Mr Turnpike’s mouth fell open in his red face. ‘Well, I have never …’
‘Shush, chéri, s’il te plait.’ Mrs Bradley sighed and sucked at her cigarette. ‘Try to be a grown-up boy, for your father’s sake,’ she said, which made Michael howl even louder.
‘Right, that’s it!’ Mother said, and stood up. ‘I knew the whole thing would turn into a farce.’ She grabbed Gabriel by the back of the neck and forced him to stand up, pushing him towards the door.
Gabriel slithered and managed to look back once at Michael, whose eyes were alight with a feverish flame.
*
Did he realise, as he was pushed away, that the heavy oak door closing on the room, still ringing with Michael’s hysterical laughter, was also the door closing on their childhood? Had he realised?
Now, as he rose from the churchyard wall, Mr Askew remembered something else which he had chosen to forget: he remembered Mother’s hand closing hard around his wrist as she pulled him out on to the street, how she had been leading him just as much as she was leaning on him, and the tears streaming down her face. Poor Mother; he had loved her then and felt bad about loving – about being in love with – Mrs Bradley.
And he remembered how, when they got home, she had suddenly dropped to her knees in front of him, her hands cupping his face, her eyes looking into his eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, my darling,’ she had said to him. ‘I’m sorry about it all, but I was trying to keep our dignity – yours and mine. You see, it’s all we have.’
His heart had bumped funny then. He had wanted to touch her cheeks, which smelt of crying. He had been bursting with love, but then the moment had passed.
‘What about love, Mother?’ he wanted to shout now, down into the tunnel of time. ‘What about the love that should have warmed my childhood?’
At least that childhood had ended in laughter.
6
Mr Askew had just congratulated himself that Mrs Ludgate might, by now, despise him enough not to turn up this Friday afternoon. The sound of the doorbell brought him back to reality.
‘You all right?’ She looked him up and down, reproachfully.
‘Yes, of course; why shouldn’t I be?’
‘You were looking peeved; a bit … lost, you know.’
He didn’t reply, but noticed that she was looking different. She was wearing summer gear: a thin-strapped dress in the kind of floral pattern which would forever separate English women from their continental sisters. Her bra straps were, by all measurements, broader than the dress straps, so that it looked as if she was wearing her lingerie on top of her clothes. He shuddered involuntarily and let his gaze sink to her feet.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Eh?’
‘What are you staring at?’
He honestly could not have told her, but suddenly realised that she must have had some kind of accident and decided to take a softer approach.
‘Have you had an operation on your feet?’ he asked, hopefully.
‘No.’ She was beginning to sound quite snappish. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ This wasn’t going well, he realised. ‘It’s just … Well, those things on your feet … I thought they might be orthopaedic.’
They both looked down at her feet, which had finally escaped from the white trainers, only to be fooled into the cul-de-sac of a pair of bright green rubber clogs. Her toenails, which could be glimpsed through large holes, had been painted sky blue, as if they were about to sing solo in a children’s pantomime.
‘Yeah … and what’s wrong with them? They are Crocs; my daughter sent me them from Exeter for my birthday.’
‘Crocs? But what are they for?’
‘They are like flip-flops, only more fashionable. And the nail polish is the same colour as Kate Moss.’
‘Kate who?’ He couldn’t believe he was having this conversation.
‘Supermodel.’
‘A supermodel wears those … things?’
‘Nah, probably not,’ she realised, not without disappointment, ‘’cause she needs to wear heels – not as tall as the other models, poor love – but she does wear this colour nail polish. It’s called “denim”.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He sighed, realising that Mrs Ludgate was just too loud for his world. ‘I suppose you’d better come inside. I was just about to make myself a cup of tea.’
‘So, do you like the sea, then?’ she asked, casually, as she followed him through to the kitchen.
‘Pardon?’
‘The seaside – I saw your car parked up by the rocks at Edencombe the other day. Reckoned you must be one for staring at the sea. Sunsets, and all that. Nothing there apart from the beach and the flipping sea and that old loony home up on the cliffs.’
He could feel her eyes on the back of his head. ‘No, that can’t have been my car you saw.’
‘There’s no one else around here who’d drive a car like that. It looks like it’s from East Germany or the Cold War or somewhere like that.’
‘Czech Republic, actually,’ he corrected.
‘Yeah, whatever … It was your car I saw and it was empty, which means you must have gone for a bit of a romantic stroll along the shore—’
‘Look,’ he flared, ‘I honestly can’t remember. I must have stopped off to sun myself for a while on the way back from the garage.’ He could feel the prickling of sweat and his shirt was sticking to his back. He wished he had not been wearing the lambswool slipover. It was too hot a day.
‘Only it was raining. Pissing it down, actually.’ She would not let it rest.
‘So what were you doing there in the rain, then?’ She had pushed him far enough into a corner and he realised it was time to strike back. But, as it turned out, it was too late.
‘Just going past on the bus. Family stuff; none of your business.’
‘Well, no –’ he had not seen it coming and it made him crude – ‘but your business is to clean this house, so you’d better go to it, don’t you think?’
Defeated, he turned to the kettle and busied himself with a cup, whilst craving for the comfort of chocolate. Just then, the doorbell rang again. ‘What now?’ he barked, and threw the teaspoon on the worktop, from where it fell on to the tiled floor, clattering. Like that spatula, all those years ago.
‘I’ll get the door!’ cried Mrs Ludgate cheerfully, celebrating her triumph.
‘No, you most certainly will not,’ he replied, adding ‘bitch’ in his mind, as he pushed past her to get to the hall.
The sunshine collapsed like a wave into the cool hall as he opened the door to the bright day. He blinked at the sudden light before seeing Mrs Sarobi standing there, smiling.
‘I am sorry to intrude. I understand you prefer to be on your own, but I wanted to give you these to say thank you for helping me at the stall the other day.’
He looked at her thin, brown hands, which held out a basket of strawberries. It seemed, at that moment, to be the loveliest gift he had ever been offered.
‘How delightful. Thank you.’ His hands touched hers briefly as he accepted the punnet.
She laughed. ‘It was the least I could do, after—’
There was a sudden noise from the hall and they both turned to look at Mrs Ludgate, who was about to speak. ‘Ah, Mrs Sarongi, is it? Are you bringing supplies?’
‘It’s Mrs Sarobi,’ Mr Askew corrected coldly.
‘Oh, it’s okay,’ said Mrs Sarobi, calmly. ‘I’m used to people getting my name wrong.’
‘It’s not that difficult; you have to be pretty bloody stu—’ Mr Askew began, but was stopped by Mrs Sarobi, who put a hand on his arm. Such a slender, beautiful hand, it reminded him of something – something lost in time and memory.
She smiled at Mrs Ludgate and said, ‘I had forgotten you would be here today; please, don’t let me interrupt your work. I must leave …’
Mrs Ludgate shrugged evasively.
But Mr Askew could not stand Mrs Sarobi leaving. ‘No. Please … That is, pe
rhaps you would like me to show you the garden?’
For a moment, she looked surprised, but composed herself. ‘Oh, yes, I would like that very much.’
‘Excellent. We will bring the strawberries and something to drink. Wine, perhaps?’ He seemed to pose this question to himself more than to anybody else, uncertain as to whether it would be proper. Did she even drink wine? Perhaps her religion … His thinking was cut short when he heard Mrs Ludgate laugh behind him; he was quite certain he did, but, when he turned round, he saw only a fixed smile on her face.
He turned back to Mrs Sarobi. ‘You wait here; I won’t be a second,’ he said, handing her the punnet of strawberries to hold. Anxiously – eager, like a child – he went, knowing that, if he did not seize the moment, quick, quick, it might be gone. She might be gone, tired of him. As others had tired of him before.
Pushing past Mrs Ludgate for a second time, he rushed to the scullery next to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Sancerre from the rack. It was one of his follies, the rack. Had he seriously imagined that he might be entertaining on his return to Oakstone? That he would somehow suddenly turn into a host, after a lifetime of shying away from entertaining? He sneered at his own vanity and returned to the kitchen to pick up a couple of glasses. For an instant, he saw his own image reflected in a leaded windowpane: that moustache, its main feature, a disguise. Would it hold? The wine was not cold enough and the glasses were not altogether clean, he noticed, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Returning to the hall, he heard Mrs Ludgate’s voice, triumphant:
‘… So I said to Mrs Edwards, “She looks Indian enough to me, as if she ought to be wearing one of them sarongs,” I said, “but she ain’t, is she? ’Cause she’s Afghanistanian.” But I don’t think she believed me. Looked at me oddly, all dark in the face, like she’d just turned Indian herself, she did.’ She laughed, throwing back her head to show the creases on her neck.
‘Is that all, Mrs Ludgate?’ he asked, coldly. She stopped laughing abruptly and looked at him.
‘What?’ she barked.
‘If you could just get on with hoovering the drawing room today and perhaps water the potted plant by the window, that’d be grand,’ he said, closing the door on his self-appointed housekeeper.
*
It had rained during the night and the vegetation was still glittering in the afternoon sun. There was a mild summer wind blowing through the boughs of the old elms, making the leaves rush like small pebbles in the shallows. He stood stiffly in front of her, holding the bottle in one hand and the stems of the glasses in the other. His dark slipover and white shirt, neatly buttoned at the cuffs, gave him the look of a waiter.
‘I am sorry,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘Please don’t take any notice of her.’
‘Oh, she’s just curious; she cannot make us out, that’s all. And I can’t say I blame her.’ She smiled up at him and the wind caught in her headscarf, gently moulding it around her face like a carved Madonna, just come alive.
He nodded. He realised that, at times, she made him feel calm, almost at ease, as if she was surrounded by an aura of harmony – like some kind of magnetic field or a wash of sleep. They walked quietly side by side for a while, following the gravel path around to the back of the house. He kept stealing glances at her, on and off, and wondered if, in a different life, he might have been walking with her like this for real. A rush of nostalgia – for something that had never been – touched his heart like sticky sadness.
Just then she looked up and saw him watching her; she gave him an oddly quizzical look, as if something had just dawned on her.
He cleared his throat, desperately trying to think of something to say. ‘You have grown,’ he blurted and immediately blushed at his own stupidity.
She too blushed, gorgeously, and answered, ‘I’m wearing heels. I don’t, normally …’
He looked down to see her naked feet in a pair of canvas wedge shoes. Next to them on the sunlit gravel, pointing slightly towards each other, were his own shoes, the ones he would normally only wear around the house. The brown leather was worn and scuffed, like the bark of an old tree. Quickly, as if to hide his shame, he took a step into the shadow next to the wall. The breeze brought a sweet scent of milk and honey. For a second he thought it was the scent of her skin, before realising that it came from the large buddleia that was in full bloom. Perhaps it’s a tolerable shrub after all, he thought to himself, at least at this time of the year, before the panicles start to turn. A red admiral was hovering on one of the purple cones, not quite settling, as if it was still deciding whether the flower was worthy of its grace. It was the kind of shrub that you would see on derelict sites and at the back of warehouses, he realised, looking quickly around the garden. The grass urgently needed mowing and the beds were completely overgrown. He gathered that she too had noticed the lawn.
‘I have neglected the garden in favour of the allotment,’ he explained, apologetically.
‘Well, it’s too large for you to manage yourself. You should pay a boy from the village to cut the grass …’
He nodded and muttered, ‘Yes, yes, perhaps a boy. Just one, though – not too many people. I would rather have the grass grow like a prairie.’
But she ignored him and continued, ‘.… and I could help you with the beds, if you like.’
He looked at her, startled. Around them, the light was growing a deeper green.
She laughed again. ‘Don’t look so frightened. Would you not rather have me crawling around your garden than some gardener?’
‘Oh, yes. Any time,’ he twittered, trying to sound light-hearted. It was such an awful thought, and beautiful at the same time.
‘You would have to give me a hand, of course; I can’t do it all on my own – and it’s your garden, after all,’ she said, casually, and sailed on along the gravel.
He released himself from the shadow and followed a step or two behind. If I could trust this woman, he thought to himself as he watched her slight back where the end of a black braid showed from under her headscarf, perhaps my burden would be reduced. But she has got her own weight to carry, surely. It would not be fair of me to increase her load. But it’s so tempting …
‘I was thinking,’ he said aloud.
‘Of what?’ she asked, looking back at him quickly and away, her cheeks still aglow.
Oh, well, he thought, if she was willing …
‘I was thinking,’ he said again, ‘that it feels like we have known each other for a long time.’
This is so easy, he thought, and smiled sadly at his hapless shoes that seemed to symbolise something more.
But she was too clever to fall for such flattery. ‘What are you doing here, in this place – this house?’ she asked, as if to force open a new avenue of honesty. She had stopped, and stood facing him.
He sighed and, in order to avoid her eyes, stepped off the path on to the grass. She followed and he led her towards the dappled shade of a bright green acer.
‘I started dreaming about Oakstone. I grew up around here, you know,’ he answered, surprising himself with such honesty. ‘I came back to be completed – to try to become whole, but I don’t know how to achieve it. And also, there was some old stuff I needed to sort out.’ He bent down to feel the grass with the hand holding the two glasses. It felt dry enough and he sat down heavily with his legs sprawled in front of him. He frowned at the sight of his mottled white skin, which showed in the gap between his beige socks and charcoal flannel trousers. Putting down the Sancerre and the glasses, which immediately fell over in the tall grass, it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t brought a bottle opener.
‘Oh, I am such a dimwit!’ he cursed.
‘Forgot the bottle opener?’
He nodded miserably, whilst rolling up his shirtsleeves. How could she have known?
‘Ah, never mind. We’ll drink it some other time. Have a strawberry instead.’
He liked the way she said it: some other time. He listened t
o her words and loved their clear lightness. He let them trickle across him like summer rain on a windowpane. They were both quiet for a while then. Once or twice, their hands brushed against each other as they reached for the strawberries in the punnet. The bangles around her wrists chimed. Leaf shadows moved on the ground.
‘So you imagined,’ she said, eventually, ‘that, just by coming back to this house, by buying this old wreck and all of this –’ she gestured with both her arms around the garden – ‘you would find some kind of sense?’
‘I belong here.’ He must try to keep this private conviction.
‘Do you, now?’ she said, with a kind of flat irony.
He laughed loudly at her absurdity. What did she know?
‘I mean,’ she continued, but without the irony, ‘can we ever belong again, once we have been uprooted?’
‘Do you not miss Afghanistan – would you not like to go back?’
‘Of course I miss it. But the memory of it’s pure nostalgia. The world I grew up in does not exist anymore. And neither does yours. There’s no way back.’
He stared at her in disbelief. In the rapt afternoon, he could feel the old tingling above his lip and pressed his index finger across his moustache. There was always the danger, he felt, that the seam would open up again – the live wound, the old wound.
‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked, obscurely, in order to gain time.
‘In Herat.’ Her mind returned briefly to where the Silk Road takes a breath and rests by the river before entering Persia. ‘My childhood was full of the scent of pines and roses, and I used to play in pomegranate orchards and terracotta-coloured courtyards,’ she continued in the voice of someone declaiming Byron. But he could see clearly that the satin pink and crimson of the roses and the dusty terracotta had all been woven into the scarf, which shaded her face now in a lovely blush.
‘That sounds wonderful.’ He even thought he could smell the roses in the air around them. And those pomegranate blossoms.
‘Precisely; it’s an image distilled from nostalgia,’ she replied with vehemence.
‘How can you be so sure that there’s no way back?’
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