Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

There was no denying her dark hair, her un-English complexion, the absence in her face of any trace of Peggy Rhodes’s genes. Three days before her seventh birthday the troubled girl found out she was adopted, discovered it by plucking up her courage and asking, after her injured victim had started a playground whispering campaign. Peggy Rhodes had flushed angrily when challenged, but had given India an answer of sorts. I’m very sorry, the Grey Rat told her, but, hmmm, hmmm, I don’t know the name of the woman who bore you. Hang it! I believe she died shortly after you were born. The identity of the father is likewise not confirmed. You must-eh? hah!-stop asking these questions. I am your mother. I have been your mother since the first days of your life. You have no other mother or father, there’s just me, I’m afraid, and I will not have these blasted questions. So she was trapped inside a lie, far away from the truth, held captive in a fiction; and within her the turbulence grew, an unquiet spirit moved, like a giant coiled serpent stirring at the bottom of the sea.

The event that would shatter the cocoon of the lie in which she lived took place some months later, in November 1974, when there was a notorious, bloody murder on Lower Belgrave Street, in the house at number 46. An English aristocrat named Lord Lucan, estranged and living apart from his wife Veronica, entered the family home in the evening of November 7 wearing a hood, and, in the basement kitchen, murdered his children’s nanny, Mrs. Sandra Rivett, probably mistaking her, in the dark, for his wife. He went upstairs and in spite of the presence in the house of his three young children assaulted Lady Lucan violently, forcing three gloved fingers down her throat, then trying to strangle her, gouge out her eyes and bludgeon her on the head. She was a tiny woman, but she grabbed his testicles and squeezed, and when he crumpled in pain she escaped. She ran down the street and burst into the Plumber’s Arms crying murder. Lord Lucan escaped, abandoning his car in the port town of Newhaven, and was never found. He left behind several notes to friends, many of them financial in content, and several large gambling debts.

John Bingham, “Lucky” Lucan, was the seventh earl. The third earl of Lucan had acquired his own bad reputation 120 years earlier. During the Crimean War, the third earl was the man responsible for ordering the catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade. This was during the battle of Balaclava. Curiously enough, the woollen hood worn by his murderous great-great-grandson was of the type known as a balaclava.

On the morning after these events a police officer rang the Rhodes household’s doorbell and asked if anyone had heard anything unusual the previous night. India had been asleep, and Peggy Rhodes said she had heard nothing. When the story broke in the evening papers, and everyone knew about Lady Lucan’s run to safety, India wondered how Peggy could have failed to notice something, considering that it was an unseasonably warm evening and their sitting-room windows had been opened wide; and, after all, the Plumber’s Arms was right across the street. Later the police returned to ask Peggy if, as a fellow member of the high-roller Clermont Club, she had known Lord Lucan. “No,” she said, “I knew him by sight, but he wasn’t particularly a friend.” India had heard her mother speak more than once about her “chums,” Aspinall, Elwes and Lucky, yet now she was lying to the police, why was that. She afterwards learned that her mother wasn’t the only liar in the story. One widely held view was that the upper class had closed ranks to protect one of their own behind an aristocratic version of omertà, the Sicilian code of silence. But India heard Peggy sobbing hard at night. John, oh John. She drew no conclusions. She was only seven years old. A few days later the police issued a statement criticizing Lucan’s set for being unhelpful to the inquiry and pointing out that withholding information in a murder case was a criminal offense, even if the withholders were millionaires and aristocrats. But India had forgotten all about Lucky Lucan by then, because two days after the murder Peggy Rhodes had come to her in her bedroom at night, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, and said, “There are things I must tell you, yes, yes. Hum! Ha! Things you ought to know.”

You have a daddy. One month after the Grey Rat, in the grip of an unexplained emotion, gave her father a name, Maximilian Ophuls was standing at the door of the house in Lower Belgrave Street holding flowers and a stupid doll. “I don’t play with dolls,” India told him solemnly, revealing much about Peggy’s attitude to parenting and taste in children’s toys. “I like bows and arrows and slingshots and excaliburs and guns.” Max looked back at her straight-faced and thrust the doll into her hands. “Here,” he said. “Use her for target practice. It’s no fun if you don’t have a target.” Then he picked her up and hugged her hard and she fell in love with him, just like everybody else. He sat her beside him in the back of a large silver car and told the driver to take them as fast as possible to a posh restaurant by the river. He was sixty-four years old and knew the words to the song, send me a postcard, drop me a line. Will you still need me, will you still feed me. “You’re a very old daddy, aren’t you,” she asked him over ice cream. “Are you going to die soon?” He shook his head very seriously. “No, my plan is never to die,” he said. “You will one day,” she argued. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe when I’m two hundred and sixty-four and too blind to see it coming. But until then, pah! I snap my fingers at Death, I thumb my nose at him, and then I bite my thumb.”

She giggled. “So do I,” she said, but she couldn’t snap her fingers. “Anyway,” she added, “I want to die when I’m two hundred and sixty-four as well.”

By the end of the day he was nuzzling her neck and finding the birds hidden there and she was learning the words to “Alouette” and she was climbing up his shoulders and then somersaulting back and away. When he delivered her back to her mother he looked the Grey Rat in the eye and thanked her, and she knew he had stolen the girl from her, that from now on his daughter would no longer be hers. If I’m his daughter I should have his name, the girl said that night, and Peggy Rhodes didn’t know how to refuse, and India Ophuls was born. What about my mummy, the girl said, tucked up in bed with a night-light sending stars whirling across her ceiling. I want to know about my mummy too. Is she really dead or is she hiding like Daddy was. Peggy Rhodes lost her temper. That woman is dead to everyone now-all right? mmm?-but she was already, ah, ah, dead to me in life. She left her husband and tried to steal your daddy away and-pah!-had his baby and was ready to abandon it and where would you have been if I hadn’t taken you in. She was going to leave you behind, hmm? hmm?, and go back where she came from and she didn’t want the shame of a baby, didn’t want the shame-d’you see?-of you. Then there were, ah, complications and she, hmph, died. What did she die of? Where was she going back to? I won’t answer these questions. But didn’t she like me really? It doesn’t matter. She didn’t choose you. I chose you. But mummy, what was my mummy’s name? I’m your mummy. No, mummy, my real mummy, I mean. I’m your real mummy. Good night.

Then Max disappeared from her life again. “I’m afraid he’s like that, dear,” the Grey Rat told her flatly, “I know he’s your father but you must understand, ahmm, he’s sort of the fly-by-night type,” and when he finally did show up, twice a year, on her birthday and on Christmas morning, there were things he wasn’t saying, things he wouldn’t talk about, and it took her close to a decade to understand the hidden war between the woman she lived with and was growing to hate and the father she barely knew but loved with all her heart, she never understood him until he saved her life. Max never spoke against Peggy, and even when India beseeched him he never betrayed the secrets the Grey Rat did not want revealed, knowing that his ability to see his daughter at all depended on accepting the Grey Rat’s ferocious terms, but for a long time India blamed him for his absences and silences, and her anger with him screwed her up even more than her dislike of the woman she lived with, because he was the lovable one, he was the one she wanted to see every day and laugh at and somersault off and drive with in fast cars and shoot BB pellets into dolls with and embrace and kiss and love. She didn’t understand that the woman she lived with had banished Max again, had denied him all but the most perfunctory access to the increasingly truculent adopted daughter for whom she, Peggy, had such mixed feelings but who represented the bone of contention in her undying quarrel with Max, and who consequently had to be held on to even if her presence was a daily reminder of past shame.