The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Thirty-One

___________


The following morning the world started up again at a different pace. For the first time in several weeks, I didn’t wake up early, didn’t drink a hurried cup of coffee or install myself immediately in the workshop pressured by things to do. Rather than returning to the frantic activity of the previous week, I began my day by resuming the long bath that had been interrupted the previous evening. And then took a walk, to Rosalinda’s house.

I’d gathered from Beigbeder’s words that her illness was just something mild and passing, no more than an unfortunate upset. Which was why I was expecting to find my friend just the same as ever, ready for me to tell her every detail of the event she’d missed and keen to enjoy my comments on the outfits that the guests were wearing, which of them was the most elegant, which the least.

A maid led me to her bedroom, where I found her still in bed, surrounded by bolster cushions, with the shutters closed and a thick stale smell of tobacco and medication, and a lack of air. The house was spacious and beautiful: Moorish architecture, English furnishings, and an exotic kind of chaos in which the rugs and the upholstery of the sofas were covered with old records out of their sleeves, letters marked “air mail,” forgotten silk scarves, and Staffordshire porcelain cups with unfinished tea, now cold.

That morning, however, Rosalinda had an air of anything but glamour.

“How are you?” I tried not to let my voice come out sounding too concerned. I had good reason to be, however, because of the way she looked: pale, haggard, her hair dirty, slumped in a dead weight on a disheveled bed with the sheets dangling onto the floor.

“Terminal,” she replied with the blackest humor. “I’m not well at all, but come sit here close to me,” she commanded, patting the bed. “It’s not contagious.”

“Juan Luis told me last night that it was intestinal trouble,” I said, doing as I’d been told. First I had to move off a few crumpled handkerchiefs, an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes, the remnants of a package of butter cookies, and a decent-sized pile of crumbs.

“That’s right, but that’s not the worst of it. Juan Luis doesn’t know the whole story. I’ll tell him tonight; I didn’t want to trouble him on the last day of Serrano’s visit.

“So what’s the worst of it?”

“This,” she said, furious, taking up what looked like a telegram and holding it in her fingers as though with pincers. “This is what has made me ill, not the preparations for the visit. This is the worst part of all.”

I looked at her, confused, and then she summarized its contents.

“I received it yesterday. Peter arrives in six weeks.”

“Who’s Peter?” I didn’t remember anyone by that name among her friends.

She looked at me as though she’d just heard the most preposterous of questions.

“Who else would it be, Sira, for God’s sake? Peter is my husband.” Peter Fox was scheduled to arrive in Tangiers on a P&O ship, keen to spend a long period with his wife and son after nearly five years of barely hearing anything from them. He was still living in Calcutta but had decided to make a temporary visit to the West, perhaps weighing his options for leaving imperial India once and for all, since the place was becoming more unsettled with the locals’ movements toward independence, according to what Rosalinda had told me. And what better perspective for considering the possibilities for a potential move than a family reunion in his wife’s new world?

“And will he be staying here in your house?” I asked in disbelief.

She lit a cigarette, and as she sucked the smoke in she nodded emphatically.

“Claro que si—he’s my husband, he has every right.”

“But I thought you were separated . . .”

“In practice, yes, but not legally.”

“And you’ve never planned to get a divorce?”

She gave the cigarette another deep drag.

“A million times. But he refuses.”

Then she told me all the twists and turns of that troubled relationship, and through it I discovered a Rosalinda who was more vulnerable, more fragile. Less unreal and closer to the earthly troubles of the residents of the human world.

“I married at sixteen; he was thirty-four at the time. I’d spent five years in a boarding school in England; I left India when I was still a girl and returned a young woman almost of marrying age, absolutely determined not to miss out on a single one of the parties in colonial Calcutta. At the first one, I was introduced to Peter, who was a friend of my father’s. I thought him the most attractive man I’d ever met in my life; I hadn’t met all that many—almost none, in fact. He was fun, capable of undertaking the most unimaginable adventures, and the life and soul of any meeting. At the same time he was mature, experienced, a member of an aristocratic English family that had settled in India three generations earlier. I fell in love like a fool, or at least that’s what I thought then. Five months later we were married. We set ourselves up in a magnificent house with stables, tennis courts, and fourteen rooms for the servants; we even had four Indian boys permanently in uniform to be ball boys in case one day we happened to decide to play a game—just imagine! Our life was filled with activity: I loved dancing and horse riding, and I was as skilled with a rifle as I was with my golf clubs. Our life was an unstoppable merry-go-round of parties and receptions. And what was more, we then had Johnny. We built an idyllic world within another world that was equally lavish, but I realized too late how fragile were the foundations upon which it was all supported.”

She stopped talking, and her eyes were fixed on emptiness, as though taking a few moments for reflection. Then she put her cigarette out in the ashtray and went on.

“A few months after giving birth, I started noticing something wrong with my stomach. I was examined, and to begin with they told me there was nothing for me to worry about, that my troubles were merely related to the natural health problems that we nonnatives were exposed to in that tropical climate. But I got worse and worse. The pain increased, my fever began to rise daily. They decided to operate and they didn’t find anything unusual, but I didn’t get any better. Four months later, faced with my relentlessly worsening condition, they gave me another close examination and were finally able to put a name to my illness: aggressive bovine tuberculosis, contracted from the milk of an infected cow that we’d bought after Johnny was born so I’d have fresh milk for my recovery. The animal had fallen sick and died long ago, but the vet hadn’t found anything abnormal when he examined it, just as the doctors had been unable to find anything in me; bovine tuberculosis is extremely difficult to diagnose. But what happens is that you start developing tubercles, sort of nodules, like lumps in the intestine that keep constricting it.”

“And then?”

“And then you end up chronically ill.”

“And then?”

“And then each morning when you open your eyes you thank heaven for allowing you another day to live.”

I tried to hide my unease with another question.

“How did your husband react?”

“Ah, marvelously!” she said sarcastically. “The doctors who saw me advised me to return to England; they thought—albeit not all that optimistically—that perhaps an English hospital would be able to do something for me. And Peter could not have agreed more.”

“Thinking of what was best for you, no doubt . . .”

A bitter laugh prevented me from finishing my sentence.

“Peter never thinks about what’s best for anyone, querida, but himself. Sending me far away was the best possible solution, but rather than it being for my own health it was for his own well-being. He had lost all interest in me, Sira. He stopped finding me fun, I was no longer a precious trophy to take around with him to clubs, to parties, and on hunts; the pretty, fun young wife had transformed into a burdensome invalid whom he had to get rid of as quickly as possible. So the moment I was able to stand on my own two feet again, he arranged tickets for me and Johnny for England. He didn’t even deign to come with us. With the excuse that he wanted his wife to receive the best medical treatment possible, he dispatched a grievously sick woman who hadn’t yet turned twenty and a little boy barely old enough to walk. As though we were just another couple of pieces of luggage. Adiós, and good riddance, my dears.”

A couple of thick tears rolled down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.

“He pushed us away from him, Sira. He spurned me. He sent me to England, purely and simply to be rid of me.”

A sad silence settled between us, until she recovered her strength and went on.

“During the journey, Johnny began to have high fevers and convulsions. It turned out to be a virulent form of malaria; he would need to spend two months in the hospital to recover. My family took me in, in the meantime; my parents had also lived in India for a long time but had returned the previous year. I spent the first few months relatively peacefully, and the change of climate seemed to do me good. But then I got worse, so much so that the medical tests showed that my intestine had shrunk till it was almost totally constricted. They ruled out surgery and decided that only with absolute rest might I manage to get even a tiny bit better. That way, they thought, the organisms that were invading me wouldn’t continue advancing through the rest of my body. Do you know what that first period of rest was like?”

I didn’t know, and I couldn’t guess.

“Six months tied to a board, with leather straps holding me still, over my shoulders and my thighs. Six whole months, with its days, its nights.”

“And did you get better?”

“Very little. Then my doctors decided to send me to Leysin, in Switzerland, to a sanatorium for tuberculosis. Like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.”

I guessed that she was talking about some book, so before she could ask me if I’d read it I encouraged her to continue with her story.

“And Peter, meanwhile?”

“He paid the hospital bills and established a routine of sending us thirty pounds a month to support us. No more than that. Absolutely nothing else. Not a letter, not a telegram, not a message via some acquaintance, or, needless to say, any intention of visiting us. Nothing, Sira, nothing at all. I never heard anything personally from him again. Until yesterday.”

“And what did you do with Johnny during that time? It must have been hard on him.”

“He was with me in the sanatorium the whole time. My parents insisted that he should stay with them, but I didn’t accept. I hired a German nanny to entertain him and take him out, but every day he ate and slept in my room. It was a rather sad experience for such a small boy, but I didn’t want him away from me for anything in the world. He’d already lost his father, in a way; it would have been too cruel to punish him further with the absence of his mother.”

“And did the treatment work?”

A little laugh lit up her face for a moment.

“They advised me to spend eight years in the sanatorium, but I was only able to bear eight months. Then I asked to be voluntarily discharged. They told me it was foolish, that it would kill me; I had to sign a million pieces of paper releasing the sanatorium from any responsibility. My mother offered to come to collect me in Paris for us to make the journey home together. And then, on that return journey, I made two decisions. The first, I wouldn’t speak of my illness anymore. The truth is, in recent years only you and Juan Luis have heard about it from me. I decided that perhaps tuberculosis might grind down my body, but it wouldn’t crush my spirit, so I chose to keep the idea that I was an invalid out of my thoughts.”

“And the second?”

“To begin a new life as though I were a hundred percent healthy. A life outside of England, away from my family and the friends and acquaintances who automatically associated me with Peter and with my chronic illness. A different life that to begin with would include only me and my son.”

“And it was then that you decided to go to Portugal . . .”

“The doctors recommended that I settle somewhere temperate—the south of France, Spain, Portugal, perhaps northern Morocco; somewhere between the excessive tropical heat of India and the miserable English climate. They designed a diet for me, recommended that I eat a lot of fish and little meat, relax in the sun as much as possible, not do physical exercise, and avoid emotional upsets. Then someone told me about the British colony in Estoril, and I decided that that might be as good as anywhere else. And that’s where I went.”

Now everything fitted much better into the mental map that I’d built up to understand Rosalinda. The pieces began to link to one another; they were no longer fragments of a life that were independent and hard to connect. Everything now began to make sense. I wished with all my strength that things would turn out well for her: now that I finally knew her life hadn’t all been a bed of roses, I thought her more deserving of a happy fate.