Evelyn screamed: a large, scarred hand, dark brown, very dirty, with hair on the back and cracked fingernails, had clamped onto her own slim fingers and held them fast. It was the explorer’s hand. He was up on one elbow, staring at her, and his harrowed face was clenched and twitching with anger. She gazed at him with wide, shocked eyes. He took the revolver from her. ‘And the bullet,’ he growled, picking it from her open palm. He took the other bullet from the camp stool and then, his eyes darting from the girl to the revolver, he loaded two chambers.
‘One for you, Agatha,’ he said hoarsely, ‘one for me.’ He nodded several times. ‘This way: quick – sure – painless. Better death, foil the pygmies, what.’ He subsided onto his back, suddenly exhausted. His fingers twitched upon the sweat-stained canvas of the cot, and a sudden access of perspiration left him pale and dripping. His eyes bulged, then fixed upon a point on the roof of the tent. His whole body shivered, and a limp hand fluttered from the canvas like an injured bird. ‘Agatha,’ he moaned; and Evelyn, dropping to her knees, took his hand.
• • •
All afternoon the fever raged, and the explorer mumbled incoherently throughout. On several occasions he was convulsed with terror, and rose up shouting that the pygmies were hard by; but each time Evelyn calmed and soothed the troubled man, mopped his brow and gave him water; and in his few moments of lucidity he gazed at her with weak, shining eyes and murmured the name Agatha. For in the turmoil of his disordered mind he lay in a child’s bedroom, in a child’s bed, with a stuffed golliwog beside him, and a kindly woman in a sort of ruffled white cap and a starched white apron briskly ministering to his child’s disease; and thus did Evelyn appear to him.
When the light began at last to thicken, and the dusk of that autumnal day crept into the explorer’s tent and pooled itself in clots of shadow in the corners of the tent, a voice came calling, ‘Evelyn! Evelyn!’ The man stirred in his uneasy doze, muttering, and Evelyn leaned close to him. ‘I have to go,’ she whispered. ‘Sleep now, and I’ll come back . . .’
He seemed about to rise from the camp bed and cry out; his eyes opened wide for an instant; but then the netherworld of shadows and confusion reclaimed him, and he sank once more into sleep of a sort. Evelyn spread upon his twitching limbs the blanket she had brought out from the house; and then she padded silently away, through the bushes, and onto the path back to the house.
• • •
The Cleghorns were old friends of the family, so Evelyn was permitted to eat with the grown-ups. Mrs Cleghorn — Auntie Vera – was a large dark woman with good teeth. She wore heavy lipstick and was married to an anesthetist called Frank — Uncle Frank – a colleague of Gerald’s. Mummy and Auntie Vera often played bridge together, and it was about bridge that they were talking when Evelyn entered the drawing room, just before dinner. Everybody was drinking a rather nice South African sherry, and Evelyn was invited to have a juice. Then Mrs Piker-Smith went to see Mrs Guppy in the kitchen, and as the two men drew aside to talk shop for a moment Auntie Vera’s great black eyes swiveled round on Evelyn like a pair of undimmed headlights.
‘Evelyn,’ she cried, plumping a cushion with a large white hand. ‘Come here and sit next to me. How is school?’ Evelyn liked Auntie Vera, but she was rather in awe of her. She sat down on the sofa, pressing her slender legs together and clasping her hands in her lap. ‘We’re on half-term,’ she said, looking at the carpet.
‘Half-term!’ cried Auntie Vera. ‘How marvelous!’
‘Yes,’ said Evelyn with great seriousness. ‘Do you know anything about Africa, Auntie Vera?’ A coal fire crackled in the grate; above the mantelpiece hung a mirror, and invitations to social functions, mostly connected to the hospital, were tucked into the inside edge of the frame.
‘Frank took me to Cairo for our honeymoon,’ said Auntie Vera, taking Evelyn’s hand. ‘He pretended I was Cleopatra!’ Evelyn turned toward her and found the great black headlamps shining with delight and the tip of Auntie Vera’s tongue resting on her top lip.
Conversation at the dinner table ranged widely from the price of sherry to the price of beef. Gerald mentioned a rather interesting colostomy he’d performed after lunch, and Uncle Frank made some quips which might, in a nonmedical household, have been taken in rather bad taste. Only once did Evelyn pay any attention, and that was during the main course, when Auntie Vera turned to her husband and said, ‘Frank, Evelyn is interested in Africa.’
‘Is she?’ said Frank Cleghorn.
‘Not all Africa, Uncle Frank,’ said Evelyn. ‘Just the Congo.’
‘Ah, the Congo!’ said Uncle Frank fatly, and began to tell the story of Henry Morton Stanley, digressing rather amusingly to mention the tragic shooting death of John Hanning Speke mere hours before the eagerly awaited debate with Richard Burton on the source of the Nile; that was in 1864. Evelyn was sitting opposite Uncle Frank, who had his back to the door of the dining room, which was half-open; as Evelyn half-listened to his affable drone, she suddenly saw, over his shoulder, pausing in the doorway as he shuffled towards the stairs, the explorer. He turned his head and stared at her. Fortunately, she did not cry out; Auntie Vera was deep in animated bridge talk with Mummy, and Daddy was concentrating on a delicate incision he was about to make in a slice of reddish beef. Uncle Frank warbled on, and in the doorway behind his back stood the haggard, feverish man, and oh, how ill he looked! His head hung weakly on sagging shoulders; his eyes burned with a low, sickly gleam out of sunken sockets in an unshaven face deeply etched with gullies of suffering. His clothes looked extraordinarily ragged and filthy against the beige flowered wallpaper of the hallway, and his scarred, grimy hands still twitched convulsively where they dangled at his sides. Evelyn stared at him wide-eyed, and Uncle Frank was flattered at the raptness of her attention. It was only after some moments that he realized her eyes were focused not upon his own but beyond them; and he began, even as his discourse flowed forward, to turn in his seat. But at precisely the same instant the explorer shuffled off down the hallway out of sight; so that Uncle Frank, seeing nothing, turned back and talked on. Daddy, having completed his incision, lifted his fork and his eyes and turned to the anesthetist as his teeth closed upon the meat; and Auntie Vera lifted her wineglass while Mummy peered anxiously into the gravy boat.
When at last Evelyn was able to get away, she dashed upstairs; and as she had half-feared, and half-hoped, the explorer was in her bedroom. Not only was he in her bedroom, he was in her bed, fully clothed, the sheets up to his chin. His teeth were chattering loudly and his whole body shivered beneath the bedclothes.
‘Cold,’ he grunted as Evelyn closed the door behind her and ran to the bed. ‘Cold, Agatha,’ he said more clearly, and she reached under the bedclothes for his hand. It was frigid. Something else was down there too – she felt the hard metallic bulge of the revolver, stuffed into the explorer’s waist-band. ‘Let me have the gun,’ she whispered.
A tremor passed across the pathetic features of the dying man. ‘Need will,’ he muttered. ‘Need will to do it. Pygmies . . .’ Here he paused, and his chest heaved painfully with the effort to talk, the effort to think. Oh, how he wanted simply to slip away, let go, sink into peace and rest and silence and darkness! – but he could not let go, not yet. ‘Pygmies,’ he said, more loudly, and Evelyn with terror clapped her hand upon his parched and cracking lips. The wild eyes darted to her bedroom door. He knew they were near. ‘Pygmies,’ he whispered, when she lifted her palm from his mouth. ‘Coming to eat us. One for you, Agatha, one for me . . .’
‘Don’t talk,’ said Evelyn, her finger to her lips. ‘We won’t be eaten. Sleep. I’ll give you a drink.’
Evelyn fetched a drink of water, and the explorer’s eyes, as she supported his shoulders and held the cup to his lips, rested on her face with an expression of such profound pain, and gratitude, and spirit that it tested the girl’s mettle pretty sternly. But she did not flinch nor falter, and when he had drunk she eased his head back onto the pillow and
stroked his chilly brow.
‘Agatha,’ he murmured, ‘Agatha,’ and his grip on her fingers loosened very slightly.
• • •
The rest of that evening was nerve-racking for Evelyn. She went downstairs to say good night to Uncle Frank and Auntie Vera, and to Mummy and Daddy, and then darted back up to her bedroom. She could only hope that Mummy wouldn’t come to tuck her in tonight; it was something she did occasionally, by no means invariably. Evelyn made up a bed for herself on the carpet, and turned off the light. The explorer seemed to be sleeping soundly. She listened in the darkness for Mummy and Daddy coming up to bed. Daddy was first; she heard him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Then Mummy came up, and stopped at the top of the stairs. Evelyn’s heart was beating fit to burst; hot chemicals discharged and flooded in turmoil about her viscera; go to bed, Mummy, a voice in her brain screamed silently, go to bed, Mummy! Steps across the landing, and then – a hand on Evelyn’s door handle!
The tension, in the few moments that followed, was, to Evelyn, lying there in the darkness, her eyes wide and her stomach awash with adrenaline, almost unendurable. Frightful scenarios unfolded at lightning speed in her febrile imagination. How could Mummy and Daddy be expected to understand about the explorer? And the gun! What if –
‘Denise!’
Even as the handle turned, her father’s voice called from the bathroom.
‘What is it, Gerald?’ replied her mother in hushed tones.
‘Have we any dental floss?’
‘On the shelf, dear.’ The door handle was still depressed; Evelyn desperately wanted to go to the bathroom herself.
‘No, I don’t see it.’
‘Oh, Gerald,’ murmured Mrs Piker-Smith; and, wifely duty superseding maternal solicitude in the ethical hierarchy of that good woman, she tiptoed to the bathroom and located the dental floss. A short conversation about the beef ensued; and then Mrs Piker-Smith went into the bedroom, closely followed by her husband, and their door, to Evelyn’s immense relief, closed behind them. But it was another excruciating hour before she dared get up and creep to the bathroom.
• • •
The next morning the explorer was dead. Silently, and, one hopes, peacefully, in the middle of the night, he had passed away. Evelyn awoke at six and realized it immediately. He was stiff and staring, and when she laid her hand upon his face, his skin was even colder than it had been last night. She closed his eyes; and then she lay on the bed beside him, on top of the blankets, and she wept quietly for ten minutes. She wept into her blankets as the fact of the loss of that long-suffering man rose up starkly in her heart, and she wept too for herself, for she was desolate. Her sorrow was keen, but it would not fester; and when she rose from her bed, wet-eyed and gulping back the hot taste of grief in her throat, she tried to think clearly what was best. But first she must air the room, and the bed, and change the sheets, for the stink of a man too long in the jungle hung heavy in Evelyn’s bedroom.
Fever had weakened him, diminished him, and the body was light. Evelyn, though skinny, was strong from hockey, and she dragged him from the bed to the closet quite easily. She sat him in the darkest corner, covered him up with a pair of old school raincoats, and pushed all her clothes to that end of the rail. Then she opened wide the windows, stuffed the sheets into her laundry basket, and climbed under the blankets, where she lay in a state of rising anxiety till Mummy should come to wake her.
‘Darling, you’ll catch your death!’ cried Mrs Piker-Smith when she came in at half past eight. The windows were wide open and the day was very blustery indeed. The curtains flapped wildly and the air was chill. Even so, there were traces. ‘What’s that funny smell, darling?’ said Mummy, standing by the closet door and wrinkling her nose. Evelyn, simulating a slow awakening, mumbled incomprehensibly from the bed. Mrs Piker-Smith stood frowning a moment more. ‘It must be your hockey things,’ she decided. ‘Give them to Mrs Guppy, darling, and they’ll be clean for school.’
Mumble.
‘It’s eight-thirty, darling’ – and she went downstairs.
• • •
Evelyn stood panting in the tent. All morning the explorer had remained in her closet, and those hours had not been easy for the girl. But after lunch Daddy had gone back to the hospital, Mummy had gone to her bridge, and Mrs Guppy had gone shopping. Evelyn breathed a prayer of thanks that all their lives were subject to such seemingly immutable routine. She’d hauled him out of the closet then and dragged him downstairs. She’d moved slowly, backwards, clutching him by the armpits. His head lolled about on his chest and his feet bumped limply on the stairs. In death he seemed so small, so light, that Evelyn was again unhappy, and her eyes brimmed with tears as she dragged him across the linoleum of the kitchen floor. She laid him down for a moment and went for a glass of water. Over the sink was the kitchen window, and it looked down on the garden. Mrs Guppy had brought in the three white sheets; her own sheets had not yet replaced them; instead, the line was alive in the wind with her parents’ underwear. The elm at the bottom of the garden was once more whipping its limbs about. A large Persian cat paused upon the wall by the gardener’s old shed, then stalked off with dignity, picking a path along the top of the wall with its tail stiffly aloft. Evelyn had drunk her water and then manhandled the explorer down the steps, between the flowerbeds, across the lawn and round the goldfish pond, into the bushes and so to the tent. And now she would bury him.
Evelyn had long since broken open the old padlock on the shed door, and it hung there now only to hold the door. She slipped it out of the eye and the door swung open. A damp, fetid smell, dusty, earthy, filled the shed. The light with difficulty penetrated the place; a large heap of sacks moldered gently in the corner, and the old plank floor was suspiciously damp thereabouts. Evelyn had once poked about in that corner, but now she tended to avoid it, for the floor was rotten beneath the sacks, and the three substances, sacking, wood, and the earth beneath the rotten wood, had begun to coalesce, as if attempting, in their nostalgia for some primeval state of slime, to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish or separate them. Other signs of regression and breakdown were manifest in that dusty old shed; upon the windowsill, beneath the vast network of cobwebs, lay the stiff little corpses, some partially digested, of flies and other small winged insects, many with their tiny legs curled pathetically over them as if in a final and futile gesture of self-closure. An old cardboard box, moist with decay, was damply merging with the wall, and in it a heap of parts from some long-forgotten automobile engine congealed blackly rigid, petrifying like coal as the work of time and damp smudged them with rust and rendered their decadent inutility ever more irrevocable. Photographs had once been pinned to the wall of the shed; these now curled at the edges like the legs of the flies, and as regards their degenerated content barely a trace could now be detected of the humans who had stood, once, before the camera, vital, one presumes, and alive. It was as though they had died in the bad air, the malaria, of that neglected little corner of the garden, the thin dusty air of the old shed, within which everything must devolve to a fused state of formless unity . . .
But Evelyn had no time to relish regression today. She stepped across the floor and seized up a spade, its blade spotted orange with rust but its handle as yet sturdy and whole. This she took from the shed and, closing the rickety door behind her and replacing the great padlock, ran back through the windy sunshine of that October afternoon and again entered the bushes.
And now she worked briskly and methodically. She collapsed the filthy tent, noticing as she did so the multitudes of tiny equatorial insects clustering in the seams and corners. She dropped it in the corner of the clearing, and then laid the explorer upon it, and his bed beside him, and then the camp stool with its few pitiful possessions – remnants of the explorer’s last wild dash from the Congo, pursued by anthropophagous pygmies who had once existed either in the reality of that far jungle or in the fevered mind of her strange and needy visitor
, Evelyn could not know which. And then she dug. For two hours she dug; her young limbs strong from hockey, she tore a steadily widening, steadily deepening hole out of the earth in the center of the clearing in the midst of the rhododendron bushes at the bottom of the garden. And when she was finished she lined the hole with the tent. And then she burned that old map of his, creased and sweat-stained; she set it afire with the odd vestas he had left on the folding stool, and the ashes fell into the pit. And then she tossed in the gun, having hauled it with a sob from the dead man’s waistband; and then the flask and the oil lamp, and then the man himself, into his grave, but not unmourned, and maybe this is all that any of us can ask for.
• • •
She saw him, occasionally, in the months that followed, always from her bedroom window when the moon was up. He’d be standing at the goldfish pond, his face pale and gleaming in the moonlight and his hands twitching at his sides. He’d look up at her window and she’d slowly move her palm back and forth in greeting. And though the fever was still upon him, he seemed no longer in mortal fear of the pygmies – yes, a subtle theme of peace had entered the symphony of his diseased being, if being indeed he was. Perhaps, after all, he was nothing; Evelyn began to see him less and less frequently after that, and at around the time — she’d have been about fourteen-and-a-half then – the time she decided to become a doctor, he disappeared from her life completely, and she never saw him again.
THE BLACK HAND OF THE RAJ
* * *
Blood and Water and Other Stories Page 3