The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  You stopped and stared out to sea. I stood by your side, noting silently that you were a few inches taller than me. At one point, a strand of your hair slid across my cheek. It was the first and only time our bodies touched that day.

  “Why?” you said. Actually, I thought you said “I”. I waited for more but I could barely hear you above the waves. I leaned in. You shuffled away.

  “What?”

  “Why? Why did you come now?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to see you. I needed to see you. I thought it was time. I thought it was time for both of us.”

  I am sorry, Diane. It was such a terrible answer. My failure to express myself clearly that day is another reason why I had to write this long, long letter to you. I was too overwhelmed by your presence to be able to think clearly. How to put into words what I could barely explain to myself? I couldn’t tell you about Else without telling you about Stijn and I could not do that on an empty, cold beach near a spray-peppered pier, the very sight of which catapulted me back to that day on the pier in Felixstowe with Robert.

  “Okay. You needed to see me and now you’ve seen me. Is that enough to assuage whatever guilt or longing or long-delayed maternal instinct you’re feeling?”

  I flinched at your tone. Your eyes were hard on my face.

  “You have your father’s eyes.”

  I blurted it out without thinking.

  “No, these are my eyes, in my face. I am not yours or my father’s. You do not have a right to label any part of me.”

  You started walking again.

  “I don’t know how much they told you about us,” I said as I struggled to keep up, my feet feeling leaden and old on the wet sand. “They said you wanted to know at 18 and they gave you our names and where we were from. I don’t know whether they gave you much other information.”

  I thought you nodded. I rushed on, my words falling over each other in their haste to leap out and hold you back. I knew I was losing you.

  “So I am Lina, Lina Rose. Your father was Robert Stirling and he… well, he killed himself after the war, after you were born. We lived in St Albans. I gave you up because…”

  You turned around then.

  “Yes?”

  “Because I thought it was the only way I could survive. I thought it was the only way that we could survive. I wasn’t able to care for you. Robert died and my parents soon afterwards and… I was broken.”

  “But you were able to head off and make quite the career for yourself? Oh yes, I’ve looked you up in the archives at the library. You are quite the celebrity, Mother. Or should I call you Lina? Which name do you need most?”

  I bit my lip to hold back the tears. I hadn’t expected hugs and flowers but I wasn’t prepared for this either. It was stupid of me. How could I not have foreseen that you would feel as furious as I did when Robert died? More furious, in fact, because I had not died. I left. And to add insult to injury, I had not only survived, I had thrived.

  “I don’t need any name. You don’t have to call me anything. We don’t have to ever meet again if you don’t want to. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to meet. In case you needed it.”

  I still wasn’t saying what I wanted to say. I stamped my foot in frustration, the way I do now when the words on the page do not do what I thought they would do, what I told them to do.

  Do you remember what you said then, Diane? I imagine you do. It is not an easy thing for either of us to forget.

  “I don’t need any opportunities from you. I wish you’d piss off and leave me alone. You’ve had a look, I’m fine, I’ve grown up, no thanks to you, and there you go. You can head off again now, conscience soothed and do whatever the hell it is you do wherever the hell you want to do it. Yes, I looked you up and yes, I wanted to know who my real parents were, but it was nothing more than idle curiosity, Lina. I feel no connection to you. Why should I? You gave me up. You’re just a middle-aged, sun-wrinkled woman standing in the wind on a beach I don’t even like. You could be anyone. That’s what you wanted, I imagine. And whatever guilt that drove you here, rest assured. I don’t need it. I don’t need your guilt, I don’t need your interest and I don’t want you in my life. Okay?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, crying now. “I wish I could—”

  “What? Turn back time? But do you really? Don’t you really want to leave time as it was but nonetheless find yourself here as you are now with a more obliging, grateful daughter? I suppose you wanted me to hug you and cry on your shoulder. You’d have had a ready-made daughter and I’d have had another Mum and life would go on, broader and better than before? Isn’t that what you really want? Well, I’m afraid that is not on offer here today, Lina.”

  You stomped off up the beach, stumbling and slipping on the pebbles. I wanted to run after you, to hold you in my arms.

  “Diane! Wait, Diane!” I started after you and that’s when you yelled back: “My name is Maria. I am not your Diane. She doesn’t exist.”

  Nine months inside me, a birth, 14 months together, 30 minutes on a beach, a lifetime of wondering and now this long letter. Is it enough? Or is our connection too tenuous to bear the weight of my expectations, the weight of this letter, my last and best work? Diane, I was wrong. I was mistaken. I was weak. But I was also right and correct and strong. I have parallel universes inside me. We all do, I suppose. It is how we survive. We do what we must to survive. Can one be guilty if one didn’t have a choice? I hear that question echo through the ages, through me and Robert and Henry and you, yes you, Diane. Are you guilty for closing your heart to me? I will say no. I will absolve us all here because I truly believe that we are compelled by events beyond our control to do the things we do to build the lives we need.

  I left England the next day, flying back to Kenya in a daze. I believed I would never see you again and the knowledge punctured me. But it also liberated me. I had seen you, you were fine, you had grown up and you were making your own choices. I had not destroyed your life for I had seen you so wonderfully, incandescently alive. I was devastated and vindicated and I have never been able to reconcile these feelings. I returned to Ol Mlima, I worked on my book, I fell deeper in love with Stijn, I grew closer to Else, I started to dye my greying hair, I worried about my expanding waist, I endured the menopause and I continued to thrive, my darling. I am sorry.

  That would probably have been the end of my story but for one persistent mosquito and the bite I received while writing on our veranda one evening in March, 1973. A few days later, Stijn flew to the coast to visit some of his suppliers. He was also going to spend a few nights with some Dutch friends in Watamu before flying back. He left on Wednesday, March 13th. I already felt a little off and my brain seemed fuzzy but I put it down to too many hours at the typewriter and too many glasses of gin the night before. By the next day, my bones were aching, my head was pounding and I could feel a fever drilling down to the very core of me. I knew it was malaria. Else put me to bed and sent one of the guards to buy quinine in the pharmacy in Naivasha. It took him three hours to make the trip and by the time he got back, I was almost delirious. I took the quinine but instead of getting better, I got worse. My body was wracked by chills and then scalded by fever, over and over again, the same malicious cycle until I felt as though I would actually quite like to die.

  On the 15th, Else found a doctor who could come to the farm. He was a retired army medic from Somerset, a gruff man with an extravagant moustache who came with no instruments, no time and no bedside manner.

  “Well, I can’t see why you had to call me at all,” he scolded Else as she stood by the bed. He had taken my temperature, looked in my eyes and ears and asked me to lift my arms and move my head from side to side. I was shaking with the cold, but sweat was still pouring off me. At least, the delirium that came with the fever had lifted for a while. I could concentrate fully on what he was saying.

  “It’s perfectly clear that she has cerebral malaria. You need to get her to a hospital and yo
u need to do it now. Any fool could have told you that.”

  I tried to raise myself from the pillows so I could tell the old curmudgeon not to speak to Else like that. I could see that she was biting her lip to hold back the tears. I felt dreadful for having put her in such a position, disdained by a pickled geriatric who had spent too much time telling too many people what to do.

  And that is why I said what I did. No good deed ever goes unpunished, Diane. That is the thing to remember.

  “Don’t be so rude. She’s doing her best. Please Else, try to get hold of your father. He can come back and take care of me. If he comes tonight, he can take me to Nairobi tomorrow. I don’t want you to have to worry about it. Call him and I can explain everything to him.”

  The doctor harrumphed and muttered something about the dangers of delaying but I had no desire to humour his arrogance.

  “I’ll explain to Stijn when you call him. He can talk to me and then he’ll come and we’ll go to Nairobi in the morning. Okay?”

  Else nodded, the doctor left and everything was not okay.

  Twenty minutes later, I fell into a fever and when I woke up, Else had called Stijn, he was on his way and I had set in motion a chain of events that would change my life again. That afternoon, the oppressive heat that had been building above our heads, pushing the acacia trees and the euphorbia deeper into the ground, cracked, sending shards of lightning and thunderbolts shooting across the bush. I drifted in and out of consciousness, alternately shivering and sweating, straining in my more lucid moments to hear a plane flying overhead, or a car on the gravel drive. By mid-afternoon, rain was pounding on the corrugated iron roof. The noise killed all thought, drumming me deeper into delirium so that my dreams were full of marauding hooves, strangers hammering at locked doors and armies storming down hills. And bombs, of course. Bombs squealing as they fell as though they too were horrified by what they were doing.

  When I woke up hours later, I was alone, exhausted but free from fever. I felt as though I’d been vigorously washed and wrung out by ladies with beefy arms and hardened faces, the tight-faced women who sat on doorsteps on Hatfield Road when I was a child. I sat up, my head spinning. Then, I heard it: an absolute silence. The rainstorm had subsided but it was more than that. I could hear my own breathing; I could hear my own heart.

  I hauled myself out of bed and pulled myself along until I found my feet again and could reach the door. I headed down the corridor, peeking into Else’s room as I passed. It was empty. I continued down the corridor and heard something. The slightest of sounds, barely a movement of the air around me, but I heard it. I got to the rain-dimmed living room and wondered why Joshua had not lit the lamps, why the grate was empty. Something moved on the veranda and I pulled back the French doors. The air was rich and wet and full of false promise. The clouds had broken and the setting sun had turned the fresh puddles into mirrors. Grasshoppers were clicking, somewhere an animal brayed and heavy drops were still falling from the sloping roof. Under the familiar sounds of a rain-drenched land, I heard Else sobbing quietly. She was on a chair in the corner and the rainwater had pooled at her feet so that for a moment I thought she was sitting in a puddle of her own tears. She had pulled up her legs and placed her arms on top and her head on top of that. It was as though she was trying to make herself as small as possible. But it didn’t matter. Bad news, Fate, destiny, call it what you will, it had already found her.

  Sobbing and gulping for air, she told me what had happened as the sun set in a blaze of red-and-gold so that it seemed like all that colour bleeding into the bush was coming from our pain. Stijn was dead, she said. The police had been. They’d found the plane in the foothills of Mount Kenya. He must have been blown off course, they said. Or he’d deviated from the route to avoid the storm, they said. He might not have known how bad it was, they said. Especially if he set off in a hurry, without making all the required final checks, they said. Else spoke in a flat voice. I knew that sound.

  I comforted her as best I could. Mary came silently, placing a tray with a teapot and two cups on the table. She had already adjusted. We were two now and there would be no need for three cups any more. Mary brought me a blanket to wrap around my shoulders and her brow creased as she whispered that we should perhaps move inside. But Else and I stayed where we were, squeezed into the same wicker chair, arms locked around each other, until the sun had gone and the moon rose, proving that the world would continue even without Stijn in it.

  They brought his body home the next day. Mary and Joshua lined up with the rest of the staff as the flatbed truck with the plain pine coffin lashed onto the back struggled through the deep puddles gouged into the gravel driveway. It was raining again, the sky was low, squeezing the light out of the air so that all around us the land seemed quelled and colourless. Stijn’s friend and business partner Wilhelm, a gruff giant of a man adored by both Else and Stijn, jumped out of the driver’s seat and took off his broad-brimmed hat as he came across to where Else and I were waiting on the veranda. He shook my hand solemnly and then Else threw herself into his arms.

  I heard him whisper to her in Dutch, the same words over and over. There was no one to comfort me, not this time. I longed to feel Charlotte’s arms around me, more than I ever had since her death. But I knew with excruciating clarity that there would never more be any arms to hold me. That’s when I broke down, startling Else and Wilhelm with my sudden sobbing. Else stumbled over to me and tried to pull me into an embrace, but I couldn’t bear it. I walked away, out into the rain, up to the truck, caring not that everyone’s eyes were on me, all watching as I placed my hand on the box and whispered: “I’m sorry, so very sorry, Stijn.”

  If I hadn’t sat out on the veranda that night to write, if I hadn’t fallen ill, if I hadn’t urged Else to call him, to summon him home. As I bent over the coffin, my forehead on the wooden lid, I tried to remember what our last words to each other were. He’d kissed me softly on the lips as he walked through the kitchen. I think he said, “See you later”, but it could have been “Goodbye”. I couldn’t remember if he’d used my name. Did I tell him I loved him? Sometimes I did but I couldn’t remember now. Stijn rarely said those words and never as a goodbye. It was simply not in his nature.

  Later, Wilhem told us that no one was quite sure how Stijn drifted off course, although they suspected the plane might have been hit by lightning and that that affected the controls. I insisted on seeing the body. Else declined.

  “I do not need to see his body, Lina. If you are happy to do it, please go ahead but then close the coffin on him. I do not need to see him now to remember him. I have all the memories I need. What is in that box is nothing more than a shell. I do not want that to be how I remember him. I do not need to go there to say goodbye. I am going to go to the waterhole to say goodbye to him in my own way.”

  She left with Wilhelm. As ever, she carried her rifle and she did not take the arm he offered, instead walking ahead of him, her long legs propelling her across the lawn so that he was forced to run to keep up. I hoped he would be able to catch her but Else could be stubborn. Like her father, she cherished her independence. She needed space as he had done. That was why they were here, on the banks of a giant lake in a wilderness so vast, it made the flower farm seem like a misplaced English front garden.

  I headed back into the house, shivering as the malaria pulsed the last of its deadly load through my blood. The staff had carried the coffin into the dining room and surrounded it with tall glass vases filled with birds of paradise from the garden and roses from the greenhouses. They must have been preparing all day. A few elderly Samburu women were clustered in a corner, singing. When I came in, they rose to their feet and shuffled out, moving together like a single being. They did not look at me directly, understanding no doubt that my grief needed no witnesses. Their crooning and keening was meant to fill the house and perhaps to distract me from the screaming inside my head. I had never understood this tradition before. I did now.
r />   The staff had taken the lid off the coffin. Stijn’s hands were bandaged and there was an unreal sheen to his face. His features seemed to have melted at the edges so that in death, he looked older. He looked dead. It was also because of that damned suit. Someone – I did not know who – had dressed him in the cream suit he was wearing when we first met in Nairobi. It was his one suit and all the years we were together, he only wore it a handful of times for weddings, meetings with government ministers and, of course, funerals. He cared nothing for the tradition of wearing black. He said he couldn’t think of anything less meaningful and that was that. He didn’t expand.

  As I stood looking at him, I realised how much I was going to miss his unflinching certainty, the terse one-liners that tested my patience but also made me feel that the world might actually make sense. My legs felt weak, my heart was racing and tears were flowing down my cheeks. I went to one of the vases, pulled out a Lina rose and laid it on top of his bandaged hands.

  “Safari njema,” I said. “Travel well, Stijn. I thought we would be together until the end. Such a stupid idea, especially for me, but I did really think that.”

  CHAPTER 27

  We buried Stijn under a whistling thorn tree on a hill at the edge of the farm. I continued writing my book at his graveside, sitting in the tree’s shade at a small wooden table that Joshua carried from the house for me. I didn’t know what else to do, Diane. So for two months, I sat by his side, typing and talking and finding solace in the silence that would forever more be his answer to all of my questions. It was a rich silence: grasses rustling, the plaintive whistle of the wind passing through the black gourd-like thorns above me, the shrieking of a fish eagle swerving over the lake. Stijn’s silence was the crackling quiet of the bush. His strength found its reflection in the power of the sun. The sight of animals lolloping to the waterhole below reminded me of his slow smile as he raised binoculars to his eyes.