“I’ve never been. — But just the same, you don’t come from that generation, Bray — ah yes, the old taboos still stick with you—” They lost what they had been talking about, in teasing and laughter.
After they had eaten, she was crouched at the fire and suddenly read aloud from her book: “ ‘People have to love each other without knowing much about it.’”
He was searching through a file and looked up, inattentive but indulgent.
She was leaning back on her elbow, watching him. “So you see.”
Then he understood that she was referring to himself — and Mweta.
They (he and she) had never used the word, the old phrase, between themselves, not even as an incantation, the abracadabra of love — making. “What’s the book?”
She smiled. “You remember the day you went to the fish — freezing plant? I took it before we left.” She held out the exhibit; it was Camus, The Plague—one of the paperbacks that Vivien had given him when he came to live in Gala.
Already a past in common.
What am I doing with this poor girl? To whom will she be handed on? And why do I take part in the relay?
He was teaching her the language — Gala. His method was a kind of game — to get her to start a sentence, a narrative, and if she didn’t know the right word for what she wanted to say, to substitute another. She would start off, “I was walking down the road — I went on until I passed a little house covered with … with …” “Come on.” “With … porridge …” They laughed and argued; if the sentences were not simply ridiculous, they might turn into bizarre comments on the local people, sometimes on themselves.
He fished for a cigarillo in his breast pocket and went to sit in the morris chair with the lumpy cushion, near her. She hitched herself over and leaned her back against his legs. He said in Gala, do you have to go home tonight? She answered quite correctly, looking pleased with herself as the words came, no, tonight I am going to — could not find the word “stay”—sleep at the house of my friend. And tomorrow? And yesterday? He tested her tenses and the terms of kinship he had been teaching her over the past few days. Yesterday I stayed at the house of my cousin, tomorrow I am going to my (mother’s brother) uncle, the day after that I am going to my brother — in-law’s, and on Friday I am going to my grandmother’s. “Very good!” he said in English, and switched back to Gala— “And after that will you come back to your friend?” She was an apt pupil; she remembered the one term she had not used: in Gala, there was no general word for “home,” children had to use the word for parents’ house, men referred to “the house of my wife,” and women referred to “the house of my husband.” “Wait a minute …” She went over the sentence in her mind— “Then I will go to the house of my husband.”
She had it right, paused a moment, smiling in triumph — and suddenly, as he was smiling back at her, an extraordinary expression of amazement took her face, a vein down her forehead actually became visibly distended as he looked at her. This time the game had produced something unsaid, with the uncanny haphazardness of a message spelled out by a glass moving round the alphabet under light fingers.
She tried to pass it off by saying, ungrammatically, in the non sequitur tradition of the game, my husband is away from home in the fields.
Then she said, in English, “I had a letter from Gordon. He might come to see the children.”
“So he’s coming.”
“I only heard a few days ago. You never know with him, I’ll believe it when he arrives. That’s why I haven’t said anything. But then this afternoon Suzi said that to you about the beans—”
“When?” he said.
Now that she had confessed she was unburdened, at ease, almost happy. “This next week. If he does.”
But he knew she knew that the man was coming — the day, the date. He said, “What will you do?”
She said, “He’ll probably stay at the Fisheagle Inn. Edna really hasn’t a bed for him.”
She would have arranged everything; after all, she sewed curtains against the arrival of Olivia.
She spent the night at “her friend’s.” She lay in the bath, her body magnified by the lens of water, and, while he gazed at her, said dreamily, “I don’t suppose Olivia will ever know about me.”
“I suppose not.”
“You wouldn’t tell her?”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t know — I would have thought you are the kind of couple who tell everything.”
We were, we were. “You’re anxious about Gordon?” Still dressed, he sat on the edge of the bath; her brown nipples stuck out of the water, hardened by the cool air, the weight of her breasts when she had suckled children had stretched the skin in a wavering watermark. It was a young (she was only twenty — nine, he knew by now), damaged body, full of knowledge. “Oh Lord no.”
“Somebody might be kind enough to tell him. I suppose everyone knows. The whole village.” He had never thought about it before; it might be a scandal, for all he knew, among what was left of the white locals. If no one had seen the pencil — torch and the two figures crossing the piece of bush in the early hours of the morning, then it was unlikely that Kalimo had not gossiped to other servants.
“I don’t think so.” She was thinking of the loyal Tlumes, the Alekes; the white people she really knew only as the parents of children who were at school with hers. “He lives in a world of his own. Just every now and then he remembers our existence. You’ll like Gordon, you’ll see. He’s a very likeable person. Everyone does.”
She might have been talking of an old friend, rather a character. He said, “I’ll believe in him when I see him.”
“Oh I know.” On an impulse she got out of the bath and streaming wet, with wet fingers, undid his shirt and pants and pressed herself against him, a contact at once nervously unpleasant and yet delightful.
Early in the morning he woke with a fierce contraction of dismay, it seemed because Kalimo was at the door and she was still there — they must have overslept. His clenched heart swept this knowledge into some other anguish, left from the day before. Kalimo opened the door but did not bring in coffee. In fact, it was much earlier than coffee — time, and he had come to tell Bray that there was someone to see him. Bray half — understood, and forgot the girl, calling out, “Kalimo, what on earth is it all about — say what you mean, come here—” And Kalimo opened the door and stood facing the bed, after one quick glance not seeming to see, either, the woman stirring. “Mukwayi, he say he the brother of your friend, there — there—”
Outside the kitchen door, under the skinny paw — paws in the strangely artificial light of dawn, a young man stood hunched against the chill.
Shinza wanted to see him. “At Major Boxer’s place! He’s there now?”
“Yes. Or you can tell me what day you are going to come. He will come there.”
He watched the man off, one of those figures in shirt and trousers who are met with on all the roads of the continent, miles from anywhere ahead, miles from anywhere behind, silent and covering ground. The red sun came up without warmth behind the paw — paw trees, as between the fingers of an outstretched hand. It struck him full in the eyes and he turned away. He walked round the front of the house and stood under the fig. As many arms as Shiva, and dead — still, always stiller than any other tree, even in the calm and silent morning, because its foliage was so sparse, in old age, that air currents did not show. It was surrounded by its own droppings; fruit that had dried without ripening and fallen, dead leaves, grubs and cocoons. She came out of the house dressed, looked once behind her and then came over to him.