by Adam Thorpe
‘Now there’s a mystery,’ he’d said. ‘No perforations, so it wasn’t hung.’
My uncle had turned it over in his hands, but my aunt had tutted.
‘Not at the table,’ she said, ‘not while we’re eating, Mr Keiller.’
She’d said this as she might have said it to me, only this time she was smiling, and Mr Keiller smiled back, saying how sorry he was to be a bad boy, tucking once more into his roast beef and potatoes. I thought of this incident now, and how my uncle had told off my aunt after the famous archaeologist had gone: ‘How dare you treat such a distinguished man so,’ he’d shouted, ‘he’s not Hugh, y’know.’
‘Have you been a good boy, darling?’ said my mother again, in just the same way, as if I hadn’t heard the first time.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And are you happy, with Aunt Joy and Uncle Edward?’
I continued staring at the grass. My mother was asking these questions in a very tired voice. The voyage had been long and there had been a storm off the Canaries. Aunt Joy had suggested (but in a firm voice) that I didn’t ‘bother’ my mother too much for the first few days. ‘You don’t want to make her ill, do you?’
No, I didn’t. If I told my mother the truth, she might ‘have a turn’. It would certainly bother her. I was so deeply unhappy, especially at Flytings, that if the truth broke surface it would be as horrible and bothersome as the Big Beef itself.
‘I’m perfectly happy,’ I replied. ‘It’s all quite jolly. Especially now you’re here.’
My mother smiled, running her forefinger over her forehead. I knew, then, that she didn’t believe me about being happy.
‘It’s a simply lovely place to grow up,’ she said. ‘And Aunt Joy always wanted children.’
‘She can have her own.’
‘None arrived,’ she said, softly. ‘No one knows why. It sometimes happens.’
I blinked quickly at the trees, which were gusting slightly, to turn them into a film. I was making a film of Unknown Africa, in the footsteps of Cherry Kearton. My Aunt-who-couldn’t-have-babies reckoned I had a ‘tick’ – but I had never heard of a tick that made one blink, and she never tried to remove it as I’d had them removed from my scalp at home.
‘Mother,’ I said, ‘how’s Quiri?’
She was blinking now.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘jolly fine, I’m sure.’
I wanted her to say, ‘He sends his love,’ but she didn’t. Perhaps he’d forgotten about me.
She had closed her eyes and very soon, her face full in the sun, her mouth opening slightly so that the bottom lip shone, she ’dropped off. I moved the parasol, with some difficulty, to shade her – feeling naughty because my uncle said that the sunlight was very good for you, like water full of vitamins. I had always been taught to fear it, and was glad when my mother and I were in the parasol’s shade. I desperately wanted to lay my head in her lap; the last time I had done this was when my father took a photograph of us both on the veranda in Bamakum.
I looked anxiously towards the house. It looked more than ever as my uncle described it: ‘A cliff of granite pretending to be a home.’ The parts my uncle had added on after the war, with black beams and white plaster and leaded windows, which he called ‘Shakespearean’, looked as if they were the bullied servant of the central block. This bulged out either side of the front door and central windows in two big bays that went all the way up to the roof, covering all angles of attack. Always, when I looked at the house from the garden, I imagined my aunt to be looking out at me. Even after she was dead. Only in the wood did I feel safe and unwatched. I would imagine the house to be Mordred’s castle, and lay siege to it, or charge it on my white charger, firing arrows with rubber suckers on the ends. My uncle took no notice or laughed and said I was so knock-kneed it must be rickets, and my aunt’s spirit was too feeble to hurt me.
Now, with my mother breathing gently beside me on this sunny lawn, the house seemed to be bearing down upon us like a big tank. It was an extremely cold house, even in summer, and my aunt was never seen inside without fingerless mittens at this time. Then I remembered that she was up with my uncle at the excavation, for she was keen on old things, and was very excited when he had returned a few days before with an amber bead.
I laid my head on my mother’s lap and she stirred.
‘No, James,’ she murmured.
I kept very still, in a rather uncomfortable position against her legs, my own curled on the grass, wondering why she had said my father’s name. After some time, during which I too dropped off, I heard voices from the wood, and broke away from my mother’s lap.
‘What have you been up to?’ cried my aunt, coming up to us over the lawn. ‘Your face!’
I felt it: it didn’t seem very different. My mother was waking up.
‘We mustn’t tire her out, now,’ said my aunt.
‘I’m all right,’ said my mother. ‘I’m not an invalid.’
My aunt stiffened, because she often called herself an invalid, but my mother didn’t know that.
‘Did you find anything?’ my mother asked.
My aunt waved a small cloth bag in front of her face, like the conjuror at the village hall. ‘Pottery and bones,’ she said. ‘Pottery and bones. Nothing older than Romano-British, as yet.’ She said ‘as yet’ as if she was warning us to behave. Her nose was burned red.
There was something I didn’t like about my uncle’s latest hobby. The previous week I had watched him cutting into the turf around the tumulus, where the ground dipped slightly, and had stood in the wrong place when he’d tried to peel it off. He called this ‘penetrating the turf line’, but it reminded me of the sick man who’d walked all the way to my mother’s ‘hospital’ with flaps of skin hanging from his legs, the flesh white and full of maggots. The sods of turf were over a foot thick and very heavy, but I managed to heap them up to one side, their grit painful under my nails. I wasn’t allowed to use a trowel, so I sat on the slope of the mound above the ditch and watched my uncle’s bent back, shielding my eyes against the glare off the chalk.
It seemed a very dull and slow thing, archaeology. He scraped away for ages and then scooped the little pile of chalk he’d made into cloth bags. He took these back at lunchtime and spent the afternoon in the garden ‘riddling’ them through a wide sieve, as they riddled corn in the little tumbledown farm at the end of Maddle Lane. He’d set up a hose to wash the finds, and the tiny stream snaked over the lawn and made mud patches which upset my aunt.
The bits of bone and pottery were like something off one of the mixens in the village, but I accompanied my uncle each morning in the hope of finding treasure. The farmer who owned the field, called Jack Jennet, would pass by with the same hope; my uncle had already paid him something for the use of the field, though the crop had not been touched, and had had to promise him a bit of the treasure if any were found.
This was odd, because my uncle had said that he wasn’t looking for treasure, only a pig, a ram, and an ox.
I had walked on my own once, in the spring, to the tumuli, with a pack of Bovril sandwiches and a Thermos. It had taken some time because I was Jack McLaren, sailing up the coast of Cape York desperately hunting for a site for his palm plantation. The two tumuli were Simpson’s Bay, its beach just where my uncle was now cutting long white scars – and my aboriginal friends were not happy about it. I had to play this game to make the place exciting: the fact that the bits of rubbish he called ‘finds’ were very old did not make them magical. In fact, I was glad I felt nothing for them, for the little bones reminded me of Mr Hargreaves on his way to becoming Sir Steggie, and at any moment I expected a fob-watch to be found. The bones were mainly of deer, however, and the Romans lived before fob-watches were invented.
My mother and I packed up the deckchairs and followed my aunt inside, as the gusts had dragged a large cloud in front of the sun. I checked my face in the mirror: there were red ripples all down one side where it had been pressed against
the folds of my mother’s dress. If they stayed, I would look like the boys in the villages we had visited on the way to the lake, except that there were no circles or waves, nothing carved carefully by a knife. But the patterns would not stay: as I touched them, they already seemed to be fading. I thought: if Quiri were here, he might be able to tell me what they meant; according to him, all marks that the days and nights made on your body were like words, and said things, even if they vanished after a few minutes.
My aunt crossed the hallway and saw me.
‘Admiring yourself, Hugh?’ she said.
She disappeared into the kitchen with a chuckle and I heard her and my mother talking. I looked at my hands. The lines on my face looked like the lines on my hands. I thought of the story Quiri had told me many times, which his mother had also told him many times, for it was also her favourite story. It was the story of how the human race came to have lines on its hands. I didn’t like the story, because it was mysterious and very sad when you thought it was going to be funny – you felt tricked each time, and each time, when it came to an end, you looked at your own hands. You couldn’t help it. One day, I would tell it to someone in England. Maybe even at school, in the dormitory, I would tell them that one instead of the wild yarns they forced me to spin.
My name was being called. It was tea with the rest of the special cream cake my mother had bought in London, on her way down. My aunt spread newspaper at one end of the kitchen table and we admired the ‘bits and bobs’, as my mother called them. They were the bigger bits, and on one of the ‘sherds’ there was a wavy pattern. My aunt became very excited when she saw a tiny blue bead in the crumbs of earth, but it turned out to be a hundred and thousand.
‘You didn’t do that deliberately, did you, Hugh?’ said my aunt, in a playful but annoyed way.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘No what?’ said my mother.
‘No, thank you.’
They both found this funny, but I had been daydreaming.
‘Manners maketh man,’ said my aunt.
I wiped cream from the corners of my mouth with my hand.
‘It’s not for want of trying,’ she added, to my mother.
My mother said she had to go and unpack her last things, and have a little nap. I went off to play and came back into the kitchen when the Indian gong rang, for supper. My mother was there, looking better; she and my aunt had a glass of sherry each, while I ate my buttered egg.
My uncle appeared at the outside door, with several bags of finds.
‘Ah, cake,’ he said. ‘Jolly good. Joy always makes ours.’
It had been left out for him, with a colander over it. He wiped his hands on his trousers and ate the last slice in three mouthfuls standing up, sucking the cream off his dirty fingers. My aunt tutted at the crumbs on the floor.
‘I’ll sweep them up,’ I said.
‘Oh, Huggins,’ said my mother.
I took the dustpan and brush off their hooks in the scullery and swept up the crumbs around my uncle’s boots.
‘Thank you very much, most obliged,’ said my uncle, in what my aunt called his ‘caustic soda voice’.
‘Is this cheek,’ my aunt asked, ‘or is it willing?’
I stood up. ‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘I’m sure it’s willing,’ said my mother. ‘I used to encourage this sort of thing. It doesn’t do to rely totally on servants.’
‘We don’t,’ said my aunt.
‘I didn’t say you did, Joy.’
‘No, but Hugh has not been noted for his helpful ways before.’
I looked at my aunt, who was smiling horribly, and wished her in Hades (we’d started Ancient Greek at school).
‘Throw the crumbs on the lawn, Hugh,’ she said. ‘There was a coal tit there this morning.’
‘I hope you’ve been helpful, Hugh,’ said my mother.
I left the room. My uncle snorted. ‘You’ve missed one there, old boy,’ he shouted after me.
I jerked the dustpan on to the grass but most of the crumbs fell on my shoes, caught in the laces and lace-holes. An evening cool was just emerging from the lawn, and the sun was tangled in the lowest branches. My face was burning: I must have played about on the lawn too long, but my uncle would approve. It was nice to stand out here for a few moments, knowing that my mother was behind me, in the kitchen. It was almost more delicious than actually being with her, because when I was with her it was too real.
I went back inside. My uncle was explaining why he was grumpy: he had found terrifically old stuff mixed up with quite old stuff. The broken bits of pottery looked all the same to me, spread out on the table, but he explained that the levels had got mixed up over time, one sinking into another, burrowed by worms and rain and badgers and rabbits, so that nothing was clear, and hundreds or even thousands of years were all muddled together.
I thought of the hundreds and thousands on the cake, when he said that, mixing with real amber beads. I noticed that his hands were no longer white, but dark, as if he was now digging into earth.
‘You should come to Africa,’ said my mother.
She poured me a glass of milk. It was as warm as when I’d collected it from the Jennets’ farm this morning, but only because it had been boiled earlier.
‘No, thank you,’ said my aunt.
‘Talking of times being mixed up,’ my mother went on.
My uncle grunted. ‘I thought it all broke down out there. Into one great rotting compost, what? Trees, masks, ju-ju huts, district officers –’ He gave a barking laugh, which was a sign that he had just made a joke.
I didn’t like the idea of my father becoming compost. (The compost heap in the garden smelt of old fruit, and was teeming with woodlice, creatures which reminded me of Sir Steggie.) My uncle always made this sort of joke when he was in a bad mood. I bit into my bread and was pleased to see that Herbert E. Standing stayed on guard by the door, pale and glimmering in his cricketing togs beyond my aunt’s head.
‘Do wash your hands, Edward,’ said my aunt. ‘The boy’s eating.’
‘You mean Hugh,’ laughed my mother.
It wasn’t a real laugh, it was to cover up the crossness – which still came through, just as the fish taste of cod-liver oil came through the square of chocolate I was allowed after it.
‘There isn’t any other boy in the room,’ my aunt replied. ‘Unless you regard dear Edward as a boy, which I quite frequently do. A little boy,’ she added, in a hoarse whisper.
From the way she was blinking, I knew that she had had ‘a touch too much’. (I was fairly sure that this referred to sherry but had never seen her sip more than her ‘thimbleful’.) My uncle brought his dirty hands down on to the table. He had very large hands, and my glass rocked enough to ruin my experiment, which was to see how much of the inside of the glass I could keep clear of milk. This meant drinking from the same spot every time and putting the glass down very carefully, so that the milk’s film was kept to the area under my lips, like a white cloth being drawn up.
‘Sometimes,’ said my uncle, in a voice I had expected to be loud, but wasn’t, ‘I regret the passing from this world of the practice of human sacrifice.’
‘It hasn’t quite passed,’ said my mother, gaily. ‘Not quite.’
My uncle stopped glaring at my aunt and blinked at my mother, as if she had slapped him on the cheek, or tweaked his beard (he was starting to grow it at this time). Perhaps this was something to do with the fact that she had spoken gaily when his own voice had been like a big leopard prowling through the bush.
‘It hasn’t?’ said my uncle, frowning.
‘Listen,’ said my mother, ‘I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say that lycanthropy is alive and well, and so is the use of the borfima.’
‘What the blazes is a borfima?’ my uncle asked. ‘And for the benefit of my dear wife, you might explain lycanthropy, too.’
He was smiling now, but not because he was happy. Aunt Joy said, ‘I know perfe
ctly well what lycanthropy means, Edward. A lot of bilge about werewolves.’
‘Leopards, in this case,’ said my mother, making me jump in my chair. ‘I will explain borfima when certain petysonolee.’
Whenever my mother said ‘petysonolee’, or a similar nonsense word, with her mouth going in and out, it was what people said in France, and was a way of talking outside me. As a result, I was looking forward to visiting France.
‘Very well, message taken,’ said my uncle. He went to the sink to wash his hands.
‘Not in the sink, Edward,’ said my aunt.
Surprisingly, he went off to the bathroom without saying a word, looking thoughtful. But then he always did what Aunt Joy told him to do, in the end.
He came back, scrubbed and changed, with a whisky in his hand. My mother nodded to me at the same time as my aunt did, which made my aunt giggle in a rather painfully high-pitched way, like a bat squeak. I drained the cocoa I’d made myself, pecked my aunt and uncle goodnight and kissed my mother (not that I defined the difference as such, it was an instinctive thing), closed the kitchen door behind me, and pretended to mount the stairs. The stairs were wooden, wide and creaky, and couldn’t be descended even on tiptoe without announcing someone’s presence. So I remained on the bottom stair and walked on the spot, carefully fading out my steps until the right number had been reached.
The keyhole in the kitchen door was large enough for sound-waves to travel through unimpeded, and once my ear was settled against its chill iron frame, I might as well have been in the room.
I knew this word borfima. I had reckoned it was a horrible illness, which was boring, because there were so many of those. It had cropped up in conversations between my father and people like Charlie Moore, but was always followed by a French word and a glance at me. I believed it had something to do with the Leopard Society, too.
There was some mumbling, and the sound of a glass being set down, then: ‘Sierra Leone,’ said my mother, as if in reply to someone. ‘Actually, it’s a bundle, a little package of things, a sort of medicine.’
