“My heart,” said Munday.
“What a shame.” Alec sounded as if he meant it. “Money’s a problem, too,” said Munday. “I can’t get another research grant unless I finish this book.” Alec smiled. “You’re a liar,” he said. “Emma’s got pots of money. We all knew that.”
Munday stared at him, but his stare turned sheepish. He said, “And I hated being a white man.”
“I thought you rather fancied it.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Munday.
“I never thought much about it myself.”
“Maybe that’s why you lasted so long.”
“Twenty-three years,” said Alec, and gulped the last of his beer.
Munday bought the next round of drinks, and when he returned with them Alec was singing softly,
“Mary had a little lamb,
It was mzuri sana;
It put its nose up Mary’s clothes Until she said, ‘Havana' ”
“Reminiscing again?” said Munday.
“Remember that little road to Bundibugyo, over
the mountains? And the pygmies—what a nuisance they were, little buggers.”
“In the Ituri Forest.”
“The rain-forest! It was so dark there. The ferns were four feet high. We used to park there, Jack and I, and wait for the tea lorries from the Congo. It was easier for them to sell it on the black market than bring it by road to Leopoldville. They were a rum lot, those Congolese lorry drivers—spoke French worse than me. And that’s saying something.”
“I didn’t realize you were involved in smuggling,” said Munday, and he saw Alec brighten and purse his lips with pride.
“I kept quiet about it there—highly illegal, you know,” said Alec. He winked. “I’m a smuggler from way back. Where’d you think I got all those crates of Primus Beer? That was a good beer. Not like this stuff—tastes like soap to me.”
Alec told a smuggling story: a late night on the Congo border—a poker game in a candle-lit hut in the forest—the drivers showing up drunk with the tea chests and arguing about the price—Alec choosing the biggest African and knocking him to the floor— not a peep from the others—tossing them out “bodily” —and Munday was taken back to the lounge of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel; he was listening to Alec, who would soon start arguing endlessly about the merits of the “head shot” over the “heart shot/’ He was forgetting the Bwamba village, as far from him then as Four Ashes was now, and cheered by the old man’s company and the long whine of the locusts. But he was not so absorbed in the story that he failed to see that what had brought him to London was what had made him look up Alec at the hotel on a Saturday; he saw his motive. The woman in the church hall had asked him how he stood it: he had not mentioned those weekends. He listened to Alec without enthusiasm and saw himself as a small anxious man, and Alec rather foolish, supporting each other. He was depressed—that woman’s word— for so much had changed, traveling to London would be an inconvenient and expensive habit, and really Four Ashes was farther from any relief than that little village beyond the mountains.
“We’ better eat something or we’ll both be under the table.”
Alec had the macaroni and cheese, Munday the hot-pot—the barman shoveled and clapped the meals to the plates, cracking the spoon against their edges to clear it—and both men sat, jammed together on the wooden bench, balancing their plates on their knees and raising their forks with great care. Alec reminisced about the five-bob lunch at the Uganda hotel, but in each reminder of the place Munday saw a new aspect of the ritual he had invented for himself there, and he wanted to be away from Alec, to return to the black house with Emma and verify his fear. Pehaps he had imagined the panic; much of his Africa seemed imaginary, and distant and ridiculous.
“I’ll tell you who I did see,” said Alec. “It was over in Shepherd’s Bush. I was waiting for a bus by the green. Bloke walked by and I thought to myself, I know him. It was Mills.”
“Ah, Mills,” said Munday. But he was thinking of Alec, in the grayness of Shepherd’s Bush, waiting for a bus—the tea planter with four hundred pickers, who had employed a driver, when few did, for his new Peugeot sedan.
“The television man,” said Alec. “Education for the masses.”
“I remember Mills.”
“He remembered you,” said Alec. “We had a natter, he said to drop in sometime. I said fine, but I doubt that I will. I never liked him. I liked her, though.”
“So did I.”
“I should say you did!” Alec gave Munday a nudge. He narrowed his eyes and said, “He never knew, did he?”
“I hope not. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t what you’d call an affair. But she meant a lot to me. I wondered what happened to her.”
“Like everyone else,” said Alec. “They’re all here, bleeding to death.”
“Did he say he lived in Shepherd’s Bush?”
“No, I think he said Battersea. He works in Shepherd’s Bush—that’s where the studios are. You thinking of paying him a visit?”
“Not him,” said Munday. “But I’d like to see Claudia.”
“Drinking still makes me randy, too,” said Alec, and he laughed.
“I had thought I might go over to the British Museum. And I was planning to leave a message for a Bwamba chap in Mecklenburg Square. I don’t know,” said Munday, pausing. “If Claudia’s home—”
“They’re in the book, and the phone’s over there,” said Alec. “Give her a ring. I’ll get the next round#” He stood up and gave Munday’s shoulder a friendly push. “Get on with it.”
When Munday came back to the bench, Alec said, “I watched you phoning. It reminded me of that night at the hotel—remember?—when Emma was in Kampala and old Mills on safari. ‘Who’s he ringing?’ I wondered—you were so damned secretive! And then I saw your car parked in the Mills’s driveway that Sunday morning.”
“She’s home,” said Munday. “She invited me over for tea.”
“Are you going?”
“I’d like to see her again.”
“I remember that night so well.”
“That was the first time,” said Munday. “There weren’t many others.”
“Mind what you do.” There was pleasure in Alec’s face. “It’s like old times,” he said. “Wish I had Rosie here.”
“I won’t do much,” said Munday. “She said her daughter’s due home from school—little Alice.”
“Jesus, now I remember the story. She saw you in bed with the old lady and said, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ ”
“Where are you off to?” asked Munday quickly.
“Notting Hill Gate for me. Dusky Islander, I expect,” said Alec jauntily. “Some bitch in white garters in an unmade bed in a basement flat to insult my body—you should try it sometime, Alfred old man.” He sighed. “Then I’ll go back to my room in the monkey house and watch television. That’s all I do. I’m getting more like them every day.”
“I’d better be off,” said Munday.
“How are things up-country?” Alec was stabbing his umbrella into the carpet. “Emma her old sketching self?”
“She’s fine, sends you her regards,” said Munday, but he thought, up-country: it was the way Alec had always referred to the Yellow Fever Camp on a Saturday night. But this time they would part in a cold London drizzle, Alec to his bedsitter, Munday to Four Ashes.
Outside the pub Alec held his collar together at his throat and looked at the street and the dripping brown sky. He said, “This fucking city, and none of them know it.”
“You should come down and see us some time," said Munday.
“No fear,” said Alec. “But give Emma my love—I still have her picture of my estate. The pluckers. The gum trees. That hill.”
“She’ll be pleased.”
Alec leaned closer, breathing beer; he said with feeling, “Tea’s a lovely crop, Alfred.”