Chapter 2: Chapter 2
It was getting daylight, and Mary Graves, who knew she would not be able to go to sleep again, watched the light come and climb on the canvass of the tent. The wind was wild outside. She got up from the cot and put on mochanins and an old, belted coat and walked through the empty of the morning into the communal tent and through it to the kitchen. McByrne and Canmore were not up yet, and they wouldn't be up for at least another hour.
There was not much to eat in the icebox and the cabinets were empty of everything but condiments, a can of Cuban coffee, a tin of tea, and a tin of groundnut oil for cooking. Mary knew McByrne bought each supply of food at Maroto or directly from the fishermen at Ileret. It seemed resupply was due again today. She found some eggs, though, and bread. So at least the kids wouldn't go hungry.
Mary boiled some water and made herself a pot of tea and took it and a cup and a chair back outside. The sun was fully up now, and she sat in her chair and drank the hot tea and looked at the tents and the trucks and the site in the fresh, bright sunlight.
She notched up her collar.
The camp was pitched by the few wide-topped acacia trees some hundred yards from the dig site. With a boulder-strewn cliff some three hundred behind them, and a stretch of twigged vegetation that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream, with the cliffs and the dam and the mountains behind.
The tea would dull her hunger for a moment, Mary knew. It would soothe the hunger and ease the nervousness of being on site. In London she would have eaten a big breakfast upon waking. It had been too rough to cook on the way here and she hadn't wanted to make time for it, and Bates and Jackson had eaten a couple of sandwiches with thick slices of raw beetroots while on the road. It wasn't McByrne's fault, Mary knew. Part of the reason why they kept everyone else out of the kitchen was so that they wouldn't be left with no food before the next supply came in.
I should get some canned stuff and keep it here, Mary thought. But I'll have to put it in a cabinet with a lock to be sure McByrne doesn't use it up and I'd hate to lock up food in his kitchen.
There were some dead branches broken off the dead ceiba tree where Bates's tent stood pitched, and they lay too close for her liking. Mary made a mental note to have it taken down.
At least the wind has calmed, Mary told herself. For now, just see that it gets done before tonight.
Now that the wind had softened, the warmth of the day began to rise from the wadis. It reminded Mary of the warm evening in '29 there on the steep cobbled street in Aveiro that ran down to the port, Charles and her sitting at a café table with their sleeves up eating the cod and shrimp out of a pot full of hot broth, drinking a sweet liquor from Lousã that tasted the way syrup smelled, and watched the wind blow the clean wash on the lines overhead, and the cruise passengers and the tourists as they climbed the steep cobbled street with the smell of saffron and peppers lashing at them.
That had been one of the good ones, she decided. They hadn't had much time before they took the boat from there to Peru, but they'd spend that time well. They'd spend it being happy. It had been horrendous liquor, though. No matter how good the cod had been.
I should stop thinking of food, Mary thought. And get up and going before the kids wake. Why haven't I seen Henderson, yet? He's usually up before I am.
She frowned. Some noise came from the kitchen.
The nights in Peru had been even better, she supposed. After the first two weeks on the site close to Trujillo they'd met back in the hotel, where the bar was open, and they'd ordered another bottle and they'd felt relaxed and happy to be in each other's company.
It had also been months before Eva Velazquez-Raquel. So that was nothing to measure anything on. Something below her sternum clenched mercilessly at the thought.
From the corner of her eye, Mary watched the tall figure of Henderson make its way towards her. Prof Jacques Roels Henderson was a tall handsome man with the appearance of one about to become forty years of age, although he was but two years Mary's senior. His genial and good-humoured disposition was hidden beneath a face that seemed sad and serious, and from afar his whole person presented a robust and weary aspect. It was the kind twinkle in his eyes that accounted for his real disposition, and the playful wickedness underneath.
Henderson sat himself down on the upturned stack of crates next to her and relaxed against the back. In one hand he held a bowl of leftover irio from yesterday. Mary ignored it, her mind still at Trujillo and Eva.
"How's your back?" She enquired, looking down into her cooling tea.
"Well. Very well," he said. "You wanted some?"
Mary looked at the bowl. "Where did you get it?"
"Kitchen." He spoke. His voice was still raw from sleep.
"I went to the kitchen."
Henderson studied her. And, lifting the bowl to his mouth, Henderson asked: "Something's bothering you?"
"No." And Mary regarded the horizon without discerning anything. It was the end of March, already. "Although it's surely going to rain soon."
"Fine."
"Not now. But soon."
Then Silva was suddenly before her, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and blinking and pushing for something clearer as he nodded at them both in greeting. Rodrigo Silva was long and dark with a strong neck and shoulders and a swimmer's physique. He had a gentle face and a bright personality although in comparison his face looked aloof. Mary knew it were just his eyes that made him reticent when he was thinking or concentrating on something. When he spoke, it were those same eyes that brought his face to life.
"I don't think we'll have as much as a drop today. And the wind might even be calm," he said, laughingly. "And McBryne send someone to Lorokon to get us something for tonight."
Mary asked him if he had tested the pulleys since they had been in store, and the man said he had tested them the day before yesterday.
"And I send Wilson to get some tins and plenty more inunction." Silva said. "Do you want the eggs?"
"Sure."
"I can get them." Henderson spoke.
"I want to," Silva said. "Siempre hay huevos," he added tiredly. He went inside, greeting McByrne loudly. Henderson looked back at her.
"Any reason why you're so agitated?" He spoke.
"None."
"Just your average morning, then?"
Mary glanced at Jackson as he emerged from the tent he shared with Silva. "Yes."
"How's Charles?" He then said. Clearly. Expressly. Henderson regarded her profile, and Mary did not meet his gaze. "Did you call him, yesterday? Does he know you're back early?"
Mary looked down at her cup again. "What did he tell you?"
"Did you really not see the irio?"
"It's plain."
"It's good. It's local. Are you going to call him tonight?"
"He'll be sure to be asleep by the time we're done."
"Mary—"
"He's tired." Mary shrugged and looked away. She didn't want to think about Charles. She only just stopped thinking about Eva. "He's always tired these days."
Mary felt Henderson study her for another moment. Inside the tent, Silva laughed at something Jackson had been telling him.
"Alright." Henderson said.
"Alright?"
"Alright," he just said. And then Silva came out again.
They worked well into midday after keeping for the early morning. The sky remained clear, and the birds hung low and circled high.
At the site there existed a protective patern of life. It was a pleasant routine of working hard; of hours of digging and studying and cleaning; pacing and cataloguing and making sure all was well-cared for; of meals and drinks to look forward to and new discoveries to be made and many old discoveries to be reevaluated. It was a routine that had many of the habits that lonely people have to busy themselves with but never talk about.
On the third morning, Mary Graves woke to the sight of Henderson standing with booted feet in the river. A line between his fingers. She walked up to him, greeted by his smile, and was slightly surprised that the water did not come above halfway her shins.
"It gets deeper by the bend." Henderson indicated a natural injunction some fifty yards behind them. He eyed Mary's pipe. "You smoking again?"
"Sometimes." Mary said. "There's anything here?"
"Not doing it to catch anything. What's the occasion?"
"Do I need one?"
"Fine. Don't tell me."
Henderson regarded the sun that came up over the colossal dam curving grandly across the upstream cliff, and held the line. The spare vegetation seemed almost crude against the onslaught of browns and reds of the mountains. The din of the first labour shift on the dam was carried over on the wind. Teams were constructing the barrage monstrosity. Concrete was being poured into the wooden formers. Surveyors were lining up sights along the dam. The wadis was alive with men, diggers, tents.... and some two miles downstream, the smoke clouds of the rhodolite mine.
"I smoke as another would drink." Mary then murmured around the pipe. "I smoke against poverty, and dirt," Mary nodded at the dig site, "running noses, roofs made from scraps, untreated syphilis, infested poultry, and the broken radio," Mary said. "And because I've nothing else to bother myself with."
"The radio's broken?"
"Mmhmm—" she lowered her pipe. "Not yet."
"Preventative smoking."
"Thank me later."
"That's a hell of a thing to do."
"Don't look too closely at it."
"No. Instead you do it the way they used smelling salts in the old days."
Like Dr Allen Gould, Mary thought. Old, damned man that he'd been. He'd been their mentor in '19.
"No. Not quite that." Mary said. "Sort of a combination of that and the way they smoked at The Mundi."
Whatever I need to tell myself, I suppose, Mary thought. I'm always doing it against something or for something now. But lots of times I'm just smoking. And by the looks of it, I'm going to do quite a lot of it today. At least I'm not smoking against going to see the governor, she thought. And that's something I'm going to put off for another few months if I can.
Mary remembered The Mundi very well. With its dirty old, ragged counter and its tables of students and low ceiling and the fireplace that ran hot winter and summer. But that had been before Trujillo and before the massacres and even before her marriage.
Mary put her hands on her lower back and leant backwards to relieve the pressure and fell into step as Henderson waded back to the banks. She regarded the site. Sand and thorny scrub between the trucks. And she regarded the wadis and the cliffs and squinted as she imagined a figure carrying a rifle on the cliff upstream. But once again the sun was in her eyes and she couldn't be sure.
"I've seen them as well. They hung around say, yesterday, and got away at first light," Henderson spoke up from his haunches, storing the line and the rod. "I saw them go."
Mary put one hand in the pockets of her old coat and held the pipe with the other and looked down to watch Henderson. "What were you doing up, then?"
"I couldn't sleep after I stopped reading and I wasn't very good company for myself so I went upstream and sat around."
Mary looked back in the direction of the figure. "Does Gerbrandy know?"
Henderson rose and shrugged. "I mentioned it first time I saw them. He didn't seem like he could be bothered."
"Should we?"
Henderson shrugged, but his mouth pulled thin, and he looked at the figure with some far-away reluctance behind his eyes.
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