Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Else, or even Elsie. Finally, Manton and Jean—well, that was better than one would have thought possible, considering how he was this very sexy man whose women had to be women, and she was what she was. But I think they were useful to each other. Jean kept Lindsay completely out of his hair, while he had put Lindsay off men forever—so Lindsay herself said, and in fact, on the very rare occasions when he was around, Lindsay simply clung to Jean, as for protection against him.

      So Manton entered this arena—only to be thrown at once because everything had changed beyond his recognition. I had tried to tell him something about the Rawul and his party, but it wasn’t possible to get across the fact of their influence: of how they had taken complete possession of the house and everyone in it. And Manton himself was at once drawn into the new dispensation. It happened just as soon as he saw the Rani and was bowled over by her. She was used to that—people being bowled over by her—and knew exactly how to handle him. She wasn’t flirtatious as much as friendly; that is, she held him at a distance by giving him her respectful attention; but she was this phenomenally beautiful woman, so that while she puffed him up with her respect, she brought him down with her aloofness. I wasn’t sure why she took even that much trouble with him; she didn’t with anybody else. Maybe she thought he could be useful in getting me to donate the house; and of course Manton was a very handsome and attractive man, always had been—I mean, it was what he was, it was the essence of his personality.

      Barbara’s reaction to the scene was unexpected. She was upset about Manton and the Rani, but that wasn’t all of it: She hated everything else too—I would never have thought that sweet, soft Barbara could hate anything or anyone, but my God she did. It was awful for her when Manton decided he had to stay; he told her to go back to New York and pack some of his clothes and bring them up, and when she began to fuss, he said “Well you can bring yours too”; but that was the only concession he would make. When she tried to argue, he said “I’ve never heard such selfish nonsense”—pointing out that he had been called to help decide whether his son and daughter should give up their house, and how generous it was of him to allow her to be in on this family affair. She found she had no choice—if she wanted to stay with him, that is, and she did; but she was horribly upset, both before driving to the city to get their clothes and after she came back. I found her in tears in her bedroom—she had to sleep separately from Manton because he got onto this high horse of how it wasn’t proper for her to share his bed in his wife’s house and with his children present. I felt sorry for her, and also that it was mostly my fault that they were here—they had been all right in New York, living in their hotel and going to costume balls.

      Michael came in on me while I was with Barbara in her room. This was constantly happening all over the house, people looking for each other in each other’s rooms, everyone with something important, and usually intimate, to say. Barbara was lying on the bed crying, and I was sitting beside her. This room suited her well—it was as fluffy and fair as she was, with ruffled curtains and flouncy chair covers and an ivory carpet with pink roses on it. Barbara was never very articulate, and besides crying couldn’t really explain herself. When Michael and I tried to comfort her, she said “It’s not only Manton and her.” Here she burst into a new flood of tears; she cried like a child and her face went puffy like a child’s. “It’s all of it,” she said, when she could speak again. “All of them. You don’t know,” she said. Michael and I looked at each other across her. If Barbara implied she knew something that he and I didn’t, it must be true because usually she was very self-deprecating. Barbara’s background and experience were quite different from what one might have expected: Looking at her, knowing her, one would think she came from some nice family in Connecticut, but in fact her mother was a movie star and Barbara had spent her early years in Hollywood and on film sets in places like Morocco or Rome. And now what she tried to explain to Michael and me was that the atmosphere in the house—I suppose she meant the way everyone was so intensely involved with everyone else—was like it used to be around her mother and her associates when they were all locked up with each other on location. And just as she had got this out, there was a brief and very authoritarian knock on the door, which opened immediately afterward—I didn’t have to turn around; I could tell by the shock passing through Michael that it was Crishi. “Oh there you are,” said Crishi, enfolding the three of us in his smile.

      An instant change came over Barbara. She had been lying there in a heap, making no attempt to hide her tears, but now she shot up on her bed and sat very upright, arranging her dress to cover her thighs and knees. She held her head high, and though her cheeks were still wet and swollen, she put a prim, distant, disapproving look on her face, like a matron with an uninvited, undesired guest. I was amazed—I didn’t think she could be like that; I had never seen her with anyone she disliked. Crishi felt it immediately, and he moderated his smile and said he hoped he wasn’t in the way, or anything? He looked from one to the other and especially warmly at Barbara, who became more prim. Then Crishi raised one slender finger at Michael, meaning one moment, very politely, but also meaning come here, now. And Michael went at once; without one glance at me or Barbara, he obeyed as he would a master’s call. When they had gone, Barbara said “He’s the worst, Harriet. No,” she said as though I had contradicted her, “he’s a bad person.” I didn’t think he was a bad person, on the contrary; but I guess I still didn’t feel strongly enough one way or the other to stick up for him with Barbara.

      I must have wiped out the incident with Paul; or allowed myself to put a different interpretation on it—at any rate, I no longer held it against Crishi. I hadn’t seen Paul around for some time, and assumed he was gone wherever it was Crishi wanted to send him. I didn’t ask about him; it wasn’t important enough. And they were always coming and going, all the followers—there were so many of them and so many different missions they had to fulfill and different centers to liaison with. I was used to seeing them tramping up and down the stairs, but it was a shock to Manton. In his day, if there was a crowd in the house, it was one that had come for a dance or a party. “What are they—hippies?” he asked me, hippies being the latest thing he had heard of. But Manton was adaptable, and it took him no time to get used to them—or rather, fail to notice them, the way he never had difficulty ignoring people he didn’t need. As in a restaurant, he would make a point of being terribly friendly with the waiter who served him and the maître d’ who gave him a good table, but everyone else might as well be plants and stones. It would be untrue to say he was a snob because it had nothing to do with class, only with whether a person impinged on his life or not. So he would brush past the “hippies” on the stairs, genuinely not seeing them; and would sit for hours with Else Schwamm in the kitchen, telling her how he was falling in love with the Rani, and what should he do about it; and she, without for one second interrupting the kneading and rolling of her pastry, face red, arms pumping, would give him the benefit of her life’s experience, the two of them convinced that it was the most important topic in the world.

      The rest of us knew better. I say “us,” including myself, for I was now in a position where I wanted to believe—that is, believe with Michael that it was all for some high purpose, and not with Barbara that it was a fraud. I knew Michael wouldn’t have been taken in by a fraud. He had spent too much time—all his life practically, and mine—examining truth and faith and every other fundamental principle. He wouldn’t compromise any of that on account of his own feelings—for Crishi, that is. He had been in love before, and whereas it may have made him suspend his quest for a while, it had never led him away from it. And it couldn’t be so now, when he felt more strongly than I had ever seen him do before. I believed in him, which was how I was ready to believe in everything else.

      It was being made clear to me that we were very fortunate to have been chosen as one of the spearheads of the movement. The Rawul’s followers felt it strongly—that they were pioneers, leaders of a mission, apostles or whatever; and this was brought home to me one day in a quarrel I had with one of the girls over the use of a bathroom. The bathroom was mine—anyway, the one adjoining my room—and while I had accepted the fact that the Rawul and his party had more or less taken over everywhere else, I continued to think of this one room and bathroom as exclusively my own. But once when I tried to go in, I found the door locked. I wasn’t pleased but I had lived enough in dorms to take it philosophically and just wait. Whoever was inside didn’t come out and didn’t come out, till finally I banged