Gravel Heart(43)

‘Lucy and Morgan … a boat on the Thames,’ she said over her shoulder as we moved slowly out of the auditorium.

Then I remembered a wedding party I had gone to with Theresa, although I knew neither the bride nor the groom and was not invited on my own account. Theresa said they would not mind in the least, and I heard in her voice the expectation of the hospitality that people of her class anticipated and extended to each other. I had met Theresa at a jazz club in Kilburn where I had gone with friends because someone had mentioned it or it was in a listing. We joined tables with another group and I found myself sitting next to her. She had soft dark eyes and a slow smile, but she turned out to be a fast-talking woman with a sarcastic wit and a loud laugh. She worked for a public relations firm and told me that her agency had a big account with a mining company that had African operations. She mentioned the name as if her association with it gave us something in common. At some point in the evening, an African woman who was dressed in a full-length spangly dress and a multi-coloured turban with an ostrich feather stuck in it came out to sing in a language none of us understood. She was the one we had come to see. After that evening I went out with Theresa three times and she told me entertaining stories, that I guessed were well salted, about disreputable goings on in the world of PR. She had no sexual interest in me and I had no other interest in her. The party on the Thames to celebrate the wedding of Lucy and Morgan was the last time we went out together.

In the foyer I had a good look at the woman I had been sitting next to during the play but did not recognise her from the party. I had known no one there, so maybe it was too much to take in after a few drinks. Did she know many people there? She said Lucy and she had been at university together and they kept in touch afterwards.

‘We’re still in touch,’ she said, laughing.

‘That’s wonderful,’ I said, ‘because it’s so easy to lose contact. Would you like to have a drink?’

The theatre bar was too crowded so we walked out to the promenade and found a wine bar there. That was how I met Billie, or rather, how I met her again. I rang her a few days later and we met for a movie and a meal on Friday night. I suggested a drink afterwards but she said she had to go to work the next morning. She worked for a bank in Liverpool Street, and it was a long way to Acton and then back to the City the following morning. She was planning to move soon but for the moment she still had to trek back and forth. Well, so did everybody else, she said, but it was still tiring. And anyway, she lived with her mother, who worried if she was late. Her elder brother also lived at home, but he could stay out as long as he liked, of course, being a man. Their father was dead, he had died when she was five.

I asked if she would like to meet again, and she said she was not sure, maybe I could call her. I called her later in the week and we met for a drink after work. So things moved slowly for us in this way, a drink after work, sometimes a film or a meal, and several weeks passed, perhaps six or seven. I was not sure if I should press harder or retreat, and whether she was taking her time or was actually reluctant, whether I was bothering her. I could imagine many reasons why she might be reluctant – a half-Indian girl with a mother at home, getting mixed up with a Salim from Zanzibar, just think about it. I would have given up long before this and gone after a more willing partner, but I had fallen out of that routine and now felt a distaste for its predatory relentlessness, and I could not quite give her up.

One evening some two months after I met her in the National, as we sat in a quiet restaurant off Holborn and she was talking about something to which I was evidently not paying full attention, I felt a tenderness for her that I had never felt for any other woman before. I would have to let her know that and make sure she did not choose to walk away from me. We went to Kew on a sunny Saturday in April and when I took her in my arms, she held on to me for a while. I knew this moment, making love to a woman for the first time, the eagerness of it. After walking the gardens we spent the afternoon lying on the grass, our coats spread out beneath us, kissing and fondling and talking, abandoned to the relief of this new knowledge of each other.

‘How did your parents meet?’ she asked me.

‘In a school debate at the Youth League headquarters,’ I said.

‘Hey, that sounds cool, tell me about it,’ she said.

‘I don’t really know any more. Tell me about yours.’

‘They met in Delhi, when he was working there for Canon photocopiers as a sales director,’ she said. ‘No, he was not a salesman, he was a sales director. An Englishman in India cannot be a salesman. All of us were born in Delhi. Suresh also known as Sol and Anand also known as Andy were both ahead of me. By the time I arrived, my eldest brother was eleven, and my father wanted him to go to secondary school in England. Perhaps it was an ancestral longing but what he said was it would make it easier for Sol, and later for the rest of us, to go to university.

‘Our father had not been to university. He had found work more or less immediately after boarding school, through a relative who had Indian connections, and ended up in Delhi working for Canon photocopiers. But it was a different world now and there was not much you could do without a university degree. So we came to London,’ Billie said, ‘which was something Daddy’s company could arrange without any problem. For him it was coming back for good, but for me and my middle brother it was the first time, although I was only a baby and couldn’t have cared less. Suresh and my mother had been back with him before, when he took them round like tourists to Bath and Margate and Cambridge and the Norfolk Broads and places like that, staying in B&Bs or with his sister in Wanstead when they were in London. That’s our Aunt Holly, still here today aged seventy-one.