The Winter Vault (17 page)

As Jean moved to get up, she found beside her a jar of water. Only then did she notice the long trail of
gargara
all around her in the sand.

The next day, a Nubian worker she did not recognize came to the houseboat; with him was a woman.

– My husband is not here, said Jean.

The man, too, was embarrassed. He nodded toward the woman beside him.

– I come because of my wife. She wants me to tell you that she has seen you and that you are not like the other wives. You are always alone. She wants me to tell you that she is the one who brought you the water yesterday when you were asleep. She sees that you will soon have a child. She wants me to tell you that when the child is born she can help you.

The young woman beside him was smiling unrestrainedly. She was young, at least ten years younger than Jean. The sight of her youthful spirit put tears in Jean's eyes. It took a few minutes to sort out the man's consternation at Jean's emotion, but soon it was set right and the young woman and Jean were speaking through her husband's translation.

– One week after the child is born, he is carried to the river. We must bring the
fatta
and eat it by the Nile, but not all – we must share it with the river. We must light the
mubkhar
and lift the child over it seven times. Then we must wash the baby's clothes in the river and bring a bucket of river water back to the house so the mother can wash her face. The child must then be held over the
rubaa
of dates and corn and everyone says the ‘
Mashangette, mashangetta’
and we pass the child over the good food seven times. Then – this is most important – the mother must fill her mouth with water from the river and pour it from her mouth onto the child. It is only when the river water flows from the mother's mouth over the child that the child will be safe.

– You would do all this for me? asked Jean, holding back her tears.

The woman looked very pleased and then suddenly sad. She spoke with her husband.

–Yes, yes, the man reassured her. She will be like your mother and make the child safe.

Now Jean often woke restless, her body strange to her, in the night. Avery entertained her with childhood stories of his cousins and Aunt Bett. He kneeled naked on the bed covers and dramatized.

– One morning with nothing to do but wait for lunch, we sat in the long grass and discussed Aunt Bett's brother, Uncle Victor. For some reason he held a morbid fascination for us, and it was usually Owen who started us off.

Avery imitated the haughty angle of Owen's head.

– ‘They say he died when a book fell off his library shelf and knocked him senseless.’

‘What book was it?’ I asked him.

Owen sighed disdainfully.

‘Who cares,’ he said. ‘That's not the point, is it?’

Owen, Avery explained, was disturbed that a man who had survived being a soldier in the Great War could die so unheroically.

‘It certainly is the point,’ I argued. ‘What book would you choose to die by?’

There was a moment's silence while we all contemplated this question.

‘The Bible, I suppose,’ said Tom.

‘Oh, don't be so melodramatic,’ said Owen.

‘I'd choose Browning's
Portuguese Sonnets,’
said Nina.

‘Not thick enough,’ I said.

Then we heard my mother calling and as usual Owen, being the eldest by almost eight years, had the last word.

‘I'd choose
Grey's Anatomy
or a medical encyclopedia, just in case there was a slim chance of resuscitating me …’

Jean laughed.

– ‘Now we can play Dessert Island,’ Nina would say as she always did when the table had been cleared. We called it that, said Avery, because we played the game while waiting for the pudding, such as it was, in those days. ‘I'm first,’ said Nina, ‘because I've been thinking and I've got a good one. If I could only take one thing to a deserted island, I would take knitting needles.’

Avery imitated the boys rolling their eyes.

– ‘Only a girl would think of something so ridiculous,’ said Owen. ‘And what a waste of a wish.’

‘What good would that be?’ I asked Nina, not unkindly. ‘The wool would get used up fast and then you'd have nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Nina indignantly. ‘You've got a good warm sweater or blanket and you've still got the knitting needles. And they could be used for lots of things –’

‘Like a spear for piercing a wild boar,’ Tom suggested. He was next youngest and always defended his sister.

‘Or to dig holes for planting seeds,’ said Nina.

‘And for cleaning under your nails afterwards,’ added Tom.

‘But your nails wouldn't need cleaning if you used the knitting needles to make the holes,’ I said.

My mother and Aunt Bett approved of these discussions. ‘Now, that's sound judgment,’ they would say encouragingly. Or ‘Perhaps we might think that through again.’

‘Or you could use them to pierce a souffle,’ said Owen sarcastically.

‘A souffle!’ shouted Nina. ‘Yes, there might be ostrich eggs on the island!’

‘Haw haw haw!’ all the boys laughed.

‘All right,’ said Aunt Bett. ‘That's enough. Knitting needles are a very good idea, Nina … and there just might be ostrich eggs on the island.’

‘Haw haw haw!’ laughed Nina.

– Your family sounds like something out of a children's story, said Jean.

– That's just it, said Avery. I think my mother and Aunt Bett discussed it and decided we would all be children out of books. They were determined. We children were their war effort. Why not? You have all those other owner's manuals – Dr. Spock and all, so why not Arthur Ransome or T H. White? It's bound to work. To raise brave, moral, thinking adults, all you need is to give them a common mission –

– And a slab of chocolate and a torch. Ah, said Jean, that explains everything.

– I thought everyone grew up in a family like ours, said Avery. It was a shock to find out it wasn't so.

– Did your Aunt Bett have a sad childhood? asked Jean.

– All childhoods are sad compared to mine, said Avery.

Then Avery told the story of Nina's eighth birthday.

– When Nina's birthday package arrived from her father, who was in the
RAF
and stationed in an undisclosed location, she held the jewellery box in her lap, watching the ballerina come alive each time she raised the lid. Then Nina sat still with her terrible longing. I used to imagine Nina was my own little sister. I tried to look at the box the way my father would have; he would have talked to her about who'd carved it, the hands of the one who'd glued the pink gauze of the tutu onto the long legs of the wooden girl, who'd wrapped the felt around the black lacquer. Who was the man or woman who had tapped the tiny brass nails into the wood … I took her hand and led her into the sitting room, where the radio was on. The evening concert was beginning. The London Symphony Orchestra. Nina, who was deaf in one ear, used to sit next to me, her useless ear buried in one hand and her good ear open to the sound. She hooked her hair over this ear, so not a strand would get in the way of the music.

‘Here we are in the countryside,’ I told her, ‘listening to an orchestra from London and a violinist from Russia who are now actually in a concert hall in Holland. That's electricity. All of those musicians hundreds of miles away, playing to us from a little wooden box in our little house in the country.’

Nina sighed. ‘Tell me again about Maria Abado.’

‘Every nightbird can see the ghost of Maria Abado. If she is here, the birds will tell us. All over the world the birds remember her and speak her name. The cuckoos and the turacos, the colies, hoopoes, the shy trogons, cranes and grebes, tinamous, nightjars, frigate birds, and cassowaries. The avocets, hawfinches, snow geese, the starlings that migrate across the Mediterranean aboard ships. The storks of the Bosphorus, the spruce grouse, the button-quail of India, the African snipe. The African village weaver bird who builds a cave of palm leaves. The upside-down bluebird of paradise, the bird of paradise of the Aru Islands. Maria was born in a village on the other side of the mountain. She befriended the birds when she was a little girl, and by the time she died, she was their patron saint.’

‘Was she really a saint?’

‘I don't know, but the birds trusted her, in order to repair her broken trust.’

‘Why was her trust broken? Was it a broken heart?’

‘Only the birds know. But they say all birds sing her story, if only we listen.’

Jean, pinned to the bed by her fatigue and the heaviness of her belly, thought how fortunate their child to have such cousins.

– Despite how close we all were during the war, said Avery, I haven't seen them for years. Nina still lives in England, but Tom went to Australia where he does something in television. And I did meet Owen in London, not long after my father died …

We met, accidentally, on the Fulham Road. The last time I'd seen Owen was also accidental, at a matinee of a film. He and his wife, Miri, had been sitting a few rows ahead, but I couldn't bring myself to disturb them. They were so involved with each other, so passionate, it had seemed an intrusion even to observe them.

As always, Owen was impeccably suited, an expensive overcoat and leather gloves. Even when he was starting out, as poor as any of us, Owen's wardrobe had been the source of endless teasing. ‘How many people do you meet in a day who will ever come to your home?’ said Owen defensively. ‘But the whole world sees how you dress. I can live with nothing, not a chair or a teapot, without even heat! But I'll dress like I have all the money in the world. That's something mother taught me, and I know what I'm talking about, you'll see, you'll see.’ And Owen, corporate lawyer, showed us all.

‘How is Miriam?’ I asked. ‘The last time I saw you together I didn't say hello, you looked so happy, I thought you'd escaped the children for a rendezvous and I couldn't bring myself to intrude. It was at
Anastasia.’

The traffic surged around us, the pavement in front of Conran's was bulging with shoppers.

‘At
Anastasia
, with Ingrid Bergman?’ Owen laughed. ‘The very day before we were to be divorced! Miri and I wanted to spend one last day together. It was perhaps the most beautiful day of our marriage – perhaps even more beautiful than the beginning, which is always fraught with such terrifying hopes. We knew the ending – which is much more secure than a future. Then we looked at each other, and it struck us. We were both so content knowing it was over, why upset the children with a piece of paper? The next day we cancelled the lawyers and went along just as before. All that haggling had completely cleared the air and we were perfectly free of wanting be together. Now we could continue separately without upsetting the children – it was a master plan. So Miri keeps on in the country house and I have my own flat to be “close to the office,” and no one has to talk about anything disagreeable. When the children are home for vacation, I come to the house and then go “back to work.” We've never been a happier family.’

‘But what if one of you wants to remarry?’

‘Avery,’ he said patiently, ‘that's all over with, isn't it? I'll always be married to Miri, I just don't want to have anything to do with her. I don't want to hear about what she thinks or what she does – I most certainly do not want to hear another word about her just causes. All that fundraising for this charity or that. I used to say to her, “Can't we eat just one meal in peace?” But,’ he said, softening, ‘she liked a good film, she really liked a good film, and so we spent a lot of time at the cinema; she was fantastic then, really clever, I could hear her brain whirring. She never, not ever, talked during a film.’

Owen smiled, now quite comfortable in his memories. ‘Don't you see? I know her so well. The very things that used to annoy me to despair now delight me. There's nothing she does that surprises me – even when she's trying to catch me off guard. The very things that irritated the life out of me, now that I'm far away, amuse me, fill me with compassion, even affection. When I'm at the house, I look at her, I know her every gesture. It was the same with my father’ – Uncle Jack, added Avery – ‘if we went to a restaurant for dinner and there was a choice of potato – every time, every single time – when the waitress asked if he wanted boiled or mashed, roasted or fried, he would hesitate, take serious pause, as if he were really ruminating on the possibilities and, of course – every time, every single time – after a long, expectant silence, he'd say, “Mashed.” As if there really was the possibility of him saying otherwise. For nearly twenty years this drove me mad. Now it is one of the fondest memories I have of him. And if you ask me,’ said Owen, ‘that is the greatest secret in life. That's what we're really saying when we're carping on about love. That's who he was, you see; that's who Miri is, you see? And it has nothing whatsoever to do with me!’

Owen was giggling, practically cackling with glee.

‘When I think of how angry I used to be,’ Owen continued, ‘what a waste of time. And when Miri parts her lips to begin a harangue – against that bad taxi driver who offended her on the way to the shops two years before, or the bank teller or the woman in committee number one hundred and four – all the strangers who upset her so, and with whom she rarely crosses paths twice – when she begins to rant, now I feel flooded with love for her, real sympathy and affection, and I can shake my head and tsk-tsk and pat her hand to soothe her, knowing at last that's all she wants me to do – that's all she ever wanted me to do. Ah,’ said Owen, giggling again, ‘I'm so happy now!’