“You know — I got business there now. I send goods already three time — thirty thousand francs. Pay in Switzerland. Not Congo.” He roared with laughter at the old story. “But you sick, Madame Edouard? What makes this—” He drew his ringed hands dolefully down his face. “You short money?”
“No, nothing. I’m all right. — I’ll see you again when I come out? I’ve got to go and look for Mrs. Wentz.”
“Anytime. Anytime. Look like I stay for Christmas.”
Her fingers felt damp and twitchy. When he had drawn that face, only succeeding in looking comic, she had felt tears coming back to her suddenly again. At the Bayleys’ she had gone dry: as you speak of a cow going dry.
Margot Wentz had let her hair outgrow its dye. While they talked she looked all the time at that inch or two of speckled white and gilt at Margot’s hairline. It was perhaps a sign of private mourning. They sat in the little sitting-room at the round table with the fringed cloth. Coffee was set out ready, with thin silver teaspoons and a silver cream jug in the shape of a tulip. They discussed Hjalmar as if he had had an illness and had been advised to go to Gala to recuperate. Rebecca said he had been looking much better lately. The work he was doing, pottering about the garden, seemed good for him. She said, in a sort of final explanation for everything that was left unsaid: “He offered to stay to look after the house,” and a look of trapped distress came over Margot Wentz’s face because now they had come up inevitably against what had happened: to that day when Rebecca and Bray left Gala. Every time Bray’s name had occurred in Rebecca’s account of Hjalmar’s life in Gala, Margot’s left cheek had moved a little as if a string jerked inside there, but now she could not avert herself any longer. She said something about that terrible business, about what a wonderful man he was; she stared at Rebecca, unable to go on. She looked magnificent; hers (unlike Loulou’s) was a face made to express tragedy.
They drank more coffee and Rebecca asked about the hotel and the son, Stephen. “No one knows what will happen,” Margot said, almost grandly. “I have no money to go, if I want to. And even if we want to, the airport is closed. I suppose the frontiers too. Hjalmar wouldn’t be any better off here—” and then remembered that if he had not stayed to “look after the house” he might have been dead, and had again that look of dislocation that Rebecca saw her presence brought to people’s faces. Rebecca asked about the daughter and that was better; she was settling down in London— “Of course, there are all the things Emmanuelle never had, all the concerts and recitalsmusic is her life, you know.” When she got up to leave, Margot said to her, “Rebecca, if you should need anything. I don’t know what — somewhere to stay, perhaps?” But she thanked her, there was nothing, she was staying with the Bayleys of course. “I see you’ve an old friend of ours in the hotel — the famous Loulou Kamboya.”
“Oh him.” Margot’s voice was dry. “He’s travelling with his own prostitutes, never mind his drivers and secretaries. It’s a good thing for my licence the police’ve got other things to do, or I’d be in trouble for running a brothel.”
Loulou was on the lookout for her and left his friends sitting drinking beer on the veranda of one of their rondavels. “You don’t want have a little drink? No? Come I show you in my limousine my business I’m making nowdays—” He had dressed in pale blue linen trousers and, despite the heat, a brown mohair sweater with a gold thread in the knit. He wore it over his bare chest, where a gold chain followed the crease of fat round the base of his neck and ended in a big medallion with a red stone. The tail of some sort of civet hung from the leopard skin hat. The great rear bay of the car was filled with specially made cases, travelling-salesman style, but with the Loulou touch — locks of scrolly gilt and red plastic crocodile covers. “From U.S., from U.S.” He was selling the same old stuff — ivory paper knives and necklaces, crude copies of the famous seated figure of King Lukengu carved for him by the dozen in some Bakuba village up in the Kasai, masks decorated with cowrie shells and copper, made not for dancing but for the walls of white people’s houses. “If I can’t go Jewburg, I think now I like go over Portuguese side myself now tomorrow. I sell this; is not so bad place there … here, I make for you petit cadeau … yes, yes you take—” and she had to find a pair to fit her out of a bundle of gold — heeled sandals with thongs made of the skin of some poor beast. “Madame Edouard, but for why you sick, eh?” He stood back and shook his head over her, well aware that presents would not help. An African xylophone was being played up and down the Silver Rhino to announce lunch and his entourage rose with a screech of chairs, chattering and arguing, the girls laughing in their special careless, loose-shouldered way, waving about pretty black hands with painted fingernails like opalescent scales, breasts bobbing, earrings swinging, little black pigtails standing out all over their heads. He called some sarcastic-sounding remark, but all that happened was more giggles and one of the girls put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot so that her bracelets jiggled and so did her round backside in her tight pagne.
Rebecca was almost at the Bayleys’ when she turned and drove back to the Silver Rhino. They were sitting at lunch, their chairs tipped this way and that, the waiters pounding and sweating round them, beer bottles being handed up and down, Loulou at the head. Wherever he went he carried with him the atmosphere of an open — air African nightclub. “Are you really going?” “To Portuguese? Yes, I tell you — this place is enough. And the plane — nothing. I go. — I go there one time already, is not bad….”
She said, “Could I come with you, Loulou — would you take me.”
“For sure I take you! For sure! Demain? Sais-tu venir? You plenty bagage and biloko?”
The Bayleys did not know what to say to her. “And when you get there? What will you do?”
“I can get a plane.”
Vivien said, “You’ll go to South Africa then.”
She shook her head.
“Where will you go Rebecca?” Vivien spoke gently.
She told them about the money Bray had sent to Switzerland.
“Don’t repeat that story to anyone else. Not even your friend Loulou,” Neil Bayley said. Vivien was silent.
“I think I’ll go and take the money.”
They did not ask any more questions.
Vivien gave her a camel-hair coat she had brought from England: “It’s almost winter in Europe — you’ve got no warm clothes.” She had the two cotton dresses they had made, the old jeans and shirt (washed, no trace of red earth), the picnic basket and Bray’s briefcase. Neil had had to ask her to let him look in it for Bray’s passport and other papers but he had given it back to her.
Neil came into the bedroom where she and Vivien stood with the coat. “What about the air ticket?”
“I’ll borrow the money from Loulou.”
Neil nodded: Loulou was her husband’s associate, the matter of the money would be easily arranged. She said at once, “He’ll be pleased to have me pay in Swiss francs.”
When Neil had left the room, she said to Vivien, “I’ll never live with Gordon again,” and Vivien stood there, looking at the coat without seeing it, pressing her thumbnail between her front teeth.
They gave her one of their suitcases. When she had packed, it was still half — empty. Up to the moment she left they seemed to feel both somehow responsible to stop her and yet unable to offer any reason why she should not go. “I don’t think he’ll ever get through the border,” Neil offered. “Specially him. It’s probably known he’s done some gun — running in Katanga in his time.”