The Last Gift (10 page)

She had said to him, ‘Are sure you know what you’re asking me to do?’ What she meant was: Do you realise how much you are asking me to give up and what I will take it to imply about you and I?

He said, ‘Yes, I do know. This will work out for both of us.’

Their shared smiles made her certain they understood each other.

The reason for moving was because Nick had just taken up his first academic post, taking his first unequivocal step in the career he had coveted for so long. Normally he would not have been expected to start until September, but because of illness and study leave and other shenanigans that she could not fully comprehend, the department was unexpectedly short of staff and had asked him if he would start as soon as possible. He had started immediately, commuting from Wandsworth to Brighton during January and February (right through those early weeks when Ba fell ill) while she went through the formalities of resigning from her job. It was a job that suited her, but she was also curious about what lay ahead, to see how things would turn out. You see, Nick said, it’s exciting, isn’t it? It was not as if giving up her job was going to leave them penniless. He would be getting a salary right through the summer instead of having to look for a job in a café, and there was plenty of time for her to find a permanent job for September. In the meantime, they began looking for somewhere to rent.

They hired a house removal firm, all paid for by the university’s Human Resources department. It was her first encounter with removal men. They arrived at eight o’clock in the morning and had packed everything in the truck in two hours, the furniture, the boxes, the plant pots. They were courteous and friendly, making just the right amount of conversation without becoming tiresome. It was a surprise. She had expected them to be gruff and resentful at having been reduced to such menial work for a living, instead it was they who politely put her at ease. They graciously accepted cups of tea while they worked, managing to seem pleasantly surprised at this unexpected civility, and they were so efficient that it made her feel sorry that there was not more for them to do, that it was not possible to give them a fuller opportunity to demonstrate their expertise.

She had thought it would be frustrating to have people fussing around their things when they were perfectly capable of moving themselves. She had always moved herself, with a little help from whoever was available, and why did they need to move everything? What was the point of taking that broken-backed old bed? Why not buy another one there? She thought hiring a removal firm was one of those corrupt little habits they had acquired from their betters, who were too lazy to do anything for themselves and would pay someone to do their breathing for them if they could. But it was not frustrating at all, in fact it made her feel good to be deferred to in so many small decisions. That was part of the courtesy of the men, to make it seem that she could instruct them to do whatever she wished and they would do it. It made her appreciate the thrill of being rich enough to pay for deference, even though it was Human Resources that was doing the paying. She knew that Nick was pleased to be the provider of these new perks. The university doesn’t treat you too badly, does it? he said. If they had offered you a company car, then I would really have felt that we were moving up in the world, she said, teasing him.

It was a small house, its walls rendered white and its front door painted blue, and she thought their furniture clumsy and bulky, but the sofa and chairs were manoeuvred in with the minimum of fuss. The bed went upstairs like a lamb. The desk, the cooker, and the fridge marched obediently to their allotted places. If she and Nick had been doing it themselves, there would have been talk of taking down doors, passing things through windows, even considering removing banister rails to get the desk upstairs, and certainly plenty of exasperated instructions and irritable debates. Instead Nick was on a stepladder, in noisy good humour, making a comic art out of hanging curtain after curtain, as if it was important they secrete themselves behind carefully arranged cover at the earliest opportunity. When they toured their house in the silence that followed the men’s departure, his arm was heavy on her shoulder, and the weight of it aroused her because she knew they would soon make love. She glanced out of the back window into their neighbour’s darkening garden and saw the scattering of plants she had been putting in earlier in the afternoon.

‘Did you see the neighbour?’ she asked, leaning against him, her voice lowered as if she might be overheard. ‘She was fussing about in the garden, planting things. She looked so busy.’

His other arm came round her waist, and she was enveloped in him. She shut her eyes for a few seconds and felt herself heating up, drifting into the beginning of lovemaking. He let her go after a moment and walked past her to the window. He glanced out briefly, then drew the curtains as if to keep out the offending view. ‘No I didn’t see her,’ he said, but as if these were words just for the sake of speaking. She knew that his mind was on other matters. ‘What did she look like?’

‘Slim, fair-haired, self-important,’ she said.

He looked at her for a long moment, as if thinking through what she had said. ‘Not my type,’ he said. She smiled, waiting for him to smile with her, waiting for him to come over to her.

That first evening in their new rented house, Nick cooked a roast lamb that he bought from the butcher round the corner. He had noticed that there was a butcher on the main road when they came to view the house, and a greengrocer and a baker, and spoke about their presence there as a kind of special piece of luck, an unexpected remnant of an extinguished way of life. As soon as he was done with the curtains, even before the movers had left, he had gone to make his first visit and had returned with a joint of lamb and a story of two elderly butchers who looked like brothers, and who served him with old-fashioned charm. She guessed he would have done his best to charm them in return, giving them that hard-to-resist grin of his, and that he would have shown them his almost boyish delight to see them there.

Anna called her mother when she went downstairs, and her mother marvelled at everything she told her, how well everything had gone, what a lovely day, how efficient the movers were, how big the bedroom, how compact their little house, the lovely blue front door, that the phone was already working. She had not wanted to try the new number until she heard from them, her mother said, in case it did something funny to the phone line, or tripped something. Anna supressed her irritation. Her mother said
tripped something
as if it was a technical term for the unpredictable caprices of machines. She came out with strange anxieties like that sometimes, as if she was thinking of somewhere else, of another place where things were done differently and where simple matters were fraught with difficulty.

‘What something funny could it have done?’ Anna asked.

‘I don’t know. It might have made something go wrong with your phone line if I called before it was ready,’ her mother said.

Tripped something, Anna thought. ‘What can a telephone call do to a telephone line to make it go wrong?’ Anna asked.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know, Hanna, but it is such a bother when machines go wrong,’ her mother said. ‘Anyway is Nick happy? Does he like it there?’

‘Of course he does. We wouldn’t have taken it otherwise,’ Anna said tetchily. ‘Anyway, he’s happily cooking our dinner and playing Miles Davis at full blast. Can’t you hear it?’

‘Yes yes, that’s nice,’ her mother said, still not convinced, even though Anna told her the world was changing and that cooking could make a man happy.

‘How is he?’ Anna asked. She tried to resist a feeling of distaste as she asked, not only because she felt forced to do so but because of the answer that she was likely to get. What could her mother say? He’s better (he’s not worse), he’s worse (he’s not better). She would not say: Actually that second stroke may have finished him off. He lies there voiceless and incontinent, groaning for sympathy and bullying the life out of me. She could not say that, it would be too shocking, it would make her seem heartless, and perhaps she did not even think it. If it was up to Anna, and she would not admit to thinking this to anyone either, she would let the stubborn man go quietly, or at least leave him alone with his secrets and his silences intact. Jamal worried about what his silences contained, but she had tired of that, not from dislike of him but because of the pointless tedium of whatever it was he would not tell them about himself. She had given up trying to unravel her unknown mongrel origins, and interested herself in what she was in her life, not what she came from. But still she asked the question, for her mother perhaps, or for herself more likely, so she would not seem callous and uncaring in her mother’s eyes. ‘Is he getting better?’

‘Oh yes, he’s sleeping better and getting stronger every day,’ Maryam said. ‘That’s the main thing, for him to get stronger. The rest is doing him good, and the physiotherapy, and the medicines. You know, I had no idea what miracles physiotherapy can do. He’s very well looked after, really.’

‘Of course he is, by you. Can he do anything for himself, or do you still have to do everything for him?’ Anna asked, unable to resist a spasm of queasiness at the thought of what that really meant. ‘You don’t want to make yourself ill as well.’

‘Oh no, he looks after himself more and more every day. He’s doing well. Stop worrying yourself about me,’ Maryam said.

‘Can he speak yet?’ Anna asked.

‘No,’ Maryam said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘But he can make sounds, you know, not words at all, but sounds that are trying to be words. The physio says it’s very promising. I get him audio books from the library, and he listens to them a lot. It’s funny. He can’t bear the voices on the radio, but he listens to the books.’

‘What books?’ Anna asked. Her father used to read slowly, and the books he liked he read more than once. She used to buy him books sometimes, to broaden his reading, books that had excited her when she was at university, but she was not sure if he read them. She thought he preferred books that gave him information, that told him things he did not know, and did not get up to too many narrative tricks. ‘What books is he listening to?’

‘Some poems I got for him, classics something,’ Maryam said.

‘Poems! Why did you get him poems?’ Anna replied, unable now to prevent her impatience from showing. ‘Why didn’t you get him something he would like to listen to?
Huckleberry Finn
or something like that.’

‘He likes them,’ Maryam said, and despite herself, Anna could hear the smile in her mother’s voice. ‘He sometimes used to read me poems from books he took out from the library. I looked for those in the audio section and got them for him to listen to this week, and he likes it.’

Anna grinned at the absurd vision of her father reading poems to her Ma. She wondered what his choice would have been: ‘If’ or ‘Daffodils’ or something to do with the sea. ‘The Lotus Eaters’ maybe, that would combine syrupy rhymes with
The Odyssey
, perfect. Once she had bought him a copy of Aimé Césaire’s
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
, in a parallel text, because at that time she had recently come to know the poem herself and had been overwhelmed by it. Perhaps she also wanted to show off to him a little, look, this is the kind of stuff I read these days. She had no idea if her father read the poem, and in any case, she herself came to tire of Césaire’s booming self-indulgent language and the theatricality of its emotion. While her mother talked, listing the audio books her father was going to listen to in the coming weeks and the improvements the physio promised, Anna’s mind wandered to her and Nick’s lovemaking earlier in the afternoon, and she briefly stroked her left nipple where Nick had nestled for a while. She made encouraging noises to her mother but was not really listening any more.

‘I’ll come down to see you when we’re more settled,’ Anna said, getting ready to hang up.

As if sensing that Anna was thinking of going and because she was perhaps not ready to let her go, her mother asked about Jamal. ‘Has Jamal got your new number?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard from him?’

‘Oh yes,’ Anna said, lying to save herself a lecture on keeping in touch. He preferred emails, and that suited her too, but she got the lecture anyway.

‘Well, you must keep in touch with each other,’ her mother said. ‘There are only the two of you. You have no other family. You must always look after each other because there is no one else to turn to in times of trouble.’

Anna listened and offered comfort as best she could. She did not say that she also had Nick (had had him in full that afternoon).

Maryam heard Hanna’s impatience as she hung up, and she shrugged. She had taught herself to make light of these slighting gestures. She went back to the living room and saw from the look in Abbas’s eye that he wanted to know.

‘Hanna,’ she said. ‘She was asking after you. They’ve just moved today, you know.’

Abbas nodded slowly and turned back to the muted television, which was showing a nature programme. He too had learned to retreat from Hanna, who had once been so dear to his life. She turned against him after she went to university, not with anger or rudeness, not at first, but with sullen and withdrawn resistance. Maryam knew how that hurt him, Hanna’s withdrawal of affection, and how he had tried to draw her back in ways that had worked before, with teasing and questions and jokes. Only that no longer worked, and one day when Abbas was making one of his blunt jokes about her clothes, Hanna had said to him: Leave me alone, Ba, and had left the room and marched right out of the house to go wherever she was going. It stunned him. She had never spoken to him like that before. Abbas could not get used to that, or to the way she talked about boys she knew at the university, or to the fact that she slept so much of the day and did not disguise her boredom at home. Sometimes he said things. In the end she did not come back during vacations, just visited for a few days and then left. Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them.