Beyond the Storm

by Diana Finley

  ‘Not at all honest,’ says Ben.

  Ben never mentions the discussion again. He asks no further questions of Anna. From this time onwards, she senses that he withdraws from her, and she is deeply saddened. Eve, on the other hand, frequently throws the revelation back in her mother’s face, uses it as a weapon, particularly at times of confrontation, of which there are many.

  ‘I suppose you’re sorry you didn’t give me away, aren’t you?’

  Of course not, Anna assures her, she would never, never have considered giving her away. What a terrible thing to say. Yet … yet Yael is the only person on earth to whom she could ever admit that in years gone by, in those darkest moments, she would sometimes torture herself by playing a terrible game. Against her will, despite herself, she would sometimes imagine … if you were put in the position of having to select one child to give away, never to see again, which would you choose: Shimon, Ben or Eve? There is no answer.

  She tries to convince herself that the children’s negative reaction to hearing her story, part of her story, proves that she was right not to tell them sooner, and that she is right not to tell them everything now. Yet sometimes in the night, she wakes with a lingering doubt gnawing at her. If she had simply told them everything when they were younger, might they just have accepted it, and accepted Shimon?

  Chapter 15

  1970

  The old plane rumbles and shakes westwards, heading towards Tehran airport. Over the mountains, clouds thud wetly against the portholes and batter the aircraft with violent turbulence. Breaks in the clouds show brief glimpses of mountain ranges far below, ridges sharp as knives, bright with sun on one side, dark and shadowy on the other. Eve cannot settle to read. She looks around her. Across the aisle, the elderly tribesman sits rocking in his seat, incanting his prayers ever more fervently. His face has turned grey-green.

  His son nods and smiles at Eve. He has told her this is his father’s first experience of air travel, his first departure from Afghanistan. They are going to a conference of leading Muslim elders in Tehran. The old man takes a small rug from his pack and lays it in the central aisle. He glances nervously out of the windows. At the sight of the vibrating wings, he raises his eyes beseechingly, fingers working their beads furiously. He looks out again, glancing from one side of the plane to the other, trying to work out which direction it is facing, which way is Mecca. Then he kneels down and starts to pray in earnest.

  The air hostess peeps out from her little compartment near the front of the plane. The safety belt warning light is on due to the turbulence. She appears to be considering whether to tell the old man to return to his seat and fasten his belt, but decides against it and shuts herself away behind the curtain again.

  Eve’s weariness and grief wraps her in a blanket of numb unreality. She pulls the shawl around her shoulders and takes out Ben’s letter, crumpled from many readings. Was it coincidence or fate that his letter had arrived at the central post office in Kabul just the day before she did? All those months living in a distant valley in the Pamir Mountains, Eve had been completely out of touch with her family, many days’ travel from the nearest town, let alone the capital. Yet there, on top of the pile of correspondence waiting at the Poste Restante, was Ben’s airmail letter. Their father had died of a massive heart attack only three days previously. Why always a ‘massive’ heart attack, she wonders; it’s not as though anyone would die of a minor heart attack. How could Sam be dead? A world without her father. It wasn’t possible. It was just too final to conceive.

  Travelling alone in wild and remote mountain regions, Eve had rarely felt fear, never considered herself in potential danger, despite all of Sam’s dire warnings before she left. ‘The Afghan is a fierce and warlike chap, not given to following rules,’ he had informed her in his old-fashioned manner. He had always referred to those of other nations in this way – ‘the Sikh’, ‘the Serb’, ‘the Arab’ – an expression belying the great respect and courtesy he showed to other peoples.

  Often, on family holidays, Eve’s mother had expressed exasperation about Sam’s insistence that to lock the car in a foreign city was an insult to the local people, implying a suspicion that they might have dishonest intent. Amazingly, it was a trust that was never betrayed; nothing was ever stolen. One time Sam’s wallet, packed with holiday money, had gone missing from his back pocket in a down-at-heel town in Yugoslavia. Eve recalls Anna’s response: the lift of her eyebrows, the knowing smile, how she had come close to trumpeting ‘What did I tell you?’ But Sam had strode calmly to the local police station and made enquiries, to find that the wallet had been found in the street and handed in intact.

  Perhaps her father’s belief in the goodwill of others had contributed to Eve’s lack of fear while travelling; like Sam, she assumed everyone she met would be well disposed towards her, that none would harm her. Nothing in her growing up had prepared her for the wilds of the Hindu Kush, but she was young enough, flexible enough, to learn new ways of dealing with a totally unfamiliar world. Yet now, suddenly, about to re-enter urban civilisation, she feels at a loss to know how to behave.

  The official at the British Consulate had been kind and helpful, perhaps glad to handle any case not simply another hippy run out of money or in difficulties over a drugs deal. He had arranged Eve’s immediate repatriation, involving first flying on this small local plane, followed by an overnight stop in Tehran, and then a scheduled flight to London the following day. Eve anticipates her return home to suburban Chislehurst with complete terror. By the time she arrives home it will be nearly two weeks since Sam’s death.

  * * *

  A taxi speeds her, together with a middle-aged British couple, from the airport through the noisy streets of Tehran to a large modern hotel, overnight stay care of the British Consulate. The woman appears intrigued by Eve’s bizarre appearance; after nearly a year away she wears a colourful mixture of local tribal garments and the ragged remains of her own clothes. She questions Eve persistently.

  ‘Have you been in Afghanistan a long time, dear?’

  ‘Yes, nearly a year.’

  ‘Oh my, that’s a long holiday! Or perhaps you were working?’

  ‘No … just travelling.’

  ‘Ah, travelling. You don’t look very well, dear. You’re terribly thin.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Have you had any treatment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, you should. You never know what you might have picked up over there.’

  Eve stares at the woman and nods. She turns to look out of the window. She does know what she has picked up; a pleasant doctor at the American Hospital in Kabul has explained that she almost certainly has severe amoebic dysentery, and will need to visit the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London as soon as possible.

  The hotel is half empty. The few guests in evidence are mostly American businessmen or engineers, recognisable by their conspicuously large-sized and garish clothes. Like all men far from home, they are lonely, bored and open to opportunities. As Eve stands in the bar and asks for an orange juice, she is immediately propositioned by an American, despite her strange clothes and wild hair. He looms over her with a blue and white checked shirt, crew-cut hair and a large, reddish face. He tells her his name is Warren and he is thirty-six, which Eve regards as impossibly old, but apart from the man at the British Consulate in Kabul and the woman in the taxi, she hasn’t spoken English with anyone for a year, and is strangely drawn to this bulky and diffident man.

  Warren offers to buy her a drink, which she accepts, and dinner, which she declines. She explains she is not well and can eat very little. Warren tells her he is an engineer with a multinational company building an oil pipeline in western Persia. The project area is remote and hot, and Warren longs to return home to the hills and forests of Vermont. He’s been away for three months and misses his wife and children.

  Eve likes his honesty. He asks – in a half-hearted sort of way – if she would sleep with him, and doe
sn’t seem surprised when she says she’d prefer a hot shower and a long sleep. They wish each other good luck and Eve retreats to her room.

  * * *

  The first morning back in England, Eve wakes in her old schoolgirl’s bedroom with its yellow curtains and posters of the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac. She wonders if it is real or a dream, or if perhaps she has dreamt her entire time away. She pads across the polished floorboards of the landing and opens the door to her parents’ room. Her mother, always an early riser, is already downstairs. The two single beds stand side by side, like children’s beds. They are neatly made, with white sheets, cream woollen blankets and shiny green eiderdowns.

  On Sam’s bed his blue and white flannel pyjamas are just visible between the two pillows, neatly folded. A small Indian woven rug on the floor separates the beds. On the bedside table is a thick copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He must have been in the middle of reading it; a bookmark peeps out two-thirds of the way through. Gently, tenderly, Eve removes it. She recognises it as one she had embroidered for him at the age of eight or nine. How she had sighed and sweated over those uneven red cross-stitches to write the words, ‘For Daddy – with love from Eve’.

  She pulls out his pyjamas and presses her face into them, breathing in the smell of him. His shaving brush and razor, his toothbrush and toothpaste in a plastic mug, stand on the glass shelf above the basin. The chintz curtains are half closed. Eve opens Sam’s side of the wardrobe. On the left, white Aertex vests and pants fill one shelf, socks and handkerchiefs another. Below them is a little heap of folded sweaters – ‘jerseys’, he would have called them. His shirts, trousers, jackets and suits hang from a rail on the other side. Everything ordered with the precision that dominated his life.

  At the extreme right end is his uniform, unworn for the last ten years. It is all there, just as always before. It seems inconceivable, impossible, that her father is not. She is overwhelmed by a sense that it is not true, that this is a conspiracy. Of course he isn’t really dead; how could he be? Why have they hidden him away? What have they done with him? Where is he? If this is supposed to be a joke, it isn’t funny, not at all. Surely it’s about time to reveal the truth.

  * * *

  She gazes around the crematorium garden, searching everywhere for some trace, but there is none. He’s not there, no part of him in evidence. Below them the red-brick buildings of the crematorium and chapel stand solid and ugly as factories. A narrow roadway separates the crematorium from a cluster of low office buildings. Two metal dustbins stand outside a door. Eve notices, with a dull shock, that the lid of one is slightly skewed. Her heart thumping, she is overcome with a feeling that that is where he must be: her father’s remains dumped in that dustbin; that is surely what must have happened. His precious ashes discarded like clinker from a cleared-out grate. She sways precariously, nauseous, empty. Get a grip, Eve, she tells herself, you’re starting to lose it. Her breath comes in jagged, uneven gulps. Ben looks at her face and grasps her arm.

  ‘There’s a plaque,’ he says quietly. ‘No grave, of course. He wanted a tree planted and his ashes scattered around it.’

  He stands patiently, looking at Eve, waiting for her to regain control and move forward.

  ‘I guess it’s hard to take it in. That he’s … gone. You do understand we couldn’t wait for you? I mean, we had to go ahead with the funeral. I wasn’t sure when you’d get my letter, or whether you’d get it at all.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘This way,’ he says, steering her towards a smooth green hillock beyond the buildings; a grassy mound, a grassy knoll, Eve thinks, sparking the memory in her mind of the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, a few years before, where Kennedy was shot. Ben and she had lain on their stomachs watching events on TV, crying, not believing it was really happening. Ben had gone upstairs and written a poem about it, full of sixteen-year-old anger and passion.

  Eve clenches her fists. She almost stamps her foot, but controls the impulse, aware that Ben would interpret it as childish.

  ‘Why do they have to give everything such stupid, bloody names? “Book of Remembrance”, “Chapel of Rest”. Nobody’s resting in it. Such idiotic euphemisms.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ says Ben, shrugging. ‘Look, here it is.’

  A tiny tree, no taller than Eve’s shoulder, stands in the mown grass, upright and straight, like a determined toddler reaching upwards as if trying to touch the sky. It is a silver birch, its bark pale and peeling. Silver birch, her favourite tree. Sam knew that, just as he knew her favourite flower was a pure, pale yellow rose. Every summer he would come in from the garden to present her with the first yellow rose in bloom. Had he chosen the tree himself? Had he planned this in advance? Did he know he was going to die? Low down, near the base of the tree, a rectangle of shiny coppery metal is fixed to the trunk at a slight angle. On it is written:

  In loving memory of

  Brigadier Samuel Richard Lawrence.

  Born 24th March 1902. Died 26th August 1970.

  Eve strokes the smooth, cool surface, allowing her fingers to feel the indentations of the script, as if reading Braille.

  ‘That’s it? This is all that’s left of his life?’

  ‘No, of course it’s not all! There’s everything he was and did and achieved. There’s our memories of him and who he was. That doesn’t stop. There’s our love for him. That doesn’t stop either. And … well … I’m proud he was our father.’

  This is more, of a personal nature, than Eve’s brother has ever said to her before. It makes her cry for the first time since her return.

  * * *

  At home, Anna is in the kitchen. The pastry for apple strudel is rolled out on a cloth on the table and Anna is stretching it rhythmically with her hands. She stops when she hears her children come in and wipes her floury hands on her apron. She gives Eve a questioning, anxious look.

  ‘Darling …?’

  Ben kisses her, then turns and runs upstairs. They hear his clomping feet leaping two or three steps at a time. His bedroom door bangs shut. Eve and Anna hug for a long time, each feeling the convulsive gulps of the other. Eve washes her hands and together they complete the stretching of the strudel pastry. They add the filling of sliced apple, sultanas, brown sugar and baked breadcrumbs, which Anna has prepared. Then they roll it up, careful not to tear its surface, seal the edges and put it away in the cool of the larder.

  Anna makes a pot of coffee and they smoke a cigarette together at the kitchen table, like they used to sometimes when Eve came home from school. Anna’s hands tremble whenever she lifts her cup.

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’

  Anna sighs. ‘It’s hard, very hard … for all of us. Sam – Daddy – was everything to me – my core, my centre. I loved him so much. I don’t know how … I always thought he was so strong.’

  ‘But he wasn’t strong. He was sick, wasn’t he? Why couldn’t they help him?’ Eve frowns and roughly brushes tears from her cheeks.

  ‘You know Daddy. He never complained about anything. Never made a fuss. If only he’d said something about the pain sooner …’ Anna’s voice tails off.

  ‘You didn’t know? Are you saying you didn’t know he was ill? How could he hide it from you? Surely you must have known about it?’

  Eve makes an involuntary tutting noise and Anna glances at her. She sighs deeply. She repeats, ‘T’ja, ja, t’ja, ja …’ She twists a pathetic scrap of tissue in her hands.

  ‘Ja, I should. I should have realised … but Sam hated anyone to make a fuss about him. He always wanted to be the strong one, to be in control … and I suppose I wanted him to be strong too. He always said it was nothing, and I wanted to believe he was right.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Mum. Of course it’s not your fault. I just wish I could have seen him again. Before I left all we ever seemed to do was argue. And now, it’s like he’s just disappeared off the face of the earth. There’s no time to tell him … well, anything.’

 
‘Daddy would have been so happy to know you are home safely, so happy. He worried about you very much.’

  ‘Did he? He worried? I wish we could have talked more, now that I’m more of an adult – but now there’s no chance to say anything.’

  ‘I know, darling. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Eve repeats. Yet was anyone at fault? Shouldn’t Anna have realised that the pains, the warning signs, which Sam had just dismissed as ‘a touch of flu’ or ‘running out of puff’, were really serious angina, foretelling his fatal heart attack? All those years her father had cared for Anna, guided her and protected her, almost as though she were a needy child. If only Eve had been there when he was at his most vulnerable, instead of on the other side of the world, might she have been able to help him? If only she had had the chance to care for him. If only she had said some of the things that would never now be said.

  Anna seems to be following the same line of thought. She plays with her trembling fingers, as though rolling prayer beads.

  ‘There is so much that wasn’t said. I tried to be honest with Sam, even though it was hard. I was open in the end, but it took a long time. Maybe I should have been more honest with you and Ben too … Sam wanted me to … but I thought I should wait …’

  ‘Wait? What are you talking about, Mum? Wait for what? What do you mean?’

  ‘Wait for you to grow up, to be more mature. To understand … how things were. There were such difficult times, such cruel and confused times. How could you possibly understand what really happened – the choices I had to make?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Eve repeats, her voice rising shrilly. ‘What choices?’

  Chapter 16

  Anna has taken to wandering the house, not exactly aimlessly, but as if puzzled and in confusion. Everything appears familiar yet unfamiliar, as though she has been deposited in a house devised by someone who has attempted to copy her home, but has done so badly, omitting the most vital elements. She feels as if she is always searching, but exactly what for is unclear. Sam, perhaps; to hear his voice, to see some sign that he has not gone from her for ever, that he is still there. Perhaps just the need to recognise something that has meaning. Peace perhaps. Peace was so long coming to her life, and it was Sam who helped her to find it. Whatever that peace was, now it has gone, and Sam too.