by Joy Richards
She kissed him lightly. “It worked out for us, didn’t it, love?”
He held her tightly, with a sudden squeeze. Thinking about the past made him feel vulnerable. “It most certainly did.”
“Right,” she continued, in a matter-of-fact voice, “go set the table and find the paper. I’ll bring breakfast through in a minute.”
“Aye aye, capitaine.” He disappeared in the general direction of the dining room. A pot of oats, with berries and peach slices, bubbled away on the mint-green Aga. Coffee was brewing in the French press, the second of the day. There was fresh orange juice in the glass jug in the fridge. Everything was going to be all right. Yet Claire felt her eyes well up, thinking about her kitchen, and her home.
They had needed a haven so badly on that day when they’d moved in, a nest of safety in an unsafe world. They’d just come back from their first joint posting in the Foreign Office, in Jerusalem, which was no easy placement in the early eighties. They’d met in Beirut only four years earlier, on what had been the first ever post for both of them. They’d fallen in love immediately, urgently and rather spectacularly. She’d actually been on a first date with someone else when they met, a Navy liaison officer who was handsome and well spoken and just generally a good choice. She took one look at Michael, with his hippie looks and even hippier political opinions, and decided they should spend every single minute together for the rest of their lives. He very much agreed.
They married with five guests at the Lewisham Registry Office two days after they’d returned to England. After that, Jerusalem. A place she’d loathed for the first six months and was heartbroken to leave three years later. Their first home together, in a crumbling apartment in West Jerusalem with bars on the windows and red geraniums in terracotta pots on the tiled floor. It was where she’d fallen in love with cooking, thanks to a wonderful Orthodox housekeeper who would come in every morning with a new recipe for her, scribbled in pointy handwriting on a piece of second-hand baking parchment. It was where Jacob was born.
They’d returned home again feeling less at home than ever. Their possessions filled three suitcases and two cardboard boxes in Claire’s mother’s attic. They had a baby, a little bundle of giggles who would stare at them with his toothless wide smile in serene expectation. They felt out of place, like they were foreigners in their own land. London, her extended playground in her university years, felt more foreign than anything else. They needed a home to call home. Surrey seemed to beckon with its home-county appeal: they took the train down for a sunny weekend, staying in the rooms over a country pub and roamed the villages while eating ice creams. It took them several such weekends to find the house; once they’d found it, it was home.
Michael put down his newspaper as she came into the room, carrying the breakfast tray. He poured her a coffee, a tiny gesture to show her his immense affection. Her thoughts were all over her face.
“We just knew, didn’t we?” he said, wiping a steel grey strand of hair from her tanned forehead and handing her the filled cup. “From the moment we pulled into the front drive.”
“We were driving? I don’t think we had a car back then.”
“It was Dad’s. Remember? Jacob had been teething and it was a nightmare to push him around in the stroller.”
Ah yes. The faded station wagon. The baby crawling across the back seats. You probably went to prison for that now. Michael was right though, the moment they saw the house, they knew they were home. Two months later, they’d moved in. That was another funny day.
“We really didn’t have that much stuff, did we?” She chuckled. “Remember? It was ridiculous. This great big Georgian house, huge yew trees out front and there we come in our T-shirts with holes and our tiny pile of possessions.”
“You put a stop to that pretty quickly, didn’t you, darling?” He helped himself to the porridge. The smell of freshly grated cinnamon and peach filled the dining room as he lifted the lid.
She smiled. This house had turned her into more of a materialist. There hadn’t been a posting, a holiday or a weekend away that hadn’t seen her return with some item of decor. “That wasn’t until later though. The house was still pretty bare when we went to Kenya.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes with exaggerated discontent. “Bare? Bare? You’re crazy, woman. I remember coming back from Kenya and the house feeling like Buckingham Palace.”
He was right, it had. After a tough and absolutely wonderful four years in rural Kenya, coming home had felt like a thousand pounds of dead weight had been lifted off of their shoulders. They had three children by the time they stepped back in the black-and-white tiled hallway: Jacob was six, Aaron was four and Elijah was about to turn two. They’d had proper travel trunks this time. In one of them was the draft of Claire’s first book, typed on a crumbling 1940s typewriter she had found in the closet of their old colonial home. Michael had carried Jacob on his shoulders, and delicately holding an asleep Aaron over his arm. He’d been a giant then, a benevolent Goliath. Endlessly strong. Before his strength was taken away.
He carried on, in his cracked voice that made it so hard for anyone other than his family to understand him. “And after that, you started with the animals. All of bloody Noah’s Ark. The cats, the dogs, the hamsters, the lizards, the mice, the chickens, the goats.” He sounded furious, but his eyes were glistening with laughter. Teasing Claire had always been his favourite pastime.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she quipped back, “we’ve never had goats.”
“Are you serious? We did, too, have a goat in that very garden.” He gestured with his long arm in the general direction of the outdoors.
“We fostered a sheep once if that’s what you mean,” she replied coolly, sipping her coffee to hide her infectious grin.
“I apologise. Sheep. Totally different.”
“Well, the children loved it.”
Michael could no longer mask his large smile “They did, my love, they certainly did.”
“Wild as they were. Monstrous boys.” Four boys, by the end of it, all two years apart and with bounds of energy. The animals had kept them busy during their scattered years in Surrey, when they had to contend with the monotony of English life. An abrupt change from their long stints in some of the most exotic corners of the world.
“I got a text from Jacob this morning,” Michael said, tucking into his porridge. “They’re thinking of coming down the weekend after next. And they can make the Skype Quiz.”
“Oh, that’s great. This has me thinking… I suppose if we do end up moving back to London we’ll be able to have quiz night in person again!”
“Like the good old days!”
They both took a pause to drink coffee and think back at their weekly quiz nights as a young family. They had taken the children all over the world with them living in disparate accommodation: from lush villas to decrepit plantation houses, and even a dodgy penthouse apartment in Dar es Salaam. They’d spent years in Surrey and years in areas torn by conflict, famine or disease. But no matter what, Tuesday night was quiz night. The stack of questions continually replenished, by buying them when in England or by getting friends and strangers to write new questions on chocolate-stained index cards. In the late nineties, the big cardboard box with all the questions had been replaced by a computer programme on the clunky family laptop, and in recent years by a fancy app on their phones.
As the children left home for university, quiz night had started happening over Skype. Sometimes the team was not complete, as the kids found themselves new adventures. Sometimes it was just Claire and Michael. Sometimes they brought along friends. Significant others came and went from the screens, often first introduced to the family through the webcam. Eventually, spouses became a fixture on Tuesday night, three wonderful wives and one wonderful husband. The grandkids were too small to take part, as the oldest was six, but there would be a time soon when they may well start interjecting with the answers. Often hilariously wrong, sometimes
strangely accurate. Kids learn about all sorts of things while adults are not paying attention. You can tell so much about how a child is learning if you play a quiz game with them.
As the accidental home-schooling mum of four, Claire knew that all too well. Most of their peers left their children back in England at boarding school while the parents were posted around the world. Claire and Michael couldn’t even think of it. So, Claire co-opted a large surface wherever they went – a table, a countertop, a large rug on the floor, and taught them as best as she knew how. The local state school had been very understanding, letting the boys tap in and out as they came and went. Every year they came back, they sat a test to see if they were behind. Every single time, they tested at least one year ahead of where they should have been. The school let them all skip one year ahead, but no more. Claire understood. School was not just learning, it was socialisation. A brilliant eleven-year-old in a classroom of fifteen-year-olds would not learn anything about how to make friends.
Like many families that move around a lot, they were close. In fact, until they were all in middle school the children often spoke a sort of language they had made up: part English, part Swahili, part funny mouth sounds. The secret code of an unbreakable tribe of boys, a band of brothers who slept, breathed and ran in unison. Anywhere they went, they were with their best friends. They begged their parents to knock down the wall between two of the bedrooms in the house in Surrey and put bunk beds in, so they could all sleep together even though there was enough space for each of them to have their own room.
When Jacob went to university, the other boys looked lost, traumatised, until he rang them in secret every night, telling them all about the beers and the girls. After Jacob left, Aaron, Elijah and Gideon all followed in his footsteps to study medicine. They schemed and plotted until they all found themselves together again, in Oxford, Jacob doing his first year of foundation training, Aaron and Elijah having joined the clinical school from intercalated degrees from Bristol and Manchester respectively and Gideon as an undergraduate. They all rented a big house together in a leafy part of town, and yet they would all up sticks and come down to Surrey for one weekend a month, come hell or high water.
“Do you remember when the boys all used to live in that weird house in Oxford?” Michael asked, and Claire marvelled once again at his ability to follow her convoluted train of thought.
“They loved that,” she answered, remembering how slightly jealous she was of their new home away from home.
“I wonder if London may feel that way in a few years. If we move up there,” he said, pausing for a sip of orange juice, “and if Aaron and Penelope settle there once they come back. We could be all together again.”
“They probably will,” she replied. “That’s where all the jobs seem to be. And that’s where Gideon, Jacob and Elijah are. You know you can’t keep those boys apart.”
Aaron and Penelope. Taking after their parents, Aaron and Gideon had both spent a significant portion of their time trying to save various God-forsaken corners of the world. Aaron as a doctor with MSF, Gideon as a journalist after he’d abandoned his medical studies in favour of a more creative career. Gideon had come home the day Melissa, his long-term girlfriend, texted him she was pregnant, interrupting an assignment reporting on electoral controversies in Uganda. There was a hint of criticism for his parents in his choices, an indication that his own ramshackle upbringing had not always been the thrilling adventure they had intended it to be.
Aaron, on the other hand, had seemed to want to replicate his own childhood. He married his fellow MSF physician, Penelope, and they seemed to relish their nomadic life across the continents. Then, suddenly, they declared they were tired, and ready for something else. They were landing back in Heathrow in two months, looking for jobs in England. London, probably. Perhaps this time Claire and Michael should be the ones who joined the boys. London was calling.
“Are you sad?” Michael asked, his eyes suddenly sharp over his coffee moustache.
“A little.”
“Is it the house?”
“Oh, it’s so stupid,” she said, her voice cracking with sudden emotion. “It’s only a big square pile of bricks after all. But it’s meant so much to us for most of our lives.”
He looked surprised. “I suppose that was most of our lives, you know. It’s weird thinking I’ve now spent most of my life with you, kid.”
She giggled. He knew how to cheer her up. “Do you know what I mean though? I feel so superficial for caring about a house like it’s a person.”
“Of course you do! And we don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.” He had been gently coaxing her into thinking about moving for weeks. She knew it was the right thing to do.
“I know! But you’re right, this is stupid. It’s the two of us and poor little Marmalade in a five-bedroomed house hours away from all our family. It doesn’t make sense!”
“And the kids can’t keep on coming down like they did before,” he said, repeating a long-laboured point. “They have families of their own, things to do. They can’t keep coming down one weekend every four like they used to.”
“Of course.” She waved her hand around. The tears were mounting at the back of her throat, and that made her angry with herself. “I know. It’s only right, time for us to go and be useful grandparents.”
“There are other benefits too.” Michael had started his sermon and was not to be derailed off it. “We’ll be in town, with all our friends from the good old days. We can go eat in interesting places, as opposed to just the Bistro Night at the Horse and Groom. We can go to the theatre more. And it will be so much easier with my hospital appointments.”
Every five weeks, like clockwork, Michael and Claire took the train into town for a morning appointment with the Neurology team at St Thomas’s Hospital. They were repetitive and never found anything new, but they would never ease up. When you have had a bullet fished out of your brain, millimetres away from the really important grey stuff, you need to keep on top of it. After the appointment, they always walked on Southbank up to a little pizza restaurant done up to look like a pastel beach hut. They had lunch, and a glass of red wine. Then they kept walking towards London Bridge station, looking past the grey water at the city in front of them.
Sometimes they met up with friends for dinner, sometimes they took the train straight back. Sometimes Claire went shopping in Oxford Street and left Michael perusing the shelves at Foyle’s. Throughout the day, they spoke very little. They both never thought they would get to have more days like these.
Michael was shot on 25 November 1992 in Rwanda. The circumstances of his involvement had never been declassified, which irritated Claire since it really wasn’t that big of a deal. By that time, they were no longer civil servants. Michael worked for a humanitarian organisation, and Claire’s books were already selling well enough to constitute a job. They had been living in Mwanza, on Lake Victoria, working with Rwandan refugees. One evening, someone from their old lives, someone in military intelligence had knocked on the door. There were hostages. Someone had to negotiate, and the only person with the necessary credibility in both camps was Michael.
Claire was chopping up tomatoes for dinner, and listening to Elijah read his book report on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter. She didn’t really have time to process what was going on, Michael rushing through the house to grab his camera, the other man waiting at the door while smoking a cigarette. Michael plonked a hurried kiss on the top of her forehead and in a heartbeat he was gone.
Claire blinked. It still felt raw, after all these years.
“I know, my love,” she said, the tears dry. “I know. It’s time to move on.”
4
Alex
Alex looked over the small squalid airport hotel room and drew in a deep breath. Man, he wanted to go home. He’d missed his connecting flight from Singapore and was stuck in Frankfurt until the next day. He threw his suitcase on the double bed in frustrat
ion. It bounced off, crashing on the thin dirty carpet. Fuck.
Thankfully the laptop hadn’t broken. He opened FaceTime on his phone and pressed the little picture of Sarah’s. After a couple of seconds, she picked up on the other end.
“Hello!” she said from their flat in London. “Have you landed yet?”
“I’m stuck in Frankfurt,” he said, plainly, trying to contain the disappointment on his face. He’d not seen her in over a week, and he ached to hold her. It sounded dramatic and rather stupid, but it was the truth.
She frowned. “Really? That is so annoying!” she said, while looking at an indeterminate point over the phone.
“Right,” he said, underwhelmed and slightly hurt by her reaction. “I should get home tomorrow around ten. I’ll work from home the rest of the day, I’m shattered.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, this time making eye contact and looking genuinely sorry. “I’ll try to get home early tomorrow. We have those mushroom raviolis from Pasta Evangelists, and I can get some nice white wine on the way back from work.”
He couldn’t help but smile. She knew the way to his heart. “That sounds like genuine paradise.”
“You know, in New York there will be none of this bullshit,” he continued, sitting on the bed and easing himself into his favourite subject “I won’t have clients halfway across the world. A few trips to the west coast, but all direct flights.”
Her face imperceptibly dropped. “That sounds amazing,” she said, looking again somewhere beyond her phone. “I can’t wait.”
“Oh don’t worry,” he said, immediately sorry he’d brought up the subject. “How is your job-hunt going? Have you heard back from Peterman’s?”
She nodded, pushing her lower lip forward to form an exaggerated frown. “No dice. They’re not looking for new account managers at the moment, senior or otherwise. Unless I bring in new clients.” She chuckled. “As if Lewis would let me anywhere near any of those.”
