When we got back to the hotel in Addis that evening, we went to the mid-thirties cocktail bar, the Ritz, full of angular mirrors, wicker chairs and a smouldering eucalyptus fire in one corner. We got on to high cane stools by the counter and sipped lagers from tall glasses like a pair from an advertisement in an old Vogue magazine and started to talk.
‘You are an ass, Helen,’ George said calmly, kindly, still so much at ease, happy in the long hot day with lagers at the end of it, food and sleep yet to come. ‘The heat’s gone to your head. What on earth could I have been talking to that Russian about — if not his bloody road?’ He laughed.
‘You went to get some sort of message from him, instructions. That’s why we had to come all the way back here.’
‘Look, I had to go off with him you idiot. How else would I have found out about his work? It’s absolute nonsense — your “intuition”; your watching the two of us shouting and feeling “left out” and therefore there was something “clandestine” between us; that I’m a KGB agent. That’s the worst sort of woman’s magazine stuff. How on earth did you get hold of that idea?’
‘I felt it, that’s all. And you’re quite right to deny it. But not my feeling. That happened.’
‘Very well then, we’re both right. And I’m sorry. I accept your intuition; you must accept my facts. We’ve misunderstood each other, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘But Helen, what an extraordinary thing to think about me. I might just as well say that you were a Russian agent. It’s as likely.’
She heard a floorboard in the corridor creak, a long succession of knuckles breaking as the joists in the old house cooled after the heat of the day. A door opened and closed — one of the bedrooms along the passage. But she knew exactly which one — and knew at once: the Tree room looking out over the deformed chestnut on the front lawn. She recognised all the sounds in the old house, could put a name to them all and a reason behind each of them. She had at one time or other slept in all these bedrooms: the Tree room where he had been put for the weekend, the Boston room with her grandmother’s collection of rocking chairs, the Blue room — and all the others.
At different ages all along her life — and therefore, to herself, as quite a different person — she had stretched herself out all over the fabric of the house, and left a part of herself in each room, an amalgam of fact and memory, an animal secretion which could be followed now like a trail, a sure scent leading her to any part of her past which she chose to re-visit. The sound of a door slamming — any door — its particular resonance, could fill her suddenly with the unhappy essence of long-distance habitation in this shell — remind her at once of the demands, the drama and the disappointments of her childhood here. One door closing was in sure memory of her mother’s frustrated affection for her; the sound of another was an exact memorial to her father’s preoccupied indifference. She had never had any trouble in finding out where it had all begun — nor in knowing what a bore it all was, so much unnecessary enmity towards decent life.
She got undressed and ran a bath in the small room attached to their bedroom where the fittings had never been changed, the huge brass taps, golden, top heavy, the wash-basin grossly substantial like the bath itself. Yes, she had wanted a father, she thought, as she got into the sweet water, smiling. And had been given a mother instead.
She sank in the water, feeling the small buoyancy in her body each time she breathed, and thought then of that night in the thirties hotel in Addis, long after they’d gone to bed, when she had woken up suddenly from the deep sleep of sex, and looked across at George, and seen a man writhing, dreaming, talking — a man she’d never met.
Guy was by himself when I got downstairs, sitting in an armchair by the fire, his long legs stretched out like trip-wires across the sheepskin rug. He had dozed off in the heat. A book he’d been reading lay on the floor beside him. I could see the cover in the lamplight: White Savages by Ole Timbutu.
By then I had really given up surprise so I was able to say to him quite easily when he woke: ‘What’s the book?’ And he replied just as easily: ‘New novel about East Africa I brought up for the weekend. Rather like books about the place.’
‘Good?’
‘Not very. Haven’t got far but it’s too complicated. Don’t know who anyone is — sort of intellectual thriller. I prefer the straightforward stuff. Have you read The Day of the Jackal?’
‘No.’
Could he really be unaware of the real nature of the book, of the identity of the two main characters? I decided to say nothing about it.
He started to read from the blurb: ‘“… frighteningly recreates the obsessive quality of a jealous vision — an outsider’s view of other people’s happiness” … What on earth is that supposed to mean?’
It seemed to me that he was being intentionally obtuse. He stood up, a puzzled look on his thin face — all the signs of a mystified family man confronted with some psychological aberration totally unknown to him.
‘Drink? Over here — what would you like?’
We walked over to a table in the corner by the verandah windows. There was the Fleischmann’s gin again, I noticed. He poured out two deep measures and added a froth of White Rock tonic to each. Then he said quietly, fingering the long dark blue velvet curtains, pulling them gently across the darker night outside: ‘That’s why I bought the book, Marlow. East Africa first — but then I read that on the blurb. It’s funny — how one wants to talk about it. And besides you …’
‘I know.’
‘You’re right in the middle of it. Part of it.’
‘I’m not her lover. I told you. For God’s sake.’
‘You are in one way — the image of him. And therefore the reality is not impossible. You must see that.’
‘That’s a very long shot indeed. But — all right, tell me about it.’
We walked slowly round the large octagonal hall, drinks in our hands, as if the big room were a small warm garden and the fire a bonfire of old twigs and leaves at one end of it.
‘You were in prison. So you’ll know the feeling: you are inside and excluded; she is outside and included. You are looking on, powerless: you want to put her in the prison with you. That was really why you married her — to hold her completely supine, making your presence — your rather heartless presence — unique and indispensable to her. And when you begin to fail in this — as you will, for she is far from supine — when she begins to move away from you, back into life, then comes the other thing, the thing you really wanted, the punishment: you start to follow her with a magnifying glass, a telescope. Because if you can’t have her on your own narrow terms, you must see how she deals with other men on her terms: that’s what you really wanted all along — for her to make that move so that you could find out the exact emotional weight of her privacy with someone else; the precise shape of her fantasy and invention with him — conversationally, emotionally, sexually. Above all you must see; this is the obsession: you want to see her eyes, their shared regard. One must see exactly; nothing less will do — to map out precisely the free flow of all her imprecisions: capture her emotion. Then there is the release.’ I was astonished.
‘What was your prison — that brought you to all this?’