“Why, do you admire it?”
“How can I? I have no information, do I? I don’t have a basis, to admire or not admire. Oh, I know about them going to prison— but even Emma won’t say much, and so you wonder what really happened and whether they …”
“Were tortured,” Robin said.
She gazed at her brother. “I’ve never been able to say it.”
“It is hard to say. I’ve practiced.”
“But then again I ask myself, why were they there in the first place? It was only a kind of colonialism. I put that to Dad once, but he said, we did what seemed right at the time. And I know he is good, he is practical, he does help people now and I expect he helped them then. But what use would I be?”
“If you go off to some place in Africa,” Robin said, “it won’t be to do something for the country, it will be to do something for yourself.”
“Do you know what frustrates me?” she said. “That I was born there, in Bechuanaland—Botswana, it is now— but I don’t have any memories.”
When she thought of Africa she thought of a clean place, full of light and air, the sun so hot that everything was sterilized, scoured clean by its glare. When she saw the pitiful babies on the famine posters it damaged the image she held inside. She did not know what to think when she saw the pictures from South Africa: glum men in suit jackets and woolen hats, trudging by railway tracks, and smoke blowing into a granite sky.
“I do remember one thing,” she said. “No, two things really. The first thing I remember is the feeling of heat.”
“Hardly strange,” Robin said.
“Yes, it seems obvious—but do you think that your body has memories that your mind doesn’t have access to?” She thought, heat seemed knitted into me; it was as if the sun were moulded into my flesh. “Even now, I’m surprised if I’m cold. It seems unnatural, it doesn’t seem right.” She paused, looking up at him to see if he was following her. “There is another thing, a little thing—we had a nurse, I asked Mum and she said her name was Felicia. She used to carry me on her back. I remember my cheek pressed between her shoulder blades, the feel of it, the heat of her skin through her dress. Isn’t that funny? I must have been very small. And then I remember Julian—I must have been older then, and I must have been in my cot or somewhere—I remember seeing Julian on her back, being carried the same way, with his head turned sideways, and fat legs dangling down. And knowing exactly what he felt—your head skewed against her spine, the bone at your …” she hesitated, “your temple, I suppose, though you didn’t have such words, that feeling of each separate bone in her spine, and skin against hot skin, just this layer of cotton between.”
“That’s odd,” Robin said.
“Yes.”
“I mean—because Julian wasn’t born in Africa.”
“Surely,” Kit said. “Because I saw him.”
“No. You can’t have. Add it up. Count on your fingers. Julian was born after they came home.”
“Who then? Who do I remember?”
A silence. They turned it over in their minds. Kit thought, I do remember Felicia: her skin smelled of onions and harsh soap. Robin said, “Perhaps you remember wrong. You were a baby yourself. Perhaps you think you remember, but you’ve made it up.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not wrong. Could it have been a neighbor’s child? That must have been it. But what neighbors? I’ve asked them, you know, what was it like? They’ve always said, it was very remote, there was only us.”
“Insofar as they’ve said anything.” Robin yawned, threw out his arms; but she had his attention, he was listening to her now, and this was an act, which said, I wish to distract myself from the thought in my head. “Don’t you think it must have been Felicia’s child?” he asked. “Her own baby?”
“No,” she said. “Not Felicia’s child, a white child. It was Julian. Surely?”
Again, a silence. Then Robin got up and went to the kitchen and made more coffee for them, and brought it back, cool and comfortless as the first mug had been, put it into Kit’s hands. Kit said, “Do you remember Joan? That woman who cut her wrists in the kitchen?”
“No. When was that?”
“You’d be six, maybe seven.”
“There, you see,” Robin said cautiously. “I ought to remember. Memory’s odd, it doesn’t work like it should. It’s unreliable.”
“I think they kept it from you,” Kit said. “You’d be out playing somewhere.”
“What happened?”
“I bandaged her up. Then she disappeared—took her things and went. I often wondered where she ended up.”
“Dad probably knows.”
“Yes.” Kit sighed. “We labor in his shadow. At least, that’s what I was telling Daniel. Or something of that sort.”
They sat on until it was three o’clock and they were stiff with cold, Kit sunk into her own thoughts, and Robin into his; then without a word they stirred, stretched, rose from their chairs. At the top of the stairs, Kit said, “Robin, another area of mystery is this. The heart complaint. Mum’s heart complaint that she’s supposed to have. I used to wonder why, if she had heart trouble, she never seemed ill. But do you think it might have been the other kind of heart complaint? Like when people say ’she has a broken heart’?”
