‘Oh,you’recoming,’ her mother repeats. ‘I have told everyone you will look after the children.’
God! What is this woman like?
‘You’ll have to find someone else.’
Emma hears a sharp intake of breath. She’s not sure if it is from her mother, or herself– instinctively preparing for what comes next.
‘Oh, I know what this is.’ Her mother’s voice is slow and precise. She takes her time to deliver the blows. ‘Not having children and being on your own has brought out the worst of you, Emma. You’ve always been selfish– never able to fit in with others. You justhaveto be different.’
Emma tries to think of Clem’s advice earlier, of sitting in the courtyard garden in the sun. She tries to keep hold of her belief in herself.
But her mother hasn’t finished. ‘Maybe if you’d had a family you would be less self-obsessed, might think about others more… You never put Will first … it was always about you… I’m surprised he…’
As her mother talks, her words worm their way deep inside Emma, into a place that will never hold a baby, safe and secure. They burrow into the core of her where she keeps her secrets, hidden so deep that no one else will ever know.
When she can bear it no longer, she hangs up and turns her phone off.
To ease her head and stop the shaking, she concentrates on her breathing. Short breath in, long breath out. As a scientist, she knows this tricks the brain into releasing calming chemicals that fight adrenalin. In through her nose: one, two. Out through her mouth: one, two, three, four. Quietly, slowly– no one must notice.
The last time she used this, she was kneeling in the freezing mud with snowdrops clutched in her clenched fist: she had rocked and breathed.
Emma looks down at the Baobab tree as it swims in front of her. She has no idea how she got back to the bar. Her breathing is ragged. When she holds her hands out in front of her to see if they are shaking, she cannot tell through her tears.
She places her palms flat on the wood, as if, in some way, this will save her from falling further. It doesn’t. Emma feels the tears running down her face and the snot dribbling from her nose, and she finds that all she can do is remember to breathe.
Her sobs when they come rack her chest and tear at her body. She cries for the husband she has lost and the baby she can never have, and despite everything, despite all she knows, she cries for what Will has missed out on, and she weeps in misery and fear because she knows she is lost.
Emma can hear voices but doesn’t understand what they are saying. She is vaguely aware of someone touching her back and holding her arm. All she can do is cry. She watches her tears splash the Baobab tree and this makes her cry even more. It strikes her that she never cries like this and for the briefest of moments she thinks about trying to pull herself together, but the relief of her anguish is too great.
She sinks into it with a feeling of letting go after a very long journey.
When Emma finally returns to some sense of herself, she is sitting at a small Formica table in an alcove off the kitchen, hidden from the main body of the room. She vaguely remembers Roberto guiding her here, his hand on her elbow, his arm about her waist, talking to her quietly in Spanish. She recalls thinking he would make a good ballroom dancer, guiding you firmly and safely around a room.
She looks up to see him looking at her anxiously.
‘I’m sorry,’ she manages to say, automatically using the language her father taught her.
‘Don’t be so English. Do not apologise,’ Roberto replies, also in Spanish.
Emma is touched and surprised by Roberto’s obvious anger. She tries to smile, but all she wants to do is sleep or cry. She cannot imagine she will ever want to do anything else again.
Roberto pushes a cup of inky, black coffee towards her. He loads her coffee with sugar and hands her a small paper serviette for her face. Emma wonders if this is where Roberto has his morning coffee and plans his menus.
He passes her a small, sweet, almond biscuit. ‘You should eat this.’
Emma stares down at the butter-coloured biscuit in her hand and at the grains of sugar gathering on her fingertips.
‘Why didn’t he love me, like I loved him?’
Roberto shakes his head and half stretches out his hand.
‘Why wasn’t I enough?’
Roberto says nothing. As Emma knows all too well, there is nothing he can say.
She smiles sadly. ‘I try and hold on to the good in him, and there was lots of good, so much that I loved.’ She looks up. ‘But it’s not enough.’
She drinks her coffee and eats her biscuit as Roberto gently fusses. Can he call someone? Where is she staying? When Emma says she just wants to be alone, he hangs his long, white apron over his chair and escorts her in silence back to her hotel.
