Dreams of Rivers and Seas Read online

  If only Albert really were beside me, she thought. Those were the moments she had felt strong and, in his strange way, loved, the moments she felt truly herself in opposition to him; not when she had to pit herself against lesser men who only fought for pleasure and power. I went with other men in order to go back to Albert, she murmured. How strange. ‘You were a god,’ she told him ‘that’s the truth.’ Always watching, always turning a divinely blind eye. Helen remembered closing his lids for the last time. ‘Seeing for both of us is hard,’ she murmured.

  She stepped out into the rain of the yard. She would like to shower in it. ‘I want to dissolve in the river,’ Albert had said. The tide carries off the day. He had mentioned some dreams but she hadn’t listened. He didn’t want her to listen to everything. Dreams of flood and creation, dreams of water rising, the slate washed clean. She turned her face to the sky and the chill rain told her how inflamed and tense her cheeks were.

  ‘Dr James?’

  ‘Souk.’

  ‘I have been looking for you everywhere. The young man is coughing, Doctor.’

  Helen shut the door on the crows and hurried back into the ward. Than-Htay was lying on his side, knees pulled to his chest as he coughed convulsively into wads of paper. Helen felt his forehead, checked his pulse. The skin was yellow, the eyes bloodshot. ‘I’ll put him in my office,’ she said. ‘Or he’ll keep them all awake and frighten the younger ones.’

  The nurse was surprised. ‘How will you rest, Doctor?’

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ Helen said. ‘I’m not sleepy. I’ll find a mat.’

  ‘Than-Htay,’ she said in a low soft voice. She wrapped a blanket round the boy, put his pillow in his hand, found his slippers and walked him slowly down the corridor to her office. She was aware, as she supported his arm, of the frailness of his shoulders and the smell of illness on his damp skin. She was aware of having more time and attention for this sick boy than she had had for her own son, though in return she never got a single word. Perhaps it was because of that. The boy was just his illness, his silence. She was drawn to that.

  In her office she unrolled the thin mattress she used for night duty. He was sitting on the edge of a chair, shivering violently. ‘Lie down, Than-Htay,’ she said. She had to release his pillow from a clenched fist.

  He lay there trembling and coughing. Helen turned out the light. For a few moments she watched, then kicked off her clogs and lay down beside him. Only now did she realise she was wet from the rain. Her doctor’s coat was drenched.

  The mattress was narrow and there was hardly room for both. The boy was in a stupor of fever. All the same he suddenly wriggled round and embraced her blindly, hugged her soaking clothes.

  She was face to face with him, embracing his bony, adolescent body and the disease that sweated from it. Who is he, really? Helen wondered. Who did he imagine was beside him?

  Her cheek was against his cheek. His breath was bad. Well, she had had more than one lover with bad breath. My own must smell of whisky, she thought. A hand clasped her fingers and as it did so she felt more powerfully moved than at any moment with Paul.

  Helen sighed deeply and tried just to be there for the boy, to be present. This is the suffering she has given her life to fighting: ‘An enemy that will never disappoint you,’ Albert had remarked, ‘by conceding defeat.’

  Albert is here in the shadows. Yes. ‘Our marriage is still not over,’ Helen whispered. ‘You kept it alive with your death.’

  Paul on the other hand had soon conceded defeat. Paul had agreed to do exactly as she suggested, and somehow that led her to start chattering, stupidly, stupidly unburdening herself. Her son always conceded defeat too and, again, when he did so, she always felt the urge to say things she mustn’t, to open her heart to him.

  Thank God she hadn’t spoken to him when he came for the funeral. There had been a moment.

  ‘I never will speak,’ Helen muttered, clasping the mute boy tight.

  She unbuttoned her doctor’s coat, slipped it off and drew Than-Htay against her skin. He was burning. She would never go to the places that must stay sacred and silent. She didn’t want to change. She would never say, Albert and I were only like this because of this or that trauma, because of this mother, this brother. No.

  ‘I don’t want to love again.’ That decision was made now. Rather Helen James would melt into this boy’s illness, his sick body and foul tubercular breath. Outside she could just hear the rain and the crows; she sensed the distant hubbub of the city and the pull of the river with its laundry wallahs and cremation fires.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  PAUL HAD EXPECTED the rain to ease, but it hadn’t. Thinking Elaine needed some distraction, he got the taxi to take them past India Gate, then up and down the parliament complex. Seen through smeared windows across a steady downpour, remote in its floodlit pomposity, the vast sandstone pile of the Raj seemed to be dissolving into the warm wet Indian night. Then they turned again and proceeded towards the old town via the ghats, the ancient taxi rattling and splashing on the uneven asphalt.

  ‘That’s the monument to Rajiv Gandhi,’ Paul pointed.

  The traffic was heavy and the rain sparkled slantwise in the illuminated air. More curious to Elaine were the bedraggled animals by the roadside, the men lighting fires under makeshift bivouacs. But even these sights held her attention only intermittently. After a few minutes she grabbed the older man’s wrist: ‘Do you think we should tell the police?’

  The girl’s hand was tense and alive and it was a pleasure for Paul to feel its grip on his skin. Sitting beside her in the taxi, he might have been travelling with any of a score of young women he had dated during his two marriages and since, all more or less Elaine’s age, all infinitely desirable.

  ‘I mean, really, he’s a missing person.’ Elaine was insisting. ‘Isn’t he? He walks out on everything, leaving a note with a false destination so nobody will go looking for him. The police should be told.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it with Helen tomorrow,’ Paul said. ‘Check out the dome on the left. The Jama Masjid, Delhi’s main mosque.’

  ‘What if he’s killed himself, though?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I know it’s stupid, but what if he’s done something desperate, because he thought I was cheating on him?’

  Paul reassured her. ‘People don’t do that, Elaine. Take it from me. They threaten to, but they never do. You know, I stayed with my second wife at least a year longer than I should because she kept saying she’d kill herself. Take us to the left, along the railway,’ he leaned forward to tell the driver – the car was reduced to a walking pace now – ‘then back through the side streets towards CP.’

  With or without umbrellas people were jostling through the traffic. Men were working to clear a huge billboard that the wind had brought down with all its scaffolding. The night was a din of horns and animated clutter.

  ‘Take a look at the pile to the right,’ Paul told Elaine. ‘The Red Fort. Moghul stuff. Huge.’

  But Elaine was not to be distracted. ‘His uncle did,’ she said dramatically.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘His uncle committed suicide. It runs in his family. I mean, why would he disappear and not answer a single message for weeks? He always answered messages. Even if only to argue. Maybe he’s been dead all this time.’

  ‘Elaine,’ Paul said firmly. ‘Don’t be so gruesome. It takes a pretty unusual mindset to want to die. Then a hell of a lot of courage actually to do it. I never knew anyone who did. In the end, it doesn’t matter how depressed they are, most people love life.’

  As he spoke these words, Paul realised that to all effects and purposes John’s father had also committed suicide. And he had done so, Paul felt sure, loving life and perhaps not depressed at all, or not in the ordinary sense of the term.

  ‘And even if he did do it,’ he went on, ‘just to look on the dark side, it wouldn’t be your fault, would it? I don’t want to be in
sensitive, I’m only saying, since other people’s decisions are beyond your command, it’s pointless to agonise. Right? Don’t torment yourself.’

  The driver looked over his shoulder. ‘I take you to craft emporium, sir? I think your daughter like jewellery? Only five minutes look. It is good for you, sir – rain is very heavy.’

  ‘No, it would be my fault,’ Elaine announced in a flat voice. ‘It would. It really would.’ She didn’t appear to hear what the driver had said. Looking out of the window she didn’t see the milling crowd, garish in neon, the curious clothes streaming with rain.

  ‘But why? How could it be?’

  ‘Very beautiful things in this emporium. Just five minutes look, sir.’

  ‘Because I was having an affair. I was cheating on him.’

  ‘Real pashmina, wooden carvings, very unusual. Silver earrings and necklaces.’

  Elaine had begun to cry. Paul caught the quiet shudder of her body. He took her hand and squeezed it as the taxi fought its way past the turn-off for Chandni Chowk, then accelerated towards Mukherji Marg.

  ‘No shopping tonight, I’m afraid.’ he told the driver.

  In an expensive bar right on Connaught Place, Elaine made an elaborate confession. Paul sat the girl in an alcove with candles and kept her supplied with small spicy candies and iced vodka. In the chiaroscuro of two nervous flames and twisting wax-smoke her breasts, under their tight black top, seemed even larger and, Paul thought, vibrant.

  ‘It would never have happened if John hadn’t been away,’ she told him. She had been feeling desperate at the time, about her career and so on, her lack of career, but somehow mischievous too. ‘Do you know? I’m different around John and then away from him. I change.’ Actually, she was rarely sure how she was feeling at all, Elaine said, or not exactly. She sighed. ‘Often I just don’t know.’

  Anyway, she’d gone to an audition. The nth. She’d been to so many. And she’d performed badly, she thought. Sometimes you do. The candidates were given a few routines to perform: mime a person discovering they are all-powerful, a woman who has just lost her baby, a boy putting on make-up – that was fun – a fanatic preparing for martyrdom.

  ‘There was a speech to read too, a sort of day-after scenario, with a lone survivor surveying the catastrophe.’ Elaine pouted. ‘God, I was terrible.’ She had been really surprised when the director’s secretary called her the following day.

  Paul listened. He enjoyed hearing people’s stories, girls’ stories that is. He enjoyed listening to their troubles. In the end he had never really done anything to seduce any of his women, nor really understood why they were attracted to him. He would listen to them; young women were almost the only people Paul did listen to. He would give an older man’s avuncular advice, perhaps drop hints of a fraught and complicated private life which he was nevertheless coping with. And somehow it always happened. They turned from their worries to him. If only briefly.

  Now, as Elaine described her first meeting with the Japanese director, the small man’s abrupt manner, his weird apartment – ‘black furniture and white carpets!’ – Paul tried to imagine what a volatile state of mind the English girl must be in: first she had taken this extremely rash decision to come to Delhi, a desperate decision, it seemed to him; she had survived a very long and very bumpy flight; then she had found her boyfriend wasn’t here after all, he had misled her; then she had been hastily ditched by the boy’s mother and passed onto an overweight but moderately handsome American who was now plying her with drink.

  She’s in a state, Paul told himself.

  Hanyaki had been very flattering that afternoon, Elaine said.

  ‘He kept saying I had something unusually fluid about me. Obviously, I was pleased. I mean, I’ve staked everything on making it as an actress. We talked for hours.’

  Elaine thought for a moment. ‘He’s a special man. Hanyaki. Very sophisticated. Knows everything. I love his accent. It’s so strong, he never really learned English properly and he just doesn’t care. I love how he doesn’t care. Anyway, it made me think how young John was. Too young for me. Not even a man really. The second time I saw him there was a bottle of champagne and I just thought, what the hell. I was in such a good mood because he said he’d give me the part. I was euphoric. Like I’d arrived.’

  Paul nodded understandingly, sipping his drink. He offered a cigarette and the girl accepted, though he could see at once she wasn’t a smoker. Eventually, he said: ‘However, the rehearsals didn’t go so well.’

  Elaine’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight. ‘Actually, I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I mean, I haven’t told anyone else, no one, and I don’t even know you.’

  Paul inhaled. ‘It’s because you don’t know me, obviously.’

  There was a short silence. Elaine fished an olive from her vodka. Paul watched her put it on her tongue.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well – how can I say it, it’s mad – the more passionate he was in bed, Hanyaki, and he was – he has a flat on Gloucester Place, if you know where that is – the more unpleasant he became at rehearsals. It was like two different people. He was so … I’ve never had sex like that. Well, I haven’t really had that many boyfriends. Miles better than John.’ She frowned. ‘John is a bit quick to be honest. Then he was horrible on stage, in front of the others. He was just unpleasant.’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘It made me frantic.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Paul reflected. ‘Perhaps he didn’t want the other actors to know you were his favourite.’

  ‘But they all knew! They knew we were going to bed. He didn’t hide it at all. On the contrary.’

  As she spoke, it occurred to Paul that this was just the kind of communication conundrum Albert James had loved to analyse. He shook his head. ‘So maybe he was angry with himself for mixing pleasure and work. He was reasserting his authority.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Elaine came out with a groan that appeared to come from deep in her stomach. ‘The fact is that the very day I started it, or rather the day before, John asked me to marry him.’

  Paul laughed. ‘Good one. So how did he find out? John, I mean.’

  ‘He saw Hanyaki put his arm round me when we were going into a pub. Or that’s what he says.’

  ‘And that’s all?’ Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘You denied it, I presume.’

  ‘Of course. Endlessly.’

  ‘So, John doesn’t really know anything, does he? An arm round the waist doesn’t mean anything. I could put my arm round you going out of here,’ Paul said, ‘or standing at the door looking at the rain, and somebody might see us and imagine all kinds of things, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. Nobody’s going to kill himself because he saw someone put an arm round your waist.’

  ‘No,’ Elaine agreed vaguely. With a deep sigh she added: ‘But he seemed to know. Really to know. He was very sure.’

  Paul glanced into her eyes. ‘And it didn’t occur to you to take this opportunity to leave him?’

  ‘John?’ She stared and frowned. ‘It did occur to me, yes. But, I don’t know, I really … I sort of like John. There’s something us when I’m with him. Then Hanyaki himself kept saying I’d be crazy to leave him, John, I mean. He said it was so unusual to find a young man with a strong vocation.’

  Again Paul smiled. How well he knew this terrain.

  ‘But now he is sending text messages from London begging you to go back.’

  He nodded at her shiny red phone which she kept on the table beside her elbow and snapped open and closed every few minutes.

  ‘Not for me!’ Elaine wailed. ‘For his play. We’re due to open the Saturday after next. In Hammersmith. And by the way, it’s terrible.’

  ‘The play? Who wrote it?’

  ‘He did. With another Japanese guy. A famous novelist apparently. It all happens in an airport, though you never know which. There are five or six plots all running into each other – passengers, cleaners, check-in staff; there’s
love, lost luggage, you name it – then a suicide bomber blows them all up. Everyone’s writing about suicide bombers at the moment. It’s awful.’

  ‘If he wants you back for the play, you can’t be that bad, can you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elaine wailed. ‘He wants me for the play, but I only have a minor part, I’m the woman who loses her baby in the explosion, and then he’ll want sex as well, won’t he? And I won’t be able to say no or he’ll chuck me out and I’ll be back at square one with nothing done. And everyone will hate the whole performance anyway.’

  Paul thought about it. ‘Maybe you don’t want to stop the affair. Maybe you enjoy it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ Elaine was in pain, yet she found herself laughing too. She tugged hard at an ear. ‘Of course I enjoy it. But first I want to see John. If I just see him, then maybe I can go back and do the play. But I need to see him first and understand about us. And instead he isn’t here! God, why didn’t I say I’d marry him when he asked? Why!’

  ‘Because you didn’t want to.’

  Paul relented and took her hand across the table in a fatherly way. ‘I’m sure if you and John love each other it will work out in the end. Won’t it? For the moment, why not go back and do the play? The important thing is that the guy wants you on stage. At least you’ll have achieved something. John will come back. As for the affair, you can take or leave that pretty much day by day.’

  ‘I want to tell him the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t,’ Paul answered quickly. ‘You didn’t tell him by text, I hope?’

  ‘I want to tell him to his face. That way I can put it behind me.’