The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

  Had he gone for a drive, or had he gone?

  My body seemed to freeze at the thought of him not being here, and, as I walked back, I couldn’t unfreeze it.

  Raúl suggested we went riding.

  ‘You know, Augusta, I’m pleased you’re living here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like you being in the coach with the artist.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ I said, not looking at him.

  ‘They have different ways over there,’ he said, waving at Africa. ‘And last time they came, they took over the place.’

  ‘Last time who came?’

  ‘The Moors.’

  ‘That was in the Middle Ages, Raúl,’ I said, crossly.

  ‘We only got rid of them in 1492,’ said Raúl. ‘Kicked them out of Granada. And somehow they’re creeping back again.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ said Teo.

  When we rode along the beach, I rode ahead.

  Teo caught up with me.

  ‘Are you sure you should be riding?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re really not yourself, Augusta. Is there anything I can do?’ she said.

  But there was nothing anyone could do.

  Except him.

  It might sound pathetic.

  Or needy.

  But that’s how it is sometimes.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’ said Teo nervously.

  ‘No, why?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s take it easy today,’ said Raúl. ‘No galloping.’

  His coach still wasn’t there.

  We untacked the horses in silence.

  Teo appeared in my caravan. She said she was taking me on a surprise trip.

  I had this terrible feeling that Parfait might take his own trip back to Burundi. To be with Wilfred. To get away from, well, me. The dilemma I was proving to be.

  If I left La Higuera, I felt, oddly, that he was more likely to leave too.

  But I didn’t know how to say no to Teo.

  So we both got in the car, and she drove me up the motorway to Jerez, trying to make me tell her I was pregnant, which eventually, unwillingly, I did. We went to the School of Equestrian Art to watch white horses dancing for tourists in an indoor arena, and tasted sherry in the famous bodegas and stayed the night with her sister.

  And although it should have been lovely, it wasn’t.

  Parfait

  I drove along the coast to Tarifa after lunch to see if the boys were around. I felt it would help to talk to them.

  ‘I know there is no straight road,’ Paco read to me, back in the lorry park in Tarifa, pulling at his ponytail.

  ‘No straight road in this world

  Only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.’

  ‘You’re a man who likes a straight road,’ said Luis, who never normally spoke much, nodding at me. ‘But none of us gets one in this life, Parfait, that’s the truth.’

  A giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads, that’s what struck me. The line repeated itself over and over in my mind.

  ‘Do you hear what we’re saying to you?’ said Paco.

  ‘But she said she didn’t want to undo it,’ I said. ‘So what does that mean? What do you think she feels about the other guy?’

  ‘Go back and ask her,’ said Antonio. ‘You shouldn’t be away from her right now. It’s no good sitting around reading poems at a time like this.’

  ‘And the baby needs a father,’ said Paco.

  ‘Hasn’t the baby got a father?’ I said. ‘A father who isn’t me?’

  ‘Has she even told him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, why the hell didn’t you ask?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Is it difficult to be a father to another man’s child?’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps you should ask Víctor that,’ said Paco.

  I thought of the way Víctor loved Wilfred, and I thought of his deaf and blind children, wearing pink cotton uniforms, dancing in the dust.

  ‘Get back to her,’ said Antonio.

  I thought of her radiant, questioning, wild face framed with jet-black hair.

  Her orange dress with the frills.

  Dancing with a white rose in her hair.

  Diving off the rocks to swim.

  Galloping down the beach.

  I pictured her reading that great huge dictionary outside the coach wrapped up in her scarves, with a crease above the bridge of her nose, trying to find a definition of love.

  A definition of love?

  I saw her sitting on the painted bench of the gypsy caravan in her denim dungarees, as if she was ready to set off on some new road.

  Some new road?

  ‘Yes,’ I said to myself. ‘Yes.’

  But when I got back, I couldn’t find her.

  Augusta

  Teo and I were back in time for the tree ceremony, and Joseph led Mary into the stable on Raúl’s donkey.

  Parfait had the microphone.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  ‘It’s four thousand six hundred and sixty-three people who died trying to cross to Europe this year,’ he said.

  I went forward to queue.

  He took a pen and he started to write, leaning on the table in front of me.

  He wrote Julia on a gold planet, and then he wrote Rose.

  And then he wrote Graham Cook.

  ‘Will you forgive me?’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Leaving you alone.’

  It was one of those moments.

  I took a breath.

  I took a star.

  I took a pen.

  I wrote Melchior.

  Another star.

  I wrote Claude.

  Another star.

  I wrote Zion.

  Another star.

  I wrote Aurore.

  It was hard to concentrate with him watching, and my fingers not working right – they’d tensed up, with my heart, which had contracted and was ticking violently like one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks.

  Parfait was called away to light the electric star above the stable, and there was the mayor getting his photo with the migrant, and there was dinner laid out on white tablecloths for them all.

  I watched him.

  The holy baby cried.

  And the cry woke something up in me.

  I was carrying a baby too.

  A baby who was real.

  As I walked away I felt a movement inside me.

  As if the baby was turning.

  The baby.

  My baby.

  I threw off my scarf and walked on the sand, digging in my toes. Then, checking there was nobody around because I wasn’t in the mood for naturism these days, probably never had been, I took off my red dress and my underwear, down on the dark beach, alone, and I dived into the waves, and I imagined the baby hearing the slap slap slap of water, inside and out. More than that, I imagined my baby. Being mine. Being here. Being he or she. Being happy to see my face. Lighting up at the sight of me. That’s what Julia said. That’s what she wanted more than anything.

  I thought of the womb that Parfait was painting which was called The Baby Doesn’t Believe there is a Mother.

  ‘Do you believe there’s a mother?’ I whispered to my baby, the first time I’d dared to speak to him, to her.

  I hoped my baby wasn’t lonely in there, all alone, and I thought of all that was coming in the other life, outside the womb, all that the baby couldn’t yet possibly imagine.

  I wondered if there was another life beyond this one, one we couldn’t possibly imagine, full of people we’d loved, we still loved, you can’t stop loving them even when you can’t see them any more.

  Again I felt the baby turning, this baby I couldn’t yet see.

  I wondered what it would feel like to give birth.

  How much it hurt.

  I thought of Julia swearing.

  I wondered if it had helped.

 
I don’t suppose Mary swore, I thought, it might have worried the angels.

  I smiled as I swam.

  Jesus passed through the birth canal, as my mother loved to call it, the vagina, as she didn’t love to call it. This was the route God chose into the world.

  I suddenly saw the dignity that had been given to my body by it.

  I dived under a wave.

  Zambullirse, they say in Spanish, to dive, to submerge oneself, and it can also mean to dedicate oneself utterly. That’s what I thought as I dived. I thought, I’m diving into this. Motherhood. Headfirst.

  ‘The sea is beautiful, you wait and see,’ I whispered to my child, my body buoyant on the water, my spirits suddenly buoyant too.

  I felt that this was the beginning of something.

  The beginning of loving.

  The real way.

  The crying-for-someone-else way.

  Which I saw, in a flash, was the kind of love that parenthood would be.

  I got out and put my dress on and wrapped my scarf around me, shivering, and I remembered Parfait asking me if this was the thing I’d undo.

  I remembered his face.

  His worried face.

  When I said no, I said no for the baby.

  Because I would, of course, do anything to undo the fact that, on the night of my twenty-sixth birthday, I lay down on the Moroccan bed with my sister’s husband.

  But I never explained that to Parfait, did I?

  He said it was nothing to do with him and he backed away.

  I thought at the time – if you love me, it’s everything to do with you. Because I’m to do with you. So perhaps you don’t love me.

  But now I saw.

  He didn’t want to look as if he was judging me for not waiting for him.

  He’d waited for a woman who he’d hoped had been waiting for him.

  And, actually, I had been waiting for him all along.

  I was still waiting for him.

  Even now.

  But maybe he was somewhere else waiting for me.

  Or maybe he wasn’t.

  I ran back to the square – to the smart dinner in the corner by the church.

  The mayor.

  Local officials.

  President of the Neighbours’ Association.

  The priest.

  But not Parfait.

  Had he left?

  Was he already on his way to the airport?

  To go and see Wilfred in Bujumbura?

  I ran along the beach road, heading towards our special spot.

  If I wasn’t wrong, there was a fire down there.

  And people.

  As I came closer, I could make out the shape of chairs.

  The flames flared up.

  Blowing in the wind.

  A person.

  Maybe more than one.

  But I could only really make out one.

  When Parfait saw me, he held out his arms.

  I wanted so much to fall into them.

  Which I hadn’t done before.

  He’d never touched a woman.

  And this felt such a beautiful thing.

  All of a sudden.

  That he hadn’t had a trial run.

  Even if I had.

  ‘Will you forgive me?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need forgiving,’ I said. ‘I need forgiving.’

  He wrapped his arms around me.

  ‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘And you’re wet.’

  He took a blanket, and he wrapped me in it. I sat down. He got a towel and he started to dry my hair. I closed my eyes, and felt his hands against my head, his fingers drying my hair, working through each strand to the end. It didn’t feel anything like Barbara Cook in the swimming pool changing rooms in Hedley Green. I never knew I had so many nerve endings on my scalp. I never knew that this was a feeling that could come through my head.

  He let my hair fall, put a log on the fire, sat down on the other chair and drew it close to me.

  ‘So, Augusta, I assume that the baby is Diego’s,’ said Parfait.

  I nodded.

  ‘You see, we both loved her so much, and perhaps we thought we’d find her in each other. If that makes any sense. Or maybe I’m making excuses. Trying out nice-sounding words to make myself look better.’

  He held my hand.

  ‘We were very sad. And very drunk. And we did it once. And never again.’

  ‘What do you feel about it now?’

  ‘It was the wrong thing to do. For both of us. But the baby is here, and deserves to be thought of as right. That’s why I said I didn’t want to rewind. To undo. I don’t want to undo my baby.’

  ‘I like it that you don’t,’ said Parfait. ‘I think I misunderstood you at the time. And I’m sorry it took me so long to think. Maybe I’m a very slow thinker.’

  I smiled.

  He smiled back.

  ‘It’s only that the baby …’

  ‘Isn’t yours?’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t mine,’ he said.

  ‘And so?’ I said, though I hardly dared ask.

  ‘I felt jealous. I wanted you to be all mine, and if there was going to be a baby, I guess I wanted that to be mine too. Is that a bad thing? Wanting to have you all to myself?’

  ‘I think that might be not so much a bad thing. As a …’

  ‘Good thing?’ said Parfait. ‘Could it be?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry I left you alone when you most needed me to be with you,’ he said. ‘It’s just I wanted …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.

  ‘There’s this poem by Federico …’

  ‘García Lorca?’ I said.

  ‘It talks about a giant labyrinth …’

  ‘Of intersecting crossroads,’ I said.

  ‘If I hadn’t left for Europe, Zion wouldn’t have died. And, if Zion hadn’t died, maybe Julia wouldn’t have died. And then this baby wouldn’t have been conceived. If you think about it.’

  ‘I guess I still had a choice,’ I said.

  He stood up.

  ‘Diego is very dark-skinned,’ I said. ‘If that helps at all. It won’t be quite so obvious.’

  Parfait laughed.

  He actually laughed.

  Which made me laugh.

  ‘I think you’re being a little optimistic,’ he said.

  ‘I feel like being optimistic,’ I said.

  ‘Does Diego know?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did you ever love him, Augusta? So that I know.’

  ‘Possibly for a week or two when I was nine years old and I was impressed that he could carry four cardboard boxes at a time.’

  ‘I’m sure I can carry five,’ said Parfait, and his smile stretched from one ear to the other. ‘Or fifty-five.’

  I smiled.

  ‘And the baby you’re carrying, I’ll carry with you,’ said Parfait. ‘As if he – or she – was mine. That’s a promise.’

  ‘I always thought promises were problematic,’ I said, and I couldn’t stop smiling either. ‘But, you know, I think they might be growing on me.’

  ‘They might?’

  ‘I need a word for this,’ I said, looking around me. ‘This moment. This feeling. This. Everything.’

  The clock chimed in the square.

  And the cloak fell on me.

  The fleeting feeling.

  Of beyond.

  It was midnight.

  Weirdly, Christmas.

  It didn’t feel anything like Christmas.

  At exactly the same moment, there were fireworks outside Restaurante Raúl.

  The cuckoo would be jumping out of the clock in my caravan.

  ‘I’ve got the word!’ I said. ‘Chimingness. You and me.’

  ‘How do you translate that?’ said Parfait.

  ‘It’s untranslatable,’ I said. ‘I always hoped I was untranslatable too. Might I be, do you think?’

  Parfait nodded, smiling.

 
‘Chimingness is a bit of an ugly word,’ I said, ‘on second thoughts.’

  ‘So let’s forget about words,’ said Parfait.

  ‘Come and swim with me – it’s so beautiful in the water,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t swum since Zion died.’

  ‘If I’ve started crying, you can start swimming,’ I said.

  We went down to the water, and I felt coy.

  I didn’t know what he might expect.

  In terms of the taking off of clothes.

  But he was on the sand taking off his jeans and his T-shirt.

  He ran, somersaulting, into the sea in his shorts, and when he stood up, under the moon, there was a kind of lustre to his wet skin.

  ‘Come on, Augusta!’ he called.

  I ran towards the sea, still wearing my dress.

  Under the moon, he picked me up in his arms.

  He whirled me around.

  I was the girl in the painting with the ribbon-skirt.

  And all the secret bits of me were going to come flying out.

  Any minute.

  Epilogue

  I’m crouched over, digging holes, and in each hole, I plant a daffodil bulb. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All around our little patch of land, out beyond the fields, behind La Higuera.

  There’s mud clustered around the ring on my left hand, the ring finger, so it’s hard to read the words.

  Ecc 3:4-5 – Parfait had it engraved.

  I looked it up.

  A time to weep and a time to laugh.

  Julia’s locket hangs down from my neck over the earth as I dig.

  A time to mourn and a time to dance.

  Esperanza, six months old, dark-haired and caramel-skinned, is in the big old pram, giggling, under the palm tree, beside the gypsy caravan, where we’re sleeping until the house is ready. Raúl’s donkey is getting the hang of her new role.

  The coach is parked at the back. We’re going away, the three of us, to Calabria for a month to help the refugees – we’ll be teaching English and writing and art. Raúl and Teo think we’re mad. Parfait says he has amends to make. I guess we both do.

  Then we’ll come back here, where we’re making our home – so perhaps I’ve sold out.

  Julia, are you laughing at me?

  Are you saying, it’s different when it’s a person?

  By the time we’re back, the daffodils will be out, all around our little white house – where I suppose, though it seems unthinkable now, there will be both pain and joy, there probably always is.