A History of the Imagination - Excerpt

A TREATISE ON DESIRE Mrs. Willoughby woke, because of an insinuating pressure on her thigh. Hearing her stir on the other side of the thin wall that separated her room from mine, I went to her. "My sleep was disturbed," she said. "By someone who entered through the French windows without invitation and stood -- there, at the foot of the bed. He stood a long time, watching me sleep, with his hand clutching my thigh. Don't ask me how I know."

"Perhaps you dreamt it," I suggested.

She lifted her nightdress so that I might regard five small bruises on an otherwise immaculate leg.

I regarded them gladly.

"One doesn't expect a nightmare mauling to leave marks!" she replied tartly.

"Was any further harm done you?" I asked, turning away to conceal my anxiety.

She was silent a moment, taking stock. Out in Kilindini Harbor, a hippo snorted. A hyena laughed somewhere in the night. She shook her head and sighed: "It is always so when Mr. Willoughby is out seeing to his affairs."

Mr. Willoughby managed the Uganda railroad. I considered placing my hand on Mrs. Willoughby's thigh in his absence, but didn't.

"And what of Lenin?" I asked instead.

She regarded her bruises, then said: "It's been ages since I've had him in my bed."

I cleared my throat meaningfully.

"Oh, Vlady is a very nice lover," she continued, "but too serious. He is death at a dinner party."

She sniffed the midnight air, delicately, through her finely shaped nose. I did, too, though mine is not nearly so handsome.

"There!" she said. "Underneath the gladiola -- can you smell it?"

I smelled nothing.

"A pungency," she said, sniffing once more. "It is always so after I have been alone a while in bed: the pressure of a hand sufficient to wake me, the bruises, and a pungency underneath the gladiola."

In sympathy I put my hand on hers. In sympathy for her bruises the blood came out on my cheeks and my loins congested.

Heavy footsteps sounded on the veranda. I turned in time to see a shadow shamble into the topiary, to be swallowed by the greater darkness of a moonless night.

Mrs. Willoughby leaned over the marmalade dish.

"Will you stay the night with me?" she asked.

My heart jumped inside my safari jacket.

"Of course, delicious lady!"

"You misunderstand," she said in a tone of unmistakable reproof. "I want you to watch."

"Watch?"

(Was Lenin about to take up unlawful residence under Mrs. Willoughby's mosquito net once again while Mr. Willoughby tended to his railroad?)

"To see what visits me in the night."

My heart sank.

She dabbed my mustache with a napkin, to rid it of a crumb of toast. Her eau d'cologne lingered in the breathless Mombasa morning.

"Come; I want to show you something."

She took me lightly by the arm and guided me into the topiary. Beside the carefully clipped thorn-bushes taught to grow up outside her bedroom (ah, Beauty!), she pointed out the trampled grass and, in earth still impressionable after the recently ended rains, two enormous footprints that could only be characterized as simian.

I didn't know it at the time, but the footsteps trodden into the rain-sodden earth outside Mrs. Willoughby's bedroom had been left there by Prince Kong. (The same Kong who, as King, would ravish a jodhpured Fay Wray in the 1930's. In 1910, however, he was a moody young gorilla with as yet no appetite for virgin sacrifice.) He had left the family's hereditary stomping-grounds in Central Africa and, after a long and circuitous peregrination, found himself in Mrs. Willoughby's topiary garden on the outskirts of Mombasa. At the time, many people were helplessly tramping the length and breadth of the continent, transfixed by the walking sickness, which then held sway. To my knowledge, however, no instances of animal contraction of the mysterious malady have ever been verified. Kong, as I would later discover, had been drawn to the open French windows by the strength of Mrs. Willoughby's desire.