‘In East Africa, yes. I went there first after Suez in ’57, taught for several years in Nairobi, then the University at Kampala, finally in Nyasaland — more or less in a sort of technical college in Blantyre. It’s Malawi now. That was in the early sixties.’ I knew Graham’s curriculum vitae off pat and looking into all the rampant tropical greenery, I felt for a second as if I’d actually experienced Graham’s Africa — instead of just a holiday there once, in Nairobi at one of the near game parks, from Cairo in the fifties.
‘Nyasaland was just next to us. I mean — about five hundred miles away. But that’s next-door in Africa. We left when the Federation broke up, and went to Kenya with Jomo. Guy was always very multi-racial.’ She smiled slightly.
‘Yes, I left Malawi then, too. Came back to London.’
It was a ridiculous charade. I couldn’t look at her.
‘With the British Council, weren’t you?’
She could so easily have said ‘were you?’ but she had to press it. I could so easily, so properly, have said ‘How do you know?’ since I’d said nothing of this to her husband the previous day. All he knew was that I was an ex-COI man. But of course I knew how she knew and I let her keep her games. I knew how she must feel — wanting quickly, desperately to hear all — what had happened to George Graham, and why. And I knew, for all her headlong questions, the restraints she must have been imposing on herself. We hadn’t begun yet; we were in the middle of 42nd Street.
‘Yes, I was with the British Council in Africa. What did you — he do — in Rhodesia? Mining?’
She smiled properly now for a moment, for the first time that day, like a woman forcing herself to be brave at a railway station. But not a true smile, merely proof of her knowledge that such an expression had a real existence, a smile like the badge of an organisation you have been expelled from.
‘He looks like a miner, doesn’t he?’
‘Farming, then — tobacco or cattle. Up country. A colonial farmstead. Not posh, but quite old, with a long wooden verandah, and fever trees round the lawn. Orange-blossom climbing the front wall and a big acacia tree outside the kitchen door.’ I gazed at the green jungle in front of me, all the rubbery paraphernalia of the trees motionless beyond the glass. Moisture ran down the huge windows in small rivulcts. ‘The garden must have smelt like a ladies’ hairdresser’s on a hot evening.’ I turned and looked at her. The smile had been held but was now an expression of open-eyed surprise as well.
‘Not quite. But almost. How do you know? You sound like a detective.’
‘Not really.’
‘Not even in the same line of country?’
‘Anyone who imagines too much is a detective.’
We walked on up 42nd Street — through the canyon, grey and busy and useless, the bright light of the morning now almost defunct as if the street were a long way underground and the real land began at the top of the buildings.
We took a bus up to the Grand Army Plaza, got off and walked into Central Park. Within moments we came to a zoo, right in the middle of it. I hadn’t expected it; there were no turnstiles, it was free: a small but well-organised zoo. She seemed as surprised by it as I was. Africa was waiting round every comer for us that morning.
‘The sea-lions are great,’ she called back to me.
We had stopped by a pool, edged all the way round by a happy crowd. I could hear huge wallops on the water, followed by fountains of spray rising above the spectators’ heads. Black and shiny shapes like wet gumboots jumped about between the crush of people. She had forced herself right up to the rails, for a proper view — always pushing forward, I thought, taking on any new thing to its limits, no matter what the physical discomfort or what other pressing concerns she might have: giving up everything for the moment, just as Graham had done — for the girl in Marylebone High Street with the awkward umbrella who Harper had thought was a contact; bent forward in eager chat with the turbaned Sikh on the Delhi-Calcutta express; the long discussion about how to cook Boeuf Stroganoff in Chez Victor which Harper had recorded. Everything that was now, was now only once, and you cut away every other part of life, before and after, in order to test it fully: the horrors that are due to great ideas; the little roads that went somewhere: how alike she and Graham were in this approach, their appetite for uncluttered experience. I envied them their continual availability. In the face of so much choice, and so much more that is simply chosen for us, they seemed to know unerringly the right paths to take — the journeys that would reward them, justly and with ease, without vanity or egoism. I tended to think too much — saw always the alternatives — and prison had strongly reinforced this bad habit.
‘You don’t like them, then?’ She came back to where I was hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, a biscuit man with a barrow beside me, with a decayed monkey on a string, trying to sell me a pretzel.
‘I’ve never liked the sea. Too cold, too big. And slippery. And salt in your mouth. And rough.’
‘Perhaps you like lakes? Unless you don’t like water at all. When were you born?’
The barrow man finally managed to sell me a pretzel. Two pretzels. I gave her one. I felt like an uncle with a godchild. ‘February.’
‘Water, then. A watery sign. You must like water.’
‘Yes, all right. I like lakes. They’re quieter at least.’
‘Lake Nyasa?’
‘Lake Malawi you mean.’
‘Yes — well you must have liked that when you were in Malawi. It was tremendous — all those blue mountains round it, like Scotland. Don’t you remember? We used to go there for holidays. One couldn’t swim in it of course.’
‘No, of course not.’ I remembered that problem very well from my days in Egypt — the snail-infested water of the canals and lakes there where the liver bugs thrived, common all over Africa in still water: Bilharzia.
‘Bilharzia,’ I said. ‘That was the trouble, I remember, in Lake Victoria too, in Uganda — couldn’t swim — had to rub yourself all over in engine grease if you went out in a boat. Gets right through the skin.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
We walked on, into the lion house. She was silent now, throwing a tail of her scarf round her neck again in another loop as if a cold wind had come up and not the warm meaty aroma, the acid wafts of old urine, that now surrounded us. We looked at one of the huge animals asleep under a dead tree trunk, dead like it. Then she spoke, neither of us looking at the other, our eyes embedded in the tawny beast.
She said: ‘The only point about Lake Malawi — anyone who’d been in the country would know it — is that you can swim in it. That’s why we went there for holidays. The current from the Shire river keeps the water moving and the weeds away. It’s practically the only lake in Africa that is bilharzia-free.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Oh dear, I am sorry.’
The animal stirred, flicked its tail an inch, looked at us for a dull moment, before dispensing with the view and turning over flat on its other side.
‘George knew that lake in Malawi,’ she went on. ‘I met him there once. We swam in it. There was a scrubby sort of Holiday Inn place above Fort Johnston on the western shore. No one ever went there, not after the break-up of the Federation. It was empty. We spent a week there doing nothing.’
‘How did you manage that? Graham left Africa in 1961, came back to London.’
‘He came back to Africa quite often afterwards. I thought you’d done your homework.’
‘Yes, but you’d left Rhodesia by then, hadn’t you?’