‘That’s not the point. We must be there.’
‘Yes,’ I said, repressing the instinct to say that I knew that too and had only been waiting for her.
In the taxi she said, ‘He insisted, you see, and I didn’t see why not because he is sweet really in a way, but then he took it so seriously so I knew I had to make it clear, just saying I was going away wouldn’t do it because he’d try to come as well or start talking about trial separations and so on, and I didn’t want any of that, I really didn’t.’
She took my hand and clasped it tight, then burst into tears, which stilled my carping but confused thoughts.
‘Sorry to hear about Woodies,’ I said, for something to say. ‘You don’t expect a Swiss firm to go bust.’
‘It didn’t go bust,’ she said sharply, ‘they simply decided to concentrate their research in Switzerland.’
‘So what about the vitamin supplements?’
‘That had nothing to do with it. The press coverage was totally slanted. Anyway it’s much more suitable for a hospital annexe.’
‘So Woodies is going back to being part of the bin?’
I thought of the crying man wandering up and down the avenue. Perhaps they would billet him in the pavilion now and he wouldn’t cry so much. But she didn’t want to talk about Woodies.
‘You’ve heard about my new job? I must have told you, I’ve been telling everyone. I’m going to Africa. Dodo’s setting up an amazing project, in the Egerton Hills.’
‘Dodo Wilmot? But I thought you hated him, smashing up that café and just paying the man off, you really loathed him.’
‘Gus, he’s changed, he’s much more serious now and the project is, well, I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but it’s fantastic. It’s going to transform the whole country. Anyway, I don’t think we should be talking about it just now.’
‘No.’
‘Poor Bobs. Oh I hope he’ll be all right.’
‘So do I.’
‘We’re really fond of him, you and me. I mean, you wouldn’t think it to hear the way we go on, but we are.’
On Edge
‘THIS IS A good day,’ the driver said and laughed. The way he said it, the bright upbeat on the last two words, made me laugh too and my lungs filled with the air flooding in through the windows of the Land-Rover and I breathed so deeply I nearly choked. The air, everyone had mentioned the air. It was the altitude but not just the altitude, and their hands flapped with the futility of trying to describe it, it’s the space, and the sky, you don’t see skies like that anywhere else. And in the travel agent’s or the queue for the jabs their voices lightened and soared at the thought of it all, like a balloon that has just had an extra puff of gas. They went on about the views too, those huge views that gave you the feeling you were looking at the whole of Africa. And I dutifully looked out of the window and saw that the joy of it was not just the endlessness but that there was nothing to see, nothing at all, no church spire or distant cooling towers, not even a line of hills, but only the unbounded expanse, straw-yellow and parched green plains to start with, then drifting lazily into bluey-green and a mild unassertive blue, quite familiar, the blue of an English summer sea or sky, but motionless as English seas and skies were not.
At first we had come through eucalyptus plantations and fields of young corn with dusty tracks winding through them up to low white farmhouses, but now slowly gaining height we had come out of the farming country on to the high veld and the landscape relaxed into its casual, indifferent self The great boulders strewn along the ridges looked ready to roll off in any direction. We overtook bulging buses which had stopped, it seemed in the middle of nowhere, to let off passengers carrying cardboard suitcases and old rucksacks who ambled along the roadside before disappearing into the thorn bushes. Now and then there was a village with a petrol pump and a bottle shop. The breezeblock bungalows and occasional cluster of reed or straw huts reminded me of somewhere else, perhaps only of pictures of Africa in travel magazines, but the huge strangeness, that was not so easy to capture on camera and take away. Nor was the pace they walked at, not really an amble or a dawdle, that suggested deliberate slowing down, but a pace that was so quiet and easy I could not help thinking of people back home grinding their cartilages to shreds on city pavements. Everyone noticed the walking too. In fact everyone had just the same thoughts their first day here, but that did not make them seem any less fresh. The opposite in fact, it was a privilege to bathe in the common experience, to shrug off the burden of inventing my own first impressions.
The landscape was changing again, harder, rockier now. No baboons chattering in the thorn bushes, then no thorn bushes. The tawny dust turning to orange and brown scree and ahead of us low mountains with sharp, broken purple crags.
‘Nearly at edge now, sir,’ the driver said. He had told me he was called Black and he had laughed at that too.
‘Edge of what?’
‘Egerton East, sir. That’s what we call it. Edge.’
The next hill had great stones perilously balanced on either side of the road, huge dimpled balls, dappled here and there with lichen silvered by the sun. A storm gathering over the valley beyond, a dry stony valley with no green or softness, then a vast rift, the far side of it raw orange and a dark rust colour. At the bottom and perched half-way up were little huts linked by some sort of railway or conveyor belt. As my eyes locked on to the scale, I could see that they had gouged out the best part of two low hills and at least half the rift was man-made. Coming down the hill a little more, I could see the real valley: a dry river-bed, broad and stony between groves of gum trees with a red dirt road slashed through them leading to a scrabble of breezeblock bungalows, four or five at most, one of them more like a long barn with a rusty corrugated iron roof.
‘Edge?’
‘Edge. Very good village.’
‘Yes, I can see.’
‘First-class water and landing strip.’
She was sitting under a tin-roofed verandah which looked out on a lawn of coarse grass with gnarled old trees full of twittering yellow birds. Beyond the old trees were trees the colour of flame and then a wire fence ten feet high at least. She had her legs up on a pile of logs and was slurping down a yoghurt before she jumped up to say hallo. Baggy beige shorts. She looked about ten years old.
‘You’ll find it just like Surrey they said, but as you can see, it isn’t.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘The air, I expect you’ve noticed the air.’
‘Not like Surrey at all.’
‘This used to be the D.O.’s house, before independence. Now the government lets it out to Wips.’
‘Wips?’
‘Wilmot Investment and Prospecting.’
‘To which you are –’
‘Assistant Geological Adviser, only the G.A.’s got tick-bite fever, so I’m really him for the moment. Look at the weaver birds, isn’t it sweet the way their nests swing?’
The breeze rustling through the gum trees sent the willow branches waving. The birds hung on to the nests trailing at the end of them, twittering as though they were about to be swept away for ever.
‘Why’s the fence so high?’
‘Oh leopards, thieves, terrorists – the border’s only a few miles away.’
‘Don’t you mean freedom fighters?’
‘Are you going to be like that the whole time? Can’t you just enjoy it?’
‘Can you?’
‘Look, there’s no point in having attacks of conscience if you’ve come to do a job. It’s the Africans who suffer most from the terrs in any case. They don’t bother us.’
‘Well, how do they feel about you carving up their country?’ I waved at the scarred further face of the valley, just visible between the trees.
‘You’re just tired and irritable, I expect it’s the heat or the altitude or something. You used to be so nice and puddingy. There’s really no point coming all this way if you’re going to start le
cturing me in the first five minutes.’
Which was true. It was perverse to be breathing in the air of paradise one minute and then without any provocation to start behaving like the sort of person I wasn’t and didn’t care for. Yet the sight of her sipping the yoghurt, and her legs, pale honey not tanned, so pertly propped up on the eucalyptus logs – she was provoking.
‘In any case,’ she said, ‘they’re really pleased about Wips coming here. With the drought they’ve had the past five years, it’s their last hope. We could have gone further up the valley, place where a man with a bucket and spade found emeralds before the war, that’s where the G.A. originally advised but Dodo liked the look of Edge. Feels it in his water that this is going to be the mother of all mother lodes.’
‘Emeralds, is that what you’re after?’
‘Could be,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘Come and have a beer.’
We went into the dark sitting-room with its furniture all covered in hide the colour of dried blood and the framed photos of Victoria Falls and the Matopos hills and the back numbers of the National Geographic and the native earthenware jugs and bowls with swirls and criss-crosses all over them, and the fan on the ceiling making a swoopy burring noise. And in the unthreatening darkness with its hint of damp, my annoyance went away and a sudden happiness took hold of me, fresh and cool like the freshness after a squall.
‘You’ll come into town with me, won’t you? We could have another noggin at Ma’s after we’ve done the shopping.’
‘Ma’s?’
‘Mrs McGuigan. It’s the, well, I suppose you’d call it the social centre.’
It seemed only a short drive, perhaps twenty minutes down a rolling dipping tarmac road with glimpses of green farmland and clumps of eucalyptus. The country looked tamed again here, and there were neat groups of huts perched above us and men and women walking along the side of the road. Yet only a few miles back Egerton had felt like the edge of the wilderness. There didn’t seem to be any clear distinctions in this country, I thought, as Helen stopped the Land-Rover at a crossroads with low white-painted cement buildings and sidewalks shaded by wooden roofs. On the far side of the road, where there were no buildings, women in brightly coloured clothes had set out stalls with produce piled high – water-melons, oranges, tomatoes and familiar vegetables such as cauliflowers and onions, as well as tropical fruits I didn’t know the names of. We walked through a gap in the buildings into a leafy square with a sandy garden in the middle. The garden was shaded by banana trees. Beyond the shops there were avenues with tall trees stretching away into the distance, and even a church spire. To come upon this place so suddenly in the bush was unsettling. The heat of the afternoon was pleasant, not shimmery. All the same, the whole thing was like a mirage.
It seemed I had been gazing happily at the sandy garden only for a couple of minutes before she was slinging the last brown paper bag into the back of the Land-Rover and saying, ‘Right, let’s get a beer.’
Helen led me under the cement arcades into a dark bar, so dark that my eyes didn’t focus at all until after she had ordered the beers, and I had the cold glass in my hand before I could make out the woman with frizzy sandy hair behind the bar. She was handsome with large pale blue eyes and she smiled a sardonic greeting as she stubbed out her cigarette. She was sitting on a stool behind the bar in a laid-back sideways posture, as though to make it clear she had as good a right to enjoy herself as the customers.
‘My, you are a paleface,’ she said.
‘You’re not exactly bronzed yourself,’ I found myself saying.
‘Where did you dredge him up?’ she said. When she got up to fetch her cigarettes, I thought for a moment from the shape of the green cotton sack she was wearing that she might be pregnant, but then she passed under the light above the rack of bottles and I could see that this was a silly mistake because she wasn’t young at all.
‘He’s an old friend. We were nannies together in France ages ago.’
‘A male nanny, Christ you hear that, Frank, this guy’s a nanny.’
‘You don’t have to tell the whole fucking neighbourhood. It’s still illegal here you know.’
The voice from the corner of the room was slow with a rough twang to it, which might have been Australian rather than South African or a mixture of both. He was a man with a long brick-red face and a gaudy striped shirt and he gave us a slow salute.
‘I said nanny not nancy, you fool.’
‘Oh,’ he said and paused before saying very slowly, ‘I’m an agronomist myself.’
‘Alcoholic is the word he’s groping for,’ she said.
‘She makes her customers feel good, you see. That’s why we keep coming back to the crummy place.’
‘Talking of which, when’s your big man coming back?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Helen said.
‘Do you think he’d be interested in my emeralds?’ She twirled her necklace of chunky green stones.
‘Marie, if he thinks those are fucking emeralds . . .’
‘Don’t call me Marie. Listen, Hel darling, you just bring him along here and we’ll show him how the natives have fun. And you can bring Paleface too.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Treat the place as your own, everyone else does, including those bloody backpackers.’
She jerked a finger at a murky corner of the room where there were rucksacks piled high on top of each other nearly up to the ceiling.
‘Where do they go without their ruckies?’
‘Search me, it’s like where do flies go in the wintertime, one of life’s great mysteries.’
Helen drained her glass and tugged my sleeve. The agronomist blew her a slow kiss as we said goodbye and stumbled out into the clear bright light of the afternoon.
‘You didn’t tell me Dodo was coming tomorrow.’
‘Didn’t I? He’s been in Jo’burg talking to the bank. He’s really good at that apparently. Did you get on with him, I can’t remember.’
‘I let him down on British naval history.’
‘Oh, I do remember.’
‘And on bread-roll throwing too.’
‘Ghastly failure all round, in fact. You must look at the LPs the D.O. left behind, they’re an amazing time-warp.’
Back at the D.O.’s house, I riffled through the wire rack: South Pacific, The Best of Harry ‘Tiger’ Roy, Mario Lanza Sings, Semprini’s Greatest Serenades, Carroll Lewis and the Savoy Orpheans – and the thought of those lush songs and tinkling ivories singing out over the noises of the African night seemed horribly touching.
‘This is the only playable one, Miriam Makeba, isn’t she fantastic?’
But somehow Miriam Makeba didn’t move me, not like she had in London. I couldn’t think why, but she sounded out of place on the D.O.’s blue-and-grey rexine record-player.
‘Afraid you’ll have to sleep in the guest-house which is a bit primitive. The best spare’s reserved for the big boss.’
‘Fair enough.’
She led me behind the house through a kitchen garden-cum-orchard, parting branches of the oranges and lemons to clear a path. The fruit, cool and waxy, brushed against my bare arms and legs. Behind the fruit trees there were familiar English things, high-heaped rows of potatoes and runner beans up sticks. The guest-house was a square outhouse with a tin roof, the white paint on the walls so thin that the texture of the breezeblocks showed through. Inside there was a truckle bed, a round rug, a table and a chair. Through the one little window above the bed I could see the top of the hills the far side of the valley.
‘Perfect.’
‘Isn’t it? I sometimes come and sleep down here because it’s cooler. It’s so close to the fence you hear all the bush noises twice as loud.’
After supper – spaghetti and the local weak fizzy beer – she gave me a candle and a mosquito net. Trailing the net behind me and holding the candle high to keep it clear of the oranges and lemons, I looked like Wee Willie Winkie, she said.
At f
irst it was the noise from the house a hundred yards away, where Black and his family lived. After they were quiet, the barking and snuffling and coughing began, occasionally punctuated by a rustle or a screech or a sudden flurry noise followed by a grunt or a cackle. At first I was sweating and then the sweat went cold and I began to shiver and diagnosed instant malaria. Then I realised for the first time that there was no glass in the window and the little patch of night sky to be seen through it seemed dizzily close. At last I slept.
In the morning I met Black carrying lettuces up the path. Behind him at the door of his blockhouse his tall elegant wife gave a shy wave.
‘What would those animals I heard in the night be?’
‘Animals? Oh, those just our dogs.’ And he pointed to a couple of terriers and a gingery mongrel playing outside his house.
‘Just dogs. It wouldn’t be a baboon? Or a leopard?’
‘Leopard?’ He roared with laughter. ‘No leopards here any more.’
‘And no lions, I suppose.’
He laughed harder. ‘To see lion, you must go to the game park. Who telling you these stories?’
‘Helen.’
‘Miss Helen? She joking you, she great joker. I must hurry to give these lettuce to Miss Brinscombe, she got no water and her lettuce all die.’
At the far end of the path, a white woman in a floppy white hat and a print frock down to her ankles was waiting with a basket.
‘Thank you, Black. The D.O.’s lettuces are always first-rate.’
I introduced myself Mrs Brinscombe’s pinched white face looked at me without interest.
‘You wouldn’t have any eggs to spare, would you, Black? They just aren’t laying at Musani.’
‘Yes, yes, all eggs you want,’ he laughed and sauntered off to the henhouse.
‘He’s a good worker, Black, when he’s not off on a bender. We used to take it in turns to pick him up from the bottle shop, me and Dolly, that’s the last D.O.’s wife. If he was really bad, Margaret, that’s his wife, would chuck him out and he’d come and stay with our boys. I don’t know what will happen to this place after the mining’s finished. Go back to bush, I expect. Or one of the fatcats will get it for a song. It’s a bit too near the border for comfort. Not many of us left, that’s for sure. We used to have six tables at the bridge night. Now you’re lucky if you can raise a four.’
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