The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  For a while we walked in silence. That was the thing with Else and Stijn. They never demanded conversation for its own sake. I must admit I found it by turn exhilarating and frustrating, depending on my mood. Sometimes their comfortable calm could weigh heavy on someone like me. Sometimes after an evening on the veranda together, I would get to bed and realise I had been talking almost exclusively to myself. I had mistaken their smiles for interventions. It made me feel silly and very secure at the same time.

  “Do you plan to stay here forever, doing your father’s books?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t really like to make plans,” Else said, her eyes sweeping the horizon as we talked. There should be no elephants around but one couldn’t rule out the possibility of a cheetah or leopard deciding to wander into the area to hunt. Our askari, or guards, tended to keep an eye on such things and alert us when there were new dangers but there always had to be a first sighting.

  “I love it here. I tried Holland and that wasn’t so good. I will stay here as long as he will have me, I suppose. I don’t want to be anywhere else and I am quite happy to help with the flowers.”

  “What about your mother? What does she think?”

  “My mother has her own life now. She has married again, she has a fine house in The Hague. She is happy and I am happy for her. But I don’t want to live her life any more.”

  Else spoke without rancour or bitterness or any negative emotion that I could discern. I shook my head in wonder.

  “You do not think this is good?” she asked, turning to me.

  “No, I think it is great. You seem to have a very mature relationship with your parents.”

  “I don’t really see them as parents. Not any more. They are just very nice people that I like to spend time with. Was it not the same for you with your parents?”

  I tried to answer as honestly and briefly as I could – I was still being circumspect even then, Diane. Somewhat to my surprise, I concluded that I had always seen them first and foremost as parents. I felt a little guilty.

  “Although, I never called my mother anything other than ‘Charlotte’,” I added. “I never knew why. It was just our way.”

  “I like it,” Else said. “It seems better than defining our parents by their roles. Better to allow them to be their own people, their real selves. Maybe if we all called our parents by their names, we would have better relationships because there would not be all the expectations that come with the job descriptions.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “So, do you see Stijn as a man first and your father second?”

  “I think so now. I hope so,” she said, turning her grey eyes on me. “I like to think I feel for him as I do because of who he is and not just because of what he did for me, as my father.”

  “That’s ambitious,” I said. “I wonder if it is possible as a parent to ever see your child as anything other than your child?”

  “You’ll have to ask my father when he comes back. It’ll give you something to talk about to break the ice after your argument,” she said, smiling again.

  We had reached the scraggy bluff overlooking the waterhole. We sat in the grass and as the sun began to set, we watched as zebras, gazelles and baboons came to drink, filling the damp, heavy air with their whinnies and cries and soothing my soul so that when I came back to the house, I wrote the opening pages of Under the Canopy in just over an hour. If you have read the book, you will now realise that I lifted some lines straight from that conversation with Else. I thrilled to the notion that we could somehow step outside our designated roles by rejecting the associated nomenclature. It was not just because Else’s idea – that we could be more than our relationships – offered a justification for, or at least a mitigation of, my own actions. It was the dizzying freedom implicit in the concept. Sitting at that waterhole, watching zebras tiptoe delicately to the edge as baboons hooted around them, I felt as though everything had turned out all right. It was as though I had been given permission to enjoy my life. Or rather to finally acknowledge that I was enjoying my life, despite my guilt over what I had done. This slender, dark-haired Dutch girl with her frank eyes and singsong voice seemed to be saying it was okay.

  When Stijn came back, I didn’t ask him if he would always only see Else as his child. We would never have that kind of discussion and that was fine. Instead, I apologised and told him, shyly, that I had started to write a book.

  “That is very good,” he said. “That is what you were meant to do. And I think you know that too.”

  Those words, and his many encouraging comments afterwards, kept me going as I slowly pieced together that first novel. I wrote with abandon and deleted with equal fervour, with no thought of publication, just because it was the something to do that I had always been meant to do. I never completely recaptured that feeling of weightlessness in my subsequent novels. That is to be expected, I suppose. One’s first book is always written out of a kind of delirious excitement, a child-like wonder at the magic and your role as magician. All the books that come after are burdened by the fear that comes with producing something, anything to order.

  Despite Stijn’s assertion that I was fulfilling my destiny, a question nagged at me, tugging at my brain so that I found myself writing ever more furiously, and if I am honest, ever more brilliantly just to silence it. Was I meant to do this to the detriment of all else? Did I have to abandon you in order to be able to fulfil my destiny as a writer? Even as I tried to quash the question, I heard an answer ring loud in the dark corners of my brain: Yes, this is what had to happen and you’d better make damn sure you succeed after paying so high a price.

  I tried to tell Stijn how I felt, obliquely without giving too much away. I needed to voice what I was beginning to realise was the question at the very heart of my existence.

  One evening, we were sitting on the veranda and the air was heavy with the promise of rain, the way you can sometimes feel a row brewing before a single word has been said. I had given Stijn my latest chapters and he was reading them silently as I paced up and down, swatting at mosquitoes, lighting more coils and generally making a nuisance of myself. I had to force myself not to look at his face as he rustled through the pages. That way madness lay. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go inside and leave him in peace but neither did I want to inadvertently catch any twitch of the lips or raising of eyebrows that might puncture the fragile self-confidence that is the only thing that separates a writer from a dreamer.

  Finally, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him look up and remove his glasses.

  “It is good. I like it. Maybe a bit too wordy at first but it gets better as you go along. Well done, Lina.”

  My heart sank. Of course, one never hears the praise, however much one tries to be mature and balanced and receptive. I only heard “wordy”. I stomped to the wicker sofa beside his chair and collapsed onto it, covering my face with my hands and moaning, “I knew it was rubbish. I knew it.”

  When I removed my hands, Stijn was grinning at me. He swung his lanky frame onto the sofa, took my hands in his and turned what I called his grey headlamps full-beam onto me.

  “Even for you, Lina, this is ridiculous. I said it was good. I made a small critic, is that what you call it?”

  “Criticism,” I said. “And no criticism can ever be small. I knew it, I knew I was out of my depth.”

  “You are not out of your depth. But you are learning to swim and you can only try to improve. That is all I was saying.”

  “You don’t understand,” I cried, pulling my hands away. I was worn out after a sleepless night, tormented by mosquitoes and buzzing self-doubt, and I had struggled all day with writing what I hoped would be the climax of the book. Of course, it wasn’t. If I remember correctly, I scrapped that whole section a few weeks later. I was also quite drunk having decided at around 4 o’clock that a gin and tonic might oil whatever jammed synapses were holding up my creative process. Stijn, as ever, was right in the path of this toxic current.


  “I have to be good at this,” I yelled. “There is nothing else. I thought being a good journalist was enough but I didn’t change anything really. It didn’t matter. Not in the grand scheme of things. So, this is my last chance.”

  “Lina, you are making no sense. Your last chance at what? And why last? Are you planning to leave, to go somewhere else? Are you dying?”

  “No, you fool,” I said, standing up and pacing and hating myself for pacing like a classic hysterical woman. It was as though I couldn’t even live without being clichéd, much less write without using clichés.

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it has taken to get here, to get to this moment, to be on the cusp of doing something that might, just might, justify everything else. If I am meant to do this but I am still not good enough to stand apart, where does that leave me? What does that say about the life I have lived, the people who had to die so that I could go on, the people I lost, the sacrifices that I and everyone else made so that this life could be what I wanted it to be?”

  Stijn said nothing. He always let me vent and not just because he knew I would anyway, with or without interruptions. I believe he also kept quiet because he wanted to really listen, to fully understand what I was trying to say. He was that rare creature who does not need to be talking or doing to know that he exists. He never needed an audience to prove to himself who he was.

  “You know, Lina, everyone who survived the war lived because others died. That is the nature of life. But it is the nature of life even in peacetime. You miss a plane and someone dies in the seat that would have been yours. You leave the house earlier than usual and the car that was travelling too fast smashes into someone else. It does not mean that your life is more valuable or that those who died were less valuable. It does not mean that you have to do something wonderful. It may be difficult to accept but there is no meaning of that kind. These are just things that happen. Death is just a thing that happens, like having blue eyes or finding a coin in the road.”

  I almost told him then, Diane. That was the moment to tell this strong man that I had had a daughter, as he had, but that I had abandoned her because I believed there was no other way, because I didn’t have a partner to whom I could have passed the burden for however long it took me to pull myself together and rediscover the maternal love that society demanded of me. But I didn’t tell him, Diane. I didn’t have the courage of my convictions, if indeed we can truly believe that my conviction was that I had had no choice. I suppose we must conclude from all I have written here that I have never been as sure of my innocence as I pretended at the start of this letter. Maybe I am not as free-thinking as I believed. Maybe I always knew what I did was wrong. A sin against motherhood, against you, against a society that could not survive if all women behaved as I did.

  In truth, Diane, I have never been able to disentangle my own reckoning from the reckoning of society. I have tried; I have faked nonchalance, I have run away, I have reinvented myself, but in the end I have never managed to quash those voices that said, and still say, that I did wrong.

  At that moment, on the veranda in Kenya, I didn’t believe that Stijn could manage it either. And as the years went by, it became harder and harder to run the risk that he would not understand, that he would not forgive. To tell him would be to become another in his eyes – a mother, worse, an absent mother. He might doubt my capacity for love. I could not bear the thought.

  And so that day and all the days that followed, I stayed silent. I hid my biggest secret from the man I loved and we were happy. We created a life for ourselves there in the Kenyan bush. Might it have been otherwise if our meeting in Brighton had ended differently, Diane? Perhaps. But these are the parallel tracks that run alongside our lives, the paths we didn’t take. Maybe there is another Lina – a quieter, calmer, less successful, more rounded Lina – walking along one of those paths. If so, I wish her well. In all honesty though, I still don’t believe I could travel beside her.

  CHAPTER 26

  It is time to revisit our meeting in Brighton, Diane. It is the only shared memory we have as I can’t imagine you still remember those months we spent together at the beginning of our story. Do you? I wish you were here beside me to answer my questions directly. I have not heard from you so I assume that means I failed to convince you to come and see me. I did not win you over, despite my lauded writing skills. Was it the emotion you found wanting? Never mind. The moment has passed. I always suspected this would be a monologue. Here is my side of the Brighton meeting. For this part of the manuscript, you will be my editor. I hope you have your red pen at the ready.

  Why did I decide to seek you out in 1967? I had built a new life for myself in Kenya. The book was coming along nicely. I was becoming happier with what I had written and more than that, I knew, despite my doubts and my regular ranting to Stijn, that I would finish it. Publication was still a dream but I suppose the thought was there.

  In the end, it was this sense of fulfilment, of contentment, that spurred me to get your address and telephone number from the adoption agency and to return to England to see you. The agency told me very little, stressing that you might not want to see me and that that was your prerogative. I detected a note of disapproval in the brief letter they sent me. I imagined a stern-faced woman with tight curls and tighter lips angrily typing and commenting about women who wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

  Something else was driving me. Else. I was growing closer to her and increasingly, unforgivably, I found myself searching her face for signs of the child I had given up. One day, we were eating sandwiches on the roof of Stijn’s Land Rover in the Aberdare National Park, keeping our eyes peeled for elephants and buffalo. Else was giggling at one of Stijn’s jokes, her hair was escaping in tendrils from the bun at the back of her head and the hot weather had brought out the freckles across the bridge of her nose. As I looked from Stijn to his daughter, I realised that I was in love with both of them. I was in love with an ‘us’ as I had been with Robert when I believed that together we were more than ourselves, that we were indestructible. I felt my throat constrict. I coughed loudly and they both looked anxiously at me. I waved away their concern, grabbing Stijn’s bottle of Tusker beer and gulping deeply. I looked again at Else. I found myself wondering if your hair had darkened, if you had freckles, if you ever laughed with such abandon that your mouth fell open. I knew what I had to do. Before I could fall in love any further, I had to try to see you. You had to be real to me so that I could not easily replace you with another woman.

  I flew into Heathrow in mid-May and stayed at a hotel near the airport. I wasn’t sure if you would agree to see me and I didn’t know what I would do if you refused. I could go to St Albans and visit the graves of my dead, I could travel into London, or I could turn on my heel and return to Kenya. All I really wanted was to see you. I couldn’t think beyond that and as I wandered around the terminal, trying to find my way to the taxi rank, I realised I was not sure if I dared venture any further into a country that had changed so much since I left it almost two decades before. My life in Kenya still had a nebulous quality. I worried that if I ventured too far I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to the wardrobe and the door that had magically opened to offer me a new life of sunshine, flowers and Stijn.

  Later in the hotel, my hands shook as I dialled your number. It rang three times. Do you remember? Who did you think it was? Were you expecting another call? I closed my eyes as I waited. Surely, there would be an immediate connection. Surely an image of you would flash before my eyes. Wasn’t that what blood was for?

  You answered and I felt a rush of the most debilitating shame twinned with a gut-wrenching joy. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and saw your face when I gave you away. I sat down heavily on the bed. I would have hung up but it would have required superhuman strength to prise my white fingers from the phone.

  “Hello?” Your voice was testier now, hurried. I had put you out already.

  Do y
ou remember what I said, Diane? I can’t. I remember silences. I think I begged. You agreed but you were reluctant. I felt like you were saying yes to get me off the phone, out of your life again. But I was too grateful to worry about my dignity.

  Two days later, I waited in front of the Odeon on the seafront at Brighton. I didn’t think you would come. I was wearing a red rose in my buttonhole. I had brought it all the way from Ol Mlima because I knew I would need to suggest something when you asked how you would recognise me. I thought one of Stijn’s roses would be a good omen. It was, of course, a loaded choice.

  I was looking the other way when someone said: “Lina?”

  I wish I could say I recognised you straight away. That would be a lie. Later, I found myself in your terse laugh, I saw Robert in your eyes and around your lips and chin, but in that moment, as you stood an arm’s length from me, you were just a stranger, someone who could have asked me for the time and who I might have remembered later because of your clear unflinching gaze and the strong lines of your young face.

  We did not hug. We stood looking at each other. I suppose I will never know now what you were thinking. I can tell you what I thought. I thought, My God, she is so beautiful. She is alive. She is fine. She grew up. What is she thinking, my God, what is she thinking?

  After some awkward small talk – how was my hotel, did I like Kenya, how long was I staying, were you enjoying art school – we walked across the path and stumbled our way over the pebbles and onto the thin ledge of sand by the sea. It felt good to be doing something together. The noise of the pebbles underfoot, the wind in our ears and the waves rushing to shore filled the awkward silences. We walked along by the water for a while, you setting the pace, always a few steps ahead so that I struggled to keep up with your retreating back. I kept opening my mouth to speak but the words died on my lips. We were never going to relive two lives in a few hours, I reasoned, and in the end, we did not have even that much time.