The Last Gift (32 page)

Just now as I imagined how she looked when I first met her, I remembered another place I went through, and another woman I loved briefly. Maybe that is what happens to someone who leads a vagabond life. He catches glimpses of reprieve when he sees a woman he can love, a woman for whom he can end his wandering, and perhaps that is what happened to me in Port Louis. I haven’t thought of her for years, but I did think of her when I first met Maryam in Exeter. It was all the more strange when she told me that her foster mother came from Mauritius, because the memory that had come to my mind was also about someone I met in Mauritius. It happened to me several years before, when we stopped in Port Louis to pick up a cargo of sugar bound for Bristol. It was my first and only visit to Mauritius.

There was a delay with the delivery of the cargo, so I went to explore the town and I got carried away with the sights. They reminded me of home. Many places reminded me of home, the look of the houses, the fruit in the market, a crowd outside a mosque. I could not stop seeing the similarities. On a beach in Port Louis I saw an old man sitting amid the reek of sun-burn fishscales, and I stood watching him for a few minutes, surprised by the familiar grace with which he pulled the needle through the sailcloth he was sewing. After walking for a long time, I found myself heading out of town, which was not my intention. As I passed a country lane, I caught sight of someone crossing in the other direction. I stopped and took a step back, and the other man did the same thing, so for a moment it was a funny sight, both of us taking a step back simultaneously across a country lane. The man laughed and waved, and I waved back. We both started towards each other and met somewhere in the middle of that country lane. I wanted to ask him for directions back to the port, although I was not particularly worried where I was. When you live that kind of life you stop caring about getting lost. The man was pleased when he found out I was a foreigner, and said that if I wanted the port I was heading in the wrong direction completely, which I had already guessed by then. He told me he was heading back to town and I could walk with him if I wished. So we walked back together, talking in the way you do when you have found a new friend. He told me I looked Mauritian and I said so did he, and we laughed so much we shook hands over it.

He came all the way to the port with me. When we got there it was already dark and the gates were shut and the security guard said there was no launch scheduled until the morning. My new friend, whose name was Pascal, said I should go and stay with him and get back to my ship the following morning. As I said, when you live that roaming life, you stop worrying about many things. My friend’s house was a small bungalow, and we went in through the back door, which was in the garden. I smelled the perfume of the flowers before I saw that beautiful garden the next day. My friend explained what had happened to his sister and she smiled and fetched some food for us. She said they only ate a light supper in the evening and apologised for the modesty of the table. I remember that, because I had never heard that expression before or since, the modesty of the table.

Her name was Claire and she was beautiful, although not as beautiful as this nag was when I first met her. The three of us ate our meal and then talked for hours. They told me about their father, whom they called Sir as if it was his name, and their mother who had died only just recently. Sir was a senior clerk in one of the big firms in Port Louis but he was also a renowned amateur botanist. It was he who grew the garden, which I would see and marvel at the next morning. I wished I could see it immediately. They made it sound so magical, describing for me the different flowers and fragrances that grew in it, but they said, no, wait until the morning. That is when it is at its best.

That night I stayed awake for a long time thinking about many things but mostly about Claire, and the next morning, after I was shown the garden, I reluctantly left to go to the port with my friend Pascal without seeing her again. But the delivery was still delayed, so I rang the number Pascal had given me and went back to my new friend’s house for lunch. When I left late in the afternoon, I shook hands with Claire and I felt sad. I thought she looked sad too. I promised to write to them and to come to Port Louis again. At the time I thought I could not bear not to see her again. But I never did write, and never went back to Port Louis.

When I saw Maryam for the third time in that factory, it made me think of Claire and how for many years I thought of her with regret. God knows what the old nag will make of this when she listens to it. I have not thought of Claire for a long time. Nor did they look alike or anything like that. It was the feeling that I recalled, a chance of happiness that I should not be stupid and lazy enough to miss this time.

Anna played the tape on the hi-fi, and her father’s voice came out of the speakers like a public performance, like something on radio. None the less, she played it softly, as if she did not want to be overheard. She listened to it with strange pride and an unexpected elation. She had not thought he would be lucid. She had expected him to rant or whisper, muttering and grumbling to himself, the way he had so often in his last months. She had expected a broken-down tearful shambles of a voice and had dreaded listening to it for that reason. What good would it do relive that misery again? So she was surprised that his voice and what he had to say disarmed her so fully. His voice was clear and composed, most of the time, and even the difficult parts were calm and eloquent. There were moments when he talked as she had never heard him speak before, humble and reflective in a way she understood. Her own stream of thought sometimes took that tone, but she had never heard that from him before. She recognised it as a kind of unforgiving honesty, which she did not usually expect to hear in someone’s voice, let alone in her father’s. He was their father: he instructed, cajoled, encouraged and commanded when that was necessary. He did not sit and muse aloud on his blunders and his regrets, and on the slow moments of reprieve.

She would have liked to hear more about that solitary walk in Singapore, or that reckless stroll in Port Louis. She would have liked to hear more of him, and it made her sad when the tape stopped. Nick’s departure had made her melancholy, and then Ba’s death on top of that was such an unexpected shock. She thought she was ready for the news about Ba, but when Maryam called to tell her, she howled on the phone like one of those demented women you see on the TV news. Listening to him talking on the tape made her wish for him, and she shed tears and mourned him for a moment, and felt sad that he had lived so long with such a feeling of wrong and such an expectation of disgrace. She took the tape upstairs and played it again on her radio cassette, listening to it through her earphones. This time she was not as much on edge, and she heard the long pauses between words and the catch in his voice in some places. She shut her eyes and she saw him sitting in his chair talking, and imagined him hurling the tape machine across the room, if he really did do that and was not just saying it to seem the capricious old man. She imagined her mother keeping him at it while he grumbled.

She reached for the phone to call her mother and tell her that she had listened to the tape. She had not spoken to her for several days, and had planned to do just this, listen to the tape and then call her afterwards. But when she called there was no reply. She leaned back in her chair and replayed the story her father had narrated in her mind, and it came to her in a series of pictures that ran swiftly past her, many of them imprecise and out of focus because she did not know enough to make them concrete and still. Her mother Maryam had told them about his life at the college and the woman he used to watch from his storeroom. Again and again she went back to the image of a lonely youth looking out of a slit in the wall, over the top of trees at a glimmering sea. She said that was a happy time for him, and perhaps it was, but what she could feel in her image of him was his loneliness. She could not see the woman or the terrace, it was too much for her. Probably a skinny teenager just out of her childhood. She would have to read and look at pictures to get a better idea of that, to see what she might have worn or what kind of terrace it might have been. She had meant to do that, ever since her mother told them he came from Zanzibar, and told them about the woman he had abandoned, the poor, pregnant sad bitch. That was only a few weeks before he died, and she had other business to deal with in that time, and not much time for reading about Zanzibar women on their terraces. Then his death and her mother’s grief put her crisis about Nick in perspective. It forced her out of her wistfulness about him and returned her to all that she disliked about him and about herself with him. One fire puts out another’s burning, slowly.

She had browsed the internet and read all the improbable descriptions of holidays and hotels, and excursions and festivals, and thought there was another place she wanted to find out about, not this one. She expected Jamal, in his methodical style, was already halfway through the appropriate literature, but he had a university library at his disposal and time on his hands. That was her excuse, anyway.

She returned to the images of his story, and realised how much she was enjoying this way of thinking about what he had said. She imagined him on that bus ride to college that he had remembered so often later, and she wondered why that journey was so memorable. Perhaps it was the clarity of it as an image, an early morning bus ride, or the difference between the black stinking creek and the distant view of the sea as they rode out of town with the breeze blowing through the open sides of the bus. Maybe it was the feeling of it that was memorable, and not the sight. She herself had pictures like that, which came back to her for no reason, a street corner near the cathedral in Norwich or a train platform in London in early evening, but she did not think of these moments with the craving he described, and so perhaps she had never known such longing. Then she saw him walking down that tree-lined street in Singapore again exulting over his freedom, and then leaning against the ship’s railings as they entered Cape Town harbour. All illusion, of course, but she could imagine how the swelling moment could carry you away. She saw him at the college, a thin youth in shirtsleeves, strolling with other youths across the grounds. She had never imagined him a college student, only ever a sailor, and when she knew him he worked as an engineer in an electronics factory. She had thought of his reading and his knowledge as something he acquired on the side, out of interest, something he’d had no time for when he was young. She had thought of their going to university, Jamal and her, as a new high point in their family’s fortunes.

Dear Jamal. How’s your beard doing? Growing fast? Apparently it has to be at least four inches below the chin before you can describe yourself as properly pious. Did you know that? Not much hope for you, I don’t think. I listened to Ba’s tape today, twice. I expected croaking and muttering, all that scary weirdness he did so well. Instead he was clear and made complete sense, and really moved me with the story of his youth and all that wandering around the world. Feeling free in Singapore. Do you suppose he was doing all that weirdness to scare us? Keep us at arm’s length? Keep away from me, whelps. It helped to know even before I started listening what
the secret
was, rather than listening in dread for the moment when he would jump out of the bushes with an unbearably dreadful story. I know it’s unbearable enough, abandoning that poor woman, girl really, and then in explanation coming out with that frantic and panic-stricken story of
that
plot against him, the foisting of someone else’s child on him. But it could have been worse. Why do you think he really ran away? Just to escape, maybe. Perhaps ­nothing tragic or profound at all. I don’t know how Ma managed to keep him at it, and how she kept him from mumbling and cursing. Because I’m sure it took some work. What do you make of that dreamy couple in Port Louis? Do you think that really happened? Pascal and Claire, a chance friendship and budding love spurned. Then many years of ancient mariner stuff before he ran into Ma in Exeter. But he told it well, though, don’t you think? I liked the idea of walking all over the island as he did, not caring about getting lost. I think this is the longest email I’ve written. It shouldn’t be allowed. I tried to ring Ma after I listened to the tape but she wasn’t there, gallivanting in Matalan probably xxx.

Jamal wrote: On what you said about getting Ma sorted out with her paperwork, next time you speak to her ask for the surname of Vijay the accountant. It might be worth checking to see if he did set up that firm and then it should be easy enough to find his business address. I can do it, I need a break from this gruelling intellectual sweat-work now and then. I am lying low with Ma at the moment. She is threatening to come visiting in Leeds, and I fear that when she sees the filth and chaos I live in she will feel forced to reform me. Someone appears to have told her about Lena, I can’t imagine who, and I think she is curious. Obviously they don’t give her enough work to keep her busy at that infidel charity where she gives her labour for nought xx.

Anna wrote: She is threatening a visit just to panic you. I don’t think she plans to go anywhere much at the moment. She is appearing in a play that the women’s group is putting on at the Centre and she is too busy rehearsing. They wrote the play themselves, and she is playing a lady doctor, probably a stubborn Spanish one called Dr Mendez. The story is something to do with asylum, and she says it has everything – birth, death and marriage, as well as some songs. She told me all the parts and who is playing what, but you need to have followed the whole serial to know who Halima is and who Lydie is, and so I’ll spare you that. I asked her about Vijay’s surname, and she said it is Gopal. She was a bit tense about the question at first, but I said we were just talking about it after the funeral, and wondered how to find her foster family, if she was interested. She said she thinks she has already found his business address. V. K. Gopal Accountants. Someone at the Centre showed her how to use the Companies House website and she searched for him there and thinks she has found him. He must be ancient, but she said he would be in his mid-seventies and she did not think that would deter Vijay from working. She hasn’t followed it up yet because she is so busy (you see) so I think a little weekend conference might be a good idea. Perhaps we can go down to Norwich to see the play and then make plans about following up? She might be just nervous about doing it on her own xxx.