Long Lies the Shadow

When she woke they had already buried him.

Gin lay in the small white room, watching the doctor’s mouth move as he told her. And for once she was grateful to the ancient Hasidic laws, the quick burial that saved her from having to face his father’s broken stare, his mother’s swollen eyes. She did not have to stand and watch his weeping wife and sons, nor answer unspoken questions, clear the confusion as to why she had been there at all. Was she the reason for his silence in his last two days of life? And if she could have borne to get past the guilt, the rage, would she have been able to so glibly lie? To deny her past, her part in his life, and his in hers? He, who once so savoured honesty, what would he have said? Lie? Protect his family yet again? She would have, for that.

A moot point.
So unusual for a BMW to roll
.

But how would she have been able to stem her own pain and look into his wife’s eyes, pretend it was his wife’s name on his lips as he died?

Perhaps they could have found some mutual comfort in the truth, the shared pain. But then she realised, with a small shock, that even now if she mentioned Leila there would be questions as to who Leila was. What irony that even at his death, she, Gin, was still the only one who knew. At least she had allowed him honesty at death. She held onto this as the only comfort. Held fast, to silence herself, and any shame.

Gin lay in the hospital room and relished the semblance of peace.

She was allowed no visitors in the first days and, indeed, expected
none. Later when, of all people, Viv arrived, Gin said little of consequence, still drugged and uninclined to the weariness of talk while Viv’s chatter assumed an air of desperate cheer. Inevitable that her family would call Viv, when Gin herself would have been content alone. She fell asleep, waking to an empty, dark room, lit only dimly by the lights from the mountain.

The doctors came, and went, and came again, each time with updates of her progress that she found herself indifferent to. She lay there, gazing out the window at the immovable mountain. She would be left with a slight limp, they said, and she thought it inappropriate to laugh. Was that all? It seemed obscene that his death should mark her so little, and she was glad for the news. Her leg would probably ache in London’s winter, they said. Overwhelmingly she longed suddenly for hard, grey rain and the hustle of a wet Saturday afternoon market. The African sunshine could never capture that. Lying alone in the small white room, she remembered why here the irrepressible sun could depress her with its falsity, how it could burn and be bright when all around was pain and poverty. In England she would be able to resonate with the coldness that sat now in her soul.

But for now, she is here, in Cape Town. For now, beneath the mountain’s watch, she will slowly repair. Ignoring the hollow ache, the need to mourn, to cut her hair and rend her garments, to cry and keen. To kneel over the ashes of all she thinks forsaken, lost, or dead.

It is her fourth day in the small white room, a time twice as long as they had spent together. There is a knock. Light but firm, and unnecessary since the door is always left ajar. Not quite so private a room, it seems.

“Miss McMann. Miss Virginia McMann,” says a voice, and it is not a question. He enters despite her silence, her lack of invitation. “I’m Nick Retief.”

He is a tall white man, in his early thirties, some five years younger than herself. Hair like hers, more blond than brown, and in need of a trim.

“Detective Sergeant Nick Retief.”

She notes a touch of emphasis, a touch of pride perhaps, and wonders at this most peculiar of South African anomalies, a man with an Afrikaans name but an English accent.

He seems unperturbed by her continued reticence to speak. “I’m investigating your –” and here he falters slightly, “accident.” He says the word as if it is foreign, as if it exists in a world he seldom inhabits. A world of unconnected incidents and random events, as if his own is certain and assured, where every action is determined exactly by a clear and measured motivation.

Gin blinks at him. Waits. He seems to wait also. Unhurried. Eventually she says, “Yes, Mr Retief?” the question formed in almost exactly the manner in which he has said
accident
to her. And indeed, to herself, her voice sounds thinly accented with an exaggerated Englishness, summoning her years in England so as to separate herself from him, and his Afrikaans name.

He squints slowly back at her, as if deciding something. “Miss McMann,” he says again.

His eyes, she notices, are gunmetal grey, but when the light hits them, they opacify to blue.

“Can you tell me what you remember?”

She wants to laugh at him. She has thought of nothing else.

“I wanted a coffee,” she starts, and then stops.

There is a patter of noise on the window, rain tapping gently on the pane. Detective Sergeant Nick Retief has stayed silent, waiting for her to continue, and Gin turns her head to look out at the mountain. The coffee at breakfast, Simon’s face as he made love to her; these are not details that interest this man. The weather has darkened the mountain, and wisps of cloud have shrouded its peak.

Gin starts again. “We drove around the city,” she says.

“There was a white car,” says Gin. She thought the memory was clean and clear. Only now, in the retelling, does she realise how fractured it is. She thinks slowly, stupidly, how unfair it was to have an accident, when they had already rounded the coast, past Llandudno and Hout Bay, safely.

“Is that all?” asks Nick Retief.

She hears a caustic dissatisfaction in his tone. Gin closes her eyes. The accident is a blur. She can only remember the urgency in Simon’s voice, his eyes.

“Is that all you remember?” repeats Retief, although his tone seems kinder than before.

She cannot bring herself to tell him Simon’s final words. What does it matter now if he called a name? So she nods, awkwardly, silently, at this man. Like a child, chastised, instead of a woman of thirty-nine.

Nick Retief turns to leave. She imagines he is as contemptuous of her faithless memory as she.

His voice sounds harsh again to her now, echoing off the stark walls. “I’ll come again in a few days. Perhaps you’ll remember more then.” A pause. “And you will need to make a statement at the station.”

After Retief has left, Gin watches the raindrops increase against the pane till they streak in rivulets down its length.

Simon will walk the passages of her soul forever. No bond will be broken now; there is only this eternal longing. And the horror replay, over and over again, with its missing pieces, till it fades in sleep but returns to her restless in dreams. A second time in Cape Town he will haunt her. She wakes to find him her first thought, grief soaking her skin like sweat. It is not as expected. She has waited for the enormity of guilt, but it has not come. Not even with visitors, not even with the flowers from his family, the bouquet of white an offer of forgiveness and understanding, if only she will proffer more than silence, give some sort of explanation. It is as before, as if merely an ocean or a continent separates them, as if a phone call or a plane ride could reunite.

She remembers their first parting, first loss.

Perhaps, thinks Gin, the love is there still. Perhaps it could not leave, though the lovers had. It must be there still, in the little flat. On a good day, perhaps it could be glimpsed. Like incense wafting through the air. Like dust in sunlight. At first, this thought depresses her, but later it is comforting. By then she is up and walking, the promised limp more evident with fatigue. The doctors fuss her less, the nurses more.

Nick Retief visits once again, but she is asleep, and she wakes to find he has left a note, and an incongruous bunch of stiff proteas on the table. The note is brief; she is vaguely surprised at the even strokes of black ink, demanding her presence at the station on her discharge. The bouquet lasts the rest of her stay, and when Viv comes to fetch her, when Gin is well enough to leave the small white room with its view of the mountain, she takes the rigid flowers with her.