Questions of Travel Read online

  Laura, 1990s

  THEO OFTEN SAID THAT he favored the beaten track. “Europe’s what I am, for better or worse. There’s nowhere I want to go that can’t be reached on a train.”

  “Australia!”

  “A dream place. Best left to the imagination.”

  “India?” For there, in plain view on his shelves, was a small library of large volumes about the subcontinent.

  “That was Mutti. She was such a proto-hippy. She dragged Gaby and me to Mexico as well. Everything was wonderful, and we didn’t understand any of it.” He took down one of the Indian books, turned pages, held out a photograph of a dancer crowned with seven cobra heads. “This man. The beliefs that move him, that got him here—I’d always just be gawking.” He rubbed his wide forehead, trying to explain.

  “Isn’t that the point? Discovering things?”

  “There’s no past in tourism. It’s one thing after another. There’s no time for time to accrue.”

  He also said, “I hope for the moment when what I know turns strange.”

  But one of Theo’s great qualities was that he never tried to diminish by belittling where a friend enthused. So he studied maps with Laura, argued about destinations, passed on tips about bargain fares.

  He turned up one afternoon at a house Laura was minding in Belsize Park. It had rained all morning; Theo had walked under dripping trees. When she opened the door, Laura thought calmly, He has come for me. That was because the fresh smell of rain had entered the house—the connection made sense to her, if to no one else. Inside, Theo glanced around—it was a contemporary, impersonal, chic kind of house with polished concrete and slabs of light—and said, “How relentlessly interesting.” His hair was damp, Laura saw, and his shoes. He told her that he had run into a friend he hadn’t seen for a while. Meera Bryden was the brand-new editor of the Wayfarer, glossiest of travel glossies. “Of course she wants to revamp it all. So I said I knew just the person she should be begging to write for her.” He handed Laura a card. “She’d like you to call.”

  “Darling Theo!” said Meera. “He’s coming to supper tomorrow. Why don’t you join us? I’m dying to meet you. And do bring something you’d like me to read.”

  Laura rang the restaurant where she worked and claimed that she had the flu. She set up her laptop and sat down. Theo had said, “Meera won’t mind where you write about. India. Sydney. All those stories you’ve told me about places you’ve been—pick any one.” The latest issue of the Wayfarer lay beside Laura. She opened it at random and read: Africa is adventure. That was what I discovered on my epic overland journey. A blackened stone spire rose in her mind like a warning finger. She was thinking of a story she hadn’t told Theo, and would never tell anyone, about a man she had met in Strasbourg. An airline’s midweek special had lured her there the previous year. She took a room in the sort of hotel that can reliably be found near a railway station, and went out to look at the city—her guidebook promised a famous cathedral and, in it, a famous clock. Later, wandering around, still unnerved by what she had seen, Laura spotted a shop that sold confiture de bière. Beer jam! Why hadn’t that occurred to Australia? No need to stop at jam, either: beer bread, beer sausages, beer pasta…Clouds were advancing, lengthening like strands of greasy wool combed out. They rushed over her, darkening the city. It should have been frightening, but the clouds moved on quickly—they were people hurrying home, hectic and smug. Night fell. Laura walked along a canal full of upside-down houses. She went into a bar and stood at the counter drinking wine. The French were addressing each other in precise, declarative sentences. A man remarked that he was suffering from un flux nasale. This was so plainly superior to a runny nose that Laura turned her head away to smile.

  She met the eyes of a man sitting alone at a table, with one hand curved around a beer. His nails were trim and shaped like spades. Quite soon, Laura and Émile were walking along a moon-chilled street. A high, blank wall ran down one side. Where it ended, there was a tree like a candelabra; its branches, innocent of leaves, bore upturned, waxy flowers.

  In her hotel room, Laura scarcely had time to set the scene by switching off the overhead light in favor of the bulb above the basin in the corner. Some hours later, Émile was getting dressed when he asked the kind of perfunctory question a resident asks a tourist. Laura answered that her first sight of the cathedral, at the far end of a street, had terrified her. “I had this awful feeling I was looking at something that had gone wrong—the scene of a disaster. The cathedral’s so dirty and so huge and so crowded around with other buildings. There’s no perspective.” What her mind was showing her, as she spoke, was something that couldn’t be looked at—it could only be encountered. Walking away, she had glanced back at the side of the cathedral. She saw the wing of a giant bat that had crashed and turned to stone where it died.

  Émile listened attentively. Then he told her that when he was nineteen, he had left home forever. There was a flight to Marseille, another to Grenoble. It was late when the plane touched down. The uncle who had arranged his papers and paid his fare drove Émile through darkness punctured by headlights to an apartment on the outskirts of the city. The next day he woke to the rapturous thought that he had arrived in France at last. He had analyzed its revolutions, memorized its poems, listed its principal exports. He hastened to the window and threw back the shutters. Then he screamed.

  It was explained to him, when he was led back into the room, that what he had seen was a mountain. The high-rise that housed him was wedged against its stony black flank. If he were to lean from the window, he might touch it—that is, if someone hung on to his feet. “But I couldn’t forget. My first sight of la belle France: a catastrophe that blocked the sun.”

  At this point, Émile and Laura found themselves with nothing to say to each other. What they had done in the bed with the dip in the middle was timeless. But now the past had shown up. It was a tree whose roots split the dusty gray carpet; its branches brushed the walls. They held bright, harsh-voiced parrots and a soldier planting a tricolore in a mound of corpses and a boy who slept with The Three Musketeers beside his pillow.

  In London the night deepened, and Laura worked on her story for Meera Bryden. She was still exhilarated by the effortlessness of writing on screen—skaters must know that swift swoop and glide. But as her work took shape, her enthusiasm ebbed. The traceless erasure of mistakes, first thoughts, alternatives masked the fallible labor that paper preserved. By the time she had finished writing, she no longer trusted her processed words. Unblemished but unfresh, they put her in mind of supermarket apples. She raised her linked hands above her head and stretched; she was thinking of Émile. His hands had smelled faintly of pepper. He rocked inside her, and in the depths of the hotel room, the door of the wardrobe sprang open; a misshapen wire hanger dangled. It was only now, remembering that night, that Laura realized this: the stories they exchanged had had nothing in common. One was about place, the other about time. She had told a traveler’s tale about the jolt delivered by strangeness, while Émile had described the first step on the road to disenchantment—it was really a story about the end of childhood. Relating it, he had looked serious and kind. But afterwards he put on his jacket hastily, as if distancing himself from a blunder, and left at once.

  “Don’t fret,” said Theo. “Meera’ll love your story—and you. She’s completely sweet. And she’s gone and married this fabulous man.”

  Lewis Bryden said, “Orstraylia? I had the most marvelous time jackarooing there. All that marvelous Outback. It seemed so much more real than Sydney and Melbourne. I mean, what is the point of Orstraylian cities? They’re just so secondhand.” To Laura, he added kindly, “But I believe the whole country’s come on awfully well. There was that marvelously good film about the schoolgirl murderers. Darling, what was it called? With Kate Winslet.”

  He carried on like that throughout the evening. His jaw was regulation issue, his profile designed for the screen. But something in the way his head
sat on his polo-neck suggested that it would come away without a fuss. So time passed happily while Lewis held forth—Laura was watching him pace about with his head tucked under his arm.

  The Brydens hadn’t been married long. Lewis found reasons to touch his plump, sexy wife: leaning across the table to stroke her fingers, resting his palm on her haunch as she changed his plate. When Meera, describing email to their guests, said that Lewis and she were addicted to it, his smirk insisted on the kind of messages they exchanged.

  Theo, leaning on Laura’s arm as they walked to the Tube, exclaimed rather thickly, “Lucky, lucky Meera!”

  He had added to his collection of Beloveds, Laura saw.

  As they started down the stairs to their platform, he swayed. A Fraser instinct for self-protection, a vicious, vital mechanism, kicked in. For a second, Laura saw her pretty hand shoot out and the long length of Theo broken on concrete. She grasped him, steadied him, of course.

  The surface of their relations remained the same after that evening at the Brydens. But something invisible and crucial had changed. It cleared a space for observation. Laura noticed that Theo no longer pleaded when friends tried to leave the house in Hampstead. Now he said, “Must you be so fucking dreary?” He spoke lightly and mockingly and meant it. More often than not, Laura gave in to his pleasant, edged hostility. She was a good sport—wasn’t that the Australian way? The following day would be sour with resentment. Her muscles cried that she earned her living on her feet while Theo sat at a desk like a child.

  The junk he brought home was spreading. The bedsteads from the garage had found their way indoors to rest against a desk. The heavy curtains in the dining room had vanished, replaced with orange venetian blinds on which a printed sunset flared. Mirror tiles had conquered a wall in the hallway, swirly mauve and silver paper was crawling over the downstairs loo. Throughout the house, tiny rubber dinosaurs paraded on ledges. Shaggy hot-pink or teal rugs, shorn from sci-fi sheep, had settled on carpets. Everywhere, the milk crates had multiplied.

  A child in buttoned boots rose from an Indian grave and ran through the depths of the mantelpiece mirror. Laura heard Hester say, Ruth choked and died—her throat was lined with gray velvet. That memory misdirected. It led Laura to think of the ugly modern house rising within Anna Newman’s walls as an infection rather than as something struggling to be itself.

  The two shapely armchairs that cradled conversation had been joined by a third, a giant recliner striped in nubbly brown and fawn. He had found it on a pavement, said Theo. Imagine that, Laura replied.

  Ravi, 1990s

  HE WAS LOOKING AT a photocopy of a sheet of ruled paper torn from an exercise book. A witness statement, Malini said. “This woman saw the bodies behind the temple. They took all the men there and hit them with rifle butts. She said she couldn’t forget the sound of the skulls splitting open—it was just like coconuts falling on the ground.”

  It was the kind of information that came Malini’s way as she visited villages around the country. Ravi shuddered at her tales but managed to forget them quite soon. Some of these things had happened in the late eighties; a long time ago in his view.

  Malini was folding the paper, her face triumphant. The center of him stirred.

  Sex made her talkative. After lovemaking, she embarked on stories of death squads and abductions, which was one reason why Ravi didn’t always listen to what she said. Their bed was a site of ecstasy and education. From the first afternoon in a friend’s borrowed room, she had been shameless: experimental, bold.

  A rotund baby, Hiran was lengthening into a scrap of a child. They fed him anamalu plantains to fatten him, but he remained a wisp; barely there.

  Ravi heard, Kang kang buuru! Chin chin noru! From the window, he looked down at the street. Several small children, including his son, were playing on a patch of waste ground near the rooming house. A neighbor looked after Hiran when Malini was at work, and he had become inseparable from her brood. “Run, run, run…,” shouted a fat little boy who seemed to be bossing everyone about. Hiran scampered after the rest, his arms swinging stiffly with his fingers pointing down. These days he ran everywhere—the quick patter of his steps was one of the background noises to life in the rooming house.

  Ravi lit a cigarette and remained at his post. A different game started up below. The children ran around until one shouted, “Bomb!” At once, the others threw themselves to the ground, where they lay spread-eagled and very still. After a little while, they got up and ran around again. Ravi couldn’t see the point of this game. But there were days when the children played it nonstop.

  Malini didn’t get on with one of her colleagues, a woman called Deepti Pieris. The origin of their quarrel was blurred. It had something to do with education—Deepti sent her children to an international school—or the position of a desk. Before it erupted, Malini had been drawn to Deepti, a confident, careless person. They had even unearthed an old connection. As a junior reporter on the social pages of his newspaper, Malini’s father had been present when Deepti’s aunt made her entrance at a ball. An architect had designed her dress. The inner layer was made of dark, coarse silk, the outer of an improbably fine net; at the last minute, hundreds of fireflies had been inserted between the two and the opening stitched shut. Malini’s father had never forgotten it: the stunned faces all turned the same way, the girl encased in living light. His photographer, an excitable Eurasian, had swooned.

  Recently, Deepti had let slip the name of her brother-in-law: a thug who owned a tire factory. When some of his workers had agitated for strike action, two strangers paid a visit to the most outspoken. When they left, the man had a broken back. “Deepti tells everyone that her brother-in-law paid for the man to be examined by his own specialist,” said Malini to Ravi. “As if we don’t know who put him in hospital in the first place.” That was the kind of story she brought home about Deepti now.

  On top of everything, the Pieris woman had a temper. Only that morning, she had flown into a rage with the tea boy and threatened to have him dismissed. Afterwards, she had gone around the office all sweetness, pressing slices of chocolate cake on everyone, laughing and talking too loudly. “She’s a typical bully. Suddenly she realizes she’s gone too far and tries to win people to her side.”

  Ravi was of the opinion that thugs and chocolate cake were secondary to the case. The underlying cause of Malini’s hostility was that she had liked Deepti at first. After the matter of the school or the desk, she felt she had been deceived. Her father was mixed up in the whole thing—Malini was as finicky as a cat where he was concerned. The tale of the firefly dress, something that had shone in her childhood, had been handled by Deepti and was tarnished. Ravi said all this to his wife, but in a tactful, long-winded way, and added that whatever the Pieris woman had done, she wasn’t responsible for her brother-in-law.

  Malini was looking thoughtful. Ravi realized that she hadn’t heard a word. She said, “You know, now I think Deepti really did feel bad about the tea boy. All that fuss with the cake. He was the one she really wanted to give it to, in fact.”

  A diptych:

  The first panel shows their wedding night, when at Malini’s suggestion, he gently dipped his fingers in her. When he withdrew them, they were strung with a luminous gossamer that thickened here and there into a silver node. For a long time afterwards, whenever he heard World Wide Web, what Ravi saw was that glistening mesh.

  The second scene dates from the last year of their marriage, a night when Hiran was keeping each outward breath pinched in his nose for a few seconds as he lay sleeping in an angle of their room behind a curtain improvised from a cloth slung over a nylon cord. It was a rhythm that created tension, Ravi’s own breath suspended as he strained to hear each faint exhalation. Meanwhile, Malini was whispering of a woman who had taken delivery of a small parcel, opened a jeweler’s velvet case and found her husband’s eyeballs nestled on ivory satin. He was a journalist and had been missing for weeks.

  Ravi’
s voice came out far too loudly. “Be careful,” it said.

  Laura, 1990s

  BEA’S COUSIN VIVIENNE, WHO lived in Naples, was returning to England because her father was ill. The thing was, she didn’t want to give up her apartment or the students with whom she was paid to converse in English.

  Bea reported all this idly to Laura. Yet an idea fanned open in the two women’s minds at the same time. It was a Sunday morning in May, and they were drinking coffee in a blue-vaulted room, the courtyard of Bea’s garden flat. There was a yellow rose and a creamy one against a wall. The hillside scent of thyme spiraled from a tub where a bay tree also grew. In twenty minutes Laura would have to leave for the lunch shift in Islington. A sense of fate—the future fixed in a shining stroke—excited and frightened her. She looked into Bea’s face and saw that she was in the grip of the same shivery thrill.

  Laura said that she couldn’t possibly do it, she had never taught English to foreigners, she had no idea how to set about such a thing.

  A soft golden moustache was sometimes to be seen above Bea Morley’s lip. She stroked it now, summoning the brisk, encouraging tone she favored when addressing an underperforming minion across a desk. “Of course you can do it. It’s only talking.” Bea was a great fixer. If the thought passed across her mind that in the absence of Laura, Theo might have more frequent recourse to her, she batted it away.

  Fate, magic, outcomes that seemed ordained—they hadn’t yet finished with Laura.

  Weeks had passed since dinner with the Brydens, and she had heard no more about writing for the Wayfarer. She didn’t like to pump Theo, now a regular visitor to their flat.