Life Times Stories Part 11

d.i.c.kie 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.

d.i.c.kie 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 fiancee 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 d.i.c.kie contemplated the vision of d.i.c.kie 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?'

d.i.c.kie 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. n.o.body'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 gla.s.s 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, d.i.c.kie 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 s.p.u.n.k! 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 G.o.d, if I'd sat down and cried every time.'

d.i.c.kie went on playing and whispering the words to himself.

'Can't you do something with him?'

'Let's go and join the others, d.i.c.kie,' 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.'

d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie, what the h.e.l.l 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. d.i.c.kie was given beer; he made cryptic remarks that n.o.body listened to. Somebody stopped the gramophone with a screech and d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie, sitting drunk on a box with his long legs at an angle like a beetle's, wanted to play the guitar but n.o.body would listen. Church could make out from the shapes d.i.c.kie'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 gla.s.ses 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. d.i.c.kie 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 b.l.o.o.d.y palace of a place, you haven't got the cla.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 d.i.c.kie? I don't see d.i.c.kie.'

'I don't know where the h.e.l.l d.i.c.kie 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 d.i.c.kie'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 d.i.c.kie. 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 m.u.f.fle her face: 'Like his father did,' she said. 'I know it. I tell you I know it.'

'He's pa.s.sed 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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, s.e.x. 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. d.i.c.kie 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 b.u.mp 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 gra.s.s 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 sungla.s.ses 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 G.o.d, no, you could find yourself at the North Pole! We'll always find a bed for you. Has d.i.c.kie said goodbye?'

'Say goodbye to him for me, will you?'

She put out her jingling, gold-flas.h.i.+ng hand and he saw (as if it had been a new line on his own face) the fine, s.h.i.+ny 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 d.i.c.kie 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 sh.o.r.e or at the hotel: stretching still even from up here as far as one could see, flat and s.h.i.+ning; a long way up Africa.

Why Haven't You Written?

His problem was hardening metal; finding a way to make it bore, grind, stutter through auriferous and other mineral-bearing rock without itself being blunted. The first time he spoke to the Professor's wife, sitting on his left, she said how impossible that sounded, like seeking perpetual motion or eternal life nothing could bear down against resistance without being worn away in the process? He had smiled and they had agreed with dinner-table good humour that she was translating into abstract terms what was simply a matter for metallurgy.

They did not speak now. He did not see her face. All the way to the airport it was pressed against his coat-m.u.f.fled arm and he could look down only on the nest of hair that was the top of her head. He asked the taxi driver to close the window because a finger of cold air was lifting those short, overlaid crescents of light hair. At the airport he stood by while she queued to weigh in and present her ticket. He had the usual impulse to buy, find something for her at the last minute, and as usual there was nothing she wanted that he could give her. The first call came and they sat on with his arm round her. She dared not open her mouth; misery stopped her throat like vomit: he knew. At the second call, they rose. He embraced her clumsily in his coat, they said the usual rea.s.surances to each other, she pa.s.sed through the barrier and then came back in a crazy zigzag like a mouse threatened by a broom, to clutch his hand another time. Ashamed, half-dropping her things, she always did that, an unconscious effort to make no contact definitively the last.

And that was that. She was gone. It was as it always was; the joking, swaggering joy of arrival carried with it this reverse side; in their opposition and inevitability they were identical. He was used to it, he should be used to it, he should be used to never getting used to it because it happened again and again. The mining group in London for whom he was consultant tungsten carbide metallurgist sent him to Australia, Peru, and again and again the United States. In seven or eight visits he had been in New York for only two days and spent a weekend, once, in Chicago, but he was familiar with the middle-sized, Middle West, middle-everything towns (as he described them at home to friends in London) like the one he was left alone in now, where he lived in local motels and did his work among mining men and accepted the standard hospitality of good business relations. He was on first-name terms with his mining colleagues and their wives in these places and at Christmas would receive cards addressed to his wife and him as Willa and Duggie, although, of course, the Middle Westerners had never met her. Even if his wife could have left the children and the Group had been prepared to pay her fare, there wasn't much to be seen in the sort of places in America his work took him to.

In them, it was rare to meet anyone outside the mining community. The Professor's wife on his left at dinner that night was there because she was somebody's sister-in-law. Next day, when he recognised her standing beside him at the counter of a drugstore she explained that she was on a visit to do some research in the local university library for her husband, Professor Malcolm, of the Department of Political Science in the university of another Middle Western town not far away. And it was this small service she was able to carry out for the Professor that had made everything possible. Without it, perhaps the meetings at dinner and in the drugstore would have been the only times, the beginning and the end: the end before the beginning. As it was, again and again the Professor's wife met the English metallurgist in towns of Middle Western America, he come all the way from London to harden metal, she come not so far from home to search libraries for material for her husband's thesis.

It was snowing while a taxi took him back along the road from the airport to the town. It seemed to be snowing up from the ground, flinging softly at the windscreen, rather than falling. To have gone on driving into the snow that didn't reach him but blocked out the sight of all that was around him but there was a dinner, there was a report he ought to write before the dinner. He actually ground his teeth like a bad-tempered child always these faces to smile at, these reports to sit over, these letters to write. Even when she was with him, he had to leave her in the room while he went to friendly golf games and jolly dinners with engineers who knew how much they missed a bit of home life when they had to be away from the wife and youngsters. Even when there were no dinner parties he had to write reports late at night in the room where she lay in bed and fell asleep, waiting for him. And always the proprietorial, affectionately reproachful letters from home: '. . . nothing from you . . . For goodness' sake, a line to your mother . . . It would cheer up poor little mumpy Ann no end if she got a postcard . . . nothing for ten days, now; darling, can't help getting worried when you don't . . .'

Gone: and no time, no peace to prepare for what was waiting to be realised in that motel room. He could not go back to that room right away. Drive on with the huge silent handfuls of snow coming at him, and the windscreen wipers running a screeching fingernail to and fro over gla.s.s: he gave the driver an address far out of the way, then when they had almost reached it said he had changed his mind and (to h.e.l.l with the report) went straight to the dinner although it was much too early. 'For heaven's sakes! Of course not. Fix yourself a drink, Duggie, you know where it all is by now . . .' The hostess was busy in the kitchen, a fat beautiful little girl in leotards and dancing pumps came no farther than the doorway and watched him, finger up her nose.

They always drank a lot in these oil-fired igloos, down in the den where the bar was, with its collection of European souvenirs or home-painted Mexican mural, up in the sitting room round the colour TV after dinner, exchanging professional jokes and anecdotes. They found Duggie in great form: that dry English sense of humour. At midnight he was dropped between the hedges of dirty ice shovelled on either side of the motel entrance. He stood outside the particular door, he fitted the key and the door swung open on an absolute a.s.surance the dark, centrally-heated smell of Kim Malcolm and Crispin Douglas together, his desert boots, her hair lacquer, zest of orange peel, cigarette smoke in cloth, medicated nasal spray, salami, newspapers. For a moment he didn't turn on the light. Then it sprang from under his finger and stripped the room: gone; empty, ransacked. He sat down in his coat. What had he done the last time? People went out and got drunk or took a pill and believed in the healing sanity of morning. He had drunk enough and he never took pills. Last time he had left when she did, been in some other place when she was in some other place.

She had put the cover on the typewriter and there was a dustless square where the file with material for Professor Malcolm's thesis used to be. He took his notes for his report out of the briefcase and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Then he sat there a long time, hands on the machine, hearing his own breathing whistling slightly through his blocked left nostril. His heart was driven hard by the final hospitable brandy. He began to type in his usual heavy and jerky way, all power in two forefingers.

In the morning in the morning nothing could efface the hopeless ugliness of that town. They laughed at it and made jokes about the glorious places he took her to. She had said, if we could stay with each other for good, but only on condition that we lived in this town? She had made up the scene: a winter day five years later, with each insisting it was the other's turn to go out in the freezing slush to buy drink and each hurling at the other the reproach it's because of you I got myself stuck here. She was the one who pulled the curtain aside on those streets of shabby snow every morning, on the vacant lots with their clapboard screens, on the grey office blocks with lights going on through the damp-laden smog as people began the day's work, and it was she who insisted be fair that there was a quarter of an hour or so, about five in the evening, when the place had its moment; a sort of Arctic spectrum, the fire off a diamond, was reflected from the sunset on the polluted frozen river upon the gla.s.s faces of office blocks, and the evening star was caught hazily in the industrial pall.

In the morning frozen snot hung from the roofs of wooden houses. A company car drove him to his first appointment. Figures in the street with arms like teddy bears, the elbow joints stiffened by layers of clothing. A dog burning a patch of urine through the snow. In the cafeteria at lunch (it was agreed that it was crazy, from the point of view of everyone's waistline, to lay on an executive lunch for him every day) he walked past Lily cups of tuna fish salad and bowls of Jell-O, discussing percussive rock drilling and the heat treatment of steel. Some drills were behaving in an inexplicable manner and he was driven out to the mine to see for himself. A graveyard all the way, tombstones of houses and barns under snow. Sheeted trees. White mounds and ridges whose purpose could only be identified through excavation, like those archaeological mounds, rubbish heaps of a vanished culture silted over by successive ones. He did not know why the tungsten carbide-tipped drills were not fulfilling their promised performance; he would have to work on it. He lied to one generous colleague that he had been invited to dinner with another and he walked about the iron-hard streets of the downtown area (the freeze had crusted the slush, the crust was being tamped down by the pressure of feet) with his scarf over his mouth, and at last ended up at the steak house where they used to go. Because he was alone the two waitresses talked to each other near him as if he were not there. Each table had a small gla.s.s box which was a selector for the jukebox; one night she had insisted that they ought to hear a record that had been the subject of controversy in the newspapers because it was supposed to include, along with the music, the non-verbal cries a.s.sociated with love-making, and they had laughed so much at the groans and sighs that the b.l.o.o.d.y slabs of meat on the wooden boards got cold before they ate them. Although he thought it senseless to fill himself up with drink he did finish the whole bottle of wine they used to manage between them. And every night, making the excuse that he wanted to 'work on' the problem of the drill, pleading tiredness, lying about an invitation he didn't have, he went from brutal cold into fusty heat and out to brutal cold again, sitting in bars and going to the steak house or the Chinese restaurant and then back to bars again, until the final confrontation with cold was only half-felt on his stiff hot face and he trudged back along planes of freezing wind to the motel room or sat behind a silent taxi driver, sour to have to be out on such nights, as he had sat coming home alone from the airport with the snow flinging itself short of his face.

The freeze continued. The TV weatherman gabbling cheerily before his map showed the sweep of great snowstorms over whole arcs of this enormous country. On the airport she had left from, planes were grounded for days. The few trains there were, ran late. In addition, there was a postal strike and no letters, nothing from England, but also nothing from her, and no hope of a phone call, either, because she had flown straight to join the Professor at his mother's home in Florida, and she could neither telephone from the house nor hope to get out to do so from elsewhere at night, when he was in the motel room; they dared not risk a call to the Company during the day. He moved between the room whose silence, broken only by Walter Cronkite and the weatherman, filled with his own thoughts as if it were some monstrous projection, a cartoon balloon, issuing from his mind he moved between that room and the j.a.panese-architect-designed headquarters of the Company, which existed beneath blizzard and postal strike as an extraordinary bunker with contemplative indoor pools, raked-stone covered courtyards, cheerful rows of Jell-O and tuna fish salad. He woke in the dark mornings to hear the snow plough grinding along the streets. Men struck with picks into the rock of ice that covered the sidewalks a foot solid. The paper said all post offices were deep in drifts of acc.u.mulated mail, and sealed the mouths of all mail boxes. England did not exist and Florida was there really anyone in Florida? It was a place where, the weatherman said, the temperature was in the high seventies, and humid. She had forgotten a sheet of notes that must have come loose from the file, and the big yellow fake sponge (it was what she had been buying when they found themselves together in the drugstore of that other Middle Western town) that she now always brought along. She would be missing the sponge, in Florida, but there was no way to get it to her. He kept the sponge and the sheet of paper on the empty dressing table. Overnight, every night, more snow fell. Like a nail he was driven deeper and deeper into isolation.

He came from dinner with the Chief Mining Engineer and his party at the country club (the Chief Mining Engineer always took his wife out to eat on Sat.u.r.day nights) and was possessed by such a dread of the room that he told the taxi driver to take him to the big chain hotel, that had seventeen floors and a bar on top. It was full of parties like the one he had just left; he was the only solitary. Others did not look outside, but fiddling with a plastic c.o.c.ktail stirrer in the shape of a tiny sword he saw through the walls of gla.s.s against which the blue-dark pressed that they were surrounded by steppes of desolation out there beyond the feebly lit limits of the town. Wolves might survive where effluvia from paper mills had made fish swell up and float, and birds choked on their crops filled with pesticide-tainted seeds. He carried the howl somewhere inside him. It was as close as that slight whistling from the blocked sinus in his left nostril. When the bar shut he went down with those chattering others in an elevator that cast them all back into the street.

The smell in the motel room had not changed through his being alone there. He felt so awake, so ready to tackle something, some work or difficulty, that he took another drink, a big swallow of neat whisky, and, that night, wrote a letter to Willa. I'm not coming back, he said. I have gone so far away that it would be stupid to waste it I mean the stage I've reached. Of course I am sorry that you have been such a good wife, that you will always be such a good wife and nothing can change you. Because so long as I accept that you are a good wife, how can I find the guts to do it? I can go on being the same thing your opposite number, the good husband, hoping for a better position and more money for us all, coming on these b.l.o.o.d.y dreary trips every winter (why don't they ever send me in good weather). But it's through subjecting myself to all this, putting up with what we think of as these partings for the sake of my work, that I have come to understand that they are not partings at all. They are nothing like partings. Do you understand?

It went on for two more pages. When he had finished he put it in an airmail envelope, stamped it, went out again he had not taken off his coat or scarf and walked through the ringing of his own footsteps in the terrible cold to where he remembered there was a mail box. Like all the others, the mouth was sealed over by some kind of gummed tape, very strong stuff reinforced by a linen backing. He slit it with a piece of broken bottle he found in the gutter, and pushed the letter in. When he got back to the room he still had the bit of gla.s.s in his hand. He fell asleep in his coat but must have woken later and undressed because in the morning he found himself in bed and in pyjamas.

He did not know how drunk he had been that night when he did it. Not so drunk that he was not well aware of the chaos of the postal strike; everyone had been agreeing at the country club that most of the mail piled up at the GPO could never be expected to reach its destination. Not so drunk that he had not counted on the fact that the letter would never get to England. Why, he had broken into the mail box, and the boxes were not being cleared. Just drunk enough to take what seemed to him the thousand-to-one chance the letter might get there. Suppose the army were to be called in to break the strike, as they had been in New York? Yet, for several days, it did not seem to him that that letter would ever be dispatched and delivered that sort of final solution just didn't come off.

Then the joke went round the Company headquarters that mail was moving again: the Company had received, duly delivered, one envelope a handbill announcing a sale (already over) at a local department store. Some wit from the administration department put it up in the cafeteria. He suddenly saw the letter, a single piece of mail, arriving at the house in London. He thought of writing no, sending a cable now that communications were open again, instructing that the letter was to be destroyed unopened.

She would never open a letter if asked not to, of course. She would put it on the bedside table at his side of the bed and wait for a private night-time explanation, out of the hearing of the children. But suppose the letter had been lost, buried under the drifts of thousands, mis-sorted, mis-dispatched what would be made of a mystifying cable about a letter that had never come? The snow was melting, the streets glistened and his clothes were marked with the spray of dirty water thrown up by pa.s.sing cars. He had impulses sober ones to write and tell the Professor's wife, but when she unexpectedly did manage to telephone, the relief of pleasure at her voice back in the room so wrung him that he said nothing, and decided to say nothing in letters to her either; why disturb and upset her in this particularly disturbing and upsetting way.

He received a letter from London a fortnight old. There must have been later ones that hadn't turned up. He began to reason that if the letter did arrive in London, he might just manage to get there before it. And then? It was unlikely that he would be able to intercept it. But he actually began to hint to the colleagues at the Company that he would like to leave by the end of the week, be home in England for the weekend, after all, after six weeks' absence. The problem of the drill's optimum performance couldn't be solved in a day, anyway; he would have to go into the whole business back at the research laboratory in London. The Chief Mining Engineer said what a darned shame he had no leave now, before the greens were dry enough for the first eighteen holes of the year.

He forced himself not to think about the letter or at least to think about it as little as possible for the remaining days. Sometimes the idea of it came to him as a wild hope, like the sound of her voice suddenly in the room, from Florida. Sometimes it was a dry anxiety: what a childish, idiotic thing to have done, how insane to risk throwing everything away when, as the Professor's wife often said, n.o.body was being hurt: Professor Malcolm, the children, Willa none of them. Resentment flowed into him like unreasonable strength I am being hurt! Not so drunk, after all, not so drunk. Yet, of course, he was afraid of Willa, ranged there with two pretty children and a third with gla.s.ses blacked out over one eye to cure a squint. What could you do with that unreasonable, life-saving strength? Against that little family group? And, back again to the thought of the Professor's wife, his being afraid disgusted him. He spoke to her once more before he left, and said, Why do we have to come last? Why do we count least? She accepted such remarks as part of the ragged mental state of parting, not as significant of any particular development. He put the phone down on her voice for the last time for this time.

He took the plane from Chicago late on Friday afternoon and by midnight was in early morning London. No school on Sat.u.r.days and Willa was there with the children at Heathrow. Airports, airports. In some times and places, for some men, it was the battlefield or the bullring, the courtroom or the church; for him it was airports. In that architectural mode of cheap glamour suited only to bathos his strongest experiences came; despair could not be distinguished from indigestion induced by time change, dread produced the same drawn face as muscle cramp; private joy exhibited euphoria that looked no different from that induced by individual bottles of Moet et Chandon. These were the only places where he ever wanted to weep, and no places could have been more ridiculous for this to happen to him.

Willa had a new haircut and the children were overcome with embarra.s.sment by the eternal ten yards he had to walk towards them, and then flung themselves excitedly at him. Willa hugged his arm and pressed her cheek against that coatsleeve a moment; her mouth tasted of the toothpaste that they always used at home. The last phone call only nine hours ago, that's all it was receded into a depth, a distance, a silence as impossible to reach down through as the drifts of snow and piled-up letters . . . No letter, of course; he saw that at once. His wife cooked a special lunch and in the afternoon, when the children had gone off to the cinema with friends, he did what he must, he went to bed with her.

They talked a lot about the postal strike and how awful it had been. Nothing for days, more than two weeks! His mother had been maddening, telephoning every day, as if the whole thing were a conspiracy of the wife to keep the mother out of touch with her son. Crazy! And her letters had he really got only one? She must have written at least four times; knowing that letters might not arrive only made one want to write more, wasn't it perverse? Why hadn't he phoned? Not that she really wanted him to, it was so expensive . . . by the way, it turned out that the youngest child had knock knees, he would have to have remedial treatment. Well, that was what he had thought such an extravagance, and he couldn't believe, every day, that a letter might not come. She said, once: It must have been quite a nice feeling, sometimes, free of everything and everyone for a change peaceful without us, eh? And he pulled down his mouth and said, Some freedom, snowed under in a motel in that G.o.dforsaken town. But the mining group was so pleased with his work that he was given a bonus, and that pleased her, that made her feel it was worth it, worth even the time he had had to himself.

He watched for the postman; sometimes woke up at night in a state of alarm. He even arranged, that first week, to work at home until about midday getting his reports into shape. But there was nothing. For the second week, when he was keeping normal office hours, he read her face every evening when he came home; again, nothing. Heaven knows how she interpreted the way he looked at her: he would catch her full in the eyes, by mistake, now and then, and she would have a special slow smile, colouring up to her scrubbed little earlobes, the sort of smile you get from a girl who catches you looking at her across a bar. He was so appalled by that smile that he came home with a bunch of flowers. She embraced him and stood there holding the flowers behind his waist, rocking gently back and forth with him as they had done years ago. He thought wildly again how she was still pretty, quite young, no reason why she shouldn't marry again.

His anxiety for the letter slowly began to be replaced by confidence: it would not come. It was hopeless safe that letter would never come. Perhaps he had been very drunk after all, perhaps the mail box was a permanently disused one, or the letter hadn't really gone through the slot but fallen into the snow, the words melting and wavering while the ink ran with the thaw and the thin sheets of paper turned to pulp. He was safe. It was a good thing he had never told the Professor's wife. He took the children to the Motor Show, he got good seats for Willa, his mother and himself for the new Troilus and Cressida production at the Aldwych, and he wrote a long letter to Professor Malcolm's wife telling her about the performance and how much he would have loved to see it with her. Then he felt terribly depressed, as he often did lately now that he had stopped worrying about the letter and should have been feeling better, and there was nowhere to go for privacy, in depression, except the lavatory, where Willa provided the colour supplements of the Sunday papers for reading matter.

One morning just over a month after her husband had returned from the Middle West, Willa picked up the post from the floor as she brought the youngest home from school and saw a letter in her husband's handwriting. It had been date-stamped and re-date-stamped and was apparently about six weeks old. There is always something a bit flat about opening a letter from someone who has in the meantime long arrived and filled in, with anecdote and his presence, the time of absence when it was written. She vaguely saw herself producing it that evening as a kind of addendum to their forgotten emotions about the strike; by such small shared diversions did they keep their marriage close. But after she had given the little one his lunch she found a patch of sun for herself and opened the letter after all. In that chilly spring air, unaccustomed warmth seemed suddenly to become aural, sang in her ears at the pitch of cicadas, and she stopped reading. She looked out into the small garden amazedly, accusingly, as if to challenge a hoax. But there was no one to answer for it. She read the letter through. And again. She kept on reading it and it produced almost a s.e.xual excitement in her, as a frank and erotic love letter might. She could have been looking through a keyhole at him lying on another woman. She took it to some other part of the garden, as the cat often carried the b.l.o.o.d.y and mangled mess of its prey from place to place, and read it again. It was a perfectly calm and reasonable and factual letter saying that he would not return, but she saw that it was indeed a love letter, a love letter about someone else, a love letter such as he had never written to her. She put it back in the creased and stained envelope and tore it up, and then she went out the gate and wandered down to the bus stop, where there was a lamp-post bin, and dropped the bits of paper into its square mouth among the used tickets.

Open House Frances Taver was on the secret circuit for people who wanted to find out the truth about South Africa. These visiting journalists, politicians and churchmen all had an itinerary arranged for them by their consular representatives and overseas information services, or were steered around by a 'foundation' of South African business interests eager to improve the country's image, or even carted about to the model black towns.h.i.+ps, universities and beerhalls by the South African State Information service itself. But all had, carefully hidden among the most private of private papers (the nervous ones went so far as to keep it in code), the short list that would really take the lid off the place: the people one must see. A few were names that had got into the newspapers of the world as particularly vigorous opponents or victims of apartheid; a writer or two, a newspaper editor or an outspoken bishop. Others were known only within the country itself, and were known about by foreign visitors only through people like themselves who had carried the short list before. Most of the names on it were white names which was rather frustrating, when one was after the real thing; but it was said in London and New York that there were still ways of getting to meet Africans, provided you could get hold of the right white people.

Frances Taver was one of them. Had been for years. From the forties when she had been a trade union organiser and run a mixed union of garment workers while this was legally possible, in the fifties, after her marriage, when she was manager of a black-and-white theatre group before that was disbanded by new legislation, to the early sixties, when she hid friends on the run from the police Africans who were members of the newly banned political organisations before the claims of that sort of friends.h.i.+p had to be weighed against the risk of the long spells of detention without trial introduced to betray it.

Frances Taver had few friends left now, and she was always slightly embarra.s.sed when she heard an eager American or English voice over the telephone, announcing an arrival, a too-brief stay (of course), and the inevitable fond message of greetings to be conveyed from so-and-so whoever it was who happened to have supplied the short list. A few years ago it had been fun and easy to make these visitors an excuse for a gathering that quite likely would turn into a party. The visitor would have a high old time learning to dance the kwela with black girls; he would sit fascinated, trying to keep sober enough to take it all in, listening to the fluent and fervent harangue of African, white and Indian politicals, drinking and arguing together in a paradox of personal freedom that, curiously, he couldn't remember finding where there were no laws against the mixing of races. And no one enjoyed his fascination more than the objects of it themselves; Frances Taver and her friends were amused, in those days, in a friendly way, to knock the 'right' ideas slightly askew. In those days: that was how she thought of it; it seemed very long ago. She saw the faces, sometimes, a flash in an absence filled with newspaper accounts of trials, hearsay about activities in exile, chance remarks from someone who knew someone else who had talked over the fence with one who was under house arrest. Another, an African friend banned for his activities with the African National Congress, who had gone 'underground', came to see her at long intervals, in the afternoons when he could be sure the house would be empty. Although she was still youngish, she had come to think of 'those days' as her youth; and he was a vision strayed from it.

The voice on the telephone, this time, was American soft, cautious no doubt the man thought the line was tapped. Robert Greenman Ceretti, from Was.h.i.+ngton; while they were talking, she remembered that this was the political columnist who had somehow been connected with the Kennedy administration. Hadn't he written a book about the Bay of Pigs? Anyway, she had certainly seen him quoted.

'And how are the Brauns I haven't heard for ages-' She made the usual enquiries about the well-being of the mutual acquaintance whose greetings he brought, and he made the usual speech about how much he was hoping he'd be able to meet her? She was about to say, as always, come to dinner, but an absurd recoil within her, a moment of dull panic, almost, made her settle for an invitation to drop in for a drink two days later. 'If I can be of any help to you, in the meantime?' she had to add; he sounded modest and intelligent.

'Well, I do appreciate it. I'll look forward to Wednesday.'

At the last minute she invited a few white friends to meet him, a doctor and his wife who ran a tuberculosis hospital in an African reserve, and a young journalist who had been to America on a leaders.h.i.+p exchange programme. But she knew what the foreign visitor wanted of her and she had an absurd again, that was the word compulsion to put him in the position where, alas, he could ask it. He was a small, cosy, red-headed man with a chipmunk smile, and she liked him. She drove him back to his hotel after the other guests had left, and they chatted about the articles he was going to write and the people he was seeing had he been able to interview any important Nationalists, for example? Well, not yet, but he hoped to have something lined up for the following week, in Pretoria. Another thing he was worried about (here it came), he'd hardly been able to exchange a word with any black man except the one who cleaned his room at the hotel.

She heard her voice saying casually, 'Well, perhaps I might be able to help you, there,' and he took it up at once, gravely, gratefully, sincerely, smiling at her 'I hoped you just might. If I could only get to talk with a few ordinary, articulate people. I mean, I think I've been put pretty much in the picture by the courageous white people I've been lucky enough to meet people like you and your husband but I'd like to know a little at first hand about what Africans themselves are thinking. If you could fix it, it'd be wonderful.'

Now it was done, at once she withdrew, from herself rather than him. 'I don't know. People don't want to talk any more. If they're doing anything, it's not something that can be talked about. Those that are left. Black and white. The ones you ought to see are shut away.'

They were sitting in the car, outside the hotel. She could see in his encouraging, admiring, intent face how he had been told that she, if anyone, could introduce him to black people, hers, if anyone's, was the house to meet them.

There was a twinge of vanity: 'I'll let you know. I'll ring you, then, Bob.' Of course they were already on first-name terms; lonely affinity overleapt acquaintance in South Africa when like-minded whites met.

'You don't have to say more than when and where. I didn't like to talk, that first day, over the phone,' he said.

They always had fantasies of danger. 'What can happen to you?' she said. Her smile was not altogether pleasant. They always protested, too, that their fear was not for themselves, it was on your behalf, etc. 'You've got your pa.s.sport. You don't live here.'

She did not see Jason Madela from one month's end to the next but when she telephoned him at the building where she remembered him once having had an office on the fringe of the white town, he accepted the invitation to lunch just as if he had been one of the intimates who used to drop in any time. And then there was Edgar, Edgar Xixo the attorney, successor to her old friend Samson Dumile's practice; one could always get him. And after that? She could have asked Jason to bring someone along, perhaps one of the boxing promoters or gamblers it amused him to produce where the drinks were free but that would have been too obvious, even for the blind eye that she and Jason Madela were able to turn to the nature of the invitation. In the end she invited little Spuds Buthelezi, the reporter. What did it matter? He was black, anyway. There was no getting out of the whole business, now.

She set herself to cook a good lunch, just as good as she had ever cooked, and she put out the drinks and the ice in the shelter of the gla.s.sed-in end of the big veranda, so that the small company should not feel lost. Her fading hair had been dyed to something approximating its original blonde and then streaked with grey, the day before, and she felt the appearance to be pleasingly artificial; she wore a bright, thick linen dress that showed off sunburned shoulders like the k.n.o.bs of well-polished furniture, and she was aware that her blue eyes were striking in contrast with her tough brown face. She felt Robert Greenman Ceretti's eyes on her, a moment, as he stood in the sunny doorway; yes, she was also a woman, queening it alone among men at lunch.

'You mix the martinis, there's a dear,' she said. 'It's such a treat to have a real American one.' And while he bent about over bottles with the neatness of a small man, she was in and out of the veranda, shepherding the arrival of the other guests.

'This is Bob Bob Ceretti, here on a visit from the States Edgar Xixo.'

'Jason, this is Bob Ceretti, the man who has the ear of presidents-'

Laughter and protests mingled with the handing round of the drinks. Jason Madela, going to fat around the nape but still handsome in a frowning, Clark Gable way, stood about, gla.s.s in hand, as if in the habit acquired at c.o.c.ktail parties. With his air of being distracted from more important things by irresistibly amusing asides, he was correcting a matter of terminology for Robert Ceretti 'No, no, but you must understand that in the towns.h.i.+ps, a "situation" is a different thing entirely well, I'm a situation, f'rinstance-'

He c.o.c.ked his smile, for confirmation, to Xixo, whose eyes turned from one face to another in obedient glee 'Oh, you're the muti man!'

'No, wait, but I'm trying to give Bob an obvious example' more laughter, all round ' a man who wears a suit every day, like a white man. Who goes to the office and prefers to talk English.'

'You think it derives from the use of the word as a genteelism for "job"? Would you say? You know the Situations Vacant column in the newspapers?' The visitor sat forward on the edge of his chair, smiling up closely. 'But what's this "muti" you mentioned, now maybe I ought to have been taking notes instead of shaking Frances's martini pitcher.'