Consider the Lilies II

It is very difficult to go off and meet strange men when your wife or girlfriend suspects you of homosexuality

This post was originally for paying readers, but I have decided to save the paywalls for more miscellaneous scribblings. If you do want to support The Pedestrian, you can get 30% off a subscription (good forever) by clicking the following link:

Editor’s Note

READERS of The Pedestrian will recall that some three weeks ago we published an excerpt from the talented young author Florid Tuppence’s sophomore novel, Consider the Lilies. You can read the first part by clicking here.

Tuppence’s novel was set to be published by the editorial Simon and Schumpeter later this year. However, the recent and unfortunate unearthing of some incendiary LinkdIn posts made by the author concerning a particular religious community have forced the publisher to drop her altogether.

Until such time as Florid finds a new editorial which is somehow sympathetic to both the championing of young, female voices and religious prejudice, she will continue to publish excerpts from her novel here at The Pedestrian. For this she will receive a very, very modest fee.

When we left our heavily-medicated heroine she had just been kicked out of her Madrid hotel room, paid for by her male companion, Randeep. Through a telephone call with Randeep’s mother, she learns that he has been killed in the Atocha train bombings of 2004. With no money to her name and no where to go, the unnamed protagonist must find some means of maintaining the lifestyle to which she has grown accustomed.

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Consider the Lilies, Chapter II
by Florid Tuppence

‘Your son was a good man. He was always — He was always impeccably dressed.’

I was standing by the phone booth trying to think of something more conciliatory to say to Randeep’s mother, but I had spent the last week in my air conditioned cocoon, and adjusting to the sudden Madrilenian heat was consuming all of my mental and physical energy. I began to realise, too, that, beyond a few scanty details, I really knew very little about this woman’s son; about the man who I had been living with for the last seven months.

‘Yes,’ she said after a short pause. ‘Randeep always did look after his appearances, even when he was very little.’

She wasn’t crying, but her voice was impregnated with the sort of thickness you experience after eating too many carbohydrates in one sitting. I suppose it’s also the sort of voice you have when your son has just been blown up in a terrorist attack.

‘I remember once he wore a blue suit with a yellow tie,’ I said, now just recalling titbits of information but trying to affect a vague fondness toward them. ‘I’m sure it was a charity dinner or something. He was often doing things like that. Going to charity events, I mean. He loved to help the needy.’

“Mmm.” His mother, with a muffled sound, seemed to assent to this. I wasn’t at all sure that what I was saying was true. It may well have been. I had not known Randeep to be a charitable type. But then again, I didn’t even know his surname. Now, the only thing I could think of when I thought of Randeep was the explosion that took his life; it seemed to have effaced all previous memories I had had of him — the flurry of glass, shredded metal, and his American Express card splintering into a thousand, irretrievable pieces of worthless plastic.

I wondered now to what extent Randeep’s mother understood my relationship with her now-deceased son; I hardly understood it myself. I had met Randeep’s family only briefly in their garden in Exeter, during his brother’s wedding reception, where he had introduced me to his mother as a sort of intimate friend. What that meant exactly was open to interpretation. Randeep’s mother might have taken it as a euphemism, a way of saying that we were a couple with sexual though not necessarily romantic ties, but even this was not strictly true. I wasn’t really a prostitute, either. Randeep and I had never been sexually intimate, even in the loosest sense of the term. The relationship was much simpler than that: He gave me money and a place to stay — I hung on his arm at social gatherings. I liked to think of it as a kind of patronage, that he was feeding me a sort of allowance. It was true that I hadn’t published or even written anything since my undergraduate degree, but I had often thought about doing so; what Randeep was financing was my poetic gestation.

At first I thought this absence of sex was my doing, that it was a deliberate denial of sexual gratification, an indefinitely-deferred sexual yield; but I soon became conscious that he had never made any advances toward me. I concluded quite happily that I must be a sort of beard, and that his frequent business meetings were actually rendezvous with his homosexual lovers.

After a while even this seemed unlikely; it is very difficult to go off and meet strange men when your wife or girlfriend suspects you of homosexuality; a closeted man is more likely to make at least some pretence to intimacy with his girlfriend, lightening her suspicion so he can go out buggering freely. This was not our case, and as the weeks went by with no sexual advance forthcoming, and with no reason to suspect that his business affairs were not just that, I concluded that Randeep was either asexual or uninterested in white girls, but that having one on his arm at social events was in some way socially advantageous.

My account of Randeep’s charitable nature was probably untrue, but I figured that a grieving mother would be unlikely to reject any positive account of her son now, no matter how implausible or erroneous it might be. She might even be positively disposed to help anyone who painted her son as a Saint, perhaps even financially, and especially if that person were in a situation as precarious as mine.

‘Yes,’ I said, gathering some steam now. ‘And of course there was little Cori, the Jamaican boy he mentored.’

Cori?’ she said, her bafflement cutting through the weariness. ‘Randeep never said …’

‘Well, I should say raised, rather than mentored. He was his mentor on the Big Brother programme. But honestly, Randeep did more for Cori than his real parents ever did. He practically got him through secondary school. He was a wonderful soul, but not at all naturally bright. I believe he is a practising physician now, back in his native Jamaica. And at only sixteen years old. They let them practice out there with very little training, you know.’

‘We had no idea. Randeep was ever so secretive.’ A change in her tone signified that I had gained a little of her confidence. ‘You know, at school he would always stand up for the weaker children. Once he even —’

And here she told me a banal anecdote which doesn’t bear repeating.

‘Really? That’s incredibly interesting. You know he never told me. I suppose that’s not surprising, considering that he never told you the thing about little Cori, either. That makes me think it must be true, emblematic as it is of his unpresuming and charitable character. “Let not thy left hand know,” and all that.’

I recalled that I was speaking to an East Asian woman who might not understand references plucked from the Evangelicals. It was a mistake that was easy enough to make; she spoke English very well, without much trace of an accent and almost exactly like an Englishwoman. I might have congratulated her on the similitude had the circumstances been different, but right now I needed her to wire me some money.

‘Mrs …’ I began, and, remembering that I was not cogniscent of Randeep’s family name, affected an Indian intonation and mumbled something akin to the word Gupshka, which seemed to me as reasonable a guess as any.

‘Mrs. Gupshka,’ I said. ‘Were you acquainted with — with Randeep’s and my situation?’

Some hesitation through the telephone static. After considering venturing a guess, she said simply:

‘No, I was not. I am not.’

Here was luck. I put another ten cents into the booth.