• • •
To come back to a house that loved you, took you in, kept you safe, a house that put its arms around you, that you pulled over your head like a blanket, and burrowed into like a lost little animal–but now it is not your home, it is other people’s . . . Sylvia went up those stairs, her feet knowing every step, every turn: here she had crouched, listening to the noise and laughter from the kitchen, thinking that she would never ever be accepted by it; and here Andrew had found her and carried her up to bed, tucked her in, given her chocolate from his pocket. Here had been her room but she must walk past it. Here had been Andrew’s room, and Colin’s. And now she was going up the last flight to Julia’s and did not know on the landing which door to knock at, but guessed right, for Colin’s voice said Come in, and she was in Julia’s old sitting-room and Colin was at–no, that was not Julia’s little desk, but a big one, that filled a wall. If all the things that had been Julia’s had been removed, and now it was all new furniture, it would have been easy, but here was Julia’s chair and her little footstool, and it was as if the room both welcomed and repelled her. Colin looked thoroughly dissipated. He was bloated, a big man who would soon be all puffy fat if he . . . He said, ‘Sylvia, why did you just run away like that? When they told me this morning . . .’
‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I really want to talk to you about something.’
‘And I am sorry. Forget what I said last night. You got me at a bad moment. If I was criticising Sophie–forget it. I love Sophie. I always did. Do you remember–we were always a–team?’
Sylvia sat in Julia’s chair, knowing that her heart was going to ache if she didn’t watch out, for Julia, and she didn’t want that, didn’t want to waste time on . . . Colin was opposite, his back to the big desk, in a swivel chair. He sprawled there, legs extended, and then he grinned, the savage self-criticism of his drunkenness.
‘And there’s another thing. What right have we to expect any sort of normality? With the history of our family? All war and disruption and the comrades? What nonsense!’ He laughed, and the smell of alcohol filled the room.
‘You’ll have to stop drinking, if you’re going to have a baby. You might drop it or . . .’
‘What? I might what, little Sylvia?’
She sighed and said gently, humbly presenting this to him like showing him a picture in a book: ‘Joshua, that’s the man I told you about–a black man of course . . . he dropped his two-year-old into the fire. He was so badly burned that . . . of course, if it happened in this country there would have been proper treatment for him.’
‘Well, Sylvia, I don’t think I’m going to drop our child into a fire. I am perfectly aware that I am . . . that I could be more satisfactory.’ This was so comical that she laughed and Colin did laugh but not at once. ‘I’m a mess. But what do you expect of Comrade Johnny’s progeny? But do you know something? As long as I was just a bear in a cave, sallying forth to a pub, or an affair here and a relationship–now that’s a word that evades any real issue–well, I did not strike myself as a mess. But as soon as my Sophie moved in and it was happy families I knew I am just a bear that was never house-trained. I don’t know why she puts up with me.’
‘Colin, I would really like to talk to you about something.’
‘I tell her that if she perseveres she may make a husband out of me yet.’
‘Please, Colin.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to go out to Zimlia and see things for yourself and write the truth.’
A silence. His smile was gently satirical. ‘How that does take me back! Sylvia, do you remember when the comrades were always going out to the Soviet Union or associated communist paradises to see for themselves and coming back to tell the truth? In fact, we are entitled to conclude, with all the hindsights we lucky inheritors have been endowed with, that if there is one way of not finding the truth it is going to somewhere to see for yourself.’
‘So, you don’t want to do it?’
‘No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about Africa.’
‘I could tell you. Don’t you see? What’s going on, it’s got nothing to do with what the newspapers are saying.’
‘Wait a minute.’ He swivelled himself about, pulled out a drawer, found a newspaper cutting and said, ‘Did you see this?’ He held it out.
Byline: Johnny Lennox.
‘Yes, I did. Frances sent it. It’s such nonsense, the Comrade Leader is not as the newspapers describe him.’
‘Surprise, surprise.’
‘When I saw Johnny’s name I couldn’t believe it. He’s turned into an expert on Africa, then?’
‘Why not? All their idols have turned out to have feet of clay, but cheer up! There’s an unlimited supply of great leaders in Africa, thugs and bullies and thieves, so all the poor souls that have to love a leader can love the black ones.’
‘And when there’s a massacre or a tribal war or a few missing millions, all they have to do is to murmur, It’s a different culture,’ said Sylvia succumbing to the pleasures of spite.
‘And poor Johnny has to eat after all. This way he is always the guest of some dictator or other.’
‘Or at a conference discussing the nature of Freedom.’
‘Or at a symposium on Poverty.’
‘Or a seminar called by the World Bank.’
‘Actually, that’s part of the trouble–the old Reds can’t spout about Freedom and Democracy, and that’s what’s on our agendas. Johnny is not as much in demand as he was. Oh, Sylvia, I do miss you. Why do you live so far away? Why can’t we all live together for ever in this house and forget what goes on outside?’ He was animated, had lost his hung-over pallor, he was laughing.
‘If I give you all the facts, the material, you could write some articles.’
‘Why don’t you ask Rupert? He’s a serious journalist.’ He added, ‘He’s one of the best. He’s good.’
‘But when they are so well-known then they don’t like taking risks. They’re all saying Zimlia’s wonderful. He’d be out on a limb by himself.’
‘They are supposed to like being the first.’
‘Then why isn’t he one of them? I could ask Father McGuire to draft an article and you could use it as a basis.’
‘Ah, yes, Father McGuire. Andrew said he had never understood the real meaning of a fatted capon before.’ Sylvia was annoyed. ‘I am sorry.’
‘He’s a good man.’
‘And you are a good woman. We are not worthy of you–sorry, sorry, but little Sylvia, can’t you see I’m envious of you? It’s that clear-eyed single-hearted candour of yours–where did you get it?–oh, yes, of course, you are a Catholic.’ He got up, lifted Sylvia on to his knee, and put his face into her neck. ‘I swear you smell of sunlight. I was thinking last night when you were being so nice to me, She smells of sunlight.’
She was uncomfortable. So was he. It was incongruous, this position, for them both. She slid back to her chair.
‘And you will try not to drink so much?’
‘Yes.’
‘You promise?’
‘Yes, Sylvia, yes, Sonia, I promise.’
‘I’ll send you material.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
• • •
Sylvia knocked on the door to the basement flat, heard a sharp ‘Who’s that?’, put her head around the door, and from the foot of the stairs a lean woman in smart tan trousers, tan shirt, with a copper-coloured Eton crop, stared up at her. A woman like a knife.
‘I used to live in this house,’ said Sylvia. ‘And I hear you are going to live with my mother?’
Meriel did not abate her hostile inspection. Then she turned her back to Sylvia, lit a cigarette, and said into a cloud of smoke, ‘That’s the plan at the moment, yes.’
‘I’m Sylvia.’
‘I supposed you might be.’
The rooms Sylvia was looking into were as she remembered, more like a student’s pad, but now very tidy.
It seemed that Meriel was packing. She turned to say, ‘They want this space. Your mother has kindly offered me a place to lay my head while I’m looking for something.’
‘And you will be working with her?’
‘When I have finished my training I shall work on my own account.’
‘I see.’
‘And when I get my own place I shall have the children with me.’
‘Oh, well, I expect it will all work out. I’m sorry I disturbed you. I wanted just to–look, for old times’ sake.’
‘Don’t slam the door. This is a very noisy house. The children do as they like.’
• • •
Sylvia took a cab to her mother’s. Nothing much had changed there. Incense, mystical signs on cushions and curtains, and her mother, large and angry but all smiles of welcome.
‘How nice of you to take the trouble to see me.’
‘I’m off back to Zimlia tonight.’
Phyllida slowly and thoroughly examined her daughter. ‘Well, Tilly, you look thoroughly dried out. Why don’t you use skin creams?’
‘I will. You’re right. Mother, I met Meriel just now.’
‘Did you?’
‘And what happened to Mary Constable?’
‘We had words.’
This phrase brought back to Sylvia a rush of memories, she and her mother, in this boarding-house or that furnished room, always on the move, usually because of unpaid rent; landladies who were best friends but became enemies, and the phrase, ‘There were words.’ So many words, so often. And then Phyllida married Johnny.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Plenty of fish. At least Meriel has had children. She knows what it is to have her children stolen from her.’
‘Well, I’ll be off, I just popped in.’
‘I didn’t expect you to sit down and have a cup of tea.’
‘I’ll have a cup of tea.’
‘Those brats of Meriel’s. Now, they’re a handful.’
‘Then perhaps she’s well rid of them?’
‘They’re not coming here, so she needn’t think it.’
‘If we’re going to have tea, let’s have it. It’s nearly time to leave for the airport.’
‘Then you’d better go, hadn’t you?’
• • •
Sylvia was again in the Arrivals of Senga airport, as crowded as it had been when she was last here, and with the same two kinds of people divided by colour, but much more by status. But there had been a change. Four–no, five, years before, this had been a vigorously confident crowd, yes, but so soon after that war faces and the set of bodies still showed a practised apprehension, as if the news of Peace had not really been taken in by the whole person. Nerves were still set for bad news. But now this crowd was exuberant, triumphant with successful shopping in London, which was overloading the small and creaking carousel to the point where great suitcases, refrigerators, luggage, furniture toppled off to be hustled away by their laughing owners. Never has there been a more openly self-congratulatory population of travellers than this one; on the plane among the whites the words the new nomenklatura had circulated with the relish of gossip.
And, again, here was the same division in dress, the new black elite in their three-piece suits, wiping copious sweat from their beaming faces, and the casual be-jeaned and T-shirted whites off to a hundred different humble stations in the bush, or in the town. Soon, both these so very different categories of being were staring at one focus: a young black woman of perhaps eighteen, very pretty, wearing the advanced clothes of some designer or other, high heels like skewers and the petulant frown of the spoiled young. She had commandeered two of the porters. Off the carousel were being lifted one, two, three, four–was that all?–no, seven, eight, Vuitton suitcases. ‘Boy, bring that here,’ she told them, in the high peremptory voice she had learned from the white madams of former times–none would dare to use it now. ‘Boy–be quick.’ She advanced to the front of the queue. ‘Boy, show my cases to the officer.’ A large black man in the queue said something to her, avuncular, proprietary, to establish his acquaintance with this dazzler to the crowd, while she tossed her head and gave him a smile half-pleased, and half Who are you to tell me what to do? All the blacks were proudly watching this accomplishment of their Independence, while the lesser mortals’ white faces did not comment, though glances were certainly being exchanged. They would discuss the incident later when safely in their homes. At Customs she said, ‘I am So and So’s daughter’–a senior Minister–and to the porters, ‘Boy . . . Boy–follow me.’ And she went through Customs and then past Immigration as if it did not exist.
Sylvia had four large cases and a little hold-all for her clothes, and while watching whole households of goods being chalked okay by the Customs officials, she knew she could not expect the same. This time she had not been lucky in whom she had sitting beside her on the plane. She was looking along the faces of the Customs officials for the young, eager, friendly face of last time, but he was not on duty, or had evolved into one of these correct officials. When she got to the head of the line, a frowning man confronted her.
‘And what is all this you have here?’
‘These are two sewing machines.’
‘And what do you want sewing machines for? Are they for your business?’
‘No, they are presents for the women at the Mission at Kwadere.’
‘Presents. And what will they be paying you for them?’
‘Nothing,’ said Sylvia, smiling at him: she knew that the sewing machines had touched this man, perhaps he had watched his mother or sister working on one. But duty won.
‘They will have to go to the depot. And you will be informed what you must pay on them.’ The two boxes were lifted off to one side: Sylvia knew she was unlikely to see them again. They would be ‘mislaid’.
‘And now what is all this?’ He knocked on the sides of the two cases as if they were doors.
‘Books. For the Mission.’
At once on to the man’s face appeared a look she knew too well: hunger. He took a lever, prised up the top of one case–books. He picked one up, turning pages, taking his time, and sighed. He let the books fall back, used the lever to bang the top down, and stood undecided.
‘Please–they are much needed, these books.’
It was touch and go. ‘Okay,’ he said. She had traded two sewing machines for the books, but she knew which the women at the Mission would choose.
She went through Immigration without difficulty, and there stood Sister Molly waiting, smiling, outlined by that brilliance of light that means rain has recently cleared the air. The rainy season had come. Late, but it was here. But now, the question had to be, was it going to stay: the last three or four years, rains had indeed broken the long dryness, but then had taken themselves off again. The region was officially in a state of drought, but today you’d not know it, with complacent white clouds sailing on the blue, and puddles everywhere. The sunlight dazzled off Sister Molly’s cross, shone off her strong brown legs. Healthy, that was the word for her. And healthy was this scene, everything strong and vigorous, newly-washed trees and bushes and a good-natured crowd disappearing into official cars and lowly buses. Sylvia felt herself again. Her visit to London had not been a success, except for her boxes of books. But that experience snapped shut behind her. London seemed unreal to her: this was real.
The back seat of Sister Molly’s old car sank under the weight of the big cases. She at once began to talk, with the news that there had been scandals. Ministers had been accused of taking bribes and of stealing. She spoke with the relish that confirms a satisfaction in everything going on as expected. ‘And Father McGuire said there was trouble of some kind at the Mission. St Luke’s has been accused of theft.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘Nonsense can be very powerful.’ And Sylvia thought that this nun’s–she was that, after all–look at her was too admonitory–a warning?–for the occasion. There was something
wrong. It did not do to dismiss anything she said. This was a very accomplished young woman. She ran a scheme that brought teachers from America and from Europe to teach for a couple of years in Zimlia, because of the shortage of black teachers, and this was–so far–welcomed by the black government because it saved on teachers’ wages. Some teachers were in schools in remote areas, and Sister Molly was almost permanently on her rounds to see how her charges did. ‘Some of them, they come from well-off families and they have no idea of what they are coming to, and then they find themselves at a school like the one at Kwadere and they can take it hard.’ Breakdowns, fits of depression, collapses of all kinds were coped with by this competent young woman as a hazard of the work: and she was kind and consoling, and some sheltered young thing from Philadelphia or LA might find herself rocked on the bosom of the deep, ‘There now, there now,’ in the arms of this Molly who had started life in a poor home in Galway. ‘And I hear there is trouble again at the school, the headmaster has absconded with the money, and Father McGuire is working double again. And now that is a curious thing, don’t you think so? All these headmasters and naughty thieves they think they are invisible to the rest of us and to the police, and so what is it goes through their poor heads, do you think?’–but she did not want an answer, she wanted to talk, and for Sylvia to listen. Soon she was back on her real centre of gravity, which was the Holy Father and his deficiencies, for apart from being a man, he was ‘putting ideas into the heads’ of priests working in various parts of the world. To hear this sequence of words, in this context–for it had ever been a main grievance of the whites that missions ‘put ideas’ into black heads–was an odd exhilaration, the same used as fuel by Colin in his books–the infinite incongruity that life was capable of. (Not long before leaving for London, Sylvia had heard from Edna Pyne that the present delinquency of the blacks was due to having had ideas put into their heads too soon in their evolutionary development.)
‘And what ideas may they be?’ Sylvia did manage to interpolate, and heard only Molly’s old refrain that the Pope was sexist and did not understand the trials of women. Birth control, said Sister Molly, that was the key, and the Pope might have the keys of Heaven, and she did not want to argue with that, but he did not understand this earth. Let him be brought up with a tribe of nine brats and not enough money to put food into their mouths, and he would sing to a different tune. And in a state of mild and agreeable indignation, Sister Molly drove all the way to St Luke’s Mission where she left Sylvia with her boxes of books. ‘No, I’m not coming in. Otherwise I’ll have to visit the nun-house.’ And Sylvia heard, as she had been meant to, hen-house.
The Sweetest Dream Page 37