Most painfully, he realized that he knew nothing about politics and nothing about this war. It now seemed urgent to him. The posse, in general, tended to regard the subject as evidence of being, as they said, a bit sad. The long years of neglect had not struck Fred until he had found himself alone in India, without even the doubtful aid of the posse to keep him up to date with information about the state of the world. In the first stages of his holiday, he had taken to reading the newspapers left outside his door in previous hotels. He made an effort, but it was too late. The stories, with their long and lordly allusions to the BJP and the STU and the FRD (Fred! he thought, like the dizzy tart he was), were opaque and, over a series of brow-wrinkling breakfasts, did not become less so. It was like listening to an inconsiderately detailed conversation between friends about people you didn’t know and would never meet. On the third such attempt, Fred’s attention had wandered towards an impenetrable but well-drawn cartoon of two politicians grappling with an octopus – he didn’t have a clue who the politicians were, but he could recognize an octopus when he saw one. A waiter and an underling were hovering by him.
‘Komflix?’ the waiter said.
‘Yes,’ Fred said faintly. ‘Yes, lots of conflicts in the newspaper.’
‘Komflix,’ the waiter said more decisively, and went away. Five minutes later, he returned with a bowl of some yellow mush. Fred accepted it; gave it a poke; tasted the sugary mess. Cornflakes. Bugger.
The driver came at ten, and the driver’s enquiries began while Fred and Carrie were still settling themselves.
‘You have left your children behind, sir, madam?’ the driver said.
‘No, no children,’ Fred said.
‘Honeymoon?’ the driver said.
‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘No, we’re not married to each other. We’re just friends. We just met.’
The driver digested this. ‘You are married, sir?’
‘I was married,’ Fred said. ‘My wife died, though, five years ago. She was killed in a car crash.’
A reflective silence came upon the car. Poor Fred! Poor wife of Fred! And then Carrie, all at once, without any encouragement, told Fred the story of her life.
Fred had only taken this journey once, in the opposite direction. Although he remembered it being a long trip, it seemed longer today. Twice, he interrupted Carrie’s story to lean forward and make sure that the driver really was taking them to Kollam. Perhaps there were, after all, no variations in pronunciation; perhaps Kollam and Quilon were really different towns. But the driver twice gave that side-to-side wobble of the head – not yes, not no, probably no more than ‘I am going to rook you of an embarrassingly small sum of money.’
It was so strange, time: it passed more slowly when everything was interesting, and when everything was boring. Outside the car, everything he saw was interesting – cripples, crops, temples, crowds. Inside the car, Carrie was talking about a boy who loved her more than she loved him, which was sad when you came to think about it.
‘And that’s how I got here,’ Carrie said eventually. Fred looked up. They had come to a halt. She smiled a brave, practised smile.
‘I wait here for you,’ the driver said.
‘No,’ Fred said. ‘We don’t know how long we’ll be.’
‘Best to wait,’ the driver said. ‘No problem.’
‘It’s best if we pay now,’ Fred said.
‘Pay later,’ the driver said. ‘I can wait, no problem, one hour, two hours, three hours, I wait.’
Later, Carrie said, ‘That’s so sad.’ Fred was watching a bullock in the middle of the road, the devout, graceful choreography of orange rickshaws around it.
‘What, the driver having to wait?’
‘No,’ Carrie said. ‘I didn’t know about your wife. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
‘My wife?’ Fred said. ‘Oh, my wife, the car crash. No, I always say that. I should have warned you. It’s not true. I just say that.’
‘It’s not true?’
‘It shuts them up. They always ask if you’re married, and then keep asking and asking, but if you tell them your wife’s dead, they stop out of respect.’
Carrie just turned and gaped. ‘It’s not true?’
‘Afraid not.’
All at once, Carrie began laughing. Around her, Indians stared at the laughing woman.
‘We seem complicated to them,’ Fred said. ‘A boy said that to me, a few days ago, in Madurai. “Complicated,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant. “Wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, divorced …” You can see what he meant. They get married and then they have children and that’s it. We have all these complicated arrangements. They understand a dead wife, though.’ The boy in Madurai had not, in fact, said ‘boyfriend’.
‘That’s terrible,’ Carrie said. ‘You’re terrible, Mr Fred. You really are. What’s your dead wife’s name?’
‘Fifi,’ Fred said. ‘They don’t often go so far as to ask that, though. It really does shut them up.’
‘Fifi, Christ,’ Carrie said. ‘And no wife? None at all?’
‘No, none,’ Fred said. ‘I should have warned you. They always ask. You should try it. It really works.’
‘We can’t both say it,’ Carrie said. ‘It would look like the widows’ outing. And they wouldn’t believe me. I just don’t look the type. I don’t look like I’ve known pain and suffering.’
‘Do I?’
Carrie turned and looked him up and down, as if he were a horse she were going to buy. ‘Oh, I would say so,’ she said. ‘Deep pools of suffering, lots of silent pain in your soul, yes, I would definitely say so. You’re deep, Mr Fred, deep and secret and sorrowful. No one ever told you you’re a man of mystery?’
‘You see that clock?’ Fred said, overpoweringly embarrassed. ‘It says here it was put up in 1911 when George the Fifth visited.’
‘Swot.’
Deep pools of suffering and silent pain in the soul, and the clock, a fifteen-foot replica of Big Ben, reminded you that some things were only good when they were very big. Dicks, for instance, he attempted – but, no, you couldn’t be smutty all on your own, either. Fred turned his attention to a roadside fruit stall. It was a sad little stall with only three sorts of fruit on it, each arranged in a series of neat pyramids on sheets of newspaper. By the stall, a boy squatted. All around the town, the forest grew, thick with fruit. The oranges and durian and mangoes glowed in the dark of the forests. But on the streets of India, there was only warty, dried, shrunken fruit to be had, piled up in hopeful pyramids. He supposed the best went straight to Sainsbury’s, and the children of India reached five foot two and stopped growing.
He was about to suggest buying some oranges to Carrie, but she had been taken by something else. On the other side of the road, two figures were making their way through the crowd. Europeans, a boy and a girl like them, but weighed down with rucksacks – the girl, who led the way, was actually carrying two, the second over her front. The boy was wearing the thin Indian skirt, the lungi, and both had beaded and braided hair. Under their loads, they were bent down towards the earth, and did not see Fred or Carrie or anyone else looking at them. Carrie, her mouth open, watched them go in the direction of the train station.
‘Someone you met?’ Fred said, when they had gone.
‘Oh, no,’ Carrie said. ‘I was just looking. They wouldn’t want to speak to us, anyway. I know the type. You know, they’ve come to see the real India, they’re not going to speak to someone just because they’ve got the same white face. And they’re not tourists, they’re travellers.’
‘I’m a tourist,’ Fred said. Nothing Indian interested Carrie; only him and other tourists. ‘I go to beauty spots and send postcards home and I buy souvenirs. I’m too old to be a traveller. I thought you were a traveller, though.’
‘Oh, no,’ Carrie said. ‘You’d know I was a tourist if you’d seen my luggage.’
‘I was asleep when you got there. Do you like India?’
‘Ooh, yes,’ Carrie said. ‘I can’t believe how cheap it is.’
Fred agreed, although whenever India had started to mean something to him, it was the glimpse of a monkey cavorting through a wild orchard of roadside pepper trees, not cheap but unbuyable, free. They walked in a slow way without map or plan. Their guide books were unhelpful, saying only that Kollam was a useful place from which to depart to explore Kerala’s network of canals. Before long, they found themselves in a street full of ironmongers.
‘I started this game,’ Carrie said, as Fred was examining a tiffin-pail with a degree of scrupulous curiosity he had never, quite, been able to summon in the face of even the lewdest temple statuary. ‘It was in Madras. Every day, I’d sit and watch the backpackers go up and down, and after a while, I started a competition, you know, for backpacker of the day. I gave them points and the one who came out on top won the competition for the day.’
‘What do you think that’s for?’ Fred asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Carrie said. It was a round tin box. ‘You could keep things in it. You’re not listening.’
‘I’m listening,’ Fred said. ‘What did you give them points for?’
‘Oh, if they were carrying a copy of Lonely fucking Planet, or for stupid hair, or for wearing Indian clothes and looking stupid in them, and for the size of their rucksacks. There was one boy who had a rucksack that was so big he couldn’t get through the door of the backpacker café in Chennai. And for having a conversation about where they’d just come from and where they were going, and telling you where you should go to and where you should have come from, that was another point.’
‘You’re a very unusual person,’ Fred said.
‘How unusual? I’m not unusual,’ Carrie said.
‘Well, I’ve never met anyone like you before,’ Fred said. It was not quite true; it would have been more true about almost any other person in this town. But he had not met those other people.
Carrie stopped. It was just another ironmonger’s, and what she picked up was just another tiffin-pail. The shopkeeper, at the back of the dingy little space, wearily raised himself from his accounts book to deal with them. She set it down and turned to Fred. Did she have the beginnings of tears in her eyes? ‘Don’t say that, Mr Fred,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to fall in love with you. I always know – I always know whether I’m going to or not, straight after I first meet someone.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Fred said. He was astonished. Perhaps he had been right; he had never met anyone like this before. He was glad of it.
‘You don’t know what you meant,’ Carrie said. Anyone else might have sounded angry. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘How many points would you give those backpackers there – those ones?’
‘Oh, we’ve done that,’ Carrie said. ‘Well, all right, four. Maybe five if they were Swedish. I know. Do you know what language they speak here?’
Fred attracted the attention of the shopkeeper. ‘Malayalam, apparently.’
‘Ma-lay-a-lam,’ Carrie said. ‘Hello! How do you say hello in Malayalam?’
The shopkeeper told them; they repeated.
‘And goodbye? And thank you? And how do you ask how much something is, in a shop?’
The shopkeeper produced a bubbling stream of syllables. He gazed at them with a schoolmaster strictness, waiting for their repetition.
‘All right,’ Carrie said. They left the shop. ‘We were only asking. Hey, Mr Fred. Will you buy me some oranges?’
‘They’re not that nice. I bought some a few days ago, but they were old and dry and full of pips. You don’t want them, really. I only bought them because of how they’d set them out. But they weren’t very nice. This was in Tanjore, though.’
‘I’m trying to guess what you do for a living,’ Carrie said.
‘I’d tell you if you asked,’ Fred said, reflecting that she hadn’t asked.
‘Whatever it is, it’s something where you get to say, I liked how they’d set them out, all day long.’
‘That could be anything, though,’ he said.
‘No, not anything,’ Carrie said. ‘For instance …’ she thought ‘… I don’t think vets get to say it.’
‘I like how you’ve set them out,’ Fred said. ‘Animal medicines. Or a line of anaesthetized hamsters.’
That was the way the afternoon passed. They looked at everything, and it all looked back at them. They had a glass each of iodine-flavoured Limca in the empty dining room of a blowsy hotel with posters of Switzerland on the walls. Carrie said the smell of the drink reminded her of swimming lessons at school. She had not had it before, and couldn’t promise that she’d have it again. ‘It’s nice, India,’ she said disconsolately. ‘It’s not as nice as Australia. It’s nicer than China, though.’
‘Have you been? Fred said, glimpsing the United Nations or something, arranged in order of niceness.
‘China smells,’ Carrie said.
On the way back to the waiting car, she started a game, of sorts.
‘Would you rather be blind or deaf?’
‘I’ve played this one before. Blind. People are sorry for you. They get annoyed with deaf people.’
‘Would you rather be a hammer or a nail?’
‘A hammer.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘But only because I’m really a nail.’
‘That’s okay, then. Would you rather be rich or famous?’
‘Rich.’
‘You’re horrible. Would you rather have a cat or a dog? Wait, have you got either?’
‘No, nothing. I’d rather have a cat if I had to. You don’t have to bother so much about them.’
‘A cat,’ she said, and from the way she’d just repeated what he’d said, he could see that she was taking in the possibility that horrible was what he might actually be. A cat, because you don’t have to make an effort for it. It was true and horrible.
‘Is that it?’ Fred said.
‘Would you rather be gay or black?’ Carrie said.
‘Gay or black?’
‘Okay, would you rather have a dead wife called Fifi or know that you were never going to have any kind of wife at all?’
‘The question doesn’t arise,’ Fred said, his heart hardening. In any case, there was the driver waiting for them, squatting with a cheroot on the bonnet of the white Ambassador. How nice was India, or Fred, or Carrie? Nicer than China?
‘You’re not going to have to choose between being a hammer and a nail either,’ Carrie said. ‘The question never arises. That’s not the point. Why doesn’t it arise?’
‘Well, I am homosexual,’ Fred said, sidling into the car as their driver held the door open. Carrie was about to get in through the same door; he started to shift along to make room. It was strange to get into a taxi with no shopping. But then she walked around with regal, ballerina-like steps. The driver, caught by surprise, ran around to open the other door. There was nothing wrong with saying that you were homosexual, but he could only have said it to Carrie when his heart was hard and cold towards her. It made no sense. He knew of no kindness or care in himself that would have stopped him saying it. She should have said something encouraging and sympathetic as she got into the car. But she said only, ‘It wasn’t really worth it, that town, was it?’ It was in quite a different voice, perhaps her mother’s decisive voice, wherever or whoever her mother might be. He hadn’t heard it before.
All the way back, she carried on playing the game, but with a party brightness in her tone that kept him at a distance. He obediently chose at her whim. It was only when she had been reduced to making him decide between being an orchid or a lawn (lawn, naturally) that she finally said he might have mentioned it earlier. There was nothing accusing about the way she said it; she only shrank back a little from her social manner as if deflating. It was an absurd complaint. The fact was banal and conspicuous. But her comment made him see that, in her life, his existence would count as in itse
lf interesting, pitiable, specialized in its appeal. In London, among the shrinking posse, the fact had been ordinary, and in India the least exotic of his qualities had been his habitual practice of sodomy, as some people might put it. It had been years since he had had a conversation like this one. She was doing her best.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ she said. The car turned off the main road, onto the dirt track that led to the hotel.
‘No,’ Fred said brutally. ‘Not my sort of thing, darling.’
‘I’ve got a boyfriend,’ Carrie said accusingly.
‘Great,’ Fred said.
Then silence fell, and afterwards Fred could never understand how that was. It was as if he had had a clear idea of someone, a different Fred, who could change the subject and, at this pitch of hostility, would ask Carrie if (say) she’d seen a newspaper recently. He imagined himself, suddenly well informed, explaining the international situation to her. There was a Fred in his mind, in the silent car, who could talk about the violence and destruction to the north. If everything, every other thing, in his life had been different, he could have smoothed things over by exposition, setting out the wrongs on each side, lighting up a history of grievance by talking. This was a girl who knew nothing. That other Fred could have enlarged her life by showing her what she had never listened to: the reason the world was as it was. He had never talked in such a way. Much as he wanted to, he could not start now. They travelled in silence, since once her games had come to an end, neither could supply anything in their place. All at once they were together in front of the hotel.
‘I’d never have thought …’ she said. ‘I mean,’ she said admonishingly, ‘Valentine’s Day.’ She stepped out and was away into the hotel.
Tales of Persuasion Page 12