The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  My mother was distraught.

  Julia gave me an antique silver writing set with a feather quill, and a tiny tray and an inkpot, and she said, ‘This is to say that you are going to be a famous writer.’

  I felt really bad that I’d given her Primark pyjamas.

  My father drove me to the airport, terse and strange.

  ‘Have a lovely Christmas!’ I said, kissing him on his cold perspiring cheek.

  He didn’t answer. I dragged my case behind me. He chased after me, and said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t forget to ring your mother on Christmas Day!’

  ‘Did you notice that Qantas doesn’t have a u?’ I said to Olly’s mother, who was wearing a denim shirt dress and practical shoes.

  ‘Only you would notice that,’ she said.

  ‘Does your mother like me?’ I said to Olly on the plane.

  ‘She likes everybody,’ said Olly, which was the wrong answer.

  When we landed in Sydney, disorientated and upside-down, I sat on the steps of the Opera House staring at its white solid sails, as if it couldn’t possibly be real. Or as if I couldn’t.

  I thought, weirdly, of the framed photo of Princess Diana in front of the Taj Majal, which used to be in our flower bed.

  I fiddled with my conch-shell necklace.

  Olly clowned around pretending to push his oldest brother in the water. His oldest brother was called Quentin.

  Qentin, I thought.

  At the first hotel, there were kangaroos on the lawn.

  ‘Do you remember the first night we met?’ said Olly, drinking a glass of white wine too quickly, pouring another. ‘Nobody ever said Kanga or Roo, did they?’

  He took my hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Kanga never had much about her,’ I said. ‘Except Roo! Obviously!’

  We both let out a small odd laugh.

  ‘Will you want to be a mother, Dragonfly?’ said Olly.

  ‘If I was a kangaroo, I might consider it,’ I said. ‘I like the idea of putting the baby in my pocket.’

  Olly and I sat staring at the kangaroos together, holding hands, but the longer we sat there, the more his hand started to feel like the plastic doll hand I had inside my bedside table drawer in Hedley Green.

  We travelled about in two Winnebago vans, stopping at beaches, and if one of his brothers or sisters fell asleep, they would write on each other’s faces with black pen and take photos on their phones and find it hilarious.

  I caught Olly watching me as I watched him, as I watched them. I think he knew. We were both starting to know. We screwed up our eyes to try not to see our differences.

  We spent Christmas Day on the beach, wearing red-and-white Santa hats. Later, I phoned my mother. They were just back from church.

  ‘Diego’s bought us a laptop,’ said my mother. ‘We’re not sure if we’ll manage it, though. Have you seen any kangaroos with their babies?’

  ‘Only one,’ I said. ‘She ran away.’

  ‘I won’t keep you,’ said my mother.

  On New Year’s Day of 2012, Olly and I were coming back to land after a day at sea in Port Stephens, sitting in a strange green net attached to the bow of a yacht, and we’d seen dolphins, leaping out of the sea, like in Tarifa, right around us, so close we could almost touch them.

  I said, ‘We used to feel like that around each other.’

  Olly Macintosh said, ‘Oh, Dragonfly.’

  And I said, ‘Thank you for turning me into a person. Making me a bit more normal. Perhaps we need a bit of a break. And then it will be the way it always was.’

  We both cried, and then we kept going all the way around the globe until we arrived at Gatwick Airport, where my father and mother and Julia were waiting in the car park, hiding, because they were nervous about meeting Olly’s posh family.

  ‘So, safely home,’ said my mother, embracing her handbag on her lap.

  The inside of the car felt very cramped.

  I said, ‘I’ve split up with Olly. As a trial.’

  My father went on driving.

  ‘Julia has some news,’ said my mother.

  ‘Not now,’ said Julia, trying to put her right hand over her left. ‘Let’s just—’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said, and I embraced her, as much as you can when you’re both wearing seat belts. ‘I’m so happy for you.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it some other time,’ said Julia, and she held my hand with her diamond hand.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. Olly and I are going to have a break until Easter. We seem to have run out of steam.’

  We drove along quietly for a while, and the seat belt cut into my neck.

  ‘We waited until you were home to have the engagement party,’ said my mother.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Will Olly come?’ said my father.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’re going to have the party in the garage and fill it with red roses,’ said my mother.

  The diamond glistened on Julia’s finger.

  I held her hand and squeezed it.

  It was warm, and her skin was smooth with hand-cream because she didn’t want to end up with old lady skin.

  ‘Put up your hand and let me look at it,’ I said to Julia.

  She did, and it seemed as if her face darkened a little.

  ‘You are totally happy, aren’t you?’ I said, trying to look into her eyes though we weren’t at quite the right angle.

  ‘Of course she is,’ said my mother.

  I raised my eyes at Julia – but she wasn’t looking.

  ‘So when will you get married?’ I said.

  ‘We think June 2013,’ said Julia. ‘And I’m not going to properly move in with him until then.’

  ‘A year and a half of still having you,’ I said, and a wave of nausea came over me, which I assumed was jet lag.

  ‘Please will you stay at home, Aug?’ said Julia. ‘Until then. So that we can be together.’

  I’d spent the last term sending short stories to competitions and not winning, and now it was time to open all my files and write the great Burundian novel.

  I knew I should get a job and earn some money. But I couldn’t think what job I would do. Except write.

  I’d never met a novelist.

  I wasn’t sure how one would go about being one – as an actual job.

  ‘How’s the book going?’ my mother would ask, but when I tried to answer, she tended to change the subject.

  ‘She doesn’t know what to say,’ Julia said.

  ‘I’m setting it in Burundi,’ I said.

  ‘Oh you’ve always gone on about Burundi,’ said my mother. ‘Even when you were a little girl. Where is it again?’

  ‘It’s in Africa, between Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo – and terrible things have happened there. For years.’

  ‘It’s odd that it never comes up on the news,’ said my father, with a face that suggested I was exaggerating.

  ‘That’s because nobody cares,’ I said, in a rather fierce voice, the one I often used when I spoke to my parents, which I regret now, thinking about it. But on I went. ‘We gain nothing from Burundi, and nothing it could do would ever threaten us. It has no influence at all. It only matters if we care about people we haven’t met.’

  ‘But we’ve got problems of our own,’ said my father.

  ‘We really can’t take the burdens of the world on our shoulders, Augusta,’ said my mother, sighing. ‘You’re too much of a dreamer.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ said my father. ‘It’s time you got a job. Sitting tapping at your typewriter isn’t going to put bread on the table.’

  ‘What are you going to do with all those notes?’ said my mother.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Perhaps Julia could find you something at the nursery. Apparently lots of the parents speak other languages there. Or there’s always the Flight Centre.’

  I went to the library to write. I put my antique writing set on the ba
ck right-hand corner of the desk like a talisman.

  On my laptop, I went on looking amongst the hundreds and thousands of stories I’d gathered for the one story. Then I found it. A journalist had gone with her tape recorder to interview a young man who’d started a rose farm outside Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, but when she arrived, she found he didn’t want to speak. He wrote on a piece of cardboard: ‘I let my roses speak for me.’

  ‘Did you ever speak?’ the journalist asked.

  ‘I stopped when my twin brother died,’ he wrote – and she’d photographed the cardboard.

  ‘Have you spoken at all since?’ she asked.

  ‘I started but I stopped,’ he wrote.

  ‘Why did you stop?’

  ‘The elections came and the only candidate we could vote for was Nkurunziza.’

  My fingers hovered over the keyboard to write the first word, and a butterfly flew in through the library window.

  Psyche is the Greek word for soul and the Greek word for butterfly. The butterfly flew over the quill pen and settled on the top right-hand corner of my screen, its wings trembling.

  I looked at it, and I wondered if it remembered being a caterpillar. Dying in the chrysalis. And coming to life again.

  My fingers wrote the first word.

  There.

  I sat back.

  Were.

  What were there?

  There were butterflies.

  They flew in a huge red swarm over Lake Tanganyika.

  Three hundred thousand butterflies, the souls of the dead.

  I got up.

  I tried to imagine three hundred thousand dead bodies.

  But I couldn’t.

  I wondered how many you could fit on the floor of the library, and what it would be like to see them all here at my feet. I looked down. Then I looked up. On the noticeboard on the wall, there was an advert for a new library assistant – experience not essential.

  I spoke to the woman called Jean who’d been there for years, the one who pulled her hair out, and she gave me the job. On the spot.

  Olly wrote me letters on thick cream writing paper with his farm address printed in gold, and he put in dragonfly facts he’d found on the internet:

  The dragonfly symbolises transformation.

  Can move direction very suddenly.

  Is capable of flying across oceans.

  I didn’t spend much time thinking about Olly.

  I thought how much I’d like to fly across an ocean.

  Before Easter, Julia and I went online and bought a dolphin stunt kite for Diego and an octopus one for Olly because I liked alliteration.

  On Easter Monday, the day our break was officially over, we flew them at the top of Old John Brown’s, the four of us, the four kites, diving into each other in the sky, wrapping around each other and collapsing in huge whooshes on top of us like tents.

  For Olly and me, it was deciding day.

  But, despite the Easter mood of resurrection, I knew I’d already decided, and I was pretty sure he had.

  Our relationship was dead, and the stone would not be rolled away.

  I had no interest in his farm in Cirencester, and he had no interest in my farm in Bujumbura, where roses grew.

  I’d never read him The Pedlar’s Caravan.

  I never could have done.

  That said all there was to say.

  This was the last day that Olly and I would ever spend together, after all those happy hours of thinking we were in love, or of being in love – if there’s a difference. This finitude gave the day a strange clarity. Our words had more resonance, and sounded louder. The wind blew against our faces with more force. I noticed the layered petals of every daisy on our way up, the gold plumpness of their centres, the green-ness of the grass, the blue-ness of the sky.

  Daffodils grew on the hillside, but their yellow trumpet coronas were drying up, and they had nothing new or extraordinary to announce.

  The boys, perhaps knowing that there would be no lifetime of obligation, chatted fluently, at ease with each other.

  My dragonfly came down, belly up.

  Olly’s octopus crashed down on top of it, astride it with its multiple legs.

  We both stared at them.

  ‘Happy memories!’ said Olly.

  I laughed, but my laughter sounded awkward, as if the two of us were watching ourselves having sex.

  It seemed odd that we ever had, looking at him all buttoned up inside his clothes.

  Olly and I walked down Old John Brown’s, crossing the stile at the bottom, where the mud was gluey thick, walking along the stream where mallards swam in twos, and we were still a pair, for the last time, as we made our way towards the level crossing.

  ‘The novel’s coming together,’ I said.

  Olly said to me, ‘Time to fly, Dragonfly.’

  I thought this was the most generous-hearted thing I’d ever heard. Until he started going out with Cressida only three weeks later – Cressida from Cirencester, from the Polo Club. They were engaged within the year. She wore a green tweed shooting jacket on their honeymoon.

  When Julia’s engagement was announced, my father pulled out half of his shrubs and flowering plants, and he started growing white rose bushes round and round the garden – like the one he’d planted for Princess Diana – tending them with a care bordering on the neurotic, covering them in manure, staring at the buds as they opened, preparing for his next loss.

  He trod carefully through the world these days as if he sensed that the sinkhole which had opened at the door of Stanley Hope Uniforms when the bell went ding for the last time would only get bigger now.

  ‘I have the title,’ I said to Julia. ‘It’s going to be called The Rose Farmer of Bujumbura.’

  In the evenings, my father was back in his study with his squared paper and his stubby pencil, calculating the expenses of the wedding.

  ‘We could always do Bring and Share,’ said my mother, standing on the metal divide between the carpets.

  My father wrote and rubbed, wrote and rubbed, ripped the page.

  ‘What do you take me for?’ he said.

  ‘Or a stand-up buffet?’ said my mother.

  ‘We will all sit down – every last one of us.’

  My father grabbed his ruler and started ruling columns.

  ‘Don’t press so hard,’ said my mother.

  ‘I’ll press as hard as I damn well like.’

  ‘We could have salad.’

  ‘No daughter of mine will marry on salad,’ said my father.

  For Julia’s wedding breakfast, at the church hall in Higgots Close, we would eat poached salmon with lemon mayonnaise followed by summer berry meringues.

  For her wedding bouquet, Julia would have a circular mass of roses, pressed together, a mix of buds and open flowers, white on white, sepia-edged and resting in gypsophila, like a nest of sprayed lace.

  As Julia dressed on the morning of her wedding, I was transfixed by her, and losing her in a way that only a twin would probably understand. She was radiant in ivory silk; I wore a bridesmaid dress the same colour as my arms.

  Julia looked in the mirror only once, when I’d fastened her wedding dress with forty-five tiny silk buttons up her curved back.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  She looked into Diego’s dark eyes and saw their children running up Old John Brown’s with kites in their hands.

  We threw confetti over the two of them, and that’s the photo I took to La Higuera, Julia’s head inclined upwards, and the rose petals falling around her face.

  It was June, and the sun shone.

  They walked from the echoey church hall to their maisonette on Higgots Close, where Diego had secretly installed a dovecote the day before in the coral bark Japanese maple, so that they arrived home to doves flying around their heads.

  I went back to number 1 Willow Crescent, to the room I’d shared with Julia my whole life. Her bed was made. She’d left her soft toys at the bottom: the white
dove, the white rabbit and the threadbare polar bear. I opened the wardrobe door and I looked at myself in the mirror. My dress had mud around the hem, and there were petals of rose confetti in my hair.

  It was very still.

  I sat on my bed.

  Then I took out The Rose Farmer of Bujumbura. I started to write. I wrote most of the night, and all the next day.

  ‘I think it would do you good to get out,’ said my mother.

  But I was out, walking with women balancing baskets on their heads, and bundles of firewood and five-gallon plastic containers full of water.

  ‘We’ve got the photos back from the wedding!’ called my mother.

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute!’

  I was out amongst the ambling policemen, smooth-skinned and lazy with heat and power, their AK 47s slung across their shoulders, chewing gum.

  ‘Lunchtime!’ called my mother.

  I was out amongst the expat houses whose gardens waved their traveller palms like ladies’ fans to keep out the smell of one hundred human bodies killed every day. I was out in thatched communities where the graves were fuller than the houses. Where no foreign journalists came. Because people in their sitting rooms in the West had had their fill of Rwanda. And didn’t have the stomach for any more.

  ‘Grandma’s here!’ called my mother, and of course she was, she was here for her wedding debrief – and no guest would have escaped the force of her judgement.

  But I didn’t go down because I was far away, with a young man, who went on planting roses for love, row after row, he didn’t stop. He would grow roses across the whole country if he had to. The African mourning doves paddled at the edge of the lake, their eyes pink with tears.

  I looked at the empty bed, and the white fur dove I gave Julia for her tenth birthday, whose fur had dissolved with loving, which she hadn’t taken with her.

  Understandably.

  Our life together was over, and would never again exist, which is the true pain of it.

  It was so quiet.

  Julia was working at Rainbow Nursery, walking there in the early mornings, in her special rainbow smock, embroidered with tiny pots of gold.

  The children asked her whether there really was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and Julia said yes of course there was. The nursery manager, a thin woman called Eileen, whose husband was dying of cancer, said that nobody ever reached the end of the rainbow.