The Black House

16

He had watched Silvano go, and it was as if he had rid himself of the continent. He drove home from the station under a sky lighted as subtly as skin, a swell of mild light with a tincture of blood, and raw gold sinews breaking from a sun pulped by clouds. This evening light was too complicated for him to see any drama in it—like the African sunset which altered too fast for him to assign it any metaphor but murder —but the light itself at this hour was his triumph. It was nearly six o’clock, and yet the light continued, thickening and changing, becoming more physical as it dimmed.

He had seen his death in the early darkness of winter, the pale daylight had been for him like a brief waking from sickness. But the seasonal illness was passing; he measured his mood by these lengthening days with a pleasure he had not known in the unvarying equatorial light. The fear had left him: he had overcome it by enduring it, like his heart, which had not pained hifti for weeks. So he had got well, and he imagined the thick scar on his heart narrowed to a harmless lip of tissue. His health allowed him to ignore his body, the intrusive wrapping of muscle he had felt failing him so keenly, weighing him with a kind of stupidity. Now he fed his mind on sleep, restored himself in the darkened room under the disc of Caroline’s face, a fixed image of sensation which, hovering in the room, amounted to a presence almost flesh. He felt her pressure so strongly on him in the Black House he didn’t need to ask where she lived, and at times in the living room with Emma, the air before the fire bore his lover’s odor so obviously it embarrassed him. It was a haunting that confronted his mind and aroused his body, but it inhibited his conversation with Emma, as Flack’s voice had, his mewing mutter against the wall, on their first day at The Yew Tree.

Munday had thought, recovering, that Emma had also recovered. She was, after all, his wife. It had not occurred to him that Emma could be ill if his heart improved, and it was only after Silvano commented on it that he had gone back to the house and seen her unwell. She looked tired, perhaps she was coming down with something; she had that lustreless inattention that precedes real sickness—not sick yet but, abstracted and falling silent, in decline. He was sorry; he was also cross, for what Silvano had said was disrespectful, not necessarily in English terms, but in Bwamba culture which forbade such intimate observations except within a family. Silvano was not part of the family. Munday didn’t like his presuming; he objected to an African tribesman telling him his wife had lost weight. He didn’t need a stranger to call attention to the hysteria that came over her when he was unresponsive. But he was ashamed that he had been too preoccupied to notice it earlier. He had his own diagnosis: she was taking refuge in illness—refuge from her dread. He laughed at the bitter irony: they had come to the country (she had chosen the place!) for his health, and now it was hers that was shaky.

He was not sure how to deal with it. He was circumspect, then bullying, and finally hearty, offering encouragement, usually at mealtimes, for he was in his study the rest of the time, while she moped, watching Mrs. Branch dust, or sat before the garden window with a sketch pad in her lap.

One evening he said, “Emma, you're not eating.”

“I don't have any appetite.”

“A good walk would set you up.”

“I hate your walks,” she said. “You make them such an occasion.”

“Why don’t you invite Margaret down here one weekend?”

“It's a bother. And there's her job—she’s probably not free,” said Emma.

“But you never see anyone!”

“I see you,” she said. “Why do you talk to me as if I’m an invalid?”

“You haven't been looking well lately.”

“I'm perfectly all right,” she said. But her denial only confirmed that she was sick in a more critical way than if she had agreed with him. She didn’t know she was sick—that was worse. She went on, “But I do wish you'd finish your book. Then we could leave this place.”

“And go where?” said Munday. “Emma, this is England!”

“It’s not ” she said, and he thought she was going to cry. “It’s a miserable house, not like any house I've ever known. Even Silvano said it.”

“What did he say?”

“ ‘Your house frightens me,' ” she said. “Those were his exact words.”

“Africans scare easily.”

“I know what he meant.”

“Africans in England seem so pitiful and comic,” he said. “Like country cousins.”

“You were offhand with him,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen you treat an African that way.”

“I couldn’t help it. He said he wants to settle in England and become a bus conductor. It’s a joke! He likes England, he says, but I took him for a walk around back and he was knocked for six—couldn’t take it. Wants to live in London.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Emma. “So do I. I admit it, Alfred, I’m not suited to the country.” He snapped, “That’s what you used to say about Africa.”

“I can’t creep into a comer and thrive.”

“Who can?”

“You,” she said. “It’s in your nature.”

“Don’t be cryptic, Emma.”

“I’m not being cryptic,” she said. “I admire it in you. But I still get awfully scared sometimes in this house. We can’t all be so self-sufficient.”

“You don’t know me,” he said. “I can’t survive alone, and I’m not self-sufficient. Emma, I’m as weak as you!”

“You’re not weak at all.”

“But I am,” he said. “This move was a great strain for me. You seem to forget I have a heart condition.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“Why are you looking at me that way?”

“I was thinking of Silvano. You used to be so fond of him in Africa. I can remember you talking to him for hours on end.”

“They weren’t social occasions,” he said. “I made notes on those conversations. And don’t worry, he’ll get his acknowledgment in the book.”

“That weekend opened my eyes. I saw you avoiding him and I thought how much you’d changed.” Emma sighed. “He left early, you know.- He distinctly said he was going to stay over until Monday. But he wasn’t happy here.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“You didn’t go out of your way for him.”

“Who went out of his way for me in Africa?” said Munday angrily. “Ten years, Emma, ten years!”

“You’re not sorry you left Africa, are you?”

“I was at first. It was a blow—well, you know. You were in the room when Dowle told me.”

“You cried.”

“That was exhaustion,” he said. “Not grief, not grief at all. But it seems so foolish now.”

“Why foolish?”

“Because we should have come home sooner. Ten years in Africa and I thought I’d be at the top of my profession. But these poaching students who flew out from England on their vacations to do research have already published their books. They have all the jobs, and I’m ten years behind the times.”

“You’re glad you came home, though?”

“It was the only thing to do.”

Emma said slowly, with mingled relief and fatigue, “I was wondering if you’d ever admit that.”

“And if my heart holds out I’ll finish the book properly.”

“Your heart will hold out,” she said.

“You seem so sure!”

“I am sure. There’s not a thing wrong with your heart.”

“Emma, you were there when Dowle told me I’d have to leave.”

“That dear, dear man,” she said.

“A scarred heart. That’s what he said. That’s why we had to leave.”

“That’s why we had to leave, Alfred, but the scar wasn’t on your heart—it was on mine. And it’s still there.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He knew you’d be impossible if I was the reason for our leaving. You’d never forgive me, you’d always blame me for ruining your research. You can be a frightful bully.” She smiled, as if she had at a critical moment discovered a strength she could use for defense. “But now you admit you’re glad to be home. You said that, didn’t you? So I can tell you the truth.”

“There are so many versions of the truth,” he said. “Let’s hear your smug one.”

“I’ve suffered,” she said.

“You deceived me, that’s why! He was protecting you—you and that conniving priest made all this up so you could leave gracefully 1”

“As gracefully as a bad heart allows,” she said quietly. “You see, you’re fine. I'm the one with tha heart condition.”

“You should see a doctor.”

“I did, that day in London, after I had lunch with Margaret. There’s nothing to be done. I have pills, I have a diet. My heart—”

“Why did you keep it from me?”

“I was afraid.”

“And that time I fainted? You mean there was nothing wrong with me?”

“Indigestion.”

“That’s what that damned specialist said. Dowle must have told him to humor me.” Munday held Emma’s hand. He said, “You needn’t have been afraid to tell me. I would have understood.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” said Emma. Her voice had faded to a whisper.

Munday took her in his arms and said, “I’m sorry. Poor Emma.”

“Having a bad heart’s an awful nuisance,” she said. “I know,” he said, “I used to have one.”

“But I have you,” she said.

The trust in her words nearly broke him. It was more than the news of her heart. He found it incredible that possessed by Caroline as much as he was, she could not know it—amazing that after guiding him to that love she hadn’t the slightest inkling of it. He would have told her then how she was the ghost’s accomplice. But her hcarjt: he could not sacrifice it to the truth. Emma inhabited the small world of illness from which he had been released. If he told her, You’ve seen the ghost I love, she might die of it—or she might laugh and say he was mad. But he believed, and he concealed it because there was no one to tell.

He was sorry for her, but he hated her fretting, the irritating senility that tension produced in her. Shopping one Saturday for groceries in Yeovil, he and Emma passed a shop window which had the plainness of a chemist’s. A sign caught his eye, Wonderful Way to Relax, and he thought of Emma. There were simple surgical goods in the window and medicines of various kinds, carrying doctors’ testimonies on placards, and soberly wrapped bottles of capsules with photographs demonstrating their effect—handsome men and women splashing vigorously in surf, reassured couples posed embracing. Munday was attracted by the unpretentious display, the clinical austerity of the pale colors. He walked on a bit further and when Emma was occupied he went back to the shop.

Inside it was empty without being bare, a freshly-painted interior with blue curtains on the front window blocking out the street. It had a disinfected air about it that was enhanced by several near display cases. A man rested his arms on one of these cases and read a newspaper with a cup of tea. He did not look up when Munday entered. The man was rather short and old, and on his large studying face were incurious features; his swollen nose and heavy jaw and lips, his fleshy ears and pouched eyes didn’t go with the streamlined shop. He might have strayed in to mind the shop for the owner. He was balding, too, and his cardigan was zippered to his neck. He turned a page of the newspaper and as he did so he glanced up at Munday and greeted him, smoothing the page with the flat of his hand.

Munday hesitated. He had seen into the cup of tea at the man’s elbow; a skin of wrinkled milk on its surface nauseated him. The cup was cracked, and the sight of this cold tea made Munday doubtful about the shop. The man put the cup to his lips and sipped. Munday wanted to go.

The man said, “Help you?”

“That device in your window,” said Munday, straightening his back. “Supposed to relax you. I wonder if I might take a look at it. Could be just the thing for my wife.” The man slid open the back door of the case and took out a slender blunt object of white molded plastic. It was about eight inches long, the shape of a probe, and had a grooved handgrip.

“That’s four pounds, forty pence,” said the man, “including batteries.”

It was only when Munday had the thing in his hand that he realized its ugly use. He wanted to drop it and hurry out of the shop. He put it down, but he stayed, to avoid looking a fool. He walked away from the man, along the case, and saw the rest, a row of rubber phalluses in different sizes, simulating erections in a villainous ridicule of flesh, with grotesque knobs and warts, like clowns¹ comic noses. Some had fasteners—belts, elastic straps, buckles, and plungers. There was an appalling rubber torso, inflated like a distended beachball, with a crudely mustached vulva. On a tray there were limp stringy contraceptives, flesh-colored, in amazing variety, tongues of shriveled rubber ringed with fur and feathers, or tentacles or protuberances like clusters of spiders. There were jars of cream, bottles of aphrodisiac capsules, manuals of sex technique with titles promising pleasure, thicker and frankly pornographic books wrapped in cellophane, electric condoms wired to transformers, and more vibrators. It was all displayed as in an ethnography exhibit, the pathetic toys of an especially savage tribe. Munday started to go.

The man lifted and rattled his newspaper. “We do mail orders,” he said. “You want the catalogues?” Munday turned and said sharply, “No, I do not.” There were men lingering just outside the shop window, hunched expectantly, like the large scavenging marabou storks which had stood bumping shoulders on a particular roadside in Fort Portal every morning watching for the garbage trucks.

Days passed, and Munday waited for Caroline to contact him through Emma—it had become a ritual for him. Sometimes in corners of the Black House where he felt Caroline’s presence strongest, near the living-room fireplace, at the store of green candles in the back hall, in the draft at the top of the stairs, he appealed to her and he sensed her moving past him like a vibrant column of warm air. He looked to Emma for Caroline’s signal (a watchfulness Emma took for indulgent concern): “Is there anything you’d like me to do, my darling?” But he wasn’t summoned.

He worked on his book, but the collection of Bwamba tools had given their peculiar odor to the study and his scribbled pages, and after writing he craved fresh air. In the afternoon he went out, choosing to walk in low sheltered places, hoping that beyond that tree or hedge she would appear to him. He took these walks alone. Emma stayed in the house. There were days when he went out hoping to come back and find it all changed, to return to a simpler, finished place, his book done, Caroline waiting, Emma dead or gone. These solitary walks were a way, he thought, of giving her a chance to die; but when he returned to the house it was always as he left it. Once, he returned to Emma at the door who alarmed him with: “Guess what she said?” Then she reported something Mrs. Branch had said about a tuft of lungwort she had called a primrose. On the way back from his walks he usually stopped at The Yew Tree for a drink. It was a brief drink, never long enough to support a conversation, and so he was surprised one day when Mr. Flack said, “How’s your book coming along?” Munday didn’t react. He sipped his half-pint and said, “What book is that?”

“Mr. Awdry said you were writing one,” said Flack.

“Mr. Awdry is mistaken.”

“He said it wasn’t about your cannibals, either.”

“No?”

“No sir, he said it’s about us.” Flack challenged Munday with a grin.

Munday said, “Why would anyone want to do a silly thing like that?”

“That’s what I asked Mr. Awdry.”

“What did he say?”

“Money, he said”

“My wife has plenty of money,” said Munday. “She could buy and sell your Mr. Awdry, and don’t you forget it.” Flack changed the subject. He spoke about the miners’ strike, entering its second month. There were power cuts nearly every day, but there were still regular deliveries of coal to houses; Munday’s coal shed was filled to the brim. Munday was not at all inconvenienced by the blackouts; he had learned to read by candlelight and oil lamp at the Yellow Fever Camp, and the Black House was designed to be heated by fireplaces and lighted by candles. The blackouts gave him a great deal of pleasure, but he did not say so.

“You need one of these,” said Flack. He showed Munday a dented miner’s hat, with a small battery-powered lamp on its visor. Flack put it on his head and switched on the lamp. “I wear it behind the bar during these power cuts.”

“Very sensible,” said Munday. But Flack looked foolish and comic in his overcoat and miner’s hat.

“It’s the old people I worry about,” said Flack. “A lot of them will die of the cold this winter because of these strikes. But the miners don’t care about that. Oh no, not them!” An old man sat by the fire, holding a glass of beer on his knee. He wore a long greasy coat and Munday remembered him as the man who had shown him his old clasp knife.

Munday asked him, “How are you managing?”

The old man said, “I don’t have any electricity.”

“None of us has any,” said Munday.

“I mean to say, I didn’t have any lights in my cottage before the strike,” said the man. “I’ve got a paraffin lamp and I cook over coal. If the coal runs out I’ll use wood. It’s all the same to me.”

“That’s the idea,” said Munday.

The man brightened with the compliment and in a

gesture of friendship he reached into his pocket and asked whether Munday would like to see his pictures of the Armenian massacre in Constantinople.

“I shouldn’t have these,” he said. He slipped the rubber band over his wrist and shuffled them furtively. Then he licked his thumb and passed them to Munday one at a time. They were brown postcards, thick with handling, of stacked bodies in a plaza and dark soldiers standing at attention with long rifles; corpses dangling straight down on a lengthy gallows beam; a bundle in a gutter that Munday recognized after a moment as a man; and three of them were of fiercely mustached Turks holding swollen severed heads by their hair. The pictures were passed around the bar and discussed.

“They look a right lot of bastards,” said Hosmer.

“Never saw that many people on a gallows,” said Flack. “Though I’ve seen one or two in my time. Deserters.”

“I can remember,” said a very old man, “after a hanging in Dorchester, they used to sell the rope by the inch. This was years ago.” He smiled and nodded. “By the inch. I reckon you could make a fortune that way.”

“It’s about time they started on the Irish,” said a stocky and slightly drunk man. Munday knew him. Before Christmas some young schoolchildren climbing in the Cairngorms had got lost in a blizzard. They had made camp, hoping to be rescued, but five had frozen to death. Flack had mentioned it it had been on the six o’clock news. The stocky man had said, “When I was their age I wasn’t in a school. I had to work, help my father with the sheep. No camping trips for me.” He was, Munday discovered later with some surprise, a shepherd. Now he said, “That’s what they should do, hang ’em.”

“They got a few in Londonderry the other day,” said Hosmer.

“They should shoot thirteen of the buggers every day,” said the shepherd.

The man collected his postcards of the Armenian massacre, snapped the rubber band around the pack, and said, “Three of them Irish had nail-bombs in their pockets. That’s a fact.”

“The paras didn’t shoot them,” Flack said. “They were killed by their own people.”

Munday felt they were trying to draw him out. He said nothing, but the subject disturbed him. Even The Times had carried a photograph of a girl whose head had been shaved and who had been tied to a pole and tarred and feathered. He had seen victims of African brutality, but this picture of the Irish girl slumped on a pole, with a blackened face and white eyes, had outraged him.

The shepherd was holding forth on the Irish. Munday wanted to interrupt, to lecture them on barbarism. But it was pointless. He listened, as he had so many times on the verandah of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel, when Alec and his cronies spoke about marauding Africans, uprisings, sometimes the Bwamba and their tortures. Munday had not interrupted then; it was idle conversation, horror reduced to small talk, without menace. An atrocity story, offered to the group, was like a ticket of entry, and a challenge or a rebuke was considered to be in poor taste.

“Mow ’em down,” said the shepherd. He described how it should be done, how he would do it himself if he had a chance: “Don’t think I wouldn’t!” Munday went to the billiard table and pulled out a cue from the rack on the side. Chalking it, he said to the shepherd, “Take a cue.” The shepherd stopped roaring. He smiled at Munday and slipped off his woolen jacket. He said, “If you like.” Flack tossed a coin. Munday called heads and lost. “You go first, mister,” said the shepherd. “Get a tanner from the landlord.” Flack handed Munday a sixpence and leaned on the bar to watch the game. The other drinkers, Hosmer, the very old man, the man with the postcards in the pocket of his long coat, a silent farmboy in boots, drew near, as Munday lined up two balls, red and white, for the break. He aimed carefully and drove his cue ball against the red, sinking it in one of the back holes.

“Red counts double,” said the shepherd. “Forty for you.”

“Flack can keep score,” said Munday.

“Good position,” said Hosmer. The white ball had come to rest near the forward spindle which stood in front of the two-hundred-point hole.

Munday took the red ball out of the chute, aimed, and potted both balls, the white in the two hundred, the red in the twenty.

“Two-eighty,” said Flack. “Nicely played.”

“You played on her before,” said the shepherd.

“He never played here,” said Hosmer.

“Take your shot,” said the shepherd.

“Don’t rush me,” said Munday. He lined up the balls again and shot; his method (“Munday’s One-Two,” Alec had called it) was the same, sinking the red, leaving the white at the lip of the forward hole, then sinking them both with the next shot, collecting two hundred and eighty points each time.

“Five-sixty,” said Flack.

The old man in the long coat grinned at the score and touched his tongue to his nose.

“Call me when you miss,” said the shepherd. He sat down by the wall and chalked his cue while the others watched Munday repeat his shot.

“We should get Doctor Munday on the team,” said Flack.

“I’m afraid not,” said Munday, and went on setting up the balls, potting them, setting them up again.

There was a clunk inside the table.

“Gate’s down,” said Hosmer. “Everything counts double.”

“What’s my score?” asked Munday.

“Five thousand and forty,” said Flack. “That’s a hell of a score.”

Munday said to the shepherd, ‘Tm going to give you a chance now.” He deliberately missed, then stepped aside and said, “Go on.”

“You’re too good for me,” said the shepherd. “I ain’t playing.”

“It’s just a game,” said Flack.

“Bit of fun,” said Hosmer.

The shepherd glowered at Hosmer. He said, “You play him then!”

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone around here who’ll want to play with you,” said Flack.

Munday said, “I don’t think there’s anyone around here I want to play.”

The shepherd came awkwardly up to Munday and said, “Have a drink, mister.”

“I must go,” said Munday. He replaced his cue and put on his coat.

“He won’t drink with me,” said the shepherd angrily.

Flack said, “He can’t. He’s got a house guest, haven’t you, Doctor?”

“Excuse me?” Munday was at the door, the men facing him from different parts of the room.

“That nigger-boy,” said Flack. “Isn’t he still up at your place?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Munday, and he bumped out without saying goodbye.

They knew; it was not hard to guess how. He had done his best to hide Silvano, but he could have predicted they would see him. TTiere were few secrets in any village. And yet what Flack had said had given him a jolt, like the rumor of his book (“Not about your cannibals, either . . ”). Munday was surprised and angry, for what continued to disturb him were the shifting similarities between this village and the one he had left. He had found England in Africa; he had always thought it would be preparation for returning, but he had returned to find Africa in England, not the whole of Africa, but a handful of its oldest follies. In some respects the two places were identical in mood, in the size of their customs. What differences he had found had given him occasions to be complacent. The similarities confused him, they reminded him of how exposed he was: he knew he would never have risked with an African woman what he had risked with Caroline. It was not spoken about—no rumors had reached him—but Munday was not sure this silence meant that no one knew, or that it was common knowledge.