Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  Grief never welcomes spring, and summer is too bright; autumn brings wood smoke and dying flowers to match a sad heart, a respite for me before the glittering social life of Linton's winters. A young Churchill dined with us—he was colonial secretary then—and once Bertrand Russell. I was called an innovative hostess and my work at the shelter noble, which I thought ironic, and Deborah began to learn how to read some of the words in her picture books. My only refuge was the garden, where I would pace restlessly up and down its paths each summer morning and sometimes late into the night, the words of Amy Lowell's "Patterns" keeping step with me and explaining to me my future:

  In summer and in Winter I shall walk

  Up and down

  The patterned garden-paths

  In my stiff brocaded gown.

  The squills and daffodils

  Will give place to pillared roses,

  and to asters, and to snow.

  I shall go

  Up and down

  In my gown.

  Gorgeously arrayed.

  Boned and stayed.

  And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace

  By each button, hook and lace.

  For the man who should loose me is dead.

  Amy Lowell (1874-1925).

  Dead is such a final word.

  And yet .., and yet ... There came that strange day when Deborah was six years old, a full decade before Linton had the grace to die: it was late summer, when the chrysanthemums blazed with color, and I was in the garden when Bertram came looking for me. I stopped my pacing and watched him move slowly and ponderously along the paths, never for a moment losing his dignity, not even when he tripped over a stone; it would never have occurred to him to lift his voice and call to me.

  He stopped in my shadow, cleared his throat and spoke. "There is, Madame, a—" He paused, his nostrils pinched. "A somewhat—a man at the door asking to see you, insisting that you have met before."

  How carefully Bertram avoided the word "gentleman"; amused I said, 'Tell him I'm busy, Bertram."

  "Yes, Madame. I'm sorry, Madame, I thought he'd come about the gardener's vacancy but he refuses to go to the rear gate."

  "It's all right, Bertram," I told him, and remembering that I had work to do I turned and strolled with him toward the French doors to the library. "But if we'd met before why didn't he give his name?"

  He opened the door and stood back for me to enter. "He did give a name, Madame, but considering his appearance—he wears a patch over one eye and his clothes are rather disreputable."

  I looked at the litter of papers on my desk—bills, appeals, invitations—and winced. Impatiently I said, "Then what was his name?"

  "A Mr. Jared someone, Madame, I did not catch the last name."

  I grasped the back of the desk chair and steadied myself. There are other Jareds in the world, I told myself, and the Jared I loved is dead, Union said so, but my heart plunged and then jumped and for a second I feared that it would stop and never beat again. I said quickly, "I'll see him after all, Bertram. Please show him in."

  When he stared at me in disbelief I added sharply, "At once, Bertram."

  And waited, clinging to the back of the chair; it seemed that only my death could defeat my hopes for I was trembling. In the hall I heard Bertram's voice: "She'll see you now. This way, please."

  The suspense was intolerable and my hand tightened on the chair. The door opened and I gasped, for it was Jared standing tall in the doorway, only a little changed; leaner, darker, his hair bleached nearly white, and one of his blessed green eyes hidden under a patch of black. "Jared," I whispered incredulously "Jared?"

  Neither of us moved. My voice, breaking on a sob, cried out, "But he said you were dead. Two years ago he told me. He'd sent men to kill you."

  "They did their best," he said, watching me from the doorway. "They robbed me of one eye and all my gold and left me for dead."

  "But—not dead," I whispered. "Not dead?"

  Words, meaningless words, while all the time our eyes were devouring each other, speaking and answering a thousand questions until at last I understood that he was neither ghost nor hallucination and flew across the room into his arms.

  What was it Shakespeare wrote of love not being love which alters when it alteration finds? Jared had sold all his possessions to come to England and search for me. Linton's assassins had nearly killed him, and once recovered he'd been commandeered as a scout for the King's African Rifles and then he had been a prisoner of the Germans .., all those years! . . , but I had known a Bakuli who taught me that trees cry when they're wounded and that rocks and stones have spirits, and I had learned that what endures is not visible to the eye, and so I saw only poetry and triumph where Bertram had seen poverty: I saw Jared.

  "I thought you'd never leave that chair," he said, smiling his magic smile so full of warmth and tenderness.

  "I thought I would faint," I told him. "I nearly did. Jared, hold me tight."

  "I am holding you tight."

  "Tighter," I said.

  "With pleasure, but Caressa—"

  "Yes?"

  His face was grave. "God only knows I mourn what happened to separate us, but there's something I have to say—it goes hard for me to say it but there's no changing things, Caressa. I can't carry you off to the Sahara or to Scotland, no matter how I dreamed for years of doing it. I've lost both my gold and the best of my youth, but when I found myself still alive with empty years to fill I knew they had to be lived near you. Had to be. If I could only find you."

  "Thank God yes," I said, kissing the patch over his blind eye and his seeing eye. Not dead, my heart sang, not dead. "Nothing matters but seeing you again. Jared, did you know that you and I have a daughter?"

  "No," he said in astonishment, and with a cry of pain, "Oh God, what I've missed. So that's why—"

  "Yes, for her sake. Her name is Deborah—your mother's name—and she'll be back in a few hours, she's six years old and I want you to see her."

  He shook his head. "Not yet, Caressa, not like this." He glanced down ruefully at his clothes. "I'm only off the boat, you see, I couldn't wait. I need to find a room somewhere, and buy a few clothes."

  "Have you money?" I asked.

  "Enough," he said. "From Cairo I wrote to a London publisher who sent a small advance after seeing the first chapter of my book on Africa."

  "Jared, it's happening?"

  "I think so," he said almost shyly. "I plan to find some sort of job—I won't need much, only a room and the time to write—and if once in a while. Caressa, just once in a while—"

  "Yes," I said, and suddenly I was remembering Bertram. Taking a deep breath I said, "Jared, the butler mistook you for—can you grow flowers as well as vegetables?"

  He looked down at me, very still and alert; he said quietly, "I've done that, yes. He thought I'd come about a gardener's job, hadn't he."

  I nodded. "We need one, you see. There's a lovely little cottage behind the greenhouse, very private, a wonderfully quiet place for writing."

  "I don't think I could bear to see you with him, not you and—"

  I stared at him in astonishment. "Do you think for a moment I forget that I share this house with a murderer, Jared? We live polite and separate lives, Linton and I. This week he's in Paris hunting down a Velasquez and it's up to me to find a gardener. Come and see the cottage," I told him. "It is a place," I added deliberately, "where we can have a little time alone together. No one goes there. Will you look at it?"

  And so I led him out through the French doors into the still-fragrant garden and we walked down the paths that I had so feverishly paced, we passed the fountain and the greenhouse and reached the little cottage in the rear, and when the door closed behind us we came together with a fierceness born of too many years apart. And the cottage became Jared's home for the rest of his life.

  Deborah has interrupted my writing with a hysterical phone call, something about Sara, but Deborah is often hyster
ical about her daughter. I cannot understand what she's saying except that Sara is planning to leave her.

  "She's twenty-five," I remind her, "and she's a very sensible young woman."

  "Sensible!" cries Deborah. "She hasn't a sensible bone in her body." Turning from the phone she calls, "Sara? Sara, come here—you tell her."

  I hear Sara's light voice saying, "Grams, can I come and talk?"

  She will be here in half an hour.

  She has Jared's green eyes and my dark hair and if, as they say, she looks like me, then I must acknowledge that once I was beautiful, yes, for she is all of that, as well as tender and confiding. She arrives breathlessly, as always, and even Bertram's solemn butler-face holds traces of a smile as he ushers her into the library.

  "Oh, Grams," she says ruefully, "I've done it again, I simply can't please Mother, I've left her in shock, and— Grams, I don't want to hurt you too." She flings herself on the floor next to my chair and looks up at me with a troubled face. "He wants me to go with him," she tells me. "Peter. It's why you've not seen me lately, it's become terrifyingly serious. He wants me to go with him and Mother's so upset."

  "Don't scowl, Sara," I tell her automatically. "Go where?"

  'To the Sahara."

  "The Sahara!" I echo incredulously.

  She nods. "He's the American I brought to meet you, the one who calls petrol 'gasoline' just as you do. He's an engineer, he works for an oil company and they're sending him out to the Sahara where there's all that oil, and Mother's shocked—you know what a snob she can be. It's too far, she says, and—oh Grams, you look shocked too."

  "Not shocked," I tell her dryly. "Do you love him?"

  "Yes," she says simply, "but Grams, you do look strange, you've gone all pale suddenly."

  "Startled perhaps," I tell her. "Envious. Astonished, certainly, at the rounding of a circle."

  She laughs. "Rounding of a circle! Envious? Grams, what does that mean?"

  I realize that it's time—past time—to tell her what she needs to know now to fortify and free her; it is the very least that I can do. I say, "Because your mother was conceived in the desert, Sara, very near to the Sahara, which is a place that I am very familiar with, incidentally. You've never known this, nor has she, but I tell it now. Privately."

  She smiles but she's puzzled. "Isn't your geography a little confused, Grams? It was in Cairo that you and Grandfather Linton met, isn't it?"

  I nod. 'True, yes."

  "Well then?"

  "But you see," I tell her gently, "I was already carrying a child—your mother—when I came to Cairo."

  She gasps. "But this is unbelievable, are you serious?" Gleefully she adds, "You mean Linton wasn't my real grandfather, and Mother—" She giggles. "You're not trying to tell me that Mother—Mother of all people—is illegitimate? My staid and very proper mother?"

  "It skips a generation," I tell her dryly. "She doesn't know and you won't tell her. She'll learn of it after I'm gone because of certain details, practical ones, that she'll need to know. But illegitimate, no—thanks to Linton."

  "But Grams," she says delightedly, "who was he? What happened? Oh, no wonder you've always seemed so—so different."

  "It's a long story, my dear, and not very important now," I tell her. "It's you who are important."

  She brushes this aside. "But who was he, my real grandfather? A desert shaykh? Oh please!"

  "An Englishman," I say. "A traveler, a hunter." It's as good a description as any, I suppose.

  "But why didn't you marry, Grams? Did he die, was he killed?"

  My thoughts veer back in time and I hear Linton's voice saying, With money and a pair of Arabs named Eyoub and Hammed, to whom 1 gave orders to kill .., but there is also Bertram's voice, Madame, there is a—a somewhat—a man at the door asking to see you, saying that you've met before. . . .

  "What is it?" Sara asks. "You've been remembering him, I can see that, but you're keeping me in suspense."

  "I'm sorry," I tell her. "Suspense?"

  "Yes, I asked what happened to him, Grams. Did he die?"

  I smile at Sara and tell her that we'll talk of this another day, that Peter must be waiting for her, that already it's tea-time and I'm a little tired. I long to tell her that he's dead now, yes, but until he died in my arms four years ago he lived safely in the gardener's cottage and she knew him as John—what better revenge upon Linton, who had sent two hired assassins into the desert to find and kill him?—and that each morning he brought roses to me from the greenhouse. With humor and with love. And Linton never guessed.

  I wish, too, that I might tell her who it was that she talked with for hours as a child, drawing much comfort from him, which appalled her mother, and that she has read all of the books that Jared wrote under another name—I need only lift my eyes to see them in the bookcase near me: Abyssinian Tales, Hunting in the African Bush, King Menelek the Second, Trekking in the Deserts and Mountains of Africa—but as Grams used to say, everyone's life is a story full of chapters and some chapters are for telling and some for concealing, and for the sake of Deborah, Linton and Jared the strange events of my past have been firmly locked away. Until Sara startled me—but she has left now to meet Peter—and except as I have placed on paper who I have been and what I have seen and why I possess a muffin man carved out of stone that is centuries old and once belonged to a desert queen.

  Perhaps Marcus Aurelius is right and the causes of a life are from all eternity spinning the threads of our being and our destinies prepared for us long before we're born, but I'm no philosopher. I know only that here is my story, as true as I can tell it, or as Omar Khayyam has written, A hair, perhaps, divides the False and True.

  But he has also written, The stars are setting and the Caravan starts for the dawn of nothing—oh, make haste!

  For this I am ready; the words I write have lately become difficult to place on paper, I grow tired but how glorious it's been to feel again, and even more glorious to unmask this proper Lady Teal whose mask bears the weight of years. I inform on myself, ready now for the next Caravan and wherever it may take me, but I know this: if there be another life beyond this one I would pray to Amina's Giver of Breath and Life, and to Bakuli's Christian God, and to the Allah of the Muslims that I be given a trick or two of magic again, a tent under the stars and Jared in my bed each night.

  This I pray: I, Caressa Horvath, also known as Missy, Little Bowman, Stranger from the North, bako to Amina and to the Hausa and their shrine spirits, widow of Sir Linton Teal and beloved of Jared.

  lyaka ya kare—it is finished.

  Shî kè nan—that's it, there is no more.