Edwards peers over the spectacles and fixes him with a wet, bloodshot eye. “May as well resign yourself, old man, you’re a celebrity now and you’ve got public responsibilities. You know as well as I do that great discoveries are as much a product of a good warm study as they are of deserts and jungles. Besides,” pulling a pocketwatch from his waistcoat, “we’ll knock off for tea in an hour or so.”
At that moment there is a rap at the door. The servant enters with a card on a tray. “The Baroness von Kalibzo.”
Edwards blanches at the name. The explorer, on the other hand, begins to breathe more rapidly, and his face undergoes a telling transformation — pupils receding, nostrils dilating, a muscle twitching at the base of his jaw — until he looks like a demented stallion sniffing out a mare in estrus.
Suddenly Edwards is at the door. He takes hold of the servant’s elbow for emphasis and announces in a clear authoritative tone that Mr. Park is not at home.
“Not at home? This is — this is too much, Bryan. The lady’s a friend of mine, and — and an aristocrat.” Mungo is standing beside his collaborator now, panting a bit, his face reddening. The servant stares at the floor. “Do you know what you’re asking?”
Edwards looks him in the eye, corporation man to the core. “I’m not asking.” Then he turns back to the servant. “You are to inform the lady that Mr. Park is not at home.”
The door closes with a soft click and the explorer stands there a moment, hands at his sides, studying the flat dull grain of the wood. He looks up at Edwards, who has moved a step closer to the door as if to block it, then strides across the room, flings himself down at the desk, and begins scratching away at the sheet before him with the desperate manic ferocity of the damned.
♦ ♦ ♦
And so it goes, week after week, month after month, invitations refused, lectures declined, friends and relatives snubbed. Mungo has become a prisoner to pen and ink, his fingers blotched like a leper’s, face pale, spine curved until it looks like an odd piece of punctuation. Day after day he stares at the page before him, eyes watering, progress testudineous, thinking he should never have left Selkirk, never challenged his place in life, never set foot in Africa. The man of action reduced to the man of recollection like some chatty doddering old veteran of foreign wars. It’s disgusting. Not at all what he’d thought it would be. A book. It’s a thing on a shelf, complete, ordered, rational — not an ongoing ache and deprivation. After walking nearly fifteen hundred miles he barely stretches his legs anymore. The only time he leaves his desk is to take his daily constitutional — with Edwards at his side, of course — or to make the occasional public appearance under Sir Joseph’s aegis. And when he bridles, Edwards is always there to remind him of his duty.
The target date is June. That’s when they’ll have the shortened version done and he’ll be free to visit Selkirk — and Ailie. Ailie. She looms in his mind like an island in the sea, an oasis in the desert. She is love and life and moral goodness, a buffer against the long African night and the seductive whirlpool of celebrity. How could he have forgotten her? The thought haunts him as he suffers through his London captivity, slave to the desk, the page, the word. Her letters have been increasingly cold and distant, his less frequent than they might be (after sifting through a jumble of words day and night, who has time for letters?). He knows he has hurt and offended her, duty before pleasure and all that, and he burns with a secret shame over his dalliance with the Baroness. He feels like a dog, some loping beast of dark desire and rutting instincts, some jism-addled hyena running with the pack. But then, insidious, the image of the Baroness cuts through his thoughts like a whiff of Eros, her breasts and bush, the hair under her arms, legs spread wide. The Baroness with Ailie’s face, Ailie with the Baroness’s face — can he even remember what Ailie looks like?
It’s an agony. But an agony that must end, will end — is ending, page by page. He looks up from his work, the fantasy playing before him, Ailie at the door of her father’s house, a stirring in his trousers, taking her now out into the garden, flowers and the scent of lilac. . but then it all dissolves and he’s gazing down at the sheet before him, letters coming into focus, dotted i’s and slithering s’s, words running across the page like troops, forming ranks, recalcitrant and hostile, boxing him in, staring him down, defeating him.
♦ THE HOMECOMING ♦
The London coach, on the last leg of its journey to Edinburgh, rattles into Selkirk at 4:00 p.m., in a vortex of swirling leaves, dust and hair. Flowers flash beside gates and walls, sheep step out of the way and gaze up with their stupid baffled sheep faces, moths and butterflies scatter like confetti, an ancient dog lifts his head and then slaps it back down in the dirt, volitionless. For a moment everything is still, as if held in suspension. The sun hangs overhead like a lantern, the essence of new grass and apple blossom narcotizes the air, the clack and whir of the wheels have a quelling, hypnotic effect on the passengers.
Mungo breathes deep, craning his neck to peer out the window over the accumulated bulk of an Edinburgh-bound matron and her antediluvian but robust mother. What he sees, in snatches, is endlessly fascinating. Three and a half years of change, both subtle and arresting — cracks in foundations, new walls and hayricks, hedges trimmed back from the road, a barn charred by fire. He leans farther, mesmerized, nostalgia sweeping him up as each landmark leaps out at him like a silent benediction — the old Hogg place set in a clump of birch, alderman’s gate, the Russells’ pea patch — his eyes gone soft with it all, leaning and looking until he’s literally hanging over matron and mother like some sort of molester. “I say there, what’s the matter with you? You, Sir — back off or I’ll holler out to the coachman.” Three and a half years.
The mood carries him into town, houses glancing by as if in a dream, trellises hung with ivy, the MacInnes girl bent over the well in a sunburst of daffodil and tulip, bees humming, cats napping, everything as orderly and serene as a page out of Oliver Goldsmith. But then a mongrel bitch with a strange stiff mane darts out of an open gate and throws herself at the wheels in a paroxysm of ferocity, yabbering at the coach as if it were packed with raw meat. The driver cracks his whip at the animal and she backs off, whimpering, but already the coach is going too fast, horses spooked, pedestrians shouting, disaster in the air. The accident is abrupt as a scissor cut: the coach veers close to a man on horseback, the horse shies, the rider is thrown. Two hundred feet up the street, nearly in the dead center of the village square, the coachman gets his team under control and brings the vehicle to a halt.
The first on the scene are smudge-faced boys, a horde of them, running with abandon, converging like flies on a shattered cider jug. Next the passersby, and shopkeepers, then just about everyone within earshot — crofters, wetnurses, sweeps and charwomen, cobblers, flaneurs, the Reverend MacNibbit. It seems that the rider — an old man in kilt and tarn o’shanter — has been flung into the middle of a cart full of trout and salmon wrapped in wet leaves. The fishmonger is beside himself with shock and grief, the old man in tartans is cursing like a professional, and the fishmonger’s wife has begun a high-pitched tirade against exorbitant taxes, the price of coal and the Presbyterian Church. There is a moment of confusion punctuated by angry shouts and catcalls, and then a bearded man catches the horse by the bridle and calms it, while another helps the old man from the fishcart. Someone laughs. Willie Baillie, drunk as usual, declaims a few snatches of a dirty limerick. And then, inevitably, someone spots Mungo.