Gravel Heart(44)

‘But the move to London did not really suit him. My mother said it was too late for him, his whole body wanted to be in India, his mind, his limbs and especially his heart. She talks like that a lot. At the slightest opportunity she slips into metaphor, especially if it’s something to do with sentiment. On special occasions she writes poems in Hindi, all about love and duty and motherhood and sacrifice, devotional poems, more like prayers, I suppose. They’re quite good if you like heavy stuff like that.’

‘Heavy stuff like what?’ I asked.

‘Life and joy are born of folly, which opens us to the infinite/I prostrate myself before the wisdom and love of our holy mother. Stuff like that,’ Billie said. ‘Anyway, whether it was true or not that our father did not want to leave India, his health deteriorated quickly in London, and after two or three years he was not working any more. He was older than our mother, but not yet of retirement age when he stopped working. He was fifty-nine, which is no age to die these days. Look at Aunt Holly, and both my mother’s parents are in their eighties.’

‘What was he ill with?’ I asked.

‘His heart. One day, when I was five, he had a stroke while he was working in the garden. I was in the garden too, playing with a toy watering can and plastic cups. I heard him make a noise, and when I looked up he was on his knees. I don’t remember what happened after that, I must have cried out or run in to get my mother. I don’t know. I remember the several terrible weeks in hospital that followed for him.

‘For a long time, that was how I remembered him,’ she continued after a silence during which, I imagined, she relived those memories. ‘I remember those miserable hospital visits, all of us crying while he lay drugged and unaware. Later other memories came back, but even now I sometimes have to work hard to repel that sight of him in a hospital bed. Do you know what I mean? When an image or a moment comes out of nowhere and overpowers you repeatedly? He called me Billie, and even though I preferred Bindiya, I used the name he called me as a way of being loyal to him. I think I was a sentimental child.’

‘Not any more?’ I asked. She was close to tears.

‘Not as much,’ she said. ‘Anyway, everybody called me Billie, and I did not think it would be that easy to get them to change. My eldest brother hated his English name and never uses it now, but he lives in Madrid where he is able to train a whole new set of acquaintances to use the name he prefers. He works as a car designer there, did I tell you that?’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said. ‘What does your other brother do?’

‘He is a surveyor with a property agency, Hope & Borough. They deal with multi-million-pound properties. Have you heard of them?’ Billie asked, looking at me expectantly.

‘No, I haven’t heard of them,’ I said.

‘They’re famous.’

It was late afternoon when we got to my flat. That was how we spent almost every Saturday that summer, we went somewhere for the day, then back to my flat to make love, and then sometimes we went out for the evening or ate at home. She would not stay the night. ‘I love being here with you,’ she said. ‘I love being with you all day, and I would love to be with you all night. But not yet. While I live at home with my mother I have to return every night. You would understand what I mean if you knew her. I couldn’t leave her at home on her own.’

She said: ‘My mother was originally from Bombay, as it used to be called, but her father was moved to Delhi on a civil service posting. That was where she met my father several years later. My mother worked for Canon as well.

‘The move to London soon after I was born was difficult for her. She was brought up with servants and was used to having them to do the chores. She was used to having relatives and friends around as well as their children, who were company for her own. In London she had to do everything for herself and by herself, and she never really overcame that first recoil she felt from the city and the life it forced on her, especially as it quickly took her husband away. She became depressed and shrill after he died. I am using that word deliberately, shrill,’ said Billie, and then paused for me to take this in. ‘When I was a child, it shamed me that my mother was so shrill. I thought her voice penetrated the walls of all the houses in the street and that the neighbours laughed at us for being so ridiculous. I did not know that she was depressed and lonely and in a panic.’

‘Why did she not return to India?’ I asked. Billie looked at me for a long second, and I knew she was thinking: Why didn’t you? Why are you still here then? ‘I meant, did she think of returning to India.’

Billie shrugged. ‘It was complicated,’ she said. ‘The house in Acton now belonged to her, all her children were at school and settled, as she saw it. Their daddy had chosen Acton because it was not yet a ghetto and its schools were still safe. If she returned to India she would be taking the children away from what their father wanted for them. Also, if she returned to India, she would have to move back in with her parents and she did not want to do that. In the end, it was her duty to be loyal to our daddy’s plans for us to go to school here and attend university.

‘She became religious after he died. She talked about him so much when I was a child,’ Billie said. ‘Marathon sessions of daddy-talk which actually did not feel oppressive. It was a way of getting to know him in such detail that he felt real to me, as if he could walk into the room at any minute. It did not feel oppressive until later, when my mother tried to blackmail us at various moments to get us to do what she wanted for us.’