‘I think Hugh has an arrangement for bridge,’ said the consul’s wife, the only hesitant voice. On dance nights she always put on silver sandals, and then if she was asked to dance blushed a refusal, not liking to deprive other wives or single women of a partner. The consul did not attend dances with her.
But this time the consul, brown knees together, rising elegantly from his chair as Stella, Rina, and Everard rose, said, with a handsome narrowing of his deep eyes, ‘Oh I think we might postpone the bridge, just this once.’
Stella, dragging Rina down the corridor which separated our cabins, blew me a mocking kiss as she disappeared, laughing.
I sat at the other end of the dining-room, far away from the Turgells and Miss Everard and the consul’s family. While I ate I saw Everard sweep in in green and gold, resplendent as the howdah with the foam-rubber cushions she had described earlier, but I did not catch a glimpse of any of the others. After dinner, in the lounge, the consul beckoned me over to a collection of chairs round two or three small tables he had had prepared for our party. He wore a black tie, but politely ignored my rather rumpled blue suit, too short over the behind, as all my suits seem to be. Mamma was absent, playing bridge, and the wife sat with the expectant face of a girl at her first party and the dreadful clothes of a provincial mayoress at a reception. The band was playing some jaunty old fox-trot from a Fred Astaire film I dimly remembered having been taken to see once with some cousins in the school holidays. One or two couples were hopping mildly round as if they were climbing, counter to the slight tilt of the floor, first this way then that. Everard came in, signalled that she would be with us at once, hung over the backs of the chairs of a group of Italians, declaiming in high-pitched Italian, and then swept out again as if with a sudden recall to purpose. Like the other member of the weather couple, rain and shine, Rina swept in through the other door and made for us. She wore one of those chiffon dresses, vaguely flowered, vague in cut, vague in fit, which so many of my young female compatriots own, a dress about as becoming, though much less revealing of the lines of the body than a winding-sheet. Round her neck was a thin chain with some weakly blue stone pendent from it. Only the tips of her ears, unexpectedly showing under her brushed-back hair, and unexpectedly adorned with little gold gipsy rings, gave a hint of life.
‘I must apologize for mummy,’ she said, rather breathless, pausing at the back of the consul’s wife’s chair a moment before she sat down beside me, dropping a limp beaded bag in her thin lap. ‘Fruit cup? How simply lovely.’ She lifted the plastic stirrer out of my Pimm cup and licked it. ‘She won’t be up, I’m afraid. She’s gone to bed.’ She shrugged her shoulders and her face, as if to say, well, that’s that. ‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ I said, amazed.
‘Is your mother not well?’ The consul’s wife leaned forward.
‘I say! I am sorry!’ said the consul.
‘Oh no,’ said the girl, with the air of someone in charge of a familiar crisis.’ She’s all right. She’s not ill. I’ve ordered a brandy for her. I’ll dash down again directly and make her take a sedative. It’s Africa,’ she added, matter-of-fact. ‘First day back in Africa, ashore today.’
‘But I thought Stella enjoyed today,’ I said. ‘She did enjoy it.’ I remembered the gaiety with which she had scuttled off to dress for the evening, blowing me a kiss from the corridor.
‘Just Africa,’ the child said wisely, almost bored. ‘It’s all right. I’ll give her a sedative and she’ll calm down and it’ll be out of her system.’ I realized that this old-young girl, this child-parent had made this journey with her mother many times since childhood. She was an old hand at – whatever it was that ailed her mother.
Rina danced with me, and then with the consul, and then excused herself, going serenely out to her charge and reappearing ten minutes later. ‘Reading,’ she said. ‘I’ve given her her pill.’ A little later, the girl disappeared again. This time she said to me on her return, ‘Asleep.’ There was a Paul Jones in progress and I saw that she was eager to be in it; I led her to the floor, lost her, and went back to my drink. She was obviously enjoying herself; she preferred a dance that was more of a boisterous game than a tête-à-tête contact between a man and a woman.
The evening was not exactly a success. Stella’s withdrawal was a betrayal of the mood in which the party had been spontaneously arranged; if the excuse had been one of the conventional ones of sickness, a headache, the commonplace jollity might have survived quite well in spite of her absence, but the uncomfortable oddity of her reason for absence seemed to show up the nature of the jollity for what it was – an alcohol-hearty camaraderie between rather incompatible strangers. Everard brought over two more officers and an amiable, fat Italian girl, and the party became very much her own. The consul excused himself early and went off unrepentant in the direction of the card-room. I was suddenly angry to find myself left with the wife, the frizz-haired, pathetic bore, with her plump silver shoes crossed at the ankle, patiently. Rather abruptly, I left too, going to my cabin by way of the deck.
I lay on my bunk, bored and wakeful. I felt a sickening at them all. A spoilt woman who got ill from the idea that she had put her foot back in Africa again. So that was the reason for the life of romantic, genteel exile in Italy: inability to face the husband, marriage, reality, inability to face even the fact of this inability, so that husband, marriage, reality took the discreet disguise of ‘Africa’. Poor devil of a husband, working his farm to foot the bill at the Pensione Bandolini. Even the daughter given the mock-Italian name, the label of escape, ‘Rina’, and taught to live her life on the move, because the mother could not bear to alight in the one place where she was, conventionally, bound to live.
And the other one, the diplomatic gentleman with his queenly dowager, dragging shamefully from country to country the suffering and insufferable ‘mistake’ he had made in one of them. Were these the sort of people Africa gets? Christ, poor continent!
Mombasa was our first port of call in Africa.
Part One
Chapter 1
My mother sometimes says, with the mixture of polite diffidence and embarrassed culpability with which understanding parents are apt to regard their adult children, that there must be something of my grandfathers in me. The one, my mother’s father, was in the Indian Civil Service, and the other, who pre-dated him considerably, was killed in the Boer War. He was a colonel and a hero, and I discovered when I was quite young that my family was ashamed of him. When I was a child, the maternal grandfather was still alive, retired in Bournemouth, and they were ashamed of him, too. My father and mother were of the generation that, after the first World War, turned upon their parents and their heritage even more contemptuously than is usual with each succeeding generation. They felt themselves to be almost a new species. My mother refused to come out, with a presentation at Court and a party of her mother’s family house in the Cotswolds; she went to London and took a job as secretary to one of the international peace organizations which flourished hopefully at the time. My father left Oxford before taking Greats and went to Berlin with a young German student to carry a Socialist flag in the Revolution. He married there, too, and so although he and my mother lived together for several years after they met in England, they were not able to marry until he had managed to divorce his first wife – she was a Pole, I think. I barely scraped into legitimacy by being born when my parents had been respectably married for five months. My father edited two or three short-lived literary reviews, translated German and French political writings and some poetry, and although he was in his late thirties at the time, managed to get to Spain, if not exactly into the war, with the Republicans in 1936. He came back safely, but died of kidney disease in 1938. All this time, and, indeed, all through my childhood, we were supported in conventional comfort by his sinecure as a director in the publishing house which was, and is, his mother’s family business.
Our flat in Kensington and later our house in the Cotswolds near my mater
nal grandmother’s house – once it had been part of the estate – were places much frequented by victims and their champions. The world of my childhood was the beginning of the world of victims we now know, and each of these victims, like an ox attended by a group of tick-birds, had his attendant champions who, as tick-birds both batten on their ox’s misery and relieve him at the same time by eating the vermin on his skin, gave the victim succour and drew from him for themselves a special kind of nourishment. Do I sound sneering? I don’t mean to be. But I suppose I got tired of them, as a child and an adolescent; tired of the German refugee professors, and the earnest Christians and passionate Jews who ran the committees to care for them and protest for them, tired of the poets who limped in from their stint in Spain, and the indignant intellectual volubility of the brilliant people who spoke for them; tired of the committee members for the relief of Chinese war orphans, and the organizers of protest meetings in support of Abyssinia, and the saintly or urbane Indians who came to address the English committees for a free India on the best way to defeat the British Raj.
One day, when I was still a small boy, I found the sword that had belonged with my grandfather’s dress uniform and thought I would hang it up on the wall in the hall of our flat in London. I was busy assembling nails and hooks and hammer for the job when my mother came in with a friend. ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing with that?’ She pointed the toe of her shoe at the sword, lying on the carpet. ‘It’s grandfather’s sword; I found it at Grannie’s and she said I could have it. We can hang it up here. Won’t it look lovely? And look, she gave me this, too – it’s the citation about his bravery at Jagersfontein.’ Perhaps the friend my mother had with her was the representative of some spirited minority or other – I can’t remember who he was – but she obviously found it embarrassing, in a light sort of way (she was laughing, I know), to be confronted with a son who wanted to display his grandfather’s citation for Boer War bravery in a home where Imperialism was deplored. ‘Look at this,’ she said to her companion, pulling a face in mock pompousness, and handing him the framed citation. And then to me, ‘Toby, you don’t want to hang that thing up there, really, darling. . .’ I said to the man, eager to explain, ‘Grandfather is buried at this place Jagersfontein. He killed a hell of a lot of Boers, though. He was a colonel.’ The two grown-ups roared with laughter. Then my mother said firmly, ‘Toby, I will not have that thing hanging here or anywhere. Not the sword. Not the citation. Positively not.’
Because her creed of living included a nervous and almost exaggerated respect for the feelings of her children, she took me aside later and quietly explained that to honour my grandfather’s exploits in the Boer War was almost like celebrating a victory for Franco in Spain. She thought this comparison would be the most meaningful for me because of my father. It was, but not in the way she thought. She did not understand a child’s uncomplicated personal loyalties. ‘But grandfather fought on the English side, daddy was against Franco – how do you mean nearly the same?’ My poor mother, if only she hadn’t taken so seriously her self-imposed task of impressing upon a schoolboy the ethical difference, irrespective of personal ties, between the Wrong Side and the Right Side, she might have realized that my interest in my grandfather was nothing more than the inspiration of the boy’s books that she considered suitable reading for me, in which great deeds were done and much face was gained in the name of dead ancestral heroes.
Anyway, the sword and the citation were packed away again, and the war came and there were more and more dispossessed and more and more committees. I was just old enough to get into the end of the war – I was in the Navy, but I never left my training-ship – and when I came back and went to Oxford and then joined my great-uncle, old Faunce (we have ridiculous names in our family; I was lucky to get away with Tobias), in the publishing firm, there was no shortage of injustices to champion, nor has there been, ever since. Of course, by then, I was old enough to take up my own stand in a house where it was considered sinful not to take a stand. I did often find that my interest in the sudden acceleration of the problems of human relationships now that man-ordained barriers of race, creed, class, and colour were breaking up, was as great as that of my mother and Faunce and their set. But I reserved to myself, even in that house, the right not to take a stand if I didn’t feel like it. Not to shame myself into indignance if I didn’t happen to give a damn. Was this just a rather childish defiance? Perhaps. But I assure you that there was something about Uncle Faunce, banging down his sherry glass beside the sheaf of letters and papers he had brought with him to Sunday lunch, and saying, ‘People don’t know the facts. We must start a newspaper campaign. Letters. Get Donald to do something for the Statesman. And what about Larry? I’ll call a public meeting myself. . .’ that was inclined to cool the adrenalin of partisanship for any issue or person to stagnation in my blood by the time we had reached the stewed pears.
The atmosphere of ideological flux which I had breathed all my life sometimes seemed terrifyingly thin, a rare air in which one must gasp for the want of the oxygen of certainty, of an established way of life. Paradoxically, there had been bred into me a horror of the freedom that is freedom only to be free; I wanted to be free to cling to what I should break from, if I wished. I did not think that a man should have to lose himself, in Gide’s sense, in order to find himself. Something in me clung strongly to the need for mediating powers – tradition, religion, perhaps; a world where you might, if you wished, grow up to do what was expected of you. My mother and father gave up a great many small, unworthy things that together, constituted a workable framework of living, but what did they have to offer in their place? Freedom; an empty international plain where a wind turns over torn newspapers printed in languages you don’t understand.
So it was that at times like the Sunday I’ve just described, I found myself settling back into a cold, turgid solidity, not an opposition so much as an obstinacy, immovable, silent, and tight-lipped, that was, I was told, completely exasperating. At these times I assure you that I honestly could feel my responses battening down against the talk; I felt that what I really wanted was to enjoy what was left of the privileged life to which I and my kind have no particular right, and which exists, even in its present reduced condition, much as it was gained, by discrimination and exploitation. I felt, with a kind of irritated relief that I really belonged to that bad old good life which my parents helped push down into a dishonoured grave. At Oxford once, when I was talking like this, a rather drunk friend (I was rather drunk too) said that when I was in that sort of mood what I really inspired in others was a strong desire to kick me in my pompous backside; which pleased me very much.
Since India had been off their conscience, my family and their set had had an overwhelming supply of victims and their champions from Africa. First it was Seretse Khama, then Michael Scott, the Hereros, Nkrumah. Pamphlets about Dr Malan and the new Prime Minister of South Africa, Strijdom, about the Mau Mau, about Belgian colonial policy in the Congo, and self-government in Nigeria, piled up beside my mother’s bath, where she liked to do this sort of reading. Journalists, foreign correspondents, and crusading parsons who had been to shake a Christian fist in the face of the godless white oppressors in South Africa, came to dine and tell their tales. All this had had the usual effect on me; had rather put me off Africa.
When Faunce began to talk of sending me to South Africa to relieve Arthur Hollward, who had been the agent there for our firm, Aden Parrot, for fifteen years or so, most of my friends, and my mother, were at once in a flurry of excitement. What an opportunity! Wouldn’t I like to be briefed about the situation out there by a Negro doctor from Johannesburg who happened to be giving a series of lectures at a summer school in Kent? Wouldn’t I collect data about the housing of Africans for a world convention on housing which would be held in Stockholm next year? Would I look into the situation of the Indian minority? Would I be sure to visit the African College at Lovedale? Would I be willing to send a weekly newsl
etter on the effects of racial segregation?
I told them all that I would be going to Africa as a publisher’s agent, to visit bookshops and promote the sale of books. I didn’t want to investigate anything; I didn’t want to send newsletters home.
I had no intention of becoming what they saw me as, what they, in their own particular brand of salaciousness, envied me the opportunity to become – a voyeur of the world’s ills and social perversions. I felt, as I had so often before, a hostility, irritation, and resentment that made me want to shout, ridiculously: I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour. I want to take care of my own relationships with men and women who come into my life, and let the abstractions of race and politics go hang. I want to live! And to hell with you all!
I lay on the deck and my immediate surroundings made nonsense out of that over-dramatic statement. The sky was so blue that it looked as if it might crack, splinter with the shining intensity of its blueness – rip as the sea did, spilling out seething whiteness where the ship cut through. The sun was blinding as a mirror or a miracle. You could not look upon his face; it was too much pagan glory for a human. Below me was the lido deck, where the water of the swimming pool tilted solidly with the slow roll of the ship, like a slice of green jelly. The children screamed as they cast themselves into the water in their rubber rings. A delicious smell of soup came before my nose and was snatched away by the wind. The men lay like dogs, basking almost naked round the feet of the women. The women wore big hats and dark glasses like a disguise, and you could not tell whether or not they were looking at you. I was barefoot and in swimming-trunks and could feel the sun leaning steadily on my shoulders. I was hungry again (it was only an hour since breakfast) and full of the pleasant consciousness of the desire to stretch my arms and legs.
A World of Strangers Page 3