Her voice took on a new resonance. ‘Ah, Perry. I was a dreamy, romantic soul, back then. I thought he was my Mr Rochester. He’s almost twenty years older than me, you know.’
‘Bloody pervert.’ I dumped myself on the sand near the foot of her rock, picked up a stick and began drawing circles.
She sounded surprised. ‘No. No, he’s not that.’
‘C’mon. You were a baby, for Pete’s sake. Seventeen! Bloody hell, that’s Matt’s age.’
‘True.’ She thought about it. ‘But Perry didn’t show any interest in me at first. He was grief-stricken about his precious Victoria. Ate in the officers’ mess and staggered home after I was in bed. For my part, I was completely infatuated within about three hours. He was an army officer—tall, dark and haunted. Very attractive combination. He became my whole world.’
‘He has a certain charisma. Even I can see that.’
‘He has.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, after several months he seemed to wake up. We started taking Lucy out together, like a family. Once I’d put her to bed, he would be waiting on the balcony with a bottle of wine. And one thing led to another.’
‘He pounced.’ I threw my stick away. I felt unreasonably sulky, for some reason. ‘On the balcony, I bet.’
‘He did. My dream came true. But . . . well. I was pretty naïve. I mean—you know—it wasn’t my first time, as they say, but nothing had prepared me for this. It was so grown-up. Such an onslaught.’
‘Told you he’s a pervert.’
‘No, no. Not a physical onslaught. But emotionally . . . He was the subject of all my romantic daydreams, but at the same time it was overwhelming. He wasn’t a callow youth of twenty who might move on after a week; he was an adult, a widower, a father. He kept saying how much he needed me.’
‘That’s heavy.’
‘Intense. Suddenly, I was in deep. Ever been out of your depth?’
‘I’m a good swimmer.’
She prodded me with a tanned, sandy foot, and I fought back a ridiculous urge to catch it in my hand. ‘I hardly think that strumpet Karin turning you down last night counts as a life-changing experience, Jake Kelly.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ignoring me. ‘We settled down like a family, the three of us, and I knew I ought to be blissfully happy, and I almost was. I was still in awe of Perry, still sort of mesmerised. But it wasn’t light-hearted. It wasn’t fun. As the months went on, I realised . . . he wasn’t jealous, exactly, or possessive—he didn’t beat up other men for talking to me—but he wasn’t easygoing. Quite the opposite, in fact. He always wanted to know I’d be home when he got there. He used to phone and check before he set out. There was a sort of neediness that I hadn’t expected and wasn’t mature enough to challenge.’
She took hold of that errant strand of hair and began to twist it distractedly around her finger. ‘And then he began to have . . . attacks.’
I was puzzled. ‘Attacks?’
‘Heart attacks, or so we thought. The whole drama. Fighting for breath, clutching his chest, screaming for me. I was sobbing in the ambulance, begging him not to die.’
‘Jeez, that’s awful.’
‘It was awful. The doctors did tests. They said there was nothing wrong with his heart. In the end they . . .’ She hesitated. Glanced at me and then away. Danced her fingers on her rock. ‘Well, never mind. The upshot was that the army posted him here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. To Nairobi, actually. For a change of scene. To train some local troops the British Army way.’
My eyebrows went up. ‘Hell. He never said.’
‘Well, now you know. We all came—Lucy and me, too. I was still the nanny, officially, although Perry and I had talked about marriage. He was stationed in Nairobi for six months. Then he got himself sent to Colchester, and that’s when he bought the house at Coptree.’
She leaned back on her hands, her face turned to the sun as though she’d talked herself to a standstill. It was a full minute before she spoke again, very quietly, very clearly. She might have been talking to herself.
‘And it was here, in this beautiful country, that I met Rod. Eighteen years ago . . . or was it only yesterday? I’d gone for lunch with some army wives, all older women, at the Thorn Tree—you might have heard of it?—and some of them knew Rod, so he joined us. He came and sat down next to me, and we talked for hours. One of the others introduced me—Deborah Bridges, as I then was—but I told him to call me Susie.’
I was baffled. ‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘A bit of rebellion, I suppose. My parents called me Deborah after my grandmother, and she was a mean, sharp-tongued old woman. Susan’s my middle name, and I’ve always preferred it. I was Susie to my friends at school. It was only my parents’ generation that insisted on calling me De-bo-rah.’ She stuck out the tip of her tongue as though the word tasted sour. ‘Perry came into their category. Rod certainly didn’t.’
The sun had moved around. I shifted a few inches, into the shade of an overhanging bush.
‘When the others left the Thorn Tree, we hardly even noticed. We were nose to nose. I told him all about Perry and Lucy, and he said it sounded as though I needed rescuing.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘The army wouldn’t have touched Rod with a barge pole. He can’t take orders. He seemed so gloriously young—especially compared to Perry—and untamed. I couldn’t see him commuting on the tube. You might as well imagine a leopard settling down quietly in Milton Keynes.’
‘A free spirit.’ I let my eyelids droop for a moment, remembering. ‘I used to be one of those.’
‘Aren’t you still?’
I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me. ‘Carry on,’ I said.
‘You’re probably thinking what a faithless little whore I was.’
‘Yeah. Best kind of woman.’
‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head. ‘But it isn’t true. Remember, I was still a teenager! My friends back home were students, young and silly, getting drunk on Saturday nights and stealing garden gnomes. But I’d shot out of school and straight into this intense, isolating relationship with Perry. I hadn’t had the fun, the laughs, the dating and discos and falling in and out of love like a yoyo. Meeting Rod made me face the fact that I was suffocating.’
She shielded her eyes with one hand, gazing at a ship as it crawled along the horizon. ‘We met again that evening, and again, and again. We had to be together, all the time. With him, I felt like a bird out of its cage, and I wanted to sing. He’d just bought this place, and he asked me to join him.’
‘But you didn’t,’ I predicted confidently. I knew she hadn’t come to live at Kulala. After all, she was Mrs Perry Harrison.
‘But I did.
’ I was perplexed. ‘You left Perry?’
‘Yes, and it was horrible. I told him I’d met someone else, and he went nuts. I thought he was going to have a heart attack—a proper one. I felt like a total bitch—and I was confused, because he’d been such a colossal figure in my life. Lucy held onto my legs all the way to the taxi, crying. Well, we were both crying. It was like leaving my own child. She was waving with both her hands, stumbling after the car like an abandoned puppy.’
‘Poor kid.’
‘You’re so right. Abandoned by her mother, then by her surrogate mother. I hated myself for it, couldn’t bear the misery I’d caused them both. For days I moped about like a bear with toothache, fretting over Lucy. It almost ruined everything. Then, one morning . . .’ She trailed off. A cockerel squawked in the scrub, close by. It made us both jump.
‘Um.’ She laughed, self-consciously. ‘You’ll think I’m mad.’
‘I already do.’
‘No, but . . . okay. I stood in the sea and watched the sun come up over the horizon. Raging up. I imagined I could hear it, roaring like Aslan, stretching out to me across the water. I imagined he—Aslan, or God, or whoever—was giving me permission. What I was doing was righ
t.’ She flapped a hand at me. ‘Loony tunes.’
‘No, I wasn’t thinking that.’
‘Yes, you were. Anyway, there it is. I stopped moping and helped Rod and Hamisi get the place set up. Designed the layout of the bar, just as it is now, cantilevered over the beach. Rod and I slept under a mosquito net strung between the trees just where your banda is. Every morning we’d crawl out and run into the water. We were so happy . . . so happy.’
‘I sense an “until” coming on.’
‘Yes. Until. I suspected, feared, denied for months. Vomited.’
‘Matt?’
‘Matt.’
‘Don’t tell me Rod’s his father?’
She shook her head vehemently, holding up an imperious hand. ‘No. That’s the point. Perry is. I had to leave.’
‘Did you? Why?’
‘Imagine yourself, Jake, at the age of twenty-three. Your new girlfriend gets herself pregnant, and it’s not even yours. What would be the decent thing for her to do?’
‘Disappear?’
‘Precisely. Rod values nothing more than his freedom. Nothing. That’s why I love him—d’you see?’
I nodded uncertainly.
‘If I’d told him about the pregnancy, he would probably have done right by me—whatever that means—but he would have resented me for it.’ She shuddered. ‘No. I couldn’t ask it of him. If I went back to Perry, I could at least give my child a father—its own father. So I pretended my dad was ill, dying of cancer, needing me to nurse him through his last illness. It wasn’t true at the time, but it became true a couple of years later, and poor Mum followed him. D’you think that was divine retribution?’
‘Nope.’
‘Rod was so calm. He didn’t need me, you see? He drove me to the airport, walked me across the tarmac, said he’d be waiting. I didn’t believe him.’ She made a small, unhappy sound, smoothing the vivid cloth across her knees. ‘Perry met me at Ipswich Station, and we never spoke about my little escapade. It never happened.’
I shook my head. ‘Amazing.’
‘It was lovely to see Lucy, but she looked quite thin and tired. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight; even used to get up in the night to check I was still there. Getting her to school was a real problem. The teacher called it separation anxiety.’ Deborah chewed her lip thoughtfully. ‘I suppose she’d suffered too much loss in her young life. She knew that people sometimes don’t come back.’
She gazed down the years, eyes unfocused. ‘Perry and I were married a month later at the local registry office. Lucy was our bridesmaid, and she was in heaven. I squeezed myself into a size fourteen dress and all day long I grinned like a Cheshire cat. Pity the bride who smiles all day! Mum had a lovely time. Dad, bless him, looked utterly confused by the whole event. You can tell from the wedding photos. They went on a cruise later in the year, because it had been such a budget wedding.’
‘They got a bargain.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t.’
She gave a little shrug. ‘Matt arrived when I was still just a child myself, really. Wow. Hell of a thing, your own baby. Quite a life-changer.’
‘I expect the novelty wears off,’ I said seriously. ‘After a month or so.’
She looked shocked for a second and then laughed. ‘You’re absolutely hopeless, you know that? No, life is never the same again, Jake. Never.’ The laugh weakened.
‘Did you enjoy having a baby so young?’ I was ghoulishly curious. I couldn’t imagine a damnation more hellish than being entirely responsible for another human being.
‘Would you?’ She met my eyes, and then her gaze slid away to the sea. ‘You have to efface yourself completely and become a non-person. It’s too hot on this rock,’ she interrupted herself, and slipped down to join me in my patch of shade. I made room for her. It wasn’t flirtatious, the way she parked herself beside me. It was companionable.
She picked up a handful of fine sand, and let it drift between her fingers. ‘Enjoy isn’t strong enough . . . it’s a lot more fundamental and a lot less comfortable. You love them in a way you could never have imagined. Your happiness is bound up with theirs, forever. You feel constant anxiety for them long after they’ve stopped feeling any for you. Both Matt and Lucy.’
I was silent, guiltily wondering if that’s how Mum felt.
‘Anyway. The point is . . . Perry’s not what he seems, Jake.’
This was too much, dangling such a snippet in front of my nose.
I mean, I’m not made of stone. I grappled with my curiosity for a few seconds and then said, ‘He’s gay, isn’t he?’
‘Uh-uh.’ She shook her head, smiling.
‘Mainlines heroin? Wears a tutu? International terrorist?’
She drew her finger and thumb across her lips, zipping them up.
I tried again. ‘He doesn’t own a string vest?’
‘Look, it was naughty of me to mention it. I can’t tell you, all right? I’ve promised him, on my children’s life. And I’ve kept that promise all these years. So stop asking.’
‘Fair enough.’ I scratched my ear. ‘Mud wrestling?’
‘Shut up. Let’s just say that he had to leave the army.’
‘Okay.’ My imagination was working overtime. Maybe Perry was a spy?
She patted my shoulder. ‘You can take it from me that life with Perry wasn’t easy. But I’d made my bed, and the children needed me. I just got on with it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what my parents did, and yet they gave me a wonderful childhood. I suspect most marriages are like that, to a greater or lesser degree.’
‘Endurance courses.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But you’re here now,’ I reminded her. ‘You came back.’
‘I wasn’t going to end up buried next to Perry in Coptree churchyard. I decided that once the children were independent, once Matt turned seventeen, my sentence would be up.’ She dug out another handful of sand. ‘I knew I could manage that.’
The grains trickled out of the hourglass of her fist, falling in a thin stream. ‘I was a model prisoner. I wanted Lucy and Matt to have perfect childhoods. My birthday parties were legendary, my Christmas tree had real candles. But every lighting of them marked another wasted year. I had this imaginary world, Kulala. It was a sort of Eden to me. In my mind I’d walk along the paths, sink into the water. I became utterly obsessed by the idea of coming back. Obsessed.’ She shut her eyes for a second. ‘I had no other concept of my future. I tried to tell myself that Rod wouldn’t be here, he’d be married and pot-bellied and living in suburbia. But still I plotted and schemed and dreamed of coming back.’
She poured the sand over my feet. It felt like warm water. ‘After Matt went off to boarding school, I did a course. Journalism.’
‘Finally.’
‘Finally. Then I managed to land a slot on the local rag. I got on well with the editor . . . one job led to another.’ She dusted the sand off her hands. ‘Several years ago, I arranged to write a piece on the war crimes tribunal in Arusha. That’s only about a day’s drive from here. I flew into Mombasa and took a taxi straight to Kulala Beach. I remember being driven through the plantation, watching for my first sight of the horizon. And there was the Indian Ocean, right where I’d left it.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘And there was Rod. He strolled up as I climbed out of the taxi. “So, Susie. Your dad finally died, then?”
’ I laughed, feeling oddly miserable. ‘You had a lot of explaining to do.’
‘I did. We spent days and nights just talking. Rod understood. After thirteen years, we picked up where we’d left off.’
‘Did you get to the tribunal?’
‘Mm. Wrote a couple of pieces. I only stayed three weeks that first time. Just a bit of home release. Matt still needed me. But I came quite often after that.’
‘Arusha?’
‘No. The world has a short attention span; it tired of the agonies of Hutus and Tutsis. The circus had long moved on. Somalia, Darfu
r, Zimbabwe, the Congo. I didn’t try to cover those areas. I did quite a bit of work on nomadic life—which fascinates me—and the effects of long-term drought here in Kenya.’
An insect began to click and hum in the dry grass nearby. Clickety-clicket.
‘And all the time,’ she said, ‘Rod and I were counting down the years—then the months, then the days—until I could come home for good.’
‘Perry must have known what you were up to.’
‘Never said so. I always made sure he was looked after. To say that I lived for my weeks here would be a pathetic understatement. This is my home. This is my life. In Coptree I merely existed, just got through the day. Here, I live.’
‘But this isn’t the real world. You can’t stay here forever.’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘Why not? I don’t like the real world. It’s going up in flames. Literally.’
‘True.’
We had a minute’s silence, thinking of the world that was going up in flames. And then I remembered Matt, crying in his room.
‘Matt’s still pretty young.’
‘Come on.’ She scowled, flicking a giant ant off her knee. ‘Matt despises me.’
‘He’s just being cool.’
‘No, really. He’s barely addressed two sentences to me since his voice broke. All I get is grunts and that’s if I’m lucky. I’ve nothing to offer my son any more. Nothing. Ever since he stopped being a cuddly cherub and became a muscled killing machine.’
‘I think that’s normal for boys his age. He’ll grow out of it.’
‘So they say.’ She grimaced miserably. ‘You never, ever stop loving them but it hurts, Jake. He looks at me as though I’m a mouldy sandwich.
Walks away when I’m talking to him.’
‘Little sod. I’ll have a word with him.’
She stood up and waded into the criss-cross brilliance of the shallows. The light seemed to flicker right through her.
‘We had a party for his seventeenth, after his exams back in June. Lots of girls, all gorgeous and all swooning over Matt. He must have had this secret, the pregnant girl. He did seem on edge. And I had my secret. I’d already got my ticket.’
‘What did you do about money?’
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