Shadow Play (2 page)

On the other hand, I'm fully aware that many readers will skip most of what follows to get straight to the juicy bits, where I bring the story up-to-date with the events that led to my disappearance. Some will certainly question why I've bothered to delve so far back and include so much that seems irrelevant, when all that matters right now is the truth behind this unexplained tragedy. Where are my priorities, as a writer and as a human being? Besides, didn't I publish a memoir just two-and-a-half years ago? Shouldn't this stuff have been in there?

Well, it wasn't. I left it all out last time round. This is precisely a record of the absences in that story. And as for why I take so long to build up to my part in recent events, I can only repeat my excuse – that this is how the memories stack up and make any sense in my head. The way I've reacted on this occasion is in line with things that have happened before. A pattern seems discernible, and is what forms the principle behind these chapters. What follows is as much about other people as it is about me – those who have loved me, such as my great-aunt, my mother, my ex-wife and our son, and some, like Sharon Pereira or Vera Howard, who passed through all too briefly. What they have in common appears to be this: they all escaped my attention when they could have used it most.

Two old women died when I was twenty-two and lived in Paddington (yes, to those of you who remember the memoir: my French restaurant and Sylvie-the-waitress period, but I repeat, none of what follows has been made public before). One of them lived on my corridor while the other died in our house in Calcutta; they both only ever existed on the fringes of my concerns, but what they had in common was that neither of them seemed to realize that. I spent about ten hours in total with the lady down the hall in Paddington – out of which only once did I invite her in for a cup of coffee. The other times all occurred in scraps, ten minutes here and five minutes there.

Her name was Vera Howard and she'd lived in that flat since she was seven. That would have been 1919, from just after the war. She waited with her ear to the door and waylaid me on my return from work. Sometimes she would push into my hands something she had baked – reheated fish and chips, or a small bowl of stew. Based on just that much acquaintance, I heard that mine was the only name she kept repeating as she lay dying in hospital. ‘Won't Raj visit me? Can you not call and inform him?' But I was beyond contact that evening, since it was my weekend off at the restaurant.

Our other neighbour Bryan said her husband had been similar: he would hail people on the stairs – strangers even, not just neighbours – and refuse to let them continue until he had offloaded his stories. The Ancient Mariner of St Michael's Street. And each person brought forth a particular set of stories – for example, recalled Bryan, knowing I was from India would have led Mr Howard to reminisce about his wartime imprisonment in Malaya; he'd only ever collared Bryan about his late father the doctor, and so on. He had been dead seven years, but his name, Albert Howard, remained on the letter box downstairs as well as on her door. In fact, Vera had added another name – of a sister who never existed. Bryan explained it was because she didn't want strangers to know that she lived alone. That was ironic, considering what happened.

Vera often hushed her voice and tried to warn me about Bryan, but she liked me enough not to make a point of it. I never believed he was any more than harmless. Even the time I brought over some of the guys from the restaurant didn't convince me. We were at my place on a Saturday night after work, finishing off some beers. Bryan heard the noise, walked in, sat for a while and then insisted that we join him. He said he'd put on some records and that he had more liquor. So we were sitting around, Aretha Franklin was booming, I'd pointed out Bryan's huge porn collection (actually I didn't need to point anything out, Paul had to move a stack off his chair to sit down), and as usual the conversation turned to Sylvie. Her tits, how tightly they sat in her blouse, what they would be like to grab from behind, or to have them brush down all over you, teasing you with little touches; how well her skirt showed off her ass. This was a month before I started seeing her, so I didn't yet
mind anyone leching. Paul brought up the subject of her ever-pouting partially open mouth, and listed all the things he had dreamt of putting inside it. I described how I wanted to use my mouth on various parts of her. After three whiskies, even Francois contributed: he confessed he'd once taken a break in the toilet because of Sylvie. He said that evening he just had to – she looked so edible.

For a while Bryan sat there listening; he'd never met her. The next thing someone noticed was that he was openly masturbating. The others were too surprised to say anything: I knew him better, so I could shout at him to stop it.

‘I can't help it,' he exhaled, eyes closed, facing forward, still continuing. ‘When you guys talk like that, I can't help it.'

‘Well, stop it, Bryan, it's disgusting. Put it back in NOW, or we are leaving.'

‘I can see her in front of my eyes, Raj, doing everything just like you're describing it.'

‘WILL YOU FUCKING STOP IT?'

My raised voice managed to force open his eyes. He gaped around and reluctantly folded himself back inside. Things turned quiet for a few minutes; then I walked the others to the door downstairs. I didn't feel like apologizing for anybody and anyway, they should have been too drunk to care. Everyone had confessed filthy things that night, so what if Bryan took things a little further?

Ok, he was a mess, but I still insisted he was harmless. ‘He never washes, and he remains indoors for days, and then you can hear him crying, and he throws his things about. He got expelled from medical school for that, you know, for being peculiar. He was asked to leave. I think he often has fits. He's
very unstable. Have you noticed how fat he gets and then sometimes he emerges so skinny? How could such a person be a doctor? He must have concealed his condition from them during admissions. And once I spoke to a charwoman his mother sent, and she complained his rooms were filthy. Even she refused to clean his toilet. That's where she drew the line, she said.'

‘Why doesn't his mother take him home?' I interrupted Mrs Howard.

‘They moved to Hertfordshire after she remarried, because this place was getting too small, they claimed. Between you and me, I think his stepfather wanted no part of Bryan. But he stayed on to study. They promised us, any problem and we just had to telephone them. Now no one ever calls on him, and our new porter keeps insisting they've changed their number. Personally,' she whispered, ‘I believe they pay him to clean up after Bryan and ignore all the complaints.'

They couldn't have been more different, Bryan Duff and Vera Howard. She worked at a florist's down the road in Bayswater, six days a week every morning, and she had impeccable standards. I never saw her without her characteristic touches of rouge, her lightly outlined eyes, shadowed cheekbones, and a mouth painted just to the point of fullness. She rarely stepped out in the daytime without large sunglasses over her brow and a scarf to frame her face. Each of her long dresses accentuated and extended her body that still flowed flawlessly through everything. Even her short kimono nightwear, with no one but me to admire it in that dark carpetless hallway, befitted a movie goddess in its boldness and confidence. And the first thing you noticed when she asked you in was a pin-up of her
in a swimsuit, right leg drawn up, left arm thrown out, blonde, with flashing teeth, perfectly Aryan arms, calves and thighs, all framed by photographically heightened contrasts of sunlight and shadow. It was from a visit to Germany in the 1930s, she told me, on a north coast island called Rügen, by a photographer who spotted her in a café in Hamburg and insisted on following her everywhere during her holiday.

Once I was presented with an album full of his other pictures – Vera lying down facing the camera, breasts pouring out of her swimsuit, dusted with sand; and others of her in sunglasses in the centre of an open square, pigeons and pedestrians in the distance.

‘Albert loved these pictures,' she recounted, ‘he often said they decided his mind to marry me. Make no mistake, it was his idea to enlarge that one. And right at the end, one of the reasons he refused to go to hospital initially was that he couldn't take it with him. Even so, I had to carry the album back and forth every time I visited him, because of course it was too embarrassing to leave it there. Before I left, and before the nurses returned, he would always ask to look at it. And each time he would pause at a different picture, indefinitely, absent-mindedly, until my eyes filled with tears.'

They couldn't have been more different, Bryan and Mrs Howard, and nothing she alleged about him was false. Now I know from repeated experience this was precisely why I liked getting on with both of them – because of their differences and because I too was a different third. I liked the range of qualities captured in our little corridor, such differences compressed so closely with myself at their centre, like a conjuror or a tightrope artist, a ringmaster or a juggler. Today I would use much humbler
images – a chameleon, or even a catalyst is how I would describe my role, something itself invisible. That is what I am actually good at, drawing someone out and then gradually becoming invisible, so that they speak and act in front of me as though they are alone. I also didn't see in those days that I wasn't at the centre of any scene, that never did my knowledge of various life-stories extend to any sort of control over their unfolding, so that far from being a ringmaster, I was often just a clueless clown.

And what incomplete, ill-developed, mishandled ‘knowledge'. I would love to be able to share more stories from Vera's glamour decades, more about Albert, and more about their years together. What kind of English girl would have holidayed alone through Germany in the 1930s? What were things like in Albert's absence? But the truth is, I never asked. In the days before I met Sylvie, I kept myself stifled inside a strange cloud-chamber of melancholy where I could not bear my own company in stillness for any length of time, nor could I endure anyone else's. So everything remained half-baked, my solitude as well as my relationships. Today I can't imagine or recall what my concerns could have been but as I said, everything real around me seems to have been on the fringes. Thus, what I have set down about Bryan is also pretty close to the sum of what I know about him, although in those months I realized I was his only visitor: there were days when I moved about noiselessly in my own room, and even then he would knock – seven, eight times within two hours, at one or two in the morning.

And so when it came about that they took Bryan away for the assault and rape of Vera, which led to her death in hospital after seventy-two hours of bleeding, it would be accurate in every sense to say that I was absent from the event. Not just
physically on the day itself, and not just in the sense that I could never have anticipated it, though it's the least you would expect from a self-proclaimed ‘ringmaster' of life-stories. I was, and had always been, absent from both the lives that ended that day, even though both of them had offered me every welcome – despite their mutual differences, despite knowing I would continue seeing the other.

In fact, one reason I often stayed away from beginning to end on holidays was that Bryan had figured out what my off-days were, and sometimes he wouldn't relent until I had answered his knocking.

I was still living in the same room (the flats on either side of me had remained vacant: they hadn't even been cleared out yet) when a few months later my father wrote to inform me that my eldest great-aunt had died. Now a letter from my father was itself an exceptional event – it was his first that year – so I could imagine the matter had moved him deeply, even though he confined himself to the indignities of the physical details. She had been found dead a few hours, lying in bed on her side, right arm reaching out for something on the table. When Baba called on her as usual in the morning, the door had to be broken down; rigor mortis had set in, and since her arm refused to submit to ordinary strength, that was how they laid her on the pyre (I could imagine him standing by alone as the flames gathered force).

The other detail in common between these two incidents, that I shared with Sylvie as we walked home from watching the second
Godfather
, was that on the night before – the last time
anyone saw my great-aunt alive – she'd remarked to my father that she missed me. She was talking about a boy of fifteen whom she hadn't seen in seven years and had barely known, but (like Vera in the hospital) she missed me. And what's more, wrote Baba, such mentions of me had not been unusual. She always inquired how I was and when I planned to return. She asked about my studies, my work, my eating and living arrangements. She asked about my impressions of London. She encouraged him to write to me. She asked him if I was writing.

‘She was a tiny lady,' I said to Sylvie in a café on Edgware Road, ‘with whom I spent a tiny portion of my childhood. She always lived with us, but it was a huge house, and I've told you about my family before. None of my uncles spoke to her: their wives, their children, even the servants were all similarly instructed. Her room had its own exit, she cooked on a stove on the floor, and her only visitor was my father. Sometimes, just occasionally, I would go in and fiddle with something while they were talking. Or sit on her high bed, reading my comics, with my legs dangling beside hers. By the time I was eight I was already as tall as she was.

‘I heard her say some odd things, but the things I heard the others say about her! I heard cousins younger than me wonder aloud why she wasn't dying, and long discussions about it between my aunts and uncles, some of whom had stopped speaking to one another for years except on this subject. Her only crime was that she wasn't married, so there was no one to protect her. And that her father, my great-grandfather, had specified that his unmarried daughter would inherit the house after the death of her older brother, a wish my grandfather had duly respected. For this offence, barring my father, each of her
nephews and nieces hated her. Even though she voluntarily confined herself to a room with its own backdoor, went out into the world invisibly and earned her keep until retirement as a headmistress, and for two decades had been effectively dead to everyone. They hated her for refusing to make out a fresh will while she was alive, and for refusing stubbornly to die.