Hot Water Man (3 page)

And Grandad had time. His Indian service had left him with a long retirement in the bungalow with the front porch, which he called the veranda, and its view over the sea. It faced the east. His life had dwindled to a lounge and those memories to which nobody else, Donald realized as he grew older, cared to listen. His brass objects were taken down, polished and put back again; they trapped the dust. Granny said. She hardly spoke of India. It was not her life as it was his, she had only lived there for thirty years before returning thankfully to dear old Britain. In fact there was not a lot you could say to Granny; she just existed from moment to moment, making things comfy.

Yet there he sat, this noble man, enduring the inexplicable 1960s in which he seemed to be spending the last years of his life. He became more infirm. He just made it down to the esplanade. Teenagers giggled when he lifted his stick at the sea, mouthing words.

Donald felt he was protecting a worn god from the faithless. Here was a man who had done more than their narrow spirits could imagine. A man who had led three hundred men through Burma; who had marched through the Delhi streets during Independence. One of those personally asked by Mountbatten to postpone his return for three more years so that he could help train up the native officers. Grandad had been given a signed photograph of Jinnah. Though intensely proud of it, Donald had not brought it to school. Jinnah who? they would say.

He knew Christine long before he met her. He had seen her on the tennis courts. She was a summer visitor and wire mesh separated their games. She wore a white Aertex shirt and a pleated skirt; her honey-blonde hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She leapt for the ball. She was not that different from the others but he noticed her. She played high, soft, girl's strokes and pressed a hand to her mouth, grimacing. Afterwards she was more at ease, spreading out her legs at the café table, tipping back her chair and sucking Pepsi through a straw. That first summer she was sometimes with girls and sometimes with youths, their hair damp from their exertions. It was only later that she told him she did not know them well; her parents, groan groan, had forced them on her.

She told him this next summer when he talked to her for the first time. He had forgotten her during the winter. She was sitting on a wooden breakwater wearing what was to become the familiar blue-ribbed bathing suit. She swung her legs; she was alone; she was ready for anything. She was fifteen. Close up her face was less perfect, with its chapped lips. She walked along the beach with him, stepping over the sunbathing adults who lay torpid as logs.

He splashed into the sea, showing off. She followed him with prancing, coltish steps, squealing. She floundered around; he impressed her with his manly crawl. Stepping out on to the beach she was bowed and shivering, her white legs goosepimpled. She looked thinner and smaller but he did not dare rub her dry. He longed to. Instead he whooped and they ran along the sand, jumping legs.

She was there with her parents and her sister Joyce. Each year they rented a bungalow. He hung around, gawkily seventeen. They walked along the cliff path; he grasped her hand over the tricky bits but relinquished it when they were safe. They swung on the children's swings; he was dizzy for her but he dared do nothing. To touch her would change her into his girlfriend; then at some point it must end. Presuming, indeed, that she would let him touch her in the first place.

They were too casual to write. The London Christine, wrapped in unknown woollies, was as arousing a thought to him as the swimsuited Christine must be to those urban rivals who had only seen her clothed. During the winter months he sat on the window seat at Durradee, his ‘A' level economics book on his knee and the rain sliding down the glass. The next summer he saw her entering the sea-front newsagent's; she emerged with a cigarette between her lips.

That year he kissed her in the Aquarium. It was stuffy down there; half the tanks were empty. Wedged against the railing, he had kissed her dry lips, while behind them the eels coiled. After that they often embraced, but only in places like the cinema. They were sweethearts in the dark, but ordinary outside. He did not want to go further. Perhaps he was under-sexed. It was just that he did not want to spoil it.

The next year he went up to London to work, a Cameron's trainee. He met other girls but Christine was separate. That summer she returned but she seemed more inward, kicking stones along the beach and moaning about her parents. He was part of her family by now; he felt included in this general complaint. She was going to university in the autumn. Their kisses were still fervent but chaste. He felt diffident and dull. Sometimes she snapped at him, and he was helpless. He wanted to grab her and take her by force but then he wanted to protect her, too, from people like himself. She had a secret life, kept from him as well as her parents. Sometimes he saw her on the back of motorbikes.

She did write; short scrawled notes full of
goshes.
Her writing stayed young and enthusiastic while she herself was changing. He wrote longer letters and more of them, ending them
lots of love
, carefully matched to the endings she put on hers. (Sometimes she put
much
love instead of
lots.
) He started seeing her in London; she wore make-up and tights, he took her to the Festival Hall and they made conversation. She went up to a new university, Nissen huts and bulldozed earth and a scattering of students who all knew each other.

One weekend he could no longer bear it; he went up to Warwick and made love to her. In the past he had plotted appropriate spots for this; he had made ardent mental bookings – the sand dunes, the creek where the bracken stood waist-high and you could hear the sea. In reality it happened on the narrow bed of her hall of residence during a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the Top Ten being played through the wall and somebody knocking on the door halfway through. They had clung; the footsteps had retreated.

He was far from being the first. She hinted that she was involved with someone else. But who else had known a Christine before she smoked; who else had seen her through three swimsuits? They did not know her sister Joyce, matronly at fourteen. He possessed years of Christine before she braided her hair into tiny plaits and questioned everything. She wore long Indian skirts and pale stuff over her healthy cheeks. She did not fool him. Her childhood was their secret.

It was four years before they married. She kept going off with other people and then coming back to him. He did not make a habit of this, himself. But then her father died. Soon afterwards they married. They came together like a brother and sister who had been lost in the woods. They understood each other so well. Or so he thought.

They bought the Crouch End flat, second floor, nothing special except that it was theirs. She was training to be a teacher but she did not take it up.

When had things started changing? When she cut off her lovely, heavy blonde hair and frizzed it up; when she preferred to be known as Chris, and discovered it was oppressive to be supported by her husband? In certain moods he felt he was losing her to the seventies. She considered him the conventional one but it was she who followed so obediently the prevailing winds. But he could not blame it all on the decade, however much he would have liked to. He still could not put it into words. Here in Pakistan, perhaps, he could recapture the old Christine, and that time years ago when everything seemed possible.

And then there was that other difficulty. They did not talk about it much; though so outspoken about her woman's predicament in general, Christine was thankfully shy about mentioning this. To transfer oneself from one continent to another could hardly solve it; logically they were the same two people as before. But he no longer felt logical about this.

The party was
held in the garden. The sun had sunk; even during twilight, however, the air felt centrally heated. Up above the crows banged about in the trees, disturbed by the social exclamations.

The film had not yet started. A blank screen hung against the wall. Spotlights were wired up amongst the bushes, pools of emerald leaves. People stood about chatting. Donald approved of dressing-up; nobody did it in England any more. Between the guests slid bearers holding trays of lukewarm gin and tonic. The Pakistani ladies drank Bubble-Up.

‘This is the life,' he said to Christine, so they looked as if they were talking. He turned to the bearer. ‘Thank you.'

‘Thank you.' Christine took a glass.
‘Shoukriah.'

‘You're much nicer to servants than you are to me,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Look, there's Shamime. She's the girl I was telling you about – does our public relations.'

Shamime turned. Tall and slim, she was one of those girls about whom you would say: She's not exactly beautiful. And keep wondering about it, unable to move your eyes from her face. Her nose was certainly too big. Her hair was looped in black coils. She wore a loose turquoise trouser suit with strings of gold chains. She looked somewhat like this in the Cameron office.

‘Amazing dress.' She held out a slim brown arm to Christine. ‘Where on earth did you get it?'

‘In England. London,' said Christine. ‘I worked in a dress shop. It sold second-hand clothes.'

‘Trendy second-hand clothes,' added Donald. The dress was a floral thing from the forties, with padded shoulders. He had mixed feelings about this garment.

‘Donald says I look like a charwoman.'

Shamime laughed. ‘Where's the shop?'

‘In a little passage where they sell antiques,' said Christine. ‘At weekends they have stalls. It's rather like your bazaars, actually. You know, lots of people, no cars, covered arcades too, like in Karachi. Rather fun.'

‘Sounds just like Camden Passage.'

Christine paused. ‘So you've been there?'

‘Adore it. I love Islington and Hampstead. I get so self-indulgent in those little shops.'

‘I see. Do you go to London often?'

‘When I run out of marmalade.' She laughed again. ‘No, seriously, there are so many things you can't get here. It's impossible.'

‘Which hotel do you stay at?'

‘My cousin has a little house behind Harrods. But hasn't Harrods changed? Full of Arabs.'

In the pause that followed this remark Donald was aware of a general shifting. Chairs had been arranged; someone was fiddling with the projector. He sat down beside Christine. He leant towards her, then stopped. He would like to gossip with her about Shamime but his wife was turning out to be disappointing in this respect; invariably she was nicer about the Pakistanis than the English. This seemed like racial discrimination to him.

The guests had taken their seats now. The lights were switched off. Donald heard the scrape and whirr of crickets up in the bushes. Or were they tree-frogs? He had yet to learn. Forty years ago these streets were a wilderness of scrub. Karachi was a small sea-port then with a native bazaar and an English cantonment; where two-lane carriageways now lay. Grandad had shot a tiger. Or perhaps that was somewhere else.

With a creak, Duke settled beside him. Donald had liked Duke from the start, when with commendable American frankness Duke had told him his wife was going to have a hysterectomy. Most people, himself included, would have steered murmuringly around the precise nature of her trouble. Christine leant across him.

‘When's the op, Duke? Last time I saw you, you hadn't heard.'

‘Saturday. I have faith in the guy – finest surgeon in Kansas.'

The whirring insects, or frogs, were reinforced by the whirr of the projector. People stopped talking. A pale, fluid shape appeared on the screen, flicking with numbers. It was an old picture, in black and white. Through a hoop the British Lion snarled, shaking its mane and growling. Showing its teeth, it resembled Grandad's, tiger skin, now balding and stored in the attic.

Two people sat down in front. It was Shamime and her brother Aziz; they both turned around to smile. Aziz was as tall and as dazzling as his sister.

The film started. The hero wore R.A.F. uniform.

‘We all have to do our bit, old girl.'

‘Reggie darling. Each time I look up in the sky I'll think it's you.'

‘Don't cry.'

‘I'm crying because I'm so proud.'

The faces were familiar from scores of British films; they were smoother and younger here. Donald was absorbed. Shamime's piled-up hairstyle blocked his view; he tilted to the side. The scene changed to an airfield. Shamime was adjusting a pin in her hair; through the gap in her arm he glimpsed a Hurricane's wing. Reggie was talking to another pilot now. His voice came from her
coiffure.

‘Before you know it we'll be home. First one back at base sets up two pints.'

‘I'm already saying cheers.'

In front, the two heads bent together. A muffled giggle; Shamime whispered something to her brother. Donald stiffened. What were they laughing at?

A roar; the fighters were off the ground. Donald could almost smell the petrol. Through grey 35mm clouds, lit by the sunset, the Hurricanes sped. Voices crackled on the intercom.

‘Can you hear me. Number Two? Over.'

A silence.

‘I said, can you hear me?'

An explosion: streaks, flashes, the screen burst with fireworks.

Silence. Donald sat very still. Up in the black sky, a jet whined over Karachi. Its passengers were safe. On the screen, smoke plumed. A splash. Water settled; smoke drifted. Donald's throat tightened.

Beside him Christine shifted, rummaging in her handbag. But it was not for a handkerchief, it was for a cigarette. She leant towards him in a cloud of smoke.

‘Dash it all, and it was his round.'

‘What?'

‘His turn', she said patiently, ‘to buy the drinks.'