She spoke in a flat drone, not peevishly. High on her right cheek there was a mole with hairs sprouting in it.
‘If you need a lift to church on Sunday, I’ll give a toot as I pass the gate at a quarter past ten. No hymns, the organ’s got termites.’
Abruptly she went off to collect the eggs which Black held cupped in his elegant long hands.
There was a roar overhead and I saw a small aeroplane which seemed to be doing a circle round the bungalow. Helen came running out and waved at the sky, then led me off to the thatched lean-to where we had left the jeep.
‘She’s a cow, that Brinscombe,’ Helen said, ‘always on the scrounge. Her husband was shot by robbers, most people would rather they’d got her.’
We bumped across a dry watercourse and up through rocky scrub with little tender-green bushes that looked like blueberries, then down into the valley and another raw stony watercourse. Beyond it, a flattened strip of runway beside a long white building with EGERTON E. painted in black on its shining tin roof. The little plane had already landed and two men were climbing out of it.
The taller of the two stood for an instant at the doorway while the other one who had jumped down wheeled over some rusty steps that were standing by the runway. Hunched in the low opening the taller man looked frighteningly large, as though there might be a lot more of him still squeezing to get out of the plane.
Finally he reached the ground and stood looking about him.
‘He’s probably saying, Isn’t that great,’ I said.
‘Yes, except that, well, he’s changed a bit.’
‘Has he? How?’
‘You’ll see, I think you will anyway.’
Dodo Wilmot put out a hand which was as huge and firm as before, but he looked more rugged somehow – he might have lost a stone or two – and for the first time I noticed his eyes as he was pointing out something in the hills: pale, the palest sort of green that is nearly grey. With his great slab of a chin and squat nose and a few strands of hair plastered to his scalp he was no longer a blob but positively ugly with a fine imperial ugliness. Even his walk seemed a little different, carrying a certain authority.
‘How’s Greg? Make sure Mrs Cardwell keeps him down at the mission for a couple of weeks minimum. You want to treat tick-bite fever with a certain respect. Any of that quartz from One-Tree turn out to be worth a dime? No? That doesn’t surprise me. I always said we’d need to go higher up the valley. Well, isn’t this great? Remember that night at the Boudin. You certainly had a load on. I thought you were never going to be done throwing up in the canal.’
He punched me lightly on the biceps and I wondered who he was thinking of.
His sky-blue bush shirt smelled fresh, of some flower that wasn’t quite lavender. He seemed unquenchable, not really human but not alarming either.
At a fork in the road that I had not noticed on the way down, he put his hand over Helen’s left forearm and made her turn the wheel to the right.
‘Let’s go see the mine. I can’t wait . . .’
And he began singing ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ in his high light voice that didn’t sound as sweet as Burl Ives now that he was singing a Burl Ives number.
The road, not much more than a track here, traversed the side of the stony hill and slalomed down through thorn bushes and reeds to a dry river-bed. Now and then we splashed through a shallow pool and sent the river birds skittering off into the bushes. Dodo took a pair of shades out of his shirt pocket and put them on.
‘O I want to go
Where there ain’t no snow
And the wind don’t blow
In my Big Rock Candy Mountain.’
Helen joined in. I had never heard her sing before. She turned out to sing so flat that I wasn’t too shy to add my drone. Sitting between us Dodo kept time beating lightly on our thighs.
We came to the half-eaten hills quicker than I had expected. Close up, they were imposing, the great cliffs and ledges, raw pink with purple zigzags running through the rock and here and there flashes of quartz catching the sun before they were dulled by the next cloud of dust coming up from the cutters working across the lower levels of the quarry. What had seemed from the other side of the valley like an affront to nature now felt like part of some gigantic natural process of crunching and shifting the earth’s surface. The noise and the dust were exhilarating. In my ear Dodo was shouting how many tons of rock his new Brenner-Thyssens could shift in an hour. I looked up at the machine just above us edging along a narrow col between two enormous craters.
‘Looks dangerous.’
‘You’re bound to take casualties in an operation this size. Statistically it’s safer than travelling by an African bus. And they take damn good care because they know if they lose a machine they’re out.’
‘And what are you looking for exactly?’
‘We are prospectors, Gus, high on hope and low on information. According to the report of the learned geologist and his fair assistant here, these granites are liable to contain mega crystals of quartz, beryl, columbite, cassiterite, you name it. Could find a crystal thirty foot long, weighing twenty tons, beryl especially.’
‘Beryl? I remember my mother had a beryl ring she liked, rather watery sort of thing.’
‘It’s a beautiful stone, colour of my eyes, would you believe. Take a look.’
And he bent towards me, grimacing to open his left eye to the maximum, as though asking me to remove a speck. Almost against my will, I stared into that green-almost-grey iris which seemed not to return my gaze, as if made of glass.
‘Ain’t worth shit, the ordinary beryl. As a precious stone, that is. Worth a bit if you find the yellow one, that’s heliodor if it’s a silicate, or cat’s-eye if it’s an oxide, like my ring’ – and he flashed a signet with a tawny gold-flecked stone in it – ‘then there’s a blue beryl, what you’d call an aquamarine. And of course if you really hit paydirt, there’s the green one.’
‘Emerald? Is that a sort of beryl too?’
‘Sure is.’
‘And that’s what you’re hoping to find here?’
Dodo grunted and tapped his nose.
I looked up into the quarry now obscured by swirling dust and felt myself to be deep in the heart of King Solomon’s mines with Prester John himself as my guide. The whole enterprise sounded so high and reckless, carving out these great chunks of hillside in the hope of finding a piece of quartz which was probably only the size of your fist and had happened to turn green a million years ago. But then perhaps once in a lifetime you would find a twenty-tonner and come back to England with a huge emerald on your pinkie and live in a stucco palace in Kensington where you would die of boredom dreaming of the high veld.
We dodged out of the way of a dusty lorry bumping off towards the tall sheds at the far end of the quarry. My canvas shoes were soaked by the grey and brown slurry that ran in sluggish rivulets down from the quarry to the river-bed. The same liquid slurped out of the corners of the dumper trucks carrying the waste off to the sheds.
‘That’s where we break up the spoil, damn hard on the grinders but it makes great road metal. The Government don’t pay us much, but it keeps them sweet and we’ll leave them a few miles of highway you don’t break your ass on. Let’s go, Helen.’
Dodo laughed and slapped the side of the jeep as though geeing up a sluggish nag. He poked his head out of the window to catch a last glimpse of the swirling dust and the great pink escarpment and the mild blue sky.
‘Isn’t Africa great? Don’t you just love the space?’
He bathed his beryl eyes in the continent. Its whole languorous sprawl might have been made for him. And even I could see the glory of it, the moral romance of the whole project.
That night he told us how he got his start. You could see he had told the story a hundred times.
‘We were farm people, had a stretch just east of Rapid City, South Dakota. You ever hear of the Badlands? Well, this land was really bad, topsoil would blow away i
n the first puff of wind and this was twister country. Anyway my daddy devised this special light plough with a cute kind of ridge-guard to keep the dirt down, got the local blacksmith to run him up a couple, then sold a few to the neighbours, pretty soon he had some cash he didn’t need to tell Mother about, so he started gambling. Well, he had beginner’s luck, my daddy wasn’t much good at poker but the other feller was worse, and he won this opencast mine off him in Saratoga one night. My daddy didn’t know a thing about mining either, so he said to me, Waldo you try your luck at it. My oh my, doesn’t that look wonderful?’
He paused to let Helen put the dish of steaming spaghetti on the verandah table. The white strands looked naked and off-putting against the dark earthenware dish and seemed grateful to be veiled by the tomato sauce Helen plumped on it.
Dodo’s odyssey rolled on. There was a one-eyed engineer who tried to flood the mine because he hadn’t got paid, and a Mexican girl whose father tried to shoot him because he wouldn’t marry her and a bank that went bust and a quarrel with his daddy who by now had cancer and a drink problem, and he had to sell to a Greek who closed the mine and sold it to a real-estate man for ten times as much but by then he had the bug and he invested in the Dolores which nobody else thought worth a damn but to everybody’s surprise –
‘And the rest is history,’ said Helen. ‘Eat up before it gets cold.’
‘Why, you are tart, my dear. I guess you must have heard the story some place before.’
He was quite unfazed, tickled if anything to be interrupted. This recital could evidently be switched on and off at will, and after he finished his spaghetti he took it up again without any sense of the flow being broken. In fact, he looked at her with a sort of intent fondness as he began again, as though these were things he knew she would want to be reminded of.
The zing of the crickets and the last chatter of the weaver birds in the branches and the scent of the gum logs and the huge velvet sky – everything around us on the verandah of the little bungalow seemed at once to press in and to lift us out of our skins, so that we were simultaneously floating like weightless men in space and tethered like Gulliver in Lilliput. There must be banal physical reasons for this queer feeling – the long flight beginning to catch up with me, the beer not as weak as it seemed – but Dodo’s rambling, bardic narrative had something to do with it, particularly in the way it seemed to bind the three of us together.
When I said good-night and went off down the path to my blockhouse my feet stumbled and my head was so full of the scent of the oranges that I could hardly keep my balance. At least I shall sleep tonight, I thought. And as soon as I hit the truckle bed – I could feel the wire triangles through the old blanket – I was cradled by that extreme fatigue that makes you feel your flesh has melted away and you are nothing but a huddled bag of bones, like a beggar sleeping on a pavement.
But this sleep didn’t last and I awoke surprised, alert enough to remember how tired I had been. All around were the usual noises – coughing, barking, rustling – but nothing out of the usual. Then something different: like a cry of pain but somehow hoarse, unfinished. Not a loud noise. Perhaps it came from some way off. But it was definite and insistent. Despite what Black had said, perhaps this was some wild animal on the prowl, if not a lion, at least a hyena or a baboon. How little we ordinary Europeans knew of the sounds made by our fellow-creatures – a cow, a sheep, a cuckoo, that was about our limit. How dull our ears were, how rusty all our senses in fact.
Again the cry, was it more urgent now, or more relaxed? Perhaps it wasn’t a cry of pain at all but some exuberant night-call which my inadequate systems decoded wrongly.
I stood up on the bed, still under the mosquito net, the gauze tickling my damp cheek, and put my ear to the open window but the noise seemed no louder. Then I threw off the net and went to the door and let in the cool night. There was no doubt about it now, the noise was coming from the bungalow.
The path did not go straight and I blundered off it through the orange bushes until my bare feet felt the earth of the vegetable patch and the beansticks reared up against the night sky. Pausing to regain breath and bearings, I heard the noise again.
So that was what it was. Perhaps I had really known from the start. But that was the first feeling, horror, of the kind that makes you gulp and wonder whether you will disgrace yourself by some kind of physical collapse. Absurd to describe it in those terms, verging on hysteria. After all, why shouldn’t she? But how could she? How could anyone who had the choice? Perhaps he had forced himself upon her – but that idea could be thrown out straight away. Her ability to fend off all comers if she wanted to, of that I was as sure as ever. She had chosen to come out here and she had chosen this, but oh. My feet ploughed into the soft potato ridges as I wandered blindly to the edge of the patch and scratched my legs on the boundary hedge of dry thorn branches. My flapping pyjama shirt caught on the prickles, forcing me to twist and tug like a sheep caught in brambles. Finally I found the gap in the hedge where the path was and exhausted as though I had walked twenty miles rather than twenty yards fell upon my plain bedstead and, to my surprise the next morning, slept sweetly, not like the night before.
The next morning was as beautiful as any morning ever. A tremble of dew on the orange trees, the weaver birds chattering above me, now and then the scarlet swoop of a widow bird or the kingfisher-blue flash of some other species – perhaps it was an African sort of kingfisher. I sat on the step letting the still gentle sun kiss my knees. Perhaps I had invented the whole thing in my sleep. Certainly I felt not soiled or disillusioned but indecently refreshed.
Then from Black’s house there came a strange wailing and though it was not really like the noise of the night before – it was obviously a woman’s voice and full of misery – it instantly revived the memory in a way that left no shred of ambiguity.
Margaret came running towards me.
‘Black is gone, sir. He has gone to kill himself.’
Even as I mumbled some useless reply, it was impossible not to notice how beautiful she was, with a long-legged gawky elegance, and a face that even in her present anguish had a docile and serene quality.
‘Couldn’t he just be –’
‘At the bottle shop or with Miss Brinscombe? Yes I looked already. But her boy saw him on the road walking very bad and saying what he said to me.’
‘That he was going to kill himself? But why?’
‘He says he is wicked and God is angry with him.’
‘Surely God doesn’t tell him to kill himself.’
‘Yes, I told him that too but he is not very clever.’
I was about to suggest we went and looked for him in the Land-Rover when Helen came down the path. She was wearing a faded print frock which was a couple of sizes too big, making her look like one of those old photographs of an Okie farmer’s wife in the Depression.
‘Yes, I know, it belonged to the D.O.’s wife, I found it in her cupboard. Dodo says we have to be tidy for church.’
‘Church?’
‘You’d better come.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t argue or Dodo will have gone and we’ll have to go with Brinscombe. Hallo Margaret, what’s the problem? Black gone off again?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sure he’ll turn up, he always does.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Would you like to come with us?’
‘No, miss, I better wait here.’
She seemed calmed by Helen’s cool confidence. Behind her I could see Dodo backing the jeep out of the car shelter.
‘Well, and how was your night?’ he bellowed at me.
‘Great.’
‘Isn’t it a pearl of a morning?’
‘Yes.’
He didn’t need to say it made him feel good to be alive, that was written all over his face. As we bumped along the road back towards the town, I stole a sideways look at Helen, hoping perhaps to see some signs of embarrassment or fatigue. But
no, she looked well, very well, perhaps in a way more ordinary because the sun had bleached her hair and her face was going a honey-brown so that she was beginning to look like the girls I had seen trying to change their money at the airport.
The small, scattered congregation in the little whitewashed church at the end of the township exuded no such vitality. Most of them were in their fifties at least, and were neither tanned nor fit-looking, often being scrawny and running to a sluglike pallor like Mrs Brinscombe’s. The vicar welcomed us overseas visitors and said he was from Godalming himself, apologised for the absence of music, though he said he hoped to have good news to give us on that subject soon, and then in a surprised, glottal voice read from the Book of Revelation the bit about the building of the new Jerusalem:
And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.
And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald;
The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst.
‘Quite a coincidence,’ I said to Dodo afterwards, ‘all that stuff about precious stones.’
‘Not really, I asked the guy to read that one for us, for luck.’
‘And –’
‘Well, I hadn’t yet signed the cheque for the new organ, so he agreed.’
I was spared having to listen to Dodo’s chuckles because at that moment my sleeve was plucked by Mrs Brinscombe.
‘Rather poor turnout, I’m afraid. There are usually more at Christmas when the young people come up from the coast. Ah there’s poor Geoff Hocking, he’s had no water for four months and he’s still waiting for his hernia, he used to be such fun. You know, what I wanted to tell Helen was that Black has just turned up at our place, covered with dust. Apparently he tried to throw himself over the top of the quarry but fell into a dumper on the next ledge. That’s his story anyway, but you can’t really believe a word they say, you’ll understand when you’ve been here as long as we have, probably just spent the night in the ditch and wanted to make a drama out of it.’
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