He went back and sat down.
She said, ‘You’re going on the same plane?’
‘Yes.’ Not looking her way, the bitch, he watched with hope as boarding time approached and there were no new arrivals at the weigh-bay. She arranged and rearranged her complicated hand luggage; rivalry made them aware of one another. Two minutes to boarding time, the airline girl didn’t want him to catch her eye, but he went over to her just the same. She said, cheerfully relieved of responsibility, ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to get a seat. Everybody’s turned up. We’re just checking.’
He and the blonde lady were left behind. Hostility vanished as the others filed off down the Red Route. They burst into talk at once, grumbling about the airline organisation.
‘Imagine, they’ve been expecting me for days.’ She was defiantly gay.
‘Dragging out here for nothing – I was assured I’d get a seat, no trouble at all.’
‘Well, that’s how people are these days – my God, if I ran my hotel like that. Simply relax, what else can you do? Thank heaven I’ve got a firm booking for tomorrow.’
A seat on tomorrow’s plane, eh; he slid out of the conversation and went to look for the reservations counter. There was no need for strategy, after all; he got a firm booking, too. In the bus back to town, she patted the seat beside her. There were two kinds of fellow travellers, those who asked questions and those who talked about themselves. She took the bit of a long cigarette holder between her teeth and quoted her late husband, told how her daughter, ‘a real little madam’, at boarding school, got on like a house on fire with her new husband, said how life was what you put into it, as she always reminded her son; people asked how could one stand it, up there, miles away from everything, on the lake, but she painted, she was interested in interior decorating, she’d run the place ten years by herself, took some doing for a woman.
‘On the lake?’
‘Gough’s Bay Hotel.’ He saw from the stare of the blue eyes that it was famous – he should have known.
‘Tell me, whereabout are the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions?’
The eyes continued to stare at him, a corner of the red mouth drew in proprietorially, carelessly unimpressed. ‘My graves. On my property. Two minutes from the hotel.’
He murmured surprise. ‘I’d somehow imagined they were much further north.’
‘And there’s no risk of bilharzia whatever,’ she added, apparently dispelling a rumour. ‘You can water-ski, goggle-fish – people have a marvellous time.’
‘Well, I may turn up someday.’
‘My dear, I’ve never let people down in my life. We’d find a bed somewhere.’
He saw her at once, in another backless flowered dress, when he entered the departure lounge next morning. ‘Here we go again’ – distending her nostrils in mock resignation, turning down the red lips. He gave her his small-change smile and took care to lag behind when the passengers went across the runway. He sat in the tail of the plane, and opened the copy of Livingstone’s last journals, bought that morning. ‘Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends.’ The book rested on his thighs and he slept through the hour-and-a-half ’s journey. Livingstone had walked it, taking ten months and recording his position by the stars. This could be the lead for his story, he thought: waking up to the recognition of the habits of his mind like the same old face in the shaving mirror.
The capital of this country was hardly distinguishable from the one he had left. The new national bank with air-conditioning and rubber plants changed the perspective of the row of Indian stores. Behind the main street a native market stank of dried fish. He hired a car, borrowed a map from the hotel barman and set out for ‘the interior’ next day, distrusting – from long experience – both car and map. He had meant merely to look up a few places and easy references in the journals, but had begun to read and gone on half the night.
A wife ran away, I asked how many he had; he told me twenty in all: I then thought he had nineteen too many. He answered with the usual reason, ‘But who would cook for strangers if I had but one?’ . . . It is with sorrow that I have to convey the sad intelligence that your brother died yesterday morning about ten o’clock . . . no remedy seemed to have much effect. On the 20th he was seriously ill but took soup several times, and drank claret and water with relish . . . A lion roars mightily. The fish-hawk utters his weird voice in the morning, as if he lifted up to a friend at a great distance, in a sort of falsetto key . . . The men engaged refuse to go to Matipa’s, they have no honour . . . Public punishment to Chirango for stealing beads, fifteen cuts; diminished his load to 40 lbs . . . In four hours we came within sight of the lake, and saw plenty of elephants and other game.
How enjoyable it would have been to read the journals six thousand miles away, in autumn, at home, in London. As usual, once off the circuit that linked the capital with the two or three other small towns that existed, there were crossroads without signposts, and place names that turned out to be one general store, an African bar and a hand-operated petrol pump, unattended. He was not fool enough to forget to carry petrol, and he was good at knocking up the bar owners (asleep during the day). As if the opening of the beer refrigerator and the record player were inseparably linked – as a concept of hospitality if not mechanically – African jazz jog-trotted, clacked and drummed forth while he drank on a dirty veranda. Children dusty as chickens gathered. As he drove off the music stopped in mid-record.
By early afternoon he was lost. The map, sure enough, failed to indicate that the fly-speck named as Moambe was New Moambe, a completely different place in an entirely different direction from that of Old Moambe, where Livingstone had had a camp, and had talked with chiefs whose descendants were active in the present-day politics of their country (another lead). Before setting out, Carl Church had decided that all he was prepared to do was take a car, go to Moambe, take no more than two days over it, and write a piece using the journey as a peg for what he did know something about – this country’s attempt to achieve a form of African socialism. That’s what the paper would get, all they would get, except the expense account for the flight, car and beers. (The beers were jotted down as ‘Lunch, Sundries, Gratuities, £3. 10.’ No reason, from Bartram’s perspective, why there shouldn’t be a Livingstone Hilton in His Steps.) But when he found he had missed Moambe and past three in the afternoon was headed in the wrong direction, he turned the car savagely in the road and made for what he hoped would turn out to be the capital. All they would get would be the expense account. He stopped and asked the way of anyone he met, and no one spoke English. People smiled and instructed the foreigner volubly, with many gestures. He had the humiliation of finding himself twice back at the same crossroads where the same old man sat calmly with women who carried dried fish stiff as Chinese preserved ducks. He took another road, any road, and after a mile or two of hesitancy and obstinacy – turn back or go on? – thought he saw a signpost ahead. This time it was not a dead tree. A sagging wooden finger drooped down a turn-off: GOUGH’S BAY LAZITI PASS.
The lake.
He was more than a hundred miles from the capital. With a sense of astonishment at finding himself, he focused his existence, here and now, on the empty road, at a point on the map. He turned down to petrol, a bath, a drink – that much, at least, so assured that he did not have to think of it. But the lake was farther away than the casualness of the sign would indicate. The pass led the car whining and grinding in low gear round silent hillsides of white rock and wild fig trees leaning out into ravines. This way would be impassable in the rains; great stones scraped the oil sump as he disappeared into steep stream-beds, dry, the sand wrung into hanks where torrents had passed. He met no one, saw no hut. When he coughed, alone in the car he fancied this noise of his thrown back from the stony face of hill to hill like the bark of a solitary baboon. The sun went down. He thought: t
here was only one good moment the whole day; when I drank that beer on the veranda, and the children came up the steps to watch me and hear the music.
An old European image was lodged in his tiredness: the mirage, if the road ever ended, of some sort of southern resort village, coloured umbrellas, a street of white hotels beside water and boats. As the road unravelled from the pass into open bush, there came that moment when, if he had had a companion, they would have stopped talking. Two, three miles; the car rolled in past the ruins of an arcaded building to the barking of dogs, the horizontal streak of water behind the bush, outhouses and water tanks, a raw new house. A young man in bathing trunks with his back to the car stood on the portico steps, pushing a flipper off one foot with the toes of the other. As he hopped for balance he looked round. Blond wet curls licked the small head on the tall body, vividly empty blue eyes were the eyes of some nocturnal animal dragged out in daylight.
‘Can you tell me where there’s a hotel?’
Staring, on one leg: ‘Yes, this’s the hotel.’
Carl Church said, foolishly pleasant, ‘There’s no sign, you see.’
‘Well, place’s being redone.’ He came, propping the flippers against the wall, walking on the outside edges of his feet over the remains of builders’ rubble. ‘Want any help with that?’ But Carl Church had only his typewriter and the one suitcase. They struggled indoors together, the young man carrying flippers, two spearguns and goggles.
‘Get anything?’
‘Never came near the big ones.’ His curls sprang and drops flowed from them. He dropped the goggles, then a wet gritty flipper knocked against Carl Church. ‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He dumped his tackle on a desk in the passage, looked at Carl Church’s case and portable, put gangling hands upon little hips and took a great breath: ‘Where those boys are when you want one of them – that’s the problem.’
‘Look, I haven’t booked,’ said Church. ‘I suppose you’ve got a room?’
‘What’s today?’ Even his eyelashes were wet. The skin on the narrow cheekbones whitened as if over knuckles.
‘Thursday.’
A great question was solved triumphantly, grimly. ‘If it’d been Saturday, now – the weekends, I mean, not a chance.’
‘I think I met someone on the plane—’
‘Go on—’ The face cocked in attention.
‘She runs a hotel here . . . ?’
‘Madam in person. D’you see who met her? My stepfather?’ But Carl Church had not seen the airport blonde once they were through customs. ‘That’s Lady Jane all right. Of course she hasn’t turned up here yet. So she’s arrived, eh? Well thanks for the warning. Just a sec, you’ve got to sign,’ and he pulled over a leather register, yelling, ‘Zelide, where’ve you disappeared to—’ as a girl with a bikini cutting into heavy red thighs appeared and said in the cosy, long-suffering voice of an English provincial, ‘You’re making it all wet, Dick – oh give here.’
They murmured in telegraphic intimacy. ‘What about number 16?’
‘I thought a chalet.’
‘Well, I dunno, it’s your job, my girl—’
She gave a parenthetic yell and a barefoot African came from the back somewhere to shoulder the luggage. The young man was dismantling his speargun, damp backside hitched up on the reception desk. The girl moved his paraphernalia patiently aside. ‘W’d you like some tea in your room, sir?’
‘Guess who was on the plane with him. Lady Godiva. So we’d better brace ourselves.’
‘Dickie! Is she really?’
‘In person.’
The girl led Carl Church out over a terrace into a garden where rondavels and cottages were dispersed. It was rapidly getting dark; only the lake shone. She had a shirt knotted under her breasts over the bikini, and when she shook her shaggy brown hair – turning on the light in an ugly little outhouse that smelled of cement – a round, boiled face smiled at him. ‘These chalets are brand new. We might have to move you Saturday, but jist as well enjoy yourself in the meantime.’
‘I’ll be leaving in the morning.’
Her cheeks were so sunburned they looked as if they would bleed when she smiled. ‘Oh what a shame. Aren’t you even going to have a go at spear-fishing?’
‘Well, no; I haven’t brought any equipment or anything.’
He might have been a child who had no bucket and spade; ‘Oh not to worry, Dick’s got all the gear. You come out with us in the morning, after breakfast – OK?’
‘Fine,’ he said, knowing he would be gone.
The sheets of one bed witnessed the love-making of previous occupants; they had not used the other. Carl Church stumbled around in the dark looking for the ablution block – across a yard, but the light switch did not work in the bathroom. He was about to trudge over to the main house to ask for a lamp when he was arrested by the lake, as by the white of an eye in a face hidden by darkness. At least there was a towel. He took it and went down in his pants, feeling his way through shrubs, rough grass, over turned-up earth, touched by warm breaths of scent, startled by squawks from lumps that resolved into fowls, to the lake. It held still a skin of light from the day that had flown upward. He entered it slowly; it seemed to drink him in, ankles, knees, thighs, sex, waist, breast. It was cool as the inside of a mouth. Suddenly hundreds of tiny fish leapt out all round him, bright new tin in the warm, dark, heavy air.
‘. . . I enclose a lock of his hair; I had his papers sealed up soon after his decease and will endeavour to transmit them all to you exactly as he left them.’
Carl Church endured the mosquitoes and the night heat only by clinging to the knowledge, through his tattered sleep, that soon it would be morning and he would be gone. But in the morning there was the lake. He got up at five to pee. He saw now how the lake stretched to the horizon from the open arms of the bay. Two bush-woolly islands glided on its surface; it was the colour of pearls. He opened his stale mouth wide and drew in a full breath, half sigh, half gasp. Again he went down to the water and, without bothering whether there was anybody about, took off his pyjama shorts and swam. Cool. Impersonally cool, at this time. The laved mosquito bites stung pleasurably. When he looked down upon the water while in it, it was no longer nacre, but pellucid, a pale and tender green. His feet were gleaming tendrils. A squat spotted fish hung near his legs, mouthing. He didn’t move, either. Then he did what he had done when he was seven or eight years old, he made a cage of his hands and pounced – but the element reduced him to slow motion, everything, fish, legs, glassy solidity, wriggled and flowed away and slowly undulated into place again. The fish returned. On a dead tree behind bird-splattered rocks ellipsed by the water at this end of the beach, a fish-eagle lifted its head between hunched white shoulders and cried out; a long whistling answer came across the lake as another flew in. He swam around the rocks through schools of fingerlings as close as gnats, and hauled himself up within ten feet of the eagles. They carried the remoteness of the upper air with them in the long-sighted gaze of their hooded eyes; nothing could approach its vantage; he did not exist for them, while the gaze took in the expanse of the lake and the smallest indication of life rising to its surface. He came back to the beach and walked with a towel round his middle as far as a baobab tree where a black man with an ivory bangle on either wrist was mending nets, but then he noticed a blue bubble on the verge – it was an infant afloat on some plastic beast, its mother in attendance – and turned away, up to the hotel.
He left his packed suitcase on the bed and had breakfast. The dining room was a veranda under sagging grass matting; now, in the morning, he could see the lake, of course, while he ate. He was feeling for change to leave for the waiter when the girl padded in, dressed in her bikini, and shook cornflakes into a plate. ‘Oh hello, sir. Early bird you are.’ He imagined her lying down at night just as she was, ready to begin again at once the ritual of alternately dipping and burning her seared flesh. They chatted. She had been in Africa only three months, out from Liverpool in answer to an adve
rtisement – receptionist/secretary, hotel in beautiful surroundings.
‘More of a holiday than a job,’ he said.
‘Don’t make me laugh’ – but she did. ‘We were on the go until half past one, night before last, making the changeover in the bar. You see the bar used to be here—’ she lifted her spoon at the wall, where he now saw mildew-traced shapes beneath a mural in which a girl in a bosom-laced peasant outfit appeared to have given birth, through one ear, Rabelaisian fashion, to a bunch of grapes. He had noticed the old Chianti bottles, by lamplight, at dinner the night before, but not the mural. ‘Dickie’s got his ideas, and then she’s artistic, you see.’ The young man was coming up the steps of the veranda that moment, stamping his sandy feet at the cat, yelling towards the kitchen, blue eyes open as the fish’s had been staring at Carl Church through the water. He wore his catch like a kilt, hooked all round the belt of his trunks.
‘I been thinking about those damn trees,’ he said.
‘Oh my heavens. How many’s still there?’
‘There all right, but nothing but blasted firewood. Wait till she sees the holes, just where she had them dug.’
The girl was delighted by the fish: ‘Oh pretty!’
But he slapped her hands and her distractibility away. ‘Some people ought to have their heads read,’ he said to Carl Church. ‘If you can tell me why I had to come back here, well, I’d be grateful. I had my own combo, down in Rhodesia.’ He removed the fish from his narrow middle and sat on a chair turned away from her table.
‘Why don’t we get the boys to stick ’em in, today? They could’ve died after being planted out, after all, ay?’
He seemed too gloomy to hear her. Drops from his wet curls fell on his shoulders. She bent towards him kindly, wheedlingly, meat of her thighs and breasts pressing together. ‘If we put two boys on it, they’d have them in by lunchtime? Dickie? And if it’ll make her happy? Dickie?’
Life Times Page 21