‘How did he hurt you?’
‘He pushed me and I fell.’ She began to cry, so I comforted her. I called Christopher and told him he mustn’t push Anna. They ran off to play again and a moment later Anna was saying: ‘Daddy, Christopher pushed me.’
‘Christopher, you mustn’t push Anna. And you shouldn’t have to be told everything twice.’
‘I didn’t push her. She fell.’
Anna put her thumb in her mouth. I glanced through the trees to see where Elizabeth had got to, but there was no sign of her. I made the children sit on the rug and told them a story. They didn’t like it much. They never did like my stories: Elizabeth’s were so much better.
‘I’m sorry.’ She stood looking down on us, as tall and beautiful as a goddess.
‘You look like a goddess,’ I said.
‘What’s a goddess?’ Anna asked, and Christopher said: ‘Why’s Mummy sorry?’
‘A goddess is a beautiful lady. Mummy’s sorry because she left me to look after you. And it’s time to go home.’
‘Oh, oh, oh, I must find Mambi first,’ Anna cried anxiously. Mambi was a faithful friend who accompanied her everywhere she went, but who was, at the moment of departure, almost always lost.
We walked to the car. Anna said: ‘Mambi was at the top of an old tree. Mambi’s a goddess too. Daddy, do you
‘I suppose so.’
‘Then Mambi can’t be.’
‘Isn’t Mambi beautiful?’
‘Usually she is. Only she’s not now.’
‘Why isn’t she now?’
‘Because all her hair came off in the tree.’
The car heaved and wobbled all the way home as Christopher and Anna banged about in the back. When they fought we shouted at them, and then they sulked and there was a mile or so of peace. Anna began to cry as I turned into the garage. Mambi, she said, was cold without her hair. Elizabeth explained about wigs.
I woke up in the middle of that night, thinking about Mr Higgs. I kept seeing the man as a shrimpish little thing, like the manager of the shop where we hired our television set. He had a black moustache – a length of thread stuck across his upper lip. I knew it was wrong, I knew this wasn’t Mr Higgs; and then, all of a sudden, I began to think about Elizabeth’s brother, Ralph.
A generation ago Ralph would have been called a remittance man. Just about the time we were married old Captain Maugham had packed him off to a farm in Kenya after an incident with a hotel receptionist and the hotel’s account books. But caring for nothing in Kenya, Ralph had made his way to Cairo, and from Cairo on the long- distance telephone he had greeted the Captain with a request for financial aid. He didn’t get it, and then the war broke out and Ralph disappeared. Whenever we thought of him we imagined that he was up to the most reprehensible racket he could lay his hands on. If he was, we never found out about it. All we did know was that after the war he again telephoned the Captain, and the odd thing was that he was still in Cairo. ‘I have lost an arm,’ Captain Maugham told him testily. ‘And I,’ said Ralph, ‘have lost the empire of my soul.’ He was given to this kind of decorated statement; it interfered so much with his conversation that most of the time you didn’t know what he was talking about. But the Captain sent him some money and an agreement was drawn up by which Ralph, on receipt of a monthly cheque, promised not to return to England during his father’s lifetime. Then the Captain died and Ralph was back. I gave him fifty pounds and all in all he probably cleaned up quite well. Ralph wasn’t the sort of person to write letters; we had no idea where he was now. As a schoolboy, and even later, he was a great one for playing practical jokes. He was certainly a good enough mimic to create a Mr Higgs. Just for fun, I wondered? Or in some kind of bitterness? Or did he in some ingenious way hope to extract money?
The following morning I telephoned Elizabeth’s sisters. Chloe knew nothing about where Ralph was, what he was doing or anything about him. She said she hoped he wasn’t coming back to England because it had cost her fifty pounds the last time. Margaret, however, knew a lot. She didn’t want to talk about it on the telephone, so I met her for lunch.
‘What’s all this?’ she said.
I told her about Mr Higgs and the vague theory that was beginning to crystallize in my mind. She was intrigued by the Higgs thing. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but it rings a queer sort of bell. But you’re quite wrong about Ralph.’ Ralph, it appeared, was being paid by Margaret and her husband in much the same way as he had been paid by the Captain; for the same reason and with the same stipulation. ‘Only for the time being,’ Margaret said a little bitterly. ‘When Mother dies Ralph can do what he damn well likes. But it was quite a serious business and the news of it would clearly finish her. One doesn’t like to think of an old woman dying in that particular kind of misery.’
‘But whatever it was, she’d probably never find out.’
‘Oh yes, she would. She reads the papers. In any case, Ralph is quite capable of dropping her a little note. But at the moment I can assure you that Ralph is safe in Africa. He’s not the type to take any chances with his gift horses.’
So that was that. It made me feel even worse about Mr Higgs that my simple explanation had been so easily exploded.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘and what did he have to say today?’
‘What did who say?’
‘Higgs.’
‘Nothing much. He’s becoming a bore.’
She wasn’t going to tell me any more. She wasn’t going to talk about Mr Higgs because she didn’t trust me. She thought I’d put the police on him, and she didn’t want that, so she said, because she had come to feel sorry for the poor crazed creature or whatever it was he happened to be. In fact, I thought to myself, my wife has become in some way fascinated by this man.
