Life Times: Stories 1952-2007

Livingstone’s Companions

In the House that afternoon the Minister of Foreign Affairs was giving his report on the President’s visit to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. ‘I would like to take a few minutes to convey to you the scene when we arrived at the airport,’ he was saying, in English, and as he put the top sheet of his sheaf of notes under the last, settling down to it, Carl Church in the press gallery tensed and relaxed his thigh muscles — a gesture of resignation. ‘It’s hard to describe the enthusiasm that greeted the President everywhere he went. Everywhere crowds, enormous crowds. If those people who criticise the President’s policies and cry neo-colonialism when he puts the peace and prosperity of our country first—’

There were no Opposition benches since the country was a one-party state, but the dissident faction within the party slumped, blank-faced, while a deep hum of encouragement came from two solid rows of the President’s supporters seated just in front of Carl Church.

‘. . those who are so quick to say that our President’s policies are out of line with the OAU could see how enthusiastically the President is received in fellow member states of the OAU, they would think before they shout, believe me. They would see it is they who are out of line, who fail to understand the problems of Pan-Africa, they who would like to see our crops rot in the fields, our people out of work, our development plans come to a full stop’ — assent swarmed, the hum rose — ‘and all for an empty gesture of fist-shaking’ — the two close-packed rows were leaning forward delightedly; polished shoes drummed the floor — ‘they know as well as you and I will not free the African peoples of the white-supremacy states south of our borders.’

The Foreign Minister turned to the limelight of approval. The President himself was not in the House; some members watched the clock (gift of the United States Senate) whose graceful copper hand moved with a hiccup as each minute passed. The Speaker in his long curly wig was propped askew against the tall back of his elaborate chair. His clerk, with the white pompadour, velvet bow and lacy jabot that were part of the investiture of sovereignty handed down from the British, was a perfect papier-mâché blackamoor from an eighteenth-century slave trader’s drawing room. The House was panelled in local wood whose scent the sterile blast of the air-conditioning had not yet had time to evaporate entirely. Carl Church stayed on because of the coolness, the restful incense of new wood — the Foreign Minister’s travelogue wasn’t worth two lines of copy. Between the Minister and the President’s claque the dialogue of banal statement and deep-chested response went on beamingly, obliviously.

‘. . can assure you. . full confidence lies in. .’

Suddenly the Speaker made an apologetic but firm gesture to attract the Minister’s attention: ‘Mr Minister, would it be convenient to adjourn at this point. .?’

The clique filed jovially out of the House. The Chamberlain came into the foyer carrying his belly before turned-out thighs, his fine African calves looking well in courtier’s stockings, silver buckles flashing on his shoes. Waylaid on the stairs by another journalist, the Minister was refusing an interview with the greatest amiability, in the volume of voice he had used in the House, as if someone had forgotten to turn off the public address system.

With the feeling that he had dozed through a cinema matinée, Carl Church met the glare of the afternoon as a dull flash of pain above his right eye. His hired car was parked in the shade of the building — these were the little ways in which he made some attempt to look after himself: calculating the movement of the sun when in hot countries, making sure that the hotel bed wasn’t damp, in cold ones. He drove downhill to the offices of the broadcasting station, where his paper had arranged telex facilities. In the prematurely senile building, unfinished and decaying after five years, the unevenness of the concrete floors underfoot increased his sensation of slowed reactions. He simply looked in to see if there was anything for him; the day before he had sent a long piece on the secessionist movement in the Southern Province and there just might be a word of commendation from the Africa desk. There was something: ‘100 YEARS ANNIVERSARY ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY PARTY SENT SEARCH FOR LIVINGSTONE STOP YOU WELL PLACED RETRACE STEPS LIVINGSTONES LAST JOURNEY SUGGEST LAKES OR INTERIOR STOP THREE THOUSAND WORDS SPECIAL FEATURE 16TH STOP THANKS BARTRAM.’

He wanted to fling open bloody Bartram’s bloody door — the words were in his mouth, overtaking each other. Church is out there, he’ll come up with the right sort of thing. Remember his ‘Peacock Throne’ piece? Oh yes. He had been sent to Iran for the coronation of the Shahanshah, he was marked down to have to do these beautiful, wryly understated sidelights. Just as a means of self-expression, between running about after Under Ministers and party bosses and driving through the bush at a hundred in the shade to look at rice fields planned by the Chinese and self-help pig farms run by the Peace Corps, and officially non-existent guerrilla training camps for political refugees from neighbouring countries. He could put a call through to London. How squeakily impotent the voice wavering across the radio telephone. Or he could telex a blast; watch all the anticipated weariness, boredom and exasperation punching a domino pattern on clean white tape.

Slowly pressure subsided from his temples. He was left sulkily nursing the grievance: don’t even realise the ‘lakes and interior’ are over the border! In the next country. Don’t even know that. The car whined up the hill again (faulty differential this one had) to the office full of dead flies and posters of ski slopes where the airline agency girl sat. There was a Viscount the next day, a local Dakota the day after. ‘I’ll wait-list you. You’re sure to get on. Just be at the airport half an hour early.’

He was there before anybody. Such a pretty black girl at the weigh-bay; she said with her soft, accented English, ‘It looks good. You’re top of the list, don’t worry, sir.’

‘I’m not worried, I assure you.’ But it became a point of honour, like the obligation to try to win in some silly game — once you’d taken the trouble to get to the airport, you must succeed in getting away. He watched the passengers trailing or hurrying up with their luggage and — smug devils — presenting their tickets. He tried to catch the girl’s eye now and then to see how it was going. She gave no sign, except, once, a beautiful airline smile, something she must have learnt in her six weeks’ efficiency and deportment course. Girls were not beautiful, generally, in this part of Africa; the women of Vietnam had spoilt him for all other women, anyway. In the steps of Livingstone, or women of the world, by our special correspondent. But even in his mind, smart phrases like that were made up, a picture of himself saying them, Carl A. Church, the foreign correspondent in the air-conditioned bar (when asked what the American-style initial stood for, the story went that he had said to a bishop, ‘Anti, Your Grace’). Under his absurdly tense attention for each arrival at the weigh-bay there was the dark slow movement of the balance of past and present that regulates the self-estimate by which one really manages to live. He was seeing again — perhaps for the first time since it happened, five? six? years ago — a road in Africa where the women were extremely beautiful. She was standing on the edge of the forest with a companion, breasts of brown silk, a water mark of sunlight lying along them. A maroon and blue pagne hid the rest of her. On a sudden splendid impulse he had stopped the car (that one had a worn clutch) and offered her money, but she refused. Why? The women of that country had been on sale to white men for a number of generations. She refused. Why me? Well, he accepted that when it came to women, whom he loved so well, his other passion — the desire to defend the rights of the individual of any colour or race — did not bear scrutiny.

Now a blonde was up at the weigh-bay for the second or third time; the black girl behind it was joined by an airline official in shirtsleeves. They consulted a list while the blonde went on talking. At last she turned away and, looking round the echoing hall with the important expression of someone with a complaint to confide, this time came and sat on the bench where he waited. Among her burdens was a picture in brown paper that had torn over the curlicues of the gilt frame. Her thin hands had rings thrust upon them like those velvet Cleopatra’s needles in the jewellers’. She puts on everything she’s got, when she travels; it’s the safest way to carry it. And probably there’s a pouch round her middle, containing the settlement from her last ex-husband. Carl Church had noticed the woman before, from some small sidetrack of his mind, even while she existed simply as one of the lucky ones with a seat on the plane. She was his vintage, that’s why; the blonde pageboy broken into curling locks by the movement of her shoulders, the big red mouth, the high heels, the girlish floral beach-dress — on leaves during the war, girls his own age looked like that. But this one had been out in the sun for twenty years. Smiled at him; teeth still good. Ugly bright blue eyes, cheap china. She knew she still had beautiful legs, nervous ankles all hollows and tendons. Her dead hair tossed frowsily. He thought, tender to his own past: she’s horrible.

‘This’s the second morning I’ve sat here cooling my heels.’ Her bracelets shook, dramatising exasperation. ‘The second day running. I only hope to God I’m on this time.’

He said, ‘Where’re you trying to get to?’ But of course he knew before she answered. He waited a moment or two, and then strolled up to the weigh-bay. ‘Still top of the list, I hope?’ — in an undertone.

The airline man, standing beside the black beauty, answered brusquely, ‘There’s just the one lady before you, sir.’

He began to argue.

‘We can’t help it, sir. It’s a compassionate, came through from the town office.’

He went back and sat down.

She said, ‘You’re going on the same plane?’

‘Yes.’ Not looking her way, the bitch, he watched with hope as boarding time approached and there were no new arrivals at the weigh-bay. She arranged and rearranged her complicated hand luggage; rivalry made them aware of one another. Two minutes to boarding time, the airline girl didn’t want him to catch her eye, but he went over to her just the same. She said, cheerfully relieved of responsibility, ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to get a seat. Everybody’s turned up. We’re just checking.’

He and the blonde lady were left behind. Hostility vanished as the others filed off down the Red Route. They burst into talk at once, grumbling about the airline organisation.

‘Imagine, they’ve been expecting me for days.’ She was defiantly gay.

‘Dragging out here for nothing — I was assured I’d get a seat, no trouble at all.’

‘Well, that’s how people are these days — my God, if I ran my hotel like that. Simply relax, what else can you do? Thank heaven I’ve got a firm booking for tomorrow.’

A seat on tomorrow’s plane, eh; he slid out of the conversation and went to look for the reservations counter. There was no need for strategy, after all; he got a firm booking, too. In the bus back to town, she patted the seat beside her. There were two kinds of fellow travellers, those who asked questions and those who talked about themselves. She took the bit of a long cigarette holder between her teeth and quoted her late husband, told how her daughter, ‘a real little madam’, at boarding school, got on like a house on fire with her new husband, said how life was what you put into it, as she always reminded her son; people asked how could one stand it, up there, miles away from everything, on the lake, but she painted, she was interested in interior decorating, she’d run the place ten years by herself, took some doing for a woman.

‘On the lake?’

‘Gough’s Bay Hotel.’ He saw from the stare of the blue eyes that it was famous — he should have known.

‘Tell me, whereabout are the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions?’

The eyes continued to stare at him, a corner of the red mouth drew in proprietorially, carelessly unimpressed. ‘My graves. On my property. Two minutes from the hotel.’

He murmured surprise. ‘I’d somehow imagined they were much further north.’

‘And there’s no risk of bilharzia whatever,’ she added, apparently dispelling a rumour. ‘You can water-ski, goggle-fish — people have a marvellous time.’

‘Well, I may turn up someday.’

‘My dear, I’ve never let people down in my life. We’d find a bed somewhere.’

He saw her at once, in another backless flowered dress, when he entered the departure lounge next morning. ‘Here we go again’ — distending her nostrils in mock resignation, turning down the red lips. He gave her his small-change smile and took care to lag behind when the passengers went across the runway. He sat in the tail of the plane, and opened the copy of Livingstone’s last journals, bought that morning. ‘Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends.’ The book rested on his thighs and he slept through the hour-and-a-half ’s journey. Livingstone had walked it, taking ten months and recording his position by the stars. This could be the lead for his story, he thought: waking up to the recognition of the habits of his mind like the same old face in the shaving mirror.

The capital of this country was hardly distinguishable from the one he had left. The new national bank with air-conditioning and rubber plants changed the perspective of the row of Indian stores. Behind the main street a native market stank of dried fish. He hired a car, borrowed a map from the hotel barman and set out for ‘the interior’ next day, distrusting — from long experience — both car and map. He had meant merely to look up a few places and easy references in the journals, but had begun to read and gone on half the night.

A wife ran away, I asked how many he had; he told me twenty in all: I then thought he had nineteen too many. He answered with the usual reason, ‘But who would cook for strangers if I had but one?’. . It is with sorrow that I have to convey the sad intelligence that your brother died yesterday morning about ten o’clock. . no remedy seemed to have much effect. On the 20th he was seriously ill but took soup several times, and drank claret and water with relish. . A lion roars mightily. The fish-hawk utters his weird voice in the morning, as if he lifted up to a friend at a great distance, in a sort of falsetto key. . The men engaged refuse to go to Matipa’s, they have no honour. . Public punishment to Chirango for stealing beads, fifteen cuts; diminished his load to 40 lbs. . In four hours we came within sight of the lake, and saw plenty of elephants and other game.

How enjoyable it would have been to read the journals six thousand miles away, in autumn, at home, in London. As usual, once off the circuit that linked the capital with the two or three other small towns that existed, there were crossroads without signposts, and place names that turned out to be one general store, an African bar and a hand-operated petrol pump, unattended. He was not fool enough to forget to carry petrol, and he was good at knocking up the bar owners (asleep during the day). As if the opening of the beer refrigerator and the record player were inseparably linked — as a concept of hospitality if not mechanically — African jazz jog-trotted, clacked and drummed forth while he drank on a dirty veranda. Children dusty as chickens gathered. As he drove off the music stopped in mid-record.

By early afternoon he was lost. The map, sure enough, failed to indicate that the fly-speck named as Moambe was New Moambe, a completely different place in an entirely different direction from that of Old Moambe, where Livingstone had had a camp, and had talked with chiefs whose descendants were active in the present-day politics of their country (another lead). Before setting out, Carl Church had decided that all he was prepared to do was take a car, go to Moambe, take no more than two days over it, and write a piece using the journey as a peg for what he did know something about — this country’s attempt to achieve a form of African socialism. That’s what the paper would get, all they would get, except the expense account for the flight, car and beers. (The beers were jotted down as ‘Lunch, Sundries, Gratuities, £3. 10.’ No reason, from Bartram’s perspective, why there shouldn’t be a Livingstone Hilton in His Steps.) But when he found he had missed Moambe and past three in the afternoon was headed in the wrong direction, he turned the car savagely in the road and made for what he hoped would turn out to be the capital. All they would get would be the expense account. He stopped and asked the way of anyone he met, and no one spoke English. People smiled and instructed the foreigner volubly, with many gestures. He had the humiliation of finding himself twice back at the same crossroads where the same old man sat calmly with women who carried dried fish stiff as Chinese preserved ducks. He took another road, any road, and after a mile or two of hesitancy and obstinacy — turn back or go on? — thought he saw a signpost ahead. This time it was not a dead tree. A sagging wooden finger drooped down a turn-off: GOUGH’S BAY LAZITI PASS.

The lake.

He was more than a hundred miles from the capital. With a sense of astonishment at finding himself, he focused his existence, here and now, on the empty road, at a point on the map. He turned down to petrol, a bath, a drink — that much, at least, so assured that he did not have to think of it. But the lake was farther away than the casualness of the sign would indicate. The pass led the car whining and grinding in low gear round silent hillsides of white rock and wild fig trees leaning out into ravines. This way would be impassable in the rains; great stones scraped the oil sump as he disappeared into steep stream-beds, dry, the sand wrung into hanks where torrents had passed. He met no one, saw no hut. When he coughed, alone in the car he fancied this noise of his thrown back from the stony face of hill to hill like the bark of a solitary baboon. The sun went down. He thought: there was only one good moment the whole day; when I drank that beer on the veranda, and the children came up the steps to watch me and hear the music.

An old European image was lodged in his tiredness: the mirage, if the road ever ended, of some sort of southern resort village, coloured umbrellas, a street of white hotels beside water and boats. As the road unravelled from the pass into open bush, there came that moment when, if he had had a companion, they would have stopped talking. Two, three miles; the car rolled in past the ruins of an arcaded building to the barking of dogs, the horizontal streak of water behind the bush, outhouses and water tanks, a raw new house. A young man in bathing trunks with his back to the car stood on the portico steps, pushing a flipper off one foot with the toes of the other. As he hopped for balance he looked round. Blond wet curls licked the small head on the tall body, vividly empty blue eyes were the eyes of some nocturnal animal dragged out in daylight.

‘Can you tell me where there’s a hotel?’

Staring, on one leg: ‘Yes, this’s the hotel.’

Carl Church said, foolishly pleasant, ‘There’s no sign, you see.’

‘Well, place’s being redone.’ He came, propping the flippers against the wall, walking on the outside edges of his feet over the remains of builders’ rubble. ‘Want any help with that?’ But Carl Church had only his typewriter and the one suitcase. They struggled indoors together, the young man carrying flippers, two spearguns and goggles.

‘Get anything?’

‘Never came near the big ones.’ His curls sprang and drops flowed from them. He dropped the goggles, then a wet gritty flipper knocked against Carl Church. ‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He dumped his tackle on a desk in the passage, looked at Carl Church’s case and portable, put gangling hands upon little hips and took a great breath: ‘Where those boys are when you want one of them — that’s the problem.’

‘Look, I haven’t booked,’ said Church. ‘I suppose you’ve got a room?’

‘What’s today?’ Even his eyelashes were wet. The skin on the narrow cheekbones whitened as if over knuckles.

‘Thursday.’

A great question was solved triumphantly, grimly. ‘If it’d been Saturday, now — the weekends, I mean, not a chance.’

‘I think I met someone on the plane—’

‘Go on—’ The face cocked in attention.

‘She runs a hotel here. .?’

‘Madam in person. D’you see who met her? My stepfather?’ But Carl Church had not seen the airport blonde once they were through customs. ‘That’s Lady Jane all right. Of course she hasn’t turned up here yet. So she’s arrived, eh? Well thanks for the warning. Just a sec, you’ve got to sign,’ and he pulled over a leather register, yelling, ‘Zelide, where’ve you disappeared to—’ as a girl with a bikini cutting into heavy red thighs appeared and said in the cosy, long-suffering voice of an English provincial, ‘You’re making it all wet, Dick — oh give here.’

They murmured in telegraphic intimacy. ‘What about number 16?’

‘I thought a chalet.’

‘Well, I dunno, it’s your job, my girl—’

She gave a parenthetic yell and a barefoot African came from the back somewhere to shoulder the luggage. The young man was dismantling his speargun, damp backside hitched up on the reception desk. The girl moved his paraphernalia patiently aside. ‘W’d you like some tea in your room, sir?’

‘Guess who was on the plane with him. Lady Godiva. So we’d better brace ourselves.’

‘Dickie! Is she really?’

‘In person.’

The girl led Carl Church out over a terrace into a garden where rondavels and cottages were dispersed. It was rapidly getting dark; only the lake shone. She had a shirt knotted under her breasts over the bikini, and when she shook her shaggy brown hair — turning on the light in an ugly little outhouse that smelled of cement — a round, boiled face smiled at him. ‘These chalets are brand new. We might have to move you Saturday, but jist as well enjoy yourself in the meantime.’

‘I’ll be leaving in the morning.’

Her cheeks were so sunburned they looked as if they would bleed when she smiled. ‘Oh what a shame. Aren’t you even going to have a go at spear-fishing?’

‘Well, no; I haven’t brought any equipment or anything.’

He might have been a child who had no bucket and spade; ‘Oh not to worry, Dick’s got all the gear. You come out with us in the morning, after breakfast — OK?’

‘Fine,’ he said, knowing he would be gone.

The sheets of one bed witnessed the love-making of previous occupants; they had not used the other. Carl Church stumbled around in the dark looking for the ablution block — across a yard, but the light switch did not work in the bathroom. He was about to trudge over to the main house to ask for a lamp when he was arrested by the lake, as by the white of an eye in a face hidden by darkness. At least there was a towel. He took it and went down in his pants, feeling his way through shrubs, rough grass, over turned-up earth, touched by warm breaths of scent, startled by squawks from lumps that resolved into fowls, to the lake. It held still a skin of light from the day that had flown upward. He entered it slowly; it seemed to drink him in, ankles, knees, thighs, sex, waist, breast. It was cool as the inside of a mouth. Suddenly hundreds of tiny fish leapt out all round him, bright new tin in the warm, dark, heavy air.

‘. . I enclose a lock of his hair; I had his papers sealed up soon after his decease and will endeavour to transmit them all to you exactly as he left them.’

Carl Church endured the mosquitoes and the night heat only by clinging to the knowledge, through his tattered sleep, that soon it would be morning and he would be gone. But in the morning there was the lake. He got up at five to pee. He saw now how the lake stretched to the horizon from the open arms of the bay. Two bush-woolly islands glided on its surface; it was the colour of pearls. He opened his stale mouth wide and drew in a full breath, half sigh, half gasp. Again he went down to the water and, without bothering whether there was anybody about, took off his pyjama shorts and swam. Cool. Impersonally cool, at this time. The laved mosquito bites stung pleasurably. When he looked down upon the water while in it, it was no longer nacre, but pellucid, a pale and tender green. His feet were gleaming tendrils. A squat spotted fish hung near his legs, mouthing. He didn’t move, either. Then he did what he had done when he was seven or eight years old, he made a cage of his hands and pounced — but the element reduced him to slow motion, everything, fish, legs, glassy solidity, wriggled and flowed away and slowly undulated into place again. The fish returned. On a dead tree behind bird-splattered rocks ellipsed by the water at this end of the beach, a fish-eagle lifted its head between hunched white shoulders and cried out; a long whistling answer came across the lake as another flew in. He swam around the rocks through schools of fingerlings as close as gnats, and hauled himself up within ten feet of the eagles. They carried the remoteness of the upper air with them in the long-sighted gaze of their hooded eyes; nothing could approach its vantage; he did not exist for them, while the gaze took in the expanse of the lake and the smallest indication of life rising to its surface. He came back to the beach and walked with a towel round his middle as far as a baobab tree where a black man with an ivory bangle on either wrist was mending nets, but then he noticed a blue bubble on the verge — it was an infant afloat on some plastic beast, its mother in attendance — and turned away, up to the hotel.

He left his packed suitcase on the bed and had breakfast. The dining room was a veranda under sagging grass matting; now, in the morning, he could see the lake, of course, while he ate. He was feeling for change to leave for the waiter when the girl padded in, dressed in her bikini, and shook cornflakes into a plate. ‘Oh hello, sir. Early bird you are.’ He imagined her lying down at night just as she was, ready to begin again at once the ritual of alternately dipping and burning her seared flesh. They chatted. She had been in Africa only three months, out from Liverpool in answer to an advertisement — receptionist/secretary, hotel in beautiful surroundings.

‘More of a holiday than a job,’ he said.

‘Don’t make me laugh’ — but she did. ‘We were on the go until half past one, night before last, making the changeover in the bar. You see the bar used to be here—’ she lifted her spoon at the wall, where he now saw mildew-traced shapes beneath a mural in which a girl in a bosom-laced peasant outfit appeared to have given birth, through one ear, Rabelaisian fashion, to a bunch of grapes. He had noticed the old Chianti bottles, by lamplight, at dinner the night before, but not the mural. ‘Dickie’s got his ideas, and then she’s artistic, you see.’ The young man was coming up the steps of the veranda that moment, stamping his sandy feet at the cat, yelling towards the kitchen, blue eyes open as the fish’s had been staring at Carl Church through the water. He wore his catch like a kilt, hooked all round the belt of his trunks.

‘I been thinking about those damn trees,’ he said.

‘Oh my heavens. How many’s still there?’

‘There all right, but nothing but blasted firewood. Wait till she sees the holes, just where she had them dug.’

The girl was delighted by the fish: ‘Oh pretty!’

But he slapped her hands and her distractibility away. ‘Some people ought to have their heads read,’ he said to Carl Church. ‘If you can tell me why I had to come back here, well, I’d be grateful. I had my own combo, down in Rhodesia.’ He removed the fish from his narrow middle and sat on a chair turned away from her table.

‘Why don’t we get the boys to stick ’em in, today? They could’ve died after being planted out, after all, ay?’

He seemed too gloomy to hear her. Drops from his wet curls fell on his shoulders. She bent towards him kindly, wheedlingly, meat of her thighs and breasts pressing together. ‘If we put two boys on it, they’d have them in by lunchtime? Dickie? And if it’ll make her happy? Dickie?’

‘I’ve got ideas of my own. But when Madam’s here you can forget it, just forget it. No sooner start something — just get started, that’s all — she chucks it up and wants something different again.’ His gaze wavered once or twice to the wall where the bar had been. Carl Church asked what the fish were. He didn’t answer, and the girl encouraged, ‘Perch. Aren’t they, Dickie? Yes, perch. You’ll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.’

‘Oh what the hell. Let’s go. You ready?’ he said to Church. The girl jumped up and he hooked an arm round her neck, feeling in her rough hair.

‘Course he’s ready. The black flippers’ll fit him — the stuff’s in the bar,’ she said humouringly.

‘But I haven’t even got a pair of trunks.’

‘Who cares? I can tell you I’m just-not-going-to-worry-a-damn. Here Zelide, I nearly lost it this morning.’ He removed a dark stone set in Christmas-cracker baroque from his rock-scratched hand, nervous-boned as his mother’s ankles, and tossed it for the girl to catch.

‘Come, I’ve got the trunks,’ she said, and led Carl Church to the bar by way of the reception desk, stopping to wrap the ring in a pink tissue and pop it in the cash box.

The thought of going to the lake once more was irresistible. His bag was packed; an hour or two wouldn’t make any difference. He had been skin-diving before, in Sardinia, and did not expect the bed of the lake to compare with the Mediterranean, but if the architecture of undersea was missing, the fish one could get at were much bigger than he had ever caught in the Mediterranean. The young man disappeared for minutes and rose again between Carl Church and the girl, his Gothic Christ’s body sucked in below the nave of ribs, his goggles leaving weals like duelling scars on his white cheekbones. Water ran from the tarnished curls over the bright eyeballs without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to shore with them, happy as a retrieving dog.

Neither she nor Carl Church caught much themselves. And then Church went off on his own, swimming slowly with the borrowed trunks inflating above the surface like a striped Portuguese man-of-war, and far out, when he was not paying attention but looking back at the skimpy white buildings, the flowering shrubs and even the giant baobab razed by distance and the optical illusion of the heavy waterline, at eye-level, about to black them out, he heard a fish-eagle scream just overhead; looked up, looked down, and there below him saw three fish at different levels, a mobile swaying in the water. This time he managed the gun without thinking; he had speared the biggest.

The girl was as impartially overjoyed as she was when the young man had a good catch. They went up the beach, laughing, explaining, a water-intoxicated progress. The accidental bump of her thick sandy thigh against his was exactly the tactile sensation of contact with the sandy body of the fish, colliding with him as he carried it. The young man was squatting on the beach, now, his long back arched over his knees. He was haranguing, in an African language, the old fisherman with the ivory bracelets who was still at work on the nets. There were dramatic pauses, accusatory rises of tone, hard jerks of laughter, in the monologue. The old man said nothing. He was an Arabised African from far up the lake somewhere in East Africa, and wore an old towel turban as well as the ivory; every now and then he wrinkled back his lips on tooth-stumps. Three or four long black dugouts had come in during the morning and were beached; black men sat motionless in what small shade they could find. The baby on his blue swan still floated under his mother’s surveillance — she turned a visor of sunglasses and hat. It was twelve o’clock; Carl Church merely felt amused at himself — how different the measure of time when you were absorbed in something you didn’t earn a living by. ‘Those must weigh a pound apiece,’ he said idly, of the ivory manacles shifting on the net-mender’s wrists.

‘D’you want one?’ the young man offered. (My graves, the woman had said, on my property.) ‘I’ll get him to sell it to you. Take it for your wife.’

But Carl Church had no wife at present, and no desire for loot; he preferred everything to stay as it was, in its place, at noon by the lake. Twenty thousand slaves a year had passed this way, up the water. Slavers, missionaries, colonial servants — all had brought something and taken something away. He would have a beer and go, changing nothing, claiming nothing. He plodded to the hotel a little ahead of the couple, who were mumbling over hotel matters and pausing now and then to fondle each other. As his bare soles encountered the smoothness of the terrace steps he heard the sweet, loud, reasonable feminine voice, saw one of the houseboy-waiters racing across in his dirty jacket — and quickly turned away to get to his room unnoticed. But with a perfect instinct for preventing escape, she was at once out upon the dining-room veranda, all crude blues and yellows — hair, eyes, flowered dress, a beringed hand holding the cigarette away exploratively. Immediately, her son passed Church in a swift, damp tremor.

‘Well, God, look at my best girl — mm-MHH. . madam in person.’ He lifted her off her feet and she landed swirling giddily on the high heels in the best tradition of the Fred Astaire films she and Carl Church had been brought up on. Her laugh seemed to go over her whole body.

‘Well?’

‘And so, my girl?’

They rocked together. ‘You been behaving yourself in the big city?’

‘Dickie — for Pete’s sake — he’s like a spaniel — ’ calling Carl Church to witness.

A warm baby-smell beside him (damp crevices and cold cream) was the presence of the girl. ‘Oh Mrs Palmer, we were so worried you’d got lost or something.’

‘My dear. My you’re looking well—’ The two vacant, inescapable blue stares took in the bikini, the luxuriously inflamed skin, as if the son’s gaze were directed by the mother’s. Mrs Palmer and the girl kissed but Mrs Palmer’s eyes moved like a lighthouse beam over the wall where the bar was gone, catching Carl Church in his borrowed swimming trunks. ‘Wha’d’you think of my place?’ she asked. ‘How d’you like it here, eh? Not that I know it myself, after two months. .’ Hands on hips, she looked at the peasant girl and the mildewed outlines as if she were at an exhibition.

She faced sharply round and her son kissed her on the mouth: ‘We’re dying for a beer, that’s what. We’ve been out since breakfast. Zelide, the boy—’

‘Yes, he knows he’s on duty on the veranda today — just a minute, I’ll get it—’

Mrs Palmer was smiling at the girl wisely. ‘My dear, once you start doing their jobs for them. .’

‘Shadrach!’ The son made a megaphone of his hands, shaking his silver identification bracelet out of the way. The girl stood, eagerly bewildered.

‘Oh it’s nothing. Only a minute—’ and bolted.

‘Where is the bar, now, Dickie?’ said his mother as a matter of deep, polite interest.

‘I must get some clothes on and return your trunks,’ Carl Church was saying.

‘Oh, it makes a world of difference. You’ll see. You can move in that bar. Don’t you think so?’ The young man gave the impression that he was confirming a remark of Church’s rather than merely expressing his own opinion. Carl Church, to withdraw, said, ‘Well, I don’t know what it was like before.’

She claimed him now. ‘It was here, in the open, of course, people loved it. A taverna atmosphere. Dickie’s never been overseas.’

‘Really move. And you’ve got those big doors.’

She drew Church into the complicity of a smile for grown-ups, then remarked, as if for her part the whole matter were calmly accepted, settled, ‘I presume it’s the games room?’

Her son said to Church, sharing the craziness of women, ‘There never was a games room, it was the lounge, can you see a lot of old birds sitting around in armchairs in a place like this?’

‘The lounge that was going to be redecorated as a games room,’ she said. She smiled at her son.

The girl came back, walking flat-footed under a tray’s weight up steps that led by way of a half-built terrace to the new bar. As Carl Church went to help her she breathed, ‘What a performance.’

Mrs Palmer drew on her cigarette and contemplated the steps: ‘Imagine the breakages.’

The four of them were together round beer bottles. Church sat helplessly in his borrowed trunks that crawled against his body as they dried, drinking pint after pint and aware of his warmth, the heat of the air, and all their voices rising steadily. He said, ‘I must get going,’ but the waiter had called them to lunch three times; the best way to break up the party was to allow oneself to be forced to table. The three of them ate in their bathing costumes while madam took the head, bracelets colliding on her arms.

He made an effort to get precise instructions about the best and quickest route back to the capital, and was told expertly by her, ‘There’s no plane out until Monday, nine-fifteen, I suppose you know that.’

‘I have no reason whatever to doubt your knowledge of plane schedules,’ he said, and realised from the turn of phrase that he must be slightly drunk, on heat and the water as much as beer.

She knew the game so well that you had only to finger a counter unintentionally for her to take you on. ‘I told you I never let anyone down.’ She blew a smokescreen; appeared through it. ‘Where’ve they put you?’

‘Oh, he’s in one of the chalets, Mrs Palmer,’ the girl said. ‘Till tomorrow, anyway.’

‘Well, there you are, relax,’ she said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, there’s a room in my cottage.’ Her gaze was out over the lake, a tilting, blind brightness with black dugouts appearing like sunspots, but she said, ‘How’re my jacarandas coming along? Someone was telling me there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do, Dickie. The boys must make a decent trench round each one and let it fill up with water once a week, right up, d’you see?’

‘The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant; it becomes more confident of its own resources — there is greater presence of mind. The body is soon well-knit; the muscles of the limbs grow hard as a board. . the countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia.’

Carl Church slept through the afternoon. He woke to the feeling of helplessness he had at lunch. But no chagrin. This sort of hiatus had opened up in the middle of a tour many times — lost days in a blizzard on Gander airport, a week in quarantine at Aden. This time he had the journals instead of a Gideon Bible. ‘Nothing fell from his lips as last words to survivors. We buried him today by a large baobab tree.’ There was no point in going back to the capital if he couldn’t get out of the place till Monday. His mind was closed to the possibility of trying for Moambe, again; that was another small rule for self-preservation: if something goes wrong, write it off. He thought, it’s all right here; the dirty, ugly room had as much relevance to ‘spoiling’ the eagles and the lake as he had had to the eagles when he climbed close. On his way down to the lake again he saw a little group — mother, son, receptionist — standing round the graveside of one of the holes for trees. Dickie was still in his bathing trunks.

Church had the goggles and the flippers and the speargun, and he swam out towards the woolly islands — they were unattainably far — and fish were dim dead leaves in the water below him. The angle of the late afternoon sun left the underwater deserted, filled with motes of vegetable matter and sand caught by oblique rays of light. Milky brilliance surrounded him, his hands went out as if to feel for walls; there was the apprehension, down there, despite the opacity and tepidity, of night and cold. He shot up to the surface and felt the day on his eyelids. Lying on the sand, he heard the eagles cry now behind him on the headland, where trees held boulders in their claws, now over the lake. A pair of piebald kingfishers squabbled, a whirling disk, in midair, and plummeted again and again. Butterflies with the same black and white markings went slowly out over the water. The Arabised fisherman was still working at his nets.

Some weekend visitors arrived from the hotel, shading their eyes against the sheen of the lake; soon they stood in it like statues broken off at the waist. Voices flew out across the water after the butterflies. As the sun drowned, a dhow climbed out of its dazzle and dipped steadily towards the beach. It picked up the fisherman and his nets, sending a tiny boat ashore. The dhow lay beating slowly, like an exhausted bird. The visitors ran together to watch as they would have for a rescue, a monster — any sign from the lake.

Carl Church had been lying with his hand slack on the sand as on a warm body; he got up and walked past the people, past the baobab, as far along the beach as it went before turning into an outwork of oozy reeds. He pushed his feet into his shoes and went up inland, through the thorn bushes. As soon as he turned his back on it, the lake did not exist; unlike the sea that spread and sucked in your ears even when your eyes were closed. A total silence. Livingstone could have come upon the lake quite suddenly, and just as easily have missed it. The mosquitoes and gnats rose with the going down of the sun. Swatted on Church’s face, they stuck in sweat. The air over the lake was free, but the heat of day cobwebbed the bush. ‘We then hoped that his youth and unimpaired constitution would carry him through. . but about six o’clock in the evening his mind began to wander and continued to. His bodily powers continued gradually to sink till the period mentioned when he quietly expired. . there he rests in sure and certain hope of a glorious Resurrection.’ He thought he might have a look at the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions, but the description of how to find them given him that morning by the young man and the girl was that of people who know a place so well they cannot imagine anyone being unable to walk straight to it. A small path, they said, just off the road. He found himself instead among ruined arcades whose whiteness intensified as the landscape darkened. It was an odd ruin: a solid complex of buildings, apparently not in bad repair, had been pulled down. It was the sort of demolition one saw in a fast-growing city, where a larger structure would be begun at once where the not-old one had been. The bush was all around; as far as the Congo, as far as the latitude where the forests began. A conical anthill had risen to the height of the arcades, where a room behind them must have been. A huge moon sheeny as the lake came up and a powdery blue heat held in absolute stillness. Carl Church thought of the graves. It was difficult to breathe; it must have been hell to die here, in this unbearable weight of beauty not shared with the known world, licked in the face by the furred tongue of this heat.

Round the terrace and hotel the ground was pitted by the stakes of high heels; they sounded over the floors where everyone else went barefoot. The shriek and scatter of chickens opened before a constant coming and going of houseboys and the ragged work gang whose activities sent up the regular grunt of axe thudding into stumps and the crunch of spade gritting into earth. The tree-holes had been filled in. Dickie was seen in his bathing trunks but did not appear on the beach. Zelide wore a towelling chemise over her bikini, and when the guests were at lunch, went from table to table bending to talk softly with her rough hair hiding her face. Carl Church saw that the broken skin on her nose and cheeks was repaired with white cream. She said confidentially, ‘I just wanted to tell you there’ll be a sort of beach party tonight, being Saturday. Mrs Palmer likes to have a fire on the beach, and some snacks — you know. Of course, we’ll all eat here first. You’re welcome.’

He said, ‘How about my room?’

Her voice sank to a chatty whisper, ‘Oh it’ll be all right, one crowd’s cancelled.’

Going to the bar for cigarettes, he heard mother and son in there. ‘Wait, wait, all that’s worked out. I’mn’a cover the whole thing with big blow-ups of the top groups, the Stones and the Shadows and such-like.’

‘Oh grow up, Dickie my darling, you want it to look like a teenager’s bedroom?’

Church went quietly away, remembering there might be a packet of cigarettes in the car, but bumped into Dickie a few minutes later, in the yard. Dickie had his skin-diving stuff and was obviously on his way to the lake. ‘I get into shit for moving the bar without telling the licensing people over in town, and then she says let’s have the bar counter down on the beach tonight — all in the same breath, that’s nothing to her. At least when my stepfather’s here he knows just how to put the brake on.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know, something about some property of hers, in town. He’s got to see about it. But he’s always got business all over, for her. I had my own band, you know, we’ve even toured Rhodesia. I’m a solo artist, really. Guitar. I compose my own stuff. I mean, what I play’s original, you see. Night club engagements and such-like.’

‘That’s a tough life compared with this,’ Church said, glancing at the speargun.

‘Oh, this’s all right. If you learn how to do it well, y’know? I’ve trained myself. You’ve got to concentrate. Like with my guitar. I have to go away and be undisturbed, you understand — right away. Sometimes the mood comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I compose all night. I got to be left in peace.’ He was fingering a new thick silver chain on his wrist. ‘Lady Jane, of course. God knows what it cost. She spends a fortune on presents. You sh’d see what my sister gets when she’s home. And what she gave my stepfather — I mean before, when they weren’t married yet. He must have ten pairs of cuff-links, gold, I don’t know what.’ He sat down under the weight of his mother’s generosity.

Zelide appeared among the empty gas containers and beer crates outside the kitchen. ‘Oh, Dickie, you’ve had no lunch. I don’t think he ever tastes a thing he catches.’

Dickie squeezed her thigh and said coldly, ‘S’best time, now. People don’t know it. Between now and about half past three.’

There had always been something more than a family resemblance about that face; at last it fell into place in Church’s mind. Stiff blond curls, skull ominously present in the eye sockets, shiny cheekbones furred with white hairs, blue-red lips, and those eyes that seemed to have no eyelids, to turn away from nothing and take in nothing: the face of the homosexual boy in the Berlin twenties, the perfect, impure master-race face of a George Grosz drawing.

‘Oh Dickie, I wish you’d eat something. And he’s got to play tonight.’ They watched him lope off lightly down the garden. Her hair and the sun obscured her. ‘They’re both artistic, you see, that’s the trouble. What a performance.’

‘Are you sorry you came?’

‘Oh no. The weather’s so lovely, I mean, isn’t it?’

It was becoming a habit to open Livingstone’s Journals at random before falling stunned-asleep. ‘Now that I am on the point of starting another trip into Africa I feel quite exhilarated: when one travels with the specific object in view of ameliorating the condition of the natives every act becomes ennobled.’ The afternoon heat made him think of women, this time, and he gave up his siesta because he believed that daydreams of this kind were not so much adolescent as — worse — a sign of approaching age. He was getting — too far along, for pauses like this; for time out. If he were not preoccupied with doing the next thing, he did not know what to do. His mind turned to death, the graves that his body would not take the trouble to visit. His body turned to women; his body was unchanged. It took him down to the lake, heavy and vigorous, reddened by the sun under the black hairs shining on his belly.

The sun was high in a splendid afternoon. In half an hour he missed three fish and began to feel challenged. Whenever he dived deeper than fifteen or eighteen feet his ears ached much more than they ever had in the sea. Out of training, of course. And the flippers and goggles lent by the hotel really did not fit properly. The goggles leaked at every dive, and he had to surface quickly, water in his nostrils. He began to let himself float aimlessly, not diving any longer, circling around the enormous boulders with their steep polished flanks like petrified tree trunks. He was aware, as he had been often when skin-diving, of how active his brain became in this world of silence; ideas and images interlocking in his mind while his body was leisurely moving, enjoying at once the burning sun on his exposed shoulders and the cooling water on his shrunken penis — good after too many solitary nights filled with erotic dreams.

Then he saw the fish, deep down, twenty feet maybe, a yellowish nonchalant shape which seemed to pasture in a small forest of short dead reeds. He took a noble breath, dived with all the power and swiftness he could summon from his body, and shot. The miracle happened again. The nonchalant shape became a frenzied spot of light, reflecting the rays of the sun in a series of flashes through the pale blue water as it swivelled in agony round the spear. It was — this moment — the only miracle Church knew; no wonder Africans used to believe that the hunter’s magic worked when the arrow found the prey.

He swam up quickly, his eyes on the fish hooked at the end of the spear, feeling the tension of its weight while he was hauling it and the line between spear and gun straightened. Eight pounds, ten, perhaps. Even Dickie with his silver amulets and bracelets couldn’t do better. He reached the surface, hurriedly lifted the goggles to rid them of water, and dived again: the fish was still continuing its spiralling fight. He saw now that he had not transfixed it; only the point of the spear had penetrated the body. He began carefully to pull the line towards him; the spear was in his hand when, with a slow motion, the fish unhooked itself before his eyes.

In its desperate, thwarted leaps it had unscrewed the point and twirled loose. This had happened once before, in the Mediterranean, and since then Church had taken care to tighten the spearhead from time to time while fishing. Today he had forgotten. Disappointment swelled in him. Breathlessness threatened to burst him like a bubble. He had to surface, abandoning the gun in order to free both arms. The fish disappeared round a boulder with the point of the harpoon protruding from its open belly amid flimsy pinkish ribbons of entrails; the gun was floating at mid distance between the surface and the bed of the lake, anchored to the spear sunk in dead reeds.

Yet the splendour of the afternoon remained. He lay and smoked and drank beer brought by a waiter who roamed the sand, flicking a napkin. Church had forgotten what had gone wrong, to bring him to this destination. He was here; as he was not often fully present in the places and situations in which he found himself. It was some sort of answer to the emptiness he had felt on the bed. Was this how the first travellers had borne it, each day detached from the last and the next, taking each night that night’s bearing by the stars?

Madam — Lady Jane in person — had sent down a boy to pick up bottle tops and cigarette stubs from the water’s edge. She had high standards. (She had said so in the bar last night. ‘The trouble is, they’ll never be any different, they just don’t know how to look after anything.’) This was the enlightenment the discoverers had brought the black man in the baggage he portered for them on his head. This one was singing to himself as he worked. If the plans that were being made in the capital got the backing of the World Bank and the UN Development Fund and all the rest of it, his life would change. Whatever happened to him, he would lose the standard that had been set by people who maintained it by using him to pick up their dirt. Church thought of the ruin — he’d forgotten to ask what it was. Lady Jane’s prefabricated concrete blocks and terrazzo would fall down more easily.

He had had a shirt washed and although he was sweating under the light bulb when he put it on for dinner, he seemed to have accustomed himself to the heat, now. He was also very sunburned. The lady with the small child sat with a jolly party of Germans in brown sandals — apparently from a Lutheran Mission nearby — and there was a group of men down from the capital on a bachelor binge of skin-diving and drinking who were aware of being the life of the place. They caught out at Zelide, her thick feet pressed into smart shoes, her hair lifted on top of her head, her eyes made up to twice their size. She bore her transformation bravely, smiling.

‘You are coming down to the beach, arnch you?’ She went, concerned, from table to table. Mrs Palmer’s heels announced her with the authority of a Spanish dancer. She had on a strapless blue dress and silver sandals, and carried a little gilt bag like an outsize cigarette box. She joined the missionary party: ‘Wie geht’s, Father, have you been missing me?’ Dickie didn’t appear. Through the frangipani, the fire on the beach was already sending up scrolls of flame.

Church knew he would be asked to join one group or another and out of a kind of shame of anticipated boredom (last night there had been one of those beer-serious conversations about the possibility of the end of the world: ‘They say the one thing’ll survive an atomic explosion is the ant. The ant’s got something special in its body, y’see’) he went into the empty bar after dinner. The little black barman was almost inaudible, in order to disguise his lack of English. There was an array of fancy bottles set up on the shelves but most of them seemed to belong to Mrs Palmer’s store of objets d’art: ‘Is finish’.’ Church had to content himself with a brandy from South Africa. He asked whether a dusty packet of cigarillos was for sale, and the barman’s hand went from object to object on display before the correct one was identified. Church was smoking and throwing darts as if they were stones, when Dickie came in. Dickie wore a dinner jacket; his lapels were blue satin, his trousers braided, his shirt tucked and frilled; his hands emerged from ruffles and the little finger of the left one rubbed and turned the baroque ring on the finger beside it. He hung in the doorway a moment like a tall, fancy doll; his mother might have put him on a piano.

Church said, ‘My God, you’re grand,’ and Dickie looked down at himself for a second, without interest, as one acknowledges one’s familiar working garb. The little barman seemed flattened by Dickie’s gaze.

‘Join me?’

Dickie gave a boastful, hard-wrung smile. ‘No thanks. I think I’ve had enough already.’ He had the look his mother had had, when Church asked her where her hotel was. ‘I’ve been drinking all afternoon. Ever since a phone call.’

‘Well you don’t look it,’ said Church. But it was the wrong tone to take up.

Dickie played a tattoo on the bar with the ringed hand, staring at it. ‘There was a phone call from Bulawayo, and a certain story was repeated to me. Somebody’s made it their business to spread a story.’

‘That’s upsetting.’

‘It may mean the loss of a future wife, that’s what. My fiancée in Bulawayo. Somebody took the trouble to tell her there’s a certain young lady in the hotel here with me. Somebody had nothing better to do than make trouble. But that young lady is my mother’s secretary-receptionist, see? She works here, she’s employed, just like me. Just like I’m the manager.’

From country to country, bar to bar, Church was used to accepting people’s own versions of their situations, quite independently of the facts. He and Dickie contemplated the vision of Dickie fondling Zelide in the garden as evidence of the correctness of his relations with the secretary-receptionist. ‘Couldn’t you explain?’

‘Usually if I’m, you know, depressed and that, I play my guitar. But I’ve just been strumming. No, I don’t think I’ll have any more tonight, I’m full enough already. The whole afternoon.’

‘Why don’t you go to Bulawayo?’

Dickie picked up the darts and began to throw them, at an angle, from where he sat at the bar; while he spoke he scored three bull’s-eyes. ‘Huh, I think I’ll clear out altogether. Here I earn fifty quid a month, eh? I can earn twenty pounds a night — a night — with a personal appearance. I’ve got a whole bundle of my own compositions and one day, boy! — there’s got to be one that hits the top. One day it’s got to happen. All my stuff is copyright, you see. Nobody’s gonna cut a disc of my stuff without my permission. I see to that. Oh I could play you a dozen numbers I’m working on, they’re mostly sad, you know — the folk type of thing, that’s where the money is now. What’s a lousy fifty quid a month?’

‘I meant a quick visit, to put things straight.’

‘Ah, somebody’s mucked up my life, all right’ — he caught Church’s eye as if to say, you want to see it again? — and once again planted three darts dead-centre. ‘I’ll play you some of my compositions if you like. Don’t expect too much of my voice, though, because as I say I’ve been drinking all afternoon. I’ve got no intention whatever of playing for them down there. An artist thrown in, fifty quid a month, they can think again.’ He ducked under the doorway and was gone. He returned at once with a guitar and bent over it professionally, making adjustments. Then he braced his long leg against the bar rail, tossed back his skull of blond curls, began a mournful lay — broke off: ‘I’m full of pots, you know, my voice’ — and started again, high and thin, at the back of his nose.

It was a song about a bride, and riding away, and tears you cannot hide away. Carl Church held his palm round the brandy glass to conceal that it was empty and looked down into it. The barman had not moved from his stance with both hands before him on the bar and the bright light above him beating sweat out of his forehead and nose like an answer exacted under interrogation. When the stanza about death and last breath was reached, Dickie said, ‘It’s a funny thing, me nearly losing my engagement ring this morning, eh? I might have known something’ — paused — and thrummed once, twice. Then he began the song over again.

Carl Church signalled for the brandy bottle. But suddenly Mrs Palmer was there, a queen to whom no door may be closed. ‘Oh show a bit of spunk! Everyone’s asking for you. I tell him, everyone has to take a few cracks in life, am I right?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘Come on then, don’t encourage him to feel sorry for himself. My God, if I’d sat down and cried every time.’

Dickie went on playing and whispering the words to himself.

‘Can’t you do something with him?’

‘Let’s go and join the others, Dickie,’ Church said; he drank off the second brandy.

‘One thing I’ve never done is let people down,’ Mrs Palmer was saying. ‘But these kids’ve got no sense of responsibility. What’d happen without me I don’t know.’

Dickie spoke. ‘Well you can have it. You can have the fifty pounds a month and the car. The lot.’

‘Oh yes, they’d look fine without me, I can tell you. I would have given everything I’ve built up over to him, that was the idea, once he was married. But they know everything at once, you know, you can’t teach them anything.’

‘Come on Dickie, what the hell — just for an hour.’

They jostled him down to the fire-licked faces on the beach. A gramophone was playing and people were dancing barefoot. There were not enough women and men in shorts were drinking and clowning. Dickie was given beer; he made cryptic remarks that nobody listened to. Somebody stopped the gramophone with a screech and Dickie was tugged this way and that in a clamour to have him play the guitar. But the dancers put the record back again. The older men among the bachelors opposed the rhythm of the dancers with a war dance of their own: Hi-zoom-a-zoom-ba, zoom-zoom-zoom. Zelide kept breaking away from her partners to offer a plate of tiny burnt sausages like bird-droppings. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA — ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM. Light fanned from the fire showed the dancers as figures behind gauze, but where Church was marooned, near the streaming flames, faces were gleaming, gouged with grotesque shadow. Lady Jane had a bottle of gin for the two of them. The heat of the fire seemed to consume the other heat, of the night, so that the spirit going down his gullet snuffed out on the way in a burning evaporation. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA. At some point he was dancing with her, and she put a frangipani flower in his ear. Now Dickie, sitting drunk on a box with his long legs at an angle like a beetle’s, wanted to play the guitar but nobody would listen. Church could make out from the shapes Dickie’s mouth made that he was singing the song about the bride and riding away, but the roar of the bachelors drowned it: Hold him down, you Zulu warrior, hold him DOWN, you Zulu chief-chief-ief. Every now and then a slight movement through the lake sent a soft, black glittering glance in reflection of the fire. The lake was not ten feet away but as time went by Church had the impression that it would not be possible for him to walk down, through the barrier of jigging firelight and figures, and let it cover his ankles, his hands. He said to her, topping up the two glasses where they had made a place in the sand, ‘Was there another hotel?’

‘There’s been talk, but no one else’s ever had the initiative, when it comes to the push.’

‘But whose was that rather nice building, in the bush?’

‘Not my idea of a hotel. My husband built it in forty-nine. Started it in forty-nine, finished it fifty-two or — three. Dickie was still a kiddie.’

‘But what happened? It looks as if it’s been deliberately pulled down.’

CHIEF-UH-IEF-UH-IEF-IEF-IEF. The chorus was a chanting grunt.

‘It was what?’

She was saying, ‘. . died, I couldn’t even give it away. I always told him, it’s no good putting up a bloody palace of a place, you haven’t got the class of person who appreciates it. Too big, far too big. No atmosphere, whatever you tried to do with it. People like to feel cosy and free and easy.’

He said, ‘I liked that colonnaded veranda, it must have been rather beautiful,’ but she was yanked away to dance with one of the bachelors.

Zelide wandered about anxiously: ‘You quite happy?’

He took her to dance; she was putting a good face on it. He said, ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re tough. Look at those eyes.’

‘If there was somewhere to go,’ she said. ‘It’s not like a town, not like at home, you know — you can just disappear. Oh there she is, for God’s sake—’

He said to Mrs Palmer, ‘That veranda, before you bulldozed it—’ but she took no notice and attacked him at once: ‘Where’s Dickie? I don’t see Dickie.’

‘I don’t know where the hell Dickie is.’

Clinging to his arm she dragged him through the drinkers, the dancers, the bachelors, round the shadowy human lumps beyond the light that started away from each other, making him give a snuffling laugh because they were like the chickens that first day. She raced him stumbling up the dark terraces to Dickie’s cottage, but it was overpoweringly empty with the young man’s smell of musky leather and wet wool. She was alarmed as an animal who finds the lair deserted. ‘I tell you, he’ll do something to himself.’ Ten yards from the bungalows and the main house, the bush was the black end of the world; they walked out into it and stood helplessly. A torch was a pale, blunt, broken stump of light. ‘He’ll do away with himself,’ she panted.

Church was afraid her breathing would turn to hysterics; ‘Come on, now, come on,’ he coaxed her back to the lights burning in the empty hotel. She went, but steered towards quarters he had not noticed or visited. There were lamps in pink shades. Photographs of her in the kind of dress she was wearing that night, smiling over the head of an infant Dickie. A flowered sofa they sat down on, and a little table with filigree boxes and a lighter shaped like Aladdin’s lamp and gilt-covered matchbooks with Dorothy stamped across the corner.

‘Take some,’ she said, and began putting them in his pockets, both outer pockets of his jacket and the inner breast pocket. ‘Take some, I’ve got hundreds.’ She dropped her head against him and let the blonde curls muffle her face: ‘Like his father did,’ she said. ‘I know it. I tell you I know it.’

‘He’s passed out somewhere, that’s all.’ She smelled of Chanel No. 5, the only perfume he could identify, because he had bought it on the black market for various girls in Cairo during the war. Where she leant on him her breasts were warmer than the rest of her.

‘I tell you I know he’ll do something to himself sooner or later. It runs in families, I know it.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s all right.’ He thought: an act of charity. It was terribly dark outside; the whole night was cupped round the small flickering of flames and figures, figures like flames, reaching upwards in flame, snatched by the dark, on the beach. He knew the lake was there; neither heard nor seen, quite black. The lake. The lake. He felt, inevitably, something resembling desire, but it was more like a desire for the cool mouth of waters that would close over ankles, knees, thighs, sex. He was drunk and not very capable, and felt he would never get there, to the lake. The lake became an unslakable thirst, the night-thirst, the early-morning thirst that cannot stir a hand for the surcease of water.

When he awoke sometime in his chalet, it was because consciousness moved towards a sound that he could identify even before he was awake. Dickie was playing the guitar behind closed doors somewhere, playing again and again the song of the bride and the riding away.

Zelide wore her bikini, drawing up the bill for him in the morning. The demarcation lines at shoulder-straps and thighs had become scarlet weals; the sun was eating into her, poor cheerful adventuring immigrant. She had been taken up by the bachelors and was about to go out with them in their boat. ‘Maybe we’ll bump into each other again,’ she said.

And of course they might; handed around the world from country to country, minor characters who crop up. There was an air of convalescence about the hotel. On the terrace, empty bottles were coated with ants; down at the beach, boys were burying the ashes of the bonfire and their feet scuffed over the shapes — like resting-places flattened in grass by cattle — where couples had been secreted by the night. He saw Mrs Palmer in a large sunhat, waving her tough brown arms about in command over a gang who, resting on their implements, accepted her as they did sun, flies and rain. Two big black pairs of sunglasses — his and hers — flashed back and forth blindly as they stood, with Zelide, amid the building rubble in the garden.

‘Don’t forget to look us up if ever you’re out this way.’

‘One never knows.’

‘With journalists, my God, no, you could find yourself at the North Pole! We’ll always find a bed for you. Has Dickie said goodbye?’

‘Say goodbye to him for me, will you?’

She put out her jingling, gold-flashing hand and he saw (as if it had been a new line on his own face) the fine, shiny tan of her forearm wrinkle with the movement. ‘Happy landings,’ she said.

Zelide watched him drive off. ‘You’ve not forgotten anything? You’d be surprised at people. I don’t know what to do with the stuff, half the time.’ She smiled and her stomach bulged over the bikini; she had the sort of pioneering spirit, the instincts of self-preservation appropriate to her time and kind.

Past the fowls, water tanks and outhouses, the hot silent arcades of the demolished hotel, the car rocked and swayed over the track. Suddenly he saw the path, the path he had missed the other day, to the graves of Livingstone’s companions. It was just where Dickie and Zelide had said. He was beyond it by the time he understood this, but all at once it seemed absurd not even to have gone to have a look, after three days. He stopped the car and walked back. He took the narrow path that was snagged with thorn bushes and led up the hill between trees too low and meagre of foliage to give shade. The earth was picked clean by the dry season. Flies settled at once upon his shoulders. He was annoyed by the sound of his own lack of breath; and then there, where the slope of the hill came up short against a steep rise, the gravestones stood with their backs to rock. The five neat headstones of the monuments commission were surmounted each by an iron cross on a circle. The names, and the dates of birth and death — the deaths all in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — were engraved on the granite. A yard or two away, but in line with the rest, was another gravestone. Carl Church moved over to read the inscription: In Memory of Richard Alastair Macnab, Beloved Husband of Dorothy and Father of Richard and Heather, died 1957. They all looked back, these dead companions, to the lake, the lake that Carl Church (turning to face as they did, now) had had silent behind him all the way up; the lake that, from here, was seen to stretch much farther than one could tell, down there on the shore or at the hotel: stretching still — even from up here — as far as one could see, flat and shining; a long way up Africa.

Why Haven’t You Written?

His problem was hardening metal; finding a way to make it bore, grind, stutter through auriferous and other mineral-bearing rock without itself being blunted. The first time he spoke to the Professor’s wife, sitting on his left, she said how impossible that sounded, like seeking perpetual motion or eternal life — nothing could bear down against resistance without being worn away in the process? He had smiled and they had agreed with dinner-table good humour that she was translating into abstract terms what was simply a matter for metallurgy.

They did not speak now. He did not see her face. All the way to the airport it was pressed against his coat-muffled arm and he could look down only on the nest of hair that was the top of her head. He asked the taxi driver to close the window because a finger of cold air was lifting those short, overlaid crescents of light hair. At the airport he stood by while she queued to weigh in and present her ticket. He had the usual impulse to buy, find something for her at the last minute, and as usual there was nothing she wanted that he could give her. The first call came and they sat on with his arm round her. She dared not open her mouth; misery stopped her throat like vomit: he knew. At the second call, they rose. He embraced her clumsily in his coat, they said the usual reassurances to each other, she passed through the barrier and then came back in a crazy zigzag like a mouse threatened by a broom, to clutch his hand another time. Ashamed, half-dropping her things, she always did that, an unconscious effort to make no contact definitively the last.

And that was that. She was gone. It was as it always was; the joking, swaggering joy of arrival carried with it this reverse side; in their opposition and inevitability they were identical. He was used to it, he should be used to it, he should be used to never getting used to it because it happened again and again. The mining group in London for whom he was consultant tungsten carbide metallurgist sent him to Australia, Peru, and — again and again — the United States. In seven or eight visits he had been in New York for only two days and spent a weekend, once, in Chicago, but he was familiar with the middle-sized, Middle West, middle-everything towns (as he described them at home to friends in London) like the one he was left alone in now, where he lived in local motels and did his work among mining men and accepted the standard hospitality of good business relations. He was on first-name terms with his mining colleagues and their wives in these places and at Christmas would receive cards addressed to his wife and him as Willa and Duggie, although, of course, the Middle Westerners had never met her. Even if his wife could have left the children and the Group had been prepared to pay her fare, there wasn’t much to be seen in the sort of places in America his work took him to.

In them, it was rare to meet anyone outside the mining community. The Professor’s wife on his left at dinner that night was there because she was somebody’s sister-in-law. Next day, when he recognised her standing beside him at the counter of a drugstore she explained that she was on a visit to do some research in the local university library for her husband, Professor Malcolm, of the Department of Political Science in the university of another Middle Western town not far away. And it was this small service she was able to carry out for the Professor that had made everything possible. Without it, perhaps the meetings at dinner and in the drugstore would have been the only times, the beginning and the end: the end before the beginning. As it was, again and again the Professor’s wife met the English metallurgist in towns of Middle Western America, he come all the way from London to harden metal, she come not so far from home to search libraries for material for her husband’s thesis.

It was snowing while a taxi took him back along the road from the airport to the town. It seemed to be snowing up from the ground, flinging softly at the windscreen, rather than falling. To have gone on driving into the snow that didn’t reach him but blocked out the sight of all that was around him — but there was a dinner, there was a report he ought to write before the dinner. He actually ground his teeth like a bad-tempered child — always these faces to smile at, these reports to sit over, these letters to write. Even when she was with him, he had to leave her in the room while he went to friendly golf games and jolly dinners with engineers who knew how much they missed a bit of home life when they had to be away from the wife and youngsters. Even when there were no dinner parties he had to write reports late at night in the room where she lay in bed and fell asleep, waiting for him. And always the proprietorial, affectionately reproachful letters from home: ‘. . nothing from you. . For goodness’ sake, a line to your mother. . It would cheer up poor little mumpy Ann no end if she got a postcard. . nothing for ten days, now; darling, can’t help getting worried when you don’t. .’

Gone: and no time, no peace to prepare for what was waiting to be realised in that motel room. He could not go back to that room right away. Drive on with the huge silent handfuls of snow coming at him, and the windscreen wipers running a screeching fingernail to and fro over glass: he gave the driver an address far out of the way, then when they had almost reached it said he had changed his mind and (to hell with the report) went straight to the dinner although it was much too early. ‘For heaven’s sakes! Of course not. Fix yourself a drink, Duggie, you know where it all is by now. .’ The hostess was busy in the kitchen, a fat beautiful little girl in leotards and dancing pumps came no farther than the doorway and watched him, finger up her nose.

They always drank a lot in these oil-fired igloos, down in the den where the bar was, with its collection of European souvenirs or home-painted Mexican mural, up in the sitting room round the colour TV after dinner, exchanging professional jokes and anecdotes. They found Duggie in great form: that dry English sense of humour. At midnight he was dropped between the hedges of dirty ice shovelled on either side of the motel entrance. He stood outside the particular door, he fitted the key and the door swung open on an absolute assurance — the dark, centrally-heated smell of Kim Malcolm and Crispin Douglas together, his desert boots, her hair lacquer, zest of orange peel, cigarette smoke in cloth, medicated nasal spray, salami, newspapers. For a moment he didn’t turn on the light. Then it sprang from under his finger and stripped the room: gone; empty, ransacked. He sat down in his coat. What had he done the last time? People went out and got drunk or took a pill and believed in the healing sanity of morning. He had drunk enough and he never took pills. Last time he had left when she did, been in some other place when she was in some other place.

She had put the cover on the typewriter and there was a dustless square where the file with material for Professor Malcolm’s thesis used to be. He took his notes for his report out of the briefcase and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Then he sat there a long time, hands on the machine, hearing his own breathing whistling slightly through his blocked left nostril. His heart was driven hard by the final hospitable brandy. He began to type in his usual heavy and jerky way, all power in two forefingers.

In the morning — in the morning nothing could efface the hopeless ugliness of that town. They laughed at it and made jokes about the glorious places he took her to. She had said, if we could stay with each other for good, but only on condition that we lived in this town? She had made up the scene: a winter day five years later, with each insisting it was the other’s turn to go out in the freezing slush to buy drink and each hurling at the other the reproach — it’s because of you I got myself stuck here. She was the one who pulled the curtain aside on those streets of shabby snow every morning, on the vacant lots with their clapboard screens, on the grey office blocks with lights going on through the damp-laden smog as people began the day’s work, and it was she who insisted — be fair — that there was a quarter of an hour or so, about five in the evening, when the place had its moment; a sort of Arctic spectrum, the fire off a diamond, was reflected from the sunset on the polluted frozen river upon the glass faces of office blocks, and the evening star was caught hazily in the industrial pall.

In the morning frozen snot hung from the roofs of wooden houses. A company car drove him to his first appointment. Figures in the street with arms like teddy bears, the elbow joints stiffened by layers of clothing. A dog burning a patch of urine through the snow. In the cafeteria at lunch (it was agreed that it was crazy, from the point of view of everyone’s waistline, to lay on an executive lunch for him every day) he walked past Lily cups of tuna fish salad and bowls of Jell-O, discussing percussive rock drilling and the heat treatment of steel. Some drills were behaving in an inexplicable manner and he was driven out to the mine to see for himself. A graveyard all the way, tombstones of houses and barns under snow. Sheeted trees. White mounds and ridges whose purpose could only be identified through excavation, like those archaeological mounds, rubbish heaps of a vanished culture silted over by successive ones. He did not know why the tungsten carbide-tipped drills were not fulfilling their promised performance; he would have to work on it. He lied to one generous colleague that he had been invited to dinner with another and he walked about the iron-hard streets of the downtown area (the freeze had crusted the slush, the crust was being tamped down by the pressure of feet) with his scarf over his mouth, and at last ended up at the steak house where they used to go. Because he was alone the two waitresses talked to each other near him as if he were not there. Each table had a small glass box which was a selector for the jukebox; one night she had insisted that they ought to hear a record that had been the subject of controversy in the newspapers because it was supposed to include, along with the music, the non-verbal cries associated with love-making, and they had laughed so much at the groans and sighs that the bloody slabs of meat on the wooden boards got cold before they ate them. Although he thought it senseless to fill himself up with drink he did finish the whole bottle of wine they used to manage between them. And every night, making the excuse that he wanted to ‘work on’ the problem of the drill, pleading tiredness, lying about an invitation he didn’t have, he went from brutal cold into fusty heat and out to brutal cold again, sitting in bars and going to the steak house or the Chinese restaurant and then back to bars again, until the final confrontation with cold was only half-felt on his stiff hot face and he trudged back along planes of freezing wind to the motel room or sat behind a silent taxi driver, sour to have to be out on such nights, as he had sat coming home alone from the airport with the snow flinging itself short of his face.

The freeze continued. The TV weatherman gabbling cheerily before his map showed the sweep of great snowstorms over whole arcs of this enormous country. On the airport she had left from, planes were grounded for days. The few trains there were, ran late. In addition, there was a postal strike and no letters, nothing from England, but also nothing from her, and no hope of a phone call, either, because she had flown straight to join the Professor at his mother’s home in Florida, and she could neither telephone from the house nor hope to get out to do so from elsewhere at night, when he was in the motel room; they dared not risk a call to the Company during the day. He moved between the room — whose silence, broken only by Walter Cronkite and the weatherman, filled with his own thoughts as if it were some monstrous projection, a cartoon balloon, issuing from his mind — he moved between that room and the Japanese-architect-designed headquarters of the Company, which existed beneath blizzard and postal strike as an extraordinary bunker with contemplative indoor pools, raked-stone covered courtyards, cheerful rows of Jell-O and tuna fish salad. He woke in the dark mornings to hear the snow plough grinding along the streets. Men struck with picks into the rock of ice that covered the sidewalks a foot solid. The paper said all post offices were deep in drifts of accumulated mail, and sealed the mouths of all mail boxes. England did not exist and Florida — was there really anyone in Florida? It was a place where, the weatherman said, the temperature was in the high seventies, and humid. She had forgotten a sheet of notes that must have come loose from the file, and the big yellow fake sponge (it was what she had been buying when they found themselves together in the drugstore of that other Middle Western town) that she now always brought along. She would be missing the sponge, in Florida, but there was no way to get it to her. He kept the sponge and the sheet of paper on the empty dressing table. Overnight, every night, more snow fell. Like a nail he was driven deeper and deeper into isolation.

He came from dinner with the Chief Mining Engineer and his party at the country club (the Chief Mining Engineer always took his wife out to eat on Saturday nights) and was possessed by such a dread of the room that he told the taxi driver to take him to the big chain hotel, that had seventeen floors and a bar on top. It was full of parties like the one he had just left; he was the only solitary. Others did not look outside, but fiddling with a plastic cocktail stirrer in the shape of a tiny sword he saw through the walls of glass against which the blue-dark pressed that they were surrounded by steppes of desolation out there beyond the feebly lit limits of the town. Wolves might survive where effluvia from paper mills had made fish swell up and float, and birds choked on their crops filled with pesticide-tainted seeds. He carried the howl somewhere inside him. It was as close as that slight whistling from the blocked sinus in his left nostril. When the bar shut he went down with those chattering others in an elevator that cast them all back into the street.

The smell in the motel room had not changed through his being alone there. He felt so awake, so ready to tackle something, some work or difficulty, that he took another drink, a big swallow of neat whisky, and, that night, wrote a letter to Willa. I’m not coming back, he said. I have gone so far away that it would be stupid to waste it — I mean the stage I’ve reached. Of course I am sorry that you have been such a good wife, that you will always be such a good wife and nothing can change you. Because so long as I accept that you are a good wife, how can I find the guts to do it? I can go on being the same thing — your opposite number, the good husband, hoping for a better position and more money for us all, coming on these bloody dreary trips every winter (why don’t they ever send me in good weather). But it’s through subjecting myself to all this, putting up with what we think of as these partings for the sake of my work, that I have come to understand that they are not partings at all. They are nothing like partings. Do you understand?

It went on for two more pages. When he had finished he put it in an airmail envelope, stamped it, went out again — he had not taken off his coat or scarf — and walked through the ringing of his own footsteps in the terrible cold to where he remembered there was a mail box. Like all the others, the mouth was sealed over by some kind of gummed tape, very strong stuff reinforced by a linen backing. He slit it with a piece of broken bottle he found in the gutter, and pushed the letter in. When he got back to the room he still had the bit of glass in his hand. He fell asleep in his coat but must have woken later and undressed because in the morning he found himself in bed and in pyjamas.

He did not know how drunk he had been that night when he did it. Not so drunk that he was not well aware of the chaos of the postal strike; everyone had been agreeing at the country club that most of the mail piled up at the GPO could never be expected to reach its destination. Not so drunk that he had not counted on the fact that the letter would never get to England. Why, he had broken into the mail box, and the boxes were not being cleared. Just drunk enough to take what seemed to him the thousand-to-one chance the letter might get there. Suppose the army were to be called in to break the strike, as they had been in New York? Yet, for several days, it did not seem to him that that letter would ever be dispatched and delivered — that sort of final solution just didn’t come off.

Then the joke went round the Company headquarters that mail was moving again: the Company had received, duly delivered, one envelope — a handbill announcing a sale (already over) at a local department store. Some wit from the administration department put it up in the cafeteria. He suddenly saw the letter, a single piece of mail, arriving at the house in London. He thought of writing — no, sending a cable — now that communications were open again, instructing that the letter was to be destroyed unopened.

She would never open a letter if asked not to, of course. She would put it on the bedside table at his side of the bed and wait for a private night-time explanation, out of the hearing of the children. But suppose the letter had been lost, buried under the drifts of thousands, mis-sorted, mis-dispatched — what would be made of a mystifying cable about a letter that had never come? The snow was melting, the streets glistened and his clothes were marked with the spray of dirty water thrown up by passing cars. He had impulses — sober ones — to write and tell the Professor’s wife, but when she unexpectedly did manage to telephone, the relief of pleasure at her voice back in the room so wrung him that he said nothing, and decided to say nothing in letters to her either; why disturb and upset her in this particularly disturbing and upsetting way.

He received a letter from London a fortnight old. There must have been later ones that hadn’t turned up. He began to reason that if the letter did arrive in London, he might just manage to get there before it. And then? It was unlikely that he would be able to intercept it. But he actually began to hint to the colleagues at the Company that he would like to leave by the end of the week, be home in England for the weekend, after all, after six weeks’ absence. The problem of the drill’s optimum performance couldn’t be solved in a day, anyway; he would have to go into the whole business back at the research laboratory in London. The Chief Mining Engineer said what a darned shame he had no leave now, before the greens were dry enough for the first eighteen holes of the year.

He forced himself not to think about the letter or at least to think about it as little as possible for the remaining days. Sometimes the idea of it came to him as a wild hope, like the sound of her voice suddenly in the room, from Florida. Sometimes it was a dry anxiety: what a childish, idiotic thing to have done, how insane to risk throwing everything away when, as the Professor’s wife often said, nobody was being hurt: Professor Malcolm, the children, Willa — none of them. Resentment flowed into him like unreasonable strength — I am being hurt! Not so drunk, after all, not so drunk. Yet, of course, he was afraid of Willa, ranged there with two pretty children and a third with glasses blacked out over one eye to cure a squint. What could you do with that unreasonable, life-saving strength? — Against that little family group? And, back again to the thought of the Professor’s wife, his being afraid disgusted him. He spoke to her once more before he left, and said, Why do we have to come last? Why do we count least? She accepted such remarks as part of the ragged mental state of parting, not as significant of any particular development. He put the phone down on her voice for the last time for this time.

He took the plane from Chicago late on Friday afternoon and by midnight was in early morning London. No school on Saturdays and Willa was there with the children at Heathrow. Airports, airports. In some times and places, for some men, it was the battlefield or the bullring, the courtroom or the church; for him it was airports. In that architectural mode of cheap glamour suited only to bathos his strongest experiences came; despair could not be distinguished from indigestion induced by time change, dread produced the same drawn face as muscle cramp; private joy exhibited euphoria that looked no different from that induced by individual bottles of Moët et Chandon. These were the only places where he ever wanted to weep, and no places could have been more ridiculous for this to happen to him.

Willa had a new haircut and the children were overcome with embarrassment by the eternal ten yards he had to walk towards them, and then flung themselves excitedly at him. Willa hugged his arm and pressed her cheek against that coatsleeve a moment; her mouth tasted of the toothpaste that they always used at home. The last phone call — only nine hours ago, that’s all it was — receded into a depth, a distance, a silence as impossible to reach down through as the drifts of snow and piled-up letters. . No letter, of course; he saw that at once. His wife cooked a special lunch and in the afternoon, when the children had gone off to the cinema with friends, he did what he must, he went to bed with her.

They talked a lot about the postal strike and how awful it had been. Nothing for days, more than two weeks! His mother had been maddening, telephoning every day, as if the whole thing were a conspiracy of the wife to keep the mother out of touch with her son. Crazy! And her letters — had he really got only one? She must have written at least four times; knowing that letters might not arrive only made one want to write more, wasn’t it perverse? Why hadn’t he phoned? Not that she really wanted him to, it was so expensive. . by the way, it turned out that the youngest child had knock knees, he would have to have remedial treatment. Well, that was what he had thought — such an extravagance, and he couldn’t believe, every day, that a letter might not come. She said, once: It must have been quite a nice feeling, sometimes, free of everything and everyone for a change — peaceful without us, eh? And he pulled down his mouth and said, Some freedom, snowed under in a motel in that godforsaken town. But the mining group was so pleased with his work that he was given a bonus, and that pleased her, that made her feel it was worth it, worth even the time he had had to himself.

He watched for the postman; sometimes woke up at night in a state of alarm. He even arranged, that first week, to work at home until about midday — getting his reports into shape. But there was nothing. For the second week, when he was keeping normal office hours, he read her face every evening when he came home; again, nothing. Heaven knows how she interpreted the way he looked at her: he would catch her full in the eyes, by mistake, now and then, and she would have a special slow smile, colouring up to her scrubbed little earlobes, the sort of smile you get from a girl who catches you looking at her across a bar. He was so appalled by that smile that he came home with a bunch of flowers. She embraced him and stood there holding the flowers behind his waist, rocking gently back and forth with him as they had done years ago. He thought — wildly again — how she was still pretty, quite young, no reason why she shouldn’t marry again.

His anxiety for the letter slowly began to be replaced by confidence: it would not come. It was hopeless — safe — that letter would never come. Perhaps he had been very drunk after all, perhaps the mail box was a permanently disused one, or the letter hadn’t really gone through the slot but fallen into the snow, the words melting and wavering while the ink ran with the thaw and the thin sheets of paper turned to pulp. He was safe. It was a good thing he had never told the Professor’s wife. He took the children to the Motor Show, he got good seats for Willa, his mother and himself for the new Troilus and Cressida production at the Aldwych, and he wrote a long letter to Professor Malcolm’s wife telling her about the performance and how much he would have loved to see it with her. Then he felt terribly depressed, as he often did lately now that he had stopped worrying about the letter and should have been feeling better, and there was nowhere to go for privacy, in depression, except the lavatory, where Willa provided the colour supplements of the Sunday papers for reading matter.

One morning just over a month after her husband had returned from the Middle West, Willa picked up the post from the floor as she brought the youngest home from school and saw a letter in her husband’s handwriting. It had been date-stamped and re-date-stamped and was apparently about six weeks old. There is always something a bit flat about opening a letter from someone who has in the meantime long arrived and filled in, with anecdote and his presence, the time of absence when it was written. She vaguely saw herself producing it that evening as a kind of addendum to their forgotten emotions about the strike; by such small shared diversions did they keep their marriage close. But after she had given the little one his lunch she found a patch of sun for herself and opened the letter after all. In that chilly spring air, unaccustomed warmth seemed suddenly to become aural, sang in her ears at the pitch of cicadas, and she stopped reading. She looked out into the small garden amazedly, accusingly, as if to challenge a hoax. But there was no one to answer for it. She read the letter through. And again. She kept on reading it and it produced almost a sexual excitement in her, as a frank and erotic love letter might. She could have been looking through a keyhole at him lying on another woman. She took it to some other part of the garden, as the cat often carried the bloody and mangled mess of its prey from place to place, and read it again. It was a perfectly calm and reasonable and factual letter saying that he would not return, but she saw that it was indeed a love letter, a love letter about someone else, a love letter such as he had never written to her. She put it back in the creased and stained envelope and tore it up, and then she went out the gate and wandered down to the bus stop, where there was a lamp-post bin, and dropped the bits of paper into its square mouth among the used tickets.

Open House

Frances Taver was on the secret circuit for people who wanted to find out the truth about South Africa. These visiting journalists, politicians and churchmen all had an itinerary arranged for them by their consular representatives and overseas information services, or were steered around by a ‘foundation’ of South African business interests eager to improve the country’s image, or even carted about to the model black townships, universities and beerhalls by the South African State Information service itself. But all had, carefully hidden among the most private of private papers (the nervous ones went so far as to keep it in code), the short list that would really take the lid off the place: the people one must see. A few were names that had got into the newspapers of the world as particularly vigorous opponents or victims of apartheid; a writer or two, a newspaper editor or an outspoken bishop. Others were known only within the country itself, and were known about by foreign visitors only through people like themselves who had carried the short list before. Most of the names on it were white names — which was rather frustrating, when one was after the real thing; but it was said in London and New York that there were still ways of getting to meet Africans, provided you could get hold of the right white people.

Frances Taver was one of them. Had been for years. From the forties when she had been a trade union organiser and run a mixed union of garment workers while this was legally possible, in the fifties, after her marriage, when she was manager of a black-and-white theatre group before that was disbanded by new legislation, to the early sixties, when she hid friends on the run from the police — Africans who were members of the newly banned political organisations — before the claims of that sort of friendship had to be weighed against the risk of the long spells of detention without trial introduced to betray it.

Frances Taver had few friends left now, and she was always slightly embarrassed when she heard an eager American or English voice over the telephone, announcing an arrival, a too-brief stay (of course), and the inevitable fond message of greetings to be conveyed from so-and-so — whoever it was who happened to have supplied the short list. A few years ago it had been fun and easy to make these visitors an excuse for a gathering that quite likely would turn into a party. The visitor would have a high old time learning to dance the kwela with black girls; he would sit fascinated, trying to keep sober enough to take it all in, listening to the fluent and fervent harangue of African, white and Indian politicals, drinking and arguing together in a paradox of personal freedom that, curiously, he couldn’t remember finding where there were no laws against the mixing of races. And no one enjoyed his fascination more than the objects of it themselves; Frances Taver and her friends were amused, in those days, in a friendly way, to knock the ‘right’ ideas slightly askew. In those days: that was how she thought of it; it seemed very long ago. She saw the faces, sometimes, a flash in an absence filled with newspaper accounts of trials, hearsay about activities in exile, chance remarks from someone who knew someone else who had talked over the fence with one who was under house arrest. Another, an African friend banned for his activities with the African National Congress, who had gone ‘underground’, came to see her at long intervals, in the afternoons when he could be sure the house would be empty. Although she was still youngish, she had come to think of ‘those days’ as her youth; and he was a vision strayed from it.

The voice on the telephone, this time, was American — soft, cautious — no doubt the man thought the line was tapped. Robert Greenman Ceretti, from Washington; while they were talking, she remembered that this was the political columnist who had somehow been connected with the Kennedy administration. Hadn’t he written a book about the Bay of Pigs? Anyway, she had certainly seen him quoted.

‘And how are the Brauns — I haven’t heard for ages—’ She made the usual enquiries about the well-being of the mutual acquaintance whose greetings he brought, and he made the usual speech about how much he was hoping he’d be able to meet her? She was about to say, as always, come to dinner, but an absurd recoil within her, a moment of dull panic, almost, made her settle for an invitation to drop in for a drink two days later. ‘If I can be of any help to you, in the meantime?’ she had to add; he sounded modest and intelligent.

‘Well, I do appreciate it. I’ll look forward to Wednesday.’

At the last minute she invited a few white friends to meet him, a doctor and his wife who ran a tuberculosis hospital in an African reserve, and a young journalist who had been to America on a leadership exchange programme. But she knew what the foreign visitor wanted of her and she had an absurd — again, that was the word — compulsion to put him in the position where, alas, he could ask it. He was a small, cosy, red-headed man with a chipmunk smile, and she liked him. She drove him back to his hotel after the other guests had left, and they chatted about the articles he was going to write and the people he was seeing — had he been able to interview any important Nationalists, for example? Well, not yet, but he hoped to have something lined up for the following week, in Pretoria. Another thing he was worried about (here it came), he’d hardly been able to exchange a word with any black man except the one who cleaned his room at the hotel.

She heard her voice saying casually, ‘Well, perhaps I might be able to help you, there,’ and he took it up at once, gravely, gratefully, sincerely, smiling at her — ‘I hoped you just might. If I could only get to talk with a few ordinary, articulate people. I mean, I think I’ve been put pretty much in the picture by the courageous white people I’ve been lucky enough to meet — people like you and your husband — but I’d like to know a little at first hand about what Africans themselves are thinking. If you could fix it, it’d be wonderful.’

Now it was done, at once she withdrew, from herself rather than him. ‘I don’t know. People don’t want to talk any more. If they’re doing anything, it’s not something that can be talked about. Those that are left. Black and white. The ones you ought to see are shut away.’

They were sitting in the car, outside the hotel. She could see in his encouraging, admiring, intent face how he had been told that she, if anyone, could introduce him to black people, hers, if anyone’s, was the house to meet them.

There was a twinge of vanity: ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll ring you, then, Bob.’ Of course they were already on first-name terms; lonely affinity overleapt acquaintance in South Africa when like-minded whites met.

‘You don’t have to say more than when and where. I didn’t like to talk, that first day, over the phone,’ he said.

They always had fantasies of danger. ‘What can happen to you?’ she said. Her smile was not altogether pleasant. They always protested, too, that their fear was not for themselves, it was on your behalf, etc. ‘You’ve got your passport. You don’t live here.’

She did not see Jason Madela from one month’s end to the next but when she telephoned him at the building where she remembered him once having had an office on the fringe of the white town, he accepted the invitation to lunch just as if he had been one of the intimates who used to drop in any time. And then there was Edgar, Edgar Xixo the attorney, successor to her old friend Samson Dumile’s practice; one could always get him. And after that? She could have asked Jason to bring someone along, perhaps one of the boxing promoters or gamblers it amused him to produce where the drinks were free — but that would have been too obvious, even for the blind eye that she and Jason Madela were able to turn to the nature of the invitation. In the end she invited little Spuds Buthelezi, the reporter. What did it matter? He was black, anyway. There was no getting out of the whole business, now.

She set herself to cook a good lunch, just as good as she had ever cooked, and she put out the drinks and the ice in the shelter of the glassed-in end of the big veranda, so that the small company should not feel lost. Her fading hair had been dyed to something approximating its original blonde and then streaked with grey, the day before, and she felt the appearance to be pleasingly artificial; she wore a bright, thick linen dress that showed off sunburned shoulders like the knobs of well-polished furniture, and she was aware that her blue eyes were striking in contrast with her tough brown face. She felt Robert Greenman Ceretti’s eyes on her, a moment, as he stood in the sunny doorway; yes, she was also a woman, queening it alone among men at lunch.

‘You mix the martinis, there’s a dear,’ she said. ‘It’s such a treat to have a real American one.’ And while he bent about over bottles with the neatness of a small man, she was in and out of the veranda, shepherding the arrival of the other guests.

‘This is Bob — Bob Ceretti, here on a visit from the States — Edgar Xixo.’

‘Jason, this is Bob Ceretti, the man who has the ear of presidents—’

Laughter and protests mingled with the handing round of the drinks. Jason Madela, going to fat around the nape but still handsome in a frowning, Clark Gable way, stood about, glass in hand, as if in the habit acquired at cocktail parties. With his air of being distracted from more important things by irresistibly amusing asides, he was correcting a matter of terminology for Robert Ceretti — ‘No, no, but you must understand that in the townships, a “situation” is a different thing entirely — well, I’m a situation, f’rinstance—’

He cocked his smile, for confirmation, to Xixo, whose eyes turned from one face to another in obedient glee — ‘Oh, you’re the muti man!’

‘No, wait, but I’m trying to give Bob an obvious example’ — more laughter, all round — ‘ — a man who wears a suit every day, like a white man. Who goes to the office and prefers to talk English.’

‘You think it derives from the use of the word as a genteelism for “job”? Would you say? You know — the Situations Vacant column in the newspapers?’ The visitor sat forward on the edge of his chair, smiling up closely. ‘But what’s this “muti” you mentioned, now — maybe I ought to have been taking notes instead of shaking Frances’s martini pitcher.’

‘He’s a medicine man,’ Xixo was explaining, while Jason laughed — ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and tossed off the rest of his gin, and Frances went forward to bring the late arrival, Spuds Buthelezi, in his lattice-knit gold shirt and pale blue jeans, into the circle. When the American had exchanged names and had Spuds by the hand, he said, ‘And what’s Spuds, then?’

The young man had a dough-shaped, light-coloured face with tiny features stuck in it in a perpetual expression of suspicious surprise. The martinis had turned up the volume of voices that met him. ‘I’ll have a beer,’ he said to Frances; and they laughed again.

Jason Madela rescued him, a giant flicking a fly from a glass of water. ‘He’s one of the eggheads,’ he said. ‘That’s another category altogether.’

‘Didn’t you used to be one yourself, Jason?’ Frances pretended a reproof: Jason Madela would want a way of letting Ceretti know that although he was a successful businessman in the townships, he was also a man with a university degree.

‘Don’t let’s talk about my youthful misdemeanours, my dear Frances,’ he said, with the accepted light touch of a man hiding a wound. ‘I thought the men were supposed to be doing the work around here — I can cope with that,’ and he helped her chip apart the ice cubes that had welded together as they melted. ‘Get your servant to bring us a little hot water, that’ll do it easily—’

‘Oh I’m really falling down on the job!’ Ceretti was listening carefully, putting in a low ‘Go on’ or ‘You mean?’ to keep the flow of Xixo’s long explanation of problems over a travel document, and he looked up at Frances and Jason Madela offering a fresh round of drinks.

‘You go ahead and talk, that’s the idea,’ Frances said.

He gave her the trusting grin of some intelligent small pet. ‘Well, you two are a great combination behind the bar. Real teamwork of long association, I guess.’

‘How long is it?’ Frances asked, drily but gaily, meaning how many years had she and Jason Madela been acquaintances, and, playfully making as if to anticipate a blow, he said, ‘Must be ten years and you were a grown-up girl even then’ — although both knew that they had seen each other only across various rooms perhaps a dozen times in five years, and got into conversation perhaps half as often.

At lunch Edgar Xixo was still fully launched on the story of his difficulties in travelling back and forth to one of the former British Protectorates, now small, newly independent states surrounded by South African territory. It wasn’t, he explained, as if he were asking for a passport: it was just a travel document he wanted, that’s all, just a piece of paper from the Bantu Affairs Department that would allow him to go to Lesotho on business and come back.

‘Now have I got this straight — you’d been there sometime?’ Ceretti hung over the wisp of steam rising from his soup like a seer over a crystal ball.

‘Yes, yes, you see, I had a travel document—’

‘But these things are good for one exit and re-entry only.’ Jason dispatched it with the good-humoured impatience of the quick-witted. ‘We blacks aren’t supposed to want to go wandering about the place. Tell them you want to take a holiday in Lourenço Marques — they’ll laugh in your face. If they don’t kick you downstairs. Oppenheimer and Charlie Engelhard can go off in their yachts to the South of France, but Jason Madela?’

He got the laugh he wanted, and, on the side, the style of his reference to rich and important white industrialists as decent enough fellows, if one happened to know them, suggested that he might. Perhaps he did, for all Frances Taver knew; Jason would be just the kind of man the white establishment would find if they should happen to decide they ought to make a token gesture of being in touch with the African masses. He was curiously reassuring to white people; his dark suits, white shirts, urbane conversation and sense of humour, all indistinguishable from their own and apparently snatched out of thin air, made it possible for them to forget the unpleasant facts of the life imposed on him and his kind. How tactful, how clever he was, too. She, just as well as any millionaire, would have done to illustrate his point; she was culpable: white, and free to go where she pleased. The flattery of being spared passed invisibly from her to him, like a promissory note beneath the table.

Edgar Xixo had even been summoned to The Greys, Special Branch headquarters, for questioning, he said — ‘And I’ve never belonged to any political organisation, they know there’ve never been any charges against me. I don’t know any political refugees in Lesotho, I don’t want to see anybody — I have to go up and down simply because of business, I’ve got this agency selling equipment to the people at the diamond diggings, it could be a good thing if…’

‘A little palm-grease, maybe,’ said Jason Madela, taking some salad.

Xixo appealed to them all, dismayed. ‘But if you offer it to the wrong one, that’s the. .? In my position, an attorney!’

‘Instinct,’ said Madela. ‘One can’t learn it.’

‘Tell me,’ Ceretti signalled an appreciative refusal of a second helping of duck, while turning from his hostess to Madela. ‘Would you say that bribery plays a big part in daily relations between Africans and officials? I don’t mean the political police, of course — the white administration? Is that your experience?’

Madela sipped his wine and then turned the bottle so that he could read the label, saying meanwhile, ‘Oh not what you’d call graft, not by your standards. Small stuff. When I ran a transport business I used to make use of it. Licences for the drivers and so on. You get some of these young Afrikaner clerks, they don’t earn much and they don’t mind who they pick up a few bob from. They can be quite reasonable. I was thinking there might be someone up at the Bantu Affairs offices. But you have to have a feeling for the right man’ — he put down the bottle and smiled at Frances Taver — ‘Thank heaven I’m out of it, now. Unless I should decide to submit some of my concoctions to the Bureau of Standards, eh?’ and she laughed.

‘Jason has broken the white monopoly of the hair-straightener and blood-purifier business,’ Frances said gracefully, ‘and the nice thing about him is that he has no illusions about his products.’

‘But plenty of confidence,’ he said. ‘I’m looking into the possibilities of exporting my pills for men, to the States. I think the time’s just ripe for American Negroes to feel they can buy back a bit of old Africa in a bottle, eh?’

Xixo picked about his leg of duck as if his problem itself were laid cold before them on the table. ‘I mean, I’ve said again and again, show me anything on my record—’

The young journalist, Spuds Buthelezi, said in his heavy way, ‘It might be because you took over Samson Dumile’s show.’

Every time a new name was mentioned the corners of Ceretti’s eyes flickered narrow in attention.

‘Well, that’s the whole thing!’ Xixo complained to Ceretti. ‘The fellow I was working for, Dumile, was mixed up in a political trial and he got six years — I took over the bona fide clients, that’s all, my office isn’t in the same building, nothing to do with it — but that’s the whole thing!’

Frances suddenly thought of Sam Dumile, in this room of hers, three — two? — years ago, describing a police raid on his house the night before and roaring with laughter as he told how his little daughter said to the policeman, ‘My father gets very cross if you play with his papers.’

Jason picked up the wine bottle, making to pass it round — ‘Yes, please do, please do — what happened to the children?’ she said.

Jason knew whose she meant; made a polite attempt. ‘Where are Sam’s kids?’

But Edgar Xixo was nodding in satisfied confirmation as Ceretti said, ‘It’s a pretty awful story. My God. Seems you can never hope to be in the clear, no matter how careful you are. My God.’

Jason remarked, aside, ‘They must be around somewhere with relatives. He’s got a sister in Bloemfontein.’

The dessert was a compound of fresh mangoes and cream, an invention of the house: ‘Mangoes Frances’ said the American. ‘This is one of the African experiences I’d recommend.’ But Jason Madela told them he was allergic to mangoes and began on the cheese which was standing by. Another bottle of wine was opened to go with the cheese and there was laughter — which Robert Ceretti immediately turned on himself — when it emerged out of the cross-talk that Spuds Buthelezi thought Ceretti had something to do with an American foundation. In the sympathetic atmosphere of food, drink and sunshine marbled with cigarette smoke, the others listened as if they had not heard it all before while Buthelezi, reluctant to waste the speech he had primed himself with, pressed Ceretti with his claim to a study grant that would enable him to finish his play. They heard him again outlining the plot and inspiration of the play — ‘right out of township life’ as he always said, blinking with finality, convinced that this was the only necessary qualification for successful authorship. He had patiently put together and taken apart, many times, in his play, ingredients faithfully lifted from the work of African writers who got published, and he was himself African: what else could be needed but someone to take it up?

Foundation or no foundation, Robert Ceretti showed great interest. ‘Do you know the play at all, Frances? I mean,’ (he turned back to the round, wine-open face of the young man) ‘is it far enough along to show to anybody?’

And she said, finding herself smiling encouragingly, ‘Oh yes — an early draft, he’s worked on it a lot since then, haven’t you — and there’s been a reading. .?’

‘I’ll certainly get it to you,’ Buthelezi said, writing down the name of Ceretti’s hotel.

They moved back to the veranda for the coffee and brandy. It was well after three o’clock by the time they stood about, making their goodbyes. Ceretti’s face was gleaming. ‘Jason Madela’s offered to drop me back in town, so don’t you worry, Frances. I was just saying, people in America’ll find it difficult to believe it was possible for me to have a lunch like this, here. It’s been so very pleasant — pleasant indeed. We all had a good time. He was telling me that a few years ago a gathering like this would be quite common, but now there aren’t many white people who would want to risk asking Africans and there aren’t many Africans who would risk coming. I certainly enjoyed myself. . I hope we haven’t put you out, lingering so long. . it’s been a wonderful opportunity. .’ Frances saw them to the garden gate, talking and laughing; last remarks and goodbyes were called from under the trees of the suburban street.

When she came back alone the quiet veranda rang tense with vanished voices, like a bell tower after the hour has struck. She gave the cat the milk left over from coffee. Someone had left a half-empty packet of cigarettes; who was it who broke matches into little tents? As she carried the tray into the deserted kitchen, she saw a note written on the back of a bill taken from the spike. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL.

It was not signed, and was written with the kitchen ballpoint which hung on a string. But she knew who had written it; the vision from the past had come and gone again.

The servants Amos and Bettie had rooms behind a granadilla vine at the bottom of the yard. She called, and asked Bettie whether anyone had asked for her? No, no one at all.

He must have heard the voices in the quiet of the afternoon, or perhaps simply seen the cars outside, and gone away. She wondered if he knew who was there. Had he gone away out of consideration for her safety? They never spoke of it, of course, but he must know that the risks she took were carefully calculated, very carefully calculated. There was no way of disguising that from someone like him. Then she saw him smiling to himself at the sight of the collection of guests: Jason Madela, Edgar Xixo and Spuds Buthelezi — Spuds Buthelezi, as well. But probably she was wrong, and he would have come out among them without those feelings of reproach or contempt that she read into the idea of his gait, his face. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL. He may have meant just that.

Frances Taver knew Robert Ceretti was leaving soon, but she wasn’t quite sure when. Every day she thought, I’ll phone and say goodbye. Yet she had already taken leave of him, that afternoon of the lunch. Just telephone and say goodbye. On the Friday morning, when she was sure he would be gone, she rang up the hotel, and there it was, the soft, cautious American voice. The first few moments were awkward; he protested his pleasure at hearing from her, she kept repeating, ‘I thought you’d be gone. .’ Then she said, ‘I just wanted to say — about that lunch. You mustn’t be taken in—’

He was saying, ‘I’ve been so indebted to you, Frances, really you’ve been great.’

‘—not phonies, no, that’s not what I mean, on the contrary, they’re very real, you understand?’

‘Oh, your big good-looking friend, he’s been marvellous. Saturday night we were out on the town, you know.’ He was proud of the adventure but didn’t want to use the word ‘shebeen’ over the telephone.

She said, ‘You must understand. Because the corruption’s real. Even they’ve become what they are because things are the way they are. Being phony is being corrupted by the situation. . and that’s real enough. We’re made out of that.’

He thought maybe he was finding it difficult to follow her over the telephone, and seized upon the word: ‘Yes, the “situation” — he was able to slip me into what I gather is one of the livelier places.’

Frances Taver said, ‘I don’t want you to be taken in—’

The urgency of her voice stopped his mouth, was communicated to him even if what she said was not.

‘—by anyone,’ the woman was saying.

He understood, indeed, that something complicated was wrong, but he knew, too, that he wouldn’t be there long enough to find out, that perhaps you needed to live and die there, to find out. All she heard over the telephone was the voice assuring her, ‘Everyone’s been marvellous. . really marvellous. I just hope I can get back here some day — that is, if they ever let me in again. .’

A Meeting in Space

Every morning he was sent to the baker and the French children slid out of dark walls like the village cats and walked in his footsteps. He couldn’t understand what they said to each other, but he thought he understood their laughter: he was a stranger. He looked forward to the half-fearful, disdainful feeling their presence at his back gave him, and as he left the house expected at each alley, hole and doorway the start of dread with which he would see them. They didn’t follow him into the baker’s shop. Perhaps the baker wouldn’t have them — they looked poor, and the boy knew, from the piccanins at home, that poor kids steal. He had never been into a bakery at home in South Africa; the baker-boy, a black man who rode a tricycle with a rattling bin on the front, came through the yard holding the loaves out of the way of the barking dogs, and put two white and one brown on the kitchen table. It was the same with fruit and vegetables; at home the old Indian, Vallabhbhai, stopped his greengrocer’s lorry at the back gate, and his piccanin carried into the kitchen whatever you bought.

But here, the family said, part of the fun was doing your own shopping in the little shops that were hidden away by the switchback of narrow streets. They made him repeat over and over again the words for asking for bread, in French, but once in the baker’s shop he never said them, only pointed at the loaf he wanted and held out his hand with money in it. He felt that he was someone else, a dumb man perhaps. After a few days, if he were given change he would point again, this time at a bun with a glazing of jam. He had established himself as a customer. The woman who served chattered at him, smiled with her head on one side while she picked the money out of his palm; but he gave no sign of response.

There was another child who sometimes turned up with the usual group. He would hail them loudly, from across a street, in their own language, and stalk along with them for a bit, talking away, but he looked different. The boy thought it was just because this one was richer. Although he wore the usual canvas shoes and cotton shorts, he was hung about with all sorts of equipment — a camera and two other leather cases. He began to appear in the bakery each morning. He stood right near, as if the dumb person were also invisible, and peering up experiencedly under a thick, shiny fringe of brown hair, looked along the cakes on top of the counter while apparently discussing them in a joking, familiar way with the woman. He also appeared unexpectedly in other places, without the group. Once he was leaning against the damp archway to the tunnel that smelled like a school lavatory — it was the quick way from the upper level of streets to the lower. Another time he came out of the door of the streaky-pink-painted house with the Ali Baba pots, as if he must have been watching at the window. Then he was balancing along the top of the wall that overlooked the pitch where in the afternoons the baker and other men played a bowling game with a heavy ball. Suddenly, he was outside the gate of the villa that the family were living in; he squatted on the doorstep of the house opposite, doing something to the inside of his camera. He spoke: ‘You English?’

‘Yes — not really — no. I mean, I speak English, but I come from South Africa.’

‘Africa? You come from Africa? That’s a heck of a way!’

‘Fifteen hours or so. We came in a jet. We actually took a little longer because, you see, something went wrong with the one engine and we had to wait three hours in the middle of the night in Kano. Boy, was it hot, and there was a live camel wandering around.’ The anecdote cut itself off abruptly; the family often said long-winded stories were a bore.

‘I’ve had some pretty interesting experiences myself. My parents are travelling round the world and I’m going with them. Most of the time. I’ll go back home to school for a while in the Fall. Africa. Fantastic. We may get out there sometime. D’you know anything about these darned Polaroids? It’s stuck. I’ve got a couple of pictures of you I must show you. I take candid shots. All over the place. I’ve got another camera, a Minox, but I mostly use this one here because it develops the prints right in the box and you can give them to people right off. It’s good for a laugh. I’ve got some pretty interesting pictures, too.’

‘Where was I — in the street?’

‘Oh I’m taking shots all the time. All over the place.’

‘What’s the other case?’

‘Tape recorder. I’ll get you on tape, too. I tape people at Zizi’s Bar and in the Place, they don’t know I’m doing it, I’ve got this minute little mike, you see. It’s fantastic.’

‘And what’s in here?’

The aerial was pulled out like a silver wand. ‘My transistor, of course, my beloved transistor. D’you know what I just heard? — “Help!” Are the Beatles popular down in Africa?’

‘We saw them in London — live. My brother and sister and me. She bought the record of “Help!” but we haven’t got anything to play it on, here.’

‘Good God, some guys get all the breaks! You saw them. You notice how I’ve grown my hair? Say, look, I can bring down my portable player and your sister can hear her record.’

‘What time can you come?’

‘Any time you say. I’m easy. I’ve got to go for this darned French lesson now, and I have to be in at noon so that old Madame Blanche can give me my lunch before she quits, but I’ll be around indefinitely after that.’

‘Straight after lunch. About two. I’ll wait for you here. Could you bring the pictures, as well — of me?’

Clive came racing through the tiny courtyard and charged the flyscreen door, letting it bang behind him. ‘Hey! There’s a boy who can speak English! He just talked to me! He’s a real Amur-r-rican — just wait till you hear him. And you should see what he’s got, a Polaroid camera — he’s taken some pictures of me and I didn’t even know him — and he’s got a tiny little tape recorder, you can get people on it when they don’t know — and the smallest transistor I’ve ever seen.’

His mother said, ‘So you’ve found a pal. Thank goodness.’ She was cutting up green peppers for salad, and she offered him a slice on the point of her knife, but he didn’t see it.

‘He’s going round the world, but he goes back to America to school sometimes.’

‘Oh, where? Does he come from New York?’

‘I don’t know, he said something about Fall, I think that’s where the school is. The Fall, he said.’

‘That’s not a place, silly — it’s what they call autumn.’

The shower was in a kind of cupboard in the kitchen-dining room, and its sliding door was shaken in the frame, from inside. The impatient occupant got it to jerk open: she was his sister. ‘You’ve found what?’ The enormous expectancy with which she had invested this holiday, for herself, opened her shining face under its plastic mob-cap.

‘We can hear the record, Jen, he’s bringing his player. He’s from America.’

‘How old?’

‘Same as me. About.’

She pulled off the cap and her straight hair fell down, covering her head to the shoulders and her face to her eyelashes. ‘Fine,’ she said soberly.

His father sat reading Nice-Matin on one of the dining-table chairs, which was dressed, like a person, in a yellow skirt and a cover that fitted over its hard back. He had — unsuccessfully — put out a friendly foot to trip up the boy as he burst in, and now felt he ought to make another gesture of interest. As if to claim that he had been listening to every word, he said, ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s American, he’s the boy with the three leather cases—’

‘Yes, all right—’

‘You’ll see him this afternoon. He’s got a Beatle cut.’ This last was addressed to the young girl, who turned, halfway up the stone stairs with a train of wet footprints behind her.

But of course Jenny, who was old enough to introduce people as adults do, at once asked the American boy who he was. She got a very full reply. ‘Well, I’m usually called Matt, but that’s short for my second name, really — my real names are Nicholas Matthew Rootes Keller.’

‘Junior?’ she teased, ‘The Third?’

‘No, why should I be? My father’s name is Donald Rootes Keller. I’m named for my grandfather on my mother’s side. She has one hell of a big family. Her brothers won five decorations between them, in the war. I mean, three in the war against the Germans, and two in the Korean War. My youngest uncle, that’s Rod, he’s got a hole in his back — it’s where the ribs were — you can put your hand in. My hand, I mean’ — he made a fist with a small, thin, tanned hand — ‘not an adult person’s. How much more would you say my hand had t’grow, I mean — would you say half as much again, as much as that? — to be a full-size, man’s hand—’ He measured it against Clive’s; the two ten-year-old fists matched eagerly.

‘Yours and Clive’s put together — one full-size, king-size, man-size paw. Clip the coupon now. Enclose only one box-top or reasonable facsimile.’

But the elder brother’s baiting went ignored or misunderstood by the two small boys. Clive might react with a faint grin of embarrassed pleasure and reflected glory at the reference to the magazine ad culture with which his friend was associated by his brother Mark. Matt went on talking in the innocence of one whose background is still as naturally accepted as once his mother’s lap was.

He came to the villa often after that afternoon when the new Beatle record was heard for the first time on his player. The young people had nothing to do but wait while the parents slept after lunch (the place, where Jenny liked to stroll, in the evenings, inviting mute glances from boys who couldn’t speak her language, was dull at that time of day) and they listened to the record again and again in the courtyard summerhouse that had been a pigsty before the peasant cottage became a villa. When the record palled, Matt taped their voices — ‘Say something African!’ — and Mark made up a jumble of the one or two Zulu words he knew, with cheerleaders’ cries, words of abuse and phrases from familiar road signs, in Afrikaans. ‘Sakabona! Voetsak hambakahle hou links malingi mushle — Vrystaat!’

The brothers and sister rocked their rickety chairs back ecstatically on two legs when the record was played, but Matt listened with eyes narrowed and tongue turned up to touch his teeth, like an ornithologist who is bringing back alive the song of rare birds. ‘Boy, thanks. Fantastic. That’ll go into the documentary I’m going to make. Partly with my father’s movie camera, I hope, and partly with my candid stills. I’m working on the script now. It’s in the family, you see.’ He had already explained that his father was writing a book (several books, one about each country they visited, in fact) and his mother was helping. ‘They keep to a strict schedule. They start work around noon and carry on until about one a.m. That’s why I’ve got to be out of the house very early in the morning and I’m not supposed to come back in till they wake up for lunch. And that’s why I’ve got to keep out of the house in the afternoons, too; they got to have peace and quiet. For sleep and for work.’

Jenny said, ‘Did you see his shorts — that Madras stuff you read about? The colours run when it’s washed. I wish you could buy it here.’

‘That’s a marvellous transistor, Dad.’ Mark sat with his big bare feet flat on the courtyard flagstones and his head hung back in the sun — as if he didn’t live in it all the year round, at home; but this was France he basked in, not sunlight.

‘W-e-ll, they spoil their children terribly. Here’s a perfect example. A fifty-pound camera’s a toy. What’s there left for them to want when they grow up.’

Clive would have liked them to talk about Matt all the time. He said, ‘They’ve got a Maserati at home in America, at least, they did have, they’ve sold it now they’re going round the world.’

The mother said, ‘Poor little devil, shut out in the streets with all that rubbish strung around his neck.’

‘Ho, rubbish, I’m sure!’ said Clive, shrugging and turning up his palms exaggeratedly. ‘Of course, hundreds of dollars of equipment are worth nothing, you know, nothing at all.’

‘And how much is one dollar, may I ask, mister?’ Jenny had learned by heart, on the plane, the conversion tables supplied by the travel agency.

‘I don’t know how much it is in our money — I’m talking about America—’

‘You’re not to go down out of the village with him, Clive, ay, only in the village,’ his father said every day.

He didn’t go out of the village with the family, either. He didn’t go to see the museum at Antibes or the potteries at Vallauris or even the palace, casino and aquarium at Monte Carlo. The ancient hill village inside its walls, whose disorder of streets had been as confusing as the dates and monuments of Europe’s overlaid and overlapping past, became the intimate map of their domain — his and Matt’s. The alley cats shared it but the people, talking their unintelligible tongue, provided a babble beneath which, while performed openly in the streets, his activities with Matt acquired secrecy: as they went about, they were hidden even more than by the usual self-preoccupation of adults. They moved from morning till night with intense purpose; you had to be quick around corners, you mustn’t be seen crossing the street, you must appear as if from nowhere among the late afternoon crowd in the place and move among them quite unobtrusively. One of the things they were compelled to do was to get from the church — very old, with chicken wire where the stained glass must have been, and a faint mosaic, like a flaking transfer — to under the school windows without attracting the attention of the children. This had to be done in the morning, when school was in session; it was just one of the stone houses, really, without playgrounds: the dragging chorus of voices coming from it reminded him of the schools for black children at home. At other times the village children tailed them, jeering and mimicking, or in obstinate silence, impossible to shake off. There were fights and soon he learnt to make with his fingers effective insulting signs he didn’t understand, and to shout his one word of French, their bad word — merde!

And Matt talked all the time. His low, confidential English lifted to the cheerful rising cadence of French as his voice bounced out to greet people and rebounded from the close walls back to the privacy of English and their head-lowered conclave again. Yet even when his voice had dropped to a whisper, his round dark eyes, slightly depressed at the outer corners by the beginning of an intelligent frown above his dainty nose, moved, parenthetically alert, over everyone within orbit. He greeted people he had never seen before just as he greeted local inhabitants. He would stop beside a couple of sightseers or a plumber lifting a manhole and converse animatedly. To his companion standing by, his French sounded much more French than when the village children spoke it. Matt shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip while he talked, and if some of the people he accosted were uncomfortable or astonished at being addressed volubly, for no particular reason, by someone they didn’t know, he asked them questions (Clive could hear they were questions) in the jolly tone of voice that grown-ups use to kid children out of their shyness.

Sometimes one of the inhabitants, sitting outside his or her doorway on a hard chair, would walk inside and close the door when Matt called out conversationally. ‘The people in this town are really psychotic, I can tell you,’ he would say with enthusiasm, dropping back to English. ‘I know them all, every one of them, and I’m not kidding.’ The old women in wrinkled black stockings, long aprons and wide black hats who sat on the place stringing beans for Chez Riane, the open-air restaurant, turned walnut-meat faces and hissed toothlessly like geese when Matt approached. Riane (‘She topped the popularity poll in Paris, can you believe it? It was just about the time of the Flood, my father says’), a woman the size of a prize fighter who bore to the displayed posters of herself the kinship of a petrified trunk to a twig in new leaf, growled something at Matt from the corner of her vivid mouth. ‘I’ve got some great pictures of her. Of course, she’s a bit passé.’

They got chased when Matt took a picture of a man and a girl kissing down in the parking area below the chateau. Clive carried his box camera about with him, now, but he only took pictures of the cats. Matt promised that Clive would get a shot of the dwarf — a real man, not in a circus — who turned the spit in the restaurant that served lamb cooked the special way they did it here, but, as Matt said, Clive didn’t have the temperament for a great photographer. He was embarrassed, ashamed and frightened when the dwarf’s enormous head with its Spanish dancer’s sideburns reddened with a temper too big for him. But Matt had caught him on the Polaroid; they went off to sit in someone’s doorway hung with strips of coloured plastic to keep out flies, and had a look. There was the dwarf’s head, held up waggling on his little body like the head of a finger-puppet. ‘Fantastic.’ Matt was not boastful but professional in his satisfaction. ‘I didn’t have a good one of him before, just my luck, we hadn’t been here a week when he went crazy and was taken off to some hospital. He’s only just come back into circulation, it’s a good thing you didn’t miss him. You might’ve gone back to Africa and not seen him.’

The family, who had admired the boy’s Madras shorts or his transistor radio, enjoyed the use of his elegant little record player, or welcomed a friend for Clive, began to find him too talkative, too often present, and too much on the streets. Clive was told that he must come along with the family on some of their outings. They drove twenty miles to eat some fish made into soup. They took up a whole afternoon looking at pictures.

‘What time’ll we be back?’ he would rush in from the street to ask.

‘I don’t know — sometime in the afternoon.’

‘Can’t we be back by two?’

‘Why on earth should we tie ourselves down to a time? We’re on holiday.’ He would rush back to the street to relay the unsatisfactory information.

When the family came home, the slim little figure with its trappings would be ready to wave at them from the bottom of their street. Once in the dark they made him out under the street light that streaked and flattened his face and that of the village halfwit and his dog; he looked up from conversation as if he had been waiting for a train that would come in on time. Another day there was a message laid out in the courtyard with matches end-to-end: WILL SEE YOU LATER MATT.

‘What’s the matter with those people, they don’t even take the child down to the beach for a swim,’ said the mother.

Clive heard, but was not interested. He had never been in the pink house with the Ali Baba pots. Matt emerged like one of the cats, and he usually had money. They found a place that sold bubblegum and occasionally they had pancakes — Clive didn’t know that that was what they were going to be when Matt said he was going to buy some crêpes and what kind of jam did Clive like? Matt paid; there was his documentary film, and he was also writing a book — ‘There’s a lot of money in kids’ books actually written by a kid,’ he explained to the family. It was a spy story — ‘Really exotic.’ He expected to do well out of it, and he might sell some of his candid shots to Time and Life as well.

But one particularly lovely morning Clive’s mother said as if she couldn’t prevent herself, perhaps Matt would like to come with the family to the airport? The boys could watch the jets land while the grown-ups had business with the reservation office.

‘Order yourselves a lemonade if you want it,’ said the father; he meant that he would pay when he came back. They drank a lemonade-and-ice-cream each and then Matt said he’d like a black coffee to wash it down, so they ordered two coffees, and the father was annoyed when he got the bill — coffee was nothing at home, but in France they seemed to charge you for the glass of water you got with it.

‘I can drink five or six coffees a day, it doesn’t bother my liver,’ Matt told everyone. And in Nice, afterwards, trailing round the Place Masséna behind Jenny, who wanted to buy a polo shirt like the ones all the French girls were wearing, the boys were not even allowed to go and look at the fountain alone, in case they got lost. Matt’s voice fell to a whisper in Clive’s ear but Clive hardly heard and did not answer: here, Matt was just an appendage of the family, like any other little boy.

It was Saturday and when they drove home up the steep road (the halfwit and his dog sat at the newly installed traffic light and Matt, finding his voice, called out of the window a greeting in French) the village was already beginning to choke with weekend visitors.

Directly lunch was down the boys raced to meet beneath the plaque that commemorated the birth in this street of Xavier Duval, Resistance fighter, killed on 20 October 1944. Clive was there first and, faithfully carrying out the technique and example of his friend, delightedly managed to take a candid shot of Matt before Matt realised that he was observed. It was one of the best afternoons they’d had.

‘Saturdays are always good,’ said Matt. ‘All these psychotic people around. Just keep your eyes open, brother. I wrote Chapter Fourteen of my book at lunch. Oh, it was on a tray in my room — they were out until about four this morning and they didn’t get up. It’s set in this airport, you see — remember how you could just see my mouth moving and you couldn’t hear a thing in the racket with that jet taking off? — well, someone gets murdered right there drinking coffee and no one hears the scream.’

They were walking through the car park, running their hands over the nacre-sleek hoods of sports models, and half-attentive to a poodle fight near the pétanque pitch and a human one that seemed about to break out at the busy entrance to the men’s lavatories that tunnelled under the place. ‘Ah, I’ve got enough shots of delinquents to last me,’ Matt said. In accord they went on past the old girl in flowered trousers who was weeping over her unharmed, struggling poodle, and up the steps to the place, where most of the local inhabitants and all the visitors, whose cars jammed the park and stopped up the narrow streets, were let loose together, herded by Arab music coming from the boutique run by the French Algerians, on the chateau side, and the recorded voice, passionately hoarse, of Riane in her prime, from the direction of Chez Riane. The dwarf was there, talking between set teeth to a beautiful blonde American as if he were about to tear her apart with them; her friends were ready to die laughing, but looked kindly in order not to show it. The old women with their big black hats and apron-covered stomachs took up space on the benches. There were more poodles and an Italian greyhound like a piece of wire jewellery. Women who loved each other sat at the little tables outside Riane’s, men who loved each other sat in identical mauve jeans and pink shirts, smoking, outside Zizi’s Bar. Men and women in beach clothes held hands, looking into the doorways of the little shops and bars, and pulling each other along as the dogs pulled along their owners on fancy leashes. At the Crêperie, later, Matt pointed out Clive’s family, probably eating their favourite liqueur pancakes, but Clive jerked him away.

They watched pétanque for a while; the butcher, a local champion, was playing to the gallery, all right. He was pink and wore a tourist’s fishnet vest through which wisps of reddish chest-hair twined like a creeper. A man with a long black cape and a huge cat’s-whisker moustache caused quite a stir. ‘My God, I’ve been trying to get him for weeks—’ Matt ducked, Clive quickly following, and they zigzagged off through the pétanque spectators. The man had somehow managed to drive a small English sports car right up on to the place; it was forbidden, but although the part-time policeman who got into uniform for Saturday afternoons was shouting at him, the man couldn’t be forced to take it down again because whatever gap it had found its way through was closed by a fresh influx of people. ‘He’s a painter,’ Matt said. ‘He lives above the shoemaker’s, you know that little hole. He doesn’t ever come out except Saturdays and Sundays. I’ve got to get a couple of good shots of him. He looks to me the type that gets famous. Really psychotic, eh?’ The painter had with him a lovely, haughty girl dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a man’s tweeds and deerstalker. ‘The car must be hers,’ said Matt. ‘He hasn’t made it, yet; but I can wait.’ He used up almost a whole film: ‘With a modern artist, you want a few new angles.’

Matt was particularly talkative, even going right into Zizi’s Bar to say hello to her husband, Emile. The family were still sitting at the Crêperie; the father signed to Clive to come over and at first he took no notice. Then he stalked up between the tables. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t you want some money?’

Before he could answer, Matt began jerking a thumb frantically. He ran. His father’s voice barred him: ‘Clive!’

But Matt had come flying: ‘Over there — a woman’s just fainted or died or something. We got to go—’

‘What for?’ said the mother.

‘God almighty,’ said Jenny.

He was gone with Matt. They fought and wriggled their way into the space that had been cleared, near the steps, round a heavy woman lying on the ground. Her clothes were twisted; her mouth bubbled. People argued and darted irresistibly out of the crowd to do things to her; those who wanted to try and lift her up were pulled away by those who thought she ought to be left. Someone took off her shoes. Someone ran for water from Chez Riane but the woman couldn’t drink it. One day the boys had found a workman in his blue outfit and cement-crusted boots lying snoring near the old pump outside the Bar Tabac, where the men drank. Matt got him, too; you could always use a shot like that for a dead body, if the worst came to the worst. But this was the best ever. Matt finished up what was left of the film with the painter on it and had time to put in a new one, while the woman still lay there, and behind the noise of the crowd and the music the see-saw hoot of the ambulance could be heard, coming up the road to the village walls from the port below. The ambulance couldn’t get on to the place, but the men in their uniforms carried a stretcher over people’s heads and then lifted the woman aboard. Her face was purplish as cold hands on a winter morning and her legs stuck out. The boys were part of the entourage that followed her to the ambulance, Matt progressing with sweeping hops, on bended knee, like a Russian dancer, in order to get the supine body in focus at an upward angle.

When it was all over, they went back to the Crêperie to relate the sensational story to the family; but they had not been even interested enough to stay, and had gone home to the villa. ‘It’ll be really something for you to show them down in Africa!’ said Matt. He was using his Minox that afternoon, and he promised that when the films were developed, he would have copies made for Clive. ‘Darn it, we’ll have to wait until my parents take the films to Nice — you can’t get them developed up here. And they only go in on Wednesdays.’

‘But I’ll be gone by then,’ said Clive suddenly.

‘Gone? Back to Africa?’ All the distance fell between them as they stood head-to-head jostled by the people in the village street, all the distance of the centuries when the continent was a blank outline on the maps, as well as the distance of miles. ‘You mean you’ll be back in Africa?’

Clive’s box camera went into his cupboard along with the other souvenirs of Europe that seemed to have shed their evocation when they were unpacked amid the fresh, powerful familiarity of home. He boasted a little, the first day of the new term at school, about the places he had been to; but within a few weeks, when cities and palaces that he had seen for himself were spoken of in history or geography classes, he did not mention that he had visited them and, in fact, the textbook illustrations and descriptions did not seem to be those of anything he knew. One day he searched for his camera to take to a sports meeting, and found an exposed film in it. When it was developed, there were the pictures of the cats. He turned them this way up and that, to make out the thin, feral shapes on cobblestones and the disappearing blurs round the blackness of archways. There was also the picture of the American boy, Matt, a slim boy with knees made big out of focus, looking — at once suspicious and bright — from under his uncut hair.

The family crowded round to see, smiling, filled with pangs for what the holiday was and was not, while it lasted.

‘The Time-Life man himself!’

‘Poor old Matt — what was his other name?’

‘You ought to send it to him,’ said the mother. ‘You’ve got the address? Aren’t you going to keep in touch?’

But there was no address. The boy Matt had no street, house, house in a street, room in a house like the one they were in. ‘America,’ Clive said, ‘he’s in America.’

Rain-Queen

We were living in the Congo at the time; I was nineteen. It must have been my twentieth birthday we had at the Au Relais, with the Gattis, M. Niewenhuys and my father’s site manager. My father was building a road from Elisabethville to Tshombe’s residence, a road for processions and motorcades. It’s Lubumbashi now, and Tshombe’s dead in exile. But at that time there was plenty of money around and my father was brought from South Africa with a free hand to recruit engineers from anywhere he liked; the Gattis were Italian, and then there was a young Swede. I didn’t want to leave Johannesburg because of my boyfriend, Alan, but my mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me behind, because of him. She said to me, ‘Quite honestly, I think it’s putting too much temptation in a young girl’s way. I’d have no one to blame but myself.’ I was very young for my age, then, and I gave in.

There wasn’t much for me to do in E’ville. I was taken up by some young Belgian married women who were only a few years older than I was. I had coffee with them in town in the mornings, and played with their babies. My mother begged them to speak French to me; she didn’t want the six months there to be a complete waste. One of them taught me how to make a chocolate mousse, and I made myself a dress under the supervision of another; we giggled together as I had done a few years before with the girls at school.

Everyone turned up at the Au Relais in the evenings and in the afternoons when it had cooled off a bit we played squash — the younger ones in our crowd, I mean. I used to play every day with the Swede and Marco Gatti. They came straight from the site. Eleanora Gatti was one of those Mediterranean women who not only belong to a different sex, but seem to be a species entirely different from the male. You could never imagine her running or even bending to pick something up; her white bosom in square-necked dresses, her soft hands with rings and jewel-lidded watch, her pile of dark hair tinted a strange tarnished marmalade colour that showed up the pallor of her skin — all was arranged like a still life. The Swede wasn’t married.

After the game Marco Gatti used to put a towel round his neck tennis-star fashion and his dark face was gilded with sweat. The Swede went red and blotchy. When Marco panted it was a grin, showing white teeth and one that was repaired with gold. It seemed to me that all adults were flawed in some way; it set them apart. Marco used to give me a lift home and often came in to have a drink with my father and discuss problems about the road. When he was outlining a difficulty he had a habit of smiling and putting a hand inside his shirt to scratch his breast. In the open neck of his shirt some sort of amulet on a chain rested on the dark hair between his strong pectoral muscles. My father said proudly, ‘He may look like a tenor at the opera, but he knows how to get things done.’

I had never been to the opera; it wasn’t my generation. But when Marco began to kiss me every afternoon on the way home, and then to come in to talk to my father over beer as usual, I put it down to the foreignness in him.

I said, ‘It seems so funny to walk into the room where Daddy is.’

Marco said, ‘My poor little girl, you can’t help it if you are pretty, can you?’

It rains every afternoon there, at that time of year. A sudden wind would buffet the heat aside, flattening paper against fences in the dust. Fifteen minutes later — you could have timed it by the clock — the rain came down so hard and noisy we could scarcely see out of the windscreen and had to talk as loudly as if we were in an echoing hall. The rain usually lasted only about an hour. One afternoon we went to the site instead of to my parents’ house — to the caravan that was meant to be occupied by one of the engineers but never had been, because everyone lived in town. Marco shouted against the downpour, ‘You know what the Congolese say? “When the rain comes, quickly find a girl to take home with you until it’s over.” ’ The caravan was just like a little flat, with everything you needed. Marco showed me — there was even a bath. Marco wasn’t tall (at home the girls all agreed we couldn’t look at any boy under six foot) but he had the fine, strong legs of a sportsman, covered with straight black hairs, and he stroked my leg with his hard yet furry one. That was a caress we wouldn’t have thought of, either. I had an inkling we really didn’t know anything.

The next afternoon Marco seemed to be taking the way directly home, and I said in agony, ‘Aren’t we going to the caravan?’ It was out, before I could think.

‘Oh my poor darling, were you disappointed?’ He laughed and stopped the car there and then and kissed me deep in both ears as well as the mouth. ‘All right, the caravan.’

We went there every weekday afternoon — he didn’t work on Saturdays, and the wives came along to the squash club. Soon the old Congolese watchman used to trot over from the labourers’ camp to greet us when he saw the car draw up at the caravan; he knew I was my father’s daughter. Marco chatted with him for a few minutes, and every few days gave him a tip. At the beginning, I used to stand by as if waiting to be told what to do next, but Marco had what I came to realise must be adult confidence. ‘Don’t look so worried. He’s a nice old man. He’s my friend.’

Marco taught me how to make love, in the caravan, and everything that I had thought of as ‘life’ was put away, as I had at other times folded the doll’s clothes, packed the Monopoly set and the sample collection, and given them to the servant. I stopped writing to my girl friends; it took me weeks to get down to replying to Alan’s regular letters, and yet when I did so it was with a kind of professional pride that I turned out a letter of the most skilful ambiguity — should it be taken as a love letter, or should it not? I felt it would be beyond his powers — powers of experience — to decide. I alternately pitied him and underwent an intense tingling of betrayal — actually cringing away from myself in the flesh. Before my parents and in the company of friends, Marco’s absolutely unchanged behaviour mesmerised me: I acted as if nothing had happened because for him it was really as if nothing had happened. He was not pretending to be natural with my father and mother — he was natural. And the same applied to our behaviour in the presence of his wife. After the first time he made love to me I had looked forward with terror and panic to the moment when I should have to see Eleanora again; when she might squeeze my hand or even kiss me on the cheek as she sometimes did in her affectionate, feminine way. But when I walked into our house that Sunday and met her perfume and then all at once saw her beside my mother talking about her family in Genoa, with Marco, my father and another couple sitting there — I moved through the whirling impression without falter.

Someone said, ‘Ah here she is at last, our Jillie!’

And my mother was saying (I had been riding with the Swede), ‘I don’t know how she keeps up with Per, they were out dancing until three o’clock this morning—’ and Marco, who was twenty-nine (1 December, Sagittarius, domicile of Jupiter), was saying, ‘What it is to be young, eh?’, and my father said, ‘What time did you finally get to bed, after last night, anyway, Marco—’ and Eleanora, sitting back with her plump smooth knees crossed, tugged my hand gently so that we should exchange a woman’s kiss on the cheek.

I took in the smell of Eleanora’s skin, felt the brush of her hair on my nose; and it was done, for ever. We sat talking about some shoes her sister-in-law had sent from Milan. It was something I could never have imagined: Marco and I, as we really were, didn’t exist here; there was no embarrassment. The Gattis, as always on Sunday mornings, were straight from eleven o’clock Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and smartly dressed.

As in most of these African places there was a shortage of white women in Katanga and my mother felt much happier to see me spending my time with the young married people than she would have been to see me taken up by the mercenaries who came in and out of E’ville that summer. ‘They’re experienced men,’ she said — as opposed to boys and married men, ‘and of course they’re out for what they can get. They’ve got nothing to lose; next week they’re in another province, or they’ve left the country. I don’t blame them. I believe a girl has to know what the world’s like, and if she is fool enough to get involved with that crowd, she must take the consequences.’ She seemed to have forgotten that she had not wanted to leave me in Johannesburg in the company of Alan. ‘She’s got a nice boy at home, a decent boy who respects her. I’d far rather see her just enjoying herself generally, with you young couples, while we’re here.’ And there was always Per, the Swede, to even out the numbers; she knew he wasn’t ‘exactly Jillie’s dream of love’. I suppose that made him safe, too. If I was no one’s partner in our circle, I was a love object, handed round them all, to whom it was taken for granted that the homage of a flirtatious attitude was paid. Perhaps this was supposed to represent my compensation: if not the desired of any individual, then recognised as desirable by them all.

‘Oh of course, you prefair to dance with Jeelie,’ Mireille, one of the young Belgians, would say to her husband, pretending offence. He and I were quite an act, at the Au Relais, with our cha-cha. Then he would whisper to her in their own language, and she would giggle and punch his arm.

Marco and I were as famous a combination on the squash court as Mireille’s husband and I were on the dance floor. This was the only place, if anyone had had the eyes for it, where our love-making showed. As the weeks went by and the love-making got better and better, our game got better and better. The response Marco taught me to the sound of spilling grain the rain made on the caravan roof held good between us on the squash court. Sometimes the wives and spectators broke into spontaneous applause; I was following Marco’s sweat-oiled excited face, anticipating his muscular reactions in play as in bed. And when he had beaten me (narrowly) or we had beaten the other pair, he would hunch my shoulders together within his arm, laughing, praising me in Italian to the others, staggering about with me, and he would say to me in English, ‘Aren’t you a clever girl, eh?’; only he and I knew that that was what he said to me at other times. I loved that glinting flaw in his smile, now. It was Marco, like all the other things I knew about him: the girl cousin he had been in love with when he used to spend holidays with her family in the Abruzzi mountains; the way he would have planned Tshombe’s road if he’d been in charge — ‘But I like your father, you understand? — it’s good to work with your father, you know?’; the baby cream from Italy he used for the prickly heat round his waist.

The innocence of the grown-ups fascinated me. They engaged in play-play, while I had given it up; I began to feel arrogant among them. It was pleasant. I felt arrogant — or rather tolerantly patronising — towards the faraway Alan, too. I said to Marco, ‘I wonder what he’d do if he knew’ — about me; the caravan with the dotted curtains, the happy watchman, the tips, the breath of the earth rising from the wetted dust. Marco said wisely that Alan would be terribly upset.

‘And if Eleanora knew?’

Marco gave me his open, knowing, assured smile, at the same time putting the palm of his hand to my cheek in tender parenthesis. ‘She wouldn’t be pleased. But in the case of a man—’ For a moment he was Eleanora, quite unconsciously he mimicked the sighing resignation of Eleanora, receiving the news (seated, as usual), aware all the time that men were like that.

Other people who were rumoured or known to have had lovers occupied my mind with a special interest. I chattered on the subject, ‘. . when this girl’s husband found out, he just walked out of the house without any money or anything and no one could find him for weeks,’ and Marco took it up as one does what goes without saying: ‘Well of course. If I think of Eleanora with someone — I mean — I would become mad.’

I went on with my second-hand story, enjoying the telling of all its twists and complications, and he laughed, following it with the affectionate attention with which he lit everything I said and did, and getting up to find the bottle of Chianti, wipe out a glass and fill it for himself. He always had wine in the caravan. I didn’t drink any but I used to have the metallic taste of it in my mouth from his.

In the car that afternoon he had said maybe there’d be a nice surprise for me, and I remembered this and we lay and wrangled teasingly about it. The usual sort of thing: ‘You’re learning to be a real little nag, my darling, a little nag, eh?’

‘I’m not going to let go until you tell me.’

‘I think I’ll have to give you a little smack on the bottom, eh, just like this, eh?’

The surprise was a plan. He and my father might be going to the Kasai to advise on some difficulties that had cropped up for a construction firm there. It should be quite easy for me to persuade my father that I’d like to accompany him, and then if Marco could manage to leave Eleanora behind, it would be almost as good as if he and I were to take a trip alone together.

‘You will have your own room?’ Marco asked.

I laughed. ‘D’you think I’d be put in with Daddy?’ Perhaps in Italy a girl wouldn’t be allowed to have her own hotel room.

Now Marco was turning his attention to the next point: ‘Eleanora gets sick from the car, anyway — she won’t want to come on bad roads, and you can get stuck, God knows what. No, it’s quite all right, I will tell her it’s no pleasure for her.’ At the prospect of being in each other’s company for whole days and perhaps nights we couldn’t stop smiling, chattering and kissing, not with passion but delight. My tongue was loosened as if I had been drinking wine.

Marco spoke good English.

The foreign turns of phrase he did have were familiar to me. He did not use the word ‘mad’ in the sense of angry. ‘I would become mad’: he meant exactly that, although the phrase was not one that we English-speaking people would use. I thought about it that night, alone, at home; and other nights. Out of his mind, he meant. If Eleanora slept with another man, Marco would be insane with jealousy. He said so to me because he was a really honest person, not like the other grown-ups — just as he said, ‘I like your father, eh? I don’t like some of the things he does with the road, but he is a good man, you know?’ Marco was in love with me; I was his treasure, his joy, some beautiful words in Italian. It was true; he was very, very happy with me. I could see that. I did not know that people could be so happy; Alan did not know. I was sure that if I hadn’t met Marco I should never have known. When we were in the caravan together I would watch him all the time, even when we were dozing I watched out of slit eyes the movement of his slim nostril with its tuft of black hair, as he breathed, and the curve of his sunburned ear through which capillary-patterned light showed. Oh Marco, Eleanora’s husband, was beautiful as he slept. But he wasn’t asleep. I liked to press my feet on his as if his were pedals and when I did this the corner of his mouth smiled and he said something with the flex of a muscle somewhere in his body. He even spoke aloud at times: my name. But I didn’t know if he knew he had spoken it. Then he would lie with his eyes open a long time, but not looking at me, because he didn’t need to: I was there. Then he would get up, light a cigarette, and say to me, ‘I was in a dream. . oh, I don’t know. . it’s another world.’

It was a moment of awkwardness for me because I was entering the world from my childhood and could not conceive that, as adults did — as he did — I should ever need to find surcease and joy elsewhere, in another world. He escaped, with me. I entered, with him. The understanding of this I knew would come about for me as the transfiguration of the gold tooth from a flaw into a characteristic had come. I still did not know everything.

I saw Eleanora nearly every day. She was very fond of me; she was the sort of woman who, at home, would have kept attendant younger sisters round her to compensate for the children she did not have. I never felt guilty towards her. Yet, before, I should have thought how awful one would feel, taking the closeness and caresses that belonged, by law, to another woman. I was irritated at the stupidity of what Eleanora said; the stupidity of her not knowing. How idiotic that she should tell me that Marco had worked late on the site again last night, he was so conscientious, etc. — wasn’t I with him, while she made her famous veal scalop-pini and they got overcooked? And she was a nuisance to us. ‘I’ll have to go — I must take poor Eleanora to a film tonight. She hasn’t been anywhere for weeks.’ ‘It’s the last day for parcels to Italy, tomorrow — she likes me to pack them with her, the Christmas parcels, you know how Eleanora is about these things.’ Then her aunt came out from Italy and there were lunches and dinners to which only Italian-speaking people were invited because the signora couldn’t speak English. I remember going there one Sunday — sent by my mother with a contribution of her special ice cream. They were all sitting round in the heat on the veranda, the women in one group with the children crawling over them, and Marco with the men in another, his tie loose at the neck of his shirt (Eleanora had made him put on a suit), gesturing with a toothpick, talking and throwing cigar butts into Eleanora’s flower-trough of snake cactus.

And yet that evening in the caravan he said again, ‘Oh good God, I don’t want to wake up. . I was in a dream.’ He had appeared out of the dark at our meeting-place, barefoot in espadrilles and tight thin jeans, like a beautiful fisherman.

I had never been to Europe. Marco said, ‘I want to drive with you through Piemonte, and take you to the village where my father came from. We’ll climb up to the walls from the church and when you get to the top — only then — I’ll turn you round and you’ll see Monte Bianco far away. You’ve heard nightingales, eh — never heard them? We’ll listen to them in the pear orchard, it’s my uncle’s place, there.’

I was getting older every day. I said, ‘What about Eleanora?’ It was the nearest I could get to what I always wanted to ask him: ‘Would you still become mad?’

Would you still become mad?

And now?

And now — two months, a week, six weeks later?

Now would you still become mad?

‘Eleanora will spend some time in Pisa after we go back to Italy, with her mother and the aunts,’ he was saying.

Yes, I knew why, too; knew from my mother that Eleanora was going to Pisa because there was an old family doctor there who was sure, despite everything the doctors in Milan and Rome had said, that poor Eleanora might still one day have a child.

I said, ‘How would you feel if Alan came here?’

But Marco looked at me with such sensual confidence of understanding that we laughed.

I began to plan a love affair for Eleanora. I chose Per as victim not only because he was the only presentable unattached man in our circle, but also because I had the feeling that it might just be possible to attract her to a man younger than herself, whom she could mother. And Per, with no woman at all (except the pretty Congolese prostitutes good for an hour in the rain, I suppose) could consider himself lucky if he succeeded with Eleanora. I studied her afresh. Soft white gooseflesh above her stocking-tops, breasts that rose when she sighed — that sort of woman. But Eleanora did not even seem to understand that Per was being put in her way (at our house, at the Au Relais) and Per seemed equally unaware of or uninterested in his opportunities.

And so there was never any way to ask my question. Marco and I continued to lie making love in the caravan while the roof made buckling noises as it contracted after the heat of the day, and the rain. Tshombe fled and returned; there were soldiers in the square before the post office, and all sorts of difficulties arose over the building of the road. Marco was determined, excitable, harassed and energetic — he sprawled on the bed in the caravan at the end of the day like a runner who has just breasted the tape. My father was nervous and didn’t know whether to finish the road. Eleanora was nervous and wanted to go back to Italy. We made love and when Marco opened his eyes to consciousness of the road, my father, Eleanora, he said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, why. . it’s like a dream. .’

I became nervous too. I goaded my mother: ‘The Gattis are a bore. That female Buddha.’

I developed a dread that Eleanora would come to me with her sighs and her soft-squeezing hand and say, ‘It always happens with Marco, little Jillie, you mustn’t worry. I know all about it.’

And Marco and I continued to lie together in that state of pleasure in which nothing exists but the two who make it. Neither roads, nor mercenary wars, nor marriage, nor the claims and suffering of other people entered that tender, sensual dream from which Marco, although so regretfully, always returned.

What I dreaded Eleanora might say to me was never said, either. Instead my mother told me one day in the tone of portentous emotion with which older women relive such things, that Eleanora, darling Eleanora, was expecting a child. After six years. Without having to go to Pisa to see the family doctor there. Yes, Eleanora had conceived during the rainy season in E’ville, while Marco and I made love every afternoon in the caravan, and the Congolese found themselves a girl for the duration of a shower.

It’s years ago, now.

Poor Marco, sitting in Milan or Genoa at Sunday lunch, toothpick in his fingers, Eleanora’s children crawling about, Eleanora’s brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts around him. But I have never woken up from that dream. In the seven years I’ve been married I’ve had — how many lovers? Only I know. A lot — if you count the very brief holiday episodes as well.

It is another world, that dream, where no wind blows colder than the warm breath of two who are mouth to mouth.