In a Free State (26 page)

‘How far you reach? You reach here? Partitive article?’

‘Partitive.’

‘In English you no have partitive article. You no say, “Bring me some ink.” ’ Bobby paused: language teaching had unexpected difficulties. ‘In French you always say, “Bring me
some
ink.” ’

‘
Some
ink.’

‘That’s it.’

Bobby looked at the boy, and the boy looked down at the book and moved a thick tongue slowly between his lips.

‘What time bar close?’ Bobby said.

‘You teach me
English,’
the boy said. ‘You no teach me French. You no know French?’

‘I know French. Look, I teach you. In English you say ink.’

‘Ink.’

‘In French you say
l’encre
.’

‘Link.’

‘What time bar close?’

‘Any time. Link. You teach me more.’

‘Bring me some ink. Bring me
de l’encre. De l’encre
. How you mean, any time?’

The boy went coy. He hung his head low over the disintegrating Irish book, so that Bobby saw the top of his head: particles of fluff trapped between the springs.

‘Bar close ten o’clock,’ the boy said.

‘You bring me tea ten o’clock.’

The boy hung his head lower. ‘Kitchen close.’

‘You bring me tea. Room four. I teach you more.’ Bobby folded the fingers of his hand and rubbed his knuckles through the oily springs of the barboy’s hair. ‘I give you shilling.’

‘Kitchen close,’ the boy said.

Bobby placed his palm on the boy’s taut neck, half on the springy hair, half on the warm skin. ‘What a little bargainer it is,’ he said; and, suddenly pulling the boy’s face across the bar to his own, he whispered into his ear, ‘I give you five.’

The boy didn’t pull his head back and Bobby, still holding the boy’s head close and feeling the boy straining to be still, began rubbing his thumb behind the boy’s left ear, feeling the bone below the smooth African skin. The boy became very quiet. Tears came to Bobby’s eyes; and though he was looking at his own thumb and the intricate modelling of the boy’s ear and the coarse little springs of hair, he was not thinking of the boy or the dogs or the intimacies to come; he was surrendering only to his own tenderness and melancholy, which at such moments overflowed.

Suddenly the boy jumped away.

The burglar alarm on Bobby’s car was shrieking. The sharp metallic vibrations rose and fell around a central, persistent wail. The hotel yard jumped with light, bright bulb after bright bulb,
everywhere. The quarters broke out into high-pitched chatter, which instantly developed into a general squealing.

‘Peter!’ the colonel called. ‘Peter!’

From the quarters women wailed. Footsteps were everywhere, in the yard, in the hotel itself.

The boy was looking at Bobby with eyes of terror.

The burglar alarm continued to shriek. It would not subside until the car ceased to rock and became still again.

‘Peter!’ the colonel called.

Bobby went out to the verandah. The colonel’s room at the end of the verandah was lit up. The door was open; the window at the back of the room showed the brightly lit yard.

The garage was an open shed. A naked bulb burned there now and threw deep shadows. The rocking of the car was not perceptible, but the alarm was still going, the central wail broken.

Bobby saw that no wheel was missing from his car, no hubcap taken off.

The silences between the wails grew longer, the wail itself fainter. The alarm became a series of cheeps, pips, and then finally died. And then the brightness of the awakened yard was as startling as the alarm had been.

Bobby went back to the bar. The boy still looked at him with eyes of terror. He had put on all the bar lights.

‘Peter,’ the colonel was saying.

At last the quarters went quiet.

‘Dog or cat jump on car, sir.’

‘Were you sleeping?’

‘Sleeping, sir.’

‘You are very foolish.’

Women wailed.

‘I’m going to have you tied up. Timothy! Carolus!’

The barboy jerked his head. But he didn’t move.

The wailing continued, drowning the colonel’s questions, the soft responses.

‘Carolus!’

Now Carolus moved. His mouth, half open, had grown thick and immobile. His movement was awkward, his limbs heavy. He opened the back door of the bar and stood for a little with his back to Bobby, his hand behind him on the doorknob. Across the dark wide passageway half a panelled door was ajar, and Bobby had a glimpse of the bright yard: the unshaded bulbs on the cylindrical metal legs of the water-tower, the glare of the whitewashed quarters, the bush at the back that glittered in black shadow and looked artificial.

‘Carolus!’

He pulled the door shut, and Bobby was alone in the bar. With all the lights on it seemed a bigger room.

Outside, the women wailed in relay, no two drawing breath at the same time. It was impossible to pick out what the male voices were saying. The wailing became simple sound, part of the background.

In a framed signed photograph behind the bar, the photograph enlarged, imprecise, a man in a boat held up a big fish and smiled in strong sunlight: the weather and the mood, and all the implied order, of a particular day. There was a calendar, with an African landscape, from a Belgian brewery, the names of towns in Belgium and Africa printed in the same red type. The paint on the half-empty shelves was old and scratched, cream below brown; in one corner half a dozen nearly empty liqueur bottles had old, dry, stained labels.

The wailing outside grew weaker, was no longer background. Bobby heard the colonel’s voice. The wailing grew loud again, subsided again, and then there was almost silence.

Bobby left the bar and went quickly down the verandah to the enclosed passageway. The door that gave on to the yard was ajar. He didn’t look. He was aware of brightness, movement. He also knew he had been observed.

Upstairs, as he was opening his door, he heard Linda open
hers. She was in a short cotton nightdress; her shiny shins looked as sharp as her elbows.

She whispered, ‘Peter? I knew it, I knew it.’

Again he felt that she was involving him in a neutral marital intimacy. And though he half wanted the company, he was perverse. He set his face, as though he had been especially affronted by what had happened downstairs, turned away from Linda and without a word pushed his door open.

It was unexpectedly bright with the glare from the yard. He closed the door, deciding at the last moment to give a little slam. He kicked something across the floor. He didn’t need to turn on the light to see that it was the key of his car.

*

It was only when he was undressed that he became disquieted. Intruders: there might have been a crisis, and he might have been without his car, trapped. He decided then to pack, to be ready at any time for a swift getaway. He arranged, around a chair, everything he would need: packed suitcase, trousers, the yellow native shirt, shoes and socks. He went to bed in his vest and underpants. It was pointless, even a little deranged; it was the behaviour of the compound. But when the lights in the yard went off, and he felt himself alone in the darkness, he was glad he had done what he had done.

There was a knock on the door, but so gentle he couldn’t be sure. He waited. The knock came again. He sat up; he didn’t put the light on. The door opened, the ceiling light was turned on. It wasn’t Linda. It was Carolus, with a tea-tray. The world was normal again; the hotel was the hotel.

‘You close door,’ Bobby said.

Carolus closed the door.

‘You bring tea, Carolus? You very good boy. You bring tea here.’

Carolus set the tray on the bedside table. Just as his limbs had lost their lightness, and he moved clumsily, so his face had altered.
His eyes had gone red, his lips thick, creased and dry, with a white bloom; his whole face appeared inflamed with apprehension and mistrust.

‘You sit here. You talk with me. I teach you.’

Carolus was taking out a piece of paper from the tight pocket of his red tunic.

‘I teach you French? I teach you hundate?’

The paper was a chit for the tea. It was made out in soft pencil, in the colonel’s firm handwriting.

Anger swept through Bobby; and his anger grew at the sight of Carolus’s heavy face.

He ordered: ‘Pencil.’

Carolus had one waiting.

‘Now get out!’ Bobby said, handing back the pencil and the chit.

Carolus didn’t move. His expression didn’t alter.

‘Go!’

‘You give me.’

‘Give you? Give you nothing. Give you whip.’

It wasn’t even true; it was someone else’s words; he was violating himself. Sitting up in bed, looking at the inflamed African face coming nearer to his, he saw it invaded by such blank and mindless rage that his own anger vanished in terror, terror at something he sensed to be beyond his control, beyond his reason.

He said, ‘I give you. I promise you. I give you.’

He took up a shilling from the change he had put out on the bedside table.

‘You give me five.’

‘I give you, I give you.’

Even when he had the money, Carolus looked at it suspiciously, and then he looked from his palm to Bobby’s face. And as soon as Carolus began to walk to the door Bobby understood that Carolus was only ‘fresh from the bush’; and Bobby knew that he
had misread the boy’s face, had seen things in it that were not there.

He said, ‘Boy.’

Carolus stopped. He started to turn to face Bobby.

‘You take off light, boy.’

Carolus obeyed. And when he left the room he shut the door quietly behind him.

Bobby turned on the bedside lamp. He poured a cup of tea. It was weak and full of leaves; it had been brewed in water that was barely hot. It was awful.

H
E WAS IN A CAR
with a woman whose identity he couldn’t be sure of. They were quarrelling. Everything she said was accurate; everything was wounding; and though to everything there was a reply, he couldn’t explain himself. He had to shout above her shouts; he was screaming; and as they sped along the empty road, dangerously, the wheel jumping in his hands, she wounded him and wounded him, more and more deeply; and there was rage and ache in his head, which seemed about to explode. He was no longer in the car. He was standing beside a table in a room full of people and chatter; and his exploding head made him collapse and stretch out right there, before them, on the floor.

When he awoke there was only the memory of the head. The woman and her arguments had vanished; but the wound remained. It was dark, but there was a quality about the darkness which suggested that it would soon be light. He reasoned: it was his early night, the events of the evening, and anyway he had packed for a quick getaway. Just the trousers and the native shirt, and he would
be off. But petrol: he didn’t have enough, his tank wasn’t filled: again and again he panicked as in his dream. And then it was daylight: a faint chattering from the quarters, a glimpse of trees at the back which he hadn’t seen the previous evening, and the radio downstairs, the African announcer stumbling over the violent words of the news bulletin from the capital.

It was the light, the openness, the lake, that surprised him when he went down to the dining-room. The sky was high and blue; beyond the ornamental palms on the boulevard the lake stretched to the horizon. The previous evening the wire-netting on the dining-room windows had appeared to enclose the room; now it offered no barrier to the light and was scarcely visible. So sodden and heavy and gloomily tropical the previous evening; but now the air was fresh. The hotel, the boulevard, the park, the lake: something of the resort atmosphere survived. And this morning there was activity on the boulevard. Above the hotel’s concrete wall an army lorry could be seen moving slowly from left to right.

The colonel, dressed as before, was at his table. He had almost finished breakfast; he was drinking tea and reading his book. Bobby, in his yellow native shirt, forgot about the lake and the light; and, left hand at his side, right hand swinging, made his swift, grim passage to the only other table that had been laid. Seated, his face set, he looked at the colonel; but the colonel was reading. Crumbs on the tablecloth, disorder in the butter-flecked marmalade: Linda had been down already. Grimly, Bobby buttered a piece of cold toast.

‘News not so good this morning,’ the colonel said. His voice was relaxed and casual. ‘Still, I suppose the sooner this thing’s over the better for all of us.’

Bobby, biting on his hard toast, gave a brief, blank smile. The colonel didn’t see; he was turning the page of his book.

Timothy, his smell sharp in the light morning air, offered the breakfast card. The card was as dingy as the red-checked waiter’s rag Timothy flicked about the table. His gestures were freer this
morning. He was almost skittish, almost familiar, and he appeared anxious to talk. With every friendly flick of his rag he released a little more of his smell.

Another lorry went grinding past the hotel.

‘Army’s on the move this morning,’ the colonel said. ‘Not a time to be on the road, when our army’s on the move. I always give them a wide berth myself.’

‘I imagine the road’s still wet,’ Bobby said.

‘Oh, one or two of those lorries are going to come to grief down some precipice or the other.’

The colonel smiled directly at Bobby. The colonel looked older this morning; but there was no strain in his face; the flesh around his eyes and mouth looked softer and rested.

Bobby was uncertain about the joke.

The colonel noticed. ‘They’re going to leave the road in an awful state.’

‘But I imagine it’ll dry out pretty quickly,’ Bobby said. ‘With this sun.’

‘Oh, with this sun it’ll dry out in no time at all. No time at all. By lunchtime, I’d say.’

It was like an invitation to linger; it was unexpected. But Linda had been down; she and the colonel had no doubt talked.

A car came into the yard. A door slammed. The colonel put a marker, a polished strip of bamboo shaped like a paper-knife, clearly an old possession, in his book; and waited. He appeared to know who the visitor was.