Memory of Love (9781101603024) (2 page)

1.

It was Thursday and I was making soup. By now it was an established routine. Greek fish soup this week. I was boiling the vegetables, and steam covered the window above the sink. The kitchen faced the beach with an unobstructed view of the endless sea, which at that moment was just a grey blur behind the film of condensation. I had cleaned the fish, three small snapper, and I was making the avgolemono, the lemon and egg sauce. The lemons were scruffy to look at, but as I cut them the fragrance filled the kitchen. The lemons from the tree behind the house seemed to have more taste and a more intense smell than any I had ever come across anywhere else. I whipped the egg whites, folded the yolks into them and then I added the lemon juice. I chopped the parsley, and it was all prepared. All that remained was to allow the vegetables to boil till they had softened, add the fish, and then at the last minute stir in the avgolemono and parsley. I had time to go and sit on the doorstep for a moment. I kept a hammock and a few rattan chairs on the deck, but I seldom used them. I preferred the doorstep.

‘Marianne,' I said to myself. ‘Marianne.'

Lately, I had felt the need to taste the name. To listen to it. Retrieve it, perhaps. It was still a strange experience – I didn't quite own it yet. Or perhaps it was mine but in another, distant time, locked inside another room. I had made it a habit to try it several times every day. I couldn't quite remember when I began, but it had been some time. I wondered how it would sound to others: a middle-aged woman sitting on the doorstep of her house repeating her own name. But there was nobody around. Just Kasper, my ginger cat; his slowly blinking green eyes looked as if they had seen everything, accepted everything. He sat beside me, close, but not too close, still in his own sphere. As we both liked it, I think. Beside each other, but separate. As always, he sat calm and patient while I did my strange exercises. Or whatever one might have called them.

‘Marianne,' I repeated. It was odd to feel how my body responded to the sound. After all these years.

It felt hot. The colour was red, and the name burned on my tongue before it lifted off my lips like a flame.

Marion, on the other hand, fell from my lips light blue, almost grey. Pale and cool. And it dissolved instantly.

Marion.

Marianne.

I stood and walked across the deck and down the stairs onto the sand. The dry grass on the dunes rustled in the light wind. I turned and looked at my house for a moment. The small weatherboard structure had become an integral part of my own physical self and I rarely consciously regarded it. I took a few steps back and looked at it where it sat on the sand in front of me. There was sand inside and out. It no longer bothered me and I had long given up all efforts at keeping it off the floors. I spent most of my time outside and I liked the idea that the distinction between inside and outside had become increasingly blurred. It was as if the house and all it contained was slowly dissolving and would eventually become one with the sand it sat on. These days I walked barefoot across the threshold without wiping the sand off my feet. It had taken me a long time to reach this state.

I knew that most people would say the house needed paint. But I liked it as it was, polished by the wind and the salt from the sea. It had become a soft grey, in some lights almost silvery, and the boards were smooth and soft to the touch.

‘Absolute beachfront' was what it had said in the brochure. It was a selling point then. Not so any more, I suspected. At least not on this coast with soft and low dunes, only just rising over the surface of the sea. The view had remained the same, of course. Impossible to ignore, even after all these years. The never-ending sea, subtly changing colour and character from one moment to the next. Never the same, yet always the same. Even before any mention of the greenhouse effect and melting polar ice, the dunes had provided a shifting, uncertain base for a house. October storms often swallowed large chunks of sand and washed them out to sea. I didn't mind the sense of uncertainty. The precariousness of my existence. That lingering subconscious awareness of the slowly rising tide that would one day prise my house off the ground and sweep it out to sea. Or the giant wave that would lift it up in one quick rolling thunder. I preferred that scenario. And I would concede. I had convinced myself that I was ready.

But till that day I was going to stay put. I walked along the beach every morning. When I had first returned to make my home in this place I had started my walks as something to give my existence some shape and form. Or perhaps as something to cling to. But the tentative, dutiful walks had eventually become purposeful routine, in a way also part of my work. If you could call it that. It was during my morning walks that I gathered my material. Driftwood. Stones and shells. Nuts and seeds. Feathers and bones. All polished by the sea and soft in my hands, each piece in its own way. There had been no particular purpose behind the gathering at first. My eyes would absent-mindedly set on a piece of wood rolling in the foam at the edge of the withdrawing sea and I would bend down and pick it up. Keep it in my hand while I walked on. Or it could be a stone, always more colourful where it lay on the wet sand than dry in my hand. But soft, always. Soothing. Later I had begun to carry a basket, and over time the gathering had become purposeful. It had changed the nature of my walks of course. They were no longer walks, really, but expeditions. Hunts. They continued to occupy my time and my thoughts.

They called me ‘the artist'. And they called me ‘the doctor'. Or just ‘her' or ‘that foreign woman'. Making it clear that somehow I was not one of them. To them I had no name, just a designation. It was a kind community though. Non-judgemental, mostly. Perhaps they just didn't care. To some extent you could be what you wanted to be there. It was as if the place attracted a certain kind of people. Generous and open-minded. Not all, of course; there were others too. Like anywhere. Those who wanted to take rather than give. But on the whole they were decent people with a natural instinct to leave others to their own.

I had
been thinking about that. This giving and taking. I had come to think that there were two kinds of people: those who produced and created, and those who lived off other people's labour. Not just in a material sense, and not just here, in my environment. To a lesser degree here than elsewhere, perhaps. No, generally, and everywhere. I wasn't even sure if one was better than the other. Perhaps both were needed to the same extent. But curiously it seemed to me that the latter – the takers – had somehow taken precedence. The reward seemed to have become higher for those who managed the result of the work of others than for the creators. Surely it hadn't always been so. I wondered when the balance had shifted and whether it would flow back again.

There I was, with my feet in the sand, foolishly trying to pretend that I was outside, or perhaps even above it all. That the world could not reach me or impact on my life. But there was no escaping the reality of the rest of the world. I was part of it by my sheer physical presence. This remote place where I existed was connected to the rest of the world in ways that I could not influence. I could ignore the world as much as I liked, but it would still be there and it would continue to affect me and my environment regardless of what I thought or did.

Behind the house was my small garden. Too elaborate a term perhaps for the small sandy patch where I grew tomatoes, lettuces, onions and herbs. And where my lemon tree lived, thwarted by the constant wind but still yielding its scrawny fruit generously. It must have been very old, older than the house. Older than me, probably. Its short knobbly trunk was wide at the base and carried scars where branches had been trimmed off. There was a grapefruit tree and a feijoa beside it, but they were new companions to the lemon tree. In the early days I had considered planting potatoes and kumara and becoming more self-sufficient. But the idea of being restricted by the demands of a proper garden hadn't appealed to me. As it was, I could leave it for weeks and little happened. The tomatoes needed watering of course, but their resilience had surprised me when I had had to leave them unattended for several days.

Apart from my garden and my cat I had very little company. I met Sophie every now and then, but not very often any more. The whole idea with our shared surgery had always been that the one of us who was not on duty should be genuinely free. She was much younger than I and she had three young children. We had shared our surgery for several years and it had worked well. I had enjoyed my work, and perhaps the social side of it, the contact with my patients, had been a replacement for the private life I largely lacked. But then there had come a day when I had decided to retire. Spend more time on my creative work. We had changed our arrangement and I served as a locum from time to time. It seemed to be less and less frequently. My life became lonelier in a way, but also richer. I had very little in the way of human intercourse but I enjoyed the sense of freedom. I had arranged my life as it pleased me and it had felt like a state of being I would enjoy until the end of my life. But it hadn't quite worked out like that.

My nearest neighbour was a farmer up the hill on the other side of the road. George Brendel. I didn't know much about him but I had always been aware that, like me, he was not a local. He spoke with a slight accent that was evident only occasionally. He owned a substantial piece of land but he kept no other animals than a flock of sheep. Like George and me, they stood out too – they were not quite right in this environment. Firstly, sheep did not really belong in this part of the country. And also, George's sheep were small and had black legs. I had only seen such sheep once before – in Gotland in the Baltic Sea. It was a mystery where George's flock came from. They grazed under his olive trees – another oddity, as nobody grew olives here. Like their owner, the sheep had slowly claimed their right to exist here, not as proper locals, but as a tolerated oddity.

George's shortcomings as a farmer seemed to have one main cause: he had money. I had no idea where this notion had come from, but it seemed to be a common assumption: George Brendel was an incompetent farmer because he had money. He had lived here much longer than I, and over the years he had come to earn a kind of respect, if not as a farmer, then as a person. He was active in the community and he was on the board of the local council.

I had been to his farm, but never inside his house. I didn't think he had a family, but I didn't really know much about his private life. He kept saying he admired my art and when he bought something, he paid for it in meat, olive oil or favours. Always too generously. I regarded it as charity. Perhaps it was something entirely different that I was not keen to analyse. As we had slowly got to know each other a little, he sometimes lingered on my doorstep when he came to visit, as if there were something he wanted to say. Oddly, it didn't worry me, but I didn't encourage it either. I had never asked him inside. There had been a time when I wouldn't have been able to accept his gifts. And certainly would not have allowed him to linger. But over time I had come gratefully to accept his offerings, material and otherwise. It happened that I caught his gaze occasionally and held on to it for the briefest moment. But there had been no obvious response. He had taken no initiative, no action. Just that uncertain lingering on my threshold.

There were a few other neighbours who occasionally would give me fish and sometimes a crayfish. Even oysters and scallops. I suspected they pitied me and didn't think I was quite equipped to manage on my own. They were probably right. For many years my house was just a place where I slept after work. And a monument to my relentless grief. Years that had become a blur. It was only since I had taken early retirement and begun to invest more time in my art that I had started to live here properly. But even after all these years I had not become one of them – someone who could rightly lay claim to this place. To them I was still a temporary visitor. Someone they needed to look after.