Breaking Light (19 page)

‘I am sorry,' he said in a strained voice. ‘Please don't take any notice of her.'

‘Oh, she's just curious; she cannot make us out, that's all. And I can't say I blame her.' She smiled up at him and the wind caught in her headscarf, gently moulding it around her face like a carved Madonna, just come alive.

He nodded. He realised that, at times, she made him feel calm, almost at ease, as if she was surrounded by an aura of harmony – like some kind of magnetic field or a wash of sleep. They walked quietly side by side for a while, following the gravel path around
to the back of the house. He kept stealing glances at her, on and off, and wondered if, in a different life, he might have been walking with her like this
for real
. A rush of nostalgia – for something that had never been – touched his heart like sticky sadness.

Just then she looked up and saw him watching her; she gave him an oddly quizzical look, as if something had just dawned on her.

He cleared his throat, desperately trying to think of something to say. ‘You have grown,' he blurted and immediately blushed at his own stupidity.

She too blushed, gorgeously, and answered, ‘I'm wearing heels. I don't, normally …'

He looked down to see her naked feet in a pair of canvas wedge shoes. Next to them on the sunlit gravel, pointing slightly towards each other, were his own shoes, the ones he would normally only wear around the house. The brown leather was worn and scuffed, like the bark of an old tree. Quickly, as if to hide his shame, he took a step into the shadow next to the wall. The breeze brought a sweet scent of milk and honey. For a second he thought it was the scent of her skin, before realising that it came from the large buddleia that was in full bloom. Perhaps it's a tolerable shrub after all, he thought to himself, at least at this time of the year, before the panicles start to turn. A red admiral was hovering on one of the purple cones, not quite settling, as if it was still deciding whether the flower was worthy of its grace. It was the kind of shrub that you would see on derelict sites and at the back of warehouses, he realised, looking quickly around the garden. The grass urgently needed mowing and the beds were completely overgrown. He gathered that she too had noticed the lawn.

‘I have neglected the garden in favour of the allotment,' he explained, apologetically.

‘Well, it's too large for you to manage yourself. You should pay a boy from the village to cut the grass …'

He nodded and muttered, ‘Yes, yes, perhaps a boy. Just one, though – not too many people. I would rather have the grass grow like a prairie.'

But she ignored him and continued, ‘.… and I could help you with the beds, if you like.'

He looked at her, startled. Around them, the light was growing a deeper green.

She laughed again. ‘Don't look so frightened. Would you not rather have me crawling around your garden than some gardener?'

‘Oh, yes. Any time,' he twittered, trying to sound light-hearted. It was such an awful thought, and beautiful at the same time.

‘You would have to give me a hand, of course; I can't do it all on my own – and it's your garden, after all,' she said, casually, and sailed on along the gravel.

He released himself from the shadow and followed a step or two behind. If I could trust this woman, he thought to himself as he watched her slight back where the end of a black braid showed from under her headscarf, perhaps my burden would be reduced. But she has got her own weight to carry, surely. It would not be fair of me to increase her load. But it's so tempting …

‘I was thinking,' he said aloud.

‘Of what?' she asked, looking back at him quickly and away, her cheeks still aglow.

Oh, well, he thought, if she was willing …

‘I was thinking,' he said again, ‘that it feels like we have known each other for a long time.'

This is so easy, he thought, and smiled sadly at his hapless shoes that seemed to symbolise something more.

But she was too clever to fall for such flattery. ‘What are you doing here, in this place – this house?' she asked, as if to force open a new avenue of honesty. She had stopped, and stood facing him.

He sighed and, in order to avoid her eyes, stepped off the path on to the grass. She followed and he led her towards the dappled shade of a bright green acer.

‘I started dreaming about Oakstone. I grew up around here, you know,' he answered, surprising himself with such honesty. ‘I came back to be completed – to try to become whole, but I don't know how to achieve it. And also, there was some old stuff I needed to sort out.' He bent down to feel the grass with the hand holding the two glasses. It felt dry enough and he sat down heavily with his legs sprawled in front of him. He frowned at the sight of his mottled white skin, which showed in the gap between his beige socks and charcoal flannel trousers. Putting down the Sancerre and the glasses, which immediately fell over in the tall grass, it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn't brought a bottle opener.

‘Oh, I am such a dimwit!' he cursed.

‘Forgot the bottle opener?'

He nodded miserably, whilst rolling up his shirtsleeves. How could she have known?

‘Ah, never mind. We'll drink it some other time. Have a strawberry instead.'

He liked the way she said it:
some other time
. He listened to her
words and loved their clear lightness. He let them trickle across him like summer rain on a windowpane. They were both quiet for a while then. Once or twice, their hands brushed against each other as they reached for the strawberries in the punnet. The bangles around her wrists chimed. Leaf shadows moved on the ground.

‘So you imagined,' she said, eventually, ‘that, just by coming back to this house, by buying this old wreck and all of this –' she gestured with both her arms around the garden – ‘you would find some kind of sense?'

‘I belong here.' He must try to keep this private conviction.

‘Do you, now?' she said, with a kind of flat irony.

He laughed loudly at her absurdity. What did she know?

‘I mean,' she continued, but without the irony, ‘can we ever belong again, once we have been uprooted?'

‘Do you not miss Afghanistan – would you not like to go back?'

‘Of course I miss it. But the memory of it's pure nostalgia. The world I grew up in does not exist anymore. And neither does yours. There's no way back.'

He stared at her in disbelief. In the rapt afternoon, he could feel the old tingling above his lip and pressed his index finger across his moustache. There was always the danger, he felt, that the seam would open up again – the live wound, the old wound.

‘Where did you grow up?' he asked, obscurely, in order to gain time.

‘In Herat.' Her mind returned briefly to where the Silk Road takes a breath and rests by the river before entering Persia. ‘My childhood was full of the scent of pines and roses, and I used to play in pomegranate orchards and terracotta-coloured courtyards,'
she continued in the voice of someone declaiming Byron. But he could see clearly that the satin pink and crimson of the roses and the dusty terracotta had all been woven into the scarf, which shaded her face now in a lovely blush.

‘That sounds wonderful.' He even thought he could smell the roses in the air around them. And those pomegranate blossoms.

‘Precisely; it's an image distilled from nostalgia,' she replied with vehemence.

‘How can you be so sure that there's no way back?'

‘It's difficult to see a bright path when the past is so dark. When the last thirty years of memory have reduced a nation …' She shook her head. ‘Anyway, my point is, we all have to move on. Even you have to move on.'

‘I want to die in the place where I was born.' It sounded a bit childish, he recognised.

‘Does it matter
where
we die?' She did not seem to register the offered key to his past. ‘Isn't it better to focus on how to live?'

He had never really thought of it like that. ‘Well, I …' He was suddenly taut inside with the fear that they were not similar at all. He looked at the strawberry punnet on the grass between them – it was an empty, aching thing.

‘I am sorry. I have hurt your feelings,' she said softly, and reached out to put her hand on his bare arm. He flinched, but kept staring at the blades of grass. ‘Look, Gabriel, I have an obtrusive way at times; you mustn't take too much notice of what I say in the heat of the moment.'

He did not look up, but she bent forward to look into his face.

‘You see, I was quiet for too long and now I have this constant urge to express myself,' she said jokingly, trying to coax him back out of himself.

He did not reply, but shook his head sadly.

As if she had been reading his thoughts, she said, ‘You know, us having an argument is a good thing – it means that we are getting closer. A unity is always made up of at least two parts, and we will never get close if we can't accept each other's differences.'

He looked up then, at her warm eyes surrounded by a silky cobweb of lines, but in his mind it was Michael's twelve-year-old face he saw in front of him. And those eyes looking back at him. He turned his troubled eyes away from her and pulled at a trouser leg. Feeling the dark beetle turn inside him and the old anxiety rising, he realised he was trapped. There was no protective corner into which he could remove himself and hide from her knowing gaze. He needed to strike out, if only to create some space. ‘Well,' he said, his voice gone hard, ‘fortunately, you have no idea about my “differences” – not to speak of my shortcomings – and I daresay that, if you did, you would find them difficult to accept.'

‘Feeling sorry for ourselves is never going to help, you know.' She was fed up, he could tell.

‘That's easy for you to say,' he retaliated, and, because he had never really grown up, he added, ‘What do you know about anything, anyway?'

She made a strange noise then, out of her throat, but she did not answer. Her light body shifted on the grass, stirring up a scent of camomile.

And then, all of a sudden, the beauty had gone out of the day, as if something had dirtied the air. The jasmine gave off a smell of urine. His heart wobbled as if it was not his young self he was remembering, reflected in Michael's eyes, but some other dear
child, lost and vulnerable – an orphan, perhaps; somebody he ought to reach out to and comfort – save, even – before it was too late. Smiling palely, he turned to apologise, perhaps not so much for what he had said as for who he was, but she had already left. The grass next to him was empty, save for a blackbird that had hopped out from under a shrub and looked at him now, sideways, with beads of unseeing jet.

*

When Mrs Sarobi first saw the pebble-dashed cottage towards the bottom of the lane, she had been disappointed. The estate agent had described it as picturesque and Edwardian, but the drab, roughcast front of the house had made it stand out from the other cottages in the lane, which were limewashed and chocolate-box charming. The interior, too, had made her heart sink. An old woman had lived there alone, she was told, and the cottage had stood empty for years after the woman's death, as the only son, who was living in London at the time, had not been able to decide what to do with it. In the end, several years later, the grown-up son had made it clear that he was no longer interested in the cottage or its contents. The agents had handled the whole business. It had been put up for sale and the price had been low enough for Mrs Sarobi to afford the deposit with the money her lawyers had eventually managed to get out of her former husband's family in Herat. She had been living in a council flat in Bethnal Green at the time. That was where they put her when she arrived, not quite knowing what else to do. It seemed to surprise the authorities that she had a plan for her life in this country. They warned against it, saying that she might struggle to fit in. But she had had enough time to think about her plan.
She was impatient and so she had bought the cottage in a hurry, without viewing it first, making the fatal mistake of trusting an estate agent.

It was true that somebody had made a half-hearted attempt to tidy the place up, but a couple of decades or more of neglect had left their mark. The old woman's furniture and other artefacts had been included in the sale, but Mrs Sarobi suspected the place had been looted before she moved in. There was very little left of value. The carpet in the front room had once been maroon, but years of unbroken traffic had worn it down so that patches were frayed and the floorboards showed through. A torn leather armchair, once of high quality, stood by the dusty grate. Any ornaments or pictures had been removed but, in a low, built-in cupboard opposite the window, Mrs Sarobi found an old record player and a handful of seventy-eight records from the forties and fifties. In the kitchen, the linoleum had been cut away around the Rayburn to reveal the original flagstones. Mrs Sarobi decided to expose the flagstones completely and put down one of her thick woollen rugs on top. Above the sink hung a yellowing calendar from 1974; a few illegible pencil marks spelt out a fading existence amongst pictures of furry ponies grazing on the moor. Only one date had been clearly circled in red: a Sunday in July. For some reason, Mrs Sarobi had felt compelled to keep the calendar in a drawer.

The two small bedrooms upstairs were cold and draughty, but the beds, which had miraculously been left in place, were of antique inlaid mahogany and bore witness to their owner's former station. Mrs Sarobi decided early on to do the place up, room by room, on her own. In the larger of the two bedrooms, taped to the back of an attractive chest of drawers, she found a number
of letters. She held the small bundle carefully in her hands and sat down on the bed. A ribbon had been tied around them and Mrs Sarobi hesitated, as its fading red suggested their content. She had a strong sense that she was trespassing, and her heart was beating harder as she untied the ribbon and let it fall next to her on the stripped bed. There were eight letters, all still in their envelopes; the love of a lifetime in eight letters, each cautiously weighted word browning in fading ink.