A Distant Shore (25 page)

“Would you like a drink before you go? A cup of tea, or something stronger?”

He turns and looks at her. He smiles with his black eyes, but he says nothing. He is dressed now, and he stands and turns fully to face her. She lies entangled in the sheets and stares up at him, a fish trapped.

“No, thank you,” he says. “I have to go.”

She notices a slight shrug of his shoulders, and then she watches as he treads silently from the room. He steps into his shoes in the hallway, then she hears the door open and bang to and the letterbox clatter, for he always shuts the door with too much force. After a short period of reflection she struggles clear of the bed linen and pulls on a cotton robe. Then she goes into the sitting room and draws the curtains a little to admit some moonlight, before opening the piano lid as far as it will go.

The following morning she goes into the shop. This is part of her daily routine. A copy of the
Daily Mail
on the way to work. It is his habit to sell it to her in a brusque manner that she knows he has appropriated in order to disguise their affair. However, of late his manner seems to have corroded into indifference. She is trying to learn not to take everything so personally, but she imagines that such anxieties are an integral part of deceit. Today Feroza is sitting on the counter top and in her arms she holds a child. A new-born baby with a head of oily black hair that is already curling wildly into cowlicks and bushy tufts. Mahmood is playing with this child and he does not see her as she walks into the shop. He is showering love and affection upon this child. Her eyes meet those of Feroza, who stares at her with a cold, unblinking gaze. She notices a mocking sneer beginning to buckle Feroza’s lips, and then Mahmood turns and sees her. There is no warmth on his face, no glimmer of communal deceit in his eyes, nothing. He simply looks at her and then returns his gaze to the child. “Give her the paper,” he says without looking up. Feroza picks up the
Daily Mail
. She holds out her hand, and Feroza drops the paper on top of the counter for her to pick up. Feroza is no longer smiling, and the child is revelling in the attention of its father.

During the second period of sixth-form music the pupils stare at her as she stumbles over her words. There are long pauses. She gazes out of the window. Then she turns to face them and laughs. She is conscious of the fact that she is making a fool of herself in front of these children. She tries to convince them of the relative merits of Mozart over his contemporaries. In fact, over all artists of the period. Sacrifice. She rolls the word around on her tongue. Sacrifice. And arrogance. Here she stops. She is brought up quickly against this word. She feels faint and wonders whether she should stop talking and play a few notes on the piano. Demonstrate something for them. Sacrifice is not the problem. Her life with Brian involved surrendering her dignity. Sacrifice. She has known sacrifice all her life. Making chicken curry is sacrifice. Asking him if he has ever been in an English home is sacrifice. Listening to him talking about his years of misery in the restaurant trade in Leicester. Buying a Sunday paper and nattering idly about the weather while others come in and out and cast her baleful glances, now that is sacrifice. They can stare at her if it makes them happy, but she knows about sacrifice. But arrogance is something new. Mozart. Mahmood. Arrogant eyes. Nobody says anything. They simply stare at her. But she is not saying anything. And then she hears the bell and she knows that today she will not have to talk any more about Mozart or about sacrifice. She watches as the pupils scrape back their chairs and stand. They gather up their books and papers, and they look at her as they walk out. They look at her and she looks back at them and grins. They continue to look at her.

She waits, but there is no knocking at the door and no rattling of the letterbox. The lights are dimmed, the candles lit, and the faint odour of Rhogan Josh lingers in the air. She has bought an especially expensive bottle of wine in order to make an effort, even though she knows that Mahmood is not a wine person. The subtleties of the bottle will be lost on him, but nevertheless she has bought the wine. However, there is no knocking at the door. There is no rattling of the letterbox. For the past few days she has gone into the shop and collected her newspaper and he has looked in her direction, but done so without encouraging conversation. But why should he? The shop is generally full and it is not their way to draw attention to themselves. This morning she sat on the top deck of the number forty-two bus and looked down into the back gardens. A woman was throwing a dripping carpet over a thin line that was stretched between two sycamore trees. Behind the woman a wooden shed leaned shoulder to shoulder against an equally unstable garage, and the whole sorry picture was illuminated by a weak pale light which gave the impression that at any moment a storm might break. As the bus passed the park she saw the stone war memorial, and beneath the plaque somebody had spray-painted “Eat Shit” on the plinth. Again she reprimands herself for her behaviour. She had let herself down in front of her sixth-formers. It was shameful to display such a lack of control, but she knew that they would soon forget her slip-up. It was only one class, and next week she will put everything back on track. And then she smells burning. She hurries to the kitchen and turns down the light under the Rhogan Josh, and then she decides to uncork the wine.

This afternoon she went into the new “one-stop” shop by the school. There was a new person behind the counter. A young girl, who had that sunken-cheeked, gypsy-like Romanian look about her. It was difficult to tell, but she was not English. That much was clear. She wondered where the girl’s parents were, and if they intended to come and help out. In her nose the girl wore a polished silver stud like a small ball bearing, and her black hair was flecked with outgrowths of purple. The child was making a statement, but it was one that was badly in need of interpretation. She chose an expensive bottle of wine and then she pointed to a doll on the top shelf. The foreign girl reached skywards and handed it to her in order that she might inspect it. “You like?” She ignored the girl and then turned the doll first one way and then the next. She knew that she was going to take it, but she was simply going through the motions. She opened her purse and handed the girl a twenty-pound note, and the girl opened the till and reckoned the change with surprising ease. Then, ignoring her customer’s outstretched palm, the girl placed the money on the counter and began to put the doll and the bottle of wine into the same paper bag. She gathered up her change and took the paper bag from the immigrant girl without glancing in her direction or offering any thanks. Once she reached home she took the expensive bottle of wine from the bag and put it in the fridge to chill. The doll she left in the bag and she placed it beside her briefcase. She dimmed the lights and lit the candles. She made Rhogan Josh. And then she readied herself. And waited. But there is no knocking at the door. There is no rattling of the letterbox.

In the morning she stops by the shop for her
Daily Mail
. She closes the door behind her. Feroza is serving a man who seems to be paying a bill. He is squinting at a printout, his glasses pushed up onto his crumpled forehead. She knows that he is questioning Mahmood’s arithmetic. Or worse, his honesty. Feroza looks at the man with contempt, and then she glances up at her new customer. The child is asleep in a basket on the counter, which makes her look like a gift that has been delivered and unwrapped. Feroza tosses the
Daily Mail
onto the counter top. She taps the counter with her knuckles and asks, “Anything else?” The man is absorbed by his puzzled squinting and so she steps around him and approaches the counter where the
Daily Mail
sits between these two women like an unsigned contract.

“I’ve brought this.” She plunges a hand into the paper bag and produces the blonde-haired doll. “For your child.”

She offers it as a gift to the wife, who looks first at the doll, and then at her. Feroza’s eyes ignite with indignation. The man looks up from the arithmetic, and then the wife spits at the Englishwoman and catches her in the face with her spittle. Feroza moves to spit again, but what spit she has left gets caught on her lower lip and hangs as a stringy testament to her loss of control. She leaves the doll and her
Daily Mail
on the counter top. She turns and exits the shop with the fierce eyes of the wife, and the puzzled eyes of the man, boring into her back. The doorbell tinkles as she opens the door, and the glass rattles as she closes it behind her. Only when she is safely outside does she take the sleeve of her coat and wipe the spittle from her face.

She ought to have known better. She sits in the dusk clutching a mug of cocoa with both hands as though she needs to keep them warm. She can barely remember her day at school, but she is sure that she gave the outward appearance that everything was fine. She can feel her feet perspiring lightly, which they always do when she is racked with any kind of anxiety. At her age she ought to have known better than to patronise a thirty-year-old woman and her child. She had been arrogant enough to presume that she could deceive this woman, who said precious little but whose hooded gaze spoke volumes. Perhaps an apology would make things right, and enable her to close this chapter with some dignity. At present this is all that she desires. Closure with dignity. Nothing more. She telephones him when she imagines that Feroza will have gone to sleep. “Mahmood,” she whispers, “it’s me. I’m sorry for calling, but I think I need to see you.” There is silence. “I need to explain about this morning, that’s all.” There is a silence that is clearly informed by his exasperation. And then he speaks.

“You must buy your newspaper somewhere else. I do not wish to know you.” He puts down the phone. He does not wish.
He
does not wish. She replaces the telephone on the cradle and holds on to the receiver as though readying herself to make a follow-up call. But there will be no follow-up call. She will draw a hot bath, and then there will be another mug of hot cocoa, and then she will go to her bed, which has unfortunately begun to feel light without a double load. In the morning she will remedy this situation. She will purge her house of all signs of Mahmood, and then she will discover another route to school. One which will neither stir her memory nor trouble her conscience.

It is Monday morning. She sits in the staffroom during a double-free period. Time to do some marking and make a cup of coffee, if she can find a clean cup. The staff have long ago given up the idea of their having individual cups, for invariably somebody would use somebody else’s cup and this would lead to a falling out and general bad feeling. This morning she finds a cup that, with a quick rinse, is tolerable. She is also lucky enough to find biscuits that are not stale. And then, as she stirs the UHT milk into the coffee, she looks up and sees him idling by the door.

“Well, come on in. Nobody’s going to bite.” He is dressed in the uniform of a relief teacher. His suit is smart, the shoes are well polished, the tie neatly knotted, and the strangely creased shirt is clearly package-fresh. The biggest give-away is the briefcase, which is emaciated and concave as though eager to be nourished with badly written papers. He looks around himself, checking that it really is him that this woman is speaking to. Now he steps into the staffroom and gingerly closes the door behind him.

“Coffee?” she asks. “I don’t recommend the tea.” He nods, then remembering his manners he speaks.

“Yes, please. Just black. No sugar.”

“Just black, no sugar,” she repeats. He sits down and places his briefcase on the floor. She hands him his cup of coffee, then she picks up her own and sits opposite him. “This is my favourite part of the week. My Monday morning double-free period. I can catch up and get a bit of peace and quiet.” He seems rather alarmed by this confession and puts down his coffee.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She looks at him, this timid man with greying temples and rather awkwardly knitted hands.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself. Geoff. Geoff Waverley.” He holds out his hand, which she shakes.

“I’m Dorothy Jones.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dorothy.”

He sounds well mannered enough, but she doesn’t remember giving him permission to call her Dorothy.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she says. “But would you like to go for a drink after school?” He pauses as though unsure how to respond to this overture, and then he laughs nervously.

“Well, why not?”

“It’s all right, I’m quite harmless. And there’s a nice pub that nobody goes into, neither sixth-formers nor teachers. That’s why it’s nice. Your reputation will be safe with me.” He laughs again, the tension flooding out of him in a great volley of high-pitched laughter. She looks at him and smiles. And then, to his evident confusion, she takes a sip of coffee, stands up, and then crosses the staffroom floor and returns to her marking.

Why not? she thinks. It has been a fortnight now since Mahmood put the phone down on her. Apart from the twice-weekly games of tennis with the boring woman who is the head of English, her life has returned to a familiar routine of time spent at the keyboard, assiduous reading, undemanding television programmes and fitful bouts of sleeping. She misses the idea of Mahmood, almost as much as she misses the man himself. Even when he went at her without any intimacy, she felt connected to something that existed beyond the narrow scope of her own predictable world. There was a stimulating confusion in her life which, with the slamming of a phone, has once more become as unsatisfactory as an unopened suitcase on a single bed. These days she finishes her meals, having often done little more than pick idly at the food, and then she stands her knife and fork to attention next to each other and gazes at the floral pattern of the wallpaper. Sometimes she stares out of the window at the people in the streets walking their dogs, stopping at hedges and lamp-posts for their pets to do their business, then quickly yanking at the dog leash and scurrying away from the little parcels that have been deposited. The one bright note in her life is her rediscovery of the joys of walking, although she is always careful to avoid the dog mess. Three miles to school, and three miles back again, all the while positively sucking in great buckets of fresh air. If, as will occasionally transpire, she feels too fatigued to walk back from school, then there is no guilt attached to hopping on a bus and paying the fare. She now notices the frequent stopping, and the tedious waiting at some stops as large numbers of passengers get on and off, but she tries not to let these things annoy her. These days, once they reach her street, she is careful to disembark one stop beyond the corner shop and walk back to her semi.