Out of Shadows (15 page)

Mr. van Hout stood and put a smoke between his lips.

“The question is, when are we going to turn it around again and fight for what rightfully belongs to
us
?” He stopped and stared right at Ivan. “Or are they just going to keep pushing you around? Maybe you don't know how to stand up for yourself.”

I could see the flames in Ivan's cheeks. He gripped his pencil so tightly I thought it might splinter.

“Ultimately, it's all about self-respect,” Sir said, “and integrity. If you have some, there's still a chance. If you let them take it, we're screwed.”

“At least some had the integrity to fight in the first place.” Ivan spoke through taut lips.

Mr. van Hout appeared to find that amusing.

“Oh, Hascott . . .”

He took a couple more drags then trod his gwaai into the floor. He walked toward the back of the class. Everyone kept their heads down.

The next thing we knew there was a scrape of metal, a clatter of chair, and we jumped around to see Mr. van Hout pinning Ivan's wrist to his shoulder blade.

Ivan was struggling even to breathe.

“Just a little extra twist and you won't be able to palm off for a month,” Mr. van Hout spoke calmly into his ear. “But in all honesty, snapping your neck would be easier and quicker. Does
that
answer your question?”

Ivan made a gasping sound into his desk.

“I didn't hear you.”

“. . . Yes . . .”

Sir let him have his arm back.

“You've earned yourself another hundred lines, this time on the meaning of respect,” he said. “And I want it by end of prep tonight. Bring it to my home.”

It was those words, I guess, that marked the beginning of the end.

We returned to Selous in a group but without talking. Ivan just watched the ground. I was going to say something to him when suddenly I spotted a car outside the house, and it took a couple of seconds to realize I knew it well.

My father and Mr. Craven were by the hood, politely side by side with somber hands behind their backs. When they saw me my dad took a single step forward, and no more.

“Robert?” he said. Mr. Craven seemed embarrassed, as though he shouldn't have been there. “Can I have a word?”

I started toward him then stopped the moment I noticed that my mother wasn't in the passenger seat of the car. Instantly I didn't want him near me. I wanted him as far away as possible. He didn't belong here. This was
my
school, not his, he had no right.

“It's about Mum.” My father stood with a stupid expression on his face.

“No,” I told him. I shook my head.

“Robert, please. Don't make a scene.”

Only it was
his
face that creased and started to cry. I resented him for that.

“No!”

He came another step with his hand reaching. I moved out of his range.

“
No!
”

I stumbled, falling back into the huddle of my friends, wanting them around me, needing them to protect me from what I knew he'd come to say. And almost predictably it was Ivan who was there first; I've never forgotten the comfort of his hands as he held me steady while the world fell apart.

The hollow sound of the earth
hitting the coffin was what finally brought me out of it. Before that, I wasn't really aware of anything.

I couldn't recollect coming home from school that day with my father, nor what I did in the six days up to the funeral. I didn't even remember getting dressed that morning or walking the road from our house to the cemetery, where two workers waited amid the cool of the trees, resting on their shovels. The tears hadn't come yet. I wasn't really thinking anything. I just stood as the talking and prayers went on, because that was all you could do, and when the vicar was done I watched the men with shovels then come forward and start filling the hole they'd put my mother into.

I fought the urge to tell them to do it quicker because the sound of the stones hitting her was too loud and all I wanted was for it to stop.

A dry wind pushed through the trees. I glanced up. I'd thought the day had been overcast but actually the sky was vivid and pure, and suddenly I noticed a load of other people
standing around the perimeter. They must have been from the village. I didn't know when they'd arrived nor did I recognize any of their faces, yet they looked on with genuine feeling. A woman started to sing in Shona, a clear, cheerful voice that was somehow sad, and I wrangled with the pain it stirred.

My father and I stood side by side, not touching and not talking. Listening. Just him and me around the grave, there was no one else. The ambassador and another man I didn't know from the Embassy had retreated to the gate earlier. Now I saw the ambassador check his watch before coming back to shake my father's hand. He seemed embarrassed and out of place.

“Again, my deepest sympathy,” he said in the end.

He was tall and thin, with a kind face and thick gray hair parted down the center. His suit looked expensive; his shoes shone through the dust on them. He didn't speak like my father.

“If there's anything we can do, old chap, and I mean anything, you let my secretary know.”

From within their gray circles, my father's eyes expressed gratitude as he bowed a little.

The ambassador turned to me. I was in my uniform because I didn't have anything else smart.

“And how
is
that school of yours? Teaching you everything you need, I hope.”

School
, I thought. It seemed so long ago. I wished I could go back, to have it and everything in it occupying my mind. Not
this
. I didn't want
this
.

I began to say something and had to close my mouth quickly because I didn't know what might come and was afraid I might not be able to stop it.

He pumped my hand and returned to his car. Now it was the turn of the other man. He straightened his tie and started
toward us; his round cheeks glowed and sweat had glued the remaining strands of his hair to his head.

“Who is that fat man?” I asked quietly. I'd never seen him before.

“Perkis,” my old man answered, still looking into the hole. “He's my assistant. But keep your voice down.”

“What's his first name?”

He took a moment. “Harold, I think.”

But when this Harold Perkis got to us he told my father: “Come back when you're ready. There's no rush. I'll get someone else in for a while; I'm sure we'll manage without you.”

Which I thought was an odd thing for an assistant to say. I looked to my father but he wouldn't meet my eye.

Mr. Craven rang to say I could be excused the last two weeks of term. I didn't want to be, but out on the veranda, all alone, my old man sat with a slight hunch and suddenly looked much older than he ever had done.

So I stayed.

I didn't sleep well at home anymore. The bed was too springy, the pillow too soft. Most of all, I missed Ivan. I regretted my decision to stay at home almost straightaway but it was too late. Time had passed and all of a sudden I was marooned in the middle of the holidays with endless days of drinking tea and watching my old man being unable to do anything. Boredom became frustration; frustration became anger.

“He isn't your assistant, is he?” I faced my father one day. “The fat man at the funeral.
He
controls
you
. You don't run the office at all; it was all a lie.”

He didn't so much as twitch, the only sign he'd heard was a deep, labored intake of air.

“Have you been to your mother's grave since we laid her to rest?” he said. “I think you should go. She'd like that.”

“She won't know.” Inside, I lamented my words instantly.

“I'd also like you to help me clear out her room. I think it's time. I'm not sure I can do it on my own. Please.”

I felt too sorry for him to say no.

“Okay.”

“I've also been thinking,” he went on, “that Matilda should come and live in the house. It's a long way to the village, plus I could do with the company. It'll be lonely when you're at school.”

Straightaway I thought of Ivan. As if he were there, turning to me and staring.

“You're giving Mum's room to a
black
?”

My father looked up sharply.

“Don't ever let me hear you talk in that derogatory way again.”

“Okay, the
maid
.”

“She has a name, and for your information I'm actually giving up the spare room. I shall go back next door. We all have a right to move on, don't you think?”

I thudded my mug onto the table, spilling tea, and marched inside.

It was as dim and musty in my mother's room as it had always been, almost untouched since the day she did what she did, and I was certain I could still see her waxen face set among the pillows.

I tore the curtains apart.

She hadn't worn clothes in ages but they were all over the chair at the bottom of the bed because my old man had gone through everything, trying to remember what her favorite dress had been for the coffin. I took them off their hangers and folded them into a pile. Everything felt like it might fall
apart and I was terrified proof of her existence might disappear in my fingers.

I put her shoes alongside the bed in a row and got everything from the chest into a single drawer and put that on the floor as well.

I was surprised by how few things she had. I was also surprised, then, to find the bedside cabinet bursting with stuff. Papers, mostly. Letters. They spilled out onto the floor. I recognized my own handwriting; it looked as if they were all here: the initial pleas, then the moans, then the lies about how good a time I was having. The memory of all those half promises she'd made and then taken away pained me so there was little remorse when I saw the most recent letter of mine had a postmark of almost a year ago.

On other letters I saw British stamps, from people I scarcely remembered.

. . . “
How are you
?” . . .

. . . “
We'd love to hear from you
” . . .

. . . “
It's been so long; you promised to write
” . . .

Friends. From our old life in England. The creases on the paper looked like they'd been read a million times, only clearly my mother had never responded and so in the end they'd given up.

Them, too?

“Stupid cow.” I folded the letters back with quivering fingers.

Right at the bottom of the pile I found the tattered envelope my mother had once tried to show me before, on the day I'd come in to ask about my grandmother. The one with the word
URGENT
written in big capitals.

I opened it up.

It was from Marjorie Downe, my grandmother's best friend.

Dear Valerie
, it began.
I could never describe the sorrow it gives me to have to deliver this news
 . . .

The moment was a punch. I felt hot and sick. I was nowhere and nothing mattered, and all the letters I'd been clutching fell from my hand and scattered over the floor. It didn't really matter what the rest of this letter contained because I already knew, yet I read anyway, words searing my eyes.

. . . 
Your dear mother . . . suddenly, and regrettably for the worse . . . peacefully in her sleep . . . a small mercy . . . miss her terribly . . . no way of phoning you . . . the funeral will be held
 . . .

Granny?

Was dead?

Why hadn't anyone told me?
When
hadn't they told me?

The letter trembled in my grasp, the date in the top corner shining like a beacon.

June 1983
.

Way back during my first year at the school.

And I remembered clearly a time in my second term, calling home because it was nearly half term and I was worried my parents might pick me up late again. And my mother acting weird and distraught on the phone and my father telling me I couldn't come home for the weekend, that I should make alternative arrangements.

Your mother's had a bit of bad . . . She needs rest
, he'd told me. Hiding the truth.

And I'd spent the half term on Ivan's farm for the first time, completely unaware of what was really going on.

A shape fell across the doorway.

“She'd planned to tell you. During the holiday.” To give him credit, my father didn't even try to pretend. “She'd insisted on doing it herself. And when I found she hadn't been able to . . . Well, there was never a right time. She knew it was wrong, she just couldn't do it. I guess she never wanted to admit it was true.”

It sounded so ridiculous to me it was almost funny. I thrust the letter at him.

“That her mother had died? It was right here.”

He shook his head.

“More than that. That her lifeline had gone. I knew she had dreams of going back one day. I'm no fool. Living abroad was never
her
choice. But I wanted to be able to look after my family comfortably, you see, and it's almost impossible to do that over there where it's a struggle just staying afloat. It is with my level of salary. When Granny was alive your mother at least had hope, a light at the end of the tunnel; without her, she has . . . she had nothing.”

He made a weary gesture.

“Everyone lies. They don't necessarily mean or want to, they just do it because it's easier. I think your mother's duplicity ate her from the inside.”

I felt I couldn't stand. At long last all sorts of emotions pushed at the seams but I wasn't familiar with any of them, and I screwed the letter up before pushing past my father.

“Robert?” I heard him say. “Where are you going?”

I didn't know. I had no idea what to do.

“What do you care? No one cares.”