Ch. 2: The Wife Behind the Sandbank

Across the bay, behind the long tongue of sand where the river slid into the sea, there was a pool so deep and so still that the herons standing at its edge could see their own legs reflected all the way down. At the bottom of this pool, in a hollow of soft black mud lined with river grass, lived the wife of Ugly-Mug.

She was a handsome crocodile, as crocodiles go, with a long jaw, a fine pale belly, and a temper that the fish of the river had learned to respect. She was not a wicked creature, exactly. But she had a way of turning a small thing over and over in her mind until it had grown into a large thing, and of turning a large thing over until it had become an injury.

The rose-apples were a small thing. To begin with.

The first night Ugly-Mug brought them home, she ate them all and asked where they had come from. He told her, cheerfully, about the tree on the far shore and the monkey who lived in it, and she listened with her eyes half shut and said nothing. The second night, she ate them and said, “Again?” The third night she ate them and said, “You were very late.”

By the end of the month, she had stopped eating them at all. They lay at the edge of the hollow, going soft and brown, while she lay at the other edge with her back to the door.

“Is something the matter, my dear?” said Ugly-Mug, who was not a quick crocodile in matters of the heart, but was not entirely a fool either.

“Nothing is the matter,” said his wife, in the voice that wives of every species use to mean that a great deal is the matter.

He waited. Crocodiles are good at waiting.

“Only,” she said at last, rolling over, “I find it curious. Every night you go away at sunset, and every night you come back at moonset, and every night you bring me fruit, as though I were a parrot to be kept quiet with a handful of seeds. And when I ask where you have been, it is always the monkey. The monkey said this. The monkey told a story about that. The monkey knows the habits of tigers. I have begun to wonder whether this monkey is a monkey at all, or whether it is some lady crocodile with a pretty snout who lives on the other side of the bay.”

Ugly-Mug was so astonished that he opened his mouth and a small fish who happened to be passing swam straight in and straight out again before he noticed.

“My dear,” he said, “he is a monkey. A real monkey. He has a red face and a tail and he sits in a tree. I could not marry him if I wished to, and I do not wish to. He is my friend.”

“Friend,” said his wife, as if tasting a word she did not like the flavour of.

She thought about it for three days. Then she thought about it for three more. And somewhere in that thinking the injury became something harder and colder, the way river water becomes stone in a cave if you leave it long enough.

On the seventh day, she called her husband to her side.

“I have been considering this monkey of yours,” she said. “A creature who eats nothing but rose-apples, day after day, his whole life long. Think how sweet he must be inside. Think what his heart must taste like, after all those years of sweetness. It must be like honey and sugar-cane and the first mango of the season, all at once.”

Ugly-Mug stared at her. “His heart?”

“His heart,” she said. “I want it. Bring him here, and I will eat it, and then I will believe that he was only a monkey after all.”

“But he is my friend,” said Ugly-Mug. “He feeds me. He tells me stories. He gave me the sweetest fruit from his tree on the very first night, when he did not know me from a log. I cannot do such a thing. You must not ask it.”

His wife did not argue. She did something much worse. She turned her face to the mud and said, quite calmly, “Then I shall not eat. I shall lie here and fast until I die. And when I am dead, you may go and sit under your rose-apple tree every night for the rest of your life, and tell your monkey that he cost you your wife.”

And she shut her eyes, and her jaws, and she did not open them again.

Ugly-Mug was miserable.

He swam up and down the pool. He swam out into the bay and back. He lay in the shallows with the river running over his back and tried to think, but his thoughts went round and round like a stick caught in an eddy. On one side was his wife, growing thinner by the hour, refusing even the plumpest fish he brought her. On the other side was the monkey, sitting in his tree, waiting for his friend to come at sunset.

“A wife,” he said aloud to a passing turtle, “is a wife. She is the keeper of the house. The wise men say that a man without a wife is like a house without a lamp.”

The turtle, who had been married for ninety years and had opinions on the subject, said nothing and swam on.

“And a friend,” said Ugly-Mug, to nobody, “is only a friend.”

But even as he said it, he felt something turn uneasily inside him, the way a crocodile feels when he has swallowed a stone by mistake. He remembered the first rose-apple tumbling down out of the dusk. He remembered the stories under the moon. He remembered Red-Face saying that knowledge was like fruit, and its real use was in the giving.

He went back to the hollow. His wife had not moved. Her breathing was slow.

“Very well,” he said heavily. “Very well. I will bring him.”

She opened one eye. It was perfectly bright.

That evening, Ugly-Mug swam across the bay more slowly than he had ever swum it. The sun was low, and the water was the colour of brass, and the rose-apple tree stood up black against the sky like something drawn with a brush. He could see the small shape of the monkey on the lowest branch, waiting.

“You are late!” called Red-Face cheerfully, while the crocodile was still twenty lengths out. “I had begun to think a shark had eaten you. I saved the best of today's fruit; I very nearly ate it myself. Here.”

The rose-apple came spinning down, and Ugly-Mug caught it out of habit, and it tasted like sand.

“What is wrong?” said Red-Face, who noticed things. “You look like a crocodile with a toothache.”

Ugly-Mug had prepared what he would say. He had said it over to himself all the way across the bay. And now, with his friend's red face peering down at him through the leaves, he found that the words came out smooth and easy, as if someone else were saying them.

“My wife,” he said, “is angry with me.”

“Ah,” said Red-Face, with great sympathy. “Wives often are. What have you done?”

“It is what I have not done. She says that you have fed me every night for months, and given me fruit to carry home to her, and told me all your stories, and in all that time I have never once asked you to my own house. She says it is shameful. She says a crocodile who takes and takes and never gives is no better than a thief. She told me not to come home tonight unless I brought you with me, so that she can thank you properly and give you a feast in return.”

Red-Face sat very still on his branch. Then a slow smile spread across his face.

“Your wife,” he said, “sounds like a lady of great good sense. I should be honoured to meet her.”