Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  It would be child’s play to enter the Palace grounds. But, once inside, would I ever emerge to tell the tale? First of the hunter’s rules teaches that however luscious the game, good the spoor, sure the poison and certain the knowledge that the quarry will soon succumb, he must still assess the height of the sun, the strength of his legs, the time elapsed since his last meal, the distance home to his campsite before moon rise and lion roar. A wise hunter will therefore forgo the loveliest eland, the most succulent giraffe’s child he has stalked for days, even if at last within bow-shot, and turn for home, knowing that another step is one too far, that to continue the hunt may see him well fed by nightfall but dead by the following noon.

  Another way must be found.

  Before the Palace lies a little island around which the traffic prowls day and night, often striking down those who attempt the crossing. The island is sanctified, it seems, by its proximity to the Palace and the great gates and the soldiers in their black hats and red coats. In this sacred place the devotees assemble, hoping for a glimpse of the Sovereign.

  On the island I saw something that signified the gods were with me. For there was a golden statue of the Empress, none other than the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair, and she lifted her hand to me as if to say, ‘Come, David Mungo Booi, and all my children of the Far Karoo. Clamber, as these visitors do, into my lap.’

  Without hesitating, I flung myself into the traffic and ran for the island.

  I was received amongst the pilgrims gathered there without surprise. That a short, semi-naked man, wearing not much more than a big brown hat, bow and quiver, should be so easily accepted was as happy as it was unexpected. The dress and bearing of these people, each in its own way, was as individual as mine. Silken sheaths and conical hats; sandals and bangles and painted foreheads; a rainbow of robes, shift, smocks and pantaloons; a feast of bright eyes; a fluttering of excited hands; a stew of tongues; a warm humming hive of visitors. Mostly Children of the Sun, with here and there a foreigner from one of the mainland tribes, but not a single native to be seen in all that chirruping, excited island population.

  Suddenly a fever swept the pilgrims on our island, a vision, a dream, a wild belief that they were permitted to enter the Palace, that now was the hour! Before I could advise them that the Palace was, and would be, barred to the likes of us, these enthusiasts produced tiny paper Union flags and, waving them like talismans to protect them from the killer traffic stalking their island, they flung themselves into the thick of it, carrying me in their mad stampede. I felt sure, if not of death in the traffic, then of certain disappointment.

  Yet we made the Royal Pavement safely. We turned to the left and ran along the Royal Iron Railings that front the Palace yard. We came to a Royal Gate in the railings, and behold the gate was wide! My wonder grew with every step. And beyond the gate, lo, a Royal Door opened into the very Palace itself. My heart was sounding as loudly as the rattles tied to the knees of those who celebrate the Trance Dance. Surely, now, I thought, we will be stopped and turned away? And there stepped into our path an officer of the Crown, raising his hand and bringing our charge to a halt.

  So near and yet so far! My companions, however, paid no attention to my sorrow. Quickly they formed an orderly line, and the officer walked along the line, taking money from each, and I assumed that we were being fined for trespassing on Royal Property.

  But when I saw my friends being ushered into the Palace, the scales fell from my eyes. This was not a fine they were paying; it was a fee!

  What pains I might have saved myself had I begun at the Palace with a pocket full of money! I had endured the most exhausting trials; been detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure; dropped on my head; saved by a flying Bishop; assailed in the Mother of All Parliaments; collected by the Lord of Goodlove Castle; experimented upon by his wife-lings. I had nearly been knighted; assaulted by football fans; and locked up with lunatics.

  Yet the answer I sought had been, all along, as plain as the duiker’s footprint in river sand, as obvious as the perfume of the lynx, as simple as snaring the bustard – I had merely to pay a fee at the Palace door.

  Simple. Straightforward. Common sense. Like everything from Tiny Alma to putting a question in Parliament. The spirit of the grocer prevailed. There was nothing that was not on the market.

  Let those who look askance at this sublime pragmatism consider the magnificent old public washrooms in Lutherburg. When we come to town on pension day and wish to avail ourselves of the facilities, we must first put a coin in the slot. Do those who obtain relief, at a price, feel any worse for doing so? And are the Lutherburg washrooms, with their majestic sea-green tiles, their gleaming copper pipes and their genuine neon lamps, any less grand, for being supported in this fashion? Well, then, why should the principle of individual contributions to public works not serve kings as well as commoners?

  So it was, at last, that I stepped into the Palace. All it took were the coins I carried in my apron pocket, the last of ex-Bishop Farebrother’s donation to the developing world. Giving them up brought me double pleasure. Both entrance and relief – for how heavily they had thudded against my tender parts with every step I took.

  On entering the Royal Apartments among the excited herd, the first thing to strike me was that the Sovereign had adapted our method of game control. But whereas we preferred a line of wooden stakes, each flagged with a fluttering ostrich plume, between which the herd of buck moved in docile lines towards the buried pitfalls, dug deep and covered with grass to conceal the long drop on to the sharpened stakes, the Monarch operated a system of guide ropes to direct her visitors and ensure they did not stray.

  In the first of the apartments we gazed in wonder, expecting, I suppose, some early signs of Royalty, if only an equerry, a chamberlain, a beefeater a knight or a lady-in-waiting. But it was quite empty except for large plush chairs and sofas, and white-face clocks that muttered to themselves like women chipping eggshell for bracelets. Here and there, on polished tables, stood bowls of fruit, carved from wood cunningly painted and very beautiful (for they had been great carvers until they laid low their forests).

  In general I would say that the Royal Furnishings were every bit as opulent as those of the ‘Best Price’ Burial Society, whose showrooms I have visited in Zwingli – without, of course, the plastic floral wreathes of pink roses and Namaqualand daisies.

  The only sign of human habitation were a number of mannequins standing in dark corners, whom I took at first to be pages. On closer inspection they proved to be statues of little black boys, barefoot, with red lips and wide white eyes, half-naked, holding candles or bowls of fruit. No doubt they were intended, these little frozen pages, to remind the Sovereign of her extended family, the Children of the Sun, across the seas.

  I turned my eyes this way and that, sure that the gracious Sovereign would be with us at any moment. Great stiff portraits, by which their painters signified the sitters to be both Royal and dead, looked down their waxen noses at our party as we moved from apartment to apartment. It must be soon, I thought. A roll of drums, a flourish of trumpets. Suddenly we would be urged to prostrate ourselves for the arrival of the Queen of England.

  But she did not come. Under flowering lights branching from high ceilings, whose leaves were chips of glass, through caverns measureless to man, we moved in silence.

  Like the dreamers who see again in their sleep the long-vanished herds of buck that once thronged the plains, and rise from their beds to try to follow them, so we moved like sleepers ever closer to the pitfall. My brain was beating out the refrain: will it be soon? Will it be now? Will it be she?

  But my heart now glimpsed another spoor entirely. What the others did not see I saw, what the others seemed quite unafraid of terrified me; for, with every step, we grew nearer our departure point. If she did not come soon, we would be shepherded out of the back door and into the wilderness.

  Still she did not come.

  I hung back. I could not
do so for long without detection, I knew, but I had suddenly one of those revelations which the gods send their favoured hunters when, sick with hunger, they must decide whether to move on to the next stony, empty, heat-struck hill on a day when not so much as a locust has passed their nose. When the hunter risks all and sees not with his eyes but feels in his heart, in his side, in his hooves, the signals of approaching game, long before it appears, feels its breath in his lungs, its fur on his nape. I knew in my heart that she was close! At any moment she might appear.

  Once again, I was mistaken. I had assumed a welcoming presence. I had believed that in buying a ticket to the Palace I was assured of a Royal meeting, or at least a greeting. And so did the other foreign pilgrims. For otherwise it seemed that our money had been taken under false pretences. But I began to see that this was to confuse our ideas of honour with those of a very different culture, for which the idea that you got what you paid for was lacking in grace and subtlety. The Sovereign existed, for most of her subjects, in rare sightings and distant glimpses; many had never seen her at all. Her corporeal presence was not at issue. She was more a form of faith. A foreigner might object, saying, ‘But she’s not there!’ Yet that would be to miss the point. In her very absence she was present. And the English, quite properly, felt that if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for everyone else.

  It was no longer good enough for me. As so often in the past, my hunting skills came to my aid. From each bowl of fruit we passed I removed a single item, a pear, an apple, a toothsome peach, and hid them beneath the crown of my tawny hat. The ostrich-hunter who plans to catch that sober bird will disguise himself in her plumage; he will wait for the brooding mother to leave her eggs and take a little walk in the veld. Sitting very still on her eggs beneath his cap of becreeping feathers, he is indistinguishable from the true bird. His arrow at the ready, he waits for her return.

  Just so. As the departing herd wound slowly between the guide ropes towards the exit, I slipped under the ropes and melted into a darkened corner, where I took off my hat and extended my right arm. Then I grew very still. They have very poor eyesight, and virtually no sense of smell; my ruse, I felt sure, would not be noted. As I stiffened into immobility, in the shadowy corner, I had become just another little black pageboy, arm outstretched, proffering a bowl of fruit. Bowing – and I think Beth would have approved – but not scraping.

  How long did I wait? I cannot be sure. All day long troops of visitors, the greater and the lesser deceived, migrated through the royal apartments, along tightly controlled game trials, eyes searching for a glimpse of their desired quarry, gasped at the chilly, empty magnificence and departed – disappointed. So lifelike was my camouflage that no one paid any particular attention to me, except a mother who reminded her child to be grateful, for there stood a member of some tribe so poor they used their hats for plates.

  Evening fell slowly, in the unwilling English manner, and I heard the Palace doors begin closing, one by one. This was just as I had suspected; after all, I knew that the public washrooms in Zwingli close their doors at sunset, and great ventures resemble each other. Keys turned in locks; visitors came no more. Silence returned abruptly, just as it does when the swallows, those creatures of the rain, who dance on their tails in the evening air, feeding on insects we cannot see, suddenly at sunset vanish with the dying light.

  Grateful for a chance, at last, to relieve the cramp that had built up in my forearm after hours of motionless hat-bearing, I was rubbing my muscles when I became aware of footsteps approaching, and there entered the room a chambermaid, carrying a kind of flywhisk, being a short stick surmounted with feathers, which she used for dispersing dust. With many a sigh, she busied herself tidying away the litter left by the departing visitors, stooping to retrieve sweet wrappers, wiping fingerprints from picture-frames, plumping up the pillows on gilded chairs where I knew none had sat, since across each seat stretched a length of twine to discourage such liberties.

  This busy cleaner now crossed to me and, to my alarm, began vigorously dabbing her feather stick into every crack of me: my nose, my mouth, my armpits. The vexatious plumes descended lower and lower until I thought my composure should shatter when suddenly my blood froze, I felt no more the feathers’ furious fingers. Her face! Perhaps in years it was a little more advanced, and a trifle more careworn, but the features were unmistakably those painted on the Coronation mug I had been shown at the inaugural meeting of the Society for Promoting the Exploration of the Interior Parts of England, in what now seemed several lifetimes before.

  She wore a Royal-blue housecoat. Emblazoned on the breast pocket was a golden lion and unicorn fighting for the crown. Her hair was tied up in a headscarf, and when she spoke the tail of the scarf lifted as a wagtail’s feathers do when it sprints across the grass.

  Perhaps I started? Who can say? At any rate she abruptly stopped dabbing at me with the infuriating feathers, pressed her ear to my chest for a moment, leapt back a step or two, very slowly retreated to the window and then, in a moment I shall savour for the rest of my life, the Queen of England addressed her loyal servant, David Mungo Booi.

  Her voice, I should say, was regal; being high, small and taut like fencing wire, bending under the pressure of her queenly enunciation, it resembled the cry of the fish-eagle.

  If I had come about taxes – Her Majesty declared – I was wasting my time. She had paid what she could. I would not get blood from a stone.

  I said I had not come about taxes.

  She put down her duster. Had I come to tell her that another of her Palaces was on fire? Well, she had this to say. Let it burn! She had only recently effected for repairs to a burnt Palace;1 every tapestry, suit of armour, picture, she had paid to have restored without a penny from the public purse and precious little sympathy from her subjects. Despite appearances to the contrary, she was not made of money.

  I expressed the hope that her Palaces would endure for a thousand years.

  In that case, said the Monarch wearily, there could be only one explanation for my visit. What had her children done now? Hanky-panky? Kiss-and-tell? Secret phone calls? Bare-breasted shenanigans? Well, she was just not, repeat not, interested. And I would not have a penny from her. The royal offspring were old enough and ugly enough to look after themselves. Enough was enough!

  I said I wished her family nothing but long life and many children.

  I thought she rather flinched at this and I hastened to reassure her that my embassy had nothing to do with the matters she had been kind enough to mention; rather, it was my privilege to come to her as the first ambassador of her loyal Red People.

  Her manner changed remarkably now. Declaring this to be fascinating news, and taking a little pair of silver scissors from her handbag, she snipped the white tape that protected the chairs and, patting a seat, pink as sunset and deep as an elephant’s yawn, she invited me to sit beside her and tell her where in her former empire her Red People resided.

  Back in the ages when my people were, I replied, we lived in the north-western reaches of the Cape Province of South Africa.

  Cries of delighted recognition greeted my reply. She too had been to the Cape. And it was in the Cape that her great-great-grandmother had fought the ‘Bores’. (Her tongue had difficulty – as ours does – in saying the names of our enemies, the Boers.) Her family had happy memories of these fellows, as they did of all the peoples they had fought and crushed. She had met several Bores while on her visit to my country as a young princess. Sadly, she had not met any of my Red People, who, she was sure, were absolutely fascinating.

  She had a great gift for making one feel oneself to be the centre of her undivided attention. Her comments, warm and flowing, effortlessly relieved one of the responsibility of saying anything in reply. She pronounced herself absolutely delighted to meet a Red Man who could tell her more about the tremendous advances in my country. The black chaps and the Bores had hated one another, had they not? Yet now they were the best
of chums. Wasn’t that tremendously encouraging? And soon, she heard, everyone would be living in houses with four bedrooms and free telephones. Wouldn’t that be tremendous encouragement to the rest of the world? She could not imagine how I had managed to tear myself away. How very, very touched she was by my gift of a hatful of fruit.

  Did I plan to stay long in England? And had I brought other gifts, for her royal collections?

  My answer dried in my mouth; the memory, still so raw, of my lost suitcase, and its treasures, assembled with such devotion by my trusting people, cut me to the quick.

  What I had brought, I said, was a great gift of her great-great-grandmother to my people. What I had lost, alas, were the gifts of my people to Her Majesty.

  I listed the treasures I had hoped to lay at her feet: a bow of the finest gharree wood, strung with sinew cut from the eland’s hide; reed arrows, beautifully light, their heads of flint and iron bound with grass; a pair of ceremonial firesticks, so ancient it is said they were made in the First Times, when animals were still people, and had belonged to Kaggen himself; and the chief of music; the singing string, the Bushman fiddle, called the gorah, whose song is as sweet as she-rain after long drought; a rich necklace of ostrich-shell beads, threaded with ant-bear hair, fit for a royal throat; and two dozen copper leg-bangles that women prize: three of the choicest poisons in the world; as well as hides, honey and cups of tortoise shell.