Borderlines
Page 11
‘Julia, this is Paula. Paula, my aunt.’
You could tell she had once been extraordinarily beautiful. Now she was drained of vigour and bleached of colour, the once-blonde hair almost white, the skin papery, but the essence preserved. She wore her hair in a chignon, emphasising a stem-like neck and ivory clavicles. Her cheekbones were high and she spoke with the clipped, peremptory tones of the elderly Katharine Hepburn. ‘Paula, how delightful to meet you. Jake has told me so much. I’ve been looking forward to spending the evening with someone who speaks with a proper English accent, for once.’
We had drinks – I was passed a gin and tonic without being asked – as Julia pointed out various local landmarks. Then she gave an exaggerated shiver, a signal for us to move to the black marble mantelpiece, where a fire burned. Above it loomed a gilt-framed portrait of Senator William Wentworth, posed tweed-clad in a gunroom, framed by gleaming weaponry and loyal retrievers.
‘My handsome father,’ said Julia. ‘He loved hunting, riding, he was a world-class skier and an avid surfer – one of the first. He was the ambassador’s right-hand man in London, liaising between Roosevelt and Churchill, at one stage during the war. But,’ she said, with a small smile, ‘one always felt those activities were never much more than hobbies. Sport was what he really loved.’
‘And women, right, Julia?’ Jake chimed in. ‘Those were the days when a man could have the most outrageous affairs – a mother and her daughter at the same time, wasn’t it? – and none of it ended up in the press. Ah, happy days, happy days.’ Ignoring Julia’s look of reproof, he guided us into the dining room, where a woman I took to be the Filipina cook was putting the finishing touches to the table.
I sat largely silent as they ran through family news and estate gossip. In New York that summer, conversation was dominated by the Concorde crash and the sinking of a Russian submarine, but foreign policy seemed a long way from Griffin House. Julia fretted over an upcoming charity ball she was throwing, and they chatted about acquaintances met on Caribbean cruises and the chance of re-election of the incumbent senator, a family friend. I had a glimpse of a life punctuated by black-tie evenings, golden summers in Martha’s Vineyard, casual church attendance and afternoons spent on charity boards. Occasionally I was politely asked a question about ‘the situation in your country’, before the conversation was whipped away. ‘Actually,’ I interrupted, the third time this happened, ‘I really don’t know the answer to that because it’s been four years since I lived in the UK.’
‘Really?’ Julia said. ‘So you are something of a rootless person, are you? How curious.’
‘Well, I never loved Britain so much that I felt I couldn’t live anywhere else.’
‘Oh, I’m quite the opposite,’ she said, picking at her salad. ‘For me, roots have become paramount. As you get older you realise that when everything else goes, they are what remain, spanning the generations. Roots and land,’ she said, gesturing towards the windows overlooking the estate. ‘The eternal nature of the landscape.’
After supper, as the staff silently cleared the plates, Jake and Julia settled on a large leather sofa and set about examining the estate accounts, his salt-and-pepper confusion of curls and her smooth pale head bowed together over the books, brandies at their sides. I wandered back to the terrace, where Julia eventually found me, smoking.
‘Oh.’ She looked affronted. ‘I didn’t realise you smoked. Miguel,’ she called, ‘an ashtray, please.’
I’d been intending to stub the thing out on the gravel. ‘Bad habit,’ I said politely, offering up the ritual smoker’s acknowledgement that they are committing a sin. Not one I’m likely to give up just to please you, though.
‘It does so permeate the clothes,’ she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
We watched the sun descending over the trees together for a few minutes. Jake was still leafing through the accounts, no doubt tactfully granting us this moment’s privacy to ‘bond’.
‘What are you thinking, my dear?’
‘Well …’ I hesitated, wondering how direct I should be. ‘As a Brit, I come from a country where we’re all very aware of class, of where everyone stands in the pecking order: working class, lower middle, professional middle, upper middle, impoverished aristocracy. And we constantly tell ourselves that this is all very feudal and rather embarrassing. And we hear the propaganda telling us that in the US, in contrast, reinvention is always possible, meritocracy the name of the game. So it’s very naïve of me, especially given that I’ve been here a while now, but I’m always surprised when I’m confronted with evidence of an American class system. This house, your history, it seems a million miles away from the America I know and work in.’
She looked at me and I noticed how the lapis-lazuli necklace around her meringue-white throat accentuated the blue-grey of her eyes, the same colour as Jake’s. I wondered if she would take offence, or simply deny my rather crude assertion of her privilege.
Instead, she said, ‘Oh, I’m glad you noticed that.’
Inclining her head, she spoke gently, as you might to a child. I wondered if she was keeping her voice low to ensure Jake could not hear. ‘There are frontiers, invisible lines that can be sensed but not seen in the US, just as in Britain. The difference is that because we have all been taught that you can do or be whatever you want to be, no American is inclined to recognise that reality. I suspect your countrymen have a far more mature and clear-eyed understanding of the true state of affairs. The lines are there. And it’s usually a mistake to try to cross them, in my experience.’ She gave me a pearly smile. Her teeth were perfect. ‘Even when someone as lovable as my nephew invites you to do so.’
I flushed. I had set myself up for it, but her directness still shocked me.
‘I’m not exactly trailer trash,’ I said, stammering.
‘Oh, I realised that,’ she said. Her voice was dry. ‘But that’s not really what I’m talking about. It’s about feeling comfortable. The French have a phrase for it: “bien dans sa peau” – “comfortable in your skin”.’ She pronounced it carefully, like someone eating fruit. ‘In the end, when sex has faded – and it always does – good manners reassert themselves, the years stretch into decades and people often find that what matters is feeling at ease in a place and community. Don’t you agree?’ Her gaze travelled the room, embracing the oil paintings and gilt-edged mirrors, the horsy bronze statuettes and imported European antiques, and the unreadable Miguel, who was closing the heavy velvet curtains.
13
Captain Peter Lewisham’s Diary
Kakardi, 1951, pages 85–9
25 February – Busy couple of weeks. On Tuesday shiftas shot at an Italian farmer and his wife driving on the Tentet–Sherano road, killing the wife. I suspect it was an accident, but the Italian has been hollering that this was a part of an anti-colonial uprising, we Brits are in league with the shiftas, etc. We drove to his farm, found him arming his workers, swearing revenge. I calmed him down – poor chap was genuinely heartbroken – and arranged for the body to be crated up and sent to Lira. It’ll be shipped back to the mother country. Five days later the same bunch of shiftas attacked a bus twenty kilometres further east. No one killed this time, just money and grain stolen, but I sent six men down to take statements, show we were taking it seriously. I’ve asked Tesfay to put out feelers and find out who’s involved. The locals are bound to know.
2 March – Received a letter from Flo today. All well back at home, she says, only the dog has had a litter of puppies and she doesn’t know what to do with them. Doesn’t want to drown any. Always good to hear from the old girl.
13 March – HQ have been in touch about the shiftas. They’re sending an intelligence officer down from Lira to discuss strategy. That’s going to be interesting. Johnny’s transfer to Neraye has come through. He’ll be off on Monday. I’ll miss the boy. A cheeky lad, but always has a cheery word for everyone. He keeps morale up. I asked Tesfay to arrange a surprise party.
30 March – On my instructions, the cook prepared a slap-up meal to mark Johnny’s departure. Two lambs stuffed with rosemary, roast potatoes, stewed cabbage, all washed down with the last of Tiny’s beer. I gave a formal speech, then the lads piled in, making various comments on Johnny’s inability to keep it in his trousers. We all ended up quite tearful, with Johnny saying – shortly before the lads carried him to bed – this had been the best year of his life.
3 April – Intelligence officer arrived today. Bit of a dry stick, he told me over supper that HQ have commissioned a report on what’s behind the rise in shifta attacks. Seems it’s not just eastern sector, it’s all over the country. They want to know whether they’re being instigated by Darrar, to show the world this country will be ungovernable unless it’s amalgamated, or whether it’s banditry pure and simple. I said, ‘Good luck with that,’ but he then revealed he wants to meet one of these bandits. Here in Kakardi. Not my idea of fun, but I said I’d see what could be done.
8 April – Rupert, the intelligence officer, has come and gone. We ended up hitting it off. Turns out his family live in Dorset, and he’s a fanatical angler, knows every twist and turn of the Tess. We talked rods and flies well into the night. Made a change to have some civilised conversation. Tesfay is going to see if he can set up a parley with the shifta chief, who, he says, is a one-eyed former sergeant recruited by the Italians. Narrowly survived the battle of Derden against our boys in 1941, bit of a war hero by all accounts. So I’m guessing there’s not much love lost for Brits there.
12 April – Villagers keep complaining about jackal raids, so we pegged out a couple of dead chickens in the headman’s compound and took up position. Three rifles in all. It was almost too easy. At 23.10 hrs precisely, a little vixen slipped under the fence and made for the bait, rippling across the ground like a ginger ribbon. I landed a bullseye: she flipped into a somersault, dead before she hit the ground. Job done. I’m going to see if I can get her stuffed. Plucky little thing.
17 April – Tesfay says he thinks he can arrange a tete-a-tete with old One Eye. On his territory – a cave up on the escarpment – and we’d have to agree to be disarmed first by One Eye’s men. Not an arrangement to my liking, but HQ seem dead set on it. So I am now waiting for Rupert. Bit of a showdown at the office this afternoon. Three old geezers turned up, all wrapped up in turbans and shawls. Turns out one of them is the father of the girl Johnny knocked up. They’d just heard about his transfer. The father slammed his cane on my desk, saying Johnny was a coward, had a responsibility to his daughter. Bloody cheek. He was lucky I didn’t order the lads to give him a good thrashing. We threw the three out. Told Tesfay to offer him compensation after tempers have cooled. HQ won’t hear of it, but I reckon we can organise a whip-round here and pay the old boy off. It’s the decent thing to do.
14
We flew to The Hague in mid-December to file the counter-Memorials.
‘Strictly speaking, this could be done by email, post or fax,’ Winston had said the night before, rhythmically smoothing and pleating his shirts as I perched on his bed. Watching a man pack is a strangely intimate experience, but I was beginning to register that there is an element of governess – nursemaid, even – to the relationship between a younger female employee and an older male boss. Nursemaids get to see the underwear.
‘But commissioners have old-fashioned ways of doing things and I have no objection. You should regard it as an opportunity to get to know the lie of the land, familiarise yourself with the facilities ahead of the hearing, when we’ll barely have a moment to think. Anything we’re likely to need, hard drives, paper supplies, ink cartridges, mobile phones … Let’s get it all now and store it at the embassy. I don’t want to be bothered with trivia, come the main event. You’re to be my scout, adjutant and quartermaster on this one. Understood, Paula?’
‘Understood.’
‘There’s another reason for trooping all the way to The Hague,’ he said, selecting two silk ties off a hanger. ‘I want the commissioners to get to know your face. Make eye contact, look friendly, if not,’ he chuckled, ‘actually beseeching. Say what you like about the bloodless neutrality of universal justice, the commissioners are human beings, and we all find it difficult to be disobliging to people we feel we know. That’s why hostages are told to strike up conversation with their kidnappers. I don’t know what’s going on with the other side, but they keep changing their legal teams. Such a blunder. We’ve always made an effort to present the commissioners with the same panel of battered faces. By the time we reach the award, a certain degree of unacknowledged empathy will have built up, while the other side will remain strangers. It’s a lot easier to rule against strangers.’
‘I think Sharmila rather minds that she hasn’t been asked along.’
‘Does she?’ The possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him. ‘We need her here. Someone who can email us anything we forget and fob off government enquiries with a certain authority. Abraham comes – that man is worth his weight in gold – she stays. It’s a tribute to her effectiveness, in fact.’
‘Well, maybe you should make that clear to her.’
‘Noted … I’m missing a shirt.’ He looked around in exasperation. ‘My God, Paula, you’re sitting on it!’ He was clearly appalled.
‘Sorry, I didn’t think you’d be taking it. It’s very frayed at the cuffs. Why don’t you leave it here and we’ll pick up a batch of new ones when we’re in The Hague?’
He shook his head. ‘We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because these may look like ordinary white shirts to your uninitiated eye, my dear, but in fact they come from Boothes & Harker on Jermyn Street, London, and are hand-stitched from Sea Island cotton, which is as close to silk as cotton can get. They have as much in common with your off-the-rack Walmart shirt, which is clearly what you’d like me to purchase, as a Rolls-Royce has with a Trabant.’
‘Well,’ I said, handing over the treasured item, ‘you need some new ones, whatever they are.’
‘The shop went out of business two years ago.’
I gave a scornful guffaw. ‘So what are you going to do? Keep wearing the Last of the Mohicans till they turn into very elegant rags?’
‘No, I will not wear them until they turn to rags.’ His voice was suddenly very clipped. I caught a glint of real anger. ‘I have done what any logical, forward-thinking person would do in the circumstances. I have put out feelers via US retailers boasting connections to UK menswear outlets and made clear that if a Boothes & Harker shirt size with a 14.5-inch neck ever crosses their desks, I am willing to pay a premium. I have written to the administrators of Boothes & Harker and asked them for their suppliers’ contact details, with a view to placing a bespoke order – a correspondence that is finally showing signs of paying dividends. I have been advised to try eBay, an avenue I’m considering pursuing. And in the meantime I will wear beautifully tailored, scrupulously stitched shirts with increasingly frayed cuffs and I’d prefer them not to be indented by your posterior. Is that acceptable?’
I held up my hands in surrender. ‘I promise not to raise the subject again. Fools rush in, clearly … I’d better go. I’ve got some drip-dry blouses to fold.’
He stopped me on my way out. ‘On the question of clothes … It’s good this came up, actually. After the counter-Memorials have been handed over, the UN’s throwing a cocktail party at the Peace Palace. The two presidents, their foreign ministers, a host of diplomats and UN top brass will be there, along with the commissioners, of course. The idea is to foster goodwill. Not much chance of that, I’m afraid, but it might be an interesting occasion. You’ll need something to wear. Now, um, what would that be?’
‘A tracksuit, perha
ps? A Lurex leotard?’ He looked anxious. ‘I’m joking, Winston. I’m guessing something black, in silk, perhaps with a bit of ruffle.’
‘Just the ticket! Formal but chic? Do you happen to own anything like that? If not, Sharmila might be able to help.’
‘Don’t worry, Winston. There was a time when I virtually collected those kinds of outfits. A lot ended up in charity shops, but a hard core remains. Leave it to me.’ He smiled, and returned to his hypnotic smoothing and pleating, like an anxious mother soothing a fractious infant.
The Royal Delft Hotel (marketing logo: ‘Never Less Than Welcome’) in The Hague was a modest establishment. Not in its first youth, the hotel had clearly received a partial makeover a few years before we became regular guests. But the scuffed linoleum on the stairs, the dirt ground into the carpet and the colour scheme on the upper floors – a wince-inducing 1970s combination of orange walls, maroon carpet and purple doors – along with the lift’s tendency to swing from side to side as it rose through the building, gave the game away.
With the exception of the size of the bathrooms, nothing erred on the side of generous. Staffing was always kept to a minimum, with the receptionist usually doubling as bartender, baggage-handler and head waiter, much to customers’ exasperation. But Winston had not picked the Royal Delft for its décor, or its service. He’d picked it because, if you showed due respect for the cyclists gliding silently along the pink asphalt strip running alongside the pavement – a charming local peculiarity he tended to forget – it was just a fifteen-minute walk from North Darrar’s embassy, and about the same distance from the Peace Palace.
Winston claimed one room, I another. Between us was the spare. He immediately unlocked and propped open the connecting door: for Winston, there was never any division between work and private life. This became our de facto office. Chairs were piled onto armchairs to clear as much space as possible. Abraham drove off to the embassy to pick up photocopiers and back-up laptops, along with all the relevant documentation, carefully catalogued at the end of the team’s previous visit. Soon, every wall socket sprouted multiple adaptors, extension cables snaked across the floor, and the computers and printers – cranky after months of inactivity – were booting reluctantly into life. The double bed, window ledges and bathroom shelves became our filing cabinets, covered with binders and laptops. The cleaner was told her services would be unwelcome for the duration of our stay, news she greeted with undisguised cheerfulness. And the first of many raids was made on the mini-bar’s store of chocolate and cashews. One of my jobs, I discovered, was to keep it stocked so that Winston, who was wont to wander fretfully in and out of his own room and ‘the office’ in the early hours, could snack at will. I, in contrast, quietly worked my way through its miniature bottles of vodka, gin and Scotch. We lived, for the most part, on trays of steak frites delivered with increasing resentment by room service, the dirty plates gradually stacking up in piles under the bed, until, giving in to some atavistic feminine impulse to keep house, I’d transfer them in a whirl of exasperation to the hotel corridor. By the end of the trip we’d be bloated, constipated, hyped on caffeine and nicotine, gripped by insomnia yet exhausted.