Olura

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘Olura. Let me see. Yes. She sits in the street, and her father is a wealthy Bolivian. Or is she the movie star who is so remarkably casual about having babies?’

  ‘She does sit in the streets. Her father was Sir Theodore Manoli. And she has no babies.’

  ‘My dear Commandant, that’s not my fault,’ I said, observing that my ignorance of Miss Manoli had thoroughly annoyed him. ‘And I have at least heard of her father.’

  ‘She is a lot more important than that old plutocrat.’

  It was my turn to be annoyed, for I remembered that Sir Theodore was a rich Greek shipowner who had taken British nationality some time in the nineteen-thirties and had splendidly deserved his knighthood which no doubt meant far more to him than the rest of us. He had worked himself into the grave for his adopted country and had—or so his biographer maintained—direct access to Churchill on any question of merchant shipping during the war.

  ‘At her age importance can only depend on the effrontery of one’s public relations officer,’ I replied.

  Vigny gave a short military laugh and looked as if he would like to spit.

  ‘I endure you,’ he said, ‘only because your smile reminds me of the more unpleasant portraits of Voltaire.’

  ‘Another Cinzano?’ I suggested.

  ‘Thank you. No.’

  ‘Well, what’s she famous for?’

  ‘She has a marked sympathy for Africans.’

  ‘Political or personal?’

  ‘Woman is never wholly a political animal.’

  A typically closed and Gallic remark! I shouldn’t have invited it.

  ‘Africans should be encouraged to see the pleasantest possible aspects of our civilisation,’ I said, ‘if, as it appears, they insist on adopting it. Personally I hope they will invent something of a more genial simplicity.’

  ‘Such as new forms of famine and disease, for example? But there appears, thank God, to be some lunch,’ he said and left me.

  Lunch did not hold for me its usual pleasures, when between courses—excellent though somewhat denationalised to suit the palates of foreigners—I could chat with Vigny and des Aunes on my left or exchange more formal courtesies with the large round table on my right which just accommodated a Portuguese family. The Frenchmen were uncommunicative. The family was distracted by its too prettified six-year-old daughter who refused to eat because she was not getting enough attention. She got it all right.

  Olura sat opposite to me some twenty feet away. I could not take my eyes off her. I kept on staring and trying not to be caught like a child, and eventually received a child’s rebuke. She rested her head on her hand and stared me down with a half-smile as much as to say: take a good look once and for all, and get on with your lunch. I felt absurdly angry with myself and with her, and let her leave the dining-room first so that I should not have to pass her table. I swore that wealthy socialites were not for me.

  Des Aunes and Vigny who never missed a trick—the French in any summer hotel have a positively feminine genius for detecting everyone’s embarrassments—watched me with discreet enjoyment. Vigny managed to say I told you so by a mere cock of the eyebrow. I took to drink. It seemed to me that my waiter had a sympathetic air of comprehension as he replaced the empty bottle with a new one. By this time I was oversensitive to deaf-and-dumb language.

  After a long siesta I found that the gale had gone down and that the evening was grey and still. The surf was formidable, thundering in under a light mist of its own making, for there was no wind to blow away the spume. This was inviting, so I went out along the beach for a bathe. There was not a soul in sight except a pair of the Civil Guard who made soundless, frantic signs for me to come in. No doubt my seal-like play with the waves looked foolhardy from a distance, but I know when the surf—it was worse than the night which you will remember—can be made to do my work for me. I was brought up as a boy on North Cornish beaches.

  I returned to the hotel, spent an hour or two writing up my notes on traces of Arabic in the spoken Basque of Alava, and went down to the lounge at the beginning of dusk. I noticed that the few British were huddled together near the bar under protection of the usual barricade of chair and sofa backs. They seemed singularly sheep-like, and I looked around for the wolf. It was, of course, Olura.

  She sat in the opposite corner, chatting gaily with a shadow and exquisitely dressed in white. That extremely expensive simplicity is as obvious to any man of taste as to a woman; we are capable of appreciating the picture, while knowing little or nothing about the brushwork. When I looked again at the shadow, I saw that the darkness against the folds of an undrawn curtain was due not to dusk but to race. I was pretty sure that I recognised that distinguished head and beard. If so, Olura’s exceptional elegance could be explained. It was the correct gesture towards a Prime Minister.

  Social confidence being now restored by waves and work, I gave her a formal bow and a more comradely smile. She at once beckoned me over and introduced me to Leopold Mgwana. He was taller and lither than I had imagined him. The pointed, black, closely-curled beard was a more integral part of his fine, bony head than it appeared when lovingly exaggerated by the charcoal of cartoonists; they also made him a forest negroid which he wasn’t. His nose and cheek-bones showed a strong Nilotic strain. Power in the flesh and power as one expects it to be are never the same; but there was no mistaking the air of purpose, benevolence and integrity which always won for him a sourly admiring Press in spite of his somewhat personal interpretation of democracy.

  As we chatted, it became clear that Olura had been waiting for him, that it was she who had selected the hotel and had come down ahead of him to assure herself that it really was the sort of place where he could relax. Vigny’s uncharitable suggestion passed through my mind, for Mgwana was only in his early forties. Even though ruffled by slight jealousy, I was inclined to disbelieve it. Olura’s attitude to Mgwana was not unlike that of a first-class personal secretary to her boss. Between them was easy and genuine friendship.

  His tranquillity impressed me. He did not in the least withdraw himself; but he was impassive as a shield of black steel, behind which roared a conveyor belt accepting, rejecting, always obedient to a pattern of press buttons which his own deeper self had set. The pattern, I should guess, was defensible even when wrong. No politician, after all, can be sure that his objectives are socially and economically valid. We in the universities are better qualified to tell. But what we cannot do and he can is to put such power into a creed that it digests his errors without doing much harm to the ideal.

  Olura and he were sipping tomato juice—a drink which to me suggests recovery from a hang-over or a rarefied atmosphere of conscious virtue. On that first evening, a little unsure of his surroundings, he had probably left the choice to her. My own refreshment during the protracted Spanish evening is invariably brandy and soda. By the time I had finished my second I found enough impudence to tell Mgwana what I had heard of him from the last Governor-General of the colony.

  He had been sitting next to me at a college gaudy, rejoicing in his retirement from the cares of office but missing his Africa and eager to talk about it. He told me that when he had been forced to put Mgwana inside—the law being what it was—he had been afraid of going down to history as a minor second cousin of the obstinate Pharaoh. Not, he said, that there was anything whatever holy about Mgwana. Far, far from it. But the man was a power-house for all Africa, and his name would endure.

  ‘I couldn’t hate him,’ Mgwana said with a deep chuckle. ‘I knew that soon I should be responsible for law and order myself. And I too had my secret fears. I wouldn’t have liked to go down to history as the leader whose followers had cut Sir Horace into pieces and sent little baskets of him round the villages.’

  Olura protested that he was exaggerating, this his followers would never have thought of it, that his own example was enough to prevent it.

  ‘But you must sometimes have felt hatred,’ I remarked to lead him on.
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  ‘Yes. I did. The stupidity of policemen. The resentments. I still hate the—the polite condescension.’

  ‘There can’t be much of that left.’

  He smiled, but didn’t answer me. After all, he was fresh from a round of conferences and probably suspicious that, as soon as he left the room, European ministers would recover a sense of ease and get on with the job on an old-boy basis.

  I ventured to touch on the question of the Portuguese colonies—my fondness for the Peninsula often makes me an untimely propagandist—suggesting that Portugal alone, with the example of Latin-America close to its heart, was genuinely trying to create a multi-racial society.

  That instantly revealed Olura for me. Just as the loyal secretary loathes the rival firm more than the managing director does, so she would not even try to see the argument. But Mgwana by no means rejected it out of hand.

  ‘They should have tried to make their Brazil faster and earlier,’ he said. ‘I grant that the idea is sincere, but I am bound to fight it. Do you find any dishonesty in that?’

  I did not. Yet later in the evening of that stimulating day, when Olura and Mgwana had dined and gone out, I did feel that he had missed a subtle difference between European nations which I could never tactfully explain.

  The Portuguese family who were my neighbours at table were fascinated by Mr Mgwana, and wanted to know who he was. I sensed that the colour of his skin was to them as unimportant as the colour of his shirt. In their gay, bird-like discussion of the lovely English lady and her obviously distinguished friend there was absolutely no undercurrent of Beauty and the Beast. The British, however, who belonged to the same class of bourgeoisie in prosperity and education, were uneasy. Their women verged upon prurient curiosity. I would have liked to add to my field ethnology some further examples of weary French cynicism, but Vigny and des Aunes had paid their bill and left the hotel.

  The next day was glorious from dawn to dusk, and the sun truly Spanish rather than Atlantic. After idling over breakfast on the terrace and still seeing no sign of Olura or Mr Mgwana I strolled westwards along the beach aiming for the delicious complex of miniature islands and peninsulas on the way to the Maya Estuary, where one could choose sun or shade and take one’s sea calm or rough according to mood.

  When I turned round to look at the attractive front of the hotel with its three tiers of stone balconies, Olura was leaning on the balustrade outside her room. I had put all of a quarter of a mile between myself and the hotel, and only a third of her was visible; but I knew very well who it was. I had discovered—let us call it sentimental curiosity—that her room was separated by two balconies from my own.

  I waved to her, without much expectation that she would notice. She waved back at once. I went on my way with a faint hope that Mr Mgwana was recovering from his political exertions by staying in bed till lunch and that Olura might accidentally choose my patch of beach. High-minded though she was, she was not at all averse to admiration—and I was the only person, unattached and of the right age, to give it.

  Half an hour later I was ashamed of that cheap ‘accidentally.’ Another woman might have come a roundabout way or settled in some half-hidden crescent of rocks where she could be sure I would find her. Not so, Olura. She was always true to her self-imposed frankness. She walked straight up to me and merely remarked that she knew I would be there.

  She was quite dazzling. No Red Riding Hood that morning. Not much, in fact, of anything at all. What there was seemed to be constructed of petals of pale green, with a wholly frivolous thigh-length wrap of some material utterly unknown to me, white, pleated, and very possibly unique.

  She swam, I observed, violently, using far too much energy. When we had settled down to sun ourselves, I congratulated her on choosing an original spot for Mr Mgwana.

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  I replied that he was a remarkable man, and that I saw what his last Governor-General had meant.

  ‘It was wicked to treat him as a criminal,’ she said.

  ‘The poor Governor was only doing what Whitehall told him he must. And even with a leader like Mgwana his people weren’t really ready for independence.’

  ‘Who is?’ she asked. ‘But it’s a right. Look at ourselves! No country which is prepared to use the Bomb deserves independence.’

  I laid off that one, for I always find myself in complete agreement with both sides of the argument, and can’t help showing it. In the heated nuclear atmosphere that does not increase one’s popularity.

  ‘Independence is, I suppose, a right,’ I agreed, ‘but it would have been hardly fair to hand over the government to Mgwana without first making sure that he had something governable.’

  She rolled her delicious body over to face me, drawing up one smooth and intoxicating thigh to support it, and accused me of talking like a civil servant in the Athenaeum. I reminded myself carefully that there might be a whole week ahead of us and that it would be unwise to point out too academically that she had no more idea than I of civil servants’ small talk in the Athenaeum.

  ‘I don’t know enough about you, Miss Manoli,’ I said. ‘Is your interest in politics active?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s an interest in humanity. And Olura, please, not Miss Manoli.’

  The musical name came very easily to my tongue. I had been repeating it rather too often in private.

  ‘There is so much I can do, you see,’ she went on. ‘It isn’t sensible that these fine men who are deciding the fate of a continent should have to put up at cheap joints in Bloomsbury. It isn’t right that they should experience nothing between’—her words came tumbling out, and she had the grace to smile at herself—‘between chops and chips and Lord Mayor’s Banquets. So I entertain them. I try to get for them everyone they want to meet—editors and tycoons and those horrible Public Relations Officers.’

  ‘I thought yesterday that you would be a marvellous P.R.O. yourself,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps it does describe how I try to help the helpless.’

  ‘Which helpless?’

  ‘The emerging nations.’

  Oh dear and damn! That sounded like a prefect of seventeen at an English girls’ school or an American do-goodess of forty. Leopold Mgwana might find her wealth and enthusiasm useful, but he wouldn’t like being described as helpless. He might even agree—if he ever drank more than tomato juice—that an African politician in London was a deal less helpless than the unfortunate Minister of State who had to negotiate with him.

  ‘They must all think you are an angel,’ I said, getting safely on to more personal ground.

  ‘Yes?’ she answered coolly. ‘Do you?’

  That put me on the spot much too early. Her remark was ironical rather than inviting. At the same time I did not rule it out that she might be probing—with some enjoyment—to see how much of a fool I was.

  ‘I might be doubtful about your technique of flying, but the wings are very lovely.’

  ‘A fairy in a Christmas pantomime?’

  ‘No. Lovely meaning lovable.’

  That kept it on a high plane, even if somewhat emphatic. What I was really thinking about—if it could be called drinking—was the fascinating effect of sun-flecked golden down on untanned surfaces.

  ‘You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘But I want to. And if I sound patronising, it’s just my professional manner which I can’t help. It only means that I feel protective.’

  She was a bit doubtful about that one. I suppose a good many men had presented themselves as likely to protect her and her money.

  ‘What are you?’ she asked. ‘A barrister?’

  ‘A comparative philologist, with an interest in ethnology.’

  ‘Cannibals and canoes?’

  ‘No. My special subject is the peopling of Europe. Migrations and so forth. I have a theory—generally considered to be unsound—that evidence imbedded in vocabulary and grammar is as significant as that of skulls, pottery and midden heaps. I kno
w nothing about Africa south of the Atlas, but our interests touch in Algeria where the inhabitants had a lot more fun than they do now.’

  ‘What sort of fun?’

  ‘Hunting over the great plains of the Sahara.’

  ‘You call that fun?’

  ‘Yes, if it means dinner for the family. No—with reservations—if it means killing for kicks,’ I answered boldly. ‘And I’ll bet you Mgwana agrees with me.’

  ‘I do not always accept Leopold Mgwana’s tastes,’ she said rather haughtily, and rolled over on her back.

  So there I was in the dock alongside criminals like Masters of Stag Hounds! On the other hand, hadn’t there been a faint appeal to me to take Olura for what she was and lay off the supposed public image of Miss Manoli? When again she rested herself on one elbow conversation was easier and more intimate—perhaps because it did not concern ourselves. She proposed to show Mgwana as much of the Basque Provinces as could be seen in a long afternoon’s drive and wanted my advice on the route.

  I have put down all this because you asked me for the utmost frankness in explaining my relations with Olura and Mr Mgwana. And you are right. Considering that I had only known Olura for thirty-six hours, my recklessness, sympathy, devotion—whatever you like to call it—is inexplicable without its full background.

  It would be absurd to claim that I had fallen in love with her. She was in another world, and her character far too complex and difficult for a don with half his mind on relics of prehistory in the Basque language. About the other half of it I have been crudely honest. I was very much aware that she was in holiday mood, unattached except for her duty to Mr Mgwana, and that if she were feminine enough—she certainly was—to look for relaxation in captivating some casual male companion, I was available, sexually excited—a revolting phrase to express my enchantment—and reasonably presentable.

  On that disastrous evening of July 21st I remember with astonishment that I was bored, and missed Vigny and des Aunes. Olura and Leopold Mgwana dined in Bilbao and did not return till after eleven. On arrival she went up to have a bath. He was more interested in a long and tinkling drink, for the night was like a steam-room.