The Italian Teacher(50)

“Write?”

“In your hand.”

She opens her palm for him to see. He approaches, squints at the smudged ink, which reads “gochut.”

“What language is that?”

“It’s . . .” She looks for the manager—not around—so digs into Pinch’s shopping bag, taking out a jar. “That.” Again, she displays her palm, and he makes out two faded words: “mango chutney.” Julie, a recent arrival to the capital from the north of England, hasn’t tried this product or many others in the shop.

“Would you like to?” He twists the lid but grunts, reddening, unable to take it off.

Smiling sweetly, she insists he not bother. The expression transforms her. In repose, she was tired and middle-aged, but becomes a little girl when smiling. She must be around his age, perhaps a tad older, with caramel-brown curls framing confectionary eyes, a wide strong frame, soft without being curvaceous. Julie M is not beautiful. He experiences a rush of need for her.

Julie explains that she wants to be more adventurous, especially now that she works at Mr. Khan’s shop. So that evening, he collects her outside Imperial Foods and leads her to a reserved table at the Taj Mahal, where Pinch explains the menu at length, only then daring to ask about her.

Hailing from a town near Newcastle, she moved south only recently, after her marriage ended and she couldn’t find work there. Pinch mentions having read newspaper articles about the dire situation in the north—that it’s so bad mothers and wives are taking the train to King’s Cross and turning tricks behind the station.

“We’re not all on the game, you know,” she says.

“No, God, no!” Pinch responds, mortified, neck blotching. “I didn’t mean to suggest that. Sorry. Just meant how bad it is.”

“I’d call myself lucky to have this job at Imperial. It’s a foothold.”

“A foothold for something else?”

“I hope so. Don’t know what yet.”

“What would you do,” he asks, leaning forward, “if you could do anything?”

“Me? I’d probably read all day.” If it has words, Julie tells him, she’ll be at it, from a cereal box to a Dickens. She asks about his line of work, evidently impressed to meet a translator, which emboldens Pinch. She laments knowing only English and asks how many languages he speaks. “Could you say a bit for me?”

“In which one?”

“All of them.”

He offers a few remarks in Italian, speaking with formality, saying it’s a very pleasant evening, that he hopes she enjoys it.

“How do you go to sounding foreign like that?” she says admiringly. “Give us some more then.”

He speaks a few lines in French, then Spanish, then German, braver as he goes, daring to say how much he likes her.

“What’s all that mean?”

“It’s just things from work.”

“And you like your work then, the translating?”

“Depends. Can be a slog. But sometimes, yes. I like coming across words I never knew existed. That’s the best part. There are tons even in English that I didn’t know.”

“Such as?”

“Absterge.”

“That’s not English.”

“It means ‘to wipe clean,’ like you’d do with a wound before surgery.”

“I would not!”

He laughs. “It’s from Middle French, by way of Latin. Sorry, I’m getting boring. Throw a samosa at me when I do that.”

“I should do, if you hadn’t eaten them all, greedy bugger.”

He suppresses the electric thrill of this—that he’s dining with a woman, that he just asked her out, that she works at the best shop in London. This had better go well or where do I buy milk?

“But I’m mad,” he adds. “Because it’s not like I can ever use these words when nobody understands them.”

She rises to find the toilet, her grin baring a gap between her front teeth. “Pardon me,” she tells him. “I always absterge my hands before pudding.”

Alone at the table, he continues to view her seat. This is what I want to dedicate myself to. This. After a mere hour in her company, he has lost any understanding of his years obsessing about art, posterity, failure. She seems truly intrigued by him. There’s nothing cynical about Julie; perhaps that’s it. He recalls a remark she made: “You survive off your wits.” That recast in an instant how he perceived his entire life to date. Before, he had planned to badger more universities with applications. Seated here, he throws off that future. He’ll take this future, even if he doesn’t know what it means. Me, alone in the world, braving it! (Though he’s emboldened to go it alone only by dint of not being alone tonight.) In a passing glimmer, he imagines sex with Julie: his hands on her hips, her breasts under the bra, his thighs against hers. Stop that—too far ahead of yourself. And here she is.

Over dessert, Julie speaks of her family, noting that she comes “from working people.”

“Everyone is so preoccupied with the class system here,” he says.

“You do realize that we’ve got a queen?”

“Yes, I often run into her waiting for the Tube.”

Smiling, she nudges his spoon out of the way to reach their mango kulfi. “In this country, a person speaks two words and you know where they come from, what their schooling was. You’re lucky, you are. You don’t have that, with your nice American accent.”