The Memory of Love (50 page)

CHAPTER 52

The rains are over, seemingly fled the skies. Adrian feels the relief. The tide of red silt has cleared from the sea. The traffic speeds, the people slow. Today the patients are out in the sun raking the newly cut grass, a line of eight men bent at the waist. From his office Adrian watches Salia watching them, arms crossed, legs apart, white uniform spotless. At that moment Salia looks up, sees Adrian and raises a hand in salute. Adrian waves back. He turns away from the window.

Somewhere out there in this city is Mamakay. What is she doing? He imagines her in the crowds at the market, searching out bargains among the stalls. In the mornings he encourages her to spend the money he has given her to furnish the house. But she moves slowly and reluctantly, and Adrian waits for her the way he has learned, like a horse whisperer, with his back half turned.

He is happy. The new house, modest, white-painted but with good floors and a small garden, became theirs for a modest rent three weeks ago. The balcony at the back faces the mouth of a small river. Adrian worried about mosquitoes, but Mamakay assured him there would be none, and in this matter she has proved correct.

He is happy. Each morning he wakes up to absorb the fact of his new life. A week last Wednesday, outside a supermarket, he saw the deaf boy again, the boy he had first seen at the police station, arrested for who knew what reason. The boy had recognised him. Adrian gave the boy a coin. The boy pressed the fingers of both hands against his lips, gestured towards Adrian and smiled. He watched the boy run back to his friends. When they’d first met, he and the boy, Adrian had been a different person. He feels this so strongly he wonders how the boy had even recognised him.

He is happy. Except in those moments when he thinks of Kate and Lisa; a jolt from his conscience surges through his body hot like electricity. He looks in the mirror and sees the traces of grey which his hair has held for years, the two vertical lines between his eyebrows. He wonders how he can be doing what he is doing. At those times he hides himself from Mamakay, for fear of allowing her to see what he sees, that he is undeserving.

At night he and Mamakay read together, out of necessity making their own simple entertainment. They talk and play cards. Once Mamakay brought out a Ludo board, at once a reminder of Kai. Adrian pictured Kai, his erratic beard, too youthful to grow into a full beard. Jealousy like a snakebite to Adrian’s heart. For some reason he found himself pretending he knew nothing of the rules of Ludo. He used it as an excuse not to play.

Last evening she lay on her back listening while he read aloud from a book and rubbed scented oil into the skin of her stomach with slow circular movements. From outside came the sounds of the mosque, of the football match playing at the video centre. Like a child she can hear the same story time and time again, though unlike a child she might snatch the paperback from his hand and read a section for herself, improving upon his inflection. She has a gift for it. Like a child she knows sections of the narrative by heart. ‘ “They say when trouble comes close ranks,” ’ she says in an accent incorrectly, yet somehow appropriately, of the Deep South. She has read
Wide Sargasso Sea
four times, though never
Jane Eyre
. He makes a promise to himself that he will find her a copy, it will be a gift, though he has no idea where he might find a Victorian novel in this city. He stores them up, these future gifts, in his mind, moments to be spun out into the future. He leans across and places the palm of his hand flat on her stomach. He thinks he feels the child inside, though it is but the shadow of her heartbeat.

Once she gave him a gift of her own. A miniature bottle of indigo pigment she’d found in a market a long time ago. The bottle had attracted her, tiny, sealed with lead, never opened. He wears it on a leather cord around his neck, tucked inside the breast pocket of his shirt. He tells himself that if he falls the glass will pierce his heart.

Most often the fear comes at night. He leaves the bed and wanders through the empty house. The electricity supply is erratic and means he must light a candle or else rely upon the moon. In those dark moments he thinks of the scale of what has been sacrificed, of Kate and Lisa, of the worst that could yet happen, that happiness such as this cannot last. He moves through the rooms and returns to bed, counting steps, counting seconds. When he slips back into bed alongside her, the fear lies low, below the surface.

One night he dreams he has lost her and wakes full of anguish. Her side of the bed is empty. When he finds her at the back of the house talking to a neighbour, absurdly anger comes as strongly as relief, that she should abandon him during his nightmare.

He watches her to see if he can catch a glimpse of what she is feeling. He sees her pleasure at his arrival, at his embrace, his small gifts and compliments. He sees no fear at all. And he asks himself, can this be so? Perhaps she does not love him. For she has never said she does and still does not talk about the future.

On Monday, three days from now, he has an appointment with Elias Cole. He has seen the old man twice since he arrived back in the country, though on neither occasion had much of consequence been said. Cole is dying. In the time Adrian had been away his condition had deteriorated again, the oxygen concentrator brought back to his room for the final road. There has been no reconciliation with Mamakay, for which Adrian considers himself responsible. It had been a disappointment when Cole declined to call for him. Adrian has become genuinely interested in the outcome, in getting to the point of Elias Cole.

That night, for the first time in many weeks, Adrian takes out his drawing pad and pencil and begins to sketch. He draws the fruit bats in the tree in the yard of the new house. For half an hour he struggles with a soft pencil to capture a likeness: the intense darkness of their faces, the brilliance of their eyes and small teeth, the elegance and fragility of their wings. He uses a flashlight to get close to them and they seem unperturbed. One of the bats is carrying a baby upon her body. Gradually he discerns differences between them, of character and features. After a while he reviews his work. There are several sketches. The first a study of the head of a bat. The second an image of the mother and her baby. A third of a spread wing: sheer matt skin, taut edges and graceful points. It seems to him unimaginable he ever found these creatures ugly. Quite simply, they are beautiful.

‘I like that.’ Mamakay, who has stolen up behind him, places her hands on his shoulders. ‘Can I see?’

He holds up the sketchbook for her.

‘May I keep it?’ she asks.

‘Of course.’ He takes the sketchbook and tears out the page. Mamakay disappears and comes back with an empty frame. Adrian turns the pages of the pad, back to the earliest sketches of the sunbird outside the apartment at the hospital. He thinks of Kai and wonders if he still sleeps there. Or if Mamakay still thinks of him.

‘There!’ Mamakay holds up the drawing of the bats inside the frame. He smiles at her. Yes, it is one of his best. The best he has done since he came here.

Late in the evening, long after they have eaten and made love, he picks up his sketchbook again. Mamakay is lying on the wicker sofa; a
lappa
is wrapped around her body, twined around to the back of her neck, where it is caught in a heavy knot.

The rain is gone and the evening air is light. The heat, for once, has slipped back into the earth. A breeze toys with the hem of Mamakay’s garment. The city seems very far away. He watches her for a long time, the sketchbook lying in his lap. It is hard to resist the urge to touch her. She is reading in the yellow lamplight, lying on her back and holding the book inches from her nose, her other arm thrown behind her. She lays the book upon her chest but otherwise remains as she is. Adrian picks up his pencil.

This night he draws her, eschewing studies and sketches, endeavouring to capture every line of her body. One by one, the lines fall upon the paper, each in its place. He works with intense concentration, can feel the tightness in his stomach. He is alive in the moment, nervous of making the next stroke, but knowing at the same time he cannot stop or whatever rhythm, whatever alchemy of brain and eyes and fingers that currently propels him will be lost. Once on paper, the moment will be held for ever, he can never forget it. He wills Mamakay not to move. On he draws until the precise moment comes when he is finished. Perhaps for the first time, he recognises the moment as it arrives. Not a single stroke erased or redrawn. The picture of Mamakay is a series of lines, curved and tapering. A curl of hair, the soft swell of her stomach. It is unlike anything he has ever drawn before.

‘If you like bats so much, I can take you somewhere.’

He’d thought her asleep, she’d lain so still.

Where are they? Adrian has no idea. He turns to see the canoe, steered by the old fisherman with his single, narrow paddle, head back into the waves. A cannon lies half submerged. A small jetty reaches to the sea. A fort, ruined stone, thickly veined with creepers, stands above them. Mamakay’s stride is shorter now than before, her breathing labours slightly. It is already late, perhaps six o’clock.

A path leads away from the small, gritty beach towards the interior of the island, past a graveyard in which stand half a dozen headstones. Adrian stops to read the names upon them and wonders what it took, all those years ago, to have words carved upon Scottish granite and brought back to be laid upon the tomb of a sailor whose own lifespan upon this island had lasted only a matter of months. A row of undulating mounds stands almost as tall as Adrian. Hills of oyster shells, thousands upon thousands, marking long-ago years, when the men who lived here dined on oysters and rum; the bottles lie upon the beach, are wedged between the boulders, rock back and forth upon the sea bed.

They are walking downhill now, away from the oyster hills, a narrow path around the edge of a disintegrating wall.

‘Here.’ Mamakay turns and stops. They are in front of a doorway, or perhaps it is the mouth of a cave. Adrian leans into the narrow portal. A colossal, crowded darkness, seething with life, the sound of a billion beating hearts. To Adrian it feels as if the island itself is a living creature, whose centre the two of them have penetrated.

Outside, in front of the cave opening, they wait for night. As the darkness outside deepens, they hear inside the cave a stirring, awakenings. The first bat emerges, noiselessly, and is gone. It is followed by other bats, singly and then in twos and threes, leaving slipstreams of wind, treacle-soft and warm. Now in tens and twenties, finally in their hundreds, bats fly past them. Adrian stands unmoving, holds his breath for the minutes it takes for the bats to leave the cave. The air is turbulent with wings, dense with bodies. Threads of wind trail across his face and arms, seem to cling to him. The wind brings the tears to his eyes and he closes them. They are everywhere, above him, around him, though they never touch him. Their numbers seem unending, until suddenly everything comes to a halt. Adrian finds himself standing holding Mamakay in his arms. The breath comes fast and hard from their lips, their bodies tremble. They are holding each other, laughing.

Adrian opens his eyes and is instantly awake. The sun is strong and the sky a deep blue. It is the morning of his meeting with Elias Cole. Twenty minutes later looking into Elias Cole’s face, Adrian finds himself searching for traces of Mamakay. There, in the line of the lips, the contour of the eyes, the slight prominence of the upper teeth. And when Cole smiles, as he did when Adrian entered, the likeness was there in the bottom lip, where it caught on and was pushed forward by the edge of the front teeth. How strange it is to see the face of a young and beautiful woman hidden within the folded curtains of an elderly man’s skin. It occurs to Adrian he and Elias Cole are practically kin.

Cole removes the breathing apparatus from his face.

‘Good morning,’ says Adrian. Somehow seeing Cole like that makes him draw several deep breaths, like a thirsty man drinking water.

‘Good morning.’ The voice as dry as paper.

‘How are you getting on?’

Cole shrugs. ‘I have nothing to complain of.’

The air in the room is cooler than outside. Grateful for this, Adrian sits in his customary seat. Over the last two days he has reread his clinical notes in their entirety. Even after he had done so Elias Cole still retained a certain opacity. As a man he was possessive, controlling and ambitious, though none of those to a degree that was by any means pathological. His was a case of mediocrity rising. If he’d been possessed of any real talent he would have been seen as a threat by the Dean and eliminated like so many others. He had allied himself with the Dean and ridden on the back of the Dean’s ambition. When the Dean became Vice Chancellor he promoted Cole to his old position. In England Adrian met people like Elias Cole every day; some of them were his colleagues. Cole was jealous of his younger brother, whom he also loved. Parallels there between the brother and Julius. Cole had alluded to them himself. In some ways he appeared to know himself well, which made whatever he was concealing all the more cleverly hidden. Unless of course the occlusion was taking place on the level of the subconscious. Adrian doubted this. He suspected Cole had been manipulating him.

‘There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

‘By all means.’

‘Did you ever see Johnson again?’

Silence.