Euphoria

20

It was over by the time I got there. I cut my engine and heard no celebrating from any quarter of the village. On the beach crows and buzzards fought for position on the ribs of a wild boar and flies marauded taro skins and fruit rinds nearby. The fire pits were cold, beads and feathers lay half buried in the pounded sand, and the air itself felt exhausted.

The lake was a good bit lower than the last time I was here and the heat had a new density. I dragged my canoe up to the grasses and carried my engine and an extra tank of petrol up the path.

I ran into no one on my way to their house. I recognized the silence, the spent stillness of a village having depleted itself in every way. I wasn’t bothered that I had missed the festivities. I was certain Nell had taken impeccable notes. It was the interviewing of Xambun that would yield the most important information.

Out of the opening of one of the men’s houses hung a pair of legs, as if the fellow hadn’t been able to make it all the way inside before collapsing. It made me aware of my own stores of energy. I felt fitter than I had in a great while, and chuckled at the memory of crashing to the ground the last time I was here. I stashed the engine and petrol below their house and went back down to the beach for the large suitcase I’d brought. At the foot of their ladder I called up softly, not wanting to disturb them if they too were sleeping. No response, so I climbed up. They were both at their typewriters in the large mosquito room.

None of the photographs taken of Nell Stone, the ones you find in textbooks and the two biographies, even the ones taken in the field, ever captured the way she really looked. You cannot see her energy, her quick brimming joy when you came through the door. If I could have any picture of her at all, it would be then, at the moment she saw me that day.

‘You came.’

‘I’m only staying three months,’ I joked, holding up the large case, which seemed even bigger inside the house.

Fen was watching her now, and her face lost its unguarded expression. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, which was over before I could register it. Then she stood back. She smelled somehow like the back garden of Hemsley House, of juniper and laburnum.

‘You look quite the gentleman anthropologist. All you need is a — wait! Wait!’ She jumped up, flashed out of one mosquito room and into the other, and returned with hat, pipe, and camera. ‘Come on. Too dark in here.’

‘Nell, he’s just arrived for God’s sake,’ Fen said by way of hello from his chair. He looked awful, blue-black rings under his eyes and his skin papery as an old man’s. His shirtfront clung to his chest, sopped in sweat.

‘It’s a classic,’ she said. ‘He can put it on the cover of his memoirs.’

She had me go back down the stairs with my suitcase and stand up against the tamarind tree facing their house. She picked up a long frond from the road and draped it over my shoulder.

‘Now bite the pipe.’

I clenched down on it and grimaced, my best imitation of a wizened old master I had at Charterhouse.

‘That’s it!’ But she was laughing too hard to take the photograph.

‘Oh Christ, I’ll have to do it.’

Fen came down and took three pictures of me. Then we put Nell in the hat with the cases and the pipe and took a few more. A man hurried past us and Fen called after him to borrow his digging stick and heavy necklaces. He handed these items over reluctantly and then looked on with concern as Fen posed with them.

Nell was in full health. From what I could see her lesions had healed, her limp was less pronounced. Her lips were the deep red of a child’s. The Tam diet clearly suited her; she was rounder, and her skin looked smooth as soap. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.

‘How are your warriors?’ Fen said as we went back up into the house. I recognized it as an idle question, a question posed by someone who was thinking of something else, the way my father might have asked me about school when I came home for a holiday, his mind on a set of cells or tail feathers.

I told them that the Kiona had promised me a Wai.

‘Fantastic,’ Nell said. ‘Can we come?’

‘Certainly.’ It had been so long since I’d had something to look forward to.

‘Party’s over here,’ Fen said.

‘Have you managed to interview him yet?’ I said.

‘Fen thinks we should play it cool with him, let him come to us.’

‘Really?’ This surprised me. There was nothing about their style of ethnographic bullying that allowed for ‘playing it cool.’ They played it hot and fast, and my first thought was to suspect they were lying to me, and I was ashamed of this.

We were inside now, and Fen was pouring us drinks, a fermented cherry juice. He let out a laugh. ‘It’s not like we have a choice.’

‘He told me to go away.’

‘We need to give him time,’ Fen said. ‘He associates us with the mine right now.’

‘He needs to talk about it with us, with people who understand what he’s been through.’

‘Nellie, you don’t know what he’s been through.’

‘Of course I do. He’s been an indentured servant to Western greed.’

‘Where? Which mine? For how long? He could have been there three months for all we know. And that chap Barton who manages Edie Creek. He’s a good sort. I bet he runs a decent operation, if Xambun was there.’

‘By my calculations he’s been gone over three years. Malun has all her fronds—’

‘Her fronds!’ Fen turned to me. ‘When we first got here she had half the fronds she does now. There is no way to know how long he was gone.’

‘Barton is not a good sort. He hosts crocodile parties, Fen.’ I didn’t know what she meant. ‘He bets on the croc and his houseboys die.’

‘That’s rubbish and you know it. What’s in that thing anyway, Bankson? Not sure you even brought a rucksack last time.’

‘Minton came by with the post, and he had a few things for the two of you.’

I popped the clasps. I’d put Fen’s five letters in the fabric of the side pocket. Nell’s post — one hundred and forty-seven pieces of it — filled the rest of the space.

‘Schuyler Fenwick.’ I handed Fen the thin packet of letters. ‘Sorry, mate.’

‘No worries. I’m used to it.’

So was she, it appeared. With none of the shock or celebration I had anticipated, she took the suitcase and set about sorting her mountain of correspondence with a businesslike air: family to the left, work to the right, and friends in the middle. She barely paused over any of them, just checked the return address and placed it on a pile. Occasionally a name brought a small smile, but she seemed each time to be hoping for someone else. Fen took his into the workroom and opened them at the desk.

I settled on the sofa and plucked a magazine from Nell’s pile. The New Yorker, which I’d never seen. On its front was a drawing of tourists at a café in Paris. It was dated August 20, 1932, and the perspective was flattened, with the tables nearly floating in the air, the faces geometric, Picasso-like. Smoke came off a cigarette in a black curlicue. The seven-hour trip in the sun caught up with me and though I meant to open the magazine, my hands were heavy and held it closed. It was a lovely drawing, though perhaps I felt that way because I had not seen a piece of Western art in so long. It filled me with longing, too: the menu, the carafes of wine, the red-and-white checked tablecloths. A waiter came up behind me. He took my order. Squab, I said. Then he turned to Nell, who said squib, and we laughed and I jerked awake.

I worried I’d laughed aloud, but Nell was reading a letter and did not hear me in any case. I could still feel it in my chest and throat, a great bubble of warmth that wanted to escape. Squib and squab. I had a small erection beneath the magazine.

‘Bankson!’ Fen nudged me. ‘I want to show you something.’

I stood woozily and followed him out and down.

‘Best to steer clear, really, when she reads all that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He shook his head. ‘She gets letters now from every crazy person in America. Everyone wants her advice, her approval. Her name on anything is suddenly some magic golden seal. Then there’s Helen.’

Fen had stopped below the ceremonial house with the enormous villainous face looming above us, its black prickly snake tongue hanging six feet out of its mouth.

‘Who’s Helen?’

‘Another one of Papa Franz Boas’ disciples. Mentally imbalanced. Black, black moods. I had to tell Nell to stop seeing her. Nell writes thirty letters to her one. But she never learns. She always fears the worst. Did you see her pawing through that suitcase for letters from Helen? I don’t think there was even one this time.’

But there was a package, I wanted to say. A heavy rectangle with Helen’s name and address in the top left corner. ‘I’m sorry I brought the post then.’

‘Best to get it over with,’ he said, and called up to the men inside.

After we climbed up and passed under the mouth of the hideous face, there was a second entrance, narrower than the first, red on both sides. I saw that it was the lower part of another carving, this one of a woman with a shaved head and large breasts that towered above us. Her waist tapered and her legs split and the opening we were about to pass through was her enormous scarlet vulva. Fen stepped through it without remark.

I took my time, examining how it was constructed.

‘Look,’ he said to me, ‘I respect their rules of secrecy. No woman has ever entered this house. So don’t tell Nell about anything you see here. It will get her all worked up over nothing.’

The inside of a men’s ceremonial house is not all that different to a dining club at Cambridge. There is the same low talk, the same clustering, the same ease. But not for nonmembers. Even Fen, for whom fitting in seemed the least of concerns, who behaved as if the world should conform to him, walked uncomfortably down the middle of the long room, his eyes adjusting, looking for a man named Kanup. Kanup was the manager of Tam art, the one who decided what would be kept and what would be sold, who set the prices and packed the canoes and oversaw the returns. He had lived with a Kiona woman for a time and as soon as Fen found him Kanup began to speak in great grandiose terms of Tam art and why it was superior to Kiona art and to the art of every other tribe in the region. Kanup was the kind of fellow who wanted your attention and made sure he got it. His Kiona was excellent, and I was compelled as much by his utter bilingualism as I was by his knowledge. I made my notes as I had made all my notes in the field, with full concentration and complete uncertainty as to whether they would be of any use at all. Fen disappeared quickly somewhere in the dim back of the vast room. After a while I was aware of voices escalating into argument behind me. I worried it was my presence in their house that was causing the trouble, but when I was able to break away from Kanup’s steady stare on me, I saw their focus was at the back of the room, in the dark alcove where Fen was. I could not see what he was doing or whom he was with.

‘What was going on back there?’ I asked him on the path home.

‘Nothing.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Nothing. Resting. Waiting for you.’ But he was lying, and not going to great pains to hide it.