Homesick (20 page)

Later, as the taxi drove them through the winding roads of the forest, Preethi thought: I don’t want it all to end tonight. I want to try, and keep trying. I want to understand, I want to
know
the things I just imagine, the things I expect. She thought about Emma, and about the people in the cowboy hats, and about Beatrice’s quiet dignity and Anthony’s grief. She wanted to understand what people wanted. But she did understand, for when Simon’s head lolled onto her shoulder, she held it there, feeling its weight, and kissing his temple, she whispered “I love you” into his dreams.

W
hen the poet, Margaret, asked her for her name, she said, “Lolly,” as if a child again. And then she corrected herself: “I mean, it’s Louisa. I couldn’t say Louisa when I was small.…”

“So you said Lolly, and the family allowed that name. They petted you and patronised you with it, and you cannot help but feel a little patronised and petted by
me
, so you—reverted?” replied Margaret.

Louisa—for that is what she infinitely preferred—said, “Yes,” simply, and with that yes a number of other questions were answered. Questions made with flashing eyes and meaningful smiles. Margaret, who kissed her later and allowed Louisa to drunkenly search about her well-worn decolletage, never allowed the name Lolly to be used. Not even by Louisa’s sister, Deirdre, or Shamini, her mother.

Margaret became as near to a partner as Louisa had had: many glorious weekend days of walks by the sea and evenings in bed. And then, as suddenly as she appeared in Louisa’s life, she disappeared. Her breasts, glorious, tanned and heavy, harboured a killer of such great proportion that nothing could save her from the lack of hair and the double slicing-away, the ghostly march so many of her friends had fallen into. Margaret made little of it, not even poems; the radio waves of her life force seemed palpable
in the room, and her concentrating face towed, drained, channelled them until one day it was as if she had forgotten to make the superhuman effort to keep living. Louisa watched her wane, her last few minutes painful and bitter, and then Margaret was gone. Louisa, who had taught herself to share her life, where she had been used to being alone, grew used to it again. It was a hardship she felt dimly, like hunger pangs at eleven in the morning, to be got over with work. She buried herself in the vaults at the library, never believing that the physicality of her grief was anything more than a daily routine of pain, like the limp of an amputee.

•

A year later, as if emerging from a sleep, Louisa stood up from her desk, removed her glasses from her weary eyes, and, answering the phone, managed a smile when the enquiries desk reported a visitor.

“It’s a Mr. Harrison,” they said. “He asked to speak specifically to
you
.”

His name made her smile. Margaret’s name was Harrison, a coincidence on a spring day, and as she walked up the stairs to the ground floor, she noticed that tears did not come when she thought of spring: it was a year and a few weeks since Margaret had died, days before blossoms appeared on trees and baby birds surfaced from cocoon-like nests and the young people on campus held hands and kissed, their eyes closed against the sudden brightness of the sky. Her days were still spent in the vaults, but she ventured out sometimes to witness the world going on, to watch with pleasure the everyday, fascinating lives of others.

He stood with his back to her, very still. But she knew already, the way he stood, perhaps the colour of his hair, she knew.

“Hello,” she said to his back, “I am Louisa, the archivist.”

He swivelled slowly on one heel, as if on a turntable, as if required to reveal himself gradually. She stepped back. Her hand, outstretched to take his, curled back to her side.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Tony. I … I have something for you. My mother …”

But he started to cry. She stepped toward him, looked at his crying face, and then, holding his arm, guided him toward an office behind the enquiry desk. He was young, maybe twenty-five, thirty at the most. His hair was the colour and texture of his mother’s hair, an auburn brown, multifarious in its tones and curly, as though it had been teased and pronged and tied into its complex of tangles, and as he sobbed into the broken tissue she found in her pocket, he grabbed at his hair and messed it backward, much as his mother had done when Louisa made love to her. And Louisa, thinking this, took a step away from him again, worried that proximity would betray her.

“Can I bring you a cup of tea?” she asked.

“No, God, no! I am so sorry,” he said and, roughly drawing back a chair, sat down at the desk awkwardly, his long legs thrusting under it, until he became the interviewer and she the nervous interviewee. “Look, my mother left you—I mean, the university—her papers. But with the proviso that
you
—I mean,
you
—take care of them.”

“Oh.”

He smiled up at her. “Yes. ‘Oh’ is what I thought, too.” He waited for Louisa’s response. She stepped backward again. He smiled, uncannily the smile that Louisa thought
of every morning the moment after she woke and reminded herself of the things she had lost. “Cup of tea,” he said. “That’s our answer to everything, isn’t it?” He sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“I had no idea she had a son.”

“No. She didn’t tell people.”

“We were close.”

“She gave me to Dad. I saw her only once a year—well, more when I was grown up, but not so much in her last months. I don’t know why. I think she may have wanted to … shield me.”

“Yes.” But Louisa blamed herself. Margaret’s last months had belonged to Louisa, completely.

He stood. “Tea,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Tea. Always a good idea. Come on. You look as if you’ve had a shock, too. Were you close, then?” he asked, unnecessarily repeating her, looking at her sideways as he reached for the door handle behind her. Louisa flinched away, but she smiled, too, and made the decision not to tell him.

•

It was a good decision, for his powers of persuasion were as strong as his mother’s, and soon, three or four months after their first meeting, they were holding hands in the late spring, as though holding hands were the camouflage of campus. In the summer, as the undergraduates began to pile their boxes into the backs of their parents’ cars, they were quiet lovers, and come the autumn term, he had signed up for an MA and had moved into her flat and her bed, overwhelming and stabilising her, in much the same way his mother had two years before.

Louisa’s work continued. She noted and sifted collections of manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, diaries,
newspapers, maps. She negotiated with depositors of collections, stepping gently in the dance around their loved ones’ very real remains, carting away papers in boxes and sometimes black bags, closing the door of her car quietly as the wife or husband or child stood listening for that sound of one final goodbye. She made grant applications, to somehow fund the cataloguing. She negotiated her own terms with the university, all the time justifying to them that the collection she was building was worth keeping for the hundreds of years she was planning for. She gave each piece of paper its own importance, and a place in her democracy: assigning it a reference in her register, a cream, acid-free envelope in which to lie, and a grey, acid-free box in which it was held, in air-conditioned stasis, each piece like an embalmed body in its coffin, never to feel the weight of earth and start its natural process of descent to crumbled soil.

At their first meeting, when they had had their tea, Tony had brought her two document boxes filled with Margaret’s papers.

“She willed them to the university,” he said, “for the establishment of the Margaret Harrison Collection.”

It was a strange business, she thought, this delving into the past. To her, the past was just an impersonal town of comings and goings, a glossy history book full of famous white people who had nothing to do with
her
, Louisa. Margaret, the love of her life, was in the boxes Tony had handed to her—but it was Margaret’s working self, her everyday drudge of a self, separate from the Sunday husband she had been for Louisa. To settle her words into their new resting places was Louisa’s job, and this is what she set out to do. Taking the boxes down to the archives, she gleefully announced their new bounty to her colleagues, but Margaret
had not been hugely well-known, and people were only mildly impressed and actually annoyed because it was yet another collection that would have to wait to be catalogued: there was no monetary gift that supported it.

None of them could foresee an academic who would be attending the reading room on a regular basis to examine the diaries of a northern, latterly militant, lesbian poet. No one could imagine even one thesis being written about her rhyming schemes. Margaret’s addition to their collection was as important as the addition of her bones to the ground.

Consequently, Louisa, over a number of weeks of falling in love with Tony, put Margaret away, chronologically, then by subject, assigning her manuscripts reference letters and numbers significant, it seemed to Louisa, only to herself. She would occasionally flick open a page—carefully, with immense respect—and there would be words and names and ideas that were nothing to do with
her
, or Tony, for that matter, and she would close the page again, stroking it down, understanding its texture and substance more than she understood its previous owner, who had once been the centre and the meaning of her world.

•

A year later, when they were discussing marriage and having a child to share their life, Tony said, “Why were you and my mother so close? How did you know her? You’ve never explained.”

“We were friends. I went to one of her readings, and we saw each other after that.”

“Saw each other?” he said, turning from the sink, his hands still wet. The sun glinted on the auburn curls, and he reached and wiped his hands on the cloth she held the last dish in.

“Yes. You know. Coffee, drinks, that sort of thing.” She knew how to lie. Her grown-up life had started when she was eight and crawled up her bed, higher, higher, away from Kumar, imagining she was climbing a mountain as she reached her hands up the wall toward her bookshelf, so her fingers did not touch where he tried to guide them. Lies were what she repeated to herself in order to forget him, and lies were what she told other people so they would not know she was the nasty, guilty, dirty child, always eight inside. Except when Margaret loved her. Except now that Tony loved her.

“Tell me?”

“Tell you what? What is there? We talked—about art and poetry and we made jokes, and laughed.”

“But what did you laugh about? Why won’t you tell me?”

“Of course I’ll tell you. It’s just hard … I really loved her. I mean, as a friend. And …”

“You loved her? I wish I had known her. I wish I had had the opportunity to love her properly …”

His eyes filled with tears; hers remained dry. “My father,” she said, changing the subject quickly, “he left my mother when I was six or seven. I remember him really well. He just went back to Sri Lanka and never came back. And my mother was so angry with him that she stopped all contact. I would have loved to have known him.”

“Did he …?”

“Die, you mean? You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I don’t know.”

He pulled a face like his mother’s, a grimace of impatient intelligence. “Did you never want to know?”

“Well, he left. He left and he didn’t come back or try to contact us, so …”

“But maybe he did. Maybe he did but your mother didn’t want you to know.”

She had never thought that her mother could deceive her in that way. She did not know her mother, really. Shamini had stopped understanding Louisa when she was eight, and Louisa empathised with her mother. A remarkably intuitive child, she had been able to look at herself and see what her mother saw: a solemn sadness, an unwillingness to speak or to laugh, to hug or to kiss. She had been a burden to her mother and her sister, Deirdre, and when she left home, she knew they had both been relieved. It was useless to think of her mother deceiving her about her father, because it was not the point. What she owed her mother was her childhood; what her mother owed her, she did not know, nor cared to know.

“It’s not important. He left. I never questioned it.”

“But don’t you question it now? I mean, now we’re talking about having children, and marriage and everything. I question my mother’s motivation all the time. I wonder why she didn’t want me.” He looked out over rooftops at the setting summer sun reflected over the calm ocean. Louisa could not comfort him, could not say—perhaps she
did
want you—the way normal people would. Margaret had emphatically told her that she had no children, nor had she ever wanted children.

“Now that her papers are part of the university,” he said, as if it were an idea that had only just occurred, “I could read her diaries.”

“No,” Louisa said. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” They looked at each other, and she knew that he would do it, and he had every right to do it. She recognised that the whole conversation had been leading up to this; he had been looking for a way to ask. Perhaps signing up
for the MA, perhaps even his relationship with
her
, was simply for this. She had not read the diaries—never wanted to know Margaret’s feelings about her. But now she cared.

•

“Mum?” she said.

“Lolly! Has something happened? Why are you calling? You are lucky—I
just
returned from the supermarket, and then Deirdre is expecting me to go and look after the little man,
my
he is
so sweet
. Such an
angel
!
Why
can’t you and that boy get married? And have children, for goodness sake, child, you’re in your thirties already!”

“Mum, look, I’m on lunch and …”

“Oh, that job is so
dull
. Hiding away in a crypt full of
dead
people when you could be
anything
! How many girls become librarians when they have a master’s in history?”