A Touch of Love Read Free

notebooks.
    ‘What’s in these?’ he asked, pointing.
    ‘Stories,’ said Robin. He handed Ted a lukewarm plate and a knife and fork.
    ‘You’re still writing, then, are you?’
    ‘On and off.’
    ‘I still have that issue of the college magazine,’ said Ted, in a tone of chuckling reminiscence. ‘You know, the one we both contributed to? You wrote a story, and I did a short article.’
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    ‘My piece was about object-oriented programming. People told me it was rather humorous.’
    Robin shook his head and began to eat chips with his fingers.
    ‘So what are these stories about?’
    ‘Oh,’ said Robin, wearily, ‘it’s just a sequence I’ve been working on. I don’t know why I bother, really. There are four stories, all interrelated. They’re about sex and friendship and choices and things like that.’
    ‘Four?’ said Ted. ‘I can only see three.’
    ‘Aparna has one of them. I wanted her to read it: she borrowed it this afternoon.’ He pulled apart a piece of cod and took one or two reluctant mouthfuls. Then he added, suddenly: ‘One should think very carefully before speaking. Don’t you agree?’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘I said, one should think very carefully before speaking.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    He was leaning forward, newly earnest and communicative.
    ‘What I mean is, a word can be a lethal weapon.’ He paused on this phrase, apparently pleased with it. ‘One word can destroy the work of a million others. A misplaced word can undo anything: a family, a marriage, a friendship.’
    Ted was about to ask him why he thought he knew anything about marriage, but decided against it.
    ‘I’m not with you,’ he said.
    ‘I was just thinking how easy it was to upset Aparna today. You see, she showed me this book.’ He pushed his plate aside, once and for all. ‘It was a new book, a hardback. I could see it wasn’t a library book, so I started teasing her about it, saying, “Since when have people like us been able to afford books like that?” Then she told me she’d been given it, because one of the authors was a friend of hers. So I took the book and looked at the title page, and there were two names, one of them English and one Indian. So I pointed at the Indian name and said, I suppose this is your friend? And she stared at me and slowly took the book out of my hand, and she said, “You just gave away a lot about yourself”,’
    Ted was baffled. He thought carefully and fast, anxious not to embarrass himself. What was the matter with this man, that they misunderstood each other so often? Friendship, he had always believed, was a meeting of minds, like marriage. Katharine and he not only understood each other as soon as they spoke, but frequently they understood each other even before they spoke. Sometimes he knew what she was thinking even before she had said it. Often she knew what he was going to think even before he had begun to think it. Intellectual compatibility had become one of the constants of his life, one of the givens, a habit, an assumption, like the company car, like the greenhouse – for which, he now remembered, he was meant to be buying three new panes at the weekend.
    What was the purpose of this abstruse anecdote? Presumably it hinged on the fact that one of the authors of this book was Indian, and that Aparna was for some reason offended at being linked with her. But surely Aparna was herself Indian? She had a funny-sounding name. Her skin was, not to put too fine a point on it, dark. So was her hair. She didn’t have a red spot in the middle of her forehead, admittedly, but that could probably be explained away. Why should one Indian not wish to be associated with another Indian, simply because they were both Indian?
    He put this question to Robin, as best he could.
    ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Robin. ‘You see, I’ve known her now for four years. She’s been here ever since I’ve been here. She’s been here longer than that.