He and the girl got out of the pirogue and lugged it onto the sand; it was quite an effort. Their voices were loud in this uninhabited place. His shorts rolled thigh — high, he waded in precaution from one end of the inlet to the other; but there were no reeds, no half — submerged logs that might suddenly come to life. “I think it’s perfectly safe.” The children were already naked. She began to climb out of her clothes with the hopping awkwardness of a woman taking off trousers — she was wearing a bathing suit underneath, a flowered affair that cut into her thighs and left white weals in the sun — browned flesh as she eased it away from her legs. She ran into the warm water, jogging softly, with a small waddling fat black child by one hand and a skinny white one gaily jerking and jumping from the other.
He had stretched himself out on the sand but stood up and kept watch while they were in the water, his short — sighted gaze, through his glasses, patrolling the limpid pallor and shimmer in which they were immersed. The black baby was a startlingly clear shape all the time, the others would disappear in some odd elision of the light, only a shoulder, a raised hand, or the glisten of a cheek taking form. Where no one lives, time has no meaning, human concerns are irrelevant — an intense state of being takes over. For those minutes that he stood with his hand shading his eyes, the most ancient of gestures, he was purely his own existence, outside the mutations of any given stage of it. He was returned to himself, neither young nor middle — aged, neither secreting the spit of individual consciousness nor using it to paste together the mud — nest of an enclosing mode of life. He smoked a cigar. He might have been the smoke. The woman and children shrieked as a fish exploded itself out of the water, mouth to tail, and back again in one movement. He saw their faces, turned to him for laughing confirmation, as if from another shore.
She brought the children back and stood gasping a little and pressing back from her forehead her wet hair, so that runnels poured over neck and shoulders, beading against the natural waxiness of the skin. “It’s — so — glorious — pity — you — didn’t—” She had no breath; undecided, she went in again by herself, farther out, this time. He felt he could not stand watching her alone. It would be an intrusion on her freedom, out there. He sat with his arm on one knee, vigilant without seeming so, sweeping his glance regularly across the water. That wet, femininely mobile body, tremblingly fleshy, that had stood so naturally before him just now, the sodden cloth of the bathing suit moulding into the dip of the navel and cupping over the pubis, the few little curly hairs that escaped where the cloth had ridden up at the groin — so this was what he had made love to. This was what had been there, that he had— “possessed” was a ridiculous term, he had no more possessed it than he did now by looking at it. This was what he had entered. Even “known,” that good biblical euphemism, was not appropriate. He did not know that body — he saw now with compassion as well as male criticalness, as she was coming out of the water towards him a second time, that the legs, beautiful to the knee, with slim ankles, were thick at the thigh so that the flesh “packed” and shuddered congestedly. She stretched out near him; she was sniffling, smiling with the pleasure of the water. No one was there except the two small children. He said to her as he might have said in a meeting in another life, “I’m sorry about what happened.”
The words lay with the sun on her closed eyelids. After a moment, she said, guardedly, “Why?”
He felt culpable of having heard her talked about in the capital. He didn’t answer at once.
“Because it’s as if it never happened.”
“Then that’s all right,” she said. She lay quite still; presently she sat up and asked for a cigarette, bundling the towel round herself with a complete lack of vanity.
“It’s almost like the beaches at Lake Malawi.”
“Is it? I never ever got to Malawi. We were going there on local leave the year I was kicked out, so it never came off. We used to picnic here with my children, years ago.”
“This beach?” she said.
“Oddly enough, I’ve never been to this particular beach before — didn’t know it existed, till we found it today. — Farther along, we used to go, up past Execution Rock, you know: on the main shore.”
“What’s Execution Rock?”
“You don’t know the legend? Well, closer to us than a legend, really. The Dolo, the tribe of the paramount chief around here, used to have a trial of endurance for their new chief — elect. Before he could take office he had to swim from the mainland to the island. If he managed it, he would be rowed back in triumph. If not, he was supposed to be carted off and executed by being thrown from Execution Rock. That part of it’s never been done in living memory, but the channel swim was still carried out until very recent times — the predecessor of the present chief did it. He was still alive when we came to live here.”
She said, “Is your wife as attached to this place as you are?”
He smiled, half — pleased, half — misunderstood— “Am I so attached?”
She did not want to presume on any knowledge of him. “But you’ve come back.”
“I can’t go explaining to everybody — but how difficult it is when people impose an idea of what one does or is.… And others take it up, so it spreads and goes ahead….” (He realized, with quick recovery, that while he was ostensibly speaking of himself he was suddenly doing so in paraphrase of thoughts about her, the image of her as presented by their friends in the capital, that he had steered away from a few minutes before.) “Coming back’s a kind of dream, a joke — we used to talk about my part after Independence like living happily ever after. Mweta was in and out of jail, I was the white man who’d become victim, along with him, of the very power I’d served. I was a sort of symbol of something that never happened in Africa: a voluntary relinquishment in friendship and light all round, of white intransigence that can only be met with black intransigence. I represented something that all Africans yearned for — even while they were talking about driving white people into the sea — a situation where they wouldn’t have had to base the dynamic of their power on bitterness. People like me stood for that historically unattainable state — that’s all.” He thought, am I making this up as I go along? Did I always think it? — I did work with Mweta, in London, on practical things: the line delegations took, proposals and memoranda and all the rest of the tug — of-war with the Colonial Office. “But the idea persists … Aleke thinks, now, Lebaliso’s been removed at my pleasure. I can see that. He tells me this morning about Lebaliso being given the boot as if remarking on something I already know.” He gave a resigned, irritated laugh. Of course, she would be not supposed to know about Lebaliso — Aleke’s typist. But it gave him some small sense of freeing himself by refusing to respect the petty decencies of intrigue. He knew nothing about Lebaliso’s transfer, and had as little right as she to hear it before the man did himself. “There was a young man — Lebaliso beat him up, in the prison here. He was being detained without being charged. I found out by chance.”