The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [39]
I said I wouldn’t.
So began a tradition between us. That I would at certain moments in my life tell Emily things that I would not tell others. And later in our lives, much later, she would talk to me about what she had been going through. All through my life, Emily would be distinct from everyone I knew.
She touched the top of my head in a gesture that essentially managed to say, “Oh, let’s forget about it. Don’t worry.” But I didn’t turn away, and kept watching her.
“What?” She raised her eyebrow.
“I don’t know, I feel strange. Being here. What will happen when I go to England? Will you be with me?”
“You know I won’t.”
“But I don’t know anyone there.”
“Your mother?”
“But I don’t know her like I know you.”
“Yes you do.”
I put my head back on the pillow and looked up, no longer watching her.
“Mr. Mazappa says I am peculiar.”
She laughed. “You’re not peculiar, Michael. Besides, that’s not so bad.” She leaned over and kissed me. “Now, make me some coffee. There’s the cup. You can use hot water from the tap.” I got up and looked around.
“There’s no coffee here.”
“Then order some.”
I pressed the intercom button and while I waited studied the photograph of the Queen of England watching us from the wall.
“Yes,” I said. “Some coffee for cabin three-sixty. Miss Emily de Saram.”
When the steward arrived, I met him at the door, and when he left I brought the tray over for her. She half sat up, then remembered the robe and reached for it. But what I saw hit me at the base of my heart. There was a tremor within me, something that would be natural for me later but at that moment was a mixture of thrill and vertigo. Suddenly there was a wide gulf between Emily’s existence and mine, and I would never be able to cross it.
If there was a desire of sorts in me, then where did it come from? Did it belong to another? Or was it a part of me? It was as if a hand from the desert that surrounded us had reached in and touched me. For the rest of my life it would recur, but in Emily’s cabin it was my first brush with the long variety of it. Yet where had it come from? And was it a pleasure or a sadness, this life inside me? It was as if with its existence I was lacking something essential, like water. I put the tray down and climbed back onto Emily’s high bed. I felt in that moment that I had been alone for years. I had existed too cautiously with my family, as though there had been shards of glass always around us.
And now I was going to England, where my mother had been living for three or four years. I don’t remember how long she had been there. Even now, all these years later, I have not remembered that quite significant detail, the period of separation, as if, as for an animal, there was a limited knowledge of the span of missing time. Three days or three weeks is the same for a dog, they say. But when I return from any period of absence there is from my dog a courteous instant recognition as we embrace and wrestle on the carpeted floor of the front hall; and yet, when I did meet my mother eventually, on the docks at Tilbury, she had already become “another,” a stranger, whose fold I would cautiously enter. There was no doglike embrace or tussle or familiar smell. And I think this may have been because of what occurred with Emily—our distantly related selves—that morning in that ochre-coloured cabin, shuttered away from the dazzle of the Red Sea and the desert that stretched away for miles.
I knelt on that bed on my hands and knees and shook. Emily leaned forward and embraced me, in so soft a gesture I felt barely touched, an envelope of loose air between us. My hot tears that had come from my darkness rubbed on her cool upper arm.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Whatever small props of necessary defence I’d surrounded myself with, which contained and protected me, and which had marked the outline of me, were no longer there.
Perhaps we talked then. I don’t remember. I was conscious of the easy quietness around me, my breathing eventually at the same calm pace of her breathing.
I must have