“Meaning, I take it, that they have something to do with sex?”
Murugan nodded and turned away his face. To his astonishment, Will saw that he was blushing.
“Give me an example,” he demanded.
But Murugan could not bring himself to be explicit.
“Ask Dr. Robert,” he said, “ask Vijaya. They think that sort of thing is simply wonderful. In fact they all do. That’s one of the reasons why nobody wants to change. They’d like everything to go on as it is, in the same old disgusting way, forever and ever.”
“Forever and ever,” a rich contralto voice teasingly repeated.
“Mother!” Murugan sprang to his feet.
Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed (rather incongruously, he thought; for that kind of face and build usually went with mauve and magenta and electric blue) in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jeweled hand pressed against the doorjamb, in the pose of the great actress, the acknowledged diva, pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of her adorers on the other side of the footlights. In the background, waiting patiently for his cue, stood a tall man in a dove-gray Dacron suit whom Murugan, peering past the massive embodiment of maternity that almost filled the doorway, now greeted as Mr. Bahu.
Still in the wings, Mr. Bahu bowed without speaking.
Murugan turned again to his mother. “Did you walk here?” he asked. His tone expressed incredulity and an admiring solicitude. Walking here—how unthinkable! But if she had walked, what heroism! “All the way?”
“All the way, my baby,” she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm came down, slid round the boy’s slender body, pressed it, engulfed in floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. “I had one of my Impulses.” She had a way, Will noticed, of making you actually hear the capital letters at the beginning of the words she meant to emphasize. “My Little Voice said, ‘Go and see this Stranger at Dr. Robert’s house. Go!’ ‘Now?’ I said. ‘Malgré la chaleur?’ Which makes my Little Voice lose patience. ‘Woman,’ it says, ‘hold your silly tongue and do as you’re told.’ So here I am, Mr. Farnaby.” With hand outstretched and surrounded by a powerful aura of sandalwood oil, she advanced towards him.
Will bowed over the thick bejeweled fingers and mumbled something that ended in “Your Highness.”
“Bahu!” she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned surname.
Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his entrance and was introduced as His Excellency, Abdul Bahu, the Ambassador of Rendang: “Abdul Pierre Bahu—car sa mère est parisienne. But he learned his English in New York.”
He looked, Will thought as he shook the Ambassador’s hand, like Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.
“Bahu,” said the Rani, “is Colonel Dipa’s Brains Trust.”
“Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel.”
His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a parody of deference and self-abasement.
“The brains,” he went on, “are where brains ought to be—in the head. As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang’s sympathetic nervous system.”
“Et combien sympathique!” said the Rani. “Among other things, Mr. Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country place! Like The Arabian Nights! One claps one’s hands—and instantly there are six servants ready to do one’s bidding. One has a birthday—and there is a fête nocturne in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls; two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Harun al-Rashid, but with modern plumbing.”
“It sounds quite delightful,” said Will, remembering the villages through which he had passed in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes—the wattled huts, the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women bent double under enormous loads.
“And such taste,” the Rani went on, “such a well-stored mind and, through it all” (she lowered her voice) “such a deep and unfailing Sense of the Divine.”
Mr. Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.
Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.
“I hope you don’t feel that my visit is an intrusion,” she said to Will. He assured her that he didn’t; but she continued to apologize. “I would have given warning,” she said, “I would have asked your permission. But my Little Voice says, ‘No—you must go now.’ Why? I cannot say. But no doubt we shall find out in due course.” She fixed him with her large, bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. “And now, first of all, how are you, dear Mr. Farnaby?”
“As you see, ma’am, in very good shape.”
“Truly?” The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intentness that he found embarrassing. “I can see that you’re the kind of heroically considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his deathbed.”
“You’re very flattering,” he said. “But as it happens, I am in good shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so.”
“Miraculous,” said the Rani, “was the very word I used when I heard about your escape. It was a miracle.”
“‘As luck would have it,’” Will quoted again from Erewhon, “‘Providence was on my side.’”
Mr. Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of merriment into a loud cough.
“How true!” the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly vibrated. “Providence is always on our side.” And when Will raised a questioning eyebrow, “I mean,” she elaborated, “in the eyes of those who Truly Understand” (capital T, capital U). “And this is true even when all things seem to conspire against us—même dans le désastre. You understand French, of course, Mr. Farnaby?” Will nodded. “It often comes to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese.
After so many years in Switzerland,” she explained, “first at school. And again, later on, when my poor baby’s health was so precarious” (she patted Murugan’s bare arm) “and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which illustrates what I was saying about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I’d ever learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our lives—weren’t they, darling?”
“The happiest of our lives,” the boy agreed, with what almost sounded like complete sincerity.
The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips, and with a faint smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. “So you see, my dear Farnaby,” she went on, “you see. It’s really self-evident. Nothing happens by Accident. There’s a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us.”
“Quite,” said Will politely. “Quite.”
“There was a time,” the Rani continued, “when I knew it only with my intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really…” she paused for an instant to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, “Understand.”
“Psychic as hell.” Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her. And surely that lifelong frequenter of séances should know.
“I take it, ma’am,” he said, “that you’re naturally psychic.”
“From birth,” she admitted. “But also and above all by training. Training, needless to say, in Something Else.”
“Something else?”
“In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the sidhis, all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously.”
“Is that so?”
“My mother,” Murugan proudly assured him, “can do the most fantastic things.”
“N’exagérons pas, chéri.”
“But it’s the truth,” Murugan insisted.
“A truth,” the Ambassador put in, “which I can confirm. And I confirm it,” he added, smiling at his own expense, “with a certain reluctance. As a lifelong skeptic about these things, I don’t like to see the impossible happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I’m compelled malgré moi to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the most fantastic things.”
“Well, if you like to put it that way,” said the Rani, beaming with pleasure. “But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely no importance. What’s important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes to at the end of the Path.”
“After the Fourth Initiation,” Murugan specified. “My mother…”
“Darling!” The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. “These are things one
