But one particularly lovely morning Clive’s mother said as if she couldn’t prevent herself, perhaps Matt would like to come with the family to the airport? The boys could watch the jets land while the grown-ups had business with the reservation office.
‘Order yourselves a lemonade if you want it,’ said the father; he meant that he would pay when he came back. They drank a lemonade-and-ice-cream each and then Matt said he’d like a black coffee to wash it down, so they ordered two coffees, and the father was annoyed when he got the bill – coffee was nothing at home, but in France they seemed to charge you for the glass of water you got with it.
‘I can drink five or six coffees a day, it doesn’t bother my liver,’ Matt told everyone. And in Nice, afterwards, trailing round the Place Masséna behind Jenny, who wanted to buy a polo shirt like the ones all the French girls were wearing, the boys were not even allowed to go and look at the fountain alone, in case they got lost. Matt’s voice fell to a whisper in Clive’s ear but Clive hardly heard and did not answer: here, Matt was just an appendage of the family, like any other little boy.
It was Saturday and when they drove home up the steep road (the halfwit and his dog sat at the newly installed traffic light and Matt, finding his voice, called out of the window a greeting in French) the village was already beginning to choke with weekend visitors.
Directly lunch was down the boys raced to meet beneath the plaque that commemorated the birth in this street of Xavier Duval, Resistance fighter, killed on 20 October 1944. Clive was there first and, faithfully carrying out the technique and example of his friend, delightedly managed to take a candid shot of Matt before Matt realised that he was observed. It was one of the best afternoons they’d had.
‘Saturdays are always good,’ said Matt. ‘All these psychotic people around. Just keep your eyes open, brother. I wrote Chapter Fourteen of my book at lunch. Oh, it was on a tray in my room – they were out until about four this morning and they didn’t get up. It’s set in this airport, you see – remember how you could just see my mouth moving and you couldn’t hear a thing in the racket with that jet taking off? – well, someone gets murdered right there drinking coffee and no one hears the scream.’
They were walking through the car park, running their hands over the nacre-sleek hoods of sports models, and half-attentive to a poodle fight near the pétanque pitch and a human one that seemed about to break out at the busy entrance to the men’s lavatories that tunnelled under the place. ‘Ah, I’ve got enough shots of delinquents to last me,’ Matt said. In accord they went on past the old girl in flowered trousers who was weeping over her unharmed, struggling poodle, and up the steps to the place, where most of the local inhabitants and all the visitors, whose cars jammed the park and stopped up the narrow streets, were let loose together, herded by Arab music coming from the boutique run by the French Algerians, on the chateau side, and the recorded voice, passionately hoarse, of Riane in her prime, from the direction of Chez Riane. The dwarf was there, talking between set teeth to a beautiful blonde American as if he were about to tear her apart with them; her friends were ready to die laughing, but looked kindly in order not to show it. The old women with their big black hats and apron-covered stomachs took up space on the benches. There were more poodles and an Italian greyhound like a piece of wire jewellery. Women who loved each other sat at the little tables outside Riane’s, men who loved each other sat in identical mauve jeans and pink shirts, smoking, outside Zizi’s Bar. Men and women in beach clothes held hands, looking into the doorways of the little shops and bars, and pulling each other along as the dogs pulled along their owners on fancy leashes. At the Crêperie, later, Matt pointed out Clive’s family, probably eating their favourite liqueur pancakes, but Clive jerked him away.
They watched pétanque for a while; the butcher, a local champion, was playing to the gallery, all right. He was pink and wore a tourist’s fishnet vest through which wisps of reddish chest-hair twined like a creeper. A man with a long black cape and a huge cat’s-whisker moustache caused quite a stir. ‘My God, I’ve been trying to get him for weeks—’ Matt ducked, Clive quickly following, and they zigzagged off through the pétanque spectators. The man had somehow managed to drive a small English sports car right up on to the place; it was forbidden, but although the part-time policeman who got into uniform for Saturday afternoons was shouting at him, the man couldn’t be forced to take it down again because whatever gap it had found its way through was closed by a fresh influx of people. ‘He’s a painter,’ Matt said. ‘He lives above the shoemaker’s, you know that little hole. He doesn’t ever come out except Saturdays and Sundays. I’ve got to get a couple of good shots of him. He looks to me the type that gets famous. Really psychotic, eh?’ The painter had with him a lovely, haughty girl dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a man’s tweeds and deerstalker. ‘The car must be hers,’ said Matt. ‘He hasn’t made it, yet; but I can wait.’ He used up almost a whole film: ‘With a modern artist, you want a few new angles.’
Matt was particularly talkative, even going right into Zizi’s Bar to say hello to her husband, Emile. The family were still sitting at the Crêperie; the father signed to Clive to come over and at first he took no notice. Then he stalked up between the tables. ‘Yes?’
‘Don’t you want some money?’
Before he could answer, Matt began jerking a thumb frantically. He ran. His father’s voice barred him: ‘Clive!’
But Matt had come flying: ‘Over there – a woman’s just fainted or died or something. We got to go—’
‘What for?’ said the mother.
‘God almighty,’ said Jenny.
He was gone with Matt. They fought and wriggled their way into the space that had been cleared, near the steps, round a heavy woman lying on the ground. Her clothes were twisted; her mouth bubbled. People argued and darted irresistibly out of the crowd to do things to her; those who wanted to try and lift her up were pulled away by those who thought she ought to be left. Someone took off her shoes. Someone ran for water from Chez Riane but the woman couldn’t drink it. One day the boys had found a workman in his blue outfit and cement-crusted boots lying snoring near the old pump outside the Bar Tabac, where the men drank. Matt got him, too; you could always use a shot like that for a dead body, if the worst came to the worst. But this was the best ever. Matt finished up what was left of the film with the painter on it and had time to put in a new one, while the woman still lay there, and behind the noise of the crowd and the music the see-saw hoot of the ambulance could be heard, coming up the road to the village walls from the port below. The ambulance couldn’t get on to the place, but the men in their uniforms carried a stretcher over people’s heads and then lifted the woman aboard. Her face was purplish as cold hands on a winter morning and her legs stuck out. The boys were part of the entourage that followed her to the ambulance, Matt progressing with sweeping hops, on bended knee, like a Russian dancer, in order to get the supine body in focus at an upward angle.
When it was all over, they went back to the Crêperie to relate the sensational story to the family; but they had not been even interested enough to stay, and had gone home to the villa. ‘It’ll be really something for you to show them down in Africa!’ said Matt. He was using his Minox that afternoon, and he promised that when the films were developed, he would have copies made for Clive. ‘Darn it, we’ll have to wait until my parents take the films to Nice – you can’t get them developed up here. And they only go in on Wednesdays.’
‘But I’ll be gone by then,’ said Clive suddenly.
‘Gone? Back to Africa?’ All the distance fell between them as they stood head-to-head jostled by the people in the village street, all the distance of the centuries when the continent was a blank outline on the maps, as well as the distance of miles. ‘You mean you’ll be back in Africa?’
Clive’s box camera went into his cupboard along with the other souvenirs of Europe that seemed to have shed their evocation when they were unpacked amid the f
resh, powerful familiarity of home. He boasted a little, the first day of the new term at school, about the places he had been to; but within a few weeks, when cities and palaces that he had seen for himself were spoken of in history or geography classes, he did not mention that he had visited them and, in fact, the textbook illustrations and descriptions did not seem to be those of anything he knew. One day he searched for his camera to take to a sports meeting, and found an exposed film in it. When it was developed, there were the pictures of the cats. He turned them this way up and that, to make out the thin, feral shapes on cobblestones and the disappearing blurs round the blackness of archways. There was also the picture of the American boy, Matt, a slim boy with knees made big out of focus, looking – at once suspicious and bright – from under his uncut hair.
The family crowded round to see, smiling, filled with pangs for what the holiday was and was not, while it lasted.
‘The Time-Life man himself!’
‘Poor old Matt – what was his other name?’
‘You ought to send it to him,’ said the mother. ‘You’ve got the address? Aren’t you going to keep in touch?’
But there was no address. The boy Matt had no street, house, house in a street, room in a house like the one they were in. ‘America,’ Clive said, ‘he’s in America.’
Rain-Queen
We were living in the Congo at the time; I was nineteen. It must have been my twentieth birthday we had at the Au Relais, with the Gattis, M. Niewenhuys and my father’s site manager. My father was building a road from Elisabethville to Tshombe’s residence, a road for processions and motorcades. It’s Lubumbashi now, and Tshombe’s dead in exile. But at that time there was plenty of money around and my father was brought from South Africa with a free hand to recruit engineers from anywhere he liked; the Gattis were Italian, and then there was a young Swede. I didn’t want to leave Johannesburg because of my boyfriend, Alan, but my mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me behind, because of him. She said to me, ‘Quite honestly, I think it’s putting too much temptation in a young girl’s way. I’d have no one to blame but myself.’ I was very young for my age, then, and I gave in.
There wasn’t much for me to do in E’ville. I was taken up by some young Belgian married women who were only a few years older than I was. I had coffee with them in town in the mornings, and played with their babies. My mother begged them to speak French to me; she didn’t want the six months there to be a complete waste. One of them taught me how to make a chocolate mousse, and I made myself a dress under the supervision of another; we giggled together as I had done a few years before with the girls at school.
Everyone turned up at the Au Relais in the evenings and in the afternoons when it had cooled off a bit we played squash – the younger ones in our crowd, I mean. I used to play every day with the Swede and Marco Gatti. They came straight from the site. Eleanora Gatti was one of those Mediterranean women who not only belong to a different sex, but seem to be a species entirely different from the male. You could never imagine her running or even bending to pick something up; her white bosom in square-necked dresses, her soft hands with rings and jewel-lidded watch, her pile of dark hair tinted a strange tarnished marmalade colour that showed up the pallor of her skin – all was arranged like a still life. The Swede wasn’t married.
After the game Marco Gatti used to put a towel round his neck tennis-star fashion and his dark face was gilded with sweat. The Swede went red and blotchy. When Marco panted it was a grin, showing white teeth and one that was repaired with gold. It seemed to me that all adults were flawed in some way; it set them apart. Marco used to give me a lift home and often came in to have a drink with my father and discuss problems about the road. When he was outlining a difficulty he had a habit of smiling and putting a hand inside his shirt to scratch his breast. In the open neck of his shirt some sort of amulet on a chain rested on the dark hair between his strong pectoral muscles. My father said proudly, ‘He may look like a tenor at the opera, but he knows how to get things done.’
I had never been to the opera; it wasn’t my generation. But when Marco began to kiss me every afternoon on the way home, and then to come in to talk to my father over beer as usual, I put it down to the foreignness in him.
I said, ‘It seems so funny to walk into the room where Daddy is.’
Marco said, ‘My poor little girl, you can’t help it if you are pretty, can you?’
It rains every afternoon there, at that time of year. A sudden wind would buffet the heat aside, flattening paper against fences in the dust. Fifteen minutes later – you could have timed it by the clock – the rain came down so hard and noisy we could scarcely see out of the windscreen and had to talk as loudly as if we were in an echoing hall. The rain usually lasted only about an hour. One afternoon we went to the site instead of to my parents’ house – to the caravan that was meant to be occupied by one of the engineers but never had been, because everyone lived in town. Marco shouted against the downpour, ‘You know what the Congolese say? “When the rain comes, quickly find a girl to take home with you until it’s over.” ’ The caravan was just like a little flat, with everything you needed. Marco showed me – there was even a bath. Marco wasn’t tall (at home the girls all agreed we couldn’t look at any boy under six foot) but he had the fine, strong legs of a sportsman, covered with straight black hairs, and he stroked my leg with his hard yet furry one. That was a caress we wouldn’t have thought of, either. I had an inkling we really didn’t know anything.
The next afternoon Marco seemed to be taking the way directly home, and I said in agony, ‘Aren’t we going to the caravan?’ It was out, before I could think.
‘Oh my poor darling, were you disappointed?’ He laughed and stopped the car there and then and kissed me deep in both ears as well as the mouth. ‘All right, the caravan.’
We went there every weekday afternoon – he didn’t work on Saturdays, and the wives came along to the squash club. Soon the old Congolese watchman used to trot over from the labourers’ camp to greet us when he saw the car draw up at the caravan; he knew I was my father’s daughter. Marco chatted with him for a few minutes, and every few days gave him a tip. At the beginning, I used to stand by as if waiting to be told what to do next, but Marco had what I came to realise must be adult confidence. ‘Don’t look so worried. He’s a nice old man. He’s my friend.’
Marco taught me how to make love, in the caravan, and everything that I had thought of as ‘life’ was put away, as I had at other times folded the doll’s clothes, packed the Monopoly set and the sample collection, and given them to the servant. I stopped writing to my girl friends; it took me weeks to get down to replying to Alan’s regular letters, and yet when I did so it was with a kind of professional pride that I turned out a letter of the most skilful ambiguity – should it be taken as a love letter, or should it not? I felt it would be beyond his powers – powers of experience – to decide. I alternately pitied him and underwent an intense tingling of betrayal – actually cringing away from myself in the flesh. Before my parents and in the company of friends, Marco’s absolutely unchanged behaviour mesmerised me: I acted as if nothing had happened because for him it was really as if nothing had happened. He was not pretending to be natural with my father and mother – he was natural. And the same applied to our behaviour in the presence of his wife. After the first time he made love to me I had looked forward with terror and panic to the moment when I should have to see Eleanora again; when she might squeeze my hand or even kiss me on the cheek as she sometimes did in her affectionate, feminine way. But when I walked into our house that Sunday and met her perfume and then all at once saw her beside my mother talking about her family in Genoa, with Marco, my father and another couple sitting there – I moved through the whirling impression without falter.
Someone said, ‘Ah here she is at last, our Jillie!’
And my mother was saying (I had been riding with the Swede), ‘I don’t know how she keeps up with Per, they
were out dancing until three o’clock this morning—’ and Marco, who was twenty-nine (1 December, Sagittarius, domicile of Jupiter), was saying, ‘What it is to be young, eh?’, and my father said, ‘What time did you finally get to bed, after last night, anyway, Marco—’ and Eleanora, sitting back with her plump smooth knees crossed, tugged my hand gently so that we should exchange a woman’s kiss on the cheek.
I took in the smell of Eleanora’s skin, felt the brush of her hair on my nose; and it was done, for ever. We sat talking about some shoes her sister-in-law had sent from Milan. It was something I could never have imagined: Marco and I, as we really were, didn’t exist here; there was no embarrassment. The Gattis, as always on Sunday mornings, were straight from eleven o’clock Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and smartly dressed.
As in most of these African places there was a shortage of white women in Katanga and my mother felt much happier to see me spending my time with the young married people than she would have been to see me taken up by the mercenaries who came in and out of E’ville that summer. ‘They’re experienced men,’ she said – as opposed to boys and married men, ‘and of course they’re out for what they can get. They’ve got nothing to lose; next week they’re in another province, or they’ve left the country. I don’t blame them. I believe a girl has to know what the world’s like, and if she is fool enough to get involved with that crowd, she must take the consequences.’ She seemed to have forgotten that she had not wanted to leave me in Johannesburg in the company of Alan. ‘She’s got a nice boy at home, a decent boy who respects her. I’d far rather see her just enjoying herself generally, with you young couples, while we’re here.’ And there was always Per, the Swede, to even out the numbers; she knew he wasn’t ‘exactly Jillie’s dream of love’. I suppose that made him safe, too. If I was no one’s partner in our circle, I was a love object, handed round them all, to whom it was taken for granted that the homage of a flirtatious attitude was paid. Perhaps this was supposed to represent my compensation: if not the desired of any individual, then recognised as desirable by them all.
Life Times Page 28
