Hot Water Man Read online

  From here she had a view of the lawn, the hose lying across it like a snake. It was edged with dusty flowerbeds and enclosed by a high stucco wall. In the comer squatted the mali, an old man. The gates were open. Through them she could glimpse 4th East Street, K12 Housing Society. This was a new, already potholed strip of road backed by the white wall of the house opposite. Sometimes a car would pass. Sometimes a man would appear with his baskets and offer her something in a weird sing-song.

  K12 was the choice place to live. She did not understand the name; there did not appear to be a K11 or a K anything else. It was one of these oriental mysteries. All the houses were modern; some were still being built. Theirs was large and functional. Behind her, beyond the sprung mosquito door that snapped shut, lay the living-room full of Cameron furniture – G-plan teak veneer, standard lamps and chairs passed from one manager to the next. Above the sofa hung a brass rubbing of a knightly couple, stiff and united. Their charcoal gaze followed her around the room.

  She settled back. She had finished A Passage to India. She lit a cigarette. It was too hot; she stubbed it out. She moved herself forward so that her legs were in the sunlight. It was so hot that nobody sunbathed here. She scratched the mosquito bite on her shin. She wanted, more than anything, to hose the lawn. She had always wanted a garden. Before this they had lived in a two-roomed flat in Crouch End. But the mali was hosing the grass; he had moved forward, sunshine lit the spray. The grass was patchy green and khaki; puddled now. If she got rid of the mali she could squat there, her toes dabbling in the mud, and spray the foreign shrubs that grew against the wall, hearing the water patter on to their leathery leaves. She could buy new plants and dig holes for them and press around their stems the beige, damp earth. But here, if you were grand enough to own a garden you were grand enough not to do it yourself. And if she sacked the mali he would be out of a job; when she had held her Urdu Primer and asked him how many – kitne – children he had, he counted eight on his fingers. Was it worth it, for her to drench the grass and feel part of this Pakistan?

  ‘Can we go out?’ she asked Donald later that evening.

  ‘We are going out. By this new digital thing, in five minutes precisely if we’re not going to be late.’ He buttoned up his shirt. The dhobi, who visited twice a week, ironed it far better than she could ever do. ‘Hardly been in, have we. Duke Hanson’s on Monday, drinks at Charles and Rosemary Whatsit’s last night. Bit of the old social whirls.’

  ‘I mean into the real city. Out beyond all this.’ She was standing at the window.

  ‘Ah, the teeming millions and the local colour. Have you seen my keys?’ He turned, smiling. She had never seen him happier than these last two weeks. He kept phoning from work to see if she was all right. She could tell by the tone of voice if somebody else was in his office. ‘I feel so guilty, leaving you here all day. We’ll go sightseeing this weekend. Remind me to get some film for my camera.’

  ‘I don’t just want to look at it. I want to get into it.’

  He stood at the dressing-table, transferring keys and coins to the pockets of his new trousers. He was stocky, with blond fuzz on his arms. His face was blunt and regular; unmemorable unless you loved him. The question was: did she still? His nose was burnt red; so was hers. They resembled each other; people in the past had taken them for brother and sister.

  We’re alone now, she thought. A new country, a huge new sky. A stucco house with eight rooms and a flat roof. Its only familiarity was the decorated shawl she had fixed with masking tape to their bedroom wall. A trunkful of clothes, and themselves. Would this improve their marriage? It must change it.

  Outside the sun was sinking. From this window you could see between the neighbouring houses. Way beyond, three miles away, lay the city; here and there blocks rose into the polluted evening sky. Turning to the left, you saw the last few houses of the suburb. Beyond lay the desert. Drab during the day, those scrub flats turned molten in the sunset. Future roads were already laid out, leading nowhere, and building plots were marked out with posts. The posts had turned pink in the light; they stretched into the distance and made the landscape look shabby and temporary. Beyond them lay the silver thread of the Indian Ocean.

  4

  Donald had grown up on the edge of the ocean. It was a tamed sea. Brinton, on the Kentish coast, was not far from Broadstairs. It was a holiday resort of pebble-dash semis, bus shelters and a windy esplanade. Old dears sat in the tea shops. Along Marine Drive the sea could be glimpsed, a grey strip between the parked cars.

  It stretched for miles, bungalows and retirement homes, electric fires on throughout the year and chairs in crescents around the picture window. Between them and the sea were the amusements to keep people busy. There was a clock-golf course, Brinton Bowls Green with thoughtful men in braces, and the Happyland Caravan Park about which complaints were made.

  Only regulars went. Brinton had not moved with the times. There were topless buses for brave souls and the Gaumont which showed Carry On pictures. Next door, the one-armed bandits were out of order. In winter the holidaymakers went and the gales blew the notices down. Donald loved it then. He loved it in all seasons, it was secure and yet there was the ocean to set him yearning. Along safe streets a van delivered bread, but above it clouds massed over a troubled Channel.

  He lived with his mother and grandparents; his father had been killed in the war. His father was a photo on the mantelpiece, and sighed asides. He himself was the man of the family. The responsibility had pleased him; as a boy he had grown up serious and adult for his age, out of step with his schoolfriends. He had always hurried home to Durradee.

  And especially to Grandad. Grandad was like a father who was never too busy. He was always there, unchanging; he frequently told Donald that he took the same size in suits he had taken forty years before. Unlike Granny he never seemed to get older; unlike Mother, who was essential of course but usually out at work or preoccupied, he was always at hand. He was the only person who treated Donald as an adult, man to man. In fact he spoke to Donald as he spoke to nobody else in the household – proper conversations, just the two of them, while the women clattered in the kitchen. It was with Grandad that he did the things he remembered – the hikes along the cliffs, scurrying to keep up with Grandad’s longer strides, tense with remembering the birds’ names so he did not disappoint. By some unspoken family law, it was only himself who was allowed in the greenhouse where Grandad stooped, too tall for the roof, lifting the seedlings. Donald lifted them too, trying not to spill the earth. He had his father to live up to. His father had served in the R.A.F. Sometimes when a plane droned overhead Grandad paused, looking up through the glass.

  He himself, though diligent, did badly at school. Grandad used to recite the names of famous men whose academic performance had been undistinguished. ‘In the arena of life,’ he said – meaning India – ‘in the arena of life what disadvantage is that? There are more important things to be tested than amo and amas.’ Donald had just failed his Latin ‘O’ level. Grandad was reassuring about that, shrinking it to its proper perspective. His gaze stretched beyond.

  And Grandad had time. His Indian service had left him with a long retirement in the bungalow with the front porch, which he called the veranda, and its view over the sea. It faced the east. His life had dwindled to a lounge and those memories to which nobody else, Donald realized as he grew older, cared to listen. His brass objects were taken down, polished and put back again; they trapped the dust. Granny said. She hardly spoke of India. It was not her life as it was his, she had only lived there for thirty years before returning thankfully to dear old Britain. In fact there was not a lot you could say to Granny; she just existed from moment to moment, making things comfy.

  Yet there he sat, this noble man, enduring the inexplicable 1960s in which he seemed to be spending the last years of his life. He became more infirm. He just made it down to the esplanade. Teenagers giggled when he lifted his stick at the sea, mouthing words.

>   Donald felt he was protecting a worn god from the faithless. Here was a man who had done more than their narrow spirits could imagine. A man who had led three hundred men through Burma; who had marched through the Delhi streets during Independence. One of those personally asked by Mountbatten to postpone his return for three more years so that he could help train up the native officers. Grandad had been given a signed photograph of Jinnah. Though intensely proud of it, Donald had not brought it to school. Jinnah who? they would say.

  He knew Christine long before he met her. He had seen her on the tennis courts. She was a summer visitor and wire mesh separated their games. She wore a white Aertex shirt and a pleated skirt; her honey-blonde hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She leapt for the ball. She was not that different from the others but he noticed her. She played high, soft, girl’s strokes and pressed a hand to her mouth, grimacing. Afterwards she was more at ease, spreading out her legs at the café table, tipping back her chair and sucking Pepsi through a straw. That first summer she was sometimes with girls and sometimes with youths, their hair damp from their exertions. It was only later that she told him she did not know them well; her parents, groan groan, had forced them on her.

  She told him this next summer when he talked to her for the first time. He had forgotten her during the winter. She was sitting on a wooden breakwater wearing what was to become the familiar blue-ribbed bathing suit. She swung her legs; she was alone; she was ready for anything. She was fifteen. Close up her face was less perfect, with its chapped lips. She walked along the beach with him, stepping over the sunbathing adults who lay torpid as logs.

  He splashed into the sea, showing off. She followed him with prancing, coltish steps, squealing. She floundered around; he impressed her with his manly crawl. Stepping out on to the beach she was bowed and shivering, her white legs goosepimpled. She looked thinner and smaller but he did not dare rub her dry. He longed to. Instead he whooped and they ran along the sand, jumping legs.

  She was there with her parents and her sister Joyce. Each year they rented a bungalow. He hung around, gawkily seventeen. They walked along the cliff path; he grasped her hand over the tricky bits but relinquished it when they were safe. They swung on the children’s swings; he was dizzy for her but he dared do nothing. To touch her would change her into his girlfriend; then at some point it must end. Presuming, indeed, that she would let him touch her in the first place.

  They were too casual to write. The London Christine, wrapped in unknown woollies, was as arousing a thought to him as the swimsuited Christine must be to those urban rivals who had only seen her clothed. During the winter months he sat on the window seat at Durradee, his ‘A’ level economics book on his knee and the rain sliding down the glass. The next summer he saw her entering the sea-front newsagent’s; she emerged with a cigarette between her lips.

  That year he kissed her in the Aquarium. It was stuffy down there; half the tanks were empty. Wedged against the railing, he had kissed her dry lips, while behind them the eels coiled. After that they often embraced, but only in places like the cinema. They were sweethearts in the dark, but ordinary outside. He did not want to go further. Perhaps he was under-sexed. It was just that he did not want to spoil it.

  The next year he went up to London to work, a Cameron’s trainee. He met other girls but Christine was separate. That summer she returned but she seemed more inward, kicking stones along the beach and moaning about her parents. He was part of her family by now; he felt included in this general complaint. She was going to university in the autumn. Their kisses were still fervent but chaste. He felt diffident and dull. Sometimes she snapped at him, and he was helpless. He wanted to grab her and take her by force but then he wanted to protect her, too, from people like himself. She had a secret life, kept from him as well as her parents. Sometimes he saw her on the back of motorbikes.

  She did write; short scrawled notes full of goshes. Her writing stayed young and enthusiastic while she herself was changing. He wrote longer letters and more of them, ending them lots of love, carefully matched to the endings she put on hers. (Sometimes she put much love instead of lots.) He started seeing her in London; she wore make-up and tights, he took her to the Festival Hall and they made conversation. She went up to a new university, Nissen huts and bulldozed earth and a scattering of students who all knew each other.

  One weekend he could no longer bear it; he went up to Warwick and made love to her. In the past he had plotted appropriate spots for this; he had made ardent mental bookings – the sand dunes, the creek where the bracken stood waist-high and you could hear the sea. In reality it happened on the narrow bed of her hall of residence during a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the Top Ten being played through the wall and somebody knocking on the door halfway through. They had clung; the footsteps had retreated.

  He was far from being the first. She hinted that she was involved with someone else. But who else had known a Christine before she smoked; who else had seen her through three swimsuits? They did not know her sister Joyce, matronly at fourteen. He possessed years of Christine before she braided her hair into tiny plaits and questioned everything. She wore long Indian skirts and pale stuff over her healthy cheeks. She did not fool him. Her childhood was their secret.

  It was four years before they married. She kept going off with other people and then coming back to him. He did not make a habit of this, himself. But then her father died. Soon afterwards they married. They came together like a brother and sister who had been lost in the woods. They understood each other so well. Or so he thought.

  They bought the Crouch End flat, second floor, nothing special except that it was theirs. She was training to be a teacher but she did not take it up.

  When had things started changing? When she cut off her lovely, heavy blonde hair and frizzed it up; when she preferred to be known as Chris, and discovered it was oppressive to be supported by her husband? In certain moods he felt he was losing her to the seventies. She considered him the conventional one but it was she who followed so obediently the prevailing winds. But he could not blame it all on the decade, however much he would have liked to. He still could not put it into words. Here in Pakistan, perhaps, he could recapture the old Christine, and that time years ago when everything seemed possible.

  And then there was that other difficulty. They did not talk about it much; though so outspoken about her woman’s predicament in general, Christine was thankfully shy about mentioning this. To transfer oneself from one continent to another could hardly solve it; logically they were the same two people as before. But he no longer felt logical about this.

  5

  The party was held in the garden. The sun had sunk; even during twilight, however, the air felt centrally heated. Up above the crows banged about in the trees, disturbed by the social exclamations.

  The film had not yet started. A blank screen hung against the wall. Spotlights were wired up amongst the bushes, pools of emerald leaves. People stood about chatting. Donald approved of dressing-up; nobody did it in England any more. Between the guests slid bearers holding trays of lukewarm gin and tonic. The Pakistani ladies drank Bubble-Up.

  ‘This is the life,’ he said to Christine, so they looked as if they were talking. He turned to the bearer. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Christine took a glass. ‘Shoukriah.’

  ‘You’re much nicer to servants than you are to me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, there’s Shamime. She’s the girl I was telling you about – does our public relations.’

  Shamime turned. Tall and slim, she was one of those girls about whom you would say: She’s not exactly beautiful. And keep wondering about it, unable to move your eyes from her face. Her nose was certainly too big. Her hair was looped in black coils. She wore a loose turquoise trouser suit with strings of gold chains. She looked somewhat like this in the Cameron office.

  ‘Amazing dress.’ She held out a slim brown arm to Christine. ‘Where on ear
th did you get it?’

  ‘In England. London,’ said Christine. ‘I worked in a dress shop. It sold second-hand clothes.’

  ‘Trendy second-hand clothes,’ added Donald. The dress was a floral thing from the forties, with padded shoulders. He had mixed feelings about this garment.

  ‘Donald says I look like a charwoman.’

  Shamime laughed. ‘Where’s the shop?’

  ‘In a little passage where they sell antiques,’ said Christine. ‘At weekends they have stalls. It’s rather like your bazaars, actually. You know, lots of people, no cars, covered arcades too, like in Karachi. Rather fun.’

  ‘Sounds just like Camden Passage.’

  Christine paused. ‘So you’ve been there?’

  ‘Adore it. I love Islington and Hampstead. I get so self-indulgent in those little shops.’

  ‘I see. Do you go to London often?’

  ‘When I run out of marmalade.’ She laughed again. ‘No, seriously, there are so many things you can’t get here. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Which hotel do you stay at?’

  ‘My cousin has a little house behind Harrods. But hasn’t Harrods changed? Full of Arabs.’

  In the pause that followed this remark Donald was aware of a general shifting. Chairs had been arranged; someone was fiddling with the projector. He sat down beside Christine. He leant towards her, then stopped. He would like to gossip with her about Shamime but his wife was turning out to be disappointing in this respect; invariably she was nicer about the Pakistanis than the English. This seemed like racial discrimination to him.