Bee shook her head harder. “Nothing,”she sobbed, finally removing her hands from her face and turning toward Rowan to reveal the snot-covered grimace underneath. She righted herself on the couch, sitting up straight. “I took nothing,” she said. “I din’t have time ’cos you rang the doorbell an’ I though’ it jus’ might be Adam. But it wuz you an’ I din’t want to see you. I just wanted to sort it all out – just finish it. ’Cos you’re all liars, you hear me? Liars . . .” Bee sank back against the headrest and swiped her face with her hands, causing a stream of mucus and tears to spread all over her cheeks like a child.
“Do I need to ring an ambulance, Bee?” Rowan said, cautiously. “Do we need to go to A & E?” At four hundred pounds per visit, she sincerely hoped not.
Bee gave a long sniff and shook her head again. “Swear,” she replied quietly. “I din’t do an’thin’. Yet. Jus’ some booze. Between not getting the course an’ Adam . . . I jus’ couldn’t sleep, so I had a drink and then some more, but I din’t do an’thin’ with the pills. I’m jus’ so sick of bein’ lied to. I thought my mum . . . thought she was a good person. But even she wasn’t. No one cares ’bout me. I thought she did, but no. Even she wanted to leave me . . .”
“Bee, what are you on about?” barked Rowan suddenly. Where was all this nonsense about Jenny coming from? It was looking like she’d need to take her to a hospital after all.
“Th’letter,” said Bee, her tone exasperated yet suddenly tired. “Arrived yessaday. Like ev’rythin’ else hadn’t gone wrong. What’s the point? You’re all interferin’ liars.”
Rowan sighed, exasperated. What letter? What was Bee talking about? Who could possibly have written to her to make her react so? To make her rant about her mother – a woman who had been dead for over twenty years, who she had never known? Rowan sank back into a sitting position on the floor, confused. She took a breath but suddenly found that she had to jump to her feet again as Bee suddenly retched and vomited helplessly down her top. All else forgotten for a moment, Rowan ran again toward the kitchen to grab a basin and a tea towel as Bee continued to vomit.
It was as she passed the table, covered in pills, that Rowan saw the letter and the envelope lying there. She reached out to pull it toward her, but stopped as she heard Bee suddenly lurch out of the living room and up the stairs toward the bathroom. Rowan felt too exhausted to move suddenly. Let her clean herself up, she though wearily, the basin and cloth still held in her hand.
Suddenly frozen to the spot with exhaustion, she glanced down at the collection of capsules and pills that were scattered everywhere – at what seemed to be everything from the household medicine cabinet.
Bee had emptied everything from the containers and mixed them together but had left the tubes lying scattered on the table. Rowan picked them up one by one. Paracetamol, she read – you could only buy five at a time by law, however, and there was only one empty tube on the table. Arnica, another said. Milk Thistle, Viagra – how odd – but nothing lethal from what she could see. A wave of relief washed over her. Just the alcohol poisoning to worry about, then, she thought to herself. The sounds of the violent vomiting from upstairs, however, seemed to indicate that Bee’s body had thankfully decided to take care of that itself.
Rowan wasn’t sure how she managed it but, once Bee had finally ceased to throw up, it only took the guts of half an hour to shower her and dress her in clean pyjamas before finally putting her to bed. She lay there, helpless as a child, her face red and her skin mottled from crying and purging. Rowan could see the tiny red pinpricks of burst blood vessels around her eyes from the strain. Bee allowed herself to be turned on her side and tucked in by her stepmother who placed a basin on the floor beside her bed, along with a stack of fresh towels and some face-wipes that she found. Bee was sound asleep by the time Rowan headed downstairs, the door left ajar so that she could hear if Bee should be sick again.
She would stay, of course. Until Bee woke and then maybe they could talk it through, whatever had upset her so. She gathered that Adam and the course at Darvill’s were both gone by the wayside. But had that been enough to prompt Bee to such a response? To contemplate taking the contents of the medicine cabinet? To drink herself into oblivion?
There had to be something more, of course. All this talk of her mother . . . and a letter . . . It was of Ed that Rowan thought as she made her way back to the kitchen table to retrieve the letter she had seen there. She’d have to tell him everything, of course, but not yet. Not until she had a clearer picture of the facts. Not until she had read this mystery correspondence. And definitely not until she had spoken rationally – or tried to at least – with her stepdaughter.
It was with this plan in mind that she swept the collection of pills off the table surface and into the waste bin, clearing a space to finally sit down and at last begin to solve the mystery, and to acknowledge that her gut instinct had been all too correct all along.
* * *
June 29th, 2020
Beehive Lodge
Green Valley Road
Franschhoek 7780
South Africa
My darling Jenny,
There is so much uncertainty inherent in sending this letter that I barely know where to begin: I am uncertain if this will reach you – whether this address is correct in the first instance and also if you actually still live there.
I am uncertain as to whether or not you will even read it. Uncertain as to whether or not you will care to know what I have to say. Uncertain whether or not you have allowed yourself to remember me. If not, then this is who I am. My name is Guillaume Melesi and I once loved you more than life itself. But you didn’t love me enough in return to choose to come with me when that was what I wanted more than anything in the world, so I had to let you be.
When I left England alone in December of 1997, without you, I made the conscious decision to let that be an end to my life there. I had plans for how my life would be – how our life would be together once we left – but you didn’t come. So I drew a line in the sand: cut all communication – incoming and outgoing – with everyone back at home.
You were all that I wanted, so without you l left myself behind in England – threw my mobile phone in a litter bin at the airport – and have since – as I’m sure you know – never once sought contact or information from my life there. Cast off one skin and grew a fresh one here, in South Africa.
I understood when you didn’t come to my flat that day that you made the decision to stay with Ed and little Bee. And I couldn’t blame you for that. But it meant that I was a broken man and the only way I could survive was to cut away completely everything that I associated with you and our time together.
I can still picture you very clearly, however. Your auburn hair and those green eyes. You come to me in my dreams still, even after all of these years. Smiling your wide smile, making some pithy remark, or growing teary-eyed over small things and needing the comfort that it made me feel strong to give.
It’s funny that for all the years I have spent in Africa – a lifetime – every time I hear the beat of the ngoma drum, that I hear the voice of Miriam Makeba or the Tuareg melodies played on the shepherd’s flute and the imzad, it isn’t Africa that I think of. It is you. In my dreams, I still feel your skin against mine. I hear your voice speak to me, hear you tell me that you want only me and that you will give up everything to be with me. I see your face look back at me – your lips apart, your cheeks flushed, as I tell you about Africa. About the exotic flowers, the dramatic, sharp mountains, the way the air is warm and sweet. About the gold of the desert and the white sands of the coast. I smell your beautiful clean cotton scent. I wonder how life would have been had you kept your promise and come to me and we had embarked on this adventure together. The adventure that was never to be.
I also loved Ed. He was my wing man, my partner in crime, my brother. Looking back with the clarity of years, it pains me that I could have hurt him so. For a long time I have wanted to s
ay sorry. I sat down to write to him, to e-mail, a hundred times over the last twenty-three years but every time I tried to say something, I couldn’t. At first, it was because of your rejection of me. This love that I have carried for you burned so strong inside me that I simply didn’t know what to say. I found myself angry with him, simply because you had chosen him over me. Because he had kept you, trapped in grey London when all the colours of the rainbow were here for your taking in Africa.
After a time, I was no longer angry. I was sorry. Never sorry for having loved you – for still loving you – but for having almost taken you away from him. After a time, it became easier to keep him from my mind and harder to find the courage to reach out to him. It was better that I left you all alone. My silence was for your good.
I waited for you in the flat that afternoon. At the airport, I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see you rush in through the doors, coming in search of me. I really believed that you would. It broke me a little inside that you didn’t.
I am a selfish man, Jenny. I have had plenty of years to reflect on that. I have no doubt that it took me a lot longer to come to that conclusion than it probably took the people I left behind.
Vicky, for one. How callous of me to desert her, pregnant. That decision was reprehensible – I see that now, but in my heart and in my head – and you can choose to tell her this if you wish – she and I were completely finished. I think she knew this too. I had no interest at that time in becoming a father and I knew that she knew my interest in her had waned. It didn’t cost me a thought to just leave and never to get in touch with her again, despite the fact that she was carrying my child. At the time, my head and my heart were so full of you that there was no room for anyone else.
I look back now and see the chaos that my cowardice must have caused, yet I thought nothing of it at the time. But now the time has come to beg for forgiveness. It is so much to ask but if you ever loved me, Jenny, can I ask you to give this message to Vicky and her child – my child – to Ed, to their family and to your Bee. I am sorry.
I stayed in South Africa. My Christmas with my parents that year was extended to a month, then six months. And then my father got sick so I stayed until he died and then stayed longer to nurse my mother who followed him not long after. I became a hotelier eventually. Married a wonderful Danish woman called Grace and we built our own business here in the Winelands – a guest lodge with a spa and a small winery. Every morning, I rise here at Beehive Lodge and my breath is taken away by the sheer drama of the mountains that surround us. I walk among my vines, greet the guests, eat the finest foods and breathe in the unspoilt pure air. It is not the adventure I once bragged about. I lost the appetite to sleep in a Bedouin tent, or to dive with sharks, to win countless accolades, to change the world, but I am content here with my wife. It is beautiful. I should love you to come to see it some day. Please do.
It’s Grace who will have mailed this letter to you. Because if you are reading it, it means that I am gone. I write this to you not knowing what time I have left, fearful of, yet resigned to the fact that it isn’t long. I have fought lung cancer as hard as I could for as long as I could – I won’t bore you with the details other than to say it is winning, even with everything that science can do nowadays. It seems that we Melesis were never built for the long haul.
With death, of course, come loose ends which must be tied. You and Ed were kind enough to allow me to be Bee’s godfather – a job at which you cannot say I excelled! In reparation for the downright shoddy fist I made of the task, I have enclosed a cheque for her. I would like it very much if she were to use it to have an adventure for herself, or to further her education to do something that she loves – or just to live well, as I have done. There is no easy way to say sorry – all that I can say is that I almost changed her life for the worst once by taking her mother away. I would like, in some way, in passing, to try to change it for the better. To do some good for a change.
You will see another cheque attached. It is made out to Vicky, but it is for her child. A bit late for that, I hear you say in your sharp tone, but I wish for the child to have this money nonetheless. If Vicky has not changed, then I doubt she will refuse it because I deserted her. Call it a guilt payment if you will, but in the absence of being a father, money is all that I can offer.
The Lodge will go to Grace and then she will pass it on to whomsoever she chooses – I have specified that in my will. It’s just that I know Vicky will ask . . . (now, in my mind’s eye, I see you smile!).
And so I draw a line under us, Jenny Mycroft. You drew yours a long time ago, I think. On the 23rd of December 1997 when you chose to stay and I chose to go. Much as it still breaks my heart, you did the right thing. I hope that you have been happy, as successful as you would have wished, and that you went on to have a large family and are enjoying a long life still with Ed. You both deserve it.
As I write, Jenny, I can see you. You’re sitting in your garden under coloured light-bulbs strung between the trees on a London summer evening, your face lit softly by candlelight. And you are smiling at me. I have made a photo album in my heart to take with me when I go and this is the picture of you that I have placed in it. The image of you that will be with me when I go, along with all of my other treasures.
Perhaps there is one more thing that you can do for me now. Try to picture me. As you knew me. As you saw me the last time you saw me, when maybe you still loved me. As I write, I am looking out over a small lake at the back of our property. Two black swans live there, slicing through the water, making a fleeting shape of a love heart with their bowed heads and long necks as they pass each other before continuing on their individual courses. Over me is blue sky, over you is most likely grey, but remember, it is the same sky all the same.
We have a blessing in South Africa that goes like this:
Walk tall, walk well, walk safe, walk free
And may harm never come to thee.
Walk wise, walk good, walk proud, walk true
And may the sun always smile on you.
Walk prayer, walk hope, walk faith, walk light
And may peace always guide you right.
Walk joy, walk brave, walk love, walk strong
And may life always give you song.
Goodbye from one who loved you fiercely,
Guillaume
Chapter 52
September 2020
Jenny
So that is what became of him.
Guillaume. The name that I have buried underneath everything else in my mind for twenty-three years. The name that I would bat away the second it dared to float up into my line of consciousness. For him I gave up everything – almost gave up my child, for heaven’s sake. Almost gave up Ed. Instead, I lost them. All because I thought that I owed it to Guillaume – the name is sharp in my thoughts – to tell him face to face that things were over between us, that I wasn’t going to go to South Africa with him, that I wanted to stay with my husband and child and grow my family and be a better person.
Because of him I died. And yes, it was my own fault – there were all those things that I could have done that day that would have meant I would still be alive – whether or not that meant I was still with Ed doesn’t matter now.
But I read that letter in the silence of the house over and over again. I should be watching over Bee to make sure that she isn’t sick again and does herself harm, the stupid thing. But I can’t go up to her room, I can’t face her because this letter has changed how she thinks of me forever. This is the ultimate irony: that for all her life she has grown up thinking that I died blameless in an accident while I have blamed only myself for leaving her.
But now, as I see his words, see his turn of phrase, read what he has said – I finally understand that while now she sees my fault in everything, I can see that I was not alone in causing my death and thereby changing the direction of my daughter’s life forever.
Sure, I was driving the car when I should
n’t have been. Sure, I was on my way to see him. Sure, I was stupid and bored and gave in to selfish desires, looking for something external to reward me when I had it all on the inside in the first place. Sure it’s all textbook cliché stuff. But it’s true.
But I was not alone in my selfishness. Guillaume was selfish too. And how. Look at his words! His admission that he loved me – he neverloved me! How could someone who was selfish enough to make a move on the wife of a man he called his ‘brother’ be capable of loving anyone but himself? How could he even begin to comprehend the sacrifice of love when he has spent his life in self-imposed exile, convincing himself that he left behind the greatest love of his life when, in fact, he sees that love every time he sees his own reflection?
‘I am selfish,’ he admits. Calling him selfish is like . . . like . . . calling the end of the world a minor interference with plans! Why have I never seen this before? Why have I needed the filter of such a long time to give me such clarity, such perspective? Selfish! A man who flitted in and out of life in search of satisfaction only for his own needs. A man who deserted his own child willingly – as he thought – just because he had grown tired of its mother. A man who could slice his life off with such ease and start again, thinking that he was reinventing himself when he was not. When he’s just keeping calm and carrying on, as they say, exactly as he was before, with only himself at the centre of his universe.
And how could there have always been a piece of me, since I died, that felt guilty for not going with him? Even though my own stupidity over him cost me my life and ruined my family’s lives, there has always been a part of me – and I can see it now as plain as day – that has felt I owedhim something. What? An apology? A piece of me? The regret and worry that I’ve carried around with me like such a heavy burden in my soul for all this time? Seeing all of this now – seeing Guillaume in this light, seeing how I felt about him – stupidly, but temporarily, besotted – is like suddenly finding out that my overstuffed suitcase was too heavy because there was an anchor in it, hidden from my sight. And by throwing that anchor out I can finally see the truth.
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