A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘You don’t have to decide yet,’ she said. ‘Just think about it.’

  ‘But why?’ said Robin. ‘Why have you changed your mind?’

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said. ‘At least, that’s not the point…’

  She tailed off and he sat in silence for several minutes. Finally she laid a hand on his arm and murmured:

  ‘Robin, I have to get some things ready now. Why don’t you go home for a while and think it over?’

  Back at the flat, he spent half an hour listening to some classical music on the radio; he tidied his room, folding his clothes and putting socks and soiled underwear into a plastic bag; and he cleared out the box at the bottom of his wardrobe, which contained all his manuscripts. He emptied it out by armfuls into the dustbin outside his back door. He cooked himself some beans on toast and used up his last three tea bags. Then he walked to Aparna’s tower block, on the far side of the city.

  She opened the door and said, from behind it, without looking to see who the caller was, ‘Hello, Robin.’ By the time he had stepped into the hall her back was already turned and she was heading for the kitchen. ‘I suppose you’ve come round for some tea,’ she said. Robin followed her.

  ‘Yes, that would be nice. Though it’s not the only thing I’ve come round for.’

  ‘Of course not. Tea and sympathy. The Englishman’s staple diet.’

  He leaned against the kitchen doorway, suddenly wary at the return of a familiar tone. And now for the first time she turned to look at him, having filled the kettle, and he saw into her eyes, which were no longer bright, or questioning, or laughing, but dull and bloodshot, and red from crying. Beneath that, there was a distant anger.

  Robin turned and said, ‘I’ll go and sit in the other room, if you don’t mind.’

  Aparna said nothing. A few minutes later she joined him in the sitting room, carrying two mugs of tea. It was carelessly made, too strong and over-milked, and the mugs had not been washed properly. She placed them side by side on the low coffee table, and opened the glass door which led out onto her balcony. It was a hot, close afternoon, and there was little hope of making the room cooler this way: the main effect was to let in the cries of truant children at play, far below, on a landscaped playground which comprised two swings, a slide, and some concrete hoops. Aparna stood on the balcony for a while, gazing down on these tiny figures as they acted out their noisy fantasies of violence and conflict. Then she went inside and sat opposite Robin. They drank for a few moments in silence.

  ‘So,’ she said at last, the words forming with undisguised effort, ‘what brings you here?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘A social call, Robin? I’m flattered.’

  ‘If I’ve called at an inconvenient time, I could always go.’

  ‘I wonder if you would. You’d be surprised if I said yes, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Is this an inconvenient time?’

  ‘It would be rude to throw you out straight away, because you probably walked all the way here and you’re feeling tired. Besides, I don’t mind having you around. You don’t take up much space.’ All at once she started to drink very rapidly, and had got through most of her mug of thick, brown tea before putting it down in disgust and saying, flatly: ‘I’m going to leave this country, one of these days. I’m going to leave it… to stew in its own juice.’ She smiled a bitter, mischievous smile, and her eyes gleamed briefly.

  ‘So will I.’

  ‘You, Robin? Where would you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where would you?’

  ‘Home, of course. Back home. You can’t do that, though, can you, because this is your home. So where would you go?’

  ‘You told me you’d never go home. Hundreds of times you’ve told me that. Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind.’

  Aparna did not answer him directly, but said:

  ‘England must be a wonderful place to be, for the English. You have so much freedom here, so much opportunity, so much interest, so much variety, such beauty. Why do they want to shut me out of all that?’

  ‘These rose-tinted spectacles you have on today,’ said Robin, ‘– where can I get a pair?’

  ‘I will start liking you more, Robin,’ said Aparna, ‘when you wake up to the idea of how privileged you are. How damn lucky you are, in where you were born and in all the chances that have been given to you.’

  ‘We can change places if you like,’ said Robin. ‘You can stand up in that bloody court in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Robin, you know I am; but you’re going to come out of this thing all right, it’s obvious. People like you always do. The courts were designed for people like you. For a start you’ve done the smart thing by choosing a woman lawyer who cares about you. She’ll wipe the floor with that man, I can see it happening now.’

  ‘What do you mean, “people like me”?’

  ‘I mean clever, middle-class, well-educated, heterosexual Englishmen. People who’ve had it their own way for hundreds of years and will continue to do so, till kingdom come.’

  They both fell silent; and when Robin finally spoke, it was as if he had just been roused from sleep.

  ‘You can tell me what’s happened, if you like,’ he said.

  She looked at him questioningly, and he elaborated: ‘To bring on this sudden burst of anti-imperialism.’

  ‘Sudden?’

  Robin picked up an old newspaper which was lying on the table.

  ‘I seem to have caught you in a bad mood,’ he said.

  ‘A bad mood.’ Aparna repeated the words slowly. ‘This is a mood, Robin, which I have been in for two years or more. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Robin, ‘I just don’t feel in the mood for an argument right now. Isn’t it funny? I just don’t think I could handle it.’

  ‘Then you’d better read your newspaper.’

  He put it back on the table.

  ‘Don’t tell me: you’ve been to see your supervisor. You’ve shown him all the stuff you’ve been working on for the past six months. And he’s raised a sceptical eyebrow, patted you on the head, and asked you out to dinner with him again.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Those bastards. Those bastards don’t realize how much this bloody degree means to me. They’ve no intention of letting me finish this bloody thing. Nothing would please them more than to see me get on, the next plane back to India, so they’d never have to spend half an hour with me and my work again. That’s what they really want.’

  ‘So that’s exactly what you’re going to do, is it?’

  ‘You’ve got no right to criticize me, Robin. Six years I’ve been fighting for this thing – six years out of my life – and I’m not a young woman any more. Not young at all. And the fact is, whatever people try to do to me, I’m still a free agent. I can still choose. I can choose to carry on fighting, or I can choose to give in. And that might just be what I do.’ Robin said nothing, so she continued: ‘Anyway, as it happens, your diagnosis was correct. I have been to see Dr Corbett, and I can report that he conducted himself in his usual fashion. I’m sure he believes that he was perfectly pleasant to me: charming, even. As if I came all those bloody miles to be charmed by some pot-bellied middle-aged academic. He started off by telling me that I was “looking good”, Was this a reference to my clothes, my face, my figure? I don’t know. Then we chatted about “how I’d been”, That was interesting: it transpired that he didn’t even know where I’d been living for the last two years. And finally, just to fill up the time, as it were, we talked about my work. We talked about this little thing I’ve been writing for one-fifth of my bloody life, and which he’s made me start again, and rewrite, and start again, and rewrite, and start again, till I’ve gone blue in the face. And what did he have to say this time, about my one hundred pages, my thirty thousand words, my six months’ sitting up here and writing? He found it “interesting”; he thought it had “poten
tial”; but, he said it needed “tidying”; he thought I had been “emotional” and “aggressive”, just because I had tried to put down something of what I feel about these writers, for God’s sake, these Indian writers, who somebody has got to rescue from these bloody English critics with their theories and their intellectual imperialism. And then, yes, he said I must come round to supper some time. And somehow, it just came up in the conversation that his wife is in America at the moment, visiting her cousin.’ She shook her head. ‘You see, intellectually these people are subtle. This disdain, this condescension, it’s never articulated. So people don’t believe you when you tell them it’s there. But I know it’s there. I can feel it. I’ve been trying to squeeze my way past it ever since I got here. Well, maybe it’s time to stop.’ Her tone changed, became sadder, but no softer. ‘God, I miss my parents, Robin. You don’t know. Six years. I miss them… so… much.’ Then she asked: ‘Would you be sorry to see me go?’

  Robin shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

  She smiled her most brittle smile. ‘You’d miss your little trinket, would you? Your bit of local colour?’

  ‘That’s not how I think of you, actually.’

  ‘I wonder. I think you’re all the same, when it comes down to it. The whole lot of you. You let yourself down, didn’t you, that day in your flat, when I showed you the book? Wouldn’t it make life easier if I just played along with what people want of me? All Corbett wants is for me to be strange and exotic: he’d love it if I walked into there wearing a sari and strumming a sitar. He doesn’t want the truth about my country: none of you do. He doesn’t want to know that this city has an Asian community of its own, and he could find out more about India in an afternoon here than I have any intention of telling him. People like that… it’s the worst way of using people. They decide what they want you to be, and then they push you and push you into that mould, until it really hurts. It hurts deeply.’

  From the lack of expression in Robin’s voice, it was not obvious that he had been listening to any of this.

  ‘Do you mind if we change the subject? I came here to talk about something, and I don’t have much time.’

  Aparna looked at him sharply, surprised. A flicker of pain shone from her eyes, as if stabbed, but within a second it was gone.

  ‘We can talk about whatever you want, as long as it’s of interest to you. Only don’t let me stand in the way of your busy schedule.’

  ‘I came to ask if I could have my story back. I’m trying to round up all the copies of the things I’ve written.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll go and get it for you.’

  She went into her bedroom and returned very quickly with Robin’s notebook.

  As he took it from her, he asked, ‘What did you think of it?’

  ‘I quite enjoyed it. I quite enjoy all your funny little stories.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She sat down again and sighed.

  ‘Well now, how important is it to you that I’m honest about this? What do you fancy today – sweet Aparna or sour Aparna? Do you want her warm, or cold? What’s on the menu, Robin?’

  ‘Today,’ he said, ‘it’s very important that you’re honest.’ Then he reconsidered. ‘I say that, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ll never know, will I, whether you meant it or not? So you can say what you like. Say what you like.’

  ‘Say what I like? That gives me a lot of scope. I hope you mean it.’ This sounded almost jocular, compared with her next remark: ‘You’re a funny man, Robin. A strange man.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked, coldly.

  ‘Well, because you are always making these obstacles for yourself. Always trying to make out that life is harder than it is.’

  ‘You think that things have been pretty easy for me, don’t you?’

  ‘Anyone could see that. Anyone but you.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the story, anyway?’

  ‘It has everything to do with it. I mean, love doesn’t have to be like that, does it? You know it doesn’t. These two people – how is it possible to have any sympathy with them? They should simply have made up their minds one way or the other, and then got on with it.’

  ‘I don’t see it as being that simple.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. I suppose now you’re going to tell me that the same thing happened to you once.’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it did.’

  ‘Poor girl.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Whoever it was you messed about like that. She chucked you, did she?’

  ‘Yes, as it happens.’

  ‘Good.’

  There was a decisive pause, before Robin stirred in his chair and said, with a touch of irritation:

  ‘What I wanted was your opinion of its literary merit.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve just given you. I can’t separate “literary” merit from what a story is saying. Why do you think all the academics here hate me so much?’

  ‘Did you find it amusing? Did it make you smile, the irony of it?’

  ‘Not really. What people call irony in literature is usually called pain and misunderstanding and misfortune in real life, and that doesn’t make me smile. There’s too little love in the world as it is, for me to find it amusing that two people should be incapable of expressing their feelings for one another. It’s the same with that horrible story about the lucky man. He was so obviously so stupid, so unthinking about the way life really works, you just wanted the narrator to say something about it, or punish him or something.’

  ‘A lot of people thought that story was funny. You’ve just lost your sense of humour, over the years.’

  ‘But you can’t laugh alone, Robin. Nobody laughs alone. I would laugh, if I had other people to laugh with.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ Robin asked, and his voice was quiet with anxiety, ‘how you used to laugh with me?’

  ‘I used to laugh with all sorts of people. Perhaps you were one of them.’ She did not notice the effect these words had on him, but hurried on: ‘These people who found your story funny – they were men, were they?’

  ‘Mostly men, yes.’

  ‘I imagined they would be. You see, men enjoy irony because it is all about feelings of power and detachment and superiority, the things they are born with. Female laughter and male laughter are quite different. I don’t think you understand the laughter of women at all: it is all to do with liberation, with letting things out. Even the sound is different, not like that barking you hear when men start laughing together.’

  ‘Are you saying I could never write anything that a woman would find funny?’

  ‘I’m just saying that you shouldn’t always be surprised when people don’t dance to your tune.’

  This provoked another short silence, which Robin showed no inclination to break.

  ‘So,’ Aparna continued, ‘you think you’ve been unlucky in love, do you?’

  ‘I’ve spoiled a few good friendships with women over the last few years, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘They can’t have been that good.’

  ‘Well, that’s for me to say, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, not really, because I don’t think you understand the nature of friendship at all. Men usually don’t. As soon as they start feeling real friendship for a woman then they can’t cope with it any more, so they convert it into something romantic. And that’s when everything falls apart.’

  ‘You seem very full of answers today.’

  ‘Somebody has to explain these things to you, when you come in here looking like a walking question-mark. Writing all these stories which are just disguised questions, cries for enlightenment. Somebody has to start sorting through all these tangles. My advice to you would be to learn. You should learn to spend more time, loving more people, in more ways. Loving someone means helping them, it doesn’t mean just… dumping your excess emotion into their lap. Your kind of love, it’s a self-gratification. Unlearn it, Robin, before it’s too lat
e.’ He looked unconvinced, so she added, angrily: ‘You certainly won’t get anywhere by flirting with homosexuality. It’s pathetic, the way you tiptoe round the subject all the time, fascinated, like an uninvited guest peering through the window at a party. Yes? Now come on, Robin, either you knock at the door and walk right on in, or you leave it alone. Why this voyeuristic obsession? Make a decision, for once in your life. But that’s not your way, really, is it? You’ve been taught to toy with subjects, not to involve yourself in them. That wonderful English education, how good it’s been at protecting you from the world.’ She sighed, rhetorically, and concluded: ‘I would give anything to have had an English education.’

  ‘So what should I do?’ said Robin: quieter, flatter, more mechanical than ever. ‘I should follow your example, should I? See nobody; love nobody; feel nothing. Living alone all this time, looking down on the world in anger from the fourteenth floor.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have any regrets about the way I’ve spent the last two years,’ said Aparna, ‘if I’d got my work done. If they’d let me get my work done. Nothing else really matters. I don’t need friends any more, you see; whereas I think you still probably do. These cold, intellectual friendships you cling to. Did you ever notice how all your friends used to dislike me? How suddenly all that brilliant debate, that spontaneous wit, would dry up as soon as I sat at the table, with my serious eyes and my comical earnestness? I bet they still only have to hear my name and they curl up at the edges. Do you ever talk to them about me? Or is the subject of people slightly too mundane for your high-flown level of conversation nowadays?’

  ‘Why have you continued to see me, Aparna?’ Robin asked. ‘I’m puzzled. I’m intrigued. The thing I’d really like to know, before I leave, is why you’ve continued to see me.’

  ‘I like you,’ she said. This made Robin laugh, very briefly and softly. ‘And once, we could have helped one another.’

  ‘Once?’

  ‘That time… when was it, it must have been last summer. You kept promising me that we would go up to the Lake District together. You had some friend who had just bought a cottage up there, and we were going to go up and spend a week or two. You were going to ring him and ask if we could use it. You kept telling me about all these places you had seen as a child, and how you wanted to go back, and I can remember thinking, to share in something like that… it might have been fun. You talked more about your family in those days, didn’t you? Now you never talk about them.’