Burnt Shadows (9 page)

       
Later, when Elizabeth repeated all this to James, in Sajjad’s hearing, he shook his head and said, ‘I hope your curiosity is satisfied. But don’t you think we should simply let her forget all that now?’ And since then the Burtons had never asked a question about Japan, or allowed her a moment of contemplation that could lead to memory.

       
Sajjad considered all this as Hiroko’s gaze turned inwards, then sat back in his chair, looking out at the garden, and let her be.

4

Hiroko watched the shadows thrown on to the ruins of Hauz Khas, around which an elaborate moonlit picnic was in progress. The ruins were just ruins, shadows just distorted impressions created by the interplay of light and dark. So even this had come to pass: a collapsing structure, the silhouette of a man falling upon it, did not impair her ability to turn with a polite smile to hear the question posed by the woman beside her.

       
‘How are your Urdu lessons coming along?’

       
Hiroko couldn’t recall the name of the Englishwoman who asked the question, though she knew her husband was on the Viceregal staff and that she had the finest jacaranda trees in New Delhi.

       
‘Very well, thank you. It’s been three weeks and we’ve finally accepted that I can only make a “k” sound using the roof of my mouth, not the back of it. It has drenched Sajjad in sorrow, but sorrow is inescapable with Urdu so he’s not blaming me.’

       
‘Sajjad? Oh, James’s dogsbody. Is that what he said, “sorrow is inescapable with Urdu”? They make the oddest claims, don’t they?’

       
Dogsbody?
Hiroko bit into a piece of roast chicken to give her mouth something to do other than retort. She didn’t know how to behave around these people – the rich and powerful, a number of whom had asked her about the samurai way of life and thought she was being charmingly self-effacing when she said the closest she had come to the warrior world was her days as a worker at the munitions factory. Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different class, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi’s equivalent of Urakami. And yet, that was unfair to the Burtons and at least partially untrue. The soft sheets, the abundance of mealtimes, the dizzyingly coloured dresses Elizabeth had passed on to her, the vastness of the Burton library, the kindness of the Burtons themselves . . . she was more than grateful for all these things, and all too conscious that they were hers by generosity, not by right.

       
‘Why are you wasting your time with Urdu?’ Kamran Ali, one of the Indian Oxbridge set, lowered his bulky frame on to the picnic blanket beside Hiroko. ‘Language of mercenaries and marauders. Do you know the word “Urdu” has the same root as “horde”? Now, Latin. That’s a language worth learning.’ He held up his empty glass and a liveried bearer stepped forward to fill it. ‘Vini, vidi, vino,’ Kamran Ali said, and the Englishwoman next to Hiroko laughed and drew him into the conversation about the odd utterances of one’s Indian staff.

       
Hiroko felt someone touch her elbow and looked up to find Elizabeth there.

       
‘Elizabeth, are you joining us?’ the Lady of Jacaranda said without making any attempt to shift and make space.

       
‘Thank you, no, Violet. The air’s much too stifling here.’ She paused for just a moment before adding, ‘I mean, because of those—’ She waved her hand in the direction of the six-foot-high sticks with flames billowing from their tips which lit up the picnic area.

       
Hiroko stood up with a mumbled excuse, caught between amusement and sadness at the acerbity of Elizabeth’s interactions with these dull but harmless creatures. As the two women started to walk away from the gathering, James, watching them from a distance, saw the light shimmer off Elizabeth’s emerald-studded necklace – he’d placed it around her throat for the first time in a world burnished so bright with love that the green gems had seemed dull by comparison. In a rare imaginative burst he saw Hiroko and Elizabeth as the twin slim gold chains of the necklace, progressing side by side except when some gleaming interruption (the Viceroy, the wife of one of James’s clients, the Nawab of Somewhere) prompted them to diverge for a while, assured that they would meet on the other side. James believed Elizabeth was solicitous of her foreign guest in establishing this pattern, never realising how much it counted for his wife finally to find herself a friend and ally.

       
Occasionally these last few weeks she had even found herself looking forward to going out when Hiroko agreed to accompany them to whatever social gathering was taking place that evening (there was never an evening without a social gathering).

       
‘Sorry to wander off for so long. I wouldn’t have heard the end of it from James if I hadn’t spent some time discussing themes for the Easter Ball with the Harridan. Her husband looks poised to further justify James’s chess-playing lifestyle.’

       
Hiroko had already learnt that it was best to keep quiet when either of the Burtons spoke about the other, but she determined right then to find a way past Sajjad’s barrier of loyal silence in all matters related to James Burton and find out why exactly a solicitor could be allowed to sit on his verandah, drinking tea and occasionally moving chess pieces around a board, without anyone raising the slightest objection. The rich! Ridiculous! she found herself thinking and shook her head about all that didn’t change no matter where in the world you went.

       
The truth of it was that since the very start of his legal career James’s foremost, and unparalleled, ability had been the charm, social connections and air of command which combined to convince clients and – more importantly – prospective clients that James Burton was a man to rely on. He brought those in need of legal counsel to the offices of Burton, Hopkins and Price and once they were there he left all those with particularly thorny problems in the hands of his colleagues, who were able enough to ensure that the clients did not regret their choices. Since he’d broken his leg he had been unable to navigate the stairs up to the third-floor law offices but he’d been unflagging in his social obligations, making adept use of the sympathy his injury garnered to the betterment of his practice.

       
Once a week Sajjad went to the office and brought back work with which James could occupy himself, but everyone understood that was little more than a façade; though the leg was considerably healed no one had bothered to enquire when he could return to work, so it seemed foolish for James to broach the subject himself. Just as it had seemed foolish to broach the subject of returning to the upstairs bedroom when he found himself able to manage the stairs. The difference in the two situations was that he didn’t particularly want to return to the office.

       
Only Hiroko’s collapse on her second day in Delhi had finally restored James to the marital bed; she had to be moved to the downstairs room and Elizabeth had told Lala Buksh to transfer James’s belongings ‘upstairs’. The command was vague enough for James to wonder if she meant ‘the upstairs guest bedroom’ but Lala Buksh had not interpreted it that way, much to James’s relief. On their first night in the same bed after a space of over two months it had seemed far too pointed to do anything other than make love, but it had been an awkward, unsatisfying business, the awfulness of the whole thing made worse by James patting Elizabeth on the head just before turning away to curl against his pillow as, long ago, he used to curl against his wife. In the middle of the night he’d woken up to find his body aching with demands; as silently as possible he’d taken care of his needs, thinking of Elizabeth as he did so, though she, lying awake yet immobile next to him, was convinced that wasn’t so.

       
Elizabeth linked arms with Hiroko as they stepped away from the lanterns and torches. Earlier, when James’s Bentley had approached the ruined complex of Hauz Khas, Elizabeth was appalled at her insensitivity in bringing Hiroko to such a place, reminding her that time and neglect should be the only cause of such devastation. We want to speed up everything in our modernity, she had thought, even destruction. But Hiroko had looked around the moonlit ruins in wonder, and stepped out from the Bentley towards the torchlight as though entering a fairy tale.

       
‘Sometimes I forget the enchantments of Delhi,’ Elizabeth said, sitting on the raised floor of a small stone structure, its pillars topped with a cupola. ‘Then there’s a night like this, and I almost believe I’ll miss this place when all this is over.’

       
Hiroko sat down next to her.

       
‘You don’t mind, then? That the British have to leave?’

       
Elizabeth laughed softly.

       
‘I’ll tell you something that I’ve never told anyone, not even James. The British Empire makes me feel so . . .’ She glanced at Hiroko as though considering how much she could be trusted, and then admitted, ‘German.’ She reached into the silver bag that hung off her wrist and pulled out a cigarette.

       
Hiroko accepted the cigarette with a wry smile. Elizabeth didn’t smoke, but took a certain pleasure from seeing Hiroko doing so in front of James’s stuffy clients, just as she took pleasure in the eyebrows of officialdom that raised themselves over the stylishly cut trousers Hiroko had brought with her from Tokyo.

       
Hiroko leaned back, her elbow resting on the stone floor, legs crossed at the ankles. Briefly in Tokyo she’d lived the life she had thought she’d wanted – that of the forties version of the ‘modern girl’. Jazz clubs, and cigarettes, and no one but herself to support with the money she earned from translations. For a while she’d even enjoyed it. Now it was only to keep Elizabeth company that she sometimes acceded to coming out to these gatherings with their intricate rules of behaviour, which she knew she could only flout up to a point before embarrassing James Burton. She was much happier curled up on a sofa in Bungle Oh! working on Urdu exercises Sajjad set for her or reading a book from the Burton library.

       
‘I always assumed I knew why Konrad was so obsessed with discovering all he could about the lives of the Europeans and Japanese in Nagasaki.’ She could talk without constraint about Konrad to his sister now, though James hadn’t entirely rid himself of the air of panic which suggested he was forseeing an oriental melodrama unfolding in his living room each time she mentioned his brother-in-law. ‘So determined to see a pattern of people moving towards each other – that’s why he kept researching his book instead of writing it, you know? He was waiting for the war to end and the foreigners to come back and give him his triumphant ending. He thought the war was an interruption, not the end of the story.’ She looked once more towards the shadows flickering on rubble and exhaled a breath of smoke. ‘I always thought his obsession grew from a need to believe in a world as separate as possible from a Germany of “laws for the protection of German blood and German honour”.’ She laughed without much humour. ‘Imagine hoping to find that separate world in Japan.’

       
‘And now? You think there was some other reason.’

       
‘Yes, Ilse. You.’

       
‘Oh.’ Elizabeth shook her head, made an embarrassed gesture of disavowal. ‘I was nothing in Konrad’s life. His mother – my stepmother – had me sent away to boarding school in England before he was born. And most of my holidays were with my mother’s family in London. Konrad and I were strangers.’

       
Hiroko nodded briefly. It would be too cruel to say that Konrad had been searching through Nagasaki for a world in which they didn’t have to be strangers, a world in which he could have arrived in Delhi to see the sister he was finally old enough to know as an equal and not found that his Germanness, her Englishness, were all that mattered.

       
‘I don’t miss him at all,’ Elizabeth said slowly. ‘But even so, when you first came to our house, before I saw you, there was a moment when I thought it was Konrad. And it was . . .’ She pressed her fingers against a spot just above her heart. ‘A joy so deep I know nothing about its origins.’ As she had known nothing about the origins of all that desperate passion in the aftermath of Konrad’s death, when she had reached for James night after night, not mourning her brother but needing some assurance of her own body’s existence – she was flesh, she was blood, not a shadow. But her only refuge was in orgasm, which felt like obliteration. Was that irony or just another of life’s cruelties?

       
Hiroko looked from Elizabeth to the men and women lounging on picnic blankets while moths and Indian waiters flitted darkly between them, a wave of an uncalloused hand brushing one away, calling the other one near. And there was Kamran Ali speaking to a waiter in his broken, English-accented Urdu. Everything here was awful and – she glanced at Elizabeth – sad. And yet here she was with nowhere else to be. Did that make her awful, or merely sad? Either way she would have to do something –
something!
– to step out of the sense of temporariness that accompanied each moment, except the ones in which she and Sajjad sat on the Burton verandah and a new language ceded its secrets to her.

       
The bearer circled back to say Mr Burton was asking his wife to join him, and Elizabeth rolled her eyes and stood up.

       
‘You would have liked Konrad,’ Hiroko said. ‘If I’d married him, I’d have made sure you liked each other.’

       
Elizabeth touched Hiroko’s hair gently.