And that night up in the manager’s old bedroom getting undressed, talking to George, watching him, standing with one hand against the chimney breast, warm from the huge fire that had blazed all evening in the grate immediately below — and thinking him somehow uneasy now that we were alone.
‘Do you like it here? Or loathe it? Honestly? You’re so wary of liking things. Or just wary of running round East Africa with someone else’s wife?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s what you might, or might not do with me in the future that worries me.’
‘This is just a prolonged one-night stand?’
‘Not for me.’
‘Nor me.’
‘There’s the problem then.’
‘What about living now?’ I asked. ‘What about that great old idea? Let’s leave the words for later, George, when we’ve lost this, if we do. That’s what words are for.’
He got into his sleeping bag in the narrow camp bed beside mine — the two beds like two separate valleys with an iron ridge between them. It was ridiculous. We took the sleeping bags off and put them down next to the grate where the floor was warm from the fire below and made love and slept there, very warm in the cold night, a broken window-pane rattling, sleeping and doing it again, waking when the wind had gone very early before dawn, and feeling entirely alone stretched out naked in the middle of Africa.
‘“… Zephyr falls asleep almost as soon as his head touches the pillow. But in the middle of the night, the nightingale wakes him with his song: ‘Trou la la — tiou; tiou-tiou! Tidi-Tidi’ …”’
The twins had fidgeted during the story, unable to relax after the excitement of the day. But now, quite suddenly, they were still, their eyelids wavering. And by the next page, with Zephyr, pushing his little rowing boat out into the lake, they were both fast asleep. ‘“Oh, what a daredevil that fellow Zephyr is,”’ I read to the sleeping, empty room, closing the book.
But it wasn’t empty. Helen had come in and was standing behind me. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’ she asked, turning off the main light and standing now in the half darkness, a small bedside lamp with a decorated shade illuminating the room faintly with the colours of some nursery fable. ‘I don’t remember — you told me you were married to someone in the same business, in British Intelligence.’
‘No. None.’ I stood up. She was carrying some of the twins’ clothes and had started to put them away in a small chest of drawers.
‘Did you know about her from the beginning — I mean, that she was in the same business?’
‘No. I only found out in the end. Almost the very end. She’d been in the business as a colleague — and more — of a number of other men — in other organisations.’
Helen looked up at me — with compassion or derision, I couldn’t say in the darkness.
‘But don’t worry,’ I went on. ‘It didn’t matter by the time I found out. We were coming apart anyway. The usual things. Nothing exciting, like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’
‘I’d better change,’ she said, quickly finishing with the twins’ clothes. ‘Thank you for the story. Dinner’s quite soon. Help yourself to drinks downstairs if there’s no one about.’
She turned and left the nursery, loosening her blouse at the waist as she walked back along the corridor to her bedroom.
The KGB, she thought, closing the door of her room, opening her blouse, starting the zip on her skirt. At first she thought with alarm — has he found out? Does he know anything? What does he know? And then she realised that if he had discovered her it was because all the time she had somehow wanted him to, that she had unconsciously left a transparent area in herself for him to see through. She had — now she knew — from their first meeting trusted him, for himself alone and because of that other he personified.
‘The usual things. Nothing exciting — like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’ His pointed voice and look reminded her so much of her own confusions when she had found out about Graham’s involvement with the same organisation, when their few weeks in East Africa had started to go wrong.
… At the end of the safari we went back to the College of African Wildlife near Moshi, winding up the little road from the town through green coffee plantations and lush farms, with the mountain and its great collar of snow always in front of us, glistening through the tall green forest which covered its middle slopes. The air was crisp there, at ten thousand feet around the College, huge trees and bougainvillaea blowing their rusty purplish leaves over the basketball and squash courts — the place like a marvellous Swiss health resort in the fall.
He phoned Nairobi several times for messages just after we got back, and then we walked down the slope in front of the College across the rough football pitch. A group of students were at one end of it, jumping about a volley-ball net, jumping high in the evening.
‘I have to go back to Ethiopia,’ he said. ‘A project way down in the Awash Valley the office want me to check on before we go on to Uganda. A new cotton plantation — and the Russians are building a road. They’re making a small plane available to us, direct from Addis.’
‘… And the Russians are building a road.’ She remembered the phrase again, clearly from all the years, because it had been the first intimation of the awful knowledge which had come to her in those days — like the setting of a charge that was to explode under all their ease.
It was stiflingly hot after we landed on the cracked sandy soil of the Awash Valley and the Danakil all rushed out from their low grass huts to see us. The older men of the settlement stood a little apart, their women behind them, but the children — the child-brides toting babies on their backs and the boys — all clustered round the small plane in a frenzy. ‘They want to be the ones to guard it,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s a great privilege to guard the bird. It’s a bird to them, of course.’
Two Israeli members of the UN cotton-growing team met us; we drove back to their camp which they’d built beneath a glade of thorn trees by the river.
‘Until they finish the road, we’re two days from any civilisation out here,’ the project supervisor said. ‘We were the first Europeans many of these people had ever seen.’
The Chief Engineer of the Russian project — Leonid somebody — joined us for lunch in the tin shack, a small yet burly fair-haired man in shorts, a rather Aryan face, young-looking and high-spirited; he talked a lot in good English — talked too much, I thought, for an engineer: more like a teacher or an actor. And I thought half-way through the meal that there was something hidden and unexpressed in him just because he prattled so much.
That afternoon we drove with him to his road works, about five miles away upstream, where they were finishing the last stretch to the new agricultural settlement for the whole area.
With the heat at more than a hundred and twenty degrees, the billowing clouds of dust, the screeching roar of the huge graders and scrapers and trucks, the site was an impossible place for any sustained conversation. Yet I noticed that this was exactly what George and the Russian were doing, walking away from the rest of us, pointing out things to each other, their mouths moving rapidly in what must have been shouts, though we could hear nothing of it at all.
Of course it all looked so perfectly natural and appropriate — the two of them wandering off like that, dodging between the huge machines, dwarfs beside the ten-foot tyres: George had made the trip to do just this — get information about the road and the cotton crop. What was it that made me certain that he was getting quite a different sort of information altogether, that the two of them weren’t talking about gradients and gravel at all?