The Midnight Palace Page 21
As for the fate that awaited each of us, time has effaced the footprints of many of my companions. I learned that after some years Seth succeeded the rotund Mr de Rozio as head librarian and archivist of the Indian Museum, and that in doing so he became the youngest man ever to hold that post.
I also had news of Isobel, who married Michael years later. Their marriage lasted five years, and after their separation Isobel went off to travel round the world with a small theatre company. The passing of the years didn’t prevent her from keeping her dreams alive. I don’t know what has become of her. Michael, who lives in Florence, where he teaches drawing in a secondary school, never saw her again. To this day I still hope to spot her name topping the bill at some show.
Siraj passed away in 1946 after spending the last five years of his life in a Bombay prison, accused of a theft which, until his dying day, he swore he didn’t commit. As Jawahal predicted, what little luck he’d had abandoned him that day.
Roshan is now a prosperous and powerful businessman, owner of a good number of the old streets around the Black Town, where he grew up as a beggar without a roof over his head. He’s the only one who, year after year, keeps up the ritual of sending me a birthday letter. I know from his letters that he married and that the number of grandchildren who run around his properties isn’t far off the figures that make up his fortune.
As for me, life has been generous and has allowed me to journey through this strange passage to nowhere in peace and without hardship. Shortly after I finished my studies, I was offered a post in Dr Walter Hartley’s hospital in Whitechapel. It was there that I really learned the job I’d always dreamed of and which still earns me my living today. Twenty years ago, after the death of my wife Iris, I moved to Bournemouth, where my home and my surgery occupy a small comfortable house with a view over the salt marshes of Poole Bay. My only company since Iris departed has been her memory and the secret I once shared with my companions in the Chowbar Society.
Again, I’ve left Ben to the end. Even today, although I haven’t seen him for over fifty years, I still find it hard to talk about the person who was and always will be my best friend. Thanks to Roshan I heard that he went to live in what had once been his father’s house – the house of Chandra Chatterghee, the engineer. He moved there with Aryami Bose, who never quite recovered from Sheere’s death and was plunged into a long deep melancholy that would eventually close her eyes for ever in October 1941. From that day on Ben lived and worked alone in the house his father had built. It was there that he wrote his books until the year he disappeared without a trace.
One December morning, years after we all, including Roshan, had given him up for dead, I was standing on the little dock opposite my house, gazing out at the marshland, when I received a small parcel. It had been postmarked by the Calcutta Post Office and my name was written in handwriting I could never forget, even if I lived to be a hundred. Inside, wrapped in layers of paper, I found half of the pendant shaped like a sun that Aryami Bose had divided in two when she separated Ben and Sheere that tragic night in 1916.
This morning, as I sit writing the last words of this memoir in the early light of dawn, the first snow of the year has spread its white mantle before my window and the memory of Ben has come back to me, after all these years, like the echo of a whisper. I imagine him walking in the crowds, through the fevered streets of Calcutta, among a thousand untold stories such as his own, and for the first time I realise that my friend, like me, is now an old man and that his journey is about to complete its circle. It is so strange to think how life has slipped through our fingers …
I don’t know whether I’ll ever hear of my friend Ben again. But I do know that in some part of the mysterious Black Town the boy I said goodbye to that morning when it snowed in Calcutta lives on, keeping the flame of Sheere’s memory alive, dreaming of the moment when at last he’ll be reunited with her in a world where nothing and no one can ever separate them.
I hope you will find her, my friend.
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2011
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
© Dragonworks, S.L. 1994
English translation © Lucia Graves 2011
First published in Spain as El palacio de la medianoche
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
The rights of Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Lucia Graves, to be identified as the author and translator of this work respectively, have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 297 85743 3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk