The Worlds Within Her (27 page)

PHOTOGRAPH: NEWSPAPER PHOTO, EIGHT-BY-TEN. HER FATHER APPEARS TO BE DEEP IN CONVERSATION WITH ANOTHER MAN. HE IS LISTENING. THE MAN IS TALKING. HE IS SHORT, THIS OTHER MAN, AND BALDING, AND ALTHOUGH IT IS NIGHT HE SPORTS SUNGLASSES. THERE IS GREAT TENSION IN HER FATHER'S BODY. HE DOES NOT WANT TO BE STANDING HERE BESIDE THIS MAN, DOES NOT WANT TO BE LISTENING TO HIM. HIS HAND IS WRAPPED AROUND THE BOWL OF A COFFEE CUP, THE TENSION IN HIS FIST REVEALING HIS STRUGGLE TO CONTAIN HIMSELF. HERE AGAIN, A DIVISION OF ENERGY: THE EFFORT AT RESTRAINT AND WHAT SHE THINKS TO BE A MASCULINE DESIRE TO CRUSH — MASCULINE NOT IN ITS ORIGIN BUT IN ITS
MANIFESTATION. IN NO OTHER PHOTOGRAPH SHE HAS SO FAR SEEN ARE HIS EMOTIONS SO EVIDENT AND SO RAW.

She smiles to herself in satisfaction: She has perceived in the photograph a grain of authenticity: what he reveals despite himself.

But then she wonders whether she is reading too much into the image. Jim has often accused the newscast of breathing life into stories that would otherwise expire after a few laboured gasps. She knows he is right. They show videotape of a twister lifting a barn but would not bother to mention it if they didn't have the tape. You people, Jim says justly, see more in pictures than is there. He had tapped a fingernail at his photo of the Swiss mountainside: the triangle of darkness, the triangle of brilliance. “It's not a statement,” he said. “It's just a moment. Hardly newsworthy.”

So she wonders: Might her father's reluctance to be there come from merely a headache or hunger — just a moment? Might the tension she detects arise from irritation with photographers or responsibilities awaiting him elsewhere?

She can never know the answers, must draw her own conclusions, must hope there is some truth in them. It is, she consoles herself, like writing a novel or researching a biography. She can enjoy no certainty greater than conjecture.

Cyril tells her this other man went on to become prime minister. He was her father's great rival. He held Ram in great esteem, Cyril says, but esteem born of the fear and hatred one has for an equal who may yet spoil one's own dreams. A clever man. He sent Ram to London to join the team negotiating for independence. Ram thought there was hope they could work together. What he didn't understand, Cyril believes, was that this man's
greatest wish was that Ram would disappear — and, of course, he did.

The sunglasses? A medical condition, says Cyril, although precisely what remains unknown to this day, years after the man's death. It was said that light — all light — was painful to him, that it prevented him from seeing. And then there was, of course, the mystique sunglasses conferred: the sense that they were to protect not his vision but his thoughts.

“WHAT IS SHE
doing?
” Ariana was scandalized. Yasmin followed the pointing finger to a swimsuited woman stretched out on a towel on the grass, a straw hat covering her face. “She's sunbathing, dear.”

“That's silly.”

“Why?”

“She needs water to get clean.”

“She doesn't want to get clean, dear. She wants to get brown.”

“Like me?”

“Like you.”

Her daughter pondered this for some moments. Then she said, “Mummy, if I do that, will I get white?”

“It doesn't work that way, dear. You'd get browner.”

Her daughter thought about that, too, and then said, “I'd like to be white some day.”

Yasmin caught her breath. Her daughter had reached into the tree of forbidden wishes and plucked poison. Yasmin, driven
by a prickling shame, wanted to protest. Wait a minute, she wanted to say, Hold on, what's wrong with …? Where did you get …? But she stopped herself. Her daughter had spoken innocently: the shame was not hers. The shame, she understood, arose from her own fear of the reaction of others: What in the world, they would wonder, had Yasmin been teaching her daughter?

And seeing her daughter safe from the peril, she began to see things as her daughter did — and understood that at the heart of her own reaction lay a grand hypocrisy: Why was it acceptable for that woman to dream of being brown, but not so for her daughter to dream of being white? And she wondered which was more dangerous: for her daughter to speculate on the impossible or for that woman to expose herself to the ravages of the sun? And yet it was, she knew, the mere beginning of a moral thread her daughter would be unravelling for the rest of her life.

Yasmin said, “Would you want Daddy to be brown?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to be white, like him?”

“Daddy's not white, silly.”

“He's not?”

“No. He's kind of … peach.”

WHY IS IT
, do you imagine, Mrs. Livingston, that so many young people are given to bemoaning the loss of olden days they see as good? Is it simply, do you think, that time is the
biggest fence, and so offers a vision of the greenest grass? It's such poppycock!

Take my son-in-law, for instance. Once, at tea, Mr. Summerhayes was mourning the loss of the art of letter writing. Letter writing, of all things — in an age when communication has become instantaneous. He had an idea that the old way — hours spent composing a letter by hand, a mail system that took weeks to deliver that letter — was somehow superior. Like so many young people, and a few older ones seeking to take advantage of their gullibility, he has varnished the past. I think he felt he was demonstrating his sense of history, the poor fellow.

May I confess something to you about Mr. Summerhayes, my dear? I do not totally trust his passions. He has them, he has passion for Yasmin, none of it is simulated — but I do not believe he trusts them himself. I do not believe that he believes in them. You see what I mean …

In any case, my dear, Mr. Summerhayes seemed to feel that not only were people in the good old days — that's us, my dear — more articulate, but we proved it in lengthy missives to one another. Some did, I suppose. I've never forgotten that lovely story you told me about your husband's love letters. Even that thrill eventually turned to unease, though, didn't it? I'm still not certain that your son would have been startled by those glimpses of the naughtiness of his father's mind, you know. Children aren't
that
naive.

Understand, my dear, I'm not saying you were wrong. We all have the right to prune our worlds, and those aspects of our lives that will survive us. And, yes, it
was
a lovely gesture, burying them with him. But still, I did detect a hint in your voice of a certain sense of loss, didn't I?

I've written few letters in my life, you know. At home there
was no reason to. And in the year we spent in England my husband took care of the correspondence. I wrote no letters home — at least not on paper. I did compose letters in my head, elaborate descriptions of what I was seeing, reflections on the life we, or rather I, was living. But I wrote none of it down. You see — and not even Yasmin knows this — writing for me is a laborious process from which I derive no pleasure. I know many words, my dear, and they come to my tongue with a certain ease, but the moment I try to order them on paper — putting the letters and then the words themselves into systematic and harmonious form — now, that is another matter altogether …

There was, I will tell you, one letter I composed that I do wish I had written down. It was neither long nor elaborate, but it spoke from the heart, and it was addressed to the one person instinct told me would understand what I was trying to say.

SHE SQUATTED ON
Jim's lap, facing him, her little fingers — their shade and shape irrefutable proof that she was her parents' daughter — tenderly exploring the contours of his face. She looked to Yasmin like someone sightless moulding a mental image: she ran her fingertips up his temples and along his hairline, down across his forehead to his eyes and nose and smiling lips. She tickled him under the chin and made him laugh. Then she leaned in close and cupped her palms around his ear.

Jim listened. Then he said, “Well, uh, I don't know. Maybe.”

She whispered again.

Jim's eyes flashed with amusement at Yasmin. He said, “I'm not sure. Why don't we see what your mom thinks?”

She grew shy, clambered off his lap and ran off to her room.

Yasmin looked expectantly at Jim.

He leaned towards her and spoke in a quiet voice: “First, she wanted to know if — when she grows up — if she'll have big breasts just like Mom's.”

“Oh, God.”

“Then she wanted to know if they'll go flippy-flop too, just like yours.” He let his smile show.

“Flippy-flop.”

“Flippy-flop. Can you believe it? I could hardly contain myself —”

“You should've just answered her question, Jim, instead of bringing me into it. You embarrassed her. Why do you think she asked you and not me?”

“Yas, the whole thing was funny, I thought —”

“Jim, the next time she wants to talk to you, talk to her.”

“It
was
funny, Yas.”

“Yeah. Until you embarrassed her. She's your daughter, Jim. Start taking her seriously.”

“Look, I do take her —”

“Mummy, I want a drink of water.”

“I do take her seriously, Yas, but —”

“Mummy! I'm thirsty!”

Yasmin stood up. “Watch that tone, young lady.” Then she went off to the kitchen to get her daughter some water.

DEAR CELIA:

It will come as no surprise to you that it is raining as I write these words. You are always the most homesick during our rainy season, as if yours were a land of perpetual wetness. Do you remember how the sound of water dripping, from the roof, from trees, would mesmerize you and turn your eyes red and moist? I remember that about you — that, and the silence that came to you. You were inaccessible at those moments, your soul in flight.

We are spending a weekend in the country, in a little town that is all honey-coloured stone. Nearby is a quiet river lined with rushes and weeping willows. The innkeeper tells us that, in fine weather, the water is crowded with rowboats — but the weather, as I've said, is not fine, and there'll be no rowing for us.