A Distant Shore (24 page)

Dorothy says very little about her own life, being concerned to make sure that the dominant narrative is male. After all, his story involves passion, betrayal, migration, sacrifice and ultimately triumph. Mahmood is a success. Her story contains the single word, abandonment. Curiously enough, she realises that both stories seem unconcerned with the word “love,” but she keeps this thought to herself. And then one evening, during the second month of their understanding, Mahmood asked her about her life, and specifically about her husband. She blushed which, given the fact that she was lying in bed with Mahmood at the time, suggested that she still carried within her the painful residue of a relationship whose memory she had been trying to shed for the past five years. “He left me and ran off with a younger woman.” She paused. “And then I left Birmingham and came back to live here.” She slowly inclined her head away from him, and wondered if a trip to the bathroom, or excusing herself to go and make a cup of tea, might be considered impolite. He said nothing. She imagined Brian parking his car in a succession of country lay-bys and spending the late afternoons wondering just what on earth had happened to his life. And why not, for she was probably at their home with a glass of sherry asking herself the same question. Her teaching career no longer interested her, and although she still derived pleasure from music, it no longer gave her joy. Joy was an emotion which soared on wings, which suggested transcendence, but her life with Brian was firmly anchored. No joy. And then there were Brian’s women who, like Brian, she imagined to be overweight. She smirked at the thought of the dreadful collisions that she presumed must pass for sex, with portly Brian no doubt casting himself as a star performer. But it was pathetic really, for she could always tell when he was at it because he stopped wearing a vest. Mahmood said nothing about Brian having run off with a younger woman. She turned to face him and pulled herself up and onto one elbow. “Are you really interested in my life? I mean there’s not much to it, you know.” Mahmood continued to stare at her with his dark eyes.

She began by explaining that, as the eldest, she was expected to set an example. And this she did, much to the annoyance of her younger sister. She worked hard, but she did not regard university to be a viable proposition. However, when she was accepted to read music at Manchester, her shell-shocked parents took her and Sheila out to a restaurant for the first time. Her father was uncomfortable handling the menu, and both girls noticed, but their mother simply laughed nervously and kept looking about herself in the hope that she might see somebody she knew. When the bill came, her father added and re-added it three times, all the while muttering under his breath about forking out money for something that his wife could have whipped up with one hand tied behind her back. He had spent his working life as a draughtsman, reluctantly hovering on the fringes of middle-class respectability, but this close proximity to what he perceived to be “white-collar smugness” served only to increase the fervour with which he preached “the value of brass.” Sadly, the celebration dinner at the restaurant merely reminded the girls of the restrictions which had long blighted their young lives, and the evening propelled Sheila one step further along a path that would finally lead her clear away from home.

Dorothy met Brian during her first year at university. A public schoolboy, he had a posh accent and confidence, two things that she knew she could never acquire, no matter how long she searched for them. For three years he protected her as she struggled with her degree in music, while he seemed to breeze through his course in mathematics, which he regarded as an unwelcome distraction from his passion for beer and rugby. As the time drew near for them to be unleashed upon the world, it was clear to their small group of friends that Brian would propose and they would be married, which, within a few weeks of graduation, they were. Brian’s parents tried to hide their disappointment, but her mother was delighted, for her ambition had never included a daughter at university, let alone a son-in-law whose family lived in a detached house. Her father, on the other hand, took his kneeling-pad down to the allotment and busied himself there. His youngest daughter had run off and was no longer in touch with home, and his eldest daughter was marrying into a world whose values he despised. Her father saw no reason to pretend, and she saw no reason to beg, and so they kept out of each other’s way. The night before the wedding her sister telephoned and wished her good luck, but said that Brian sounded as though he lacked a bit of spark. They had argued, but they did so without passion. She reminded Sheila that the wedding would not be the same without her, and her sister reminded her of the facts that she had recently shared with Dorothy during the university visit. They both fell silent. She decided to conclude the conversation by telling Sheila that after the wedding they would be moving to Birmingham, where Brian was brought up. Sheila laughed.

Long before she went to live there, she had already imagined Birmingham to be a city whose heart was a cold arterial clot of motorways, and whose suburbs were full of windows that displayed washable flowers. Brian was happy, for he had secured a job in a city-centre merchant bank, but soon after their marriage they discovered that they could not have children. They had every test possible, but the doctors claimed that they still did not know what was wrong, which of course meant that they probably did. After years of being prodded and probed they finally did discover the reason for their failure, and their GP was left with the sad task of persuading Brian to accept that the problem was his. However, her compassion quickly soured into anger as she began to hear about his petty affairs at the bank with backroom girls. Straight out of school, these were graceless, slightly dumpy girls still too naïve to be placed in front of the clientele, but who went positively weak at the knees at the thought of being pinned beneath a man who wore a suit and tie to work. She threw herself into her life as a teacher of music at the local secondary-modern school, and having proved her ability to tease tuneful sounds from their discordant souls, she was quickly transferred to the grammar school. This was a place where the parents expected, and where the headmaster expected, although she soon discovered that the pupils were as unfocused as the pupils at the supposedly inferior school. And then Brian’s affairs seemed to stop, and she realised that there must be somebody special. She herself had not been totally ignored. There had been staffroom flirtations; the head of physics idly pushing an arm through hers and looking at her in a particular way; and the cricket master forever offering his services as a driver to run her to a concert, or to the supermarket, or to anywhere that took her fancy. Once or twice a month a man would sit next to her on the bus and attempt conversation, but she knew that her days as an object of desire were firmly rooted in the past. She imagined that either pity or curiosity motivated these men, and it never occurred to her that there might be any possibility of her seriously pursuing a liaison beyond the one she endured with Brian.

He left the note on the kitchen table. It simply said, “Sorry.” At first she did not know what to make of it. She tried to remember the threads of their last argument. There was always an argument in the air, like an unresolved plot line from one of the television soaps whose omnibus editions he liked to watch at the weekends in his socks and sandals. But she could not remember any argument. She put down her bag and went upstairs to get out of her school clothes. Then she taught her private student, and after the hopeless boy had left, she began to prepare dinner. It was only when the light began to fade at 8:30 p.m. that she realised that her inability to locate the source of any argument was far more significant than she was acknowledging. In fact, there was a problem. She called his office, but there was no answer, just the office machine and his dry-toned voice. After a sleepless night in their oversized raft of a bed, everything was clarified. The letter arrived with the morning post. She recognised his handwriting and tore it open. He had gone to Spain with Barbara, whoever Barbara was. He was sorry, but he could not live this life, and it was killing him to pretend. He had to go, but he knew that she would be better off on her own without him. How did he know? she wondered. The selfish pig had walked out on nearly thirty years of marriage and was writing to her as though the only thing that he was guilty of was exchanging the wretched uncertainty of English weather for the calming predictability of blue sky and bright sunshine. She did not dress, nor did she leave the house. She telephoned the school and told them that she needed to take a week’s leave of absence because of a family crisis, and the headmaster’s secretary answered her in a voice which seemed to be taunting her with secret knowledge of the failure of her marriage. And then, sometime later the same day, having drunk a dozen cups of coffee, a decision was made to sell up and, at fifty years of age, start over again in the nondescript town that she had grown up in. She would leave Brian’s Birmingham and go home and find a position among her own.

Mahmood had listened attentively and occasionally raised an eyebrow, but she knew that hers was not a very interesting story. For the past five years she has lived in a neat semi-detached house and earned her daily bread as the music mistress at the grammar school that, soon after her return, abandoned all standards and became the local comprehensive. In the evenings she has become something of a television addict, watching programmes that she acknowledges have no value beyond the killing of dull time. Reality shows and court-room dramas are her speciality, but once in a while she can enjoy a documentary, particularly if it concerns animals. Meanwhile, in Spain, her former bank-manager husband runs a bed and breakfast (which he insists on calling a “pension’) on the Costa del Sol for “upmarket” British tourists. Football shirts are not encouraged, and fried breakfasts, not just continental cold plates, are offered. In fact, according to the promotional material that Brian so generously sent to her, fried breakfasts are the speciality of Barbara’s house. Apparently, even some of the bigger hotels don’t do “the works,” but at Brian and Barbara’s “Casa BeeBee” you can always get a fried breakfast. Having read the brochures, she immediately burned them. For five years she has lived alone, and each passing year she has watched herself age, the increased wrinkling of the skin between her breasts being her secret barometer of decrepitude. Last month the man on the bus asked to see her bus pass and she slapped the two-pound coin down so hard that she hurt her hand. Not turning heads is one thing, not being taken seriously is another thing altogether. And then one morning, as she felt herself finally coming to terms with the futility of years spent mourning a man whom she had never truly loved, she walked into the corner shop for her newspaper and the new owner, a doe-eyed Indian man, handed her a copy of the
Daily Mail
and took her money.

She continues to teach because there is nothing else for her to do. It is too late for a change of career, and there is no other profession that she can imagine herself pursuing. The truth is she lost the passion for teaching music at about the same rate that English schoolchildren appeared to lose the passion for learning. And the piano is not a popular instrument. Was it ever? In the remote hope that she might unearth a singular talent she takes private pupils, but she understands that she is little more than an unwelcome distraction for middle-class children whose parents are determined to provide them with socially acceptable skills. To most pupils she is no different from their ballet teacher or their tennis professional. But, mercifully, she has not lost her love for the music itself. After Brian left she thought about trying to compose. Her few university compositions were praised, and her senior lecturer had written her a note asking her to perhaps consider applying for a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. But little did he know that her sail was already hoisted in the direction of Birmingham. These days she practises again, and she tries to tease notes into tuneful shapes. Sometimes she writes down her patterns, but she does not tell this to Mahmood. Occasionally she sees him in his shop wearing a personal stereo, a discordant, tinny whine leaking out from the badly padded headset. She is used to offering herself up to his boredom, but after her disastrous attempt to interest him in Chopin, she now refuses to expose her beloved music to his stone ears.

In the bathroom of the house she lays out towels, a robe, fresh soap and a toothbrush. To start with Mahmood would shuffle heavily into the bathroom and use her “gifts.” She tried not to allow uncharitable thoughts to enter her head, but she knew that Feroza could not care for him in this way. And back in his native country he could only have dreamed of such luxury. But he no longer bathes. He goes to the bathroom, but he sometimes forgets to shut the door properly and she hears the undignified thunder of urine cascading directly into the water and not against the side of the bowl. And then he flushes and blows his nose at the same time, so that it sounds as though a storm has broken loose in her house. Mahmood comes back and he has another go at her, but it is as though he is trying to knock her through the bed. In the beginning it gave her pleasure to spoil him a little, but these days, Mahmood no longer has time to be spoiled. The presents she buys, the silver pendant, the leather wallet, the address book, are no longer fingered and weighed and then finally held. He simply nods and sometimes he even forgets to take them with him. And so there are no more presents. When he finishes, Mahmood rolls out of bed and steps quickly into his clothes. For some reason he scrunches his white cotton underpants into a ball and pushes them into his trouser pocket. She looks at his smooth, unmarked back as he bends over to pull on his socks.