“Well, we might still feel like some later.”
“It won’t be hot.”
“Never mind, it’ll be wet.”
As they moved back to the car two children appeared out of the forest; or they had been there, behind the trees, patiently watching for the moment to come forward. She gave into their cupped hands the remains of the bread and cheese and the last of the eggs with small fish in them. Before the car had driven off the two frail figures had disappeared once more into the forest.
Not long after they came upon what was evidently a road-block that had been half cleared. Branches and stones had been dragged aside and there was just sufficient room for the car to pass. There was nobody about, but it was not far from the turn-off to the cattle-dipping station sixty miles from Matoko. No rain had fallen yet in this part of the country; towards three o’clock the heat and the monotonous rhythms of motion, of the hot current of air coming past the windows with the sound of someone whistling through his teeth, now made him drowsy. They changed over; Rebecca drove but he did not sleep, merely stretched himself as much as he could in the small car and rested his eyes away from the hypnotic path of the road. Now he was the one to light cigarettes for her. He had shut his eyes for a moment, when he heard her make a small sound of impatience beside him, and he roused himself and saw that up ahead, quite far, was another road-block. There was a heat — mirage that magnified the jumble of branches and green; they couldn’t make out very well whether it stretched across the whole road or not. She slowed down and they kept their eyes strained on the obstacle. But of course she could see so much better than he. “Damn it, it is right across. Now wha’d’we do?”
“Just keep going slowly.” He put his head out the window; the grass was very high, elephant grass, very dry, last season’s grass still standing; a dead tree had been dragged into the road, roots and all, broken branches had been piled upon it. She stopped and turned off the engine.
“Let’s have a look. You stay in, a minute.”
He walked slowly to the barrier, climbed over to the other side, walked up and down it and climbed back. He came to the car, smiling. “How energetic are you feeling? We’ll have to do some hard labour.” She got out and they started with the easy stuff, the broken branches. But the tree trunk, with its dead roots clasping a great boulder of red earth with which it must have been uprooted in some storm, would not budge. She began to laugh helplessly at their grunting efforts. “Wait a moment, my girl. What about trying the jack? If we get it under this hollow bit here, maybe we can get a little elevation and then heave.”
The jack wasn’t kept in the boot, in the front, but under the back seat, because the clamp that held it in its proper place had been broken ever since he bought the car. He got in and dumped the picnic basket on the front seat and jerked up the back one in a release of dust. At the same time something burst out of the grass, he felt himself grabbed by the leg, by the waist, and he was caught between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat, somehow desperately hampered by the size and strength of his body. At once there were people all round and over and in the car, there had been no sound and now there was nothing but yells and shouts and his great, his lung-bursting, muscle-tearing effort and he did not know if they were yelling, the men who were upon him, or if Rebecca was screaming. Even greater than his effort to defend himself was his terrible effort to make himself heard by her, to reach her with his voice and make her run. They had his legs out of the car and the back of his neck hit the rim of the floor and he was deafened, his voice became a silent scream to him as pain felled him for a moment, but then a brute strength burst up in him and he got to his feet, he was aware of himself staggered gigantically to his feet among men smaller than he. Then he was below them, he was looking up at them and he saw the faces, he saw the sticks and stones and bits of farm implements, and sun behind. Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a word of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I’ve been interrupted, then—
Part Six
Chapter 22
She was a long time in the culvert by the road. Her nails were full of red earth. The red earth walls, staunched with tufts of dead grass, rose on either side of her. With her head pressed against them she waited for it to happen to her, too. There was earth and saliva in her mouth. She was gulping and howling like an animal. She heard the tearing of flames and saw the thick smoke.
And then there was silence. Behind the sound of burning, nothing. The burning died away and there was only the smell and the smoke.
She had run towards him at first when they started pulling him out of the car. He had got to his feet and looked straight at her without seeing her because of that shortsightedness. But in the same split second he was brought down beneath them and the sound of the blows on the resistance of his big body sent her crazedly hurling herself through the grass, fighting it. She was turning her ankles, running, her stumbling scramble led her off down a kind of slope cut into the ground. And she was there, deep in the ditch beyond the grass. But she was not twenty yards from them, from him, and she knew it would come to her, it was no use, she was held by the walls, waiting for them.
She was sure they must be there in the silence.
She did not move. The smoke no longer poured up; it was thin, hanging in stillness. She did not know how much time passed. But the silence was empty; above, in the tops of the long grasses between her and the road, scarlet weaver-birds flicked, swung, and chirped a question. More time passed. She got up and tried to climb out of the culvert but the walls were too high. She wandered along out the way she had been driven in, up the diagonal cutting made by the roads department. She pushed weakly through the heavy grass. The car was on its side, blackened, the seats still smouldering, the road full of glass.
He was clear of it. He was in the road unharmed by the fire. Unharmed. She began to sob with joy because he was not burned, she went concentratedly but not fast — she could not move fast — towards him, towards his legs rolled apart. She walked all round him, making some sort of noise she had never heard before. Round and round him. His body — the chest, the big torso above the still narrowish male waist that he kept, for all his weight — was something staved in under the dirtied bush jacket, out of shape, but he was still there. The whole of him was there. Strange, soft-looking patches of earth and blood; but the whole bulk of him, complete. A lot of dirt and blood on the face, a sort of grimace, lips slightly drawn back as when he was trying to unscrew something tight.
Suddenly she saw that his glasses were smashed into his cheekbones. The frame lay near his ear but glass was embedded there in the firm flesh just below that tender, slightly shiny area of skin that was always protected by his glasses. The glass was pressed in so hard that the flesh was whitened and had scarcely bled. She went down on her knees and with a shaking impatience in her fingers began to try to take out the broken glass. She was concerned only not to hurt him, it was difficult to do without hurting him.
After a little while she went and sat on the white-washed milestone at the side of the road. His eyes were not open but the lids were not quite closed and showed a line of glint. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and cleaned the earth from beneath her nails, carefully, one by one. It was very hot. Sweat ran down the sides of her face and under the hair, on her neck. She watched him all the time. She became aware of a strange and terrifying curiosity rising in her; it was somehow connected with his body. She got up and went over to this body again and looked at it: this was the same body that she had caressed last night, that she had had inside her when she fell asleep.