This Must Be the Place (49 page)

They were from a college in Canada: that much she could comprehend. But it was the name that was bothering her. Samuel Reeves. Samuel L. Reeves. Samuel Lionel Reeves.

‘Lionel’ she recognised: it was her husband’s name. ‘Reeves’ she recognised: again, it was her husband’s and it had been hers for forty-five years. But ‘Samuel’ she did not recognise. She didn’t know anyone of that name and, she was quite sure, neither did her husband.

But it seems he did. It seems he knew this boy, this chess-playing, rock-climbing, chemistry-major boy, who required heating and bedding and food, who needed books and sports jackets and extra tuition in something listed as statistical analysis. It seems he knew him very well. Well enough to pay for his college education, for his rent and bills, books and tuition. Which must, she reasoned, as she sat on the bed, mean he knew him very well indeed.

The truck starts up and Rosalind feels a dart of excitement. She sits forward, gripping the seat in front. They are off! She feels as she had done when the train that would whisk her off to boarding-school had started: ahead of her was potential, was life, was above all, release.

Someone on a boat in Patagonia had told her about these trucks that took travellers across the salt flats: a German man with a ponytail and a lisp. You should see it, he had said, and swung his head from side to side. It is like nowhere else you’ve ever been, like nowhere else you’ve ever seen.

The concept, as much as the inadvertent rhyming couplet, had appealed to her.

In the last two months, Rosalind has climbed Machu Picchu with some gap-year kids. She has been to the Atacama Desert, visited a witches’ market in La Paz. She has swum in a thermal pool, been massaged with volcanic mud and hiked through an araucaria forest. She declined to go white-water rafting on account of her contact lenses but she did cycle along the world’s most dangerous road, which was over-hung with waterfalls and pitted with crosses marking places where people had died, at the end of which was just a town with a square and an ice-cream shop and a hotel with a murky pool and soporific fish and a DVD player and a stack of dubbed Hollywood movies. She wanted nothing more than to go somewhere that was like nowhere else she’d ever been: that was, in a nutshell, exactly what she wanted.

So here she was. Off in a vibrating, rattling van, her backpack lashed to the roof, her walking boots and sunscreen at the ready, in search of an ancient prehistoric lake, dried out by the sun, in search of a place where the white desert meets the blue sky.

Without warning, the hitherto silent lone man on the seat in front of her utters the word ‘Dad?’

Rosalind could not have been more surprised, until the American answers, ‘Yeah?’ without looking up from his guidebook.

Rosalind watches, fascinated. These two know each other? They are father and son? They had all been in that hut, waiting for the truck to arrive, for over two hours and neither of them had given the slightest sign that they were together. They had sat, she remembers now, on opposite sides of the hut, each looking out of the window. (The Swiss couple had pawed each other briefly, then settled down to gaze at photographs of themselves on their phones.)

Stupid of her, really, she thinks, as she covertly glances from one man to the other. They actually look very alike.

‘Can you hold this for a second?’ the son is saying.

The American puts out his hand, still without looking up, and the other man, the son, places into it a piece of machinery. Some kind of dial with wires trailing from it.

‘What is that?’ Rosalind asks. She can’t help herself.

The father glances at her, then back at his book. He has startlingly blue eyes, an unusual blue, not pale, not dark but somewhere in between, and a heavy, emphatic brow. ‘It’s part of a seismograph,’ he says, ‘a machine that measures—’

‘I know what a seismograph is.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course.’ She rearranges the bag on her lap. Men could be so arrogant. ‘I’ve just never seen one before.’

‘Well, OK.’ He inserts a finger into his book, to mark his place. ‘You’ll see one later today. Niall is going to take some readings.’

They both regard the back of the son’s head. He doesn’t turn round but continues working on his machinery, fitting one part of it into another, straightening a wire, lifting a valve of some sort to his mouth and blowing away the dust.

‘Of the Salar de Uyuni?’ Rosalind asks the back of his head. ‘What for?’

They leave a pause for the son to answer, which he doesn’t.

‘He’s a scientist,’ the father says, as if this explains everything.

‘Here in Bolivia?’

‘No, New York.’

‘I see,’ Rosalind says. She switches to her drawing-men-out mode. She prides herself on being adept at this. ‘The two of you work together? A father and son seismology team? How very unusual.’

‘No,’ he shakes his head, ‘we don’t work together. Niall is the seismologist but I’m just …’ he seems to hesitate ‘… I was … I’m not working at the moment. I …’

He grinds to a halt. A terrible crevasse has somehow opened up in the conversation. Rosalind can almost see it there in the truck, as it speeds through scenery that isn’t yet spectacular, just generic South American plain – scrubby cacti, a few haughty-faced llamas, gravelled verges – as the Swiss couple settle themselves down for a conjoined nap. She seems to have stumbled on the one thing this man does not want to talk about, perhaps what he has come here precisely to avoid. It is clear to her that this man, these two men, have undergone some terrible personal trauma. She has seen this before, the taut-eyed expression of despair, felt the atmosphere of silent, gagged tension: it will mean a breach, a loss, an inconsolable termination of some sort. Something has happened, something has ended, something has been wrenched from them. Rosalind sees this. Something has derailed these two men and here they are, as she is, in the Bolivian Altiplano.

‘I’m not … I’m …’ The man is trying again, his hands holding the pages of the guidebook are trembling, with grief or illness or both, Rosalind doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know.

‘You’re taking a break,’ she finishes for him quietly, before turning back to the window, signalling that she will press him no further, that the conversation may cease, if he so wishes.

And he does wish. For the next hour or so, the only sound is that of the wind rushing past the windows and the tip-tip-a-tap of the seismograph vibrating as the truck navigates rougher and rougher ground.

The problem was, Rosalind thinks, as they speed into desert – an ochre place of streaked sand and strange, wind-blown rock formations – that Lionel had been so appallingly unapologetic. He thought, or seemed to think, that having a son he’d kept from her for twenty years was not something that necessitated any kind of excuse or regret. Worse, he seemed to think it was none of her business. When she’d confronted him with the bills and invoices he’d sat for a moment at his desk, his head lowered, buried in his hands, and she’d thought he was grappling with feelings of guilt and remorse so strong that he couldn’t meet her eye. She, his wife, who had stood by him, who had remained at his side, for three decades in this country, who had supported and aided and eased his career at every turn, lunching and dining and entertaining God knows which dignitary or politician he would turn up next, ensuring he had a pressed silk square in his breast pocket every single morning, slotting a
boutonnière
into his jacket, fitting a hat to his balding crown before he headed out into the sweltering city. But when he raised his head, his expression hadn’t been as she’d expected – ashamed or furtive or even placatory. On the contrary, he’d looked irritated and weary, as if she was bothering him with some trifling matter, or as if she had taken it upon herself to meddle in something that shouldn’t concern her.

He had taken off his glasses and pinched the skin of his nose and rubbed at his forehead, all the while telling her about how he’d started ‘seeing’ – as if it was just a matter of eyes, of vision, something that involved the engagement of a single sense – a woman a long time ago, while she, Rosalind, had spent those months back in England.

He made it sound, she thinks now, as she sits in the truck, as she feels every knock and bump and rock in the road travel up through the wheels and axles and suspension of the truck into the scantily padded seat and up into her spine, as if it had been a holiday. As if she was lounging about, living it up there in England for that year, reading magazines and seeing friends, when in fact she had been helping her sister with the early arrival of her second set of twins.

So while she was teaching the older children to sit on the potty or helping bathe the tiny babies or pegging out endless laundry or getting up in the night to prepare bottles or negotiating with the health visitor for extra orange juice or mopping up her sister’s copious tears, her own husband was at home in their Santiago house ‘seeing’ another woman.

Rosalind has no idea what this ‘seeing’ entails. She has vague images of evenings spent in restaurants or nightclubs, dancing in half-light to a swing band, clandestine meetings in hotel rooms, glasses of wine, presents, perhaps, from that jeweller’s with the green leather boxes.

The woman, he’d said, was no one she knew. A Toronto journalist, in Santiago for a few months. There had, he’d said, in a monotone, apparently weary of the conversation, been a child. (‘A resulting child’, was his exact phrase, as if the boy was the residue of some chemistry experiment, some kind of statistic, to be recorded on a graph or logged in a column.)

He had, he’d said, felt he needed to ‘do the right thing by them’ and provide the boy with an education.

Something had happened then: the phone had rung or one of the servants had come through a door with tea on a tray, to be drunk, post to be opened and read. He had turned away from her to deal with whatever it was, as if that was an end to the matter. So Rosalind had walked away, through the rooms and corridors of their house, and she had been thinking of all the questions she hadn’t put to him: did he still see the woman, had he loved her, did he see the boy, how often and when, what did he look like, did he look like him, and what about her, Rosalind, his wife of forty-five years, what was she supposed to make of this information, what about doing the right thing by her, and what on earth would that right thing have been?

She wasn’t thinking of her sister, in the first few weeks of the babies’ lives, how she had sat in her nursing chair with her head in her hands, saying, how will I cope, how will we manage, I can’t do it, Rosie, I just can’t, you take one, please, take both. She hadn’t, of course, even though she would have loved nothing more than to bundle one – or even both – of those little pink babies under her arm and trot off back to South America. She didn’t think about how, when she next visited England, two years later, none of the children had any memory of her, even though she had fed them, changed them, sung to them, lulled them off to sleep, wiped their bottoms, mashed up their first foods. She didn’t think about whether Lionel had had the woman there, whether they had been together in these rooms, whether the servants had known, had known all this time, all these years, whether everyone knew, except her.

What she did think about was the children she and Lionel had never had. The ones who didn’t make it, the ones who were but then not quite. There had been three – what a number, astonishing to think! – until Lionel had said, enough, until Lionel had said, no more. We’re fine as we are, he said. Just us. Rosalind pictured them, those three, as she often did: sitting in the chairs of her drawing room, loitering in the hall, waiting for her on the treads of the stair, their little chins resting on their knees, although, of course, they would have been quite grown-up by now. She thought, too, about how she’d read somewhere that the only language that had a word for existences, lives such as theirs, was Romany.
Detlene
, they called them. The wandering souls of miscarried or stillborn children. Those who had undeniably lived but only within their mother.

In the truck, she is suddenly conscious that the American man is glancing over at her. She puts up a hand to her lips. Had they been moving? Had she been murmuring to herself, as she knows she does sometimes, had she said
detlene
aloud? (A strange comfort it had been, to find a word for the very thing that lies in the core of your being, in the most secret alleyway of the heart.)

She wills herself not to meet the enquiring gaze of the man beside her. She does not want to look into his bluntly direct gaze. None of his business and, anyway, it’s highly unlikely anyone would know such a term. Unless, she reflects, the man is Romany. Which she is fairly confident he is not.

The doubting travel agent in the adobe hut had not been wrong about the beds, Rosalind reflects, as she tries to find a comfortable position for her neck. The pillow, such as it is, seems to be filled with some kind of grain. Millet, perhaps, or amaranth. It is rock-hard, either way, and makes a disquieting crunching sound when she moves her head, not unlike footsteps on gravel.

They are in a room about the size of the second-best guest bathroom in her house. But there the resemblance ends: no gold taps here, or glazed tiles, underfloor heating or piles of towels. The walls are of compacted mud, the floor grit; the low ceiling releases wisps of what looks like straw or dried grass from the depths of its weave. No lights: they must all use a torch. No windows. The door is a tacked length of sacking, which inflates and deflates in the breeze.

Five campbeds are arranged in a line, all of which have an iron bar running down their length. She is right in the middle of the row, the filling in the sandwich. The couple have pushed theirs together, naturally, and have gone to sleep rather sweetly holding hands. The Americans are on her right, the father hunched inside his sleeping-bag, the son finally settled, after performing some intricate ritual with lotions and bandaging. The poor soul has the most appalling skin condition: she glances over for long enough to register scarlet swarms and welts on his back, his arms, his legs, before turning quickly away. Everyone, she knows, deserves their privacy, even on a trip like this, where they are housed together in unprecedented proximity, like animals in a rescue kennel.