‘How did you know I was here? George?’ Annabelle didn’t seem frightened, just very angry.
‘No. I found the letter you wrote him. And I saw the flat downstairs. Where you have that African,’ I added pointedly.
Annabelle looked up fiercely. ‘Why can’t you mind your own bloody business?’
I hadn’t thought her capable of this sort of coarse talk; there had always been something refined, even old-maidish about Annabelle in the past.
‘It is my business,’ I said. ‘You forget: I was married to Laura, who was married to Willy, when you were all out in East Africa together. And now I’m having to pick up the pieces of whatever it was you all got up to out there. And that’s what I’m here to find out.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking —’
‘Oh yes you do,’ I broke in viciously. ‘I’ve read your letter about not “betraying” George. And seen that African’s clothes down in your basement flat. Well, that African killed Laura and now he’s after us, Clare and me. So, you see, I know, and I want to know the rest.’
‘But … you killed Laura?’ Annabelle looked up at me, prevaricating, I thought. And I was very angry now.
‘Did I? You really think that?’ I said fiercely. ‘Then hadn’t you better tell me?’
I sat down on the edge of the diving-board, fondling the skewer. Annabelle sensed the violence in me, saw the violence in the skewer, too, and I could see she was more frightened now than angry.
‘Where’s George?’ she asked, a placatory tone in her voice.
‘George has run away. I shouldn’t be surprised but the African is after him now. And you next. So what’s this all about, Annabelle? Are you going to tell me?’
I gazed down at her intently. The sloping bottom of the pool was already several feet deep in dirty water and the powerful hose, which she’d dropped, was thrashing around like a snake. It would fill the pool eventually.
‘You can stay down there and drown,’ I said. ‘If you don’t tell me.’
‘But surely you know,’ Annabelle said. ‘Surely Laura told you? We always assumed she would.’
‘No, she didn’t tell me. But tell me what?’
Again Annabelle was silent. And I felt a sudden stab of loss at this intimation of some vast deceit on Laura’s part — Laura with whom I thought I’d shared every secret. And this made me all the more angry. I stood up.
‘You better start explaining. It’s too late for any more lies. Don’t you see?’ I shouted at her now, brandishing the skewer right above her head, so that she stepped back quickly.
‘All right — all right.’ Annabelle held her hands up, surrendering. ‘I’ll tell you.’
I let her climb up the ladder and we sat down on opposite sides of a wooden picnic table in the shade at the far end of the pool.
‘The men lied,’ Annabelle said at last. ‘George and Willy. But we all had to lie in the end.’ She scowled fiercely, like a caged animal, looking over at the arched doorway on the other side of the patio. She might have been expecting, daring George to enter through it, at any moment, so that he could share and suffer equally the horror and indignity of this tale she had embarked on.
‘Go on,’ I said. I still had the skewer with me. ‘You all lied?’
‘Yes. Even Laura. Though it was hardly her fault. We both had to cover up for them … their mania for discovery, disruption,’ she added viciously.
‘But what about Laura? What did you expect her to have told me?’
‘About Clare. That she wasn’t their child. That’s where it all began.’
I thought I’d misheard Annabelle. Then, realising that I hadn’t and assuming some ancient infidelity out in East Africa, I said wildly, ‘She was George’s child, you mean? Or yours?’
‘No. She was nothing to do with any of us.’ Annabelle looked away, distracted, gathering her unpleasant memories together.
‘What do you mean? That Clare is an orphan?’
‘Yes. But more than that.’
‘But that’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘She even looks like Laura.’
‘She does, a little. We noticed that from the start. Same fair hair, blue eyes. It made the deception that much easier. But she wasn’t their child. I can promise you that …’
Annabelle’s voice had that pregnant tone now, that real weight which comes with truth, the truth long withheld. ‘And of course she wasn’t autistic either,’ she went on.
‘Well that can’t be true,’ I said, satisfied that I knew more than Annabelle about something at least. ‘Of course she’s autistic.’
‘The same symptoms — yes. They’re very similar, or at least insofar as we have any direct experience now of such wild children. But it wasn’t autism.’ Annabelle was calmer, taking a precise, scientific approach to things, the ethnologist rising in her, all her old vagueness gone — seen now for the front it was. Then she added — almost, it seemed, as an afterthought: ‘Clare was wild, you see.’
‘Well, I knew that. She lived in the wilds, for a few years, out in Africa …’
‘No. I mean she was actually reared in the wild. They found her, you see, the tribesmen in the hills, quite a long time after her parents had died. They trapped her, on her own apparently. Completely wild. But she’d survived somehow, in the hills above the valley, suckled by some animal, maybe. Who knows?’
I thought I must have misheard, or misunderstood Annabelle this time. ‘You mean some kind of wolf child?’
Annabelle nodded.
‘Look, this is nonsense,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to begin at the beginning, won’t you?’
‘Clare must be about ten or eleven now, I suppose. One can’t tell exactly. But it was nearly four years ago, I know that.’ She gazed out towards the trees by the river, remembering. ‘After the big rains, in Nairobi. The fossil expedition left for the Turkana province then, four hundred miles north, making for Lake Rudolf where we had our camp that year, a place way off the beaten track, sixty miles from the last town up there, a place called Lodwar. And then we came to a village, beyond Lodwar, just a few old tin shacks in the middle of the desert.’ She paused, as if suddenly unsure of her mental directions.
‘Yes. It’s wild up there. I know that,’ I said, anxious that she should get on with it.
‘It’s hot. Just hot,’ Annabelle corrected me sharply, remembering the heat. ‘Just the long red floor of the valley. I remember coming down the one main track in the village late that afternoon: it looked like a dead dog run over in the camel-dung at the side of the road. But when we got nearer to it in the convoy we saw it was a child, mostly decomposed. The place was practically empty. There’s been trouble up there for several years, warring tribes, cattle raids, border disputes. But I remember the dead child because of Clare, later: one child making up for the other in a way.’
‘You wanted children, you and George?’
‘No. Not after George and I fell out, at least. George only ever wanted to discover things, no matter what the cost. My job is to study things as they are: to preserve them. And of course it was George who first heard about Clare, set us all off on the trail for her.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. A month or so later he’d driven back to Lodwar where we’d left stores. And he found a group of tribesmen when he got there, exhausted, on their last legs. Not Turkana, but some Karamojong from across the border in Uganda, a hundred miles to the west, driven over the mountains by Idi Amin’s army. It was all mayhem in Uganda then: the old tribes over there were all being broken up, their crops pillaged, everything destroyed. It was the beginning of the end for the Karamojong people. They were the last of the big East African tribes still intact, all their old customs, language, dress. It was all still there,’ Annabelle went on forcefully. ‘Leopard skins, assegais, warpaint, ostrich plumes, wonderful rituals, festivals, ebony-coloured warriors … They were agrarian or cattle-rearing then, but in the wilder parts, up in the Moroto mountains, there were still some nomadic, hunter-gatherers among the Tepeth tribe. The last of the old Africa …’