by Gerda Pearce
She wants to tell him also that she cannot explain why she shuns familiar accents, repulsed. That she feels the weight of the invisible cord that stretches umbilically across the distance of a continent, and will not be cut.
That last day, leaving. Leaving Cape Town, that city between mountain and sea, her home and her heartbreak. Two months since she left her home with Viv and Abbie, two months since he had said he did not love her, two months since she packed her bags and drove away. Two months since she kissed her sleeping niece and fled, without confronting Viv. What was there to say? Viv, she had heard since through a mutual acquaintance, was three months’ pregnant.
A knock at the door of the rented apartment. She padded along the carpeted corridor. The rectangle of the flat allowed for two entrances, one from the car park above and one from the road below, but it was impossible to see anyone approaching.
Sunlight blinded her temporarily. Her eyes adjusted slowly from the dark of the apartment. Jonnie stood outside, bunch of flowers hanging from one hand, ubiquitous cigarette in the other.
“Hi,” he breathed out smoke.
Part of her had wished for this moment, if only to wound him, to hurt him as he had her, but now he was here, she found words stuck in her throat. Since that night he said he did not love her, since he told her about him and Viv, since the next morning when she took her stuff and left, she had kept herself busy. The apartment was found within hours, nestled here in Oranjezicht, the mountain looming steeply to her right, as if at any minute to topple onto the boxy houses glinting in the sun below its peak. From the shaded balcony, she could see far below into the basin of the bay, watch the sails far out on the horizon dip and rise. It was this hesitation that allowed him entrance. He handed her the flowers. Roses, she noticed, with bitterness. He knew roses were her favourite, and red. Buds tight, still dew-fresh. Expensive, prized in Africa for their temperamental growth, their sullen reluctance to proliferate as they did in cooler climes. Playing hard to get, she thought, had its own rewards. It was a game she had never had the inclination to play. It had always struck her as dishonest, requiring levels of artifice and cunning she felt lacking in her makeup. Perhaps this had been her first mistake. If she had laughed at Simon when he said he loved her, if she had ignored Jonnie’s advances, perhaps they would have valued her more.
Like roses in a hot, dry land.
He was inside. She closed the door, smelled the buds in vain for any fragrance.
“Thank you,” she said, for want of words. “It’ll be a waste, though, you know, I leave tonight.”
“I know,” he said, looking out the window of the lounge, and she wondered how.
The mountain’s surface was clear to see in all its rugged outcrops and narrow pines. The apartment was dark against the brilliance of the sun outside, and when he turned, his face was set in shadow, his expression unreadable.
“I’ll put these in water,” she said and left him, went to the tiny kitchen with its black-and-white tiled floor and retro fridge. She ran water in the stainless steel sink, laid the roses in the pool that formed beneath the taps. They would open after she was gone, soft velveteen petals curling slightly at the edges, for no one to admire. Later still they would fold and rust, shrivelling to a desiccated end, brown and fragile, crumbling to the touch. There was a taste of bile in her throat. She was still in love with him.
She wants to tell him that it took Europe to free her from him. A full five years before she could swear it was a week since she had thought of him, and relief washing over her for it. And Michael helping her forget. She misses Michael so acutely now, she feels her chest contract with pain. But she won’t call Michael again, she knows. There’s no point.
She felt him enter the kitchen behind her, her senses attuned to his presence. She asked him why he had come, watching the tap drip into the steel sink of roses. Click, clock, click, the drops fell. With an echo into the bowl. A watery echo, like the click of Xhosa at the back of a spit-filled mouth.
“We never meant it to happen,” he said into the space above her head. “We fought it. Both of us, Ginnia. Especially Viv.”
She stood completely still, facing away from him, although she wanted to scream, to turn and throw his flowers in his face, hoping the thorns would tear at his flesh the way his words were cutting into hers.
“We never meant to hurt you, Gin. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” whispers Gin now, fleetingly surprised to find she means it. It had all been for nothing. The measure of pain she had endured might have found some balance had she known it was worth it. That her pain was equalled by his resultant happiness. Or Viv’s. “I’m sorry you’re not happy.”
Jonnie grabs her hand like a man reprieved. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” An old joviality to his voice. “That Friday, the day the police came! You remember?”
She could never forget. The thirteenth of May, 6.30 knock, the police had come questioning. Questioning her right to words, her right to live with whom she chose. Ultimately it was what irked her most, the final insensitivity. She had lived with the pettiness and the barring of words, newspapers smudged in black blocks of censored sentences, paragraphs of paranoia, line after line inked out of subversive existence. In taking Jonnie’s details, the policeman had been unable to spell neurologist. Rage had wintered these many years to a wry amusement.
Jonnie laughs again.
Gin stares down at their two hands, linked now, folded one within the other, her pale skin sheltered within the burned amber of his. It is a good sound to hear, his laugh, and lifts suddenly the mood between them. Odd how they could laugh about it now, when at the time the threat of imprisonment or detention without trial had hung so heavy in the air there had been little time for mirth. And ultimately he had not escaped that.
His bleep spurts again. “I must go,” he says, but not before he takes her telephone number, gives her his.
Now there is a renewed connection, now they will see each other again, now they will be friends.
34. GIN
Ellie does not fit again in the ten days that follow, and she is discharged with an outpatient appointment made for a fortnight later.
The day of the follow-up is a particularly cold Tuesday morning. Gin cannot remember such low temperatures for November in London. Ellie is swaddled in bright blue. Everyone, Gin supposes, will assume she is a boy. They wait in the over-heated blandness that is Hammersmith’s outpatients department. Patients sit in sickly-patterned chairs welded together in rows of red metal. As expected, there is a delay. Jonnie is seeing patients and he stops for a quick hello. It is odd to see him again, their meeting having melded into the surreal state Gin associates with Ellie’s birth and subsequent seizure. He leans in to smile at Ellie, whose eyes fix on him with that curious intensity of hers. The appointment was for noon, but it is two before Ellie’s name is called. She is due to be seen by Jonnie himself, not someone more junior, and Gin is surprised.
“I wanted to see her again,” he explains when she comments, but from the way he looks at her when he says this, Gin surmises he means her and not Ellie.
She blinks away, uncomfortable at the thought, looks out of the window onto the brick wall of the building alongside. His attention is too intrusive after her self-imposed isolation, and his presence brings memories, unwanted.
Jonnie questions Gin about Ellie’s feeding and sleeping patterns while he takes Ellie through a series of tests, weighing her, measuring her wriggling height, examining her reflexes, ocular response, and checking her ears. This last procedure Ellie takes exception to, and begins to cry. Before Gin can respond, Jonnie picks her up and cuddles her with one arm. He tickles her stomach, and Ellie stops crying, her face scrunching up with delight. Jonnie’s smile is endearing. Gin wishes she had his ease with Ellie. She holds out her arms to take her daughter from him, thanks him, and says goodbye. But Jonnie leaves the room with them, closing the door behind him. He walks with them to the reception desk, m
akes another appointment for a month’s time with the female clerk, who seems slightly flustered by this amount of personal attention for one patient in particular. He flirts mildly with the woman, who laughs readily, her skin darkening with pleasure. Gin is reminded once more of Jonnie’s social grace, the art he has of dealing with people, something she herself had always found difficult to master.
She takes the piece of paper, thanks the clerk and Jonnie, adjusts Ellie’s blanket, moves to leave. But Jonnie asks her to wait while he grabs his coat.
“You’ve no more patients?”
“You’re my last for today. Won’t be a moment.” He grins at her.
This move was deliberate on his part. Gin is unsure of her feelings and uncomfortably aware of the clerk’s scrutiny.
Jonnie returns, shrugging into a long leather coat, and throwing a striped scarf around his neck. He leads them to a sliding door and they exit from the heat of the hospital into a drab and freezing afternoon.
“God, I can’t get used to this cold. And these short days!” He shivers. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.” He points the way ahead.
“It’ll be better after the solstice,” Gin consoles. “It’s amazing how you notice the days actually lengthening. Minute by minute.”
He looks at her with such heat that she feels as if she is inside the hospital again. The pram butts against a misplaced concrete slab.
“I’ll push her,” he says, taking the pram with one hand. He crooks his elbow, inviting Gin to put her arm in his.
She feels awkward, but is too polite to refuse. Her woollen gloves slip on the smooth leather of his coat. Jonnie wears no gloves and she wonders if his hands are cold.
“Did you come by bus?” he asks as they near the main road that runs outside the hospital.
To their right are the distinctive cream-and-pinkish-brown parapets of Wormwood Scrubs prison. A disorderly queue has formed at the bus stop, waiting for buses that will be held up by the traffic that packs Du Cane Road. Exhaust fumes puff into the wintry air and wither away in the wind.
She shakes her head. “Walked. It’s not far.”
“I’ll walk you back then,” he says.
Gin starts to protest, then stops. She will be glad of the company. The first part of the journey back passes a bleak housing estate and although it is daylight, its deserted atmosphere depresses her.
It is a chilly walk. There are few people on the pavement and their path is unimpeded. He does not comment when her leg starts to cramp up, accentuating her limp. But she notices that he slows his pace. Her awkwardness at holding his arm has gone, and she leans on him slightly for support.
“You know what I miss?” he asks, as they veer left and then right.
“What?” queries Gin, hoping he will keep the conversation impersonal.
She is relieved then, when he answers, “Peppermint crisps.”
She cannot help laughing at his longing for the sweet from home, slivers of mint cracknel pressed between two layers of milk chocolate. The conversation centres on food while they walk the wide pavement, into the wind. She and Jonnie reminisce about watermelons dripping with juice on summer sand, the firm flesh of yellow peaches under the shade of bluegum trees, and the peppered kick of biltong. He is lyrical in his remembrance; roasted crab on a beach braai, surf sounding into the night, fish straight from the Indian Ocean served with sloppy chips too hot to eat, drizzled with salt and tart with vinegar, and the green cane cut fresh from the sugar plantations, so sweet it would make your teeth ache. Eventually Gin puts him out of his misery and tells him there are shops selling South African delicacies if he so desires.
“That wasn’t the case when I arrived,” she continues, “you know, the first Christmas I was here, Michael and I went searching for a bottle of wine from home.” They had found one, at long last, but only after the wary proprietor had looked around fearfully while pulling a fine Cabernet Sauvignon from beneath his counter.
Jonnie laughs heartily. “And I bet it cost the earth!”
She nods, then sobers, “I found people just assumed I was a white racist, either way.” Some had actively been aggressive, others more circumspect, sidling up to tell her that “her” government had the right idea. A crowded bus passes them, windows steamed. “But on the whole, I’ve been very fortunate. People in London kind of accept you as a Londoner mostly, irrespective of where you’re from.”
They walk over the pedestrian crossing and up St Quintin’s Avenue, past a nursing home that used to be a hospital, past the roundabout, down St Mark’s Road, and up Cambridge Gardens to reach Ladbroke Grove. Trees stripped naked for the season stick black fingers up into a bleached sky. She asks him if he has been to the market that runs the length of Portobello Road and he shakes his head.
“We’ve seen some of the sights. But I started work almost straight-away. And we’ve been settling in.” He lives further out, he tells her, the other side of the hospital, but within walking distance of it.
“We can go past the market, then,” she offers. “It’s not as busy as on the weekend.” She leads them across the Grove, Jonnie still pushing the pram, and cuts into the market near the canopy-covered Green, empty now on a Tuesday. Come Sunday it will be packed. “Is your wife also a doctor?”
The idea seems to amuse him. “No, she’s not working right now. But she trained as a child therapist.”
“How did you meet?”
“My mother,” he says after a pause. He gives a short laugh. “She finally found me a nice Muslim girl.”
Gin wonders how his mother had reacted towards Viv but says nothing. They reach the fruit and vegetable sellers, stalls stacked high with produce, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, curly kale, tomatoes clinging to the green vine, broccoli tinged with purple florets.
Jonnie slows the pram and stops at one of the stalls. “This is great,” he enthuses. He buys four avocados, a couple of thick-skinned oranges, and ten red apples. The stallholder wraps them in brown paper bags and Jonnie stacks them on Ellie’s pram.
Gin zigzags off the Portobello, passing colourful houses four stories high. Yellow, cream, lime, cream again, white, blue, aubergine, white again, and scarlet.
“Reminds me of the houses in the Bo-Kaap,” remarks Jonnie, “only taller.”
It is only polite to invite him in to her blue house on the Hill. He walks around, admires the mature garden, says he likes the spacious feel of the house. She makes him tea while he amuses Ellie.
“There’s nothing of you in her,” he notes suddenly, then reflects. “No, wait, she has the same shape mouth as you.”
Gin makes a face at him as she hands him his mug. He smiles at her, and her heart tugs. She had forgotten how beguiling a smile.
“In fact,” he says slowly, and his eyes glint, “she’s so dark she could have been mine.”
She knows he is teasing her, but there is a tone of regret in his words, for time that can never be recaptured. It is a tone like Simon’s, that last day.
I’ve something to tell you, Gin.
A restless yearning forms.
Something I should have told you ages ago.
A yearning that will be endless, now.
35. VIVIENNE
Michael hugs Viv so hard that her eyes water. His delight is obvious as he ushers her and Nick into his flat. It is in the same courtyard complex where Gin had lived. Viv watches the two men size each other up as she introduces them. They shake hands.
“It’s a mirror image of the one Gin had,” says Michael when she comments. He leads them off the short hall into a square, comfortably furnished lounge. It is cool inside, a relief from the heat.
“I never knew her then,” says Viv, “I never saw her flat. I just know it’s the one on the end. She told me.” Viv sinks thankfully into an armchair. They had made an early start this morning, and it is good to be out of the car.
“It’s great,” says Michael, “I get to walk to lectures.” He heads into the kitchen to make them tea.
>
Not like the farm, out of town and subject to the vagaries of weather, the steep incline of road. Gabe lurks everywhere in this town for her, she thinks, but especially on the farm. She is glad Michael hadn’t moved back there.
There is so much to catch up on with Michael. His move here, the preparation for the coming year, her life, the girls. He sounds excited and Viv thinks he looks younger than when she last saw him. Years ago now. He does not talk about his divorce, and she presumes this is because of Nick’s presence. She wishes she and Michael had time to talk properly, and alone. A sense of disloyalty to Nick catches her unawares. It is disquieting, this attachment to the man.
“Anyhow,” says Michael, “I thought you’d only be up in the New Year. Didn’t you want to show Abbie around the university or something?”
“Oh yes. I will be back then.” She looks quickly at Nick. “This is just a pre-Christmas break. The girls are at my mom’s.” She cannot tell Michael of that terrible day in the sunroom, nor of the tentative truce she and Abbie had made. It had been a difficult few months. After Jonnie had left, the girls had naturally spent more time at home, and but for that day, she might have let Nick into her life more. Instead she had been conscious of Abbie’s antagonism, and time with Nick had become a snatched luxury. It was Nick who suggested the break when the girls went off to her mother’s. “Anyhow, since Port Alfred is so close, we thought we’d stop in on you.”