He told her about Lena and saw her eyes slowly light up with interest and pleasure. He told the story as an entertainment, how he had been secretly besotted with her, tongue-tied with adoration when he was with her, and then how he was so surprised by the kissing after the party and did not know how to proceed afterwards. She shook her head with pity at his fumbling. He told her about the boyfriend Ronnie, and about the postcard, and how she came back from her holiday on the Shannon and took charge. He kept it light, the way she liked her stories. She loved the postcard episode.
‘You are such an innocent,’ she said. ‘She more or less had to put her life in danger with her super-fit hunk before you realised that she wanted you.’
‘I’m an idiot,’ he agreed. ‘But there’s no need to exaggerate. How was her life in danger?’
She brushed aside Marco’s attempt at suicide. An exhibitionist escapade, she said. He was going to jump out of that car when the moment was right. He just wanted to scare the living daylights out of his parents. Jamal saw how she hesitated when he told her that Lena’s father was Italian, frowning a little at another immigrant story, but she let it pass without remark. Then when he finished telling her what he could for the moment, the silence opened up between them again and her face turned morose. They were on the outer edges of London when she began to tell him how things were between Nick and her. I think he’s fucking someone, she said, or several someones. Or that he will sooner or later. Jamal listened silently while she went into detail about her unhappiness with Nick and all that she thought lay ahead for her. The detail surprised him. She had never spoken to him in this way about Nick before. Jamal had thought that Hanna and Nick were permanent, and had long ago learned to keep his opinions on the matter to himself. He could not understand how Hanna could tolerate Nick’s egotism, and his flaunting of his intelligence and knowledge. Now as he listened to his sister talking about the failure of her love with such glib misery, he felt sorry that he had lost the habit of speaking openly to her. He watched her as she talked, absently stroking her mobile phone, and he could not find the easy words of reassurance that the moment required.
As they pulled into Liverpool Street station she said, I’d better call our leader. Stay in touch, beautiful one. They went in different directions on the Circle Line, she to Victoria and he to King’s Cross. On the train north, his mind turned to his father and the secret he had endured and then forced on them, and to his mother and the unhappiness Ba had caused her. He thought of what Ma had told them, of the woman he had married and how he thought himself tricked, how he cried so much as he spoke of those times and those events. It’s no good though, she said. Nothing can be done about these things. The crying does no good now. He should have spoken about all this many years ago.
He felt he should have stayed with them for a few more days.
The Return
4
It was getting dark when Anna arrived home. Nick was sitting in front of the TV watching the evening football. She had rung him from Liverpool Street to tell him what train she was catching, and that he was not to worry about picking her up. She would take a taxi from the station. There was a time when he would have said, Nonsense, I’ll be there. She told herself not to be petty, not to fret her mind with these trivial grumbles. He rose to his feet and embraced her, holding her for a long moment, looking concerned.
‘Was it terrible? Is everything all right?’ he asked gently, steering her to the sofa.
She smiled at his fussing anxiety and kissed him quickly on the lips. ‘No, everything is not all right,’ she said, sitting down where he wanted her to. ‘I saw these two women in Liverpool Street, a mother and a daughter, I think. They were so hopelessly fat, and so much at a loss, so confused in that huge station. It was depressing to see them. Black women. They spoke to each other in a language I did not understand, and were looking around in a terrified way. I don’t think they could read English.’
‘Then?’ Nick asked when she said no more for a while.
‘Then nothing. I went to catch my train,’ she said. ‘Asylum seekers, I suppose. Maybe I should have offered to help, but the sight of them depressed me. They were so helpless and so ugly. Is it really so bad where they come from?’
‘Probably,’ he said quietly.
She smiled. ‘You sound like my saintly brother.’
‘How was it at home?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘They had news for us. My mother was raped when she was sixteen and my father is a bigamist,’ she told him.
‘What!’ he said, sitting up in his chair.
‘Which apparently is not so strange for people like us,’ she said cheerfully. ‘How was your conference?’
‘Oh, tedious. Same old people saying the same old things. I stayed the night with Matt, that was the best part,’ he said, smiling, so she did not believe what he was saying.
‘Did your paper go well?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ he said, frowning modestly. ‘It didn’t seem that anyone has given much thought to the subject, so my contribution made a bit of an impact.’
‘I’m sorry, you never told me what your paper was on,’ she said. Or I did not ask in time and you were in such a rush to go.
‘It was on CMS missionary activity in Eritrea,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s Church Missionary Society, a nineteenth-century Anglican evangelical movement. Did you know that the Bible was translated into Ge’ez in the fifth century after Christ? I didn’t even know there was a language called Ge’ez until just recently. I didn’t know that it had its own alphabet, and the learning to translate the Bible.’
‘Yes, you told me. Didn’t your friend Julia at work give a paper on that?’ she asked.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We did a joint paper, Julia and I. She talked about the Ge’ez Bible and I talked about CMS activity. God knows what we were up to in England in the fifth century but it wasn’t much to do with Christianity or translating the Bible. That didn’t stop us from taking our own improved brand of Christianity to the Eritreans in the nineteenth century, which the miserable wretches rejected. They preferred their outdated Ge’ez variety instead of accepting the opportunity to join the modern world.’
Is it Julia you’re fucking then?
‘What was that you were saying about your father being a bigamist?’ he asked, smiling, inviting her to make what she had said into a joke. So she told him how the visit to Norwich had gone and how she had been unable to contain her irritation with the horribleness of what her mother had told them. After a while she saw that he was no longer attentive to her words, but that his eyes moved slowly over her face and her body. She stopped talking and he came over to the sofa for her. She clung to him as he kissed her, murmuring and groaning in his mouth. She could not help herself. She did not want to help herself. It was ecstacy to lose herself in pleasure so complete that it overwhelmed her whole mind and her whole body.
Afterwards, as they lay in the dark, she said: ‘On the way home, I was sitting on the train yearning for you. I even said the words to myself, yearning for you. I was sitting there thinking that soon I will be home and you will make love to me just as you have done.’
He grunted contentedly and turned over towards her. He ran his hand over her belly and breasts. After a moment, she heard his breathing change and knew that he was almost asleep. He usually fell asleep before her and she had become used to waiting for his breathing to change before she opened her mind as a prelude to sleep. It was often a good moment, and she felt a kind of relief as she heard him sleeping. She felt that way most nights, as if she had been released from a watchful presence. Then in the dark she allowed a hidden self to come creeping out, one which entertained secret ambitions and desires. Sometimes she simply replayed happy moments or indulged serial fantasies of her future achievements, when she would become a great success and win fame. When his breathing had become deep and forgetful, she composed herself and selected the narrative she wanted to run through for herself, as if
she was selecting a book or a piece of music. If he stirred at such moments, or moved about in his sleep, she waited irritably for him to settle down again so she could return to her secret dramas.
She had always been slow to fall asleep, and when she was younger she had lain awake for hours in the dark because her parents had decreed a time when her light had to be switched off. She thought of how protective her father had been, and how every night before he went to bed, he carefully opened her bedroom door and asked in the softest whisper if she was asleep. She did not answer, and he went away satisfied that his little girl was contentedly sleeping. They stopped bothering her when she started to study for examinations, and then she could read for hours until she became too tired to read any more. At some point, her sleepless hours became a delight, when she played out her daydreams, and undid her inadequacies and fulfilled all her ambitions.
She was still able to do that now, but she had a better idea of her limitations, and it now required an act of will to enact some of her fantasies. Perhaps it was only non-achievers like her who spent hours in the dark living a fantasy life. Perhaps successful people did not need to imagine success, and could fall asleep instantly like Nick after sex. She thought of their lovemaking a short while ago, and replayed what they had done move by move, living again every delicious stroke and thrust. Had he made love to Julia yet? She thought he had, that was her guess. Nick was not inclined to deny himself for long. She did not really want to think about that and what it meant, not at this hour. She wished she could fall asleep, and not be bothered by the sinking sense that her life was adrift, which stole on her when she was unwary.
To keep herself from agitation, she silently recited the first verse of Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ to herself: Lay your sleeping head, my love. Then when she finished that she tried to do the same with ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my senses. It took her some moments to get the first verse right, and then she recited it again until she could see it in her mind as if it were on the page in front of her. She did the same thing with the second verse, and then waited to see the two verses together before starting on the third. She knew that verse quite well and so she was over that one quickly, more quickly than she would have liked. She struggled through the fourth, and fell asleep when she got to: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.
That night she had the house dream again. She was walking on a gently rising cobbled street. She could see that it made a turning to the right ahead of her, and on the corner were chairs and a couple of tables outside a small café. There was a smell of wood smoke in the air, and the sound of accordion music and low-pitched voices in conversation. Behind her, she knew, was the sea. There was no one in sight but there were people around. It was a street she recognised, and she marvelled to be there again after having been away for so long. She had never thought she would see this street of her youth again, or feel so comfortable and at leave to stay for as long as she wished. At the corner, the road narrowed and grew dark, and on her right she saw a huge door that was slightly ajar. Against every cautious instinct in her dreaming body, she pushed at the door and entered. Instantaneously she found herself on a terrace looking out to sea and to the town round the curve of the bay. A man spoke softly nearby, and when she turned to look she saw a dark-skinned young man sitting on a stool with his hands in a tub of washing. The sleeves of his baggy shirt were rolled up and he wore an old satiny white cap on his head. He spoke again in the same gentle voice but she could not make out his words. She felt a slight sense of panic and suddenly was eager to leave. She struggled to get a good grip on her suitcase, which she had not been aware she was pulling behind her, and tried to find her way back to the street. Instead she found herself in the derelict house of her dreams, dragging her suitcase up worn wooden stairs and along rotting floorboards, stifled by cobwebs and a steady throb of anxiety. The suitcase was growing heavier and becoming difficult to manoeuvre on the littered floors, but she could not leave it behind even though it was old and battered. Later, in the early hours before morning, she dreamed that she was riding a horse across a beautiful landscape of gentle hills and sheltered pasture, with the shadow of mountains in the far distance.
Lena and Jamal were invited to tea with their neighbour, whose name, it turned out, was Harun. It said so on the postcard he had pushed through the letterbox. They turned up at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon as instructed. When he opened the door, Jamal saw that he was wearing a suit and an open-necked shirt. The suit was of a similar vintage to the one Ba used to wear, except that Harun’s looked less dilapidated. The bruising and swelling on Harun’s face had gone down, although there were still some dry scabs on his cheek and on his temple. He seemed very pleased to see them.
‘On the dot,’ Harun said, extending his hand to Lena and then shaking Jamal’s hand. ‘Come in, please. When I went back to Sainsbury’s to thank them for the way their staff had looked after me after my tumble, the manager reminded me of the shopping I had lost. So instead of my oranges and salad, he sent one of his young men round with an enormous hamper of tins and vegetables and fruit and biscuits and cakes, as if to reward me for my injury. This is a gift from Sainbury’s to all of us,’ he said, gesturing with a flourish towards the coffee table, on which he had placed a plate of biscuits and another of small cakes decorated with colourful icing.
He left the room to fetch the tea, and Lena gave the biscuits and cakes an expert examination while Jamal looked around. The chairs and sofa were large and old, covered in a faded floral upholstery with wooden insets in the arms. The most faded of the chairs was the one under the window, evidently Harun’s chair, with a small table beside it on which he had left a spectacles case and a book. The wallpaper was also floral and faded, and the paintwork was going brown. A small television stood against the inside wall of the house, and next to it was the radio and hi-fi. Everything looked old and worn out. The carpet was matted and bare in places, and of an indeterminate grey colour, which might originally have been a pale shade of green or blue. The room spoke of poverty, or at least lack. Just behind the door stood a bureau. On the bureau, and on two of the walls were framed photographs, sepia with age; there were three framed photographs in all. The two on the walls were of groups, one taken in a studio, and the other in a garden. The one on the bureau was a head and shoulders photograph of a woman.
Jamal stood up to have a closer look at the photograph of the woman, taking her to be a wife passed away. Her face was composed, as if she had made her whole body come to rest moments before the photograph was taken. The small tolerant smile on her lips, patient and forbearing, had spread to her eyes, and her whole face looked as if it would burst into a broad grin if the photographer did not hurry up and take the picture. Jamal guessed that she would have been in her mid-thirties when the photo was taken. She was sitting slightly sideways, leaning forward, her head turned towards her left shoulder facing the camera, a classic studio pose.
He heard the kettle click and headed back to the sofa, in case he should seem too curious too soon. As he went back to sit down he glanced at the two photographs that hung on the walls. One was a group of three, two women sitting down and a man standing behind the small ornamental table that stood between them. He guessed they were siblings. The other was of two men and a teenaged boy. The men were both on the portly side, buttoned up in waistcoated suits and wearing hats. The boy stood between them, in shirtsleeves, and the hand of one of the men was on his shoulder. They were standing in a garden, the men smiling, the boy grinning. In the background, light glinted off a pond, beside which stood a stone bench. From the style of dress, he guessed that both photographs were taken in the period between the wars. He wondered if they were part of the woman’s family.
Jamal sat down beside Lena, who asked him in a whisper if that was Harun’s wife. As Harun poured the tea, he made conversation. He took two brief sips of tea and then put his cup down on the table beside him. ‘As you will have seen on
my card, my name is Harun,’ he continued in his unhurried way. He paused for a moment and then added, as if unsure whether to provide this additional information: ‘Harun Sharif.’
‘How are you feeling now, Mr Sharif?’ Lena asked. ‘I hope the nurse has been coming to look after you.’
Harun made a disapproving noise. ‘Tssk, not Mr anything, I would much prefer Harun. The nurse only came to check that I had survived the night, and since I had, I was able to persuade her to go away and never come back. There was no need for her to waste time on me when there are many others who require her skills. I am perfectly well, Lena, apart from the usual aches and pains, and that quite unexpected tumble the other day.’
‘The infirmities of age,’ Lena said.
‘Precisely,’ Harun said, laughing and nodding, acknowledging his own phrase. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I assume you are students. What are you studying?’
Long before half an hour had passed, it was clear that Harun was making ready for them to go. He offered them more tea, which they declined, and after a short pause as if to make certain that they would not have any more, he gathered the cups and saucers and put them on the tray. Then he sat back in his chair, smiled at them and glanced out of the window. ‘Well, that was very nice,’ he said after a moment, making as if to get to his feet. ‘We must arrange another session of tea very soon. I know you are very busy with your work, but when you can spare a little time, then it would be very nice to have a chat again.’
‘Well, we didn’t waste too much of his afternoon, did we?’ Lena said to Jamal when they got back. Lisa and Jim were back from their Berlin trip, and they told them the story of their tea with the neighbour. ‘We can’t have been in there for twenty minutes,’ said Lena.
Jamal laughed. ‘He reminds me of my Ba,’ he said. ‘Here’s your tea, drink it and goodbye, thank you. He more or less kicked us out in the end.’
The Last Gift Page 19
