Then I spoilt it. The state of Nathan’s shirt had been puzzling me – it was not properly ironed. I leant over and fingered the crumpled collar. ‘Don’t you have an iron at Minty’s flat?’
Nathan pulled irritably at it. ‘Minty is not one of nature’s ironers. It was her turn… and I tried to show her… you know, about shirts.’
‘Did you? And what did Minty say?’
Nathan seemed baffled. ‘When I explained that the trick is to iron from the yoke outwards, she threw it back at me.’
‘Well I never. The free spirit.’
He jerked the lock of his briefcase shut. ‘One minute women are saying one thing, then they’re demanding the opposite. They want to be noticed, they demand homage. Then we provide it, and find ourselves accused of rape or of some fearful transgression against their rights. They say they want us to be free, and they want to be free, and, saps that we are, we believe them.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘It didn’t take long.’
Angry and hostile, we slid down from our precarious perches on the stools and went our separate ways.
Chapter Eighteen
I knew Nathan would deny it. I knew he would fight against a feeling he would consider wrong and beneath him but, looking back, my job introduced an irritant into our marriage. It was to do with timing, for later on Nathan was fine about it.
I think he felt we had lost an innocence, that an illusion had changed.
Six months after I began work as the assistant in the books department, Sam fell ill. It began with a high fever. ‘It’s just a bug,’ I assured Nancy, the bright New Zealander who helped out in the afternoons and whom I had had to bribe to stay for the whole day. I grabbed my book bag and headed out of the front door.
On the third day, Sam began to vomit and his temperature was still worryingly high. Nancy rang in at eight o’clock to say she was sorry but she could not miss any more of her college course. I cornered Nathan in his study. Could he take time off? I asked. Being new to my job I did not like to risk cutting corners. Nathan dropped a pile of envelopes into a basket marked ‘Bills’ and looked thoughtful. ‘Not really,’ he replied, and I had the impression that he had been waiting for a moment such as this. ‘I can’t take a day off at such short notice.’
I squared up to him. ‘Please.’ If Nathan was in the slightest danger of saying, ‘I told you so,’ I knew I would lose my temper.
‘I told you so,’ said Nathan, but in such a way that my anger was stillborn. This was a serious disagreement.
There was an icy silence. ‘I don’t believe you said that.’
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘Sorry. But you know what I feel about you working. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. I asked you to wait until the children were older.’ He turned his back and stapled a couple of documents together. ‘Do you realize how fortunate you are, Rose, in not having to work?’
‘I’ll overlook the moral blackmail, Nathan. What’s happened to “I help you, you help me”? Where’s that gone?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
I grasped the nettle. ‘You helped me get the job.’
‘You were set on it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember that next time you need support.’
I rang Ianthe and begged for help. Delighted to be of use, she arrived bearing an old jigsaw puzzle of the battle of Marathon that I had played with, plus a copy of The Little House on the Prairie. I had doubts that Sam would respond to a girl’s account of pioneering in the American west, but when I returned in the evening, Poppy was perched on his bed, playing nurses and feeding Sam sips of freshly squeezed orange juice, while he read aloud in a feeble voice from The Little House. He looked up as I entered the room. ‘Mum, such a wicked story.’
It was a soothing, textbook sight.
Ianthe was hemming a skirt. ‘I think he’s a bit better.’ She bit off the thread, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The needle dived in and out of the flowered material. ‘Supper’s done,’ she said, ‘and the washing.’ She reached for her scissors and a machine bobbin fell out of her basket on to the floor, unravelling white cotton as it rolled. ‘All under control.’
Ianthe had been over-optimistic, and that night Sam was worse. I kept vigil in a room that smelt of sickness and disinfectant. Nathan tiptoed in and out, ignoring me. ‘Poor old fellow,’ he told Sam, who was trying to be brave. At one o’clock, Nathan went to bed, leaving our differences to grow colder.
Sam muttered and tossed. Every hour I took his temperature, and at one point I went down to the kitchen and heated water, which I carried back upstairs through the white-tinged darkness and silence. Bit by bit, I washed Sam, his thin white boyish legs, then his arms, his fingers, the white, exhausted face. Please get better, I kept saying to myself. Please, please, let there be nothing wrong.
At five thirty, I managed to get a couple of teaspoons of boiled water down him, and he dozed. I plummeted into sleep.
I was woken by the sound of pitiful, desperate retching and Sam’s sobbing. I panicked. ‘Nathan,’ I called. ‘Nathan.’ He shambled sleepily into the room. ‘We’ve got to get him to hospital.’ Without a second’s hesitation, he swung into action.
Together we wrapped Sam in Nathan’s old green dressing-gown for extra warmth, got him into the car and drove at top speed to St Thomas’s casualty department. There we huddled on chairs for an hour and took it in turns to hold our drooping son upright.
Nathan whispered reassuringly to Sam and kissed the top of his matted hair. He spoke to me only when necessary.
So we sat amid the blood, the noise, the stale air, and battled with our separate thoughts. Sam slid down on to my shoulder. So tired that my eyes burned, I held him close. ‘Nathan,’ I whispered. ‘Please.’
He turned and looked at me – at the wreckage of me. ‘Oh, Rosie,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you some coffee.’ He returned with it, and manhandled my free hand around the polystyrene cup. ‘Go on, drink it.’ He stroked my cheek – his way of saying sorry. Gratefully, I looked up into his face, and he smiled down at me. ‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Drink up.’
Sam was admitted to hospital for observation, and improved rapidly. The paediatrician was not sure what was wrong, but was equally sure it was nothing serious. ‘He may have had some sort of shock, or an allergic reaction, and his system has rebelled. He needs rest, quiet, and no upset’
At nine thirty I rang work and told them I would not be in for a couple of days. I told Sam I would stay with him while he was in hospital. White and frightened, but still trying hard to be brave, he whispered, ‘I’m glad you’re here, Mum.’
I slipped my arm around his shoulders. I had been in danger of forgetting the wonder and terror of being a mother.
‘Just a bug,’ I told Hal, after throwing up in the plane to Brazil and then in the hot, noisy hotel by the airport. I lay down on the bed with a handkerchief rinsed in cold water over my eyes.
The sun slatted through my half-closed lids, its light and heat intrusive in a way I had never experienced before. This was the continent of lush harshness, damp, drilling heat, and a magisterial river.
It was Hal’s surprise trip, his secret expedition. I had hoped we would be going to Morocco and the desert: I longed for somewhere fierce, dry and unequivocal, but Hal was gripped by his passion for ecology. This was a new science, the way forward, etc., etc. Someone had to do it, he said, but I thought it was the romance of the subject that had got to him. Good versus evil. The little guy fighting the big ones. For the past six months, he had been working to acquire financial backing for an expedition to monitor the effects of tree-felling on the Yanomami, a people whose territory extended from the Orinoco forests in Venezuela to the northernmost reaches of the Brazilian Amazon basin.
‘No wonder you didn’t tell me,’ I said, when he sprang this surprise destination on me. I was packing up my things to leave Oxford for the last time. ‘I don’t want to go there. You should have asked me.’
He took from me the pile of clothes I was holding, dumped them on the bed and pulled me into his arms. ‘You had finals, remember. Listen, these people are under threat. They’re down to between ten and fifteen thousand and decreasing rapidly. Logging is destroying their home, and the big companies don’t care a toss.’ He buried his lips in my neck. ‘We have to take a look and alert the agencies who can do something.’
Leaving Oxford was going to be a wrench and I felt weepy and irritable, not like myself. I shook him off and stuffed a pair of socks into my suitcase. ‘You can’t just rely on me dropping everything.’
‘That’s fine,’ Hal said easily, lightly, in a take-it-or-leave-it voice. ‘I can find someone else.’ I whipped round. He lifted his shoulders dismissively. ‘Not to worry, Rose. I thought you’d like the surprise. Someone else can hop on board. Couldn’t be easier.’
It was a threat, and I panicked. ‘No, Hal!’ I cried. ‘It’s fine. Of course I’ll come. Forget what I said.’
Hal was good in triumph: unlike me, he never crowed. ‘I don’t think you’ll regret it.’ He bent over and gave me one of the kisses that reverberated through every nerve. ‘Next one the desert, OK?’ His lips moved on down and, as usual with Hal, I yielded.
I let him mould me, but what did I care? Hal was my poetry and my passion. He was the dreaming youth, the whisper of enchanted lands, the magician that transformed my life.
‘There’s nothing wrong?’ he asked me, a couple of days later.
‘No, no, nothing.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
The study was projected to take four months, and we agreed that I would join him for the first three weeks, then return to England to begin my job. We flew into Brazil and took a connecting flight up to the small town of Quetzl where we met the guide. We spent a week wrestling with the language problem, tying up details and a timetable, and working out the supply drops. After that, we loaded up a six-seater plane and took off over the rainforest.
Mile after mile unrolled underneath the plane in a world of unimaginable dimensions. The vegetation was so thick that it was impossible to see the forest floor but here and there a tributary glinted, muddy and sullen. In places, mist lay thickly over the trees.
The plane shuddered in the thin air and the pilot took frequent swigs from a Thermos. Hal made a face at me, and I managed a joke. ‘The Chinese have a curse: may your dreams come true.’
The plane lurched, and suddenly my stomach crawled with nausea. The words shrivelled on my lips and I bent over to retie a bootlace, knowing that I had lied to Hal. There was something wrong, and I had not dealt with it.
God knew how we managed to land on the rudimentary airstrip but we did. The forest rushed up to swallow us, the aircraft ricocheted over the uneven surface and we were there.
The following morning, we trekked up to base camp, which was a deserted Yanomami settlement. Hal went ahead with the guide, keeping up a cracking pace and making light of the obstacles on the path. Behind me, the porters were loaded so heavily I felt embarrassed, but they did not appear to mind.
The forest was like a cage, built of green interlapping plates, some of which did not fit well. After several hours of slogging, I began to miss the sky, as I might a good friend. It was damp underfoot and our feet were sucked into mud of varying consistency. Roots writhed in and out of it, and strange star-shaped bright-coloured flowers bloomed among the detritus. It was an alien habitat, whose heat pawed at the skin.
Every so often, Hal turned to wave encouragement. Once he plodded back and retied the bandanna round my neck to catch the sweat. ‘Good girl, Rose.’
‘Are you happy?’ I asked.
‘Very.’
Wrapped in mosquito nets, we spent the first night in hammocks strung between trees, and listened to the noises of the rainforest at night. At intervals, a porter got up to tend the fire and patrol our camp. My stomach full and temporarily quiescent, the magic, strangeness and noises of the forest worked on me.
‘Tarzan loves Jane,’ said Hal softly.
I did not reply. In this big, strange world, words were inadequate.
After a second day of hard trekking, we reached the Yanomami settlement, abandoned after a logging company had started operations a mile away. Their huts remained, doughnut-shaped and thatched with palm leaves. Each could accommodate a large number, sometimes as many as two hundred, but every family had a hearth to itself. The central area was set aside for communal activities, such as dancing and singing.
I chose a hearth, and dumped my rucksack on the floor, which was of beaten mud. It had dried unevenly, and its colours shaded from blood to dark crimson. It was alive with insects. Any minute now, the tropical night would descend with the swiftness that took my breath away.
Hal appeared with the rest of our stuff. ‘Light’s going.’
‘Let’s get things sorted.’
‘Here.’ He handed me a cotton sleeping bag. I ignored it, clapped my hand to my mouth, ran outside and retched into the undergrowth.
I sensed that Hal was behind me. I stood upright and wrapped my arms across my stomach. ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said. ‘Could you be pregnant?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s possible,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know’.
‘How late?’
‘Over three weeks.’
His hand closed roughly on my shoulder. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Don’t you mean what are we going to do?’ I closed my eyes. It was a question of will, and I would will it not to be so. ‘It could be anything. It happens. The system goes haywire and then adjusts.’
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Jeez, I hope so.’
The first of the two scheduled expeditions from base camp was by boat up to Zaztelal where the logging company had also set up an outpost and where sightings of the Yanomami had been reported.
Hypnotized by the yellow-green mirror over which we paddled, I sat in the back of the boat. Hal was in the prow, taking notes and photographs. After each shot, he recorded the position from the map references. He snapped me too or, rather, the hat that shaded my face.
Greedy with love, I feasted on every tiny detail about him. His hair, already bleaching in the sun, his excitement, the long legs braced against the movement of the boat. Just as greedily, I feasted my eyes on a humming-bird, whose plumage was of so iridescent a blue that it almost hurt to look at it, on the strange blooms that hung from the trees and the silent fish shapes in the water. The heat wrapped us in a second skin. Every so often our passage disturbed a pocket of methane gas trapped in the water and the stench filled our nostrils as we glided onwards.
At Zaztelal, the villagers came out to meet us. Over a communal meal they told us tales of the Yanomami, who had a reputation for aggression. They also told us of the logging company’s riches, which had showered over them, of the strange disease that killed many children, of their shock when the conquistadores moved on after they had plundered the forest.
Hal wrote, ‘Measles?’ in his notebook.
The following morning, we made a preliminary reconnaissance of the logging area, which was roughly ten miles in diameter. Here, severed tree trunks wept sap, the undergrowth had been pulverized, the soil polluted with oil and chemicals, and the sky was all too visible. The guide explained that the forest was renewing itself but not quickly. Normally, if Yanomami were around they would have been cultivating their crops of plantain and cassava. Also, monkey, deer and armadillo would have been in the forest.
We returned via an alternative route, which looped to the north and took us past the northern spur of an oxbow lake. Apparently, otters often chose them to build their dens in and I lingered, fascinated, while Hal loped over the rope bridge to the other side.
‘Come on,’ he said.
Half-way across, I stopped: I had never been good at heights. Drenched in sweat, I clung to the rope. ‘Come back, Hal,’ I called.
He walked towards me and the
motion of the bridge made me retch. I gazed down at the water. Hot, sluggish, muddy… alien. If a fish from it flopped into my lap I would not recognize it. A mistake to think of fish – I was sick.
Hal waited until I had finished, then smoothed my hair back from my wet face. ‘Oh, Rose,’ was all he said, impatient to get going.
I took his hand, looked down – and screamed.
Gummed up by debris, forced into pools alongside the bank, the water slowed and eddied. Floating on the surface of one of those pools was a human hand with stiff, splayed fingers.
I pointed. Hal pulled me over the bridge then he and the guide edged down to the water. The guide took his stick and poked hard. There was a hiss, an explosion of bubbles and gas, and a body wallowed to the surface.
The face was decayed, half eaten and terrible.
Together they hooked a rope around one of the legs and tethered it to a root. ‘We’ll return to camp and get help,’ said Hal, and wrote down the location on the map. ‘Body here,’ he wrote. ‘Time: 14.15.’
The next day, we went back to the base camp, and Hal radioed the police in Quetzl.
It was not such a big mystery. Six weeks ago one of the logging firm’s European supervisors had gone missing. Apparently he had failed to pay the wages owed to a couple of native employees. They had taken revenge in the manner appropriate to them.
After that I had nightmares. I dreamt of the dead face, of hostile eyes, of being hunted in the strange, dangerous forest… and over and over again of Ianthe and me, watching the men tip-tupping our furniture out of Medlars Cottage.
I grew heavy-eyed and lethargic, and dreaded the nights when I tossed and turned in the hammock, listening to the rustle of insects in the palm roof.
During his convalescence, Sam and I struggled to complete the battle of Marathon (a thousand pieces), only to discover the last two were missing.
‘I can’t get better, Mum, until we find them.’ Sam sent me a pale smile.
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman Page 19