Hot Water Man (16 page)

‘You are a man of imagination, Mr Hanson. And the pond?'

‘You're no longer looking at an insanitary puddle, you're looking at a boating lake. Six times the size – according to our expert, the natural water source can fill at least six times the capacity it's filling now. At the far end we'll have a barbecue pavilion and bandstand for local-type music-sitars and such – and displays of traditional dancing. And the opposite shore from the hotel we'll have the chalets.'

‘Ah yes?'

‘Sure. Lakeside accommodation with road access round the rear. Eight units, fully air-conditioned of course, with bathroom en suite and personal car port. They'll have a beautiful view of the hotel across the water and, behind them, the hill with the tomb. We have permission from the tourist office to install spotlights. I have in mind some kind of
son et lumière.'

‘Your enthusiasm is infectious, Mr Hanson. I must say, when I first looked at this place . . . And the landscaping?'

‘For a job this radical we've found nobody –' Duke coughed, ‘uh, can't seem to find any suitable contractors in your country, so I've flown in a team of experts – American-trained; I worked with them in the Gulf. Before that they'd been responsible for the revolutionary Abu Dhabi Translux – the one with the underground gardens. They'll be importing the top-soil, turf and so on. Astroturf in recreational areas. Plus half-mature trees and decorative shrubs. It'll be an overnight transformation. High-cost outlay, but otherwise you wait twenty years for the place to look good. And it's going to look good. Mr Chowdry, my heart's in this one.'

‘It is your baby, as they say. I am right?'

‘Sure. There's something about this place. I've even taken to dreaming about it.'

They gazed across the water. Shamime had told him about the fishes, swimming with their heads toward the shrine. He had imagined them like bright silver filings drawn towards a magnet. But his irrigation engineer had found little evidence of aquatic life, the place was so polluted. There was a silence. Up the slope behind them, the boy hawked and spat like an old man. Duke wanted to explain that he was doing this because he was ambitious not for money but for his homeland. He wanted to bring the best of his country to this one. He felt it like a missionary. It was the hygiene he wanted to bring – hygiene in body and spirit, in business-dealings too. A clean world unmuddied by caste and corruption. Here the water was dirty. Only in a clean world was there a chance for everyone, as there had been a chance for himself, Duke Warren Hanson. But how could he put this into words for a Pakistani, even the Under-Manager of a Translux? Mr Chowdry would be offended. And to Shamime? He did not like to tell her in case she mocked him.

Besides, she just might say: who's so incorruptible now?

They left the waterside and made their way back up through the bushes. The boy rose to his feet but he did not follow them. They walked past a food stall with its hissing lumps of batter. A family sat on the mat, eating.

Mr Chowdry indicated them, smiling: ‘I think you shall attract a different class of customer, Mr Hanson.'

My hotel will be classless, Duke wanted to say. Sure you had to have the money, but who the hell would mind what job you did? Who would mind if your uncle was a minister? No sign of Shamime here. He hadn't seen her for so long that he felt clumsy and nervous again.

Both cars stood empty. The Cameron driver emerged from a tea stall. In Duke's hand, the cones were scrumpled paper balls. When could he speak to her?

He fetched two Cokes. When he straightened up from the car she was there.

‘Phew. Wow. It's hot. Can't you just dome-in this whole place, Duke, like Houston or wherever, and air-condition the lot?'

He fetched another Coke. She unwound her dupatta, twisting her head to pull it off. Her hair was damp around her face. ‘It's sweet, the shrine. Very kitsch, with a puce nylon shroud, all scattered with the flowers of the faithful.'

Duke grunted. Half, he was relieved that she hadn't been uttering prayers. Half, he felt she should.

‘Humbugs,' said Shamime cheerfully, ‘most of them. Sham miracle-workers. God I need a drink.' She took the can. ‘Then we ought to be getting back, Mr Chowdry.'

‘I have a reception at six,' said Mr Chowdry. ‘A family wedding. But I would so much like to hear more about the hotel itself. I've had a most interesting introduction to its outdoor facilities.'

Shamime paused. ‘I know. Duke, you go back with Mr Chowdry, then you can talk.' She had the can to her lips. ‘I'll drive your car. After all, I know how to work the starter.'

The Coke fizzed in his mouth. She mentioned it so casually.

Mr Chowdry walked towards the Cameron car. She was waiting for something. She stood near enough for him to make out the stitching, small fancy coils, around her collar and down the front. She lifted her hand towards him, a half-gesture. He opened his mouth to speak.

‘Duke – the key?'

‘Uh. Sure.'

He rummaged in his pocket, holding his can in the other hand. She took the key and climbed into his automobile, smiling up at him for the first time. In the dashboard ashtray lay the stubs of her cigarettes from last Saturday. He disapproved deeply of smoking but he could not bring himself to clean them out.

She drove ahead. For a while they kept up with her. She had opened the window. Her hair flew loose in the wind like black snakes; they whipped and tangled. The blue sleeve billowed. Before she had looked muffled; now she looked released, with her wild hair splaying.

Her hair in his mouth. She was lying on his chest, turning her head this way and that, rubbing it against his face. ‘Dook, Dook,' she murmured. She mimicked his accent; he tried to lift her face and push back her hair to see if she was smiling.

Duke rubbed his belly. The bites burned. He had not seen her body, only felt it smooth as an eel. He pictured Minnie's familiar stomach – flat, sallow skin softened by childbearing; the grey pucker of her appendix scar. ‘Life has made its mark,' she had once said with that grave smile. It hadn't mattered to him, though how could he persuade her of that now, after what he had done? It would be so obvious to her: a young body instead of a known, used one. If only he could persuade himself it was that simple. Nobody would be harmed then.

Her belly was altered now. He himself had not seen its tacky black stitches. Right now he felt responsible. It was his wound.

He was telling Mr Chowdry about the proposed conference facilities. Shamime drove recklessly. Ahead his Datsun dissolved in the heat haze. He could not grasp her; she mocked him with her teasing hair and her teasing voice. He must let her drive away.

Christine had brought
the seeds her first week out here. She had filled a Cameron dinner platter with soil. (British Home Stores china.) These at least I can germinate. And five weeks later some had sprouted; just a few. Cosmea: their branched leaves, feathery frail, had opened like babies' hands.

She knelt in the flowerbed. A strip of sand ran round three walls of the compound, the fourth side being the driveway which was edged with flowerpots. She dug with a spoon she had stolen from the kitchen. It was not the time for planting.
Tips for the Tropics
made it clear that winter, not summer, was the growing season. But why not, if she kept them watered? Her little seedlings must take root.

She must do something. It was all right for Donald, out at the office all day. He was part of the working city; he arrived home perspiring, drained but elated, with his briefcase full of papers. He had taken root.

She put a seedling into the hole. Three pairs of eyes watched her. These belonged to Mohammed's girls. Christine poured in the water and the seedling floated on its side. The water drained away; she held the plant straight and pressed in the soil around it.

Mohammed's wife called the children, her voice a high wail. Easy to think her fat, Christine had told herself several times, rather than pregnant. She herself had not dared go near the quarters since that visit to the doctor's a week ago. She felt too embarrassed. But she also felt obscurely rebuffed, that the woman had not given her the occasional smile since then. After all, they had sat in the surgery, two women together; they had practically held hands. Sisters under the skin.

The children did not leave. They just moved back a few steps, probably to get a better view. She firmed in the seedling. Perhaps Mohammed was watching, stilled during his morning's toil. Recently she had not spoken much to him, either. Before, there had been the odd moment of domestic intimacy – when she had tried, laughingly, to use his mosquito spray; when she had pointed out Joyce's children in her dressing-table snapshot. Since last week she had been avoiding any social conversation. Just once she had asked him where this hot water man was –
‘kidder'
, she knew the word for ‘where'. But he had taken her to the gate, pointed into the distance and gabbled a stream of words. In fact she had also asked Rosemary (Reckitts Rosemary, because her husband was in Reckitt and Colman), when thanking her for that drinks party. ‘Hot water man?' Rosemary thought she was inquiring about a plumber and had gone on about their unreliability and how her shower unit was already cracked. She could not ask Donald; he would want to know why and that would make her shy.

Beyond the wall a car drove by, blaring its horn. She could see nothing from here. She must get past this wall and into the city. It was no good walking around here; it was just modern streets and chowkidars staring. And it was not getting into the place, to drive to Rosemary's or Sally's and drink lime sodas while they discussed tennis fixtures and the heat. To think that she was now the sort of woman who waited for her husband's key in the lock. Except that he did not have to open the door because Mohammed was there to do it for him.

The problem was, she had lost Sultan's card. Yesterday she had taken a taxi to Nazimabad but it must have been the wrong part, perhaps West. ‘
Kidder
East?' He had driven her to an amusement arcade, a dispiriting place called Happyland. Heaven knew what he thought she wanted. And the office buildings had all looked the same. She could not find his name in the phone book, but then it was full of misprints. Sultan Rahim had disappeared back into the city.

She gazed at the seedlings. They looked frail; some were crooked. Behind her she could hear the children breathing. Sometimes she tried to speak to them, but they just hid their faces like their mother and ran behind the house.

She stood up. The girls scattered, with muffled squeaks. Shestraightened a leaning seedling. She had always presumed to have children some time, at her own convenience; everyone did, didn't they. She had not bothered to put it into words. Motherhood was a glow on the horizon if she cared to turn her head in that direction. They had talked about everything else, herself and Roz and Cassie, those long smoky afternoons in the shop. More accurately: they discussed in detail the outcome – the career compromise, the child-sharing, father participation, individual fulfilment and all that. But they had never discussed what would happen if one could not have a child at all. Choice was what they discussed: women's choice for this and for that. Choice, all in their heads. They had never thought of their bodies making the choice for them.

She wiped her hands on her trousers. Donald was coming home for lunch; he sometimes did. Then he would return to the busy city where his work waited. Already her seedlings drooped in the sun. Alien, English plants; would they ever root themselves in this foreign soil? She was the same as them, wilting.

A pip-pip outside the gate. Donald was back. Mohammed emerged from the house and walked up the drive. Why could not Donald open the gate himself? It looked so silly, sitting in the car. But then he did not blare his horn like some of their neighbours; just an apologetic bleat as if his car was clearing its throat. Sometimes this disarmed her. Sometimes it irritated her. If he was going to wait on his rights ('After all, darling, it's what we pay the chap for'), at least he could do it in the Pakistani manner.

Mohammed stood aside as Donald drove in. Mohammed found it a relief when Donald returned; she sensed this increasingly. There was a rhythm between the two men, as if they had been rehearsing for this all their lives. Centuries of assumptions were taken for granted. She walked to the porch. She was the loose attachment in this machinery.

Mohammed carried in the briefcase. Donald did not kiss her, with the bearer there in the hall. In fact he seldom touched her when Mohammed was on duty.

‘Phew.' He laid his jacket on the hall chair. ‘Hot, eh?' He turned to Mohammed.
‘Bahut garum.'

When alone, she dismissed Mohammed and made herself a sandwich. Today the table was laid for a proper lunch. The ceiling fan turned; the cloth lifted, revealing the table-legs. Mohammed had still not learnt about the mats. Instead of the plain ones he had put out Ann Smythe's nursery set. Perhaps he was a child at heart. Today she had the elephants and Donald had the teddies. From the kitchen came discreet clinks and the smell of frying.

‘Pleasant morning?' asked Donald.

‘The fish-wallah came to the gate, so I bought some interesting little local fishes, I couldn't understand the name. Then I read a bit . . .' She paused. She sounded like someone from the last century. But then it was the last century here, for women. ‘Then I planted out those seedlings from the spare bedroom.'

‘Good. You must get mali to water them thoroughly. He's a sly old bugger, you know. Always creeping off.'

She straightened her spoon. ‘Oh, I've given him leave.'

‘What?'

‘I told you before,' she lied. ‘I'm sure I did.'

‘Told me what?'

‘I'm still paying him, of course. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. But I told him he needn't work here any more; I'll be doing it. He'll soon get something else because of my card at the B.W.A.' Mention of this should soften Donald; he liked her to be in touch with the B.W.A.