It was just as Harold was coming away that the booking-clerk remembered his full instructions.
‘Sah, sah,’ he called after him, ‘you want sleeper reservations, sah? Sleeper reservations and meal vouchers?’
The booking-clerk was always delighted to have a chance to use the connecting telephone. The Sleeper Manager was a friend of his, a personal friend. And, on days when no trains were running, the two of them would often spend whole hours chatting together. The booking-clerk kept an official railway duster specially for wiping out the mouthpiece during prolonged conversations.
But today was disappointing. He cranked and re-cranked the little ebony handle on the instrument, but there was no answer from the other end. What made it particularly shaming before a stranger was that he could so plainly hear the bell ringing all the time.
‘’ Scuse me, sah,’ he said at last. ‘Back in no time at all.’
Harold could hear, outside on the platform, the shouts of the booking-clerk. Then came an answering call from somewhere behind the Goods Depot. A moment later, there was the noise of loud laughter and the sound of returning footsteps.
The booking-clerk re-appeared behind the grille.
‘Everything is ready now, sah,’ he said, cranking away again at the handle. ‘No more delays. Your sleeper reservations will be made absolutely forthwith.’
Because the conversation was in rapid Mimbo, Harold could not make out a single word of it. He even began to doubt whether they were talking about him at all. Then the booking-clerk turned anxiously towards him.
‘The Sleeper Manager wishes to know which Wednesday, sah.’ ‘Next Wednesday,’ Harold told him. ‘Like my ticket.’
‘Yassah. Certainly, sah.’
There was more Mimbo from the booking-clerk; more intense listening to what the Sleeper Manager had to say.
‘He is asking whether you wish full meals? No partial refreshments served at all any longer. Only full meals.’
The conversation became heated again. The booking-clerk banged his fist down on the receiver. Then, covering up the mouthpiece with his pale pink palm, he referred to Harold again.
‘Twenty per cent reduction if you pay for the return journey at the same time,’ he said. ‘All full first-class meals throughout. Dinner five courses.’
‘Single,’ Harold told him.
There was more Mimbo; more laughter. The booking-clerk rang off.
‘Everything absolutely O.K., sah,’ he said. ‘All fixed and in order. The Sleeper Manager asks if you would please be so good as to go to his office to confirm the details. It is close beside on the same platform. The very next building, in fact. Ah’ll phone, sah, to say you’re on your way. In fact, sah, Ah’ll accompany you mahself.’
The taxi was due in twenty minutes; and Harold’s bags, all packed and labelled, were blocking up the little hallway of the bungalow.
So he had done it. There was no turning back. By tomorrow morning, Amimbo would simply be a township somewhere on the map; and Sir Gardnor would have to find someone else to help him with his book.
‘It had to be this way,’ he kept telling himself. ‘There isn’t any future for either of us. And it isn’t fair on her. She’s the one who’d have got hurt. Not me. Pulling out’s the only thing. Now, before it’s too late. She must see that.’
He was staring out of the window across the garden. Through the trunks of the acacia trees, he could see the white sunblinds of the Residency.
‘It was only talk. She didn’t really mean it. People who talk about killing themselves never do. She’ll get over it. She’ll forget all about me.’
He had just finished the last of the breakfast coffee, and had lit a cigarette. On the table beside him stood a little pile of letters that he had sat up most of the night writing.
The one to Mr. Frith had been comparatively easy. Reading between the lines, it would tell him all that he needed to know; all that he knew already, most likely. The one to Sir Gardnor had not proved unduly difficult, either. It mentioned urgent family business at home, and finished up with an apology and regrets for not having been able to see the book right through to the proof stage. It gave nothing away.
It was the letter to Lady Anne that had been written, torn up, rewritten and re-written. Twice he had ripped the envelope open again, and each time he had decided that the letter had better go as it was.
‘After all, it’s the truth, isn’t it?’ he kept saying to himself. ‘So why not be frank and face up to it? I owe her some kind of explanation: I can’t simply disappear. It’s kinder this way. God knows I don’t want to hurt her.’
He looked at his watch. The Coronation Flyer, in its cream and chocolate paintwork, would already be standing in the Terminus.
‘Not long now,’ was the one thought running through his mind. ‘Not long, and I’ve made it. I’ll write to her again when I get to Nucca.’
The taller of the two houseboys came sidling into the room, his big hands flapping, the toes of his strong black feet wriggling with excitement. Harold recognised all the signs. It meant that the boy had just broken something; or the frying-pan had been stolen; or there were ghosts round the bungalow again; or he had just seen the tail end of an enormous python gliding in behind the kitchen-stove; or the cook once more had said something unpleasant about his mother.
Harold caught sight of the cook behind the bead curtain: it was the vivid white glint of his eyes that gave him away. The curtain parted and the cook came through. He was carrying something.
It was a bulging and mis-shapen hamper. Waddling awkwardly because of its size, he placed it proudly upon the table. It was a surprise, he said; a big surprise, planned specially for the journey. He started to undo it. The taller boy snatched it away from him. They pulled. One of the straps on the hamper came clean away in the struggle. This made things easier. Between them they began removing the contents to display them. There were two roast chickens; a ham; a tin of Fray Bentos corned beef; oranges; bananas; a Huntley and Palmer Rich Dundee Cake; a Christmas pudding with a label on the jar saying ‘Boil for four hours’; a packet of chocolate biscuits; ten cigarettes.
For between meals, they kept saying; and in case of waking up at night when the restaurant car is left in darkness.
The huge hamper made Harold’s parting gift of money seem mean and ungenerous. But they were delighted. Absolutely delighted. And why not? All for free, they’d had the fun of packing a monster picnic basket. They’d had the additional fun of solemnly presenting it to the man who had already paid for it. And he had given them, in return, not merely full wages but a dowry as well. What more could they ask?
It was the sound of the taxi wheels slithering to a stop on the wet earth that interrupted them. Frantically, they began packing up the hamper again, breaking off only to shout out of the window to the driver to tell him to stop honking. Because of the broken strap, they used string. The string snapped, and they found a piece of sash-cord. They knotted it fiercely. They carried out the hamper between them like undertaker’s mutes. They returned for the suitcases.
With their going, the bungalow suddenly became strangely quiet and empty. He could hear the thud-thud, thud-thud of the pressure pump at the top of the garden.
‘I know I’m doing the right thing, pulling out,’ Harold kept repeating to himself. ‘It’s for the best in the long run. Best for Anne and for me.’
The two houseboys were outside with the taxi-driver. They were in the middle of a disagreement as to how the luggage should be loaded. Through the window, Harold could see that it had all come off again, and was standing in the mud while they argued.
He went through into the deserted bedroom. It looked as though no one had ever slept there since the bungalow had been built. In the bathroom, there was at least one memento of him: his squeezed-out tube of toothpaste had been left out on the shelf below the little mirror. He tried the kitchen. It looked different, smelled different. There were the breakfast things all washed-up on the drainin
g board, but the stove was full of ashes. There was nothing cooking on it.
He came back into the dining-room, and there was Sybil Prosser standing in the further doorway. He hadn’t heard her enter; didn’t know how long she had been there. But she was watching him. The middle button of her blouse was undone, and her hair was escaping in all directions from the various grips and pins and slides that she always wore. Her usually sallow complexion was flushed and fiery-looking.
‘And she thought she could trust you,’ she greeted him.
‘What do you mean?’
She stood there, her flat bosom rising and falling.
‘Then you don’t know?’
The note of utter incredulity was obviously genuine.
‘Know what?’
Sybil Prosser drew her tongue across her thin dry lips.
‘She heard you were leaving. It was all round Amimbo.’
‘So?’
‘So,’ Sybil Prosser repeated. ‘So she took a whole bottleful of sleeping-tablets. We’ve had the doctor up there all night. She was unconscious for hours. Simply hours. And when she came to, she began asking for you.’
Sybil Prosser paused for a moment and her pale eyes lit up again.
‘God knows why,’ she added.
‘Asking for me, did you say?’ Harold repeated dully.
‘I can’t stop her,’ Sybil Prosser told him.
‘And she’s all right again?’
‘Don’t ask me. All those tablets. And she’d been drinking.’
‘Is the doctor still there?’
‘He’s not leaving her.’
There was a pause; a long pause. All that Harold could hear was the noise of Sybil Prosser’s heavy breathing; and in his ears, the sound of his own heart pounding. Then, abruptly, he went over to the door.
The houseboys were there waiting for him.
‘Take those bags off again,’ he said. ‘I’m staying.’
Chapter 14
It was nearly a month now since Sir Gardnor had returned. There was still nothing definite. No word from the Prime Minister. Sir Gardnor had merely taken up the African reins again with the huge question-mark of India tantalisingly hanging over him.
Not that he seemed to care. He was back in his beloved Amimbo, he kept saying; so far as he was concerned, there was a whole lifetime of work waiting for him on his very doorstep. Indeed, while away, Sir Gardnor appeared to have discovered a fresh source of energy. Council had been brought forward to 9 a.m.; and a new body that he had invented—the Governor’s Committee—sat with individual Ministers every afternoon at the Residency. Amimbo, in short, was enjoying all the benefits of zealous and enlightened modern Colonial administration.
There were difficulties, of course. Mr. Talefwa, under the pseudonym, ‘Truth-Teller’, had started a new series, entitled ‘Hidden Places’. Only yesterday he had warned his readers that, with the Governor’s return, the hangings in Amimbo Gaol would shortly begin again. There were at the moment, he stated, three innocent men—all victims of aggressive imperialism—ready to be sacrificed on trumped-up charges of treason, rape or murder.
And Native Affairs was uneasy because Mr. Talefwa had succeeded in upsetting Mr. Ngono. In a leading article, he had referred to a certain notorious, dark-skinned jackal, educated at a foreign university and with local interests in dance-halls and importing establishments, cultivating the Governor’s retinue for immoral purposes or corrupt commercial advantage.
What made it so awkward for Mr. Ngono was that the clerk to whom he had confided in Mr. Frith’s office had since been dismissed for stealing, and was now on the staff of the Amimbo Mirror.
In the circumstances, there was little that Mr. Ngono could do in the Courts. He had therefore arranged to have Mr. Talefwa beaten up. But he had not reckoned on Mr. Talefwa’s natural built-in flair for martyrdom. Mr. Talefwa insisted that the ruffians who had attacked him were all plain-clothes policemen acting under direct Government orders: from a reliable source, he further reported that a made-to-measure coffin with his name on it was already stored in a secret room in Police headquarters.
Nor was the rest of the Colony any calmer. In Okuro Province typhoid epidemics had broken out in two districts nearly a hundred miles apart; a landslide had disrupted the telephone system to Omtala; a road surveyor had shot himself, or been shot, at Omurumu; tribal warfare had led to a mass killing less than three hours’ drive from Amimbo; and the rains had washed away a small township on the banks of the Abatele River.
Sir Gardnor, for his part, took it all in his stride. He was imperturbable. It was always the same, he said, after every wet season; year by year, disaster followed close upon the heels of disaster. But, he pointed out, the rains were now easing. The sky in places was already blue again.
His long projected safari, he added, would be able to take place, as planned, in four or five weeks at the outside. In the meantime, he was only sorry that Lady Anne should have gone down with another of those inexplicable illnesses of hers.
Because of the climate, he had already been forced to send his son back home to England. And if Lady Anne’s health did not materially improve in the near future, he would—he openly admitted—have to make the ultimate sacrifice, and ask her to leave him as well.
‘But how can you possibly think I’m well enough?’ she was saying. ‘I haven’t been outside the place once since it happened.’
‘It’d do you good,’ Harold told her. ‘Get you out of yourself.’
Lady Anne did not reply immediately. She was lying back on the long couch with the cushions all piled up behind her. In between answers, she closed her eyes and appeared to be sleeping.
‘She’s not asleep really,’ Sybil Prosser told him. ‘She’s enjoying herself.’
Harold turned to Lady Anne.
‘Would you rather we left you?’ Harold asked.
Lady Anne opened her eyes for a moment.
‘I don’t mind either way,’ she said. ‘It makes no difference to me. I’m still half dead. That’s what you don’t realise.’
‘She probably wants a drink.’
It was Sybil Prosser who had spoken.
Lady Anne’s eyes were closed again.
‘Drinking won’t help me to come to life again,’ she replied. ‘It simply makes me feel a little bit less dead.’
With her hair loose over her shoulders, and in the plain white dress that she was wearing, it might have been an exhausted schoolgirl who was lying there. It was only the hands that were not schoolgirl’s hands. The blue pattern of the veins was too plainly stamped there.
‘I’ll give her another one,’ Sybil Prosser said in her flat, unraised voice from which all emotion had been drained long ago. ‘If I don’t, I’ll only have to get it for her after you’ve gone. I’m tired out.’
Lady Anne was looking at Harold now.
‘You didn’t believe I’d do it, did you?’ she asked. ‘I told you, and you didn’t believe it.’ She reached out her hand for the drink. ‘But as soon as you heard you decided to stay on. That’s all that matters. That’s what I keep telling myself.’
There was a chair beside the couch, and Sybil Prosser sat down on it. She crossed her long legs. Then she uncrossed them. Yesterday, it was her hands that had been giving her trouble: she had kept clasping and unclasping them. Today, it was her legs. She couldn’t keep them folded over on the same side even for five minutes.
‘Well, are you going on safari, or aren’t you?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Don’t forget, I’m the one who has made all the arrangements.’
‘I’m too tired,’ Lady Anne replied. ‘I can’t stand the journey. Besides, there’s no point in it. I don’t enjoy killing things. He does. I don’t.’
Sybil Prosser stirred. She re-folded her legs the way they had been.
‘There’s no point in staying here,’ she said. ‘Everyone else is going.’
Lady Anne took a sip of her drink, and put the glass down on the table beside her.
; ‘Not everyone,’ she replied, with a little half smile. ‘Not me. And not Harold. I haven’t given him permission to go. Not yet, I haven’t.’
‘But I’ve said I’ll go,’ Harold told her. ‘I said I would when H.E. asked me.’
‘Then you may have to change your mind. I don’t know yet. It’s too early.’ She gave a little sigh. ‘But don’t worry. There’s plenty of time. We’ve still got a fortnight. We’re bound to have heard by then.’
‘Heard what?’
‘About India.’
Lady Anne suddenly roused herself. She was sitting up on the couch now. The smile had disappeared completely.
‘Are you blind, both of you?’ she asked. ‘Why the hell should Gardie’ —it was the only occasion on which Harold had heard her call Sir Gardnor by his pet name—’want Harold with him? It stands out a mile if only you could see.’
She had closed her eyes as she was speaking.
‘Now please go away both of you,’ she said. ‘Go away, and leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to either of you. I just want to go to sleep.’
Chapter 15
The practical arrangements for the forthcoming safari were already well in hand. An air of anticipation, almost of foreboding, hung over the whole Residency; and those, like the A.D.C. who had been through it all before, knew what they were still in for.
That was because Sir Gardnor insisted on personally supervising everything. His personal tent—it was marquee-size to begin with—was having another complete section laboriously stitched into the middle of it; an electric generator unit delivered by the Royal Engineers had been rejected out of hand because it was too noisy; Army Signals, quite unnecessarily in their view, were carrying out extensive tests with lash-up aerial masts, under what Sir Gardnor referred to as ‘service conditions’; and another telegram—a peremptory one tins time—had been sent to the gunsmiths in London demanding that the telescopic rifle sight, returned for some minor optical adjustment, should be flown back out immediately.
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