by Francis King
‘He thinks I’m going to pinch it.’
Alexine greeted the man in Arabic and explained: ‘I want some clothes for my friend.’ Sunny was examining, head tilted up, a row of ancient hats on a shelf above him.
The man, who had not returned her greeting, silently shuffled to the farthest end of the shop, turned and beckoned. Hanging from a long row of pegs, Alexine saw a jumble of western clothing, men’s, women’s, children’s, all dusty, most stained, many so tattered that, in their own countries, the owners would most likely have consigned them to the rubbish dump.
Even her dead father’s clothes, so clean and in such perfect condition, had filled her with revulsion when, having gone into his room to ask her mother something, she had found her sorting them out with the aid of Hans and the valet. On that occasion, having received an answer to her question, she had at once retreated. She felt an even more intense revulsion now. Most of the people who had once owned these clothes, brought with them when they had set out, full of hope, from their own temperate countries for what Lucy called this hell-hole, must now be dead. There were many children’s garments. Most of those children must also be dead. She put out a hand to an embroidered pinafore, touched it, then at once withdrew the hand. The shop-keeper was watching her suspiciously with that one, pus-tacky, red-rimmed eye.
Then Sunny was beside her. Straining on tiptoe, he reached up to hitch some corduroy breeches off their hook. He held them up against himself, chin tucked in as hejooked down. With the amazing serendipity that he so often showed, he had at once alighted on a perfect fit. For the first time, the shop-keeper smiled. He pulled back a curtain over what seemed to be little more than a closet and indicated that Sunny should go behind it to try the breeches on.
In a few moments, Sunny marched out. He stood in front of Alexine, hands raised, in the manner of an acrobat seeking applause after the performance of a particularly difficult trick. Gazing at him, she realized with amazement how much he had grown and filled out in the past few weeks. ‘Good? Good?’ He whirled round.
‘Perfect. A perfect fit for the lad,’ Daan said.
Alexine thought of the boy, no doubt dead of some insidious or peremptory tropical disease, who had once worn the breeches. She was filled with horror at the thought of Sunny now wearing them. But they looked almost new; they were, as Daan had said, a perfect fit.
‘Please,’ Sunny said, misinterpreting her hesitation for an uncharacteristic reluctance to spend money. ‘Your present for me. Please!’
‘Oh, very well!’ She turned to the shopkeeper. ‘How much?’
‘You must bargain, miss!’
‘Oh, I can’t be bothered. Why waste the time?’
The man named a sum and she at once accepted it.
Sunny now began to forage for other things, running hands along a shelf or reaching up to jerk some other garment off its hook. As with the breeches, he showed an astonishing flair for finding exactly what was right for him. Daan also began to hunt, pulling out a pair of yellowing combinations, a heavily creased cravat, and a boater hat with a sweat-stained ribbon.
In one corner, boots and slippers were piled high. Sunny knelt down and began to scrabble among them, like one of Alexine’s dogs looking for some edible morsel in a garbage-heap. Eventually, he extracted a pair of black patent-leather boots, which he dusted off on the sleeve of his jellaba before extending a bare foot and then pulling one on.
‘Wrong boot! Wrong boot!’ Daan shouted.
Sunny threw it aside and grabbed its pair.
‘Try the other now,’ Daan said.
Hands on hips, Sunny strutted up and down the shop in both boots. It was the first time in his life that he had not been barefoot. Yet again, the fit was perfect. Yet again, Alexine thought: ‘He’s no longer a child!’
He grinned: ‘Yes, missie?’
Alexine nodded, his joy all at once communicating itself to her.
‘I might buy these,’ Daan said. He held up a pair of boots. ‘Those boots of mine are on their last legs. What d’you think, miss?’ Noticing the look of distaste on her face, he said: ‘ I’ve no feelings about wearing dead men’s boots. Or anything else.’
‘I’ll buy them for you. If you really think they fit.’
‘Oh, no, miss! I’ll settle for them myself.’ The protest was a token one.
‘I’d like to.’
‘You must get him to give you a lower price for everything together. You’ve bought more than he probably sells in a month of Sundays.’
But again Alexine could not be bothered to bargain.
‘How are we going to get all this clobber home? There’s too much to carry.’
Although Daan had spoken in Dutch, the shopkeeper somehow guessed what he had said. He went to the doorway of the shop and shouted something in a hoarse voice. Then he coughed and spat out a green glob of phlegm, which landed on the bedraggled corpse of a bird upturned, feet in air, in the gutter. ‘ Wait, madame. Wait, please.’
Eventually a lanky boy arrived pushing a cart.
Pointing at him, the shopkeeper said in Arabic: ‘Tip for boy, madame. Yes?’ Then he repeated the word in English: ‘Tip, tip, tip!’ Probably it was one of the very few English words that he knew, perhaps even the only one.
‘Later,’ Daan told him loudly and clearly in Dutch. ‘When we’ve got back home.’ He always imagined that if he said something with sufficient volume, then somehow his Dutch would be understood.
The shopkeeper nodded, having again somehow guessed what Daan had said. He laughed and, once more extending his head out of the door, coughed and spat another huge glob of phlegm into the open drain. Then: ‘Tip, tip, tip!’ he sang out happily in English.
‘What about the tailor?’ Daan asked.
‘Oh, another time. Let’s get all this stuff home. Mrs Warburton gave me directions but I never wrote them down. I’m not at all sure where he is.’
‘You could ask.’
Alexine shook her head. She felt oddly disorientated so that, looking around her, she was not even sure of the way back home. This disorientation, creating a feeling of vague panic, seemed to her to be merely an extension of the general disorientation that had afflicted her since her arrival in Khartoum. As in the city itself, so in her life there was a labyrinth of routes and she was dizzied by the struggle to decide down which to plunge.
‘It’s so hot.’ She put a hand to her forehead.
‘Oh, I thought it was rather cooler, miss. There’s this nice breeze now.’
Nice! As they stood beside the open drain, the breeze, fluctuating capriciously, struck Alexine as being like a series of breaths from a giant mouth full of rotting teeth.
Fortunately, Sunny knew the way. He strode out ahead both of them and of the youth with the hand-cart, from time to time looking round to see if they were following but chiefly gazing down at his newly acquired boots. He was also wearing the breeches and one of the two jackets that Alexine had also bought for him. She had told him that he would be far too hot in these clothes but he had insisted that no, no, he would be fine.
‘Well, you look like a real macaroni,’ Nanny Rose told him, when they entered the house. ‘I hardly recognized you.’
‘What do you think of these?’ Daan held up his boots.
Nanny Rose inspected them, screwing up her eyes. ‘Not bad. They must have cost you a pretty penny.’
‘They cost Miss Alexine a pretty penny.’
‘You’re too generous! I keep telling you.’ Nanny Rose shook her head in disapproval.
‘Oh, what’smoney for? One might as well spend it while one has it.’
Nanny Rose, who had repeatedly heard Alexine express this sentiment, again shook her head, her mouth pursed.
Sunny, having seated himself on a stool, began to tug off his boots. In the heat of the walk home, his feet had swollen and his tugging was unsuccessful. Seeing his predicament, Alexine knelt down on the floor – really it was too absurd, the way she pandered to him, Nanny Rose thou
ght – and began to tug at one of the boots herself. Eventually, she all but fell over backwards as it came away.
‘Oh, you’ve got a blister! Look where it’s been rubbing!’ She looked round at Nanny Rose: ‘ Do bring me some of that Salve Benoit, Nanny.’
‘We’re running low. Miss Addy used a lot of it for her sunburn.’
‘Oh, never mind that! Bring it.’
Muttering under her breath, Nanny Rose moved off.
Alexine touched the blister gently with a forefinger. It was over the toe that overlapped the one next to it. Sunny smiled up at her, showing the gap where one of his front teeth had been knocked out.
When she went out later that evening, Sunny, as so often on such occasions, attached himself to her without asking for her leave. He was once again wearing the boots, but now, where the leather had rubbed against the toe, he had neatly cut out a diamond-shaped hole.
‘Do you really want to meet my husband?’
‘Of course. If he’s willing to meet me.’
‘He’s curious about you. About all of you, but about you particularly. He’s not been curious about anything for weeks.’
‘Well, that’s a good sign.’
‘I hope so.’
Alexine, whose moods of depression or doubt were always so transient, could not understand how a woman relatively young and in apparent good health could so constantly suffer from both. Like Harriet, she felt sorry for Lucy; unlike Harriet, she was also irritated by her. It was often with difficulty that she restrained herself from scolding her: ‘Come on! You can’t spend your whole life brooding and moaning!’
With his sheet thrown back and his nightgown rucked up so that it revealed his white, oddly hairless legs, one crossed over the other at the ankles, and even a thigh, Alexine thought of the greyish grubs that the porters had avidly seized when they had seen an army of them on a clump of low trees, their branches already half-ravished of their leaves. The porters had at once begun to thrust these grubs, often two or three at a time, into their mouths, before swallowing them, whole as it seemed, with greedy relish. Roderick looked like a magnified version of one of these.
Lucy fetched a chair from where it stood against a wall. ‘Sit,’ she said.
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve so many things to do. I’ll leave you both alone together.’
Alexine felt a swelling panic. How was sheto initiate a conversation with this man who had not returned her greeting with more than a grunt, and who now stared up at her with dazed, puzzled eyes? For several seconds after Lucy’s departure, they were silent. Alexine looked out of the curtainless window at a tree from which a number of fruit bats were dangling; Warburton continued to stare at her.
Suddenly he spoke: ‘You’re very elegant.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re all very elegant. I was watching you from over there’ – he raised a flaccid arm and pointed – ‘one afternoon when you were in the garden, and I thought how elegant all of you were. But you were the most elegant of all.’
‘People usually say that my aunt is the most elegant.’
‘Do they? Do they? Then they’re wrong. Anyway … anyway …’ He seemed to have lost the thread of what he had been planning to say. One hand, the yellow-tinged nails for so long uncut that they looked like the talons of some bird of prey, moved restlessly over his thigh as though in search of that lost thread. Then he said: ‘ You must be an extraordinary woman. A prodigy.’
Alexine laughed and shook her head. ‘There’s nothing extraordinary about me – about any of us.’
‘You have courage – travelling in this godawful country, by yourselves, three women.’
‘Four women,’ Alexine corrected. She now thought of Nanny Rose, as she had never done in The Hague, as one of themselves.
‘Yes, that needs courage.’
‘Not really. We can always give up and escape. Tomorrow or the next day we can decide that we’d rather be in The Hague – or London, or Paris, or Vienna – and, pfft, the magic wand can carry us there.’
‘Magic wand?’
‘Money. My money. I know it’s bad manners to talk of money, but I find that, travelling like this, I talk about it and think about it constantly.’
He gave a small, twitchy smile. ‘How lucky!’
‘Yes. Lucky. Our luck is that, because of money, we’re free. It doesn’t require courage to come to a place like this if one is free to leave it whenever one wants. The real courage is to come to a place like this knowing that one can never leave it.’
‘You’re flunking of my wife.’
‘And of many other people.’
Again there was a silence, with Alexine once again staring at the fruit bats dangling like black handkerchiefs from the tree outside the window and him once again searching her half-averted face.
‘You wanted to ask me something?’
‘I wanted to ask you two things. The first question is about you. The second is about myself. I don’t know if you’re able – or prepared – to answer either.’
‘Try.’
‘What’s the matter with you? Your wife doesn’t seem to know.’ He winced visibly at the brutality of the question. Then he was grateful to her for it. It was as though a surgeon had lanced a boil: a moment of excruciating agony, then relief.
‘I wish I knew.’ For a time he pondered, head turned sideways, away from her, and hand to cheek. She waited with growing impatience. At last, in a dreamy, puzzled voice, he said: ‘Everything has lost its taste for me. Everything – sickens me. I don’t want to do anything – eat, get out of this bed, read a book, talk to anyone, even perform my natural functions. Imagine a clock which has all its other components in perfect order but mysteriously has lost its mainspring.’
‘Money,’ she said. ‘People say that money is the root of all evil but it can also cure evils. Your wife tells me that you have financial problems.’
Once again her directness first pierced him agonizingly and then brought a gush of relief. ‘She shouldn’t have told you that.’
‘Well, she has. And I don’t blame her. We were here. Whom else could she tell?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘Yes. I’ve made a mess of things. No doubt of that. I was overconfident. It’s when you think that you can cheat someone else that you’re most likely to be cheated.’
‘I want to help you.’
‘Help me? Why?’
‘Because I’ve become fond of Lucy. I feel sorry for her in a way that I can’t feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for you, yes, of course I do, but I hardly know you and so … But because of Lucy I want to help you.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
‘I told you. Money. Tell me what you need to get on your feet again.’
‘On my feet again? Do you mean that literally or figuratively?’
‘Both. I want you out of that bed. But I also want you back in business – whatever that business is.’
He stared at her. Then he burst into laughter. The laughter prolonged itself. He put a hand over his mouth, like a child trying to suppress its giggles under the eyes of a disapproving adult. ‘Are you proposing to be my fairy godmother?’
‘Yes. Why not? I can afford it.’
Suddenly, as though leaping up and away to avoid some imminent danger, he swung his legs aloft and then down from the bed. As the legs described an arc in the air before her, she saw for a second the plump white cock, another enlarged grub, the loose, wrinkled scrotum and the luxuriant, sweat-moist bush above them. There was something both ludicrous and pitiable about the sight.
He perched on the edge of the bed, knees together, one inturned foot over the other, leaning forward towards her. She could smell his breath. It reminded her of the breeze that, putrid gust on gust, had fanned over the open drain in the market. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Perfectly.’
Suddenly he raised one arm above his head and then the other, and exhaled a tremendous yawn, almost a groa
n, his whole body shuddering as he did so. ‘Let’s think about it. Both of us.’
‘I don’t have to think about it. I decide what I’m going to do. I do it. Does that sound terribly arrogant to you?’
He nodded, smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘But in one matter I can’t decide what to do. So that’s my second question to you. Where do I go from here?’
Either he genuinely misunderstood her or he pretended to do so. ‘From here? Aren’t you happy in our house? Hasn’t Lucy …?’
‘We love it here. And Lucy has been immensely kind to us. But I have to push on. That’s why I came here – not to stay here but to push on. We’ve been here long enough already but …’ Again she looked out of the window at the motionless fruit bats. ‘ I can’t be like one of those bats – just hanging on. Tell me. Where do you think I should go?’ When he did not answer, merely staring at her, his eyes narrowed, she went on: ‘I want to find something that no one else has found. To go somewhere where no one has gone before me.’
‘There’s nowhere where no one has gone before you. This whole continent is teeming with people.’
‘I mean – no one white.’
‘Ah! I see.’ He spoke ironically.
‘So what do you suggest? You know this whole area so well. You’ve travelled all over it. You’ve seen more of it than anyone eke. That’s what they told me in Cairo, and what they now tell me here.’
‘The Grail,’ he said. ‘The Holy Grail. Did any women go out in search of the Holy Grail? I don’t think so. I don’t remember.’
She was mystified. ‘The Holy Grail?’
He nodded. ‘ There always has to be something in Africa that people are obsessed with finding. The finding of it doesn’t mean that the people of this wretched continent – or anywhere else for that matter – become richer or happier or even better. It’s just the singularity of the find that makes it – for some idiots – worth suffering for and even dying for. But the nature of the Holy Grail constantly keeps changing. Until recently it was the source of the Nile. But that search is virtually over.’
‘So what are the idiots searching for now?’ Alexine spoke drily. If all the men who had ventured out, palpitating with excitement, ambition and dread, into the vast darkness of this continent were idiots, then surely she herself, a mere woman, was also one?