Long Lies the Shadow (11 page)
Read Long Lies the Shadow Online
Authors: Gerda Pearce
He cannot sleep. Michael paces the house. It feels empty without Gin. He had not missed the consultant’s emphasis. Physically, he had said, pausing, Gin was fine. He wanted her kept in for a few days, he said. Michael stayed as long as possible, watching her slip in and out of sleep. He found the atmosphere of the aged ward oppressive, tiled with its malachite and maroon Victorian tiles. Gin lay sapped of colour, her hair spread limply across the starched pillow with its blue stitching proclaiming it property of the National Health Service. He had brought her more of the pineapple she seemed to crave but, unable eventually to avoid the nurses, who were preparing for the night shift and impatient to empty the ward of visitors, he had left.
Two whiskies and an unread chapter later, he is still awake. Restless. On a whim, he decides on a walk. He pauses at the gate of the house, inhaling jasmine. He lights a cigarette and turns right. The streets are still wet from the evening rain. Cobalt puddles shine up at him. Michael smokes as he walks. When he first came to London, he would often walk alone at night. Nights like this, walking the calm streets, so different to their daytime façade.
He had seen Gin and Viv at their home in Cape Town before he left. In many ways it would have been easier not to say goodbye. Sitting at their table with the door open to the late December heat, he had wished he could stay. Wished the peace of the day would envelop the land, and
let him live his life out endlessly beneath the mountain. He had envied them their lives, unfettered by conscription, unfettered by the looming choice to stay or go. But he was being unfair. Both women were scarred by Gabe’s death. He saw it in Gin’s eyes, sometimes when she looked at Viv, and especially when she laughed. She would cut it short, as if by laughing she betrayed her dead brother. And looking at Viv, Michael’s heart had ached. Her hands moved constantly, lighting cigarette after cigarette. At night, after many glasses of wine, she stilled somewhat, and finally her eyelids would fall heavily over her beautiful eyes. Her eyes that earlier had darted, flicked, searched back and forth, as if by moving they could outrun the pain.
He lingers near the tube at Notting Hill Gate. A night bus, empty, swishes by. Michael flicks ash into the gutter and turns left down Pembridge Gardens. The trees seem taller at night. Looking up, he notes the insomniac lights in the students’ residence. He stops to gaze at the residential building opposite, the place he had found lodgings when he first came to London. He was still living there when Gin had arrived six months later.
He had been up since five. The night porter had nodded wordlessly at him as he left. A friend of a friend of an acquaintance had helped him find the place. The network of the dispossessed, the new diaspora of disillusioned young South Africans had kicked in. A number here, a contact there. It had been light already by the time he had walked the short distance up to the tube, and for Gin’s sake he was glad she was arriving in the summer. England’s winter had been a shock almost systemic. The dark mornings, the cold unbanished by any amount of heating. Having left the heat of home, of summer’s height in the opposite hemisphere, it had added to his sense of alienation, misbelonging. When Gin had called so unexpectedly, said she was coming, his spirits soared. She had told him some of what had happened, a truncated version, he sensed, and while for her sake and
for Viv’s this had saddened him, for selfish reasons he didn’t care.
A breeze rises, sprinkles leftover rain from plane trees as he bears left again. He had thought to merely walk the block as he smoked and return to the house, but now he has a taste for the night. The moon is a waxing ovoid above. Hands in his pockets, he crosses Pembridge Road, heads up past the elegant houses of the rich. He comes to the top of Portobello Road. Deserted, but still quivering with the resonance of its day. As he walks along Kensington Park Gardens, the width of it seems almost exhilarating after the narrow lanes lined by tall houses. He reaches the sandstone spire of St John’s, its lawns sooty in the streetlight, the yellow forsythia hedge greyed. Cars filter past him. There’s always traffic on the Grove, he thinks. He stops to sit on the bench in front of the church, lights another cigarette. He loves this view. To either side of the road, the stone pavements and high houses slope down the hill. The road looks like a lit runway. Traffic lights change soundlessly at an empty junction. A black cab passes, a lone passenger in the back. He has met no one on the street so far, but out of the shadows to his right, someone approaches. He watches as a woman walks up to him. She is dressed entirely in black. Black jacket, black skirt, black tights, black boots.
“Got a light?”
Michael is surprised at the contact, even more surprised at her voice. It is deep, accented, but he cannot place its origin. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his lighter. She is holding no cigarette, he realises, so he offers her one from his packet. The woman takes one, leans down to him. Blonde hair falls across her face as she does so. Sultry eyes flick over him. Her hand touches his lightly as he holds the flame for her. She stands back, draws on her cigarette, looks at him. Michael waits.
“Do you want to go for a drink?” she asks. Her voice is coated with smoke.
He considers for a moment, expecting Kristina’s image, the guilt. Instead it is Gin who comes to mind, her sleeping figure, soft hair falling across her forehead.
People were wheeling their way out through the double steel doors. He glimpsed luggage labels from Johannesburg, clues of trips to Africa. He was conscious of his heart taken to thumping against his ribs; his hands felt clammy. Soon Gin would walk through those doors, the image of her brother, blue eyes searching him out in a crowd held at bay by chrome bars. And when they at last found each other, others stared as he hugged her, this waif from home, this lost girl. Come from a place where he last remembered life exploding in his veins. He spun her around in delight. He hugged her so hard, her breath was pushed from her lungs. But she did not appear to care, because for her a long journey had ended. Because she seemed happy to see him again, and she was laughing. Laughing, and crying. As was he.
He shakes his head. “No, but thank you.”
The woman smiles slightly, her shrug almost imperceptible. She walks on without another word, trailing smoke. He watches her until she disappears over the rise of road to his left, her blonde hair bleached under the streetlight. She does not look back.
He had forgotten the night creatures. People like him, roaming the murky streets, each for their own reason. Gin’s arrival in London had changed that for him.
He is back on Ladbroke Road, almost at the house, when he decides to walk on, to find a late-night bar or club and get a drink. Something about the house bothers him when Gin is not there. He feels a darkness descend on it without her. He hopes she is sleeping, and peaceful.
The club is a subterranean mix of loud music and sweaty bodies, not the quiet sophistication he was after, but it is late and his options
within walking distance are limited. Eventually he reaches the bar, slides thankfully into one of the slim barstools to one side of the counter. Here are the other nocturnals at play. He sits drinking white wine and watching them. It will not mix well with his earlier whiskies he reflects, but he can sleep late. As long as he gets to the hospital for visiting hours.
Something in a girl’s demeanour attracts him. Something familiar, but it is fleeting, nebulous.
“Where are you from?” she asks. Lifting her glass, she gestures aimlessly with it around the room, as if asking rather, “What brought you here?”
She is so young. Michael has a sudden urge to confess all. To tell her about Gabe, about why he left Africa, where he has been, why he is here. About Gin, about Kristina even –
I have a wife
– about the roads that have brought him here, to this night, this bar. He even wants to tell her about the woman on the Grove, with whom, had he been so inclined, he might be drinking now, instead of here with her. The urge passes and in any case he suspects that she is not really listening, is, in fact, not at all interested in why he, Michael, is here. Perhaps it is the way she drinks her wine, just that bit too quickly. Or the absent look she has, the look of someone who is drinking to forget. Someone very much like himself. Perhaps she is on drugs, he thinks, from the slight shine to her eyes. He turns to the barman.
But she persists, leaning into him. “Buy me another,” she breathes, insistent. Her breasts push at the yellow neckline of her dress, her ebony curls spill forward, and he cannot resist.
Her name is Cecile and she takes him back to her studio flat in Linden Gardens. It is on the top floor, small but unexpectedly neat. Immaculate even. Michael inspects her bookcase as she pours them more wine, red this time. It is a good Claret and again he finds himself surprised. She is studying, she says, with a measure of self-deprecation.
“What course?” he asks, though from the contents of the bookcase he has surmised literature, history, philosophy – the usual, he thinks.
“Oh, the usual,” Cecile laughs, “Literature, history, philosophy.” She moves towards him, adds, “sex.” Her hand tugs at his belt, “let me show you what a good student I am.”
He thinks it so gauche as to be charming, and her giggle is infectious. He watches as she unbuckles his belt.
Only when he is walking back to the house, the night sky paling slowly into a muted dawn, does he reflect how he has made love to a girl half his age, merely because something in her eyes, perhaps in the way she flicked her hair, had reminded him of the only woman he had ever loved. The only woman he could never have.
Gin has to spend two more nights in the hospital. She seems cheerful, if slightly frustrated, when he visits. He is pleased to see her face has more colour. Again he stays as long as he can, and sits and reads when she dozes off. The second night on his own in the house Michael manages to fall asleep in front of the television, waking before dawn, the lounge cold and his neck stiff from the chair. The third night, however, he finds himself walking the Grove again. Trying and failing to avoid the club, he returns to its curved counter, its oddly enticing interior. He knows he is hoping Cecile will be there. He sits at the bar, and orders drink after drink, searching the silhouetted figures for her raven hair, for her yellow dress – stupid, she will not be wearing it again, he admonishes himself – and yet still he looks. Once he thinks he sees her, leaving with a man, but he cannot be sure. He knows it is puerile, but he leaves soon after, walks to Linden Gardens, stares up at her flat. The light is on. Is she studying, or with the man? In the end, disgusted with himself, he walks home.
At the gate of the house, he stops, puts his hand in his pocket, in need of his cigarettes. Instead his hand folds around paper. Kristina’s letter. Michael unfolds the envelope. It glows a sulphurous yellow in the streetlight.
He puts the unopened envelope on the table in the kitchen, reluctant still to read it. Kristina’s rounded lettering has been marked by his pocket and his forgetfulness. He fingers the outside of it, trying to imagine what mood she wrote his name in, tries to decipher from
her writing whether she was angry, bitter, resigned. Or simply past caring? Like himself. The thought weighs heavily on him. He knows he could live happily – at this he stops himself, grimacing – well, at least, less unhappily, if he were never to see Denmark again. He could let it slip away from his life without a backward glance. And his wife? Would she be so easily dismissed? He thinks of Cecile and knows the answer.
He leaves the letter and goes upstairs to shower. As he towels off, he wonders what his life would have been like if Gin had given him a different answer that day in the café so long ago.
Gin was staring blankly at him. For a moment Michael wondered whether she had heard him. But then she blinked, looked down at her cup, and took a big sip of coffee. Her eyes were huge as they looked at him over the rim of the mug.
“Michael,” she said, eventually, “let me get this right. You want me to marry you?”
He knew he was asking her to make a huge decision, a huge commitment. If they married, he would gain her passport, her citizenship, her inalienable right to stay. Safe. Safe from any deportation. Safe forever from the reaches of the South African Army. Gin did not seem fazed by his seeming unromanticism. They both knew it was not a proposal of passion. Maybe she thought of Simon or Jonnie, of what could have been. In some ways, Michael hoped she would say no. If she did, it meant she had not given up, had not abandoned forever her high ideals. For a while, they both watched the traffic pass outside the café window. Big red buses ambled past. Now and then a black cab turned sharply, careered across lanes to irate horns. Then he looked at her. She smiled, and he smiled, and then they both laughed.
The noise in the café was loud, and her voice was quiet, but clear. “Michael. Darling. No. Never.”
Michael tosses the towel on the bed. In a sudden moment, he envisages Gin old, her brow furrowed, her face lined by all the years. He looks in the mirror, rubs at his chin, regretting his decision not to shave. He imagines his own face, aged. He could ask her again, he realises. Somehow he knows if he does, and he tells her about growing old together, somehow she will succumb, say yes, and that would be that. The understanding would be based on the unencumbered companionship they find in each other. It had been like that when they were growing up, and at school. Then, for a while, it had disappeared. At university, she had lived a separate life with Simon. He had hardly seen her. Neither had Gabe. And so the two men had found themselves apart from Gin and Hannah. A lump forms in Michael’s throat. He does not want to think about Gabe now. And especially not Hannah.
Michael sighs, smoothes back his still-wet hair. He had been granted leave to stay in Britain, political asylum. And eventually they had travelled, he and Gin. A month, trawling around Europe.
Tuesday, Barcelona. Gaudi’s city. Even if, he thought, agreeing with Orwell, that the Sagrada was the most hideous thing he had ever seen, with its grotesque carvings, one couldn’t deny the craft of the man. Every statue, spire, or building of his contorted with colour. They gave Michael vivid nightmares but Gin had revelled in it all, the seven hills, the pedestrianised Avenue de Gaudi with its many shops and cafés, its leftover history of civil war. Although she could not face the castle on Montjuic with its tales of torture, and the beggars distressed her. Too much like home, she said. And the weather hot and humid like Zululand. They even passed a hairdresser’s called Durban. They walked the city a thousand times, and talked and talked. He knew, for all his wanderlust, the one place he wanted to go was home. The one place he could not travel to. It said so in his temporary British passport. Michael struggled with the most basic Catalan and Gin had teased him about being an Englishman abroad, which made him smile.
“The plight of the refugee,” he said, with good humour.
“Don’t give me that look, while you suck on that eternal cigarette.” She was playful.
He squinted at her under the relentless sun, happy.
And right then, right there, they had met Kristina, and her friend Birgit. And they had moved on to Italy as a foursome. In Venice, aside a stinking canal, Gin had announced she was heading back to London. They had been standing at the bridge that led over to the Ghettare, the original Jewish ghetto. It was a short walk to the train station and he’d walked with her, his head and heart at odds.
He goes downstairs, stares at the table. The crumpled cream envelope rebukes him silently as he pours himself a whisky. He sips at the strong liquid. Then he hooks a finger under the mangled flap and pulls. It tears jaggedly. Extracting the folded contents, he is surprised to find three folded sheets of paper inside. One is hand-written and short, Kristina’s writing, black ink showing through the thin film of it. He is reluctant to read it. The other two are typed, official. His first reaction is resentment. Resentful that his wife has opened his mail, to send it on she must have read it. Michael opens the first typed communiqué with one hand, the other picks up his whisky. But as he starts to read, his hand stops mid-air.
The liquid trembles in the glass.