her plate, safely within reach like some potent talisman. At intervals she automatically opened and closed them. ‘When you first arrive here everything seems dark, but then you look at the forest and see the stars burning in the leaves.’ She tapped the glasses. ‘That’s why I wear these, Doctor.’
‘Is it?’ Sanders picked up the glasses and held them in the air. One of the largest pairs he had seen, their frames were almost three inches deep. ‘Where did you get them? They’re huge, Louise, they divide your face into two halves.’
Louise shrugged. She lit a cigarette with a nervous flourish. ‘It’s March 21st, Doctor, the day of the equinox.’
‘The equinox? Yes, of course … when the sun crosses the equator, and day and night are the same length …’ Sanders pondered this. These divisions into dark and light seemed everywhere around them in Port Matarre, in the contrasts between Ventress’s white suit and Balthus’s dark soutane, in the white arcades with their shadowed in-fills, and even in his thoughts of Suzanne Clair, the sombre twin of the young woman watching him across the table with her frank eyes.
‘At least you can choose, Doctor, that’s one thing. Nothing is blurred or grey now.’ She leaned forward. ‘Why did you come to Port Matarre? These friends, are you really looking for them?’
Sanders turned away from her level gaze. ‘It’s too difficult to explain, I …’ He debated whether to confide in her, and then with an effort pulled himself together. Sitting up, he touched her hand. ‘Look, tomorrow we must try to hire a car or a boat. If we share expenses it will give us longer in Mont Royal.’
‘I’ll gladly come with you. But do you think it’s safe?’
‘For the time being. Whatever the police think, I’m sure it’s not a virus growth.’ He felt the emerald in the gilt ring on Louise’s finger, and added: ‘In a small way I’m something of an expert in these matters.’
Without moving her hand from his touch, Louise said quietly: ‘I’m sure you are, Doctor. I spoke this afternoon to the steward on the steamer.’ She added: ‘My aunt’s cook is now a patient at your leproserie.’
Sanders hesitated. ‘Louise, it’s not my leproserie. Don’t think I’m committed to it. As you say, perhaps we have a firm choice now.’
They had finished their coffee. Sanders stood up and took Louise’s arm. Perhaps because of her resemblance to Suzanne, he seemed to understand her movements as her hips and shoulders touched his own, as if familiar intimacies were already beginning to repeat themselves. Louise avoided his eyes, but her body remained close to him as they moved between the tables.
They walked out into the empty lobby. The desk-clerk sat asleep with his head leaning against the small switchboard. To their left the brass rails of the staircase shone in the damp light, the limp fronds of the potted palms trailing on to the worn marble steps. Still holding Louise’s arm, and feeling her fingers take his hand, Sanders glanced out through the entrance. In the shadows of the arcade he caught a glimpse of the shoes and trousers of a man leaning against a column.
‘It’s too late to go out,’ Louise said.
Sanders looked down at her, aware that for once all the inertia of sexual conventions, and his own reluctance to involve himself intimately with others, had slipped away. In addition, he felt that the past day at Port Matarre, the ambivalent atmosphere of the deserted town, in some way placed them at a pivotal point below the dark and white shadows of the equinox. At these moments of balance any act was possible.
As they reached his door Louise drew her hand away and stepped forward into the darkened room. Sanders followed her and closed the door. Louise turned towards him, the pale light from the neon sign below illuminating one side of her face and mouth. Knocking her glasses to the floor as their hands brushed, Sanders held her in his arms, freeing himself for the moment from Suzanne Clair and the dark image of her face that floated like a dim lantern before his eyes.
Shortly after midnight, as Sanders lay asleep across the pillow on his bed, he woke to feel Louise touch his shoulder.
‘Louise …?’ He reached up and put his arm around her waist, but she disengaged his hand. ‘What is it …?’
‘The window. Go to the window and look up to the southeast.’
‘What?’ Sanders gazed at her serious face, beckoning him across the room in the moonlight. ‘Of course, Louise …’
She waited by the bed as he crossed the faded carpet and unlatched the mosquito doors. Peering upwards, he stared into the star-filled sky. In front of him, at an elevation of forty-five degrees, he picked out the constellations Taurus and Orion. Passing them was a star of immense magnitude, a huge corona of light borne in front of it and eclipsing the smaller stars in its path. At first Sanders failed to recognize this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least ten-fold, transforming the thin pin-point of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jewelled flowers that afternoon.
Thinking lamely that perhaps the balloon might be breaking up, forming a cloud of aluminium like a gigantic mirror, Sanders watched the satellite setting in the southeast. As it faded the dark canopy of the jungle flickered with a million points of light. Beside him Louise’s white body glittered in a sheath of diamonds, the black surface of the river below spangled like the back of a sleeping snake.
IN the darkness the worn columns of the arcade receded towards the eastern fringes of the town like pale ghosts, over-topped by the silent canopy of the forest. Sanders stopped outside the entrance of the hotel, and let the night air play on his creased suit. The faint odour of Louise’s scent still clung to his face and hands. He stepped out into the road and looked up at his window. Unsettled by the image of the satellite, which had crossed the night sky like a warning beacon, Sanders had left the narrow, high-ceilinged hotel room and decided to go out for a walk. As he set off along the arcade towards the river, now and then passing the huddled form of a native asleep inside a roll of corrugated paper, he thought of Louise, with her quick smile and nervous hands, and her obsessional sun-glasses. For the first time he felt convinced of the complete reality of Port Matarre. Already his memories of the leproserie and Suzanne Clair had faded. In some ways his journey to Mont Royal had lost its point. If anything it would have made more sense to take Louise back to Fort Isabelle and try to work out his life afresh there in terms of her rather than Suzanne.
Yet the need to find Suzanne Clair, whose distant presence, like a baleful planet, hung over the jungle towards Mont Royal, still remained. For Louise, too, he sensed that there were other preoccupations. She had told him something of her unsettled background, a childhood in one of the French communities in the Congo, and later of some kind of humiliation during the revolt against the central government after independence, when she and several other journalists had been caught in the rebel province of Katanga by mutinous gendarmerie. For Louise, as well as for himself, Port Matarre with its empty light was a neutral point, a dead zone on the African equator to which they had both been drawn. However, nothing achieved there, between
