A rush of air. He feels his cheeks distort, his body cartwheel through space, his guts and stomach trailing behind. Impossible to breathe. He has lost his hold on Balia, feels her body tumble past him. He is falling. Then comes the sting of the water. Only that.
The sting of the water to tell him he is alive.
TWO YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 56
October 2003
He has friends in Norfolk. A small group of people he has met since he started coming regularly. They are, on the whole, retired folk. Still vigorous and, as his mother did, choosing to live out their lives close to the elements. In the mornings, tracing his mother’s footsteps along the beach, Adrian passes people he recognises. The old boy in tweeds who walks back along the beach in the mornings from the shop with his newspaper under his arm, accompanied by an arthritic Labrador. Adrian does not yet count him as a friend. They have only ever exchanged greetings at a distance. The older man will raise his hat in a friendly enough way, though something in his demeanour, the pace of his walk and the way he retains the direct line of his route, makes Adrian feel that conversation is not desired.
The couple in the next bungalow but one had known his mother when she was alive. They tell Adrian that the man in tweeds is a widower these five years. They welcomed Adrian’s appearance with a card on the doorstep and an invitation to sherry. He had been a lecturer at the university. She is a former dance teacher and had given him a photograph of his mother, wearing a fluid grey jersey dress, posed in the style of Pina Bausch. In the evenings, to ease the possibility of an incipient loneliness rather than an actual mood of loneliness, Adrian will occasionally stop by for sherry, which is taken each day at five o’clock. The bungalow next to Adrian’s had been bought by weekenders, who rarely, if ever, made the journey from London.
Adrian is neither a weekender nor a resident, rather something in between. Following his mother’s death he’d chosen to retain the bungalow. It comes in useful for writing and sometimes for weekends with Kate. His other friends are an assortment of ages, some from his past, his school and student years who still live near by, others are attached to the university, one or two — like the sherry couple — had been friends or acquaintances of Adrian’s mother. Interesting, when he thinks about it, to find oneself of an age where it becomes possible to have friendships in common with one’s parents.
He is not unhappy.
In the evenings he often dines at the Lamb and Anchor, where the owners have done a reasonable job of creating an ambience of simulated authenticity and where the local drinkers, with their dogs and habitual places at the bar, render an equally convincing imitation of a hearty welcome. Adrian is fine with it. He will drink a Guinness, because this is what he ordered the first time and is now presumed to be his ‘usual’. He will say his hellos, take a seat by the fire, whose embers gleam even in the summer, read his newspaper and order the day’s special. With his meal he will drink a glass or two of the perfectly decent house red, or else order a half-bottle of claret. When he visits with Kate, the regulars, mostly men, will tease her in a gruff fashion to which she will respond politely and in perfect seriousness.
It amuses him, Kate’s unsettling of these men, of which she is entirely unaware. He admires the way she can brilliantly deadpan a joke, her ability to sum up a person’s nature in the moment of meeting. Over dinner he watches her careful rearrangement of her cutlery. At other times he has seen her dancing alone, believing herself unobserved, and he is reminded of Ileana. Adrian has come to look forward to the time they spend alone in each other’s company and in which he has found a new and entirely unexpected love for her — a gift from the end of his marriage. After the main meal the publican will insist upon a free dessert for Kate, who expresses a preference for cheese.
In the city he is busy. During the day he is occupied with his clients, his evenings — and he makes sure of this — are filled with obligations, departmental meetings, board meetings for the various organisations he is involved in running, papers to write, dinner parties.
It is here, in Norfolk, he most often thinks about her. Sometimes he will make the journey to the coast for no other reason than to do so. Something to do with the water, the sea. Today he is alone. Kate is in town with her mother and he is not in the mood for company or sherry, so he lets his thoughts go to her. He watches the sea and imagines, as he has so often, the waves joining up, turning from grey to blue to green, drawing him into the past. At those times he experiences a surge of yearning as powerful as the movement of the ocean.
The moment has long since passed when the loss had outlasted the duration of the affair itself, though the love Adrian feels is as strong as ever. Unlike those earlier occasions — mourning a lost affection of his youth — this time there is to be no imagining her altered features, her new occupations, no unknown rival or replacement upon whom to project a wild jealousy. For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one — which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. So he sits and watches the sea and thinks of Mamakay.
During his last days in the country Adrian stayed in the apartment with Kai. Kai came and went in between his shifts and cooked meals for them both, took charge of day-to-day matters. Adrian never returned to the home he had shared with Mamakay. Each evening Adrian and Kai spent in each other’s company. When Adrian heard the sound of Kai’s key in the lock he was glad. It allowed him an excuse to stop the pretence of work, of trying to keep himself on track. Kai’s company offered distraction and comfort at the same time, the comfort of feeling close to Mamakay.
Adrian never saw Elias Cole again. From Babagaleh, who cleared the house where Adrian and Mamakay had lived, Adrian learned the fate of the remaining actors from Cole’s story. Yansaneh, who was removed from his lecturer position in the humanities department and assigned to the northern campus: killed when the campus was overrun early in the war. Vanessa, Cole’s mistress, living with a foreign speculator who arrived in the wake of war. One day, idly searching the Internet, Adrian came across a lecturer in international media studies at a university in one of the southern states of America. His name: Kekura Conteh.
It was Babagaleh, too, who had undertaken many of the practical arrangements for Mamakay’s funeral. The wake was held at the Mary Rose. Adrian found he did not know very many people, which was perhaps unsurprising, for his relationship with Mamakay had barely left the tight confines of the world they had created with each other and for themselves alone. Ileana came, naturally. And Attila, for which Adrian had felt a gust of gratitude. Some of the guests, assuming he had been brought along by somebody else, made polite conversation with Adrian, asking him how long he had been in the country and with which agency he had come to work, how he found living there. And Adrian answered them in kind, could not bring himself to tell them he had been Mamakay’s lover, could not help but notice it was Kai to whom they displayed the deference reserved for the most greatly bereaved, to whom they offered consolation. Adrian watched and found that he did not mind. He stood with his back against the wall and observed the mourners. Once his eyes alighted upon Babagaleh moving through the room, in between the people, continuing unnoticed with his tasks. Babagaleh would survive them all, thought Adrian. He wanted to ask Mamakay a question about Babagaleh, remembered where he was and considered how the question would for ever remain unanswered. A hundred times a day it happened: he turned to her with a thought upon his lips.