Life Times Stories

Livingstone’s Companions





Livingstone’s Companions


In the House that afternoon the Minister of Foreign Affairs was giving his report on the President’s visit to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. ‘I would like to take a few minutes to convey to you the scene when we arrived at the airport,’ he was saying, in English, and as he put the top sheet of his sheaf of notes under the last, settling down to it, Carl Church in the press gallery tensed and relaxed his thigh muscles – a gesture of resignation. ‘It’s hard to describe the enthusiasm that greeted the President everywhere he went. Everywhere crowds, enormous crowds. If those people who criticise the President’s policies and cry neo-colonialism when he puts the peace and prosperity of our country first—’

There were no Opposition benches since the country was a one-party state, but the dissident faction within the party slumped, blank-faced, while a deep hum of encouragement came from two solid rows of the President’s supporters seated just in front of Carl Church.

‘. . . those who are so quick to say that our President’s policies are out of line with the OAU could see how enthusiastically the President is received in fellow member states of the OAU, they would think before they shout, believe me. They would see it is they who are out of line, who fail to understand the problems of Pan-Africa, they who would like to see our crops rot in the fields, our people out of work, our development plans come to a full stop’ – assent swarmed, the hum rose – ‘and all for an empty gesture of fist-shaking’ – the two close-packed rows were leaning forward delightedly; polished shoes drummed the floor – ‘they know as well as you and I will not free the African peoples of the white-supremacy states south of our borders.’

The Foreign Minister turned to the limelight of approval. The President himself was not in the House; some members watched the clock (gift of the United States Senate) whose graceful copper hand moved with a hiccup as each minute passed. The Speaker in his long curly wig was propped askew against the tall back of his elaborate chair. His clerk, with the white pompadour, velvet bow and lacy jabot that were part of the investiture of sovereignty handed down from the British, was a perfect papier-mâché blackamoor from an eighteenth-century slave trader’s drawing room. The House was panelled in local wood whose scent the sterile blast of the air-conditioning had not yet had time to evaporate entirely. Carl Church stayed on because of the coolness, the restful incense of new wood – the Foreign Minister’s travelogue wasn’t worth two lines of copy. Between the Minister and the President’s claque the dialogue of banal statement and deep-chested response went on beamingly, obliviously.

‘. . . can assure you . . . full confidence lies in . . .’

Suddenly the Speaker made an apologetic but firm gesture to attract the Minister’s attention: ‘Mr Minister, would it be convenient to adjourn at this point . . . ?’

The clique filed jovially out of the House. The Chamberlain came into the foyer carrying his belly before turned-out thighs, his fine African calves looking well in courtier’s stockings, silver buckles flashing on his shoes. Waylaid on the stairs by another journalist, the Minister was refusing an interview with the greatest amiability, in the volume of voice he had used in the House, as if someone had forgotten to turn off the public address system.

With the feeling that he had dozed through a cinema matinée, Carl Church met the glare of the afternoon as a dull flash of pain above his right eye. His hired car was parked in the shade of the building – these were the little ways in which he made some attempt to look after himself: calculating the movement of the sun when in hot countries, making sure that the hotel bed wasn’t damp, in cold ones. He drove downhill to the offices of the broadcasting station, where his paper had arranged telex facilities. In the prematurely senile building, unfinished and decaying after five years, the unevenness of the concrete floors underfoot increased his sensation of slowed reactions. He simply looked in to see if there was anything for him; the day before he had sent a long piece on the secessionist movement in the Southern Province and there just might be a word of commendation from the Africa desk. There was something: ‘100 YEARS ANNIVERSARY ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY PARTY SENT SEARCH FOR LIVINGSTONE STOP YOU WELL PLACED RETRACE STEPS LIVINGSTONES LAST JOURNEY SUGGEST LAKES OR INTERIOR STOP THREE THOUSAND WORDS SPECIAL FEATURE 16TH STOP THANKS BARTRAM.’

He wanted to fling open bloody Bartram’s bloody door – the words were in his mouth, overtaking each other. Church is out there, he’ll come up with the right sort of thing. Remember his ‘Peacock Throne’ piece? Oh yes. He had been sent to Iran for the coronation of the Shahanshah, he was marked down to have to do these beautiful, wryly understated sidelights. Just as a means of self-expression, between running about after Under Ministers and party bosses and driving through the bush at a hundred in the shade to look at rice fields planned by the Chinese and self-help pig farms run by the Peace Corps, and officially non-existent guerrilla training camps for political refugees from neighbouring countries. He could put a call through to London. How squeakily impotent the voice wavering across the radio telephone. Or he could telex a blast; watch all the anticipated weariness, boredom and exasperation punching a domino pattern on clean white tape.

Slowly pressure subsided from his temples. He was left sulkily nursing the grievance: don’t even realise the ‘lakes and interior’ are over the border! In the next country. Don’t even know that. The car whined up the hill again (faulty differential this one had) to the office full of dead flies and posters of ski slopes where the airline agency girl sat. There was a Viscount the next day, a local Dakota the day after. ‘I’ll wait-list you. You’re sure to get on. Just be at the airport half an hour early.’





He was there before anybody. Such a pretty black girl at the weigh-bay; she said with her soft, accented English, ‘It looks good. You’re top of the list, don’t worry, sir.’

‘I’m not worried, I assure you.’ But it became a point of honour, like the obligation to try to win in some silly game – once you’d taken the trouble to get to the airport, you must succeed in getting away. He watched the passengers trailing or hurrying up with their luggage and – smug devils – presenting their tickets. He tried to catch the girl’s eye now and then to see how it was going. She gave no sign, except, once, a beautiful airline smile, something she must have learnt in her six weeks’ efficiency and deportment course. Girls were not beautiful, generally, in this part of Africa; the women of Vietnam had spoilt him for all other women, anyway. In the steps of Livingstone, or women of the world, by our special correspondent. But even in his mind, smart phrases like that were made up, a picture of himself saying them, Carl A. Church, the foreign correspondent in the air-conditioned bar (when asked what the American-style initial stood for, the story went that he had said to a bishop, ‘Anti, Your Grace’). Under his absurdly tense attention for each arrival at the weigh-bay there was the dark slow movement of the balance of past and present that regulates the self-estimate by which one really manages to live. He was seeing again – perhaps for the first time since it happened, five? six? years ago – a road in Africa where the women were extremely beautiful. She was standing on the edge of the forest with a companion, breasts of brown silk, a water mark of sunlight lying along them. A maroon and blue pagne hid the rest of her. On a sudden splendid impulse he had stopped the car (that one had a worn clutch) and offered her money, but she refused. Why? The women of that country had been on sale to white men for a number of generations. She refused. Why me? Well, he accepted that when it came to women, whom he loved so well, his other passion – the desire to defend the rights of the individual of any colour or race – did not bear scrutiny.

Now a blonde was up at the weigh-bay for the second or third time; the black girl behind it was joined by an airline official in shirtsleeves. They consulted a list while the blonde went on talking. At last she turned away and, looking round the echoing hall with the important expression of someone with a complaint to confide, this time came and sat on the bench where he waited. Among her burdens was a picture in brown paper that had torn over the curlicues of the gilt frame. Her thin hands had rings thrust upon them like those velvet Cleopatra’s needles in the jewellers’. She puts on everything she’s got, when she travels; it’s the safest way to carry it. And probably there’s a pouch round her middle, containing the settlement from her last ex-husband. Carl Church had noticed the woman before, from some small sidetrack of his mind, even while she existed simply as one of the lucky ones with a seat on the plane. She was his vintage, that’s why; the blonde pageboy broken into curling locks by the movement of her shoulders, the big red mouth, the high heels, the girlish floral beach-dress – on leaves during the war, girls his own age looked like that. But this one had been out in the sun for twenty years. Smiled at him; teeth still good. Ugly bright blue eyes, cheap china. She knew she still had beautiful legs, nervous ankles all hollows and tendons. Her dead hair tossed frowsily. He thought, tender to his own past: she’s horrible.

‘This’s the second morning I’ve sat here cooling my heels.’ Her bracelets shook, dramatising exasperation. ‘The second day running. I only hope to God I’m on this time.’

He said, ‘Where’re you trying to get to?’ But of course he knew before she answered. He waited a moment or two, and then strolled up to the weigh-bay. ‘Still top of the list, I hope?’ – in an undertone.

The airline man, standing beside the black beauty, answered brusquely, ‘There’s just the one lady before you, sir.’

He began to argue.

‘We can’t help it, sir. It’s a compassionate, came through from the town office.’

He went back and sat down.

She said, ‘You’re going on the same plane?’

‘Yes.’ Not looking her way, the bitch, he watched with hope as boarding time approached and there were no new arrivals at the weigh-bay. She arranged and rearranged her complicated hand luggage; rivalry made them aware of one another. Two minutes to boarding time, the airline girl didn’t want him to catch her eye, but he went over to her just the same. She said, cheerfully relieved of responsibility, ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to get a seat. Everybody’s turned up. We’re just checking.’

He and the blonde lady were left behind. Hostility vanished as the others filed off down the Red Route. They burst into talk at once, grumbling about the airline organisation.

‘Imagine, they’ve been expecting me for days.’ She was defiantly gay.

‘Dragging out here for nothing – I was assured I’d get a seat, no trouble at all.’

‘Well, that’s how people are these days – my God, if I ran my hotel like that. Simply relax, what else can you do? Thank heaven I’ve got a firm booking for tomorrow.’

A seat on tomorrow’s plane, eh; he slid out of the conversation and went to look for the reservations counter. There was no need for strategy, after all; he got a firm booking, too. In the bus back to town, she patted the seat beside her. There were two kinds of fellow travellers, those who asked questions and those who talked about themselves. She took the bit of a long cigarette holder between her teeth and quoted her late husband, told how her daughter, ‘a real little madam’, at boarding school, got on like a house on fire with her new husband, said how life was what you put into it, as she always reminded her son; people asked how could one stand it, up there, miles away from everything, on the lake, but she painted, she was interested in interior decorating, she’d run the place ten years by herself, took some doing for a woman.

‘On the lake?’

‘Gough’s Bay Hotel.’ He saw from the stare of the blue eyes that it was famous – he should have known.

‘Tell me, whereabout are the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions?’

The eyes continued to stare at him, a corner of the red mouth drew in proprietorially, carelessly unimpressed. ‘My graves. On my property. Two minutes from the hotel.’

He murmured surprise. ‘I’d somehow imagined they were much further north.’

‘And there’s no risk of bilharzia whatever,’ she added, apparently dispelling a rumour. ‘You can water-ski, goggle-fish – people have a marvellous time.’

‘Well, I may turn up someday.’

‘My dear, I’ve never let people down in my life. We’d find a bed somewhere.’

He saw her at once, in another backless flowered dress, when he entered the departure lounge next morning. ‘Here we go again’ – distending her nostrils in mock resignation, turning down the red lips. He gave her his small-change smile and took care to lag behind when the passengers went across the runway. He sat in the tail of the plane, and opened the copy of Livingstone’s last journals, bought that morning. ‘Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends.’ The book rested on his thighs and he slept through the hour-and-a-half ’s journey. Livingstone had walked it, taking ten months and recording his position by the stars. This could be the lead for his story, he thought: waking up to the recognition of the habits of his mind like the same old face in the shaving mirror.





The capital of this country was hardly distinguishable from the one he had left. The new national bank with air-conditioning and rubber plants changed the perspective of the row of Indian stores. Behind the main street a native market stank of dried fish. He hired a car, borrowed a map from the hotel barman and set out for ‘the interior’ next day, distrusting – from long experience – both car and map. He had meant merely to look up a few places and easy references in the journals, but had begun to read and gone on half the night.

A wife ran away, I asked how many he had; he told me twenty in all: I then thought he had nineteen too many. He answered with the usual reason, ‘But who would cook for strangers if I had but one?’ . . . It is with sorrow that I have to convey the sad intelligence that your brother died yesterday morning about ten o’clock . . . no remedy seemed to have much effect. On the 20th he was seriously ill but took soup several times, and drank claret and water with relish . . . A lion roars mightily. The fish-hawk utters his weird voice in the morning, as if he lifted up to a friend at a great distance, in a sort of falsetto key . . . The men engaged refuse to go to Matipa’s, they have no honour . . . Public punishment to Chirango for stealing beads, fifteen cuts; diminished his load to 40 lbs . . . In four hours we came within sight of the lake, and saw plenty of elephants and other game.

How enjoyable it would have been to read the journals six thousand miles away, in autumn, at home, in London. As usual, once off the circuit that linked the capital with the two or three other small towns that existed, there were crossroads without signposts, and place names that turned out to be one general store, an African bar and a hand-operated petrol pump, unattended. He was not fool enough to forget to carry petrol, and he was good at knocking up the bar owners (asleep during the day). As if the opening of the beer refrigerator and the record player were inseparably linked – as a concept of hospitality if not mechanically – African jazz jog-trotted, clacked and drummed forth while he drank on a dirty veranda. Children dusty as chickens gathered. As he drove off the music stopped in mid-record.

By early afternoon he was lost. The map, sure enough, failed to indicate that the fly-speck named as Moambe was New Moambe, a completely different place in an entirely different direction from that of Old Moambe, where Livingstone had had a camp, and had talked with chiefs whose descendants were active in the present-day politics of their country (another lead). Before setting out, Carl Church had decided that all he was prepared to do was take a car, go to Moambe, take no more than two days over it, and write a piece using the journey as a peg for what he did know something about – this country’s attempt to achieve a form of African socialism. That’s what the paper would get, all they would get, except the expense account for the flight, car and beers. (The beers were jotted down as ‘Lunch, Sundries, Gratuities, £3. 10.’ No reason, from Bartram’s perspective, why there shouldn’t be a Livingstone Hilton in His Steps.) But when he found he had missed Moambe and past three in the afternoon was headed in the wrong direction, he turned the car savagely in the road and made for what he hoped would turn out to be the capital. All they would get would be the expense account. He stopped and asked the way of anyone he met, and no one spoke English. People smiled and instructed the foreigner volubly, with many gestures. He had the humiliation of finding himself twice back at the same crossroads where the same old man sat calmly with women who carried dried fish stiff as Chinese preserved ducks. He took another road, any road, and after a mile or two of hesitancy and obstinacy – turn back or go on? – thought he saw a signpost ahead. This time it was not a dead tree. A sagging wooden finger drooped down a turn-off: GOUGH’S BAY LAZITI PASS.

The lake.

He was more than a hundred miles from the capital. With a sense of astonishment at finding himself, he focused his existence, here and now, on the empty road, at a point on the map. He turned down to petrol, a bath, a drink – that much, at least, so assured that he did not have to think of it. But the lake was farther away than the casualness of the sign would indicate. The pass led the car whining and grinding in low gear round silent hillsides of white rock and wild fig trees leaning out into ravines. This way would be impassable in the rains; great stones scraped the oil sump as he disappeared into steep stream-beds, dry, the sand wrung into hanks where torrents had passed. He met no one, saw no hut. When he coughed, alone in the car he fancied this noise of his thrown back from the stony face of hill to hill like the bark of a solitary baboon. The sun went down. He thought: there was only one good moment the whole day; when I drank that beer on the veranda, and the children came up the steps to watch me and hear the music.

An old European image was lodged in his tiredness: the mirage, if the road ever ended, of some sort of southern resort village, coloured umbrellas, a street of white hotels beside water and boats. As the road unravelled from the pass into open bush, there came that moment when, if he had had a companion, they would have stopped talking. Two, three miles; the car rolled in past the ruins of an arcaded building to the barking of dogs, the horizontal streak of water behind the bush, outhouses and water tanks, a raw new house. A young man in bathing trunks with his back to the car stood on the portico steps, pushing a flipper off one foot with the toes of the other. As he hopped for balance he looked round. Blond wet curls licked the small head on the tall body, vividly empty blue eyes were the eyes of some nocturnal animal dragged out in daylight.

‘Can you tell me where there’s a hotel?’

Staring, on one leg: ‘Yes, this’s the hotel.’

Carl Church said, foolishly pleasant, ‘There’s no sign, you see.’

‘Well, place’s being redone.’ He came, propping the flippers against the wall, walking on the outside edges of his feet over the remains of builders’ rubble. ‘Want any help with that?’ But Carl Church had only his typewriter and the one suitcase. They struggled indoors together, the young man carrying flippers, two spearguns and goggles.

‘Get anything?’

‘Never came near the big ones.’ His curls sprang and drops flowed from them. He dropped the goggles, then a wet gritty flipper knocked against Carl Church. ‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He dumped his tackle on a desk in the passage, looked at Carl Church’s case and portable, put gangling hands upon little hips and took a great breath: ‘Where those boys are when you want one of them – that’s the problem.’

‘Look, I haven’t booked,’ said Church. ‘I suppose you’ve got a room?’

‘What’s today?’ Even his eyelashes were wet. The skin on the narrow cheekbones whitened as if over knuckles.

‘Thursday.’

A great question was solved triumphantly, grimly. ‘If it’d been Saturday, now – the weekends, I mean, not a chance.’

‘I think I met someone on the plane—’

‘Go on—’ The face cocked in attention.

‘She runs a hotel here . . . ?’

‘Madam in person. D’you see who met her? My stepfather?’ But Carl Church had not seen the airport blonde once they were through customs. ‘That’s Lady Jane all right. Of course she hasn’t turned up here yet. So she’s arrived, eh? Well thanks for the warning. Just a sec, you’ve got to sign,’ and he pulled over a leather register, yelling, ‘Zelide, where’ve you disappeared to—’ as a girl with a bikini cutting into heavy red thighs appeared and said in the cosy, long-suffering voice of an English provincial, ‘You’re making it all wet, Dick – oh give here.’

They murmured in telegraphic intimacy. ‘What about number 16?’

‘I thought a chalet.’

‘Well, I dunno, it’s your job, my girl—’

She gave a parenthetic yell and a barefoot African came from the back somewhere to shoulder the luggage. The young man was dismantling his speargun, damp backside hitched up on the reception desk. The girl moved his paraphernalia patiently aside. ‘W’d you like some tea in your room, sir?’

‘Guess who was on the plane with him. Lady Godiva. So we’d better brace ourselves.’

‘Dickie! Is she really?’

‘In person.’

The girl led Carl Church out over a terrace into a garden where rondavels and cottages were dispersed. It was rapidly getting dark; only the lake shone. She had a shirt knotted under her breasts over the bikini, and when she shook her shaggy brown hair – turning on the light in an ugly little outhouse that smelled of cement – a round, boiled face smiled at him. ‘These chalets are brand new. We might have to move you Saturday, but jist as well enjoy yourself in the meantime.’

‘I’ll be leaving in the morning.’

Her cheeks were so sunburned they looked as if they would bleed when she smiled. ‘Oh what a shame. Aren’t you even going to have a go at spear-fishing?’

‘Well, no; I haven’t brought any equipment or anything.’

He might have been a child who had no bucket and spade; ‘Oh not to worry, Dick’s got all the gear. You come out with us in the morning, after breakfast – OK?’

‘Fine,’ he said, knowing he would be gone.

The sheets of one bed witnessed the love-making of previous occupants; they had not used the other. Carl Church stumbled around in the dark looking for the ablution block – across a yard, but the light switch did not work in the bathroom. He was about to trudge over to the main house to ask for a lamp when he was arrested by the lake, as by the white of an eye in a face hidden by darkness. At least there was a towel. He took it and went down in his pants, feeling his way through shrubs, rough grass, over turned-up earth, touched by warm breaths of scent, startled by squawks from lumps that resolved into fowls, to the lake. It held still a skin of light from the day that had flown upward. He entered it slowly; it seemed to drink him in, ankles, knees, thighs, sex, waist, breast. It was cool as the inside of a mouth. Suddenly hundreds of tiny fish leapt out all round him, bright new tin in the warm, dark, heavy air.





‘. . . I enclose a lock of his hair; I had his papers sealed up soon after his decease and will endeavour to transmit them all to you exactly as he left them.’

Carl Church endured the mosquitoes and the night heat only by clinging to the knowledge, through his tattered sleep, that soon it would be morning and he would be gone. But in the morning there was the lake. He got up at five to pee. He saw now how the lake stretched to the horizon from the open arms of the bay. Two bush-woolly islands glided on its surface; it was the colour of pearls. He opened his stale mouth wide and drew in a full breath, half sigh, half gasp. Again he went down to the water and, without bothering whether there was anybody about, took off his pyjama shorts and swam. Cool. Impersonally cool, at this time. The laved mosquito bites stung pleasurably. When he looked down upon the water while in it, it was no longer nacre, but pellucid, a pale and tender green. His feet were gleaming tendrils. A squat spotted fish hung near his legs, mouthing. He didn’t move, either. Then he did what he had done when he was seven or eight years old, he made a cage of his hands and pounced – but the element reduced him to slow motion, everything, fish, legs, glassy solidity, wriggled and flowed away and slowly undulated into place again. The fish returned. On a dead tree behind bird-splattered rocks ellipsed by the water at this end of the beach, a fish-eagle lifted its head between hunched white shoulders and cried out; a long whistling answer came across the lake as another flew in. He swam around the rocks through schools of fingerlings as close as gnats, and hauled himself up within ten feet of the eagles. They carried the remoteness of the upper air with them in the long-sighted gaze of their hooded eyes; nothing could approach its vantage; he did not exist for them, while the gaze took in the expanse of the lake and the smallest indication of life rising to its surface. He came back to the beach and walked with a towel round his middle as far as a baobab tree where a black man with an ivory bangle on either wrist was mending nets, but then he noticed a blue bubble on the verge – it was an infant afloat on some plastic beast, its mother in attendance – and turned away, up to the hotel.

He left his packed suitcase on the bed and had breakfast. The dining room was a veranda under sagging grass matting; now, in the morning, he could see the lake, of course, while he ate. He was feeling for change to leave for the waiter when the girl padded in, dressed in her bikini, and shook cornflakes into a plate. ‘Oh hello, sir. Early bird you are.’ He imagined her lying down at night just as she was, ready to begin again at once the ritual of alternately dipping and burning her seared flesh. They chatted. She had been in Africa only three months, out from Liverpool in answer to an advertisement – receptionist/secretary, hotel in beautiful surroundings.

‘More of a holiday than a job,’ he said.

‘Don’t make me laugh’ – but she did. ‘We were on the go until half past one, night before last, making the changeover in the bar. You see the bar used to be here—’ she lifted her spoon at the wall, where he now saw mildew-traced shapes beneath a mural in which a girl in a bosom-laced peasant outfit appeared to have given birth, through one ear, Rabelaisian fashion, to a bunch of grapes. He had noticed the old Chianti bottles, by lamplight, at dinner the night before, but not the mural. ‘Dickie’s got his ideas, and then she’s artistic, you see.’ The young man was coming up the steps of the veranda that moment, stamping his sandy feet at the cat, yelling towards the kitchen, blue eyes open as the fish’s had been staring at Carl Church through the water. He wore his catch like a kilt, hooked all round the belt of his trunks.

‘I been thinking about those damn trees,’ he said.

‘Oh my heavens. How many’s still there?’

‘There all right, but nothing but blasted firewood. Wait till she sees the holes, just where she had them dug.’

The girl was delighted by the fish: ‘Oh pretty!’

But he slapped her hands and her distractibility away. ‘Some people ought to have their heads read,’ he said to Carl Church. ‘If you can tell me why I had to come back here, well, I’d be grateful. I had my own combo, down in Rhodesia.’ He removed the fish from his narrow middle and sat on a chair turned away from her table.

‘Why don’t we get the boys to stick ’em in, today? They could’ve died after being planted out, after all, ay?’

He seemed too gloomy to hear her. Drops from his wet curls fell on his shoulders. She bent towards him kindly, wheedlingly, meat of her thighs and breasts pressing together. ‘If we put two boys on it, they’d have them in by lunchtime? Dickie? And if it’ll make her happy? Dickie?’

‘I’ve got ideas of my own. But when Madam’s here you can forget it, just forget it. No sooner start something – just get started, that’s all – she chucks it up and wants something different again.’ His gaze wavered once or twice to the wall where the bar had been. Carl Church asked what the fish were. He didn’t answer, and the girl encouraged, ‘Perch. Aren’t they, Dickie? Yes, perch. You’ll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.’

‘Oh what the hell. Let’s go. You ready?’ he said to Church. The girl jumped up and he hooked an arm round her neck, feeling in her rough hair.

‘Course he’s ready. The black flippers’ll fit him – the stuff’s in the bar,’ she said humouringly.

‘But I haven’t even got a pair of trunks.’

‘Who cares? I can tell you I’m just-not-going-to-worry-a-damn. Here Zelide, I nearly lost it this morning.’ He removed a dark stone set in Christmas-cracker baroque from his rock-scratched hand, nervous-boned as his mother’s ankles, and tossed it for the girl to catch.

‘Come, I’ve got the trunks,’ she said, and led Carl Church to the bar by way of the reception desk, stopping to wrap the ring in a pink tissue and pop it in the cash box.

The thought of going to the lake once more was irresistible. His bag was packed; an hour or two wouldn’t make any difference. He had been skin-diving before, in Sardinia, and did not expect the bed of the lake to compare with the Mediterranean, but if the architecture of undersea was missing, the fish one could get at were much bigger than he had ever caught in the Mediterranean. The young man disappeared for minutes and rose again between Carl Church and the girl, his Gothic Christ’s body sucked in below the nave of ribs, his goggles leaving weals like duelling scars on his white cheekbones. Water ran from the tarnished curls over the bright eyeballs without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to shore with them, happy as a retrieving dog.

Neither she nor Carl Church caught much themselves. And then Church went off on his own, swimming slowly with the borrowed trunks inflating above the surface like a striped Portuguese man-of-war, and far out, when he was not paying attention but looking back at the skimpy white buildings, the flowering shrubs and even the giant baobab razed by distance and the optical illusion of the heavy waterline, at eye-level, about to black them out, he heard a fish-eagle scream just overhead; looked up, looked down, and there below him saw three fish at different levels, a mobile swaying in the water. This time he managed the gun without thinking; he had speared the biggest.

The girl was as impartially overjoyed as she was when the young man had a good catch. They went up the beach, laughing, explaining, a water-intoxicated progress. The accidental bump of her thick sandy thigh against his was exactly the tactile sensation of contact with the sandy body of the fish, colliding with him as he carried it. The young man was squatting on the beach, now, his long back arched over his knees. He was haranguing, in an African language, the old fisherman with the ivory bracelets who was still at work on the nets. There were dramatic pauses, accusatory rises of tone, hard jerks of laughter, in the monologue. The old man said nothing. He was an Arabised African from far up the lake somewhere in East Africa, and wore an old towel turban as well as the ivory; every now and then he wrinkled back his lips on tooth-stumps. Three or four long black dugouts had come in during the morning and were beached; black men sat motionless in what small shade they could find. The baby on his blue swan still floated under his mother’s surveillance – she turned a visor of sunglasses and hat. It was twelve o’clock; Carl Church merely felt amused at himself – how different the measure of time when you were absorbed in something you didn’t earn a living by. ‘Those must weigh a pound apiece,’ he said idly, of the ivory manacles shifting on the net-mender’s wrists.

‘D’you want one?’ the young man offered. (My graves, the woman had said, on my property.) ‘I’ll get him to sell it to you. Take it for your wife.’

But Carl Church had no wife at present, and no desire for loot; he preferred everything to stay as it was, in its place, at noon by the lake. Twenty thousand slaves a year had passed this way, up the water. Slavers, missionaries, colonial servants – all had brought something and taken something away. He would have a beer and go, changing nothing, claiming nothing. He plodded to the hotel a little ahead of the couple, who were mumbling over hotel matters and pausing now and then to fondle each other. As his bare soles encountered the smoothness of the terrace steps he heard the sweet, loud, reasonable feminine voice, saw one of the houseboy-waiters racing across in his dirty jacket – and quickly turned away to get to his room unnoticed. But with a perfect instinct for preventing escape, she was at once out upon the dining-room veranda, all crude blues and yellows – hair, eyes, flowered dress, a beringed hand holding the cigarette away exploratively. Immediately, her son passed Church in a swift, damp tremor.

‘Well, God, look at my best girl – mm-MHH . . . madam in person.’ He lifted her off her feet and she landed swirling giddily on the high heels in the best tradition of the Fred Astaire films she and Carl Church had been brought up on. Her laugh seemed to go over her whole body.

‘Well?’

‘And so, my girl?’

They rocked together. ‘You been behaving yourself in the big city?’

‘Dickie – for Pete’s sake – he’s like a spaniel – ’ calling Carl Church to witness.

A warm baby-smell beside him (damp crevices and cold cream) was the presence of the girl. ‘Oh Mrs Palmer, we were so worried you’d got lost or something.’

‘My dear. My you’re looking well—’ The two vacant, inescapable blue stares took in the bikini, the luxuriously inflamed skin, as if the son’s gaze were directed by the mother’s. Mrs Palmer and the girl kissed but Mrs Palmer’s eyes moved like a lighthouse beam over the wall where the bar was gone, catching Carl Church in his borrowed swimming trunks. ‘Wha’d’you think of my place?’ she asked. ‘How d’you like it here, eh? Not that I know it myself, after two months . . .’ Hands on hips, she looked at the peasant girl and the mildewed outlines as if she were at an exhibition.

She faced sharply round and her son kissed her on the mouth: ‘We’re dying for a beer, that’s what. We’ve been out since breakfast. Zelide, the boy—’

‘Yes, he knows he’s on duty on the veranda today – just a minute, I’ll get it—’

Mrs Palmer was smiling at the girl wisely. ‘My dear, once you start doing their jobs for them . . .’

‘Shadrach!’ The son made a megaphone of his hands, shaking his silver identification bracelet out of the way. The girl stood, eagerly bewildered.

‘Oh it’s nothing. Only a minute—’ and bolted.

‘Where is the bar, now, Dickie?’ said his mother as a matter of deep, polite interest.

‘I must get some clothes on and return your trunks,’ Carl Church was saying.

‘Oh, it makes a world of difference. You’ll see. You can move in that bar. Don’t you think so?’ The young man gave the impression that he was confirming a remark of Church’s rather than merely expressing his own opinion. Carl Church, to withdraw, said, ‘Well, I don’t know what it was like before.’

She claimed him now. ‘It was here, in the open, of course, people loved it. A taverna atmosphere. Dickie’s never been overseas.’

‘Really move. And you’ve got those big doors.’

She drew Church into the complicity of a smile for grown-ups, then remarked, as if for her part the whole matter were calmly accepted, settled, ‘I presume it’s the games room?’

Her son said to Church, sharing the craziness of women, ‘There never was a games room, it was the lounge, can you see a lot of old birds sitting around in armchairs in a place like this?’

‘The lounge that was going to be redecorated as a games room,’ she said. She smiled at her son.

The girl came back, walking flat-footed under a tray’s weight up steps that led by way of a half-built terrace to the new bar. As Carl Church went to help her she breathed, ‘What a performance.’

Mrs Palmer drew on her cigarette and contemplated the steps: ‘Imagine the breakages.’

The four of them were together round beer bottles. Church sat helplessly in his borrowed trunks that crawled against his body as they dried, drinking pint after pint and aware of his warmth, the heat of the air, and all their voices rising steadily. He said, ‘I must get going,’ but the waiter had called them to lunch three times; the best way to break up the party was to allow oneself to be forced to table. The three of them ate in their bathing costumes while madam took the head, bracelets colliding on her arms.

He made an effort to get precise instructions about the best and quickest route back to the capital, and was told expertly by her, ‘There’s no plane out until Monday, nine-fifteen, I suppose you know that.’

‘I have no reason whatever to doubt your knowledge of plane schedules,’ he said, and realised from the turn of phrase that he must be slightly drunk, on heat and the water as much as beer.

She knew the game so well that you had only to finger a counter unintentionally for her to take you on. ‘I told you I never let anyone down.’ She blew a smokescreen; appeared through it. ‘Where’ve they put you?’

‘Oh, he’s in one of the chalets, Mrs Palmer,’ the girl said. ‘Till tomorrow, anyway.’

‘Well, there you are, relax,’ she said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, there’s a room in my cottage.’ Her gaze was out over the lake, a tilting, blind brightness with black dugouts appearing like sunspots, but she said, ‘How’re my jacarandas coming along? Someone was telling me there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do, Dickie. The boys must make a decent trench round each one and let it fill up with water once a week, right up, d’you see?’





‘The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant; it becomes more confident of its own resources – there is greater presence of mind. The body is soon well-knit; the muscles of the limbs grow hard as a board . . . the countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia.’

Carl Church slept through the afternoon. He woke to the feeling of helplessness he had at lunch. But no chagrin. This sort of hiatus had opened up in the middle of a tour many times – lost days in a blizzard on Gander airport, a week in quarantine at Aden. This time he had the journals instead of a Gideon Bible. ‘Nothing fell from his lips as last words to survivors. We buried him today by a large baobab tree.’ There was no point in going back to the capital if he couldn’t get out of the place till Monday. His mind was closed to the possibility of trying for Moambe, again; that was another small rule for self-preservation: if something goes wrong, write it off. He thought, it’s all right here; the dirty, ugly room had as much relevance to ‘spoiling’ the eagles and the lake as he had had to the eagles when he climbed close. On his way down to the lake again he saw a little group – mother, son, receptionist – standing round the graveside of one of the holes for trees. Dickie was still in his bathing trunks.

Church had the goggles and the flippers and the speargun, and he swam out towards the woolly islands – they were unattainably far – and fish were dim dead leaves in the water below him. The angle of the late afternoon sun left the underwater deserted, filled with motes of vegetable matter and sand caught by oblique rays of light. Milky brilliance surrounded him, his hands went out as if to feel for walls; there was the apprehension, down there, despite the opacity and tepidity, of night and cold. He shot up to the surface and felt the day on his eyelids. Lying on the sand, he heard the eagles cry now behind him on the headland, where trees held boulders in their claws, now over the lake. A pair of piebald kingfishers squabbled, a whirling disk, in midair, and plummeted again and again. Butterflies with the same black and white markings went slowly out over the water. The Arabised fisherman was still working at his nets.

Some weekend visitors arrived from the hotel, shading their eyes against the sheen of the lake; soon they stood in it like statues broken off at the waist. Voices flew out across the water after the butterflies. As the sun drowned, a dhow climbed out of its dazzle and dipped steadily towards the beach. It picked up the fisherman and his nets, sending a tiny boat ashore. The dhow lay beating slowly, like an exhausted bird. The visitors ran together to watch as they would have for a rescue, a monster – any sign from the lake.

Carl Church had been lying with his hand slack on the sand as on a warm body; he got up and walked past the people, past the baobab, as far along the beach as it went before turning into an outwork of oozy reeds. He pushed his feet into his shoes and went up inland, through the thorn bushes. As soon as he turned his back on it, the lake did not exist; unlike the sea that spread and sucked in your ears even when your eyes were closed. A total silence. Livingstone could have come upon the lake quite suddenly, and just as easily have missed it. The mosquitoes and gnats rose with the going down of the sun. Swatted on Church’s face, they stuck in sweat. The air over the lake was free, but the heat of day cobwebbed the bush. ‘We then hoped that his youth and unimpaired constitution would carry him through . . . but about six o’clock in the evening his mind began to wander and continued to. His bodily powers continued gradually to sink till the period mentioned when he quietly expired . . . there he rests in sure and certain hope of a glorious Resurrection.’ He thought he might have a look at the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions, but the description of how to find them given him that morning by the young man and the girl was that of people who know a place so well they cannot imagine anyone being unable to walk straight to it. A small path, they said, just off the road. He found himself instead among ruined arcades whose whiteness intensified as the landscape darkened. It was an odd ruin: a solid complex of buildings, apparently not in bad repair, had been pulled down. It was the sort of demolition one saw in a fast-growing city, where a larger structure would be begun at once where the not-old one had been. The bush was all around; as far as the Congo, as far as the latitude where the forests began. A conical anthill had risen to the height of the arcades, where a room behind them must have been. A huge moon sheeny as the lake came up and a powdery blue heat held in absolute stillness. Carl Church thought of the graves. It was difficult to breathe; it must have been hell to die here, in this unbearable weight of beauty not shared with the known world, licked in the face by the furred tongue of this heat.





Round the terrace and hotel the ground was pitted by the stakes of high heels; they sounded over the floors where everyone else went barefoot. The shriek and scatter of chickens opened before a constant coming and going of houseboys and the ragged work gang whose activities sent up the regular grunt of axe thudding into stumps and the crunch of spade gritting into earth. The tree-holes had been filled in. Dickie was seen in his bathing trunks but did not appear on the beach. Zelide wore a towelling chemise over her bikini, and when the guests were at lunch, went from table to table bending to talk softly with her rough hair hiding her face. Carl Church saw that the broken skin on her nose and cheeks was repaired with white cream. She said confidentially, ‘I just wanted to tell you there’ll be a sort of beach party tonight, being Saturday. Mrs Palmer likes to have a fire on the beach, and some snacks – you know. Of course, we’ll all eat here first. You’re welcome.’

He said, ‘How about my room?’

Her voice sank to a chatty whisper, ‘Oh it’ll be all right, one crowd’s cancelled.’

Going to the bar for cigarettes, he heard mother and son in there. ‘Wait, wait, all that’s worked out. I’mn’a cover the whole thing with big blow-ups of the top groups, the Stones and the Shadows and such-like.’

‘Oh grow up, Dickie my darling, you want it to look like a teenager’s bedroom?’

Church went quietly away, remembering there might be a packet of cigarettes in the car, but bumped into Dickie a few minutes later, in the yard. Dickie had his skin-diving stuff and was obviously on his way to the lake. ‘I get into shit for moving the bar without telling the licensing people over in town, and then she says let’s have the bar counter down on the beach tonight – all in the same breath, that’s nothing to her. At least when my stepfather’s here he knows just how to put the brake on.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know, something about some property of hers, in town. He’s got to see about it. But he’s always got business all over, for her. I had my own band, you know, we’ve even toured Rhodesia. I’m a solo artist, really. Guitar. I compose my own stuff. I mean, what I play’s original, you see. Night club engagements and such-like.’

‘That’s a tough life compared with this,’ Church said, glancing at the speargun.

‘Oh, this’s all right. If you learn how to do it well, y’know? I’ve trained myself. You’ve got to concentrate. Like with my guitar. I have to go away and be undisturbed, you understand – right away. Sometimes the mood comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I compose all night. I got to be left in peace.’ He was fingering a new thick silver chain on his wrist. ‘Lady Jane, of course. God knows what it cost. She spends a fortune on presents. You sh’d see what my sister gets when she’s home. And what she gave my stepfather – I mean before, when they weren’t married yet. He must have ten pairs of cuff-links, gold, I don’t know what.’ He sat down under the weight of his mother’s generosity.

Zelide appeared among the empty gas containers and beer crates outside the kitchen. ‘Oh, Dickie, you’ve had no lunch. I don’t think he ever tastes a thing he catches.’

Dickie squeezed her thigh and said coldly, ‘S’best time, now. People don’t know it. Between now and about half past three.’

There had always been something more than a family resemblance about that face; at last it fell into place in Church’s mind. Stiff blond curls, skull ominously present in the eye sockets, shiny cheekbones furred with white hairs, blue-red lips, and those eyes that seemed to have no eyelids, to turn away from nothing and take in nothing: the face of the homosexual boy in the Berlin twenties, the perfect, impure master-race face of a George Grosz drawing.

‘Oh Dickie, I wish you’d eat something. And he’s got to play tonight.’ They watched him lope off lightly down the garden. Her hair and the sun obscured her. ‘They’re both artistic, you see, that’s the trouble. What a performance.’

‘Are you sorry you came?’

‘Oh no. The weather’s so lovely, I mean, isn’t it?’

It was becoming a habit to open Livingstone’s Journals at random before falling stunned-asleep. ‘Now that I am on the point of starting another trip into Africa I feel quite exhilarated: when one travels with the specific object in view of ameliorating the condition of the natives every act becomes ennobled.’ The afternoon heat made him think of women, this time, and he gave up his siesta because he believed that daydreams of this kind were not so much adolescent as – worse – a sign of approaching age. He was getting – too far along, for pauses like this; for time out. If he were not preoccupied with doing the next thing, he did not know what to do. His mind turned to death, the graves that his body would not take the trouble to visit. His body turned to women; his body was unchanged. It took him down to the lake, heavy and vigorous, reddened by the sun under the black hairs shining on his belly.

The sun was high in a splendid afternoon. In half an hour he missed three fish and began to feel challenged. Whenever he dived deeper than fifteen or eighteen feet his ears ached much more than they ever had in the sea. Out of training, of course. And the flippers and goggles lent by the hotel really did not fit properly. The goggles leaked at every dive, and he had to surface quickly, water in his nostrils. He began to let himself float aimlessly, not diving any longer, circling around the enormous boulders with their steep polished flanks like petrified tree trunks. He was aware, as he had been often when skin-diving, of how active his brain became in this world of silence; ideas and images interlocking in his mind while his body was leisurely moving, enjoying at once the burning sun on his exposed shoulders and the cooling water on his shrunken penis – good after too many solitary nights filled with erotic dreams.

Then he saw the fish, deep down, twenty feet maybe, a yellowish nonchalant shape which seemed to pasture in a small forest of short dead reeds. He took a noble breath, dived with all the power and swiftness he could summon from his body, and shot. The miracle happened again. The nonchalant shape became a frenzied spot of light, reflecting the rays of the sun in a series of flashes through the pale blue water as it swivelled in agony round the spear. It was – this moment – the only miracle Church knew; no wonder Africans used to believe that the hunter’s magic worked when the arrow found the prey.

He swam up quickly, his eyes on the fish hooked at the end of the spear, feeling the tension of its weight while he was hauling it and the line between spear and gun straightened. Eight pounds, ten, perhaps. Even Dickie with his silver amulets and bracelets couldn’t do better. He reached the surface, hurriedly lifted the goggles to rid them of water, and dived again: the fish was still continuing its spiralling fight. He saw now that he had not transfixed it; only the point of the spear had penetrated the body. He began carefully to pull the line towards him; the spear was in his hand when, with a slow motion, the fish unhooked itself before his eyes.

In its desperate, thwarted leaps it had unscrewed the point and twirled loose. This had happened once before, in the Mediterranean, and since then Church had taken care to tighten the spearhead from time to time while fishing. Today he had forgotten. Disappointment swelled in him. Breathlessness threatened to burst him like a bubble. He had to surface, abandoning the gun in order to free both arms. The fish disappeared round a boulder with the point of the harpoon protruding from its open belly amid flimsy pinkish ribbons of entrails; the gun was floating at mid distance between the surface and the bed of the lake, anchored to the spear sunk in dead reeds.

Yet the splendour of the afternoon remained. He lay and smoked and drank beer brought by a waiter who roamed the sand, flicking a napkin. Church had forgotten what had gone wrong, to bring him to this destination. He was here; as he was not often fully present in the places and situations in which he found himself. It was some sort of answer to the emptiness he had felt on the bed. Was this how the first travellers had borne it, each day detached from the last and the next, taking each night that night’s bearing by the stars?

Madam – Lady Jane in person – had sent down a boy to pick up bottle tops and cigarette stubs from the water’s edge. She had high standards. (She had said so in the bar last night. ‘The trouble is, they’ll never be any different, they just don’t know how to look after anything.’) This was the enlightenment the discoverers had brought the black man in the baggage he portered for them on his head. This one was singing to himself as he worked. If the plans that were being made in the capital got the backing of the World Bank and the UN Development Fund and all the rest of it, his life would change. Whatever happened to him, he would lose the standard that had been set by people who maintained it by using him to pick up their dirt. Church thought of the ruin – he’d forgotten to ask what it was. Lady Jane’s prefabricated concrete blocks and terrazzo would fall down more easily.

He had had a shirt washed and although he was sweating under the light bulb when he put it on for dinner, he seemed to have accustomed himself to the heat, now. He was also very sunburned. The lady with the small child sat with a jolly party of Germans in brown sandals – apparently from a Lutheran Mission nearby – and there was a group of men down from the capital on a bachelor binge of skin-diving and drinking who were aware of being the life of the place. They caught out at Zelide, her thick feet pressed into smart shoes, her hair lifted on top of her head, her eyes made up to twice their size. She bore her transformation bravely, smiling.

‘You are coming down to the beach, arnch you?’ She went, concerned, from table to table. Mrs Palmer’s heels announced her with the authority of a Spanish dancer. She had on a strapless blue dress and silver sandals, and carried a little gilt bag like an outsize cigarette box. She joined the missionary party: ‘Wie geht’s, Father, have you been missing me?’ Dickie didn’t appear. Through the frangipani, the fire on the beach was already sending up scrolls of flame.

Church knew he would be asked to join one group or another and out of a kind of shame of anticipated boredom (last night there had been one of those beer-serious conversations about the possibility of the end of the world: ‘They say the one thing’ll survive an atomic explosion is the ant. The ant’s got something special in its body, y’see’) he went into the empty bar after dinner. The little black barman was almost inaudible, in order to disguise his lack of English. There was an array of fancy bottles set up on the shelves but most of them seemed to belong to Mrs Palmer’s store of objets d’art: ‘Is finish’.’ Church had to content himself with a brandy from South Africa. He asked whether a dusty packet of cigarillos was for sale, and the barman’s hand went from object to object on display before the correct one was identified. Church was smoking and throwing darts as if they were stones, when Dickie came in. Dickie wore a dinner jacket; his lapels were blue satin, his trousers braided, his shirt tucked and frilled; his hands emerged from ruffles and the little finger of the left one rubbed and turned the baroque ring on the finger beside it. He hung in the doorway a moment like a tall, fancy doll; his mother might have put him on a piano.

Church said, ‘My God, you’re grand,’ and Dickie looked down at himself for a second, without interest, as one acknowledges one’s familiar working garb. The little barman seemed flattened by Dickie’s gaze.

‘Join me?’

Dickie gave a boastful, hard-wrung smile. ‘No thanks. I think I’ve had enough already.’ He had the look his mother had had, when Church asked her where her hotel was. ‘I’ve been drinking all afternoon. Ever since a phone call.’

‘Well you don’t look it,’ said Church. But it was the wrong tone to take up.

Dickie played a tattoo on the bar with the ringed hand, staring at it. ‘There was a phone call from Bulawayo, and a certain story was repeated to me. Somebody’s made it their business to spread a story.’

‘That’s upsetting.’

‘It may mean the loss of a future wife, that’s what. My fiancée in Bulawayo. Somebody took the trouble to tell her there’s a certain young lady in the hotel here with me. Somebody had nothing better to do than make trouble. But that young lady is my mother’s secretary-receptionist, see? She works here, she’s employed, just like me. Just like I’m the manager.’

From country to country, bar to bar, Church was used to accepting people’s own versions of their situations, quite independently of the facts. He and Dickie contemplated the vision of Dickie fondling Zelide in the garden as evidence of the correctness of his relations with the secretary-receptionist. ‘Couldn’t you explain?’

‘Usually if I’m, you know, depressed and that, I play my guitar. But I’ve just been strumming. No, I don’t think I’ll have any more tonight, I’m full enough already. The whole afternoon.’

‘Why don’t you go to Bulawayo?’

Dickie picked up the darts and began to throw them, at an angle, from where he sat at the bar; while he spoke he scored three bull’s-eyes. ‘Huh, I think I’ll clear out altogether. Here I earn fifty quid a month, eh? I can earn twenty pounds a night – a night – with a personal appearance. I’ve got a whole bundle of my own compositions and one day, boy! – there’s got to be one that hits the top. One day it’s got to happen. All my stuff is copyright, you see. Nobody’s gonna cut a disc of my stuff without my permission. I see to that. Oh I could play you a dozen numbers I’m working on, they’re mostly sad, you know – the folk type of thing, that’s where the money is now. What’s a lousy fifty quid a month?’

‘I meant a quick visit, to put things straight.’

‘Ah, somebody’s mucked up my life, all right’ – he caught Church’s eye as if to say, you want to see it again? – and once again planted three darts dead-centre. ‘I’ll play you some of my compositions if you like. Don’t expect too much of my voice, though, because as I say I’ve been drinking all afternoon. I’ve got no intention whatever of playing for them down there. An artist thrown in, fifty quid a month, they can think again.’ He ducked under the doorway and was gone. He returned at once with a guitar and bent over it professionally, making adjustments. Then he braced his long leg against the bar rail, tossed back his skull of blond curls, began a mournful lay – broke off: ‘I’m full of pots, you know, my voice’ – and started again, high and thin, at the back of his nose.

It was a song about a bride, and riding away, and tears you cannot hide away. Carl Church held his palm round the brandy glass to conceal that it was empty and looked down into it. The barman had not moved from his stance with both hands before him on the bar and the bright light above him beating sweat out of his forehead and nose like an answer exacted under interrogation. When the stanza about death and last breath was reached, Dickie said, ‘It’s a funny thing, me nearly losing my engagement ring this morning, eh? I might have known something’ – paused – and thrummed once, twice. Then he began the song over again.

Carl Church signalled for the brandy bottle. But suddenly Mrs Palmer was there, a queen to whom no door may be closed. ‘Oh show a bit of spunk! Everyone’s asking for you. I tell him, everyone has to take a few cracks in life, am I right?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘Come on then, don’t encourage him to feel sorry for himself. My God, if I’d sat down and cried every time.’

Dickie went on playing and whispering the words to himself.

‘Can’t you do something with him?’

‘Let’s go and join the others, Dickie,’ Church said; he drank off the second brandy.

‘One thing I’ve never done is let people down,’ Mrs Palmer was saying. ‘But these kids’ve got no sense of responsibility. What’d happen without me I don’t know.’

Dickie spoke. ‘Well you can have it. You can have the fifty pounds a month and the car. The lot.’

‘Oh yes, they’d look fine without me, I can tell you. I would have given everything I’ve built up over to him, that was the idea, once he was married. But they know everything at once, you know, you can’t teach them anything.’

‘Come on Dickie, what the hell – just for an hour.’

They jostled him down to the fire-licked faces on the beach. A gramophone was playing and people were dancing barefoot. There were not enough women and men in shorts were drinking and clowning. Dickie was given beer; he made cryptic remarks that nobody listened to. Somebody stopped the gramophone with a screech and Dickie was tugged this way and that in a clamour to have him play the guitar. But the dancers put the record back again. The older men among the bachelors opposed the rhythm of the dancers with a war dance of their own: Hi-zoom-a-zoom-ba, zoom-zoom-zoom. Zelide kept breaking away from her partners to offer a plate of tiny burnt sausages like bird-droppings. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA – ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM. Light fanned from the fire showed the dancers as figures behind gauze, but where Church was marooned, near the streaming flames, faces were gleaming, gouged with grotesque shadow. Lady Jane had a bottle of gin for the two of them. The heat of the fire seemed to consume the other heat, of the night, so that the spirit going down his gullet snuffed out on the way in a burning evaporation. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA. At some point he was dancing with her, and she put a frangipani flower in his ear. Now Dickie, sitting drunk on a box with his long legs at an angle like a beetle’s, wanted to play the guitar but nobody would listen. Church could make out from the shapes Dickie’s mouth made that he was singing the song about the bride and riding away, but the roar of the bachelors drowned it: Hold him down, you Zulu warrior, hold him DOWN, you Zulu chief-chief-ief. Every now and then a slight movement through the lake sent a soft, black glittering glance in reflection of the fire. The lake was not ten feet away but as time went by Church had the impression that it would not be possible for him to walk down, through the barrier of jigging firelight and figures, and let it cover his ankles, his hands. He said to her, topping up the two glasses where they had made a place in the sand, ‘Was there another hotel?’

‘There’s been talk, but no one else’s ever had the initiative, when it comes to the push.’

‘But whose was that rather nice building, in the bush?’

‘Not my idea of a hotel. My husband built it in forty-nine. Started it in forty-nine, finished it fifty-two or -three. Dickie was still a kiddie.’

‘But what happened? It looks as if it’s been deliberately pulled down.’

CHIEF-UH-IEF-UH-IEF-IEF-IEF. The chorus was a chanting grunt.

‘It was what?’

She was saying, ‘. . . died, I couldn’t even give it away. I always told him, it’s no good putting up a bloody palace of a place, you haven’t got the class of person who appreciates it. Too big, far too big. No atmosphere, whatever you tried to do with it. People like to feel cosy and free and easy.’

He said, ‘I liked that colonnaded veranda, it must have been rather beautiful,’ but she was yanked away to dance with one of the bachelors.

Zelide wandered about anxiously: ‘You quite happy?’

He took her to dance; she was putting a good face on it. He said, ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re tough. Look at those eyes.’

‘If there was somewhere to go,’ she said. ‘It’s not like a town, not like at home, you know – you can just disappear. Oh there she is, for God’s sake—’

He said to Mrs Palmer, ‘That veranda, before you bulldozed it—’ but she took no notice and attacked him at once: ‘Where’s Dickie? I don’t see Dickie.’

‘I don’t know where the hell Dickie is.’

Clinging to his arm she dragged him through the drinkers, the dancers, the bachelors, round the shadowy human lumps beyond the light that started away from each other, making him give a snuffling laugh because they were like the chickens that first day. She raced him stumbling up the dark terraces to Dickie’s cottage, but it was overpoweringly empty with the young man’s smell of musky leather and wet wool. She was alarmed as an animal who finds the lair deserted. ‘I tell you, he’ll do something to himself.’ Ten yards from the bungalows and the main house, the bush was the black end of the world; they walked out into it and stood helplessly. A torch was a pale, blunt, broken stump of light. ‘He’ll do away with himself,’ she panted.

Church was afraid her breathing would turn to hysterics; ‘Come on, now, come on,’ he coaxed her back to the lights burning in the empty hotel. She went, but steered towards quarters he had not noticed or visited. There were lamps in pink shades. Photographs of her in the kind of dress she was wearing that night, smiling over the head of an infant Dickie. A flowered sofa they sat down on, and a little table with filigree boxes and a lighter shaped like Aladdin’s lamp and gilt-covered matchbooks with Dorothy stamped across the corner.

‘Take some,’ she said, and began putting them in his pockets, both outer pockets of his jacket and the inner breast pocket. ‘Take some, I’ve got hundreds.’ She dropped her head against him and let the blonde curls muffle her face: ‘Like his father did,’ she said. ‘I know it. I tell you I know it.’

‘He’s passed out somewhere, that’s all.’ She smelled of Chanel No. 5, the only perfume he could identify, because he had bought it on the black market for various girls in Cairo during the war. Where she leant on him her breasts were warmer than the rest of her.

‘I tell you I know he’ll do something to himself sooner or later. It runs in families, I know it.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s all right.’ He thought: an act of charity. It was terribly dark outside; the whole night was cupped round the small flickering of flames and figures, figures like flames, reaching upwards in flame, snatched by the dark, on the beach. He knew the lake was there; neither heard nor seen, quite black. The lake. The lake. He felt, inevitably, something resembling desire, but it was more like a desire for the cool mouth of waters that would close over ankles, knees, thighs, sex. He was drunk and not very capable, and felt he would never get there, to the lake. The lake became an unslakable thirst, the night-thirst, the early-morning thirst that cannot stir a hand for the surcease of water.

When he awoke sometime in his chalet, it was because consciousness moved towards a sound that he could identify even before he was awake. Dickie was playing the guitar behind closed doors somewhere, playing again and again the song of the bride and the riding away.





Zelide wore her bikini, drawing up the bill for him in the morning. The demarcation lines at shoulder-straps and thighs had become scarlet weals; the sun was eating into her, poor cheerful adventuring immigrant. She had been taken up by the bachelors and was about to go out with them in their boat. ‘Maybe we’ll bump into each other again,’ she said.

And of course they might; handed around the world from country to country, minor characters who crop up. There was an air of convalescence about the hotel. On the terrace, empty bottles were coated with ants; down at the beach, boys were burying the ashes of the bonfire and their feet scuffed over the shapes – like resting-places flattened in grass by cattle – where couples had been secreted by the night. He saw Mrs Palmer in a large sunhat, waving her tough brown arms about in command over a gang who, resting on their implements, accepted her as they did sun, flies and rain. Two big black pairs of sunglasses – his and hers – flashed back and forth blindly as they stood, with Zelide, amid the building rubble in the garden.

‘Don’t forget to look us up if ever you’re out this way.’

‘One never knows.’

‘With journalists, my God, no, you could find yourself at the North Pole! We’ll always find a bed for you. Has Dickie said goodbye?’

‘Say goodbye to him for me, will you?’

She put out her jingling, gold-flashing hand and he saw (as if it had been a new line on his own face) the fine, shiny tan of her forearm wrinkle with the movement. ‘Happy landings,’ she said.

Zelide watched him drive off. ‘You’ve not forgotten anything? You’d be surprised at people. I don’t know what to do with the stuff, half the time.’ She smiled and her stomach bulged over the bikini; she had the sort of pioneering spirit, the instincts of self-preservation appropriate to her time and kind.

Past the fowls, water tanks and outhouses, the hot silent arcades of the demolished hotel, the car rocked and swayed over the track. Suddenly he saw the path, the path he had missed the other day, to the graves of Livingstone’s companions. It was just where Dickie and Zelide had said. He was beyond it by the time he understood this, but all at once it seemed absurd not even to have gone to have a look, after three days. He stopped the car and walked back. He took the narrow path that was snagged with thorn bushes and led up the hill between trees too low and meagre of foliage to give shade. The earth was picked clean by the dry season. Flies settled at once upon his shoulders. He was annoyed by the sound of his own lack of breath; and then there, where the slope of the hill came up short against a steep rise, the gravestones stood with their backs to rock. The five neat headstones of the monuments commission were surmounted each by an iron cross on a circle. The names, and the dates of birth and death – the deaths all in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – were engraved on the granite. A yard or two away, but in line with the rest, was another gravestone. Carl Church moved over to read the inscription: In Memory of Richard Alastair Macnab, Beloved Husband of Dorothy and Father of Richard and Heather, died 1957. They all looked back, these dead companions, to the lake, the lake that Carl Church (turning to face as they did, now) had had silent behind him all the way up; the lake that, from here, was seen to stretch much farther than one could tell, down there on the shore or at the hotel: stretching still – even from up here – as far as one could see, flat and shining; a long way up Africa.