The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [47]
It would be a long afternoon, during which we saw each other only from across the room, speaking to various relatives. All through the stand-up lunch I noticed her moving from person to person in this expatriate community in the role of a dutiful family bee—going from a devastated old aunt, to an uncle still too cheerful by habit, to a nephew who did not understand why everyone was so calm, for he adored Ramadhin, who had tutored him in mathematics and used to reason with him through any crisis. I saw her sitting with that boy on a lounge chair in the garden, and I wanted to be there with them rather than under the curious gaze of one of her parents’ friends. I suppose because the boy was ten years old. And I wished to know what she was saying to him, how she could justify what she was saying or why we were behaving like some composed sect who spoke only in whispers. And then I saw it was not the boy who was weeping but Massi.
I left the man in mid-sentence and went out and sat by her and put my arm around her shuddering body that never stopped shaking, and not one of the three of us thought of speaking. And when I looked up later through the glass doors into the house, I realized that all the adults were inside and we were the children in the garden.
The evening began to darken and as it did, the Ramadhins’ modest home, which had once been a sanctuary for me, seemed a frail ark. The last visitors were slowly walking out onto the unlit suburban street. I was standing beside the family in the hallway about to leave as well, needing to make the train back to central London.
“I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “But I’ll be back in a month, with luck.”
Massi was watching me carefully. It was what we both had been doing all afternoon, as if reconsidering a person we had once known well. Her face was broader and there was a different manner than when we were young. I was witnessing her new and careful courtesy to her parents. She who had been in loud battle with them all through her teens. I was aware of these differences just as I knew she could pin me down more clearly than anyone among my recent friends. She could have hauled out some perception of me from our past and placed it adjacent to what she was seeing now. She’d been the sidekick to her brother and me during school holidays, when the three of us lounged in a city that was not quite ours and where we were made to feel it was not quite ours—it was a strange contained universe we moved around in, taking the bus to a swimming pool in Bromley or to the Croydon Public Library, or to Earls Court to see the Boat Show, or Dog Show, or Motor Show. No doubt we still had the same knowledge of those specific bus routes in our brains. She’d witnessed all my changes during our teens. All of this was in her.
Then the gap of eight years.
“I have to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon but I’ll be back in a month, with luck.”
She stood in the hallway watching me, her face in clear shock at the loss of her brother. Her boyfriend was beside her, holding her by the elbow. We had spoken earlier in the evening. If he was not her boyfriend, he certainly hoped to be.
“Well, let me know when you get back,” Massi said.
“I will.”
“Massi, why don’t you walk with Michael to the station? You two should talk,” Mrs. R. said.
“Yes, come with me,” I said. “This way we’ll have an hour together.”
“A lifetime,” she said.
Massi existed in the public half of the world that Ramadhin rarely entered. There was never hesitation in her. She and I would come to share a deep slice of each other’s lives. And whatever became of our relationship, the ups and downs of its seas, we improved as well as damaged each other with the quickness I learned partially from her. Massi grabbed at decisions. She was probably more like Cassius than like her brother. Although I know now that the world is not divided that simply into two natures. But in our youth we think that.
“A lifetime,