Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Sitting here now, under the shade of the rondavel’s overhang with the light dying in his blind eyes, he sees his eighty-three-year-old life as the great trunk and branches of the baobab. Rough, long-lived, enduring. And the years he shared with Ada are the tree’s brief flower, opening and closing in a day. And like that flower, she can not pass him, her life can not open and close without him knowing. Her death will release a scent that he will feel, even here, in Africa after so many years. It had to be so. Two people could not share like they had shared and not feel each other’s passing. He would not believe it to be any other way. She is still here, still alive. She has not left him.

♦

Now Fortune is telling him that he must leave. The doctor has sent his orders and he has been encouraged by his friends in Enkeldoorn and by his friends in Maronda Mashanu to listen to them. They are all telling him he must leave, that he must go to the hospital. They are saying he can come back when he is well, but he knows he will not. He knows he is leaving.

Thomas, who helps Fortune look after him, is here to guide him into town, and Leonard has returned from teaching at the school. He heard the rattle of his bike as he arrived, and then, later, the chatter of the children coming home. Leonard has come to take care of his letters, to pack up his unanswered correspondence.

Suddenly, after the quiet of the afternoon, the solitude of his darkness, the sound of Noel’s lone voice reading Keats, there is activity all around him. Mothers are trying to feed their children in the huts down by the river. Fortune is talking quickly at Thomas. Not to him, but at him, telling him what he must do for Baba Cripps in the hospital as she packs his few clothes into an old leather suitcase. And Leonard, in the rondavel behind him, sorting through his papers, chattering away to him, speaking loudly and clearly, telling him about his newborn son, who, as Baba Cripps recommended, he has named Horatio. His tone runs the full range of his voice, his low, serious conversation peeling off into high laughter as he describes how his son eats, walks, looks. And then, as he brings some piece of correspondence to Arthur’s side, his voice is suddenly low and respectful again:

‘There are two letters from Oxford University Press, Baba, shall I bring these, yes?’

Arthur answers but he feels this activity, the commotion, as if it were at a great distance. He is far away inside his blindness and his memories, thinking about leavings and how Ada is still alive, still in his world. He wants her to know that he has not left her either, never, however far away he has been. That, although they were never married, he has never stopped thinking of her as his wife. He calls Leonard to his side and tells him to open the trunk in his rondavel and find the blue folder.

‘Which one, Baba? There are very many folders in the trunk.’ Arthur tells him it is not a folder of letters or poems but another folder, a folder of personal papers. He will know which one it is because it will hold a piece of paper with ‘Last Will and Testament’ written across the top.

♦

Fortune and Thomas have moved Arthur inside so he can dictate to Leonard in peace. He is lying on his mattress again and Leonard is sitting on the old metal trunk, Arthur’s old typewriter on his lap. Arthur listens as Leonard feeds his will into the roller: the crunching of the ratchets as he turns the handle, the metallic spring as he releases the lever to secure the sheet in place. As always he indicates he is ready by saying, ‘Yes, Baba?’

Arthur speaks slowly and clearly. His own voice coming to him as if spoken through a sea shell, spoken through a sea.

‘Centre page, capitals. Underlined. Codicil. C-O-D-I…’

This, then, is what he will leave. Not a letter, too easily dismissed as the romantic despair ot a dying man and too easily lost, but a statement. A statement of his memory, written in the one document that assures careful, considered thought. His Testament. Not legal, not financial, but emotional. She will know that he did not forget her. She will know that he did not leave her because of this, what he will leave her. Not the money, but the words.

‘I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps (comma) do hereby give and bequeath to (underline) Mrs Ada Neeves…’

And when she reads this statement, she will remember him, however briefly, perhaps as transiently as the baobab’s flower, opening and closing overnight, but she will remember him and know that he remembered her. And for that moment, when she remembers, he will live again, resonating in her thoughts the way she has resonated in his for the fifty years since he last saw her: standing at the door of another man’s house with their child by her side looking out at him from behind the folds of her mother’s skirt.

Theresa is sitting on a bench on Parliament Hill waiting for her future. She is wearing her Sunday tweed jacket and skirt, her best ankle boots and a cloche hat given to her by her best friend, Dina. She sits with her bead handbag on her lap, and her hands on the bag, looking out over the grass, parched blond in patches by a late-flowering summer. Lifting her head slightly she looks out further, over the trees below, their pale and dark greens punctured by the fine yell ow stone of two church spires.

The bench Theresa sits on is engraved along the back rest: ‘For Albert, who loved this view ’ carved into the dark wood. As she studies the land before her she tries to imagine who Albert was, and who engraved this bench in his memory. A wife? A daughter? There is no indication, just his name, living on in the place he made his. She remembers a line of Byron’s, or rather part of a line: ‘ Livewho you are .’ Perhaps that is why Albert’s name is here, because this is where he lived who he was. And yes, she thinks, that should be celebrated, because living who you are is not as easy as it sounds, she knows that.

A kestrel is hovering above and in front of her. The bird has been tamed by the populated heath and it hangs in the air closer than she has ever seen one before. She can make out its grey hood and the black tipped markings on its wings and tail as it drops and rises, balancing on the currents of the breeze, poised with potential. Like a horse galloping or a fish swimming it is beautiful simply because it is doing what it has been born to do. Living what it is. She watches the delicate tight-rope act of its hovering, perfectly balanced between motion and stillness, and recognises how the bird’s state describes so eloquently how she feels herself, sitting there on that bench: motionless, yet poised between two movements, ready to drop or to rise, depending on what the next half hour brings.

Theresa sits on the bench, waiting and watching the view with the same attention and expectancy as the hawk scanning the grass for its prey because she is waiting to discover how she will live: what kind of a life she will have, whether she will have children who will visit this bench in years to come and tell their children how their grandmother sat here, waiting. As she waits she feels the nervous energy of her anticipation swell inside her like a wave. With each minute that passes the surges get stronger and she tries to distract herself, first by looking at the view, then the hunting kestrel and then, with a force of effort, by thinking not of the years to come, but of the years that have been instead. The years that have brought her here, to this hill and this bench, risking her future because of her past, trying to live who she is.

♦

It was when he was having his appendix removed on the kitchen table that her father (or rather Tom, the man she had known as her father) had finally apologised to Theresa. The white sheet over his legs and the wooden tabletop were both soaked in his blood. There was more of it on the flagstones, big dark splashes around where the doctor had been standing. He had lost a lot during the operation and she remembered how the kitchen had smelt not like a kitchen at all, but more like a slaughter-house.