The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [88]
“Somehow Sunil discovered he was the undercover man. He’d come across him talking to the English officer. So he could talk.”
I thought I could save you, Miss Lasqueti had written somewhere in her letter to me. But I had run into Emily with the man from the Jankla Troupe. She was caught up with him, in something fraught and dangerous.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place. I remembered how Mr. Nevil spoke of separating the remnants from dismantled steamers in a breaker’s yard to give them a new role and purpose. So I found myself no longer with Emily, on Bowen Island, but within those events in the past, trying to recall the afternoon when my cousin was part of a circus troupe’s stunt and a bracelet was put on her and broke the skin on her wrist. I was remembering too that silent man who wore the red scarf around his neck, the man we thought of as the tailor, and how we had not seen him at the Cat’s Table during the final days of the journey.
“You know what I remember about Mr. Gunesekera?” I said. “I remember how kind he was. That day you had the welt by your eye, when you came over to our table—you’d been swiped by a badminton racquet, you said. And he reached out to touch it. Perhaps he could imagine how you might have been hurt, that it wasn’t an accident at all, but had been caused by someone, Sunil perhaps, asking you to do what he wanted. You thought Gunesekera was attracted to you, but perhaps he was just concerned for you.”
“That night by the lifeboat—I can’t remember now—I think he made a move towards me, grabbed my hand. He seemed dangerous. And Sunil and Asuntha suddenly came forward…. Let’s stop now. Please, Michael, I can’t do this. Okay?”
“Maybe he wasn’t attacking you. I think he wanted to look at the cut on your wrist. He must have seen Sunil put that bracelet on you after the pyramid event, breaking the skin, and then rubbing something on it. In fact he was the one who was protective of you. And he was killed.”
Emily did not say anything.
“When I couldn’t wake you the next morning, I kept shaking you, and you said you felt poisoned. Perhaps they’d taken something from Mr. Daniels’s garden to drug or confuse you. So you wouldn’t remember. There were poisons there, you know.”
“In that beautiful garden?”
Emily had been looking down at her hands. She suddenly shifted and stared at me, as if everything she had believed, every foothold for years, had been a lie. “I’ve thought all along I was the one who killed him,” she said quietly. “Maybe I did.”
“Cassius and I believed you’d killed him,” I said. “We saw the body. But I don’t think you did.”
She leaned forward on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. She remained like that for a moment. I watched her, saying nothing.
“Thank you.”
“But you were helping them escape. And as a result, Niemeyer and the girl died.”
“Perhaps.”
“What do you mean, ‘perhaps’?”
“Just perhaps.”
I was suddenly angry. “The girl, Asuntha, she had a whole life ahead of her. She was a child.”
“Seventeen. I was seventeen too. We all became adults before we were adults. Do you ever think that?”
“She didn’t even scream.”
“She couldn’t. She had the key in her mouth. That was where she kept it. After it was taken from Perera. That was what they needed for them to escape.”
I WOKE ON THE SOFA BED, the curtainless living room full of light. Emily was sitting in the armchair watching me, as if noting what I had become after the passage of years, adjusting her assessment of the disobedient boy who had lived near her for a period of time in his youth. At some point the night before, she had told me she’d read my books, and that whenever she browsed through she spent her time putting two and two together—some fictional incident with the original drama that had happened in her presence, or an episode in a garden that was clearly my uncle’s garden beside the High Level Road. We had each changed places. She was no longer the focus of obsessed swains. I was no longer