Life Times (28 page)

Staring, on one leg: ‘Yes, this's the hotel.'

Carl Church said, foolishly pleasant, ‘There's no sign, you see.'

‘Well, place's being redone.' He came, propping the flippers against the wall, walking on the outside edges of his feet over the remains of builders' rubble. ‘Want any help with that?' But Carl Church had only his typewriter and the one suitcase. They struggled indoors together, the young man carrying flippers, two spearguns and goggles.

‘Get anything?'

‘Never came near the big ones.' His curls sprang and drops flowed from them. He dropped the goggles, then a wet gritty flipper knocked against Carl Church. ‘Hell, I'm sorry.' He dumped his tackle on a desk in the passage, looked at Carl Church's case and portable, put gangling hands upon little hips and took a great breath: ‘Where those boys are when you want one of them – that's the problem.'

‘Look, I haven't booked,' said Church. ‘I suppose you've got a room?'

‘What's today?' Even his eyelashes were wet. The skin on the narrow cheekbones whitened as if over knuckles.

‘Thursday.'

A great question was solved triumphantly, grimly. ‘If it'd been Saturday, now – the weekends, I mean, not a chance.'

‘I think I met someone on the plane—'

‘Go on—' The face cocked in attention.

‘She runs a hotel here . . . ?'

‘Madam in person. D'you see who met her? My stepfather?' But Carl Church had not seen the airport blonde once they were through customs. ‘That's Lady Jane all right. Of course she hasn't turned up here yet. So she's arrived, eh? Well thanks for the warning. Just a sec, you've got to sign,' and he pulled over a leather register, yelling, ‘Zelide, where've you disappeared to—' as a girl with a bikini cutting into heavy red thighs appeared and said in the cosy, long-suffering voice of an English provincial, ‘You're making it all wet, Dick – oh give here.'

They murmured in telegraphic intimacy. ‘What about number 16?'

‘I thought a chalet.'

‘Well, I dunno, it's your job, my girl—'

She gave a parenthetic yell and a barefoot African came from the back somewhere to shoulder the luggage. The young man was dismantling his speargun, damp backside hitched up on the reception desk. The girl moved his paraphernalia patiently aside. ‘W'd you like some tea in your room, sir?'

‘Guess who was on the plane with him. Lady Godiva. So we'd better brace ourselves.'

‘Dickie! Is she really?'

‘In person.'

The girl led Carl Church out over a terrace into a garden where rondavels and cottages were dispersed. It was rapidly getting dark; only the lake shone. She had a shirt knotted under her breasts over the bikini, and when she shook her shaggy brown hair – turning on the light in an ugly little outhouse that smelled of cement – a round, boiled face smiled at him. ‘These chalets are brand new. We might have to move you Saturday, but jist as well enjoy yourself in the meantime.'

‘I'll be leaving in the morning.'

Her cheeks were so sunburned they looked as if they would bleed when she smiled. ‘Oh what a shame. Aren't you even going to have a go at spear-fishing?'

‘Well, no; I haven't brought any equipment or anything.'

He might have been a child who had no bucket and spade; ‘Oh not to worry, Dick's got all the gear. You come out with us in the morning, after breakfast – OK?'

‘Fine,' he said, knowing he would be gone.

The sheets of one bed witnessed the love-making of previous occupants; they had not used the other. Carl Church stumbled around in the dark looking for the ablution block – across a yard, but the light switch did not work in the bathroom. He was about to trudge over to the main house to ask for a lamp when he was arrested by the lake, as by the white of an eye in a face hidden by darkness. At least there was a towel. He took it and went down in his pants, feeling his way through shrubs, rough grass, over turned-up earth, touched by warm breaths of scent, startled by squawks from lumps that resolved into fowls, to the lake. It held still a skin of light from the day that had flown upward. He entered it slowly; it seemed to drink him in, ankles, knees, thighs, sex, waist, breast. It was cool as the inside of a mouth. Suddenly hundreds of tiny fish leapt out all round him, bright new tin in the warm, dark, heavy air.

 

‘. . . I enclose a lock of his hair; I had his papers sealed up soon after his decease and will endeavour to transmit them all to you exactly as he left them.'

Carl Church endured the mosquitoes and the night heat only by clinging to the knowledge, through his tattered sleep, that soon it would be morning and he would be gone. But in the morning there was the lake. He got up at five to pee. He saw now how the lake stretched to the horizon from the open arms of the bay. Two bush-woolly islands glided on its surface; it was the colour of pearls. He opened his stale mouth wide and drew in a full breath, half sigh, half gasp. Again he went down to the water and, without bothering whether there was anybody about, took off his pyjama shorts and swam. Cool. Impersonally cool, at this time. The laved mosquito bites stung pleasurably. When he looked down upon the water while in it, it was no longer nacre, but pellucid, a pale and tender green. His feet were gleaming tendrils. A squat spotted fish hung near his legs, mouthing. He didn't move, either. Then he did what he had done when he was seven or eight years old, he made a cage of his hands and pounced – but the element reduced him to slow motion, everything, fish, legs, glassy solidity, wriggled and flowed away and slowly undulated into place again. The fish returned. On a dead tree behind bird-splattered rocks ellipsed by the water at this end of the beach, a fish-eagle lifted its head between hunched white shoulders and cried out; a long whistling answer came across the lake as another flew in. He swam around the rocks through schools of fingerlings as close as gnats, and hauled himself up within ten feet of the eagles. They carried the remoteness of the upper air with them in the long-sighted gaze of their hooded eyes; nothing could approach its vantage; he did not exist for them, while the gaze took in the expanse of the lake and the smallest indication of life rising to its surface. He came back to the beach and walked with a towel round his middle as far as a baobab tree where a black man with an ivory bangle on either wrist was mending nets, but then he noticed a blue bubble on the verge – it was an infant afloat on some plastic beast, its mother in attendance – and turned away, up to the hotel.

He left his packed suitcase on the bed and had breakfast. The dining room was a veranda under sagging grass matting; now, in the morning, he could see the lake, of course, while he ate. He was feeling for change to leave for the waiter when the girl padded in, dressed in her bikini, and shook cornflakes into a plate. ‘Oh hello, sir. Early bird you are.' He imagined her lying down at night just as she was, ready to begin again at once the ritual of alternately dipping and burning her seared flesh. They chatted. She had been in Africa only three months, out from Liverpool in answer to an advertisement – receptionist/secretary, hotel in beautiful surroundings.

‘More of a holiday than a job,' he said.

‘Don't make me laugh' – but she did. ‘We were on the go until half past one, night before last, making the changeover in the bar. You see the bar used to be here—' she lifted her spoon at the wall, where he now saw mildew-traced shapes beneath a mural in which a girl in a bosom-laced peasant outfit appeared to have given birth, through one ear, Rabelaisian fashion, to a bunch of grapes. He had noticed the old Chianti bottles, by lamplight, at dinner the night before, but not the mural. ‘Dickie's got his ideas, and then she's artistic, you see.' The young man was coming up the steps of the veranda that moment, stamping his sandy feet at the cat, yelling towards the kitchen, blue eyes open as the fish's had been staring at Carl Church through the water. He wore his catch like a kilt, hooked all round the belt of his trunks.

‘I been thinking about those damn trees,' he said.

‘Oh my heavens. How many's still there?'

‘
There
all right, but nothing but blasted firewood. Wait till she sees the holes, just where she had them dug.'

The girl was delighted by the fish: ‘Oh pretty!'

But he slapped her hands and her distractibility away. ‘Some people ought to have their heads read,' he said to Carl Church. ‘If you can tell me why I had to come back here, well, I'd be grateful. I had my own combo, down in Rhodesia.' He removed the fish from his narrow middle and sat on a chair turned away from her table.

‘Why don't we get the boys to stick 'em in, today? They could've died after being planted out, after all, ay?'

He seemed too gloomy to hear her. Drops from his wet curls fell on his shoulders. She bent towards him kindly, wheedlingly, meat of her thighs and breasts pressing together. ‘If we put two boys on it, they'd have them in by lunchtime? Dickie? And if it'll make her happy? Dickie?'

‘I've got ideas of my own. But when Madam's here you can forget it, just forget it. No sooner start something – just get started, that's all – she chucks it up and wants something different again.' His gaze wavered once or twice to the wall where the bar had been. Carl Church asked what the fish were. He didn't answer, and the girl encouraged, ‘Perch. Aren't they, Dickie? Yes, perch. You'll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.'

‘Oh what the hell. Let's go. You ready?' he said to Church. The girl jumped up and he hooked an arm round her neck, feeling in her rough hair.

‘Course he's ready. The black flippers'll fit him – the stuff's in the bar,' she said humouringly.

‘But I haven't even got a pair of trunks.'

‘Who cares? I can tell you I'm just-not-going-to-worry-a-damn. Here Zelide, I nearly lost it this morning.' He removed a dark stone set in Christmas-cracker baroque from his rock-scratched hand, nervous-boned as his mother's ankles, and tossed it for the girl to catch.

‘Come, I've got the trunks,' she said, and led Carl Church to the bar by way of the reception desk, stopping to wrap the ring in a pink tissue and pop it in the cash box.

The thought of going to the lake once more was irresistible. His bag was packed; an hour or two wouldn't make any difference. He had been skin-diving before, in Sardinia, and did not expect the bed of the lake to compare with the Mediterranean, but if the architecture of undersea was missing, the fish one could get at were much bigger than he had ever caught in the Mediterranean. The young man disappeared for minutes and rose again between Carl Church and the girl, his Gothic Christ's body sucked in below the nave of ribs, his goggles leaving weals like duelling scars on his white cheekbones. Water ran from the tarnished curls over the bright eyeballs without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to shore with them, happy as a retrieving dog.

Neither she nor Carl Church caught much themselves. And then Church went off on his own, swimming slowly with the borrowed trunks inflating above the surface like a striped Portuguese man-of-war, and far out, when he was not paying attention but looking back at the skimpy white buildings, the flowering shrubs and even the giant baobab razed by distance and the optical illusion of the heavy waterline, at eye-level, about to black them out, he heard a fish-eagle scream just overhead; looked up, looked down, and there below him saw three fish at different levels, a mobile swaying in the water. This time he managed the gun without thinking; he had speared the biggest.

The girl was as impartially overjoyed as she was when the young man had a good catch. They went up the beach, laughing, explaining, a water-intoxicated progress. The accidental bump of her thick sandy thigh against his was exactly the tactile sensation of contact with the sandy body of the fish, colliding with him as he carried it. The young man was squatting on the beach, now, his long back arched over his knees. He was haranguing, in an African language, the old fisherman with the ivory bracelets who was still at work on the nets. There were dramatic pauses, accusatory rises of tone, hard jerks of laughter, in the monologue. The old man said nothing. He was an Arabised African from far up the lake somewhere in East Africa, and wore an old towel turban as well as the ivory; every now and then he wrinkled back his lips on tooth-stumps. Three or four long black dugouts had come in during the morning and were beached; black men sat motionless in what small shade they could find. The baby on his blue swan still floated under his mother's surveillance – she turned a visor of sunglasses and hat. It was twelve o'clock; Carl Church merely felt amused at himself – how different the measure of time when you were absorbed in something you didn't earn a living by. ‘Those must weigh a pound apiece,' he said idly, of the ivory manacles shifting on the net-mender's wrists.

‘D'you want one?' the young man offered. (
My graves
, the woman had said,
on my property
.) ‘I'll get him to sell it to you. Take it for your wife.'

But Carl Church had no wife at present, and no desire for loot; he preferred everything to stay as it was, in its place, at noon by the lake. Twenty thousand slaves a year had passed this way, up the water. Slavers, missionaries, colonial servants – all had brought something and taken something away. He would have a beer and go, changing nothing, claiming nothing. He plodded to the hotel a little ahead of the couple, who were mumbling over hotel matters and pausing now and then to fondle each other. As his bare soles encountered the smoothness of the terrace steps he heard the sweet, loud, reasonable feminine voice, saw one of the houseboy-waiters racing across in his dirty jacket – and quickly turned away to get to his room unnoticed. But with a perfect instinct for preventing escape, she was at once out upon the dining-room veranda, all crude blues and yellows – hair, eyes, flowered dress, a beringed hand holding the cigarette away exploratively. Immediately, her son passed Church in a swift, damp tremor.