Leila by Robin Jenkins

Author:Robin Jenkins [Jenkins, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857901552
Publisher: Birlinn

Thirty-Three

HE WAITED till after the funeral before suggesting to Leila, one night in their bedroom, that they should take Maitland’s advice (the Deputy Commissioner had been among the mourners in the small cemetery) and go away for a while, if not to Scotland, then to any other place she liked. She shook her head. He was forgetting the elections, she said. She must stay and work hard. Without her her comrades might lose heart.

‘Perhaps you should go home, Andrew,’ she said, ‘to see your parents. How long is it since you last saw them?’

It was at least six years. He had spent all his long leaves visiting places like Cambodia.

‘Not without you,’ he said.

Nor with her, either. He remembered his mother’s hysterical letters.

‘It would be only for a few weeks.’

Did she think the elections more important than their marriage?

‘A day would be too long away from you,’ he said.

‘But you’re not interested in the elections. You think they’re a waste of time, because His Highness is sure to win.’

‘Yes. Your father thinks so too. Everybody does.’

‘I don’t.’

He saw that her hope of victory was somehow bound up with her grief. It was to be part of her consolation. He must be careful not to take it from her.

‘You don’t know the people of Savu as I do, Andrew. I was born and brought up among them.’

‘I’ve been teaching their intelligentsia for eight years,’ he said.

‘Yes, but you’ve said yourself they never let you know their inmost thoughts.’

He remembered how he had laughed at their sensible conception of love.

He couldn’t resist saying: ‘But, Leila, don’t you realise that if there was a miracle and your People’s Party won it would really make no difference? His Highness would still have the money. He’d still have the first and final say in everything.’

‘It would be a step forward, a small one, yes, but it would be a beginning. You don’t prefer dictatorship, do you?’

‘I suppose I just don’t trust politicians.’

‘I am a politician.’

‘An exceptional one.’

But she would not let him dismiss it with a joke and a kiss, the one as awkward as the other. ‘You are my husband, Andrew. If you were to forbid me to take part in politics I would have to obey you.’

That was preposterous, but he felt tempted.

He had not offered to make love to her since Christina’s death, showing the same consideration as he would have if she had had a child recently born and not one recently buried.

She had not offered either.

Tonight he did, half-expecting her to refuse, half-hoping indeed, but no, she was eager. She had one condition, though.

‘I want a child, Andrew,’ she murmured, ‘but not yet.’

He supposed it was because Christina’s death was still too painful a wound, and he loved her all the more for it.

‘Not till after the elections.’

He felt let down. Irony was needed to make the situation tolerable, but neither he nor she had any, then. She was sweetly serious, he rather sourly embarrassed.

‘You understand, Andrew?’

Yes, he understood. Any

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