by Peter Rimmer
“Are you asking me that as a boy you grew up with, or a priest?”
“As a man.”
Everyone was looking up at the heavens while the children slept. They looked for a long time.
“I don’t know,” said Hilary. “Without God it makes no sense. Nothing does. But I don’t know. We seem to think man is special and deserves a God. Maybe a great concept. Look at it all up there. Did man create God to comfort himself, to give himself someone to pass the questions to that he will never understand? Or did God create man, the universe, all these stars, how they move, how they grow, is there one Great Being out there who controls it all? The Church says God is within each of us. Maybe I have seen too much of man. If there is no God, Will, then our lives are utterly and totally pointless. So let us believe. The alternative leaves us wretched. Without our consciousness, our ability to think, nothing would matter. Who feeds our individual brains with questions? What makes us think? We know how the brain processes thought through electric pulses but who asks the questions in our head? Is the questioner tangible, can he die, is it our God within us? All those heavens above and all we have is a question that man has been asking ever since he could think… I don’t think anyone knows the answer, Will.”
Beyond their sight the river flowed on its course and Will banked up the fire with three large tree trunks.
First Josephine retired to her bed of freshly cut elephant grass under mosquito net close to the fire. All afternoon and evening she had not once thought of politics.
Mary fell asleep next to her children. She was more happy than any of them: when a life is drying up and then finds its purpose, the joy is greater. She loved her skinny husband with a passion learnt from endless hope and her children with a disbelief that her God could have given her so much. With equal blind passion she loved her God, believed in him as something real around her, within her all the time. In the end, she would show her husband God. With the firelight playing across her children and all that was good in her life, she fell into a dreamless sleep, trusting God and man.
Laurie managed to fight a bout of hiccups by concentrating on the heart of the flames. Then he also slept, away from his bed of grass and loaded rifle. Demons stalked his dreams and his body shook in the reaching firelight. It would not have mattered to Laurie Hall whether he woke or not. The bottle next to him was half full.
Hilary fell asleep on his grass bed struggling with his God as he did every day when the brief moments from work gave him time to think. He was always asking for the vision of the truth which never came.
Will checked his rifle and placed it lengthwise along his bed, the barrel pointing down at his feet. His recurring nightmare, vivid in its execution, was to wake to a rampant lion with the gun barrel pointing the wrong way and not enough time to turn and shoot. Always he woke with the lion bounding through the air.
“Goodnight,” he called softly to the trackers around their fire. “Keep your fire stoked.”
“Goodnight, baas,” came the chorus.
Within a minute Will and the trackers were sound asleep.
For a long time nothing happened. It was the beginning of the night.
The river flowed through the night never changing its course or its intention of reaching the sea. An owl fluffed its feathers and widened its eyes looking for mice, but the night was dark and the owl blinked. The bird called and closed its eyes, waiting for the stars to brighten or the moon to come out. Down below the tree, mice moved cautiously, looked for food by smell in the shadows, hunger chasing their fear. The frogs croaked their mating calls. On the other side of the big river a leopard coughed and still nothing happened; the night world was still, waiting to come out and feed.
The crossed trees burnt away where they met at the fire and a small black hole appeared while the fire spread back down the trunks, shrinking the light and the pool of safety around the bodies sleeping softly near the fires. Even Laurie slept and made not a sound. As the night grew colder the stars shone light that brought back the river, reflecting the heavens in the black oily water as it flowed.
One by one the hippopotamus came out of the water, walking round the hillock where the family slept, to find grass. The big amphibians grazed silently in the night, the mothers close to their calves. All across the valley, buck came out to graze, smelling the wind for danger. At a short distance in the long grass were hyena and jackal, following the night shadows of the grazing herds, and back from the scavengers the leopards came out to hunt.
At the campfires the black holes were large, the tree trunks smouldering away from each other and the glow of firelight almost extinguished.
Will woke and listened to the night, smiling to himself. These were the precious moments around the campfire when the bush was quiet, the clients sleeping. Gently, he slid his hand over the safety catch of his rifle, making sure of its position. Will listened to the night for danger and then he rose from his bed and pushed each of the trunks back into the centre of the fire, sending sparks up into the trees. Brushwood he piled over the stumps and the fire caught and flamed, sending light to the top of the fever tree and pushing the dark away from the sleepers. Will went across to the trackers’ fire and did the same.
“Thanks, baas.” It was Sixpence lying awake… “God can be found through our ancestors.” The black man had spoken to Will’s back.
Will returned to his bed of grass and fell asleep.
The lion roared an hour before the dawn, a sound so terrifying to man that everyone in the camp woke, the fear reaching back to their progenitors living in the forest, sleeping in the crooks of trees. Josephine howled, petrified by fear, not knowing where she was and the lion roared again and Josephine tangled herself in the netting as she fought to get away, unable to see or reason, frightened to the roots of her being.
Will ran across to his sister and held her through the netting until the shakes and screams had calmed to sobbing.
“All right, sis. That old lion’s more than two kilometres away on the other side of the river and cats can’t swim.”
“Are you sure?” came a small voice out of the tangled netting.
“Quite sure. Live long enough with the animals and you’ll come to love the roar of a lion.”
“I want to go home to England where it’s safe.”
“Nowhere’s safe, sis. In England, the predators look like men.”
Across the fire, Laurie Hall found his bottle and took a long swig. “I’ll drink to that,” he said.
Will brought his bedding and laid it next to Josephine’s, holding her hand under the netting. Only when he heard her steady breathing and the pressure on the palm of his hand relaxed did he allow himself to fall back into sleep.
They were all woken by the dawn chorus of birds singing the praise of day, the danger past. Soon the smell of coffee permeated the camp.
Josephine watched the children all morning. Malcolm, just three, guarded his sister Penelope, not quite two years old, with dog-like dedication. The void and melancholy detached her from conversation. Josephine watched Hilary with his Mary and Mary with her Hilary and nowhere else had she ever seen such happiness. All the politics and the cause, the righteousness, the great importance, seemed lost in the bush. The meaning of life was here to be seen. The future, man-made utopia was nothing in comparison to the glory of nature.
Back at base camp, Hilary packed the children’s blankets in his Land Rover.
“Can’t stay away any longer,” he told Will. “You know how it is. Well, it’s been a lovely stay. Come and visit us on the mission any time. Josephine, my love to your parents and tell your father I pray for him every day. Bombs! Why cannot man shower the earth with love?”
“There never is a right time to say something you don’t want to say,” began Josephine. “Your charges can wait a little while longer, Hilary. This, everything here, is about to end. I have information, certain information that will change your lives. We are pulling out of Africa, lock, stock and barrel. The
British. The days of the empire are over forever.”
“Won’t affect a missionary,” chuckled Hilary, putting the last of their overnight bags in the Land Rover.
“Did you know they hate you?”
“Don’t be silly, Josephine.”
“I don’t mean the people you treat and teach. The politicians. The people who want their own country to rule themselves. A friend of mine likened the missionaries to the most dangerous of front-line troops; people like yourselves, Mary and Hilary, dedicated to goodness and helping others. The concept of believing in our God as the one and only God, our branch of divinity that must be believed by everyone or they will burn in hell for eternity. That’s how my friend put it to me. Frightening stuff. My friend said the missionaries told the people of Africa to kneel down and close their eyes and pray to the one true God and when they opened their eyes, they found the Union Jack flying over their heads. He thinks our religious zeal was just an excuse. My friend thinks your good deeds had an ulterior motive, colonialism. In the time of Queen Victoria, Church and State were very close together and the bishops sit in the House of Lords and the Queen is head of the Church. It looked better to have a righteous mission, the honour of spreading the word of Christ. Those churchmen were Englishmen first and being men of God was just their profession. Mostly younger sons. They either went to administer the colonies or into the Church of England. Didn’t matter which. You see, like my African friend, I don’t think there was even a moral base to colonising people, making them do what they are told. All of you will have to get out of Africa and soon. We have seen what they will do to missionaries and settlers in Kenya and the Belgian Congo.”
“What about the Federation?” asked Will.
“It’s gone.”
“And the white settlers?”
“A minor refugee problem.”
“You can’t be serious? Why, ten years ago they were trumpeting the future of the Federation, saying it was the next Canada. Over a hundred thousand British answered the call.”
“Things change in the world. This part of the country will very soon become the Republic of Zambia. If you say I told you I will deny this conversation but outside of Laurie, we are all family.”
“What about the trackers?” asked Will.
“They know. They will run your business, and from what I have seen they will do it well.”
“Just dump us like that.”
“We shouldn’t have been here in the first place. After a few years back in England, you’ll forget all about this.”
“The RAF will look me up.”
“No they won’t. I checked up.”
“You’re very thorough.”
“I’m trying to help, Will. Granda always said you can’t fart against thunder, if you’ll forgive the expression, Mary. What I am giving you is a warning. Take my advice. It’s the turn of Africa to enjoy the fruits of social democracy. We can’t preach one thing at home and another in the colonies, now can we?”
“From the pre-wheel age to Westminster democracy,” said Laurie Hall. “Wow… Should be fun… For a few…a very few… First we bugger up their system and then we leave them in the lurch. We give them medicine to multiply like flies and expect them to go back to gathering and hunting, everyone with a hut by a river. Poor sods, all I can say. Poor bloody sods. Tragedy is, when they’ve ripped themselves to pieces indulging in mass self-destruction, as there won’t be enough to go round, the ones that are left will turn to the likes of Hilary and Mary to bind up their wounds. And the good-hearted likes of Hilary and Mary will do it. The other cheek syndrome. One minute it’s the right thing to colonise. Then it’s the right thing to not. All in the name of the poor bloody people. The way I see it, the poor bloody people don’t matter one poor bloody jot… Better have a drink. Foul taste in my mouth. No offence to anyone. Just man at his selfish best. Last night’s lion in comparison was a pussycat.”
2
While Will was driving Josephine to Mongu Airport, Byron Langton, six thousand miles away, was again contemplating a major problem in his life: finding a suitable wife. For Byron, everything in life was a trade and if he was going to give up the merry-go-round of a rich bachelor he wanted something equally valuable in return. A man of wealth and position required an heir, a biological impulse almost as strong as procreation.
Outside his office in Pall Mall, the London traffic was relentlessly moving in both directions up and down the streets and round the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. The heart of the empire was beating normally. The discreet plaque at the street entrance to the building now heralded Langton Merchant Bank Limited and underneath a list of subsidiaries that only Byron knew were shell companies that he managed on behalf of his clients, most of whom the financial press had never heard of. Business was plentiful for the upstart merchant bank in the summer of 1963.
On the other side of the entrance, a similar discreet plaque in a different print bespoke London Town Music Limited with three subsidiaries underneath. The one called Music Lane, thirty per cent owned by Shelley Lane, was the cash cow of the whole organisation as it needed no further capital to increase its substantial revenues. Shelley at twenty-four was a very rich lady.
At reception, Madge O’Shea, the flaming redhead, still held court after four years that had seen the company take up any office space in the building that became vacant. The building was four storeys high, thin and old and musty except where the people entered the renovated spaces occupied by the Langton companies. Madge, still his private secretary, had given up trying to date Byron and was genuinely interested in the growth of the company, her bachelor of commerce degree from London University being used to the full. Madge was the first of the new breed of satisfied career ladies with a sex life to match the men; she did not need a husband to give her support.
Byron’s mind drifted away from the old matrimonial problem. He had met many girls who would bring money and influence but most of them, he quickly decided, would drive him crackers within a week. Determined not to take second best he banished the problem from his overactive mind and poured himself a third cup of tea from the pot on his desk. The tea cosy from Langton Manor, made by Grandma with her own two hands, kept the tea hot for over an hour. Idly, Byron picked up the model car from its stand and put it back again without realising what he had done; the model was a very nice miniature of an open Bentley 3 Litre. Byron looked at his watch.
“Shit, I’m late,” he said out loud.
One rule was to never meet the stooges of the politicians jockeying for power in the collapsing colonies of the empire where Byron would be recognised. The man to be given lunch today was Paul Mwansa and Byron was still not sure whether the man introduced by Josephine was from the same organisation that had approached Johnny Pike for twenty thousand pounds. He was inclined to think not and mentally wrote off the previous investment as premature, too soon before independence, the politicians not having whittled themselves down to the one black nationalist party to face the British.
“Back tomorrow, Madge. Take over for me. Driving into the country for lunch.”
“Shelley wants to talk to you face-to-face,” said Madge.
“Shelley always wants to talk to me. Give her my love.”
“That I won’t.”
The arrangement began with the coffee. Byron had chosen a small pub on the River Thames just south of Oxford from which they could still see the spires and antiquity of British learning. The food had been good and the weather fine. The willow tree in front of where they sat on the lawn trailed in the water. A stickleback was fussing in and around the green wands of the pussy willow. Out on the river an amateur rower caught a crab, the oar coming out of the water fast and slapping the passenger on the face with a wet paddle, the noise echoing sharply across the lawn. “Sorry, old girl,” followed by a fit of giggles. Byron let a half-smile play across his face.
“We can kick you British out any time,” said Paul Mwansa.
“You do that, old c
hap. Nothing to do with me. Don’t think I’m the colonial office to badger. You chaps have a habit of thinking you’re owed something. You can take control. You can nationalise the copper mines but you won’t have sold one pound of copper. You don’t exactly have a local market for your product. Forget your politics for a moment and remember the customer is always right and your customer is Western industry, not the colonial secretary. If you get too pumped up with your own importance, you’ll inherit a lot of very nice, very dead copper mines. The metal brokers will eat you up, Paul. Just remember, you need me or the likes of me more than I need you. I have a lot of varied business. In your brave new world you will only have copper and very little else. You play around in the copper market and the price can drop in half overnight and all the effort you have put into your politics won’t be worth a penny. Political power is the road to money. Money is the road to happiness. I’m not some poor white settler you can bully. Do we understand each other? If you want legitimate and profitable marketing of your base metal, you need buyers who are sure of a stable supplier, continuity, price stability. You need a selling agent who knows the buyers’ market. There’s plenty of copper in Chile. More importantly, when you find this selling agent, you need a man who will look after your party’s interest so that any change in power in your new Utopia won’t affect your party’s bank account. I can be your legitimate insurance. Now, let’s realise we are both on the same side and get down to details. By what you said earlier, this Zambia is only months away. There is a lot of work for my company to do.”
“Why did you take over Manningly’s newspaper?”
“Oh, that’s quite simple. My insurance in a very nasty world. I have a file on every black politician in British Africa. There is no one born in this world who does not do something he or she wishes to forget. Why, I even have a file on my sister.”
“Why do I have to do business with you?”