He slit the top of the envelope carefully and drew out the folded sheet at the same time handing it towards her, but she came to stand close beside him, head bent to read it together.
Stavanger.
Lyndsay recognised the handwriting from the statement of expenses the guide had presented at the end of each week of services in Mexico. She sensed her lips moving as she and her son read, as if following a foreign language. Dear Mrs Bannerman, I didn't want to shock over the phone, so I write to tell you he died last night, Adrian. In his sleep, the doctor came at once, I called. It was heart failure. He did not suffer. It was after the theatre. We had a nice walk by the sea in the afternoon. That was yesterday, 14th. So that was the date when it happened.
Both stopped reading. What happened: he stayed behind in Mexico, he went to Norway. Gone away. It is difficult to realise another departure. If this had been a letter from Adrian telling at last that he was not coming back, the state of retirement he was in, Stavanger, was final, would that have been different? But what an insane escapist thought. Even if they were having it together. Adrian is dead. He hasn't announced finality. He's silent about it. Lyndsay and he read poetry together when they were young, tags remain, 'Death is silence, things which are not'. The guide he retired to speaks, writes for him.
Her son – their son – stirs the sheet of paper; they must read on. As if there is anything to say. Already told: died in his sleep, in bed beside the guide of course, no suffering, she knows because she was there, she simply sensed there was no rise and fall of breath or his body was cold against hers. They had walked together in the afternoon on the beautiful North Sea beach, Sola, a theatre where the streak of wet in the light from the stage that touched his cheek announced another kind of grief.
Read on. A gap, a pause at the word processor before a new start to this letter. Mrs Bannerman (again, though surely thought of as Lyndsay, embarrassment, guilt at the appropriation of retirement or late assurance that this title of marriage would never have been usurped) Mrs Bannerman, I have made all the enquiries, I will do it immediately you give me details where he must be received. My telephone number and email is at the top of the page. I can arrange it. I will send his body.
Smiling.
How else. In the grief she also must feel.
They walk into early evening light in the garden of Paul 's house, to which he returned from that other garden. Up and down, slowly, legs move even if mind doesn't. To the shrubs and the acacia where the children's swings hang twinned, one's been strung up for Klara too; and back. Lyndsay trips over an abandoned toy in the rapid rise of darkness in Africa and he steadies her; also himself, to speak. Silence is only for the dead. Adrian.
Let's go in.
It's no-one else's decision, only theirs, as the conditions of another state of existence were finally between them alone in quarantine. He doesn't dutifully indicate, it's yours to decide, you, his lover, that indefinable relation dubbed by law and church, wife. Do you want him back; if dead. Did he ever express that primeval urge, to be buried in his natal soil. The idea that his death in the logical sequence of events after retirement would happen elsewhere never occurred. He could have had a heart attack and died in the Arctic under the aurora borealis, that retirement venture with Lyndsay that didn't come off. Preserved in ice ready to be flown home.
Home. From Stavanger. Begin over again, from the grave. Or the ashes of the crematorium. There are new beginnings, in place. This's not home you left to follow so late, in archaeological digs, your avocation.
Smiling.
Found it.
They didn't tell other members of the family, not Jacqueline, not Susan, not Emma in Brazil, of the offer. An email was sent thanking the guide and declining. His mother asked Paul to place his name alongside hers. He had his sense of loss carried with him in the wilderness that still needed him and his team, Derek, Thapelo, always new threats to which there must be human solutions (if your father dies do you now exist in his place, nature's solution). If there's a possibility for the dune mining project or the pebble-bed nuclear reactor to be outlawed that's proof that what is a vocation and an avocation may be worth pursuing in the limited span of one individual's minuscule existence, not seen from Space.
What she – Lyndsay – does with sorrow – it must be? – cannot be asked and must not be pried at or spied upon. The life of parents is a mystery even when you are paired off with someone in a version of the state, yourself. She has her successes, as the defeat of destruction of the Pondoland dunes, if achieved, would be a success at least partly attributable to Derek, Thapelo and himself. She's been appointed to serve on the Constitutional Court, and this is no Gender Affirmative post, that's certain.
Adrian is not a taboo subject. Paul does not know that she has on her desk in her office at the Constitutional Court a photograph of Adrian she took when they were together at an archaeological site in Mexico. They speak of Adrian when a context comes up to remember something he might have remarked, laughed at with them, and when listening to music together, talking of his depth of understanding from which she profited and, yes, Paul's evidently growing enjoyment must have come, even of those composers she's never learnt to listen to without a sense of psychic disruption, Stockhausen, Penderecki etcetera. Perhaps the only way to break the silence is to have passed on something. Impalpable.
A well-secured box addressed in the same unfamiliar hand eventually was delivered, containing a few small archaeological artifacts, a reproduction feather headdress of the kind seen being made with delicate ancestral skill by vendors outside the Museum of Anthropology, and what was evidently a draft of thoughts on the experience of seeing unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. She gave the artifacts, headdress, and the manuscript to the Department of Archaeology at a university where one of the academics was a friend. She asked, maybe the university press would publish the draft in some form.
EDEN OF AFRICA FACING THREAT OF BEING SUBMERGED BY FLOODS
This is the kind of lyrical drama a newspaper headline makes of the waters Noah must have seen. But not from Outer Space. Not from a helicopter. The team has come back from a second survey of Okavango to map-covered walls, spread aerial photographs and half-drunk cups of instant coffee. Which is the reality? Here or there. It's not normal to live in two environments, every traveller knows the disorientation, disbelief, that is the brief consequence of leaving home and walking out into a foreign country ten hours later. But this consequence of being back among domestic objects and four walls, from wilderness, earth or water is a condition of living, not jet lag.
As they go over in their minds and talk what was seen down below, the observations shouted, half-heard, to one another against the racket of the helicopter, there is another question of which is the reality: the 'Eden' treasure feared threatened or the people of the central delta there, told they must abandon their homes before the rising waters. What's going to happen to them anyway, if ten dams that will alter the cosmic picture of the world as seen from Space are built?
Shouldn't be thinking about this, like this. The practice of conservation, boots in the mud, Thapelo's occasional addition of beers to basic supplies, concentrates on one issue at a time, some sort of sequence in activity while the commissions keep sitting, for or against. What is in the others' minds – about these people.