‘I think I should go home.’
‘OK, come down to reception in, say, twenty minutes? They’ll have a cab waiting for you.’
‘OK.’ He is expecting something else, a brief goodbye, a ‘see you later’, or ‘I’ll call you when I get back from Gloucestershire.’ Instead, there is the curt click of Zafar hanging up.
XII
Montu enters the drawing room and announces that the car is ready and the boxes and trunks have been loaded. Mr Roy Chowdhury nods in acknowledgement and asks him to wait outside. His eyes are red-rimmed and small, he clasps his two hands together under his shawl to hide their stubborn shaking. Bimala hasn’t stopped crying for the last week; now that Miss Gilby is really going away forever, now that it is no longer a faint possibility in the dim future but in the here and now, and happening right under her eyes with the truculence and irreversible tyranny of the present tense, she is inconsolable. She has given away all her books on Indian birds to her. On the fly-leaf of each she has inscribed in her childish hand, using her characteristic rounded and perfectly formed English letters, TO MISS GILBY MY TEACHER, FRIEND AND COMPANION, WITH MY LOVE. And below that, in cursive, ‘Please do not go away.’ Miss Gilby hasn’t opened the books since the day she was given them.
The bandages around her head are still there, although now it is more of a bandage than heavy headgear. She still needs her stick to walk. She tries to get up; Mr Roy Chowdhury and Bimala are immediately at her side, trying to support her gently. She tries to concentrate on little, irrelevant things — the thin blue border of Bimala’s sari, the terracotta horses from Bankura, which sit in the four corners of the room, the silver-tipped end of her walking stick that belonged to Mr Roy Chowdhury’s brother. Her lips are pressed into a nearly invisible line. Judging by the copiousness of her weeping, Bimala is the one who needs support, she thinks.
She doesn’t remember if she has spoken to them at all this morning. She opens her mouth to console Bimala but she can’t think of anything appropriate to say, so she remains silent.
Montu toots the car horn. Shuffling and hobbling, she gets into the car, helped by Bimala and Mr Roy Chowdhury. The courtyard is a blizzard of circling pigeons: Bimala’s naw jaa is scattering grains from behind the blinds. Only an occasional arm, disembodied, reaches out and the palm opens to fling down some rice.
Mr Roy Chowdhury gets into the car as well; he has insisted on accompanying Miss Gilby all the way to Calcutta, despite her protests.
Over the last week, Miss Gilby, foreseeing this moment, has talked herself into not looking out of the car window. She sits beside Mr Roy Chowdhury and busies herself with the difficulty of sitting in the back in her current state, with rugs, with finding a place for her walking stick. In the periphery of her vision, Bimala reaches out a hand towards the separating glass.
She remembers Mr Roy Chowdhury’s voice breaking on his last words, ever, to her. ‘Miss Gilby, I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive us.’
THIRTEEN
The meshes of the afternoon draw him in. He lies on the sofa looking at the sky framed by the window. Eventually, darkness falls like the sound of dew. The blinking lights of the aeroplanes traverse the windowpanes and he sometimes moves his head slightly to let the lights describe a perfect diagonal in the square of glass. At other times, he positions his head to have a line of those lights bisect two opposite sides of the square. There are occasions when two or three planes at a time crisscross against the dark panel of the sky. The geometric possibilities become endless, a whole bagatelle of distant lights remotely controlled from the darkness of the sitting room. Sometimes, Ugo sits on the windowsill, keeping an eye out for things. All lives have an onward flow, a beginning leading to a middle leading to an end; only his seems to be a swirling eddy in someone else’s flow, destined to whirl round and round for a brief while till a change in current or wave pattern obliterates it. For that brief while, every day is today.
Ritwik discovers a tattered, termite-infested 1904 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book. He hesitates before showing it to Anne — who knows what tormenting history might jump out of this one like a particularly macabre jack-in-the-box — and leaves it lying on the kitchen table. After a day, Ritwik comments on it and Anne says, ‘Good god, that used to be my mother’s. Where on earth did you drag it out from?’ Her tone is pleased, surprised.
Ritwik brews some tea and they sit at the kitchen table, gently browsing. He discovers a brown newspaper cutting between pages 72 and 73, in the section on soups. It says GLYCERINE — THE HOUSEHOLD FRIEND. There follow three short paragraphs on the uses of glycerine — making cake mixes richer, preventing crystallization of jam, as fabric softener.
‘Anne, there’s a recipe for mullagatawny soup on page 73. Do you think the cutting was to mark that? Did you cook it in India?’
Anne has no memory of the crumbling cutting.
‘Oh my god, calf’s head soup, sheep’s head soup, ox cheek soup. Ughh.’
Anne cackles at his squeamishness.
‘Anne, look, a “Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes”. Shall I make it for you tomorrow?’
On discovering that the first ingredient is an ox-cheek, they are helpless with laughter.
‘And, pray, what may the benevolent purpose be?’ Anne barely manages to say while dabbing at her eyes.
They ultimately settle on ‘Pea Soup (Green)’ — there are others: ‘Pea Soup (Yellow)’ and a ‘Pea Soup (Inexpensive)’ — and Ritwik spends a lot of time converting pints, pounds and quarts to more familiar measures.
‘I can’t taste anything or smell anything very much. Pea soups and mullagatawnies are all the same to me,’ Anne says.
The levity suddenly fades from the kitchen. ‘Do you ever have an appetite?’
‘No.’
The short, clear truth of her answer has a sobering effect on Ritwik.
‘You’ll find out that when you reach my age, you need very little to live on. That’s because you’re not really living, but waiting, which requires a lot less, I suppose.’
Ritwik reaches across the table to touch her nearly naked carpals. ‘As long as I’m here, you’re going to be eating,’ he says with enforced jollity. ‘I shall watch over your meals like a hawk. Pea soup it is tomorrow for supper.’
The packets of frozen petits pois sweat on the kitchen table, the spinach soaks in the sink, the lettuce is shredded, the stock is a murmuring simmer in a broken-handled pot at the back of the cooker. Anne has insisted on having the television on. Ritwik has had to concede on this one; she said it gave her company, as if his were not enough or up to the mark, he had pointed out, to which she had replied that the television gave company of such a different sort that they should have a different word for it altogether. Ritwik is brewing some tea in Anne’s old and chipped red teapot when she, in the middle of saying something about breadcrumbs to which Ritwik wasn’t paying much attention, asks him with a bell-like clarity, ‘Did you throw out all my gin or have you hidden it somewhere? I suspect the latter. In that case, we could reach a compromise: I’ll let you keep your hiding place a secret and you let me have a bottle when I want. Rationing. By far the best solution.’
‘On one condition,’ he says. ‘You tell me where you got it from.’
‘No. Never reveal one’s sources. Rule one. You should know.’
‘What do you mean, I should know?’
No answer. Ritwik decides to spring his surprise, a pleasant one: he has discovered a stash of mouldy, curling, black-and-white photographs in the loft above his room, hidden away in the insulating material, while he was attempting to hide the bottles of gin. He had looked at all of them and realized, to his great delight, that they were photographs from Anne’s days in India. Or perhaps not, because he couldn’t identify Anne in any of the pictures, but it was undeniable that they were all taken in India while it was still under British rule. Maybe they belonged to someone else and Anne had forgotten all about them. He hopes that it will be a treat for her to rediscover these forgotten images.