A Guest of Honour

Chapter 22

She was a long time in the culvert by the road. Her nails were full of red earth. The red earth walls, staunched with tufts of dead grass, rose on either side of her. With her head pressed against them she waited for it to happen to her, too. There was earth and saliva in her mouth. She was gulping and howling like an animal. She heard the tearing of flames and saw the thick smoke.

And then there was silence. Behind the sound of burning, nothing. The burning died away and there was only the smell and the smoke.

She had run towards him at first when they started pulling him out of the car. He had got to his feet and looked straight at her without seeing her because of that shortsightedness. But in the same split second he was brought down beneath them and the sound of the blows on the resistance of his big body sent her crazedly hurling herself through the grass, fighting it. She was turning her ankles, running, her stumbling scramble led her off down a kind of slope cut into the ground. And she was there, deep in the ditch beyond the grass. But she was not twenty yards from them, from him, and she knew it would come to her, it was no use, she was held by the walls, waiting for them.

She was sure they must be there in the silence.

She did not move. The smoke no longer poured up; it was thin, hanging in stillness. She did not know how much time passed. But the silence was empty; above, in the tops of the long grasses between her and the road, scarlet weaver-birds flicked, swung, and chirped a question. More time passed. She got up and tried to climb out of the culvert but the walls were too high. She wandered along out the way she had been driven in, up the diagonal cutting made by the roads department. She pushed weakly through the heavy grass. The car was on its side, blackened, the seats still smouldering, the road full of glass.

He was clear of it. He was in the road unharmed by the fire. Unharmed. She began to sob with joy because he was not burned, she went concentratedly but not fast — she could not move fast — towards him, towards his legs rolled apart. She walked all round him, making some sort of noise she had never heard before. Round and round him. His body — the chest, the big torso above the still narrowish male waist that he kept, for all his weight — was something staved in under the dirtied bush jacket, out of shape, but he was still there. The whole of him was there. Strange, soft-looking patches of earth and blood; but the whole bulk of him, complete. A lot of dirt and blood on the face, a sort of grimace, lips slightly drawn back as when he was trying to unscrew something tight.

Suddenly she saw that his glasses were smashed into his cheekbones. The frame lay near his ear but glass was embedded there in the firm flesh just below that tender, slightly shiny area of skin that was always protected by his glasses. The glass was pressed in so hard that the flesh was whitened and had scarcely bled. She went down on her knees and with a shaking impatience in her fingers began to try to take out the broken glass. She was concerned only not to hurt him, it was difficult to do without hurting him.

After a little while she went and sat on the white-washed milestone at the side of the road. His eyes were not open but the lids were not quite closed and showed a line of glint. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and cleaned the earth from beneath her nails, carefully, one by one. It was very hot. Sweat ran down the sides of her face and under the hair, on her neck. She watched him all the time. She became aware of a strange and terrifying curiosity rising in her; it was somehow connected with his body. She got up and went over to this body again and looked at it: this was the same body that she had caressed last night, that she had had inside her when she fell asleep.

The basket and his briefcase had been flung out of the car and so were not burned. She picked them up and balanced the briefcase across the basket beside him, to keep the sun off his face.

And more time went by. She sat on in the road. Her shirt was wet with sweat and she could smell it. Sometimes she opened her mouth and panted a little; until she heard the sound, and stopped. She was beginning to feel something. She didn’t know what it was, but it was some sort of physical inkling. And then she thought very clearly that the flask was still in the basket and got up firmly and fetched it and poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic cup. As she saw liquid there, it all came back to her with a rush, to the glands of her mouth, to her nerves, to her senses, to her flesh and bones — she was thirsty. She drank it down in one breath. Then for the first time she began to weep. She was thirsty, and had drunk, and so it had happened: she had left him. She had begun to live on. Desolation beat down red upon her eyelids with the sun and the tears streamed from her eyes and nose over her earth-stained hands.

Some people came down the road. An old man with safety-pins in his earlobes and a loin-cloth under an old jacket stopped short, saying the same half-syllable over and over. There were little children watching and no one sent them away. All she could do before the old man was shake her head, again, again, again, again, again at what they both saw. The women sent up a great sigh. Bray lay there in the middle of them all. They brought an old grey blanket of the kind she had seen all her life drying outside their huts, and an old door and they lifted him up and carried him away. They seemed to know him; he belonged to them. The old man with the safety-pins said to her in revelation, “It is the Colonel! It is the Colonel!”

She did not know him any more. She had left him. She was walking along the road between the cotton-covered, great soft hanging breasts of two women, she was alive.

They took them to an hotel that was closed or deserted. The building was boarded up and there was some sort of huge aviary outside but no birds in it, the wire doors open and a lot of burst mattresses and rubbish piled there. They took him to their own quarters, to one of their mud houses, and laid him on an iron bedstead in the cool dimness. It was the old man’s bed and there was a pillow-case embroidered free-hand with yellow crosses, red birds with blue eyes, and blue flowers with red leaves. The women sat with him and clapped their hands together soundlessly and kept up a kind of archaic groan, perhaps it was praying, perhaps it was just another human sound she had never heard before. She rested her head against one of the big breasts on cloth that smelt of woodsmoke and snuff. The D.O. from the Matoko boma came and took her away in his landrover, and his little wife, looking rather like Edna Tlume, seemed afraid of her and put her to bed in what was obviously the marital bed. A white doctor in priest’s robes came and gave her an injection; they put her to sleep because she was not dead. She understood; what else could they do with her? She slept the whole night and in the morning found herself in a big bed, after all those nights in the narrow one.

Neil and Vivien Bayley appeared to take her to the capital. She wore one of the D.O.’s wife’s dresses and she had nothing but the picnic basket and the briefcase.

At the Bayleys’ house the children were all over her, pulling at her, chattering, asking where Clive and Alan and Suzi were. Vivien used the adult formula: “You mustn’t worry Rebecca, she’s very, very tired,” but to them she was the familiar Rebecca into whose car they used to be piled for entertainments and expeditions. All Vivien’s children went through a stage of being rudely aggressive towards their mother; Eliza yelled, “It’s not fair! Rebecca’s nicer than you!” A scene swept through the house, banging doors, raising voices.

Neil’s way was to say whenever he came into the house, “I think we all need a brandy.” They did not seem able to talk to her without all three of them having a drink in their hands. She drank to make it possible for the Bayleys but she would not take the pills Vivien gave her because then she had to go and lie down and sleep, and when she woke there was a moment when she didn’t know it had happened and she had to discover it again. Vivien said, “I think it’d be a good idea if we made you some dresses.” The sewing machine was brought into the living-room and Vivien kept up a sort of monologue while she sewed, handing bits of the finishing over to her to be done. She was wearing Vivien’s clothes, which fitted her better than the D.O.’s wife’s dress had. She remembered and said to Vivien, “Did you send back the dress to Matoko?” Vivien said gently, “No, but I will when the transport starts running again, don’t worry.”

She was turning up a hem. The material was pale green cotton. She said, “What will they do with him?”

Vivien’s hands were taken slowly from the machine, her face had an imploring look. “They’ve cabled his wife to see if she wants his body flown back.”

The airport was closed, they had told her. He would be kept lying somewhere, there were refrigerators for that sort of thing. No one knew when planes would leave again. She had tried to make a joke about the airport, saying, “So your riot bag’s just standing by,” but Vivien had taken it as a reminder of something unspeakable and could not answer.

With the brandy glasses in their hands they talked about what had happened. Out of that day — yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that: slowly the succeeding days changed position round it — another version came into double exposure over what she knew. The men who had attacked were a roving gang made up of a remnant from the terrible riots that had gone on for a week centred round the asbestos mine. A Company riot squad led by white strangers— “ You see,” Vivien interrupted her husband, “I knew they’d get round to using those men from the Congo and Mweta wouldn’t be able to stop them. I knew it would happen”—had opened machinegun fire on strikers armed with sticks and stones. The white men dealt with them out of long experience of country people who needed a lesson in the name of whoever was paying — they burned down the village. The villagers and the strikers had made an unsuccessful raid on the old Pilchey’s Hotel, where the mercenaries had quartered themselves. Someone had put up those road-blocks, probably with the idea of ambushing the white men (hopeless, they had left already, anyway). … It was said that the one who started the hut-burnings was a big German who didn’t travel in the troop transports but in his own car.

Vivien said, “But this was a little Volkswagen, and there was a woman in it.”

“To asbestos miners an army staff car’s the same as any other kind. A car’s a car.” Neil spoke coldly to her. “Nobody knows anything, any more, when things get to the stage they are now. I don’t suppose Mweta knew they would machine-gun people. Burn their houses over their heads. He just put it in the hands of the Company army, left it to their good sense … that’s quite enough.”

She offered the information, “The people who helped us knew Bray. An old man with safety-pins in the holes in his ears. He knew him from before.”

Neil had put the brandy on the floor. His hands were interlocked between his knees, his big, bright, bearded head (river-god’s head, Bray had once called it) stared down through his legs so that the veins showed in his rosy neck. He said thickly, sternly, “Yes, they knew him. But it only takes a handful of strangers. Miners are recruited all over the country. God knows who they were. Nobody knows who the white men were. White men from somewhere. Perhaps they travel in Volkswagen cars, perhaps they cart women around with them. Putting up their road-blocks a mile from those people who’d known him for twenty years was a bunch of men who’d never seen him before. That’s all.”

Agnes Aleke came to see her. Agnes was wearing her smooth wig, she was smartly dressed, and she cried all the time. “If only you’d come in the plane with me, if you’d come when I went.” Through Bray’s death she seemed to experience in her plump voluptuous little body all that she had feared for it. Rebecca sat with her in the garden and held her hand to comfort her; Vivien carried out tea. “Come and stay with me, Rebecca, come to my mother’s place. It’s a nice house. Oh how I hated that place, that Gala, don’t show me that place again, never — and how you must hate us — I said to my mother, she will hate us and why shouldn’t she.” They embraced, Rebecca patting her gently while she sobbed. Vivien said with firm kindness, “What do you think of our dressmaking, Mrs. Aleke? You know Rebecca and I made that dress she’s wearing, ourselves.”

Roly Dando came. It was in the late afternoon; they all drank. Thin little Roly had about him the air — taint, portent — of one who knows what is going on in a time of confusion and upheaval, when what official information there is ceases to be trustworthy. It was known that Mweta was not at the President’s Residence; his messages to the people continued to be issued, but from some unknown retreat. His television appearances were, it was said, old films to which new taped statements were — not too well — matched. None of this was mentioned. But they talked. Dando seemed convinced that Shinza was over the border, planning a guerrilla insurrection. Dhlamini Okoi and the Minister of Health, Moses Phahle, had disappeared and were obviously with him. Goma was said to be in prison; there were so many people in prison that if someone wasn’t seen for a few days it was presumed that that was where he must be. Neil said, “Roly, is it true that Mweta has asked for British troops?”

Roly sat there in the dusk with his sinewy shrunken neck pulled up very straight from his collar; he did not seem to hear. He rose to fetch another drink and hesitated on the way, where Rebecca sat. He put his hand on her head: “La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La Filie aux Yeux d’Or.” He stalked awkwardly to the veranda table and poured himself something. He came back and sat on the arm of her chair, his arm round her, touching her neck as he talked, as he grew a little drunk, unable even now to resist the dismal opportunity to take advantage of his grief to fondle a woman. He was talking of Bray. “The thing is, of course, all our dear friends abroad will say he was killed by the people he loved and what else can you expect of them, and how ungrateful they are, and all that punishment-and-reward two-and-two-makes-four that passes for intelligent interpretation of events. That’s the part of it that would rile him. Or maybe amuse him. I don’t know.”

Vivien’s beautiful controlled voice came out of the dark. “I wish we could know that James himself knew it wasn’t that, when it happened.”

“Of course he knew!” Roly spoke with the unchallengeable authority of friendship on a plane none of the others had shared. “He’s got nothing to do with that lot of spiritual bed-wetters finding a surrogate for their fears in his death! He knew what’s meant by the forces of history, he knew how risky the energies released by social change are. But what’s the good. They’ll say ‘his blacks’ murdered him. They’ll go one further: they’ll come up with their guilts to be expiated and say, yes, he certainly died with Christian forgiveness for the people who killed him, into the bargain. Christ almighty. We’ll never get it straight. They’ll paw over everything with their sticky misconceptions.” Roly spent the night because of the curfew. She heard him snoring in the room next to the one she had been given.

Vivien talked to her a lot about her children, about Clive and Alan and Suzi, but she herself was not thinking about them at all. She began to bleed although it was not the right time and it was then that she thought: so it never happened; there never will be a child. Vivien put small activities in her way as if driving some lost creature, out of kindness, along a track. “I think you ought to go and see Margot. If you feel like it. She’s very down. She really would like to know about Hjalmar, though of course she wouldn’t say it.” So she took Vivien’s car and drove to the Silver Rhino. It was the first time she had driven since that day. The car was the same kind — an old-model Volkswagen. Her feet and hands managed of themselves. It was only five days ago.

It had rained all night again and the morning was beautiful. (Put on the green dress, Vivien said.) There were soldiers on guard round the post office and broadcasting studios, people were cordoned off from the area where the newspaper offices had been stoned. Outside the railway station and bus depot hundreds of women, children, and old people sat in bright heaps among household goods and livestock in the strong sun high with the stink of urine and rotting vegetables; there were no trains or buses running.

And everywhere the rain and heat brought out flowers. The soldiers in their drab battledress stood under blossoming trees, poinsettia and hibiscus were crudely brilliant as carnival paper blooms in the driveway of the Presidential Residence that was said to be empty. In the old garden of the Silver Rhino an enormous American car was parked, with an older but scarcely lesser one behind it. There were nylon curtains in the balcony of windows round the rear of the new one, and ocelot-patterned seat covers. Some African men in pyjamas were sitting on the grass outside one of the bungalows — she did not really notice, on her way to the main building. But one of them got up and came forward with arms wide, a huge, fat man with a cigar in his mouth and a leopard — skin toque on his head: Loulou, Loulou Kamboya, Gordon’s ex-partner from the Congo. “Madame Edouard — I say I know dat girl walking! What you make here?” “Loulou — and you?” He took her by the shoulders, beaming at her, an enormous grape-black face with thick ridges of flesh that pressed back against the ears and even up the forehead from the frontal ridge. “I make everywhere business. You know Loulou. But what this fighting, eh? They mad, eh? I sit here, I come yesterday one week wid my people, nothing for do, nothing. Sometime I think I go faire une petite folie—” He laughed hugely. She knew from Gordon that “faire une petite folie” meant to find a girl and make love; Loulou and Gordon spoke French together, the Congo French spoken by semiliterate Africans, mixed with Lingala words and Belgian usage, but Loulou had always been proud of being able to speak to her in English so that she wouldn’t feel left out. “Et les bébés, they grow okay? Where Gordon? He making cash again or no? Ah Gordon, if he stay this time now with me, you have plenty dresses! I make the big time — that’s right, I say the big time, eh? — I hear in cinéma! Oh business continue to go good but now this damn war or what. What? What? Eh? I here wid my people yesterday week already.”

“Where are you making for?”

“I go for South. Down, down. Far for here. I have ticket but the plane don’t go. You see, I want to go for Jewburg. You remember?”

Yes, she remembered; he had always had a yearning to see Johannesburg. He had refused to be convinced that South Africa didn’t let in black men from other countries as a rule, and that if he did get in he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his habitual freedom of bars and girls.

“You know — I got business there now. I send goods already three time — thirty thousand francs. Pay in Switzerland. Not Congo.” He roared with laughter at the old story. “But you sick, Madame Edouard? What makes this—” He drew his ringed hands dolefully down his face. “You short money?”

“No, nothing. I’m all right. — I’ll see you again when I come out? I’ve got to go and look for Mrs. Wentz.”

“Anytime. Anytime. Look like I stay for Christmas.”

Her fingers felt damp and twitchy. When he had drawn that face, only succeeding in looking comic, she had felt tears coming back to her suddenly again. At the Bayleys’ she had gone dry: as you speak of a cow going dry.

Margot Wentz had let her hair outgrow its dye. While they talked she looked all the time at that inch or two of speckled white and gilt at Margot’s hairline. It was perhaps a sign of private mourning. They sat in the little sitting-room at the round table with the fringed cloth. Coffee was set out ready, with thin silver teaspoons and a silver cream jug in the shape of a tulip. They discussed Hjalmar as if he had had an illness and had been advised to go to Gala to recuperate. Rebecca said he had been looking much better lately. The work he was doing, pottering about the garden, seemed good for him. She said, in a sort of final explanation for everything that was left unsaid: “He offered to stay to look after the house,” and a look of trapped distress came over Margot Wentz’s face because now they had come up inevitably against what had happened: to that day when Rebecca and Bray left Gala. Every time Bray’s name had occurred in Rebecca’s account of Hjalmar’s life in Gala, Margot’s left cheek had moved a little as if a string jerked inside there, but now she could not avert herself any longer. She said something about that terrible business, about what a wonderful man he was; she stared at Rebecca, unable to go on. She looked magnificent; hers (unlike Loulou’s) was a face made to express tragedy.

They drank more coffee and Rebecca asked about the hotel and the son, Stephen. “No one knows what will happen,” Margot said, almost grandly. “I have no money to go, if I want to. And even if we want to, the airport is closed. I suppose the frontiers too. Hjalmar wouldn’t be any better off here—” and then remembered that if he had not stayed to “look after the house” he might have been dead, and had again that look of dislocation that Rebecca saw her presence brought to people’s faces. Rebecca asked about the daughter and that was better; she was settling down in London— “Of course, there are all the things Emmanuelle never had, all the concerts and recitalsmusic is her life, you know.” When she got up to leave, Margot said to her, “Rebecca, if you should need anything. I don’t know what — somewhere to stay, perhaps?” But she thanked her, there was nothing, she was staying with the Bayleys of course. “I see you’ve an old friend of ours in the hotel — the famous Loulou Kamboya.”

“Oh him.” Margot’s voice was dry. “He’s travelling with his own prostitutes, never mind his drivers and secretaries. It’s a good thing for my licence the police’ve got other things to do, or I’d be in trouble for running a brothel.”

Loulou was on the lookout for her and left his friends sitting drinking beer on the veranda of one of their rondavels. “You don’t want have a little drink? No? Come I show you in my limousine my business I’m making nowdays—” He had dressed in pale blue linen trousers and, despite the heat, a brown mohair sweater with a gold thread in the knit. He wore it over his bare chest, where a gold chain followed the crease of fat round the base of his neck and ended in a big medallion with a red stone. The tail of some sort of civet hung from the leopard skin hat. The great rear bay of the car was filled with specially made cases, travelling-salesman style, but with the Loulou touch — locks of scrolly gilt and red plastic crocodile covers. “From U.S., from U.S.” He was selling the same old stuff — ivory paper knives and necklaces, crude copies of the famous seated figure of King Lukengu carved for him by the dozen in some Bakuba village up in the Kasai, masks decorated with cowrie shells and copper, made not for dancing but for the walls of white people’s houses. “If I can’t go Jewburg, I think now I like go over Portuguese side myself now tomorrow. I sell this; is not so bad place there … here, I make for you petit cadeau … yes, yes you take—” and she had to find a pair to fit her out of a bundle of gold — heeled sandals with thongs made of the skin of some poor beast. “Madame Edouard, but for why you sick, eh?” He stood back and shook his head over her, well aware that presents would not help. An African xylophone was being played up and down the Silver Rhino to announce lunch and his entourage rose with a screech of chairs, chattering and arguing, the girls laughing in their special careless, loose-shouldered way, waving about pretty black hands with painted fingernails like opalescent scales, breasts bobbing, earrings swinging, little black pigtails standing out all over their heads. He called some sarcastic-sounding remark, but all that happened was more giggles and one of the girls put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot so that her bracelets jiggled and so did her round backside in her tight pagne.

Rebecca was almost at the Bayleys’ when she turned and drove back to the Silver Rhino. They were sitting at lunch, their chairs tipped this way and that, the waiters pounding and sweating round them, beer bottles being handed up and down, Loulou at the head. Wherever he went he carried with him the atmosphere of an open — air African nightclub. “Are you really going?” “To Portuguese? Yes, I tell you — this place is enough. And the plane — nothing. I go. — I go there one time already, is not bad….”

She said, “Could I come with you, Loulou — would you take me.”

“For sure I take you! For sure! Demain? Sais-tu venir? You plenty bagage and biloko?”

The Bayleys did not know what to say to her. “And when you get there? What will you do?”

“I can get a plane.”

Vivien said, “You’ll go to South Africa then.”

She shook her head.

“Where will you go Rebecca?” Vivien spoke gently.

She told them about the money Bray had sent to Switzerland.

“Don’t repeat that story to anyone else. Not even your friend Loulou,” Neil Bayley said. Vivien was silent.

“I think I’ll go and take the money.”

They did not ask any more questions.

Vivien gave her a camel-hair coat she had brought from England: “It’s almost winter in Europe — you’ve got no warm clothes.” She had the two cotton dresses they had made, the old jeans and shirt (washed, no trace of red earth), the picnic basket and Bray’s briefcase. Neil had had to ask her to let him look in it for Bray’s passport and other papers but he had given it back to her.

Neil came into the bedroom where she and Vivien stood with the coat. “What about the air ticket?”

“I’ll borrow the money from Loulou.”

Neil nodded: Loulou was her husband’s associate, the matter of the money would be easily arranged. She said at once, “He’ll be pleased to have me pay in Swiss francs.”

When Neil had left the room, she said to Vivien, “I’ll never live with Gordon again,” and Vivien stood there, looking at the coat without seeing it, pressing her thumbnail between her front teeth.

They gave her one of their suitcases. When she had packed, it was still half — empty. Up to the moment she left they seemed to feel both somehow responsible to stop her and yet unable to offer any reason why she should not go. “I don’t think he’ll ever get through the border,” Neil offered. “Specially him. It’s probably known he’s done some gun — running in Katanga in his time.”

“He’ll get through all right. Gordon always says Loulou can do anything.”

He drove a day and a night with only a short nap two or three times with the car come to rest at the roadside. It was dangerous for anyone to drive so long and fast without rest but she knew nothing would happen. She found it was not that you don’t care if you live or die but just that you know when you can’t die. You have been left alive. He had brought with him only one of the girls, and there was plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. She and the girl had no common language, so their communication consisted of an occasional smile and a wordless accord about the times they needed to go off into the bushes together to pee. The heat was very great and with the speed produced a daze: forest, savannah, scrub, a change in motion winding down a pass. Loulou got on well with the officials at the border post and “forgot” two bottles of whisky left standing beside the air — conditioner that sweated water in the humidity. On the other side of the frontier was night, sudden bursts of cackling music as he tried to pick up some station on the car radio, confused sleep, the fuzzy bulk of him there in the sweater, the headlight beams cloudy with insects, dawn coming in as a smell of freshness before the light. They were in a near-desert, hard yellow earth funnelled into antheaps fifteen feet high, dowdy thornbush draped in tattered webs, huge baobab trees. They drove over wooden bridges above dry riverbeds. Towards midday all growing things ceased to exist and there was nothing but hard yellow cliffs, drifts of pollen-coloured dunes, more cliffs runnelled and sheered away by exposure, and then behind the yellow, a blue as bright and hard — the sea. Through the filthy villages, the escort of bicycles and chickens and overburdened buses and lorries that are the first sign of every colonial town, they came to factories with Portuguese names, cliffs clothed completely with the pink and white walls and tiled roofs, the dark trees and brilliant trails of bougainvillea of white men’s houses, and below, the pale cubes and rectangles of the commercial centre behind a curved corniche and a harbour-jumble of ships and cranes. Loulou took her to the Lisboa Hotel (“You like it — two bar for cocktail”) and gave her the equivalent of fifty pounds, partly in dollars, partly in sterling, in addition to the price in escudos of a ticket for Europe. On one of their trips to the bushes the girl had shown Rebecca packets of notes in a calico bag on either hip under her pagne—she seemed to have been brought along more as a piggybank than une petite folie. Loulou himself did not book into the hotel; he had his good friend in the harbour customs to go and see, and then he had promised to buy the girl a wig — she put her fingers on her shoulders and smiled demandingly to show that it must be long hair, really long — before they set off again to drive down south to the other seaport.

When they had gone she sat on one of the beds in the room she had been given, swaying slightly, still, from the motion of the car, and telephoned the airways office. She was told she would have to wait two days for a connection to Zurich; there was a seat for her on the plane. They took her name and she said she would come to pay for the ticket later.

It was a double room with two beds separated by a little night-table holding the telephone, an ashtray, and a booklet entitled, in English, French, and Portuguese, What to See and Where to Go. There was a bathroom and behind thick curtains she found a little slice of balcony. She went out for a moment. A half-moon of flat bay, the palms moving away at regular spaces along the curve, and just opposite the hotel, a new block going up behind screens of matting. In a gap, workmen sat on the tightrope of steel girders eating their lunch. Down below, a tiny square that must have been the plaza when the town was a garrison outpost was divided by sand paths and ornamental plants, like the quarterings of a heraldic crest. A workman with a paper forage cap on his head waved at her. She came inside, pulled the curtains again, and stood looking at the two beds. She turned down the cover of the one she had sat on while telephoning, and lay on her back. Six fake candles of the chandelier had made six shaded brown circles on the ceiling. The glass drops giddied slowly in some current of air that she did not feel. There was nothing familiar in the room but the picnic basket and the briefcase. And herself. It was on this day, exactly one week ago, that they had been on the road from Gala.

One of the men at the reception desk of the Hotel Lisboa was short, with a large head of crimped hair, a tiny mouth blue-shaded all round no matter how closely shaven, and young brown eyes ringed like a marmoset’s. This large head was not very high above the counter and was always inclined in one kind of service or another — he was either changing travellers’ cheques, getting a number on the telephone for someone, or clicking the lead out of his little gilt pencil to draw a street-map. He spoke English fluently and it was he who told her how to get to the airline office. He would step out to prod at the button when the lift was slow to come; with a smile like the smile from a hospital bed he would take up the room-key dropped at the desk by a guest going out into the sun.

She could recall at will every detail about this man’s face, it was a rubber stamp tried out on a blank page, whereas in Bray’s face there were gaps that could not be filled in. Between the cheekbone and the angle of the jaw, on the left side. From the nose to the upper lip. She could not put him together. She caught certain expressions and certain angles but she could not find the steady image.

The promenade under the palm trees was much longer than it looked. It took more than half an hour, walking slowly, to reach the entrance to the docks. She would walk one way along the promenade and the other way on the opposite side of the wide boulevard, along the shops and buildings. Just before the docks there was a smelly place where the promenade was slippery with bits of fish and African women wholesalers bargained for catches and took them away, in the boots of the local taxis. On the town side was a new complex of banks and insurance companies, all mosaics and metal collage and the sort of monumental sculpture of black goddesses that white architects tend to commission in colonies where the local population is particularly malnourished. There were shops crammed with transistor radios, tape-recorders, and electric grills with well-browned plaster chickens stuck on their spits. There were older buildings, storerooms and warehouses shuttered blind, and others with peeling pastel façades, trompe-l’oeil pillars and garlands painted faintly round the doors and windows. At the pavement cafés men read newspapers; the white ones lowered them a moment when a woman passed. She sat in the street at one or other of the little tables for long stretches, drinking her black coffee well sweetened and watching the big birds that stood all day in the shallow water of the bay, looking stranded on the mud when the tide was out, and locked to their mirror-image, upside down in the calm pale surface, when the tide was in. Once she walked down to the edge of the sloppy mud but the birds did not move. There were concrete benches on the promenade. She sat for a while pestered by child beggars selling lottery tickets, and young Portuguese soldiers; perhaps the benches were the traditional place for picking up girls, although prostitutes in that town were hardly likely to be white. The young soldiers came from an ancient fort on one of the yellow hills above the bay; if she turned left instead of right, along the promenade, when she came out of the Hotel Lisboa, she passed beneath it. It was solid and worn as the crown of an old molar; the Portuguese had built it five hundred years ago and were there still — army jeeps went up and down the steep road to the battlements and sentries’ huts stood among the very old fig trees, rooted in the walls, that had never let go, either. At night it was floodlit; one of the sights mentioned in the trilingual guide beside the bed.

The plane did not leave until six in the evening on the second day. She bought a bottle of shampoo and washed her hair and went to the little square to dry it in the morning sun. A ragged old black man in a cap with the coat-of-arms of the town was splattering a hose on the coarse leaves of the shrubs. There were no English newspapers but the reception desk at the hotel displayed a wire stand with Time and Newsweek for the foreign businessmen who sat at all times of day under the neon lights of the bar lounge, exchanging handshakes and the misunderstandings of language difficulties with local businessmen and their hangers-on. She had bought Time and turned the pages in the square while the workmen whistled at her from the scaffolding. Married, divorced, dead — actresses, members of deposed royalty, American politicians she’d never heard of. Pictures of a group of nude students burning an effigy on a towering bridge; of a Vietnamese child with her arm blown off at the elbow. Near the bottom of a page, the photograph, the name — EENY MEENY MWETA MO — WILL HE BE THE NEXT TO GO? This has been the year of the coup in Africa-half-a-dozen governments toppled since January. Good-looking good boy of the Western nations, Adamson Mweta (40) is the latest of the continent’s moderate leaders to find himself hanging on to the presidential seat-belt while riots rock his country. His prisons are full but even then he can’t be sure who, among those at large, Left or Right, is friend or foe. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, urbane anti-Communist Albert Tola Tola, is inside after rumours of an attempted takeover last month. His trusted White Man Friday, Africa expert Colonel Evelyn James Bray (54), who helped him negotiate independence, has been murdered in mysterious circumstances on the road to the capital. His one-time comrade in arms, Leftist Edward Shinza, has succeeded in stirring up an insurrection in the trade unions that has escalated from general strike to countrywide chaos. As if to prove this old friends taunts that he is no more than “the black watchman standing guard outside the white man’s enterprise,” Adamson Mweta has had to call upon Britain to send troops to his country. Will the invasion-by-invitation of the former colonial master keep him in his seat and the country’s gold and other valuable mineral resources in the hands of British and U.S. interests?

Quite short; the last of the columns under the general heading of Africa. It was Mweta’s face that she had seen — Bray’s name was come upon in the middle of the text. She read the whole thing over several times. She walked down to the promenade and back along the shops and sat down again at one of the pavement tables. Other people had their newspapers and she had the magazine lying there beside the bowl full of paper sachets of sugar. The tide was coming in round the birds’ legs. A few empty tables away a man and a small boy were concentrating on something the man was drawing. The child had his head cocked sideways, smiling in admiration, anticipation and self-importance — the drawing was being done for him. The man was ageing, one of those extremely handsome men who might have a third or fourth wife the same age as a daughter. Every now and then he lifted his head and took a look under a raised, wrinkled brow at the sea for some point of reference. It was a very dark Mediterranean face, all the beautiful planes deeply scored in now, as if age were redrawing it in a sharper, darker pencil. Brilliantly black eyes were deep-set in a contemplative, amused crinkle that suggested disappointed scholarship — a scientist, someone who saw life as a pattern of gyrations in a drop under a microscope. But he was shabbily dressed and poor looking. Perhaps an intellectual who’d got into political trouble in Portugal. The little boy hung on his arm in eagerness, hampering him. At last the picture was finished and he held it out at arm’s length against the sea and the little boy clambered down from his chair to see it properly. She could see, too — a picture of great happiness, past happiness, choppy waves frilling along, a gay ship with flags and triumphant smoke, birds sprinkled about the air like kisses on a letter. The child looked at it smiling but still in anticipation, looking for the—something—the secret marvel that exists only in children’s expectation. It was the man himself who laughed at his work in enjoyment. Then the little boy took the cue and eagerly laughed, to be with him. The child had a final pull at the straw of his orangeade and then the pair crossed the boulevard hand and hand, taking the drawing along. The man steered the child in a special kind of alert protectiveness that suggested the charge was temporary, or new; a divorced father who has abducted the child from the custody of a former wife. — But no, he was really too old to be the father; more likely a grandfather who found himself alone with a child; she had the strong impression that this was the last thing in that man’s life, all he had left.

They were gone. For ten minutes she had felt a deep interest in those two human beings. One of the birds opened its wings — she had not seen them move before — and flapped slowly away over the bay.

The plane came in late from stops farther south in Africa and by the time it took off the town was a scimitar of sparkle along the bay, a bowl of greenish light that was the sports stadium, a tilting stage — set that was the fort, and then a few glows dying out like matches on the ground. She saw nothing of the forests and deserts of the continent she was leaving for the first time, although the man in the seat beside her kept turning on his reading-light to look at the map stuffed in along with the sick-bag in the seat-pocket. Brownish shaded areas, green areas: drops of moisture shimmied outside the double window and she could not even see the darkness — only her own face. The hostess brought along a trolley of papers and there was the cover of that same number of the magazine there, and when the trolley was steered back, it was gone: somewhere along the rows of seat-backs, someone was reading it. The man who was her neighbour drank individual bottles of champagne with the air of doing so on principle rather than with any enjoyment and at an hour when at last there was no food being served and the lights had been dimmed he pressed the red button for the hostess and asked for seltzer. Since he was awake she took out of the briefcase (beside her, between her legs and the wall of the plane) the half-sheet of typing paper on which, in Bray’s handwriting, there was the name of the bank, the number of the account, and La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. She had looked at it a number of times since she had got into the plane. It was probably the last thing he had written. The cheque for Hjalmar? No, that must have been before. But she could not be sure; she did not know when he had decided to put down on that piece of paper the particulars about the account. She wouldn’t ever know if it really was the last time he was to write when he wrote: La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. There was nothing but the facts, the address, the code name. What could one find in the shape of the letters, the spacing? She searched it as the child had searched the man’s drawing.

She put the paper away in the briefcase again. Beside her there were suppressed belches.

If he had copied out (from some notebook? from memory?) the details of the account, of course, it must have been to give to her. So that she would know where to go. But if they were to be together there would be no need for her to have the piece of paper. He had put it in the briefcase, he had not given it to her. When was he going to give it to her?

But perhaps it had been in the briefcase a long time. No notebook, no commitment to memory: kept in the briefcase for the record, and automatically taken along with them when they left as part of the personal papers, his and hers, they would need together. The man at her side fell asleep and she felt her mind begin to slide, too; there was a jerky snatch of dream with Bray walking about in it, but she drew back fearfully into wakefulness. And in hours or a little while, looking out into the blue — black that was clear now, she saw a burning crust along the edge of a darker mass. She thought of a veld fire but then was aware of a narrow reflection of the fire mirrored along its shape. It was a coastline down there — the seashore and little harbours lit up all night into the early dawn while the land mass behind was asleep. Now she saw blackly glittering swells of darkness: the sea.

The man beside her was craning his neck at a polite distance over her shoulder. He said, “The coast of Italy.”

She had never been out of Africa before. A feeling of intense strangeness came over her. It was day, up in the air. Down below, the people of Europe slept on. Soon there were the Alps in the cold sun, shining and elegant. Passengers revived to look at them, spread like a display for watches in a jeweller’s window.

A black Mercedes taxi took her from the glass and black airport into the city. Gentle humps of fields were still green, or stubbled after harvest. A chill breath misted them over. All the new buildings were the same heavy black frames squaring-off glass that was the same sheeny grey as the lake reflecting the sky. A high jet spouted out of the lake as if a whale were kept in captivity there. The hotel the girl at the airport information desk sent her to was an old villa above the lake and she had to walk down the street to get a tramcar into town. The houses had little spires, balconies, towers, and were closed away behind double windows; along a wall, an espaliered pear tree held still a single pear, ruddy and wizened. She wore the camel-hair coat and her legs were cold. The tram faltered and teetered steeply down and she got off with everyone else at a terminus in the main street. She had, not in her bag but in her hand clenched in the pocket of the coat, the piece of paper: apparently the bank was in this main street. She began to walk along looking at the way the numbers ran, and she crossed because the evens were on the other side, and walked on and on, gaining the impression that everyone was making straight for her as if she were not there. Then she realized that here people kept to the right, not the left. The street was very long and wide and busy but she was not conscious of shops or people, only of numbers. There was a bank with a satiny façade with tiny show-cases where a beaming puppet in a blonde wig held up her savings, but that was not the one. She showed someone the name on the piece of paper and was directed a few yards on to a pillared portico and huge double doors. Inside she was in an echoing hall with a black-and-white tiled floor and a few mahogany and brass-railed booths pushed far back round the walls. A porter intercepted her on the way to one of them. He couldn’t understand her and took her to a pale clerk who spoke perfect English. They sent her in a mahogany lift up through the great vault of the building. The feeling of strangeness that had begun in the plane grew stronger and stronger.

There was another echoing hall in which footsteps were a long-drawn-out approach or retreat. But here there was a corner with a thick carpet and leather-and-velvet chairs. She sat and looked at banking journals in French and German full of pictures of black frame-and-glass factory buildings and people skiing with wings of snow. An Indian man and woman were waiting, too — the woman in a gauzy sari with a cardigan over it — a stranger from another climate, like herself.

She did not believe, now, that anyone in this place would know about the account, or that the account or the money, spoken about so far away, existed at all. An impostor in bare legs and borrowed coat went along corridors, past troughs of plants, a wooden bear with hats and umbrellas on its arms, into a large stuffy, muffled room unlike any office she had ever been in. Another wooden bear. A glassfronted bookcase. Table held up by a satyr caryatid. A desk too, but with its functional aspect so softened by tooled leather, photographs, and a pot of African violets in a gilt basket that it was just another piece of furniture.

Herr Weber introduced himself like a doctor ready to hear any intimacy as blandly as he might ask about regular bowel action. He had a neat kind face and an old-fashioned paunch with a watchchain. La Fille aux Yeux d’Or might have been Schmidt or Jones; he wrote something with his silver pencil, rang a bell, sent for some papers. While they waited he made conversation. Bray had teased her that Goebbels and Goering as well as Tshombe had put away their millions in Swiss banks. Herr Weber was an old man— “Already forty years in this bank,” he told her, smiling. Where did she live? “Oh Africa must be interesting, yes? I have always wanted to visit — but that is so far. My wife likes to go to Italy. It is beautiful. And we have been once in Greece. That is beautiful. But Africa is beautiful too, neh?” Perhaps he had had this same conversation with Tshombe and would have it with the woman in the cardigan and sari— “Oh India must be interesting, yes?”—while all through the years he had sat safe among his family photographs.

When the papers came he read through them at the odd angle of people who wear bifocal lenses and asked how much money she wanted to draw. She said she thought all of it.

He made the fatherly suggestion: “Don’t you want rather to transfer it wherever you’re going? Where do you go?”

She had thought only of coming here: that was where she had been going. She said, “England.”

His short soft forefinger was a pendulum. “You know if you take your money to England, you don’t get it out again? You have it here in Switzerland, you can write to us from anywhere in the world, we send money to you. It’s better you take now only what you need, and I transfer to England what you are going to need there — where it is? London? — Whatever bank you say.”

“Any bank — I don’t know any.”

She signed some papers. He wrote down the particulars of the sum to be paid into the account of Jean-Louis Kamboya, of Lubumbashi. “Congo Kinshasa, no?” He was proud to know the difference. “With this Congo and that Congo—” He gave her a slip for the teller and shook hands, “I wish you a pleasant stay, dear lady. Unfortunately this is not the best time. You should come in springtime, neh?”

Downstairs white male hands with a gold wedding ring counted out fifteen hundred Swiss francs in notes and clipped them together. She was like Loulou’s girl, now, with a variety of currencies about her.

And now it was done. Her own footsteps died away behind her as she came out through the great doors and she was confronted with figures in raincoats and overcoats hurrying all round her, the sound of children’s inquiring voices in German. Now she had no purpose at all and bewilderedly she met the shops full of suède coats and crocodile-skin luggage (real, not like Loulou’s), the splendid toyshops, shops with rosy salami and horseshoe-shaped sausages, showcases of steel and gold and diamond watches, shops with fur boots. A constant waterfall streamed down the inside of a window filled with bowls of roses, lilies and orchids, magnifying them and somehow setting them out of reach as the lenses of goggles did the wild gardens under water in that other lake that was left behind. In a confectioner’s women bought cakes and ate them at the counter. A blast of heat at the door kept the chill out and while she drank a cup of coffee in the vanilla-scented room where everybody was eating sweet things she watched fingers pointed at this cake or that and felt her legs warmed by the central heating. Out in the street she wandered on past a tiny buried square with a lichened statue deep in hand-shaped leaves cast like old chamois gloves. She had never seen a chestnut tree before but she recognized the conkers children played games with in the English storybooks of her childhood. It began to rain; an old fat woman sold roast chestnuts from a brazier kept aglow under an umbrella. In the tram going back up the hill she sat among the housewives going home with their morning’s shopping, already equipped in full dress against the coming of winter — coats, boots, umbrellas, gloves; even the little children with their gumboots and duffles zipped up tubbily. They seemed so placid, matter-of-factly prepared for hazards all foreseen in an environment of their own where all risks were known ones. But of course, it was never really like that: even these damp pink noses (even Herr Weber) could be invaded in their lawful feather-beds by the violence of sudden love or death.

She felt so cold and bloodless that she ordered a glass of red wine in the hotel lounge. It was furnished with rickety antiques and family portraits and ended in a little conservatory where the common plants that grew everywhere at home, in Africa, were warmed by central heating and trained up the glass from pots. A young couple were sitting there, stirring the cream on their coffee and slowly finishing bowls of berries sprinkled with sugar. They murmured to each other in German — something like, “Good …?” “Oh very good”—and went on dreamily licking the spoons. The girl wore trousers and a sweater with a string of pearls, she was tall and narrow-footed and remote. The man, shorter than she, looked not quite at home in rather smart casual clothes and had a worried little double chin already beginning beneath his soft face. The girl yawned and he smiled. It was the stalemate of conversation, the listlessness of a newly married couple who have never previously been lovers. “Very good,” he said again, putting his bowl on the tray.

The wine rose to her head in a singing sensation and she thought of them sitting on politely round a coffee table for ever, he slipping down into fatness and greyness, she never released from her remoteness, while their children grew, waiting to take their places there. She became aware of an ornamental clock ticking away the silence in the room between herself and the couple.

Chapter 23

And so she came to England, flying over a grey sea with scum floating like spit, a sea into which the sewers of Europe emptied; over European cities made up of grey blocks like printers’ lugs.

Her parents were living there. But the fact was just an address to which she had written letters and not a place probably within an hour’s journey of the streets she knew now, in London, where people walked off into a thickening of mist as if off the end of the world. She made no attempt to get in touch with her family. She wandered the streets and rode the buses going to see all the things that stood for this city. If there was a lane that said “To Samuel Johnson’s House,” she took it; if there was a brochure, she bought it. She waited on the steepening stairways of tube stations, descending into darkness. She crossed bridges and smelled the musk of churches. She passed the pubs full of beer — coloured light where people stood close-packed, touching. She was among them in trains where they stood close-packed, not touching. She read the messages: in the tube, a girl dropping paper panties from between forefinger and thumb — Give Your Dirty Washing To the Dustman; in the Soho chemists’, Pregnancy Test—24-Hour Service. She went along the titles of second-hand books on a barrow off Old Compton Street; the faces of old men under the yoke of sandwich-boards; the look-out of touts standing like shopwalkers outside strip clubs.

She crossed between the puddles from the fountain and the legs of the people who sat all day with their packs and guitars, marooned on that traffic island that was Piccadilly Circus. A young Jesus in dirty white robes had a ring of frizzy-maned disciples. Girls in Red Indian fringes rested on boys in fur-trappers’ jackets. They streamed past, around, behind her in Shaftesbury Avenue, cowboys with belts as wide as corsets, pale girls with long tangled hair, long bedraggled coats and broken boots like the waifs in illustrations to school-prize editions of Dickens; gipsies, Eastern mendicants, handsome bandits with mustachios, a bullfighter in green velvet pants and bolero, coming full on at her. What did this cold fiesta know of the reality of hot sun on a burning car? Of the load of mauve flowers carried by the trees in the village where chickens tied by the leg were mashed into blood and guts under men’s feet — a moment of sudden displacement came to her like the dazzling dark brightness that follows a blow. She went unrecognized here; she was the figure with the scythe.

Yet this was where Bray came from: there were faces in which she could trace him. An elderly man in a taxi outside a restaurant; even a young actor with sideburns and locks. He might have once been, or become, any of these who were living so differently from the way he did. It was as if she forayed into a past that he had left long ago and a future that he would never inhabit. She wandered the bypasses of his life that he had not taken, meeting the possibility of his presence. It came to her as a kind of wonder, an explanation. Of what? His life? His death? Her experience of living with him? Something of all three. She had started off with the knowledge that she would not live with Gordon again. It was the first positive thing she knew after the moment, on the road, when she had become conscious of thirst; she had said to Vivien, “I will never live with Gordon again.” Now she began to have an inkling of why she knew this. This place where Bray had come from was full of faces that he was not, that he had chosen not to be. He had made his life in accordance with some conscious choice — beliefs, she supposed, that she also supposed she didn’t properly understand. It didn’t have much to do with being what her father would have called a nigger-lover. But it had something to do with life itself. Gordon was always trying to outwit; Bray lived not as an adversary but a participant. She had never lived with anyone like that before. And once you did, you couldn’t live again with a Gordon, who wanted only to “make his pile and get out”—always to the next country just like the last and the next “opportunity” just like the last: to make his pile and get out. Bray’s way had ended on the road as if he hadn’t mattered any more than a bunch of chickens tied by the leg — yes, the explanation given by the people in the capital was nothing to her, meaningless against the fact of his death as she had heard it and seen and felt it in flesh as she picked glass from his cheek. Whoever they were, they had killed him like a chicken, a snake hacked in the road, a bug mashed on a wall, and what they had done was pure faceless horror to her, the madness of waiting in the ditch, the earth under her fingernails. But she was sure he would have known who they were. He would have known why it had happened to him. Old lecherous Dando, trying to feel the beginning of her breast from over her shoulder, was right about that.

She kept still the piece of paper with the particulars of the Swiss account in his handwriting; she carried it around with her in the pocket of the new coat she had bought herself in one of the shops full of lights flashing on and off to nasal music. He had smuggled the money out because he loved her, that she also knew. But this did not please her as proof, because (taking the paper out in tubes, buses, on park benches) it meant at the same time that he accepted they would part, that there was a life for her to live without him. And — cracking the code further — at the time when it was written, that meant he would go back one day to Olivia; not that he would be dead.

She thought of Olivia as an empty perfume bottle in which a scent still faintly remains. She had found one on one of the shelves in the wardrobe of her hotel room: left there by some anonymous English woman, an Olivia. She knew nobody in the city of eight millions. She had nothing in common with anyone; except his wife.

At times she was strongly attracted by the idea of going to see Olivia and his daughters. But the thought that they would receive her, accept her in their supremely civilized tolerance—his tolerance — this filled her with resentment. She wanted to bare her suffering, to live it and thrust it, disgusting, torn live from her under their noses, not to make it “acceptable” to others.

She had bought herself warm clothes and now looked like anyone else, as she went about. After an exchange with the Irish maid in the hotel on the subject of the ages, temperaments, and proclivity to illness of their respective children, she thought of how she would send for her children and perhaps live in London with them. It was not so much a plan as a daydream — walking with them over the piles of fallen leaves in the parks. The Irish maid was the only person she talked to and the conversation began the moment the woman opened the door with her pass key every day and went on, impossible to stem, until a final burst of the Hoover drowned parting remarks. The answers to questions about children were factual but it was Bray she was speaking of when husbands were discussed, and he was alive, waiting for her to come back to whatever part of Africa it was they lived. The maid was satisfied without any precise definition: she referred to Africa as “out there” and looked sympathetic. “I had to leave me job down in the men’s university hostel after twelve years becaz the coloureds was needlin’ each other in the bathroom — I saw the pots of vaseline. I went straight down to the superintendent, I said, all those coloureds the government’s lettin’ in, I’m not used to things like that, I said, my husband wouldn’t let me stay another day — I won’t stand for that, I said, thank you very much.”

Although there was the half — sheet of paper in the coat pocket, there was also what Bray had said the night before they left Gala. She had told him — not in so many words — the only thing she feared about Gala was being sent away, and he said, I know; but I’ll be there. And when she had said, how can we go together, and he knew England was in her mind, he had said, perhaps we can manage. He had said: we’ll decide what to do. (Sitting one afternoon in something called the Ceylon Tea Shop, she suddenly remembered that precisely.) We’ll decide what to do. Perhaps the code of the paper didn’t read that he was going to set her down somewhere, gently, regretfully. It might have meant they were going to Sardinia, where the spear — fishing was so good. No, not really that … but somewhere together outside Gala; they had never had any existence, outside Gala.

In the teashop with the blown — up photographs of tea-estates and the framed quiz How Much Do You Know about Tea? facing her, she came back again to the fact that on that last night they had not made love properly. It was she who had decided, because they were both so tired and had to get up early, that they wouldn’t finish it. He fell asleep inside her body and there was the thought, like a treat, that they would make love in a big bed for the first time the next night, in the capital. So he had never come to her, she had never come to him; it had never been reached, that particular compact of fulfilment. She passed through days now when she was racked by an obsession of regret about this. Of all the deprivation, the loss, the silence, the emptiness, the finality, this became the most urgent, and the cruellest, because urgency itself was a form of mockery thrown back at her from the blank of death: there was nothing for it to be directed at. She told herself that they had made love a hundred times, the compact was made — what did one more time matter? But she hungered for that one last time. It had been given up, for nothing, lost along with the rest, for no reason. She asked herself again and again what difference it would have made. But the answer was fiercely that she wanted it. It was hers. Before death came. It had belonged to her; it was not death that had taken it — what death took was unarguable — it had been forgone. She thought about it so much that she produced in herself the physical manifestations of the unfinished act. The lips of her body swelled and she knew with horror the desire of that night that now would never be satisfied.

She felt afraid of herself.

The smell of stale cigarettes in ashtrays was the smell of Gala after burnings.

Walking round the shivering ponds, down the avenues of leaves sodden as old newspaper under the trees of parks, she saw the nodules of next year’s buds on the stripped branches, the callousness of the earth endlessly renewing itself. Would she, too, seek again — she tried to reduce it to the baldest fact — that coming up of one flesh against another until like a little stone breaking at last the surface of a still pool, sensation in ring after ring flows out from that little stone, that pip fructifying from its hiding place, the plumb centre of her being … she thought: that’s all it is. She grew afraid. It would come back, commonplace desire. Everything else would come round again; be renewed. She sat in the bus and felt the threat of ordinary bodies around her.

There were days when hammering fists of anguish ceased for no more reason than they would begin again. Then she cried. She had begun to do exercises on the floor of the hotel room every morning because she had read in some newspaper that you could get through long periods simply by going through the motions of some routine, and she lay there on the maid’s Hoovered carpet and the tears ran from the outer corners of her eyes. She wept because the sense of Bray had come back to her so strongly, as if he had never been dead on that road and it had never happened. What was she doing in the hotel room? The sense of him was restored to her and she did not have to look for signs of him or question him, because he was gone and there was nothing more to find. And so he died, for her, again. The Irish maid came to clean and the marks of weeping could not be hidden from those hen-sharp eyes beneath the hackle-like fringe; she said that she’d just heard how her children were missing her. The lie became a tenderness towards them and a longing to see them; and the fantasy of walking with them in London changed to an intention. In a few days she would work out what sort of letter to write to Gordon about them. She did not know how or why she expected Gordon to hand the children over to her. She supposed everything might even seem to go on as before, with Gordon satisfied that he had a wife and children somewhere, only just a little more remote than they had always been.

One afternoon she was coming out of the supermarket in the suburban shopping street near the hotel when somebody said her name. It came like a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned. A tall, very slender girl with a narrow, sallow face curtained in straight black hair was leaning casually on a wheeled shopping basket. It was Emmanuelle. “I thought it was you but it couldn’t be — are you over on holiday?”

“My family live in England. I’ve been here about two weeks.” She held tightly closed her packet containing one pear and one orange; evidence of her solitariness. “And you — you live round about?”

Emmanuelle’s hair wrapped itself across her neck like a scarf, in the wind. “We’re just down the road. Beastly basement flat. But we’re getting a big studio next month — if we don’t go back, instead.”

“Back? Could Ras go back?”

“It’s someone else.”

“I’m sorry — I just thought—”

They stood there talking, two women who had never liked one another much. Emmanuelle’s elegant hands mimed a sort of trill of inconsequence along the handle of her basket. “That’s all right. No drama. We’re friends and all that. I’m living with Kofi Ahuma — he’s just published his first novel, but now his father’s in favour again in Ghana, and he can indulge his homesickness. So we may go to Ghana. Are your children with you? We’re producing a children’s play together — he wrote it and I did the music. It’s on at the Theatre Club for the next three days, they might enjoy it.”

“No, they’re not here.”

Emmanuelle gave the quick nod of someone who reminds herself of something that hasn’t interested her very much. “Oh my God — you were in that awful accident, weren’t you?” She was mildly curious. “What happened to Colonel Bray — he was beaten up?”

“He was killed.”

“How ghastly.” She might have left Ras but she was still armed with his opinions. “Of course, he was with Shinza and that crowd. Poor devil. These nice white liberals getting mixed up in things they don’t understand. What did he expect?”

Chapter 24

The two airlifts of troops who were flown in at Mweta’s request for help from Britain succeeded in bringing order to the country for the time being. It was the same order of things that had led to disorder in the first place. But Mweta was back in his big house and Shinza was in exile in Algiers and Cyrus Goma, Basil Nwanga, Dhlamini Okoi and many others were kept in detention somewhere and — for the time being — forgotten.

Hjalmar Wentz was unharmed in the house in Gala and it was he who packed up Bray’s things after Bray’s death and sent them to his wife, Olivia.

No one could say for certain whether, when Bray was killed on the way to the capital, he was going to Mweta or to buy arms for Shinza. To some, as his friend Dando had predicted, he was a martyr to savages; to others, one of those madmen like Geoffrey Bing or Conor Cruise O’Brien who had only got what he deserved. In a number devoted to “The Decline of Liberalism” in an English monthly journal he was discussed as an interesting case in point: a man who had “passed over from the scepticism and resignation of empirical liberalism to become one of those who are so haunted by the stupidities and evils in human affairs that they are prepared to accept apocalyptic solutions, wade through blood if need be, to bring real change.”

Hjalmar Wentz also put together Bray’s box of papers and gave them over to Dando, who might know what to do with them. Eventually they must have reached the hands of Mweta. He, apparently, chose to believe that Bray was a conciliator; a year later he published a blueprint for the country’s new education scheme, the Bray Report.