by Adam Thorpe
‘We done look um. ’E go get craw-craw too much in dis place –’ The man (a small, tubby fellow called Mr Henry, with rheumy eyes and a light white stubble) patted his loins. ‘Craw-craw’ is a sort of African ecthyma, encouraged by starch and severe humidity. I wasn’t far wrong. If it had been smallpox, or rubella, the pustules would have appeared on the face.
James nodded – grimly. If we are to set by example, then what an example was here! James was wonderfully philosophical about it.
‘One hopes to get vital info out of the chap one’s relieving. Now we’ve got to begin from scratch.’
‘Well, God managed it,’ I quipped. ‘What do we do when the poor fellow wakes up?’
‘Rub gin into him,’ James replied.
‘No, quite the opposite. Total abstention, forced if need be.’
No comment from James!
My few exposed parts (knuckles, a bit of the neck) were turning into a butcher’s slab. The holes in the netting were big enough to let the moths in, too. They plastered themselves on the glass of the hurricane lamp so thickly it was considerably dimmed. My first task, as usual, would be a bout of sewing. James lit his pipe and the whining thinned from choir to principals. A satisfying number of them were crushed by my tapping keys: my diary, if written in the evening, is splattered with blood. Since most of it is mine, this does not perturb me.
You only have your first evening in Eden once, so we dragged it out until well after one o’clock. The sublime satisfaction of not having the boat underfoot was part of it, and the fact that we had not yet had our ‘own’ home until this moment. Never mind that James might be moved on in five or seven years! And, dear Edward – this is our Eden: at least, it eerily resembles the engraving in the old Arnold Bible, if you remember it. It certainly has serpents as big.
Eventually, yawning, I stood up to go to bed. Then I froze, and not from cold. James asked what the matter was. I pointed to the river. The moon had moved, of course, but the bay is so wide that the water was still a silvery glare. At one point in the middle, it had been interrupted by a considerable shadow, like a long log.
‘The Big Beef,’ came a voice from behind. I hadn’t even said anything!
Mr Hargreaves was standing in front of the open double doors. He was dressed in a linen suit, rumpled but clean, and an open-necked shirt. He had canvas shoes on, but no socks.
‘Hargreaves!’ said James. ‘You’ve forgotten y’socks, this time.’
‘Look here,’ said Hargreaves, ‘I’m awfully sorry. I seem to have misbehaved myself.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. Adding: ‘We were on the point of retiring.’
‘We’ve commandeered the main room for a few nights,’ said James, ‘until we sort things out. Feeling our way about, y’know. Hope you don’t mind.’
The wretched man asked if it was late, consulting at the same time a rather grand fob-watch fetched from his suit pocket. Perhaps time had indeed stopped.
‘Rather late,’ I replied. ‘It is already tomorrow.’
‘It is never tomorrow,’ he replied, pedantically. ‘By the way, what’s the month?’
‘We are the third of May,’ James said.
There was an edgy pause, during which Hargreaves tapped his watch almost thoughtfully and then pocketed it with a grunt. I felt exhausted, now. All I wanted was my bed and our mosquito net.
‘What’s the Big Beef, then?’ James asked, just as I was about to move.
The man snorted. This either meant: No Idea, or God, Don’t You Know? (Clue: ’beef means animal in pidgin.) The moonlight glared off his spectacles, so that one couldn’t see his eyes. I turned away and studied the river. The long, humpy log had gone, leaving a ripply wake. The forest was plunged in shadow now, quite black. It seemed to be set back further than the brightly massed stars above it.
‘A remarkably clear night,’ said James, ‘and possibly the last.’ He is so good in these situations!
Hargreaves pulled up a chair, tweaked his trousers, and sat rather gingerly.
‘Aaah,’ he sighed. ‘The pleasures of the night, and of solid company.’
Protocol and myself struggled, and protocol won. I sat down again. (Disconcerting, though, being appreciated for one’s solidity.) I was about to ask after his medical complaint. He was looking up at the veranda’s rusting sheets. ‘I built this, y’know,’ he said. ‘With my own hands.’
‘Very impressive,’ I lied.
‘Took me six months. Northcott –’ He waved his hand about, as if dismissing someone. ‘My predecessor. Giles Northcott. Cambridge man, so never knew him. Northcott was bloody hopeless. Hadn’t done a thing. All the improvements you see, were my doing. I leave them to you, with J. S. Hargreaves’s blessing.’
‘Thank you,’ said James.
‘Who’s that lovely creature in the hallway?’
‘Tarbuck’s daughter. Grace Tarbuck.’
‘Ah yes, that’s right. Lovely creature.’
I had the strange notion that he’d studied her while she was asleep. Possibly for ages.
‘I’m most awfully sorry about this morning,’ he went on. ‘Or was it actually the afternoon?’
James gave a little snort.
‘Between the two, old chap. We call it noon.’
Hargreaves’s sigh told me that he had been drinking. In the light of the hurricane lamp, his face looked flushed and congested, not pale at all. We would have to remove all offending bottles from wherever they were hidden, I thought. (I also thought: there is little difference between those ill-fed wretches who beg for alms in London and spend it in the public house, and this official of our august Colonial Service!)
‘Enjoyed the music, Hargreaves. Nice thought,’ said James. (What a kind, decent sort he is!)
The wretch looked confused. Did James realise how drunk he was? If he’d been pretty well starving, a mere drop would have an effect. To fill the awkward silence, I asked after his complaint. In those starched trousers, he must have needed no reminding.
He looked at me with a most sinister leer, and I instantly regretted bothering.
‘My dear Mrs –’
He was struggling to remember his successor’s name, showing his gums again. He bore a remarkable resemblance, with his round spectacles, to the Wolf dressed up as Grandmother Hood. (I loathe drunkenness, don’t you?) He gave up the struggle, or the struggle gave him up. His eyes must have closed behind the glare of his glasses because his head lolled like a puppet’s, and he started breathing stertorously.
‘Is he asleep?’ whispered James.
Sweat was running off the man’s face like drops of rain; one gleamed on the end of his nose. I felt his pulse at the wrist (very feeble) and asked James to hold the lamp close to the unconscious face. I lifted his eyelids to check the pupils were dilated equally (they were), and pronounced him to be collapsed from drink, not from an apoplectic fit. However, none of these activities stirred him, so I went into the main room to fetch my smelling salts. One of the crates stacked at the end had two of its boards levered out of their nails. Blades of straw were scattered on the concrete floor. Enough of a gap to pass a bottle through. Temptation had come via Messrs Griffiths McAllisters’ habit of marking their crates’ contents. The ants were already inside, their little polished bodies barely distinguishable from the glass. I have to say that the crate smelt of England, of course: of dry little offices and fields stooked with hay. There was James’s favourite sherry! I fervently hoped that Hargreaves hadn’t pilfered one of those; we had carefully calculated the amount, as with everything else.
There were an awful lot of crates. I felt quite dwarfed. There was nothing of ours that was not in a box. I thought: this is how I might be taken out, were the worst to happen – and the worst is as likely to happen as not! Isn’t that a morbid thought? I am only going by statistics.
Grace is saying to me: the rain is lessening, we are going. As you might gather, I had to take this up again in the morning, but I have run out of time. I wi
ll relate further in my next missive. I hope you find it interesting.
I am learning so much. Partly I am writing all this to you in case there are unforeseen consequences, and a defence is needed. Explanation will [indecipherable]. I am keeping copies, but everything here is subject to Africa, and Africa swallows everything at a gulp – sometimes without chewing it first.
With all my love and affection,
Charlotte
P.S. Please write with all your news – however tiny. (The tiniest is best, in fact. I prefer it to your ‘large concerns’, I’m afraid, Edward. We are already too large here!)
Bamakum, June 13th, 1921
Dear Edward,
I am addressing this to you alone just in case Joy finds the enclosed a little ‘vapourish’, as she puts it. I know that she doesn’t like the sordid in life. Neither do you, but for different reasons. We used to share our secrets, did we not?
I have discovered two things about dear James that are new to me. 1) He likes gin. 2) He cannot father children (medically speaking). Both are the result of his last tour in Africa, before we met. When I say he likes gin, I mean that he likes it a little too much. He drinks nothing before sundown, but makes up for it between that hour and bedtime. He sees the habit as necessary to health – like the taking of one’s quinine grains. I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t make him so crabby, like Father got towards the end. But that was port, and Mother’s death.
I did hope to bear children one day, before I was too old. However, I had already accepted that having children and living in the tropics do not go easily together. The knowledge that the yellow jack had fatally enfeebled James’s reproductive capacity, if revealed before our marriage, would have changed nothing. He is the man I love.
It is fate, or God’s will, or whatever, this. I can now concentrate solely on my life’s mission. It is almost like being a nun.
As if to seal this acceptance, my dispensary or ‘bush hospital’ is thatched and stocked and already running. It is merely one of the huts on the edge of the compound, but is as grand to me as any sanny in Hampshire. Slowly, it is becoming known about, and the patients trickle in from the bush. I am teaching mothers some sensible habits, such as: coming to me before rather than after seeing (and paying) the medicine man – avoiding rusty blades – and not, when a woman is in labour and having difficulties, pounding her abdomen like a tom-tom. I could tell you other things but they are messily medical and womanly. I am not yet sure if my advice is being taken up: all they want is shots of serum for everything. But don’t think yourself superior to these ignorant people. All any human being wants is a shot of serum for everything: James regards his glass of gin in that light. If there was a serum against white men slaughtering each other in their millions, I would inject all your sex immediately. Instead we put all our faith into bits of diplomatic paper and gold reserves.
Mr Hargreaves has finally left us, thank goodness. We are now on our own, with the servants. Let me recap the last four weeks.
I had a few revealing conversations with the poor man, while he recovered with us, waiting for Tarbuck’s return. One in particular would have interested you. We were in ‘his’ room, where I was treating his craw-craw (its complications are only interesting to a nurse). He congratulated us on being given Bamakum. I asked him what there was to be congratulated about. He said Bamakum was the Garden of Eden. I replied that such a comparison had indeed come to me as the steamer approached, but that brief acquaintance had quickly banished it: the Garden of Eden was without mosquitoes, servants, gin, rainstorms, and craw-craw. I nearly added ‘bibulous predecessors’. Instead I stressed that I liked it here. After Buea. In the way that hell would be more stimulating than limbo.
‘Is it hell, then?’
‘No. Not at all. I was merely being amusing. But it certainly isn’t Eden, Mr Hargreaves.’
‘What three classes of sin are possible, my dear Mrs Arkwright?’
He was sitting on the bed in his towelling robe. I was packing up my equipment. He looked at me in a most forbidding way. I thought hard for a moment.
‘Original, deadly, and a third one, less important. Trivial, I think.’
‘Venial, Mrs Arkwright.’
‘Ah. I’m sure you’re right.’
It was so very hot and humid in the room, even with the shutters put to. All we have here are primitive cloth fans without the punkah-wallahs to operate them. I felt as if Africa was taking a mould of my face. I was about to leave the room with a tray of soiled swabs, when he asked me if James had had ‘a good war’. I said that there was no such thing – but that Africa, for all its discomforts, had not been as horrible as the trenches. He nodded furiously. Then he stood up, as if on parade.
‘Flanders was in the second class of sin, Mrs Arkwright. Deadly. Deadly sin. All seven, actually. Even sloth. Sloth let it carry on and on and on and on and on. I have never ever felt such sloth. I watched a man sink into the slime of a shell hole, and couldn’t do a damn thing about it, I was filled up with so much sloth.’
Every time he said ‘sloth’, he expectorated a little, making him look even more deranged. I replied that I had treated dozens of poor young men with the same listless condition, and that it was called shell-shock, or battle weariness. He snorted rather rudely. He was leaning against the wall. This is inadvisable. (When you visit us for the weekend, I will inadvise it.) The walls have all been painted in creosote, which the climate has prevented from drying properly. As the fellow pushed himself off, he lost a few strands of hair and some flock off his cherry-red robe. He didn’t seem to feel the former, but came right up to me. I tried not to grimace at his sour breath – he was talking straight into my face, with only the soiled swabs between us.
‘There never was any unfallen garden, Mrs Arkwright. No damn fall to make, you see. I’ve studied crocs, for weeks, for months, for years. And they should damn well know, having been around a sight longer than us, what?’
‘I’m not sure what point you are making. Don’t touch the swabs, they are purulent.’
‘Original sin is original sin, Mrs Arkwright. It was there before the great round gourd itself. It was there before the water trickled down the sides of the gourd to the earth. It was there before the lightning crackled and the first green shoot grew. It was there before any ancestor smiled by the light of his fire. Everything else is icing on the cake, Mrs Arkwright.’
‘You welcomed us with some light operetta, Mr Hargreaves. I was glad for that particular icing.’
He grinned, but pleasantly. Actually, he would have a rather pleasant, lively face, if it wasn’t for his diseased gums and his general look of derangement.
‘Protocol, Mrs Arkwright, protocol.’
He stood to attention again, perhaps mockingly. As I was going out he called after me, ‘Grateful to you for your care and patience. Your fingers are very cool, Mrs Arkwright.’
Edward – do you find this little discussion useful, with your ideas of civilised decadence and so forth? I found it oddly distressing.
I have wandered out several times to the cemetery. It’s from the time of the German traders. James had the gardener ‘tidying it up’. Apart from poor Northcott’s modest affair in stone, cut by the Baptists, it’s all bumps beneath crosses made out of iron joists and bed rods. They’re already rusted and ancient looking, with the odd blank name plate. Whatever names were painted on have long disappeared, yet the traders only left during the war. This fact combined with that little discussion brought my spirits down for a full week.
I told James that I thought Hargreaves had become an out-and-out pagan.
‘As long as he isn’t in any secret society, darling, it can be classed as professional interest. Most of the old Coasters have a bit of them that’s gone that way. Like wearing robes and smoking hooglies in Arabia, or putting your hands together and bowing in India. Helps one understand the people.’
A secret society, Edward, is exactly like the ones we have at home, only the problem out h
ere is that it can end up very nastily. You must have heard of the Leopard Society business in Calabar, which was like the Masons with spots – those spots being slavery and murder-by-leopard (someone disguised, with horrible claws). Tarbuck’s lot stamped it out, and they all sing hymns now. But around here, and even deeper in the forest, no one knows quite what goes on. There are even Crocodile Societies, apparently, which makes me physically shudder. James showed me the local map he’d found in a drawer. It’s from trading days, and covered in mould – but that makes no difference, since the mould can stand in for the forest, and most of the forest is uncharted. Even the Germans have nothing written in that ugly Gothic script, north of us, except Der Wildnis. We are a little red hut on the thicker one of the wiggles, and Ikasa is three red huts. I don’t think we deserve to have a hut, if Ikasa has only three. The ends of the map dropped off the ends of the table, which was very fitting.
James is going to rebuild the veranda. Don’t ask me how, but it involves a lot of concrete. Mr Hargreaves was very proud of it, but every time it rains the tin roof not only rattles but lets in quite a number of the balusters. I am astonished, in some of these storms, that we are not all washed away, let alone the veranda. Every time the concrete floors are scrubbed, little pebbles come away with the bristles. James blames the PWD. I blame the weather.
The second conversation happened one evening, after supper, on one of the rare occasions Hargreaves joined us (he only left a week ago). Normally he stayed in his room, or went for little strolls around the compound. For dinner, he would dress up – in soiled evening jacket and trousers, but no tie. He would make fun of James wearing a tie. One doesn’t wear a tie in the bush, but James is a stickler for etiquette. Anyway, we were all three smoking on the veranda. It was not raining. (In Buea, I would have had to retire. Here I do not.) The subject of ju-ju came up. Fetishes and spirits and such-like were discussed. Hargreaves thought Tarbuck’s trip up-river was putting Grace in great danger. He paused to pull deeply on his cigar, crackling the tobacco. He nodded to himself Then he announced that he had seen a man pierced through the heart with a spear. James, who has seen the same done with bayonets and other horrible manly things, wondered what that had to do with ju-ju.