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Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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BOOK: A Lovesong for India
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Nathan greeted, shouted, played the game along with the rest; but what was going on at their table for three was of a different order. Although it was an actual journey he was proposing to Rita and Kris, in using the antique names – Aleppo, Smyrna, Adrianople – he conjured up their past with ships in their harbours and the sultan at his court; and from there he penetrated into the heart of their ghettos, which was also the heart of his film, where devout shopkeepers felt a stirring of the soul that told them the Messiah was coming.
‘
He
was coming,’ Nathan said, pointing at Kris, who lowered his eyes and smiled in a charmingly deprecating way.
‘He’s not an actor,’ Rita repeated stubbornly.
‘Nobody would believe an actor,’ Nathan said.
‘But they’d believe him?’
‘They’d believe
in
him,’ Nathan answered her. He leaned forward and spoke in the intimate, passionate way he used whenever he wanted to fire financiers up about his project. Now it was to Rita that he described the lives of the believers, humble, despised, persecuted, forced to practise their faith in secret – and then, in their darkest hour, that promise, whispered from shop to shop and alley to alley, that the Redeemer was on his way.
‘People want to see him. They need to see him,’ Nathan said.
‘Who do you mean? Kris? Or the character in your film?’
Just then someone beckoned to Nathan, who, excusing himself, got up to join him. It was an actors’ agent, in the process of negotiating a contract with Nathan for a client; but now he had called him to tell him the latest joke that was making the rounds of the studios about a recently fired executive. When they had finished laughing, Nathan directed the other’s attention towards Kris.
The agent looked, appreciated. He said, ‘Who’s his agent?’
Nathan said, ‘You are.’
Left alone for a moment of privacy, Kris and Rita exchanged – not words, not even glances, they didn’t have to do that. Kris was fully alive to her doubts and fears and wanted only to still them. ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fun, Rita. A fun trip.’
But what she surmised in him had nothing to do with a fun trip. She realised that whatever Nathan believed, or pretended to, Kris
truly
believed.
‘I can’t do this without you. It’s a big job, Rita. A terrific responsibility – I mean, all these
people
.’ He waved his slender hand around the restaurant, indicating to her all that gross luxury and the sinners in it making deals. ‘I’ve got to help them because, you see, really in their hearts they want something different; like they’re waiting for it; like they’ve been promised.’
She had never seen him so worked up. He was fervent, inspired – not from outside, but as from that inner source that had, up till now, remained secret and hidden. He was pleading with her: ‘I can’t let them down, Rita.’
She kissed his cheek (it was burning). She didn’t understand or believe in his mission, but she knew that she had to be by his side for whatever it was he felt called upon to do. She persuaded herself that she was necessary to him, that he needed her. But really she knew it was the other way around, and that it was she who needed him, just as much as did all the others who so passionately desired him. She already surmised that soon these would no longer be counted as individuals but in their tens of thousands. This was confirmed for her when Nathan and the agent joined them, each of them laying a hand on Kris’s shoulders, each of them smiling – as delicately reverent as though touching a golden idol capable of fulfilling every promise, every wish.
Pagans
 
Brigitte: calm, large-limbed and golden as a pagan goddess, she loved to lie spreadeagled on the beach or by her swimming pool, in communication with the sun. Los Angeles had been good to her. When she was young, at the time of her marriage, she had been a successful model. Her husband, Louis Morgenstern, was a small wizened shrewd little man, thirty years older than herself but a studio head, a powerful producer, a very rich man. It had been a relief for her to give up her career. She preferred to swim, to sunbathe, to give dinner parties for Louis (studded with stars but as dull, in their different way, as those her sister Frances gave in New York for her banker husband); also to travel in Europe and occasionally take lovers – wry intellectuals who taught her what to read and confirmed her contempt for the sorts of films made by the studios, including her husband’s.
Her sister Frances had been very sceptical about the marriage to Louis. She was wrong. In spite of the lovers – kept secret, discreet – it lasted almost thirty years and so did Brigitte’s respect and liking for her husband. While Frances had married conventionally within their own circle settled in the US for several generations, Louis was the first in his family to be born here and still had a grandmother who spoke no English. Frances and her husband Marshall were ashamed of what they considered their sister’s misalliance. They felt themselves to tower over Louis and his family – socially of course, culturally, and physically too, as was clear at the wedding when tiny Morgensterns scurried among the lofty trees of bankers and real estate developers. Afterwards Marshall joked about the ill-matched couple and how Brigitte would be crushing Louis on their wedding night between her mighty thighs.
Brigitte was in her fifties when Louis died, and Frances, for whom Los Angeles was a wasteland, said, ‘Now perhaps you’ll come back to civilisation.’ Brigitte sold her house – the Hollywood mansion of indoor and outdoor pools, patios and screening rooms – while Frances searched for a suitable apartment in New York for her. Meanwhile Brigitte moved into a suite in a hotel, and although Frances found one Upper East Side apartment and then another, all close to herself and Marshall, Brigitte kept making excuses not to move into them. She liked Los Angeles; unlike New York, it was lightweight and undemanding. From one hotel window, she could see pretty houses frail as plywood scattered over the wooded hillside. From another, she had a view over the city of Los Angeles spread flat as far as the horizon; at night it was transformed into a field of shimmering flickering glow-worms fenced by the cut-out silhouettes of high-rise buildings. And the trees – the tall straight palm trees with their sparse foliage brushing a sky that was sometimes Renaissance blue and sometimes silver with pollution but all day held the sun to pour down on the ocean, the golden beach and Brigitte herself, past menopause but still golden and firm in her designer swimsuit, and pads on her large smooth lids luxuriantly shut.
Frances was getting impatient. I suppose she has a new lover out there, she thought to herself; and she said it to Brigitte over the phone: ‘Who is it now, another of those foreigners filling your head with clever rubbish.’
Brigitte laughed; she had always laughed at Frances’s disapproval, whether it was of Louis, of her lovers or of her indolence. Brigitte still had male friends – she needed them to tell her what to read – but she had long since reached a stage where she could admit that sex was boring for her. With Louis, she had enjoyed sitting beside him while he explained their stocks and shares and other holdings to her. By the time he died, he had been ill for some years but was only semi-retired, for his successors at the studio continued to need his experience and his financial clout. Twice a year he and Brigitte still gave their dinner parties where the agents and the money men mixed with the stars. Louis had little respect for most of the stars; he mocked their pretensions and perversions, their physical beauty which he said was the work of plastic surgeons and monkey glands. After each dinner party and the departure of the famous guests, he kissed Brigitte in gratitude for what she was: full-figured and naturally tanned, almost Nordic, God knew how and it was not only the hairdresser and the beautician. Louis had grown-up children from a previous marriage, and when it turned out that Brigitte couldn’t have any, he was glad, wanting to keep her perfect, unmarred. Actually, Brigitte was not sorry either; she didn’t think she had time for children. Frances said anyway she was too slothful and untidy ever to be able to bring them up. Frances had untold trouble with her own now grown-up son and daughter, who had gone the unstable way of the young and too rich.
Two years after selling her house, Brigitte was still in Los Angeles. By this time she had met Shoki, a young Indian, and an interesting relationship had developed. It may have appeared a classic case of older woman with impoverished young immigrant, but that was not the way it was at all. It was true that he was young, very young; it was also true that he was poor, insofar as he had no money, but the word impoverished was inapplicable. He had the refinement of someone born rich – not so much in money as in inherited culture. This expressed itself in him physically in fine features and limbs; culturally in his manners, his almost feminine courtesy; and spiritually – so Brigitte liked to think – in his eyes, as of a soul that yearned for higher being. These eyes were often downcast, the lashes brushing his cheeks, for he was shy – out of modesty not lack of confidence. As far as confidence was concerned, he reposed as on a rock of ancestral privilege, so that it never mattered to him that he had to take all kinds of lowly jobs to keep himself going. Brigitte had met him while he was doing valet parking at her hotel; he had been filling in for another boy and left after a few weeks to work in a restaurant, again filling in for someone else. There were always these jobs available in a shifting population of unemployed or temporarily unemployed actors and other aspirants to film and television careers.
He himself wanted to become a writer-director, which was why he was here so far from home. He informed Brigitte that film was the medium of expression for his generation – he said it as though it were an idea completely original to himself. He carried a very bulky manuscript from agent to agent, or rather to their secretaries, and was always ready to read from it. Encouraged by Brigitte, he sat in her suite and read to her, while she watched rather than listened to him. Maybe it was all nonsense; but maybe it wasn’t, or no more than the films on which Louis had grown so immensely rich; and she wanted him to be successful, so that he wouldn’t go away, or wouldn’t sink along with the other young people for whom he filled in on an endless round of temporary jobs.
She introduced him to Ralph, who had started off as a producer and now had his own talent agency. He had often been among her and Louis’s guests, the powerful locals who had been their friends or had considered themselves so. Actually, some of them had made a pass at her – as who did not, even when she had been beyond the age when any woman could have expected it. Usually she laughed at them, and the one she had laughed at the most had been Ralph: ‘Come on, you don’t mean it.’ Finally he had to admit that he did not. His excuse was that she was irresistible. ‘At fifty-five?’ she asked. He was the only person ever to explain to her in what way, and of course it was easier for him, with his lack of taste for women, to be impersonal. He said that her attraction was her indifference – the fact that she just
was
, the way a pagan goddess is, Pallas Athene or someone, ready to accept worship but unconcerned whether it is given or not.
The introduction to Ralph was a success. Shoki came back enthusiastic about Ralph’s kindness to him. When Brigitte phoned Ralph to thank him, Ralph said it was one’s duty to help young talent. He sounded guarded; there was a silence, then she said, ‘So what did you think?’
‘About the screenplay? It’s interesting. Different.’
‘Yes, isn’t it.’
Brigitte had hoped Ralph would have a more explicit opinion. She knew for herself that the work was different, and also difficult. The characters spoke in a poetic prose that was not easy to understand, but it sounded beautiful when Shoki read it to her, and every time he looked up for her appreciation, she had no difficulty giving it. Then he continued, satisfied – though really he did not need approval, he had the same confidence in his work as he did in himself.
When there was another crisis in his living arrangement, Brigitte solved it by taking a room for him in the hotel. He was concerned about the expense, but when she reassured him that it wasn’t a suite, just a single room, he moved in with his small baggage. He liked it very much. It was on the second floor and overlooked the hotel garden with its cypress trees and silver fountain. It was also decided around this time that it was really not necessary for Shoki to take any more jobs when he could do so many helpful things for Brigitte.
Frances found the perfect New York apartment for her sister and Brigitte agreed to take it, pay a deposit, sign papers – ‘Oh please, Frankie, whatever.’ Frances was not satisfied; she knew she was being got rid of and asked herself, What’s going on? Unfortunately she had no one with whom to share her doubts. Although she and her husband Marshall were known and seen everywhere as an indivisible couple – large and rich – the communication between them was not intimate. Whenever she tried to confide some deeper concerns to him, he answered her with an indifferent grunt or by rattling his newspaper at her in irritation.
BOOK: A Lovesong for India
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