“Two for me, please. Thanks so much.” The vicar had smiled at Munday’s remark, a repetition of his wife’s. It was a habit of their marriage; they had reached that point of common agreement where language was shared and experience reported in identical words. Though they were unaware of it, they disputed their similarity using the same idioms, the speech— like a local dialect—that their marriage and their years in the bush had taught them.
“I was just telling Mrs. Munday that I used to visit the previous tenants, and I know that brass knocker on the kitchen door—”
He continued speaking. The information disturbed Munday: he wished he had not heard previous tenants; it gave the house the flavorless character of an inn, a shelter where occasional people, birds of passage, came and went, indistinguishable in the brevity of their stay. And the mystery of the house, the ghosts of other occupants, sensations hinted at by the old men at The Yew Tree that Munday had begun to savor, were diminished. Two opposing feelings occurred to him: a curiosity about the fate of the previous tenants, a dread that the vicar might tell him. But especially he disliked being associated with them or any other visitor (the choice of cider had marked him at the pub) and he was disappointed by all the vicar’s news—it had the effect of withholding the house from him by making him and his wife temporary guests, and it insulted his arrival home.
Munday leaned against the bookshelves which covered the wall to the right of the chimney. On the facing wall there was a mirror and a color print of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen; he mocked it and remembered the Omukama’s portrait that hung in the camp bungalow, the leathery face of the aged king with the blank eyes whom Alec, a tea-planter friend of Munday in Fort Portal, had described as looking like a crapulous gorilla. Munday had made no comment; the African District Commissioner had insisted he hang it, and later he had been invited to the Omukama’s palace. (“Palace!” he had whispered to Emma; it was new, unswept, looked like a supermarket, and it smelled of dogs and cooking bananas.)
Emma said, “But how marvelous!”
Munday tried to read the spines of the books. He saw Walter Scott, Sketches by Boz, Hammond Innes and Agatha Christie, a child’s history of England, Readers Union in uniform bindings, some thick paperbacks with unfamiliar titles, probably American, Bibles in two sizes, church pamphlets, a school atlas, a row of Penguins, a woman’s annual, a guide to wildflowers. He had seen identical libraries in a dozen East African hotels and rest houses. Their condition was identical, too; they were unused, and unused books rotted and stayed moribund in their uniquely vile dust. Beside the shelf there was a patch on the wall, sweating paint, and this rising damp had made a trickle of water on the stone floor.
“—galloped like this through the back pasture there,” said the vicar. He put his tea cup down and imitated a horseman, his jowls shaking. His chirpy prattle and exaggerated friendliness was a result of being met by Munday and made uncomfortable by the challenge. Munday was behind him, not saying a word, but he saw how hard the vicar was trying.
The vicar went on to explain the rooms, the experiences of the other tenants with that inefficient knocker, and he finished, “It’s a very old place, you know. This room we’re in is Seventeenth Century, the back section and kitchen are Eighteenth, and the lavatory—well, that’s modem of course!”
Emma laughed, Munday stared—he objected to being told about his house. If it had secrets he wanted them to be his, to discover them for himself. He slid a book out—What Katy Did—pushed it back and noticed how low the ceiling was. Small men had built the house, laborers dwarfed by vast clouds and lit by a pearly glow from the sea; he saw them working in the rain, gathering stones in heavy wheelbarrows to claim a comer of the landscape. Then they had gone back to their cottages and seen other people inhabit the house, perhaps people from far away. Munday was not of the village; and Emma, in spite of her sentiment, and the vicar—his accent said it—neither were they. But the vicar was proprietorial; he wouldn’t admit what Munday had already reluctantly acknowledged: that they were all trespassers.
“Is it a big parish?” Emma asked.
“Quite,” said the vicar. “Marshwood Vale on the west and the Beaminster road on the east. We go straight up to Broadwindsor. I have a church there as well. But don’t be misled by the size—attendance is very poor. We’re trying to raise money for a new church hall. Hopeless!” he said, and he laughed.
“Maybe God intends that as a sort of—”
“Alfred.”
“I say,” said the vicar. His eye strayed over the objects on the floor. He knelt and picked up a short knife, the size and shape of a grapefruit knife, with a rusty hammered blade. “That’s an interesting little chap,” he said. “What does one do with that?”
“Ceremonial knife,” said Munday. “Used in puberty rites.” His gaze caught the vicar’s. He said with a half-smile, “Circumcisions.”
The vicar squinted at it, holding it gingerly with his fingertips. He shook his head slowly.
Munday said, “That particular one’s seen a lot of service.”
“Absolutely fascinating,” said the vicar. He stooped and put the small knife on the floor near others that resembled it. He grinned at Emma. The vicar had a threadbare and slightly seedy aspect which made him seem somehow kindly; the seams of his black suit were worn shiny, his trouser cuffs were spattered with mud and his heavy shoes had been polished so often and were so old they were cracked, and scales of leather bristled where they flexed.
“It was a gift from a village headman,” said Munday.
The vicar nodded at the little knife.
“Alfred gave him a packet of razor blades in return.”
“Yes, I gave him my razor blades,” said Munday. “Do Africans shave?” asked the vicar. “I don’t think of them as having five-o’clock shadow.”
“For circumcisions,” said Munday, wondering if the vicar’s innocence was a tactful way of allowing his host a chance to say that absurd thing. “He asked for them.”
“Of course,” said the vicar.
“A pity, really. Soon they’ll stop making those knives altogether. They’ll lose the skill. Notice how that blade fits into the handle—and those markings. They’re not random decorations. Each one has a particular social significance.”
“That’s progress, isn’t it?” said the vicar. “Using your Gillette blades for circumcisions, drinking beer out of old soup tins and whatnot. I suppose they’re frightfully keen on evening classes as well?”
Munday thought the vicar might be mocking him. He picked up another object, a fragment of polished wood. A fang of glass—it could have been a spiky shard from a broken bottle—protruded from one end, and this was circled by a fringe of coarse monkey hair.
“And this,” said Munday, “this is what the Sebei people use on girls.”
He offered it to the vicar, but the vicar put his hands behind his back and peered at the object in a pitying way.
“Girls?” he said, and he winced. “I had no idea—”
“They gash the clitoris,” said Munday.
“Goodness.”
“Hurts like the devil,” said Munday, “but it keeps them out of trouble. Blunts the nerve, you see. Sex isn’t much fun after that.”
“Alfred, your tea’s going cold.”
Munday took his cup from the bookshelf and drank with his lips shaped in a little smile; the smile altered, becoming triumphant when he swallowed.
“Last year my wife and I went to Italy,” said the vicar. “Such an interesting place. And you get used to
the food after a bit. They’re not fond of the English, you know—like your Africans, I expect.”