by Louise Dean
The day before they were to leave, they arranged buses to take all the children to the beach for the day. The kids lived only twenty miles from the sea and had never seen it. The excitement was wild, all the kids bouncing at the windows of the buses, shouting and singing. Arriving, they went en masse into the water, charging and cheering, then retreating in shock, then advancing again, splashing and crying out.
‘Like pepper the water, like pepper!’
‘Like pepper in the eyes! Like pepper!’
This was a change from the maudlin crooning, the torn petticoat-holding, the swaying before benefactors, and Jeff and Rachel were pleased to see the children being kids and not in their usual role of ‘war orphans’. One by one they came out of the surf, to wipe their eyes on T-shirts, and then they raced right back in again.
Jeff had brought out a baseball bat and he organized the kids into a game while Rachel had her hair plaited by some of the older girls and a little one on each knee. She asked them questions about their lives. She was careful; the kids had seen some terrible things. When they first met, she had asked the pastor for the story of each child and he summarized each case study with casual brevity; mother raped, father murdered, mother lunatic, father amputee, mother missing, father missing.
Before they left the beach, they opened great plastic bags of gifts for the kids, a T-shirt each, a bag of sweets, some new flipflops and, because the violence of the pandemonium threatened to harm the smaller kids, Rachel commanded them to stand in lines by size and let the little ones choose first.
Salamatu didn’t get what she wanted, she had whispered her desire to Rachel on the beach, and so Rachel persuaded Jakka to relinquish a doll in favour of a pair of shorts. The twelve-yearold girl went off in a sulk, and cast Rachel looks all afternoon, making sure she saw her hurt. But Rachel kept her eyes fixed on little Salamatu, who sat and hugged her dolly by the side of the snack hut.
‘It’s like me and my mummy,’ she said.
‘Oh, sweetheart, do you miss your mummy?’
Sister Rose limped up in her long skirts, telling the girl to join the group for the lunch.
On their last night they took the staff for fried chicken and there was some dispute about who would get the chicken bones that were left over, Sister Rose was scolded by the pastor for pulling the bag from the hands of the junior pastor’s wife, but the evening ended in reconciliation via prayer with the pastor offering thanks to Jesus for Auntie Rachel and Uncle Jeff.
‘All of our hope and faith now rest with you, Uncle Jeff,’ said Sister Rose throatily into his ear as she embraced him on their way out. ‘I have fifteen children living with me. Don’t forget me.’ She held his arms in her hands as she pushed him away to see him better, and with a beatific smile she enquired of him, ‘Who you think need them bones most? You can send me something, you can do it when you get back. Some dollars.’
* * *
They had a last beer in the bar. Jeff said he felt bad.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No,’ he laughed derisively. ‘No.’
‘Then bad about what?’
‘The whole thing, Rachel,’ he said.
He looked sick. They sat there with a beer each, scratching their arms and legs. She gave him his anti-malarial pill. He pushed it back at her.
‘Fuck it, it makes me want to retch,’ he said to her. He finished his beer. ‘I feel bad,’ he said again. ‘I don’t know that I’m up to this. I can’t work out what’s good and bad like you can. I can’t figure it out. There’s no, like, tool or anything for that. I’m out of my depth.’
‘Don’t say that. It will be fine.’ She tried to touch him.
He moved his arm away. ‘Like we’re such paragons, Rachel! Well, maybe you think you are, but I don’t think I am.’
‘Come on, J. They need us.’
‘Yeah, but that’s not enough.’
‘Of course it is! That’s everything! I don’t understand. Are you going to let me do this on my own? Because I will.’
‘I never asked anyone to count on me for anything! I never did! Not in all my life. I never asked for all of this!’
‘You’ve had too much to drink.’
‘Hey, I can’t even count on me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know who I am, Rachel, and what I am. I can’t pretend to be some sort of saint. I’m selfish. I want to be happy. I’m sorry these people live like this but I’m not sorry enough to swap places. I can’t follow you around Africa like . . . like some sort of . . . like . . . like I mean it.’
They looked at each other. He raised his beer bottle.
‘I feel better for that.’
Chapter 19
Maud asked to stay the night with Simone; they liked to watch television until midnight, eating toffee chews with Maud’s head in the crook of Simone’s button-up housecoat, the two of them lying side by side on the sofa. It was their secret that they stayed up so late. Guy went to bed before eight most evenings.
‘We won’t tell,’ the old girl said to her.
‘On ne dit surtout rien,’ Maud would confirm. And Simone’s eyes would cloud as they did so often when she held the little girl who was all hers, whom she had taught to speak French, who spoke her own words back to her, who listened to her so intently.
Ma petite est comme l’eau,
Elle est comme l’eau vive . . .
Maud would sit in the bath, humming this, Maud’s tune, passing the flannel over her legs, wishing for a mermaid’s tail.
* * *
Rachel had gone to London to meet with lawyers who were going to act pro bono to establish a charitable organization to raise money for the orphans’ new home.
Jeff stood outside the great villa that evening with a glass in his hand. At night the yellow mustard green of pines seemed to ripen, and nature seemed to approach, a version of who goes there, don’t look or else. Two or three birds sang their last good songs.
He felt the excitement of knowledge that wine brings diffuse through his throat and abdomen. He looked down to his neighbour’s house and he thought: You and me and the green on the tree, willing spring or anything, to happen and to happen to us.
Then he went down there with a bottle in his hand, feeling the plastic wrap around the cork willing to give.
He and Valérie drank the bottle. He told her that he’d been presented that morning with a letter, by his wife.
‘She prays morning and night, that’s the problem.’ (‘You’re driving me nuts,’ he’d said to her between gritted teeth, looking at her on her knees, at the foot of the bed, praying.) ‘Why does she have to do it here in front of me? Some things should be private.’
Like his own assignations in the shower every morning. But before he could get to the shower that morning she had that letter ready for him, and he took it into the kitchen and sat, reading it, picking the corners of his eyes, stale mouthed, wiping up the milk that Maud spilt from her bowl with his shirtsleeve, overly harsh with the kid when she upset her glass. He took her on his lap when she cried and kissed her head, and read the second side.
* * *
It might be because you don’t feel the same way about God that I feel so lonely with you. In any case, although I care for you, as a ‘neighbour’ as a brother, as a fellow, I feel that I need to follow Him and love Him with all my heart. I don’t want to have further relations with you until God’s love is in this marriage . . .
He’d walked into the bedroom and sat down while she teetered round, wet haired, clutching her little breasts.
‘You’ve lost your mind.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Maybe you need to see a doctor or a shrink. Get something.’
* * *
‘So she leaves me this damned letter on the bed, you know, because we can’t even speak to each other any more now we’ve got not just the one kid but fifty fucking three or whatever it is. She’s like some kind of religious maniac. Basically she’s saying the relationship
is over. Oh no, wait. We’re to be like Mr and Mrs Billy Graham or something. You know, it’s the piety I can’t stand. Talk about holier than thou.’ He laughed through his nose. ‘I like sex, I can’t help it. Is that so wrong? Jesus Christ, I might as well be a eunuch.’
Valérie opened another bottle.
‘Thank you for listening to me, Valou,’ he said almost shyly. He was on his best behaviour; the decorous old-fashioned Yankee Doodle dandy.
They opened a third bottle and emptied a packet of cigarettes.
‘Just to be touched, kissed . . . I mean is that so wrong? Is it? Yeah, it’s great about the orphans. Great. But if it’s all good, why do I feel like shit? Why does having orphans mean my services are no longer required? Oh, man. I like sex. Shoot me!’
When she began with her own cautionary tale, he cut in and got back to his. But she didn’t mind. She knew she had only to listen to him to get what she wanted.
‘I like sex too,’ she said.
‘I mean, come on, we’re only human . . .’
‘I like sex. I like it even when it is wrong,’ she said.
‘It’s not even like we used to . . . What do you mean by wrong?’ His mouth stayed open.
She put out her cigarette.
‘Crimes passionnels,’ she said ever so slowly, enjoying the moment.
‘That’s not wrong though. Is it?’ he said, his brow knitting.
‘If it’s bad. If it’s really bad. You know.’
‘What do you mean by bad?’
‘That it is not right, that it is not right to do it.’
‘You mean like, well I don’t know, I mean like something people don’t normally do, what do you mean? Like something weird?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, come on! Don’t leave me hanging. What are you talking about? Anal?’
‘No.’ She laughed and threw the empty pack at him. ‘No, I don’t mean anal.’
‘What then?’
‘No, I mean need. Something, you know, really savage. And hungry.’
‘Oh, man. I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘I’m thirsty too, and I don’t know how it happened. I used to have a great life. She got pregnant and I did the right thing. I had a great job, I was riding high. I was somebody. I gave that up. She wanted me to give up the life I used to have. I did it. I did it for her and the kid . . .’
He was off again.
‘I’m sorry, but you will have to think long and hard,’ she interrupted him, ‘about what you will do now. Right now, I mean.’
‘No, no, no. I don’t want to think. I want to drink.’
She stopped him with her hand on his face, three fingertips on the cheekbone, she was looking at him with clear intent. ‘I’m afraid of falling in love with you,’ she said.
He took her fingertips from his cheek and uncurled them and kissed the centre of her palm, looking up at her and he said, ‘Fall in love with me, please. Please fall in love with me.’
‘Come to bed and I will.’
* * *
They kissed and held each other, moving their hands over each other’s skin. They averted their faces from each other to breathe; her lips moved against his razor-neat cheek, and she gave small ordinary gasps.
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
Then he put his hand over her mouth like a soldier raping a girl, and she looked at the half of him she had not seen before, the strained face, that looked at her with anger.
‘Don’t go home. Stay here with me,’ she said afterwards as he moved off her and she reached for the side lamp and switched it off.
She lay on her side with her buttocks in his groin. He put his arms around her and held her breasts. He kissed her hair. He whispered, ‘Voltaire said that it is in the face of the lover you see God.’
But it was completely dark in that shuttered room and he was asleep within seconds, while Valérie lay there, creating love.
Chapter 20
The next Sunday lunchtime was the last they would spend together, as couples.
Guy and Simone joined them all up at the Abrams villa. The meal was slow coming. They drank a couple of bottles of Champagne before it appeared. Bored, Guy took up the bowl of Camargue salt that was on the table, and threw it in his mouth, swallowing it down in one, then sat coughing and spitting, all done in. Simone assured them he’d done stupider things, he’d eaten live frogs for example. He retired a few minutes later, to the pool maintenance shed, to sleep it off.
Rachel had just come back from London. She was distracted, Richard thought. She forgot to turn the oven on, and the leg of lamb sat for an hour in the gloom.
On the terrace in the sunshine, Valérie manufactured a conversation concerning love and, on her insistence, each person was enjoined to put forward a definition. Jeff closed his eyes. She woke him by spilling her glass over him. He opened his eyes and dried his trouser leg the best he could with a napkin, making no comment.
Simone was chewing on her cigarette holder. ‘Love is sacrifice,’ she shrugged heavily, ‘for a woman. That’s what it is. Putting yourself second. You do it for the children and sometimes for the man. The cart cannot go faster than the horse.’ She shrugged again. ‘When I was running the market stall . . .’
‘What about you, Jeff?’ said Valérie, seeing his reptilian face settle again into the pretence of slumber.
‘Oh, I guess we all see things very much our own way, you know. I guess we think about ourselves first, don’t we? And what we want, and then we go and get it . . .’
‘I think that is pathetic.’
‘He’s being honest,’ Simone said, just as quickly, with a nervous smile, uncertain as to which way the wind was blowing and what, if anything, it carried for her and hers.
‘It is so égoïste!’
‘Yup, that’s me. Prime asshole.’ He closed his eyes again, but he was not smiling.
‘Well, love is the belief that there is someone better than you, worth putting ahead of you, like Simone said,’ said Rachel. ‘Of course it’s very close to idolatry, really. If you think about it. I am a jealous God . . .’
‘It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe,’ Jeff sang, pulling his baseball cap down.
‘Why are you asking anyway?’ said Richard. ‘Are you trying to teach something or trying to learn something?’
‘It’s for a book I’m writing.’
‘A book? You’re writing a book?’
‘I knew it!’ said Simone.
‘Oh really.’ Jeff opened his eyes. ‘How does it end?
‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet,’ she said, rising. ‘Badly, I suppose.’
After lunch the women went to do the washing-up, the men dallied with their wineglasses outside. Simone glanced through the windows at them from time to time, her experience had taught her that when two or more men gather in any place, they are avoiding something.
Simone was at the sink, like a school-bus driver, casting looks behind her to see who was on board, sleeves rolled up, and Valérie drying and Rachel putting the leftovers into the rubbish bin and piling plates.
When Jeff stole past with a bottle, Valérie let a plate drop on to the floor. He flinched but kept walking. Simone spun round with a spatula in a cloth like a robber with a gun, saying, ‘Nobody move.’ Then she bent to pick up the pieces of the plate with hasty assurances, concerned for their feet, saying all the while, ‘Stay still, you’re wearing sandals, stay where you are.’
‘Je rentre,’ said Valérie, stepping past her mother, leaving her tea-cloth on the counter. ‘I am going home.’
Simone carried on with a dustpan and brush, fussing and sweating and laughing and talking, talking, talking. It would be hard to sweep away, this one, and she knew it so she kept her head down, seeking specks of glass. ‘I’m thinking of the children,’ she said, ‘they come in and out with bare feet.’
Through the open door Rachel watched the dark-haired woman walking loftily past the two men on the terrace. She had taken the lo
ng way round. It would have been quicker to go through the front of the house.
Rachel poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen. She looked at Maud in profile, sitting on the kitchen counter, playing with an Alessi corkscrew, opening and closing the arms on it. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes still, she was utterly absorbed in this opening and closing until she tapped a glass by mistake, liked the sound and made deliberate music. She caught her mother’s eyes and smiled. Rachel’s eyes were full of tears.
Maud put down the corkscrew and opened her arms to her mother. ‘Don’t cry, Mummy, don’t cry. Have a glass of wine.’
Chapter 21
People lied. People stopped talking to each other. Rachel was disappointed by the ongoing disputes from the construction of the villa, some of which were now going to tribunal for work not done, work badly done, and there were other spurious rows, some based on tittle-tattle, which gave those paid in full up front, sometimes friends, the excuse not to complete the work.
She asked Jeff, on the flight back to Freetown, what was wrong with the world.
He suspected she thought she knew and that frightened him. Jeff disliked fundamentalism. He kept a lid on what was wrong, and focused on what was pleasant; like Valérie with her top down around her waist as they kissed in the lawnmower shed, the evening before he left.
‘Her big mouth, always hanging open, it annoys me when I see it. It seems to me so false, you know,’ Valérie said to him about Rachel and that had made him nearly as nervous as what Rachel was saying now.
He had a lot on his mind, and still she talked, and talked and talked. He turned away from her, drinking his beer from the can, and he put on his earphones, studying the tiny screen intently, regular in his sips.