Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  ‘And me, what about my feelings? I’m not just a fucking hamster you can take out of its cage whenever you feel like it, you know.’

  ‘I know, Paul.’ She searched for words. ‘But you always knew you wanted children. It didn’t seem fair to put you through that if I wasn’t going to have the baby. Especially in the situation we were in.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Chala flinched. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ his voice had returned to the cold, flat monotone, ‘this is not about whether I want a baby or not. Of course I “want” a baby, you know that. You’ve always known that and yet you’ve always made me think that wasn’t an option in any future we had together. I married you, knowing that. And now out of the blue, you swan in and present me with a fait accompli and expect me to jump up and down and clap my hands. Well, whatever you learnt in Kenya, Che, the world you left behind hasn’t changed. It doesn’t fucking work like that. How do I even know it’s mine? How do I know you didn’t fuck someone in Kenya?’

  Chala looked at Paul now. She thought of the secret scar that Julius would have to carry through his life. Hers was nothing besides his. She spoke from a place deep inside her.

  ‘You don’t know, Paul. I did not fuck anyone in Kenya. I can say those words and you can choose whether to believe me or not, but you will never know what I have or haven’t done.’ She clawed for the essence of their wedding vows. ‘More importantly, you don’t need to know. The only things you need to know are that I love you and I want this baby with you – and to know whether you want a future with me and the baby in it.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He took her hands in his, but the gesture felt sad and she froze inwardly. ‘You had time to work that out and I need to do the same.’

  ‘B…’ The tears came quietly, inevitably, for all Chala’s efforts. ‘I know this must be a huge shock for you, but I thought you wanted me back.’

  He looked at her, into her. ‘But it’s not just you any more. I need to work out what I really want. I’m going to go away for a bit, somewhere on my own. I won’t be long. I just need a week or so to get my head around this. Can you do that for me? Let me have that?’

  She looked for sarcasm in his face, but there was none. ‘Yes,’ she pulled strength into her voice from a new place inside her. ‘Of course I can. You gave me space when I needed it and I will never forget that. Of course, you can have all the time you need to decide what you want.’ She tried to look into his eyes, but he looked away from her and said nothing. She spoke again, finally, into the silence. ‘I’ll sleep in the spare ro…’ She got up, piled the half-eaten pizza onto a plate in the fridge, walked around the table and put her arms around Paul from behind, kissing his neck quickly and gently. ‘I love you, Paul. I’ll wait for you to call me.’

  ‘OK.’ He said it to the table in front of him, without looking round. His body was tense and she forced herself to walk away.

  CHAPTER 43

  ‘Femke, how are you?’

  ‘I’m good, but we miss you. Even Tek Tek and Cheza can’t understand where you are!’

  ‘I wish someone could tell me that!’ Chala laughed. ‘Gosh, it’s good to hear from you. Have things settled down yet? What’s going on now? Kenya has dropped completely out of the news here.’

  ‘Here too, in a way. Everyone just wants to get back to normal. Kofi Annan is coming over to try and, how do you say, medium a solution.’

  ‘Media… and the IDP camp – is that still running?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve been there with Mick a couple of times to drop off some clothes and blankets and stuff. It looks like it’s been there for ever, like some kind of strange Arabian village with tents in the desert. But so many people have gone back to the western provinces.’

  Chala smiled secretly at the speed with which Mick’s name had come into the conversation. ‘So, how are you and Mick, then?’

  ‘He wants to take me to Tanzania for a long weekend.’

  ‘Well, that’s cool, isn’t it?’ She noticed the coy pause at the other end of the line – more than the usual time lag on an international call. ‘It won’t be the first time you’ve done a long weekend together!’

  ‘His parents live there.’

  ‘Wow,’ Chala’s laugh was warm, and she realised suddenly how much she missed Femke. ‘Well done you, you’ve hooked a Kenya Cowboy!’

  ‘Pole pole, we’ll step one foot at a time.’

  ‘Of course.’ Chala left the English uncorrected this time. ‘But anyway, I’m happy for you. That sounds good, wherever your feet are now.’

  ‘You are laughing at me, you English bitch! Tell me, how are you?’

  ‘Oh, no, let’s not talk about me yet, tell me more about Naivasha. Have you seen Winnie? Do you know how they’re doing at the shelter?’

  ‘Yes, actually, we had a beer together in town yesterday. She’s good, she looks tired and I think she misses you, but she’s good. She said the two boys in hiding will wait one more week and then she’s going to bring them back to the shelter.’

  ‘Oh good, that’s good.’ Chala looked across at the present they’d given her, the wooden tray inlaid with photos of the shelter boys, now hanging on their kitchen wall. ‘I wonder how little Julius is doi…’

  ‘Enough, tell me about you. What did Paul say when you told him?’

  ‘God, you’re just as bad on the phone as you are in real life!’ She took a deep breath, as she felt the inevitable sting of salt in her eyes and the twinge of panic where her baby lay. It was a completely different kind of feeling to the fear that had gripped her in the midst of the turmoil in Naivasha. That had been visceral and immediate; this was much gentler, more insidious, the anticipation of potential loss. She knew two things with certainty: she wanted the baby and she wanted Paul. She would do nothing to risk losing either of them, ever.

  ‘Chala, what’s wrong?’

  ‘He’s not sure what he wants. He’s gone away – I don’t even know where – to think about it all. He says I’ve had time to adjust, but he hasn’t and he needs space to think.’

  There was another pause and then Femke spoke. ‘He’s right, you know. It must be very hard for him. It is too sudden.’

  ‘I should have told him before.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. You had your reasons and now he has his. You need to be patient.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ At least Femke didn’t know, would never know, the full extent of those reasons. And Paul, he must never know either. She would save him from that, whatever he decided.

  ‘Sounds like you need a cup of tea.’ The reference reminded her of all they had been through together in Kenya.

  ‘Yes, I wish you were here to have one with me. I miss you.’

  ‘Well, you can come and see me in Holland, when I go back for Christmas.’

  ‘Sounds like a good plan. You know, there’s someone else I’m going to see tomorrow. You remember me telling you about Denise? Well, I’m going to stay with her for a couple of days.’

  ‘And the letter?’

  ‘I think I’m finally going to find out what’s in it. She says it’s better she tells me face to face. I don’t see what it could possibly say that makes any difference to anything, but I’m still nervous.’

  ‘One foot at a time, Chala.’

  ‘Yep, you’re right, one foot at a time. Thanks for calling me.’

  ‘I’ll speak to you soon. Call me after you’ve seen Denise.’

  ‘OK, and listen – good luck with your weekend in Tanzania.’

  She sat with a coffee after the phone call – decaf, a new concession to the life growing inside her – and stared up at the tray of photos, trying to divert her attention to fund-raising ideas for the shelter. Waiting was hard. She and Paul had both done such very different types of waiting over the last couple of months, and now there was a new kind of waiting in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps this was more akin to what Paul had been through while she was away.
/>   At least one of the pieces of waiting in her life would be over tomorrow. She drifted into a reverie about Philip, unaware that she was stroking her stomach again, soothing and protecting the life inside her from the waves outside. Would she ever know whether he had committed suicide? Her gut feeling was that he had, and yet at one level it didn’t make sense. Why, after all these years, would he suddenly make such a decision? He had loved her like his own daughter, even if Denise had been unable to. She came full circle, as she always did, when she punished herself with this line of thinking. He was gone. She could never ask him.

  But there was a letter. Perhaps the answer had been waiting quietly all this time.

  CHAPTER 44

  Denise’s house was a surprise. She had expected something quite subdued and middle class, slightly arty perhaps, a Victorian ground-floor flat with a terraced veranda into a shared garden, the feminine touch of a woman who has long since got used to living alone evident everywhere. But her first thought, as Denise showed her in, was about what Paul would make of it. There was colour everywhere, dishevelled and competing. The whole back wall of the living room was painted a deep red, in violent contrast to the bright white around it, rich blue cushions on a red leather sofa and a huge bunch of lilies in a long black glass vase, placed strategically just in front of a mirror. Another wall was covered by an enormous oil painting of a buffalo stampede.

  ‘Your mother gave me that,’ Denise said as she caught Chala staring at it, ‘after she first went out to Kenya. Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is!’ Chala focused on the painting. ‘Paul would love your house!’

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you round and then I’ll get us a drink.’

  There was a nervousness in Denise; she seemed less in control than she’d been the last time they’d met. Chala followed her, continuing to marvel at the amount of colour everywhere, and suddenly it seemed impossible that she and Philip could ever have stayed together. The only room that was subdued was the one at the back of the house, which she had converted into a surgery for her private speech therapy patients. It was comfortable and not overly clinical, with a sunlit view into the small green swathe of back garden, but there was no clue there to the passion of Denise’s private personality.

  Finally, they sat down with drinks in the living room. Denise filled the threat of silence with questions about the Kenyan crisis, and Chala found herself offering sound bite versions of what had really happened, impatient suddenly to travel back in time.

  ‘The letter,’ she said finally, after Denise had served their second drink, without remarking on Chala’s opting for just tonic. ‘What did it say?’

  Denise’s face tightened. ‘I will tell you what it said, of course I will, but we have time. This is hard for both of us, I know. Do you mind if we take it a bit slowly?’

  ‘One foot at a time?’

  ‘What?’ Denise looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Just something my Dutch friend Femke says.’ She hesitated, sensitive to Denise’s need to delay the moment, but other questions flowed in front of the door that Denise was afraid to unlock. ‘What I don’t understand is why you wanted to see me last time, if you hadn’t even read the letter then. I mean, I can understand why you couldn’t bear to be with me after the accident’ – the habitual flinch – ‘but then why did you want to see me again at the funeral? Why did you want to even re-establish contact?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was not the answer she had expected. Chala waited patiently for more.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. It’s just that I couldn’t see you without seeing Emma. I just couldn’t cope, couldn’t get beyond it, and I think I blamed Philip, for not being in the room when it happened, for not being able to stop it, for not being able to stop me feeling the way I did. He just withdrew into himself. We weren’t helping each other get through the situation, and he was fiercely protective of you, and you, you started to become part of the battleground of ghosts between us. Do you remember that doll you had?’

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Yes. I wanted to kill that doll, get rid of it. I was sure it was making your nightmares worse, but Philip wouldn’t have it, said you were too vulnerable to deal with another disappearance. God knows who was right, but I started to realise that I was going to lose my sanity if I stayed. I just had to get away.’

  ‘OK,’ Chala said slowly. ‘I understand all of that, but why did you want to re-establish contact when Philip died?’

  ‘Maybe it was partly guilt. When I started to get stronger again, I felt guilty about the way I’d abandoned you – you and Philip. The whole thing was an accident – a terrible accident – but we should have been able to help each other and move on over time, together. I couldn’t do that. I have never remarried, never had another chi…’

  Realisation struck Chala: Denise had never moved on sufficiently to create a new life with another child in it. She looked at Denise and saw pain in the lines that had given away nothing at the funeral.

  ‘And then, when Philip died, I just thought what a was… and the only way that I could avoid burning up with regret was to reach out to you.’

  Chala touched her gently on the arm. ‘Didn’t you ever want to get back with Philip?’

  ‘Sometimes, but I was never sure enough, or never had guts enough. I always thought he was the weak one. In fact, I know now how weak he was—’ She said this with a splash of vehemence that made Chala look up.

  ‘Why did you think he was weak?’ Chala asked, defensive.

  ‘He was always … so passive. Always sitting on the fence. He would never defend anything or anyone.’

  ‘What do you mean? I know he hated confrontation and he was non-judgmental to the extreme, but I always loved that about him.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I loved that too, b…’ Denise looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s hard to think of specific examples that don’t sound petty. You must know what it’s like, living with someone day in, day out. The differences between you are what attract you at the beginning and then, with time, they are exactly what frustrate you. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you get to a place where you just accept the differenc… and I think, if the accident hadn’t happened, we would have done that too.’

  She trailed off, but Chala was still desperate to understand. ‘Yes, I see all that – in theory – but I still don’t really get it.’ Never presume to know the secrets of a marriage, she remembered Philip saying to her once.

  ‘You know Philip was engaged to someone else when we met – did he ever tell you that?’

  ‘Yes, I knew that. She was a bit of a nutcase, wasn’t she?’

  ‘He allowed her to be.’ Even after all these years, this was clearly still a sore point for Denise. ‘We were madly attracted to each other – although there was no physical contact between us, Philip was a stickler over that – but he took ages to break it up. The first time he broached the subject with her, she all but threatened suicide. Did he ever tell you that?’

  ‘Really? No, he never mentioned that.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t exactly say it, but she insinuated it – even in my company once at a party, she said that she would fall apart if he ever left her. It was a weird thing to say in a social context, but I saw the way she checked to make sure that Philip had heard it. She was saying it for effect and he fell for it every time. It drove me mad. It was so obvious they were no good for each other, and as we became friends he told me he wasn’t sure he loved her enough to marry her, but still he didn’t have the guts to leave her.’

  ‘So what happened in the end?’

  ‘Someone else appeared on the scene and swept her off her feet and she was the one to break it up.’

  ‘Poor Philip.’

  ‘Not at all. He was relieved to be free and that’s when we were allowed to happen, but if I’d got fed up of hanging around I’m not sure he’d have ever come after me. He just took what life gave him. Even after the whole wretched thing happened with Emma, he n
ever fought for me, never tried to make contact or come after me. Sometimes I wanted to shake him and say life doesn’t have to be only what comes along. I wanted him to take life by the horns, not just take whatever it happened to throw at him. I’m sure he lost touch with loads of our friends after I left. I was the one who would organise the parties. He would never make the effort on his own. I bet he never sent a single Christmas card ever again.’

  Chala remembered the lack of ritual around Christmas in their house with fondness; she had grown up with a proud sense of Philip’s lack of convention. It was disconcerting to hear such a different interpretation of all this now.

  ‘I must sound harsh.’ Denise reacted to Chala’s quietness. ‘Truth be told, we were as bad as each other. Neither of us had the guts to bridge the distance I allowed to grow between us. Neither of us ever tried to go back. Ha!’ Denise’s laugh was hollow. ‘I never thought of it like that. He was the one who was too weak to run away from his engagement and then I was the one who was too weak to stay in our marriage.’

  ‘No, I think what you did took a lot of guts.’ Chala had made a mental step backwards, trying to understand what had happened between them. ‘You made a clean break. That made it easier for everyone to move on. You forced yourself to build a life and you discovered something that you love, and a way of caring for people around you.’

  ‘The wrong people.’

  ‘Now you sound like me!’ Chala managed a weak smile and continued. ‘On the rare occasions that I could ever get Philip to talk about the past, he told me that it was better that you kept what you had between you intact. That your relationship never had time to sour enough to scar the memory of what you’d had together.’

  ‘Gosh, your mother would have hated that – much too cynical.’

  ‘Or not. You could argue it was deeply romantic at some level. He loved you, you know.’

  ‘Don’t you think he ever blamed me for leaving?’

  ‘No, I think he blamed himself. I don’t know why he always seemed to blame himself so much.’