The Memory of Love
Page 51
A rush of air. He feels his cheeks distort, his body cartwheel through space, his guts and stomach trailing behind. Impossible to breathe. He has lost his hold on Balia, feels her body tumble past him. He is falling. Then comes the sting of the water. Only that.
The sting of the water to tell him he is alive.
TWO YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 56
October 2003
He has friends in Norfolk. A small group of people he has met since he started coming regularly. They are, on the whole, retired folk. Still vigorous and, as his mother did, choosing to live out their lives close to the elements. In the mornings, tracing his mother’s footsteps along the beach, Adrian passes people he recognises. The old boy in tweeds who walks back along the beach in the mornings from the shop with his newspaper under his arm, accompanied by an arthritic Labrador. Adrian does not yet count him as a friend. They have only ever exchanged greetings at a distance. The older man will raise his hat in a friendly enough way, though something in his demeanour, the pace of his walk and the way he retains the direct line of his route, makes Adrian feel that conversation is not desired.
The couple in the next bungalow but one had known his mother when she was alive. They tell Adrian that the man in tweeds is a widower these five years. They welcomed Adrian’s appearance with a card on the doorstep and an invitation to sherry. He had been a lecturer at the university. She is a former dance teacher and had given him a photograph of his mother, wearing a fluid grey jersey dress, posed in the style of Pina Bausch. In the evenings, to ease the possibility of an incipient loneliness rather than an actual mood of loneliness, Adrian will occasionally stop by for sherry, which is taken each day at five o’clock. The bungalow next to Adrian’s had been bought by weekenders, who rarely, if ever, made the journey from London.
Adrian is neither a weekender nor a resident, rather something in between. Following his mother’s death he’d chosen to retain the bungalow. It comes in useful for writing and sometimes for weekends with Kate. His other friends are an assortment of ages, some from his past, his school and student years who still live near by, others are attached to the university, one or two – like the sherry couple – had been friends or acquaintances of Adrian’s mother. Interesting, when he thinks about it, to find oneself of an age where it becomes possible to have friendships in common with one’s parents.
He is not unhappy.
In the evenings he often dines at the Lamb and Anchor, where the owners have done a reasonable job of creating an ambience of simulated authenticity and where the local drinkers, with their dogs and habitual places at the bar, render an equally convincing imitation of a hearty welcome. Adrian is fine with it. He will drink a Guinness, because this is what he ordered the first time and is now presumed to be his ‘usual’. He will say his hellos, take a seat by the fire, whose embers gleam even in the summer, read his newspaper and order the day’s special. With his meal he will drink a glass or two of the perfectly decent house red, or else order a half-bottle of claret. When he visits with Kate, the regulars, mostly men, will tease her in a gruff fashion to which she will respond politely and in perfect seriousness.
It amuses him, Kate’s unsettling of these men, of which she is entirely unaware. He admires the way she can brilliantly deadpan a joke, her ability to sum up a person’s nature in the moment of meeting. Over dinner he watches her careful rearrangement of her cutlery. At other times he has seen her dancing alone, believing herself unobserved, and he is reminded of Ileana. Adrian has come to look forward to the time they spend alone in each other’s company and in which he has found a new and entirely unexpected love for her – a gift from the end of his marriage. After the main meal the publican will insist upon a free dessert for Kate, who expresses a preference for cheese.
In the city he is busy. During the day he is occupied with his clients, his evenings – and he makes sure of this – are filled with obligations, departmental meetings, board meetings for the various organisations he is involved in running, papers to write, dinner parties.
It is here, in Norfolk, he most often thinks about her. Sometimes he will make the journey to the coast for no other reason than to do so. Something to do with the water, the sea. Today he is alone. Kate is in town with her mother and he is not in the mood for company or sherry, so he lets his thoughts go to her. He watches the sea and imagines, as he has so often, the waves joining up, turning from grey to blue to green, drawing him into the past. At those times he experiences a surge of yearning as powerful as the movement of the ocean.
The moment has long since passed when the loss had outlasted the duration of the affair itself, though the love Adrian feels is as strong as ever. Unlike those earlier occasions – mourning a lost affection of his youth – this time there is to be no imagining her altered features, her new occupations, no unknown rival or replacement upon whom to project a wild jealousy. For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one – which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. So he sits and watches the sea and thinks of Mamakay.
During his last days in the country Adrian stayed in the apartment with Kai. Kai came and went in between his shifts and cooked meals for them both, took charge of day-to-day matters. Adrian never returned to the home he had shared with Mamakay. Each evening Adrian and Kai spent in each other’s company. When Adrian heard the sound of Kai’s key in the lock he was glad. It allowed him an excuse to stop the pretence of work, of trying to keep himself on track. Kai’s company offered distraction and comfort at the same time, the comfort of feeling close to Mamakay.
Adrian never saw Elias Cole again. From Babagaleh, who cleared the house where Adrian and Mamakay had lived, Adrian learned the fate of the remaining actors from Cole’s story. Yansaneh, who was removed from his lecturer position in the humanities department and assigned to the northern campus: killed when the campus was overrun early in the war. Vanessa, Cole’s mistress, living with a foreign speculator who arrived in the wake of war. One day, idly searching the Internet, Adrian came across a lecturer in international media studies at a university in one of the southern states of America. His name: Kekura Conteh.
It was Babagaleh, too, who had undertaken many of the practical arrangements for Mamakay’s funeral. The wake was held at the Mary Rose. Adrian found he did not know very many people, which was perhaps unsurprising, for his relationship with Mamakay had barely left the tight confines of the world they had created with each other and for themselves alone. Ileana came, naturally. And Attila, for which Adrian had felt a gust of gratitude. Some of the guests, assuming he had been brought along by somebody else, made polite conversation with Adrian, asking him how long he had been in the country and with which agency he had come to work, how he found living there. And Adrian answered them in kind, could not bring himself to tell them he had been Mamakay’s lover, could not help but notice it was Kai to whom they displayed the deference reserved for the most greatly bereaved, to whom they offered consolation. Adrian watched and found that he did not mind. He stood with his back against the wall and observed the mourners. Once his eyes alighted upon Babagaleh moving through the room, in between the people, continuing unnoticed with his tasks. Babagaleh would survive them all, thought Adrian. He wanted to ask Mamakay a question about Babagaleh, remembered where he was and considered how the question would for ever remain unanswered. A hundred times a day it happened: he turned to her with a thought upon his lips.
Elias Cole had been too unwell to attend his daughter’s funeral.
The morning of the next day Adrian, awaking to the conviction that he wanted to return to England, walked through to the sitting room where Kai was asleep on the settee and woke him to inform him of his plans. The yearning for the familiar overwhelmed him. Kai nodded slowly, but said nothing. An hour later Kai left for work, returned in the late afternoon and sat opposite Adrian.
The last Saturday they spent at the beach at Ileana’s house, arriving to a viridescent light. Lightning slipped across the sky. Thunder unrolled a dark shadow. Afterwards the three friends walked in a new brightness, breaking the rain-soaked membrane of sand to leave warm, dry footprints. Nobody else was around, the beach was deserted. They passed the empty hotel, with its bar and snooker table still awaiting the return of guests called suddenly away. The fishing villages were quiet, canoes upturned upon their stands, nets abandoned where they lay. Curious, remarked Ileana, that fishermen should so dislike getting wet. The remark left them incapable with laughter. Some things seemed to make no sense at all. Ileana raised her head and a hand, said look. Ahead of them, on a distant sand spit, a black heron unfurled a single wing.
One day perhaps he will return. He sees himself stooped under the sun, the prospect of his own death upon the horizon, searching for those places and people among whom he lived for those months and whom he had loved.
At other times he looks at Kate and he thinks of what he has left behind.
This is the time of year Adrian loves most on the coast. The birds have begun to arrive. A small flock of sandpipers, strutting along the waterline. He keeps a pair of binoculars on the table by the window and now raises them to his eyes. Almost daily there are redstarts, shrikes and yesterday a glimpse of a pied flycatcher. They will be headed south soon, to the coast of West Africa.
And yesterday, too, a letter from Kai, who writes erratically but with reasonable frequency and no longer avoids using the computer. This time, though, he returned to his preferred form. Enfolded into the letter was a document composed of eight handwritten sides of paper. Adrian opened it and began to read, carried it out on to the deck, into the early-morning sun. It was the story of Agnes, her husband and daughters, of Naasu and JaJa. Everything Adrian had known must be true but had never been able to discover, never been able to prove.
Everything he needed was there.
And there was something more, on the bottom of Kai’s letter, in the same blue Biro, as though for a few moments Kai had been called from the room and left his letter unattended on the table. Something Adrian saw only on his third reading. On the bottom right of the page.
A child’s careless scribble.
*
The child stops and stands to stare at her feet, as though seeing them for the first time. She grips sand between her toes and lifts one foot and then the other. One foot and then the other. She raises her shoulders and rocks her head between them, stamps her feet and laughs. The boy Abass goes to her, stretches out his arms to pick her up, but she evades him and runs away along the waterline. In three strides he has her; hands under her arms, he swings her up. Presently he sets her down and they walk away along the edge of the shoreline. Something left on the sand by the sea’s withdrawal catches their attention.
From high up on the beach Kai watches them as they begin to dig, applying themselves silently to the task. Abass, dark-skinned and angular. By contrast the girl is chubby and bronze, her hair a mass of black ringlets. Of the hair Kai’s aunts are delighted and despairing in equal measure, for it will not be bound, springs free of braids and defies their hair oils and combs. The child squirms beneath their hands and pulls out the bands and ribbons. Kai can see the salt crystals sparkling among the curls as the girl moves under the sun. This evening Kai’s aunts will tut at him as they begin work to undo the effects of sun, sea and salt upon the child’s hair. They will chide each other and vie for ownership of the comb, just as earlier that morning Kai’s aunts gently competed with one another to dress the child in her swimsuit, rub lotion upon her back and send her in search of her sandals. The whole expedition was alien to them, for they were village women from the arid interior, whose lives had been spent swathed in cloth against the heat and dust. But they enacted their roles and officiated over the preparation of the child with such conviction that Kai’s cousin, passing through the living room on her way to church, stopped to watch, twisted her mouth into a wry shape and exchanged with Kai a look as long as either of them dared.
They left in Old Faithful, bellies of fried plantains, smoked fish and pepper, pawpaw and lime. To Ileana’s. It has become a regular event, every fortnight or so, the trip to Malaika beach and to Ileana. The adults sit on chairs in the shade at the front of the house and watch Abass lead the little girl on to the rocks to search among the rock pools for aquatic life to capture and place in a makeshift aquarium on the steps of Ileana’s house until it is time to go and those creatures that are still swimming, crawling or hovering, by virtue of having survived, will have won their freedom. Kai watches. At the end of the rocks stands a lone black heron and Kai is returned to a time two years ago, a week after he had handed the curled newborn to a wet nurse. In those days he came and went between Adrian’s apartment and the neonatal ward, tending to both man and child.
He remembers standing inside the women’s ward observing how the wet nurse lifted the child from his arms and returned her to her own body, strapping the infant in the place between her breasts; he saw in the meticulousness of the woman’s movements the first evidence that she believed the child would survive. It would take time, but everything in the way the woman tucked and folded a cloth around the infant said time was something she had.
The day is coming to a close. They should be going if they are going to make it to the ferry port. Still, Kai prefers, for a few more moments, to watch the children play. The little girl dances on the tide line, Abass scoops up fistfuls of wet sand. And then whatever it is they have been seeking has been found, and the little girl laughs.
The laugh comes back to him, time and time again. It comes in the night, and at other unexpected moments, in his dreams – an echo of its pitch and timbre. But from the little girl it comes whole, pure and absolute. It is Nenebah. And in an instant the sound of that laugh can return Kai to a hillside overlooking the city eight years ago, to the moment following a lost joke, the playful bite during a morning’s embrace.
During his days at the hospital he pauses at occasional moments to think of her. One day last week a lizard dropped from a door lintel on to his shoulder and then on to the floor. The creature backed itself into a corner of the room, watched Kai out of one rotating eyeball, before hastening past him through the open door. The sort of occurrence that would have made Nenebah smile and search for hidden meanings. Kai walks from theatre to ward to staff room, crossing the courtyard under the glare of the sun. He arrives early in the day when the south wall of the building is purple with the morning glory that now grows there. By the time he leaves in the evening, the flowers are twisted sweet-papers. Yesterday he altered his route out of the building for no particular reason except that he felt like it, so it took him through the children’s ward, where he walked the length of the room while a paper plane circled in the air above him, carried on the eddying wind of the fan.
On other days Kai passes the room where Elias Cole died, one day before dawn two years ago. Nobody else had been present, so there was no saying in what manner he had faced his end. A preacher was called. The man administered a belated blessing, requested from Kai his taxi fare home and a donation to the church. Babagaleh cleared the room of Cole’s belongings. To Kai, Babagaleh gave the photograph of Nenebah, in which she appeared both to turn from and to confront the camera. Kai kept it alongside her other possessions and her clarinet. He passes the old house from time to time. It is closed up now. Babagaleh has returned home to the north and the love of his estranged wife.
Last night, the first time in many months, Kai woke during the night. He had been dreaming a
nd, though the images of the dream were lost to him, he was left nevertheless with a sensation of well-being, of possibility. He left his bed and walked out into the yard. There was a breeze, unusual for the time of year, it was still early for the harmattan. It carried with it a hint of moisture, of night blooms and wet fruit. In the darkness the city dogs sang to each other. Somewhere in the long grass a frog called for an unknown mate. Kai breathed deeply. He sat down upon the step, his back to the house, and settled down to wait. And finally, above the houses, he saw rising slowly the muted, insistent radiance of dawn.
Today Tejani comes home.
The little girl’s laugh lingers in the air, is swept away by the tide. Kai stands up and calls the children. They make a race of returning to him. He meets them halfway down the beach. The little girl opens her hand to show him a five-petalled sand dollar lying upon her palm. They have arrived rolled in sand, like a sugar coating, and Kai leads them back down to the water. The little girl likes to ride into the waves upon his shoulders, rides him like a bull through the white horses.