He was not disgusted by the memory, though he wondered at his bravado, seeing in sexual surrender a kind of courage. Emma was saying, “After all the trouble the Awdrys went to—” He pitied her for knowing so little and he wished to tell her, so she could know how far beyond her be had gone, how she would never again limit his life with her timid shadow. She rearranged her breakfast, making disorder on her plate, sliding and cutting the egg, breaking the toast; but she didn’t eat. He saw her dwelling uneasily here, as she had in Africa, where every day promised him a sensation of special longing and she had complained of the heat and flies.
“Do you suppose we’ll ever see that woman again?” Her question was innocent; he listened for suspicion but heard none.
“Which woman?”
“The glamorous one.”
“Oh, is that what glamorous means?” Munday continued eating. ‘Tve often wondered.”
“She was trying,” Emma said.
“She. was a welcome relief from the others,” said Munday. “They were awfully silly—going on about the Irish.”
“I think I was unfair to her. I hope she didn’t notice.”
Munday was confounded; he had no reply. Even the smallest observation mocked what he knew. Her Caroline was an occasional dread, but his lover was real.
Emma said, “I thought she wanted me to go.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t know how women look at each other.
They don’t have to say a single word—their faces say everything. She frightened me horribly.”
“They were all pretty frightening.”
“She was different,” said Emma. “You’re not a fool, Alfred—you must have noticed that.”
“And that’s why you left the party.”
Emma nodded. “I really believed she wanted me to go.”
“Do you believe that now?”
“No,” said Emma softly. “It was foolish of me.”
“You had all their sympathy,” said Munday. “They asked about you.”
“After you dropped me, I felt so—I don’t know —so safe. I made a fire, I’m not sure why—it was a lot of bother. I had a glass of warm milk, and then I went to bed. I was ’dead to the world—I didn’t hear you come in, and usually do.” Emma put her hands on the table and sighed. “And I know why I slept so soundly, too.”
“Why?”
“Guilt,” said Emma. “I felt so guilty.”
“Don’t say that,” said Munday, whispering the consolation. Guilt!
“You can’t be expected to know,” said Emma. “I haven’t told you everything.”
“There was that woman you saw at the window.” His bluff businesslike tone suggested it was preposterous.
“I don’t know what I saw,” said Emma. “I hate this house.”
“You wanted to come here,” said Munday. “It was your idea, the country.”
“Don’t throw it in my face,” she said. “Can’t we go to London?”
“The next time I need a haircut,” he said.
“Alfred, I’ve had such terrifying dreams,” she said. But she said it with great sadness rather than shock. “Tell me about them.”
“No,” she said swiftly, and her eyes flashed, “I couldn’t do that”
“Sometimes it helps.”
“Filth,” she said. “You'd think I was raving mad."
“Everyone has unusual dreams.”
“Not like this. Never.” She pushed her plate aside.
“Probably far worse,” he said. He looked at her. “I dream of Africa.”
She turned away and said, “I dream of you."
“Then I’m sorry I disturb your sleep.” he said.
She looked up at him, and as if she knew how distant he was and was calling to him from the edge of an uncrossable deepness, she said, “Alfred, you do love me, don’t you?”
“Very much,” he said. In the past he had answered her like a man testing his voice to reassure himself in a strange place, hoping to hear a confident truth in the echo of his words. This time he was lying— it had to be a lie: the truth would kill her—but, because he knew its falseness beforehand, he said the lie with a convincing vigor, and he added, “With all my heart.”
He spent the rest of the morning in the living room, with his notebook in his lap, writing little, savoring the memory the room inspired in him. Mrs. Branch had cleaned (he had said to her, “Sorry about all those ashes”); she had started a meager fire of sticks and coal—she imposed her frugality everywhere in the house—and restored the room to its former dustiness. The sleeves of sunlight at the window were alive with swirling dust particles that had been hallowed by Caroline; and the few flat splashes of wax on the mantelshelf, seemingly so unimportant, recalled an important moment. The room was special, it held Caroline's presence, her whispers, the worn carpet bore the imprint of her knees; in Mrs. Branch's little fire was a fleeting odor of Caroline’s magnificent blaze, which lingered as well in sooty streaks on the mantletree—that was especially blackened, and looked as if it had contained an explosion.
Not a room, but a setting he understood, that had involved him and given him hope. The Black House was finally his, and it was Caroline’s doing: she knew the house, she had directed him there, and Emma sleeping through it upstairs had kept the act from being casual. It was deliberate. He refused to see it as betrayal. It was too bad that in being faithful to himself he had been unfaithful to Emma, but he consoled himself with the secrecy of it. He did not believe he had wronged her—she barely knew him and she could not know more without being hurt. So he was determined to protect her, the more so now because she needed his reassurance. He would never leave her, and he told himself that he had not lied to her: he dearly loved her—but in a way she kept it from completion, for she required his love, and she depended on him, but she gave him little for it. She had little to give; she was stricken with a kind of poverty and would fail without him.
But this poverty in Emma, demanding his attention, had diminished his respect for her, and the boldness he saw in Caroline, the skeletal brightness in her hair and bones, cornered him, challenged his heart and gave him a feeling of triumph. It would be brief—that was the worst of sex; but he was under a sentence of death: he deserved and needed that adventure. It had led him to an understanding of Emma, whose doom was to live famished; it had also turned him to examine his body. He had begun to despise his heart as a failure, but now he valued it and looked at it with wonderment and a renewed affection. It was a narcissism he did not think was possible in a man his age; but then, he was not old. He had had a second chance. He had enjoyed another woman and was not sorry. With luck he would repeat it; it was not unusual, many people did the same.
The work he had set for himself, so long delayed, began to interest him, and during the days that followed he wrote with purpose, giving every word a meticulous dedication—as if he were being admiringly watched—filling his notebook with observations about the Bwamba. He had been returned to himself, and he was amazed at his resolve. He loved the Black House now, and in his study, using his new patience, he was able to recall particular details of Africa he had earlier thought had been lost to him. He recovered them and saw their value, which was his value as an anthropologist. He had regained his will; his new serenity allowed him the perspective to see the stages of his African experience, how he had grown and changed beside the people he had studied, who were themselves changeless. He wrote with surprise and pleasure of how he had gone to that remote place behind the mountains and set up house and endured suspicion and the discomforts of the equatorial climate in order to witness the daily life of a people whose past and present were indistinguishable, who had confided in him their deepest secrets, which were heart-breaking, and who stank of witchcraft. Like them, he had cut himself off—gladly at first, then with misgivings. And though there had been times among them when he had despairingly seen himself as no different from them, existing in the season-less monotony of swamp and savannah, now on the notebook pages they appeared like little creatures from prehistory, fixed like fossils, with simple habits —using the technology of child campers—and uttering inconsequential threats with a murderous charm. He was so different! The ten years flashed in his mind; he saw the Bwamba from a great height, like a man in a meadow who kicks over a stone and looks down at the mass of wood-lice on the underside scurrying for cover.