Prodigies

by Francis King

  Chapter Seven

  ALL THROUGH HER TRAVELS, Alexine had constandy taken photographs. Sometimes the whole long, straggling caravan would be halted when something – a formation of rocks, a cluster of trees, a group of nomads – caught her attention. The tent that served as her darkroom would be unloaded, the cumbrous equipment unpacked.

  If there were people involved, then they were often frightened of this one-eyed monster glaring at them, and overawed by the imperious white woman in her flowing robes, a silk scarf wrapped round her head, who, when not endlessly fidgeting to get a pose exactly right, would order them in an oddly accented Arabic: ‘Don’t move! Don’t move at all! Still! Absolutely still!’ Their reluctance to participate – what was she doing? was this some way of putting a spell on them? might not the monster gobble up their souls? – was only overcome by lavish presents of goods or money. Sometimes even these inducements could not win them over, and the intended victims would then scuttle off on their camels, horses or donkeys, without even a backward glance.

  Until Sunny’s arrival, Harriet had usually acted as Alexine’s assistant. This task, devoid of any opportunity for artistry such as the photographer herself enjoyed, had eventually begun to pall on her. But equally devoted to her duty and her daughter, she continued to carry it out, even in the intense heat of the midday sun, without even a murmur of complaint.

  Sunny avidly watched the two women at work, either standing beside one or other or squatting near the landscapes or the peoples being portrayed. When he finally viewed the picture, he would draw in his breath and his eyes would widen with wonder. Magic! From time to time, in an effort himself to work the same sort of magic, he would draw with a finger in the dust beside him, attempting a recreation, however ephemeral, of what he saw before him. But he was never satisfied with the resulting image and would hurriedly erase it with a palm.

  Harriet eventually came to depute some of her tasks as assistant to the boy – would he please hold this, carry this, wipe this, wash this for her? He was an amazing learner in this, as in everything else. Eventually, when she was occupied, usually with Osman as interpreter and Daan in attendance, in settling one of the innumerable wrangles that took place between the servants, Sunny took over entirely from her. Self-importantly he rushed hither and thither, whereas she, in similar circumstances, would merely stoically drag herself about, wan and weary from the heat and the endless travelling.

  His English was soon good enough for him to indicate, a beseeching expression on his face, that he would like himself to attempt to take a photograph. Alexine smiled and shook her head. ‘Not yet. Too difficult.’ Then, because he looked so crestfallen, she relented. ‘All right. Have a try.’

  He pointed at her. ‘You.’ It was she and not, as she had supposed, two men approaching on donkeys, whom he wanted to photograph.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. Wait. Please.’

  He went and fetched a folding chair from the half-dozen set out under a gaudy blue-and-red striped awning, where the four women and he would soon be eating their midday meal. Then he pointed to it, to indicate that she should sit on the chair. She had always been the photographer, not the person photographed. She felt uneasy sitting motionless before the camera instead of fidgeting behind it.

  In an eerie mimicry of her own procedure, he went forward, knelt and began to twitch first at the folds and then at the lace flounces at the bottom of her dress. The Egyptian maids would scrupulously unstitch and stitch back these flounces, so that, unlike the dress, they could be laundered after only a single day of wear. He gazed at her, head on one side. Tentatively he put out a hand, gathered courage, and held her chin in his fingers. He tilted it slightly. ‘Yes. Yes. Good.’ He stood back, he gazed at her. ‘Yes.’

  When that plate had at last been successfully processed and she had handed him the print, he stared down at it for a long time. He touched the image where her right arm was slightly out of focus. He shook his head. She was amazed by this perfectionism. During the long exposure, she had moved slightly, as many of her sitters moved. Unless the result was a whole area out of focus, she never bothered about this blemish. But he clearly did.

  Soon, they were alternating as photographer and assistant. Then, with an increasing assumption of authority, it was he who would supervise the setting up of darkroom tent and equipment, while she rested in the shade of the awning until he indicated to her that everything was ready.

  Their collaboration gave her a strange, almost sexual thrill, such as she had experienced when, as photographer and sitter, she and Adolph had collaborated in creating image after image. She had brought all those images with her in a lacquer box. Sometimes, alone at night, she would take them out and stare down at them with a mixture of anger and regret.

  Inevitably, she began to irritate Harriet and Addy with the increasingly long delays caused by her and Sunny labouring to produce a photograph of something or someone that struck the two older women as totally unremarkable.

  ‘If only that wretched machine had never been invented!’ Harriet grumbled as yet again they waited for the order for the caravan to start.

  ‘And if only she had never bought that wretched boy!’ Addy said.

  Chapter Eight

  LUCY WARBURTON SUPERVISED THE TWO MAIDS, One SO stunted that she was almost a dwarf and the other so huge that Lucy’s husband, Roderick, referred to her as ‘the elephant’, in their sweeping and scrubbing of room after room. The Khartoum house, which had been abandoned by a previous Governor for one newer and more central, was really a series of houses, linked to each other not merely by roofed-over passages but by the luxuriant creepers, the haunt of birds, small animals and snakes, that, long unpruned, cascaded everywhere. She was not domestic and she hated domesticity. That, as much as love, had been the reason for which, in defiance of his prohibition, she had quit her father’s Lincolnshire rectory, had married an ailing man, son of a carpenter, many years older than herself, whom her father described as ‘nothing better than an adventurer’, and had then set sail with him to East Africa.

  ‘In this corner. Here! Here!’

  When she had received from Cairo the request to let out a number of empty rooms to these three eccentric, apparently immensely rich Dutch women, her first impulse had been to refuse. But her husband had returned not merely ill from a year-long journey into the interior but also almost penniless, having been cheated by his Arab partners in a series of deals so complex that, when he had irritably tried to explain them to her, she had been totally unable to understand them. Now he lay upstairs, no longer suffering from the fever with which he had returned but, as she put it, smashed. He did nothing, he rarely said anything. He would eat a little of the food that one or other of the maids carried up to him on a tray and then would push it aside. Occasionally, as she stood looking down at him with a mixture of pity and exasperation – she rarely now felt any love – he would turn his head up to her and, to her horror, his eyes would begin to fill with tears. He was, for the moment at least, past earning any money. Letting the rooms now would earn some. The gossip was that the three women splashed money around.

  She looked on in indifference as the squat little maid ran after a scorpion, dislodged from a dusty corner by her broom, and then, broom raised high above her head, brought it down with impeccable aim to pound it into pulp. The maid screeched with delight at her success.

  Lucy pointed at the windows and told the maids: ‘ Those must be cleaned.’ After years in the country, she spoke the language almost as fluently as English.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ the elephant said.

  ‘No, today. They may arrive at any time now. Any time. We don’t know. Everything must be ready for them.’

  A firm shake of the head. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, all right, tomorrow.’ Lucy gave in to them, as she always did. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, she thought. She knew not merely such hackneyed quotations but much else of Shakespeare by heart. Regarded as both plain and a b
lue-stocking in Lincolnshire, she had been destined by her father for a career as governess to the children of the wealthy patron who had appointed him to his living.

  She wandered away, progressing through a honeycomb of empty rooms, almost all empty of furniture. She hoped that the rumour was true that these three women were travelling not merely with a number of cats and dogs and innumerable wardrobe trunks, but also with every sort of furniture, including a piano. There were not enough things here to furnish even one bedroom to their standards. High up in a corner of one room she noticed that, no doubt having entered through a broken window-pane, birds had built themselves a large, dishevelled nest. In another room, spider webs festooned the brass bedstead that was the only piece of furniture in it. In a bathroom, also containing an earth-closet, there was a terrible stench. She lifted the lid of the closet, and saw that it had not been emptied for who could say how long.

  Eventually, she gave up on this depressing voyage from one high-ceilinged, empty or half-empty room to another, and returned to the wing, its walls recently painted by the gardener who also doubled as handyman, to which in recent years she and her husband, having at last wearily despaired of having any children, now confined themselves. In this wing, she had what she had come to call ‘my den’, a small addition to the house, built out into the garden from the main structure, in which, in the days of the Governor’s occupation, the guards used to sit during the day and sleep during the night. Every wall was covered with bookcases. There was a desk, piled high with papers and books; a chair and a table made locally of unvarnished wood on which there were a few ivory objects, obtained in barter on those increasingly rare occasions when she had joined her husband on his travels; a pile of letters, most of them unanswered; and an ebony box riddled with worm-holes.

  She raised the bunch of keys that dangled from her waist – she had learned that everything had to be kept under lock and key if it were not to be in danger of being filched – and, having inserted it, opened the box. Carefully she took out what looked like a ledger, an ink-well and a pen. She sat down, the ledger before her on the table, and began to riffle through the pages, reading at random here and there. Then, having reached the end, she smoothed the pages before her with a large, bony hand, the wedding-ring perilously loose, and picked up the pen.

  At that moment, she heard his voice: ‘Lucy! Lucy! Where the hell are you?’

  She was tempted to ignore it. But with a sigh she put down the pen between the open pages and got to her feet. ‘Coming,’ she called. ‘Coming! What is it?’ She always tried to suppress the note of exasperation in her voice but, as now, usually failed to do so.

  She went into the room. He looks as if he were on the rack, she thought. He was only forty-three but he might have been mistaken for sixty. His hair and straggly beard were white and the deep criss-cross wrinkles on his yellow, pulpy face looked as if a fine wire mesh were containing a deliquescent cheese. She felt a sudden horror and remorse. What had happened to him? She had once asked him that question, soon after his return, and he had made no answer. Now she put the question only to herself.

  ‘Did you want something, darling?’

  ‘When are those infernal women arriving?’

  ‘According to the last news they’ve left Barbar. They ought to be here any time now.’

  ‘I don’t want them. It’s the last thing I want.’

  ‘We have to have them. You know that.’ She had learned, of necessity, to be implacable in this quiet, patient manner. ‘We’re almost down to our last farthing.’

  ‘If those scoundrels –’

  ‘What’s the use of talking about it?’ She wanted to add: ‘You’ve so often cheated others. Now it’s your turn.’ But she restrained herself. Instead, forcing herself to be solicitous, she asked ‘ Some tea? Or some lemonade?’

  He shook his head frenetically from side to side. She might have said: ‘Some arsenic? Or some cyanide?’ Then he got out hoarsely: ‘Water. Just some water. But make sure it’s boiled.’

  ‘It’s always boiled.’ She turned away.

  Having brought him the water, she returned to her room and again took up the pen. But the words that had flowed like molten lava the previous day now refused to come. She raised her head and once again watched the giant spider that for days had been building its web above an empty cupboard. If the spider was so indefatigable and persistent, why could she not be like it? Again she picked up the pen and plunged it into the ink-well.

  But it was no use. The words would not respond to her bidding. She was too full of panicky expectation.

  The women’s voices, echoing about the high-ceilinged rooms, jangled like bells. Everything about them had amazed Lucy: the elegance of their clothes; the size of their retinue; their perfect English and French; the perky black boy whom they treated not as a servant but as though he were a member of their family. They might have arrived not as tenants in this hell-hole but as guests in the elegant Georgian mansion of her father’s patron.

  ‘I think this would be best for Addy. There’s a lovely view from this window.’

  ‘How about the piano going here?’

  ‘Oh, no. There’s a patch of damp. Look!’

  ‘I wonder where we can find someone to tune it.’

  ‘Sunny’d better have this little room next to mine.’

  ‘This cupboard must be put in store. It takes up too much room.’

  ‘Would you be happy here or would you like that other room up the stairs?’

  They were so eager, decisive, cheerful: all the things that Lucy no longer was. In her plain brown dress, her hands clasped before her, she followed behind them, saying nothing unless one of them first addressed her.

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ Harriet told her.

  Lonely?

  ‘So surprising,’ Addy took up. ‘Fascinating. A real labyrinth. One never knows where one’s going. Or where one’s going to end up.’

  ‘It needs so much doing to it. Even if we could find the workmen, we couldn’t find the money.’

  ‘Well, if you could find the workmen, then we’d be perfectly prepared to produce the money,’ Alexine volunteered. ‘Do try. Please.’

  ‘I wonder how we’re going to accommodate all our staff?’ Harriet pondered. ‘There’s room here for our old Nanny and our dear, grumpy, faithful old retainer Daan. And Sunny is to be next to Alexine. But the others … I suppose there might be room for some of them here but …’ She mused, plump hand to chin.

  ‘Our two maids sleep upstairs. There are another two little rooms there, next to theirs.’

  ‘Oh, that would be perfect for our two little Egyptian girls – the ones that look after my sister, my daughter and me. After a fashion.’ Harriet laughed. ‘But what about the rest?’

  ‘There are some outhouses at the back. We could clear them of their junk.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t want to put you to too much trouble. But that would be a solution. Our local people are not at all particular – as you’ll know, I’m sure, from your own experience. They’ve been sleeping out in the open for weeks and weeks on end during our journey.’

  ‘We must think about a kitchen,’ Alexine said. ‘ I have a feeling that our best choice might be that large room at the back. You know the one I mean?’ She turned to Lucy. ‘Could you spare that as well?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We’ve brought all our own kitchen things with us. Pots and pans. Ice-box. Water filter. Even a range!’

  In the next room, which contained no furniture other than the brass bedstead still festooned in spider webs, Alexine rushed over to the bed, threw herself on to it and bounced up and down, laughing like a child. Suddenly Lucy, who had been previously alienated by her imperious manner, was drawn to her. She had so much gaiety, energy and zest. ‘Oh, what bliss to be on a bed that actually has springs! That camp bed was torture.’

  Lucy marvelled as, sweating and grunting, the servants began to carry in an endless succession of valises, crates, w
icker baskets, pieces of furniture, carpets, curtains, and even pictures, while Harriet and Alexine, sometimes prompted by Nanny Rose or Daan, issued their directions, often countermanded not merely once but two or three times. Far away from all this activity, Addy sat in Lucy’s den, her feet on a stool, reading a book. Lucy’s own maids looked on, goggle-eyed. From time to time, with a lot of giggling, they would make a half-hearted attempt to give clumsy assistance or would appraise, under lowered lids, the younger and the more handsome of the men, who would surreptitiously return their interest.

  ‘Oh, no, Flopsy, no, no!’ The dog had cocked a leg against the brass bedstead and a stream of urine was snaking across the floor.

  ‘Luckily the carpet hasn’t been put down,’ Harriet said.

  In the early afternoon, Lucy, assisted by the three maids, laid out a meal. There was rice, a stew of extremely tough goat with aubergine and tomato, some sour-tasting bread, and oranges, pithy and almost juice-less, that had been roughly peeled and cut into quarters. Sunny gobbled up what was given to him and then eagerly accepted a second helping. Because of the quality and quantity of his diet in recent weeks, he was growing fast. The rest merely picked at their food. Their own cook would certainly have done far better than this.

  ‘I really must apologize for this dreadful meal. But there’s a shortage of most things at present. Supplies are so erratic here.’

  ‘We still have masses of provisions with us,’ Alexine said. ‘Haven’t we, mama? We can spare you anything you need. Just tell us. We could feed a whole regiment.’

  You almost have a whole regiment with you. Lucy wanted to say it but managed not to do so.

  Near the end of the meal, Addy asked the question that all of them had been wanting to ask.

  ‘Is Mr Warburton away?’

  ‘No.’ Lucy had dreaded this. ‘He’s … he’s not well, I’m afraid. He went on one of his trips and returned … Nothing serious,’ she added. But from the way that the trio now looked at her, she knew that they knew that that was not the truth.