Life Times Stories Part 13

And Matt talked all the time. His low, confidential English lifted to the cheerful rising cadence of French as his voice bounced out to greet people and rebounded from the close walls back to the privacy of English and their head-lowered conclave again. Yet even when his voice had dropped to a whisper, his round dark eyes, slightly depressed at the outer corners by the beginning of an intelligent frown above his dainty nose, moved, parenthetically alert, over everyone within orbit. He greeted people he had never seen before just as he greeted local inhabitants. He would stop beside a couple of sightseers or a plumber lifting a manhole and converse animatedly. To his companion standing by, his French sounded much more French than when the village children spoke it. Matt shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip while he talked, and if some of the people he accosted were uncomfortable or astonished at being addressed volubly, for no particular reason, by someone they didn't know, he asked them questions (Clive could hear they were questions) in the jolly tone of voice that grown-ups use to kid children out of their shyness.

Sometimes one of the inhabitants, sitting outside his or her doorway on a hard chair, would walk inside and close the door when Matt called out conversationally. 'The people in this town are really psychotic, I can tell you,' he would say with enthusiasm, dropping back to English. 'I know them all, every one of them, and I'm not kidding.' The old women in wrinkled black stockings, long ap.r.o.ns and wide black hats who sat on the place stringing beans for Chez Riane, the open-air restaurant, turned walnut-meat faces and hissed toothlessly like geese when Matt approached. Riane ('She topped the popularity poll in Paris, can you believe it? It was just about the time of the Flood, my father says'), a woman the size of a prize fighter who bore to the displayed posters of herself the kinship of a petrified trunk to a twig in new leaf, growled something at Matt from the corner of her vivid mouth. 'I've got some great pictures of her. Of course, she's a bit pa.s.se.'

They got chased when Matt took a picture of a man and a girl kissing down in the parking area below the chateau. Clive carried his box camera about with him, now, but he only took pictures of the cats. Matt promised that Clive would get a shot of the dwarf a real man, not in a circus who turned the spit in the restaurant that served lamb cooked the special way they did it here, but, as Matt said, Clive didn't have the temperament for a great photographer. He was embarra.s.sed, ashamed and frightened when the dwarf's enormous head with its Spanish dancer's sideburns reddened with a temper too big for him. But Matt had caught him on the Polaroid; they went off to sit in someone's doorway hung with strips of coloured plastic to keep out flies, and had a look. There was the dwarf's head, held up waggling on his little body like the head of a finger-puppet. 'Fantastic.' Matt was not boastful but professional in his satisfaction. 'I didn't have a good one of him before, just my luck, we hadn't been here a week when he went crazy and was taken off to some hospital. He's only just come back into circulation, it's a good thing you didn't miss him. You might've gone back to Africa and not seen him.'

The family, who had admired the boy's Madras shorts or his transistor radio, enjoyed the use of his elegant little record player, or welcomed a friend for Clive, began to find him too talkative, too often present, and too much on the streets. Clive was told that he must come along with the family on some of their outings. They drove twenty miles to eat some fish made into soup. They took up a whole afternoon looking at pictures.

'What time'll we be back?' he would rush in from the street to ask.

'I don't know sometime in the afternoon.'

'Can't we be back by two?'

'Why on earth should we tie ourselves down to a time? We're on holiday.' He would rush back to the street to relay the unsatisfactory information.

When the family came home, the slim little figure with its trappings would be ready to wave at them from the bottom of their street. Once in the dark they made him out under the street light that streaked and flattened his face and that of the village halfwit and his dog; he looked up from conversation as if he had been waiting for a train that would come in on time. Another day there was a message laid out in the courtyard with matches end-to-end: WILL SEE YOU LATER MATT.

'What's the matter with those people, they don't even take the child down to the beach for a swim,' said the mother.

Clive heard, but was not interested. He had never been in the pink house with the Ali Baba pots. Matt emerged like one of the cats, and he usually had money. They found a place that sold bubblegum and occasionally they had pancakes Clive didn't know that that was what they were going to be when Matt said he was going to buy some crepes and what kind of jam did Clive like? Matt paid; there was his doc.u.mentary film, and he was also writing a book 'There's a lot of money in kids' books actually written by a kid,' he explained to the family. It was a spy story 'Really exotic.' He expected to do well out of it, and he might sell some of his candid shots to Time and Life as well.

But one particularly lovely morning Clive's mother said as if she couldn't prevent herself, perhaps Matt would like to come with the family to the airport? The boys could watch the jets land while the grown-ups had business with the reservation office.

'Order yourselves a lemonade if you want it,' said the father; he meant that he would pay when he came back. They drank a lemonade-and-ice-cream each and then Matt said he'd like a black coffee to wash it down, so they ordered two coffees, and the father was annoyed when he got the bill coffee was nothing at home, but in France they seemed to charge you for the gla.s.s of water you got with it.

'I can drink five or six coffees a day, it doesn't bother my liver,' Matt told everyone. And in Nice, afterwards, trailing round the Place Ma.s.sena behind Jenny, who wanted to buy a polo shirt like the ones all the French girls were wearing, the boys were not even allowed to go and look at the fountain alone, in case they got lost. Matt's voice fell to a whisper in Clive's ear but Clive hardly heard and did not answer: here, Matt was just an appendage of the family, like any other little boy.

It was Sat.u.r.day and when they drove home up the steep road (the halfwit and his dog sat at the newly installed traffic light and Matt, finding his voice, called out of the window a greeting in French) the village was already beginning to choke with weekend visitors.

Directly lunch was down the boys raced to meet beneath the plaque that commemorated the birth in this street of Xavier Duval, Resistance fighter, killed on 20 October 1944. Clive was there first and, faithfully carrying out the technique and example of his friend, delightedly managed to take a candid shot of Matt before Matt realised that he was observed. It was one of the best afternoons they'd had.

'Sat.u.r.days are always good,' said Matt. 'All these psychotic people around. Just keep your eyes open, brother. I wrote Chapter Fourteen of my book at lunch. Oh, it was on a tray in my room they were out until about four this morning and they didn't get up. It's set in this airport, you see remember how you could just see my mouth moving and you couldn't hear a thing in the racket with that jet taking off? well, someone gets murdered right there drinking coffee and no one hears the scream.'

They were walking through the car park, running their hands over the nacre-sleek hoods of sports models, and half-attentive to a poodle fight near the petanque pitch and a human one that seemed about to break out at the busy entrance to the men's lavatories that tunnelled under the place. 'Ah, I've got enough shots of delinquents to last me,' Matt said. In accord they went on past the old girl in flowered trousers who was weeping over her unharmed, struggling poodle, and up the steps to the place, where most of the local inhabitants and all the visitors, whose cars jammed the park and stopped up the narrow streets, were let loose together, herded by Arab music coming from the boutique run by the French Algerians, on the chateau side, and the recorded voice, pa.s.sionately hoa.r.s.e, of Riane in her prime, from the direction of Chez Riane. The dwarf was there, talking between set teeth to a beautiful blonde American as if he were about to tear her apart with them; her friends were ready to die laughing, but looked kindly in order not to show it. The old women with their big black hats and ap.r.o.n-covered stomachs took up s.p.a.ce on the benches. There were more poodles and an Italian greyhound like a piece of wire jewellery. Women who loved each other sat at the little tables outside Riane's, men who loved each other sat in identical mauve jeans and pink shirts, smoking, outside Zizi's Bar. Men and women in beach clothes held hands, looking into the doorways of the little shops and bars, and pulling each other along as the dogs pulled along their owners on fancy leashes. At the Creperie, later, Matt pointed out Clive's family, probably eating their favourite liqueur pancakes, but Clive jerked him away.

They watched petanque for a while; the butcher, a local champion, was playing to the gallery, all right. He was pink and wore a tourist's fishnet vest through which wisps of reddish chest-hair twined like a creeper. A man with a long black cape and a huge cat's-whisker moustache caused quite a stir. 'My G.o.d, I've been trying to get him for weeks-' Matt ducked, Clive quickly following, and they zigzagged off through the petanque spectators. The man had somehow managed to drive a small English sports car right up on to the place; it was forbidden, but although the part-time policeman who got into uniform for Sat.u.r.day afternoons was shouting at him, the man couldn't be forced to take it down again because whatever gap it had found its way through was closed by a fresh influx of people. 'He's a painter,' Matt said. 'He lives above the shoemaker's, you know that little hole. He doesn't ever come out except Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. I've got to get a couple of good shots of him. He looks to me the type that gets famous. Really psychotic, eh?' The painter had with him a lovely, haughty girl dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a man's tweeds and deerstalker. 'The car must be hers,' said Matt. 'He hasn't made it, yet; but I can wait.' He used up almost a whole film: 'With a modern artist, you want a few new angles.'

Matt was particularly talkative, even going right into Zizi's Bar to say h.e.l.lo to her husband, Emile. The family were still sitting at the Creperie; the father signed to Clive to come over and at first he took no notice. Then he stalked up between the tables. 'Yes?'

'Don't you want some money?'

Before he could answer, Matt began jerking a thumb frantically. He ran. His father's voice barred him: 'Clive!'

But Matt had come flying: 'Over there a woman's just fainted or died or something. We got to go-'

'What for?' said the mother.

'G.o.d almighty,' said Jenny.

He was gone with Matt. They fought and wriggled their way into the s.p.a.ce that had been cleared, near the steps, round a heavy woman lying on the ground. Her clothes were twisted; her mouth bubbled. People argued and darted irresistibly out of the crowd to do things to her; those who wanted to try and lift her up were pulled away by those who thought she ought to be left. Someone took off her shoes. Someone ran for water from Chez Riane but the woman couldn't drink it. One day the boys had found a workman in his blue outfit and cement-crusted boots lying snoring near the old pump outside the Bar Tabac, where the men drank. Matt got him, too; you could always use a shot like that for a dead body, if the worst came to the worst. But this was the best ever. Matt finished up what was left of the film with the painter on it and had time to put in a new one, while the woman still lay there, and behind the noise of the crowd and the music the see-saw hoot of the ambulance could be heard, coming up the road to the village walls from the port below. The ambulance couldn't get on to the place, but the men in their uniforms carried a stretcher over people's heads and then lifted the woman aboard. Her face was purplish as cold hands on a winter morning and her legs stuck out. The boys were part of the entourage that followed her to the ambulance, Matt progressing with sweeping hops, on bended knee, like a Russian dancer, in order to get the supine body in focus at an upward angle.

When it was all over, they went back to the Creperie to relate the sensational story to the family; but they had not been even interested enough to stay, and had gone home to the villa. 'It'll be really something for you to show them down in Africa!' said Matt. He was using his Minox that afternoon, and he promised that when the films were developed, he would have copies made for Clive. 'Darn it, we'll have to wait until my parents take the films to Nice you can't get them developed up here. And they only go in on Wednesdays.'

'But I'll be gone by then,' said Clive suddenly.

'Gone? Back to Africa?' All the distance fell between them as they stood head-to-head jostled by the people in the village street, all the distance of the centuries when the continent was a blank outline on the maps, as well as the distance of miles. 'You mean you'll be back in Africa?'

Clive's box camera went into his cupboard along with the other souvenirs of Europe that seemed to have shed their evocation when they were unpacked amid the fresh, powerful familiarity of home. He boasted a little, the first day of the new term at school, about the places he had been to; but within a few weeks, when cities and palaces that he had seen for himself were spoken of in history or geography cla.s.ses, he did not mention that he had visited them and, in fact, the textbook ill.u.s.trations and descriptions did not seem to be those of anything he knew. One day he searched for his camera to take to a sports meeting, and found an exposed film in it. When it was developed, there were the pictures of the cats. He turned them this way up and that, to make out the thin, feral shapes on cobblestones and the disappearing blurs round the blackness of archways. There was also the picture of the American boy, Matt, a slim boy with knees made big out of focus, looking at once suspicious and bright from under his uncut hair.

The family crowded round to see, smiling, filled with pangs for what the holiday was and was not, while it lasted.

'The Time-Life man himself!'

'Poor old Matt what was his other name?'

'You ought to send it to him,' said the mother. 'You've got the address? Aren't you going to keep in touch?'

But there was no address. The boy Matt had no street, house, house in a street, room in a house like the one they were in. 'America,' Clive said, 'he's in America.'

Rain-Queen We were living in the Congo at the time; I was nineteen. It must have been my twentieth birthday we had at the Au Relais, with the Gattis, M. Niewenhuys and my father's site manager. My father was building a road from Elisabethville to Ts...o...b..'s residence, a road for processions and motorcades. It's Lub.u.mbashi now, and Ts...o...b..'s dead in exile. But at that time there was plenty of money around and my father was brought from South Africa with a free hand to recruit engineers from anywhere he liked; the Gattis were Italian, and then there was a young Swede. I didn't want to leave Johannesburg because of my boyfriend, Alan, but my mother didn't like the idea of leaving me behind, because of him. She said to me, 'Quite honestly, I think it's putting too much temptation in a young girl's way. I'd have no one to blame but myself.' I was very young for my age, then, and I gave in.

There wasn't much for me to do in E'ville. I was taken up by some young Belgian married women who were only a few years older than I was. I had coffee with them in town in the mornings, and played with their babies. My mother begged them to speak French to me; she didn't want the six months there to be a complete waste. One of them taught me how to make a chocolate mousse, and I made myself a dress under the supervision of another; we giggled together as I had done a few years before with the girls at school.

Everyone turned up at the Au Relais in the evenings and in the afternoons when it had cooled off a bit we played squash the younger ones in our crowd, I mean. I used to play every day with the Swede and Marco Gatti. They came straight from the site. Eleanora Gatti was one of those Mediterranean women who not only belong to a different s.e.x, but seem to be a species entirely different from the male. You could never imagine her running or even bending to pick something up; her white bosom in square-necked dresses, her soft hands with rings and jewel-lidded watch, her pile of dark hair tinted a strange tarnished marmalade colour that showed up the pallor of her skin all was arranged like a still life. The Swede wasn't married.

After the game Marco Gatti used to put a towel round his neck tennis-star fashion and his dark face was gilded with sweat. The Swede went red and blotchy. When Marco panted it was a grin, showing white teeth and one that was repaired with gold. It seemed to me that all adults were flawed in some way; it set them apart. Marco used to give me a lift home and often came in to have a drink with my father and discuss problems about the road. When he was outlining a difficulty he had a habit of smiling and putting a hand inside his shirt to scratch his breast. In the open neck of his shirt some sort of amulet on a chain rested on the dark hair between his strong pectoral muscles. My father said proudly, 'He may look like a tenor at the opera, but he knows how to get things done.'

I had never been to the opera; it wasn't my generation. But when Marco began to kiss me every afternoon on the way home, and then to come in to talk to my father over beer as usual, I put it down to the foreignness in him.

I said, 'It seems so funny to walk into the room where Daddy is.'

Marco said, 'My poor little girl, you can't help it if you are pretty, can you?'

It rains every afternoon there, at that time of year. A sudden wind would buffet the heat aside, flattening paper against fences in the dust. Fifteen minutes later you could have timed it by the clock the rain came down so hard and noisy we could scarcely see out of the windscreen and had to talk as loudly as if we were in an echoing hall. The rain usually lasted only about an hour. One afternoon we went to the site instead of to my parents' house to the caravan that was meant to be occupied by one of the engineers but never had been, because everyone lived in town. Marco shouted against the downpour, 'You know what the Congolese say? "When the rain comes, quickly find a girl to take home with you until it's over." ' The caravan was just like a little flat, with everything you needed. Marco showed me there was even a bath. Marco wasn't tall (at home the girls all agreed we couldn't look at any boy under six foot) but he had the fine, strong legs of a sportsman, covered with straight black hairs, and he stroked my leg with his hard yet furry one. That was a caress we wouldn't have thought of, either. I had an inkling we really didn't know anything.

The next afternoon Marco seemed to be taking the way directly home, and I said in agony, 'Aren't we going to the caravan?' It was out, before I could think.

'Oh my poor darling, were you disappointed?' He laughed and stopped the car there and then and kissed me deep in both ears as well as the mouth. 'All right, the caravan.'

We went there every weekday afternoon he didn't work on Sat.u.r.days, and the wives came along to the squash club. Soon the old Congolese watchman used to trot over from the labourers' camp to greet us when he saw the car draw up at the caravan; he knew I was my father's daughter. Marco chatted with him for a few minutes, and every few days gave him a tip. At the beginning, I used to stand by as if waiting to be told what to do next, but Marco had what I came to realise must be adult confidence. 'Don't look so worried. He's a nice old man. He's my friend.'

Marco taught me how to make love, in the caravan, and everything that I had thought of as 'life' was put away, as I had at other times folded the doll's clothes, packed the Monopoly set and the sample collection, and given them to the servant. I stopped writing to my girl friends; it took me weeks to get down to replying to Alan's regular letters, and yet when I did so it was with a kind of professional pride that I turned out a letter of the most skilful ambiguity should it be taken as a love letter, or should it not? I felt it would be beyond his powers powers of experience to decide. I alternately pitied him and underwent an intense tingling of betrayal actually cringing away from myself in the flesh. Before my parents and in the company of friends, Marco's absolutely unchanged behaviour mesmerised me: I acted as if nothing had happened because for him it was really as if nothing had happened. He was not pretending to be natural with my father and mother he was natural. And the same applied to our behaviour in the presence of his wife. After the first time he made love to me I had looked forward with terror and panic to the moment when I should have to see Eleanora again; when she might squeeze my hand or even kiss me on the cheek as she sometimes did in her affectionate, feminine way. But when I walked into our house that Sunday and met her perfume and then all at once saw her beside my mother talking about her family in Genoa, with Marco, my father and another couple sitting there I moved through the whirling impression without falter.

Someone said, 'Ah here she is at last, our Jillie!'

And my mother was saying (I had been riding with the Swede), 'I don't know how she keeps up with Per, they were out dancing until three o'clock this morning-' and Marco, who was twenty-nine (1 December, Sagittarius, domicile of Jupiter), was saying, 'What it is to be young, eh?', and my father said, 'What time did you finally get to bed, after last night, anyway, Marco-' and Eleanora, sitting back with her plump smooth knees crossed, tugged my hand gently so that we should exchange a woman's kiss on the cheek.

I took in the smell of Eleanora's skin, felt the brush of her hair on my nose; and it was done, for ever. We sat talking about some shoes her sister-in-law had sent from Milan. It was something I could never have imagined: Marco and I, as we really were, didn't exist here; there was no embarra.s.sment. The Gattis, as always on Sunday mornings, were straight from eleven o'clock Ma.s.s at the Catholic cathedral, and smartly dressed.

As in most of these African places there was a shortage of white women in Katanga and my mother felt much happier to see me spending my time with the young married people than she would have been to see me taken up by the mercenaries who came in and out of E'ville that summer. 'They're experienced men,' she said as opposed to boys and married men, 'and of course they're out for what they can get. They've got nothing to lose; next week they're in another province, or they've left the country. I don't blame them. I believe a girl has to know what the world's like, and if she is fool enough to get involved with that crowd, she must take the consequences.' She seemed to have forgotten that she had not wanted to leave me in Johannesburg in the company of Alan. 'She's got a nice boy at home, a decent boy who respects her. I'd far rather see her just enjoying herself generally, with you young couples, while we're here.' And there was always Per, the Swede, to even out the numbers; she knew he wasn't 'exactly Jillie's dream of love'. I suppose that made him safe, too. If I was no one's partner in our circle, I was a love object, handed round them all, to whom it was taken for granted that the homage of a flirtatious att.i.tude was paid. Perhaps this was supposed to represent my compensation: if not the desired of any individual, then recognised as desirable by them all.

'Oh of course, you prefair to dance with Jeelie,' Mireille, one of the young Belgians, would say to her husband, pretending offence. He and I were quite an act, at the Au Relais, with our cha-cha. Then he would whisper to her in their own language, and she would giggle and punch his arm.

Marco and I were as famous a combination on the squash court as Mireille's husband and I were on the dance floor. This was the only place, if anyone had had the eyes for it, where our love-making showed. As the weeks went by and the love-making got better and better, our game got better and better. The response Marco taught me to the sound of spilling grain the rain made on the caravan roof held good between us on the squash court. Sometimes the wives and spectators broke into spontaneous applause; I was following Marco's sweat-oiled excited face, antic.i.p.ating his muscular reactions in play as in bed. And when he had beaten me (narrowly) or we had beaten the other pair, he would hunch my shoulders together within his arm, laughing, praising me in Italian to the others, staggering about with me, and he would say to me in English, 'Aren't you a clever girl, eh?'; only he and I knew that that was what he said to me at other times. I loved that glinting flaw in his smile, now. It was Marco, like all the other things I knew about him: the girl cousin he had been in love with when he used to spend holidays with her family in the Abruzzi mountains; the way he would have planned Ts...o...b..'s road if he'd been in charge 'But I like your father, you understand? it's good to work with your father, you know?'; the baby cream from Italy he used for the p.r.i.c.kly heat round his waist.

The innocence of the grown-ups fascinated me. They engaged in play-play, while I had given it up; I began to feel arrogant among them. It was pleasant. I felt arrogant or rather tolerantly patronising towards the faraway Alan, too. I said to Marco, 'I wonder what he'd do if he knew' about me; the caravan with the dotted curtains, the happy watchman, the tips, the breath of the earth rising from the wetted dust. Marco said wisely that Alan would be terribly upset.

'And if Eleanora knew?'

Marco gave me his open, knowing, a.s.sured smile, at the same time putting the palm of his hand to my cheek in tender parenthesis. 'She wouldn't be pleased. But in the case of a man-' For a moment he was Eleanora, quite unconsciously he mimicked the sighing resignation of Eleanora, receiving the news (seated, as usual), aware all the time that men were like that.

Other people who were rumoured or known to have had lovers occupied my mind with a special interest. I chattered on the subject, '. . . when this girl's husband found out, he just walked out of the house without any money or anything and no one could find him for weeks,' and Marco took it up as one does what goes without saying: 'Well of course. If I think of Eleanora with someone I mean I would become mad.'

I went on with my second-hand story, enjoying the telling of all its twists and complications, and he laughed, following it with the affectionate attention with which he lit everything I said and did, and getting up to find the bottle of Chianti, wipe out a gla.s.s and fill it for himself. He always had wine in the caravan. I didn't drink any but I used to have the metallic taste of it in my mouth from his.

In the car that afternoon he had said maybe there'd be a nice surprise for me, and I remembered this and we lay and wrangled teasingly about it. The usual sort of thing: 'You're learning to be a real little nag, my darling, a little nag, eh?'

'I'm not going to let go until you tell me.'

'I think I'll have to give you a little smack on the bottom, eh, just like this, eh?'

The surprise was a plan. He and my father might be going to the Kasai to advise on some difficulties that had cropped up for a construction firm there. It should be quite easy for me to persuade my father that I'd like to accompany him, and then if Marco could manage to leave Eleanora behind, it would be almost as good as if he and I were to take a trip alone together.

'You will have your own room?' Marco asked.

I laughed. 'D'you think I'd be put in with Daddy?' Perhaps in Italy a girl wouldn't be allowed to have her own hotel room.

Now Marco was turning his attention to the next point: 'Eleanora gets sick from the car, anyway she won't want to come on bad roads, and you can get stuck, G.o.d knows what. No, it's quite all right, I will tell her it's no pleasure for her.' At the prospect of being in each other's company for whole days and perhaps nights we couldn't stop smiling, chattering and kissing, not with pa.s.sion but delight. My tongue was loosened as if I had been drinking wine.

Marco spoke good English.

The foreign turns of phrase he did have were familiar to me. He did not use the word 'mad' in the sense of angry. 'I would become mad': he meant exactly that, although the phrase was not one that we English-speaking people would use. I thought about it that night, alone, at home; and other nights. Out of his mind, he meant. If Eleanora slept with another man, Marco would be insane with jealousy. He said so to me because he was a really honest person, not like the other grown-ups just as he said, 'I like your father, eh? I don't like some of the things he does with the road, but he is a good man, you know?' Marco was in love with me; I was his treasure, his joy, some beautiful words in Italian. It was true; he was very, very happy with me. I could see that. I did not know that people could be so happy; Alan did not know. I was sure that if I hadn't met Marco I should never have known. When we were in the caravan together I would watch him all the time, even when we were dozing I watched out of slit eyes the movement of his slim nostril with its tuft of black hair, as he breathed, and the curve of his sunburned ear through which capillary-patterned light showed. Oh Marco, Eleanora's husband, was beautiful as he slept. But he wasn't asleep. I liked to press my feet on his as if his were pedals and when I did this the corner of his mouth smiled and he said something with the flex of a muscle somewhere in his body. He even spoke aloud at times: my name. But I didn't know if he knew he had spoken it. Then he would lie with his eyes open a long time, but not looking at me, because he didn't need to: I was there. Then he would get up, light a cigarette, and say to me, 'I was in a dream . . . oh, I don't know . . . it's another world.'

It was a moment of awkwardness for me because I was entering the world from my childhood and could not conceive that, as adults did as he did I should ever need to find surcease and joy elsewhere, in another world. He escaped, with me. I entered, with him. The understanding of this I knew would come about for me as the transfiguration of the gold tooth from a flaw into a characteristic had come. I still did not know everything.

I saw Eleanora nearly every day. She was very fond of me; she was the sort of woman who, at home, would have kept attendant younger sisters round her to compensate for the children she did not have. I never felt guilty towards her. Yet, before, I should have thought how awful one would feel, taking the closeness and caresses that belonged, by law, to another woman. I was irritated at the stupidity of what Eleanora said; the stupidity of her not knowing. How idiotic that she should tell me that Marco had worked late on the site again last night, he was so conscientious, etc. wasn't I with him, while she made her famous veal scalop-pini and they got overcooked? And she was a nuisance to us. 'I'll have to go I must take poor Eleanora to a film tonight. She hasn't been anywhere for weeks.' 'It's the last day for parcels to Italy, tomorrow she likes me to pack them with her, the Christmas parcels, you know how Eleanora is about these things.' Then her aunt came out from Italy and there were lunches and dinners to which only Italian-speaking people were invited because the signora couldn't speak English. I remember going there one Sunday sent by my mother with a contribution of her special ice cream. They were all sitting round in the heat on the veranda, the women in one group with the children crawling over them, and Marco with the men in another, his tie loose at the neck of his shirt (Eleanora had made him put on a suit), gesturing with a toothpick, talking and throwing cigar b.u.t.ts into Eleanora's flower-trough of snake cactus.

And yet that evening in the caravan he said again, 'Oh good G.o.d, I don't want to wake up . . . I was in a dream.' He had appeared out of the dark at our meeting-place, barefoot in espadrilles and tight thin jeans, like a beautiful fisherman.

I had never been to Europe. Marco said, 'I want to drive with you through Piemonte, and take you to the village where my father came from. We'll climb up to the walls from the church and when you get to the top only then I'll turn you round and you'll see Monte Bianco far away. You've heard nightingales, eh never heard them? We'll listen to them in the pear orchard, it's my uncle's place, there.'

I was getting older every day. I said, 'What about Eleanora?' It was the nearest I could get to what I always wanted to ask him: 'Would you still become mad?'

Would you still become mad?

And now?

And now two months, a week, six weeks later?

Now would you still become mad?

'Eleanora will spend some time in Pisa after we go back to Italy, with her mother and the aunts,' he was saying.

Yes, I knew why, too; knew from my mother that Eleanora was going to Pisa because there was an old family doctor there who was sure, despite everything the doctors in Milan and Rome had said, that poor Eleanora might still one day have a child.

I said, 'How would you feel if Alan came here?'

But Marco looked at me with such sensual confidence of understanding that we laughed.

I began to plan a love affair for Eleanora. I chose Per as victim not only because he was the only presentable unattached man in our circle, but also because I had the feeling that it might just be possible to attract her to a man younger than herself, whom she could mother. And Per, with no woman at all (except the pretty Congolese prost.i.tutes good for an hour in the rain, I suppose) could consider himself lucky if he succeeded with Eleanora. I studied her afresh. Soft white gooseflesh above her stocking-tops, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that rose when she sighed that sort of woman. But Eleanora did not even seem to understand that Per was being put in her way (at our house, at the Au Relais) and Per seemed equally unaware of or uninterested in his opportunities.

And so there was never any way to ask my question. Marco and I continued to lie making love in the caravan while the roof made buckling noises as it contracted after the heat of the day, and the rain. Ts...o...b.. fled and returned; there were soldiers in the square before the post office, and all sorts of difficulties arose over the building of the road. Marco was determined, excitable, hara.s.sed and energetic he sprawled on the bed in the caravan at the end of the day like a runner who has just breasted the tape. My father was nervous and didn't know whether to finish the road. Eleanora was nervous and wanted to go back to Italy. We made love and when Marco opened his eyes to consciousness of the road, my father, Eleanora, he said, 'Oh for G.o.d's sake, why . . . it's like a dream . . .'

I became nervous too. I goaded my mother: 'The Gattis are a bore. That female Buddha.'

I developed a dread that Eleanora would come to me with her sighs and her soft-squeezing hand and say, 'It always happens with Marco, little Jillie, you mustn't worry. I know all about it.'

And Marco and I continued to lie together in that state of pleasure in which nothing exists but the two who make it. Neither roads, nor mercenary wars, nor marriage, nor the claims and suffering of other people entered that tender, sensual dream from which Marco, although so regretfully, always returned.

What I dreaded Eleanora might say to me was never said, either. Instead my mother told me one day in the tone of portentous emotion with which older women relive such things, that Eleanora, darling Eleanora, was expecting a child. After six years. Without having to go to Pisa to see the family doctor there. Yes, Eleanora had conceived during the rainy season in E'ville, while Marco and I made love every afternoon in the caravan, and the Congolese found themselves a girl for the duration of a shower.

It's years ago, now.

Poor Marco, sitting in Milan or Genoa at Sunday lunch, toothpick in his fingers, Eleanora's children crawling about, Eleanora's brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts around him. But I have never woken up from that dream. In the seven years I've been married I've had how many lovers? Only I know. A lot if you count the very brief holiday episodes as well.

It is another world, that dream, where no wind blows colder than the warm breath of two who are mouth to mouth.

A Soldier's Embrace.

Town and Country Lovers.

One.

Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf is a geologist absorbed in his work; wrapped up in it, as the saying goes year after year the experience of this work enfolds him, swaddling him away from the landscapes, the cities and the people, wherever he lives: Peru, New Zealand, the United States. He's always been like that, his mother could confirm from their native Austria. There, even as a handsome small boy he presented only his profile to her: turned away to his bits of rock and stone. His few relaxations have not changed much since then. An occasional skiing trip, listening to music, reading poetry Rainer Maria Rilke once stayed in his grandmother's hunting lodge in the forests of Styria and the boy was introduced to Rilke's poems while very young.

Layer upon layer, country after country, wherever his work takes him and now he has been almost seven years in Africa. First the Cote d'Ivoire, and for the past five years, South Africa. The shortage of skilled manpower brought about his recruitment here. He has no interest in the politics of the countries he works in. His private preoccupation-within-the-preoccupation of his work has been research into underground watercourses, but the mining company that employs him in a senior though not executive capacity is interested only in mineral discovery. So he is much out in the field which is the veld, here seeking new gold, copper, platinum and uranium deposits. When he is at home on this particular job, in this particular country, this city he lives in a two-roomed flat in a suburban block with a landscaped garden, and does his shopping at a supermarket conveniently across the street. He is not married yet. That is how his colleagues, and the typists and secretaries at the mining company's head office, would define his situation. Both men and women would describe him as a good-looking man, in a foreign way, with the lower half of the face dark and middle-aged (his mouth is thin and curving, and no matter how close-shaven his beard shows like fine shot embedded in the skin round mouth and chin) and the upper half contradictorily young, with deep-set eyes (some would say grey, some black), thick eyelashes and brows. A tangled gaze: through which concentration and gleaming thoughtfulness perhaps appear as fire and languor. It is this that the women in the office mean when they remark he's not unattractive. Although the gaze seems to promise, he has never invited any one of them to go out with him. There is the general a.s.sumption he probably has a girl who's been picked for him, he's bespoken by one of his own kind, back home in Europe where he comes from. Many of these well-educated Europeans have no intention of becoming permanent immigrants; neither the remnant of white colonial life nor idealistic involvement with Black Africa appeals to them.

One advantage, at least, of living in underdeveloped or half-developed countries is that flats are serviced. All Dr von Leinsdorf has to do for himself is buy his own supplies and cook an evening meal if he doesn't want to go to a restaurant. It is simply a matter of dropping in to the supermarket on his way from his car to his flat after work in the afternoon. He wheels a trolley up and down the shelves, and his simple needs are presented to him in the form of tins, packages, plastic-wrapped meat, cheeses, fruit and vegetables, tubes, bottles . . . At the cashiers' counters where customers must converge and queue there are racks of small items uncategorised, for last-minute purchase. Here, as the coloured girl cashier punches the adding machine, he picks up cigarettes and perhaps a packet of salted nuts or a bar of nougat. Or razor blades, when he remembers he's running short. One evening in winter he saw that the cardboard display was empty of the brand of blades he preferred, and he drew the cashier's attention to this. These young coloured girls are usually pretty unhelpful, taking money and punching their machines in a manner that a.s.serts with the time-serving obstinacy of the half-literate the limit of any responsibility towards customers, but this one ran an alert glance over the selection of razor blades, apologised that she was not allowed to leave her post, and said she would see that the stock was replenished 'next time'. A day or two later she recognised him, gravely, as he took his turn before her counter 'I ahssed them, but it's out of stock. You can't get it. I did ahss about it.' He said this didn't matter. 'When it comes in, I can keep a few packets for you.' He thanked her.