Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

Yet the marriage was not unhappier than most.

Money was one problem.

Another was the lack of a child. Arthur made no reproach; but Iris, who had lied to him about her age, was frightened that barrenness would betray her. There was also the dread that Lawrence, fumbling down there , had passed on something unmentionable.

She consulted doctors, Western-trained and ayurvedic, two specialists, a soothsayer, a faith healer. A priest exorcised the house. Iris implored Saint Anthony to grant her father the blessing of grandchildren, and sent five rupees to a famous temple in the south.

Finally, when she had exhausted her stratagems, Iris discovered that she was expecting a baby. She was forty-one years old but the pregnancy was uneventful, the delivery easy. They wrapped the infant in clean cloths and presented him to her. She hadn’t known that the universe weighed fi ve pounds, eleven ounces.

He was named Thomas Sebastian after his grandfathers. But Iris, preparing a bottle of Cow & Gate infant formula, observed his dark limbs and coarse hair, and beheld her mother the crow.

The danger of a throwback: one reason why respectable whites avoided Eurasians.

Prices went on rising. Arthur cut down his expenditure on drink to a fifth of his salary.

Iris had two barres of different heights installed in her large, rectangular hall and opened a dancing school for children. She felt the shame of it: a married woman obliged to work.

Her qualifications were four years of ballet at a school run by a Frenchwoman; much was made of this in Iris’s prospectus. However, late in life Madame Pauline Duval had taken to appearing at mass draped only in a creamy lace tablecloth. The memory was still vivid in Mangalore. Iris was obliged to lower her fees. Her Academy of Dance attracted only a few dozen children, not all of them from desirable backgrounds. But it covered the cost of St Stephen’s Junior College, where Tommy was now an Upper Infant.

Matthew Ho’s wife, a bundle with her hair in a knot, turned up to enrol her twin daughters. Iris was pleased to observe that the doughy little tots were devoid of talent.

Sebastian de Souza died. A grim, protracted death ensuring maximum havoc for Iris and a succession of slovenly nurses.

Shortly before the end he had a bowel movement, fouling the air. Trying not to inhale, Iris approached with basin and sponge. Her father opened his sunken eyes and addressed her: ‘Dolt.’

Later, turning it over in her mind, she thought he might have said, Don’t. It was in any case his last message to her.

Thirty years earlier, he had sold the apartment. A provision in the settlement granted him life tenancy, rent-free. Sebastian had not considered it necessary to impart these facts to his daughter. A lawyer’s letter gave Iris thirty days to vacate the premises.

Abdul Mustafa Hussein, the new owner, received her in the tiny, lentil-smelling office attached to his dry-goods store. ‘Kwality Remains When Price Is Forgotten’ announced an ominous plaque above his head. But the man in the white cotton skullcap was not unkind, and when Iris began to cry, he was sincerely moved. She was allowed to remain in her ancestral home at a rent that was only mildly scandalous.

The Academy taught only the basics, flat shoe and barefoot dancing. But a parent withdrew her daughter, saying that Iris’s marble floor was injurious to a dancer’s feet. Iris protested, reasoned, argued, stormed; in vain.

There came a Saturday when the only children waiting on the verandah were the Ho twins, their pigtails secured with stiff red bows.

Old Mr Lal retired, entrusting the export of cashews to his brother’s son. Vijay Lal was twenty-nine and had spent two swinging years in Leeds. He had sideburns, and a secretary he called Mini. Vijay summoned all his workers over the age of thirty and explained what was wrong with India. ‘This is a very backward-thinking country. My uncle, for example, went on employing some people for the simple reason he had always done so. I am intending to change all that.’ Then he gave them a month’s notice.‘For the Age of Aquarius we are needing fresh blood.’ He rose from his chair and clicked his fingers. He might have been ordering up the massacre; instead his voice rose in song. He warbled, in a relentless whine, of times that were a’changing. When at last he had finished there was silence. Gradually it dawned on his audience that he expected applause.

Iris took it with remarkable aplomb. ‘Now we have to emigrate. What I’ve been telling you for years.’

At first, Arthur put up a resistance. But history was not on his side.

Every year there were fewer and fewer of those whose hybrid faces branded them the leftovers of Empire. The Pereira boy had gone, the Redden girls were going; the railway Gilberts, all eight of them, had scraped up the fares for Toronto.

Tom walked up to the lighthouse. The sea hurled itself at the land; went away, bared its teeth and renewed the attack. Passed for Canada. Passed for England . People he had known all his life had been scrutinised like cashews and declared fi t for export. The past was sliding from under his feet. He glimpsed, for the first time, the flux inherent in human affairs.

The scene struck him as momentous. He felt he was witnessing it from a great height, fixing it in his mind like a memorable passage in a book: the figure in navy shorts on the headland, the turmoil below.

On Iris’s settee, Matthew Ho turned a sisal brim in his fi ngers and declined Arthur’s offer of whisky and soda.

He was one of those who had prospered since Independence. But eight months earlier his mother had died, and now Dr Ho had resigned his registrarship at the government hospital. His wife had a cousin in San Diego, and the Hos would be joining his household later that week. ‘There are the children to think of,’ Matthew said, his thin eyes directed at a vase of plastic roses on a teapoy. Altogether the fellow was a queer fish, as Arthur remarked afterwards. ‘Gives the impression he might come out with something neither of you wants to hear.’

Two bookend children had accompanied Matthew Ho, as if he required material evidence for his case. Tom, instructed to ‘Go and play’ with his guests, led Opal and Pearl onto the verandah. There he scratched a mosquito bite, limp with envy. At the house of a wealthy school friend, he had seen a Coca-Cola bottle. Acquired at a diplomatic sale, the empty bottle was displayed on a cabinet along with other trophies. Tom had coveted it at once: teenage, curvaceous, modern; a glass America. He looked at the twins, whose half-moon upper lips showed no indent, and was compelled to say, ‘I’ll probably get a transistor radio for Christmas.’

Pearl and Opal inspected him in silence. Then their round little mouths twitched. Side by side on the verandah wall, they kicked their four patent-leather feet and laughed in his face.

‘Not America.’

‘Not England,’ countered Arthur.

‘Not England,’ agreed Iris. ‘Why should we suffer The European Winter?’

Arthur blinked.

‘Audrey,’ she reminded him, with quiet triumph. ‘ Australia.’

Audrey, Arthur’s youngest sister, was the one who had kept in touch. She was not a trivial correspondent, reserving her flimsy blue aerogrammes for weighty communications: the death of their father, a brother-in-law’s appendectomy, the Coronation, her marriage, the decline of England, the prospects that glittered elsewhere.

Iris, the least practical of women, possessed the foresight that is a by-product of fear. Against just such a day, she had found the postage for Christmas cards, birthday greetings, a studio photograph of the three of them taken against a cardboard Taj Mahal.