A Touch of Love (2 page)

‘Were you not expecting me so soon?’ Ted asked.

‘I’m sorry. I lost track of the time. Do sit down.’

He revealed a sofa by sweeping a pile of shirts and underpants to the floor.

‘Well, Robin,’ said Ted, looking at him and wondering why he was not properly dressed (he was wearing only a red towel dressing gown and a pair of slippers), ‘we meet in altered circumstances.’

‘How is Kate?’ he asked.

‘Oh, she’s fine. Just fine. A funny thing,’ he announced, to break the immediate embarrassed silence, ‘– I stopped to ask for directions just now and spoke to a friend of yours.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. She seemed slightly… Asian.’

‘Her name’s Aparna.’

‘Striking-looking woman, I thought. She’d just been to visit you, too, had she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you don’t seem to be short of friends, Robin.’

‘We quarrelled.’

‘Oh? Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘Yes, it was. It was about a book.’

There was another silence. Ted, master of the manipulative conversation, adept at the winning of confidences, was finding it hard to cope with the listless minimalism of Robin’s answers. Fortunately, however, there was a sudden change of subject.

‘Anyway, Ted, I spoke to Kate on the phone about your cottage and she didn’t seem to think there’d be any problem. I suppose you’ve brought the keys with you?’

Ted was too nonplussed to respond. Robin sat down on the bed opposite him and continued (his voice cold, effortful, inexpressive):

‘You know, if I hadn’t had the chance to go away somewhere, I think I would have gone mad. Or something. I’ve been feeling so tired. I think I must need some sleep. I think I must need some rest. I feel as though I need to talk. I need to see someone. I need to get away. I need to be alone. I feel frightened. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I have been doing, these last few days. I don’t know where I’ve been. I went into a shop. I picked up a tube of toothpaste, and walked out with it. The woman had to run after me. She said, You haven’t paid for that. I’ve hurt my finger. I slipped and hurt it on the stairs. I feel exhausted. I feel cold and hungry. I’m always hungry. I put a frozen pie in the oven, and came back half an hour later, but I hadn’t put the oven on. I’d forgotten. I had to eat bread instead. I can’t believe what I’ve been hearing on the radio. She let him use our air bases. They used our air bases to bomb Libya. I’m scared. I’ve got to get away. And I’ve always wanted to go back to the Lakes. It’s quiet up there, and clean, and it has associations for me. I used to go up there with my family. My parents and my sister. One of the things I’ve been thinking, the last few days, is how much I miss my family. How stupid it is to cut myself off from them like this. If I hadn’t been able to use your cottage, I was going to write to them, ask them if I could go back home, stay with them a while. But this will be better. Much better.’

A softer man than Ted might have been moved by this speech. Indeed, at a pinch, Ted himself might have been moved, if he had been listening. Instead he was surveying the squalor of Robin’s flat, and thinking about his cottage in the Lake District, and as he did so, his resolve hardened. They had bought the cottage with a legacy from Katharine’s mother, who had died in 1983. The question of what they should do with the money had been the subject of several long and violent arguments, which he now recalled with some fondness. Eventually he had had his way, and the Lakes had won out over Cornwall. Physical force had not been necessary, after all. The cottage was on the main road between Torver and Coniston; all that stood between it and a fine view of the water was half a mile of dense pine forest. Ted and Katharine had been conscious, at first, that their presence might be regarded by the locals as invasive, but they had had no difficulty in integrating themselves into the community: their only neighbours, the Burnets, who lived across the road, turned out to be a charming couple from Harrow who were always ready to make up a four at bridge. Ted was not prepared to have his standing among these people compromised by the arrival of this disreputable acquaintance who clearly had no idea of how to look after property. His eye – so used to monitoring Katharine’s efforts – had soon picked out the grime caked on to Robin’s skirting board, the ash on the carpet, the cobwebs hanging in unvisited corners. Not that he could give this as his reason for refusing, of course. A little white lie would have to be invented.

‘Well, the fact is, Robin,’ he said, ‘that Katharine was being somewhat premature. What she seems to have forgotten is that my mother is staying there at the moment. She’ll be staying there for a month at least.’

Robin stared at him in absolute silence, his expression blank, his eyes unmoving. Ted wondered whether he had heard, or registered, or understood his explanation, which had come out, he thought, sounding very reasonable. He tried to phrase a question – ‘Is that all right?’, ‘You do see the problem, don’t you?’ – but the words would not form. What he heard himself ask, finally, was:

‘Now – what about something to eat?’

∗

It transpired that there was no food in the kitchen, apart from some margarine and half a packet of flaccid cream crackers. Ted went out to find a chip shop. Not having visited a chip shop for several years, he was surprised to be charged more than three pounds. The owner told him that such prices were quite common now, even in the north. When he returned to the flat, he found that Robin had not fetched clean cutlery and warmed the plates, as requested, but was sitting at his desk writing a letter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect you back so soon.’

Ted sent him off to the kitchen and took advantage of his absence by having a surreptitious look at the letter. It was to his mother, and began:

This will probably come as a surprise to you but I am thinking of coming home and perhaps staying for a little while. I hope this idea appeals to you because I know we haven’t communicated much recently, but I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to see you both again. I seem to have taken a lot of wrong turnings recently and I badly need to get away from here and think things through. I haven’t put that very well, but I shall try to explain things more
…

This was all he had written. Ted was reading over the letter a second time, puzzled, when Robin came back. Anxious not to be thought inquisitive, he pretended to have been looking at the red notebooks.

‘What’s in these?’ he asked, pointing.

‘Stories,’ said Robin. He handed Ted a lukewarm plate and a knife and fork.

‘You’re still writing, then, are you?’

‘On and off.’

‘I still have that issue of the college magazine,’ said Ted, in a tone of chuckling reminiscence. ‘You know, the one we both contributed to? You wrote a story, and I did a short article.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘My piece was about object-oriented programming. People told me it was rather humorous.’

Robin shook his head and began to eat chips with his fingers.

‘So what are these stories about?’

‘Oh,’ said Robin, wearily, ‘it’s just a sequence I’ve been working on. I don’t know why I bother, really. There are four stories, all interrelated. They’re about sex and friendship and choices and things like that.’

‘Four?’ said Ted. ‘I can only see three.’

‘Aparna has one of them. I wanted her to read it: she borrowed it this afternoon.’ He pulled apart a piece of cod and took one or two reluctant mouthfuls. Then he added, suddenly: ‘One should think very carefully before speaking. Don’t you agree?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I said, one should think very carefully before speaking.’

‘How do you mean?’

He was leaning forward, newly earnest and communicative.

‘What I mean is, a word can be a lethal weapon.’ He paused on this phrase, apparently pleased with it. ‘One word can destroy the work of a million others. A misplaced word can undo anything: a family, a marriage, a friendship.’

Ted was about to ask him why he thought he knew anything about marriage, but decided against it.

‘I’m not with you,’ he said.

‘I was just thinking how easy it was to upset Aparna today. You see, she showed me this book.’ He pushed his plate aside, once and for all. ‘It was a new book, a hardback. I could see it wasn’t a library book, so I started teasing her about it, saying, “Since when have people like us been able to afford books like that?” Then she told me she’d been given it, because one of the authors was a friend of hers. So I took the book and looked at the title page, and there were two names, one of them English and one Indian. So I pointed at the Indian name and said, I suppose this is your friend? And she stared at me and slowly took the book out of my hand, and she said, “You just gave away a lot about yourself”,’

Ted was baffled. He thought carefully and fast, anxious not to embarrass himself. What was the matter with this man, that they misunderstood each other so often? Friendship, he had always believed, was a meeting of minds, like marriage. Katharine and he not only understood each other as soon as they spoke, but frequently they understood each other even before they spoke. Sometimes he knew what she was thinking even before she had said it. Often she knew what he was going to think even before he had begun to think it. Intellectual compatibility had become one of the constants of his life, one of the givens, a habit, an assumption, like the company car, like the greenhouse – for which, he now remembered, he was meant to be buying three new panes at the weekend.

What was the purpose of this abstruse anecdote? Presumably it hinged on the fact that one of the authors of this book was Indian, and that Aparna was for some reason offended at being linked with her. But surely Aparna was herself Indian? She had a funny-sounding name. Her skin was, not to put too fine a point on it, dark. So was her hair. She didn’t have a red spot in the middle of her forehead, admittedly, but that could probably be explained away. Why should one Indian not wish to be associated with another Indian, simply because they were both Indian?

He put this question to Robin, as best he could.

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Robin. ‘You see, I’ve known her now for four years. She’s been here ever since I’ve been here. She’s been here longer than that. Six, seven years.’ His speech was halting, now, as if he had lost the habit of explaining things to people. ‘When she got here she was proud of her nationality. She even showed it off. The way you saw her dressed today – she didn’t always use to dress like that. She was popular, too, in those days: so popular that it used to make me jealous. Of course, she always had time for me. We were very close, in some ways. But still, I’d be standing talking to her outside the library and every few seconds someone would be coming by, saying hello, stopping to chat. It would be as much as I could do to get a word in edgeways. Not just students, either: professors, lecturers, librarians, the people from the canteen. You wouldn’t believe it. What you saw today was a shadow. She lives alone now. In a tower block, right on the other side of town. The fourteenth floor. I’m the only one she still sees. They’ve all forgotten her. They got bored with her.’

There descended a silence which was, it seemed to Ted, potentially interminable.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘Racism doesn’t have to be blatant. It doesn’t have to be sudden, either, and it can happen anywhere. She got tired of being thought of as foreign; she got tired that it was always the first thing people noticed about her. She only came here to work, and get her degree, and then she found that people had decided to use her to brighten up their lives. “Their bit of local colour” she used to call it. She fought hard to be taken seriously, but it hasn’t worked. And now she thinks that even I’m no different. Even I think of her that way. She’s so bitter now, with me and with everybody; and yet I can remember this kindness, this warmth, that I never found in anyone else.’

Ted, who had no idea of what to say to any of this, began to clear up the plates.

‘Do you ever feel,’ said Robin, ‘that you’ve gone through your whole life making the wrong decisions? Or worse still, that you’ve never really made any decisions? You can see that there were times when you might have been able to – help someone, for instance, but you never had the courage to do it? Yes?’

Ted paused at the doorway to the kitchen, and said: ‘You’re not really on top form at the moment, are you, Robin?’

Robin followed him through and watched as he put the plates into the sink.

‘Or even worse than that, have you ever wondered what’s the point of making decisions in the first place, when the world’s run by maniacs, and we’re all at the mercy of interests outside our control, and we never know when something terrible might happen, like a war or something?’

‘Well, you’re absolutely right, of course. Look, Robin,’ Ted turned, and said, unexpectedly, ‘you haven’t got a needle and thread, have you? I’ve lost a button.’

‘Yes. In the drawer of the dressing table.’

They went back into the other room. Ted found the needle and a reel of white cotton, and began threading it.

‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘I’m listening to every word you say.’

‘I just feel… I need to get away and start all over again. Do you ever have that feeling?’

‘Sometimes.’ The needle had a very small eye, and Ted was finding it difficult to get started.

‘I mean, I just don’t know where the last few years have gone. I seem to have achieved nothing, personally, academically, creatively. I seem to have lost all direction.’

‘Yes, I see.’ He tried sucking the end of the cotton, hoping that this would make it easier to thread.

‘I never see my family. I never hear from my sister any more. There are no jobs in universities these days. I can’t see where my thesis is leading. My relationships with women have been disastrous. I can only see the negative side of things. Everything seems flawed. Everything seems useless and futile. Do you understand what that feels like?’

Ted, having succeeded in threading the needle, and having found a spare button in the pocket of his shirt, was now taking his shirt off. It was halfway over his head as he answered: