CHAPTER FIVE

‘WOULD I BE right in supposing,’ the biographer asked, ‘that the truth about Albert’s death is that he didn’t want to be treated?’

Helen James had agreed to talk to the man. It was early evening in the lounge of the Ashoka Hotel. She had immediately felt better that morning when she had packed John off to Agra to see the Taj. She was proud of the boy, but he seemed superfluous. Then she had found herself disoriented at the clinic. It was distressing. She was aware of working without concentration or sympathy. All her life, wherever Albert got funding for one of his projects, she had offered her abilities, free of charge, at some local clinic. Her energy was never less than boundless. Under the glint of her rapid eyes, the sure touch of practised fingers on sore skin, even men and women of the most alien cultures surrendered their scepticism. Wagan, they called her among the Iatmul: witch doctor.

In the early years in Kenya and in New Guinea she and Albert had set up the clinics themselves and worked together: she examining infected wounds, listening to ugly coughs, distributing medicines, he doing all the lab and paperwork. Helen was a doctor, Albert a biologist. That was the thrust of their marriage, initially. They had both been eager to leave England. Each had needed the charisma of the other to make the break and each knew that the other could only be won and held by this willingness to leave everything behind. They would give their talents to the world’s poorest. No other explanation for their travels was required.

Then Albert backed off. Over a period of five or six years he had begun to doubt the wisdom of it. Switching from biology to anthropology, to kinesics, proxemics, cybernetics, he had developed his famous theory of non-manipulative study: any established culture is wiser than its foreign visitors and would-be benefactors; the clinic saved individual lives but it altered habits of mind, community traditions, attitudes to sickness and death; they were changes that would have incalculable consequences down the line. He wrote papers about delicate, self-correcting cultural ecologies – he was himself a delicate man – about complementary personality differentiation in complex social dynamics. Anti-establishment intellectuals loved him.

At that point, Helen had had John. It was a difficult time for her. An impetus had been lost. From being a couple, or a team, they were supposed to become a family. Did we ever achieve that? she wondered. Helen missed her work, the work she had shared with Albert. She missed healing people. And she couldn’t help her husband with the things he was doing now. Intellectually, he had moved away from her. Nor could she become a local woman; they were both agreed that a European could never be part of a pre-modern culture. Your Western consciousness blocked you. John, of course, had had to be sent to schools back in England. The boy came and went. So Helen began to use her medical skills in clinics run by local people along local lines, taking instructions from others. That was hardly intrusive, she protested.

Helen came to life in her work. She beamed at the native women, intimidated their suspicious menfolk. Examining a suppurated eyelid, pressing home a syringe, she was in command. Albert had seemed pleased with the compromise. ‘The choices I make apply to myself,’ he said, ‘and to no one else.’ At this point he was studying the relations between spoken word and physical gesture, between patterns of communication and collective ethos. Sometimes he would sit in Helen’s clinic for hours, talking to patients at random. He made sketches, took notes. A breakthrough paper was written: Prayer and Courtship Postures in Christian, Hindu and Muslim Cultures. The conference invitations began. Neither felt the need for another child.

In these local clinics, Helen had worked below her potential, seeing more patients than one could possibly give proper attention to. She had often been without the necessary diagnostic tools, without sophisticated medicines, without adequate facilities for care, without an interpreter. She had been thrown back on her intuition, which sharpened enormously. She could smell illness. ‘Albert studies the local ethos and pathos,’ she would laugh on rare social occasions, ‘while I pander to the vulgar desire to stay alive.’

Yet there was never any question of her withdrawing her devotion to her husband. Rather the contrary. Their travels had meaning now because of his brilliance: the theories he was developing would have resonance for what began to be called globalisation, the merging of all cultures. We were one of those special couples – this was the first thing she must tell this would-be biographer – who are totally dedicated to each other, because they have a higher goal. The mission came first, even if they had different ideas as to what the mission was. That was what made their marriage so sound.

But do we really want a biography? Helen worried today as she saw her patients at the clinic. She picked her way through the bodies in the waiting room. There was a man with a very severe testicular hernia. Helen couldn’t focus. Something wordless was gnawing behind these thoughts. Examining a deep abscess in a boy’s neck, she framed the question: how old is a woman, a widow, at fifty-three?

She had agreed to meet Paul Roberts at his hotel because she didn’t want him to see Albert’s books in the apartment. It would be difficult to stop the man going to the shelves and picking things up. She must go through everything herself first. But she had no desire to go through her husband’s work. She felt tired.

‘Who was that?’ John had asked the previous evening when she put the telephone down after the biographer’s call.

‘Just someone I have to meet,’ she told him.

Her son had watched her. The boy was sprawled on the couch with his Coke in his hand. He had turned the television on. Whenever John came home from school – home being Afghanistan, or Laos, or Zambia – there had always been a fridgeful of Coca-Cola for him. Helen loved his crude young appetite and it disturbed her. She wanted to be strict, she wanted to have him eat local vegetarian dishes, to understand that money doesn’t grow on trees, she wanted him to spend some time in the clinic where only the poorest of the poor came. She wanted to rub his young well-educated face in filth. And she wanted to spoil him and enjoy his youth and complacency. He seemed a stranger and she herself felt strange when he was here.

‘Tell me about Dad,’ John asked again.

Helen said she couldn’t talk. ‘He died right here,’ she sighed, ‘in our bedroom. You know he always said: You can’t balance the life equation without death.’ She frowned: ‘Maybe next time you visit I’ll be ready.’ Then she added: ‘He had a lot of pain, though he never let himself be nursed. You know how he was. At the end, he really wanted to die.’

As she spoke, John’s eyes never left her. It was uncomfortable. The boy was trying to get close. She wanted to embrace him, but knew she wouldn’t. Nor would she ever press him to come and see the work she did at the clinic. ‘The truth is, John love,’ she told him abruptly, ‘we’ve hardly any money. You know. It’s a problem. Now your father’s various grant incomes will dry up of course and I’m afraid there’s almost nothing in the kitty. You’ll have to support yourself as soon as possible.’

It was an exaggeration, but it did the trick. ‘Albert didn’t have any insurance,’ she explained. She was sitting at her place at the big table. ‘You know we never thought about that kind of thing.’

‘But how much money is there?’ John demanded. His mood changed. He became alert and aggressive, constantly shaking the empty Coke can as if to check whether there was any left. ‘I mean, if I’ve got to find other funds, I need to know when.’

‘You should go and see your grandparents when you get back,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they can help.’

Mother and son had argued then. It was unexpected and unpleasant. Helen certainly hadn’t meant to argue the very day of Albert’s funeral, but the boy was stubborn.

There was no way, he repeated over and over, that he was going to go crawling to Granny Janet to ask for money. ‘The fucking old witch.’

‘There’s my father as well,’ she responded primly.

‘Granddad Jack’s fucking gaga!’ John objected. With extreme belligerence, he began to tell his mother that she should get in touch with her mother herself. ‘You do it. You’re her daughter.’

‘But she dotes on you!’ Helen cried.

‘Maybe ten years ago,’ John said. ‘You can’t cut yourself off from members of your family for half a lifetime and then go crawling to them for money!’

‘John, John, John,’ Helen laughed, ‘don’t exaggerate! You should thank God you’re not out on the street with a begging bowl in your hands.’

She paused and looked hard at him. ‘Why have you always been scared of people, John; scared of working, scared of asking for things? Granny Janet would love to help.’

‘I’m not fucking scared!’ he objected. He insisted on swearing. His mother never swore. ‘And I work about fourteen hours a day, for your information.’

‘But not for money. You’ve never done a stroke for money in all these years.’

‘Well, nor have you! You’re proud of not working for money.’

‘But I don’t need any. And what I do is different.’

‘Everybody needs money.’

Helen smiled indulgently. ‘Really, I don’t, John,’ she said. ‘As long as I work at the clinic. People are generous. They pay in kind. Life is cheap here. And I don’t need cans of Coke at every meal, or smart shirts and trousers.’

‘It’s the rent that costs,’ John objected. ‘You have no idea what London’s like now. I don’t have a car. I never eat out. Actually, I never drink Coke at home either. Only when you get it for me. I live like a monk.’ There was a long pause. ‘Dad should have thought of this,’ he accused her.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ she laughed. ‘Just because you have to fend for yourself, it’s poor Albert’s fault.’

John had shaken his head and turned away from her to the television where a tubby BBC man in a turquoise shirt was interviewing Moroccan shopkeepers about the shortcomings of democracy.

‘Your father risked everything,’ she said, ‘to take his study in unconventional directions. You can’t imagine how difficult it was for him to find funding for some of his projects.’

Helen paused. She appeared to reflect. ‘And we certainly weren’t depending on parental assistance at your age. When we went to Kenya we had nothing. A tent and a typewriter and that was it.’

‘Only because you hated your mother,’ he said.

‘I didn’t hate her. We just didn’t get on.’ And she added: ‘Your father’s parents weren’t poor either, but we never took money from them. We made a clean break.’

John changed channel. He stared at a programme in Hindi that seemed to be about traditional theatre, or its disappearance perhaps. Helen watched him. She was right on the edge. If he keeps up the pressure, I’ll go and say something, she thought. But the boy held back, like an animal unable to use its energy. He didn’t know what move to make. Then she wanted him out of the house. She wanted her work in the clinic and that was that.

‘No fucking way am I going to crawl to Granny Janet,’ he finally repeated.

Helen burst out laughing. She even clapped her hands.

‘And if we’re so short of cash,’ he rounded on her, ‘what’s the point of paying for a driver and a hotel for me to go to see some old shit monument I don’t give a damn about? The Sufi stuff was gross. It was primitive! I’d rather go home. I’ve got work to do in the lab. Serious work.’

‘I’ve already arranged it for tomorrow,’ she told him calmly. ‘Your father was very keen for you to see the Taj. These things don’t cost much here.’

‘I won’t do it,’ he repeated. He was interrupted by the beep of a message arriving on his phone. He pulled the thing from his pocket, frowned and got up. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘goodnight, I’m still jet-lagged, I’m going to bed.’

After a few minutes, Helen had followed him, knocked, gently pushed open his door and asked, ‘Let’s talk about nice things, John. Tell me about this girlfriend. I suppose she’s the one sending the messages.’

‘I’ve already told you.’

Helen had waited at the door.

‘She’s into theatre,’ he said. ‘But I already told you. Actually, Elaine must be the funniest person I’ve ever met. I mean, she can mimic any voice. Even better than Dad could.’

‘Not monkey calls, though.’ Helen lifted an eyebrow.

‘No, not monkey calls,’ John smiled. Albert James had published a famous study on meta-communicative signals in monkey communities. He did hilarious imitations. ‘But on the phone she can really make the craziest voice sound completely convincing.’ He frowned: ‘It’s just that she’s having trouble getting a first break after drama school. Her father’s always on at her about a proper job.’

Helen watched him. ‘That’s a hard life, I imagine, the theatre, films.’

‘You should meet her, Mum.’ John looked up, suddenly enthusiastic again. ‘She’s very pretty. You’d like her.’

It was a characteristic of all members of the James family that they would drop an argument in a matter of moments. Nobody ever said sorry.

‘You know your father’s brother wanted to be a playwright,’ Helen said.

‘Right,’ John frowned. ‘Actually, Mum, that’s the kind of story I have to be careful not to tell her …’

It was remembering this comment of her son’s that the following afternoon almost the first thing Helen James said to Paul Roberts was: ‘You can’t understand Albert, Mr Roberts, without thinking about his brother, John. That’s where you should begin.’

‘The one who killed himself?’ the American replied.

Helen was taken aback by this brusqueness. ‘Among other things,’ she said dryly. Just being in a hotel like the Ashoka restored her to the sort of rebellious, anti-establishment identity she felt most at home with. Its flaunted luxury was obscene. Yet she couldn’t help but be impressed by the American’s staying here. It meant quite an income.

They were at a low table in the Bamboo Room with soft-footed waiters bowing and scraping. Helen had ordered a tea and been confronted with the silly rigmarole of a dozen brands on a silver tray. Indian music drifted from the neon-lit wall draperies, never really listenable but never absent. The upholstery too aimed to evoke something local, yet that Westerners could feel comfortable with. Paul Roberts asked if his guest minded his ordering a gin. ‘I’m a little nervous,’ he laughed. His face had an Irish set to it, she thought, florid and earnest and a little stupid.

Certainly he was precipitate. No sooner had the drinks arrived with the inevitable nuts and biscuits and gleaming teaspoons and folded white napkins, than he asked: ‘Since you’ve told me where I should begin, am I to take it, Mrs James, that you’re happy for me to do this book? Can I count on your help?’

Helen had put on a simple, very elegant, grey wool dress. She had been conscious of dressing for an occasion, without really knowing what sort of occasion. An occasion without Albert.

‘I know nothing about you,’ she said politely. ‘I’m a little surprised, frankly, to find an admirer of Albert’s staying at the Ashoka.’

‘Oh?’ the American raised an eyebrow. ‘I left in a hurry,’ he said, ‘the Indian Tourist Board booked for me.’

Helen watched him. Could he have been a student, perhaps, when Albert taught briefly in the States?

‘Mrs James, I’ve been corresponding with your husband for some time, by email. We had, er, kind of explored the question of a biography. I wasn’t aware that he was ill. I had no idea. He didn’t say anything about it.’

She sipped her tea.

‘He didn’t tell you about our correspondence?’

‘No.’

‘I can show you the emails,’ Paul Roberts said, ‘though, like I say, we were only at an exploratory stage.’

Again Helen said nothing. There was a powerful energy coming from the man, a coercive and rather naïve energy. He wanted to be liked, but only because she was Albert’s wife, of course.

‘The idea,’ the American continued, leaning forward rather urgently, ‘was for a biography that would give equal space to his thinking and his life, you know, showing how the one grew out of the other, and how relevant that thinking is to the contemporary world.’

Helen left a pause. ‘Tell me something about yourself,’ she eventually asked.

‘What can I say?’ The American sat back. He had full, satisfied lips, a rather wide nose, ruddy cheeks. ‘My father was an evangelical clergyman. Grew up in Albany. I’m the black sheep of the family, I guess. Graduated in philosophy, at Harvard. A few postgrad courses mixed with freelance journalism, till I got on the Globe, the Boston Globe, that is, and eventually travelled for them as foreign correspondent. In the last few years I’ve published a couple of books. A sort of novelised biography of Gandhi, you know, one of a collection of potted biographies for Harcourt Brace, and then a travel thing: Evenings in Asia. When they were both successful, I sort of dropped the day-to-day journalism. Just luck, I guess. Anyway, it was thanks to that success that I was able to get a publisher interested in Albert James.’

At this point Paul Roberts again leaned forward across the lacquered table, looking directly into Helen James’s eyes: ‘This book, though, Mrs James, will be far more serious than the other two. This is the book I want to write. You see, I truly believe your husband was one of the most important individuals of our times. I mean, he was at the heart of the modern contradiction and he knew it. Communication, consciousness, intervention, nonintervention, the mental ecology of global living, inside or outside: the problem is to get people to understand what Albert had understood.’

Helen James felt a sharp pain. Tears were coming. She stood up. ‘Thank you, Mr Roberts. I will go away and think about it.’ She picked up her jacket from the back of the chair.

The American was alarmed. ‘Mrs James! Please stay. I do apologise. Perhaps it is insensitive of me. I—’

She turned. He too was on his feet. He wore a smart blue suit but without a tie. His face was full of a sort of pained vivacity, like a dog that has expected approval and now finds himself being shut in his kennel.

‘I need to use the bathroom,’ Helen said.

She found the toilet area at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, cavernous and clad in white marble. She must wash her face, cool her eyes. ‘I’ll cry alone, with Albert,’ she said out loud, ‘when I scatter the ashes. Not with anyone else.’

A young, dark-skinned girl slipped off a stool and hurried over to run the water in the sink for her; a pretty girl with thick hair in a tress. She inserted the plug and tested the temperature. The taps were polished brass. The girl offered her a fresh bar of pink soap on a porcelain dish, then fetched a soft white towel and held it ready across outstretched hands. A girl for my son, Helen thought. There are so many young girls. She looked at the smooth dark hands drying her own, at the maroon and gold of the colonially inspired uniform. The girl had understood she was upset.

‘Is it okay, madam, you are needing anything else?’

Helen opened her purse to give a tip. She could slip out of the hotel now if she wanted; she hadn’t left anything in the lounge. She could spend the evening alone, start looking through Albert’s things. So many things in the apartment had gone dead. So many places felt empty. She hovered, checking her face in the bright mirror. The bathroom was very lavish. The marble was white as icing sugar. Her face seemed faded, veiled.

‘Does madam need some powder?’ The girl came back. ‘We have lipsticks, madam.’

Reluctantly, determinedly, Helen climbed the stairs back to the Bamboo Room.

They talked for two hours. First he must tell her why he was the black sheep of the family, she said. ‘Oh, because I divorced,’ Paul Roberts laughed. He had an explosive laugh. ‘Divorce was sort of unthinkable in the environment I grew up in, you understand? Only wicked uncles divorced, only witches tempted them. But I’m sure you know what puritan New England is like. Then I smoke! Alas, yes. A real compulsive. And smoking is of the devil. Not to mention studying philosophy. The divorce was just a confirmation in the end.’

Helen smiled. ‘And did you remarry?’

‘Sure, and divorced again!’ The American laughed even louder.

‘How sad.’

‘Not at all.’

‘And do you have children?’

‘Three. Two by number one, one by number two. A kind of neat symmetry if you’re willing to confuse the logical types.’

This was Albert’s vocabulary. The man was performing. ‘I’d like a vodka,’ she told him. She didn’t smile. ‘A vodka and lemon with plenty of ice.’

‘My pleasure,’ he grinned and raised his hand.

When the drink arrived she told the younger man that she had never really liked India. She had been happiest in the least contaminated places: New Guinea, Borneo. She wouldn’t use the word primitive. After the USA, however, Albert had felt it was important to be at the point of greatest attrition between traditional and modern, the melt line, he called it, or confluence: which meant India.

As she mentioned the USA, she looked at the journalist carefully. He only said: ‘I was based in Delhi a while for the Globe. Bewildering place.’ Helen drained the vodka in one and felt better. Without asking her permission, Paul Roberts ordered another.

‘What Albert wanted to do,’ Helen said, ‘was establish a cybernetic model that would allow us to predict how different cultural systems would absorb the influx of Western ideas and transform them. Even the way a clinic is run, for example, is completely different here from in Europe.’

The American took this as a cue to talk about the time he had covered the stand-off between Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists at the temple marking Krishna’s birthplace which of course was just a stone’s throw – and plenty of stones had been thrown – from some important mosque. On two occasions he had come under fire.

‘And having recently read Prayer and Courtship Postures,’ he told her, ‘I was constantly thinking, what would be Albert James’s take on all this, you know? He would have grasped the underlying pattern behind the confrontation. It often surprised me, reading his stuff, that he never offered himself as a mediator in these situations.’

Helen stared at the man. ‘The biggest mistake people make with Albert,’ she said forcefully, ‘is to imagine that he saw his thinking as in any way “useful”. That’s quite wrong.’

‘I know, I know,’ the American came back easily. ‘I know he thought that. But his ideas changed my life. Maybe they weren’t meant to be useful or to change anything, but they did. Ideas do. Or it could be this is just a lexical problem,’ he grinned. ‘I mean what do we mean by useful? Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all,’ Helen said. She hated cigarettes.

A waiter stepped from nowhere with a lighter. ‘Why thank you!’ Paul Roberts exclaimed. ‘There’s usefulness for you!’ he laughed. He seemed quite vulgarly at ease now. He drew on his cigarette between full fleshy lips. Suddenly, his face clouded: ‘Mrs James, I know I shouldn’t ask, but the question is tormenting me. I mean, my having a correspondence with a great man who was dying, yet who never mentioned being ill. Can I ask you, did he take his non-interventionist ideas so far as to refuse medical treatment? Is that why it happened? Do forgive me if I’m being indiscreet again.’

She took in how rapidly the man moved from the infantile to the shrewd, from building up credit to drawing on it, overdrawing in this case. Very slowly, she replied: ‘It depends what you call treatment. A lexical problem.’

‘Touché,’ Roberts said.

And again Helen suggested, ‘I do think the place to start is with his brother John, and his father.’

Paul Roberts listened respectfully for a few moments while she talked about the circumstances leading up to John James’s suicide. It was an old story. ‘And yourself?’ he eventually asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Yourself, Mrs James. You are surely the most important relationship in Albert’s life? Thirty years together, isn’t it? Maybe the place to start is you.’

Helen bit a lip. She finished her drink. ‘I worshipped Albert and I had the privilege of making certain things possible for him. In return, he was the most faithful and fascinating companion a woman could wish for.’

A few moments later, when she stood up to go, Paul Roberts asked her if she knew where he could contact a certain Sharmistha Puri whom Albert had apparently been working with. ‘Some project on spiders.’

‘I have no idea,’ Helen told him.