Freeing Grace (18 page)

She shielded her eyes with one hand, gazing at a ship as it crawled along the horizon. ‘We met again that evening, and again, and again. We
had
to be together, all the time. With him, I felt like a bird out of its cage, and I wanted to sing. He’d just bought this place, and he asked me to join him.’

‘But you didn’t,’ I predicted confidently. I knew she hadn’t come to live at Kulala. After all, she was Mrs Perry Harrison.

‘But I
did.

’ I was perplexed. ‘You left Perry?’

‘Yes, and it was horrible. I told him I’d met someone else, and he went nuts. I thought he was going to have a heart attack—a proper one. I felt like a total bitch—and I was confused, because he’d been such a colossal figure in my life. Lucy held onto my legs all the way to the taxi, crying. Well, we were both crying. It was like leaving my own child. She was waving with both her hands, stumbling after the car like an abandoned puppy.’

‘Poor kid.’

‘You’re so right. Abandoned by her mother, then by her surrogate mother. I hated myself for it, couldn’t bear the misery I’d caused them both. For days I moped about like a bear with toothache, fretting over Lucy. It almost ruined everything. Then, one morning . . .’ She trailed off. A cockerel squawked in the scrub, close by. It made us both jump.

‘Um.’ She laughed, self-consciously. ‘You’ll think I’m mad.’

‘I already do.’

‘No, but . . . okay. I stood in the sea and watched the sun come up over the horizon. Raging up. I imagined I could hear it, roaring like Aslan, stretching out to me across the water. I imagined he—Aslan, or God, or whoever—was giving me permission. What I was doing was right.’ She flapped a hand at me. ‘Loony tunes.’

‘No, I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘Yes, you were. Anyway, there it is. I stopped moping and helped Rod and Hamisi get the place set up. Designed the layout of the bar, just as it is now, cantilevered over the beach. Rod and I slept under a mosquito net strung between the trees just where your banda is. Every morning we’d crawl out and run into the water. We were so happy . . .
so
happy.’

‘I sense an “until” coming on.’

‘Yes.
Until.
I suspected, feared, denied for months. Vomited.’

‘Matt?’

‘Matt.’

‘Don’t tell me Rod’s his father?’

She shook her head vehemently, holding up an imperious hand. ‘
No.
That’s the point. Perry is. I had to leave.’

‘Did you? Why?’

‘Imagine yourself, Jake, at the age of twenty-three. Your new girlfriend gets herself pregnant, and it’s not even yours. What would be the decent thing for her to do?’

‘Disappear?’

‘Precisely. Rod values nothing more than his freedom.
Nothing.
That’s why I love him—d’you see?’

I nodded uncertainly.

‘If I’d told him about the pregnancy, he would probably have done right by me—whatever that means—but he would have resented me for it.’ She shuddered. ‘No. I couldn’t ask it of him. If I went back to Perry, I could at least give my child a father—its
own
father. So I pretended my dad was ill, dying of cancer, needing me to nurse him through his last illness. It wasn’t true at the time, but it became true a couple of years later, and poor Mum followed him. D’you think that was divine retribution?’

‘Nope.’

‘Rod was so calm. He didn’t
need
me, you see? He drove me to the airport, walked me across the tarmac, said he’d be waiting. I didn’t believe him.’ She made a small, unhappy sound, smoothing the vivid cloth across her knees. ‘Perry met me at Ipswich Station, and we never spoke about my little escapade. It never happened.’

I shook my head. ‘Amazing.’

‘It was lovely to see Lucy, but she looked quite thin and tired. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight; even used to get up in the night to check I was still there. Getting her to school was a real problem. The teacher called it separation anxiety.’ Deborah chewed her lip thoughtfully. ‘I suppose she’d suffered too much loss in her young life. She knew that people sometimes don’t come back.’

She gazed down the years, eyes unfocused. ‘Perry and I were married a month later at the local registry office. Lucy was our bridesmaid, and she was in heaven. I squeezed myself into a size fourteen dress and all day long I grinned like a Cheshire cat. Pity the bride who smiles all day! Mum had a
lovely
time. Dad, bless him, looked utterly confused by the whole event. You can tell from the wedding photos. They went on a cruise later in the year, because it had been such a budget wedding.’

‘They got a bargain.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t.’

She gave a little shrug. ‘Matt arrived when I was still just a child myself, really. Wow. Hell of a thing, your own baby. Quite a life-changer.’

‘I expect the novelty wears off,’ I said seriously. ‘After a month or so.’

She looked shocked for a second and then laughed. ‘You’re absolutely hopeless, you know that? No, life is never the same again, Jake. Never.’ The laugh weakened.

‘Did you enjoy having a baby so young?’ I was ghoulishly curious. I couldn’t imagine a damnation more hellish than being entirely responsible for another human being.

‘Would you?’ She met my eyes, and then her gaze slid away to the sea. ‘You have to efface yourself completely and become a non-person. It’s too hot on this rock,’ she interrupted herself, and slipped down to join me in my patch of shade. I made room for her. It wasn’t flirtatious, the way she parked herself beside me. It was companionable.

She picked up a handful of fine sand, and let it drift between her fingers. ‘
Enjoy
isn’t strong enough
. . .
it’s a lot more fundamental and a lot less comfortable. You love them in a way you could never have imagined. Your happiness is bound up with theirs, forever. You feel constant anxiety for them long after they’ve stopped feeling any for you. Both Matt and Lucy.’

I was silent, guiltily wondering if that’s how Mum felt.

‘Anyway. The point is . . . Perry’s not what he seems, Jake.’

This was too much, dangling such a snippet in front of my nose.

I mean, I’m not made of stone. I grappled with my curiosity for a few seconds and then said, ‘He’s gay, isn’t he?’

‘Uh-uh.’ She shook her head, smiling.

‘Mainlines heroin? Wears a tutu? International terrorist?’

She drew her finger and thumb across her lips, zipping them up.

I tried again. ‘He
doesn’t
own a string vest?’

‘Look, it was naughty of me to mention it. I can’t tell you, all right? I’ve promised him, on my children’s life. And I’ve kept that promise all these years. So stop asking.’

‘Fair enough.’ I scratched my ear. ‘Mud wrestling?’

‘Shut up. Let’s just say that he had to leave the army.’

‘Okay.’ My imagination was working overtime. Maybe Perry was a spy?

She patted my shoulder. ‘You can take it from me that life with Perry wasn’t easy. But I’d made my bed, and the children needed me. I just got on with it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what my parents did, and yet they gave me a wonderful childhood. I suspect most marriages are like that, to a greater or lesser degree.’

‘Endurance courses.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But you’re here now,’ I reminded her. ‘You came back.’

‘I wasn’t going to end up buried next to Perry in Coptree churchyard. I decided that once the children were independent, once Matt turned seventeen, my sentence would be up.’ She dug out another handful of sand. ‘I knew I could manage that.’

The grains trickled out of the hourglass of her fist, falling in a thin stream. ‘I was a model prisoner. I wanted Lucy and Matt to have perfect childhoods. My birthday parties were legendary, my Christmas tree had real candles. But every lighting of them marked another wasted year. I had this imaginary world, Kulala. It was a sort of Eden to me. In my mind I’d walk along the paths, sink into the water. I became utterly obsessed by the idea of coming back.
Obsessed
.’ She shut her eyes for a second. ‘I had no other concept of my future. I tried to tell myself that Rod wouldn’t be here, he’d be married and pot-bellied and living in suburbia. But still I plotted and schemed and dreamed of coming back.’

She poured the sand over my feet. It felt like warm water. ‘After Matt went off to boarding school, I did a course. Journalism.’

‘Finally.’

‘Finally. Then I managed to land a slot on the local rag. I got on well with the editor . . . one job led to another.’ She dusted the sand off her hands. ‘Several years ago, I arranged to write a piece on the war crimes tribunal in Arusha. That’s only about a day’s drive from here. I flew into Mombasa and took a taxi straight to Kulala Beach. I remember being driven through the plantation, watching for my first sight of the horizon. And there was the Indian Ocean, right where I’d left it.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘And there was Rod. He strolled up as I climbed out of the taxi. “So, Susie. Your dad finally died, then?”

’ I laughed, feeling oddly miserable. ‘You had a lot of explaining to do.’

‘I did. We spent days and nights just talking. Rod understood. After thirteen years, we picked up where we’d left off.’

‘Did you get to the tribunal?’

‘Mm. Wrote a couple of pieces. I only stayed three weeks that first time. Just a bit of home release. Matt still needed me. But I came quite often after that.’

‘Arusha?’

‘No. The world has a short attention span; it tired of the agonies of Hutus and Tutsis. The circus had long moved on. Somalia, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the Congo. I didn’t try to cover those areas. I did quite a bit of work on nomadic life—which fascinates me—and the effects of long-term drought here in Kenya.’

An insect began to click and hum in the dry grass nearby. Clickety-clicket.

‘And all the time,’ she said, ‘Rod and I were counting down the years—then the months, then the days—until I could come home for good.’

‘Perry must have known what you were up to.’

‘Never said so. I always made sure he was looked after. To say that I lived for my weeks here would be a pathetic understatement. This
is
my home. This
is
my life. In Coptree I merely existed, just got through the day. Here, I live.’

‘But this isn’t the real world. You can’t stay here forever.’

She lifted a shoulder. ‘Why not? I don’t like the real world. It’s going up in flames. Literally.’

‘True.’

We had a minute’s silence, thinking of the world that was going up in flames. And then I remembered Matt, crying in his room.

‘Matt’s still pretty young.’

‘Come on.’ She scowled, flicking a giant ant off her knee. ‘Matt despises me.’

‘He’s just being cool.’

‘No, really. He’s barely addressed two sentences to me since his voice broke. All I get is grunts and that’s if I’m lucky. I’ve nothing to offer my son any more. Nothing. Ever since he stopped being a cuddly cherub and became a muscled killing machine.’

‘I think that’s normal for boys his age. He’ll grow out of it.’

‘So they say.’ She grimaced miserably. ‘You never, ever stop loving them but it hurts, Jake. He looks at me as though I’m a mouldy sandwich.

Walks away when I’m talking to him.’

‘Little sod. I’ll have a word with him.’

She stood up and waded into the criss-cross brilliance of the shallows. The light seemed to flicker right through her.

‘We had a party for his seventeenth, after his exams back in June. Lots of girls, all gorgeous and all swooning over Matt. He must have had this secret, the pregnant girl. He did seem on edge. And I had
my
secret. I’d already got my ticket.’

‘What did you do about money?’

‘I’d been siphoning off funds into a separate bank account for years. About seventeen years, actually. I had a bit invested. There’s no need to look as though you’re sucking on a lemon.’

I was gawping at her. I mean, we all make mistakes. But stealing the housekeeping money for all those years—stashing it away from the very first day of your marriage—well, that’s over the top. That’s dishonesty on a pretty monumental scale.

She kicked a spray of sapphires into the air. ‘Look, Mr Goody-Goody, there’s no call for you to be sanctimonious. It was my money too. I spent my entire adult life working for that family. They got a free nanny, chauffeur, housekeeper, cook and cleaner. Bargain! So I gave myself the odd bonus. So what? I won’t ask Perry for more. I could demand a share in his army pension, make him sell the house. But I won’t. He’s getting off bloody lightly.’

‘He is—financially
.
So there you were, ready to go.’

‘All ready to go.’ She held up both hands in a gesture of finality. ‘Filled the freezer, cleaned the place from top to bottom, got the cleaner to increase her hours. The Great Escape.’

‘Why didn’t you tell them you wouldn’t be back this time?’

‘Didn’t tell them . . . ?’ She looked scandalised. ‘I
did
!’

My jaw dropped. ‘They lied to me.’

‘Of course they lied to you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have agreed to come. I told them on the day I left. I didn’t say where I was going, just that after I’d written my piece I wasn’t coming back. Perry took it hard, as I expected. Matt just went out. And Lucy gave me an ear bashing.’

‘She’s not in your fan club, is she?’

Deborah looked unhappy. ‘I’ve abandoned her twice, really. She’s never forgotten the first time, and she may never forgive the second. I would have been in touch, you know. Once the dust had settled. But the sad fact is that my children couldn’t care less if I emigrated to Mars.’

‘You’re wrong there. Matt literally begged me to find you.’

She splashed back up the beach and knelt down, looking into my face. ‘Really?’ ‘Really.’

Her face fell. ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ she said bitterly. ‘So he can play with his new doll, which really cries and wets its nappy. If I don’t play too, they have to take her back to the shop.’

I let it go. The air was distorted now, quivering as though the sand was on fire, and our patch of shade had shrunk.

‘Rod will be home by this evening.’ She sounded desperate. ‘I have to decide before then. Tell me, Jake. Advise me. What do I do? What I
want
to do is burn Perry’s letter and stay here, where I’ve found happiness.’