The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  So, Dharan and Karunya see me as I am now, a solitary westerner, and they try to help. But when I am with them, I am actually longing to hide away in my room once more to surround myself with the comfort, the escape, of writing. Or else, when it gets too much, I just excuse myself and go for a walk along the long flat beach here where it is very easy to lose myself in my thoughts.

  This beach is very different to the rounded bay of Unawatuna and it would be possible just to keep on and on walking north to the mouth of a lagoon at Irakkandi Beach or south to Trincomalee. Of course, there are soldiers on the beach but then there are soldiers everywhere here and nobody is the least bit interested in a single westerner wandering along an isolated beach on his own; I stopped to talk to one of them yesterday – he must have been aged no more than twenty and carried an automatic rifle. He could not have been more polite and was obviously bored out of his mind. We talked about London and the English football league.

  I seem to have strayed, or rather wobbled drunkenly, away from the London story. Bloody deviant, Greenwood. Well, even in London, the song is the thing that tipped the see-saw, that threw my life there of career drive and hopeless marriage out of balance, once again forcing me to show the chaotic feelings that I had tried to keep locked away within the life that I had created for myself. So, here come the confessions of a selfish bastard bits.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The setting is the Middle Temple Hall in August 2002. That’s where the concert was held. This was the last time I saw Catherine before the trial because I was away on holiday in France at the time of the final consultation with the silk and my role was supportive anyway.

  The concert bore the title ‘Reflections’. With a name like that, I remember that I expected the programme sheet to be coloured lilac and to bear silver pictures of intertwining vines. I was taken by surprise. The first half of the concert was dedicated to the ‘D’ minor key and included the Bach double violin concerto and, also the Albinoni oboe concerto, both in that key and both beautiful pieces of music. Josh and I listened to them often and, in a failed attempt at instilling some classical effect to the opening of Raja’s hotel, I played them as part of the repertoire for the welcoming party (what a stupid thing to do that was, as well) until Josh turned the whole thing into a beach dance with music that would have left Albinoni reaching for the ecstasy tablets or maybe I mean cyanide pills.

  It was one of those perfect evenings - a very rare thing in England. Hot with clear blue skies. The people at the gathering before the concert were well dressed and seemingly relaxed. There was an undercurrent of civilised enjoyment and the surroundings showed English architecture and establishment at its best. The mulberry tree in the Temple Garden provided the focus for people to congregate, drink champagne, eat canapés and speak mildly about legal society and legal issues. I knew many people there and made polite conversation. It was the well-oiled posh gossip machine humming along in set-piece attunement.

  Catherine had delivered a ticket for me in chambers a few days previously. I found it in my pigeon hole with a yellow sticker attached to it on which she had just written ‘C x.’ The seats were numbered and I was in the front row.

  I remember sitting through the first half of the concert wondering what I was doing there, staring at the painting of Charles I and the pictures of the other monarchs on either side of him. Yes, the music was beautiful and well played but sitting alone at a concert is as miserable as sitting alone for dinner in a restaurant; the interval was particularly awkward because I had nothing to do and no one to talk to. So, by the time the second half of the concert started I was looking forward to it being over.

  Catherine came on to the dais to the usual polite applause after the orchestra was fully assembled as the interval finally came to an end. She was wearing a royal blue dress. Her golden hair was carefully arranged so that she had a plait across the top of her head, giving it the appearance of bearing a natural crown of hair. She wore dazzling gold and diamond pendant ear rings. She looked beautiful. A small, vulnerable figure but truly majestic.

  The orchestra began, softly introducing into the hall the reminiscence and melancholy of the music and then Catherine began to sing. She filled the large hall with her sound in a way that took command of the entire setting. The atmosphere within the hall became electrifying as she sang to the emotions of everyone there and the audience became locked into her song. The tempo of the music was slow and she used that to bring out the deepest sorrow from the piece. She sang as though she meant every word that she used and as though she was telling of a grief that was so deep that it could only be expressed through music. I could not take my gaze from her and could not stop myself being utterly absorbed into the song that she sang. I allowed the skill and beauty that she showed and the depth of the sadness that she voiced to crusade through every aspect of my emotional being and I found tears running down my face as I sat watching her. I had not cried for years.

  And then, in a pause in the music near the end of the piece, she looked across to the front row where I was sitting and our eyes met briefly. It was a sudden glance between two people that sent a wave of communication that is not capable of translation into words but which is like a radio signal, laden with the hidden and different grief that we both bore. She knew, in that moment, how much that song meant to me. When she turned her gaze away it was to meet the last few bars of singing which require strength of voice and passion as they hit the highest notes and the full emotion of the song. I felt that she was singing them for me. Catherine gave them such strength and showed such personal commitment to the music that there cannot have been a single person in the audience that was not spellbound. When the piece ended, people jumped to their feet in applause. I stood as well and applauded but felt far too surprised by my own reaction to join in with the more frantic clapping.

  The last piece that evening was a tedious piece of Haydn that belonged in a Bath tea room. If I could have left before it started I would have done so but that would have been unmistakably gauche. As soon as the concert ended I made my way out of the hall and started to walk towards my motorbike, which was parked in the Temple. As I walked past the Temple church I heard Catherine’s voice.

  ‘Simon.’ I stopped and turned. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Where did you learn to sing like that?’ I asked.

  ‘I have always sung. And at the moment it is the only way that I can cope with what is happening.’

  ‘But that was heaven sent.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  ‘No really, it was.’ I touched her arm and felt her stiffen as I did so, as if affronted by my touch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She smiled, it seemed to me with resignation, once again sending out airwaves of sorrow. ‘Good night Simon. Thanks for coming.’ Then she turned and went back into the hall.

  I walked the opposite way, towards the Inner Temple parking area and got on my bike to face a different kind of music. The sort that only my then wife and her father, Tom, could play.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dharan and Karunya, bless them, have been looking after me for the past few days. They have started bringing food up to me on a tray now rather than laying it out for me and then hovering in my room, not for money but to see if I am OK. Dharan also brought some Sri Lankan whiskey at one point, truly dreadful stuff that looks and smells like piss, so I didn’t drink it, especially after coming a definite second in the battle of the gin bottle a few days ago. Anyhow, whiskey is not my drink. It sort of runs in the family.

  I did accept his offer of some weed, or hashish as they call it here, because I like the smell and thought I would try it again. Josh used to smoke it from time to time – puffing the ‘erb, as we used to call it. Now the room stinks like a grass bonfire and I have had to open all the windows.

  So, right now I think I am somewhat stoned and that feels pretty good - even the geckos seem somewhat sedated as they have stopped scurrying across the walls. So, t
his is probably just the condition for me to write about my marriage. It’s only six years ago that it ended and I can barely recognise myself from then - I think.

  The evening of the concert sticks in my memory not just because I wept all over the place but also because it produced the night when my childless and near sexless marriage to my patrician wife Penelope (never, ever, Penny), took a final and terminal nose dive after I returned home late for the birthday supper of her oily father, Tom.

  Penelope was a fierce commercial lawyer, probably still is, for all I care. One thing’s for sure, she’ll never read this. She wore a permanent frown, designer clothing and very expensive jewellery. Between us, we had everything money could buy. Tom, her equally patrician father, was a criminal silk who was then in his early seventies and so beyond his sell-by date that he should have been thrown out with the refuse years before. Tom. Tosser Tom. Forgive me, Tosser Tom QC. It was as if he had the word conservative written on every aspect of his being, from the top of his straight, greased down grey hair, through his silk cravat and top pocket handkerchief to the base of his well-polished leather shoes. He probably had it tattooed on his dick. I suspect that he had a Union Jack on his underpants – Y-fronts, probably stained. Or a picture of Margaret Thatcher.

  Well that’s what I thought of him. What would he think of me now, if his language could ever descend to the demotic level necessary? This is how I first described that to Josh. Picture two elderly men wearing smoking jackets, sitting in leather arm chairs in a gentlemen’s club drinking claret, puffing at cigars and having this conversation.

  ‘Have you heard about Carruthers?’ the first asks (that must be Tom).

  ‘Carruthers?’

  ‘Yes, Carruthers. They found him in the jungle.’

  ‘In the jungle?

  ‘Yes, in the jungle with a donkey.’

  ‘With a donkey? Not a male donkey, I hope.’

  ‘Oh no, female, female,’ says Tom exuding a puff of cigar smoke, ‘there is nothing queer about Carruthers.’

  Only Tom would say of me that the donkey was male. I can well remember when I first told that story to Josh. ‘Jag är åsnan, sedan?’ (‘I am the donkey then?’), he replied almost weeping with laughter because I had not thought that through. He then added, as he pelted down to the sea for a late-night swim ‘Far better hung…Och jag har inte stora öron - and I don’t have big ears.’ Oh well, who gives a fuck about the homophobic anyway.

  So, when Sunil tells a story, as we encouraged him to do, he nearly always includes a fiery dragon that shoots out fiery flames. Often featuring in his stories somewhere is Devol Deiyo, the God of Vengeance whose temple sits like a white and passive breast on the headland overlooking the beach at Unawatuna from where, it is said, he exacts punishment on those who do evil. A God who, without any shadow of doubt, would be no match whatsoever for Penelope; she ate dragons for breakfast and slaughtered her commercial opponents during the rest of the day, radiating the self-conferred and supreme divinity that arose from her standing as the saviour of her clients about whom she spoke with gay (now, dare I say that - really?) abandon.

  Was I any better than she was? Not a bit of it. I know full well I wasn’t. After all, I was the one who married her and promised to stay with her for life. Our marriage was a product of us both. We knew bits about each other’s pasts but only enough not to look foolish at dinner parties or family gatherings. It is so obvious to me now that I was hopeless husband material, not just because I have now been in a relationship with another man (…I suppose that follows, doesn’t it?) but because I was so emotionally and spiritually empty that there was no prospect at all that I would offer Penelope happiness or anything else that she needed. We were upwardly mobile lawyers from the time we met. What she needed was someone far stronger than me. A big warrior with whom to fight life’s battles. What did I want? I didn’t know then. My energies were directed to fighting my way up a parallel ladder of success at the family bar, drawing attention to myself and hiding behind the quest for money, recognition and status. In that driven lifestyle there was no space for a proper marriage.

  And, never mind dragons, what character from one of Sunil’s stories would best represent me? A snake? By the end of our marriage Penelope and I just tipped as much rubbish as we could into each other’s trash can despite casting ourselves as belonging to the beautiful people of the legal world. A couple who, for the last five years that we were together, set a target for a combined income of £500,000 p.a. and more than achieved it, each year. It isn’t difficult for two ambitious lawyers without children. In the quiet of the night I disliked myself intensely, and for very good reason; so why should she have liked me?

  Well, what meaningful enlightenment occurred to end that relationship, our marriage of eighteen years?

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ blasted my way from Penelope’s fiery lips as I went into the kitchen/dining room in our Chelsea home that night after I eventually got home from the concert, set fair to play the well-rehearsed role of the naughty child. Her parents were still there. Tom had plainly been drinking and Jane, his miserable wife, looked suitably miserable; this was to be one of the rare occasions when she would be allowed to drive Tom’s immaculately kept light blue Jaguar car and she was drinking water from a cheap glass, while the two others drank wine from the decent wine glasses. The house stank of the smoke from Tom’s foul cigarettes. Nobody else smoked.

  ‘Chambers,’ I must have lied in reply and probably added something like: ‘Where else?’ in counter-attack because the evening fell apart very quickly after that. It was plain that Penelope, who had the next day off, had drunk buckets, never mind glasses, of wine and that always meant trouble. It also meant that she was easy to alienate (by which I mean lob in a few conversational hand grenades and watch the explosions) but, after an evening spent at the concert, I wanted nothing to do with the intensity of a drunken spat. Penelope and her father met infrequently but, when they did, would often drink like for like as the conversation became more and more driven by alcohol. I never got involved with their sessions, as they called them - it would have been like throwing myself into a den of cannibals with the motif ‘Sunday lunch for two’ on my T-shirt.

  Swiftly on the heels of the ‘you’re late’ exchange came the ‘you’re a selfish bastard as well’ speech and, amongst the spitting venom it also contained words which, when ethically cleansed, went something like this: ‘Well it’s Dad’s birthday, in case you had forgotten, and I was hoping that on this of all nights you would not be late. We had planned to give Dad a nice family dinner.’ Tom graciously told me it did not matter and told me to sit down and have a drink and some food. Plainly he was keen to launch into another tedious round of legal stories which I would have avoided if I could, but Penelope was hanging on his every word and nobody escaped the Demi-God of monologues, Tom, that easily.

  After about half an hour he was in full flow, speaking with his patrician voice out of the side of his mouth and revealing his rotting and nicotine-stained teeth. I had heard his stories many times before and was trying to get some warmed-up food down my throat. Jane was getting agitated about the amount that he was drinking. I knew what was coming and it occurred over the birthday cake when Jane had the audacity to interrupt him and finally managed to get a word in, albeit very much edgeways and only after she and I had tried to clear the table.

  ‘Stop fussing.’ Bless Tom. He always came in bang on cue.

  ‘Shall I light the birthday cake?’ That was the small match that Jane struck and with it followed a very big fire.

  ‘Couldn’t eat another thing and, may I remind you, I’m not a child. What do I want a bloody birthday cake for?’

  Oh Tom, I can think of a reply or two to that question. Tempting but no – I didn’t say it.

  ‘I went to a lot of trouble to make that cake.’

  Jane went, bearing her misery like a medal, to get the cake out of the tin in which she had brought it. She put it on to a
plate. It was a sponge cake and had obviously shifted in the tin while being transported as the top was slightly squashed and the cake was out of shape.

  ‘You’re kidding...I am not eating that.’ Tom then pushed the plate with the cake on it away from himself in disgust. I can remember thinking ‘that’s precisely why they call you Tosser Tom.’ It was Jennifer who had first told me about his nickname.

  ‘You are always so ungrateful,’ Jane whimpered.

  ‘And you are just pathetic,’ Tom poured himself another glass of red wine.

  ‘I would love a piece of cake.’ That was my entry into the exchange. I hoped to bolster Jane and was pissed off about Tom wanking over the conversation.

  My efforts did not work at all. ‘Shut up, Simon.’ Enter Penelope, wearing full battle gear. Tom took a large swig out of his wine glass and just looked away. That’s when the evening degenerated into Tom being sullen, Penelope being arsey and drunk, me being righteous in Jane’s defence and Jane being even more miserable than she was before, if that is possible.

  ‘Come on Tom, it’s time I drove you home.’ Jane was now in coping with drunken husband mode in which she plainly had a first-class degree. The cake sat smug and untouched on the table, its job done.

  ‘Give me the car keys Tom and get your coat,’ Jane said, taking control.

  Tom threw the car keys down on the table. ‘Take the things. I just hope your driving is better than your cake making.’ Bastard! He then stumbled towards the lavatory and urinated loudly while Jane collected their coats.

  When Tom emerged Jane tried to help him put on his coat but he swept her aside, lit another cigarette and said ‘Just get in the bloody car would you.’ Jane turned and said a miserable ‘bye and thanks for the meal’ before escorting Tom through the door that I held open for them. Exeunt Tosser Tom and not so Jaunty Jane; I never saw them again – thank you, fortune. I imagine that Tom would say the same about my absence from his life. Now, if I held the door open for him he would probably mutter ‘you’re a puff’ to me as he went through it.