"My poor, poor Will!" They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried.
"When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou." An hour later, needless to say, they were naked and in bed. After which he had moved, earth to earth, into the pink alcove. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.
"Do you really mean it, Babs?" She really meant it.
There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, standingly loud and slightly out of time, "Here and now, boys," shouted a talking bird.
"Shut up!" Will shouted back.
"Here and now, boys," the mynah repeated. "Here and now, boys. Here and-"
"Shut up!"
There was silence.
"I had to shut him up," Will explained, "because of course he's absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren't they? What about your husband's death, for example? Is that irrelevant?"
Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. "In the context of what I have to do now- yes, completely irrelevant. That's something I had to learn."
"Does one learn how to forget?"
"It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living." She gave him a sad little smile and added, "It isn't easy."
"It isn't easy," Will repeated. And suddenly all his defenses were down, all his pride had left him. "Will you help me?" he asked.
"It's a bargain," she said, and held out her hand.
A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr. MacPhail had entered the room.
8
"Good evening, my dear. Good evening, Mr. Farnaby."
The tone was cheerful-not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely. And yet, before coming here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discolored. Half a long lifetime of love and lovalty and mutual forgiveness-and in another day or two it would be all over; he would be alone. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—sufficient unto the place and the person. "One has no right," her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, "one has no right to inflict one's sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn't sad. One just has to accept one's grief and one's absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept..." His voice broke. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. Five minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in the shadow of the huge stone Buddha. With a little plop, sharp and yet liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into the water. Thrusting up from the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny beetles and the wild bees from the jungle. Darting, pausing in mid-flight, darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragonflies were hawking for
midges.
"Tathata," Dr. Robert had whispered. "Suchness."
For a long time they sat there in silence. Then, suddenly, he had touched her shoulder.
"Look!"
She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing. Two small parrots had perched on the Buddha's right hand and were going through the ritual of courtship.
"Did you stop again at the lotus pool?" Susila asked aloud.
Dr. Robert gave her a little smile and nodded his head.
"How was Shivapuram?" Will enquired.
"Pleasant enough in itself," the doctor answered. "Its only defect is that it's so close to the outside world. Up here one can simply ignore the organized insanities and get on with one's work. Down there, with all those antennae and listening posts and channels of communication that a government has to have, the outside world is perpetually breathing down one's neck. One hears it, feels it, smells it-yes, smells it."
"Has anything more than usually disastrous happened since I've been here?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary at your end of the world. I wish I could say the same about our end."
"What's the trouble?"
"The trouble is our next-door neighbor, Colonel Dipa. To begin with, he's made another deal with the Czechs."
"More armaments?"
"Sixty million dollars' worth. It was on the radio this morning.
"But what on earth for?"
"The usual reasons. Glory and power. The pleasures of vanity and the pleasures of bullying. Terrorism and military parades at home; conquests and Te Deums abroad. And that brings me to the second item of unpleasant news. Last night the Colonel delivered another of his celebrated Greater Rendang speeches." "Greater Rendang? What's that?"
"You may well ask," said Dr. Robert. "Greater Rendang is the territory controlled by the Sultans of Rendang-Lobo between 1447 and 1483. It included Rendang, the Nicobar Islands, about thirty percent of Sumatra and the whole of Pala. Today, it's Colonel Dipa's Irredenta.'" "Seriously?"
"With a perfectly straight face. No, I'm wrong. With a purple, distorted face and at the top of a voice that he has trained, after long practice, to sound exactly like Hitler's. Greater Rendang or death!"
"But the great powers would never allow it." "Maybe they wouldn't like to see him in Sumatra. But Pala- that's another matter." He shook his head. "Pala, unfortunately, is in nobody's good books. We don't want the Communists; but neither do we want the capitalists. Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us-for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our labor costs are low and investors' dividends will be correspondingly high. And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People's Democracy. We say no to both of you, so we're unpopular everywhere. Regardless of their ideologies, all the Great Powers may prefer a Rendang-controlled Pala with oil fields to an independent Pala without. If Dipa attacks us, they'll say it's most deplorable; but they won't lift a finger. And when he takes us over and calls the oilmen in, they'll be delighted."
"What can you do about Colonel Dipa?" Will asked.
"Except for passive resistance, nothing. We have no army and no powerful friends. The Colonel has both. The most we can do, if he starts making trouble, is to appeal to the United Nations. Meanwhile we shall remonstrate with the Colonel about this latest Greater Rendang effusion. Remonstrate through our minister in Rendang-Lobo, and remonstrate with the great man in person when he pays his state visit to Pala ten days from now."
"A state visit?"
"For the young Raja's coming-of-age celebrations. He was asked a long time ago, but he never let us know for certain whether he was coming or not. Today it was finally settled. We'll have a summit meeting as well as a birthday party. But let's talk about something more rewarding. How did you get on today, Mr. Farnaby?"
"Not merely well-gloriously. I had the honor of a visit from your reigning monarch."
"Murugan?"
"Why didn't you tell me he was your reigning monarch?"