The Pleasure Seekers (31 page)

The daughter, Indrani, from what I gather (because they don’t talk too much about her), still hasn’t returned from her get-rich stint in Guatemala with the English boyfriend. Mama said that she disappeared with a chunk of Mr Jain’s retirement money a while ago – so I guess she’s done a runner
.

Anyway, they’ve still got her pictures all over the house – graduation pictures of both kids – at least four in every room, in case you missed the point. Oh, and the mantelpiece, I have to tell you about the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It’s got this giant Taj Mahal in the centre, flagged by the Eiffel Tower on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. It’s TOO tacky
.

Every Indian family’s living room I’ve been taken to so far is exactly the same. LOOK, they all seem to be saying, see how far we’ve come – all the way from our village in the boondocks. But we’ve been to Paris, we’ve been to New York, we own a house in London. God! Don’t ask how I’m going to survive the next few months because every time I walk into this house I feel like I’m on high alert, like they’re watching me all the time to see what I’ve been using and how much. Only yesterday, I was up in bed early, reading with my lamp on, and who pushes the door and walks in but old sourpuss himself. Guess what he tells me? Beena, I hope that light hasn’t been on ALL night. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! They make me watch TV with them every night. There’s this quiz show
– Who Wants to be a Millionaire –
and it’s hilarious because whenever any of the contestants decide to risk their money and go for the jackpot, Uncle hides his head behind a cushion and says, Puppy, I can’t watch any more! Is the answer correct?

Bean wrote all this to her sister, imagining the delight on Mayuri’s face when she saw her letter sitting in the jute bag that hung on the gate of the house she and Cyrus had rented by the beach. A small white house with two-bedrooms and a garden where they grew tomatoes and basil and sometimes threw fancy-dress parties. Bean could almost see her sister shaking with laughter, and then sitting down at her writing desk.

Mayuri’s news from home was predictable at first, about the heat, or the difficulties she was having with the children at the Montessori school where she taught. And then slowly, as the distance between them grew wide enough to accommodate the truth, she began to reveal things Bean could never have imagined.

Sometimes, when I’m lying across from Cyrus in bed, it’s as if I don’t know him at all. I can recognize all the parts of him – the long, gangly legs, the pale arms, the nose he hates so much. It’s a picture I know and love, but sometimes, how can I explain it? I’m standing outside this picture. I’m looking at this man I call my husband, and he’s a stranger to me. Do you know how terrifying that is? Sometimes, when he has his arms around me, I have to move out from under them and retreat to my own side of the bed. Just so I can breathe. This happens only in flashes, of course. On a daily basis, we move and work like one of his well-oiled cars, knowing exactly how to please and irritate one another. But when it does happen, it’s the saddest thing in the world. I used to believe in destiny, but I don’t know any more, Bean. Now I only believe in what you create
.

Sometimes I think of Mama and Daddy, about those Saturday afternoons they’d lock themselves in the bedroom. I remember us standing outside and hollering for them, and Daddy coming to the door, all dishevelled, saying how we had to run along and play because this was their “alone time”. I wonder if they ever had their moments of doubt. They must have, but how amazing that they never once made us feel it. But tell me about you. Have you met any nice men? There must be lots of nice men in London
.

Oh, there were men. Men and more men. Everywhere Bean looked there were men. Bean watched them on her way to work, dressed like crows in their dark suits and briefcases, and she wondered whether there was a life to be made with any one of them. With that man reading the paper so devoutly – that fine-looking, upstanding man who might be cheating on his wife with a young girl in the office who totters in on spiky heels with blow-dried hair? Or how about that stranger there – leaning against the pole, devouring his just-picked-up photographs from Snappy Snaps? If it wasn’t for the way he clutched the leather satchel under his arm, or the stoutness of his fingers, Bean might have approached him and said, ‘Let’s get off at the next stop and walk the streets together. Let’s build a house and start a life.’

Bean was looking for someone to come rushing in to meet her at the end of the day in a blue long-sleeved shirt and ironed trousers. Someone who would gather her into his arms and take her to a place they could call home. She was waiting for someone to push open the door and enter her life, but it hadn’t happened yet. Not yet.

Once a month Bean went to visit her Uncle Huw and Aunty Carole in Brighton, and allowed her cousins Gareth and Ed to parade her around town as the exotic cousin visiting from India. Or she took the train to Nercwys and stayed with her Uncle Owen, who was suffering terrible arthritic pains, but was still spending all day in the garden watching his trees grow.

In Nercwys Aunty Eleri wanted to tell her stories of when her mam was young and daring and had dashed off to London and then dashed off to India. ‘Look here, love, that’s her before she went away,’ Aunty El said, pointing to her favourite photograph of Siân, standing at the gates of Tan-y-Rhos, looking at the fields ahead of her – her hair so long and beautiful that Bean, looking at it, wanted to say,
Mama, Mama, why did you ever cut it?
‘Your mother’s something else, I tell you. All the rest of us getting older by the minute, and she just looks the same. Hasn’t changed a jot.’

Bean pored over Aunty El’s immaculate photo albums, searching for pictures of her sometimes summers. There were so many that when Bean looked through them, she couldn’t remember the exact order of what happened when. There were pictures of her first trip when they were all standing like a row of perfect pins at the front door: Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Nain, Aunty El, Taid and baby Bean in Taid’s arms. There were old black and white ones of Nain and Taid: Nain with her curls so tight they bobbed up under her hat like springs; Taid looking exactly like Siân in a man’s suit with that same long, serious look. There were pictures of Uncle Huw and Owen with their heads full of hair, smiling as if one of them had just told a joke. There were so many pictures of Bean and Mayuri in smocks and frocks, sitting on wombles and bicycles and on their uncle’s shoulders, in swimsuits at the Sun Centre in Rhyl, on ponies at the beach in Kinmel Bay, that when Bean looked at them she could never remember ever having been so small, so precious.

At her grandparents’ grave, Bean sat trying to work out how part of them were part of her, how part of this village was part of her. Because if she understood
this
, she thought, perhaps she’d understand where she fitted into the rest of it – into this mist and rain, these houses and cars, these people walking their dogs, leading their lives.

And my life?
Bean wanted to ask.
Where’s my life in all of this? Is this my real life or is it just a prelude to something before I return . . . Return to where? Why do I always feel like I’m visiting wherever I go?
Why? Why? Because the sky’s so high.
Is this how you felt when you first came to India, Mama? Is it possible you still feel this way
? One foot in, the other foot out.

24  A Great Sin Can Enter Through a Small Door

Within a month of her arrival in London, Bean signed up with a temp agency called Working Angels, who were so impressed with her words per minute and Excel skills, they immediately sent her out to financial and media organizations all over the city, where she stuffed envelopes, despatched media packages and updated computer databases; where no one bothered to learn her name because she was only going to be there for a few days or a week, tops; where by the time she worked out where the fancy pens were stocked and who in IT to call if there was a problem, she had to wave a quick adieu and disappear through the revolving doors.

As it grew colder, Bean began to learn the city underground. The elaborate connect-the-dots system, which had at first seemed confusing, now began to appear in her dreams like a giant earthworm, burrowing under the surface – picking people up in one place and spitting them out in another. For a long time she travelled like a slave to those dots, going from point to point without having any idea how it all connected above the ground, finding out only later how sometimes it was easier to just get out and walk: Green Park to Piccadilly Circus for instance, or Holborn to Chancery Lane.

Bean loved the trains and the people who travelled in them. What possibilities there were lurking under each of their lives, what chances escaping into the air! What amazed her most was the sense of decorum that prevailed; nothing like India with all its abundance of chaos and noise. Here, nobody complained if the train halted for five minutes between stations. At most, there were raised eyebrows, a brief glance up from the columns of the newspaper, but otherwise, people seemed oblivious, little islands unto themselves. Once in a while, though, there were slip-ups – some poor fool trying to jam himself into the carriage while the doors were closing, thinking those two minutes between trains were going to change his life. And once, at Baker Street, Bean saw a man try to kill himself by jumping on the tracks – an incident that rattled her so badly, she quashed all her dominant Indian sensibilities, stopped elbowing to be first and began standing far behind the yellow line until the train came to a complete and final stop.

By the end of September, Bean was assigned to a small publishing firm in Islington called Stonewell’s, who specialized in bed & breakfast guides to the British Isles. Bean’s job was to phone each of the B&B owners to find out if they still held the same accreditation, if they had any new information they wanted to add and how many, if any, of their clients in the past year had mentioned Stonewell’s as their major source of information. It was a boring job, but steady.

Al Stonewell, proprietor of Stonewell’s, was an amiable, unkempt sort of man who stormed in late every day with his pug Lizzie and disappeared under the mountain at his desk, only to emerge in the afternoon to make tea for all his employees – an act he’d later bring up casually in the pub to prove he was a man of egalitarian principles.

There were only two other employees at Stonewell’s: Tom McDonald and Allegra Edwards. Senior editor Tom was a young, Oxford-educated man, always dressed in collars and V-necked sweaters. If you could get him to talk about classical music or tennis, his face lost its usual constipated look as he burst into a torrent of unexpected enthusiasm, but his modus operandi was to sit quietly in the corner, tap tapping away on the computer in a dispassionate and dull manner.

Allegra was a web designer by profession, but a portrait painter (of fluctuating talent, it has to be said) by inclination. She was one of those vigorous, voluptuous women that Bean always thought, if she were a man, she’d be attracted to. She was tall and striking in a Meryl Streep kind of way, besides which, she took nothing too seriously, and was so heavily endowed with that excellent English quality of self-deprecation, that Bean spent many an afternoon at her desk with her legs clamped, recalling those long-ago days in Sylvan Lodge when Mayuri and she, having worked themselves into a frenzy of laughter, would have to race and do half-bum half-bum on the potty upstairs.

After a month at Stonewell’s, Al sat down with Bean and told her that Working Angels was charging him £10 an hour to hire her but paying Bean only £8, so how about they eliminate the temp agency and he hire her for £9?

Bean acquired a routine. Angel Station every morning. Past the hairdresser, Abel, who asked her to come away with him to Paris every weekend. Past Sergei, who flirted madly while making her tuna and sweet corn baguette for lunch. Past the glass doors of the two-man architect’s firm that Bean could see straight into if she leaned towards the left-hand side of her desk.

Bean spent many hours leaning on the left-hand-side of her desk, spying on the raven-haired Spanish architect with the muddy green eyes. She knew how many cups of coffee he drank, how he cleaned his fingernails while talking on the telephone, the way his compact body eased in and out of his golden Vauxhall. She knew at the end of the day, if she walked slowly and pointedly enough, maintaining eye contact through the glass, he would see her and give her a little smile.

Allegra and Bean made wagers about the Spanish architect: could they get him to wave? Did he have a woman? Did he even like women? What was the width of those sturdy calves beneath his jeans? They began an ever-evolving list of possible names for him on the weekly ideas pad: Raphael, Francis, Enrique, Fernando, Juan, Gabriel, Jorges.

Bean began to feel that this had always been her life. She put weekly cheques into her first-ever bank account. She had drinks with everyone after work at The Fitzroy Tavern, always hoping that the Spanish architect would walk in. Always missing him, because she had to rush home to Lewisham, where Mr Jain would be standing at the front door, tapping his foot impatiently because Bean was a little past the 9 PEE EM curfew, saying, ‘This is England, missy. ENGLAND.’

Bean would do this and do this for three months until the incident with Deenu happened. Then, Bean would pack her bags and flee to the uber-posh Euro-Trash area of South Kensington to live with Allegra, who offered her the spare room in exchange for a monthly contribution of £400, plus one nude sitting a week – a deal that Bean, given her circumstances, couldn’t possibly refuse. Bean would change from a girl to a grown-up, throw her incy-wincy fears up in the air – and fall in love like never before. Russian rocket scientist, Brazilian dancer, Greek musician, English actor, Nigerian investment banker, Canadian rock-climber and finally, Spanish architect. Bean, with her own set of keys for the first time in her life – ka-chink ka-chink ka-chink – coming and going as she pleased.