“Hence the artillery fire at night,” said Clara. “We try to carry on as best we can, but who knows how it will all end?”
NOW, AS THOUGH to signal a change of subject, she took off her glasses. Her huge owl eyes were restored to normal size, green and lively.
“I hope you don’t mind that Charles has told me all about you and your unhappy love affair,” she said. “I must say — and he agrees with me — that it’s to your credit how deeply you were affected. But you’re young and have the whole world before you. Rest assured, in time, you’ll find happiness.”
Here we go again, I thought: Dupont’s told her to give me some advice.
“The main thing is not to retreat, not to fear getting involved again in future,” she said. “Some of us swear off any entanglements after we’ve been hurt. But that isn’t a virtue. It’s just a form of cowardice — a fear of being wounded again.”
That comment hurt a little.
“Of course, in your case I don’t mean right now,” she said, to make me feel better. “You’re still in your period of mourning. But you must never become a cynic about love. If you do, the very women who are worth loving will sense an emptiness in you and will stay away. They’ll understand you can’t take root in their hearts, nor they in yours.”
She was enjoying very much having someone new to tell her theories to, I suspected. I wondered if advice to a novice like myself would culminate in some revelations about her own life and experiences in the matter of love.
I couldn’t have been more right.
“As a matter of fact, I myself know exactly what you’ve been through,” she said. “Yes, I married a man two decades ago, now. Just one week after our wedding in England, my new husband and I came to Africa. We were both twenty-one and quite a pair of innocents. I’d barely finished my nursing training and he was an adventurous, idealistic schoolteacher — that’s why he wanted to work in a part of the world that was most in need.”
I did my addition: twenty-one, twenty years ago would make her now forty-one. Her skin was so wrinkled by the sun I’d thought she was much older. Yet in other ways she might still have been twenty-one: her green eyes were so youthful and lively and there was an energy about her that seemed somehow out of place in that worn face.
“My husband died unexpectedly just four years ago,” she said. “Physically he wasn’t a strong man, so the climate and various tropical diseases killed him though he was quite young. He was the first District Education Officer in the region of the Basio people, five hundred miles south of here. I was in charge of nursing at the local hospital. I was very much in love with him when we came here — I wouldn’t have left England otherwise. But the man I loved turned out not to be the same as the man I married. I don’t suppose that’s too uncommon.”
Clara sipped her tea and I waited to hear more.
“You see,” she said, putting down her cup, “during that period of almost twenty years when he was on his various official education tours — they lasted for weeks, sometimes months — he’d been intimate with a variety of Basio women. I’d never have known if he hadn’t confessed it to me just six months before he died. I’d have been in blissful ignorance and broken-hearted at his death.”
She’d caught my interest now and wanted to make the situation quite clear.
“The way he behaved wasn’t entirely his fault,” she said. “It was one of those cultural things neither of us had been aware of when he took the position. In much of the Basio region there’s no such concept as fidelity in marriage. Everything’s communal. Property belongs to the people as a whole and all children are raised communally. Aside from those specific occasions when husband and wife get together for the purposes of propagation, sexual activities are communal too, based on what the Basio regard as the quite normal desire of a husband or wife for a variety of partners.
“The fact that my husband was a handsome man, as well as a stranger from another race and a guest in their territory, made him very much in demand. If he’d refused the advances of their women, not only would it have been a huge insult to the Basio culture, it would have made his work as Education Officer quite impossible. So he didn’t refuse.
“When he eventually confessed to me, I understood his predicament on an intellectual level, and I didn’t really blame him. He insisted he still loved me and had loved me all along— that his activities with the Basio women had nothing whatsoever to do with love. But inwardly I was very disappointed in him.”
It was so silent in the room now that we could hear the cicadas in the flower beds outside. Clara sipped her tea, choosing her words carefully.
“The fact was, after he confessed, I just couldn’t find it in myself to love him anymore,” she said. “Still, we made a decision never to raise the subject of his extramarital activities again. During his final months — of course, we didn’t know that’s what they were — whenever he came back from one of his trips, we’d pretend nothing questionable had gone on while he was on the road.”
I thought that must have been a very hard act to keep up.
“You’re right,” she said. “The time came when I couldn’t bear it anymore and I’d made up my mind to leave him and go back to England. But before I could tell him my decision, news came that he’d died of a heart attack in one of the villages he was visiting. After his death, I wanted to get away from the Basio region as quickly as possible and applied for the position here.”
I nodded sympathetically and she again sipped her tea.
“I was sure I’d had quite enough of men,” she said. “Then Charles appeared. Funnily enough, he reminded me of my husband in some ways — certainly with his adventurous spirit. Probably these are always the kinds of men who’re willing to come to such dangerous, out-of-the-way places. A woman can fall in love with them but she can’t fully trust them, as I’ve learned from experience. I’m sure Charles isn’t faithful either, but somehow that’s not as important to me as it once was. Which tells me something about myself I hadn’t quite understood before.”
She could see I looked puzzled.
“You see, the main thing is I love him, and he loves me, too,” she said. “He’d never lie to me about that. It’s what counts most of all between a man and a woman.” She nodded her head in satisfaction at the idea.
I was beginning to feel unwell again, but I wanted to ask her how she could be so sure her conclusion was valid. Before I could ask her anything, however, she returned to my own love problem.
“From what I gather,” she said, “you fled from Scotland before you really had a chance to find out why that girl rejected you.”
Again, I didn’t like to hear someone else use the word “fled” to describe my action, no matter how accurate it might be. Also, I was feeling really unwell.
Clara hadn’t noticed and kept talking.
“You don’t really know what was going through the girl’s mind,” she said. “Maybe she had very sound reasons for what she did. But, of course, you’re still at the stage in life when you think that if the world lets down a good person like you, you can never trust it again. When you get older, you’ll see that’s not the way it is.”
My head was so befuddled by that stage, I wasn’t really sure what she meant.
JUST THEN THERE was a knock at the door, followed by the entrance of the nurse who’d brought me to the dining room. She was carrying a newly born baby wrapped in a little shawl. She didn’t say anything, but looked worried. Clara put her glasses on again, got up, and took the baby from her. She opened the top of the shawl and looked inside for a moment.