Hot Water Man (24 page)

The shutter clicked. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him approaching. With light fingers he turned her face the other way. Her legs slid round, to slant demurely to the right.

‘A profile now, if you please.'

On this wall hung a certificate, perhaps from his unlikely Madison Avenue days, and the photo of a baby advertising powdered milk. It was a Pakistani baby, rather fetching, dark-eyed and fat. Probably they liked them fat. She did not move her mouth until the shutter clicked twice. Then she asked: ‘Have you, by any chance, heard of some saint or other – a hot water man?'

‘Please to wait a moment. Do not move your head.'

She stayed rigid, eyes locked with the baby's. He gazed back at her. His glossy limbs were creased and bendy. Three clicks.

‘Sorry,' she said.

‘Now, please to turn the head this side and look into the camera. A smile please.'

‘That's difficult. Can you say something funny?'

‘My only joking it is in the Urdu. My English it is solely for the courtesies and the business.'

She kept her gaze steadied into the camera. She stretched her skin into some sort of grimace, perhaps a smile. He clicked several times and lifted his head.

‘I am sorry. You were speaking?'

‘I said, is there a shrine somewhere near Karachi where women go to offer prayers? Something to do with warm water.' She remembered the word. ‘A
pir
used to live there. A sacred place, apparently, for . . .' she cleared her throat, ‘your people.'

He gazed over the glass eye of his camera. ‘I am a Christian. I am in the dark, concerning this, the same as yourself.'

She clapped a hand to her mouth, blushing. ‘How stupid of me.' She tried to laugh. Of course, with a name like Pereira he must be Goan. She kept on thinking of them as all the same.

‘Ah, do not move please.' He started clicking fast. ‘Excuse me, but for the first time you are looking natural.'

It had always
taken Donald some time to work things out; he was made this way. During the days since the news about his grandfather he had been trying to organize his feelings. He was still confused; in a way he wanted to be. It was like the aftermath of an explosion when the haze and dust has yet to settle. When they did the damage would be revealed. He preferred to postpone this.

In the daytime it was hard to concentrate anyway. There was business to attend to, faces waiting for an answer and traffic to be negotiated in his sweltering car. The days felt different now, since Before. They had lost their transparency. But he could ignore this, as one ignores an ache by being constantly on the move. And in the evenings there was Christine, whom he had not yet told. Once he told her, in words, it would be confirmed. He would no longer be able to talk about other things and ignore the misery.

Yesterday Iona Gracie had phoned. The call had been about the Ginntho development but at the end he had asked if she knew more about this Marnley chap. The Indian woman had died, said Mrs Gracie, some years later. She had been thinking about it since Ronald's visit – after all, she had little enough to think about except this blessed hotel, and her memories. As it happened, someone's bearer was this woman's cousin and she, Iona, had heard a few more facts some years later. The woman was a local girl, a Sindhi, and had returned to her village with the baby boy. Soon afterwards she had died. For the life of her she could not remember the name of the woman or the baby, even if she had known at the time.

‘Whose bearer was that?' asked Donald, trying to sound conversational.

She could not remember, it must have been – oh, fifty years ago. Some bungalow in Clifton – yes, it was painted pink now. Opposite the Dutch Consulate. A British family lived in it then. She had often played tennis there before she was married. Now it was all changed, of course, but the buildings remained.

Donald told himself: it was a long time ago; half a century. Attitudes were different then, there was a different code of behaviour according to your class and your race. He remembered from school – he had always remembered that line from some play:
But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

But he could not settle his grandfather comfortably and forgettably into history. Even there he did not sit easy. He had not just gone along with the rules; he had exploited them. Mrs Gracie had admitted as much. It was one thing to take a native mistress and have her bear his child; it was another to treat her in a way which, even by the standards of the time must be considered cruel, cold and mean. Bad enough, in fact, for his grandfather to be transferred, no doubt for everybody's sake.

Looking back now and trying to remember Grandad, his memories were smudged. He did, in fact, remember him as tight-fisted. But that had seemed like Grandad's personal resistance to a shoddier modern world; part of his noble obliviousness. What other traits had he himself seen as more heroic than they were? Must he go back, painfully pick them up, and turn them over? Feel them disintegrate?

He would only picture Grandad during those last few years of his life. He would not creep right back into the past and ruin it, rendering valueless everything Grandad had shared with him, and everything Grandad had stood for. But the very word ‘Grandad' now sounded inappropriate. Too false, too cosy. What words to replace it? An old man? A cruel old man?

As an old man what had he been like? Someone more tender with plants than with people. Towards the end of his life he had treated his wife, by now frail and querulous, with a belligerent gallantry. Constricted by the narrow doorways, he shooed away others to let her through. He would snap at her but not allow anyone else to do so. He guarded her with fierce exasperation. Donald had presumed that their marriage had been quite happy. They had rubbed along; in those days one did not inspect the bond with the intricate vocabulary one did now. It was to Donald that he told all his jokes.

Had Granny known? Surely not. The woman could have lived in the house and Granny would not have noticed. She seemed too absorbed in herself and her husband's comforts, too preoccupied with the small moments of day-to-day life. (Had the native woman offered him something better than this?) Besides they had moved away from Karachi the moment they married, or soon after.

What did it matter, something that this old man had once done, long ago? It did matter, of course, most dreadfully. It mattered that his grandfather had told nobody. Whether the reason was that he was too ashamed, or too uncaring, thinking it of no account – both mattered in their different ways and now Donald would never know which it was. Back in Brinton his grandmother, aged eighty-eight and bedridden, obviously had no knowledge of it; even if he wished he could find out nothing from her. Part of the horror of it was that his grandfather probably had had no moment, during all that time in India, that he would have needed to lie about any of this; not really. After all, a native woman was not the same as an English one; she was not part of one's life in the same way. Perhaps she had meant more to him than that; but perhaps one did not recognize, even to oneself, that such a woman could.

It was partly for this reason that he had not yet told Christine. She would wade in with all the arguments about injustice, racism, women's roles, imperialism, all that. Which indeed was a point, but not
the
point. Besides, she had always accused him of hero-worshipping his grandfather. Through her indignation (aimed at Grandad) and genuine sympathy (aimed at himself, Donald) there might just be a faint taste of justified comeuppance. And he did not care to discover this.

That afternoon he had to drive out some twenty miles to visit a Government of Sind Fertility Station. This was a new project with experimental strip-testing of various compounds, a drainage scheme and a new legume crop being planted. The road led out past Ginntho Pir into the desert beyond. A few villages were visible from the road. They all looked the same: obscure, mud-walled huts hemmed in by piled-up scrub. From the distance they scarcely showed – mere dun irregularities, blocks and tangles natural as rocks in the landscape. In the nearer ones you could see, through the thorn scrub, penned goats and the women who rose from their haunches with earthenware pots on their shoulders. Cattle dung had been slapped on the walls of the huts, to dry in the sun and burn for fuel. Behind the walls, what went on was as closed and incomprehensible as in another century.
And besides, the wench is dead.

Here he sat behind the khaki shoulders of his driver. In a village like that a boy had crouched in the dust, years ago, as those children were squatting now. His surname should have been Manley. Donald would never know who he was. Perhaps the man still lived in a village like that; he must be over fifty-five years old now, a little older than Donald's own father would have been, had he lived. Perhaps the man had died or gone away. Perhaps he had moved to Karachi. One of those men past whom Donald had pushed in the crowded streets – one of them could have been his own half-uncle.

‘Sahib is all right?'

Donald managed to open his eyes, and sat up straight. Jalal the driver was looking at him in the mirror.

‘Fine. It's just a little hot.'

At the Fertility Station Donald stood in the concrete porch, asking the director the correct questions about chemical mix and crop results. In front stretched the fields edged with raised mud walls, like the plasticine models he had made as a child. Water had been pumped along the ditches; the earth was damp as putty. Green shoots grew in the various strips, some sparse, some thicker.

‘Soon I hope we are having some rain,' said the director. ‘Generally in August there is a little rainfall. You are feeling the heat, Mr Manley?'

Donald nodded. ‘Just a little.'

‘And you have a family out here?'

‘A wife, yes. No children.'

He could have added: but my grandfather had a child here. Somewhere he sowed a seed. One child grew, perhaps paler than the others. Lost now.

On the return journey the car approached Ginntho Pir. From this side the mound rose above the small collection of huts. As yet Donald had not visited the place; he was waiting to do so with Christine. On top of the hill, shaded by trees, the shrine stood behind the large old mausoleum. As the car passed, it slid slowly behind the larger building, its white walls disappearing from sight. These people went there to pray. For what? For a child to be born, for a child not to die, for some impossibility to happen. Perhaps the woman had knelt in there, once. He himself would feel like an intruder. The humbler the place, the more private it seemed. He turned to look out of the back window; as the car drove down the road, past the bushes and the bazaar, the little shrine again slid into view, smaller in the distance. He felt oddly moved by its absurd plaster turrets. Somebody had tied flags around them – flags showing loyalty to no country, only to faith. Why? He knew nothing; he must try to understand.

Back at the office there were some telephone messages on his desk, left by Mary. One said ‘Please ring Mrs Gracie.'

He sat down. It was six o'clock; he could quite reasonably put it off until tomorrow. He knew what she would say – that she had thought out a tactical plan of attack and that she was relying on him to do a, b or c. She still had no idea who he was, or his connection with the proposed development. If it came to a confrontation the whole thing could be extremely awkward. His loyalties should lie with Cameron's, of course, but he would prefer this not to be tested.

She answered. ‘Ah Ronald dear. I just had to tell you, I've been rummaging through my desk trying to find the lease as I promised and you wouldn't guess what I found instead.'

A pause for effect. He could picture her breathless in that sombre hall, her hairband askew. ‘What?' he asked.

‘A bundle of my mother's letters. They were written to her friend Annie Kershaw in Surrey. Annie must have returned them to us after Mama's death, they're absolutely riveting. I want to read you something. Ready?'

He grunted, nodding, and pushed his swivel chair round. The Tibet lady faced him, holding the soap. She looked dumb, suppliant and beautiful. Perhaps his grandfather's woman had looked at him like that.

‘It's about your grandfather's friend, that Marnley. You said you wanted every scrap I could find for the book.'

He sat up, alert. ‘That's right.' He had forgotten that he had told her his grandmother was writing her memoirs, hence the need for information. He loathed lying; he had managed to forget this one already.

‘Here it is. There's a bit about some regimental parade, who fainted and so on, then this: “The usual rash of confinements this winter, Winnie Atwood had a girl, Mrs Herrick a big bouncing boy, eight pounds, and scandal scandal, I know you like all the tit-bits Annie dear, on the servants' grapevine this morning I heard that the native so-called sweeper of a Major in the Kentish Fusiliers, a woman called Moni, had a boy born last week. Ayah's aunt was the midwife. Ho hum, nothing unusual here, men will be men, my dear.” Then she goes on about a garden party. The dates fitted, Ronald. I just thought you'd like to know, so you can fit in the woman's name. If indeed one wants to include such things.'

‘Thank you so much,' he said. ‘Most useful. Moni.' He put down the receiver.

Moni. He gazed at the hoarding. He sat still for some minutes, rubbing his forefinger from side to side, across the surprisingly dense hairs of his new moustache.

He did not drive straight home. At the Sind Club junction, the boy who usually sold him
Newsweek
waved a copy, grinning, as Donald turned the car left, towards Clifton. It was the only clue he had and he was unlikely to get any more. It was a miracle he knew this much after all these years, when so many things had been changed out of recognition.