Life Times Stories Part 10

'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, d.i.c.k 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 G.o.diva. So we'd better brace ourselves.'

'd.i.c.kie! 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 s.h.i.+rt knotted under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s over the bikini, and when she shook her s.h.a.ggy 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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-fis.h.i.+ng?'

'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, d.i.c.k'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 gra.s.s, 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, s.e.x, 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, gla.s.sy 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 gra.s.s 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 h.e.l.lo, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 fas.h.i.+on, to a bunch of grapes. He had noticed the old Chianti bottles, by lamplight, at dinner the night before, but not the mural. 'd.i.c.kie'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 d.a.m.n 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressing together. 'If we put two boys on it, they'd have them in by lunchtime? d.i.c.kie? And if it'll make her happy? d.i.c.kie?'

'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, d.i.c.kie? Yes, perch. You'll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.'

'Oh what the h.e.l.l. 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-d.a.m.n. 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to sh.o.r.e 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 b.u.mp 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 sungla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed Church in a swift, damp tremor.

'Well, G.o.d, 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?'

'd.i.c.kie 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, d.i.c.kie?' 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. d.i.c.kie'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, d.i.c.kie. 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. d.i.c.kie 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. b.u.t.terflies 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 b.u.t.terflies. 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 ash.o.r.e. 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 const.i.tution 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 lat.i.tude 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 h.e.l.l 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. d.i.c.kie 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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, d.i.c.kie 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 b.u.mped into d.i.c.kie a few minutes later, in the yard. d.i.c.kie had his skin-diving stuff and was obviously on his way to the lake. 'I get into s.h.i.+t 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. G.o.d 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, d.i.c.kie, you've had no lunch. I don't think he ever tastes a thing he catches.'

d.i.c.kie 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, s.h.i.+ny 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual boy in the Berlin twenties, the perfect, impure master-race face of a George Grosz drawing.

'Oh d.i.c.kie, 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 enn.o.bled.' 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 n.o.ble 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 d.i.c.kie 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 fis.h.i.+ng. 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, anch.o.r.ed 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 s.h.i.+rt 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?' d.i.c.kie 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 d.i.c.kie came in. d.i.c.kie wore a dinner jacket; his lapels were blue satin, his trousers braided, his s.h.i.+rt 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 G.o.d, you're grand,' and d.i.c.kie looked down at himself for a second, without interest, as one acknowledges one's familiar working garb. The little barman seemed flattened by d.i.c.kie's gaze.

'Join me?'