by Tim Parks
John still doesn’t want to understand, but very soon now it will be impossible not to. He senses that. He senses the crisis coming. The boy was wearing shorts. He was skeleton-thin. His frail arms lay along his sides, but hers were clasped around him, their heads pressed together on a single pillow. John clutched his hands in his hair. Their bodies are a knot he can’t untie.
Someone knocked at the door. John stood still. The handle turned and pushed. The door was locked.
‘Please, ma’am! I am bringing some chai.’
He must see her face. Again John got down beside her. He put his hand on her shoulders. He must pull them apart. The cold skin made him shiver. It was stiff as putty. The arms were clasped tight, damp and stiff. Now he knows it’s not sleep. Suddenly, he grabbed her hair and yanked it. ‘Mum, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Sir!’ shouted a voice from outside.
The head jerked back and the body half turned. His mother’s eyes were open, glazed, the mouth twisted in a mocking smile. Immediately he let go. But the body stayed there, suspended. Her breasts, he thought. He was seeing his mother’s breasts. He had asked to see his father’s body not his mother’s. They were round firm breasts. They weren’t old at all. The nipples are distinct. She is laughing at me. John heard his mother laugh. He definitely heard it. A chuckle gurgled from her lips with a trickle of grey fluid. In a split second, he understood; he saw it all with the clarity of the perfect experiment and before he knew it he had slapped her, he was slapping his mother’s face. ‘Damn you!’
‘Sir, madam!’ There was more than one voice now. The doorknob rattled furiously. John had no idea what he was screaming, only that his arms were a fury of blows, his hands were aching.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PAUL WOKE FROM an intense dream. It seemed he had only just fallen asleep. A phone was trilling, drilling. Paul never dreams, he rather prides himself on never dreaming. He had been in bed, in Boston, with his second wife, their tiny baby, when a voice called. He had pushed the quilt aside and started downstairs, barefoot, listening. Paul! It had been a man’s voice. As he descended the stairs, the baby had begun to cry. He heard his wife murmuring comfort. Paul hurried on down flight after flight of stairs. He was naked. He would never reach the bottom. The thin infant whimper, the woman’s soft words, grew distant behind him. The steps in front were darker now, darker and narrower, plunging deeper and deeper. His chubby thighs grazed the walls both sides. Paul knew it was no longer his house. How could it be? Then his feet splashed in water, he felt a breeze on his cheeks. A river was running deep in the stone and again a voice called across the darkness.
Paul!
The phone rang. Paul sat up and looked at his watch. 7.25. He had indeed slept only a few minutes, only the time of the dream perhaps. How long do dreams last? Feeling shaken, he waited for the caller to give up. Helen wouldn’t phone at this hour, surely. He needed to sleep after a long and very stupid night. At my age. But the noise went on. Paul dragged himself to the sitting room.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello. Hello. Who is that?’
‘Paul Roberts speaking. I’m afraid Helen—’
‘You are a relative of Dr Helen James?’
‘Who is this calling?’
‘This is the police. Delhi police. Are you a relative of Dr Helen James?’
‘I’m a friend,’ Paul said. He tried to clear his thoughts. ‘Has something happened?’
‘You are not a relative, sir?’
‘I said, I’m a friend. A friend of the family,’ he added.
‘There is no relative of Dr James at this number?’
‘There is no relative staying here, no. Only myself.’
‘You are a friend of Dr James?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please to come to the Sudha Dutta clinic at once. Do you know where that is? Shadhanad Marg? You know? Yes. Very good. I will explain on your arrival. No, please come now. This is a police order. Now. Without delay.’
Returning to sit on the bed, Paul wondered why he felt so … what? Upset? Guilty? Or just oddly adrift. It was a physical feeling, a hollowness. What on earth did the police want? Did the phone cause the dream perhaps? Looking for his shoes, he was aware of envying Elaine her youthful misery, of envying Helen her intense adult anguish. These women. ‘I have no intensity,’ he told himself out loud, and he remembered what the girl had said only a couple of hours ago: ‘It just didn’t seem real.’
For the evening had finally produced a kiss. Entering Helen’s flat towards 2 a.m., soaking wet, laughing from the adventure of tramping through the warm rain over pavements strewn with storm debris, he had turned to her and she had appeared to welcome his advance. They had kissed.
So?
All his experience told Paul that a kiss would settle things one way or another: two personalities met naked on the lips and you knew immediately who the other was, or at least who they would be for you. You knew if there would be sex.
Paul had turned to Elaine, perhaps on impulse, perhaps calculating (but these categories had become meaningless a very long time ago). The girl’s mouth came to his; they were tasting each other, opening to each other; there was a nervous urgent warmth about her; the anxiety and confusion of the evening were concentrated on her lips. And she hadn’t hung back. She allowed his arms to surround her, allowed their bodies to be pressed together. There was no resistance. It must have gone on at least a couple of minutes.
‘We’re soaking,’ she said then.
‘I’ll get you a towel.’
He had hurried to the bathroom, his mind full of logistics. Here? Now? What time would Helen be home?
He came back with a bathrobe. There would be the problem of her hairs on the pillow. Her perfume perhaps. Paul liked these details.
Elaine was still standing on the mat by the door where Helen left her indoor slippers.
‘I’d better go to the hotel,’ she had said.
Paul handed her the robe. ‘Get dry,’ he told her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Call a taxi.’
Paul was not the man to insist. Yet he was surprised.
‘It was a nice kiss,’ he said quietly.
She managed to smile and bite her lip at the same time. She opened her mouth, hesitated: ‘I came to find John.’
Paul handed her the towel. ‘Beautiful and elusive creature,’ he said with mock gravity, ‘give me a moment to change, then I’ll call a cab and take you back.’
He had gone into his room. Drying off and dressing, he had been very aware of being overweight, over forty. All around were Albert James’s books with their enigmatic scribblings. James’s problem, he suddenly decided, was he never had fun.
When he went back, Elaine was still in her wet clothes, her head to one side as she towelled her hair.
‘Your pretty pink scarf,’ Paul said.
It was sodden, which made the pink darker, almost crimson. She took it, grimaced, pushed it in a pocket. ‘You really looked cute in it, you know.’
‘Sure you want to go?’
She nodded. But then the taxi company didn’t answer. A recorded message explained they were closed on week nights from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.
‘So?’ Paul asked. ‘What do we do?’
She agreed to strip off her wet clothes, wear the bathrobe, sit on the sofa. ‘I’ll wait up till six,’ she told him. ‘You go to bed.’
Paul was too gallant to leave her. And she might change her mind.
‘Whisky or tea?’ he offered.
She wanted tea. She sat cross-legged in the bathrobe, careful to keep herself covered, pulling the lapels across her chest, tucking flaps between her legs. The movements intensified an atmosphere of domestic intimacy, as between father and daughter.
‘God, it’s quiet here,’ she said. Then, as if engaged in some other ongoing conversation, she went on: ‘I won’t decide anything till I see John.’
‘What if you can’t find him?’
She began to explain that she had said no to John’s proposal when he made it because it seemed too soon, it didn’t fit in with becoming an actress. She was ambitious and he had seemed overwrought, not really himself. He was so young. Now she had lost John and maybe her ambition too.
‘As soon as you get back to London you’ll feel excited about it all again,’ Paul assured her. ‘Especially when you hear your parents telling you to get a proper job.’ He laughed. ‘For example, if I went back to Boston, instead of going out to Bihar, you can bet your life in a few days I’d be drafting a proposal for some new book or other. I’d be back with my girlfriend there.’
‘So it’s just a question of where you are?’ she protested.
‘Where you choose to be,’ he corrected.
Paul was playing the gentleman and at the same time enjoying the sight of that flushed skin at the base of her neck, the paleness of her small feet, her tight little nail-bitten fingers clutching her mobile in the hope of a response from her boyfriend.
‘Speaking of choosing to be places,’ he said, ‘if you’re feeling tired, we could lie down on the big bed. I won’t touch you. Promise.’
She shook her head.
‘You don’t trust me,’ he grinned.
‘Maybe I don’t trust myself.’
Encouraged, Paul grew earnest. It was a while since he had stayed up all night. Perhaps personality shifts in the small hours. Or perhaps he didn’t really have any personality at all. Albert James had suggested, he began to tell her, that we can only understand ourselves in relation to the communication systems we are locked into. ‘It’s a pessimistic position, but there’s also the hint of a possible way out: if you suddenly change the way you behave, the system is exposed, the other people in it get confused, and the self-perpetuating machinery seizes up. If you follow me.’
Elaine shook her head. She had understood nothing about John’s father, she said. Paul jumped to his feet, went to the shelves and pulled out a few books. He was genuinely enthusiastic and at the same time felt a powerful physical desire to be near the girl, to smell her skin up close.
‘See how he wrote over everything he read?’
He sat beside her on the sofa and opened a heavy volume. She looked at the scribbles in the margin and managed to decipher: ‘Reconciliation is ever spectral.’ What on earth could that mean? The book was about Partition. Still shaking her head, she remarked: ‘John thought he was a genius.’
‘No doubt about it.’
‘But that he’d thrown it all away by not getting involved in a proper research team.’
Beside a page discussing the negotiations that led up to Indian independence, James had written, ‘Syntax and semantics dissolve in contemplation.’
Elaine had to turn the book round to follow the scrawl round a photograph of Nehru. ‘Art’s lively death wish …’
‘Well, I hope he knew what he meant,’ she sighed.
Then she twisted her lips in an expression that might have been wry, or just sardonic: ‘I’ll tell you what, though: whenever John, or now you, start talking about him, you always get exciting and,’ she hesitated, ‘sexy somehow?’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Paul smiled.
Three hours later, unexpectedly, as he walked her down the stairs to the taxi in the early morning, she kissed him again. She didn’t want to be accompanied as far as the hotel, she said. She had put on her damp clothes with no more than an amused grimace and shiver. But as they arrived in the entrance she turned to him and opened her arms. It was recognisably the same kiss as before, but also unmistakeably valedictory, as if promise and goodbye had somehow been superimposed. In his ear she whispered, ‘I’m sorry, it just seemed unreal.’
Paul had hurried back upstairs and lain in bed. He was angry with himself. Over the last week or so he had resolved to change and now, almost immediately, he had betrayed that resolve. He felt confused. ‘You must go to Bihar,’ he muttered. He repeated the words. In all of this adventure, he told himself, the only person with any solidity and consistency has been Helen. Helen was the same in every time and place; Helen lived and saved lives while Albert did nothing but watch and take notes. ‘Go to Bihar,’ he whispered. ‘Life has brought you to a big change.’
Unable to sleep, Paul had found himself repeating these fragments. ‘Life has brought you to a big change. You must go to Bihar. Enough of collecting women. Enough of playing at living. This failure with Elaine is the turning point. Go to Bihar. Go with Helen. Life has brought you to Helen and Bihar.’
Whichever way he turned on the pillow, after a few seconds a pulse began to thump in his ear. Bihar. Bihar. He lay on his back. Bihar was a poverty-stricken, miserable place. So he imagined. I had life sewn up, Paul thought: the books, Amy. Why do I have to do this?
He turned this way and that, but the words went on automatically. ‘Go to Bihar. Change your life. Go to Bihar.’ Then suddenly he was in a different bed; he was back in his house in Boston, back with his second wife, their baby daughter, and a voice was calling his name from the basement, from somewhere deep below the ground: Paul.
‘Go figure,’ Paul muttered, putting the phone down and heading to the bathroom for a pee. The Delhi police. He had never had a high regard for dreams. No need to hurry, he thought. He had never had a high regard for the police forces of developing countries. Years of journalism had acquainted him with their appetite for melodrama and red tape, especially where foreigners were concerned. It would be some stupid quibble over someone’s immigration papers or permission to work. Paul prepared himself a coffee, then called a cab.
There were two police vehicles in the street by the clinic. Still uncertain whether to be alarmed or irritated, Paul was led to the outpatients’ waiting room. ‘Please stay here,’ he was told abruptly. ‘We are coming to talk to you very soon.’ Before he could think to object, the men were gone.
Paul looked around him. The benches against bare walls were all taken and a dozen and more men and women sat patiently on the floor talking quietly, chewing, scratching, in a warm but, for the American journalist, alien togetherness.
He went to stand at the window, looking out of the room through vertical bars and smeared glass across the brick and mud path between entrance and gate. It was all very unlovely, but better than meeting the quietly curious eyes of the Indians in the waiting room. It irked him the way they were all looking at him, in a quiet collective way. Then, with a muffled clatter, four policemen banged out of the main entrance to the building some twenty yards away to the right. Two were holding a young man by the arms, a white man with flaxen blond hair. His head was swaying and he walked uncertainly, as if in some kind of trance. Another policeman walked ahead and another behind.
Paul watched and frowned. The policemen pushed the blond boy through the gate and into a car. Something has happened. He turned and looked for someone in the room to speak to: ‘Do any of you know why the police are here?’
‘What is that, sir? Sorry?’
It was a gaunt man leaning on crutches. Paul repeated the question a little more loudly. ‘Do you know why the police are here?’
Everybody began to talk. In Hindi. Some of them were obviously joking at his expense. Finally, a younger man sitting on the floor said: ‘Nobody knows. Perhaps a crime, sir.’
A nurse arrived at intervals to call the patients by number. They were all holding numbers. It was almost an hour before a policeman came and told Paul to follow him to the other end of the building. In a room that was little more than a cubby a senior officer was speaking on his mobile.
‘I’d be grateful if you could tell me what all this is about,’ Paul began the moment the man closed his conversation. ‘Where’s Helen? Helen James?’
The man wore a khaki uniform and peaked cap. Thickly framed glasses gave the pockmarked face a certain poise. His moustache was a badge of self-satisfaction.
‘Mister?’
‘Roberts.’
‘Ah yes, my colleague spoke to you on the
phone.’
‘Please, I’ve been waiting—’
‘Mr Roberts, I must ask one or two questions.’
The man was abrupt and authoritative. Paul was given a seat across the desk from a young policeman who was taking notes. Telephone still in his hand, the officer preferred to stay on his feet. There was much coming and going of men in uniform; a doctor looked in and hurried out.
‘You are staying in Dr James’s apartment. That is right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long have you been staying there, Mr Roberts?’
Paul tried to remember. ‘Three weeks, give or take a day or two.’
‘You are not resident in India?’
‘No.’
‘And what is the purpose of your visit?’
Paul was patient. ‘I’m researching a biography of Albert James, Helen James’s husband.’ He hesitated. What other explanation could he convincingly give of himself? ‘He died recently.’
‘Ah.’ The policeman frowned. ‘A biography. You are a writer, then?’
‘I wrote a book on Gandhi.’
‘Gandhi,’ the man raised an eyebrow. ‘You are a pacifist?’
‘Not especially.’
‘You are not a pacifist.’
Paul was exasperated. ‘Listen, could you tell me what this is about?’
The request was ignored. ‘When did Dr James’s husband die exactly?’
‘January. I think the 17th of January.’
The officer went to stand over his younger assistant’s shoulder as if to check what he was writing. Perhaps his English wasn’t perfect. Without looking up, he asked: ‘And what were your relations with Dr James’s son?’
‘John James?’
‘I didn’t know his name, Mr Roberts. I asked you what were your relations with him.’
‘None. I’ve never met him.’
‘You’ve never met Dr James’s son?’ The policeman raised a heavy eyebrow and smiled with self-conscious sarcasm, as if he had caught Paul out. ‘You are a guest of the mother, but you don’t know the son.’
