Maharani Page 4

  ‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ she said. ‘Come, dance with me.’

  I was never much of a dancer, but as Neena was far from steady on her feet, my own clumsiness went unnoticed. We staggered across the room, bumped into a drinks trolley, and knocked over a stuffed leopard.

  Extricating myself from the moth-eaten trophy, I said, ‘This must have been one of His Highness’s conquests.’

  ‘No, I was the one who shot it. My husband was given the first shot, but he missed. He missed out on most things. But that’s another story. You must meet my new friends. They’re very special.’

  A tall, good-looking man of about forty was smiling at me, hand extended.

  ‘This is Ricardo,’ she said, putting a hand on his arm in a gesture of ownership. ‘He’s from Bolivia.’

  ‘Cultural attaché in the Bolivian Embassy,’ he added by way of further enlightenment.

  I shook his hand and told him I was a writer.

  ‘And what do you write?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Romantic drivel,’ said Neena, butting in.

  ‘I didn’t know you were one of my fans,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you must meet my wife,’ said the diplomat diplomatically. ‘She reads romantic novels.’

  I was introduced to the wife. Mrs Montalban. Not half as glamorous as the diplomat. Rather plain, in fact. She wore glasses; little or no make-up; a dress more suitable for office than a party. Almost as though she wanted to go unnoticed. By contrast, her husband was flashy, glamorous, the Latin extrovert, the Valentino type. But she was trim, in good shape.

  She said she would love to read my books. I told her there were only two, and one of them was for children.

  ‘My daughter reads a lot,’ she said. I followed her gaze to the top of the stairwell, where two children sat crouching, watching the proceedings—the same children I had seen before in the garden.

  ‘Pablo can come down if he wants to, but he’s shy.’

  ‘Pablo?’

  ‘We named him after Picasso, but it’s Anna who paints.’

  ‘And what does Pablo do?’

  ‘Dreams.’

  Neena grabbed me by the arm and led me away to meet her other guests. A magistrate who wrote poetry. A dental surgeon. A faded princess. An overweight aunt (the lady in red). And Prince Kartik and his friends, a noisy bunch, who were having a party of their own at one end of the hall. The young prince was drunk. He gave me a welcoming hiccup and subsided into an armchair. His friends paid no attention to me or to Neena, but carried on dancing.

  ‘Where’s your younger son?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s at boarding school. Expelled last year, but they had to take him back. The chairman of the board is an old friend.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Made love to me, of course.’

  ‘Not the chairman. Your son.’

  ‘Oh, he was caught smoking pot. They all do, you know, this younger generation. Ever since the Beatles came to Rishikesh.’

  ‘Well, if he can sing like a Beatle, we’ll forgive him.’

  Prince Kartik’s friends were doing their best to sing like the Beatles, but with only limited success. Anyone passing the house that night might easily have mistaken their efforts for the baying of wolves or jackals.

  We retreated to the bar at the far end of the room. I observed that it was well stocked with the choicest of wines, brandy, cognac and Scotch whisky.

  ‘All thanks to Ricardo,’ said Neena. ‘Whatever I want, he’ll turn up with it.’

  ‘Is he staying some time?’

  ‘Only a week. Then we’re off to Nepal.’

  ‘His family too?’

  ‘No, just Ricardo and me. The family will be here. The children will be going to that school next door.’

  Ricardo passed us at that moment. Playing the host as though he’d always been master of the house, he was escorting a guest to the door. The doctor was leaving early. I watched Neena as she watched Ricardo. She had the aspect of a caged tiger watching its keeper approach with the day’s hunk of juicy red meat. She was ready to pounce on her meat. And she wasn’t going to share it with anyone.

  An ornate wall clock struck midnight, but the drinking and dancing continued. There was no sign of any dinner. Neena could sustain herself on a purely liquid diet, and so could most of her guests. But I was growing hungry. I looked around for snacks but even the peanut bowls were empty.

  Mrs Montalban was beckoning me from the next room. She put a plate of cutlets in my hands.

  ‘I can see you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘You’d better have some of the children’s dinner.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They’ve eaten and gone to bed. Plenty of mutton cutlets left. You eat mutton?’

  ‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Desperate writers can’t be fussy.’

  ‘Nor can desperate housewives,’ she said, and helped herself to a cutlet. She seemed a homely sort of person, and I warmed to her.

  ‘I think I’ll slip away,’ I said, ‘but I hope to see you again.’

  ‘We are here.’

  I wished her goodnight and left the house by the kitchen door, walking around the building and through the garden—or what had once been a formal, ornamental garden. It had been neglected for some time. Bright moonlight shone on untrimmed rose bushes and paths that were a tangle of ivy and irises gone wild.

  As I opened the gate, I was startled by an apparition. A tall figure in white came floating towards me.

  It stopped and turned to look at me. I made out a long, sallow face of indeterminate age, the eyes deep-set, malevolent, and recognized the ghostly figure. It was the household’s pet nun, the same white-robed Sister who had been nanny to Neena’s two brats.

  Was she a real nun, I wondered, and if so, why wasn’t she in a convent or a nunnery instead of wandering about the Hollow Oak grounds. Or was she just a sinister figure in fancy dress?

  Either way, she sent a shiver down my spine.

  I did not stop to talk to her, but made a quick exit from the grounds.

  The strident dance music followed me for some way before being dissipated by the enveloping silence of the mountains.

  A pair of foxes were dancing a jig in the bright moonlight. A nightjar called, tonk-tonk. A street dog sang to the moon.

  Everyone was having a party.

  7

  In those years, Neena was something of a hedonist. Widowed early, she had made the pursuit of pleasure her principal object in life. I think she wanted to cram all the fun that was possible into the few years of comparative youth that remained to her. And she didn’t care if others were hurt in the process.

  Ricardo was a catch that she had no intention of relinquishing—not for some time anyway.

  She told Mrs Montalban to look upon the palace as her own home, albeit with her husband in absentia, and then took off with the obliging diplomat on a grand tour of beach resorts—Goa, the Maldives, Pondicherry where she still owned the hotel—and Nepal.

  Mrs Montalban and the children had everything they wanted, but they were ill at ease in Hollow Oak. The nun appeared to be in charge, looking after the expenses and ordering the servants about. Prince Kartik showed up from time to time, complaining that he hadn’t received his monthly allowance, ‘Mummy’ being preoccupied with other matters. The younger prince phoned from his school, demanding pocket money, and the nun would send him a money order.

  And how were the Montalban children getting on? Anna was busy painting landscapes. Pablo, hands in pockets, whistling cheerfully, was loafing about on the Mall, drifting in and out of the cinema halls.

  We met again at the Rialto. The film was Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It turned out we were both fans of action-filled westerns. He sat next to me and we exchanged notes on our favourite western heroes. He liked Clint Eastwood, who had recently arrived on the screen with the ‘spaghetti’ western. I mentioned Gary Cooper, but he was too young to have heard of him. This was before the coming of t
he video, so there was no way of catching up with the classics.

  While the film was on, Pablo took no notice of me, even though he had seen me sitting a couple of seats away. He was totally absorbed in the on-screen action, even clapping his hands when the big gunfight climaxed to his satisfaction. There was something very innocent, even old-fashioned, about his enthusiasm. It reminded me of a performance of Peter Pan, which I had seen at a London theatre in the 1950s. When Tinker Bell was dying the audience was told she could be saved only if the audience declared that they believed in fairies. We were asked to clap our hands if we believed in fairies. Everyone clapped—or almost everyone—and Tinker Bell was saved. Not that the audience really believed in fairies. But they went along with the spirit of the play and the spirit of the playwright, that master of whimsy, J.M. Barrie.

  Outside the hall, Pablo came up to me and asked, ‘Did you like the movie?’

  ‘Loved it,’ I said to please him.

  ‘The gunfight was great, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Super.’

  ‘Did you like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Doc Holliday drank too much. Like my father. And the Maharani.’

  ‘She can drink more than Doc Holliday. And she’s a better shot with a rifle.’

  He smiled, gazed at me in a conspiratorial way. He had beautiful green eyes. His complexion was olive. He had full, sensual lips. There was something feminine about him, his hair long and black and glossy, his long hands full of gestures, his voice musical, as yet unbroken.

  ‘Do you think they would give me a poster?’ he asked unexpectedly.

  I was amused. And sympathetic. I remembered my lonely boyhood, expeditions to various cinemas, sometimes in out-of-the-way places (Chandni Chowk, Meerut, even the suburbs of London), and the care and enthusiasm with which I would collect publicity leaflets, film magazines, postcards of favourite stars.

  Mr Ahuja, the manager of the Rialto, was sitting in his office. I went up to him and asked, ‘Do you have a spare poster that you can give this boy? He’s a regular customer.’

  He looked up and smiled. ‘We’ve used them all up for this picture. But here are the posters for our next attraction. It will run for a week. My Fair Lady. Do you like musicals?’

  ‘He likes posters.’

  The manager laughed. ‘Well, I can spare one, I think. Since you’re regulars.’ He rolled up a fairly large wall poster and handed it to me. I handed it to Pablo. He was thrilled. He took my hand and kissed it.

  ‘I’ll put it up on my bedroom wall,’ he said.

  The manager was touched. ‘I’ll save some posters for you,’ he said. ‘Keep coming to the Rialto.’

  We assured him that we would keep coming.

  Pablo kept me company on the way back to Barlowganj. It was dark by the time we reached the Hollow Oak gates. Pablo’s mother was pacing up and down the garden path.

  ‘Thank you for walking home with him,’ she said, obviously relieved to see us. ‘Sometimes he starts dreaming and gets lost. Would you like to come in?’

  ‘Another time,’ I said.

  ‘After the next picture,’ said Pablo. ‘You’ll come with me, won’t you?’

  ‘If your mother agrees.’

  ‘Pictures, pictures,’ she said. ‘That’s all he lives for. And there are five cinemas in town!’

  ‘But if you are on holiday, what does it matter?’

  Pablo was so pleased to have an ally in me that he broke into Spanish as he said goodnight: ‘Buenas noches. Adios, amigo!’

  8

  There’s just one way to write: put pen to paper and allow the words to come by themselves. As they will, if you don’t interrupt and don’t juggle them around too much.

  In my window seat at Maplewood I allowed the words to come through the window, laden with the scents of summer. An old honeysuckle, planted by someone fifty or sixty years ago, climbed the outside wall and poured its heady fragrance into the room. I was the beneficiary of someone else’s loving labour—a woman who loved gardens and planted and cared for this honeysuckle and watched it grow. And when she died, the garden too died of neglect; but the honeysuckle, being strong, was so well established against the wall that no one thought of cutting it down any more than they thought of pulling the house down. So there it was, adding its fragrance to the words as they floated in through the open window.

  My good companion, the honeysuckle; that, and the babblers who often hopped in to snap up the moths that had knocked themselves out overnight, flinging themselves against the lighted window; that, and the little shrew, the chuchunder, who ran squeaking from room to room, weak sighted and rather helpless, expecting my protection from the questing tabby cat from across the road.

  And one fine day there was Pablo at my door. Pablo bearing a gift.

  He unrolled a poster, and there stood Laurel and Hardy, as large as life, in a film called The Flying Deuces.

  ‘Saw it when I was a boy,’ I said.

  ‘It’s being shown again. You said you liked Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘Stan and Olly forever!’

  ‘It’s showing tomorrow.’

  ‘Then we’ll see it together. How many posters do you have now?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Mr Ahuja is very generous.’

  ‘My mother sent him a cake.’

  ‘Fair exchange.’

  ‘But I have a problem, amigo.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I can’t put them up anywhere. Sister Clarissa is in charge while the Maharani is away and she says we can’t have film posters stuck all over the walls. Not even in my room.’

  ‘Mean old thing. A few posters would brighten up the place—better than having mounted tiger heads and deer antlers suspended from the walls. We should pull them all down!’

  ‘We can hardly move about indoors, she’s so fussy. Won’t let us touch the furniture. Nothing must be moved. Nothing has been moved since the Maharaja died.’

  ‘When does the Maharani come back?’

  ‘Don’t know. Sister won’t say.’

  ‘Doesn’t your father phone?’

  He shook his head. There was anger in his eyes—too much anger for so delicate a boy.

  ‘My sister drew a picture of her,’ he said, taking a folded sheet from his coat pocket.

  ‘Of the Maharani?’

  ‘No, of the nun.’

  He straightened out the sheet and showed me a crude sketch of Sister Clarissa. It was quite a good likeness. Piercing, protruding eyes stared out of a long, cavernous face. There was a cruel twist to the mouth. One eye appeared to be higher than the other; perhaps Anna had got them out of alignment.

  ‘I have never seen her so close up,’ I said. ‘There’s something scary about her.’

  ‘I heard the servants talking about her in the kitchen. They say she isn’t really a nun. That’s just a disguise.’

  ‘Why would she dress up as a nun?’

  ‘Because she’s wanted,’ said Pablo mysteriously.

  ‘Wanted?’

  ‘Wanted for murder.’ He said this in a sort of stage whisper, although there was no one to hear us talking. ‘I heard it from the old chowkidar. She was a nurse, she worked in a big hospital, and if she thought one of the patients was a bad person, had done something wrong, she would come by whenever she was on night duty and suffocate them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With a pillow, of course.’

  ‘You’ve seen too many movies, Pablo.’

  ‘But I haven’t seen it happen in a movie. The chowkidar, Ram Singh, knows all about her. He’s been with the palace staff since he was a boy—first in Mastipur, now here. When they discovered she was killing sick people, she had to go into hiding. The Maharaja helped her. She was his aunt, a gypsy from Europe. He hid her in the palace for a year, and when she came out she was no longer a nurse—she was dressed as a nun!’

  Pablo looked so serious, so worried, that I burst out laugh
ing.

  ‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of her, amigo. She doesn’t like us. We are in the way.’

  With my window open to the wind and the rain, I can recall that time, that summer of long ago, and I see before me the pale, beautiful face of Pablo, his long fingers (more artistic than his sister’s), the green of his eyes reflecting the morning sun, his soft, sensual lips, and one of those rare smiles which brought out the dimples in his cheeks.

  With the rain on my face, I remembered the rain on our faces when we were caught in a sudden storm, walking back from the pictures to Barlowganj, no umbrellas, his futile efforts to keep his latest poster from getting wet. We stopped at the cottage and I wrapped him in a large towel, and he sat on my bed shivering while I made him a mug of strong coffee. He was an ugly duckling, all ribs and sharp bones, but with the promise of becoming a swan one day.

  He smoothed out the poster and gazed tenderly at the sodden image of Elvis Presley—not exactly my poster boy, but a teenage heart-throb in his time.

  ‘It will dry out,’ I said.

  He looked up and smiled at me—not with the same tenderness that he had bestowed on Elvis, but with the affection that comes from trust and companionship.

  But to return to that morning in the window seat, and the drawing of Sister Clarissa. Pablo had placed it on my desk—not much on it in those days—and he was staring at it with an expression far removed from the benevolent gaze which he had bestowed upon Elvis. A spasm of Latin fury swept across his face. It was gone in a moment, but I would remember it for a long time.

  ‘She-devil!’ he hissed, as he spat upon the image. ‘Witch woman!’ And picking up my paper knife he stabbed repeatedly at the face and figure of the crude representation of the nun.

  ‘Well, that should do for her,’ I said. ‘And, by the way, you’ve broken my favourite paper-cutter.’ It had broken off at the tip due to the violence with which Pablo had slammed it into the table.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quite contrite. ‘I’ll get you another.’

  ‘Don’t worry. A table knife will do just as well—though not for stabbing Sister Clarissa!’

  I took the desecrated drawing, set a match to it, and watched it burn to cinders.