But do I know him. I have never seen this man. I only know about old men. Poor man.
Archie was always there for her. He said, only days ago, any time, come to me, Sharon and me, any time. And now: to be there for him … she made for the telephone but it was he, her lover, who knew better. That’s no good. To call. You better see him yourself. That is the right way, if you want …
Oh yes, she wants. This horrible thing can’t be allowed to touch Archie.
Sexual harassment — the boss putting his hand up the skirt of his secretary, the politician fumbling at his assistant’s breasts — that’s for the pages of the tabloids. He listened patiently — or perhaps his mind was elsewhere, she was too distrait to notice — while she continued to tell him again and again who this uncle was, what he was, not only to her but to others, how many years of care and skill and healing, begun even before she was born. Later in the afternoon she went back to the car and he heard her drive away. He knew where to.
Archie’s house: hardly changed. Only the trees grown, towering. The same garden where she had tumbled about on the grass over Gulliver. Dogs came shambling and jumping in greeting, she pressed the intercom and out of what she sensed was emptiness the accents of a black woman came through static to tell her the doctor and his wife were gone away, they said they will come back at the end of next week; she must not give to anyone the name of the place where they were.
Next week.
He and she would be gone away; the two plane tickets were carried about with her, her passport was at the embassy of his country for the entry of a visa.
She was back at the cottage sooner than he would have thought, and quiet. All I can do is write to him. What else. Who can this creature be who would get such a thing into her crazy head. But the letter was not written. When next day she received her official document, the visa stamped in her passport, something else happened. They had rejoiced, embraced, almost losing their footing together, and then suddenly, grave, he said it.
Now before we go we must be married.
Marriage is for suitable matings in the Northern Suburbs, for Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his wives. Whatever the foreigner might think of The Table at the EL-AY Café, other forms of trust have been discovered to her there.
What for. We don’t need that.
He looked at her for what seemed a long time.
What for. She said it again. We don’t need that. A bit of paper … like the one they wouldn’t give you… to let you stay.
But she felt he would withhold from her his rare smile, for good. Nevermore. The black mirror of his eyes refused to reflect her.
If you must leave with me then we must marry. I cannot take a woman to my family, with us — like this.
Just say the word.
She laughs, with tears.
He took her in his arms and kissed her solemnly as if exacting a vow. Two days before the aircraft took off they went to the Magistrate’s Court and before a marriage officer, the first time he had dared show his face in any place of law enforcement. David from The Table was the required and only witness. They kept away from any celebration, that night, at the café where she had taken him, on impulse, out of the garage, for coffee. He was right about The Table — something left behind, abandoned like the cottage — The Table was no more of use to her, to him and his qualities, than the gatherings at Sunday lunch on Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ terrace.
Let us go to another country …
The rest is understood
Just say the word.
Chapter 17
Ibrahim ibn Musa.
He stands at the foot of the stair where the aircraft has brought its human load down from the skies. Lumbered and slung about with hand-luggage and carrier bags, he turns to wait for her to descend from behind him.
He is home. He is someone she sees for the first time. The heat is a gag pressed across her nose and mouth. There are no palm trees.
Ibrahim ibn Musa. They have traipsed across the stony crunch of the airfield in the shouldering of others, entered an echoing babble in which movement and sound are united confusion, and now are before the immigration booths. A man behind the glass partition lowers his stamp. Ibrahim ibn Musa.
Her visa takes a moment’s scrutiny. The wife; Ibrahim ibn Musa. That’s all; done.
An airport in a country like this is a surging, shifting human mass with all individualism subsumed in two human states, both of suspension, both temporary, both vacuums before reality: Leaving, Arriving. Total self-absorption becomes its opposite, a vast amorphous condition. The old women squatting, wide-kneed, skirts occupied by the to-and-fro of children, the black-veiled women gazing, jostling, the mouths masticating food, the big bellies of men pregnant with age under white tunics, the tangling patterns of human speech, laughter, exasperation, argument, the clumps of baggage, residue of lives, sum of lives (which?), in a common existence-that-does-not-exist. Julie is no different, she has no sense of who she is in this immersion, everyone nameless: only him, officially: Ibrahim ibn Musa.
He was very efficient, speaking his own language, making enquiries, engaging in exchanges of colloquial ease with those he approached. He retrieved the elegant suitcase and the canvas bag, and pushed and shouted to grab the door of a taxi before others could get to it. The drive from the airport to the outskirts of the capital on a pot-holed tarred road was a contest with other vehicles pressing up to overtake one another like horses on the home stretch of a race. She was suddenly exhilarated and laughed, feeling for the hand of this new being. I’m here! I’m here! What she meant: can you believe it? I’m with you.
She dodged about to see through this window and that the silhouette of the city emerging blindingly beyond — to her eyes — the decaying few industrial buildings, vehicle repair shops and tarpaulined nooks under Coca-Cola signs where men sat drinking coffee. White, white, sunlight was white on the cubist shapes of buildings pierced by the index fingers of minarets.
We don’t stay any time in town. We go to the bus station now.
I want to walk about, look at everything.
All right. Not today. There are not many buses where we must go.
The bus station on the periphery of the city was a smaller version of the airport concourse. Only here there were cages of chickens among the bundles of life-time possessions. He discouraged her from going to the lavatory. This’s a dirty place.
You forget that I come from Africa? I’ve camped out all over, stayed in villages, you know my friends — we didn’t exactly look for tiled bathrooms—
His brow twitched with impatience. You don’t know this.
She was overcome with love for him: he is in shock, coming back home. She must make light of his irritation with her. Ibrahim … (trying out the name, listening to it, feeling it on her tongue). So what d’you want me to do? Wet my pants on the bus? But she laughed alone.
Wait. He caught by the arm one of the men in a voluble group and asked something that was enthusiastically answered by all at once. There’s a place we can get coffee just down the road; you can go, while we are there, it will be better.
But the bus? Ibrahim. We’ll miss the bus?