Questions of Travel Read online

  She almost told him about a little plush dog in Sydney who nodded now-now-now.

  But all these disclosures and exchanges lay in the future. That first day, Laura merely walked through Theo’s house with him, already hungry for his presence. On shadowy cherrywood heights, white roses gleamed like ghosts.

  Ravi, 1990s

  THE BASNAYAKES’ INFLUENCE PROCURED Ravi a temporary post at the hospital, where a cautious expansion of the computer system had thrown everything into disarray. The clerical staff, inadequately trained, blamed Ravi for every difficulty they encountered or created. That was only natural. He was an outsider and an exponent of change.

  Ravi had to concede that the new system was not entirely suited to the needs of the hospital, which were predictably contradictory. There was always an exception or quirk for which technology failed to account. But it annoyed him also that the clerks would go on swearing they had read the instructions he had prepared when it was plain that they hadn’t. Why did people hold on to lies like that? He remembered visiting the dentist as a child and insisting that he always brushed his teeth after meals, the fabrication so taking hold of his mind that he was convinced by it and furious with the dentist for his skepticism.

  Malini, who had turned up to walk home with Ravi, shifted the baby onto her other hip and signed a petition that was being passed around by an orderly. Later the same evening, she announced that she wanted to go to Colombo to attend a rally protesting the tear-gassing of garment workers by the police.

  “Are you mad?” inquired Carmel. “Are you asking to be killed or worse?”

  Carmel Mendis was in the habit of picking up her cup of tea, then lowering it again without drinking; she would repeat the gesture five or six times until the liquid was stone cold. It drove her daughter-in-law wild. When her mother’s back was turned, Priya gave a flawless imitation of the performance with the cup, the maddening way Carmel would set it down and fold her lips or pluck at the shoulders of her dress. The two young women snickered together. Later their talk turned grave, Priya confiding the details of a quarrel with a girl at work. Ravi came home to find them on the veranda, slapping at mosquitoes. They looked at him as if they had never seen him before.

  In the afternoons, Malini helped Carmel in her hairdressing salon. It was frequented mainly by old ladies of limited means who, as the flood of obsolescence rose around them, clutched here and there at scraps that passed for style. Malini was tender with them, massaging a damp, ancient scalp for long minutes while an old woman sat with head tilted back over the bowl at a stiffly cautious angle. Sometimes, a tear oozed from a wrinkled lid, acknowledging the pleasure and rarity of being touched.

  More and more often, a coin slid from a claw into Malini’s hand. She never failed to pass on these tips to Carmel, but her mother-in-law began finding fault with her over trivial things. She accused Malini of heating the water for too long. There were conflicts over shampoo, too. It was sometimes sold in sachets since many people couldn’t afford a whole bottle, and several of Carmel’s customers would bring along the kind they preferred. When this happened, Carmel never used the whole sachet. At the end of the afternoon, she would salvage the little plastic packet from the wastepaper basket and squeeze out the dregs into a container. These leftovers served for other clients; indeed, for Carmel herself. It was a simple procedure and Carmel had explained it simply, yet Malini would squeeze a sachet dry before throwing it away. When confronted, she talked about honesty—the nerve!

  Priya, who had been regretting her recent confidential impulse, seized the chance to support her mother now against Malini. She was in love with a married man and tended to snap at everyone else. The affair was conducted in the honeymoon suite at the hotel where Priya and her lover both worked. She lost herself briefly in reliving the moment when his mouth closed on her nipple, and the sea murmured at their window like a bride.

  It was unfortunate that Malini broke into this reverie by wondering aloud why foreigners were so keen on taking pictures of everything. “Taking, taking, always taking.” She was sick of tourists, she said: when they came with their money and their diseases, when politics kept them away. Priya chose to interpret this as an oblique attack on the way she earned her living. Afterwards, each went about with a shut face. Thunderclouds of silent allegation hung between them for days.

  Malini said, “You like people much more than I do. That’s why you can ignore them.”

  It was quite true. Time and again, Ravi watched his wife blunder into the web of human feeling and get stuck. She was right; it was all she knew. That people might be attached to absurdity or injustice or falsehood was a fact she acknowledged but couldn’t grasp. Ravi, having no wish to rearrange the world, was on far easier terms with it. One day, when he refused to be roused by yet another politician’s malice, they came close to a serious row. Malini hissed that she had been quite wrong, Ravi’s acceptance of every kind of folly or vice was not a symptom of tolerance, after all, but a profoundly cruel assessment: “You expect no better of people.” The quarrel was taking place in their bedroom, and it was the desire to keep it from Carmel, hovering on the other side of the wall, that prevented it from escalating. To the world—which they still confused with their families—they presented a solid façade.

  Laura, 1990s

  THIS BUSINESS OF ONE sentence after another, of thought moving steadily forward: it was goose-stepping under another name, grumbled Theo. “Something important altered forever in this century. Progress became the status quo. We fetishize it.” He topped up Laura’s glass, refilled his own. “So these days, taking your time, resisting change, is the radical response.”

  All this had spiraled out from a meeting with his supervisor that afternoon. An adherent of graphology, Dr. Gebhardt insisted on handwritten drafts of her students’ work. With the spread of personal computers, there had been complaints. Theo had arrived in Dr. Gebhardt’s office to find her poring over the latest communiqué from the dean—his photocopied signature told of an arrested mirror stage allied to misogyny and sexual dysfunction. All Dr. Gebhardt could spare Theo was a terse injunction to just get on and write.

  Laura suggested that Dr. Gebhardt had a point—after all, Theo was running late with the next chapter of his thesis. He countered with his gray stare. How, it asked, was it possible not to be diverted by a cousin’s venture into beekeeping, by the tensions of a friend’s research into medieval verse forms, by the potassium salts with which a neighbor was treating a twitch in her eye? Twice a month, Theo went to Fulham to take fish and chips to a bedridden letterset printer whom he had met in 1986 at a post-Chernobyl rally. He knew that the postman’s stepdaughter was bulimic, he knew the name of the village in the Punjab where the Sikhs who kept the off-license had been born. And there were his projects, his Beloveds, his collections. Had Laura seen his latest mass-market art coup? “A quid in Oxfam. For the lot. I’m very tempted to hang them over my bed.” Four saucer-eyed children with shaggy sixties hair clutched toys, drooped wistfully in individual frames.

  On Laura’s birthday, Theo gave her one of Anna’s books: an octavo volume in blue wrappers, an essay by Virginia Woolf about Walter Sickert, a Hogarth Press first edition. The package, wrapped in paper of the same blue, was bound with a string of creamy pearls: “From my own faux-oyster bed.”

  Laura wasn’t the only woman who eyed Theo with studied negligence. Most didn’t last. But Bea Morley did. Laura found her way to friendship with Bea, a bedrock attachment that would last all her days. They had met at one of the Sunday evening gatherings Theo liked to host. Other regulars included a woman who was writing a book about surfing, and a guitarist whose hairline was receding faster than his hopes of fame. Sometimes an organic farmer turned up, sometimes a couple from Peru. An electronic engineer liked to take over the kitchen and stir-fry noodles for everyone. Like all drinkers, Theo was fundamentally uninterested in food. Friends knew to arrive with mezze or a roast chicken or the ingredients for mushroom pasta. Pizzas wer
e ordered or an array of curries. Someone might show up with a dish of baked apples and a carton of cream.

  Treats circulated, Es, handmade chocolates, smoky Polish vodka, spliffs, a platter of Stilton and figs. Theo had a video of “Nostalgija,” the Croatian entry in a recent Eurovision Song Contest. He would play and replay it over everyone’s protests. His laugh was the kind that always surprises. He would place his hands over his face and hoot.

  Currents crossed and sometimes sparked, conversations, ideas, causes, needs. Once there was a chunky boy, barely twenty, with red hair and the face of a pampered pug. When he left the room, Theo rose and followed him. They didn’t come back.

  Laura fell into an affair with a financial analyst. He was on secondment to Bea’s firm, a black-eyed, experienced man. Things went on very nicely for some weeks. Then he returned to his family in São Paulo.

  “I feel shitty,” sang Theo. “I feel shitty, I feel shitty and witty and GAY!”

  Ravi, 1990s

  AT NOON, IN THE monsoonal off-season, fishermen slept in the shade cast by their sails. One man had a coil of smoke at his feet, a gray cat from whom he was never parted. Beyond the lagoon, in the sea-lit distance, the horizon went on and on. It was as steely and thin as a wire—the kind that garrotes.

  Observing this scene along with Ravi was a boy with hair that matched the sand and eyes the color of the sea. Soon they fell into conversation. Protein-reared, the stranger had long-muscled limbs covered with golden hairs where netted light quivered. His name was Mikael, he said, he had recently graduated in computer science in Stockholm. In October he was going to Silicon Valley, where he had been hired by Hitachi to work on storage software.

  They talked about this for a while. Then the Swedish boy asked if Ravi would take a photo of him. It was a simple point-and-shoot camera, but Ravi fussed over everything, stepping back and sideways, then adjusting his subject’s position in order to maximize the charm of the backdrop with its coconut trees and bundled nets. It wasn’t the first time he had taken a photo of a tourist, and he always drew out the process. An unconscious yet almost frantic wish was at work in him on such occasions: the simple, terrible human need to be taken into account.

  Mikael and he left the lagoon together. As they approached the tourist strip, Mikael suggested lunch. Ravi declined; he couldn’t be sure who was to pay.

  Five minutes after saying goodbye, he hurried back. Mikael had paused to look at a painted devil mask in the window of a shop. They spoke briefly, and the Swedish boy took a notebook and pen from his daypack, and handed them to Ravi.

  Below his address, Ravi added: Do not let sadness be associated with your name!

  For months, the post brought a spurt of hope. The memory of the moment when he had decided to go back to Mikael remained forceful: a zigzag of lightning, cartoonish and brilliant, had blazed across Ravi’s mind. The postscript, quite uncharacteristic of him in its boldness, had flowed from the same inspired source. The impression that he had merely been obeying the dictates of a higher power was so strong that he never doubted the outcome. In fact, waiting for the offer of employment at Hitachi to arrive, Ravi was almost bored. It was a phenomenon familiar to him from his schooldays. Whenever he had been thoroughly prepared for an exam, he had felt a great lassitude on opening his paper and reading the questions. How tedious to have to go through the business of writing down his answers! Then, as now, he had felt assured of success. But first the idols of patience and routine had to be placated.

  He said nothing to Malini, just as he would not have boasted, as a schoolboy, of the high mark he knew he would receive. But there was a nightmare in which a neighbor’s servant, a filthy creature who might have been fifteen or twenty-seven, came running to say there was a phone call for Ravi. Holding a black receiver that smelled of other people’s breath, he heard, No connection. No connection.

  More time passed, and he no longer thought about Silicon Valley every day. And yet he had imagined it in such detail, his mind erecting vast white buildings ribboned with tinted glass. There had been low, landscaped shrubs, and saplings dreaming of fullness and tied to stakes.

  Laura, 1990s

  BEA MORLEY INVITED LAURA to spend a weekend in Berkshire with her parents. Bea had spoken of a cottage; Laura, stirred by poetic thoughts of thatch, was confronted with a substantial stone house. At breakfast, the jam spoon had been a present from Queen Anne to a Morley godchild now going to pieces under the churchyard yew. The cottage also sheltered candlesticks, pillow slips, engravings and so on passed down through generations. But what really struck Laura was a quite worthless object: a broken brick that served to prop open the back door. As she toed it into place with her wellington, Bea remarked that they really should get a proper doorstop, it was just that they no longer noticed the brick. It had been there forever, as long as she could remember. Her father, coming into the scullery, said much longer than that, he could remember it as a small boy. He picked it up, and they all looked at it. It was locally made, said David Morley, the bluish-black color came from the manganese in the region’s soil. He was a metallurgist, interested in minerals and materials. He pointed out faint creases and pockings in the brick, signs of insufficient control over its firing and hence of considerable age. It was smaller, too, than a modern brick—and by the way, did they know that bricks no longer contained clay but only sand and cement with pigment thrown in? Then Bea fetched a book, a local history. It confirmed that an Elizabethan manor house had stood on the far side of the cow pasture until a fire destroyed it in 1698. She examined the lump of brick: could it be Elizabethan, salvaged from the ruin? Maybe, said her father, it was very old anyway. He returned it to its place, and the two young women left the house to walk in polished September air, and the brick wasn’t mentioned again.

  But it weighed on Laura’s thoughts. Blue-blooded jam spoons and their like remained within families through time and space, were transmitted by inheritance, accompanied their owners through displacement and change. That was to be expected: such objects were cherished, if only for their associations. Somewhere in her father’s house lurked a pair of Victorian fire dogs, relics of the sizeable cargo shipped over oceans by Frasers for the embellishment of their stolen acres. But a broken brick! It was more matter than artifact. No one would think of packing it up to carry with them. Nor would it have survived in a house swept clean for a change of owners. Its neglected presence pointed to the persistence of Morleys in that one place. Her own people struck Laura, by comparison, as a vigorous, shallow-rooted plant still adapting itself to alien soil. The Frasers were undeniably modern, however. What was the modern age if not movement, travel, change?

  She remembered Theo once saying that the twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. “I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don’t belong where they end up and long for the places where they did.”

  That was what Laura looked forward to, evenings alone with Theo, the coils and flows of their talk. They were comfortable in two old leather armchairs, Theo’s long legs propped on a hideous corduroy pouf. The Dr. Gebhardt epic would continue. Her groundbreaking study of Hegel, Disco and Rhizomatic Hermeneutics was in fact the work of a graduate student, subsequently dispatched to an entry-level appointment in Tierra del Fuego with no provision for sabbatical. He disappeared there in mysterious circumstances—all that was known was that he had wept on receiving a letter from Dr. Gebhardt the previous day. After a costly investigation smuggled into the faculty’s budget under Research, this suggestive document fell at last into the dean’s hands. But Dr. Gebhardt’s menaces were so thoroughly encrypted in references to Horizontverschmelzung, text-as-paradigm and even—boldly!—to eumeneis elenchoi that nothing could be proved.

  But as the evening deepened, and the level in the third bottle sank, it was always of childhood that Theo spoke, recounting pleasures and dreads, tea in the garden with th
e scent of mignonette borders, a sinister china mandarin that adorned his mother’s workbox, where it nodded its wobbly head. There were scenes to which he returned obsessively, enlarging on earlier versions. Daydreaming of adventure, safe under the window at the top of the house, was one such recurring tale. Another involved a different window, this one in his bedroom. It opened straight into the branches of a pear tree. In spring there was an abundance of blossom. The child was told to be careful of bees. But he would stand at his open window listening to the bees at their busy work. “I thought of it as the sound of love. A patient, devoted murmur.”

  There came a spring when blossoms and bees were few; and one day the great silver tree was gone, cut down. The child blamed himself. He had not listened hard enough to the bees, he had failed in the loving concentration that keeps things steady and whole.

  Laura asked if the apple tree outside the kitchen had been planted to replace the lost pear.

  “I’ve never eaten such pears as came from that tree. Perhaps there aren’t any left in the world.” Theo’s hands made a shape. “Solid, narrow. A sculpted look.”

  It was an old-fashioned upbringing, Laura thought. There was a rocking-horse with a rolling eye, and a holiday beside a lake where the boats were shaped like swans. There were violin lessons and Sunday pony rides and wet afternoons spent with jigsaws or paints.

  She once asked, “Weren’t you allowed to watch TV?”

  He frowned. “It wasn’t important.”

  Laura’s notion of how the English reared their young was vague. Largely gleaned from books about children who tracked down smugglers or held midnight feasts at boarding school, it bolstered her Australian conviction that the old world was a backward sort of place.