‘It’s difficult to see a bright path when the past is so dark. When the last thirty years of memory have reduced a nation …’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, my point is, we all have to move on. Even you have to move on.’
‘I want to die in the place where I was born.’ It sounded a bit childish, he recognised.
‘Does it matter where we die?’ She did not seem to register the offered key to his past. ‘Isn’t it better to focus on how to live?’
He had never really thought of it like that. ‘Well, I …’ He was suddenly taut inside with the fear that they were not similar at all. He looked at the strawberry punnet on the grass between them – it was an empty, aching thing.
‘I am sorry. I have hurt your feelings,’ she said softly, and reached out to put her hand on his bare arm. He flinched, but kept staring at the blades of grass. ‘Look, Gabriel, I have an obtrusive way at times; you mustn’t take too much notice of what I say in the heat of the moment.’
He did not look up, but she bent forward to look into his face.
‘You see, I was quiet for too long and now I have this constant urge to express myself,’ she said jokingly, trying to coax him back out of himself.
He did not reply, but shook his head sadly.
As if she had been reading his thoughts, she said, ‘You know, us having an argument is a good thing – it means that we are getting closer. A unity is always made up of at least two parts, and we will never get close if we can’t accept each other’s differences.’
He looked up then, at her warm eyes surrounded by a silky cobweb of lines, but in his mind it was Michael’s twelve-year-old face he saw in front of him. And those eyes looking back at him. He turned his troubled eyes away from her and pulled at a trouser leg. Feeling the dark beetle turn inside him and the old anxiety rising, he realised he was trapped. There was no protective corner into which he could remove himself and hide from her knowing gaze. He needed to strike out, if only to create some space. ‘Well,’ he said, his voice gone hard, ‘fortunately, you have no idea about my “differences” – not to speak of my shortcomings – and I daresay that, if you did, you would find them difficult to accept.’
‘Feeling sorry for ourselves is never going to help, you know.’ She was fed up, he could tell.
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he retaliated, and, because he had never really grown up, he added, ‘What do you know about anything, anyway?’
She made a strange noise then, out of her throat, but she did not answer. Her light body shifted on the grass, stirring up a scent of camomile.
And then, all of a sudden, the beauty had gone out of the day, as if something had dirtied the air. The jasmine gave off a smell of urine. His heart wobbled as if it was not his young self he was remembering, reflected in Michael’s eyes, but some other dear child, lost and vulnerable – an orphan, perhaps; somebody he ought to reach out to and comfort – save, even – before it was too late. Smiling palely, he turned to apologise, perhaps not so much for what he had said as for who he was, but she had already left. The grass next to him was empty, save for a blackbird that had hopped out from under a shrub and looked at him now, sideways, with beads of unseeing jet.
*
When Mrs Sarobi first saw the pebble-dashed cottage towards the bottom of the lane, she had been disappointed. The estate agent had described it as picturesque and Edwardian, but the drab, roughcast front of the house had made it stand out from the other cottages in the lane, which were limewashed and chocolate-box charming. The interior, too, had made her heart sink. An old woman had lived there alone, she was told, and the cottage had stood empty for years after the woman’s death, as the only son, who was living in London at the time, had not been able to decide what to do with it. In the end, several years later, the grown-up son had made it clear that he was no longer interested in the cottage or its contents. The agents had handled the whole business. It had been put up for sale and the price had been low enough for Mrs Sarobi to afford the deposit with the money her lawyers had eventually managed to get out of her former husband’s family in Herat. She had been living in a council flat in Bethnal Green at the time. That was where they put her when she arrived, not quite knowing what else to do. It seemed to surprise the authorities that she had a plan for her life in this country. They warned against it, saying that she might struggle to fit in. But she had had enough time to think about her plan. She was impatient and so she had bought the cottage in a hurry, without viewing it first, making the fatal mistake of trusting an estate agent.
It was true that somebody had made a half-hearted attempt to tidy the place up, but a couple of decades or more of neglect had left their mark. The old woman’s furniture and other artefacts had been included in the sale, but Mrs Sarobi suspected the place had been looted before she moved in. There was very little left of value. The carpet in the front room had once been maroon, but years of unbroken traffic had worn it down so that patches were frayed and the floorboards showed through. A torn leather armchair, once of high quality, stood by the dusty grate. Any ornaments or pictures had been removed but, in a low, built-in cupboard opposite the window, Mrs Sarobi found an old record player and a handful of seventy-eight records from the forties and fifties. In the kitchen, the linoleum had been cut away around the Rayburn to reveal the original flagstones. Mrs Sarobi decided to expose the flagstones completely and put down one of her thick woollen rugs on top. Above the sink hung a yellowing calendar from 1974; a few illegible pencil marks spelt out a fading existence amongst pictures of furry ponies grazing on the moor. Only one date had been clearly circled in red: a Sunday in July. For some reason, Mrs Sarobi had felt compelled to keep the calendar in a drawer.
The two small bedrooms upstairs were cold and draughty, but the beds, which had miraculously been left in place, were of antique inlaid mahogany and bore witness to their owner’s former station. Mrs Sarobi decided early on to do the place up, room by room, on her own. In the larger of the two bedrooms, taped to the back of an attractive chest of drawers, she found a number of letters. She held the small bundle carefully in her hands and sat down on the bed. A ribbon had been tied around them and Mrs Sarobi hesitated, as its fading red suggested their content. She had a strong sense that she was trespassing, and her heart was beating harder as she untied the ribbon and let it fall next to her on the stripped bed. There were eight letters, all still in their envelopes; the love of a lifetime in eight letters, each cautiously weighted word browning in fading ink.
She pulled out the first one, dated 1936, and blushed as she read that initial rush of agony and lust: Your eyes, the softness of your lips, your naked skin, I want, can’t wait, oh my love, when? A man called George had signed the letter to his darling Cecilia. She herself had never received such a letter. She could not imagine what it would be like to read those words addressed to her – if it had been her eyes, her skin as soft as silk … She could not bear it; it was all too much. She put her hand to the bed and thought of Cecilia sleeping there. It made her shudder. But it was for that reason, for the empty bed, that she could not resist the last letter. Her hands were shaking as she held the envelope in her hands. The stamp was dated 1942 but, as she pulled out the letter, another, smaller envelope fell out. It was unstamped and, to her great surprise, unopened. The same hand, that only a few years previously had written about flesh and heart, had marked the letter, To my son, on his eighteenth birthday. She contemplated the sealed envelope, turning it over in her hands. She was at a temporary loss. Opening the sealed letter seemed to be going too far. She put it back in with the other letters and retied the fading ribbon. After a moment’s thought, she put the bundle in her pocket; she would decide what to do later.
However, she soon forgot about the letters; it was another find, from the smaller bedroom at the back, which was to keep her awake for many nights. She found the cache by chance. It was hidden under a loose floorboard, which in turn had been covered by a marble-topped bedside cupboard, left behind wi
th the bed. The cache held a child’s treasure hidden in an old tin case, the size of a shoebox. As Mrs Sarobi opened the lid of the box, kneeling on the floor by the bed, her body was prickling as if tiny ants were crawling all over her skin. There were a few pebbles, polished on a riverbed, a feather from a raven, still with a blue sheen to the oily black, a small metal clip with flaking red paint, which looked as if it might have something to do with electronics, and, wrapped in a soiled white handkerchief and placed carefully into a corner of the case, a collection of blue glass shards, some of them still showing a pattern of tiny painted flowers. Mrs Sarobi held the shards in her hands and felt at once a peculiar sense of purpose. She carried the handkerchief and its contents carefully downstairs. Gingerly, almost tenderly, she laid out the pieces on the oilcloth on the kitchen table and stood back to look at them. They were from some kind of vessel, she reckoned, and, without knowing why, she decided to try to piece them back together.
Over the following weeks she made slow progress, what with her daily work in the allotments and still sorting out the house at night. But gradually, piece by broken piece, the vessel began to take form. It was a cheap, ugly thing, she realised, but for some reason a child had treasured it, guarding it along with the things that mattered most, protecting it wholeheartedly against the giant world – that baffling hugeness that the child was just venturing into.
Mrs Sarobi had been a child once – with a child’s name. She used to be Nahal – young plant. Her father gave her this name. He had been a keen gardener. ‘Once life has been given,’ he used to say, ‘growing is its most fundamental occupation.’ This name was the most significant gift she would ever receive. It carried the weight of a life born out of another, tied with the silken thread which stretched from her mother’s heart – the heart which stopped shortly after Nahal was born.
A leggy girl with thin plaits and a cotton smock the colour of canaries, Nahal would play in the courtyard with her cousins. In the alchemy of late afternoon, the terracotta walls turned to red gold. Later, she would sleep, sedated by the scent of evening jasmine. Listening to her father’s slippered feet on the stairs in the morning made her warm.
‘You must study, you must read,’ Father would say. ‘Illiteracy is the greatest threat to this country and our culture – because, in the end, ignorance always makes us cruel.’ By then, she was aware of threats. She felt tranquil inside her father’s words, but around them tension was mounting and coarse twines of it found their way into her body. She felt them, knotting into a ball in her stomach.
They had to leave and they went to England, where the rain curved across the landscape like a strung bow. In Cambridge, that first evening, she picked a white flower and held it under her nose – but it had no scent and she was embarrassed to have been found out in that way. She was lost for a while.
Gradually, she grew accustomed to her new home. She was intelligent, they told her with astonished admiration, as if no one expected her to be. She was different in so many ways, after all. She learnt and the young plant grew. It thrived in this rich, well-watered soil where it had taken root.
When her father died, she could have cried; she could have fallen to her knees and cried, ‘My life, my love is dead.’ But she was too dry, sapped. She was uprooted, her growth stunted. It was as if she had been whole before and now she was only half and so she had lost twice as much. Her grief was doubled. The burden of her own life was too heavy for her flesh, her breath, her single heart.
With no time to lose, her uncle in Herat brought her back and, using the small inheritance from her father as a dowry, married her off to one of his associates. It was a favourable arrangement, she was told. As her new husband’s property, she was pushed into silence and lost herself once again. She withered behind closed shutters, although, sometimes, tender fingers of sunshine would reach through the slats to touch her face and, from time to time, a scent of jasmine would carry along the street over the car fumes.
When she did not conceive, her husband grew impatient – angry, even. He was much older and time was running out. ‘Give me a son,’ he demanded, but she willed herself to stay barren because she knew that no life would be able to grow in that place.
She supposed he did it to increase the odds – or perhaps it was a punishment. They – the men her husband brought to the house – entered her body and she withdrew her life, her secret life, into a protective corner of her head. Her body became irrelevant – an outlandish tumour, attached to her in some obscure way – until she wondered if it had ever served a purpose – if she had ever served a purpose.
He died shortly after the Taliban took over. With the help of a foreign organisation she managed to escape before his relatives closed down on her. The almost comic irony of that did not escape her; she was saved, just as an entire culture went under.
For a while, once she had reached Britain, the country where she had once been happy with her father, she wanted there to be somebody to whom she could say, ‘I will tell you everything.’ But no one asked. No one ever asked. But she had a plan and, in the end, she just wanted to go where she had never been. She went to Middle England.
Although she had no religion and it was no longer demanded of her, she continued wearing a headscarf. She withdrew into the veil and its folds of silence. All she wanted was a small piece of English ground where she could bring things to life – and let them grow.
There was something about him on that first day at the allotments that reminded her of her father. It was his eyes that convinced her. They were very dark, giving nothing away at first, but then they had started to shift. He too had things to tell, she could see, things that he was used to keeping to himself. He had great strength underneath all that vulnerability and she felt at ease in his company; there was a clear affinity. At times, she wanted to reach out and touch his warmth. She liked their shared silence, which was more than words. They understood each other, without knowing each other; they could tell each other everything, she felt. She hoped. That was all.
7
The house had been built some time in the early eighteen hundreds; its graceful symmetrical lines and generous proportions epitomised the kind of harmony and elegance that was the reward for imperial service. In the garden, glossy rhododendrons, blazing acers and a single, spiky-branched monkey-puzzle tree, fostered from seedlings in a new, harsh climate, were further testaments to its connections with the rest of the empire. It was only natural, then, that it should be set slightly apart from the rest of the houses in the small stannary town on the edge of the moor.
It was Mr Bradley’s father, Colonel Bradley, who, on inheriting the house from his father, had decided to call it Oakstone – a masculine, solid and, above all, English name, which signified everything he believed in. He died of a massive stroke, which, to his friends at the club, seemed altogether appropriate. The colonel and his wife only ever had one child and, although the fact that the child was a son lessened the stigma, a couple of their standing was really supposed to breed better.
Mrs Bradley left life quietly, facelessly, and slipped into obscurity without much fuss and to the inconvenience of no one – something she might have been quite proud of in life.
The fortune, most of it originally from the wife’s side, was considerable – or so it was thought. But, by the time of Colonel Bradley’s death, it had dwindled. There might have been an ill-advised investment, or a mistress or two with expensive tastes. That was the thing about wealth – even the kind acquired abroad: one could never be too sure about it. By the time the house was passed on to the only son, young Mr George Bradley, it came with a much reduced inheritance.
*
And now, Mr Askew stood amongst his unopened, dust-covered boxes in the high-ceilinged hall with the checked tile floor, and frowned at a memory. There was a musky, brambly darkness in the corners, as if the house itself carried in its walls a clammy bafflement at life and human emotions – as if it too wondered how to live a decent life.
*
They were about sixteen or seventeen when they met again, for the last time, before Michael vanished and Gabriel escaped.
It was the summer before Gabriel’s last year in school. The skies were high and the evenings were powdery blue, and there had been a rumour going around for weeks: there was an underground pub up on the moor where farmhands and vagabonds would meet to drink and gamble. Gabriel had heard the rumour too, although he was never anywhere near the boys at school who knew about such things. He asked Uncle Gerry about it once, but something dark came into the latter’s eyes as he told his nephew to keep away from such places. He should have known better, of course, than to tell a teenage boy to stay away from a secret. Gabriel became obsessed with finding the pub. For a fortnight, he spied on his schoolmates and their older brothers, straining to overhear something that might reveal the secret location. Until, one evening, cycling back from Stagstead over the moor road, he saw, on a ridge on the horizon, two figures struggling westwards against the wind. Without hesitation, he turned the bike off the road and made for the ridge, riding across firmer ground and pushing it through mires and up the scree. It was a beautiful evening and it would stay light for many hours yet. The bog rush was in bloom and the tiny orchids wore their green bonnets. Once, he came across a carpet of dog violets growing out of the wind and the scent of fresh, elusive mystery made him stop for a moment and fall to his knees, as if answering a prayer.
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