‘Heavy stuff like what?’ I asked.
‘Life and joy are born of folly, which opens us to the infinite/I prostrate myself before the wisdom and love of our holy mother. Stuff like that,’ Billie said. ‘Anyway, whether it was true or not that our father did not want to leave India, his health deteriorated quickly in London, and after two or three years he was not working any more. He was older than our mother, but not yet of retirement age when he stopped working. He was fifty-nine, which is no age to die these days. Look at Aunt Holly, and both my mother’s parents are in their eighties.’
‘What was he ill with?’ I asked.
‘His heart. One day, when I was five, he had a stroke while he was working in the garden. I was in the garden too, playing with a toy watering can and plastic cups. I heard him make a noise, and when I looked up he was on his knees. I don’t remember what happened after that, I must have cried out or run in to get my mother. I don’t know. I remember the several terrible weeks in hospital that followed for him.
‘For a long time, that was how I remembered him,’ she continued after a silence during which, I imagined, she relived those memories. ‘I remember those miserable hospital visits, all of us crying while he lay drugged and unaware. Later other memories came back, but even now I sometimes have to work hard to repel that sight of him in a hospital bed. Do you know what I mean? When an image or a moment comes out of nowhere and overpowers you repeatedly? He called me Billie, and even though I preferred Bindiya, I used the name he called me as a way of being loyal to him. I think I was a sentimental child.’
‘Not any more?’ I asked. She was close to tears.
‘Not as much,’ she said. ‘Anyway, everybody called me Billie, and I did not think it would be that easy to get them to change. My eldest brother hated his English name and never uses it now, but he lives in Madrid where he is able to train a whole new set of acquaintances to use the name he prefers. He works as a car designer there, did I tell you that?’
‘Yes, you did,’ I said. ‘What does your other brother do?’
‘He is a surveyor with a property agency, Hope & Borough. They deal with multi-million-pound properties. Have you heard of them?’ Billie asked, looking at me expectantly.
‘No, I haven’t heard of them,’ I said.
‘They’re famous.’
It was late afternoon when we got to my flat. That was how we spent almost every Saturday that summer, we went somewhere for the day, then back to my flat to make love, and then sometimes we went out for the evening or ate at home. She would not stay the night. ‘I love being here with you,’ she said. ‘I love being with you all day, and I would love to be with you all night. But not yet. While I live at home with my mother I have to return every night. You would understand what I mean if you knew her. I couldn’t leave her at home on her own.’
She said: ‘My mother was originally from Bombay, as it used to be called, but her father was moved to Delhi on a civil service posting. That was where she met my father several years later. My mother worked for Canon as well.
‘The move to London soon after I was born was difficult for her. She was brought up with servants and was used to having them to do the chores. She was used to having relatives and friends around as well as their children, who were company for her own. In London she had to do everything for herself and by herself, and she never really overcame that first recoil she felt from the city and the life it forced on her, especially as it quickly took her husband away. She became depressed and shrill after he died. I am using that word deliberately, shrill,’ said Billie, and then paused for me to take this in. ‘When I was a child, it shamed me that my mother was so shrill. I thought her voice penetrated the walls of all the houses in the street and that the neighbours laughed at us for being so ridiculous. I did not know that she was depressed and lonely and in a panic.’
‘Why did she not return to India?’ I asked. Billie looked at me for a long second, and I knew she was thinking: Why didn’t you? Why are you still here then? ‘I meant, did she think of returning to India.’
Billie shrugged. ‘It was complicated,’ she said. ‘The house in Acton now belonged to her, all her children were at school and settled, as she saw it. Their daddy had chosen Acton because it was not yet a ghetto and its schools were still safe. If she returned to India she would be taking the children away from what their father wanted for them. Also, if she returned to India, she would have to move back in with her parents and she did not want to do that. In the end, it was her duty to be loyal to our daddy’s plans for us to go to school here and attend university.
‘She became religious after he died. She talked about him so much when I was a child,’ Billie said. ‘Marathon sessions of daddy-talk which actually did not feel oppressive. It was a way of getting to know him in such detail that he felt real to me, as if he could walk into the room at any minute. It did not feel oppressive until later, when my mother tried to blackmail us at various moments to get us to do what she wanted for us.’
Billie was now the centre of my days. Sometimes we met after work mid-week, but mostly we waited for the weekend. Saturday morning came to have such a magical excitement that I could not contain my happiness as I made ready to meet her. This sense of joy rested on something fragile and insecure. If she was late, my thoughts became cloudy with worry that she was never coming to see me again, or that she was putting off coming as long as possible because she was bored by the predictability of how we spent our time together. She was ashamed of me, of the work I did, of my lack of ambition, of my strangeness, my ordinariness, my blackness, my poverty. Then when she came, and smiled to see me, and held me so tightly and so long that I could not mistake the intensity of her pleasure in me, when she came and held me like that, the darkness evaporated and I cried with happiness. She knew this about me, how tensely and expectantly I waited for her, but she did not know the vulnerability that lay just below it. She took it for the eagerness of my desire and it made her smile to think how avid I was for her.
Towards the end of autumn of that year, when the pavements were covered with wet leaves and the parks were bedraggled and windblown, and we had been together for seven months, Billie stayed with me for the weekend for the first time. She had told her mother that she was going away to stay with a university friend. She also told her mother that she was thinking of leaving home to live in a place of her own, sharing with another woman from work.
‘My mother cannot understand this wish, and when I told her she looked bewildered at first then she looked pained as if I had said something … I don’t know … obscenely unloving,’ Billie said. ‘I told her just before I left to come here, and hurried out before she could say much in reply. I thought I’d leave it for her to turn over in her mind but I’ll have to do a lot more talking when I return.’
In the following months, Billie reported daily heated arguments and pained silences and endless promises she made to her mother. Her brother Anand who was living at home intervened on her side. ‘I try to explain to her that’s how it is here. Everyone leaves home and sets up on their own. Everybody wants to have their own life and to have control of it. She understands that, of course, but she pretends to find it strange because she cannot bear to be on her own. She would have us all at home if she could. It was the same when my brother Suresh wanted to move to Madrid.’
It did not shock me that her mother was so reluctant to let Billie leave home. I could imagine my mother being just as puzzled by the desire to leave for what to her would seem like no reason at all. Even though we had been seeing each other for several months – I love these sweet English euphemisms, seeing each other – I had still not met any members of her family. This was not a concern to me at first. I had not met any family members of any of the women I had known before. If one asked me to join her for a family occasion I said politely that I would rather not. I did not desire that kind of intimacy. With Billie it was different. She was planning to move in and her mother and her brother
would be reassured to know something of who she was moving in with. She made light of the matter whenever I mentioned it. ‘We are a long way from any moving yet,’ she said. ‘But you will, you’ll meet them.’
The story she was telling her family was that she was looking to move in with a woman friend from work, and my appearance in their midst would throw some doubt on that. I could not help thinking that the reason she was not allowing the meeting was because she knew they would disapprove of me. I could think of several reasons why they might do so but if Billie was seriously planning to move in, it seemed best to me to come clean and talk them round because she could not hide me forever. She shook her head when I said this and I knew there was trouble ahead.
Despite my apprehension Billie did make the move. One weekend she came with a suitcase as if she was going away for a few days and stayed for the whole week. She went home for the weekend with her empty suitcase and returned on Sunday with some more of her things. In this way she moved herself in slowly without quite moving out of her home. I loved the intimacies of living with her: cutting an extra set of keys, adjusting the central heating times to suit her, hanging her underwear on the drier, shopping together, going to bed with her every night and waking up beside her, making love, sometimes first thing and last thing every day. She browsed my bookshelves but rarely took down a book. I was methodically going through Chekhov at the time and tried to interest her too.
‘After all, we met through Chekhov,’ I reminded her.
‘No, I don’t really enjoy reading,’ she said. ‘I went to see the play because I studied it at school and someone at the bank was raving about the brilliance of the production, and Anand was around one evening when I was talking about it to my mother and he got me a ticket. He likes to do these generous surprises. So I thought I might as well go and see it, and when I did, there he was, my lover, waiting beside me.’
Her mother never asked to visit the flat or meet her flat-mate from the bank, although she apparently issued a vague invitation should Billie wish to invite her. Nevertheless, Billie worked on an emergency procedure that would enable us hurriedly to remove all evidence of my presence in the flat, and somehow or other hide me as well. It made me laugh to see her practising because I always found some giveaway that she missed. ‘What’s this?’ I would ask, holding up the criminal evidence: a size 10 shoe, a belt, underpants and socks in the dirty laundry basket.
‘That’s cheating,’ she said about the laundry basket.
‘Why’s that? You don’t think your mother would check your laundry basket? It’s the first place I would go to if I wanted to find out who you were sharing with,’ I said.
After several months of subterfuge, I finally met Anand when he dropped Billie off after a visit home. He showed no surprise when we met and must have known all the important facts beforehand. Billie had taken him into her confidence but had still not said anything to her mother. Anand shook hands and smiled non-committally, a soft-spoken, well-built man with a mass of curly auburn hair. I imagined people looked twice when he introduced himself as Anand because he looked so unlike one. His eyes, which were grey, moved quickly round the room when he came into the flat, adding up and calculating like a surveyor and a brother, I supposed. He refused to stop but he gave us a friendly wave as he drove off in his Mercedes.
So I became a secret she shared with her brother, who found the deception difficult, so Billie said. He rarely visited us and arranged to meet Billie in town for lunch when he wanted to see her. Apart from this half-secret matter of where she lived and with whom, everything worked well for us. I loved touching her and I knew that I would never forget the feel of her unblemished skin. Is that how a lover’s skin always feels? One night I started to tell her about my mother whom I had neglected in my absorption with Billie, but she fell asleep before I had got past the way she used to talk over glossy American dramas as we watched TV. We had been on a long day out on the coast, and we had wine with our meal, which Billie could not take much of. She remembered the next day: ‘You were saying something about your parents and I fell asleep.’
‘I was only talking about my mother, how she used to have this annoying habit of talking over what was going on on the TV, kind of rewriting the script,’ I said, and tried to leave it at that.
‘No,’ said Billie. ‘Tell me more.’
‘When I was seven my Baba left us,’ I said, and realised I had never said that to anyone. ‘That’s all. I don’t know why he left.’
‘Tell me,’ she said, holding me as I made to turn away from her. So I told her, but still not fully, and she tugged and pulled until I told her more and more. I told her all I could, which was still not everything: about my father’s silence, about the lunch basket, about my mother’s secret visits with her lover, about Uncle Amir, about Munira, about my mother’s sadness. ‘Her eyes sometimes had a blankness as if they were turned inside out and were gazing inwards, and sometimes suddenly she sucked in her lips as if she had taken a blow to her body. I don’t know what memories did this to her and why afterwards she sat in silent despair. But the moment always passed and after it eased away her eyes would quicken again with truculence and anxiety and amusement. When I asked her what it was all about she said things sometimes came back to her.’
‘What things came back to her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She did not like to talk like that about herself. Something broke in my father after he left us. He did not say much after that, or do much. He lived like a hermit in a room behind a shop. Neither of them wanted to talk much.’
‘So that is the darkness in you,’ said Billie after I was silent for a while. ‘I knew there was something you were keeping out of reach.’
I felt humbled in my need, a betrayer, hawking my agony for her sympathy, but she said no, it was a line we had to cross. You have to talk about the things that cause you pain.
At some point in the summer another line came up. Billie’s mother decided that she wanted to visit the flat, to see where her daughter lived. Billie went into emergency procedure mode and the following day, which was the one appointed for the visit, I was sent off for a long walk. It was pointless because I did not see how anyone, let alone a mother, could walk into our flat and think that two women lived there. The second bedroom had boxes and books and a desk and a single bed we had cleverly put in there to fool Billie’s mother that a co-tenant lived in it, but it was unmistakably not the bedroom of a woman friend who also worked in the bank. When I returned from my marathon walk I found Billie sitting in front of the TV with the set switched off.
‘She wants to meet you,’ she said when I asked her how it had gone. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘It sounds like an order,’ I said. She looked at me angrily but did not say a word. ‘Was it horrible?’ I asked, trying to make amends.
‘What do you think?’ she said.
Her mother had come with Anand and after a brief tour of the flat had said, He reads a lot of books. In the interrogation that followed Billie was forced into a full confession. It was bound to happen sooner or later, I said. We’ll go and see her tomorrow and then work out how we go on from there. I tried to get Billie to tell me what made her so pessimistic but she would not. Don’t worry, I said, I’ll charm the old biddy, but she snorted and told me I did not understand anything about families. On the way to Acton the next day Billie still looked doubtful and I arrived at their house full of dread. Anand let us in, with a nonchalant smile and a handshake for me and a kiss for his sister, and led us into the living room. Billie’s mother was sitting on the sofa, a small smile of welcome on her face, just as one might expect.
‘Salim,’ Billie said, introducing me, and it sounded as if someone had shouted an obscenity in a sacred place. I stepped forward to shake hands. Billie’s mother was around sixty, I guessed, her face a little fleshier than Billie’s but the features similar. She was dressed in a sari with lines of brown, saffron and cream and wore large tinted glasses, a friendly elegant w
oman who showed no sign of turning shrill. She patted the sofa beside her and said Billie’s name. In the meantime Anand ushered me to a chair by the window and retreated to another one on the other side of the sofa, deeper into the room. No doubt the plan was to keep me in full view. Billie and Anand did most of the talking, telling work stories and chatting about this and that. Sometimes I was drawn in with a question but nothing challenging, an invitation to offer an opinion or to provide some inconsequential information. Billie’s mother said almost nothing but followed everything with a smile and a benign expression in her eyes, even when they fell on me. It was looking good, I thought, and tried to make eye contact with Billie but she only briefly acknowledged me.
I had expected smouldering accusing stares and acid questions about my parents, my work, my religion, but the nearest it came to that was when I looked at Billie’s mother while Anand was talking and found her gazing at me with surmise. She caught my eye and smiled and then turned towards her son. In due course the cakes and tea came out and after a visit of two uneventful hours or so, we set off for Putney.
‘I like your mum,’ I said. ‘She looks so elegant. I can see where you get your looks.’
Billie shook her head, worrying at something she was not ready to talk about yet. I guessed she was going over the visit in her own mind. When she was ready to speak about it she said the visit had gone surprisingly well but something in her tone made me think she was saying that to hold me off. The next day she called me from work to say that she was summoned home to Acton that evening.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked. I didn’t want to ask if it was about me, but of course it must be.
Gravel Heart Page 15
