Coincidence: A Novel

by J. W. Ironmonger

  10

  January 1978

  It wasn’t long after the incident with Marion Yves and the seagull that the story took hold in the Manx village of Port St Menfre. The Reverend Jeremiah Lender, who must have been bound by some obligation regarding clerical confidentiality, nonetheless recounted the story of the seagull to his wife Ruth, making her promise faithfully not to share these secrets with a soul – not with a single soul – a pledge that Ruth Lender solemnly extracted later that same day from her sister Mary. Mary, in turn, swore secrecy with her cousin Eve; and after that the trail has faded. But it does appear that within twenty-four hours the tale was common currency among all but six members of the village population: Marion herself, the vicar, Gideon Robertson the fisherman, Peter the barman and Mr and Mrs John Hall at the Bell Inn.

  Versions of the seagull story varied in their particulars, especially when it came to the final outcome. Marion had left the Reverend Lender without revealing the course that God had chosen through the medium of the seagull. But the vicar told his wife that he was sure that the piece of bread snatched up by the first gull had in fact corresponded to one of the potential fathers, and not to either of the less palatable options of single parenthood or termination of the pregnancy.

  Eventually, of course, the story did find its way to the three putative fathers.

  The first to appear at the gate of 4 Briny Hill Walk was the landlord of the Bell Inn. John Hall was a bulldog of a man, a former SAS soldier, built like a rugby full back and with a face as red as a strong rosé wine, a neck as wide as a cider barrel and a look of permanent outrage. He stormed up the pathway and rapped belligerently on the door. Marion admitted him, and the door was closed for almost an hour before he left the cottage, as scarlet-faced and furious as he had been on arrival. It hadn’t been an easy encounter. He demanded to know what Marion thought she was doing, spreading rumours through the village; rumours that he, Sergeant Hall, the innocent and irreproachable landlord of the inn, had somehow fathered a child by her. He, the blameless husband, the ex-soldier with the spotless reputation, was now tarred with the brush of suspicion.

  ‘Don’t you remember fucking me, down in the beer cellar,’ she asked, ‘with your trousers around your ankles and me pressed up against boxes of cider, while your wife pulled pints in the bar above our heads? Don’t you remember lying me down on an old wooden pallet, and tearing my knickers in your haste to get your thing inside me? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

  He might have wished to protest his innocence, but how could John Hall deny it? He was a military man; he was possessed of a code of honour. He squared up to the truth. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you must tell me if the child is mine.’

  ‘Can’t you tell yourself?’ Marion replied. ‘Did you fire blanks from that thing? Didn’t I have to douse myself with bottled water before going back to the bar, in case the smell of your spunk should give me away to your wife?’

  It wasn’t the only exchange that took place between Marion and John Hall that evening, but it was the one that mattered. One hour after he arrived, John Hall left 4 Briny Hill Walk in little doubt that the child in Marion’s womb was his, but resolved to admit it to no one.

  Gideon Robertson lumbered up to Number Four as the sun set, just a few hours after John Hall’s visit. He did not march up and strike the door like the ex-soldier had done; instead he stood hesitantly at the gate of the cottage he had once shared with Marion, and for a while he sat on the low wall looking out at the tide, watching the last of the mackerel boats returning. The sun had disappeared beneath the Irish Sea before he headed gingerly up to the front door and tapped as gently as a child. He too was admitted.

  How did this conversation go? There was much more history between Gideon and Marion. Theirs had not been a hasty knee-trembler in a beer cellar; they had shared a bed like husband and wife, had rolled nightly into each other’s arms, had slept and caressed and loved and argued and done all those things that lovers do. Gideon was more hurt than angry; more concerned for Marion than for himself. He had no reputation to protect. ‘How are you taking all this gossip?’ he asked her. ‘How will you manage this pregnancy on your own?’

  He begged her to let him stay, flattered and cajoled in his big, cumbersome way. He made promises. He would look for work on the island. He would raise the child as his own with no care if it were his or some other man’s. And there is no doubt that Marion found his suit difficult to resist. She cared for Gideon. So why didn’t she relent, and let him take his place beside her and raise the child as his own? Was it the seagull and the bread that swayed her? Perhaps. Was it the fear that one dark night when the swell was high he would sail out and never return? Certainly this preyed on Marion’s mind – she, who was the daughter of a man who had died at sea and the granddaughter of another. Did she look at him and see no future for herself or her baby? We do not know. All we know is that the interview took about an hour.

  No one saw Peter the barman visit. He came after midnight, after the inn had closed its doors.

  ‘They are saying,’ he said dramatically to Marion, ‘that you have fallen pregnant.’

  Marion laughed at this ponderous accusation. ‘Fallen pregnant? Fallen? Is that how it happens? Why didn’t they teach us this at school? Well, well. And I always imagined there would be some screwing involved.’

  Peter sheepishly corrected himself. ‘They’re saying you are with child.’

  Marion was weary of these encounters by now. She was in her dressing gown and the two were standing in her kitchen. ‘Are they really,’ she said with some sarcasm in her voice. ‘Well it must be true then, if that’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘They are saying,’ insisted Peter, ‘that I’m the father.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Marion again. ‘And could it be true?’

  ‘You must tell me,’ said Peter. ‘Tell me if it’s true.’

  ‘Don’t you remember being in my bed?’ asked Marion.

  Peter looked bowed. ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘And do you remember wearing any protection?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘And didn’t they teach you at school in England what might happen if you come into a girl with no protection?’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘What did you think, young Peter?’

  ‘I thought you were on the p-pill.’ He stammered this out.

  ‘And did you ask me? Did you ask if I was on the p-p-p-pill?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You didn’t. You just assumed.’

  ‘So I am the father then?’

  She looked at him. He was eighteen. He was slight and pale and he was frightened of what she might say, of what this might mean.

  ‘Do you remember that day . . . up by the stream?’

  He bobbed his head.

  ‘We lay in the long grass.’

  ‘I remember. We were underneath a hornbeam tree.’

  ‘Is that what it was? You quoted poems to me as the sun went down.’

  ‘ “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” ’

  ‘That was one of them.’

  ‘ “Thou art more lovely and more temperate”.’

  She slid an arm around him.

  ‘Was it that day?’ he whispered.

  ‘Of course not.’ She allowed their eyes to meet. ‘That was September.’

  ‘ . . . And this baby?’

  ‘Was conceived in November.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘ “Winter when icicles hang by the wall . . .” ’

  ‘Is this another poem?’

  ‘ “And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, and Tom bears logs into the hall, and milk comes frozen home in pail”.’

  She laughed and pretended to slap him but he caught her hand and held it.

  ‘So, is it mine?’

  ‘Where were you in November?’

  ‘You know where I was in November.’

  ‘Then you know
as much as I do.’

  He released her hand. They were both breathing heavily now. Softly he recited, ‘ “Not yesterday I learned to know, the love of bare November days, before the coming of the snow”.’

  ‘Is this another poem?’

  ‘Robert Frost.’ He held her then, and whispered the lines into her ear. And a little while later they went up the small staircase to bed.

  11

  June 1992

  In Langadi the day began early. Anyeko, thirteen years of age, was the oldest child in the orphanage. She would rise when the cockerels started to call, when the sun was still an orange gleam on the eastern hills. She would pull on her blue school dress and would scamper out of the dormitory. She would lead the nanny goats from the night shed and tether them in the grass yard, and she would throw open the shutters of the chicken roost and laugh out loud when the birds all flew down at once.

  When it was time to milk the goats, Anyeko would go to the window of the mission house and tap on the glass. Azalea, now also thirteen, lanky and tanned with a boy’s cut of hair and not a single girlish curve on her figure, would slip out from beneath her mosquito net, and, barefoot, still in her nightdress, she would tiptoe outside. The two girls would run back to the goat yard, and snatching up the buckets, laughing together, high, happy voices floating over the compound, they would milk the nanny goats in time for breakfast.

  Breakfast at Langadi was at seven o’clock with the sun still low in the sky. Odokonyero, the big Acholi cook, would be waiting for the goats’ milk. He would splash it straight from the bucket into the pan ready to make cassava porridge. Tebere, one of the older boys, would fetch rolls of charcoal for the stove, and two more girls, Okema and Kila, would stir it. When seven o’clock arrived, Odokonyero would nod towards Anyeko and Azalea and the two girls would tug on the bell rope, and the bell high in the bamboo rafters would summon the mission to the table.

  The mess hall was a high wooden gazebo, open on all sides around a cement floor, shaded by a roof of deep black thatch. The kitchen was no more than an alcove, featuring a barbecue fashioned from the two halves of an oil drum and a lock-up cupboard for storing pans and provisions. Mrs Rebecca Folley, her long hair tied back in a bun, would sit at the top of one long table smoking her first cigarette of the day and slowly savouring a tin mug of tea. She favoured her tea freshly brewed, using tea leaves from western Uganda, still green, bought in bundles from the market in Moyo. Luke Folley, on the other table, preferred coffee. His favourite beans were from Mbale in the far east of Uganda, freshly roasted each morning by the cook.

  The smell of Luke’s breakfast coffee roasting slowly over the charcoal would become one of Azalea’s abiding memories of Langadi. Long after this day was over, this day that would change her life for ever, the smell of coffee would be one of those delicate index smells that could trip delicious cascades of memory, so that even as an adult, even in the winter streets of London, she could walk past a coffee shop and catch just the faintest hint of Mbale beans rich with all the smells and sounds of Africa: the chuckle and whoop of the gonolek bird and the flash of its scarlet and black wings, and there in the distance would be the sounds of the motor scooters on the road to Moyo and the high, excited voices of the orphanage children; and if she closed her eyes just for the briefest of moments, there would be Pastor David droning out grace and Odokonyero doling out the meals.

  It was a morning such as this, a hot African morning. The fifteen orphanage children and the Folleys, the cook, the six farm workers, and Stanton who drove and maintained the mission bus, and the old Buganda preacher Pastor David, and Maria the orphanage matron, and Elizabeth the nurse, and two maids who cleaned and washed and helped in the kitchen, and two boys who swept and minded the compound, and Ritchie and Lauren the VSO students still pale from the English winter, and old Mzee Njonjo, a Kikuyu man from Kenya, who served as the nightwatchman; all thirty-six sat down for breakfast, and another sixteen breakfasts would be cooked and served to patients in the hospital. You might argue that only thirty-five sat down for breakfast, since Odokonyero never quite took a seat at the table – he was too busy with the porridge and with Mr Luke’s coffee – but a place was set for him nonetheless.

  The five farm boys were first at the table. They had already milked the Ankole cows and walked them out to pasture, and now they were hungry. They bantered and jostled until Mr Oweko the farm manager came to take his seat beside them.

  No one could eat until Pastor David had recited grace, and he would always appear ten minutes or more after the breakfast bell, by which time the farm boys and the orphans were shrieking his name and the porridge was cooling fast on the table. ‘Please hurry, Pastor David,’ Matron Maria would reprove him, ‘or our orphans will starve.’

  ‘One more minute and I’d have said grace myself,’ Azalea would say.

  The language spoken at the St Paul Mission was English. This was a tradition begun by Lester Folley I. Acholi was spoken too, informally, and other Luo and Sudanese dialects like Dinka and Madi. Fragments of Swahili were used as a lingua franca in marketplaces and on the streets, for this was a melting pot of a place and snippets of English and Swahili were necessary to carry out business here. Sometimes there would be Arabs in the marketplace, swathed in Bedouin headscarves, walking tall and erect, speaking Sudanese Arabic, shunned by the Acholi. There could be Kenyans, who had drifted across from the difficult farmlands of Lake Turkana looking for greener fields to work. There were short, dark people from the lands to the west – Congolese – in their colourful cottons, here to trade with animal skins and bush meat and forest fruits and beads made from the teeth of crocodiles. There were Chinese here from time to time, emissaries from Peking looking for opportunities to engage with the ever-changing regimes. There were Europeans, too – Britons mainly – farmers and missionaries for the most part, like the Folleys, but some who came to work on projects for the UN or for businesses back in Europe. Any journey from Karama to Gulu and north on the dirt road to Moyo would pass a whole collection of missions and clinics, their signboards proudly proclaiming their presence to passers-by. Never, the Acholi must have felt, had there been so much interest in their immortal souls.

  Then there was commerce of a less spiritual kind. There were representatives of charities and foundations whose aims were related to aid, healthcare, education or wildlife. And often in Gulu, around the pool at the Acholi Inn, or limbering with cold beer at a roadside bar, would be the occasional mercenary soldier from Belgium or from England, kitted out in neutral khaki, displaying biceps with tattoos to advertise their unsavoury trade.

  But this international assortment was, in reality, little more than a dust of seasoning among the growing numbers of native Ugandans and Sudanese for whom this forgotten line on a colonial map had become a refuge from a conflict zone – and this only when the borderland managed to escape from being a conflict zone itself.

  Azalea would later talk about these days in Langadi as the happiest of her life. The Folleys had a network of friends in the communities of the West Nile, and these families would come to visit in their Land Rovers or in their old Toyota vans. Out on the verandas in the evenings the adults would talk and play bridge and click Scrabble tiles, while Azalea and the children would make endless explorations of the farmstead, climbing the trees and collecting insects in jars. When Lester Folley I bought the farmstead in 1907 it was a remote place, off every beaten path. By the time Luke and Rebecca arrived at the mission in January 1984, the track had become a thoroughfare and the cluster of huts that had once comprised the village had grown into a township, now with its own school and church and a welter of uninviting shops and bars. For two hours every evening, between four and six, the mission would open up its gates to provide access to the standpipe that drew water from an aquifer, and this singular act of charity saved local families the long walk to the river for water and the longer walk back. A queue would begin to form by the gate early in the afternoon, women mostly, bearing jerrycan
s and plastic bottles; and by the time Odokonyero (whose job as cook also made him head of security) swung open the gate at four o’clock, there could be two hundred people waiting for water.

  Odokonyero would count the villagers in – he knew them all by name – and he would police the whole operation with his watch. Every day this involved an awful lot of hand-waving, raised voices and squabbles.

  ‘Can’t you all be a little quieter?’ Rebecca Folley would appeal to Odokonyero. Her schoolroom was right next to the standpipe, and the daily commotion disturbed the children.

  ‘But it isn’t me who is making the noise,’ Odokonyero would exclaim, quite untruthfully for his was the voice that soared above them all. But no matter: the inefficient routine of the water pump was too much a part of village life ever to interrupt it.

  Every now and then the villagers would appear with a child. The child would become the immediate responsibility of Matron Maria, who would look after his or her welfare until the parents or other relatives could be found. Luke Folley would complete the necessary government paperwork and would photograph the child, then send the papers off to the police control in Gulu where a show would be made of looking for the missing family. Often, of course, the parents were never found. There were fifteen children in the orphanage this morning, although there had sometimes been as many as twenty-six and once as few as five. Orphans didn’t always stay long. As soon as they were stronger, well fed and partly educated, a distant family member would often come to claim them, especially if they were old enough to carry water, or to help in the fields. There was little that the Folleys could do when this happened. So the reclaimed child would be vaccinated and hugged and dispatched with the new family; and every now and again one of the Folleys would happen to drive past the village where the child now lived and, if all was well, a happy reunion would take place.