“We muddle along, Emma and I,” said Munday.
Silvano stammered, then said, “But she does look different.”
“Emma? In what way?”
“Thinner, I think,” said Silvano.
“She might have lost a few pounds,” said Munday. “Change of climate—it’s to be expected.”
“Not only that,” said Silvano. “Also the face is tired and the hands are shaking.”
“What you’re saying is that you think she’s sick.”
“I think,” said Silvano uncertainly.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Munday, and he drove faster in annoyance. “She’s never felt better in her life. She’s home. It’s meant a lot to her—to us both— coming back to England. Our life is here. I admit I had some reservations about coming back—it’s not easy after so long. But now I see it was what we had to do. I was wrong about Africa, I was wrong about England.” He rambled on, as if talking to himself. “You can’t stay overseas, miles and miles away in some godforsaken place, and go on denying you have a country and always trying to accommodate yourself, pretending you have a life and friends. Yes, it’s depressing. I lost ten years that way. I was a young man when I went out to Africa—I’m not young any more.” He gunned the engine and smiled. “But we’re back now, and we’re jolly glad of it. You can’t blame us for that, can you?”
“No,” said Silvano.
“And you’ll go home, of course?”
“I like London.”
“You like London,” said Munday. “You have money and a flat—you’re luckier than most English people. But what happens when your scholarship runs out and they raise your rent? Have you thought of that?”
“I can teach,” said Silvano.
“Rubbish!” said Munday. "I can’t even get a university job just now, so what chance is there for you?”
“Even bus conductors earn high salaries in England,” said Silvano.
“High? What does that mean? Higher than what? Herdboys in Bwamba, coffee-pickers in Toro, Uganda poets? You tell me—you’re an economist,” said Munday. He grumbled, “Bus conductors don’t live in Earl’s Court.”
“I would like to stay,” said Silvano in an obstinate whisper.
“Go home,” said Munday.
“It’s primitive. People starve. You know that.”
“No one starves in Bwamba,” said Munday. “You put your women to work in the fields. Your wife, Silvano, remember? The system works—inherited land, a little magic, and a bunch of bananas a day.”
“I never liked it.”
“It’s all you have,” said Munday. “Read my book.”
“I will read it,” said Silvano. “Where can I buy it?” Munday didn’t reply. He changed gears on a hill and then said, “You have no business here.”
“I have friends here,” said Silvano, insulted but controlling his anger. “You had friends in Africa.”
“I had subjects,” said Munday. “Friendship is only possible between equals.” Silvano turned to the side window. He was slumped in the seat, clutching his knees, looking at the fields whipping by. Munday was irritated anew by his hair, its absurd shape parodying mourning, and by his clothes, which Munday saw as pure folly.
Munday parked at the station. He jerked the hand brake. He said, “Don’t you dare hurt that girl.” When Silvano boarded the train, the small frivolously dressed black man, pulling his cardboard suitcase through the high metal door of the carriage, Munday felt a pang of sorrow for him, he looked so sad. Munday regretted the conversation in the car—not his ferocity, but his candor. Silvano was behind the window, alone in the compartment, wagging his yellow palm at Munday. Munday waved back, and the train hooted and pulled away. He had said too much— worse, he had simplified. How could he explain that his England was a black house whose rooms and shadows he understood, and a woman—ghostlier than any African—who had bewitched him with passion? He had returned to a house and a woman. But he knew that, as with Alec—that last glimpse of him disappearing into a crowd of London shoppers— Silvano would sink, and nothing that Munday might say could matter, neither consolation nor blame. The truth was simple: he never wanted to see him again.
16
He had watched Silvano go, and it was as if he had rid himself of the continent. He drove home from the station under a sky lighted as subtly as skin, a swell of mild light with a tincture of blood, and raw gold sinews breaking from a sun pulped by clouds. This evening light was too complicated for him to see any drama in it—like the African sunset which altered too fast for him to assign it any metaphor but murder —but the light itself at this hour was his triumph. It was nearly six o’clock, and yet the light continued, thickening and changing, becoming more physical as it dimmed.
He had seen his death in the early darkness of winter, the pale daylight had been for him like a brief waking from sickness. But the seasonal illness was passing; he measured his mood by these lengthening days with a pleasure he had not known in the unvarying equatorial light. The fear had left him: he had overcome it by enduring it, like his heart, which had not pained hifti for weeks. So he had got well, and he imagined the thick scar on his heart narrowed to a harmless lip of tissue. His health allowed him to ignore his body, the intrusive wrapping of muscle he had felt failing him so keenly, weighing him with a kind of stupidity. Now he fed his mind on sleep, restored himself in the darkened room under the disc of Caroline’s face, a fixed image of sensation which, hovering in the room, amounted to a presence almost flesh. He felt her pressure so strongly on him in the Black House he didn’t need to ask where she lived, and at times in the living room with Emma, the air before the fire bore his lover’s odor so obviously it embarrassed him. It was a haunting that confronted his mind and aroused his body, but it inhibited his conversation with Emma, as Flack’s voice had, his mewing mutter against the wall, on their first day at The Yew Tree.
Munday had thought, recovering, that Emma had also recovered. She was, after all, his wife. It had not occurred to him that Emma could be ill if his heart improved, and it was only after Silvano commented on it that he had gone back to the house and seen her unwell. She looked tired, perhaps she was coming down with something; she had that lustreless inattention that precedes real sickness—not sick yet but, abstracted and falling silent, in decline. He was sorry; he was also cross, for what Silvano had said was disrespectful, not necessarily in English terms, but in Bwamba culture which forbade such intimate observations except within a family. Silvano was not part of the family. Munday didn’t like his presuming; he objected to an African tribesman telling him his wife had lost weight. He didn’t need a stranger to call attention to the hysteria that came over her when he was unresponsive. But he was ashamed that he had been too preoccupied to notice it earlier. He had his own diagnosis: she was taking refuge in illness—refuge from her dread. He laughed at the bitter irony: they had come to the country (she had chosen the place!) for his health, and now it was hers that was shaky.
He was not sure how to deal with it. He was circumspect, then bullying, and finally hearty, offering encouragement, usually at mealtimes, for he was in his study the rest of the time, while she moped, watching Mrs. Branch dust, or sat before the garden window with a sketch pad in her lap.
One evening he said, “Emma, you're not eating.”
“I don't have any appetite.”
“A good walk would set you up.”
“I hate your walks,” she said. “You make them such an occasion.”
“Why don’t you invite Margaret down here one weekend?”
“It's a bother. And there's her job—she’s probably not free,” said Emma.