A Touch of Love (16 page)

But it was not only her sympathy for Robin which was making her kind; there was also a more personal hopefulness which he had not expected to see in her again. She was more forthcoming about her work. It transpired that, for the first time in more than a year, she had started writing again. A new idea had begun to take shape, and she believed that she had finally struck upon a line of argument which could not fail to meet with her supervisor’s approval. It seemed possible that she might finish her thesis after all, that all her effort would be rewarded, that she would finally prove herself in the eyes of the academic authorities who had persisted in doubting her. Robin was staggered by the amount of energy she continued to devote to this project. She was invariably working when he visited her, and she rarely stopped, by her own account, until three or four in the morning.

One afternoon she allowed him to read everything that she had written so far; and they talked about it, at first in her flat, and then over dinner at a restaurant near the city centre. It began as a more or less serious discussion, with Robin expressing real enthusiasm, tempered with criticism on some points of detail; but gradually the tone of the argument became more playful. Aparna teased him about his intellectual prejudices and soon got him reminiscing about Cambridge: she always liked to hear stories about some of the absurd people he had known there. By the end of the evening they were both moderately drunk and helpless with inexplicable laughter. Robin ended up sleeping on her sitting-room floor and realized, just before falling asleep, that he had actually managed to spend an evening without once thinking of the impending trial.

So it was hardly surprising that he should be drawn to Aparna again, on the day when he received Emma’s note. It had simply asked him to call in at the office as soon as possible. He had gone at once, and found a different Emma: nervous, brusque, inarticulate. She set out the advantages of a plea of guilty; she explained how serious it would be if he stood trial and the verdict went against him. She said nothing, this time, about her own faith in his case.

‘You don’t have to decide yet,’ she said. ‘Just think about it.’

‘But why?’ said Robin. ‘Why have you changed your mind?’

‘I haven’t,’ she said. ‘At least, that’s not the point…’

She tailed off and he sat in silence for several minutes. Finally she laid a hand on his arm and murmured:

‘Robin, I have to get some things ready now. Why don’t you go home for a while and think it over?’

Back at the flat, he spent half an hour listening to some classical music on the radio; he tidied his room, folding his clothes and putting socks and soiled underwear into a plastic bag; and he cleared out the box at the bottom of his wardrobe, which contained all his manuscripts. He emptied it out by armfuls into the dustbin outside his back door. He cooked himself some beans on toast and used up his last three tea bags. Then he walked to Aparna’s tower block, on the far side of the city.

She opened the door and said, from behind it, without looking to see who the caller was, ‘Hello, Robin.’ By the time he had stepped into the hall her back was already turned and she was heading for the kitchen. ‘I suppose you’ve come round for some tea,’ she said. Robin followed her.

‘Yes, that would be nice. Though it’s not the only thing I’ve come round for.’

‘Of course not. Tea and sympathy. The Englishman’s staple diet.’

He leaned against the kitchen doorway, suddenly wary at the return of a familiar tone. And now for the first time she turned to look at him, having filled the kettle, and he saw into her eyes, which were no longer bright, or questioning, or laughing, but dull and bloodshot, and red from crying. Beneath that, there was a distant anger.

Robin turned and said, ‘I’ll go and sit in the other room, if you don’t mind.’

Aparna said nothing. A few minutes later she joined him in the sitting room, carrying two mugs of tea. It was carelessly made, too strong and over-milked, and the mugs had not been washed properly. She placed them side by side on the low coffee table, and opened the glass door which led out onto her balcony. It was a hot, close afternoon, and there was little hope of making the room cooler this way: the main effect was to let in the cries of truant children at play, far below, on a landscaped playground which comprised two swings, a slide, and some concrete hoops. Aparna stood on the balcony for a while, gazing down on these tiny figures as they acted out their noisy fantasies of violence and conflict. Then she went inside and sat opposite Robin. They drank for a few moments in silence.

‘So,’ she said at last, the words forming with undisguised effort, ‘what brings you here?’

‘Nothing. I’ve come to see you.’

‘A social call, Robin? I’m flattered.’

‘If I’ve called at an inconvenient time, I could always go.’

‘I wonder if you would. You’d be surprised if I said yes, wouldn’t you?’

‘Is this an inconvenient time?’

‘It would be rude to throw you out straight away, because you probably walked all the way here and you’re feeling tired. Besides, I don’t mind having you around. You don’t take up much space.’ All at once she started to drink very rapidly, and had got through most of her mug of thick, brown tea before putting it down in disgust and saying, flatly: ‘I’m going to leave this country, one of these days. I’m going to leave it… to stew in its own juice.’ She smiled a bitter, mischievous smile, and her eyes gleamed briefly.

‘So will I.’

‘You, Robin? Where would you go?’

‘I don’t know. Where would you?’

‘Home, of course. Back home. You can’t do that, though, can you, because this is your home. So where would you go?’

‘You told me you’d never go home. Hundreds of times you’ve told me that. Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind.’

Aparna did not answer him directly, but said:

‘England must be a wonderful place to be, for the English. You have so much freedom here, so much opportunity, so much interest, so much variety, such beauty. Why do they want to shut me out of all that?’

‘These rose-tinted spectacles you have on today,’ said Robin, ‘– where can I get a pair?’

‘I will start liking you more, Robin,’ said Aparna, ‘when you wake up to the idea of how privileged you are. How damn lucky you are, in where you were born and in all the chances that have been given to you.’

‘We can change places if you like,’ said Robin. ‘You can stand up in that bloody court in three weeks’ time.’

‘I’m sorry about that, Robin, you know I am; but you’re going to come out of this thing all right, it’s obvious. People like you always do. The courts were designed for people like you. For a start you’ve done the smart thing by choosing a woman lawyer who cares about you. She’ll wipe the floor with that man, I can see it happening now.’

‘What do you mean, “people like me”?’

‘I mean clever, middle-class, well-educated, heterosexual Englishmen. People who’ve had it their own way for hundreds of years and will continue to do so, till kingdom come.’

They both fell silent; and when Robin finally spoke, it was as if he had just been roused from sleep.

‘You can tell me what’s happened, if you like,’ he said.

She looked at him questioningly, and he elaborated: ‘To bring on this sudden burst of anti-imperialism.’

‘Sudden?’

Robin picked up an old newspaper which was lying on the table.

‘I seem to have caught you in a bad mood,’ he said.

‘A bad mood.’ Aparna repeated the words slowly. ‘This is a mood, Robin, which I have been in for two years or more. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

‘Do you know,’ said Robin, ‘I just don’t feel in the mood for an argument right now. Isn’t it funny? I just don’t think I could handle it.’

‘Then you’d better read your newspaper.’

He put it back on the table.

‘Don’t tell me: you’ve been to see your supervisor. You’ve shown him all the stuff you’ve been working on for the past six months. And he’s raised a sceptical eyebrow, patted you on the head, and asked you out to dinner with him again.’

There was a short silence.

‘Those bastards. Those bastards don’t realize how much this bloody degree means to me. They’ve no intention of letting me finish this bloody thing. Nothing would please them more than to see me get on, the next plane back to India, so they’d never have to spend half an hour with me and my work again. That’s what they really want.’

‘So that’s exactly what you’re going to do, is it?’

‘You’ve got no right to criticize me, Robin. Six years I’ve been fighting for this thing – six years out of my life – and I’m not a young woman any more. Not young at all. And the fact is, whatever people try to do to me, I’m still a free agent. I can still choose. I can choose to carry on fighting, or I can choose to give in. And that might just be what I do.’ Robin said nothing, so she continued: ‘Anyway, as it happens, your diagnosis was correct. I have been to see Dr Corbett, and I can report that he conducted himself in his usual fashion. I’m sure he believes that he was perfectly pleasant to me: charming, even. As if I came all those bloody miles to be charmed by some pot-bellied middle-aged academic. He started off by telling me that I was “looking good”, Was this a reference to my clothes, my face, my figure? I don’t know. Then we chatted about “how I’d been”, That was interesting: it transpired that he didn’t even know where I’d been living for the last two years. And finally, just to fill up the time, as it were, we talked about my work. We talked about this little thing I’ve been writing for one-fifth of my bloody life, and which he’s made me start again, and rewrite, and start again, and rewrite, and start again, till I’ve gone blue in the face. And what did he have to say this time, about my one hundred pages, my thirty thousand words, my six months’ sitting up here and writing? He found it “interesting”; he thought it had “potential”; but, he said it needed “tidying”; he thought I had been “emotional” and “aggressive”, just because I had tried to put down something of what I feel about these writers, for God’s sake, these
Indian
writers, who somebody has got to rescue from these bloody English critics with their theories and their intellectual imperialism. And then, yes, he said I must come round to supper some time. And somehow, it just came up in the conversation that his wife is in America at the moment, visiting her cousin.’ She shook her head. ‘You see, intellectually these people are subtle. This disdain, this condescension, it’s never articulated. So people don’t believe you when you tell them it’s there. But I know it’s there. I can feel it. I’ve been trying to squeeze my way past it ever since I got here. Well, maybe it’s time to stop.’ Her tone changed, became sadder, but no softer. ‘God, I miss my parents, Robin. You don’t know. Six years. I miss them…
so
…
much.
’ Then she asked: ‘Would you be sorry to see me go?’

Robin shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

She smiled her most brittle smile. ‘You’d miss your little trinket, would you? Your bit of local colour?’

‘That’s not how I think of you, actually.’

‘I wonder. I think you’re all the same, when it comes down to it. The whole lot of you. You let yourself down, didn’t you, that day in your flat, when I showed you the book? Wouldn’t it make life easier if I just played along with what people want of me? All Corbett wants is for me to be strange and exotic: he’d love it if I walked into there wearing a sari and strumming a sitar. He doesn’t want the truth about my country: none of you do. He doesn’t want to know that this city has an Asian community of its own, and he could find out more about India in an afternoon here than I have any intention of telling him. People like that… it’s the worst way of using people. They decide what they want you to be, and then they
push
you and
push
you into that mould, until it really hurts. It hurts deeply.’

From the lack of expression in Robin’s voice, it was not obvious that he had been listening to any of this.

‘Do you mind if we change the subject? I came here to talk about something, and I don’t have much time.’

Aparna looked at him sharply, surprised. A flicker of pain shone from her eyes, as if stabbed, but within a second it was gone.

‘We can talk about whatever you want, as long as it’s of interest to you. Only don’t let me stand in the way of your busy schedule.’

‘I came to ask if I could have my story back. I’m trying to round up all the copies of the things I’ve written.’

‘Of course. I’ll go and get it for you.’

She went into her bedroom and returned very quickly with Robin’s notebook.

As he took it from her, he asked, ‘What did you think of it?’

‘I quite enjoyed it. I quite enjoy all your funny little stories.’

‘What does that mean?’

She sat down again and sighed.

‘Well now, how important is it to you that I’m honest about this? What do you fancy today – sweet Aparna or sour Aparna? Do you want her warm, or cold? What’s on the menu, Robin?’

‘Today,’ he said, ‘it’s very important that you’re honest.’ Then he reconsidered. ‘I say that, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ll never know, will I, whether you meant it or not? So you can say what you like. Say what you like.’

‘Say what I like? That gives me a lot of scope. I hope you mean it.’ This sounded almost jocular, compared with her next remark: ‘You’re a funny man, Robin. A strange man.’

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked, coldly.

‘Well, because you are always making these obstacles for yourself. Always trying to make out that life is harder than it is.’

‘You think that things have been pretty easy for me, don’t you?’

‘Anyone could see that. Anyone but you.’

‘What’s that got to do with the story, anyway?’

‘It has everything to do with it. I mean, love doesn’t have to be like that, does it? You know it doesn’t. These two people – how is it possible to have any sympathy with them? They should simply have made up their minds one way or the other, and then got on with it.’

‘I don’t see it as being that simple.’

‘Of course you don’t. I suppose now you’re going to tell me that the same thing happened to you once.’