Of course, ‘First Snow in Port Suez’ interested me for its content – the snowy scene. This was not its only charm. After all, I could have asked Father to tell me of winter in Scotland, or chosen as my bedtime story ‘The Snow Queen’, one of my favourites, with its illustrations by Edmund Dulac. No, the winter scene was not the sole or even chief source of my passion for the postcard. My absorption seeded from a union of its content and its form. A curious reversal had taken place: the very qualities that had once troubled me about the photographic method – the stillness, the silence – now drew me to it.
I was nine years old; at the market I had experienced much; I had learned new words, and a new language; I had become enamoured of Iffe; my relationship with Ade had taken a new turn; and only recently I had acquired a proper name. Is it any wonder I sought the stillness of the postcard? At every spare moment I held it before me. Eventually, when I felt the image had been imprinted on my mind, as bright light lingers on the retina long after we have closed our eyes, I would bury my head in my blanket and listen to ‘First Snow in Port Suez’. What did I hear? At first very little. Curses from the bent woman. The faint crunching of the soldiers’ boots. Of course, somewhere in the Grand Hotel the fire was hissing and crackling, but I was unable to hear it. This attenuation of sounds disturbed me. I felt as if the whole scene, in whose noise I wanted to delight, existed in a flat and insubstantial realm; my only awareness of it was what I could glean directly from my sense of vision. Nevertheless I continued to look – and, over time, I began to sense a quality that was not present in the scenes in our album, a muffled or stifling presence, a kind of quiescence dropping from the sky. I looked harder, and I became aware of something truly surprising: unlike my family photographs, whose noise I could discern, on that street in Port Suez there was a near-absence of sound; and I understood that the delicious silence of the snow, its slow thrilling descent, was the very thing seeding this effect. It seemed to me that the photographer, in an effect he could not have foreseen, had managed not only to capture a rare occurrence of snow in an African city, but to represent the absence or mutedness of sound caused by the snowfall.
During the Christmas period of 1956 I went with Iffe to St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. Ade had been given a minor part in a production of The Snow Queen, a mission-school play of ill-timed entrances and stammered lines, with a zealous pianist and shrieks from children in the audience. Nevertheless, I was greatly stirred, and not only because of my fascination with ‘First Snow in Port Suez’.
I had admired drama at the market, and Iffe’s place in that drama. But here, in the church, before a white backdrop which seemed imperceptibly to float, I was witnessing drama on a formal stage for the first time, and I could not keep still. I gasped and laughed out loud; my feet rattled the pew. I received reproving glances from mothers in the audience, menacing looks which, had my excitement stemmed from pleasure alone, would have stopped my squirming. I was experiencing something far greater than pleasure, however. On that meagre platform where everything dull and ordinary appeared to shine I became acquainted for the first time with theatre’s power to transform. The set was crude, the acting clownish. But I wanted to believe in the reality of the performance, and my imagination supplied what the staging lacked. I could not deny that the grubby wisps decorating the set were merely scraps of cotton wool, and yet to my mind they were the embodiment of snow, wet, fluffy and cold; and from my vantage beside Iffe in the second row, the play took place not on a rough platform made out of packing crates, not under pallid lights in a hot city, but in a land of striking white vistas and strewn ice, peopled by noble citizens in horse-drawn sleighs, with snowflakes as big as hens!
Just as the elements of the set became greater than their commonplace forms, so the child-actors, some of whom I knew from the market – thin sun-baked children, dusty like me, and who, like me, had the most fantastic concept of snow – acquired a patina of dignity and grace. Inept with their lines, stiff, bored, with shiny noses, and sweating in winter coats; those same children (with whom days previously, by discarded crates by the juju stalls, I had mixed a brew of chickens’ feet, feathers, a dried lizard, spit, urine, sea water, sandal straps, stones and dust, bits of broken pottery, and some tobacco stolen from my father’s pouch) seemed to me perfectly at home in Lapland.
All except Ade. His face was painted white, his cheeks rouged, and he was pretty, almost feminine in sandals and a long loose patchwork dress – I think he played a robber girl. He was so changed! And yet because I knew him well, and had made a study of his voice, and even his way of running was familiar to me, I could not forget I was watching my friend. Ade or the robber girl? The confusion between the two might have broken the illusion of the theatre. It might have exposed the base nature of those grubby wisps, which I refused to acknowledge. But from my earliest days, like all children perhaps, I had a need or capability to believe in more than a single world. It was not so much that I saw beyond the painted face to the boy I knew as that I found myself willing to believe simultaneously in Ade and the robber girl, as if I was watching a kind of living emblem of the famous, double-ended caricature by W. E. Hill, which represents both a young and an old woman, the nose of the elder being the cheek of the younger. In one scene, when the robber girl stood still for a moment against a backdrop of white trees and briefly rested his eyes on me, I felt my heart lurch.
Towards the end of the play, as Gerda (absurdly played by Olu, the tallest of our friends, whose incipient moustache showed clearly under the spotlights) approached the Queen’s palace, a storm came at us, an effect involving an electric fan and bagfuls of feathers. There was a brief spurt of applause; shrieks from the children in the audience echoed around the hall. I remained silent. I had to take home some of that snow. It was my chance to step into ‘First Snow in Port Suez’, to become one of the children in the postcard. Leaping up on to my seat, I grabbed handfuls out of the air and stuffed them into my pockets. They were fluffy, wet and cold! I stood there with full pockets, ready to witness the finale. I was determined to believe in the illusion of winter. But seconds later the strange pretence was broken. A woman in the front row turned and gave me a look of such determined spite that I sat down and remained quiet for the rest of the play, which I could no longer believe in or follow. It was not so much a frown or glower as a kind of passionate demand – but for what? It appeared to take in the whole of the church, moving from the domed ceiling to the stage and on to the audience, and then it focused on me. Careful, that look said, the theatre is a siren that can speak truths without possessing a hero’s heart! You might convince yourself it is authentic, but you don’t fool me!
I did not know that the woman whose pale eyes had looked into my own was Mrs Honeyman. Nor could I guess that in the following months she was to have an influence over my life, that she would succeed (where others had failed) in bringing me into her realm, under the power of her ideas. Nevertheless, I sensed the challenge in that look. It was, I think now, both a recognition of a kindred spirit and an attempt to dominate that spirit in me. It saw my childish need to believe in the illusion of the theatre and wanted to expose, then crush, it. Later, when I knew her better, I recognized that look as forceful but not strong, like a powerful handshake that conceals the weak individual beyond the grip, and I found that she was jealous of many things, and that she acted strangely when she thought it would please me. Why, then, did I let myself be taken in by her, if even for a brief period? Now that I am here, recalling my history, I am seized by a suspicion: did I want her to rule me because I was tired of having no mother in my life?
After the play she approached our pew. She lit a cigarette and said to Iffe, ‘I am glad you were able to come. Your boy made a wonderful little girl.’ Iffe didn’t reply but in her unhurried way only nodded her head. Then, addressing me, she said, ‘Wait here,’ and left to fetch Ade. I turned to examine Mrs Honeyman. She wore a raw silk dress and curious hat made out of black feathers. Part of he
r awkwardness came with her height; she held her long body very straight and seemed acutely aware of it, almost embarrassed by it. She watched until Iffe disappeared, then took off her hat, and her hair, like some wilting creeper, fell limply down the back of her neck. She said, ‘Hello, Evie.’ (How did she know my name?) ‘I am Susan Honeyman.’ Smiling, she said, ‘I hope you liked the play, it was quite a triumph, don’t you think?’ She drew hungrily on her cigarette.
‘I liked it very much,’ I said truthfully. And since she did not immediately speak, I added, ‘Especially the snow storm,’ and looked at her with wide eyes.
‘You liked my little trick with the feathers,’ she said, through a mesh of blue smoke.
She sat down beside me on the pew and held her head very still. I said, ‘I even got hold of some of the flakes and put them in my pocket. I wanted to take them home. But they’ve melted. And now my pockets are soaking wet.’
Mrs Honeyman opened her mouth. A kind of high, stifled laughter emerged from it. After several moments she composed herself and said, ‘What a funny little girl!’ and laughed again, which said to me, If anyone heard you calling those feathers an instance of snow, what could she think but that you are out of your mind?
She lit a cigarette. I felt she was daring me to speak. I said, ‘Do you know, in 1942 it snowed in Port Suez?’
‘I don’t doubt you believe it,’ she answered immediately. ‘I dislike liars. I am drawn to storytellers, however. That is why I have taken an interest in you.’
Over the following weeks I got to know Mrs Honeyman. Ade, Ben and Iffe left to visit relatives for the Christmas period, and there was no one to cook for us. So at evening time the Honeymans came to our house; they brought supper, and the four of us ate on the veranda. The men talked, mostly about work, of their plans to clear the city’s slums and the skyscrapers they wished to raise, after which they retired to Father’s office. I was left alone with Mrs Honeyman. She would take out a cigarette from her silver case and with an excited gesture illuminate the tip. She sucked powerfully then exhaled with a look of keen pleasure, as if it tickled or amused her to smoke. Exhaling blue-grey clouds from her nose, she began to talk; as her cigarette spiced the air, her voice punctuated it.
I learned that she led an idle life, of no interest to anyone, and had cultivated a hatred of all action but the raising of the hand, with a cigarette in it, to the lips. Nevertheless I saw she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance and was unable to keep them to herself. This might have led to tedious evenings on the veranda. Yet it was quite something what she made of her moods, from which she was apt to branch out to wider concerns (although she always returned to her ill-health or disequilibrium).
‘Do you know,’ she told me, ‘last night I had the sensation I was floating above my bed. I must have been dreaming, although I was convinced I was awake. I think it had something to do with my body’s quarrel with the fact of gravity.’ And, later: ‘It was very curious this morning when the cook came to bring me my replenishments. I could not help feeling that she was trying to poison me, as servants everywhere are wont to do. My great tiredness is no doubt linked to her cooking.’ Another evening: ‘Evie, do you hear the little catch in my throat when I pronounce the vowel a?’ This she attributed to an apple pip that had got stuck in her throat, and she believed that by talking she would increase the blood flow to her neck, which in turn would increase the possibility of the pip being loosed, which, finally, would reduce the frequency of the fits of breathlessness and coughing from which she suffered.
Mrs Honeyman hinted that in her twenties she had been an actress, but since arriving in Nigeria five years earlier, in her mid-thirties, had spent nearly all of her days in bed, dozing and smoking. She hated the festive season because the mission-school play, which her husband and the priest pestered her to direct, forced her into activity. To ‘over-extend’ herself in this way was bad for her health. She even claimed that directing those hordes of ‘niggers’ (I noticed Mrs Honeyman took pride in using terms like ‘nigger’, ‘savage’, ‘crowface’ and ‘cannibal’) threatened her sanity. So much so that she maintained one could perceive in the Christmas play the mark of an unbalanced mind. (And, in fact, hearing this, I recalled something that hadn’t struck me during the performance but which I now found odd: each of the boys had played female parts; and Dayo, the only girl, had been cast as Kai.)
‘But perhaps you don’t believe me,’ she said (this on New Year’s Eve, after Father and Mr Honeyman had left us at the table). ‘Perhaps you think I am making the whole thing up. I knew it! You don’t believe I am in any way responsible for the Christmas play!’ I assured her that I believed her. ‘That makes me very happy,’ she said, breathing out a menthol cloud and bending double to cough. ‘You see, I took great pains over its composition. It might seem to you that it was a small trifle of a thing. Getting those bandits to act was a labour in itself, because nigger children are forever joking around and telling lies. They don’t know the difference between acting and real life! But, Evie, do you know that wasn’t the hardest part. Not by any means. The adaptation of the Andersen tale cost me a great deal, to be honest with you.’ She sighed and ran her fingers through her long, blonde, lifeless hair as if to emphasize the point. Then she made a claim that seemed to contradict what she had said only a moment before: ‘Of course, it is all empty palaver,’ and went on to disparage her efforts, saying the topic was too boring for a ‘young lady’ to have to endure. Nevertheless the following evening we picked the topic up again, analysed the speeches for false notes, talked about how she might have made the costumes more lifelike. I told her once again how much I had liked the simulated snowfall. ‘Well now,’ she said, ‘I can’t say what kind of peculiar serendipity led me to create that effect. Inspiration is a mysterious business, Evie, it can’t be forced.’
For me these conversations were novel experiences and exciting. Not only was I lacking a mother figure in my life, the memory of The Snow Queen lived in me powerfully. I had been struck by the theatre’s transformative powers, which had seemed to speak of my desire or will to shape my own personality. And yet it was Mrs Honeyman who had spoken – she whose pale eyes gave the colour of insincerity to everything she said!
Slender, angular, shrewd, washed out, gesticulating with her eyes which flashed and faded according to the quality of her mood, Mrs Honeyman attended to me, tried to please me even. She had the idea we were intimates, but the nature of the connection was unclear. Did she consider our relationship to be that of teacher to pupil, or nurse to troubled child, or guru to unbeliever, or seducer to victim, or even, as I briefly hoped, mother to daughter?
She had no children, and on hearing her talk about Mr Honeyman I could not believe she would ever conceive one. She called him, variously, ‘sow’, ‘canned rhinoceros’, ‘blubber-lips’, ‘that spent parvenu’. ‘You know,’ she said once, towards the end of the Christmas holiday, ‘the funny thing is that everyone considers my husband outstandingly clever. But, really, if you set it next to my own, his brain is like a raisin compared to the grape. I knew it when I married him. That is why I agreed to his proposal.’ I laughed, and she turned violently round and said, ‘I allow my husband great liberties. All I ask in return is that he stop spitting on the floor!’
That she should be so insulting to her husband, while being so well disposed towards males in general – almost girlish with laughter when I told her about my friendship with Ade – intrigued me; and this aspect of her character enabled me to forgive her sometimes heartless words.
‘Wait until you find yourself in the arms of your man,’ she said on one of our last evenings together. ‘Evie … think of it. It will be twilight, the street-lamps will be flickering on the river, and he will stop joking – they do, you know, and that is because their blood-pressure alters – and he will take you like this – wait, there is no one to see us! – and press you like this, with his hands like so.’ Clutching me, she said, ‘I s
ometimes think that to be held tightly and kissed is the whole secret of life.’ But a moment later she grew solemn. ‘With your great ears and ill-proportioned face you will never attract Ade, or any man for that matter. That is probably a good thing, Evie, for children come out of women through tunnels of pain.’
‘It can’t be like that really,’ I said.
‘What do you know!’ she said, stepping back. ‘You are young. You should take advantage of your youth to learn one thing … refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted. Oh, only a fool loves being alive!’
The following evening, the last before Iffe, Ben and Ade returned, Mrs Honeyman seemed distracted. She didn’t eat. After supper she smoked in silence, then paced the veranda for a while. Standing behind my chair, with one hand resting gently on my shoulder, she whispered, ‘I believe you have met my cook.’ I straightened my back. Fear flashed through me. How could I have failed to link the Honeymans’ cook, with her wizened face and keen bargaining and strange stories, with Mrs Honeyman? Before I could answer, Mrs Honeyman said, ‘She is a remarkable creature in many ways. Very talkative and interesting … vindictive too. She leads what I call a quixotic life. Let me tell you something. The savage mind thinks very differently from mine and yours. It is not goaded by truth.’ She came round to face me. ‘My cook, for instance, will simply lie or tell stories if she thinks it will be of advantage to her.’ Mrs Honeyman stroked the arm of my chair, and her voice became grave. ‘To be honest with you, at this stage of your development you are not entirely unlike her. That is why I was not surprised when you insisted on calling those feathers an instance of snow. This has something to do with the fact of your being an exceptional late birth. I have seen it in your face, Evie, you are teetering on the precipice of barbarism.’ She sat heavily in her chair. In her normal voice (soft, crumbling like ash from her cigarettes), she said, ‘But where was I? Let me see. Ah, yes. Like all of her race, my cook does not know the difference between a lie and the truth. I will see that you learn that difference, because life punishes liars ruthlessly and indiscriminately. That is why the natives are so wretched.’
The Echo Chamber Page 17