There’s barely a breeze, and the air — it must be seventy-five or eighty degrees — melts over them like butter. Ailie throws off her scarf and hat, loosens her collar, and watches the reeds fall back in the distance and the great battered tower of Urquhart Castle loom up on her right. It’s glorious. The day, the scenery, the company. She feels girlish and silly, the blood gone light in her veins. Georgie strains at the oars. She wants to reach out and tweak his nose.
“Shall we move in close for a look at the ruins from down here?” he puffs, swinging the boat toward the castle promontory. He is facing her, three feet away. Their legs are touching.
“Yes,” she laughs, everything funny, everything perfect. She’s drunk already and they haven’t even uncorked the wine. “Yes,” she repeats, and then, just as quickly, “no.” Georgie, obedient as a dray horse, drops the oars. “I mean, we’ve seen the castle. Let’s strike out for the middle of the loch, make the shore a speck, have an adventure. We could just drift along out there, drift all day.”
He grins a big horsey pleased grin. There is nothing he’d rather do than ferry her around the lake — take her anywhere she pleases, drift till the sun goes down. He leans into the oars with a vengeance, gobbling up the feast of her eyes.
The boat rides out over the waves, the sound of the oars rippling like wind chimes, and Ailie throws back her head, eyes closed, feeling like the heroine of a medieval romance, like Una or Iseult the Fair. Here’s Georgie, the sweating hero, there’s the castle and here the lady in distress: all they need is a dragon. She laughs out loud at the thought of it and Georgie joins in, his grin as wide as the horizon.
An hour later they’re riding the loose abdomen of the lake, dead centetv shore to shore, the boat gently lifting and swaying with the almost imperceptible breath of the great still body of water. The sun falls over them like eiderdown, hot and luxurious. Georgie’s jacket is draped over the bow seat, his shirt has fallen open to the waist; Ailie has removed her shoes and stockings, trailing her feet in the water like a country maid. Tongue and bread and radishes are spread out on the perfect blanched field of the linen tablecloth, and two empty wine bottles he on the floor, softly rocking with the rise and fall of the loch. They are laughing, Ailie and Georgie, over old times.
‘Those poems you used to write me! The Blushing Morn of your Cheeks / The Foaming Billows of your Breasts’. . they were so, so ridiculous.” She chokes on her laughter, gasping for breath, the mechanism gone autonomous, laughter like hiccoughs.
Georgie is laughing too. He was ridiculous. He admits it.
“And, and — the way you used to play that recorder, and, and sing—”
Her face is flushed with wine and blood, two points in the back of her skull throbbing from the force of her laughter.
“I admit it,” Georgie laughs. “I was preposterous, pimply-faced, a moonstruck adolescent.” Suddenly he’s not laughing anymore. “But I mean it, Ailie. I loved you. I loved you then and I love you now.”
It is as though someone has suddenly dropped the curtain, changed the script. She was laughing half an instant before, in control, the joke on Georgie; now she’s tense and riveted. His words dig at her like fingers in clay, softening her, making her blood beat like a parade of drums. Stop, she thinks, stop. And then: go on, go on.
He’s on his knees now, between her legs, his lank knuckly hands rubbing fitfully at her thighs as if she’d drowned and he was trying to revive her. “From the first time,” he says, “I swear—” but she puts a hand over his mouth, cradles his head, strokes the stiff yellow spectacle of his ears. The sun, the wine, the romance of the loch, the hoary castle, a year and a half of celibacy, she is on fire.
Worshipful, reverential, without a hint of clumsiness or uncertainty, he presses himself to her, a votary, the secret ceremony as smooth and proper as if it had been rehearsed. Her skirts, the undergarments, the buttons of his trousers. And Ailie: her mind has gone dead on her, she’s a creature of sensation, of electricity, of stroking and smoothing and caressing, her eyes closed, caught up in the rhythm of it, the boat swaying, Georgie’s shoulders trapped in her palms, his face in hers, his tongue. .
Her eyes blink open, close, open again. Over his shoulder: what is that? Screened by his hair, the stiff geography of his ear. She’s delirious. Delirious. He moves in her, but her eyes are open, she’s craning her neck. It arches over the boat, rearing up, slick and muscular and wet — impossible, it can’t be — a face at the tip of it, serpent’s eyes, the shadow falling across her flushed cheeks like a swift stinging slap.
No. It can’t be.
She shuts her eyes and holds on tight — as if her life depended on it.
♦ WATER MUSIC (REPRISE) ♦
It is sometime in early April — the fifth? the sixth? — he can’t be sure.
Time has become an irrelevance. There is only the sun and the inexorable slide of the river, the long running slope to resurrection. And resurrection it will be: he is certain of it. Forget despair, futility, self-doubt. The cards are on the table, and they’re all aces: the Niger has swung southward. Just as he’d hoped and prayed it would, just as Amadi had predicted. For two months now they’ve been heading south, and it’s like an inoculation of confidence. South. To the Atlantic. To vindication. To glory.
A simple turn of the river. It’s done wonders for everyone’s attitude. Ned Rise has loosened his grip on the tiller, Martyn has begun to talk and even smile a bit, and M’Keal — though still troubled in his mind — has shown signs of coming around. And why not? They’re like prisoners on death row whose sentences have suddenly been commuted. Two months ago they were staring doom in the face; now they’re home free. All they have to do is hold on a bit longer — and who knows, it could be no more than a month, a week even — hold on and bask in a hero’s welcome in London, maybe even pick up a government pension. They’ll be drinking porter and punch before you know it, diddling the girls, sinking their teeth into great dripping pots of bubble and squeak, wheels of Cheshire cheese and craggy mounds of oysters. Oh yes: they’re going home.
Of course, it hasn’t been all singing around the campfire and Pollyanna at the dress shop. Even after the river began pulling them southward they had scare after scare, crisis on top of crisis. Hostile tribes lined the riverbanks — the Juli, the Ulotrichi, the Songhai and Mahinga — and squadrons of canoes regularly shot out to intercept them. One morning they woke to see an army of Tuareg — kissing cousins to the Moors — gazing down on them from a bluff. There must have been three thousand of them, mounted on camels, their indigo jubbahs rattling in the wind, beards bristling, double-edged swords glinting in the sun. They never moved. Not a one of them. It was as though they’d been carved from stone. And yet how terrible this silent presence was, how heinous, how insupportable — what were they doing there, what did they want? Another time, after a skirmish with a flotilla of native canoes, two black fanatics managed to board the Joliba in the confusion, and were about to rupture the blond bulb of the explorer’s skull when Martyn wheeled round and dispatched them with a flurry of saber strokes. For days afterward Mungo went round fingering his head as tentatively as a man stacking eggs in a basket.
But by far the most disturbing event of the meridional leg of the journey was the defection of Amadi Fatoumi. It had been agreed that Amadi was to be released from any further obligation on reaching Yaour in Hausaland. There he would be given the balance of his wages in muskets, powder and tradegoods (he’d been paid the first half, in cowries, at Sansanding), and he would attempt to hire a Hausa tribesman to guide the expedition the rest of the way. Fine. That was the agreement. No one liked it — what if they couldn’t find another guide? how could they land Amadi at Yaour without exposing themselves to attack? — but they would just have to live with it. That he would leave them was a given, but it was the way in which he was to do it that left them cold.