by Francis King
Alexine was once more in command.
Chapter Nineteen
‘MADAME WARBURTON! Mademoiselle Van Capellen! Mademoiselle Van Capellen!’
It was Lola, who had entered the house unannounced, as she always did now, and who was calling their names. At the sound of her voice, Mister began to yap.
In her den Lucy pulled an exasperated face, put down her pen and, having hastily blotted what she had been writing, pushed the sheet of paper into a drawer of her desk. She turned the key in the drawer and then put the key into a pocket. Roderick used to tell her that if she took as much care about locking up the stores as she did about locking up her precious manuscript, they would lose much less to thieving.
‘Oh, hello, Lola. Mademoiselle Van Capellen has had some bad news.’
‘Bad news?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Two runners arrived almost simultaneously. They brought letters from the expedition.’
As soon as Addy had seen that the first of the letters had been written by Nanny Rose and not by Alexine or Harriet, she had known at once that something terrible was wrong. Nanny Rose had difficulty in writing and her letters were full of grammatical and spelling errors. She rarely put pen to paper.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Let’s go into the drawing-room. I don’t want to disturb Mademoiselle Van Capellen.’
They both sat down. Then Lucy jumped up and closed the door.
‘Yes?’ Lola prompted.
‘I’m afraid that Madame Thinne has died.’
Lola put a hand up to her cheek and let out a little squeak. Her eyes widened, the colour drained from her face. ‘Died?’ Suddenly her mouth twisted to one side and she began to sob uncontrollably.
Lucy had not expected such extreme distress. She nodded. ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. Of course, she was sixty-six. You may not have known that. It’s amazing that a woman of that age was able to go through all that she went through. I couldn’t have done so even at my age.’
Leaning forward in the chair, her hands gripping its arms, Lola was still sobbing. Then, after a number of attempts to stem the sobs, she got out: ‘She was my teacher. Without her – what will I do? Where will I find another teacher in this place?’
‘She wouldn’t have been here for very long anyway.’
‘I know, I know. But maybe she could have persuaded my father. I think he would have listened to her – someone so important. My dream was to go to Italy – to Napoli or Roma. Or perhaps I could have gone to the Netherlands with her, and she could have continued to teach me.’ Speaking of all these opportunities now lost forever renewed her anguish. Again she leaned forward in the chair and again the sobs jerked out of her.
‘Yes, it’s sad. Very sad. I’m sorry. And it’s even sadder for Mademoiselle Van Capellen. They were so close, the two sisters. In recent years they had rarely been separated.’
The door had opened.
‘Oh, it’s you, Lola.’
Lucy and the girl looked across at Addy, who remained standing in the doorway. One hand rested on the jamb for support, the other was clutching a sodden handkerchief up against her chest. Her hair was hanging loose round her shoulders, her cheeks were unrouged, and she was wearing only a peignoir with a nightdress beneath it. Her eyes were red from weeping, the wrinkles round them looking like small scars.
‘Oh, Mademoiselle Van Capellen, I’m so sorry, so sorry!’ Lola ran towards her.
Addy did not yet realize, as Lucy did, that the girl’s sorrow was largely for herself. Moved by the apparent sympathy, she all but gave way to tears once again, her lips quivering. ‘I ought to have been with her. I feel so guilty.’ Trembling hand to wall, she staggered across the room, towards the sofa.
‘Nonsense,’ Lucy said. ‘If you’d gone with her, you might also be dead.’
Addy sank on to the sofa with a small moan. ‘ I keep getting this terrible pain.’
‘There’s a French doctor here at the moment. He was brought from Cairo to see one of the Mudir’s wives. I’m going to ask Roderick to get him to come and see you.’
‘Oh, no, no! I’m all right. All I need is to get back home again. That’s all.’ Then, realizing how wounding this might be to this woman with whom she had struck up, against all expectation, such a close friendship, she rushed on: ‘Except that I shall miss you, oh, I shall miss you so much, Lucy.’ An idea flashed to her: ‘ Why don’t you come back with me? For a visit – or even forever! Why not? I’m going to be lonely, oh, so lonely without my sister.’
‘You’ll have Alexine.’
‘Oh, Alexine! I don’t think she cares a hoot about me. Not really.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘Not a line from her, not a single line, during all these ten, eleven months … Not even when her mother dies. She leaves it to Nanny Rose to tell me. Can you imagine?’
‘She was very ill herself. And no doubt Harriet’s death …’
Lola had been following the conversation avidly, turning her head back and forth from one of the speakers to the other. Now she asked:
‘You’ll go back to your country – you and Mademoiselle Thinne?’
‘Of course. As soon as possible. Before anything else can happen. You know, in one of her last letters, my sister wrote of visiting a mission, where all but two of the eleven – or was it twelve? – priests had died. She wrote that she thought that there must have been a curse on it. Perhaps that curse followed her.’
‘Nonsense!’ Lucy exclaimed.
‘It’s possible. Perfectly possible. Anything is possible in this country.’
‘Dearest!’ Addy held out her arms, expecting Alexine to run into them. But instead Alexine moved deliberately, almost hesitantly towards her, with a puzzled, dazed expression on her face, and then halted too far away for them to touch each other. Mister sniffed at the hem of her jellaba. She gazed into Addy’s eyes, her head tilted to one side. Her sunburn had faded, so that her face and arms shocked Addy with their whiteness. Her eyes were huge above her gaunt cheeks, and her nose seemed much larger and more aquiline. ‘What you’ve been through!’ Again Addy held out her arms. At last Alexine allowed her aunt to embrace her. As Addy put
her lips to her niece’s cheek, she was amazed that, on a day so
hot, the flesh should be so cold. She sensed a corresponding coldness
in Alexine’s whole demeanour.
Sunny, Nanny Rose and Daan were standing some distance away.
‘Nanny! Thank you for your letters. You must also have gone
through a terrible time.’
‘I did all I could for her. We all did.’
‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure!’
‘I’m not really one for writing letters. I hope you could understand
what I wrote.’
‘Oh, yes! Of course! Both letters were so beautiful.’
Soon, after that vacillating beginning, Alexine was once more in
command. ‘We’d better decide what we want the porters to bring
up and what to store. We must also set about making the final
payment to them. You know, we had to pay about twice as much
for the steamer on the return journey than we paid going.’
‘I wish you could have brought back the body,’ Addy said.
‘Well, you can understand the problems. In any case, I think that
that’s where she would have been most happy. It was a beautiful
place. She loved places like that far more than Khartoum – or
probably The Hague.’
‘If anything were to happen to me, I’d want to be with my own people.’
‘That was the difference between you and mother. All people were her own people.’
‘Your aunt is far from well. I got a French doctor to see her – he was here to attend to one of the Mudir’s wives, but the poor woman died the day after he got here. After a lengthy examination of your aunt, he diagnosed a serious heart condition.’
> Warburton and Alexine were walking alone together in the garden. The dogs, which he secretly detested, were either frisking around them or dashing off into the undergrowth.
‘What did he prescribe for her?’
‘Digitalis. The usual thing. She’s not young. She undertook a journey that would have taxed a woman half her age. She’s now had the shock of your mother’s death.’
Alexine sensed an undercurrent of accusation in his words, and it sharpened her ever-present guilt. For a while she was silent, her head lowered. Then she asked: ‘Are you warning me of something?’
‘No. I’m merely giving you the facts. Lucy and I – particularly Lucy – have become very fond of her during all these months. What we like most about her is her …’ – he paused, seeking for the right word – ‘her gallantry. And her gaiety, of course, that too. Your mother had that gallantry. Perhaps it’s a family quality? Perhaps an aristocratic one? I don’t know anything about your family other than that it is aristocratic. And I’m far too lowly to know anything about the aristocracy.’
‘I want Lola to have the piano. I mean the one here, the large one, not that dreadful little one we took with us. That other one we can give to some mission or other. No doubt someone will enjoy thumping out hymns on it.’
The irrelevance of this to what they had been previously saying took him aback. ‘That’s kind of you. Typically generous.’ He was thinking: Typically extravagant. He mused for a while, as Alexine stooped, picked up a stick off the baked earth, and hurled into the bushes for the dogs. ‘ It’s sad we’H never hear your mother play again. She played so beautifully.’
Alexine stooped for another stick. She was thinking of that terrible jangling from the hideously out-of-tune piano when her mother had played on it for the last time. She should have gone into her then, to sit with her and give her what comfort she could, instead of thinking, as she had done at the time, ‘God, what a din!’, before resuming her sorting of some photographs.
‘Yes, she played beautifully. But I know so little about music.’
Addy’s lips were blue and her nostril flared as the struggled to breathe. She had come down to dinner and now wished that she hadn’t. It was disturbing that not merely Nanny Rose and Sunny but also now Daan should be sitting with them at each meal. Alexine had insisted on that.
‘But, Alexine, you can’t be serious,’ she had protested, after she had overheard her telling Lucy that in future Daan would also eat with them.
‘I’m being perfectly serious. We all ate together throughout the journey. Mama never minded. She was happy to have him with us along with Nanny and Sunny.’
‘Yes, but that was something different –’
‘If people are prepared to share your dangers, then it’s only fair that you should be prepared to share your meals with them.’
‘What an odd girl you’ve become!’ Constant pain had given an edge to Addy’s voice.
‘Become? Wasn’t I always odd?’
Warburton was staring quizzically at Alexine as, head lowered, she raised a full spoon from her soup. In the five days since her return, she had already begun to look far better. But, perversely, she had attracted him far more when she had been so haggard and pale that anyone might have thought that she was suffering from some mortal illness. Next to her, Daan was wiping his soup-plate with a hunk of bread. Addy, appalled, was frowning down at the hand holding the bread.
‘So what are your plans?’
‘My plans? Well, eventually, I suppose I’ll have to start all over again.’
Alexine was wholly unaware that, at the words, Addy had jerked up her head to stare across at her in horror.
‘Well, that shows courage after all you’ve gone through.’
‘Or obstinacy.’ Alexine laughed. ‘I never like to give up on things.’
‘So – so when is the next royal progress planned to take place?’
Alexine ignored the sarcasm. ‘It’s not going to be anything like a royal progress. You were right. To have a hundred people accompanying one is far less effective than having twenty. Yesterday someone told me that Mr Pullar and his wife were expected back soon. If they plan another journey, then perhaps they’d agree to our joining forces.’
‘That sounds to me like a recipe for total disaster. He wouldn’t take kindly to your giving him orders, and she wouldn’t take kindly to the company of a woman younger and more attractive than herself.’
‘And what’s to happen to me?’ Addy demanded.
Alexine, who had given the matter hardly any thought, hesitated. ‘Well, of course, I’d be happy for you to come along too. But I know you wouldn’t want that. You could stay here. I’m sure that Lucy and Mr Warburton would be happy to have you.’ She looked first at Warburton and then at Lucy.
After having waited in vain for her husband to answer, Lucy said: ‘ Of course!’ She turned to Addy. ‘We’d love that. Your company has been the best thing that has ever happened to me here.’
‘Or I could take you back to Cairo and from there we could find a ship for you,’ Alexine put in.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you! How kind! How thoughtful!’ This was not Warburton’s playful, glancing sarcasm but one full of previously suppressed bitterness. ‘But please, please, don’t worry about me. I may be old and ill but I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. Do by all means set off on your next hare-brained expedition. But all I ask of you is not to force other people to go along with you.’
‘What do you mean – force, force?’
The witnesses to this sudden confrontation were aghast. Lucy extended a hand and put it over one of Addy’s, as though, without any words being spoken, her touch alone would calm her and restrain her. But Addy ignored this.
She sucked in her breath, with a high-pitched, wheezing sound. ‘Oh, you know what I mean!’
‘No, I don’t, I don’t.’
‘If it hadn’t been for your nagging and bullying, your mother would never have dreamed of coming out to her death in this dreadful, dreadful place.’
Hating any scenes, Sunny jumped up from the table and, head lowered, hurried out of the room, as Alexine shouted across the table: ‘What are you talking about? She wanted to come. She didn’t have to come. It was what she wanted. And she was happy here. You may not believe it, but she was happy. She often told me that. She said that her time in Africa was the best time of her life.’
Addy once more sucked in her breath, then gave a laugh of derision. ‘She only put up with it all because of you. She pretended, for your sake, that she was enjoying herself, but she hated it all, hated it! And why do you think that I came?’
‘You asked to come. I didn’t ask you.’
‘I asked to come because I felt that I had to be on hand to protect your mother.’
‘To protect her? To protect her from what? You’d have hardly been of much use if we’d been attacked by natives or wild animals.’
‘To protect her from you.’
Lucy picked up the handbell before her and tinkled it. ‘If no one wants any more of the mutton, shall we go on to some fruit? I found some wonderful peaches in the market.’
But neither Addy nor Alexine paid any attention.
‘The trouble is that you’ve always been spoiled. You’ve always had your own way. If it hadn’t been for you and your ridiculous ideas of being a great explorer, your mother would still be with us and I wouldn’t be the wreck that I am.’
‘I’m not responsible for the state of your health.’
‘It was that illness of mine that ruined it. I’ve never been the same since. That French doctor agreed with me. He said that that sort of strain on the system can weaken the heart. You’re to blame for that. You’d better face it.’
Alexine’s chair grated back. ‘ Excuse me, Lucy. I can’t listen to any more of this.’ She stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Addy gave a scoffing laugh and put out a hand for one of the peaches on the dish just placed bef
ore her by the maid. ‘She doesn’t like to hear a few home truths. But I felt I had to have it out with her.’
‘Oh, Addy, I wish that you hadn’t. What’s the point? She’s suffered so much.’
‘Well, I’ve suffered too. And I’m still suffering. No one was closer to me than my sister, no one, no one. And now I’m in this constant pain.’
With trembling fingers she began to peel the peach.
‘We’re all tired,’ Nanny Rose said, as though to a group of quarrelling children. ‘It will seem quite different tomorrow. When we’re tired we say things we don’t really mean.’
‘Oh, Nanny Rose, one can always rely on you to come out with the right thing,’ Warburton said, tipping his chair so far back that he was in danger of falling over. ‘I do like that about you.’
Not sure whether he was making fun of her or not, Nanny Rose nodded. ‘Thank you.’ Once she would have said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ but since Harriet’s death she had dispensed with that sort of subservience. Even Addy was no longer ‘ madam’ to her but merely Miss Van Capellen.
‘And what are your plans?’ Warburton asked.
‘Well, you might as well know them sooner than later. Mightn’t they, Daan?’ She smiled fondly across at the old man, as she wiped the corners of her mouth with her heavily starched linen napkin. ‘First, Daan and I are going to get married.’ Again she smiled. ‘Well, it’s never too late. We made enquiries yesterday at the Lutheran mission.’
Addy put down the slice of peach from which she had just taken a bite. She stared at it with an expression of melancholy disgust. She was in no mood to offer her congratulations.
‘That’s wonderful, Nanny,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m sure that you’re both going to be extremely happy.’
‘Do you plan to make your home in The Hague or in England?’ Warburton asked.
‘Oh, neither. We want to live in Cairo.’
‘Cairo!’
‘Yes, that’s our plan. We like that city. And Daan’ – she looked over to him – ‘ has become interested in the antique things they dig up here. Also in those objects made by the natives. They’re not really to my taste, but foreigner visitors pay a lot for them. As I’m sure you know. Daan’s quite an expert now. An American in Cairo told him he had a real flair. Didn’t he, Daan?’