— That’s what makes the easy life tough in the States. — A glance, to see her laugh. — It’s happened to me, too. But what about the other way round? The other side of the world? Got to wear a different hat there, êh.—
— People seem — older.—
— Not so much innocence and icecream.—
— The trouble there’s more likely to be they’re on to everything you haven’t said, when you ask or answer … But your hat’s always the one with gold braid, everywhere.—
— The best place is here and now, on this road in Africa, with no hat on at all. Bare head, bare-foot. The chance doesn’t come too often. (His passenger had taken off her sandals and was lying back with her feet up on the dashboard.) D’you want to drive for a bit? The road will be passing through the Tsavo reserve soon and we can’t change over among the lions.—
In command of a hired car, alone in the front with a casual acquaintance asleep on the rear seat (—I need to be fresh for what I have to do when we arrive—) there was in this trivial and marginal circumstance a sense of being that really belonged with permanence, not a day-trip. He rumbled a little, an inactive but not extinct volcano, back there. She snuffed at the old hot smells of grass digested and excreted, of wet grass growing, blowing with the wind-flow of her speed, that flushed away the scent of after-shave. The road was empty; the rump of a buck or two whom the approach of the car startled long before she was close enough to see more. At a detour she scarcely slowed down on the loop of sand road. The car sang a different tune, shuddering softly over corrugations beneath a fluffy surface. Then the wheel was wrenched away under her hands — she clutched at it, shocked, almost laughing, on a roller-coaster — and the space that enclosed her and the sleeping man went wild, displaced fiercely this way and that, back and forth across the road. She had her foot down on the brake as if on the stirrup of a bucking monster, the wheel twirled uselessly, the enclosed space tilted sideways, righted, tilted completely, she was upside-down, struck on the head, feeling at the same instant a huge thud at her back.
The car landed on its four wheels and careered away through grass and trees, hitting nothing and coming to a stop where its own momentum ended. She had been thrown into the empty seat beside her. She saw him struggling up from the floor behind with the grouchy clumsiness of someone inconsiderately woken by a shake on the arm. He must have unfastened the buckle of his elegant belt for ease before he took a nap, and his first instinct was to close it dignifiedly. She began to laugh. He saw her laughing at him with eyes shaking and glittering with tears. The tears splashed onto her mouth: he laughed at her. — My God, what did you do? What did you do?—
She could not stop laughing. — Woke you up. Sorry I woke you up.—
— My God, what did you do?—
Their amazement at being unhurt turned to euphoria. The doors were not jammed; they got out of the car and examined each other, knees, arms, heads. — Are you sure you’re all right? You can’t be all right? — But I am! Maybe a bump’ll come up here on my head. — He took her head entirely between his hands and felt it all over. — Does it hurt here? Here? — No. No. Just a little there, where I told you.—
— No sign of a cut. You should let your hair grow, it’s a protection. — Idiot, idiot I am, I braked. Everyone’s taught never to brake in a skid. I knew it, but I didn’t do it.—
He got into the car and it started at the turn of the ignition key. Their faces exchanged triumph as he looked up at her through the window. — I’ve never before believed in miracles. — But I’m a Catholic, so I do.—
Slowly rolling back to the road; she gave a little shudder and put her hand, as if to steady herself, on his broad knee as he drove. It was the touch with which they had examined each other for hurt. Quiet and emptiness of the landscape closed over the startling rupture as if it had never happened. A few hundred yards from where they had broken into the environment with their steel capsule gone amuck, he stopped the car, took up her hand and pointed it into the trees. Five or six elephants were browsing there at various distances, to be made out, patiently, one by one, by the fan of ears like giant leaves among dark foliage or the stir of a tree-trunk become a huge foot; had been there in their vast and dreamy existence, outside the short violent incident taking place in human time. If the skid had happened a few hundred yards farther along the road, the car would have burst down upon the beasts with an alien present. The car and its occupants could have been crumpled like a chocolate wrapper under their rage. The travellers sat in silence watching life on this grand scale of size and time. — It’s not so easy to kill me. It’s been tried three times. — He was looking out turned half-towards her with his elbow leaning on the open window and his hand hanging on the steering wheeclass="underline" a face composed always to be observed, ambivalent nuance erased, features boldly and definitively simplified for emphasis. A face for a postage stamp.
— Shall I tell you something? — From the moving car the forest scrub they were passing through again appeared uninhabited. They were alone as human beings are alone only among animals. — What I’m going to do when we get there? Certain people I’m going to meet? Nobody else in the world knows this, it’s going to happen in Mombasa because in Nairobi everyone’s got big ears. I’m going to meet people who are willing to kidnap my son.—
Willing? But she asked nothing, her attention fixed hovering on the hieroglyph of a profile. The small nose, whose nostrils rested low and broad seen full-face, was curved, polished along an arch of bone like a weapon lodged in the flesh.
— My son, that I trained in my own army, he was one of those who threw over my government. Yes, he was willing to have me killed. Now he’s going to have his chance: they’ll bring him to our bush headquarters and there, in the North, where we’re in control again, I’ll give him the choice — to defect to us.—
He was waiting to see if there was any need to explain what could not be said, whether the experience of this white girl with whom nothing had needed an explanation so far, went so far as to ‘follow him’ as she would put it.
She did not ask the question. Without moving his head he slid his glance. Her head was cocked back as if she had taken a deep breath, but the full lovely breasts were stirred only regularly, calmly, shallowly. She asked a different question; and that was his answer. — Your only son?—
— No. The eldest — by the second wife. The first has daughters. My eldest — and the best of them. Right from the day he began to walk.—
Alone on an East African beach again, among strangers. The General dropped her where there was no tamarisk but the same cloisters of palms to stroll along, and a swim was a gentle engulfment through ghost-pale shallows until the body was taken, like the streak of another substance into the watery layers of an agate, into the still, clear sea. Lusaka was landlocked, Eastern Europe and the brownstone locked each year in snow, in West Africa the open surf flung high and hissing upon sand tainted with cholera. She went back into the Indian Ocean through groups of tourists talking German, English children squealing, and a few black rocks, stepped round, that were African bodies. She floated and recalled without pain the yellow swimsuit and the emergence of the obsidian arms, head and torso from the sea. The water itself washed pain away; there was only the sensuality with which it did. She floated, and had nothing in the world but a pair of jeans held together with a safety-pin.
The General did not arrive for lunch at the five-star hotel. She waited at the terrace bar, as arranged, and lazily refused the approaches of a handsome young German who had noticed her on the beach and now offered a Pimm’s Cup. As the bar emptied towards two o’clock, he did not believe she was really expecting any particular man (a girl like her would not be waiting for a woman) and came up to her again, his flat pink ears gristly clean and his blond hair marked round the hairline with dried salt. She shook her head, but with a smile that softened offence. — Anozzer time, maybe? — She ate a sandwich in place of the five-star lunch and gave the barman a note, describing to whom it was to be handed: —A large man in a blue blazer and beige pants. African.—