The Lotus and the Wind (30 page)

She plucked a lotus flower and carefully tied it into her hair. She would not speak because the day had spoken her words for her and showed on her behalf everything that she had to show. There were these:

Shalimar, that was old yet not stern, whose thick grass and shaded arbours were good and beautiful only because people existed to enjoy them. Every experience shared was thereby doubled. (Yet Robin quoted--’The snows fall and none beholds them there.’)

Her mother dozing in a camp chair, snoring rhythmically, a low grrmph-grrmph, her parasol collapsed across her face that had become almost lovely, her hand resting on the cradle.

The girls, Mary and Ada Savage, bright red ribbons in their hair, white skirts, white shirtwaists, playing rounders with her father and Shivsingh and Colonel Rodney--and Robin, who laughed with the rest of them.

The twins, whom she had been feeding behind a high wall of the emperor’s garden when, in the fullness of content, her husband surprised her. (Yet he had passed from brooding to decision. He wanted to speak to her but could not or dared not. It was fantastic that he, who sounded in her every note of awe and love, should fear her. But he did.)

Robin paddled slowly. She wondered whether she was asleep, so like a dream was their soundless passage among the lotus. After a long time she moved her head and stroked it against his knees. It was dark. She said, ‘We must have the babies christened. We can’t go on calling them The Boy and The Girl. What do you want to name them?’

‘I haven’t thought.’

‘Robin! And godparents?’

Robin said, ‘I have thought about that. The Girl should have two godmothers and one godfather, The Boy two godfathers and one godmother, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘I would like Shivu to be The Girl’s godfather. What about Edith Collett for one godmother?’

‘We-e-ell.’ She ought to have expected this but she hadn’t. She was taken by surprise and a little shocked. An Indian, even though he was a rajah, as her daughter’s godfather? Why, a real godfather might help to bathe her as a baby, and could certainly give her clothes, even underclothes, when she grew up. She felt that she was a beast, a cruel and unkind woman, to think like this. But she could not help it. After all, there
had
been a Mutiny.

Robin said, ‘I think they’d both like it.’ Trails of phosphorescent water ran out at every stroke from the end of his paddle.

That was true. Shivsingh and Edith Collett would feel they were loved, and she knew how much both of them needed that. Her niggling, unpleasant doubts remained, but pride and admiration began to push them deeper down inside her. She thought: No one else in the whole world would think as Robin thinks. Whom have I married? What place will I reach if he lifts me, by the strings of my love for him?

Robin said, ‘The other godmother, I have no ideas. I would like The Boy’s godfathers to be my father and Jagbir.’

‘Jagbir!’ In spite of the tenor of her recent thoughts the exclamation was forced out of her on a rising note of incredulity.

‘Yes, Jagbir.’ He laughed softly. ‘Jagbir will never be able to do much for him, except perhaps teach him to be a good officer. Then only if he wants to be a soldier and joins the regiment. Jagbir will never be an officer himself. He’ll finish as a havildar.’

‘Robin, it’s--’ She fumbled cautiously for words. ‘It’s so unusual. I’m afraid people might laugh at him when he grows up and they hear his godfather is a rifleman, a Gurkha. My mother was hoping the commander-in-chief would accept. Your father knows him, and he could be so useful. And don’t you think godfathers have to be Christians, at least?’

‘That would apply to Shivu too. I don’t know. I want The Boy to grow up as good and happy a man as Jagbir. I don’t care what name the godfathers call God by.’

She did not want to argue with him to-night. She said nothing more about the godparents but instead mentioned the names she had long ago decided she wanted her children to be called by. Robin answered at once. ‘Catharine’s a good name, but not Robin. Peter. Catharine and Peter.’

She had not expected him to agree to his son’s being named after him, so she did not protest. She said, ‘All right, then. Peter and Catharine. Can’t you push the shikara into the reeds there and rest a minute? I’m getting a crick in my neck talking up at you like this.’

With a single stroke of the paddle Robin nosed the bow of the shikara into a reedy island that loomed darker ahead above the glistening flowers and the starlit water. The lights of Srinagar shone on their left hand, lending ghostly form to the trees along the edge of the lake. He slipped down to the cushions beside her, and she wanted love to be made, literally. She wanted to create love out of the warm air and the lotus and the water, and lap him in it. She opened her arms to him.

Her body floated down and she saw it in the shikara as she rose, borne on lotus balm, and embraced him in the windless air above the lake. How far could she rise, how far lift him with her?

The strain on her arms and at the back of her closed eyes grew intolerable. She had to let go. She opened her eyes and stared silently a long while into Robin’s. His head was a dark shape on the sky; his eyes held no answer to her question, nor would he say where he had been, how high, how near, how far.

She said, ‘What are you going to do when your leave’s over? Does Major Hayling want you to stay in the Intelligence? Did your father talk to you about returning to your regiment? You know he’s been able to fix something with Old Alma and Colonel Franklin so that--I mean, they aren’t going to--’

Robin leaned away from her with a gentle movement. He laughed quietly, not bitterly. ‘Good heavens, yes, I’d forgotten I was a coward. They were right, though. I am.’

‘Robin, please!’

‘The question won’t arise for a bit. I’ve got to go.’

Got to go where? What do you mean, go? The rising tide of alarm filled her throat so that she could not say the words. She knew now that this was what he had been trying to tell her ever since he came to Srinagar.

‘Why do you have to go? Have you been ordered to?’ She forced herself to speak in a business-like tone--although she felt the wind rushing about her in the calm of the lake, tugging at her because she loved Robin, and tugging at him to tear him apart from her. The lotus was in her hair, and the wind was jerking at it to cast it out and away--but the water was calm, and the flowers on the lake did not stir petal or stem.

Robin was speaking. ‘I haven’t been ordered to go. I’ve been ordered not to go.’ He began to explain to her about central routes and southern routes and railways and mountains and deserts and rivers, and the Russian whose wife was like an anchor--or was it a rope he compared her to? At length he said, ‘I’m waiting to get my strength again, then I’ll go.’

‘How long will that be, before you’re fit?’

After a short hesitation he said, ‘I’m lying, even to myself. It isn’t physical strength I’m waiting for, but moral courage--and it hasn’t really got much to do with the secret-service work. That’s just the--the arena in which I’m struggling. I’m waiting for a sign that says “Go,” and gives me the strength to do what I ought to do--leave you alone.’

‘For ever, not to come back?’ She spoke very calmly.

‘I don’t know. Will I find another coin and be able to interpret it?’ Then, suddenly forceful, ‘Anne, I’m sinking.’

‘
What!
Is the boat leaking?’ She sat up hurriedly and peered over the side.

He laughed hard, a fresh laugh that blew away some of the phantasms his words and his manner had conjured from the lake to frighten her. He said, ‘Not the shikara, Anne. Only me.’ Then, seriously but not tragically, he said, ‘I’ve told you. More love is being heaped on me than God gave me capacity to bear.’

‘Oh no, Robin, no! We’re not asking you to give anything back, none of us. We only want you to be yourself, to be happy.’

He said flatly, ‘Love is a load, and I don’t think I can carry it without its breaking me. If it did break me I’d become a better husband, a better son, a better father. But--I can’t
willingly allow myself
to be broken, Anne! I can’t. You couldn’t! Nobody can!’

She thought he might mean the excess of domesticity that had surrounded him since he came back. She thought he might imagine that with the babies he would be tied all his life to paved roads and padded comfort. She thought a hundred things--while the wind whistled in her ears.

She said, ‘Let’s get away from our people for a bit. Let’s go up the Sind Valley. Your father says it is beautiful and wild. We can shift camp as often as you like. Peter and Catherine will have to come, but they can be carried in doolies. I’m not very strong yet, but when we get into camp you can go out and fish and shoot and climb. You can paint.’ She kneaded his right hand between both her own. A hardness and dryness in her mouth prevented her from swallowing while she waited for him to answer.

He said, ‘Yes. All right. That will do.’

‘Then we’ll start to-morrow!’

‘It’ll have to be the day after. We can’t arrange it in time for to-morrow. I’ll warn Jagbir to-night.’

She bit her lip, then determined to say it. ‘Please don’t bring Jagbir, darling. I think he reminds you of everything you’ve been through. He’s not part of this--this thing, this horrible thing which makes you believe you can’t love people. He doesn’t know the answer, he can’t tell you anything.’ She finished, breathing deeply, and as soon as the last word was out of her mouth she wished she could recall it.

It was the old mistake, of fighting the wrong fight. She was a fool to set Jagbir up as an enemy in her mind, as someone who competed against her for Robin. Jagbir was on her side and he was a friend. Jealousy, in connection with Robin, was the last fatuity. Robin feared all who came close to him. He had just explained to her that he feared they would break into him to exorcise the comfortless presence reigning over his spirit. But the presence, however forbidding, was the gift of God, and he had to fight to prevent man substituting for it any lesser gift. Anne realized now that anyone was her ally who could help her show Robin that human love did not have to be demanding. If a woman of the streets could for a moment persuade him of the reality of any kind of love, that woman was her ally and to be loved by her. If Jagbir could show him the reality of faithful, unasking, all-giving devotion, Jagbir was her ally and her friend. But the words had been spoken, and Robin took them up quickly. ‘Very well. I’ll leave Jagbir behind.’

The enemy blew down from the mountains, and she jerked her head against it, knowing it was not real, just a wild wind of her imagination. But the lotus blossom fell out of her hair and dropped to the surface of the lake, where it lay motionless, its petals extended.

Sitting in front of the tent, she watched Robin move down the face of the mountain. He had gone off from the previous camp at five in the morning, to explore a side valley for flowers and rejoin the rest of them here.

She heard the bearer tell her that tiffin was ready, and acknowledged the message with a nod but did not turn her head. They had been five days on the trail by now, and the business of pitching camp had settled into an easy routine. She had to crane her neck to see the cliffs beneath the hidden summit of the mountain. Below the cliffs a grassy alp hung to the face of the rock. Below that the slope bent steeply down through thin, insecurely anchored pines. A lammergeier circled, a tiny dot, across the face of the cliffs, the wind carrying his dark, rushing shadow over the marmot in its hole and the hare in its form. She saw Robin run down across the alp and drop into the pines. Twenty minutes later he came out on the last slope, walking now with a long, easy stride. He did not stop at the stream but came straight on across it, leaping from stone to stone and, when the boulders failed, stepping down to wade through the boiling, icy water. Then he ran up the slope to her and reached the grass. His light-grey tweed trousers were wet from the waist down, and the breeze could not stir his perspiration-wet, dishevelled hair. He held a bunch of flowers loosely in his right hand.

He extended his arm. ‘I found these up there on the cliff.’

‘Above the alp? It looks terribly steep.’

‘It is. Look, isn’t this one like edelweiss? And this is a blue poppy.’

‘Darling, it’s beautiful!’ She leaned over the flowers in his hand and sniffed them carefully. There were white and pink and scarlet and blue. The poppy was like a flower carved of veined blue ice, so cold and fragile it seemed in Robin’s brown hand. Beside it the red button of an anemone winked gaudily from the protection of a frieze of spear-like grey-green leaves.

He said, ‘Take them, put them on the table. They don’t last long in captivity but while they do they’re worth the getting.’

She took the flowers and got up from her chair. ‘Tiffin’s been ready for half an hour. You’re soaked. You must go and change or you’ll catch pneumonia.’

‘Not a hope.’ He looked down at his shirt. ‘But I’ve been sweating. I’ll change.’ He glanced up at the sun and around at the rocks and the shadows of the trees with a curious, all-embracing sweep of the eyes. ‘It’s just after one. I’m hungry.’

At tiffin she remembered that she was going to persuade him to stay here at least an extra day. She said, ‘What shall we do this afternoon? Let’s fish. Then to-morrow you can take me up there.’

His eyes were hollow and blue-rimmed, and the brown and green flecks in them did not move with the Light as they used to. A transparent pallor was visible under his sunburn, like a ghost seen through a dark veil, and in the evenings she imagined sometimes that his skin shone like phosphorus. She knew that he hardly slept at night. Twice she had awakened to find him gone from the camp bed beside hers. She had heard nothing until he came in from outside, when by the dim lantern she saw that he wore only his nightshirt and that his feet were bare. He had become impervious to cold and heat.

He said, ‘Fishing?’

‘Yes, Robin.’ She laughed lightly. ‘Trout fishing. That’s what we came up the Sind to do. Remember?’