After Father Ambrose’s little speech Peggy Ophuls was able to find a few willing helpers, not only a doctor and a midwife but also girls to cook for Boonyi, and to wash her and oil her and comb her tangled hair. Mrs. Ophuls made no attempt to limit the damaged woman’s food intake. “Let’s have the child out safely,” she told Father Ambrose and the orphans (who muttered sullenly, but made no objection). “Then we can think about the mother.”
In due course the baby was born. Boonyi, cradling her daughter, named her Kashmira. “Do you hear me?” she whispered into the little girl’s ear. “Your name is Kashmira Noman, and I’m going to take you home.”
This was when Peggy Ophuls’s face hardened and she revealed her darker purpose, unveiling the secret she had kept hidden until this moment beneath the cloak of her apparently boundless altruism. “Young lady,” she said, “it’s time to face facts. You want to go home, you say?” Yes, replied Boonyi, it is the only thing I now want in the world. “Hmm,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Home to that husband of yours in Pachigam. The one who never came for you. The one who stopped writing. The clown.” Boonyi’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, my dear, I make it my business to know-Ha! I see!-That’s the chap you’re going back to with another man’s baby in your arms?-Mmm?-And you imagine that’s the chap who will give this little girl his name-Kashmira Noman-and take her for his own, and then it’s off into the sunset for a spot of happily ever after?” The tears were streaming down Boonyi’s face. “That’s a nonstarter, my dear,” said Peggy Ophuls unsentimentally, moving in for the kill. “Noman, indeed!-That’s not her name. And what did you say? Kashmira? No, no, darling. That can’t be her future.” Something new in the tone of her voice made Boonyi dry her tears.
“Tell you what, though,” added Peggy Ophuls, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Here’s a bit of a plan.-Are you listening? You’d do well to listen.” Boonyi was paying attention now. “It’s winter,” said Peggy Ophuls. “The road over the Pir Panjal is closed. No way into the valley by land.-No matter.-I can give you what you want. I can get an aircraft to fly you in. You’re probably more than one seat wide. That can be taken into account.-You don’t have to worry about nursing the child. I have a wet nurse standing by.-You can probably travel in, what, a week? Let’s say a week. I can have a comfortable vehicle waiting for you at the other end to drive you back to Pachigam in style. How does that sound?-Hmm?-Sounds good, I expect. Ha! Of course it does.”
Boonyi’s tears had dried. “Please, I do not understand,” she said at last. “What is the need for a wet nurse?” As the words left her lips she saw the answer to the question in her benefactress’s eyes.
“Do you know the tale of Rumplestiltskin?” asked Peggy Ophuls, dreamily. “No, of course you don’t.-Well, in brief.-Once upon a time there was a miller’s daughter who was told by one of those whimsical fairy-tale kings, If you have not spun this straw into gold by tomorrow morning, you must die.-You know the type of fellow I mean, dear.-They’ll screw you or chop off your head, those killer princes, love and death being the same sort of thing to them. They’ll screw you and chop off your head. They’ll screw you while your head is being chopped off… -Sorry. As I was saying.-In the middle of the night, while she sat helpless and weeping, locked away in a castle tower, there was a knock at the door, and in came a little manikin, who asked, What will you give me if I do it for you? And he did it, you know, three nights running he spun the straw into gold, and the miller’s daughter lived, and of course she married the whimsical king, and had a child. Silly woman! To marry the man who would have killed her as easily as blinking.-Well!-Scheherazade married her murderous Shahryar, too.-Can’t beat women for stupidity, what?-Take me, for example. I married my whimsical prince as well, the murderer of my love.-But you know all about him, of course, I’m so sorry.-So, where was I.-Yes. In conclusion.-One night the little manikin came back. You know what I came for, he said. Rumplestiltskin was his name.”
They were alone in the room; alone with their desperate needs. The silence was terrible: a dark, hopeless hush of inevitability. But the look on Margaret Rhodes Ophuls’s face was worse, at once savage and happy. “Ophuls,” said Peggy-Mata. “That’s her father’s name. And India’s a nice name, a name containing, as it does, the truth. The question of origins is one of the two great questions. India Ophuls is an answer. To the second great question, the question of ethics, she’ll have to find answers of her own.”
“No,” said Boonyi, shouting. “I won’t do it.” Peggy Ophuls put a hand on the young mother’s head. “You get what you want,” she said. “You live, and go home. But there are two of us here, my dear.-Don’t you see?-Two of us to satisfy. Yes. You know, the night before I came to India I dreamed I would not leave without a child to call my own. I dreamed I was holding a little baby girl and singing her a song I’d made up specially.-And then all this time with all these children I’ve wondered when my child would come.-You understand, I’m sure.-One wants the world to be what it is not.-One clings to hope. Then finally one faces up.-Let’s look at the world as it is, shall we?-I can’t have a baby. That’s clear. More than one reason now. Biology and divorce.-And you?-You can’t keep this little girl. She will drag you down and she will be the death of you and that will be the death of her.-You follow?-Whereas with me she can live like a queen.”
“No,” said Boonyi, dully, hugging her daughter. “No, no, no.”
“I’m so glad,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Hmm?-Yes. Really!-Couldn’t be more delighted. I knew you’d be sensible once it was all properly explained.” As she left the room she was humming the dream-song to herself. Ratetta, sweet Ratetta, she sang, who could be better than you?
Here is ex-ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, falling, for the time being, out of history. Here he is in disgrace, plunging down through the turbulent waters of 1968, past the Prague Spring and the Magical Mystery Tour and the Tet Offensive and the Paris événements and the My Lai massacre and the dead bodies of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, past Grosvenor Square and Baader-Meinhof and Mrs. Robinson and O. J. Simpson and Nixon. The swollen ocean of events, mighty and heartless, closes over Max as it always does over losers. Here is drowned Max, the invisible man. Underground Max, trapped in a subterranean Edgar Wood world, a world of the disregarded, of lizard people and snake people, of busted hustlers and discarded lovers and lost leaders and dashed hopes. Here is Max wandering among the high heaps of the bodies of the rejected, the mountain ranges of defeat. But even in this, his newfound invisibility, he is ahead of his time, because in this occult soil the seeds of the future are being planted, and the time of the invisible world will come, the time of the altered dialectic, the time of the dialectic gone underground, when anonymous spectral armies will fight in secret over the fate of the earth. A good man is never discarded for long. A use is always found for such a man. Invisible Max will find a new use. He will be one of the makers of this new age, too, until old age at last rings down the curtain, and Death comes to his door in the form of a handsome man, a Mercader, an Udham Singh, Death asking him, in the name of the woman they once both loved, for work.