Rewards and Dilemmas , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Craig Low Roderick

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114 pages

English

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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.

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Romance

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	14 mars 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782344797
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
REWARDS AND DILEMMAS
A NOVEL
by
Roderick Craig Low

Publisher Information
Published in 2012
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2012 Roderick Craig Low
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The right of Roderick Craig Low to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Dedication
For Chantal
With 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 11 th 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 ulti