A Life Apart (27 page)

T
he November morning briefly toys with the idea of frost but settles for bruised sunshine instead. If it holds, the afternoon is going to be one of
those autumn ones, glassy air blazing with burned gold till the dark comes down like a swooping cat, sudden and swift. In their separate rooms, both Anne Cameron and Ritwik, sleepless and still,
think of cats.

It wouldn’t do for Ugo to get that fat sparrow, no, it wouldn’t, but she knows of no way to prevent cats from stalking birds. He would probably come and offer the
half-dead bird to her one of these days, purring and wrapping himself around her ankles. No, she couldn’t have that. Ugo himself was one of those offerings, although an unintended one. The
Pakistani family five doors down, with three children, one of the kids, what was his name now, Saleem or Osman, one of the boys, certainly, but beyond that she cannot be any more definite, one of
the boys had come in with seven kittens one day, spilling out of his arms and shoulders and hands, and dropped them one by one in her front room.

‘You like? Amma says we can’t have them all. You want one? Please.’ The boy, hardly more than six, was pleading.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No. Who would look after it?’ Best not to get attached to creatures, and at such a very late hour in life too.

‘You,’ the boy said, with perfect, unassailable innocence.

‘I’m not very good at looking after things.’ The words hurtled out, as if her faculty of speech itself had become incontinent. What was she
doing?
Very soon, she’d
actually start telling this little boy, with such lovely dark eyes, like a forest lake, about how she could never look after things. People. Richard. Clare. Christopher.

‘Please.’ That word again.

In the end she didn’t know how one had come to be left in her house. But she had got the nice and ingratiating Mr Haq, the boy’s father, to install a cat-flap in the back door
leading to the garden. That way, Ugo could go in and out as he wished; that was more than half the problem taken care of. But the boy, was it Osman or Saleem, she doesn’t see any more.

She lies. She saw him once, huddling in a corner of the road with half a dozen other boys, when she made an extremely rare sortie from her front door to the end of the road one day, just to see
if she could make it unattended, just to see. The boys had fallen silent when she had emerged from the house. A few foreign words, opaque and derisive, tinged with cruel laughter somewhere, had
leaked out from their close cluster. And then, ‘Bag lady.’ More laughter. Of course, they thought she wouldn’t be able to hear.

Maybe it wasn’t Saleem or Osman at all among those boys.

Ritwik is obsessed with Ugo. Never having shared a living space with an animal before, his first instinct was to feel slightly repelled by the whole idea. The cat hair
everywhere didn’t help. And he was convinced he would catch some disease off the fat marmalade animal, diphtheria or something equally terrifying. He doesn’t know when that gave way to
this rapt adoration, watching Ugo and thinking how he was perfect, pure form. Nothing that he did – the way he moved, yawned, curled himself, stretched out in the slowly moving quadrilaterals
of sunshine on the carpet, head-butted Ritwik’s outstretched hand, ran his jawline along the human knuckles – nothing was less than infinite grace.

And then there was the disdain, the utter unimportance of taking anything else except his own wants into account. Pure form, yes, but pure selfishness as well. And why not? Why should animals
conform to human ideals or indeed be made to behave in human ways? That is why Ritwik hates dogs, their slavering, adoring excess, tailoring their lives to human expectations and emotions. No such
rubbish with cats. They do things on their own terms; you like it, fine, you don’t, you can fuck off. There was a letter in the
Guardian
a few weeks ago that reminded readers:
‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff.’

He is becoming a staff to Anne. No sooner does he think that than he cringes at the bad pun. Oh, well, anyway, he
is
a support, there is no denying that. In the beginning, while Gavin had
explained his duties to him, it had all seemed neat, contained, a job more than anything else: making sure that Mrs Cameron used her stairlift all the time; keeping the bath dry
at all
times
; locking and securing all doors and windows because who knows what miscreants might be targeting the house, knowing a brittle, eighty-six-year-old lady lived there with only a part-time
help; feeding the cat; changing Mrs Cameron’s sheets; giving her a warm sponge three times a week; chamber-pot duties; cleaning her after she had messed herself; heating her soup; collecting
her winter fuel allowance; trips to the Post Office for monthly collection of state pension . . . The list grew, like something organic, with a breathing, spreading life of its own, but it was
manageable. It could be boxed under the broad title of ‘duty’ and that itself limited it.

What he hadn’t been prepared for was the little ambushes tucked away cunningly between the spaces of these boxes. Like the time Anne walked into his room, without knocking, her powder blue
nightdress clinging to her bony form like a helpless sail trying to clutch on to something before it was blown away by the lawless winds. In the kind, low light of his bedside lamp, which he always
kept on, he noticed there was a conspiratorial look in her hollow eyes, a gleam that could only have been called naughty. And mingling with her normal doughy odour was something else, something
floral and sick . . . juniper berries, yes, that was it.

It took him another few seconds to nail down the smell to gin and that too after he had noticed her teetering on the soles of her feet while saying, ‘Boy priest, story time. Story
time.’

Almost without thinking, Ritwik looked at the watch on his bedside table. Twenty past two. Did the old bat never sleep? Over the last few months, he had gradually trained himself to be woken up
like this, with as little gap as possible between the meshy drag of sleep and awareness, sharp like an instant shard of glass. You couldn’t have the submerging luxury of drowsiness when there
could be an eighty-six-year-old lying in a crooked and impossible heap at the bottom of the stairs. But to be woken up by the drunken old bat demanding to be read a story? There were limits.
Besides, where the fuck did she get her hands on a bottle of gin?

He swallowed his annoyance. ‘It’s very late. Do you know what time it is?’ It was pointless asking her anything, or having the to and fro of ordinary human interaction through
small talk with her. She never answered. In most cases, she probably never even heard the questions from the other side. In the radical innocence of old age, the horizons of her world had become
that of an infant’s: very close and devoid of everyone in it except her own self.

‘Priest boy will read a story now. You can choose the book.’

‘How generous of you. Thank you.’ The acid crept up his throat. If Anne heard it, she didn’t say anything. There was always the danger that she registered far more things than
she ever let on. Ritwik had found out that Anne clocked things with the beady-eyed sharpness of a bird, bringing them out later, at unexpected and sudden moments, seemingly without motive, but they
never failed to unsettle Ritwik deeply. It was like having your bookshelf suddenly break into speech one morning, ‘You don’t really have time for a wank now, why don’t you go down
and make Anne her tea?’

So he did exactly what he was told: he chose the book. He got out of bed, went over to the bookshelf and picked out his Arden edition of
Hamlet. Teach her a lesson, this one; let’s see
if she ever asks me to read again.

‘Shall we go to my room? Richard shot himself in here. It was his study, you see,’ she said.

Just like that. No warning, no advance preparation, nothing. As if it were as trivial as saying, ‘This room is too dusty, let’s go sit somewhere else.’ Ritwik knew that the
questions which swarmed into his mind, like humming locusts, a huge drove of them, would receive no answers, not even the basic one, ‘Who is Richard?’ He filed the comment away, heavy,
dangerous, like a bullet, in his head. Like Anne, he would bring it up when least expected, see if surprise led to a chink in this wilful wall.

‘I removed all the pictures and drawings of birds from the house after that. The bloody lot. Gave them away, drove out to a landfill and got rid of the rest,’ she keeps talking to
herself.

‘OK, let’s go to your room,’ he said, his voice perfectly modulated, normal. Overnormal. ‘Do you want me to take your arm?’

When they were settled in Anne’s room, with its musty smell of dust, sourish yeast and the new liquid detergent Ritwik had bought last week, he opened the book at random and started
reading, his delivery flat, expressionless, as deliberately droning and undramatic as he could make it.

To this, Hamlet then says,

Something in the words, some feathery whisper behind this son chiding his mother, his disgust oozing out from the fascinated, sick lump of words he had so lovingly chosen to pin her down, lulled
Ritwik into stressing the right syllables, even doing different vocal modulations for Gertrude and Hamlet. He left out his tags, ‘This is the Queen’, ‘Now Hamlet says’, and
let the drama tug him away.

Anne’s head was lolling. There were bubbles forming and breaking, accompanied by the rhythmic drone of slight susurration, on her lips. Ritwik stopped, reached for the edge of her
counterpane and tried to wipe her mouth. At that very instant, she opened her eyes, pin-sharp, unreadable, and said, ‘Christopher died in India. Malaria. A severe type, they said.
That’s why I came back. Richard was in school here. I could hardly live there on my own.’

What on earth was she saying? She was in India? When? Why wait for four months and then mention it? Why not in the very beginning when an
Indian
person was moving in? Who was Christopher?
Which bit of India? When? Why? Was Richard her son? Was Christopher her husband? Would Gavin know? Why hadn’t he said anything?

He continued his reading, leaping over lines because Anne’s words had made him miss pages and he didn’t want to waste time finding the line where she had lobbed her explosive: he
didn’t want to give her an excuse to think he was unduly curious about her life.

‘We lived first in Delhi and then in Almora. Christopher was with the Forest Commission. You’re not from there, are you? You look different.’

‘No, I’m from Calcutta.’

‘Never went there. I went out there when I was your age. Came back ten years later. Changed something in me. Didn’t like it there, not to begin with. Not even while I was there. But
after I came home, for years I went around missing something, not sure quite what. Felt a bit empty. Pale. Make no mistake, I was relieved to be back here. But then, over time, I got bored, I
suppose.’

Ritwik kept very quiet. It was like watching a very rare animal come out to drink; if you so much as exhaled, it would immediately bound off, never to be spied again.

‘One of Christopher’s officials was eaten by a tiger. Fancy that. Hoo hoo hoo hoo.’ The laugh was like a high moan of a malicious wind in the pliable top branches.
‘Shouldn’t laugh. But it seems so unbelievable now. Tigers carrying off people. They were doing track repairs to the railway lines, I think.’ Pause. ‘No, I think I’m
confusing it with something else. Heavy rains and the whole rail track got flooded. They had to take a boat from Ranikhet. A boat on the railway lines.’ Her voice was becoming faint, she
seemed to be losing the thread of her story. She looked distracted.