Saigon (9 page)

When he’d gone the Annamese woman turned to stare apprehensively at her husband. “He has never asked me to go at this time of night before,” she whispered. 

Ngo Van Loc avoided her gaze. “If we disobey him I may lose the opportunity to go to Canton,” he said shortly. “And that’s important for our movement. Get dressed and go quickly. I will find the needle and thread for you.” 

Taking care not to wake her sons, who were curled up together on their sleeping mats, she dressed and combed ‘her hair then slipped out of the hut without looking at her husband. 

Nathaniel Sherman stumbled slightly at the entrance of his hut, and his wife heard him cursing and fumbling for a long time with the flap fastenings. Once inside he removed his shoes and trousers very slowly then drew back her mosquito net and smiled lopsidedly at her before lowering himself unsteadily onto her cot. Outside, the thunder rolled more loudly, and a few drops of rain began to plop against the thatch above their heads. 

“You’re still a mighty beautiful woman, my dear,” he said, slurring his words slightly. “I know I haven’t always been what a husband should be to you — but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and admire your beauty.” He bent his head towards her until she could smell the cognac fumes on his breath. “You know that, don’t you?” 

She closed her eyes to hide her revulsion as he pressed his open mouth against hers and began fumbling with the buttons of her bush shirt. Eventually he pushed his hand inside her brassiere and began kneading one of her breasts, but instead of responding she lay motionless and waited as she always did; gradually the movements of his hand grew slower, the rhythm of his breathing more regular, and when at last he lay still she disentangled his hand from her twisted clothing and slipped out from underneath him. Immediately he sprawled sideways across the cot in a loose posture of sleep and began snoring loudly. 

The rain at that moment became torrential, drumming noisily on the thatch above her head, blotting out all other sounds of the night. She hesitated for only a second or two, then without looking around, she ripped the ties from the front flaps and stepped outside. The rain was driving down with great force, swamping the dry ground, and within moments her hair was plastered flat against her cheeks. Lightning forked overhead, illuminating the camp like day, and thunder crashed deafeningly through the deep darkness that followed. In the glare of the lightning flashes she rushed across the flooded clearing and didn’t stop until she reached Jacques Devraux’s hut. 

Inside, a lamp hanging from the apex of the roof was still lit, and because he hadn’t closed his mosquito curtain, her eyes fell at once on the slender golden body of Ngo Van Loc’s wife spread-eagled beneath him on his cot. Devraux was staring towards the front flaps as she entered and he froze when he saw her. She gazed back mutely into his eyes, horrified and deeply aroused in the same instant, and when she didn’t turn away he began to move once more, slowly at first, and then with gathering force and swiftness. Again and again he bore down on the Annamese woman and as his movements quickened he kept his gaze fixed challengingly on Flavia Sherman’s face. 

She stood rooted to the spot, staring back at him as though hypnotized, watching the skin of his face slowly tauten across his cheekbones. Gradually the downward thrust of his naked loins became more urgent and uncontrolled, and in a final moment of spasm, his features spread and widened suddenly into a flattened mask. For a long time he remained motionless like this, his body arched backward, his teeth clenched, his lips drawn back in a silent rictus of ecstatic agony. Then the Annamite woman began to sob and he relented at last and raised himself from her; still moaning quietly to herself she scrambled from the cot onto the dirt floor, gathered her scraps of clothing together and fled past the American woman into the rain. 

As soon as she’d gone, Flavia Sherman began to fumble with the buckle of her belt; but her hands shook uncontrollably and it took her a long time to undress. Jacques Devraux watched in silence as she stepped out of her sodden clothing. In the light of the lamp hr naked body was glistening with rain and perspiration and when she saw the desire in his eyes she fell to her knees beside him. 

With a tenderness that surprised her the Frenchman put his arms around her and lifted her onto the cot beside him. For a moment he held her head in his hands, searching her face with a strange expression in his eyes. Then he drew her against himself and kissed her roughly. She began to moan as he caressed her trembling body, and when he entered her she cried aloud as though in great pain. With the roar of the jungle storm filling their ears they abandoned their bodies to the hunger of many lonely years, driving in blind, frantic rhythms towards one furious ecstasy after another. 

Sometimes Flavia Sherman wept as though with grief, and although the storm drowned most of her cries Joseph heard the faint sounds of his mother sobbing as he stood outside the hut in the torrential downpour. Unable to sleep he had drawn back the front flaps of his hut to watch the spectacular storm and had been startled to see her dashing across the flooded clearing in the glare of the lightning flashes. Thinking that she might need his help, he had dressed quickly and hurried after her, but outside the hut of Jacques Devraux he had stopped, suddenly afraid. When he first heard her voice she seemed to be in agony, and imagining she was ill, he had started impulsively forward again; then with a deep sense of shock he had sensed the awful intimacy of the strangled cries. For several minutes he stood outside the hut, drenched to the skin, listening to the muffled sounds with a growing sense of desolation. Then he turned away and splashed numbly back across the flooded camp to his own hut. 

A vista of paradisiacal tranquility opened up beyond the windows of Jacques Devraux’s Citroën B-2 landaulet as the motor car swung over the summit of another of the many rolling hills along the Mandarin Way. On one side of the ancient north-south coastal highway linking Saigon and Hanoi steep cliffs fell away to a dazzling beach of white sand fringed with coconut palms, and on the mirror-flat surface of the South China Sea far below, bat- winged Chinese junks floated at rest like toys on a turquoise pond. Inland, the Annamite Cordillera thrust its purple peaks towards the afternoon sky, but neither Joseph Sherman nor his mother gave more than a passing glance to the spectacular mountain and ocean scenery outside the car. 

They had remained wrapped in their own separate thoughts ever since leaving the hunting camp earlier in the day and had barely spoken to one another. Flavia Sherman was still wrestling with the turmoil of emotions that had kept her awake long after she returned to her own hut through the stormy jungle night. There she had found her husband still snoring on her cot, and she had stretched out on his; but sleep hadn’t come, and long before dawn she had decided she must leave the camp at once. When Nathaniel Sherman awoke and saw where he was, he had looked at his wife shamefacedly and agreed immediately to her request to be driven to the imperial capital at Hue where the emperor of Annam was due to celebrate the Tet festival the following day. Joseph had accompanied her willingly, but she had soon noticed that his manner was subdued and cool towards her, and this had added a vague new dimension to her unease. 

As Ngo Van Loc drove them northwards, her thoughts against her will returned constantly to the frenzy of that midnight jungle storm and the gnawing fear that she might not have emerged from her folly unscathed. A breathless, pervasive sense of heat possessed her body at every return of the memory and she was unable to remain settled and at ease in her seat for more than a few minutes at a time. She found herself searching back to her youth for reasons to explain the blind and selfish obsessions which had taken hold of her since they arrived in the French tropics and she wondered if her father’s ruin and death by his own hand in the Louisiana cotton slump of ‘89, when she was only two years old, was the root cause. If he had lived, her hard-pressed mother might not have insisted that she accept the advances of the heir to the Sherman tobacco fortune. Perhaps the suffocating conventions of the Shermans’ Queen Anne plantation house would not have been forced on an unknowing seventeen-year-old if her ailing mother had not been so shamed by their straitened conditions in a rented house on the borders of the Creole quarter of New Orleans. 

The first of a series of world hunting trips to collect animals for the newly endowed Sherman Field Museum of Natural History — the latest public shrine to celebrate the force and virility of the male Sherman line —- had seemed to promise her a refreshing diversion from the dull routine of Tidewater Virginia and the house of political convenience in Georgetown. But the strangeness of the tropics and the sophistication of the almost-forgotten culture from which she had sprung had greatly exaggerated her sense of release from the frustrations of the past. The sudden disturbing plunge into the jungle in the cloying heat of the Saigon River had made her more intensely aware of her body than at any time since the fevered days of adolescence. Perhaps too the journey had reminded her of the dreadful certainty that within a few years her beauty would fade, and all these inflated hopes and fears had combined to produce a mood of abandon utterly foreign to her that had found its culmination in that jungle storm. She closed her eyes as the memory rushed back vividly into her mind again, and a feeling of panic rose through her at the thought that a fierce spark of that madness might be living on within her as she approached the middle of her life. She shifted restlessly in her seat once more, imagining she could actually feel the angry pinpoint of fire burning deep inside her womb.... 

In his corner Joseph found himself grappling with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. He couldn’t reconcile those terrible uncontrolled cries he had heard in the night with anything he already knew of his mother. To him until then she had always been a safe comforting haven; complete and seemingly self- sufficient in herself, she had always been an unfailing source of reassurance, ever ready to pour unquestioning love and affection on him in his moments of need. His father’s favoring of Chuck had forced him to turn to her increasingly for solace, and that some unimaginable selfishness should have driven her to commit her dreadful act of desertion baffled and disturbed him deeply for reasons he didn’t begin to understand. Although she was sitting only a foot or two away from him in the opposite corner of the seat and had frequently tried to smile at him, he felt inexplicably betrayed. He didn’t really understand what had happened or why, but he sensed things would never be quite the same again. Something alien had come between them, something that could never be removed. He felt irretrievably alone and the woman beside him seemed suddenly to be a total stranger. 

Sometimes, as they encountered new crowds of pole-carrying Annamese peasants jogging ceaselessly between market and rice field, or spilling out of their tiny village temples and pagodas, he felt that what had happened was somehow inextricably bound up with the torrid, exotic country that was so totally unfamiliar to him in all its ways, and other distressing images of the recent past began to flood through his mind; he saw again the brutal French colon lashing the fallen prisoners between the shafts of the cart in Saigon, remembered the horror he had felt at the sight of what he thought were many massacred coolies on the river wharf on their arrival, and he heard once more the thud of the Citroen striking the peasant boy on the way to the hunting camp. The elation he’d felt the day before at his own breathtaking adventure with the Moi girl now also seemed suddenly shameful to him, and he began to wonder if his exaggerated pride in the deed hadn’t been the direct cause of the danger in which he and his mother had suddenly found themselves on the plain. It had, he decided, certainly brought about the death of the unfortunate buffaloes. Before they left the camp he had seen the hides of the bull and its calf scraped clean of all life, suspended like limp black rags in the drying tent; their white, eyeless skulls were hanging close by, and he felt a sense of desolation suddenly at the thought that he was responsible. Only the day before, those noble, horned beasts had been filing unsuspectingly through the long grass of the plain, intending to wallow harmlessly in some cool place through the heat of the day. Then in his foolish exhilaration he had leaped into a tree and spotted them with his binoculars. If he hadn’t been so puffed up with conceit, the buffalo that had not been noticed by the Moi might now be basking contentedly in the shallows of the river.... 

“Joseph, is something wrong?” 

The voice of his mother broke into his thoughts unexpectedly and he started inwardly. Because he knew he couldn’t speak of what was in his mind, he pretended he hadn’t heard her and continued to stare out of the window. 

“Is it because you couldn’t shoot the deer? Are you still upset because your father called you ‘Momma’s boy’?” 

“Perhaps, a little.” He kept his face turned away from her so that she wouldn’t see that he wasn’t telling the whole truth. “I was thinking too, about the buffalo. I feel like I sentenced them to death because I spotted them. Those skins are going to be shipped home and stuffed with sawdust and put in a glass case in our museum. But nobody would really care if they weren’t. It would have been better if we’d let them live 

His mother leaned across the seat to Squeeze his hand, but he felt an inner coldness towards her and didn’t respond. Studying his profile she noticed that he looked pale and red-eyed, and a new fear made her temples throb suddenly. 

“Did you sleep well last night, Joseph? The storm didn’t keep you awake, did it?” 

“No. I slept very well,” he said quickly. “I was really tired after everything that happened yesterday.” 

She sat watching him for a moment, hoping he would look around and smile; but he kept his back turned to her and continued to gaze abstractedly out the window.