‘Your forebears,’ said James. ‘I am the grandson of a grocer.’
‘Oh, well done,’ said Geoffrey.
‘And my grandfather was a surveyor’s clerk,’ said Jill.
‘And mine was a farm labourer in Dorset,’ said James.
‘Congratulations,’ said Geoffrey. ‘You win. None of us can compete with that.’ And off he went, with a wave of his hand to Sylvia, Daniel just behind him.
‘He was always such a poseur,’ said Jill.
‘I would have said a pouf,’ said James.
‘Now, now, the least we can expect here is political correctness.’
‘You can expect what you like. As far as I am concerned, political correctness is just another little sample of American imperialism,’ said the man of the people.
‘Discuss,’ said Jill.
And, discussing, they went off.
On the steps of Butler’s, Rose Trimble agitatedly hovered, in a smart outfit bought in the hope Andrew would invite her to the dinner: but he had not answered her messages.
Jill appeared and ignored Rose, who had described her Council as a disgrace to the principles and ideals of democracy.
‘I was only doing my job,’ said Rose to Jill’s back.
Then, cousin James, whose face hardened: ‘What the hell are you doing here? Short of muck in London?’ And he pushed her aside.
When Andrew came down the steps with Mona and Sylvia, he at once said, ‘Oh, Rose, how utterly delightful to see you.’
‘Didn’t you get my messages?’
‘Did you send me messages?’
‘Give me a quote, Andrew. How did the conference go?’
‘I am sure it will all be in the papers tomorrow.’
‘And this is Mona Moon–oh, do give me a quote, Mona. How is married life?’
Mona did not reply, and went on with Andrew. Rose did not recognise Sylvia, or rather only much later thought that boring little thing must have been Sylvia.
Abandoned, she said bitterly to the delegates who were streaming past, ‘The bloody Lennoxes. They were my family.’
Sylvia was embraced by Andrew, kissed prettily by Mona and put into a taxi: they were off to a party.
• • •
Sister Molly’s house was dark and locked. Sylvia had to ring and ring again. The snap of locks, the grind of chains, the click of keys, and Molly stood there in a blue baby-doll nightdress, the silver cross sliding over her breasts. ‘Sorry, we all have to live in a fortress these days.’
Sylvia went to her room, carefully, as if she might spill about like a jelly. She felt she had eaten too much and knew wine didn’t suit her. She was light-headed, and trembled. Sister Molly stood watching as she lowered herself to her bed and flopped.
‘Better take that off,’ and Molly pulled off an outer layer of linen and shoes and stockings. ‘There. I thought so. When did you last have malaria?’
‘Oh–a year ago–I think.’
Then you have it now. Lie still. You have the devil of a temperature.’
‘It’ll go.’
‘Not by itself, it won’t.’
And so Sylvia went through her bout of malaria, which was not the bad kind, cerebral, which is so dangerous, but it was bad enough and she shivered and she shook, and swallowed her pills–back to the old-fashioned quinine, since the new ones were not working with her–and when she was finally herself, Sister Molly said, ‘That was a go, if you like. But I see you are with us again.’
‘Please telephone Father McGuire and tell him.’
‘Who do you take us for? Of course I rang him weeks ago.’
‘Weeks? ’
‘You’ve had it bad. Mind you, I’d say it was malaria plus, a bit of a collapse generally. And you’re anaemic, for a start. And you have to eat.’
‘What did Father McGuire say?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry. Everything’s going on as usual.’
In fact, Rebecca had died, and so had her sick boy Tenderai. The two children who stayed alive had been taken away by the sister-in-law whom Rebecca suspected of poisoning her. It was too early to tell Sylvia the bad news.
Sylvia ate, she drank what seemed to be gallons of water, and she went to the bath, where the sweats of the fever were finally swilled away. She was weak but clear-headed. She lay flat on her little iron bed and told herself that the fever had shaken foolishness out of her that she could well do without. One thing was Father McGuire: through difficult times she had been telling herself that Father McGuire was a saint, as if that justified everything, but now she was thinking, Who the hell am I, Sylvia Lennox, to go on and on about who is a saint and who isn’t?
She said to Sister Molly, ‘I have understood that I am not a Catholic, not a real one, and I probably never was.’
‘Is that so? So you either are or you aren’t. So it is a Protestant you are, after all? Well, I have to confess to you that in my view the good God has better things to do than worry about our little squabbles, but never tell them I said that, in Belfast–I don’t want to find myself knee-capped when I go on leave next.’
‘I have been suffering from the sin of pride, I know that.’
‘I daresay. Aren’t we all? But I’m surprised Kevin never mentioned it if you are. He’s a great one for the sin of pride.’
‘I expect he did.’
‘Well, then, and now take it easy. When you are strong enough, give some thought to what you are going to do next. We have suggestions for you.’
And so Sylvia lay and took it in that she was not expected back at the Mission. And what was happening to Clever and Zebedee?
She telephoned. Their voices, so young, desperate: Help me, help us.
‘When are you coming? Please come.’
‘Soon, as soon as I can.’
‘Now Rebecca’s not here, things are so hard . . .’
‘What?’
And so she heard the news. And lay on her bed and did not weep, it was too bad for that.
• • •
Sylvia lay propped up on her bed, absorbing nourishing potions while Sister Molly, hands on her hips, stood smiling, watching forcibly while Sylvia ate, and all day and as far into the night as was possible for Zimlia’s early-rising citizens, came people of the kind Andrew Lennox, or the tourists or visiting relatives or people who under the white government had not been welcome, never met. And Sylvia had not met them either until now.
She was being made to reflect that while places like Kwadere existed in Zimlia, far too many of them, perhaps her experiences had been as narrow in their way as those of people who would not have believed that villages like St Luke’s Mission could exist. After all, there were schools that actually taught their pupils, which had at least some exercise books and textbooks, hospitals that had equipment and surgeons and even research laboratories. It was her nature that had seen to it that she was in as poor a place as possible: she understood that as clearly as she did that fretting over her degrees of faith or lack of it was absurd.
On a level far from the embassies or the lounges of Butler’s Hotel, or the trade fairs, or the corrupt bosses at the top (referred to by Sister Molly as ‘chocolate cake’) were people who ran organisations with small budgets, sometimes funded by single individuals, who accomplished more with their money than Caring International or Global Money could dream of, and who laboured in difficult places to achieve a library, a shelter for abused women, provision for a small business, or provided small loans of a size that ordinary banks must despise. They were black and they were white, Zimlian citizens or ex-pats, forming a layer of energetic optimism which spread up to embrace minor officials and lower civil servants, for there has never been a country that relied so much on its minor officials, who are competent, not corrupt, and hard-working. Unsung they are, and mostly unnoticed. But anyone who understood, would go for help to some comparatively lowly office run by a man or a woman who, if there were any justice, would be openly running the country, and who in fact were what everyt
hing depends on. Sister Molly’s house and a dozen like it formed a layer or web of sane people. Politics were not discussed, not because of principle but because of the nature of the people involved: in some countries politics are the enemy of commonsense. If the Comrade Leader was mentioned at all, or his corrupt cronies, it was as one talks about the weather–something that had to be put up with. A great disappointment, the Comrade President, but what’s new?
Sylvia was being presented with a dozen possibilities for her future. She was a doctor, people knew she had created a hospital in the bush where none had existed. She had fallen foul of the government, too bad, but Zimlia was not the only country in Africa.
A sentence in our textbooks goes something like this: ‘In the latter part of the nineteenth century, and until the First World War, the Great Powers fought over Africa like dogs over a bone.’ What we read less often is that Africa, considered as a bone, was not less fought over for the rest of the twentieth century, though the dog packs were not the same.
A youngish doctor, a native of Zimlia (white), had returned recently from the wars in Somalia. He sat on the hard upright chair in Sylvia’s room and listened while she talked compulsively (Sister Molly said this was a self-cure) of the fate of the people at St Luke’s Mission, dying of AIDS, and apparently invisible to the government. She talked for hours and he listened. And then he talked, as compulsively, and she listened.
Somalia had been part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, which set up its usual apparatus of prisons, torture chambers and death squads. Then by a smart little piece of international legerdemain, Somalia became American, swapped for another bit of Africa. Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and communists of various persuasions who had flourished under the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies, now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed. The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling water had been poured into an ants’ nest. The structure of decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope, particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them by war.
The doctor sat for hours on his hard chair and talked, because he had been watching people kill each other for months. Just before he left he had stood on the side of a track through a landscape dried to dust, watching refugees from famine file past. It is one thing to see it on television, as he said (trying to excuse his garrulousness), while he stared at her, but not seeing her, seeing only what he was describing, and it was another thing to be there. Perhaps Sylvia was as equipped as most to visualise what he was telling her, because she had only to set in her mind along that dusty track two thousand miles to the north people from the dying village in Kwadere. But he had watched, too, refugees fleeing from the killing troops of Mengistu, some of them hacked and bleeding, some dying, some carrying murdered children: he had watched that for days, and Sylvia’s experience did not match with it and so it was hard to see it. And besides there was no television in Father McGuire’s house.
He was a doctor, and he had watched, helpless, people in need of medicines, a refuge, surgery, and all he had had to aid them had been a few cartons of antibiotics which had disappeared in a few minutes.
The world is now full of people who have survived wars, genocide, drought, floods, and none of them will forget what they have experienced, but there are, too, the people who have watched: to stand for days seeing a people stream past in thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million, with nothing in your hands, well, this doctor had been there and done that, and his eyes were haunted and his face was stricken, and he could not stop talking.
A woman doctor from the States wanted Sylvia for Zaire, but asked was Sylvia up to it–it was pretty tough up there, and Sylvia said she was fine, she was very strong. She also said that she had performed an operation without being a surgeon but both doctors were amused: in the field, doctors not surgeons did what they could. ‘Short of transplant operations, and I wouldn’t actually go in for a by-pass.’
In the end she agreed to go to Somalia, as part of a team financed by France. Meanwhile she had to go back to the Mission to see Zebedee and Clever, whose voices when she spoke to them over the telephone sounded like the cries of birds caught in a storm. She did not know what to do. She described these two boys, now no longer children, but adolescents, to Sister Molly and to the doctors, and knew that one, who saw children like these every day of her working life, thought that both were destined for future unemployment (but she would keep a look out, perhaps they could be found work as servants?), and the others, with their minds full of starving thousands, endless lines of poor victims, could only with difficulty bend their imaginations to think of two unfortunates who had dreamed of being doctors but now . . . So what’s new?
***
Sister Molly had to drive out fifty miles beyond Kwadere to resume work interrupted by Sylvia’s illness. She had arranged that Aaron would collect Sylvia from the turn-off. Her complaints about the Pope and the churchly male hierarchy were interrupted by the sight of six great grain silos along the road whose contents–last season’s maize–had been sold off by a senior Minister to another drought-ridden African country, the proceeds pocketed by himself. They were driving through hungry country; for miles in every direction stretched bush dry and starved because of the overdue rainy season.
‘I wouldn’t like to have his conscience,’ said Sylvia, and Sister Molly said that it seemed some people had not yet understood that there were people born without consciences. This set Sylvia off on her monologue about the village at the Mission, and Sister Molly listened, saying, ‘Yes, that is so,’ and, ‘You are in the right of it there.’ At the turn-off Aaron was waiting in the Mission car. Sister Molly said to Sylvia, ‘Well, that’s it, then. I expect I’ll see you around.’ And Sylvia said, ‘Fine. And I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me.’ ‘Forget it.’ And off she drove with a wave of the hand that was like a door shutting.
Aaron was vivacious, eager, on the verge of a new life: he was going to the Old Mission to continue his studies to become a priest. Father McGuire was leaving. Everyone was leaving. And the library? ‘I am afraid the books are not many now, because you see, with Tenderai dead, and Rebecca dead and you not here, who was to look after them?’
‘And Clever and Zebedee?’
Aaron had never liked them, nor they him, and all he said was, ‘Okay.’
He parked the car under the gum trees and went off. It was late afternoon, the light going fast from gold and pink clouds. On the other side of the sky a half moon, a mere whitish smear, was waiting to acquire dignity when the dark came.
As she arrived on the verandah the two lads came running. They stopped. They stared. Sylvia did not know what was wrong. While ill she had lost her sunburn, had become white as milk, and her hair, cut off because of the sweats, was in wisps and fronds of yellow. They had only known her as a friendly and comfortable brown. ‘It is so wonderful to see you’–and they came rushing at her, and she put her arms around them. There was much less substance to them than she was used to.
‘Isn’t anyone feeding you?’
‘Yes, yes. Doctor Sylvia,’ they hugged her and wept. But she knew they had fed badly. And the bright white shirts were dingy with dirt because Rebecca was not there to do them. Their eyes through the tears said, Please, please.
Father McGuire arrived, asked if they had eaten and they said yes. But he took a loaf from the sideboard, and they tore it in half and ate hungrily as they went down to the village: they would return at sunrise.
Sylvia and the priest sat in their places at the table, the single electric lightbulb telling him how sick she had been, and she that he
was an old man.
‘You’ll see the new graves on the hill, and there are new orphans. I and Father Thomas–he’s the black priest at the Old Mission–we’re going to set up a refuge for the AIDS orphans. We’ve got funding from Canada, God reward them, but Sylvia, have you thought that there will be perhaps a million children without parents, the way we are going?’
‘The Black Death destroyed whole villages. When they take pictures of England from the air they can see where the villages were.’
‘This village will not be here soon. They are leaving because they say the place is cursed.’
‘And do you tell them what they should be thinking, Father?’
‘I do.’
The electric light suddenly failed. The priest lit a couple of emergency candles, and they ate their supper by their light, served by Rebecca’s niece, a strong and healthy young woman–well, she was now–who had come to help her dying aunt, and she would leave when the priest left.
‘And I hear there’s a new headmaster at last?’
‘Yes, but you see, Sylvia, they don’t like coming out to these far-out places, and this one’s already had his problems with the drink.’
‘I see.’
‘But he has a big family and he will have this house.’
They both knew there was more to be said, and at last he asked, ‘And now, what are you going to do with those boys?’
‘I should not have set up their expectations and I did. Though I never actually promised them anything.’
‘Ah, but it is the great wonderful rich world there that is the promise.’
‘And so, what should I do?’
‘You must take them with you to London. Send them to a real school. Let them learn doctoring. God knows this poor country will be needing its doctors.’
She was silent.
‘Sylvia, they are healthy. Their father died before there was AIDS. Joshua’s real children will die, but not these two. He’s waiting to see you, by the way.’
‘I am surprised he is still alive.’
The Sweetest Dream Page 48