Once in London she came to be rated amongst the six most dangerous enemies beyond the borders. Connected with the Azanian Liberation Front, romantically linked for a time with one of its leaders, Kaiser Zulu, she was branded a convinced and radical believer in the violent overthrow of the Regime. Rumours and legends constantly appeared in the press. Red Magda they called her. He remembered Magdalena’s mother had made an attempt to save her. She announced that she would go abroad and talk to her daughter, call on her to repent. Various well-wishers raised money. Her local bowling club of course, a building society, and several newspapers ran the campaign to raise money to send this brave mother to save her daughter from the clutches of a terror movement, notorious for its cruel atrocities throughout the southern sub-continent. The usual photographs of flyblown and swollen corpses of murdered nuns, frozen in typically blind poses of hopeless entreaty, were shown, the pathetic stumps of what had been arms and legs pushing against the concrete air. Those shockingly familiar pictures the newspapers so loved, of decaying remains pictured against the dusty landscape of Africa which seemed in a strange way to lend a curiously gentle, eerily inoffensive aspect to the once-human husk, as if the horror melted away amid these vast indifferent surroundings and the bones, the hide, the carcass spread-eagled in the veld like a lion kill, or a drought victim, was another of the necessary sights of Africa. Except these were holy remains. The papers said so. Sacred clay. Relics. Powerful muti. As those who killed them and those who photographed them knew, in Africa the only good nun was a dead nun.
Magdalena’s mother’s visit of redemption went badly wrong. She got on famously with Kaiser Zulu, who, she said, reminded her of her old cookboy, and she was pictured singing choruses of ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ in some tourist nightspot and told reporters, on her return, that her daughter wasn’t as black as she had been painted. Angry letters filled the newspapers from readers demanding their money back.
RED MAGDA’S MOTHER DUPED! the headlines yelled.
The sunshine lay shyly on the grey-green fields beside the motorway. Blanchaille’s first glimpse of England showed it to be small and tightly woven. The fields fenced everything within view. Nothing out of eyeshot, everywhere contained, ordered, bounded. The jumble of houses to left and right, three small factories, a smudge of development eating away the green and then the countryside spluttering out in a last fling of parks and trees as the houses began in earnest, but still, even to Blanchaille’s untrained eye, recognisably houses, double storeys, detached, heavily planted in muddy yards, in the strange green smallness of the countryside.
Magdalena drove well, fast, her small, pretty hands in speckled yellow gloves calm on the wheel. The road swept upwards and ran as an elevated motorway into the solid, metalled city with its row upon row of semi-detached dwellings. It struck the stranger, the sandy tongued foreigner, blinking with lack of sleep, this sudden mass of building. It asserted itself, this solid, glued immobility of London, everywhere packed, joined, touching, far fewer single houses now and these were bulge-fronted, pebble-dashed, red tiled roofs. And then blocks of them, stuck solid, identical, joined irretrievably and running on for streets seemingly without end. He shivered. Magdalena must have seen this for she smiled.
‘You thin-blooded African creatures, travelling north without coats. You could freeze to death here. Even in summer.’
‘I brought nothing, nothing except what I stand up in.’
‘You’re unprepared then, in many ways. I’m glad to see you, Blanchie. But I have to tell you I really don’t know what you’re doing here. Your clerical career was both wild and original. You upset the Church, your friends, the Regime and you did it damn well. We all depended on you, watching from here. You were useful there. I’m afraid you may be at a bit of a loss here.’ She lit a cigarette, the grey smoke blurred and clung to the furry coat she wore. She smiled, perhaps to soften the force of her remarks and showed sharp white teeth, but when he protested he had not come ‘here’ in any sense but was merely passing through he was cut short by a growl of displeasure.
‘This place is hell. I can’t tell you what I’ve been through. People told me I was lucky to have missed the balance of payments crisis. They say that was worse. The English are a strange race, obsessed with economics and they seldom bath. You’ve no idea how I suffered when I first arrived. When I came the country was governed by a series of pressure groups who went around shrieking at one another about incomprehensible causes. The daily obsession of the country was the value of the pound. “Pound up a penny” the headlines screamed, day after day. “Pound down a half penny!” Nothing else counted. Nowhere else featured. Wild rumours swept the land. I remember going to the opera when suddenly through the stalls and around the banks of boxes ran the whisper: “Pound lost three points against the dollar!” Pandemonium! Strong men tore their hair, women swooned. And given the lack of washing facilities, to which I’ve already referred, you can imagine what a malodorous demoralised crowd they were. Like an elderly woman with a guilty past they are beset by their desire to confess, on the one hand, and deny it all, on the other. They regret, repent and deplore all they’ve been, never realising that it’s only their past that makes them worth knowing.’
She lived in Sealion Mansions off Old Marylebone Road. A squat, solid, peeling green-painted block smelling of wax, dust and the sea. From the fishmonger’s opposite there drifted an aroma, a cocktail of brine, shell and sand wafting across the street. A corridor of fragrance crossed the road between fishmonger’s and entrance foyer along which the sea tang drifted from the boxes of silver fish, wide-eyed in their beds of crushed ice.
Also staring up at the flat were two men in raincoats. The sky was clear.
Magdalena’s flat was luxurious but small. A little entrance hall, a sitting-room, a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. The bedroom was done in apricot silk.
‘You’re looking for a shining city on a hill, a sort of heaven, but you won’t find it, Blanchie. Not here, at any rate.’
‘I’m not looking here.’
Then why stop over?’
‘I tell you, I don’t know.’
He admired her bedroom. She seemed pleased. It was her lair, she said. An odd term. Above the circular bed hung a large painting in which two opposing forces shaped like tattered kites clashed violently. Red and black, two antagonistic whirlpools, fighting cocks, shredded and bloody, whirling and tearing at each other. Or perhaps two circular saws meeting tooth-on and the very sounds of their grinding collision were reflected in the shards of green and yellow paint with which the outer edges of the canvas were pierced.
She made him scrambled eggs and she ordered him to sleep in the large circular bed. He awoke in the late afternoon with the soft grey light in the room and found her above him, straddling him, naked. Her hand on his chest pinned him on the bed.
‘Stay. Don’t go on.’
Stay where? What did she mean? Sleepily he asked for an explanation but she drew him up into her and then fell to work from above, deftly rolling him from side to side and so their love-making began. Or not love-making really, but a struggle of sorts, without words, hot and desperate. She darting her head down to kiss him, his temple, foot, hand, sharp stinging kisses and he responding, no not responding but retaliating, giving little nips to lobes and elbows so that she squealed when she came, her hands gripping his buttocks and ramming herself home again and again, long after it was over. And still she would not release him and it was to be done again, their pubic bones jarred like shunting engines. He was bruised now. How hard she was down there, how rough! But she forced him over and over until he came at last, briefly, again, hopelessly, quite exhausted now, lying with his face in her neck and beginning to feel the pain in his back. She must have scratched him, the sweat ran into the score marks her nails had made and stung, but still she did not let up and since he was now past any sort of movement, slid from him, came out sideways, sliding, lubricated with sweat and turned him over now, mounted, reared up, placing precisely the lip of her vagina against his coccyx, rubbed herself there, scouring, grinding herself until she came to her climax, her breath hoarse in his ear.
He did not hear her leave. Perhaps he slept, briefly, or even passed out, but when he at last left the bed to look for her she’d gone.