Soon they were well into the mountains. Every now and then they saw peaks and further peaks rising above the rain and the mist; so that after only half an hour of climbing. it seemed they were on the roof of the world, at the heart of the continent. The sunlight and the scrub, the straight black road, the hiss of the tyres, the play of light on brilliant green fields: that belonged to another country. The car bumped along the rocks; sometimes for stretches the road was strewn with cinders, which made a squelchy sound; the car was noisy, rattling, low gears always above the din of the rain. Not talking, listening for other motor vehicles, half expecting to see army lorries around every blind corner, Bobby and Linda concentrated on the shut-in road.
Occasionally now they saw· huts beside the road and wild lilies in small rain-splashed ponds. Sometimes the land fell away on one side and the black trunks of roadside trees and the wet black lower boughs, leaves dripping, framed a view of a grey-green valley: inset terraced hills, red paths going up each hill to a little stockaded grass hut, paths winding away to other, hidden valleys.
'This was what I meant,' Lindasaid. 'I never expected there would be fields here or that they would terrace up all those hills, right to the very top. I never thought of those tracks, and never thought it would look so old and settled.'
'It was the land we left them,' Bobby said.
She leaned back in her seat and took off her dark glasses, and Bobby saw that he had said the wrong thing, had struck the wrong note.
'It's absurd to think of now,' he said soon after, in another voice. 'I knew nothing at all about Africa when I came here. I was surprised to find them working iron. Somehow no one had thought of telling me that. I was really surprised. But you know that if you leave any old piece of metal lying about -'
'And not so old. Overnight your car can disappear, with only the seats left to mark the spot. They'll pick a Boeing clean in a week.'
Bobby knew the joke, but he laughed. 'I suppose I vaguely felt when I came here that they would be hostile because I was white and English and because of South Africa and things like that.'
'They don't care about South Africa.'
'That's just it. This extreme sophistication. They laugh.'
'Sammy Kisenyi was telling me that's because they're very angry.'
'Sammy exaggerates, like the politicians. Sammy likes to do the racial thing from time to time. He's really just testing you. That can be a bit of a bore. I can't bear that sort of socialistic, thirdworld pose, can you? It's something he picked up in England. It's not typical. They say Sammy had a rough time in England.'
'It's certainly left him with a thing about the white woman.
The blind, the lame, the halt, no one's safe.'
'That's rather pathetic. I wonder how many Sammys we are creating.'
'Pathetic, it's frightening. Sammy believes he's irresistible because he's black and fat. He feels he learned how to "handle" English people in England. Seriously. He's badly mixed up.'
'Sammy's an exception. I suppose what I like about ordinary Africans is that with them there's none of this testing. They take you just as you are. Doris Marshall is right. I have a lot to be grateful to Denis for. He made me come over here. The things you do when you're young. Writing the LCC exam because everybody else was writing it, applying to Hedley's because everybody else was applying. I suppose it's a kind of hysteria. There are so many things you can do perfectly adequately. So many things that you know are not enough, but would do. You look steady, when in fact you're just drifting. I wasn't much of a fighter. After Oxford I was just content to be well again. It never occurred to me that I might want to use myself fully as a human being. It isn't easy to explain, I know, and everything one says can be twisted here. There are too many people around who know how to make the correct noises.'
'You make it so difficult, Bobby.'
'In what way?'
'People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. I wonder if people talk about the place they live in as much as they do about Africa.'
' Oxford. People talked about nothing else except being up at Oxford.'
'I suppose we did try too hard to make the correct noises. We should have known from the first day that the country wasn't for us, and we should have taken our courage in both hands and gone back home.'
'But you've been here six years.'
'As Martin says, the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.'
'And you're really going South?'
'It's only an idea. In four years Martin will be fifty. I suppose we could go back to England and Martin could go freelance. He is a hack who thinks he is, as Martin says. But you can't really make a fresh start at forty-six. And Martin isn't really the freelance type. He isn't much of a fighter either.'
The car bumped and bumped. The trees dripped. Through black overhanging leaves they had a glimpse beyond far peaks of a small mountain lake, grey, like the sky. A roadside jacaranda had freshly shed its purple flowers, a brushing of delicate colour on the rock and mud of the road: they went over it.
'My life is here.'
'Bobby!'
On a path on the wooded hillside just above the road about a dozen Africans in bright new cotton gowns were walking one behind the other in the rain, covering their heads with leaves. With the bright colours of their cottons, and the leaves over their heads, they were very nearly camouflaged. They didn't look at the car.
'That's the sort of thing that makes me feel far from home,' Linda said. 'I feel that sort of forest life has been going on for ever.'
'You've been reading too much Conrad. I hate that book, don't you?'
'You mean they're probably just going to a wedding or an annual general meeting.'
'Now you sound like Doris Marshall.'
'All right.'
'I loved Denis. I can never stop being grateful to him for what he did for me. My meeting with him at that college Gaudy changed my life. I began to feel I wanted to use myself again. He got me my job here, and I suppose he showed me how to look at the country. But he wanted me to keep on being helpless. He wanted to remain my go-between. He kept on saying that I didn't understand Africans and he would handle them for me. He didn't like it when I started to find my own feet and get around. Such a naive man, really. He wanted me to remain his property. He went insane when he discovered I didn't object to physical contact with Africans.'
'You were neither of you discreet.'
'He talked so much of service· to Africa. I· can't tell you how shattered I was. Arid then he started this campaign against me. I thought I was finished. But that was when I truly got to admire Ogguna Wanga-Butere and Busoga-Kesoro. They understood what Denis was up to.'
'I don't want to hear any more.'
'They are all like that.'
All at once Bobby's excitement died down. He felt he had destroyed the mood of confession and friendship and had lost Linda. He had spoken too much; in the morning he would be full of regret; Linda would be another of those people from whom he would have to hide. He set his face, the silent man.
They passed more Africans on the hillside. Linda didn't exclaim or point them out. Bobby began to search for words that would restore the old mood. Half an hour ago he had so many things to say; now nothing new suggested itself. Feeling Linda sitting in reproach beside him, he wished only to go over what he had· said, to recapture those passages where he had held her.
'I suppose,' he said, 'this is the sort of drive I used to dream of. The mountains, the rain, the forest. To me it is like Bergman country.'
Yellow mounds of fresh earth began to appear at the roadside and sometimes on the road itself. Heavy vehicles had passed some time before, and their tyres had squashed the earth and spread it over the road; yellow rivulets ran everywhere. Below them there was a valley, grey-green and blurred in the rain. Within the valley there were many conical little hills, each terraced, each with its grass hut behind a grass stockade; and to the huts and along the bottom of the valley faint brown paths ran, like the paths in a fairytale.