After Les Mille-Isles, the Aérobus from Mirabel began to run into traffic, the crowds pressing ever closer, seeming to threaten her with the promise she had made to Michael. It would have been difficult to refuse. And cowardly not to be prepared to say in public all the things she had spoken about so freely in the safety of a college garden. It was Michael himself who would be taking the bigger risk. Ashamed, as the bus made its stop-and-start way down de La Gauchetière, she told herself to think instead of Fabrice – and of her parents, of how much they would be looking forward to seeing her.
Stephen’s request for an interview with the Warden had been granted straight away, his Scout returning almost immediately with a note inviting him to drop by for sherry before Hall.
Now, back in his own rooms, he cringed to think how obvious it must have been that he had been seeking reassurance that he was still appreciated. Pathetic. Infantile. He buried his face in his hands as he heard again the pompous, patronizing tones ushering him towards the door – ‘No, no, dear boy, no cause to worry, not at all, not one little bit. Marxism qua power in the land may be in what many of us would consider terminal decline, but Marxism qua historiography is in extremely rude health, extremely rude health.’
The heat in his brain mounted as he relived the episode. Most of the other dons would already be at High Table, but he could not face Hall tonight. He would eat in town later. But first he would assert himself. Show the old fraud he was not to be patronized. He crossed to his desk and took out a pad of notepaper.
Dear Warden, Thank you for seeing me at such short notice this evening. It is perhaps surprising that college life offers so few opportunities to talk of these things, and I am grateful for …
With sudden violence, he screwed up the letter and threw it at the scarred leather waste bin by the side of the fireplace.
After twenty minutes’ fumbling, Toby threw the Rubik’s cube across the room where it bounced at an unexpected angle from the floorboards and took a chip out of a Royal Doulton vase that had been a present from his mother-in-law. Or his mother in law once-removed, as he now thought of her. He sighed and settled down in front of the TV programme he was supposed to be watching in order to catch a new branding exercise by a rival agency. Hélène would be back in Canada by now. Half a world away. Or maybe it was only a quarter.
His eye was drawn to the accusing chip in the vase. What did he really feel about that chip, he asked himself, tearing open another bag of potato crisps. A great deal of satisfaction, he answered with a small defiance. Sarah, he was pretty sure, was working around to asking for a divorce. God knows they both had grounds. Acres of grounds. A whole country estate of grounds. An entire nation with several overseas possessions of grounds. He waited for the commercial break, fully prepared to be unimpressed. Somewhere in the darker recesses of his mood, he knew, was a lurking fear that redundancy as well as divorce might be pencilled into his diary for the coming year. What he should do was have the courage of his whims and forget it all, go to Africa for Christmas, get himself tucked up somewhere warm with Hélène, instead of sitting here on his own eating Savoury Hoops and watching Jackanory. But it was wishful thinking. The girl wouldn’t have a bar of him. Not that he couldn’t see why. Spending her life feeding the hungry and healing the sick and, for all he knew, visiting the imprisoned, while he devoted his life to achieving a nought point one per cent increase in the market share of barbecue-flavoured crisps. He reached for the remote and, an hour later, awoke to find himself listening to Judi Dench reading from Tales of Beatrix Potter.
9 | Look me in the face
Geneva, December 1980
It was the week before the Christmas vacation and the silver Volkswagen stood alone in the parking lot of the World Health Organization. On the sixth floor the usual noises – the light staccato of typewriters, the soft purr of phones, the tired back and forth of photocopiers, the whine of the elevators – had long ago fallen silent.
Michael ran a finger down a column of figures, making a brief margin note requesting the removal of decimal points. Starting again at the top, his eyes scanned the column for measles. And in the silence of the empty building he heard again the voice of Hélène. Her anger and despair in the tranquillity of an Oxford garden had shaken him, perhaps because it had brought back memories of a former self. And because, when all the niceties were stripped away, she was right. And wasn’t it reasonable that her anger had been directed partly at an acquiescent health establishment of which he was a part? An establishment that, as soon as you looked at it with anything like fresh eyes, was rotten with complacency? An establishment that allowed millions of children to sicken and die, millions more to be stunted, blinded, crippled, while those who held the power and the purse-strings never gave them more than a second’s thought?
He made another effort to focus on the task in hand, proceeding down the totals column, committing to memory the data for the seven or eight countries which between them were home to more than half the world’s children. After a moment’s thought, he began applying an approximate ratio to convert immunization coverage rates into numbers of deaths from vaccine-preventable disease. A hundred and eighty thousand in Nigeria, two hundred thousand in Pakistan, forty thousand in Zaire. The bottom line, he knew, would still be close to five million. Each an individual child. And for every one who had died, several more now deaf, blind or brain-damaged. Beyond the lights of Geneva, out over the dark expanse of the lake, he saw the measles ward in Bangui, curtained against the brightness of a light that would have tortured the eyes of the twenty or so children in the cots. Where had the hopes of those days gone? Days of working every waking hour to make those early hopes into a reality. And to put behind him the memory of Seema Mir.
He turned the page to the column for polio vaccine, finger again beginning to travel down the list.
‘Bonsoir, monsieur le docteur. Vous travaillez tard.’
The security guard had paused for a moment in the doorway.
‘Salut, Marcel.’
‘Un autre café la prochaine fois?’
‘Non, merci. Trop de café déjà ce soir.’
The guard continued his rounds as Michael’s finger found Ethiopia, translating its six per cent immunization rate into five thousand or more cases of paralytic polio every year. He stared again into the darkness above the lake, seeing huge clouds rolling in from the Ethiopian highlands towards the twenty-a-side football game somewhere on the outskirts of Addis. An advance scud of rain had sent the players running for shelter. All except one: a boy of nine or ten who had been trying to join in, laughing and calling out as he pushed his skateboard through the dirt with his arms. But now he was stuck in the mud of the centre circle, holding his arms over his head to protect himself from the sudden weight of the rains. Michael’s finger continued on down the column – Eritrea, Ghana, Haiti, India – hearing the battering on the corrugated iron of the canopy above his head, seeing two of the other boys rush back out to carry the crippled youngster to shelter. The office lights flickered briefly as he reached the bottom line. Four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand children dragging themselves through life with their arms.
For a moment, something like panic threatened as he stared at the carnage represented by the calm rows of statistics spread out over his desk. Hélène had said it: it could all be prevented for an almost negligible amount. Measles, neonatal tetanus, polio, even whooping cough, for God’s sake. It could all be ended within a few years if only the world really gave a damn about all these kids.
Not until after midnight did he turn his attention to his own draft introduction in which, as last year, he had attempted to enumerate the principal roadblocks. But, even as he read it through, he heard again the voice in the college garden: ‘spare me the logistics and the cold chains, Michael’. He looked up from the text. Where in his draft did it say, as Hélène had said, that the real reason was that more than eighty per cent of health budgets were being spent on less than ten per cent of the
population? Where, under the subheading of ‘Financial implications’, did it say ‘for Christ’s sake, the whole thing could be done for the cost of a couple of F-15 jet fighters.’ And at what point in his own little speech to the World Health Assembly would he look up and say: ‘Look me in the face and tell me that it couldn’t be done inside five years if the world thought it was important enough.’
Slowly, he closed the ring binder of spreadsheets and stood in front of his desk, staring down at the blue cover that bore the WHO’s serpent-entwined Rod of Asclepius, god of healing. At a quarter to midnight he picked up the phone and checked his watch. It was still only early evening in Atlanta. He punched in the number, without needing to look it up.
10 | Filer à l’anglaise
Wednesday, January 28th, 1981
In a sweltering wooden hut three thousand miles away from the headquarters of the World Health Organization, Hélène Hevré was fighting off the waves of tiredness that had been building up all afternoon. Around her, in green-and-white tunics, were gathered the dozen trainees of the cadre Protection Maternelle et Infantile. The lesson was supposed to last until five, but her students were already shuffling in the heat, anxious to start the journey back to their villages for the weekend. And she too was anxious to finish packing and leave enough time for her goodbyes. Christmas had come and gone and the speech she had agreed to make in New York was no longer next year but next week.
She checked her topic list: counting red and white blood cells; acute and chronic diarrhoea; urine and stool testing; blood smears for malaria; recognizing respiratory infections … before finally smiling up at them all, her expression acknowledging the heat and bringing the lesson to an end.
When the relief doctor had given her a wave through the window to signal his arrival, she sat for a moment, alone and exhausted at the small desk in the centre of the aisle, heat and tiredness fighting for control of her body. Down both sides of the ward, wooden window flaps were propped open, making little difference to the temperature. Tomorrow she would be in freezing Manhattan, and a few days later in Montreal, where she would check herself into McGill and try to get to the bottom of whatever might be wrong. There were times when the tiredness seemed in remission, only to return in a new onslaught days or weeks later. She had also noticed a slight swelling of the lymph nodes, though that could just be a sign that, like everyone else working in the clinic, she was constantly fighting off some infection or other.
Time was getting short, but she lingered still on the ward, the only sound the unsteady murmuring of the kerosene fridge and the occasional call of a bird from the bank of the river. She had not wanted to go like this; projects half completed, trainees half trained. But it was no use pretending. If she made the speech that lay neatly typed at the bottom of her suitcase, then there was no way she would be able to return to Africa. The government would cancel her visa. And in any case her own organization would just as surely bar her return for fear of repercussions on the programme. Addressing Michael’s meeting meant making the break she had dithered over for so long – starting a new life, going home to a place she no longer knew. Above all, abandoning the dream of Fabrice’s return, the fantasy of her being there to nurse him back to health and start a new life together.
A few minutes later, back in her own quarters, she took out the bamboo-framed photograph. The handsome, intelligent face looked back at her, delivering the usual shock of contrast between his carefree expression and the thought of what might have become of him. In the dimness she heard his voice, telling her in the liquid cadences of West African French that speaking out was exactly what she should be doing, that charities like her own were doing a good job patching up a few of the thousands of broken bodies at the bottom of the cliff but that the real task was to confront what was pushing them off the top. ‘And that, ma chère Hélène, is a job for Africans, not expats.’ And that was why he had not shown up that night in the garden of L’Eau Vive when she had waited, reading the menu again and again, watching the citron candle burning down, until the nuns had taken off their aprons and gathered to sing their nightly a capella prayer. At that moment she had wished that she too could still pray.
She removed a few more photographs from the drawer, along with a bundle of Hallmark ‘Thank You’ cards. Impatiently, she scraped the tears from her cheeks with one hand and with the other slipped the photos between the folds of her only warm sweater.
Outside the light was already beginning to fade, the air tinged with wood smoke as she stepped out on to the veranda. She stood for a few moments until, on an impulse, she lowered the suitcase to the decking and crossed the few yards of bare earth back to the ward.
She approached the cot in the dim light, her rubber sandals making no sound on the concrete floor. Leaning over, she resisted the temptation to rest a hand on the rail, knowing that the slightest noise might provoke an agony of convulsions. Earlier that day she had quietened the spasms by giving the child as much sedating barbiturate as she dared. One of the trainees had asked about antibiotics. But there was nothing that antibiotics could do now. The infection that had sent the toxins pulsing through the tiny body was long gone. And of antitoxins there were none. She looked down at the little girl who was momentarily at peace. In an hour or so the mother would return, stealing in apologetically with her plastic shopping bags. Come to sit by the cot for another night. Come, in all probability, to watch her daughter die while Hélène would be high above the Atlantic. The child stirred, but did not wake. Two inflamed cuts marked the upper arm where a féticheur had attempted an insufflation of herbs.
She took a last glance around the ward. Between the aisles, the Christmas tree was beginning to drop. How many more mothers were there in the world tonight waiting for their infants to die of simple tetanus? Michael would know. At least to the nearest few thousand.
At half past six she left the compound for the four-mile drive to the airport. On the way she called briefly at the hospital to say goodbye to the Directeur, knowing she should have allowed at least an hour if she were not to be accused of the sin of filer à l’anglaise. In the event she made her escape after ten minutes, shaking hands in the French African way and raising her hand to her heart. She would miss being one of Les Amis.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 20th, 1981, Stephen found himself staring down at the Atlantic through the slightly opaque window of a Pan American 747. The Christmas vacation had been a time of tidying up his affairs, putting his books and belongings into storage, and preparing to leave his rooms. And whether it was the forced inactivity of the seven-hour flight, or the monotonous roar of the great GE engines pushing him towards the New World, or just the distant blue leatherette of the ocean thirty-five thousand feet below, he had also found himself staring into an inner self that was usually far too close to be seen.
What he saw there was a man on the threshold of middle age locked in the youthful embrace of an ideology that had once satisfied so much more than the demands of intellect and conscience. From his teens, the feelings of guilt at the privilege he had been born into had seemed to put him at a psychological disadvantage, as if privilege had somehow invalidated his existence in the new world of the 1960s. And in that world where his social class had seemed to make him an enemy at worst and an irrelevance at best, Marx had offered him a place to stand. Perhaps it was the promise of personal validation, even more than the appeal to youth’s raw sense of fairness, that had pushed him to embrace communism; the intellect had merely followed. All this he saw, staring down into the vast confessional of the Atlantic, its blank emptiness so open to metaphor and melancholy.
He ignored the drinks trolley, continuing to gaze down at the ocean, glimpsing for a moment that this probably explained why he had clung on for so long, the fingers of the intellect reaching for every last handhold of justification while all around him others were letting go, conceding the failures and the abuses of the communist dream. All this, he saw from seven miles high, had defined who and
what he was as he approached his middle years; and all of it exaggerated by years of joining in the game of leftier-than-thou, leapfrogging over others to positions of ever-greater radicalism, positions which he had the intellectual capacity to defend but which, at moments like this, he could see were surely absurd. And, for a few minutes at least, it was clear to him that it wasn’t Oxford he needed to escape; nor was the attraction of New York’s New School of Social Research anything to do with its radical traditions. What it offered was a release from the sterile prison he had created for himself over the years, a chance to rethink his position with comparatively little loss of face; leave behind some of the intellectual baggage. Like so many who travel hopefully, he travelled to leave himself behind.
Seema had suspected that something was wrong as soon as the meeting with her editor had been switched from their normal lunch spot to the more formal setting of Gammer & Duce’s publishing house in the heart of the Cast Iron District. When she arrived, it was clear that Janie was nervous about something, prevaricating rather than getting down to business.
Soon afterwards she found herself shaking hands with Clyde Robie, a man of about forty who was introduced as the new Director of Publishing. Without preliminaries, he took the opening chapters of Seema’s manuscript from his briefcase and tossed them on to the editor’s desk. After seating himself casually on the windowsill, he indicated to Jane to start the meeting while he looked down, apparently bored, at whatever might be happening in the street below.
The Kennedy Moment Page 8