The Last Gift (14 page)

After a moment’s rest, Ralph spoke of when he was a policeman in Northern Nigeria, a brief spell of imperial duty before Nigeria’s independence forced him back home to make money.

‘You know, it was reading Orwell and that essay of his, “Shooting an Elephant”, that made police work seem something decent to do. Isn’t that curious? When what he was intending to show was the unworthiness of our imperial enterprise?

‘Do you like Orwell, Anna?’ Ralph asked, turning to her at last with a look of prostrate attention. ‘Nick said you studied literature. Do they ask you to read Orwell these days?’

Anna was drawn into the conversation, and she found herself gradually soothed by Ralph’s blatant flattery and impressed by his wide reading and his intelligent observations. He seemed to have read most of Orwell and Forster and Conrad and Kipling and was able to move easily between these writers, drawing comparisons, inviting her opinion, listening. It was like a seminar, gently steered by Ralph, and Anna was completely absorbed. It was Jill who broke the spell, rising to clear the dishes. A short while later Anna found herself in the kitchen, helping Jill and telling her about her school and the children she taught and how she liked working there.

That was her first meeting with Nick’s parents: Ralph who could not be ruffled in his self-satisfaction, and Jill who seemed first kind and then complicated, and then withdrawn and apologetic. Anna felt a discomfort on that first meeting, which she still could not fully lose. She did not say this to Nick, because it made her sound like a wimp, but she did not think they liked her.

Maryam was forty-eight years old when Abbas had the second stroke, and when they let him out of hospital she gave up work so she could look after him. There was not much choice in the matter. It was either that or have a carer in the house, and she knew how much he would hate that, and anyway, it was not as if she was giving up being the Governor of the Bank of England. She had to learn to think differently about money when she had hardly thought
about it at all. She had left everything to him. She had to
learn about allowances and how to claim them, how to access his pension, how to do everything without his help. She had to learn how to care for him. It took a while for her to absorb and understand these new arrangements, to know them with as little resentment or disgust as she thought she should. Abbas could not speak or laugh or feed himself, or clean himself properly after using the toilet. She minded that last one most of all, however hard she tried. She could not help herself. She could not hide it from him although she did her best. He always shut his eyes when she cleaned him, but sometimes she saw tears coming out of his clenched eyelids.

After the early weeks passed, and Abbas was receiving regular therapy and beginning to make progress, she thought it was time she shook herself awake and found something to do. She went to the hairdressers to have the grey banished from her hair, and if Abbas’s therapy sessions allowed, she went to the gym one afternoon a week. She took to the young woman instructor there immediately. She was a thin blonde-haired woman who wore large glasses and spoke in a rapid and unusual way, as if she was pretending to be someone else. Maryam liked her friendly bossiness because it allowed her to disguise her ignorance about what happened in a gym. She also liked her unstinting flattery and her cries of joy for every new little exercise Maryam completed successfully.

One day she read in the local free newspaper about a Refugee Centre in Norwich, which, among other things, offered legal advice and information to refugees and asylum seekers. It helped them to trace families and relatives, and just generally helped them to settle. There were some stories in the feature, stories of real people and what had befallen them and where they were now. It was work that would have special meaning for her because of Abbas and because of her own confused beginnings, and because of Jamal who was studying the subject. She saw that some of the staff were volunteers, and she thought that was something she would like to do. It would be a bit like joining a family business. On the afternoon that Abbas had his physio session, Maryam went to the Centre and offered her services. Abbas would probably not like her to do it. If he could speak, he would probably say she was just going to bother people who had their own lives to sort out, interfering and asking questions that nobody wanted asked, offering advice, which helped no one. And she was not sure when she would find the time from looking after him, but she went to the Centre that Thursday afternoon and offered her services anyway. Is there anything I can do to help?

Maryam turned up at the Refugee Centre looking elegant and relaxed, more so than she realised because inside she was tensed with the expectation of being refused, not needed, superfluous. But her offer was accepted, and she hurried back to the Health Centre to collect Abbas, wondering how she could now fit it in. On the drive home she could not help herself and told Abbas what she had done. She glanced towards him to see if he had heard her, and she saw the beginnings of a tight little smile on his face. It was a tiny grotesque grimace, but it was a smile, his first since the stroke.

‘Abbas, you are smiling,’ she said quietly, smiling herself. ‘You can smile. It’s about time you did, Mr Boots. So you don’t think the Refugee Centre is a bad idea?’

She rang Jamal later that evening (after she had tried Hanna first) and told him about the smile first of all.
It was a tiny little thing but it was a smile all right
. Then she told him about the Refugee Centre.

‘What will you do there?’ he asked.

‘I can help in a lot of ways,’ she said. ‘In the crèche, with the literacy classes, or with community events at the Centre.’ She wanted Jamal to be impressed but she could not be sure from his voice if he was holding something back. ‘It was what made your Ba smile, so he thinks it’s all right. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

‘If you want to do it . . . I mean if you want to do that kind of work. It might be quite ordinary, boring. Cleaning, making tea, skivvying work, not much different from what you did at the hospital or at home,’ he said.

‘So you don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she said, disappointed.

‘Yes, of course it’s a good idea,’ Jamal replied. ‘Especially if it made the invalid smile. It will be good for you to do something different, get a break from the caring, do something that you want to do. I just worry that they might not let you do anything interesting. You know, that it would just be more chores for you to do.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think it will be like that. I think there will be a lot to do,’ Maryam said, and she made sure that he heard the smile in her voice.

The next day of their visit Nick borrowed Jill’s car and took Anna out to the country. They had slept in separate rooms, and Anna had not expected the luxury of a large comfortable bedroom with its own bathroom. When she shut the bedroom door, the carpet, the curtains, the wallpaper and the furniture absorbed all sound, and the room felt unattached to the rest of the house. It was like a hushed, sealed capsule floating free. When she opened the curtains in the morning, she looked over a large garden, which was so full and neat that she guessed it was looked after by a team of gardeners. The structure she had seen in the gloom was a pergola with a vine growing on it. Nick drove to a nearby village he wanted her to see, and they strolled through it while he told her about the ancient church, and about stories of the English Civil War in which it featured. He told the stories as if they belonged to him, as if he was present at their unfolding, standing at the edge of a nearby lane looking on these events happening in the open. They saw no one in the village until they entered the pottery, where the potter smiled at them ­without stopping work on his wheel. Nick explained in a whisper that the pottery was famous, and people came from far and wide to buy pots here. It was a small village, and soon they were out in a country lane where daffodils were still in bloom and which was shaded by huge budding trees.

‘Your mother does not talk very much,’ Anna said.

Nick laughed: ‘You mean my father talks a lot. No one gets to say much when Dad is in the mood, which is when he is relaxed and comfortable with the company. I must say, he seemed very much in the mood last night. So that means he likes you. You’ll get used to it, you’ll have no choice,’ he said, laughing again at the thought. ‘Anyway, I heard you and Mum chattering away in the kitchen, so it looks as if everything is going well.’

Late in the morning Nick said they would have to go back so he could attend the Easter service. Anna said she would like to go too. Nick said she should not feel she had to. He went because he did not know how to get out of it after all these years. The vicar of the church they went to was his Dad’s brother, his Uncle Digby, and for as long as he could remember, his parents had said that the Easter service was the most important ceremony in the Christian calendar. According to them you did not have the right to call yourself a Christian if you did not attend the service to rejoice in the saviour’s resurrection – even though they did not trouble themselves too much to exercise this right at other times of the year. Besides, the service and the late family lunch afterwards had become their own pleasant family tradition. ‘I’ll come,’ Anna said. ‘I’d like to.’ She wanted to feel that she had been invited into their warmth and intimacy, and she wanted to share it fully. She did not want to hold back and quibble.

She told him that she wanted to go to the Easter service because she had never been to one before, or been to any kind of church service for that matter.

‘No!’ he said, gratifying her with his disbelieving surprise.

It was true: not a service, nor a christening, nor a church wedding, nor any of those things. She had seen these events in films and on TV, that’s all. Everything she knew about Christianity was entirely theoretical, mostly things she had read when she was doing her literature degree and bits and pieces you cannot avoid picking up.

Nick said his lineage teemed with vicars and lay preachers. Hearing Anna say that about the Church was like meeting someone who said he had never seen the moon.

It was another one of those things her Ba had made sure they were ignorant about. When Anna started school, some of the Muslim parents began a campaign to have their children excluded from events that had anything to do with Christian practices. The parents were staff and postgraduate students at the university in Norwich, not many, but they knew how to campaign. It was a Church of England school, although that had nothing to do with her and her brother being there. It just happened to be near them and had a good reputation. When the exclusion campaign started, the headmaster thought a principle was involved, namely that children attending a school such as his had to participate in all its practices otherwise the school’s
esprit de corps
would be in jeopardy. In addition, he did not like having the school’s style cramped and tempered with in this way by a handful of people who did not value the ethos it held dear. But the parents organised petitions, threatened appeals and in the end the headmaster agreed to allow the children of Muslim parents to exclude themselves from certain school events. He would much rather they had taken their children elsewhere, but the local council office advised him not to allow the protest to become a scandal. And because her name was Hanna Abbas and her record said she was a Muslim, her parents were offered the option of excluding her and they took it. Hanna was excused from any Christian events, and so was her brother Jamal when his turn came. The teachers did little to make it easy for the Muslim children, keeping them together in one class while the Nativity play or the harvest festival went on in the hall. They were the awkward squad, and the school did not mind them knowing that they were.

It was her father who was the Muslim, although there was nothing particularly Muslim about what he did or the way they lived. Sometimes he told them what it meant to be a Muslim, the Pillars of Islam, as he called them, praying, fasting, giving alms, going on the pilgrimage to Mecca, although he never did any of those things himself. He told them the story of Muhammad, and of Muslim conquests of most of the known world, from China to the gates of Vienna, and of its scholarship and learning. The stories were like great adventures, that was how he told them, tales of when men were giants and it was still possible to stumble on a treasure chest of emeralds and diamonds when searching for firewood in the forest. What their mother Maryam knew about religion was what she had picked up along the way, and it was the lightest of burdens. She probably would not have thought to exclude her children from anything, but their father saw it as a small reprieve from the overwhelming corruption of his children, so he insisted they be excluded. The campaigning parents, of whom he was not one, kept a watchful eye on the school, and her dad did not want it said that he had neglected to care for his children. Then after a while Hanna and Jamal became used to being excused from any Christian activity, and insisted on it themselves, because they knew that was what they were expected to do. That it was what their dad wanted them to do. That was how she could grow up in England and not go to a church once. If their dad was a proper Muslim, he would have committed a great sin by keeping them in ignorance about their religion, instead of which he kept them in ignorance about everything, or tried to anyway. There was so much more he should have told them, a great deal more about a great many things.

Nick did not say anything when Anna told him this, but Anna could see the look of distaste on his face, and she assumed it was distaste for her Ba. She felt a moment’s brief regret, but nothing that she had said was untrue. It was sad if her description made him sound like a bigoted immigrant, but that was what he had laid himself open to, and she resisted the impulse to say something in his defence.