The door was locked and the key stiff, so that it was some time before we managed to open it. But as soon as we did there was a strange smell, something soiled, pungent, that I couldn’t identify,
‘What is it?’ I wondered.
But Alice could smell nothing. There was a single window low down near the floor, with an old tasselled roller blind, torn, half-covering it. The blind flapped suddenly, as though caught in a draught, though the window was firmly shut. Running down the centre of the room was a double-sided glass case with other larger exhibits littered about the place, in corners or hung on the walls.
At first glance it seemed a typical collection, picked up by some acquisitive colonial civil servant in a lifetime spent traversing the wild places seventy or eighty years before. It wasn’t a big collection, and not all of it was African. There was a Tsantsas head, a speciality of the Jivaro Indians, the label said, from Ecuador in the glass case: a tiny, jaundice-coloured human head, the skull removed, with obscenely protuberant lips and nose, shrunk now to the size of a small monkey’s, with a long thick tress of jet-black hair still attached to the top. And there were several dark cane blowpipes from Borneo and New Guinea, one of them not more than a foot long, like a pea-shooter or a little malicious flute, complete with barbed darts made of bamboo. There was an ordinary skull here, too, in the African section, a blackened ivory colour, with a smashed temple where someone must have killed the man years before with a blunt and heavy instrument. There were beads and cooking pots and tom-tom drums, together with a coin collection, Egyptian piastres and Indian rupees. There was the model of an Arab dhow in the case, along with an old Martini-Henry rifle and brass cartridges, with a legend in neat copperplate beneath explaining these objects as part of a contraband cargo captured by the British authorities in Mombasa harbour on July 7th, 1917. In a top corner of the case I found what looked like a minute powder-horn, the horn of a small goat, with a wooden plug stuffed into the hollow top. Inside were the hardened remains of some tar-coloured substance. I thought it must be an old portable ink-bottle, from some early missionary school in the bush, perhaps. And it wasn’t until I found the label nearby, which had obviously come adrift from the horn, that I saw what it was: ‘Wabaio Poison Horn for Arrow Heads — taken from Wandarobo Tribesman, Northern Frontier District, August 1919. (Made from the Wabai and Dukneya trees, found in British Somaliland.)’
The walls were covered with cracked Zebra-hide shields, long Masai spears, with decaying ruffs of red tassel just beneath the spearhead, and other native implements of destruction, all rather gone to seed now in the small, white-washed, musty room. But the really strange thing was the smell, which I couldn’t find any reason for, and a collection of extraordinary tribal masks.
There were half a dozen of them in the case: African ceremonial masks, each presenting a grotesque or fearsome image, painted in vivid reds and black, with the eyeholes rimmed in white, and with dangling necklaces of human teeth hanging down in short rows at either side. Alice took one of them out. It was made of antelope-hide, crimped like a canvas over a matrix of ink-dark thorn twigs.
As I looked at it something moved behind us. Turning, I saw Clare standing in the doorway. We had left her in the nursery, content with her bricks. But she had followed us for some reason and now she stood on the threshold looking into the room, looking at the mast in my hand with an expression of strange delight. She walked forward slowly, hand outstretched.
I thought the mask too valuable or delicate for her to handle. But Alice allowed her to have it and, far from being rough with it, she treated it with delicate respect. We watched her: she held it up in front of her face with both hands and looked at it for a minute. Then she set it down against the wall and crouched in front of it on her haunches, inspecting it from a distance for a much longer time. She didn’t want to touch it any more, just to gaze at it. And it seemed as she did so, as she looked into the empty eye-sockets of this hideous, livid emblem, that she had found some peace, drew some release from the violent drama in the mask. Her eyes were bright with an intelligent response at last.
Encouraged by this, Alice took the other five masks from the case and set them up against the wall for Clare, on either side of the first, which pleased her: except that something in the placing wasn’t quite right. And Clare re-arranged all the masks then in a semi-circle round her, flat on the floor, so that she sat erect in the middle of them finally, surrounded by these threatening visions, inspecting each calmly in turn as she slowly circled her head, perfectly absorbed, content at last.
It was Alice who said it, though the same thought had occurred to me. ‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘It’s as if she was holding court, as if the masks were real people, courtiers, paying homage to her.’
‘Yes. Something like that. Some strange game —’
‘As though she was a Queen,’ Alice ran on, excited by something, breathless in the closed room perched under the warm slates of the house. And then I knew what the smell in the room was: the acrid smell of old lime dust, congealed sweat, animal-hide and cow-dung, with a top-dressing, a rumour of pepper, spices. That was it: it was a faint amalgam of Africa itself, that first whiff on the quayside, or airport, or in the back streets of Cairo that I remembered now from my days in the same continent twenty years before. We were suddenly, all of us, in the middle of Africa then — even Alice, who had never been there, which was why the smell had meant nothing to her originally. The three of us had moved in time, to somewhere else, Alice and I standing over the child, onlookers at some secret ceremony. But what was it? What thing in these dead masks, what spirit in these African relics, had brought Clare to such life again? And what connection was there between Clare’s mysterious recreation of Africa and the real African, with his livid scars, who’d been looking for us in the valley, and was still perhaps lurking somewhere in the area?
I had no way of finding out. Clare couldn’t tell me. Willy was long dead and Laura was gone, too. Yet I felt now that she must have denied me something, some truth about their African past, which might explain all our subsequent tragedy. The only people who could help me over this were the Bensons — George and Annabelle Benson, in Oxford. And, seeing Clare’s behaviour, I felt a strange urgency now, and a danger, as if something vital was at last within my grasp, and that to identify it was a matter of great urgency, against an even greater peril.
Fourteen
I took Alice’s car to Oxford to try and talk to George Benson the following afternoon — disguised in one of Arthur’s most distinguished Savile Row suits and with another £100 of Alice’s money in my pocket, in case I was delayed overnight. I had asked Alice to keep Clare inside the house meanwhile, under her eye all the time, with the doors locked and the alarms on, until I got back. She had offered me her small automatic again, but I told her to keep it on her herself now. And I left the swordstick behind as well. The police would be on the lookout for just such an object. Yet I felt I needed something in the way of a weapon. And then I had it, a possible answer: the little horn of Somali arrow-poison in the glass case, together with the flute-like blowpipe from New Guinea and the bamboo dart. This would form a useful threat: indeed, if the poison was still active, it could form a lethal combination which Benson, given his vast anthropological knowledge, would surely appreciate.
And certainly I might have to threaten him. If Laura, my own wife, had felt unable to tell me something murky from their African past, why should Benson, if he shared this knowledge, be any more willing? Indeed, with his professional eminence as a Professor of Anthropology at Oxford University and his latter reputation on television as an African pre-history Guru, he might be extremely unwilling indeed to disclose anything improper which had occurred on those fossil treks which he had organised for Willy. All the same, I knew I wouldn’t hesitate to force or frighten him into any useful admission, if he didn’t offer the same willingly. Laura — and Willy too — might have died as a result of something Benson could explain. Clare might have lost her mind in the same cause, and there was a half-burnt African still lurking somewhere in the middle of England. I wanted to know about him as well.