Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Fear, crouched always like an imp under her ribs, leaped out on her thirty-third birthday. She remained in front of the mirror, fingering the treacherous silver thread coiling through her hair. She could still pass for twenty-four but that was hardly the point.

Next door the Ho baby was crying.

It was the war, thought Iris, the war had ruined everything, mixed everything up.

It was the mixing she had loved, at the time. In the WVS she had rolled bandages and mixed with English people. A girl called Babs-a new style of girl, fresh from England -was kind to the Eurasian volunteers. It was rumoured that Babs was a Communist. Iris was able to overlook this-also the way Babs wasted time conversing with tonga drivers, also Babs’s blond moustache-because Babs took a shine to her. There were invitations to tea; the loan of a monograph on shanty-dwellers.

In April Babs was offered the use, for a week, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea-garden in the Nilgiris. It stood on the far side of the valley from the manager’s house; his assistants had gone to the war and left their bungalow vacant. Unfortunately Babs had seen fit to invite two Indian sisters as well, the up-to-date kind who had opinions. Even the discovery that the Guptas were connoisseurs of detective fi ction could not redeem them in Iris’s view. With their homespun saris and dog-eared Agatha Christies, they had a disturbingly ambiguous air.

All was righted by the advent of Captain Lawrence Fitch, Babs’s brother. He brought with him one of his fellow offi cers in the Hussars, a beanpole he addressed as Saunders; but for Iris this second young Englishman remained purely notional. There was only Lawrence: attentive to her every whim, always at hand with a shawl or a fish-paste sandwich, his honey-brown eyes sticky with appreciation. He had a scar just below the hollow at the base of his throat. More than anything in the world Iris wished to press her mouth to it. He gave off a powerful odour of tobacco and leather mingled, mysteriously, with burning sugar.

Ponies were hired. As he helped Iris mount, Lawrence ’s fingers grazed her thigh.

There were mornings on the spines of ridges clad with rhododendron; a picnic in splotchy light by a stream. There were cards and charades. One evening, with an extravagant sunset spreading itself between mountains,Ayushi, the younger Gupta girl, who wore a diamond nose stud, was persuaded to tell their fortunes. Smoothing Iris’s palm with a fi rm, fl exible thumb, she offered her a journey over water. The tiny diamond winked like a code.

Iris was a good dancer. Lawrence enfolded her in his smell and hummed along to ‘Embraceable You’ as he steered her through the French doors onto the verandah. On their last evening he wore his dress uniform of scarlet, dark blue and gold. Iris got her wish; and much more besides.

It was clear to Iris that she was engaged to Lawrence. Only, nothing was said for the moment. Discretion was her personal sacrifice to the war; she spent twenty months feeling exalted.

In that time he wrote to her twice; the second time, three scrawled lines stating what he would like to do to her when they next met.

In the last December of the war, she went into the WVS canteen and was greeted with the news that Babs’s brother was dead. In Babs’s sitting-room, on an ugly blond-wood settee, Iris poured out her own sorrow.

Babs stared at her. Then said, in a thick voice, ‘How dare you claim a connection.’

Iris, grappling anguish and mucus, made noises.

‘The idea of Larry and…you.’ Babs ground her teeth.‘With your spangles-on-net dresses.’

Word got out.

Matthew Ho, the doctor’s son who lived next door to the de Souzas, waited for Iris after mass. She had known him forever. On the way home, he asked her to marry him. Hygiene and his Sunday suit notwithstanding, he went down on one knee on the pavement. A crowd materialised at once to offer advice and encouragement.

Iris, schooled in obedience, relayed the news to her father. ‘Damn Ching-Chong cheek,’ said Sebastian de Souza. He might have been enraged but chose to be amused instead. After a moment, Iris could see that amusement was what the situation called for. Father and daughter tittered together.

For weeks, a word was enough to set them off. Chopsticks . Pigtail .

Every four months, for three years, Matthew took Iris to lunch at The Golden Lotus and renewed his proposal. On these occasions he remained seated. It was not the kind of restaurant to tolerate a spectacle.

Then he married a distant cousin, a girl who had been in Nanking when the Japs invaded. It was rumoured that unspeakable things had been done to her.

They did not seem to have caused any lasting damage, thought Iris, plucking the tell-tale hair from her scalp with vicious precision. Matthew Ho’s wife had already presented him with three plump yellow sons. The baby was colicky. Iris would wake at night to his screams.

In a sea-stopped street, she passed Arthur Loxley. He peered in under the umbrella Iris carried for her complexion, and lifted his hat.

Change was flexing its claws, snarling the weave of Arthur’s days. The maharani had announced that she was emigrating to Cincinnati. She was paying for the girls to retrain as shorthand-typists. Arthur, feeling a brisk pattering across his stomach, had opened his eyes to find the prettiest one practising her finger exercises while fellating him.

He would have been a pushover for Iris in any case. She was beautiful and set herself to be charming. His strength of will could be gauged from the quantities of papier-mâché knick-knacks and gaudy rugs he had amassed, the result of bazaar encounters with liquid-eyed Kashmiri merchants.

Arthur rented a sweltering cell in the house of a govern ment clerk with nine children. It had a concrete verandah overlooking a strip of baked earth, where bold canna lilies, red and fierce yellow, grew in rusty tins. In that narrow place he passed sublime afternoons, dozing with a tumbler at hand and his landlord’s mongrel bitch stretched panting beneath his Bombay fornicator. The younger children made a game of him, daring each other to drink the melted ice in his glass or deposit a spider on the hillock of his belly. Once, as he snored, the smallest girl placed a blue flower between his parted lips.

Iris, inspecting the set-up, saw at once that it would not do. There was a swathe of stink from the drains. The dog’s teeth worked furiously at her ticks. The children, intuiting an enemy, gathered at a distance and dug in their noses.

Thus it was settled that Arthur would join the de Souza household. If he faltered at the prospect of his father-in-law’s countenance over breakfast, he gave no outward sign of alarm. He was still flooded with gratitude that Iris had chosen to make him the gift of herself; a marvel twenty years of marriage would not quite suffice to dim.

And the house, set on a hill, was wonderful. Like the de Souzas, it had declined over three centuries. First the grounds had shrunk, then the mansion itself had been divided and sold piecemeal and partitioned again. It had suffered concrete outgrowths and bricked-in colonnades. An elderly gentleman lived on a half-landing; a balcony sheltered a family of seven. But the house wore its changes like medals, hung out strings of washing like flags. Flowering creepers fastened it to the earth. In the compound, goats and hens roamed among tall trees and lavish ferns. There was a bed of rangy, perfumed gardenias. The de Souzas’ apartment on the ground floor retained a portico, pillars, ceilings that flaked but were plastered with garlands and painted with cherubim, windows that gave onto the puckered blue sea.

Arthur Loxley enjoyed this distinction: he was the sole individual to slip past his father-in-law’s guard. The lessons of history notwithstanding, Sebastian de Souza had continued to believe in the supremacy of the English race. But illusions that the fall of Singapore had left intact could not long survive daily proximity to Arthur. Four days after Iris returned from her honeymoon, her father informed her of her mistake. The enumeration of his son-in-law’s inadequacies occupied the following half an hour; and then the rest of Sebastian’s days.