It was over by the time I got there. I cut my engine and heard no celebrating from any quarter of the village. On the beach crows and buzzards fought for position on the ribs of a wild boar and flies marauded taro skins and fruit rinds nearby. The fire pits were cold, beads and feathers lay half buried in the pounded sand, and the air itself felt exhausted.
The lake was a good bit lower than the last time I was here and the heat had a new density. I dragged my canoe up to the grasses and carried my engine and an extra tank of petrol up the path.
I ran into no one on my way to their house. I recognized the silence, the spent stillness of a village having depleted itself in every way. I wasn’t bothered that I had missed the festivities. I was certain Nell had taken impeccable notes. It was the interviewing of Xambun that would yield the most important information.
Out of the opening of one of the men’s houses hung a pair of legs, as if the fellow hadn’t been able to make it all the way inside before collapsing. It made me aware of my own stores of energy. I felt fitter than I had in a great while, and chuckled at the memory of crashing to the ground the last time I was here. I stashed the engine and petrol below their house and went back down to the beach for the large suitcase I’d brought. At the foot of their ladder I called up softly, not wanting to disturb them if they too were sleeping. No response, so I climbed up. They were both at their typewriters in the large mosquito room.
None of the photographs taken of Nell Stone, the ones you find in textbooks and the two biographies, even the ones taken in the field, ever captured the way she really looked. You cannot see her energy, her quick brimming joy when you came through the door. If I could have any picture of her at all, it would be then, at the moment she saw me that day.
‘You came.’
‘I’m only staying three months,’ I joked, holding up the large case, which seemed even bigger inside the house.
Fen was watching her now, and her face lost its unguarded expression. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, which was over before I could register it. Then she stood back. She smelled somehow like the back garden of Hemsley House, of juniper and laburnum.
‘You look quite the gentleman anthropologist. All you need is a—wait! Wait!’ She jumped up, flashed out of one mosquito room and into the other, and returned with hat, pipe, and camera. ‘Come on. Too dark in here.’
‘Nell, he’s just arrived for God’s sake,’ Fen said by way of hello from his chair. He looked awful, blue-black rings under his eyes and his skin papery as an old man’s. His shirtfront clung to his chest, sopped in sweat.
‘It’s a classic,’ she said. ‘He can put it on the cover of his memoirs.’
She had me go back down the stairs with my suitcase and stand up against the tamarind tree facing their house. She picked up a long frond from the road and draped it over my shoulder.
‘Now bite the pipe.’
I clenched down on it and grimaced, my best imitation of a wizened old master I had at Charterhouse.
‘That’s it!’ But she was laughing too hard to take the photograph.
‘Oh Christ, I’ll have to do it.’
Fen came down and took three pictures of me. Then we put Nell in the hat with the cases and the pipe and took a few more. A man hurried past us and Fen called after him to borrow his digging stick and heavy necklaces. He handed these items over reluctantly and then looked on with concern as Fen posed with them.
Nell was in full health. From what I could see her lesions had healed, her limp was less pronounced. Her lips were the deep red of a child’s. The Tam diet clearly suited her; she was rounder, and her skin looked smooth as soap. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
‘How are your warriors?’ Fen said as we went back up into the house. I recognized it as an idle question, a question posed by someone who was thinking of something else, the way my father might have asked me about school when I came home for a holiday, his mind on a set of cells or tail feathers.
I told them that the Kiona had promised me a Wai.
‘Fantastic,’ Nell said. ‘Can we come?’
‘Certainly.’ It had been so long since I’d had something to look forward to.
‘Party’s over here,’ Fen said.
‘Have you managed to interview him yet?’ I said.
‘Fen thinks we should play it cool with him, let him come to us.’
‘Really?’ This surprised me. There was nothing about their style of ethnographic bullying that allowed for ‘playing it cool.’ They played it hot and fast, and my first thought was to suspect they were lying to me, and I was ashamed of this.
We were inside now, and Fen was pouring us drinks, a fermented cherry juice. He let out a laugh. ‘It’s not like we have a choice.’
‘He told me to go away.’