Nicky, who has wriggled off Mercia’s lap, helps her pack. He searches his pockets frantically, then rushes off to consult his mother, who arrives with his good trousers. From their pockets he extracts a piece of string, a glass marble and a pigeon’s tail feather, whilst his mother looks on smilingly. Here, he says, he has found these presents for Mercia, but if he had known she was going so soon, he’d have got her something special like the porcupine quills he left at his ouma’s house.
Mercia says that these are the best presents she has ever had. She swallows back the unexpected tears as she kisses him goodbye. It won’t be long, she promises, before she’ll be back for those porcupine quills. Then she remembers the camera. Here, she says to Sylvie, this is to make sure that you send me photographs of the two of you. She shakes Sylvie’s hand, slides into her seat and is about to drive off when the woman puts a restraining hand on her arm.
You will, she asks in a strangled voice, take care of Nicky?
Yes, of course, Mercia finds herself saying, bewildered, not knowing what it means, what she means. Look, I’ll be in Cape Town for a few days. We could talk on the phone, later. Then she amends it. Listen, I have to be back in two months to see to Jake. That gives us all time to think things over. I’ll keep in touch. I’ll let you know.
How bloody awful. How the woman must wish she were a fucking tortoise. Summoning from God knows where the courage, the dignity, to free herself from them, the poisonous Murrays, only to be thrown back once more into their clutches — for the sake of her child. Is that what mothers have to do? Eat humble pie? Prostrate themselves for the sake of their children? Sell themselves? How wretched, how absolutely wretched for Sylvie.
Chapter 17
Home at last. The taxi stops behind her car, parked exactly where she left it two weeks ago. Mercia drags in the suitcase, shivers, and switches on the central heating. She wanders through the ice-cold apartment, sparse and elegant after Sylvie’s cramped rooms. Something is wrong, a disturbance of some kind, as if someone has rearranged everything ever so slightly, so that she can’t put her finger on it, can’t say with conviction that the coffee table has shifted an inch to the left. Which is, of course, nonsense.
Is this where she lives? Is this her home? What does she do with all these things, all this space? What would any single person do with all this space? At the time Craig had argued for a smaller apartment, but she would hear none of it. The place had been a bargain at the price, and one room less would not have been significantly cheaper. She stands in the doorway of the vast living room with its ornate cornices and wall of tall windows. Her grand nineteenth-century Glasgow apartment, built by sugar and tobacco lords from the spoils of slavery.
Before her very eyes panning across the rug, the elegant leather sofas, the glass and chrome table, all these things assume the ghostly shapes of objects covered in dust sheeting, all wrapped up and parceled like a Christo project. Mhairi, the cleaner, had once asked her what the Corbusier chaise longue was for. Mercia shudders, shakes her head to free the furniture parcels of their wrapping. This is her home with the marble fireplace and mantelpiece at the far end. The cold hearth smells of Sylvie’s outside grate. She will not light a fire.
Still clutching her coat, Mercia goes to Craig’s room, sits down at his desk at the window, where she can see the man across the road sitting at his own window, reading a newspaper. A man for whom Craig had constructed an entire life in prize-winning free verse. The terra-cotta boxes on his window ledge cling to the corpses of summer flowers — a brown tracery of once-blue lobelia persists, and dead petunia stalks sit bolt upright in rigor mortis. There they will stay until next year, she remembers, lashed by winter wind and snow into bare, spindly stalks. Until spring comes babbling like an idiot, scolding the old roots. Until one Saturday morning in late April when the man will fuss about the window boxes with new trailing lobelia, new petunia plants that in good time will produce their blue and purple flowers. Just like every year that they have lived there, when spring comes down the hill. In April, not October. Would the man recognize himself in Craig’s verse? There is something comforting about not knowing him, knowing nothing about him except for the business with window boxes.
If this home away from Kliprand and her family feels strange, it is only a question of time, a matter of half an hour at most, for the emptiness to be filled with what soon will be familiar routines. Like the gas boiler fired up, pumping hot water through old copper pipes, the warm tick-ticking of radiators slowly thawing into life, spreading invisible warmth. In this empty apartment Craig’s absence hovers like the heat molecules rushing up, out of reach, to cling to the high ceiling. Mercia will not wait for the warmth; she will not call Smithy just yet; instead, she’ll do her messages as the Scots say — a trip to the supermarket, which invariably means a conversation on the corner of Byres Road where she is so often detained by someone she knows. So many students who have passed through her hands. More of a village here than Kliprand. Does no one ever leave this city?
Dr. Ants in Her Pants. That’s what Craig called her when he first flicked through her passport. Only five years old and already bursting with border-control stamps. Where have you not been? he asked, shaking his head.
In those brand-new days there was something of admiration in his voice. Craig had after university spent two years in London, with a trip each to Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam.
Look, he said defensively, I come from a country of folk who once upon a time rushed about colonizing the world, and so freeing those left behind of the horrible Christianity they took along to dump on others. Thereafter, folk needed only to move across the border, either to make good or to relish being in exile. Now, having recovered ourselves, we no longer have to do that, so I’ve come back to Glasgow and this is where I stay put. Healthy or what?
Mercia laughed. In those brand-new days their differences were a source of fond banter. She said, Let’s be accurate: back to the West End of Glasgow. It’s because you can’t find your way in big cities, hopelessly lost in London, nose in the A — Z for the entire two years, no sense of direction; in fact, could you find your way to the south side of this city?
Mercia has always had that fifth sense, even in strange cities, where, after a cursory consultation of a map, she was able to move swiftly through a crowd, confident about her whereabouts. Like a springbokkie, her father used to boast, lifting its nose to smell the direction of the wind, pounding a hoof into the earth, before, quick as a flash, having found its bearings, it leaps off straight as a die to its destination. That is still how Mercia sees herself, propelled effortlessly through the world, eager to see yet another place. Not pathological restlessness, as Craig later diagnosed. She was after all prepared to stay put in Glasgow. In the city’s West End with Craig by her side, she had no desire to move house, to try another city, or even another part of town.
Precisely, he said. So you have the comfort of a home, but rushing about being a citizen of the world means that you don’t have to acknowledge it as home.
This home needs time to make itself more comfortable. As Mercia searches for a warmer coat, ready to wander down to the supermarket, the telephone rings. It is Smithy, darling Smithy, whose voice is like honey, except, that voice is unusually clipped as she asks Mercia to come over for dinner that night. Smithy seems anxious to get off the phone, so that Mercia knows something is wrong, wheedles the news out of her. All right, Smithy says. I planned to tell you later, but here goes: Morag gave birth prematurely last week. The little girl’s been in an incubator for six days, but she’s out now. Tiny, but absolutely fine.