NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (born Worcester, 1957) grew up in the Far East and South America. After a stint making documentaries for the BBC, he joined The Times and then became literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. A winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask prizes, he has written five novels, including The Dancer Upstairs (which was filmed by John Malkovich), and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin. His latest novel is Secrets of the Sea (2007), set in Tasmania, where since 1999 he has lived for part of each year. He is currently editing Bruce Chatwin’s letters.
WHO IS DILYS HOSKINS? A 55-year-old widow with white hair and sharp blue eyes that look out from unintendedly fashionable hornrims. The mother of two children, both now in their twenties. Widowed for eight years. Born on the east coast of Africa in a country of high-duned beaches, deep lakes, fertile plains, intractable marshes and deserts. A woman to whom the following words might apply were you to speak with neighbours in her run-down apartment block: detached, resourceful, a hard barterer, ladylike. In other words, a most improbable assassin.
She is at the end of her long month in London. Her daughter Rachel has just given birth to Dilys’s first grand-child, an eight-pound boy with a piercing cry. Dilys has been staying in the converted basement of Rachel’s terraced house in Putney, helping out. In five days’ time, she will fly to Australia for her son Robin’s graduation ceremony, from his school of architecture in Perth, before returning to her one-roomed flat in her African capital, into which she moved after the government confiscated Coral Tree Farm. She does not deny the surplus of fear that spills out when she considers the chaos that awaits her, or the poisonous sense of her own impotence. She is only one untrained person. What can she do to help? She is not a nurse, not a doctor; she is a farmer’s wife who for the past eight and a half years has wanted a husband and a farm. But her mind is made up.
Her children have been emailing each other. They don’t think that she should return. She has a strained relationship with both.
On a rainy evening in the last week of her visit, Dilys stands in her daughter’s kitchen, waiting for a pot of tea to brew, when she hears Rachel call in an urgent voice: ‘Mum, you’ve got to come. He’s on the telly.’
The word ‘he’ burns on her breath.
Dilys impatiently fills two mugs, then takes them into the living room where, seated on a large sofa beside her breastfeeding daughter, she watches, over her tea, the still-boyish features of her president denying the epidemic.
It is a novelty for Dilys to observe how outsiders report on her country. There is no one to contradict the President from within. Foreign journalists are forbidden. When Dilys is at home, her short-wave radio is jammed to blazes. Russia says nothing; China is just as feeble. But here on the BBC there are regular news items.
‘Nay, there is no epidemic,’ the President insists in his mission-school, old-fashioned English, jabbing his forefinger at an appreciative crowd. It is a rumour put about by the nefarious white minority with the Europeans and Americans behind them. It is the Europeans and Americans who are responsible for the food queues, the fuel queues; who even now are intercepting vital oil supplies on the high seas and scheming to recolonise the country with the assistance of greedy racist usurpers … He is dressed in his signature blue kaftan and a white baseball cap which looks ridiculous perched on top of his thick black shock of hair.
Rachel listens to the hectoring voice. Her baby, unlatched momentarily from its breast, gives a small air-sucking convulsion, then reclamps its gums around the dark purple bullet of her nipple.
Neither Dilys nor Rachel says what’s on their mind. The words have been used over and over:
You malignant bungler. Only one man is responsible for reducing the country to ruin; everywhere the stink of death, disease gnawing its way from village to village, farms deserted, motherless children grovelling for food through stacks of uncollected garbage; and night after night the pick-axe handles rising and falling, the bloodshed, the mutilations, the rapes, the abductions. One man, Mr Pointer.
What her daughter does say: ‘I’ve had another message from Robin. He says you’re mad. You’ve got a round-the-world ticket – all you have to do is keep flying till you get back to London and I’ll pick you up again at Heathrow.’
Dilys swallows another watery sip of Darjeeling and says nothing.
Irked, Rachel cradles her baby. ‘I know it’s hard, Mum. It was our home, too.’
She lapses into silence. She has a blonde fringe and her father’s small chin. Then, in a reasonable voice: ‘Listen, I’ve spoken again to Tim about the basement. It’s not what you’re used to, but you’d have your own entrance.’
‘Robin is getting quite serious about this Australian girl?’ with great firmness.
‘For God’s sake, Mother!’
Rachel’s emotions are running very close to the surface. She is, however, an old hand at manipulating her mother.
Dilys slams down the mug. ‘I am going back, Rachel,’ in a flaming tone. ‘And nothing you, Robbie or your husband can say will stop me. It’s where I belong.’
Her ferocity shakes them both. Arms folded, she sits at a perpendicular angle and watches her daughter cover the baby’s ears, shielding it from the shouting.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Rachel hisses, and turns the child towards the television screen, giving it an uninterrupted view of an embroidered blue kaftan and a brushed-up halo of black hair. She prepares to leave the room. ‘Where does this anger come from? You can be angry, but not that angry.’
Next morning, to avoid the stress of another argument, Dilys borrows Rachel’s umbrella and leaves the already cramped house and waits for a bus to take her to Piccadilly. It’s a midsummer morning, but the rain has not stopped since she arrived in London. At last, a bus sloshes to a halt. When a teenage boy – white and spotty, with wires trailing from under his woollen cap – attempts to barge past her onto it, she grabs his arm. ‘Excuse me.’
She elbows her way ahead of the boy to buy her ticket and is mildly astonished to be told that the fare is the same as a week ago. She gives the driver the right coins and a grateful, shaky smile, and pockets her ticket and moves along to the rear of the bus.
Settled into her seat, Dilys feels foolish for having exploded. She sits back and casts her eye around the other passengers. The faces are white, black, brown, yellow – and mostly British, presumably. As the bus crosses the Thames, she floats the opinion that what she is seeking is reassurance. She is looking for someone like her. Because isn’t what she faces merely the lot of all 55-year-old women of a ‘certain generation’ who have disappeared on themselves in the quicksand of domestic life?
She gazes out over the river at the dark mob of clouds assembled in the London sky. But the tunnelling mole of her anger hasn’t gone away.
When Dilys was a young mother, her friends called her ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A feisty and rather plump child, she had had the handicap of a late-blooming beauty. Suddenly to find herself at twenty-eight turning heads was almost more disorienting to her than the birth of her first child, which followed closely after. Overnight, along with the extra weight that had insulated her, she lost her pluckiness and confidence. With the arrival of cheekbones, she became benign, mild-mannered, accommodating. Now Dilys – she who flies off the handle at the tiniest provocation – has repossessed her childhood ferocity. Other people might think that she has turned into someone new, but they are quite wrong. You can’t remake yourself into who you are not. On the other hand, you can return to the person you once were. She is simply stretching the muscles, dormant for so long, of the unruly girl.
Four impervious rows ahead, the teenager watches the rain-spattered window, swaying his head from side to side.
Thirty-five minutes later, Dilys steps down opposite the Ritz and is walking past the Royal Academy, feeling cold and wet and oppressed, when she notices on the railing a framed poster for a Munch exhibition and is reminded of the reaction on her daughter’s face the night before. Dilys can’t recall her last visit to an art gallery. Her fine white hair twinkling with raindrops, she collapses her umbrella and goes in.
The painting hangs in the furthest room. Dilys doesn’t see it at first. Her eyes glide dutifully from wall to wall and then her heart stops. A face looks out at her, into her – sparking a shock of recognition.
It’s hard for Dilys to explain, this giddying affinity she feels for the young woman with tangled yellow hair. The small breasts and swollen belly remind her of the desperate black girls in her East African capital. But the pale colour of the skin – squeezed fiercely from the tube and painted in rapid horizontal brushstrokes, like slashes – is her own. The colour of celery, white clock towers, pith helmets.
Only closer up does she see that the young woman is not alone: stretched out on a bed behind her, also naked, is a man with a moustache.
Dilys fumbles with her audio-guide and learns from a dispassionate voice that the man is the French revolutionary leader Marat; and the woman – who has gained access to Marat on the pretext of revealing a plot against him – Charlotte Corday. ‘Munch completed the work in 1907, a year before his breakdown …’
The subject of the painting surprises Dilys. The two figures are so modern, like lovers in a bedsit. And, while she has heard of Marat, she knows nothing about Charlotte Corday – except that she famously stabbed Marat in his bath. She definitely wasn’t in the painting by Jacques Louis David. Who is she? How did she kill him?
She lifts her head and meets the stare of the assassin. The expression is vacant, corpse-like (even the dead man on the bed seems more alive), but it goes on snatching at Dilys.
Some time later, Dilys steps back from The Death of Marat. The painting has entered her marrow. The signalling emptiness of the young woman’s face, its aura of aloneness, confronts Dilys with the bleaching of the canvas of her own existence. She feels boiling over all the things that she can’t – or won’t – discuss with Rachel and Robin. They are the one family link left, but their thrust to start again, to build new lives in Britain and Australia, has deafened her children. Dilys knows the pattern too well – she has taught it to them: In order to survive, you have to forget. You have to. But her oblivion, so painstakingly achieved, is unravelling.
As she walks back to the cloakroom, the outsized feeling takes hold of Dilys to challenge one of these people entering the Royal Academy: ‘Are you aware that my president thinks you are supposed to be enjoying an unholy alliance with a few defenceless farmers who live in another continent?’
She’d expect shrugging shoulders. ‘Sorry, the situation sounds ghastly,’ as they shove past. And over the shoulder, ‘Didn’t you choose to stay? Isn’t that what happens in Africa?’ Or, if they know some history, ‘Isn’t he simply taking back land seized by whites in the 1890s?’
In her obstinate mind she runs after them, shakes them, violated by their indifference. ‘I’m sorry, but did you know that eight out of ten of these ‘settler vermin’, my late husband included, bought their farms since independence – that is to say, under the President’s very own laws?’
There is so much that she would like to get off her chest. She could stand here and talk all week and there’d be plenty left over. But how fast the blinds rattle down whenever she tries to explain – her parents had not come out until after the early days, when they were busy killing people; she does not carry a gun; did not call her dog after the President or sing, ‘Climb the hill, baboon’. She is not one of those excruciating ‘whenwes’, who begin each backward-groping conversation ‘When we lived in ….’ But even though she isn’t one of those, Africa is the only place she knows. She is an African just as much as her president is. Britain owes her nothing. All she has in common with the original pioneers – and with some of the crowd in the Munch exhibition – is the whiteness of her skin.
One person who understands is a mad, dead Norwegian painter. In the catalogue, she reads that Munch said he was pregnant with his painting The Death of Marat for nine years.
Dilys is not due to leave for Australia until Friday evening. Tingling with the novelty of being truly herself, she will spend her remaining afternoons in London in the Putney library, digging out books on the French Revolution.
Charlotte Corday arrived in Paris on a blazing July afternoon, battling her way through crowds all dressed in tricoloured cockades and soft liberty caps, and booked into the Auberge de Provence, a stuffy first-floor room overlooking the Rue des Vieux Augustins. The porter put down her bulging leather bag and without saying anything drew open the heavy curtains. The nosy summer sunshine picked out a marble-topped desk and an unmade bed. She turned to the porter, a big-boned man, slightly deaf with a box jaw that hung open, and asked him to fetch a chambermaid to make up the bed and then to bring her a pen, ink, some paper.
That afternoon, she set down the words she had rehearsed in her head on the journey from Caen. She wrote quickly, no crossings out. The peace of France depended on the fulfilment of the law. She was not breaking it by killing a man who had been so universally condemned. If she was guilty, then Hercules too was guilty when he killed Geryon and Cacus. But did Hercules ever meet a monster so odious?
She folded the sheet six times and pinned it to her baptismal certificate.
This was the conviction she had reached: Marat had to be killed and peace restored.
No one is so strong as the woman who stands alone. She had asked nobody for help, breathed not a word of her plan to anyone. Those who knew her imagined she was in England. Before departing Caen, she had written to her father: ‘I am going to England because I do not believe one can live happily and quietly in France for a very long while to come.’
A whole nation can pay for the folly of one man. She was going to restore peace to the world by ridding it of a monster.
Who is this Dilys Hoskins who is so infatuated with Charlotte Corday and is now seated in the economy-class cabin on the overnight flight to Singapore? A woman in her imperfections and vanities not markedly different from any other passenger. Not a hero as a consequence of her determination to stay put, but a menopausal widow with nowhere else that she wants to go – except home. A woman who has no answer to the question: At what point are you entitled to feel part of the land where you were born; at what point do you earn your stake in its living earth?
She glances at the young couple in her row, engrossed in their film. Do you know what is going on, how bad? If you do not know, how can you help? But if you knew how bad it was, would you be able to help?
The newspaper in her lap tells her that the epidemic is spreading, aggravated by the rains. There is a photograph of an empty hospital, the wards deserted. Two children sit on the steps waiting for their parents to show up. The President has not been seen in public for several days.
‘The tragedy’, says a representative from an aid agency, ‘is that this disease is deadly but curable.’
Her hard-headed husband once said to her with reddened eyes in the days after they lost their farm: ‘I would do it, given the chance.’
‘I know you would, darling,’ she said and squeezed his hand as he had grabbed hers at the start of her labour with Rachel, and two years later with Robin.
That’s how deep it was with Miles – he wouldn’t vote again for the President to save his soul from hell. But his cancer went deeper.
Her meal tray cleared and the overhead lights switched off, Dilys tries to sleep. But her feet are swelling up and a shadow flitting from side to side across the back of her mind is preventing her.
Charlotte Corday woke early on that hot Saturday morning in July, and put on a simple brown dress of piqué cotton, a white linen fichu that she tucked into her bodice, a black hat. All very quiet and sober.
It was 7.30 a.m. when Madame Grollier, the hotelier, unlocked the front door to let her out. The shops were not yet open. She reached the Palais Royal within twenty minutes and went for a walk around the public gardens. The plants were shrivelled and coated in dust. She made ten circuits and then left the gardens and walked up the Galeries de Bois to number 177, where a burly man was pulling open the shutters. In the window she spotted a display of cutlery. The man, Monsieur Barbu, the shop’s owner, invited her in. She was looking for a kitchen knife, she told him; something to pare fruit with. He took out a velvet-lined tray and she chose a black-handled knife with a six-inch steel blade. The handle was carved from ebony and had two rings on it – and he demonstrated how it might be hung from a shelf or a cook’s belt. She paid forty sous for the knife, which came in a green leather sheath, and slid it into her pocket, and thanked him and walked out.
On her way back to the gardens, she bought a newspaper and sat on a green bench to read it. The news from Orléans was that nine men were to be guillotined following an attempt to murder Marat’s deputy. She put down the newspaper, the breath pushed out of her. At that moment a small boy running past fell over. He yelped in pain and looked up at her, chin wrinkling, his face pressed to the path. Their eyes met and, though from a different angle, each saw that the other wanted to cry, and perhaps because of this recognition both held back from actually doing so. She helped the boy to his feet and stroked his applered cheek, smiling, a small grave smile of sadness, and he stumbled off, rubbing the gravel from his knees, with an exaggerated limp.
‘Black Robespierre’ is what they had called him, some of the farmers she grew up with. The same ones who fled abroad after his election. ‘You wait, Dilys,’ as they packed their belongings. ‘Beneath that preposterous kaftan, there’ll always be a Mao collar.’ She wanted not to argue, but believe. She was in her mid-twenties then, Rachel’s age, and had faith in the President and the vision he articulated for their (yes, their) country in his shy, polite, wedding photographer’s voice. These farmers were taking the Yellow Route out, she couldn’t help thinking. She went to one of their yard sales and bought a Black & Decker drill with some bits missing and a Zenith short-wave transistor radio.
And how reasonable the President appeared at the outset. All that stuff about forgiveness, his passion for peace, of wanting to take everyone with him. The President wanted the whites to stay, help rebuild. There would be no retribution, a little redistribution maybe, in time; but revenge, nay, not that. He appoints a white farmer as his agricultural minister to safeguard the farmers’ future. He listens attentively, in his blue kaftan. He has a new name: Mr Pointer, the people call him with affection – because he always points his finger when speaking. He’s a messianic figure. Everyone wants to meet him.
So her husband takes Mr Pointer at his word. Her husband in his floppy green hat who loved lemon cream biscuits and fine-shredded marmalade and the tangos of Carlos Gardel. Who saw the worst in everyone only after he had seen the best. One always admires the qualities in people that one lacks oneself. Miles’s assertive manner was the same towards everyone. A man whose unbelievable bluntness went hand in hand with an extreme honesty. When they met, he was the owner of a thriving printer’s shop on the capital’s main street, but with a hankering for the land: land that Mr Pointer with outstretched arms was urging people such as Miles to take up.
‘The secret of success in life’, Miles tells Dilys as if she were his apprentice and not his wife, and as she would later tell their children, ‘is to be ready when your opportunity comes – and go for it.’ He sells his printing business and with their joint savings they buy a small tobacco farm twelve miles inland from the sea. They invest in a herd of milk-producing cows. They install a new hand-pump in the chicken-yard to draw up water from the aquifer. They renovate the house, a modest whitewashed single-storey building at the top of a long lawn hedged with thorn bushes in which plum-coloured starlings like to nest, and a view beneath a thrilling sky over a horizon tufted with elephant grass. The sandy soil needed plenty of fertiliser, but the river gave water all year round. She would watch her children slide down the water-smoothed rocks and go exploring with them on an escarpment veined with an ancient stone terrace.
She needs to be useful. She starts up a school, employing two teachers; she creates a library for the village; she ensures that the workers have a nice place to live in. To use her president’s words, she is doing her best ‘to move forward together’. She has grown up playing with African children. It doesn’t always make you a non-racist, but in her case the strong feelings that they all form part of one scrappy tribe have stayed. Although she is never so assertive or abrupt as her husband, she treats Africans as does Miles, as she would Europeans, and they like her for it. They notice that Sleeping Beauty is increasingly picking up her husband’s ways, but at least they know that when she is being rude to them she would behave no differently towards white people. Everyone waves at her when she drives around – unlike at the next property, where the farm workers glower.
Dilys was educated in the capital in the same school as her mother. In her French class she studied Camus. She envied him when he wrote, ‘This earth remains my first and last love.’ At Coral Tree Farm, she learns to understand Camus’s sympathy for the land. During harvest time, she is never out of the tobacco shed. Each time she grades a leaf and rubs the ribbed arteries beneath the tips of her fingers, she feels an immediate connection with those who have cropped the plant and with the soil that has produced it; an involvement which passes beyond intimacy. The tobacco leaf, like the warm frothing milk that she squeezes from the cows, is tangible, something she can pinch and smell. It is life itself.
Unlike her liberal friends, Dilys is unsentimental about Africans; she has seen enough to know that Africa is a tough place – the Troubles have taught her that. But it’s only when living on the farm that she experiences the authentic sense of Africa being her place. As though a book she is reading in another language has shifted imperceptibly into her language.
At what point did the truth come tumbling down on her that Black Robespierre had diddled – Miles’s word – his people? At what point did the bluebottle settle on the lens to reveal that the President’s promise of integration was just a fiction? Specifically, at what point did the quiet, shy, friendless wedding photographer become the raucous shock-haired demagogue in a baseball cap, urging his thugs to turn on settler vermin like the Hoskins family? In other words, at what point did Mr Pointer decide to punish her for the white taint of her skin?
The questions are like the furious horizontal strokes of Munch’s brush.
The driver of the hackney cab in the Place des Victoires had no idea where Marat lived and had to climb down and amble along the rank asking his colleagues. ‘30 Rue des Cordeliers,’ one of them yelled. ‘Just off Faubourg Saint-Germain.’ He heaved himself back up and shortly before eleven o’clock dropped her off outside a tall grey shabby house with shops on either side.
Charlotte walked through an empty porch into a courtyard where two women chatted in the shadow of an arcade.
She asked: ‘Citizen Marat?’
‘Staircase on the right,’ nodded one of them, her eyes lingering on this fastidiously dressed, rather beautiful young woman with enlarged blue humourless eyes.
She crossed the courtyard and ran up the steps, following the iron balustrade to the top of the staircase. The bell pull was a curtain rod with a makeshift canvas handle. She tugged it. Then stepped back, patting down her bodice where she had concealed the knife.
A muffled sound of females talking. Then the door opened and a woman stood there, biting her lip. The disarray in her face mimicked the chaos of the hallway behind. Tiles missing on the floor. Filthy wallpaper – patterned with broken Doric columns. And the rancid smell of over-fried fish.
‘What do you want?’
She explained herself in a composed voice. She wanted to meet Marat. It was urgent. She had vital news – about a planned insurrection in Caen.
‘Out of the question,’ the woman said brusquely. ‘Marat is sick. He can’t see anyone.’
‘What if I come back tomorrow?’
Just then another woman appeared in the doorway: Marat’s mistress, Simone. She seconded everything that her younger sister had said. No, she can’t make an appointment. It’s impossible to say when she’ll be able to see him, when he’ll be better.
‘Then I shall go home and write to him,’ she replied calmly, resisting every cell in her body that screamed for her to fight her way beyond them.
Dilys breaks the long flight to Perth with a stopover in Singapore. At the insistence of her son, she is booked for two restorative nights into the Raffles Plaza. The steady hum of the air-conditioning drives out the noise of the city twelve floors below. But she cannot sleep. She wakes and does not know where she is, and for a moment her husband is alive and she is in Africa still.
She is sitting at her tinny little table, trying to lose herself in a novel, when Beauty her housemaid bursts in.
‘Mrs Hoskins, you must come …’
Dilys barely keeps up with Beauty as they run to the end of the lawn. She hears the cries from behind the thorn bushes. The cow is stumbling and stopping every few steps, its intestines wrapped around its legs like South American bolas. The grass glistens red from the slashed udders. A head twists around at a strange angle, sensing her presence, and the look in the creature’s eyes sends Dilys racing back to the house.
She grabs the keys, her breath coming in short thrusts. She has to kill it. And she doesn’t know how. She needs Miles …
The agonised bellows continue to reach her as she struggles to unlock his gun cabinet. Hunting is man’s business. But her husband has taken the children for safekeeping to a cousin’s house in the capital and will not be back until next day.
She pulls out the rifle and a handful of bullets. She has never killed an animal, other than a chicken when Beauty was away. Miles had infuriated her by saying: ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll do it. You’ll never be able to do it,’ and she had not let him – she had jolly well halal-killed the chicken exactly as Beauty had taught her.
But a chicken was not a cow.
She stares at the bullets loose in her palm. The same panic has assaulted Dilys ever since Miles’s cancer was diagnosed. The panic that tells her he isn’t going to be around and she will have to do more and more and she doesn’t know how.
That unearthly lowing, it’s intolerable.
Through the mesh window – another horrible cry. And she knows in a small, dry, cold and ruthless part of her, in a space beyond the emotions and the histrionics and the tears, that she has no choice. Only she can put the animal out of its suffering. There is only her.
The rifle is unexpectedly light. She walks with a pallbearer’s tread back down the lawn. It isn’t that she’s unaware of the path she must take. All her life, she has been an observant passenger. But she has never done the driving, and now she has to.
On the other side of the hedge, something is still staggering. A mouth wheezes open and a tongue curls up, stiff, blue, abnormally long. She fumbles and pulls the trigger.
In the dying light, she walks over to the office shed and raises Peter Trasenster on the battery-powered radio. The neighbouring white farmers do a security roll-call every night. Until now the area has been peaceful; their road is the only road into the capital without a curfew. But a fortnight ago, Coral Tree Farm was gazetted in the government newspaper. Ninety days to vacate. Her sick husband is running around calling on lawyers to dispute it.
Trying not to sound melodramatic, she explains to Peter what has happened. He tells her to stay where she is, a local patrol will come by and check. She locks the rifle in the gun cabinet and crosses the lawn and bolts the doors.
Afterwards, no one believed it. Sleeping Beauty – this mild-mannered woman – shooting a cow. Her children were incredulous.
Back in her hotel room, Charlotte Corday manoeuvred the baptismal certificate out from under her breasts, along with the piece of paper attached to it, containing her manifesto. Next, she removed the knife and placed it on the desk behind the ink bottle. She stared at it for a moment, before reaching out and taking a fresh sheet of paper.
Her letter written, she folded it into an envelope, scribbled Marat’s name and address on the outside, and rang for the porter. ‘Be sure to deliver this by seven o’clock this evening.’
Then she asked Madame Grollier to arrange for a hairdresser to be sent up.
It was something about the sisters, their strong, careless faces. She decided that Marat had a keen eye for women. She was too primly dressed this morning. This time, she would arouse the ex-monk’s vanity.
The timid young coiffeur who knocked on her door at 3 p.m. found her waiting for him, already wearing a loose white bombazine gown with a grey underskirt, a low-cut bodice, and over her shoulders a rose gauze scarf. For the next hour he stood behind her, gathering the gold tresses from her round lovely face and braiding them into a single garlic string that fell down the middle of her back.
All this time, she sat there in the solipsism of her conviction, not saying anything. Detached. Her eyes on the marble-topped desk and the knife in its green leather sheath. Absolutely indifferent to what his hands were doing.
He sprayed her hair and throat with cologne and powder.
When she walked downstairs at six-thirty on this baking July evening, it took Madame Grollier a second or two to connect the white-gowned woman who descended in high-heeled shoes, wearing an emerald cockade hat, and fanning her scented face with a gloved hand, and the person who arrived three days earlier from the Normandy countryside with cake crumbs on her sleeve.
Dilys cannot hear them, since bare feet make little noise; and then they are there.
A high-pitched voice draws her from her chair. She parts the curtain and, when she sees who is out there, motions that she is coming. Before leaving the room, she pauses at Miles’s desk to pick up something.
The angry voice speaks again as she enters the hall. ‘Open this door or we’ll fuck you up, mamma.’
She unbolts the door and stands in the feeble porch light. Assembled before her, a silent ominous mob stretching back to the tobacco shed. Leather jackets, green caps, red and yellow T-shirts printed with Mr Pointer’s smiling face.
A few of the young men carry branches torn from the trees. Others clutch whips made from fan belts and bicycle spokes. Their faces gleam with the prospect of violence.
‘What do you want?’ addressing their leader. As if she doesn’t know.
He raises a golf club. Solidified in its grooved metal head, the mood of menace and uncertainty that has lurked in the background these past months.
‘We have come to take your land.’
She runs her eyes over the faces, recognising one.
‘Elias?’
When he was a boy, she had bought Elias reading glasses so that he could study.
He looks away.
Disappointed, she turns back to the man holding the golf club. Fresh blood is spattered across his T-shirt. She wonders if it was the cow’s blood.
‘How old are you?’ her eyes angry. Thinking of the cow. She can sense the blue veins standing out on her neck.
The question makes him uncomfortable. He wipes his nose on his leather sleeve.
‘Then you were born after the Troubles. That was the year I bought this house …’
He shakes his arm. ‘This land belongs to us. You white Kaffirs came and grabbed it long ago from our people.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ the rebellion rising in her voice. ‘I have this certificate from your government’ – she has stopped saying ‘our’ – ‘It specifies that it is not needed for resettlement.’
She shows it to him. It will get her nowhere. But she wants him to see it, this annoying young man who all of a sudden has made her feel middle-aged and powerless.
‘See there. “No Present Interest”. Signed by the courts. Your courts,’ harping on it.
He frowns at the legal language.
‘Mr Pointer makes the law, not the courts.’
‘This is still private property. If you don’t leave, I shall call the police.’
He laughs. The arrogant, unedited laughter of someone with the sanction of the provincial governor’s office. ‘The police will do nothing. We can do what we like.’ And rips it in half.
Dilys slams the door, bolts it, then seizing Beauty’s hand, runs through the house, out the back, to the office shed, thrusting her housegirl down beneath the desk. She’s not worried about being raped herself, but the story among the local farmers is that these idiots have been told to rape women like Beauty. To create babies who will vote for Mr Pointer.
Her hands vibrate as she radios the Trasensters. ‘Oscar Romeo Four Five.’ Across the lawn, she can see the lights being switched on one by one. She listens to the mob thumping on Rachel’s harmonium and singing hysterical songs of liberation as they tramp through the rooms. ‘We will find you, we will find you …’
‘Oscar Romeo Four Five.’
At last, she raises Vanessa Trasenster. ‘I need help.’
‘Isn’t Peter with you?’
‘White bitch, where are you?’
A golf club smashes through the panes. Hands stretch through the shattered glass and grope for her hair. A black tentacle fastens around the cable and rips it from the wall. When all of a sudden the baying stops and they are running off, piling onto the tractor with their booty. Car doors slam in the darkness. There’s the chatter of a radio. Then Peter Trasenster’s voice. ‘Dilys?’
In the morning, she walks through the rooms. The children’s blackboard broken to bits. Miles’s record collection. Her books. Even her son’s watch in fragments. And an acrid tang of urine – coming from where, she can’t tell.
Mr Pointer’s response? ‘This is a peaceful demonstration of people who are frustrated.’
Dilys is surprisingly undisturbed by the house invasion. She doesn’t perceive it exactly as a tea party at Government House – as one or two neighbours mutteringly suggest – but rather as part of her toughening-up process. What she can’t get used to, what unhinges her, is the imminent loss of the farm and the deteriorating effect that this has on Miles. Than her husband no one could be more finicky in the kitchen, but she notes that he has started to leave his knife by the sink, still covered in marmalade.
The hackney cab drew up outside 30 Rue des Cordeliers. She asked the driver to wait and walked in long strides through the porter’s lodge – empty as before – and up the stairs.
Her gloved hand tugged on the bell.
The door was swung open by a fat, one-eyed woman, wearing a man’s ill-fitting trousers. Visible in the dirty hallway behind was the pile of newspapers she had been folding – copies of L’Ami du Peuple, edited by Marat, and printed on the press which he and Simone had installed in their apartment.
Charlotte started to explain herself all over again.
But the fat woman interrupted. Marat was not seeing anyone. He was taking a bath.
Then would it be possible to find out if Marat has received her letter?
The fat woman glared at her. At the sight of that elegant hair-do and ravishing white bust, a vision of health and privilege, her face contracted. ‘Oh, he receives many letters,’ and turned to pick up another newspaper. ‘Sometimes too many.’
Before anyone could say anything, two men ran up the staircase and barged past. One waved an invoice that required signing. Another had come to take a bundle of newspapers to the War Office.
Angry, she stamped her foot and called out, trying to catch someone’s attention. ‘I have come from far away with important information that I need to deliver personally to the People’s Friend. There’s a plot against him. I have names!’
Simone, the mistress, appeared, attracted by all the hubbub. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ momentarily nonplussed by the summer dress and the hat with its knot of emerald ribbons.
‘Did he get my letter?’
‘Letter? I don’t think so.’
‘I have to see him.’
‘Maybe in two or three days.’
But a man was shouting something from inside the apartment.
She waited, leaning against the wall, watching the fat, one-eyed woman who very deliberately folded another copy of next day’s edition of L’Ami du Peuple. Charlotte noted with horror that it called for the head of her friend Charles Barbaroux.
Suddenly, Simone was back. ‘He will see you.’
Dilys wonders why on earth her son has insisted on her spending two overnights in Singapore, where she knows no one. Unable to sleep, she decides to set out early for a stroll through the city centre.
The humidity hits Dilys the instant she steps outside. She looks right and left before deciding to head off in the direction of Orchard Road. The shops taunt her, their windows filled with filmy sarongs and skirts translucent as flies’ wings. Five minutes into her walk and sweat is meandering down her cheeks and neck. She feels disoriented, as if she has stood up in a hot bath. When she comes out into a park with spreading angsana and flame trees, and sees a bench, she flings herself down onto it. All she wants to do is strip.
Dizzy and flushed, she hauls off the burgundy cashmere cardigan that was a gift from her daughter. Her eyes blink with sunshine and sleep and the cardigan clings to her – she had exchanged it for a size smaller because she anticipated shedding the weight she put on in England. She allows it to fall on the bench while she lifts her elbows to let the air circulate. Then fishes inside her bag for a tissue and starts mopping her face.
She is looking about as if she expects the flame trees to lean forward and smother her, when the bench sinks a fraction beneath the weight of another woman.
Her dizziness passes. The park is still again when she falls into polite conversation.
The woman is waiting for her daughter to finish a swimming lesson. She speaks fluent English, but is not English. Tall, slim, mid-thirties, with her light brown hair pulled back and dressed in thin clothes that show her youthful shape, she reminds Dilys of a backpacker who once stayed at the farm. There is something vivacious about her, indiscreet. A woman who likes a good gossip, Dilys senses.
‘Are you from here?’ Dilys asks, wiping her forehead.
‘With a name like Van der Hart!’ No, she’s Dutch. She has been in Singapore two years. Her husband works for an investment bank; he is in hospital (‘an operation for a floating kidney’); he should be home by the weekend (‘Fingers crossed – otherwise, I’ll have to take him more books! Barend’s always got a book in his hand. I sometimes think he’s more interested in books than in me.’).
Dilys half-listens, not really engaged. Not accustomed to this humidity. Even sitting down with her cardigan off, she does not feel like herself.
Until Mrs Van der Hart looks at her. ‘You’re not from here, either.’
‘No,’ stuffing into her bag the beige-stained Kleenex.
‘Are you English?’
She could easily say yes. It’s what her children do. Stifling a yawn, she replies, ‘No,’ and braces herself for the inevitable.
‘Where are you from?’
Dilys smiles a little wanly. Even as her tongue moulds the word, she experiences the familiar embarrassment mingled with shame. But what answer can she give? She is not from anywhere else.
Certainly, she is not prepared for Mrs Van der Hart’s response.
Instead of changing the subject or commiserating or getting up and leaving, Mrs Van der Hart says to her: ‘Did you know your president is here?’
Dilys pales. She sits up, her back stiff as the cane that she always carried for snakes. Ever so slowly, she swings her head around. ‘My president?’
‘He is in the same hospital as my husband.’
‘What, in Singapore?’ she asks. ‘Here?’
‘He wanted my husband’s room, but the hospital wouldn’t allow it; he’s in the next room, which is smaller,’ Mrs Van der Hart says with satisfaction.
Her heart has stopped and her blood is flowing backwards. ‘I had no idea he was ill.’
‘Well, it can’t be too serious, because yesterday he had a tailor in with him,’ and before Dilys can ask how in God’s name Mrs Van der Hart has come by this information, ‘I get it all from Barend, who gets it from the nurses. He’s probably just having a service check. Dictators are high maintenance.’
Dilys listens to the gossip passed on by those talkative nurses to Mr Van der Hart. The ban preventing the President from travelling to Europe. The Cuban urologist whom he always insisted on visiting in Kuala Lumpur. The recent transfer of this doctor who has won his trust to a senior position in Singapore – ‘where they do things differently. Your president decided to follow him here for treatment, but this being Singapore it means he has to leave all his bodyguards outside, except one, who sleeps on the sofa. Barend found himself standing next to him in the toilet and realised that’s who it was.’
But she is standing up and waving. ‘There’s my daughter. I have to go.’
Over the road – a crocodile line of damp-haired children in white short-sleeved blouses and blue box-pleat belted pinafores.
Dilys studies her long pale fingers that have interlocked as if the future is written in her hands and she can read it. The skin on them is cracked, like a farmer’s. Her head tilts back. ‘Wait, what hospital did you say?’
‘The Stamford – on Arab Street.’
Her palms prickle. ‘Which floor?’ trying to discipline the excitement that has leaped into her eyes.
Simone led the way along a dark passage, smelling of printer’s ink, to a small narrow bathroom adjoining a bedroom. The air was thick and damper than a swamp.
He was lying in a clog-shaped copper bath, naked to the waist. A brown dressing gown was draped across his shoulders and a wet towel wrapped his forehead. Her first impression: his head – crowned with bunched-up tufts of lank black hair – was grotesquely large for his body. Her second: how leathery and inflamed his skin looked. It was the same texture as the knife’s sheath.
Balanced across the bath was a pine plank with papers on it and copies of newspapers speckled with drops of bathwater.
Simone retrieved an empty jug from beside the bath and went out, not closing the door.
He was correcting proofs. He reached the end of the paragraph and looked up.
That face. Yellow-grey eyes. A crushed nose. Long sparse hairs for eyebrows. And scabby scales blotching the deformed body. Leprosy had left its rodent’s teeth all over his bony shoulders and there was a bitter reek of vinegar that she traced to the towel.
The man in the bath leaned back at an angle. His bloodshot eyes exploring her with Calvinist intensity. Gravely, he assessed her perfect breasts. His eyes grazed over her throat, along her scarf, down her gown. No woman dressed like this, looking like this, had ever stepped into his bathroom.
He indicated with his pen a low stool below the window. She sat, her eyes sweeping the room, taking in more details: the map of their country pinned to the wall; a plate on the windowsill, heaped with sweetbreads.
‘Your name again?’ asked Marat.
‘Charlotte Corday,’ she told him, her gloved fingers fidgeting with her lace bodice the only outward sign of nervousness.
‘How old are you?’ His voice was powerful, melodious; out of keeping with his undeveloped frame.
‘Twenty-four.’
He tossed the proofs to the floor. ‘Simone says you have come from Caen to see me.’
‘That’s right.’
The tone in her partner’s voice speaking to this beautiful young woman brought Simone back into the bathroom with the jug that she had refilled with water.
She poured him a glass that he raised to his swollen lips. Pieces of almond and ice floated on the surface.
‘All right?’ his mistress wanted to know.
‘You might give it more flavour next time,’ grimacing, and handed it back.
She took the empty glass and the untouched plate from the sill. ‘I’ll heat this up.’
His eyes on the young woman, he nodded and seemed not to notice the door close.
Dilys shakes hands with Mrs Van der Hart as if pumping up water from a long way down. Then she walks back to the Raffles Plaza. The heat from the pavement rises up through her thick skirt, but she does not feel it.
She spends the rest of the morning at the swimming pool on the eighth floor. In the old days, in the days when she was Sleeping Beauty, she would keep her hair above the surface, but she wants to dive under, soak herself. She comes up for air and swims out over the rooftop towards the empty sky and the city. When her fingertips touch the small blue tiles at the other end, she turns and swims in an even breast-stroke, back towards the breakfast bar.
As Dilys finds frequently happens, the act of swimming – like dreaming – releases deeper thoughts. Her mind had stopped at the moment of revelation and now it makes reckless seesaws to catch up.
– This coincidence. His presence literally around the corner/my sudden obsession with Charlotte Corday. Isn’t it fate speaking?
– No, it would be immoral, illegal. Besides, what difference would it make? Look at Iraq after they hanged Saddam Hussein. Look what happened to Charlotte Corday. She was guillotined and reviled and Marat became a martyr.
– But if Hitler had died in that suitcase bomb, how many millions of lives would have been saved? Who would suspect a white, middle-class grandmother?
Up and down she continues. After thirty laps, she climbs out. She knows that she looks a mess, and once she has towelled herself dry she goes down to the lobby to make a hair appointment – it needs a trim anyway. But the earliest they are able to take her is tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. She considers cancelling it, then recalls a hairdresser once telling her that a new haircut can be as good as plastic surgery. She had looked with puzzlement at the pregnant young woman who ran forward to greet her at Heathrow, until she recognised her daughter Rachel beneath the unfamiliar fringe. Dilys’s flight doesn’t leave until the evening. She confirms the appointment.
It’s not yet noon. She feels renewed, less jangled.
Three hours later, Dilys returns to the hotel carrying two large brown paper bags. The swim has sharpened her appetite and once upstairs she orders a steak from the room-service menu. While waiting for it to arrive, she unpacks her new purchases and hangs them up. The smallest item is a laminated identity badge on a chain. She holds it out at arm’s length, inspecting it. The lettering is not up to the standard of Miles’s printing firm, but from a short distance it convinces. It looks official, she thinks.
Footsteps down the corridor and something squeaking and a rap on the door. A man pushes in a trolley with her meal on it. She has sat down to eat before he is even out of the room.
The steak is minuscule and Dilys plays an antique game from childhood of carving it into smaller and smaller portions to make it last longer. She has picked the plate clean when abruptly she stands up.
She unzips her suitcase and rifles through it for the plastic bag in which she has wrapped the Munch catalogue. Was there a knife in the painting? I’m not sure there was.
Dilys digs out the catalogue and checks the illustration. No, not even a bath. Just two naked figures in a room with a bed. An anonymous room like this one – like the room I’m flying back to, she thinks.
She will never retrieve all the days she sat in a cane chair, not leaving her tiny cement-floored flat back in Africa. Severed, useless, shrunk. The time that was stolen, like the momentous loss of the farm, of her darling Miles – it is unreimbursable.
But does she have the courage to do it herself? In a battle, she can almost imagine killing a figure in the distance with a rifle. Or pushing a button to drop a bomb. But to stab someone …
Charlotte Corday didn’t have a moment of doubt.
‘Who taught you to pierce Marat to the heart at first blow?’
‘The indignation that filled my own. I was determined to sacrifice my own life in order to save that of my country.’
Dilys picks up the steak knife from the trolley and with the napkin wipes it clean, one side and then the other. Sitting on the edge of her comfortable bed on the twelfth floor of the Raffles Plaza, she remembers the breakfast knives that she kept finding in the kitchen, black with ants. And Beauty leading her out into the chicken yard and reaching an arm into the coop.
Did Charlotte Corday sit in her hotel room and weigh up which part to stab? The heart or throat? His throat would be above the bedclothes; she couldn’t bear the horror of pulling back the sheets.
She tests the blade with her thumb and an image of Miles slaughtering a springbok flashes before her. The neck tautened back, the swift slash of the sharpened blade, the bright spurts of blood on the tobacco-coloured earth.
‘This is how you do it, Mrs Hoskins,’ Beauty had said, holding up the chicken like a lantern.
She drops it with a clatter onto the plate and goes into the bathroom. Coming back out, she changes into her nightdress. But she is not able to leave the steak knife alone. Once more she walks over to the trolley and picks it up. Hadn’t she managed to put that cow out of its misery – the bulging, all-seeing eyes meeting hers, knowing what she was about to do, and after she had done it a whistling sound as awful in its way as the last sound that she would hear bubbling out of Miles’s mouth.
Dilys looks around the room, her eyes settling on the bed. She decides to try the knife out on the pillows. But when she raises it, something in her resists doing damage to the hotel’s Italian linen. It remains suspended at a ridiculous angle in the cooled air above her pillow.
She weighs the knife one last time in her hand. Then she tucks it between the pages of the catalogue as if to mark a place and lies down on the bed.
‘So what is happening in Caen?’
She tells him.
‘You have the names of those involved?’ He takes up his pen, waiting.
She dictates. It’s a roll-call of her friends. Barbaroux, Buzot, Guadet, Louvet, Pétion … Her voice is even, without strain. Summoning them to her side.
He writes down the names, licking something from his tongue, followed by what sounds like a titter. In his excitement, the dressing gown slips further from his shoulders, exposing something ghastly.
She leans forward, suppressing a little cough, and her hand delves into her bodice.
‘I will have them guillotined in a few days.’ Less than two yards away, the pen hovers. ‘Is that the lot?’
She leaps up, toppling the stool, withdraws the knife from its sheath, and in a single downward movement plunges it sideways into his chest. She skewers it in deeper, through veins and tendons. He has no time to respond, save with an exhalation of air as the steel tip punctures his lung. She pushes in harder, into his heart, until only the ebony handle protrudes.
The squelching sound when she pulls out the knife is not unlike a pumpkin hitting the earth. The blood jets up – over her wrist, her bare snowy neck – through a wound in the top of his chest that will be wide enough for Simone to fit her fingertips into.
He shouts out, but it is not his voice that is heard by the women who slam open the door. It is Charlotte’s scream.
Dilys goes one more time into the bathroom to check that her lipstick is not too dark. She has had her hair done in the salon downstairs and is wearing a blouse of ivory silk open at the neck and a conservative foresty green skirt. She might be on her way to the Kennel Club Show.
Anyone who looked closer, though, would see the eraser marks. Children gone, husband dead – now it’s just her. A woman left behind who has had to watch everyone leave. Her unresolvable fury is aimed as much at the President as towards her loneliness.
Her body tenses, as if it has heard one of Miles’s favourite milongas strike up. She runs her tongue over her lips and murmurs to her spectacled face in the mirror: ‘Don’t worry, darling.’
She inclines her head and very carefully slips the chain over it, tucking the laminated badge down into her cleavage. The owner of the family-run print-shop in the Funan Centre had given her a good price to have it made up, even throwing in the chain for free. It was another of Miles’s beliefs. ‘If you’ve got an identity badge round your neck, people won’t stop you.’
She returns to the room and gulps down the gin and tonic that she mixed herself from the mini-bar. She is no longer afraid. She picks up her bag from the bed and plucks the plastic room-card from the wall socket, extinguishing the lights, and leaves.
The Stamford Hospital is but a short walk from her hotel. She gets through surprisingly easily. ‘I’m visiting Mr Van der Hart,’ she tells a harassed-looking receptionist. Before the young woman has time to formulate a reply, Dilys’s face takes on the expression of blunt intransigence that so annoys her children. ‘Ward C,’ she says.
‘Are you a relation?’
‘I’ve brought him another book,’ Dilys explains in a triumphant maternal voice. The sound in her chest as she walks through the lift is like the tail of a dog beating on the carpet.