Will turned on him angrily. “What the devil do you think you’re doing, you little fool?” He jerked his arm out of the boy’s grasp.
Intimidated, Murugan changed his tone. “I just wanted to know if you were ready to come to my mother’s.”
“I’m not ready,” Will answered, “because I’m not going.”
“Not going?” Murugan cried in a tone of incredulous amazement. “But she expects you, she…”
“Tell your mother I’m very sorry, but I have a prior engagement. With someone who’s dying,” Will added.
“But this is frightfully important.”
“So is dying.”
Murugan lowered his voice. “Something’s happening,” he whispered.
“I can’t hear you,” Will shouted through the confused noises of the crowd.
Murugan glanced about him apprehensively, then risked a somewhat louder whisper. “Something’s happening, something tremendous.”
“Something even more tremendous is happening at the hospital.”
“We just heard…” Murugan began. He looked around again, then shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you—not here. That’s why you must come to the bungalow. Now. There’s no time to lose.”
Will glanced at his watch. “No time to lose,” he echoed and, turning to Mary Sarojini, “We must get going,” he said. “Which way?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, and they set off hand in hand.
“Wait,” Murugan implored, “wait!” Then, as Will and Mary Sarojini held on their course, he came dodging through the crowd in pursuit. “What shall I tell her?” he wailed at their heels.
The boy’s terror was comically abject. In Will’s mind anger gave place to amusement. He laughed aloud. Then, halting, “What would you tell her, Mary Sarojini?” he asked.
“I’d tell her exactly what happened,” said the child. “I mean, if it was my mother. But then,” she added on second thought, “my mother isn’t the Rani.” She looked up at Murugan. “Do you belong to an MAC?” she enquired.
Of course he didn’t. For the Rani the very idea of a Mutual Adoption Club was a blasphemy. Only God could make a Mother. The Spiritual Crusader wanted to be alone with her God-given victim.
“No MAC.” Mary Sarojini shook her head. “That’s awful! You might have gone and stayed for a few days with one of your other mothers.”
Still terrified by the prospect of having to tell his only mother about the failure of his mission, Murugan began to harp almost hysterically on a new variant of the old theme. “I don’t know what she’ll say,” he kept repeating. “I don’t know what she’ll say.”
“There’s only one way to find out what she’ll say,” Will told him. “Go home and listen.”
“Come with me,” Murugan begged. “Please.” He clutched at Will’s arm.
“I told you not to touch me.” The clutching hand was hastily withdrawn. Will smiled again. “That’s better!” He raised his staff in a farewell gesture. “Bonne nuit, Altesse.” Then to Mary Sarojini, “Lead on, MacPhail,” he said in high good humor.
“Were you putting it on?” Mary Sarojini asked. “Or were you really angry?”
“Really and truly,” he assured her. Then he remembered what he had seen in the school gymnasium. He hummed the opening notes of the Rakshasi Hornpipe and banged the pavement with his ironshod staff.
“Ought I to have stamped it out?”
“Maybe it would have been better.”
“You think so?”
“He’s going to hate you as soon as he’s stopped being frightened.”
Will shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t care less. But as the past receded and the future approached, as they left the arc lamps of the marketplace and climbed the steep dark street that wound uphill to the hospital, his mood began to change. Lead on, MacPhail—but towards what, and away from what? Towards yet another manifestation of the Essential Horror and away from all hope of that blessed year of freedom which Joe Aldehyde had promised and that it would be so easy and (since Pala was doomed in any event) not so immoral or treacherous to earn. And not only away from the hope of freedom; away quite possibly, if the Rani complained to Joe and if Joe became sufficiently indignant, from any further prospects of well-paid slavery as a professional execution watcher. Should he turn back, should he try to find Murugan, offer apologies, do whatever that dreadful woman ordered him to do? A hundred yards up the road, the lights of the hospital could be seen shining between the trees.
“Let’s rest for a moment,” he said.
“Are you tired?” Mary Sarojini enquired solicitously.
“A little.”
He turned and, leaning on his staff, looked down at the marketplace. In the light of the arc lamps the town hall glowed pink, like a monumental serving of raspberry sherbet. On the temple spire he could see, frieze above frieze, the exuberant chaos of Indic sculpture—elephants and Bodhisattvas, demons, supernatural girls with breasts and enormous bottoms, capering Shivas, rows of past and future Buddhas in quiet ecstasy. Below, in the space between sherbet and mythology, seethed the crowd, and somewhere in that crowd was a sulky face and a pair of white satin pajamas. Should he go back? It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do. But an inner voice—not little, like the Rani’s, but stentorian—shouted, “Squalid! Squalid!” Conscience? No. Morality? Heaven forbid! But supererogatory squalor, ugliness and vulgarity beyond the call of duty—these were things which, as a man of taste, one simply couldn’t be a party to.
“Well, shall we go on?” he said to Mary Sarojini.
They entered the lobby of the hospital. The nurse at the desk had a message for them from Susila. Mary Sarojini was to go directly to Mrs. Rao’s, where she and Tom Krishna would spend the night. Mr. Farnaby was to be asked to come at once to Room 34.
“This way,” said the nurse, and held open a swing door.
Will stepped forward. The conditioned reflex of politeness clicked automatically into action. “Thank you,” he said, and smiled. But it was with a dull, sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that he went hobbling towards the apprehended future.
“The last door on the left,” said the nurse. But now she had to get back to her desk in the lobby. “So I’ll leave you to go on alone,” she added as the door closed behind her.
Alone, he repeated to himself, alone—and the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous. This long corridor with its green-painted walls was the very same corridor along which, a year ago, he had walked to the little room where Molly lay dying. The nightmare was recurrent. Foredoomed and conscious, he moved on towards its horrible consummation. Death, yet another vision of death.
Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…He knocked and waited, listening to the beating of his heart. The door opened and he found himself face to face with little Radha.
“Susila was expecting you,” she whispered.
Will followed her into the room. Rounding a screen, he caught a glimpse of Susila’s profile silhouetted against a lamp, of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of clawlike hands. Once again the Essential Horror. With a shudder he turned away. Radha motioned him to a chair near the open window. He sat down and closed his eyes—closed them physically against the present, but, by that very act, opened them inwardly upon that hateful past of which the present had reminded him. He was there in that other room, with Aunt Mary.
Or rather with the person who had once been Aunt Mary, but was now this hardly recognizable somebody else—somebody who had never so much as heard of the charity and courage which had been the very essence of Aunt Mary’s being; somebody who was filled with an indiscriminate hatred for all who came near her, loathing them, whoever they might be, simply because they didn’t have cancer, because they weren’t in pain, had not been sentenced to die before their time. And along with this malignant envy of other people’s health and happiness had gone a bitterly querulous self-pity, an abject despair.
“Why to me? Why should this thing have happened to me?”
He could hear the shrill complaining voice, could see that tearstained and distorted face. The only person he had ever really loved or wholeheartedly admired. And yet, in her degradation, he had caught himself despising her—despising, positively hating.
To escape from the past, he reopened his eyes. Radha, he saw, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged and upright, in the posture of meditation. In her chair beside the bed Susila seemed to be holding the same kind of focused stillness. He looked at the face on the pillow. That too was still, still with a serenity that might almost have been the frozen calm of death. Outside, in the leafy darkness, a peacock suddenly screamed. Deepened by contrast, the ensuing silence seemed to grow pregnant with mysterious and appalling meanings.
“Lakshmi.” Susila laid a hand on the old woman’s wasted arm. “Lakshmi,” she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. “You mustn’t go to sleep.”
Not go to sleep? But for Aunt Mary, sleep—the artificial sleep that followed the injections—had been the only respite from the self-lacerations of self-pity and brooding fear.
“Lakshmi!”
The face came to life.
“I wasn’t really asleep,” the old woman whispered. “It’s just my being so weak. I seem to float away.”
“But you’ve got to be here,” said Susila. “You’ve got to know you’re here. All the time.” She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman’s shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table.
Lakshmi sniffed, opened her eyes, and looked up into Susila’s face. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you were,” she said. “But then Dugald always did have good taste.” The ghost
