“For the better?” she asked.
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” he smiled. “This time, I think yes.”
She looked away again. She seemed unconvinced.
“Tell me,” she said. “Is it lonely?”
He shrugged his shoulders; he’d never thought so before. Then he turned and started back down the paddock. “Come with me,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve something I want to show you.”
He could not recall the last time he had looked at them, and for a moment was panicked when they were not on the shelf in the lounge where he’d thought. Finally, after some rummaging, he found the small black cardboard box with the silver lettering that read Pepper & Sons in the bottom drawer of the bureau, beneath Pippa’s mother’s lace tablecloth.
He left the drawer hanging open and went and sat next to her on the settee. He put the box down on the coffee table and took a deep breath.
“She was very angry with me when I gave them to her,” he said, sounding slightly mischievous. “I drove all the way to Birmingham to have them made. I was told by someone in the village, I can’t remember who, that Birmingham was the place.”
Very carefully, he lifted the lid from the box and set it aside. Then he folded back the tissue paper. She had to lean forward to see what was inside.
“My God, they’re beautiful.”
He grinned: “Go on, take them out.”
He watched her as she dipped her slender fingers into the box and gently removed the two rings. She then placed them in the palm of her hand.
“For a long time,” he said, “we had very little money. When we were married I gave her a copper band, which was itself hard to come by. It always turned her finger green. There was never any thought of an engagement ring.”
“How could she ever have been angry with you?”
“Well, as I said, we hadn’t a lot of money really, even then. Truth be told,” he continued, “I’d been putting little bits away for a few years before I bought them.” Now he laughed: “And when I did finally give them to Pippa, she was so upset with me that she refused to wear them.”
“Really?”
“Oh, it didn’t last. Once she let me put them on her finger she never took them off. Not even when she was doing the washing up, which made me rather nervous.”
She slipped the rings, a small diamond solitaire in a raised setting and a gold band with delicate scrolling, onto her bare ring finger and held her hand out in front of her.
“I don’t blame her,” she said. “Though I can understand your being worried.”
As she removed them she noticed that the width of each had been slightly altered, thin cuts where a dull metal had been added.
“Were they too small for her?” she asked.
“Oh, that,” he said, taking the rings from her and returning them to the box. “That’s nothing.”
She placed a hand on his forearm. “I’m glad you showed them to me.”
“Yes,” he said, rising quickly from the settee. “Yes, I just thought you might like to see them.”
He walked back to the bureau and put the box in the drawer. He straightened the folds in the tablecloth and laid it carefully on top.
They fitted the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle of Westminster Abbey shortly before three and then, at her insistence, he napped in his chair in the lounge while she set about preparing tea. He slept soundly and woke refreshed, if a little stiff-necked, to a meal the likes of which he’d not had in a very long time: roast chicken, parsnips, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, boiled carrots and pork sausage. They ate not in the lounge, but at the dining-room table. They finished with cups of coffee and ice cream from a tub she’d found at the bottom of the deep freeze, where the chicken had lain hidden for so long. They did the washing up together. And afterward he took down two tumblers from the cupboard and brought them into the lounge, along with the bottle of cognac he kept now for whenever he felt a cold coming on.
First they watched a comedy program that he did not fully understand, but it made her laugh so he said nothing. Then it was time for the Nine O’Clock News. As the presenter began with a story on the Middle East, he wondered how it was that the evening had passed so quickly. He poured himself a second glass of cognac.
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that the world has gone quite mad.”
The third story was that of a pensioner, an eighty-one-year-old widow in Luton, who’d been attacked by two men who followed her home from the post office after she’d cashed her benefit cheque. They’d tied her to a chair and beat her with a blackjack until her eyes had swollen shut. Then they’d used old newspapers to set fire to her settee and left her to die. Neighbours had heard the struggle, but none called for help until they saw smoke billowing from the window of her council house. All were shocked that such a thing could happen. A photograph of the woman in hospital, bandages covering her face, was shown. Police had no leads in the case, but were confident that the perpetrators would be found.
“You’re right,” she said. “Quite mad.”
As the main news switched over to the East Midlands broadcast he leaned back in the chair and watched her. He felt slightly light-headed from the cognac. She was sitting forward on the settee; her glass, only half-drunk, she rolled between her palms, every once in a while taking the smallest of sips, at which she wrinkled her nose. Looking at her in profile as she eyed the television, he wondered if he didn’t see something of Pippa in her. In the line of her jaw, possibly, which stood out strongly from her thin neck; or in the smallness of her ears. Pippa had had tiny ears, with only the hint of a lobe. Often he’d teased her about them by talking more loudly than was necessary.
When she turned to him he was smiling.
“Is there something funny?” she asked, returning his grin.
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I was just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Nothing in particular, really,” he said. “Least ways nothing of interest.” He held out the bottle. “Would you like a top-up?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
She set her glass on the table. “In fact,” she said, getting to her feet. “I think I might turn in if it’s all the same to you. It’s been a long day.”
It used to be that he would have a glass of cognac every night before bed, to help him off to sleep, until the time came when he found that even this small tipple left him groggy the following morning. But now, nearing the bottom of his third, he was looking forward to a fourth.
The empty Pepper & Sons box lay on the table beside him and he held the rings in his hand. The jeweller who’d mended them had done a poor job. The director of the funeral parlour had been apologetic about having to cut them from Pippa’s finger and quite kindly offered to pay part of the repair cost, but he’d refused. And when he drove with them all the way back to Birmingham he found that Pepper & Sons was no longer in business. It had become a museum. The woman who ran the gift shop suggested he take them to a jeweller in the city centre. The address she gave him was that of a shabby storefront shop whose proprietor offered to buy both rings. When he wouldn’t sell, the man suggested that he at least replace the stone in the engagement ring, informing him that the original was of deficient calibre. In the end he took them to the local jeweller in the village who did the job for him at half price.
He laid the rings back in the box and poured himself another measure of cognac, which he carried across the room. Standing beside the settee he looked at the photograph of himself and Pippa. Before that afternoon it had been some time since he had taken notice of it. And staring at it now, he realized that he had forgotten how young Pippa once was. Most often when he thought about her, it was as she was near the end: her bones brittle from the osteoporosis, her heart congestive like her father’s and her mind ruined by the dementia that robbed him of her even before she died. In those last months, he remembered her walking the darkened house at night, unable to sleep, not reco
gnizing him when he came to take her back to bed. A different Pippa from the one in the photograph, from the laughing girl who had to hold her hat on in the wind. He took a drink of cognac and held it in his mouth until it burned his tongue.
He stood in the open doorway and watched her as she slept. The light from the hallway splashed across the floor. She had folded her clothes and laid them on the chair beside the window. In bed she lay with her head turned away from him, facing the wall. Through the duvet, which was pulled tight under her chin, he could see the shape of her breasts, rising and falling in the slow motion of slumber.
He took a step forward and plunged the room into darkness. He listened to her breathing: measured, constant. When he stepped back, the light returned, illuminating her again. He remained a moment longer, watching her, then pulled the door closed.
In the night he dreamed that she crept into his room and stood naked at the foot of his bed. She was lit by moonlight. When he pulled back the duvet she slipped into the bed beside him, pressed herself against his tired body. He took her breast in his mouth, tasted the warmth of her flesh, the distant saltiness of her skin. In his dream she did not speak, just a faint smile curling her lips. Then the brightness woke him and he felt spent. It was late, the morning sun already high.
He stood before the mirror in his bedroom and dressed himself. As he buttoned his waistcoat, he found that another stitch had come loose. It would need to be mended before it could unravel further. After his walk, he decided: a cup of tea, the darning needle; maybe he would watch some television as he set about it.
The faintest trace of cigarette smoke greeted him in the kitchen, but nothing else. No empty teacup; no saucer with fag-ends. The money was gone from the telephone table, but the number for the minicab company had been left behind.
In the lounge he found his empty glass and the bottle of cognac where he had left it on the side table beside the Pepper & Sons box. He sat down and filled the glass halfway and looked out the window. The previous day’s rain had not quite washed away the stain her face had left on the pane. He saw through it to the field across the road, brilliant green in the bright morning sun. He brought the glass to his lips and drank, feeling the warmth of the cognac as it slid down his throat into his empty belly. It settled there like a small fire.
He set the glass back down and picked up the box. He turned it over in his hands several times, tracing his finger along the edges before opening it, though he needn’t have bothered. He knew by the weight alone that the rings were gone. Sitting there, he remembered how they had looked on her slender, bare finger. She could get a fair price for them from any pawnbroker. They were of good quality, no matter what the Birmingham jeweller had said, and they would take her as far as she needed to go.
DEVIL WITHIN
MARLOWE TOOK ILL and had to remain at the Excelsior while I went on alone. It wasn’t meant to be that way. Marlowe was the one who had found them eight months earlier. And while it was true that I had Mathieu at my disposal, I lacked any field experience. Marlowe had come to refer to me, only half jokingly, as the lab rat. I spent my time at the institute hunched over a microscope, examining samples taken from the brains of the smaller primates. I crunched the data and catalogued the specimens that Marlowe brought back from his expeditions. I compiled neat reports culled from his often chaotic field journals and presented his findings to the Board of Governors, ensuring that he would have the funding required for his next junket. I was very good when it came to the bureaucratic and experimental minutiae; in other words, those aspects of the work that Marlowe abhorred. In truth, he was not a man given to such things, being far too gregarious. I, on the other hand, was mundane: perfectly suited. And though Marlowe at times chided me for being so, I think there was a small part of him that was jealous of my institutional abilities.
Still, I must admit that in the back of my mind I’d always harboured fantasies of working in the field. Vague and romanticized notions of bivouacking in the wilds, only the humming hurricane lamps to fend off the blackness of a jungle night; of constructing a crude block and tackle to lift myself into the Amazonian canopy where I would locate a new and healing subspecies of orchid; of hacking my way through the near-impenetrable bush of a torrid equatorial clime to discover a tribe long thought vanished. But even I knew that these were flights of fancy, beyond me in real life if not simply because of my disposition, then certainly because of my age. Marlowe had fifteen years on me; and there were those who had fifteen years on Marlowe. And yet, he’d found his lost tribe.
Strictly speaking, though, the people in the village of Ascension were neither lost nor a tribe, but a people living apart. If that constituted a tribe, then one could say that I was myself a tribe, Marlowe too. Ascension lay high in the mountains of the Maladif district, the only region in this island nation still covered by the dense forest that once blanketed the entire country. Everywhere else the jungle had been denuded. First it was for the rich mahogany; international lumber companies clear-cut entire districts so that the wealthy could furnish their homes with the dark red wood. What they left the peasants stripped away and baked into charcoal to be sold at the markets in the cities along the coast. The rainy seasons took care of the rest, washing away the fertile soil so all that remained were the scarred and scrubby reminders of what once was. All, that is, except for the Maladif district, whose hills lay lush and foreboding.
People here are afraid of the jungle of the Maladif district. Even Mathieu, who was born in a town in the foothills there, expressed his wariness at venturing too far into the forest. “It is a bad place,” Mathieu said. “Bad things happen there.” Bad things, many believed, that were perpetrated by the villagers of Ascension.
That didn’t stop Mathieu from taking the money Marlowe offered him. His initial cockiness, when he assured us that he could lead us directly to the village, only waned as our departure neared. I felt certain, as I’m sure Marlowe did, that Mathieu would abandon us soon after we entered the jungle; that at the first opportunity he would make his escape and return to the capital to revel in his triumph, regaling his mates with the story of how he cheated the blancs and left them to wander in the mal-foret.
I hadn’t been that bothered by the prospect at first. I figured that even if Mathieu did abscond, Marlowe could get us to Ascension. But now that he was laid up in the Excelsior, I would be left to the mercy of Mathieu. When I tried to explain my concern to Marlowe, he would not hear it.
“Don’t be such a fool, James,” he said to me, lifting himself from his fever-stained sheets. “He wouldn’t think of leaving you out there. Especially not as I’ll be here in Cap Gloire. It would take very little effort to locate him in the event that he returned without you. What guides there are hereabouts spend their days drinking usque in the cantinas down along the quay. In any case, Mathieu is well aware that it would only take a word to my friends in the Force Sûreté to have him taken care of.”
It was Marlowe’s relationships with members of the new regime that had afforded us the opportunity to be the first to approach the villagers of Ascension. I do not know upon what these relationships were based or how they were first established. Marlowe didn’t think it necessary to tell me. I’m sure it had to do with money somewhere along the line. For as Marlowe explained to me several times, in this country all dealings with the government are effected by bribery. Corruption is the mainstay.
Yet there seemed something more to Marlowe’s relationship with the officials here. The deputy minister of the Interior greeted our arrival at the airport, and when he welcomed Marlowe, he did so with a reverence that seemed disproportionate. I also detected a slight hint of fear in the man’s aspect; nebulous, but nonetheless apparent. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the deputy minister, unlike the majority of the officers who’d carried out the most recent coup, was not a native of the Maladif district. This was unusual, since it is the tendency in this country for usurpers of power—here it is usually the case o
f one junta overthrowing another—to adhere to a geographic loyalty rather than one based on rank. For example, the previous military government comprised, to a man, officers from Marais, the western-most district of the country. Marlowe made certain I did my reading before we arrived.
Still, friendship with the authorities alone could not guarantee exclusivity. After the doctor had left us—warning Marlowe that if he did not remain in bed and allow the antibiotics to run their course, the virus would strip the cilia from the walls of his intestines—I did my best to convince him that the excursion should be postponed. I advised that we wait until he was back on his feet.
“This is your project,” I said to him. “You’ve put in the work.”
Again he would not hear of it.
“What you’ve got to understand, James,” he told me, taking hold of my left hand to quell its slight tremor, “is that here corruption is simply a way of life. My friends have been kind enough to grant us a head start. But the bribery has begun. The pharmaceutical companies have reached deep into their pockets. Palms, as they say, have already been greased. At the least, we have a week’s advantage. My friends can delay the paperwork only so long. As for me, I could be laid up here for months. If you don’t go now, then we’ll have missed our chance.”
Of course, I knew he was right. I knew that I had no choice but to forge ahead without him.
The roads in Cap Gloire were miserable, the potholes unlike anything I had experienced. It was as if great starving beasts had fed upon the asphalt. There was no driving over these craters. Instead, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians alike gave them wide berth, as though in venturing too close one ran the risk of being swallowed up by the earth itself. I noticed this soon after we’d passed through the front gates of the Excelsior, Mathieu behind the wheel of the open-topped Land Rover that Marlowe had managed to secure for us, courtesy of one of his friends in the Force Sûreté. As we made our way along Avenue-de-la-Mer, heading north away from the ocean and toward the highway that would lead us into the interior, I glanced over my shoulder to get a last look at the Excelsior.
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