Stephanie Page 3

  Krishna trotted beside her for a while, his face anxious. He explained that the brooch was really his father’s, and his father blamed him for having let it out of his sight. The value was so great – to them – that it represented the family fortune. If anything should happen to it …

  ‘Nothing will happen to it,’ she said; ‘ it is quite safe.’

  He was not able, Krishna explained, he was not allowed into the hotel and he did not even know their names.

  ‘Colton,’ she repeated. ‘C.O. L.T.O. N.’

  ‘Col-toon.’

  ‘He will be home by five.’ All the same she wished Errol had not taken the brooch on approval. Had he ever really had any intention of buying it? Certainly Krishna, having come down so far in price, could never reduce it again, by half. Errol had a mischievous streak, she well knew. It didn’t matter much if he played tricks on her; it was a bit callous to practise them on this ragged young Goan.

  She lunched at one of the other restaurants today – it was hotter than usual, and one sought the breeze. The menus at all the restaurants were very much the same, and she had tiger prawns, for which she was developing an insatiable taste.

  The hotel was preparing for some sort of jamboree. Endless streams of waiters and workmen were carrying and rearranging tables and putting up balloons round the swimming pool. Monstrous effigies, inflatable and grotesque, were being erected on poles and swung gently in the warm air. Long barbecue trestles were rattling into place. There would, of course, be dancing. Every night there was dancing to a live band, but this was obviously some special occasion. The Indians – and the Goans – never lacked for an excuse to make merry.

  A fairly cosmopolitan bag of guests at the hotel: English, French, German, Swiss, Indian; none, fortunately, in a special majority over the others. Being a gregarious type, she would have chatted to most of them, but Errol seemed to want to keep all his laughter and high spirits for her, and have other people stay at a distance. Now that they saw her on her own, two English couples separately came across to talk to her, and she had a very unstudious afternoon. Tea came and went, and it was five before she walked up to her bungalow and realised that Errol was overdue. She hung about a bit and thought, well, damn it, he might have telephoned. Another bathe? In the afternoon breeze the sea was prancing; it would probably be unsafe to swim because of the undertow, but jumping through the breakers was always exhilarating. She must be careful not to be rescued, though. Young Goan lifeguards were usually on the watch with an old tyre and a length of rope, and they seemed particularly eager to rescue ladies who appealed to their sense of the aesthetic.

  As soon as she came out of the sea and saw Krishna waiting she wished she had used the pool instead.

  ‘He is not home yet,’ she said. ‘He will come soon.’

  Krishna glanced anxiously at the sun, which had less than an hour to set.

  ‘I do not take the money home, Father beat me with rod. He will say we are in ruin!’

  ‘Mr Colton should be back very soon.’

  ‘You bring the money, miz?’

  She squeezed the water out of her hair. ‘I am sorry to tell you this, Krishna, but I do not think Mr Colton will buy the brooch after all. He has decided, I think, that it is not what he wants.’

  Krishna sucked his teeth in dismay. ‘The money?’

  ‘I do not think he will keep the brooch.’

  ‘Then the brooch? Where is it?’

  ‘In our apartment.’

  ‘The money …’

  ‘No money.’

  ‘The brooch. You get brooch, miz, please. Father beat me with rod.’

  She picked up her flimsy wrap and put it on to protect her shoulders from the sun.

  ‘I am going up now. He should be back. If not I will tell him to meet you at the steps at seven.’

  ‘Dark then.’

  ‘The lights from the hotel will show up the steps.’

  ‘Master come, miz. You or Master. Father beat me with rod. We are ruin.’

  She shook him off with difficulty, feeling annoyed with his persistence and annoyed with Errol. Of course the brooch was safe with them, but the young idiot of an Indian had trusted them without knowing anything about them. For all he knew they might be leaving on the morning plane, taking the brooch with them. How could he challenge them?

  She went to the desk to see if there was any message, but there was not. She took the taxi up to the bungalow but nothing had changed. The air was moist and cloying now. She pulled off her bikini and took a shower, then found some ice in the fridge and poured a large gin. She felt better for this. Be damned to hash. Good luck to them as liked it, but it was not for her.

  From the balcony she watched the sun go down. When barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day – who had written that? The barréd clouds were there tonight – a thin black wafer bisecting the sun as it sank into the opal sea; but it would be quite hard to think of a tropical day as soft-dying; too abrupt and dramatic for that. Even the sun seemed to go too fast. At five past six its rim touched the horizon, and in a little over two minutes it was gone! Royal purples, iridescent greens and peacock blues glowed in the turning waves.

  In her handbag, as she took out a handkerchief, was a bill for next month’s rent of the flat in Broomfield Road, by agreement paid in advance, and this as yet unpaid. It was rather a grand flat for an undergraduate, tastefully furnished, good prints on the walls, but she had moved into it a year last January, thanks to a sub from her father. She had shared it with an Australian girl, Jennifer Price, but Jenny had gone back to Adelaide last Christmas when her mother unexpectedly died, and had not returned. Having just met Errol, she had not made an immediate attempt to find a new flatmate because it was marvellously convenient to have the place to oneself. However, she simply couldn’t afford to keep it on on her own, hence the unpaid bill; and she had refused Errol’s offer of help (kept mistress?); so she must find someone fairly quickly. The obvious person was Anne Vincent; she would come like a rocket, but there were drawbacks. Anne was in her first year and had a crush on her. There was a Lezzy feel about the relationship and Stephanie didn’t want to fan it.

  After the sun, a short luminous afterglow, some stars came out, and it was night. Another drink; shut the windows. So far as she had been able to discover, there weren’t any flying insects by the sea in Goa, but there was no point in going out of one’s way to attract them.

  Seven o’clock came. She closed the paperback she had been leafing through, took off her beach wrap, slid into a frock, combed her hair. Then she thought of Krishna. The wretched little man would be waiting at the bottom of the steps. Damn Errol! Quite often he had been unpredictable in his comings and goings before, but not as bad as this. She’d have to take the beastly brooch down herself.

  If she could find it. She tried the drawers but no luck. A brooch was easy to put away in some unobtrusive corner. Maybe the provoking man had taken it with him.

  The only other possible place was his briefcase under the bed. She yanked the case out, feeling felonious and wondering if he would come in and catch her. Well, serve him right. The case was one of those with a combination alphabet to unlock it, but in Bombay she had seen him press an E, two Rs, an O and an L. She did the same and the case flicked open.

  A wad of money, mostly in hundred-dollar bills, nearly fell out. A pile of documents too, on a variety of styles of paper, from good vellum to the flimsiest of cheap decorated Indian paper. Diagrams, maps of various parts of the world, details and dates of consignments. Names of ships, airlines, names and addresses, hotels, towns, Hong Kong, Singapore, Peshawar, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur.

  Then she saw the brooch. It had been dropped in loose and was at the bottom of the case. She grabbed it, put it on the bed, turned to shut the case. One last look: peeping Tom. Most of the papers seemed to be records of consignments, for Greece, for Holland, for England. But there were attached memos, here and there. One read: No worry about customs here. Just pay the officers!
Mainly it was flax they were shipping. An odd thing to be concerned with and in such quantity. Wasn’t it?

  Stephanie shut the case and with a toe slid it back under the bed. She thought she would run down and give Krishna the brooch back to quell his anxieties and then come up and finish dressing. Not that anyone dressed much in India. When they came down for the first dinner Errol had remarked: ‘I believe mine must be the only tie in Goa.’ But she would brush her hair again, make up her face.

  Errol had to be home soon. What would she say to him? Not very much. She was trembling. Silly, she needed another drink. Maybe she needed to get altogether stoned tonight. And to stay permanently stoned until she returned to England. Not on hash, but on good honest gin.

  She drank the next down quickly and felt it warming her with a protective glow. A protection against an ugly suspicion. There must be some mistake.

  She picked up the brooch and pinned it to her frock, then took it off, fished out a bit of tissue paper and wrapped it. Better to let Krishna see they had been caring for it.

  She stepped out of the bungalow and began to walk down the stepped slope to the hotel. The breeze caressed her face. There must be some mistake?

  In her two and a half years at Oxford she had mixed with a fair assortment of people, students, dons, many from outside the university. Particularly in the last year she had become friendly with this inner group of rich students, Bob and Tony and Zog and Fiona and Arun Jiva and the rest, and through them she had come to see some of the seamier side of undergraduate life. Nobody was vicious but a number were pretty wild. Some took drugs, some took drink, a few, like Zog, nothing. But she had become familiar with the jargon of the day.

  Flax she knew to be the in name for heroin.

  VI

  She was halfway through dinner when he slid into the seat beside her.

  ‘Hi. Remember me, eh? Sorry, I got delayed at the office.’

  ‘Hello.’ She looked at him, half smiled, then went on with her dinner.

  No one could call him good-looking, but he had such tremendous bony, whimsical charm, such appeal, and tonight he had a clean glowing look as if he had spent the day in restful ease and was all ready to enjoy the night. She swallowed a mouthful of food, to stop the bile from rising in her throat.

  The music ended and he looked about, nodding to one or two fellow guests. He patted her hand and said: ‘Now you’re cross. Never mind. I’ll make up for it … Oh, I see, no waiter service tonight. One has to go to the burning ghats.’

  It was his name, and a good one, for the barbecue meats laid out and simmering at the trestle tables. He went off, picked up a plate, and presently came back with it filled with a variety of curries.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’ he asked.

  ‘Very good. The usual, of course.’

  They ate in silence for a time. The band anyway was noisy enough. Some people who had finished their supper were already dancing. Others had broken off between courses. The white-coated waiters drifted silently in and out of the tables removing used plates.

  ‘I got some super photographs,’ he said. ‘ The Sé is pretty splendid – that’s the cathedral – neglected but all the more photogenic for that. I took some nice ones through the wheel of a broken handcart … And the Church of St Cajetan – Romanesque, you’d think. The old monastery – not much left but the tower. And some of the colour-washed houses make good subjects. Little enough colour in the people, though.’

  He went on talking but she did not have much to say. Seeing she had finished her meal he said: ‘Dance?’

  ‘Later. Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Like another drink?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He went away and came back with a bowl of fruit. A waiter brought them drinks and Errol sent them back because one of the glasses did not please him.

  Stephanie finished her cigarette. ‘ I took the brooch back to Krishna.’

  He did not say anything until the waiter had returned with fresh glasses. His eyes looked very light coloured in the arc lamps. ‘Whatever made you do that?’

  ‘He was round me all day with a pathetic tale that he’d be beaten by his father if he didn’t take back the brooch or the money tonight, so I –’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘Yes. Well, yes … I waited until after seven. I thought maybe you’d taken off for England and left me to pay the bill.’

  ‘Could you have?’

  ‘No.’

  He laughed. ‘These little black devils.’

  The fun around the pool was becoming furious. Urged on by a dozen people in fancy dress, a chain was forming, each holding another’s middle, and jogging round the pool to a South American beat.

  ‘It’s an eastern Lambeth Walk,’ said Errol. He knitted his eyebrows. ‘But the brooch was in the case, my pet. How did you get it?’

  ‘Opened the case. I saw the combination when you got your passport out of it in Bombay.’

  ‘Did you now. I’ll be the son of a gun.’

  ‘Warning to you, dear. If you will desert your mistresses they may turn nasty.’

  ‘Well, you’d have had plenty to pay the bill with in there!’

  ‘So I noticed.’

  ‘Notice anything else?’

  A fractional hesitation was all she allowed herself. ‘ Nothing that made much sense. What is flax?’

  ‘Flax is flax, dear. A staple food. Haven’t you heard of it? Makes linseed, textile fibres, candlewicks, God knows what else. You ever heard of a flax wench?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They were about at one time. Still are in some countries. Manmade fibres don’t have it all their own way. It’s a very profitable commodity, otherwise we wouldn’t handle it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I and my companies.’

  ‘I thought you were into theme parks.’

  ‘We’re into a lot of things. Business is business. Okay?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘What d’you mean, more or less?’

  ‘Are you bending the law a bit somewhere?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I caught a glimpse of a note which said not to worry about customs officers because they could be bought.’

  ‘My word,’ he said. ‘You have been busy in my absence!’

  She flushed. ‘ Bluebeard’s wife, opening the forbidden door.’

  ‘Maybe. But what the hell? We’re none of us angels.’

  ‘And anyway, it’s none of my business, eh?’

  ‘You said it, but yes … Rest assured it’s all very minor and innocent. And you’re in no way involved.’

  When he had finished his meal they danced and drank some more, but he did not offer her any more cookies. Afterwards she refused to sleep with him. She wouldn’t make the conventional female excuse.

  He didn’t like that at all, but she was not giving way. She wanted a long time, a long time to herself, to think.

  Chapter Two

  I

  Naresh Prasad walked down the crowded street towards the tea shop where he was to meet his friend Shyam. He knew himself to be in an awkward situation but did not doubt his ability to talk his way out of it.

  It was really only a question of not being able to repay the loan for another month or so. In the privacy of his own room – though Bonni had been there, as she always was, whining under his feet, as was the privilege of a wife – rehearsing in his mind what he had to say, he had felt confident. His reasons for not being able to repay the money this month had seemed reasonable, his excuses excusable, his regrets and pleas could not be disregarded except by a man with a heart of stone. And Shyam Lal Shastri, his old schoolfriend, though noisy and a bit of a bully, was in essence a generous man and would not let him down.

  But as he crossed the street, picking his way among the rush-hour traffic, the honking ramshackle taxis, the bicycles, the crowded buses, the thousands of pedestrians hurrying like himself, milling in ant fashion about th
e shops and the streets, or squatting talking in the gutter amid a babel of noise and hot dust, he had a moment’s unease wondering whether Shyam might just possibly cut up rough. Shyam Lal Shastri had been known to cut up rough as a young man and was credited with having stabbed a youth to the point of death in a crowded cinema in a dispute over a girl. It would be a pity if he cut up rough.

  The tea shop was at the entrance to a bazaar and opposite a big advertisement for the latest sensational movie, showing – four times life-size – a beautiful Hindu girl being carried off by a bandit. The tea shop was crowded and dark, and it took a minute for Nari to accustom his eyes after the slanting glare of the sun. Then he saw Shyam sitting at a table with a middle-aged bearded man in a white newly pressed cotton suit. At first he thought, he hoped, they were not together but when Shyam saw him he spoke to the older man and the older man nodded.

  They were already drinking tea and munching arrowroot biscuits. Nari greeted them both and the middle-aged man was introduced to him as Mr Haji Noor Mohamed. For a moment or two Nari chatted brightly to Shyam, who was the same age as himself and was stout and pockmarked but darkly good-looking if you liked the extrovert type. Mr Mohamed had no small talk and sat silently sipping his tea and watching Nari with deep-set assessing eyes.

  No one invited Nari to take tea, so he ordered some for himself. There had been a meeting of the Congress Party yesterday – for some anniversary, and Nari wondered if Mr Mohamed had come from out of town to join the celebrations. The dress was right, but a little too richly ornamented.

  Out of the blue, as it were, quite without any good reason at all, it seemed, just when they were discussing the ill effects of smog in Bombay and what they must do to clean up the city, and the constant influx of new inhabitants – many thousands a day flocking in from the surrounding countryside – and how some firms were moving their premises to Poona where it was cheaper and cleaner and no union problems, and how lax the city council was in dealing with the matter of over-population – just when the conversation was proceeding very smoothly Shyam broke off and said: ‘Have you brought the money to repay your debt, Nari?’