Tefuga by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

pulled his robe back round him.
    â€œAm I to take it,” he said as he sat down, “that your current amiability towards me is an aid to you in your portrayal of a woman sexually involved with a much older man?”
    The harsh public tone was marked. He might have been in front of the cameras, pinning down the slitherings of some industrial spokesman. Miss Tressider twitched the sheet away and re-odalisqued, but answered as though also involved in an interview, cool and serious.
    â€œOh no. I don’t need that. It’s in the imagination. Reality would get in the way.”
    Jackland put on his spectacles and started to read, or to pretend to. Miss Tressider stared at the ceiling.
    â€œHas it been bothering you, Nigel?” she said.
    â€œNot greatly, but it seems an obvious question to ask. One point that emerges strongly from the diary is the way in which two presumably inhibited and, so to speak, uneducated people should have contrived to get so much out of the sex act. One is bound to wonder what it might have been like for them.”
    â€œBut we aren’t like that, are we? Besides, they were in love.”
    â€œI have the grace to pretend on suitable occasions.”
    â€œAnd sometimes I have the honesty not to act. You’re very self-centred­, aren’t you, Nigel? Have you actually loved anyone, ever?”
    â€œNot to my knowledge.”
    â€œBetty?”
    â€œOedipally, you mean? Again, not …”
    â€œI don’t mean. Anyway I shouldn’t have asked. When it’s over you can tell me all about her. I’d like that. I rather go for old Ted, you know. I don’t think he was anything like the stick dear Piers is making him out. I can see quite a bit of him in you, Nigel.”
    â€œI find it hard to imagine anyone more totally different. He was a steady, decent, unimaginative elderly schoolboy who’d come to Nigeria because he could think of nothing better to do with his limited talents, and then proceeded to take the job too seriously for his own good. The only similarity I can perceive is that the old boy could express himself on paper. I’ve read his reports at Kaduna. He could put a case over and he had a spare, accurate, natural turn of phrase. You get the impression from the diary that de Lancey could run rings round him, but they were more evenly matched than you might imagine. Bugger! Where did he come from? That’s not supposed to happen in here.”
    Jackland had slapped at his shin while speaking and now brushed the flattened corpse of the mosquito away.
    â€œShe, not he,” said Miss Tressider. “The blokes are vegetarians.”
    â€œWhy me, anyway? There you are, laid out like a banquet for the Mayor and Corporation of Mosquito City and they home in on my sapless shanks.”
    â€œFemale solidarity, I expect. Keep taking the pills and you’ll be all right.”
    â€œFor malaria. There are plenty of other things. When I was doing the research for this job I read about an A.D.O. who ate some inadequately cooked river fish and contracted a parasite which burrowed into his brain and drove him mad. His servants sent for a doctor who rode thirty miles and arrived to find the man dying. As he bent over the bed to try the pulse the A.D.O. pulled a revolver from under his pillow and shot the doctor dead.”
    â€œCharming. Keep off fish, Nigel. Or go and sleep with the others. Anything else?”
    â€œSleeping sickness, cholera, typhoid, black-water, tetanus, hepatitis—various parasites—there’s a guinea worm in the diary—tick fever—that’s in the diary too, Bestermann died of it—I believe there’s a specially nasty variant round here—river blindness—lot of that because of the spray from the rapids, in fact there’s a W.H.O. project on it at Kiti … You know, the insurance premiums alone on this trip would pay for an hour of screen time shot in the Home