“Yes, he is not as young as before. I am very sorry about Mr Trevor.” Her mouth was twitching, and just for a second I thought she was making fun of me, but then I realised she must be upset.
“Never mind, Mary. It is OK…and Justin is really too young to have started.”
“He is too young, and Mr Trevor too old. Yes, they should not smoke, it is true.”
I felt rather silly, when she put it like that, but Mary was a mother, she understood.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t want Jamil to smoke. Honestly, Mary, it’s very dangerous.”
And then Mary nodded, submissively, and said, with passion, “They must not do it.”
And so I said, “Mary, let’s forget all about it.”
Because that is the only grown-up way, and someone in the house has to be a grown-up.
“Forget all about it, please, Miss Henman. I want us to be like a family.”
“Of course, Mary. We can be like sisters.”
Though obviously I would be the older sister. I felt more touched than I would have expected. I wondered if this was the moment to hug her.
“Vanessa,” she said, with that quick shift of attention that characterised Mary Tendo’s conversation, “what are those papers on the table?”
“Oh, just work from my Life Writing students,” I said. I did not imagine she’d be interested. She waited, and then said, “That is interesting.”
“I like to help our students get published. I am sending these extracts to an agent. Quite a famous one, in fact. One of the best. She will come to visit the class after Christmas.”
(Of course I did not tell her my little secret. I’ve decided to enclose a few pages of my own, from the thing I was writing about leaving my village. With a pseudonym, naturally, Emily Self. I thought the name was rather clever.)
“That is interesting. You are very helpful,” she said. Her eyes were very big and very bright.
“Oh well. I mean, it’s a lottery. I just have to pray that the good ones get noticed.” Emily Self, I thought, for instance.
“Next week let us all go to church together,” she volunteered, with her wonderful smile, her teeth like bright ivory, her gums deep pink. “Then we can pray together about the agent.”
She had said this before, and I’d turned her down, but now seemed exactly the moment for bonding. And, certainly, praying hard about the agent! After all, it was a very sweet offer. Although I am not formally religious, I do have a sense of spiritual beauty. And, though one feels shy of saying so, love. Even if one’s behaviour sometimes falls short. “Yes, Mary. Why not. You and I will go together.”
“And Justin as well. And Mr Trevor.”
“Oh well, I don’t know about them, Mary. But thank you very much for asking me.”
I wanted to reciprocate in some way. With her very recent raise, it couldn’t be money. So I found myself saying, “There’s something else. I would like to invite you to come with me to my village. I come from a village, you know, as you do.”
It is one of the things I know about Uganda. I talked to the people at the embassy, and they said, “Remember, when you meet Kampalans, the important thing for all of them is the village. Even though they are city-dwellers, they all belong, at heart, to a village.” I suppose it is where she spends her weekends, but I was too busy to go and see one. Perhaps one day I will go back to Uganda, and Mary will take me to her village.
“Yes, Miss Henman. We shall go to the village.” And that was the moment, and I gave her a hug. She was shy and hung back, quite stiff in my arms, but I hugged her harder to show that I meant it, and somehow we bumped our heads together. “Sorry, Mary.”
“OK, Henman,” I thought I heard, but then she added “Vanessa”. She did seem to smell very faintly of tobacco, but cigarettes cling through several washes.
39
Vanessa is putting things in her diary. It is covered all over with birds’ feet of writing, scratchy and criss-crossed, a busy woman’s diary. In fact, there is hardly any white space. The only blank page is in ‘Reading Week’, when the students at her college have a mid-term break to try and read around their subjects. Into that week she might fit some writing, but she quickly inks something over it. It coincides with the party in the village, when she wants to go and stay with her cousin: perfect. Her pen pecks hard at the empty space. If she goes for three days, there will be four days left. She rings up Fifi and agrees to go to Paris, and then she scratches over the last bit of whiteness, cross-hatching it with Eurostar times and places, and then she thinks briefly about her writing, and the pleasure in her busy-ness is tinged with guilt. Perhaps she will take her laptop to France.
The maddening Arab is ringing again, the one who thinks she is Japanese. “There is nobody here called Mistendo,” she snaps, and puts the phone down, as she has before, but this time, because she said the name out loud, it suddenly clicks: of course, he wants Mary. Vanessa never thinks about her surname. Mary has always been simply, well, Mary. How can Vanessa have been so stupid? But she is too busy to call him back. Next time he calls, she will put him through. She returns to her in-tray, and forgets all about it.
Vanessa’s especially busy because she is going to church at eleven, with Mary. In theory she’s looking forward to it, but in practice she fears she is going to cry. Memories of her mother’s funeral, when the village turned out in sympathy, and suddenly she felt part of a multitude, when all her adult life she has been alone, just she and her son against the world.
Yet that is the ideal state for a writer, as she recently told her new intake of students. “Most modern writers are exiles,” she said. “You see exile can be a very personal thing, to do with a kind of willed isolation. I speak from my own experience.” (She was quoting, in fact, from a book she had read.) “How many successful women writers are married? Almost none, I think you’ll find.”
Beardy seemed to bridle when she said that. He stayed behind at the end of the class, pretending to pack up his papers. Once they were alone, he’d taken her on. “Do you think you should be warning these young ladies against marriage?” he asked her, with his old·fashioned, playful twinkle. “I mean, I myself have been through a divorce, but I try not to put my daughters off it. I miss being married. I don’t write any better.”
“I think your writing is improving somewhat,” Vanessa had said, repressively. (She’s never quite told him how good he is, because she finds him a little threatening. His comments in the seminars are too sharp; he is starting to gather a coterie. Older students can be controlling.)
“You’re single, are you?” he smiled at her, but his tone was coarse, bubbling with laughter. “You’ve mentioned a son. But of course you are. Has it helped you write your Pilates books?”
Vanessa’s mouth had gone tight and thin. “I have also written two highly praised novels,” she said. “Exactly what point are you trying to make?”
“I think I’ve made it,” he said, with a laugh, and bowed ironically, and left the room, but at the last moment, he turned back, and said, no longer laughing, apologetic: “In fact, I have read both your novels. I think you’re really talented. But when are you going to write another? Does being single really help us to write?”
And then he was gone, leaving her winded.
And yet, Vanessa knows she’s right. This morning, she needs to be alone, herself, in charge of her desk, in charge of her life, before she can submerge herself in Mary’s.
She wishes she had not agreed to church.
She is changing her clothes — because what do you wear? A skirt, surely, but not a hat, and too much jewellery would look vulgar, but none at all might look a bit bare, so she finds her pearls, and the pink wool suit she wears to chair departmental meetings, and a matching pinky-pearl ring and bracelet — when Mary knocks on the bedroom door. Vanessa’s white silk vest is half over her head. She stares at Mary through the neck-hole.