Prodigies

by Francis King

  Alexine entered. ‘We’ve been wondering what’s happened to you. Don’t you want any dinner?’

  ‘No. Thank you, dear. I think I’ll give it a miss. Somehow – I feel too tired to eat.’

  ‘Let me get one of the servants to bring you something here on a tray.’

  ‘No. No, please. The thought of food … I’m all right. Don’t worry. Just tired.’

  Alexine approached the bed and looked down at her mother’s face and dull, dazed eyes. Despite her hatred and fear of illness, whether her own or others’, she now sat down on the edge of the bed and took her mother’s hand in hers.

  ‘You have a fever.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’

  ‘Of course you have!’ Now Alexine raised her hand to her mother’s forehead. ‘If only there were a doctor in this godforsaken place.’

  ‘Thank goodness there isn’t. Most doctors only make one worse.’

  ‘We can’t move on tomorrow. It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Oh, do stop fussing! Oh, leave me alone! I want to rest, rest, rest!’

  ‘Oh, very well!’ Affronted, Alexine got to her feet and made to leave the tent.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. Forgive me! You know what I’m like when I’m tired.’

  But even when she was tired, Harriet was rarely ill-tempered.

  Alexine hesitated, then returned to the bedside. Her lower lip caught between her teeth, she squinted down at her mother. Then she said: ‘It’s strange. Long, long ago, there was a time – a short time – when I really hated you. Yes, hated you.’ She nodded as Harriet gazed up at her with bewildered, frightened eyes. ‘You sent Sammy away. I told myself I’d never forgive you for that. And now – now I love you more than anyone else in the world.’ Harriet turned her head aside, with a little gasp. ‘ I mean that. Truly I mean that.’

  There was a silence. Then, her head still turned away, Harriet said: ‘It was for the best – for you, for him, for everyone. Or, at least, I thought it was for the best.’ She drew a deep sigh. ‘One does what one thinks was for the best and one never knows whether it may not have been for the worst after all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know why I said that! It’s all so long ago. Who knows? Anyway – anyway, Mama, get well soon. You’re – you’re so precious to me. I don’t think I could go on without you.’

  Harriet now looked up at Alexine. ‘Of course I’m going to get well soon. There’s nothing really wrong with me. Nothing.’

  She put out a hand and Alexine bent forward and grasped it in both her own. The hand was burning. It also felt inert, but for a strange throbbing that, at erratic intervals, pulsed through it.

  Harriet had got out of bed and was playing the piano. But by now, with all the travelling, it was horribly out of tune, and after a while she could not bear to continue. In any case, her mind had become as blurred as her sight, and she kept forgetting the notes of the Chopin Nocturne, once so familiar to her that she used to say that she could have played it in her sleep.

  Nanny Rose had heard the jangling from the next-door tent.

  ‘What are you doing? Get back into bed! At once!’

  She spoke to Harriet as to a refractory child. In the past she would never have been so peremptory. ‘ Come along! Let me help you.’ She softened. ‘You poor dear. You are having a tough time of it. But these fevers burn themselves out. You’ll see. You know how it was with Alexine.’

  Harriet banged down the lid of the piano. Then, supported by Nanny Rose, she staggered across the tent to her bed. ‘ That piano badly needs tuning.’ Her voice was now no more than an unravelling thread.

  ‘Yes, I know, dear. But we’re not going to find anyone to tune it out here, that’s for sure. Once we’re back in Khartoum that nice Vassili can see to it.’

  ‘Vassili?’ Harriet subsided on to the bed.

  ‘That Greek. You must remember him.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ Harriet said vaguely. She closed her eyes. Then she muttered: ‘I feel terribly thirsty. I drank all that lemon-essence and water’ – she indicated the empty glass on the table beside with a trembling hand – ‘and now I already I have this terrible thirst.’

  The thirst intensified. She had always been so moderate in her appetites but now she drank endlessly – more lemon-essence and water, wine mixed with water, arrowroot with wine, chicken-broth, the making of which Nanny Rose supervised. But, as though her body rejected all this liquid, it streamed endlessly from her, soaking the sheets and the mattress beneath them.

  When she had become so weak that she had difficulty in swallowing, Nanny Rose soaked some lint in water and then repeatedly placed the lint between Harriet’s lips. The first time that she did so, Harriet stirred and gave a small chuckle. ‘Is that extreme unction?’

  Alexine entered the tent and for a while watched what Nanny was doing. The lips moved feebly on the lint. Drops ran down on either side of the dying woman’s fallen-in mouth. Then she made a desperate sucking noise.

  ‘Let me do it! No, let me do it!’ Alexine’s voice was sharp with the anguish that she was determined to suppress.

  ‘All right, dear. You have a try. She seems to be taking something in. I’ll go and get some more sheets.’

  Alexine sat down by the bed and leaned forward. Then she soaked another piece of lint in the water and placed it between her mother’s lips. But this time it merely rested there. The lips did not move.

  Her mother opened her eyes and stared up at her:

  ‘I must.’

  ‘Must what?’

  ‘Up. Get up.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’ Like Nanny Rose, Alexine now spoke to Harriet as though she were a child. ‘You can’t get up until you’re really better.’

  Soon Harriet again opened her eyes. She twisted her head from side and side and then put out a hand to thrust the damp, grey hair up from her forehead. She repeated:

  ‘I must.’

  ‘No, no! You can’t get up.’

  ‘Must – list – letters …’ She raised an emaciated arm, the almost black veins standing out on it, in the direction of her desk. Then the arm fell back.

  ‘Oh, forget all those!’

  Harriet closed her eyes. Her mouth opened and she gulped in air. Then she expelled it in a long, shuddering breath. She lay quiet.

  Alexine stared down at her mother, exerting all her formidable will: Get well, get well, get well.

  After a long time, Nanny Rose returned, some sheets over her arm. ‘Would you believe it? There were only these two clean sheets. I don’t know what those wretched girls have been doing. One of them is too taken up with that Mohammed to have any notion what she’s at, and the other can no longer be bothered.’ She went across to the bed. ‘I’ll move her over and then, if you’d …’

  She stared down. In a puzzled, aggrieved voice she said: ‘ I do believe she’s gone. Yes, I do believe it.’

  Alexine jumped up from her chair. She opened her mouth wide, as though she were about to scream, and then snapped it shut. She leaned over her mother and stared down at her, her face immobile, without any sign of emotion. She drew back. She walked over to the chair, sank into it and covered her eyes with her hands.

  ‘There, there, dear!’ From behind, Nanny Rose put her hands to Alexine’s bowed shoulders and rested her cheek against hers.

  ‘Oh, please!’ Alexine jerked away.

  ‘I’d better tell Daan. You’ll be all right? Only a moment.’

  Nanny hurried out of the tent to the one that she and Daan occupied. With mounting agitation she cried ‘Daan! Daan! Daan!’ as she jerked back the tent-flap.

  Then to her amazement, she saw him on his knees by his bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He looked up guiltily, tongue caught between his yellow, irregular teeth.

  ‘Praying!’ Nanny Rose exclaimed angrily. ‘ It’s no use praying now! She’s gone!’

  Osman supervised the digging of the grave. The twelve porters, each team of
which had so often complained that its stint of carrying Harriet’s chair had gone on for too long, now argued about who was to have the honour of doing the digging.

  That evening Harriet’s body was placed in the makeshift coffin, lined with the tasselled, heavy cloak that she had worn to parties, and was carried out on the shoulders of Osman, Daan, Ahmed and Sunny. Because Sunny was so much shorter than the others, it listed perilously to one side. Nanny Rose had thought it foolish to give him a task for which the vakeel would have been so much better suited. But Alexine had insisted that, no, he must be one of the bearers. Her mother had been so fond of him, Alexine said, and he of her. But Nanny Rose thought that nonsense; the mistress had never really accepted him.

  Alexine stood waiting by the grave, her white face as immobile as ever and her hands clasped before her. Nanny Rose had at first stood close to her, but Alexine had at once moved a step away.

  The size of the grave had been miscalculated, so that the porters had to hurry off to retrieve their spades in order to widen it. While this went on, everyone waited in silence, except for Nanny Rose who demanded of Daan, ‘Do they never get anything right?’

  Nanny Rose had told Daan that he must conduct the service.

  ‘Me! But I’m not a priest. How can I do it?’

  ‘Well, who else is there?’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘You must. Must. You owe it to her.’

  Alexine’s head was bowed. Then, suddenly, while Daan was still mumbling from the Prayer Book held in his trembling hands, she turned to Nanny Rose.

  ‘How can I forgive myself?’

  Nanny Rose spoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes squinting angrily: ‘What are you talking about? No one could have asked for a better daughter.’ She drew in a sharp breath.

  ‘No, no!’

  Then Alexine was once more motionless.

  Sunny, who was beside her, looked up at her and, when she made no response, nudged her and pointed. As though with difficulty, she focused her gaze.

  A small, bald hill swelled up beyond the encampment; marshalled on it, totally still and silent, were all the African members of the expedition. Their white robes fluttered in the wind, so that they looked like some giant wave arched on the crest, its spume reflecting the dying light of the sun.

  As the little party of Europeans, Sunny, Osman, Ahmed and the grave diggers moved off, there all at once burst from these onlookers strange wails of lamentation. Later Nanny Rose was to tell Daan that it had sounded like the howling of a pack of wolves – not that she had ever heard one. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it had stopped.

  Alexine hurried off ahead of the others. Sunny ran to catch up with her and then placed a hand on her arm. But she ignored him. She lifted the flap of her tent, turned and once more looked up to the bald crest of the hill.

  Everyone had gone.

  Nanny Rose now, in effect, took over the leadership of the expedition during the long retreat back to Khartoum. Having for all her life been obedient to the orders of anyone not a child or a servant, she was now the one who issued orders. At first, there were mutterings of rebellion – who did this woman think that she was? But then everyone reluctantly came to respect her. She had, by some miracle, acquired the decisiveness and force of will that they themselves had never possessed and that Alexine had lost.

  At first Nanny Rose went through the formality of consulting Alexine at the beginning or end of each day’s trek. Usually she would find her either lying out on the chaise-longue in the shade of a tree, dozing or staring up at the sky, or else at the desk of what had once been Harriet’s tent, assembling and annotating, with painstaking slowness and thoroughness, the floral specimens collected over almost a year.

  ‘Do you think that we should send another runner about the steamer? Something might have happened to that man. I have a feeling we were wrong to trust him.’

  As she raised her head, Alexine’s neck now seemed extraordinarily frail and vulnerable. Nanny Rose was stabbed with pity. Poor darling! She had first seemed to take her mother’s death so well, and now she was taking it so badly. ‘Do what you think best. I leave it to you.’

  I leave it to you. That was what she constantly said. Or: I trust you. Or: You know best. In the past, Alexine had never left anything to anyone, had never trusted anyone to carry out her wishes precisely as she wanted, and had never thought that anyone knew best.

  When they travelled, Alexine did not ride, but was carried in the palanquin-like chair which Harriet used to occupy. She had told Sunny that he could ride the horse and this he now did, maintaining an ambling pace beside her. The vakeel complained to Nanny Rose that, if anyone rode the horse, he should be the one to do so and not that boy. She replied that it was nothing to do with her, he must speak to Mademoiselle Thinne about it. Restrained by a grudging reverence for her grief, he never did.

  If Nanny Rose was now the commander, then Daan and Sunny were her two trusted lieutenants. At last, so late in life, Daan had also learned how to issue orders – barking out unintelligibly in a Dutch peppered here and there with some mispronounced Arab words and phrases learned on the trek: ‘No, here, here! … Not that one, you idiot, the other one! … Bring it, bring it! Quick, quick!’ The imperious tone was the same that Philip had so often used to him and his fellow servants. It also carried echoes, albeit fainter, of Alexine.

  Under the stress of Harriet’s death and Alexine’s near-death, Sunny had all at once ceased to be a frisky, erratic, laughing, demonstrative child and had become an adult. He had grown rapidly, his shoulders had broadened, wisps of hair were visible on the firm line of his jaw and on his chest. His expression was melancholy, grave, ruminative. He spoke in a low, gravelly voice, totally unlike his previous excitedly high-pitched one. Alexine, watching from her chaise-longue or her chair but saying nothing, realized that there was some sort of flirtation going on between him and one of the two personal maids. The maid was at least five years older than he was, and she had a hard, determined look to her. But she was certainly beautiful, and moved with a swift, pantherine grace. Once Alexine might have felt jealous and possessive. Now she did not care.

  As they retraced their steps, she was constantly reminded of her mother. It was in this valley that they had seen what her mother claimed was an eagle, huge wings outspread, and she herself was sure was a vulture. There, far away in the distance, she could make out the mission chapel and the eleven tukuls, but she had no desire to approach them and, for once decisive during this interminable retreat, told Nanny Rose that they must push on, not stop. She, too, now believed that the place was cursed. Perhaps the curse had had something to do with her illness and those terrible dreams. Perhaps it had also had something to do with the death of her mother. It was under that rock that three ancient shrouded women had been squatting. Seeing the vast caravan they had at first jumped up in terror, preparatory to fleeing. Then they had shyly approached, hands holding their veils high up over their faces, with only the eyes visible, and Harriet, without their asking, had given them some money. There, shimmering through a gauze of heat ahead of them, was the village in which they had sat by a well, while Sunny, with indefatigable persistence, practised the cartwheels that he was later to master.

  All these places now seemed to bear the same relationship to the places of the past as sepia photographs to the colourful realities from which they had derived. The sky had been clearer then, the grass more vivid, the sounds of the birds circling about them far louder. Life had now bled away, and what remained lacked all tone and edge.

  Alexine had ceased to worry about changing her clothes, about washing her body, about having her hair combed and curled by Nanny Rose or one of the two maids. Nanny Rose would tell her, ‘You know, dear, I really think it’s time to change that dress of yours,’ or ‘I’ll tell the girls to bring the water for a bath as soon as the tents are up’, or ‘Let me do something about that hair’. Alexine would protest for a while and then, when Nanny Rose persisted,
would at last acquiesce with a sigh.

  Everywhere, she kept the revolver close beside her. She would touch it or hold it obsessively. It gave her the same consolation as a baby derives from a comforter.

  After many weeks of travel, they once again reached the shallow stream and Nanny Rose ordered the gutta-percha boat to be readied for the crossing.

  ‘You’d better come with me and the cats,’ she told Alexine.

  But Alexine was hesitant. ‘You go ahead. I’ll wait here a little.’

  Sunny was talking, as he so often now did, with the little maid. She was giggling behind the hand raised to her face. He was shaking a finger at her in mock reproof.

  As on the previous occasion, there was a chaos of struggling humans and animals, shrieks, panicky shouts, splashing, laughter. But to Alexine it was all at first forlornly attenuated and pale. Then, on an impulse, seeing that Sunny was leading some of the dogs down the water’s edge, she once again tucked up her voluminous jellaba and knotted it round her thighs, kicked off her shoes, and strode down to join him. He looked up at her in amazement, then smiled and handed her two of the leashes.

  She strode on into the water. Flopsy and a mongrel acquired during their travels paddled, heads raised above the muddy stream, beside her.

  ‘Good dogs! Good! Good!’

  The returning boat neared her. One of the two oarsmen leaned out of it, extending a hand. Did she want to come aboard?

  She threw back her head to get her hair out of her eyes. She laughed, with a sudden access of joy. ‘No. No, thank you.’

  The opposite bank seemed to have acquired a new effulgence. She could see Nanny Rose gesticulating at the porters, instructing them where to stack their burdens. Daan was tethering the donkey. But, good heavens, what was that lazy head porter doing, sitting under a tree and devouring a slice of melon, instead of lending a hand?

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ The water streamed off her as she emerged, followed by the dogs, which at once began to shake themselves. ‘ Get up, do something! You’re not paid to sit there eating.’ She swung round. ‘Oh, Nanny, I honestly don’t think that’s the best place to stack those boxes. It’s directly in the midday sun.’