A Feeling in My Bones

A Feeling in my Bones

by

Gervase Shorter

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2011 Gervase Shorter

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DISCLAIMER

‘A Feeling in my Bones’ is a work of fiction and all of the characters in it

are imaginary. Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

Prologue

Most of the time I´m too scared to go out of the house but once in a while I pluck up my courage and go for a walk along one of the shady, winding streets in this hilltop district of the city. Usually there aren´t too many people about but, all the same, I take care to wear dark glasses and pull my hat well down. I´ve also got into the local habit of avoiding direct eye contact with any men I happen to pass because in these parts direct eye contact is taken as a come-on.

It´s August now and spring is starting in this beautiful, dangerous southern city. It´s beginning to get a little warmer though the winter that´s just finished was so dry and mild that I never felt the need for anything more than a light pullover. Up here on our hilltop butterflies with big, bright blue, iridescent wings have started to flit about among the trees. In three months or so it will be high summer, blisteringly hot, so they say, but it will also be the rainy season, when the bougainvillea will come out again in all the gardens in this pleasant, quiet old part of town, whether I´m still here to see it or not.

I´ve also found a steep flight of ancient stone steps worn smooth by generations of feet, descending from the top of the ridge all the way down to sea level, or thereabouts. Roughly half way down there´s a spot shaded by a huge old mango tree where I sometimes sit and read a book. From there you can see down to the bay with the ships sailing in and out and also the shuttle flights taking off and landing at the little city airport. The steps must have been built ages ago, when all traffic was still horse drawn and almost nobody uses them nowadays so I don´t feel too unsafe when I sit there. The fact that the steps are so little used also makes them a convenient spot for putting out offerings to the black gods whose cult the slaves brought with them across the Atlantic. Sometimes I find that a rough earthenware bowl has been left with some rice and beans in it, occasionally a glass of cane spirit and a cheap cigar, or else a black cockerel, its throat cut, lying in a pool of blood. These offerings provide a feast for the thin cats that prowl the streets but no humans dare to touch them.

The police are looking for me. I´ve seen their ads on TV and there are posters stuck to lamp posts even up here in this quiet corner of town, with a photograph of me and the offer of a reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Sara Forrester, an English lady who has disappeared. I´ve tried to disguise myself by dying my hair but the photographs are still recognizably me and though the reward might not be considered much in England, it´s a fortune here where most people are so poor. I´ve asked my friends whether the servants in their house might not be tempted to turn me in. After all, there are five of them – the caretaker/odd job man who lives in a cottage at the end of the garden, the cook, the chauffeur and the two cleaning ladies who come in every day from one of the slums a mile or two away, at the other end of the ridge. The reward would be enough for one of them to retire on. My friends say no, their servants would never do that but I still can´t help having my doubts.

And what would happen if the police did find me? They aren´t like the friendly copper you´d meet on a street corner back home. The rules – or lack of them – are different here. During my three months´ stay I´ve picked up a bit of the language and now I can read the papers and watch television so I know a bit about what awaits anybody hauled off to a police station - usually a series of beatings to extract a confession and then a ghastly medieval style prison, often so overcrowded that the wretched prisoners have to take it in turns to lie down on the filthy concrete floor. And they´re not always let out even when they´ve served their sentence.

Luckily, there aren´t too many policemen about in this quiet part of town. Once in a while you see a couple of them in their navy blue baseball caps and bullet proof jackets lounging outside a bar or else a police car tears past full of policemen clutching guns, their muzzles sticking out of the windows and then, a few minutes later, you hear the long bursts of automatic gun fire coming from a nearby slum, the police helicopters whirl by overhead and then, later still, you hear the wail of the ambulances. There are also the so-called civilian police who don´t wear uniforms so I have no way of telling how many of them there are round here. Their techniques are more sophisticated and are known to include electric shock treatment applied to the kidneys and genitals. And I´m sure there must be others looking for me, plenty of them probably, all very keen to get their hands on the reward.

And what would happen if they did succeed in discovering the whereabouts of the English lady who´s disappeared? Well, the newspapers regularly report what they call ‘clandestine cemeteries’. They´re mostly discovered on the outskirts of the city, where the shanties give way to scrub and long grass, and sometimes they contain as many as several hundred shallow graves. The police don´t investigate them - and for an obvious reason: everyone knows it was the police who put the bodies there but that´s not something they can be expected to admit to and anyway there´s not much point in an investigation because by the time somebody discovers the cemetery the police will have forgotten who the victims were.

It´s in one of those clandestine cemeteries that the English lady they´re all looking for is likely to find her last resting place and you don´t need to have second sight in order to imagine her perfunctory funeral rites: it´s beginning to get dark and night falls quickly here so they´re in a bit of a hurry. A car with no number plates turns off the road and bumps up a rough track through low brush. It stops and four men get out. The leader walks off through the bushes looking for a likely spot and calls the other three over. Then he lights a cigarette as he watches them get briskly to work with the pickaxe and spades they´ve brought, digging a roughly rectangular hole. He turns away, unzips his flies and urinates into the undergrowth. By the time he turns back the hole´s practically finished. It doesn´t have to be very deep, just enough to stop the vultures from uncovering the bundle wrapped up in a bit of old cloth that they get out of the car boot and tip into it. They shovel the earth and stones back on top, smooth the mound over a bit and pat it down with the back of the spade and then they retrace their steps to the car, get in and drive away down the track, only switching the headlights on when they get to the asphalt. And that will be that. The English lady will have disappeared for ever.

I haven´t committed any crime except overstaying my tourist visa which was valid for three months. So, technically, I´m an illegal immigrant now, like millions of others. The reason I didn´t go to the police to renew my visa was because I knew what they´d do if I did. They´d hand me over to the man who´s after me, the man who´s traced me here and is offering the big reward, the man who is … well … it´s a long story, one that I can only tell if I start at the beginning. I said I hadn´t committed any crime but of course that´s not true. I have. I´ve committed a very serious crime indeed, one which carries the death penalty. I know too much.

Chapter 1

The obvious place to begin the story is my husband, Jake Forrester´s trip to Miami in the summer of 2006, the trip that changed so much in our lives, brought us riches beyond our wildest dreams but also brought with them unimagined worries and fears and, worst of all, changed Jake himself almost beyond recognition but it really starts earlier because it is mainly about just two people – my husband, Jake Forrester, and myself, his wife Sally Forrester – and perhaps one other person as well. It is around my relationship with my husband that the story really revolves, a relationship that began in 1984 when we met for the first time.

We were in our last term at Oxford; we´d just sat our final exams and were hanging around waiting for our results. I can usually tell how well I´ve done in exams and I reckoned my degree in English Literature would be pretty good or at least creditable and, as it eventually turned out, I was right. Jake had been reading law and didn´t have much of an idea about how well he´d done but when his results came out later they were pretty well on a par with my own.

It was a glorious, hot summer day, the sort of day Shakespeare considered comparing his Dark Lady to, though it was the end of June of course, not May and no darling buds were being shaken by rough winds. In fact, there was no more than a light breeze on which a few small clouds were floating in the immense, pale blue sky overhead. We´d set out at about mid day with a group of twenty friends for a picnic on the river. We had five punts and in a mental snapshot I can see Magdalen Bridge which we´ve just passed under, now a little way astern as I lie comfortably back in the red plush cushions, listening to the lapping of the water as an athletic young man in an open necked shirt and white trousers poles us expertly along. The river is a bit sluggish with water weeds here and there floating in the gentle current, the water shallow enough in places for you to see its gravel bottom. There is that special sweetish smell of the river. Round the next bend our little combo starts up, just a saxophone, a clarinet and a trumpet. The trumpeter and clarinettist, undergraduates I know by sight from college dances, are lying on their backs like me, their instruments pointing straight up towards the sky as they extemporise cool, lazy jazz. The fine weather has brought a lot of people out onto the river and other boating parties cheer as they overtake us or pole past in the opposite direction. We emerge from shade into sunlight and then we´re back into shade again as we glide along under the overhanging trees.

And Jake? I really have only the haziest recollection of him at that first meeting, one that is not completely separable from the Jake I was to get to know later, when he came into much sharper focus. He wasn´t on the same punt as me and it was only when we´d been going for perhaps an hour and had all tied up in a backwater, that the little groups from the different punts merged. Boys and girls were about equal in numbers, one or two couples, the rest unattached. People sauntered about from one little group to another as we spread out our picnic on the bank and uncorked the champagne. It was a bit sketchy as picnics go, some baguettes, a couple of Italian sausages, some fruit and a basket full of cheeses. The party became more animated after the languor of the river with occasional bursts of uproarious laughter and, as time wore on, snatches of singing followed by more laughter.

Did Jake and I fall in love at first sight? No, but we sized each other up, liked what we saw and made mental notes to meet again. Jake was tall, slim, more aesthetic than athletic in appearance with rather a pale face, dark, not quite black hair and eyes, a nose a little on the long side, definitely handsome. And what about me? Well, I´ve always been good looking – though I know I´m not the person who should be saying this - and can occasionally turn heads still, at the age of forty three. At Oxford it was all I could do to keep the admirers at bay so that I could get on with my studies. I´d decided when I came up that I was going to get a good degree. I meant to have fun too, of course, but the good degree was always my first priority.

Actually, Jake´s and my recollections of when we met for the first time are so hazy because, by the time we came up to each other we were both already a little drunk on the champagne. What I do remember much better on that beautiful summer day is our mood – not just Jake´s and mine but the whole party´s euphoria, the lazy June warmth combining with an immense relief at getting our final exams over. At that age you think you´re immune from disaster and the prospects of a charmed life lay ahead of us, stretching away, golden and inviting as far as ever the eye could see.

It was a while before I saw Jake again but he´d asked me how I could be reached when we´d both gone down and one evening in London he phoned me at the mews flat I was sharing with three other girls and we met for supper at a Kensington bistro a couple of days later. The mutual attraction was still there but, in the hiatus of leaving the university and plunging into real life, we´d drifted a little apart. Jake was studying for the bar and eating his dinners but by the time he was called his ambitions had changed and, once qualified, he struck out in quite a different direction. He never practised as a barrister, but I´m running ahead of myself again. As for me, I´d joined the staff of a famous publisher as a management trainee. When Jake and I met again we´d already started to realise that earning one´s living was not going to be all beer and skittles. Still, it was a pleasant evening and one that was followed by other suppers and other lunches, a symphony concert and, one Saturday, a trip down the river for fish and chips at Greenwich. I began to look forward to seeing Jake; the twinge of homesickness I´d felt on setting out into the wide world on my own vanished and, after a while, I found that concentration on my work was becoming increasingly difficult because Jake would keep wandering into my thoughts.

All the same, when he proposed to me it was still a surprise that took my breath momentarily away. Appropriately enough, we had just been to see Donizetti´s opera, L´Elisir d´Amore, at Covent Garden, sitting in the cheapest seats and enjoying that charming piece of light comedy for the first time. I had put my hair up, I remember, and was wearing an emerald green tube dress, daringly low cut, that I´d bought in a sale at Debenham´s. Afterwards, we were having dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant and it was as I was eating zuppa di pesce and he was tucking into a mound of antipasti that suddenly, quite out of the blue, Jake asked me to marry him. Did he do it on the spur of the moment? It would have been like him. Anyway, I was temporarily struck dumb and so said nothing.

"But will you, Sally? I mean it. I´m being serious."

You´ll have to give me some time to think about it, I said. This is an important decision. It´s not like trying to make up one´s mind what to have for the next course.

How much time do you want? I don´t think I could bear waiting long for an answer.

A week would be reasonable, don´t you think? I said.

Much too long.

Three days then.

I tell you what: I´m giving you a solemn warning now: if you don´t give me your answer over the dessert the offer will be automatically withdrawn. He was trying to look as if he really meant it but, even though I was all of a flutter, I could see he was having great difficulty keeping a straight face.

We ate our osso buco in silence, stealing a glance at each other from time to time, after which, faking maidenly reluctance, I spun out my dessert (a fantastic chestnut ice cream with marrons glacés and a hot white chocolate and vanilla sauce) as long as I could, accepting him just before I downed the last mouthful and then we toasted each other in two glasses of champagne that the waiter brought without being told because Jake must have briefed him in advance. What if I´d turned you down? I thought but didn´t say.

Four days later I met Jake after work and we went to a jeweller´s to choose a ring together. It wasn´t to be anything too expensive – just an amethyst mounted on a gold band surrounded by a cluster of very small round pearls and turquoises – but it was pretty and I still went on wearing it a lot even later when I owned diamonds that had to be kept in a safe and cost an absolute fortune in insurance. After we´d bought the ring we went back to Jake´s flat and made love on his narrow, bachelor´s bed.

Jake shared his cramped apartment in Pimlico with Gus Doddington, an Oxford contemporary. They´d rented it together when they came down from the university and began life in London but Gus, always so helpful, was easily persuaded to find other accommodation so that I could move out of the mews flat and in with Jake. I could see the other girls looking at me enviously as I packed my few belongings into two battered suitcases and set off for Pimlico in a taxi. Jake and I were pretty hard up because my share of the mews flat rent was only half the contribution Gus had been making to their joint rental in Pimlico. We got married four months later.

It´s not at all easy to describe someone you´ve been married to for years but since Jake´s breakdown there´s been more of a distance between us so perhaps that makes it a bit easier to describe him as he was then. He was born two years before me on 10th February so he´s an Aquarian and, though I don´t believe in astrology, I have to admit that Jake has exactly the characteristics of a typical Aquarian with his head in the clouds and his feet off the ground, imagining and even pursuing improbable schemes. Boats usually feature in Jake´s daydreams though he knows nothing at all about sailing. First we were going to live in a houseboat on Chelsea Reach or Little Venice and then the plan was to buy a junk in Hong Kong and sail round the world in it. He hung on tenaciously to both schemes and I had the greatest difficulty talking him out of them. I think it was this side of him that charmed me most and, in business, enabled him to come up with original, unorthodox solutions to his clients´ problems. Aquarians are supposed to be particularly compatible with people born under the sign of Libra – like me, for instance.

So what else? He was intelligent, with an enquiring mind and an accurate memory, hard working when the subject interested him but capable of endless procrastination if it didn´t. Generous, usually good humoured, especially when things were going the way he wanted them to, moody when they weren´t. On the negative side his basic optimism occasionally led him to spend his income before he´d actually received it – a dangerous thing to do in his line of business. Charm, tact – he had his fair share of both but not so much that he could bend the rules in his own favour.

Our wedding was a very modest affair. It took place at a register office and was not at all like the white wedding with bridesmaids and bouquets and wedding marches and confetti that I´d always imagined I´d have. There was a reception afterwards for relations only. Mum and Dad came all the way up from Taunton bringing Uncle Jack and Aunt Violet with them. My elder sister Gwen and Arnie, her accountant husband, were also there with Rosemary, their four year old daughter but Jake had no relations at all. He was an only child and his parents had died of cancer within months of each other while he was still at Oxford. Gus was our best man. Poor Gus died in a car crash one night about three years later when a drunk, driving home from a party and overtaking on a blind corner, hit his car head on and killed them both. I went to his cremation with Jake, the only time I´ve ever seen him in tears. But all that´s in the future of course.

The wedding reception was a slightly odd affair but then I think weddings often are, with all sorts of obscure undercurrents going on below the surface. After the brief, rather impersonal ceremony we all went off to lunch in the private room Jake had reserved at a restaurant in South Kensington. Everyone stood about, a little uncomfortable in their best clothes (Dad´s collar a little too tight, I remember). The women – myself included, of course – were all in outfits specially bought for the occasion and were covertly appraising each other´s appearance the way women do. I was all in pink – a coat and skirt coming just below the knee in a tweedy sort of material with a silk blouse, a hat with a little pink veil that kept getting in the way and pink high heels with satin bows. Mum and Dad were a bit on edge, meeting Jake for the first time, not quite sure what to make of him while I could see Jake was trying his best to find the right note to strike so that there were one or two silences and awkward moments. Actually, in my experience parents are often a bit ambivalent at a daughter´s wedding, particularly if she´s good looking. Secretly they´d really much prefer to keep her for themselves. Gwen was drinking a little too much in a rather obvious effort to be cheerful. She´s not exactly plain but her looks aren´t in my class, as she well knows and she resents attentions paid to a younger sister that she used to patronise and only recognised as a competitor when it was too late. Arnie, as usual, said nothing at all. The food, when it came, was unappetizing: small helpings of overdone meat under a thick gravy. Rosemary fidgeted and toyed with her food and looked bored.

It was a relief when it was over and Jake and I could leave for a cheap honeymoon lasting a week, which was all we could afford because cash was short. As a management trainee I didn´t earn much and Jake was earning nothing at all but, luckily, he´d inherited a bit when his parents died and that was what we were living on so we spent our week in a small hotel in Caernarfon. It rained every day and the hotel food was awful. We wandered round the old streets, dodging under shop fronts trying to keep out of the rain and paced the castle´s battlements under an umbrella, staring out into mist sweeping in from the Menai Straits but it didn´t matter. We were together and in love and we had a whole week just to ourselves with nothing else to worry about.

And Jake was a wonderful lover. I say ‘was’ because I´m talking all the time about him as he was before his breakdown. Here I have to digress a little. I don´t think you can give an adequate description of a relationship if you ignore its sexual side. Something that completely mystified me when I studied English Literature from Piers Plowman to Martin Amis was how such a supremely important part of a couple´s joint experience, perceived differently by each of them, could be left out so completely by all novelists - even the greatest of them - before D.H.Lawrence arrived to widen literary horizons. I´m not talking about pornography and the description of physical sensations to which it is limited; I mean the sexual dimension of a complex relationship between two real people taking place on many different levels. If you