The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  They listened to the wind. She had the impression Lucy was hoping she would say something to absolve her of her dilemma. Her cousin was correct, as far as she could see. That was the curse of the place, of living as a white person in Africa with all its privileges, as Margaux had said. Anywhere else the whites became ordinary citizens, and here they were not prepared to accept such a demotion.

  ‘Do you think passion for a job and passion for a person are one in the same?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I think of passion for a vocation as something that you are driven to do, or be, out of conviction,’ she offered. ‘It’s a doubtless state. Passion for a person is…’ She looked away, towards the wedge of Tern Island. Around it white birds frothed. ‘Something else.’

  ‘Have you ever felt it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know him.’

  ‘I guess I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s just something that’s been on my mind.’ She smiled. ‘And I’ve got no one else to ask.’

  ‘What about Storm?’

  ‘He’s not much of a talker.’ Lucy smiled. ‘As you may have noticed. He’s a good person, essentially, but he doesn’t look inward. He’s not very emotionally experienced.’

  ‘Has he ever had a relationship?’

  ‘Not that I know of, but I’ve been away for years now. If he did I don’t know that he’d tell me. He’s very private. He’s like Dad, that way.’

  Her heart pounded so loudly she was afraid Lucy could hear it. She felt a ragged thrill to be discussing Storm with Lucy. He was a great mystery and she had thought – wrongly perhaps – that Lucy was his intimate, that she would be able to shed light on the perplexing emergency that had overtaken her, which had been generated by him. To get to the bottom of the mystery had become necessary, without her even realising it, perhaps even more essential than what she felt when she watched him move, startled and rapt, as if she were watching a separate species. She did not expect what had taken place between them to happen again, or she would not be able to live if it did not. It could not, they would not allow it. They had not even spoken of it. Her hunger or terror had not diminished. She shied away from his company but felt desperate if she did not know where he was. She feared him and yet felt more serene with him than with anyone she had known. She careened between these two extremes. She couldn’t imagine how she would be able to let him go.

  The winds of the afternoon had abated. They watched terns fly over the ocean. The birds were bright white arrows against the blue.

  ‘I’ve been wondering about you,’ Lucy said. ‘The things you’ve witnessed, your experiences. Mum said you were very nervous, when you first came to the house.’

  ‘Field hospitals are nerve-wracking places.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Lucy said.

  ‘You think I’m suffering from something.’

  ‘Well, it would be surprising if you weren’t. I mean, in psychoanalytic terms.’

  ‘I’ve had all the symptoms: insomnia, night sweats, flashbacks, irrational fears, arrhythmia, palpitations.’

  ‘You’re not worried by that?’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do but wait for it to pass.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re doing here,’ Lucy said, her voice grave. ‘Waiting for it to pass?’

  ‘I suppose. I’m thinking, too. I haven’t had time to think in years. Or to just be.’

  Lucy’s head dipped. With her knees gathered and her bony shoulders she looked like a solemn child. ‘What about lust?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘We were talking about passion. Have you ever felt lust?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Lust is primal,’ she said. ‘It’s a primitive force. It has no logic or understanding. Passion can be constructive but lust is always destructive.’

  Lucy frowned. ‘So it’s a mystifying element in life. You have no choice but to act on it?’

  ‘Do you think we should always be aware, in control?’

  ‘You’re talking to a future Jungian analyst,’ Lucy laughed. ‘It’s not possible to be in control. The unconscious is too powerful.’

  ‘But what is the unconscious, if it’s not part of the self?’

  ‘It is, but it’s a self you’re not much in contact with.’

  ‘A saboteur, or a succubus, then.’

  ‘That’s a negative interpretation but it can be,’ Lucy agreed, ‘if you don’t acknowledge its presence. Like anything you suppress it only comes back stronger. Once you are in contact you can at least have a conversation.’

  She did not tell Lucy what had happened in her own life, so recently – how she had realised the self was not one coherent entity after all, that there might be several selves, and no way to know which was the real one; that the discovery of the unconscious self was like the birth of a new and thrilling persona. But a persona who was far more reckless, and hungrier for life than she was, she who was used to a certain security now, that of the middle-class doctor, the woman who inspired respect and admiration, the woman who had fought for and attained a place in the world.

  She was alarmed at the turn Lucy’s questioning had taken. Did she suspect something? Wariness crept into her. Since the moment she had met her, she understood Lucy was different from the rest of her family. It was not her profession, or not this only, that gave Lucy uncommon insight, she suspected, but rather character. She felt bested by her cousin, and also exposed. Lucy might have generated these feelings in her even if she’d had nothing to hide. Delphine was also astute, but her instincts were more primal, built of shrewdness. She didn’t think she could withstand both categories of scrutiny at once.

  She looked up to find Lucy’s watchful eyes on her. ‘I try to see us through your eyes.’

  ‘And what do you see?’

  ‘People who can’t take much hardship. We’ve been spoiled by wealth. Life here is too seductive. We can’t take the cold. We go to other countries because it’s impossible to get a job here, now. We’re not wanted. But when things get tough we’re on a plane home where we don’t wash dishes or make our own beds. And even if we move to England or America we never get this country out of our heads. It’s a kind of curse, to come from such a beautiful country. Anywhere else you go is a disappointment. There’s a passion in that, too, the misplaced love you can feel for a country where you’re no longer of any use.’

  ‘There is,’ she said. People were so much more alive here than in England, so much more characters, living up to their dramatic nicknames: Chex, Storm, Dutch. She thought of the young women she had met at the parties Storm took her to, whose mothers and fathers had bequeathed them names from the map: the girl named after the Larsha Hills, another for the Leramora wildlife park, even a girl named Africa. Romantic names, certainly; the glossy women she had met who bore them lived up to their epic tang. It was a country that inspired sufficient passion to make people imprint its names on their children.

  Lucy smiled. ‘Here we are on the beach saying things to each other we’d never say at home.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. The house is so much my mother’s, I guess. It’s as if it’s on her side. Maybe it even is her.’

  They stood and walked back. The coral pools were being filled again by the incoming tide. They had been talking for an hour, perhaps. She had lost all track of time. She could never tell how much of it had passed here, or how much might remain.

  Margaux stood in the entrance of Reef Encounters, inside a penumbra of shade.

  ‘You fit right in now.’

  She looked down at her own body to find she wore a black vest, a kikoi folded correctly at her hips like a skirt, flip-flops on her feet. She was very tanned.

  ‘I’m trying to go native.’

  ‘You’re succeeding. Time for a drink?’

  They sat at the table they always took, with the view of the beach, the scallo
ped sweep of the bay and the coral islets that dotted it like boats perpetually at anchor.

  ‘So what did the spook want?’ Margaux asked.

  ‘Nothing really. He’d heard from someone I was working in the north. He wanted to know what was really going on there. From someone on the ground – he actually used the phrase, on the ground.’ She smiled. ‘A real spy sentence.’

  ‘It’s quite strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way he approached you. He blew his cover. Not that he had much of it in the first place.’ Margaux turned her sunglasses towards her. She saw herself in them, two distant, sepia selves. ‘It must have been important.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. There are intelligence agents everywhere, as you said.’

  ‘Just watch yourself with these guys,’ Margaux said. ‘We make fun of them, sitting here and reading their five-day-old Daily Telegraphs, but they mean business. The security situation here is bad now. I really think that. I’m going home myself.’

  ‘Are you?’ She was surprised. This was the first time Margaux suggested she would return to the States.

  ‘Before it gets any worse. Plus I’m teaching in the fall.’

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘In two weeks.’ Margaux pursed her lips. ‘Just in time for the start of term. I’ll go from sipping G&Ts on the coast to standing in front of a room of a hundred eager freshmen teaching Archaeology 100.’

  ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’ She had said it before she knew the phrase was out of her mouth. Margaux’s imminent departure had provoked a sudden panic. Before she knew it, the story, which she told haltingly, was there between them.

  Margaux sat back in her chair. She removed her sunglasses. Margaux’s eyes were round, like two brown eggs. ‘He’s your cousin. That’s a problem. At least where I come from.’

  ‘I didn’t know him. I never knew him. He’s a stranger. Or like a stranger.’

  Margaux gave her a delicate look. ‘He’s still related to you. Genetically.’

  ‘It’s not as if I’m trying to have a child with him.’

  ‘What are you doing, then? I think you’re using him as much as he is using you.’

  It was as if she’d been slapped in the face. ‘Why does it have to be about use?’

  ‘You’re trying to revive yourself. You’ve been dead. Or you’ve been around death for so long it’s become your life. You can’t tell one from the other anymore.’ Margaux put her sunglasses back on. ‘Loving a person and loving how they make you feel is not the same thing.’

  She was driven to her feet. It was one of those moments when she could feel the past peeling away behind her, and another, nameless force nudging her towards the future.

  ‘Why did you tell me then?’ Margaux asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you don’t want my opinion at all. You just wanted to get it off your chest. You needed to tell someone your secret. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I thought you were telling me as a friend.’

  ‘I was. I am.’

  ‘Well then.’ Margaux put her hands on the table in front of her and opened them, palms up.

  She walked away from the table. She didn’t want to – it was rude, she knew – but a force drove her away.

  ‘See you around.’ There was a forlorn, perplexed tone in Margaux’s voice. The waiter who had been coming to refresh their drinks stepped back and out of her path as she brushed by.

  She started the engine of Julia’s Land Cruiser. It was not unpleasant, this vertigo she was living in, she thought, as she drove up the drive, as the security guards raised the zebra-painted boom and waved her off in their white shirts, faces dark under Charles de Gaulle hats. She had lost the sense of what she should be doing in her life. She had only ever wanted to not feel a fraud. Everything had been about that. And she was not. She stood firm, as if on a plinth, above all these people. After their golf lunches and their community film nights, she will return to the real business of healing the victims of war and peace.

  ‘All my friends are going back.’

  ‘Well, it’s September.’ Julia placed a bottle of wine on the table. ‘Back-to-school time.’ Julia kept her voice light, as if it were any other year, facing her children’s return to boarding school or university.

  Lucy had graduated with her Masters in June and would soon start supervised training in psychology at the Tavistock Institute. Within a week her life would be walks through Tavistock Square with its gazebo in the middle like a reposing crane, a placement in a hospital, essays and exams.

  Later, Lucy would spend the night at Evan’s; Delphine, her aunt and uncle would have a drink at a yacht club reception after dinner.

  ‘What will you do?’ Julia asked Storm.

  ‘I don’t know. Watch a movie maybe.’ He gave her the briefest of glances.

  Delphine’s eyes landed on her. ‘When will you go back, Rebecca?’

  ‘In two weeks.’ The sentence settled in her stomach. She hadn’t realised it was so soon.

  ‘Will you return to London?’

  ‘No, to my job, in Gariseb.’

  ‘Don’t you find it difficult, being stuck up there with the Bora and the Nisa?’ Delphine said. ‘Now there are two peoples who will never make peace. They’ve only been warring for the last three thousand years.’

  ‘There are privations, yes.’

  ‘It can’t be good, the civil war up there. Do you think it will ever end?’

  Delphine’s question surprised her. She knew more than anyone else in the family, who treated the conflict in the north as a distant scrap that would never touch their lives, despite being in the same country. But then Delphine had spent a great deal of time in the bush, she supposed. She understood the enmities between peoples. She would not make the mistake of calling it a tribal or ethnic conflict. It was far more complicated than that.

  ‘I don’t know. Certainly not while the Islamists have a hold on the territory.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid there?’

  A shiver travelled up her spine. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should I be afraid?’

  Delphine gave her a level, dispassionate look. ‘You’re a woman. It sounds very exposed, where you are.’

  ‘It is,’ she conceded, ‘but everyone’s fears are different. The worst things have already happened to me. That’s changed my relationship with fear.’

  ‘And what are those worst things?’

  ‘Delphine,’ Julia intervened. ‘Maybe Rebecca doesn’t want to talk about them.’

  ‘No, it’s alright.’ She smiled at Julia. ‘I’ve come under attack several times, in camp. I’m most afraid of bombing raids from the air rather than a ground assault.’

  ‘And you haven’t ever been singled out? Personally?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Lying always depressed her. She struggled to counter the energy they generated within her, which was as heavy as mud. She sat up straighter and injected vigour into her voice. ‘I’ve been fortunate that way.’

  Storm’s eye had followed their exchange back and forth. She was answering Delphine’s questions, ostensibly, but really she was speaking to him.

  When everyone had left they sat on the edge of her bed, their knees white in the moonlight flooding through the louvres.

  When Storm was not near and she conjured up a visual picture of him, she always saw him in profile. His face carved the night in two; on one side was darkness, on the other silver moonlight catching the edges of his face. She thought, not for the first time, that her fascination might in reality be an obsession with a face, a face that in some ways resembled her aunt’s, who resembled her mother, who resembled her.

  ‘What you said to Delphine tonight, was that true? About not having been attacked personally?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have been, but I didn’t want to talk about it.’

  He smiled. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘How did you know?
’

  ‘I just sensed it wasn’t the truth. You’re an honest person,’ he said.

  She turned to him. ‘Am I? How can you be so sure? Is what we’re doing now honest?’

  He never answered. They were speaking, then they were kissing. She could remember no transition, no decision. Kissing him felt the same as speaking. There was an honesty to that, too. A blue rush of power passed through her. His mouth was her mouth. She was astonished by its familiarity. It was not her own yet she knew every ridge, every hollow.

  She pulled away. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you don’t want me, then what do you want?’

  He turned his head. She lifted her knee and sank down to the bed beside him.

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘What do I think?’

  She could hear the waves, far beneath the house. The tide was coming in.

  ‘That I’m a dilettante.’

  A sudden boredom crushed her. She sat up again and faced him. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘All my life, I’ve been some kind of golden boy.’

  ‘People haven’t taken you seriously, is that what you mean? If you want to be taken seriously you have to do something serious.’

  He looked away. Part of him wanted her censure, she understood: to be taught, scrutinised and found wanting. She heard the dry rustle of the wind in the palms sentinel outside his bedroom.

  ‘It’s my looks. Even you only like me for them.’

  ‘It’s not the worst thing that can happen in life, that you’re so good-looking you never know for certain if people are attracted to you because of the beauty of your inner self.’

  He would not look at her, still.

  ‘I like you because –’ she paused, trying to find something to say that would mollify him. ‘I feel so alive in your company. You’re like the sky.’