by A. N. Wilson
It was all Lennie’s fault anyway – and this, apart from the new editor of The Daily Legion, was her other chief concern as she girlishly skipped down the carpeted stairs – that the Filipinos had gone away. By Christ, she had given that fucking agency hell about it on the telephone. The bloody woman had had the cheek to say there were limits. Lennie had enemies. One needed enemies. This had been one of Martina’s most useful discoveries about life. A few enemies here and there served as grappling irons to assist one’s ascent up the sheer rock face. Lennie, though, had made enemies pointlessly, just by being a shit. She had forced him to offer a lot of money to that agency, she’d gotten them to sign injunctions the minute the little Filipino shits walked out on them forbidding them to say one word about their experience. Otherwise, it was easy to imagine the headlines in the rival titles. Gone were the days of decency when stories about proprietors were not carried in newspapers owned by rivals. In the scurrilous gossip columns of other rags, and in Private Eye, there had already been inaccurate jokes about Lennie’s servant troubles.
The world knew – or that part of the world which enjoyed reading shit – about Lennie’s uncontrollable rages with drivers, cooks, maids, butlers. The shit-eaters had all read about Lennie picking up the Chinese – Korean, actually, which shows how much you can believe of this total crap – maid by the scruff of the neck and holding her out of a first-storey window; and similarly garbled stories had appeared of the coffee pot that got hurled at the little Eye-tie’s head, or the scrambled eggs deliberately thrown, then heeled into the sheepskin rug. He did not, however, shout, ‘Now suck it’ – he’d said, ‘Lick it.’ But these bastards got nothing right. Of course, they never stayed long, these agency servants. Never before, though, had all five walked out en masse and without notice.
It was obviously to punish the Marks – Martina wasn’t a fucking idiot – that the agency had not supplied replacements at once. If the Queen’s staff all left Buckingham Palace, if the German Embassy found itself without a single person to wash a teacup, then the agency would have temps round there and –aber dalli. Why did this fucking agency not send someone at once to empty Martina’s kitchen trash-can, which was starting to stink, make a meal, tidy a bed? Because they were making a point. So tonight’s dinner – which was to have been a buffet for thirty – was now a smaller sit-down affair at Diana’s, the Court’s favourite restaurant. The couple promised by the agency would not start for another week.
Martina thought of these things, and not of the personality, or appearance, of a delivery boy bringing a few supplies, relief to the house of siege. So – no – afterwards – to the police – she could not give any very accurate vision of what he looked like.
As she fumbled with the key which opened the last Chubb lock on the front door, she asked, ‘You remembered the cigarettes?’
The visitor was six feet or more, a gangling boy in a loose black blouson and enormous trainers. Of his features, a balaclava helmet hid all but his eyes, which were smoky-grey.
‘What cigarettes is vat ven?’
The cockney had returned, replacing the Guards officer. It was a flattened, slightly anxious voice. He walked past her carrying the plastic sacks. That was her first intimation that something was amiss: he did not, as the real delivery boy had done on the two previous afternoons, put the bags down by the front door, and present a chit for her to sign before scampering off again into the dark. This boy stepped inside and slammed the door shut with the swivel of an elbow.
‘You’re on your own, right?’
The throaty fear was all the more evident in his tone now, but she also sensed, with his fear, an excitement.
She was so taken aback by the impertinence of his question that she answered it.
‘What’s that to you?’
‘Quick. Money.’
‘But the shopping is always charged to our account. You’re not expecting me to pay on delivery?’
‘Money.’ More insistent.
‘What is this? If you think you’re getting a tip simply for doing your job …’
It was then that she saw the Stanley knife in his hand. Its blade was already moist with blood. In his grey-blue eyes she read a combination of emotions which she had seen so often before in her visitors in the old days: triumph and terror.
SIX
Towering above the other demonstrators, the bony skull and grey hair of Father Vivyan Chell were unmistakable. Though Lennox Mark had seen the priest on television and sometimes in the newspapers, it was nearly forty years since he had seen him in the flesh. The short hair, which had been dark in those days and was now silvery, was brushed back from the brow in the identical military manner. The high cheekbones and hawk-like nose both seemed more pronounced. He was even thinner, like some alarming bird of prey in his black monk’s habit and cloak. Yet, despite the peculiar rig, he looked, as he had always looked, more like a brigadier than a padre.
In figurative and actual terms, Chell stood head and shoulders above the other demonstrators. These displays were a regular occurrence outside LenMar House. Some of the bleeding-heart newspapers had begun to notice the situation in Zinariya. One of the lefty rags had a cock-and-bull story about the Kanni-Karkara mines: it raked up the old sob-stuff about cruelties in the days of white ownership, the supposed responsibility of Britain to intervene because Britons – that is, great-grandfather Mark – had first thought to extract copper from the mountains of southern Zinariya, the setting up of the West African Mining Organization after independence, the alleged abuses continuing after African control, the stories of corruption, of Western businesses forming unwholesome alliances with the present regime. Time was, the Western busybodies who presumed to interest themselves in these complicated affairs had supported General Bindiga because he was supposedly a Marxist-Leninist. Then, the earnest old hags in ankle-socks and the corduroyed college lecturers discovered that, like Lenin, Bindiga was not afraid to kill people who got in his way. Then, some of these bearded cretins put two and two together and realized that Lennox Mark’s business interests continued in West Africa while he built up a media empire in Europe. So, when they wanted to make themselves feel smug and warm inside and they had momentarily forgotten the plight of the poor little foxes being hunted by dogs, or the Tibetans being persecuted by the Chinese, or prisoners of conscience languishing in Turkey, the professional minders of other people’s business would come and demonstrate at LenMar House. Lennox did not reckon much to their chances of interesting the great British public in their moral preoccupations. The great British public would weep buckets over the plight of poor little foxy-woxy, but it frankly couldn’t give a shit about some tribesman in northern Zinariya having his balls shot off by one of Bindiga’s guerrillas, nor about the so-called slave-labour employed on the cocoa farms in those regions. Jesus, most English people did not know the difference between West and East Africa, wouldn’t be able to locate a big country like Kenya on a map, let alone point to Zinariya.
Father Vivyan was something rather different. When Lennox Mark was still a little child, the story of Father Vivyan had gripped the public imagination: the gallant young army officer who went to Lugardia, as it then was, in the last days of colonialism, became embroiled in the civil war, and then, as a result of a profound spiritual experience, renounced the soldier’s life, and joined a religious order, and lived among the poorest of the poor. He wrote a spiritual autobiography which was an international best-seller. Vivyan Chell had become the voice of the African oppressed, persuading the missionary order which he had joined – the Community of the Holy Redeemer – to identify itself completely with, first, the Zinariyan struggle for independence, later with the most radical of its political figures. Chell’s voice and influence were heard beyond the confines of Zinariya. He visited South Africa and Rhodesia, from both of which he was expelled, and he formed friendships with several African heads of state. He had become himself a symbol of the European capacity to remake itself, in penitence, and as
sist a new and independent Africa on its way: a symbol, more generally, of Christianity’s surviving power to challenge the values of this world.
Lennox Mark was a boy of fifteen when he read Father Vivyan’s Lift Up Your Eyes! The book came as an extraordinary revelation. It had never before occurred to him to question his father’s and grandfather’s right to be rich and powerful. Their ‘ownership’ of farms, tobacco, cocoa, of copper mines, of large houses, of stocks and shares, seemed quite natural, just as the servitude of the black house-servants and farm-workers was simply a given, the way things were.
At Queen Alexandra College, the bogus public school which he and the other white boys attended in its well-mown grounds outside Chamberlainstown (now Mararraba), the life of the huge majority of Zinariyan citizens was unseen, unimagined. Lennox edited the school magazine. Somewhat to his surprise, the headmaster acceded to his request to go down to the slums of Louisetown, the shanty district of Mararraba, which huddled near his grandfather’s copper mines, and interview the famous Christian troublemaker who lived there.
Within the first five minutes of stepping from that dusty old bus, the pudgy schoolboy Lennox had known that he was to have his entire vision of the world changed. He had seen and smelt the life of the poor for the first time. And above the rags and the dust and the squalor of the red mud-houses soared the brick church, built with their own hands by the Community of the Holy Redeemer, a building which, since the coming of Vivyan Chell, already symbolized in the eyes of many Africans the hope of freedom.
Vivyan Chell was fifteen years older than Lennox, so on this encounter he was little more than thirty. So many times, in the intervening decades, Lennox had closed his eyes and seen that street in Kanni-Karkara, a gust of wind blowing a dust-cloud along the road; shoeless children running, clutching the skirts of this enormously tall, gaunt Englishman, who wore a white cassock like the Pope’s.
And here he was again, forty years on, in Bermondsey, bellowing, ‘Justice for Zinariya!’ The crowd, which was about half African, took up the cry, and then Chell began to chant ‘Alkawari!’ – the name of the opposition party, whose leader, Professor Galwanga (‘The Zinariyan Gandhi’), was regularly lampooned in the Legion newspapers.
‘Alkawari!’ drawled Vivyan Chell’s unmistakably aristocratic tones. ‘Alkawari! Alkawari!’
That adolescent encounter beneath the great brooding brick church of the Holy Redeemer was something which Lennox Mark had been trying to forget for his entire life. He had fallen completely under the priest’s spell. The headmaster had given him permission, for the purposes of collecting information for the magazine article, to stay one night in Kanni-Karkara. In the event, for nearly four weeks the boy stayed and worked in the mission in the shanty towns. He had slept on a straw pallet, as the priests did. He had risen earlier than dawn to pray with them, and to wait for God in the darkness and silence of the African night. Then, before first light, he had served Father Vivyan’s mass, an unforgettable, highly charged spiritual experience, and the day would begin, the exhausting and unfolding life of a poor parish in an African industrial suburb.
The monks helped to run a hospital, many of the patients young men, wheezing and dying from emphysema or pneumoconiosis – now, Lennox had heard, forty years on, full of AIDS patients. There were two schools, run largely by volunteers. There were the makeshift houses where mineworkers lived with their families; all these hovels were tiny and none had proper sanitation. There was no flush lavatory, as far as Lennox ever discovered, in the whole of the township; the monks, like the mineworkers, squatted over earthen holes when the need came.
‘You have been given a great gift,’ Vivyan Chell had told him. Lennox could still remember the bony fingers of the priest on his own fleshy shoulders, and the penetration of those iron-grey, terrifying eyes looking into his own.
‘Christ sent you here.’
In spite of Vivyan’s short back and sides, there was something about the monk’s long face which recalled certain images of Jesus, those on the Turin shroud, for example, or of El Greco, which made it possible, when he spoke, to believe that you were actually in the presence of the Word Made Flesh.
‘You did not come here by chance. Christ sent you. You must go and tell your father what you have seen. Your father is not a bad man. He is something very like a bad man, though – and that is, a rich one. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom and know God. You want your father to know God? Well, it is for his sake that you must go and tell him what you have seen here. Tell him what these mines are doing to these people …’
This speech so fired the adolescent Lennox with a vision of Christ’s Kingdom that he did pluck up the courage and tell the old man. Not long afterwards, he found himself on a plane crossing the Atlantic. He did work experience in a merchant bank on Wall Street, stayed with some cousins at the Hamptons in the summer, lost his virginity, and entered MIT, slightly young, the following fall. He had never seen Vivyan Chell from that day to this, though he had followed the monk’s career, his political agitations, his return to England.
Forty years on, Lennox Mark did not know whether he still possessed a conscience. He sometimes wondered if Martina’s function in his life, the secret of his dependence upon her, was her capacity to numb his few remaining tendencies towards heart, towards feelings, towards what the sentimentalists called decency. He could not resist the superstition, it had been with him ever since his first encounter with the priest in Africa, that Vivyan Chell could reawaken all the bleeding-heart nonsense. This was because, try as he did to convince himself otherwise, Lennox Mark believed that the universe was indeed run along lines where moral laws were as invariable as those of physics. God was always there behind the curtains.
‘Get that crowd cleared away before I get out of the car,’ Lennox told Tom.
‘Alkawari!’
The old ladies and corduroyed lecturers had taken up the African cry.
‘Alkawari! Alkawari!’
‘Get rid, I say, get rid …’
The commissionaires were emerging from the automatically opened glass doors of the building, but it was hard to see what two bottle-nosed old pensioners in white peaked caps could do against a crowd of a hundred, nor why the police need be summoned to disperse an entirely peaceful assembly.
Lennox Mark did not mean to get out of the car until the crowd had gone away. He certainly did not mean to address them. No sooner, however, did he hiss at Tom to get rid of the demo than he found himself opening the door of the Bentley and facing them.
‘I assure you …’ he heard himself calling to them, ‘there is absolutely no … If you have a grievance … I am more than happy to discuss …’
Corduroy, beards, black faces, ankle-socks, like waves of the Red Sea falling back before the rod of Moses, filed against the plate glass of the building, leaving alone Father Vivyan Chell, as if before that modernist construction of the late 1980s there had been translated, as in some pious fable, the carved statue of a saint from the stone niche of a Gothic cathedral, standing there upright, gaunt and tall.
‘Then, Lennox,’ said the monk, ‘I should think that after forty years there would be things to discuss – wouldn’t you?’
‘Father Vivyan.’
He stood there, the silver-haired proprietor of that great enterprise, once more a gauche, overweight teenager.
‘I don’t know quite … what it is you want … what …’
‘You could invite me in,’ said the monk, ‘for a glass of whisky.’
SEVEN
Martina’s steadiness surprised even herself. It visibly surprised the boy. She could see the eyes peering from the balaclava for signs of distress. Even her voice betrayed only the hint of fear, its tremolo disguised by the habitual foreign lilt.
She knew that he had stepped into a world where he would find nothing familiar, and she traded on this weakness. Even her un-Englishness was chic, sophisticated. He ha
d probably never heard a voice like hers unless he had hung round the bigger tourist hotels in London.
She returned his stare and just above the eyes saw a few centimetres of honey-brown skin.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘Money,’ he repeated huskily. ‘Jewels.’
A long-fingered hand, also honey-brown, reached for the diamond in her right lobe. It was a large stone for so small an ear, and it was a stud, fixed by a small screw. From the way in which he held the ear, as a clumsy child might grab a flower on a delicate stem, it seemed possible that he was deciding between two quick methods for removal, either tearing the ear from her head with his fingers or doing a slice with the bloodstained Stanley knife.
‘Let me help you,’ her voice said.
Early in life, she had learnt to detach herself utterly from what was happening physically with a man. Only thus had she retained her sanity. Those early days of unhappiness served her in good stead now.
‘Don’t try nuffink.’
It was the parody voice again.
EIGHT
‘You don’t drink?’ asked the monk, who had taken a swig of the single malt offered him.
‘I’ll stick to Seven-Up – no, I don’t drink. Are you sure you don’t want …’