The Dhow House by Jean McNeil Page B

‘I keep my hand in by building swimming pools. In fact I built this one –’ he gestured to the black rectangle of water, just beyond the perimeter of light. ‘It beats camping out for months in Sierra Leone with only warm Coke to drink.’
    She flicked her eyes in Storm’s direction. He was laughing, open-mouthed, at something Evan had said.
    ‘These young people,’ the man said. ‘They’re all so competitive now. It was never like that, for me. We didn’t have much to compete over – no Go-Pros, no Canon Mark Sixes, or whatever the model is now. I have to buy them all for my son, just so he can keep his mates’ respect. That’s what he tells me anyway. In my day we were lucky if we had a car. In fact I had to ask to borrow my father’s, and he charged me for petrol.’
    The hurricane lamps fizzed with random flares of paraffin, mafuta ya taa . Julia had taught her the Swahili term, along with mshumaa – candle. She loved the swish of the words, how they sounded reluctant to let go of themselves.
    As they spoke she tried to catch Storm’s eye. She didn’t know how to read his tone, she realised. In fact she had no idea what he was thinking. All the clues she had learned to decipher and which had worked so well in her favour – the angle of a glance, the set of a mouth, a drift in the eye, a restless right hand – failed her with him. With another corner of her mind she registered Storm’s astonishing effect in the dark light of the dinner table. He was at that fleeting point in life where beauty had the immovable density of fact, like wars or diseases.
    The beauty she encountered in this country was not of any stripe she had met before. In part it was the sun, she supposed, the climate and the outdoor life they made possible. In England these people would look quite ordinary, but here they had taken on the sheen of demi-gods. She had never trusted beauty; beautiful people’s faces were sculpted by other people’s gaze, by the certainty that they will be looked at, and so they never fully belonged to themselves.
    The guests went home at eleven. She woke hours later to a thud somewhere within the house. It was difficult to tell where the sound, dull and insistent, emanated from. She padded down the stairs.
    A figure gleamed in the twilight. It stood next to the pool. In its hand was a rope. Storm turned at the sound of her step. Beyond him, over the lip of the low cliff, dawn was soaking the horizon with opalescent light. His body was dense with shadow. He held up the rope, which spasmed and twitched three-quarters of the way down its body.
    She took a step back just as he turned and walked out to the edge of the patio, beyond the infinity pool. She watched his shoulder blade tense. He drew his arm back and released it – a taut, powerful throw. The snake went flying over the cliff.
    He did not turn back towards her, but walked out into the garden.
    She stayed at the bottom of the stairs, a shock reverberating through her. He did not want her in the house, in the family, he did not want her anywhere.
    She returned to her room. She thought of what she had witnessed the night before from the top of the stairs. Did he know she had seen them? Was that the reason for his hostility. But what had she seen exactly? Young men could have tactile friendships – she knew this from the field, from the army – that they were intimate with each other in a way that women seldom were. She could not say what Evan’s hands on her cousin’s head had been about. Only that the gesture she had witnessed carried a charge. Their nakedness, too, had seemed a deliberate provocation – but to whom? To each other? To Julia, or even her?
    What spooked her most was the lack of recognition in Storm’s eyes when they looked at each other. At times he looked at her as if he really never had seen her before. With this was an absence fellow-feeling so profound it pitched her into a pit of loneliness.
    Perhaps she would take his cue