Absolute Friends Page 5

  Nonetheless the miracle happens. By the end of a couple of terms Dr. Mandelbaum has acquired a star pupil and Mundy has found his refuge. Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Eichendorff and Mörike are his secret familiars. He reads them furtively in scripture prep, and takes them to bed to read again by flashlight under the sheets.

  “So, Mr. Mundy,” Dr. Mandelbaum declares proudly over a chocolate cake he has bought to celebrate Mundy’s success in a public examination. “Today we are both refugees. For as long as mankind is in chains, maybe all good people in the world are also refugees.” It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world’s downtrodden classes. “We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.’”

  After which he will read him a passage from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise while Mundy listens respectfully, nodding to the cadence of the beautiful voice as if it were the dream-music that he will one day understand.

  “Now tell me once about India,” Dr. Mandelbaum will say, and in turn closes his eyes to Ayah’s plain tales from the hills.

  Periodically, seized with a desire to exercise his parental duty, the Major will descend unannounced on the school and, supported by a cherrywood walking stick, inspect the lines and roar. If Mundy is playing rugby, he will roar at him to break the blighters’ legs; if cricket, to swipe the buggers over the pavilion. His visits end abruptly when, angered by defeat, he accuses the sports master of being a bloody pansy and, not for the first time in his life, is escorted from the field. Outside the school’s walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school’s war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial.

  Yet while the oppression Mundy suffers at the hands of his jailers entrenches his loathing of them, he cannot dodge the curse of their acceptance. His real enemy is his own good-heartedness and his inextinguishable need to belong. Perhaps only those who have had no mother can understand the emptiness he has to fill. The change in the official attitude is subtle and insidious. One by one, his gestures of insubordination pass unnoticed. He smokes cigarettes in the most perilous places but nobody catches him at it or notices his breath. He reads the lesson in chapel while drunk on a pint of beer gulped down at the back door of a nearby pub, yet instead of the mandatory flogging he has the rank of prefect thrust on him with the assurance that the post of head boy is within his grasp. There is worse to come. Despite his ungainliness he is capped for rugby, promoted to the school cricket team as a fast bowler, and appointed the unlikely hero of the hour. Overnight his heathen practices and subversive tendencies are forgotten. In a dreary production of Everyman he is given the title role. He leaves school covered in unwanted glory and, thanks to Dr. Mandelbaum, with an Exhibition in Modern Languages to Oxford.

  “Dear boy.”

  “Father.”

  Mundy allows time for the Major to muster his thoughts. They are seated in the conservatory of the Surrey villa and as usual it is raining. Rain shades the blue pines in the neglected garden, seeps down the rusted frames of the french windows and pings onto the cracked tile floor. Flighty Mrs. McKechnie is on home leave in Aberdeen. It is midafternoon and the Major is enjoying an interval of lucidity between the last of the lunch hour and the first of the evening. A scrofulous retriever farts and mutters in a basket at his feet. Panes of glass are missing from the conservatory, but this is all to the good since the Major has developed a horror of enclosure. In accordance with new regimental orders no doors or windows to the house may be locked. If the bastards want him, he likes to insist to his diminished audience at the Golden Swan, they know where they can find him; and he indicates the cherrywood walking stick which is now his constant companion.

  “You’re set on it, are you, boy? This German thing you’re up to?”—drawing shrewdly on his Burma.

  “I think so, thank you, sir.”

  Major and retriever reflect on this. It’s the Major who speaks first.

  “Still some decent regiments out there, you know. Not everything’s gone to the devil.”

  “All the same, sir.”

  Another prolonged delay.

  “Reckon the Hun will come at us again, do you? Twenty years since the last show. Twenty years since the show before that. They’re about due for another, I grant you.”

  A further period of rumination follows, until the Major suddenly brightens.

  “Well, there we are then, boy. Blame your mother.”

  Not for the first time in recent months, Mundy fears for his father’s sanity. My dead mother responsible for the next war with the Germans? How can this be, sir?

  “That woman could pick up languages the way you and I pick up this glass. Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Telegu, Tamil, German.”

  Mundy is astonished. “German?”

  “And French. Wrote it, spoke it, sang it. Mynah bird ear. All the Stanhopes had it.”

  Mundy is gratified to hear this. Thanks to Dr. Mandelbaum, he has for some while been privy to the classified information that the German language has beauty, poetry, music, logic and unlikely humor, as well as a romantic soul incomprehensible to anyone who can’t decode it. Short of a KEEP OUT sign on its door, it possesses everything a nineteen-year-old Steppenwolf in search of a cultural safe haven could decently ask. But now it has genealogy as well. Any further doubts he may have are quickly dispelled by fate. Without Dr. Mandelbaum he would never have plumped for German. Without German he would never have signed up for weekly tutorials on Bishop Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic. And if he hadn’t signed up for Wulfila, he would never have found himself, on the third day of his first term at university, sitting buttock-to-buttock on a chintz sofa in North Oxford with a diminutive polyglot Hungarian spitfire called Ilse who takes upon herself the task of leading a motherless six-foot-four virgin to the sexual light. Ilse’s interest in Wulfila, like Mundy’s, is an accident of life. After an academic safari through Europe, she has descended on Oxford to expand her understanding of the roots of contemporary anarchism. Wulfila wormed his way into her syllabus.

  Summoned at darkest night to the Surrey villa, a bereft Mundy cradles his father’s sweated head and watches him spew out the remaining fragments of his wretched life while Mrs. McKechnie treats herself to a ciggy on the landing. Other mourners at the funeral include a fellow alcoholic who is also a solicitor, an unpaid bookmaker, the landlord of the Golden Swan and a handful of its regulars. Mrs. McKechnie, still firmly twenty-nine, stands to attention at the open graveside, every inch the courageous Scottish widow. It is summer and she is wearing a black chiffon dress. A languid breeze presses it against her, revealing a pair of fine breasts and a frank outline of her remaining assets. Masking her mouth with her Order of Service, she murmurs to Mundy from so close that he can feel her lips fluttering the little hairs inside his ear.

  “Look at what you might have had if you’d asked nicely,” she says in her mocking Aberdonian brogue, and to his outrage brushes her hand across his crotch.

  Safely back in his college rooms, a trembling Mundy takes stock of his humble patrimony: one red-and-white carved ivory chess set, much damaged; one army-issue khaki knapsack containing six handmade shirts by Ranken & Company Limited, Est. Calcutta 1770, By Appointment to HM King George V, with branches in Delhi, Madras, Lahore and Murree; one pewter hip flask, much dented, for sitting under neem trees at sundown; one tin penknife, Burmas for the use of; one truncated ceremonial Gurkha kukri engraved To a Gallant Friend; one multigenerational tweed jacket with no maker’s attribution; one copy of Selected Readings from the Works of Rudyard Kipling, foxed and much thumbed; and one heavy leather suitcase with brass corners, found hidden or forgotten beneath a sea of empty bottles in the
Major’s bedroom wardrobe.

  Padlocked.

  No key.

  For several days he keeps the suitcase under his bed. He is the sole possessor of its destiny, the only person in the entire world who knows of its existence. Will he be mountainously rich? Has he inherited British American Tobacco? Is he the sole owner of the secrets of the vanished Stanhopes? With a hacksaw borrowed from the college butler he spends an evening trying to cut his way through the padlock. In desperation he lays the suitcase on his bed, draws the ceremonial kukri from its scabbard and, in thrall to its power, makes a perfect circular incision in the lid. Drawing back the flap, he smells Murree at sunset and the sweat on Rani’s neck as she crouches at his side peering into the rock pool.

  Official army files, British, Indian, Pakistani.

  Faded parchments appointing Arthur Henry George Mundy to the rank and condition of second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain in this regiment, then a lesser regiment, then the one below it.

  One yellowed, hand-printed playbill of the Peshawar Players’ production of Snow White, featuring E. A. Mundy in the role of Dopey.

  Letters from unhappy bank managers concerning “mess bills and sundry other debts that can no longer be covered by this account.”

  Beautifully handwritten protocol of a court-martial convened in Murree in September 1956, signed Warrant Officer J. R. Singh, Court Clerk. Statements of witnesses, statement of Prisoner’s Friend, Judgment of this Court. The prisoner confesses his crime, no defense offered. Statement by Prisoner’s Friend: Major Mundy was drunk. He went berserk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions and throws himself on the mercy of the court.

  Not so fast. Sorry is not enough. What actions? Mercy for what?

  Summary of evidence, submitted in writing to the court but not read out. It is alleged by the prosecution and agreed by the accused that Major Mundy while refreshing himself in the officers’ mess took exception to certain words spoken in flippant jest by one Captain Gray, an honorable British technical officer on temporary attachment from Lahore. Seizing said respected captain by the collars of his uniform in a manner totally contrary to good order and military discipline, he three times head-butted him with great accuracy causing extensive facial bleeding, kneed him purposefully in the groin and, resisting the efforts of his perturbed comrades to restrain him, dragged the captain onto the veranda and administered such a horrendous rain of blows with his fists and feet as might have gravely endangered the captain’s very life and being, let alone jeopardized his marital prospects and distinguished military career.

  Of the words spoken by the captain in flippant jest, there is so far no clue. Since the prisoner does not offer them in mitigation, the court sees no purpose in repeating them. He was drunk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions. End of defense, end of career. End of everything. Except the mystery.

  One fat buff folder with pockets, the word FILE inked in the Major’s hand. Why? Would you write BOOK on a book? Yes, you probably would. Mundy spills the contents of the folder onto his frayed eiderdown. One sepia photograph, quarto size, on presentation cardboard mount with gilt surround. An Anglo-Indian family and its many servants cluster in a rigid group on the steps of a multiturreted colonial mansion set in the foothills of upper India amid formal lawns and shrubberies. Union Jacks fly from every pinnacle. At the center of the group stands an arrogant white man in stiff collars, next to him his arrogant unsmiling white wife in twinset and pleated skirt. Their two small white boys stand either side of them, wearing Eton suits. Either side of the boys stand white children and adults of varying ages. They can be aunts, uncles and cousins. On the step below them stand the uniformed servants of the household, color-coded for precedence, the whitest at the center, darkest at the edges. The printed caption reads: The Stanhope Family at Home, Victory in Europe Day, 1945. GOD SAVE THE KING.

  Conscious that he is in the presence of the Maternal Spirit, Mundy takes the photograph to his bedside light, tipping it this way and that while he scans the ranks of the female members of the family for the tall polyglot Anglo-Irish aristocrat who will turn out to be his mother. He is looking particularly for marks of dignity and erudition. He sees fierce-eyed matrons. He sees dowager ladies long past childbearing age. He sees scowling adolescents with puppy fat and plaits. But he sees no potential mother. About to set the photograph aside he turns it over to discover a single scrawl of brown handwriting, not the Major’s. It is the hand of a semiliterate girl—perhaps one of the scowling adolescents—blobbed and reckless in its excitement. Here’s me with me eyes shut, tippical!!

  No signature, but the exuberance is infectious. Returning to the photograph, Mundy examines the group for a pair of shut eyes, English or Indian. But too many are shut on account of the sun. He lays the photograph faceup on the eiderdown and rummages among the other offerings in the folder and selects, at random but not quite, a wad of handwritten letters bound in string. He turns the photograph facedown again and makes the match. The writer of the letters is also the writer of the illiterate inscription on the back of the photograph. Dealing the letters onto the eiderdown, Mundy counts off six. The longest is eight unnumbered sides. All are scrawls, all are painfully, atrociously spelled. Marks of dignity and erudition are conspicuously absent. The earliest start My dearest or Oh Arthur, but the tone quickly deteriorates:

  Arthur, bloody hell, for the love of God listen to me!

  The bastad that done this to me is the same barstad that your Nell gave herself willing and week to, your Gods judgmint on me, Arthur, don’t bloody deny it. If I go home ruined my dad will kill me. I’ll be a scarlit whore with an illigitment to feed they’ll give me to the nuns and take me baby I’ve heard what they make you do for repintince. If I stay in India its me with the halfcarst prostutes in the market God help me I’d rather drown meself in the Ganges. Confessions not safe here, nothing is, that dirty bogger Father M’Graw would as soon tell Lady Stanhope as put his hand up your skirt and that Housekeeper stayring at me belly like I’ve stolen the lunch off her. Are you pregnant by any chance, Nurse Nellie? God help me Mrs. Ormrod whatever makes you think such a thing, it’s all the good food you’re feeding us in the servants hall. But how long will she believe that pray Arthur when I’m six months gone and still swelling? And me playing the Holy Virgin Mary in the staffside Christmas tablo for Christs sakes, Arthur! But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit done it to me, was it? It was you! THEYRE FOCKIN TWINS ARTHUR I CAN FEEL THEIR BLOODY HARTS GOING HEAR ME!

  Mundy needs a magnifying glass. He borrows it from a first-year student on his staircase who collects postage stamps.

  “Sorry, Sammy, something I need to look at a bit closer.”

  “At fucking midnight?”

  “At any fucking time,” says Mundy.

  He has focused his attention on the lower step and is searching for a tall girl in nurse’s uniform with her eyes closed, and she isn’t hard to spot. She’s a sunny, overgrown child with a head of black curls and her Irish eyes clamped shut exactly the way she says they are, and if Mundy ever wore a nursemaid’s drag and a black wig and squeezed up his eyes against the Indian sun, this is what he’d look like, because she’s the same age as I am now, and the same height, he thinks. And she’s got the same damn-fool all-weather grin I’m wearing while I gawp at her through the magnifying glass, which is the closest I will ever be to her.

  Or hang on, he thinks.

  Maybe you’re smiling out of shyness because you’re too tall.

  And there’s something of the wild spirit about you too, now I come to look at you more closely.

  Something spontaneous and trusting and joyful, like a tall, white Rani full-grown.

  Something that is actually a great deal more to my taste than the stuck-up, tight-arsed aristocrat of dignity and erudition that I’ve had shoved down my throat from the day I was old enough to be lied to.

  * * *

  Personal and Confidential to Yourself

  Dear Captain Mundy,

  I am dire
cted by Lady Stanhope to draw your attention to your obligations to the person of Miss Nellie O’Connor, a nursemaid in Her Ladyship’s employ. Her Ladyship asks me to advise you that if Miss O’Connor’s position is not promptly regulated in a manner befitting an officer and gentleman, she will have no alternative but to apprise your Regimental Colonel Commanding.

  Yours faithfully,

  Private Secretary to Lady Stanhope

  One marriage certificate, signed by the Anglican Vicar of Delhi in what looks like rather a rush.

  One death certificate, signed three months later.

  One birth certificate, signed the same day: Edward Arthur Mundy is hereby welcomed to the world. He was born, to his surprise, not in Murree but in Lahore, where both his mother and his baby sister were certified dead.

  Mundy deftly completes the equation. The nature of Captain Gray’s words spoken in flippant jest is no longer in question. Mundy? Mundy? Aren’t you the fellow who put the Stanhope nursemaid in the family way? By providing no cause to have them repeated in court, the Major secured an embargo on them. But only in court. The secretary’s letter may have been personal and confidential to the Major—but so it was to the entire strength of the Stanhope household and its outstations. His head still buzzing with images of the berserk Major raining blows on luckless Captain Gray, Mundy searches his heart for the appropriate rage, anger and recrimination that he tells himself he should be mustering, but all he can feel is a helpless pity for two inarticulate souls trapped in the conventional cages of their time.

  Why did he lie to me for all those years?

  Because he knew he wasn’t enough.

  Because he thought she wasn’t.

  Because he was sorry and guilty.

  Because he wanted me to have the dignity.

  It’s called love.

  The brass-cornered suitcase has one more trick up its sleeve: an ancient leather-bound box embossed with a gold crest containing a Pakistani War Office citation dated six months after the birth of the infant Mundy. By directing the operations of his platoon with reckless disregard for his own safety and firing his Bren gun from the hip, Major Arthur Henry George Mundy emptied twenty saddles and is hereby appointed an honorary bearer of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor. The medal, if it was ever struck, is missing, presumed sold for drink.