In the days that followed, the memory of that late-night journey to and from Theo’s room continued to nag. All the doors Laura passed had been shut against her. But there was something else—something that eluded and disturbed. What is wrong with this picture? But she couldn’t work it out.
The puzzle slid away behind the mood that had prompted her question about Theo’s thesis. Laura was in the grip of nostalgia. It had begun in Naples; when she went back there for the Wayfarer, she had dreamed of Sydney every night. The drift of these dreams was forgotten when she woke. But a filtered residue remained, to do with sandstone walls, beach towels drying over balconies, the small, mean kind of cockroach, bus drivers in shorts.
Laura put it down to the weather in Naples, a sultry dampness that recalled childhood and triggered her joyful Australian anticipation of rain. Arcs of purple bougainvillea, episcopal and disorderly, bore their share of responsibility, abetted by the port, the ferries, the ships that came and went.
But the reruns of home went on long after Naples and no longer confined themselves to dreams. With London concrete underfoot, the sole of Laura’s shoe remembered the knobbly sensation of treading on a gumnut. Waking, she was hoisted into consciousness by the cutlery clang of a gangway hitting the deck of a ferry. The sung litany of currawongs arrived to obscure piped pop songs in a mall. Strap-hanging in the Tube, Laura swayed: she was standing on the deck of a boat, adjusting her stance to the wash from the Heads.
A jacaranda-haunting went on for weeks. Aerial views, sunsets, the twist in The Sixth Sense: Laura had missed them. Her mind’s eye had drifted to jacarandas—the wild romance of the trees! They went unnoticed from one spring to the next, and then they were all-at-once: not a blossoming but an apparition. They purpled valleys, filled the funnel-shaped space between roofs, transfigured suburban hills. In rain light, their lilac was also blue. It was the color of nostalgia itself: elusive yet unmistakable, recollection and promise. Nostalgia floated jacarandas over London traffic, above the aisles in Sainsbury’s. In Kentish Town, three floors above the high street, Laura’s carpet was a pool of fallen blooms.
Time passed, and the jacarandas were replaced by a white-noise whisper. While Laura waited in a check-in queue or for the start of the inflight movie, when she plugged in her international adapter or converted her receipts into sterling, when she used Google for the first time or sent a fax for the last, while she backed up her files, while she waited, with a flute of champagne, for all the computers in the world to crash, she heard: Australian summer. Australian summer. The dead grass browned the paddocks. It pricked like the beginning of tears.
Nostalgia has its correctives. Laura reminded herself that if you chose differently they said you were up yourself. She remembered that you could spend two days on a train and step out into sameness. There were the fruit bats draped like licorice chewing gum over the power lines that had killed them. And who was she kidding about summer in Sydney? When it wasn’t pouring, it stifled with a thick yellow curtain. She called up several items along these lines, including a Fraser cousin who boasted of castrating sheep with his teeth.
The whisper turned insistent, grew intermittent, reverted to its old theme: What are you doing here? Laura bought pressure socks to guard against deep-vein thrombosis, she was upgraded on a flight to LA, an optometrist informed her that she neglected to blink. She went to the Screen on the Green with Theo, she had lunch with Meera, there was a weekend in Berkshire with Bea. Everything went on sort of as usual. The phone rang at night, and there was no one there.
Ravi, 2000
RAVI RETURNED TO WORK, traveling for an hour and a half each way by bus. Everyone—colleagues, students, the woman who served him in the canteen—treated him gently. Even the dogs lying about the campus seemed to turn a sympathetic gaze on him as he passed. Frog-Face avoided him and crouched at his desk—he looked as if someone had forgotten to inflate him. The professor kept an old manual Smith-Corona in his office, and could be observed squaring up to the machine as if to an opponent. The keys made a noise like quarrelling birds.
When the black square of the banyan threatened, Ravi would begin counting. Zero, one, two, three, four…Long ago, he had known a student who could recite pi to two hundred places. He considered emulating her or counting in primes. But with complexity came hesitation: the chink in the wall through which anything might slip. What was straightforward required no thought and provided the sturdiest defense. Eight hundred and four, eight hundred and five, eight hundred and six…
He dropped a glass bowl. It came apart in five toothed pieces. Horrified—he imagined that everything in Freda’s flat cost the earth—Ravi gathered up the segments and dropped them in the bin. “Not like that!” cried Freda. “That glass could cut someone. Dispose of it thoughtfully!”
There was the rule that he had to go out onto the balcony to smoke. When he came back inside, Freda’s silence was a shirt that scratched. Once she tilted her chin and asked, “Is it super-sensible to expose yourself out there?” Her hands, beautiful even when she had forgotten her rings, were so satiny they looked polished. They moved, pushing something unwanted away.
Like Malini, Freda Hobson was a slim woman. But her gestures, like her voice, were large. It seemed to Ravi that she occupied a great deal of space. He spent evenings in his room, avoiding her. Luckily, Dutch friends of hers owned a house in the Galle fort; she often spent weekends with them. Was it possible that she was avoiding Ravi? The small, enforced intimacies of shared space were oppressive. About to leave for her daily swim, Freda was fumbling in her basket when a pair of skimpy blue knickers fell out at Ravi’s feet. And although he was usually careful to emerge fully dressed from his room in the morning, he had once come out wearing only a sarong, having heard the front door slam. But Freda was still there. Ravi retreated to his room immediately, his cheekbones prickling. She appeared not to mind seeing him half naked. But she had minded about the knickers, Ravi could tell.
The idea of moving back into his old room grew compelling. Freda’s apartment now had the look of a trap—a clean, scientific trap, where experiments that involved cruelty and mice were conducted. Ravi returned to the lane that led to the rooming house. He saw himself walking steadily up the stairs, crossing the landing. But, “Could put a bomb,” said the manager sadly, and handed over a familiar suitcase. Why had Ravi imagined that his room would be waiting, just as he had last seen it with its rumpled bed? All day, he had pictured and feared the blue skirt with orange pockets draped over a hanger. Now the thought of it shut up in a suitcase was more than he could bear.
He had said nothing about his plan to move out, knowing that Freda would oppose it. At first, remembering her flow of favors and gifts to Malini, Ravi had decided that Freda relished the power that comes with a leash woven of debts. Later, when he felt sure that she disliked him, he saw her as a princess who kept her pea close. He knew this because he felt the same way. Freda Hobson was behind everything that had destroyed his life; he wallowed in the punishment of her proximity. Was there no limit to the harm that could come from two women talking with their heads close together? Ravi should have acted decisively, impressed the need for caution on Malini, he should have insisted and banned. What the situation had called for was a husband who thundered I forbid, someone mustachioed and unyielding. Not a fool who silently listened to plans for publishing the account of a boy whose torturers had driven rusty bicycle spokes into his eyes.
Freda came out of her room wearing tracksuit trousers and a loose T-shirt the color of wet cement. She had a headache, she said. The skin over her fine, high-bridged nose looked thin; the purple eyes had darkened in their sockets. Ravi saw the face that she would wear in her grave.
Now and then, at night or very early, he would hear her talking to herself. Remembering his son’s long, murmured monologues, Ravi wanted to inflict bloody, physical damage on Freda. This was always followed by a wash of guilt. It was simple kindness that had prompted her to take him in and offer
him her help. You’re lucky to know her, he told himself. He was very super-lucky! He even knew that the two people he loved best in the world were dead.
Freda pressed her Discman on Ravi. His attachment to this gadget was ferocious and swift. As night deepened, he would lie on his bed listening to Freda’s music. She had a fondness for homemade themed compilations. His favorite was Colors: “Little Green,” “Baby’s in Black,” “Purple Haze” and so on. He played the CD over and over, turning up the volume. The last time he had listened to music in this intimate, flooding way was on those long-ago Saturdays with Dabrera. Ravi remembered—but it was more accurate to say that his body remembered—his occupation by music, a sensation that began as invasion and ended as release. Songs ran loose in the gulfs and caverns of his being. He listened again to “Red Right Hand.”
One evening, Freda’s PowerBook caught his eye. His aversion to the Internet, so definite just a few months earlier, suddenly seemed hazy and foolish. He missed Internet magic, he longed to be carried away. What were the hundred best songs of all time, what was the Brent-Salamin algorithm? Ravi could Ask Jeeves. A streetcam would show him Montevideo, he could look at close-ups of Miss World. He could join the Michael Jackson fan club, check the weather in Muscat, find a soul mate in Maine.
With a little shock, Ravi remembered Aimee. He had known every crevice of her, but now she was transparent and silvery. But that was an anachronism: memory, always old-fashioned, had called up an analogue ghost. Aimee was an up-to-date phantom, stored in code on a cyber-clipboard, readily retrievable. Ravi wouldn’t be the one to do it, however. He stroked the laptop. An Apple—his mouth filled with anticipatory saliva. The white plastic lid lifted. But the PowerBook was password protected.
Ravi had only to tell Freda what he wanted; she was in the next room. But it would be conceding a little victory to admit that he had changed his mind.
A ring-bound folder held printouts of reports from several NGOs, the relevant passages highlighted in sickly green. Four students shot at close range. Six farmers hacked to death. Eleven bodies in a trench. It went on and on. The catalogue had a cheerful, rollicking quality. Eight maids a-milking, sang Ravi silently, seven swans a-swimming. He hadn’t thought of that song in years; now it bounced about his skull. He wondered if the folder had been left on the table for him to read. Freda Hobson clung to a belief in accurate accountancy. Her terminology, like Malini’s, was juridical, circling around the fetishes of witnesses, evidence, proof.
Carmel Mendis rang. A letter had come from Roshi de Mel’s father, Aloysius. An acquaintance in Vancouver, a man who had been a colonel in the Sri Lankan army, had told Aloysius that the police had orders from high up to do nothing about Malini and Hiran’s case. The old tortoise gave it as his own opinion that Ravi should let bygones be bygones. Ravi lost his temper. Did Aloysius de Mel imagine that murder was a move in a squabble, something the magnanimous overlooked?
Freda said, “We absolutely need that letter. Don’t you see? It’s vital, actually. Tell your mother to send it to you at once.”
Tell not ask. But Aloysius had instructed Carmel to destroy the letter—he didn’t want any trouble, he had a sister in Sri Lanka—and she had torn it into tiny blue flakes.
Not for the first time, detectives asked Ravi if his wife had made enemies. It was not unknown, they suggested, for those who worked on behalf of women to attract a man intent on revenge. Officers had arrived at the NGO with no warning and a court order, and taken away files and the computer Malini had used. Ravi remembered stories that had hung over their bed in light, smothering folds: sons set on fire, daughters raped with broken bottles, brothers who had gone to a police station and never returned. What did he think? inquired Freda with light scorn. That the NGO would just have handed over material that put lives at risk? She had sent a letter to every English-language newspaper asking why, if the murders were the result of a purely private vendetta, no arrests had been made. She stood silhouetted against the window, her profile dark, faultless, frightening. Ravi realized, She is the queen of spades.
Freda closed her hand softly around a moth, carried it to the balcony, released it. If he had been forced to describe his life, Ravi would have groped for a word that meant something like “dismantled.” When she came back into the room, dusting her hands, Freda spoke of trauma. Ravi learned that, being traumatized, he couldn’t get on with his life. She suggested, yet again, that he “talk to someone.” There were people who could help, trained professionals. “When you’re ready, of course. You must take all the time you need. But they do say talking is the most wonderful release.”
Even as Freda urged, her eyes were Hiran’s, imploring forgiveness for this or that small crime. At intervals, advice about seeking help burst from her as if independently of her will. The first time, Ravi had thought, Who helped them? He would never realize that he had said this aloud. Now, looking at Freda’s face, the close-grained skin, he remembered the pimples that had blighted his adolescence. Everyone had advised, Don’t squeeze! Whenever Ravi had yielded to temptation, the little rush of pus and blood produced self-disgust. But it also brought relief.
Around this time, Ravi stopped washing. At first, he had relished the novelty of hot water on tap; had stood for ten minutes twice a day under the regulated cloudburst of the shower. Then he stopped. It wasn’t a decision, merely a ceasing. He brushed his teeth, disliking staleness in his mouth, and soaped his hands when they felt sticky or were visibly grimed. Not wishing to draw undue attention to himself, he shaved every few days. But he no longer washed his body or his hair.
He bought a tin of baby powder with which he sprinkled his armpits and groin. His scalp itched for a while, but quite soon the discomfort went away. He continued to enjoy the fresh scent of his clothes, laundered in the washing machine. When it had completed its cycle, the machine played a tune. The flat offered various fleeting, electronic sounds, suggestive of a different kind of life. There was the ringtone of Freda’s mobile, a DVD protested its ejection, emails announced their arrival. The microwave went ping.
Laura, 2000
IN A HOTEL ROOM in Prague, Laura answered the phone. Meera Bryden said, “Laura, darling.”
The man who had traveled to Prague with Laura—a photographer she had met at the Wayfarer Christmas party—reached for the remote.
“Darling, the saddest, saddest thing,” said Meera’s voice in the shocking silence. “Theo’s dead.”
He had fallen asleep drunk, choked on his own vomit, died. Lewis Bryden, having let himself into Theo’s house two days after he failed to turn up to a dinner party, found him in the kitchen on a puffy leatherette couch.
Over the days that followed, Laura suffered the usual emotions, violent and banal. What was unexpected were the tiger stripes of jealousy. At the funeral, she could barely look at Lewis. That Theo should have entrusted him with a key! The man was a fool. How dare he appear haggard when Laura’s mirror had returned a face that was tightly composed? She noticed with satisfaction that he was showing signs of baldness. And his head continued to give the impression that it would come away readily from his shoulders. Laura saw herself wielding the axe.
Gaby Shapton had her brother’s solid black brows and none of his beauty. There were children about her, one an angel, all self-conscious with a sense of occasion. She bent over a dark head, retying a bow.
Laura went up to her, blurted, “I’m so sorry.”
Theo’s sister was a short, soft woman with an unfocused gaze. It gave her a wide, inhuman look. Her clothes hung from her in folds like a hide. She gripped Laura’s fingers and said, “Oh, so am I.”
The memory of the night when she had seen Theo up to bed wouldn’t leave Laura. She stood once more on the landing, glancing first up, then down the stairs. She remembered the awful pictures. She saw the doors shut against her like graves.
She realized, There was no window on the top landing.
She was back in Prague; alone this time. She emailed Bea:
Had Theo ever talked to her about reading for hours under a window on the top landing when he was a child? No, replied Bea, but he had often spoken of the pear tree outside his bedroom window and how much he had missed it when it had to be cut down.
Laura thought about all these things. She saw red apples in a market and thought about the apple tree in Theo’s garden—its girth and reach. When she returned to London, she looked up Gaby Shapton’s address. She wrote a letter, shoved it under a folder, read it a few days later, threw it away, wrote another.
Gaby’s reply arrived before the end of the week.
The stories Theo used to tell you were our mother’s. My guess is she never spoke about her family when she first came to live in England. What was the use of remembering what had gone forever? At school she was a dirty Hun who couldn’t speak English. The past must have seemed as if it belonged to someone else, an adored youngest child in Berlin.
I think it was only when she had children of her own that Mutti allowed herself to remember. She was always telling us about Berlin, stories used to pour from her. It seemed perfectly usual to me, I thought everyone’s mothers talked like that. She had the most amazing memory, heaps better than I can do when my kids pester me to tell them about when I was a little girl. It was like Mutti was looking into a book, describing the pictures there. She remembered everything, toys, curtains, puddings, the rain dashing against the small window with the round top, the doctor whose breath smelled of soup, the mignonette in my grandfather’s buttonhole, the workbasket mandarin with the nodding head. She used to talk and talk, and it was so vivid, it was like seeing everything yourself. It’s not really surprising Theo believed he had. Reading about the mandarin made me cry. I’d completely forgotten it till your letter.
Questions of Travel Page 17