I Think of You: Stories (6 page)

Her remark had been true. He lived in heroic proportions and would have been better off as some medieval knight, be it Arab or Frank. He would have gone out and slain dragons and ghouls and rescued damsels in distress. He would have been kind to his squire and his horses and would have believed in the chastity of his wife weaving in her tower. And perhaps, in the Middle Ages, his belief would not have been misplaced.

Another memory sprang to her mind. “The Spartans,” he was fond of saying, “spent the last day before Marathon
adorning themselves and combing their hair. They knew they were going to die.” On their last day, he had come up to the living room in the cottage. His car had been packed. He was setting off down the M-I. He was drunk. But he was very well dressed, with a velvet jacket and a silk foulard. “I have combed my hair,” he had said quietly, swaying at the top of the stairs.

She pressed a hand to her head. Not again. Please. Not again. It’s over now. Finished. Her eye caught her desk. It was cluttered with objects. She stood up and went over, looking at them absently. Papers, letters, ashtrays, an old half coconut shell, a silver flask in a leather case, some flying instruments salvaged from a wrecked plane, and a gun. She picked it up. An old Colt.45. “When you shoot yourself in the head,” he had told her, “your brains splatter all over the place. It’s a hell of a mess.”

“What can you do?” she had asked.

“Put your head in a plastic bag first.”

The doorbell rang. She stood very still. It rang again. She walked slowly to the door and opened it. A boy stood holding a carefully folded pile of shirts. He handed them to her. She took them automatically.

“How much?”

“Twelve shirts by five piastres is sixty piastres,” he said.

She went back to the living room, put the shirts on the sofa, and took her purse from her handbag. She took out seventy piastres and went back to the door.

“Take these.”

“Do you have anything else for ironing?”

“No thanks,” she replied, “not today.”

She closed the door and turned again to face the flat. The dining room was now directly opposite her. She walked over. These had been her favorite pieces of furniture. Solid dark oak in a rustic style with carved lions’ heads for handles. The massive table and sideboards stood waiting for her in the gloom. She opened the small upright sideboard they had used as a bar. It was as well stocked as ever and the crystal goblets sparkled quietly inside. She put out her hand. She had treasured these goblets and the formal china with gold and green edging. She looked around. The table would be covered with the beige and gold damask tablecloth and the room lit by candles in silver candlesticks. Where is the silver? she wondered. The trays and candlesticks were not in their places on the sideboards. She started looking for them. She opened the sideboard doors and peered inside, and there were the delicate little blue and white Japanese bowls. Bought in Tokyo. A great tiredness overwhelmed her. She put out a hand behind her, dragged up a chair, and sat down. The whole world. What city was left that she could go to and not find memories? Why not give in? Why not come back? Tokyo. All those pretty little girls in red miniskirts and white cotton gloves operating the elevators and incessantly bowing: “Thank you for shopping at our store, we hope you have a good day, we hope you will come back.” All those gaudy shrines, presided over by sleepy-eyed Buddhas who had sat inscrutable as she clapped her hands and tied a piece of paper with a wish to the sacred tree. She had always wished for one thing. Incoherently. Make it right. Dear God,

Buddha, Allah, make it right. She felt the pricking of tears behind her eyes, but she would not cry. Two whole years had passed since that day in the living room of the cottage and she was not going to cry anymore.

She resumed her search for the missing silver and in a corner of the larger sideboard she found it. She drew it out. Trays, ashtrays, candlesticks, and a trophy inscribed “Miss Cairo University
1970
.” Eight years ago … All were tarnished. Bits of them were quite black. Typical again, she thought. He can’t bear to see them tarnished and can’t be bothered to get them polished, so he tucks them away in a corner and hopes they’ll disappear. Or maybe he even hopes that by some miracle when next he thinks to look, he’ll find them gleaming and bright. She rubbed a corner of the cup with her thumb. I wonder if he has any polish? she thought again. With a surge of energy she made for the kitchen. She stood looking around. His mother had bought them the kitchen fittings and her aunt had made the curtains. So pretty, with their blue flowers and white broderie anglaise trimming. They were still there, the sunlight shining gently through them. And there was the breakfast bar and the little two-eyed cooker where she’d learned to make goulash soup. She looked at the sink. There were two unwashed glasses. She took off her rings and watch and started to wash them. They’d always had friends around. Parties. How had she managed with such a tiny kitchen? Such a tiny fridge? She opened the fridge. Even the containers had been carefully chosen and had blue flowers to match the curtains. In the door were two bottles of beer and a bottle of white wine and seven
eggs. She opened a round container. It was full of jam. She dipped a finger in it and licked. Date jam. His mother’s date jam. She had a vivid image of him: a serious little boy of seven, playing in the sea at Alexandria. His nanny wades out from the beach holding up her galabiya with one hand, the other holding out a sandwich. She waves and calls, “Come out now. Come and have a date jam sandwich!” When he was seven she had not yet been born, but the image was vivid in her mind from stories repeated by his mother every time she gave her a present of a large jar of date jam. She made it with her own two hands. The dates were laid neatly one on top of the other and in the center of each one was an almond and a clove. Then they were covered with syrup. “It always brought him out,” she would say. “He loved the sea, but he loved his mother’s date jam more.” And she would laugh.

She put the lid back on the pot and closed the fridge door. Where were those photos of him as a child that she had had framed? They were not hanging anywhere. But then he had never been particularly keen on them. She remembered the silver. She rummaged around in the kitchen cupboards. She found some shoe polish and some powdered soap, but that was all. She closed the cupboard doors and went back to the dining room. Slowly she put the silver back into the corner of the sideboard. I could buy some, she thought. I could go right now and buy some polish and come back and do it. She closed the sideboard door and looked up at the wall above it. There they were. The framed maps of Sinai. The two old army maps he had used when he made his celebrated trek across the desert.

He had gone with a friend. They had traveled by jeep and by camel, spending days at the monastery of Saint Catherine and weeks with the Sinai Bedu. She had listened wide-eyed to his tales of that trip. “Can we do something like that together?” she had asked. “But I’ve already done it,” he had said, laughing. And it was true. He had already done it. He had already done a lot of things. His memories were more vivid to her than her own. She had no memories. She had had no time to acquire a past, and in her worst moments, locked up in some bathroom, it had seemed to her that his past was devouring the present.

She pulled herself away from the deserts and mountains and turned to the living room. Her eyes fell on the pile of fresh shirts on the couch. She crossed over and picked them up carefully and walked automatically to the wardrobe in the corridor. She pulled open the left-hand door, and sure enough, there were the shelves of clean ironed shirts. She put away the ones she was carrying. The whites with the whites and the coloreds with the coloreds, noting as she did so how many were unfamiliar to her. Then, on an impulse, she pulled open the right-hand door. Suits and jackets hung quietly in place. At the end of the row was a fur-lined overcoat they’d bought at Harrods. “Your fur,” she used to call it. “Who’s sitting warm inside his fur?” And he’d always grin and pull the collar up around his neck. She put out her hand and stroked it, then started to pull it out. Behind it, something hung shrouded in a white sheet. She left the coat and, taking hold of the other hanger, removed the shroud. She found herself looking at her wedding dress. It hung from her hand, a dream creation in white and gray lace,
embroidered lovingly with tiny seed pearls. Her hand shaking, she hung it back in the cupboard and hung the sheet over it. She knelt down to adjust the sheet around the train and her fingers hit a smooth object. She pulled it out. A white cardboard box. She knew what it was. Hesitantly she opened the lid, and sprang up and back with a scream. Her veil and small, pearl-embroidered Juliet’s cap nestled in tissue paper. They were covered with black moths. Trembling and with cold hands, she put the lid back on the box and carried it to the kitchen. She put it in the sink, searched for the matches, and set fire to it. She stood and watched it burn; then she cleared up the ashes and washed the sink and her hands. Her stomach turned again, and again she rushed to the bathroom. Always bathrooms. She flushed the toilet and rinsed out her mouth, then slowly made her way to the bedroom. She pulled herself up onto the large four-poster bed and lay there, careful to keep her sandaled feet off the fine pink linen sheets. She lay still as the world pitched and tilted and, weakened now, she felt the tears creep sideways from her eyes onto the bed. This too was familiar. Lying there dizzy, weeping, sick. Recurring illnesses that they said were hysterical. “What’s wrong with you?” they asked. “Why don’t you settle?” She didn’t know, she always said. She
didn’t
know. She lay on the bed and sobbed herself to sleep, carefully keeping her feet over the edge.

The instant she woke she saw the velvet-papered walls and the white lace curtains. She did not have an instant’s doubt about where she was. She knew. What she did not know was
when
she was. What happened? she asked, lying on the bed.

Where is he? What did I dream? She lifted herself up on one elbow and saw her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. She did not see a round-faced girl with long, straight black hair. Instead she saw, with recognition, relief, and sorrow, the woman with the curly hair and the pearl necklace. She lowered herself gently off the bed, straightened the linen, and left the room.

She went to the living room and headed for the right-hand side of the large bookcase. She scanned the literature shelves and picked out five books on seventeenth-century poetry. Then, carrying the books, she picked up her handbag. She walked through the flat and out of the door. She switched off the light and pulled the door to. Then she put her key in the lock and turned it firmly, twice.

Out in the sun, she got into her little red car. She put the five books and her handbag on the passenger seat and drove down the west side of the square. She maneuvered carefully around the potholes till she came out of the bumpy road and to the roundabout once again. There she picked up speed.

Mandy

Wednesday, 28 December 1978

Dear Mummy,

I am writing to you from New York—although by the time you get this I’ll be back in London. We’re visiting (or “visiting with,” as they all say) some friends of Gerald’s. He had his heart set on coming here for the New Year, so here we are. This is our third day and I haven’t really seen anything of the city yet, but I will soon.

I saw Saif in London just before I left and he seems okay. I found I envied him his pretty flat dreadfully. This trip has put off my accommodation problem for a bit, but I think Gerald and I are beyond working things out (did you know all along?) and I’m going to try and find a place of my own as soon as I get back to London. Although there
is
something quite bracing about having all my possessions in the car and being “of no fixed address.”

Gerald doesn’t think so at all, of course. He’s ravenous for the three-bedroom house—preferably in the Boltons—and the garageful of Porsches. Maybe he’ll get them someday; I wish him luck, but I’m truly fed up with him being angry with me for “having once had them.”

Anyway, Saif has got himself a lean-looking one too. Female, of course. And American. Yes, I’m afraid the days of Lady Caroline of the tiger-shooting, coolie-whipping father are over, and the chances of her riding for the Gezira Club as plain Mrs. Madi have quite dis-appeared.He brought this new one also up to the north of England in my last fortnight, when I was printing out the thesis. He was taking her on the Windermere round. To a little hotel run by two gay chaps where we once had dinner. He was taking her there for a couple of days and phoned me and asked could he come up and borrow the Lancia? And I said I ’d rather he took it because I was going to be finishing soon and how was I going to drive two cars away from that place? So they came up on the train and I met them. I paid twopence and went down to platform 3 as I had done so many times before and the train came in and he stepped out as he had done so many times before. As usual, he was a bit shorter than I remembered, and as usual, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. Then she stepped out after him and solved my problems.She was dressed up like a Lich-field ad. A Country Casual outfit that he’d wanted me to buy back in ’75: a just-below-the-knee camel skirt, a russet cashmere jumper, and a
cape
—would you believe?—with a Burberry check scarf, brown