The Black House

14

Over breakfast he almost told Emma what had happened the previous night in the living room. Emma was joylessly buttering toast and talking about her sick feeling, repeating her apology for having left the party early—and, in exaggerating the offense, seeming to cherish the pathetic image of herself as wayward and unreliable: “They must think I’m awful,” she said. “Did they seem cross? I wouldn’t blame them if they were. It was unforgivable. But really, Alfred, you’ve no idea how I felt.”

And Munday was going to blurt out, “Listen to me! I met Caroline afterward. I took her here and locked you in the bedroom. We were downstairs and we—”

What? His memory stammered at the reply. He had the will to confess but he lacked the words. What he remembered were incomplete and oddly-lit features, like the broken images he had once got after turning over his car on an African road, the wrecked dazzle of his own arms and legs: there was the fire, a tipped-over chair, Caroline naked on all fours, himself contorted on the floor, sucking at her with a kind of insanity. He hadn’t the imagination to contain it all; there was no way for him to describe it to Emma without disparaging it, and to hint at it would have made it ridiculous—besides, how could he hint at that?—so it could only be concealed, an act with no name. So the world turned, and on its darkened half the bravest made love in the postures of animals; but it was the only real life—the earth’s sunset, the senses’ dawn—for which no one had contrived a language. It had taken him this long to discover joy in the dark and he knew how much he had wasted: that return journey, to Africa and back, denying what he could not say. But now the phantom was flesh; he was possessed; he was complete, anjd Emma was a stranger to him.

He was not disgusted by the memory, though he wondered at his bravado, seeing in sexual surrender a kind of courage. Emma was saying, “After all the trouble the Awdrys went to—” He pitied her for knowing so little and he wished to tell her, so she could know how far beyond her be had gone, how she would never again limit his life with her timid shadow. She rearranged her breakfast, making disorder on her plate, sliding and cutting the egg, breaking the toast; but she didn’t eat. He saw her dwelling uneasily here, as she had in Africa, where every day promised him a sensation of special longing and she had complained of the heat and flies.

“Do you suppose we’ll ever see that woman again?” Her question was innocent; he listened for suspicion but heard none.

“Which woman?”

“The glamorous one.”

“Oh, is that what glamorous means?” Munday continued eating. ‘Tve often wondered.”

“She was trying,” Emma said.

“She. was a welcome relief from the others,” said Munday. “They were awfully silly—going on about the Irish.”

“I think I was unfair to her. I hope she didn’t notice.”

Munday was confounded; he had no reply. Even the smallest observation mocked what he knew. Her Caroline was an occasional dread, but his lover was real.

Emma said, “I thought she wanted me to go.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You don’t know how women look at each other.

They don’t have to say a single word—their faces say everything. She frightened me horribly.”

“They were all pretty frightening.”

“She was different,” said Emma. “You’re not a fool, Alfred—you must have noticed that.”

“And that’s why you left the party.”

Emma nodded. “I really believed she wanted me to go.”

“Do you believe that now?”

“No,” said Emma softly. “It was foolish of me.”

“You had all their sympathy,” said Munday. “They asked about you.”

“After you dropped me, I felt so—I don’t know —so safe. I made a fire, I’m not sure why—it was a lot of bother. I had a glass of warm milk, and then I went to bed. I was ’dead to the world—I didn’t hear you come in, and usually do.” Emma put her hands on the table and sighed. “And I know why I slept so soundly, too.”

“Why?”

“Guilt,” said Emma. “I felt so guilty.”

“Don’t say that,” said Munday, whispering the consolation. Guilt!

“You can’t be expected to know,” said Emma. “I haven’t told you everything.”

“There was that woman you saw at the window.” His bluff businesslike tone suggested it was preposterous.

“I don’t know what I saw,” said Emma. “I hate this house.”

“You wanted to come here,” said Munday. “It was your idea, the country.”

“Don’t throw it in my face,” she said. “Can’t we go to London?”

“The next time I need a haircut,” he said.

“Alfred, I’ve had such terrifying dreams,” she said. But she said it with great sadness rather than shock. “Tell me about them.”

“No,” she said swiftly, and her eyes flashed, “I couldn’t do that”

“Sometimes it helps.”

“Filth,” she said. “You'd think I was raving mad."

“Everyone has unusual dreams.”

“Not like this. Never.” She pushed her plate aside.

“Probably far worse,” he said. He looked at her. “I dream of Africa.”

She turned away and said, “I dream of you."

“Then I’m sorry I disturb your sleep.” he said.

She looked up at him, and as if she knew how distant he was and was calling to him from the edge of an uncrossable deepness, she said, “Alfred, you do love me, don’t you?”

“Very much,” he said. In the past he had answered her like a man testing his voice to reassure himself in a strange place, hoping to hear a confident truth in the echo of his words. This time he was lying— it had to be a lie: the truth would kill her—but, because he knew its falseness beforehand, he said the lie with a convincing vigor, and he added, “With all my heart.”

He spent the rest of the morning in the living room, with his notebook in his lap, writing little, savoring the memory the room inspired in him. Mrs. Branch had cleaned (he had said to her, “Sorry about all those ashes”); she had started a meager fire of sticks and coal—she imposed her frugality everywhere in the house—and restored the room to its former dustiness. The sleeves of sunlight at the window were alive with swirling dust particles that had been hallowed by Caroline; and the few flat splashes of wax on the mantelshelf, seemingly so unimportant, recalled an important moment. The room was special, it held Caroline's presence, her whispers, the worn carpet bore the imprint of her knees; in Mrs. Branch's little fire was a fleeting odor of Caroline’s magnificent blaze, which lingered as well in sooty streaks on the mantletree—that was especially blackened, and looked as if it had contained an explosion.

Not a room, but a setting he understood, that had involved him and given him hope. The Black House was finally his, and it was Caroline’s doing: she knew the house, she had directed him there, and Emma sleeping through it upstairs had kept the act from being casual. It was deliberate. He refused to see it as betrayal. It was too bad that in being faithful to himself he had been unfaithful to Emma, but he consoled himself with the secrecy of it. He did not believe he had wronged her—she barely knew him and she could not know more without being hurt. So he was determined to protect her, the more so now because she needed his reassurance. He would never leave her, and he told himself that he had not lied to her: he dearly loved her—but in a way she kept it from completion, for she required his love, and she depended on him, but she gave him little for it. She had little to give; she was stricken with a kind of poverty and would fail without him.

But this poverty in Emma, demanding his attention, had diminished his respect for her, and the boldness he saw in Caroline, the skeletal brightness in her hair and bones, cornered him, challenged his heart and gave him a feeling of triumph. It would be brief—that was the worst of sex; but he was under a sentence of death: he deserved and needed that adventure. It had led him to an understanding of Emma, whose doom was to live famished; it had also turned him to examine his body. He had begun to despise his heart as a failure, but now he valued it and looked at it with wonderment and a renewed affection. It was a narcissism he did not think was possible in a man his age; but then, he was not old. He had had a second chance. He had enjoyed another woman and was not sorry. With luck he would repeat it; it was not unusual, many people did the same.

The work he had set for himself, so long delayed, began to interest him, and during the days that followed he wrote with purpose, giving every word a meticulous dedication—as if he were being admiringly watched—filling his notebook with observations about the Bwamba. He had been returned to himself, and he was amazed at his resolve. He loved the Black House now, and in his study, using his new patience, he was able to recall particular details of Africa he had earlier thought had been lost to him. He recovered them and saw their value, which was his value as an anthropologist. He had regained his will; his new serenity allowed him the perspective to see the stages of his African experience, how he had grown and changed beside the people he had studied, who were themselves changeless. He wrote with surprise and pleasure of how he had gone to that remote place behind the mountains and set up house and endured suspicion and the discomforts of the equatorial climate in order to witness the daily life of a people whose past and present were indistinguishable, who had confided in him their deepest secrets, which were heart-breaking, and who stank of witchcraft. Like them, he had cut himself off—gladly at first, then with misgivings. And though there had been times among them when he had despairingly seen himself as no different from them, existing in the season-less monotony of swamp and savannah, now on the notebook pages they appeared like little creatures from prehistory, fixed like fossils, with simple habits —using the technology of child campers—and uttering inconsequential threats with a murderous charm. He was so different! The ten years flashed in his mind; he saw the Bwamba from a great height, like a man in a meadow who kicks over a stone and looks down at the mass of wood-lice on the underside scurrying for cover.

He wrote, marveling at how many features of Africa lived within him, appearing at his command from a tangle in a distant precinct of his mind. He made notes on ideas to pursue: on the rarefied atmosphere of isolation and its effect on memory; on the queer crippling delusions he had had to overcome —one had stayed with him for days, a belief that everything that lay outside the camp had been destroyed (it was during the April rains, the road was closed, and it had taken a great effort of will for him to stir outside and find it untrue)—or another, more reasonable fear, that having stayed away so long he had been forgotten by everyone in England who had ever known him.

One day at the end of the first week in January, Munday entered the kitchen for lunch and found a letter propped against his water tumbler. Anxiously he picked it up and turned it over. It had not been opened. Still, his heart raced, as if the simple lifting of the letter had caused him an exertion.

“It came this morning,” said Emma, putting a dish on the table. “I didn’t want to disturb you.” She uncovered the dish. “Do you mind having shepherd’s pie again?”

“Not at all,” said Munday abstractedly. He slit the envelope and held the letter to the window. It was written in spotty failing ballpoint, large regular script on ruled paper from an airmail pad. But it was not from Caroline. He took the message in at once, Forgive my delay, down to the cramped overpracticed signature.

“Surprise, surprise,” he said.

“Who’s it from?”

“Silvano,” said Munday, seating himself at the table and shaking out his napkin. “Seems he’s decided to pay us a visit.”

“But you invited him,” said Emma.

“So he says. I honestly can’t remember.”

“Weeks ago,” said Emma.

Munday folded the frail paper and ran his fingers down the crease. “I wish he’d chosen some other time to write. I’m so busy at the moment.” He opened the paper again and said, “Here, listen, ‘owing to pressure of work I have neglected to reply.’ Pressure of work!”

“Are you going to put him off?”

“No, I suppose the only thing to do is get it over with,” said Munday. “I’ll ask him for next weekend.”

“Strange,” said Emma. “I didn’t think I’d ever want to see another African again as long as I lived. But I feel so starved for company here. It’s like being back in the bush—this feeling I’m standing still in a wretched backwater, and everything’s out of reach.”

“What an extraordinary thing to say,” said Munday.

“You know what I mean. A dead end. You feel it too, don’t deny it.”

“I feel nothing of the kind.”

“Then you’re lucky,” said Emma. ‘Tm quite looking forward to seeing Silvano. He was a nice boy. What did you say he’s doing in London?”

“What they always do,” said Munday. “Economics, political science, moral philosophy. Should be very useful when he goes back to the Inturi Forest—they’re crying out for people like that in Bundibugyo.” Munday made a scoffing snort, then said, “Ah, shepherd’s pie, my favorite.”

“You said you didn’t mind.”

“But twice in one week, Emma!”

“It was all I had time for,” said Emma. “I was doing housework—Pauline left to go shopping. It’s early-closing today.”

“Ayah's down at the bazaar, is she?” Munday helped himself to the shepherd’s pie.

“I hope they’re not cruel to him.”

“Who?”

“Silvano,” said Emma. “At the pub, in the village —these local people. You said you were going to show him around.”

“Did I?” Munday began to eat. “Oh, yes. That’s right.”

Later that afternoon, Munday sketched out points to be made on notions of time. It was something no anthropologist had dealt with, theories he planned to develop regarding the uselessness of calendar time in folk-cultures—or any culture: how arbitrary it was to count years, one by one, when in reality years were plastic and indeterminate, often reversible, and to travel in space in a given direction might mean losing a century. He would examine the traveler’s platitude about going back two thousand years. (“These people are living in the stone age,” said tourists in Bwamba; they came for the hot springs and the degenerate road-bound pygmies.) It could jar the balance of the mind, this toppling back and forth in time, if you were resident and serious; and the Africans, whose time was circular, moved from century to century in licking a stamp for a bride-price letter, or fixing an axe-head with plastic twine from an Indian shop, or keeping sorcery bones and the clippings of funeral hair in a blue shoulder bag marked BOAC. Munday had experienced the slip of those contrasts. He had shunted from the timeless simplicity of the village, to Fort Portal where the atmosphere was of the 1920s, to Kampala—always ten years behind London—to London itself, which had never ceased to be strange for him. Time was a neglected dimension in the study of man; but it mattered, and one had to consider this in judging people who lived in pockets of inverted time. Munday himself had lurched to the past and back by degrees, blunting his memory in the movement, so his own age was a puzzling figure and all dates seemed wrong. He had seen Africans shattered by the same confusions.

Emma stood at the door. Munday saw her but went on writing. Time is elastic, binding and releasing the—

“I’ve decided to bake a pie,” said Emma.

“Good for you,” said Munday. He saw her lingering, he tapped with his pen. “I didn’t realize apple pies were your strong point.”

“They’re not. But I know where we can get some apples.”

“Splendid.” Munday continued to write—to pretend to. He scratched at the paper.

Emma remained in the doorway.

Munday said, “Off you go.”

“No,” said Emma. “I can’t. You have to get them.”

“Then let’s have the pie tomorrow, shall we?” He

showed her the half-filled notebook page. “I’m rather busy.”

“I must have the apples tonight,” she said, and she added, “Please help me.”

“Can’t you see you’re interrupting me?”

“Alfred,” she pleaded, her voice breaking.

Munday snapped the notebook shut. “This is ridiculous. Apples! Emma, I don’t care if we have apples tonight or tomorrow or never. I’m not interested.”

“You never help me!” Emma sobbed. “I try and try, and you always—”

“For goodness’ sake—”

“You’ve got to go,” Emma said, the lucid appeal coming between her sobs.

“Hold on,” said Munday. Now, he smiled. “Didn’t you tell me today was early-closing? All the shops will be shut. It’s gone four.”

“It’s not a shop,” said Emma. “It’s that place we went before Christmas—that farm on the back road.”

“Hosmer’s?”

“Yes. There was a sign on one of those cottages. Someone sells them.”

Munday tried to remember. “I didn’t see any apples when we were there.”

“I tell you I saw the sign,” said Emma.

Munday said, “You’re making this up.”

Emma came forward and howled, “I’m not! I’m not! Help me, Alfred—you must go now.”

“Send Branch,” he said.

“No—you!” She set her face at him.

Munday got up and held her; she was shaking. He said, “Do calm yourself, my darling. If you want me to go, of course—’’

“You can walk,” she said. The hysteria had wrung her and left her breathless. “It’s not far—down the road, past The Yew Tree, that valley road, where it dips. But if you don’t hurry”—her voice went small, like a child’s disappointed protest—“I won’t have my apples.”

He thought she might be mad, and he recalled what

she had said at lunchtime, everything’s out of reach. He had to reply to her unexpected demand by humoring her. He took the money she offered, a pound note folded into a neat square, and he kissed her and said, “I won’t be long.”

It was dusk, a sea-mist was building in the fields, veiling the hedgerows, and he walked into the falling dark on Emma’s errand. The Yew Tree was shut; one upper window was lighted, the rest held oblong frames of clouds and the last of the sun, breaking through in dim cones at the sea. Munday turned down the lane and walked briskly, putting a bird to flight—it beat its way out of a hedge noisily without showing itself to him—and then to the row of thatched cottages. He hadn’t seen the bam before, but it was there, a rough building of flint and white coarsely-shaped stone beyond the mucky rutted barnyard. And a large sign was nailed to the gatepost on the cottage next to Hosmer’s, apples. Several chickens pecked close to the house; their feathers were muddied on their undersides, but their presence and their color emphasized that some daylight still lingered.

Munday rapped on the door and heard his sounds echo in the house. He peeked through the window. He saw the kitchen table in the center of the room, cruets, a newspaper, a jam jar. He rapped again, then gave up and crossed to the bam, stopping midway to catch a glimpse of the platform where he had seen those dead dogs under the canvas. He remembered them only when he was descending the stone stairs. But they were behind Hosmer’s cottage, those flayed things.

His shoes sucked in the mud as he wrenched the barn door open. At once he smelled the sour decay of apples and saw in warped racks huge cider barrels, rags wound on their wooden bungs, and a cider press, like an early printing, machine, the thick iron screw and the woodframe black with dampness. The paraphernalia leaned at him: a wheelless wagon resting on greasy axles, and hose-pipes and glass jugs and a pruning hook, and on posts supporting the hayloft, harnesses, snaffles, and coils of rope. The apple smell was strong and stung his nose, but there was in its richness something of the earth, a live hum that engaged all his senses. In the wagon were bushel baskets of apples. Munday carefully stepped over the jugs and reached for a basket.

His shadow sank in a wider shadow as the interior of the barn grew dark. It was as if the door had been shut on him without a sound.

“Is this what you’ve come for?”

Munday turned and saw Caroline at the door, blocking what daylight remained; behind her legs a white chicken moved, pecking at mud, bustling in jerks.

“You,” he said. She had given him a fright. He left the wagon and clattered past the jugs, upsetting one. He saw she held a full paper bag against her chest.

“I had to see you,” she said. “I’Ve missed you.” Munday said, “Oh, my love, my love,” and embraced her, kissed her and split the bag of apples. Caroline dropped her arms and released it. The apples tumbled to their shins, fell between them, plopping at their feet, making bumps as they hit and their skin punctured and bruised on the bam floor. Munday stepped on one, skidding on its flesh, ancj hugged Caroline for balance. The apples rolled in all directions, gulping as they bounced.