At the airport Sarah could not disentangle herself from her gaggle of bluegrass singers. One of the women, a large blond woman balancing on crutches, had twisted her ankle getting out of the consul’s jeep in Lubumbashi, and Sarah had to take her to the medical unit at the embassy. The woman was chewing gum vigorously and blew a bubble of pale emerald green, exactly the same color, to Jacques’ astonishment, as her eye shadow. Sarah looked harried, her peeling face disfigured with blotchy patches of reddish pink, and she stood explaining the situation to Jacques a little apart, stiff and self-conscious, as the Americans watched.
His spirits sagging, Jacques smiled ruefully at his frustrated lust as he walked across the dusty parking lot to his car. Just when he thought he could touch her without making her flinch with pain. Just when he thought they could move from the balcony to the bedroom. The orchids lay forgotten in the back seat of the car. He slipped into the driver’s seat and tried to convince himself that his talk with Marceau would have soured the pleasure of being with Sarah again, even though he knew that nothing could ever do that. He drove back into town, dropping Louis in the cité, and, on an impulse, headed up the hill to Djelo Binza and Bika’s house.
For the first time, he could not say for sure what Bika would do when he found out that Marceau had tried to bribe him—to keep Bika headed in the right direction? In the old days, before Bika’s return, he would have known. Ça se paye, Marceau had said, a thin trickle of sweat rolling past his ears.
Out along the Matadi road dry season smoke hung in the air and turned the sunset skies fantastic shades of orange and purple, the rich, riotous colors of days without rain. The sky in a K-Mart painting, Doris Snead had said once, looking out over the river, and everyone had found this amusing, he could never figure out why. But, then, foreigners always found so much to laugh about in Africa. It was part of the fun of being there. Nous, les Européens.
There were no soldiers at the gates of Bika’s house, only three ordinary guards in brown overalls sitting on the ground on pieces of cardboard boxes smoking cigarettes. Patron had left for the evening, they said.
For a moment he thought of going in and asking the cook to make him up something to eat while he waited for Bika. But it was half past six, still the drinks hour. He sat in the car and smoked a cigarette, then decided to drive across the crest of the hills to the Hamiltons’. He was afraid that if he went back down the hill and into town, he would let the moment pass, would lose his resolve to find out what Bika and Marceau were up to. And why it had anything to do with him.
Jacques drove inside the Hamilton gates, averting his eyes from Fiona’s Jaguar, an ugly brown, a Simba beer truck brown, parked in the porte-cochère.
Surrounded by parrot cages, the Dalmatian bitches, and various cats, Fiona sat smoking with a drink in her hand on the untidy verandah that ran the full width of the front of the house.
“Jacques, Jacques, I’m delighted to see you,” she rose to her feet and steadied herself against the back of her chair. “I truly am.”
“Where is Josh?”
“At the riding club. Planning this year’s ball. Gussie’s there. Gussie’s always there. So I came home.”
She looked around distractedly for a chair that was not piled high with children’s toys or books and papers and magazines. The Hamiltons were the kind of English who ran a house that was forever slovenly, dingy and unclean, no matter how many servants swarmed about the place. It was part of their carefree allure. Debris piled up in corners, the odor of birdcages and the urine smell from children, dogs, and cats clung to the nostrils.
Fiona dumped the contents of a chair to the floor and Monopoly cards and money spilled over it.
“Shit,” she said. “Sit down, Jacques. Mawata will be along with the drinks cart in a minute. The boys are getting the children ready for their supper.”
She was dressed in a pale blue silk dress that tied on one side, like a sarong. She wore a double strand of large pearls with a diamond clasp and her makeup was fading, and her face going slack with the whiskies.
They sat together and drank and smoked while darkness took away the garden until the servants remembered to turn on the dismal fluorescent guard lights. Mawata brought out a tray of hot samosas. At the back of the house Jacques could hear the sharp, bright voices of the children as the servants put them to bed. He yearned to join them, to laugh with the children, tell them a story with a happy ending, and smell the soapy fragrance of their hair as he bent over to kiss them goodnight.
A parrot in one of the cages beside the front door said “Lawdy, Lawdy,” and uttered a prolonged sigh.
Fiona clutched at her temples theatrically. “You know she has set out to drive me crazy, Jacques.”
Jacques knew that she was talking about her husband’s mistress. Gussie Pearce had become the drama of Fiona’s life. Gussie gave her something to talk about, Gussie gave her an excuse for drinking as much as she liked, as often as she liked.
Jacques sat and listened and thought of Sarah and the sweet tightness in the pit of his stomach when he saw her blond head as she stepped out of the plane and started down the steps.
“Crazy. Absolutely crazy. You don’t take me seriously, do you? Neither does Josh.” She poured herself another drink. “Did you hear that parrot?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not mine. Gussie gave it to Josh to drive me crazy.”
Jacques laughed. “Stop it, Fiona.”
“Laugh all you like. Gussie has set out to drive me crackers with that parrot.” She leaned across Jacques and looked at the parrot. “Gussie named the parrot Lawdy, Lawdy, Miss Scarlett. She taught it to say ‘Lawdy, Lawdy,’ but not ‘Miss Scarlett’ so that every time the sodding bird says, ‘Lawdy, Lawdy,’ I keep waiting for it to say ‘Miss Scarlett.’ I can’t help myself. I say it under my breath. I wait for that ‘Miss Scarlett’ to come out of the damned bird. Everybody does. It’s not just me. The bird’s driving me mad. She knew it would. She knows I’m like that.” She looked at Jacques, her eyes indeed a little wild. “Did you wait for it to say, ‘Miss Scarlett’?”
“No.”
“Well, I did. I always do.”
“Throw a cover over it.”
“You don’t understand me.”
“Listen, go to bed now.”
“Do you know what she told a crowd of us the other day?”
“What?”
“Gussie told us that when she was sixteen, she was voted The Most Inspirational Volleyball player in her school. Can you imagine? Being proud of that? The Most Inspirational Volleyball player? Who but Gussie would ever think of being proud of that? Would you?”
“I don’t know,” Jacques said. “I never played volleyball.”
“I’ve noticed that Americans brag about some very strange things, haven’t you?”
“It’s late, Fiona. I have to go.”
“Where? At this time of night? Is there a party I don’t know about?”
Jacques got out of his chair and bent down to pick up the Monopoly game scattered on the floor.
“Jacques, . . . everyone’s been wanting to know . . . is Janine coming back?”
The steady thuda, thuda, thuda sound of drums in the cité drifted up from below the hill.
“No.”
Jacques started down the steps.
Fiona swayed to her feet and followed him. “Well, then, think of that,” she said, pensively, as if to herself, “Silly ol’ Janine will get exactly what she always wanted: all the money in the world and a big flat in Brussels. Humph. She wasn’t as dumb as we thought.”