The Lily Hand and Other Stories (4 page)

‘Why not?'

He sat up rigidly in his chair, staring at her with dropped jaw and horrified eyes.

‘Yes, why not?'

She turned the picture and smoothed it out before him. ‘Did you look at the other one carefully? Colour the face blue, forget the beard, and make this fellow put down his flute, and you'd hardly know them apart. Two gentle, plaintive, pretty faces. People made them exactly alike because they needed exactly the same from them. True, we're looking at the likeness on one of its lowest planes, but the same holds good higher up, you know. All that is different in them is the conventions. Why not both? They're one and the same.'

He was clinging to the arms of the chair as if the world had begun to rock under him. He stared under knotted black brows, trying to grasp the magnitude of her blasphemy. His jaw worked, and he couldn't speak. He drew a convulsive breath and whispered creakingly: ‘You're not serious! You don't know what you're saying!'

‘I am serious. Do you mean you've never really caught a glimpse of it? In four years? Everybody who ever got as far as imagining the inevitability of God was looking at the same sun through his own particular little window. The view doesn't even vary so very much, not until the creeds become business. When the priests move in, and start cornering, and organizing, and retailing what the saints left freely about the world for everybody to enjoy, then the distortions and perversions begin. But that doesn't alter the first principle. Nothing can.'

‘You're just being deliberately perverse. I don't see the slightest resemblance between this … this thing … and the church calendar they've got there on the wall beside it. That's all very facile talk about the two pretty faces. I know our almanacs aren't great art, just as well as you do. But supposing this had been Hanuman, or Ganesh, as it very well might have? What then?'

The heat with which he had begun this outburst cooled quickly, she heard the note of security steady in his voice again, and was sure in her heart that he could not be shaken. In a moment he would be sounding indulgent, reminded to his comfort that she had been in India no more than four or five weeks, and was only running true to beginners' form in knowing everything.

‘It wouldn't have mattered,' she said simply. ‘I thought this might have made it easier to see, just the fact that it was Krishna. But it makes no difference. They're all aspects and allegories.'

‘And a beautiful monotheism embracing them all, I suppose, when one develops eyes to see!' He laughed shortly and angrily. ‘Rachel, you're not really such a fool as all that.'

She looked back at him without any answering indignation, even smiled a little. ‘Did you ever wonder why Tagore and Gandhi so often wrote simply “God”? Because they meant it, that's why. And long before their day Indians were leaving the evidence for us all over the place, if we cared to see it:

“the loving sage beholds that Mysterious Existence wherein the universe comes to have one home;

Therein unites and therefrom issues the whole;

The lord is warp and woof in created beings.”

That isn't one of the desert fathers, that's the Yajur Veda.'

‘Well, now come down out of the clouds for a moment, and look around you, and see what goes on at ground level.'

‘It was right down at ground level I got all this,' she said mildly. Below ground level, actually, she thought. But of course I had a lantern and a guide. ‘Would you believe it,' she said, ‘I ploughed my way conscientiously through most of the Vedic translations before I left home? And it never really occurred to me that they meant exactly what they said! “One All is Lord of what moves and what is fixed, of what walks and what flies, this multiform creation.” That's in the Rigveda. “Our father, our creator, our disposer, Who is the only One, bearing names of different deities”.'

‘There's a lofty literature to every heresy and every heathenism,' said Andrew violently. ‘But “If the light that is within you is darkness, how great is that darkness”.'

She had been ready to continue the argument with goodwill, but that stopped her. After that there was nothing to say; she heard it as an oracle. She lifted her head and studied him with a long, thoughtful, wondering look. His darkness seemed to her impenetrable.

She relaxed with a sigh, and reached for her glass. The scarred Krishna rustled mournfully under her hand. She took it up gently. It was Subramanya who carried a lantern.

‘May I have this? As a souvenir.'

‘Of course, if you'd like it,' he said stiffly.

He got up, and went to lean on the verandah rail. ‘Shall we go out? It's a bit late now, but we could still go down to the Point, if you feel like it?'

But when she agreed that it was a little too late, and remembered that she had a dress to iron before dinner, he seemed, if anything, rather relieved. The whole thing must have been a shock to him. Probably he was already reconsidering about her, drawing back a little, making sure the way of retreat was still open. Maybe it was high time to move on, and leave them both a breathing-space.

She mentioned that evening, over coffee, and in the right tone of regret and reluctance, that Sudha had to get back to Madras, and that she really ought to go with her and see about her flight to Calcutta, before it became altogether too hot to go there at all. Andrew made the right disappointed noises, and cautious feints at dissuading her, but she saw that the news was at least as welcome to him as it was to her. And Sudha, who could always be relied upon to do all things gracefully, sighed her regrets over her coffee cup, and explained sadly that her husband was coming home from New Delhi two days earlier than she had expected him, and she must be in Madras to welcome him.

So that was that. Rachel knew exactly how it would end. They would part on the best of terms; but after the first dutiful letters of thanks and valediction they would let each other drop, gently and gratefully and once and for all. No hard feelings. But it was just as well to have found out in time.

She went down in the morning towards the cave-temple. The boy with the name of a god was sitting on his heels in the sandstone portico, with a long blade of grass between his teeth. He spat it out when he saw her coming, and joined his long, brown hands beneath a dazzling smile. She sat down beside him on the steps, and opened the flat, cardboard folder she carried.

‘Subramanya, this afternoon I'm going away, back to Madras.'

‘I shall be sad,' he said, but so serenely that it was plain he would not remain clouded for long.

‘I brought you back this.'

She opened the folder between them on the step. She had pressed the picture between the folds of a linen towel, but the thin white scars would never come out. She looked at the mutilated face, and was aware of belated anger. What right had anyone to distrain a poor man's possessions in the name of religion? What happened to courtesy and decency before a fundamentally good man could so forget himself?

‘Why did you let anyone force you to take it down? It was your property, you had a right to hang it wherever you liked.'

He looked at her gravely, but without any distress, his large eyes wide open to the sun. ‘It did not matter so much. It is only a picture. Cobb Sahib is like a child about pictures. You must go gently with children, when they do not understand.'

‘Yes,' she said, for some reason gloriously reassured, even though Andrew would surely remain a child to the end of his self-sacrificing days in this place, and never come near understanding of the thing he had done, or the forbearance extended to him. ‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘He is a good man. It would be wrong to hurt him.'

He pricked up his head alertly, looking beyond her towards the road. A car and its attendant dustcloud rounded the curve of the village, the first tourists of the day. Subramanya tightened the cord round his waist, and hitched the lantern expectantly against his hip.

‘Lord Krishna is not jealous; he knows, he will wait. Some day Cobb Sahib will stop caring so much about images, and look for God.'

That was perfect, there was nothing more to be said. He had illuminated everything.

‘Take my picture with you,' he said suddenly. ‘I don't need it. It was mine, I bought it. I give it to you.'

The car had stopped in the arc of gravel by the road; two men were getting out, festooned with cameras. Subramanya rose to go to his duty.

‘Not because it is a little spoiled,' he said, turning on her his sudden, blazing smile. ‘I like it better now, because you brought it back. But I give it to you.'

‘Thank you, Subramanya. I'll keep it gladly.'

‘To remember me,' he said, already skipping away from her with one bright eye upon his clients; but he turned once more before he left her, and joined his hands in a last salute.

‘Namaste!'

‘Namaste!'

He ran away from her as he had run towards her on the first day, headlong and eager, clutching his lantern firmly by the ring at the top. As she drew back into the trees with the cardboard folder under her arm she heard him announce himself magnificently to the newcomers, astride before them at the edge of the sandstone outcrop, with the instrument of revelation uplifted proudly in his hand.

‘I am Subramanya. I am light-boy.'

Grim Fairy Tale

Looking back now, I realize that I ought to have smelt a rat right from the start. If I hadn't been as vain as I was green, I should have wondered whatever possessed my boss to take me with him on that business trip across Europe, when he had so many older and abler men at his disposal. My driving was all right, but certainly no better than Smith's or Davidson's, and I couldn't speak a word of German, while Brent was completely bilingual, and they were all senior to me.

But at the time, of course, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that Mr Fordyce should choose me; so it never occurred to me that the real difference between Smith, Davidson and Brent and me was that they were married, and I was single.

Mr Fordyce had a daughter. Lilian was coming with us as far as Cologne, where she was going to spend the two weeks of her father's business jaunt with friends of the family, and we were to pick her up again on the drive home. I didn't see anything fishy in that, either. She seemed a nice girl, and I never noticed anything peculiar about her, such as her being twenty-eight. I was twenty-two myself, and rather partial to the company of girls older than myself, because they were better listeners. All across France and Belgium I enjoyed having my driving admired – so intelligently, too – and my ego gently groomed by Lilian's approbation, and I really missed her when she left us at Cologne.

From then on I don't know which of us talked more about her, her father or me. He must have been rubbing his hands, because everything was going according to plan, and, knowing what he knew, he must have been willing to bet I was as good as hooked. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't have been better – I might have been very happy, and I should almost certainly have been comfortably off, because he was the sort to do the right thing by his son-in-law.

But of course, after that night everything was different. I don't know that I had any choice, after that night.

We were a whole week in Frankfurt, where Franz Eisner, the firm's chief agent in Germany, had his office. Then we went on to Stuttgart and Munich, and back by way of Nuremberg. And it was in Nuremberg, when we had just two days to get back to Cologne and pick up Lilian, that Mr Fordyce got a telegram, and announced that a big deal with Canada was coming up unexpectedly, and it was by way of being an emergency, and he'd have to fly back to England immediately. Leaving me to drive the car back across Germany, pick up the girl, and escort her safely home. Which he had no doubt I could do admirably. Stephen Dalloway was the white-headed boy all right, while it lasted.

I had no doubts, either. I felt a few inches taller, and quite complacent at the idea of two days or more
tête-à-tête
with Lilian, but probably not as complacent as he felt at the way the bait had gone down. It was only after I'd seen him off that I had time to remember little things like my complete lack of German, and the fact that I should have to drive and navigate at the same time on roads I didn't know and through cities where the traffic had put the fear of God into me even on the way out when I'd had the boss and all his experience right at my elbow.

Still, I wasn't the sort to have qualms about my own capabilities. To my way of thinking, there wasn't much I couldn't do, given the opportunity. And of course, it was flattering to have it taken for granted that I could be relied on to manage the journey across Europe like an old hand. I had visions of a distinguished future, Stephen Dalloway, Continental representative of Fordyce's, comfortably installed in Franz Eisner's office in Frankfurt.

It was afternoon when I started, owing to my having to see the boss off at the airport, but it was only two hundred and twenty kilometres to Frankfurt, and from there to Cologne by the autobahn is a morning stroll. I'd memorized the map beforehand, and in any case you'd have hard work to lose yourself between Nuremberg and Würzburg, because once you light out westward across the face of Germany there's virtually nowhere else to go. I'd decided not to stay overnight in Frankfurt itself, but to stop short of it by the odd few kilometres, and sleep in Hanau, so as to face the city in the morning, when I was fresh and at my best.

I had a bit of a cold, just come out that morning, but it was nothing much to bother about, and the sun was shining, and altogether I felt pretty good.

By five o'clock that afternoon things didn't look quite so cheerful. The sky clouded over early, and turned the colour of lead, and there was thunder rolling round on my left flank. Then I picked up a five-inch nail which was just one of the things I'd forgotten to allow for, and it fetched me up on the grass verge of the road, shaken and irritated. And while I was changing the wheel the rain began – not thunder rain yet, just a nasty, wetting drizzle that gradually grew heavier, and had me feeling cold and clammy before I had the sense to grope in the back of my car for my raincoat.