The Last Gift (26 page)

Harun made a disapproving noise. ‘Tssk, not Mr anything, I would much prefer Harun. The nurse only came to check that I had survived the night, and since I had, I was able to persuade her to go away and never come back. There was no need for her to waste time on me when there are many others who require her skills. I am perfectly well, Lena, apart from the usual aches and pains, and that quite unexpected tumble the other day.’

‘The infirmities of age,’ Lena said.

‘Precisely,’ Harun said, laughing and nodding, acknowledging his own phrase. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I assume you are students. What are you studying?’

Long before half an hour had passed, it was clear that Harun was making ready for them to go. He offered them more tea, which they declined, and after a short pause as if to make certain that they would not have any more, he gathered the cups and saucers and put them on the tray. Then he sat back in his chair, smiled at them and glanced out of the window. ‘Well, that was very nice,’ he said after a moment, making as if to get to his feet. ‘We must arrange another session of tea very soon. I know you are very busy with your work, but when you can spare a little time, then it would be very nice to have a chat again.’

‘Well, we didn’t waste too much of his afternoon, did we?’ Lena said to Jamal when they got back. Lisa and Jim were back from their Berlin trip, and they told them the story of their tea with the neighbour. ‘We can’t have been in there for twenty minutes,’ said Lena.

Jamal laughed. ‘He reminds me of my Ba,’ he said. ‘Here’s your tea, drink it and goodbye, thank you. He more or less kicked us out in the end.’

‘I thought he was a very gracious man, though,’ Lena replied, joining in the joke. ‘Apart from his style of saying goodbye. He had a very clear way of speaking, don’t you think? A kind of eloquence.’

‘What do you think he does?’ Lisa asked. ‘Or did, rather. I should think he’s retired now, wouldn’t you?’

Lena shrugged. ‘Jamal was poking around like a detective. I don’t know if he picked up any clues. Jamal, what was that book he had on the table? That should tell us something.’

‘The Essays of Montaigne,’ Jamal said, and laughed out loud at their stunned silence. ‘I don’t know what book he had on the table! I just wondered what you would make of the possibility that he might be reading Montaigne.’

‘I think he’s a writer,’ Lena said later, when they were on their own. Jamal looked sceptical. ‘Just the way he spoke, and all the things he knew about Irish literature.’

That night they heard the banging and the shouting again next door as they lay in bed. Jamal got up and started to dress, but the noises stopped before he had his shoes on, and after a moment of tense silence, Lena called his name and he went back to bed. The next afternoon, Jamal knocked on Harun’s door.

‘I heard shouting and banging last night,’ he said, standing on the pavement outside Harun’s house. ‘You should call the police.’

‘I have called the police, but they tell me there is nothing they can do,’ Harun said wearily. ‘It has been like this since Pat died. They never used to do this when she was here. I have seen these young people. At least I think it’s them, some youths that I see down this street. I don’t know if they all live around here or just come to make mischief, but I have seen a group of them and seen their grins as I walk past them. I think they are the ones who come and do all the shouting. But listen, I’ll survive. They are probably more frightened about what they are doing than I am. I have seen enough in my life not to be frightened by children shouting abuse.’

Jamal could imagine his Ba saying the same thing. Me, I’m not afraid of these children. I’m more afraid of the police. But Jamal had no faith in children and did not think they could be disarmed by being ignored. They were as evil as everyone else. Just think for a moment of the tortures child soldiers were committing in African wars. He did not want to insist with Harun when he had come to offer sympathy, so after a moment he asked: ‘Have you read Montaigne?’

‘Yes, some years ago,’ Harun said, surprised. ‘With some pleasure, I must say. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh I just wondered. I heard someone talking about Montaigne on the radio the other day, someone working on a new edition of the essays,’ Jamal lied. ‘I just wondered if you had read him. I haven’t, but I think I will.’

‘You’ll enjoy him, I’m sure. He is very entertaining, and wise. When I read him for the first time, I was taken completely by surprise. The style was quite unexpected, so accessible and intelligent and frank, not always something you expect when you read a writer from another century and one who you think will have a different view of the world. Come in, let’s have a talk about Montaigne,’ Harun said, opening the front door wide and standing back.

‘Well, I’ll read him first and then we can talk,’ Jamal said, grinning.

‘Come in anyway, let’s not stand here at the door like strangers.’

Inside, Jamal’s eyes were drawn to the photograph of the woman on the bureau, and without hesitation he asked if that was his wife. Pat. Harun shook his head and motioned for Jamal to sit while he took the chair by the window.

‘I don’t know who the woman is,’ he said, smiling, apparently not minding Jamal’s directness. ‘We found the pictures in one of the kitchen drawers when we moved into this house more than twenty years ago. The house was empty when we bought it. All the furniture was cleared out, the floors were bare or covered with bits of broken lino here and there. It felt like a house where someone had lived his or her last days in. Then perhaps a relative or the solicitors cleared the house for sale. Well, whoever cleared the house missed the photographs in the drawer. Pat was for throwing them away but I managed to keep them. Then a year or two ago I put them up on the walls.’

Harun stopped as if that explained everything.

‘Why did you put photographs of people you don’t know on your walls? They are nothing to do with you,’ Jamal said politely.

‘They are something to do with me,’ Harun replied, equally politely. ‘I found it comforting to think these were people who may have been part of the life of this house. They look far too grand to have lived in such a humble house, but perhaps they visited here. Possibly the gentry in the pictures were the employers of the people who lived here, or even possibly their relatives who may have fallen on hard times and may have been forced to come down in the world. I enjoyed entertaining all these possibilities, and up there on the walls, they looked benignly on this space that I now occupy. I have grown fond of them, and without their kindly gaze, this would feel a far emptier place than it does.’

Jamal had heard the
a year or two ago
, and assumed these photographs replaced others that were there before, perhaps of Pat. He guessed that the pictures were a decoy, a way of obscuring a reality, offering one story instead of another. But obscure it from whom? Who would come to his house to read his life?

‘The pictures seem to have put you in deep thought, Jamal,’ Harun said. ‘It is just a frivolity, don’t let it trouble you. Sometimes I pretend that a stranger comes to the house and asks me to reveal the story behind the photographs because he or she assumes they belong to me. I imagine that I say that yes, they are my pictures, but I have forgotten the people and the places in them. Think just how absurd that story would strike anybody who heard it. I wonder if it could ever be true, that you would reach a time when the mementos of your life would say nothing to you, when you could look around you and have no story to tell. It would feel as if you were not there with these nameless and memoryless objects, as if you were no longer present among the bits and pieces of your life, as if you did not exist.’

Jamal asked. ‘Are you play-acting your non-existence?’

‘No, I imagine how it would feel to arrive at that condition, not wish for it,’ Harun said, giving every sign of enjoying the exchange. ‘Not yet, anyway. I don’t think this play with the pictures is a kind of death wish. I lament the passing of each day, as if it is something I have lost. I don’t wish for my days to end yet.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ Jamal said, encouraged by his smiles to press for something clearer. ‘What is this drama with the images an enactment of? What does it mean?’

‘I am not sure what it means, just a frivolity on my part,’ Harun said again. ‘When the idea occurred to me I was amused by what someone would read from this, like wearing a disguise and walking the streets and seeing how the world looked at you differently. Medieval princes found this very entertaining, for example. But since I did not expect anyone to come and see the drama, it was, as you say, a game I played by myself. And since you are forcing me to think so hard about this little frivolity, which I entered into intuitively, I should confess that the pictures may also have been an evasion.’

‘Pat,’ Jamal said, almost involuntarily.

‘Yes, Pat,’ Harun replied, and then turned to look out of the window for what seemed to Jamal a long time. He guessed he was running images of her through his mind, remembering her. Then he looked back at Jamal and nodded, smiling wryly in a way he was beginning to recognise. He thought the smile was a courteous rebuke which meant
I don’t want to talk about this matter right now
, or perhaps
this is not something that I can talk about with you when I hardly know you
. Another old man hoarding his memories. It made him think of Ba. So much about Harun made him think about Ba, how he might have been.

‘I’d better leave you in peace,’ Jamal said. ‘I’m sorry if I intruded, but thank you for talking to me about the pictures.’

‘No no, you have not intruded. It gives me pleasure to talk to you. Like someone I have known for a long time,’ Harun said.

‘What was your work?’ Jamal asked.

‘Many years ago I was a journalist. Then when we moved here I became a teacher of journalism at the Polytechnic,’ Harun said, waving these matters aside. ‘Now I write stories for children.’

‘You are a writer,’ Jamal said, delighted.

Harun grinned to have made him happy. ‘Well, that is to flatter me. I write children’s versions of great stories, and I make up one or two of my own in the same register, although these are not for publication. I have done episodes from Firdausi’s
Shahnameh
and some from Homer, and most recently a version of the original
Hamlet
. They are published in small cheap editions for children and sold in South Asia and Africa. It is work that gives me pleasure.’

‘I would love to read them,’ Jamal said.

‘Then you shall,’ Harun said. ‘Is that what you want to do? Be a writer?’

‘Me?’ Jamal said, quite astounded by this suggestion.

Then Harun got up and went to the bureau. He opened the desk doors and Jamal saw him reach into a heavy, battered old bag. He brought out a framed photograph and handed it to him. Pat, he said. There were two of them, standing on a wide beach with their backs to the sea. He recognised a much younger Harun, perhaps in his late thirties with long black hair, and Pat beside him. She wore a short, sleeveless cotton dress, splashes of mauve and white, and on her face was a small intimate smile. Jamal thought she looked beautiful and pleased with herself, as if everything was going according to plan. She was as tall as Harun, and perhaps slightly heavier. It must have been a calm day, because her long black hair lay unruffled round her face.

‘That was taken at Sennen Cove in Cornwall,’ Harun said. ‘We went there for a holiday in that wonderful summer of
1976
.’

Jamal looked at the photograph for a moment longer and then handed it back. ‘She looks lovely,’ he said.

‘She died, as perhaps you have guessed. She was here with me for so many years and then she was gone, for ever. There used to be a picture of her on the bureau, taken when she was about your age, over there, where the picture of that woman is now. And behind you was that one with the two of us together on holiday in Cornwall. Over there above the television was a picture of me taken when I was a student, just arrived in England. I took them down after Pat died because they made me sad, and forced my mind to think about things that caused me pain. They interfered with the living form of her that I had in my mind. I preferred to have her appear to me in various sudden visions than to have her looking at me in that fixed way. It was so sudden, how after so many years she was gone and there was no one to talk to. Sometimes I’m struck with amazement when I consider exactly how I have found myself here. But then I suppose many people can say that about their lives. It may be that events constantly take us by surprise, or perhaps traces of what is to become of us are present in our past, and we only need to look behind us to see what we have become, and there is really no need for amazement.’

Harun smiled wryly at Jamal, apologetically, his eyes glistening. ‘You are a very good listener, Jamal. I was watching you in case you fidgeted or looked wearied, so I would know to stop, but you did not. It is a handy skill for an aspiring writer. Now you see, you have indulged the ego of an old man and he has pounced on your sympathy to burden you with these miserable thoughts.’

‘You have not burdened me,’ Jamal said, moved by the sight of the grieving old man. They sat silently for a while, and then Jamal said again: ‘You have not burdened me.’

It was after six when he left, and by then he knew that Harun came from Uganda in
1960
to study journalism. His family were of Yemeni Shia origin, very orthodox in their piety. Yazids, Jamal said. Exactly, Harun said, pleased with him. They did not like it when he met Pat.