Absolute Friends (13 page)

The night nurse is as big as Ayah, but she tells no stories about the Prophet Mohammed.

He arrives as a doctor, the way clever heroes do in movies: at crack of dawn while the sergeant's man is dozing in the sentry's chair, and Mundy is lying on his back sending messages to Judith. The white medical coat has three pips on each shoulder and is several sizes too big for him. A stethoscope dangles haplessly round his neck, and a pair of enormous surgical galoshes cover his fraying sneakers. The whole of West Berlin must have been looking out for a shit-faced poison dwarf, but that hasn't stopped him, he's resourceful. He's wriggled or talked his way past the sentries at the gate, and once inside the hospital he's made a beeline for the orderlies' room and forced a locker. There is a yellowy sickness round his eyes. His forelock is too young for him, his revolutionist's scowl replaced by deep uncertainty. The rest of him is smaller and more crumpled than ever.

"Teddy, I am without words. What you did for me--saving my life, no less--this was the gesture of a friend I do not deserve. How can I repay you? Nobody has ever performed such an absurd act of sacrifice on my behalf. You are English, and for you, all life is a silly accident. But I am German, and for me, if it has no logic it is meaningless."

Lakes have formed in the brown eyes. His oversized voice is husky inside the little chest. His words sound carefully prepared.

"How's Judith?" Mundy asks.

"Judith? Legal Judith?" He seems to have difficulty remembering the name. "Judith, ah well, she is in good form, thank you, Teddy, yes. Affected, as we all are, by this outrage but, as you would expect of her, not bowed. She suffered a small head wound, she breathed too much gas. She is _eingebläut__ like you, but she is recovered. And she asks to be remembered to you"--as if that settles the matter--"warmly remembered to you, Teddy. She admires you for what you did."

"Where is she?"

"In the squat. A small bandage for the first few days. Then nothing."

The _nothing,__ and the silence that follows it, prompt Mundy to pull a humorless grin. _"To the girl who has got nozzings on,"__ he intones idiotically in English, quoting a line of doggerel the Major was fond of reciting in his cups. "She knows they're throwing me out, does she?" he asks.

"Judith? Of course. A totally unconstitutional act. The lawyer in her is outraged. Her immediate instinct was to go to the courts. I had to use all my persuasive powers to convince her that your legal position here is not as strong as she would wish."

"But you managed."

"Only with great difficulty. Like many women, Judith does not take kindly to arguments of expediency. However, you would be proud of her, Teddy. Thanks to you, she is completely liberated."

After that, as good friends may, Sasha sits at Mundy's bedside, holding his friend's wrist rather than his smashed-up hand but somehow contriving not to look Mundy in the eye. Mundy lies staring at him, Sasha sits staring at the wall, until Mundy out of politeness finally pretends to be asleep. Sasha leaves and the door seems to close twice: once on Sasha and once on the completely liberated Judith.

5

FLAT YEARS, frustrating years, years of directionless wandering are about to blight the progress of Ted Mundy, life's eternal apprentice. He later thinks of them as his Empty Quarter, though in number they amount to less than a decade.

Not for the first time in his brief existence, he is hustled out of town at first light. He has no disgraced father to care for, the road is flat and metaled. No weeping Rani hunches as if crippled at the compound gates and, though he searches everywhere for her, no Judith. Murree's ancient army truck has been replaced by a polished Jeep with white spats, and it's the military police sergeant, not a Punjabi warrior, who offers a last piece of friendly advice.

"Come back any time you like, son. We'll remember you, and we'll be bloody waiting for you."

The sergeant need not worry. After three weeks of studying the ceiling of his hospital ward, Mundy has no plans to return, and no destination in mind. Should he return to Oxford? As who? In what disguise? The prospect of resuming a degree course among a bunch of overeducated children who have never seen an ideal fired in anger is repugnant to him. Landing at Heathrow he heads on an impulse for Weybridge, where the inebriated lawyer who attended his father's funeral receives him in a dark mock-Tudor house called The Pines. It's raining, but then it always was.

"One had _rather__ hoped you'd have the decency to reply to one's letter," the lawyer complains.

"One did," Mundy says, and helps find the missing document among a heap of chewed files.

"Yes, well, there we are then. Something in the kitty after all. Your late father Arthur signed a banker's order on his savings fund, stupid bugger. He'd have stopped it years ago if he'd known. Don't mind if I knock off the first five hundred for fees?"

_A lawyer is always an arsehole,__ Mundy reminds himself as he slams the garden gate behind him. Striding down the road, he meets the fairy-lit outline of the Golden Swan. The night's last revelers are departing in the rain. Mundy spots himself and his father among them.

"Good crowd tonight, boy," the Major is remarking, dragging on his arm like a drowning man. "High level of conversation. You don't get that in a mess. All shop."

"It was really interesting, sir."

"If you want to feel the heartbeat of England, they're the ones to listen to. I don't say much, but I listen. Specially Percy. Fund of knowledge. Can't understand where the fellow went wrong."

Number Two, The Vale has been razed to the ground. All that remains, so far as Mundy can make out by the streetlamp, is a builder's board offering family homes with three bedrooms and a ninety percent mortgage. At the railway station, the last train to anywhere has left. An old man with a German shepherd offers bed and breakfast for five pounds cash in advance. By midday Mundy is a new boy again, riding westward on the school train, looking out for chaps who comb their hair in public.

The abbey with its flag of St. George looms like a risen crypt over the dismal town. At its foot lies the close, and up the hill the ancient school. But Mundy doesn't climb the hill. Somehow there was never quite the space up there for impecunious refugees from Hitler's Germany to teach cello or the language of Goethe. They were deemed more comfortable living above a redbrick shoe-shop on the roundabout. The side door is in an alley. The same faded handwritten notice in Mandelbaum's pedantic German hand is fastened to it with rusted drawing pins. _For out of hours, press only__ _LOWER___. For Mallory, press only__ _TOP__ _and afterwards please__ _WAIT___.__ Mundy presses _only__ _TOP__ and is pleased to wait. He hears footsteps and starts to smile until he realizes they are not the footsteps he wants. They are swift and flurried and whoever owns them is yelling back up the stairs as she descends: _Hang on, Billy, Mummy will be back in a minute!__

The door opens six inches and stops dead. The same voice says, _Shit.__ The door slams shut, he hears the chain come off. The door flies open.

"Yes?"

Young mothers never have time. This one has a pink, flustered face and long hair she has to sweep away to let him see her.

"I was hoping for Mr. Mallory," Mundy says. He indicates the faded notice. "He's a teacher at the school. Top floor."

"Is he the one that's dead? Ask in the shop. They'll know. _Coming, Billy!__"

He needs a bank. Somewhere they cash checks from lawyers in Weybridge for young men in search of Godot.

Airborne once more, Mundy drifts between dream and reality. Rome, Athens, Cairo, Bahrain and Karachi receive him without comment and pass him on. Landing in Lahore, he declines the airport's many imaginative offers of a night's accommodation and delivers himself into the hands of a driver called Mahmoud who speaks English and Punjabi. Mahmoud has military mustaches and a 1949 Wolseley car with a mahogany dashboard and wax carnations in a vase fixed in the rear window. And Mahmoud knows his way to the _very precise location, sahib, no ifs and buts, the perfectly exact position__ where an Irish Roman Catholic nursemaid and her dead daughter would have been _most reverently laid to rest.__ Mahmoud knows this because by coincidence he is a lifelong friend and also first cousin of an ancient white-turbaned Christian sacristan who says his name is Paul after the saint, and is the owner of a leather-bound register which, when encouraged by a small donation, indicates where the most gracious sahibs and memsahibs are buried.

The cemetery is an enclosed oval of descending terraces beside a derelict gasworks. It is strewn with decapitated angels, bits of ancient car and smashed concrete crosses with their intestines open to the sky. The grave lies at the foot of a tree whose spreading branches make such a pool of blackness under the glaring sun that Mundy in his half-dazed state fancies it is open. The headstone is sandy-soft, the carved inscription so faded that he has to guess the words with his finger. _In memory of Nellie O'Connor of County Kerry Ireland and her baby daughter Rose. Beloved of her husband Arthur and son Edward. Rest in God.__

I'm Edward.

A score of children have attached themselves, tendering flowers from other graves. Unheeding of Mahmoud's protests, Mundy presses money into every small hand. The hillside becomes a hive of begging children, and the tall, stooping Englishman longs to be one of them.

Crammed into the passenger seat with his knees knocking against the mahogany dashboard of the ancient Wolseley, the Returning Son watches himself enter the dusty haze that in India you must always pass through on your way to somewhere. And when you arrive, the haze is waiting for you. On lush hillsides he recognizes the deserted stone breweries built by the Raj to wash down the Major's curry. It's the road we drove down when they sent us back to England, he thinks. These are the bullock carts we honked at. These are the children who stared at us but I didn't stare back.

The bends have acquired a rhythm. Like a willing dray-horse the Wolseley responds to it. Brown mountains with their peaks sawn off by haze lift ahead of them. To their left lie the foothills of the Hindu Kush, presided over by the mother peak of Nanga Parbat.

"Your very town, sahib!" cries Mahmoud, and there it is: a glimpse of brown houses perched on a ridge, gone again with the next turn. Now the relics of the departed British take on a military note: a collapsed sentry post, a dying barrack hut, an overgrown reviewing stand. A final push by the Wolseley, a few more turns. They are in the town. From tour guide and chauffeur Mahmoud promotes himself to estate agent, conversant with every fine property in Murree and the bargain price that will secure it. This main street, sahib, is today one of the most fashionable in all of Pakistan: note the fine restaurants, food stalls and clothes shops. In these secluded side streets you may observe the elegant summer villas of the richest and most discerning citizens of Islamabad.

"Kindly reflect upon the most superb views, sahib! Admire the distant plains of Kashmir! As to the climate, it is most jolly. And the pine forests are full of animals at all times of year! Smell also the sweet Himalayan air! Oh gladness!"

Please drive on uphill, says the Returning Son.

Yes, this way. Past the Pakistani Air Force base and keep going.

Thank you, Mahmoud.

The air force base is made of smart tarmac instead of grass. A second floor has been added to the officers' quarters. _Those bloody pansies in blue, they hog the budget every time,__ Mundy hears the Major fume. The road is pitted now, and overgrown. Dusty poverty replaces the affluence of the town. After a couple of miles they reach a brown slope strewn with abandoned military cantonments and poor villages.

Stop here, please, Mahmoud. Thank you. Here is fine.

Goats, pye-dogs and the eternal poor drift across the overgrown parade ground. The dust-patch next to the mosque where the great cricketers of tomorrow honed their skills is today a hostel for the dying. The same hand that erased Number Two, The Vale has turned the Major's bungalow into a half-dried skull, ripping off its tin roof, doors and balcony but leaving the eyeless sockets of the windows to stare at the destruction.

Do the asking, please, Mahmoud. I have forgotten my Punjabi.

_Ayah? Everyone's an ayah, sahib! What's her name?__

She has no name but Ayah. She was very big. Mundy wants to add that she had a huge bottom and perched on a tiny stool in the corridor outside his bedroom, but he doesn't want the children to laugh. She worked for an English major who lived here, he says. The major left suddenly. He drank too much whiskey. He liked to sit under that neem tree over there and smoke cheroots called Burmas. He mourned his wife, loved his son and regretted the Partition.

Does Mahmoud translate this? Probably not. He too has his delicacy. They find the oldest man in the street. _Oh, I remember Ayah__ most _well, sahib! A Madrasi, as I recall. All her family had perished wretchedly in the many massacres, except for the good lady herself. Well, sir, yes, there we are, as we say. After the English left, nobody wanted her anymore. First she begged, then she died. By the end, she was most diminutive. The sahib would not have recognized her as the large lady he is describing. Rani?__ he speculates, warming to his work. _Now which Rani would that be, sahib?__

The Rani whose father ran a spice farm, Mundy replies, by a feat of memory that bewilders him until he recalls how she used to bring him gifts of spices wrapped in leaves.

Suddenly the oldest man in the street remembers Rani exactly! _Miss Rani, she is married__ most _suitably, I assure you, sahib. You will rejoice to hear of her good fortune, thank you, sir. When she was but fourteen years of age her father gave her to a rich factory owner resident in Lahore, what we call in this region a most suitable match. To date they have been blessed with three fine sons and one daughter already, which I say is not bad going, thank you, sahib. You are most gracious, like all the British.__

They are walking back to the Wolseley but the oldest man is still with them, clutching Mundy's arm and peering into his eyes with unearthly benevolence.