Tefuga by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

window. The glass was grey with river-mist and the light of dawn. Jackland, wearing a thin green cotton bath-robe, sat in an upright chair which he had tilted and was rocking with a push of his toe against the corner of the bed. His bed-roll lay in hummocks on the floor. Though their affair had begun abruptly only a few days earlier and was still fresh—still, for him, perhaps, astonishing—he had insisted that his age excused him from having to share a single bed all night. Indeed he did look older at the moment than he had when speaking to the camera, but this was mainly the effect not of his sleeping arrangements but of heavy reading spectacles, which somehow enhanced the hollows below his cheek-bones, edging the mildly haggard a year or two further towards the cadaverous.
    Miss Tressider had aged too, but more deliberately. On set she had contrived to seem barely into her twenties. Now she had relaxed to her own age, some ten years more. She had changed in other ways. It would have been difficult, of course, to imagine the woman who had stepped from the canoe lying in a pose of such feline languor, but there was more to it than that. Her off-stage face, though not so pretty as her press photographs, was much less run-of-the-mill than the one she had invented for her portrayal of Betty Jackland, mouth firm and with a hint of the archaic smile seen on early Greek statues, the chin somehow less bulky, the eyes sleepy and sly.
    â€œI keep saying you should have,” said Jackland.
    â€œAnd I keep saying not till it’s all over. Imagination’s more important than truth, Nigel. You can’t see it because you’re a journalist, really. Betty didn’t know the truth, did she? She didn’t have much clue what was going on, and none at all what would happen next. I don’t want to either. Knowing what’s next in the script is knowing too much—I have to imagine it away. All Betty knew was that Ted was her ticket of escape from that fucking awful father and she’d chosen fucking awful Africa instead, so now here she was in the stink and heat trying to find out how to love her funny old husband.”
    â€œDo you think she did?”
    â€œOh, yes. Not the way she thought, though.”
    â€œI suppose he provided her with a more admirable and adequate father-figure than the one issued to her by the heavenly quartermaster.”
    â€œA bit of that. Oh, I don’t go for that sort of explanation much. It’s all too coggy. We aren’t made of separate bits and pieces. We’ve grown. Branches and roots and leaves aren’t the tree. The tree’s the pattern they make. When I get a part right it means I’ve managed to copy the pattern. I do it by imagination. I just need one or two things to go on. But it’s no use you telling me how Betty held her riding-crop unless I’ve grown into someone who’d hold it like that without thinking.”
    â€œMy mother would not have lain around like a starlet attempting to catch the eye of the Playboy centrefold editor.”
    â€œDo you want me to be Betty all the time, Nigel?”
    â€œNo thanks.”
    â€œAre you sure? Come here, then.”
    â€œI’m trying to read.”
    â€œCome here.”
    Jackland put his Economist down, removed his spectacles, rose and stood gazing down at her. She raised her left arm in succulent invitation while her right slipped languorously over the edge of the bed. He was shrugging himself out of his robe when with that lolling hand she caught the edge of the sheet and flipped it across her body, leaving only her head, arm and naked shoulder visible. She put the hand to her face and with the gesture of an uncle amusing small children by a variety of grimaces slid it downwards, wiping out Mary Tressider and replacing her with the woman who had landed from the canoe. Jackland looked for a moment at the young, tremulous, earnestly bewildered features, then nodded and