But first she must do what she dreads, and ring Omar. She shivers as she puts in the number, and manages to misdial three times. The line is appalling, racked with howls and moans. Her ex-husband is out, and Awatef seems distant. “He could not look for ever, Mary.” And so he came home. “Baghdad is still dangerous, do you understand?” The boy in the zoo had already moved on, and Omar could not even confirm he was Libyan.
Omar has come home, without Jamil. Without Jamil. Hope, drags, curdles.
“Mary, believe me, Omar has tried…but he must also look after his family.”
“Once he had another family,” says Mary, but Awatef doesn’t hear, and Mary doesn’t repeat it. Instead, she says, “Tell Omar I am sorry.” She is not surprised, but she shivers more severely, shaking so hard that her teeth knock together. So cold, so pitiless, this grey country. She sits and stares blankly at the concrete floor. Then she rings the number Vanessa has given.
“Mary! I have been mad with worry! Is Justin all right? What on earth has happened!”
The voice is broken up, it is fizzing with snow. Mary thinks that her little employer must be frozen. (But in fact, Vanessa’s sitting in Lucy’s front room, telling her cousin all about her life, cradling a large balloon of brandy that both of them agree they ‘wouldn’t have usually’. Fortunately Lucy is a good listener. Vanessa is having a lovely time. Lucy makes her feel glamorous. Now she in turn feels benign towards Mary. After all, poor Mary’s writing was a little old·fashioned, even though the agent did her best to be kind. Vanessa is the one who is tipped for success. She’s already drafting the blurb in her head—“a raw, riveting tale of rural lust…”)
“It is snowing, Vanessa, the road is not easy, but Justin is fine. He is eating chips and drinking his tea.”
“Where are you?” The voice sounds suspicious now.
“Crossroads Services, near Freemantle.”
“You’ve stopped at the Services? That will hold you up. I do hope you’re not going to get here too late.” There is a silence. Mary turns her eyes to the window shivering against the night, its glass shaking and straining in the wind, barely managing to hold back the wild white weather, the unfriendly distances of which Vanessa knows nothing.
Perhaps alerted by her silence, Vanessa tries again. “Of course the main thing is you’re both all right. It’s just that, you know, preferably, I’d rather you didn’t wake up Lucy.” She cocks one eyebrow at her cousin, who makes polite demurring faces: they mustn’t worry, it is quite all right.
“Yes, Miss Henman.”
“Oh really, Mary, by now you must have learned to say Vanessa.” She means it to be friendly, but it comes out wrong, as if she is saying that Mary is stupid, and Mary’s voice echoes back through the snow, muted, stubborn: “To say Vanessa. Yes, Miss Henman.”
“It isn’t actually snowing here,” Vanessa says, as if that makes it better. “But the forecast did say it was on the way. Isn’t it exciting, a White Christmas! You’ll be able to tell everyone in Uganda you had a real White Christmas with us!”
Then Mary starts to know she will not be going. A voice in her head says, Never, never. “Yes, Miss Henman. A White Christmas.”
(But where did that voice come from? Of course she must go. But it speaks to her again: Go home, go home.)
“Well anyway Mary dear, safe journey. Give my love to Justin. Kissy kissy kissy.”
53
Vanessa puts down the phone frustrated, but dramatizes it into a laugh, for Lucy. “That was Mary. Of course, my African friend. Yes, the heroine who saw off that infatuated student. We are very close now, but as you know, she was my cleaner for years and years. They don’t find it easy to be treated as equals. Even now Mary occasionally calls me Miss Henman. As if she were a child, and I the teacher!”
And Vanessa starts to glow with her own importance, the power of ruling and then renouncing, the touching affection Mary feels for her now, which “must mean I’m not completely ghastly!” She laughs at the absurdity of that thought. “She saved my life, Lucy, you know.” And then inspiration carries her along. “But I have been able to give something in return. Living in the house of an established writer has encouraged Mary to write about her life. Now I’ve put her in the way of a top literary agent. Of course in my job I have all the contacts. It isn’t certain she’ll be able to help her, but if Mary gets published, won’t it be wonderful?”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” says Lucy, yawning. “It’s very exciting, all these famous people. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll tear myself away and go up and finish wrapping my presents. I’ve left them out some ham and potato salad.”
Real snow starts falling, light and lovely, in the blank central space of the double-glazed window that Lucy has framed with spray-on snow and little bunny-scuts of glued cotton wool. “Oh isn’t it glorious, magical,” Vanessa enthuses, as Lucy goes to bed, and then settles down alone with a double gin, the TV controller, and a mug of cocoa. She feels heroic, waiting up for them.
But she falls asleep, frightened, and still on her own, as the temperature plummets around two am.
54
Now Mary is ready to ring her accountant, but she looks at her watch: already ten pm. Midnight in Uganda: too late to ring. She longs for Kampala’s warm earth, tender heat, the sheen of round brown arms in the moonlight. She hopes Charles is being faithful to her.
She switches to ‘Messages’ to send him a text, but finds to her surprise that he has left her one. She clicks on it, and reads, and reads again, flushes the toilet, and shouts “E-e-eee!” She looks in the cold mirror of the loos, and smiles, and then laughs, and an elderly woman who had peeked around the outside door, gingerly, draws back again. Mary’s all alone in this sterile grey space, but her smile is big and warm enough to light up the room—
Because her friend the accountant is already in London. Charles is at Heathrow! He has cleared Immigration. Because of the weather, he is putting up for one night at the airport, but tomorrow he will come to ‘the white woman’s house’, enyumba eyo mukyala omuzungu.
Mary’s smile dies. The house will be empty. There will be nowhere for Charles to go.
Meanwhile Justin is sitting waiting in the café. “I thought you had left me,” he says, with mock pathos. The humour of it is lost on Mary. He is just a baby, a baby man. As they come out of the Services, the icy wind hits them, and flurries of snow attack their lips and noses, and both of them skid on the pristine white surface, and Justin clings on to Mary’s arm. It isn’t clear if he is using her or saving her, but Mary feels Justin is dragging her down.
And now her consciousness is torn in two, as the future pulls her in opposed directions. She knows she must drive Justin to Vanessa’s village. She has promised to do it. She has to do it. Justin is incapable of getting there alone. It is one of the last things she’ll do for Vanessa, a kind of final handover, and then — Vanessa will carry the load on her own.
But Mary also knows that she is going back to London. She imagines herself hugging her friend the accountant. She can almost feel his strong arms crushing her. She knows they will soon be together again.
For the moment, the snow is enough to cope with. She’s reluctant to leave the kingdom of light, the reassurance of the other human faces, and reenter their box, and restart the race, the snails’ race over the earth’s glassy surface, which is slowly being covered with a skin of black ice, so that every so often, the car slips very slightly. It feels colder now: they keep their coats on. Justin has a picnic blanket under the back seat, and when he sees Mary shivering, he plunges like a dolphin and brings it up, and drapes it carefully round her shoulders.