A Burnt Out Case (23 page)

‘I have nothing to hide from Mr Parkinson,’ Rycker said in English.

‘As you wish.’ The heat of the afternoon had driven away even the barman. The paper streamers hung down like old man’s beard. Querry said, ‘Your wife tried to telephone to you at lunch-time, but there was no reply.’

‘What do you suppose? I was on the road by six this morning.’

‘I’m glad you’ve come. I shall be able to leave now.’

Rycker said, ‘It’s no good denying anything, Querry, anything at all. I’ve been to my wife’s room, number six, and you’ve got the key of number seven in your pocket.’

‘You needn’t jump to stupid conclusions, Rycker. Even about towels and combs. What if she did wash in my room this morning? As for rooms they were the only ones prepared when we arrived.’

‘Why did you take her away without so much as a word . . . ?’

‘I meant to tell you, but you and I talked about other things.’ He looked at Parkinson leaning on the bar. He was watching their mouths closely as though in that way he might come to understand the language they were using.

‘She went off and left me ill with a high fever . . .’

‘You had your boy. There were things she had to do in town.’

‘What things?’

‘I think that’s for her to tell you, Rycker. A woman can have her secrets.’

‘You seem to share them all right. Hasn’t a husband got the right . . . ?’

‘You are too fond of talking about rights, Rycker. She has her rights too. But I’m not going to stand and argue . . .’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find my boy. I want to start for home. We can do nearly four hours before dark.’

‘I’ve got a lot more to talk to you about.’

‘What? The love of God?’

‘No,’ Rycker said, ‘about this.’ He held the book open at a page headed with a date. Querry saw that it was a diary with ruled lines and between them the kind of careful script girls learn to write at school. ‘Go on,’ Rycker said, ‘read it.’

‘I don’t read other people’s diaries.’

‘Then I’ll read it to you. “Spent night with Q.”’

Querry smiled. He said, ‘It’s true – in a way. We sat drinking whisky and I told her a long story.’

‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying.’

‘You deserve to be a cuckold, Rycker, but I have never gone in for seducing children.’

‘I can imagine what the courts would say to this.’

‘Be careful, Rycker. Don’t threaten me. I might change my mind.’

‘I could make you pay,’ Rycker said, ‘pay heavily.’

‘I doubt whether any court in the world would take your word against hers and mine. Good-bye, Rycker.’

‘You can’t walk out of here as though nothing had happened.’

‘I would have liked to leave you in suspense, but it wouldn’t be fair to her. Nothing has happened, Rycker. I haven’t even kissed your wife. She doesn’t attract me in that way.’

‘What right have you to despise us as you do?’

‘Be a sensible man. Put that diary back where you found it and say nothing.’

‘“Spent the night with Q” and say nothing?’

Querry turned to Parkinson. ‘Give your friend a drink and talk some sense into him. You owe him an article.’

‘A duel would make a good story,’ Parkinson said wistfully.

‘It’s lucky for her I’m not a violent man,’ Rycker said. ‘A good thrashing . . .’

‘Is that a part of Christian marriage, too?’

He felt an extraordinary weariness; he had lived a lifetime in the middle of some such scene as this, he had been born to such voices, and if he were not careful, he would die with them in his ears. He walked out on the two of them, paying no attention at all to the near-scream of Rycker, ‘I’ve got a right to demand . . .’ In the cabin of the truck sitting beside Deo Gratias he was at peace again. He said, ‘You’ve never been back, have you, into the forest, and I know you’ll never take me there . . . All the same, I wish . . . Is Pendélé very far away?’

Deo Gratias sat with his head down, saying nothing.

‘Never mind.’

Outside the cathedral Querry stopped the truck and got out. It would be wiser to warn her. The doors were open for ventilation, and the hideous windows through which the hard light glared in red and blue made the sun more clamorous than outside. The boots of a priest going to the sacristy squealed on the tiled floor, and a mammy chinked her beads. It was not a church for meditation; it was as hot and public as a marketplace, and in the side-chapels stood plaster stallholders, offering a baby or a bleeding heart. Marie Rycker was sitting under a statue of Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux. It seemed a less than suitable choice. The two had nothing in common but youth.

He asked her, ‘Still praying?’

‘Not really. I didn’t hear you come.’

‘Your husband’s at the hotel.’

‘Oh,’ she said flatly, looking up at the saint who had disappointed her.

‘He’s been reading a diary you left in your room. You oughtn’t to have written what you did – “Spent the night with Q.”’

‘It was true, wasn’t it? Besides I put in an exclamation mark to show.’

‘Show what?’

‘That it wasn’t serious. The nuns never minded if you put an exclamation mark. “Mother Superior in a tearing rage!” They always called it the “exaggeration mark”.’

‘I don’t think your husband knows the convent code.’

‘So he really believes . . . ?’ she asked and giggled.

‘I’ve tried to persuade him otherwise.’

‘It seems such a waste, doesn’t it, if he believes that. We might just as well have really done it. Where are you going now?’

‘I’m driving home.’

‘I’d come with you if you liked. Only I know you don’t like.’

He looked up at the plaster face with its simpering and holy smile. ‘What would she say?’

‘I don’t consult her about everything. Only in
extremis
. Though this is pretty
extremis
now, I suppose, isn’t it? What with this and that. Have I got to tell him about the baby?’

‘It would be better to tell him before he finds out.’

‘And I prayed to her so hard for happiness,’ she said disdainfully. ‘What a hope. Do you believe in prayer at all?’

‘No.’

‘Did you never?’

‘I suppose I believed once. When I believed in giants.’

He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent. He could detect in himself a dim nostalgia for the past, but everyone always felt that, he supposed, in middle age, even for a past of pain, when pain was associated with youth. If there were a place called Pendélé, he thought, I would never bother to find my way back.

‘You think I’ve been wasting my time, don’t you, praying?’

‘It was better than lying on your bed brooding.’

‘You don’t believe in prayer at all – or in God?’

‘No.’ He said gently, ‘Of course, I may be wrong.’

‘And Rycker does,’ she said, calling him by his surname as though he were no longer her husband. ‘I wish it wasn’t always the wrong people who believed.’

‘Surely the nuns . . .’

‘Oh, they are professionals. They believe in anything. Even the Holy House of Loretto. They ask us to believe too much and then we believe less and less.’ Perhaps she was talking in order to postpone the moment of return. She said, ‘Once I got into trouble drawing a picture of the Holy House in full flight with jet-engines. How much did you believe – when you believed?’

‘I suppose, like the boy in the story I told you, I persuaded myself to believe almost everything with arguments. You can brainwash yourself into anything you want – even into marriage or a vocation. Then the years pass and the marriage or the vocation fails and it’s better to get out. It’s the same with belief. People hang on to a marriage for fear of a lonely old age or to a vocation for fear of poverty. It’s not a good reason. And it’s not a good reason to hang on to the Church for the sake of some mumbo-jumbo when you come to die.’

‘And what about the mumbo-jumbo of birth?’ she asked. ‘If there’s a baby inside me now, I’ll have to have it christened, won’t I? I’m not sure that I’d be happy if it wasn’t. Is that dishonest. If only it hadn’t
him
for a father.’

‘Of course it isn’t dishonest. You mustn’t think your marriage has failed yet.’

‘Oh but it has.’

‘I didn’t mean with Rycker, I meant . . .’ He said sharply, ‘For God’s sake, don’t you start taking me for an example, too.’

CHAPTER 3

I

The rather sweet champagne was the best that Querry had been able to find in Luc, and it had not been improved by the three-day drive in the truck and a breakdown at the first ferry. The nuns provided tinned pea-soup, four lean roast chickens, and an ambiguous sweet omelette which they had made with guava jelly: the omelette had sat down halfway between their house and the fathers’. But on this day, when the ceremony of raising the roof-tree was over at last, no one felt in a mood to criticize. An awning had been set up outside the dispensary, and at long trestle tables the priests and nuns had provided a feast for the lepers who had worked on the hospital and their families, official and unofficial; beer was there for the men and fizzy fruit drinks and buns for the women and children. The nuns’ own celebration had been prepared in strict privacy, but it was rumoured to consist mainly of extra strong coffee and some boxes of
petits fours
that had been kept in reserve since the previous Christmas and had probably turned musty in the interval.

Before the feast there was a service. Father Thomas traipsed round the new hospital, supported by Father Joseph and Father Paul, sprinkling the walls with holy water, and several hymns were sung in the Mongo language. There had been prayers and a sermon from Father Thomas which went on far too long – he had not yet learned enough of the native tongue to make himself properly understood. Some of the younger lepers grew impatient and wandered away, and a child was found by Brother Philippe arrosing the new walls with his own form of water.

Nobody cared that a small dissident group who had nothing to do with the local tribe sang their own hymns apart. Only the doctor, who had once worked in the Lower Congo, recognized them for what they were, trouble-makers from the coast more than a thousand kilometres away. It was unlikely that any of the lepers could understand them, so he let them be. The only sign of their long journey by path and water and road was an unfamiliar stack of bicycles up a side-path into the bush which he had happened to take that morning.

The proud song of superiority went on: superiority to their own people, to the white man, to the Christian god, to everyone beyond their own circle of six, all of them wearing the peaked caps that advertised Polo beer.

Nzambi had never been humiliated as a criminal: he was an exclusive god. Only Deo Gratias moved some way towards them; he squatted on the ground between them and the hospital, and the doctor remembered that as a child he had come west from the Lower Congo too.

‘Is that the future?’ Querry said. He couldn’t understand the words, only the aggressive slant of the Polo-beer caps.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you fear it?’

‘Of course. But I don’t want my own liberty at the expense of anyone else’s.’

‘They do.’

‘We taught them.’

What with one delay and another it was nearly sunset before the tree was raised on to the roof and the feast began. By that time the awning outside the dispensary was no longer needed to shelter the workmen from the heat, but judging from the black clouds massing beyond the river, Father Joseph decided that it might yet serve to protect them from the rain.

Father Thomas’s decision to raise the roof-tree had not been made without argument. Father Joseph wished to wait a month in the hope that the Superior would return, and Father Paul had at first supported him, but when Doctor Colin agreed with Father Thomas they had withdrawn their opposition. ‘Let Father Thomas have his feast and his hymns,’ the doctor said to them. ‘I want the hospital.’

Doctor Colin and Querry left the group from the east and turned back to the last of the ceremony. ‘We were right, but all the same,’ the doctor said, ‘I wish the Superior were here. He would have enjoyed the show and at least he would have talked to these people in a language they can understand.’

‘More briefly too,’ Querry said. The hollow African voices rose around them in another hymn.

‘And yet you stay and watch,’ the doctor said.

‘Oh yes, I stay.’

‘I wonder why.’

‘Ancestral voices. Memories. Did you ever lie awake when you were a child listening to them talking down below? You couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it was a noise that somehow comforted. So it is now with me. I am happy listening, saying nothing. The house is not on fire, there’s no burglar lurking in the next room: I don’t want to understand or believe. I would have to think if I believed. I don’t want to think any more. I can build you all the rabbit-hutches you need without thought.’

Afterwards at the mission there was a great deal of raillery over the champagne. Father Paul was caught pouring himself a glass out of turn; somebody – Brother Philippe seemed an unlikely culprit – filled an empty bottle with soda-water, and the bottle had circulated half around the table before anyone noticed. Querry remembered an occasion months ago: a night at a seminary on the river when the priests cheated over their cards. He had walked out into the bush unable to bear their laughter and their infantility. How was it that he could sit here now and smile with them? He even found himself resenting the strict face of Father Thomas who sat at the end of the table unamused.