The Black House

3

He was anxious for his old colleagues to know that he was working on the book he had promised. In the letter he said, “presently engaged,” which was not true. The book—all Munday saw of the future—was not written, it was not started; it was a valise of unsorted note cards and partially-filled copy books, kept over a period of ten years in Africa. Some were in Emma’s handwriting, his rambling dictation, a method he had begun when the mission doctor cautioned him about his blood pressure. Dictation hadn’t worked; he couldn’t speak and think clearly at the same time, and anyway his blood pressure had continued to rise. There was part of a diary, too, the observations of a new arrival, a beginner: enthusiastic paragraphs entered the first year, celebrations which succeeding years of repetition had turned into commonplaces, for what had seemed unique was only strange, and when, with familiarity, it ceased to be strange—the plant life, the sunlight, the smells—it was beneath notice.

He had also said, “a social history.” Not that. It would be anthropology, as travel and discovery—not a study, but a record of a people and an account of his own movements and changes in attitude, his experience of the climate and language, the kind of book that had once been written by learned and opinionated explorers. Munday had not taken his long residence lightly, and he had biases. He would risk what errors of judgment were unavoidable in such circumstances and write as a man who had lived closely with an alien people; his responses would be as important as the behavior that caused those responses. He had entered the culture and assisted in practices whose value he saw only as an active participant; witchcraft and sorcery had almost brought him to belief in those early years because he had been more than a witness. That was at the core of the book. It was the kind of book that had ceased to be attempted except by amateurs and hacks; all the excitement had gone out of anthropology—he had been away when the attitude changed; his eagerness to explore was no longer fashionable. His early paper, “Hunger and The Uncanny,” was dismissed as tendentious, gullible, and anecdotal. Now he was refuted more cold-bloodedly with sociology—statistics, models, punched cards, computer verdicts, and young men crouched with clipboards at the fringes of villages. Anthropology, the most literate of the sciences, whose nearest affine was the greatest fiction, had degenerated to impersonal litanies of clumsy coinages and phrases of superficial complexity, people of flesh and bone to cases or subjects with personalities remaining as obscure as their difficult names, like the long Latin one given to the pretty butterfly. He did not use those words.

He intended his book to redeem those people. Redeem was not too big a word: they were in every sense lost. He had once described the Bwamba in a paper as “witch-ridden semi-pygmies,” and privately as “tricky little bastards,” but they were his, he had been the only person to study them—and by accident, for he had thought in London that they lived in the mountains, and it was only when he got there that he discovered that they were a lowland people who preferred the concealment of swamps and the isolated copse in the savannah. So he had stayed at the Yellow Fever Camp from the first and had the Bwamba to himself. Once, an American anthropologist had come to the district with plans for a study and many boxes of supplies. Munday ridiculed the man’s electric typewriter and tore up the letter of introduction, written by a classmate who had gone to California—“I know you will give him the advantage of your wide experience,” the letter said.

“You’re poaching,” said Munday to the stunned researcher. “Do you know how the Bwamba deal with people like you? Poachers? They ambush them and flay them alive. You’d better leave while it’s still light It’s a long drive back.”

It was partly this obstinacy that had earlier earned him the respect of many people in his profession, several of them eminent; he was said to be cantankerous but incorruptible, but, never giving in, he developed what was almost a grudge against his own honesty, and he was thin-skinned to criticism, responding to the mildest doubt of his methods with merciless personal attacks. Nearly everyone agreed that he had stayed away, among those people, for far too long; it had affected him, and when his name was mentioned in the Common Room of an English university, men who had praised his work would say, “I like her well enough—” But he had come home. That was his regret. He had planned to write the book in Africa, to note on the last page the name of the African Village, the Yellow Fever Camp, and the date of the book’s completion, as proof of the authenticity of his remoteness, the severe distance from any library; the bush tombstone of the missionary, saying simply that he had died in that place, proved sincerity. It would be different now, a village name, perhaps his full address, but an English village in Dorset. If anyone asked why, he could say, “Doctor’s orders.”

“I hope he’s wrong about our sea freight,” said Emma.

Munday was filling a bureau drawer with his underwear and socks. He said, “Flack? He’s making that up. Like his malaria, and that business about having his teeth pulled. Did you ever hear of such a thing!”

“Part of the cure,” said Emma, using Flack’s clinical tone of voice.

“I saw you smiling,” said Munday. He shook his head. “I was afraid I was going to burst out laughing. He’s incredible.”

“He seems very sweet all the same.” She stopped speaking and smiled at the wall, and shortly she saw her face, the mirror frame, her husband’s head behind her shoulder. She tried a new expression and patted her hair. “I’m glad we’re here.”

“The Yew Tree,” said Munday, continuing his unpacking.

“England,” said Emma. She spoke it with a passion Munday doubted, enunciating it like a word in an old hymn, with a sob of relief in her throat. It was the way people said it in plays staged by amateur drama groups in Uganda, and it made Munday uncomfortable.

He went over to his wife. He was going to touch her shoulder, but thought better of it. He faced her. “You’re glad the doctor sent me home.”

“Don’t put it like that. You make it sound like failure.”

“It was, for me,” he said. He had never thought he would return home except to lecture at one of the institutes on the progress of his research. His return he saw as a defeat, a partial failure of which not panic but annoyance was one symptom. He would still lecture at an institute but it would not be the same as flying to London for a conference, reading his paper, and then returning to the African village.

“You know how much I hated it,” said Emma, and added her correction softly, “Them.”

“We could have discussed it.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she said, trying not to smile. Then, “I didn’t want to sound pathetic—I thought it would bore you.”

“You had your painting.”

“I had my painting,” Emma said, and now she did smile; she saw the water colors she had forced herself to make, Native Hut, Tulip Tree in Blossom, Rhino Camp—the perfect reflection of the promontory in Lake Albert that had been hung upside-down at the British Council Library in Fort Portal, Humped Cattle, and that mess, Sunset over the Congo. She looked up at Munday, “And you had your people.”

“You’re ridiculing me.”

“Because sometimes,” said Emma, “you are ridiculous.”

“Don’t start again,” said Munday, remembering that sudden voice against the wall, and Flack at the door.

“Your people. That’s what you called them.”

“That’s what they were.”

“ ‘Lapses,’ ” said Emma. “That’s what savagery is when you call savages people.”

“We’ve had this conversation before,” said Munday.

“So we have,” she said, her tone going from hostility to gentleness as she turned her head.

“Savages, savagery. I daresay the people around here will agree with you,” said Munday. “As if any of you know the first thing about it!” He went on emptying the suitcase with angry vigor, and slapping a stack of clean shirts said, “I’ve got a surprise for them.”

“What’s that?”

“You remember Silvano, the Bwamba chap who’s at the London School of Economics? I’m planning to have him down here one weekend, as soon as we’ve moved into the house. Introduce him to all the locals, show him around.” Munday’s face became amused. “Should be interesting,” he said with satisfaction. “They don’t see many Africans around here.”

“So you’re going to inflict Silvano on them, is that it?” Emma saw a cheetah, teardrop markings down its jowls, the wild thing on a leash, being taken to tea at a grand house, causing awe-struck stares and nervous conversation, then curled and panting loudly by the feet of a scared guest.

Munday smiled, and snorted with pleasure.

“Like some strange pet,” Emma said. She saw the cheetah pawing the air, frightening strangers with its teeth and claws and bright fur.

“Let’s not argue about it,” said Munday. “Look, it’s almost dark.”

The husband and wife looked at the window and saw their reflections staring in at them, though it was not yet four. The insubstantial gloom of the afternoon which had made the view such a deep African green, had become night during their short talk, giving them a reason for ending it and further emphasizing the familiarity Munday felt about the landscape, for that velvet dark, the liquid windows and the overbright yellow bulbs of the room circled by one dusty moth —all of it, with the smell of floorwax, reminded him of African night and African seclusion. He wondered: Have I carried Africa here?

“We should finish this unpacking,” he finally said. He turned his back on the window and walked over to the bureau where a drawer sagged open.

“Your letter to The Times,” Emma said. “Do you really believe all that?”

“Emma,” he said, warning her with her name. “Because / don’t. I want you to know that. I’m glad we’re here—home.”

“This isn’t home.”

“It’s England,” said Emma.

“A comer of it.”

“We’re English,” she said.

“We’re strangers here,” he said; his voice was gruff. “What were we in Africa?”

“English,” he said.

Emma said, “You know nothing.”

Munday was annoyed; he couldn’t reply to that. But he remembered something else. He said, “What do you mean by saying I’m ridiculous?”