by Robert Edric
Our minds wandered into the background of these dramas, and we learned nothing solid, nothing of any use to us, other than that Abbot considered himself to be at our centre in the matter, and that anything concerning Frere must now be undertaken through him. He wore this small responsibility like a crown and became even more unbearable than usual in its possession.
He told me that he was liaising directly with Bone concerning Frere’s treatment, and in improving the conditions in the flooded garrison, suggesting to me that my own involvement must cease. I told him that there was nothing in the document to prevent me from continuing to visit Frere. This angered him, and though he was forced to concede the point, he made it clear to me that everything I now did and said in the matter might be legitimately observed and noted.
Fletcher asked him how large the delegation was likely to be, and we knew again by Abbot’s answer that he was guessing.
The Inquisition would come and shine its light on us in our darkness. Abbot would help direct the light this way and that, and the Blaze of understanding would be so great that we would all be dazzled and then blinded by it. Nothing would remain unseen. We had all lived too long in the half-light of speculation and hearsay, of lying and evasion, to have any true idea of how brightly that light of enquiry, and, possibly, of redemption, might now shine in on us. We all understood this, and we all made our own unspoken assessments. The hand behind any one of those six signatures might sweep us all away, might take Frere from us and never again present him to view.
We were reminded by Cornelius that the document had come to us via the far shore.
‘Meaning what?’ Abbot said angrily.
‘Meaning nothing,’ Cornelius said, looking round at the rest of us to confirm what we all understood – that whatever we knew was already known by others.
‘It has no bearing, no bearing whatsoever,’ Abbot insisted. ‘No-one else has any involvement in the matter.’
Fletcher asked if he might look again at the papers, but Abbot refused him and sealed them in his case.
He left us shortly afterwards.
A bottle of brandy was produced and the rest of us sat together considering the wider implications of the message we had so abruptly received.
Cornelius wondered aloud why we had been forewarned of what was about to happen, and when I asked him what he meant, he told me instead to imagine how much pleasure Abbot would have in reading the document through the bars of Frere’s cell door. I still did not fully understand what he was saying, until Fletcher, sitting beside him, made his hand into a gun and pressed it into his temple. I told him he was being ridiculous, but he refused to argue with me.
Cornelius diverted us by calculating how long it would take the delegation to reach us if it had departed, as we were told, from Leopoldville, eighteen days previously. He calculated that ten days remained before it would be with us. Fletcher put this closer to twenty. He said there would be ‘new’ men involved, men unaccustomed to travelling in the wet season, and that, besides, there were too many diversions along the way.
I left them and returned to my quarters.
I thought of approaching Abbot alone and asking him if he knew anything more than was contained in the document, but even as I considered this I knew that I would achieve nothing. He knew no more or less than the rest of us, the only difference being that his own ignorance had been sanctioned, had been elevated into an official role within the proceedings, and ours had not.
I sat for an hour in my open doorway, watching all the stars of heaven in the night sky and listening to the calls of unseen creatures all around me.
14
‘You didn’t see fit to tell me about my inquisitors?’ were Frere’s first words to me when I saw him two days later.
‘Abbot warned us off,’ I said. ‘Besides, I knew he’d do a good enough job of telling you himself.’
‘He did.’ He examined his teeth in a mirror as he spoke, seemingly unconcerned about the events now officially set in motion around him, and circling ever faster towards him.
He had been brought back to us with an infection in his mouth and gums, and this had recently become inflamed, causing him some pain. He pointed out to me which of his teeth were loose, and I saw too the white filigree pock of the disease on the inside of his cheeks and starting on his tongue. Because it caused him pain to speak, he spoke with the left-hand side of his mouth closed. The slight discoloration of his cheeks remained, but this might still have been the fading bruise of his beating.
‘I suppose he read it to you word for word,’ I said.
‘Word for word. Through the bars. I trust you didn’t think you could protect me in some way by not telling me, that you believed you might hold them off, that I might be better served by not knowing what was happening?’ There was no anger in his voice at this air-clearing, only a clenched sense of disappointment.
‘Fletcher reckons they’re eighteen days away yet.’
‘I would have said nearer twelve.’ He spoke as though he were advancing to meet them. ‘However long they take to get here, nothing will change the facts of the matter, they will still arrive, I will still be waiting for them, you will still be stood to one side wringing your hands and watching.’ He signalled his apology to me for this last remark. He was as uncertain as the rest of us about what was happening, but whereas we were still able to play our ignorance to advantage, he was not.
He had been reading through a pile of his papers upon my arrival.
‘Are you preparing yourself?’ I said.
‘Am I undertaking my own defence, do you mean? I might be a fool, but I am not that particular breed of fool.’ Everything he said was designed to hold me apart from him: where I offered light he added shadow; where I conjured up chance, he saw only risk. It was something he wanted me to understand. He had said it before.
‘Is that how you see it – an inquisition?’ I said.
‘Friend Abbot was very clear on the point. I imagine the man will want to keep a precise and very complete record of everything said. Why else are they coming?’
‘They may merely wish—’
‘I mean why are they coming as opposed to me merely being sent for? A week trussed up in the hold of a steamer would see me gone for ever.’
‘So you imagine they wish to undertake something here as opposed to elsewhere, on the coast?’
‘Beyond the eyes of the world. Surely you can see how much more expedient that might be for everyone concerned, myself included.’
‘Yourself?’
‘Think of the shame, the disgrace this will bring on my family.’
And on Caroline? The thought remained unspoken between us.
‘A great deal would depend on your confession,’ I said.
He put down the mirror and gently wiped the saliva from his lips.
The door to his cell had been open on my arrival. The previous day, following Abbot’s visit, Bone had appeared and told Frere that he might also inhabit the outer room during daylight, returning to be locked up only at dusk.
‘He even offered to accompany me around the garrison yard on the condition that I was hobbled to prevent me from running. And so long as I agreed to remain within sight of either him or one of his armed cronies.’
I was surprised at the offer. ‘Perhaps they don’t want to be accused of maltreating you.’
‘No – plenty of time for that after the trial. Or perhaps I am expected to make some attempt at escape.’ He saw the concern on my face. ‘No, I won’t run. Besides, I have too much to do here before the delegation arrives. Work I never finished.’
Reluctant to leave him, I finally told him about the incomplete journal Amon had brought to me. I lied to him and said I had received it only that morning. I had read what remained of the journal’s pages, but other than discover where Frere was headed, the path he followed, and what he had hoped to see there, I had learned nothing of the emptiness beyond.
Upon hearing this, he immediately re
ached across the table and held my arm.
‘Did you bring it with you?’
I hadn’t.
‘To what date are the entries intact?’ He shook my arm.
I told him and he released me. He closed his eyes and made some calculation.
‘On that final page was there a sketch map of the confluence of the Lomami and Pitiri rivers along with one other?’
I told him there was, if that’s what they were, and he let out a long breath.
‘Did you imagine the journal had been lost?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know, I couldn’t be certain. I was sick with a fever, delirious for a week before and a week afterwards.’
‘Afterwards?’
‘After the events it chronicles. I believed then that I was closer to death than to life and I did nothing to draw myself back. There was nothing I could do. I can’t even remember if I went on writing, though I imagine I did. I remember wanting to write, I remember knowing what I wanted to say. And whether I did or not, I chronicled everything before I fell ill in good enough detail. Good enough detail for anyone looking at it to be in no doubt about what I was saying.’
I knew that sometimes he wrote in code – he once told me that this was done to protect some commercial secret or other, though I had never been wholly convinced of this – and I asked him if this was how the missing pages had been written.
‘I’m afraid not. I’m afraid I was all too feverishly exultant in what I had witnessed and accomplished to be capable of keeping any part of it secret. I did not so much write, as shout onto those missing pages.’
‘And will you not tell me what that achievement was? Others already know of it, and soon it might become common knowledge.’
‘And sooner yet, it might become damning evidence against me.’
‘But you still cling to the idea that if you told me it would somehow work against you.’
‘No – that it would work against us. Some things I can afford to lose, others I cannot relax my grip upon – my belief in – to even the slightest degree. Please, try to understand what I’m saying, don’t force me to have to explain something in which my own understanding is as imperfect as your own, but which I need to possess, to cleave to above all else while this storm gathers around me. Without your friendship, without your faith in the man I was, there would be no wall for me to stand against and face my accusers.’
‘So you wish me to remain ignorant of the facts, perhaps even to be deluded into—’
‘You are not deluded, James Charles Russel Frasier, but you are wont to see the best in men, and on occasion to turn side-on to the truth.’
I was about to refute this, but he looked hard at me and held up his hand to silence me.
He went on: ‘Soon, that opportunity – that privilege of ignorance – will not exist. It is no longer a possibility for me, and soon it will be lost to you and the others. If you can grasp nothing else of what I’m trying to say to you, then at least grasp that.’
On any other occasion I would have complained at this twisting retreat into seeming melodrama, but I saw that it served his purpose, and I saw too that I might later turn it to my own advantage.
‘I will believe you,’ I said. ‘And I accede to what you want – to my uncomfortable ignorance of the facts – if you promise to tell me what happened during the days of those missing pages if and when my knowing serves your purpose, and certainly before these strangers arrive with their own notions of justice and retribution.’
He again held up his hands to silence me.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes afterwards. The rain had not yet started.
Outside, Bone went through the motions of drilling his men, shouting his instructions five times over and then spending twice as long berating them for their inefficiency.
‘I spoke to the humpback yesterday,’ Frere said.
‘Oh? He was here?’
‘He sometimes comes and sits outside the window. We talk without seeing each other. He occasionally runs errands for me. He does the same for Bone and the others. He escorts women into the garrison each night and then takes them away again. He offered to do the same for me.’
‘Does he know anything that might help you?’
‘He knows better than anyone here what is happening across the river. He knows where the best rubber is coming from and why so little of it is coming to us. He knows that the politicians are rolling their dice again. He knows that the heavy rain has come at a bad time and destroyed the growing crops over a wide area to the north. People are on the move and raiding. Fighting is starting up again all along the Mutua and Chapa Rivers.’
‘We hear the same rumours week in and week out,’ I told him.
‘I believe him. He tells me all this in Wenya. He lies only in English.’
‘Has he learned anything relating to what Hammad intends to do? Will he present himself to the enquiry?’
‘Of course he will. He will be called. He was my rescuer, remember.’
We were silenced by the sound of shooting in the garrison yard. I rose and went to the small window. Bone and his men were shooting at a rusty drum in the far corner of the yard. Each shot on target brought forth a cry from the man who fired. Watching them, it was difficult to see who fired which shot, and the few successes were all loudly contested.
When I turned back to Frere, he was once again studying his papers. I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to bring him on my next visit.
‘There’s an old journal,’ he said. He spoke without looking up, but I saw that he had momentarily stopped writing.
‘Which one?’
He paused before answering me. ‘The journal containing the account of our visit to Babire.’
I caught my breath at mention of the place.
‘Can you bring it to me? Do you have it?’
I nodded to both questions.
‘I do understand your feelings,’ he said.
I left him after that, before the onset of the rain.
Outside, Bone and his men had grown tired of their target practice and were gathered around the perforated drum sticking their fingers into its holes. Bone called out to me, but I was in no mood for him and I continued walking. I imagined him raising his empty rifle and aiming it at my back.
15
The days which followed were days of uncertainty and waiting for all of us – days of activity, of preparation, of stock counted, of ledgers and accounts completed, of timetables made good. I was exhorted daily by Abbot to ensure that all my own accounts and my Company map-making were up to date. He intended presenting to whoever was sent to us as complete a dossier as possible of all our various works, and my maps, he flattered me, would be as clear an indication as any of what we had all, in our separate endeavours, achieved there over the previous months.
He showed me the charts he himself had compiled – charts on which the columns rose and rose in accordance with this lofty purpose. And in an unguarded moment he even confessed to me that he hoped to gain promotion for himself as a consequence of this inspection. I allowed him to indulge himself in this fantasy, allowed him to go on behaving as though he and not Frere were the true focus of the enquiry. In a report I had once read undertaken by the Native Protection Committee – the greatest joke of the age – I had seen the members of a now defunct French Station referred to as the ‘cheating and unscrupulous instruments of rapacious, pitiful and never-ending folly’, and the description had stayed with me. Cornelius had read it, too. He said our native workers and gatherers regarded us as flabby, weak-eyed devils, and said he hoped our investigators did not deem it necessary to ask them what they knew or thought of what had happened. Sanity and desire, he said, quoting, I imagined, from one of his beloved Belgian poets, become breezes and now winds blowing away from us. Abbot, of course, laughed in the face of all this doom-laden rhetoric.
It was only as he left me that Abbot suggested that the person best served by all our efforts over the c
oming days would be Frere himself, but when I asked him to explain himself he became defensive and said that his observation needed no explanation.
Cornelius gathered together his quartermasters and began a thorough stock-taking of our rubber and other trade goods. I asked him why he bothered, knowing that his records of stock and trading were the most complete of any of us. He told me he was doing it because whoever was sent to visit us and enquire into Frere would also be required to report on how well or how badly things were going here. He looked around us as he spoke. The same had happened before, he said. No opportunity to inspect us and report back would be wasted. And Abbot, for all his other failings, understood this perfectly. He even instructed his native staff to find the Company uniforms with which they had been issued upon their appointments, but which few had worn beyond their first week of work.
As I had anticipated, only Fletcher openly refused to undertake Abbot’s bidding. He had started repairs to the damaged jetty, but this was slow work in the swollen river and the wharf would remain unusable for a long time after our visit. This distressed Abbot the most. He authorized the hiring of more labour, but Fletcher told him there was no more labour to be had, that too many men had returned to their homes and lost crops.
With the jetty out of operation we were losing trade. Boats could no longer be tied up to await unloading, and anchorage in even the calmer channels was precarious. Some vessels approached us, were warned of the delay, and then signalled their intent to continue downriver. We had no fixed contracts with most of these men, and berate them or plead with them as Abbot might, there was nothing he could do to entice them to us.
Two days following this unhappy conversation with Fletcher, Abbot had even greater problems of his own.
The fallen wall of the quarry had never been cleared from where it lay once the workers’ corpses had been retrieved, and following this, as part of an attempt to better drain the swamp of the quarry floor, Abbot had ordered a mound of clay pipes to be carried and restacked beneath the slumped mass. These pipes had already been waiting there three years ago upon my arrival. They were sent originally when that early great expansion was still anticipated, ready to drain the surrounding land for workers’ sheds.