I swam about a bit and then floated in the tepid calm with her for nearly an hour. After the dreary wet summer and the cold wet autumn at home — after a whole lifetime of dreary English winters and wet English springs — I was enchanted with the slack, warm beauty of the place. I seemed to feel an actual physical melting, as if some component of my blood that had remained insoluble for twenty-six years of English climate had suddenly, wonderfully, dissolved into free-flowing. I gazed in lazy physical joy at the lovely, smooth-patterned boles of the coconut palms, waving their far-off bouquets of green away above our heads, the water, and the white beach. I lifted an arm out of the water to feel the air, warm as the water. I dug my feet into the clean sand, so soft its substance was soft as the water. The last jagged crystal in my English blood melted away.
But Stella Turgell talked of Italy. Warmth and beauty and physical happiness meant Italy to her, though they might be experienced on a beach on the East Coast of Africa. She and her daughter had just spent nearly two months in Florence, and apparently Stella spent several months of each year somewhere in Italy — in Rome, Perugia, Venice, Garda, and, always, Florence. They did not seem to me to be really rich people, and I wondered what circumstances in their background gave them this freedom. Stella’s passion for Italy was nineteenth-century, Byronic — the nearest I can possibly bring it to the present day is to say that when it came to Italy and all things Italian, she saw everything like one of those young girls in Forster’s early novels about the English in Italy, girls who marry the libertine sons of dentists in places with names like Poggibonsi, or whose lives are changed irrevocably after being spectator to an Italian quarrel in an Italian square. The Italy of Moravia and the realist films did not exist for her. Her way of talking about Italy embarrassed me, even when we confined ourselves to discussing paintings and churches, though my mood that day when we were floating in the sea was such that nothing could irritate or embarrass me more than mildly.
As she talked I saw that her months in Italy were her life, so far as she was concerned; the rest of her time, spent, apparently, between her mother’s home in Devon and her husband’s farm in Northern Rhodesia, was impatiently and almost blindly lived through. Her only comment on the stay in Africa to which this voyage which we were sharing was carrying her, was to remark, closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose in pleasure at the breeze: ‘Well, six weeks from now, we’ll be on our way back. Not this way, of course. West Coast.’
‘To Europe?’
‘England. But not for long. By April I’ll be back at Pensione Bandolini.’
I pictured her, endlessly, tunelessly, coming down a hill road in Florence in the sunshine, a parasol open behind her head, pausing to smile at a bambino in the dust, waving her fluttering greeting and calling out in her clear English-voiced Italian to some peasant woman with black eyes, a black-downed lip, and ‘character’. The road, the child, the peasant — all were unreal. . I said: ‘Have you never lived in Africa?’
She said, without opening her eyes, ‘Rina was born in Rhodesia. When she was very young, I did.’
I wanted to say — that impossible question, idiotic, irresistible when you are on your way to live in a new country: What is it like? But I was aware that the fact that I was going out to live in Africa, and the fact that she was bound to it in some way, was a bond about which we never spoke; was something she would see that we stepped over or around, conversationally — something accepted and therefore not worth discussing, was it not? — her manner always seemed to imply, passing on rapidly and easily to the enchanting things about us, or left behind in the Mediterranean.
There was a moment of silence, and then she went on, lightly, almost as if I had spoken after all, ‘You must have an active and not a contemplative nature, to take Africa. My husband adores it. He rushes about the farm, completely absorbed from morning till night. The people are quite terrible. I shall never forget them. Their awful dinner parties. Awful food. Same people, same food, year after year, simply at this one’s house this week, someone else’s house the next Nothing to talk of but crops, female complaints, servants. Ugly, ugly. Nothing but ugliness.’
Suddenly she opened her eyes and drew herself upright, rising out of the water, and, shining, eager, she brought out one of her paralysing generalities again: ‘Beauty is the most important thing in life, don’t you think so?’
When people come out with statements like that, I always feel that I do not know what they are talking about. I flounder before this bold snatching-up put of the half-sensed, dimly-realized things I have only now and then thought I might have touched for a moment. Is this great glittering flashy fish what it was that brushed my hand then and then, rarely? Is that all — this impossible great artefact? I recoil from it. If that’s the case, I shan’t let my perception wander down there again.
I was sure that whatever this woman meant by ‘beauty’, whatever the word was a cover for, was the most important thing in her life. But I could not answer for it for myself, certainly not yet, not then. I said something empty, noncommittal, the kind of remark Americans put with glee into the mouths of the English in films. We came out of the water together, and parted to dress.
Just as we were walking back over the sand to where our taxi was waiting under the palms, we saw the long-legged figure of Rina, flying down a path through the bushes toward us. Some people from the ship who had hired a taxi to take a look around had dropped her at the beach. ‘Here, darling,’ said Stella, throwing her swimming suit to the girl. ‘Hop in quickly. It’s heavenly.’ But Rina would not swim. Stella went back to her dressing-place to fetch a towel she had forgotten, and the girl said, nibbling at a leaf she had in her hand: ‘I’m so glad mummy’s had such a lovely morning.’ I thought, what an odd, patronizing child she is; what queer creatures English girls’ schools turn out. (Already I found myself thinking of England and English institutions objectively.)
The taxi took the three of us up to the beach hotel and waited while we had tepid gin slings and a poor lunch. ‘Ugh!’ Stella made a face, though she laughed: ‘The moment you put your foot back here. Anything does.’
The warm gin made me feel benevolent. I even found myself bantering quite pleasantly with Rina. ‘We should have found an Indian restaurant in the town,’ she said.’ I’d have liked something hot and sharp to eat.’
We decided, anyway, not to risk the hotel coffee, but to go back to town and look for an Arab café. We did not find one, but trailing back in the direction of the docks, we passed a place that looked like an unsuccessful compromise between a continental café and a tea-shop. It was not quite open to the street and not quite enclosed. People sat, raised back from the street, and looked out from behind the briars and scrolls of a wrought iron shopfront which had been put up in place of the customary glass. The consul and his two women were sitting there, and they called down to us. We were burningly thirsty and we went in and sat at an adj-joining table. The consul’s party were just finishing lunch, and their coffee looked terrible, so, rather foolishly, at half past two on an afternoon of great heat, I ordered John Collinses for us. The place smelled of grilled steak and the drinks were a long time coming. A big fan went slowly in the middle of the ceiling, cutting up and pushing round shoal after shoal of warm air; it was odd to feel the movement of air past one’s face, entirely without the coolness associated with such movement. The place was almost empty and against the imitation log-cabin bar, a tall African waiter in a limp white robe and a red fez slept bolt upright. He wore fancy socks and a shabby version of the sort of pointed-toed patent dancing-shoes I had once seen in my father’s cupboard. His was the sweaty monkey-face that I associate with the few new-born babies I’ve been unable to avoid seeing; the sweat made it interesting by creating planes and highlighting creases that gave it that same innocent ancientness. The consul, who was sitting back with his elbow hooked round one of the iron curlycues on his chair, saw me looking at the man and waved his hand; a hand that, in movement, always looked as if it were giving an order. ‘There you are. Can you believe in the Mau Mau, here? We’re only three hundred miles from Nairobi, this is Kenya. You couldn’t credit it. Pangas and burnings. . And look at that. Wouldn’t want to harm a fly. . ’ As if to prove the consul’s point, a fly settled on the sleeping face and crawled up the left cheek from mouth to eye.