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Bombay
    Nicholas Shakespeare
    for Murray Bail
    Now that I’m no longer living in India, whenever there’s a hot day I think of a huge swimming pool in Bombay and Sylvia Billington.
    We lay stretched out on canvas chairs – Sylvia, her husband Hugh and I – within splashing distance of the pool, on a strip of lawn facing the Arabian Sea. It was VJ Day, and sounds and perspectives blurred in the midmorning heat. There was the hum of traffic along Breach Candy Road and a faint sweet-sour smell of garbage. If I half closed my eyes, the world receded to an oblong of intense blue sky that seemed a projection of the pool.
    At the time – the late sixties – I had only been in India for a few weeks, and as a temporary member of the Breach Candy Swimming-Bath Club was new to its hierarchies. Ten yards away, staff from the Russian Consulate had their corner with a net that they strung up, ‘when not stringing up dissidents’, to use Hugh’s words. They didn’t talk to anyone much, but thumped a leather volleyball back and forth. I could see a barefoot gardener in khaki shorts squatting as he pulled out weeds. Closer to, a woman even paler than I was squabbled with her teenage son in a needlepoint English accent very similar to Sylvia’s.
    At the glass-topped table where Sylvia had insisted I join them, a waiter in a white jacket unloaded his thousandth tray of the week, eyed by several sandwich-hungry crows.
    Bogogoingg!
    Sylvia squinted up, tensing. Above us, to our left, a muscular young man in tiny crimson swimming trunks bounced from the diving board.
    Whoosh . He struck the water.
    Seconds later, a blond head broke the surface. He smoothed back his hair in the way a man does who wishes he had a mirror and swam to the steps to do it again. After another glance at the diver, Sylvia put on her reading glasses and picked up her Illustrated Weekly .
    The Breach Candy Swimming-Bath Club was along the road to the Gymkhana Club. It never opened in the evenings, but on humid days its cold pool drew Bombay’s expatriate community to jump in and afterwards enjoy a nimbu-pani , a refreshing blend of lime, sugar and water served in tall glasses. Aside from a couple of film stars, no Indians were members. In the circles in which the Billingtons moved, the place was known, good-naturedly, as the ‘White Hole of Bombay’.
    The Billingtons were among the oldest members in every sense of the word. They were ‘part of the furniture’ as much as the long planter’s chairs that always needed repairing, or the glossy white plates from which we ate our buffalo-steak sandwiches. And rather like the swimming club itself – in pretty good trim but fractionally curling at the edges for being outdoors – they had about them a settled mediocrity. Other members exhibited a pragmatic energy, knowing that they would be leaving in eighteen months. The Billingtons in all probability were going to die here.
    Even before meeting them, I had formed the image of a couple in late middle age, thrifty, childless, who lived in a modest apartment on Malabar Hill. No one seemed to have visited their home, but the tone in which ‘modest’ was spoken hinted there were reasons why the Billingtons did their socialising at the club. This was only our second poolside encounter. Our first had taken place the previous Saturday. I was walking past a chair towards the end of the afternoon when I grew conscious of tight blue eyes investigating me over the top of a magazine.
    â€˜You’re not, by any chance, —.’ She said my name.
    â€˜That’s right.’
    The woman took off her glasses and stood at the second attempt.
    â€˜Sylvia Billington.’
    Her skin was lined beneath her make-up, as if stretched too much and then let go, and her straw-coloured hair, which she later assured me was once ‘as long as my elbow and red’, had retreated in thin curls close to her scalp.