Ithaca (7 page)

As he grew up he figured out how to temper his impetuosity, developed the strength and flexibility that would see him through difficult situations; from his father, he inherited traits that he often wished were better formed in himself, such as patience and calm; but it was from his mother that he got the qualities that most defined him: the ability to take risks, a deep stoicism that helped him through the hard times, and the resilience that kept him going no matter how many times he was struck down.

Thinking about her now he feels unexpectedly crushed by her death, especially because he hadn’t been able to mourn her properly. This was true of his father’s passing as well, but at least then Julia and his surviving parent cushioned his sense of loss. Moreover, he was closer to his mother than his father, not that it had mattered very much, he was always the absent son who phoned home from time to time and visited once a
year. Julia and his mother had not got on and that had strained their relationship for a while. When his father died, his mother and he had made up and he had tried unsuccessfully to get her to return to the land of her birth so he could take care of her. But there was no moving her. She had turned her face against her parents and England after they had opposed her marriage to the Indian coffee planter she had fallen in love with when she was twenty-two, and so far as she was concerned the decision was permanent. She had stayed away from their funerals, she had signed over everything they had left her in their respective wills to her sister, and now, nearly half a century later, she still would not relent. She would stay on in the old house on the hill that Nirmal and she had moved to after he had retired – it did not matter to her that she was seventy-one years old and arthritic and diabetic.

She had once told him about his paternal grandfather dying a few months after his beloved wife of fifty-two years had passed on. Apparently, local superstition had it that the surviving partner of a long-term marriage was most at risk of dying within a few days of the birthday or death day of the departed spouse. Sure enough, his grandfather had died three days after he’d marked his wife’s birthday with a nightlong remembrance ceremony of his own devising. That fact had stuck in his mind, and every year, for the next five years, he would become extremely anxious about his mother’s health three days before and three days after the birth and death anniversaries of his father. He set up an elaborate early warning system comprising neighbours, friends, and servants who would check in on her regularly and keep him informed
about her state of health. Last year she had negotiated the days that bracketed the critical dates on the calendar without setting off any alarms, but in the winter she was struck down by the flu and he received the phone call he had been dreading, saying he should get to Yercaud immediately.

He found her listless and worn, and unable to move a few steps without becoming breathless. Her GP suggested moving her to the hospital, and she said she didn’t mind going but that he shouldn’t expect to see her back in the house again. He had brushed aside her fears, but within a day of being admitted to the hospital she took a turn for the worse. Her doctor was blunt with him: his mother was dying and he would have to start making his peace with that fact. He told the doctor that no expense should be spared to make her well again, she was tough and she could make it. He took one of the rooms at the hospital reserved for the family of patients, and spent every waking moment at his mother’s bedside; by now her condition had deteriorated further and she was drifting in and out of a coma.

When you are keeping vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is seriously ill, the one thing that no one tells you about in advance is that you will be bored and frustrated by your inability to make yourself useful, and will often be regarded as an irritant because you get in the way of those who are trying to do their jobs. In large city hospitals nobody but hospital staff gets to attend on critically ill patients, but in the country hospital to which his mother had been admitted the rules were more relaxed and he spent hours trying to talk to her, stroking her face, badgering the nurses for updates on her condition.
Finally, they could take it no longer, and the senior nurse ordered him out of the intensive care unit. He went upstairs to his room. The hospital was surrounded by low, humped hills capped with mist, and he looked out at them, his mind blank. He felt no grief; he could fix no thought or image of his mother in his head. For the next couple of days he was allowed into the ICU for an hour every morning and an hour every evening when he was allowed to spoon-feed her a few sips of porridge. One night when he was trying to sleep, his mind began to fill with memories of her and he knew that she was going to die; at three the next morning a nurse came up to his room and said she was very sorry to tell him that his mother had passed away peacefully a few moments ago.

He had stayed dry-eyed when his mother died – he was so preoccupied with all the details he had to attend to that he was unable to grieve. When he returned to London his memories stayed bound tight within him. But now, in this strange city that he has fled to without really thinking, and at the end of an evening that has touched him in a way that he was not prepared for, the cords that he has used to tie the loss of his mother tightly within him come undone, and he weeps uncontrollably.

When the crying subsides, his mind is rinsed clean and he is able to think calmly for the first time in months. He decides not to return home early. He checks out of the hotel in Thimphu, and takes a room in Paro, a small town surrounded by cloud-welted mountains where he takes long, solitary walks, not thinking about much, trying to centre himself, not forcing it, but letting it happen as naturally as possible. By the time he
gets on the plane for the return journey home the anxiety he was gripped by has dwindled to almost nothing and his confidence is restored. The troubles that brought him to Bhutan have not gone away but he is now able to place them in the right context, the first and perhaps most important step when it comes to dealing with them. He has started to make his peace with his mother’s death; he will work things out with Julia and Mandy no matter how long it takes. Adopting a more relaxed attitude to the threat that looms on the job front is in some ways the most difficult thing; he has fought hard to get to where he is now, but as he reflects upon his career, he comes to the realization that nothing is ever guaranteed in publishing. He has always known that but had forgotten it as his mind had grown unquiet. No, publishing is not a profession for the faint-hearted or those who crave certainty and results that are commensurate with effort. That is why he has always found it thrilling, the knowledge that the unexpected is always just a minute or a month away, and that no matter how dire things seem, something will turn up, something always does.

S
he had decided to leave Zach after she’d had nightmares for five days in a row, in which she died in gruesome ways – disembowelled, shot through the eye (the left), set on fire, drowned in a lake of turpentine, and smashed flat by a locomotive. She was no great believer in the interpretation of dreams, but these seemed to point to the fact that her marriage was killing her, a view her best friend, Anthea, agreed with, so she walked out and the dreams stopped. It wasn’t that her relationship was something she could write a misery memoir about, she wasn’t a battered, bruised, electrocuted victim. No, the truth was far more boring, it was simply that the man she had married because he was passionate and exciting and necessary to her own life had grown distant, dull, and wrapped up in his work. But if Julia Spence thought that leaving meant she was rid of Zachariah Thomas, she quickly found out otherwise. As he bounced from crisis to crisis, she found that they were
as present in each other’s lives as they had been when they were together, perhaps more so because it was difficult to take each other for granted anymore.

Julia did not want to lead a life that was less than fulfilling, and if it was possible she wanted to lead a life that was above average. She had known this from about the age of four when her mother, frustrated by her inability to make anything of her own life, took her older daughter’s life into her hands and attempted to make it into something extraordinary. Ballet classes, tennis lessons, hours and hours spent thumping away on the family piano, perched on a pile of cushions so she could reach the keys – she was pushed into everything she showed any sort of aptitude for, as well as a few activities that she was exceptionally bad at (public speaking came to mind). But in the end she didn’t become world-class in anything her mother thrust upon her. By the time she got to Balliol and chose English and Modern Languages for her undergraduate degree, her mother had given up on her. Importantly, Julia had not given up on herself and now that she was capable of thinking independently she understood that she could lead a life that was not ordinary
without
being able to serve a tennis ball at close to a hundred miles an hour or coaxing out of her stubbornly indifferent piano a sublime interpretation of Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in G major. The key, she figured, was in leading a life that was truly fulfilling to her, a life that she could look back on and say, yes, this was a life well lived. She knew what she did not want: the desperate search for love or more likely sex that some of her girlfriends indulged in. She was dubious about the illusory
promise of marriage and children struck her as being more trouble than they were worth. She liked travel but did not think she was bold enough to wander through lands that were completely alien to her, which seemed the only sort of travel that would be truly exciting. Nor did she want to end up with a job that she could do in her sleep and that would extirpate within a decade any notion of well-being. That was the easy part, more difficult was finding something that would challenge and fulfill her for the rest of her days.

She briefly considered becoming a foreign correspondent like Anthea, who was forever being sent off by the
Gazette
to places like Beijing and Azerbaijan, but you had to be crazy like Anthea in order to be able to deal with that sort of unstructured, unsettled life. For a while she thought she might become a social worker but the six months she spent at an ashram near Tirunelveli, after passing out of university, cured her of that notion; she wasn’t unselfish enough to give of herself so completely. Her fallback option was to become a frustrated academic like her mother, although the prospect of teaching waves of supercilious undergraduates and spending the rest of her life in a place like Broad Street, Oxford, filled her with a peculiar sort of horror. Fortunately, before she drove herself completely mad, she found her niche in publishing; a classmate had found a job as an assistant with Random House and spoke rapturously of her new life – interacting with the best writers alive, never doing the same thing day in and day out, working with intelligent, interesting people. Julia interviewed for and landed a job with a medium-sized publishing firm and soon found out that her classmate had
exaggerated. An assistant’s job was far from glamorous: when she was not photocopying, stuffing envelopes, scheduling lunch appointments, making coffee, or managing anxious authors who wanted to take things up with her boss, she was editing the least interesting authors on the list or panning the execrable nonsense in the slush pile in the hope of finding gold.

Accidentally, as with most things in life, she discovered her calling. Three years after embarking on her career in publishing, at a book launch she got talking with the founder of a small but prestigious literary agency, Fraser Evans Associates, who was looking for someone who could take care of some of his authors; she decided to take him up on his offer and within a few months she knew she had made the right decision. She was working with authors on their manuscripts, rather than attending production meetings; she was interacting closely with some of the best minds of her generation rather than being a small cog in a vast impersonal machine that spat out hundreds of titles, and she knew that in her future lay the prospect of finding and promoting new and exciting talent. She knew heartbreak for the second time in her life (after the obligatory college dalliance) when she had a brief affair with a young writer who had published an intensely felt and rapturously praised collection of stories and then dumped her and the agency in quick succession, but she recovered soon enough and went on.

Three months after her affair fizzled she met Zach. She was in Edinburgh for the literary festival, and was making herself some coffee in the hospitality yurt when he walked in with someone she knew at HarperCollins. They were discussing
the bravura performance that day by Caryl Phillips – she had been in the audience, and agreed with them that he was one of those rare writers whose stage presence was as thrilling as his writing. Her publishing acquaintance had wandered off after a while and she and Zach were left alone. She discovered he had grown up in Tamil Nadu, its blazingly colourful landscapes igniting in her mind as they spoke, and the mental and physical attraction between them had escalated from there. She knew she was looking good that day, her long, straight chestnut hair and brown eyes combining well with the stylish Michael Kors skirt that she had worn on a whim, although it wasn’t the sort of thing you normally wore to a book festival (he had later confessed that he had found the combination of sunglasses stuck on top of her head and the flash of white he’d glimpsed under her skirt when she crossed her legs unbelievably erotic). They had dinner that day, and two months after they returned to London they were lovers. He was by far the most intense person she had met in her life, his enthusiasm for his authors and for a life in books bordering on the evangelical; she found his vitality and exotic looks an irresistible combination, and before the year was out they were planning to get married. To her relief he got on well with her parents and her younger sister, but the opposite wasn’t true – she had liked his father, a refined-looking man with a shock of unruly white hair and a cutting sense of humour who went out of his way to make her feel welcome, but his mother had shown no warmth towards her prospective daughter-in-law. She didn’t know why this was so, she would have thought that she and this Englishwoman
who had decided to make India her home would have had at least a few things in common, but when it was clear that her friendly overtures were being snubbed she withdrew into herself and waited for the visit to come to an end. She wouldn’t accompany Zach on future visits to his parents’ home, she decided, and after the wedding she wouldn’t have anything more to do with his mother.