by Francis King
‘He’s disappeared. He was asleep on the ground beside me and now …’ She turned repeatedly, frantically gazing to now the right and now the left.
‘I hope he’s not run away. We should have taken greater care.’
‘We could hardly have tethered him.’
Harriet shivered, her plump arms – she was the only one of the five Europeans not to have lost weight during the trek – across her breasts as her hands clasped her shoulders. At this hour, it was often chilly. ‘ Poor little soul.’
Then, suddenly, they saw him. Where had he come from? What had he been doing? A moment before, as Alexine had circled round and round in her search for him, the cluster of rocks had been bare. Now there he was, on the highest of them, gazing down at them, the dawn wind fluttering the makeshift garment around his emaciated body. Nanny Rose had said that, before they struck camp, she was going to run him up a shirt and some trousers.
‘Come! Come! Here!’ Alexine called. Then she realized that these were precisely the words and precisely the tone, by turns coaxing and commanding, that she used to summon back one of the straying dogs.
He did not respond. He merely stood motionless, the rising sun a vast orange globe on his right and the sky a greenish-grey on his left.
Alexine, Harriet beside her, her arms still clasped around her shivering body, raised a hand. She beckoned.
Still he did not respond.
Alexine held out both her arms. Then, at last, he moved. He began to leap, barefoot, with extraordinary agility and assurance from rock to rock, in a disquieting reminder of the strange old man seen two days before. Once he had completed the descent, he raced towards her. He was smiling. Then he was laughing. It was the first time that she and Harriet had seen him do either.
It was as useless to question him as it had been useless to question Sammy on his first arrival in the house. He threw himself into Alexine’s arms and she held him there.
‘Perhaps he was hungry,’ Harriet said, always practical, though it was impossible that he could have found anything to eat up on the barren rocks.
‘Perhaps he had to see to a call of nature.’
‘Yes, that was probably it.’
But why had he had to go so far? The night before they had shown him the latrines dug for the Egyptians.
He learned with astonishing quickness. As the endless procession inched once more forwards, he would always be with Alexine, now sitting in front of her on the horse and now walking beside her. When walking with her, he would often unselfconsciously slip his hand into hers. As soon as he heard any word or phrase, whether in English, French or Arabic, he would begin to repeat it over and over to himself, at first in bewilderment and then, nodding his head, in satisfaction that he had succeeded in memorizing it. Later, if the word or phrase were in English or French, he would bring it out again when needed. But they soon noticed that he would never bring out any word in Arabic. They decided that he associated that language with his former captors. But, if he never spoke Arabic, it was soon clear that he could understand simple things said in Arabic in his presence.
Each day, Alexine would no longer devote so much of her time in searching for botanical specimens while waiting for the main party to catch up with her and Osman. Instead, in the skimpy shadow of a tree or the more substantial one of a rock, she would instruct the boy as she used once to instruct Sammy. These lessons now were much less frustrating than those of the past, since there was no longer the continual effort of scrambling over the cruelly spiked railings of Sammy’s deafness. She would point, she would say something. Reproducing the sound with an almost comic exactness, he would name the thing for himself.
On the first day no one came up with a name for him, merely referring to him as ‘ he’ or ‘the boy’.
‘We must give some sort of Christian name,’ Nanny Rose said.
‘Since he’s certainly not a Christian, why should we do that?’ Addy asked. Recovered from her illness, she had taken to colouring her prominent cheekbones, still yellow from the days of fever, with far too much rouge.
‘You know what I mean!’ Nanny Rose was no longer as deferential as when they had started on the journey, so that only the day before Addy had complained to Alexine, ‘If you ask me, she’s getting a little too big for her boots,’ adding: ‘And Daan is no better.’
‘I wonder if there’s any way of finding out his name from him?’
Alexine beckoned the boy over, from where he was squatting on the ground, turning over a tattered and soiled pack of cards that she had given him after he had absorbedly watched her and Addie play a game of piquet. Knowing nothing of any card game, he was merely fascinated by the strange images.
He jumped up, leaving the cards in the dust, and hurried over to her.
She pointed now at Addy, now at Harriet, now at Daan and now at herself, each time repeating the relevant name a number of times. Again she pointed at herself. ‘Alexine! Alexine! Alexine!’
She pointed at him. He frowned, biting on his lower lip.
Again she pointed at herself. ‘Alexine.’ Now she said it quietly, with none of the previous emphasis.
‘Alexine.’ He repeated it. He looked up at her for approbation under lowered lids.
She nodded. ‘ Good.’ She smiled. It was all so like her lessons with Sammy all those years ago.
He smiled back, hesitandy at first, then his mouth widening and his eyes lighting up.
She pointed at him. ‘You?’
‘You?’ The sound was repeated with uncanny accuracy.
She shook her head, pointed at him again. ‘You. Name.’ With both hands she made a beckoning gesture, which said: ‘Come on, come on, try!’
Again he frowned. Then he stooped and scratched at one of his bare legs, where a fly had settled. He looked up again. His mouth opened. From the back of his throat came a guttural series of sounds. What were they? It sounded like ‘Abgilgusunni’ or ‘Abgilgusummi’. Harriet and Addy declared that it was the latter, Alexine was sure that it was the former. Nanny Rose and Daan shook their heads and said that they couldn’t make head or tail of it.
‘Anyway, that seems to have solved the problem,’ Nanny Rose said.
‘It’s a name but hardly the Christian name you wanted,’ Addy retorted.
Alexine tried to say it. ‘Ab-gil-gu-sunni.’
‘Summy, summy,’ Harriet corrected her sharply. It had been a long and particularly bumpy ride on the camel and she was feeling irritable.
‘We can’t call him all that. Let’s just call him Sunny,’ Alexine said.
‘Sunny doesn’t really describe him,’ Addy objected, not foreseeing that later it would do so.
‘Well, Sunny it is,’ Daan said. He was puffing at his pipe, something that he would never have done in their presences in The Hague or even in Cairo.
Alexine pointed at the boy. ‘Sunny,’ she said. Again she pointed at herself. ‘Alexine.’ Again she pointed at him. ‘ Sunny.’
He gazed anxiously at her, shook his head. Then he pointed at himself; ‘Sunny?’ The tone was interrogative, dubious, wary.
She nodded.
Yet again he pointed at himself. Then, with a surprising assurance, he said: ‘Sunny. Sunny.’
But was he Sunny or Sonny? Alexine was never sure.
‘You treat that boy as if he were your own child,’ Nanny Rose told her on one occasion, irritated that the leader of this vast expedition should jump up to fetch some iodine and a dressing as soon as she saw that the little rascal had cut a finger while slicing some tomatoes. There were often times when Alexine did indeed think of him as her own child, with a protective, yearning tenderness. ‘He might be one of your dolls,’ Nanny Rose told her on another occasion, as Alexine carefully dressed him in clothes made for him not, on this occasion, by Nanny but by herself. In the past she had never been in the least interested in needlework; but, as with every practical activity, she was soon adept at it.
One day, when calling for him as they were ab
out to resume their journey soon after dawn, Alexine was amazed and disconcerted to hear the name that emerged from between her lips. It was ‘Sammy’, not ‘ Sunny’. Thereafter, the same slip was often to recur, particularly when she was in a hurry or tired. To both names he answered with equal alacrity.
Chapter Six
AT LONG LAST, after eighteen days of travelling, suddenly, at sunset, they saw the Nile, a vast, burnished snake slithering between two ochre sand banks. Sunny cried out in amazement and pointed at it. ‘Nile, Nile,’ Alexine said, and he repeated ‘Nile.’ It seemed so near, coiled there in the rapidly diminishing light, but they did not reach it until the following day, since Addy had begun yet again to complain of exhaustion and the heat and one of the dogs had again raced off and got lost.
When they finally reached the river, and prepared to set up camp, Sunny pulled off all his clothes and, with an exultant cry, raced off and plunged into the brown, lethargic waters.
‘He’ll drown!’ Nanny Rose cried out in alarm. She turned to Daan: ‘Do something!’ But Daan, who had never learned to swim, had no intention of risking his life to save someone to whom he still referred, when out of earshot of his employers, as ‘that little savage’.
But there was no real cause for alarm. Whether he had ever before swum, there was no way of knowing; but he certainly managed to keep afloat, splashing round in circles like the straying dog, which, having at last caught up with them, had now jumped in to join him.
‘Oh, I’d love to go in,’ Alexine said.
‘Oh, no, no! It would be the death of you,’ Nanny Rose protested. ‘You could catch enteric – or something even worse. They do everything in that water. You know that. You’ve seen them.’
Since Addy still looked so frail and since her complaints were becoming more and more clamorous, Osman managed to hire a small boat in which she could travel upstream. Another boat was also hired for the animals. Six men, constantly complaining and constantly persuaded to continue their task by lavish tips from Alexine, pulled the vessels. Indifferent to everything around her, Addy spent day after day stretched out on the sagging bunk in the one stifling little cabin reading Père Goriot. From time to time she would get up to inspect her face in the fly-blown mirror hanging askew on the wall beside the bunk and then, having dabbed at it with a handkerchief, would once more apply rouge and powder to the wrinkled, faded skin. ‘I look a fright, an absolute fright,’ she would mutter aloud to herself. ‘A hag. This is crazy, crazy, crazy.’
Now they would often stop at some town or even large village, astounding its inhabitants with the endless procession of camels, donkeys, dogs and porters sweating under vast loads. At the first of these halts, Barbar, some dozen sheiks galloped up to the caravan on camels and told them that the Governor wished to see them.
‘We can’t go like this,’ Harriet said. ‘We’re filthy. What’ll he think?’ She turned to Alexine: ‘And you’ll have to get into a proper frock.’
‘Is this an improper one?’
‘Frankly, yes. It looks like a nightdress.’
‘The Governor might approve of that,’ Harriet said.
Eventually, it was agreed that the visit to the Governor should take place in two hours’ time. At once, the servants started to put up the tents. Once Harriet’s, Addy’s and Alexine’s were ready, the servants set up folding tables and brought basins and ewers of water. For many days, at the outset of the expedition, they had performed these tasks as though for the first time. But now they had at last become a routine, so that the men rushed around without any pause for thought.
Harriet examined herself in the long mirror, brought from The Hague, that she constantly dreaded that one of the servants would drop and break. ‘Well, I must say I don’t look too bad.’ Each day of the trek, the two laundry maids would patiently wash and iron the women’s clothes, supervised by Nanny Rose and sometimes by Harriet herself. These last days the washing had been done with water from the river, and in consequence the clothes had an unpleasantly dank, deadly smell, which their wearers had tried in vain to eradicate by splashing both the clothes and themselves with eau-de-Cologne or lavender water. ‘And you look marvellous,’ Harriet told Addy, even as she wondered if all that rouge and powder might not create the wrong impression.
‘Oh, I don’t know that I’ll go with you,’ Addy suddenly announced.
‘Oh, you must come, you must! After you’ve taken so much trouble to make yourself look so elegant. Why not?’
‘It’ll be a bore. You know it will. I’d much rather stay here and finish Père Goriot.’
‘Don’t be silly. You must come.’
‘Oh, very well.’ Addy raised a hand and pulled down the heavy lace veil hitched over the brim of her hat. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
A carriage, drawn by two emaciated horses, flies clustered in the lacerations on their fallen-in flanks, had already arrived. ‘Oh, these horses!’ Alexine pulled a face. ‘I can’t bear to look at them.’ When the unshaven coachman began to belabour them, she jumped up from her seat and, to his amazement, cried out in Arabic: ‘Don’t do that! Don’t! Stop it!’
‘That’s the only way to get them to move,’ he told her. From then on, the horses ambled along, from time to time stopping either to crane their necks for leaves from the avenue of trees up which they were travelling or to lower them to champ at some tuft of sere vegetation.
‘Something is biting me!’ Addy announced. She plunged a hand down the front of her dress. ‘This carriage must be full of fleas.’
‘It’s too late to worry about fleas now.’ Harriet laughed. ‘I can’t count the number of times I’ve been bitten.’
‘The bugs on the steamer were far worse than any fleas. I think they must have been eating that powder recommended by Mr Shepheard, instead of being killed by it.’
‘May we talk about something a little more elevated?’ Harriet suggested.
‘Oh, I’m being bitten to death!’ Addy cried out, again plunging her hand down the front of her dress.
Alexine put a hand into her bag and drew out some coins. A group of children, surprisingly well clothed and showing few of the usual signs of malnutrition, were running along beside them. When she flung the coins out in a glittering arc, the children at once left the carriage to scrabble for them.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Harriet said.
‘Why? What’s wrong with it? I’m sure the children are pleased. And it saves me having to give to some children and not to others.’
‘I don’t know. I find it ugly.’
‘I wish I’d brought Sammy with me.’ Hastily she corrected herself: ‘Sunny.’
‘Oh, no,’ Addy said. ‘That wouldn’t really have done.’
‘He’d have behaved perfectly. He always does.’
‘That’s as may be. But it would have been, well, a kind of insult to the Governor to bring someone like that to see him.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘I’m surprised that you don’t.’
The long, low, house, surrounded by a wide veranda and enclosed in a garden, was far larger than they had expected. As the coachman tried to help them down from the carriage – ‘No, thank you, thank you, I can manage perfectly well, thank you’ Addy told him in French, pulling her white-gloved hand away from his outstretched one – a shaggy dog, lying out as though dead under a tree, bestirred itself, gave a single bark followed by a growl, and then resumed its slumber. The two men who had been escorting the carriage jumped down from their horses, and one of them then shouted out that the foreign ladies had arrived.
A slight, youngish man, dressed in western clothes but with a fez on his head, appeared in the doorway of the house, stared at them for a few seconds and then limped towards them, with a smile of greeting. He spoke French. In an ante-room he told them that the Governor had received instructions from both Cairo and Khartoum to ensure that they received everything that they needed during their visit to Barbar. They were ‘visiteurs d’un
e classe unique’, he assured them. Then he pointed down a corridor. ‘Please!’
As they walked down the corridor, Addy let out a squeal. A lethargic rat, a curious orange-brown in colour, was nosing at something not far away from them. At the sound of the squeal it scuttled away and vanished. By now Harriet, Alexine and Nanny Rose had become used to rats, since the steamer and the dahabiahs had both been infested with them until the cats and dogs had begun to reduce their numbers. But Addy was always astonished and terrified when one appeared. Her worst moment had been when, raising the lid of one of her valises to get out a dress, she had come on a nest of baby rats, wriggling on the dress, a vivid peacock blue in colour, that lay on the top. There was a gaping hole on one side of the valise, where the teeth of the parent rats had gnawed through the canvas. Her scream had summoned Nanny Rose, who had briskly picked up the dress and baby rats together and flung them out of the porthole. ‘ My dress, my dress!’ Addy had wailed, to be told by Nanny Rose: ‘Oh, you couldn’t possibly wear it again, oh no, no!’
‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ the young man said, as he now sidled past them in order to open the door at the end of the corridor. A sweet, powerful scent struck at them from him. With a narrow hand he turned the handle. The door refused to open. He pushed at it and then administered a kick. He gave an exclamation of annoyance, pulling a face. Then he rattled the handle back and forth again, until at long last it yielded. He smiled, bowed. ‘ Please, ladies. Please.’
The room was vast and almost wholly bare. There were no curtains on the soaring windows but, oddly, what looked like a frayed and stained damask curtain had been tacked, askew to one wall, a travesty of a Gobelin. At the far end there was a throne-like chair, with a high back, upholstered in red velvet, and arms that ended in lions’ heads. One of the ears had been chipped off one of these heads, the wood yellow against the heavily varnished brown of the rest. An elderly servant with a long fly-whisk in his hand stood behind the chair. Seated in it was a plump, jolly-looking man, whose low forehead was heavily corrugated above a face otherwise unlined. He was wearing a soiled white silk shirt, a gaudy silk cravat, creased grey cotton trousers and a jacket far too large for him, its sleeves almost concealing his hands. In a corner, behind him, there was a mattress, horsehair protruding from one edge of it, with cushions piled on top of each other at one end. From an indentation in the cushions and from the presence, near to it on the floor, of a dish containing two meatballs glistening with oil, it was clear that the Governor must, on their arrival, have been reclining there.