Just before she entered the café, Penny raked her hands through her hair and stood straighter. She was suddenly conscious of the swell of her stomach, her breasts straining against her ill-fitting bra. Robert and Laura were sitting at a window table in the back. Penny gave what she hoped was a cheery wave and joined them. Robert jumped up and kissed her on both cheeks. Laura looked at her quizzically and shook hands with a firm grip.
‘Ah, a real native,’ said Laura. ‘How do you do? Robert said he was so pleased to have met you. The first proper conversation he’d had since he got here.’
Penny smiled. ‘That can’t be true. He has Montaigne as a companion, after all.’
Robert ordered a carafe of wine and they perused the menu before settling on salade Perigourdine.
‘We’ll be mainlining cholesterol,’ Penny said to Laura. ‘It’s got the lot, gizzards, duck breast and foie gras.’
‘Good,’ said Laura. ‘We can diet when we’re dead. I can’t tell you how many friends of mine who’ve jogged and counted calories for decades and have ended up with heart attacks and ruined knees. Or worse, in a coffin.’
Penny surreptitiously observed the other woman. She was rail thin, elegant in a weathered, tanned way with dark eyes and sleek brown hair cut close to her head. Despite her American accent, her jeans and faded top, she had a Parisienne air about her. Penny could imagine her cycling with brio about the Left Bank. Laura gesticulated and waved her arms about in a European way. Penny noticed a crop of thick dark hair under her arms.
‘What in God’s name is this?’ asked Laura as their food arrived. She speared a wrinkled brown ball on her fork. ‘It looks like a fossilised turd.’
‘That,’ said Penny, ‘is one of the famous gizzards. Taste it. They’re good.’
Laura obediently chewed and swallowed. ‘I agree and I retract my earlier statement. More like a fossilised testicle. Or what I imagine a fossilised testicle might look and taste like.’
Penny had to admit that she liked Laura. She was interesting and funny. Robert clearly shared her opinion, patting Laura’s arm as they spoke and ruffling her hair as he went to the bar for more wine.
What a fool she’d been, indulging in romantic adolescent fantasies. She was past all that anyway. So much more peaceful to have them both as casual friends. Laura looked the type to enjoy a walk. She would invite them home, for a bit of a hike through the hills, then supper. The company would do her good.
‘So how did you two come across each other?’
Penny jumped out of her reverie. ‘In the café, another one nearby, and then we had supper together. I think he was lonely, missing you.’
Laura arched an eyebrow. ‘He might have been lonely, but he wasn’t missing me, as in “missing”, as in “romance”. I’ve known Robert a long time. I knew his wife. We worked together. Robert and I are good friends, but that’s it. He suggested I visit him because I’ve just come out of a long relationship.’
She leaned towards Penny. ‘You’ve been tucked away in the country for too long. I like Robert, but I don’t sleep with men. I mean, I’ve tried it, but I didn’t like it. It seems to me that you and Robert should get to know each other better.’ Laura lifted her shoulders in a Gallic fashion and tilted her head to one side. Penny blushed. What was she to make of such a comment? Did she have an invisible tattoo on her forehead? Lonely woman in search of a romantic encounter? She was saved from having to reply as Robert sat down, brandishing a full carafe. He refilled Laura’s glass, but Penny shook her head.
‘I have to make it back up the path.’ She knew her cheeks were still red. ‘And I have to get to the post office.’ She reached down for her bag before offering a tentative invitation. ‘Would you both like to come for supper? We could walk for a bit beforehand. There’s a kind of cave and a good view from the hill above me. Friday? Around six?’
‘Terrific,’ said Robert. His eyes crinkled against the afternoon sun. ‘I’ll call you, get the directions.’
She thanked him for lunch, kissed them both on the cheek and scurried out of the café. She would go to the post office on her way home, check if anything had arrived for the new doll’s house. She would concentrate on that.
All the way back home, striding up the path until she was hot and breathless, she felt the two small parcels in her bag knocking against her side in a steady rhythm. When she reached the courtyard, she stood gazing at the solid wall of mountains across the valley, their peaks flaming in the afternoon light, until she regained her breath.
She unlocked the kitchen door and carefully unwrapped the parcels. The first was a miniature cream Aga with controls you could actually turn, from Kent, Connecticut. She held it in her hand, carefully opening and shutting the oven doors. So intricate and exact, worth waiting for. The second parcel, from a Somerset address, was even more satisfying: a palm-sized copy of a mid-eighteenth-century console table with tapered legs and a bronzed base. Another eBay find, another early morning pounce.
Penny dusted them and placed them next to the special box in the hall. The Aga would go in the basement kitchen and the positions of cook and kitchen maids would be filled by a family of apronwearing Labradors, salvaged at the end of Emily’s Sylvanian Families phase. Matthew’s Mickey Mouse pyjamas would be cut into a pantry tablecloth and fragments of his favourite mini mirrorball, brought home by Sandy after some trip, would tile the master bathroom. The mirrorball had broken almost immediately, but she had kept the pieces for all these years. Everything would come to life once it had found its home in the new doll’s house.
The house was silent apart from the ticking of her mother’s old grandfather clock. This was the time of day she liked best, walking from room to empty room, feeling the last of the sun warm her face, thinking what she would cook for supper, what she would read that evening, planning the next day.
But the usual calming routine wasn’t working. She was still jangling from her lunch and Laura’s suggestion that she seduce Robert, or at least make some kind of play for him. Also, she couldn’t stop comparing her oh-so-bourgeois and solitary life in France to the one that Emily, Matthew and Sandy were no doubt enjoying in India.
She had become obsessed with domestic hygiene. She rubbed her hands with antiseptic gels, she sprayed the kitchen table with a homemade concoction of vinegar and lavender oil, as if she could keep at bay what she began to call the subcontinental effect.
There were times when Penny thought India was colonising her small French outpost. All three of them were besieging her by email and text messages. From his hotel lounge, equipped with free wifi (‘one of the few things in this country that works’), Sandy offered detailed accounts of his indigestion. When he wasn’t pondering his own entrails, he worried that Emily appeared completely besotted by this mysterious guru she’d never seen.
Over dinner one night, Emily had told Sandy that she would do anything that Rosheme asked of her. When Sandy asked would Emily jump off a bridge if Rosheme told her to, Emily replied that he would never ask her to do anything without a good reason. She had become very attached to one of Rosheme’s followers, a young man called Samten who went to university in London.
Sandy also worried about Matthew’s problem with ‘substances’. Sandy had stopped drinking, in case she was wondering. Penny had been right to ask if it was a bit late for a gap year. But he was running late for so many things in his life that one more scarcely seemed to matter.
From an internet café, Emily said everything was going as well as could be expected. ‘Dad is trying hard and sometimes he is very trying, but we’re doing some fun things, getting out and seeing some of the amazing things around the town. We’ll get there in the end. You’re not to worry.’
This immediately made Penny worry a lot, particularly as Emily had not been specific about what Penny wasn’t to worry about. Matthew confined himself to cryptic texts.
‘AAMOI why U marry him? AISI, nothing in common. Am seeing him 2moro. ADIP xxm.’
Penny w
anted to leave them alone, but they wouldn’t let her. From Nigel’s office, she replied dutifully to each email while thinking that, for a divorced family, they spent far too much time communicating with each other. It reminded her of their old life, how it didn’t work. Remembering that dispelled the envy that somehow the three of them had managed a harmony that had eluded the four of them together.
Instead she began to feel guilty about spending money that could feed an Indian family for weeks, if not months. Annoyed with herself for feeling guilty, she walked down to the Wednesday market and bought more food for the dinner with Robert and Laura: a plump roasting chicken, freshly churned unsalted butter and a perfectly ripe brie. On the way home, she dropped into Nigel’s office and set up a standing order to Oxfam. It was something.
By five o’clock on Friday, the chicken was stuffed with onions and a great bunch of tarragon, ready for the oven. She washed potatoes, carrots and spinach from the garden and baked an apple tart, looking up an old recipe of her mother’s. She dusted off a good Bergerac red for the brie and chilled a white Montravel for the chicken. There was nothing else to do except wait for them to arrive.
The sun was already dipping behind the pines, but the courtyard flagstones were still warm. Fat bees hovered over the valerian and lavender, now in full flower. It was as she had hoped: a kind summer. She planned to take Robert and Laura along the goat path to the top of the hill and what she had imagined might once have been a cave. It was an ideal pre-dinner walk; energetic but not strenuous, taking only an hour and a half. She was congratulating herself on keeping away from the mirror all day when she heard footsteps behind her. It was Robert. He was alone.
‘Where’s Laura?’ she asked, wiping her hands on her trousers before going in for a quick peck on his cheek. This was not what she’d envisaged. She wanted a pleasant walk, a convivial dinner with three people. Now she had to wade through an evening freighted with possibility.
‘That has to go down as one of the most downbeat welcomes I’ve ever had,’ he laughed. ‘But I guess I’ll survive. Laura sends her apologies. She’s got some kind of gastric bug and is lying low.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Penny. ‘Sorry also for my very poor welcome. I need to brush up on my social skills.’
In the kitchen, as he declined anything stronger than water, she watched him glancing around. She imagined everything through his eyes, probably too handmade and provincial for his New York taste; God knows what he would make of the latest doll’s house project in the sitting room, its Palladian columns waiting for a roof, the three floors of rooms half painted, bits and pieces everywhere.
Head in the oven as she placed the chicken on a tray, she heard the clatter of his feet on the flagstones change to a thump as he reached the wooden hall floor, and then a muffled thud as he stepped through to the rugs in the sitting room. She stood up and waited, almost willing him to make fun of the doll’s house because then she would have a good reason not to like him and everything could revert to normal.
Silence. At the door of the sitting room, she saw Robert crouched down, peering behind the columns.
‘This is amazing,’ he said.
‘Ready to go?’ she asked, thinking that he meant the opposite, as she did when she used that word.
‘But I haven’t finished admiring your work,’ he said. ‘It’s quite something, so intricate.’
Was he patronising her? She couldn’t decide. ‘There is a school of thought that says it’s a stupid waste of time – I’m fiddling with matchwood while they in India are burning with inspiration.’
Robert straightened, rubbing the base of his spine with his hand. The movement was endearing, a small indication of a physical frailty, that all was not whipcord muscle and perfectly balanced tendons.
‘Why is what you’re doing any less valid than what they’re doing, or not doing? You know that old Hemingway dictum – don’t confuse action with movement. Enlightenment or lack of it is not about geography.’
‘You’re right. I shouldn’t be so touchy about things.’ She smiled. ‘Let’s go. We should catch the sunset from the top if we leave now.’
Chapter 40
For the next two days, Sandy tried to find a good time to apologise. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He knew only that he had to say something. But Emily was too busy at the ashram for anything more than a quick coffee and Matt said he had a stomach bug. Sandy was not to visit. It might be contagious. Sandy hung around his hotel sending emails, reading and feeling sorry for himself. Finally Matt called and asked him to his hotel. ‘For tea,’ said Matthew. ‘Just a quick one.’ Sandy was out of the hotel and in a taxi in less than five minutes.
An almost naked man, lean with a beard and matted hair, stood completely still on a corner, oblivious to the traffic and the crowded pavement. He was smiling, a beatific grin as he lifted his head to the sky. Maybe, Sandy thought, he should become like this man, a sadhu. Just take off your clothes, put on a loincloth and keep walking. Enlightenment and peace would surely follow. Or maybe not.
His reverie was interrupted by the driver swerving hard and braking outside the hotel. Sandy paid the fare, forgetting to bargain, and went inside. He was expecting it to be some kind of fetid dosshouse, but it was surprisingly large and light behind the rundown exterior. Sandy peered beyond the foyer, where people lounged on a neat lawn in the afternoon sun.
It wasn’t just a crowd of teenagers. There was a group of American women, all with grey hair, and the man sitting cross-legged on the grass was about his age. He hadn’t minded about not staying with Emily, because she was living in the ashram. But to be hived off to some dump of a hotel, the name of which was an absolute lie, when he could have been here in comfort, near his son? Neither of them wanted him. It hurt.
He looked around for Matthew. Perhaps he was still in his room. But when Sandy asked the hotel clerk, the man stopped dusting his desk and beamed at him as if he was about to impart some wonderful news and produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket.
‘From your son,’ the clerk said, giving it to Sandy. ‘Lovely boy, so kind.’
Sandy quickly unfolded the piece of paper, worried that Matthew’s stomach bug had suddenly got worse and that someone had taken him to hospital. Sandy saw the hurried handwriting, so like his own. Something had come up. Matthew couldn’t make it after all. He would call Sandy later, or the next day.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.
The lines swam into his consciousness unwanted and unbidden. Sometimes he wished old Gerard would take a running jump into someone else’s psyche. He no longer yearned for success. He did not hunger for perfect note moments. None of that mattered anymore. All Sandy wanted was a chance with his children.
He decided to walk back to his hotel because each step would take him somewhere and physical movement would calm him, even though his sense of direction was erratic at best. The hotel was only about ten minutes’ walk away, near a plump white dome of a temple. He’d seen it from his room. The dome would be a beacon.
He was confused in less than a minute. Somehow, his surroundings had shifted. The lane he found himself in was narrow and winding. There was another temple dome in front of him. Was it the same one?
Sandy wasn’t sure, so he turned back to regain his bearings. In his head he kept hearing Emily’s shouted accusations, and Hopkins’s lines of self-loathing. He would never be able to make it up to his children. He was a fool to have thought it was possible. He had left it too late.
Everything was disjointed and disappearing into something else. He looked around him, certain the lane he’d walked down was lined with stalls selling rolls of linen and synthetic satins embroidered with fierce dragons. He remembered because the smell of chemicals on the fabric had made his eyes water. But the stalls had somehow disappeared and had been replaced by shops selling pieces of pipe and coils of wire.
‘Mountain Vie
w Hotel? Please? Where?’ he asked one of the shopkeepers. The man nodded and pointed towards a smaller lane. Sandy was doubtful, but the man insisted. ‘Yes, yes. Hotel.’ Sandy turned into a narrow row of food stalls selling spinach and carrots, and piles of fresh ginger and turmeric. Further along a young girl flipped doughnuts in a vat of smoking oil. It was hot and airless. His stubbed toe ached. His ankles were chafed, probably blistered. Every step hurt.
A group of young men gathered around a bicycle laughed at him and shouted something. One of the men, shirtless, with his jeans slung low, raised his arms and pointed an imaginary gun. The others laughed and urged him on. Sandy was scared. If the men came at him, he could do nothing. There was no point of refuge, no shops or cafés with English signs where he could retreat to safety. Sandy turned his back on them and hobbled off in a different direction, down yet another lane. Snorts of laughter followed his progress.
Under the now familiar aromas of cooking oil, chilli and cumin, there was a smell of something sweet and close. Before he could turn away, he saw a sad trickle of blood course through the dust, as a young boy behind a meat stall wiped his cleaver. On the table lay a small goat, still twitching, its pale eyes frozen in agonised surprise.
Sandy retched. Everything about the town was repugnant and alien. All he could think of was getting out of this hideous cruel place. But there were no taxis or cars anywhere, no Western tourists, only bicycles, carts and far too many people crammed together, jostling for their own tiny piece of space. Everywhere he looked was another lane, another row of stalls or a dim alleyway, and there he was, just standing there, unable to move and not knowing what to do.
He needed to stay calm, to remember he was in a small town with a centre and a periphery. It wasn’t a maze, he told himself. He would walk with his shadow at his front and eventually find himself somewhere with a taxi, or another white face. But the lanes grew even smaller and it was so crowded that his shadow merged into all the others. When he looked up, there were no temple domes, just the haze that stung his eyes. He thought he would never escape.
After Everything Page 25