“You’ll have a hard time convincing me of that,” said the doctor.
“I don’t intend to try,” Munday said evenly. He would not be provoked. It was a vulgar subject—and anyway he had never himself made love to an African woman: it would have put his research at risk. But something else prevented him from discussing the matter any further with the doctor. He saw himself repeatedly cast in the role of defender of Africans—with Flack, with the vicar, with the pompous spokesman in the church hall. He defended Africans by inverting the abusive generalities, until he had found himself saying things he didn’t mean. What he knew of the real weaknesses of Africans he would withhold from these ignorant sceptics who didn’t deserve to know.
“I see the wives of some of these black high commissioners. West African, I should think. Great big bottoms. They never pay their bills, but if I refused to take them on they’d complain to the minister.”
“And they’d be quite right to complain,” said Munday. He added, “But I agree—they should pay their bills.”
“Tell them that,” said the doctor, who had become noticeably less friendly. With a hint of impatience he said, “All right, let’s have a look at you.”
He examined Munday thoroughly, running the cold smooth disc of the stethoscope over his chest and back. Then he wrapped a thick rubber bandage around his bicep and inflated it with a bulb. Munday felt his forearm tingle and his hand go limp. The doctor took that off and asked Munday to squeeze his extended fingers. Munday squeezed.
“Harder,” said the doctor.
Munday got a better grip on the doctor’s fingers and clutched them tightly until his own fingers turned white.
“Fine,” said the doctor. “Dowle said something about a stroke.”
“It surprised me,” said Munday. “I’d always been fit. It was after a large meal. I felt pretty ropey—had a pain here,” he said, touching his chest. “My wife said I had awful color and I was gasping—couldn’t get my breath.”
“Sounds an awful lot like indigestion,” said the doctor with scorn.
Munday winced. “Your friend Dowle called it a seizure.”
“Sometimes they happen like that. It’s hard to tell. Your blood pressure’s a little above normal, and I thought I heard a slight flutter. But that’s not so unusual.”
“Father Dowle said something about a scar on one’s heart.”
“ ‘Knickers,’ we used to call him,” said the doctor, smiling, and the statement mocked at the mission doctor’s diagnosis. He pointed at Munday. “The heart’s a tough organ, you know—it’s a great pumping device. There might have been a constriction, a kind of blockage. It can kill you by pinching off the blood flow, or the heart itself can repair the damage. It leaves scar tissue, that’s all he meant. How do you feel? Any discomfort?”
“I don’t sleep well,” said Munday. “And lately I’ve felt pain, a burning sensation. I get short of breath. It seems to come with worry.”
“Most ailments do,” said the doctor. “But I’ll book you for an electrocardiogram just the same.”
Munday was going to speak of how Emma confirmed what he had feared in the black house, in that inhospitable village. But the doctor’s dismissive manner put him off; at that distance, too, the black house and his fears seemed unreal—only a nearness of the dark comers, the liquid shadows, the rub of that unexampled smell at his nose alarmed him. Not near it, he could doubt it. In London it all seemed absurd, and this consultation seemed unnecessary, like a pain struggled with for days that disappears in a miraculous cure in the doctor’s waiting room. His fears were hollow words, neutral and without urgency, simply a memory of terror grown quaint in a distance that allowed him to forget. It was the way he sometimes felt about Africa. Up close, as a resident in the Yellow Fever Camp, it excited so many particular fears and made his mind nimble but now he had trouble seeing it except as a formless dazzle of the exotic. The rest was forgotten; it wasn’t lost: it was all, he knew, buried in his mind.
“What exactly do you worry about?”
“My work.”
“What is your work?”
“At the moment—I’m being frank—nothing. An anthropologist studies people. I have none.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t know,” said Munday. His memory, his fear was of being hunted down, thrown out of the black house by a gulping phantom.
“Do you get depressed?”
It was that woman’s question. Munday could not honestly say no. He said nothing.
“A lot of doctors would fill you up with pills. I’m against that,” said the doctor. “Get a lot of fresh air, take exercise. Moderate drinking’s all right. Do you smoke?”
“A cigar occasionally.”
“You’re lucky you can afford them. But watch what you eat. Diet’s very important. My receptionist will give you a diet card. You can put your shirt on.”
Buttoning his shirt, Munday said, “Father Dowle thought it was serious enough to send me home.”
“I’m not saying it’s not serious. You’ve got to take care of yourself. But you’re better off here in any case, aren’t you?”
“Here?”
“England,” said the doctor.
A black house in a remote village, Munday wanted to say, that’s the only England I know now. But he said: “Father Dowle specifically said—”
“God,” said the doctor. He walked over to the door and opened it. “I remember once when we were doing a urinalysis. There was a girl in the class—forget her name, not very pretty. Dowle slipped gold filings in her specimen when she wasn’t looking, then showed her how to do a gold test on it. She thought he had taken leave of his senses, of course, but when it came out positive she was beside herself. ‘Gold in my urine!’ she said, and Dowle leaned over and said in a heavy brogue, ‘They’re laughing, but I’m thinking we should sink a shaft, my dear.’ ”
“That’s ten guineas gone west,” said Alec in the Wheatsheaf. He had been waiting at the end of a long bench by the wall, and seeing Munday enter he rose and greeted him loudly in Swahili, the way he always had on the verandah of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel on a Saturday morning. That was Munday’s day in Fort Portal and he always spent it with Alec in continuous drinking, watching the road and the progress of the sun, until it was time to drive back to the camp, a long bumpy trip his drunkenness shortened by blurring. At the end of those afternoons, watching the fierce blood-red sunset, crimson chased with yellowing pink on the mountains, Alec used to say, “They’re killing each other again in Bwamba.”
10
Alec had managed a tea estate, and Munday in town for the week’s supplies looked forward to the older man’s company while Emma visited her friends and used the British Council Library. It was some relief from what after a year had become monotony in the village. Alec had sat, often jeering humorously with his cronies, and sometimes with the African girl who lived with him, whose picture appeared on the yellow tea wrapper—in the picture she was holding a similar packet of tea. Munday had never seen Alec in England; today he was alone in the crowded pub, looking burdened by his heavy suit and rather older: a sunburn had always masked the boozy floridness of his face and without it the patches of bright veins only emphasized his pallor. But his voice was the old familiar trumpet and his shouted Swahili caused several people nearby to turn and listen, and Alec, noticing their curiosity, had continued. Only when Munday was seated beside him did Alec lower his voice and resume in English.
“You reminded me,” Munday had said, and he told his story of having spoken Swahili to the porter at Waterloo. What had made him feel ridiculous in Emma’s eyes impressed Alec, and Alec said, “So you’re still the bwana mkubwa. That happened to me once in Marseilles. I opened my mouth to speak French and out came 'Kuja hapaV Baffled those frogs, I can tell you.”