T. Boyle - Water Music

“What’s this I hear from Edwards?” he says, each word cutting like a sword. He is sitting at the head of the big conference table in his study, shoulders hunched, chin jutting forward, looking for all the world like a bulldog straining at an invisible leash.

“Sir?” Mungo is flushed to the ears. He looks up quickly and then drops his gaze to the glass of claret in his hand.

“Don’t play games with me, boy — you know damned well what I’m talking about.”

“If you mean the Baroness—”

“The Baroness,” Sir Joseph mocks, hanging on each syllable as if it were smeared with excrement. “The woman’s a disgrace. She’s an immoralist, a vampire.”

Mungo looks up as if he’s been slapped. “You’re not being fair — she has her good points.”

“A pair of boobs, Mungo, a pair of boobs. That’s all.” He holds up a palm to forestall any further argument. “I’m not going to debate the subject. I want you to stay away from her. Period. You’re not just some hick from the Borderlands anymore, son — you’re a celebrity, you’ve got a position to maintain. And I’ll be damned if one of my geographical missionaries is going to run around town like some lower primate with an itch in his testicles.

“You’ve been at it for two weeks now — to the detriment of your work on the book, so Mr. Edwards tells me.” Banks’ expression softens a bit.

“We have subscribers to account to, Mungo. The good people who put up the money to buy you this glory that’s gone so quickly to your head. Isn’t it about time you sat down and repaid them?”

He pushes himself up from the table and shuffles over to the sideboard to refill his glass. Then adds, almost as an afterthought, “After all, it’s only words they want.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Words. They haunt him night and day, through his rewrite sessions with Edwards, through breakfast, tea and dinner, words masticated over plaice and fowl, lucubrated at the hour of the wolf, pried from the recesses of his memory like bits of hardened molding. . words that fight one another like instruments out of tune, arhythmic, cacophonic, words that snarl sentences and tangle thoughts until he flings the pen down in rage and despair. He never imagined the book would be such drudgery. After the stark physical challenge of Africa and the heady swirl of celebrity, the last thing he wants is to sit at a desk and push words around like a professional scrabble player.

Of course he does have Edwards. Bryan Edwards, Secretary of the African Association, has been looking out for him at Sir Joseph’s request. Precise, logical and thorough, he is constantly at the explorer’s side, coaching, cajoling, editing, sometimes sleeping the night on a cot in the spare room (Mungo has taken lodgings in London at the Association’s insistence and expense). And yet, no matter how eager and helpful his amanuensis is, Mungo still can’t seem to get himself out of bed in the morning. Every cell of his body resists it. He lies there, feeling hollowed out, a husk, drained and sucked dry. It’s an old but familiar feeling, the terrible devastating Weltschmerz of the boy who wakes with the knowledge that he hasn’t finished his Latin assignment.

One afternoon, the weak winter sun spilling into the room like milk, he turns to Edwards and bares his teeth. “I’ve had it,” he says, pushing back the chair and leaping up to pace round the room. “I don’t give a damn if they strip away my salary and boot me out into the street, I can’t write another word.”

Edwards is sitting at a table heaped with an accumulation of torn and yellowed scraps of paper that could only have come from an overturned wastebasket. He is wearing spectacles, and has the thin-lipped, wateryeyed look of the scrivener. At the moment he is sifting through this heap of crumpled paper — Mungo’s original hat-sequestered notes — looking for a reference to Tiggitty Sego’s cousin’s wife that Mungo insists is there.

“I tell you,” the explorer shouts, “I’d rather be tortured by the Moors again, flayed with whips and scourges and shackled face down in my own vomit, than have to spend the rest of the evening here like some damned copyboy.”

Edwards peers over the spectacles and fixes him with a wet, bloodshot eye. “May as well resign yourself, old man, you’re a celebrity now and you’ve got public responsibilities. You know as well as I do that great discoveries are as much a product of a good warm study as they are of deserts and jungles. Besides,” pulling a pocketwatch from his waistcoat, “we’ll knock off for tea in an hour or so.”

At that moment there is a rap at the door. The servant enters with a card on a tray. “The Baroness von Kalibzo.”

Edwards blanches at the name. The explorer, on the other hand, begins to breathe more rapidly, and his face undergoes a telling transformation — pupils receding, nostrils dilating, a muscle twitching at the base of his jaw — until he looks like a demented stallion sniffing out a mare in estrus.

Suddenly Edwards is at the door. He takes hold of the servant’s elbow for emphasis and announces in a clear authoritative tone that Mr. Park is not at home.

“Not at home? This is — this is too much, Bryan. The lady’s a friend of mine, and — and an aristocrat.” Mungo is standing beside his collaborator now, panting a bit, his face reddening. The servant stares at the floor. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

Edwards looks him in the eye, corporation man to the core. “I’m not asking.” Then he turns back to the servant. “You are to inform the lady that Mr. Park is not at home.”

The door closes with a soft click and the explorer stands there a moment, hands at his sides, studying the flat dull grain of the wood. He looks up at Edwards, who has moved a step closer to the door as if to block it, then strides across the room, flings himself down at the desk, and begins scratching away at the sheet before him with the desperate manic ferocity of the damned.

♦ ♦ ♦

And so it goes, week after week, month after month, invitations refused, lectures declined, friends and relatives snubbed. Mungo has become a prisoner to pen and ink, his fingers blotched like a leper’s, face pale, spine curved until it looks like an odd piece of punctuation. Day after day he stares at the page before him, eyes watering, progress testudineous, thinking he should never have left Selkirk, never challenged his place in life, never set foot in Africa. The man of action reduced to the man of recollection like some chatty doddering old veteran of foreign wars. It’s disgusting. Not at all what he’d thought it would be. A book. It’s a thing on a shelf, complete, ordered, rational — not an ongoing ache and deprivation. After walking nearly fifteen hundred miles he barely stretches his legs anymore. The only time he leaves his desk is to take his daily constitutional — with Edwards at his side, of course — or to make the occasional public appearance under Sir Joseph’s aegis. And when he bridles, Edwards is always there to remind him of his duty.

The target date is June. That’s when they’ll have the shortened version done and he’ll be free to visit Selkirk — and Ailie. Ailie. She looms in his mind like an island in the sea, an oasis in the desert. She is love and life and moral goodness, a buffer against the long African night and the seductive whirlpool of celebrity. How could he have forgotten her? The thought haunts him as he suffers through his London captivity, slave to the desk, the page, the word. Her letters have been increasingly cold and distant, his less frequent than they might be (after sifting through a jumble of words day and night, who has time for letters?). He knows he has hurt and offended her, duty before pleasure and all that, and he burns with a secret shame over his dalliance with the Baroness. He feels like a dog, some loping beast of dark desire and rutting instincts, some jism-addled hyena running with the pack. But then, insidious, the image of the Baroness cuts through his thoughts like a whiff of Eros, her breasts and bush, the hair under her arms, legs spread wide. The Baroness with Ailie’s face, Ailie with the Baroness’s face — can he even remember what Ailie looks like?