CHAPTER 11

On the non-stop flight to London Blanchaille sat beside Mr Mal who explained that he was a fleeing Asian. Blanchaille said he thought that Asians had stopped fleeing Africa, but Mr Mal replied that Africa was still full of fleeing Asians, if only you looked around you. Mr Mal had fled from Uganda to Tanzania, from Tanzania to South Africa, and he was now fleeing to Bradford. He spoke of Bradford in the terms of wonder American immigrants must once have used about California. In his opinion the Asians were the Jews of Africa. It was amazing, Blanchaille thought, just how many people claimed to be the Jews of Africa. President Bubé in a celebrated speech claimed that distinction for the Afrikaner; Bishop Blashford was not above claiming it for harassed Catholics in the days when they were often persecuted by the Calvinists as ‘the Roman danger’. President Bubé issued a statement declaring that the Catholics could pretend to be Jews or Methodists or Scientologists for all he cared, but while subversives threatened the country under the cloak of religion, he would show no mercy… (this a reference to the flight of Magdalena dressed as a nun). Let them go around in prayer shawls and yarmulkas if they liked, the security forces would root them out. Newspapers discussed this animatedly. CAMPS FOR CATHOLICS? the headlines wondered excitedly, and BUBÉ PLANS POGROM? What did the real Jews of Africa call themselves — with so many people competing for the title?

There was a large party of deaf-mutes travelling on the plane, pleasant young people who seemed quite unaffected by their disability. Blanchaille watched a young man in blue jeans and a red shirt carrying out an animated conversation with his girlfriend. He was a walking picture show. He held his nose, pulled his ears and seemed able to rub his stomach and pat his head simultaneously. He also did impressions: a boxing referee counting his man out, the drunk in the bar thumping his chest angrily, he opened bottles, he snatched a hundred invisible midges out of the air, hitched a ride, sent semaphore signals across the cabin. His fingers, his hands, his busy silent tongue that lapped against his open lips were altogether an eloquent and loquacious display. His hands and fingers flew, pecked and parroted, swam in the air, signalled, sang, played the old game of scissors, paper and stone. They were an excited aviary those flying hands, moving hieroglyphics, they signalled the meanings which words, if they had tongues of their own, would picture to themselves. His girl appeared to listen to him with her nose. Frequently her eyes applauded. He almost envied them their ability to talk so openly without fear of being overheard. He wished he knew why he had been routed through London. Beside him Mr Mal dozed, and cried out in his sleep of the pleasures of exotic Bradford.

Nothing prepared Blanchaille for the shock of finding her waiting at the barrier.

She took his trolley from him despite his protests and led him through the automatic glass doors into the thin uncertain sunshine of the English spring. He gazed at her, the thick blonde hair was pulled behind the pretty ears and expensively waved. Her perfume enveloped him in waves of warm musk. Magdalena looked chic and well cared for. He watched her small, square, capable, deft hands on the steering wheel. He couldn’t believe he was sitting beside her again.

‘This is kind, Magdalena. But not necessary, really.’

‘Not kind or necessary. Blanchie, it is absolutely essential!’

He sat back in the car and watched the huge clouds passing low overhead like enormous aircraft showing their massive bellies. The sky in England seemed very low. That was his only observation to date. Magdalena had hugged him mightily and noted his weight increase. ‘Too much beer,’ she said affectionately.

In the old days Father Lynch had remarked on the abundance of Magdalena’s affections. She resembled her biblical namesake, he said, and much would be forgiven her for she loved much, or more accurately she loved many. That was true. The altar boys had heard of Magdalena’s powers as one hears of a wonderful cave of diamonds from which everyone is free to help themselves; of a hill of cash; a love goddess one dreamed of, panted after and never expected to get and who suddenly announced she was giving away the lot, for the asking.

Van Vuuren had announced the miracle: ‘There’s a girl called Magdalena. She gives.’

‘How much?’

‘Everything.’

It seemed inconceivable, a colossal lie. One could not accept the alarming hugeness of this claim. How much did she give? And what exactly did that wild generalisation mean? Did she pet? Did she French kiss? Did she allow her bra to be removed? Was it possible to go any, well, further?

‘Piss off,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘You’re an unbelieving lot. I said the lot. I mean the lot. Everything.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do you think?’

‘You didn’t? Just like that.’

‘We don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care. But you can try for yourselves.’

And they did. Zandrotti first, followed by Ferreira and both returned glowing from the encounter, enchanted and absolutely converted, aflame with new faith and zeal. In her arms they had passed from uncertainty to deep belief. She was a miracle, a blessing! Kipsel confirmed, and Van Vuuren looked knowing, the veteran. Blanchaille held out in his scepticism. His unbelief was of Augustinian proportions and he prayed that it be strengthened with each fresh report of his friends’ success, with Zandrotti’s tears, always emotional, in recalling how amazingly easy it had been, she had been. She had just opened up and took him in and there he was, doing it like he’d been doing it all his life.

‘What — without precautions?’

‘Sure. When are you going to do it, Blanchie?’

‘Soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Just soon.’

‘You’re chicken.’

‘No, I’m not. Look, all right, it happened with you but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will happen with me.’

And it did seem to him too fast and too far. Too implausible. Sexual intercourse was something that clearly required longterm planning, something worked up towards, a large project studied in the old Chambers’s Encyclopedia of 1931 which he found in the hostel library and which dwelt in detail on the fertility rites of remote tribes in New Guinea. Not something you nipped in for on a Saturday afternoon. But it was for Saturday afternoon that it had been arranged and he was to be driven there by Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, Kipsel and Ferreira, in Van Vuuren’s brother’s bottle-green MG. It occurred to him that they feared that unless they took him there themselves he might not go, he might just say he’d been… He denied it vehemently but knew it could well have been true.

To Blanchaille’s horror Magdalena’s parents were at home, something which deterred his grinning sponsors who began a swift retreat and left him with the miracle herself, a broad-shouldered, solid, commanding, shapely girl with a mature manner and a shrewd assessing look in her blue-grey eyes. Backing out with embarrassed grins his friends mumbled shamelessly about ‘getting home’, probably regarding the afternoon as lost. Suddenly the parents also left, claiming with what Blanchaille considered false sincerity that they’d remembered an urgent appointment at the bowls club. Blanchaille was contorted with shame and rage; could the parents of the easiest girl in town play bowls? Surely they knew why he was there and were not going to allow it? Could they remain slumped in deck chairs over their brandies after playing a couple of taxing lengths on the green without a care in the world about what their daughter was doing with her young friend?

Obviously they could.

Magdalena had sized him up with a practised eye. Blanchaille thrust his hands into the pockets of his grey raincoat which he had worn, not against the weather, but simply because it hid the frightful khaki shorts all the hostel boys were made to wear. What happened next was a blur. She did not ask him to sit down (speed was always her strength), she crossed the room, kissed him hard, so hard she lifted him off his heels. In his confusion he thanked her but she did not seem to require thanks. Indeed, seeming to regard all conversational niceties as superfluous she pushed him down onto the sofa and attempted to spread him out. The fear of her parents returned. His own unpreparedness plus some foolish juvenile desire to preserve at least a vestige of the romantic formality made Blanchaille resist her advance, bracing his legs, refusing to straighten the knees. Magdalena left off pushing and went to the heart of the matter by loosening his belt, lifting his shirt, easing him, fingering him, making him ready. All this with the one hand while the other, on his chest, pinned him firmly to the sofa and then directing his hands beneath her skirt, obliging him to lower her pants, wriggling expertly as she sloughed them off and planted herself upon him. Blanchaille attempted to say something but his tongue had thickened in his mouth and all that came out was a low gurgle. He thought afterwards that perhaps what he’d meant to say was something like: ‘Shouldn’t we at least close the curtains?’ But the moment was gone, passed before he knew it. She moved once, twice, three times and Blanchaille was afloat in that warm sea he’d just entered.