I woke early the next morning. Habit of a lifetime. My mother was always up before dawn. I’d hear the crunch of her footsteps on the gravel outside my bedroom window as she went to water her veggie patch, and I’d roll out of bed and join her in the pale light, just as the first birds were stirring. That was our time, Mum’s and mine, before the monster got up.
There was a bellbird that used to fly in from the bush to visit our garden, a little olive-green fellow with red eyes. He’d sit up in the rata and call, and his voice sounded like panpipes echoing in the hills. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound so magical as our bellbird. I wanted him to build his nest in the garden, but he came only for the nectar, when the rata was in bloom. He’d bewitch us for a time and then he’d be off, back to the bush, with a rustle of wings. Mum said he didn’t belong to us and he never could.
I pulled on last night’s shorts and wandered out into the half-dark, peering across the gently moving sea. The darkness was thinning, like black paint in a pot of water. And it looked as though someone had lit an enormous fire just on the other side of the horizon.
I intended to hop down the little cliff and charge straight into the water. That would see off my hangover. I could already taste the salt in my mouth. But I didn’t have the beach to myself. Someone was already there, standing in the shallows, facing east. Around her, little waves tumbled calmly onto the sand like a litter of kittens playing. She hadn’t seen me. I sat down quietly, my legs hanging over the cliff, and we watched and waited together.
The distant fire pulsed and billowed as though fanned by a giant’s breath. Then suddenly it broke free, and the sea glittered, and a path of dazzling light shot like an arrow across the surface of the water, straight at me.
Hundreds of times I’ve watched the sun come up, in all sorts of places. It’s always like witnessing a great event, an epic moment in history. You can almost hear the roll of drums. But this time was extraordinary. This time, I felt as though the sun was God. (Incidentally, if my brother Jesse knew I’d said that, he’d immediately have me committed to an asylum so he could get the farm all to himself.)
Within a few minutes the sky was denim blue, and about a thousand birds were making a hell of a racket. The heat was already getting into its stride, and the horizon had begun to waver. Deborah stood silhouetted against the flashing water, a light wind rippling her shirt. Tangled between her shoulder blades, her hair was set alight in the low rays. The legs of her shorts were soaked. I noticed she hadn’t changed her clothes; I’m willing to bet she’d never been to bed.
Eventually, she glanced back towards the campsite. A tall old guy was emerging from the trees, wearing ragged shorts and holding up two magnificent silvery fish in each hand. She waded ashore and greeted him in Swahili. There was a fair amount of nodding and smiling, and they both headed off to the kitchen to complete the deal. I watched as they wandered up the path, talking quietly. I kept them in sight until the white cloth of her shirt had disappeared behind the glowing ivory and green of a bush. As she passed, a chattering swarm of little yellow birds burst from the leaves.
It was as though she had been here all her life. These were her colours and her sounds; this was her air. It was difficult to imagine her making meat pies in a red and black farmhouse near Ipswich, with beeswax on the floor and mothballs in the cupboards.
After a swim I strolled up to the bar, where Hamisi gave me some coffee. You could almost smell the heat: dust, seaweed, and an exotic sweetness I’d noticed as soon as I stepped off the plane. Over at the campsite, people were wandering to the showers and back, or boiling kettles on paraffin rings. The pace was gentle, the light clear; it was like floating in a beautiful, drug-induced dream. Even the sea seemed to move in slow motion.
It couldn’t last, of course. Progress and politics and human greed had to catch up eventually, even here, and tear it all apart. Kulala Beach couldn’t hold out forever. Perhaps drought would destroy it. Perhaps disease, or riot, or war. Or maybe a concrete crop of foreign-owned resorts. They’d put up a barbed-wire fence, and armed guards would beat up the dignified old fisherman if he came near.
I took a bottle of water back to my private cliff among the trees, grabbed my map and guidebook from the cabin, and sat with my back against the door. Briskly, humming boldly to myself, I looked up Mount Kenya. I’d found Mrs H, now. My life was my own.
Yep. I was out of there.
I stared at the same page for half an hour, and I didn’t learn anything about Mount Kenya. I was still thinking about Matt. And Deborah, thigh-deep in the waves at sunrise.
A small sound on the sandy path. A pair of bare, dusty feet. She’d showered and wrapped one of those pieces of tie-dyed cloth around herself—bright primary colours—with another one as a belt. She sat down on a rock, facing the sea. A wisp of honey-coloured hair was blowing across her mouth. I wanted to brush it away for her.
‘Read it?’ she asked.
‘Yep. Every word.’
‘And?’
‘And I’m very glad it isn’t my problem.’
She jerked her head down towards the beach. ‘Come for a walk with me?’ Her voice was clear. Uncluttered. Like the chime of our bellbird, up in the rata.
I bet we set the campers gossiping. We wandered through the luminous shallows, right along to the end. The foam stretched in creamy arches around our ankles.
‘Are you still writing articles?’ I asked, when the silence became embarrassing.
For a second she looked startled. I think she’d forgotten I was there. ‘They’re hard to sell, nowadays,’ she replied absently, swishing her toes.
I found myself smiling. ‘Humanising these people for all the liberal lefty types.’
‘Ah, yes. That’s Lucy talking, isn’t it?’
A shoal of pin-sized fish scurried away from our shadows.
‘I’m not a brilliant journalist,’ she said suddenly. ‘But what I was trying to do was show how atrocity works, in practice; how the unimaginable becomes reality. I wanted people to, you know, recognise the monster within themselves. So they’d be on their guard against it.’
‘Not me,’ I argued, picking up a shell and skimming it out to sea. ‘I’m a lazy prick. Couldn’t be bothered to summon up enough hatred.’
She didn’t reply, just looked cynical. Her eyes matched the turquoise water.
‘You must have had to hear some harrowing stories,’ I said, forcing myself to look away and vowing to get a grip on myself.
‘And so should we all. We’re all responsible.’ She glanced sideways at me, a small smile at one corner of her mouth. ‘Even lazy pricks.’
I laughed. She scratched her nose, thinking. ‘I know what people’s images are of Africa. Child soldiers, starving babies, atrocity, corruption, AIDS.’
‘Or pretty sunsets and the odd elephant.’
She nodded. ‘Both are distortions. Reductions. Both deny the fun.’ She held her arms out wide, a tightrope walker. ‘The life. The courage. Anyway, this is my home. For a while at least, I want to be a part of it, not an observer. Which is convenient, because there’s not as much work for freelancers as there was.’
We’d reached the end of the beach, and she began to clamber purposefully over the rocks.
‘Hamisi tells me you’ve met Rod.’
‘Er . . . mm.’ I hauled myself up, scraped my shin on a razor-sharp rock, and swore under my breath as bright red blood cheerfully spurted out. ‘Nice guy.’
‘And I imagine you’re wondering how Mrs Perry Harrison comes to be living on Kulala Beach?’
‘Not really.’
She made her fingers into a pistol and aimed it at my head. ‘If you say it’s none of your business, I’ll have to kill you.’
I jammed my hands into my pockets like a schoolboy, squinting up at the sky. The sun looked menacing now, like a vast white firework at the moment it explodes. And the colour was draining out of the day. Even the sea had faded to a rippling opal.
‘No good asking me for advice. I’m pathologically shallow,’ I said. ‘Really. A night out, couple of beers, swap a yarn or two—that’s all I’m good for.’
‘I don’t think so. If all that was true, you wouldn’t be here.’
I watched Mrs Harrison—a flash of brilliant colour—leaping easily from rock to rock, unruly hair swinging across her graceful shoulders. I tried to imagine her with Perry, hosting Christmas drinks by the fireplace at Coptree. And I couldn’t.
‘Okay,’ I called after her. ‘What’s the story?’
She stopped, poised on a massive boulder. Her mouth twitched, as though she’d just beaten me at a game of tennis and was trying not to crow. Then, abruptly, she disappeared.
Following her, I found myself dropping down into a perfect miniature bay, just a few feet across. The sand was flat, washed clean by the tide and shaded by bush that tumbled down to the edge. After the glare, it was a relief. She’d settled herself on a low stretch of rock, half covered by heavy vines. She tucked that strand of hair behind her ear.
‘Your shin’s bleeding.’
‘Won’t kill me.’ I splashed seawater over my leg. ‘Look, Lucy did fill me in a bit. Her mother dies, and before she’s cold in her grave, you swan in like a sort of gold-digging Mary Poppins.’
She laughed, without amusement. ‘I’d just turned twenty when I married Perry,’ she said. ‘And—yes—I was pregnant with Matt.’
‘Not a crime.’ I began to mess about in the sand with my big toe, digging up little shards of coral. Here I was on a tiny, isolated beach, with a fascinating woman dressed in nothing but a couple of bits of cloth. And all I did was dig in the sand with my toe. Pathetic. I was losing my grip.
‘It was a crime, though.’ She chewed her lower lip. A habit of hers. ‘I threw up on my wedding day.’
‘I know lots of blokes who’ve done that.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘This was morning sickness, Jake, not morning after the stag night. It wasn’t a fairytale for me, all lace and orange blossom and bashful blushes. They had to stop the car on the way to the registry office so I could chuck up. Not a great start to married life.’
‘No, I s’pose not . . . And it’s true about you being the nanny?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She sat up a little straighter. ‘I became Perry’s nanny within days of leaving boarding school. I was booked into a course in journalism, but Perry was an acquaintance of my dad’s, and he was desperate for help because his wife had just died. So I flew out to Germany, where he was based. It seemed a good opportunity to improve my German and save a bit of cash.’ She paused. ‘I was only seventeen. Lucy was four.’
I tried to picture a small Lucy. ‘I bet she was cute.’
Deborah lit up. ‘Unbelievably cute! Very clingy, because she’d just lost her mother. She used to creep into my bed in the night and snuggle up to me.’
‘Wasn’t compulsory to marry her dad, though, was it?’
Her voice took on a new resonance. ‘Ah, Perry. I was a dreamy, romantic soul, back then. I thought he was my Mr Rochester. He’s almost twenty years older than me, you know.’
‘Bloody pervert.’ I dumped myself on the sand near the foot of her rock, picked up a stick and began drawing circles.
She sounded surprised. ‘No. No, he’s not that.’
‘C’mon. You were a baby, for Pete’s sake. Seventeen! Bloody hell, that’s Matt’s age.’
‘True.’ She thought about it. ‘But Perry didn’t show any interest in me at first. He was grief-stricken about his precious Victoria. Ate in the officers’ mess and staggered home after I was in bed. For my part, I was completely infatuated within about three hours. He was an army officer—tall, dark and haunted. Very attractive combination. He became my whole world.’
‘He has a certain charisma. Even I can see that.’
‘He has.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, after several months he seemed to wake up. We started taking Lucy out together, like a family. Once I’d put her to bed, he would be waiting on the balcony with a bottle of wine. And one thing led to another.’
‘He pounced.’ I threw my stick away. I felt unreasonably sulky, for some reason. ‘On the balcony, I bet.’
‘He did. My dream came true. But . . . well. I was pretty naïve. I mean—you know—it wasn’t my first time, as they say, but nothing had prepared me for this. It was so grown-up. Such an onslaught.’
‘Told you he’s a pervert.’
‘No, no. Not a physical onslaught. But emotionally . . . He was the subject of all my romantic daydreams, but at the same time it was overwhelming. He wasn’t a callow youth of twenty who might move on after a week; he was an adult, a widower, a father. He kept saying how much he needed me.’
‘That’s heavy.’
‘Intense. Suddenly, I was in deep. Ever been out of your depth?’
‘I’m a good swimmer.’
She prodded me with a tanned, sandy foot, and I fought back a ridiculous urge to catch it in my hand. ‘I hardly think that strumpet Karin turning you down last night counts as a life-changing experience, Jake Kelly.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ignoring me. ‘We settled down like a family, the three of us, and I knew I ought to be blissfully happy, and I almost was. I was still in awe of Perry, still sort of mesmerised. But it wasn’t light-hearted. It wasn’t fun. As the months went on, I realised . . . he wasn’t jealous, exactly, or possessive—he didn’t beat up other men for talking to me—but he wasn’t easygoing. Quite the opposite, in fact. He always wanted to know I’d be home when he got there. He used to phone and check before he set out. There was a sort of neediness that I hadn’t expected and wasn’t mature enough to challenge.’
She took hold of that errant strand of hair and began to twist it distractedly around her finger. ‘And then he began to have . . . attacks.’
I was puzzled. ‘Attacks?’
‘Heart attacks, or so we thought. The whole drama. Fighting for breath, clutching his chest, screaming for me. I was sobbing in the ambulance, begging him not to die.’
‘Jeez, that’s awful.’
‘It was awful. The doctors did tests. They said there was nothing wrong with his heart. In the end they . . .’ She hesitated. Glanced at me and then away. Danced her fingers on her rock. ‘Well, never mind. The upshot was that the army posted him here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. To Nairobi, actually. For a change of scene. To train some local troops the British Army way.’
My eyebrows went up. ‘Hell. He never said.’
‘Well, now you know. We all came—Lucy and me, too. I was still the nanny, officially, although Perry and I had talked about marriage. He was stationed in Nairobi for six months. Then he got himself sent to Colchester, and that’s when he bought the house at Coptree.’
She leaned back on her hands, her face turned to the sun as though she’d talked herself to a standstill. It was a full minute before she spoke again, very quietly, very clearly. She might have been talking to herself.
‘And it was here, in this beautiful country, that I met Rod. Eighteen years ago . . . or was it only yesterday? I’d gone for lunch with some army wives, all older women, at the Thorn Tree—you might have heard of it?—and some of them knew Rod, so he joined us. He came and sat down next to me, and we talked for hours. One of the others introduced me—Deborah Bridges, as I then was—but I told him to call me Susie.’
I was baffled. ‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘A bit of rebellion, I suppose. My parents called me Deborah after my grandmother, and she was a mean, sharp-tongued old woman. Susan’s my middle name, and I’ve always preferred it. I was Susie to my friends at school. It was only my parents’ generation that insisted on calling me De-bo-rah.’ She stuck out the tip of her tongue as though the word tasted sour. ‘Perry came into their category. Rod certainly didn’t.’
The sun had moved around. I shifted a few inches, into the shade of an overhanging bush.
‘When the others left the Thorn Tree, we hardly even noticed. We were nose to nose. I told him all about Perry and Lucy, and he said it sounded as though I needed rescuing.’ She shook her head in wonder. ‘The army wouldn’t have touched Rod with a barge pole. He can’t take orders. He seemed so gloriously young—especially compared to Perry—and untamed. I couldn’t see him commuting on the tube. You might as well imagine a leopard settling down quietly in Milton Keynes.’
‘A free spirit.’ I let my eyelids droop for a moment, remembering. ‘I used to be one of those.’
‘Aren’t you still?’
I opened my eyes, and she was looking at me. ‘Carry on,’ I said.
‘You’re probably thinking what a faithless little whore I was.’
‘Yeah. Best kind of woman.’
‘Thank you.’ She inclined her head. ‘But it isn’t true. Remember, I was still a teenager! My friends back home were students, young and silly, getting drunk on Saturday nights and stealing garden gnomes. But I’d shot out of school and straight into this intense, isolating relationship with Perry. I hadn’t had the fun, the laughs, the dating and discos and falling in and out of love like a yoyo. Meeting Rod made me face the fact that I was suffocating.’
She shielded her eyes with one hand, gazing at a ship as it crawled along the horizon. ‘We met again that evening, and again, and again. We had to be together, all the time. With him, I felt like a bird out of its cage, and I wanted to sing. He’d just bought this place, and he asked me to join him.’
‘But you didn’t,’ I predicted confidently. I knew she hadn’t come to live at Kulala. After all, she was Mrs Perry Harrison.
‘But I did.
’ I was perplexed. ‘You left Perry?’
‘Yes, and it was horrible. I told him I’d met someone else, and he went nuts. I thought he was going to have a heart attack—a proper one. I felt like a total bitch—and I was confused, because he’d been such a colossal figure in my life. Lucy held onto my legs all the way to the taxi, crying. Well, we were both crying. It was like leaving my own child. She was waving with both her hands, stumbling after the car like an abandoned puppy.’
‘Poor kid.’
‘You’re so right. Abandoned by her mother, then by her surrogate mother. I hated myself for it, couldn’t bear the misery I’d caused them both. For days I moped about like a bear with toothache, fretting over Lucy. It almost ruined everything. Then, one morning . . .’ She trailed off. A cockerel squawked in the scrub, close by. It made us both jump.
‘Um.’ She laughed, self-consciously. ‘You’ll think I’m mad.’
‘I already do.’
‘No, but . . . okay. I stood in the sea and watched the sun come up over the horizon. Raging up. I imagined I could hear it, roaring like Aslan, stretching out to me across the water. I imagined he—Aslan, or God, or whoever—was giving me permission. What I was doing was right.’ She flapped a hand at me. ‘Loony tunes.’
‘No, I wasn’t thinking that.’
‘Yes, you were. Anyway, there it is. I stopped moping and helped Rod and Hamisi get the place set up. Designed the layout of the bar, just as it is now, cantilevered over the beach. Rod and I slept under a mosquito net strung between the trees just where your banda is. Every morning we’d crawl out and run into the water. We were so happy . . . so happy.’
‘I sense an “until” coming on.’
‘Yes. Until. I suspected, feared, denied for months. Vomited.’
‘Matt?’
‘Matt.’
‘Don’t tell me Rod’s his father?’
She shook her head vehemently, holding up an imperious hand. ‘No. That’s the point. Perry is. I had to leave.’
‘Did you? Why?’
‘Imagine yourself, Jake, at the age of twenty-three. Your new girlfriend gets herself pregnant, and it’s not even yours. What would be the decent thing for her to do?’
‘Disappear?’
‘Precisely. Rod values nothing more than his freedom. Nothing. That’s why I love him—d’you see?’
I nodded uncertainly.
‘If I’d told him about the pregnancy, he would probably have done right by me—whatever that means—but he would have resented me for it.’ She shuddered. ‘No. I couldn’t ask it of him. If I went back to Perry, I could at least give my child a father—its own father. So I pretended my dad was ill, dying of cancer, needing me to nurse him through his last illness. It wasn’t true at the time, but it became true a couple of years later, and poor Mum followed him. D’you think that was divine retribution?’
‘Nope.’
‘Rod was so calm. He didn’t need me, you see? He drove me to the airport, walked me across the tarmac, said he’d be waiting. I didn’t believe him.’ She made a small, unhappy sound, smoothing the vivid cloth across her knees. ‘Perry met me at Ipswich Station, and we never spoke about my little escapade. It never happened.’
I shook my head. ‘Amazing.’
‘It was lovely to see Lucy, but she looked quite thin and tired. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight; even used to get up in the night to check I was still there. Getting her to school was a real problem. The teacher called it separation anxiety.’ Deborah chewed her lip thoughtfully. ‘I suppose she’d suffered too much loss in her young life. She knew that people sometimes don’t come back.’
She gazed down the years, eyes unfocused. ‘Perry and I were married a month later at the local registry office. Lucy was our bridesmaid, and she was in heaven. I squeezed myself into a size fourteen dress and all day long I grinned like a Cheshire cat. Pity the bride who smiles all day! Mum had a lovely time. Dad, bless him, looked utterly confused by the whole event. You can tell from the wedding photos. They went on a cruise later in the year, because it had been such a budget wedding.’
‘They got a bargain.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t.’
She gave a little shrug. ‘Matt arrived when I was still just a child myself, really. Wow. Hell of a thing, your own baby. Quite a life-changer.’
‘I expect the novelty wears off,’ I said seriously. ‘After a month or so.’
She looked shocked for a second and then laughed. ‘You’re absolutely hopeless, you know that? No, life is never the same again, Jake. Never.’ The laugh weakened.
‘Did you enjoy having a baby so young?’ I was ghoulishly curious. I couldn’t imagine a damnation more hellish than being entirely responsible for another human being.
‘Would you?’ She met my eyes, and then her gaze slid away to the sea. ‘You have to efface yourself completely and become a non-person. It’s too hot on this rock,’ she interrupted herself, and slipped down to join me in my patch of shade. I made room for her. It wasn’t flirtatious, the way she parked herself beside me. It was companionable.
She picked up a handful of fine sand, and let it drift between her fingers. ‘Enjoy isn’t strong enough . . . it’s a lot more fundamental and a lot less comfortable. You love them in a way you could never have imagined. Your happiness is bound up with theirs, forever. You feel constant anxiety for them long after they’ve stopped feeling any for you. Both Matt and Lucy.’
I was silent, guiltily wondering if that’s how Mum felt.
‘Anyway. The point is . . . Perry’s not what he seems, Jake.’
This was too much, dangling such a snippet in front of my nose.
I mean, I’m not made of stone. I grappled with my curiosity for a few seconds and then said, ‘He’s gay, isn’t he?’
‘Uh-uh.’ She shook her head, smiling.
‘Mainlines heroin? Wears a tutu? International terrorist?’
She drew her finger and thumb across her lips, zipping them up.
I tried again. ‘He doesn’t own a string vest?’
‘Look, it was naughty of me to mention it. I can’t tell you, all right? I’ve promised him, on my children’s life. And I’ve kept that promise all these years. So stop asking.’
‘Fair enough.’ I scratched my ear. ‘Mud wrestling?’
‘Shut up. Let’s just say that he had to leave the army.’
‘Okay.’ My imagination was working overtime. Maybe Perry was a spy?
She patted my shoulder. ‘You can take it from me that life with Perry wasn’t easy. But I’d made my bed, and the children needed me. I just got on with it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what my parents did, and yet they gave me a wonderful childhood. I suspect most marriages are like that, to a greater or lesser degree.’
‘Endurance courses.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But you’re here now,’ I reminded her. ‘You came back.’
‘I wasn’t going to end up buried next to Perry in Coptree churchyard. I decided that once the children were independent, once Matt turned seventeen, my sentence would be up.’ She dug out another handful of sand. ‘I knew I could manage that.’
The grains trickled out of the hourglass of her fist, falling in a thin stream. ‘I was a model prisoner. I wanted Lucy and Matt to have perfect childhoods. My birthday parties were legendary, my Christmas tree had real candles. But every lighting of them marked another wasted year. I had this imaginary world, Kulala. It was a sort of Eden to me. In my mind I’d walk along the paths, sink into the water. I became utterly obsessed by the idea of coming back. Obsessed.’ She shut her eyes for a second. ‘I had no other concept of my future. I tried to tell myself that Rod wouldn’t be here, he’d be married and pot-bellied and living in suburbia. But still I plotted and schemed and dreamed of coming back.’
She poured the sand over my feet. It felt like warm water. ‘After Matt went off to boarding school, I did a course. Journalism.’
‘Finally.’
‘Finally. Then I managed to land a slot on the local rag. I got on well with the editor . . . one job led to another.’ She dusted the sand off her hands. ‘Several years ago, I arranged to write a piece on the war crimes tribunal in Arusha. That’s only about a day’s drive from here. I flew into Mombasa and took a taxi straight to Kulala Beach. I remember being driven through the plantation, watching for my first sight of the horizon. And there was the Indian Ocean, right where I’d left it.’ She smiled, remembering. ‘And there was Rod. He strolled up as I climbed out of the taxi. “So, Susie. Your dad finally died, then?”
’ I laughed, feeling oddly miserable. ‘You had a lot of explaining to do.’
‘I did. We spent days and nights just talking. Rod understood. After thirteen years, we picked up where we’d left off.’
‘Did you get to the tribunal?’
‘Mm. Wrote a couple of pieces. I only stayed three weeks that first time. Just a bit of home release. Matt still needed me. But I came quite often after that.’
‘Arusha?’
‘No. The world has a short attention span; it tired of the agonies of Hutus and Tutsis. The circus had long moved on. Somalia, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the Congo. I didn’t try to cover those areas. I did quite a bit of work on nomadic life—which fascinates me—and the effects of long-term drought here in Kenya.’
An insect began to click and hum in the dry grass nearby. Clickety-clicket.
‘And all the time,’ she said, ‘Rod and I were counting down the years—then the months, then the days—until I could come home for good.’
‘Perry must have known what you were up to.’
‘Never said so. I always made sure he was looked after. To say that I lived for my weeks here would be a pathetic understatement. This is my home. This is my life. In Coptree I merely existed, just got through the day. Here, I live.’
‘But this isn’t the real world. You can’t stay here forever.’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘Why not? I don’t like the real world. It’s going up in flames. Literally.’
‘True.’
We had a minute’s silence, thinking of the world that was going up in flames. And then I remembered Matt, crying in his room.
‘Matt’s still pretty young.’
‘Come on.’ She scowled, flicking a giant ant off her knee. ‘Matt despises me.’
‘He’s just being cool.’
‘No, really. He’s barely addressed two sentences to me since his voice broke. All I get is grunts and that’s if I’m lucky. I’ve nothing to offer my son any more. Nothing. Ever since he stopped being a cuddly cherub and became a muscled killing machine.’
‘I think that’s normal for boys his age. He’ll grow out of it.’
‘So they say.’ She grimaced miserably. ‘You never, ever stop loving them but it hurts, Jake. He looks at me as though I’m a mouldy sandwich.
Walks away when I’m talking to him.’
‘Little sod. I’ll have a word with him.’
She stood up and waded into the criss-cross brilliance of the shallows. The light seemed to flicker right through her.
‘We had a party for his seventeenth, after his exams back in June. Lots of girls, all gorgeous and all swooning over Matt. He must have had this secret, the pregnant girl. He did seem on edge. And I had my secret. I’d already got my ticket.’
‘What did you do about money?’
‘I’d been siphoning off funds into a separate bank account for years. About seventeen years, actually. I had a bit invested. There’s no need to look as though you’re sucking on a lemon.’
I was gawping at her. I mean, we all make mistakes. But stealing the housekeeping money for all those years—stashing it away from the very first day of your marriage—well, that’s over the top. That’s dishonesty on a pretty monumental scale.
She kicked a spray of sapphires into the air. ‘Look, Mr Goody-Goody, there’s no call for you to be sanctimonious. It was my money too. I spent my entire adult life working for that family. They got a free nanny, chauffeur, housekeeper, cook and cleaner. Bargain! So I gave myself the odd bonus. So what? I won’t ask Perry for more. I could demand a share in his army pension, make him sell the house. But I won’t. He’s getting off bloody lightly.’
‘He is—financially. So there you were, ready to go.’
‘All ready to go.’ She held up both hands in a gesture of finality. ‘Filled the freezer, cleaned the place from top to bottom, got the cleaner to increase her hours. The Great Escape.’
‘Why didn’t you tell them you wouldn’t be back this time?’
‘Didn’t tell them . . . ?’ She looked scandalised. ‘I did !’
My jaw dropped. ‘They lied to me.’
‘Of course they lied to you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have agreed to come. I told them on the day I left. I didn’t say where I was going, just that after I’d written my piece I wasn’t coming back. Perry took it hard, as I expected. Matt just went out. And Lucy gave me an ear bashing.’
‘She’s not in your fan club, is she?’
Deborah looked unhappy. ‘I’ve abandoned her twice, really. She’s never forgotten the first time, and she may never forgive the second. I would have been in touch, you know. Once the dust had settled. But the sad fact is that my children couldn’t care less if I emigrated to Mars.’
‘You’re wrong there. Matt literally begged me to find you.’
She splashed back up the beach and knelt down, looking into my face. ‘Really?’ ‘Really.’
Her face fell. ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’ she said bitterly. ‘So he can play with his new doll, which really cries and wets its nappy. If I don’t play too, they have to take her back to the shop.’
I let it go. The air was distorted now, quivering as though the sand was on fire, and our patch of shade had shrunk.
‘Rod will be home by this evening.’ She sounded desperate. ‘I have to decide before then. Tell me, Jake. Advise me. What do I do? What I want to do is burn Perry’s letter and stay here, where I’ve found happiness.’
‘That’s a very rare commodity, happiness. Very, very rare.’ I meant it. I’d been searching for years, and the pot of gold always disappeared when I got closer.
‘A great gift,’ she agreed.
‘So. Stay.’
‘But then my grandchild will be given away to strangers, and Matt will never see her again.’ She rubbed her eyes despairingly. ‘He’ll never forgive me. And I’ll never forgive me. Those photos . . . Matt and his tiny daughter. Made me want to cry.’
It’s life and death, tell her. Bring her back.
‘Lots of kids get adopted,’ I argued half-heartedly.
‘C’mon, Jake. Be realistic. It may be a miserable existence, where nobody loves her. Paedophiles have even adopted children especially so they can abuse them.’
‘That can’t be very common.’
‘But it happens. And she’d never be able to contact us. We’d never sleep easy again.’
Promise you’ll bring her home with you. Promise.
She met my eyes. ‘So must I start all over again? Another seventeen years in the slammer?’
‘Matt could have her back one day,’ I suggested doubtfully.
‘I’ll be her mother . . . I’ll love her. It means nothing to me any more, that half-life of the privileged. Plastic friendships. Hairdos and aerobics and personalised number plates. Fussing about whether our darlings will be brain surgeons or concert pianists. People here—those women you can hear, chatting, pounding maize—they worry about whether their children are even going to make it through the latest drought. Their lives are real.’ Her hand fastened on my arm. ‘Help me, Jake! I don’t know what to do.’
At first I didn’t answer. I was watching the silver trail of a jet as it inched across the emptiness, and wishing I had a better answer for her.
‘I know what I’d do,’ I said. ‘I’d develop a sudden urge to explore Outer Mongolia. I’m a gold medallist at running away.’
I felt her fingers tighten. ‘Good plan.’
I sighed. It was no use. ‘But I know what you’re going to do, Deborah, and so do you. I think you made your decision sometime around dawn this morning. I don’t think the sun gave you his blessing this time.’
She hid her face in her hands, and I laid an arm around her shoulder as she grieved. The heat seemed to breathe, like a sleeping dragon.
I heard her laugh. Or sob. Either way, it was a bitter sound.
‘I wait seventeen years,’ she said. ‘And Matt forgets to buy a condom.’