Mary does see it’s sad, Vanessa’s ugly village, where the children are fat, which would be strange in Kampala, where only businessmen’s children are fat. There are no real shops here, no businesses, no stalls selling flowers or vegetables. The beautiful church, with its fine tiled spire topped with a golden chicken spinning in the wind, which Mary had hoped they would attend on Sunday, has been turned into flats, so Uncle Stan told her. He whispered that only half of them have sold. “It’s a joke. No one round here can afford them.”
Mary’s anger ebbs away. They are what they are. And with a slow upsurge of pity and pride, Mary finally starts to believe it. The house where Vanessa grew up is poor.
Perhaps she is embarrassed for Mary to see it. It is actually smaller than her own family house, the house where Mary grew up in Uganda.
So she and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same.
But Mary does not feel she worked hard as a child. There were always aunties and cousins to help. For her, there was so much sun, and laughter. And all the doors and windows were open. And nobody drew on the walls of houses.
And without planning it, or wanting it, Mary puts her arm round Vanessa’s shoulder, she draws her to her, and Vanessa cries. “I did the garden, I hated it, but the garden never looked like this…I cleaned the house, I cleaned the house.” She is almost hysterical, she keeps repeating it. They stand together in the autumn wind, and Vanessa clings, and Mary comforts.
On the way back to Aunt Isobel’s, Mary spots something she did not see on the way out. It stands opposite the point where their lane turns off the thundering steel ribbon of road. At first it looks like the eye of a fish, silver and glassy, a thing on a stick, then as they get closer, it’s the mouth of a fish, a silver gape with a grey open mouth, seen from the side, a lateral V, and then she sees that the grey is the road, the ribbon of road reflected in a mirror, and it is some kind of fish-eye mirror that she has never seen before, put there to show drivers that there is a turning where tractors might suddenly come out.
Vanessa spots it at the same time, and as they stand there, waiting for the stream of metal to stop and let them back into kinder country, the sun comes out, and illuminates it. Both of them stop and stare at it, side by side, pressed close together by the tiny gap between the thorns and the lorries. It is a tiny, radiant disc of sharp beauty, with a huge blue sky and swelling white clouds, a convex circle that shines like a world, and they are there, minute, in the bottom right corner, at the end of a road that slopes away into the distance, at one precise vortex of time and space, and the world is enormous, and they are tiny, and their ant-like bodies vibrate with the traffic, two small living things on an enormous planet, and Mary has crossed the earth to this place, and when she turns again, ten feet down the turning, the two of them merge into the same bright dot.
45
On the way back to London, Vanessa drives, silent, rejecting Mary’s offer to drive, discouraging her attempts to talk. Yet both of them know they have grown closer.
Approaching the front door, Vanessa is anxious. “I only hope Justin’s all right,” she mutters.
“It will be OK, Vanessa,” says Mary. “Anna was coming in to clean. And Soraya said she would cook him dinner.”
“And who is Soraya? Oh, the Indian girl.”
“No, Vanessa, she is not Indian. I have met Trevor’s friend. She is a white woman.”
The house seems normal, no fire or flood, and Justin’s room is tidy, but empty. At seven he comes back, and seems pleased to see them, and actually calls Vanessa ‘Mum’, and tolerates ten minutes of news about the village before he wanders away again.
For Vanessa it is a quick turn around. At seven tomorrow she will be on the Eurostar, sitting opposite Fifi, off to Paris.
“You’ll be all right, Mary?”
“Yes, Vanessa.”
“It’s only three days. Nothing will happen.”
“Nothing will happen,” Mary agrees.
In fact Mary hopes that a lot will happen. Because Vanessa is going away, Mary has fixed for Trevor and Justin to go and do some work for Zakira.
But Vanessa thinks, soon this will be over. Justin is practically normal again. I just need to edge him towards a real job, or possibly he should go back into education, a Master’s in something, I would pay his fees…
The worst is over. I am fond of Mary, we’ve become fast friends, but soon she’ll be gone. One day I shall visit her, of course, in Uganda.
46
Next day Vanessa sleeps on the train to Paris, though Fifi is nervous, and wants to talk. She is going to visit her ancient grandmother, who has recently been taken into hospital. Fifi, who has never liked spending money, has arranged for them to stay in her empty house. There is a complex chain of negotiation; a cousin has given her spare set of keys to another cousin’s neighbour’s friend, or perhaps the gardener of the neighbour’s friend. There are instructions about lights, and locks, and bedding, ‘such a bore’ for Fifi, who has other things to think about, for instance, payment for the cat-sitter who will be feeding Mimi organic cream and chicken livers.
“I must say the family seemed rather reluctant. And almost suspicious of my motives. I mean, it was my therapist told me to go. Of course I couldn’t tell them that. But anyone would think I was after Grandma’s money. I admit she has rather a lot of money, but for heaven’s sake, there are ten of us grandchildren, and all the others have done better than me, they have all podded, there are scads of great-grandchildren. I am hardly competition for them. In any case, I am a grandchild. I do have a right. I have a right to a family.”
Vanessa pretends to fall asleep. Fifi is tiring when she talks about rights. Besides, Vanessa needs time to herself, she needs to drink deep of her own story, the bittersweet time-warp of her days in the village…it’s like sipping medicine, remembering Miss Tomlinson. The things the woman said about Vanessa’s parents.
The sour dark house where Vanessa grew up. Yesterday it looked so cramped, so poor.
Mum’s poor strangled garden, Vanessa thinks, remembering the nettles, the rusty wire. But then, Mum could never look after herself. Which meant we had to look after her. Dad’s awful, clumsy tenderness. I despised him because my mother did. It wasn’t comfortable, despising my father.
Then later, having to get away. Being forced to reinvent herself. The difficulties when she came home from Cambridge, and Lucy and the others laughed at her new accent, which she herself wasn’t even aware of.
Forty years later she’s still hot with shame.
“Vanessa, you’re not listening!”
She forces her lids open on the flat French countryside, the nondescript land between Lille and Paris, and tries to listen, but inside her head she is remembering the cleaning, always the cleaning, before school in the morning and when she came home, the only way to keep her mother’s nerves at bay, since Dad or Stan used to tramp the mud in, the floor in the kitchen was usually swimming, the old chipped sink bloomed with vile yellow stains…Her mother’s pale fretful eyes would be searching, restlessly looking for mess and dirt, more proof that life on earth was a nightmare, a hellish test she could not survive. Vanessa had to work hard to save her, for without her mother she knew she would be finished, since Mum was the only one who knew she was clever, too good to be a farmworker’s daughter.
I tried to make everything different for Justin. Only the best was good enough. He had every chance that money could buy.