Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  He looked at his watch. Six minutes since he had spoken to Howard, time enough for him to have got clear of the house. Once again he checked the revolver, then he put on his coat, let himself out of the flat and went down in the lift to the car. He saw no one. No one saw him.

  As he drove down Belgrave Road his thoughts went back to Louise. She was Algeria for him. In those last days before independence when he would have been shot by both sides if he had put his nose into the streets, she had hidden him. While Algeria crumbled into a Moslem state, while his brothers, the pieds noirs and the army deserters fought a last-ditch stand to save the country from being dragged away from France, he had spent days on end in bed with her. It was ironic that at the time when he had been in most danger, in the week after he had blown up the oil dumps in Oran harbour, he had had one of the best times of his life. He had never enjoyed a woman more. It was summer and she had a cool apartment on the heights above the old city. When they needed food she would go out into the warm dusk and come back with new bread, wine, saucisson de campagne, a few onions, olives. . . . Sometimes they pulled the bed to the window and made love looking out over the city, letting the evening breeze off the sea dry their sweat.

  But that was 1962 and Louise had been twenty-six. Things were different now. He had been shocked when he had seen her a month earlier. He knew she would not be much more than forty but she looked worn out. Isabel, on the other hand, though only a few years younger than Louise, seemed in her twenties by comparison. That is what money could do, he thought.

  He paused at the traffic lights on Buckingham Palace Road, seeing the mist swirl round Victoria Coach Station and he shivered. After Algeria most other climates were too chilly, yet he had to admit that he felt more alive, more mentally alert than he had for a long time. Perhaps he needed action and danger, as in the old days, to give life its full taste.

  The old days. Less than twenty years ago, yet another age. The change had been abrupt. They had a vineyard in those days, started by Jacmel’s great-grandfather a few kilometres from Miliana. When Jacmel inherited it there were more than five hundred hectares under vines and the wine they produced had a reputation that was growing to equal that of the Clos Fallet or the Coteaux de l’Harrach.

  From his childhood Jacmel had worked on the great vineyard that lay under the hot African sun, knowing that one day it would be his. He had loved it with the passion of someone who knows exactly what he wants from life and that he will be doubly blessed by getting it. In 1958 his father died and he took over.

  He threw himself into the reorganization and improvement of the vineyard, building a new cooling system, a new fuloir, putting in stainless steel fermentation tanks, replanting areas with shiraz vines. He was in the midst of this work when de Gaulle made his speech on Algerian self-determination and the days of the French presence in Algeria were numbered.

  In the space of a few months Jacmel’s dream turned into a nightmare. Early in 1960 he helped other European settlers defy the government by putting up barricades in Algiers, with the passive complicity of the French army. But it had not helped. A year later French voters approved de Gaulle’s policy in a referendum and four weeks later the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, the O.A.S., was formed to fight the French separatists and the Moslem community.

  At first Jacmel had stayed among his vines. Helping to build barricades was one thing, making plastic explosive another. But slowly he began to realize that if Algeria became independent he would lose the vineyard and with it everything he had ever wanted. It was then he decided to fight.

  Like many other recruits to the O.A.S. he started by carrying messages, arranging clandestine meetings, helping to run “safe” houses for hunted pieds noirs, but soon he worked his way up in the organization until he finally reached the apogee–or as some Frenchmen said, the nadir–membership of the Delta Commando which robbed banks, blew up soft targets, kidnapped and killed Moslem leaders or French barbouzes, the counter terrorists who tried to infiltrate O.A.S. ranks. He had enjoyed neither the robbery nor the killing. He told himself there was no other way. Six months after joining the O.A.S. he was on the French Government’s “Most Wanted” list, and after he had blown up the oil storage tanks in Oran harbour both the F.L.N. and the French Army organized an intensive search for him. It was then that Louise hid him.

  When Algeria became independent in July 1962 and the Moslems began to cut a few white throats he had decided to get out. He paid one last visit to his vineyard. He and Louise drove out in a small Panhard with false plates, stopping well away from the farmhouse.

  It was warm in the late afternoon with a sirocco blowing from the south, and the vineyard was deserted. The vines were heavy with black grapes. As they walked towards the house he could feel the heat of the soil come up through his shoes. The blood-red sun was sinking behind a range of low hills casting the house and winery into dusty grey shadow. This was the time of day his father had come out on to the veranda and drunk several glasses of iced wine and soda. From a distance the house looked just the same as ever, but as he drew closer he could see that the shutters and the windows had been smashed. F.L.N. slogans had been daubed on the walls. Inside, the rooms were shattered. Broken furniture lay everywhere. He and Louise had walked through the rooms in silence. Outside, he went first to the pressing-room then to the vat house. Vandals had again anticipated him but there was evidence that later hands had tried to put right some of the damage. He guessed what had happened. Rumours were rife that workers’ cooperatives had been formed to take over the vineyards once the owners had fled.

  He had stood outside the winery for a long time then abruptly he had turned to Louise and said, “Come. Help me.” They went to the shed where the tractors and the spraying equipment were housed. This was one area he had not modernized and he showed her how to operate a hand pump that raised gasoline and diesel oil from their storage tanks on the ground, to tanks on high platforms. He then brought in one of the tractors with the big sprayer which was normally used to spray the vines with copper sulphate against mildew. The sprayer’s tanks were empty and into these he now fed diesel and gasoline from the high tanks.

  There was a moon that night otherwise he would not have been able to do what he did, since the lights of the tractor would have drawn labourers from nearby villages. He worked without stopping except to refill the sprayer tanks. All that night Louise pumped and he sprayed and by dawn he had covered a series of strips, soaking the vines in the mixture. At first light he knew it would be too dangerous to continue so he put the tractor away and poured what remained of the mixture into the vats holding last year’s wine.

  As the sun’s rim broke the eastern horizon he put a match to the vines nearest the house. The petrol, held by the heavier diesel fuel, had not vaporized and now it went up like a bomb, each vine exploding into flame and smoke. The fire raced down the rows and sparks were carried from one fuel-soaked strip of

  vineyard to the next on the driving wind. Soon, whole areas of vines had caught alight.

  The wind was blowing the flames in the direction of the house but Jacmel did not wait to see it burn. He and Louise had got into the car and had driven away in the direction of Algiers and he had not looked back once at the great pall of smoke that rose up into the sky.

  The burning of the vineyard marked the end of a phase in Jacmel’s life; nothing was ever to be the same again.

  He turned the Cortina into Eaton Square and began looking for the house. It faced north. There it was, the Citroen was outside as arranged. He stopped, went up the stairs and rang the bell.

  Louise must have been waiting just inside the door for it opened immediately. She pulled him in.

  “Entre vite! Mon Dieu! Que je suis contente de te revoir!”

  She closed the door and put her back to it. Her sallow face was strained.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”

  “L’enfant est sorti. J’ai pas pu l’arreter. Je suis–”

  From the bo
ttom of the stairs Dave said, “Remember our agreement? You no spikada French and I no spikada Pakistani. Right?”

  Jacmel looked at him without expression, then Louise said, “Come upstairs ”

  In the kitchen Jacmel said, “Tell me.”

  “The little bugger went out,” Dave said.

  “You . . .” he pointed at Dave. “You be quiet for a little.” He turned to Louise. “Tell me.”

  * * *

  At this time, in Hampstead, the lights were already on in the Institute of Toxicology which lay between Heath Street and the Whitestone Pond. In the late afternoon gloom the mist had settled on Hampstead Hill and the outlines of the Institute were blurred. It was not a big building, nothing like the Pasteur Institute in Paris with which it closely worked. In the days of Empire its grant had been substantial but since then Treasury money had only come in dribbles and the Institute now barely survived and was little known outside its own particular sphere.

  In her office on the first floor Dr Marion Stowe, its assistant director, was dictating into a recording machine. “Antivenom is effective in relieving hypertension and bradycardia provided that the circulating volume is restored with intravenous fluid, preferably fresh whole blood or plasma expanders stop paragraph Antivenoms are not thought to prevent local tissue damage though four of the patients bracket cases three to six see Nigerian research BMJ Warrell, Ormerod, Davidson twenty December seventy five close bracket who had severe local envenoming–” The telephone on her desk began to ring. She looked at her watch and smiled. Susan home from school. She thought of the dark cheerless flat in Belsize Park and again–as she often did–felt a sense of guilt at the thought of her daughter returning each day from school to an empty flat. But what could she do? How could she change things? She pulled off her left ear-ring and answered the phone.

  “Hello, darling,” she said. “Everything all right? Have a good day? Stew? Oh, poor you. Anything special you’d like? What about some Chinese? I could pass the Tai Tong on the way home. Sweet and sour chicken? Good, yes, and pancake rolls. What about beef and green peppers, you like that? I’ll get one of each. We’ll make our own rice. Anything on the box? Blue Peter isn’t on, is it? No, of course not, that was yesterday. Anyway, it’s Friday so I won’t be late. See you soon, darling. ‘Bye.” She put down the telephone and automatically put on her ear-ring again. Ten years old, she thought. My God, in a few years she’ll be gone and then what? She felt a sense of desperation. Thoreau was only half right, she thought. All women, too. She picked up the microphone and began dictating again. “If necrosis does develop immediate extensive surgical . . . debridement . . . uh . . . followed by split skin . . . ah . . .” She switched it off. She could not concentrate now. Monday would do just as well.

  She sat back in her desk-chair and stretched, feeling restless. She got up and walked to the window. She could see nothing but her own reflection in the long panes: a woman of middle height, thirty-four years old, in a long shapeless white coat. Irritated, she took off the coat and threw it on to a chair. That was better, she could see herself more clearly; she had a waist once more. She ticked off the points with a lack of sentiment: hair, rich, auburn; face, good eyes, large mouth, high cheek bones–too definite for beauty but not bad. Tim had once said she looked Byzantine. It was a nice thing to say. Bosom, good, high. Hips too broad. Tell-tale creases on her skirt. Stretch marks on her tummy, too, but only she knew that. And Tim, of course. Good legs. Feet too large. On the whole B+ or, if the day was kind, A–. She decided to go home and went to the lab across the hallway. Professor Taylor-Askew, the Director of the Institute, had not been in for nearly a month and with his eyes steadily becoming worse, was unlikely to return. Idly, she wondered if she would get the job. Did she want it? Did she want to be cooped up here for another twenty-six years before retirement age? Once she became director she would have even less time with Susan, and as for marriage . . . well, there didn’t seem much prospect of that anyway.

  It was a small laboratory, only three assistants. There had once been five, but that was before Marion’s day. Joe Truman was bent over his microscope, unmoving, as though cast in bronze; Phyllis, who had taken her doctorate three months before and was getting itchy feet, was washing out some flasks and the Rajah, C. C. Mukerjee, who made the tea, drove the van, looked after the specimens in the small room next door which they called “the zoo”, was unpacking the latest batch of venom from the Sparrman Institute in Port Elizabeth. It was a scene unchanged for the past five years and sometimes Marion was grateful, for it gave her a sense of continuity and security, and at other times she felt repelled by its sameness; it was a dichotomy she had never resolved.

  “Didn’t Loewenthal have something for us today?” she asked Mr Mukerjee. “Wasn’t there a shipment due from Durban?”

  He looked up from his unpacking. “I have been,” he said.

  “Everything all right?”

  “One is looking sick.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Three.”

  “You should have called me.” Frowning, she went into the adjoining room, the “zoo”, and closed the door behind her. It was very warm. Around the walls were fifteen or twenty small wooden crates, each with a trap-door at the top held by a metal catch. One side was open but covered by fine wire mesh; in each crate was a snake. As she walked past the cages she was aware of the jewel-like eyes and the flickering tongues. There were Russell’s Vipers, coral snakes, rattlers, taipans, Egyptian cobras, puff adders. The three new crates were on a shelf on the left of the room and she crossed to inspect them. They still had their customs forms stapled to their sides and the words “Dangerous Reptiles” stencilled on to the wood. There was no movement in any of the crates and she craned forward to look more closely. The first held a boomslang, the elegant green and yellow tree snake that had been thought only slightly venomous until a few years before when one had killed a famous American herpetologist. It lay coiled upon itself regarding her with unwinking eyes. It didn’t look too bad after its long flight. Nor did the night adder in the second cage. But the Rajah seemed right about the occupant of the third cage. It lay limply, its head tucked into the far corner of the crate. Marion thought there was something odd about it and it wasn’t only the way it was lying. The light in the room was dim so she switched on a powerful centre lamp and went back to inspect the snake. Her frown deepened. Then she realized what was bothering her: size. This was a small snake, not more than three feet long; shiny black, small head. And it looked like a . . . but she wasn’t sure what it was. She went back to her room and pulled down Fitzsimons’ Snakes of Southern Africa and paged through it until she came to colubridae. She found the picture she wanted facing page 121. She held the book up to the light and glanced back and forth from the picture to the inert body of the snake. It matched. She was looking at a harmless black house snake of the type that was found throughout South Africa. But the Institute never

  ordered harmless snakes. She flicked back a few pages and under Field Notes read: “Similar in habits to the Common Brown House Snake, but not nearly so common nor so widespread as the latter. Like other members of the genus, it has a quiet docile disposition and seldom attempts to bite, even when first handled.” There was not much more so she turned to the entry for Brown House Snake and quickly read the columns of text. Apparently they were often tamed and used almost as pets by some South African farmers who kept them to control vermin in and around the homestead. Then another line caught her attention. “In its darker phases this species is often mistaken for the young of cobra or mamba and, unfortunately, summarily killed for such.”

  She closed the book and went into the laboratory. “Have you got the waybill for that Durban shipment?” she said to Mr Mukerjee. He rummaged on his desk, brought up a sheaf of papers and handed them to her. One boomslang, she read, that was correct. One night adder, that was also correct. One black mamba . . . it wasn’t like Loewenthal to make mistakes. “Mr Loewenthal’s got i
t wrong,” she said. “He’s sent us a black house snake.” C.C. stood up and looked at the waybill and then at Marion. He sucked noisily through his teeth.

  “Mr Loewenthal was not there,” he said. “I am being dealt with by Mrs Loewenthal.”

  “That explains it, then.”

  “Must I take it back?” There was a look of sullen resistance in his eyes.

  “It’ll be all right here for the weekend,” she said. “Probably better off than in the shop. Leave it till Monday.”

  The expression gave way to one of happiness. “Very well. Very well.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’m off,” she said. “I’m going to see Professor Taylor-Askew.” The lie slipped out easily. “Joe, if you’re last, will you see the lights are put out?”

  Joe grunted and she went into her room to get her coat.

  “ ‘Night everyone,” she said, passing through the lab and out on to the landing and down the staircase. The mist was much thicker now. It made everything very still. She could hardly hear the cars churning up Heath Street at the start of the Friday rush hour; there was only the drip-drip from the huge oaks that surrounded the Institute. Sweet and sour chicken, she said to herself as she crossed to the car park. And beef with green peppers. Pancake rolls. She wondered if they had enough soya sauce at home, perhaps she should stop in at the supermarket and pick up a bottle.