Prodigies

by Francis King

  Sipping at the water, Harriet said: ‘You haven’t been to see Addy.’

  ‘Oh, Addy!’

  ‘Be patient with her, darling. It’s hardly her fault that she’s holding us up. I’m terribly worried about her. There’s blood in her stool.’

  Alexine, who was now squatting on a rolled-up carpet, put a hand up over her eyes. ‘Oh, please! Spare me the details!’ Never ill herself, she shrank even from talk of illness.

  ‘Look in on her. She’s devoted to you.’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  Alexine did not at once go to Addy’s tent. Instead, as soon as the heat of the afternoon was beginning to cool, she took herself off, with all five of the dogs, in search of plants. Before leaving The Hague, she had begun to study botany, in addition to Arabic, and she had subsequently included some books on the subject in Addy’s library. Harriet had come to share this interest, tenderly pressing and then mounting each exotic flower, but on this occasion, wishing to be alone, Alexine did not ask her to accompany her.

  The sun was already plunging towards the horizon when she got back. Well, she’d better get it over with. Flopsy faithfully trailing with lolling tongue behind her, she approached Addy’s tent. At once Mister set up a shrill yapping. ‘ Quiet! Quiet! Stop that!’ she could hear Nanny Rose shout.

  Alexine raised the tent-flap and went in. At the sight of her, the Spitz at once fell silent and began to wag his tail. Since it was she who always insisted on feeding and exercising the dogs, they looked on her as their mistress. Nanny Rose got to her feet and tiptoed over. Addy lay out, eyes shut, her mouth twisted at one corner, and a hand resting up against a flushed cheek. ‘ She’s been delirious, poor darling,’ she whispered. ‘Saying the oddest things. One can’t reason with her.’

  Alexine gave a small, involuntary shudder. Since they had arrived in Egypt, she had grown used to nauseating smells; but this was particularly horrible, even though it was overlaid by the clean pungency of the eau-de-Cologne that Nanny Rose had been liberally splashing over the damp sheets and pillows and, from time to time, patting on to Addy’s sweating forehead and neck. She edged towards the bed.

  ‘Take my chair.’

  ‘No, I’m all right standing.’

  ‘Take it, dear.’ Nanny Rose was insistent. The poor girl looked as if she were about to faint, she thought.

  Alexine sank on to the chair and then remained motionless for several seconds, staring intently at Addy, as though willing her to get off the bed and walk.

  ‘She hasn’t eaten a thing for more than twenty-four hours. She just drinks glass after glass of water.’

  ‘That’s probably best.’

  Addy’s eyes opened. They squinted up at Alexine with an extraordinary intensity. With the hands that Nanny Rose manicured for her with so much care and skill, she jerked the sheet up from her midriff to the tip of her chin, as though in inadequate protection against this intruder.

  ‘Alexine.’ She croaked the word, with no welcome, much less pleasure.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Dying.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you’re not dying. You’re going to be perfectly well in a day or two. Are you taking that Dr James’s mixture? And the laudanum?’

  The eyes still squinted up at her, with a dazed malevolence.

  Nanny Rose answered: ‘ Yes, dear. I’ve been following your instructions to the letter.’

  ‘We all follow your instructions.’ Addy spoke again from the bed. ‘What are you?’

  ‘What am I? What do you mean? I’m your niece.’

  Addy closed her eyes. Mouth open, she began to breathe stertorously.

  Nanny Rose touched Alexine’s shoulder. ‘Don’t pay any attention. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s delirious. She’s been talking nonsense to me off and on for most of the day.’

  Alexine leaned forward and attempted to take one of Addy’s hands in hers. But with a whimper Addy jerked it away. Nanny Rose picked up the bottle of eau-de-Cologne and shook some of it on to the handkerchief that she had already used for this purpose. She stooped and patted Addy’s forehead with it.

  Addy opened her eyes and smiled at Nanny Rose in gratitude. Then the eyes swivelled, her gaze settled on Alexine. ‘Did Nanny tell you about it? Did you go and look?’

  ‘Tell me about what?’

  ‘Go and look! Look! The snake.’

  ‘Snake?’

  Nanny Rose shook her head at Alexine. ‘Pay no attention,’ she whispered. ‘ It’s the fever. That’s all. There’s no snake.’ Nanny Rose leaned over Addy. ‘There’s no snake. I looked, I got Daan to look. No snake,’ she repeated, loudly now, separating the two words.

  ‘It was in the commode. I saw it. This snake. Huge. Shiny. Yellow. With red, red patches. I saw it.’ Her face screwed up. She began to whimper. ‘I saw it. Why don’t you believe me? I saw it, saw it!’

  Nanny Rose looked down at Addy and Addy in turn looked up at her, mouth open and brows puckered in a frown.

  Again there was a silence. Then, eyes closed, Addy twisted her head convulsively from side to side. She began to mutter. What was she saying? Half of Alexine did not wish to know, the other half was morbidly avid to do so. ‘Why do we always do what you want? Why, why?’ Again the eyes opened. She stared up at Alexine. ‘Have you put a spell on us? Is that it? Even Nanny, even poor old Daan? Is it?’ She rolled her body away and once more drew the sweat-saturated sheet up to her chin. Alexine could still hear her muttering: ‘You’re a witch. That’s what you are. The witch who always gets what she wants.’ At that she relapsed, eyes once more shut, into immobility and silence.

  Alexine forced herself to sit on and on, though she longed to get away into the fresh, dry air, out of this miasma. At a gesture from her, Nanny Rose brought up a camp stool. She was about to lower herself on. to it when Alexine insisted on herself taking the stool, so that Nanny Rose could once more have the chair in which she had been sitting. ‘No, no,’ Nanny Rose protested, but Alexine got her way. She got her way. She thought about that: I always get my way. Perhaps that was dangerous not merely for others but also for herself? She forced herself once again to take Addy’s hand and to hold it in hers. This time, still apparently sleeping, Addy made no attempt to withdraw it.

  The hand grew hotter and hotter and stickier and stickier in her grasp. Then she saw the large beads of sweat pricking through the tall, narrow body, and drenching the sheets. How could one person contain so much fluid? Nanny Rose reached for a cloth and, pulling back the top sheet and jerking up the shift beneath it, began to mop Addy’s small, pointed breasts – they were like those of a pubescent girl, Alexine thought, now seeing them for the first time – and belly. ‘This must be the fever breaking,’ Nanny Rose said. ‘Poor dear. Poor, poor dear.’

  Suddenly Harriet appeared. ‘Oh, here you are!’ she greeted Alexine. ‘Do you know – I’ve just discovered – those scoundrels made off with three tins of biscuits. They can’t have eaten a biscuit in their whole lives.’

  ‘Please, mama, please. Can’t you see …?’

  Now Harriet approached the bed, full of remorse. She stared down. She almost said: ‘She’s dying.’ Tears began to gather in her eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, madam. I think it’s all right. One of my little ones – it was just like this when the fever broke.’

  The next day Addy was better, sitting up in bed, propped on pillows, to continue with her reading, and even taking some of the gruel that Nanny Rose had prepared for her and now, with tender caution, spooned into her mouth. She seemed to have little recollection of her illness and never again mentioned the snake.

  Alexine’s restlessness intensified. She wanted to get moving, push on. Once again she went for a walk accompanied by only the dogs, and once again she stooped to examine the tiny, brilliant flowers, embedded in the crevices of rocks or scattered in the undergrowth on either side of the zigzag pathway.

  At one moment, silhouetted against the dark blue sky on a ye
llow-white rock streaked with brown and orange that soared up like a huge decaying molar, she was delighted to see a gazelle motionless, head raised. In a moment, however, the dogs had raced off, barking wildly, in futile pursuit of it. Leaping sideways and away, it was at once lost to sight.

  Later, an ancient, bearded man had leapt towards her from rock to rock. White hair flowing to his emaciated shoulders and stick-like legs covered in ulcers, he had some of the uninhibited, graceful agility of the gazelle. The dogs barked and snarled at him, teeth bared. But he paid no attention either to them or to her, continuing his rapid progress downward, the wind and his precipitate descent making his long white hair swirl like foam about him.

  After he had passed her, Alexine turned round to follow his progress. But in what seemed a moment, he had vanished behind a particularly tall rock, never to reappear. She felt an unease far more intense than she would have felt had he accosted her. Who was he? Where was he going? Where had he come from? He was carrying nothing, he was almost naked. Had he been a delusion, like Addy’s snake in the commode?

  She began to hasten back to the camp, whistling or calling to the dogs if they attempted to stray.

  Late that afternoon Osman asked Alexine whether she would like to see something.

  ‘See something? See what?’

  He smiled. ‘A market. A market unlike any you have seen. Interesting. Yes? Why not? Few white people see such a market. Not far.’ He made a wide gesture, the full sleeve falling away from his muscular, coal-black arm, to indicate that the market took place behind a low range of hills to their left.

  ‘All right.’ She was bored, she was restless. Yes, why not? Perhaps that mysterious old man had been going to this same market. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘But tell no one else – not mama, not auntie.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t think either of them is in any state to come with us.’

  They rode out side by side. Conversation between them was always sporadic, each talking, either in Arabic or in English, only when there was something that needed to be said. On this occasion both of them were silent.

  Seeing them leaving the camp, Nanny Rose had said to Daan, ‘I don’t think she should go off with him alone. Anything could happen. I don’t trust him. A rogue.’ Daan had then laughed, as, seated on one of Addy’s crates of books, he dabbed camomile on to his still inflamed calves. ‘ Oh, that one can look after herself. Don’t you worry!’

  Alexine rarely felt tired but she did now. The wait to resume their journey had been so long, and waiting to do something, she told herself, was often more exhausting than actually doing it. She felt like one of the plants that, picked on her walks, drooped, as though already dead, in the ferocious midday heat. Perhaps, like them, she would revive when the sun began to sink.

  ‘Look!’ Osman roused her from a near-sleep, pointing at a wide swathe in the sand beside them. She peered at it. It was as though someone with a huge flail had swept it across the low dune in an arc. ‘ Snake!’ he said, and laughed. He let go of his reins and extended his arms to their full extent. ‘Big, big. Swallow you, swallow all of you, and then, slow, slow, you disappear.’ Again he laughed. A boa constrictor? That must be what he meant.

  Suddenly, as they passed through another cleft between two jagged rocks covered in a lichen emerald in some places and so brown in others that it appeared to be dead, Alexine saw a green, grassy expanse ahead of them. ‘An oasis!’ she cried out.

  Osman nodded. ‘Oasis.’ He grinned.

  ‘Why didn’t we come here to camp?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not good.’

  ‘Why not good?’

  Again he grinned, again shook his head.

  Totally naked children soon surrounded them, appearing from nowhere, so it seemed. They ran along beside the two horses, holding out skinny, often ulcerated arms and shouting. Alexine searched in her saddle-bag and scattered a handful of coins. The children rushed to pick them up, pushing and even hitting and kicking out at each other. Was there nowhere on this continent that people did not fight over money? Alexine wondered. Then she reminded herself that, albeit often more formally and gracefully, people fought over money everywhere in the world.

  They were approaching a village, its neat straw beehive huts set out in orderly rows, with an oval pool in the foreground surrounded by grazing buffaloes, palm-trees and a plant, its bulky stems surmounted by feathery, amazingly delicate fohage; she had learned from an illustration in one of her botanical books that the plant was ambatch. Osman now explained to her that the people used its spongy wood to make their narrow boats.

  When they were some hundred yards from the village, shots rang out, the sound ricocheting back and forth among the surrounding hills and causing Alexine’s Arab to rear repeatedly, so that, had she been riding side-saddle, she would certainly have been thrown. Were they about to be killed? As she struggled to control the horse she felt, amazingly, no terror at the prospect.

  Osman’s horse, a bay, had done no more than curvet from side to side. Now he pulled out two revolvers from his belt and raising one in each hand, fired them repeatedly up into the sky. He smiled at her, then called out: ‘No worry, no worry! Greeting!’

  A straggling group of some dozen or so soldiers emerged, their uniforms stained and ragged. Some of them carried antiquated rifles or pistols, some merely cudgels or sticks. Two or three wore red, gold-braided tarbooshes. All were barefoot, their toes widely splayed. At first, since she was riding astride and had covered most of her face with a white linen scarf to protect it from the sand-laden wind, they assumed Alexine to be both an Arab and a man. But then, when she began to speak English to Osman, they realized their error and at once crowded round her horse, pointing at her, while jabbering excitedly. One of them even put out a hand to touch her leg in its stirrup, only hurriedly to withdraw it, as though it had been burned by the contact. His companions all burst into laughter.

  Osman greeted the soldiers and they waved their weapons in the air and shouted their greetings back.

  Surrounded by this escort, they trotted up to a long, low-lying thatched house, with a wattle fence around it. Standing in the doorway was a tall Arab, Mohammed Kher, a fly-whisk in one hand and an expression of disdain on his face. Osman at once jumped off his horse and, handing the reins to one of the entourage, rushed up to Kher to enfold him in an extravagant embrace. A vivacious conversation followed, with a lot of slapping of backs and laughter. Alexine slipped off her horse but remained with it. When Osman at last indicated her presence, Kher at first merely peered at her, with a frown and a pursing of the lips. He later told Osman that she was the first white woman ever to have visited the place. He had also added (though Osman did not also report this to Alexine) that she was far too narrow-hipped and flat-chested to be in the least attractive.

  Having peered at her from afar, Kher then strode over and, circling her, haughtily examined her, as though he were wondering whether to purchase an inferior mare or cow. Then he nodded and returned to Osman. The two men once again took up their conversation, but this time the tone was clearly serious.

  Having tethered her horse to a tree, Alexine went and sat down on a rickety bamboo stool that stood by itself, as though abandoned, among recently watered beds of tomato and aubergine plants. The flies constantly settling on her arms and on her lips and even in her nostrils, she waited with ebbing patience.

  Osman approached her. ‘He wants money,’ he said in English.

  ‘Money? What for? Does anyone in this country not want money?’

  He laughed. ‘Everyone wants money. He wants money if you wish to see market.’

  ‘What’s so special about the market?’

  ‘You will see.’

  ‘How much money?’

  He hesitated. Then he named a sum. She knew that the sum was larger than that demanded by Mohammed Kher, but by now she no longer felt any resentment when people whom she thought that she trusted played such tricks on her.

  ‘I
haven’t got that sort of money with me.’

  ‘How much money?’

  She told him.

  He shook his head. Then, in a moment of inspiration, he pointed at the bracelet on her wrist. It was one that, so many years before, Adolph had given her after they had made love for the first time in the squalid garçonnière. ‘ That,’ he said. ‘Give that. Good.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He was insistent, nodding his fine head. He put out a hand and touched it. ‘Gold. Diamonds. Good.’

  Suddenly, on a whim, she wanted to be rid of the bracelet, just as, still intermittently thinking of him against her will, she wanted to be rid of Adolph’s memory. She began to unfasten the bracelet. ‘All right.’

  He took the bracelet and, holding it out ahead of him, returned to Mohammad Kher. Kher was delighted with the gift, but at first he put on a half-hearted show of not being so, frowning, shaking his head and refusing to take it from Osman’s grasp. When he did so, he at once fastened it around his own wrist. There were two other chunky silver bracelets there already. He held out the wrist and twisted it from side to side, smiling down at his new acquisition.

  ‘Now we can go to the market. It will begin soon, soon.’

  With Kher, Osman, the entourage of soldiers and some other Arabs who had suddenly emerged from the house all ahead of her, Alexine found herself walking alone through the village. The horses had been left behind. Dogs, fortunately tethered, barked and threw themselves in her direction, incensed by her alien smell. Children kept crowding around her, jabbering and laughing, and then, for no apparent reason, racing off with squeals of what might have been either terror or derision. Some women, carrying pitchers on their heads, halted and stood motionless, staring at her in silence.

  Beyond the village, there was a zaraba: an enclosure made of high poles, sharpened at the tops, so thickly intertwined with brushwood that it was impossible to see between them. Long before they neared it, Alexine was assailed by a stench reminiscent of the time when, a small child, she had been taken by her mother and father to stay at John’s country estate in Derbyshire, and, wandering about the grounds alone, had inadvertently approached the pigsties. She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of the breeches that she had taken, despite Harriet’s and Addy’s protests, to wearing for riding, and held it to her nose.