The Lowland (10 page)

He remembered the shortwave radio that he and Udayan had put together, drawing information from all over the world to another isolated place. He realized that in some sense Holly was more alone than
he was. Her isolation, without a husband, without neighbors around her, seemed severe.

The roof of the cottage was as thin as a membrane, the pelting sound of the rain like an avalanche of gravel. Sand was everywhere, between the cushions of the sofa, on the floor, on the round carpet in front of the fireplace where Chester liked to sit.

Hastily she swept it out, just as the dust was swept out twice a day in Calcutta, then shut the windows. The mantel above the fireplace was piled with stones and shells, pieces of driftwood; there seemed to be little else decorating the house.

He looked out the window, seeing the ocean covered with storm clouds, the dark sand at the water’s edge.

Why bother going to the campus beach, when you have this?

It’s a change of scene. I love arriving at the bottom of that hill.

She busied herself in the kitchen. She was turning on the oven, filling the sink with water, soaking lettuce leaves.

Will you get a fire started?

He went to the fireplace and looked at it. There were logs to one side, a set of iron tools. Some ashes within. He removed the screen. He noticed a book of matches on top of the mantel.

Let me show you, she said, already next to him before he needed to turn around and ask.

She opened a vent that was inside, then arranged the logs and the thinner sticks. Handing him one of the tools, she told him to nudge them together after the flame was lit. He sat monitoring the fire, but she had lit it perfectly. There was nothing to do other than allow it to warm his face and hands as Holly prepared the meal.

He wondered if this was where she had lived with Joshua’s father, and if this was the home he had left her in. Something told him no. There were only Holly’s things, and Joshua’s. Their two raincoats and summer jackets hanging on pegs by the door, their pairs of boots and sandals lined up beneath.

Do you mind checking the window over Joshua’s bed? I think I left it open.

The boy’s room was like a ship’s cabin, constricted and low. He saw the bed beneath the window, covered with a plaid quilt, the pillow damp with rain.

On the floor, below a bookcase, was a partially completed jigsaw puzzle of horses grazing in a meadow, looking like a frame to a missing image. He crouched down and put a hand into the box, sifting through seemingly identical pieces that were nevertheless distinct.

When he stood up he noticed a snapshot lying on Joshua’s chest of drawers. Right away Subhash knew it was Joshua’s father, Holly’s husband. A man in shorts, barefoot, on a beach somewhere, holding a smaller version of Joshua on his shoulders. His face tilted up at his son, both of them laughing.

Holly called him to dinner. They ate pieces of chicken cooked in mushrooms and wine, served with bread warmed in the oven instead of with rice. The taste was complex, flavorful but without heat of any kind.

He pulled out the bay leaf she’d put in. These grow on a tree behind my family’s home, he said. Only they’re twice the size.

Will you bring some back for me, when you go to visit them?

He told her he would, but it felt unreal, in her company, that he would ever be back in Tollygunge, with his family. Even more unreal that Holly would still care to spend time with him when he returned.

She told him she’d lived in the cottage since last September. Joshua’s father had offered to move out of the old place they’d shared, off Ministerial Road, but she didn’t want to be there. The cottage had belonged to her grandparents. She’d spent time in it as a young girl.

After the stew there were slices of an apple cake and mugs of lemon tea. As the rain fell harder, lashing the windowpanes, Holly spoke of Joshua. She was worried about how the separation was affecting him. Since his father had left, she said, he’d turned inward, frightened by things that had not frightened him before.

What things?

He’s afraid of sleeping alone. You see how close our rooms are. But he’s been coming into my bed at night. He hasn’t done that for years. He’s always loved swimming, but this summer he’s nervous in the water, afraid of the waves. And he doesn’t want to go back to school in the fall.

He swam at the beach the other day.

Maybe because you were there.

Chester began to bark and Holly got up and clipped the leash to
his collar. She threw on her rain jacket, and picked up an umbrella by the entrance.

You stay where it’s dry. I’ll only be a minute or two.

While he waited for her to return, he went to the sink and washed the dishes. He marveled at the self-sufficient nature of her life. And he was also slightly nervous for her, living alone in such a remote place, without bothering to lock her door. There was no one to help her, apart from the babysitter who looked after Joshua while she worked. Though her parents were alive, though they lived nearby, in another part of Rhode Island, they had not come to take care of her.

And yet he himself did not feel completely alone with her here. They were accompanied by Chester, and Joshua’s clothes and toys. Even a picture of the man she’d once loved.

That’s the first night in a long time I haven’t had to do the dishes after dinner, she said, joining him again. The plates and glasses had been put away, the dish towel was drying on a hook.

I don’t mind.

You’ll be all right, driving home in this weather? Can I lend you a jacket?

I’ll be fine.

Let me walk you under the umbrella to your car.

He put his hand on the doorknob. But he didn’t want to go; he still didn’t want to leave her. As he stood wavering, he felt the side of her face, pressed lightly against the back of his shirt. Then her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her voice, asking if he’d like to stay.

Her bedroom was the mirror image of Joshua’s. But because the bed was larger there was room for practically nothing else. Inside this room he was able to forget about what his parents would think, and the consequences of what he was about to do. He forgot about everything other than the body of the woman in the bed with him, guiding his fingers to the hollow of her throat, over the ridge of her collarbones, down toward the softer skin of her breasts.

The surface of her skin fascinated him. All the minute markings and imperfections, the patterns of freckles and moles and spots. The range of tones and shades she contained, not only the inverse shadows from tanning, highlighting portions of her body he was seeing for the first time, but also an inherent, more subtle mixture, as quietly variegated
as a handful of sand, that he could discern only now, under the lamplight.

She allowed him to touch the slack skin of her belly, the coarse mound, darker than her hair, between her legs. When he paused, uncertain, she looked up at him, incredulous.

Really?

He turned his face. I should have told you.

Subhash, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care.

He felt her fingers clasping his erection, positioning it, drawing him near. He was embarrassed, exhilarated. He felt and did what he had only imagined until now. He moved inside her, against her, unaware and also aware, with every nerve of his being, of where he was.

The rain had stopped. He heard the sound of water, from the leaves of the tree that spread over the roof of her house, a sound that was like sporadic bursts of applause. He lay beside her, meaning to go back to his apartment before the next day began, but he realized after a few minutes that Holly was not simply being quiet. Without warning, she had fallen asleep.

It felt wrong to wake her, or to go without telling her. So he remained. In the bed that was warm from the heat of their bodies, he was unable at first to fall asleep. He was distracted by her presence in spite of the intimacy they’d just shared.

In the morning he woke up to the sound of Chester’s breathing, to the smell of his fur, his paws clicking softly around the three sides of the bed. The dog stood patiently, panting by Holly’s side. The room was warm and bright.

She’d been sleeping with her back to Subhash, nestled against him, unclothed. She got out of bed and pulled on the jeans and blouse she’d been wearing the night before.

I’ll make coffee, she said.

He dressed quickly. Stepping out to use the bathroom, he saw the open door to Joshua’s room. The boy’s absence had made it possible. He was there because Joshua was not.

Holly came back from taking Chester outside, and offered to make breakfast. But Subhash told her he had work to catch up on.

Should I let you know, the next time Joshua goes over to his father’s?

He felt uncertain; he saw that the encounter of the night before
might be a beginning, not an end. At the same time he was impatient to see her again.

If you like.

Opening the door, he saw that the tide was in. The sky was bright, the ocean calm. No sign, apart from all the seaweed that had washed like empty nests up on the sand, of the storm there had been.

Chapter 3

He wanted to tell Udayan. Somehow, he wanted to confess to his brother the profound step he’d taken. He wanted to describe who Holly was, what she looked like, how she lived. To discuss the knowledge of women that they now shared. But it wasn’t something he could convey in a letter or a telegram. Not a conversation he could imagine, even if a connection were possible, taking place over the phone.

Friday evenings: this was when he was able to visit Holly at the cottage and to spend the night. The rest of the time he kept a distance, sometimes meeting her for a sandwich on the beach but nothing more. For most of the week he was able to pretend, if he needed to, that he did not know her, and that nothing in his life had changed.

But on Friday evenings he drove to her cottage, turning off the highway onto the long wooded road that gave way to the salt marsh. Through Saturday, sometimes as late as Sunday morning, he stayed. She was undemanding, always at ease with him. Trusting, each time they parted, that they would meet again.

They walked along the beach, on firm sand ribbed by the tide. He swam with her in the cold water, tasting its salt in his mouth. It seemed to enter his bloodstream, into every cell, purifying him, leaving sand in his hair. On his back he floated weightless, his arms spread, the world silenced. Only the sea’s low-pitched hum, and the sun glowing like hot coals behind his eyes.

Once or twice they did certain ordinary things, as if they were already husband and wife. Going together to the supermarket, filling the cart with food, putting the bags in the trunk of her car. Things he would not have done with a woman, in Calcutta, before getting married.

In Calcutta, when he was a student, it had been enough to feel an attraction toward certain women. He’d been too shy to pursue them. He didn’t court Holly as he’d observed college friends trying to impress women they were interested in, women who almost always became their wives. As Udayan had surely courted Gauri. He didn’t take Holly to the movies or to restaurants. He didn’t write her notes,
delivered, so as not to rouse suspicion from a girl’s parents, by the aid of a friend, asking her to meet him here or there.

Holly was beyond such things. The only place it made sense for them to meet was at her home, where it was easiest to be, where he liked to spend time, and where she saw to their needs. The hours passed with their talking, long conversations about their families, their pasts, though she didn’t talk about her marriage. She never tired of asking him about his upbringing. The most ordinary details of his life, which would have made no impression on a girl from Calcutta, were what made him distinctive to her.

One evening, as they drove back together from the grocery store, where they’d bought corn and watermelon to celebrate the Fourth of July, Subhash described his father setting out each morning to the market, carrying a burlap sack in his hand. Shopping for what was available, what was affordable that day. If their mother complained that he hadn’t brought back enough, he’d say, Better to eat a small piece of fish with flavor than a large one without. He’d witnessed a famine of devastating proportions, never taking a single meal for granted.

Some mornings, Subhash told her, he and Udayan had accompanied their father to shop, or to pick up rationed rice and coal. They had waited with him in the long lines, under the shade of his umbrella when the sun was strong.

They had helped him to carry back the fish and the vegetables, the mangoes that their father sniffed and prodded, that he sometimes set to further ripen under the bed. On Sundays they bought meat from the butcher, carved from a hanging goat carcass, weighed on the scale, wrapped in a packet of dried leaves.

Are you close to your father? Holly asked him.

For some reason he thought of the picture in Joshua’s room, of Joshua on top of his father’s shoulders. Subhash’s father had not been an affectionate parent, but he had been a consistent one.

I admire him, he said.

And your brother? Do you two get along?

He paused. Yes and no.

So often it’s both, she said.

• • •

In her cramped bedroom, setting aside his guilt, he cultivated an ongoing defiance of his parents’ expectations. He was aware that he could get away with it, that it was merely the shoals of physical distance that allowed his defiance to persist.

He thought of Narasimhan as an ally now; Narasimhan and his American wife. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to lead a similar life with Holly. To live the rest of his life in America, to disregard his parents, to make his own family with her.

At the same time he knew that it was impossible. That she was an American was the least of it. Her situation, her child, her age, the fact that she was technically another man’s wife, all of it would be unthinkable to his parents, unacceptable. They would judge her for those things.

He didn’t want to put Holly through that. And yet he continued to see her on Fridays, forging this new clandestine path.