by Francis King
But Lucy persisted: ‘I just had this feeling the moment that I saw you …’
‘No, truly, there’s nothing.’
Addy returned with a velvet-covered box, which she carefully opened and then held out.
Lola let out a scream of pleasure. ‘ Is that really for me?’
A brooch nestled on cotton wool inside the box, its one flaring diamond surrounded by modest rubies. Lola had noticed it on Addy on two or three formal occasions. On the last of those occasions she had even commented admiringly on it, adding ‘It must be worth an awful lot of money’ – a remark that Addy had later condemned as ‘ crude’.
‘It belonged to my mother,’ Addy said with assumed indifference. ‘I never greatly liked it. It’s yours.’
‘But why? Why?’
‘Why?’ Addy was vaguely offended as she began the gather up Harriet’s letters. ‘Why? Because we’re friends. Aren’t we?’
‘Oh, yes, yes! Of course.’
Two days later it was not to Lucy but to Addy that Lola confided the reason for her worry. The two of them had taken the carriage down to the market while, fretful at the interruption to her work on her novel, Lucy was dealing with some consular business.
The two women were jogging along in silence, an unusually cool breeze on their faces; Lola turned and, in a voice totally unlike her usually loud, confident one, said: ‘Mademoiselle Van Capellen – I wonder if I might consult you about something?’
‘Yes, of course. What is it?’
‘I’m rather worried.’
‘Worried? What are you worried about? You’re far too young to have any worries.’
‘Well, the thing is …’ Her voice trailed away. She turned her head aside and gazed out of the window.
At that moment, the elderly Englishman who had come to the Sudan to hunt big game passed them on a horse. He raised his hat. ‘Good morning, ladies!’ he boomed out. ‘Good morning to you!’
Addy graciously acknowledged the greeting; Lola did not.
When he had gone, Addy prompted: ‘So?’
Lola’s face looked yellow and pinched and Addy now noticed the acne breaking out on the line of her right jaw.
‘I’m – I’m late,’ she muttered.
‘Late?’ Back at the house, Addy was to curse herself for her obtuseness. ‘Late? What do you mean?’
‘Well, I haven’t – haven’t – bled for more than seven weeks. And I’m – I’m frightened.’
Addy stared at her. All at once she was reliving her own joy and then terror when, all those years ago, she had slowly begun to realize that she was pregnant.
‘Oh, but that sort of delay’s not at all uncommon. With Mrs Van Capellen and my niece it’s always been like clockwork, but I used to have endless problems. Sometimes I bled so much that I had to take to my bed.’
‘I’ve never been late before. Never, in my whole life.’
‘You’re probably just run-down. Or it may be because of this unseasonable heat.’
Lola shook her head. ‘No, I feel it. I just know.’
‘When did you last’ – Addy sought for a conventional phrase since convention, despite the scandal of her youth, had always been important to her – ‘have intercourse.’
Lola thought, eyes screwed up and the fingers of one hand pressed to her full lips. ‘Almost two months ago.’
‘And you’d had it a number of times before?’
Lola hesitated to answer, fingertips still to lips.
‘I’m sorry to ask you these questions, but if I’m to be of any help to you …’
Lola shook her head. ‘Not a number of times. Three.’ Her voice was attenuated to a wispy thread so that Addy, who was beginning to go deaf, could hardly hear her.
‘And are you still … still seeing him?’
Again Lola shook her head. ‘He’s gone away. I think … feel …’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t think he’ll want to see me again.’
‘Why? Did you quarrel?’
‘No. Not quarrel. But that’s – that’s his way.’
‘How do you know?’
‘People say. Another girl – a friend of mine – they – they did things – two, three times. Then …’ She raised her hands and dropped them.
‘He sounds a thoroughly bad sort.’
‘He is, he is! But … I love him. Loved him.’
Addy put a hand over the girl’s. ‘Poor dear.’ Then, after a few seconds’ silence, she asked: ‘ Have I met him?’
Lola did not answer, biting her lower lip.
‘Have I? Yes?’
Lola nodded.
‘Where?’
‘At that party, the first party.’
With a triumphant leap of intuition, Addy at once knew who it must be. ‘Was it that Mr Fielding?’
Silence.
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
Lola nodded.
‘The brute! I never took to him, even on our first meeting in Cairo.’
‘What am I to do?’
‘You haven’t said anything to your parents?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t! I couldn’t! They’d turn me out of the house.’
‘I’d better speak to Mrs Warburton. She knows this place. She may have some idea. Let me do that. May I?’
‘But I don’t want anyone else to know.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be discreet.’
‘Well, there are these old women – and some young ones. They prepare potions that are said to be effective. But they could be dangerous.’
‘What’s the alternative for the poor girl? She says her father will turn her out of the house.’
Lucy thought. She said, ‘Well, if that were to happen, I suppose she could come to live here. Perhaps once the baby was bora – and had been adopted – her father might then relent. Yes, she could do that.’
‘But would you want her here all the time?’
‘No, not really,’ Lucy retorted drily. ‘ But what’s the alternative – if we can’t get her an abortion?’
‘And you think Mr Warburton …?’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t in the least welcome the idea. But – I really don’t care a jot about that.’
Both women laughed. They were now accustomed to speaking with contempt about Warburton.
Lucy enquired among the two women servants employed by her and the three employed by Addy. Eventually one of Addy’s servants, a Sudanese, reluctantly came up with the name of an old woman living in a village seven miles from the town. She was famous, the servant said, as an expert in such matters. Deciding not to take Lola with them, Addy and Lucy set off in the dusty, dilapidated carriage. The road was little more than a stony track, and they were constantly thrown against each other. In the best of humours in spite of the nature of their errand, they merely laughed each time their bodies collided.
The old woman lived in a thatched hovel, where the small, crowded village petered out in a few shacks, some pens for sheep, and a patch-work of cultivated and uncultivated smallholdings. She was seated on a stool, a naked child of two or three in her lap. Shortsightedly she was peering down at the child’s head through half-closed, hooded eyes, as she diligently picked out nits and then crushed them between her long fingernails. Lucy spoke to her in Arabic, but she shook her head, not understanding, and then resumed her task.
‘I ought to have realized we’d have this difficulty.’
‘What about the coachman?’
‘We don’t want the whole world and his wife to know our business. And in any case his Arabic is so poor …’
At that moment a young man in shabby Western dress and dusty boots sauntered past. He smiled at the two women and, when Lucy smiled back, raised his hat, bowed and said in French: ‘Good morning, ladies.’ He was later to tell them that he was a tax official.
‘Good morning.’ It was Lucy who answered. Addy would never have done so.
He walked on, hesitated, halted, and then returned.
‘May I
help you?’
‘Well, yes,’ Lucy said. ‘Thank you. But we don’t want to take up too much of your time.’
‘My time is all yours, madame.’
A three-sided conversation ensued between the stranger, the old woman and Lucy. Addy, taking no part, opened the fan that she was carrying with her, and began vigorously to wave it before her face. Beads of sweat were pushing through the powder on her cheeks and neck, and the curls artfully created for her that morning by her maid with a pair of tongs were limply sticking to her forehead.
Alexine had once said that all conversations between Europeans and Africans ended in discussion of money, and this was no exception.
‘But that’s absurd! That’s far too much!’
‘She says this medicine is special to her. No one else has such medicine.’
‘But one could buy a mule for less than that!’
‘If you want the medicine, and not a mule, then she says that that is her price.’
Lucy argued so vigorously that, pushing the child off her knees to the ground, the woman eventually got up off the stool in order, arms akimbo, to confront her on the same level.
At long last, the contestants agreed a sum, and Addy, insisting that Lucy must pay no part of it, produced the money from her bag.
‘I congratulate you, ladies,’ the man said.
The old woman disappeared into the recesses of the hovel, followed by the child, who crawled after her, wailing as he did so. When she reappeared she was carrying a bottle that proclaimed in French on its grubby, scuffed label: Vinaigre.
‘Well, I hope you’ve paid out all that money for something more efficient than vinegar,’ Lucy said, pointing to the label.
As they walked over to the carriage, the old woman, bent almost double, shuffled after them. Lucy and Addy quickened their pace, convinced that she was going to ask for more money. When she put a hand on Addy’s arm, Addy at once jerked it away. But the woman’s intentions were, it emerged, entirely benevolent. She smiled, said something, smiled again, said something more.
‘She is wishing you good luck. You and the woman who will take the medicine. She is asking the gods to bless you.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of her.’ Addy now felt guilty for her former suspicions. She inserted a hand into her bag, drew out a coin and, smiling, stooped to give it the child in the dust at her feet. He grabbed the coin and was about to shove it into his mouth when the old woman snatched it away from him.
The young man asked if he could have a lift with them back to the city. They were far from eager to agree to this request, but felt that, after he had given them so much help, they could hardly refuse. He sat opposite to them, one leg crossed high over the other. His boots, though dusty, looked expensive, but he was wearing no socks. His legs were thin and extremely hairy. He pulled some amber beads out of his pocket and began to click them between his fingers, smiling now at one and now at the other.
Addy fanned herself more and more vigorously. Then she coughed and coughed again. In recent days she had become breathless after any effort, and there was an intermittent feeling of constriction in her chest. The man put down the beads on the seat beside him,
and again foraged in his pocket. This time he produced a box of
pastilles. He held it out.
She shook her head, forced a smile. ‘Thank you. I’m all right.
Thank you.’
He put away the box, and a long silence followed.
Then he said: ‘Is the medicine for one of your servants?’
Each woman waited for the other to tell the inevitable he. Then
Lucy said: ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’
‘These country girls … Is she a country girl?’
‘Er-yes.’
‘It’s always the same sad story.’
To change the subject, Addy asked him whether he was from
Khartoum or elsewhere?
He was from Aswan, he said. Did they know Aswan?
Of course, Addy answered. Then she said: ‘We passed through
it on our horrendous journey from Cairo.’
‘Horrendous?’ He was surprised.
Addy laughed. ‘Well, far from comfortable. I’m a creature of
comfort,’ she added.
The next day Lola arrived at the house, as arranged, and Lucy and Addy watched her as she drank the first of three doses from the bottle. The liquid was sticky, a dark-brown with strange, grease-like orange globules in it. However much first Addy and then Lucy shook the bottle, these globules refused to disperse. Lola pulled a face as she swallowed the draught from the glass, and then lurched forward, retching. Tears appeared in her eyes.
‘It’s horrible!’
‘Well, anyway you got it down. And kept it down,’ Lucy said.
When Lola arrived on the following day, she looked even yellower than ever and the acne was now a bright red along her jaw.
‘Any luck?’
She shook her head miserably. ‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘ Twice. During, the night. I woke my mother. I told her I must have eaten something bad.’
‘Well, you’d better take the second dose,’ Addy said.
‘Oh, no! No!’
‘Yes!’
Again Lola bent over, retching; again her eyes filled with tears. Her lips were drawn back, and her teeth were stained a murky brown. She walked out with them on a shopping errand but soon said that she felt exhausted and, having kissed each of them perfunctorily, turned for home.
On the day after that, still nothing had happened. ‘ I don’t believe that medicine’s any good. She cheated us. Who knows what it really is?’
‘You must take the third dose.’
Again Lola protested, and again, bullied by them, she eventually swallowed the draught.
The next day Lola dolefully told them that there had still been no result.
‘Well, that’s it. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps she did cheat us.’ In sudden rage, amazing the other two women, Lucy flung the empty bottle against the kitchen wall, where it shattered. Lola stooped to pick up the fragments but Lucy ordered her: ‘ Leave it, leave it! The maids can see to it.’
Out in the garden, the three drank lemonade. The birds were even more noisy than usual, and the fruit bats, hanging motionless upside down from the trees, had returned. The bats always made Addy feel uneasy. Suppose one were to detach itself and drop on her head?
‘Well, what are we going to do now?’ Lucy voiced the question in all of their minds.
‘I’ll have to have it,’ Lola said, in a despairing voice.
‘Yes, perhaps that would be best,’ Lucy said. ‘If you can’t have it at home, you can have it here. Why not?’ That previous night she had toyed with the idea of adopting the baby. Before, she had been thankful for her childless state, but now, suddenly, she had begun to regret it and to long for it to end.
‘You are very kind.’ Lola eyes filled with tears. ‘My best friends.’
Four days later the three of them were playing cards. Lola, though the game was new to her, was constantly winning. Piled up before her were the sweets which, at Addy’s suggestion, they had been using as counters. She was staring down at her cards when, suddenly, she put a hand to her stomach and let out a scream. She let out another scream and jumped up from her chair. On the pale yellow damask seat there was now a scarlet patch. As she raced into the house, Addy and Lucy both saw that the back of her dress was also drenched in blood.
Lucy flew after her, followed by Addy, at a slower pace.
‘Are you all right?’
Lola had locked herself in Addy’s bathroom. She made no answer.
Lucy rattled the door handle. ‘ Lola! Let me in! Let me in!’
Addy sat down on the upright chair beside the bathroom door and crossed her hands in her lap. Acutely now she felt that constriction in her chest.
For a long time Lola would not open the door, even though Lucy continued to rattle at the handle and call to her. When at
last she emerged, her face was yellow-grey and streaked with sweat. She had got out of the dress and stuffed it into the commode, before putting on a peignoir belonging to Addy that she had seen hanging behind the door. One hand was raised to hold the folds of the peignoir together, the other was in her damp hair. Later, Lucy, pulling a face, would rescue the dress and one of the maids would wash it and iron it.
‘It’s gone. Over.’
She said it not merely with utter exhaustion but also, to the amazement of the other two women, with a furious anguish.
Chapter Fifteen
THEY HAD NEVER BEEN HAPPIER. ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful, so beautiful,’ Harriet kept exclaiming as they passed through the gallery forest, previously visited by Alexine, camped on a vast plain with herds of buffalo in the distance, or watched some dozen elephants processing majestically down to a pond surrounded by gum trees to drink.
On one occasion, as a stretch of downland gently rose, a luminescent green before them, Harriet even remarked: ‘It’s as good as Scotland.’
‘As good as Scotland!’ Alexine exclaimed. ‘It’s a hundred times better. From then on, she would constantly mock her mother by asking ‘As good as Scotland?’ when she remarked on the beauty of some view.
Eventually they arrived at a river, little more than swollen stream, that the two guides, who would constantly argue with each other, on this occasion both agreed they would have to cross.
‘At last we can use that gutta-percha boat,’ Nanny Rose said. ‘I thought we were never going to.’
Although they cried out in dismay when the boat appeared to be about to capsize as the two of them climbed in, Nanny Rose and Harriet were eventually ensconced in its bows.
‘Come on, Daan! Come on!’ Nanny Rose gestured vigorously.
‘No, I’m all right. I’m all right. I can wade. The water’s not deep.’
‘Well, you come, Alexine!’ Harriet cried out.
‘No, no. I’m going to wade.’
‘You can’t! No, no!’
But, as always, Alexine got her own way.
When the boat, hauled by a number of men stripped of every piece of clothing except their loincloths, had deposited its first cargo of the two European women and their terrified maids, and then returned, it was found to be too small for many of the animals.