We were standing close by the pole and she was cheating by standing on her toes, her face lifted straight up and the rain crashing into the thatch above us and I wasn’t sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.
We went back to the sofa and somehow I told her about Aunt Dottie and the New Forest and my trip to the Galápagos in ‘22. ‘My father had hoped the trip would make a biologist out of me but the only valuable thing I discovered was that my body loves a hot, humid climate. Unlike yours.’ I nearly brushed my fingers along her scarred arm beside mine.
‘I come from hearty Pennsylvania potato farmers on my mother’s side. You’ll have to see me in winter. The cold gives me energy.’
I laughed. ‘I’m not sure I want to see what that looks like.’ But I did. More than anything I could think of.
She told me more about her potato-growing ancestors and their escape from the Great Famine, which put me in mind of Yeats’s ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan,’ and we ended up saying poems back and forth.
After the war I’d memorized most of Brooke and Owen and Sassoon, and half convinced myself that they’d been written by John. Or Martin, who actually did write poetry. The war poets were all tangled up with my brothers and my youth and I thought I would cry when I got to the end of ‘Hardness of Heart’ and the bit about tears not being endless, but I didn’t. Nell did the crying for both of us.
I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. She was married. She was pregnant. And what would it have mattered in the end? What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.
We fell asleep reciting. Who was speaking or what poem I am not certain. We woke to little Sema and Amini poking us in the leg.
25
The morning began as the one before, with children scrambling in and out of her lap, and hand games and explosions of laughter. Bani brought me coffee and I worked at her typewriter. A few boys peered in through the netting. Chanta didn’t come but I thought more about my conversation with him and jotted down some questions for Teket when I returned.
All at once, far too early, Nell scooted everyone out of the house.
‘What’s going on?’ I called to her.
‘No mothers,’ she said. ‘No adult women today.’ She began packing her visiting bag. She was wearing the blue dress I’d first seen her in. ‘Something is going on. It happened last month and they wouldn’t let me in. I’m not going to be brushed off this time. I’ll be back at teatime.’ And she was gone.
By teatime Fen might be back, too.
I spent a few hours at their bookshelves and the piles of books around them. They had brought so many books, American novels I’d never heard of, ethnographies that had won prizes I didn’t know about, books by sociologists and psychologists with strange names from places like California and Texas. It was a whole universe I barely knew existed. They had a mound of magazines, too. I read about Roosevelt’s election and something called the Cyclotron, an atom-smasher that forced particles around in circles to accelerations of over a million electron volts, at which point they broke and formed a new kind of radium. I would have stayed in reading all day, but Kanup came round to ask if I wanted to go fishing.
I followed him down to the water. The sky was clear and the sun beat down, but the ground was pocked and shredded from the storm, littered with huge fronds and leaves, nuts and hard unripe fruits. We crunched through piles of debris to get to his boat on the beach. Many canoes were already on the water, paddled by men. I asked him why the men were fishing today, and not the women.
He smiled and said the women were busy. He seemed to want to imply more, but not say it. ‘The women are crazy today,’ he said.
We checked our nets and headed out. The Tam men were born and bred to be artisans: potters, painters, and mask makers. They were, I learned that afternoon, staggeringly poor fishermen. They argued and insulted one another. Their fingers ripped holes in the fragile fiber nets. They didn’t seem to understand how the traps worked. Their loud voices scared the fish. I had a good chuckle watching them, but all the while I was aware of the far side of the lake, dimly shimmering, from where at any moment my canoe would reappear.
I was glad when we got back to shore, eager for tea with Nell and what little time alone with her remained. But Kanup wanted to wash out the canoe, which he thought smelled of fish though he hadn’t caught anything, and plug up a small leak, so we went to get some gum sap from his house. I called up to Nell as we went by, but there was no answer.
When we returned to the beach she was standing ankle-deep in the water, both hands shielding her eyes, scouring the surface of the lake. Kanup was talking and she turned about and saw us. Her arms dropped to her sides.