White Lies

Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#u1a972315-faf0-5e7f-9f24-bd6ee04ee4f8)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

PART 1 (#ulink_5d14121c-c11f-52a3-b986-312045b08294)

ONE (#ulink_96fee61a-cbb2-59d1-bece-4b276c6099c2)

We were in a supermarket in Flers that Saturday afternoon last January. Joy was choosing things you wouldn’t buy if you were planning to leave your husband, unless she was stocking up for the unexpected, the bare cupboard I didn’t know was coming. But there was something wrong, she was low-speed, and anything I said echoed and died out like a weighted sack of words dropped into a winter pond.

I saw her clutch a bag of flour like she couldn’t let it go, her bottom lip pegged in her teeth. Did I catch her in the act of planning or had she just made the decision, and was wondering if she really wanted to leave me with a bag of flour I wouldn’t need? I must’ve tipped the balance, if there was still a balance, when I said: what d’you want that for?

If she stood here now I wouldn’t say: when did you decide to leave me, which item in the trolley was the last moment of our marriage? She’d picked a tin of chickpeas instead of dry ones, holding her breath like she was weighing up the future.

—We can’t afford these bloody tins, I said, snatching it off her and clunking it back on the shelf, jumping back in time and trying to change events. She’d run out of last straws right then.

We drove home through mist like a stocking over your head, down lanes invisible under tractor mud. The Land Rover cab was cold and streaming, the glaze channels on the door-tops completely rusted away, the windows held in place with splints of oak lathe from our ceiling. I said: what are you so fucking miserable about? Shouted it really, because we had to shout to hear ourselves above the roar of the diesel engine.

—I need some time to myself, she’d shouted back. I have to go away, to be alone.

I spent the rest of the weekend in a dumb panic. She’d ask me to wait outside while she made phone calls, and once there I began to map out my future alone. I occupied myself with the twenty-year-old hay-bales, dragging them out the barns and up the back garden, cutting the hemp string, the bales springing open like accordions into cakes. I mulched the vegetable beds, one square hay cake at a time, but they were too compact so I pulled them all apart and scattered them loose and thick. Then Joy banged on the window and I stood there as she handed me a cup of tea. She made small talk and offered me a home-made biscuit like she was the widow of the place, old Madame Macé, and I was the silent, respectful gardener.

—I’ll only be gone a week, she said, coming outside and standing on the well cover. The dark green box hedge behind her, the sound of a man we’d never seen calling his dog.

—You’re not coming back, I said, I know you’re not coming back.

—I’m your friend, she said, but the hug was all jacket and mittens, her body already gone. I don’t have anything to give you right now …

I didn’t dare ask what she meant. I didn’t even ask who she’d phoned or where she was going. I stretched every minute till it snapped and blanked out the whole of the coming week. She said she’d booked a ticket on the Eurostar shuttle, and she asked me if I’d drive her to the station Monday morning, like she was a guest who wanted to get the train to Paris.

This was the first time she’d left anyone, perhaps the first time she’d ever lied, so she hadn’t known that all deserters say: I just need time to think, it’s not you, I’m your friend, don’t worry. I’d done it before almost word for word, amazed at how easy it was to get away with. It was no different now, only I was the shocked one, willing to agree to anything, but not wanting to know what I’d done wrong. When I get back we’ll talk, she said. I remained grateful for every kind word, but we knew there’d be no talk.

She was my executioner, quick, tidy, purposeful, letting me spend my last hours outside where, by Sunday, I was just hanging about, gripping on to corner-stones or gutterpipe, crying against the seized-up baler rusting down by the mare. I’d kick its solid rubber wheels, homing on their details to alleviate the distress. I noticed they’d come off a British Army gun carriage made in Birmingham in 1942. I tried to concentrate on the effects of this war and forget Joy, but I couldn’t eat and she had to sit on my lap to help me drink the tea. So I felt like a war veteran too, trembling on a stick on a last visit to France, to this farm where the battle took place in the German retreat. We were surrounded by souvenirs of that battle and the occupation. A German Officer’s pocket inkwell Joy had found just by putting her hand under the cider press. Track-wheels off Panzer tanks stuck upright in the garden for periwinkles to climb. US Army jerrycans, 1943, on the Land Rover roof rack. A German-French dictionary, Berlin 1941. Hitler Pfennigs and machinegun bullets lying unused in their hundreds on the floor in rotten layers of grain and in the recesses of every barn wall. There were live shells still on a window ledge and the aluminium box we’d scuffed out from under the chicken house with the words US Army Bomb Mechanism on it. Water canteens and leather webbing and big brass shell cases with greasy rags tied over the top which old Farmer Macé had used as rust-proof paint pots. And the mound of heavy leather army horse tack from the beginning of the war.

Our conversation evaded concrete futures. Joy listed the small things I could get on with while she was away. I swallowed the lies like they were pep pills. If I strayed into emotive areas she’d say don’t, so I didn’t. I shut off my mind so the imaginary time between her leaving and her coming back would cease to exist beyond that domestic span of going up the field to check on the goats or gathering wood for the night.

On Sunday morning Joy wove a band of lavender for my fishing hat then asked me to stay outside till she banged on the window with a mug of tea. I went chopping wood, smashing up old oak planks, so worm-eaten they were half powder. Monsieur Aunay’s grandson came by on the Mobylette to check on some beasts in the top field. I’d only ever seen him at apple gathering, in the back of the cart with the whole family. Now he looked like he was on a rite of passage, his first solo task. He’d borrowed his grandpère’s Mobylette and white crash helmet and he wore a new pair of blue overalls. He checked the bœuf and pushed the Mobylette homeward down the muddy track. I swung the axe a few more times but there he was, standing beside me, holding out a piece of paper. Fund-raising to renovate the salle des fêtes at Landigou, ten francs a scratch card. I bought one, he stood there as I scratched it. Vous avez perdu.

On Monday morning I could see Joy was holding her breath, crossing her fingers, suppressing that rising triumph of getting away, or the terror in case the Land Rover wouldn’t start or the train was cancelled. I played my part to perfection too, and if she noticed maybe she was grateful. For me it was not an act of love but contrition, letting her believe she wasn’t lying, that she was just taking time out from a lifelong commitment and in the process helping herself over a period of self-doubt.

There wasn’t time, and it wasn’t Joy sitting there now. In this woman’s haste to get away from me, the future image of herself had slipped its lead and pulled ahead, choking and laughing. Just simple but significant changes, like she didn’t drink coffee that morning. It makes me manic, she said, like it’d been a lifelong tendency and she was talking to an acquaintance years hence.

As we got in the Land Rover she said to the geese: bye you lot and I knew my last chance had gone. It was the farewell I never got.

Monday was market day in Briouze. We followed our neighbours’ tractors with their orange beacons flashing in the mist, the breath of lumbering beasts billowing through the slats of vacheres towed by mud-lagged Land Cruisers and crapped-on Renault vans. It was the perfect time to turn her back on the place.

We stood on the railway platform away from the smokers. She acted like we were strangers, stepping on a train to be a single girl travelling alone in France, with no winter clothes in her rucksack. I didn’t know she’d packed the silk shirts and cotton socks, the brown dress and safari shorts. Or that she’d be back in Africa before I could sleep again.

The train came in like a row of linked tombs. I tried to say something but my mouth was cold, I couldn’t feel my lips and my jaw locked shut.

—Buck-up, she said.

She gave me her cheek as I went to kiss her mouth, and I caught her smell for a keepsake. By the end of the week it would disappear from her clothes and the bed as the mould and damp remains of Le Haut Bois took over.

She’d once called me ‘the unlucky explorer’ from some poem it doesn’t matter who wrote:

And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers

come back, abandoning the expedition;

the specimens, the lilies of ambition

still spring in their climate, still unpicked;

but time, time is all I lacked

to find them, as the great collectors before me.

TWO (#ulink_43e535d0-670a-58eb-9586-adb9b6d1421d)

I’d read about Joy The Gold-Panning Missionary long before I met her. A flowery article beside an inky newsprint photo in Viva, a Nairobi women’s magazine which Zanna showed me.

Zanna was twenty years older than me. We met in London at a Somali literacy gig in Whitechapel. She was thin, with blue tracing-paper skin, dressed in black with a beehive sitting on her head. She kept her money down her bra in a leather pouch and put belladonna drops in her eyes to make them blue. She said her husband Austen lived in Kenya.

She took me back to her flat in Stoke Newington to show me her photos of Africa, her Pokot stools, Karamajong finger knives, Turkana beads and Masai blankets, her kanzus, kikois and her paintings of Lake Baringo. She changed into a floor-length tie-dyed jellaba and gave me a kikoi to wear while she made us fried-egg sandwiches and told me about Austen. She’d met him in Soho in the fifties when he was a young linguist, half-starved and selling poetry pamphlets outside cafes.

Zanna sold hand-made clothes down Portobello Road and modelled for unknown painters or stashed things for spivs and thugs and Jewish booksellers. She had boxes of photographs of half-starved young men in black rollnecks, gathered like poets outside new coffee bars. Everyone was called Johnny and they were all geniuses, all dead too. Drink, suicide, drugs, starvation, Jack the Knife. When Francis Bacon was starving, Zanna would give him ten bob for a painting. She’d scrape the paint off and sell the canvas down Bayswater to slumming toffs.

—No one wanted one with the fuckin paint still on it, darlin.

Then Austen got a job teaching English in Kenya, so Zanna joined him as his ‘disguise’. By now the photos were Kodakolor with white borders: Austen turned half native, half Africa bum in his shorts and elephant-hide bush-boots, tea cloth headdress, elder’s staff, ten beers a night. In the sixties Austen joined the BBC East Africa Monitoring Unit and they married. He boozed with prostitutes, hunted elephants, camped in lion country and trout fished the Berkshires. The photographs were black and white again: Austen’s boot on a dead elephant. Zanna running the camp kitchen. A Sikh mechanic holding a blunderbuss beside the zebra-striped Land Rover.

Soon Austen’s prostitutes moved in. Illiterate Kikuyu girls who spent his money on school fees for cousins, seed for their shambas, booze, cloth and witch doctors. Zanna painted watercolours and took African lovers, but her life there became a tour of duty whittled down to three months a year, just enough time to extricate Austen from another hoax, disaster or nightmare.

The magazine cutting about Joy was in a box with bundles of aerogrammes hammered into stencils by Austen’s typing and his latest photos of dogs, ducks and parched scrub. Austen had come across Joy on one of his walks in Pokotland and suggested Viva do an article. Joy, the 29-year-old American missionary helping children pan for gold so they could pay their school fees. Joy, living in a bush village in cattle-raiding country, running the school and a women’s self-help group. She rode a motorcycle, wasn’t married, and Zanna said she was ‘ever so nice’ but wasn’t really a ‘missionary’.

I always told people that my own African past was typical and insignificant. A year in Sudan as a teacher, ten months of it on strike, after which I’d been sacked and drifted along the overland trail of East Africa in my late twenties, trying to find something I could do naturally with little effort, a bit of stringing in Uganda maybe, but always failing to make the breakthrough.

I was thirty then, stuck in London a whole year, incoherent about why I felt drawn back to Africa. Zanna’s Africa was a corrupt and dangerous playground which had turned Austen into a reckless adventurer who believed he was indestructible. But he was just a middle-aged man glutting on sex and booze with Kikuyu tarts in native dives.

It was dawn when Zanna suggested we went to bed, even if I wasn’t her type. Sex was silent, in the dark made by thick drapes and blankets tacked over the windows. Next day I found the set of clothes Austen kept for his annual week in London. Thornproof suit, impeccable Crombie, shiny brogues. I put them on and wore them for weeks, riding Zanna’s black wartime bicycle about town, getting oil on the turnups. I spent her money on an Aeroflot ticket to Nairobi, then thought about what I’d say when I walked into Amolem and asked for Joy.

All Aeroflot flights went to Moscow back in those days. We landed in minus sixteen, got shunted through a terminal behind glass walls and three hundred abandoned boarding gates. Six iron-curtain travellers huddled in the distance with their brown-paper baskets and stringbags. Every gate was blocked by ground staff with guns, boy recruits in military serge, the icy stare of cold raw shaves.

Our passports were taken and replaced by flimsy red cards. We wouldn’t be flying on to Nairobi that day and they didn’t know when. No plane, bad weather.