CHAPTER TWO

RETURNING FROM AN eight-hour shift at the clinic, Helen James came home to find her maid pointing excitedly at the bedroom, one finger over her mouth. ‘Mr John is here! Your son, madam!’ Helen opened the door to the spare room. John lay on the bed, fully clothed, his handsome face smoothed in sleep, a blond forearm on the pillow. What an improbable presence, she thought. He bore no resemblance really to herself or Albert, so lithe and so relaxed.

Helen had been very much tempted, two or three days ago, not to tell her son about this at all. Why tell anyone? She would definitely have preferred to wind up her marriage by herself. She would have preferred a funeral with no public but herself, or no funeral at all, the bare cremation. In a dream, not three weeks before, she had seen herself carrying her husband’s body to a funeral pyre by the riverside – he wasn’t heavy at all – laying him down on the mud at the water’s edge while the crematorium wallahs heaped on the wood, then holding his hand and talking to him while he burned and sang and the river flowed by. An oddly Indian dream, she thought. When she woke he was shuffling back from the bathroom. She would have liked to cremate him herself, push the coffin into the furnace herself, collect the ashes herself, sweeping them into the skirts of her dress, and hide them herself, on her own, in a place that only she knew. Yes, yes, she had dreamed of doing that; she daydreamed. Yet the morning after the long and terrible last night she had called John on his mobile. ‘Your father died this morning.’ It was a duty. You can’t deny a son the death of his father. John is a duty and a burden to me, she thought. She shook her head. What fine clothes he was wearing. He seemed unthinkably large and adult. There were two empty Coke cans beside the bed. ‘We’ll have to talk about money, my boy,’ she muttered.

Helen changed out of her work clothes, then sat at the table in the sitting room looking through the newspaper and drinking tea. Every few moments she stopped, her head cocked, as if listening. These are fragile days, she thought, but in the end she would get through. The death of a partner is not the worst way for a relationship to end. Suddenly, Helen decided that she didn’t want to eat alone with her son. She called a colleague, then woke the boy towards seven. ‘John, love, we’re going out to eat, do you mind?’

When John appeared in the sitting room, Kulwant Singh was already there. A Sikh. The young man had meant to ask at once how it had been, how his father had died so quickly when only a couple of months before the doctors had been talking of normal life expectancy; had he left any special message for his son? But Mrs James was already shooing them out of the apartment; there was a small place she hadn’t been to for a long time, she said. ‘I don’t digest properly if I eat late.’ She seemed so much her ordinary self that her son was taken aback.

Kulwant was a jowly, jovial, heavily built man recently returned from a trip to London and very much amused, he declared, by this marriage of Charles and Camilla. ‘It is too funny,’ he kept saying as they ate their meal, ‘these old folks marrying, you know. It’s too funny.’

Exactly as if he were in a pub with Elaine’s friends in London, John began to get worked up about the complete idiocy of royalty. It was incredible, he protested, that even foreigners were seduced by this soap opera.

For a moment the Indian doctor seemed offended – ‘Indians are not ordinary foreigners’ – he complained. Then he chose to be indulgent and chuckled. ‘No, it’s too funny!’

‘How old are they, exactly?’ Helen asked. She couldn’t recall.

‘Late fifties,’ Kulwant said. ‘Far beyond childbearing age, you see.’

‘But who cares how old they are?’ John insisted. ‘It’s the attention they get from the press that’s so maddening and mindless, when anyone who’s halfway talented is eternally ignored.’

‘We must not speak only of talented people,’ Kulwant laughed. ‘There are so few of them!’

Eating quietly, Helen was grateful that no one had mentioned Albert. She herself was fifty-three.

‘I like it here,’ John talked enthusiastically as they walked a little way before finding a cab. Kulwant had hurried off in an autorickshaw. ‘I like the way the air smells and the rickshaws and animals.’ He was looking at a girl in a sari swaying side-saddle on a scooter. ‘Are you going to stay?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Helen told him. ‘I have the clinic. I have my patients.’

‘I’m glad. We’ll come and visit.’ He meant Elaine.

‘You didn’t appear to like Kulwant very much,’ his mother said.

‘Oh no, he was nice. Just that it drives me crazy to think I’m sitting in a restaurant in the heart of the subcontinent eating whatever spicy stuff it was with a man in a bright green turban and all he wants to talk about is whether Harry was the butler’s son and did Charles have the balls to murder Di.’

‘So what did you want to talk about?’

‘I don’t know,’ John laughed. ‘The colour of his turban maybe. Are the colours symbolic or something?’

‘Why didn’t you ask?’

At this point John pulled a couple of coins from his pocket to get rid of two little boys who had been tugging at his sleeves. At once, a dozen more appeared. Poorly lit, the street was still busy. So many people seemed to be carrying things, in their arms, on their heads, with carts and bicycles, as if life were an endless to and fro of bulky packages. Many more squatted on the kerb. Helen shooed the boys away.

‘I didn’t want to offend,’ John said. ‘You know? I’m never sure what I can ask and what I can’t.’

‘Kulwant is busy arranging the marriage of his daughter,’ Helen said. ‘Unfortunately, the girl damaged a knee just when everything seemed settled. She was getting off a bus in traffic and a motorbike hit her. Quite near here, actually. They had to use the money they’d saved for the wedding to pay for her operation. These things aren’t free here. So now the groom’s family has turned cool.’

‘Oh,’ was all John could think to say. ‘I thought they’d stopped arranging marriages.’

‘Not at all.’ Helen stopped on the kerb and waved for a taxi.

‘How come the London trip, then, if he’s short of money?’

‘Financed by the drug companies, so that he’ll prescribe the right things, to those who can afford them of course. If my patients only got what they could afford, they’d never be treated at all.’

Mother and son were silent on the drive back to their apartment, but when they were settled in the sitting room, John at last said: ‘I was hoping to see Dad, tomorrow, before the funeral.’

Helen had gone to sit at her place at the room’s big table. She sighed. ‘I knew you’d want to, but I had the coffin sealed this morning.’

After a short silence, John tried: ‘Can’t they open it?’

His mother looked at her boy. The young man was so well made, with his grey, wide-set eyes, his soft thick hair. She sighed. ‘It’s not a nice sight, John. Best think of him as he was.’

‘I’m not a child,’ John protested.

‘It’s been forty-eight hours now,’ Helen said. ‘And he’s not in a deep freeze. They usually do things right away here you know.’

‘Mum, I spend all my time studying the difference between live cells and dead cells. We’re in the same business.’

His mother didn’t reply.

John turned to the window. ‘How come it happened so quickly?’

‘There were metastases.’

‘So why didn’t he fly back to England?’

‘You know how he was, John.’

The young man felt thwarted. He had imagined himself sympathising with his mother. She would share with him how the end had been. His father would have left a message of some kind, some words for him to mull over. They would look at photographs together. Dad’s had been a rich life, full of travel and ideas. They would feel consoled and close and talk about the future. Instead, the son felt frustrated, even angry. He walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out a Coke and went to sit on the sofa opposite the television.

‘You remembered the Cokes,’ he said grudgingly.

‘How could I forget?’ she smiled. ‘Tell me about yourself, John. How’s the thesis going?’

‘Pretty well finished,’ he said. ‘But the thesis is a detail compared with the research itself. It’s a whole new approach to TB.’

‘And this girl?’

‘Elaine?’ He softened. ‘She’s fine. Looking for her first acting jobs.’

‘Well, let’s hope this time,’ his mother said.

John had a way of being left by pretty girlfriends. His mother would smile wryly. John didn’t reply.

‘And you finish when?’

‘If things in the lab go well, this spring.’

‘After which?’

‘They’ll take me on for the project we’re doing.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m the best.’

His mother watched him. ‘Don’t you think it might be an idea to get some experience first? Often it helps your research if you’ve seen a few things. There are plenty of TB patients to study here, if you’re interested. You know your father …’

‘Mum,’ John shook his head. ‘In the field I’m in, just to understand all the information you need to make even the tiniest step forward takes a lifetime. You have to specialise, specialise, specialise. There’s no time to fool around. And it’s done in the lab, not looking at patients. You don’t need to see the sufferers.’

They sat in silence, Helen behind the big table, John with his leg over the arm of the sofa, swirling his Coke round in its can as if it were cognac. Very soon, he knew, she was going to get up and say goodnight. All his life his mother had preferred to sit at table rather than in an armchair or on the sofa. Wherever they lived, one end of the sitting-room table would have her papers and correspondence, more recently her laptop, a couple of magazines: Medical Digest, BMA News and Quarterly. It was as if Helen James created a little office or nest of her own within the larger nest of the home.

And in the past, of course, Albert would have been present too, listening over and over to his audio recordings, watching the videos he had made, writing his interminable notes. When she wasn’t in the clinic, when he wasn’t off on his researches, it had been rare for the two of them not to be in the same room. They discussed his ideas. Dad was the one who had the ideas, sitting on the floor usually, sorting through piles of old tapes and books and notes. The whole house was Albert’s office, and his kitchen and bedroom. He drew no boundaries.

‘Listen to this,’ he would say, and then they would argue some hypothesis back and forth – they rarely agreed – getting quite worked up sometimes, until she would get to her feet – she was a tall, graceful, angular woman – put aside a book that she hadn’t really been reading, or a letter that hadn’t quite got written, and announce that she was going to bed: ‘I don’t know about anybody else,’ she would say, ‘but this old girl needs to be fresh for the clinic in the morning.’ She needed energy, she said, for her patients and their diseases. She had lives to save. It wasn’t for the likes of her – but she was smiling – to spend her days idly videoing other people’s conversations.

Afterwards, his father would sit up for another hour and more, or perhaps for half the night, playing and replaying the same four or five minutes of video, a conversation he had filmed, in the market, at the bank, in the hospital, at a religious ceremony, often in languages he didn’t understand. And as he watched he would say, ‘Ha!’ Or, ‘No! No, it’s not that,’ taking no notice at all of his son, never explaining quite what it was he was after or up to. It was a situation that had allowed John to get away with a great deal over the years.

‘Well, I’m off to bed,’ Helen James announced abruptly. She stood up. ‘To be honest, John, I’ve had a difficult couple of months. I need to get my strength back. And we’re short of staff at the moment.’

Her son stood up to embrace her. As he recalled, the places his mother worked in had always been short of staff. ‘Didn’t Dad say anything for me?’ he asked.

Her eyes flickered away from his.

‘I don’t know,’ he tried. He wasn’t sure if he was asking too much. ‘Some advice, some message?’

Helen James embraced her son and held him tightly. It was the first real contact. Each was looking over the other’s shoulder. ‘Your dad was ill,’ she whispered. John pressed his cheek against hers. ‘A couple of days before the end he said, “If John has time to come out, make sure he visits at least the Sufi tombs, and if possible takes the trip to Agra to see the Taj.”’

‘Oh God, that’s so Dad!’ John laughed, but he almost cried too. ‘How can I? I’m leaving Thursday, Mum. Otherwise all the lab work will get behind.’

‘Two days is plenty,’ she said. She stood back and held him at arm’s length. There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling. ‘You hardly need to hang about here with your old mum, do you?’

When his mother had gone to bed, John flicked through the TV channels. Why did I get so heated about Charles and Camilla? he wondered. He felt wide awake now and uneasy. What would happen at the lab if he wasn’t there to keep track of things? He was the only person who was always present.

Going to the spare room, he took out his laptop and scrolled through lists of readings they had been taking. ‘How did the audition go?’ he texted Elaine. ‘Everything okay, here. Mum making a big show of being in control.’

The girl did not reply. John pulled out a copy of a journal on communications theory. There was no wall space without its bookshelves and every book and magazine was covered with his father’s scrawl. Some words were underlined, others crossed out. The comments in the margin spilled over onto the page. Not all of them appeared to have much to do with the text they had been written beside. On an article entitled ‘Cybernetics and Invertebrates’, Albert James had written: ‘START AND END WITH BREATHING.’ And then beneath that, in a tiny, heavily slanted scribble: ‘drink every evening ceremonial substitute for thing that hasn’t happened. But what thing?’

John shook his head. It was the kind of distraction that had always prevented his father from producing anything concrete. Mother at least changed people’s lives day by day with her diagnoses and medicines. Midway through an article on left-lobe anomalies in chronic schizophrenics, he found the note: ‘Not to KNOW anything! Only observations, stories.’

Again John frowned. Perhaps his father’s real problem, he thought, had been his difficulty working together in a team, with other people, towards a shared goal, something essential these days given the sheer amount of spadework that was required to get to grips with anything. You had to be a link in a larger chain, contribute one thing, whereas Dad was always out on his own, trying to solve the whole world himself.

Not properly tired, John lay on the small bed, waiting for sleep. It was impossible to think usefully of his work without being in the lab. Breaking down the smallest particles and isolating even smaller ones, to manipulate them, even the most unimaginably tiny coils of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, every phospholipid: that was the way to progress. That was the way to put new drugs in the hands of people like his mother. Not scribbling queer thoughts over other people’s publications. John felt uneasy. It was frustrating that he hadn’t seen Dad’s body. What did I come here for after all?

Suddenly he was dreaming. It was a troubled sleep. He was walking down the same broad avenues he had walked this morning, but wearing one ordinary, really rather elegant leather sandal, while the toe of his other foot was crammed into a tiny, white, child’s shoe, a little girl’s shoe, it seemed, which he was dragging along on the pavement because there was no way his foot would ever actually get inside it. And what irritated him enormously – it was an angry sleep – was that when the Indian man in the airport shop had told him that they only had one right-footed sandal in his size and that the best thing was to take that together with this strange little white feminine thing for his left foot, he had actually accepted this stupid solution. How dumb can you be! If there’s one thing you need two of, John, and the same size, it’s shoes! ‘Symmetry!’ Dad always used to say: ‘At the heart of life is symmetry!’ And shuffling along the broken pavement among the beggars and with car horns blaring and rickshaw drivers soliciting, he was torn between going back to the shop to protest, because he had actually paid £17 for the things – £17 of my parents’ money! – and setting off instead to the Sufi tombs where he was to see his father’s body for the last time.

‘John!’ A voice whispered. ‘John. Time to get up.’ His mother was shaking his shoulder. The funeral was at ten.