Freeing Grace (17 page)

Eventually, she glanced back towards the campsite. A tall old guy was emerging from the trees, wearing ragged shorts and holding up two magnificent silvery fish in each hand. She waded ashore and greeted him in Swahili. There was a fair amount of nodding and smiling, and they both headed off to the kitchen to complete the deal. I watched as they wandered up the path, talking quietly. I kept them in sight until the white cloth of her shirt had disappeared behind the glowing ivory and green of a bush. As she passed, a chattering swarm of little yellow birds burst from the leaves.

It was as though she had been here all her life. These were her colours and her sounds; this was her air. It was difficult to imagine her making meat pies in a red and black farmhouse near Ipswich, with beeswax on the floor and mothballs in the cupboards.

After a swim I strolled up to the bar, where Hamisi gave me some coffee. You could almost smell the heat: dust, seaweed, and an exotic sweetness I’d noticed as soon as I stepped off the plane. Over at the campsite, people were wandering to the showers and back, or boiling kettles on paraffin rings. The pace was gentle, the light clear; it was like floating in a beautiful, drug-induced dream. Even the sea seemed to move in slow motion.

It couldn’t last, of course. Progress and politics and human greed had to catch up eventually, even here, and tear it all apart. Kulala Beach couldn’t hold out forever. Perhaps drought would destroy it. Perhaps disease, or riot, or war. Or maybe a concrete crop of foreign-owned resorts. They’d put up a barbed-wire fence, and armed guards would beat up the dignified old fisherman if he came near.

I took a bottle of water back to my private cliff among the trees, grabbed my map and guidebook from the cabin, and sat with my back against the door. Briskly, humming boldly to myself, I looked up Mount Kenya. I’d found Mrs H, now. My life was my own.

Yep. I was out of there.

I stared at the same page for half an hour, and I didn’t learn anything about Mount Kenya. I was still thinking about Matt. And Deborah, thigh-deep in the waves at sunrise.

A small sound on the sandy path. A pair of bare, dusty feet. She’d showered and wrapped one of those pieces of tie-dyed cloth around herself—bright primary colours—with another one as a belt. She sat down on a rock, facing the sea. A wisp of honey-coloured hair was blowing across her mouth. I wanted to brush it away for her.

‘Read it?’ she asked.

‘Yep. Every word.’

‘And?’

‘And I’m very glad it isn’t my problem.’

She jerked her head down towards the beach. ‘Come for a walk with me?’ Her voice was clear. Uncluttered. Like the chime of our bellbird, up in the rata.

I bet we set the campers gossiping. We wandered through the luminous shallows, right along to the end. The foam stretched in creamy arches around our ankles.

‘Are you still writing articles?’ I asked, when the silence became embarrassing.

For a second she looked startled. I think she’d forgotten I was there. ‘They’re hard to sell, nowadays,’ she replied absently, swishing her toes.

I found myself smiling. ‘Humanising these people for all the liberal lefty types.’

‘Ah, yes. That’s Lucy talking, isn’t it?’

A shoal of pin-sized fish scurried away from our shadows.

‘I’m not a brilliant journalist,’ she said suddenly. ‘But what I was trying to do was show how atrocity
works
, in practice; how the unimaginable becomes reality. I wanted people to, you know, recognise the monster within themselves. So they’d be on their guard against it.’

‘Not me,’ I argued, picking up a shell and skimming it out to sea. ‘I’m a lazy prick. Couldn’t be bothered to summon up enough hatred.’

She didn’t reply, just looked cynical. Her eyes matched the turquoise water.

‘You must have had to hear some harrowing stories,’ I said, forcing myself to look away and vowing to get a grip on myself.

‘And so should we all. We’re
all
responsible.’ She glanced sideways at me, a small smile at one corner of her mouth. ‘Even lazy pricks.’

I laughed. She scratched her nose, thinking. ‘I know what people’s images are of Africa. Child soldiers, starving babies, atrocity, corruption, AIDS.’

‘Or pretty sunsets and the odd elephant.’

She nodded. ‘Both are distortions. Reductions. Both deny the fun.’ She held her arms out wide, a tightrope walker. ‘The life. The courage. Anyway, this is my home. For a while at least, I want to be a part of it, not an observer. Which is convenient, because there’s not as much work for freelancers as there was.’

We’d reached the end of the beach, and she began to clamber purposefully over the rocks.

‘Hamisi tells me you’ve met Rod.’

‘Er . . . mm.’ I hauled myself up, scraped my shin on a razor-sharp rock, and swore under my breath as bright red blood cheerfully spurted out. ‘Nice guy.’

‘And I imagine you’re wondering how Mrs Perry Harrison comes to be living on Kulala Beach?’

‘Not really.’

She made her fingers into a pistol and aimed it at my head. ‘If you say it’s none of your business, I’ll have to kill you.’

I jammed my hands into my pockets like a schoolboy, squinting up at the sky. The sun looked menacing now, like a vast white firework at the moment it explodes. And the colour was draining out of the day. Even the sea had faded to a rippling opal.

‘No good asking me for advice. I’m pathologically shallow,’ I said. ‘Really. A night out, couple of beers, swap a yarn or two—that’s all I’m good for.’

‘I don’t think so. If all that was true, you wouldn’t be here.’

I watched Mrs Harrison—a flash of brilliant colour—leaping easily from rock to rock, unruly hair swinging across her graceful shoulders. I tried to imagine her with Perry, hosting Christmas drinks by the fireplace at Coptree. And I couldn’t.

‘Okay,’ I called after her. ‘What’s the story?’

She stopped, poised on a massive boulder. Her mouth twitched, as though she’d just beaten me at a game of tennis and was trying not to crow. Then, abruptly, she disappeared.

Following her, I found myself dropping down into a perfect miniature bay, just a few feet across. The sand was flat, washed clean by the tide and shaded by bush that tumbled down to the edge. After the glare, it was a relief. She’d settled herself on a low stretch of rock, half covered by heavy vines. She tucked that strand of hair behind her ear.

‘Your shin’s bleeding.’

‘Won’t kill me.’ I splashed seawater over my leg. ‘Look, Lucy did fill me in a bit. Her mother dies, and before she’s cold in her grave, you swan in like a sort of gold-digging Mary Poppins.’

She laughed, without amusement. ‘I’d just turned twenty when I married Perry,’ she said. ‘And—yes—I was pregnant with Matt.’

‘Not a crime.’ I began to mess about in the sand with my big toe, digging up little shards of coral. Here I was on a tiny, isolated beach, with a fascinating woman dressed in nothing but a couple of bits of cloth. And all I did was dig in the sand with my toe. Pathetic. I was losing my grip.

‘It
was
a crime, though.’ She chewed her lower lip. A habit of hers. ‘I threw up on my wedding day.’

‘I know lots of blokes who’ve done that.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘This was
morning
sickness, Jake, not morning after the stag night. It wasn’t a fairytale for me, all lace and orange blossom and bashful blushes. They had to stop the car on the way to the registry office so I could chuck up. Not a great start to married life.’

‘No, I s’pose not . . . And it’s true about you being the nanny?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She sat up a little straighter. ‘I became Perry’s nanny within days of leaving boarding school. I was booked into a course in journalism, but Perry was an acquaintance of my dad’s, and he was desperate for help because his wife had just died. So I flew out to Germany, where he was based. It seemed a good opportunity to improve my German and save a bit of cash.’ She paused. ‘I was only seventeen. Lucy was four.’

I tried to picture a small Lucy. ‘I bet she was cute.’

Deborah lit up. ‘Unbe
liev
ably cute! Very clingy, because she’d just lost her mother. She used to creep into my bed in the night and snuggle up to me.’

‘Wasn’t compulsory to marry her dad, though, was it?’

Her voice took on a new resonance. ‘Ah, Perry. I was a dreamy, romantic soul, back then. I thought he was my Mr Rochester. He’s almost twenty years older than me, you know.’

‘Bloody pervert.’ I dumped myself on the sand near the foot of her rock, picked up a stick and began drawing circles.

She sounded surprised. ‘No. No, he’s not that.’

‘C’mon. You were a baby, for Pete’s sake. Seventeen! Bloody hell, that’s Matt’s age.’

‘True.’ She thought about it. ‘But Perry didn’t show any interest in me at first. He was grief-stricken about his precious Victoria. Ate in the officers’ mess and staggered home after I was in bed. For my part, I was completely infatuated within about three hours. He was an army officer—tall, dark and haunted. Very attractive combination. He became my whole world.’

‘He has a certain charisma. Even I can see that.’

‘He has.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, after several months he seemed to wake up. We started taking Lucy out together, like a family. Once I’d put her to bed, he would be waiting on the balcony with a bottle of wine. And one thing led to another.’

‘He pounced.’ I threw my stick away. I felt unreasonably sulky, for some reason. ‘On the balcony, I bet.’

‘He did. My dream came true. But . . . well. I was pretty naïve. I mean—you know—it wasn’t my first time, as they say, but nothing had prepared me for this. It was so grown-up. Such an onslaught.’

‘Told you he’s a pervert.’

‘No, no. Not a physical onslaught. But emotionally . . . He was the subject of all my romantic daydreams, but at the same time it was overwhelming. He wasn’t a callow youth of twenty who might move on after a week; he was an adult, a widower, a father. He kept saying how much he needed me.’

‘That’s heavy.’

‘Intense. Suddenly, I was in deep. Ever been out of your depth?’

‘I’m a good swimmer.’

She prodded me with a tanned, sandy foot, and I fought back a ridiculous urge to catch it in my hand. ‘I hardly think that strumpet Karin turning you down last night counts as a life-changing experience, Jake Kelly.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ignoring me. ‘We settled down like a family, the three of us, and I knew I ought to be blissfully happy, and I almost was. I was still in awe of Perry, still sort of mesmerised. But it wasn’t light-hearted. It wasn’t
fun
. As the months went on, I realised . . . he wasn’t jealous, exactly, or possessive—he didn’t beat up other men for talking to me—but he wasn’t easygoing. Quite the opposite, in fact. He always wanted to know I’d be home when he got there. He used to phone and check before he set out. There was a sort of neediness that I hadn’t expected and wasn’t mature enough to challenge.’

She took hold of that errant strand of hair and began to twist it distractedly around her finger. ‘And then he began to have . . . attacks.’

I was puzzled. ‘Attacks?’

‘Heart attacks, or so we thought. The whole drama. Fighting for breath, clutching his chest, screaming for me. I was sobbing in the ambulance, begging him not to die.’

‘Jeez, that’s awful.’

‘It
was
awful. The doctors did tests. They said there was nothing wrong with his heart. In the end they . . .’ She hesitated. Glanced at me and then away. Danced her fingers on her rock. ‘Well, never mind. The upshot was that the army posted him here.’

‘
Here
?’

‘Yes. To Nairobi, actually. For a change of scene. To train some local troops the British Army way.’

My eyebrows went up. ‘Hell. He never said.’

‘Well, now you know. We all came—Lucy and me, too. I was still the nanny, officially, although Perry and I had talked about marriage. He was stationed in Nairobi for six months. Then he got himself sent to Colchester, and that’s when he bought the house at Coptree.’

She leaned back on her hands, her face turned to the sun as though she’d talked herself to a standstill. It was a full minute before she spoke again, very quietly, very clearly. She might have been talking to herself.

‘And it was here, in this beautiful country, that I met Rod. Eighteen years ago . . . or was it only yesterday? I’d gone for lunch with some army wives, all older women, at the Thorn Tree—you might have heard of it?—and some of them knew Rod, so he joined us. He came and sat down next to me, and we talked for hours. One of the others introduced me—Deborah Bridges, as I then was—but I told him to call me Susie.’

I was baffled. ‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘A bit of rebellion, I suppose. My parents called me Deborah after my grandmother, and she was a mean, sharp-tongued old woman. Susan’s my middle name, and I’ve always preferred it. I was Susie to my friends at school. It was only my parents’ generation that insisted on calling me De
-
bo
-rah
.’ She stuck out the tip of her tongue as though the word tasted sour. ‘Perry came into their category. Rod certainly didn’t.’

The sun had moved around. I shifted a few inches, into the shade of an overhanging bush.

‘When the others left the Thorn Tree, we hardly even noticed. We were nose to nose. I told him all about Perry and Lucy, and he said it sounded as though I needed rescuing.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘The army wouldn’t have touched Rod with a barge pole. He can’t take orders. He seemed so gloriously young—especially compared to Perry—and untamed. I couldn’t see him commuting on the tube. You might as well imagine a leopard settling down quietly in Milton Keynes.’

‘A free spirit.’ I let my eyelids droop for a moment, remembering. ‘I used to be one of those.’

‘Aren’t you still?’

I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me. ‘Carry on,’ I said.

‘You’re probably thinking what a faithless little whore I was.’

‘Yeah. Best kind of woman.’

‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head. ‘But it isn’t true. Remember, I was still a teenager! My friends back home were students, young and silly, getting drunk on Saturday nights and stealing garden gnomes. But I’d shot out of school and straight into this intense, isolating relationship with Perry. I hadn’t had the fun, the laughs, the dating and discos and falling in and out of love like a yoyo. Meeting Rod made me face the fact that I was suffocating.’