It was clear to Iris that she was engaged to Lawrence. Only, nothing was said for the moment. Discretion was her personal sacrifice to the war; she spent twenty months feeling exalted.
In that time he wrote to her twice; the second time, three scrawled lines stating what he would like to do to her when they next met.
In the last December of the war, she went into the WVS canteen and was greeted with the news that Babs’s brother was dead. In Babs’s sitting-room, on an ugly blond-wood settee, Iris poured out her own sorrow.
Babs stared at her. Then said, in a thick voice, ‘How dare you claim a connection.’
Iris, grappling anguish and mucus, made noises.
‘The idea of Larry and . . . you.’ Babs ground her teeth. ‘With your spangles-on-net dresses.’
Word got out.
Matthew Ho, the doctor’s son who lived next door to the de Souzas, waited for Iris after mass. She had known him forever. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. Hygiene and his Sunday suit notwithstanding, he went down on one knee on the pavement. A crowd materialised at once to offer advice and encouragement.
Iris, schooled in obedience, relayed the news to her father. ‘Damn Ching-Chong cheek,’ said Sebastian de Souza. He might have been enraged but chose to be amused instead. After a moment, Iris could see that amusement was what the situation called for. Father and daughter tittered together.
For weeks, a word was enough to set them off.
Chopsticks
.
Pigtail
.
Every four months, for three years, Matthew took Iris to lunch at The Golden Lotus and renewed his proposal. On these occasions he remained seated. It was not the kind of restaurant to tolerate a spectacle.
Then he married a distant cousin, a girl who had been in Nanking when the Japs invaded. It was rumoured that unspeakable things had been done to her.
They did not seem to have caused any lasting damage, thought Iris, plucking the tell-tale hair from her scalp with vicious precision. Matthew Ho’s wife had already presented him with three plump yellow sons. The baby was colicky. Iris would wake at night to his screams.
In a sea-stopped street, she passed Arthur Loxley. He peered in under the umbrella Iris carried for her complexion, and lifted his hat.
Change was flexing its claws, snarling the weave of Arthur’s days. The maharani had announced that she was emigrating to Cincinnati. She was paying for the girls to retrain as shorthand-typists. Arthur, feeling a brisk pattering across his stomach, had opened his eyes to find the prettiest one practising her finger exercises while fellating him.
He would have been a pushover for Iris in any case. She was beautiful and set herself to be charming. His strength of will could be gauged from the quantities of papier-mâché knick-knacks and gaudy rugs he had amassed, the result of bazaar encounters with liquid-eyed Kashmiri merchants.
Arthur rented a sweltering cell in the house of a government clerk with nine children. It had a concrete verandah overlooking a strip of baked earth, where bold canna lilies, red and fierce yellow, grew in rusty tins. In that narrow place he passed sublime afternoons, dozing with a tumbler at hand and his landlord’s mongrel bitch stretched panting beneath his Bombay fornicator. The younger children made a game of him, daring each other to drink the melted ice in his glass or deposit a spider on the hillock of his belly. Once, as he snored, the smallest girl placed a blue flower between his parted lips.
Iris, inspecting the set-up, saw at once that it would not do. There was a swathe of stink from the drains. The dog’s teeth worked furiously at her ticks. The children, intuiting an enemy, gathered at a distance and dug in their noses.
Thus it was settled that Arthur would join the de Souza household. If he faltered at the prospect of his father-in-law’s countenance over breakfast, he gave no outward sign of alarm. He was still flooded with gratitude that Iris had chosen to make him the gift of herself; a marvel twenty years of marriage would not quite suffice to dim.
And the house, set on a hill, was wonderful. Like the de Souzas, it had declined over three centuries. First the grounds had shrunk, then the mansion itself had been divided and sold piecemeal and partitioned again. It had suffered concrete outgrowths and bricked-in colonnades. An elderly gentleman lived on a half-landing; a balcony sheltered a family of seven. But the house wore its changes like medals, hung out strings of washing like flags. flowering creepers fastened it to the earth. In the compound, goats and hens roamed among tall trees and lavish ferns. There was a bed of rangy, perfumed gardenias. The de Souzas’ apartment on the ground floor retained a portico, pillars, ceilings that flaked but were plastered with garlands and painted with cherubim, windows that gave onto the puckered blue sea.
Arthur Loxley enjoyed this distinction: he was the sole individual to slip past his father-in-law’s guard. The lessons of history notwithstanding, Sebastian de Souza had continued to believe in the supremacy of the English race. But illusions that the fall of Singapore had left intact could not long survive daily proximity to Arthur. Four days after Iris returned from her honeymoon, her father informed her of her mistake. The enumeration of his son-in-law’s inadequacies occupied the following half an hour; and then the rest of Sebastian’s days.
Yet the marriage was not unhappier than most.
Money was one problem.
Another was the lack of a child. Arthur made no reproach; but Iris, who had lied to him about her age, was frightened that barrenness would betray her. There was also the dread that Lawrence, fumbling
down there
, had passed on something unmentionable.
She consulted doctors, Western-trained and ayurvedic, two specialists, a soothsayer, a faith healer. A priest exorcised the house. Iris implored Saint Anthony to grant her father the blessing of grandchildren, and sent five rupees to a famous temple in the south.
Finally, when she had exhausted her stratagems, Iris discovered that she was expecting a baby. She was forty-one years old but the pregnancy was uneventful, the delivery easy. They wrapped the infant in clean cloths and presented him to her. She hadn’t known that the universe weighed five pounds, eleven ounces.
He was named Thomas Sebastian after his grandfathers. But Iris, preparing a bottle of Cow & Gate infant formula, observed his dark limbs and coarse hair, and beheld her mother the crow.
The danger of a throwback: one reason why respectable whites avoided Eurasians.
Prices went on rising. Arthur cut down his expenditure on drink to a fifth of his salary.
Iris had two barres of different heights installed in her large, rectangular hall and opened a dancing school for children. She felt the shame of it: a married woman obliged to work.
Her qualifications were four years of ballet at a school run by a Frenchwoman; much was made of this in Iris’s prospectus. However, late in life Madame Pauline Duval had taken to appearing at mass draped only in a creamy lace tablecloth. The memory was still vivid in Mangalore. Iris was obliged to lower her fees. Her Academy of Dance attracted only a few dozen children, not all of them from desirable backgrounds. But it covered the cost of St Stephen’s Junior College, where Tommy was now an Upper Infant.
Matthew Ho’s wife, a bundle with her hair in a knot, turned up to enrol her twin daughters. Iris was pleased to observe that the doughy little tots were devoid of talent.
Sebastian de Souza died. A grim, protracted death ensuring maximum havoc for Iris and a succession of slovenly nurses.
Shortly before the end he had a bowel movement, fouling the air. Trying not to inhale, Iris approached with basin and sponge. Her father opened his sunken eyes and addressed her: ‘Dolt.’
Later, turning it over in her mind, she thought he might have said, Don’t. It was in any case his last message to her.
Thirty years earlier, he had sold the apartment. A provision in the settlement granted him life tenancy, rent-free. Sebastian had not considered it necessary to impart these facts to his daughter. A lawyer’s letter gave Iris thirty days to vacate the premises.
Abdul Mustafa Hussein, the new owner, received her in the tiny, lentil-smelling office attached to his dry-goods store. ‘Kwality Remains When Price Is Forgotten’ announced an ominous plaque above his head. But the man in the white cotton skullcap was not unkind, and when Iris began to cry, he was sincerely moved. She was allowed to remain in her ancestral home at a rent that was only mildly scandalous.
The Academy taught only the basics, flat shoe and barefoot dancing. But a parent withdrew her daughter, saying that Iris’s marble floor was injurious to a dancer’s feet. Iris protested, reasoned, argued, stormed; in vain.
There came a Saturday when the only children waiting on the verandah were the Ho twins, their pigtails secured with stiff red bows.
Old Mr Lal retired, entrusting the export of cashews to his brother’s son. Vijay Lal was twenty-nine and had spent two swinging years in Leeds. He had sideburns, and a secretary he called Mini. Vijay summoned all his workers over the age of thirty and explained what was wrong with India. ‘This is a very backward-thinking country. My uncle, for example, went on employing some people for the simple reason he had always done so. I am intending to change all that.’ Then he gave them a month’s notice. ‘For the Age of Aquarius we are needing fresh blood.’ He rose from his chair and clicked his fingers. He might have been ordering up the massacre; instead his voice rose in song. He warbled, in a relentless whine, of times that were a’changing. When at last he had finished there was silence. Gradually it dawned on his audience that he expected applause.
Iris took it with remarkable aplomb. ‘Now we have to emigrate. What I’ve been telling you for years.’
At first, Arthur put up a resistance. But history was not on his side.
Every year there were fewer and fewer of those whose hybrid faces branded them the leftovers of Empire. The Pereira boy had gone, the Redden girls were going; the railway Gilberts, all eight of them, had scraped up the fares for Toronto.
Tom walked up to the lighthouse. The sea hurled itself at the land; went away, bared its teeth and renewed the attack. Passed for Canada. Passed for England
.
People he had known all his life had been scrutinised like cashews and declared fit for export. The past was sliding from under his feet. He glimpsed, for the first time, the flux inherent in human affairs.
The scene struck him as momentous. He felt he was witnessing it from a great height, fixing it in his mind like a memorable passage in a book: the figure in navy shorts on the headland, the turmoil below.
On Iris’s settee, Matthew Ho turned a sisal brim in his fingers and declined Arthur’s offer of whisky and soda.
He was one of those who had prospered since Independence. But eight months earlier his mother had died, and now Dr Ho had resigned his registrarship at the government hospital. His wife had a cousin in San Diego, and the Hos would be joining his household later that week. ‘There are the children to think of,’ Matthew said, his thin eyes directed at a vase of plastic roses on a teapoy. Altogether the fellow was a queer fish, as Arthur remarked afterwards. ‘Gives the impression he might come out with something neither of you wants to hear.’
Two bookend children had accompanied Matthew Ho, as if he required material evidence for his case. Tom, instructed to ‘Go and play’ with his guests, led Opal and Pearl onto the verandah. There he scratched a mosquito bite, limp with envy. At the house of a wealthy school friend, he had seen a Coca-Cola bottle. Acquired at a diplomatic sale, the empty bottle was displayed on a cabinet along with other trophies. Tom had coveted it at once: teenage, curvaceous, modern; a glass America. He looked at the twins, whose half-moon upper lips showed no indent, and was compelled to say, ‘I’ll probably get a transistor radio for Christmas.’
Pearl and Opal inspected him in silence. Then their round little mouths twitched. Side by side on the verandah wall, they kicked their four patent-leather feet and laughed in his face.
‘Not America.’
‘Not England,’ countered Arthur.
‘Not England,’ agreed Iris. ‘Why should we suffer The European Winter?’
Arthur blinked.
‘Audrey,’ she reminded him, with quiet triumph. ‘Australia.’
Audrey, Arthur’s youngest sister, was the one who had kept in touch. She was not a trivial correspondent, reserving her flimsy blue aerogrammes for weighty communications: the death of their father, a brother-in-law’s appendectomy, the Coronation, her marriage, the decline of England, the prospects that glittered elsewhere.
Iris, the least practical of women, possessed the foresight that is a by-product of fear. Against just such a day, she had found the postage for Christmas cards, birthday greetings, a studio photograph of the three of them taken against a cardboard Taj Mahal.
Passed for Australia.
At the thought of a New World, Arthur felt great weariness. He was not sure he could be dusted off for it. But there was his son’s face, etched with excitement. He had realised, in the first week of his marriage, that his wife was vain, capable of pettiness and not in love with him. In all that concerned the boy, however, her faculty for selflessness outstripped his own. She would willingly plough herself into the dust for the sake of the future quivering in their son. Arthur thought of rain falling in a far country; one day, turning to grain.
Old Mr Lal sent his ancient, gleaming Bentley to take them to the station. Friends and neighbours gathered on the steps. At the last moment, with faces already arranged for farewells and all the luggage squeezed in, Tom said he had to use the lavatory.
In the yawning rooms of childhood he raced hither and thither, touching a doorframe, a tile; thinking, The last time, the last time. Glancing through a window to fix a view forever— the last time, the last time—he saw a dog on the shadowed edge of the lawn: a tiny, heraldic beast, one forepaw raised; milky as marble. Then it was gone. Fear opened its wings under Tom’s heart. Already a neighbour had acquired a dog he didn’t recognise. It was a glimpse of the terrible future: a world he knew as well as his own face altering by degrees, never entirely alien but riddled with strangeness. One day he would pass through these scenes like a ghost, everywhere encountering proof of his irrelevance.