She felt very sorry for Sony and no longer envied him his father’s love or the pony in the garden.
And the life those three lived, grim and solemn, thrifty and deserving, suddenly struck her as free and easy compared with that of Sony, the pampered little prisoner.
Their mother, hungry for news, listened dejectedly and in silence to the two sisters’ cautious account of what they’d seen and heard.
Then she burst into tears and kept repeating, “So he’s lost to me, lost!” as if the education and affluence Sony enjoyed was erecting an impenetrable barrier between herself and the boy, were she even able to see him again.
It was at this time that their mother’s behavior changed.
She left the hairdresser’s where she’d been slaving away for twenty years or more and began going out in the evening. Although Norah and her sister never suspected it at the time, they would gather years later that their mother must have worked as a prostitute and that this activity, which her outward cheerfulness belied, was the particular form her grief took.
Norah and her sister would return to their father’s on holiday once or twice.
But no longer did their mother ever want to be told anything about what they’d seen there.
She’d assumed a hard, determined look; her face was smooth under her makeup; and whatever the context, with a sarcastic curl of the lip and an angry sweep of the hand, she was given to saying, “Oh, what do I care?”
This new demeanor and this gritty bitterness enabled her to meet exactly the kind of man she was looking for. She married a bank manager, who like her was divorced and remained her husband to this day. He was an uncomplicated, likable, and well-paid man, very kind to Norah and her sister, even to the point of — at their father’s invitation — taking them with their mother to see Sony all together for the first time.
Their mother hadn’t seen the boy since he’d left.
Sony was now sixteen.
On learning that their mother had remarried, their father wasted no time inviting them, and reserving several nights’ accommodation for them in the town’s best hotel. It was as if — Norah thought — he’d been waiting for their mother to make a new life for herself before he could stop worrying that she’d try to abduct Sony.
And that’s how they all found themselves, like a big, happy, reconstituted family, Norah and her sister, their mother and her husband, Sony and their father, seated in the hotel dining room eating local delicacies, their father and the new husband discussing calmly, with only a hint of awkwardness, the international situation, while the boy and his mother, sitting close together, shot furtive, uneasy glances at each other.
Sony was as usual superbly turned out: he wore a dark linen suit; his skin was soft and smooth, and he had a short Afro haircut.
Their mother’s face wore its new fixed expression. Her mouth was slightly twisted, her heavily lacquered hair was dyed pale blond, and Norah noticed as her mother asked Sony about school and his favorite subjects that she took care with her grammar and syntax, knowing that Sony was now much better educated and more refined than herself, a mortifying and uncomfortable awareness.
Their father looked at them with a happy air of relief, as if at long last he’d managed to reconcile old enemies.
Is that what he really thinks now? Norah wondered, cross and astonished. Has he managed to convince himself that it was Sony and our mother all these years who were unwilling to meet?
Long before, when, wild with grief, their mother had told him on the telephone that if he refused to send Sony to spend the holidays with her she would borrow the airfare to visit her son in his house, their father had said, “If I see you getting off that plane, I’ll slit his throat and mine right before your eyes!”
But was he really man enough to cut his own throat?
There he was now, seated at the head of the table, handsome, charming, exquisitely polite, his cold dark eyes shining with love and pride whenever he gazed at Sony’s adorable face.
Norah noticed that her brother never looked anyone straight in the eye. His affable, impersonal gaze flitted from one person to another without dwelling on any face in particular, and when spoken to he stared fixedly at an invisible point in the distance, without ceasing to smile or to adopt an expression of serious interest in whatever was being said to him.
He was particularly careful, Norah thought, not to be caught unawares by their father’s gaze. Even then, even when their father looked at him and Sony glanced elsewhere, he seemed to withdraw, to curl up in the depths of his being, where he was safe from every judgment, every feeling that involved him.
He exchanged a few words with his mother’s husband, and then with her, haltingly, because she had reached the limit of what she dared ask him.
After the meal they went their separate ways, and although it was a few days before their departure, Sony and their mother never saw each other again and never again would their mother mention him.
Their father had organized a lavish program of tourism, had hired a guide and a chauffeur for them, even paying for a few extra nights at one of the chalets in his holiday village in Dara Salam.
All that, however, their mother refused, dismissing the guide and the chauffeur, and bringing forward their departure date.
She no longer left the hotel. She just went back and forth between her room and the pool, smiling in the same mechanical, distant, very calm way that Sony did, leaving Norah and her sister to entertain the husband, who took pleasure in everything and found nothing to complain about, until the last evening, when, at a loss where to go, they took him to dinner at their father’s, and the two men chatted until two in the morning, parting with reluctance and promising to see each other again.
That had really annoyed Norah. “He was making fun of you the whole time,” she said to the husband, with a snicker, as they went back to the hotel.
“What? Not at all. He’s a very nice man, your dad!”
And Norah immediately felt guilty for her spiteful remark, allowing that it was indeed perfectly possible that their father had genuinely enjoyed the company and that she was simply angry with the two of them for appearing to trivialize her mother’s immense unhappiness, and also that it was her mother, after all, who had accepted the unseemly idea to bring her husband to their father’s house in the obscure hope, no doubt, of provoking an almighty row, at the end of which she and Sony would be avenged and their father confounded, his cruelty having been exposed and acknowledged, but ought she not to have understood that this ideal husband was not the sort of person to make a scene?
Their mother never saw Sony again, never once wrote to him or telephoned him, and never even mentioned his name.
She and her husband had moved to a house in the outer suburbs. From time to time Norah brought Lucie to see her. She had the impression that since their return her mother had never stopped smiling, a faint smirk that seemed disconnected from her face floating lightly in front of her, as if she’d snatched it from Sony to mask her pain.
Norah continued passing on to her the odd bits of news she got from Sony or their father — about Sony’s studies in London, or his return to their father a few years later — but it often seemed that their mother, through her smiles and nods, was trying not to listen.
Norah spoke about Sony to her less and less, then stopped altogether on learning that, after getting a very good degree, he had ended up in his father’s house, and was leading a strangely passive, idle, lonely existence.
Her heart of course often missed a beat when she thought of him.
Should she not have gone to see him more often, or made him come and see her?