by Roger King
I said, “What?”
“I’ve worked it out,” he said, still not opening his eyes. “You’re a Goan Indian Portuguese Arab African of Catholic Moslem parentage.”
“You were listening?”
“Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Of course, the Arabs here are mixed up with all sorts of African blood, and European and Asian, so really it’s more complicated. You’re from everywhere.”
“Please stop, Geoffrey. I’m from nowhere.”
I THOUGHT I WOULD NOT SLEEP THAT NIGHT, BUT I
slept the deepest of sleeps and woke in possession of two messages to myself, from myself. The first was that I should not marry Ali. Perversely, now I knew I was part Arab, it seemed all wrong. The idea was to escape my beginnings, not to be snagged by another part of them. The second message told me that I loved my mother—the one in the next room, not the one who gave birth to me. I felt a rush of loyalty to my distracted Mummy who had brought me up and loved me so well that I had suspected nothing. I wanted to know nothing more about my real history. I didn’t want to be anywhere where I might accidentally learn about my real history. I wanted to be a migrant making her own history.
“Geoffrey,” I said next morning, over tea, “I’m going to the airport with you.”
“You’re going to see me off?”
“No, I’m flying to Dar too. It’s where I live, really. In any case you need a nurse.”
“What about your fiance?”
“I don’t think I’m going to marry him after all.”
Geoffrey looked into his tea for a long while. “Is it my fault? Because of what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“"You know ... the beach. Maybe I shouldn’t ... I mean I liked it. I liked it very much. I like you very much. You’re... lovely.”
“Thanks... No, don’t worry, it’s not because of you.” “Oh.”
I checked myself. What was the harm if he should feel a little responsible? “At least I don’t think so. Not as far as I know. I mean, I do like your company though. I like talking to you. I feel... larger somehow when I’m with you. That’s silly, isn’t it? And you saved my life, don’t forget that.”
“How? I thought you saved mine.”
“The passport.”
“Oh, yes. So maybe you should look after me. Maybe I need a nurse between Dar and London too.”
“You’re inviting me to fly to England with you?” “Maybe.”
“Maybe I’ll say yes, then.”
“Shall I tell the Dar office to buy another ticket?” “Maybe. Should I go and pack?”
I had stopped breathing. I was a hundred feet up on a tightrope without knowing how I got there or where next to put my foot.
He leaned towards me and took my hand. “Marcella, are we being serious?”
“I don’t know. Are we?”
He laughed, looked away, was skittish. “I don’t know either.” Then he kissed me on the mouth, his tongue travelling round the inside of my lips, surprising me, pleasing me, actually. “Yes, come. I think I love you,” he said.
“What?” I nearly laughed. It was so unlike him, this recklessness and passion, that I wondered about his loss of blood, the bang on his head. Then I thought of London. Not England, London. I recalled the dream I had, in which I watched myself at the brilliant party in an imagined London. This was it, my chance to go to the party. Just say the word. But did I love him? Well, I was grateful. I felt warm towards him. There had been that funny, complicated sex, and he might have been hit over the head because of me. And I was different in his company, maybe better. I might. I thought I might. Or that it might not matter.
“All right, then,” I said.
At Dar airport, we waited with the other passengers in a bare cement room with a few chairs—not enough —positioned around the walls. We had passed through the little curtained booth where the security officer had searched our bags and, as it turned out, stolen Geoffrey’s pocket calculator. In the middle of the room, like a museum exhibit, was an x-ray machine with a hand-written out of order note stuck to it with peeling tape. Geoffrey and I were quiet. We had spent the previous night at the Indian-run Empire Hotel where the management gave me possessive looks that said how much they disapproved of the immoral Indian girl with the European man, and how much they desired her for themselves. They would not have guessed that our stay was entirely chaste, Geoffrey too weak, or too something, to do more than sleep.
The door of the waiting room opened directly onto the tarmac, where our plane sat a hundred yards away, radiating heat. I vaguely expected something to happen, someone to stop me. The heat rising from the tarmac would dissolve me before I could cross it. I could not remember exactly why I had so wanted to make this journey. Surrounding our quiet was a group of noisy, sunburned Europeans, a mixture of nationalities, who were excited and bound together by having climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. They were taking the same plane as me, but their journey was entirely different. The country they were leaving was different, their Europe would be different. Geoffrey’s only comment was a sour one, about ignorant Westerners who saw poor countries as their playgrounds.
Already the flight was an hour late. Yet the plane was there and no one could give a reason for the delay. The passengers pressed around the open door to the tarmac, engaging the guard there in conversation as a way to reach the air. “Marcella,” called out a familiar voice from the doorway. “And Geoffrey.” The crowd parted and David passed through the gap, neat in an army officer’s uniform.
“I should have made arrangements for you in the VIP lounge. I am so sorry for the delay. Marcella, I wanted to apologise for not attending your carol party. I had to return to Dar. Happy Christmas, by the way. Geoffrey, are you sure you are well enough to travel? Do you remember me?”
“David was the one who took you to hospital,” I prompted.
“Oh, I didn’t recognise you in your uniform.” Geoffrey’s look of surprise at the approach of a friendly soldier turned into comprehension.
“Well, you were hardly in a state for formal introductions when we met.”
“I wanted to thank you. For everything you did. You may have saved my life.”
“No, no, please. I just happened to trip over you.”
“I didn’t know you were an army officer.”
“Oh, this uniform business ... don’t think about it. Marcella, I see you got your passport all right. I think you had no more trouble with the Assistant Passport Officer?”
“No ... no.” And I knew then that my passport had nothing to do with Geoffrey.
“Here’s my card.” He offered one to each of us. It said he was a captain in the Tanzanian army. “I sometimes visit London. Perhaps I’ll see you.”
“I’ll give you my card.” Geoffrey fumbled with his briefcase.
“Not necessary. I know where to find you. Come with me.” He touched Geoffrey’s shoulder, led us through the knot of tourists, murmured something to the soldier on the door, and guided us across the shimmering tarmac to shake our hands at the base of the aeroplane steps. “Goodbye, my friends. No, au revoir is better.”
The modern migrant, I just expounded for my paper, the notepad resting on knees warmed by a blazing fire, goes where his colonisers came from. It’s not now the monsoon drifts that take us east and west, mingling the shades of brown around the equator, as natural as wind-borne seeds. Now the Algerians go north to France, against the current, the Nigerians to England, the Vietnamese to the USA, transplants obtrusive in the landscape. It used to be, I’ve said, that the migrant travelled until he found a place that reminded him of home and there he settled, his strangeness mitigated by this familiarity. Goans sailing three thousand miles to Zanzibar found the same ocean, the same sort of boats, rice, palm trees, trade, the same heat, the same wind. Now though, I’ve explained, it isn’t a climate suited to his clothing that the migrant seeks, but a familiarity with the language and official ways of late-departed rulers. It’s not trade they follow
but the tailings of their missing wealth.
So, you see, with hindsight, it was just inevitable that I went to England. Ali never stood a chance with his old- fashioned bait of Oman. My terrors, the business with the passport, the slip of Mrs F’s tongue, my deceitful heart, my restless stubborn ways, Geoffrey’s bang on the head, even the mere fact of Geoffrey, all these were nothing in the greater sweep of things, just stones on a road that I had no choice but to walk down.
I am making sense for the takers of sense, spending my Christmas vacation at Moore writing a paper on human migration. I keep from them inconvenient news, that my friends were all adventurers, all in London by their own mischievous choice, for the moral climate and the trade, ready to depart when the season closed or the wind changed. For the students I try to offer something truer and more complicated, because they are children and deserve something better than simple sense, and I have an unused capacity for love.
At Cookham College my researches moved on and, spurred by Mr Drummond’s “cesspool of wickedness,” I went backwards from Bayswater to Zanzibar. I first learned, with disappointment, that the name came from the Persian, zangh for black and bar for coast—nothing more interesting than some early Persian traveler’s view of it as the place where black people lived. But later I found a different, better, explanation: that the name came from Zayn Za ’ Barr, Arabic for, “fair is the land.” We Arabs had brought poetry to the name, feeling, perhaps, that now it had been made part of the Omani sultanate, it deserved a more gorgeous history.
The fair land; the black coast; the cesspool of wickedness. This, I discovered, was the other pleasure in research: not only do all things and people turn out to be connected, but every connection turns out to be unreliable. No one, any more than me, can say exactly where she came from or who she is. I am setting about introducing this subversive concept into my spring courses. They said I could teach anything.
I STAYED WITH HIM JUST SIX WEEKS.
We were tired, arriving in England on the day after Christmas, Geoffrey so sleepy on the journey that I worried he might turn out to be unconscious. In the bus from the airport to Reading he rested on my shoulder while I looked around wide-eyed. England was colored with a child’s plain paints. The road was too simply black, the grass too green, the cars too uncluttered and shiny, their number plates too big and yellow. Under the clouds, the works of man were boldly definite, themselves the source of light. There was a lack of dust, the element that joined everything at home, the fields, the roads, the once-white cars, the hair of pedestrians. The tropical blur of dust and glare. This road was the smoothest I had ever travelled, and the other travellers, languid in their private cars, seemed thrillingly in control as they passed us, speeding on their private tracks.
My excitement was subverted only by the sense that we were going the wrong way. We had arrived at an airport west of London and to get to Geoffrey’s home in Reading we were going further west, leaving the city behind us. When I first saw Geoffrey in Zanzibar he had been standing with his back to the people and the sea, staring at a blank, grey wall. Now his heavy head was on my shoulder, and he was leading me away from London.
We took a taxi from the centre of Reading to Geoffrey’s house. “Who will be home?” I asked, anxious about first impressions.
“No one. I live alone.” He seemed surprised.
“Oh.”
There had been little time for thought and, though Geoffrey was a single man, the only home I was able to imagine was some sort of family household, Geoffrey probably at its head. If I assumed anything, it was a home a little grander than the average, whatever the average might prove to be. There had been the authority of his questions in Zanzibar, the ‘Dr.’ in front of him, the United Nations behind him. If I had pressed myself for specifics, I might have seen poorer dependents craving his attention and a phone that rang off the hook with international callers. Shrivelled grandparents might be waiting in the doorway, ready to take his coat and disapprove of me. Maybe servants. There would be Christmas cheer, of course, but there would also be the question of my suitability as a wife. It could come to that. His awkwardness with women was promising, a portent of seriousness. And he was the cleverest man I had ever met.
The taxi turned into progressively narrower streets until we were in one with barely enough room for us to pass between parked cars. This street was a long, straight dead-end, seeming to diminish to nothing. On both sides we were flanked by long, low brick buildings studded by hundreds of colourful doors and windows, no two alike, and separated from the street by tiny patches of fussy garden.
“A hundred and four,” said Geoffrey to the driver. “Just past the red Escort.”
The information I was receiving about my new life was arriving faster than I could take it in and my first impression of Geoffrey’s home was just the cold clunking of our suitcases against the door frame and a dark interior, musty as a cave.
“I’ll turn on the central heating.” Geoffrey heaved himself up a narrow staircase and out of sight. There was a single room downstairs and, tacked onto the back of it, a little kitchen. I walked there and greeted as a friend the cooker with a kettle sitting on it.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” I called out thinly into the gloom. “Where do you keep the tea?” There was no reply, but my hand wandering across the shelves found, at first attempt, a tin with tea in it and, taking this as a good omen, I returned back through the narrow living room to open the curtains and let in the weak December light. All was silent. There was no movement in the street, not even wind. This was the full stop at the end of a very long sentence.
I found a grubby sweater lying on the couch, pulled it over my head and unrolled the sleeves so that they hung down beyond my chilled hands. The whistle of the kettle wavered, then established a steady keen for me. I gave a slight cough—the damp—and turned towards the noise. “Welcome to my humble abode,” said Geoffrey, arriving next to me, an awkward smile on his face.
“It’s nice,” I lied, looking around. “Lots of books.” Then, uncertain how to continue: “I’m making tea.”
“Oh, you should let me do that. "You’re my guest, Marcella.” But in contradiction of his words, he slumped onto the couch, his outstretched legs bisecting the room.
“No, you’re my patient, remember.”
“As long as you don’t think it’s because you’re a woman,” he replied, mysteriously.
In the next two or three weeks, I read books, two of them, while Geoffrey worked. I spent my long days lying in bed, wrapped in his duvet, the untidy red-brick backs of the neighbouring row of houses my only view. Geoffrey told me that these little terrace houses had been built for workers at the local biscuit factory a hundred years before, but now they were homes for single young professionals like himself, or family homes for immigrants—like me. He was inexplicably proud. From my window I could see Indian women in their kitchens, wooly cardigans over their saris. They looked miserable. Loud music came from the Jamaican family next door. It was good, Geoffrey explained, to live among ordinary people—though I never saw him talk to them.
Among all his dull books on economics I found a book by Dickens—David Copperfield—the only author I recognised. Memorably, the nuns had made us read A Christmas Carol at school, not understanding the terror that ghosts could produce in Zanzibaris. David Copperfield took me to London. He braved loneliness and destitution on his way to winning love and riches. Like me, he was fatherless, not belonging to anyone or anywhere. He had a stupid first marriage before finding happiness and I soon chose to identify with that too. The people he ran into seemed a lot like those I knew from Africa, feckless Micawbers and creepy Heeps with their big ideas and miserable poverty. It made perfect and reassuring sense to me that David Copperfield’s determination and hard work would lead to wealth and happiness.
Geoffrey had another view: that money was the enemy of happiness. Now that I was living inside his topsy-turvy world, it no longer seemed like freedom. He had no
TV because it made you ignorant. No car, because a bicycle was superior. And no visiting London, because the city had nothing important that couldn’t be found here, and it just tore money from your pocket. London squatted monstrously on the horizon, half an hour away by express train. I was more than ready to offer myself as sacrificial virgin.
Geoffrey worked. “My work ...” was his favourite way to begin sentences. By day he was at the university and in the evenings I had to keep quiet while he wrote his Zanzibar report on the living-room table. At night he tossed and turned, caught up in some puzzling anxiety about his status in the University of Reading’s Centre for International Development, a place that appeared to be as riddled with intrigue as Zanzibar, but with none of the consequences. He was much smaller now that he was in England. I tried to comfort him. I cooked. I reached out for him in bed. He said: “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s my work. I’m tense. I’ll get better.”
“I can help you to relax,” I offered, and curled my arm over his back to find and stroke his penis.
“No, let’s just sleep.” He moved my hand up to his heart.
I felt useless and wrong, tied by lack of money to someone who did not want me. I took back my hand and turned away from him, muffling the little coughs that kept me company through the night.
“I love you, Marcella,” Geoffrey murmured, making me cry.
I read David Copperfield as slowly as I could, but it still ended. “Do you have any more books like this?” I asked Geoffrey, my hand still on David.
He looked around his shelves, happy to advise, and said, “Try this one. It’s about a woman.”
Jane Eyre, the other book to save me, affected me in a much more complicated way. Here was another misfit— an orphan—making her way without attachments, this one my size and sex! When Geoffrey came home from work, irritating me by wheeling his bike through my kitchen, I was increasingly impatient. I told him that his anxiety about his work was excessive, that he should have more spirit, more appetite for life. I adopted Jane Eyre’s tart tongue and tried for her precise no-nonsense way of summing things up. Jane saw through people and when a situation was bad she had the dignity to speak out and, if necessary, leave. Then there was Rochester, broad- chested, big-voiced and bursting with passion. When he spoke to Jane, his directness and wit were a perfect match for hers. Geoffrey’s worrying and whining did not compare well to Rochester. Where was our great passion? Jane would never have shared a bed with someone she did not love just because she had nowhere else to go. She’d rather run into the bush and starve. Reading Jane Eyre was working me up into an agitated state. Oddly, it never occurred to me to compare myself to Rochester’s imprisoned foreign wife.