The Memory of Love

by Forna, Aminatta

  He is happy. Except in those moments when he thinks of Kate and Lisa; a jolt from his conscience surges through his body hot like electricity. He looks in the mirror and sees the traces of grey which his hair has held for years, the two vertical lines between his eyebrows. He wonders how he can be doing what he is doing. At those times he hides himself from Mamakay, for fear of allowing her to see what he sees, that he is undeserving.

  At night he and Mamakay read together, out of necessity making their own simple entertainment. They talk and play cards. Once Mamakay brought out a Ludo board, at once a reminder of Kai. Adrian pictured Kai, his erratic beard, too youthful to grow into a full beard. Jealousy like a snakebite to Adrian’s heart. For some reason he found himself pretending he knew nothing of the rules of Ludo. He used it as an excuse not to play.

  Last evening she lay on her back listening while he read aloud from a book and rubbed scented oil into the skin of her stomach with slow circular movements. From outside came the sounds of the mosque, of the football match playing at the video centre. Like a child she can hear the same story time and time again, though unlike a child she might snatch the paperback from his hand and read a section for herself, improving upon his inflection. She has a gift for it. Like a child she knows sections of the narrative by heart. ‘ “They say when trouble comes close ranks,” ’ she says in an accent incorrectly, yet somehow appropriately, of the Deep South. She has read Wide Sargasso Sea four times, though never Jane Eyre. He makes a promise to himself that he will find her a copy, it will be a gift, though he has no idea where he might find a Victorian novel in this city. He stores them up, these future gifts, in his mind, moments to be spun out into the future. He leans across and places the palm of his hand flat on her stomach. He thinks he feels the child inside, though it is but the shadow of her heartbeat.

  Once she gave him a gift of her own. A miniature bottle of indigo pigment she’d found in a market a long time ago. The bottle had attracted her, tiny, sealed with lead, never opened. He wears it on a leather cord around his neck, tucked inside the breast pocket of his shirt. He tells himself that if he falls the glass will pierce his heart.

  Most often the fear comes at night. He leaves the bed and wanders through the empty house. The electricity supply is erratic and means he must light a candle or else rely upon the moon. In those dark moments he thinks of the scale of what has been sacrificed, of Kate and Lisa, of the worst that could yet happen, that happiness such as this cannot last. He moves through the rooms and returns to bed, counting steps, counting seconds. When he slips back into bed alongside her, the fear lies low, below the surface.

  One night he dreams he has lost her and wakes full of anguish. Her side of the bed is empty. When he finds her at the back of the house talking to a neighbour, absurdly anger comes as strongly as relief, that she should abandon him during his nightmare.

  He watches her to see if he can catch a glimpse of what she is feeling. He sees her pleasure at his arrival, at his embrace, his small gifts and compliments. He sees no fear at all. And he asks himself, can this be so? Perhaps she does not love him. For she has never said she does and still does not talk about the future.

  On Monday, three days from now, he has an appointment with Elias Cole. He has seen the old man twice since he arrived back in the country, though on neither occasion had much of consequence been said. Cole is dying. In the time Adrian had been away his condition had deteriorated again, the oxygen concentrator brought back to his room for the final road. There has been no reconciliation with Mamakay, for which Adrian considers himself responsible. It had been a disappointment when Cole declined to call for him. Adrian has become genuinely interested in the outcome, in getting to the point of Elias Cole.

  That night, for the first time in many weeks, Adrian takes out his drawing pad and pencil and begins to sketch. He draws the fruit bats in the tree in the yard of the new house. For half an hour he struggles with a soft pencil to capture a likeness: the intense darkness of their faces, the brilliance of their eyes and small teeth, the elegance and fragility of their wings. He uses a flashlight to get close to them and they seem unperturbed. One of the bats is carrying a baby upon her body. Gradually he discerns differences between them, of character and features. After a while he reviews his work. There are several sketches. The first a study of the head of a bat. The second an image of the mother and her baby. A third of a spread wing: sheer matt skin, taut edges and graceful points. It seems to him unimaginable he ever found these creatures ugly. Quite simply, they are beautiful.

  ‘I like that.’ Mamakay, who has stolen up behind him, places her hands on his shoulders. ‘Can I see?’

  He holds up the sketchbook for her.

  ‘May I keep it?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course.’ He takes the sketchbook and tears out the page. Mamakay disappears and comes back with an empty frame. Adrian turns the pages of the pad, back to the earliest sketches of the sunbird outside the apartment at the hospital. He thinks of Kai and wonders if he still sleeps there. Or if Mamakay still thinks of him.

  ‘There!’ Mamakay holds up the drawing of the bats inside the frame. He smiles at her. Yes, it is one of his best. The best he has done since he came here.

  Late in the evening, long after they have eaten and made love, he picks up his sketchbook again. Mamakay is lying on the wicker sofa; a lappa is wrapped around her body, twined around to the back of her neck, where it is caught in a heavy knot.

  The rain is gone and the evening air is light. The heat, for once, has slipped back into the earth. A breeze toys with the hem of Mamakay’s garment. The city seems very far away. He watches her for a long time, the sketchbook lying in his lap. It is hard to resist the urge to touch her. She is reading in the yellow lamplight, lying on her back and holding the book inches from her nose, her other arm thrown behind her. She lays the book upon her chest but otherwise remains as she is. Adrian picks up his pencil.

  This night he draws her, eschewing studies and sketches, endeavouring to capture every line of her body. One by one, the lines fall upon the paper, each in its place. He works with intense concentration, can feel the tightness in his stomach. He is alive in the moment, nervous of making the next stroke, but knowing at the same time he cannot stop or whatever rhythm, whatever alchemy of brain and eyes and fingers that currently propels him will be lost. Once on paper, the moment will be held for ever, he can never forget it. He wills Mamakay not to move. On he draws until the precise moment comes when he is finished. Perhaps for the first time, he recognises the moment as it arrives. Not a single stroke erased or redrawn. The picture of Mamakay is a series of lines, curved and tapering. A curl of hair, the soft swell of her stomach. It is unlike anything he has ever drawn before.

  ‘If you like bats so much, I can take you somewhere.’

  He’d thought her asleep, she’d lain so still.

  Where are they? Adrian has no idea. He turns to see the canoe, steered by the old fisherman with his single, narrow paddle, head back into the waves. A cannon lies half submerged. A small jetty reaches to the sea. A fort, ruined stone, thickly veined with creepers, stands above them. Mamakay’s stride is shorter now than before, her breathing labours slightly. It is already late, perhaps six o’clock.

  A path leads away from the small, gritty beach towards the interior of the island, past a graveyard in which stand half a dozen headstones. Adrian stops to read the names upon them and wonders what it took, all those years ago, to have words carved upon Scottish granite and brought back to be laid upon the tomb of a sailor whose own lifespan upon this island had lasted only a matter of months. A row of undulating mounds stands almost as tall as Adrian. Hills of oyster shells, thousands upon thousands, marking long-ago years, when the men who lived here dined on oysters and rum; the bottles lie upon the beach, are wedged between the boulders, rock back and forth upon the sea bed.

  They are walking downhill now, away from the oyster hills, a narrow path around the edge of a disintegrating wall.<
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  ‘Here.’ Mamakay turns and stops. They are in front of a doorway, or perhaps it is the mouth of a cave. Adrian leans into the narrow portal. A colossal, crowded darkness, seething with life, the sound of a billion beating hearts. To Adrian it feels as if the island itself is a living creature, whose centre the two of them have penetrated.

  Outside, in front of the cave opening, they wait for night. As the darkness outside deepens, they hear inside the cave a stirring, awakenings. The first bat emerges, noiselessly, and is gone. It is followed by other bats, singly and then in twos and threes, leaving slipstreams of wind, treacle-soft and warm. Now in tens and twenties, finally in their hundreds, bats fly past them. Adrian stands unmoving, holds his breath for the minutes it takes for the bats to leave the cave. The air is turbulent with wings, dense with bodies. Threads of wind trail across his face and arms, seem to cling to him. The wind brings the tears to his eyes and he closes them. They are everywhere, above him, around him, though they never touch him. Their numbers seem unending, until suddenly everything comes to a halt. Adrian finds himself standing holding Mamakay in his arms. The breath comes fast and hard from their lips, their bodies tremble. They are holding each other, laughing.

  Adrian opens his eyes and is instantly awake. The sun is strong and the sky a deep blue. It is the morning of his meeting with Elias Cole. Twenty minutes later looking into Elias Cole’s face, Adrian finds himself searching for traces of Mamakay. There, in the line of the lips, the contour of the eyes, the slight prominence of the upper teeth. And when Cole smiles, as he did when Adrian entered, the likeness was there in the bottom lip, where it caught on and was pushed forward by the edge of the front teeth. How strange it is to see the face of a young and beautiful woman hidden within the folded curtains of an elderly man’s skin. It occurs to Adrian he and Elias Cole are practically kin.

  Cole removes the breathing apparatus from his face.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Adrian. Somehow seeing Cole like that makes him draw several deep breaths, like a thirsty man drinking water.

  ‘Good morning.’ The voice as dry as paper.

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  Cole shrugs. ‘I have nothing to complain of.’

  The air in the room is cooler than outside. Grateful for this, Adrian sits in his customary seat. Over the last two days he has reread his clinical notes in their entirety. Even after he had done so Elias Cole still retained a certain opacity. As a man he was possessive, controlling and ambitious, though none of those to a degree that was by any means pathological. His was a case of mediocrity rising. If he’d been possessed of any real talent he would have been seen as a threat by the Dean and eliminated like so many others. He had allied himself with the Dean and ridden on the back of the Dean’s ambition. When the Dean became Vice Chancellor he promoted Cole to his old position. In England Adrian met people like Elias Cole every day; some of them were his colleagues. Cole was jealous of his younger brother, whom he also loved. Parallels there between the brother and Julius. Cole had alluded to them himself. In some ways he appeared to know himself well, which made whatever he was concealing all the more cleverly hidden. Unless of course the occlusion was taking place on the level of the subconscious. Adrian doubted this. He suspected Cole had been manipulating him.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Did you ever see Johnson again?’

  Silence.

  Will Cole take the easy way out and lie? Adrian half expects him to. Instead he replies, ‘So someone has been talking to you. That is always a danger in this place. Full of gossips and whisperers.’

  Now it is Adrian’s turn to be silent as he considers his reply, at what point to mention Mamakay, when Cole continues, ‘But then again, Babagaleh tells me you and my daughter have become acquainted.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Adrian.

  ‘Did you think perhaps I didn’t know? Or were you worried I would disapprove? Well, I don’t. Get her out of this place. There’s nothing for her here.’

  ‘She wants to stay.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. She was always contrary in that way.’ A pause. ‘And it was from my daughter you learned I kept occasional company with Johnson?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Adrian.

  ‘Hmmph.’ Cole gives a soft snort. ‘And who told her?’

  ‘She recognised him when he visited your house. She’d seen him before.’

  Cole nods slowly. All the time he is thinking, moving the fingers of his right hand, flexing them one after the other, so they ripple like a fan. Adrian can almost hear his brain tick. He looks away.

  ‘It was a social relationship,’ says Cole presently. ‘We drank whisky. He had a taste for Black Label, as I recall. It cost me a fortune. We discussed the state of the country. I was Dean by then. It was important to have a sense of what was going on.’

  ‘Can you see how that would seem strange to someone on the outside? Given what you told me about him, your feelings for him?’

  Cole flicks his fingers and then closes them into his palm. His tone is subtly changed. Adrian listens carefully, trying to define the shift, but fails to pinpoint it.

  ‘As you so rightly put it, you are an outsider. This is a small country. You’ve never lived in a place like this. Here enemies are a luxury only the poor can afford. The rest of us have to move on – to use your terminology. I made my peace with power. I had no other choice.’ He smiles thinly at Adrian.

  ‘You were friends.’

  ‘Acquaintances would be my preferred term.’

  ‘How did it happen? I mean, how did it happen that you found your way into his company again?’

  ‘I forget now. I believe he came by the house. I don’t really recall.’

  ‘Sometimes people can find themselves thrown together by events. Something that binds them in an unlikely way.’ Johnson was ambitious and clever, but lacked a truly first-rate mind, the fact of which he concealed with belligerence and obtuseness. If Cole couldn’t see the similarities between himself and Johnson, Adrian could. It was remarkable, in fact. Projection? Perhaps. Though it didn’t do to be too clever about these things. Johnson might just as easily be exactly as Cole described. On many occasions Adrian had asked himself whether the connection with Johnson went deeper than Cole allowed.

  Cole frowns. ‘He was an acquaintance. Nothing more.’

  ‘Who gave Johnson the list of students? Was it you?’

  Cole’s face remains impassive, though Adrian sees the light change in his eyes, a muscle flinch in his cheek. He regards Adrian with an expression emptied of meaning.

  ‘What is it you think you know of these matters?’

  ‘I only know what you and your daughter have told me. In her view you betrayed her friends the night the campus was attacked. You delivered them to Johnson.’

  The silence this time is longer. Cole shakes his head. He seems to have regained control of his composure so fast Adrian is momentarily unsure now whether he even lost it. He says, ‘It is what she believes.’

  Cole continues to shake his head until he provokes a minor coughing fit. He pulls himself up, his elbows angled sharply outwards, raises his head, breathes deeply and exhales, closing his eyes.

  ‘Could you call Babagaleh for me, please?’

  Adrian does as he is asked. He doesn’t follow Babagaleh back into the room, but waits in the corridor, his back against the warm grit of the bare concrete wall. Through the door he can hear the sounds of movement, the murmur of the oxygen concentrator, the whisper of voices. He cannot make out what is being said. Fifteen minutes elapse. Adrian waits. His conversation with Elias Cole needs to be finished, taken to its conclusion, whatever that might be. Cole is tiring. The change Adrian heard in his voice when he first entered the room, behind the rattle of the stiffened lungs, the vocal cords taut and dry: Cole is wearing out.

  The door opens and Babagaleh steps into the corridor, nods at Adrian, who pushes open the door to the room
. Cole is lying on his pillow much as Adrian left him, his eyes closed.

  ‘We all live with the consequences of our pasts, don’t we? One might ask what brought you here? Compassion? Career? The failure of marriage symbolised by the ring you no longer wear? And why here?

  ‘Babagaleh tells me your grandfather’s name was Silk. That he was posted here before the war. I mean your war, of course. Naturally I find that interesting, as a historian. Fortunately our recorded history here is short enough for me to be able to remember most of it. Our last Governor was Beresford Stuke. Silk served under his predecessor. An undistinguished career, if you’ll forgive my saying so. Apart from the minor fiasco of the chief’s rebellion, I dare say he would have gone on to something quite good.

  ‘Babagaleh’s brother – I use the term loosely, he claims so many – is a barman at the Ocean Club. Did I ever tell you that? The chap must be about due for retirement now. He was even there in my day.’

  Adrian is silent. Cole, who is not looking at him but out of the window, continues. ‘There are some things that may have happened in the past that carried less weight then than they do now. Or vice versa. That seemed important then, and now are all but forgotten. Time presses hard on me, lying here. It’s hard not to think of these things.

  ‘Where were we? Oh, yes. We were talking about Johnson. What a fellow! I disliked him. In fact it wouldn’t be going too far to say I hated him. But, you see, you don’t make an enemy of a man like Johnson. Not if you have any sense. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, isn’t that what they say? Whatever I did, I did for Mamakay. She was too close to where the trouble was. She risked being caught up in it. Johnson was on to them. With or without me, the net was closing. I had to take care of my own. Any father would have done the same. If I gave Johnson a list of names, it was because I had no choice. Was I to know what he would do with them?