Three Continents (33 page)

I said “He likes girls.”

“Yes he does, but it's also because he's so disappointed about his relationship with Michael. . . . Manton really cares for Michael—he'd like to get really close to him, but you know how Michael is.” There was a silence; we both looked at the picture. It struck me that, in spite of their size, their mythological proportions, they were really a very ordinary, bourgeois sort of family—mother, father, and baby.

Barbara said “Manton feels very strongly about family—our family, that's you and Michael and me and the baby.”

“I know. He talked to us.”

“I feel strongly about it too. I do love you, Harriet. Isn't it funny, I'm going to be your mother.” We squeezed each other's hands and giggled. It
was
funny. I knew Barbara was coming around to say what Manton had said—about the properties and the money. I saw she felt shy about it for fear of being misinterpreted; so I helped her. I said “Michael and I explained to Manton, about being committed and all of that. To the movement. It's got a new name, Barbara—Transcendental Internationalism.” I don't know why I told her that; maybe to impress her, or at least to have her take it more seriously. But I did not succeed. She said “Manton wants to call the baby Elisabeth, after his mother; and if it's a boy, after your grandfather of course.” She looked at the picture, and I could see she was getting herself together to say what she felt but was too embarrassed to come out with.
She had always been like that—shy, fond, and reticent. But feeling she had to speak, for everyone's sake, she overcame her own sense of inadequacy; being pregnant helped her—I mean, it was not only her but two of them speaking; and there was the picture to look at for inspiration. She said “Manton says he hates not being a family—everyone not caring and letting everything go and fall apart. He says it's taken him till now to realize that it's more important than
any
thing—the family, and everything that's been built up; holding it all together. I think so too,” she said, looking at me in appeal. “That we should all—be together. Hold together.” And she took my hand and kept it in hers.

I said “What about Crishi?” and went right on: “I'm married to him, Barbara, just like you and Manton are going to be married. And like those two are,” I indicated the gigantic couple in the picture. What could she say to that? Our hands were still intertwined but not our feelings. I knew she wanted to contradict me, and she was right. It wasn't like that at all! There was no resemblance in these marriages, any more than there might be in our lovemaking. I knew that Barbara loved Manton; and perhaps also how she loved him, in her soft voluptuous way. But she couldn't know—she could have no conception of the way I felt for Crishi: the sick hunger that gnawed at me. Dear good plump pregnant Barbara—I kissed her for her innocence; and melting and tender, she said “You'll come for our wedding, won't you darling, we want you there so very much.” I promised I would and meant it—provided of course I wasn't needed here.

I
HATE to say it, but I was relieved when they returned to the States. Although Crishi never again tried to stop me from seeing them, I still felt split between two opposite sides. But I never for a second doubted which one I belonged to, even though I was not always happy—far from it. There was no change in our circumstances: Anna remained with us, waiting for Crishi as I was; and Renée continued to come upstairs in the dark—not often, but from time to time, sort of establishing her right. It is strange how you can get used to something and make compromises and accept what is presented as inevitable. I suppose that was how the Bari Rani had got used to her situation and adjusted to it, so that our two households had grown together.

Sometimes I wondered about the Rawul, how he was taking these developments in his family; but I don't think he was too much aware of them. He lived on another plane. He was there to change the world. Anna said he was crazy, and while it was true that there was a strange light in his eyes, I still believed that it was the light of the skies he had gazed into so much, and everything he had seen there and dreamed. While the rest of us revolved around him, immersed in our preoccupations, he stood alone—or would have, if it hadn't been for the Bari Rani. For her he wasn't this almost symbolic figure, but a husband who often enraged her, whom she fussed over and fought with and said was getting too fat. And in return he shouted right back at her and became
enmeshed in the petty quarrels she started with him. And when he rose to her that way, although she pretended to be indignant, she also appeared satisfied—as though she had been testing him, to see if he was still as he had been.

Around this time, Crishi began to have a lot of business troubles. He became more cheerful than ever and bustled around and whistled between his teeth—anything not to let anyone know he was worried, least of all me. But of course Renée shared every secret with him, and whenever I came in on them unawares, they were in some deep confabulation; but the moment he saw me, he would draw away from her and become the most lighthearted person in the world. For Renée it was more difficult to pretend there was nothing the matter. A heavy weight made her sigh frequently, and her eyes were veiled with melancholy. She was particularly sweet with me during these days but very short-tempered with Anna. She complained about Anna to me, said that her pretense of writing a book about the Rawul was only an excuse to hang around and freeload. She warned me never to give her any money. I didn't tell her that I had been doing so—at first nervously, because I knew Crishi would be going through my checkbook; but he never said anything about the amounts I lent to Anna, so I guess he didn't disapprove of them.

Anna told me that the reason everyone was so worried was that a huge amount of bail had had to be found for Rupert; and it was an especially bad time because there had been some arrests among the followers and what they were carrying had been confiscated and lost. “Naturally she's in a bad mood,” Anna said, referring to Renée; she added “Never mind, it's only a little while longer and their troubles will be over.” I knew she was referring to when Michael and I would come of age; I had got used to it being generally assumed that everyone was waiting for that time, and I guess Michael had too. He and I never spoke about it to each other.

Then Lindsay and Jean appeared on the scene. I can't say I was really pleased to see them, but Crishi seemed to be. He made quite a fuss of them. They went through the same routine as Manton and Barbara had—that is, they were ceremonially received by the Rawul in the downstairs flat and met both households at the Indian restaurant. They were as
stiff and out of place as Manton and Barbara had been; I decided there and then it was hopeless to bring everyone together. Michael cared neither one way nor the other; he sat there with his head bent over his plate, eating. But Crishi and Renée really put themselves out; and when Lindsay and Jean asked me to accompany them on a tour of England, Crishi insisted I go, though I didn't want to.

That was a strange trip. Lindsay and Jean were very, very loving with each other, with their differences apparently resolved: It was the same as with Manton and Barbara, who had also, since my marriage, drawn closer together. And like Manton and Barbara, they loved being in England. Lindsay often said she felt more at home here than anywhere else, or rather, she didn't say, she asked—“Why do I feel so at home here?” The answer you were supposed to give her, and if you didn't she supplied it herself, was that it was where her roots were. Technically this was true, for both sets of her great-great-grandparents had emigrated from here in the 1850s; but all the same, she appeared exotic and transplanted—more so than, for instance, the Rawul, Renée, and Crishi, who somehow belonged. While in London, Lindsay and Jean stayed at the Ritz, but once in the country, they booked themselves into what they liked to think of as inns. They
had
been inns, often dating back as far as the fifteenth century, although converted into hotels with modern baths and central heating that was never on high enough. After English breakfasts in hotel dining rooms with wooden beams and Tudor fireplaces, Lindsay and Jean went out to visit churches, abbeys, and manor houses. With me in the backseat, they drove from one old village and market town to another, content with everything they saw, soothed and lulled by the green fields, the riverbanks, the low clouds spilling alternately soft rain and watery sunshine. Looking very American in the Scottish country clothes they had bought in London, they walked sturdily in brogues, while I trailed behind them. Mostly I was on the lookout for pay phones from which to call Crishi. I tried every place he might be—in the upstairs flat, the downstairs one, the gallery, the office, the Earl's Court house, at Babaji's—but he either had just left or was expected any minute. When I did get him, he was
loving and happy to hear me but there was someone waiting for him in a car outside or on hold on another line. I would say “I think I'll come home,” and he'd say “Oh I miss you ever so—I have to go, they're waiting—” “Crishi, I
want
to come home!” He had hung up. Sometimes I got Michael, who was more sympathetic. “It must be a drag for you,” he said when I told him I was tired of touring with Lindsay and Jean. But when I said I wanted to come home, he too became evasive—not as evasive as Crishi, but more embarrassed as he advised me to stick it out a bit longer.

The high point of the trip was our visit to what Lindsay liked to think of as her ancestral village. Actually, the Macrorys had come from Ireland, and Lindsay had visited there. But she hadn't liked it—it depressed her, she said, it was too primitive—and much preferred this English place where one of the Macrorys had come to be the vicar and where the great-great-grandfather who had emigrated to America was born. We went into the church, which was very old, the oldest part dating from Norman times. Between the stone buttresses, the walls were plainly whitewashed; the pews were no more than wooden benches; the stone floor was scrubbed to the bone; but the outside light, refracted through stained-glass windows, made this simple interior glimmer like a semiprecious stone. There was a register of the vicars in an unbroken line from 1176 to the present day. They included Lindsay's ancestor, the Reverend James Macrory, with the dates of his vicarage, 1837–1850. He lay buried in the graveyard adjoining the church with his wife, Margaret Jane, beside him. Lindsay, who had been here before, led us to these graves, wending her way between ancient tombstones, some of them half sunk into the ground. Oh, Lindsay was so proud here, queenly; she strode with her head held high, her golden hair and designer scarf blowing in the wind. When we reached the Macrory graves, she and Jean held hands and read the inscriptions out loud to each other. Neither of them seemed to feel the rain-cold wind that swept through the grass and the yew trees and through me, making me shiver. Their imperviousness may have been partly due to the warm, woven new clothes they wore; but mostly to the reverence they felt as they stood hand in hand by the ancestral
grave, like two pilgrims at the culmination of their destined journey. I was not only cold but impatient—because I knew that when at last we could turn from this sacred place, we would have to retrace our steps through the graveyard, past the church, along a brook, over a stile, around a haystack, and not a telephone in sight till we got back to the hotel.

When Jean asked me that night at dinner in the hotel dining room, “Aren't you proud?” I knew she meant proud of my ancestry. What could I say? It didn't seem such a big deal to me to belong to any one place, even if it was old. But Lindsay said it gave her a very special feeling to think of the Reverend James Macrory and Margaret Jane his wife mingled in this earth. There was an old, old waiter serving us, a shuffling and surly old man who couldn't manage all the tables; everyone had to wait a long time and sometimes got the wrong orders. Lindsay, who at home tended to be short with waiters and salespeople so that it got embarrassing to be with her, was very patient with him. Lindsay was in a mellow mood; mellow and thoughtful. “Jean and I've been thinking,” she said, during one of the long waits between courses. “About Propinquity.”

They outlined their plan to me. They said they wanted to turn it into a historic house—“Historic,” I said, “it was only built in 1906.” “We want to show how people lived. How it was in Grandfather's time. We'll restore everything the way it was—we'll lay the table in the dining room with all the things so it'll look as if the family was just sitting down to eat. And we'll hang the pictures back—you wouldn't remember but we used to have Father's Uncle Gerald on the stairs till someone wrote that book implicating him in some awful murder on St. Kitts, which Father said was all lies, though he did take the picture down. But every family has something in it; I mean, that's what history
is
.”

I said “What about the Rawul and the movement?”

“Oh Jesus,” Lindsay said, hiding her face in her hands. I had spoiled her mood.

Jean said gently, “Lindsay thinks it's wrong.”

“What is?” I asked; and when they didn't answer, I said to Lindsay, “You used to think it was all right. You wanted to give the place; you yourself wanted it.”

“I've been thinking lately,” Lindsay said. “We both have—haven't we, Jean?”

“What about?” I asked.

“Oh well, many things.” She glanced up suspiciously: “I suppose only you and Michael are allowed to think. You two are the great intellectuals and I'm the dumbbell.”

“Now dear,” Jean said warningly, “we're here to have a sensible talk and not to pick on Harriet.”

“I'm not.” She made a visible effort to be sensible and continued: “It's been helpful having those people at Propinquity-—the Rawul's people—they work hard and they've done a good job on the grounds and they're not bad in the kitchen either, though nothing very special, not like when Else was there.”