Surfacing from the daze of effort Theodore had run forward as Lung fell. He was too late to help, but stayed looking down at his friend. Lung’s eyes were open. He had his head in Mrs Jones’s lap and lay there, gazing up into her face, much as Theodore had once seen them in the valley of the lilies.
‘Missy,’ he whispered, with a smile of painful joy, and closed his eyes.
18
THEODORE WAITED IN the small room to which he had been shown by a servant wearing a black jacket and striped trousers – the butler, he guessed. The room smelt strongly of many things, especially damp dogs. A row of waterproofs and great-coats hung along one wall. The two chairs were upholstered in shiny red leather, padded with horse hair, and crackled angrily when one sat down, as if they were not used to such treatment. The pictures on the walls were of men in tall hats galloping on stretched-out horses under a moonlit sky. Outside the single sash window a pale sun shone, but the morning’s rain still dripped from trees onto the gravel of the driveway where Theodore’s cab waited. The cab-horse had a vague look of Albert about it.
Sooner than Theodore had expected the butler returned.
‘This way, if you please, sir,’ he said.
His manner had changed. When Theodore had been trying to persuade him to take the note to his master at once, instead of leaving it to lie with the letters on the sideboard in the hall, he had been very stiff and in his cold way hostile. Now, though still stiff, he was respectful and even faintly inquisitive. Theodore followed him across the hall, with its polished floor and Persian rugs and cases of porcelain and trophies of animal heads along the walls, then down a short corridor to a door which the butler opened and held for him.
‘The young gentleman, sir,’ he intoned.
‘Ah. Come in,’ said a man’s voice, light, musical, tense.
This room was quite large. Tobacco smoke mingled with the powdery scent of chrysanthemums which, with a number of plants Theodore had never seen, stood in large pots around the floor. Two large windows with heavy stone mullions looked out over a valley towards bare hills. The sweep of wood Mrs Jones had told him about – ‘just right for his lilies’ – curled down the slope to the left, dark cones of pine spiring among the last tattered golds of autumn. Theodore knew that the house was less than ten years old, but it felt as though it had stood here for a long time and housed many generations of rich men. He could only guess that most of the objects in the room were expensive, just as most of the plants in the pots were exotic and rare, but that was not the reason why they were there. They were there because they suited the taste of the man they belonged to, and so the room felt as though it had taken shape round a single personality. In the hearth a couple of logs smoked in thin blue streams on a pile of white ash, and over the fireplace was a portrait of a woman, painted in profile to show the richness of her red-gold hair and the almost bird-like fineness of her profile. The picture fitted the room too.
Not much to look at, Mrs Jones had said, a little bloke, trim, something about him made him look like he’s just been polished, even in the middle of a jungle . . .
Nothing about the description was wrong, but there was something else which Theodore felt he should have been prepared for, but wasn’t – a vitality, a quickness of glance, a sense of hard intelligence poised cat-like behind the façade of this small neat man in his quiet tweeds.
‘I’m Monty German,’ the man said. ‘I believe you are Theodore Tewker. How do you do?’
‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’
‘How is she? When did you see her? Does she need help?’
‘She was fine four months ago, sir.’
‘That sounds a bit final. Are you sure she’s all right? You’re telling the truth? She’s not dead?’
‘No sir. She’s become a Buddhist . . .’
‘Daisy! What else? There’s something else.’
‘Yes sir. I said she was fine when I saw her, but she’s going to have a baby . . .’
Mr German’s face went white. He had been standing in front of the hearth, but now he took a quick step towards Theodore and stopped.
‘When?’ he whispered.
‘In about six weeks, I guess.’
‘Has she good doctors?’
‘No, sir. She says she doesn’t need them. She’s in a monastery in Tibet, and a monk called the Lama Amchi has been teaching her how to control her bodily functions. She told me to tell you that she’ll have the baby as easy as rain in April. She told me to use those words. I think she’s right, sir.’
‘Are you a Buddhist too, Mr Tewker?’
‘No, sir. I’m a member of the Congregation of Christ Jesus.’
‘You’d better sit down and tell me a bit more. I must say I don’t understand much of what you’re talking about – in fact I can’t make head or tail of it. I wasn’t certain at first, but I’ve decided that you haven’t come to try and get money out of me.’
‘No, sir. Mrs Jones made the Lamas give me enough money – I sailed first class from India, and I have enough to pay my passage to the States, and then some.’
‘All right, but if you need any more . . . sit in that chair.’
Unlike the chairs in the room where Theodore had first waited, these had been designed to make the sitter comfortable, and felt as though they had often done so; but Theodore perched on the edge of his, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, concentrating on telling his story as exactly and unemotionally as possible. As he spoke the sense grew in him that by telling the story to the one man who was entitled to hear it all he was somehow disposing of it, detaching it from his life and setting himself free. Mrs Jones had asked him to lay a ghost for her, but he found he was also doing something of the sort for himself. Though he would always remember these last months, henceforth they would no longer haunt him.
Mr German didn’t interrupt. At one point he rose and tugged at a wide embroidered ribbon which hung down the wall by the fire, and a little later the butler came in carrying a silver tray with two glasses, a green bottle and a silver jug. He opened the bottle with a pop and poured a glass of pale foaming liquid, which he handed to Mr German; then he fetched a low table to beside Theodore’s chair and poured him a tall glass of orange. Theodore, who had stopped talking at a nod from Mr German as soon as the butler had entered, sipped his drink while he made up the fire and as soon as the door closed resumed his story.
It was all there, waiting to be uncoiled like a hawser running smoothly off a deck – the burning of the Settlement, Mrs Jones riding Sir Nigel down the rain-soaked track to stare at the broken bridge, the rout of her treacherous porters, Mrs Jones riding between the smoking huts, the journey’s start, P’iu-Chun’s house, the ambush in the woods, the night at the rock pillar, the idyll in the valley of lilies, the flight to the bridge, the Lama Amchi, and all the slow accumulating change in her, right down to Theodore’s last talk with her in her mountain cave. The only things he left out of the story were his own doubts and fears and miseries. Otherwise he put it all in. Things which he would have been embarrassed or ashamed to say to anyone else seemed necessary and therefore easy.
When he’d finished he looked up. Mr German was lying stretched out in his chair with his glass beside him, barely touched. There was a long silence.
‘This fellow Lung?’ said Mr German. ‘He’s all right?’
‘I liked him, sir.’
‘So did Daisy, evidently, and that’s recommendation enough for me. But that’s not what I meant. Does he need any help?’
‘He was still very weak when we got to Darjeeling, sir, but we met up there with Professor Lockwood and his wife . . .’