Prodigies

by Francis King

  Nanny Rose had brought a number of medicines. He had been reluctant to swallow any of them, but she had stubbornly insisted, as she used once stubbornly to insist when Alexine declined a childhood dose of rhubarb or worming powder. ‘Now I want you to be sure to take this powder. This is the important one. Don’t forget! I’ll be very angry if you forget. You must take it if you want to get well.’

  He closed his eyes, his face expressionless.

  ‘Don’t forget!’ she repeated.

  Outside the tukul, she said: ‘Poor fellow! I don’t give him long. It’s a strange thing. I always seem to know.’

  ‘Seem to know?’

  ‘When someone’s about to make the journey.’ Nanny Rose was full of these euphemisms. They always exasperated Alexine.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll recover. At his age, why not?’ But at heart Alexine shared Nanny Rose’s pessimism.

  ‘It’s odd. There’s that poor fellow – not much more than thirty – and it’s all but over for him. And here am I – nearing my sixties – and I feel as though I were reborn.’

  ‘Reborn?’

  ‘Yes, as soon as I arrived in Africa, I felt that. All that went before now seems to like a dream. And Daan says it’s the same for him. He says that before he was always living other people’s fives and now he’s at last living his own. I suppose that’s one way of putting it. You know, I don’t think I ever want to return to England or the Netherlands. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘I sometimes feel the same. I just want to go on and on, farther and farther, deeper and deeper.’

  Alexine and Harriet had been playing piquet, a lantern beside them.

  Harriet put down her cards. ‘My eyes are tired. Let’s stop.’

  ‘You say that because you’re losing.’

  ‘I always lose with you. But this is the first time I’ve said my eyes are too tired for me to go on.’ She picked up the cards and began to shuffle them.

  Alexine jumped up. ‘Let me show you something.’

  ‘What? In the dark?’

  ‘It’s not dark.’ Alexine tilted her head and gazed up into the sky. ‘There’s that huge full moon. And all those stars – so many stars. It’s lighter than on a foggy day in London – or The Hague for that matter.’ She beckoned. ‘Come!’

  Harriet got up from her chair, hitching at her shawl. After the intense heat of the day, the nights were often cold. ‘What is it you want me to see?’

  ‘The graves. The graves of all the priests who have died here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to see anything so morbid!’

  ‘Please! It’s very moving. Beautiful too. You can’t really make out the inscriptions – just part of a name here, part of a date there – but you imagine all those men leaving France to come all this distance out here. And for what?’

  ‘For God, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you – do you really believe in God? Tell me truthfully, mama.’

  Harriet thought for a while. ‘ I used to think that God had created the world. But, having come here, I now think that, on the contrary, the world created God.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Harriet did not answer.

  Alexine slipped an arm through her mother’s as they took the downward path to the overgrown garden and the little cemetery beyond it.

  ‘You know, I can never think of you as my mother.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘I mean, for me you’re really like a sister – or like a closest friend.’

  ‘Yes, we are close, aren’t we?’

  ‘And all these adventures have made us so much closer. We were never as close as this before.’

  Harriet halted and Alexine halted with her. In the undergrowth near them there was a rustle.

  ‘What’s that?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I hope it’s not a snake.’

  A cat, not one of theirs, whisked out. It was carrying something small and wriggling in its mouth. It was too dark to see the precise nature of its prey.

  ‘Horrible!’ Harriet said.

  ‘It’s only being a cat. Just as when humans do horrible things, they’re only being humans.’

  They walked on for a while in silence. Then Alexine jerked her mother’s arm, bringing her to a halt.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Alexine put a finger to her lips. She pointed.

  Below them they could see the arches with the creepers cascading from them. In front of the arches the headstones stood out a bleached white. A man and a woman were there. She was on her knees before him, and he, hands on hips, was looking not down at her but straight out ahead. Harriet and Alexine had never seen the woman before, but they could see that she was not white. The man was Père Thomas. He was in front of his brother’s headstone.

  By mutual consent, saying nothing, they turned and retreated.

  It was only as they neared Harriet’s tent that she said: ‘ Poor devil! What terrible fives they lead here!’

  The next day, Alexine told Harriet that she wanted to photograph her down by the headstones. As she had lain awake the previous night, she had, as so often, clearly visualized the image. She had known precisely where and how she would position her mother. There would be the dark foliage behind her and a headstone beside her. The sun, filtering down through the cascading foliage, would chequer her dress, but it would also strike full on her face and hands, so they stood out starkly white.

  ‘Oh, no, dear, no. The last thing I want is to be photographed in that dreary place.’

  ‘Oh, please, please!’

  They argued and eventually Harriet gave in.

  ‘I’ll just call Sunny to give us a hand.’

  ‘Oh, do we really need him? I can help you.’ The resentment that Harriet had felt when Sunny had begun to supplant her as Alexine’s assistant, had intensified as he had become more and more her partner, often himself posing sitters or choosing a scene.

  ‘We can’t carry all that equipment all that way – and then back again – by ourselves.’

  ‘Oh, very well. But I’d much rather be photographed out here, by the chapel. It’s so picturesque.’

  ‘I want a picture, not something picturesque.’

  As Sunny tightened the head clamp, Harriet cried out: ‘ Oh, do be careful! You’re hurting me! And you’re ruining all Nanny’s work with the tongs.’

  ‘It’s essential that you don’t move,’ Alexine said. ‘Pretend you’re a corpse.’

  Harriet’s body stiffened. She stared unblinking ahead of her. Oh, if only that wretched boy would stop gawping at her! She felt an involuntary tremor of an eyelid. That mustn’t happen again or the likeness would be ruined.

  ‘Lovely! Perfect. Don’t move yet. Don’t move!’

  A fly buzzed round Harriet but she did not move.

  ‘You’re my best model.’ Alexine removed the plate from the bulky camera and handed it to Sunny. The she stooped for another and inserted it. ‘Just one more.’

  ‘Oh, please!’

  For the rest of the day, Alexine and Sunny continued to take photographs. Alexine even tried to photograph the dogs. But though she posed them on the laps of either Sunny or Nanny Rose, whom she instructed to clasp them firmly, they always somehow managed to move, so that, when the plates were at last developed and printed, there was Nanny Rose or Sunny perfectly solid, but the dogs were merely ghostly, evanescent blurs or scratches of whiteness or blackness.

  ‘It’s as though they didn’t exist,’ Nanny Rose commented to Alexine. ‘And yet they have far more life in them than anyone but you.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN THEY LEFT, they presented the mission with bags of dried beans and apricots, coffee, sugar and some bottles of brandy. Nanny Rose added some medicines – ‘though we can’t really spare them, our stocks are running low,’ she told Harriet and Alexine.

  The two priests and the five laymen all came out to see them off. Père François staggered, as though drunk, towards each of them in turn, shak
ing their hands. He was deathly pale and his adam’s apple was even more prominent than ever. Père Thomas avoided their gaze as he too shook their hands, almost as though he knew that Harriet and Alexine had been witnesses of that scene in the cemetery. He had a morose, almost angry expression, and he did not smile even when, in front of them, Sunny performed a whole series of exuberant cartwheels. The laymen stood motionless, their black faces devoid of any expression that might give a clue to their feelings. Alexine wanted that clue. What would become of them when the last of the priests had either died or been recalled and the mission was closed? Were they truly believers or did it suit them to appear to be believers? What did they feel about the two white men, both so frail, one physically and one morally?

  Alexine and Sunny rode not ahead of Nanny Rose and Harriet in their makeshift palanquins of chairs supported on poles, as they usually did, but beside them. All of them, even Sunny, were in a sombre mood. The two fathers had said that they were looking forward to seeing them if they were to return the same way, but the visitors all knew that, even if that return were to happen, their hosts would probably have vanished.

  When they could no longer glance back to see the lake, the hills round it, the steeple of the chapel and the blue smoke drifting up from the nearby village, their spirits at once lifted. Daan, jolting along on his donkey, began to sing an old ballad in his nasal tenor. Alexine pointed out trees and bushes with particularly spectacular flowers on them. Harriet leaned back, eyes closed, a smile on her face, as she felt a cool breeze wafting over with an illusory smell of the far-distant sea.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ Sunny said. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I must have a start.’

  ‘All right. I’ll wait here and you can begin running when you reach that rock over there.’

  Nanny Rose muttered: ‘I could do with a bite.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  THERE HAD BEEN A NUMBER OF DAYS when she had been so happy, riding on and on, over hills, beside streams, across woods or through villages, that she had not wanted or, on many occasions, even been able to sleep. She would hum tunelessly to herself as she jogged along on her horse and then she would break off and look over to Sunny beside her and for no reason at all she would smile at him. At night, long after the others had gone to bed, she would he out on the bamboo-and-wicker chaise-longue that Harriet had bought in Khartoum and stare up at the sky. At such moments, she had a strange sense that she had become both omnipotent and immortal.

  Then, one afternoon, everything changed. They had halted for some food, but she had no appetite and she felt her body twitching with restlessness. There was a curious sensation at the back of her neck, as though the muscles were constantly contracting, and her fingertips were tingling. ‘Oh, come on! Let’s get moving again. We want to arrive at that town they spoke about before nightfall.’

  Soon after they had moved on again, she was aware, with a sense of bewilderment and dread, of a change in the sky. It was no longer limitless and translucent. Now it was as though a huge glass bowl had been inverted over their straggling party, imprisoning them within it. The rim of the bowl, where the horizon extended, had been smoked to a blue-grey. She peered into the distance, twisting from side to side in her saddle. Was it some optical illusion of light and dust? The blue-grey began to darken, even though it was long before nightfall. Sunny said something to her but she hardly heard him and did not reply. There was a sensation of grit under her eyelids and a metallic taste in her mouth.

  The town sprawled far farther than they had expected, and its muddy streets were thronged with people. Normally she would have. delighted in all the movement and noise, but now when the good-natured crowds stared, shouted and gesticulated as the interminable cavalcade, repeatedly held up, wound its way between them, she cringed, as though fearful of some sudden attack.

  Mechanically performing a task long since grown familiar to her, she asked a dignified-looking shopkeeper for the head man and followed him when, striding out beside her horse, he took her to him. She presented a letter from the Mudir, she handed over the usual gift of money. Her throat felt dry, she still had that metallic taste in her mouth and, once so fluent in Arabic, she now stumbled over the simplest of words.

  As she, Osman and the vakeel were returning to join the others, it was with amazement that she heard her name being called in English. It was Fielding, strolling on the other side of the street in the company of two Arabs.

  ‘I was expecting you!’ Having hurried over to her horse, he placed a hand on a stirrup. She stared down at him. His face was blurred, its edges dissolving.

  ‘You!’

  ‘Why so surprised? I’ve been hearing about all your adventures.’

  ‘How?’ She felt the monosyllable fall from her mouth like a stone.

  ‘Oh, one hears, one hears. Eventually one hears everything.’

  She tried to smile down. ‘You got here before us.’

  He laughed. ‘Of course. I haven’t got all your baggage to hinder me. Are you coming to the festivities this evening?’

  ‘The festivities?’

  ‘Don’t ask me what they are. But they’re celebrating something – the birth of a God, some victory over their enemies, something of that kind. There’ll be dancing and singing. It might even end in an orgy – who knows? It’ll be mteresting for you. Just what an explorer ought to explore. I’m sure you’ve never been at an orgy before.’

  She thought, once again experiencing that strange sensation of the muscles contracting at the back of her neck, while her fingertips tingled.

  ‘All right. Yes.’ She licked her lips. ‘ Yes.’

  ‘Shall I call for you at, say, eight or so? I’ll be able to find you, no difficulty about that, since there are so many people accompanying you on your royal progress.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Good.’

  She was aware of him frowning up at her, half puzzled and half anxious. Clearly he realized that something was amiss. Then she kicked at the flanks of the horse, without saying anything further, and moved off, followed by Osman and the vakeel. She had often thought and even dreamed of Fielding during the journey, longing for him and yet disgusted with herself for doing so. Now she had met him again and she felt neither pleasure nor disgust but merely an inexplicable weariness.

  ‘You don’t look well. You look exhausted. Why do you have to go?’

  Nanny Rose was helping Alexine into her frock. Harriet, seated, was watching them.

  ‘Because it’s something I want to see. He said – he said it’s the kind of thing every explorer ought to explore.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you had a touch of the sun. You’re not yourself.’

  ‘What is myself?’

  Harriet and Nanny Rose exchanged worried glances.

  ‘Nanny is right,’ Harriet said. ‘You should get to bed and have a good rest.’

  Alexine shook her head. She longed for the oblivion of sleep but she must not give in. It was, after all, she who constantly looked after the others, not they her. A tremor ran through her body, making her put out a hand to the frame of the pier-glass.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ ‘Sure.’

  Earlier, in the street, Fielding had looked dirty, bedraggled and unshaven. But he had now bathed, shaved and changed into formal clothes. Briefly, Alexine once more felt as she had felt throughout her travels: vigorous, eager, euphoric, in control both of herself and of everything around her. The old dizzying pull of his attraction had become even stronger than ever. She wanted him, she was going to have him. Was she not the girl who always got what she wanted?

  ‘Who are those men?’ Six barefoot men slouched behind him, muskets over their shoulders. All had identical red cloths wrapped round their heads. A seventh man, also with a red cloth round his head but without a musket, was carrying a lantern.

  ‘Oh, the head man sent them. They’re here to protect us. Or, rather, you. I said that you didn’t need any protectio
n, you were perfectly capable of looking after yourself and that I was perfectly capable of looking after you if you weren’t. But he insisted. He said that there’s lot of lawlessness during these festivities. People drink – or take things even more intoxicating.’ He looked around. ‘Aren’t you going to travel in a chair?’

  ‘Oh, no! I want to go on foot.’

  ‘Then I’ll leave my horse here.’

  As they set off down the first of a labyrinth of narrow streets, he took her arm in his. She moved not away but even closer to him.

  ‘Now tell me all the things that have not been reported to me!’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘About your adventures.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve had some wonderful days! Unforgettable!’ Like a once dry cistern suddenly and miraculously filling with water, she was continuing to feel energy and joy pulsing up and up within her. It was no longer an effort to respond to his questions; she laughed with total naturalness whenever he made one of his sardonic remarks or teased her.

  Crowds were surging along in the same direction as themselves, with a lot of pushing, shouting and laughter. To protect her, Fielding removed his arm from hers and instead placed it round her shoulder, drawing her against him. ‘Don’t be afraid. They’re in a happy mood.’

  ‘I’m not afraid. Not in the least.’

  She felt his jacket rough against her cheek.

  ‘We have a place beside the head man. He’s a friend of mine. And in any case you gave him such a handsome present, you earned it with that.’

  They turned a corner and there, in front of them, was a vast, bare, uptilted stretch of ground crammed with people and blazing with bonfires. Each time they passed one of these bonfires, the leaping flames seared her face and bare arms.

  There was a beating in her head, louder and louder, more and more insistent. She put a hand to her forehead, pressing her temples with her fingers, as though in an effort to squeeze out the sound. Then she realized that the beating was not in her head but came from a row of drums beyond the leaping, stamping, swaying masked dancers in the circular space kept clear for them by men with the same red cloths around their heads as those worn by their own guards.