by Gerda Pearce
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” But the line is already dead.
“Gin!” says Michael, his baritone warm, unchanged. “How are you? Where are you? I’ve been trying to get you for ages. Did you get my text? I’ve been a bit worried, actually.”
“My mobile. Was. Broken,” she says. Then, “Michael, where are you? Kristina, Kristina said –”. What had she said? Kristina had only given her his number.
“I’ve moved from Praesto, Gin. I’m teaching in Naestved.”
“Teaching? Since when do you teach?”
He laughs. “Since I did a teaching qualification. It’s a temporary job. I’m here till June. In fact, I’ve applied for a post in London after this.”
She cannot find her voice. She is longing to see him, to talk with him face to face. Hope is an emotion almost too much to bear.
“Gin? Are you still there?”
She makes a sound like Yes.
“How was home?” He sounds concerned now, perhaps remembering her dad.
No one will even have told him about Simon, Gin realises. A desperate loneliness takes hold. “Michael,” she says, and it is like a sob. “Michael, I’m pregnant. Mikey, I need you. Please come to London.”
8. VIVIENNE
“He was furious, you know,” says Viv. The line crackles and Viv holds the telephone away from her ear.
“Who? Retief?” Gin’s voice sounds English and far away.
“Yes, who else?”
Viv turned into her road to find Nick leaning against his car, arms folded. Waiting impatiently for her. How long he had been there she did not know. Viv was at first amused, intrigued. He asked where Miss McMann was while Viv unpacked her groceries and her files from the back of the car. When Viv told him that Gin had left, had flown back to London, Retief started pacing in the street. Miss McMann should not have left without telling him, he fumed. Viv had grown vaguely alarmed, then angry.
“Mr Retief,” she said, “would you kindly not talk to me in that tone.”
He stopped, startled, as if unaware of his rant. “I’m sorry, Vivienne,” he said, contritely.
Viv softened. She did not know why. Perhaps it was the way he used her first name, yet so formally, as if determined to pronounce each syllable. Perhaps it was his sudden boyishness, or the dark-blond lock that had fallen across his forehead, making him swat at it absently as he tried to hold her gaze.
“Look, Nick,” she said, handing him one of the bags, “help me take these in and we can talk properly inside. I do have neighbours you know, and I don’t like them thinking I’m in trouble with the police.”
He followed her in.
“Why, Viv?” Gin’s voice brings her thoughts back to the present.
“Something about procedure. Part of an ongoing investigation. And now apparently the insurance people are involved. On his back about it.”
“Insurance people?”
Viv hesitates. She fears sounding callous. “Simon’s insurance, Gin,” she says as gently as she can, “his life insurance. You know what they can be like, checking everything.”
Nick had said they’d been onto his superior, who had been onto him. Give them what you’ve got, close it up, move it on, he had been ordered. Nick hated that, he said, hated handing a case over untidied, unfinished. He paced again, this time in her kitchen, up and down, while Viv unloaded the supermarket bags on the sideboard. She handed him cans to slow his tread, and he started to help her unpack, talking all the while. Eventually he stopped and they settled into a scene almost domestic. Viv made coffee and their hands touched as she passed him the mug. Retief reddened at the contact.
“You like him, don’t you?” Gin asks, changing the way the conversation is headed.
“Well, yes. Yes, I do,” reflects Viv.
It had been ten years since her divorce and it had felt nice, having Nick in her kitchen helping her. They sat, deliberately apart, sipping at their coffee while the conversation drifted from Nick’s work, from his apparent obsession with Gin’s case to other, simpler subjects. He commented on her garden, green from the rain. Viv listened, surprised, while he told her that hellebore might be good for the dry shady spot in the barren corner, that agapanthus would thrive on neglect if given the sunny space near the front gate.
“I didn’t know you gardened, Sergeant Retief,” she smiled, embarrassing him.
“Well, ja, I don’t really. Not now, but when I grew up, on the farm, my mom liked to garden. And the lack of water was always a factor, what would grow and what wouldn’t.”
He told her about his childhood in the Transkei, about the constant droughts that would threaten the farm, that would bring lines to his father’s already weathered brow. About how it had been his grandfather’s farm, and his great-grandfather’s before that. Viv made more coffee and the afternoon slipped into evening. He told her about his mother, whom his father had met while buying supplies in the Cape, and how his father had brought her back to the farm and the small farming community. He had not told her if his mother, uprooted, had suffered, but instead told Viv how, while his father farmed, his mother had grown vegetables and tried to coax flowers from the hot, dry earth.
“And did they not want you to take over the farm then, Nick?” Viv asked.
They had progressed onto wine, and she had tucked herself next to him on the couch as she handed him the glass. He stayed quiet for a while after her question, and she sensed it was a topic he did not want to talk about. Then he murmured something about not wanting to battle nature endlessly for scant reward. But Viv thought this wasn’t a man afraid of a battle, and suspected other reasons.
“I thought he seemed to like you,” says Gin, rather absently.
“Did you?” laughs Viv. “Well, ja, he’s sweet.” She tells Gin about the gardening advice. “Anyhow, he said they might call you or something.”
“Who?”
“The insurance people.”
“Oh.”
“And he might need to call you also.”
“Oh,” says Gin again, without enthusiasm.
They talk of other things.
“How are the girls?” asks Gin, “I wish I’d seen them when I was home. Abbie must be what, seventeen soon?”
“Yes,” says Viv, and launches into the recent tales from school, how Abbie is all teenage angst and pimples, while Kayleigh, just turned fifteen, is still full of innocent wisdom. “You know, Gin, I don’t know where she gets it from! Not me!” She stops herself from saying: or Jonnie.
They laugh, talk some more about the girls, about Gin’s move from the flat to the house, progressing slowly. About Gin’s pregnancy, her astonishing news.
“It’ll be all right, you know,” says Viv. She knows what it is like to raise a child without a father. They are silent. Viv knows they are both thinking of Gabe now. “You know you can always come home. Come stay here if you need. I’ll look after you, like you looked after me.” Viv is solemn.
“Yeah, Retief would probably like that.”
They laugh again.
Viv does not mention how, long after Nick Retief had left, she had opened the French windows to the cool of the evening and sat smoking on the porch, long into the moonless night.
9. GIN
Michael finally arrives on a clear summer morning, his teaching stint done. Gin takes the lengthy drive out to Gatwick airport, passing fields still dew-wet, the pink dawn tinting the hills.
It is not difficult for her to rise early; she has lain awake and restless on so many nights that on most days she is up by five. She has taken to walking down to the river on these occasions, walking the miles, crossing through the park. She takes bread for the ducks and swans that dip and preen upon the pond, readying themselves for the coming day. She wanders past the Serpentine, the fountains still silent, through the walk of roses, across the Arch, and down through St James’ Park till she reaches the water of the tidal Thames. She likes the cool of the early day, and walks back to the house well befor
e the traffic increases to its morning peak, before the heat hits its height.
Summer, dreaded summer. Its orange twilights are reminiscent of those at home, the sunsets that she had hated. London should not be allowed the so-called good weather of other climes; it is not suited to a hot July. Heat does not become this grand old city; it sweats and smells, steams and stifles. A haze sits, visible, palpable. Gin stays in the house for much of the day, thankful for its old walls, thick with cool. The air is finer here on the hill, high above sea level. Sometimes she swears she can smell the barley from fields a hundred years long gone. Sometimes she dreams of Simon. He is trying to tell her something but the message is lost in the fog of awakening.
Gin exists outside of herself; she feels as if her consciousness hovers above and to the right of her eyes. The accident, she theorises, must have damaged connections to her limbic system. At the oddest times, she has spinal shivers, a sensation of being watched. Perhaps, she thinks, it is herself watching herself. Perhaps there is a part of her truly dead, with Simon, a part that watches herself with his eyes, the same penetrative stare. Then again, perhaps it is his genes she carries now awhile that makes her feel his touch once more in sleep, and lately she sees again his outstretched hand, hears the gasping rattle in his throat. These nights she wakes with a ring of sweat about her neck, her breasts, as if it is toxin she carries. She hopes she will be able to love this child.
Gin pulls the car into the anonymous sprawl of the airport car park.
Michael hugs her as he always does, a huge, encompassing embrace that makes her feel both safe and sleepy. As if she now can rest.
“Gin!” Grabbing her to him. “God, you’re so thin. What’s happened to you?” He holds her back away from him to look at her. “You’re supposed to be pregnant, fat, glowing.” Michael’s voice is teasing but she can see his worry.
She looks at him and laughs. “You should talk. And your hair!” Michael’s glossy brown hair, always worn long, is shaven. Gin reaches up to brush her hand through the spiky shortness. “You look like you’re in the Army.”
He buys her coffee before the drive back into London, and over it she tells Michael much of what he does not yet know. In a flat tone she relates the trip home, her father’s funeral, what she can remember of the accident. She does not mention Simon’s final words; she has told no one, not even Viv, and especially not Retief. Michael listens without questions, allows her the space to speak. She tells him too how she has left her job, feeling slightly guilty. It was Michael who had found her the post based at the hospital. He had been working there himself, portering until his psychology qualifications were approved in Britain. Gin herself had not applied to get her own degree recognised, despite Michael’s sensible urgings. Somehow she had lost her lust for healing. Instead she had taken the job of technician in the pharmacy at the same hospital. They had left the hotel, moved from Michael’s single room, found the flat. It had seemed huge in comparison, the way the house now in turn dwarfed its four rooms.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she tells him. The unit had, during her time there, been privatised. Profit, not patients, had become the drive. Slowly the work she had initially enjoyed had eroded into endless shifts, preparing chemotherapy well into the nights. Syringe after precious syringe churned out, a thankless quest. It had been even harder for her when her father’s cancer was diagnosed. He had the best of care, but Gin knew so many in Africa didn’t.
“When I came back from Cape Town I saw it for what it was. I just didn’t know why I was doing it anymore.”
He reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. “I’d love to work in a hospital again,” he says wistfully. Denmark has little need of psychologists, he tells her, and especially those who are not Danish. He had encountered a subtle xenophobia that made him always an outsider, especially at the factory where he first found work, where he checked the same circuit on the same board that passed him forty times an hour. And after seven hours of that, his neck and shoulders stiff from peering through the magnifying scope at the rolling rubber strip that carried the neatly laid-out pieces, he went home through the bland little town to his bland little flat. He laughs self-consciously.
“But now you’re teaching?” asks Gin.
“Yes, that’s why I did the qualification. It was also an attempt to save my marriage. One that didn’t work.” There is a weariness in his voice.
It is Gin’s turn to squeeze his hand. She waits for him to say more, but instead he looks at her coffee cup, still full, the contents cold.
“Gin, I really am worried about you, are you eating?” he asks again.
Gin blinks at him. “Of course I am,” she answers mechanically, but in truth she cannot remember when she last ate.
Michael is looking at her oddly. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
That last day, leaving. The day she chose to leave her land, her country and her kin. Africa was so very hard to leave behind. Wisps of long-held memories swirled like ghosts in childhood chambers of her brain. The acrid taste of dust, hot days on Transkei roads, the warm stillness of Okavango air, cicadas screaming, the drenching rains of Cape winters. The land was part of her, but she found herself wishing it were not, wishing to escape that heady, hedonistic mix of beauty and of pain.
She had left Cape Town as soon as she could, her only thought to get away from Jonnie, get away from Viv. A sour week at home. She had said goodbye to Zululand, to her sister, her parents, her childhood. A perfunctory week of goodbyes. To Hannah’s parents. Promising to see Hannah in Johannesburg before she left. To Michael’s parents. Promising to hug their son when she met him in London. Promising to make him write more, phone more.
And trying to say goodbye to Gabe, her dead brother’s memory pervading everything. Her mother still seemed unable to part with Gabe’s remains. She had stuck the urn of his ashes on a table in the hall. Gin would rather have taken them up to the blue mountains, scattered them among the ochred leaves of forest, and set her brother free. Set him finally free in this land that he also had loved, the land that had been part of him too.
Then, Johannesburg. She would not have seen him, but for Hannah. Hannah, Gin’s friend and Simon’s cousin, who insisted that Gin see Simon, say goodbye.
Hannah was hosting a party. Everyone, said Hannah, would be there.
Gin did not feel like going to a party. Her leaving was cause for sadness, not celebration. And everyone whom Hannah knew, she did not. Except for Simon. Perhaps, thought Gin, this was Hannah’s revenge. Hannah, denied Gabe by her father. Just like me, thought Gin. Gabe and I were not good enough, not Jewish enough. Something sullied and unclean had come between her and Hannah. Gin was wary, reluctant. Maybe Hannah wanted to show her Simon’s wife, his newborn twins, show Gin how happy Simon was with one of his own.
Michael is still waiting for an answer.
“Oh, Michael, I’m fine. I promise.” But she cannot blame him. Years ago now, but she knows he can never forget.
Simon greeted Hannah with a kiss, looking all the while over his cousin’s shoulder at Gin. She could barely look at him. There was a compression in her chest at the sight of him. But to look away from him was to take in his life, Hannah’s life, Johannesburg life. Where parties with too much food were thrown while others starved, and young men died for no reason. She barely listened while Hannah asked after Simon’s wife, why she had not come. Instead Gin walked away, took in the view from Hannah’s high-rise flat, the diamond lights of the city below against the black velvet of night. Every city was beautiful at night, she mused, however ugly and however scarred by day. He had come up behind her, was watching her watching the city. She closed her eyes at the way he breathed her name.
Michael is grimly silent. She knows he is remembering holding her head over the basin while she vomited, remembering the blood of her miscarriage. The last time she had carried Simon’s child.
She was quiet in the car. They drove around the city while Simon talked, a streami
ng release of words that she did not hear. She did not want to know of his life, his life without her. But slowly it seeped into her brain that, with her, he talked because he could. There was a part of him that was still the man she once knew and loved. His thoughts were allowed a certain freedom in her company. With her, it seemed, he was himself. This thought would later open up regret.
He parked the car back in the garage beneath Hannah’s apartment. They had been away for hours. Hannah would be angry with her for leaving the party but Gin did not care. She knew no one else at Hannah’s party. She owed Hannah nothing.
Simon was silent. Then, “Ginny,” he said suddenly, “this man, this Jonnie, do you love him?”
Gin was startled out of inattention. She had not mentioned Jonnie, few even knew about him. Hannah. Hannah must have told him, she realised. But Hannah knew nothing of what had happened in Cape Town.
He turned to look at her. “You know what it’s like then, to try to be with someone in this country who isn’t white.”
Ah, yes, Leila. The enigmatic Leila. The Leila he had loved. But he had discarded Leila too, as he had discarded her. If she, Gin, white but not Jewish, had not been suitable, how much less so Leila. Leila, not even white.
What could she say, wound him further? She wanted to tell him that he had turned away from feelings that were too frighteningly real, and that his world was now a fake world. A world of plastic surgery, substitute brides, and expensive cars. He had a real house in the wealthy suburb of Sandton, had hired a real black maid to save his real Jewish wife’s hands. You, my man of ideals, the doctor who would heal the world. Simon, my rock, thought Gin, you are lost to me, to this land, and to Leila, whom you loved.
She wanted to say this to him, but she looked into the brilliant blackness of his eyes, and lifted her hand to stroke his rough cheek. She could not shatter his cherished illusions. Out of love for him, still. She stared at him. They had lost something, and he knew it also.