“That made me hesitate, but I persisted. I explained to him that I was not cut out for the sort of life that we were leading. I wanted to travel. I wanted to get to know people. I couldn’t face the prospect of sitting there on the verandah for the next goodness knows how many years, drinking afternoon tea with his mother while she went on and on about some complicated injustice that had been done to her family twenty years before. I just couldn’t face it.
“He tried to persuade me to stay. He offered to build a new house next to the existing one, which I could then live in and not have to share with his mother. He said that he would pay
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for people – educated people, he said – to come and talk to me during the day. He made all sorts of offers.
“I became more and more depressed at the thought of what I was doing. Thomas was such a good man, and I was behaving as if I was some petulant Madame Bovary. But I couldn’t stop how I felt. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for a life which I found so completely unfulfilling and so I eventually gave him a date on which I proposed to leave.
“Two days before I was due to go – I had already packed everything and had the flight from Bombay all organised – two days before, there was the most awful kerfuffle. One of the managers from the factory arrived and he was sobbing and waving his arms about. It took some time before I managed to work out what it was all about. There had been an accident at the factory. Thomas had taken it upon himself to inspect a piece of equipment and had inadvertently touched a live wire. They had tried to revive him, the manager said between his sobs, but it had been to no avail. ‘You are widow now,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry, but now you are widow. Your husband has died of electricity.’
“You can imagine how guilty I felt. And I still do, to an extent.
That man had offered me nothing but affection and support, and I had repaid him with what I suppose he must have viewed as contempt. That is not what I felt, of course, but that is what he must have seen it as.
“His mother now became mute. She looked at me, but then looked away, as if it was painful even to see me. I did my best to speak to her, but she simply didn’t seem to hear me. And in the meantime, I had to deal with the lawyers, who informed me that I now effectively controlled the electricity factory, as Thomas had left his entire shareholding to me. This was worth quite a bit of money. The family was well-off anyway, but the factory, it turned out, had some very valuable land attached to it. I could easily live very well on the income which the shares produced, even if we sold none of the extra land. And I could live on that not only in India, where things are cheap, but back in Scotland.
“To begin with, of course, the thought of controlling the factory appalled me, as it tied me down even more. But I did make an 74
effort, and I stayed for a further few years, getting the hang of how the business worked. Eventually, I decided that I had done enough and that I could leave without feeling too guilty. The old woman
– Thomas’s mother – had become demented by now, and spent her time wandering around the garden with a long-suffering attendant, chopping the heads off flowers. I returned to Scotland for a while, and then went off on further adventures for quite some time, which I regret that I can’t tell you about just now because this risotto I’m making is requiring my complete attention and I cannot talk about anthropology and make a proper risotto all at the same time. So the rest of my life will have to wait for some other occasion.”
Pat left Domenica shortly after ten, crossed the landing to her flat, and went straight to her room. Bruce’s door was shut, but the narrow band of light from beneath it told her that he was in. And there was music too; in the hall she could just make out the faint sound of the Cuban bands that he liked to play. He was considerate in that respect, at least, as he was always careful to keep the volume low.
She closed her door behind her and prepared for bed. The evening had started badly with that exchange over the hair gel –
she would replace that tomorrow, she had decided – but Domenica’s company had soon made her forget her irritation. Domenica and Bruce were polar opposites: she represented wit, and subtlety; Bruce represented . . . well, what did he represent? She closed her eyes and thought of Bruce, to see what free association might bring, but she opened them again sharply. A jar of hair gel.
She had been unsure what to expect of Domenica. On the face of it, dinner with a sixty-one-year-old neighbour might have been a dull prospect, but it had turned out to be anything but that. There were, presumably, dull sixty- one-year-olds, but there were also plenty of dull twenty-year-olds. It might even be,
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thought Pat, that there were more of the latter than the former.
Or did it not matter what age one was? If one was dull at twenty, then one would still be dull at sixty-one.
Age was not of great importance to Pat. The secret, she thought
– and she had read about this somewhere – was to talk to people as if they were contemporaries, and that was something that Domenica obviously understood. Her older neighbour had not talked down to her, which she might easily have done. She had treated her as somebody with whom she could easily share references and common experiences. And that had made it all seem so easy.
She had found out a certain amount about Domenica – about India and anthropology and, tantalisingly, a few snippets about feral children – but she was sure that there was much more to come. During dinner, their conversation had not let up, but Domenica had said little more about herself. Rather, she had told Pat something of the neighbours: of Tim and Jamie, who lived in the flat below, of Bertie’s parents, Irene and Stuart, and of the man in the ground-floor flat, the man whom nobody saw, but who was there nonetheless.
“There may be a perfectly simple explanation,” said Domenica.
“Agoraphobia. If he suffers from that, poor man, he won’t want to go out at all.”
Pat noticed that Domenica spoke charitably, but when it came to Irene and Stuart, her tone changed.
