CHAPTER THIRTY

PAUL HAD EXPECTED the rain to ease, but it hadn’t. Thinking Elaine needed some distraction, he got the taxi to take them past India Gate, then up and down the parliament complex. Seen through smeared windows across a steady downpour, remote in its floodlit pomposity, the vast sandstone pile of the Raj seemed to be dissolving into the warm wet Indian night. Then they turned again and proceeded towards the old town via the ghats, the ancient taxi rattling and splashing on the uneven asphalt.

‘That’s the monument to Rajiv Gandhi,’ Paul pointed.

The traffic was heavy and the rain sparkled slantwise in the illuminated air. More curious to Elaine were the bedraggled animals by the roadside, the men lighting fires under makeshift bivouacs. But even these sights held her attention only intermittently. After a few minutes she grabbed the older man’s wrist: ‘Do you think we should tell the police?’

The girl’s hand was tense and alive and it was a pleasure for Paul to feel its grip on his skin. Sitting beside her in the taxi, he might have been travelling with any of a score of young women he had dated during his two marriages and since, all more or less Elaine’s age, all infinitely desirable.

‘I mean, really, he’s a missing person.’ Elaine was insisting. ‘Isn’t he? He walks out on everything, leaving a note with a false destination so nobody will go looking for him. The police should be told.’

‘We’ll talk about it with Helen tomorrow,’ Paul said. ‘Check out the dome on the left. The Jama Masjid, Delhi’s main mosque.’

‘What if he’s killed himself, though?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I know it’s stupid, but what if he’s done something desperate, because he thought I was cheating on him?’

Paul reassured her. ‘People don’t do that, Elaine. Take it from me. They threaten to, but they never do. You know, I stayed with my second wife at least a year longer than I should because she kept saying she’d kill herself. Take us to the left, along the railway,’ he leaned forward to tell the driver – the car was reduced to a walking pace now – ‘then back through the side streets towards CP.’

With or without umbrellas people were jostling through the traffic. Men were working to clear a huge billboard that the wind had brought down with all its scaffolding. The night was a din of horns and animated clutter.

‘Take a look at the pile to the right,’ Paul told Elaine. ‘The Red Fort. Moghul stuff. Huge.’

But Elaine was not to be distracted. ‘His uncle did,’ she said dramatically.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘His uncle committed suicide. It runs in his family. I mean, why would he disappear and not answer a single message for weeks? He always answered messages. Even if only to argue. Maybe he’s been dead all this time.’

‘Elaine,’ Paul said firmly. ‘Don’t be so gruesome. It takes a pretty unusual mindset to want to die. Then a hell of a lot of courage actually to do it. I never knew anyone who did. In the end, it doesn’t matter how depressed they are, most people love life.’

As he spoke these words, Paul realised that to all effects and purposes John’s father had also committed suicide. And he had done so, Paul felt sure, loving life and perhaps not depressed at all, or not in the ordinary sense of the term.

‘And even if he did do it,’ he went on, ‘just to look on the dark side, it wouldn’t be your fault, would it? I don’t want to be insensitive, I’m only saying, since other people’s decisions are beyond your command, it’s pointless to agonise. Right? Don’t torment yourself.’

The driver looked over his shoulder. ‘I take you to craft emporium, sir? I think your daughter like jewellery? Only five minutes look. It is good for you, sir – rain is very heavy.’

‘No, it would be my fault,’ Elaine announced in a flat voice. ‘It would. It really would.’ She didn’t appear to hear what the driver had said. Looking out of the window she didn’t see the milling crowd, garish in neon, the curious clothes streaming with rain.

‘But why? How could it be?’

‘Very beautiful things in this emporium. Just five minutes look, sir.’

‘Because I was having an affair. I was cheating on him.’

‘Real pashmina, wooden carvings, very unusual. Silver earrings and necklaces.’

Elaine had begun to cry. Paul caught the quiet shudder of her body. He took her hand and squeezed it as the taxi fought its way past the turn-off for Chandni Chowk, then accelerated towards Mukherji Marg.

‘No shopping tonight, I’m afraid.’ he told the driver.

In an expensive bar right on Connaught Place, Elaine made an elaborate confession. Paul sat the girl in an alcove with candles and kept her supplied with small spicy candies and iced vodka. In the chiaroscuro of two nervous flames and twisting wax-smoke her breasts, under their tight black top, seemed even larger and, Paul thought, vibrant.

‘It would never have happened if John hadn’t been away,’ she told him. She had been feeling desperate at the time, about her career and so on, her lack of career, but somehow mischievous too. ‘Do you know? I’m different around John and then away from him. I change.’ Actually, she was rarely sure how she was feeling at all, Elaine said, or not exactly. She sighed. ‘Often I just don’t know.’

Anyway, she’d gone to an audition. The nth. She’d been to so many. And she’d performed badly, she thought. Sometimes you do. The candidates were given a few routines to perform: mime a person discovering they are all-powerful, a woman who has just lost her baby, a boy putting on make-up – that was fun – a fanatic preparing for martyrdom.

‘There was a speech to read too, a sort of day-after scenario, with a lone survivor surveying the catastrophe.’ Elaine pouted. ‘God, I was terrible.’ She had been really surprised when the director’s secretary called her the following day.

Paul listened. He enjoyed hearing people’s stories, girls’ stories that is. He enjoyed listening to their troubles. In the end he had never really done anything to seduce any of his women, nor really understood why they were attracted to him. He would listen to them; young women were almost the only people Paul did listen to. He would give an older man’s avuncular advice, perhaps drop hints of a fraught and complicated private life which he was nevertheless coping with. And somehow it always happened. They turned from their worries to him. If only briefly.

Now, as Elaine described her first meeting with the Japanese director, the small man’s abrupt manner, his weird apartment – ‘black furniture and white carpets!’ – Paul tried to imagine what a volatile state of mind the English girl must be in: first she had taken this extremely rash decision to come to Delhi, a desperate decision, it seemed to him; she had survived a very long and very bumpy flight; then she had found her boyfriend wasn’t here after all, he had misled her; then she had been hastily ditched by the boy’s mother and passed onto an overweight but moderately handsome American who was now plying her with drink.

She’s in a state, Paul told himself.

Hanyaki had been very flattering that afternoon, Elaine said.

‘He kept saying I had something unusually fluid about me. Obviously, I was pleased. I mean, I’ve staked everything on making it as an actress. We talked for hours.’

Elaine thought for a moment. ‘He’s a special man. Hanyaki. Very sophisticated. Knows everything. I love his accent. It’s so strong, he never really learned English properly and he just doesn’t care. I love how he doesn’t care. Anyway, it made me think how young John was. Too young for me. Not even a man really. The second time I saw him there was a bottle of champagne and I just thought, what the hell. I was in such a good mood because he said he’d give me the part. I was euphoric. Like I’d arrived.’

Paul nodded understandingly, sipping his drink. He offered a cigarette and the girl accepted, though he could see at once she wasn’t a smoker. Eventually, he said: ‘However, the rehearsals didn’t go so well.’

Elaine’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight. ‘Actually, I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I mean, I haven’t told anyone else, no one, and I don’t even know you.’

Paul inhaled. ‘It’s because you don’t know me, obviously.’

There was a short silence. Elaine fished an olive from her vodka. Paul watched her put it on her tongue.

‘So?’

‘Well – how can I say it, it’s mad – the more passionate he was in bed, Hanyaki, and he was – he has a flat on Gloucester Place, if you know where that is – the more unpleasant he became at rehearsals. It was like two different people. He was so … I’ve never had sex like that. Well, I haven’t really had that many boyfriends. Miles better than John.’ She frowned. ‘John is a bit quick to be honest. Then he was horrible on stage, in front of the others. He was just unpleasant.’

‘Odd.’

‘It made me frantic.’

‘I can imagine.’ Paul reflected. ‘Perhaps he didn’t want the other actors to know you were his favourite.’

‘But they all knew! They knew we were going to bed. He didn’t hide it at all. On the contrary.’

As she spoke, it occurred to Paul that this was just the kind of communication conundrum Albert James had loved to analyse. He shook his head. ‘So maybe he was angry with himself for mixing pleasure and work. He was reasserting his authority.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Elaine came out with a groan that appeared to come from deep in her stomach. ‘The fact is that the very day I started it, or rather the day before, John asked me to marry him.’

Paul laughed. ‘Good one. So how did he find out? John, I mean.’

‘He saw Hanyaki put his arm round me when we were going into a pub. Or that’s what he says.’

‘And that’s all?’ Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘You denied it, I presume.’

‘Of course. Endlessly.’

‘So, John doesn’t really know anything, does he? An arm round the waist doesn’t mean anything. I could put my arm round you going out of here,’ Paul said, ‘or standing at the door looking at the rain, and somebody might see us and imagine all kinds of things, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. Nobody’s going to kill himself because he saw someone put an arm round your waist.’

‘No,’ Elaine agreed vaguely. With a deep sigh she added: ‘But he seemed to know. Really to know. He was very sure.’

Paul glanced into her eyes. ‘And it didn’t occur to you to take this opportunity to leave him?’

‘John?’ She stared and frowned. ‘It did occur to me, yes. But, I don’t know, I really … I sort of like John. There’s something us when I’m with him. Then Hanyaki himself kept saying I’d be crazy to leave him, John, I mean. He said it was so unusual to find a young man with a strong vocation.’

Again Paul smiled. How well he knew this terrain.

‘But now he is sending text messages from London begging you to go back.’

He nodded at her shiny red phone which she kept on the table beside her elbow and snapped open and closed every few minutes.

‘Not for me!’ Elaine wailed. ‘For his play. We’re due to open the Saturday after next. In Hammersmith. And by the way, it’s terrible.’

‘The play? Who wrote it?’

‘He did. With another Japanese guy. A famous novelist apparently. It all happens in an airport, though you never know which. There are five or six plots all running into each other – passengers, cleaners, check-in staff; there’s love, lost luggage, you name it – then a suicide bomber blows them all up. Everyone’s writing about suicide bombers at the moment. It’s awful.’

‘If he wants you back for the play, you can’t be that bad, can you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Elaine wailed. ‘He wants me for the play, but I only have a minor part, I’m the woman who loses her baby in the explosion, and then he’ll want sex as well, won’t he? And I won’t be able to say no or he’ll chuck me out and I’ll be back at square one with nothing done. And everyone will hate the whole performance anyway.’

Paul thought about it. ‘Maybe you don’t want to stop the affair. Maybe you enjoy it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know!’ Elaine was in pain, yet she found herself laughing too. She tugged hard at an ear. ‘Of course I enjoy it. But first I want to see John. If I just see him, then maybe I can go back and do the play. But I need to see him first and understand about us. And instead he isn’t here! God, why didn’t I say I’d marry him when he asked? Why!’

‘Because you didn’t want to.’

Paul relented and took her hand across the table in a fatherly way. ‘I’m sure if you and John love each other it will work out in the end. Won’t it? For the moment, why not go back and do the play? The important thing is that the guy wants you on stage. At least you’ll have achieved something. John will come back. As for the affair, you can take or leave that pretty much day by day.’

‘I want to tell him the truth,’ she said.

‘Don’t,’ Paul answered quickly. ‘You didn’t tell him by text, I hope?’

‘I want to tell him to his face. That way I can put it behind me.’

Paul kept his hand over hers and pressed with a certain urgency. ‘You really mustn’t, Elaine.’ It was the first time he had used her name. He began to tell her about the time he had told his first wife he was having an affair. ‘Later I realised I just wanted to hurt her. It was a kind of punishment. I made her unhappy for nothing.’

‘I just don’t know,’ the girl repeated. ‘Life is too complicated. I never thought it would be like this.’

‘Let’s smoke a hookah!’ Paul suggested, withdrawing his hand. He smiled and had ordered one before she had even understood what a hookah was. While he was still explaining, a waiter brought the heavy pipe over from the bar and made an elaborate show of cleaning the mouthpiece. The bowl was already lit.

‘Just suck deep through the bubbles,’ Paul told her. ‘The smoke goes through the water, you see. It’s nicer than a cigarette, especially if you’re not used to smoking.’

Elaine made another attempt to cheer up. ‘It looks like a cross between a candlestick and a vacuum cleaner,’ she laughed.

The bar was getting busy and they had to raise their voices. She took the mouthpiece between pouting lips and made Paul laugh sucking in her cheeks and going cross-eyed. As she let go, a great dizziness passed over her.

‘God!’ she had to shake her head and sit back. She closed her eyes for a few moments, then opened them laughing. ‘You’ve still got my pink scarf on. You look really funny.’

‘I’m getting used to it,’ Paul grinned.

Then almost indignantly she told him. ‘I’ve talked too much about me. I feel like I’m giving myself away and you haven’t said anything about you. It’s not fair.’

‘So what do you want to know?’

Elaine sucked on the pipe again. ‘Who you are,’ she said evenly.

‘That’s a long story.’

‘Tell me.’

Paul ordered two more drinks. ‘You’ll be bored,’ he warned. He took a rather melodramatically deep breath. ‘In a nutshell, I was a mother’s boy in an extremely religious family. When I was small they expected me to be a clergyman. But really, it was a sort of school for lying. I mean, when people demand perfect behaviour, what can you do but pretend you’re better than you are? To please them. Then there comes the day, of course, when you want to punish everyone for all the effort it’s been.’

Because Paul had said all these things so many times before to so many girls, he had the feeling as he spoke that he was simultaneously both present and not present, honest and dishonest. He was in the bar with Elaine, smoking a hookah, drinking vodka, very aware of the girl’s breasts and the scaffolding of her bra, but he was also at a considerable remove, he was calmly observing himself with her, or with some other girl perhaps at some other moment in the past. With Amy even. And quite probably Helen James was beside him in that observation post, wherever it was; yes, Helen was at his elbow as he listened to himself talking so charmingly and persuasively to Elaine; and while he talked, the older woman was passing ironic remarks, sarcastic remarks, because she saw through everything; she saw through his spiel, and she kept warning him to cut the bullshit. But she was enjoying it too, Paul thought. And he was enjoying her remarks, however cutting they were. He knew that deep down Helen didn’t really want him to change at all, she didn’t want him to become a good man. It was a sort of competition and Helen was actually using those ironic remarks as a way of getting control of him, a form of seduction maybe, just as he in a quiet way, almost against his will really, was casting nets for the girl. ‘Liberation from what into what?’ Albert James had written in that early email. Perhaps there is no space, Paul suddenly found himself thinking, beyond compulsion and persuasion. Unless death maybe.

‘I suppose it’ll sound like I’ve had loads of girlfriends,’ he wound up a few minutes later, amused and apologetic, ‘but the truth is, in a funny way, it was always them who had me. You know? Really. Then as soon as I’m with someone, as soon as I’m supposed to be faithful to them, you can be sure I’m planning to betray them already. I guess it’s just a way of behaving I learned.’

‘You could unlearn it,’ Elaine said, sucking on the hookah again.

‘Easier said than done,’ he sighed. ‘Though, actually, that’s pretty much why I was thinking I’d do this aid work out in Bihar. I’ll live like a monk for a while. Out of harm’s way.’ Paul meant it and simultaneously saw at once what a good line it was.

‘Sounds like a cop-out.’ Elaine protested. She was speaking in a louder voice now. The alcove was blue with smoke and her hair was mussed from constantly pushing her hand into it. She had drunk a lot. ‘I think you should go back and marry this Amy,’ she told him seriously, ‘and force yourself to make a go of it.’ Growing more heated, she didn’t appear to be aware when their ankles brushed against each other for a moment under the table.

Towards one Paul called for the bill. ‘You must be tired,’ he told her. Outside, a doorman held a huge umbrella and steered them arm in arm into a taxi. Elaine slid across the seat. ‘The India International Centre,’ Paul announced.

‘International Centre, sir. Where is that sir?’

‘Lodhi Gardens,’ Paul said.

The taxi was an old Fiat. The rain drummed on its thin roof. The engine had a hoarse, rasping sound and the suspension slumped alarmingly to the driver’s side.

‘Typical,’ Paul murmured.

They had barely got to Tolstoy Marg before the vehicle coughed and died at a traffic light. Elaine giggled. She was sitting close to him. The driver turned the ignition key, muttering to himself as the starter motor turned and turned. After four or five attempts the thing shuddered into life. At the next traffic light it stalled again.

‘Everything okay?’ Paul enquired.

‘Very okay. Very normal, sir. Older car, sir. Carburettor.’

‘What a darling rattletrap,’ Elaine laughed. In a low voice in Paul’s ear she did a perfect imitation of the man ‘Very okay, very normal, sir. Older car for older man, sir.’

Paul squeezed her arm. They proceeded along a broad road glistening with muddy water and littered with broken twigs. The driver had a young, rather sullen face under an untidy blue head-cloth. He seemed offended that Paul had doubted his vehicle. Perhaps he had caught a snatch of Elaine’s imitation. ‘It is always starting again, sir,’ he pronounced with sour dignity. ‘You are not worrying now.’

Elaine burst into giggles.

The girl half leaning against him, Paul wondered what would happen when they arrived at the International Centre. He didn’t greatly care. My career is at sea, he thought. He had never started a project and given up before. It was curious that he wasn’t more concerned. And I don’t miss Amy at all, he reflected.

Then, as they passed India Gate, the park empty tonight in the heavy rain, he remembered something Helen had said when they had sat together on the grass that evening: ‘It would be dangerous, for someone like you to follow Albert too far,’ she had said.

The car was coughing and shuddering again. All at once Elaine’s fingers were at his neck. ‘You look too silly with that scarf.’ She couldn’t shake off this attack of the giggles. ‘I can’t believe you’re still wearing it!’

Her face was very close to his as she sat up and leaned over to untie the pink silk. He could feel her drunken breath on his lips. He was protesting half-heartedly, ‘Don’t pull, Jesus, you’ll strangle me! Ouch.’

Their mouths were really very close. Then the car cut again. Not at a light this time but while they were accelerating away from one. The driver steered the vehicle through a deep puddle towards the kerb.

Elaine sat back with a jolt, still laughing. Cursing under his breath, the driver began to punish the starter motor. After a dozen attempts, Paul said: ‘I think we’d better find another car.’

‘Not at all, sir. All very normal.’

‘God,’ Elaine returned to earth, ‘I’m so exhausted.’

‘Just one moment, sir. Old car. Always starts.’

They waited while the man sat turning the key. Then Paul had had enough. ‘You know, it’s only about half a mile to Helen’s flat now,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk and call a cab from there.’

‘It is raining very hard, sir,’ the driver said.

Paul paid him up to this point and they got out. They had no umbrella but the rain was warm. By the time Elaine had walked round the car and slipped an arm under his, they were already drenched. ‘Old car!’ she mimicked giggling. ‘Always starts!’