The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (38 page)

Douglas looked at his wife. Jean was standing on the lawn talking to Evelyn. She shot a glance at their son. Sooner or later the three of them would have to sit down and discuss Adam’s sexual orientation. The thought of this conversation—indeed, any conversation—filled Douglas’s heart with lead.

I can’t live the rest of my life with her
.

So what did one do? Cross the gas station forecourt, like Jack Nicholson, and climb into another vehicle? Evelyn’s son had done it.

A chill wind blew. Evelyn hugged her cardigan to herself, wrapping it around her chest. It was an instinctive, girlish gesture. How frail she looked, as if a strong wind would topple her over!

“This has knocked us for six,” said Douglas. He remembered the plane, how he blew up the plump lozenge of the neck cushion and passed it to Evelyn. Already he had wanted to ease her passage through life. It was hard, traveling alone.

Evelyn, wrapped in the airline blanket. Recently the two of them had crossed the street to Khan’s Video Rental. At the crossroads some women waited for a bus—village women, Muslims, enveloped from head to foot in burkas.
“Being old’s like wearing one of those,”
Evelyn had said.

Had Evelyn’s husband ever told her she was beautiful? Hugh sounded a breezy, no-nonsense fellow. Evelyn said he was devoted to their spaniel.

“Here, Dad.” Adam passed him a Kleenex. He was looking at him oddly. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

“Who?” asked Douglas.

“Dorothy.”

“Ah,” said Douglas. “Yes.”

The sun was sinking. At this time of day the garden was transformed into a place of great beauty. Douglas looked at Evelyn, still miraculously alive, her shadow lengthening across the grass. Her hair was no longer gray. In this light it shone, the palest gold. He wondered if she had been blond in her youth. Seventy-four years of her life were unknown to him, and yet here she was, utterly familiar.

And then Adam took the apple, and ate it
. Douglas hadn’t read the Bible since Sunday school. They were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, he knew that.

Douglas got up, went indoors and lay down on the bed, his face pressed into the pillow.

L
ater, when Adam and his mother had settled down for their little chat, Adam said: “Poor Dad, he couldn’t stop crying. It’s not like him.”

“I never knew he was
that
fond of Dorothy,” said Jean.

“He’s inconsolable.”

T
he next day, Ravi and Pauline flew to Delhi to visit his family. She never discovered what had caused her husband to make that speech during the extraordinary Christmas dinner. Something had affected him powerfully, but he had been unable to put it into words. Maybe it was the scent of loss in the air, for that day she had decided to leave him.

Now she wasn’t so sure. They arrived at Delhi Airport, where the hands of the clock had to be inched, laboriously, into the future; Pauline could see the knee of the man squatting behind the clock face. Why can’t we simply be mammals? she thought. We
are
mammals. Why can’t we simply be warm bodies in bed, our arms around each other? The world is too terrifying to face alone.

Ravi touched her shoulder. “There they are,” he whispered.

At the barrier stood his family—his parents, his sister, her two children, his Auntie Preethi. Ravi waved back.

“Here goes,” he muttered, like a boy of six.

“I
wish you hadn’t told me that, Ma,” said Keith.

“I had to tell somebody,” said Muriel. “Now you know when I’m going to die, you know how long we’ve got each other for.”

“It gives me a weird feeling,” he said.

Three of them were walking through the Botanical Gardens—Muriel, Keith and Theresa—though none of them was interested in plants. Theresa said: “Don’t believe all that stuff, palm leaves and stuff. It creates such helplessness.”

“You’ve changed your tune,” said Keith.

“I want to go home,” said Theresa. “I’m tired of it here, my clients need me, Mum’s got Christopher now, though God knows what he’s going to do here. I mean he’s a sort of stockbroker or something.”

“Plenty of money in Bangalore, darling,” said Keith.

A monkey swung past, carrying a baby under its arm, but they were used to monkeys now. In two days’ time Keith and his mother would be flying to Spain. He wore a red baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, and a shirt printed with pineapples. Already he seemed alien to Theresa. For two weeks they had been inseparable, but now he was returning to unknowability. On January 6 he would, like Persephone, be swallowed into the Underworld, the sunlit Underworld of the Costa del Sol, where in some incomprehensibly dodgy way he would go to ground. I shall remember you all my life, Theresa wanted to say. I love you. Not in the way Swamiji wrote in his
Eightfold Path to Enlightenment
, however. There’s nothing cosmic about my love; it’s only too particular. I love your arms and your skin and the smell of you. I love you inside me. I love your eyelashes brushing my cheek when you blink and the way you make me laugh. These foolish things.

I
t was the next day. Sonny sat in the Gymkhana Club drinking whisky with Keith.

“I’m just a small fish, my friend,” said Sonny. “That
maderchod
P.K. is too big for both of us.”

“What’s a
maderchod
, mate?”

“Motherfucker.” Sonny drained his glass and snapped his fingers for more drinks.

“I’m cutting my losses and getting out of here,” said Keith.

“I must tell you something.” Sonny lowered his voice. “I did a terrible deed and in my next life I shall pay for it. Revenge is not sweet, dear boy. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.”

“What did you do, then?”

“It was I who killed Norman-sahib.”

“He died on the job, right?” said Keith, lighting a cigarette. “That’s the rumor, lucky old sod.”

“He died in the arms of a
hijra
.”

“A what?”

“A eunuch.”

Keith clapped his hand to his mouth.

“It’s not funny!” barked Sonny. “How can I forgive myself? I shall make amends to the old Britishers, I have decided to devote myself to their well-being, but how will I help his poor daughter, so sad and pale?”

The drinks arrived. Keith removed his ice cubes and put them in the ashtray.

Sonny spoke the words not expecting an answer. He was merely thinking out loud in the company of his new confidant who might understand the pickle he was in, Keith-sahib being in a pickle himself. A worse one, Sonny suspected, for he himself had never been involved in the drugs side of P.K.’s organization. Keith Donnelly, he guessed, knew more about this than he was prepared to divulge. Sonny certainly didn’t want to know, things being bad enough already. See no evil, hear no evil.

“How can I help this poor lady,” said Sonny, “who in three days’ time will fly home with only the ashes of her father for comfort?”

“You really want to help her?” Keith looked at him.

Sonny nodded. How simple it was in his boyhood, being passed from knee to knee! His mother’s lips against his cheek, the smell of her perfume. If only he could rewind his video and dwindle into a child again, adored just for being a boy.

Keith smiled. “I got an idea,” he said.

I
t was late. Douglas stood at the gates of The Marigold, gazing at the crossroads. There were four choices: the airport, the town, the office world, the Old City. He had come to a moment of decision. His skull felt tight. Nearby, the gateman’s cigarette glowed. Douglas had given up smoking in 1986, but he needed one now.

In the light of the streetlamps the legless beggar sat on his trolley. Evelyn said she only gave to two beggars; you had to make a decision on these matters. She gave to the legless man, for though young he was helpless. And she gave to the elderly beggar out of a feeling of solidarity. Their circumstances were worlds apart, but she said it all boiled down to the same thing.

Douglas thought of the forty-eight years he had lain beside his wife. Dorothy had dreamed about the water buffalo in the stream behind her childhood home, now no doubt landscaped over to become a corporate lawn. Lying next to Jean’s nightie-clad body, Douglas, too, had dreamed. The years he had spent with his wife had dissolved away as if they had never been. It was bloody terrifying. Exhilarating, too. What was real, in this life? Had he ever grasped it, all those years of being a solicitor and a husband, of raising children and tramping across Dartmoor?

Behind him, in the darkness, the crickets chirruped. Maybe they were tree frogs; he had never discovered. He knew nothing except that they would go on chirruping through the night and the beggars would go on waiting.

How could he cause such pain when sooner or later they would all die? Was such monumental selfishness justified even in the young and heedless? Christopher, Evelyn’s son, was bad enough, running away with an Indian lady and leaving his children fatherless. Here he was, apparently aged seventy-one.

“Rose in the bud, the June air’s warm and tender …”

For a moment Douglas thought it was a record. But the voice was too tuneless.

“Wait not too long and trifle not with fate …”

Maybe it was Hermione. Her grandchildren were visiting. She had told them she was writing her memoirs, a statement that had been met with polite incomprehension. More relatives were arriving the next day, and several people were leaving—his own son, accompanied by the Howard Hodgkin painting Dorothy had bequeathed him in her will; Pauline and Ravi, accompanied by her father’s ashes. Theresa, too, was flying back to England, and Keith was taking his mother to start a new life in Spain.

“Love comes but once, and then, perhaps, too late.”

Douglas heard a smattering of applause. He thought: I wish I’d learned how to play the piano.

It’s never too late
. Madge was getting married in March. She was moving to New York with her cheery little millionaire. Anything was possible.

Douglas’s heart thumped like a teenager’s. He stepped into the hotel. The calendar still displayed last year’s puppies although it was January 5. On the desk sat an ashtray, containing a stub smudged with scarlet lipstick. It was Madge’s. She no longer spent the nights at the hotel but went home with Mr. Desikachar,
See you later, alligator
, reappearing at lunchtime the next day. There seemed something profoundly naughty about this.

In a while, crocodile …
Standing in the empty lobby, Douglas made his decision.

T
heresa tucked into her vegetarian lasagne. She was always hungry on planes. Beside it sat a portion of shrink-wrapped cheddar and two crackers. She looked at the cheese. How appreciated it had been, by the elderly people she had left behind!

She thought: I have eaten meat. I have drunk beer from the mouth of my lover. I can hardly recognize the person who flew out two months ago. I never had the showdown with my mother, the conversation I had been meaning to have all these years, but it has somehow become irrelevant. If there was anything to forgive, I have forgiven her. I didn’t need Swamiji to tell me this; I have found it out all by myself. My mother is another generation; she has no vocabulary for my dissatisfactions. She and her friends at The Marigold, they are the last of a species. Their memories are of a world that is already history: a world where children were seen but not heard, where men looked after women. Where women cared for their men. The witnesses to this world are disappearing one by one. Madge’s husband Arnold had survived Auschwitz. Their world was one of tragedies and certainties that have disappeared forever.

The stewardess pushed the trolley past. “Can I have one of those?” asked Theresa.

She took the small bottle, twisted off its cap and poured the wine into her glass. As she did so she thought: People like me, we won’t be old like them. We’ll have to make it up as we go along.

Then she thought: Maybe, despite the perms and the cardis, that’s what they’re doing too.

Theresa finished the lasagne and split open the wrapper. She gazed at the yellow rectangle of cheddar. To be frank, she was fed up with cheese, cheese and more cheese. No wonder she had put on weight.

You’re not fat, you’re gorgeous
.

Theresa drained the glass of wine. Closing her eyes, she thought: What’s it all about? What
is
it all about?

W
ithin a month Christopher was back home. Marcia flew out to Bangalore, to his rented flat, and prized him out. It was easier than both had anticipated, as if he were an oyster already loosened within the shell.

To his surprise, Marcia was compassionate, almost tender. “Honey, that’s where fantasies should stay. In your head.” She sat on the bed while he packed. “Else what should we do for dreams? Believe me, I know.” She had done something to her hair.

At the airport, by sheer force of will, she got them upgraded to business class. Christopher was helpless. The past weeks shimmered and dissolved. “That story’s not your story,” Marcia said. “
We
are.”

Oh, it was painful. But in retrospect he knew that the suffering he had inflicted, and experienced, was seen from his usual distance. Nothing had really changed. He had been a man watching himself embarking on a thrilling and impulsive venture, a man impersonating himself.

He sat on the balcony of their apartment. Way below, on 82nd Street, the traffic was stilled and released by the lights, over and over again. As winter progressed the sunlight inched down the building opposite. Marcia brought him out a glass of Chablis. “What a silly boy you’ve been,” she crooned. “A silly, silly boy.” She stroked his thinning hair.