Читать книгу Love Tastes Like Strawberries - Rosamund Haden - Страница 12

On Tuesday afternoon, without knowing it, Stella passes Françoise in the street on her way from Verve magazine. Françoise is walking to work at the Spar. Stella is on her way to pick up her car from the garage so that she can drive to her mother’s house in Ashville – the house she still hasn’t put on the market two years after her mother’s death. The mechanics have fixed the alternator, and assure her that her Corsa won’t break down.

“You’ve got a cellphone?”

“Yes,” she calls back, nearly reversing into a lamppost.

Stella has taken the rest of the week off work to research her article. “I have lined up dates,” she told Winter.

“What? During work?”

“Some of them can only make it during business hours. There’s a married man.”

“Good, that’s good, for the article, I mean,” says Winter.

Stella had sat at home in Woodstock trying to will words on to a page. By day two she couldn’t bear it. She still hadn’t heard from Timothy, her housemate was away on business; she stayed up all night walking around the house, listening in case someone was trying to break in.

On the road to Ashville, Stella pushes the CD into the player. Calming music fills the car. “Still your neurotic mind.” The Indian guru repeats the mantras. His mesmerising voice floats in the thick heat. But Stella can’t relax. She switches the meditation CD off and checks her cellphone again. Still no word from Timothy.

For a crazy moment as she drives out of town she thinks she might find him sitting in the hammock waiting for her on the stoep in Ashville. In the past he would often arrive at her mother’s house unexpectedly on a weekend when life got too much. He would escape to home cooking and warmth. He had adopted her mother as his own. His mother was cold and aloof and disappointed in him. On many evenings they would all sit under the blankets in the hammocks on the stoep and chat. They would drink wine and make a fire and the world would be kept at a safe distance.

Her mom would not be there now to let him in. And anything could have happened to the house over the winter. The plants might have died. The roof might have blown off. The mice might have eaten through her mother’s paintings or scratched away the paint. The bees might have broken through from under the floor and swarmed the rooms. She is not sure what she will find.

The road turns a sharp corner and Stella catches her breath. She is in the mountain pass that descends to the scrubland. The ground falls away steeply to the left, down to a river. She turns the radio on and looks straight ahead at the road, refusing to look down into the gorge. She knows that there might still be pieces of her mother’s car down there where it landed finally after crashing and falling and bursting into flame. Sometimes at night she sits bolt upright in bed woken by a nightmare – the sound of metal on metal as her mother’s car swerves into the truck, then tumbles over the rocks and crumples on impact at the edge of the water.

Sometimes in her dream her mother isn’t inside the car; sometimes she is on the far bank of the river, watching.

Stella is past the gorge now and the road is flat and empty of cars. The light is golden. The air is clearer. The road twists and turns through the valley. The mountains fold into one another, formed millions of years ago out of volcanic rock on the edge of the Karoo. She passes a farm advertising a wine tasting.

On a straight stretch of road she closes her eyes for a few seconds and lets go of the steering wheel.

I am space. I am free.

A truck hoots. She swerves on to the dirt; slams on the brakes; is thrown back in her seat. The car stalls.

It’s quiet.

Breathe.

Ten kilometres from Ashville she pulls off the tar on to the dirt road just before the bridge that crosses the river. She gets out and walks under the gum trees down to the dry river bed. The leaves crackle underfoot as she picks her way. The river is just a trickle, dried up by the summer heat. The air is warm and she can see pinpricks of light from the houses in the village through the branches of the trees. One year it rained so much that she and her mother stripped naked and bobbed in the rock pools. Stella should have packed up the house by now and put it on the market. But she can’t bring herself to do it. It is a part of the process of loss, her therapist had said. She dislikes her intensely.

Ashville is small and dusty and surrounded by apricot orchards and olive groves. Stella’s mother’s house is halfway up the main road on the left. The driveway is overgrown with yellow grass. Stella’s car bumps down it. The house looks neglected and in desperate need of paint, new window frames, a gutter. The plants in the garden are shrivelled with heat and the grass is yellow and dry. Stella feels a pang of guilt. On the stoep, waiting for her outside the front door, are what seems to be a year’s worth of apricot jam jars and a message.

Call when you’re at the house. The water is leaking in the back.

It’s from their next door neighbour, Mr Harding. Stella recognises his handwriting. She looks around, half expecting him to be watching her like a friendly troll, to appear from behind a tree in the apricot orchard. But there is nobody.

Twilight is deepening into darkness. A light that is on in the house next door is switched off; now there is no pool of light to guide her. Stella has to feel in the dark for the keyhole in the kitchen door.

She brushes the spiders’ webs from across the door, jiggles the key in the lock and pushes. As the door creaks open she is hit by the smell of rotten fruit. There are still plates in the sink covered with mould from her last visit months earlier. The dust rises as she dumps her bag on the floor and puts her laptop on the kitchen table. She fills the kettle and switches it on. The plug sparks and she sees where water has leaked down from the roof on to the electrics. She will have to get an electrician. But for now she moves the kettle to another plug and uses the laptop on battery mode. She plugs the dongle in, connects to the internet and waits for a message from Jude.

Stella had started trying to find others from the life drawing class. She had started with Jude and tried the philosophy department at the university. They remembered Jude. She had been a brilliant student. Brilliant but lazy, Stella thought. And, no, they couldn’t give out personal details, even if Stella was her aunt. At lunchtime she had plucked up courage to try Jude’s old digs. A long-haired student wrapped in a towel answered the door. He looked stoned. She waited while he pulled open a kitchen drawer overflowing with bits of paper: electricity bills, flyers for takeaway food, rizla papers. He rummaged around and produced a torn piece of newsprint.

“Here, you could try this.” He handed her the number and email address. “She left that ages ago. She said she’d come back to collect some furniture, but she hasn’t showed.”

Stella had tried the phone number the student had given her, but the woman who answered said Jude didn’t live there any more. She had sent Jude an email and waited, checking her inbox every few minutes until Marge sent her an email saying that Winter was standing right behind her.

Stella had been so absorbed she hadn’t noticed. Before Winter could say anything Stella had told her that she was emailing someone from the internet dating site – someone who had given her his name and email address. They had just got past the chatting stage. This was the set-up. “Man about Town” had become Jack, who was interested in coffee, found long hair a turn-on and knew how to “treat a lady”. Winter had nodded and said she was glad it was progressing. That’s when Stella had decided to take it a step further, and the “married man” research had presented itself. Winter had given her a week. Stella needed time to find them, the other members of the life drawing class. It was “perfect”.

The reception in Ashville isn’t great. She struggles to connect. When she does her inbox is empty. She makes herself another cup of tea and waits, staring at the screen. And then it lights up. A message.

Hello Stella. It’s Jude. You know, from long ago. Remember me? I need your number. We need to talk.

As if Stella hadn’t sent her an email. As if Jude had tracked her down. She sends Jude her cellphone number and spookily quickly the phone rings, like Jude has been sitting over her computer, waiting. There are voices in the background but Stella can’t hear them clearly. She knows she is listening for Luke.

“Where have you been?” says Jude with the same intense urgency in her voice that Stella remembers. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you. I have your jersey. You remember, the one I borrowed that evening, at Ivor’s party, the one I gatecrashed. I’m holding it ransom.”

“Ivor is dead.”

“I know.”

“So you read the obituary.”

There is silence.

“Did you read the obituary?” Stella repeats trying to hear the voices in the background.

“Yes.” Stella can’t tell if Jude is lying.

“I need to see Timothy,” Jude says.

Something catches in Stella’s throat. “Timothy’s not at home. He’s away,” she says defensively.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

Stella knows Jude is smoking from the breaks between her words. She’s exhaling smoke in small puffs. But where? In a digs somewhere with Luke? Camped out on someone’s floor?

“Hey, I’ll meet you outside Ivor’s house on Monday at four,” Jude says. “We need to talk.”

After Stella puts the phone down she regrets agreeing to go to Ivor’s house again. It is not a good place to meet. What if Tony is there, or that girl? She tries to phone Jude back to arrange another place. But the line is dead.

Stella makes herself toast with apricot jam then goes out on to the stoep. On the hill on the outskirts of the village, across the apricot orchards and dusty olive trees, Stella can see Margaret Booth’s house presiding. She is the self-appointed mayoress of Ashville and she knows everything that goes on in the village. The lights are on. Margaret Booth is in residence. She has many houses scattered around the globe. She must have returned from summer in the north. She is a swallow. “More like a fat partridge,” Mr Harding always joked.

The air is cooler now that it’s dark. The bats flit between the trees in the apricot orchards next door.

As Stella stands out on the stoep she looks across the hedge to the house next door. A light is switched on again. A shadow passes across the closed curtain like a shadow puppet. And then is gone. Stella stares. The house has been on the market for over a year, since the couple who had tried self-sufficiency in the country had returned to jobs in the city.

She runs across the dry grass to the olive tree near the fence and crouches down and watches. There the shadow is again, silhouetted against the curtain. It’s a man. He walks across the room and sits down at a table. She can see the outline of a jacket and trousers as he hunches over something at the table. A computer? Is he typing? She waits to see if anyone else will join him but no one does.

Stella stays in the same position for five minutes, afraid that if she turns or walks away the noise will alert the man next door. Her legs are beginning to ache and she feels idiotic. No sensible person would do this. What she is doing is weird, but a lot of what she does is labelled “weird” by those who stick more rigorously to the rules. She watches as he stands up and walks towards the windows. The curtains are pulled open and she ducks further down. He looks out into the dark and for a moment she is terrified he has seen her. Then he pulls the curtains shut again.

Back on the stoep her heart is pounding. She checks her cellphone – nothing from Timothy, a plz call me from Marge.

In her mother’s room she takes off her clothes. It’s hot. She lies naked.

Favourite holiday destination – India.

A page her mother tore out of an old National Geographic magazine is stuck on the door of her old wooden wardrobe above the mirror. The moon is hanging over the Ganges, reflected in the stirring water.

Stella closes her eyes, stares across the water and sees her mother on the opposite bank, waving and laughing. She is wearing a bright pink sari.