A Bend in the River (26 page)

The Tivoli was a new or newish place, part of our continuing boom, and was owned by a family who had run a restaurant in the capital before independence. Now, after some years in Europe, they had come back to try again here. It was a big investment for them—they had skimped on nothing—and I thought they were taking a chance. But I didn’t know about Europeans and their restaurant habits. And the Tivoli was meant for our Europeans. It was a family restaurant, and it served the short-contract men who were working on various government projects in our region—the Domain, the airport, the water supply system, the hydroelectric station. The atmosphere was European; Africans kept away. There were no officials with gold watches and gold pen-and-pencil sets, as at Mahesh’s. While you were at the Tivoli you could live without that tension.

But you couldn’t forget where you were. The photograph of the President was about three feet high. The official portraits of the President in African garb were getting bigger and bigger, the quality of the prints finer (they were said to be done in Europe). And once you knew about the meaning of the leopard skin and the symbolsim of what was carved on the stick, you were affected; you couldn’t help it. We had all become his people; even here at the Tivoli we were reminded that we all in various ways depended on him.

Normally the boys—or citizen waiters—were friendly and welcoming and brisk. But the lunch period was more or less over; the tall, fat son of the family, who stood behind the counter
by the coffee machine, superintending things, was probably having his siesta; no other member of the family was present; and the waiters stood about idly, like aliens in their blue waiters’ jackets. They weren’t rude; they were simply abstracted, like people who had lost a role.

The air conditioning was welcome, though, and the absence of glare, and the dryness after the humidity outside. Yvette looked less harassed; energy returned to her. We got the attention of a waiter. He brought us a jug of red Portuguese wine, chilled down and then allowed to lose its chill; and two wooden platters with Scottish smoked salmon on toast. Everything was imported; everything was expensive; smoked salmon on toast was in fact the Tivoli’s plainest offering.

I said to Yvette, “Indar’s a bit of an actor. Were things really as bad as he said?”

“They were much worse. He left out cashing the traveller’s cheques.”

She was sitting with her back to the wall. She made a small arresting gesture—like Raymond’s—with the palm of her hand against the edge of the table, and gave a slight tilt of her head to her right.

Two tables away a family of five were finishing lunch and talking loudly. Ordinary people, the kind of family group I had been used to seeing at the Tivoli. But Yvette seemed to disapprove, and more than disapprove; a little rage visited her.

She said, “You can’t tell about them. I can.”

And yet that face, of rage, still seemed close to a smile; and those slanting eyes, half closed above the small cup of coffee which she was holding at the level of her mouth, were quite demure. What had irritated her about the family group? The district she had judged them to come from? The job the man did, the language, the loud talk, the manners? What would she have said about the people in our nightclubs?

I said, “Did you know Indar before?”

“I met him here.” She put the cup down. Her slanting eyes considered it and then, as though she had decided on something, she looked at me. “You live your life. A stranger appears. He is
an encumbrance. You don’t need him. But the encumbrance can become a habit.”

My experience of women outside my family was special, limited. I had had no experience of dealing with a woman like this, no experience of language like this, no experience of a woman with such irritations and convictions. And in what she had just said I saw an honesty, a daringness which, to a man of my background, was slightly frightening and, for that reason, bewitching.

I was unwilling for us to have Indar in common, as Indar and she seemed to have had Raymond in common. I said, “I can’t tell you how much I liked being in your house that evening. I’ve never forgotten the blouse you wore. I’ve always been hoping to see you in it again. Black silk, beautifully cut and embroidered.”

I couldn’t have touched a better subject. She said, “There hasn’t been the occasion. But I assure you it’s still there.”

“I don’t think it was Indian. The cut and the work were European.”

“It’s from Copenhagen. Margit Brandt. Raymond went there for a conference.”

And at the door of the Tivoli, before we went out again into the heat and the light, during that moment of pause which in the tropics is like the pause we make before we finally go out into the rain, she said to me, as though it were an afterthought, “Would you like to come to lunch at the house tomorrow? We have to have one of the lecturers, and Raymond finds that kind of occasion very trying these days.”

The steamer would have been about fifteen miles downriver. It would have been travelling through bush; it would have passed the first bush settlement. There, though the town was so close, they would have been waiting for the steamer since morning, and there would have been the atmosphere of a fair until the steamer passed. Boys would have dived off dugouts and swum towards the moving steamer and barge, trying to get the attention of passengers. Trading dugouts, poling out from their stations on the bank with their little cargoes of pineapples and roughly made chairs and stools (disposable furniture for the river journey, a specialty of the area), would have been attached in clusters to the sides of the steamer; and these dugouts would be taken—
were being taken—miles downriver, to paddle back for hours, after that brief excitement, through the fading afternoon, dusk and night, in silence.

Yvette had cancelled the lunch. But she hadn’t let me know. The white-jacketed servant led me to a room which obviously awaited no visitors and was not at all like the room I remembered. The African mats were on the floor, but some of the upholstered chairs that had been taken away for that evening (and, as I remembered Yvette saying, stored in a bedroom) had been brought out again—fringed imitation velvet, in the “old bronze” colour that was everywhere in the Domain.

The buildings of the Domain had been run up fast, and the flaws that lamplight had hidden were noticeable in the midday brightness. The plaster on the walls had cracked in many places, and in one place the crack followed the stepped pattern of the hollow clay bricks below. The windows and doorways, without architraves or wooden facings, were like holes unevenly cut out of the masonry. The ceiling panels, compressed cardboard of some sort, bellied here and there. One of the two air conditioners in the room had leaked down the wall; they were not on. The windows were open; and with no projecting roof, no trees outside, just the levelled land, the room was full of light and glare and there was no feeling of shelter. What fantasies I had built around this room, around the music that had come out of the record player—there, against the wall next to the bookcase, with its smoked Perspex cover showing dust in the bright light!

To see the room like this, as Yvette lived in it every day, to add my knowledge of Raymond’s position in the country, was to catch her unawares and get some idea of her housewifely ordinariness, some idea of the tensions and dissatisfactions of her life at the Domain, which had until then seemed so glamorous to me. It was to fear to be entangled with her and this life of hers; and it was to be surprised and relieved at the disappearance of my fantasies. But relief and fear lasted only until she came in. The surprise then, as always for me, was herself.

She was more amused than apologetic. She had forgotten, but she knew there was something she had had to remember about
that lunch. There had been so many changes of plan about the lunch—which was in fact taking place in the staff room of the polytechnic. She went away to make us some scrambled South African eggs. The servant came in to clear some receipts from the oval table, which was dark and highly polished, and to lay the table. “You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance.”

On the upper shelf of the bookcase I saw the book Indar had shown me that evening in which there was a mention of Raymond and Yvette as generous hosts at one time in the capital—a mention which had mattered to Yvette. The bright light and the altered room seemed to make it a different book. Colour had faded from the backs of books. One book I took out carried Raymond’s signature and the date 1937—a note of ownership, but also perhaps at that date a statement of intent, Raymond’s expression of faith in his own future. That book felt very tarnished now, with the paper brown at the edges, the red letters on the paper spine almost bleached away—something dead, a relic. Another, newer book carried Yvette’s signature with her unmarried name: very stylish, that Continental handwriting, with a fancy
y,
and speaking in much the same way as Raymond’s signature of twenty-three years before.

I said to Yvette while we were eating the scrambled eggs, “I would like to read something by Raymond. Indar says he knows more about the country than any man living. Has he published any books?”

“He’s working on this book, and has been for some years now. The government were going to publish it, but now apparently there are difficulties.”

“So there are no books.”

“There’s his thesis. That’s been published as a book. But I can’t recommend it. I couldn’t bear to read it. When I told Raymond that, he said he could scarcely bear to write it. There are a few articles in various journals. He hasn’t had time for many of those. He’s spent all his time on that big book about the history of the country.”

“Is it true that the President has read parts of that book?”

“That used to be said.”

But she couldn’t tell me what the difficulties now were. All I learned was that Raymond had temporarily put aside his history to work on a selection of the President’s speeches. Our lunch began to feel sad. Understanding Yvette’s position in the Domain now, knowing that the stories I had heard about Raymond would have been heard by others, I began to feel that the house must have been like a prison to her. And that evening when she gave a party and wore her Margit Brandt blouse began to appear like an aberration.

I said, as I was getting ready to leave, “You must come with me to the Hellenic Club one afternoon. You must come tomorrow. The people there are people who have been here a long time. They’ve seen it all. The last thing they want to talk about is the situation of the country.”

She agreed. But then she said, “You mustn’t forget them.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. She left the room, going through the door that Raymond had gone through after he had made his exit speech that evening; and she came back with a number of magazines,
Cahiers
of this and that, some of them printed by the government printery in the capital. They were magazines with articles by Raymond. Already, then, we had Raymond in common; it was like a beginning.

The rough-bladed grass of the lawns or open areas of this part of the Domain was high; it almost buried the low-level lights housed in mushroom-like aluminum structures that lined the asphalted avenues. A number of those lights had been smashed, some a long time ago; but there seemed to be no one to mend them. On the other side of the Domain the land for the model farm had become overgrown; all that remained of the project was the Chinese gateway that the now absent Taiwanese or Chinese had built, and the six tractors standing in a line and rotting. But the area where the public walked on Sundays, following a fixed one-way route—watched now by the Youth Guard and not the army—was maintained. New statues were still added from time to time to this public walk. The most recent, at the end of the main avenue, was a bulky sculpture in stone, unfinished-looking, of a mother and child.

Nazruddin’s old words came to me. “This is nothing. This is
just bush.” But my alarm wasn’t like Nazruddin’s. It had nothing to do with my business prospects. I saw the empty spaces of the Domain, and the squatters from the villages camping just outside; and my thoughts were of Yvette and her life on the Domain. Not Europe in Africa, as it had seemed to me when Indar was there. Only a life in the bush. And my fear was at once the fear of failing with her, being left with nothing, and the fear of the consequences of success.

But that alarm vanished the next afternoon when she came to the flat. She had been there before with Indar; in that setting, my own, she had for me a good deal of her old glamour. She had seen the Ping-Pong table with my household junk and with one corner left clear for Metty’s ironing. She had seen the paintings of European ports that the Belgian lady had bequeathed me with the white studio-sitting room.

It was against this white wall that, after some talk about the paintings and the Hellenic Club, both of us standing, she showed me her profile, turning away when I drew close, not rejecting me or encouraging me, just seeming weary, accepting a new encumbrance. That moment—as I read it—was the key to all that followed. The challenge that I saw then was what I always saw; it was the challenge to which I never failed to respond.

Until then my fantasies were brothel fantasies of conquest and degradation, with the woman as the willing victim, the accomplice in her own degradation. It was all that I knew. It was all that I had learned from the brothels and nightclubs of our town. It had been no hardship to me to give these places up while Indar was around. I had grown to find those occasions of vice enervating. For some time, in fact, though it still excited me to see these women in groups in a bar or a brothel front room, I had shrunk from true sex with bought women, and restricted myself to subsidiary sexual satisfactions. Familiarity of this kind with so many women had bred something like contempt for what they offered; and at the same time, like many men who use brothels alone, I had grown to think of myself as feeble, critically disadvantaged. My obsession with Yvette had taken me by surprise; and the adventure with her (unbought but willing) that began in the white sitting room was for me quite new.