Hotel Juliet

by Belinda Seaward

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Memory Cougan, black and in her twenties, has a successful career and an adoring fiance. But at her engagement party, she panics. Brought to London aged five, she has no recollection of Africa, or why she left. Leaving Adam behind, she returns to a place she no longer recognises - and to Max, the coffee planter who may have the answers. But Memory's journey of discovery is not hers alone to make. For Max, hardened by years in the bush, her arrival will reawaken memories of the most intense time in his life and of his beloved aeroplane, Hotel Juliet. For Elise, her adoptive mother, Memory's flight threatens to reveal the truth of what really happened in Africa all those years ago. Moving from Britain to Africa over twenty years, Hotel Juliet combines pathos and tragedy with the possibility of glorious redemption to tell the poignant story of a passionate love triangle that resonates down to the present day.

Release date: January 3, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

IF YOU ARE LOST

If you are really lost and have no idea of your position, this is the time to take a firm hold of yourself and make up your mind that you are not going to be in a hurry to get down, but that you are going to fly round in the hope of finding an aerodrome up to the last safe half-hour of your fuel.

Zambia, 1972

They removed his left leg in the morning. By the evening he was awake and at first felt no pain because they had given him morphine. His right arm was pierced by the line that fed blood into his vein and the first thing he saw was the transfusion pouch hanging engorged above his head like a dark ripe fruit.

A nurse came and gave him water. She was young with a long face and large liquid eyes. She wore her cap far back on her head, showing her braided hairline divided into minute sections on her bluish scalp. ‘Drink,’ she commanded in her soft African accent.

He couldn’t speak. The rim of the cup felt thick against his lips. His throat was drier than he had ever known. The nurse watched him steadily as he tried to drink.

‘More.’ He took a sip and handed her the cup. She checked his pulse, holding his eyes, her expression intense as if she had lost something precious.

He slept. When he woke there was a doctor by his bed and the same nurse with the same vehement look in her eyes. The doctor, a tall man in his late thirties with a clean-shaven head and palms the colour of balsa wood, nodded briefly before turning the sheet. A bridge had been placed over the mattress to raise the bed clothing so that no material touched his raw skin. As he turned the sheet the doctor made a sucking sound through his teeth. The nurse leaned forward to look and the doctor pointed out something. Craning over the narrow expanse of his bed, they looked at his leg as if it were something of deep and sympathetic interest. Max wondered if there was any mutilation that frightened them, any agony they could not meet with their soft, dark eyes. How might they have responded if one of their own children had been lying in his place? Would they have turned away then?

His leg had been severed a few inches above the knee and was wrapped in white bandages, already soiled with blood and yellow fluid. There was a slightly sweet, sulphurous smell that reminded him of mussels slowly turning bad on hot rocks at low tide. The skin on his thigh had been shaved and felt flat and cool to touch, not like skin at all, more like cold, white paper. Below the knee, the missing part of his leg itched; even though it had been cut from him, it still itched and burned.

The nurse gently pulled the sheet back across the bridge. She smoothed down the white folds across his chest, but did not touch him. He looked at her. She had one of those kind African faces that glow with a sort of protected goodness. She must have been only twenty or so, but her features were those of someone much older and more experienced in the world. He swallowed. The nurse asked if he wanted water. He shook his head; his throat was filled with tears and he did not want to give way in front of her because he felt that if he allowed himself to break he would never be able to gather himself up in one piece again. He shifted away from her. She remained by the bed for a few moments and then walked away down the ward where some men called out to her in her own language. By the time she had reached the double doors of the ward his pillow was soaked.

He wondered what they had done with the rest of his leg. It seemed odd to him that such a large part of his own body was now somewhere he didn’t know about. He would like to have had the missing limb next to him, in a box by his bed, so that he could lean over every now and then and check it. For some reason he thought of it as a child, a newborn with its umbilical cord still attached, skin puckered and bruised. The thought of it made him yearn in a way he might have yearned for any sick creature to survive.

After the shooting his leg had suffocated. Dry gangrene had developed, killing tissue, destroying muscles, tendons, ligaments, bone; all the internal engineering before turning his skin black as charred meat. The crepitation was not painful, it rendered his leg drily unconscious, sloughing the skin from his toes, turning them grey and silky. All his nails came off and sometimes he would catch his thigh on a sharp piece of himself snagged inside the folds of the sheets. He felt the decaying leg as a heavy presence; the more diseased it became the heavier it got until it seemed to be the whole weight of him. It was his entire body. It governed all his thoughts and moods, and infected his memories and dreams. It had become everything he had amounted to, and he fully expected it to kill him.

Joshua had looked after him at Marsden’s old bush house where Max had dragged himself like an animal. The elderly cook, who had looked after Wing Commander Marsden in his last days when the malaria fever had pinned him to his bed, was used to sickness. He brought Max tea made from bush herbs and roots and tried to coax him to eat from the bowl of nshima he brought every morning. Max could only manage a few spoonfuls of the sticky yellow maize porridge before he felt full. He drank the bush tea gratefully. Even though he expected to die, he didn’t want to dishonour the cook by refusing his offering.

Max waited for death, stoically bearing his injury, expecting the gangrene to travel up through the rest of his body, devouring him with its toothless jaws. He had turned into a kind of food for the disease, a hump of flesh that was being sucked dry piece by piece. He knew the state of his leg worried Joshua because when he came to clean it with a freshly boiled cloth he sometimes closed his eyes as if in denial of what he saw.

One bright afternoon the door burst open, disturbing the mosquito nets across the bed and Joshua announced that the security guard wanted to see Max. Geoff Seven was dressed in uniform. He was much thinner than when Max has last seen him and ignored questions about what had happened to him. With a tight look on his face he lifted Max from his bed and carried him out to a waiting jeep.

The guard had driven fast across the bush, jolting in and out of the holes that pocked the road like the marks of small dark explosions. Max had shuddered in the back, cold sweating inside the blanket Geoff had placed over him, the trees passing overhead in a nauseous spin. At a crossroads they stopped and the guard twisted round to check on him. When he saw the spewed mess on the blanket he got out and with a deliberate motion went over to the side of the road where he picked a handful of dry grass. He returned to the jeep, puffing slightly, and then gently used the grass to mop up the vomit from the blanket. Then, in an extraordinary gesture, he took off his uniform shirt and wiped the sourness from Max’s face.

They set off again, Geoff driving more slowly this time, his eyes flickering to the back, his body tense inside an immaculate white vest, the soiled green shirt smirched into a ball on the passenger seat beside him.

It was dark by the time they reached the hospital. Max had woken to the feel of gentle hands lifting him from the jeep and on to a trolley. Geoff had stood apart, drinking a Pepsi, his eyes streaked with red. Max had put his hand out to him as he was wheeled inside and the guard had nodded. Max knew he would get back into the jeep and drive the eight hours back across the bush just as soon as he had finished his drink.

The guard would still have been driving as they removed his leg. The operation took less time than the journey, and he would not have reached the plantation by the time Max was awake. He imagined the guard would make the journey again just as soon as he had been to the police. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he would not come again. He would get to hear about it, though – how the police had come and placed Max under hospital arrest.

But by the end of the first week no one had come. A month passed and then another and gradually Max stopped waiting, although there was still a part of him that remained alert, like a dog sleeping with one ear cocked for danger. He asked to be moved closer to a window because of not being able to breathe at night, and the orderly pushed his bed across the ward. He left the window open with the fly screen pulled across.

It was a little easier near the window although he could still hear the sounds in the surgical ward, the mutterings and occasional screams of the other patients that filtered through the faded green curtains around his bed. The hospital was owned by a mine company and trucks arrived daily with new casualties, mostly young men with broken, crushed or missing limbs from mining accidents. They were pushed on to the ward on trolleys, silent after their amputations, stumps bound in clean, new bandages.

The trucks provided a rhythm for his days. From his bed he could hear them coming and going, wheels scratching across the dirt, sending up plumes of white dust that billowed into the sky like smoke. His world became a patch of sky covered by fly mesh through which he would watch clouds moving with agonizing slowness. There were never two moments when the sky was the same. It endlessly shifted, the clouds forming new lakes and valleys every hour. He saw jets and small planes and once a dark powerful mass of eagle, feathered wing tips like ragged black gloves streaming against the blue bowl of sky. Sometimes when he woke there would be such a strange pure light around the rim of the clouds that he almost could not bear to look.

As he lay inert, his mind turned over his time of flight. He recalled the journeys he’d taken to Landless Corner, following the line of the Great North Road, which wound like a dry red river through the flat open country, then over to the Lukanga Swamp before turning back across the plantation fields where his coffee pickers worked, bent in the middle, like people broken in half. He remembered ground lessons with the wing commander, the flying manual he read nightly when the old man was dying, the effects of rudder, airspeed, gliding approaches, sideslipping across wind, climbing, gliding and stalling. His first solo. Lying in his hospital bed, he relived every lesson in detail, recounting entire pages of the manual by heart, its homely phrases ringing clear in his mind as if someone were speaking them aloud to him. Sometimes he felt that the flying manual was the only thing holding him together. It stopped him from falling.

The wound around his stump became infected and Max saw more of the doctor who spoke quietly around him as if he were a sick horse. The doctor’s fingers were cool as he searched his arm for veins, his forehead smooth, untroubled by the process of dealing with disease that seemed to Max to be the worst kind of attack on humanity, so muted were the patients, so profoundly bound up in themselves. The infection made his blood race, his body swim with sweat. At night he woke trapped in a sticky lake of his own making, a great pounding in his ears that sounded like drums, but was actually his own heartbeat. The nurse bathed his forehead with cloths soaked in iced water. The pouch of blood was exchanged for a clear bag of saline solution and clean white sheets were pulled on to his bed. He was watched at night. At some point he became delirious and begged the nurse to cut the saline bag down because he believed it to be poisoned by soul thieves. The nurse sat solemnly by his bed, a bag of knitting in her lap, eyes the colour of infinity. She lifted his hands and put them on his chest whenever he tried to snatch the IV line.

He spent days drifting in and out of consciousness, the limb aflame under the sheet, tormenting him with its absence. He could feel the impact of the bullet, the actual moment when his hamstrings tightened, his ligaments popped, his bone ruptured. His missing knee ached and when he moved it pieces of grit grated together under his skin. He was so convinced that his leg was still attached that many times during the night he would drag down the sheet to look, thinking perhaps that there had been a mistake, that they had taken someone else’s leg instead. The bandages and oozing stump seemed incomprehensible, a trick of some kind. He did not understand how he could feel pain in something that no longer existed. How could he flex toes that were no longer there, or turn his ankle, or bend his knee? Maybe he was suffering from some kind of mental disorder that made him see things as missing when they were present. Or maybe he was under some kind of black magic curse. He didn’t want to believe this, but he could not rule it out. The doctor said his experience was normal. He explained that the limb was a kind of phantom, which in time would disappear.

Gradually the infection subsided and he was able to look at the sky again. He felt weak and not quite inside himself and he had lost a great deal of weight. His arm felt hollow as if his muscles and tendons had melted, leaving only the remains of dry bone. Further down, his hip bones protruded into sharp points that snagged against his exploring hand. He didn’t dare go any lower. The nurse fed him nshima, but he was unable to keep anything down for long and regurgitated a thin yellow stream from the side of his mouth. She wiped his chin and persisted.

One morning he woke to a full white sky. Standing by his bed was a woman in a pale apricot dress and he was momentarily confused, thinking that he had somehow summoned her from his memory, creating her phantom presence. He sat up and the woman moved a few paces closer. She had drawn her hair back and was carefully made up as if for a dinner party with two pearl drops swinging lightly from her ears. She looked for somewhere to sit down, but there was no chair near his bed and so she stood awkwardly, her eyes staring at the tented expanse of sheet drawn over his body.

It was a moment before either could speak.

‘Max,’ she said carefully and lowered her eyes. She brought her thumbnail up to her mouth and twisted it against her teeth. Her hands were rough and seemed older than her face. He had forgotten how young she was. She was really no more than a girl. She let out a long breath and pulled at her lower lip and then in a sudden impatient movement pulled her hands down and clenched them in front of her.

‘What are you doing here, Elise?’ The words came out harsher than he intended.

She flinched. ‘I needed to see if you were …’ She pulled her eyes down, unable to complete what she meant to say.

He looked at her and then turned away. Through the window the sky rolled and tumbled heavily, the white clouds seeming to strain against a powerful force that was trying to break them open.

She took a step closer, but stopped just short of the bed. ‘I’m so sorry, Max,’ she said gently, her eyes aghast. ‘I came before, a few weeks ago, but they wouldn’t let me see you.’

He closed his eyes. He felt tired and he did not know how to talk to her.

‘I won’t stay long,’ she said. ‘They told me not to tire you.’ He could hear her breathing, the slight wheeze he remembered. ‘I just wanted you to know that we’ve made all the arrangements.’

He thought she meant prison, but she continued: ‘The police have dropped the charges.’

‘It was my gun.’

‘Look at me, Max.’

He kept his eyes closed, his head turned. He knew it would be far worse if he faced her. ‘I know what happened.’

‘But you mustn’t speak about it.’ Her voice wavered. ‘Tambo admitted shooting a white man; there’s nothing for you to worry about. You are free.’

He continued to stare at the sky. He understood that she needed some version of events that she could believe in, some story that she could live with.

‘Look at me,’ she said again. ‘Why won’t you look at me?’

He summoned his strength. ‘You must tell them the truth.’

He heard her gasp. ‘I can’t. Max, they nearly killed you. They could come back, even here.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It makes no difference what happens to me now.’

She moved closer and reached out and touched his shoulder. He flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and pulled her hand away. He remained where he was, facing her with his back, the touch of her skin burning into his mind.

‘I also came to tell you that the little girl is with me. I went looking for her after …’ She swallowed and he listened to her breathing snag. ‘Her name is Memory. She’s been living with me in the house, and it’s helping … we’re helping each other really. My father has come over. He’s made the arrangements. We want to take her home with us; we’re waiting for the recommendation from the welfare officer. It will be a new start for all of us, Max.’

He heard wrenching hope in her words. She continued, her voice barely faltering even though she had now begun to cry. ‘You’ll recover. I know you will. You’re a survivor. Nothing can beat you, Max, I’ve always felt that. You’re indestructible. The strongest person I know.’

He thought she would leave then, but she stood quietly by the bed, no longer crying. ‘I love you,’ she said and he heard defiance in her voice. He envied her courage. She was the one who would survive. She was young enough to forget. He heard her inhale sharply. ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you,’ she said in a whisper. He knew she would leave soon. He hadn’t told her. He would never tell her. He couldn’t express how much he felt for her because now it was impossible. She was the horizon of his life, the point he would always look towards. He waited for the longest possible moment before turning to look at her.

Her hair had loosened in the humidity and the make-up around her eyes had smudged, but the impression he had was that she was now freshened. She wiped her nose with a tissue and swept back a few strands of hair that had fallen forward on to her cheeks. She looked at him with shining eyes. Max felt his throat constrict. He tried to speak but all the words he considered in his mind sounded inadequate for an experience he held infinitely in his soul. He reached for her hand.

She cried again. He felt her hot tears on his wrist. ‘It wasn’t wrong,’ she said, looking at their hands held together on the white sheet. ‘It can’t ever be wrong to love another person. That wasn’t why it happened.’

He let his eyes rest in hers for the last time.

After she’d gone he lay without moving in the bed. The hospital was silent around him, most of the patients sleeping through the hot afternoon. The air felt thick and humid, its flat heat rebuking the emotions that had been stirred. Max closed his eyes and saw an image of Paul Cougan’s open face, swivelling round on a barber’s red chair, laughing.

The doctor and then the nurse appeared and both found chores to do around the wounded limb. It seemed as if a long time had passed before they pulled the green curtains around his bed and left him alone with his thoughts. The delay between Elise leaving and him lying with the lights lowered, the sounds subdued, the pain pinned with a new dose of morphine, had fooled Max into thinking he would not react. The first splutterings were reflexive and closer to the sensation of vomiting than sobbing. But then it came, an outpouring of rain, a buckling grief that flung him to depths of pain he did not know existed. It was as if all the departures of his life, all the losses, frustrations and disappointments had happened to him all at once. These two people he had loved. These two people had given themselves to him, both of them had handed themselves over, and he would have to live with the knowledge that he had let them down. He had not been careful enough. He had ignored what he knew, and now the shame he felt, the deep flooding of humiliation caused him to cry out, and he bit on the pillow to muffle the sound.

The next day they taught him how to walk. As the nurse lifted him from the bed, her arms warm across his back, he realized that he was being shown how it would be from now on. He was entering the second half of his life whether he wanted to or not: the transition from air to being on the ground.

He was wheeled in a chair to a small and dirty hot room with a bundle of sticks in the corner all leaning against one another. He wasn’t asked to choose. The nurse made the decision for him: a pair of crutches with the arm rests padded with a worn strip of red towel. The nurse got him to stand. He felt eerie, suddenly giant. A floaty sensation bloomed in his head as the nurse helped him on to the crutches. ‘Try, just try,’ she said, even though he made no attempt to resist. He swung between the crutches and tried to adjust to his new lopsided weight. He did not know how to orient himself. What had been joined up and obvious before was now broken. The nurse put her hand on his shoulder and urged him forward. He took a halting, limping lurch on the crutches and tottered, feeling the rough pads dig under his armpits. ‘Good,’ the nurse said.

After his first lesson, he practised alone. Swinging on his crutches, he realized how delicate a two-legged skeleton was. To lose a limb was to lose a way of seeing. He had no idea of how he walked because he had never had to think about it until now. He had simply relied on his body to remember what to do and he had to learn to ignore what was stored there because it was useless to him. Pushing forward, leading with his chest like a butterfly swimmer, he thrashed his way through his first strokes, measuring his progress by the squares on the tiled floor. It took him ten days to reach the end of the corridor.

When he grew stronger he explored the hospital, lurching by the kitchens where staff in blue hairnets stood over huge aluminium basins. They did not look up as he went past. Now he was moving he was invisible, no longer a patient to be watched over as a matter of life or death, but someone on the fringes, in limbo. The doctor who had treated him so kindly even failed to recognize him one morning. Max understood that he was no longer part of the place, but it was unclear whether he was free to go. There seemed to be no one who made such decisions.

The skies continued monotonously white and heavy and he knew the rains would begin soon. His early morning excursions around the hospital took on a new urgency. He didn’t want to be stuck on the ward during the rains. He wanted to be back on the farm, smelling the rain and dirt and feeling part of the outside again. His foreman had been to visit once and told him that the coffee was the healthiest it had ever been. With good rains this season Max would be harvesting his best crop yet. Grimly he swung his body on the rickety crutches and tried to harden his mind to thoughts of profit.

The rains broke through one morning as he lurched down the corridor. When he returned to his bed there was Geoff Seven dressed in a fawn suit, trousers hemmed with a band of red mud, his waxed shoes splattered at the sides. The guard sat quietly, hands held gently in prayer. He looked up as Max approached and bowed his head. In one hand he held a slightly crumpled caramel-coloured hat. Propped up against the bed was a pair of dark wooden crutches.

A little while later the nurse brought his things and the security guard helped him dress. The familiar clothes were bigger than Max remembered; the shorts waistband slipped down past his navel and his shirt billowed across the shoulders. Even his boot seemed to have increased in size. It slopped against his white ankle as he stood one-legged, leaning against the guard who tusked as he laced him up, as if he were telling off a child.

When Max had finished dressing, the guard took a step back and nodded his head firmly. His eyes were gently lit. He thrust out a large dark grey hand, enfolded Max’s hand in his and drew it up to his chest in a warm capacious grip, more of cradle than a shake.

Max met his eyes. Immediately the guard dropped his hand and lowered his own gaze. His arms hung straight by his sides, his pose resembling that of a mournful grey heron. The expression signalled deep courtesy towards the other person. Nothing spoken could have said as much and Max knew he had been forgiven, even though he did not understand why.

The guard helped him on to the new crutches, turning away as Max made his first movements. Then he collected his hat from the bedside and placed it on his head, pinching the top to ensure it sat at the right angle. He let Max lead, walking slowly alongside him down the ward and out to the front of the hospital building where new trucks were coming in, churning up the ground which smelled of rain.

2

FORWARD FLIGHT

In their forward flight the wings attack the air at an angle (angle of incidence). The wings therefore resist forward flight; this is known as DRAG.

London, 1996

Memory makes her last call of the day to a photographer caught in traffic at Victoria. ‘Can you take the photocall at Christie’s tomorrow at ten?’

‘So long as it’s not rock star stuff.’ The photographer’s voice splinters. ‘Hang on, let me pull over.’

Holding the phone away from her ear, she waits, glancing up at the wall-mounted television where the early evening news begins with the sound turned down low.

‘Memory, I can’t fucking hang about …’

‘Sorry.’ She pulls the receiver closer, still watching the TV screen where the Princess of Wales leaves the London Lighthouse. The photographer sighs. ‘Forget it,’ she says. ‘I’ll book someone else. You still OK with the premiere tonight?’

‘I’m on my way to put the ladders up now.’ The photographer’s voice fades into the surrounding violence of traffic and then comes back like an echo. ‘If I ever get out of here.’

She laughs. ‘Maybe see you later?’

‘I’ll try.’ His voice is spiky with tension.

She disconnects and draws a line through the photocall. She won’t send anyone to Christie’s. The Japanese magazines will have to fill their pages with something else. The press agency she works for as diary editor feeds the world with photo features. From Norway to New Zealand, Britain is misrepresented as a land of green hills and large breasts; a milky village offering silver spoons, sporting heroics, slinky girl groups, kitten rescue homes and vintage motorcycle clubs in the form of a curdling culture. She wonders sometimes what the readers of these foreign magazines must think when they visit London and find not the promised land of Burberry rain bonnets, but a dark, spewing, hot-headed place.

The red light on her desk phone flashes. ‘Memory, call on line two, your mother.’

She hesitates then buzzes the operator. ‘Tell her I’m on another call.’

Putting the phone down, she goes through the jobs for the next day: Planet Hollywood, Tower Bridge, Prince Edward’s Theatre, all covered. That just leaves the job in Brighton: the Holiday from Humanity Club featuring Bob and Sarah who intend to gallop across the beach wearing nothing but zebra body paint. Memory reads the accompanying press release. ‘We find freedom in expressing ourselves as animals.’

‘Bunch of freaks,’ Adam, one of the staff photographers, snorts behind her. He starts to massage her shoulders. ‘Relax, you’re so scrunched and tense.’ His fingers find dull sore patches and prod them into points of pain.

‘You’re making it worse.’ She squirms away from him.

He makes a face at her and drifts off to the knot of people gathered under the TV. She knows he enjoys this time of day, the half-hour wind-down when people leave their light boxes and talk to one another as human beings. At this time of day her colleagues are fresh and enthusiastic, confiding and joky as they never are during the grim hours of the morning or long headachy afternoons. She watches Adam talk to a thin young man dressed in clothes so outsized he appears to be emerging from a collapsed army tent. Most of the staff dress this way – drab, utilitarian, surprisingly fussy – but just occasionally one of the girls will come in wearing a flirty vintage coat or pair of pastel leather boots and everyone will talk about it all day.

Adam touches the tall young man on the shoulder, using his fingertips to move him slightly so that he can see the TV better. For some reason this tiny gesture enrages her. Then Adam turns and looks at her. He mouths something; she doesn’t know what he’s saying because she’s still feeling hot with outrage. He looks over at the group under the TV and then back to her. This time the mouthed words are deafening, as if he’d shouted them across the office. ‘Love yoo.’ His mouth stays in the shape of the ‘yoo’ for a moment, a cartoon blown kiss. One or two people have picked up the semaphore, including Aidan from the library who sends Adam an affectionately mirrored ‘fuck yoo’ before sliding his eyes back to the TV screen. But Adam can’t turn back immediately; he needs a response from her, some kind of confirming gesture. It’s there: a minute, hard panic in his eyes, which won’t go away until she does something. Without thinking she lifts her hand with her palm facing towards him and sees him actually flinch, as if the air had slapped him.

She thinks of last night’s dinner with Adam and her mother. They’d gone to one of those incredibly expensive, highly uncomfortable places in Hampstead with metal seats that dig into the soft part of the back. Elise, who had a top job in medical research, had paid; she always did, and she’d sat next to Adam, quite close so that their