"And of course you wouldn't enjoy being poor."
"I certainly wouldn't."
There was a silence.
"Well," said Susila at last, "let's get back to Africa."
"I'd been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line lor Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her."
"Next to the young woman you couldn't have liked less?"
"Couldn't have liked less," he repeated, "or disapproved of more. But if you're an addict you've got to have your dope-the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you."
"It's a funny thing," she said reflectively, "but in Pala we have liardly any addicts."
"Not even sex addicts?"
"The sex addicts are also person addicts. In other words, they're lovers."
"But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love."
"Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn't follow that I'm always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly-that's part of the Art of Loving."
As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before-the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power-Rachel squared, Rachel to the rath. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time-time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends' cocktail parties, on weekends in the country. "Just you and me, darling," she would say, "all alone together." All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful weekends, he was as hopelessly a Babs addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned-for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irre-pressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs-it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. "Do you mean it, Will-do you really mean it?" "I really mean it." It was in hopelessness, in utter hopelessness, that she had walked out to the car, had driven away into the rain-into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk trying to write an article on "What's Wrong with Youth," trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave, and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence, no doubt. . . He had opened, and there, instead of the telegram, was Babs-dramatically without makeup and all in black.
"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.