‘And where will you go?’
‘Crown Cottage, I suppose,’ Mr. Frith replied. ‘There’s nowhere else.’
It was the grace-and-favour house of Amimbo, Crown Cottage. Originally built for Government hospitality of important visitors, it had, over the years, been allowed to deteriorate because so few important visitors ever came. The lattice of white woodwork in front sagged in places as though it had been cut out of cardboard, and the green roof of corrugated iron had not been re-painted since last year’s rains.
‘I’m afraid you won’t find that very comfortable,’ Harold told him. But Mr. Frith was past consolation.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said bitterly. ‘I don’t count for anything. I’m only the Chief Secretary.’
There was a knock at the door, and the native clerk announced that the Prison Commissioner was waiting. Mr. Frith jerked himself back into efficiency again.
‘Well, get something drafted, and let me see it,’ he said. ‘Remember it’s high level. Don’t refer to accommodation.’
It was about Old Moses that the Commissioner had come.
‘Not a word from him, so far,’ he said. ‘Evidently made his mind up. Isn’t going to speak.’
‘Any good trying to get him to sign something?’ Mr. Frith suggested.
The Commissioner shook his head.
‘Can’t read,’ he said simply.
‘Well what do you want me to do?’ Mr. Frith demanded. ‘I can’t make him talk.’
‘Only make sure there isn’t any postponement,’ the Commissioner told him. ‘That’s all. He should just about be able to make it on the third. After that, I wouldn’t like to say.’
‘How’s he eating?’
The Commissioner shook his head again. He was a heavy, loosely-built man, and every time he denied anything his cheeks wobbled.
‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘Hasn’t eaten a proper meal since we had him.’
‘Still drinking his milk?’
‘Two or three cups a day. Doesn’t seem to mind that.’
Mr. Frith half-turned away, and fixed his eyes on the top of the spire again. Just when the Commissioner thought that it was the end of the conversation, Mr. Frith’s good idea came to him.
‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘he’s been up at the Residency for years. Probably doesn’t eat native food any longer. Give him what he’s got used to.’
The cheeks wobbled again.
‘Tried it,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘Simply pushes it away from him.’
‘What’s the doctor say?’
‘Wants us to keep on with the pills. Vitamins, you know. Six a day. They’re crushed up and put into the milk before he gets it.’
This time it really was the end of the conversation. Mr. Frith got up out of his chair.
‘Well, if there’s any change let me know,’ he said. Remembering Mr. Talefwa, he paused. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to him.’
The rest of Mr. Frith’s appointments were as much routine, and all as much frustrating. The Chief of Police wanted to raid the offices of War Drum because a secret informer, who turned out to be Mr. Ngono, had secured an advance proof of tomorrow’s leader which openly accused the Police Department of corruption. The Government granary at Omtala had accidentally been burnt to the ground. Somewhere down to the south, raiders had driven off three hundred head of cattle, and there were rumours of blazing villages and murdered herdsmen. Cholera cases were increasing around Aktu Junction. And, overnight, one of the ornamental lamp-posts had been impudently stolen from Victoria Square.
When twelve o’clock came round, Mr. Frith remembered that he had not seen the draft reply to the telegram. He merely nodded when Harold gave it to him, and instinctively picked up his pen to make the necessary alterations. After crossing out the last sentence, he brooded over it for a moment and then wrote it in again, inking over the letters to make them stand out properly.
‘Well, better get it off,’ he said. ‘Nothing we can do about it.’
He had finished his morning’s work, and had gone over and unlocked the drink cabinet.
‘Care to join me?’ he asked.
Harold saw his opportunity.
‘What’s he like, the new Governor?’ he asked.
Glass in hand, Mr. Frith felt better. He was now quite prepared to talk about it: earlier he wouldn’t have been ready to face up to the subject at all.
‘He’s forty-eight, that’s what he’s like,’ he said. ‘Just the right age for top promotion. Twelve full years of being H.E. before the pension.’
He paused.
‘And he’ll get my K.,’ he added, bitterly. ‘Bound to. It’s a full Governorship.’
Mr. Frith broke off, and went across to the drink cabinet for the other half of the drink that had just revived him.
‘You said last night something about Sir Gardnor wanting to get me replaced. Did he tell you why, sir?’
Mr. Frith paused with the glass halfway up to his lips.
‘Gathered it was something personal,’ he replied. ‘Said you’d understand.’
Chapter 34
There it was, Lady Anne’s Morris Cowley parked outside the European Drug Emporium.
Harold walked over, and waited. A moment later, Sybil Prosser came out. She looked hot and bad-tempered. She was carrying a paper parcel that had come undone already, and she was scattering things—tooth paste, face flannels, nail varnish.
He picked up the bits, and Sybil Prosser forgot to say thank-you. instead, she stood there staring hard at his eye-shade.
‘How much longer are you going to wear that thing?’ she asked. ‘It can’t be good for it.’
‘It’s just that it goes misty if I take it off,’ Harold replied.
He half turned away as he was speaking so that only his good eye was facing her.
By now Sybil Prosser had dumped her parcel down on the passenger seat of the Morris. That meant that her hands were free.
‘Here, let me see,’ she said to him. ‘You can’t afford to take chances. Not with eyes you can’t.’
Always abrupt in her movements, she was aggressively quick and jerky. Taking hold of Harold by the shoulders, she turned him sharply round, and lifted up the eye-shade. But even that did not satisfy her, because he was in the shadow of the shop-front. With a tug, she pulled him out further onto the pavement where the light was better. A moment later, she let go of the shade and the elastic headband brought the celluloid flap down smartly on his cheek-bone.
‘Looks all right,’ she said. ‘A bit watery. But it would be, covered up like that. You ought to see a specialist.’
‘I shall as soon as the trial’s over.’
Sybil Prosser had her head on one side, regarding him.
‘And when will that be?’ she asked.
‘That’s what I was going to talk about,’ he told her. ‘How is she?’
‘Just the same,’ She paused. ‘I wouldn’t say any better.’
‘Can I see her?’
It was significant that Sybil Prosser’s permission had to be asked: up at the Residency, Sybil Prosser was now in sole command.
‘It didn’t do much good last time, did it?’ she asked.
‘That wasn’t my fault. She just began remembering things.’
Sybil Prosser slapped hard at a fly that had landed on her forearm.
‘I didn’t say it was your fault,’ she replied. ‘It’s only that I don’t want her going on being reminded.’
It was crowded out there, on the pavement in front of the Drug Emporium. People were passing by the whole time, and they had to move over almost into the roadway to avoid being run down by a barrow loaded with live chickens, tied together by their legs, that were being delivered to the general stores next door.
‘Isn’t there somewhere else we can go and talk?’ Harold asked.
Sybil Prosser already had her hand on the door-top of the Morris.
‘What about?’
‘About Anne.�
�
‘I’ve told you. I want her left alone.’
Sybil Prosser was at her worst, Harold decided.
‘I don’t want to do anything to upset her,’ he began to explain. ‘I just want to see her. It seems so rotten somehow, shut away up there.’
‘She isn’t shut away.’
‘Well, not seeing anyone, I mean.’
‘She sees me, doesn’t she?’
It was not Sybil Prosser who broke off the conversation. It was Harold. His eye was hurting him. Lifting up the eye-shade in all that sunlight hadn’t done it any good, and it was watering freely by now. He could feel the tears trickling down underneath the celluloid as he stood there.
It was only with his good eye that he could see Sybil Prosser. Her chin was tilted up on her long neck, and the corners of her mouth were drawn down into a pattern of wrinkles that he hadn’t noticed before.
His eye gave one of its sudden jabs.
‘Oh go to hell,’ he said, under his breath; and turning his back on her, he walked straight past her into the European Drug Emporium trying to think of what he could buy. Mr. Talefwa’s Fighting Fund, ‘Save a Brother’, had, so the paper announced, already assumed ‘epic and gigantic proportions’. Promises of international aid were, it said, ‘pouring in by telegraph and other means, unspecified, from Calcutta, Hong Kong, Moscow, Philadelphia U.S.A., London England, Freetown, Jamaica, Boston Mass.’, and ‘other centres of Imperial oppression of coloured workers’. A perfectly genuine ten shilling postal order had, moreover, appeared from nowhere in the War Drum’s G.P.O. mail box, and been promptly cashed at the adjoining counter.
What was even more important was that Mr. Talefwa had a new recruit—Mr. Ngono. And it was all because, between them, Harold and Mr. Frith had failed entirely to do anything.
After that stroll on the lawn beside Harold’s bungalow, Mr. Ngono had come away thoroughly heartened and fairly burning with loyalty. He had simply been waiting for the moment when the raiding-party would descend on the War Drum’s offices. In his mind’s eye, he had already seen it all—Mr. Talefwa being led off in handcuffs; police vans outside laden with seditious matter; and, in the lean-to shed at the rear, strong men with crow-bars smashing up the printing press itself.
Whereas, in point of fact, absolutely nothing had happened. He had not been called for jury service; and no one had even enquired to see if he was likely to be free.
In the result, Mr. Ngono felt lonely and rejected; even humiliated. In a flash he realised how wrong he had been to join the wrong camp, to pretend that he was what he wasn’t. Despite his College tie and his handmade shoes and his Indian motor-bicycle, he was still an African: his future lay with other Africans.
And he went straight round to tell Mr. Talefwa so.
‘You are only too entirely right,’ Mr. Ngono confided. ‘Every one of your accusations will be bloody well self-justified. And your suspicions, too.’
His arm was on the back of Mr. Talefwa’s chair—his editorial chair— as he was speaking.
‘Then I shall put your name at the top of the column of subscribers to “Save a Brother”,’ Mr. Talefwa promised him, ‘and you can pay me afterwards.’
Mr. Ngono removed his arm, and came round to the front of the desk. Tor purely commercial reasons associated with certain important European contracts in the offing it would be impossible for my close identity with the Fund to be immediately revealed,’ he explained. ‘But behind-the-scenes and under cover, like hell absolutely.’
A happy thought came into Mr. Ngono’s mind, and he broke into the most dazzling of his smiles.
‘I will even,’ he said, ‘contribute most generously in big money, but anonymously, of course. You may, in fact, have the complete and confidential list of all bad debts from my various business enterprises, both retail and wholesale. If they do not settle up immediately, right on the bloody nail in fact, you can threaten to publish their names as people who should be made bankrupt or otherwise suitably disgraced in public. That, and other strong-arm methods should produce a veritable small avalanche.’
Mr. Talefwa remained dubious.
‘And you are prepared to swear that you saw Mr. Stebbs and Lady Anne alone together in their motor-car near the railway siding after midnight?’ he asked.
Mr. Ngono responded enthusiastically.
‘Beyond all confusion of doubt,’ he said. ‘I could, with my eyes shut, repeat the whole damn conversation ad lib and verbatim. I recall most distinctly wishing them both a most happy safari and a big killing. My very words to the last letter. Ironically prophetic, too, did they not prove?’
But Mr. Talefwa was not interested in irony.
‘And were there other occasions?’ he asked.
Mr. Ngono gripped the front of the desk to steady himself.
‘You can take it from me, bloody well yes,’ he replied. ‘Enough to fill a bookful. Quite continuous in fact, and all entirely shameless.’
‘And you saw these things yourself?’ Mr. Talefwa persisted.
Mr. Ngono covered his eyes with his hand for a moment.
‘Not always personally and at immediately first-hand, of course,’ he replied. ‘Not with my other business affairs pressing down on me. But my informants are all exceedingly trustworthy and reliable persons.’
Mr. Talefwa was, by nature, disinclined to believe in either trustworthiness or reliability.
‘Who are they?’ he asked.
‘The houseboys at the bungalow,’ Mr. Ngono told him. ‘Our own people. Why should they lie to me? Day-and-night watch, in fact. And rewarded for their revelations. Small payments for petty incidents, and larger emoluments for more startling disclosures.’
‘And could you get the houseboys to come forward?’
Mr. Ngono shook his head and spread his hands wide open.
‘I would not for a King’s ransom recommend any such course of action,’ he said. ‘After all, who are they? Simply ignorant, uneducated peasants of the most humble kind. Such liars, too, both of them. I should feel highly uncomfortable the whole time they were in the witness-box. How could we ever be sure that someone else had not bribed them?’
Mr. Talefwa was silent: he was thinking. Then he glanced up.
‘Are there any letters?’ he asked.
Mr. Ngono spread his hand, palms outwards, towards Mr. Talefwa to show how empty they were.
‘It is known though that he frequently wrote to her, and received her most eager replies,’ he answered. ‘But the waste-paper baskets, combed through backwards and forwards with extreme care, were always most disappointing.’
‘A pity,’ was all that Mr. Talefwa said.
He looked Mr. Ngono full in the face.
‘And you will be ready to tell everything you know to our Counsel when he is decided upon?’ he asked. ‘In Court, you will be on oath remember.’
‘With the utmost delight and the most extreme eagerness,’ Mr. Ngono replied. ‘As for the oath, it does not in any way worry me. I am entirely unsuperstitious. It is my European education, you understand.’
Mr. Talefwa understood perfectly.
‘And now if you will excuse me,’ he said, ‘it is time for me to close the office. I would be obliged if you would leave some minutes before me. For the time being it would be unwise for us to be seen together in public places. In our separate ways we are both marked men already. After the trial begins, it will be even more so.’
Chapter 35
It was more than three days now since Harold had met Sybil Prosser outside the Drug Emporium; and during the whole of that time there had been complete silence from the Residency. Mr. Frith had, in fact, made a mental note to send someone round to see how the A.D.C. was getting on.
Then Sybil Prosser phoned.
‘How’s your eye?’ she started straight in. ‘Got that thing off yet?’
He began to tell her. But it was too late: Sybil Prosser was already speaking again.
‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’
she said. ‘But if you like to come over, you can see her now. It’s the best time.’
‘But how is she?’ Harold asked. ‘Is she better?’
‘Judge for yourself,’ Sybil Prosser told him. ‘I’ve said you can see her.’
‘You mean straightaway?’ he asked.
But he was too late: Sybil Prosser had already rung off.
The streets outside were deserted: it was still too early, and too hot, for strollers. And there was a strange empty look to the drive as he turned into the Residency grounds. With no flag flying from the masthead, a deep hush seemed to have descended on everything. The crunch of boots on gravel as the pair of sentries stamped themselves, Guards’ fashion, to attention seemed like an echo left over from Sir Gardnor’s day.
At the house, Dr. Fernandez was just leaving. Coming down the wide staircase, he looked more squat and toadlike than ever. He sagged from side to side on each step as he descended. At the sight of Harold he stopped, and remained on the bottom step, his pleated shirt-front quivering.
‘When the visitors start arriving,’ he said, speaking slowly as though reciting some well-known Portuguese proverb, ‘then the doctor knows it is time for him to pack his bag.’
‘Then she really is better?’
Dr. Fernandez tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.
‘As I said,’ he told him. ‘Widow’s Madness. It is all over. There are no complications. I speak with authority. I am a specialist in women.’
The forefinger was raised for a moment admonishingly, and then the tapping started up again.
‘But no excitement please. No arguments. Just love-making. And to agree with everything she says. Then you will find how reasonable she is. How calm. Otherwise…’
He spread his hands as he said it to indicate that, even with his unique specialist knowledge of the sex, there were still some extreme conditions that he could not yet control.
When Harold reached the west wing, it was Sybil Prosser who opened the door of Lady Anne’s apartment; and it might have been her own front door from the way she stood there. There was no sign of any staff; not even the familiar figures of the nurses. Sybil Prosser herself was wearing one of their white overalls. It was too short for her, and left the whole length of her thin wrists showing.
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