The house they had bought, filled with possessions that had been stored all the years they were in Africa, the garden they had made, spoke for them. It was not a house to be quitted.
“They expect you back,” she said with pride.
“Adamson was in the flush of victory, all right. I think he’d have embraced Henry Davis.” Davis was the settler M.P. who had been responsible, at one stage, for getting Mweta banished to the far Western Province.
“He naturally assumes you’ll come out of exile.” They laughed. But they were talking of Mweta; the strange shyness of twenty-two years of marriage made it impossible for her to say: Do you want to go? The passionate beginning, the long openness and understanding between them should have meant that she would know what he wanted. And in a way she did know: because it was for them a code so deeply accepted that it had never been discussed-one was available wherever one was of use. What else was there to live by? And so the question of what they were talking about really amounted to her hidden, pressed-down, banked-over desire to know whether this house, this life in Wiltshire, this life — at last — seemed to him the definitive one, in the end. Because she was suddenly realizing that it had been so for her. She was, after all (in the true sense of after all that had gone before) an Englishwoman. She had taken out of storage the furniture and family possessions that had been nothing but a nuisance to her when they left England together twenty years ago, and, putting them in place, inevitably had accepted the life the arrangement of such objects provided for, and her comfortable private income made possible. In the room they had decided upon for his study, the desk from her great-grandfather that had naturally become his — a quiet field of black-red morocco scratched with almost erased gold — was a place to write the properly documented history of the territory (Mweta’s country) that had never been done before; not the boxwood Colonial Office desk at which one dealt with government forms and made the empirical scribbles of administration or politics, written one day and screwed into a ball the next.
In the scented, mothy evening she felt the presence of the house like someone standing behind her. She did not know whether he felt it too; and she could not try to find out because if it turned out that he didn’t — she had a premonition, sometimes, that in middle age you could find you had lost everything in a moment: husband-lover, friend, children, it was as if they had never happened, or you had wandered off from them without knowing, and now stood stock-still with the discovery.
They watched the moths in the tobacco flowers. She said in her sensible, inquiring, Englishwoman’s voice behind which generations of her kind had sheltered, “Did Mweta say how long?”
“It was very much a gesture! He was tremendously in the air!”
“No, but he’d already mentioned it yesterday, isn’t that so? You misunderstood him yesterday. A year? Six months? — What?”
White people given appointments in African countries after independence were usually employed on contract. “Good Lord, I’ve no idea, I’m sure he hasn’t either. It’s all in the air.”
Olivia went in to change the record and because it was, unexpectedly, Mozart — the harp and flute concerto — he lit a cigar to smoke while he enjoyed it. She wandered down to the herb garden and brought back a branch of dill; “There he is,” she said. It was their owl, a youngster who had hatched out down in the field and was heard every night. She remarked that tomorrow she must pick the dill for drying. Everything was just as it was. But everything was changed. All had turned over in the barrel of the world and steadied itself again. She knew, if he didn’t, that he was going.
It was night in Europe all the way. Dark rain in the afternoon in London when the plane took off, at Rome the airport a vast, bleary shopwindow shining blurred colours through rain. He hauled down his coat again to get out at Athens. The metal rail of the steps wheeled against the plane was icy-wet to his palm and in the streaming rain he did not smell the Aegean or thyme, as he had remembered from other journeys to Africa. Inside the airport under the yellow light the passengers sat down again on exhausted-looking chairs, bundled deep in their heavy clothing. An old woman with crinkly grey hair woke up at her post outside the lavatory and opened the door, smiling and grasping a filthy cleaning rag. He walked around to ease the cramp in his knees but there was a small circumference and within a few strides one found oneself back again at the shop, before which women and child passengers were drawn to gaze at embroidered aprons and evzone dolls. A girl of ten or eleven with the badges of the cantons of Switzerland sewn to the sleeve of her coat had exactly the look of Venetia at that age. He bought a postcard of brilliant blue sea and dazzling white ruins and tried to write, in what he could remember of Greek: Winter and darkness here but in Cambridge, perhaps, there’s already spring yelling its head off? My love to you, James. Venetia had had a first in Greek, herself, only a year ago, and could laugh over the mistakes.
But that was the end of Europe. At Kano a huge moon shone and in a light brighter than a European winter afternoon the passengers made their way across the tarmac at three in the morning against the resistance of a heat of the day persisting all through the night as the sun persists in a stone it has warmed. There was a smell of wood-smoke; the men moving about beneath the belly of the plane had bare black feet. When the passengers climbed aboard again, their clothes felt hairy and the plane was airless. He put the coat away on the rack, apologizing, trying not to hamper other people in the general move to rearrange gear; the anticipation of arrival, still some hours off, aroused in them not so much common purpose as a spread of instinct, as in the lifted heads of a herd become aware of the promise of water. When the sun rose some slumped off into sleep, but women began to examine the plastic bags in which they kept their hats, and, as the hard beams of the sun struck into the cabin on hairnets, pale lips, and stubble, queues formed for the lavatories. While he was writing on the customs and immigration form, BRAY, Evelyn James, and the number of his passport, someone was reading his name over his shoulder; he flexed it awkwardly, not because he minded, but in mild embarrassment. The queue for the lavatory moved along a notch, he glanced up and the man, carrying a flowered sponge-bag, caught his eye with a tired vacant stare that changed to an expression of greeting. The woman who had dozed beside him all night communicating the intimate rhythm of her breathing but never exchanging a word, suddenly began to talk like a bird who has the cover taken off its cage. He wedged himself between the seats to recover the shoe she had lost somewhere over a distant desert; she laughed, protested apologetically, and shook cologne down into her freckled bosom. Dragging back the little curtain from the oval window, she looked into the dazzling glare of space and said, “Glorious morning up here!” and they discussed with animation the cold and sudden winter that was left behind.
As he did not have a window seat he did not see the bush and the earth red as brick-dust and the furze of growth along the river-beds: not until the plane had come to a stop on the runway, and they were waiting for the health inspector to come aboard. He unhooked his safety belt and leaned over to look at an angle through the bleary lens on the far side of the aisle; and there it was, tiny and distorted and real, bush, earth, exactly as it remained in his mind always, without his thinking about it. It was underfoot. It was around. A black man in khaki shorts (used to be a white man in white stockings) sprayed a cloyingly perfumed insecticide over the passengers’ heads as a precaution against the plane harbouring mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The doors opened; voices from without came in on currents of air; he emerged among the others into heady recognition taken in at all the senses, walking steadily across the tarmac through the raw-potato whiff of the undergrowth, the fresh, early warmth on hands, the cool metallic taste of last night’s storm at the back of the throat, the airport building with the five pink frangipani and the enclosure where out-of-works and children still hooked their fingers on the diamondmesh wire and gazed. The disembarking passengers were all strangers again, connected not with each other but to the mouthing, smiling faces and waving hands on the airport balcony. He knew no one but the walk was processional, a reception to him, and by the time he entered the building over the steps where, as always, dead insects fallen from the light during the night had not been swept away, it was all as suddenly familiar and ordinary as the faces other people were greeting were, to them. Waiting to be summoned to the customs officers’ booths, the companions of the journey ignored each other. Only the man with the flowered sponge-bag, as if unaware of this useful convention, insisted on a “Here we are again” smile. “You’re Colonel Bray?” He spoke round the obstacle of a woman standing between them. “Thought I recognized you in Rome. Welcome back.” “I must confess I don’t remember you. I’ve been away a long time.” The man had long coarse strands of sun-yellowed hair spread from ear to ear across a bald head and wore sunglasses that rested on fine Nordic cheekbones. “I’ve only just come to live here — from down South. South Africa.” He made a resigned grimace assuming understanding— “My wife and I decided we couldn’t stick it any longer. So we try it out here. I don’t know; we’ll see. I read you were coming back, there was an article in the paper, my wife Margot sent it to me in Switzerland, so I thought it was you. You were just in front of me when we got out in Rome.”