The Memory of Love (8 page)

‘You’re welcome to wait.’

I said, ‘I’m disturbing you.’

‘Oh, I welcome the distraction. What would you like? A beer?’ And she disappeared into the house.

When she returned Saffia asked after Vanessa. In my answer, I told her Vanessa was well, which I expect was true. We talked a while of unimportant matters. At some point – I can’t remember how we got there – Saffia told me she had newly acquired a camera and asked if she could take my picture.

‘Of course,’ I replied.

By the time she left the room and returned I had risen in readiness and was hovering, somewhat self-consciously, considering how best to position myself. The truth is I am an uncomfortable photographic subject. There is nothing about the experience I can find to like.

‘Over here.’ She patted the railing. ‘With the view behind you.’ I obliged and stood facing her.

‘Like this?’ I put my hat on my head and tipped it backwards, swung my jacket over my shoulder. An attempt to be jocular. Pathetic, I dare say. She didn’t smile. Instead she stood gazing at me, the camera held loosely in her hands. I waited, unnerved and excited at the same time. There was a boldness in the nakedness of her gaze, the way she eschewed the use of the camera either as prop or buffer. Finally she shook her head. The light was behind me, she said. She moved me to a chair.

One or two clicks of the camera shutter. She paused and fiddled with the lens, moved a foot or two closer and depressed the shutter release. Closer again. From the middle of the floor to the arm of a chair. From the chair arm to the edge of the coffee table. Neither of us spoke. My palms had begun to sweat and I could feel the prickle of moisture under my arms. Saffia’s proximity, the effort of maintaining my pose and of breathing through my nose was in danger of making me light-headed. I inhaled two or three times and forced myself to bring my breathing under control. Saffia for her part peered through the viewfinder and seemed to fidget with every knob and lever of the camera’s apparatus. If she noticed any awkwardness on my part she gave no sign of it. When she looked at me, which she did frequently, it was as though a veil had dropped in front of her eyes. Looking not seeing. I had transformed into a thing to be photographed. I saw how the power of the camera could be disinhibiting, too. So close to me now, I swear I caught a scent of her, a combination of her perfume and a warm, animal smell.

Somewhere inside the house a door opened. A shadow slid across the wall, a door closed. I turned my head. The shutter clicked one last time. Saffia lowered the camera and followed my gaze.

‘My aunt. You’re lucky, Elias,’ she laughed. ‘You who are born in the city don’t have to put up with relatives staying all the time.’ At that she stood up and moved away. The camera’s power had been dispelled.

An aunt then, of course. How I wished it had been a mere servant. The presence of an elder in the house, a chaperone, lent respectability to my visit, the reason Saffia was relaxed. I suspected it was important to her to do the right thing.

Below us, the cry from a minaret, and then another, the beginning of evening prayers across the city. For a while we both listened without speaking. Saffia rose to switch on a light or two above us and at the same time offered me another beer. As I was about to answer an old woman appeared carrying a rolled mat under her arm – the aunt, presumably. She eyed me narrowly and spoke a few words to Saffia in their language. Saffia responded. I have no idea what was being said. The old woman withdrew, walking with slow steps and continued mumblings, pulling a shawl from her shoulders over her head. At the edge of the verandah she spread the mat on the floor and began the movements associated with prayer.

It began to rain. A pattering at first, becoming faster, like running feet. Then the gentle moan of wind. Saffia watched the skies for a moment and suggested we move indoors.

‘I must be going,’ I said suddenly. I stood up, collecting my hat from the seat where I had laid it.

‘Let the rain stop first.’

But I knew Julius was unafraid of the rain; I didn’t want him to find me there.

‘Really, I should go. I was supposed to meet somebody. I had quite forgotten.’ I put my hat on.

Saffia offered to fetch me an umbrella. Immediately I saw in her offer not a mere umbrella, but a reason to return. I was about to accept, then shook my head. I might be expected to return the umbrella through Julius. Of course I would.

At the door she held out her hand. Her touch was almost painful to me. Some women offer you little more than the tips of their fingers. Not Saffia, she closed her hand around mine, the heat melted into me, seeped through my blood, filling it with a flash of white-hot hope.

Inside, her aunt’s voice calling. Saffia withdrew her hand from mine.

‘Come and visit us again soon, Elias.’
Us
.

I turned and fled into the rain. Out in the street I pushed my hand deep into my pocket, closing my fingers around the warmth of her touch, like an object I was afraid of losing. For a long time as I walked I wondered what it might be like to feel that touch, every day, whenever you felt the need. On an arm, on the back of your neck, on your cheek. A kiss. An embrace. I walked on, the rain filling the brim of my hat and pouring off, streaming down my neck. By now it was properly dark and I faced a long walk home.

I am a person generally happy in my own company; still I had no desire to spend the evening at home alone. I found myself passing an establishment I had once or twice frequented and stepped inside. I took a place at the bar. My hands were shaking and for some reason I felt unaccountably angry. The first whisky I ordered I knocked straight back. I ordered another and drank it neat and warm. The heat hit my belly, the alcohol warmed my blood, I felt the tension ease. I caught sight of myself in the fly-spotted mirror behind the bar; the shadow of my hat brim obscured my eyes. Behind me in the recesses of the room I saw a woman, alone and watching me. I removed my hat and allowed our eyes to meet in the mirror.

She was what you would call a working girl, though of course it never was that easy. They all expected to be paid for, but acted insulted if you suggested such a thing up front. It was always a fine line. Still, with the look we exchanged I felt we understood each other. I beckoned her over and offered her a drink. She accepted with a shrug. I ordered myself another whisky and put my hand on her knee.

Young. Nineteen, perhaps. Her youthfulness made up for what she lacked in beauty. She drank her beer fast and noisily, like a child, with her nose in the glass. I indicated to the barman to bring another and encouraged her to talk, to save me the bother of doing so myself. She lived in Murraytown, she told me, the old fishing village that was now part of the city. I remarked she was a long way from home. She was a friend of the owner, she said. With the subtlety of a mule, she peppered her conversation with references to her rent, her college fees – why do they always claim to be studying? – pointed to the broken heel of her shoe. Within a very short time she was tipsy. I helped her to her feet, told her I was going in her direction and offered her a lift home.

We climbed the stairs to my apartment. She sat down on the settee while I poured us both drinks. I sat down next to her and put my arm around the back of the seat.

‘Don’t you have any music?’ she asked.

‘Why don’t we just talk,’ I said. ‘You’re beautiful.’ I put my hand under her chin, turned her to face me and kissed her. We moved to the bed.

I desired her. I wanted to lie with a woman. I also wanted, urgently and desperately, to rid my system of the still-nameless emotion that had overtaken it. As I raised myself above the girl and in the light of a passing car, I saw not her face but Saffia’s face. When I touched her skin, I felt nothing but Saffia’s skin. I entered her quickly.

The girl, who for her part had been more or less motionless, appeared to come to life and commenced writhing and moaning. No doubt she imagined it was what was expected of her. The truth was it had exactly the opposite effect to what was surely intended. I was forced to increase my activity in proportion to my wilting desire and she took this as a sign of her success, adding endearments and spoken encouragement to her repertoire. I would have liked to place a hand across her mouth, but doubtless she would have started screaming. I concentrated instead on blocking out the sounds. Finally, after some minutes, I managed a climax.

In the days following I applied myself to my article. I worked late most nights, hitting the keys until my fingers ached. In between Julius came and went, as before, borrowing twenty-five cents for a soft drink, updating me on the progress of Apollo 10, helping himself to my books. It seemed Saffia had said nothing to him of my visit. At the end of the week, after much drafting and redrafting, my paper was complete. I typed up a final copy and submitted it.

Two weeks later my paper was returned via my pigeonhole with an attached note from the Dean. It had been declined for publication.

CHAPTER 7

A morning. Adrian sits on the window ledge and surveys the patch of land between the back of the bungalow and the perimeter wall. On a length of surgical thread a plastic prescription bottle, filled with sugar solution and fashioned into a makeshift bird feeder, is suspended from a vine. Adrian finishes his cup of coffee, pours the dregs down the drain and goes to shower and shave. When he returns, a tiny sunbird, no bigger than a rosebud, is hovering next to the bird feeder. Its wings, held high above its back, beat so fast the bird is reduced to no more than a smudge of colour and a long, curved beak. Hastily Adrian picks up his sketch pad and block of watercolours and tries to capture the blur of violet-and-black feathers. He should, he knows, be on his way to his office. Instead he draws and watches the bird, weightless in the air, as if held by an invisible filament, and he considers how slender, how insubstantial his reasons for being here.

As a boy he had imagined his adult life as one of countless adventures. Early versions of the same vision saw him involved in the rescue of animals: a drowning dog, a horse with a broken leg. As his imagination roamed further from home, he saved wild animals from forest fires, or even from extinction. Later, the animals were replaced by a girl or a woman: his cousin Madeleine or his dark-haired art teacher. At night he dreamed of his art teacher, of acts of heroism, and of great journeys undertaken, of heights scaled, all with a kind of remote, fuzzy certainty. How exactly these adventures would come about was unclear; they simply lay ahead of him somewhere in a distant, amber-coloured future.

When he came to thinking about it much later, he saw the tint of his boyhood dreams had not been so much amber as sepia. Memories of his grandfather and grandmother, perhaps, of their faintly exotic ways, the ivory cigarette lighter and camphor-scented cigarette boxes, the polished wooden floors and rugs long before such furnishings became fashionable. Of his mother, who was so nearly born abroad. It used to impress him, how close she came to being foreign, as he thought of it. His pregnant grandmother stepping off the boat home in the runup to war. His boyhood adventures took place not in the future, but in some fictional landscape of the past that could equally have been prompted by Tintin, Rider Haggard or any of the adventure books boys his age consumed. Adventures undertaken and survived, which would somehow solve all the things that had been puzzling him, and after which a quieter life began.

Sometime around Adrian’s fifteenth year the imaginings faded, to be replaced by an anxiety, creeping and insidious. Life inside the house slowed and became suffused with a muted quality as his father’s illness progressed. Adrian’s mother’s hopes gathered like clouds above her son’s head. University followed exams. Adrian chose to study close to home to be on hand to help his mother. By the time he began his second year, those of his friends who had taken a year out returned coppery and newly confident, only to depart again to take up their places in university towns far from home.

When he left for Bristol to pursue his clinical training he did so alone in the knowledge of the post he had been offered and had declined at the hospital in a nearby town. At the railway station he turned and watched his mother’s cloth coat disappear into the crowd, back to the closed walls of life with his father. His mother, who was nearly born in a foreign land.

The bird has been hovering for what seems to Adrian a remarkable length of time. With his brush he applies the paint straight on to the paper, sheet after sheet covered in images of the bird. Somebody – Adrian forgets who – once told him that if humans were to fly they would require chest muscles six feet deep to raise their own weight. He wonders now if this could possibly be right. Or if it is one of those beliefs of which there are so many small and large, carried from childhood to adulthood without question. He
did
know the birds expended such energy in flight they needed to drink twice their body weight in nectar each day. Such effort invested in the mere fact of existence. Sometimes nature’s ways did not bear scrutiny, only the result: a beauty that burst the banks of logic.

Nine o’clock. He swirls his brush into the water, on to his palette, daubs the paper. At the end of the corridor his office awaits. Adrian paints on. The bird’s feathers, now in full sun, appear black, though they are in fact the deepest purple with a metallic sheen he knows he lacks the expertise to capture.

Once his life was guided by train timetables, fifty-minute appointments that ended regardless of whether the timing was good or bad for his client (they were ‘clients’ now, ‘patients’ no longer). An hour for lunch, usually curtailed by staff matters. Two trains home. Twenty minutes and seven minutes, respectively. Perhaps an evening engagement, the hours in which hospitality would be dispensed neatly printed out in black-and-white and posted six weeks in advance. None of that here. In the months before his arrival, in those same hazy visions of his youth, he had imagined lines of patients – patients, not clients – and in responding to his patients’ needs his workload would create itself and he would end each day gratifyingly exhausted. So he had thought. But they have stopped coming now, more or less entirely. And, he suspects, his colleagues have stopped bothering to make referrals. These are the thoughts that swirl in the back of his mind, like the colours of the paint in the water. He came here to help and he is not helping.
He is not helping
.

He glances at the clock on the wall above the shelf. Standing at the end of the uneven row of paperbacks is a neat group of thicker volumes:
Surviving Trauma, the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Handbook
, the World Health Organisation’s
Mental Health of Refugees
,
ICD-
10
Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders
,
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.

He begins to mix crimson paint and water, adds quantities of Prussian blue.

During his clinical years, Adrian had found himself drawn to the study of stress disorders. As a boy of twelve, around the same time as his adventurous imaginings began, he’d gone through a phase of reading books about the First World War. The stories he read and reread with morbid fascination were those of shell-shocked soldiers being forced back to face the guns or else being shot for cowardice. Once he’d recounted some of those stories for his mother. He remembered it distinctly, she standing making butterscotch pudding at the kitchen counter. In turn, she had recounted her own memories of the Second World War.

Once, Adrian’s mother told him, when her mother was out and she was being minded by a neighbour, the air-raid sirens had sounded. The neighbour, a woman in her forties already yellowed with age and Capstan cigarettes, led her to the air-raid shelter. His mother remembered sitting huddled next to her neighbour upon the cold floor of the shelter, feeling the cold replaced by a flow of warmth, thinking she had wet herself until she realised the urine belonged not to her, but to the neighbour. The pool of liquid slowly turned chill. Sitting in the warm kitchen Adrian could smell the acrid tang of urine, the brick dust and stale air. Later, Adrian read how teams of psychiatrists had accompanied the men to the front during the Second World War. But none for the civilians back home, he thought. Nobody provided psychiatrists for them.

In the last month of Adrian’s third year of clinical studies, a gas leak on an oil rig one hundred and twenty miles off the coast of Aberdeen caused an explosion late one night. The force of the explosion wrenched the platform in two, a torrent of flame rushed upwards into the northern skies. The men trapped on the rig escaped the flames by sliding down the support poles or jumping hundreds of feet into freezing seas overlaid with a slick of burning oil. One hundred and sixty men died. The survivors, who were few in number, struggled to return to their lives. They visited their doctors complaining of nightmares and flashbacks, of sleeplessness, panic attacks, of moods that swung from fear to fury. Several took to drink, one would not be touched by water, stopped washing and hid in his house behind locked doors, another saw his wife and children wearing the faces of his dead colleagues, a third soiled himself at the sight of the sea.

Adrian wrote a paper arguing for a more proactive response from mental health professionals after major disasters and had it accepted for publication. At the time many among his colleagues still described traumatised patients as suffering from nervous shock. The paper won Adrian modest acclaim when it was cited by lawyers preparing a case for compensation against the rig’s owners. What previously had not existed as a classified mental disease eight years earlier suddenly drew the attention of others in his field. Adrian knew he should feel pleased. Instead he felt cold and anxious, as though he had foolishly revealed the whereabouts of something precious.

The years ticked by. Adrian built up a steady private practice alongside his position as a senior clinical psychologist at a London hospital. In his mother’s regard, he had outdone himself. Adrian, though, felt his career oscillate just short of its tipping point.

Meanwhile there were new developments. Stress inoculation. Rewind technique. A practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming made his name with the publication of a theory he named emotional freedom technique. In America a woman psychologist developed a method called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. Some among the fraternity dismissed it as quackery, though Adrian wondered if this wasn’t, at least in part, because the originator of the technique was both a woman and based in California. Adrian read all the available writings including those of the dissenters. The results, as published, were dramatic and nobody, not even the psychologist herself, whose name was Francine Shapiro, could entirely account for them. Out of sight of his colleagues Adrian attended a training course and on occasion had even practised the technique upon his private clients.

Yet despite investing every effort in keeping abreast of new developments as his chosen field grew ever more populated, increasingly it felt to Adrian that the momentum of his career had dissipated.

So when he saw the advertisement in the back of a professional journal for a government-sponsored psychologist to work overseas, Adrian had mailed an application to the address of the international health agency the same afternoon. He hadn’t mentioned it to Lisa. The post was for a six-week project. In the event his application failed and he’d not bothered Lisa with news of that either. Then, one Friday night, a voice faintly on the telephone from Rome. The successful applicant had been taken ill. Was Adrian free to go at short notice?

Why there? Lisa had asked him, when he finally told her. She’d seemed neither pleased nor displeased, simply baffled. A civil war had placed the country in the news in the last year or so. Several times in the conversation Lisa transposed the name of the country to ‘Sri Lanka’ where a civil war was also being fought, though on an entirely different continent.

The team had stuck together. Beneath a still surface upon which people shopped at the markets and went to work violence bubbled, erupting from time to time in the rural areas. There was a curfew from eight to eight. Nobody left the capital. Adrian enjoyed the camaraderie, the sensation of remote danger. On his return to England he had applied for a further posting and been accepted. When he told Lisa he included, in his account, the impression his return had been requested. She had not been happy and yet it could not be said she had been happy – for several years.

The second time the plane was crowded. Groups of Europeans held conversations outside the toilets, in the aisles, across the backs of the seats. The Africans, for the most part, remained seated. Adrian knew nobody, though one or two among them ventured to ask his business. Or more precisely, with which agency he was working. Adrian’s brief amounted to not much more than the name of a hospital and the information they had requested an in-house psychologist. The hospital administrator, a woman in her forties, with hair pulled back into a knot from which it escaped at spiky angles, was new to her job and seemed unprepared for his arrival. Her brisk manner conveyed less regret at her own lack of readiness than a sense that his coming at this time was something of an inconvenience.

Why? Lisa had asked him. Why this place? He had shrugged and told her there had been no choice. And that was partly the truth. The real truth was he’d always known this country’s name, never made the mistake of confusing it with an island nation thousands of miles away. When, for a few weeks one year, the country was briefly in the news, he knew a little more about it than most, at the very least he knew its correct location. Sierra Leone, the place where his mother had nearly been born.

Nine-thirty-five. He really must be gone. The bird is no longer feeding but sitting at the apex of a curl of razor wire. Adrian carries the plate he has been using as a palette to the sink, holds it under the tap, watches the colours as they run into each other. He leaves the plate upside down to dry on the draining board and goes around the flat turning off lights.

On his way out of the house he takes down several of the reference books from the shelf, tucks them under his arm. He steps outside, into the heat and light, closes the door carefully behind him, turns his key in the upside-down lock and slips it into his pocket.