The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Read online

  After group yoga—only the less demanding postures, it was really an excuse for the old dears to have a snooze—Beverley would sit in Evelyn’s room and do her nails, tenderly holding her hand while her cigarette smouldered in the ashtray and she told her about her latest love rat.

  “How could he?” Evelyn would say when Beverley paused for breath. “Fancy that!”

  “And then Maureen saw him at the petrol station, filling up his car—three kids in the back and the bastard had never told me!”

  “Which one is Maureen, dear?”

  “The one with the allergies. Remember?” said Beverley. “Her face blew up when she got that kitten.”

  It pained Evelyn that she looked forward to Beverley’s visits more than to those of her own daughter. They certainly saw more of each other.

  It was Beverley who broke the news, one day in August.

  “They’re closing this place down!” she whispered. “Heard the old bat in the office talking on the phone. Can’t afford to keep it going, the grasping sods. They’re going to knock it down and build houses on it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s happening all over, sweet pea, it’s in the papers. Like, there’s new rules and regulations, nobody can afford them. Better just to flog the place and bugger off to Barbados.” She dipped her brush in the little pot.

  “They can’t just do that without telling us.”

  “Keep still, sweetheart.” Evelyn’s hand was trembling. Beverley held it steady and painted on the varnish. “What’s going to happen to you all, you poor things?”

  It was true. Leaside, a large Edwardian building on a prime site three miles from Chichester, was to be sold. At this point Evelyn didn’t panic. She would move elsewhere. All her life, somebody had taken care of her.

  She phoned her son in New York. Christopher would know what to do.

  “Slightly bad news, Ma,” Christopher said. She recognized that voice from his childhood, when he hid his school reports.

  Christopher went on about the stock market and September 11, something about falling returns. It was all beyond her. In the background, somewhere on the Upper East Side, one of his children shouted, “Dad, it’s not working!”

  The gist seemed to be that she had less money than she thought. She heard the TV, and a child crying.

  “Sorry, Ma, Marcia’s at the gym and I’m holding the fort. Got to go. We’ll work something out.”

  She phoned her daughter. Theresa was furious; she had never had an easy relationship with her brother and was even more hostile toward his wife. “That bitch is bleeding him dry. You know she got a designer to do up their apartment? Know how much they cost? And private schools for the kids, skis and whatnot.”

  Christopher sent Evelyn a sheet of incomprehensible figures. Oh Hugh, help me! Her pension, it seemed, had shrunk alarmingly. It was all due to the same thing, Christopher said: a slump in the world markets.

  Theresa suggested that her mother come and live near her in Durham, an offer made with a palpable lack of enthusiasm. “Trouble is, I’m away so often, courses and things. I’m off to Skyros next month.”

  “What about your counseling?” asked Evelyn.

  “Oh, it’s very flexible. Usually just a couple of days a week; I can rearrange it with my clients.”

  How can you live on that? Evelyn opened her mouth, and closed it again. Of course she knew how.

  “There’s always the local council,” said Theresa. “If you threw yourself on their mercy—I mean they’d have to help, wouldn’t they? They must have homes, or sheltered housing. I can make inquiries.”

  Evelyn didn’t consider herself a snob, not really. However, she found this conversation depressing. Did her daughter understand nothing?

  No doubt Theresa meant to be kind, but the message was clear: her mother was redundant. No longer a human being, she was a problem to be solved by the local authority, like a drug addict or one of the homeless. She was homeless. She was to be shunted away out of sight. How quickly, after Hugh’s death, had she become surplus to requirements!

  “You can’t go to one of those places,” said Beverley the next week. “Not somebody like you.” Beverley understood.

  “Anyway, I’m not old enough.” When reminded of it, Evelyn’s age surprised her. Seventy-three wasn’t her; it floated nearby, as irrelevant as a sum on a blackboard. She didn’t connect it to herself. “I’m not ill enough, either. You have to have something wrong with you, for one of those places.”

  “I’ve been having a nose round.” Beverley produced a copy of The Lady. “I nicked it from one of my clients—don’t touch, your nails are wet.” She opened it and, squinting through the smoke, pointed to one of the advertisements. “How about this place?”

  Evelyn peered through her spectacles. “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. My uncle Edward lived in a house called Marigolds. It was just outside Pontefract.”

  “Well, this one’s in India.”

  The idea was preposterous, of course. India. It was a big enough kerfuffle just to get herself to Chichester. Evelyn had grown more fearful in her old age. The newspapers carried such alarming stories—biological attacks, rapes and muggings. That very week, according to the Sussex Mercury, somebody had set fire to a litter bin in the Cathedral precinct.

  Beverley, however, thought the idea a hoot and sent off for the brochure. The next week she sat down in Evelyn’s room and opened it.

  “Look at that house—you could be in England. Except it’s sunny.” Outside, rain lashed the window. It had been the wettest August on record—gales, thunderstorms. The management had had to switch on the central heating. “What’s the point of moldering away in this bloody country? How long’ve you lived in Sussex?”

  “All my life,” said Evelyn.

  “That’s so not adventurous. Isn’t it time for a change? After all, what’s to keep you here?”

  How did Beverley guess? Evelyn hadn’t talked much about her children and her grandchildren; it was too painful. Besides, she could never get a word in edgewise.

  “It’d do you the world of good, petal,” said Beverley. “It’s never too late, and you’re in terrific nick now your hip’s better. If you don’t like it you can always come home.”

  All my life. Put like that, it did sound tame. But they had been fulfilled and happy years, Evelyn was sure of it, despite Theresa’s bemusing version of events. With the passing of time, however, and the departure of its main characters, the mixture felt denuded and flavorless; she had thought about it too much, it was like meat with the goodness boiled out of it.

  “I used to make an excellent stew,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Though I say it myself. The secret was pouring Hugh’s wine into it.” Evelyn paused. “He never knew. I used his beer for killing slugs, too. You pour some into a dish and leave it in the garden, overnight. They climb into it and drown. Such a happy death. The best sort one could imagine, really.” She relapsed into silence.

  “Here, stop babbling and try some of this.” Beverley squirted her with perfume. “It’s Arpège.” She always had some free samples with her. They tried them out together.

  Evelyn roused herself from her reverie. No, the idea was mad. She gave back the brochure. “I couldn’t die in a foreign field.”

  “Indians don’t die.”

  “Yes they do, dear. All over the place.”

  “What I mean is, death’s not important.” Beverley had learned this from her friend Maureen, who knew more about yoga than she did. “When you die you come back as something else. A woodpecker or something.”

  “Why a woodpecker?” asked Evelyn.

  “Search me.”

  Until recently Evelyn had believed in heaven. Now that she was drawing nearer to it she wasn’t so sure; it was like someone shoving a page in front of her face—the closer it came, the more blurred the writing. There was so much senseless suffering in the world—what had Hugh done, to deserve those final months
? To believe in heaven you had to believe in God, and during those last terrible months in the hospital she had lost Him.

  Beverley pointed to a photo. “That’s the doctor at the hotel. Dr. Sajit Rama, he’s called. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  “He looks like Omar Sharif.”

  “Isn’t Omar Sharif about a hundred years old?”

  “He wasn’t always, dear,” said Evelyn.

  “Actually, isn’t he dead?”

  Evelyn thought suddenly: This life, it’s as if I’m dead already.

  Beverley gazed at the photo. “What do you think Omar Sharif should come back as?”

  “Himself, but younger,” said Evelyn. “And staying in the next room.”

  They burst out laughing. “Plenty of life left in you,” said Beverley, “you naughty girl.”

  Evelyn was surprised at herself. “It’s those big dark eyes. We used to have a spaniel with eyes like that.” What was the dog’s name? Disappeared, along with so many others. Only that morning—was it that morning?—she had forgotten the name of Christopher’s wife.

  Oh Lord, what was it? If she tried to remember, it only became more frustrating. Sometimes it worked if she came at it casually, fooling herself that the name didn’t matter. Sometimes it felt like grabbing at shoals of minnows; they darted away in the water, tiny slivers of silver, they would never be caught.

  “Indian men are so fit compared to pasty English ones,” said Beverley dreamily. “Honest, you’d feel ten years younger.”

  Marcia. There, she wasn’t completely senile.

  This cheered Evelyn. She picked up the brochure and looked at a photograph. It showed the hotel garden. The place was bathed in a golden light, the light of long afternoons in her childhood garden, now tarmacked over to become the freight terminal at Gatwick. “The timeless beauty of India,” it said. Time didn’t really exist, not with the important things. Evelyn talked to Hugh in her head; his voice continued even though he himself had stopped. She could remember every inch of that garden—the brick path, worn in the middle; the moss beneath the rainwater tank where she had found a newt.

  “I remember now,” said Beverley. “With Hindus you’ve got to do good deeds. Then you come back as something better.”

  What had the newt done, to end up being a newt? Perhaps it had once been a cruel father who had beaten his children.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Beverley.

  “Nothing, dear.” Evelyn found this conversation invigorating; nobody at Leaside talked about things like this. The very word India sharpened her senses, like squeezed lemon. Even if she never went there, which was likely, it was bracing to think about it. Hugh would have been amazed that she even entertained the idea.

  She thought of her children and smiled. It was worth doing it, just to see their faces.

  But of course she couldn’t. What about the dirt and disease? “What about those Muslim terrorists?” Evelyn asked. They bred out there, hatching their suicide missions. She feared for her grandchildren, living in New York. She feared for herself.

  “Indians are Hindus, silly billy,” said Beverley. “The Muslims are in Pakistan, that’s why they made it. To put the Muslims there. Even I know that.”

  “I know so little,” said Evelyn.

  “Never too late to start.”

  Christopher, who was inclined to lecture, had tried to interest his mother in wider matters. On his last visit, when he had given Evelyn the computer, he had said that it was all one world now. “It’s called globalization, Ma. You see, I can download the kids onto your computer and you can talk to them.”

  “I’d rather see them.”

  “You do see them. It’s as if they’re in the room. Distance has become meaningless. I can work anywhere; all I need is my laptop. Time and space have been transformed—look, our lettuce comes from Kenya, our Raleigh bikes are made in Korea, our sneakers in Taiwan—”

  “I’ve never had any sneakers,” said Evelyn.

  “That’s the new global economy.”

  “Perhaps I should get some; they’re supposed to be so comfortable.”

  “I remember talking to a chap who was harvesting the next field—remember that huge field at the end of the garden? Stonking great combine harvester. Said he had a flat in Eilat, for the scuba diving, harvested in Sussex and Israel and Saudi, traveled all over the world. Chap who drove the tractor came from Poland—”

  “What are you talking about, dear?”

  Christopher had stopped, with a little sigh. While she was pruning her forsythia, it seemed, the world had been transformed.

  Beverley gazed at the doctor’s photo. “Honest, I’d go there myself if I was old.”

  She left. Evelyn stood at the window and watched her manicurist scuttling through the rain. Beverley opened the car door. Faint sounds of yapping came from the interior; it was her West Highland terrier, Mischief. Beverley flung her case into the backseat. Then she drove away, the loose exhaust pipe rattling.

  Evelyn stood there, watching the rain lash the rhododendrons. How strange, she thought; if I went to India, which I can’t possibly imagine doing, it would be Beverley whom I would miss the most.

  We are what we think, all that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.

  SAYINGS OF THE BUDDHA

  Dorothy Miller lived in a block of flats next to Madame Tussaud’s. Outside, day and night, traffic roared down the Marylebone Road. Dorothy had always been a poor sleeper. Lying in bed, she listened to the cars passing in waves, rising, then subsiding.

  Through the wall, however, was silence. The waxworks stood, mute in their celebrity. Dorothy hadn’t been in there in years but she sensed their presence, keeping watch with her through the night. Queens and murderers, mistresses and presidents, their selves had long since died but their replicas remained, forever poised—a hand raised, eyes gazing nowhere. During the war they had been stored in an adjacent building. One night, in a bombing raid, the roof was blown off; when the rescue teams arrived they had stared, appalled, at the heap of limbs.

  Dorothy lived alone. She thought: If these flats were bombed, people would rescue their photo albums before they rescued me. She was used to this sensation. Sometimes, in fact, she got a certain satisfaction from it. After all, she had had an interesting life, as interesting as that led by many of the effigies next door. Sometimes, half-asleep, she imagined them stirring themselves and stretching their limbs; she imagined them ageing.

  Some of them, in fact, she had met during her career; some she had featured in programs. Dorothy had worked at the BBC, in current affairs. She had traveled widely and been involved in some of the history on the other side of the wall. It was many years now, however, since she had retired. Arthritis confined her to the flat, sometimes for days at a time. It was on the ground floor. Each day, outside her kitchen, a queue formed for the waxworks—students, Japanese tourists. As she brewed her coffee the people gazed through the window. They peered closer, unnerving her, until one day she realized: Of course they’re not looking at me. They’re inspecting their own reflections in the glass.

  Increasing years, of course, render us invisible as if in preparation for our eventual disappearance. Dorothy had never been a head-turner but she had always been smartly dressed—a sophisticated woman who had never married though there were rumors of an affair with an actor, himself married, now long since dead. Inquiries about her private life were not welcome; in fact, nobody would think of attempting to make them.

  In recent years chronic pain had made her short-tempered. What was happening to the world? Had she missed something? People seemed to have pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into their own solipsistic little lives. Half of them didn’t even bother to vote. In a way, Dorothy couldn’t blame them. The rot had started with Mrs. Thatcher, there’s no such thing as society, but a worse betrayal was committed by her own party, which had mutated into something so repellent that she was tempted to up-sticks altogether and leave the cou
ntry. Even the BBC, once so familiar, was now unrecognizable. The phrase “market forces” had, like a cancer, eaten into the organization she had most loved. That it was elderly to think this way only made her more irritable. Newspapers were full of interviews with people she had never heard of, famous for being famous, famous for being celebs; what had they done, what was the point of it all? No doubt Tussaud’s was full of them now. At some defining moment a sea change had occurred—around the time when train passengers were renamed customers, when ordinary dogs disappeared overnight, to be replaced by pit bull terriers. It was as if she were performing in a play and realized, quite suddenly, that the cast had been replaced by actors she had never seen before.

  Dorothy started making breakfast. No oranges. Yesterday she had hobbled out to her local greengrocer’s only to find it had turned into a Snappy Snaps. Her own face, in the mirror, had been replaced by that of an old woman.

  It was the rush hour. Outside, the traffic was at a standstill; even here in the kitchen she could smell the exhaust fumes. She knew that she was struggling against her own irrelevance. August had been miserable; the queue along the pavement was a hunched row of anoraks. On Radio 4 they were broadcasting an item about care home closures: “… squeezed out of existence by regulatory overload and starved of funding by social services …”

  Dorothy tried to unscrew the percolator. What will happen to me, she wondered, when the time comes? Her BBC pension would hardly stretch to a private place, not for more than a few years, and her lease was soon to expire; a Hong Kong company had bought the block of flats and planned to refurbish the place and sell it off at a no doubt extortionate profit.

  “A spokesman said, ‘Unless the government makes £1.5 billion available immediately, the sector will collapse and the NHS could be left with a bill for £15 billion.’ ”

  Dorothy was seventeen when the NHS was created. Now it was cheaper to send people to France for new hips. They returned, glowing with praise and with a taste for red wine at lunch.