Amitav Ghosh - The Shadow Lines

The Shaheb, flustered, straightened his tie and said: I’m Indian.

Mike shut one bleary eye and looked him up and down. You don’t look much of an Indian to me, he said. Killed any Englishmen yet?

The Shaheb retreated a step in horror, shaking his head. Tridib began to giggle.

So what makes you Indian then? said Mike, advancing a step.

Then Tresawsen stepped between them and led him away.

Tresawsen himself is in the centre of the photograph. He is standing very straight, and since he is tall anyway, he towers over everybody else. He has a long face, with direct, deep-set eyes. There are sharp lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes and lips. He is only twenty-eight, but here he looks as though he has already reached that indeterminate age which could lie anywhere between the beginning and the end of middle age. The right sleeve of his jacket is hanging at his side in a way that makes it very hard to tell that there is anything wrong with his arm. But in fact the bones of that arm are made mainly of metal and he cannot use it except in a very rudimentary way. He has always claimed that he injured himself in a motorcycle accident. But Mrs Price doesn’t quite believe him, or rather, she thinks there was more to it.

The first she ever heard of it was when she received a letter from France, telling her that he had had an accident and was in hospital in Verdun, that he had hurt his arm very badly, but that she was not to worry, because the doctors had said he would be all right. The letter was signed Francesca Halévy, and a figure seven in the date had been crossed in the waist. She didn’t know what to think. She had thought him to be in Stuttgart, teaching English, but she’d read that they had had trouble there, and now here he was on the other side of the border, and what’s more, in a town whose name had the most dreadful associations for everybody of her generation, lying in a hospital, being looked after, presumably, by a woman who sounded both Jewish and German. But when she wrote offering to go herself, her correspondent replied by return of post to say that it wasn’t necessary, she was looking after Alan herself, and he would soon be well.

But when he came back to England, a month later, he looked anything but well. She had wanted him to stay with her in Hampstead for a while so that she would be able to nurse him herself, but he’d only stayed a week before moving out to Brick Lane. She had asked him once what had happened, and he’d given her an oddly evasive, self-deprecating kind of answer, muttering something about running his motorcycle off the road at night. Mrs Price, now stricken with guilt for not having gone to visit him in France, had felt that she had lost the right to press him for a proper answer.

But still, to her relief, he seemed cheerful when she met him again. His friends had introduced him to somebody called Victor Gollancz, he told her, a publisher who ran a club called the Left Book Club. He’d been offered a job helping to edit the Club’s newsletter, he said.

He was still working with the Left Book Club when that picture was taken, at their office in Henrietta Street, off Covent Garden. But when the war began and the Club’s offices moved to Berkshire, he resigned and stayed on in London, earning a little money occasionally by writing for the Tribune and the Observer , and helping out sometimes at the Socialist Bookshop on St Bride’s Street, near Holborn.

Francesca Halévy is standing between Dan and Tresawsen. She is slim and tall, with dark hair and a wonderfully sad, aquiline face. One of her arms is lying on Dan’s shoulders, while she has arched the other, dancer-like, over her head. She is dressed in a long, black skirt and a narrow-waisted jacket. Mayadebi and Mrs Price, standing on the edges of the group, are both looking at her intently, awestruck by her elegance.

Mrs Price has often speculated about Francesca to Mayadebi: she knows that Francesca shares that house in Brick Lane with the three men. But the trouble, as she puts it, is that she doesn’t know which of them exactly Francesca shares it with . It ought, by rights, to be Alan, she thinks, because she is convinced now that Alan injured himself in trying to smuggle her out of Germany. But at the same time Francesca seems to be very familiar with Mike: Mrs Price has actually seen her once, tucking in his shirt, in public. Mrs Price doesn’t really like Francesca, though she tries hard — she is altogether too elegant, too brilliant, too worldly … She can’t help hoping that her brother won’t, isn’t …

There is another picture of them, taken in the drawing room. This is Tridib’s favourite. It is a shadowy, indistinct picture, taken in the failing evening light, on a very long exposure. They are bunched around a large armchair. A part of the drawing room is visible behind them. It seems a very large, bare room; there is little furniture in it and nothing at all on the walls. The door at the other end, which opens out into the back garden, is visible, but it is no more than a dark smudge, blacked out with a heavy curtain.

Francesca is sitting in the chair and Mike and Dan are perched on its arms. All three of them have moved, and their faces are a blur on the photograph. They are laughing — perhaps at the Shaheb’s insistence on taking pictures of them. Mrs Price and Mayadebi are standing behind the armchair, with Alan Tresawsen in between, towering above them. Mrs Price has May in her arms, a tiny white bundle, and she is looking down at her, smiling proudly, her hair tied up on top of her head in a swirl of blonde pigtails.

Tresawsen is looking down from his great height at Mayadebi; he looks gentle and perplexed.

A few minutes before this picture was taken Tresawsen and Mayadebi spoke to each other for the first time. They hadn’t exchanged a word all evening, so they were both a little awkward when they found themselves standing next to each other, for the picture. At length, clearing his throat, Tresawsen had remarked: You’ve chosen an unfortunate time to come to England, haven’t you? It must be worrying to be stranded so far away from home with a war looming ahead.

Yes, Mayadebi had replied, I am worried, but for my son and husband. It wasn’t a matter of choice, but if it were I couldn’t have chosen any better time to come to England myself.

He was taken aback: Why?

Well, she said, laughing, the couple of months she had spent in London had been so exciting — the atmosphere had changed so dramatically, even within the last few weeks. People were becoming friendlier; in the shops, on the streets, she couldn‘t help noticing. Everyone was so much nicer now; often when she and Tridib were out walking people would pat him on the head and stop to have a little chat with her; the shopkeepers would ask her how her husband was, and when he was to have his operation. But it wasn’t just her — everyone was being friendly with everyone else; why, just that morning his sister, Elisabeth, had said that old Mrs Dunbar who lived down the road had actually been civil for the first time in living memory …

Yes, he said, that’s true — there’s a kind of exhilaration in the air.

Yes, that’s the right word, said Mayadebi: exhilaration. I’ve been lucky, I’ve been able to watch England coming alive. I wouldn’t have seen that if I hadn’t been here now.

Tresawsen laughed. People don’t believe me, he said, but it’s the same over there — in Germany — though of course in a much more grotesque way. It was odd coming back here — like stepping through a looking glass.

It was then that the Shaheb clicked his shutter. Mayadebi is looking up at Tresawsen, smiling shyly; her sari has slipped off her head. Although she is as old as Tresawsen and the mother of two children besides, she looks half his age: clear-eyed, innocent and luminously beautiful.