The Ghosts of Eden

by Andrew JH Sharp

  ‘What happens to those convicted of murder in Uganda?’ Michael asked.

  ‘It wasn’t murder – armed robbery. Although I suppose it might have been murder if the night-watchman hadn’t pinned him to the wall with his panga.

  ‘So Kabutiiti was unharmed?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  Audrey said, ‘Are you all right, Michael? You’ve gone pale.’

  ‘Och!’ James said, laying on the accent, ‘he just needs some fresh Highlands and Islands air.’

  Michael said, ‘Excuse me, I need the bathroom.’

  He bent over the basin waiting for the nausea to pass. Zachye had lied – must have sent his letter before he set off to kill Kabutiiti . . . in his eagerness for more money. For over a year he had believed himself to be an accomplice to murder. Believed that he should hang. Now he was reprieved; the victim had been resurrected. But he felt no elation. He had lost Felice anyway. She had probably married Kabutiiti by now. But why had Felice rejected him so precipitously? Maybe Zachye had confessed to the attempted murder and implicated him. He doubted it; the sentence for armed robbery would be long enough without volunteering for more. Something else must have happened. Of course it had – how could he have thought otherwise? Felice would hardly have been in Nairobi, going to lectures, if she had just heard that her benefactor had been murdered. How could he have been so blind? If he had known that it was not the murder of Kabutiiti that had driven a stake through his hope, he would have persisted with her: gone back, written, pleaded, until he could absolve himself or explain. The nausea welled again. He tried to remember the last time that he had been able to control his emotions.

  The McCrees’ cottage lay in billows of heather on a small bay overlooking startlingly white sands. When the sun appeared between the clouds (islands above islands), the sea swam with streams of blue, turquoise and green. Seabirds rode the fizzing water beyond the headland. Michael walked the lonely paths along the coast. When he came in from his walks he sat on a chair on a platform near the front window that allowed a view of the bay, and stared out to sea.

  He had brought books to read, although he found that the shelves were full of discarded novels from previous guests. A stack of board games lay in a corner: none for single players. He picked up a Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice. He had enjoyed reading it many years before, but put it down again when he remembered that the couple in the book got together in the end and, presumably, lived happily ever after.

  Preferring the view to books, he looked out with his binoculars, following the passage of yachts between the islands, spotting seals, shearwaters and divers. Letting the binoculars down into his lap he recalled that dewy morning in the National Park with Felice. He remembered the evening before that dawn when they had talked long into the night while Stanley slept beside the fire. How relaxed she had been with him then; how happy. Then her eager correspondence, before whatever had caused her to reject him in Nairobi. There was a desk on the other side of the room. He searched it and found writing paper. Lowering himself slowly onto the stool in front of the desk he centred the pad on the desktop, took a pen from his shirt pocket and started to write.

  Dear Felice,

  You may be surprised to hear from me after so long and I ask for your forgiveness if this letter is unwelcome. I am sending it to Lwesala in the hope that it will be forwarded. I can’t imagine where you are now, or what you are doing, although I heard from James and Audrey McCree that you have gained a masters. My congratulations.

  You can picture me, if you wish, sitting in the McCrees’ cottage in Scotland, overlooking the sea, and listening to the wind and the seagulls. This is a convalescence – I have not worked for many months, which is quite uncharacteristic – but I’m recovering now.

  It may be that you have found happiness with someone new, but if that is not so, then I would like you to know that I have been faithful. I do not know what happened, so suddenly, to make you so appalled at having to meet me in Nairobi, but whatever the reason it would bring me some peace of mind to know it. Maybe I can receive your absolution. I need it. I have the same address in London.

  Faithfully yours,

  Michael

  He left the letter on the desk and went to look at the sea again, its ever-changing surface hiding the mysterious stillness of the deep. Thinking of Felice, and seeing the water, brought the sea of faith to mind: troubled, choppy on the surface, treacherous currents; but beneath, in the depths, something quiet and still, something sustaining and powering. Perhaps just a primitive instinct – but an instinct for hope, for humility, for selfless love (far beyond a socially protective decency, he thought), for searching for transcendence. Something important to his lost family, and important to Felice. He had found a definition of faith that he could lean towards whilst reading the philosopher-theologian Simone Weil: the longing for an absolute good, directing attention and love towards that good. Yearning for Eden. Vague as it was, he wondered whether Felice might think this proof enough of a spiritual awakening – if that was what was important to her. If he met her again, he would tell her that he was sympathetic; he understood the human need; was much less cynical; had seen where his cynicism could lead – its logical consequences. Man cannot live by bread alone.

  He returned to the desk and folded the letter. He could not deny that humans had an electrified jelly-mind, but neither could he deny that living as if that was the only truth was self-defeating. A paradox of the human condition. A curse, he felt.

  ‘Is this yours, Mr Lacey?’

  Mrs Craddock – hunchbacked, knobble fingered, sallow skinned, but eyes as sharp as a sparrowhawk’s – was waiting for him, on the first morning of his return from Scotland, by the low wall that separated their properties. She held a small branch in an outstretched pincer grip, her face turned away as if she had picked up a used condom. In her other hand she held, as always, a hand fork; she spent hours stabbing at her garden. A tight black headscarf gave her a piratical appearance.

  Today Michael had neglected, before going out, to look through his front door spy hole to see whether she was lurking. He believed himself to be a low-profile neighbour: polite, quiet, helpful when possible (he had taken out Mrs Craddock’s dustbin since her husband died), but she clearly thought otherwise, and was threatening to live on for ever, powered by malice. He was not sure whether a psychotic dementia was creeping up on her, or whether she was innately wicked.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not with you . . .’

  ‘Are you blind? It’s a branch. From your cherry tree. Keep your litter to yourself, young man.’

  Her front garden rose behind her, dense as the heart of Borneo: stinging nettles, cow parsley, straggly dogwood, a thick stand of bamboos. Sharply bristling acanthus leant over the wall like a phalanx of spears. The neighbours called it Ealing Forest.

  ‘Must have blown across.’ He stretched over and took the stick. ‘I’ll get rid of it.’

  ‘Another thing, you’ve got thistles in your back yard.’ She never referred to his neat-as-a-crew-cut lawn as a garden.

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Cut ’em down, Mr Lacey, or they’ll seed in my garden.’

  ‘Well, thanks, I’ll do it as soon as I can.’ He started to move off, nodding as if he much appreciated her advice.

  ‘Another thing, a woman came looking for you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lacey, a woman. Yesterday, it was. She hung about your door, ringing your bell. Brazen, she was.’

  ‘Tall with fair hair?’ He couldn’t tell if Naomi might take it on herself to reappear.

  ‘No, not tall. Dark. Very dark.’ She cracked out the ‘dark’.

  ‘Dark? Sorry, she was dark skinned or her hair was dark?’

  ‘Not a darky, Mr Lacey. Not this one. I said she was dark haired. Are you deaf? Dressed respectable, she was, but it doesn’t fool me.’

  ‘Did she say what she wanted?’

  ‘No, and I wouldn’t like to think what she wanted, Mr L
acey. She asked when you’d be back. How would I know? I said.’

  ‘I think I told you that when I left, but anyway, did she leave a message?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have taken a message, would I, Mr Lacey? That would be interfering. You keep your business to yourself.’ She raised her nose and fought with her lips as if chewing a lemon.

  ‘Did she leave her name?’

  ‘Asked for it, I did, and that’s when she took herself off. Ashamed of herself, I should think. Girls like that wouldn’t leave a name, would they?’

  ‘Well, got to go now.’

  ‘Another thing.’

  He backed down the path, his briefcase in one hand, the errant branch in the other.

  ‘There was a little boy in the car.’

  He reached the gate, nodded back, forced a smile and unlatched the gate to go through.

  Mrs Craddock raised her voice, making a passing mother and her school-age children turn their heads. ‘Looked a bit like you, Mr Lacey, that little boy. Yes, I could quite see the resemblance, I could.’

  He closed the gate and strode to his car, a smile on his face; he was confident that he’d never fathered a child. A woman with dark hair? He placed his briefcase in the foot well of the passenger seat, contemplated dropping the cherry branch in the gutter but, fearful of being shouted at by Mrs Craddock, threw it in after the briefcase. Could have been Jo, but he’d not seen her for years. Perhaps it was a patient: someone with a bitter complaint about an operative complication, who had found out his home address. He got behind the wheel smartly – Mrs Craddock had shuffled to her front wall, shaking her head – and slotted the key in the ignition, but sat there for a few seconds arrested by another possibility. Rachel? His sister. She’d be dark haired – chestnut. He toyed with the idea of getting out again to ask Mrs Craddock if the woman had a scar in her left eyebrow – Rachel’s face had been lacerated on that fateful, unthinkable day – but she would only assume that in addition to leaving his loose liaisons pregnant he assaulted them. He turned on the ignition. Rachel could well have a child – children – by now. If so, the little boy in the car would be . . . his nephew. A nephew; his own. A peculiar feeling of regret threatened. He threw the wheel and drew out fast, leaving rubber on the road.

  When he arrived home he found a small white padded package face down on the mat. He picked it up and took it through to the kitchen, switching on the kettle before turning the package over. It had been hand delivered, no stamp, just ‘Michael’ written on the front. He opened it while he waited for the kettle to boil, although his mind was still on his work: he thought he’d return to the hospital later that evening, as there was a patient with abdominal pain whom he wanted to reassess. Since his illness he had become obsessively protective towards his own patients; after all, they were all he had left. When he passed his colleagues in the corridor or sat with them in audit meetings and committees he sensed a veil of embarrassment. But his relationship with his patients was uncomplicated: they needed him, and he needed them.

  There was a miniature blue envelope in the package. He shook it out onto the sideboard and was about to pick it up, but stopped when he read the message: ‘For Michael. With my love, Rachel.’

  ‘What the . . . ?’

  With an exasperated grunt he swept the card off the sideboard onto the floor and stared at the kettle. The water had started to agitate and protest. Rachel always sent him a card for his birthday, but no anniversary loomed. He had courteously, but firmly, made it plain many years ago that she should not write to him, but still the cards came: a drip-drip torture. He never wrote back. He picked up the envelope to throw it in the bin but felt some hard object inside. He lifted the flap and squeezed the opening so it gaped. A wedding ring. He picked it out and turned it in his fingers.

  Three small diamonds. The kettle began to buck and blow.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ His mother’s ring.

  It was cruel, sending him the ring: razor blades would have been more acceptable, certainly more understandable. He cut the kettle’s switch and slid the ring onto his little finger. It would not go past the first joint. He rested his hand flat on the kitchen sideboard staring at the three stones. As clear as his own hand he saw his mother’s hand as she knelt beside his bed – that time when he was about seven and had wanted to sell one of the diamonds to buy his father a car fast enough to race in the East African Safari Rally. He tried to bring to mind their conversation, but could not even recall the sound of her voice. He did remember pleading with Rachel the next day, something like ‘If you don’t have a baby girl when you grow up please will you give me Mum’s ring, ’cause I’ll be your next most special person.’

  ‘Damn her!’

  It was not until three weeks later that an event occurred of sufficient consequence to rub out the nagging disturbance of Rachel’s gesture. He was in the hall when the postman dropped an air letter through the post-box. It had a brilliant stamp, oversized and colourful, so it looked like a tropical butterfly flapping down onto the mat. The stamp was Tanzanian; the letter from Felice. Michael made himself go and sit down at the dining table before he opened it. He gripped the paper as if it might be snatched from him.

  Dear Michael,

  I received your letter yesterday. I am so sorry that you’ve been ill. I pray for your full recovery. Many things have happened since we last met. It has been a great regret to me that I was rude to you when you came to see me in Nairobi – and that I was not able to say what had happened. So now I should have the courage to speak to you. I have a post as a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam. Would you be able to come and see me? Circumstances make it impossible for me to come to you. Write soon.

  Affectionately,

  Felice

  He stood up and whooped for joy, as if he had swapped one derangement for another. It was a thin thread of hope, but it was golden.

  The man in the smooth black gabardine suit, dark silk shirt and burgundy twill tie in Patel’s Precious Stones, Oxford Street, said, ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Lacey. My cousin in Leicester speaks most highly of you.’

  He had a patrician air, and studied Michael imperiously down a sniffy nose, his voice high-pitched, his manner markedly solemn, as if Michael had come to collect a loved one’s ashes from a funeral parlour. Michael thought his perfectly swept black hair must be a toupee.

  Michael said, ‘I first heard of you when I was a schoolboy in Uganda. Your cousin told me about your jewellery business. I thought I’d ring him first to find out if you were still in the same line.’

  Mr Patel gave a little cough. ‘Mr Lacey, we’ve come a long way – a very long way, sir – from those Uganda days. Patel’s Precious Stones has outlets in New York, Berlin and Paris. None in the colonies now, sir.’ His shoulders shuddered. ‘Mr Lacey, perhaps you would like to accompany me to a private room.’

  His accent was inflected with a dash of French, particularly on his rs, which Michael assumed was there to lend weight to his upper-caste deportment. But the effect was more Inspector Clouseau than Hercule Poirot.

  ‘Would you like coffee, some tea?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Ah, of course; follow me then, sir.’

  They passed through two doors, separated by a short dark stub of corridor. The first required number entry, for which Mr Patel brought his nose close to the keypad to block Michael’s view, entering the numbers with little stabs of his fingers, so that it looked to Michael as if he was picking his nostril hairs. The opening of the second was preceded by the flourishing, in a theatrical fashion, of two heavy keys.

  ‘Here we are, sir.’

  Subdued lighting, oak panelling, royal-blue carpet thick enough to hush their footsteps as they entered the room, two Queen Anne chairs – seated with red velvet – either side of a substantial glass-fronted walnut display cabinet. No doubt there were hidden alarms. Michael checked the ceiling for a vent through which a jewel thief would have to squirm if he were to break in, but the room
looked as secure as a clenched fist.

  ‘You were seeking a diamond engagement piece, I believe. I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for in our premier collection. These are too singular to display at the front.’

  Mr Patel positioned himself to the side of the cabinet and then bent stiffly at the waist to press a brass switch on the wall. Even allowing for the cunning illumination, Michael found the shower of glancing light and colour dazzling against the black satin backcloth, as if the constellations had been compressed and miniaturised.

  His eye settled on a ring with a single round diamond. ‘That one,’ he said. The diamond was large, although not ostentatious, and was just the sort of breath-taking stone he had hoped to dig up on Crystal Mountain when he was at junior school.

  Mr Patel’s hand was hovering.

  ‘Yes, that one.’ He had had no idea that it would be so easy to make the choice.

  ‘You have an exceedingly good eye, sir. The gem is graded IF – internally flawless. You’ll also observe that there’s no yellow tint; it’s pure, the mark of an exceptionally rare diamond.’ He coughed lightly again and arranged his facial muscles to simulate a faint smile. ‘For an exceptionally rare lady, sir?’

  Michael was sure that he’d said that before.

  Mr Patel unlocked the cabinet with a brass key, lifted out the ring with the care and concentration of a bomb disposal expert and placed it on Michael’s palm. ‘The cut on this diamond, sir, brings out its intrinsic brilliance.’

  ‘I think she’ll love it.’

  ‘Would you like to view the other exhibits?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Of course not. Do you have a ring from the lady, to ensure a perfect fit?’

  Michael found himself reaching for the inside pocket of his jacket and taking out Rachel’s blue envelope. He had meant to return his mother’s ring to his sister, but could not bring himself to do so until he had achieved something: recalled his mother’s face and heard her voice. He had lifted out the ring often, to squeeze the stones between his fingers as if he could evoke a genie of remembrance. Nothing came. It was ironic: he could retrieve every memory verse of his childhood, but couldn’t call up his mother. Now he felt impelled to pass the ring to Mr Patel, and say, ‘This fits her.’