He glanced back at Nelly’s house. Afterwards, he would remember his sense that everything—the pepper tree by the gate, the sloping driveway, the broad blue sky itself—was holding its breath, gathered to the moment. The impression was forceful, but Tom’s thoughts were busy with Nelly as he had once seen her: astride a sunny wall in the suburb where they both lived, a striped cat pouring himself through her arms.
In the corner of his eye, something blurred. At the same time, the rope skidded through his fingers. His head snapped around to see grey fur moving fast, and the dog in pursuit, the end to which sinew and nerve and tissue had always been building.
Tom swooped for the rope, and clawed at air. On the hillside above the track, the dog was swallowed by leaves.
Birdsong, and eucalyptus-scented air.
A lean white dog, rust-splotched, springing up a bank.
Things Tom Loxley would remember.
I
T HAD
begun, seven months earlier, with a painting.
April becalmed in hazy, slanted light. Tom clipped on the dog’s lead and they left his flat to walk in streets where houses were packed like wheat. Windows were turning yellow. Dahlias showed off like sunsets. On an autumn evening in the city, Tom looked sideways at other people’s lives.
At a gallery he hadn’t entered in the four years since his wife left, long sash windows had been pushed up; there were smokers on the terraces with glasses in their hands. Tom tied the dog to the garden side of the ornate iron railings and went up the steps.
A group show: four young artists. Their friends and relatives were congratulatory and numerous in the two rooms on the ground floor. Tom drank cold wine and looked at paintings. They seemed unremarkable but he knew enough to know he couldn’t tell.
From the street it had seemed there were fewer people upstairs. He had his glass refilled by a pierced girl with ruffles of hair parted low on the side, and started up the stairs. But something made him glance back. She was looking up at him, her face gleaming and amused; and he realised, with a little lurch of perception, that she was a boy.
The first-floor room that ran the width of the building contained work unrelated to the exhibition below. A well-fleshed man stood in front of a painting, blocking it from view.
‘Eddie’s still channelling Peter, it seems.’ He had a thin, carrying voice. A dark boy standing beside him snickered.
On the short wall opposite the door was an almost-abstract landscape at which Tom looked for four or five minutes; a long time. Then he went out onto the balcony and saw a couple leaving the gallery stop to fondle the dog’s floppy ears. The word Beefmaster passed on the side of a van.
When Tom stepped back through the floor-length window, the large man was in the centre of the room. More people had attached themselves to his group. He gazed out over their heads; his face was round and turnip-white. The pallor made his eyes, which were very dark, appear hollow. He murmured as Tom passed. There was a small explosion of laughter.
Tom gulped wine in front of the picture opposite the door. His scalp hummed. He thought, I am the wrong kind of thing. He thought, I don’t belong here. The adverb having a wide application.
By an act of will, he directed his attention to the landscape in front of him. His formal training in art history was limited to two undergraduate years. They had left him a vocabulary, formal strategies for thinking about images. He believed himself to possess a set of basic analytical tools for operating upon a work of art.
Faced with this picture, he thought only, How beautiful. And relived, at once, the frustration that had edged his youthful efforts, shadowing the pleasure he took in looking at art. Pictures belong to the world of things. They cannot be contained in language. Tom was still susceptible to their immanent hostility. It had persuaded him, as a student, to concentrate on literature. There he was at home in the medium. For all their shifting play, narratives did not exceed his grasp. He paid them the tribute of lucid investigation and they unfolded before him.
An English voice said, ‘Isn’t it
completely
wonderful?’
A milky woman with crimson pigtails was smiling down at him. ‘I was
sure
it was you.’ She went up on her toes; she was wearing beaded mesh slippers. Up and down she went again, holding out her hand.
The rocking was a boon. It identified a party in the summer; a long woman rising and falling. ‘We met at Esther’s, didn’t we?’ Tom took her cool, boneless fingers. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember . . .?’
‘Imogen Halliday. But everyone just says Mogs.’
Mogs was wearing a kimono fashioned from what might have been hessian, slashed here and there to show a silky green undergarment. She said, ‘How is Esther? I’ve been simply
swamped
.’
‘I’ve been out of touch myself.’
Two years earlier, Tom Loxley and Esther Kade had been deputed by their respective university departments, Textual Studies and Art History, to attend a weekend conference on Multimedia and Interactive Teaching Strategies. Under the cir-cum stances, alcohol and sex had seemed no more than survival mechanisms. Later both regretted the affair, which outlived the conference by only an awkward encounter or two. But Esther now felt obliged to invite Tom to her parties to show there were no hard feelings; for the same reason, he felt obliged to go.
Interactive strategies, he thought.
‘Isn’t life mad? But I
adore
working here.’ Mogs swayed above him, waving a hand on which a green jewel shone.
Christ
, thought Tom. It’s
real
.
Mogs was, in her own way, catching.
‘I was looking at you: you were transfixed.
Isn’t
she a marvel?’ The slippers rose and fell. ‘Nelly
Zhang
,’ said Mogs’s soft English voice.
Tom nodded. He had read the name, which meant nothing to him, on the list he had picked up at the door. And noted that the picture was not for sale.
‘Carson’s known her forever. Since before . . . you know,
every
thing. She’s over there with him, actually. In the black . . . tunic, I think you’d say.’
Tom turned his head and saw a woman in a loose, dark dress that fell to mid-calf. Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon.
‘Really exciting. A
painting
. An early work, of course—she was barely out of art school. From Carson’s own collection. Such a privilege just to
see
it now that Nelly only shows photographs of her work.’
Mogs was all right. But Tom wished she would go away. He wanted to be left alone with the picture.
Outside the gallery, a spotlight fell across a strip of grass where Nelly Zhang squatted, scratching the dog’s chest.
‘Hail dog,’ she said. ‘You speckled beast.’ She peered at his name tag. Her sooty fringe made an almost shocking line against her powdered skin.
The dog wagged his tail. His good looks habitually elicited caresses, titbits. Experience had taught him confidence in his ability to charm.
Nelly stood up. Tom was not a tall man, but her head was scarcely higher than his shoulder.
She said, ‘Lovely dog.’
He remembered that his wife used to refer to the dog as a chick magnet.
Nelly was lighting a thin cigarette. The pungency of cloves and behind it—Tom’s sense of smell was acute—a bodily aroma.
The dog tilted his spotted muzzle and sniffed. Tom bent to untie his leash.
‘That looks professional.’
‘Just a quick-release tie.’
‘A man who knows his knots. So much rarer than one who knows the ropes.’
He didn’t say, I was lonely growing up.
He didn’t say, String is cheap.
B
UT IT
might have begun long, long before that evening in Carson Posner’s gallery. It might have been historical.
War took an Englishman called Arthur Loxley to the East and in time returned him with two medals and a shattered knee to ruined Coventry. His mother had been killed in the first raid; to his father he had never had much to say. A trio of sisters inspected him as if their free trial period might expire and leave them stuck with him forever. At some point each took him aside to ask what he had brought her from the Orient. Their blue eyes glittered with the understanding that the world had been made safe for the business of acquisition.
He was twenty-six, and his knee ached all through the winter. But the map was still stained pink. Pink people could move about it as they pleased; could rule a line on it and bring nations into being. Arthur returned to India, where that kind of thing was causing a commotion. He paid no attention to it, having had his fill of history. What he was after, then and for the rest of his life, was a bolt-hole, with drink thrown in. There was also the memory of a twenty-four-hour leave he had spent in the whorehouses of Bombay. A Javanese half-caste with spongy golden thighs was instructing him in the art of cunnilingus when boots thundered past in the street and a Glaswegian voice bellowed that Rangoon had fallen. Thereafter, news of defeat would always induce in him a mild erotic stir.
Having drifted down the Malabar Coast he fetched up in Mangalore, where he was taken on as an inventory clerk by Mr Ashok Lal, an exporter of cashew nuts with a godown in the port. When Arthur looked up from his ledger, boats rocked on green water.
He rediscovered, with gratitude, the room India granted to casual human theatre. It was there, on every street: in garlanded Ganesh affixed to a radiator grille, in a scabby, naked toddler with liquid jewels at his nostrils, in the man who, possessing no legs, propelled himself on a wheeled plank, advancing on Arthur with a terrible smile. It was not that Arthur idealised the place, for he was a kind man and the daily spectacle was often cruel. But he relished the friendly attention paid here to comedy and tragedy alike; a willingness to be entertained, amused, horrified that he recognised as a form of thanksgiving for the faceted world.
And so, from modest pleasures, Arthur fashioned a happy life. The locally distilled whisky was cheap, the beer cheaper. He ate devilled prawns every Sunday. Once a month he visited a former maharani who had a house with turquoise shutters in the shadow of the cathedral, and five exquisitely skilled girls.
An Indian who had been with the firm for eighteen months was promoted over Arthur, whose congratulations were sincere. He was as indifferent to distinctions of race as to his own advancement. He drank steadily, sometimes fabulously, but always arrived at his desk sober.
Contentment, being rare, never fails to attract attention. Arthur Loxley, with his veined cheeks and drunkard’s careful gait, was increasingly in the thoughts of a beautiful woman. Iris de Souza’s father had informed her at the age of six that she was to marry an Englishman, and neither of them had ever lost sight of that goal. Iris’s skin was fair, her face ravishing; many a pretty Eurasian was let down by toothpick legs, but Iris’s calves were shapely. Her mother, a handsome crow, had had the good sense to die young. Her father—but it would take a separate volume to explore the intricate self-loathing of this man, who despised in others the inadequacies that crawled in his own murk. He was an umbrella, tightly furled. Springing open, he might gouge flesh from your fingers. His rages were unpredictable and inconsistent. Iris acquired early the important female attribute of fear.
Fear, crouched always like an imp under her ribs, leaped out on her thirty-third birthday. She remained in front of the mirror, fingering the treacherous silver thread coiling through her hair. She could still pass for twenty-four but that was hardly the point.
Next door the Ho baby was crying.
It was the war, thought Iris, the war had ruined everything, mixed everything up.
It was the mixing she had loved, at the time. In the WVS she had rolled bandages and mixed with English people. A girl called Babs—a new style of girl, fresh from England—was kind to the Eurasian volunteers. It was rumoured that Babs was a Communist. Iris was able to overlook this—also the way Babs wasted time conversing with tonga drivers, also Babs’s blond moustache—because Babs took a shine to her. There were invitations to tea; the loan of a monograph on shanty-dwellers.
In April Babs was offered the use, for a week, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea-garden in the Nilgiris. It stood on the far side of the valley from the manager’s house; his assistants had gone to the war and left their bungalow vacant. Unfortunately Babs had seen fit to invite two Indian sisters as well, the up-to-date kind who had opinions. Even the discovery that the Guptas were connoisseurs of detective fiction could not redeem them in Iris’s view. With their homespun saris and dog-eared Agatha Christies, they had a disturbingly ambiguous air.
All was righted by the advent of Captain Lawrence Fitch, Babs’s brother. He brought with him one of his fellow officers in the Hussars, a beanpole he addressed as Saunders; but for Iris this second young Englishman remained purely notional. There was only Lawrence: attentive to her every whim, always at hand with a shawl or a fish-paste sandwich, his honey-brown eyes sticky with appreciation. He had a scar just below the hollow at the base of his throat. More than anything in the world Iris wished to press her mouth to it. He gave off a powerful odour of tobacco and leather mingled, mysteriously, with burning sugar.
Ponies were hired. As he helped Iris mount, Lawrence’s fingers grazed her thigh.
There were mornings on the spines of ridges clad with rhododendron; a picnic in splotchy light by a stream. There were cards and charades. One evening, with an extravagant sunset spreading itself between mountains, Ayushi, the younger Gupta girl, who wore a diamond nose stud, was persuaded to tell their fortunes. Smoothing Iris’s palm with a firm, flexible thumb, she offered her a journey over water. The tiny diamond winked like a code.
Iris was a good dancer. Lawrence enfolded her in his smell and hummed along to ‘Embraceable You’ as he steered her through the French doors onto the verandah. On their last evening he wore his dress uniform of scarlet, dark blue and gold. Iris got her wish; and much more besides.