In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,71

any more. But of course in another way he will always be responsible for what happened and that knowledge is burned into him like a brand. At least she didn’t die. He imagines what would have followed if she had and how the rest of his life would be different.

Among other things, he talks over this subject with Caroline in the weeks that follow. She is the only other player left from the drama they’ve just been through and they cling to each other for consolation. They keep each other company in a bickering, dependent way, almost like family. She has now become his friend, though he didn’t seek her out by choice. On an arbitrary morning their lives were pushed together and fused by fate. She could have walked away when she heard me shouting, or kept her distance like the others did, and perhaps by now she wishes that she had. But instead she came up the stairs and into the room and since then she’s taken up station in a corner of his life.

But this makes for a fraught and uneasy alliance, he feels he owes her a debt and at the same time resents that obligation, he wants to leave this whole experience behind, to erase every trace of it, but she’s there every day to remind him. And she’s carrying her own pain and loss, which have become grafted onto Anna and by extension onto him. She’s in a bad state like him, not sleeping well, given to bouts of weeping. But she also seems to feel, though she doesn’t say it aloud, that he’s in some way a solution to her troubles, and he shrinks from that silent expectation. He has failed Anna, he will fail her too.

But his time here is drawing to a close. In just a month or two it will be unpleasantly hot, already a lot of local businesses are shutting down. He is leaving soon, meeting another friend in Bombay and travelling north, to the mountains. Caroline has tried to persuade him to stay, why don’t you meet your friend, she says, and come back here. No, I tell her, I have to move on. In response she books her own ticket home for a day before his departure. This date is coming closer, and he needs it, the leave-taking, as a climax and conclusion.

On one of those last evenings, when they’re eating dinner together, she says to him, what happened to me in Morocco, the accident we had there. You know, where I lost my husband.

Yes.

I haven’t told the story yet. I’ve told some of it, just the basic facts. But the whole story, what actually happened, I’ve never told to anybody.

Yes, he says, and he can feel what’s coming. It makes him sick to the heart, he wants to run, but he stays where he is.

I would like to tell the story just once, she says now. I want somebody to hear it, then I might be able to leave it and walk away. Do you know what I mean.

He nods, he knows exactly what she means. Whatever the story is, he knows it will be terrible and he dreads taking it on. But after what she’s gone through on his behalf, how can he refuse.

They put it off till a couple of days before her departure. At her request they go down to the beach one evening. The sun is beginning to sink into the water, the clouds are full of colour. They find a place away from other people, close to a little stream and a clump of palm trees, and sit on a log. I don’t know how to start, she says, I’ve written some of it down and I thought I might read it to you. But when she takes out her sheaf of papers it all feels wrong, too wooden and formal. Just tell me, I say, just tell me what happened.

Almost as soon as she begins to speak, she’s quaking and trembling. It happened thirty years ago, but it’s as if she’s living it again in this moment, and it becomes like that for him too. Her story travels into him, his skin is very thin, there’s no barrier between him and the world, he takes it all in. And even afterwards when he wants to get rid of it he can’t do it, in the weeks that follow as he tries to leave Goa and the village behind the things