He came from the office — merely across a loggia in another part of the Embassy complex, all of their life was securely under one roof — and saw Hillela, many afternoons, sitting among a tumble of children and cushions, the children’s limbs tangled close about her, their hands playing with her hair or fingers.
— Come, papa, it’s a guessing game. Come and play.—
— Papa, there’s a lion and two hippos and they want to eat him up but he won’t come into the water — Hillela’s telling that story again because it’s such a nice one …—
Smiling at him from among his children, her face as firm and clear as theirs; with his arrival, domestic content was perfectly rounded.
She did not have many duties — duty being what does not come naturally — in that posting, where the Ambassador was temporarily relieving a colleague recalled. In a French-speaking city, Marie-Claude had found more friends, liked to do her own shopping in boutiques run by French people who had stayed on under a black government civilisedly tempered, it was felt, by the fact that the President had a white French wife. Some people said the young girl in the Ambassador’s household was a housekeeper, others assumed she was a relative of Marie-Claude — and Marie-Claude did not deny, only corrected this: —No, no, no relation at all! But it’s true, she’s like a young sister, a member of the family. The children adore her. — Certainly she played tennis, took part in sightseeing and dining-out parties, as any visiting favourite from Europe experiences Africa in pursuits imported long before her.
But there were times when the surrogate was alone in the house with only the half-awareness of the presence somewhere of servants that is like the sound of her own heart to any white brought up in Africa. Alone as if she were an ambassador’s wife in a succession of interleading rooms, passing furnishings and objects with which she has no connection, interchangeable from Residence to Residence. If the Ambassador happened to come in he seized her sufferingly. Under his elegantly-hung suit his body swelled and prodded her; but that presence outside the beating of blood reminded that nothing further was permissible, not here, not now. — Look what you do to me. — He was handsome, proud. She would shake that curly head, not culpable. — You know just what you do, my little girl, don’t you.—
Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman had never been here but the town floated as flower and palm fragments, islands and isthmus, on lagoons covered with a mail of waterlilies; a breeze touched, as if it were the black rags of bats themselves, flapping the air round the streetlamps as lights threaded on across bridges. She was seen in the town, where the cry of Edith Piaf came from the bistros, but mostly she kept to the quarter of embassies, villas and hotels. Regularly a young First Secretary from the British Embassy ran to meet her at an open-air bar for their six o’clock rendezvous. — You had better be seen with one or two young men — believe me, my treasure, no-one will believe you haven’t got a man somewhere, if they don’t see him. — A First Secretary was eminently suitable. — But you won’t sleep with him, will you? — She was such a sensible girl, she understood a man has to sleep with his wife; that was different. — You won’t, will you, eh? — When there was a sortie to a nightclub, where the presence of wealthy local blacks and the strident sexual beauty of black prostitutes was the amusement, Marie-Claude appointed the young First Secretary to partner her protégée. Emile danced with her dutifully once or twice, flirting publicly in exactly the harmless degree expected of the married males in homage to the irresistibility of the female sex that had, of course, delivered them to their wives.
Boutique, bistro, bar, nightclub — these were the marked routes of the diplomatic and expatriate community. There was a path of her own drawn through the grass; the grass closed it away behind her. It led across one of those stretches of ground that are called vacant lots in the cities of other continents; here it was a vacant patch in history, a place where once manioc had been grown and goats had wandered, now appearing on some urban development plan as a sports or cultural centre that would never be built. A tiny scratching of planted maize was hidden in the grass, like a memory. Her path crossed those made by the feet of fishermen, and servants moving from and to where she was going, the enormous hotel that multiplied itself, up and up, storey by storey, shelf by shelf of identically-jutting balconies and windows that eventually had nothing to reflect but sky. There was no other structure to give it scale, nothing to dissimulate its giant intrusion on the low horizons of islands and water, that drew the eye laterally. Even the great silk cotton tree and the palms left as a sign of its acculturation when the site was cleared were reduced to the level of undergrowth beside its concrete trunk.
Inside, the scale of unrelation, of disjuncture continued; through ceremonial purplish corridors she walked, past buried bars outlined like burning eyelids with neon, reception rooms named for African political heroes holding a silent assembly of stacked gilt chairs, crates of empty bottles and abandoned mattresses, sudden encounters with restaurant stage-props — plastic palm trees and stuffed monkeys from some Tropicana Room, rolled-up carpets from the Persian Garden. At the white grand piano outside a locked entrance where photographs of girls whom gilt text dated the previous year announced as direct from the Crazy Horse in Paris, she turned to a bank of elevator doors like the reredos of some cathedral. Her path was always the same; through the grass, through the carpeted tunnels of corridors, the soughing ascent to the same floor. She had her key to the room; the bed was big as the one in Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman’s fake palace. The Ambassador came by some path of his own through this dark ziggurat, pyramid, Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building raised to the gods of development; he could arrange everything as he arranged immigration papers. He shed the Ambassador. What a pleasure to be able to give so much pleasure! Enough to turn any young person’s head. One day when he made love to her he smelled his children on her. It was a great sweetness to him; it brought the two halves of his life together as they had never been before. An annealment, wholeness; a new eroticism.
— You have simplified everything.—
— Why me? — He had not concealed, despite the risk at the beginning that a young girl might have been shocked or even jealous, and withdrawn herself, that he had had many love affairs.
— I don’t know, I don’t want to know. Simplicity is the one thing that can’t be explained. Not that you are simple, Hillela. You won’t get away with that, my little girl! But that you are clever enough to make things simple.—
— Emile, why do you like other women so much? — She knew that was her category.
— Oh you are young, Hillela, you are still at the stage when you ask all the questions, you don’t propose any answers.—