Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

His mother joins him outside. ‘What would you like for supper?’

‘We’ve only just had lunch.’

‘I know. Still, these things have to be planned, always did.’ She smiles.

Children took so much for granted. Children took happiness for granted.

‘Why don’t I take you out?’ says Adrian.

‘Oh, no. It would be a waste.’

‘Come on. Let’s do it. Where would you like to go? Where’s good around here?’

‘Well, if you insist. We could drive up the coast. There’s a pub I’ve been to a few times.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ll book it, then.’ And she turns back into the house.

At five o’clock they return from the garden centre. For the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening Adrian works on the new deck, laying a network of joists on the old concrete patio, checking each joist with a spirit level as he goes. He works stripped to the waist. The sun is warm on his back, an occasional tear of sweat runs into his eyes. He has reached an age, he realises, when he considers manual labour to be somehow rewarding. Today in particular he welcomes the refuge it offers; concentrating upon his hands forces him beyond the vortex of his own thoughts.

A goal. He will have the frame ready before they go out to eat. He straightens to review his work, feels the ache and release, almost pleasurable, in his vertebrae and the muscles of his back, standing amid the cross-hatch of wooden beams as if upon a raft, the sharp scent of fresh timber mingled with the sting of salt.

Elias Cole had not sent Babagaleh to Adrian in the weeks leading up to Adrian’s departure. Adrian passed by the old man’s room several times, to be told he was indisposed. He wondered whether he’d pushed him too far at their last meeting. Adrian said goodbye to Mrs Mara and the other members of staff, though he’d not seen Kai once. Kai was avoiding him, Adrian felt certain, and knew that he, too, was guilty of the same. He wasn’t entirely sure of the reason for his behaviour, which he had declined to examine too closely. Adrian is not, he tells himself, a jealous man. But then there was the sense, the constant sense he had had, of something lingering. How alike they were in many ways, Kai and Mamakay, like siblings really. In the way they both resolutely occupied only the present, kept doors closed, showing only what they chose to reveal. Both Kai and Mamakay had places from which all others were excluded, from which Adrian was excluded. Even now the fear coiling around his heart is that in those closed-off places is something the two of them share from their past, some arc of emotion, incomplete, requiring an ending.

Is he doing the right thing? Sometimes he feels he is losing his mind.

‘Damn!’ A splinter of wood slides under the nail of his forefinger. The pain is pinpoint and exquisite. Adrian presses down on the bed of the fingernail and then sucks the end of his finger. The sky has a sulphurous cast; dark clouds boil on the horizon. Adrian’s mouth tastes of blood and iron. A drop of rain touches his skin and then another. Within moments the sand is turned dull and the pebbles sleek. Adrian collects the tools he has been working with and goes back inside the house.

In the shower before dinner, hot water powering down upon his shoulders. He thinks of her at times like this. In the heat of the bathroom he could be in her apartment. He feels his body’s response, turns his face up to the shower-head, holds his breath. In his mind he watches her coming towards him. What does she do? A short time later he lets his hand fall back to his side, watches the semen swirl and slide away with the water. The outward tension, briefly, is dissipated, the yearning inside remains.

The place is more of a restaurant than a pub, interconnecting dining rooms, tiled floor and green-painted dado rail. On the wall opposite Adrian is a portrait of a woman cast in a shadowy garden-room light, who might be Virginia Woolf. He watches his mother as she reads the menu through her spectacles. She has dressed for the occasion, exchanged her corduroys for a pair of velvet trousers and a velvet shirt. At the door a man, the restaurant’s owner, had greeted her with some familiarity, so Adrian thought. Adrian struggles to imagine his mother coming here. With whom? Who are her friends here? he wonders. He catches himself. The same challenge for every one of us, he thinks, to release our parents from the bondage of our own imagination. He lowers his head to the menu.

His mother orders with confidence, Adrian less so, unsettled by so many choices. In the end he duplicates her choice, then changes his mind and orders local crab followed by duck. Several times he lifts his wine glass to his lips. He feels, if he is honest, a little detached from reality. Mamakay, Ileana, the wards of chained men, all there where he left them. He wonders about Adecali and whether his nightmares are troubling him, whether he is remembering to practise going to his special place. Practise, practise, Adrian told him before he left. Keep control of your own mind. The group sessions were planned to continue without him, the football games, though, had to be cancelled.

What he appreciates about his mother, now he thinks about it, is that to her he can, if he chooses, talk about such things. Never does she make him feel as though his work, his dealings with the darker side of human lives, is something he must keep to himself, as if such talk was somehow embarrassing for polite company, did not go alongside goat’s cheese and Gressingham duck.

He realises too that all this means nothing to him. Places like this restaurant, fine wines, he could enjoy it all but somewhere in the last year it had ceased to matter.

An elderly couple make their way across the span of the dining room, telltale trembling in his limbs. Adrian feels his heart constrict. He glances at his mother and finds her looking at him.

They take dessert and coffee in the bar, sitting side by side on a cushioned bench.

‘It made him so angry,’ his mother says, stirring crystals of brown sugar into her coffee.

‘What made who angry?’

‘Your father. His illness made him angry. It frustrated him. He took it out on you sometimes.’

‘He took it out on you as well.’

‘Oh.’ His mother picked up her coffee cup in both hands. ‘That didn’t bother me. I understood. There were so many reasons he was angry. The disease, the way it crippled him and took the years away. But I always felt he was angry for me, not angry with me.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He was angry with himself, on my behalf. At the beginning he would disappear into these long, dark days. He felt I never should have married him. We came here a couple of times before we married. Of course, it was very different then. Your father had a motorbike when I met him; he bought a sidecar for it. I couldn’t squeeze into it once I was pregnant, but we kept it until the year after you were born. We took you out in it once or twice. We got stuck in the sand. Right here.’ She points with her spoon in the direction of the beach. ‘What a hoot! We came in here afterwards to dry off. They had rooms back then.’

Adrian sits quietly for a moment. He cannot remember his father as anything other than brooding and intense. He has no memory of the sidecar, not unsurprisingly. He does, though, have a memory of a photograph of it, a man astride the motorbike and the empty sidecar. It was a black-and-white photograph with crenellated edges; they printed them smaller in those days. Odd he remembers it so clearly. It must have been taken with a camera that was already old. Adrian had always thought the image was of his grandfather. So it was his father. His mother, presumably, had been behind the camera.

‘And how did you feel?’