Absolute Friends (7 page)

"Sorry, Sammy, something I need to look at a bit closer."

"At fucking midnight?"

"At any fucking time," says Mundy.

He has focused his attention on the lower step and is searching for a tall girl in nurse's uniform with her eyes closed, and she isn't hard to spot. She's a sunny, overgrown child with a head of black curls and her Irish eyes clamped shut exactly the way she says they are, and if Mundy ever wore a nursemaid's drag and a black wig and squeezed up his eyes against the Indian sun, this is what he'd look like, because she's the same age as I am now, and the same height, he thinks. And she's got the same damn-fool all-weather grin I'm wearing while I gawp at her through the magnifying glass, which is the closest I will ever be to her.

Or hang on, he thinks.

Maybe you're smiling out of shyness because you're too tall.

And there's something of the wild spirit about you too, now I come to look at you more closely.

Something spontaneous and trusting and joyful, like a tall, white Rani full-grown.

Something that is actually a great deal more to my taste than the stuck-up, tight-arsed aristocrat of dignity and erudition that I've had shoved down my throat from the day I was old enough to be lied to.

* * *

Personal and Confidential to Yourself

Dear Captain Mundy,

I am directed by Lady Stanhope to draw your attention to your obligations to the person of Miss Nellie O'Connor, a nursemaid in Her Ladyship's employ. Her Ladyship asks me to advise you that if Miss O'Connor's position is not promptly regulated in a manner befitting an officer and gentleman, she will have no alternative but to apprise your Regimental Colonel Commanding.

Yours faithfully,

Private Secretary to Lady Stanhope

One marriage certificate, signed by the Anglican Vicar of Delhi in what looks like rather a rush.

One death certificate, signed three months later.

One birth certificate, signed the same day: Edward Arthur Mundy is hereby welcomed to the world. He was born, to his surprise, not in Murree but in Lahore, where both his mother and his baby sister were certified dead.

Mundy deftly completes the equation. The nature of Captain Gray's words spoken in flippant jest is no longer in question. _Mundy? Mundy? Aren't you the fellow who put the Stanhope nursemaid in the family way?__ By providing no cause to have them repeated in court, the Major secured an embargo on them. But only in court. The secretary's letter may have been personal and confidential to the Major--but so it was to the entire strength of the Stanhope household and its outstations. His head still buzzing with images of the berserk Major raining blows on luckless Captain Gray, Mundy searches his heart for the appropriate rage, anger and recrimination that he tells himself he should be mustering, but all he can feel is a helpless pity for two inarticulate souls trapped in the conventional cages of their time.

Why did he lie to me for all those years?

Because he knew he wasn't enough.

Because he thought she wasn't.

Because he was sorry and guilty.

Because he wanted me to have the dignity.

It's called love.

The brass-cornered suitcase has one more trick up its sleeve: an ancient leather-bound box embossed with a gold crest containing a Pakistani War Office citation dated six months after the birth of the infant Mundy. By directing the operations of his platoon with reckless disregard for his own safety and firing his Bren gun from the hip, Major Arthur Henry George Mundy emptied twenty saddles and is hereby appointed an honorary bearer of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor. The medal, if it was ever struck, is missing, presumed sold for drink.

Dawn has broken. With tears streaming down his cheeks at last, Mundy pins the citation to the wall above his bed and next to it the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes and their minions, and hammers them both home with his shoe.

Ilse's radical principles like her eager little body are unappeasable, and Mundy in the flush of his initiation can be forgiven for not spotting the difference. Why should he care that he knows even less about Mikhail Bakunin than he does about the parts of the female anatomy? Ilse is giving him the crash course in both, and it would be downright impolite to accept the one without the other. If she rails against the state as an instrument of tyranny, Mundy passionately agrees with her, though the state is about the last thing on his mind. If she lisps of _individualization,__ extols the _rehabilitation of the I__ and _the supremacy of the individual,__ and promises to cut Mundy free of his submissive self, he implores her to do exactly that. That she talks in the same breath of radical collectivism disturbs him not at all. He will make the bridge. If she reads aloud from Laing and Cooper, while he dozes temporarily sated on her naked belly, a nod of appreciation can scarcely be accounted hardship. And if making love appeals to her more than making war--for in her spare moments away from anarchism and individualism Ilse is also an evangelizing pacifist--he will hang up his musket for her any day, just as long as her impatient little heels keep hammering his rump on the coconut matting of her anchorite's horse trailer in St. Hugh's--gentleman callers tolerated between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m. for Earl Grey tea and Marmite sandwiches with the door open. And what more soothing, in the afterglow of lust temporarily assuaged, than the shared vision of a social paradise ordered by the free agreement of all component groups?

Yet none of this should imply that Ted Mundy is not by predisposition committed to the New Jerusalem that Ilse has revealed to him. In her starry radicalism he has found not only echoes of the venerable Dr. Mandelbaum, but evidence of his own vague stirrings of revolt against most of the things that England means to him. Her just causes are his by adoption. He's a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example. He's a frozen child who is beginning to thaw out. Occasionally, trotting off to a lecture or library, he will brush up against a former schoolmate in sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and polished brown toe caps. Awkward exchanges pass before each hurries on his way. _Christ, that fellow Mundy,__ he imagines them thinking, _gone completely off the rails.__ And they're right. Pretty much, he has. He belongs neither to the Gridiron nor the Bullingdon, the Canning nor the Union. At raucous if dismally attended political meetings he relishes his tussles with the hated rightists. His height notwithstanding, his favored position away from Ilse's arms is perching cross-legged with his knees up by his ears in the cramped rooms of left-leaning dons while he listens to the gospel according to Thoreau, Hegel, Marx and Lukács.

That he is not persuaded by intellectual argument, that he hears it as music he can't play rather than the iron logic it professes to be, is neither here nor there. He is undaunted by belonging to a tiny band of gallant comrades. When Ilse marches, Mundy the great joiner puts his whole good self where her loyalties are, boarding the coach with her at Gloucester Green at daybreak equipped with the Mars bars she likes, and the carefully wrapped egg-and-cress sandwiches from the market, and a thermos of tinned tomato soup, all stowed for her in the Major's army-issue knapsack. Shoulder to shoulder and often hand in hand, they march to protest against Harold Wilson's support of the Vietnam War, and--since they are robbed of the chance to dissent through the parliamentary process--proclaim themselves members of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. They march to Trafalgar Square to protest against apartheid and issue passionate declarations of support for American students burning their draft cards. They cluster in Hyde Park, are politely dispersed by the police, and feel vindicated if a little hangdog. Yet hundreds of Vietnamese are dying every day, bombed, burned and thrown out of helicopters in the name of democracy, and Mundy's heart is with them, and so is Ilse's.

To protest the seizure of power in Athens by the CIA-backed Greek colonels and the torture and killing of unnumbered Greek leftists, they linger vainly outside London's Claridge's Hotel where the colonels are believed to be residing during a furtive visit to Britain. None emerges to receive their jeers. Undaunted, they repair to the Greek Embassy in London under banners reading _Save Greece Now.__ Their most satisfying moment comes when an attaché leans out of a hotel window and shouts, "In Greece, we would shoot you!" Safely back in Oxford, they still feel the wind of that imaginary bullet.

In the winter term, it's true, Mundy takes time out to stage a German-language production of Büchner's _Woyzeck,__ but its radical sentiments are impeccable. And in the summer, if a little sheepishly, he plays valiant cricket for his college and would have a high time drinking with the boys if he didn't remind himself of his allegiances.

Ilse's parents live in Hendon, in a semidetached villa with a green roof and plaster dwarfs fishing in the garden pond. Her father is a Marxist surgeon with a wide Slav brow and fuzzy hair, her mother a pacifist psychotherapist and disciple of Rudolf Steiner. Never in his life has Mundy met such an intelligent, broad-minded couple. Inspired by their example, he wakes up in his rooms one morning seized with a determination to propose marriage to their daughter. The case for doing so strikes him as overwhelming. Bored out of her wits by what she perceives as half-baked British protest, Ilse has for some while been hankering for a campus where students go the whole hog, such as Paris, Berkeley or Milan. Her choice, after much soul-searching, has fallen on the Free University of Berlin, crucible of the new world order, and Mundy has pledged himself to accompany her there for his year abroad.

And what more natural, he argues, than to go as man and wife?

The timing of his proposal is not perhaps as propitious as he imagines, but Mundy in the grip of a great plan is blind to tactic. He has turned in his weekly essay on the symbolic use of color by the early _Minnesänger,__ and feels master of the moment. Ilse on the other hand is worn out by two days of ineffectual marching in Glasgow in the company of a Scottish working-class history student named Fergus, who she claims is irredeemably homosexual. Her response to Mundy's declaration is muted, if not downright contemptuous. _Marriage?__ This was not one of the options they considered when they were debating Laing and Cooper. _Marriage?__ Like a real bourgeois marriage, he means? A _civil ceremony__ conducted by the _state?__ Or has Mundy so far regressed in his radical education that he covets the blessing of a religious institution? She stares at him, if not angrily, with profound gloom. She shrugs, and not with grace. She requires time to reflect on whether such an outlandish step can be reconciled with her principles.

A day later, Mundy has his answer. A squat Hungarian angel wearing nothing but her socks stands feet splayed in the only corner of her anchorite's horse trailer where she can't be spotted from across the quad. Her pacifist-anarchist-humanist-radical philanthropy has run out. Her fists are clenched, tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.

"You have completely bourgeois heart, Teddy!" she bawls in her charmingly accented English. And as an afterthought: "You wish stupid marriage and you are complete infant for sex!"

3

THE ASPIRING STUDENT of the German soul who steps off the interzonal train into the vibrant Berlin air possesses six of his late father's shirts that are too short for him in the sleeve but mysteriously not in the tail, one hundred pounds sterling, and fifty-six deutschmarks that a weeping Ilse has discovered in a drawer. The grant that kept him just below water at Oxford, he has been advised too late, is not available for study overseas.

"Sasha _who,__ Sasha _where,__ for God's sake?" he yells at her on the platform of Waterloo station while Ilse, wracked by Magyar remorse, decides for the umpteenth time to change her mind and jump aboard with him, except she hasn't brought her passport.

"Tell him I sent you," she implores him as the train mercifully pulls out. "Give him my letter. He is a graduate but democratic. Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha," which to Mundy sounds about as convincing as everybody in Bombay knows Gupta.

It is 1969, Beatlemania is no longer at its zenith, but nobody has told Mundy. In addition to a monkish mop of brown hair that flops over his ears and bothers his eyes, he sports his father's webbing knapsack to denote the rootless wanderer he intends to become now that life has lost its meaning for him. Behind him lies the wreckage of a great love, ahead of him the model of Christopher Isherwood, illusionless diarist of Berlin at the crossroads. Like Isherwood, he will expect nothing of life but life itself. He will be a camera with a broken heart. And if by some remote chance it should turn out that he can love again--but Ilse has obviously put paid to that--well, just maybe, in some sleazy café where beautiful women in cloche hats drink absinthe and sing huskily of disenchantment, he will find his Sally Bowles. Is he an anarchist? It will depend. To be an anarchist one must have a glimmer of hope. For our recently anointed misanthrope, nihilism is closer to the mark. So why then, he might wonder, this spring in my stride as I venture forth in search of Sasha, the Great Militant? Why this sense of arriving in a fresher, jollier world, when all is so demonstrably lost?

"Go to Kreuzberg," Ilse is howling after him, as he waves his last tragic farewells from the carriage window. "Ask for him there! _And look after him, Teddy,__" she commands as a peremptory afterthought which he has no time to explore before the train conveys him on the next stage of his life.

Kreuzberg is not Oxford, Mundy observes with relief.

No kind lady in blue curls from the University Delegacy of Lodgings is on hand with mimeographed lists of addresses where he must behave himself. Priced out of the better parts of town, West Berlin's unruly students have set themselves up in bombed-out factories, abandoned railway stations and tenement blocks too close to the Wall for the sensibilities of property developers. The Turkish shantytowns of asbestos and corrugated iron, so reminiscent of Mundy's childhood, sell neither academic books nor squash rackets, but figs, copper saucepans, halva, leather sandals and strings of plastic yellow ducks. The scents of jeera, charcoal and roasting lamb are a welcome-home to Pakistan's lost son. The handbills and graffiti on the walls and windows of the communes do not proclaim college productions of the plays of minor Elizabethan dramatists, but pour invective on the Shah, the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, President Lyndon Johnson and the Napalm Culture of U. S. Imperialist Aggression in Vietnam.