They left the café and entered Oxford’s old town. Adam felt himself transported to a distant era, one where gargoyles might well spread their stony wings and leap from high gables. Kayla led him down cobblestone lanes, tight caverns carved from buildings of stained glass and golden stone. Occasionally the crowds pushed them together, causing their bodies to brush. Adam wondered if she shared the same electric hum every time they touched.
Kayla named ancient structures with the casual manner of introducing old friends. The Radcliffe Camera, Foyles, Brasenose, Magdalen, Balliol. She spoke of others who had walked there before—Isaac Newton, C. S. Lewis, Cromwell, Tolkien, a dozen kings of England, hundreds of heads of state from all around the globe. She walked him through the Covered Market, past dis-plays of pheasants nailed to the butchers’ doorposts by their tail feathers, and pig trotters stuffed with smoked bacon, and forest mushrooms pickled in dark ale. Adam emerged at the other end and was blinded by the sun, such that all his senses were filled with light and the scent of Kayla’s hair.
Relationships had never come easy to him. His connections to women were shallow. Yet here, in a world removed from any he had known, at a time when everything in his life was either shattered or uncertain, Adam found himself unwinding. The prospect of deepening mysteries beckoned within the sunlit lanes.
He drew her to one side and declared, “I want to help.”
“What?”
“You. Your father. The company. I want to be part of solving this crisis.”
“There might be nothing anyone can do.”
“Still, Kayla, I’d like to try.”
She nodded thoughtfully and slipped her hand around his arm. “You make me feel a little ashamed.”
“Why?”
“Daddy gave me a check this morning. Fifty thousand pounds from his own savings. It’s to help me try and sort through the mess we’re facing in Africa.” Their walk was slower now, but purposeful. Adam let her guide him to the door of a barber-shop. “All I could think of was, four months. This gives me four more months to find a way out. And here you are, broke, a stranger, four thousand miles from home, maybe no job in a week’s time, and you want to help.”
The bell over the door jangled as they entered. Kayla put his name on the list, then guided him to the waiting area. When they were seated, Adam leaned in very close and said, “Give me the money.”
“What?”
“Fifty thousand pounds gives you four months, that’s what you said. So take twelve and a half for the next month and let me invest the rest. I’ll set you up a couple of investments that feed your project a regular income.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking.”
“I’m trying to give your project some extra breathing space.”
Kayla shook her head so vehemently it carried through her entire body. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” she repeated.
“I know your father’s gone to bat for me. A stranger he has no reason to trust. Especially when his firm is facing something pretty awful. Okay. So I owe him big-time. And he’s concerned enough about what you’re doing in Tanzania that he’s covered his walls with your photographs.” Adam leaned in closer still. “I’m good at what I do, Kayla. Very, very good.”
After the barber, Kayla first led him to the bank the company used. Once the check had been cashed and an account opened, she guided him next door for a new cell phone. From there Kayla led him along yet another pedestrian lane of cobblestones and growing shadows. She stopped before a shop whose bowed window was framed in wood blackened by time. The gold lettering above the door declared it to be as a haberdashery and gentlemen’s clothier, established in 1608. She asked, “Are you comfortable with spending money?”
“I haven’t had much experience lately.”
The door gave a cheerful ring as she pushed it open. “Do yourself a favor and don’t look at any price in here.”
The haberdashery was narrow but very deep. When Kayla introduced herself and explained what they were after, they were led to the rearmost room, one that most customers never saw. The shop’s back chamber was fitted out like a gentleman’s club. The walls were oiled panels, the wood’s grain lost to candle smoke and age. Kayla settled into a horsehair settee and watched as the salesman treated Adam with a butler’s deference. At her insistence, he purchased a suit shaded somewhere between navy and smoke, a jacket, two pairs of slacks, three dress shirts, two ties, and an overcoat. Adam did as she had instructed, biting down on his worries over the cost. Only once did he look at a price tag. It was enough for a quiet cry of very real pain.
For Kayla, time became split into tiny fragments. The day’s every nuance could be extracted and examined. She saw the dust motes dance in light from the narrow rear windows. She tasted the waxy oil used on the wall panels. The salesman whistled a rambling tune as he pinned Adam’s trousers. Kayla recalled playing with her dolls on the same ancient Persian carpet while her mother sat in the chair where she was now, talking with her father as the salesman stood him upon the same stool that Adam used.
Kayla had always assumed she would grow up and find a man just like her father. She had thought the pimply-faced young men of school would one day vanish, and in their stead would be her prince. Then it was university in America, and young men with brash voices who spoke of the money they would earn or the power they would wield, and how Kayla would fit so beautifully into their futures. Ambition was their calling card. Their intelligent gazes and strong features and easy confidence proclaimed that they had been born to claim the future.
Her last year at school, Kayla had begun fearing that her chance at any true passion had been whispered on a night when she had not been listening. Or perhaps her life’s mate had smiled at her at one of the endless stream of parties, and she had been too preoccupied to see, and any meaningful dreams had been buried with her mother.
Then a classmate had shared plans of a year in Africa. She was going to work for Oxfam on their Fair Trade project, helping small farmers gain a greater share of the revenue from their products. The next day, Kayla had signed up for what she thought would be a sort of working vacation. Instead, she had found a passion worthy of investing her life.
Or so it had seemed, until the man she thought she knew had walked away with her project’s funding. And broken her heart in the process.
Which had brought her home. To this. Sitting in her mother’s chair, watching a stranger walk to the changing room and hand his new clothes back through the curtain.
She blinked away the sudden stinging and smiled as the salesman returned with a silver tea service. She cleared her throat and asked, “How do you take your tea?”
“I have no idea.” Adam swept aside the red-velvet curtain and reemerged in a new shirt and slacks. “I don’t have much experience with drinking tea in a shop.”
“You’ll find there’s not much difference from drinking it anywhere else.”
“Very funny.” He sat on the seat next to hers, the tiny round table between them. Just as her mother and father had once sat. Kayla had loved to pour the tea, setting the silver strainer over the cup just as she did now . . .
“What’s wrong, Kayla?”
Kayla felt the harmonies of planets in parallel orbit, just from Adam speaking those three quiet words. She knew tension had redrawn the angles of her face. She knew her chin had jutted in a fashion that made her look old. And her lips were tightly compressed. She had seen the expression often enough in her mirror over the past ten months.
Kayla needed both hands to steady the pot and pour the tea. “I was thinking of Africa.”
Adam took the cup, let her add milk, declined sugar. “Tell me where you are.”
Perhaps it was the way he spoke that last word. Where you are. Where her life is now. Not in the past. This very moment. She set down the pot, and said the first thing that came to her mind. “I drink a lot of tea in Africa. The water isn’t safe unless it’s boiled, and even boiled it still tastes horrid. So I drink tea all day long. All Westerners do. Tea or coke or bottled water, and sometimes the shipments of water from Europe don’t come through. Our office has its own filtration system, and then we boil the water hard and use tea to mask the flavor.”
She stared at the rear window and the tiny walled garden beyond. The intensity of Adam’s gaze sent her soaring away, back to a world of yellow heat and eternal dust. She was there, and yet intensely here as well.
“Kayla.”
She started. “Sorry. I was . . .”
“Away. Tell me what you are seeing.”
“East Africa is in its third year of drought. The lack of rain dominates everything. All the trees around the cities have been chopped down for fuel. There is electricity a few hours each day, but the poorer families can’t afford to use it, especially for cooking. The pennies they earn go for food. If there’s any money left over, they send one child to school. Sometimes the eldest, sometimes the brightest. Whoever is lucky enough to shine. The others work. Everybody works all the time, and hopefully there’s food to eat and money left over for the one lucky child to study.”
She saw herself walking the yellow road from the compound where many of the Europeans lived to the project’s offices. The compound was on the airport road, about a mile and a half closer to Dar es Salaam than the offices. She often walked the road in the cool of early dawn. If she missed her walk, it meant no exercise that day, because later the heat grew overpowering. The hour between night and day was very special. There was little car traffic, but the road was nonetheless very full. Children fortunate enough to go to school walked with their books and wooden tablets, for no family could afford the luxury of writing paper. The children who herded goats or the family cow watched the students with carefully blank faces, revealing neither envy nor the hopelessness of a life forever denied them. The dust was not so bad then, and the sky was awash in a gentle light. One of Kayla’s tenets was that every family involved in her project had to place all their children in school. She was very strict about that. It meant she could walk the road and smile at the children, and feel that she was making a difference in other small lives.
She heard herself say, “The youngest children gather fuel. But as I said, there aren’t any trees left. So they gather animal dung and thornbushes. And old bones. There are bones every-where now. The fields are full of dust and animal carcasses picked clean. Fires of cow dung and thorn brush and dried bones give off an amazing aroma. I know it sounds horrid. But the smell is like some exotic spice. This morning I finally got round to unpacking my suitcases so I could give everything a proper wash. The smell took me straight back. It is in everything. Even my hairbrush.”
Kayla stopped then. The words dried up entirely. For she had another image, one of Geoffrey entering the offices. He had always taken a taxi from the hotel where he had lived to the project. Geoffrey liked to say he wasn’t above helping the unwashed masses, but he needed a proper start to the day. He was fastidious in his dress and almost foppish in his manners. But his smile and his charm and his incredible looks had been enough to mask the distance from which he had viewed life in Africa. Or so it had been, until that morning.
Kayla blinked and slowly came around. Adam watched her with an impossible patience. Impossible that a haircut and some new clothes could change him so much. His face looked leaner, his manner more polished. She felt a sudden desperate urge to claim he was just another thief, just another liar. Just like all men were bound to be.
Because to do otherwise would be to accept what her heart now whispered. That Adam was not merely different. Nor was he just a friend. The way he looked at her now invited Kayla to bridge the impossible divide and enter the forbidden zone. The zone beyond the walls that, up to now, she had called protection. The temptation hovered in the air between them, sparkling in the sunlight upon gossamer wings of invitation.
She whispered, “We really should be going.”