Dreams of Rivers and Seas Read online

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Helen told him. ‘I have the clinic. I have my patients.’

  ‘I’m glad. We’ll come and visit.’ He meant Elaine.

  ‘You didn’t appear to like Kulwant very much,’ his mother said.

  ‘Oh no, he was nice. Just that it drives me crazy to think I’m sitting in a restaurant in the heart of the subcontinent eating whatever spicy stuff it was with a man in a bright green turban and all he wants to talk about is whether Harry was the butler’s son and did Charles have the balls to murder Di.’

  ‘So what did you want to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ John laughed. ‘The colour of his turban maybe. Are the colours symbolic or something?’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask?’

  At this point John pulled a couple of coins from his pocket to get rid of two little boys who had been tugging at his sleeves. At once, a dozen more appeared. Poorly lit, the street was still busy. So many people seemed to be carrying things, in their arms, on their heads, with carts and bicycles, as if life were an endless to and fro of bulky packages. Many more squatted on the kerb. Helen shooed the boys away.

  ‘I didn’t want to offend,’ John said. ‘You know? I’m never sure what I can ask and what I can’t.’

  ‘Kulwant is busy arranging the marriage of his daughter,’ Helen said. ‘Unfortunately, the girl damaged a knee just when everything seemed settled. She was getting off a bus in traffic and a motorbike hit her. Quite near here, actually. They had to use the money they’d saved for the wedding to pay for her operation. These things aren’t free here. So now the groom’s family has turned cool.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all John could think to say. ‘I thought they’d stopped arranging marriages.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Helen stopped on the kerb and waved for a taxi.

  ‘How come the London trip, then, if he’s short of money?’

  ‘Financed by the drug companies, so that he’ll prescribe the right things, to those who can afford them of course. If my patients only got what they could afford, they’d never be treated at all.’

  Mother and son were silent on the drive back to their apartment, but when they were settled in the sitting room, John at last said: ‘I was hoping to see Dad, tomorrow, before the funeral.’

  Helen had gone to sit at her place at the room’s big table. She sighed. ‘I knew you’d want to, but I had the coffin sealed this morning.’

  After a short silence, John tried: ‘Can’t they open it?’

  His mother looked at her boy. The young man was so well made, with his grey, wide-set eyes, his soft thick hair. She sighed. ‘It’s not a nice sight, John. Best think of him as he was.’

  ‘I’m not a child,’ John protested.

  ‘It’s been forty-eight hours now,’ Helen said. ‘And he’s not in a deep freeze. They usually do things right away here you know.’

  ‘Mum, I spend all my time studying the difference between live cells and dead cells. We’re in the same business.’

  His mother didn’t reply.

  John turned to the window. ‘How come it happened so quickly?’

  ‘There were metastases.’

  ‘So why didn’t he fly back to England?’

  ‘You know how he was, John.’

  The young man felt thwarted. He had imagined himself sympathising with his mother. She would share with him how the end had been. His father would have left a message of some kind, some words for him to mull over. They would look at photographs together. Dad’s had been a rich life, full of travel and ideas. They would feel consoled and close and talk about the future. Instead, the son felt frustrated, even angry. He walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out a Coke and went to sit on the sofa opposite the television.

  ‘You remembered the Cokes,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘How could I forget?’ she smiled. ‘Tell me about yourself, John. How’s the thesis going?’

  ‘Pretty well finished,’ he said. ‘But the thesis is a detail compared with the research itself. It’s a whole new approach to TB.’

  ‘And this girl?’

  ‘Elaine?’ He softened. ‘She’s fine. Looking for her first acting jobs.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope this time,’ his mother said.

  John had a way of being left by pretty girlfriends. His mother would smile wryly. John didn’t reply.

  ‘And you finish when?’

  ‘If things in the lab go well, this spring.’

  ‘After which?’

  ‘They’ll take me on for the project we’re doing.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m the best.’

  His mother watched him. ‘Don’t you think it might be an idea to get some experience first? Often it helps your research if you’ve seen a few things. There are plenty of TB patients to study here, if you’re interested. You know your father …’

  ‘Mum,’ John shook his head. ‘In the field I’m in, just to understand all the information you need to make even the tiniest step forward takes a lifetime. You have to specialise, specialise, specialise. There’s no time to fool around. And it’s done in the lab, not looking at patients. You don’t need to see the sufferers.’

  They sat in silence, Helen behind the big table, John with his leg over the arm of the sofa, swirling his Coke round in its can as if it were cognac. Very soon, he knew, she was going to get up and say goodnight. All his life his mother had preferred to sit at table rather than in an armchair or on the sofa. Wherever they lived, one end of the sitting-room table would have her papers and correspondence, more recently her laptop, a couple of magazines: Medical Digest, BMA News and Quarterly. It was as if Helen James created a little office or nest of her own within the larger nest of the home.

  And in the past, of course, Albert would have been present too, listening over and over to his audio recordings, watching the videos he had made, writing his interminable notes. When she wasn’t in the clinic, when he wasn’t off on his researches, it had been rare for the two of them not to be in the same room. They discussed his ideas. Dad was the one who had the ideas, sitting on the floor usually, sorting through piles of old tapes and books and notes. The whole house was Albert’s office, and his kitchen and bedroom. He drew no boundaries.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he would say, and then they would argue some hypothesis back and forth – they rarely agreed – getting quite worked up sometimes, until she would get to her feet – she was a tall, graceful, angular woman – put aside a book that she hadn’t really been reading, or a letter that hadn’t quite got written, and announce that she was going to bed: ‘I don’t know about anybody else,’ she would say, ‘but this old girl needs to be fresh for the clinic in the morning.’ She needed energy, she said, for her patients and their diseases. She had lives to save. It wasn’t for the likes of her – but she was smiling – to spend her days idly videoing other people’s conversations.

  Afterwards, his father would sit up for another hour and more, or perhaps for half the night, playing and replaying the same four or five minutes of video, a conversation he had filmed, in the market, at the bank, in the hospital, at a religious ceremony, often in languages he didn’t understand. And as he watched he would say, ‘Ha!’ Or, ‘No! No, it’s not that,’ taking no notice at all of his son, never explaining quite what it was he was after or up to. It was a situation that had allowed John to get away with a great deal over the years.

  ‘Well, I’m off to bed,’ Helen James announced abruptly. She stood up. ‘To be honest, John, I’ve had a difficult couple of months. I need to get my strength back. And we’re short of staff at the moment.’

  Her son stood up to embrace her. As he recalled, the places his mother worked in had always been short of staff. ‘Didn’t Dad say anything for me?’ he asked.

  Her eyes flickered away from his.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he tried. He wasn’t sure if he was asking too much. ‘Some advice, some message?’

  Helen James embraced her son
and held him tightly. It was the first real contact. Each was looking over the other’s shoulder. ‘Your dad was ill,’ she whispered. John pressed his cheek against hers. ‘A couple of days before the end he said, “If John has time to come out, make sure he visits at least the Sufi tombs, and if possible takes the trip to Agra to see the Taj.”’

  ‘Oh God, that’s so Dad!’ John laughed, but he almost cried too. ‘How can I? I’m leaving Thursday, Mum. Otherwise all the lab work will get behind.’

  ‘Two days is plenty,’ she said. She stood back and held him at arm’s length. There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling. ‘You hardly need to hang about here with your old mum, do you?’

  When his mother had gone to bed, John flicked through the TV channels. Why did I get so heated about Charles and Camilla? he wondered. He felt wide awake now and uneasy. What would happen at the lab if he wasn’t there to keep track of things? He was the only person who was always present.

  Going to the spare room, he took out his laptop and scrolled through lists of readings they had been taking. ‘How did the audition go?’ he texted Elaine. ‘Everything okay, here. Mum making a big show of being in control.’

  The girl did not reply. John pulled out a copy of a journal on communications theory. There was no wall space without its bookshelves and every book and magazine was covered with his father’s scrawl. Some words were underlined, others crossed out. The comments in the margin spilled over onto the page. Not all of them appeared to have much to do with the text they had been written beside. On an article entitled ‘Cybernetics and Invertebrates’, Albert James had written: ‘START AND END WITH BREATHING.’ And then beneath that, in a tiny, heavily slanted scribble: ‘drink every evening ceremonial substitute for thing that hasn’t happened. But what thing?’

  John shook his head. It was the kind of distraction that had always prevented his father from producing anything concrete. Mother at least changed people’s lives day by day with her diagnoses and medicines. Midway through an article on left-lobe anomalies in chronic schizophrenics, he found the note: ‘Not to KNOW anything! Only observations, stories.’

  Again John frowned. Perhaps his father’s real problem, he thought, had been his difficulty working together in a team, with other people, towards a shared goal, something essential these days given the sheer amount of spadework that was required to get to grips with anything. You had to be a link in a larger chain, contribute one thing, whereas Dad was always out on his own, trying to solve the whole world himself.

  Not properly tired, John lay on the small bed, waiting for sleep. It was impossible to think usefully of his work without being in the lab. Breaking down the smallest particles and isolating even smaller ones, to manipulate them, even the most unimaginably tiny coils of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, every phospholipid: that was the way to progress. That was the way to put new drugs in the hands of people like his mother. Not scribbling queer thoughts over other people’s publications. John felt uneasy. It was frustrating that he hadn’t seen Dad’s body. What did I come here for after all?

  Suddenly he was dreaming. It was a troubled sleep. He was walking down the same broad avenues he had walked this morning, but wearing one ordinary, really rather elegant leather sandal, while the toe of his other foot was crammed into a tiny, white, child’s shoe, a little girl’s shoe, it seemed, which he was dragging along on the pavement because there was no way his foot would ever actually get inside it. And what irritated him enormously – it was an angry sleep – was that when the Indian man in the airport shop had told him that they only had one right-footed sandal in his size and that the best thing was to take that together with this strange little white feminine thing for his left foot, he had actually accepted this stupid solution. How dumb can you be! If there’s one thing you need two of, John, and the same size, it’s shoes! ‘Symmetry!’ Dad always used to say: ‘At the heart of life is symmetry!’ And shuffling along the broken pavement among the beggars and with car horns blaring and rickshaw drivers soliciting, he was torn between going back to the shop to protest, because he had actually paid £17 for the things – £17 of my parents’ money! – and setting off instead to the Sufi tombs where he was to see his father’s body for the last time.

  ‘John!’ A voice whispered. ‘John. Time to get up.’ His mother was shaking his shoulder. The funeral was at ten.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ELAINE HAD REMINDED John he must take a black suit. John didn’t have a suit. He had dug out a dark blue jacket. Elaine had helped him pack. He didn’t have a tie either. ‘I haven’t worn a tie since school,’ he said. He had laughed. But dressing now, he felt anxious. It would have been right to wear a tie for his father’s funeral. Should he ask Mum if there was one in the flat? The hesitation surprised him. When did I ever worry about dress? Dad never cared. His father had scandalised many a prestigious audience by turning up to deliver lectures in an old tee-shirt. He always wore the same clothes. It was family legend, more memorable really than the kind of things he had talked about.

  How had they dressed Dad for his coffin? John wondered. The thought stopped him. He breathed deeply. In his old jeans, with the zip that never stayed up? When he went through to the living room he found his mother wearing a very formal black dress. This too he hadn’t foreseen. She had even found a black hat. Perhaps bonnet was the word. ‘Am I all right?’ he asked. ‘How do you mean?’ Helen James was putting papers in her handbag. She hadn’t noticed how her son was dressed. Nor had there been any mention of breakfast. ‘The driver is waiting,’ she said.

  Only in the car did it occur to John to wonder what kind of funeral his mother had arranged. They were in India. He had no idea what an Indian funeral was like. He had never thought about his father’s funeral. But it wouldn’t be Indian, surely? ‘Have you invited a lot of people?’ he asked. Helen James seemed distant. She held her back erect. ‘I wondered if there might have been an obituary somewhere,’ he went on. It was still in the back of John’s mind that he might insist on seeing the body at the undertaker’s. He felt it was his right and he mustn’t forego it.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she asked.

  The car had stopped outside a place John imagined must be a hardware store but it turned out to be the funeral parlour. There were cars and autorickshaws double-parked and his mother jumped out and crossed the deep gutter to speak to a rather distinguished elderly man in a loose double-breasted black jacket, but rather incongruously wearing a yellow woollen hat and yellow gloves. It wasn’t that cold. John saw her fussing with her handbag and pulling out papers, then rummaging to look for something else. They were gestures that took him back to childhood. He was aware of feeling simultaneously sorry for his mother, being widowed so early like this, and intimidated too. What was the point in my coming, if she didn’t want me to see him? She saw death almost daily in her work of course. Then he realised four men were struggling to squeeze between the double-parked cars with a coffin swaying over their heads. A hearse, dilapidated yet oddly American-looking, had come round the corner and stopped in a third row, blocking the road, pumping out fumes. A din of horns began. A woman with a large basket on her head threaded the traffic. Drivers were shouting at each other while the four men struggled to get the coffin between the parked cars. The bulky, lacquered box seemed extremely cumbersome. Could he really ask them to open it?

  ‘How much will it all cost?’ John enquired when his mother climbed back in and slammed the door. The hearse was moving off ahead. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said again. John couldn’t tell if she was suffering or just distracted. ‘I was wondering if it was expensive,’ he repeated. ‘Everything’s expensive, dear,’ she said.

  They drove through the streets following the hearse in the always chaotic traffic. ‘We’re going to a Protestant cemetery to the north of town,’ Helen James now explained. ‘It’s an old military place; a lot of the expats and local Christians use it. They’ve just added a modern crematorium because they’re running out of burial space.’
She frowned at a ramshackle block of low, brick buildings thronged with women milling around fruit carts. ‘The Christians here are rather down on cremation,’ she went on. ‘They tend to insist on those parts of the Bible that suggest the body needs to remain intact until the day of resurrection. But probably the real hitch is that cremation is a Hindu tradition. It would be easier for the Christians to adopt it, if the Hindus did something else, if you see what I mean.’ John recognised his father’s kind of reasoning.

  ‘And the funeral will be at the cemetery?’ he said.

  ‘There is no funeral,’ Helen replied. ‘As such.’

  John fretted. This was not how his father’s death should have been. But all his childhood had been lived in the knowledge that other families were integrated in the world in a way the Jameses were not. The Jameses were on the move, with a mission, always studying and helping wherever they went, but never really part of things. It was good when it came to impressing girls with the different places you had grown up. ‘I don’t know how you can settle for Maida Vale after the childhood you’ve had,’ Elaine would shake her head. She herself had protective parents in Finchley; they were dead against her being an actress. John wanted to text her now, but it seemed inappropriate to pull his phone out sitting beside his mother as they followed Father’s hearse through the clogged roads. A girl was walking in the gutter beside them, rolling a used car tyre with extended arms.

  Apart from some exotic vegetation, the cemetery was remarkably English-looking: overgrown and ill-kept. The gravestones seemed positively Victorian with grubby angels holding scrolled tablets bearing elaborate black lettering. Even the weather had a raw and misty English feel, though the crows were definitely larger than London crows. As the car passed the main gate, the birds rose in a flapping storm, circling the graves, cawing so loudly they smothered the sound of horns on the road outside. Then John noticed two or three cloaked figures, apparently asleep among the tombstones. Here and there, on their haunches, women hacked at the rough grass with sickles. There were patches of broken red earth, abandoned sheets of corrugated iron.