The Memory of Love (48 page)

Nenebah. He would have liked to touch her. Just to hold her hand in his. To feel her skin. He used to like to grip her lightly with one hand at the side of her neck. She would tilt her head and trap his fingers.

How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she’d needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he’d let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he’d been changed. He’d been incapable, and in being incapable he’d let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.

Something bumps the side of his head, a piece of wood, something covered in tar, a lump of old polystyrene. He sits up slightly and flounders in the water, is hit by a passing wavelet and momentarily submerged. He wipes his face and looks at the distant shore. There are still people at the beach bar to which he had returned late in the evening and where the barman had unctuously welcomed him. Spurred by a memory of the peace he had found in his mid-afternoon swim, Kai had taken to the water for the second time in a day. Drifting along like an abandoned boat, one whose occupants have drowned. A pitch black, perfect peace.

He lays his head back in the water and searches for the Plough. He ought to be getting home. He lifts his head again, tracks the cones of a car’s headlights down the long beach road.

Ah, he thinks, and lays his head back upon his pillow of water.

CHAPTER 50

A silver sea, smooth and still, the reflection of a gull moves across the surface, a few clouds in the sky, elliptically shaped, like a school of porpoises. Here and there other gulls float undisturbed on the water. On the shoreline, a mother and her toddler. The child, wearing red wellington boots, is running through the surf away from his mother, looking over his shoulder at every turn to make sure she is following. Adrian can hear, dully through the glass, the sound of the mother’s voice. She is smiling and at the same time calling warnings. A perfect autumn day, thinks Adrian. Busy looking over his shoulder the child loses direction and veers into the sea; water splashes over the top of his boots. Now the mother is pulling them off and pouring the water out of each one. She is holding the child tight to her in one arm; his feet dangle several inches above the sand. But the child struggles to be free and so the mother sets him down. He runs away. The mother follows behind carrying the boots. The child runs away, away: shrieking, giddy with freedom. His blond hair blown about in a wind of his own making.

‘No biscuits. Sorry, darling. I should have got some in, but I only drive into town once in a while and I don’t eat them any more myself. When you called I’d no idea you’d be here quite so quickly.’

‘It’s fine,’ says Adrian. He turns away from the window and the boy, moves to take the tea tray from his mother and set it down upon the low table. He says, ‘You must spend a lot of time just looking at all of this.’

His mother nods. ‘It’s never the same from one hour to the next. It’s the sky, you know. People complain Norfolk is flat, but they’re looking in the wrong place. You need to lift your head. It’s the sky that matters. Of course, you know that. I forget sometimes.’

He’d arrived the evening before in a tepid light, feeling drained by the long drive from London. During supper, eaten on their knees opposite each other in the sitting room, he’d been more aware of the reflections on the glass, of his mother entering and leaving the room than of what lay beyond the darkness. The meal they ate was sparing, his mother’s once lush cooking sacrificed to the austerity of cholesterol and blood-sugar levels. They had not spoken of his reason for being there. Adrian had volunteered nothing and his mother had not asked, her forbearance itself a clue as to how serious she must imagine it to be. She had opened a bottle of rather good wine, a gesture he felt was replete with solace as much as celebration.

Ileana had driven him to the ferry which would take him across to the airport. The plane flew into darkness across the Sahara and this time Adrian did not see the dunes or the dust rising up to the aircraft’s wings. When he woke up they were over mountains, the Alps, perhaps. The plane touched down in the early morning, the airport brightly lit, cold and empty. Passports were checked at frequent intervals. From the airport Adrian had rented a car and driven straight to Norfolk. The pace of cars on the road shocked him.

‘Milk?’

‘Yes, please.’ Fresh milk. And yet he finds himself so used to the faint metallic flavour of the tinned variety, he misses it.

The previous evening both Adrian and his mother had retired early. Adrian pleaded exhaustion, feeling at the same time alive with nervous energy. After his mother had gone to bed, he left his bedroom and returned to the sitting room to read the paper and then to watch the news on the twenty-four-hour television news channel, the flickering television images reflected on the obsidian wall. So much seemed to have happened while he had been away. By the time he watched the bulletin on its third loop, the stories had all become familiar. Once in the night he’d woken to a strange noise, like the call of a night bird. He laid his head down, listened to the sound of the sea, a giant’s slow breathing. After a few minutes he dropped into a deep sleep lasting seven hours.

He woke to a pale amber early-autumn day. The sea was still, the tide far out. Miles of glowing wet sand.

He watches his mother pour the tea, with her free hand smooth back a single lock of silver hair that dips into her eyes. The number of sculptures on the lawn had grown since last he was here. Something that looked like a horizontal Stonehenge. A man and a woman, he composed of jagged rocks, she of smooth, round pebbles, a cleft stone at the meeting of her thighs. After breakfast they’d taken a walk down the beach, during which Adrian told his mother the reason for his return and his mother listened in between picking up pieces of jetsam and occasional pebbles, ramming them into her trouser pockets, until she bulged like a child with pockets full of tuck and conkers. Once she had stopped and looked at him, shading her eyes from the sun, her expression thoughtful and serious. But in the end she’d said nothing more than, ‘Hmm.’ And then, ‘See, looks like amber. Of course, it’s not.’ Tossed the pebble back among the others. Finally, ‘You seem to have given it a great deal of thought.’

They walked in silence for half an hour more and climbed a dune at the far end of the beach. Once or twice Adrian stopped to extend a hand to his mother, but she waved him away, a somewhat terse gesture, made, as it was, in silence. At the top they sat and looked out over the sea. His mother plucked a blade of grass, put the end in her mouth, lay back on the rough grass and closed her eyes. She remained still so long he began to think she’d fallen asleep.

Finally she said, ‘Does Lisa know you’re here?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Have you thought about Kate?’

‘Of course I have. I think about her constantly.’

‘Nowadays, I suppose, you follow your dreams.’ Her tone, lacking the true spirit of accusation, so very matter-of-fact, made him feel whimsical and foolish. Without waiting for an answer she stood up, not bothering to shake the grass seeds from her hair or brush the sand from her trousers. He followed her down.

They’d lunched in the sun next to the open window: ham, boiled eggs and salad. Hard to imagine this as the same sun that bore pitilessly down upon the Equator. This water, the same body of water reached from here to there, at some point changing colour from grey to blue, silver to green. Adrian thought of Mamakay and imagined her practising her clarinet. The thought occurred to him he had never heard her practise. Only once he arrived unexpectedly to a yard full of music. Mamakay playing below, her neighbour and fellow band member on his trombone above, an improvised serenade. He wonders what Mamakay is doing at this moment. Only an hour’s time difference; the sun would be at its height.

After lunch his mother lit a cigarette, something he had never seen her do.

‘I know, I know.’ She caught his look and shrugged. ‘What, frankly, does it matter?’ She set the lighter on the table: a heavy ivory table-lighter he recognised as once having belonged to his grandparents.

After lunch she put him to work on a small series of jobs. Her television aerial, loosened by the wind, swung back and forth issuing a mournful plea every time the wind blew. He’d fetched a ladder and climbed up to the roof, discovered it to be the source of the sound he had heard in the night. A piece of tarpaper had come loose and Adrian called to his mother to bring roofing nails and a hammer, was surprised when her head appeared over the horizon of the roof.

‘How long are you staying?’ she asked as she handed the hammer to him.

‘I’m not sure yet, a day or two? Maybe longer.’ He wasn’t as sure of his place here as he’d been while she remained in the old house.

‘Good. Then perhaps you can help me with something. A small deck at the front. Can’t possibly do it on my own. I was going to hire somebody, one of those Eastern European fellows, but now you’re here. Shouldn’t take too long with two of us at it.’ And she’d disappeared again, taking his assent for granted. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she called.

A low sun strikes the room, dust mites spin slowly in the air, are sent rushing in one direction and then another by the occasional movement or draught. The hum and tap of a dying bluebottle. A lone dog searches the waterline, no sign of an owner. On the edge of the frame a boat with a blue sail disappears behind a curve of rock.

‘Now a boat
would
be a fine thing,’ says his mother, as though apropos of a continuing conversation.

‘What kind of boat?’

‘A sailing boat. Something reassuringly solid and wooden. The sort of thing the owl and the pussycat would have owned.’ She laughed lightly. ‘Held together by layers of varnish.’

‘Sail away for a year and a day,’ says Adrian. And then, so suddenly he is surprised by himself: ‘Did you ever think of leaving Dad?’

A pause. His mother pours milk into her tea and sets the jug down carefully upon the tray. ‘Your father was ill. He needed me. I would never have left.’

‘But, I mean, didn’t you …?’

She interrupts, as though this is something she is sure of. ‘Never.’

They drink their tea more or less in silence. Adrian tries to apologise, but she brushes him off. He notices a stillness has come over her and he regrets his incaution; he’d been enjoying the new ease they had found in each other’s company.

While his mother is clearing the kitchen (for she will hear nothing of him helping) Adrian stands outside in a new breeze. Beneath his feet the grass is springy, growing in tufts upon the sandy earth. He notices one of his mother’s sculptures, a great abstract snail, its shell a curl of seashells of decreasing size. There is another, a feather, the vanes of which are composed of dozens of real feathers. A piece of driftwood several feet long, from a particular angle it resembles an animal. Balanced upon its back a second piece of wood, dark twisted limbs, a boy perhaps, straddling the back of a great bear. Adrian looks out to the horizon. Upon the sea white horses have begun to form. Watching them, Adrian feels on the brink of something momentous, like a sailor embarking upon a voyage hundreds of years ago. He does not feel afraid and nor does he feel courageous; the only emotion he is aware of, in addition to the surge of feeling he experiences when he thinks of Mamakay, is shame: hot and heavy as tar.

His mother joins him outside. ‘What would you like for supper?’

‘We’ve only just had lunch.’

‘I know. Still, these things have to be planned, always did.’ She smiles.

Children took so much for granted. Children took happiness for granted.

‘Why don’t I take you out?’ says Adrian.

‘Oh, no. It would be a waste.’

‘Come on. Let’s do it. Where would you like to go? Where’s good around here?’

‘Well, if you insist. We could drive up the coast. There’s a pub I’ve been to a few times.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ll book it, then.’ And she turns back into the house.

At five o’clock they return from the garden centre. For the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening Adrian works on the new deck, laying a network of joists on the old concrete patio, checking each joist with a spirit level as he goes. He works stripped to the waist. The sun is warm on his back, an occasional tear of sweat runs into his eyes. He has reached an age, he realises, when he considers manual labour to be somehow rewarding. Today in particular he welcomes the refuge it offers; concentrating upon his hands forces him beyond the vortex of his own thoughts.

A goal. He will have the frame ready before they go out to eat. He straightens to review his work, feels the ache and release, almost pleasurable, in his vertebrae and the muscles of his back, standing amid the cross-hatch of wooden beams as if upon a raft, the sharp scent of fresh timber mingled with the sting of salt.

Elias Cole had not sent Babagaleh to Adrian in the weeks leading up to Adrian’s departure. Adrian passed by the old man’s room several times, to be told he was indisposed. He wondered whether he’d pushed him too far at their last meeting. Adrian said goodbye to Mrs Mara and the other members of staff, though he’d not seen Kai once. Kai was avoiding him, Adrian felt certain, and knew that he, too, was guilty of the same. He wasn’t entirely sure of the reason for his behaviour, which he had declined to examine too closely. Adrian is not, he tells himself, a jealous man. But then there was the sense, the constant sense he had had, of something lingering. How alike they were in many ways, Kai and Mamakay, like siblings really. In the way they both resolutely occupied only the present, kept doors closed, showing only what they chose to reveal. Both Kai and Mamakay had places from which all others were excluded, from which Adrian was excluded. Even now the fear coiling around his heart is that in those closed-off places is something the two of them share from their past, some arc of emotion, incomplete, requiring an ending.

Is he doing the right thing? Sometimes he feels he is losing his mind.

‘Damn!’ A splinter of wood slides under the nail of his forefinger. The pain is pinpoint and exquisite. Adrian presses down on the bed of the fingernail and then sucks the end of his finger. The sky has a sulphurous cast; dark clouds boil on the horizon. Adrian’s mouth tastes of blood and iron. A drop of rain touches his skin and then another. Within moments the sand is turned dull and the pebbles sleek. Adrian collects the tools he has been working with and goes back inside the house.

In the shower before dinner, hot water powering down upon his shoulders. He thinks of her at times like this. In the heat of the bathroom he could be in her apartment. He feels his body’s response, turns his face up to the shower-head, holds his breath. In his mind he watches her coming towards him. What does she do? A short time later he lets his hand fall back to his side, watches the semen swirl and slide away with the water. The outward tension, briefly, is dissipated, the yearning inside remains.