The Pure Gold Baby (35 page)

A jaçana stalks and picks its way over the marshland, elegant, colourful, the chestnut-fronted lily-trotter bird which seems to walk upon the water. Anna is not very good at using the binoculars (and neither is Jess, who has astigmatic vision), but she is content with what she seems to see through them. Light-heeled little fawn antelope graze and scatter on what may or may not be a wooded island just over the water. Jess thinks they are puku, but she isn’t sure.

Jess is thinking, peaceably, of Raoul. Shortly before the African departure, he had invited her to his apartment, in an act of return hospitality for her tea party with Steve. This had been a bold initiative on his part, and she had hesitated about accepting, but she had been touched by his confidence, and had made her way one spring evening to Regent’s Park and to his mansion flat.

He had offered her a drink in No. 24A on the fourth floor, and dinner in a slightly up-market bistro in Baker Street. The lift up to 24A was old-fashioned but well appointed, its brass gleaming, its woodwork polished. She had been unaccountably nervous as he opened the door, smiling, blinking through his rimless glasses, but when she saw the rooms within she calmed down. She had been fearing bachelor squalor or anonymous clinical tidiness, but the flat is habitable, even cosy, with book shelves and paintings and photographs, with comfortable chairs and oriental rugs, and a large vase of lilac blooms (how did he get hold of those?) scenting the air. It looks well settled: not as deeply settled as Kinderley Road and Shawcross Street, but lived in, cared for. The walls are papered with a warm red paisley print, the curtains are buff and gold. Jess sits, with a glass of white wine, and admires. She has never been to the Middle East, but she fancies there is a touch of the Lebanon here, a touch of ancestral taste in the furnishings, although all of them could easily have been purchased in John Lewis on Oxford Street.

She is looking, covertly, for a photograph of Marie-Hélène, but pretends to be inspecting the paintings. There is a small oil of a Mediterranean harbour scene, and a sand-coloured gouache of a pale house in an oasis beneath a turquoise sky, and a drawing of bomb damage that looks like a Graham Sutherland. She can’t see Marie-Hélène, but that must be the clever son, the one and only son, in a proud and ornate silver frame on the drinks cabinet.

The drinks cabinet is almost certainly John Lewis, and it is quite well stocked for a man who seems to drink only wine, and not very much of that. She wonders if he entertains frequently. He is retired, but she knows he still sees colleagues from overseas, associates from the hospital and the university where he taught, publishers and postgraduate students.

They talk of Ursula, and Africa, and Anna. Raoul now knows the full story of Anna’s recent illness and her life’s condition, and, now he has met Anna, he talks about her in a friendly way, entering into Jess’s world of concern. They have spoken several times of Wibletts, of Victoria and her son Marcus, of the gross Dr Nicholls. As they prepare to set off for their dinner, Jess gestures towards the photograph and ventures ‘That must be your son?’ and Raoul is delighted to admit to him. Yes, that is he. That is the young man who understands subatomic particles, neutrinos and the speed of light.

The son looks more like Raoul than like Marie-Hélène.

They enjoy their dinner, and Jess teases Raoul that he has yet again chosen lamb cutlets. They come adorned with a little paper frill. She likes to watch him nibble. She has Coquilles Saint-Jacques, an old-fashioned dish, which is served, as it should be, in its pilgrims’ scallop shell. Over coffee, Raoul reaches for her hand and briefly holds it, then pats it as he relinquishes it. ‘You must take care in Africa,’ he says; ‘you must remember to take all your pills.’

She had been pleased to have her hand patted. She has led a celibate life for years now, and has considered her body a burnt-out case, long past the need for any physical intimacy, but Raoul’s mild attentions had been acceptable, indeed welcome. She had wondered if he had been about to make any further move or declaration, but he had left it at that, embracing her warmly but politely as she paused on the steps of the Baker Street tube. He is exactly the same height as she is.

Bob is taller than Raoul and Jess. She can hear his loud and happy voice in the next hut. He has recently made one or two friendly attempts to suggest reclaiming his marital rights, but hadn’t seemed put out when she declined. He had loved her once, and is fond of her now, but he can take her or leave her.

And now here he is, advancing, carrying a couple of bottles of beer by the neck, with two glasses hooked on his fingers. He pulls up a chair, pours a beer for Anna and Jess (he drinks from the bottle, but knows they don’t like to) and settles back creakily to gaze over the lake. All three are recovering from the long flight and the short flight and the jolting of the Land-Rover on the dirt track through the straggling spreading utterly African miombo woodland. (Jess has at least temporarily memorised the word ‘miombo’, but Anna doesn’t like it. Anna has strong views on new words.) Jess is thinking that Bob has organised this camp well: it is remote, but not alarmingly, frighteningly remote. It is well within Anna’s comfort range. Tomorrow they will pursue Livingstone and, after that, the missionary settlement and the saucepans, and then they will join Bob’s TV people. She tries to remember how much she had told Bob about the BaTwa lobster-claw fisher children. Will any of them be alive today?

There are seventy-three different ethnic groups in modern Zambia, and the BaTwa are considered one of the most ‘primitive’.

Bob is more interested in animals than in people. He has already spotted a sitatunga browsing over the lake. He tells Anna that it has webbed feet, which isn’t quite true, but it is more or less amphibious.

The hippos make their massive bubbling watery noises, a strange mixture of mirth and menace, and Bob, raising his glass to happy and unworried Anna, says, ‘You’d better not go for a plunge here, babe. There’s crocs in there too.’

‘I’ve brought my swimming suit,’ says Anna in response.

‘Seriously,’ says Bob, ‘you save that for the pool on the way back. They’d snap you up here for a snack at any time of day.’

Anna laughs, but Jess is curiously relieved that Bob has given this ridiculous and surely unnecessary warning. She’s already explained the obvious dangers to Anna, that you have to be really careful about a lot of things in Africa, but she hadn’t wanted to scare her, and Bob’s casual reminder comes in well. Bob is as kind-hearted a man as he was when she first knew him. Indeed he has become more kind-hearted and more understanding. He is on good terms with his daughter and his ex-wife, and he has been more than good with stepdaughter Anna. And Jess knows that, however brief their life together had been, in his way he loves her.

She wonders if he and Raoul would like one another. Raoul is ten times cleverer than Bob and Jess and the Professor and anyone Jess has ever known, but that’s just a fluke. It’s just a matter of neurones and dendrites and synapses. His are better connected than theirs. Is she, Jess, now upgrading herself intellectually by having a flirtation with Raoul? This very quick thought, flitting through her, makes her laugh and snort into her beer. She makes a note to herself to tell me about it, as she knows it will be right up my street.

Bob laughs too, though he doesn’t know what the joke is, and then the Mexican adventurer waves from the men’s hut, and they make their way with him by the thin blue light of their clockwork torches (for the sun has now sunk) along the dark path to their supper. The chorus of the frogs grows louder and louder, and the snorting of the hippos fades away, and Venus and Jupiter as clear as wild diamonds ride through the black enormous African sky.

Over their fritters and fried tomatoes and sweetcorn they are joined by their pilot and the Zambian guide Emmanuel, and, when the meal is served, by the cook, whose name is Isaac. Isaac has a small son, who watches the party intently from the kitchen doorway; he was allowed to bring them a plastic basket of bread, but backed away shyly when Jess thanked him. Jess suspects the Zambians may have other names, which they do not choose to use in mixed company.

The three white men compete, as men do, with tales of adventure. Jess and Anna and the Zambians listen, an appreciative and tolerant audience, and behind their narratives Jess listens to the sounds of the bush—a roaring, a rustling, an occasional baboon screech. She knows all Bob’s stories, some of them too well, but Brewster’s accounts of hopping round the country in his little taxi plane are new to her, and not too scary. This is a safe country, unlike the Congo, just over the border. They had flown over a bit of the Congo on their way here—Brewster had pointed down to the Congo Pedicle, thrusting its mineral-rich foot rudely down into Zambia.

The Mexican’s tales, in contrast to Brewster’s and Bob’s, are horrifying. He tells them about his brother, who was kidnapped and held hostage in a sealed room for a hundred days in Mexico City. None of the family dares to live in Mexico now. He is here to relax, to escape, in the deep peace of Africa. Nothing can harm him here. Nobody will kidnap him here.

The Zambians shake their heads and make sympathetic noises as he tells this story. They know life is grim and lawless over the border in the Congo, but they hadn’t expected to hear such horrors of a great and civilised city.

The Mexican is sweet and quick-witted with Anna. He gives her a little present, in the form of a nest of a paradise flycatcher. It is tiny, intricately made of feathers and moss, and he had found it that afternoon on the forest floor beneath a mpundu tree. The paradise flycatcher, Emmanuel tells them, is a very small bird with a very long tail. He shows them its picture, in his bird book. Anna holds the nest on her knees proudly, tenderly.

A hippo slumps noisily up from the water, very close to them, and they hear it munch and graze. It is grey and dirty-pink and enormous.

They sit round a wood fire, loosely built in the shape of a star. The logs and branches point inwards, and the charcoal core of the star glows a dull red. Occasionally Emmanuel replaces or moves a grey branch, and the sparks fly upwards, and little flames burst forth. This is the kind of fire they have been making here for many thousands of years. It has burnt through the stone age, through the iron age, through the advent of Speke and Livingstone and Stanley, and it burns on, through the Jet Age, through the age of KK and HIV and climate change and safari tourism. The light of the fire plays dully and dimly on the faces of the group: on Bob, still boyish though grey-bearded; on Anglo-Saxon Brewster, tanned and clean shaven in his khaki shorts; on the fabulously wealthy and stylish young Jewish Mexican with his ringlets; on the dark, taut and gleaming ebony skin of Emmanuel the guide and Isaac the cook; and on Anna’s pale, fair, attentive brow. Jess watches, and thinks of the People of Many Lands and of that Christmas when all the children were young. It is a comfort to be here, so peacefully, with this strange group, by this ancient fire.

Emmanuel is appointed to take them to the Memorial and then onwards to the Livingstone river crossing and the Holden missionary settlement near the lake and the Saucepan Graves. The Mexican takes an interest in their project, and asks if he can come too, but is reminded that Brewster is due to fly him to the Shoebill Camp at the crack of dawn the next morning, where his strict and serious Zimbabwean bird guide will be waiting for him.

As Jess and Bob and Anna and Emmanuel and a driver casually armed with a gun grind along in the Land-Rover, and clamber in and out of a dugout canoe, and admire the egrets and ibises and kingfishers and storks, Jess’s mind probes back to that earlier journey, so many decades ago, with Guy and Graham Slater and all those other chaps, some of whose names she has forgotten. Ghosts of memories of the landscape emerge, prompted by the cry of a bird, a footprint, a cemetery of grey tombstone anthills, the grey trunk and gaunt dead branches of an elephant-stripped tree, the red mud of a river crossing, the smiling eager schoolchildren with their bags of schoolbooks waving from the side of the road. But there is some other memory lying behind them all, something that had preceded them all. It will not come to her. She cannot get it back. It may be the cause of all things, or it may be an irrelevance, but she cannot return to it.

The Livingstone Memorial she had misremembered, although she knows they had picnicked by it long ago, and she knows it cannot have changed much in forty-odd years. There it stood, and there it stands, a small plain blunt brick-and-cement obelisk in a woodland glade, erected more than a hundred years after Livingstone’s death, with its inscriptions commemorating him and his ‘faithful native followers’. The handsome young woman now in charge of it tells them that some people are agitating for a smarter, more modern monument, but she and the local people like it as it is. ‘People expect it to be like this,’ she says; ‘they don’t want a new one. This is the one they all remember. This is the one in all the photographs.’

Jess hadn’t remembered it very well and had thought it much smaller, although she politely nods her agreement. But, as she climbs up into the back of the vehicle, another image does come back, an image almost as clear as that of the unplumbed lavatory. It is of a cement-block shed with a handwritten notice on it reading clinic. It had stood all alone, somewhere near here, and when they had looked inside it they had found nothing but a wooden bench and a small wooden cabinet, its door swinging open, empty save for a tube of antiseptic cream and a roll of doubtful bandage.

Dr Livingstone had been highly valued for his carefully crafted wooden travelling medicine chest with its treasure of neatly stored and magical little glass bottles. His faith had sustained him, but his quinine, calomel, jalap and rhubarb had saved others.

There is an undergrowth round here that looks like bracken, under the taller woodland trees. It has little curled fronds. But it isn’t bracken. It can’t be. The fronds are knee-high.