He threw up his arms above his head. ‘Nothing to do with the law if he’s guilty?’ he demanded. ‘Then I damn well ask you what is the law there for?’
Mr. Ngono, however, was forgetting that the cocoa man had spent most of his life on the equator: he knew what it was to get caught up in native arguments.
‘You’re wasting our time,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m asking you a straight question: is Old Moses guilty, or isn’t he?’
Mr. Ngono put his hand over to his heart this time.
‘You are asking me that again?’ he replied. ‘I have only just answered you. My advice is that we keep out of it. Not take sides at all. It is most kindly-meant advice, too. Entirely considerate.’
‘ “Yes” or “no”?’ the foreman repeated.
Mr. Ngono tried again to light his cigarette, but he could not keep the flame steady enough.
‘I am prepared to say “yes”,’ he answered. ‘But only in the sense that it is one of them. Nobody in particular. No hard personal feelings. No grudge. But one of them definitely “yes”. Of that you may have no damn doubt whatsoever.’
He paused.
‘Those are my views. No beating about the bush. No frills, either.’
The foreman drew out his wet, sticky handkerchief.
‘You’re playing the fool with us,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re doing. Just playing the fool.’
It was the schoolmaster who leant forward.
‘Would you mind if I asked our friend a few questions?’ he enquired. ‘I think it may help to clear things up.’
‘Good luck to you,’ was all the foreman said.
He was wiping the back of his neck again.
The schoolmaster was all ready. His pen was wound up, and his finger-tips were together.
‘In your view, is Mr. Stebbs the murderer?’ he asked.
Put that way, the question shocked Mr. Ngono. He had always liked Harold Stebbs, and he felt sure that Harold Stebbs liked him, too.
He banged on the table.
‘That is just the kind of thing I damn well warned you against,’ he said. ‘It is jumping to extremely false conclusions. Like some bloody bull in a china shop. Mr. Stebbs is my friend, and I say “no”. Even if you wish to keep me here all night I shall continue to deny it.’
The schoolmaster nodded.
‘Then the A.D.C., perhaps?’
This time Mr. Ngono laughed quite openly. He did not even attempt to conceal his feelings. It was a rude, mocking sort of laugh.
‘That snob?’ he asked. ‘You are suggesting that he would harm someone with a title? An H.E. at that! If you think that sort of thing, you damn well don’t know human nature. By God, you damn well don’t.’
He had managed to light his cigarette by now, and he blew the cloud of smoke carelessly into the schoolmaster’s face.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘he is like so many of his sort. He is just a poof. A harmless, bachelor poof. He wouldn’t bloody well kill a mosquito. It would be too damn much like bad manners.’
Bringing in the word ‘bachelor’ was very clever: the schoolmaster was unmarried, too.
‘What about the kitchen boy?’ the schoolmaster asked. ‘He wouldn’t mind killing things, would he?’
So it was back to racialism: Mr. Talefwa had warned him from the start that it would go that way. This time, Mr. Ngono got really angry.
‘If that brave young man himself was in the room,’ he replied, ‘you wouldn’t damn well dare to utter.’
His stomach was turning over again, and he had to raise his hand to his mouth to excuse himself.
‘Besides,’ he resumed, smiling quite charmingly, ‘we are all men of the world, aren’t we? I mean, we all have been in some pretty dirty spots in our time. Most disgraceful, in fact. When we were younger, of course. Before we had reached our present high positions. And we damn well know what the kitchen boy was up to that night, don’t we? His tribe is renowned for it.’
‘So you don’t think it was the kitchen boy?’
Mr. Ngono winked back at him.
‘You know damn well, it wasn’t.’
Even turned as he was full face towards Mr. Ngono, the schoolmaster did not seem to have noticed the wink. He was deep in thought; intense, painful thought. The tips of his fingers were pressed so tightly together that he might have been praying.
‘Then are you telling us that it’s Lady Anne?’ he asked.
He had separated his hands as he was speaking, and was holding them out in an open gesture of invitation for Mr. Ngono to come forward.
But Mr. Ngono saw it at once for the trap that it so obviously was. Instinctively, he drew back.
African independence was one thing; and well worth waiting for. But it was still a long way off; no more than a bright gleam in the eye of Mr. Talefwa, in fact. In the meantime, Mr. Ngono had his European business connections to consider. And how could he ever hope to secure another contract within the community if he was known to have gone around suggesting that Governors married the kind of women who might murder them?
Thinking of the terrible position in which he might have found himself, he became indigant.
‘Lady Anne is a most pure and virtuous person,’ he replied. ‘A saint, in fact. For her of all people, a halo would not be too damn much.’
He was aware of the eyes again; the accusing, probing eyes all round him.
He looked hard at the schoolmaster.
‘The stink of what you have just said hangs all round you,’ he told him. It is most extremely nauseating.’
He raised his thumb and forefinger in the air, and squeezed both nostrils hard together.
‘Then that brings us back to Old Moses, doesn’t it?’ the schoolmaster asked him.
A fresh stab of pain shot through Mr. Ngono’s stomach.
‘I have told you before,’ he shouted back. ‘Old Moses has damn well nothing to do with it.’
‘Oh, but he has,’ the schoolmaster replied in the same quiet classroom voice. ‘You said it was one of them, and you’ve ruled out all the others. There’s no one left now but Old Moses, is there, Mr. Ngono?’
Mr. Ngono’s shoulders were heaving. He was pressing down hard on the buckle of his trouser belt.
‘You must excuse me,’ he said. ‘I am most extremely unwell. It is my bad digestion.’
‘Then, as we’re all agreed, shall we go through?’ the foreman asked.
They had been shut up with each other for nearly three hours, and the prospect of release seemed merciful. There was the immediate scraping of chairlegs.
Only Mr. Ngono remained seated. Ever since the schoolmaster’s last question, he had been sitting with his hands on his knees, looking downwards at his feet. He was utterly exhausted; too exhausted even to care any longer.
If only Mr. Talefwa had been there in person, he would have seen how courageously he had fought. How stubbornly, too. Even brilliantly, at times. Mr. Ngono could not find it in him to reproach himself: the reason for his defeat was simply that he had been so hideously outnumbered.
The Chief Justice did not prolong things. After the days of heavy strain on the prisoner and remembering his advanced years it would, he said, be kinder to bring the trial to an end without delay. It had been a fair one, he added, and no exertions had been spared to secure an acquittal. Nevertheless, the evidence had been overwhelming, and the finding of the jury was both just and inevitable. He produced the black cap, and passed sentence accordingly.
Mr. Das instantly gave notice of appeal.
That same evening, Mr. Ngono was beaten-up on the way back home from his night club.
Public feeling was undoubtedly behind the assault. But the fact that his monogrammed cigarette case, gold pencil and chiming wrist watch were all missing suggested that common robbery might have figured somewhere in it, too.
Book IV
Truth and Consequences
Chapter 46
By now, they had been three days at sea; and, already, Amimbo
seemed far off and long ago.
Mr. Frith had sent for Harold as soon as the trial was over. It was that eye of his that was worrying them, Mr. Frith had said: he’d had a word with the Governor, and they both agreed that, if he didn’t want to lose the use of it, he ought to get it properly attended to. Moorfields was what Mr. Frith had in mind, and that meant a trip back home for him. He’d fixed up the bit about sick-leave, and there was a boat leaving on the Friday. If Harold got to work on it straightaway, he might just be able to make it.
Going away or staying made not the slightest difference, Sybil Prosser told him: so long as she was around, no one was going to see Lady Anne.
It was a miracle that she had survived the trial, Sybil Prosser added; and, if Harold was any friend of Lady Anne’s, he’d see that the kindest thing that he could do now would be to leave her alone so that she had a chance to recover. Of course, he could write if he wanted to: she couldn’t stop him doing that. After all, it was only natural that Lady Anne would like to hear from him. Letters weren’t nearly so tiring as visitors.
Joining the ship wasn’t quite the everyday affair that Harold had imagined: word had got round, and they were on the look out for him. He found himself a someone, a celebrity. It wasn’t every day that they carried a star witness from a big murder trial, and the Captain was proud to have him on board.
He was popular, too. Everyone liked the decent showing he had made under cross-examination. The whole of the First-Class passenger list agreed that, after what he had been through, he deserved to be left alone to get a good rest, and invited him to join them at little parties specially laid on around the bar on the afterdeck.
But it was no use: he simply wasn’t a good mixer; and, after one or two disappointments, they began to leave him alone again. Not that it was altogether Harold’s fault. There was that everlasting pain that went on underneath the eyeshade; and his mind wasn’t on what was being said, anyhow. It was on Lady Anne mostly.
She kept coming back into his mind, uninvited and unannounced. If he picked up a book and began reading, there she was, in between his eyes and the page, looking up at him. She even spoke sometimes. It was mostly as he was going off to sleep that he had heard her. Just his name usually, spoken quite quietly; whispered almost. And, with the sound of her voice, came that perfume that she always wore; little eddies of it kept drifting across the cabin, and then getting lost again as the blades of the endlessly whirring fan began to play on them. Once, during the night, when he was still asleep he had thrown out his arm in the darkness groping to feel if she was there beside him.
The two letters that he had so far written had both been torn up again. Torn up very small, too. He had stood at the rail tossing the bits over, one by one, so that they could never be pieced together again. He was a rotten, bad letter-writer, he decided.
The musical chimes that announced dinner had already sounded, and Harold was in front of the mirror brushing down his hair. The image that stared back from the looking-glass rather amused him: it was as though the two of them had never met before. It wasn’t simply the grotesque eye patch that made him look a stranger: it was everything about him. The fresh, pink-complexioned young man who had travelled out on the Ancarses was no longer there. He’d been replaced. This one was thinner, even sparse-looking. And his face had trimmed-down, too: the skin was drawn tight in places, and pitted with tiny scars where the rock splinters had entered. There were two lines, that hadn’t been there before, running beside his mouth and beginning to drag the corners down.
‘I’ll have another shot at it in the morning,’ he was telling himself. ‘Perhaps I can do better after breakfast. In any case, I can always send a cable. Send a cable, and then write properly when I get back home. Really say what I want to.’
He reached out for his tie, and carefully drew the two ends down to the same length. It was Hong Kong silk, fresh from the European Emporium: one side was fraying open already. He bent forward to make sure that his collar was in place.
But it was not the starched, African-laundered shirt front that the mirror was reflecting. It was Lady Anne’s face that confronted him; her face, with the dark hair loose over the temples and those remarkably fine eyes of hers looking back into his. The eyes, however, were scarcely at their brightest. They were sad and anxious-looking; even frightened. In another moment, there might have been tears in them.
But, as he stood there, she was fading, going away from him again. The Hong Kong tie and the two rolled gold studs were beginning to show through. The portrait frame had become an ordinary dressing-table mirror again, and he was standing in front of it.
‘In any case, she’s bound to have written to me by now,’ the thought came to him. ‘She’ll have got hold of the address somehow. She’s probably air mailed it. It’ll be there waiting for me when I get home. I know it will.’
That had been nearly a month ago; a month, and still no letter from Lady Anne.
It was because he was in hospital, he told himself. Somebody hadn’t re-addressed the envelope; it must simply be lying there at his bank, or at the Colonial Office, or on the tray in his aunt’s front hall out at Reading; either that, or it had been stuck into the criss-cross tapes on the green baize board down below in the entrance hall.
She’d have had his letters by now: that much was certain. They must have been arriving in batches, too, the way the mail in Amimbo always came. He’d been writing every day. Or had been up to the time of his first operation. There’d been a break then; he’d missed five whole days in succession.
And it looked now as though there was going to be another break. It was the big operation that was coming up tomorrow: they warned him that he would have to take things easily after that one. That was why he had spent most of the afternoon writing. She wasn’t to write a long letter back, he had ended up by telling her: he didn’t want her to go tiring herself, or anything like that. Even a postcard would do, just so that he could know that she was all right.
As it was, the only news of Amimbo had come from Mr. Frith. There had been two letters. That, in itself, was rather disturbing because it showed that the mail was coming through all right: there wasn’t any hold up on the line to Nucca. And Mr. Frith’s were the kind of letters that Harold would hardly have missed if they had gone astray somewhere.
The first had been about the reprieve. Mr. Drawbridge had acted promptly; and the act of sparing Old Moses’s life had, Mr. Frith said, been well received by all communities, the Asian included.
The second letter dealt mostly with smaller matters. The budget looked like going through pretty much as they had presented it. Harold wasn’t to worry about the state of the bungalow garden while he was away because Public Works would keep an eye on the boys to see that they didn’t let up on the watering. Mrs. Drawbridge was expected out there as soon as she had fixed up about the children; and the staff in the Cottage Hospital had successfully re-set Mr. Ngono’s nose that had been broken in the beating-up affair. There had been a fire in the marshalling-yard where a spark from the Coronation Flyer had landed on a consignment of copra; and Harold wasn’t to go using that eye of his too much until he’d heard what the doctors had to say. Mr. Frith hoped that there were some good shows on in town; and, if it wasn’t too much trouble, he’d be grateful if Harold could bring him back some HB refills for his propelling pencil.
The letters had been handwritten on his Telegraph Hill notepaper, and there was a lot of smudging and crossing-out towards the bottom of the second page. Harold got the impression that they must have been written late at night; the bit about the refills had been added as a postscript to both of them.
There had been no mention of Lady Anne or Sybil Prosser in either letter.
Now that the operation, the big one was all over, Harold rather admired himself for having taken the outcome so calmly. Not that it would make much difference to him: he’d been used for so long to going around in an eyeshade. And, in any case, he’d known what he was in for when t
he Sister had brought him the hospital form to sign. The only thing that he didn’t fancy was going along to the place in Holborn so that they could match up the colour with the other one.
For the time being, he was resting. He was back with his aunt in the little villa in Reading, and she was looking after him. Large cups of milky coffee, and soft cakes with icing on them, were put down beside him when he least expected them; and there were fresh flowers in his bedroom. It was all part of the process of building him up again, his aunt kept saying; and she was thoroughly enjoying it.
There was another three weeks of sick leave stretching ahead of him, and he spent the whole of it feeling ungrateful. It had been his idea to get out of England in the first place, he kept reminding himself; and he knew now that the only real life for him was back there in Africa. That was why he kept looking at the calendar, waiting until it could all start up again.
He’d got used to the idea that he might not be hearing from Lady Anne; no longer expected to, in fact. And, in a way, he was glad. It showed that she trusted him. Even if she was too ill to write, she knew that he was coming back to her; and on what terms. It had all been there in that long letter that he had sent from the hospital before the big operation. Perhaps the surgery had made him more apprehensive than he realised: whatever it was, he’d found it easier that afternoon to say what he really meant.
The one thing that he wanted her to know was that he really loved her; loved her for ever, that was. That it hadn’t just been one of those sudden affairs that flare up so often, simply because someone is lonely and there doesn’t happen to be anybody else around.
If there had been a relapse, if she were really ill again, Mr. Frith would have been sure to mention it: even preoccupied as he was about the refills for his propelling pencil, he could hardly have overlooked a thing like that.
Chapter 47
It was because he was living for the next meeting with Lady Anne, because he had already rehearsed it in his mind so many times, that he decided, before he went back, to go down and see young Timothy.
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