“Which village did you say?” she asked, although I hadn’t, but now Lamin told her before I had an opportunity to be vague. The penny dropped.
“Oh, but you’re involved with the school! Of course. Well, I know people say the most awful things about that woman but I really love her, I admire her, honestly. I’m actually an American, too, originally,” she said, and I wondered how she thought anyone could be uncertain on this point. “Normally I don’t care for Americans, in general, but she’s the kind with a passport, if you know what I mean. I really find her so curious and passionate, and it’s a great thing for the country, all the publicity she brings. Oh, Australian? Well, either way she’s a woman after my own heart! An adventuress! Although of course I came here for love, not charity. The charity came afterward, in my case.”
She touched her heart, which was half exposed, in a multicolored spaghetti-strap dress with a frighteningly deep décolletage. Her breasts were long, red and crêpy. I was absolutely determined not to ask her whose love she had come here for, nor to what good deeds this act had ultimately led, but sensing my resistance, she decided, with an old woman’s prerogative, to tell me anyway.
“I was just like these people, just here on holiday. I didn’t mean to fall in love! With a boy half my age.” She winked at me. “And that was twenty years ago! But it was much, much more than a holiday romance, you see: together we built all this.” She looked around proudly at this great monument to love: a tin-roofed café with four tables and three items on the menu. “I’m not a rich woman, I was really just a humble yoga teacher. But these people in Berkeley, you only have to say to them: ‘Look, this is the situation, these people are in desperate need,’ and I can tell you, you’d be surprised, these people really just go for it, they really do. Just about everybody wanted to pitch in. When you explain what a dollar does here? When you explain how far that dollar’s gonna go? Oh, people can’t believe it! Now, sadly, my own children, from my first marriage? They have not been so supportive. Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you. But I always say to the people here, “Don’t believe everything you hear, please! Because not all Americans are bad news, not at all.” There’s a big difference between the folks in Berkeley and the folks in Fort Worth, if you catch my meaning. I was born in Texas, to Christian folks, and when I was young America was a pretty hard place for me, because I was a free spirit and I just couldn’t find my place. But I guess it suits me a little more now.”
“But you live here, with your husband?” asked Lamin.
She smiled but did not seem overly enthralled by the question.
“In the summers. The winters I spend in Berkeley.”
“And he goes then with you?” asked Lamin. I had the sense he was conducting subtle research.
“No, no. He stays here. He has a lot to do here, all year round. He’s the big man round here and I guess you could say I’m the big woman back there! So it works very well. For us.”
I thought of that layer of girlish illusion Aimee’s new-mother friends all appeared to have lost, a kind of light in their eyes that had gone out, notwithstanding even their own celebrity and wealth, and then I looked into the wide, blue, half-crazed eyes of this woman and saw a total excavation. It hardly seemed possible someone could have had so many layers stripped from her and still be able to play her part.
Five
After graduation, from the base of my father’s flat, I applied for every entry-level media job I could think of, leaving my begging letters on the kitchen counter each night for him to post in the morning, but a month passed, and nothing. I knew my father’s relationship to these letters was complicated—good news for me meant bad news for him, meant me moving out—and sometimes I had paranoid fantasies that he never posted them at all, just deposited them in the bin at the end of our street. I considered what my mother had always said about his lack of ambition—against which accusation I had always angrily defended him—and was forced to admit that I could see now what she was getting at. Nothing made him jollier than my Uncle Lambert’s occasional Sunday visits, when we would all three plant ourselves in deckchairs on the ivy-covered flat roof of my father’s downstairs neighbors and smoke weed, eat the homemade fish dumplings that were Lambert’s excuse for being two to three hours late, listen to the World Service and watch the Jubilee Line trains rise up, every eight to ten minutes, from the bowels of the earth.
“Now this is the life, love, wouldn’t you say? No more: do this, don’t do that. Just us all friends together—equals. Eh, Lambert? When you get to be friends with your own kid? This is the life, isn’t it?”