Zakira has tied back her jet-black hair, and put lipstick on, and wrapped herself in an expensive purple coat which Mary envies. Zakira feels beautiful again, although she is enormous, leaning, sometimes, on Mary’s arm, a painted boat on the cold river, listing as she sails towards the ice of winter. “I love this country. If I’d been born in Morocco I couldn’t have done a thing that I wanted. But I hate the weather. I love the heat.”
Mary, in her thin orange coat, agrees strongly.
The two woman have struck up a makeshift alliance, based partly on Zakira’s acute need. She has spoken to no one for several days, and now she tells Mary everything. Her perfect life has imploded, this year: she has had to drop out of the topflight MBA she was doing at Imperial College, — because she was too sick to get in to classes three times a week, and fell behind with her assignments. “Although I have finally got permission to take it up again next year.” She tries to study now, but being pregnant makes her sleepy. “I’ve just been afraid that I will never manage, once the baby is born. On my own. In disgrace! You know, I’m not religious, but we are still Muslims.” Her parents are Zakira’s greatest worry. They are separated in all but name: her mother has gone back to Morocco to look after her own bedridden mother, and her father, a professor at SOAS, is currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard. “In one way it is a fantastic relief. If they were here, and knew, they would be going mad. In theory my father is a liberal, but in practice he would be so ashamed. And my mother — my mother is medieval. And at the same time, I do miss them. They have a house in Kensington. In a way they’ve always been too proud of me, and so I was bound to disappoint them, wasn’t I? A bit like Justin with his mother…I was a junior partner in the firm where Justin worked, the youngest ever, male or female, then I got on this high-powered MBA. My brother is the tearaway. But my mother loves him more than me!”
Zakira knows a lot about Mary already. “You were like a mother to him, he said. I can’t believe that you’ve come back.” She’s arrived like the bringer of hope, of life. Zakira’s face has lost its hard, bored expression. Her beautiful eyes are alight again. She understands Justin has really been ill, that it wasn’t as she feared, that he didn’t want to see her, after the bad quarrel when she gave him up. She understands now that he lost his job, that the two things together have made him ill. “And there were some real bitches in that office, believe me. I was glad to get out and do my MBA.” Now she knows that Justin has been ill, she can feel tender: now she knows what is wrong, she will care for him.
And yet there is the obstacle of Justin’s mother.
Zakira has never met Justin’s mother, although she has heard too much about her, for Justin loves his mother excessively, even for Zakira, who honours her family. This woman has snubbed her several times on the phone, slamming it down when Zakira was speaking. No wonder Justin hates her as well as loves her.
But Mary tells her it is time for them to meet. Mary seems enviably confident. Zakira is impressed with her. She does not quite believe all that Mary says, about writing The Life of Mary Tendo; Justin has not mentioned that Mary is a writer, and nannies do not usually write their lives, and besides, Mary seems — very African, somehow — in most ways, very different from Zakira…
On the other hand, there is something about Mary, an energy and hopefulness Zakira has lost over the lonely spring and summer months of being pregnant, saying nothing to people at her old workplace in case they rejoiced that she had messed things up, and nothing to her family, and nothing to Justin, while thinking, at first, “I shall have an abortion,” and later, when she found she had left it too late as a way of never making that fatal decision, “A child is coming, what will happen to me?” None of her contemporaries has children. But Mary has a son. She understands.
Zakira’s nervous about meeting Justin’s rude, cold mother. Still, at least the fear makes her feel alive, where an hour ago she was indifferent, moribund, because it seemed that no change was possible, that she would be imprisoned in the cold for ever, imprisoned in her body with its lumbering cargo. No one would visit her and no one would help her, and the big heavy baby would never be born, because out in the world no one waited for him, no-one wanted him except his mother.
Now the knot of fate is going to loosen. Zakira sways along at Mary’s side.
Mary gives Zakira one last warm smile before she slips her key into the door. She leads Zakira into the sitting-room, then goes upstairs to waken Justin.
But he is not there.
The bedroom is empty.
Even more surprising, the bed is made. Mary checks the bathroom, the loo. No one. She comes downstairs and scans the back garden. It doesn’t seem possible, but Justin has gone. (Though she doesn’t remember this until later, she sees Justin’s arrows all over the garden, sticking out of tree-trunks and flowerbeds and fences, the arrows Mary smuggled in from Uganda, pale bamboo arrows with barbed steel heads. Justin has been playing with someone in the garden. His goat-skin quiver lies on the ground.)
She is just relaying the bad news to Zakira when the front door opens, they rise to their feet, their faces alight with nervous excitement — and Vanessa tramps in, looking tired and grim as she does at the end of a day of teaching. She goes straight to the kitchen without noticing them. The tap runs, then she reappears, and is taken aback to see the two of them.
“Good afternoon Miss Henman, Vanessa,” says Mary.
“Ah Mary,” says Vanessa, with a small sigh, and encompasses Zakira with a vague smile. Soon her house will be full of Ugandans. Still, Mary has worked harder since her wages rose: she is washing-up again, and using the vacuum.
“Miss Henman, this is my friend,” starts Mary. “She—”
“From church?” Vanessa says, shaking Zakira’s hand rather cursorily. “Very nice to meet you. Now, Mary, do make your friend tea or coffee. I’m actually exhausted. I shall go and lie down.”
And before either woman can explain herself, she has swept upstairs, clutching a milky glass of aspirin, her lips tight and pale without their coat of crimson, her forehead creased with tiredness, a folder of marking in her other thin hand, together with the letter she has found in the hallway.
The gaps in the house become wider and deeper. They sit there stranded in the shadowy sitting room, surrounded by photographs of strangers, and suddenly they feel what they did not before, two African women in a foreign land.
Mary stares at Vanessa’s African masks, which her employer is particularly proud of, staring out at them from an expanse of pale plaster, dark cicatriced faces with empty eyes. They do not feel like ancestors.
“I do not like them,” she says to Zakira.
“They are ignorant,” says Zakira, regally. She is not talking about the masks. For a moment she feels much closer to Mary. What can it be like, living under this roof? “People like her know nothing about us. And they do not want to get to know us.” And then she pauses, and reflects. “I think they are afraid of us.”
34
Vanessa lies upstairs on her bed. The aspirin is beginning to work. Down below, she can just hear the quiet murmur of the two women’s voices like a distant river. It isn’t unpleasant. It is comforting. Perhaps she and Justin have grown too self-enclosed. Perhaps it is good to meet new people, though today she had come home completely exhausted.
Vanessa’s class today was a near-riot. She had asked the new intake to bring in an object which inspired their writing, and might inspire others. Usually people bring photographs, maybe ferns or shells, a stone or a feather. But Derrick had turned up with a whole dead pigeon, and two of the girls became hysterical, one because she said all pigeons had fleas (though it was a soft, pink, plump-looking thing) and the other because she suspected he had killed it. This girl, Daisy, who came from Devon, wore long hippyish clothes that were tight over her breasts, and had big, fixed eyes, rather slow and moon-like. She very often seemed to quarrel with Derrick. Perhaps she was attracted to him. Daisy had brought along a photo of her cat, which was white and fat and soft and sleepy. “You like to kill things,” Daisy shouted at him. “We don’t want to see your victims.”