The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  ‘Do you know the country?’ I asked him.

  In answer, he smoothed his palms over the paper and breathed deeply, almost as though he were possessing the place, or some fond memory of it. ‘In Cairo, I have a collection of maps and charts numbering almost two thousand. You would not imagine so many had ever been made. It seems a mania. I employ my own map-makers. They show me where I have been and where I am going. I daresay you draw yours to serve an entirely different purpose.’

  There was a great deal of empty space on the map before him, and he ran his hand into this whiteness, left it there for a moment and then raised it to his face and studied it, as though an imprint of something might remain. Then he held out his palm, fingers splayed, to me and asked me what I saw there. At first I didn’t understand him, had misunderstood the rules of the game we were still playing.

  ‘I see the rivers and paths of your hand,’ I told him.

  He considered this for a moment and then burst into laughter. He repeated what I had said to Amon, who did not laugh, exactly, but who produced an openmouthed grin from which Hammad’s own laughter might at that moment have been coming.

  This ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

  ‘I believe we understand each other, you and I, Captain Frasier.’

  I no longer used the title. I had told him this at our first meeting, but he had insisted then that it was something hard-earned, something to be proud of, and so I had unwillingly acquiesced to his use of it. He himself carried a great many honorary titles, awarded to him, presumably – or so it suited me to believe – by people who confused fear with respect.

  On that first visit to his home, Frere and I had been shown the specially constructed cabinet, inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, in which all the various medals and insignia attached to these titles were kept. Four locks secured the cabinet and its massive feet were bolted to the floor. I gained then some notion of the vanity which fed the man’s appetites.

  ‘Are we talking about Nicholas Frere?’ I asked him, keen to bring this circumvention to an end.

  ‘We are indeed.’

  ‘Do you know the circumstances of his disappearance and discovery?’

  ‘And a great deal else besides.’ He continued to look around me as he spoke.

  ‘Then was it you who found him?’

  In the doorway, Amon flinched at the harshness of my words and all they implied.

  ‘Indeed, and as you already well know, it was not. I did, however, have the opportunity to speak with the father of the dead girl.’ This was his counter-blow. And it was he who told me everything that had happened.’

  ‘And are you going to relate the story to me, here, now?’

  He smiled at this. Ah.’

  ‘Then tell me what you wish to tell me, ask whatever it is you are going to ask of me.’

  ‘Ask of you? Ask what of you? I merely wished to see you to tell you that, whatever the outcome of this unhappy affair, whatever the fate of that disgraced and unhappy man – the murderer Frere – that I am prepared to present my testimony to whatever court wishes to try him in the matter.’

  ‘But whatever you said would only be hearsay, the words of another, not your own.’

  ‘Ah, of course.’ He locked his fingers, pretended to consider what he was about to say next. ‘Perhaps I am not making myself clear. What I meant to say was that I would be happy not only to appear before any such court, but that I would also be happy to ensure that the girl’s father appeared, that I will guarantee this, and that I shall do whatever I can for the grieving, disconsolate man from this time until that. The loss of a daughter, and under such circumstances as those – can you or I ever truly understand how that poor and wretched man must feel?’ The tone of his voice changed as he spoke. There was now no attempt to suggest concern, and he spoke solely to make his own unspoken demands clear to me.

  ‘Is it possible to see this man?’ I said.

  ‘The feather-collector? I am afraid not. But rest assured, he is well cared for. He says he wants to die, that his daughter was his only remaining child, her mother long since dead or left behind or whatever.’

  I knew now that he was embellishing, but knew also that a lie repeated was no more or less of a lie for that.

  ‘You believe that we will be overtaken by events elsewhere?’ I said. ‘That Nicholas Frere will not be sent home to face trial, that he will be tried here?’

  ‘How perceptive,’ he said. ‘However, I shall travel to London, if necessary. And gladly.’

  ‘And your witness?’

  ‘Ah. The man would be persuaded.’

  ‘With you as his protector, how could he refuse?’

  ‘You see, we do understand each other.’

  ‘But better if this place were granted some degree of independence from foreign government and Frere were tried here.’

  ‘“Some degree of independence.” How generous. And do not forget, Captain Frasier, it is largely at my insistence that Mr Frere is being returned to you. Who do you imagine had those barbaric chains taken from him?’

  The same man who built the prison in the first place and then had the chains fitted to the walls. But I resisted saying this.

  He turned to Amon, who immediately held his small book closer to his face. Amon, I fear we have offended Captain Frasier.’

  Amon pretended not to have been aware of what had happened, but, as with Hammad’s own pretence, he made no real effort to convince me.

  ‘Perhaps I have been over-generous, conceded too much. Perhaps the distraught father might yet break into Frere’s cell with a sword and chop off his head and then vanish into one of those empty white spaces never to be seen again. Perhaps even a lion or some other such beast might attack Frere and savage him until he is dead.’

  Amon’s eyes widened at both suggestions.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said to Hammad.

  ‘Do, Captain Frasier? What do you imagine yourself capable of doing?’

  ‘I might discover that the tales of whatever Frere is supposed to have done are just that – tales.’

  ‘Ah, so he has denied everything? He is an innocent man.’

  ‘He is an honest man.’

  ‘Whose life is worth more than the small ignorant savage whose life he took? Is that what you believe, is that what you truly believe?’

  I could not answer him honestly.

  He saw this and said nothing to provoke me further. He motioned for Amon to open the door, a signal that our conversation was over.

  5

  I first met Frere in the Company headquarters in Knightsbridge, where, unknown to each other, we had both been called to our interviews on the same day.

  I had been in London for a week, staying with one of my father’s business partners. I had dealt with some business for my father, largely concerning the shares he held in the various London companies connected with his own, and everywhere I went I was treated as he would have been treated. His partner attempted to dissuade me from accepting the Company position, but when I told him I knew he had been briefed by my father on the matter, he gave up trying.

  On several occasions when my daily round took me close to Knightsbridge I had walked back and forth in front of the Company headquarters and studied the building. It was part of an impressive terrace, with a crest in gold and black above its double entrance, and reached via a high flight of steps, on either side of which stood polished marble pillars. It was an imposing entrance into that life, one that inspired confidence and every investment a man might be willing to make.

  On the day of my interview I arrived over an hour early. I cannot explain why I did this, nor why I attempted to explain to the porter who showed me in that I had only just then arrived in London and did not wish to waste my time elsewhere. He took out a book from beneath his desk, opened it to the present date, and slowly searched for my name with his finger.

  ‘Twelve-thirty,’ he said.

  It was then barely eleven.


  ‘Are all those others being interviewed for the same position?’ I asked him. I was dismayed by the long list of names amid which my own sat.

  ‘Not my business,’ the man said.

  ‘May I wait?’ I indicated the glazed door against which the November rain was just then starting to beat.

  He considered my request as though I had posed him a conundrum, pinching his nose and pursing his lips. I understood then the full extent of his domain.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said eventually.

  He led me to a first-floor room up a wide, portrait-lined staircase, and, as intended, I felt the eyes of all those other men looking down at me as I ascended. We came to a door marked ‘Library’, and he showed me inside, closing the door behind me before I could ask him if I would be called for or be expected to present myself elsewhere at the appointed time.

  I had thought there might be others waiting there, but I was alone. The room was lined from ceiling to floor with book-filled shelves. A fire burned in the broad fireplace, around which were placed several leather armchairs. I went to one of these and sat down. Above the mantel was a giant map of Africa, and beside it two portraits, life-size, of warrior kings. A lion skin was pinned to the wall between the high windows, and I went to inspect this and to look down at the street below. It was raining more heavily by then and the water ran in sheets over the small panes. Directly opposite, a building had recently been demolished and a blaze of timbers burned at the centre of the site, filling the street with its sodden smoke.

  I returned to the hearth, sat for several minutes, then rose and looked along the shelves. I quickly realized that most of those volumes I had understood to be books were, more accurately, bound reports and journals. The whole of one of the shorter walls was taken up with volumes of Company minutes dating from its foundation seventy years earlier. I took down the most recent of these and returned to my seat to examine it. I doubt there was a country in the world which was not in some way represented in its pages. Reports on mining, agriculture, quarrying, logging, farming and fishing from Chile to Australia, from the Baltic to Cape Horn. I remember how encouraged I was to see so many badly drawn maps accompanying these reports. I searched the volume for that part of the world for which I was hopefully bound, but found nothing.

  It was as I was about to return the volume that the door opened and someone else was shown in by the porter.

  This man stood for a moment, accustoming his eyes to the dimmer light of the room. At first he did not see me. He, too, went to the lion skin. He pulled a chair to the wall, stood on it and examined the animal’s head more closely. I heard him talking to himself, remarking on what a poor job had been made of preparing the skin. I rose then, making as much noise as possible to announce my presence to him. I expected him to climb down from the chair and come to me, but instead he searched for me, saw me against the glow of the fire, and asked me if I had ever seen a less fearsome-looking lion.

  I went to him, the volume still in my hand.

  ‘Are you a committee member?’ he asked me.

  ‘I’m here for interview,’ I said.

  ‘Ukassa Falls, the concessionary Station?’ He leaped down and came towards me with his hand out. ‘Nicholas Edwin Stephen Frere,’ he said. ‘When I was five, my dying father confided to me that I had been an unwanted child, that I was unlikely to inherit anything from him, and that I was called Stephen against my mother’s wishes after the saint who was stoned to death.’

  ‘It seems a lot to take on at such an age,’ I said.

  ‘Death-bed confidence. And you?’

  I told him my name as we shook hands. He repeated it, grasping my hand more firmly. He closed his eyes for an instant, opened them, and said, ‘Some Technical Difficulties Concerning the Azimuth Mapping of Near-Polar Latitudes.’

  It was the title of a paper I had published two years earlier; four pages long with a further seven pages of calculations and two sides of references. Sixty copies of the off-print still sat in my bureau; twelve copies of the journal in which it appeared sat in my bookcase. I had submitted three further articles on the strength of this acceptance, and all three had been returned. It was hard for me to believe that anyone else had read the article, then or since.

  ‘Were you long at the Pole?’ he said.

  ‘At the Pole?’

  ‘Mapping.’

  I had been no further north than Edinburgh and told him this.

  ‘I imagined as much,’ he said, and burst into laughter. He pulled the chair back to where it had stood and pointed me back to the fire.

  ‘I’m surprised you remembered it,’ I said.

  ‘I have a curse of a memory. Practically everything I read or see or do, I remember.’

  We sat in seats on either side of the fire. He seemed perfectly at home there, as though he were a regular visitor.

  ‘Was this what you expected to find?’ he asked me. ‘All this, this room, this building, all this ostentation, all this marble, brass and mahogany?’

  I told him I hadn’t known what to expect.

  ‘And which position are you here for?’

  ‘Map-maker.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘I personally am offering my worthless self up for the post of – ’ he pulled a folded sheet from his jacket – ‘Officer in charge of Acquisitions and Chief Cataloguer. Two posts.’

  ‘What will they involve?’

  ‘Who knows? Means and needs, I suppose. Much like your own position.’

  ‘Are you hopeful?’ I asked him.

  ‘Hopeful that when my money bond is paid it will be sufficient.’

  I knew that this was how these positions were often acquired. My father had written letters of recommendation; I had brought sealed envelopes to his business partner.

  I wished I had known then that Frere had published fourteen articles and papers, six in the same journal as my own, and that he had written and published two books, the first at his own expense, concerning the classification of microscopic fauna. But I knew nothing of any of this until we were quartered together on the Alpha three months later. Another man might have made more of my solitary article merely as an introduction to his own, but not Frere, and when, a fortnight out of Tilbury, I confronted him with his own body of work – I had gone in search, following the trail of footnotes from one piece to another – he said he was no longer so keen on devising his system of classification and cataloguing of dead specimens, and that what interested him now were the practices and customs of living people.

  ‘What will they expect of you?’ I asked him.

  We were both conscious of the fact that elsewhere in the building a committee of men was already conducting its interviews.

  ‘Whatever they expect, I shall give it to them – give it to them in spades – and I shall continue working on my own behalf,’ he said.

  I showed him the poor quality of the maps in the volume I still held, and he looked at these for several minutes before speaking.

  ‘They serve the Company’s purpose,’ he said, and I heard his note of warning clearly enough.

  ‘I shall bear that in mind,’ I said.

  He slapped the volume shut. ‘Just remember that we are the men they need,’ he said.

  ‘Why us?’

  ‘Why us? Look at us.’ And if he was disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm on that occasion, then he did not show it.

  ‘FrËre,’ I said, as though by this simple expedient I might understand something vital of him. ‘From the French for “brother”?’

  ‘From the English word “friar” – monk or fish salesman via a, shall we say, socially aware family who might or might not, at one time or another, have visited France, or possibly met someone else who had been there and saved themselves the trouble.’

  ‘You could change it back,’ I suggested.

  He shook his head. ‘It suits me. Besides, I long since redressed the balance of my disappointment by losing the accent.’


  At that moment, when our laughter was at its loudest, the door opened again, and this time two old men came into the room. They were two of the fattest men I had ever seen, and one wore a top hat and carried a cane, which made him look even more ridiculous. Frere stopped laughing immediately.

  ‘Which of you is Frasier?’ the man in the top hat called to us.

  I rose from my seat, uncertain if I was being asked to follow them to my interview. I had lost all track of time since the arrival of Frere.

  But instead both men came towards me, smiling and with their hands extended.

  I remember stepping forward to greet them, and as I did so I braced myself against the first of them telling me how well he knew my father.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Frere said softly beside me, and he too rose to greet the men.

  6

  I was approached by Cornelius, who asked me to accompany him to the Jesuit mission at Kirasi.

  ‘Not a great deal to see there these days,’ he said, ‘but once the place served some good. It used to be part of our duties here to supply it and to arrange passage for the people coming and going, but since we abandoned them they avoid us.’

  I knew that many years ago there had been some philanthropic connection between the mission and the Company, that our services had been offered and that we had extended our hospitality to the people moving between the mission and the river on their way to Stanleyville. I had hoped Cornelius might tell me more about this, but he answered my queries only reluctantly, and ventured few opinions of his own other than to let me know that he regretted this severance, and regretted even more what had happened to the place ever since. There had once been a hospital for incurables, meaning lepers, at Kirasi, but the inmates had either died, left or been sent elsewhere in recent years.

  We still maintained the small tin chapel alongside the garrison for the use of visiting missionaries and other workers on their overnight stops going upriver.

  I knew that Cornelius had been more involved than most with the mission, and that, of us all, he alone – and against Company wishes – ensured the chapel remained in a state of good repair, and that he went there every Sunday morning to worship. Upon my arrival with Frere he had taken us to the place and invited us to accompany him at the next service. We had imagined he meant that everyone at the Station would attend, that the chapel would be filled with worshippers, but at our first attendance both Frere and I saw what a private ritual we had intruded upon and we afterwards stayed away.