Return to Mandalay (9 page)

‘Come to dinner on Saturday,’ Selina had urged her one Monday morning. ‘One of Jon’s friends will be there, and Jon’s sister and her pal. It’s just a casual get-together.’

‘You’re not matchmaking?’ Rosemary was hesitant.

‘Course not.’

But as a matter of fact, Rosemary had liked Alec from the first. Tall, thin and be-spectacled, with an obvious distaste for small talk, he was about as poles apart from creative, outgoing Nick as any man could be. But he wasn’t just a computer science geek, he liked walking and he was into music. Turned out he was a bit of a foodie too and their conversation ranged from his love of Led Zeppelin, to walks along the South West Coast Path, to the menu of a particularly good local restaurant that had opened up in town. When they had a quiet moment to themselves, just before Rosemary said goodnight, he invited her there the following evening. And to her surprise, she heard herself accept.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Selina had said. ‘The first man you look
at since Nick and he lives in Copenhagen.’ She looked appraisingly at Rosemary. ‘I suppose that makes him safe.’

‘Maybe it does,’ Rosemary conceded. But it was a step, wasn’t it? She was still only thirty-seven. But not ready to run the mile.

Alec did work in Copenhagen but he was back for a month to see his parents and to carry out some programming research, and so Rosemary saw quite a bit of him. And she liked what she saw. He didn’t expect too much of her. In fact he seemed to expect nothing. They could walk and talk, or they could walk in silence, it didn’t matter to him. He liked her when she dressed up for dinner and he liked her just as much after a morning’s gardening when she was wearing wellies and jeans. He didn’t try to get her to talk about Nick (she was more than a little fed up with the ‘better out than in’ brigade), but once, when she did want to talk about Nick and even had a bit of a weep, he hadn’t minded a jot. He met Eva and was nice to her, but he didn’t pretend he wanted to adopt her or become her best friend. Some people might have said he wasn’t very emotional. But that was what Rosemary liked most about him.

Two days before Alec returned to Copenhagen, Rosemary’s mother, Helen, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer. It was a shock and yet hardly a surprise. She’d been getting paler and weaker for some time and her debilitating migraines had become more and more frequent. Rosemary was devastated. All she could think was,
another loss
. She had always adored her mother even though she was the first to
admit that Helen wasn’t easy. The trouble with her mother was that she’d always wanted everything to be perfect. Sometimes she had crackled with the pure tension of it. And what was perfect? What could be perfect? Certainly not life, which was ragged and raw and full of snakes and ladders around every corner which would always take you by surprise.

It was Alec who comforted her when she cried, who held her in his arms and eventually made love to her. And briefly, wonderfully, Rosemary found herself wanting it again, this closeness, this intimacy with another human being. It had been missing from her life for so long. She’d thought that it was another part of her that she would never find again.

‘Will you come and visit me?’ he asked her on the day he left. ‘Copenhagen’s a beautiful city. And it’s only a short flight away. You could stay as long as you like.’

Rosemary wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking. Was he proposing a long-distance relationship? She couldn’t see herself flying out to Denmark every other weekend. Or was he suggesting something more permanent? What about work? What about her family? ‘I can’t leave my parents,’ she said. ‘My mother …’ And then, of course, there was Eva. What sort of a proposition was she with a teenage daughter like Eva? She wasn’t easy, she never had been easy and Rosemary’s relationship with her was fraught at best. She was working towards her GCSEs and eventually she’d go on to university, or so Rosemary hoped. But what did Eva feel? Rosemary hadn’t a clue. And worse still, she wasn’t sure how it had ever got that way.

‘You’d like it over there,’ Alec said. ‘It could be a new start.’

Magical words. If there was anything Rosemary needed, it was a new start.

*

‘About Burma,’ Alec said now. He paused to look at one of the old boats moored in the canal, but Rosemary had the feeling he wasn’t looking at it at all.

‘Yes?’ She re-wound her soft pashmina scarf and tucked it back into the collar of her jacket. But she was mildly surprised. It wasn’t like him to delve.

‘Couldn’t you put it behind you now?’

Could she? Rosemary thought of the day she’d made her discovery.

Alec had returned to Copenhagen and within months her mother had died. Her father had grieved for her, but there was something else. Relief, perhaps? Her parents were very different, she reminded herself, maybe over the years they’d even grown apart. But they’d been happy, hadn’t they, in their own way?

The letters were tucked in his bedside cabinet and Rosemary only found them because she was sorting out some of her mother’s stuff and had discovered a couple of pairs of her father’s socks in Helen’s drawer. The letters were tied with a red ribbon and her first thought was: love letters. And she felt a streak of happiness. Because this meant they had loved one another after all. They had written love letters and her father had kept every one.

She soon realised her mistake. She flicked through them.
Each envelope was written in her father’s hand, but they weren’t addressed to her mother. They were addressed to someone called Daw Moe Mya who lived in Burma. And they hadn’t been sent.

Rosemary held them in her hands for several minutes. What did it mean? Who was this Daw Moe Mya? Why hadn’t he sent any of these letters to her? What had he wanted to say, but not said? She was intrigued. And her father was out of the house.

Curiously, she eased open the first envelope that he hadn’t even sealed, just folded.

she read.

Rosemary gasped. She put a hand to her mouth. She checked the date. It was written only two years ago.

Constriction around my heart…
That phrase had an awfully familiar ring. Rosemary knew exactly how that felt.

She rummaged through the letters then, read every one, about thirty in total. Love letters, yes. But written to a woman
in Burma. And when she’d finished reading. Well, then she understood.

Her father had never really loved her mother. Through no fault of her own, Helen had always been second best. He had met this woman in Burma, and he’d never stopped loving her since. The dishonesty … Rosemary could hardly credit it. It left her with a bitter feeling, a taste in her throat of bile. He had come back to England and married Rosemary’s mother, allowing her to think she was his chosen one, his special girl, the woman he wanted to marry.

But she wasn’t. She never had been. And she must surely have known. No wonder he had never given Rosemary his time when she was a child and then a woman, no wonder her mother had always longed for everything to be perfect and had often looked so sad. No wonder that he was relieved now that he could stop pretending. He had always been in love with Maya, this woman from Burma. And his marriage, his English life with Helen, with Rosemary and, yes, even with Eva. It had all been a sham.

*

‘The thing is, Rosemary …’

It took her a moment to realise that Alec was still talking.

‘It doesn’t matter too much to me because I’ve got no one left.’

She stared at him. No one left?

‘But for you. You’ve got your father and you’ve got Eva.’

Had she though? Rosemary put a hand to her brow. He was really confusing her now.

‘At first, I wasn’t sure I needed another new challenge at my age,’ Alec went on. ‘I’m still not completely convinced.’ He let out a short laugh.

He was walking more quickly now and Rosemary had to pick up her pace to keep up with him. She almost took his arm to slow him down, but they weren’t really like that, she and Alec. They didn’t link arms and they didn’t hold hands, not usually.

‘Convinced about what, Alec?’ she asked him.

He glanced at her, distracted. He brushed back his thinning sandy hair. ‘I mean it’s nice that they’re interested, of course. Flattering, you know.’

‘Convinced about what?’ Rosemary stopped walking.

He stopped too, put his hands on her shoulders and she felt the pressure through her leather jacket. ‘I’ve been asked to join a different company, Rosemary,’ he said. ‘It means a promotion, more money, a complete change in fact.’

‘A complete change?’ she echoed. What did he mean, a complete change? Had he been head-hunted then? Was that it?

‘Yes.’ He relaxed his grip. She searched his expression, still waiting.

‘It’s in Seattle,’ he said.

The Shwedagon was so much more than Eva had expected. The pagoda was bigger, grander and more golden. The mosaiced glass of the walls and pillars glittered and the ornate teak carving around shrines and pavilions simply took her breath away. Eva was in awe. ‘Did they really use sixty tons of gold to build this place?’ she asked Klaus. Not to mention the diamonds decorating the top of the spire.

‘I believe so.’ He smiled. He seemed to be enjoying her reaction to the most famous temple of Myanmar.

Eva decided to get that information later from her guide book. For now, it was more important to absorb the atmosphere, to stare up at the golden stupa rising over 300 feet above her head, to absorb the wafting fragrance of incense sticks lit for various Buddhas and nats, the spirits of the place who must be appeased, and to listen to the soft chanting of men and women praying and meditating, sitting cross-legged, bowing forwards reverentially on the worn matting of the temple. None of her studies, none of her grandfather’s stories had prepared her for this, the reality.

‘You must take off your shoes at the bottom of the steps,’ Klaus had told her, indicating where she should leave them.
But no sooner had she set them down than they were seized upon by two doe-eyed, raggedy children and carried triumphantly back to their stall. It seemed that they stored captured shoes and gave them back to their owners in return for a small donation.

Klaus clicked his tongue at them. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Bring the shoes back here.’

But Eva just smiled. ‘It’s alright, really,’ she said.

‘They take advantage,’ he told her. ‘You should not encourage or this will become another culture of beggars rather than people trying to be independent.’ But from his tolerant expression, she guessed that he understood how she felt on this, her first trip.

Because the children were being enterprising, surely? Eva was keen to support the community. And she didn’t care a bit if they were taking advantage. Five hundred kyatts might do something significant for them, but for her it was less than fifty pence.

‘It is traditional to visit the planetary post dedicated to your birth day,’ Klaus told her as they commenced their walk around the stupa. ‘Which day is it?’

‘Saturday.’ As in Saturday’s child has to work for a living, thought Eva.

‘
Naga
. It is the dragon, I think.’ Klaus raised an eyebrow and took her to the post where people were strewing the Buddha with offerings of flowers and pouring water over him from a gilded cup, as was the custom. ‘Astrology is very important to Buddhists,’ Klaus told her. ‘The day of the week when you
were born, the position of the planets. They are considered to have great significance.’

They continued to wander barefoot around the stupa in a clockwise direction, pausing to admire anything that took Eva’s fancy, a pavilion containing four teak Buddhas, house martins darting and diving in and out of the castellations of a temple, a group of black-haired children striking a big, golden bell. Klaus seemed quite happy to go wherever she wanted and Eva couldn’t stop taking photos. She knew she was behaving like any other tourist, but how could she help it? There was so much to see, so much to capture. The dusty ceramic tiles were smooth under her feet and the air was warm, soft and fragrant, filled with that rhythmic prayer and chanting.

But when she put her camera to one side … That was when she felt it. The real and gentle spirituality of the place and the people. The sense of stillness. The shimmer of the gold and the warmth of the teak, the smoky incense and the fading light as the sun dipped and began to slowly set behind the greenery on the far side of the temple. It cast a shaft of red light that mellowed the pagoda into burnished amber and made it seem richer than ever. Darkness softly fell around them like a blanket. And the golden stupa, now bejewelled with lights, was outlined against the indigo sky, pinpricked by stars and cradled by the crescent moon.

‘I am glad that you like the Shwedagon,’ Klaus said to her. ‘It is the glory of Myanmar, I think.’

She nodded. ‘And perhaps it has its spirit too.’

He bowed his head in acquiescence. ‘But now, you are ready to go?’

Most people had left the temple, but Eva and Klaus lingered to watch a procession of pink-robed, shaven-headed novice monks holding strings of jasmine flowers and paper parasols. They were just children, not more than nine or ten years old, and they were accompanied by members of their family dressed in their best
longyis
and most colourful shawls.

‘It is the most important moment in the life of a young Burmese boy,’ Klaus told her. ‘His initiation.’ He seemed thoughtful. ‘It is when he becomes a proper and dignified part of the human race.’

‘But will these boys stay monks for the rest of their lives?’ she asked.

‘No. Some do, of course. There are many
phongyis
who dedicate their entire life to the scriptures. But most of them simply withdraw from the secular world for a period of time in order to seek enlightenment, just as the Buddha did.’ He shrugged. ‘Or so they believe.’