5 a.m., maybe 6. The morning drums would begin beating soon. He pulled on his sweat-stiff shirt, dust-cuffed trousers and tight dress shoes.
He opened the door, looked left and right, and raced down the dark corridor, trying not to skid on the flagstones. A rectangle of light glowed before him like a door to heaven – the courtyard. He ran towards it, then he saw Ba George and slowed to a trot. The old butler was wearing a suit, a bow tie squeezing the hanging skin at his neck, and holding a spotty tray. His carriage was painfully erect.
‘Mwashibukeni, Ba Lonode.’ Ba George bowed his head fondly.
‘Eyamukwayi, bashikulu,’ Ronald panted. ‘Do you know where Miss Agnes is?’
‘Mm?’ The old man frowned. ‘Ah, mwebantu, katwishi. I do not know.’
They walked together a few paces. Ba George asked after Ronald’s parents.
‘We have not gone to see them yet, but I will take her to the village soon.’
‘That is very good,’ Ba George said in a disapproving tone, as if he suspected that Ronald would do no such thing. Ronald smiled stiffly, eager to leave the conversation.
‘Ah, look!’ Ba George pointed. ‘There is your Missus Aganess.’
Ronald was so relieved that he didn’t even hear Ba George’s ‘your’, the butler’s kind acknowledgment. But he felt it – that Agnes belonged to him – as he looked out into the old courtyard.
It was a ruin: riven pavestones, piles of broken rocks, ancient hydrangeas clinging together in cracked pots. Barefoot, in her paisley dress, Agnes was standing in front of the birdbath, which was a statue of a woman, head tilted, one knee bent, the hem of her robes curled upward to form the basin. There wasn’t much water inside, and what was there was bluegreen with mildew.
Some tiny creature had decided, nevertheless, that it was sufficient to its needs. It fluttered in the water, strumming up and settling down, sending a spray into the air as fine as the mists of Surrey. Agnes’s face was carved in a look of concentration, her hands raised as if holding a small bowl up to the statue. It took Ronald a moment to understand that she was cupping the air around the winged creature, touching its motions, reading its splashing since she could not see it.
The sun rose an inch and cleared the horizon, sending a ray into the courtyard that touched the droplets that had collected on her forearms, making a flashing rash in her skin. Argus. Ronald remembered it from one of Carolyn’s mythology books. A monster covered with eyes.
‘Did you see that?’ He turned to Ba George. The old butler was frowning and peering at the woman in the courtyard. He slowly nodded his head. But when Ronald looked back at Agnes, the light had shifted, or she had. The eyes in her skin were closed. Agnes brought her cupped hands together and the flurry above the birdbath ceased.
Ronald walked across the flagstones and touched her shoulder gently. Agnes turned to him and cracked her hands open slightly. ‘I think it’s a butterfly.’
He looked inside. It was not a butterfly but a dragonfly – no, a pair of dragonflies, locked in sexual congress, their iridescent wings still spinning in the pink cage of her fingers.
1964
Agnes woke with a start. Something was gripping her ankle – a cold, wet hand. She shook her leg free and turned on her side. She had been dreaming of a forest of blueblack trees – the ones at Shiwa? Lurking in the hollows of their roots was a crouched presence, a hand reaching through the dark. The stretching tendons. The grip. Agnes shivered and patted for the other pillow. Ronald was gone – already at work probably. What time was it? She heard doves cooing and a scratching sound, moving in mesmeric loops. She stretched out her leg and there it was again – a hand closing around her ankle. She sat up.
‘Who’s there?’ she whispered.
The scratching sound ceased. ‘Mwauka bwanji, Madamu?’
‘Grace?’ Agnes smelled the girl’s familiar odour now – Strike soap and Sun Beam polish and beefy sweat. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Me, am just creening, Madamu.’
‘Ka-leaning,’ Agnes said irritably and collapsed back onto her side.
Grace’s English irked Agnes to no end. The girl called the kitchen the chicken and sometimes forced Agnes to get up so that she could wash the shittybeds, which Ronald had explained was the local word for bedsheets.
‘Do you think your fixation on the girl’s pronunciation is a latent sign of coroniarism?’ he