Читать книгу Secrets and Sins - Jaishree Misra - Страница 16

It wasn’t working. Riva closed her laptop and leant back in her chair, suddenly exhausted. It had been a messy writing day, starting off with a couple of extremely productive hours first thing in the morning. But, after that phone call from Susan, her work had been patchy, thoughts swinging wildly from what suddenly seemed like trivial fictional diversions to the terrible earth-shattering stuff of reality. In her time as a fiction writer, Riva had discovered that, usually, it was real life that was the crucible for the most powerful dramas. Poor Susan. Riva hadn’t heard her friend sound so distraught in years. In fact, she probably hadn’t heard Susan sound so distraught ever – Susan being the kind of placid soul who had steadfastly done nothing wrong all her life. Suddenly the carefully made-up problems of Riva’s protagonist seemed so very inconsequential in comparison to what Susan was facing at the moment. Riva clicked shut the Word document that was the growing manuscript of her third book. There was no point. Whatever she wrote on a day like this was bound to be complete rubbish and guaranteed to be trashed when she returned to it later.

Riva looked at the kitchen clock as she slipped her laptop back into its case. Three pm. Enough time to grab a shower before heading out to Susan’s school. They had agreed to meet at the Portuguese café down the road from the school so that Susan would not be interrupted by her colleagues or students. She seemed to want Riva’s help in preparing a strategy before Joe got home that night but, although Riva had given it extended thought, she had not come up with any ideas beyond boxing Joe’s ears if indeed he had been cheating on Susan. She still couldn’t believe it though. Not Joe, ideal-boyfriend-then-ideal-husband Joe Holmes, the kind of guy all their single female friends were looking for.

Riva shoved her computer case onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase with some force. Then she sprinted up the stairs, gathered her towel from the airing cupboard and disappeared into the shower.

Towelling herself dry a few minutes later, Riva wondered where her own husband had gone. Ben had left the house first thing in the morning to go to the British Library and certainly had not said he wouldn’t be home for lunch. The ham sandwich Riva had made for him when she stopped for a bite at midday now lay in the microwave with its edges curling. She sighed. No doubt Ben would be expecting a hot meal when he got back, seeing as she’d been in the house all day, and would not be amused at the sight of a dried-up sandwich awaiting him instead. Riva sighed again, more deeply. The business of both of them being full-time writers did rather complicate the domestic arrangements sometimes. Never mind that Ben found more excuses to leave the house than she did, the nonfiction he wrote apparently requiring more trips to the library than fiction writing, which Ben always seemed to imply required less hard graft. Never mind the fact that she was the only one of the two of them with an actual publishing contract!

Riva sighed and gave herself a reproachful look in the bathroom mirror. She knew she shouldn’t be uncharitable to poor Ben, even if it was only in her thoughts. It was downright mean to regard his writing plans as dubious merely because he hadn’t been published yet. She, more than anyone else, ought to understand how much determination it took to spend hours working on a manuscript, completely uncertain of whether it would ever get published or even read.

Shivering in her underwear, Riva sprinted to the pair of tall mahogany wardrobes in the bedroom. She cast a glance out at the steely sky. It had remained a stubborn grey all day, reluctantly leaking meagre sunshine through leaden clouds like an afterthought. And now it was barely three o’clock and the day was already resolutely darkening into night! She hurriedly pulled on a thick jumper over a T-shirt and dragged on her Levi’s, feeling altogether miserable. She had always hated these short February days, when night and day were barely discernible from each other. Something to do with her Indian birth, she reckoned, or the two sunny years she had spent in the Punjab before her parents had emigrated to England. Despite all these years, she had never grown used to the unrelenting greyness of the English winter and never would.

Of course, today everything was made infinitely worse by the misery of her best friend, but something had been palpably infecting her feelings for Ben of late, even though today, of all days, she should have been appreciative of her faithful husband. Perhaps it was something to do with her beloved father’s recent death, which had rather curiously brought into focus Ben’s own shortcomings as a husband.

‘Well, Ben,’ Riva muttered, sitting on the edge of her bed to yank on a pair of fleecy boots, ‘I could have roused myself to rustle up a pulao or a soup, just to keep you feeling like a man who’s just come in from a hard day’s work. But, you know what? My best friend, Susan, has just found that the man she’s lavished every ounce of love she’s had to give since she was eighteen may be having an affair. As though he were just another dick and not the fine, intelligent, upstanding man we always thought he was. Maybe, just maybe, she needs me a tiny bit more than you do tonight, Ben.’

That was the other thing about a writer’s life: these ridiculous monologues that had recently become a habit, everyone assuming that a writer’s life was easy simply because you could hang around in your pyjamas while doing your day’s work. Would anyone stop to consider, Riva wondered, that she hadn’t spoken to another soul all day? Except for Susan this morning, which was a most unusual event. Even the routine trip to the newsagents had been dumped in favour of finishing Chapter Ten because there was every danger of being sucked into reading something in the papers that would gobble up a precious couple of hours. Deadlines, deadlines, did publishers know how sapping of creativity these bloody deadlines could be? Ben certainly didn’t.

Riva looked at herself in the mirror to dab a bit of powder over her face and run a kohl pencil over her eyes. That would do. She really ought to wipe this unseemly frown off her face before she got to Wimbledon. For Susan’s sake. God knows she needed some cheering up, although Riva didn’t feel terribly well qualified to be that person tonight.

She picked out a small leather satchel and slipped her travel card into it, making her way downstairs. It was only as Riva was pulling on her coat in the hallway that she saw the letter sticking out of the postbox. The envelope was creamy and expensive looking, and had a French postage stamp bearing a Cannes postmark. Riva ripped it open and nearly dropped it in her excitement. She reread it to be sure it wasn’t a mistake. This was incredible! She, Riva Walia, was invited to be a jury member at the sixty-third Cannes Film Festival this summer!

In disbelief, she ran her eye once again over the details, savouring every word…At the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès…Nine jury members…Chaired by Isabelle Huppert…

Then she sucked in her breath sharply as she read the names of the other eight judges and came to the fourth on the list…Mr Aman Khan from India.

Riva leant heavily on the sideboard, suddenly dizzy. Perhaps she had wished for this somewhere in her deepest subconscious, in some kind of stupid yearning fan-like dream. Without an author carefully plotting events on a timeline and playing God with a bunch of helpless characters, choreographing their every move, how else could such an astonishing thing possibly happen?

Riva slid the letter under a pile of newspapers and left the house, resolving to contain her excitement until after she had met poor Susan.