Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  For a moment she paused beside the two chairs drawn up next to each other in front of the television set. She leaned over and plumped up the crimson pillow on the one chair but left the other chair as it was with its seat cushion sagging, the indentation of a head still clear against the top of the down-filled headrest.

  It was an old chair with an old-fashioned footstool. The fabric was expensive: a Clarence House silk, imported from England. It wasn’t really the right kind of fabric for a chair that took a lot of wear and the silk was now shiny with age and starting to fray. But she had bought it because of Eric. He had picked it out himself. It was an odd choice for him; he was very much a corduroy-and-tweed man. But he had claimed this chair as his chair, flopping into it with a satisfied air of ownership whenever he visited. She’d get on his lap, curling her long legs beneath her as if she were just a little girl, while he stroked her hair and touched her face. It was a ritual. Just the two of them sitting there together for the longest time, simply holding on to each other, not speaking. And then he’d cup her face in his hands and ask with the formality of a first-time lover: ‘May I kiss you?’

  Eric.

  She placed her hand on her breast. Oh. Her heart was sagging. She could feel it tilting slowly; dragging, dragging at her chest and her heart was so heavy.

  Such pain. Such terrible pain.

  • • •

  THE PARKING BAY at the end of the row was empty. Eric’s colleagues must still be battling it out as to who was going to inherit that coveted space. Isa pulled her car into a bay close to the lift.

  She had applied more make-up than usual and had bathed her eyes in cold water. But she kept her dark glasses on after she got out of the car.

  It was a small building, housing only a start-up computer company, a publishing house dealing in purple romances, Eric’s accounting firm, and her own office. Since Eric’s death, she had been thinking of moving, of starting fresh somewhere else. Somewhere she wouldn’t unconsciously listen for his footstep on the floor above her; wait for him to casually bump into her in the lift or car park. She should make an effort to get on with her life. But she seemed to have no energy, no energy at all. It was too easy to give herself up to a kind of mental drift. She was unable—maybe unwilling—to free herself from the flaccid but relentless grip of lethargy. She went to bed tired; she woke up tired.

  Stencilled on the glass doors in front of her were the words ISA DE WITT INTERIORS: ARCHITECT AND DECORATOR. Cindy, her secretary cum receptionist, had the phone to her ear and a resigned expression on her face. When she saw Isa walk in, she rolled her eyes and made a cutting motion across her throat.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Cindy placed her hand over the receiver: ‘Mrs Morris.’

  Isa sighed. ‘Let me talk to her.’

  She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. Anna Morris was a client who took up a lot of time and energy. As a favour to one of her other clients, Isa had taken her on: redesigning and redecorating the woman’s bedroom. But there always seemed to be something wrong. The trim on the curtain was not the exact shade of mink Mrs Morris had stipulated. The builders were rude to her and would have to be replaced. The chest of drawers that was delivered to her house yesterday showed a scratch and why hadn’t Isa come herself instead of sending her assistant?

  The woman was more trouble than she was worth and Isa had yet to be paid for services already rendered. But she forced herself to keep her voice even. Yes, she would stop by today to take a look at the bureau and yes, she could assure Mrs Morris that the work would be done well before the start of the Christmas holidays.

  A large design easel was situated in front of the window. Isa walked over and for a few minutes she looked at the sketches for the de Vere project. The skylight in the entrance hall was too small: maybe she should splay it out at angles to make the volume appear larger. And she still wasn’t happy with the client’s preference for a large, round-headed window in the living room: it was all wrong for the visual drama created by the other slim, twelve-foot floor-to-ceiling windows. Still, this was the kind of project she enjoyed, creating a space from scratch; not having to fuss and fumble with ill-proportioned rooms devoid of light and symmetry.

  Turning her back on the sketches, she moved closer to the window. The view from here was not inspiring: industrial warehouses with dust-covered windows and corrugated iron roofs. But if she looked down the narrow opening between the two unlovely buildings opposite, she could see the fierce blue water of the Indian Ocean. At the moment the ocean looked like a painted strip of colour, but later in the day the sun would beat down with such frenzy that the blue would splinter into a million blinding, diamond sparkles. Isa opened the window and breathed in the peculiar smell she associated so strongly with the city of Durban and its harbour: a hushed smell; a smell of salt, musk, and secret decay.

  She glanced at her watch. Maybe she should try calling Alette again.

  But just as she stretched out her hand to the receiver, the phone buzzed sharply.

  ‘A call from London,’ Cindy said in her ear.

  Isa smiled. ‘Put her through.’

  ‘It’s a him. A Mr Darling. He’s says he’s a solicitor.’

  The name was unfamiliar to Isa. A solicitor?

  The voice that came on the line was very British: the cut-glass accent of the upper classes. The words were uttered neatly, precisely, and they shattered her world.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have to convey the news to you over the telephone,’ Mr Darling said. ‘I did not myself know of the accident until after Mrs Temple passed away. As executor of her estate …’ His voice carried on and on, but Isa didn’t hear him.

  Accident.

  Alette has had an accident. Only a few hours ago they had spoken together on the phone and since then…

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Isa’s tongue felt heavy in her mouth. ‘She’s an excellent driver. What happened?’

  He coughed. ‘A wicked stretch of road, that. Very easy to lose control of the wheel. And she wasn’t wearing her seat belt.’

  He paused delicately. ‘As I was saying, Miss de Witt, I do believe it would be of great help if you could fly over to London for the reading of the will. I can tell you now that you are the sole beneficiary…’

  Eric. Now Alette. She placed her hand to her mouth, and when she took it away a long, sticky string of saliva clung to her palm.

  ‘Miss de Witt? Are you there?’

  She forced herself to speak. ‘Go to London? Why should I go to London?’

  ‘Well, she left you the house and you might like to take a look at it before deciding on how to proceed. It is still on a long lease, you know. Sixty years, fifty-three unexpired. Furthermore…’ He paused and she could hear him take a deep breath. ‘Furthermore, there is a quite unusual clause in the will, which would require you to be in London.’

  ‘What clause?’

  ‘Really, it is rather difficult to explain and it is not something I would care to discuss on the telephone. It would be much better if we could meet face-to-face. I thought as Christmas is almost upon us, you might be able to break away? Would it be a great inconvenience to fly over?’

  Cold, she was cold. She placed her one arm over her chest, hugging herself.

  ‘Is there anything important keeping you in South Africa right now?’ he tried again when she did not respond.

  Isa thought of the bottom drawer in her closet: boxer shorts and T-shirts and socks rolled into neat balls. White handkerchiefs and a pair of cufflinks. She thought of his toothbrush in the cup on the top shelf in the bathroom. She thought of what it would be like to simply switch off the light and pull the door shut behind her.

  ‘No. There’s nothing keeping me here.’

  ‘Are you all right, Miss de Witt?’ The solicitor’s voice was tinged with genuine concern.

  ‘It’s just … I spoke to Alette only this morning.’

  There was a long pause. The solicitor spoke slowly, warily.
‘Miss de Witt, I’m afraid you must be mistaken. You could not have spoken to Mrs Temple today. Mrs Temple died two days ago.’

  TWO

  Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move,

  This will not take her;

  If of her selfe she will not Love,

  Nothing can make her:

  The Devill take her.

  Song

  Sir John Suckling (1609–1642)

  THE GROUND WAS SOAKED with the rain of the past week. As he let himself into the front garden, his shoes sank deeply into the wet mulch of leaves and dirt. He didn’t close the small black gate behind him. That gate always creaked on the back swing, and though it was late and not one window in the entire street of terraced houses showed a light, he did not want to take a chance on waking any of the neighbours.

  A gust of wind shook the branches of the tree above him and a spatter of wet drops chilled the back of his neck. He moved closer to the house, looking up at the pale window on the top storey where her bedroom was.

  For a moment he felt his breath catch—he could have sworn he saw something moving up there, shadow on glass. But then he shook his head and blinked deliberately. No. He must stop this. It was over. She was gone.

  The spare key should still be in its usual hiding place behind the loose brick, guarded by the climbing hybrid musk roses. There were no roses in bloom now: just a tangle of tough stems. But come summer, he knew, the pink and apricot buds of ‘Buff Beauty’ and ‘Cornelia’ would scent the garden with a dreamy fragrance.

  Roses had been her passion. And she loved the old varieties: ‘Gypsy Boy,’ ‘Grüss an Aachen,’ ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’. ‘The most sweet-smelling rose in the world,’ she’d say, her red hair pushed up underneath the wide straw hat, the large pruning scissors moving through the foliage with unsentimental vigour. She believed in cutting back the roses hard, so hard that he had protested. But she merely laughed at his concern. ‘You have to be cruel to be kind. If you give it a good pruning now, you’ll see. It will reward you with hundreds of blooms in years to come.’

  Cruel to be kind. Those were the exact words that had gone through his mind during the memorial service. Cruel to be kind. Nip in the bud. Close the book. Drop the curtain.

  Put the lid on.

  He smiled. His fingers searched in the hollow behind the brick and withdrew the two keys tied to each other by a simple piece of string. For a moment he stood staring at the keys, absentmindedly wiping away the dirt clinging to them, his mind still on the service. He had never been to a cremation before, hadn’t quite known what to expect. But it had all been done very tastefully. He was a little surprised at how few people there were. Two of the neighbours, some clients, a woman she had befriended at her aerobics class—and that man, of course.

  At the end of the service the funeral director had asked them all to sign the funeral book. In a cramped fist Alette’s neighbour had written in the comments column: ‘I will never forget her smile. God bless.’ He had written two words only: Precious dust. His epitaph for her. It amused him to think that she had read these very words only a few minutes before the crash. And what a delicious irony that her epitaph should be words from an elegy written for a woman who had lived more than three hundred and fifty years ago: a chaste woman, a woman of virtue: ‘filia praemortua prima Virgineam animam exhalavit.’ A woman with a virginal mind. Whereas Alette had been a slut. Wanton and hard of heart, to borrow a phrase of his mother’s. In no way like the sainted Maria Wentworth, who died in 1632, and of whom could be said, ‘…a Virgin, yet a Bride, To every Grace, she justifi’d , A chaste Poligamie, and dy’d.’

  He placed the key in the lock and turned it noiselessly. He wasn’t going to disturb anything. He merely wanted to touch her things. Maybe lie in her bed for a brief moment, touch his cheek to her pillow. It would be his own private way of saying goodbye to her. A small act of self-indulgence.

  THREE

  She, she is dead; she’s dead; when thou know’st this,

  Thou know’st how wan a ghost this our world is.

  The Anniversaries

  John Donne (1572–1631)

  THE PRE-CHRISTMAS RUSH had most flights from Cape Town to London fully booked. Isa was unable to get a direct flight to the U.K. and had to settle for a connecting flight via Frankfurt. This would have worked out fine, allowing her to arrive late morning in London, but her plane was delayed before take-off from Johannesburg and she missed her connection. When she arrived at Heathrow sore and weary to the bone, she was seriously wondering whether the whole trip was a huge mistake. By the time she had struggled through the long line at immigrations and retrieved her luggage, the watery sunshine that had greeted the plane on its arrival had disappeared. Isa emerged from the airport building into a chilly, dark blue dusk.

  She pushed herself into the corner of the roomy back seat of the taxicab and buttoned her coat up to her chin. The cold weather was a shock to the system after the moist heat she had left behind in Durban. The cab driver, fortunately, was not the chatty type. After asking her for the address, he closed the small window behind his head and she could hear, very faintly, the sound of his radio: Bob Dylan knocking on heaven’s door and sounding indescribably weary.

  Alette’s cremation had taken place two days before. She had told Mr Darling to go ahead with the service and not to wait for her arrival. At the time she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to get a flight out, and truth to be told, wasn’t she looking for an excuse not to be there? After Eric’s death she had longed to be part of a ceremony; a ritual. But with Alette … no.

  Tomorrow she was to meet with Mr Darling at his offices. She wondered if he was feeling apprehensive about meeting her. Poor man. He probably thinks he has a nutcase on his hands after listening to her telling him of her phone conversation with a person who had died forty-eight hours before.

  After learning from him of Alette’s death, she had immediately contacted the phone company and had, with the greatest difficulty, persuaded them to check on whether she had received an incoming call in the early morning hours.

  There was no record that such a call had been placed.

  Outside it had started to rain. Drops of water, stretched into impossibly long pear-shaped streaks, clung for a brief moment to the windows of the cab before being blown away by the wind. She really was extremely tired. So tired that she did not properly take in the rain-swept road, the yellow smears of headlights. With a faint start of recognition, though, she identified the rectangular bulk of Buckingham Palace. She had always thought of it as a place constantly flooded with festive light, but tonight the building was dark. And then the taxi was leaving the busy main street, turning and twisting; weaving through tiny, narrow streets lined with terraced houses and red-brick mansion blocks. She caught a brief glimpse of the cold gleam of the Thames before the taxi driver stopped the car in front of a dark house. With a cheery, ‘Here you are, then, love,’ he helped her unload her suitcase. Isa watched the black cab until its tiny orange taillights disappeared from view. She turned to face the house in front of her.

  It was a narrow, terraced house on three floors, sharing its party walls with two identical-looking houses on either side of it. Alette once told her that all the houses in this street had been built in the thirties. Their facades were simple and uncluttered with no decorative flourishes: no cast-iron fencing, no white-and-cream stucco pillars like the period houses Isa had noticed on her way in. But the street was tree-lined—probably delightful in summer—and every house seemed to have the luxury of a small front garden that set it back from the road. At the moment, though, the soft, sifting rain gave the street a forlorn, abandoned air.

  Isa had never visited Alette in this house. The last time she was in London was five years ago for Alette’s wedding and by then Alette was already living with Justin. It was only after the divorce that Alette had moved to this place. There was talk of Isa flying over for a visit—helping out with the refurbishment—but somehow it never hap
pened. At the time Isa hadn’t felt confident enough to be away from her office. Her business was not yet established and was balanced on that precarious edge between success and sudden collapse. And then there was Eric. Their life together could be measured in stolen hours over lunch or after work: passion and desire and togetherness squeezed into small, furtive chunks of time. The idea of leaving him for two or three weeks had been unthinkable.

  And the years went by. And every year over Christmas they’d tell each other that yes, this was the year they really had to get together. But they never did. And now she hadn’t seen Alette in five years. And now it was too late.

  The tiny black gate stood wide open. Isa walked through and pushed it shut. It creaked dismally and she shivered slightly at the wet feel of the wrought iron against her palm. She walked up the small front garden, tripping a little over some broken flagstones: her suitcase dragging in her hand. As she climbed up the two shallow steps leading to the front door, she started to rummage in her shoulder bag for the keys, which the super-efficient Mr Darling had sent to her in South Africa via courier.

  The locks were oiled and the keys turned without any trouble. The door swung open into darkness. Keeping the door open with her shoulder so that the entrance hall could be lit by the light of an outside lamp post, Isa groped against the wall in search of a light switch.

  She found it and blinked in the sudden, bright-edged glare. Moving away from the door, she allowed it to swing softly shut behind her.

  As in most London houses, the hall was narrow, opening up immediately into a balustraded staircase leading to the second storey. A rear door, which she assumed led to the kitchen, was directly ahead of her. On the console table flanking the left wall was a bamboo tray with some unopened letters. On the right-hand wall were mounted hooks from which hung an array of scarves, hats and jackets.