“I think it would be much nicer if we were all married,” Catherine said. “Then no one could criticize us. Will you really marry him, Heiress?”
“Yes,” the girl said.
“I’m so pleased,” Catherine said. “Everything I worried about is so simple now.”
“Would you really?” David asked the dark girl.
“Yes,” she said. “Ask me.”
David looked at her. She was very serious and excited. He thought of her face with her eyes closed against the sun and her black head against the whiteness of the towel robe on the yellow sand as it had been when they had made love at last. “I’ll ask you,” he said. “But not in any damned bar.
“This isn’t any damned bar,” Catherine said. “This is our own special bar and we bought the mirror. I wish we could marry you tonight.”
“Don’t talk balls,” David said.
“I’m not,” Catherine said. “I really mean it. Truly.”
“Do you want a drink?” David asked.
“No,” Catherine said. “I want to get it said right first. Look at me and see.” The girl was looking down and David looked at Catherine. “I thought it all out this afternoon,” she said. “I really did. Didn’t I tell you, Marita?”
“She did,” the girl said.
David saw that she was serious about this and that they had reached some understanding that he did not know about.
“I’m still your wife,” Catherine said. “We’ll start with that. I want Marita to be your wife too to help me out and then she
inherits from me.
“Why does she have to inherit?”
“People make their wills,” she said. “And this is more important than a will.”
“What about you?” David asked the girl.
“I want to do it if you want me to.”
“Good,” he said. “Do you mind if I have a drink?”
“You have one please,” Catherine said. “You see I’m not going to have you ruined if I’m crazy and I won’t be able to decide. I’m not going to be shut up either. I decided that too. She loves you and you love her a little. I can tell. You’d never find anybody else like her and I don’t want you to go to some damn bitch or be lonely.”
“Come on and cheer up,” David said. “You’re healthy as a goat.”
“Well, we’re going to do it,” Catherine said. “We’ll work out everything.”
Chapter Seventeen
THE SUN WAS BRIGHT now in the room and it was a new day.
You better get to work, he told himself. You can’t change any of it back. Only one person can change it back and she can’t know how she will wake nor if she’ll be there when she wakes. It doesn’t matter how you feel. You better get to work. You have to make sense there. You don’t make any in this other. Nothing will help you. Nor would have ever since it started.
When he finally got back into the story the sun was well up and he had forgotten the two girls. It had been necessary to think what his father would have thought sitting that evening with his back against the green-yellow trunk of the fig tree with the enameled cup of whiskey and water in his hand. His father had dealt so lightly with evil, giving it no chance ever and denying its importance so that it had no status and no shape nor dignity. He treated evil like an old entrusted friend, David thought, and evil, when she poxed him, never knew she’d scored. His father was not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him. Finally, he knew what
his father had thought and knowing it, he did not put it in the story. He only wrote what his father did and how he felt and in all this he became his father and what his father said to Mob was what he said. He slept well on the ground under the tree and he waked and heard the leopard cough. Later he did not hear the leopard in the camp but he knew he was there and he went back to sleep. The leopard was after meat and there was plenty of meat so there was no problem. In the morning before daylight sitting by the ashes of the fire with his tea in the chipped enameled cup he asked Mob if the leopard had taken meat and Mob said, “Ndiyo” and he said, “There’s plenty where we re going. Get them moving so we can start the climb.”