A Lovesong for India (13 page)

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Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

BOOK: A Lovesong for India
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Whenever Magda took on a new client, she worked out a strategy on how to advance that particular talent’s career. She considered each one individually, meticulously and with cunning – it was what made her such a fabulous agent – so that it could not be said that she gave Ellie more consideration than anyone else. What was different was that she introduced her to her cousin Robert, for the first time mixing her family and her business – although Robert, besides being her cousin, could also come under the category of business, for he was a highly successful composer of musical comedies. Magda’s reluctance to make use of the relationship could be traced back to various causes, mostly to do with their childhood, and with his mother, and with her mother, and so on into the tangled web of a family’s wariness with each other. She
was
wary of Robert; she couldn’t exactly say that she didn’t like him or trust him – though sometimes, it was true, she did neither. Yet she trusted him with Ellie, calling him in as part of her game plan for her.
‘Must I?’ he said when she asked him to see Ellie. This was on the phone, but she could exactly picture his expression of weary distaste (he had had it as a boy, for practically all suggestions coming from his cousin Magda). But when he did meet Ellie and had her sing for him, he at once agreed about her talent. That was the beginning of Ellie’s career, though it was a few more years before it became spectacular.
Meanwhile, she lost her place to live. One day she arrived in Magda’s office – this was becoming a daily event, for Magda had ordered her to report to her personally on her auditions and to discuss other prospects; and just generally to report. Unfortunately, Magda was too busy to give as much time to Ellie as she would have liked; and on that particular day she had looked at her watch twice and said, ‘Oh God.’ Usually Ellie was complaisant about being shunted out, but that day she just sat on; as though waiting, or as though having nowhere else to go. This latter turned out to be the case: for when Magda looked at her watch again and said, ‘I really must
run
– come in tomorrow, OK?’, Ellie remained where she was. She looked up at Magda, who was poised to depart; she said, ‘I lost my place.’
Magda looked back at her in surprise. ‘I thought you didn’t have a place.’
‘I don’t. They’ve turned me out of theirs; their place.’ Ellie usually assumed that everyone was as familiar with her circumstances as she herself was and needed no explanation. However, she now gave one more clue: ‘Because of her boyfriend moving back in.’
Magda suspected rather than knew Ellie’s living arrangements. They did not bear looking into very carefully, consisting of shifting from one hole to another in a part of the city that was common ground for criminals and young middle-class bohemians.
‘Don’t you have anywhere to go? No other friends?’
Ellie became uncharacteristically voluble. She explained how she had parked her stuff with some people she knew and that some other people she knew had allowed her to sleep on their floor, but since they were expecting a sanitary inspection due to an infestation of cockroaches, she could only stay there for a couple of nights. ‘And then?’ Magda asked. ‘Then I don’t know,’ Ellie said, and again she raised her eyes to Magda, in candid submission this time.
Magda was not the first person to whom Ellie had appealed for help. She had only gone to her after Robert had turned her down. She had gone straight to his studio; she thought he lived there. He didn’t, but then she knew very little about him except that he was Magda’s cousin; and of course this famous composer. She had only met him that one time when she had sung for him. He hadn’t said much to her about her voice but she was aware that he liked it – and there was something in the quality of his appreciation that
she
liked. Maybe because she herself tended to be monosyllabic, she felt the full weight of the one syllable he had uttered. ‘Yes,’ he had said – the sort of yes she said in her own mind when something came out right.
His studio was the top floor of a brownstone. On her first visit she had asked for him by name, but this second time she only said, ‘He sent for me,’ tilting her head towards the top of the house from where piano music sounded. ‘You know where to go?’ asked the young man who had opened the door the first as well as the second time – was he the butler? He was very good-looking. She went straight up and didn’t even knock, knowing she might not be heard above the piano. As soon as she entered, he stopped playing. ‘What do you want?’ he said, his voice suggesting even to her, who was too needy to be sensitive, that maybe her visit was a mistake.
‘I told you I’d send for you when I had something,’ he said.
‘I know.’ She hovered within the door so miserably that she was sure he would relent and be nice to her.
‘Then why do you come slinking in here?’ he said, not nice at all.
‘You said you liked the way I sing.’
Robert, still sitting at the piano, looked towards her with narrowed eyes. ‘Did she tell you to come? What’s-her-name – Magda?’
After a split second, in which she tried to decide whether it would be better to lie or not, she shook her head. ‘I lost my place,’ she explained but was met by an icy stare that forced her to continue: ‘So if you wanted to send for me, you wouldn’t know where to find me.’
‘What’s that accent you have? It’s appalling.’
‘That’s what they say: my mum and dad. They’ve got lovely accents, like actors. They
are
actors. Shakespeare and Noel Coward and all the other classics.’
He waggled the fingers of one hand for her to come over to the piano. He pointed to some notes he had scribbled and told her to sing them. After frowning at them for a moment, she did so, evidently to his satisfaction for he said ‘Yes’ again. Then he told her to leave, which she did, slowly and in the hope of being called back, but he had resumed playing his piano before she even reached the door.
 
When Ellie moved in, Magda expected that everything would soon be covered with a young girl’s disorder, discarded panties and lipsticks that had lost their tops. But this did not happen. Ellie left nothing lying about, as if she had nothing. After every meal she ate, she washed and wiped her plate and cup and stowed them away. When Magda marvelled at her neatness, she said it was because of always living in a very small space. From her earliest childhood, she was used to occupying a single room with her parents on their tours, when they were lucky enough to be hired by a repertory company; and when they weren’t, they waited out the time in lodgings in some far-out London suburb, usually the upstairs part of a semi-detached house, with a gas-ring to cook on and the lavatory on the landing.
In the mornings, dressed up for her meetings in her business suit and blouse with matching bow, Magda would tiptoe into the spare bedroom, careful not to wake Ellie. But she was always awake, sitting up in bed and brushing her hair. Magda reminded her of auditions she might have fixed for her that day, and also asked, trying to sound casual but sounding shy instead, what time she thought she might be calling in at the office? She longed to but refrained from inquiring about Ellie’s plans for the evening. She herself came home earlier than she had ever done before; sometimes Ellie wasn’t there, and if she came in very late, Magda would leave supper for her and go to bed, so that Ellie shouldn’t feel she had been waited up for. Next morning she said, ‘Where did you go yesterday?’
Ellie yawned. ‘Oh, the usual.’
‘In SoHo?’
‘And around there. Thanks for the quiche last night.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘Yum-yum.’
Ellie went mostly to the same place: the house in the Village where Robert had his studio. Usually the same person let her in – he
was
the butler, and his name was Fred. She went straight upstairs. The first couple of times Robert had fussed again, but after that he let her stay. She was no trouble at all, sitting very quietly against the wall with her arms around her knees; sometimes she was useful, when he asked her to sing something he was trying out. She stayed till he sent her away – which was later every day, for as his work progressed he worked longer hours. She had assumed that he lived in the studio, but one day he left off early and said he had to go home. She said, ‘You
are
home.’ He didn’t bother to answer but opened the door to let her precede him down the stairs. When they got to the street, he said, ‘I go this way’; she tried to follow but he said, ‘No, you go that way.’
As it happened, Magda too got home early that day and was delighted to find Ellie already there. At once Magda suggested all sorts of outings – dinner in an Italian restaurant, a movie, whatever Ellie wanted; but it turned out all Ellie wanted was to stay home and talk to Magda. ‘No, really?’ said Magda, laughing and pushing back her hair fallen into her flushed face. She went into her bedroom to change into something more relaxed, careful to put away her clothes as neatly as Ellie did hers; in this respect, Magda had become a reformed character. She was just slipping into her kaftan – her best one, gorgeous in black and gold – when Ellie came in without knocking. Magda quickly tugged the robe down over her hips and thighs – had Ellie seen them? ‘Oh sorry,’ Ellie said, so maybe she had. Magda flushed scarlet; she really must go on that diet, or eat less, or both, or something. But Ellie had other things on her mind than Magda’s figure.
‘When’s he calling people? Robert? For his new piece?’
‘How do you know he’s writing one?’
‘Oh, you hear things. At the auditions. Like who’s doing what when. Everyone talks at auditions.’
‘How did you get on today? Are they calling you back?’
‘Maybe.’ Ellie tried to remember to what audition she was supposed to have gone; she had forgotten to attend, as she did most days. ‘Funny, isn’t it: he’s your cousin and you don’t know what he’s doing . . . Don’t you like him, or what? Then why do you never see him? I mean, your
cousin
.’
‘Well, actually I was supposed to see him today. But I got out of it, and thank God I did because now you and I can have the evening together. What do you want to eat? I’ll call Call-cuisine, their menu’s right here – ’
‘Where?’
‘It’s in the drawer behind you.’
‘Where were you going to see him today?’
Magda was puzzled for a moment, then she laughed. ‘Oh you’re still on Robert? His mother’s having her birthday party today: Aunt Hannah. Big deal. Of course Mother’s there –
my
mother, Lottie – ’
‘But shouldn’t you go? If it’s her birthday and she’s having a party and all. You haven’t said you’re
not
going?’
‘I called to say I have this ghastly throat. Hannah’s scared to death of germs. Just hand me that menu, would you – in the drawer, just behind you? Thank you, darling.’
‘You could say you’re better. Then we could go. We could both go.’
‘You must be joking.’
Ellie’s lips trembled so that she could hardly speak, but she managed it somehow: ‘You’re ashamed of me.’ Magda quickly laid her hand over Ellie’s mouth to silence her, but Ellie removed it. ‘That’s why you don’t want me to go to your aunt’s party or meet her or anyone. I
know
you don’t want me to meet your mum – you speak to her every day and you’ve never even told her about me. You’re ashamed of me, that’s the reason. I’m not grand enough.’
Magda gave a dry laugh. ‘It’s me who’s not grand enough. Oh, she’s proud of me in a way, that I’m this agent with this big deal agency everyone knows about. But it’s not what she wants; not for
her
daughter. “You’re more like Hannah,” she tells me, and believe me, coming from her that’s
not
a compliment. Hannah? I told you: Robert’s mother.’
‘Are you?’
‘Like her? Certainly not! She’s the Teutonic side of the family. I used to dread going to her place as a kid. “Don’t tread on the carpet with those
shoes
!”’
‘What about Robert?’
‘I never did fathom how he can bear living with her, but he must like it all right because he’s still there. His studio is strictly for business, for his work. For everything else he runs home to Mother. He’s a classic case, if ever there was one.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘On Park, in one of those stodgy old apartment houses full of bankers and real-estate developers. People like my parents preferred to live on Fifth—’
‘Where on Park?’
‘No, on Fifth – oh, you mean Hannah? Park and 85th, as if it matters. I cannot believe, Ellie, that you and I are having this one evening together and we’re sitting here talking about
my family
.’
 
Ellie was perched very meekly on one of the throne-like velvet chairs that decorated the stately lobby. When Robert stood in front of her and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ she silently stared up at him. ‘What do you want?’ he said, tapping a foot impatiently.
‘To see you,’ she answered and got up, still staring at him. She followed him through the main doors held open for them by a doorman. As soon as they were outside, he told her, ‘You must not, ever, come here.’
‘But if I have to see you very badly?’
It had begun to get dark, also to rain. The road glistened with the reflections of headlights swimming down the Avenue and a swarm of lit-up windows glimmered through the wet dusk. Rain appeared to be Ellie’s natural element: the way it washed her pale face and made her hair cling to her cheeks recalled centuries of English waifs growing like tall weeds out of their gutters.

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