Blood and Water and Other Tales (3 page)

One fresh and gusty day in the damp autumn of her twelfth year Evelyn found a lost explorer in the garden of her parents’ London home. He was lying in a small tent beneath a mosquito net so torn and gaping as to be quite inadequate, were there any mosquitoes for it to protect him from. His clothes were stained with sweat and blood, and a grizzled beard stubbled his emaciated face. On the folding stool beside the camp bed stood a flask, empty, a revolver, unloaded, two bullets, three matches, a small oil lamp, and a dirty, creased map of the upper reaches of the Congo. He was delirious with fever and occasionally gibbered about the pygmies. Evelyn thought he was wonderful.

And he thought she was wonderful, too. When the delirium had passed and he lay, pale, spent, and shivering, she loomed out of the fog that was his consciousness like a bright ministering angel.

“Agatha,” he whispered. “I want a drink of water.” The angel vanished, and the explorer lay panting feebly in his tiny tent. In the deep, still place at the center of his frenzied mind a flame of hope was lit, for Agatha was here. What had happened was this: the explorer had mistaken Evelyn for the nanny who’d nursed him through a childhood illness!

Evelyn returned to the tent with a cup of water. She folded back the ragged netting and helped the explorer onto an elbow. Much of the water spilled onto his bush jacket, but at length his parched lips smacked up their fill and he lay back, exhausted. Evelyn gazed down at him with benevolent compassion.

“Agatha,” he whispered, “give me your hand.” She knelt on the ground beside the camp bed and took the explorer’s clammy palm in her fingers. A ghost of a smile hovered at the cracked edges of the man’s lips. “Agatha,” he sighed; but then, seized suddenly with a fresh wave of panic, he started up from his bed. “The pygmies, Agatha!” he shouted. “I hear the pygmies!”

Evelyn remained calm. She laid her cool hand upon his fevered temples. The traffic of London murmured in the thoroughfares beyond. “They’re miles away,” she whispered. “They don’t know you’re here.”

“They’re coming!” he shouted, his head jerking from side to side and his red-rimmed eyes abulge. “They’re coming to eat us!”

“Nonsense,” breathed Evelyn, stroking that troubled brow. “No one’s going to eat us.”

The panic passed; a moment later the tension was visibly draining from the explorer’s body. He sank back onto the camp bed. “Agatha,” he said weakly, his hand still clutching hers. “You’re good.”

“Rest,” murmured Evelyn. “Sleep. You’re safe now. Sleep.”

When she was sure the explorer was sound asleep, Evelyn skipped up the garden to the house. A washing line was strung from a post at the top of the steps to a tree by the wall at the side of the house. To this line were pegged three white sheets, all flapping wildly in the wind. Dead leaves spun about the girl as she pattered gracefully up the steps from the garden. She opened the back door. Her mother and Mrs. Guppy were bent over the oven with their backsides to her.

“Are you quite sure it’s done, Mrs. Guppy?” her mother was saying.

“It’s had twenty-five minutes, Mrs. Piker-Smith. It must be done.”

“Oh, I do hope so. Gerald is so fussy about his chop. Ah, there you are, Evelyn. Run and wash your hands, dear, and we’ll eat.”

Mrs. Piker-Smith was a plump, tweedy woman, and she was commonly in the throes of mild anxiety. Ten minutes later she sat at the dining-room table gazing at her husband, Gerald, the eminent surgeon. He in turn was gazing at his chop. Evelyn had already started to eat, and paid no attention to either of them.

“Is it all right, dear?” said Mrs. Piker-Smith. “We gave it almost half-an-hour.” Her own knife and fork were poised at a shallow angle above her plate. A sudden gust rattled the windowpane. The surgeon tentatively sliced a small section of meat and raised the fork to his lips. He chewed the meat thoughtfully, his eyes wandering about the ceiling and upper walls as he did so. Finally he swallowed and, laying down his cutlery, dabbed at his lips with a starched white napkin. “It’s quite thoroughly cooked, Denise,” he said, his eyes suddenly settling upon his wife’s troubled face. “You need not worry so.”

“Oh, good,” said Mrs. Piker-Smith, brightening, and with some gusto cut a potato in two. “What have you been doing all morning, Evelyn?” she said, turning to her daughter.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Nothing?” said her father, eating.

“Just playing in the garden, Daddy.”

“What ever does the child get up to?” he murmured, as he transferred a spot of English mustard from the side of his plate to a neat rectangle of chop. “Daddy.”

“Yes, Evelyn?”

“Are there still pygmies in the Congo?”

A frown briefly ruffled the calm surface of the surgeon’s fine-domed brow, like a breeze whispering across a lake. “I believe so. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, school.”

“Are you doing Africa, darling?” said Mrs. Piker-Smith.

“Sort of.”

“It’s not called the Congo anymore,” said Daddy. “It became Zaire when the Belgians left.”

“When was that, Daddy?”

“Nineteen-sixty, I think.”

*   *   *

After lunch Evelyn always had to go to her room and read on her bed for an hour. Today she stood at the bedroom window, gazing into the garden and thinking about her explorer. White clouds fled like driven rags across the blustering blue sky, and the branches of the great elm at the bottom of the garden flailed about like the arms of drowning men. The Piker-Smiths’ was one of those long narrow gardens enclosed by an old wall whose crumbling red bricks were overgrown with ivy. The path ran from the foot of the back-door steps between two flowerbeds and then twisted over a stretch of lawn before arriving at a small round goldfish pond, the surface of which was half-hidden by clusters of green-fronded water lilies. Beyond the pond a gardening shed, its windows misted with dust and cobwebs and its door secured by a huge rusting padlock, clung in ramshackle fashion to the corner formed by the east wall and the end wail. The rest of the garden beyond the pond was a tangled and overgrown mass of rhododendron bushes, into whose labyrinthine depths, since the death of the old gardener, only Evelyn now ventured. It was in that tangled thicket of evergreens that the explorer’s tent was pitched, and there that the man himself lay struggling with a furious malaria. The three white sheets billowed in the wind, and for an instant Evelyn imagined the house and the garden as a great ship shouldering on to the tropics. Absently she picked up a jar containing a pickled thumb that Daddy had given her. She swirled it round in its liquid and willed the time to pass.

*   *   *

When her hour was up, Evelyn came downstairs to find Daddy in the hall just leaving for the hospital. He was telling Mummy something about dinner: the Cleghorns were coming and there was no sherry in the house. Then Daddy said goodbye and left.

“Now, darling,” said Mrs. Piker-Smith, “I’m off to my bridge. You’ll be all right till Mrs. Guppy gets back?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

Then Mrs. Piker-Smith left too. Evelyn was alone. She was down the back-door steps in a flash, under the billowing sheets, across the lawn and into the bushes. The explorer was still fast asleep. Evelyn knelt beside him and watched his face with intense concentration for some minutes. Then her gaze drifted to the objects on his camp stool, and settled on the black revolver. She had never touched a gun before, and it fascinated her. She reached out hesitantly, and clasped it by the grip. How cold and slippery it was! And how heavy! She lifted it and pressed the barrel to her cheek. It smelled metallic and oily. She touched it once with her tongue, and recoiled with a small shock as she tasted its steely sweetness. Ugh! She cradled it in her palms, in her lap, and stared at it solemnly. How would you put bullets into it? She could turn the cylinder, but she could not release it. Perhaps this little catch...

Evelyn screamed: a large, scarred hand, dark brown, very dirty, with hair on the back and cracked fingernails, had clamped onto her own slim fingers and held them fast. It was the explorer’s hand. He was up on one elbow, staring at her, and his harrowed face was clenched and twitching with anger. She gazed at him with wide, shocked eyes. He took the revolver from her. “And the bullet,” he growled, picking it from her open palm. He took the other bullet from the camp stool and then, his eyes darting from the girl to the revolver, he loaded two chambers.

“One for you, Agatha,” he said hoarsely, “one for me.” He nodded several times. “This way: quick— sure—painless. Better death, foil the pygmies, what.” He subsided onto his back, suddenly exhausted. His fingers twitched upon the sweat-stained canvas of the cot, and a sudden access of perspiration left him pale and dripping. His eyes bulged, then fixed upon a point on the roof of the tent. His whole body shivered, and a limp hand fluttered from the canvas like an injured bird. “Agatha,” he moaned; and Evelyn, dropping to her knees, took his hand.

All afternoon the fever raged, and the explorer mumbled incoherently throughout. On several occasions he was convulsed with terror, and rose up shouting that the pygmies were hard by; but each time Evelyn calmed and soothed the troubled man, mopped his brow and gave him water; and in his few moments of lucidity he gazed at her with weak, shining eyes and murmured the name Agatha. For in the turmoil of his disordered mind he lay in a child’s bedroom, in a child’s bed, with a stuffed golliwog beside him, and a kindly woman in a sort of ruffled white cap and a starched white apron briskly ministering to his child’s disease; and thus did Evelyn appear to him.

When the light began at last to thicken, and the dusk of that autumnal day crept into the explorer’s tent and pooled itself in clots of shadow in the corners of the tent, a voice came calling, “Evelyn! Evelyn!” The man stirred in his uneasy doze, muttering, and Evelyn leaned close to him. “I have to go,” she whispered. “Sleep now, and I’ll come back....”

He seemed about to rise from the camp bed and cry out; his eyes opened wide for an instant; but then the netherworld of shadows and confusion reclaimed him, and he sank once more into sleep of a sort. Evelyn spread upon his twitching limbs the blanket she had brought out from the house; and then she padded silently away, through the bushes, and onto the path back to the house.

The Cleghorns were old friends of the family, so Evelyn was permitted to eat with the grown-ups. Mrs. Cleghorn—Auntie Vera—was a large dark woman with good teeth. She wore heavy lipstick and was married to an anesthetist called Frank—Uncle Frank—a colleague of Gerald’s. Mummy and Auntie Vera often played bridge together, and it was about bridge that they were talking when Evelyn entered the drawing room, just before dinner. Everybody was drinking a rather nice South African sherry, and Evelyn was invited to have a juice. Then Mrs. Piker-Smith went to see Mrs. Guppy in the kitchen, and as the two men drew aside to talk shop for a moment Auntie Vera’s great black eyes swiveled round on Evelyn like a pair of undimmed headlights.

“Evelyn,” she cried, plumping a cushion with a large white hand. “Come here and sit next to me. How is school?” Evelyn liked Auntie Vera, but she was rather in awe of her. She sat down on the sofa, pressing her slender legs together and clasping her hands in her lap. “We’re on half-term,” she said, looking at the carpet.

“Half-term!” cried Auntie Vera. “How marvelous!”

“Yes,” said Evelyn with great seriousness. “Do you know anything about Africa, Auntie Vera?” A coal fire crackled in the grate; above the mantelpiece hung a mirror, and invitations to social functions, mostly connected to the hospital, were tucked into the inside edge of the frame.

“Frank took me to Cairo for our honeymoon,” said Auntie Vera, taking Evelyn’s hand. “He pretended I was Cleopatra!” Evelyn turned toward her and found the great black headlamps shining with delight and the tip of Auntie Vera’s tongue resting on her top lip.

Conversation at the dinner table ranged widely from the price of sherry to the price of beef. Gerald mentioned a rather interesting colostomy he’d performed after lunch, and Uncle Frank made some quips which might, in a nonmedical household, have been taken in rather bad taste. Only once did Evelyn pay any attention, and that was during the main course, when Auntie Vera turned to her husband and said, “Frank, Evelyn is interested in Africa.”

“Is
she?” said Frank Cleghorn.

“Not all Africa, Uncle Frank,” said Evelyn. “Just the Congo.”

“Ah, the Congo!” said Uncle Frank fatly, and began to tell the story of Henry Morton Stanley, digressing rather amusingly to mention the tragic shooting death of John Hanning Speke mere hours before the eagerly awaited debate with Richard Burton on the source of the Nile; that was in 1864. Evelyn was sitting opposite Uncle Frank, who had his back to the door of the dining room, which was half-open; as Evelyn halflistened to his affable drone, she suddenly saw, over his shoulder, pausing in the doorway as he shuffled towards the stairs, the explorer. He turned his head and stared at her. Fortunately, she did not cry out; Auntie Vera was deep in animated bridge talk with Mummy, and Daddy was concentrating on a delicate incision he was about to make in a slice of reddish beef. Uncle Frank warbled on, and in the doorway behind his back stood the haggard, feverish man, and oh, how ill he looked! His head hung weakly on sagging shoulders; his eyes burned with a low, sickly gleam out of sunken sockets in an unshaven face deeply etched with gullies of suffering. His clothes looked extraordinarily ragged and filthy against the beige flowered wallpaper of the hallway, and his scarred, grimy hands still twitched convulsively where they dangled at his sides. Evelyn stared at him wide-eyed, and Uncle Frank was flattered at the raptness of her attention. It was only after some moments that he realized her eyes were focused not upon his own but beyond them; and he began, even as his discourse flowed forward, to turn in his seat. But at precisely the same instant the explorer shuffled off down the hallway out of sight; so that Uncle Frank, seeing nothing, turned back and talked on. Daddy, having completed his incision, lifted his fork and his eyes and turned to the anesthetist as his teeth closed upon the meat; and Auntie Vera lifted her wineglass while Mummy peered anxiously into the gravy boat.