The Black House

10

Alec had managed a tea estate, and Munday in town for the week’s supplies looked forward to the older man’s company while Emma visited her friends and used the British Council Library. It was some relief from what after a year had become monotony in the village. Alec had sat, often jeering humorously with his cronies, and sometimes with the African girl who lived with him, whose picture appeared on the yellow tea wrapper—in the picture she was holding a similar packet of tea. Munday had never seen Alec in England; today he was alone in the crowded pub, looking burdened by his heavy suit and rather older: a sunburn had always masked the boozy floridness of his face and without it the patches of bright veins only emphasized his pallor. But his voice was the old familiar trumpet and his shouted Swahili caused several people nearby to turn and listen, and Alec, noticing their curiosity, had continued. Only when Munday was seated beside him did Alec lower his voice and resume in English.

“You reminded me,” Munday had said, and he told his story of having spoken Swahili to the porter at Waterloo. What had made him feel ridiculous in Emma’s eyes impressed Alec, and Alec said, “So you’re still the bwana mkubwa. That happened to me once in Marseilles. I opened my mouth to speak French and out came 'Kuja hapaV Baffled those frogs, I can tell you.”

“My porter was insulted,” said Munday.

“Served him right,” said Alec. “The striking classes always have it their own way, what? Here, let me get you a drink.” Alec pushed his way to the bar and returned with a pint. “A handle, right? I never forget a thing like that.” He raised his glass and said, “Confusion to your enemies, death to mine! Alfred, it’s like old times.” Then Munday said he had just come from Harley Street, and Alec had made the remark about the ten guineas.

“He told me I was perfectly all right,” said Munday.

“Maybe you are!”

“Maybe so,” said Munday. “But I certainly don’t feel it.”

“You are looking a bit unbuttoned,” said Alec. “I’m not surprised. I haven’t felt at all well since I stepped off that plane. Not at all.”

“Who’s running the estate now?”

“My branch manager,” said Alec, and he snorted at the contemptuous joke. “I hope it goes bust. They had no right nationalizing me. I was employing four hundred pickers—I’ve heard they’re down to a hundred and fifty now. They haven’t a bloody clue. And here I am.” Alec looked disgustedly around the pub.

Munday didn’t encourage him in his anger. He had seen Alec aggrieved before, and aggrieved Alec turned abusive, inviting witnesses to his pain. Munday respected the vigor of Alec’s settler opinions, though he always steered him away from the talk about Africans, which strained Munday’s loyalties. He wished to keep them separate, the Africans in the village, Alec and his cronies in Fort Portal. What he admired in Alec was the knowledge he had—a subtle expression of his attachment to the country—of the local flora, the names of wild flowers and trees, the types of grass; Alec made distinctions about landscape few Africans made, and he remembered Alec drunk one night outside a bar he called “The Gluepot,” stooping to the sidewalk and plucking a flower and holding the frail shaking blossom in his large fingers to identify it. Munday had once considered writing an anthropological study of people like Alec, the tribalism of the post-war settlers, but he felt he might have lost them as friends if he did that. Then his Saturdays would have been empty.

“The last time I saw you wearing a suit was at the Omukama’s funeral,” said Munday.

“Remember that?” said Alec. “That was a bash! All those women screeching, those sort of round horns they were blowing. The High Commissioner was there —God, he hated me. I got pissed as a newt afterward with Jack at The Gluepot.” Alec shook his head and smiled.

“Do you ever see him?”

“Jack? Not really. The last I heard he was applying to London Transport. Imagine Jack driving a bus!”

“He can do better than that, surely,’.’ said Munday, though he saw Jack clearly in the badge and uniform of a bus driver.

“A foreman on a tea estate? There’s nothing for him here. He’ll be bloody lucky to have a job at all.”

“Emma’s seeing Margaret this afternoon.”

“Margaret! Wasn’t she a dragon? Always reminded me of that film actress whose name I can never think of when I want to. I remember the night she came after Jack. We were drinking late at the hotel—Jack had his African popsie. ‘Excuse me/ I says and Margaret tore a strip off them both, told Jack she never wanted to see him again. I could hear her all the way out to the garden, swearing like a navvy. I’ll never forget that.”

“We were at the camp then.”

“You missed all the fireworks,” said Alec.

“Not exactly. Emma saw Margaret at Allibhai’s that Saturday and got a blow by blow description.”

“He got the boot, too, Allibhai. I expect I’ll be seeing him in Southall one of these days.”

“Do you live out that way?”

“Bleeding Ealing—not far off. I hate the place. Ever been there? It’s a five-bob ride on the Underground, ancl I’m paying the earth for a one-room flat —that’s what they call a bedsitter these days. Australians upstairs, always stamping on the floor, South Africans, you name it. Beside me there’s a family of Maltese—kids all over the place, God only knows where they sleep. It’s a right madhouse, toilets flushing, water running, radios playing. African bloke lives somewhere in the building. One day I saw him in the hall and says, ‘Kitu gani?’ ‘I am an engineering student,’ he says and gets all shirty with me. Filthy? You have no idea. Leaves turds the size of conger eels in the pan for the next person to admire. The pubs are a disgrace, all noise and music, television sets, and these horrible little chaps in old clothes with sequins pasted to their faces—queers, I fancy. Look at that bloke there.”

Alec, breathless from his tirade, nodded at a tall young man in a black cape who was standing at the bar with his back to them. He held a glass of red wine in one and and in the other a chain leash. A wolfhound with damp hair squatted panting beside him, its long tongue drooping and quivering.

“Ever see anything like it?” said Alec.

A woman entered the bar, striding past Munday and Alec. She wore a bowler hat tipped back on her head, a fox-fur coat, a shirt and tie, striped trousers and black patent leather shoes; a young man, shorter than she, with long hair and a pale face and faded velvet jacket, held her hand. The woman ordered a whisky for herself, a beer for her companion. She talked loudly to the barman while her companion smoked.

“They’re all on drugs,” said Alec. “It’s incredible how this country’s gone downhill. Saw a couple of queers the other day having it off in Walpole Park. And the prices! I pay ten quid a week for a room barely big enough to swing a cat in.”

“We’re not paying a lot,” said Munday, “but we’re finding the country a bit of a strain. The cold toilet in the rented house. It gets so dark. And those country roads. It’s all retired people.”

“I keep thinking,” said Alec, “there should be a pub somewhere in London where blokes like us from the bundu could go and talk over old times. Sort of club.”

“Malcolm used to drink at The York Minster.”

“Poor Malcolm. They say he looked awful toward the end. Where was that? Nairobi?”

“Mombasa.”

“No, I’m sure it was Nairobbery.” Alec smiled grimly. “I’d even settle for that.”

Munday was jostled by a man with a briefcase. He said, “It’s filling up.”

“Packed. Where do they all come from?” Alec clamped his lips together. “If this was the hotel they’d all know me, everyone of them. Hi Alec.”

“Have you thought of moving out of London? Maybe into the country?”

“I would, but”—Alec leered—-“There’s no nyama there.” It was a settler euphemism, the Swahili word for meat, and he made it sound vicious.

“Is there any here?”

“Animals,” said Alec. “Read the cards at the news agents! Notting Hill Gate’s a good place for them.

‘Dancing Lessons,' ‘French Lessons,’ ‘Games Mistress,’ and whatnot. Some are quite young, just getting started. I usually ring up ‘Dusky Islander Seeks Unusual Position’—I always liked the black ones. They’re not a patch on those Toro girls but at my age you can’t be choosy. I’m past it—I admit it—but they don’t mind.” Alec sipped his beer and said, “We didn’t know when we were well off. But it’s too late for that now. It’s all finished. We’re stuck here. I suppose we should make the best of it."

Munday objected but said nothing. Alec, fifteen years his senior and with little education, was including him in his declaration of futility. He said, “I’ve been thinking of perhaps going back.”

Alec said, “They’ll kill you.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why don’t you then?”

“My heart,” said Munday.

“What a shame.” Alec sounded as if he meant it. “Money’s a problem, too,” said Munday. “I can’t get another research grant unless I finish this book.” Alec smiled. “You’re a liar,” he said. “Emma’s got pots of money. We all knew that.”

Munday stared at him, but his stare turned sheepish. He said, “And I hated being a white man.”

“I thought you rather fancied it.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Munday.

“I never thought much about it myself.”

“Maybe that’s why you lasted so long.”

“Twenty-three years,” said Alec, and gulped the last of his beer.

Munday bought the next round of drinks, and when he returned with them Alec was singing softly,

“Mary had a little lamb,

It was mzuri sana;

It put its nose up Mary’s clothes Until she said, ‘Havana' ”

“Reminiscing again?” said Munday.

“Remember that little road to Bundibugyo, over

the mountains? And the pygmies—what a nuisance they were, little buggers.”

“In the Ituri Forest.”

“The rain-forest! It was so dark there. The ferns were four feet high. We used to park there, Jack and I, and wait for the tea lorries from the Congo. It was easier for them to sell it on the black market than bring it by road to Leopoldville. They were a rum lot, those Congolese lorry drivers—spoke French worse than me. And that’s saying something.”

“I didn’t realize you were involved in smuggling,” said Munday, and he saw Alec brighten and purse his lips with pride.

“I kept quiet about it there—highly illegal, you know,” said Alec. He winked. “I’m a smuggler from way back. Where’d you think I got all those crates of Primus Beer? That was a good beer. Not like this stuff—tastes like soap to me.”

Alec told a smuggling story: a late night on the Congo border—a poker game in a candle-lit hut in the forest—the drivers showing up drunk with the tea chests and arguing about the price—Alec choosing the biggest African and knocking him to the floor— not a peep from the others—tossing them out “bodily” —and Munday was taken back to the lounge of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel; he was listening to Alec, who would soon start arguing endlessly about the merits of the “head shot” over the “heart shot/’ He was forgetting the Bwamba village, as far from him then as Four Ashes was now, and cheered by the old man’s company and the long whine of the locusts. But he was not so absorbed in the story that he failed to see that what had brought him to London was what had made him look up Alec at the hotel on a Saturday; he saw his motive. The woman in the church hall had asked him how he stood it: he had not mentioned those weekends. He listened to Alec without enthusiasm and saw himself as a small anxious man, and Alec rather foolish, supporting each other. He was depressed—that woman’s word— for so much had changed, traveling to London would be an inconvenient and expensive habit, and really Four Ashes was farther from any relief than that little village beyond the mountains.

“We’ better eat something or we’ll both be under the table.”

Alec had the macaroni and cheese, Munday the hot-pot—the barman shoveled and clapped the meals to the plates, cracking the spoon against their edges to clear it—and both men sat, jammed together on the wooden bench, balancing their plates on their knees and raising their forks with great care. Alec reminisced about the five-bob lunch at the Uganda hotel, but in each reminder of the place Munday saw a new aspect of the ritual he had invented for himself there, and he wanted to be away from Alec, to return to the black house with Emma and verify his fear. Pehaps he had imagined the panic; much of his Africa seemed imaginary, and distant and ridiculous.

“I’ll tell you who I did see,” said Alec. “It was over in Shepherd’s Bush. I was waiting for a bus by the green. Bloke walked by and I thought to myself, I know him. It was Mills.”

“Ah, Mills,” said Munday. But he was thinking of Alec, in the grayness of Shepherd’s Bush, waiting for a bus—the tea planter with four hundred pickers, who had employed a driver, when few did, for his new Peugeot sedan.

“The television man,” said Alec. “Education for the masses.”

“I remember Mills.”

“He remembered you,” said Alec. “We had a natter, he said to drop in sometime. I said fine, but I doubt that I will. I never liked him. I liked her, though.”

“So did I.”

“I should say you did!” Alec gave Munday a nudge. He narrowed his eyes and said, “He never knew, did he?”

“I hope not. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t what you’d call an affair. But she meant a lot to me. I wondered what happened to her.”

“Like everyone else,” said Alec. “They’re all here, bleeding to death.”

“Did he say he lived in Shepherd’s Bush?”

“No, I think he said Battersea. He works in Shepherd’s Bush—that’s where the studios are. You thinking of paying him a visit?”

“Not him,” said Munday. “But I’d like to see Claudia.”

“Drinking still makes me randy, too,” said Alec, and he laughed.

“I had thought I might go over to the British Museum. And I was planning to leave a message for a Bwamba chap in Mecklenburg Square. I don’t know,” said Munday, pausing. “If Claudia’s home—”

“They’re in the book, and the phone’s over there,” said Alec. “Give her a ring. I’ll get the next round#” He stood up and gave Munday’s shoulder a friendly push. “Get on with it.”

When Munday came back to the bench, Alec said, “I watched you phoning. It reminded me of that night at the hotel—remember?—when Emma was in Kampala and old Mills on safari. ‘Who’s he ringing?’ I wondered—you were so damned secretive! And then I saw your car parked in the Mills’s driveway that Sunday morning.”

“She’s home,” said Munday. “She invited me over for tea.”

“Are you going?”

“I’d like to see her again.”

“I remember that night so well.”

“That was the first time,” said Munday. “There weren’t many others.”

“Mind what you do.” There was pleasure in Alec’s face. “It’s like old times,” he said. “Wish I had Rosie here.”

“I won’t do much,” said Munday. “She said her daughter’s due home from school—little Alice.”

“Jesus, now I remember the story. She saw you in bed with the old lady and said, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ ”

“Where are you off to?” asked Munday quickly.

“Notting Hill Gate for me. Dusky Islander, I expect,” said Alec jauntily. “Some bitch in white garters in an unmade bed in a basement flat to insult my body—you should try it sometime, Alfred old man.” He sighed. “Then I’ll go back to my room in the monkey house and watch television. That’s all I do. I’m getting more like them every day.”

“I’d better be off,” said Munday.

“How are things up-country?” Alec was stabbing his umbrella into the carpet. “Emma her old sketching self?”

“She’s fine, sends you her regards,” said Munday, but he thought, up-country: it was the way Alec had always referred to the Yellow Fever Camp on a Saturday night. But this time they would part in a cold London drizzle, Alec to his bedsitter, Munday to Four Ashes.

Outside the pub Alec held his collar together at his throat and looked at the street and the dripping brown sky. He said, “This fucking city, and none of them know it.”

“You should come down and see us some time," said Munday.

“No fear,” said Alec. “But give Emma my love—I still have her picture of my estate. The pluckers. The gum trees. That hill.”

“She’ll be pleased.”

Alec leaned closer, breathing beer; he said with feeling, “Tea’s a lovely crop, Alfred.”

The walked in different directions, but met again by accident a few minutes later near the Leicester Square tube station. Alec was walking up Charing Cross Road. He smilied at Munday and called out, “Kwaheri!”—and people turned—and then stooping in the rain and still gripping his collar he continued on his way, trudging into the raincoated crowd of shoppers.

Munday walked by the house several times, preparing himself to meet her by calling up her face and rehearsing a conversation. He almost went away. His interest in seeing her, encouraged by Alec, had dwindled as soon as Alec had left him; now it had nearly vanished and there was moving him only a youthful muscle of curiosity. In the taxi he had felt a jumping in his stomach, that pleasurable tightness that precedes sex, but he had stopped the taxi on the other side of Chelsea Bridge so that he could cut across the park, and the pleasure left him. He saw two black boys, running through the trees, chasing each other with broom handles, skidding over a landscape where they didn’t belong. Their flapping clothes annoyed him. His feet were wet. He resented his fatigue; the speed of the taxi, the noise and fumes of the city had tired him, he was unused to those assaults on his senses, and already he felt that the trip to London was wasted. His mid-afternoon hangover drugged him like a bad meal. He wanted to lie down somewhere warm and sleep.

It had not been hard for him to find the house. It was prominent, announcing its color in a long terrace of bay-windowed three-story brick houses on a road just off the south side of the park. The road stretched to a lighted corner, where more blacks, whose idleness he instantly resented, lingered under a street lamp. The conversion of the Mills’s house reproached the other gloomy house fronts. The brick had been painted white, there was a yellow window box, and the door was bright yellow; the iron gate was new and so was the brass knocker and the mat on the top step. In the little plot in front there was a square of clipped grass and a small bare tree: on one limb a florist’s tag spun.

He tapped the knocker and waited. He was trembling; his heart worked in troubled thumps—he always heard it when he was nervous, and hearing it increased his nervousness.

The door opened on a woman’s thin face. “Yes?”

“Is Mrs. Mills at home?” Munday spoke sharply to the stranger.

The question bewildered the woman. She said, “What is it you want?” And then she smiled and said, “Alfred?” and flung open the door.

“Claudia,” he said in a weak expression of surprise. He did not dare to look closer. He almost said, Is that you?

He could not hide his embarrassment, his kiss was ungainly, he bumped her chin. He wanted to stare at her, to compare her with his memory, she was so thin and sallow, and her hair was brown. It had been blond. He was disappointed—in her, in himself; was deeply ashamed, a shame so keen he heard himself saying, “I’m sorry—” Then he was moving into the lounge and talking, apologizing for being early, explaining the train he had to catch, complimenting her on the decoration, the bookshelves, the chrome and marble coffee table. She was naming stores, Liberty, Heals, Habitat, as he named objects of furniture. He avoided her eyes and now he was talking about the carpet—it was orange—but his eyes were fixed on the narrow bones showing in her feet. He wished he had not come; he wanted to go.

“And a color television,” he was saying. It was on, a large screen swimming with yellow and blue, and the deep orange face of a talking man. He felt obliged, having made the comment, to watch it. The man was talking very slowly, as if to a child, and tearing a newspaper into strips.

“Not ours,” said Claudia. “It’s on loan. The BBC gives them to all their senior staff.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” said Munday, and at a loss for words he went on watching the program. Now a small-breasted girl was singing a nursery rhyme in a halting way and waltzing foolishly with a stuffed bear.

“Do sit down, Alfred.” Claudia picked up a glass. “Are you sure you want tea or would you like something stronger? I’ve been drinking gin ever since you rang—for courage!”

“Tea’s fine,” said Munday. He sat in a chair which had a spoon-shaped seat. He swiveled awkwardly.

“I was so surprised to hear from you.”

“Really? I thought you might have seen my letter to The Times ”

“We get the Guardian” said Claudia. “Not that I ever read it. That Northern Ireland business is so awful. Have you been back long?”

“A little over a month—we’re in the country. Dorset.”

“Dorset’s lovely,” said Claudia. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you. Was it—?"

“Years ago. That party,” said Munday. “At Margaret’s.”

“Poor Margaret.”

“Jack’s driving a bus.”

“He deserves to,” said Claudia, pouring herself another gin. “They ruined my theory, you know, breaking up like that in Africa. That ludicrous court case.”

“What theory is this? You never told me.”

“About divorces. As an anthropologist you might be interested,” said Claudia. She sipped her gin. “Not very complicated. It’s just that everyone says that marriages go to pieces in the tropics. That’s a myth. Why should they break up there? There’s no housework to do, the kids are off your hands, no worries. It’s like a holiday. I don’t know where these writers get the idea it’s such a great strain on a marriage— that scene at the club where the outraged husband throws his drink into the lover’s face and says, ‘You’ve been seeing my wife.’ That sort of rubbish.”

“I’ve seen it happen, but not in those precise words.”

“It never happens! No one cares. Do you remember when we did those Maugham plays? ‘Sybil, have you betrayed me?’ and all that?”

“The Uganda Players,” said Munday.

“What a farce,” said Claudia. “And that pansy director—I forget his name. Those plays made me laugh.

I don’t know why I joined that silly drama group. Emma wasn’t in it, was she?"

“She had her painting to occupy her,” said Munday. “And we were at the camp.”

“You lived so damned far from town,” said Claudia. She smiled. “I’ll bet she’s not doing any painting here.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. She’s doing housework, going to the launderette, shopping, cooking. What a bore. I know— that’s what / do. That’s my theory—marriages don’t break up when people go to the tropics, they break up here, when they get back. There’s a name for it.” Claudia snapped her fingers.

“Culture shock,” said Munday.

“Right, right—culture shock. There’s none of it in Africa, but there’s masses here.”

“I suppose I’m having a bit of it myself,” said Munday. It slipped out, and he was angry with himself for having revealed it: she might ask why. But she hadn’t heard, she was still talking.

“I’m not saying that Martin and I are thinking of separating. We’re muddling along well enough. But it’s tough sometimes. You’ll see. You haven’t been in England for a long time, Alfred. Marriage is hard here.”

“It’s hard everywhere, let’s face it.”

“No, not in Africa—it’s easy there,” she said. “Everything is easy there, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“You know it is!” she said. “But here—it’s part of my theory—every married couple is on the verge of divorce.”

“You don’t say.” He could see she was drunk; he wanted to calm her, and leave.

“You see, marriage is grounds for divorce,” she said. “Marriage as we know it. Young people don’t even think about it any more.”

“So the younger sociologists say,” said Munday.

“But marriage has never been sacred among the Bwamba. They’re always swapping partners. I worked it out once—the divorce rate among the Bwamba is twenty times that of the English. As for adultery— they simply choose a woman and stick a spear in the dirt in front of her hut to show she’s occupied. The husband won’t interrupt.”

“Did you bring your spear with you today?” She laughed coarsely.

Munday said, “I’ve got a train to catch.”

“You and your Africans,” she said. “Didn’t you get sick of them? I’m sick of them. I’m not a racist, I’m just sick of them—seeing them, hearing about them. They’re always on television, and Battersea’s full of them. Why don’t people ever talk about the Chinese? There are more Chinese than there are Africans, and there’s more to talk about.” Claudia had finished her drink. She licked the lemon peel and said, “The Head Prefect at Alice’s school is an African. That’s why they made him Head Prefect.”

“He’s actually a West Indian,” said Alice, entering the room with a tray. She looked at Munday and said hello with a coolness that seemed so calculated he could not reply immediately. He thought: She knows me.

“Just put it down there,” said Claudia.

“You’re a big girl now,” said Munday at last. “Sixteen,” said Claudia. “Though she thinks she’s a few years older.”

“Mummy, please.”

“She hates me,” said Claudia. “It’s a phase.”

Alice was attractive; she wore denim slacks that fit her high buttocks tightly, and her hair was long, in a single rope of braid, with the blondness that had gone out of her mother’s. She poured the tea and brought Munday his cup and a plate with a slice of fruitcake on it. Munday smiled, but she did not respond. She maintained that sceptical, knowing look, which was an adult frown of accusation, worn deliberately, Munday guessed, for her mother’s former lover. It put Munday on his guard, but disturbed him, because it rubbed at the memory of his lust. All the old forgotten feeling he had had for the mother, who inspired nothing in him but a vague pity and shame for the woe in her eyes, came awake in the presence of the pretty daughter, for whom he felt a twinge of desire. And that awakening was enough of a reminder of his lust for the mother to make him uneasy.

He said, “I have to be at Waterloo—”

The phone rang in another part of the house.

“Excuse me,” said Claudia, and went to answer it. Alice was seated cross-legged on the floor, her hand lightly resting on her crotch. “Where’s your hat?” she asked. “You used to have a funny hat.”

“I still have it somewhere,” said Munday. “You do have a good memory.”

“I remember you,” she said. Her stare was as solemn as any adult’s.

Munday looked away. He had seen the same face at the bedroom door. He said, “How do you like living in London?”

Alice said, “Mummy fucks my friends.”

Munday was shocked by the simple way she said the brutal sentence, but managed to say, “Oh? And do you disapprove of that?”

“It embarrasses me,” said Alice, as simply as before.

“Yes, I suppose it does,” said Munday. “But don’t be too hard on her. I mean, don’t judge her too harshly. Maybe you’ll see when you’re her age that there’s not that much love around. And it can be a frightening thing—” He stopped, at the girl’s stare, her look of total innocence; he felt he could only disappoint her if he went on.

She lifted the plate. “Would you like another piece of fruitcake?”

“I’m fine,” said Munday. But he was shaken, his mouth was dry. He took a sip of tea and said, “I must go—I’ll have to find a taxi.”

“I’m sure mummy would love to take you to the station.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Munday.

“I’ll just have half,” said Alice, reaching for the cake. “I shouldn’t—I’m supposed to be dieting.” She broke a piece and ate it, taking large girlish chews. “Because I’m on the pill.”

“Then you are a big girl,” said Munday, and now he saw her as only insolent, made so by the mother.

“Mummy doesn’t think so.”

“That was Martin,” said Claudia, entering the room. “He’s going to be late.” And as if she had guessed at the conversation that had been going on, intuited it from the silent man and girl, she said accusingly, “What have you been talking about behind my back?”

“Doctor Munday was telling me about his African tribes,” said Alice, gathering the plates.

“That’s right,” said Munday, astonished at the girl’s invention. In that girl was a woman, but a corrupt one.

“You’re not going?” Claudia said, seeing Munday stand.

“I’ll miss my train if I don’t hurry,” said Munday. He kissed Claudia at the door; she held on and made him promise to come again. She pressed against him, and he was nearly aroused, because he was looking past her at the girl with the tray on one arm walking through the room on long dancer’s legs, showing her tight buttocks as she picked up an ashtray, straightened a lampshade.

“You haven’t forgotten,” said Claudia, feeling him harden. He pulled her head to his shoulder and watched Alice slowly leaving the room, tossing the loose rope of her hair. Then he said, “No.”

Waiting with Emma at the platform gate in Waterloo Station, Munday heard “Hello there,” and felt a tug on his sleeve.

He turned and greeted the stranger in a polite way, and then he remembered the face and said nothing more. It was the tall man from the lecture who had contradicted him.

“You’re Munday,” said the man. “I thought I recognized you. Up for the day?”

“Yes.”

“Shambles, isn’t it?” They were in a crowd, pressing toward a gate, where a conductor stood clipping tickets.

Inside the gate the man said, “We’ve got to be up front—Crewkeme’s got a rather short platform.”

“I know,” said Munday. “We’ve been this way before.”

“Will you join me?” The man was smiling at Emma. “That would be nice,” said Emma.

“We haven’t been introduced,” said the man. “My name’s Awdry.”

He shook Munday’s hand and they made their way up the platform and boarded the train. Awdry slid open the door of a first-class compartment. He said, “This one looks as good as any.”

“I’m afraid we’re in second,” said Munday, relieved that he would not have to endure the man’s company for three hours, and embarrassed at having to admit he had a cheaper ticket.

“Oh, what a shame,” said Awdry. “You’re way down there.” He pointed down the passage with his umbrella.

“Perhaps we’ll see you in the village,” said Emma.

“I hope so,” said Awdry. “I’ve got a crow to pluck with your husband.” He turned to Munday and said genially, “Your letter—‘confused observations of a generation of misfit District Commissioners’—all that.” He laughed. “I was livid when I read it, but I think I can discuss it sensibly now.”

“That’s good to hear,” said Munday.

“I’ll be in touch with you—you’re up at the Black House still, I take it? Say, you’d better get a move on or you won’t find a seat!”

They didn’t find a seat. The train was filled with returning commuters, who had taken all the seats while they had been standing talking to Awdry. Munday and Emma stood in a drafty passage outside a second-class compartment as far as Basingstoke. Inside the overbright compartment they drowsily read the evening papers, which were full of news of an impending miners’ strike; and when, at Salisbury, the compartment emptied, and they were alone, Emma spoke of Margaret: she was doing part-time secretarial work, she was seeing a man, she had put on weight.

“Alec is at the end of his tether,” said Munday. He made no mention of Claudia, but heard repeatedly Alice’s cheerless phrase about her mother, and saw the young girl in the room, dancing past him as he embraced Claudia.

“What did the doctor have to say?”

“Him? He examined me, said to take it easy,” said Munday. “He was a bit of a fool. Kept going on about Father Dowle.”

Emma put the paper down and opened her novel to the first page. She flexed the book and began to read.

Munday said, “He told me my heart’s in a rather dicky state. That scar business. Blood pressure’s way up.”

Emma looked at him closely, “Did he say it was serious?”

“I’m not well, Emma,” Munday said. “Not well at all.”

From the lighted carriage the night was black, but at Crewkeme they saw the full moon, and across the road from the black house, in the moonlight, a field of sleeping cows.

But even then, returning after a tiring day in London, their eyes heavy, their feet burning, hungry and yet unable to eat, they saw the house as no more familiar to them than it had been on that first day. Munday kicked open the gate with a clang; now he was sure of his feelings. It was in darkness, his England, all he could lay claim to; it was—everyone said it and he agreed—the Black House. The day in London taught him that he could not live there, cast up like the others whose only friends were those who had been similarly reduced in size by their years in Africa. He had expected more, but he had stayed away too long: no one was waiting for him. He was resigned to the Black House. He went inside. The stove had gone out, the rooms were cold, the dampness had crept back leaving on the crumble of its streaks a smell of mold. It was too late to make a fire, and without hot water for the bottles they slept between cold sheets.

They were not less afraid of the house, and they were conscious of an awful demeaning failure. They continued in the house hopelessly, habituated to their fears, with the sense that each room held the traces of a person who had left moments before—the suggestion of moving cones of air, the dying vibrancy of a word just whispered. The haunting left them with the uncertain mood of a sickness, but haunting was not the word they used; it was not a physical fear of attack—an amorphous jelly ghost rushing at them with cold arms—but rather a sense, numbing their minds, that they had put an intruder to flight and were witnessing the last vagrant clues of its presence. Emma believed she had seen a woman at the window, and so Munday had begun to see something feminine in those traces. The woman, ghostly inhabitant of the house, was like an aspect of his heart, and his ache told him that she. shared much of what he himself feared. He was linked to her, more than to Emma, and when, entering the house after the day in London, Emma said, “Someone’s been here,” he did not dispute it, it was what he felt, and he knew what Emma never would: that it was a trespasser surprised, someone like him, restless, perhaps sick and very lonely, imploring him to believe so that he might see her.

But he saw her only in his dreams, which were half of Africa, green walls of bamboo pipes with feathery branches on mountain roads, banana groves hanging thickly with clusters of fruit, heavy red blossoms, and of the warning motion of blacks in high elephant grass; the heat that rose from the slippery decaying earth, and blue four-inch dragonflies in the papyrus swamps where hairy plants choked the waterways and odd huge birds suddenly took flight, beating the air with clumsily hinged wings; but he belonged there, he had his own canoe and two solemn black paddlers with saw-toothed daggers at their waists. In some of the dreams he was swimming and speechless, and plunged in smothering foliage towards a girl-woman with the softest thighs, who showed him the flesh in her mouth as red as the blossoms. The dreams aroused him and denied him rest. He had one the night of his return from London.

The confusion over the charwoman followed a few days later.

Useless in his study, brooding among his notes and weapons—he bitterly resented the theft of the dagger—Munday saw Emma’s housekeeping as a possible source of her unhappiness. She was sad, and busy, and her work reproached his inactivity. What she did was drudgery, and the cleaning and cooking left her exhausted. There was much more to do, strenuous chores like washing the spattered windows, beating the rugs, cleaning the oven. Munday did not want to do them himself, so he could not insist that Emma do them. They remained neglected. Claudia’s comment (“She’s doing housework”) had made Munday see Emma at the sink, heaving the coal scuttle, riddling the fire in the Rayburn; he watched her examining her reddened hands or pushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes; he noticed that she borrowed books from the Bridport library and returned them unread.

Once, looking through the back pages of The Times, Munday said, “There’s a job going in Algiers. Looks interesting. But the salary’s quoted in dinars ”

Emma sighed. “What about your book?”

“I could work on it in the mornings,” he said. “Do a little teaching in the afternoons.”

“You could do that here.” She was polishing the brass fire tongs; she didn’t look up.

He said, “I think we need someone around to help you out.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of doing the housework?”

“I hate to see you looking so tired at the end of the day,” he said. Emma went on polishing. He said, “I’ll bet there are lots of people in the village who’d be glad of a chance to earn a few pounds.”

The advertisement in the Bridport paper, a weekly, appeared that Friday. They had a dozen phone calls, most of them preceded by rapid pips, inquiring whether child-minding or cooking was involved. Emma explained the duties and invited all the callers for interviews. But only three women came. The first was old and inquisitive and said she had enjoyed Munday’s talk at the church hall. She was not so much interested in the job, she said, as eager to meet someone who’d seen a bit of the world. She warned Emma to be careful whom she hired for the job; there were so many layabouts in the village and they were so undependable. She told a story about one: Munday had heard it before, told by one of Alec’s cronies of a Bwamba herdsman he had employed. She said the only way to get things done was to do them yourself. She had learned that in Bromley, which was her home until her husband had retired. Before she left she sold Emma a raffle ticket for the Christmas Draw.

The next woman, Mrs. Branch, was young. She came with her sister-in-law who, confusingly, did most of the talking, asked all the questions and stated the fee; it became clear to Munday after some while that it was not she who was applying for the job, but the big worried girl with her, who sat twisting her handbag in her lap and looking anxiously around the kitchen. They left abruptly, and from the window Munday saw them walking down the road, deep in conversation.

It was dark when Mrs. Seaton came. Munday was at The Yew Tree, borrowing a hoe-shaped poker for cleaning the soot and dust from the Rayburn. Emma told him what had happened. She had been taken by surprise; there was no warning, no sound of a bus or car. The brass knocker sounded and Mrs. Seaton was at the door, shaking the wet from her umbrella. In spite of her mysterious arrival she was businesslike and looked capable. She accepted the cup of tea the others had refused and she said she had done similar work for the summer people. It was she who raised the subject of money. And she was candid: her husband was out of work, he was on the dole, they were having trouble making ends meet.

“We’ll be in touch with you,” Emma had said, and the woman left as she had come, stepping into the darkness and the sea-mist that glowed in a drifting nimbus around the ouside lamp.

“She sounds just the ticket,” said Munday, and the next day, which was sunny and cold, the kind of bright cloudless day that seemed to follow a dreary wet one, they walked the half mile into the village to find her and tell her she could begin work immediately.

Bowood House, like The Yew Tree, was not in the village of Four Ashes; with some other cottages —The Thistles, Rose Dene, Ladysmith, and Aleppo —it comprised a nameless hamlet on the village’s fringe. Four Ashes (one of the original trees still stood) had some local fame as a place of great charm, but the charm was all on the main road, Hogshill Street: in the market cross and the several antique shops with plates and prints in the windows; in the chemist’s, White’s, where in his first week Munday had bought a bottle of Friar’s Balsam for his cold; in Watkins’ Bakery, the two tea shops, the sweet shops, all severely old-fashioned; in Pines (“High-Class Groceries & Quality Vegetables”) which displayed in a glass case whole wheels of cheeses, and sold Stilton in stone jars, unusual spices, and freshly ground coffee; in Lloyd’s of Four Ashes, the men’s outfitter: and in the hotel, The White Hart, a former coaching inn, which retained the look of another century in its heavily rendered and whitewashed front, its archway and courtyard and mullioned windows. The church, St. Alban’s, on the crest of Hogshill Street, had a Norman font and some thirteenth-century stonework, and a vast yew tree in the cemetery which spread itself over the deeply pitted gravestones.

But Mrs. Seaton’s house was at the back of the village, in an unexpectedly crowded settlement of new and old terrace houses and cottages—the old ones leaning into the narrow street. There was a tiny pub, with a swinging sign, “The Eight Bells,” on one corner, and a low block of new council flats stood at the end of the street, a dead end, next to a coal yard.

“I had no idea the village was this big,” Emma said. She saw another street, packed with houses, running off Mrs. Seaton’s, and like Mrs. Seaton’s hidden from the main road.

“Funny little place,” said Munday. He knocked on the scarred door.

A boy of about ten opened the door. He wore an undershirt and pajama bottoms. He stared at Munday.

“Hello,” said Munday. “We’re looking for Mrs. Seaton.”

The boy shook his head. “Not here,” he said softly, and started to close the door.

“Hold on,” said Munday. “When will she be back?”

“She don’t live here.”

“Where does she live?”

Again the boy shook his head.

“What’s your name?” Munday asked.

“Peter Tuck.”

“Is your mother at home?”

The boy nodded, jerking his head forward.

“Tell her I’d like to have a word with her.”

The boy shut the door.

Munday whispered to Emma, “I think he’s a bit simple.”

The door opened. A middle-aged woman stood there with a baby on her hip. The woman’s fatigue looked like suspicion. The baby plucked at a button on her dress.

“Mrs. Tuck?”

“Yes.” She lifted the child and held it tightly to her shoulder, shielding herself with it.

“We’re looking for a Mrs. Seaton,” Munday said. “We were told she was at this address, and—”

“Over there,” said the woman. She pointed across the street at a house with a green door.

“Thanks very much,” said Munday. “We must have misheard the number.”

“Welcome,” said the woman, and shut the door. Munday was knocking on the green door when Emma said, “I didn’t mishear the number—she wrote it down. Look.” The penciled address was distinct on the scrap of paper.

An old lady answered the door. “What do you want?” she asked.

Munday told her.

“I’m Mrs. Seaton,” said the woman. She wore a frayed sweater—it was buttoned to her neck—and she carried a large wooden spoon.

“Perhaps a relative of yours,” said Munday. “Your son’s wife? You’re not the woman we’re looking for.”

“My children are dead. There’s only Sam.”

Munday laughed, but without pleasure. He said, “This is all very confusing.”

The woman looked closely at Munday. She said, “Are you from the Water Board?”

“No,” said Munday. He explained his errand and showed the woman the scrap of paper with the address written on it.

She said, “That’s over there.”

“They sent us over here.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. There was a cry from within the cottage, an old man’s voice cracking with impatience. The woman said to Munday, “Sam.”

“Is there any other family by the name of Seaton in the village?”

“Used to be. This was years ago. But they went to Australia.” The woman was closing the door. “Bye now—mind how you go.”

Munday said, “Are we losing our minds?”

Emma closed her eyes.

“Looks like we’re stuck with that Mrs. Branch,” he said.

Emma called her by her first name, Pauline; Munday called her “Branch,” and sometimes “Mrs. B.” She began work the week before Christmas, and her first chores were those hard ones, the neglected windows, the rugs that had lain unbeaten for over a month, the jumble of boots and walking sticks in the back passage that needed sorting out. Mrs. Branch had been nervous in the interview; occupied with housework she was calm, single-minded, but apt to overdo things. She washed the windows in the shed and she beat the hall carpet so hard she broke the rope on which it was suspended. Munday took an interest in her and watched her closely, but his unfriendly humor only bewildered her.

He saw that she carried envelopes of artificial sweetener in her handbag, for the tea she drank in the middle of the morning. She explained that she was dieting.

“Then you won’t want a lunch hour, will you,” said Munday, masking his irony with briskness.

“Sir?” Mrs Branch was uncertain. She gave Emma a slow puzzled look.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Emma. “He’s joking.”

“I was wondering,” said Mrs. Branch, and seemed glad to return to scraping soot from the stovepipe.

She had a full round face and grew hot when she worked, and heavy arms, and when she sat she pushed her hands together, hugging herself with her elbows to hide her bulk. She wore high leather boots with her plain clothes, and eye make-up—green lids and black streaks on her plucked eyebrows. She said she was twenty-three, but she had the careworn movements and sighing obedience of a woman twice that age. After a day or two Munday knew her habits. She was noisy, and appeared bewildered when Munday called attention to her noise. She banged pots and slammed doors and dragged chairs back and forth on the hard kitchen floor. She walked through the house setting her feet down as if she were dropping bricks. Munday detested her boots and told Emma that she knew how to go up the wooden stairs on her heels. He said angrily, “Listen to her!” She played the radio and murmured to the music, and when she was vacuuming she turned the radio louder so that she could hear it over the racket of her cleaning. Munday, calling out “Branch!” put a stop to the radio, and he urged her to be quieter. She said, “Yes, Doctor” in the broad accent that Munday associated with ridicule.

But she was useful, she was of the village, a local. She brought them news; of deaths and accidents, of animals she had seen flattened on the road on her way to work. She was their only link with the village, so after the first few days Munday approached her with inquiries, about his stolen dagger and the mysterious Mrs. Seaton—but she said she couldn’t help him. She was cheerful and came each morning with a weather report; her predictions were usually accurate. Apart from her talk of the weather she said very litde.

Munday refused to eat with her, but he still attempted to engage her in conversation. She let it drop that she had been bom in Toller Porcorum. Munday said, “Tell me a little bit about it.” It was from Mrs. Branch that Munday learned the pronunciation of local place-names, Beaminster, Puncknowle, and Eype. And Munday often found himself (holding up a pair of secateurs or an axe from the shed) asking, “What do you call this?” Like the Africans whom he had also questioned in this way, she was at first suspicious of his interest in details of puzzling insignificance.

He asked her how she heated her cottage and was not satisfied until she described every stage of the procedure; why did she butter the end of the bread loaf before she sliced it? How had she met her husband? How long had they courted? Why had they moved to Four Ashes? He led up to intimate questions by telling her of Bwamba customs. “In Africa, he said, “if a pregnant girl marries a man who is not the father of her child she has the option of strangling it at birth.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, but talked more easily of childbirth then. She had two children, she said, and would bring them around one day for Munday to see.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Munday. He went on to tell her of the Bwamba marriage ritual, the groom’s brothers joyously pissing on a stool, the groom placing his hands in it and then the naked bride sitting on his hands; the consummation that was virtually rape, and the brothers’ freedom in sharing the wife later. Simply, he described the patrilineal society. Mrs. Branch was outraged, but talked about her own marriage. Munday established contact with her, and though his questions were intimate his manner was academic, and he maintained an interviewer’s distance. He saw that she enjoyed being questioned about herself; she was discovering with curious surprise that her life, seemingly so dull, was worthy of attention and even important to this stranger.

“We call that a rake,” she said one day in answer to a question of Munday’s. He threw the tool aside and went into the house.

On her fourth day she arrived early, before eight, in the morning darkness that was like night. Coming down to breakfast Munday saw her seated at the kitchen table, tapping a small envelope of sweetener into her coffee.

“Morning, Branch,” he said, but nothing more. He had no conversation at breakfast—breakfast being for him not so much a meal as a way of preparing himself for surroundings his sleepless nights seemed to rearrange: breakfast was over when he was calm. He was slightly antagonized by the girl seated at his table while he was standing. He would not join her. He decided to stall for time by reading the paper. But it was not on the table and not outside the door.

“They haven’t brought my Times ” he said.

“I put it on the chair,” said Emma, who was at the Rayburn, frying Munday’s egg.

“Oh, here it is, Doctor,” said Mrs. Branch. “I were sitting on it.” She handed it to him with an apology.

Munday tossed it on the sideboard. The paper was crushed, rounded to a template the shape of her bottom. He could not read it; he could not bear to put his fingers on it or have it near his food. He went into the living room and sat brooding until he heard the bangings and clatter that told him Mrs. Branch had begun her work.

While she worked, padding busily from room to room on the stocking feet Munday demanded of her, Munday sat at his desk in the study. Mrs. Branch had restored a superficial order to the house and Munday felt some of his solitude return. The balance was Mrs. Branch’s, for it was a house that needed a servant and Munday had come to depend on houseboys; the house was too large to be run by a man and wife; a marriage could not fill it or make it work. Mrs. Branch did more than clean; she aided the marriage, she justified the size of the house—without her he sometimes felt the house would have been insupportable. Emma’s cleaning had made him guilty, Mrs. Branch’s efforts gave him freedom—the attraction of any good servant—and allowed him time to think. Soon, without using his notes he started to write—an introductory paragraph, a page of description, then several. It was the way, he imagined it would be, working by a country window, writing in longhand, the fan-heater whirring at his feet, his privacy secured by watchful women.

But it was a false start. He had groped in his mind for that distant landscape and tried to be faithful to the memory he had kept of those people who lived in the steamy exposed swamps beyond the mountains, in huts they knocked down regularly every two years. Talking with Alec in the Wheatsheaf, he had seen them clearly and remembered so much. He wrote eagerly, his writing flowed; but the eagerness and the speed was deceptive. He reread his pages and the words capsized his heart, for in every word he wrote were the dripping oaks, the gorse and broom around the Black House in Four Ashes, the mood of that particular day when they had been trapped in the cow pasture and seen in the fading light those pathetic boys carrying empty bottles, and later his sight of the two dead dogs under the canvas.

He crumpled the pages and began again to describe Africa; but he described an English day, withered leaves, the pale winter sun. Fear.

This new place, a looming vision, drove out all the others—the African scenes which his familiarity only blurred—and it even banished all his earlier memories of England, everything except childhood fear and childhood loneliness. At his desk he saw a young boy with inky slender fingers reading Malinowski in a South London library and guiltily looking up from time to time at men holding newspapers fixed to bamboo rods who he believed could read his deepest thoughts and who despised his ambition. The image of that frightened boy stayed in his mind, and it was as if in the forty years that lay between that afternoon and this, nothing had happened. The years had passed but every detail of experience was lost to him. And he was sorry, because the boy in the library who had imagined himself in a canoe in the western Pacific, and living among naked savages, and famous for it, could not know that the years would fall away and not even all the intervening failure was preparation enough for a return to this room and more fears and a sadder image of himself.

He was distressed to see Emma repeating his disappointment in her painting. She worked from sketches she had made in the back garden. Her colors floated; the pictures were indistinct, a child’s primitive vision of earth and sky. Attempting to paint over her mistakes she made the mistakes stand out or else muddied them with greater error. Munday could see that outwardly the Black House resembled the African bungalow: Emma was painting, the servant was cleaning, he was going through his notes. They had never spoken about it, but what had sustained them in Africa was the thought that if they failed there they could always return home. Now they were home, there was nowhere else to go and it seemed there was nothing more for him.

His sense of the fugitive woman in the house grew fainter with Mrs. Branch’s cleanings. He had both regretted and longed for that third presence; he had anticipated the event of her appearing, revealing herself to him and uncovering his memory. He yearned for a great passion, a great idea, a future to complete and release him. He sat in his study, simulating work, to prepare himself for inspiration, believing that his memory was like a dark room which the eye of his imagination would accustom itself to. He labored without motion or progress. He heard sounds and looked up to see the awkward girl at the study door. In irritation he said, “Yes, Branch, what is it?”

“We call this the shortest day of the year,” she said. And softly: “I thought you might want to know.”

“Thank you,” he said.

On Christmas they heard church bells ringing on all sides, in villages sunken from view; huntsmen passed the house, and children in new boots. They exchanged presents, a tie, a scarf, and new diaries for the coming year. There were distant horns, the hunt swarmed in the back pasture and the foxhounds yapped through the afternoon. They talked of going out for a walk, but it was cold; they stayed indoors and between them finished the bottle of amontillado.