What You Call Winter Page 4

  The night of Bertie’s visit, Annabelle made lamb biryani, a rare expense that revealed her hopes for the evening’s outcome. Roddy felt uneasy. The recent accidents preyed on his mind, and the dinner presented countless opportunities for mishaps. He had a horror of the ghost turning up during the dinner party, determined to wreak some new havoc. Roddy stayed home all day long, an occasion so uncommon that Annabelle asked if he were ill.

  “We have people coming,” he snapped. “I’m trying to prepare.”

  She laughed at him. “What will you do to prepare?” She was squatting on a low stool, peeling prawns, and flicking the leavings into an old red bowl. Her fingers were wet and specked with bits of shell, and she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. The girl had left a battered tin pot on the flame and was chopping onions.

  “Is that knife too big for her?”

  “For Celia? What nonsense! Every day of the week she’s chopping with it.”

  Roddy looked nervously at the prawns. “And these are fresh? You’ve smelt them?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Roddy? Go and pester someone else.”

  “Just take some care,” he said with irritation. Throughout the day he wandered through the rooms of the house, finding danger in every corner. In the afternoon, when he lay down to sleep for an hour, he felt a coil of tension in his neck.

  It was dark when they heard Bertie calling to the guardsman to open the gate. “That idiot,” muttered Roddy. “Never there for two minutes running.”

  Annabelle smoothed her skirt. “Remember, you promised to listen,” she said in a sharp whisper and opened the door.

  “Hallo, hallo!” called Bertie, raising a hand.

  “So good to see you,” said Celeste, kissing Annabelle on each cheek. Behind her was Mary, in a shapeless pink dress with socks and sandals on her feet. She was smiling shyly. “Say hello, Mary.”

  “Hallo, hallo, hallo!” she shouted, then twined her hands and cocked her head to one side.

  “Hallo, Mary! How pretty you’re looking!”

  Mary nodded, grinning.

  Annabelle pretended to pout. “How long it’s been since you’ve come to visit me! Where have you been hiding all this time? I think you’ve grown tired of us.”

  Mary shook her head violently. Hair slipped from her white bow, which reminded Roddy of a little girl’s.

  “All right, then, darling, come, come. Give me a kiss. There we are. You’ll have a drink, all of you?”

  “Rum for you, right, Bertie?” Roddy went to pour and found the level of rum in his bottle was well below what he remembered. But could he be sure? He was not a rum drinker; how long had it been since he had offered any to a guest? He stared at the bottle, trying to remember, until the sound of Annabelle’s voice roused him and he hurried back into the front room.

  Dinner was served without a hitch. Mary ate avidly, bent over her food with undivided attention, and when she had finished, she pushed back from the table and took her plate to the kitchen.

  Bertie looked after her fondly. “Mary likes to help.”

  “Such a sweet girl,” said Annabelle. “I see her every Sunday at St. Jerome’s.”

  “Oh, they just love her in the choir. She practices those songs night and day, doesn’t she, Bertie? She likes to put on little concerts for us. And the whole neighborhood knows her. When we walk down the street with her, I’m always astonished by how many friends she’s picked up. At church, at the films. Everyone’s waving!”

  Roddy glanced toward the kitchen. Mary and Celia were laughing together over the sound of running water. Celia had a high-pitched giggle he had never heard before. He wondered what it would be like to have Stephen and his wife and children living nearby. What places would they occupy in the neighborhood?

  “Now,” Celeste began, “let me tell you how we came across this contractor.”

  Later, after they had gone, Roddy sat in his chair and listened to the thin trickle of water from the spout. The girl was nearly finished cleaning, and in the bedroom Annabelle was snoring. But Roddy felt too spent to get up from his chair. The waiting, all the fruitless worry, had exhausted him.

  He fell asleep in the chair and woke with a start, some hours later, to the sound of laughter from the open window. He rose, stiff and aching, and looked through the iron bars. The night air was cool, and the guardsman had permission to burn a small fire. Sitting next to him was the kitchen girl, her head tipped back and a bottle to her lips. She sputtered and thumped the bottle to the ground, giggling. “Hssst.” The guardsman put a finger to his lips, but this produced only more gales of laughter. He grabbed her bare ankle and tugged teasingly.

  Of course Roddy had to put a stop to it. Celia was from a village near Poona, entrusted to them by her parents. It was Roddy’s responsibility to look after her while she lived in their house. But that unpleasantness could wait until morning, he decided. He would leave it to Annabelle. For the time being he watched their play with an odd wistfulness, conscious that here was the explanation for the rum he had missed. The accidents were only that. His father had not come home.

  The next day the guardsman was dismissed; the following week the girl was sent home to her mother. Roddy and Annabelle had a day girl in from the fishing village. At night they were alone. Roddy felt his life closing in smaller and smaller circles around him. Bertie was much occupied with his construction, and for the time being the card game was halted. Most days Roddy wandered to the gym to see who was about. When he was home, he watched cricket matches and napped more than usual.

  Roddy’s cast was removed, the skin beneath it pale and tender. A baby’s skin, soft and wrinkled and oddly sensitive. He felt it tingling, newly exposed to dust and air, the first time he walked in the evening. By now the ghost appeared only sporadically—whimsically, it seemed to Roddy. Was he being teased? He saw Dominic’s face in a bus window, or thought he did. He could not be certain that he spotted him in a wedding party. A figure disappeared around a corner on market day—was that his father’s stride?

  One day he went to see his parents’ graves. Dominic D’Souza had taught mathematics at St. Gregory’s School for Girls, three streets away from Roddy’s house. He and Roddy’s mother were buried side by side in the yard of the adjoining church, with a single stone slab that his mother had chosen.

  It was at the grave that Roddy, for the first time, tried to summon his father. The courtyard was empty, the girls in classrooms. The school building buzzed like a hive. “Dad,” he tried, though he had never called his father that. “Daddy!” The word rang against the stone. For a moment he stood, mortified by his own descent. How had he come to believe such things? But he stayed another twenty minutes, the hot sun pressing on his head and shoulders, until finally he turned away.

  When he reached home, the telephone was ringing. It was after eight and Annabelle had already gone to her investment club. Roddy answered; it was Stephen.

  “So, Dad, it’s come off at last! How does it feel?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “I have to be careful still. It’s tender. A bit stiff.”

  Annabelle chatted easily with Stephen, concocting one thing, then another, to report or suggest, offering advice about the children, but Roddy never knew what to say to him. He could hardly connect the strong, firm voice on the line with the child he had known, the narrow face and long, melancholy nose. The overbite they had paid to correct.

  Once Stephen had come home with a cut lip and bruised cheek. After Annabelle ministered to him, she sent him out to the garden with a strap and told Roddy to see to it; he was the boy’s father. Roddy had found the boy waiting for him just outside the door. He held the strap but did not offer it, and Roddy felt an unwelcome reluctance. Stephen’s lip was pink and swollen, crusted with sugar that Annabelle had applied to stop the bleeding. The bruise on his cheek was beginning to darken. But his eyes were fierce as he faced his father, reminding Roddy of the heroes in
films he had seen long ago. What had happened? Roddy wondered, but with no idea that he could ever really know. He felt a sudden jolt of anger that Annabelle should hold this boy responsible, this boy with his puffed lip who had already been wronged, and with that came the revelation that he and Stephen were allies at last. Roddy understood the boy when his mother could not; Roddy, not Annabelle, knew that this scene in the garden was a mistake, that Stephen had committed no offense.

  “The lip is paining?” Roddy had asked, gently he hoped, and when the boy had jerked his head, no, Roddy felt a nearly unbearable tenderness for him. He had wanted to beg the child not to get hurt, not to put himself in danger. But he simply put an awkward hand on Stephen’s shoulder and patted him there. “Go and tell your mother I’ve given you a shouting.” Stephen had stared at him a moment; at first, it seemed, he did not understand. Then his gaze changed. If he realized that he and his father had become conspirators, he did not let on. He didn’t smile, as a boy might after a narrow escape. But Roddy believed his son had been satisfied, that Stephen had looked at him and had not found him wanting.

  Now Stephen was telling him about the children. Andrew in the seventh grade, Katie in the fifth. “Dad, Mum and I have been talking. Maybe you should think about a flat building. The house is so much for her to keep up at this age …” He listened to his son’s voice streaming across long-distance lines: “money saved in case of an emergency … this thing with your arm … a wake-up call … a nice flat, built exactly to order …”

  “My father built this house,” he told Stephen. “He built this house for me and my brother, and I’m the only one left.” He could see Stephen still, standing in the garden with his swollen lip and the strap in his hand. For a glorious moment Roddy saw the point of his father’s visits —that they belonged here, in this place, even after death. His father, himself, his beloved son, a line unbroken. He felt a surge of joy. “This house will go to you!”

  There was a long pause, and for a moment he thought the line had gone dead. “I know, Dad. But I live here now.”

  Stephen rushed to fill the sudden silence. Katie was studying India in school. She had made a collage full of pictures torn from magazines. Elephants, Roddy guessed. Andrew was doing well on his ice hockey team, but Stephen had to take him to practice at five in the morning. “It’s pitch-black at that hour, and the wind comes barreling through the streets. But he still can’t wait to get on the ice.”

  “We’re having a cool winter as well,” Roddy said.

  “Dad!” He laughed. “What you call winter is nothing to us! It’s like our summer.”

  Roddy felt a burning in his chest. Annabelle had wept when Stephen left India, but Roddy had not tried to stop him. He had let his son go. When had Stephen drifted so far? When had their seasons become his?

  “This hockey business, is it dangerous?” Roddy asked suddenly. He saw the boy, Andrew’s face recalled best from photographs, but with a cut and bleeding lip.

  “Not too bad. They wear a lot of padding. There’s nothing to worry about,” his son told him.

  Roddy went to the Santa Clara Talkies. A sign outside said the cinema would close in a few months to make way for the construction of an American-style department store. The theater would reopen farther down Linking Road. Roddy, who had not come to the Talkies since he was a child, felt a strange hollowness in knowing it would soon be gone.

  He paid for a ticket and walked past the snacks counter, where children were splayed against the glass, choosing sweets. The hall was dim and close, filled with people smoking cigarettes and waiting in queues for the W.C. He had come at intermission, but he pushed against the crowds on their way to the lobby and climbed the worn steps to the balcony. His seat was in the last row, and he could see the heads of the people in front of him. From behind they might have been anyone, a dark knobby head, a wiry gray one. His father and mother, who had died so many years apart. His brother, who had slipped away to the Gulf and then to death so unobtrusively that Roddy could scarcely register the shift, from gone to gone, until the years had hardened his absence into something unyielding and permanent. Stephen and Jess and their little ones, trying to stand in the bucket seats to see the whole of the room, suddenly exposed beneath the intermission lights. A few rows farther, a woman with a bun held an infant over her shoulder, and even the baby’s face was so soft, so impressionable, that it might have been Stephen staring back over the years. He could not remember much of his son’s features as a baby, only the feel of him, the span of Roddy’s hand over his chest, the weight of his head.

  The lights blinked, calling back the crowd. Roddy had not felt so lost since the weeks after his father’s death. His mother had spun her grief into fervent prayer; his brother, young enough still to crawl into his mother’s bed without feeling ashamed, had cried on her pillow. Roddy found no comfort in either place. He had come to the films, in a fury of rage and sorrow. You see, I am here, where you were, where you forbade me to go, he thought fiercely, as though he commanded his fathers undivided attention even then. He sat in the back of the theater, twelve years old, and thought of all the nights his father had made him afraid. A folio of students’ work open on the table and Roddy with a book in his lap. They worked in silence. Roddy’s neck and shoulders ached.

  “Sit up straight. How can you learn, slumped over like that?”

  His father’s voice made him jump and Roddy eyed the clock with dread. Words on the page dissolved as he read them; he turned back a page.

  “Are you ready?”

  His father’s eyes were sharp and unrelenting. Roddy stumbled through answers he knew. “Wait, wait …”

  “You know it or you don’t know it. Go back again and tell me when you know it.”

  It was what Roddy remembered best of his father, those evenings of study, that keen-eyed gaze. For weeks, he could not imagine the world without those eyes pinning him to his book and forcing him up again. He could not imagine a world in which he could suddenly watch films one day after the next. He could not imagine a world, any world, beyond his father’s reach. As Lent passed, he waited with mounting desperation to be driven from the theater. Easter brought nothing. The footrace with which he had deceived his mother, finally run and lost, and the days flattened—broad, unruly, all his own. He moved into them knowing his father had left him.

  The lights dimmed again, and the reel flapped for a moment until a picture took hold. The film started abruptly where it had left off. All the dark heads in front of him were silhouetted against the screen. They were not his father or his mother, not the grandchildren he hardly knew. He was alone in the theater and suddenly frightened. When had he become so alone? How was it possible? Roddy D’Souza, a dutiful son, a family man. He had married, he had raised a child, he was a man with friends and connections; what had happened? He saw the guardsman and the village girl joined hand to ankle by the fire; he saw his wife reaching out to the baby boy at the top of the slide. He saw his life shrinking, cinched in closer and closer by the slow, calm circles of the ghost on his bicycle.

  Air thickened in his lungs, the circles tightened around his rib cage. His breath came in gasps and he struggled to his feet, pushing past knees and thighs, fighting his way to the aisle. His hand slid onto someone’s shoulder, and he grasped it tightly—“What’s wrong with you? Sit down!” — as he stumbled past to the end of the row. He leaned against the back wall and drooped forward, slack as a puppet, trying to breathe the stifling air. Was this the story of his father’s death, drowning in the darkness of the theater, alone? His breath rasped in his throat, sharp and whispery. Annabelle. Stephen.

  And then a peal of laughter startled him. Sitting on the aisle, two rows ahead of him, was Bertie’s daughter, Mary, laughing out loud and clapping her hands. Roddy glanced at the screen, where a tearful mother in a widow’s white sari was begging her son for something or other. The whole of the theater was caught up in this drama, hushed, enthralled, but Mary raised her hands high over her hea
d and cheered. She was attracting attention. People turned to stare, and Roddy could hear others begin to laugh. Were they mocking her? He looked for Bertie and Celeste but couldn’t see them anywhere.

  Mary swung her head from side to side, nodding and grinning at all the people around her. Some were smiling kindly, he could see now, sharing in her pleasure. A small child stood upright in his mother’s lap and pointed, and Mary pointed back at him, thumping her hand on her thigh in delight. “So sweet,” he heard a woman say. A middle-aged man lifted his arms, encouraging Mary to go on with her clapping. Ssscccchhhhttt, hissed a younger man, but Mary paid no attention.

  Roddy was breathing more evenly now; the bands around his chest had eased. He neither looked for his father nor wondered if his father looked for him. When the scene changed, and the son in the film pushed angrily past his mother, Roddy moved next to Mary. There were no more seats in the row, but he stood just behind her in the aisle and waited for the film to end. Her laughter spent itself eventually, but she rocked back and forth, smiling at some secret pleasure until Roddy surprised her and walked her home.

  The Santa Clara Talkies closed two months later, and construction began on the department store, a development Annabelle followed with great anticipation. She had been to department stores in the States with Stephen’s wife, Jess — the stacks of shirts in every style and color, the endless rows of children’s shoes. And she was ready with money to spend. Roddy had struck a deal with the contractor.

  “And he’s given me a gold chain, son. For my Christopher medal, just think! Your father!”

  When it was Roddy’s turn to speak, he cleared his throat. “If I can get a visa … you know, it’s difficult at my age … after the winter …”

  He handed the telephone back to Annabelle when his son said, “We can’t wait, Dad!” He imagined Katie holding up her collage to show him, shy little thing, and the pictures Roddy might help her add to it. He could go to the ice rink with a blanket for his knees and watch Andrew skate.