Gravel Heart(46)

‘That’s cheating,’ she said about the laundry basket.

‘Why’s that? You don’t think your mother would check your laundry basket? It’s the first place I would go to if I wanted to find out who you were sharing with,’ I said.

After several months of subterfuge, I finally met Anand when he dropped Billie off after a visit home. He showed no surprise when we met and must have known all the important facts beforehand. Billie had taken him into her confidence but had still not said anything to her mother. Anand shook hands and smiled non-committally, a soft-spoken, well-built man with a mass of curly auburn hair. I imagined people looked twice when he introduced himself as Anand because he looked so unlike one. His eyes, which were grey, moved quickly round the room when he came into the flat, adding up and calculating like a surveyor and a brother, I supposed. He refused to stop but he gave us a friendly wave as he drove off in his Mercedes.

So I became a secret she shared with her brother, who found the deception difficult, so Billie said. He rarely visited us and arranged to meet Billie in town for lunch when he wanted to see her. Apart from this half-secret matter of where she lived and with whom, everything worked well for us. I loved touching her and I knew that I would never forget the feel of her unblemished skin. Is that how a lover’s skin always feels? One night I started to tell her about my mother whom I had neglected in my absorption with Billie, but she fell asleep before I had got past the way she used to talk over glossy American dramas as we watched TV. We had been on a long day out on the coast, and we had wine with our meal, which Billie could not take much of. She remembered the next day: ‘You were saying something about your parents and I fell asleep.’

‘I was only talking about my mother, how she used to have this annoying habit of talking over what was going on on the TV, kind of rewriting the script,’ I said, and tried to leave it at that.

‘No,’ said Billie. ‘Tell me more.’

‘When I was seven my Baba left us,’ I said, and realised I had never said that to anyone. ‘That’s all. I don’t know why he left.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, holding me as I made to turn away from her. So I told her, but still not fully, and she tugged and pulled until I told her more and more. I told her all I could, which was still not everything: about my father’s silence, about the lunch basket, about my mother’s secret visits with her lover, about Uncle Amir, about Munira, about my mother’s sadness. ‘Her eyes sometimes had a blankness as if they were turned inside out and were gazing inwards, and sometimes suddenly she sucked in her lips as if she had taken a blow to her body. I don’t know what memories did this to her and why afterwards she sat in silent despair. But the moment always passed and after it eased away her eyes would quicken again with truculence and anxiety and amusement. When I asked her what it was all about she said things sometimes came back to her.’

‘What things came back to her?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She did not like to talk like that about herself. Something broke in my father after he left us. He did not say much after that, or do much. He lived like a hermit in a room behind a shop. Neither of them wanted to talk much.’

‘So that is the darkness in you,’ said Billie after I was silent for a while. ‘I knew there was something you were keeping out of reach.’

I felt humbled in my need, a betrayer, hawking my agony for her sympathy, but she said no, it was a line we had to cross. You have to talk about the things that cause you pain.

At some point in the summer another line came up. Billie’s mother decided that she wanted to visit the flat, to see where her daughter lived. Billie went into emergency procedure mode and the following day, which was the one appointed for the visit, I was sent off for a long walk. It was pointless because I did not see how anyone, let alone a mother, could walk into our flat and think that two women lived there. The second bedroom had boxes and books and a desk and a single bed we had cleverly put in there to fool Billie’s mother that a co-tenant lived in it, but it was unmistakably not the bedroom of a woman friend who also worked in the bank. When I returned from my marathon walk I found Billie sitting in front of the TV with the set switched off.

‘She wants to meet you,’ she said when I asked her how it had gone. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘It sounds like an order,’ I said. She looked at me angrily but did not say a word. ‘Was it horrible?’ I asked, trying to make amends.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

Her mother had come with Anand and after a brief tour of the flat had said, He reads a lot of books. In the interrogation that followed Billie was forced into a full confession. It was bound to happen sooner or later, I said. We’ll go and see her tomorrow and then work out how we go on from there. I tried to get Billie to tell me what made her so pessimistic but she would not. Don’t worry, I said, I’ll charm the old biddy, but she snorted and told me I did not understand anything about families. On the way to Acton the next day Billie still looked doubtful and I arrived at their house full of dread. Anand let us in, with a nonchalant smile and a handshake for me and a kiss for his sister, and led us into the living room. Billie’s mother was sitting on the sofa, a small smile of welcome on her face, just as one might expect.

‘Salim,’ Billie said, introducing me, and it sounded as if someone had shouted an obscenity in a sacred place. I stepped forward to shake hands. Billie’s mother was around sixty, I guessed, her face a little fleshier than Billie’s but the features similar. She was dressed in a sari with lines of brown, saffron and cream and wore large tinted glasses, a friendly elegant woman who showed no sign of turning shrill. She patted the sofa beside her and said Billie’s name. In the meantime Anand ushered me to a chair by the window and retreated to another one on the other side of the sofa, deeper into the room. No doubt the plan was to keep me in full view. Billie and Anand did most of the talking, telling work stories and chatting about this and that. Sometimes I was drawn in with a question but nothing challenging, an invitation to offer an opinion or to provide some inconsequential information. Billie’s mother said almost nothing but followed everything with a smile and a benign expression in her eyes, even when they fell on me. It was looking good, I thought, and tried to make eye contact with Billie but she only briefly acknowledged me.