When he awakened, perhaps an hour later (she might have drifted a little, too), he turned in the bed and put his mouth on hers, then trailed down her body until he had parted her legs and was licking her there, parting the lips and sucking them into his mouth and then releasing them, putting his tongue inside her, and then running it up the length of the opening. It felt wonderful, and she lay back and sighed, letting the warmth of her lover wash over her. After a time, he moved in the bed and, lying on his side, brought his lower body level with her head. She took him into her mouth while he licked, and held him, moving only slightly. He tasted of sourness, and salty sweat, and smelled of their sex. Finally he stopped licking her and lay back so she could suck. She did so for a little while, then let him rise over her, where he supported himself on his arms and said, “Put me in you.” Taking hold of him, she guided him in, and he was so excited that he caught her hand between his pelvic bone and her own. She got her hand out, and he pushed in with jarring force, once, twice, pulling almost all the way out before ramming himself at her again. When he came, he squeezed her shoulders, arched in the bed, head back, and then he let his head drop forward, relaxed, still supporting himself on his hands. When he removed himself, he said, “You were finished, weren’t you?”
She couldn’t catch her breath. “Yes.”
She made herself lie over close to him, nestling at his shoulder as she had before. The television was still on. Someone talking about the heat and the air quality, and a hazardous-materials accident out on the interstate to Memphis. The world to her just now seemed a calamitous place, full of noise and madness.
Tyler turned the television off. “Do you know what I am?” he said. “I am an immediate soul. I’m a person whose life is lived in immediacy. Do you know what that means?”
“Should I know what it means?”
“It means that I have no self,” he said. “I have only the semblance of a self. I am something included along with ‘the other’ in the compass of the temporal and the worldly.”
“Tyler, I’m not a philosopher and I don’t read philosophy.”
“You ought to. That’s direct from Kierkegaard. And it’s a truth about me. I live by how all others around me live, and therefore experience nothing other than their immediacy. I have no authentic self, and am in despair, though my defining it makes it comic.”
“I don’t understand,” Lily said.
“Makes it absurd,” he went on. “So even my striving becomes nothing but a comic dumb show, like the pantomime act of a puppet on a string.”
“Oh, give me a break,” she said. “That’s a lot of self-congratulatory shit.”
“I’m only describing what it looks like from the point of view of Kierkegaard.”
“But what are you telling me? That you’re depressed?”
“Do you see it, then? Even in the act of saying it, I have no being, since I’m taking most of it from Kierkegaard.”
“Tyler, what’s the point? Are you depressed?”
He seemed to consider this, and then shook his head. “That’s not the thing itself. Your next question will be what am I depressed about? I’m so far gone from that. The word has no meaning where I am.”
“And where are you?”
His smile seemed genuine. “I’m here with you.”
“You know how I mean the question, Tyler.”
“I don’t have an answer for you, though,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure it all out myself.”
“Okay,” Lily said. She got out of the bed and went into the bathroom, where she ran water and took a shower this time. When she got out, he had dressed and was sitting on the bed, watching Jeopardy.
“We’d better get back,” he said tonelessly.
11
100 ADDISON ROAD, in the cold and damp of a day in January. Winds sweep down coal ash and the dust of chimneys, swirling. The sky is the color of iron, and the swollen folds of dark cloud at its edge move with a sluggish, chilly sullenness, letting so little of the sun’s light through that one can’t tell if it is almost day or almost night. In the street outside, horse-drawn carriages go by, curtains closed, the riders bundled in black to just below the eyes, or in the dark colors that soak up whatever heat there is. The clatter of horses’ hooves makes an unfamiliar sound for one who has walked hundreds of miles in forests and spent months on water. Now and then a lone dog skulks by, and once or twice someone may walk past, some gentleman on a walking errand, also bundled to the eyes against the chill. At intervals, one may see people come past on the new-fangled mode of city transportation, a bicycle. It is so curious and so strange-looking that other pedestrians stop to watch.
The day she takes a coach to Soho to deliver Dolokov’s packet of letters, there is a chilly mist, which seems to rise from the ground. A dreary, English winter afternoon. She sits unhappily in the gloom of the closed coach, and looks through a chink in the heavy curtain, at the wet streets, holding the packet of letters in her lap. The coach goes by what is apparently an accident involving a bicycle. She observes this with a certain sour, amused vexation—and wonders about the import of the letters. She hasn’t looked at them; she promised not to. The name on the outside of the packet, above the address, is Jane Darnsley. The coach pulls in front of a tall stone house, with a closed gate and shuttered windows. It reminds her of Highgate. She expects to hear the chatter of gamecocks in the yard as the coachman gets down and opens the door for her. A murk is over the city. The air stings with its cargo of industrial grime and garbage. She enters the gate, and goes up to the door, clutching the packet. The door opens a crack before she gets to it—the denizens of this house have heard the coach, and have seen her coming. A very tall shadow stands in the doorway, with the dim glow of firelight behind it. A hand comes out of the shadow, white as bleached bone, and makes a beckoning motion. The shadow turns, and moves into the house, and Mary enters it. Not a word is spoken. She follows the figure down a corridor and to the left, into the room where the firelight comes from. The figure turns, and is revealed to be a man with a grotesquely long face, long nose, long ears—his features are exaggerated in the way of a carnival mirror. His eyes are bottomless; you can’t see the whites of them.
There is a couch in the room, on which is seated a very heavy woman in white lace with ivory combs in her hair.
—We received your communication, she says to Mary.
—Are you Miss Darnsley?
—Miss Darnsley is dead.
—Jane Darnsley?
The woman nods solemnly, and the man utters a syllable of pain or sorrow.
—The same. Dead, the woman murmurs.
For a moment, no one says anything more. The tall man moves to the fire and begins tending to it.
—I am her mother.
—I’m so terribly sorry, Mary says.
The man begins to emit a sound, a low keening. Mary doesn’t realize at first that it is a human sound.
—The letters were written to her by her Russian friend?
—Well, I’ve not looked at them. But I assume so, yes.
—You are certain you have not looked at them?
—No. Mary hands them over.
The woman turns heavily on the couch and reaches with the packet of letters toward the tall man, who takes it and looks at it for a few moments, holding it in both long-fingered hands. Then he turns and thrusts it into the fire.
—What are you doing? Mary says. What in the world.
—He was evil, the woman says. He’s a foreign devil who put ideas into her head.
Mary stands there, looking at the woman and then at the man, and then at the packet of Dolokov’s letters, curling into flame, darkening and collapsing to ash.
—Leave us, the woman says. Go back to your devil, and tell him she’s dead. She drank poison and died choking on her own filth. Tell him that. Tell him what he did.
—Mr. Dolokov is probably dead ’imself, by now, Mary says. You might’ve communicated your feelings to me by return p
ost. I could’ve burned them myself.
—Leave us, the other says.
Mary lets herself out in the sound of the man’s weeping.
The coachman is waiting for her, standing by the open door.
—Take me ’ome, she says.
Then she stops and thinks to correct herself.
—Take me back to Addison Road.
12
THE TEMPERATURE in their apartment is a tropical eighty-six degrees. That is how she keeps it these days. She has had a malarial episode, a bout of fever that will recur, now, periodically, the rest of her life—coast fever, she calls it—and the leaden cold scene outside the windows, even now that she has recovered from her illness, chills her to the marrow of her thin bones. She has put mementos around the flat—charms, amulets, masks, chains of beads, woven cloth, bracelets, one dried leather shield, painted in twilight colors, the image of a woman with exaggerated breasts and the heavy trunklike legs of a crocodile. At the entrance to the flat there is a three-foot-tall statue carved from wood, stained with dried blood, and riddled with nails that are blood-colored with rust. The face is agape in either horror or ferociousness—it’s hard, Mary says, to tell which.
This violent-looking figure causes a small sound of alarm to rise in the throat of a visitor whom Charley brings to the flat one evening in February 1894. They trudge up the stairs together, Charley leading, talking, and in typical fashion neglecting to mention the unusual nature of the decor. Mary is prepared to dislike the visitor, since in the past weeks she has had to collect all of her family spirit to keep from flying off the handle with Charley. Charley has reverted to his old, lofty indolence, depending on Mary for everything while holding forth as if the matters he deigns to speak of are raised in stature by his attention. To put it quite plainly, he’s spoiled: a child who never learned that one has to work at being interesting, that one cannot expect the world to give up its riches without the expense of spirit.
—Mary, he says, stepping up into the flat. Meet the head of the Royal Niger Company. I thought you ought to meet him. Sir George Goldie.
She’s familiar with the name. In Africa, she had dealings with several traders from the company. The Royal Niger Company plies the interior, and though their concerns are more with the inland water routes, there is friction between them and MacDonald’s Coastal Oil Protectorate. It was Goldie, she knows, who organized the several different concerns of the region into the Royal Niger Company, which maximized efficiency in trade and went some to keep from ruining the ability of the African tribes to continue producing palm oil and the other commodities the Empire expected to take from the continent. Goldie was knighted as a result of this. Now he stands before her in a waistcoat and holding his hat, a wide-brimmed fedora, she notices, far from fashionable. He bows, never taking his eyes from her. His eyes are the color of distance on the ocean—a pelagic dark blue suggesting depths. He takes her in.
—Well? Charley says.
Mary and Goldie begin to speak at the same time, and then stop. They each try to encourage the other to go on, and in the process again speak at the same time. Mary puts her fingers to her lips and nods at him.
—I bring greetings from James Henley Batty, he says. But this is not what he started to say, and Mary indicates this with a nod, and an encouraging smile.
—I send them back to him, she says, after a pause. You were saying?
He hesitates, with a charming attention to the brim of his hat.
—I was going to say that the gentleman at the entrance of this flat is quite formidable indeed.
—A gift, she says. From a Fang witch doctor, retired.
She pronounces it Fong, as the tribal chieftains do. He smiles, appreciating her dry tone.
—You have been among them? he asks.
—Some. I would like to travel farther up the Ogowe, where I understand there are others. The kind who ’ave not seen Europeans.
—They’re purported to be rather unpredictable, not to say terrifying.
—Exactly, she says. I’ve received the same information.
—My sister is in a rather anxious hurry to get herself killed, Charley says, with a sour little smirk.
—I’m very happy to meet you, says Goldie to Mary.
—And I you, Mary says.
Charley stirs, as if coming to himself after a period of daydreaming. He claps his hands together.
—Well, Mary. We’d like a sip of brandy apiece. And two cigars, if you will. They’re in the sideboard.
Mary sets out to accomplish this task while the two men talk. Mostly it’s Charley who talks. Charley met Goldie after seeing him lecture earlier in the evening. Goldie’s subject was the failure of the royal administration of territories—this mostly having to do with meddling in the cultural life of the people where meddling was not called for, of refusing to understand them, or to give them the credit of supposing aspects of their culture to be something they might wish to protect.
—I admire that business about behaving as if the savages are all waiting to run from their own history and traditions, Charley says. Although one must admit that the assumption carries a good deal of power. That is, acting in that way seems to convince the savages of just that. I understand they convert in droves to Christianity. And one understands it, hearing about some of the fetish practices.
—Well, says Goldie. But if you ruin the economy and the structure of the place, there isn’t much left to trade for, is there?
Charley hasn’t heard him.
—It’s exceptional, that just as you were ending your talk I had the thought that it would do my sister a service to bring her into your acquaintance. And here we are.
Mary pours the brandy, and then moves to the other side of the room. The men talk for a few minutes about the evening’s lecture. Their exclusion of her rankles, though she observes that Goldie is uneasy, and keeps glancing her way. Charley asks for more brandy, and she gets it for him. Goldie watches, and politely accepts more himself. Charley drinks his rather quickly, and asks for more. When she sets the bottle by him, he gives her a disapproving look, so she takes it back to the sideboard. For a few moments, the only sound is the contented smacking of Charley’s lips as he drinks his brandy. But then he lights his cigar and begins spouting his opinions to Goldie, droning on in his cocksure way about the responsibility of the white man in the world of darkness and despair. It is all borrowed, badly, from Kipling. Goldie tries gingerly to disagree, but then seems to relent, with a gentle grin. Mary decides that there is a supple kind of appeal about him, an acceptance: he won’t be contentious here. He exhibits a willingness merely to provide a sounding board.
—I say, Mary, it’s so awfully hot in here, Charley says abruptly, pulling at his collar.
—I ’adn’t noticed, she says.
Charley turns to Goldie.
—As you no doubt see, my sister learned to talk from our poor mother.
Goldie looks at her.
—James Henley Batty can’t speak highly enough of you, Miss Kingsley.
—Oh, Charley says, she’s quite a substantial character. Do you know she’s writing a bloody book about Africa? And as if that weren’t enough, old Macmillan is going to publish it. He was our uncle Charles’s publisher. My namesake. You are no doubt familiar with the book Water Babies?
—I’m afraid not, says Goldie, staring at Mary, clearly relieved at the chance to move the conversation to another plane. Tell me about your book, Miss Kingsley.
—I’m afraid, she says, it’s not much more than a knockabout farce. But I am aspiring to do something more serious, soon, in terms of anthropology, along the lines of Ellis, and Sir Alfred Lyall, or the Germans, Baumann and Buckholtz, or Kohler.
—I know Ellis, says Goldie, smiling as if out of chagrin at not knowing the others.
—Mary speaks German fluently, says Charley. This is very good brandy.
Goldie nods distractedly at him.
Mary says:
—I plan to
return to West Africa as soon as possible. I’ve spoken to the people at the British Museum. I’ve got support and the means, and I’m going down there again.
—I may be off to Singapore soon, says Charley.
Mary is returning Goldie’s frank gaze.
—I would like to go down to West Africa and stay. I feel adrift in London.
—It’s in your blood, then, Goldie says. As it’s in mine.
—Mary lost weight, down there, Charley says. And she’s been sick because of it. She brought some sickness back with her from the wretched place. There’s nothing but sickness down there, I’m led to understand. It’s misguided to want to return, Mary. You already have a book out of it.
—Notes and letters, she says. I mean to do a thoroughgoing study.
She addresses Goldie:
—I’m quite taken with the African mind. They see the world more clearly, I think. I ’ad a conversation with a witch doctor one middle of the night after ’elping him with a sick man. I used our medicine and he performed some incantations and uttered some spells. It was just a case of some kind of mild food poisoning, and nothing, really. An ’our out of the night. But we talked almost all night afterward. The man was a very proficient speaker of English, and ’e explained to me what ’e was about. I felt I could’ve been speaking with Spinoza. That view of the world, you know, as animate and soul-haunted.
—I can’t say I’ve ever had that feeling, says Goldie. About the world.
Charley says:
—Tell her what you told us in your lecture tonight about the death rate in Cameroon last year.
—I already know it, Mary says. I know that statistic.
Goldie leans toward her, the faintest motion, looking into her eyes, as if trying to read her feelings. But he speaks to Charley.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 58
