Something to Hide

  Sometimes she’s filled with guilt. ‘I keep thinking of the times I was irritable with him.’

  I can’t follow her there, she’s on her own. He and I didn’t quarrel, we were too newly in love. Bev and Jeremy, however, had a whole history together. ‘I was angry with him for never fixing the car, it’s falling to bits but he was always too busy. And being so hopeless with money, letting people take advantage of him. I had to do all that and I hated it too, he never understood that, all the bills and boring paperwork, and having to ring people up and being the bad cop. And then we used to argue about the dogs.’ She sighs, as if he’s still here. This exasperation is more painful than the happiness because it makes the marriage so real.

  ‘Everything sounded fine in your blogs.’

  ‘Of course it was fine!’ She snorts when she says this, as if I wouldn’t understand, not having had a long marriage. Then she bursts into tears and tells me how much she loved him. ‘He was so warm and kind and generous.’

  ‘I know he was.’

  ‘You saw that in him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I thought we’d be together for ever and ever.’

  I take her tiny, fierce hand. It grips mine, kneading my fingers. ‘I know how you feel,’ I say.

  Her sodden face gazes at me. ‘You’re such a honey. I knew you’d be the only person who’d understand.’

  And the weird thing is that I do feel close to her, closer than I’ve ever been. Sometimes I forget my link to Jeremy and am simply a supportive friend. And, as I said, loss has changed Bev – for the better, I’m afraid. That beady-eyed competitiveness has gone, stripped away by grief. She’s honest and open.

  So we toss along, side by side on our shared current. I’m amazed she doesn’t notice; maybe she presumes this is sympathy, for grief makes egotists of us all. In a funny way it reminds me of our earliest days at school, when we fell into friendship like people fall into love – that fierce, clammy bond between best friends, forged in blood. It reminds me of what drew us together in the first place.

  We drink a lot – gin and the local tonic, which tastes of lavatory cleaner. She gets drunker than me but who cares? We barely eat. Clarence brings us plates of curling sandwiches and tinned soup and wordlessly takes them away. He’s tall and skinny and God knows how old, very black, with sorrowful yellow eyes. I wonder how much he’s grieving or whether he’s so used to death, in a country ravaged by AIDS, that one more person means little except the loss of his job. I have no knowledge of the African mind, and haven’t the energy to work him out.

  Because both Bev and I are exhausted. There are so many things to do – the funeral to arrange, Jeremy’s affairs to sort out, the house to eventually pack up, if I’m staying that long. I have no idea of her plans or of mine. My London life – work, friends – seems to have evaporated, as if they never existed. At times I feel there’s no point in going home at all; the thought of my empty house fills me with dread, because then I’d have to face up to the future.

  Bev seems to feel the same way. Her old vigour is gone; she’s listless in the stultifying heat. It’s not only hot, but oppressively humid. Everything gets mouldy here, she says – the clothes, the walls. She notices it more now Jeremy’s dead; in his sudden absence, the house seems to have given up its battle against the damp. We move around it like cripples, exhausted with grief. For grief is laboursome, I’ve realized, it takes every ounce of concentration to work one’s way through the day, the clock chiming that another hour has passed.

  So we live a cloistered, diminished life. Bev can’t face sorting out Jeremy’s clothes or even going into his study. She spends a lot of time on the phone, and with her dogs. She fusses over them, and talks to them, and feeds them various pills, but it’s Clarence who takes them around the block and does the shopping. There are no results yet from the hospital.

  People come to visit; they bring cake and commiserations. A nice man called George, from Zonac, sits twisting his hands in his lap. Apparently he was one of the people who remained loyal to Jeremy after he left.

  ‘He was the life and soul of the office,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe I’ll never hear that belly-laugh again. And I admired him for what he did, it was bloody courageous. The company was appallingly vindictive, in my opinion. In fact, when I heard he’d died—’ He stops.

  ‘What?’ asks Bev.

  ‘Nothing.’ He looks up at her and smiles, thinly. ‘I’ve read too many whodunnits. Bugger all else to do in this shithole.’

  ‘Jeremy died of natural causes,’ snaps Beverley, and bursts into tears.

  A young Dutch couple, Hans and Kaatja, arrive from the charity. They bring gifts from the Kikanda – a lizard made from a wire coat-hanger, and an object that looks like a large child’s dummy bound with coloured thread. They say that the tribe is in mourning and have smeared themselves with ash.

  ‘They’re making him an honorary ancestor,’ says Kaatja.

  Bev answers them dully. I’ve come to suspect that she’s not too interested in Jeremy’s project. In fact, she sounds positively hostile. Maybe she resents it for taking him away from her for weeks at a time. And she certainly has mixed feelings about the Kikanda. Her emails, needless to say, gave no hint of this. Everything was rosy in round-robinland.

  And now she’s only energized when Hans tells her that they slaughtered a buffalo in Jeremy’s memory.

  ‘That’s horrible!’ she says. ‘He would have hated to cause the death of an innocent animal.’

  I can see the young couple hesitating; maybe they were going to say that she eats slaughtered animals herself. They’re sensitive to the situation, however, and keep their mouths shut.

  After they’ve gone she sinks back in the settee, the cane creaking, and runs her hand through her hair. It’s tangled and greasy; she hasn’t washed it for days.

  ‘It’s that stupid charity that killed him,’ she says. ‘That’s what I think. He caught the disease up there, or the parasite, or whatever it was. That place is surrounded by swamps and God knows what was breeding in them.’

  That afternoon the lab phones. No toxins were found in their tests. The cause of death is inconclusive, and Jeremy’s body can be released for the funeral.

  ‘I’m not being a very good host,’ says Bev.

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m here to look after you.’

  ‘You’ve lost weight, you look as terrible as me.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Shall I give you a massage?’

  Dewdrop Aromatherapy is situated in a small annexe overlooking the garden. I lie face down, naked; the scent of candles mingles with the smell of dog shit drifting through the window. Bev puts on some music. I hear the squirt of oil and then her little fingers are kneading me, like a baker kneading dough. You’ve got one of the six most beautiful backs in Britain. She’s surprisingly rough; I wince.

  ‘Are you OK?’ her voice asks.

  Strangely enough, I feel an erotic jolt. We’ve seen each other naked in the past, when we shared the bathroom, but this is different. Her hands are voyaging where Jeremy’s hands have been. Her expert little fingers are seeking him out and exploring him, through me. I love your darling wrinkly elbows, I love every bit of you. Surely she can feel him, through me. Do you like me doing this? And this?

  I’ve been watching her, these past days. Her mouth, that has sucked his cock a thousand times. Her hands, that have stroked his body as it thickened into middle age. Now she’s investigating my body as she pummels away. Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon is playing. This is a surprisingly sophisticated choice; I had expected whale music.

  Afterwards I sit up, flushed and refreshed, as if I’ve been making love. She passes me a dressing-gown and blows out the candles.

  ‘I’m off to bed.’ She strokes my cheek. ‘Sleep tight, sweet pea.’

  Only at night does Jeremy return to me. During the daylight I manage, with a superhuman effort, to keep him at bay, but once I close my bed
room door he’s waiting for me and I surrender myself to grief. This house is full of his things but I have so pitifully little, just some photos on my mobile. I scroll through them like a miser, rationing myself to once a night; I know them so well that I dread them losing, by constant re-examination, their electric charge. I lie under my sheet gazing at his face, like a child reading a forbidden book after lights-out. He’s the same old Jeremy, I can almost smell his body, and yet he’s altered by his presence in his African home, a place with which I’m gradually becoming familiar. I want to tell him what I think about it. I want to tell him about everything that’s happened and to make him laugh. I want him to fling open the door, in his ludicrous shirt, and say, Sorry, I went out for a while but I’m back now. Let’s head for that airport!

  The funeral is over and we have a small urn. We brought it back to Oreya in a carrier bag; I wish Bev had used something lovelier and more substantial, like one of the woven baskets they sell beside the road. Something less throwaway.

  It was a modest ceremony, in the Anglican church in Assenonga – Bev’s going to arrange a big memorial when she gets back to England. Around fifty people turned up, but many of Jeremy’s African friends couldn’t afford the journey. He has been dead for two weeks now but strangely enough this was the only time when he seemed entirely absent. The vicar never knew him and uttered platitudes that bore no resemblance to the man at all. We sang some hymns. Bev read out a passage from, of all things, The Prophet, a book whose toe-curling homilies have always been a laughing-stock amongst anyone with any sense.

  ‘Even as love is for your growth, so is he for your pruning,’ read Bev. ‘Love is sufficient unto love. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness.’ Surely Jeremy didn’t buy into this rubbish? Bev went on about love’s wings enfolding you and love’s sword strengthening you, and ended with the line, ‘You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts’ – words so staggeringly inappropriate, in Jeremy’s case, that I had to hide my face in my hands.

  And then, at last, there was a moment of grace. As we drove home from the airport the sun was setting, that molten African sunset which is its daily miracle. The taxi got stuck in traffic. As we were sitting there, beggars tapping at the window, a tree exploded with bats. They streamed into the suffused sky, and at the same moment I heard singing. We were outside a church, the Oreya Street Mission, a tin building whose windows were lit with strip lights. From it came the sound of a choir.

  Let sorrow do its work, send grief and pain,

  Sweet are Thy messengers, sweet their refrain,

  When they can sing with me

  More love, O Christ, to Thee.

  The words were loud and clear, sung in harmony by men and women. It was the sound of Africa, and filled with such a charge of emotion that tears sprang to my eyes.

  As the taxi moved off Bev laid her head on my shoulder. I realized, then, that she was thinking the same thing as me. Because she said: ‘That was for Jeremy.’

  The funeral releases something in Beverley. She’s suddenly galvanized, almost manic, and says she’s ready to sort out Jeremy’s stuff. ‘I’m going to go through his things like a dose of salts,’ she says. This seems a curious way of putting it but these are curious times. Indeed, ‘curious’ seems a curious way of putting it. We’re not ourselves but that’s hardly surprising.

  I’m dreading seeing Jeremy’s clothes but she says we’ll sort out his study first. She opens the door. Two of the dogs, Trinket and Gypsy, barge in with us. They’re both disturbed by the stuffy, darkened room. Trinket starts barking and Gypsy urinates on the floor.

  ‘They both loved Jem!’ Bev shouts over the barks. ‘And he loved them.’ This is untrue, of course, but I say nothing.

  She pulls up the blind and opens the window. In this heat it hardly makes a difference. I look around, pretending this is the first time I’ve seen his study. In fact, I sometimes sit here while Bev has a nap.

  Bev slumps down with a sigh, and gazes at the room. It’s neater than the rest of the house – indeed, pretty featureless. Either Jeremy was tidier than Bev, which I doubt, or he had already started to sort things out for his departure. It’s a small room, with a heavily barred window and shelves filled with files. There’s a map on the wall and a laptop on the desk. I don’t worry about this because he deleted his emails.

  Bev swirls around on the office chair while Clarence mops up the pee. He leaves, his sandals slapping against the lino. For a while she’s silent. She just swirls, frowning. It’s obviously upsetting, to be in this room for the first time. She’s told me how much she’s been dreading it.

  Suddenly she swivels round to face me. ‘There’s things missing,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Things of his have gone.’ She points to the shelves. ‘There was a photo of his parents there, in a silver frame. And the cup he won, for badminton.’ She gets up and wanders round the room. ‘And some of his books have gone – look, there’s a gap there. And a cartoon of him in the panto, when we were living in KL. And a jade paperweight, and an ebony monkey.’ She looks at me, her frown deepening. ‘They were here, I know they were.’

  My heart races. Avoiding her eye, I bend down and stroke Trinket’s scabby head.

  Because I’ve realized where they are. They’re in my house in Pimlico.

  Some items of clothing have disappeared too. A couple of tweed jackets and a pair of trousers. Bev says there’s also some shoes missing. I know where they’ve gone, of course.

  It’s already distressing enough, without this. Some of his clothes we’re throwing away, the rest we’re putting into bags for the local church. Several of his shirts are familiar. I long to press them to my face and smell him, but Bev’s here in the bedroom and she’s pretty upset too. Not just by the distressing task of clearing his wardrobe, but by the missing items.

  ‘Maybe he got rid of stuff and never told you,’ I say. ‘He may have done it ages ago.’

  She looks at me curiously. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t need those sorts of clothes here, would he? It’s too hot.’

  There’s a silence. She’s still looking at me. ‘He loved those jackets, he had them made in Hong Kong. He wore them all the time when he was in Europe. He wouldn’t just give them away.’

  ‘He was pretty generous.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, I thought he was.’ I’m blushing. ‘From what I knew of him.’

  She turns away and starts bundling shirts into a bag. ‘You’re just saying that, Petra. You know perfectly well what happened, you don’t have to make up excuses.’

  I can’t speak. I sit there on the floor, surrounded by rolled-up balls of socks. Sweat trickles down my back.

  ‘Quite honestly, sweetie, I feel sick,’ she says. ‘It’s the betrayal that’s the worst thing. The horrible, horrible betrayal.’

  From the kitchen comes a faint clatter of pans and the smell of frying. I can feel Bev looking at me.

  She sighs. ‘It’s so sad, when we go back such a long way.’

  She gets up abruptly and leaves the room.

  I sit there, paralyzed. She’s right, of course. It is, indeed, the ultimate betrayal. I feel desperately sorry for her but I remain in the bedroom because what can I say? That I’m so sad that she’s lost both her husband and her best friend, it was insane of me to come, and that I’ll move into a hotel until I can get a flight home?

  So it’s happened. It was bound to. In a strange way I feel relieved that she’s found out. When did she know? When did she start to have her suspicions, and why did she keep it a secret until now? For a fleeting moment I wonder if Jeremy told her about us, and she’s been pretending all this time. She’s an expert liar, I know that, and likes manipulating people. She always has.

  I feel a nasty little wave of self-pity – hasn’t she, in a way, been betraying me? I’m disgusted with myself for even considering this, but I’m in such turmoil I can’t thin
k straight.

  Outside, the dogs start barking. Raised voices are coming from the kitchen, where Bev is shouting at Clarence.

  ‘How could you do it?’ she yells. ‘How could you?’

  Of course. It’s Clarence she suspects.

  I hear his mumbling voice. She sounds tearful now, and very angry. Even the dogs are joining in.

  I get to my feet. My limbs feel like lead. When I walk into the kitchen I see Clarence standing at the oven, spatula in hand. Smoke issues from the frying pan. He’s tall, and dwarfs Bev. His face, as always, is devoid of expression.

  ‘Clarence didn’t do it,’ I say.

  Bev swings round. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, it could have been an intruder. You said there’s a lot of crime about.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Beverley glares at me and turns back to Clarence. ‘I’m not going to call the police. I just want you out of here. Now. Now!’

  Clarence pulls off his apron. He doesn’t look surprised. She’s a white woman and therefore unfathomable; his normal lassitude is undisturbed. He turns off the gas, lays his apron on the table and leaves the room at his usual dignified pace. I watch his grey, cracked heels.

  Bev stands there, breathing heavily. Her face is flushed as pink as her T-shirt. ‘Fucking Africans,’ she says. ‘Stealing from a dead man. What a fucking, fucking country. The sooner I get out of here the better.’

  I make another effort on Clarence’s behalf. ‘It couldn’t be him because such odd things have gone. They weren’t all valuable.’

  ‘What, a silver cup? A silver frame?’

  ‘I mean books and things. And shoes.’

  ‘You don’t understand, sweetie. Real leather shoes are like gold dust here.’ She glares at me. ‘Anyway, whose side are you on? He even took that birthday card you made.’

  ‘What birthday card?’

  ‘That one you made for Jem, that collage, when he was thirty. He had it framed, it was one of his favourite things.’