Long Lies the Shadow (18 page)

Nick takes her hand, and they turn back towards the house. “You
see, Vivienne, you don’t have to be afraid. And you don’t have to fight it. The sea will always bring you home.”

Jonnie visits her once a week, ostensibly to check on Ellie, although Gin suspects it is to check on her as well. But she is pleased for his company, and it allays her worries about her daughter. They walk with Ellie down the lenient slope to Holland Park, and Jonnie wheels the pram along the barren ground as they weave beneath the trees that are all mottled bark and naked branches. He helps with Ellie and Gin feels both grateful for, and yet resentful of, his obvious expertise with children. He stays late sometimes. He brings with him a laughter and an irreverence; it is a feeling she has missed.

He does not mention Ellie’s father again and Gin tells him only that he was killed in the same accident in which she had hurt her leg. They mention neither Viv nor his new wife. On the odd late evening when he stays to share some wine, Gin wonders what he tells his wife, or whether he still flouts his religion by drinking wine at home, but she does not feel inclined to ask. In fact, she does not care. Jonnie talks of work, of patients, of how he is finding this new country. He speaks often of home. Politics is a frequent topic of debate. Their conversations alternately exhaust and enliven her.

It is his effect on Ellie she notices most. Ellie, who seems to have an earnest temperament not unlike her father, brightens in Jonnie’s presence. She gurgles with delight at his appearance, and in turn Jonnie seems inexplicably drawn to this child. Tiny fingers curl around his with steady hold, while she stares at him with eyes that could penetrate one’s soul.

One evening he arrives with bagfuls of ingredients for supper,
“Courtesy of your market,” he says, “for a
proper
chicken curry. And because,” he adds, “you don’t eat enough.”

Gin, bemused, sits at the table and watches while he unpacks chicken pieces, rice, tomatoes, an onion, yoghurt, spices, and a single, vibrantly green lime.

“You’ve got oil?” he opens cupboards without waiting for her reply.

“In the one above the kettle.”

Jonnie takes out the bottle and switches on the kettle. He grabs a frying pan from the drying rack and puts it on the stove, adding some oil. Gin has to help him light the gas with matches. He takes a sharp knife and pierces the skin of each tomato, pours boiling water over them. Their skins curl back from their scalding, and peel away easily. Jonnie chops the flesh of them, piling it all on a plate. He pulls a match out of the box and starts to chew on it. Gin’s look is quizzical.

“It stops your eyes watering,” he explains, dicing onion. He tosses the pieces into the pan, and it spits. “See, no tears,” he says, discarding the match. Ginger, garlic, and chillies get chopped and added to the sizzling pan. Spices are next, coriander, cumin, turmeric, stirring all the time to stop them sticking. A dash of salt, freshly ground black pepper and the tomatoes follow. “I tried to teach the girls. Kayleigh would be quite a good cook if she could pay attention long enough.” He laughs. The sauce boils and he turns the heat down to let it simmer.

Gin takes this apparently unguarded comment as a cue to ask him about her niece. “What’s Abbie like, Jonnie?”

He responds by looking at her briefly, eyes narrowed. “She’s lovely.” He pauses, smiles at her. “You know Gin, she looks a lot like you.”

Gin feels afresh the old guilt. Her lack of contact with Gabe’s daughter had always bothered her. But the circumstances were
such that she had felt no contact was better than some. And Abbie had been so young when Gin had left, she was sure she would not remember her. But her sister had kept in contact, albeit irregular.

“I know Issy kept in touch.”

“Yes, I remember. We met her a few times. She always sent Abbie presents on her birthday. Made Kayleigh quite jealous.” Jonnie reminds her that Abbie had spent some holidays with her
grandparents
. “Less so after your mom died, but your dad, well, he adored her.” Her dad, he says, had also commented on Abbie’s resemblance to her aunt.

Dad
. Gin cannot speak, seeing her father’s face in front of her again.

Jonnie adds the chicken pieces to the sauce. “Good, we’ll leave that for a half hour or so.” As he cleans and tidies, washing bowls, stacking the drainer, he talks more of the girls, telling Gin about their schooling, their favourite subjects, and more of what they are like. They are good students. Abbie excels at languages, Kayleigh at mathematics and biology.

It is apparent to Gin that he misses them more than he cares to admit.

“You like children, don’t you, Jonnie?” she observes. “You’re very good with them.” She cannot bring herself to say he is good with Ellie. It is too close, too much a reminder of her own failings as a mother.

Jonnie checks on the simmering curry. “Yes,” he says, covering the pan again, “I do like children. I’m not sure I’m that good with them, though.” Steam volcanoes out of the pot of rice and he adjusts the heat.

Gin wonders if he and his wife are still trying to conceive, but keeps her curiosity to herself. Instead she asks, “Did you and Viv want more kids?” It is the first time she has mentioned Viv’s name openly like this.

He shrugs as he adds the yoghurt into the saucepan. “We had problems in our marriage by then.” The sauce bubbles gently and Jonnie scoops some up in a teaspoon, blows it cool, tastes it. He cuts the lime in half and squeezes it one-fisted into the pan. The juice dribbles over his hand.

“Well, you must have been a good father. You raised Abbie as your own.”

He smiles, chops fresh coriander leaves. “That was easy. She’s easy to love.” His smile widens then and his tone turns playful. “She’s like you in temperament too, you see…”

Gin laughs despite herself. She brings out a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc while he serves up the curry, sprinkled with the chopped
coriander
. They sit in the kitchen to eat. The room is warm from his cooking and the air still fragrant with spice. The flavours hit her tongue and burn her mouth. Hotter than she remembers.

“You adopted Abbie, didn’t you, Jonnie? So she’s Abbie Kassan now?”

Jonnie nods as he swallows. He takes a slow sip from his wine glass. When he speaks, his tone has lost its humour, and he is
reflective
. “I may have been a good father, but I make a crap husband.”

She does not miss his use of the present tense.

It is Jonnie who makes the effort to decorate her home for
Christmas
. Gin teases him about his obvious enjoyment of the process, but nothing she says shifts his determination. Late December, he hauls in a tree one morning, leaving a trail of pine needles in the hall, and stands it in a corner of the lounge.

“It’s her first Christmas, Gin, you have to.”

Jonnie’s enthusiasm is catching, and they spend the rest of the morning hanging baubles and trailing tinsel on the pungent branches. Ellie is captivated by the glitter and the rustle of the tree. Come the afternoon, Jonnie takes Ellie out for a walk. Picking up Gin’s keys from the table in the hall, he leaves, telling Gin to rest. She looks in the mirror after he has gone, sees for herself the face etched with fatigue that must have prompted his instruction. She feels like a fraud. Her nights are disturbed not by Ellie, but by the unrelenting dreams of Simon.

She runs a hot bath, heaps in a turquoise mix of rosemary and sage bath foam, and soaks in the bubbles. Her exhaustion ebbs out with the bathwater. She wraps herself in a towel, squeezes water out of her hair. Then she cleans out the bath, and rinses it.

Then it blanks again, car towards car, the curve undone. Why can she not remember? She can remember his hands. Those long fingers
and tender hands. Remembers them on the wheel, remembers the sweep of road that took them up and over the hill. Remembers those hands on her body, touching her. She can see Simon’s dead face, his shining eyes lost to life, dull in death. They were stuck open, fixed in their last unyielding stare. She cannot bear to think of his pain. She remembers them wheeling her away, her consciousness slipping. In her vague and unfinished memory of the crash, she knows there was a time before he died that she had watched him struggle to focus through the pain. She knows he fought against death, he would not have let himself slip away without a fight. And he was trying to tell her something, but her memory fails again, blurs into a red mist, like blood, tainting clarity, as her own injuries drew her away from him, as he struggled for every breath. As he fought.

Gin dresses, makes tea, watches the afternoon creep towards an early dusk. The doorbell rings. It is too soon to expect them back and anyhow, Jonnie took her keys. She opens the door to a ghost.

In the years since she last saw him, Simon’s father Isaac has aged. His face, never young, has creased. The hair, never thick, has thinned. He wears it combed over his head, parting low over his left ear. Oiled strips plastered over his shiny scalp reach the other ear, ending in curls, whiter than the preceding streaks of grey. Tendrils pull out above the rest, wave helplessly atop his head. Isaac was always taller than his brother Jacob, but now he seems bent, shrivelled. There exists no sign of robust health.

Stunned, Gin invites him in, gives him a hasty embrace. She is thankful for Ellie’s absence and now in dread of Jonnie’s imminent return with Isaac’s granddaughter. It is possible, though unlikely, that Isaac has heard about Ellie. Gin has contacted no one, only
her sister and Michael, and she hopes, albeit vainly, that he knows nothing.

Isaac walks stooped, his left shoulder lists off lower than the right. He is apologising to her, apologising for arriving like this. Unannounced.

Gin barely listens, surreptitiously checking the room for signs of a child, for signs of Ellie. None are obvious in the large lounge and she seats him there, beside the gaudy Christmas tree, offers him tea or coffee in a voice that does not sound like her own. Stalling for time to gather her thoughts, she brings tea, apologises for no biscuits or cake.

No, no, he insists, it is he who should apologise.

They circle each other with polite talk. She asks after Isaac’s wife and then feels the horror of having to ask about Simon’s wife, Simon’s sons. She stumbles over the words, falls mute. Isaac saves her, launching into how everyone is. His niece Hannah –
you remember Jacob’s daughter? Simon’s cousin?
– is home for the holiday season. She is taking Simon’s son to have a look around Rhodes University, he says. Simon’s son is keen to read his degree there, the year after next.

Gin swallows hard and then sips her tea. She does not know how to respond. She searches for the flint that burned once in Isaac’s eyes, the ever-present hint of a smile on his lips, a readiness to laugh
heartily
and often. There is none. His eyes look dulled and crescented with grey. Simon’s death, no doubt, has robbed them of their light.

Eventually they exhaust the family news. Gin stands and turns on a side lamp to throw light into the darkened room. Where is Jonnie? Surely he will be back any minute. Gin prays he is delayed.

“Virginia, my dear,” says the old man sitting in her lounge.

She turns slowly to face him, cold seeping into her body as she does so. Her arms and legs start to freeze, stripping her of feeling, numbing her till there is only the core of her left. Her heart, still beating.

“I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.”

This she had not expected. She had thought it obvious. Surely he wanted to ask about Simon, about his son, about Cape Town, about the accident?

Isaac puts his cup down with some force, sits forward in the leather armchair. “I’m here,” he says, with obvious effort, “about Simon’s will.”

“His
will?
” The words are out before she can help it. “His will?” she repeats, more calmly. Then she asks quietly, “What has that got to do with me?”

His son, explains Isaac, with infinite poignancy and patience, has bequeathed her some things. Gin sits down on the couch opposite him and watches while he pulls out some papers and a package. She listens as Simon’s father tells her that his son has left her the flat in Grahamstown. The little flat in the cobbled courtyard, beneath the sun. Where love had lived. Gin feels her legs start to shake uncontrollably.

Simon, you sentimental fool. To put it all at risk, for me.

“So you’ll need to sign there,” Isaac stabs the sheet. “And then there is the money.”

Gin is still trying to absorb the flat. “Money?” she breathes.

A large amount, substantial. A policy Simon took many years ago, as if this explains it all. Gin’s hands are trembling. Isaac must be wondering why Simon had left all this to her, but he carries on
nonetheless
, passing form after form that later, he explains, Gin must sign. She sits and stares at him and the pages, brilliantly white, that pile up in front of her.

Eventually Isaac looks up. “There’s one more thing. He also left you this.”

Carefully he hands her the package that Gin must find a way to take from him without convulsing. She knows what it is.

Inside is a book. The book is oblong and pastel blue. The top right hand corner of the cover is well worn, with a fold from use. The title is written up along the vertical axis, in a yellowed script that, when new, was white.
Somehow we Survive
. It is underlined by part of a drawing, the line which forms the outer edge of a prison bar. The subtitle
An Anthology of South African Writing
is written parallel, so that it too is underlined, but by the line that is the inner edge of the bar. Wrapped around the bar is a man’s hand, sketched in charcoal. In striations, a man’s face, with closed eyes, large nostrils, and open-mouthed in a scream, or perhaps, Gin had always
imagined
, more hopefully a song. Lines run alongside his mouth, into his throat, where the clavicular ends are large, grotesque even, his bones protruding through the thin skin.

Simon, you sentimental fool.

In its day, deemed subversive, the book had been banned. Simon had smuggled it back from San Francisco after a medical conference. Saved it, as a surprise, for several months. Wrapped it plainly for her birthday, that first year. Wrapped it plainly, but with obvious care, in neat folds of cream-coloured paper, the Sellotape cut with surgical precision. Found, he said, at the back of a bookstore in the Heights. Writings of exile, of longing, of love. And in the front, inscribed to her, incongruously, Yeats’ poem:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book
…

He had been the man who loved the pilgrim soul in her. When he gave it to her, smuggled and illicit, South Africa had been in a state of emergency. Now, her country is free, struggling with its
new-found
freedom, but free nonetheless. Now, Simon is dead. Yet the book’s relevance endures. Now she knows for herself the meaning
of exile, of longing, of love. Now she knows that, despite death and destruction, somehow we survive.

Simon. You sentimental fool. What were you thinking?

Gin clasps the book tightly to her chest, her knuckles white. She stares at Isaac, words trying to exit her strangled throat. All she can think of is how, even after his death, he has risked their secret coming out. For her.

Simon had kept the book, though she had left it. The sentimental fool.

“I’m sorry, Virginia. I’ve upset you.”

She shakes her head, wordless. Isaac starts to say something but is interrupted by the sound of the front door opening.

Jonnie. Ellie
. Home.

“Gin?” Jonnie calls from the hall. She knows he will be hanging up his coat, folding up the pram, one-handed as he always does, Ellie clasped to him with his free hand.

She stands up as he enters the room. Jonnie stops at the sight of Isaac. Ellie is held to his chest, her face obscured, her curls covered in a crocheted yellow hat with pink flowers. Isaac stands too. They are both looking at her now.

Gin wills herself to talk. Her voice squeaks out. “Isaac, this is Jonnie Kassan. Jonnie, this is Isaac Gold. He is a very dear family friend.”

The men shake hands.

“And who is this?” Isaac peeks at Ellie, then steps back, his mouth slack.

“This is Ellie, Isaac,” says Gin, “Ellie is my daughter.”

Isaac turns from staring at Ellie to look at her. He runs a pale tongue over dry lips. She does not know if he is about to say
something
or is merely astonished by Ellie’s existence.
Oh God
, she thinks,
he knows. Ellie looks too much like Simon. No, she’s mine. I will not lose her, I will not share her.
She looks across to Jonnie. Her eyes widen,
willing him to play along with the lie she is about to tell. He cocks his head slightly, frowning, not understanding.

Isaac opens his mouth. Desperate to stop any words, she adds swiftly, before he can speak, “Jonnie is her father.”

It is Jonnie who is slack-jawed now. He recovers admirably, although his eyes slant dangerously at her and she can see his mouth tighten with disapproval.

Please, please
. She begs him with pleading eyes.

Still holding Jonnie’s gaze, she directs her words to Isaac. “Jonnie’s also a doctor, Isaac.” Then to Jonnie, “Isaac is a surgeon.”

“Retired now,” corrects Isaac. His voice is strained but polite. He looks at Jonnie. “My son was also a doctor.”

Jonnie’s eyes flick to Gin then back to Isaac. “
Was
?”

Isaac looks as if he might crumble. “Yes, was. He’s dead, you see. A car accident.”

Both men look her way.

She looks away from them, her eyes finding the pine needles
scattered
below the tree. Her hold on the book tightens, and her
knuckles
start to hurt.

“I’m sorry,” says Jonnie in a voice weighted down with an emotion Gin cannot identify. He shifts Ellie to the opposite arm. Ellie sticks her fist in her mouth and closes her eyes.

But now Jonnie is saying something much worse. He is asking Isaac if by any chance his son was called Simon. Gin steps backwards, feels the couch hit the back of her knees, and she sits down heavily,
listening
to Isaac exclaim in the affirmative, listening to Jonnie tell Simon’s father that yes, he knew his son, that they had studied together in Cape Town, at medical school. Gin feels her world contract.

She sits, watching her life unravel before her.