Dreams of Rivers and Seas

by Tim Parks

  Paul Roberts was unimpressed. ‘There are quarrels Albert James wasn’t part of all over the world,’ he remarked. The slim, ascetic Indian made him feel awkward and gauche.

  With a condescending smile, Dr Coomaraswamy said he regretted that he knew no one who could really help the biographer, no one who was on intimate terms with Albert James, aside of course from Mrs James. ‘Albert had many acquaintances,’ he said, ‘and one or two fervent disciples, but no friends, I don’t think.’ He began to move toward the door.

  ‘What was his interest in theosophy?’ Paul asked. ‘I mean, was it academic or personal?’

  ‘I very much doubt whether Albert would have distinguished between those categories.’

  ‘But did he speak of it as being part of his research?’

  ‘He never spoke of his research.’

  Paul was determined not to be hurried out. ‘I presume,’ he said, ‘since he came regularly to the Theosophical Society, you must have talked theosophy together. I mean, did he believe in reincarnation, did he believe in the Masters?’

  Coomaraswamy sighed. ‘Professor James would arrive a few minutes after proceedings had begun, listen to whichever speaker was presenting his work that evening, have a cup of tea afterwards and go home.’

  ‘Do you think he aspired to be a Master himself,’ Paul hazarded, ‘a Mahatma, a Guardian, perhaps guiding mankind from beyond the grave?’

  ‘One doesn’t aspire to become a Guardian, does one, Mr Roberts?’ The exasperating man coughed and cleared his throat. ‘That would be vanity. One aspires to wisdom. A Master becomes a Master only by election.’

  They were at the door now. Coomaraswamy opened it and made a little bow. The whole conversation had barely lasted five minutes. Paul stopped on the threshold. ‘Theosophy teaches the need for unmediated personal experience of the divine. Am I right? That’s the essence of the business.’

  He used the word ‘business’ deliberately. The Indian raised an eyebrow.

  ‘So, would you say that Albert James had achieved or was seeking such an experience?’

  Coomaraswamy smiled wanly: ‘That is really no concern of yours or mine, is it, Mr Roberts?’

  The following afternoon Paul took a taxi to St Anne’s. Again, he had had the name of the school from Sharmistha. Crossing the chaos of Connaught Place he remembered how much he disliked Delhi. It was a constant hubbub of bodies, smells, sounds, all of them alien and for the most part unattractive, with neither the efficiency of the modern nor the charm of tradition. I’ll get what info I can, he thought, and then go back to Boston. Only the women held his eyes, the bright saris side-saddle on scooters, the swinging ankles. But there seemed to be no way of approaching them.

  ‘Was there any particular reason,’ he asked Sister Nirmala, ‘why Albert James had wanted to teach here?’

  The plump headmistress reflected: ‘He sent in his curriculum like so many others, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid, despite his many writings and very superior mind, poor Mr Albert still needed to sing for his supper. We were rather concerned, when he put himself forward, that a man of his remarkable calibre might not be taking such humble work as we could offer very seriously; you know how it is sometimes with intellectual men, they think teaching children is beneath them. But after all when it came down to the nitty-gritty Mr Albert was really most diligent. Most most diligent. He was really rather a saint, if such a thing is possible for a man who is not a Christian. We were always very happy to have him on our staff.’

  Built in grubby parkland to the north of the city, St Anne’s was a once ambitious project fallen into disrepair, a common category in India. Paul Roberts asked the headmistress if he might be allowed to talk to Mr James’s last class. In the event, the girls were delighted to be let off a few minutes of mathematics and chattered away happily.

  ‘Girls!’ shouted the sister in a surprisingly stentorian voice. They wriggled on their thighs in their green and gold uniforms. It was a pleasantly old-fashioned classroom with desks straight from the fifties. ‘Girls, this American visitor is writing a book about your wonderful old teacher, Mr James. He wishes to ask you some questions; since he is a man of some achievement, I hope you will want to show him the utmost respect.’

  The girls looked at the bulky American and tittered.

  Paul tried to smile. It hadn’t occurred to him what a powerful experience it would be to stand in front of a class of alert adolescent girls. There was a strong animal odour in the room. Leaning against the teacher’s desk, he tried to present himself as both vigorous and relaxed: ‘Girls, I, er, just wanted to know if you young people had any stories you could tell me about the way Albert James taught you.’

  Paul found it unsettling that Sister Nirmala had decided to stay in the room. There might be things they wouldn’t say in the nun’s presence. Some of the girls glanced at each other. There was whispering in Hindi. They all wore their hair in gleaming black pigtails.

  ‘Come on now, girls,’ said the sister briskly. ‘Everyone knows you adored Mr Albert.’

  ‘He was a lot of fun for us,’ a voice eventually said.

  ‘In what way?’ Roberts asked.

  ‘Nobody has ever failed his exams,’ said a bright face.

  There were giggles. It was curious to think of lanky, abstruse Albert James driving out here three times a week to stand up in front of these kids. There was something disquieting about their imprisoned liveliness, their massed femininity.

  ‘He asked us to draw the weather,’ one girl said.

  ‘To draw the weather?’

  ‘And invent new insects,’ said another.

  ‘Mr James liked to apply very experimental methods,’ Sister Nirmala agreed.

  ‘Then we had to think of ways to change the world to suit the new insect we had drawn.’

  ‘Or the new weather we invented.’

  ‘Sometimes he took a film of the lesson,’ said a voice. ‘We looked at it on the computer.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’ Paul Roberts asked. ‘Did he tell you?’

  Nobody answered. Whenever a girl spoke out she became individual and defined, but when they all shut their mouths they were one silent animal. In the front row a small girl was picking at the skin round her fingernails. She wouldn’t look up.

  ‘What do you think, casting your minds back now, was the main thing Mr James was trying to teach you? I mean, if you could sum it up in a few words?’

  ‘He taught science,’ said a voice.

  ‘The man didn’t mean that,’ another girl protested and burst into giggles. Sporadic voices rose as if released from a hush expectation.

  Finally a solemn, full-cheeked girl in the second row said: ‘Mr James told us that even when a lesson is about spiders or snakes it is also about all of us in the classroom. He said: what you are drawing, that is who you are. And who your ancestors were. The way you draw an elephant is India.’

  ‘The history of India,’ someone said.

  ‘And the future.’

  Towards the back another girl covered her face with her hands. It seemed some emotion was stirring. As with Coomaraswamy, but in a completely different way, Paul again had the impression that vital information was being withheld. Had he come to Delhi just a few weeks before and met Albert James in the flesh, everything would have fallen into place. Instead, he had arrived only in time to see the smoke drifting up from the crematorium chimney. The man had escaped him.

  Returning to his hotel room, Paul found a scrap of yellow paper under the door bearing the words: ‘TELEPHONE MESSAGE. From: Mrs James. Message: I will not give my permission.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JOHN EMAILED HIS mother, but received no reply. ‘You can’t force me to do what you want,’ Elaine had said, ‘any more than my father can.’ ‘I have no money, Mum,’ John wrote again. He didn’t want to phone. Elaine reminded him that he owed her £200. She wouldn’t even talk about living together. ‘If you hurt me again, it’s the end,’ she said.


  John tried to bury himself in the lab ten or twelve hours a day, but his enthusiasm for mapping out the invisible world of tubercular gene expression was faltering. In Adelaide a group of Australians had done something very similar to what their own team had envisaged. They had tricked a ribosome into some bizarre behaviour precisely at the moment when the bacterium passed from dormant to active. Even at the other end of the world these ideas were in the air. It was an expression his father had often used. ‘We don’t possess our minds, John. These things are in the air.’

  Gazing stupidly at the computer screen, John shook his head. I should have confronted Dad, I should have gone out to see him. About what? ‘Mum,’ he wrote, ‘I am now in debt to the tune of £2,000.’

  He typed his father’s name into Google again. This time he clicked for images. A dozen faces appeared. None were familiar. It was the first of twenty-three pages. You could write a history of photography, of portrait painting. There were hundreds. Someone was setting up a family tree with photos that went back to the 1860s. There was an Albert James with an eyepatch and handlebar moustache, a young black boy in a baseball cap, an able seaman who had died on HMS Hood. ‘We shall not forget,’ read the caption.

  John’s father appeared on the fourth page, his green eyes amused and pained. Bizarrely, he was standing arm in arm with a Zulu in full tribal dress holding a spear. On the tenth page there was a cartoon caricature of Albert James that had appeared in the New York Review shortly after the publication of Postures. The artist had been able to think of nothing better than to emphasise the anthropologist’s sticky-out ears.

  His mother didn’t reply. It seemed impossible. Elaine assured John she had forgiven him, but she was very, very busy with rehearsals. ‘Get some paid work,’ she told him. ‘Part time.’ The girl seemed intrigued and scared by what had happened between them that night. They both had bruises. Neither wanted to talk about it.

  ‘MOTHER,’ John wrote, ‘PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED MY MAIL.’

  ‘She is trying to force me to beg from Grandmother,’ he told Elaine, ‘to go and ask the old witch for money.’ He wouldn’t do it.

  In an unplanned gesture John copied the email to his father’s old address. How did Yahoo ever find out you had died? Maybe Mum checked Dad’s mail to inform those who hadn’t heard. At once, there came an out-of-office reply: ‘Albert James regrets that he will not be able to respond to his email for some time.’ There was a phone number. ‘In case of emergency, phone …’

  John stared at the number. It was not the home phone in Delhi. A mobile? The young man felt anxious. On three consecutive nights he dreamed his father was in the basement lab at St Mary’s, simultaneously alive and dead. A conviction that dreams were meaningless didn’t help. He was upset. The coffin must be opened, he dreamed, and something done. Some cells must be centrifuged. But the coffin was also the dissecting bench. John was taking bacteria from the lungs of a mouse. That was always a tricky business. In one dream the basement lab was knee-deep in stagnant water. Maybe it was sewage. The coffin was floating and bumping against the walls. How could he work on a surface that moved? Definitely a sequence of dreams, Dad had written. But what is the point, John demanded, of reflections that can lead to no useful action, that have no issue in the world? Ignore them.

  In the real lab he and his colleagues must analyse the properties of hundreds upon hundreds of genes: those that continued to be expressed after the tubercular bacterium’s contact with the immune system and those that did not. This was the passage from active to dormant state. Each gene must be examined with care, each complex experiment repeated at least three times. Glaxo were right that the only point of any research is to arrive at a product. It would take time. The third night John tackled the coffin but couldn’t open it. There was no lid, no hinge, no lock. It seemed all of a piece. Yet, as if through frosted glass, he could see his father’s face inside. The man was moving his lips. He was explaining.

  Recounting these dreams to Elaine, John noticed, won him back some sympathy. Her boyfriend had become more interesting; he wasn’t just a science nerd; he was going through a difficult patch.

  ‘It shows you loved him,’ she said earnestly. Sometimes, she held his hand as if he might be ill; she smoothed the blond hair on his forehead and planted a kiss by his ear; but again she reminded him of the £200: ‘In the end it wasn’t mine, Jo; it was Dad’s.’

  Days and weeks passed. John explained to his project organiser what the situation was. He was penniless. Sympathetic and avuncular, Simon was shocked to find how blindly his young collaborator had been counting on a contract once his thesis was complete. ‘You haven’t spoken to Personnel at all?’ he asked. ‘You haven’t even applied to the grants commission?’

  John said he had thought it was a sure thing. After all, he was constantly being complimented for the thoroughness of his work. People treated him as an essential part of the project.

  ‘Research is easy compared with getting yourself paid for it,’ Simon joked. He couldn’t understand how the young man, who was also his best student, could have been so naïve. Everybody else seemed to know the score. ‘I’ll look around,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to lose you.’

  John felt lost already. He cadged meals. He walked the three miles from home to the lab. ‘Why aren’t you on the dole?’ friends asked. ‘MUM!’ He sent another mail. He blew the typeface up to thirty-six points and changed the colour to red. He wouldn’t go on the dole. No. I am doing a highly complex job in a field where there is plenty of money, he told himself, yet none is coming my way. He felt humiliated. ‘MOTHER!’ He used italic bold. She didn’t reply. She is taking it out on me for smashing her table, he thought. He knew the table was irrelevant. It was the moment in the bedroom that mattered. She has washed her hands of me. ‘Why don’t you phone her?’ Elaine asked. ‘How can you expect others to help, if you won’t help yourself?’

  Elaine was kind to him, but busy. In the past, she had been the vulnerable one. Now she had her rehearsals, she had a place in the world. Practising her mime in the sitting room, she swayed round the sofa with staring eyes, arms waving languidly. ‘After the explosion,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be looking for my baby. But how can I really know what it would be like after an explosion?’

  John watched her, her arms and wrists in particular. They were the movements of a plant underwater, he thought.

  Returning to Maida Vale, he sat on his bed, and tossed the three green elephants at the dartboard above Jean-Pierre’s bed. They clattered and dropped on the coverlet. Sometimes one dropped on another and they knocked together. They chipped. He hadn’t tried to repair them. Not one elephant, not two elephants, but three, three elephants! They were ruined. You couldn’t even fit them inside each other.

  Sleeping early, he dreamed he came ashore on an open boat among mudflats where severed heads had been thrust on poles. Why was he dreaming so much? His father’s head was among them. ‘It is not easy to do field research on headhunters,’ his father had famously observed in the opening pages of Wau. It became a family joke. ‘It is not easy to do field research on nuclear explosions,’ his mother needled at dinner table. ‘On the dress habits of ghosts,’ Father came back. ‘On a child’s thoughts in the womb,’ Mother capped him. ‘Your father risked everything,’ she had told John that evening, ‘to take his study in unconventional directions.’ ‘Why on earth did you buy those ugly things?’ she had demanded after he had smashed down the elephants on the tabletop. John couldn’t get her voice out of his head. ‘Those ugly things! They’re horrible!’

  Finally, his flatmate Peter warned him that if he couldn’t pay the rent he would have to leave his room. He had talked to Jean-Pierre about it. ‘Next month,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  All the same, forty-eight hours after this conversation, when John found himself standing outside his grandmother’s rather grand corner house in Richmond, he had the impression he had arrived there by accident; he had gone out f
or a walk in Maida Vale and stumbled across this place, eight miles away. He hadn’t planned to be here at all.

  Helen James’s parents lived in a quiet street near the river. The house must be worth a fortune, John thought, pushing the garden gate. His jaw was aching with tension. He had never quite grasped the fact before. He had been so young when he came here for holidays; he arrived in a cab, played, was pampered, watched television, got bored and was put back in a cab again.

  It was drizzling softly from a slow, turbulent sky. John turned back through the gate to the street and walked to and fro on the pavement behind the hedge. He kicked the wall. ‘Why have you always been scared of people?’ his mother had asked, ‘scared of asking for things? Because you’ve always had everything on a plate,’ she answered her own question. ‘I asked Elaine,’ he muttered. Elaine had refused him. Never in his life had John been violent. He hardly knew what violence was. I am being forced to beg, he told himself. He kicked a drainpipe. They send me to Winchester, then I’m forced to beg. They prepare me for a highly professional career, the James family career, in biology, then all at once I’m abandoned. I have to beg. Father had written to him frequently at school, far more than Mother, but the letters were experiments in explaining things, as if assessing whether a child could be made to understand such and such an idea in this or that idiosyncratic way. They came complete with anecdotes and drawings. They didn’t answer the questions John always asked: Where shall we go next holiday? Isn’t there a school in Chicago I can go to?

  John walked away. He would find any old job and forget the lab. Let’s see how Mum reacts. His parents had groomed him for this career. The James family had been scientists for generations. They went to good schools, took good degrees. Then a phone call, a funeral and he was destitute. Let’s see how she reacts to her son washing dishes. Mother daily examines every kind of ugly illness, he told himself, touches infected skin, looks into ulcerated mouths, sews up anal fistulas, but she won’t reply to my email.