Rewards and Dilemmas

By Roderick Craig Low

Hugh Ballater is a successful writer who enjoys international literary success, in contrast to his troubled personal life. After divorcing his wife, he leaves England and buys a house on the Kenyan coast where he continues to write. Finally at peace, he produces some of his best novels from his beachside retreat. With the unexpected arrival of a young Indian woman looking for work, his life takes a new turn. However, their encounter is short-lived as he dies unexpectedly. After his death, the reading of his will sparks a chain of events that has far reaching consequences for those closest to him. This love story crackles with intrigue and suspense around the dilemmas and rewards facing his housekeeper - the narrator of the story - and his ex-wife and children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AUK Authors
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781782344797

Book preview

Love

Chapter One

I knew he was dead.

In spite of appearances, I knew.

Everything looked exactly as it always did when I got back from the store behind the Country Club. There he was, sitting out on the veranda, facing out to sea, with his huge tanned bull’s back to me - his keyboard and computer screen before him in the shadow of the wide umbrella. He was sitting up straight, watching the waves and puzzling over his next sentence. But, today, he was seeing nothing and the elusive words would never come.

I felt my usual greeting, ‘I’ve brought everything you wanted,’ catch in my throat. Unnecessary. As it always was. He never asked the impossible.

I remember walking over to him, touching his shoulder and gazing out to sea at what he saw last, not wanting to look at him but standing there with my hand on his shoulder, like a loving wife showing matter-of-fact affection during a conversation with her husband. In spite of the warmth of the day, his skin seemed cold, unresponsive, not as it should - his life retreating to the core of his being, shrinking and extinguishing, leaving his body an ephemeral epitaph to what had been.

I remember standing there for a long time, watching the breakers and listening to the surf, feeling the tips of my fingers go numb, obediently imitating his numbness, before I could turn to look at him. And when at last I brought myself to glance at him, he seemed strangely normal, hands embracing each end of the keyboard as they often did when he was in deep thought, looking out over the top of the screen at the sea. Everything as it always was, except for the flies that wandered undisturbed over his face and probed the moist corners of his unblinking eyes. I recall wafting them away with my free hand and hearing them buzz angrily before trying to resume their investigations. I swept them away more insistently and watched as they beat a temporary retreat to the safety of the air where they cruised up and down and across, impatient for me to withdraw.

I remember deciding to telephone Doctor Ishmael at the surgery in Harambee Road. He would know what to do. He was a personal friend and I knew he would come around as soon as he could. I looked at my watch. Half past ten - surgery nearly over. The citizens of Malindi who could afford to be sick would soon be on their way, clutching their prescriptions and potions and feeling better just for their comforting presence. As they made their way home, eager to add substance to the placebo effect of possession, I would lift the telephone and, by that simple act, start a chain of events that would take him away from me and close the door on the life I had known.

I looked back down at the still figure and hesitated. I didn’t want him to go, didn’t want to set in motion the consequence I dreaded, lacked imagination for the certainties of his dying, couldn’t visualise life without him. It was all too sudden, too soon, too final. I needed time to come to terms with what had happened; needed some way of slowing the clock and looking at myself and the perfidious, transient landscape I realised I now occupied.

So I stood with one hand on his shoulder, the other fanning his face and infuriating the flies for I don’t know how long. Then, to hold back the inevitable still longer, I left his side and walked down the beach to the water line. From there, I looked out over the ocean toward my homeland and then back at him, still sitting and, from that distance, appearing to be watching me.

Secure in the knowledge of my sightless audience and the time his patient concentration afforded me, I recall kicking off my sandals and stepping fully clothed into the surf, feeling the wet sand give way beneath my feet as the waves grasped it in handfuls before pounding it against the beach again. I caught my breath as I felt the water glue my clothes to my back and watched him watching me, just as he had the first time - that day, long ago. I even found myself waving to him, half imagining him waving back, peering again through salt-stung eyes at him, hoping desperately for something I had always taken for granted - the unsung treasure-house of life and of being.

I stayed a while, the knowledge of what I had to do on my return making delay the sweetly attractive sole option open to me. I walked out until the water wrapped itself comfortingly around my waist in dangerously seductive swells, making my breath come in short gasps. I stood again at the edge of the sea, curling my toes around ripples of sand, then lifting my feet out of the water and watching their impression sliding towards the restless waves, pausing for a moment as if in shock before slipping unseen below the surface. I even built a clumsy, childish barrier against the incoming tide with apologetic, half-ashamed, half-embarrassed movements, like a teenager longing for the innocence of childhood again. God knows why I did that, shovelling up a dyke and then watching its hopeless courage faced by overwhelming odds. Trying, perhaps, to emulate Canute, to hold back the tide, to be mistress of all I surveyed, to command the waves and, if so, who knows, snatch power over life and death? Then, knowing my limitations, accepting the inevitable and simply wanting to see him again, I walked slowly back up the beach, shivering in spite of the warmth of the day, peeling my clothes away from my skin so that they might dry and hide my procrastination. Then I swept the flies from his face before kissing him one last time and telephoning the doctor.

***

‘No, I couldn’t. It doesn’t seem right.’ Doctor Ishmael shook his head.

I looked at him, ashamed. ‘Force of habit,’ I said. ‘Making lunch for two as usual. You may as well. I’m sure he’d have seen the funny side.’

‘Perhaps, but not out here. Not with him watching us.’

‘No, no. We can eat inside whilst we wait for the undertakers. It’s cooler in there.’

The doctor looked understandably relieved. To someone so preoccupied with life, it was as though untended death was strangely unnerving to him.

‘We must keep the flies off him.’ The doctor was visibly distressed.

‘Shall I get a sheet to cover him?’

‘Yes, please do. That would be better.’ He raised his voice as I went in search of a sheet, perhaps to overcome unreasonable fear at being left alone in his dead friend’s presence. ‘He was a good friend - a good friend to Kenya, too. He’ll be missed.’

He’ll be missed. His words rang in my ears. When he was alive, he was public property. His demise would not diminish his celebrity. His death would belong to the nation, his agent, his publisher, the world at large. They would all bemoan the loss of his talent. But his friends - Doctor Ishmael and his wife, the Kenyattas, the old Fanshawes who still treated the country as if it belonged to them, the Spinettis, the Cuovis and the others - they would miss the man.

And me? What had I lost, and who would understand my loss? I collected a clean white sheet from the Ottoman in the bedroom, returned to the balcony and let it drop like a fishing net over his rugged head, removing and adjusting it again and again as an excuse to look at him once, twice, three times more.

How could I put what I had lost it into words that did not sound trite, melodramatic, or simply exaggerated? Lost everything perhaps?, I thought, No, I had not lost everything, for I had my memories, my health, my home, my self. I had certainly lost my love, but saying that belittled my pain; cheapened my emotional response. My feeling was so much more than simply one of lost love.

I remember puzzling over it for nights after that fateful day and only feeling a sense of mental contentment when I managed to embrace the idea of a shadow losing the object that determines its existence.

That’s how I felt.

Like an effect become extraneous through the loss of its cause.

I could imagine the reports somewhere on the inside pages of the newspapers. Authors, however famous, only ever grace the inside pages, unless some story of sexual notoriety surfaces. A little later, his story would appear in the obituary columns, accompanied, perhaps, by that photograph taken next to a Scottish loch for the flyleaf of his most recent books. He liked that image.

For the last eleven years of his life, author Hugh Ballater lived in Kenya in a house overlooking the Indian Ocean, it would read. And, in the final sentence of the obituary notice, Hugh Ballater is survived by his ex-wife Virginia, a daughter by their union and a son by her first marriage.

There would be no mention of me, his shadow. His superfluous shadow.

And that’s how things should be, I thought. What we shared was beyond the boundaries of journalism.

Beyond explanation. Beyond official recognition. Beyond words.

***

Saturday, the 11th February, 1950

I’ve not made an entry since catching the train for Dover over a month ago. But diaries are like that, a melange of significant events and considered assessments.

Here I am, the ultimate cliché, the struggling writer in a garret with a panoramic view of Paris. I work with the houses of Montmartre behind me, jostling each other in a soundless struggle for supremacy. Below me, all day and most of the night, the clattering Metro breaks noisily out of the ground for a few yards like an ill-tempered mole before retreating with a sigh into the safety and fearsome certainties of its tunnel; the traffic - all long black bonnets with inverted Citroen ‘V’s on their radiators - makes slow and impatient progress, up and down, like an orderly swarm of ants plundering some oasis of its own discovery. From early in the morning, the scents from the bakery waft in at the window. And, as the shadows lengthen on bright days, or the day gives up the ghost when it rains, prostitutes, rubbing sleep from their eyes as they begin the evening shift, totter about in that ambiguous no-man’s-land between play and work - all cheap and unsubtle allure, heavy make-up and defiant pride - sporting the uniform of bright colours and high heels their profession demands, but lighting cigarettes, talking to their fellow-travellers, idling in and out of shops and nonchalantly eating croissants. And, as city life conspires to defy the inevitable arrival of night, of darkness and of death, the gaudy, tacky and ultimately sadly-hysterical on and offs of the neon around the doorways of the clubs reflects on the streaked and dusty glass of my window. I am constantly surprised and delighted by the dynamic confidence of the place, so much a contrast with my homeland.

The concierge, constantly fidgeting nervously in her grubby doorway and conveying an impression of gleeful enthusiasm for Napoleon-sanctioned undercover responsibilities and duties fiercely defended, has reached the stage of giving me a Gallic shrug and turning away to blow her nose noisily into a carelessly-held handkerchief in response to my cheery greeting. This, says my neighbour on the fourth floor - a pale, asthmatic young man who works for the authorities counting the clippings in the ticket machines and comparing these with the piles of francs and centimes in the endless search for fraudulent bus conductors - is a sign of complete acceptance. Christian, for that is his name, if not a reflection of any religious persuasion - he being an ardent communist and an ex-member of the French Resistance - is particularly surprised at this demonstration of approval, especially in view of the fact that I am, as he never fails to remind me, both a foreigner and a stranger.

However, I feel now is not the time to tell him that this is not my first visit to Paris; that I spent formative days as a stripling teenager peeling brown-caked fear from my legs fighting for his country’s liberation; or that, if a hero’s welcome is too much to ask, respect for someone who pays his rent on time and makes little or no noise late at night might at least deserve an equally cheery ‘bonjour’ or ‘bonsoir’ to mine own.

At the risk of sounding trite and affected, I am here to retain my artistic integrity, and in writing this I already feel as fraudulent as any hapless and quick-fingered clippie. I have been fortunate in the success of my first two novels but do not want to fall into the trap of writing endlessly to a formula of my own unconscious creation.

‘More of the same’, my editor demands.

I look upon my work to date as little more than detective stories - simple characters solving complex and unusual problems, clues and red herrings falling out of the narrative at convenient moments, the natural order of things distorted beyond credence to feed the rival egos of writer and reader in equal measure. If I had stayed in London, they’d have got ‘more of the same’, but I wanted to write differently. I am drawn to write books about complex people dealing with the everyday challenges of existence. The opposite, in fact, of the up-to-now.

And now, both a confession and a justification.

My knowledge of French is so rudimentary that I cannot understand anything other than simple concepts and am left to puzzle away at the struggle of humanity coming to terms with itself and the things that go on around it. This suits my objectivity very well. The human condition I observe is not confused by language, nor made particular or peculiar by race, creed or colour. It is a universal, Esperanto-like state of affairs. Thus, my sojourn in a country where, for me, communication is difficult, in a strange way makes life for me both simple and straightforward. I cannot comprehend what people say and am therefore only in communication with my responses to what they are doing.

This puts me in a quandary, however.

If I stay, I will inevitably become reasonably proficient in the language and, as a consequence, will become embroiled in the minutiae of people’s lives. Will that mean I’ll have to move on - forever travelling in order to be able to visit myself uninterrupted and undisturbed by the events taking place around me? Must a writer cut him- or herself off in order to avoid losing touch? A question I cannot answer - at least for the present.

So here I sit with my typewriter, my isolation and my view. The only interruptions are my daily shopping trips to the Boulevard Rochechouart, a slowly consumed cognac or two at the Bar des Fleurs in the Place St. Pierre, Christian coughing and wheezing in the next room and trying out his English on me while begging sugar or coffee, the endless revving of engines and hooting of horns, and the rattling trains of the Metro shaking the foundations of the surrounding buildings.

And words flow from me in gouts, like blood from a severed and untended wrist.

***

Doctor Ishmael waited with me until the undertakers had gone. They seemed upset by the sheet and the fact that we hadn’t laid him down flat, but he would have been too heavy for us to handle without separating him from his dignity. So there he had sat until they came, still impressive under his shroud.

I saw him once more as they stretched him flat and laid him on the bier, but he no longer looked like Mr. Hugh, more like a statue or a plaster cast. I was reminded of television images of Lenin and Stalin effigies being tumbled as the communist regimes collapsed all over Europe - great busts and figures with fixed, kindly, fatherly, no-nonsense expressions, strangely inappropriate considering the undignified treatment they were receiving. Chipped, fallen, an irrelevance from the past, toppled in the dirt, yet eternally calm and resigned to their fate.

The front door dropped shut with a dull clatter that echoed around the silent house. I watched through the glass as the two men struggled to a mud-caked black van. Mr. Hugh being carried away in that anonymous vehicle troubled me. Then I realised a truth that brought me comfort. They only had the part he himself discarded; left behind like so much unwanted beach flotsam.

Heart failure can be a choice, I heard long ago, a wordless statement which implies, ‘it’ll only be more of the same. Another verse, another chorus. Variations on a theme by nature, out of life. And if that is how it is going to be, that is what I want. Out, of life. I choose this way to end it. Throw the switch. Extinguish the spark. Kill the light. Embrace the dark. I want no more of it.’

As the van started to puff blue exhaust and performed a U-turn in the road, I put a hand over my mouth in an attempt to stem the flow of tears building up behind my eyes.

I turned to the doctor.

‘Oh, Doctor Ishmael. I don’t know what to do.’

There were tears in his eyes as well as he embraced me clumsily. He and Mr. Hugh had been good friends and I realised, humbly, his loss was real too.

‘I’ll take care of everything,’ he said. ‘Did he wish to be flown back to Britain? He was never ill, was he.’

‘No, he was never ill. I can’t believe this has happened... a heart attack ... no warning.’

You say these things on the spur of the moment, it’s the shock. But I could believe it. He’d had enough, done enough. Life could not have got any better and he’d given up, ultimately bored by it all. Cheating decrepitude, cheating possible slow, painful decline. Showing his hand before the end of the game. Stepping away from the table before the dice turned against him.

Mr. Hugh was always a man of style.

‘Did he ever mention burial? Talk about his demise?’ Doctor Ishmael enquired, peering at my preoccupation.

‘Only once,’ I replied, pulling myself together. ‘Scatter my ashes on the sea, he said, then you can watch the waves and picture me there, a thousand million grains scattered over the seas from here to India. That way you’ll never get away from me! That’s what he said. It was probably a joke. He’d had some of his whisky and he was laughing. That was ages ago. You see, I always told him I’d go back to India if he ever tired of me.’

I suppose I meant I’d go back if he died before me. You always talk in riddles when saying what you mean is too painful.

Doctor Ishmael shook his head sadly. ‘Well, that might not be enough, I’m afraid. They’ll want to bury him. Take him back to England, no doubt. Did he have a solicitor?’

‘He’s in London. Mr. Hugh used to speak to him from time to time. The number must be in his desk. Oh, and I’ll have to let his literary agent know.’

He walked over to the French-window overlooking the balcony and traced his hand idly around the window frame as if testing for dust.

‘Will you be alright? Do you want my wife to come over to see you?’

‘Perhaps tomorrow, Doctor Ishmael. That would be kind. Perhaps tomorrow.’

***

Tuesday, the 14th June, 1955.

Undoubtedly the biggest challenges, in my life at least, concern relationships with the opposite sex. With men, I can have the kind of rational friendships that you pick up, enjoy and then set aside until the next time paths cross, like a favourite gramophone record or, inevitably, considering my calling, a good book. Male friendships are, for the most part, founded on common interest and shared opinion.

But with women, it’s totally different. The intimacy element hints at diminishing rational importance, as if sex resolves the equation of life. It’s as though, having nothing in common, the mathematics of the relationship is solved through sexual attraction alone. But it is simply not so. Women don’t behave as men do. For a start, they are much more demanding. Men usually come together as a consequence of some mutual pursuit and, the interest inevitably being banal and infinitely ’put downable’, so is the friendship. If, when I was in London, I felt like an evening of soccer-talk, I would go to see Phil and John in