A Natural Curiosity (31 page)

Equal in the eyes of God.

Could Miss Fawcett have loved Paul? Abstractly, as a drop in a wave in the human ocean? As human stuff, despite all, as human matter?

Human matter. This week Alix had read in the paper of a delegation of women from a group of Pacific islands who were presenting a protest to the United Nations on the subject of radiation. They had given birth, they claimed, to monstrous deformities, to babies without heads, to babies with two heads, to babies like monkeys, to full-term lumps of human matter that looked like bunches of grapes.

Could one love a bunch of grapes? Alix shuddered. What will she say to Paul about Angela? She will await inspiration.

This week, Alix had made an experiment. She had been to have her hair done. For Alix, this was an event, an occasion, and it had not been vanity that inspired her, but curiosity. She had chosen a cheap hairdresser, on the Coalbright Road, in that long dreary ridge which houses a muddle of small neighbourhood shops, most of them bearing marks of doom. The more prosperous are not ethnic. The salon selected by Alix was not horrifyingly dismal—she was not prepared to martyr herself—but it was a little sad. A non-ethnic Monsieur Raoul presided, but not very visibly. He lurked in a back room. Alix allowed her hair to be washed, minimally trimmed, and dried by a nice girl with
MANDY
embroidered on the breast pocket of her pink overall. Mandy, confronted by Alix’s fierce grey mane, suggested highlights, lowlights, conditioner. ‘What kind of conditioner do you use, madame?’ she inquired, kindly. ‘I can tell it’s not doing you any kind of good.’ Alix did not like to admit that she did not use any conditioner.

She sat there, trying to reply to Mandy’s small talk, while breathing in the salon atmosphere, while trying to imagine herself a small boy, twenty years ago. Curls of hair lay on the floor, old women sat around under old-fashioned dryers, Busy Lizzies and geraniums wilted on a windowsill, and old women’s down-market magazines lay in a crumpled heap. Perhaps the Whitmore salon had been smarter than this?

And the smell. Had it smelled like this? It was the smell that seemed most pertinent. A hot, scorching, chemical smell. Poisonous, dangerous. Sickly sweet, yet acrid at the same time. The smell of deceit, of concealing, of repression. Layers on layers of smell. Alix sat back while the perfumed Mandy puffed hot air at her, and breathed it all in, hot air, perfume, poison and all. Yes, this could easily drive one mad. If lead fumes can poison one, then so could this. Hadn’t Stephen Cox once thought he was going mad, when in the old days he lived over a dry cleaner’s?

If I were in a detective story, thought Alix, as she pulled up outside Porston, I’d try to prove brain damage from hair lacquer. As a defence.

She was half serious.

She had brought Paul a bunch of grapes, some chocolate, and another book. Gates clanged behind her, keys turned.

Paul was waiting for her, at his table.

‘You look different,’ he said, accusingly.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had my hair done. It’s not
very
different, is it?’

She had not expected him to be so observant. Would he guess why she had been to the hairdresser? That it had been, indeed, for him? She wondered what to say to him about Angela, as he described to her the disruption caused in the prison by the introduction of a new voluntary AIDS test. Very few had volunteered, and one who had and had been found positive was going through hell as a result. Paul thought this was not fair. Paul had volunteered, had been found negative. Or so he said.

The hour limped along. Time was running out, and she had not mentioned his mother. Neither had he. She found herself unable to refer to Angela. She hadn’t yet told him that she had seen either of his parents. Of course, having seen
them
, she saw
him
differently. Could he
tell
that she had seen them, as he could tell that she had had her hair done?

They talked of Ian Kettle and his television series. Alix divulged that Ian and Fanny Kettle had invited her to a party. She often said things to Paul that she did not mean to say, simply to make conversation. Paul complained about the difficulties of signing on for parts of the education programme.

They wouldn’t let him do archaeology and ancient history, he said, they couldn’t get a tutor. He was thinking of pursuing his other interest, botany, instead. Alix spoke of the Open University. She would ask Brian about its courses, she said. And then Paul said, suddenly, ‘I had a letter from my Dad. He said you’d been to see him.’

Alix felt herself, unaccountably, blushing. Her face burned. She put one hand up to touch it, to cover it.

‘Yes,’ she said. She should have told him at once, should have owned up.

‘He said you were going to see my mother.’

‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘I’m going to try.’

The lie was out, now she would have to stand by it.

‘My father sent me his love,’ said Paul.

Alix felt the tears stand up in the rims of her eyes. She swallowed hard.

‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘He didn’t have much to say. But he ended it with love, God bless.’

This is ridiculous, thought Alix. She was deeply moved. She sniffed. Her nose prickled.

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Paul.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Alix. The love of God. The indiscriminate love of God.

‘It’s a funny town, Toxetter,’ she ventured, to fill in the silence. The moment had passed, the angel had flown. ‘Yes, it’s a dump,’ said Paul Whitmore.

Charles Headleand and Nigel Bicester are sitting in the kitchen of the abandoned British Embassy in Baldai trying to tune in to the World Service of the BBC. Charles shakes his head. ‘I don’t get it,’ he says. ‘Could they be jamming the frequency?’

‘Easily,’ says Nigel, relieved that Charles has also failed to get the programme. ‘In fact, probably.’

Charles switches off the strange, high-pitched whistle, and stirs another spoonful of sugar into his instant coffee.

‘Christ, what a God-forsaken hole,’ he says.

The embassy is not what he had expected. It is not smart. It is a dump. The old news photographs of the wall over which the video of the death of Dirk Davis had been thrown had made it look grander than it is. It is nothing like as smart, as his apartment in New York, or as the house in Harley Street. Her Majesty’s diplomats clearly do not live in the splendour to which they were once accustomed. Downhill all the way.

Charles is tired and irritable. He wants a drink, but there isn’t anything to drink. This is a mad country. Baldai airport had been walled with liquor, jewelled marble halls of Duty Free had extended in every direction, an Aladdin’s cave of booze, a mirage in the desert sands. But here, Bicester tells him, there’s not a drop to be had.

‘You must be going crazy out here,’ says Charles, as a compliment, to young Bicester. ‘However do you keep yourself occupied?’

‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ says Nigel Bicester. He is a pleasant, blond young man, public school, well spoken, deferential. ‘I’m learning Arabic, it passes the time. And I have my music. And there are one or two chaps I see from time to time. Socially.’

‘Brits, you mean?’

‘Well, there’s one Englishman, and a Scot. And a Canadian.’

‘What are they doing out here?’

‘Two of them are engineers. The Englishman’s a writer. He teaches English. Odd sort of fellow, but he passes the time. He used to be out here with the British Council, and when they withdrew their presence he stayed on and privatized himself. He’s gone a bit native.’

‘What does he write?’

Bicester looked vague.

‘I’m not quite clear. I think he said it was a prose epic.’

Charles got up, restlessly, and began to walk up and down the little kitchen, with its mementoes of England—jars of Nescafé, of Cooper’s marmalade, of Marmite. Typhoo tea bags, Marvel milk powder.

‘Ugly building, this,’ he says.

‘Yes, isn’t it? Sixties Oriental Brutalism. I particularly dislike those tiles. If I do go mad, it will be the fault of those tiles.’

Charles smiles appreciatively at the offending floor with its crude geometry of cruel blue and green and black.

‘And I’m not too keen on the light fittings either,’ adds Bicester.

‘No,’ says Charles. ‘Bit like a dentist’s, aren’t they?’

Nigel Bicester is pleased to have Charles Headleand as his guest. As Charles has surmised, life in Baldai is dull. It is a mixture of dullness and fear and responsibility for things Nigel does not understand. Like the electricity generator. His departing superior had lectured him passionately about the generator, but Nigel knows he did not grasp the point.

Nigel hopes Charles will be a practical man. Although he had failed to get the World Service, he had showed impressive command of the fax and telex machinery, and had already sent messages buzzing round the globe. Although Nigel believes Dirk Davis is dead, he is hoping Charles will not establish this too easily. He wants him to hang around for a week or two. Maybe Charles plays chess. Nigel is bored with music and Arabic and his shabby prose writer.

So far, Charles has made no progress in his pursuit of Dirk Davis. He knows by now that he is on a wild goose chase, and that there is no point at all in trying to establish contact with those who claimed to have executed him. He has meetings arranged for the next day, with the doctor who is said to have certified the death, and with a dubious lawyer. He has already decided inwardly that he will accept whatever story they tell him. This may be cowardly, it may be undignified, but it is what he will do. Unless their accounts seem very suspicious. He hopes they will not. He hopes that by now they will have got their act together, even if they are not telling him the truth.

He does not like it in Baldai. There is nothing to see in the town but modern buildings of curious Texan structure, and a few palm trees that for all he knows may be made of plastic. Wide roads lead nowhere. The light is harsh. He cannot get the World Service, and Baldai TV, as he had feared, consists of long political and religious discourses in a foreign tongue, interspersed with Western commercials for soft drinks and soap and photocopiers. At one point he feels a small sense of triumph as he finds a radio reading from the Koran in English: it seems like an old friend, and the passage chosen is more inspiring than most of those he managed to find on his own account. It enjoins men to honour their mothers who bore them with pain and reared them from helplessness, it speaks of the limitless knowledge of Allah, of his power to bring all things to light from their hidden places, even those things as small as grains of mustard seed. It tells Charles that if all the trees on the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to replenish it, were ink, the writing of the words of Allah would never be finished. Allah created you as one soul, and as one soul he will bring you back to life. Charles listens, with interest. At whom is it aimed, this English rendering? There are no American tourists in Baldai.

The grain of mustard seed intrigues him. There are grains of mustard seed in biblical parables, he dimly recalls. He gets his stolen Gideon Bible out of his suitcase and tries to find them, but it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. A biblical Concordance would be useful, he thinks, but the embassy library does not rise to one. It had a selection of Wilbur Smith and James Clavell, but no Scholarly apparatus to speak of, apart from a
Short English Dictionary
and a
Guide to the Birds of the Middle East
.

He is reduced to comparing the Koran’s account of Joseph’s dream with the Bible’s. He is proud of himself for managing to find both.

As he fiddles with the knobs of the machine, and rummages through sacred texts, he finds his mind wandering to and wondering at the richness and variety of British television, and, more particularly, to the image of the old oak tree by the River Barle. Hundreds of years old, and bald, blasted, stag-crested; but alive, robust, deep-rooted, a grand old man, sire of a million acorns. Charles identifies with this oak. He thinks of his wives, and of his five children. He has not done too badly. He has done badly, but not too badly. He has sinned, but he has survived. The storms have raged about him, but he has weathered them. And the children should sing in his branches. Jonathan, Aaron, Alan, Sally and Stella. Is not his place with them, instead of here, chasing the ghosts of the dead?

Fanny’s party is drawing near. It will be attended by as varied a gathering as Northam can afford, and by one or two uninvited guests, and the Dark Stranger. Susie Enderby has already bought some new pink beads to complement her new grey-pink silk dress. She does not yet know that Fanny Kettle is preparing a grey-pink drink, a Pharsalian Pink drink, but when she sees it she will perforce divine some charmed harmony in the match. The beads are mock-pearl, a three-string choker with a golden clasp, quite expensive for costume jewellery. She has shown them to Clive, a trifle guiltily, and has even gone so far as to show him the receipt from Lovell & Harris: £36.80.

She does not know about the pink drink, but she does know that Fanny has invited Blake Leith, as it were ‘for’ Susie. Fanny goes on and on, these days, about Blake Leith. The very name has become incantatory. Fanny is pushing Susie into the arms of Blake Leith. Why? As a whim, for fun, as a kindness? Susie does not know and cannot tell. Blake Leith is a ridiculous name, a seducer’s name, a co-respondent’s name, but Blake Leith, glimpsed once and briefly introduced as he was leaving and Susie was arriving at the Kettle household, had not looked ridiculous. Although he had looked like a seducer and a co-respondent. A tall, thin, shambling, greying figure, a casual villain in grey cord trousers and an old patched jacket. A journalist turned property developer, says Fanny. A wealthy man.

Alix Bowen has also bought a new dress for Fanny’s party. Reluctantly, it is true, and of necessity. Her old blue ethnic party dress has finally perished. It met an honourable fate. She had worn it to dinner one cold night at their new friends’, the Bells of the university English department, and had ruined it by helpfully clambering up into the loft to try to unblock a frozen pipe with a hair dryer. She had succeeded with the pipe, as various gurglings in the loft and cries of delight in the bathroom below testified, and had descended the stepladder dirty, triumphant and ripped. ‘I told you it would work!’ she was able to boast, as she dusted herself down, amidst the admiration of Brian, Karen, Tim and another couple whose names Alix had never quite caught. ‘I learned that in the big freeze of ‘62. Or was it ‘63?’ Brian said that Alix was a genius with plumbing. ‘I
understand
plumbing,’ said Alix, settling herself down, the queen of the hour, to a brandy and soda. ‘There’s nothing mysterious or electrical about plumbing, plumbing’s just like a human body, really. Intestines and blockages. It gets cold, it gets hot, it gets air in it. It’s not like cars. I don’t understand cars. Do I, Brian?’ And they had discussed houses and cars, and whether houses were female and cars male, and Alix had remembered little Nicholas her son in that bitter bitter winter, a little boy with measles, hot and feverish, and in the end no water at all in the house despite her coaxing, for the pipes in the street had frozen solid, and she had had to queue at the water lorry with a plastic bucket . . .