Joining Suzy on the veranda, I offered a glass of wine to her unresponsive hand. She looked out over the lake, unmoved, sucking at a cigarette. Why the smoke did not penetrate her clothing, while mine did, was one of the unexplained mysteries of our marriage. Her claim, which had no merit that I could detect, was that her Sullivan & Powell tipped cigarettes emitted only the mildest and least penetrative of odours. Unlike my Montecristos.
‘Never again,’ I said. I may actually have shuddered. I remember some involuntary movement, a full body tremor. ‘I’m happy to see the sights. I like our driver. But keep me off the streets. They utterly disgust me.’
She half turned, and took a long drink of the wine, lips pursed as if against excessive acidity, some crass grapefruity sauvignon perhaps. It wasn’t. Along with my box of cigars, I had imported an adequate supply of Meursault, which had travelled better than I had.
‘Tell me about disgusting,’ she murmured, not meeting my eye.
I came up behind her and put my arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘this is all my fault.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, ‘you’re doing your best. It was asking too much of you . . .’
I kissed her neck, which smelled of the market and humid air.
‘There’s still time before dinner,’ she said. ‘Let me have a quick shower.’
She ‘felt at home’ in India, she said, though this was our first trip together. She’d been determined to save me the discomforts of such a visit, but eventually I had insisted: if she felt that India was (in some idiotic way) ‘her spiritual home’, then the least I could do, before we both dropped off the perch like dead parrots, was to accompany her there.
She would happily have abjured the palaces and luxury hotels with which India is now so amply provided, and stayed instead in simple hostelries, or – more desirable yet – with ‘real Indian families’, as she had on previous visits with various friends. (I don’t know what ‘unreal’ Indian families would have been. Except, of course, for her own.)
Her parents Henry and Sophia – latterly Sir and Lady – lived in a Georgian rectory in Dorset, which they purchased in their late-thirties with money gouged out of the City. They proceeded to reinvent themselves as stereotypes, took up country pursuits with the idiotic enthusiasm only urban refugees can generate. They hunted (fox), fished, went on bracing walks in wellies, planted a kitchen garden, were active in the local church, and provided occasional jobs for a number of locals, whom they, not entirely discreetly, called yokels. Their only deviation from the county norms was in their choice of governesses for the children, Suzy and her older brother Rupert. Not for them the sulky and hormonally hyperactive au pair – ‘trouble on wheels, my dear’ – nor indeed, did they look for the sort of nanny self-advertised in The Lady. No, they wanted only Indian women, of mature age, to look after their children. They wanted an ayah, and indeed a succession of them were called just, and only, that. The local gentry sneered, but Sir Henry was triumphantly unrepentant: ‘It’s what they would have done, if they’d thought of it first. Too late now.’
And so Suzy grew up, in their Dorset idyll, a foster child of Empire. Sir Henry encouraged Ayah to read Indian stories, sing Indian songs, draw pictures of tigers, elephants, and parrots, make Indian sweets, and otherwise indicate to the children that there was something other – if not something more – than the long tedious days of West Country life. He could hardly wait to catch the 6.50 train from Dorchester to London every Monday morning and spending the week at his set in Albany. He had some grand times there, and Sophia left him to it. It was rather a relief, she said.
On the raised dais, slumped next to the couple as they exchanged rings, was their dog Bruno, an ungainly slobbering half-breed, tarry black, bleakly unappealing, intermittently dangerous. He’d twice bitten their postman, and their mail now had to be picked up at the local post office. The ring had been attached to a string around his neck, and the wedding celebrant, who to my surprise wore neither beard nor sandals, had some difficulty getting it off the beast’s neck, and into the hands of the increasingly anxious groom.
Further noxious blather ensued. Suzy’s crimson parrots seemed to mock and threaten me, as her hand released the firmness of its grip, and became still, coolly resting in mine. When the groom, finally, kissed the bride, with more enthusiasm than I thought seemly, the pleasure on Lucy’s face soothed me. Next to me Suzy wiped her tears. Our daughter was married.
I presume it should be a happy memory, but its edges are frayed and foxed by sadness. Happiness is fragile at the very moment of pleasure-taking, so easily defeated by a toothache or an itinerant virus. And past happiness? That lovely weekend at Lake Garda? The week that Suzy’s first novel came out? Delicate, easily bruised, soon rotten, evanescent. Do we lie on our deathbeds remembering such nonsense? Who cares? Who cared?
I was undelighted by Lucy’s choices and prospects, though I am unsure, as things developed and she entered fully into her life as wife and mother, whether I was right to worry so. And now worry seems a pallid, almost desirable state of mind compared to my daily dose of helplessness, desperation and withdrawal. Oh, to have some worries! School fees. Recalcitrant teenagers. Marital disharmony. Any of the above, please. All of the above. Anything, rather than this.
When Lucy was three, I recall her slight and wispy in a favourite cotton dress, white with tiny pink hearts perhaps – I can’t remember – but in the story I am constructing she looks dreamy in it, worn unfashionably long for one so tiny, floaty and ethereal as an angel. She would walk alongside as we went to the local shops, reach up on tiptoes and, if I leant down, put her hand in mine. We weren’t holding hands, hers was too slight to grasp mine, yet, but I would enfold her tiny fingers in my palm, and squeeze them as gently as if I were testing a downy apricot in the supermarket, anxious to avoid bruising.
I found myself whistling quietly as the song drifted through my head: Johnny Mathis’s ‘Misty’, a sentimental ballad that I had always scorned, though when I was sixteen my first girlfriend found it moving, though not moving enough. I get misty, just holding your hand. The metaphor felt surprisingly appropriate, for such a rotten song. Love fills every available space, soaks, suffuses and diffuses like a sea mist filling a room. Distances recede, all you can see is what is in front of your face. It makes you feel soggy. Nothing is better than love.
It was striking, only a year or so later, when Lucy had gained a couple of inches and no longer had to tiptoe, nor I to lean, that we could walk hand in hand, she giving me an answering squeeze, as firm as she could. We were both aware, I felt, of some new dimension to our relations, something grown up, reciprocal but diminished. I had stopped singing ‘Misty’ by then – you had to lean down to feel that way.
Her childhood reappears, now, only in cloudy vignettes that I rather suspect I have invented, or at least elaborated considerably. I suppose it doesn’t matter. We reconvene what time allows, and the arc of our stories is drawn from the few incidents that we recall, or make up. Most of my memories of her as a tiny girl are set in the summer. In the winter she was a demon, felt the cold terribly, shivered and sniffled, and resolutely refused to wear warm clothing when she went out. One Christmas Suzy bought her a chic olive green duffel coat with wooden toggles, which Lucy loathed from the very moment it emerged from its wrapping paper and refused to wear.
‘No buttons!’ she would howl. ‘No! No! No buttons!’
I was