CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

TONIGHT WOULD NOT be an ordinary night. Helen was not so blind she could not see a change of colour in the air, a change of weather. But nothing was decided. She sat in her taxi looking at the havoc left by the storm, the broken branches, fallen signposts, spilled rubbish. She watched the rain teeming on the mess, dogs skulking about blocked drains. She had seen it all before. She thought of nothing and at the same time she knew the night would be full of thoughts. She should not have spoken so openly to Paul. A line of defence had been swept away. An army of regrets was preparing the final assault. Go on regardless, Helen told herself.

She paid the driver outside the clinic and, as usual when on night duty, signed in a full hour early. She performed a series of reassuringly mechanical actions. She removed her shoes, opened her surgery and put on her hospital clothes, her work slippers. She checked the admissions register, went to the ward and walked between the beds, nodding to those she knew, checking the records of those she didn’t, listening to the afternoon nurse, a middle-aged Muslim woman who was angry with visitors bringing in food and making a mess.

‘We must be having some discipline in here!’ the nurse insisted. ‘You please speak to them, Dr James; if you could remind them of our regulations.’

Helen noticed that Than-Htay was in a bed this evening.

‘He has been coughing,’ the nurse said. She lowered her voice, ‘Blood.’

The boy followed Helen with his eyes but didn’t speak.

She went to the noisy Hindu family with their assortment of sweets and cards for a sick auntie. She smiled and they fell silent.

‘Good evening, madam,’ one of them said.

In a quiet voice, Helen reminded them of the rules, the visiting hours, the number of friends and family members permitted, what could and could not be brought into the ward.

‘Very sorry, madam,’ the oldest of the group began at once.

‘We are leaving only,’ another promised.

‘It is my fault, madam,’ the sick woman said. ‘Today it is the anniversary of my poor husband’s decease and we were saying puja for him.’

The nurse shook her head as the family bundled out of the door, laughing and hushing each other. ‘They were just rude to me,’ she complained.

‘I’ll send you someone to sweep up,’ Helen said.

She went back to outpatients now and watched as an elderly doctor in a white cap distributed pills and gave injections to those who came to the clinic after their day’s work. Not many had turned up, he said, in this weather. A boy who had lost an arm looked away and talked loudly while his stump was medicated. There were strong smells of damp clothing and disinfectant. Helen went off to have tea with Martin, the Dutch aid worker, who told her about a case sent on to them by a local state hospital during the afternoon. The woman had cancer of the bowel. The state doctors had opened her up to operate, taken one look, sewed her up again and sent her here to die.

Helen liked Martin. She liked his Dutch accent, his seriousness. She noticed he seemed reluctant to head off home after his hours were done. Perhaps he would like to meet Elaine, she thought. He could show her the city. She would not think of John. If his girlfriend didn’t know where her son was, she certainly didn’t. Obviously he didn’t want anyone to know. Helen fervently hoped he was not in Delhi. There is nothing for John in Delhi, she thought. He is much better off far away from me.

She asked Martin what he would be doing this evening. He was going to the cinema. ‘Some Bollywood thing.’ He was trying to learn a little Hindi.

‘You’ve been here a long time,’ he observed. ‘You know the language and everything.’

‘Only five years. I came with my husband. He was doing research. Anthropology.’

‘How interesting. I’d love to meet him.’

‘He died just after New Year.’

It seemed extraordinary to Helen that another member of staff didn’t know these facts around which her existence revolved. But in the end why should he? Martin had arrived in March.

‘No, don’t worry, please,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s just that now I can’t decide whether to stay here in Delhi or move on.’

‘I suppose you have earned the right to go back home.’

Helen shook her head. The young man had a charming solemnity about him. His bare arm on the table was thick with soft blond hair. A teaspoon seemed very small between his fingers.

‘I never think of work in those terms,’ she said. ‘It had crossed my mind I might go out to Bihar to help with the kala-azar they’ve got. It won’t be hard to replace me here and I know kala-azar, I could be useful.’

‘That’s very courageous of you.’

‘It isn’t courage. It’s what I’ve always done.’

So many aid workers, Helen had observed over the years, came away to prove something to themselves, to do penance perhaps, then they returned home with no money in their pockets but a small fortune in moral capital: all their lives, whenever inequality raised its accusing face, they would be able to say they had given the world’s poor a whole year of their time. Helen was never going ‘home’, as they called it. She would never give her mother that satisfaction.

She said goodnight to the Dutchman and ran the routine supplies check with the departing doctor of the twilight shift. Dr Naik was a dapper little Tamil, very dark-skinned, with a clipped moustache and neat little teeth, neatly manicured fingers. They went through the emergency drugs inventory: antibiotics, anticoagulants, morphine. Every time Helen saw the green and white packs of insulin, she felt an intensification of awareness, a strong tide of self-knowledge rising within her. ‘Do it tonight, Helen. Spread my ashes in the Yamuna, right in town, with the rest of the rubbish.’

‘Fourteen boxes,’ she counted

‘Enough to slay a jolly elephant,’ the Tamil doctor laughed.

He hurried off and for a while she stood at the window watching the rain in a narrow alley. It fell steadily as though in a doomed but determined cleaning process, streaming down brick and boards, clattering on corrugated plastic. She thought of the water pulling the city’s dust and filth down towards the river, towards the sea. It would be raining hard on the monument to the dead children below the Wazi Bridge, washing away shit and ashes, dry seeds and fallen petals. Why had her work in the clinic lost its meaning when Albert died? Was it because she herself had opened the green and white box and administered the drug? He had tricked her into betraying her vocation and she could practise it no longer; was that it? Or had it been a test to see if she would really obey, like Abraham and Isaac? Perhaps I wasn’t really supposed to. I was supposed to stop at the last moment. ‘Maybe he didn’t want your help,’ Paul had said. Helen could make no sense of it. ‘I miss you, Albert,’ she muttered. ‘You shouldn’t have left me like that. You shouldn’t have made me do it.’

At 9 p.m. she took official control of the clinic. Dr Naik was gone. Not that she was alone. There was a night nurse, and half a dozen and more of the menial staff slept in the back courtyard, or, on nights like tonight, on mats in the canteen. I needed Albert all those years ago, she reflected, to escape England and to stay away. To escape mother and brother. Oh, but it was so much more than that. It was inexplicable. All at once Helen was extremely agitated. What a terrible loss of composure it had been, blathering to this sticky American. ‘That just isn’t me,’ she said out loud. ‘I refuse to be like that.’

A young man had been admitted in the afternoon with acute pains in his upper legs. At ten the nurse took his temperature and blood pressure and administered another sedative and anticoagulant. The diagnostic process would begin tomorrow. This wasn’t a fully trained nurse but a medical student getting experience, another Muslim girl. These were the corners the clinic had to cut. Helen sent her off to the staff office to rest. She spoke for a few minutes to a mother who was stretched on a mat beside the bed of her infant son. ‘He’ll get well now,’ Helen told the mother. ‘He’s through the crisis.’ She had been saying these things all her life. Then she went to sit beside Than-Htay.

The ward lights were dimmed on the twenty beds with their institutional green covers, white sheets. The windows were open to let in what freshness could penetrate the fly screens. The whir of overhead fans and the patter of the rain mingled with the sighs and snores of the patients. One man in his forties lay awake staring at the ceiling, his turban still pinned in turban shape on the low shelf beside him, his long greying hair matted on the pillow. An adolescent girl tossed from side to side. Albert had sat through many night duties in this and other clinics, partly to help when they were short-staffed, partly because he was interested to know how far culture-conditioned behaviour penetrated sleep habits. It was another eccentric project. Muslims who rose in the night to pray, for example. Did they sleep in a Muslim way? Albert was perfectly capable of staying awake all night, watching and taking notes, coming home to mimic a snore or, on one occasion, a sleepwalker. Sometimes he would talk in a low voice to a sufferer who could not sleep; language was not an issue; he was always able to tell the prayerful man which way to look for Mecca. Helen had admired his thoughtfulness and discretion.

But on other occasions she had betrayed Albert during night duties. She had made love to pleasant young doctors like Martin, and even not so pleasant doctors, even downright pigs, selfish, power-driven men like her brother. She liked to do that, to make these men want her, to have sex and feel nothing for them, nothing at all. Why had she told Paul that? Why expose your life to the very man who could pick up a pen and write everything down? Or was it because he could do that? She would never go home to her loathsome mother, her bragging, disgraceful brother, the whole ugly, conspiratorial, profoundly hypocritical ethos of her childhood world.

But why did I hate it so much?

Sitting on a stool in the dim ward, by the bed of this sick young man, Helen was struck by a kind of amazement at how she had grown up, the person she had become. How had it happened? ‘We talked about everything in theory,’ she murmured out loud, ‘didn’t we Albert? We talked endlessly about how people develop different personalities in their different countries and different circumstances, how each mind is integrated with its origins. But we never talked about us. We never really talked about my family, about my war with Mother and Nick.’

Helen murmured these words out loud as if her husband were there beside her. ‘And we never talked about your brother’s room either, come to think of it.’ For all Albert’s interminable analysis of every possible form of communication, they had never actually spoken about the freshly wiped photograph of the fatal girlfriend. ‘I have shown you,’ he had said, closing the door, and the conversation was closed forever.

At no point had it crossed Helen’s mind to leave Albert for the other men she had sex with, the doctors, administrators, occasionally even patients. None of them had had a tenth of her husband’s intelligence and tenderness. None of them knew how to combine knowledge and silence. They were chatterboxes. They wanted information without understanding. Talk talk talk. Mother talked endlessly too. Helen hated talkers. Nick had boasted interminably about his girlfriends, his cars, his money. Her brother was a fool. It was Albert’s silence that held me, she realised, his determined quietness. How strange.

I must not chatter to the American, she decided. ‘Don’t,’ Helen ordered herself. ‘Don’t talk to him.’ Albert had known so much, but kept silent. It was his silence together with his knowledge that was so compelling. Albert had understood her relationship with her mother and brother. Without discussing it he understood she must leave that battlefield. She must leave England. There was no need to discuss why. Otherwise I would have done nothing but fight them all my life; it would have eaten me up. I would have achieved nothing.

Yes, Albert understood, Helen remembered. Actually, it was hard for her to think of anything he hadn’t understood. His knowledge encompassed mine. The only irony was that at the end of the day none of that extraordinary intuition had been turned into a real scientific breakthrough. At the end of the day Albert had failed. ‘All important communication,’ she had read from one of his papers to a conference in Los Angeles, ‘takes place without language, or behind language, or in spite of language.’ She could see the professors didn’t understand. These things were hard to demonstrate. They weren’t like a room you could show full of cobwebs, a photo on a bedside table.

‘You wrote your papers for me,’ Helen said quietly, ‘didn’t you Albert?’

All their married lives Helen had been convinced that her husband would go down in history as one of the great thinkers of his age. She had felt safe with him, proud of him, proud she had married him. And instead he had achieved nothing. All Albert’s thinking had come to nothing. The slut in Chicago had destroyed him, Helen decided, drained him of his energy. A man with that dusty room behind him would never have touched an underage prostitute. She knew it. She knew it was his father who had wiped the picture. He hadn’t needed to tell her. What else could she do but work like mad to have his name cleared? Then just as the battle was won he had stopped making love. He had stopped all physical contact.

‘Why? Why did you do that, Albert?’

Helen sat still on Than-Htay’s bed, listening to the breathing and turning and sudden sighs of her patients, clasping and unclasping her hands. Albert never spent a night in a hospital bed, she remembered. Not once. Wasn’t that extraordinary?

She closed her eyes. Here it came again. The thought was returning, the thought that all this other thinking led to: it was not for fear of physical suffering that Albert had asked her for death. That’s the truth and you must face it. It wasn’t for fear of pain and drugs.

‘It was our marriage ending,’ Helen whispered. ‘Wasn’t it, Albert?’

Or rather, it was Albert not letting it end, not while he was alive. That was the suffering he didn’t want to go through, or her to go through; that was the thing that must not happen. Their marriage mustn’t end. If we ever had a real wedding ceremony, she realised, but now she didn’t speak the words out loud, it was when he had said, ‘Let’s do it now, Helen. Let’s do something that can never be undone.’

Than-Htay coughed. His coughing woke him. It became a fit. Chest jerking with convulsions, the adolescent pulled himself up on his elbows in the half-light. Others in the ward stirred. Helen stood and reached a hand behind his head, propped him up, wiped his mouth with paper towels. Breathing again, his eyes registered no surprise to find her there. His whole expression was one of resignation and defeat.

‘Are you okay?’

The boy coughed. His ribcage stiffened.

‘Are you all right?’ She asked in Hindi, in Gujarati.

He didn’t respond. He spoke no words and made no signs.

Even if he doesn’t hear much, he must have seen my lips move, Helen thought. He must know what I’m asking.

The boy lay back on the pillow. There was a look of reproach in his eyes. He wants to die, she thought. Or he is waiting for death. He has nothing. No family, no energy, no future. All his memories are bad.

Helen stood up, crossed the ward and turned left into the corridor. She walked briskly down to her office at the end, let herself in, unlocked a cupboard and drank directly from a bottle of Royal Challenge. She paused, holding the cap over the neck of the bottle, as if about to screw it back on, then drank again. She and Albert had both become regular drinkers over the last few years. Routine got them through the day, then there was that gap between work and sleep when one drank. They talked a lot when they drank, but never about the things that mustn’t be talked about.

Helen took another long slug and looked at herself in the cheap glass of the cupboard. She saw the bottle pressed between her lips, her eyes gleaming softly above it.

‘You treated me as a god, not a man,’ Albert whispered.

Helen stiffened and lowered the bottle. When had he said that?

‘Albert?’ she called softly.

She couldn’t remember. Had he? Or is it now? Did he say that now?

‘You treated me as a god, Helen.’

The drink has gone to her head. But it was true I put him on a different plane. I always did, from the beginning.

Is he standing in the shadows behind her? She didn’t turn. Could he be watching?

She had treated Albert as a god. Yes. Above morality, above conflict. All other men were nobodies. Paul is a nobody, she thought. Paul was looking for a god when he turned to Albert. But Albert always turned such people away.

Now the American was trying to make a saint of her.

She had wanted John to worship Albert. Instead the boy criticised. John was petulant and resentful. He clung to me and criticised. I mustn’t live with Paul, Helen decided. I will start to blather. I will start to undo everything we did together. She saw now that actually that would be the only way to give a future life meaning: she must undo what had been done with Albert. She must let him go, let him shrink into something smaller and more human. ‘Well I won’t,’ she muttered. It was ugly. It was farce. She lifted the bottle again, again took a long slug, screwed the top back on and locked it away in its cupboard.

Than-Htay doesn’t want to live, Helen told herself. It was curious how Albert hadn’t wanted children of his own but found surrogate children everywhere, boys and girls. He had made friends with Than-Htay at once. He liked to make friends with people who couldn’t follow him, people who wouldn’t push themselves forward as intellectual disciples. Disciples embarrassed Albert.

Since the patients were quiet now, Helen could have lain down; she had a mattress in her office. The nurse would do her rounds at midnight, at two, at four. Then there would be the call to prayer from the Jama Masjid, the call to another day without Albert. At six Dr Devi would come. But all that seemed very far away. These thoughts had brought an idea. No, it isn’t a new idea; not new at all; on the contrary Helen is aware that she has been thinking about nothing else since her husband died.

She walked through the ward and unlocked a small service room that opened onto the courtyard behind the clinic. She unbolted the main door, pushed it an inch or two and looked out. The rain showed no signs of relenting. The big plants in their pots were taking a beating. There were bougainvillea and jasmine. There were fresh herbs for the clinic’s kitchen. Between four high brick walls, the yard was dark and separate, but infiltrated by the noise of the city. Delhi’s interminable horns had begun again after the storm; there was the splash of a broken gutter, cries and laughter from the building opposite where lights flickered behind coloured drapes on the second or third floor.

Helen listened. Behind this courtyard, she knew, was a huge pressure of population, Old Delhi, so many people living in poverty, many of them Muslim survivors of Partition. ‘One day’s sectarian violence can wipe out all the lives you saved in thirty years,’ she muttered. But such accountancy was pointless. It is pointless to look for reasons for what you’ve done. You did it and that is that.

I don’t want to see John, she decided. I mustn’t. Helen senses now that her son is near. She feels he is in Delhi. He has come. What’s he doing here? she wondered. Why is he persecuting me? ‘John is a burden,’ she said out loud. For his own sake it would be better not to see me. He needs to be free from these roots, or this rootlessness. Explaining wouldn’t help. With Albert’s death, I’ve lost the faculty to keep silent, she realised. She had lost her equilibrium. I’ve started chattering. Well, she mustn’t chatter to John. You absolutely mustn’t.

All at once a loud shrill laugh rang out from across the courtyard. A voice rose over the patter of the rain, then another. It was a piercing woman’s voice, then a man roaring his appreciation. A moment later someone put on some music, a twanging sound. People were having fun, they were living, perhaps they would soon be making love.

Than-Htay will never make love, Helen thought. The idea came with the force of something you just knew and that was that. The boy will never make love. And nor must I.

Than-Htay has lived through things, Helen realised, that stripped him of all desire to live, all desire to talk. It was in the past. It was incurable.

How strange that she had betrayed Albert so easily when he was alive and struggled so hard now he was dead.

It was because Than-Htay had no desire to live, Helen thought now, looking out at the rain, that Albert had not pushed him to return to the clinic for treatment. Obviously. Albert wasn’t afraid of other people’s despair. Had he been alive now, Helen would have attacked him fiercely for that decision. We would have argued fiercely. But now, without his presence to fight against, she realised that part of her had always agreed with Albert, part of her had always suspected he was right.

Was that why he mocked me? He knew my protests were pointless; I could never really fight clear of him. Now it was as if Helen must be both people in one, she must argue with herself inside her head the way Albert used to argue with her, she must watch herself the way he watched, mock herself as he did. She must mock herself.

It was exhausting.

In the darkness a crow had started to caw. The sound was uncanny in the black rain. It rose and fell monotonously, caw caw caw, until it was hardly a sound at all, but a rhythm, an invitation to darkness and rain. The twang of the sitar faded. A window had closed. Instead the bird animated the darkness, perched on a ledge somewhere. It gave a pulse to the rain. Helen imagined its throat swelling and shrinking. Caw, caw. Then she heard a beating of wings. Another bird arrived. The sound doubled. The rhythm strengthened like gathering waters. Caw, caw, caw, caw.

If only Albert really were beside me, she thought. Those were the moments she had felt strong and, in his strange way, loved, the moments she felt truly herself in opposition to him; not when she had to pit herself against lesser men who only fought for pleasure and power. I went with other men in order to go back to Albert, she murmured. How strange. ‘You were a god,’ she told him ‘that’s the truth.’ Always watching, always turning a divinely blind eye. Helen remembered closing his lids for the last time. ‘Seeing for both of us is hard,’ she murmured.

She stepped out into the rain of the yard. She would like to shower in it. ‘I want to dissolve in the river,’ Albert had said. The tide carries off the day. He had mentioned some dreams but she hadn’t listened. He didn’t want her to listen to everything. Dreams of flood and creation, dreams of water rising, the slate washed clean. She turned her face to the sky and the chill rain told her how inflamed and tense her cheeks were.

‘Dr James?’

‘Souk.’

‘I have been looking for you everywhere. The young man is coughing, Doctor.’

Helen shut the door on the crows and hurried back into the ward. Than-Htay was lying on his side, knees pulled to his chest as he coughed convulsively into wads of paper. Helen felt his forehead, checked his pulse. The skin was yellow, the eyes bloodshot. ‘I’ll put him in my office,’ she said. ‘Or he’ll keep them all awake and frighten the younger ones.’

The nurse was surprised. ‘How will you rest, Doctor?’

‘It’s not a problem,’ Helen said. ‘I’m not sleepy. I’ll find a mat.’

‘Than-Htay,’ she said in a low soft voice. She wrapped a blanket round the boy, put his pillow in his hand, found his slippers and walked him slowly down the corridor to her office. She was aware, as she supported his arm, of the frailness of his shoulders and the smell of illness on his damp skin. She was aware of having more time and attention for this sick boy than she had had for her own son, though in return she never got a single word. Perhaps it was because of that. The boy was just his illness, his silence. She was drawn to that.

In her office she unrolled the thin mattress she used for night duty. He was sitting on the edge of a chair, shivering violently. ‘Lie down, Than-Htay,’ she said. She had to release his pillow from a clenched fist.

He lay there trembling and coughing. Helen turned out the light. For a few moments she watched, then kicked off her clogs and lay down beside him. Only now did she realise she was wet from the rain. Her doctor’s coat was drenched.

The mattress was narrow and there was hardly room for both. The boy was in a stupor of fever. All the same he suddenly wriggled round and embraced her blindly, hugged her soaking clothes.

She was face to face with him, embracing his bony, adolescent body and the disease that sweated from it. Who is he, really? Helen wondered. Who did he imagine was beside him?

Her cheek was against his cheek. His breath was bad. Well, she had had more than one lover with bad breath. My own must smell of whisky, she thought. A hand clasped her fingers and as it did so she felt more powerfully moved than at any moment with Paul.

Helen sighed deeply and tried just to be there for the boy, to be present. This is the suffering she has given her life to fighting: ‘An enemy that will never disappoint you,’ Albert had remarked, ‘by conceding defeat.’

Albert is here in the shadows. Yes. ‘Our marriage is still not over,’ Helen whispered. ‘You kept it alive with your death.’

Paul on the other hand had soon conceded defeat. Paul had agreed to do exactly as she suggested, and somehow that led her to start chattering, stupidly, stupidly unburdening herself. Her son always conceded defeat too and, again, when he did so, she always felt the urge to say things she mustn’t, to open her heart to him.

Thank God she hadn’t spoken to him when he came for the funeral. There had been a moment.

‘I never will speak,’ Helen muttered, clasping the mute boy tight.

She unbuttoned her doctor’s coat, slipped it off and drew Than-Htay against her skin. He was burning. She would never go to the places that must stay sacred and silent. She didn’t want to change. She would never say, Albert and I were only like this because of this or that trauma, because of this mother, this brother. No.

‘I don’t want to love again.’ That decision was made now. Rather Helen James would melt into this boy’s illness, his sick body and foul tubercular breath. Outside she could just hear the rain and the crows; she sensed the distant hubbub of the city and the pull of the river with its laundry wallahs and cremation fires.