My Secret History (65 page)

Jenny was an accountant with a large firm in the City, having left the bank which had been her first job. Her work was as remote from mine as it could possibly have been. Its remoteness and its obscurity perhaps made it bearable for me. I had very little idea what she did. It wasn’t tax. She analyzed corporate expenditure. I sometimes saw the results—her name on reports. And she saw mine on books. But she had never seen me write one, no one had, no one—not even another writer—knew how a particular book was written. It had nothing to do with fluency. It was a clumsy, messy, and mysterious process that was done in the dark.

Jenny did not have the severe look of an accountant. You
might have taken her in her casualness for an art teacher or magazine editor. She was browny blonde. She dyed her hair so regularly with Born Blonde that I did not know what her natural color was now. Perhaps underneath it all she was going gray. She had greeny-blue eyes, and sometimes wore thick glasses and sometimes contact lenses. I hated knowing how a woman achieved an effect of stylishness or beauty; I did not want to hear about wires or makeup. I wanted to see the final result.

She seldom dressed fashionably, but she had conviction which was possibly a greater asset. Her clothes were large and loose, and she always looked comfortable. I had first been attracted to her by her looks, and she had not lost her beauty.

There was something in the way she sat, and in her loose clothes and big bag, that suggested she needed space—elbow room. She seldom held my hand, she recoiled slightly when I hugged her. If I touched her or took her arm she always smiled, and then her arm seemed to go dead. I often spoke to her and saw her smile; but she was not listening to me—she was smiling at something in her mind. She had a powerful memory and she sometimes lived in it, outside my reach. She reminded me of Jack in her seriousness. She was logical and at times very quiet, and those times I imagined her heart fluttering and her breathing very steady and that she was unaware of what was happening around her. She was intensely alert but not particularly watchful. She walked fast and had no sense of direction. She was defeated by the simplest mechanical object and always had trouble with so-called childproof caps on aspirin bottles. She laughed at the thought that she might have to apologize for her eccentricities. “That’s the way I am,” she said. She did not find fault with anyone who was different. Her own oddness had made her tolerant. But she could be very impatient.

This compassion in her, this logic and intelligence I relied on and needed. She had English good sense and English modesty, and was without the English envy. I was deficient in all her strongest qualities, and I knew it. Because of that she had become a part of me. Was there anything in me that she valued? I think she was fascinated by my various weaknesses and my self-assurance. She had told me that she wondered: How could someone like Andre, so incomplete, be so bold? She had once thought it was because I was an American. But
no, it was because I was a writer. That conundrum had made me a writer.

She knew me well and could be very quiet beside me, or else could read my mind. We had been married nearly sixteen years. She hated the word “wife.”

In the Transit Lounge of Terminal Three at Heathrow I said, “The plane’s not boarding yet. Let’s look at the Duty-Free Shop. I want you to buy something for yourself. Will you do that?”

“Of course, if you insist. I think I’ll buy a diamond wristwatch.”

I stood by with my credit card but all she bought was a liter bottle of whiskey.

She said, “Someone in the office had one of those fake Rolex watches. She bought it in Singapore for about twenty quid. It was actually quite nice—so nice, in fact, that it put me off the idea of ever buying a real one.” She clasped the bottle. “This is all I need. I’ve heard you can’t get the stuff in India.”

She held my hand as the plane taxied to the runway, and she squeezed it tightly until the plane took off. But just as we passed over Windsor Castle she let go. When I put my arm around her she said, “Please don’t, Andy. I’m so hot. Oh, God, are you offended?”

Night came on quickly because we were flying east. We ate, we slept, we were woken for breakfast; and we landed in hot early morning, in blinding light. It was much steamier than on my previous visit, and because I was mentally comparing it I found it harder to bear than Jenny. I had not expected it, but she had been ready for anything.

The heat made me bad-tempered. When the taxi driver told us that his meter was broken I laughed sarcastically. I said, “Anyway, I know the fare is a hundred and twenty rupees.”

“One fifty, sah,” he said. He was unshaven and thin, and another grubby man sat with him in the front seat of the jalopy.

I tried to insist.

“Don’t make a fuss,” Jenny said. “You’re always trying to get a bargain. You should be ashamed of yourself, haggling with this poor man.”

After we checked into the hotel and were shown to our room, Jenny stood at the window and said softly, “It’s a moral dilemma, isn’t it—the luxury hotel in the poor hungry country?”
She turned to me and laughed in a helpless and self-mocking way. “It’s wickedness.”

“So what should we do about it?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going for a swim,” she said, and she pulled off her T-shirt.

I said it was too hot to swim and that it seemed almost perverse for people to sunbathe in a tropical country.

“You used to criticize me for swimming in Uganda.”

“Yes, at the swimming pool, with all the Africans hanging on the fence.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. She changed into her bathing suit quickly and efficiently, hardly conscious of her nakedness, as though she were alone. She was healthy and had a good figure—in fact, she was beautiful, with a youthful bloom still on her clear skin. But she was frowning at herself in the mirror. She said, “I’ve just been through a beastly English winter and some sun is just what I need. You can sit here and sulk and feel virtuous.”

While she was swimming I called Indoo at his agency. He said that we must meet—that he had some plans for me.

“I’m here with my wife,” I said. “That woman you met—Eden—was not my wife. You understand?”

“Don’t worry, old boy,” Indoo said.

Later that day I took Jenny to the Red Fort. I showed her the Moti Mahal, the Throne Room; we walked on the battlements. I said, “That’s the
Hathi Pol
—the elephant gate.”

“This is fun,” Jenny said. She wore a straw hat she had bought at a stall, and a blue dress and sandals. “I can’t believe I’m really in India. If it weren’t for the smells and all these ragged people I would find it hard to believe. It’s splendor and misery together, isn’t it?”

An Indian man was following us. He had a stack of postcards which he showed us and then held in Jenny’s face, obstructing her.

“I don’t want any postcards, thank you,” she said.

But the mere fact that she had spoken to him was taken by the man to be a sign of encouragement and he began grunting and whining and shuffling the cards.

Jenny ignored him and tried to walk on.

“Muddhoom, muddhoom—”

“No,” Jenny said, and smiled stiffly at him. But he made the
mistake of trying to put a postcard into her hand, insisting that she buy it, and she snapped, “Pack it in!”

This made some children playing nearby turn to us and laugh. Jenny’s expression softened.

She said, “Do you remember when Jack was that age?”

She became serene with reflection, and she seemed impervious to the heat. The temperature was in the nineties and the afternoon sun was cruelly slanted, striking from just above the rooftops into our eyes.

“So sweet,” she said as the children continued to laugh in a hiccupping way. “We’re not too old to have another child, you know.” She was still smiling. “And they can be such a damned nuisance, too.”

We moved on, to the alleys of the fort that had been converted into a bazaar. I kept stopping at the stalls and looking at the brassware, the antique jewelry, the carvings, the leather goods and woven bags.

“You and your knickknacks,” Jenny said, laughing impatiently. “You can buy that stuff in London, you know.” She went ahead. “I’m going to look at the marble screens.”

“Aren’t you tired of sightseeing?”

“Not yet. I want to finish looking at this place. I don’t want to have to come back here tomorrow. That’s for somewhere else—the mosque, I think.”

Another postcard seller approached her and began gabbling.

Jenny stared at him and in a level voice she said, “Bugger off.”

The next day we met Indoo at the bar of the hotel. He looked rather stunned, and I wondered whether he was drunk, but then I realized he was just being respectful, because of Jenny. He did not remark on her beauty—it was regarded as unseemly to speak that way of a man’s wife. I wasn’t flattered—I was annoyed that he had taken a liberty in gushing about Eden on my last trip.

“Perhaps you would enjoy meeting my wife,” Indoo said. He spoke to Jenny in the solicitous tone that he might have used for an invalid.

“I’d love to,” Jenny said. “Only we don’t have a lot of time.”

“She would show you all the shops in Delhi,” he said. “The best-quality ones. You could indulge yourselves in shopping sprees.”

“I’m afraid that’s not my line,” Jenny said, smiling pleasantly.

Indoo—his idea rejected—became even more formal. He said, “I understand perfectly” in a way that suggested he did not understand at all.

To lighten the mood I said, “Indoo doesn’t really approve of material things. He probably agrees that shopping is a sinful waste of time.”

This made him smile. “True,” he said. “But India needs hard currency. So I make an exception.”

“Tell Jenny about
maya
,” I said.

He lifted one finger, the way bores do when they lecture you, and he said, “We Hindus believe the whole material world is
maya
—illusion. The secret lies in letting go of things.”

Jenny merely stared at him, her head slightly tilted in disbelief.

Indoo was trying to look pious. He held his glass primly and in a soulful voice said, “I myself believe this is so.”

“Then what’s that in your hand?” Jenny asked. “Is that whiskey or an illusion?”

Indoo laughed slowly and insincerely. “Jolly good,” he said. “I like that. I forgive you for that.”

It seemed to me that this little get-together was not working at all.

Finally, Indoo said—as though for the first time—“I tell you what I would like to do very much indeed. White-water rafting on the Ganges. Bring your bathing costumes. I shall provide a hamper and all other requisites.”

“That’s an interesting idea,” I said.

“Yes,” Indoo said. “I will collect you in my car early in the morning—say, four or four-thirty. We will drive northward to Hardwar. There we take a back road to my agency’s camp on the Ganges. The river is very swift at that place. I have four chaps onsite who will take us downriver. You put on life jackets and paddle like hell through the rapids. I tell you, it is jolly exciting, especially when raft twists and turns in water. Adventure travel is the thing these days. This is a full day’s adventure. What do you say?”

This produced a silence, and then Jenny said calmly, “Excuse me, are you talking to me?”

“Indeed,” Indoo said, and I saw he was miserable—just the way he tried to wink at me made him seem pathetic. “What about it? White-water rafting on Mother Ganga.”

Jenny smiled at him. She said, “You must be joking.”

But she agreed to go with us the next day as far as Hardwar, where she got out, holding Murray’s
Guide
.

Indoo and I had breakfast at the camp. He seemed to relax as soon as Jenny was gone. Was it because she was my wife and he had had to keep a pretense of formality? Or was it that he felt part of a deception? I was surprised that he had any reaction at all, since I had always taken him for a fairly easygoing hypocrite.

“It is better this way,” he said, buckling on his life jacket. “Women are not at home on rubber rafts, you know.”

He paddled just behind me in the rear seat, shouting and screaming in the rapids and yelling to his men to go faster. When we came to the reach in the river where we had seen the corpse, he laughed and said, “Remember?”

The water brimmed where we had buried the bones. After seeing that I lost my taste for the rapids and couldn’t paddle very hard. I wasn’t grieving—I simply became heavy and thoughtful, and I kept looking back, as though in burying those bones I had buried something of myself.

I wanted to tell Jenny this when we met her later in the afternoon at the bridge in Hardwar. But I did not want to burden her with a lugubrious thought: she was smiling, she was happy, she said she had had a wonderful day. I’d tell her tomorrow.

“We must see Roorkee,” Indoo said, but he forgot to tell the driver, and he was sleeping when we came to the turnoff, so we kept on the direct road to Delhi. Indoo slept crookedly beside the driver, his head at an unnatural angle, and it flopped forward, waking him briefly, each time the driver touched the brake.

I told Jenny about the white-water rafting. I did not mention the corpse; only the rapids, the cold water, the hike afterwards.

“I would have hated it,” Jenny said. “You know who you sound like? One of those boring scoutmasters, always rabbiting on about fresh air. One of those tedious middle-aged men who walk around in shorts showing their knobbly knees. The next thing you’ll say to me is that I need more color in my cheeks!”

But this was mischief, not malice. She was hugging me as she spoke, and then she kissed me.

“I’m glad I came,” she said. “And I’m glad you had a good time. You don’t really need me to hold your hand, do you?”

“How did you spend the day?”

“I wandered around Hardwar. I had a cup of tea and then I had lunch at a filthy little place. The food was quite decent. I took some pictures and looked at the temples. You know Hard-war is a holy city? Then I got a taxi and went across the river to Rishikesh. Do you remember how the Beatles used to go there, to see the Maharishi? I wasn’t expecting much—I was prepared to mock it. I walked around and watched the people praying and washing in the river and”—there was a catch in her throat—“don’t laugh, but I felt a kind of holiness come over me.”