Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Abass turns, looks at him and says, ‘But you’re going away, too. You’re going to live in America.’

‘Well, I’m not going any time soon,’ replies Kai. Until now he hadn’t realised quite how much Abass has been quietly working out for himself.

And only several hours later, by which time the church congregation had departed and Abass was fast asleep, does Kai realise exactly what Abass had said.

‘Going away, too’, without even knowing it. Abass had said ‘going away, too ’.

In her room Ileana performs her own particular tea ceremony: silvered pot, Lipton tags, canned milk. To Adrian the teapot makes her look like a Roma.

‘How far gone?’ she says.

‘Three months,’ answers Adrian. A week has passed, a week since Mamakay told him she was pregnant with his child. He feels the responding tension in his stomach. His emotions are in the wind.

Ileana crosses the room and places the tea on the desk in front of him.

‘In my professional capacity I would have to say physician, heal thyself. These things don’t just happen.’ She pats him lightly on the shoulder like a dog, the first time that Adrian can ever remember her touching him, evidence of the magnitude of her sympathy. ‘Jesus, you’ve crossed the line so many times, I don’t know which side of it you’re on any more.’

‘I know,’ says Adrian, shaking his head.

Later he walks alone in the Patients’ Garden. Ileana’s bluntness came with wisdom. Not how but why, more importantly what would happen now. He is a man with a wife, a child, a job to go back to, a home. Beneath his feet the ground is damp with recent rain, the Patients’ Garden smells of earth and moss. Rain drips from the leaves high up on to those below, musical notes. Under the heavy cloud, the garden is almost in darkness. After the months of heat and dust, Adrian still enjoys the rain, can soak it up. At night, hearing it upon the roof and during the day as he watches from his window, he marvels at its power. The rain hurls itself down with such force it seems to rage at the earth, like an angry woman throwing herself upon her lover.

He thinks of Mamakay, the equanimity with which she seems to accept the fact of her condition. From the moment they met she had appeared to expect nothing from Adrian and now it is as though what is happening to her is taking place on another plane, a higher one, from where she can see years into the future beyond the details of their liaison, towards a different horizon. She has made the greatest decision by far and by which all the others are measured, and she has made it alone. She intends to create a life. Adrian might feel grateful that she would make it so easy for him. He might, but he doesn’t. Her self-possession draws him to her; there is the desire, the compulsion almost, to breach it.

He hears rather than feels the rain begin again, striking the ground around him, hitting the upper leaves of the tree. Eventually it finds its way to him. For a few minutes longer he remains seated, letting the rain soak into his cotton shirt and touch his skin.

A cigarette stub left burning in the ashtray marks Ileana’s departure. Adrian crushes it out, and as he does so looks up to the board behind Ileana’s desk. The coloured pins and Ileana’s earring are there still, stuck into the map, tracing the journeys made by Agnes. Though Adrian regularly checks the admissions records both here and at the medical hospital, Agnes has never come back. Once Salia had gone of his own accord to the old department store to find the former doorman and obtain his promise to be informed if anything was heard or if Agnes reappeared. Since then, nothing.

Adrian takes Agnes’s file and opens it, leafing through the pages to remind himself what is written there. In the short weeks he had known her he’d used his time well. The incident with the gold chain had seemed like a blessing, empirical evidence of her dissociative state. What is he to do with all this information, now rendered useless? For he lacks the crucial element, that which would bind it all together — whatever it is that impels her journeys. The thing that makes Agnes do what she does.

Babagaleh is outside Elias Cole’s room; he tells Adrian the man inside is sleeping. At other times Babagaleh will enter and gently wake his master, but today he says Cole had passed a bad night. Babagaleh has placed himself in charge now, a sure sign Elias Cole is dying.

Leaving the old man’s room Adrian catches sight of Kai ahead of him, recognising him even in the poor light of the corridor by his habitual flip-flops, theatre greens and T-shirt, wonders in that moment whether to call out, opens his mouth, hesitates and in his hesitation the moment is lost. Kai turns the corner and disappears.

From the apartment Adrian dials his home telephone number and listens to the distant ringing. He’s about to replace the receiver when Lisa comes on the line, breathless. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, it’s me.’

‘Hello? Sorry, who is it?’

‘It’s me. Adrian.’

‘Oh, hi. Sorry, I could hardly hear you. Some of the girls are round for lunch.’

‘Do you want me to call back?’

‘No, it’s OK. They’re fine. They’ve just opened another bottle. How is it going? When are you coming back?’

They never speak without her asking the question. Today, he can hardly bear it. Instead of answering he describes for her the new sessions. In the last he achieved something, in getting the men to remember and write down or draw — for several were illiterate — their experiences. A small triumph, but significant. He remembers back to when he first arrived, how high his expectations had been, how broad his assumptions. He’d been all wrong. So much ground needed to be laid before he could even begin to build their trust. Only now does he feel he is making progress.

‘Lisa?’

A pause. ‘In the cutlery drawer, Anne. Sorry. Well, that sounds all very good. They’re certainly lucky to have you. I hope they realise it.’

‘Thanks.’

Another small silence. He can hear her draw breath. ‘Darling, I’m pleased for you, I really am. But what can you expect to achieve with these people? How many problems can one man solve in a place like that?’

He has to admire her gift for putting her finger right on top of it. He tries for flippancy and fails. ‘Someone has to do it.’ His words are followed by a burst of background laughter, the scrape of chairs, someone calling for Lisa.

‘Well, someone doesn’t have to be you,’ and then, with her customary restraint, ‘Let’s not argue. I just hope you haven’t forgotten your priorities.’

‘Of course not,’ Adrian replies.

When they have said goodbye he goes to the kitchen and, though it is early, pours himself a tumbler of whisky, carries it back to sit on the cane sofa. He thinks of Lisa and her girlfriends in London. Summer there now. They’d be in the conservatory. No husbands, of course. If Adrian was ever at home, he’d remove himself to his study or to sit at the bottom of the garden or else go out on some imaginary errand. He sips his whisky, presses the cool glass against his forehead. He is aware of something absent in his emotions and it takes him a moment to realise it. He does not miss home, at all.

Later he calls his mother. He pictures her in what he still thinks of as her new home: a triple-glazed bungalow by the sea, a model of architectural efficiency, free of any kind of charm and easy for her to manage on her own. A fortnight before his departure Adrian made a farewell visit. He’d arrived early and stood waiting for her at the gate, looking at the sculptures made out of jetsam and driftwood that decorated the lawn. In the distance he saw her coming towards him, a seventy-year-old beachcomber, in a corduroy jacket, her windswept hair a silver flame around her head. More masculine in manner and dress than before, as though she had shifted ground to fill the space left by his father. That day she’d been as happy as he’d seen her.