Prodigies

by Francis King

  As they bowled along the seafront Alexine was filled with exhilaration. There was only one other bicycle in Tripoli, the property of the youthful French consul, and so, inevitably, everyone whom they passed halted to stop, stare and point. But, for once, this blatant attention in no way annoyed her. Perilously taking a hand off the handlebars and her eye off the road, she would wave and nod in greeting. Before the arrival of the bicycles she had imagined that she would use them to ride out over the sands of the desert. But a brief attempt on the outskirts of Tripoli had at once made her realize the futility of this idea.

  ‘Have you seen the Prince?’ she asked the desk-clerk when she and Sunny returned to the hotel. Massimo had not been at breakfast and she had had no glimpse of him since.

  ‘I’m sorry, mademoiselle. His key is here but he isn’t in his room.’

  Alexine sighed and the line of her mouth tautened. Increasingly, Massimo would disappear, sometimes for two or three days. When he returned, his clothes would be crumpled and grubby, his shoulder-length hair dishevelled, his eyes bleary, and his chin covered in a golden stubble. Where had he been, what on earth had he been doing? Alexine would demand, with a mixture of anxiety and anger. He would either then make no answer at all or else petulantly tell her, as he had so often in the past petulantly told his mother, that he had to lead his own fife, that he was under no obligation to explain his movements to anyone, that he hated prying and spying, that he refused to be cross-examined. At that, he would stagger upstairs, fall on his bed, and sleep for several hours.

  ‘What on earth does he do?’

  Sunny shrugged. He had heard something of Massimo’s escapades and had made his guesses, but he shrank from revealing to Alexine what he had heard or guessed.

  ‘I must go and write some letters.’ Curiously, once so reluctant to write letters, Alexine now wrote them almost daily. It was as if Harriet’s final legacy had been to bequeath to her daughter an occupation that had soon become not merely a duty but also a pleasure.

  As so often, it was to John that she wrote, her hand moving over the paper with the same rapidity that Harriet’s had done. Even the way in which she expressed herself was Harriet’s: informal, unliterary, often even ungrammatical, vivid and full of eagerness and optimism.

  I have ordered seventy camels which should come in about twenty days, and I am busy whilst waiting with preparations that are as odd as they are complicated and tiresome. It seems that to travel into the interior here one must turn oneself into a sort of grocer – but one that does not get paid for his goods! On the last expedition the food that we carried was almost wholly for ourselves. Now we must carry large quantities for others. In addition, Sunny and I spent most of yesterday buying an extraordinary variety of other things, destined to be presents for the grand folk met on our way – cotton stuffs, knives, needles, beads, red mantles, Turkish caps, no end of things.

  Because of all this expenditure, funds are once again beginning to run low. I must therefore ask you, I’m afraid, to instruct Glyn’s Bank …

  She broke off at the sound of an uneven tread down the stone flags of the corridor outside her room. She jumped up and pulled open her door.

  ‘Massimo!’

  He swung round. There was a dark-brown, diamond-shaped stain down one side of the elegant white cotton jacket that she had bought him only a few days before, and a bruise on his cheek. One of his boots trailed its laces. His face was, as on similar occasions in the past, unshaven, and the left eye was bloodshot.

  ‘Where have you been? You’ve been gone so long! I was thinking of sending out a search party.’

  ‘Please!’ His voice was hoarse. ‘I’ve told you and told you! I can’t share my whole life with you – or with anyone else. I must be free.’

  She felt no annoyance, only a baffled pity. Where did he go? What did he get up to? Had he found friends whom he was determined she should never meet or even see? Was there some woman? The always unanswered questions now nagged at her with even sharper importunity.

  ‘You worry me,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. I care too much for you not to be upset when you disappear for a day, two days, and then return in that state and refuse to –’

  ‘Oh, shut up! Shut up!’

  Once so elaborately courteous, he increasingly spoke to her with such rudeness.

  He hurried into his room, slamming the door behind him. She heard the key turning in the lock.

  That evening followed the pattern of other evenings after one of his fugues: it was as though nothing untoward had ever taken place. There was still the bruise on his cheekbone and the one eye was still bloodshot. But he was immaculately dressed, he had washed and shaved, and he was, as he could so often be, the most entertaining of companions. Looking at him across the dining-room table, she forgot her hurt and anger at the way in which he had spoken to her and was overwhelmed, as so often, by a dissolving, relaxing tenderness. He was so beautiful, she thought, as she so often did when looking at him. Constantly she was amazed by the regularity of his features, the transparency of his skin, the sheen of his hair, and the extraordinary violet of his eyes under arched brows. But what she felt on each of these occasions was not so much a sexual as an aesthetic excitement.

  She could not resist giving words to the thought that had suddenly come into her mind, though she knew that he would find them ridiculously gushing, as she did herself. ‘You look exactly like Antinous.’

  ‘Antinous?’

  ‘In Rome we saw that statue of him. I thought him the most beautiful man I had ever seen.’

  ‘Well, thank you for the comparison.’ He spoke drily; but she knew that secretly he was delighted by the compliment.

  When, the meal over, they settled down to a game of chess, she noticed that his fingernails, dirt-seamed when she had confronted him outside his room, had once more been scrupulously manicured. It was her own Egyptian maid who each day performed this task for him. Even the nails, with their pinkish glow and generous moons, struck her as beautiful.

  Chapter Three

  ALEXINE WAS WRITING A LETTER TO SOPHIE in her tent:

  We have now reached the fine remains of a Roman town called Bondjem. It is extraordinary to find such a remote and lonely place full of archways and buildings – now of course all in ruins – of immense stones. I haven’t seen any architecture so massive and grand since I was in Malta last year. Sunny has collected some bits of Roman pottery – a peculiar red colour. I myself prefer to collect flowers. But they quickly wither in the icy cold of the nights …

  She broke off there, as Sunny stormed into her tent.

  ‘I’m going to kill that man!’

  ‘Oh, Sunny, what’s happened? What’s the matter?’

  ‘He’s disgusting! Why doesn’t he leave me alone? That’s all I want. I want him to leave me alone. Not to talk to me, not to come near me.’

  ‘But you were getting on so well.’ At the outset of the expedition she had feared trouble between the two; but she had been amazed to see how, from the outset, Massimo had been at pains to ingratiate himself with Sunny – choosing a place beside him at meals, often riding beside him, constantly attempting to draw him, taciturn as he was, into any discussion. Now, within the past week or so, all that had changed. What had Massimo done?

  ‘He’s loathsome!’

  Bewildered, she persisted: ‘But I don’t understand. What is it? You seemed to be such good friends.’

  ‘Thank you! I don’t want to be his friend.’

  After that, Sunny slept not in the tent that he and Massimo had so far been sharing but, wrapped in blankets against the cold, out under the stars.

  Clearly, there was now some irreconcilable difference between the two; but what it was continued to baffle her. Perhaps Sunny disapproved of Massimo’s bout of drinking at the end of a long day’s journey or even sometimes during it? The Arabs, strict in their avoidance of alcohol, might certainly do so. He would carry a bottle of wine with him in his saddle-bag and drank from
it openly, even ostentatiously, with his head tilted up and a hand tipping the bottle up against his lips. Or perhaps Sunny disapproved of Massimo’s way of quitting the dinner-table as soon as the meal was over, in order to squat with the porters or the guards, as they passed a hookah around in a circle from one to another? The sweet, acrid smell would waft over to the tent in which Alexine and Sunny would still be seated at the dining-table, often discussing their plans for the forthcoming day. About these plans Massimo now showed a total indifference – ‘ Oh, I leave it to you both’, he would tell them, or, sarcastically, ‘ You both must plan all these things in your infinite wisdom. Leave me out of it. I really have nothing to contribute.’

  One night, while completing yet another letter to John, Alexine laid down her pen and hurried out of her tent, having suddenly decided that she would wander for a little among the ruins before she retired. Sunny had often told her that it was dangerous for her to go out like that unaccompanied, but she had always laughed at him. The desert, she told him, was not like the African jungle. She looked up at the sky, once again marvelling at the multitude and the brilliance of the stars, with a sense of dizzying breathlessness.

  Beyond some of the stunted trees that surrounded the miniature oasis, she came on a row of ruined arches, which at once reminded her, even though they were totally devoid of foliage, of the ruined arches of the tumble-down mission church. But there were no gravestones in front of these, to gleam eerily in the moonlight. What there was, though – only now did she notice it – was a cave receding back and back from one of the arches. Without a lantern, it was impossible to estimate the depth of the cave or to discover what, if anything, was in it. For a while she peered into its darkness, as though expecting some flash of lightning to reveal everything to her. She felt a sudden, inexplicable urge to venture in, to lie down, to be sealed in a cocoon of its stillness and darkness, to fall asleep there, far from the problems of coping with the enmity between Sunny and Massimo and the inefficiencies and demands of so many servants, porters and guards. Then she braced herself and turned away from it, to retrace her steps.

  From the encampment of the porters she heard the sound of singing and hands clapping. A voice shouted out something she could not catch, and then another voice: ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ This was followed by laughter. A moment later, someone began to beat monotonously on a drum, the same note repeated over and over with no variation of rhythm.

  As she edged towards the encampment, the previously unvarying rhythm began to quicken. From a slight eminence, separating the rest of the encampment from the area occupied by Sunny, Massimo and herself, she saw someone was dancing before the fire blazing up into the icy desert air. It must be one of the Egyptian maids – though they usually kept themselves separate from the porters, regarding them as their inferiors. The body swayed, jerked, circled the fire, casting huge shadows on the sand dunes. There was now a tinkle of thumb-bells, in time to the accelerating beat of the drum. Somewhere one of the dogs was barking, on a single desperate note. Once more the onlookers raised their voices in encouragement and delight. ‘Yes, yes, yes! That’s it! That’s it!’

  It was then that Alexine realized with a shock that the figure dancing round the fire under the huge, almost full moon, was not a girl but Massimo.

  What an idiot! Her first feelings were of annoyance and contempt, followed by a chill. She drew her cloak closer about her and hurried on.

  Later that night, she was woken by the sound of Massimo cursing, as he tripped on a guy-rope of her tent, so close to his own, and all but fell over. Then she heard him singing, as he had once sang for her in Naples, that aria of Rosina’s, Una voce poco fa, in parody of a coloratura diva.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL AMONG THE ROMAN RUINS that, although it conflicted with her previous plans and Sunny’s impatience to get moving, she decided to stay on for another two days.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ she asked when Sunny complained.

  ‘It’s you who always want to hurry. What’s changed you?’

  ‘I love this place. I feel totally at peace here. And I want to take some photographs.’

  Helping Alexine to carry the cumbersome equipment and himself from time to time halting to take a photograph, Sunny was soon reconciled to the delay. Set in a niche, he spotted half a marble head of a woman. He made Alexine stand beside it and took three photographs, frowning in concentration as he did so.

  ‘If only we could take it back with us!’

  ‘Far too heavy,’ he said.

  ‘It’s probably some Roman goddess. I wonder which.’

  ‘She looks rather like you.’

  ‘Do I really look so stern?’

  When they returned from this expedition, they found Massimo lolling against a tree, a bottle beside him. Raising a hand to his forehead to shield his narrowed eyes from the sun, he squinted up at them. His cheeks were flushed and, when he at last spoke, his voice was slurred: ‘Ah, here are our two photographers! Always busy! Always up to something!’

  ‘You should have come with us.’

  ‘Not with the sort of hangover I have!’

  ‘That bottle won’t improve things,’ Alexine said.

  ‘The hair of the dog.’

  Later, when Alexine left her tent, Massimo was asleep, his chin on his chest and his mouth half open with a thread of saliva trailing from it.

  At the midday meal, however, he seemed once more to be himself. Once or twice he asked Sunny a question. Sunny’s answers were offhand and barely audible.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Massimo eventually challenged him.

  ‘The matter?’

  ‘What have I done to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then why the hell can’t you give me a friendly answer?’

  ‘Children! Children!’ Alexine intervened, in an echo of Nanny Rose’s interventions when she and Sammy used to squabble. At that moment she did, indeed, see them as her two children, in constant rivalry with each other for their mother’s love and respect.

  ‘Let’s go over to those ruins that the guide was speaking about,’ Massimo suddenly suggested when the meal was over.

  ‘How? Riding?’ Alexine asked.

  ‘Why don’t we walk?’

  ‘In this heat?’

  ‘It’s not all that bad.’

  ‘All right.’ It was unusual for him to show so much initiative and energy.

  The three of them trudged off across the burning sand in the direction pointed out to them by the Arab guide. The guide asked, reluctantly, if they wished him to accompany them, and Alexine said no, no, it wasn’t necessary. The guide was clearly relieved. From time to time Massimo picked up one of the reddish brown stones and handed it to Alexine, who placed it in the bag slung over her shoulder. Sunny walked a short distance behind them. He was carrying Alexine’s parasol for her and two bottles of water. At one point he asked why she did not put the parasol up. She replied that her wide-brimmed straw hat was sufficient protection against the sun.

  The temple consisted of little more than a dozen or so stones, an arch and the shattered remains of a mosaic floor. But some distance from it Sunny came on a lion’s head, its nose chipped away, half buried in the sand. He had always shown that sort of serendipity. Eagerly he began to extricate it.

  ‘In perfect condition,’ Alexine said.

  ‘We could take it with us. It’s not too large.’

  ‘And this.’ Massimo held up what looked a shard of emerald-green pottery. It was as though he were trying to vie with Sunny in making a discovery.

  Surprisingly, Alexine was more excited by the shard, turning it over and over in her palm, than by the lion’s head. Eventually she slipped it into her bag.

  ‘Shall we take the lion?’ Sunny asked.

  ‘Yes. Why not?’

  At some distance from the temple, some scrub bristled up from the side of a sand dune. They went over to it and crouched in its shade. Sunny produced one of the bottles of
water and then a beaker. He filled the beaker and handed it to Alexine.

  ‘Wonderful!’ She drank greedily.

  Sunny filled another beaker and himself drank from it.

  ‘What about me?’

  Sunny refilled the beaker from which he had drunk and then, without a word, handed it to Massimo. Massimo frowned at him, then began to drink, not as they had done with one greedy gulp after another, but with delicate sips.

  The sun was beginning to sink as they started the walk back to the camp. Sunny was carrying the lion’s head, now in both hands in front of him, and now, supported by one hand, on his shoulder. ‘God, this is a weight!’

  ‘Why not let Massimo help you with it?’

  But Massimo, walking at some distance from them, whistling softly to himself, made no move to do so.

  It was only when they had arrived at her tent that Alexine suddenly realized that she had left her bag at the temple. ‘ I put it down when we having that rest. Oh, how idiotic of me! Didn’t either of you notice?’

  Neither of the two men answered.

  Then, with weary irritation, Sunny said: ‘ I’ll have to go back for it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. Ride. You must ride.’

  She stood in the entrance of her tent watching the silhouette of horse and man moving slowly away against the setting sun. Then they passed over the brow of the sand dune and were lost. She was overcome with an inexplicable feeling of valedictory sadness. Glancing over to the encampment, she saw that Massimo was now squatting, as so often, with the Tuareg guards, the hookah yet again circling among them. Going into her tent, she began to continue her letter to Sophie. But soon, with a gasp of impatience, she gave up and, having removed her boots, lay out on her bed.