quite sensible, really; a matter of convenience – though, of course, also rather funny – there were a number of jokes about it current in the village for a time. To her – well, it was not until after the marriage was an accomplished fact that she began to try to understand what it was, and what had brought it about.
At the end of that first winter after Arthur’s death, Johnny had had an affair with one of the women in a safari party that was on its way home to the south. Rita knew about it, because, as usual, the housekeeper had told her. But on the day the party left (Rita knew which woman it was, a woman not young, but with a well-dieted and massaged slimness) Johnny came into the office after the two jeeps had left and plonked himself down in the old cane chair near the door. Rita turned her head at the creak of the cane, to ask him if he knew whether the cook had decided, for the lunch menu, on a substitute for the chops that had gone off, and his eyes, that had been closed in one of those moments of sleep that fall like a shutter on lively, enervated wakefulness, flew open. He yawned and grinned, and his one eye twitched, as if it winked at her, of itself. ‘Boy, that’s that,’ he said.
It was the first time, in the seven years he had been at the hotel, that he had ever, even obliquely, made any sort of comment on the existence of his private life or the state of his feelings. She blushed, like a wave of illness. He must have seen the red coming up over the skin of her neck and her ears and her face. But, stonily, he didn’t mind her embarrassment or feel any of his own. And so, suddenly, there was intimacy; it existed between them as if it had always been there, taken for granted. They were alone together. They had an existence together apart from the hotel and the stores, and the making of decisions about practical matters. He wouldn’t have commented to her on his affair with a woman while Arthur was alive and she herself was a married woman. But now, well – it was in his careless face – she was simply a grown-up person, like any other, and she knew that babies weren’t found under gooseberry bushes.
After that, whenever he came into the office, they were alone together. She felt him when she sat at her desk with her back to him; her arms tingled into gooseflesh and she seemed to feel a mocking eye (not his, she knew he was not looking at her) on a point exactly in the middle of the back of her neck. She did not know whether she had looked at him or not, before, but now she was aware of the effort of not looking at him, while he ate at table with her, or served in the bar, or simply ran, very lithe, across the sandy road.
And she began – it was an uncomfortable, shameful thing to her, something like the feeling she had had when she was adolescent – to be conscious of her big breasts. She would fold her arms across them when she stood talking to him. She hated them jutting from her underarm nearly to her waist, filling her dress, and, underneath, the hidden nipples that were brown as an old bitch’s teats since the children were born. She wanted to hide her legs, too – so thick and strong, the solid-fleshed, mottled calves with their bristly blonde hairs, and the heavy bone of the ankles marked with bruises where, bare-legged, she constantly bumped them against her desk.
She said to him one morning, after a dance night at the hotel – it simply came out of her mouth – ‘That Mrs Burns seems to have taken a fancy to you.’
He gave a long, curly-mouthed yawn. He was looking into space, absent; and then he came to himself, briskly; and he smiled slowly, right at her. ‘Uh, that. Does she?’
She began to feel terribly nervous. ‘I mean I – I – thought she had her eye on you. The way she was laughing when she danced with you.’ She laughed, jeering a little.
‘She’s a silly cow, all right,’ he said. And as he went out of the bar, where they were checking the empties together, he put