by Judy Croome
Between his father working at the pharmacies he would inherit one day, and me busy with my charities and decorating my home, little Barry spent more and more time with his grandmother. Somehow, those wide grey eyes of his retained their innocence. I could no longer bring myself to hug him when he crawled out to greet me as I arrived to fetch him, his small face crinkled with determination as he struggled down the small steps that led off Grace’s porch. What was the use of teaching him love? Let him find out early, while he was young enough to grow defences, that love, no matter what the source, was a lie. But the child just smiled and smiled, offering kisses to friends and strangers alike.
‘He’s a little angel,’ Grace said and bent to whisper some words of praise in his ear as her hand hovered above his head. Polishing his halo, I jeered to myself, for Grace had always been one to see halos and angels, even the Spirit King, in her dreams.
I sighed. She hadn’t had those delusions for a while. ‘Have you confused your digitalis dose again, Grace?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no, dear,’ she smiled at someone behind her. ‘These days Enoch worries about that.’
I had not seen him come out of the cottage to stand behind Grace. But since that horrible episode on the balcony at the Hunt Ball, I did my best not to notice him.
‘One task I can do for you, Mrs T.’ He speaks with nuances as rich as his damned eyes. Those damned eyes, which could make Little Flower weep if I looked too closely at them. He added, ‘While we’re together.’
‘Is it already time for you to go?’ she asked, a little wistful.
‘Soon,’ he said and touched her cheek so gently her eyes drifted closed with the pleasure of it. ‘I must go soon.’
Ingrained politeness, and the control I had over Little Flower, helped me to ignore his words and what they meant. ‘I must take little Barry home to the babysitter,’ I said harshly.
‘Don’t go,’ Grace pleaded. ‘You hardly visit any more.’ I never visited much before the stranger came, so I wasn’t sure why she complained. ‘Stay, so we can talk a while.’
Talk? I must sit and listen to her rambles about angels when I didn’t even believe in a Spirit King? Talk? When he sits there, next to her, with his black hair and black heart and beautiful eyes that could steal my soul if he wanted it? But he didn’t want it, did he? He wanted Grace.
‘I must visit the clinic.’ I picked up my son in one arm and, with the other, gathered his bundles of bags, crammed with clean nappies and milk bottles and all the other trivia a baby needs.
‘You’re going to visit your uncle?’
I nod. Balanced so I didn’t drop my load, I place the obligatory kiss on her cheek.
‘What a good daughter you are,’ she said. I scowled at her, startled into momentary stillness and she turned to the man at her side. ‘Don’t I have a good daughter, Enoch?’
‘You do, Mrs T,’ he agreed, but he spoke to me. Those eyes looked at me and through me and in me and, in a murmur as sweet as the wind that whispered over a wide deep ocean, he added, ‘She’s a very good daughter. A loving daughter, and loyal.’
I couldn’t bear it. I simply could not bear his praise, for in it I heard a love so deep it almost made me believe. Believe that love is possible, even for one such as I, and for one such as Little Flower. Certainly, his words touched Little Flower. She shifted and groaned within me and, with a deep-seated instinct I denied her, denied him. My child yelped in surprise as my arm tightened about his warm body and my denial of Enoch’s seductive praise seeped out as a strangled gargle.
‘Bless you, dear,’ Grace said. ‘I hope you’re not catching the influenza.’ She brushed my forehead, testing it for the clamminess of illness as if I were no older than the child I held in my arms, and as if I were as dearly beloved.
I had to flee. I had to get away.
‘I’m going to be late,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’ I almost ran to reach the new car. Barry bought it with the profits from the new pharmacies. A Silver Wraith, as it glided along the road, it glinted like the ocean on an overcast day or like the eyes of a stranger when he burrowed into your core.
We had hired a new man to replace old Elijah. As I hurried along the path, away from Grace and her beloved, the chauffeur held the door open and tipped his cap as he reached for the baby bags. I gave them to him and scrambled inelegantly into the car. I held little Barry tightly and did not look back. I buried my face in his baby soft hair and he chortled with delight as he curiously touched the wetness on my cheeks with his chubby baby fingers.
An echo reverberated inside my head. A loving daughter…a loving daughter… and all I could think of was how much love hurt. It hurt so much my heart no longer knew how to love, or even whether it wanted to know what love was.
• • •
‘How did the visit to the clinic go?’ Grace asked next time I visited her.
She lay, propped up in bed, looking pale and tired with violet smudges dusted under her eyes. Leaning back into the softness of the pillows banked behind her head, she scrabbled on the bedside table, disturbing the items scattered across its surface—a few mints; a book; a pen; some blank paper; all that kept an invalid busy. Her movements, stiff with fatigue, knocked over a small bottle of pills and it clattered noisily to the floor as she clicked her tongue in annoyance.
I sighed. ‘What do you need?’
‘Some water.’
I rose from my chair to fill an empty glass with water from the jug, half pushed behind the bedside lamp. ‘Here,’ I said and held the glass to her dry and slightly cracked lips. ‘You’re dehydrating. You need to drink more.’ I lifted her hand from where it lay on the coverlet, limp and exhausted, and pressed the glass into it.
‘Dear Zahra,’ she said as she gulped some liquid down, before sinking into a quiet rest with the glass loosely clasped on her chest. She breathed shallowly for a while, before rousing. ‘How did the visit to the clinic go?’ she persisted.
‘Satisfactory,’ I replied.
‘Is your father in good health?’ she asked.
‘My uncle,’ I snapped. ‘I go to visit my uncle.’
She lifted her eyelids, thin and papery with age and illness, and gazed at me dreamily. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m confused these days. I meant your uncle. Is he well?’
The blood did not pause in its headlong tumble through my body. Did she suspect the truth? The small wise curve of her lips said she did and I wondered when I had revealed my secret to her.
‘My uncle,’ I placed a subtle stress on the word, ‘hasn’t spoken a word in over twenty years, Grace.’ I shrugged. ‘He’s as well as expected.’
‘He must be so sad,’ she said and her eyes drifted closed. ‘Sad.’
As fast as the fear that she knew more than I had ever told her drove my blood delirious, the anger congealed it. It ran thick and heavy through my heart. What about my sadness? I wanted to rage. What about Little Flower?
The attics of the mind hold onto their dusty secrets and free them at inappropriate moments. I heard my Daddy, so full of sorrow, saying, as he sometimes had, ‘You’re so beautiful, Little Flower. So beautiful. A poor, weak man like me can’t resist you.’ He’d cry, as much as Little Flower did, all through his loving. Both of us sad for Little Flower’s hurt. And, like Grace, I became sad too, for what mere mortal could resist the lure of Little Flower’s ezomo?
‘Where’s Enoch?’ I asked. He was one man who could, and had, resisted Little Flower.
‘He’s busy preparing for his journey home, dear,’ Grace answered.
Little Flower lurched upwards as she heard what Grace said. The stranger would leave soon. Enoch, the beautiful stranger was leaving. In that lonely epiphany I finally admitted that, no matter how much I ignored him, no matter how much I denied his existence, Little Flower longed to have the stranger love her.
As did I.
‘When?’ I blurted. ‘When does he leave?’
‘Soon,’ she sighed. There was no hint on her face of t
he pain she faced at the incipient loss of her beloved, only deep and abiding love. ‘It’ll begin soon.’ Her smile swelled into one of serene innocence. It reminded me of the smile on my Daddy’s face as he lay in his bed at the clinic, with a scar on his temple the reminder of what he once was: lover to Little Flower, demiurge of Zahra and father to both.
‘So Enoch will be gone soon. Good,’ I said. I gritted my teeth to muzzle Little Flower’s lament as she saw the end to her hopes for love. The veils around her began to disintegrate. She crept out and the skeletal fingers of her ezomo clutched my fragmenting control. It pulled and dragged, ripping my veneer of humanity enough for Little Flower to bleed into the room. Her presence hovered over us and startled Grace so that she frowned with urgent, worried eyes.
‘What is it, Zahra dear?’ she asked. ‘Oh, what is it that makes you look so—’
I interrupted her. ‘He must leave. Good riddance! He’s a liar. A philandering liar. He must go and never come back.’ The sobs were loud in the room, quiet with the scent of approaching death.
‘Zahra! Not Enoch!’ Grace said. ‘Oh, no, dear, never Enoch. You don’t understand!’
My chair crashed backwards as I jumped to my feet. ‘You don’t understand!’ I strode forward so I could lean over her. ‘He promised me. He promised me love. But he hurt me, he hurt me.’ I was not sure if I spoke of my Daddy or of Enoch, the tall stranger whose eyes promised hope and delivered despair. I shouted, ‘Love is a filthy lie!’
The tears ran down Grace’s cheeks. She struggled to sit half-upright and reached out a trembling hand. ‘Oh Little Flower, dear child, you don’t understand!’ she cried. ‘Before he can love you, you must find love in yourself!’
‘I understand this,’ I said and gripped her hand. ‘You have left nothing.’ I shook her until she coughed a bit. ‘You took all their love,’ I cried and thought of the people who clustered around her, calling her Mrs T in such a way that the unloved, like Zahra, and like me, came to know what they had lost. I jostled her again, harder. ‘You had all of them to love you! Why couldn’t you let him love me? Why did he have to love you and not me?’
‘Zahra,’ she panted. ‘Dear Little Flower! He loves you too. He does. He does. You are his beloved!’
‘No!’ I screamed and rattled her like a rag doll, not even questioning her use of my Daddy’s special name. She was so frail she was like air between my hands. ‘You lie. He turned away from me. He…turned…away…from me.’ After each word, I shook her shoulders and sobbed, until I was crying so hard I hardly heard her reply.
‘Because you weren’t ready! You weren’t ready for him yet.’ Her choking gulps penetrated my rage and I reached deep to find some of Zahra’s cool calm steel. I loosened my hands and dropped her back on her cushions. As I stepped away, my foot bumped the small vial of pills that had rolled off her table.
Her hands fluttered to her chest, to her blue-tinged lips and back to her chest as a grimace of pain wrenched her face. ‘My pills,’ she wheezed. ‘My heart pills.’
I stared down at the floor. There was a bottle marked Lanoxin lying next to my shoe. I looked at it a long while and remembered how hard Zahra had tried. How many years she had struggled to be loved. And how, always, this woman, this Grace, had stood before me and drawn away the light that could have saved Little Flower from her own ezomo. Without that light I was doomed already and, if she was gone, if I did not bend and pluck up the tablets, there would be no one standing between Zahra and love.
I closed my eyes and the multitude of my senses swept over me. There, in the distance, I saw the memory of Grace choking and coughing. Faintly, I smelt the hot sirocco wind as it blew grit along a road where a young rebel, greedy for all that was not his, held my pearls aloft. Great, roaring sobs, cleaving through the ocean of my heart, drowned all the memories, all of them. Only Little Flower moaned a requiem for an old dying woman, who had touched her cheek and offered her a love she could not recognise and had not known she wanted.
I dropped to my knees. My fingers scrabbled for the pills. ‘Come on, come on!’ I heard Little Flower urge me, but my hand shook so much and I cried so much, I dropped the bottle. Eventually I grasped it firmly enough to tap a pill into my hand. I crawled to the side of the bed, opened Grace’s mouth and put the pill in. I held the glass to her lips, water slopping over the sides as my hand shook. ‘Drink, Grace, please, please drink,’ I begged. ‘The pills will help.’
But the water dribbled out of the slack corners of her mouth.
I was too late.
Too late to save Grace.
And far too late to ever save myself.
Chapter 16
Lulu
“Are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?”
‘Enoch’s new to the Court. An Outlander,’ Jamila tells me. ‘He arrived a few weeks before you did. I didn’t think he belonged here, so I almost sent him away, but he said he’d been here before and knew Prior Ajani.’ She pulled a face. ‘Those leather clothes he wears are awful. And that long hair! He’ll never fit in here. Did you see he wears a nova as an earring?’
I suspect that Jamila has reservations about Enoch, as do I. I keep quiet, though; unsure whether my own odd notions about him make me hear wariness in Jamila’s tone.
‘How long will he work here?’ I ask.
She shrugs, and frowns down at the papers she shuffles. ‘As he’s a friend of our holy man, I suppose he’ll stay longer than I’d like.’ She holds up two pieces of paper. One, a soft pink. The other, an elegant cream and gold. ‘What do you think of these?’ she asks.
I press the save button to store the letter I’m typing. The wheels of my chair squeak as I roll it back, slamming the open drawer on my desk shut as I rise and walk to where she sits. I take the cream sheet and read:
Mrs Zahra Templeton
requests the pleasure of your company
at the marriage of her grandchild
Mr Dawud Bakari Templeton
to
Miss Jamila Anne Johnson.
‘Oh!’ Although not as easily as Jamila did, I dismiss thoughts of Enoch and the odd effect he has on me. ‘You’ve got the samples of your wedding invitations.’
‘I collected them from the printers on my way home from work yesterday.’ She doesn’t look at me but watches her finger, neatly manicured and painted nude beige, push the two invitations around the top of her desk. ‘Dawud likes the pink one, but I hate pink. Which do you prefer?’
I take my time. I pick them up and rub the different textures. The embossed gold words blur, but I keep up the pretence of examining these paltry pieces of paper, which, to Jamila, are clearly important.
Does Jamila grasp what her question means? Such a simple question, such a normal one for a friendship. But, although I fail to notice it in Jamila’s company, my skin has condemned me to a less than normal life. To share this moment, to have my opinion asked as if my answer is important…I gasp in a lungful of air to thaw my thoughts.
‘What’s wrong?’ Jamila asks. ‘Don’t you like them?’
I replace the invitations on her desk. ‘The cream one,’ I say. I can tell from the way she strokes it, she prefers it. ‘I like the cream one.’
‘Oh, do you? I like it because it’s so elegant and refined.’ Her reply is pensive and I have an urge to protect her, but from what dangers I cannot begin to guess.
‘It suits you.’
My words please her, although she doesn’t answer. She leans back in her chair and places her palms on top of the invitations, scattered on the desk. The cuffs of her soft lamb’s wool jersey—a pale green, like a forest blessed with sunshine after the rain—pull back to reveal slender wrists. There is a slim gold watch decorating one arm and it matches the triple golden chain she always wears around her neck. She crushes the pink invitation and throws it in the bin.
‘Dawud chose this,’ she says. ‘I hate pink. Only country girls wear pink.’
I bark
a laugh at her feigned petulance. Jamila, in her own quiet way, has a grace that I lack.
‘That sounds good, Lulu,’ Prior Ajani says from behind us. ‘To hear you laugh when—’
‘I have the proofs of my invitations, Prior Ajani,’ Jamila interrupts. She taps the cream and gold paper, drawing his attention. ‘I like this one best.’
As the old holy man strolls over to her desk, I move aside. ‘Do you want coffee, Prior Ajani?’ I ask. It’ll give Jamila more time to share her pleasure with him.
‘With extra sugar today, Lulu,’ he says.
I walk to the counter, surprised to find there’s no coffee bubbling away. Jamila, involved in her plans, must have forgotten. I prepare the coffee and, while the percolator hisses and spits, I watch her.
Her golden head bends close to the tufted baldness of Prior Ajani; with subtle grace, she digs out the discarded pink invite. The old man’s concentration, where he must have no real interest, doesn’t waver. I see it as a tribute to the way the people of St Jerome love sweet Jamila. Her joy is ours, for her charitable heart brings beauty to the court; her devotion and her friendship are too generous for her own good.
I take Prior Ajani his mug of coffee, and his pleasant, round face glows. ‘We’ve waited long enough for this day, haven’t we, Jamila?’
‘Nine years,’ Jamila sighs. I hear an echo of my own insecurity in her words. Did she think Dawud would never marry her? ‘Now it’s so close I can hardly believe it.’
‘Well, my dear,’ he says and pats her shoulder as he straightens, ‘we’ll celebrate with you.’
‘Of course you will,’ she says. ‘All of you! You’re the best of my friends!’ She includes me in the sweep of her approving gaze. My mouth goes dry as she adds, ‘I want it to be a perfect day. Of course, you’ll both celebrate with me!’