Running in the Family (20 page)

After about ten minutes he still isn’t over this bizarre motive for the visit. A servant brings him a cane basket full of fruit, and bread, and scones. Sir John says “come” and begins to stroll into the garden with the food under his arm. I gather we are to have breakfast under the trees. As we usually eat at seven in the morning, Gillian and I are both starving. He walks slowly towards a series of aquariums on the other side of the pool and driveway. “My fish from Australia,” he says, and begins to feed them from the basket. I lift my head to see a peacock on the roof spreading his tail.

“Hell of a lot of trouble that one caused.” What? “You know he jumped out of the train when it was going full speed … luckily we were passing a paddy field and he fell into it. When the train stopped he just climbed aboard again covered with mud.” It is a Victorian dream. We are on the lawn, my sister Gillian, this frail and powerful man, and we are surrounded by four or five peacocks who are consuming my scones, leaning in jerks towards the basket he holds. And interspersed among the peacocks as if imitating them are sprinklers which throw off tails of white, keeping the birds company. Now it is time to feed the sambhur deer and jungle fowl.

In the next half hour we ease him back into the story three times and, his memory finally alive to the forties, he remembers more and more. All through his narrative he never calls my father
by his name, christian or surname, just “this chap,” or “that fellow.” He is enjoying the story now. I’ve heard it from three or four other points of view and can remind him of certain bones—the pots of curd, etc.

“I was the commanding officer, you see. He had been drinking for months. Then one night at two in the morning he drives into the base in his jeep. He says the Japanese have invaded. He’s found one. Well I didn’t think so, but I climbed into the jeep and drove off with him. There was a man five yards out in the surf standing there like a statue. This fellow says, “There he is.” He had found him two hours earlier coming ashore, halted him, fired his pistol into the water between the man’s legs and said, stay there, stay right there,
do not move
till I get back, and jumped into the jeep and came to get us at the base. I put the jeep lights on him and we could see right away he was a Tamil. So then I knew.

“Next morning I took him with me to Colombo by train. He played hell on the way.”

The sambhur has eaten all the bananas, so we go back in, join Sir John’s doctor and the doctor’s wife and sit down in an open dining room to the real breakfast.

Sir John’s breakfasts are legendary, always hoppers and fish curry, mangoes and curd. A breeze blows magically under the table, a precise luxury, and I stretch my feet to its source as I tear apart the first hopper. My sandal is wrenched off and goes flying down under the length of the table, luckily not in the direction of Sir John. My foot tingling. While everyone else eats I lean back and look underneath and there is a small portable fan a few inches from my toes ready to tear into flesh this time. I could have lost a toe during one of these breakfasts searching for my father.

Sir John is talking about someone else now, delighting in some
scandal about “one of the best liars we have.” The open windows that come down to within six inches of the floor have no glass. A crow steps up as if to make an announcement, moves away and then the peacock climbs in and steps down to the light brown parquet floor. His feet give a slight click at each step. No one has seen this wonder, it seems, but me. Sir John reaches for a hopper, tears off the brittle edges of the dough, and taking the soft delicious centre, holds it out and the peacock he has not even looked at but hears, perhaps just senses, takes a final step forward, declines his neck and accepts the hopper walking away to a less busy part of the dining room, eating as he walks.

While we eat, an amateur theatre group from Colombo which is producing
Camelot
receives permission to be photographed on the grounds. The dream-like setting is now made more surreal by Sinhalese actors wearing thick velvet costumes, pointed hats, and chain mail in this terrible May heat. A group of black knights mime festive songs among the peacocks and fountains. Guinevere kisses Arthur beside the tank of Australian fish.

The photographers outside, the idea of
Camelot
, all remind Sir John of his political tribulations. For he claims that if anything lost him elections it was the grandness of the house and his parties—pictures of which appeared in the newspapers. He tells us of one of the most scandalous photographs organized by the Opposition. A demure young couple visited him along with a third friend who had a camera. They asked if he minded their taking some photographs and he gave them permission. The photographer took several pictures of the couple. Suddenly the man dropped to his knees, lifted up the woman’s sari and started chewing away at her upper thigh. Sir John who was watching casually a few yards away rushed forward and asked what was happening. The
man on his knees unburied his head and grinned at him saying, “snake bite, sir,” and returned to the thigh of the woman.

A week later three photographs appeared in the newspapers of this blatantly sexual act with Sir John also in the picture chatting casually to the woman whose face was in the throes of ecstasy.

My Aunt pulls out the album and there is the photograph I have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother together. May 1932.

They are on their honeymoon and the two of them, very soberly dressed, have walked into a photographic studio. The photographer is used to wedding pictures. He has probably seen every pose. My father sits facing the camera, my mother stands beside him and bends over so that her face is in profile on a level with his. Then they both begin to make hideous faces.

My father’s pupils droop to the south-west corner of his sockets. His jaw falls and resettles into a groan that is half idiot, half shock. (All this emphasized by his dark suit and well-combed hair.) My mother in white has twisted her lovely features and stuck out her jaw and upper lip so that her profile is in the posture of a monkey. The print is made into a postcard and sent through
the mails to various friends. On the back my father has written
“What we think of married life.”

Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

It is the only photograph I have found of the two of them together.