“Hello, future,” she said.
It is uncomfortable to find oneself liking, however momentarily, somebody of whom one disapproves with all the poor passion at one’s command. Morris distracted himself by watching Dinah, and immediately wished he’d had a camera going—it was a perfect example of her quickness that she should at once recognise in her own nature an element that she shared with this stranger but did not share with him, for she was peering sideways and down at her chest and feeling with her fingers the area round her own nipples. It would have been anthropomorphism to say she was dissatisfied, but to a comical extent she looked it.
Anne, still laughing, reached out a careful hand and started to tease at the fur on Dinah’s nape. Dinah was entranced. For a few seconds she stayed where she was, hunched like a man in a shower to relish the process; then she skipped on to the arm of the chair, took Anne by the wrist and moved her hand to a place on her ribs which she seemed to think needed attention. Anne, Morris could see, did instinctively what he himself had only learnt to do by watching Hugo van Lawick’s films.
“You ought to have trained as a vet,” he said.
“Oh, Mummy always has a dozen dogs in the house. And my father behaved as though our education was complete when we’d learnt how to groom a horse. But they’d have thought vets a bit beneath us. Will you do something for me?”
She had chosen her moment beautifully, establishing a deliciously cosy relationship with Dinah, slipping in a quick reference to her real social superiority to anything Morris knew, then asking. She mightn’t be brainy, but she was cunning.
“Ung?” he said.
“Are you still Foreign Minister?”
“I think so. I’ll know to-morrow, when I see where I’m sitting at the feast.”
“Can you fix me a passport?”
Morris said nothing, but stared at her gloomily, pulling his lip. She and Dinah made a charmingly posed contrast, both beautiful examples of their species, absorbed in their simple task: it was difficult to imagine refusing either of them anything. Really, this girl was a hundred years out of date. The roles she wanted weren’t being written any more—barging about the middle east, meddling in native politics, upsetting everybody, landing in some fracas far beyond her and then expecting to be rescued by a British Naval Party under the command of a snappily saluting little snotty. Now she was expecting Morris to come to the rescue.
“Haven’t you got one?” he said.
“I’ve had my British one withdrawn, the sods. I’ve been getting about on a Syrian travel document, but I think Bruce has impounded it. A Q’Kuti passport would be just the job.”
“Ung.”
She stopped grooming Dinah to look at him with the same speculative glance he had seen earlier. She was calculating his price. Not money, not sex . . .
“The point is,” she said, “I don’t think Bruce is going to let me go. Ever. We’re having a wild time together at the moment, but it can’t last. And when it’s over . . . He hasn’t said anything, but I’ve been listening to the women . . . sometimes he’s taken a fancy to a dancer from Dar or somewhere and had her flown in for a week and given her a present and sent her home . . . they talked about Simoko as if she was one of those. But they talk about me as if I’m one of them—you know, there’s several old women there who were Bruce’s father’s girls—they’ve been shut up in the women’s quarters for years—when it was only a sort of mud fort. OK, I’m enjoying myself right now, but I’ve got work to do.”
“Exactly,” he said.
She stopped grooming Dinah and swung round at him like a gun on a tank turret.
“Who made you judge in Israel?” she snapped. “Slavery for life, is it?”
“I don’t know . . . nobody . . . I’m not a judge . . . to set you free, either.”
“As far as you’re concerned I’m just another monkey in Bruce’s zoo? And you’re one of them? ”
She made a gesture, vivid with passion, towards the oblivious eunuch. Dinah parodied it. Anne didn’t laugh this time.
“I don’t know what I think,” said Morris. “I’m not very clever at either/or situations, I’m afraid. As a matter of fact I don’t really approve of the Sultan keeping a zoo here at all; but since he insists on having one I try to make it tolerable for the animals. And, well, I suppose you’re better off here than you might be in prison.”
“Which is where I belong, you think?”
“I tell you, I don’t know!”
Slowly she swung back to Dinah.
“Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “We got interrupted.”
They returned to the silent ritual of grooming. Morris felt a twitch of jealousy that they should seem to understand each other, instantly, so much better than he understood either of them. Hell, there were things he could accomplish which this girl could never begin on—he began to run his mind over the probable grammar of Dinah’s exploration of the future tense.
“What were you saying about to-morrow night?” said Anne. “About this feast, I mean, and knowing whether you were still Foreign Minister?”
It was uncanny how smoothly she flipped herself back into the unruffled stream of polite chat.
“Oh,” said Morris, “well, there’s this feast. Theoretically it’s held when the floods begin to recede, but it doesn’t work out like that . . .”
“It’s probably something to do with the moon. Like Easter.”
“Yes. Well . . . you know, you ought to go and listen to some of it. The Sultan gives this feast—it lasts six hours—and in between the courses boys from the marshes sing the Testament of Na!ar. There’s one clan—the rock-dove clan—where all the boys have to learn all the traditional songs. Really it’s an astonishing performance, especially if you know that they aren’t allowed to sing them after they’ve reached puberty. Why don’t you make friends with the marshwomen? They could explain. You see, there’s a special gallery with a pierced screen where the women can sit if they want to . . .”
When she had gone, mission unaccomplished, Morris settled again at his work-bench; the whine of his fine-toothed saw, the hum and fizz of his polisher discs, the small feeling of accomplishment as each blue cross took on an almost professional finish—these should have been soothing, but despite them he felt irritated and disappointed. Dinah, too, was suddenly tiresome. Quite soon he had to give up his work to try to occupy both their minds with education.
It didn’t go well. Morris kept thinking about Anne, and perhaps Dinah did too. He was surprised, almost alarmed, by the strength of his wish that she had stayed longer, and how his original awkwardness and resentment in her presence had changed to liking. If the Sultan had known, be would have been full of jeering innuendoes, but . . .
Dinah suddenly swept a row of six counters off the coffee-table and squatted sullenly, waiting for some kind of reproof or punishment that would give her the excuse for a tantrum. When it didn’t come she shuffled off to her nest, stuffed her mouth with shavings and went to sleep.
Morris picked up the scattered counters and then sat crouched forward on his chair, poking them around at random and thinking about himself. This was not a thing he often did in any analytic way, because he considered his own personality rather null and unrewarding; he spent much more time speculating about Dinah’s character, or the Sultan’s. But now he was struck once more with a kind of resentment of a trait in his own nature which seemed to make it impossible for him to enjoy the company of suitable friends and colleagues—suitable in the sense that his mother had used when she selected suitable children for him to play with; all his life the people he had got on with had been quite wrong for him, hopelessly out of his sphere, or even morally corrupt—a raffish collection of High Tory squirelings at Oxford, that ruthless fat Dutchman who smuggled orangs and talked about nothing but guns, the Sultan, Kwan, and even this murderess.