1990 - Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  But trying to run and extract my camera from its case meant that I could not properly judge where I was going. One foot went too near the edge of the gully, the ground gave way and I fell, tumbling and slithering twenty feet of near-vertical incline to its bottom, coming to rest in a rubbery clump of pepper cress that grew in the stream bed.

  At first I was a bit stunned and disorientated. I stood up and sat down heavily, straight away. I crawled up the stream a way to find my camera, which was dirty but undamaged.

  Getting my bearings, I realized that the noise of the fight had moved on, further upstream. I walked up the ravine for a hundred yards trying to follow it. Then it seemed to burst out anew on the bank edge high above me. I could glimpse in the trees and bushes the flailing, rushing bodies of several chimps, but could not recognize them. Then suddenly it was quiet again. Then some hooting, then some furious screams. Then silence.

  The banks of the ravine here were very steep and with little vegetation growing out of the stony exposed earth there were few handholds. I walked downstream looking for an easier route out. I found a place where some creepers and lianas grew down the bank face from the forest above. I grabbed the thickest, tugged strongly on it to see if it gave, and began to climb up, hauling myself hand over hand.

  I was half-way up when I heard a noise—a slither of earth and pebbles—I looked up to see a rock the size of a medicine ball bounce down towards me. I had no time to avoid it or protect myself. My seeing it and its fall by me were virtually simultaneous. I felt its warm breeze brush me, it may even have touched my hair, and then heard it bury itself with a thunk in the damp sand of the river bed. Big clods of earth, dust and shale followed it. This did not miss me. I hung on to my liana and hunched my head into my shoulders.

  When that had passed I lowered myself to the stream bed carefully, and shook the dirt from my hair and clothes. I washed my face in the trickle of water and walked downstream to a place where I could climb up unaided.

  I walked slowly back through the glade and joined the main path that led to the camp. Only then did I remember the fight and wondered what had happened to Clovis and Rita-Lu. I stopped and deliberated for a while whether to go back and search for them, but I realized that this late in the day any solitary efforts I could make would be a waste of time.

  I set off again, turned a corner and met Roberta Vail.

  It shocked me to see her there. I felt the breath driven from my body.

  “My God,” I said. “Jesus, Roberta…”

  “There you are,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Eugene wants to see you.”

  We walked back together. She seemed to me to be almost unreasonably calm, though I realized that might simply be in contrast to my own jangled and unsettled state. She said she didn’t know what Mallabar wanted to see me about. He was away somewhere and had radioed back to camp asking her to find me and bring me to him. The Land Rover was waiting. All she knew was that he had something to show me.

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked.

  She tapped the walkie-talkie strapped to her belt. “I called up Joao. He told me you were heading back, so I came down the path to meet you.” She glanced at me. “Why are you so dirty?”

  “I had a fall. I slid down the side of this ravine.”

  “Got to be more careful, Hope.”

  “I know.” I had an idea. “Did you hear any chimps?”

  She paused. “Ah…no. I didn’t. Did you?”

  “Yes. A hell of a din. I was trying to follow. That’s when I fell.”

  “No, I didn’t hear anything.”

  I can’t say why—perhaps it was because she seemed so incurious—but I thought she was lying. And a suspicion entered my mind then, like a thin splinter worked in to the palp of a finger, small but indisputably there, that—perhaps, possibly, conceivably—that rock the size of a medicine ball that had missed my head by an inch or less had been dislodged by something else, and not by the exertions of my over-eager climb.

  Back at camp we got into a Land Rover and were driven, first to Sangui, and then south, heading, I soon realized, for goalpost village. By the time we arrived it was almost dark and the headlights were switched on. In the village we were directed on, and soon we saw Mallabar’s Land Rover and a group of about two dozen villagers gathered round the goalposts.

  I opened the door and climbed out. I felt stiff and weary. There was a cool breeze blowing and carried on it was a distinct smell of wet earth. It would rain tonight.

  Mallabar left the crowd and strode toward us. I could tell from his posture and the conviction of his walk that he was both excited and pleased with himself.

  “Hope. Sorry to drag you down here. But it’s important, you’ll see.”

  He led me back towards the crowd. Hauser was there; he smiled and greeted me. I felt suddenly apprehensive, as if these people were now my enemies. The crowd parted and I saw why I had been called here.

  Strung up by its hind legs to the crossbar of the goalposts was a large, dead leopard. In the glare of the headlights the white fur on its groin and belly looked almost indecently clean.

  “There, Hope.” Mallabar presented it to me triumphantly as if it were some exotic hors d’oeuvre.

  “There’s your predator. That’s what’s been killing your chimps.”

  FAME

  Hope is more honest with herself since she came to live on Brazzaville Beach. She can admit to herself now, that, almost from the day she saw Bobo being killed, and certainly from the death of Mr Jeb, there were other motives forcing her to act in the way she did. Alongside her alarm and her shock had been another sensation: excitement. She felt lucky, almost blessed. It was Hope Clearwater who was witnessing these extraordinary events. What was taking place at Grosso Arvore was unparalleled, revelatory—no matter what explanation might be offered up later. And Hope was aware, from very early days, that there was every chance that it would be her name for ever associated with this new knowledge and understanding. Hence the urge to have something in print; hence the reticent and scrappy way she proceeded with Mallabar. If she told him too much, if she shocked him into sacking her, then the killings and the fate of the southern chimps would either be misconstrued or go undocumented. Or, worse still, someone else would break the news to the wider world. Though she was reluctant to admit it for a long time, Hope was in thrall to a vision of the future in which her name glowed with lasting renown. She had to be very careful that she did not throw this opportunity away.

  Five Acre Wood. Hazel, sallow, beech, hawthorn, maple, sycamore, blackthorn, birch, oak, ash and elm.

  The elms were dying.

  When Hope pried away the friable, seamed bark she saw the shallow, vermiculate grooves running along the wood beneath. They looked too small scars to injure great trees like these. But the evidence was irrefutable. Even now, with winter almost arrived, and only a few yellow leaves clinging on, Hope could tell which were the dead, diseased branches: twigless, furry with lichen, and without the true whip and give of live boughs in the wind.

  She walked through Five Acre Wood. It was a cold day with low heavy clouds, mouse grey, dense. The stiff breeze spat drops of sleety rain. All around her the wood seemed to sway and heave in the wind. She was well wrapped up but her cheeks and nose were numb from the cold. Beneath her feet the path was wet and muddy and the clayey loam stuck to her boots in a thick, ochre rind. As she made her way through the wet underwood, the blackthorn and the hawthorn scratched at her oilskin. A strand of hair that had escaped from her woolly hat flapped annoyingly in front of her eyes.

  The wind was blowing in cold off the grey tossed Channel, sweeping up the cliffs and across the down-lands and winter fields to tug and worry at the trees of Five Acre Wood. The light was cold and neutral, with a urinous hint of yellow that probably meant snow that evening.

  Hope thought with pleasant anticipation of her small cottage. The Raeburn heater in the kitchen stuffed with wood and coal; logs burning in the grate of the
sitting-room fire; upstairs in her chilly bedroom an electric heater buzzed, her bed hot from the wire grid of her electric blanket. Everything went full blast in the cottage these winter evenings; she was careless about her fuel bill. The windows would weep with condensation, the hot water pipes would ping and shudder as the Raeburn bulged with heat…And what would she have for dinner? she thought. She was putting on weight again, making big spicy stews for herself—lamb and chicken, oxtail and pork—slathering potatoes with butter and salt. But these days she did not care.

  All this fantasizing about her cottage and her evening meal made her suddenly want to be back indoors and out of the cold. She was heading for Green Barn Coppice, one of the five remaining areas of woodland that she had still to date and classify. She had intended to make a start today, but she felt tired and buffeted by all this raw weather.

  She picked her way carefully down a bank, slithery with fallen beech leaves, on to the drove road that led to the quarry pits and Green Barn Coppice. She stopped. If she turned right instead of left she could cut through Blacknoll Farm to East Knap and be there in fifteen minutes. She stood for a moment in the muddy lane, her brain dull with the effort of thought, trying to goad herself into making a decision. What the hell, she thought, the coppice will be there tomorrow, and I’ve got a lot of potatoes to peel. She turned right, into the wind, and walked down the lane towards the farm.

  Since she and John had separated, Hope had been back to London only once. John had cleared out all his belongings but had left the flat dirty and untidy. So she had spent an afternoon houseworking, hoovering and dusting and wiping down surfaces, as if attempting to expunge John’s smell from the place, and remove all lingering traces—stray hairs, fingerprints, toothpaste smears—of his presence.

  She bought some flowers, a new bedside lamp and a whistling kettle. She threw many things out: some ugly glasses with a sailing-ship motif, a thin rug, a blackened frying pan, a bathroom blind with two waterstains the shape of New Zealand. All these changes were more than cosmetic. She saw them as punctuation marks: a full stop here, a new paragraph there. Her life had changed now, and these alterations signalled that fact. She was not returning to a former state, she felt, this was the next step. Many of the bits and pieces she discarded had no association with him or with their life together; she simply wanted the atmosphere in her flat to be subtly different—the old place made new, for whatever was coming next.

  Having spent all Saturday effecting all this, she went to visit him on Sunday in a calm and confident frame of mind. He was living in a street that ran behind the Albert Hall, a high redbrick cliff of a Victorian terrace. He had rented a tiny, one-roomed, furnished flat under the eaves. It was cluttered with cardboard boxes full of his possessions which he had made no attempt to unpack. There was a long table which he had pushed up to the dormer window. The view took in the top of the Albert Memorial and a section of Hyde Park. The table was covered with papers and files. When she came in he kissed her firmly on the mouth. She had expected some shyness or awkwardness, but his mood, like hers, was brisk and confident. He went into the kitchenette to make her a cup of coffee.

  “Nice view,” she said, looking out of the window. A fat, grey pigeon sat on the guttering two feet away preening, and making its soft cry. She rapped on the glass and it flew away.

  “What?” he said, returning with two steaming mugs.

  “Pigeon. Can’t stand them.”

  They sat down.

  “Look busy,” she said, indicating the papers.

  “I’m getting a lot done,” he said. “Amazing. Funny what a change of scene can do sometimes.”

  She sipped the hot coffee, recognizing the mug she was drinking from as hers. They chatted on, not at all sadly or wistfully, but almost in a mood of quiet self-congratulation. They had done the right thing, John said. Hope agreed. He knew they would get back together again, but he just had to go a little further on his own. Once this body of work was over, then they could reassess everything and start anew.

  “I miss you,” he said with a smile. “All the time. And I can’t imagine not being with you.”

  “Good. Exactly. That’s what I hoped you’d say. I can’t imagine it either.”

  “But I think it’s best this way, for the time being.”

  “Yes. Get things on an even keel again.”

  “We had fun, didn’t we. Have fun,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Together, I mean. Don’t we?”

  They rationalized further, adultly. Hope made the point that the Dorset job had perhaps come at the wrong time, had meant they spent too much time apart, had forgotten something of what it was like to be together. When she was finished it would be the perfect opportunity to make new plans.

  “Perhaps we could go back to the States,” he said. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “No. Well, as long as it was somewhere nice. I have to get a job as well.”

  “That can be arranged. You’d be amazed.”

  They explored this option for a while and each enthused the other. It was a definite possibility, they concluded.

  When Hope left she was cheered up, more optimistic. When his work was going well he was a different person.

  At the door he said, “I think I’m close, this time. There’s something taking shape. A new set.”

  A set? Hope thought. What was a set? But she humoured him. With her spread fingers she framed an invisible title, a plaque in the air.

  “The Clearwater Set,” she proclaimed. She saw she had said exactly the right thing.

  He smiled, momentarily exhilarated, then lowered his gaze, immediately modest.

  “If only,” he said quietly. “My God, if only.”

  When he looked up she saw the ache of his ambition in his eyes for a second or two.

  “Don’t push yourself, Johnny,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me, you know. I’ll be happy if there’s a Clearwater Curve or a type of triangle or half a theorem, whatever.” But she saw she had inspired him.

  He shook a pair of crossed fingers at her. “Don’t worry,” he said, with a kind of breathless glee. “We’re practically there. The big one. The Clearwater Set.”

  She returned to Knap relieved and relaxed. To her surprise she found she could think unmoved and objectively about the affair with Jenny Lewkovitch. She was not bothered any more by his infidelity. He was too unusual a person, she felt, his motives in life, in the way he dealt with others, were strange and one-off. Even his adultery, she told herself, came into a different category from other people’s betrayals. But then she wondered if she were fooling herself, being less than honest, self-deluding. She thought about it, seriously, and decided that, in all objectivity, she was not being unfair.

  Her new mood lasted for a few more days. All the data on the hedgerows came back from the typist and the marked-up Ordnance Survey maps were sent off to the cartographers. It was an impressive and thorough piece of work, Munro told her, shyly. She happily accepted his compliments: he was right. She had examined and classified 475 hedgerows. Of these 121 had been graded as level one: ancient hedgerows of crucial ecological importance which were to be protected and conserved. Now her work on the woodland was almost completed, Munro asked her to stay on to classify the ecology of the estate’s watermeadows and some areas of downs and heathland. The work would take her through the following summer. She asked for some time to think about it.

  But she found that the act of considering her future brought in its train a mild depression which refused to be shaken off and, indeed, steadily deepened. She told herself it was simply the effect of concluding one job and having to start the process of finding another, but as the days went by and nothing improved she realized her disquiet was more profound than that.

  She telephoned Bogdan Lewkovitch and asked how John was. Bogdan reported that he was in very good form, as far as he could tell, working hard and fairly jolly and sociable. Then a day later John called and asked if he could come down to Knap for a w
eekend. Hope said no, immediately, making up some excuse. She felt guilty at first, but then she was irritated by his asking. He knew perfectly well that the cottage had one bedroom and one bed, so where did he expect to sleep? With her? If so, what was the point of officially separating if you saw each other at weekends to make love?

  This call and her annoyed reaction to it prompted a further clear-eyed reassessment of her marriage. Was he incorrigible or merely wayward? Would he ever change? Was she doing the right thing? As she could provide no satisfactory answers to her own questions, her anger gave way to a more pervasive melancholy. So she thought about her marriage, and John, and herself, as she tramped the lanes and droveways of the estate, moving from one sodden wood to another, solitary and brooding, distracted only by her measurements and classifications and her dreams of enormous meals.

  She walked through Blacknoll farmyard. It was empty apart from a damp bedraggled collie who picked its way through the brown puddles, barely glancing at her. The tearing noise of a drill biting into metal came from a big asbestos barn. It was funny, she thought suddenly and for no particular reason, but she wasn’t missing sex. Weeks had gone by since the last time she and John had made love but she wasn’t missing it at all.

  She was still pondering this phenomenon as she unlocked her cottage door and changed out of her damp clothes. She put the kettle on the Raeburn’s hob to boil and wondered vaguely if this was a sign that, genetically, she was Old Maid material. Perhaps she was exhibiting the symptoms prematurely…? This is what Meredith claimed had set in with her, recently. Except in her case she wasn’t the least worried about it. In fact she was almost exultant: complete contentment with one’s own company, Meredith said, was a rare and real achievement. Every need—emotional, intellectual and physical—could be catered for, single-handedly and fulfillingly, by the correctly inclined person. Blissful self-sufficiency was how she described it.