Faithless Read online

  I tested you. ‘Your study in Dunwich?’

  ‘No, not in England. The longer I’ve stayed here the less I feel at home.’

  ‘Germany?’

  ‘Oh no. I feel at least as distant there.’

  ‘Surely there’s one place?’

  You were silent for a long time. ‘If I really had to say then I think that my ideal station is probably a hotel in Switzerland.’

  Ah, Max. Neutrality, anonymity. A country that had no history for you, no claim on you. Is that where you really wished to exist? Away from the rubble of the past. Away from me.

  I said nothing. Your hand was still resting on my hip as we lay there together on the sand but you might as well have pushed me forcefully away from you. Like the time when you read me a poem with a line about the house of belonging. ‘I’d like to live there,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t live in the house of belonging,’ you replied. ‘You can only rent. Short term.’

  I can’t give you enough, you told me very early on. A confession, a warning. But I realised that you weren’t referring to the outward contours of our predicament, in which there was never enough of anything. Never enough time, never enough opportunities to meet. No, you were warning me about something else, something in you that couldn’t fully admit another soul, some shameful deficit you had always felt in yourself. An essential solitude that could not be scoured away even by the most ardent love. But back then I saw it as a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down. How clichéd and predictably tragic it sounds now. And perhaps it was all imposture in the end. Because you fell in love twice, Max, you who never wanted to be beholden or to have anyone beholden to you. Once with a child and once with me.

  By the shoreline Flora is piling stones into the skirt of her dress, holding the edges of the hem to form a kind of sling. There are so many it seems the thin cotton must soon tear under the weight of them. She chooses the stones carefully, picking up several and examining them at length before discarding them or placing them into her skirt. So intent on her task that she doesn’t notice the waves creeping up almost to her feet. I should tell her to take her sandals off; the water will ruin the leather. But I have no sway here, no authority. I say nothing. She turns back and stares at me for a moment and I wave to her but she ignores me.

  In the years Flora was lost to me I would imagine who she might become. How her voice would sound, if her fair hair would darken, if she was clever at school. She would be someone considered and quiet, I was sure, someone who hung back a little, watching. Even as a very small baby she seemed to take everything in. In the spring I would take her to Regent’s Park and hold her up to see the roses, watching her face as the scent washed over her. An alarmed sort of concentration, her nose screwed up. In winter we went to galleries and museums. I showed her Turner’s skies, Greek statues, the twisted skeins of Jackson Pollock, Matisse’s blue dancers; once, the enormous body of a horse, preserved in formaldehyde and suspended from the ceiling of the Tate Modern. I found her leaves and flowers, feathers and stones. I played music to her; Bach preludes and Chopin nocturnes, swaying her in my arms in time to the music. All this in the spaces between the real job of looking after her; the ordinary, exhausting chaos: laundry and mess and struggles against my arms as I tried to settle her, the jagged crying that always took me by surprise for its lack of frequency and made its way deeply into me, so that when she went to sleep the air around me rang with uneasiness, waiting as I did for her panic to begin. The breakages in shops, the crash of a jar bumped by her pram and then my apologies, the mopping up, the contrast to well-regulated babies with their Norland-nanny mothers or actual Norland nannies looking coldly to one side. Hush and clean bottles, Virginia Woolf called it. Motherhood is a conspiracy of hush and clean bottles. Well, no. Motherhood is noise. Irregularity. Mad, mad; there is no real word for the love. Love, it will have to be love.

  Later, I read to Flora, book after book. I would wonder sometimes if any of this would remain in her. The colours of the paintings, the smell of the roses, the piano music, the sound of my voice. She was so little; perhaps it would all dissolve within her. But I hoped that she would retain some small echo of my love. A voice in her dreams, a memory of being held; a flicker of something to steady her. And then I worried that it might be harder for her if she remembered.

  Flora and I walk home at dusk, past the ruins of the Greyfriars Monastery high up on the cliffs above the shingle beach. Some sheep have escaped from a nearby field and they move slowly through the abandoned buildings, grazing on the scrubby grass. A final shaft of light falls slantwise over the old stones and a wall of dark cloud has risen up from the horizon. Flora was fascinated by the ruins when we first came up here two weeks ago; the ceremonial gate that led to nowhere, the stone arches and fallen walls. There is a grotesque carved head above one of the arches and by the entry gate an empty niche where a statue of a saint once stood. It’s in the town museum now, carried away by the villagers to safety. ‘Whose house was this?’ Flora asked me. You told me once, Max – whispered it almost as if it were a confession – that as a child growing up in a post-war Germany devastated by the Allied bombing, you believed that all cities were ruins. That it was not until you were in your teens that you understood this was not the natural condition of cities. But you carried those ruined cities in your heart. All those bombed-out houses and mountains of rubble, those doorways opening into emptiness. How much we simply accept as children until we learn that things should be otherwise.

  On the way back to the village Flora walks on the other side of the road to me, one hand clutching her skirt full of stones. If I cross over to walk beside her, she slows her step so that she falls behind me and then slips across the road again when she thinks I am not watching her. Soon after we have left the beach a van careens around the corner, filling the narrow road, and I seize Flora’s hand and draw her to my side. She looks startled, but for a moment she stands there beside me with her hand in mine before she pulls away and walks on ahead of me. Her fine hair is a tangle of knots, a blurry pale halo around her small head. She refuses to let me brush it or plait it, or to wipe her face, or tie up her shoelaces or help her with the buttons of her dress. The only thing she will submit to is a bath, and only if I run the water for her and leave the room. She will not undress until she is alone; she stands silently and waits for me to hang her towel over the chair and close the door. She does not sing or splash in her bath, does not make any sound at all. Last night, disconcerted by the long silence, I opened the door a crack and called out to her. She flailed around in alarm, water slipping over the edge of tub, and then she cowered from me. Drew her bony knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them and buried her face so that I could not see her. When I spoke her name, she began to cry, and she did not stop crying until I left the room and closed the door behind me.

  On the drive here from London last week she rested her forehead against the window, staring out at the unfurling fields, the vast flat swathes of barley, the barren scrubland. The light seeped faintly through the lowering clouds. I watched her face palely reflected in the glass, the sharp curve of her turned cheek. ‘Malnourished’. I saw the word written in her medical file.

  ‘Is it morning or night?’ she asked me, her face still turned away towards the window. I could see how she might have been confused. The hazy disc of the sun could have been a rising moon, the pale shadows those of dawn or dusk.

  ‘It’s morning. Early morning. Are you tired?’

  But she didn’t answer me. So often she simply ignores my questions. It is not sullenness or petulance; nothing as reassuringly childlike as that. No, it is as if my words make no impression on her.

  The dusk is thickening as we approach the priory. Sunday evening and the streets of the village are empty, the lamps shivering faintly against the stone walls of the buildings. Soon it will be full night. The rain begins when we are still some way from home; a fine misty drizzle that turns quickly into a downpour. By the time I have wrestled the old iron key into the awkward lock of the door, Flora and I are both drenched, our hair plastered to our skulls. She makes no complaint; in fact, she barely seems to register the rain though her teeth are chattering.

  Upstairs she lets me towel her hair dry and make her a cup of hot chocolate. Sitting cross-legged in the old velvet armchair, the mug between her hands, a pink flush to her cheeks, she looks like an ordinary child. Undamaged, unhaunted. How desperately I need for her to be an ordinary child. Her eyes close slowly and she rests her head against the side of the chair. I take the mug gently from her hands and place the crocheted blanket from the end of my bed over her.

  The night seems much denser here. We should have a fire flickering in the grate, a place to warm our hands. In the room below us, our landlord, Nicholas, is playing the piano. He favours Chopin. All this week he has made his way methodically through the nocturnes, though tonight he is playing late Beethoven. Prickly, those piano sonatas, and full of dissonance and rifts. My father loved the late pieces, they sounded through the rooms of my childhood in India whenever he was there. Playing them is beyond most people; even listening to them is difficult sometimes. My mother hated them. But Nicholas makes a very good job of it.

  We would be the only lodgers, he said when I telephoned from London to inquire about accommodation; there wasn’t much call for rooms this late in the season, and the weather would be turning soon, the village very quiet. That would suit us perfectly, I told him. Nicholas seems to have accepted our strange afflicted presence in his midst. He hasn’t asked why we have come to this tiny stretch of Suffolk coast, nor how long we plan to stay. It is not incuriosity that restrains him, for I have seen him watching Flora and me. It’s a careful, benevolent kind of watching, as if he were standing guard
from a distance.

  When we first arrived he gave us a tour of the priory, showing us the medicinal garden that the monks had first planted, the niches in the walls where they had placed their candles. He could almost be a monk himself, the last of the order left guarding the ancient abbey. Though the priory itself is cosily furnished with all manner of antiques, decorative plates and water pitchers, rag rugs and framed tapestries, lace-edged tablecloths and embroidered cushions. Surely these are not the leavings of the monks. They speak much more of the influence of a wife, or a mother, though I have seen no evidence of either. He lived alone, Nicholas told me when we first arrived. Though not unhappily, he added swiftly, as if to ward off any unwelcome feelings of pity. You must have known him; this town is too small for everyone not to be known to each other. Perhaps you even visited him here to talk about music, or met him at the Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room. Sometimes I think I might ask Nicholas but I’m not sure I could bear to hear someone else’s memories of you. I want you to stay mine.

  A few days ago Flora and I met Nicholas when we were out walking on the cliff path above the beach and he showed us the last solitary grave of the All Saints churchyard. Hidden away in a little thicket and hemmed in by a low wooden fence, the grave seemed perilously close to the cliff’s edge.

  ‘Will it fall?’ Flora asked as we stood together on the path, our eyes watering in the wind.

  ‘No,’ Nicholas told her. ‘It’s safe and sound.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s safe,’ she said sceptically. ‘It could fall. Why did they put the grave garden so close to the edge?’

  The grave garden indeed; a better name than a boneyard, I suppose. Flora looked perturbed. There was a vein pulsing at her temple; it looked like a bruise against her almost translucent skin. By her sides her hands were curled into tight fists.

  ‘I think it’s quite secure, Flora,’ I said. ‘There’s a fence there.’

  She turned a scornful face to me. How little I know, the look on her face seemed to say. How very little. She glared at me for a moment, her fists still clenched, and then turned and ran off ahead of us along the path, her thin legs kicking up behind her. Once again I was left feeling that I had disappointed her in some small but searing way; that I had failed to understand her or to respond to her correctly. It’s a feeling I frequently had with you – not so much that I missed the meaning behind your words, but that I had not absorbed the things that lay hidden in your silences.

  In her sleep Flora’s eyes skitter rapidly under her eyelids and her tiny body startles then relaxes, then startles again. I stare at the sharp point of her chin, the dark hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Does Flora dream of escape? Is she imagining her way back to another life? There are so many legends of children lost or abandoned and raised by wolves or bears, stolen or rescued. Peril and deliverance, loss and return. The child emerges from the mouth of the cave clad in bearskins or is spied by hunters running through the forest, scarred and scratched, hair matted and face blackened, her frock in rags. The human face among the animal ones, the baby suckling at a bear’s teat. All the stories end with the rescue, the child carried triumphantly back to the village, borne aloft and rejoiced over, delivered into the arms of her tearful parents. Bathed and fed and restored; the new dress and the shining hair, the village parade and the gifts of welcome all part of the anxious and impossible wish for her to forget. But what the rescued child has been returned to is a life she barely remembers, faces she no longer knows. The cheering crowds and the outstretched arms fill her with terror and alone in her bedroom she stares at her face in the mirror for hours on end. She cannot meet their eyes or remember their words. She must learn not only to eat with a fork, to wear shoes and button her dress, but also to choke back the language she knows, to forget the ways of the forest and the musky smell of the bear den. To forget what she is and reassemble herself into a girl.

  It is late and the music has stopped now. There is no sound but the ragged pull and surge of the waves and the whistling of the wind in the chimney. I pick Flora up from the armchair and carry her to the tiny bedroom adjoining mine. She is warm and pliable, her head flopping onto my shoulder, her breath soft against my neck. She murmurs something but I cannot make out the words. I kiss her forehead and smooth her hair. Who knows what goes on in the caverns of her mind.

  Atalanta. That was the name given to the girl raised by bears. Abandoned by her father as a baby in the forest and suckled by a she-bear. Later, she became a formidable huntress, declaring that the only man she would consent to marry was the one who could outrun her. I think of Flora tearing along the cliff path ahead of us the other day, running into the lambent haze of the late afternoon light until she could barely be made out. Her white dress and her long hair streaming out behind her until she too looked like a streak of light, a pale blur. When Nicholas and I reached the Greyfriars ruins at the end of the path, there was no sign of her at all; it was as if she had simply vanished. The road was empty. Could she have run all the way back to the priory? Or down to the sea? Then, suddenly, a flit of silvery movement. Nicholas pointed towards the grey stones and there was Flora, walking along the high ruined wall of the old monastery. How she had scrambled up there I do not know; the wall seemed to have no foothold in it, no step to help her. When she saw us she stood still for a moment, then stretched out her arms and launched herself off the wall. I could feel the fear spinning in me – surely she would break a leg or snap a wrist. But she landed like a tiny gymnast, knees bent and arms reaching forward, wavering a little and then righting herself. She gave me a look of triumph as she walked back across the field towards us. Little minx, my mother would have said. God knows, she said it to me enough times. She thinks I am mad, my mother, coming here to Suffolk with Flora. Perhaps I am.

  I lay a long time awake in the high iron bed, listening to the waves. Oh, Atalanta, you will need to be brave and wild, fleet of foot and ferocious, I wanted to tell her. You will need to outrun those who would do you harm, to cast off the men who will want so much from you, to be ready to fight for yourself. But she knows this, of course she knows this. In the middle of the night I started from my sleep and walked to the door of Flora’s bedroom and stared in at her small body under the covers.

  I hoped to hear her wake and say my name.

  Did you speak my name under your breath, Max? Did you feel it as I felt yours, like a charm, a spell, a prayer on your lips? On those solitary walks here that brought you, always, back to the doorstep of your own house, did you ever once speak my name?

  From the edge of our garden at Rajakkad you can see a mountain range that looks like a sleeping elephant. I showed it to you, Max, on your first day at the house, drawing the shape of it with my finger – the great sweep of the back, the long trunk. We stood staring out across the valley, the bats swooping above us. In the evenings the guests liked to gather in the gardens for drinks, the air soft and heavily scented, the dusk settling down over the Palani Hills. My father’s old valet, Rajesh, would slip through the bushes, balancing a tray of cocktails, and the gardens would be full of the clink of glasses and the quiet murmur of conversation. Lanterns hung from the trees.

  ‘The weight and certitude of an elephant,’ you said softly. It’s a line from a Barbara Ras poem; in it, she also writes about ‘mad breaking-heart stickiness’. I looked up the poem the next day in one of the anthologies in the library. I kept it with me all these years; it seemed like a portent of what was to come. The real seducers use words, my mother used to say to me, they talk you into bed. But there was no guile that day and I’m not even sure seduction is the word for what happened between us.

  There’s a photograph of the two of us standing at the edge of the valley, barely more than silhouettes in the late-afternoon haze, framed by two low trees, as if we were standing on a stage. The blue peaks of the Western Ghats can be seen in the distance. My hair is loose and reaches all the way down my back and my hands are on my hips. I was twenty when we met. I had been at Cambridge for two years and there had been some boys, but what I knew of love, of desire, was mostly still abstract. My life then remained something imagined, something unfurling before me. All my books unwritten. I’m not sure I would even recognise the girl in that photograph if she turned to look at me.