The Last Gift (33 page)

Anna wrote later: The drama is unfolding. In the first place, although not in order of importance, the play is on this Friday and Ma would be honoured by your presence, as you are well aware. It’s the last Friday of the school term, and I had to negotiate hard to be released from all the fun events on the last day of school before Christmas. In the second place, I have just spoken to Ma and she has received a reply from the dreadful cousin Dinesh who used to menace her all those years ago. It said that he has passed on her request and Mrs Ferooz Gopal has agreed to hear from her but does not want to meet her. Mr Vijay Krishna Gopal is now retired and rather unwell, and she will agree to nothing that will upset him. Mrs Gopal has nominated Saturday afternoon at
2.00 p.
m. as a time when Ma can call. Ma – this is the new Ma, for God’s sake – immediately rang the number and spoke to Ferooz. Can you believe it? The woman who used to treat the telephone as if it were some kind of a trap? In short, through some kind of ancient magic, probably abject apologies and tears, they managed to make up enough for Ferooz to agree to see her after all. I think the children, that is you and I, were part of the magic. So Immigrant Family Abbas is off to Exeter at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. I just checked the trains. I don’t think Ma needs us for support or anything like that. Our role will be to act as decoys to draw enemy fire. Oh well, we’ll find out if there is anything to find out, and that will be something. It has been a wonderful term at the school. I think I’ve got my favourite class hooked on Keats. And, I am pleased to say, the melodrama of my life down here diminishes by the day. Some time very soon I’ll even stop thinking about that fuck-head. Love to Lena xx.

Jamal replied almost immediately: Bravo! Down with melodrama. This is your first email in two days. Don’t you realise that people who spend all day in front of the computer rely on emails for their sanity? Yallah, we’re going to Exeter.

The Refugee Centre looked as if it might once have been the premises of a small business. There were two large rooms downstairs and several offices upstairs. The play was to be performed in the inner of the two large rooms, and drinks and snacks could be bought in the room nearer the front door, which was normally the reception area for the Centre. The makeshift theatre otherwise served as a crèche, an activities area for various voluntary groups, a meeting room, and even as a concert venue when required.

The play began at three in the afternoon and finished at around four. The chairs were arranged in a rough semi­circle, leaving a space clear at the end of the room nearest the large doors. There was a drum set just inside the door. The room was crowded with women and children, many of them already seated, and a few men who lounged against the walls, looking as if they were there only temporarily. Judging from appearance, the audience was made up of people from Africa and Asia, and a family or two of Central Europeans. Many of them seemed to know each other. Jamal, from professional curiosity, had already found out that they were mostly Somali, Eritrean, Afghanis and Romanian Roma. There was constant coming and going, children wandering about, and a great hum of talk and laughter.

Finally, the lights went down, and a spotlight high on a rafter at the back came on. In the spotlight they saw that a young man had slipped in and was sitting at the drum set. There was instant applause while the young man grinned with delight, waving his sticks in the air at this welcome. More lights came on and turned the cleared area into a stage. All the cast were women and children. The play was a series of narrations, women telling stories of disrupted lives. Some of it was dramatised, some of it was comic, and there were passages of song, accompanied by someone behind the audience playing a flute. The drummer built up tension when required and signalled changes of scenes. The audience still moved in and out, although less so now, and the children were constantly on the point of wandering on to the stage area.

As the play progressed, the movement among the audience slowly died down and the number of men in the room increased. Ma was the doctor who gave the women stern advice about themselves and the children, and told them something about the nature of the modern world they had fled to. Some of the figures and statistics sounded familiar to Anna from what she had heard Jamal say at times. She glanced at him and he smiled at her, acknowledging his contribution. Feeding her propaganda, she whispered. When an actress delivered what she thought was a powerful line, she turned to the audience for a reaction, and the audience generously applauded while the drummer showed his appreciation with a swelling roll on his drums. The climax of the play was a wedding. The groom was played by a youth who could not have been more than thirteen, but he was just an excuse. All the women in the room, African and Asian and European, burst into a raucous joyous song in Somali, which they had been rehearsing for weeks. Their voices rang with such clarity that they needed no accompaniment. Their faces, and the faces of everyone else, glittered with smiles, and the room was full of song and laughter.

They were up early the next morning for the
7.10 to
Liverpool Street, then across London to Paddington for the Exeter train. They arrived in Exeter just after
12.00,
having travelled across England from east to west. Maryam said little during the train journey, looking out of the window most of the time, or listening to her children’s conversation with a placid smile. They left her to her thoughts, and Anna expected they would be turbulent and anxious ones, despite her appearance of calm. She tried to imagine Ferooz, a thin woman who smiled a lot, her mother had said, and Anna wondered whether she would receive them with bitterness or courtesy. Whichever way, it had to be done, to find out what could be found out.

In the taxi from the station, Maryam looked around with eyes sparking with memory. It was her first time back in Exeter since she left so suddenly thirty years before, and everything was so changed. She seemed much less tense than she had been on the train, especially before they took the tube across London. The address Ferooz had given her was different from the place where she had lived with them before, and was in a prosperous area unfamiliar to Maryam, who fell silent as they approached their destination. It was a large new house with a drive spacious enough to allow a big car to turn around. There was a grey Mercedes Benz parked in front of the garage. A Christmas garland hung on the door. The door was opened by a young Indian woman who smiled at them cheerfully and knowingly, and introduced herself as Asha. She ushered them in. The hallway was ample, with a four-foot-wide staircase leading to the upper floor. Christmas decorations crowded the hallway. It was obvious that this was a rich man’s house.

The young woman led them to the sitting room and stepped inside, and then stood to one side to let them come in, Maryam first, then Anna and Jamal hanging back. The room ran the full width of the house, with windows at the back and the front. Standing in front of the rear windows was a thin tall woman in a flowered dress, her arms stiffly by her side, her body tense and somehow disapproving, her lined face taut. Jamal had not expected Ferooz to look so frail, so anxious. In his mind, he realised, he had pictured her as an antagonist, and had figured her as more robust than this. Then almost in spite of herself Ferooz broke into a smile, which she quickly suppressed, clamping her lips over her large teeth as if in rebuke, but in the meantime her body had changed, and she walked forward and took Maryam’s hand. Very gently, she raised her hand to her lips and kissed it. In turn, Maryam leaned forward and kissed Ferooz on her right hand, and then on her left cheek and then on her right. It gave Jamal an anguishing pleasure to watch this exchange of courtesies and affection, as if he was witnessing the completion of an unfinished rite.

‘Maryam,’ Ferooz said, smiling now without restraint. ‘Maryam, Maryam. It is so good of you to come and see us. But to stay away for so long!’

‘It was bad of me,’ Maryam said, her eyes glistening. ‘You look just the same.’

‘Oh don’t, you’re such a liar. I’m old and skinny,’ Ferooz said, waving Maryam’s flattery away. ‘And these are the children. So grown up, so lovely. Who would have imagined. Hanna and Jamal, please, you are welcome. Come and sit down, Asha will bring us some snacks.’

It was only after these exchanges that they noticed a man sitting silently on the other side of the rear windows, shaded from the light by a partly drawn heavy curtain. He was old and dark with a large wart on his cheek. Vijay. Ma had never mentioned a wart on his cheek. When they sat down he too was part of the circle, although he was withdrawn in his shaded corner.

‘Vijay too is pleased that you came,’ Ferooz said, indicating the silent man. ‘If you knew him well you would be able to see his smile. Poor Vijay had to have a hip replacement operation, and he suffered a stroke after surgery. He recovered but not fully and now all the time he’s under heavy medication for the pain. He lost mobility and he can’t speak, but he can hear. He knows you’re here and he welcomes you too. There Vijay, you see, he’s smiling. Can you see he’s smiling?’

Jamal could not see that he was smiling, but he smiled back anyway. Asha brought a tray of snacks and soft drinks, and they nibbled at these while Ferooz told them about Vijay’s misfortune and its impact on his life. ‘Vijay loves to work,’ Ferooz said. ‘Do you remember, Maryam? He is now seventy-seven years old, and he has worked hard all his life. So now imagine the torment for the poor man when he has to sit there all day and worry about what his partners are getting up to. Dinesh runs the business now, and he does it very well. It’s a big firm, very successful, but poor Vijay cannot stop worrying. I know what he’s like. Never mind, he’s using this opportunity to catch up on all the reading he never did. Just now he is listening to an audio book of a history of Gujarat. We went back to India to visit, before he fell ill, and it was wonderful for him to see his family again. It was like a festival and he was handing out presents like a prince. He was very proud of what has become of his country, and now he wants to know all about Gujarat.

‘But you must tell me about what you have been doing all these years while you have been hiding from us,’ Ferooz said smiling, her eyes moving between them amiably to take any blame out of her words.

Maryam told her about Norwich and about Ba’s illness and death, and then after a while, she raised the matter they had come to see them about. Ferooz nodded and said she would tell her all that she knew. When they fostered her they were given her birth certificate and were told her history. As she spoke, she handed Maryam a piece of paper that she had ready on the little table beside her. Maryam accepted the birth certificate and looked at it briefly before putting it down on her lap. With that brief look she had seen that her name appeared only as Maryam, no second name.

‘Much of this I told you when you first came to live with us, when you were nine years old,’ Ferooz said with a smile. ‘There may be certain things I did not tell you then because I did not think a child would understand, but I tried to remember to tell you later. Is there something in particular you would like to know?’

‘I would like to find out who my mother was, if it is possible to know something about her,’ Maryam said, picking up the birth certificate and holding it up for a few seconds.

‘The official story was that you were left at the hospital entrance, and the search for the mother was unsuccessful,’ Ferooz said, looking at Anna and Jamal at this point, perhaps to mitigate the starkness of the information she had just given them, or because she could not help smiling at the sight of Maryam’s children. ‘The caseworker we dealt with told us more. She told us that the police investigation could not come to any conclusion because the most likely woman to have been the mother disappeared. They heard about her from a neighbour who came forward after an appeal. She told the police that the people who used to live down her street had a daughter who fell pregnant, and she was unmarried. They were refugees after the war, Polish. They couldn’t go back because of the communists, so they stayed on in England for a few years. She knew they were planning to emigrate, but she wasn’t sure if it was to Australia or South Africa. It was one of those two, that’s for sure. When she first heard about their plans they still had not decided between the two, but she thought they decided on Australia in the end. She saw the family leaving but it was all very rushed, and she did not have time to talk to them. She said she did not want to be nosy, but she did notice that the girl was no longer pregnant and there was no sign of a baby. People were very alert to such things then. It was only a couple of weeks later, when she heard about the appeal for information that she wondered if there might be a connection.

‘The police investigated and found out where the young woman worked, and questioned some of her co-workers. They said she had left months ago and they knew nothing about where she had gone to. She used to see a soldier, not British, a darkie with a light complexion. People said things like that without embarrassment then. That was what the caseworker told us, and she said those were the words quoted in the file. A darkie with a light complexion could mean anything, and since we were not really worried to trace any of these people, we did not ask for names. I should have thought that one day you would want to know, but we did not think like that then. Anyway, this is only like a rumour, because the woman had disappeared and the police were never able to confirm an identification.’

After she finished telling this meagre history, Ferooz turned towards Vijay, as if to see if he had anything to add, but really, Jamal thought, to escape Ma’s wide-eyed intensity.