Breakfast with the Nikolides Read online

  ‘Of a house I used to live in – once.’

  ‘What – here?’ asked Binnie.

  ‘Yes,’ said Louise.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘It was particularly beautiful – to me, because I made it,’ Louise answered slowly.

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Broken to pieces long ago,’ said Louise. ‘Don’t talk to me now.’ Binnie stared.

  Nothing had changed on the river; it might have shifted a little, eaten away a foot or two of earth from the bank, uncovered a new shoal of sand, swept away another, but it was the same; the banks were the same with the same nude brown children running to play in the wash that spread in the same way up the banks as the steamer went along, and the fishing boats moved with the same lilting crescent movement as they passed … It was the end of our honeymoon, the beginning of my married life with Charles – thought Louise; and suddenly the vibrating of the deck under her feet, the slowly passing scenery, sharpened with a nightmare quality. It was happening over again. (‘No!’ cried Louise. ‘No!’)

  She was wearing a narrow veil tied over her hat and the two ends blown back resolved into the two long ribbons of the steamer wash, and for her, unlike Emily, they broke the quiet of the river with a sustained inexorable break.

  (‘Stop!’ she cried. ‘Stop. Please stop. I must go back!’ But this was a nightmare and her cry had not made a sound.) The steamer went on. It had started, it would arrive at the terminus. It might stick on a sandbank, but that would only be a delay. It would arrive.

  Louise had lately been having a dream. It was a dream in which a man rode on a horse, and the man was Pestilence or Famine or Death or simply a rider, an ordinary man, but Louise did not know what he was because she would not look at him. That was the dream; she knew that if she looked at him she might be saved, but she refused to look till he was close, riding her down, and then it was too late. The dream was a symbol for what was happening now, in this terrifying repetition that washed away the years and made her catch her breath with panic. It was too late.

  Someone else, not Emily, was standing beside her at the rail. She barely came to his shoulder, she could see the outline of his shoulder behind her cheek, his arm by hers on the rail, the wind ruffling the dark hairiness of it … She gave a little gasp and put out her hand and touched – Emily.

  ‘Oh, Emily!’ she said, ‘oh, Emily!’ and Emily stiffened as if she had winced. A sulky, almost resentful look came into the child’s face.

  ‘What’s the matter, Emily?’ Her voice was sharp.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why do you wince away like that?’

  ‘I was thinking.’

  After a contact with Emily, Louise often grew angry like this … Charles ought to have told me, she cried angrily. He should have warned me. Why didn’t he warn me?… And like a cold thought, the answer slid into her mind: ‘Why should he warn you? He didn’t ask you to come.’

  Just before they reached Amorra, the steamer passed a line of buildings along the farther bank: a factory chimney, great sheds of corrugated iron, trucks on rails that ran down to a jetty, and a flotilla of grey launches with a blue-and-white key design round their funnels. Attached to the buildings was a strange yellow house, with gables and turrets and a dark red roof; it had a garden with a row of trees and a jetty of its own. It looked curiously complete: small, foreign and fascinating, like the picture in a French reading book … I should like to visit it one day, thought Emily.

  Then on the jetty she saw two children, waving to the steamer; she could see them quite clearly, they appeared to be wearing dark clothes and dark socks and one had a white pinafore. They did not move but stood and stolidly waved. In the middle, holding a hand of each, was an Indian nurse, an ayah. ‘They are too big to have an ayah, holding on to them,’ said Binnie scornfully. ‘Imagine if we were afraid of tumbling in the water!’

  ‘They are not like us,’ said Emily. ‘I wonder who they are.’

  When Louise’s first cable was brought in and he read it, the whole of Charles had been flooded with such a surge of relief that he felt sick. Louise had left Paris at the beginning of the war, he knew that, and he knew she had gone confidently back soon afterwards, but he had not known whether she had been too late to get away again. During all the weeks of desperate anxiety and burning heat, the wirelesses of Amorra had poured out the news; they could be heard blaring in Hindustani and Bengali in the bazaar, in Bengali and English in the College, in Hindustani, Bengali and English in the houses.

  Charles went to the Principal’s big tall house. It was a blisteringly hot evening. In the College, as he passed, the professors were sitting out on the platform above the tank with small palm-leaf fans in their hands, and the students were walking listlessly in twos or threes or sitting on their beds on the verandahs. The dry nervous heat accelerated the tension, and the loudspeakers still blared.

  Sir Monmatha Ghose was in, and he too was listening to the wireless, dressed in a thin muslin vest and beautifully looped dhoti, the graceful Hindu nether garment, and toeless slippers, though in College he usually wore European clothes.

  ‘Can I listen to the news with you?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Assuredly. Bring a chair for the sahib and bring a whisky peg.’

  They listened in silence, smoking. Charles smoked cigarettes, which he stubbed out before they were finished; Sir Monmatha Ghose smoked a hookah with silver chasings and a gay green-and-pink piping to the mouthpiece, and the hookah punctuated the news with a soft hubble-bubble of sound that was echoed by the regular puffing of smoke from Sir Monmatha Ghose’s lips.

  ‘May I come again?’ said Charles when it was over and he rose to go.

  ‘Come every night.’

  Charles hesitated on the step and said suddenly, as if it were torn from him, ‘I cannot sit and listen to it alone.’

  Sir Monmatha Ghose took out his mouthpiece. ‘You need not, I am here.’ And he asked, ‘Then you think she is in Paris?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ cried Charles. ‘I don’t know.’

  Louise’s cable came a few days later. It had taken nine days on the way. He stared at it and then he realized that he was filled only with triumph that in her desperate moment Louise had wanted him; immediately he crushed that down; it made him faintly pitiful and he had every objection to being pitied. He read the cable again and said definitely and finally ‘No,’ and crumpled it up and dropped it on the table. ‘No, thank you,’ said Charles, and then he picked it up and smoothed it out, and said ‘Why not?’ He answered: ‘MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME IF YOU COME.’

  After his cable had gone he would have given anything to get it back. ‘She won’t come,’ said Charles, ‘it was only panic.’

  (Louise’s panic came up like wings out of the grass before the footstep was anywhere near. He had cause to remember that, and he cried, ‘I can’t start that again!’)

  (‘I shall not start it again, whatever happens,’ said Charles; ‘I could not. It is over and it is dead. It can’t begin again.’)

  The last words Louise had written came to him now. ‘Understand; nothing – nothing – will make me alter my mind. You have finished this for us, for ever.’ He wrote them now, in a letter to meet her in Calcutta. ‘This is what you said when you went away. This is what I say now. Nothing shall make me alter my mind or anything else about me. You can go or you can stay. It makes no difference to me. Nothing can alter me now.’ As he wrote it he had altered already.

  He had grown a certain laziness in these years; perhaps, like most Indians, he wished more than he did – hoping, almost believing, that wishing is the same as thinking, and thinking is tantamount to doing. He had been contented and that had made him lazier still; laziness, dilatoriness, is natural to India; the sun steals the marrow from the bones, and Charles had worked for eight years out under the sun in the fields, in the lazy certain rhythm of the land, and he had not finished yet … Because I believe in it, said Charles. Why? Becaus
e this is my work that I have found for myself, and I shall not finish it till I die; because I believe that India is one of the new countries; like China and like Russia it is so old that it is beginning to be new. I am of the country now, I am not an exile, I am not even an alien. When I pick up a handful of earth to feel its quality, I know it as I crumble it. I know it better than the Indians themselves. I have studied it, tested it, doctored it, made it better than itself. My results are creeping like a tide across the land – no, they are coming out of the land, because they come from the soil – and when I die, said Charles, don’t let anyone have me cremated. Put me into the soil where I belong, where I may do some final good to a patch of wheat or a mango-tree. Louise called me a clod. Well, so I am; and I shall stay a clod, come or stay as you like. There’s nothing you can do to me now …

  In all his calculations he had forgotten the children. For the children, their father was a little far-away man on the part of the map that was shaped like a deep pink teardrop. Emily, it was true, had invested him with a personality from a picture she had seen in the Illustré, a picture of the Patagonian Consul in a white pressed suit, white sun-hat, dark face and beard. No one knew how Binnie had imagined him, but she was certainly as surprised as Emily when Louise pointed down from the deck of the steamer and said, ‘That’s Charles,’ and added as if it were an unfamiliar word, ‘that’s your father.’

  ‘Father?’ said Binnie, and she and Emily looked down at the man standing on the wharf among the coolies. Emily knew that the same dreadful thought had struck them both. ‘Is he – black?’ Binnie was just going to ask it when he looked up at them and they saw the blueness of his eyes. He stood on the wharf in the midday sun without a hat, in shorts and a khaki shirt, no coat and no collar or tie or socks. He looked to them wild, not at all their idea of a father, and Emily felt a little stir of excitement and anticipation as she watched him; he was totally unexpected and new. He did not wave or smile. ‘Isn’t he expecting us?’ said Binnie.

  He came up on the deck of the steamer that made a stage high up above the town, and Louise stood up like a child to meet him. In her white cheeks there was a hot flood of colour. Emily watched them from the rail; Louise, who had always seemed tall to her, looked quite small, and the sun striking across the deck made her skirts transparent, showing her legs, and thighs, making her look flimsy. They did not kiss. They stood with those few yards of deck between them and looked at one another and there was a pricking silence as they looked. Charles spoke first. ‘How do you do, Louise?’

  Emily savoured the oddness of that. She looked at Louise, but Louise said nothing and the moment seemed to be given to Charles. He said, ‘You look very well – after all these years.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘You are prettier than ever, but you know that of course.’

  Why did he speak to her in that curious taunting way? Emily and Binnie were staring in surprise. He did not look at them. It seemed to Emily he would not look at them.

  ‘You haven’t seen the children,’ said Louise.

  ‘You can hardly expect me to recognize them, can you?’ He spoke roughly and, as he said it, Emily with a peculiar little shock recognized herself: that was just how she herself spoke when she had something unbearable she wanted to hide.

  Then Binnie walked straight across the deck and shook hands. She looked up at him and he, very slowly, looked down at her. ‘How do you do, Father?’ said Binnie.

  He stood, swinging her hand a little in his, and his face had altered … He was – frightened – before, thought Emily. Why should he be frightened of Binnie?…

  ‘I don’t remember hearing an English child’s voice before,’ said Charles. ‘Funny.’ And he looked over Binnie’s head to Emily. ‘Can’t Emily say something too?’ Emily was hotly embarrassed, but under the mockery in his voice she thought he sounded eager. ‘Emily—’ he said again as if he liked to say it, then his eyes came back to Binnie. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t know my name?’ Binnie was shocked.

  ‘I haven’t seen you before,’ said Charles, and he said to Louise a little triumphantly, ‘She gets her eyes from me,’ and immediately he dropped back into his bantering. ‘But of course, hers are steadier than mine.’

  Emily had a sudden unaccountable pang of pity.

  They drove through the bazaar to the house, and as they turned in at the gate, a young Indian, dressed like a soldier in khaki with a puggaree and a polished belt and a cane, clicked his heels and saluted. ‘That’s Mahomed Shah,’ said Charles to the children. ‘He used to be a sepoy, now he’s our porter. You’ll like him.’

  ‘Are there any other Europeans here?’ Louise asked, and her voice was tense.

  ‘None,’ said Charles, ‘except the Nikolides.’

  ‘What a funny name,’ said Binnie.

  ‘There are Mr and Mrs Nikolides,’ said Charles, ‘and they have two funny children, funnier than you. Their names are Alexandra and Jason.’

  ‘They sound funny,’ said Binnie, ‘but I like the sound of them.’

  ‘Those must be the children we saw on the jetty as we came,’ said Emily.

  The car drove under the porch where the servants were standing in clean white clothes. As they came into the hall, Louise stopped with a sharp catch of her breath and put out her hand as if she were giddy; her hand found Emily’s shoulder and tightened on it so that it hurt, but Emily, with her new awareness, said nothing. She looked round the hall; it was exceptionally pretty and she could see nothing in it to startle Louise. It was panelled in white, and the stairs leading up were stone with a solid side instead of a banister rail and a shelf where a row of Canton enamels, like the ones Louise collected, shone with coloured flowers and birds. ‘Remember those?’ asked Charles pleasantly.

  The dining-room had white furniture, with a deep red floor and curtains of patterned red and gold leaves on white silk. ‘That material has worn wonderfully well, hasn’t it?’ said Charles. Over the fireplace was a curious huge axe, with a handle of wood carved with a crest and a blade-edge that looked sharp and clean.

  ‘Does it really cut?’ asked Binnie.

  ‘Does it, Louise?’ asked Charles; and then he said, ‘Of course it does. It’s Dutch; did you know you had a Dutch great-grandfather? He built his house with that.’

  ‘And what do you use it for?’

  ‘Now I have decided to keep it up here,’ said Charles.

  Upstairs was the drawing-room stretching away to the windows in a high curved bay. ‘Some of the pictures are new, of course. I couldn’t save those, but this is your piano—’ he ran his fingers down the notes – ‘you see it’s managed to keep its tune without you.’

  Louise said nothing at all; she still held Emily’s shoulder and she looked suddenly exhausted. ‘You want to go to your room,’ said Charles; ‘I’ve put the children in the spare room. This is yours—’ and they followed him across the passage. Emily thought Louise did not want to come, but Charles led the way in through double white doors.

  ‘What a lovely room!’ said Binnie.

  ‘Like it, Louise?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Why did you keep it – exactly the same?’ Louise cried, and her voice was breaking. ‘How could you? It was broken for ever.’

  ‘It’s still broken,’ said Charles.

  ‘It isn’t, it’s lovely,’ said Binnie. ‘Look at the lovely table and the brushes. Whose are they? These are not your brushes, are they, Mother? Three mirrors and lights! Look at the light in the bed. Mother, is that your bed? Are you going to sleep in it?’

  ‘She has made it, so she’s going to lie in it, isn’t that it, Louise?’ said Charles, and, as if he could no longer bear the sight of them, he shook his shoulders and went out and downstairs. Louise went slowly across the room as if a weight were dragging at her knees and sat down. Emily watched, standing still and clumsy and cold in the middle of the floor. She was beginning to feel sick.

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Bi
nnie cheerfully, bouncing up and down on the bed. ‘You didn’t make it, did you, Mother? You needn’t ever make your beds in India, need you?’

  In the night Louise lay and listened to the drums. The bazaar lay close beside the garden walls and the drums and cymbals in the temple by the banyan tree were very constantly beaten. It was a harmless cheerful little temple; it was lined inside with bathroom tiles, and the roots of the grey old tree appeared surprisingly among them. It was used chiefly as a meeting place, for argument or gossip, but in the night its drums had a baleful throbbing sound. Louise had never noticed the life of the temple and the tom-toms started in her the beating of panic in her heart. She lay and listened, her heart beating, beating, and painfully awake … If I go to sleep I shall dream. I shall have my dream again and I shall dream we are not safe. But are we safe? Is anything safe? Why did I come? Oh why, why did I come? What have I done? But what else could I do? I didn’t know what to do. And, what else was there to do? It was mad, an impulse; a silly impulse, but anything then had to be an impulse. There was no time for anything else. No time to think. Every night I see again that road we drove along. The car went slowly, so slowly; I was faster than the wheels all the way, trying to urge them on. Why was it so dreadful? Dreadful – so that it will be with me to the end of my days. There was nothing spectacular. The only fear all the way was the petrol. I had forgotten the petrol. We nearly ran out of petrol and I saw those two British officers in the square – where? I don’t know where – and they gave me a five-gallon tin. Later on we found one petrol pump that was working, but they would only part with ten litres. No one stopped us or questioned us. We were not alone. Cars passed us, or we passed them all the way, and pony-carts and bicycles and horses, and people walking and people with wheelbarrows and perambulators. The children seemed sunk away to nothing, with small tired faces, and Emily was abominably cross. Then she was carsick and I had to keep stopping the car for her. Binnie said nothing but Emily kept asking why we didn’t stay where we were …