Prodigies Page 46

  She was awoken by a loud altercation. People were shouting. Then a shrill scream rang out. Giddy with sleep, she stumbled off the bed and went to the opening of the tent and raised the flap. The sun had almost sunk, the air was already chill. A fight was taking place, with some four or five men milling around together, while the others surrounded them. In Cairo she had once seen a crowd ringing some fighting pariah dogs in the same way. Then she realized that one of the men was Massimo and that two of the other men were holding him while the others viciously kicked and punched him. He saw her, she was sure of that, as he began to scream: ‘Help me! Help me!’

  She ran in her bare feet towards the fracas. ‘ Stop that! Stop it!’

  But they paid no attention to her, did not even look at her.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it at once!’

  ‘Help me! Help me!’

  She ran back to the tent and, with trembling hands, pulled her revolver out from under the pillow of her bed. She cocked it.

  ‘Leave him alone! Leave him! Or I’ll shoot you.’ She raised the revolver and fired up into the sky.

  The men were briefly frozen by the sound. Then she heard their baying, like a pack of frenzied dogs.

  Again she cocked the revolver and again she raised it. She must not kill Massimo. She trained the sights on the man who was tugging at one of his arms, a few inches distant from him.

  As the shot rang out, she felt as though the kick of the revolver had been hugely, agonizingly magnified. She recoiled, she collapsed on to the ground. She heard a confused hubbub all around her. She saw a man with a sword rush at Massimo. She screamed, ‘No, no!’

  Then, as the blood gushed out, she knew that the same sword had all but severed her arm.

  On top of the far-off dune, horse and rider were motionless.

  Epilogue

  IT IS ALL NONSENSE. Why do people, twenty-six years later, still go on writing such nonsense? He told everyone what happened, and others, straggling back to Tripoli either with him or in small groups, confirmed his story. But the nonsense continues.

  It was an Englishwoman, one of his most frequent clients, who this morning brought in the copy of the Morning Post, when she arrived with two of her six children to have them photographed. ‘This may be of interest to you,’ she said. Fearful that he might start reading the article there and then and so delay her, she added: ‘I’ll leave it with you. No hurry to return it.’

  The article is by a well-known Algerian journalist, who claims that, during a journey that he made among the Tuareg, he learned from an old man, once one of the guards on the expedition, that Alexine did not die but, after the murder of Massimo, recovered from the wound, was captured and then sold to a wealthy chieftain by whom she had three children, all still alive. She herself, the journalist says, is dead.

  Sunny puts his head in his hands. It is once more bursting with all the old exasperation, anguish and despair. Nonsense, nonsense! Similar nonsense has repeatedly been written in the past. What is the matter with these people? He was with her when she died, too late to do anything about the nearly severed arm from which the blood was gushing out over the sand. He was with her, he held her in his arms, he tried to staunch the bleeding. When he realized that she was dead, he howled like a dog, endlessly, on and on and on. Later, much later, he and three other men dragged her body to that cave and, having wrapped it in her mackintosh cloak, buried it there, under a cairn of stones. It was he who, as an afterthought, placed the lion head on top of the cairn, as a memorial to her. He remembers exactly the tone of voice, reverential and sorrowful, with which one of the others, a porter from Luxor, said ‘Yes, that’s right, that’s right. She had the heart of a lion.’

  On his return, he recounted this over and over again to all the people, some hostile and some sympathetic, who questioned him. John, of course, believed him at once, because, having known him before, he was certain of his total loyalty to his half-sister. It was John who bought for him the studio and the house that stood beside it, and who told him that he could keep all Alexine’s photographic equipment – which the guards had not looted, since they had no idea of its value or even of what it was. But, none the less, dark, dangerous rumours persisted. People who had never met any of the three of them and knew nothing of them would wonder to each other if his story was really the true one. Might it not be that he and Massimo had both been her lovers and that, in the course of a violent quarrel between the two of them, he had killed Massimo, and she, attempting to intervene, had somehow also got killed? She was, after all, a woman who always defied convention. So why be surprised that she should have had an Italian Prince and an African savage as her lovers at one and the same time?

  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy there was talk of sending an expedition to recover the body. But John at once rejected the idea: she was resting where she would be happiest to rest, not in some cemetery in England or the Netherlands but in Africa, which had always obsessed her and which she had so much loved. In any case, a French military mission, despatched to explore the possibility of laying a trans-Saharan railway, had recently ended in disaster, with its eighty members all either killed by Tuareg or dying of starvation and thirst. Why risk more lives?

  Although constantly busy with the work of his studio – he is the only photographer in the city and he is now far more expert than Alexine ever was – Sunny finds that, after all these years, he thinks far more often and far more intensely about Alexine than in the immediate aftermath of her death. Before locking up the shop and going next door to join his Italian wife and their daughter for dinner, he often takes out the photographs of the expedition and pores short-sightedly over them through the glasses that have a way of slipping down low on the bridge of his nose. He wants answers to his questions: Why did she ever come to Africa? Why, in that stinking market, crowded with slaves, did she decide to buy him and not one of a host of other people? And did she realize that he was there, up on that sand dune, looking down at the carnage and looting below him, cravenly not riding down at once to her aid because he knew that, if he did so, he too would be murdered?

  Having dropped the Englishwoman’s newspaper to the floor, he stares yet again at the many ghostly, tantalizing images of her. Sometimes the mouth and the widely spaced eyes smile up at him. But far more often the whole face is tense with an implacable resolve. He cannot find his answers.

  Giving up, as in the end he always gives up, he reaches for the bag, soiled and battered from the long, desolate trek back to Tripoli. He was bringing it back to her from the patch of scrub on that last, terrible day. Later, he handed over to John everything of value that he found in it – a bracelet, once Addy’s, that she must have removed and slipped into it during their walk; a small jewelled box containing some pills; another box, made of tortoiseshell, containing visiting cards (as though, in the desert, she would hand out to the inhabitants of some oasis these proofs of her identity!). But two things he kept.

  One is a map of Africa covered in a fine network of fines in red ink, criss-crossing each other, doubling back, appearing never to arrive at any destination or perhaps even to have one. The other is a bright emerald shard from some pot made by unknown hands hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

  He stares down at the map. He balances the shard in his hand.

  He is aroused from his meditation by the entrance of his plump, grey-haired but still beautiful wife. ‘What are you doing? What’s happened to you? We’re waiting to eat!’ She leans over him and looks down at the evanescent, enigmatic images spread out before him on the desk. Once again she asks that question that she has so often asked.

  ‘What was that woman to you?’

  But instead of giving his usual reply, ‘Nothing’, this time he says: ‘She was my mother.’

  At that his wife bursts into laughter. ‘She was white. You’re black. How can she have been your mother?’

  This is a work of imagination, not of record. But I owe a profound debt to Pauline Gladstone’s bio
graphy of Alexine Tinne, Travels of Alexine. My other outstanding debts are to Samuel Baker’s Albert Nyanza, Frank McLynn’s Hearts of Darkness, and Timothy Severin’s The African Adventure.

  Copyright

  First published in 2001 by Arcadia

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  Copyright © Francis King, 2001

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