Hot Water Man

  The guests had taken their seats now. The lights were switched off. Donald heard the scrape and whirr of crickets up in the bushes. Or were they tree-frogs? He had yet to learn. Forty years ago these streets were a wilderness of scrub. Karachi was a small sea-port then with a native bazaar and an English cantonment; where two-lane carriageways now lay. Grandad had shot a tiger. Or perhaps that was somewhere else.

  With a creak, Duke settled beside him. Donald had liked Duke from the start, when with commendable American frankness Duke had told him his wife was going to have a hysterectomy. Most people, himself included, would have steered murmuringly around the precise nature of her trouble. Christine leant across him.

  ‘When’s the op, Duke? Last time I saw you, you hadn’t heard.’

  ‘Saturday. I have faith in the guy – finest surgeon in Kansas.’

  The whirring insects, or frogs, were reinforced by the whirr of the projector. People stopped talking. A pale, fluid shape appeared on the screen, flicking with numbers. It was an old picture, in black and white. Through a hoop the British Lion snarled, shaking its mane and growling. Showing its teeth, it resembled Grandad’s, tiger skin, now balding and stored in the attic.

  Two people sat down in front. It was Shamime and her brother Aziz; they both turned around to smile. Aziz was as tall and as dazzling as his sister.

  The film started. The hero wore R.A.F. uniform.

  ‘We all have to do our bit, old girl.’

  ‘Reggie darling. Each time I look up in the sky I’ll think it’s you.’

  ‘Don’t cry.’

  ‘I’m crying because I’m so proud.’

  The faces were familiar from scores of British films; they were smoother and younger here. Donald was absorbed. Shamime’s piled-up hairstyle blocked his view; he tilted to the side. The scene changed to an airfield. Shamime was adjusting a pin in her hair; through the gap in her arm he glimpsed a Hurricane’s wing. Reggie was talking to another pilot now. His voice came from her coiffure.

  ‘Before you know it we’ll be home. First one back at base sets up two pints.’

  ‘I’m already saying cheers.’

  In front, the two heads bent together. A muffled giggle; Shamime whispered something to her brother. Donald stiffened. What were they laughing at?

  A roar; the fighters were off the ground. Donald could almost smell the petrol. Through grey 35mm clouds, lit by the sunset, the Hurricanes sped. Voices crackled on the intercom.

  ‘Can you hear me. Number Two? Over.’

  A silence.

  ‘I said, can you hear me?’

  An explosion: streaks, flashes, the screen burst with fireworks.

  Silence. Donald sat very still. Up in the black sky, a jet whined over Karachi. Its passengers were safe. On the screen, smoke plumed. A splash. Water settled; smoke drifted. Donald’s throat tightened.

  Beside him Christine shifted, rummaging in her handbag. But it was not for a handkerchief, it was for a cigarette. She leant towards him in a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Dash it all, and it was his round.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His turn’, she said patiently, ‘to buy the drinks.’

  She sat back, crossing her legs so casually in her wartime dress. Donald grunted. He thought of his mother, a wartime sweetheart and so soon a wartime widow. She had worn a dress similar to Christine’s but hers was not bra-less; underneath it she wore solid foundations. Christine seemed so untested. He was so untested. His father had braved the flak. How would he, his father’s son, behave under enemy fire?

  He would be called Don. At one period he had tried this name but nobody seemed to notice, so he went back to Donald. His life had been so safe; his father and thousands like him had made it secure. On the beach at Brinton there was a derelict bunker; bang-bang he had shouted to his friends, crouched in its interior which was littered with sweet wrappings.

  ‘He was in a fighter squadron,’ he told Duke after the film, another gin and tonic in his hand. ‘But he wasn’t killed on ops.’ He stopped. ‘Ops’ seemed, in the circumstances, a poorly-chosen word. ‘He was bombed in a train coming home on leave, in 1945. So near the end of the war. Ironic really.’

  But his father had been a hero, like Grandad. In Donald’s sense of the word they both were. Men in the front line of action.

  ‘You see, Duke . . .’ He leant forward; alcohol had made him confiding. ‘I come from a family of what you Americans would call achievers. I mean, not grand or anything like that. Rather the contrary; middling middle-class, quite ordinary really. But men who stretched themselves to the full and got things done.’

  And whose women followed them, he added wordlessly, watching Christine wandering off in the direction of the french windows. How could he explain his need to protect her, and her corresponding urge to liberate herself from his manly support? Here in Pakistan he had a sales-force of thirty-five men; there were slums through which, as they walked, she must surely cling to his arm; there were signposts in Urdu script which neither of them could understand. She was no longer striding her known English streets. It was not subservience he wanted but some recognition, long lost, that he had skills to respect. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted no women friends around her, either, to raise their eyebrows pityingly at this concept. He wanted to recapture her. And if that was impossible, he wanted them to be lost together.

  And another thing, he wanted to say. We don’t seem to be having a child.

  When he knew him better, surely he could confide in Duke. The man was like an oak, strong and weathered. He had lived but he was somehow innocent too, a big simple man. He looked fifty but he would look the same way for ever. And he could take his drink; Donald’s head was already swimming. What had Christine said once? When you like someone you make them a hero; it’s your short cut so you needn’t work them out. Adding silently, no doubt: you like to build them up because you’re so weak yourself.

  Shamime approached. ‘You’ll all come to the beach on Saturday, won’t you?’

  ‘Saturday?’ said Duke.

  ‘We’re having a few friends to our hovel.’ She laid her hand on Duke’s arm. ‘We’re not letting you pine away.’

  ‘What’s the hovel?’ asked Donald.

  ‘Our little beach hut. You must get a beach hut, Donald.’

  Aziz appeared at her side with a plate of food. Oily spiced meats spread into egg mayonnaise; their British Council hosts laid on a multinational menu.

  ‘We’ll have some Scotch,’ he said. ‘The real McCoy.’ With a charmingly quizzical smile he looked at his glass, which held the local stuff.

  How did they get it, thought Donald, in this Muslim place? Connections, connections. Their uncle was a minister.

  Shamime turned to Duke. ‘I’ve found your perfect hotel receptionist. Aziz.’ She pointed to her brother. ‘He’d be wonderful. He looks gorgeous and he’s such a dummy.’

  Aziz smiled. The international type, he looked the part. He wore well-pressed slacks and a cotton sports shirt, the pocket jutting with his packet of Rothmans.

  ‘It’d keep him out of mischief,’ said Shamime. ‘He spends all his time at the Club, or in his den fiddling with his veeseeyah.’

  A pause. ‘His what?’ asked Donald. He pictured some local artifact, like a string of beads.

  ‘V.C.R. Video.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He’s got some quite nice films. Cabaret, Butch Cassidy, that thing with Barbra Streisand in it.’

  ‘A tiny bit more up-to-date’, said Aziz, ‘than the offerings of your kind British Council.’ He speared a prawn.

  Donald prickled. He thought of men like his grandfather risking their lives for this country. Keeping the peace, digging canals to bring fertility to what was then known as India, making laws that were still maintained as the arbiters of sense. All so the likes of Aziz – then considered a native – could now have a driver waiting outside in the Mercedes.

  Shamime leant towards him. ‘Do look at your wif
e,’ she whispered. ‘I think she’s going native.’

  Donald turned. Chairs had been arranged for eating. In one group sat Mr Samir, his office manager, and Mr Samir’s wife in a turquoise sari. They forked in the food, nodding and smiling. The third person was Christine. She looked large, pale and shabby. She alone was eating with her hand. To be precise, swabbing her plate with a folded flap of chapatti.

  6

  By noon Christine admitted defeat. She moved her idle paraphernalia – Nivea oil, cigarettes, damp, half-finished airletter to Joyce – into the one air-conditioned downstairs room, a small study. She clicked the switch; soon the air grew lukewarm, then almost fresh. On the dot of twelve-thirty there would be a tap on the door. There Mohammed would stand, her gin and tonic on a tray. She had a hangover but she did not dare tell him, as he was a Muslim.

  The window looked on to the side wall. A strip of earth separated the front lawn from the back where Mohammed’s quarters lay. This consisted of one room jutting from the kitchen, with its own curtained doorway. Unpainted concrete, it was stuck to the white building like a wasps’ nest. From it came cooking smells and the sound of a radio. The front garden was empty but at the back it was always busy; chickens scratched around, but when they came up this side alley children ran out to shoo them back. She did not like to step around the back of the house; she felt shy. Mohammed’s wife was a plump woman who was probably the same age as Christine; when she saw Christine she giggled and pulled her scarf across her face. Yesterday she had been sitting outside on a rug. She had looked approachable for once. It was in the heat of the day; the children were quiet. Christine had walked up, cleared her throat and said ‘Salaam.’ The woman had lifted her head and bent down. Oh heavens she was praying.

  Once she knew she was coming out East Christine had started reading bits in the newspapers she would never normally have done – reports on the new order in the Middle East and articles called ‘Behind the Veil’. By now she knew a little about women in Islamic countries. Behind the veil sounded gauzy and romantic, an enticement. But down in the streets she had seen women enveloped in grubby white sheets, a bit of crochet where their eyes were, stumbling along the pavement behind their husbands. She had been to a gathering at Mr Samir’s house where chairs were lined against the wall and women sat in rows, pink sari, blue sari, glinting with jewels and drinking Fanta while from the next room came men’s laughter. They had talked about somebody’s wedding, speaking polite English for her sake. ‘You have children?’ the next lady asked her. ‘No,’ she had replied. And there the conversation had ended.

  Last night after the film show she had asked Shamime about women here.

  ‘Don’t be fooled, it’s a confederacy,’ Shamime had said. ‘We run the place really but we’re too clever to show it.’

  Christine thought of London and Roz, the girl who owned Rags Period Frocks. Roz, herself and some others had a kind of women’s group, too informal to be given a name, just something that had evolved. They did not quite call each other ‘sisters’ but they felt like a sisterhood. A confederacy of women.

  ‘Women rule’, said Shamime, ‘but subtly. We may not have much power but we’ve got influence. Far more effective, my girl. Women here are the real personalities. Every man I know is dominated by his mother. Just you wait and see. They’re led by the nose. But we’re cleverer than you; we don’t let them realize it.’

  In Shamime’s nose was a jewel. There was something primitive as well as exotic about this; to pierce a nose seemed more shocking than piercing an ear. It looked like bondage. Led by the nose: who was leading whom?

  ‘Do I have a pimple?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Christine blushed. ‘I was just looking at that diamond. Who wears them here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I mean – is it something to do with being unmarried, or grown-up . . .’ She struggled with cultural images. Always it was the women who were marked – wedding rings, those red blobs Hindu women wore. Marks of ownership, sometimes by husbands and sometimes by God.

  ‘Heaven knows.’ Shamime laughed. ‘I only had it done last month. A little man at the Intercontinental.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You’d look lovely with one, but I think a sapphire with your skin. Shall I tell you his name?’

  ‘Donald would have a fit.’ Christine put her hand to her mouth. ‘I mean, it looks gorgeous on you, but . . .’ This was worse. But Shamime just laughed, her jewel winking.

  Christine switched off the air-conditioner. It was lunchtime. Outside the window a midday breeze had found its way into the garden; in the silence branches scraped back and forth against the wall. Who was confining whom? She thought of her mother, back in the lounge at Mill Hill. She loved her mother with deep exasperation; these feelings were mutual. ‘The Larches’ was always home; a grassy bank separated it from the Al dual carriageway, busy day and night. Signs led off in all directions, Dover, Folkestone, Hatfield and the North. During Christine’s childhood the M1 was being built half a mile beyond the existing road; the giant legs of a flyover grew up with her over one autumn. When she was seventeen she took driving lessons.

  Her mother had learnt to drive before Daddy died but she did it helplessly, gripping the wheel like a sinking woman. At first glance her mother was far from subjugated. She was slim, active and full of bright observations. She worked on the board of the local school, she brought up her daughters, she cleaned up before the cleaning lady arrived just as she, Christine, now hurried from room to room before Mohammed reached them. Yet she lived behind a purdah of the small and the personal. Setting the world to rights meant sorting out the sock drawer. ‘Silly old me,’ she would say, comfortably refusing to change. She invited indulgence; Christine’s father fondly narrowed his topics when she took part in the conversation. If he had minded he never let it show. Wearied of confrontations Christine too had ended up by making allowances for her; in other words, by treating her as less. This had saddened her. Though easing the atmosphere her mother had noticed it too and treated Christine with the brightness of a hostess. She was settled in her domestic life, bound by her received ideas of what a wife and mother should be.

  Christine had struggled free of all that. She had taken the M1 motorway up to university; she had travelled further. She had tried to escape what she had realized was the prison of her sex.

  ‘What about the prison of mine?’ Donald had asked once, mildly. ‘All this lib thingy. Do they think I adore going to the office every day?’ He had paused. ‘I don’t understand why women are such slaves. I mean, I am so you needn’t be.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, I can’t afford having a bash at being a teacher and then deciding I don’t like it – wait a second, Chrissy – and then going into advertising and deciding it’s too trivial, and then taking time off with all that yoga business, and then being a part-time waitress for one’s experience of life with a capital L – wait a sec – then trying to write about life with a capital L but getting a lovely tan instead, then working in that clothes cupboard for a pittance. I mean, if I miss one repayment to the old Abbey National it goes down on a little file and if I miss any more they stop our mortgage.’ He paused for breath. ‘Somebody’s got to have a nine-to-five mentality. I can’t afford to find myself.’

  ‘You’re very hostile.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s just that I get a bit fed up when I come home and there’s this tribe of them, all living off their husband’s alimony and filling the kitchen with cigarette smoke. They look at me as if I’ve stepped into the wrong house.’

  ‘It’s only because you don’t fancy any of them. You’d agree with them if they flattered you and had plunge necklines.’

  ‘Now who’s being sexist?’ He took her in his arms. This seemed condescending; she struggled free. He said: ‘You always say I’m conventional, darling, but you’re just as bad.’

  ‘Why do you only call me darling when you’re getting at me?’

  ‘You were much ??
? well, freer, when you were younger. Sort of more original when you didn’t mind about being ordinary. When you weren’t worrying about any of this.’

  ‘I wasn’t married then. Sorry, sorry. It was just that I hadn’t thought then.’

  ‘Not thought – listened to other people.’

  She had felt uncomfortable. Why did she remember this conversation so well?

  She picked up her Urdu Primer and went into the kitchen. Last night, after the film show, Donald and herself had not learnt their Urdu together as planned; fired by alcohol and a tiff about her eating with her hands they had tried, doggedly, the bedsprings creaking, to conceive.

  In contrast to the rest of the house the kitchen was primitive: stone sink, bare boards, a place memsahibs entered only to rub their finger along the surfaces and check the grocery list. Mohammed had finished washing-up the lunch. He was scrubbing the sink. The place smelt of cockroach powder. She leant casually against the wall, assuring him by her stance that she had not entered to inspect. ‘Never trust the servants,’ said that terrible Marjorie woman whose husband worked in Grindlays Bank.

  ‘Mohammed, what’s the name of that bazaar down in the old city?’ She talked, of course, in English. A pause. ‘Bazaar.’

  ‘Bohri Bazaar.’

  ‘Not that one.’ Everyone went to Bohri Bazaar. It was full of tourist knick-knacks; European women sailed through, the crowds opening like waves. Shopkeepers spoke in hectoring mid-Atlantic.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Beginning with J, I think. In . . . old . . . city.’ She spoke loudly, as if addressing the retarded. Donald did this too. She tried to find the word for ‘old’ in her Primer. It was full of words of a lost age, like ‘inkwell’ and ‘cavalry’, but no ‘old’.

  ‘Ah, Juna Bazaar. No good, memsahib.’

  ‘I go.’

  ‘Bad place, memsahib.’

  ‘I go.’

  ‘I go also.’

  ‘No, no.’ She prodded her chest. ‘I go alone.’