The Angels Weep (84 page)

Bawu’s shoulders were shaking quietly, the tears still
streaming down his face. Craig dragged himself across the saloon
and lifted himself onto the bench beside him. He took
Bawu’s hand and held it. The old man’s hand was thin
and light and dry, like the dried bones of a dead seabird. The
two of them, old and young, sat holding hands like frightened
children in an empty house.

O
n the
following Friday, Craig crawled out of his bunk early and did his
housekeeping in anticipation of Bawu’s regular visit. The
previous day he had laid in half a dozen bottles of gin, so there
was unlikely to be a drought, and he broke the seal on one of
them and set it ready with the two glasses polished to a shine.
Then he put the first three hundred pages of the typescript next
to the bottle.

‘It will cheer the old man up.’ He had taken
months to pluck up his courage sufficiently to tell Bawu what he
was attempting. Now that another person was about to be allowed
to read his typescript, Craig was seized by conflicting emotions;
firstly by dread that it would all be judged as valueless, that
he had wasted time and hope upon something of little worth, and
secondly by a sharp resentment that the private world that he had
created upon those blank white sheets was to be invaded by a
trespasser, even one as beloved as Bawu.

‘Anyway, somebody has to read it sometime,’ Craig
consoled himself and dragged himself down to the heads.

While he sat on the chemical toilet he could see his own face
in the mirror above the hand-basin. For the first time in months
he truly looked at himself. He had not shaved in a week, and the
gin had left soft putty-coloured pouches under his eyes. The eyes
themselves were hurt and haunted by terrible memories, and his
mouth was twisted like that of a lost child on the verge of
tears.

He shaved, and then switched on the shower and sat under it
– revelling in the almost-forgotten sensation of hot suds.
Afterwards, he combed his wet hair over his face and with the
scissors trimmed it straight across the line of his eyebrows,
then he scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled. He found a clean
blue shirt, and then slid along the companionway, hoisted himself
to deck-level, lowered the boarding-ladder, and found a place in
the sun with his back against the coping of the cabin to wait for
Bawu.

He must have dozed, for the sound of an automobile engine made
him start awake, but it was not the whisper of the old
man’s Bentley, but the distinctive throb of a Volkswagen
Beetle. Craig did not recognize the drab green vehicle, not the
driver who parked it under the mango trees, and came hesitantly
towards the yacht.

She was a dumpy little figure, of that indeterminate age that
plain girls enter in their late twenties, and which carries them
through to old age. She walked without pride, slumping as though
to hide her breasts and the fact that she was a woman. Her skirt
was bulky around her thick waist, and the low sensible shoes
almost drew attention away from the surprisingly lovely lines of
her calves and the graceful ankles.

She walked with her arms folded across her chest as though she
was cold, even in the hot morning sunlight. She peered
shortsightedly at the path through horn-rimmed spectacles, and
her hair was long and lank, hanging straight and lustreless to
hide her face, until she stood below the yacht side and looked up
at Craig. Her skin was bad, like that of a teenager who was on
junk food, and her face was plump, but with an unhealthy soft
look, and a sickroom pallor.

Then she lifted the horn-rimmed spectacles from her face. The
frames left little red indentations on each side of her nose, but
the eyes, those huge slanted cat’s-eyes with the strange
little cast in them, those eyes so dark indigo blue as to be
almost black – they were unmistakable.

‘Jan,’ Craig whispered. ‘Oh God, Jan, is it
you?’

She made a heart-breakingly feminine gesture of vanity –
pushing the lank dull hair off her face, and dropped her eyes,
standing awkwardly pigeon-toed in the dowdy skirt.

Her voice barely carried up to him. ‘I’m sorry to
bother you. I know how you must feel about me, but can I come up,
please?’

‘Please, Jan, please do.’ He dragged himself to
the rail and steadied the ladder for her.

‘Hello,’ he grinned at her shyly, as she reached
the deck-level.

‘Hello, Craig.’

‘I’m sorry, I’d like to stand up, but
you’ll have to get used to talking down to me.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard.’

‘Let’s go down to the saloon. I’m expecting
Bawu. It will be like old times.’

She looked away. ‘You’ve done a lot of work,
Craig.’

‘She’s almost finished,’ he told her
proudly.

‘She’s beautiful.’ Janine went down from the
cockpit into the saloon, and he lowered himself after her.

‘We could wait for Bawu,’ Craig said, as he placed
a tape on the machine, instinctively avoiding Beethoven and
selecting Debussy for a lighter happier sound. ‘Or we could
have a drink right now.’ He grinned to cover his uneasiness
and discomfort. ‘And quite frankly I
need
one right
away.’

Janine did not touch her glass, but sat staring at it.

‘Bawu told me you were still working at the
museum.’

She nodded, and Craig felt his chest constricted with helpless
pity for her.

‘Bawu will be here—’ He searched desperately
for something to say to her.

‘Craig, I came to tell you something. The family asked
me to come to you, they wanted somebody whom you knew to break
the news.’ Now she looked up from the glass. ‘Bawu
won’t be coming today,’ she said. ‘He
won’t be coming ever again.’

After a long time Craig asked softly, ‘When did it
happen?’

‘Last night, while he was sleeping. It was his
heart.’

‘Yes,’ Craig murmured. ‘His heart. It was
broken – I knew that.’

‘The funeral will be tomorrow at King’s Lynn, in
the afternoon. They want you to be there. We could go together,
if you don’t mind?’

T
he weather
changed during the night, and the wind went up into the southeast
bringing with it the thin cold drizzling
guti
rain.

They laid the old man down amongst his wives and children and
grandchildren in the little cemetery at the back of the hills.
The rain on the freshly turned red earth piled beside the open
grave made it seem as though the earth were bleeding from a
mortal wound.

Afterwards, Craig and Janine drove back to Bulawayo in the
Land-Rover.

‘I’m staying at the same flat,’ Janine said,
as they drove through the park. ‘Will you drop me there,
please?’

‘If I am alone now, I’ll just get sad
drunk,’ Craig said. ‘Won’t you come back to the
yacht, just for a little while, please?’ Craig heard the
pleading in his own voice.

‘I’m not very good around people any more,’
she said.

‘Nor am I,’ Craig agreed. ‘But you and I
aren’t just people, are we?’

Craig made coffee for both of them, and brought it through
from the galley. They sat opposite each other, and he found it
difficult not to stare at her.

‘I must look a sight,’ she said, abruptly, and he
did not know how to answer her.

‘You will always be the most beautiful woman I have ever
known.’

‘Craig, did they tell you what happened to
me?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Then you must know that I am not really a woman any
more. I will never be able to let a man, any man, touch me
again.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘That’s one of the reasons that I never tried to
see you again.’

‘What are the other reasons?’ he asked.

‘That you would not wish to see me, to have anything to
do with me.’

‘That I don’t understand.’

Janine was silent again, huddled on the bench seat, hugging
herself with that protective gesture.

‘Roly felt that way,’ she blurted. ‘After
they were finished with me. When he found me there beside the
wreck, when he realized what they had done to me, he could not
even bear to touch me, not even to speak to me.’

‘Jan—’ Craig started, but she cut him
off.

‘It’s all right, Craig. I didn’t tell you to
hear you deny it for me. I told you so that you would know about
me. So that you would know that I have nothing left to offer a
man that way.’

‘Then I can tell you that, like you, I have nothing to
offer a woman – that way.’

There was quick and real pain in her eyes. ‘Oh Craig, my
poor Craig – I didn’t realize – I thought it
was just one leg—’

‘On the other hand, I can offer someone friendship and
caring, and just about everything else.’ He grinned at her.
‘I can even offer a shot of gin.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to get drunk.’
She smiled back at him gently.

‘I said sad drunk, but we should give Bawu a little
wake. He would have liked that.’

They sat facing each other across the saloon table, chatting
in desultory fashion, both of them beginning to relax as the gin
warmed them and gradually they recaptured some of that long-lost
camaraderie that they had once enjoyed.

Janine explained her reasons for not accepting the invitation
of Douglas and Valerie to live at Queen’s Lynn. ‘They
look at me with such pity, that I start to feel it all over
again. It would be like going into a state of perpetual
mourning.’

He told her about St Giles’, and the way he had
absconded. ‘They say it’s not my legs, but my head
that prevents me from walking. Either they are crazy or I am
– I prefer to think that it’s them.’

He had two steaks in the refrigerator, and he grilled them on
the gas while she made a dressing for the salad, and while they
worked he explained all the modifications that he had made to the
layout of the yacht.

‘With the roller boom, I would be able to shorten or
make sail without leaving the cockpit,’ he chatted on.
‘I bet that I could manage her single-handed. It’s a
pity I’m not ever going to have the chance.’

‘What do you mean?’ She stopped with an onion in
one hand and a knife in the other.

‘My darling is never going to feel the kiss of salt
water on her bottom,’ he explained. ‘They have
impounded her.’

‘Craig, I don’t understand.’

‘I applied to the exchange control authorities for a
permit to ship her to the coast. You know what they are like,
don’t you?’

‘I’ve heard they are pretty rough,’ she
answered.

‘Rough? That’s like calling Attila the Hun unkind.
If you try to get out of the country, even as a legal emigrant,
they allow you to take out only a thousand dollars’ worth
of goods or cash. Well, they sent an inspector round and he
valued the yacht at two hundred and fifty thousand. If I want to
take it out, I have to make a cash deposit of a quarter of a
million dollars, a quarter of a million! I have a little over ten
thousand dollars between me and prostitution, so until I come up
with another two hundred and forty thousand, here I
sit.’

‘Craig, that’s cruel. Couldn’t you appeal? I
mean in your special circumstances?’ She stopped herself
when she saw the little arrowhead of a frown appear between his
eyes. Craig brushed over the reference to his disability.

‘You can see their point of view, I suppose. Every white
man in the country wants to get out before the big black baddies
take over. We would strip the country bare if there was no
control.’

‘But, Craig, what are you going to do?’

‘Stay here, I suppose. I don’t have much
alternative. I’ll sit here and read Hiscock’s
Voyaging Under Sail
and Mellor’s
Cruising Safe
and Simple
.’

‘I wish there was something I could do to
help.’

‘There is. You can lay the table and hook a bottle of
wine out of the cupboard.’

Janine left more than half her steak, and drank little of the
wine, then she wandered across the saloon to examine his
collection of tapes.

‘Paganini’s
Capricci
,’ she murmured,
‘now I know you are a masochist.’ And then her
attention was attracted to the neat square pile of the typescript
on the shelf beside the tapes.

‘What is this?’ She turned the first few sheets,
and then looked up at him. Those beautiful blue eyes in the once
beautiful face, that was now swollen and distorted with fat and
speckled about the chin with angry little blemishes, made his
heart plunge. ‘What is it?’ And then, seeing his
expression, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s none of my
business.’

‘No!’ he said, quickly. ‘It’s not
that. It’s just that I don’t really know what it
is—’ He couldn’t call it a book, and it would
be pretentious to call it a novel. ‘It’s just
something I have been fiddling with.’

Janine riffled the edges of the sheets. The pile was over
twelve inches deep. ‘It doesn’t look like
fiddling,’ she chuckled, the first time he had heard her
laugh since their reunion. ‘To me it looks like deadly
earnest!’

‘It’s a story I have been trying to write
down.’

‘May I read it?’ she asked, and he felt panic
rising in him.

‘Oh, it wouldn’t interest you.’

‘How do you know?’ She lugged the huge typescript
to the table. ‘May I read it?’

He shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t think you will
get far, but if you would like to try—’

She sat down and read the first page.

‘It’s still very rough, you must make
allowances,’ he said.

‘Craig, you still don’t know when to shut up, do
you?’ she said, without looking up. She turned the
page.

He took the plates and glasses through to the galley and
washed them, then he made coffee and brought the pot to the
saloon table. Janine did not look up. He poured her a mug, and
she did not look up from the page.

After a while he left her and slid through to his cabin. He
stretched out on the bunk, and picked up the book he was reading
from the bedside table. It was Crawford’s
Mariners’ Celestial Navigation
, and he began to
wrestle distractedly with zenith distances and azimuth angles. He
woke with Janine’s hand on his cheek. She jerked her
fingers away as he sat up hurriedly.