Meanwhile, he was well stocked with water, and with other forms of drink. Although capable of considerable abstinence, he would go in for bouts of heavy drinking, like a sailor on shore leave, and he did not see why he should not indulge in one of these at the end of his journey: he was preparing for the indulgence each night, after pitching his tent, by a nightcap of whisky.
He changed tune, and started on Greenland’s icy mountains. He’d met a few missionaries, on his travels, in desolate outposts. Converting the Heathen, the Turk and the Jew, the Eskimo, the Pacific Islander, the African. Their task had always seemed to him mad: he was more likely to find gold in a tin mine, than they were to strike faith in the heathen human heart. But they went on prospecting. Likely places, unlikely places.
On the boat over, he had met a French couple; he had been unable to avoid meeting them, as they were all three placed together at the same first-class dining table for meals. At first he had thought them husband and wife, but after a while it became clear that they were brother and sister: middle aged, olive skinned, soberly dressed, they were on their way to visit their mother, who was dying in a nursing home in Algiers. He was a business man: she an actress, it seemed. They were on poor terms, but united by their journey. In Paris, where both lived, they never met, they said. With the same features, the same gestures, the same ironic smile: we never meet, they said. Did David have brothers, sisters, a wife? No, none, nobody.
Black birds of passage. He had walked on the deck with them after their dinner in the blue night, in the middle of the black Mediterranean. The woman, immobile as a figurehead in the slightly salty air, held a silk scarf round her throat with one gloved hand, as she looked south. Her brother, a man of fifty, covered her other glove with his as it lay on the rail, ‘Death brings us together,’ the woman had said, not very dramatically, factually rather, and down in the bar he had heard some of their differences. She had signed a petition claiming to have had an abortion, out of female solidarity, she said: he was a Catholic, with a public position, and six children. They told David these things freely, as pop music from a coin machine filled the bar. They sat, the three of them, round a plastic-topped steel-rimmed round table, lit from beneath with lurid pink and green and chequered lights, covered with brown melted smudges from lighted cigarettes, and the other two discussed why it was not possible, in these times, to live in the same city on friendly terms with one’s brother, one’s sister. David listened to these foreign conversations, volunteering nothing. He had never inhabited a region where friendship had been possible, of the sort these two had perhaps once enjoyed in infancy. An only child.
People often told David things. He had heard some amazing stories, both in the prolonged and enforced intimacy of communal effort (what else can one do, in the Falkland Islands, but tell stories?) and from passing strangers, such as these. There must, he sometimes thought, be some rift in his nature, unperceived by himself, down which people knew they could let their confidences tumble out of sight. Other people’s garbage. He could understand the satisfaction. Once, on an uninhabited island off the north-west coast of Scotland, he had lost a gun metal cigarette lighter down a crevasse between two rocks. He liked to think that it was still there.
He rarely told people much in exchange. They didn’t seem to demand it. But he would make his own offerings. On this occasion he showed them some of the objects that he carried around in his khaki pockets: a dull topaz or two from his valley, a little aspirin bottle of stream tin, a twig of straw tin, a sign of previous habitation. (There was no one there now: the water had dried up.) They looked at his relics with interest.
The coin box played a popular song called ‘Souvenir’. The woman recited, sombrely, more dramatically, ‘Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?’ It was a poem by Verlaine, she explained, that their father had recited frequently over the dining table. They had been born and brought up in Algeria, she explained, and had not been back since the troubles. They were returning to the land of their birth. ‘O temps, suspends ton vol,’ she said, with feeling. She was an actress. Her solid cream neck rose from the throat of her dark green dress, a firm column. She looked so like her brother, the same nose, the same eyes, the same gestures, and yet they led in the same city lives so far removed, so mutually hostile, that they never met.
‘As pants the hart for cooling streams,’ sang David, driving through the desert, prompted this time by the surrounding dryness. He thought of the French woman and her brother, and of Frances Wingate, who was attending the conference, and whose lecture he had heard earlier that year. He looked forward to meeting her. He was quite interested in archaeology.
Frances Wingate sat on the aeroplane and stared down at the desert. She was bored. Perhaps the stone in her chest was boredom. Nothing seemed very interesting any more—travelling was a drag, the conference was certain to be tedious, the desert below was extraordinarily tedious, and she didn’t even feel like the drink she’d ordered. She was terrified of boredom, it was the worst threat, or so it seemed for the moment. The absolute futility of all human effort struck her in all its banal, heavyweight, unanswerable dullness. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.
She tried, with an immense effort of the will, to make herself think about something interesting: namely, Joe Ayida, Minister of Culture of Adra. He was, as she had told her brother, quite an exceptional man. She had met him in London: he had come to talk to her about her trade route and her Trans-Saharan emporium. He had been extremely excited by them, and also extremely well informed about the possibility of similarly interesting discoveries on his own territory. She had told him that it was more than likely that such discoveries could and would be made. He had talked a great deal about the history of Africa, and had been not at all annoying on the subject: through him, she had glimpsed what it must be like to have lost one’s past, and to stand on the verge of reclaiming it. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians he had said, they have blinded us for centuries. She agreed. She always agreed in theory, but Joe had made her feel that it mattered. They discussed the massive joke of Zimbabwe, the confusion created amongst Egyptologists by radio-carbon dating, the inability of the European mind to conceive that any good thing could come out of Africa. They have conceded us homo habilis, but it is not enough, said Joe Ayida. We will rewrite the labels in the museums. Quite right, said Frances, carried along by his enthusiasm.
Joe Ayida wasn’t an archaeologist, or even an anthropologist. He was an art historian. Of course, as they had frequently remarked to one another, the disciplines overlapped more and more these days. He was also a sculptor. To hear him talk of tradition and the individual talent was to enter into a world where old labels had meanings. Frances found it deeply exciting, and also beyond her. There was something in Joe Ayida that she could never catch. She was too old and came from the wrong culture. But she could recognize it, she had a feel of its quality. Hearing him speak one heard words like ‘artist’ and ‘nation’ for the first time, with a kind of primal clarity.
Joe was ideally placed so to speak. His nation was a small one, his country large. It needed culture, it needed water, and minerals, and oil, it needed past, present and future. It seemed that some of these commodities had now been discovered: perhaps Adra was about to become as rich as a Gulf State. She wondered what they would do with the money, if it were really there. Television stations, airports, roads, railways, hotels, washing machines? At the moment, most of the people of Adra were semi-nomadic: she had met plenty of them herself in her travels. They pitched their tents by small ancient trees, they wandered with their Biblical cattle. The country would need a lot of money if it wanted to get any kind of modern living to its remoter inhabitants. And perhaps it didn’t want to. Modernization wasn’t so much taken for granted as a blessing, these days.
She wondered what Joe’s intentions were. He was a dynamic man, and had certainly been a powerful force in organizing the conference, but he wasn’t exactly Prime Minister ye
t, and there were other yet more powerful economic forces involved. It was going to cost Adra a lot of money to get at its newly discovered resources, and one of the many things Adra hadn’t got was a lot of money. Loans, investments. The conference was doubtless intended to raise a few million pounds. It was a prestige project, to persuade the world of the seriousness of Adran intentions. A prestige project of the intellect, as the amazing hotel they were all going to stay in was a prestige project of a more earthy nature. She gazed at the brochure for it, which lay brightly-coloured on her table, provided by Air-Adra. It was really too amazing. The architect that designed it must have gone mad. It was an enormous building, the Hotel Sahara, and it was much wider at the top than it was at the bottom, like a kind of pyramid in reverse, each floor extending by one step out into the sky. A blue, dazzling, blistering Kodacolour sky. One wouldn’t have thought such a construction possible. It looked quite illogical, as though it must surely fall over. It was as white as the sky was blue, and its base was surrounded with ornamental palm trees and fountains. A row of large Mercedes was drawn up in front of the vast entrance. Frances found herself hoping that she hadn’t been given a room that hung out, as it were into space. If a child had built such a building out of Lego bricks, she would have understood it. It was quite an amusing shape. But it wasn’t for real.
The drink that she had ordered arrived, brought by a rather forbidding very black Adran girl. It was a Campari soda. Frances stared at it in horror. Whatever had happened to her, that she had started to order drinks she didn’t like in order to have a change? At least it was an exciting colour, as the hotel was an exciting shape. Such dull little pleasures would have to do her for the rest of her life, she thought glumly. For what did the future hold? Nothing much. She’d be able to keep her mind occupied while delivering her own paper, but that wouldn’t last long, and she knew she’d get horribly bored listening to other people’s. Interpreters were so dull anyway. She sipped the healthy pink drink. It wasn’t too bad, but it certainly wouldn’t amuse one for eternity. Oh God, she felt bored. She wanted Karel. That short conversation with Hugh about sex had upset her. She hadn’t thought about sex for a long time till then, but after all she wasn’t as middle aged as she pretended to be. Why hadn’t she tried anyone else, after Karel? Was it the fear of annoying him, even in his everlasting absence? Surely not. Perhaps it was the fear of being bored by people, once one started having personal relationships with them. She hadn’t liked to admit it to herself when she was younger but now she didn’t really mind: the fact was that she found most other people frighteningly dull. Most other people were frighteningly dull, and that was the end of it. It wasn’t really their fault, but one could guess what they were going to say, and was tired with it before they’d said it. And if one slept with a dull person, they would be sure to hang around asking for more. Frances found herself in the unfortunate position of knowing that people would hang around asking for more whether they wanted it or not. She seemed to have that kind of effect on people. And it was very hard to get rid of them without being rude.
So there one was, alone. Here I am, she said to herself, moving her lips over the words.
Karel had never bored her, not for an instant. She had loved him so much that even when she couldn’t understand what he was saying she had been happy to watch him say it. How could he not reply to her postcard? How could she love him so much, and other people not at all? Ah, she had asked this question often, in their happy years. And had always found her own answer. It is because you are so lovely, so amazing, she had cried, each time. For so he was.
The endless sand flowed under them. Work was all that was left, with Karel gone and the children growing. But somehow, when one knew one was good at it, it lost its charm. Why bother? What did it matter, one archaeologist more or less? One Minister more or less?
Though that, of course, wasn’t quite true. For Joe Ayida was in a position to influence his country’s future.
Still, what was a country? My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Oh God, she did feel low. She knocked back the Campari and rang for another. The Adran girl came back and said they would be landing shortly and was Frances sure she wanted another drink. Yes, quite sure, said Frances, who was not at all sure. The drink never arrived.
But there were plenty of drinks at the hotel. So many, in fact, that Frances began to wonder whether it might not be more dignified to move on to heroin or cocaine and make an end of it.
She was met at the airport by a civil servant. It appeared that various other conference members had been travelling on the same flight: she had suspected that this might be so, and had deliberately avoided the eyes of people who might be trying to look at her. She was used to being looked at, and used to avoidance. They all shook hands politely on the tarmac. Frances began to feel slightly, but very slightly, better, as she stepped into the old routine. All one has to do, she told herself with a part of herself, is to keep moving, keep talking, and don’t spend too much time alone. And you’ll survive. What for? Don’t ask, don’t be naive. While actually smiling, while actually speaking to a stranger (she said to herself, in the back of a diplomatic car, talking to a Unesco man and a Polish woman engineer at the same time) one cannot possibly feel too terribly miserable.
The hotel was as surprising as its photograph, if not more so. They all exclaimed. The civil servant explained why it was like it was. He assured them it was very comfortable. And so it was. They stepped into a dense jungle of a foyer, beautifully air-conditioned (for it was, even at this time of the year, unpleasantly hot outside), with mosaic paving, rippling fountains, heavenly Musak. The manager met them, smiling happily, but without servility. What an honour, what a pleasure. The President of Zambia had visited him the week before. Before that, the English prince. And now so many distinguished guests. Their baggage would follow from the airport, would they like to see their rooms, would they like drinks in the lounge? Dinner would be served at eight. Tomorrow for work, this evening for society.
Frances liked this kind of thing, and she found herself responding like a Pavlovian dog. Thank Christ, she said to herself, for the large amount of silliness and vanity in one’s makeup. Without it, one would indeed drop dead with boredom.
The conference members were eyeing one another uneasily. Should they have a drink, should they see their rooms? Frances said that she would see her room, and others followed suit.
She was, in fact, in an overhanging bit, just as she had predicted. It was clearly thought to be a particularly pleasant room, with views of nothing much in all directions. It was large and comfortable. She wandered round it for a while, opening cupboards, trying taps. They all worked, for which she awarded full marks. Out of the last window she looked through, she saw a large glinting swimming pool, lurid green blue in the evening light. It was enormous, shaped like a kidney, with diving boards and chutes and floodlighting. Her spirits rose. She had brought her bathing suit. An after-dinner swim would be quite reviving.
Then she sat down on the bed, and burst into tears.
After a few minutes, her luggage arrived. It seemed to be an extremely efficient country. The man who brought it up didn’t seem to expect a tip, either, for he dumped it and disappeared very abruptly.
She unpacked her clothes, her books, her papers, Karel’s teeth. Then she had a bath. While she was in the bath, the phone rang: it was Joe Ayida, asking if she had arrived safely, asking how she felt. I’m fine, she said, what a glorious hotel. Do you think so, he said, ambiguously, and laughed. I’ll see you at dinner, he said. Unless you come down first, for a drink.
I’ll be down in half an hour, she said. And in half an hour, she went down to the bar, dressed rather smartly in a long black dress. The bar was large and opulent, marble floored, full of plants climbing up pillars and birds in white wire cages. Conference members stood about, drinking, and the television was on. The Prime Minis
ter was speaking, as it seemed at some length. So there was television in Adra. She looked around for Joe, and wondered if the drinks were free, and if she ought to purchase some Adran currency. She spotted him, luckily, before she had to confront the problem. ‘Ah, my dear Frances,’ he cried with heart-warming certainty, disengaging himself from an ageing Russian, ‘my dear, here you are. How delightful, how delightful.’
He shook her hand, heartily. In Adra, emancipated women were honorary men, as he had explained to her, and could not be kissed.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘how nice to see you.’
‘How nice of you to come all this way,’ he said. And so they went on for some time. He provided her with a large drink, and introduced her to some of her prospective colleagues: she was well aware that she was very far from being the most important person there, and was pleased that he stayed with her. He stayed with her until they went in to dinner, and then abandoned her between a French economist and an Adran engineer. She tried hard with both, ate a vast amount of food, washed it down with as much wine as she could get into her glass, but was nevertheless glad, actually glad, when their chairman rose to his feet and made a welcoming speech. He spoke of the need for international cooperation, and to prove its need, his speech was duly translated into several languages. Luckily it was brief. It was followed by other speeches, also brief, one from a Unesco man, one from Joe Ayida himself, one from some unexplained American. Then the chairman stood up again and announced the schedule, and explained how papers would be distributed and in which languages, and told them that an expedition had been arranged for the following week and he hoped they would all go, and that the rest of the evening was their own.
The Realms of Gold Page 26