Chapter 24
Auntie Beverley came to Birmingham to visit him in October of his first year. She took the train on a Saturday morning, arriving just after eleven, standing outside the station with a bag containing food proper food, she said, not whatever it was universities fed students.
Marcus collected her and took her on a walk through the campus, showing her the library and the seminar rooms and the canal path where he ran in the mornings. She walked beside him in her good coat, looking at everything with that measured attention that was so like his mother's he sometimes caught himself doing a double-take.
'You seem settled,' she said.
'I am,' he said. 'It took a few weeks but I'm settled.'
'Good friends?'
'Two very good ones. Tunde and Priya. I want you to meet them.'
They ate lunch in the flat he shared with Tunde and two other students. Tunde had cooked naturally and Beverley ate two plates and complimented him in a way that made Tunde visibly proud. Priya arrived after lunch and sat with them for two hours, talking at her characteristic speed about her practicum placement and the state of English education policy and the novel she was reading. Beverley watched Priya with something that looked like delighted bewilderment.
'How does she breathe?' Beverley murmured to Marcus.
'I've been trying to work that out for three months,' he said.
After Tunde and Priya left, Beverley and Marcus sat in his room with the food she'd brought rice and peas and stewed chicken and sweet potato pudding eating properly, talking quietly.
'Your mother asked me to check on you,' Beverley said.
'She always asks you to check on me.'
'I always would anyway. But I want you to know she asks. Every week. She wants to know you're eating and sleeping and that you've not forgotten where you come from.'
'I haven't forgotten anything,' Marcus said.
'I know.' Beverley looked around the small room the books stacked two-deep on the shelves, the journal on the desk, the photograph of him and Diane on the windowsill. 'She'd be proud of this room,' she said. 'Just the organization of it.'
Marcus smiled. 'She raised me.'
'She did,' Beverley said. Then, more quietly: 'You know, when she asked me to take you, I was frightened. Not of taking you. Of failing her. Of what it would mean if you suffered here. If England hurt you.'
Marcus looked at his aunt. 'It didn't,' he said.
'No,' she said. 'It didn't.' She looked at him with something in her eyes he could not quite name but that moved him. 'You are remarkable, Marcus. I need you to know that I think that. Not just because you have good grades. Because of who you are.'
He held that. He nodded.
Before she left to catch her train, she hugged him at the station in the way she almost never hugged long and deliberate, with both arms.
'Tell Mama I'm all right,' he said.
'She knows,' Beverley said. 'But I'll tell her anyway.'