Gravel Heart(45)
Billie was now the centre of my days. Sometimes we met after work mid-week, but mostly we waited for the weekend. Saturday morning came to have such a magical excitement that I could not contain my happiness as I made ready to meet her. This sense of joy rested on something fragile and insecure. If she was late, my thoughts became cloudy with worry that she was never coming to see me again, or that she was putting off coming as long as possible because she was bored by the predictability of how we spent our time together. She was ashamed of me, of the work I did, of my lack of ambition, of my strangeness, my ordinariness, my blackness, my poverty. Then when she came, and smiled to see me, and held me so tightly and so long that I could not mistake the intensity of her pleasure in me, when she came and held me like that, the darkness evaporated and I cried with happiness. She knew this about me, how tensely and expectantly I waited for her, but she did not know the vulnerability that lay just below it. She took it for the eagerness of my desire and it made her smile to think how avid I was for her.
Towards the end of autumn of that year, when the pavements were covered with wet leaves and the parks were bedraggled and windblown, and we had been together for seven months, Billie stayed with me for the weekend for the first time. She had told her mother that she was going away to stay with a university friend. She also told her mother that she was thinking of leaving home to live in a place of her own, sharing with another woman from work.
‘My mother cannot understand this wish, and when I told her she looked bewildered at first then she looked pained as if I had said something … I don’t know … obscenely unloving,’ Billie said. ‘I told her just before I left to come here, and hurried out before she could say much in reply. I thought I’d leave it for her to turn over in her mind but I’ll have to do a lot more talking when I return.’
In the following months, Billie reported daily heated arguments and pained silences and endless promises she made to her mother. Her brother Anand who was living at home intervened on her side. ‘I try to explain to her that’s how it is here. Everyone leaves home and sets up on their own. Everybody wants to have their own life and to have control of it. She understands that, of course, but she pretends to find it strange because she cannot bear to be on her own. She would have us all at home if she could. It was the same when my brother Suresh wanted to move to Madrid.’
It did not shock me that her mother was so reluctant to let Billie leave home. I could imagine my mother being just as puzzled by the desire to leave for what to her would seem like no reason at all. Even though we had been seeing each other for several months – I love these sweet English euphemisms, seeing each other – I had still not met any members of her family. This was not a concern to me at first. I had not met any family members of any of the women I had known before. If one asked me to join her for a family occasion I said politely that I would rather not. I did not desire that kind of intimacy. With Billie it was different. She was planning to move in and her mother and her brother would be reassured to know something of who she was moving in with. She made light of the matter whenever I mentioned it. ‘We are a long way from any moving yet,’ she said. ‘But you will, you’ll meet them.’
The story she was telling her family was that she was looking to move in with a woman friend from work, and my appearance in their midst would throw some doubt on that. I could not help thinking that the reason she was not allowing the meeting was because she knew they would disapprove of me. I could think of several reasons why they might do so but if Billie was seriously planning to move in, it seemed best to me to come clean and talk them round because she could not hide me forever. She shook her head when I said this and I knew there was trouble ahead.
Despite my apprehension Billie did make the move. One weekend she came with a suitcase as if she was going away for a few days and stayed for the whole week. She went home for the weekend with her empty suitcase and returned on Sunday with some more of her things. In this way she moved herself in slowly without quite moving out of her home. I loved the intimacies of living with her: cutting an extra set of keys, adjusting the central heating times to suit her, hanging her underwear on the drier, shopping together, going to bed with her every night and waking up beside her, making love, sometimes first thing and last thing every day. She browsed my bookshelves but rarely took down a book. I was methodically going through Chekhov at the time and tried to interest her too.
‘After all, we met through Chekhov,’ I reminded her.
‘No, I don’t really enjoy reading,’ she said. ‘I went to see the play because I studied it at school and someone at the bank was raving about the brilliance of the production, and Anand was around one evening when I was talking about it to my mother and he got me a ticket. He likes to do these generous surprises. So I thought I might as well go and see it, and when I did, there he was, my lover, waiting beside me.’
Her mother never asked to visit the flat or meet her flat-mate from the bank, although she apparently issued a vague invitation should Billie wish to invite her. Nevertheless, Billie worked on an emergency procedure that would enable us hurriedly to remove all evidence of my presence in the flat, and somehow or other hide me as well. It made me laugh to see her practising because I always found some giveaway that she missed. ‘What’s this?’ I would ask, holding up the criminal evidence: a size 10 shoe, a belt, underpants and socks in the dirty laundry basket.