She married him in cold blood. Stunningly ugly she was.

I open my notebook, uncap my pen, jot down the words and blow the ink dry. Then I look out to sea. It is silver in the afternoon sun, blinding, churned into white horses by a hot, steady wind.

The hotel verandah on which I sit is sheltered by a whitewashed wall at either end, a yellow-and-white striped awning above. Out on the lawn, yellow-and-white striped umbrellas snap and billow in the wind. The new owners have built a freshwater pool at the edge of the cliff, leaving the old pool, far below, to return to the sea. Next door, a block of condominiums rises through twenty-four stories, to a penthouse on the twenty-fifth. By comparison, the lighthouse on the beach looks quaint now, sentimental perhaps.

"Two teas, madam." The waiter stands poised while I clear my things off the table.

I point out my daughter to him, ask him to go and tell her to come up. She is down at the pool, lying still as death on a deck chair, her pink English face lifted raw to the African sun. Four or five boys wrestle noisily in the water, splashing her without seeing her. Compared to local fifteen-year-old girls, she is plump, childlike in her ponytail and cotton swimsuit. When the waiter arrives, she sits up, smiles, shielding her eyes with an arm. She has her father's smile, my eyes, his skin. An alien, he would have said, a bloody alien. Meaning that, for all her schoolgirl enthusiasm, she doesn't belong in this place.

Perhaps if I had actually seen his body after the murder -- brains and blood, the nostrils slit to ribbons, one eye out of its socket (I invent these things, all I know is "stabbed") -- perhaps then I would have felt the loss more violently. If I had even thought he might die, perhaps I would have tried to notice things about him more carefully, things to remember for the future (although I know, I know this never works.) Even so, I could have tried to look beyond what people told me, what I thought I saw for myself. As it is, all I remember now is his absence. The bungalow without him in it. The peacocks gone. Dust on the binoculars. Cobwebs in his boots.

I watch her climb the steps, her towel around her neck. She has his wide shoulders and sinewy arms, but not the careful deliberation of movement, the float of the head. Considering these absences again, now, in this place, I suffer the loss of myself as I was then, and turn away, pinching the bridge of my nose between two fingers.

She flaps her towel across the chair and sits down. "What's wrong, Mummy?"

"Stainless steel," I say, reaching for the teapot. "Africa's endless love affair with stainless steel."

She looks politely, and then lifts her cup. "But what?" she insists.

"I'd rather you went alone this evening. Would you mind very much? I'll walk you to the bungalow gate."

She smiles. She's generous with me when I behave like a child. "I knew you'd ask," she says. "Of course I don't mind." She breaks open a scone and butters it, spreads it with apricot jam, then cream. She hums as she does this.

Normally, I'd warn her off too much butter, too much cream. But this time I just smile and say, "Nice?" She's at home with tea and scones, like a worker opening his lunch tin in the field. Aphorisms and incongruities do not amuse her. She's after facts, always has been. Since we arrived in this place, she too has been carrying a notebook. In it, she jots things down -- plants, trees, the dates of this and that. When she looks up from the page to check the spelling of a Zulu word, an Indian name, with her high English voice rising politely at the end of the question, I want to snatch away the paper and tear it up.

"What I can't work out," she says, swallowing her vowels with the scone, "is exactly what a black person in this country could have hoped to achieve by murdering a white one. Especially then."

I sigh and look back out to sea. "`Achievement' is hardly in it," I say. I have learned to play this English game of pouncing on a word, winding around it, away from the larger issues.

She grins. "Point taken!"

But I don't enjoy playing, nor can I bear her hearty delight, her sails spread like some batty player in an English detective fiction. "I think you should wash your hair," I say, "and do it up. Maya is coming for supper and bringing her daughter."

She nods absentmindedly, pouring another cup for herself. "But I mean -- I've always thought that what you wrote in Absence of Others is what happened. In the main, that is."

"Fiction is orderly; life's a mess."

She bows her head, scolded. Despite her matter-of-factness, she holds the love story to her chest like a pillow or a bear. Until now, the murder has given it shape. It has enhanced her life. This much I know.

I know, too, that there are things I have selfishly hidden from her, things about him that are more hers than mine. Even the place, the place itself, which was, in a way, as much as I knew of him, as far as I wanted to know him, I suppose. I open my mouth to speak, but self-pity has me by the throat. It is the kind of self-pity that includes her. It is for us.

"Mum?" Her hand settles onto my shoulder, unsure of its welcome.

I grasp it in both of mine, kiss it violently, hold its palm to my cheek. Two old women with white hair and white shoes smile at us from the next table. Hester slides her hand from my grasp, buries it between her thighs, and looks away.

I clear my throat. "There are things I could tell you, Hester," I say softly. "But it's hard to remember beyond what I've remembered already. To tell it again would be to reinvent it. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

© Copyright 1999-2002 Lynn Freed

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