‘Has that bloody pill-merchant gone at last? What have you been doing with him all this time?’ He glares at her out of eyes that seem sunk into his head.
‘I only gave him a drink.’
‘Drink?’ He seizes upon the word with avid suspicion, accusing her with those eyes, burning with fever in their black cavities.
Dumb and motionless, she watches him slowly work his way into the room, grabbing one chair after another, until he reaches the tray of drinks. Here he holds the whisky bottle up to the light to see how much has gone, next turning his attention to the two glasses, only one of which has been used. This doesn’t deter him from examining the other minutely, and even smelling it before putting it down. ‘So you haven’t taken to the bottle so far,’ he says in a nasty tone.
‘You know I hate the stuff,’ she replies, and adds diffidently: ‘Won’t you go back to bed?’
He ignores this, looking all round the room with a crafty, suspicious air, as if the major might be hiding behind the furniture. Heaven only knows what makes him see the place objectively for once, in all its impersonal, dreary bareness, just as he took it over from his bachelor predecessor. Dimly recalling his mother’s drawing-room, full of chintz and silver rose bowls, he asks the girclass="underline" ‘Why the hell don’t you do something about this room?’
But when she says, ‘What?’ he is stumped, unable to fix his elusive dissatisfaction in words, and merely looks around irritably, until he suddenly asks: ‘Why aren’t there any flowers?’
She couldn’t be more astonished if he’d said elephants, bewildered, as she already is, by his sudden unlikely interest. She too looks round the room, with a helpless feeling: it still seems beyond improvement — where could one possibly start?
‘Tell the mali to bring some flowers in buy them in the bazaar if he can’t grow them. What do I pay him for?’ The man keeps his eyes fixed on her angrily, all his grievances boiling up inside him. He doesn’t realize the dismay at the prospect of having another antagonistic native to deal with prevents her from answering; to him, her silence appears a deliberate provocation. It’s precisely this silence of hers that he always finds so maddening, and the way she simply sits about doing nothing at all. ‘I believe you’re trying to drive me insane!’ he explodes, at the end of his tether. ‘Why don’t you ever do anything? It’s your job to make the house look decent — I thought you were supposed to be so artistic…’
The sneer neither relieves his anger nor stops the fever rising in him. Everything is slowly starting to move round and round in the dark closed world that confines him; and, although he clings on tight to the back of a chair, he seems to be floating round too. He longs for the security of his bed, but daren’t let go of the chair; in fact, the effort of coming down here has taken so much out of him that he can’t move.
It’s all his wife’s fault. As always, he blames her for everything. If he could trust her he wouldn’t have to get up and wander about the house. How dare she bring that devil of a doctor into his home? The whole world seems to be in a conspiracy against him in his illness. And he’s helpless. He can only cling on desperately to the chair that looks bloodstained, made of the raw red sticky wood they use in the jail. Even the fan against him and has started to squeak as it trundles round, making a fiendish sound which strikes right on the nerves, expressly in order to torment him… as she does… knowing the secret of some sore spot in the depths of his being… The throbbing in his head impels him to brandish his fist at the fan… at the girl… at the whole bloody universe. In his rage and resentment he can only mumble inconsecutive phrases that fall from his lips like moribund toads. — call in that fucking bastard behind my back…’ And then, shifting to a different grievance: ‘To look at this room no one would think a woman lived here… it doesn’t look like a home at all…’
These last words have the totally unforeseen effect of touching off some illumination in the hearer’s mind. With sudden hope, she realizes that she’s never felt any sense of permanence here; never thought of the place as her home. Which seems to mean that she won’t be here for the rest of her life, after all. But she at once loses sight of this gleam of encouragement, as the aggrieved mutterings continue.
The man is so full of rage that he lumps everything into one colossal grievance: the depressing room, the diabolical major, the badly functioning contraption of metal fins on the ceiling, the perfidious wife who’s dragged him down here from the sick bed where he ought to be lying — where she ought to be cherishing him, waiting on him…
There’s nothing left in him now but the sort of blind fury and grievance a bull might feel, pricked by all those maddening banderillas it can’t see, stuck in its flesh, from which blood is streaming. Only it’s darkness, black blood, that streams into the room, flooding everywhere, so that he’s drowning in it. He can’t see properly and tries to call for more light, but now he can’t get out a word. In front of his eyes his wife’s face turns into a pallid clock face, solemnly ticking. He feels he is dying of thirst, his throat and mouth dry as sand. The whisky bottle appears before him, three times larger than life; but when he reaches out for it his arm breaks off at the shoulder.
The throbbing in his head becomes a loud sustained buzz, like a dentist’s drill, pierced intermittently by the thin intolerable screech of the fan… of a nail hammered through his skull. Everything is rushing away from him, falling apart. Fragmentary elements of a room race past, dissolving in the general torrent of disintegration… into which he falls too, and is falling to pieces…
Nothing is real any longer; except a pair of thin, blackish, wiry arms, which materialize mysteriously, and mysteriously retain their solidity, grasping him strongly, holding him up… and finally carrying him up the stairs like a baby…
Luckily for him, he is spared the knowledge of this culminating indignity.
11
The mercury in the thermometer by the door has crept up one degree higher this afternoon. Otherwise nothing has altered. The brain-fever birds keep repeating the question that will never be answered. Mr Dog Head is still alternately sweating and shivering, his fever high and his temper vile beyond words. Everything is exactly the same. And yet everything is entirely different, for the girl has a visitor.
The only visitors she’s had so far are the condescending club ladies, who occasionally honour her with their presence and patronisingly ask her to join this or that. Now, for the first time, she has a visitor of her very own. And the incredible thing, just like magic, is that this visitor is actually the person she’s always wanted to know but been sure she never would, because her husband dislikes all young people. The thought of the sick man makes her feel slightly guilty. But why should she feel guilty? She’s not responsible in any way for this amazing meeting, which has come about quite spontaneously, without any action on her part, like a gift from the gods.
She can hardly believe it, and has to keep glancing across to make sure ‘the man in suede boots’ really is sitting there under the squeaky fan, his legs stuck out in front of him, looking quite at his ease. The famous boots are extremely elegant at close quarters, obviously made for him, in that lovely pale leather, soft and supple as velvet.
The two of them are sedate at first. They talk politely to one another. They sip their tea. They speak of the heat, of the snakes that inhabit the swamp and sometimes crawl on to the path along which the young man walks every day to his work. In serious tones they mention the power of coincidence: if he hadn’t killed that snake… if she hadn’t happened to see him from lie verandah…