Three Continents Read Online Free

too in control of himself, and of Michael, to be much affected; as if he could take it or leave it, whereas Michael couldn’t leave it at all. If at any time during the day he didn’t know exactly where Crishi was, he would go quite wild and walk around asking everyone, and sometimes people told him lies to save his feelings. Michael knew perfectly well—it may have been partly why he was so desperate—that Crishi was involved with girls in the entourage. And of course there was the Rani, with whom he was very intimate—neither of them made any secret of that, and when they presented each other as adopted mother and son, it was in an indifferent, believe-it-or-not way. Michael himself tried hard to believe it. Once, when I commented that she seemed awfully young to be Crishi’s mother, Michael got quite worked up: “Young? She? She’s as old as Medusa.” “How old is Medusa?” When Michael frowned at this would-be joke, I said, trying to sound casual the way I always did when I mentioned him: “How old is Crishi?” Michael shrugged: “Obviously years younger than she is. Years and years,” he said fiercely.
    It was hard to tell how old Crishi was; and even harder when you knew everything he had done and everywhere he had been, so that on calculating you could only wonder “Surely he can’t be that old?” He looked, at first sight, quite young. That may have been because he was so lithe and quick and always on the go, you could hardly keep up with him the way he ran around, and always in a terrifically good mood. It was only when you looked closer and saw the corners of his mouth and the skin around his eyes—but of course then, at the beginning, I never did look closer; that came later. And it was as difficult to make out his nationality as his age. His way of speech was a strange mixture—sometimes there was a slight Oriental lilt, and he used the usual international Americanisms; but his most basic accent was the sort of Cockney that was fashionable at the time, having supplanted the English the Rawul had learned to speak at Harrow. His appearance too was ambiguous: At first sight, he might have been an Italian or a Spaniard, but then there were his slightly slanted eyes, his double-jointed fingers, his very slim ankles, and feetso narrow that he had difficulty getting shoes to fit him.
    Besides myself, the other person in the house who wasn’t 100 percent enthusiastic about our guests was Jean. In her case, it was mostly jealousy over Lindsay and the quiet, secluded life they had made for themselves. Or rather, Jean had made—she was always very much in charge, and though it was Lindsay’s house, she was glad to have someone else look after it. Jean used to run a successful realty business, which she had sold at a good price after deciding to devote herself to Lindsay. She was an excellent businesswoman, hearty and one of the boys in her dealings with the world, but in her private relations she was ultrasensitive and very vulnerable and feminine inside her shapeless unfeminine body. Before they had settled down together as a more or less married couple, she and Lindsay used to have terrible fights. Many of them were about Mrs. Schwamm, who was jealous of Jean’s position in the house and treated her as a usurper. In the end, it became obvious that one of them had to go. By then Lindsay had found Jean suited her so well, in both her emotional and her domestic life, that she had no difficulty deciding between them, though Mrs. Schwamm had been her mother’s cook and had gone with Lindsay on her marriage because she was so devoted to her. One thing about Lindsay—she appeared to be very dithering, she was very dithering, but she never hesitated to get rid of people when necessary. But now of course Mrs. Schwamm was back again and in charge of the kitchen and Jean had to put up with her. And more, much more, she had to put up