by Paul Theroux
“How awful for you,” said Munday.
“I know it looks very pretty,” said the man. “But I can tell you it’s no bed of roses.”
“We’re from London,” said the woman. “Retired.”
“Silvano’s from London,” said Emma.
Silvano smiled and started lighting a cigarette.
“Not from overseas?” asked the man.
“From overseas,” said Silvano, puffing on the cigarette. “And also from London, as well.”
“I knew you were strangers,” said the man. “I can always tell. London?”
“It’s rather a long story,” said Munday.
The man started to speak, then he fell silent. The door had opened and the woman in the blue smock entered with the tea things. She arranged them on the table, cups, teapot, a china pitcher of hot water, a plate of scones and fruitcake, a dish of dark jam, and a large dish of cream.
“Will that be all?” asked the woman.
“Lovely,” said Emma.
The woman scribbled again on her pad, tore off the leaf, and slipped it beside Munday’s plate. She left the room. An inner door banged.
“She’s from London,” said the man at the far table. “Barnet. Lost her husband last year. Don’t get her started.” He was biting his toast between sentences. “Road accident. Ever see such driving? They ran this as a bed and breakfast. Now she can only manage teas. That’s why we come here. Give her the business.” The man continued to chatter. Munday decided to ignore him. He split a scone, buttered it, spread it with jam, and topped it with a spoonful of clotted cream. Silvano watched him, following one step behind him in his preparations: Munday was eating his scone as Silvano was spreading the cream.
Emma said, “I’m sure you’ll be making new friends.”
“Not here,” said the man. “I don’t want them here, thank you very much.”
“It’s this retirement,” said the woman. “It’s all so new to us. We’re thinking of buying a spaniel.” The man turned to Emma and said, “The way I see it, you’ve got to have a reason for getting up in the morning.” Emma said to Silvano, “How do you like your tea?”
“Very good,” he said. His lips were flecked with cream.
“Look at him eat!” said the man, nodding at Silvano. “Chagoola mazooli?”
“Mzuri sana,” said Silvano.
“I was there during the war,” said the man.
“I’m about ready to push off,” said Munday.
“Wait, Alfred,” said Emma. She poured hot water into the teapot.
The man and wife were rising from the table, the man putting on his tweed cap, the woman her coat.
“You’ve got to have a reason for getting up in the morning,” said the man.
“Yes, dear,” said the woman.
They approached the Mundays’ table. “Nice talking to you,” said the man.
“Enjoy your holiday,” said the woman.
The man clapped a hand on Silvano’s shoulder and said, “Cold enough for you?” He left, snickering.
“Poor old soul,” said Emma.
Silvano said, “He seemed jolly friendly.”
“A sad case,” said Munday. “Now, if you’re about through, I think we’d better be going.”
“Do let him finish his cup,” said Emma.
“I’m finished,” said Silvano, and drained it.
“You’re the one who’s lagging,” said Munday to Emma.
It was dark by the time they arrived back at the Black House, and Silvano said, “It never gets this dark in London.” Munday went to his study, Emma stayed in the kitchen, and Silvano settled himself in the living room, hunched over and watching “Doctor Who.” At seven o’clock Emma came into the study. She shut the door behind her and said, “Aren’t you going to take him out?”
“He’s perfectly happy,” said Munday. He was taking the measurements of a number of Bwamba axe-heads; they were spread before him on the desk, large and small. He picked up a sharp spiked one and struck the air with it. “I’ve got my axe-heads, he’s got his telly program.”
“You’re ignoring him.”
“You know how I loathe television,” said Munday. “Why don’t you sit with him?”
“I thought you might take him to the church.”
“The church?” Munday put the axe-head down. “Emma, there’s nothing on at the church.”
“There’s a service.”
“It’s Saturday night. It’ll be shut.”
“I think you should go down there.”
“We’ve seen one church today,” said Munday. “We can go tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow,” said Emma. “Tonight. It’s important that you go now.”
“Emma, that’s insane—”
“Oh, God, I have such a headache,” she said, and she groaned, “Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Alfred, I’m not well.”
“I’ll tell you what—I’ll go down to the church alone, and if there’s something going on I’ll come back for Silvano. In the meantime, he can watch television.” Emma said, “Hurry.” Munday drove to the village and parked near The White Hart. The stained-glass windows of the church were lighted, and entering by the side door he could see baskets of flowers on the altar and all the lights burning, the flowers and the illumination giving the church interior the illusion of warmth and height. It was his first visit to the church, but there was nothing strange about it; no two African huts were the same to his eye, but all English churches seemed interchangeable, and this one, with its smell of wood and floorwax and brass polish, its sarcophagus with a recumbent marble knight and crouching hound, its dusty corners and wordy memorials—this one was no different from St. Candida’s, or the hilltop church in East Coker, St. Michael’s, which Emma had enthused over (and made an occasion for urging an Eliot play on Munday; “I can’t vouch for his poetry, but I can tell you he’s fairly ignorant about Africans,” said Munday when he had read it). He browsed among the leaflets in the wooden rack at the door, read one of the memorial stones, and then seated himself in the last pew. Above him the ribbed windows were gleaming black, gem-shaped segments of roughened glass fixed in lead.
A figure suddenly stood up in a front pew, and the pew itself growled. Shawled and seated when he had entered, she had blended with the jumble of still shapes near the carved pulpit—he hadn’t seen her. She clacked down the aisle, holding the shawl at her throat, her head down. But Munday recognized her before she had gone three steps, and he started to get up. She passed by him without lifting her eyes.
Munday followed her outside to the churchyard, the cemetery of old graves on the far side of the church. She walked along a gravel path, past illegible headstones—some leaning, some broken or tipped over—past a tall grave-marker with a burst plinth, and through the grass, where snowdrops had started, the tiny white blossoms growing in clusters close to the ground, as if they had been scattered there like handfuls of wool: they were lighted by the reflection of the church windows that fell across them. She sat on a stone bench under a large yew tree, out of the glare of the moon and nearly hidden in the shadows of the thick foliage. Munday sat next to her, and though he did not touch her, he could feel her breathing, that warm pulse in her throat, her skin warming his a foot away.
He kept apart and whispered, “What are you doing to Emma?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re smiling.”
“No.” But she was—he could see her mouth.
“What are you telling her?”
“Only that I want you.” The purr in her voice gave the words an emphatic nakedness.
He said, “Caroline—”
“Hold my Jiand,” she said. She pulled off one glove and reached over and laid her white hand on his thigh.
He covered her hand with his own and said, “You’re a witch.”
“I’m not,” she said, with a pout of amusement on her mouth. “Anyway, what do you know about witches?”
“A great deal,” he said. “You’re using her.”
“I can only reach you through her.”
He mumbled something, not words, the syllables of a sigh.
“What did you say?”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” he said.
Caroline clutched his hand; Munday could feel her fingers, her nails pricking his palm. She said, “You want me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s fair.” She leaned over and kissed him lightly, but his cheek burned, as if she had scarred him where her lips had brushed his skin.
“I want to make love to you now.”
“We can’t,” she said.
“Please.”
“Here?” She laughed. “On this bench? In the church? Or there, behind that grave?”
“Anywhere,” he said, and looked hopelessly around the graveyard.
She took his chin and turned his face towards hers. She said, “I believe you would!”
“Hurry,” he said. He hugged her and tried to draw her up.
“No,” she said. “Never that. Don’t hurry me— don’t push me into the grass and hike my skirt up, then fumble with me and tell me you have to go when you finish.”
“I won’t.”
“But you will. You have to. It would ruin it.”
Munday said nothing; she was right—Emma was waiting.
“There’s time,” she said. “We’ll do it properly— not hurrying and half-naked and looking at your watch. I know you would if I let you, but I won’t let you cheat me that way. I want to be naked, on top of you, with a fire going like that first night. God, that was wonderful. You were babbling in some African language.”
“Was I? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I thought you knew,” she said. “I thought you were doing it deliberately.”
“Perhaps I was,” he said.
“Next time I want to make love to you. Take you in my mouth and swallow you.”
“When?” he whispered.
“Soon,” she said. “You’ll see.”
“I’ve never known anyone like you.”
“But then you’ve been away, haven’t you?”
“For such a long time,” he said. “And so far away. You can’t imagine.”
“I can,” she said. “You still taste of Africa.”
“I used to hate the thought of coming back,” he said. “England—but you’re not English.”
“I am!”
“No,” he said, “not like any woman I’ve ever known here.”
She smiled. “So you’ve known one somewhere else.”
“Africa is full of witches,” he said.
“You’re mad,” she said. “And it’s a wonder you love me.”
“But that’s what I do love!”
The lights in the church had gone out while they were speaking, and Munday left her in darkness and stumbled through the graveyard, choosing his way among the stones and snowdrops in the moonlight which lay like water on the ground. For all he had said, he was afraid, but the fear beating in his blood animated him, caused a leaping in his mind that was next to joy. The panic he felt was vivid enough and yet so wild in him it might have been something he had learned eavesdropping on another person’s passion—emotion so unusual that it eluded memory and that for him to try to recall it would be to lose it entirely, or perhaps admit that it was too intense to be his. And a further fear, which was like a fear of his own courage, one that he had known in Africa, not of being incapable of understanding the witch-ridden mind in the village paralyzed by myth, but of understanding it too well, generating a sympathy so complete it was the same as agreement; the fear that, in time, only the most savage logic would satisfy him and everything else would seem fraudulent and unlikely. It happened, but briefly, and he had overcome it. Now he was home, freed from them by his heart—the blacks and the jungle they owned were a distant trap. He might have died there!
An eager panic held him. It was that glimpse of himself in the churchyard, trampling the tufts of snowdrops he had tried to avoid, his half-remembered desire that approached and taunted him like a masked dance, and the thought of Caroline’s promptings to Emma— the witching appeal to his own body. He refused to doubt that, because simply by believing, he had Caroline to gain. He could only dismiss someone else’s ghost. But his own haunting rewarded him with desire and he remained astonished by what he would willingly risk for her.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” said Emma.
“Yes,” said Munday. “There was something. But it’s over now.”
“You can take him out tomorrow.”
“I’m off to bed,” he said. “Is he well occupied?”
“He’s watching ‘Match of the Day.’ ”
“This way,” said Munday, starting off the road near the Black House to a path partially arched with high bushes. It was a narrow path and, barely used, it promised greater narrowness further on.
“Isn’t the village on this road?” asked Silvano. He hesitated on the tarmac in his pin-striped suit and winced at the untrodden path.
“We’ll go around the back by the path,” said Munday. “Much more interesting the country way. I’m sure you get quite enough of paved roads in London.”
“I like paved roads,” said Silvano.
With Munday in the lead, they walked down the path, bent slightly to prevent bumping the overhanging branches. The path became high grass, then ceased at a sudden coil of brambles. Munday circled it and came to a gate made of rusted pipes. Munday vaulted the gate; Silvano climbed it, straddled it, and swung his legs over, taking care not to soil his suit. But he stumbled and duck-walked to his knees on the other side, and he was brushing them as Munday strode on ahead in his heavy sheepskin coat, the turtleneck sweater Emma had knitted and his already smeared gumboots. Over a small hill, Munday stopped, thwarted by a freshly plowed field. High cracked curls of drying mud were screwed out of long furrows; Munday saw himself tripping and falling. He followed the tractor ruts in the yard-wide fringe of turf at the field’s edge, and fifty yards behind him, Silvano swung his arms, walking unsteadily in his pointed shoes.
At the far end of the field Munday found a low opening in the thorny hedge fence. Without waiting for Silvano, he stooped and pushed himself through and then trotted down a long slope, steadying himself with his stick. He was on the level field below, poking at the undergrowth, when Silvano burst through the opening in the thorns and immediately began slapping the hedge’s deposits from his jacket. He caught up with Munday. Munday sprinted away.
“Please,” said Silvano, calling Munday back. “Just a minute.” He squatted on his heels like a Russian dancer, kicking one leg out, then the other, to pull at his ankle socks.
“Pick up some burrs?”
“They are paining me.”
“You want to keep to the center of the path,” said Munday. “Of course you know you’re wearing the wrong sort of socks and shoes. Finished?” Silvano stood up. He was out of breath from having run down the slope; his spotted eyes bulged, his nostrils were larged flared holes in the squashed snout of his nose, bits of broken leaf and the torn gray veil of a spider’s web clung to his hair. The wind turned one of his lapels over and sent his tie flapping over his shoulder. He hunched and jammed his hands into his pockets. A froth of cloud showed over the ridge of the hill, and in the morning light diffused by the cloud Silvano’s face was unevenly brown, brushed with various shades of pigment.
They stood at the head of another path, a trough that might have served as a water course in heavy rains, overgrown at the sides with toppling still-green swatches of grass and widening past a thicket where it was trampled by hoof prints. Munday held his chin thoughtfully. He was a methodical hiker, and country walks, never a relaxation, seemed to bring out a militarist in him, an authoritarian streak: he took charge, read the Ordnance Survey maps, chose the route, gave orders, and was usually critical of any companion’s slowness. Something that had maddened
him in Africa was that when hiking from place to place with his tape-recorder and haversack of note caFds, he had always been led by a small naked man, jinking through the bush, grunting directions. But in the end he had stayed long enough to guide himself—that mastery of the featureless savannah was one of the consolations of his long residence.
He pointed with his walking stick and said, as if to a column of men instead of the single African in his pointed shoes and pin-striped suit, “You see that meadow? I think we’d be advised to skirt round there and head towards the wooded bit. That hill is our objective. You’re not tired, are you?” Silvano shook his head.
“Want my gloves?”
“No, it’s okay.” Silvano pushed his fists deeper into his pockets.
“Off we go then,” said Munday. He hurried down the path, slashing at the grass, tearing out tufts on the ferrule of his walking stick and flinging them into the air. Behind him, Silvano dodged these flying tufts.
“This is where it gets a bit sticky,” said Munday. They were at the shore of a large pool of mud. Munday took a long stride into it.
“The cows come here,” said Silvano. He was balanced, teetering on a stone which stuck up from the mud and stiffened hoofprints.
“Except that cows don’t wear shoes, do they?” said Munday. “Horses, I should say. The hunt most probably.” He continued to stride through the mud, his boots squelching, his stick waving for balance.
Silvano contemplated a move. He stepped to another protruding stone and sank it with his weight. That shoe went deep into the mud. He swung his other leg in a new direction, placed his right foot in the mire further along and sucked his left foot out. Seeing that both shoes were irretrievably wet and large with mud he relaxed, shortened his steps and stopped looking for footholds. He splashed through like a horse, throwing his feet anywhere in the mud, which now daubed his trouser bottoms. In the field beyond, his shoes made a squishing sound and he wrung bubbly water from his toes with each step.
They hiked towards the hill as through a series of baffles, Munday moving briskly and staying far ahead, Silvano falling back, stumped by the fences and dense hedges and stopping to pluck at the barbed seeds that bristled on his suit. Again Munday waited for him to catch up. He stood impatiently at the foot of Lewesdon Hill, leaning on his stick, watching Silvano approach.
