The Memory of Love (13 page)

CHAPTER 13

Julius. What would you like me to tell you about him? He was a person who believed in himself, in the purpose of his existence, in his own good fortune. Julius didn’t like to be alone, he required companionship. He sought out my company, and in many ways, it seemed to me, he had come to depend upon it.

Once we made a trip to the casino. We were together without either of our women. By that time my relationship with Vanessa had shrivelled to virtually nothing and I was still at odds as to how best to conduct myself around Saffia given the unfortunate outcome of my last visit. Julius, unaware of all of this, came to my office looking for entertainment.

We had been drinking. The suggestion was his, as most suggestions were. He grew exuberant under the influence. In that way, as in so many, we were opposites, for drink has always caused me to close in upon myself and, if bothered, I am prone to lash out. Julius felt lucky, and he declared it aloud to the empty street as we stepped out of a bar and headed in the direction of the casino. He stacked his chips on a single number. I spread my chips carefully. The wheel spun. I won, modestly. Julius lost, royally. He celebrated his losses at the bar.

That was the night I learned Julius was an asthmatic. While we were in the casino, something, I forget what, struck him as amusing. He began to laugh. The illness showed in his laughter, laughing was apt to set off an attack. That was why Saffia had looked at him with such concern that first dinner at their house. This time the laugh turned into a cough, he had been coughing a lot recently. The change in the seasons, perhaps. The dust in the air had lessened as the harmattan drew to a close. But the rains brought their own hazards. Spores and pollens filled the air as new life burst forth. Within moments he was wheezing, a see-sawing sound, broken with intermittent bursts of coughing. He reached into his pocket, drew out an inhaler. I was surprised. I suppose in my mind I always thought of asthmatics as carrying considerably less weight than a man like Julius. I remember he had once told me that as a child he had nearly died. I believe he must have been talking about his asthma. He was the youngest, the only boy. I could see it all. He behaved as though the world had been made for him alone, a result of being constantly indulged, no doubt. Or perhaps also for so nearly having left it.

In the weeks that followed I was a guest at their house on two occasions. Both times at Julius’s behest, and at the risk of drawing myself to his attention with a sudden display of reticence, I acquiesced. I could not resist the opportunity to be near her. I sought solace in the very thing that caused me pain.

Saffia’s withdrawal from me took the form of unerring good manners. I alone noticed the way her eyes never sought mine, as they had before, unselfconsciously. And should our eyes meet by chance, her smile never broadened as it used to, but remained fixed in depth and width, quickly supplanted by an offer of more beer, an enquiry as to whether I was being bothered by mosquitoes, a suggestion to visit this place or that place, or meet this person or that person. She asked after Vanessa frequently. It is a way women have, or perhaps learn, of repositioning a man at arm’s length.

On the second occasion I dined at their house, Saffia and I were left momentarily alone at the table. Julius and Ade had set out to fetch more beer. Kekura had disappeared into the toilet. She would not have desired it, this sudden abandonment by the others, but was left little choice but to entertain me. She filled the silence with a question, another one, about Vanessa’s well-being.

‘Well, that’s just it,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid to tell you Vanessa and I won’t be marrying after all.’

‘Oh.’ She was genuinely taken aback by this, as of course she would be. Wary still, though. ‘I didn’t realise. I mean I didn’t know you two were engaged.’

‘No, of course you wouldn’t. And we weren’t, not formally. I had hoped it would be so; Vanessa decided differently.’

‘You should have come to see me.’ Her face was full of concern.

‘I did. I mean I tried. But your aunt … It wasn’t the right time.’

A white lie. Essential to our friendship, to the delicate negotiations that kept it within the framework of the acceptable. I watched her face as the shades of knowledge deepened, the shift in emotions, the flare of relief, the flush of embarrassment that came with the realisation she had mistaken the purpose to my last visit.

‘Perhaps I could talk to Vanessa.’ She was keen to help now.

‘Thank you, Saffia. But I don’t think it would do any good. Any good at all.’ I shook my head and stared down at my plate. A moment of silence. From somewhere in the back of the house came the singing of the cistern. ‘There’s just one thing.’ One last tap, I couldn’t resist but drive my advantage all the way.

‘Of course.’

‘If you wouldn’t mind, I’d prefer we kept it between us. Not even Julius.’

‘No, no. Don’t worry. You won’t have to put up with any of Julius’s teasing.’ She leant across and squeezed my forearm.

Friendship restored.

Moments later Kekura appeared, attending to the buckle of his belt and waving his damp hands in the air to dry them. I watched Saffia, who sat, the shadow of a crease upon her brow, still trying to compute what I’d told her and most of all, I suspect, the fact that she had apparently been wrong about my motives. Ah, the vanity of women! She’d allowed herself to believe I was attracted to her and so the freshness of relief contained a chill of rejection.

June. And the rains had settled into their stride. The water ran off the hills and out to sea staining the blue with a dark shadow of silt. In those hours in the late morning and afternoon when the rain let up and the sun shone, you could see the hills above the city, vibrant and green. With the students revising or else in exams, and many lectures and classes consequently suspended until the new academic year, the campus had the atmosphere of a seaside town out of season. With the exception of the holidays, this was the time I enjoyed the most. Space to think, time alone. These were the things I cherished. Not so Julius who, without the daily performance of his lectures and the adoration of his students, seemed bored.

I was at work, once more, on a paper for publication in the faculty journal. This time I had taken stock of my conversation with the Dean and come to the conclusion he was inviting me, if one could put it like that, under his wing – to become his protégé. In addition I had absorbed his advice over the choice of subject for my paper. We had spoken once more on the topic; he had passed me in the corridor, ‘Ah, Cole!’ and ushered me into his office. I was gazing at the objects on his desk, fixing them in my memory. Onyx paperweight. Pen stand. Ivory letter-opener. Nameplate. The Dean stood facing the window, his stiff little buttocks pointed at me.

‘Are you a political man, Cole?’

I answered, honestly, I believe, that I was not.

‘Good. In my view the job of we academics is to provide the perspective of the past. Leave the present to others.’

I mumbled a demurral, adding that surely the study of one period did not preclude the simultaneous study of another.

‘I’m not suggesting anything of the sort,’ the Dean had answered, somewhat testily. ‘I’m saying we are historians, that’s what we are.’

‘Of course.’ Frankly, I had no wish to get into a row. I needed several more publications to my name to stay on track to tenure. If the Dean offered me an administrative post as well, so much the better.

‘A university is a place of learning, not of politics. And I like to run a tight ship. You see what I’m saying, Cole?’

He was referring, I think, or at least thought so then, to what was going on in Europe and in America, the demonstrations which seemed to be erupting everywhere. The year before was 1968. There’d been riots in Paris, strikes and student occupations in Rome. At Harvard the next year the administration building had been overrun. The same in Berkeley, in May. A student had been shot by the police. In his outrage Julius had burst into my office, shaking a copy of the newspaper. ‘Kids, Cole!’ he’d said. ‘They were kids. If they’re going to have the courage to question kicked out of them, who is there who will do it?’ For a man of his size, he was quite excitable. He sat down, blinking. I believe there were tears in his eyes. I knew little of the riots or indeed what exactly had provoked them. Communist sympathisers, if you believed the authorities. Free speech, if you were with the students. I didn’t put much store by either account. The students were troublemakers. The police were doing their job, with relish, undoubtedly. But doing it all the same. For me such antics were a world away. This was Africa. The 1960s had not reached us here. Well, that’s not quite true. Some of the academics in other countries like Nigeria had involved themselves in politics, kicking up a ruckus over things they didn’t like. But they were the exception rather than the rule. All it achieved was to lose them their jobs. And I wasn’t sure I agreed with some of Julius’s ideas about education. It was our job to get the students through their exams, that was all. In that respect you could say I was a traditionalist, like the Dean.

I steered the conversation back on track by raising the subject of my proposed new paper, ‘Direct Taxation in the Early History of the Province’. The Dean, as he had already made clear to me, had the soul of a bean counter. Much as I expected, he was delighted with my proposal. There then followed a thoroughly enjoyable conversation between the two of us on the subject, during which he addressed me throughout as his equal. In time I rose and made to depart.

‘Good talking to you, Cole.’ And then, ‘Cole?’ I turned, my hand on the door. The Dean didn’t look up at me as he rummaged around the papers on his desk. ‘Your room. Weren’t you going to give me a list of people who used it outside hours? Other than yourself, of course.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh. I thought I’d asked you.’

I shook my head.

‘Well, anyway, there’s a meeting coming up about office space on the campus. It would be good to have some figures, to give me a picture. If not an overview, then an example to better our case.’ He raised his head and looked at me directly as he said this.

‘Of course. No problem.’

‘Leave it in my pigeonhole.’

I assured him I would, and with that I made my departure.

CHAPTER 14

There, on the opposite path, Attila. It is the morning of Adrian’s third visit to the asylum. He cannot help himself, he estimates the distance to the stairway to Ileana’s office and calculates that an encounter is unavoidable. He feels a faint flush, something about the man unnerves him.

Attila seems not to remember his name.

‘Of course,’ he says when Adrian has supplied it, accompanied by a small deadly smile. ‘So you’re back. How are you finding things?’

‘Fine. Thank you. Salia is being most helpful.’

Adrian doesn’t want to say more until he has had the chance to examine Agnes again, until he has a greater sense of her condition. Here Attila is all powerful, his grace everything. The Minotaur inside his labyrinth. Adrian moves aside to make way for the older man.

Agnes is an enigma, still. The clues he has to work with are few. There is no evidence of delusions, she is calm. The attendants say she is one of the better patients, meaning she is not disruptive, complaining only of a headache. She seems to be in a constant state of readiness, as if waiting for someone or something.

Twice Adrian has interviewed her, both times in Salia’s presence. On the last occasion Adrian borrowed from Ileana an orange, a sugar cube and a biscuit with a jam centre. ‘Can you tell me the name of this?’ he said, rolling the orange across the table towards her. He offered to let her keep each item she correctly identified. She’d been more responsive, and though still did not look directly at Adrian, she answered his questions. To Agnes he would likely seem a figure of some authority, an impression he decided to preserve. She could not remember how she came to be here or who brought her. Her voice was halting, he struggled to hear her and required Salia’s intervention. From time to time she rubbed a hand across her face. Other times she twisted the corner of her
lappa
. And though she could not answer all his questions, everything about her manner was compliant.

Though he despises cheap tricks he picked up a mirror from Ileana’s desk and turned it round to her. ‘Tell me what you see.’

One minute rolled over into two; she continued to gaze at her image. Once she rubbed her thumb over it. She leaned forward and placed the mirror upon the table.

‘What did you see?’ he repeated.

She shook her head and frowned. ‘The glass is no good.’

There’d been one other significant moment. It occurred as Agnes was leaving and passed Salia, in his customary stance, back to the window, hands folded behind him. She’d raised her chin and gazed out of the window. And then she had enquired of Salia, in an entirely conversational manner, why the harmattan had come so early this year. Were the rains over so quickly? And Salia had replied, softly and with deference, that the rains had ended several months past. That had been three days ago.

Today Salia reports he had been called to attend Agnes during the night. After the progress of the last few days she has taken a turn for the worse. A disturbance on the ward in the early hours of the morning. She’d been agitated and upset, talked of the loss of a gold chain and became frantic in her efforts to leave. He’d had no choice but to sedate her. Adrian listens to Salia, who stands silhouetted against the window, against splinters of white sunlight. Together they go to the female ward, where Agnes lies, still sleeping.

‘Should we constrain her when she wakes?’ asks Salia.

But Adrian cannot abide the idea. ‘Just keep her quiet. Let her sleep it off.’

Salia’s silent assent conveys a sense that he would do it differently, though it will be as Adrian wishes.

Afternoon. Salia and Adrian are in town. Salia steps across the choked and foul gutter in his unblemished nurse’s shoes. Tradesmen sit behind open wooden cases balanced upon stools. Salia passes between them, stops in front of a building and allows Adrian to take the lead. The stairway is unlit, the air sulphurous. At the first floor the door opens into a large hall. Inside the shapes of people move around in noise and shadows between cubicles delineated by lines of washing and makeshift cardboard screens. From outside, less than ten yards away, there is no evidence of this second city within the halls of the old department store. Adrian’s foot knocks against a bucket, water sloshes over his shoe, the noise bounces dully off the walls. A woman’s voice softly curses him. Adrian hesitates and Salia takes the lead once more. ‘Excuse me, Ma?’ to the woman as she rescues her bucket. He asks her where they might find the person they have come to find. Bent over her bucket, she raises her head and points.

They find the man, dressed in a vest and a pair of shorts, sitting upon a plinth once used to display mannequins. Yes, he says. It was he who brought the woman to the crazy hospital. He knew about Dr Attila. He hadn’t wanted to leave her on the streets.

‘You live here now?’ Adrian asks.

The man nods. To Adrian’s relief he speaks English. ‘I was doorman here,’ he adds. ‘Before.’ He says it as others do, in a way that conveys a sense of timelessness. Before. There was before. And there is now. And in between a dreamless void.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Yes. Her daughter worked here once, the ma would pass by from time to time.’

Sometimes he would go and call her daughter for her. A fine girl, the daughter. He and the woman would pass the time of day as she waited. The woman lived a way outside the city, he remembered, because when there was nothing else to say they discussed the state of the roads. That is as much as he remembers. Many years have passed. So much has changed. People say the woman has become possessed.

‘Is that what you think? That she is possessed?’

The man stands up from the plinth to address Adrian: strained, slow movements.

‘I have seen her here before. Sometimes, for some of us, they say spirits call. She is not possessed, but she is crossed, yes. And that makes some people afraid. I am not afraid, because I knew her before. But people now are not as they were, they are more fearful.’

The man accompanies them back to the stairwell. Adrian thanks him and shakes his hand. Salia leans forward and presses a few notes into his palm, and the man nods and closes his fingers around them. Silently he watches them go.

Outside they make their way back through the glare and the dust. Salia, two steps ahead of Adrian, walks like a dancer with his shoulders and chin straight, seeming almost to glide an inch above the ground. Adrian wonders how to engage him in conversation.

‘What exactly did he mean when he said she was crossed?’ he asks.

Salia turns to look at him. ‘Why do you worry about this woman?’

The question, upon the lips of a psychiatric nurse, stops Adrian short. One of the attendants had asked the same thing, chuckling secretively as she waddled down the ward sprinkling disinfectant upon the floor, her manner suggestive of something faintly improper about his interest. Why this one? Why not? he wants to answer back. But he cannot think of any other answer apart from one that is true, because apart from the patient in the hospital, the dying Elias Cole, she is all he has. He has no desire to have to justify himself. Still, Salia is Attila’s henchman.

‘Shall we get something cold?’ Adrian points to a seller with an ice box sitting upon his haunches under a tree. He needs to be in the shade, out of this unrelenting heat. Salia nods and orders crushed ice, choosing a topping in a lurid shade of yellow. Adrian asks for a Coke and searches in his pocket for the change. While Salia spoons crushed ice into his mouth, Adrian repeats his question.

‘It is to say,’ answers Salia. ‘When a spirit enters a person sometimes it makes them act a certain way, what people call crazy. So he is trying to tell you the woman was acting crazy when he found her. That is all.’

Later, in Ileana’s office, Adrian carefully rereads Agnes’s notes. On the wall he stares at a map of the country. Holding on to the patterns, the order of vowels and consonants of the unfamiliar place names mentioned in her notes, he locates them one by one. In an ashtray on Ileana’s desk he finds a small number of coloured drawing pins, also three earrings and a safety pin with a ribbon tied to it; he uses them all, pressing them through the paper. In this way he marks each separate location, including the place where he saw Agnes in the street his first week in the country. He is standing back, reviewing his work, when Ileana enters and stands next to him smelling of smoke and perfume.

‘Art therapy?’

Adrian smiles. ‘Guess.’

‘Something to do with your patient, right?’

‘Yes.’

She gazes at the map, then shakes her head. ‘Tell me.’

‘They’re all the places she was found before she was brought here.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ says Ileana.

Side by side they stand and stare at Agnes’s journeys mapped in colours and jewels.

Agnes sleeps. Both her hands are tucked under her chin, her body curled into a question mark. She is completely still, no fluttering of eyelids, a dreamless sleep. Adrian stands at the foot of her bed. He can barely discern her breathing. In the corner of the room a woman smiles and sings to herself.

Afterwards he walks through the gardens, past the lawns to a small cluster of trees in a hidden corner. The Patients’ Garden, as it once was, has gone wild. Crazy paving. Anywhere else he might have imagined it as somebody’s idea of a joke. The paths are overgrown, the air carries an odour of dead flowers mingled with the freshness of the sea. The ground is covered with long, curved pods, some of which have opened and spilt their seeds. An orchid, dark and dense, crouches on a branch above him. He ponders Agnes and her journeys. Fugue, they call it in his profession, a condition in which the body and the disturbed spirit are joined in shadowy wanderings.

Agnes is searching for something. Something she goes out looking for and fails to find. Time after time.