by Roger Curtis
Her eyes opened to see a tiny cone of ice and snow, far distant and isolated in a great plain beyond the jagged escarpments of the middle ground. Everything was touched by the glow of evening. It was a calendar view, with all the ingredients in place, shining and perfect.
Andrew cast her an anxious glance, knowing that the association with Jefferies would re-enter her mind. ‘We’re both mountaineers, you see.’
She took his arm. ‘It’s all right. Really.’
There was a small horizontal rock slab, natural but so appropriately placed that there was no option but to sit there. He had brought a rug and spread it out for her.
‘You recognise it?’
‘Ararat?’
‘I’m told so. Seventy miles, yet you can almost touch it. Some would say it’s the centre of the world.’
‘You believe the legend?’
‘Of the ark? I believe it has substance, but not here. Even legends must conform to physical laws. But yes, I believe in a Noah and his ark.’
‘Tell me what you believe.’
‘Noah was a small-time farmer on the outskirts of Nineveh – today’s Mosul. There’s an account of the flood preserved on clay tablets found there. He had a few livestock – cattle, pigs, chickens and the like – more members of the family than commodities. When the waters began to rise he had the gumption to pack them into a converted boat he happened to keep on the river. The rise was of only a few feet and didn’t last, but it spelt death to his neighbours’ animals. So he became a local celebrity. It had all the elements for a legend.’
‘But why Ararat?’
‘In the early Chaldean form the legend placed the grounding of the ark on mountains much closer to home. Mountains were needed, you see, to give the story dramatic appeal. Those early chroniclers wouldn’t have known that the peaks to the north were actually higher. When that was realised, Ararat had to be the prime candidate.’
‘So what does the story tell us?’
‘More than you might think. The modern version has lost its meaning in becoming fantastic. The message, Sarah, is that you take judicious advantage of what’s available, so that you can restore the good things to how they were.’
‘That’s the message for me, you think?’
‘It might be.’
‘About whether I should go back?’
‘Ah, now you’re putting me in a position of great responsibility. If you stay as you are – and there’s something inside you that wants to do that – someone once called it the Streisand nose syndrome…’
‘She’s beautiful!’ Sarah protested, ‘I’m not having that!’
‘And so, scar and all, are you.’
She felt the warmth of his body through the course cotton of her jacket and shivered. Had the wind risen and become more chill, or was she feeling once again the glimmer of a dimly remembered teenage passion?’
‘If you stay as you are,’ he said, picking up the thread again, ‘you will be a great gain for humankind. You have compassion without sentimentality – leaving Irina aside for the moment.’
‘I’m no Livingstone or Schweitzer.’
‘I believe you could be.’
‘You’re sweet to me, but what you can’t know is that I’m really a simple girl, rather hurt in ways I don’t yet fully understand, quite kind, I suppose, and incredibly lazy. What can you make of that?’
‘If you go back you’ll need a strong will to resist the temptations of the good life. What makes it difficult for me is that I believe you can. So you could still become a Mother Theresa, even with a perfect face.’
‘Streisand? Theresa?’
‘Different, worthwhile, something substantial that won’t blow away in the wind.’
‘So you’re telling me to go.’
‘Yes, reluctantly. Very reluctantly.’
‘Am I allowed five more minutes here?’
‘Yes.’
There was no sun now, and no distant peak beyond their capsule of suffused twilight. Tiny snatches of human voice wafted up from the camp far away: disembodied spirits, restless, dissipated. What they signified was no longer an influence.
‘This little seat we’re on,’ Andrew said. ‘I think God made it with a purpose.’
‘Can you forget what you told me just now? About being…’
‘I’m remembering what you said about nothing being absolute, nothing so exclusive that you can’t make a dive for the apple when it falls from the tree.’
How those last few exquisite moments contrasted with the final cruel recollection: of the white rope against the immutable black rock, lowering her back into the cauldron of everyday life, to sink or swim as best she might.
After her last days at the camp Sarah had decided to spend her final weekend in Istanbul. ‘You’ll need to acclimatise yourself to western culture, sort of,’ Allison had told her in her worldly-wise way. In the event the pull of going home was too great. She changed her Sunday ticket for a Friday flight, then telephoned Alice to meet her at Heathrow. She thought the reception was cool. Then she remembered that Alice was always a bit like that where she was concerned.
She went to the kiosk to collect the photographs taken during that last hour of hectic activity at the camp when everything had to be recorded. Looking at them now, spread out on the seats in the departure lounge, great bubbles of sadness welled up within her. Smiles, tears, gifts squeezed from resources of almost nothing, her gratitude greater than they could have known. And Andrew, waiting by his jeep, the saddest thing of all.
Boarding the plane would be the cut-off. At that point the recent past would become encapsulated and stored, to be savoured when she felt herself worthy enough to look back. That, she thought, might be a long way off.
Already, as she climbed the steps, she was fingering the envelope that Nuru had given her with his final handshake. ‘It’s from Jazreel. I promised to give it to you only when you’d decided unequivocally to go. Very odd. You know, we met in Ankara just so she could give it to me. Most mysterious.’
The flight attendant at the cabin door looked at her for a moment longer than she should have done. There must have been things about Sarah’s expression that she couldn’t quite reconcile.
SUBURBIA
December 1987 – July 1988
20
The decision to return to Shirley Hills had been easier than its acceptance when the time finally came. Even as she wheeled her trolley out of baggage reclaim it was in her mind to avoid Alice and go somewhere where she could hide up for a while, to think things out and prepare herself for Brian’s knife. In the event two things prevented it.
In the first place it was Christmas; if, that is, Christmas can be brought forward three weeks to include the manic urge to buy that seemed to prevail – at least at Heathrow – at the time of her arrival. Howard Blake’s Snowman extended a metaphorical hand as she walked out of customs. Once through the gate the cacophony was almost unbearable. But for a delicious moment it brought back the wonder of being a child.
In the second place Mark was waiting there with Alice. His features were drawn, as if all confidence had been sucked out, leaving him dry and wrinkled, like an ageing balloon. The smile, touched now by self-consciousness and apprehension, was as welcoming as it was honest. She could not recall a time when he had been so pleased – really, truly pleased – to see her. Perhaps there had been only one skin after all.
Alice, by contrast, seemed to have flourished. Her cheeks glowed within the frame of a fur-lined bonnet, giving her the warm cosiness of a children’s book character. It was a wonder that the extravagant sardonyx cameo at her neck had not tempted some passer-by to pluck it off and run. Perhaps it was Alice who had sucked Mark dry.
They drove to Shirley Hills in Alice’s car, which was odd as Mark usually got into a car only if he w
as king. She screeched to a halt, sending gravel spattering against the front steps. Sarah was surprised that Mark had not become angry. But, looking at him, he had not even noticed.
‘Wakey, wakey, we’re here,’ Alice shouted over her shoulder. With a sudden realisation of lost manners Mark jumped out to open Sarah’s door at the front.
‘You see, the man still cares,’ Alice said. Then she relented. ‘Sorry, Mark, that was a bit forward of me.’
Mark had not taken offence. ‘No, not at all. It was astute of you to remind me.’
They sat drinking coffee at a kitchen table longing, in its bareness, to share some of the plates piled up at the sink. ‘A woman comes in,’ Mark explained, ‘but not until Monday.’
Sarah was itching to tell of her adventures and had her photographs ready in her bag. But no-one asked. Alice boasted of the dinner she had to attend that evening at the Surgeons’ Hall. ‘They were lucky to get Brian to speak before he leaves for the States,’ she said, adding brightly, ‘A bit like you, Sarah.’ Mark sat watching them, quietly waiting for Alice to go.
‘That woman is trying to score over you, Sarah. I think she’s trying to make the most of it before Brian puts you right.’ Then the corners of his mouth twitched and he chuckled to himself. ‘I had to work on Brian for weeks to get him to agree to it. You know what he said to me? I will only do it if I think I can get it absolutely right; otherwise someone else can. He’s an odd-ball, Sarah, but underneath a good friend I think.’
‘I can’t believe I’ve only five more days of this,’ Sarah said, touching her face.
The first thing she looked for upstairs was her bear, Alfonso. He sat presiding over an ice-flat counterpane, defiantly daring the most nymphoid of potential concubines to disturb its pristine surface. His raised arm pointed to the pots on the dressing table. There, he said, just as they always were. ‘You’re a good, loyal bear,’ she told him, whisking him into the air and hugging him tightly.
Her gyrations around the room stopped abruptly as she passed the window on her third rotation. Before, the leaves of the chestnuts in the Dell had been russet, defiant in the wind and impenetrable. Now, wet tarmac shone through the dark lattice of boughs and twigs. What she saw froze her heart: a for-sale notice posted at the perimeter hedge. She shouted to Mark down the stairs. He came sheepishly towards her, knowing what was coming.
‘Tell me it’s just land you’re selling.’
‘I’m afraid it’s the house. I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’
‘I couldn’t tell you in the letter. Or on the way here with Alice around, although – God knows – she’s aware of it. The fact is I lost the battle at Massingham and haven’t managed to find anything since.’
‘But you’re a businessman, for heaven’s sake. You weren’t tied to their apron strings.’
‘I didn’t think so – then. Please let me tell you in my own time. You wouldn’t believe how far their tentacles spread, and how tight the grip.’
‘I think I might.’
‘Sarah.’
‘Yes?’
‘Lie down with me. To talk.’
There was a long silence as they lay side by side, uncertain what to do. Eventually he put his arm beneath her neck and she rolled towards him. Then she said, ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? That you haven’t told me yet.’
‘I think I’m being poisoned.’
‘Mark, that’s ridiculous!’ She thought for a moment. ‘What does Brian say?’
‘With your problem, I haven’t bothered him.’
‘He must have noticed.’
‘He’s… well… very selective in what he sees.’
‘I thought he saw everything.’
‘Anyway, there are headaches and nausea, and cramps in the morning and evening. I’m steadily losing weight.’
‘Cancer?’
‘That’s what I thought. Then I had it checked out. It isn’t. Nor AIDS. Nor anything else in the text-book, apparently. They’re baffled, Sarah, and frankly so am I. And frightened.’ She watched his eyes playing on the ceiling like twin searchlights. ‘Surely, if they’d wanted revenge – and I can’t think why they would – they’d have had their pound of flesh by now.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘It’s the sort of subtlety I used to practice, remember, in a more benign way.’
‘That could be why you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion now.’
‘Not this time.’
Can Christmas really have meaning – even as an escape from the mockery of living – when your face hurts like hell beneath the grip of bandages?
It was a struggle to think so, this Christmas eve. Sarah had wanted to put sprigs of holly above each of the pictures in the drawing room, as her parents had done when they – the two sisters – were young. But the etiquette of the Dell forced them instead into crystal vases where they simply looked spiky and menacing. Mark had lit a fire and was prodding at blackening chestnuts on the grate against regular belches of smoke from the unswept, barely breathing chimney. It could have been the set of a Hammer film, with two ghoulish figures facing each other across a cheerless hearth.
It was an apt setting in which to throw the impressions of the event about in her mind. Those words of Brian’s: ‘It’s the beginning of a new life, Sarah, better even than before.’ Were they said before or after the surgery? The hand that held hers as the anaesthetic coursing through her veins expunged all fear: was that the same hand that had stroked her forehead – and more than once – before her eyes opened? She did not know. Most vivid of all was the feeling of having at last escaped, but from what exactly? It had made her cry dry tears.
‘Sarah, you’re dreaming again.’
‘Sorry. Do you want another tape on?’
‘No.’
With difficulty Mark got down on his knees to harvest the chestnuts. The white oval at his crown was no natural balding. Suddenly he began to laugh, compulsively, in quick snatches, as if he were trying to imitate a donkey. ‘From now on you go up and I go down, isn’t that how it is?’
‘They’ll sort you out next week. They wanted to admit you before Christmas, remember? Next week do as they say.’
‘And you? When the bandages come off? I bloody well wish Brian was here.’
‘He said he’d fly back if there were problems. He meant it. He’s got complete faith in Dr Ransome, who reports daily.’
‘I wanted to be first to see it.’
‘And you shall!’
There was no question of dinner. But after its normal time Alice arrived with presents, though they had nothing to exchange. There was also an envelope with a Christmas card inside and another which Sarah immediately recognised. ‘It was on the floor of the car,’ Alice explained, ‘after I collected you from the airport. Sorry I forgot to give it to you.’ It was Jazreel’s letter, which Sarah thought she had lost on the aircraft. She put it on her desk without opening it.
‘Don’t you want to see who it’s from?’
‘I know what’s in it,’ Sarah lied. ‘I’ll open it later.’ She hoped she had concealed her agitation and spent the rest of the evening willing Alice to leave. If there was success in that, it took a long time to achieve.
‘Any message for Brian?’ Alice asked at the door.
‘Tell him there will be when I know the result. Oh, and happy Christmas.’
There were sounds of footsteps from the corridor upstairs.
‘What’s that?’ Alice was alarmed.
‘My mother. Didn’t I tell you? She’s staying with us for Christmas. She’s not very sociable these days and a bit shy with visitors.’
‘I see.’
That night Sarah slid in beside her husband and pulled the sheets over her face. He made no move, but she knew he was awake. When at last his breathing was regular Sarah crept do
wnstairs to read Jazreel’s letter.
As Mark faced her across the breakfast table he could not have failed to notice the anger in her eyes that was still there.
When the bandages came off, Sarah was neither pleased nor disappointed. There was something of a ripe Victoria plum about the blotched purple of the bruising that remained. Had she not known better, she would have seen it as a change for the worse. It was, in fact, precisely what Brian had told her to expect.
The effect was that the problem of her face now gave way to a more pressing matter: the secret that had been a constant companion since before her return and which she had dared not share.
A blast of cold air caught her vulnerable cheek as she stepped out of St John’s Wood tube station, forcing her back inside to adjust her scarf and straighten her dark glasses. The local map on the wall told her that Bidwell Street was only two blocks away.
A luxury private clinic with fine views over the city, the brochure had said. Who in their right mind, having their womb scraped and the contents sucked out, would care about the view. More likely, for some, the drop to the ground would be the greater attraction. You’ll like it there, the counsellor had told her, and Mr Prandesh gets very good results. She wondered if a not-so-good result meant a continuing pregnancy.
The fact of the pregnancy had been less of a problem than the identity of the foetus. Did it have to be Sammy’s? Wasn’t there just a possibility that Mark had slipped quietly into her bed before the shutters against love and respect had finally come down? She couldn’t remember. Should she take more time, perhaps, to consider? After all, if she had the mind for it the timings could probably be checked more precisely. And, for her of all people, weren’t children’s lives now precious?
She knew already in her heart that Mark, in his demise, would have no space for an unborn child; so the question was academic. Another bitter gust caught her cheek where the scarf had slipped, like a spiteful friend pinching her when she told a lie. Yet it was no lie, this thing that held Mark in its grasp and would not – she was sure of that now – ever let him go. It was cowardice, of a kind, that stopped her questioning deeply enough. Perhaps, in a vague way, she already knew the ‘how’; what she could not fathom was the ‘why’. She set off wearily along the pavement.