The plane did not leave until six in the evening on the second day. She bought a bottle of shampoo and washed her hair and went to the little square to dry it in the morning sun. A ragged old black man in a cap with the coat-of-arms of the town was splattering a hose on the coarse leaves of the shrubs. There were no English newspapers but the reception desk at the hotel displayed a wire stand with Time and Newsweek for the foreign businessmen who sat at all times of day under the neon lights of the bar lounge, exchanging handshakes and the misunderstandings of language difficulties with local businessmen and their hangers-on. She had bought Time and turned the pages in the square while the workmen whistled at her from the scaffolding. Married, divorced, dead — actresses, members of deposed royalty, American politicians she’d never heard of. Pictures of a group of nude students burning an effigy on a towering bridge; of a Vietnamese child with her arm blown off at the elbow. Near the bottom of a page, the photograph, the name — EENY MEENY MWETA MO — WILL HE BE THE NEXT TO GO? This has been the year of the coup in Africa-half-a-dozen governments toppled since January. Good-looking good boy of the Western nations, Adamson Mweta (40) is the latest of the continent’s moderate leaders to find himself hanging on to the presidential seat-belt while riots rock his country. His prisons are full but even then he can’t be sure who, among those at large, Left or Right, is friend or foe. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, urbane anti-Communist Albert Tola Tola, is inside after rumours of an attempted takeover last month. His trusted White Man Friday, Africa expert Colonel Evelyn James Bray (54), who helped him negotiate independence, has been murdered in mysterious circumstances on the road to the capital. His one-time comrade in arms, Leftist Edward Shinza, has succeeded in stirring up an insurrection in the trade unions that has escalated from general strike to countrywide chaos. As if to prove this old friends taunts that he is no more than “the black watchman standing guard outside the white man’s enterprise,” Adamson Mweta has had to call upon Britain to send troops to his country. Will the invasion-by-invitation of the former colonial master keep him in his seat and the country’s gold and other valuable mineral resources in the hands of British and U.S. interests?
Quite short; the last of the columns under the general heading of Africa. It was Mweta’s face that she had seen — Bray’s name was come upon in the middle of the text. She read the whole thing over several times. She walked down to the promenade and back along the shops and sat down again at one of the pavement tables. Other people had their newspapers and she had the magazine lying there beside the bowl full of paper sachets of sugar. The tide was coming in round the birds’ legs. A few empty tables away a man and a small boy were concentrating on something the man was drawing. The child had his head cocked sideways, smiling in admiration, anticipation and self-importance — the drawing was being done for him. The man was ageing, one of those extremely handsome men who might have a third or fourth wife the same age as a daughter. Every now and then he lifted his head and took a look under a raised, wrinkled brow at the sea for some point of reference. It was a very dark Mediterranean face, all the beautiful planes deeply scored in now, as if age were redrawing it in a sharper, darker pencil. Brilliantly black eyes were deep-set in a contemplative, amused crinkle that suggested disappointed scholarship — a scientist, someone who saw life as a pattern of gyrations in a drop under a microscope. But he was shabbily dressed and poor looking. Perhaps an intellectual who’d got into political trouble in Portugal. The little boy hung on his arm in eagerness, hampering him. At last the picture was finished and he held it out at arm’s length against the sea and the little boy clambered down from his chair to see it properly. She could see, too — a picture of great happiness, past happiness, choppy waves frilling along, a gay ship with flags and triumphant smoke, birds sprinkled about the air like kisses on a letter. The child looked at it smiling but still in anticipation, looking for the—something—the secret marvel that exists only in children’s expectation. It was the man himself who laughed at his work in enjoyment. Then the little boy took the cue and eagerly laughed, to be with him. The child had a final pull at the straw of his orangeade and then the pair crossed the boulevard hand and hand, taking the drawing along. The man steered the child in a special kind of alert protectiveness that suggested the charge was temporary, or new; a divorced father who has abducted the child from the custody of a former wife. — But no, he was really too old to be the father; more likely a grandfather who found himself alone with a child; she had the strong impression that this was the last thing in that man’s life, all he had left.
They were gone. For ten minutes she had felt a deep interest in those two human beings. One of the birds opened its wings — she had not seen them move before — and flapped slowly away over the bay.
The plane came in late from stops farther south in Africa and by the time it took off the town was a scimitar of sparkle along the bay, a bowl of greenish light that was the sports stadium, a tilting stage — set that was the fort, and then a few glows dying out like matches on the ground. She saw nothing of the forests and deserts of the continent she was leaving for the first time, although the man in the seat beside her kept turning on his reading-light to look at the map stuffed in along with the sick-bag in the seat-pocket. Brownish shaded areas, green areas: drops of moisture shimmied outside the double window and she could not even see the darkness — only her own face. The hostess brought along a trolley of papers and there was the cover of that same number of the magazine there, and when the trolley was steered back, it was gone: somewhere along the rows of seat-backs, someone was reading it. The man who was her neighbour drank individual bottles of champagne with the air of doing so on principle rather than with any enjoyment and at an hour when at last there was no food being served and the lights had been dimmed he pressed the red button for the hostess and asked for seltzer. Since he was awake she took out of the briefcase (beside her, between her legs and the wall of the plane) the half-sheet of typing paper on which, in Bray’s handwriting, there was the name of the bank, the number of the account, and La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. She had looked at it a number of times since she had got into the plane. It was probably the last thing he had written. The cheque for Hjalmar? No, that must have been before. But she could not be sure; she did not know when he had decided to put down on that piece of paper the particulars about the account. She wouldn’t ever know if it really was the last time he was to write when he wrote: La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. There was nothing but the facts, the address, the code name. What could one find in the shape of the letters, the spacing? She searched it as the child had searched the man’s drawing.
She put the paper away in the briefcase again. Beside her there were suppressed belches.
If he had copied out (from some notebook? from memory?) the details of the account, of course, it must have been to give to her. So that she would know where to go. But if they were to be together there would be no need for her to have the piece of paper. He had put it in the briefcase, he had not given it to her. When was he going to give it to her?
But perhaps it had been in the briefcase a long time. No notebook, no commitment to memory: kept in the briefcase for the record, and automatically taken along with them when they left as part of the personal papers, his and hers, they would need together. The man at her side fell asleep and she felt her mind begin to slide, too; there was a jerky snatch of dream with Bray walking about in it, but she drew back fearfully into wakefulness. And in hours or a little while, looking out into the blue — black that was clear now, she saw a burning crust along the edge of a darker mass. She thought of a veld fire but then was aware of a narrow reflection of the fire mirrored along its shape. It was a coastline down there — the seashore and little harbours lit up all night into the early dawn while the land mass behind was asleep. Now she saw blackly glittering swells of darkness: the sea.