The Black House

5

The Bowood House described in the letter the landlord’s agent had sent when requesting a deposit for breakage and the first month’s rent was not the Bowood House the Mundays carried their suitcases into —baggage tags fluttering from the handles—that dark rainy day towards the middle of November. In Uganda, and in the cramped London hotel, Munday had read the letter aloud to Emma, and he had pored over it alone many times, relishing the phrases that were used so casually by the agent. The description interested and excited him, generated a feeling of expectancy, a foreknowledge of comfort, that was some consolation for the disappointment he had felt on being told he would have to leave the African village and move out of the bungalow at the Yellow Fever Camp. (“That heart of yours,” Father Dowle, the mission doctor, had said.) And having used the address of Bowood House on his letter to The Times he had committed himself, before moving in, to a fixed image in his mind. He had a settled feeling about the place and its dimensions, as if he had already lived in it and knew its separate warm rooms: there were four bedrooms and a box room, a “snug” kitchen with, “units,” a “sunny” breakfast room, a studio (where he saw himself at work), an inglenook. There were “j>ower points” in every room (“Imagine, Emma,” he had said, “power points!”—but the joke was wearing thin). Outside, there was a “courtyard,” and part of the house was “rendered.” There were “outbuildings” on the “grounds” and trees at the bottom of the garden which, the agent promised, bore soft fruit.

Mr. Flack said, “You’re not seeing it at its best.” He had put on his peaked cap and, hunched over the steering wheel, driven the Mundays to the house in his old black Humber. That morning a letter had come from the freight forwarders saying that the nine cases were on their way to Four Ashes.

Mr. Flack said, “The rain.” He leaned back and squinted at the gray pouring sky as if to determine how long it would last.

“A Bwamba would call this rain a good omen,” said Munday. But he felt differently about it. He looked at the house. He did not want to go inside.

Mr. Flack said, “It’s got bags of character.”

Emma agreed. Munday heard her say, “Charming.”

“Thanks for the lift, Flack,” said Munday, and, already feeling let down, quickly sent the old man away so that he would not be able to report on their disappointment. The wind blew the rain against the trees and knocked shriveled leaves into the shallow courtyard puddles where some stuck and some floated. Behind them on the far side of the road the limbs of a stripped tree howled; the wind came in gusts, rain in rushing air, emptying the trees and pulling at their branches and blackening their trunks.

Even when Mr. Flack had gone the Mundays remained on the roadside, trying to make sense of the agent’s letter by comprehending the house. The sight of it was like an incomplete memory, the sort an adult has, faced with his childhood house: unfamiliar details Were intrusive and disturbing, the size, the color, the position, some black front windows with drawn curtains, the chimneys—absurdly, Munday had imagined smoke coming from the chimneys, and these cold bricks with empty orange flues depressed him and spoiled the memory.

The house looked small. Munday had not expected that nor its unusual position, directly on the narrow road; one long wall was flush with the road (leaves collecting at the foundation where it formed a gutter), and a high bushy bank, the edge of a field, rose up behind, dwarfing the house. It gave the impression of having once had some definite purpose on the road: the stone shed might have been a smithy’s or wheelwright’s.

“I don’t imagine it made any difference when the only traffic was a wagon passing once a day—” Munday continued speaking but his words were lost in the engine roar and hissing tires of a truck which passed just then, its green canvas bellying on top and flapping at the back. Munday finished hopelessly, “—stand this.”

The house was of stone, and squat, with a slate roof, the black slates shining in the rain; a sharp scalloped ridge on the roof peak was its only elegance. It was set plumply against the bank and looked older than that bank, as if the back pasture had risen, the verge at either end lifted in a grassy swell, sinking the house into the earth. The walls absorbed the damp differently, the pale new stone moistened like sand, the dark and almost black old stone, the brown hamstone extension at the back which was the bathroom and toilet (“low-flush,” the letter said) replacing the roofless brick shed half-hidden in tangled briars and a mature holly tree in the back garden. There was also a recent and unattractive coal shed across the courtyard, its cement blocks stained unevenly with wetness. The rain and damp defined the portions of the house by shading their ages variously, and the side that faced the road was darkened by soot and exhaust fumes, the stone foundation covered by dry inland limpets and a deep green moss like patches of felt, the shade of the cushions on the billiard table at The Yew Tree.

“Courtyard,” said Munday, kicking open the iron gate. The gate made a grinding sound as Munday walked across the flagstones. A puddle at the entrance was being filled by a gurgling drain-spout. “Double doors,” he said, fumbing with the large latchkey. He entered the gritty hall with its ragged rope mat, then the chilly damp kitchen. He taught himself the meanings, bitterly, by sight. Now he knew “snug” meant tiny and “character” inconvenience and “charming” old; the ceiling was low, and though it was unnecessary for him to do so—he was not tall—he stooped, oppressed by the confining room and making his irritation into a posture. He glanced around; he said, “Sunny breakfast room.” The house was cold and held a musty stale odor that not even the draft from the open door freshened—an alien smell, not theirs.

Munday came to attention before a still clock on a kitchen shelf which showed the wrong time on a bloodied face. He was afraid and heard his heart and felt it enlarge. He recovered, saw the rust, and feeling foolish went to the sink which was coated in grime. He turned on the faucet; it choked and spat, brown water bubbled out and patterned rivulets into the grime, and then it became colorless and Munday shut it off. What a stubborn place, he thought. He tried the lights; they worked. He opened the oven door, the furnace door, a cupboard. He peeked into a comer room and mumbled, “larder.” He sniffed and looked for more.

Emma stood in the doorway, still holding her suitcases. A tractor went by and rattled the windows.

“Hello, what’s this,” said Munday in his sour voice, “power points.”

“Don’t,” said Emma. “Don’t say anything more. Please, Alfred. Or I’ll cry—”

Munday was silent; behind him his wife began to sob. She went to the kitchen table and sat down and took a lacy handkerchief from her bag. Munday wanted to touch her hair but he kept himself away and tried to give his feeling for the house a name. He told himself that this house was what he had surrendered Africa for, it was the object of his return home. It made him uneasy—not sad like Emma (if her tears meant that), but restless, exposed like a blunderer to staring cupboards and walls. It was as if someone in all that strangeness knew him and was hunting him.

It was not that the house was cold and unused, nor that it was so different from the agent’s description. It was not derelict, and if it had been truly empty he felt he could have possessed it; Munday—again sniffing and moving rapidly from room to room—was anxious for an opposite reason. He sensed, and he was searching for proof, that it held a presence that the apparent emptiness warned him of.

The dampness and that dusty odor lingered as a clammy insinuation in every comer of the house, and while Emma sat at the kitchen table and cried—the door open to the drizzling courtyard completing the picture of abandonment in which she occupied the foreground: the kind of portraiture she admired but could not achieve with her own paint-box—Munday busied himself with a coal hod he found in the shed, split some dry branches for kindling and tried to drive out the dampness with fires at each end of the house. After a smoky uncertain start in the living-room fireplace (the old newspaper smoldered, too damp to flare up), the pile of dry sticks Munday eventually shredded and splintered caught and burned noisily and filled the stone opening with slender flames. He heaped on it pieces of broken coal and short halved logs from a brass-studded keg near the hearth, and he watched the fire until he could smell its heat.

In the firebox of the kitchen stove, a low stout Ray-bum of chipped yellow enamel, he laboriously started a fire, following the instructions from a manual provided by the owner and using the fuel specified, anthracite knobs, like smooth black buns. He worked with a poker and tongs and several cubes of white crumbling firelighter. The firelighters flared and roared for minutes, then burned out, leaving red edges on the fuel which quickly cooled to blackness. It took him nearly an hour, but he had a good fire, and after he shut the door to the firebox he opened the vents so wide he could see the flickering light and hear the roar of the flames being sucked around the elbow of the stovepipe, their gasps in the chimney’s throat. With the stove alight he boiled a kettle and put hot water bottles in the double bed; he found the electric fires and plugged them in and turned them on high, making them ping like egg-timers. Later, remembering the cost, he adjusted them to warm.

Munday smiled at his fires and rubbed his hands before them. He went outside and was delighted to see smoke billowing from his chimneys—that signal, so poignant and reassuring, of active habitation; like winter breath, swirling from a man’s face. Emma cheered up in the warm house. She made tea and swept the floors, she put sheets and towels in the airing cupboards and discovered the view from the bedroom window that gave a glimpse of the sea. Munday joined her at the window; seeing that she had stopped crying he had paused in his brisk movements and shuffled and stooped to reassure her.

He said, “No need to cry.”

“It was that carpet in the kitchen,” she said. “It looked so worn and horrid. I couldn’t help myself. God, whose feet—”

“I’ll take it into the shed,” said Munday.

“No—your heart. Please.”

“It does look depressing,” he said in the kitchen. What he had taken for a floral pattern were dark tulip-shaped stains and spots like blossoms in the gray tattered nap.

“Let me help you,” said Emma.

The husband and wife knelt on the kitchen floor, side by side, and rolled up the carpet. The activity, seemingly so abrupt and insignificant, was important to them as an illustration of their marriage, what was best in it—and what both would remember when the apprehension they felt, the suspicion of the strange place, the fear of an unwelcome surprise which neither wished to call death, was answered by proof, so that in the end only one of them would be able to recall that rainy morning, the rolling carpet, and that movement, bumping forward on their knees.

They carried it to the shed and left it with other discarded things, the garden tools, the summer chairs which all appeared to be broken, a dog’s dish, a pitchfork, a scythe, paint cans and enamel basins and two porcelain chamberpots nesting on the worktable. Munday lifted the top one out. It was ornate and had flowers on it, still brightly colored. Its handle was whole.

“I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said.

“When I was a girl,” Emma said, “I used to stay with my aunt and uncle in Eastbourne—”

Munday listened to the story; she was happy, he laughed appreciatively. She had told him the story before, but this telling of it was hopeful evidence that he had her support, that she was calmed and would share the solitude of the village with him as she did this memory.

With the fires going and the lamps blazing in the windows the house was alive, its personality was established with the heat and light; the dark late-aftemoon helped, and the gusts of wind blew gouts of raindrops against the side windows and then seemed to push at the glass with a pressure like spread fingers that strained every inch of it and then released it. The dark and the weather which was growing wild outside and perhaps threatening the slates made the house seem a good shelter: the exaggerated storm outside, the warmth inside, maintained in Munday’s imagination the illusion of the place as a refuge. And the husband and wife moved more freely knowing that the room they were about to enter would be warm.

But still the suggestion of a menacing presence, a half-formed fear, like a small creature of liquid, swayed and seemed to yawn in whatever room was adjacent to the one Munday happened to be in. He trusted the room he occupied; he was uncertain about the other rooms and could only verify his safety by entering them. Each time he stretched his arm to switch on a light in a darkened room he dared not step into, he was cautioned by a pain in his heart that was like a brief bright star.

“I must take it easy,” he said to his wife. “I think I’m overdoing it.”

“You’re restless,” she said. “Let me make you a drink.”

Munday was one of those men who looked at his watch before he had his first drink of the day. His rule on weekdays was no alcohol before sundown, and he was obedient to the rule. It was dark; he said yes; Emma poured the gin out, and only then did Munday look at his watch and see that it was four-fifteen, that sundown was at mid-afternoon and that he would be drunk before dinner.

“Emma, look at the time!”

Emma laughed and handed him his drink. She said, “It looks as if we’ll have to adjust our habits. It gets dark so early in winter. I’d forgotten. I must remember to get a bottle of sherry from Mr. Flack.”

“Amontillado,” said Munday. “That’s a good drink for this time of day.”

They talked at length about what drinks they would depend on through the winter. Then Munday said, “The freight hasn’t come. What do you suppose is keeping them?”

“This isn’t a very easy place to find,” said Emma. “And there’s just that brass knocker out front. I wonder if we can hear it from here?”

They were seated before the living-room fireplace. Munday said, “Is the outside light on? It should be. And if the kitchen’s dark they might be put off and go away.”

“I’ll have a look.”

“I’ll do it,” said Munday, bijt he didn’t rise. Then Emma was out of the room and her opening and shutting the door made a damp breeze from the dark hall settle on Munday’s shoulders. He shuddered and leaned towards the fire and warmed himself.

There were his fires, but still dark and cold parts of the house remained. Now they were in a place where doors were always kept shut; a house was not an open sunlit breezy place, but many separate closed rooms, one or two of suffocating smallness, and each with its own smell and temperature and purpose. Already the house had doubtful comers, the alarmingly cluttered box room where they put their empty suitcases, the drafty unlighted stairs with its protruding candle-holders on the walls, and the several doors which swung unaided by a hand and surprised him when their iron latches clanked; the dark back hall where there were so many rubber boots and raincoats and walking sticks—he’d find a light for it, but who did all that clobber belong to? He could not be certain they were alone. The unfamiliarly early darkness made him doubtful, or the old men whose suggestion of ghosts he had mocked, or maybe he was tired. It was not fear but doubt; and he told himself his heart was sick and half-broken. He would not admit superstition—he had seen too much of that. Emma had said he was restless, he was always that in new places. He felt stupid; something he had known since childhood he had now forgotten, and he believed the reminder of this knowledge, something to animate the thought that slumbered on a ledge in his mind—but it lay hidden—was in this house.

Just like the rat. That hurrying rat in the African bungalow, at the Yellow Fever Camp. Seeing it enter the kitchen he had stamped, and the rat had scuttled into the pantry. Munday had yelled for the cook and together they cornered it. But the terrified thing had leaped at his legs, and fear made Munday recoil when he should have kicked out. Then the rat was past him, in the hall, under the bookcase, in the bedroom, the study, cowering and scampering wildly when it was threatened with the cook’s broom. Munday was separated from the cook; the rat shot along the passage, skidding on the waxed floor, and into the living room. The cook shrieked, and when Munday entered the room the cook told him the rat had run into the garden. But Munday had not seen it go, and long after, even on the sunniest day, he could not make himself believe that the rat had gone as the cook said. He smelled \(—it smelled of sex, musky and genital—and he heard at the level of the floor the rat hurrying through the bungalow with a querulous panic, clawing with its forepaws, rising up and nibbling with its yellow teeth. He had not told Emma his fear, but he had often lain awake at night and listened to the sounds near his bed.

So the sense of a substantial shadow in the house remained with him, in spite of the fires and the warmth. He sat massaging his knees like a man who has not arrived at his destination but is only stopping in a place too unfamiliar to afford him the rest he expected, who may get up at any moment and move out But he stayed where he was.

The nine crates arrived tfiat evening. The driver, his eyes bright from driving in the dark, said he had got lost in the country lanes.

“You should use a map,” said Munday.

“I do,” said the driver. “You’re not on it.” The crates were not large; some were put in the shed unopened, the rest in the house. The driver used his crowbar to open the heavier ones, and when he had finished Munday saw him to his truck. The man looked around, like someone caught in a wilderness, and said, “Now how the hell do I get out of here?”

Munday showed him the way.

In the living room, unwrapping the taped parcels of artifacts (weapons, tools, and ornaments; but all resembling each other), he constantly heard sounds in the kitchen. Though he knew Emma was making tea he stopped what he was doing and wondered if there were someone with her only he could see. He considered warning her of the danger, but checked himself and went on unpacking, because if it was a danger it was one to which he could not assign a name.

“I didn’t realize we had collected so much junk,” said Emma. She entered the living room carrying a tray and had that erect stateliness of the tray-bearer. She held a teapot, cups and saucers, a milk jug, a plate of sandwiches, and a small cheese board. She put the tray on a footstool in front of the fire and began preparing the tea things, arranging the plates, pouring the milk.

Munday was handling a short knobbed club. He tested it, wagging it back and forth. He said, “I’d be lost without my collection.”

He looked fondly over the objects he had already unwrapped, the neatly labeled knives, the clay pots, the digging sticks, the beaded necklaces. “They’ve stopped making clubs like this,” he said. The old fool in the decayed coat at The Yew Tree, with his treasured clasp knife: had he said that? Something like it. “I feel very lucky to have these things.”

“The necklace there,” said Emma. “We made ones like that when I was a Girl Guide.”

Munday said, “That’s the sort of remark—”

“No,” she went on, “they don’t make clubs like that anymore. They don’t have to. Why make a club when you can steal the window bars from an Indian shop and use those to beat—”

“You’re being rather a bore,” said Munday, still admiring the club. “This was carved from a single piece of wood—a mangrove root.”

“Damn, I’ve forgotten the sugar.”

“I’ll get it.”

Munday rose and went into the dark hall and came face to face with a man in black. His heart wrenched and a searing bulb of pain stung him with fire and threatened to burst through his chest. He stepped back into the lighted living room and said with a stammerer’s effort, “Do you always walk into people’s houses without knocking?”

The man was calm; there was a smile on his pink face. He said, “Not if I know they’re carrying weapons,” and he pointed to the club Munday held tightly in his hand.

In the hall, that little space, there had been a fusty odor from the net curtains and the window nailed shut and the rising damp that soaked the walls. He had breathed the bad air and it had made him more anxious by gagging him. He was off balance, he felt surrounded by a single man, and he was startled bumping into the man and meeting that broad warm face in his own hall. But Munday could not manage his fear, aAd what the stranger saw was a very angry man backing into the middle of a great pile of shredded paper and ripped cartons and wrappings and an assortment of thick objects of wood and stone. They were worn and oddly-shaped and scratched with feeble tracings of decoration, crude patterns, spirals, crosses and dots which attracted his eye but were too simple to engage it. Munday held his heavy club halfraised and Emma, behind him, a saucer with an unsteady tea cup rattling on it; she warned him about his heart in a pleading voice, “—Getting upset won’t do you any good at all, Alfred.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” the man said over Munday’s stammered complaint, and he smiled at Emma and shrugged as if to indicate that Munday was a slight embarrassment to them both.

“You damn well should be,” said Munday. The man in black clutching a wet hat in his hands had surprised him, but it was not what Munday feared or expected, so even the considerable ache of the shock he had just had gave him no relief: now he was no

leg's afraid and he was angered by this false alarm, an interruption of his older fear.

“Bob Crawshaw,” the man said and put out his hand. “I’m vicar up at St. Alban’s. I was just passing—”

“Will you have some tea, Vicar?” Emma said. She had risen, not as the vicar thought, to offer him the cup, but to be in a position to reach over and steady her husband, who had looked a moment earlier as if he was about to assault the man.

“That would be lovely,” said the vicar. He looked rescued. He stepped past Munday and took a long stride over the discarded packing material to accept the cup from Emma. He began stirring the spoon very fast and looking from husband to wife. With the offer of tea, order was established, and holding the cup in his hand the vicar felt he could cope.

“I’m not a well man,” said Munday.

“Sorry to hear that,” said the vicar.

“And I’m astonished that someone like you . . .” Munday began, his eyes bulging.

“Alfred, the sugar,” Emma said firmly. “Please.” Munday left the room.

“I think you gave him a turn,” Emma said. “But I really must apologize for him.”

“He’s quite correct,” said the vicar, “and I’m completely in the wrong. I don’t blame him a bit. I should know better.”

“He can sound awfully offensive—”

“No, no, he’s absolutely right,” said the vicar, insisting, and dismissing Emma’s apology. “But you see I used to visit the previous tenants and I know that knocker on the kitchen door can’t be heard from here. It’s such a confusing house. So when I saw your living-room light on—”

Munday, looking calmer and not carrying the club, returned to the room with the sugar bowl, and setting the spoon toward the vicar, offered it. He said in a subdued voice, “You gave me a turn.”

“Two for me, please. Thanks so much.” The vicar had smiled at Munday’s remark, a repetition of his wife’s. It was a habit of their marriage; they had reached that point of common agreement where language was shared and experience reported in identical words. Though they were unaware of it, they disputed their similarity using the same idioms, the speech— like a local dialect—that their marriage and their years in the bush had taught them.

“I was just telling Mrs. Munday that I used to visit the previous tenants, and I know that brass knocker on the kitchen door—”

He continued speaking. The information disturbed Munday: he wished he had not heard previous tenants; it gave the house the flavorless character of an inn, a shelter where occasional people, birds of passage, came and went, indistinguishable in the brevity of their stay. And the mystery of the house, the ghosts of other occupants, sensations hinted at by the old men at The Yew Tree that Munday had begun to savor, were diminished. Two opposing feelings occurred to him: a curiosity about the fate of the previous tenants, a dread that the vicar might tell him. But especially he disliked being associated with them or any other visitor (the choice of cider had marked him at the pub) and he was disappointed by all the vicar’s news—it had the effect of withholding the house from him by making him and his wife temporary guests, and it insulted his arrival home.

Munday leaned against the bookshelves which covered the wall to the right of the chimney. On the facing wall there was a mirror and a color print of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen; he mocked it and remembered the Omukama’s portrait that hung in the camp bungalow, the leathery face of the aged king with the blank eyes whom Alec, a tea-planter friend of Munday in Fort Portal, had described as looking like a crapulous gorilla. Munday had made no comment; the African District Commissioner had insisted he hang it, and later he had been invited to the Omukama’s palace. (“Palace!” he had whispered to Emma; it was new, unswept, looked like a supermarket, and it smelled of dogs and cooking bananas.)

Emma said, “But how marvelous!”

Munday tried to read the spines of the books. He saw Walter Scott, Sketches by Boz, Hammond Innes and Agatha Christie, a child’s history of England, Readers Union in uniform bindings, some thick paperbacks with unfamiliar titles, probably American, Bibles in two sizes, church pamphlets, a school atlas, a row of Penguins, a woman’s annual, a guide to wildflowers. He had seen identical libraries in a dozen East African hotels and rest houses. Their condition was identical, too; they were unused, and unused books rotted and stayed moribund in their uniquely vile dust. Beside the shelf there was a patch on the wall, sweating paint, and this rising damp had made a trickle of water on the stone floor.

“—galloped like this through the back pasture there,” said the vicar. He put his tea cup down and imitated a horseman, his jowls shaking. His chirpy prattle and exaggerated friendliness was a result of being met by Munday and made uncomfortable by the challenge. Munday was behind him, not saying a word, but he saw how hard the vicar was trying.

The vicar went on to explain the rooms, the experiences of the other tenants with that inefficient knocker, and he finished, “It’s a very old place, you know. This room we’re in is Seventeenth Century, the back section and kitchen are Eighteenth, and the lavatory—well, that’s modem of course!”

Emma laughed, Munday stared—he objected to being told about his house. If it had secrets he wanted them to be his, to discover them for himself. He slid a book out—What Katy Did—pushed it back and noticed how low the ceiling was. Small men had built the house, laborers dwarfed by vast clouds and lit by a pearly glow from the sea; he saw them working in the rain, gathering stones in heavy wheelbarrows to claim a comer of the landscape. Then they had gone back to their cottages and seen other people inhabit the house, perhaps people from far away. Munday was not of the village; and Emma, in spite of her sentiment, and the vicar—his accent said it—neither were they. But the vicar was proprietorial; he wouldn’t admit what Munday had already reluctantly acknowledged: that they were all trespassers.

“Is it a big parish?” Emma asked.

“Quite,” said the vicar. “Marshwood Vale on the west and the Beaminster road on the east. We go straight up to Broadwindsor. I have a church there as well. But don’t be misled by the size—attendance is very poor. We’re trying to raise money for a new church hall. Hopeless!” he said, and he laughed.

“Maybe God intends that as a sort of—”

“Alfred.”

“I say,” said the vicar. His eye strayed over the objects on the floor. He knelt and picked up a short knife, the size and shape of a grapefruit knife, with a rusty hammered blade. “That’s an interesting little chap,” he said. “What does one do with that?”

“Ceremonial knife,” said Munday. “Used in puberty rites.” His gaze caught the vicar’s. He said with a half-smile, “Circumcisions.”

The vicar squinted at it, holding it gingerly with his fingertips. He shook his head slowly.

Munday said, “That particular one’s seen a lot of service.”

“Absolutely fascinating,” said the vicar. He stooped and put the small knife on the floor near others that resembled it. He grinned at Emma. The vicar had a threadbare and slightly seedy aspect which made him seem somehow kindly; the seams of his black suit were worn shiny, his trouser cuffs were spattered with mud and his heavy shoes had been polished so often and were so old they were cracked, and scales of leather bristled where they flexed.

“It was a gift from a village headman,” said Munday.

The vicar nodded at the little knife.

“Alfred gave him a packet of razor blades in return.”

“Yes, I gave him my razor blades,” said Munday. “Do Africans shave?” asked the vicar. “I don’t think of them as having five-o’clock shadow.”

“For circumcisions,” said Munday, wondering if the vicar’s innocence was a tactful way of allowing his host a chance to say that absurd thing. “He asked for them.”

“Of course,” said the vicar.

“A pity, really. Soon they’ll stop making those knives altogether. They’ll lose the skill. Notice how that blade fits into the handle—and those markings. They’re not random decorations. Each one has a particular social significance.”

“That’s progress, isn’t it?” said the vicar. “Using your Gillette blades for circumcisions, drinking beer out of old soup tins and whatnot. I suppose they’re frightfully keen on evening classes as well?”

Munday thought the vicar might be mocking him. He picked up another object, a fragment of polished wood. A fang of glass—it could have been a spiky shard from a broken bottle—protruded from one end, and this was circled by a fringe of coarse monkey hair.

“And this,” said Munday, “this is what the Sebei people use on girls.”

He offered it to the vicar, but the vicar put his hands behind his back and peered at the object in a pitying way.

“Girls?” he said, and he winced. “I had no idea—”

“They gash the clitoris,” said Munday.

“Goodness.”

“Hurts like the devil,” said Munday, “but it keeps them out of trouble. Blunts the nerve, you see. Sex isn’t much fun after that.”

“Alfred, your tea’s going cold.”

Munday took his cup from the bookshelf and drank with his lips shaped in a little smile; the smile altered, becoming triumphant when he swallowed.

“Last year my wife and I went to Italy,” said the vicar. “Such an interesting place. And you get used to

the food after a bit. They’re not fond of the English, you know—like your Africans, I expect.”

“My Africans—”

“The stories are so horrible,” said the vicar. “The killings, the tribal wars. It’s always in the papers, isn’t it That casual business of taking scalps. I have a friend —we were at Oxford together—he went out there, Ghana, I believe. The stories! Evidently, one of their presidents—this was a few years ago—called himself the Redeemer.’ Now, I ask you!”

“Kwame Nkramah,” Munday said. “But it doesn’t have quite the same meaning in the vernacular.”

“Yes,” said the vicar. “My friend runs a mission in what sounds the most unbelievable place. He’s a delightful man, takes it all in his stride, absolutely devoted to the people. And he’s marvelous about mucking in and seeing tilings get done. Once a year we take up a collection, send him bundles of old clothes, tattered books, and bushels of used postage stamps. I can’t imagine what he does with those stamps! I suppose they like the bright colors.”

Munday had put his tea down. He said, “My Africans didn’t take any scalps.”

“Not white scalps,” said Emma to the vicar.

“Not any,” said Munday.

“The vicar—”

“Call me Bob, please.”

“Very well, then. Bob was speaking figuratively, I’m sure.” She said, “They can be very nasty. They’re nasty to Indians and nasty to each other. Alfred says he likes them but sometimes I think he doesn’t like them any more than I do, and I don’t like them at all. They’re cruel and silly and they’re so ugly their faces scare you.”

“They speak figuratively, too,” said Munday. “And there were times when I wouldn’t have blamed them a bit for taking the odd missionary scalp.”

“He doesn’t really mean that,” said Emma.

“I’m sure your friend in Ghana is an angel,” said Munday. “But missionaries can be so arrogant. So damned righteous and discouraging. I’ve always felt there’s something fundamentally subversive about a mission—the vicarage, the church, vespers, the Land Rover, and those beautiful English children playing croquet on their patch of lawn while the village kids gape at them through the fence.”

“That used to happen to my children,” said the vicar, “when I had a parish in Gillingham!”

“I should have warned you, vicar,” said Emma. “Alfred’s an anthropologist.”

“So I gathered.”

“One never hears a good word about missionaries from them. Alfred won’t tell you this but our nearest hospital was run by Catholic priests—White Fathers. That’s where our friend here used to go when he was poorly.”

“That doctor was about as pious as I am,” said Munday. “An Irishman. Dowle. Drank like a fish. Father Tom, they called him. He was a cunning devil, and he had the usual prejudices—a regular old quack. But he was first-class at curing dysentery. ‘Bug in your bowel, eh?’ he’d say. ‘Take some of the muck, then. And he’d hand me a bottle of gray liquid. Did the trick practically overnight.” Munday smiled. “We used to call it Father Tom’s Cement.”

“Sounds jolly useful.”

Munday said, “Dowle sent me home. Said I had a dicky heart.”

“Don’t start,” said Emma.

“I imagine you boiled your water?” said the vicar. “We boiled our water,” said Munday.

“And we had one of these filters,” said Emma, outlining the shape of the container with her hands.

The vicar straightened up and jerked his lapels. “I’m going to let you good people have your dinner.” Emma rose from the chair. “Don’t rush off,” she said. “We’ve just had tea.”

“I’ll come again. I’d love to hear all your stories,” said the vicar. He turned to Munday and said, “I can’t wait for your book.”

“Book?”

“The one you mentioned in your letter to The Times”

“Oh, that,” said Munday.

“I was intrigued by your letter,” said the vicar. “Really, it held me.”

“Just dashed it off,” said Munday. “Wanted to set the record straight. Glad you liked it.”

“Yes, I did,” said the vicar: “Actually, Mr. Awdry put me on to it. And that’s why I sneaked in here tonight. Once a month we have a sort of educational do at the church, a film-show or a talk, refreshments beforehand. It’s partly to get people together in some kind of fellowship. We have so many new people in the village, like yourselves. We charge a small admission—that goes toward the new hall and the fuel bill. Last month we had a lecture on Hardy.”

“How appropriate!” said Emma.

“Chap came over from Drimpton. He’d actually met Hardy—acted in the stage version of Tess, though I’d no idea there was such a play. It was fascinating.”

“It sounds fascinating,” said Emma.

“And you want me to do one of these talks?”

“I was hoping you’d be December. I’d be very pleased if you would. Perhaps talk about some of your experiences. Your travels.”

“I never saw it as travel,” said Munday. “For me it was residence. Travel bores me—it constipates me. All those bad meals. Surly staff. Strange beds.”

“Your residence then,” said the vicar. “That would be perfect Have you any slides or pictures? They’d be most appreciated.”

“Very little of it’s unpacked, I’m afraid. You understand we’ve just moved in.”

“Absolutely,” said the vicar. “We won’t make any firm dates. But if you agree in principle I can announce it in the church bulletin.”

“Go ahead,” said Emma, urging Munday to agree. “All right,” said Munday. It was not what he had planned, the learned society, the paper read to scholars at the Institute of African Studies. It ridiculed that image of himself journeying to London or' Oxford to deliver a lecture.

“Thanks very much,” said the vicar. “And now I will let you good people have your dinner!”

“I’ll see you to your car,” said Munday.

“Don’t bother,” said the vicar. “I know my way out I’ve been here dozens of times.”

When the vicar’s car drove past the window, Munday said, “Dozens of times. That reminds me—”

“You embarrassed me,” said Emma. “You were horrid to him. That poor man—he was so uncomfortable.”

“It’s like a sickroom in a hospital. Hundreds of people have been in it. The vicar knows it well, that room, all the others who’ve died in your bed. He knows something you don’t.”

“You’ve been so morbid lately.”

“I have reason to be,” said Munday. “Emma, my heart.”

“But you go on about it.”

“So would you.”

“No,” she said. “I’d try not to think about it.”

“People come here to die,” said Munday. “New people in the village. Did you hear him? He means retired people—‘like yourselves.' ”

“I’ll start the dinner.”

“Emma—” There was something more Munday wanted to say; he had the will and he opened his mouth, but the words eluded him, the thought had been wiped from his mind. He struggled dumbly with what he recognized as stupidity; his mind wouldn’t move. He said, “Nothing. I’ll see to this unpacking.”

Just before they sat down to eat, Emma said, “Do take that carton of rubbish outside.”

“It can wait,” said Munday.

“No,” said Emma. “I want you to do it now.” She opened the door for him, and a damp draft rolled into the kitchen.

“I’d rather not go outside just now.”

“For my sake,” Emma said in a tremulous voice.

“You’re not going to cry,” said Munday.

“Alfred, please”

“As you wish,” he said.

The rain had stopped. He put the carton in the shed and shut the door, and he had just started back to the house when he heard an owl call him. It was a low distinct hoot, in bursts, like a bewildered child mispronouncing a curse in the dark. He went to it, it drew him through the yard. He couldn’t see the owl; it stopped; it began again, the clear notes reaching Munday and making him feel as if the hidden bird was speaking directly to his fear.

Munday walked into the road; the hoots ceased. He imagined the plump thing roosting above him in the row of oaks he had seen that morning. He could see their outer branches and the lower part of the trunks illuminated by the light from the windows of the house. A few steps down the road and he was in darkness; he smelled the wet trees and now in the black he heard them dripping—that dripping, it was fast, from many branches, a crackling patter on the dead leaves and on the road, a kind of sprinkling which went on and on, the rapidity insisting he remember. He was afraid; his fear was new, and the fear made his thoughts formal. He thought: There is no jungle as strange as this. He thought: When have I ever been in jungle? He admitted he never had, there was none. He had driven through rain-forest and he had camped in low bush with guides and porters; he had marveled at the pathless forest that stretched behind the Yellow Fever Camp. In the daytime, sun flashed on its wetness; at night it was loud with the scrapings of locusts, but not one low owl and all those quickly dripping trees. There, he had been prepared to endure remoteness, but here he was surprised seeing no human trace, no sign of habitation except lights so distant and small they were like an answer to the mist-shrouded sky with its meager scattering of stars. There was no moon or wind, only that pattering on the pillows of leaves and a rich vegetable smell.

He looked back and saw the windows of the cottage, shining yellow, lighting their own peeling sills and rhomboids on the road and patches of hedge. He smelled the acrid coal-smoke but couldn’t make out the chimneys. Apart from the owl squeezing out those clear hooting notes, and the falling drops from the tree branches, everything was still—a stillness he was unused to. He had forgotten that; had it always been like that? He heard his feet and his sigh, and anxiety gripped him by the throat. He was aware of having looked for someone and found no one, only the hiding dark and the sea-mist at the windows and the stillness, all suggesting their opposites: the bright clamor of a surprise, like a phantom huntsman waiting on a horse in the hills that lay in that blackness, who chose not to show himself. He had come back for that.

He tried to tell Emma his fear. As he spoke he felt it all retreating on his tongue.

“Oh, I once heard an owl,” she said. She was tasting the soup. “I once heard an owl in London.”