I was surprised at this ideology. The affair seemed to have had far wider dimensions than those of a double bed. I had pictured a woman formidable in desire, perhaps, but not in political spirit. It seemed an unlikely relationship, this between a Marxist and an old-fashioned colonial Tory. Yet was she that? She seemed to be correcting my thoughts on her even as I read her letter, as though she were close to me, hearing her voice in the next room:
Thursday
I am not afraid of the future. I am not the ‘Natural Tory’ you once called me. It’s simply a determination to be happy, and having come half-way through life I’ve proved certain ways to this end, travelled some of them, and don’t believe I’ve got anywhere near the end yet. And those ways, that map, is for me most often in the past; in things half done then, not in new shapes and forms. We think we have experienced the past just because, willy nilly, we have lived through it, that we have completed it. But we haven’t. There were hundreds of turnings off the main street which we knew about then and never took. I want to take them now — not to re-live anything — this has nothing to do with nostalgia — but to live now all that was unlived then.
Pickfords removal van interrupted me later that afternoon, clearing the place out, leaving only the basic furniture that had come with the flat. Afterwards I didn’t feel like going on with the letters. I packed them up in his suitcase, along with the rest of Graham’s data. There was a last meeting with McCoy and Croxley opposite at their look-out post and then the Southampton boat train first thing next morning.
‘Well,’ McCoy said pompously in the fading light, ‘anything new in your researches?’
We were sitting at the dining-room table again, surrounded by Graham’s shadowy remains. Croxley got up and turned the light on. Graham’s shoes were on the table.
‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘But I see you’ve filled in a missing piece.’ I saw Graham’s bare feet now at the end of a body hanging from a rope.
‘But you are getting the hang of the man?’ McCoy said abruptly.
‘Oh yes. I’m beginning to see him very well.’
We went over all my routines again, checking everything once more. It was Croxley who nearly upset things at the end. ‘The postman,’ he said. ‘What did he bring Graham this morning? The strike’s finished. We saw him come.’
‘Yes. A lot of bills.’ I reached inside my coat, ‘I nearly forgot. And a letter from his mother.’
‘We’ll settle those.’ I handed the envelopes over, and Croxley looked through them.
‘Not much in eight weeks’ post,’ I said. But I didn’t press my luck.
‘He wasn’t the writing type,’ Croxley said. ‘In his position you don’t commit yourself, least of all to written confidences.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Just bills from the Gas Board.’
‘And his old mother in Durban.’
I was sorry to deceive Croxley.
‘Come on,’ McCoy broke in. ‘You’re not writing an obituary of Graham. Get into his shoes, Marlow. And go!’
The ship left at midday. Yachts were far out in front of us, coloured triangles heeling right over in a sharp wind and spray of Southampton water that did nothing for us at all. We had gone far beyond the natural elements in our steel hulk, were already a world within a world. The yachtsmen were reaclass="underline" they would go and they would turn round when the afternoon began to die far out, coming up the water in the evening on another tide, leaving the salt on their lips, like the memory of a kiss, tasting it as an elixir they’d missed all winter, the acid flakes summoning up long after nightfall in the club all the risks and pleasures of the day.
But for me the huge ship was a prison again, of another sort, and I gazed as longingly at the sea that morning as I’d watched the sky move past my Durham window. It was one of those moments when, in middle life, one makes a promise to renew the buried athlete in oneself, swears brief fealty to some natural order, thinking, just for a few minutes or so before sleep, that tomorrow one will break the cage of self, leap out of it at a bound — into falconry, mountain climbing, yachting or even golf. So, even in escape, in gliding down the water, feeling the first small butts and tremors of the channel, I wanted some other and greater escape.
I didn’t bother with lunch that day. I was so tired. Instead I lay down in my cabin amidships and took out the woman’s letters again.
… we walked to the top of a hill in Tsavo Park, with the warden and his stories about hippos on the banks of the Nile, where he used to be. Do you remember? How he and his wife met one walking by the river and hit it with his walking stick on the nose — and then hit it a second time. ‘Now I’m absolutely certain,’ he said, ‘that if you stand up and face these animals nine times out of ten they’ll break.’ A Jack Hawkins figure in an old bush hat and a Land Rover. The air was so crisp in the evenings, when it got cold and dark within half an hour, and the cedar roared in the grate, the Tilley lamps hissed, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner …
I couldn’t quite make it out-the writer’s style, the knowledge; this recurrent African theme. There were the obvious images of space and freedom and something lost. But that wasn’t all. What had they been up to? A shooting safari? Who was this woman, what was she like? What else had happened in Tsavo National Park — and what, precisely, had happened at all the other times they’d spent together which I didn’t know about? I was already beginning to suffer the onset of that blatant curiosity that comes with shipboard, or any other enclosed life, though it might have been nothing more than the dregs of my profession stirring again, the never-dying taste for the curious that is the essence of the trade.
Falling in and out of sleep as the ship slid down the channel, the waves starting to boom gently on its flanks, I tried to fill in the gaps in her letters as in Graham’s notes and memos, trying to properly compose their affair like a Maupassant story or a new Brief Encounter.
I had to complete Graham’s reality in myself, polish it, make it shine perfectly. I had so far an unformed part, handed out by the script editor, the lines of character briefly drawn, and for my own survival I had to research the role to its limits. Very well, then. I would start by inhabiting Graham’s most intimate secrets — by imagining, inventing them.
… We had met that spring six years ago just after I’d come back from a trip to Kenya: under the chandeliers in the huge salon on the first floor in Whitehalclass="underline" glasses falling about the place, the long table at one end littered with bottles, half a curtain drawn against the glare of evening light from the river; Africans standing up everywhere through the arid chatter, as significant on the horizons of the room as baobab trees on their own plainsland: the rich African’s Africa; the shapely, dusky confidence. And this woman had somehow stood out from all this, talking to Belafonte from the Voice of Kenya Radio who was doing a script with me. She had risen above this expensive gathering so that I had noticed her as easily as a potentate on a throne as I walked towards her with my secretary …