Breaking Light (20 page)

She pulled out the first one, dated 1936, and blushed as she read that initial rush of agony and lust:
Your eyes, the softness of your lips, your naked skin, I want, can't wait, oh my love, when?
A man called George had signed the letter to his darling Cecilia. She herself had never received such a letter. She could not imagine what it would be like to read those words addressed to her – if it had been her eyes, her skin as soft as silk … She could not bear it; it was all too much. She put her hand to the bed and thought of Cecilia sleeping there. It made her shudder. But it was for that reason, for the empty bed, that she could not resist the last letter. Her hands were shaking as she held the envelope in her hands. The stamp was dated 1942 but, as she pulled out the letter, another, smaller envelope fell out. It was unstamped and, to her great surprise, unopened. The same hand, that only a few years previously had written about flesh and heart, had marked the letter,
To my son, on his eighteenth birthday
. She contemplated the sealed envelope, turning it over in her hands. She was at a temporary loss. Opening the sealed letter seemed to be going too far. She put it back in with the other letters and retied the fading ribbon. After a moment's thought, she put the bundle in her pocket; she would decide what to do later.

However, she soon forgot about the letters; it was another
find, from the smaller bedroom at the back, which was to keep her awake for many nights. She found the cache by chance. It was hidden under a loose floorboard, which in turn had been covered by a marble-topped bedside cupboard, left behind with the bed. The cache held a child's treasure hidden in an old tin case, the size of a shoebox. As Mrs Sarobi opened the lid of the box, kneeling on the floor by the bed, her body was prickling as if tiny ants were crawling all over her skin. There were a few pebbles, polished on a riverbed, a feather from a raven, still with a blue sheen to the oily black, a small metal clip with flaking red paint, which looked as if it might have something to do with electronics, and, wrapped in a soiled white handkerchief and placed carefully into a corner of the case, a collection of blue glass shards, some of them still showing a pattern of tiny painted flowers. Mrs Sarobi held the shards in her hands and felt at once a peculiar sense of purpose. She carried the handkerchief and its contents carefully downstairs. Gingerly, almost tenderly, she laid out the pieces on the oilcloth on the kitchen table and stood back to look at them. They were from some kind of vessel, she reckoned, and, without knowing why, she decided to try to piece them back together.

Over the following weeks she made slow progress, what with her daily work in the allotments and still sorting out the house at night. But gradually, piece by broken piece, the vessel began to take form. It was a cheap, ugly thing, she realised, but for some reason a child had treasured it, guarding it along with the things that mattered most, protecting it wholeheartedly against the giant world – that baffling hugeness that the child was just venturing into.

Mrs Sarobi had been a child once – with a child's name. She
used to be Nahal – young plant. Her father gave her this name. He had been a keen gardener. ‘Once life has been given,' he used to say, ‘growing is its most fundamental occupation.' This name was the most significant gift she would ever receive. It carried the weight of a life born out of another, tied with the silken thread which stretched from her mother's heart – the heart which stopped shortly after Nahal was born.

A leggy girl with thin plaits and a cotton smock the colour of canaries, Nahal would play in the courtyard with her cousins. In the alchemy of late afternoon, the terracotta walls turned to red gold. Later, she would sleep, sedated by the scent of evening jasmine. Listening to her father's slippered feet on the stairs in the morning made her warm.

‘You must study, you must read,' Father would say. ‘Illiteracy is the greatest threat to this country and our culture – because, in the end, ignorance always makes us cruel.' By then, she was aware of threats. She felt tranquil inside her father's words, but around them tension was mounting and coarse twines of it found their way into her body. She felt them, knotting into a ball in her stomach.

They had to leave and they went to England, where the rain curved across the landscape like a strung bow. In Cambridge, that first evening, she picked a white flower and held it under her nose – but it had no scent and she was embarrassed to have been found out in that way. She was lost for a while.

Gradually, she grew accustomed to her new home. She was intelligent, they told her with astonished admiration, as if no one expected her to be. She was different in so many ways, after all. She learnt and the young plant grew. It thrived in this rich, well-watered soil where it had taken root.

When her father died, she could have cried; she could have fallen to her knees and cried, ‘My life, my love is dead.' But she was too dry, sapped. She was uprooted, her growth stunted. It was as if she had been whole before and now she was only half and so she had lost twice as much. Her grief was doubled. The burden of her own life was too heavy for her flesh, her breath, her single heart.

With no time to lose, her uncle in Herat brought her back and, using the small inheritance from her father as a dowry, married her off to one of his associates. It was a favourable arrangement, she was told. As her new husband's property, she was pushed into silence and lost herself once again. She withered behind closed shutters, although, sometimes, tender fingers of sunshine would reach through the slats to touch her face and, from time to time, a scent of jasmine would carry along the street over the car fumes.

When she did not conceive, her husband grew impatient – angry, even. He was much older and time was running out. ‘Give me a son,' he demanded, but she willed herself to stay barren because she knew that no life would be able to grow in that place.

She supposed he did it to increase the odds – or perhaps it was a punishment. They – the men her husband brought to the house – entered her body and she withdrew her life, her secret life, into a protective corner of her head. Her body became irrelevant – an outlandish tumour, attached to her in some obscure way – until she wondered if it had ever served a purpose – if she had ever served a purpose.

He died shortly after the Taliban took over. With the help of a foreign organisation she managed to escape before his relatives
closed down on her. The almost comic irony of that did not escape her; she was saved, just as an entire culture went under.

For a while, once she had reached Britain, the country where she had once been happy with her father, she wanted there to be somebody to whom she could say, ‘I will tell you everything.' But no one asked. No one ever asked. But she had a plan and, in the end, she just wanted to go where she had never been. She went to Middle England.

Although she had no religion and it was no longer demanded of her, she continued wearing a headscarf. She withdrew into the veil and its folds of silence. All she wanted was a small piece of English ground where she could bring things to life – and let them grow.

There was something about him on that first day at the allotments that reminded her of her father. It was his eyes that convinced her. They were very dark, giving nothing away at first, but then they had started to shift. He too had things to tell, she could see, things that he was used to keeping to himself. He had great strength underneath all that vulnerability and she felt at ease in his company; there was a clear affinity. At times, she wanted to reach out and touch his warmth. She liked their shared silence, which was more than words. They understood each other, without knowing each other; they could tell each other everything, she felt. She hoped. That was all.

The house had been built some time in the early eighteen hundreds; its graceful symmetrical lines and generous proportions epitomised the kind of harmony and elegance that was the reward for imperial service. In the garden, glossy rhododendrons, blazing acers and a single, spiky-branched monkey-puzzle tree, fostered from seedlings in a new, harsh climate, were further testaments to its connections with the rest of the empire. It was only natural, then, that it should be set slightly apart from the rest of the houses in the small stannary town on the edge of the moor.

It was Mr Bradley's father, Colonel Bradley, who, on inheriting the house from his father, had decided to call it Oakstone – a masculine, solid and, above all, English name, which signified everything he believed in. He died of a massive stroke, which, to his friends at the club, seemed altogether appropriate. The colonel and his wife only ever had one child and, although the fact that the child was a son lessened the stigma, a couple of their standing was really supposed to breed better.

Mrs Bradley left life quietly, facelessly, and slipped into obscurity without much fuss and to the inconvenience of no one – something she might have been quite proud of in life.

The fortune, most of it originally from the wife's side, was considerable – or so it was thought. But, by the time of Colonel
Bradley's death, it had dwindled. There might have been an ill-advised investment, or a mistress or two with expensive tastes. That was the thing about wealth – even the kind acquired abroad: one could never be too sure about it. By the time the house was passed on to the only son, young Mr George Bradley, it came with a much reduced inheritance.

*

And now, Mr Askew stood amongst his unopened, dust-covered boxes in the high-ceilinged hall with the checked tile floor, and frowned at a memory. There was a musky, brambly darkness in the corners, as if the house itself carried in its walls a clammy bafflement at life and human emotions – as if it too wondered how to live a decent life.

He dreaded this particular memory, he averted his mind from it, but, irritatingly, it followed him closely, like an unfed cat slinking between his legs. Annoyed, he walked into the kitchen, trying to shake off the past. The kitchen where Mrs Bradley had once served him pancakes and where, years later, he had been forced to come of age – where everything that he had previously taken for granted, all the warm comforts, mundane secrets and sorry little truths, had been twisted like a kaleidoscope, forever changing the colour and the play of light. Mr Askew was feeling increasingly anxious. He moved heavily towards the back door and, pushing it opened, stepped out into the misery of the day.

*

They were about sixteen or seventeen when they met again, for the last time, before Michael vanished and Gabriel escaped.

It was the summer before Gabriel's last year in school. The
skies were high and the evenings were powdery blue, and there had been a rumour going around for weeks: there was an underground pub up on the moor where farmhands and vagabonds would meet to drink and gamble. Gabriel had heard the rumour too, although he was never anywhere near the boys at school who knew about such things. He asked Uncle Gerry about it once, but something dark came into the latter's eyes as he told his nephew to keep away from such places. He should have known better, of course, than to tell a teenage boy to stay away from a secret. Gabriel became obsessed with finding the pub. For a fortnight, he spied on his schoolmates and their older brothers, straining to overhear something that might reveal the secret location. Until, one evening, cycling back from Stagstead over the moor road, he saw, on a ridge on the horizon, two figures struggling westwards against the wind. Without hesitation, he turned the bike off the road and made for the ridge, riding across firmer ground and pushing it through mires and up the scree. It was a beautiful evening and it would stay light for many hours yet. The bog rush was in bloom and the tiny orchids wore their green bonnets. Once, he came across a carpet of dog violets growing out of the wind and the scent of fresh, elusive mystery made him stop for a moment and fall to his knees, as if answering a prayer.

A buzzard soared overhead, away from the sun, but Gabriel ignored its invitation and continued westward along the ridge, the bike rolling more easily now on the firmer ground. He had lost sight of the two figures he had seen previously and, after a couple of miles, he knew that he was lost. This was a part of the moor he had never been to before. The wind was rising. He had gone too far. Something told him he ought to turn round and follow the watchful buzzard back towards civilisation. He
hesitated. There was a swift chill in the June air; he could feel it now and he wished he had brought his pullover. A single sheep bleated forlornly somewhere nearby and was answered from afar. He felt with the tip of his tongue along the fine fuzz of his upper lip and sighed. At times such as this, his natural instinct was to give up, to walk out and pretend it didn't matter. No one ever asked him to explain his actions. Gabriel's relationship with his mother had grown even more distant lately. Most things about him were either conveniently forgotten or brushed under the carpet, and so he reckoned that what he did or didn't do was of no real consequence. Slipping away was easy. And yet, on this particular evening, he felt a sudden urge to explore the moment – just as he would have done as a boy, charging over the moor with Michael at his side. He was aware that Michael had once made him braver and that the weakness inside him was all his own doing. He was the wrong one, the one who must try to set things right. And yet he seemed utterly unable to better himself – he remained a coward.

Cycling on, he felt a rush of excitement. His new-found bravery was followed by that familiar tightening in his groin and he had to brace himself not to reach down to his fly and touch
it
. There had been other times on the moor. Hardening. The smell of gorse flowers – sweet, sticky. The shame of it. Why would it not leave him alone? Instead, he pushed on over the heathland. The exercise felt good and eased the compulsion for the moment. The wind found its way into his cotton shirt, filling the fabric over his back like a spinnaker. He stopped and listened. He could hear music on the air. Turning his head, he followed the failing notes off the high ground and into a narrow valley where a stream had once been channelled away to leave a dry riverbed.
There, hidden in a grove of stunted oak trees, was a dilapidated granite farmhouse. It surprised him that he hadn't seen it before, it had been so close, but then the moss-covered walls merged seamlessly into the surrounding vegetation, and the roof, a muddle of turf and rusting corrugated iron, further camouflaged the building. The small windows were all boarded up, but the notes from a piano escaped through a gap between the wall and the roof, where a small part of the drystone wall had crumbled. A dribble of damp smoke leaked from a broken chimney.