by Tim Parks
Towards seven, as the others slept, John let himself out of the flat and took an autorickshaw back to the hotel. In reception a young woman stood up from the sofa and came towards him with a marked limp.
‘You are Mr John James?’ she said. ‘My name is Jasmeet Singh.’ She held out her hand. As soon as he took it, she began to cry.
John looked round. The receptionist was laying flowers on a piece of paper. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He felt exhausted.
‘Mr John,’ the girl gripped his hand. ‘Mr John, I am afraid I am the one responsible for your father’s death.’
PART FOUR
AN ACT OF LOVE
CHAPTER TWENTY
HELEN STARTED TO tell Paul about the goings-on at the clinic. More than forty people had been brought from a wedding with food poisoning. The director was convinced that the chief administrator was taking a cut on supply contracts: drugs, dressings, laundry. Their biggest problems really were lack of medicines, lack of beds. There was a TB sufferer now, for example, that Burmese boy she had mentioned, who was spending his nights on a mat in the yard. She mainly handled outpatients. Of course if the public hospitals worked properly there would be no need. Or maybe there is always need, everywhere. Helen chuckled. ‘Especially when you use the cheapest caterers at a wedding.’
‘And Kulwant?’ Paul wanted to know.
‘He holds a surgery for urological problems. A couple of hours a week. It’s not nearly enough. At his private clinic he just does prostate surgery for those who can pay. A lot of them Americans.’
‘So he understood Albert’s problem, I guess?’
‘Kulwant wanted to operate. Albert wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘And he and Kulwant got on?’
‘Albert got on with everybody.’ She shot the American a glance. ‘It isn’t such an unusual thing to refuse therapy.’
Paul watched her. Each morning she left the flat before he woke up, came home in the evening, washed, changed, put out the food her maid had prepared. While she was out, for five consecutive days, Paul had looked through Albert James’s books, sampled scores of videos, failed to find anything indicating a major work in progress.
‘He must have had a laptop,’ he eventually remarked one evening. ‘Didn’t you say he’d got a camcorder?’
Helen hadn’t given him permission to look through Albert’s papers, but she hadn’t told him not to. She hadn’t asked him to stay in the flat, but she had shown no surprise and made no objection when she returned that first day and found him still there.
‘Have you any idea where it is?’ Paul asked. ‘There might be a whole new book in it.’
‘I did look,’ she said. ‘He had a laptop, but I can’t find it.’
‘At the university?’
‘He didn’t have an office there. He just went to discuss things with people in various research teams. That was always his way.’
‘He might have left it in a friend’s office.’
Helen shrugged. ‘I haven’t really enquired.’ She added: ‘The last six months were very stressful. He was in a lot of pain.’
They ate together. Dhal, vegetables, a chapatti. She kept her eyes on her food. ‘Albert was mad about living,’ she said. ‘He had such an appetite, like a child almost, particularly for seeing things, and at the same time he was eager to die. He said it would be exciting. Sometimes I think he mixed the two up, as if dying would be the most vital thing he could do.’
Helen spoke with a hint of bitterness, glancing at Paul from time to time to assess how much he had understood. Physically, the American was a reassuring presence. Later, alone in bed, she spoke her husband’s name out loud.
‘Albert? So?’
She lay on her back, waiting.
‘Did you finally get to the pattern of patterns?’ How had he put it once: the weft on which all waters are woven? ‘You should have been a poet,’ she told the darkness. ‘Did you?’ Just before the end, there had been a moment when he had looked at her very intensely but couldn’t speak. Well into the early hours her mind went back and forth between anger and tenderness.
Retiring to the small bedroom, Paul had never felt closer to a subject nor further from being able to start writing. The more notes he took, the more difficult it all became. Perhaps Helen was right and Albert James had lost direction after they left the USA. That was when his interest in insects and spiders began. The court case, the accusations of an underage prostitute, had unsettled the man, it was understandable, likewise the controversy surrounding his speculations on mental illness. He had always been happy to let others steal his ideas and grab the limelight.
Paul had brought a dozen books from the sitting room and stacked them on the bedside table. ‘Where the flow of information is necessarily interrupted,’ he read a scrawl on the flyleaf of the first, ‘there we can be sure we are approaching the sacred.’
It was a university text on communications theory, published by McGraw-Hill. Paul tried to make sense of the words. He had soon realised, on rapid examination of the publications in the flat, that the first thing to do would be to establish the order in which James had read them; then he might make more sense of the comments in the margins. But how to do that? And what did he mean: ‘Where the flow of information is necessarily interrupted ’? What information? Why ‘necessarily’? What did he mean by ‘sacred’?
Albert’s books were shelved in alphabetical order with works on electronics sitting beside tomes of anthropology, novels, history, philosophy, physics, math. You had the impression that he read widely but indiscriminately; he was following a thread that remained obscure; or he was deliberately dispersing himself, distracting himself, not following a thread, disappearing, as it were, into other people’s thoughts so as to weave connections between them, spread his mind across them, perhaps precisely to avoid reaching any conclusion of his own, as if such a thing would be some kind of transgression.
Many of the works were illustrated: art books, Hindu iconography, hand-weaving in Kashmir, photographs of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta. With each author Albert James seemed to strike up a different relationship, a particular tone of excitement or complicity or dismay. Even the handwriting changed. Ancient school editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were especially densely annotated. ‘The terror that is of the nymphs!’ he had scribbled. It was clear that he had come back to some books at different times and written notes beside notes, upon notes, between notes. On a copy of the New York Review, between the columns of an alarmist piece about global warming, he had written: ‘The snake, the pool, the liquid eye! ’
On the fifth day Paul found a stack of letters. There was no filing cabinet in the Jameses’ flat. He had lifted down a box from the top of the large wardrobe in the main bedroom. It was serious snooping, but Helen had left him on his own here. She must know this could happen.
It was a large box that had once held twelve bottles of Kingfisher beer. He put it on the table. Lochana was at work in the kitchen and he wondered if the elderly maid referred these liberties to Helen, or again if he could ask her about the girl who had been there the night of the dinner, the charming girl washing sheets on the video.
There were letters from Coomaraswamy of the Theosophical Society, a dozen of them. So much for the man’s candour saying he only knew James from occasional meetings. ‘You ask me if I think religious experience is a middle ground between consciousness and unconsciousness,’ Paul read. The man had a rather girlish handwriting: ‘You tell me that you see our language-driven, hyper-aware, purposeful and predatory mode of being as an evolutionary dead end that can only lead to the cancellation of mankind from the planet. For myself, I wonder about the tormented eschatology of your anxieties.’ ‘It is not for me to say,’ one of Coomaraswamy’s letters ended, ‘but for you to know, whether you have been chosen.’
There were scores of letters from sponsors and potential sponsors. These had been packeted together with an elastic band. ‘Dear Professor
James, our agency is in broad agreement with your concerns and aims. Nevertheless, we feel that the project you have put forward is too theoretical and speculative to satisfy our parameters for funding, however modest your requests.’ The embossed letterhead was: The Federal Agency for Urban Planning, Washington DC. ‘However,’ the letter continued, ‘if you could give practical examples of how the collective psychology of a particular urban environment might be shifted toward the more benevolent attitudes you refer to, we would be willing to reconsider our decision.’
A note from the Arachnid Society asked Albert James where he was up to in his research: ‘We are particularly eager to hear about your considerations on male and female web structures.’
A London publisher reminded James that his delivery of a typescript of approx 80,000 words, provisionally entitled Mapping the Unknowable, was now more than eighteen months overdue, and that according to the terms of the contract the initial advance of £5,000 (paid into your account in March 2001) should now be returned. ‘Could you reassure us,’ the letter concluded, ‘that the book is approaching completion, in which case we shall not press for return of the advance?’
Paul went to the window, opened it and lit a cigarette. The day was a blast of heat and fumes. It did not seem that James had kept copies of the letters he had sent, unless on his computer of course. Perhaps if Paul were to make a note of all the addresses here he could ask correspondents if they would allow him to consult what James had written. It seemed like hard work for little profit. Coomaraswamy for one would not cooperate, otherwise he would have mentioned these letters at their meeting. ‘Either I just get on and write the goddamned book,’ Paul muttered, ‘or I drop the whole thing and cut my losses.’
He was feeling restive. Dying when he did, Albert James had escaped him, and at the same time had drawn him away from his ordinary life, was still drawing him away. Paul hadn’t checked his email for days. He was losing any sense of his Boston self. Yet the fascination Albert aroused didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere. His ideas were more confused now than when he arrived. It would have been wiser, Paul caught himself thinking, to have taken on a simpler project, something more obviously marketable, an idea he could have researched back home. ‘One Hundred American Heroes’ was a project he knew would be easy to sell. On the other hand, he had staked a large part of himself on this biography. You deliberately chose someone difficult, he thought, a task that would force you to grow up. Now deal with it.
He went to the kitchen table and turned the box upside down, sorting through the papers very quickly. More than half were invitations to conferences. He barely glanced at them. On world peace. On communication among reptiles. On language and psycho-pathogenesis. Exploring primary and secondary thought processes. Learning to learn how to learn. Towards a Behavioural Response to Global Warming.
Then he came across a handwritten letter. It was from someone who had heard Albert James speak as recently as 2005 at a conference in Calcutta: Models for the Development of India. Quite probably this was the last conference James ever attended.
Esteemed Professor James,
I was among the many regional delegates who listened to your very learned paper on the importance of maintaining flexibility in all variables of human activity. I confess that during your long speech I fell asleep on two occasions (you will remember how many very taxing speeches there were that afternoon and, alas, I am well advanced in years). Only afterwards, remembering the diagrams you showed, did I realise the extreme importance of what you were telling us: every time we impose rigid forms of behaviour we limit our chance to respond to changing circumstance.
I have thought a great deal about this, Professor James. It is a gloriously simple idea, at first it seems innocuous, but the consequences are most dire and some people will find them repugnant. For what you deeply mean, I think, is that such sacred principles as freedom of individuals, democracy, marriage, monogamy, respect for all religions, supreme importance of human life, these are all behaviour forms that have been ‘fixed’ and that we need to question before they lead us to calamity.
This is extremely polemical. These are very important principles that our troubled and multicultural society has attained only over many centuries and with the greatest effort and discipline. If ordinary people shed such principles what will become of them? What will become of all of us?
But of course you understand that. You strike me as a man of profound wisdom, Professor James (a wisdom, if you will permit me this licence, that radiates from yourself, and not from your words). Yet you are saying we must remember we can organise in different ways; you are saying nothing must be sacred if we are to survive.
Esteemed Professor James, I wish very much that you had chosen to spell out this conundrum more clearly for the conference delegates and regional politicians of India. Your ideas are very challenging, but you present them so that it is easy for your audience to turn a deaf ear or even nod off. The delegates listen to you, indeed they are captivated by your charisma, yet at once they start to feel sleepy. You do not galvanise.
I would very much like to invite you to our ashram (see enclosure), but only if you are willing to furnish clear replies to our members (about 300) about how you think future development should best be undertaken in the world that is fast coming. At the end of your speech you said a possible way is to ‘heal the aesthetic from the virus of purpose’. Do I remember rightly? This is not at all clear to me; as I said, I am old and perhaps growing stupid. Surely you do not believe that we must spend our lives looking at works of art?
Esteemed Professor, you are speaking in code. It does not bode well. You have enemies, perhaps? Please come and explain to us in Uttar Pradesh what you mean. I have an intuition that it may be important.
I remain, sir, your admirer and, potentially, your pupil,
Dr Radha Ladiwale
Paul took the box to the main bedroom, climbed on a chair and put it back on top of the wardrobe with the dust and cobwebs. Getting down, he looked round the room. Again he was struck by the fact that there were no photographs, just the bed, a chest of drawers, the wardrobe. He looked inside. The floor of a wardrobe is always a likely place for storing things. There was nothing. Only Helen’s clothes hanging neatly. Paul went through them: plain dresses and tunics for work. This is the first woman’s wardrobe I ever saw, he thought, that isn’t full to overflowing.
Still, there were two or three elegant things: a long robe in a turquoise satiny material, a black minidress. Paul pulled it out, smelled it. Something she must have worn when younger. He found it strange that she would keep such a thing, though she still had a good body. Some women were lucky. He breathed deeply. In the chest of drawers, among heaps of plain things – pants and undervests laundered a thousand times – there were half a dozen pieces of silky underwear. Of Albert’s clothes, not a trace.
When Helen came back that evening he asked if he could take her out to eat. ‘Lochana has prepared some food,’ Helen said. ‘It will go to waste.’
‘For a drink then,’ he proposed. ‘I’ve been in all day.’
‘That’s hardly my fault,’ she objected. She was tired. Then she pursed her lips, looked around: ‘Okay. Just let me shower.’
As they walked down the stairs and out into the hot evening, exchanging greetings with the condominium sweeper in the forecourt, Paul was struck by how much they must seem a couple. Helen had put on her white cotton dress, the same she wore for her dinner party, and walked at an easy pace, apparently immune to the heat. Dark glasses lent her a certain glamour. He was sweating in his linen jacket. A chipmunk ran along the pink wall of Lodhi Gardens. The air had a sullen, pre-monsoon feel.
‘I’ve run into trouble with my project,’ he told her.
They sat down in the cool of an air-conditioned café. The waiter brought drinks.
‘I really need to have a better sense of how it ended, for Albert. Otherwise I can’t get a grip on the thing. I’m losing it.’
&
nbsp; Helen showed no sign of helping. She loosened her hair from its tie, shook it out, gathered it again.
‘Basically’ – Paul tried to sound matter-of-fact – ‘I need to know about Albert’s death, whether he thought he had brought his work to a conclusion and what that conclusion was. At the moment it’s as if his life were leading to something really major that isn’t there. It stops short.’
She granted him a glance as she slid the tie up her ponytail. He knew she knew things. For her part, Helen wondered why she hadn’t just told him to go away. Finally she said: ‘You could talk to his Ayurvedic doctor. I have the address somewhere.’
Paul was riled. ‘So why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I never said I would help with your book.’
‘Then why are you letting me stay with you? Why give me the address now?’
She smiled. ‘Your company is not unwelcome. You know that.’
Paul hesitated. ‘Today I read some letters, the ones in the box on top of the wardrobe, in your bedroom.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know you had a search warrant.’
‘You must have guessed I would look at things.’
‘Must I? Albert would never have done that.’ Before he could resume, she said: ‘You know, I think you should ask yourself why you became so determined to write about Albert.’
‘I told you. It began with reading Wau. And a feeling there was some affinity …’
She shook her head. ‘It’s to do with your family, Paul,’ she said. ‘Your women above all.’
‘How so?’ He was surprised.
‘Perhaps you are looking for some sort of authority for living the life you have chosen, for being apart from your wives and children, for having serial romantic relationships with young girls. You need a kind of secular saint or religion to substitute the ones you grew up with, to overcome your feelings of guilt. Albert was always attracting people like you.’ Helen paused: ‘I think it would be dangerous, though, for you to follow him too far.’