by Roger King
It’s hopeless, the pictures are too small and of too poor quality. According to The Guardianthey are of two Indian businessmen who were found dead in a South African hotel, and who have now been linked by investigators to the BCCI. Neither the South African nor the Indian government admits them to be their nationals. One could be Benji. But the face is shadowed and the expression much grimmer than any expression I ever saw on Benji’s face. I wonder if the photo was taken from a corpse. All I can make out is that the man is about the same age as Benji would be now, and balding. A rounder face, but then there would have been time for Benji to put on weight and coarsen. He has a moustache, though it’s not quite the same shape as Benji’s. He’s wearing a collarless Indian shirt, which does not seem like Benji at all. I’ve been using all my intuition to make the photo speak to me. But nothing. Nothing is passing between me and the man in the photo.
Geoffrey never met Benji and I’m half regretting that I told him in my letter of my decision to search. He says he thought twice about sending me the clipping, only from what he knew it seemed like it might be relevant. He would try to find out more for me if I wanted, but he’d already held on to the clipping for nearly a year.
I’ve ignored Gabrielle’s advice and written to Monique asking her to press Adnam, and I’ve sent a second letter to Adnam, this time to his old London address. I’ve abandoned caution. My empty days feel like enemies now and I don’t see much hope in the flowers and trees, which have been looking foreign and exotic to me recently. You don’t walk through the woods here, you walk into them and disappear. They are limitiess, engulfing. I’m told there are bears. I might flee if there was somewhere to go. Neither Britain nor Tanzania would welcome me.
Somewhere between the hopeful innocence of Benji’s hopeless business schemes and this photo of a dead man’s face, all spirit drained from it, life teetered. It staggered step by step from innocent to sinister, from a sense of satisfactory order to a powerlessness. Each little step was too small to see then: coincidences, crossed boundaries, broken understandings, accumulating proofs that the world was not ordered as I believed.
The meeting Adnam had organised for us turned out to be at the St John’s Wood mansion that I had visited on my first day as Ismael’s poodle and had since forgotten. This coincidence should not have surprised me, except I assumed that everything from that time was finished.
“This is Marcella from Zanzibar, Benji’s associate. Marcella, this is my countryman, our distinguished host.” Ashraf held my eyes with a twinkle while our diminutive host smiled gently and in accordance with proper Moslem decorum did not offer this woman his hand. He stayed small, still and quiet, a denial of power that only served to assert it. “And this is our host’s wife, Zareen, so famously elegant. Adnam and Monique, the lovebirds, you know of course.”Ashraf dipped and pirouetted to make the introductions, movements that demonstrated the thickness of his thighs compared to the daintiness of his feet.
“Actually, I already know Zareen too.”
The tall, graceful woman searched my face with her dark eyes. “I’m sorry, Marcella. I thought I recognised you, but I can’t remember from where.”
“I’ve visited your home before. With someone called Ismael who knew your husband. We played Scrabble with your son. Years ago.”
“Oh, yes! I remember. But you look different.”
“My dresses were shorter in those days.”
“Perhaps it’s that. But you look wonderful anyway. So, I’m lucky today. I have two friends to visit me. Come—Monique, you too—we’ll go into the drawing room, leave the men to their business. My boy is a teenager now, you know, Marcella. He doesn’t like to play games with his mother anymore. Do you and Benji have children?”
Zareen walked ahead, leading us away. I looked back to catch Benji’s eye. The idea was that Benji had come here under the sponsorship of Ashraf and Adnam, to secure BCCI backing for a deal. My temporary five million had something to do with Benji’s credibility and I should have been there with him. I feared for him. Our host was money, Ashraf army, Adnam influence. Benji only had his faith in himself to win a place in this company, and that fragile thing, I believed, was assigned to my care.
Benji mouthed across the room, “It’s OK,” and pushed the palms of his hands downwards like a prophet calming seas. He wore his serious business face, the one that was not really him.
“Marcella,” said a voice in my ear, “I’ve missed you.” It was recognisably Monique’s voice with its unruly strength, but her efforts to moderate its exuberance seemed to have cracked it and made it tremulous. I looked down at the hand on my arm: Monique’s long, lovely, fine-grained fingers, now freighted with expensive rings. The change was sufficiently disturbing that I turned away from Benji and the men to look at her. Her wild cape of hair was caught and tamed, and instead of one of her light dresses that seemed barely applied to her body and which spoke of Paris and the tropics in a single breath, she was encased in a couture suit with gold braiding and gold buttons. I took in her huge eyes and found an apologetic look there. “I’ve been ill,” she said. “They say it’s a post-natal something.” Her hand shook slightly.
By the time I could take my eyes from Monique, the men had gone. For the thesis I wrote in prison, where I reinvented order, I made Monique Case Study A, and counted her as a success. The light-skinned daughter of a Mauritian Creole family had escaped the limitations of her caste by migrating to Paris and then to London, where, newly polished and free of social restraints, she had traded her beauty on the international market and snagged a millionaire. I ended the story there, my heart hardened against sadness, and the knowledge of her ruin.
“No,” I said to Zareen as we settled into armchairs in her drawing room, “no children. We’re not married.”
I sat between these two lovely, wealthy wives, with half my mind on Benji and the different conversation in another room. A servant brought us tea and little cakes and Zareen questioned me about my business and about owning my own home, and whether Benji wanted to marry me. My answers led to thoughtful silences which I fancied was the sound of Zareen dreaming of my life for herself.
“I don’t think that Benji’s the settling-down type,” I said. “And I’m not sure I am either. What would I have that I don’t already have?”
“You’re so independent,” said Zareen. “I do admire your courage. You don’t miss children?”
“Oh, there are enough children as it is. No,” I corrected my glib and inconsiderate reply, “I love children. It just hasn’t happened. Wrong man, maybe. Of course,” I turned towards Monique who was being careful with her cup and saucer, “I never had Monique’s opportunities.” She looked back at me, trying to imagine who this Monique was who had had so many opportunities. I elaborated: “So many men chasing you. So many parties.” To Zareen I explained, “Even Benji was one of Monique’s first,” and then back to Monique, “Did I ever thank you?”
Monique thought, then said, “I did, didn’t I, go to a lot of parties?” Then she frowned like a small girl confronting an insoluble arithmetic problem.
“Monique,” I said, “you’ve only been married eighteen months. "You can still go to parties.”
“No,” she replied simply, as if to everything.
I waited until bedtime, and Ashraf’s departure to his room, to ask how the meeting went.
“Well. It went well. Ashraf knows everyone in Pakistan.”
“Are we doing business with Pakistan?”
“I am. Among other places.”
“Benji, what are you cooking up?”
“I can’t tell you. Not yet.”
“What do you mean you can’t? I was supposed to be there. What about all that money in my account?”
“That was Adnam’s. It’s gone now. I just don’t want to tell you yet, Marcella. It may not happen. I’m sorry. It’s much better you don’t know for now. For your sake. Trust me.”
I hesitated, on the edge of anger, then thought I must. I pu
t my hands to his throat, but only kissed him. “Singapore man. All this mystery. You’ve always been in love with mystery. Give me a clue at least. Not mercenaries to Fiji. Or Idi Amin?”
“No, no small stuff like that. It’s a commodity deal. Buying one place, selling another. That’s all. But it’s just better to be discreet. For now.” He paused, removed my hands from his neck and held my shoulders with his own. “This time it’s different. This time I’m in the right place. It’s right.”
“OK, it’s right. But don’t expect me to deal with the telephone calls. Just bring yourself to bed.”
“I’ll join you in a minute. I have to have a word with Ashraf.”
News from England barely reached us in Bayswater. I caught sight of items on the TV news and skimmed them in the paper but they were stories from a foreign place. Since I first arrived, I had not left London. Among my friends and neighbours, the English were less well represented than Arabs, Indians and half-a-dozen other varieties. I had not even visited outer London. My world was central London with a thin extension arm west down the M4 to Heathrow Airport, from which members of my world departed and arrived. Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi were closer and more important than Yorkshire and Wales. The news from England was baffled and muffled by our noisy Babylon before it reached my ears.
As far as I could tell England at that time was all riots and police. Striking coal miners were shown fighting with police in various remote places. The police were battling people in the cities too, mostly black people, West Indians—Afro-Caribbeans, according to Kamara’s correction of the news reader—protesting earlier actions by the police. Even in London there were riots, but not in my part of London. The pictures on the TV were of police with shields and truncheons, houses on fire, men with blood coming from their heads, and Mrs Thatcher explaining it all very carefully and very slowly. We turned the sound off when Mrs Thatcher came on. We were the sort of free market entrepreneurs she said that England needed, but none of us liked her. It was clear that we were not the shade of entrepreneur she had in mind.
England was in revolt, but Bayswater was doing well. People were crowding in from all over the world and property prices had gone sky-high. The news from England was only real when it actually stepped on us. When Mrs Thatcher abolished the London government, the Greater London Council and its leader, Ken Livingstone, with it, I was caught unprepared. We all liked the cheeky young man who had lowered the tube fares and stood up for Londoners. He wasn’t the pompous Henry Drummond-Lord Cramp-Mrs Thatcher sort of English person. We felt he would have fitted in at Hereford Road, would have sat right down on the floor cushions and joined in the talk. How could a city’s government be completely abolished just like that? Not just replaced, abolished. Even in Zanzibar it would have been shocking. The GLC had a big building opposite the Houses of Parliament that looked equally important and permanent. This was a coup, a rug pulled out from under us, proof of the existence of arbitrary power. Because I had followed events so loosely the news came as a shock. I had taken England to be reliable beneath the surface, well regulated, entirely different from Africa, and I felt personally betrayed to discover it was not. People died in coups.
Even more upsetting to my sense of balance than the London coup was a modest plan to privatise Porchester Baths. This was news landing right on my big toe. The swimming pool was the first place that I had made my own in Bayswater, before I came to think of all Bayswater as mine. Recently, with my new affluence, I had become a regular at the more expensive Russian Baths section. I went there for steam heat, dry heat, all sorts of heat and water at any time of the year. I treated myself to massages there. Sometimes I treated Gabrielle. I drank tea on the deck chairs between the potted plants and chatted like a queen with other foreign women. This was my place. Now Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives wanted to develop it, modernise it and sell it to the highest bidder. There was to be a public meeting and, stiff with the resolution to take control of my world, I decided to attend.
This meeting was my single public act in London. I was convinced that I had a right to be heard. I was a regular customer and a prominent local resident. I might be an illegal immigrant, unable to vote, but in the United Kingdom of Bayswater I was a citizen of good standing.
The meeting was held in Porchester Hall, part of the same building that housed the baths. A row of Conservative men sat facing us and told us what they were going to do. I looked around the hall. There were at least a hundred white faces with a sprinkling of brown. The public was given their turn to speak. Members of swimming clubs talked of their love for the pools, others admired the architecture and the elegant varnished changing cubicles that bordered the pool and were so convenient. People were taking the words out of my mouth. Nobody liked the plan for taking out the cubicles and making room for squash courts. I found that the place I thought I had cherished in isolation was cherished by a whole community. I put my hand up then pulled it down. Then put it up again.
“Yes,” the chairman said, pointing in my direction, so that I looked behind me. “'Yes, you.”
“I just want to say how much I like the woodwork around the pools.” My voice wavered; I was astonished and unnerved to find myself standing up to speak in England. “I want to agree with everyone else. You shouldn’t change anything.” Then I sat, my heart thumping at my effrontery, finding this was all I had to say.
“Thank you,” the chairman said dryly. “Any fresh points someone would like to raise?”
That was it, the sum total of my London politics. The meeting closed and we all exchanged friendly, glancing smiles, me and all those nice English people I never seemed to meet. We had told the Westminster Conservatives exactly what we thought of their plan to ruin our baths and privatise them. We’d spoken in a single voice and sent them packing. I was thrilled, like a schoolgirl noticed by the older girls and invited to their party.
A few weeks after the public meeting I went to the Baths as usual and found them closed, piles of broken, varnished wood in the street, with the sound of smashing and ripping coming from inside. We had all been ignored. Though we had seemed to be in control, we had not been in control. There was something about England I was not properly understanding.
I’m tracking them, the signals that might have cautioned me if I had troubled to pay them attention. The coup, the baths. Then there was the murder of our friendly halal butcher down the road, a Libyan, who the police said could have been the victim of either a London burglary or a Libyan assassin. They never did decide, and let the matter drop. And there was, about that time, the explosion that blew up the Arab newsagent in Queensway, in the building that also housed my dentist. That story was overshadowed in the local paper by the toppling of a crane on the Whiteley’s site with the death of its operator, an event more real to its readership than murders and explosions among foreigners. They were scooping out the insides of Whiteley’s then, behind the dark facade—why was I so surprised when Ron told me it had been reborn?
RON IS BACK. HE BOUNCED OVER TO SEE ME THE SAMEday he arrived, fired up by jet travel.
“Hey, I loved Zanzibar,” he announced immediately, expecting me to be delighted. “It’s still pretty much unspoiled. The old city could do with a coat of paint, though.”
I went back to my hammock on the porch and closed my eyes against the light while he circled the chair I offered him.
“Did you find it exotic?”
“As a matter of fact I did think it was pretty exotic.” I smiled and his voice took on a defiant tone. “There’s probably nowhere else like it in the world. An old stone city in Africa. Arab dhows. The mixture of people. I’d say it’s exotic on most counts.”
“Many tourists?”
“Quite a few. Not the usual types, though. More adventurous. I met a group searching for Captain Kidd’s treasure.”
“Oh, that old story. So did you go to park on the waterfront like everyone else?”
“Jamituri? Of course. It’s the scene. I thought of you a lot wh
ile I was there. Tried to imagine you as a little girl.”
“When I was a little girl I spied on the last remaining Englishman with my sister. We had a theory that Englishmen didn’t pee and he never did anything to prove they did. Did you have an ice-cream?”
“What?”
“An ice cream. There was a stall selling soft ice-cream, wasn’t there? With plastic cones on top of the awning?” “Sure. It had a line a mile long. But I didn’t have one. I had coconut milk from one of the vendors. Much better. In any case I wouldn’t trust ice-cream in a place like Zanzibar.”
“No, Ron, you shouldn’t.”
So, my ice-cream stall was still there doing its job without me. I wondered who owned it now. Maybe Louis. Goodness, he would be thirty. Maybe if I’d stayed in Zanzibar and waited for the tourists I would have become rich anyway.
“And you, Marcella, how have you been? How was summer in Vermont in my absence?” He was pacing. His shadow passed across me.
“Ron, please settle down. Summer in Vermont has been very quiet. Lonely, actually.”
“'You’ve missed me?”
“Maybe I need someone to argue with.”
Questions rose in me, contended, fell. I did not want the answers through Ron’s tourist eyes. A poor messenger after all these years. I wanted to talk my mind, of London and Zanzibar, of Benji, my fears and the puzzles I could not solve. Ron was all I had, and lying there, my eyes closed, I wondered where to start and which thread might unravel things.
Ron finally sat and took my hand. I opened my eyes. Before he left he would not have presumed to take my hand. His eyes shone. He was emboldened. He said, “I asked some people if they had known you.”