by Alan Judd
Those at the back were still pushing. As the spinning rear wheels reached firm ground near the road the car jerked forward. The open door caught Sir Wilfrid on the shoulder and toppled him gently into the mud. Patrick braked suddenly, fearing he was about to run over his ambassador.
‘Look out, they’ve got him! They’ve got him!’ Clifford shouted from the back. The minister knelt on the floor, put both hands to his head and bellowed, ‘Police! Police!’
Patrick put the car into neutral and smiled.
The police came. They were in open lorries and wore riot helmets. The whites had carbines or pistols, truncheons and shields. The blacks had truncheons and shields. They debussed and laid into the helpers swiftly and precisely. Those with carbines took up positions alongside the road whilst the others ran amongst the fleeing helpers. Some who had seen the lorries approach escaped in time but others were too late and became embroiled in mud and confusion, stumbling, slipping, sometimes yelping before they were hit. Some ran into the beer hall but most tried to get away between the bungalows. One of the two who had been fighting sat bemusedly at the roadside, holding his head. He was hit across the shoulders, knocked sideways and dragged by his feet back to one of the lorries. Others were beaten as they fell. Some howled and some were suddenly silent, blood streaming from wounds to the head and face. As one was dragged unresistingly away his shirt rode up to his shoulders and his trousers slipped down his thighs.
Two policemen, one white and one black, ran to Sir Wilfrid. He was already on his feet. He held up his arm again. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop all this!’
Clifford got out and held the ambassador by his other arm. Sir Wilfrid took no notice. The minister and Mrs Collier watched the beating and dispersal of the helpers from within the Rolls. Two of the younger ones stopped at a safe distance, picked up some stones and threw them. A policeman knelt and aimed at them with his carbine.
Putting the Rolls into gear and accelerating were actions performed unthinkingly and completely. They were obvious and once taken seemed inevitable. The car moved sharply on to the road, causing two policemen to jump aside, and pulled up in front of the kneeling man so that his aim was blocked. It missed the barrel of the carbine only because the policeman lifted it at the last moment. The stone-throwers ran off.
The young policeman’s face was thin and freckled, pale with anger.
‘I damn near shot you, man!’ he shouted in a Lower African accent. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’
Patrick switched off the engine and got out. He felt suddenly weary. ‘I was stopping you shooting.’
‘How did you know I was going to shoot?’ The young policeman came close.
‘I saw you aiming.’
‘How do you know I wasn’t aiming over their heads?’
‘I hope you were.’
The policeman moved closer still. ‘And what is it to you whether I was or wasn’t?’
‘I saw you doing it, that’s what it is to me.’ Patrick stared stonily into the policeman’s hard eyes. He felt both angry and unsure of himself. The policeman raised the butt of his carbine to waist height.
The captain who had stopped the car on the way into Kuweto stepped between them and said something sharp in Lower African. Without hesitation the policeman turned and walked away, his carbine at his side.
The captain smiled disarmingly. ‘Was he rude to you, sir? My apologies if he was.’
‘He was about to shoot someone for throwing stones.’
‘You mean he was pointing his gun? It was more likely he was just taking precautions.’
‘It didn’t look like that to me.’
‘It wouldn’t, though, would it?’ The captain shook his head and looked in the direction of the young policeman. ‘You should know, sir, that not long ago that officer faced eight hundred rioters out for his blood and kept them at bay for twenty minutes until help arrived. He’s very committed when he goes into action. Like the rest of us. It’s not always easy for other people to understand.’
‘I understand you perfectly.’ Patrick’s anger subsided into a dull core which he feared would express itself in petulance and petty resentment. It was all too easy to imagine how the scene might have appeared to those already expecting the worst: the ambassadorial Rolls spattered with mud and stranded outside the beer hall; an excited, drunken crowd; one of the men who had been fighting sitting by the road with blood on his face; in the mud by the Rolls the body of the British ambassador. Nevertheless, he wanted to say something. ‘Why don’t you use plastic bullets?’ he asked, knowing that that was not it.
The captain nodded whilst he gazed at the prisoners being dragged towards the lorries. ‘We’ll use plastic bullets when they throw plastic stones.’
The minister had got out of the Rolls and was talking to Sir Wilfrid, Clifford and two policemen. There were a dozen or so prisoners, mostly bowed and bleeding, but no other helpers in sight. The police returned to their lorries, talking and laughing as they tapped their truncheons against their thighs. The captain turned to go.
Patrick felt he hadn’t finished. ‘There wasn’t any trouble, you know. We’d got stuck and they were pushing us out of the mud. That was all.’
‘That wasn’t how it looked to me.’
‘You didn’t wait to see.’
The captain faced him. ‘To be plain with you, sir, if it weren’t for people like you poking around trying to do good for something you don’t understand there wouldn’t have been any trouble here anyway. If you’d seen one half of what I’ve seen in this place you wouldn’t wait to see more. You’d just act, like I did, then you’d know that’s an end to it.’
The captain walked back to his lorries. Patrick tried to think of a reply, but he too had acted without waiting to see.
Personalities began to reassert themselves. Clifford gave the police a long description of the missing Simon, necessarily repetitive since he could remember only that Simon was small and black. He pointed to the cap in the mud as evidence of abduction. Sir Wilfrid talked earnestly and at length to the captain, on the one hand apologising for being the unwitting cause of the incident and on the other condemning the brutal effectiveness of the police operation. He named people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to whom he would speak; the captain was polite and unyielding. The minister strutted about before being properly noticed and then, having secured the attention of most of those near, offered to intervene between the police and the local community.
‘I’ll be the go-between,’ he said. He looked round to see if there were any blacks he could approach. ‘They’re more likely to talk to a third party. I’ll come back and let you know their demands.’
The captain looked puzzled. ‘Demands?’
‘Yes, you know, what they want. I’ll go and find out. I’ll go on a walkabout.’
A small old man was creeping warily back towards the beer hall by a circuitous route that took him well away from the police. The minister strode purposefully towards him. The man scampered away. The minister turned back. ‘See what I mean? Your men have frightened them. They were quite approachable before you charged in. This will look bad in the press, I’ll tell you that for nothing now.’
The captain shrugged. ‘You won’t find any press here, sir.’
‘Can we go now, Ray?’ Mrs Collier called from inside the Rolls.
The captain walked away. The minister ignored his wife and picked on Clifford. He repeated what he had said to the captain. Clifford energetically agreed.
Patrick leant against the car with his arms folded. When Sir Wilfrid came over to him he neither stood up nor composed his features in their usual expression of respect.
Sir Wilfrid’s shirt hung out, his tie was still loose, there was mud down his right side and his hair was wild. He shook his head and looked towards the lorries. ‘I am assured that the prisoners will now be well treated but I’m not sure I believe it. I shall take it up with the MFA when we get back. This would happen when the minister’s here, though I must s
ay he seems to relish it. It’s just rather unfortunate when we are indebted for our rescue to the Lower African police.’
‘Are we?’ asked Patrick.
‘Of course we are. What would have happened if they hadn’t come when they did?’ He poked his head through the car window and spoke reassuringly to Mrs Collier before turning back. ‘One thing I must say, Patrick – and I’m not complaining, you must understand that – but one thing I must say is that I thought you behaved a bit rashly. I expect you know what I’m talking about. There’s really no need for me to say it. It was that moment towards the end when the police had arrived and the rioters had dispersed and you suddenly shot the car forward. I don’t mean when I fell over, I mean after that. I saw you do it. In fact, you very nearly hit my foot. Perhaps you didn’t mean to? Perhaps it was an accident?’
Patrick felt the same dull anger as with the police captain. He kept his arms folded and stared straight ahead. ‘No, I did mean it. It wasn’t an accident.’
‘You very nearly hit one of the policemen, Clifford was telling me.’
‘Yes, I very nearly did.’
‘I’m not blaming you, mind, it was a very tense time for all of us. But I must say I think you overreacted.’
Clifford joined them, holding Simon’s cap. ‘Everyone panics at some time or other. Don’t let it upset you. No harm done, though when you shot forward I got a nasty bang on the head from the minister’s knee.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Surprised by the violence of his inner reactions Patrick had no wish to defend himself. The police captain would have been easier to talk to than his own colleagues. There had been a sudden widening of the gap he had always felt between himself and others in the embassy, though where precisely he or they stood he could not have said.
‘Never mind,’ continued Clifford. ‘As I say, no harm done. The thing is to keep cool in future.’
By the time they left, the minister was in good enough humour to ask his wife how she was. ‘No doubt in my mind the police went over the top,’ he said, whilst she was still replying. ‘We could’ve talked them round if the police hadn’t gone in like that. But that’s not the point. The point is the original grievance. Why were they rioting in the first place? That’s what’s got to be rooted out and put right.’ He looked challengingly about him.
Sir Wilfrid smoothed his hair and said reluctantly, ‘It’s oppression come to boiling point. The particular cause was probably incidental and unimportant.’
‘Drink,’ said Clifford firmly. ‘They’d been on the beer.’
‘They weren’t rioting,’ said Patrick.
The others looked at him. There was a pause and then they turned away again as if embarrassed. The minister shook his head, ‘If only the police had waited until we’d got a dialogue going. If only they’d held off for that. That’s what’s wrong with this country – no dialogue. You must have dialogue. Everywhere. Same the world over.’
Patrick drove the Rolls back. Anthony had a headache and said nothing. Simon’s house was in another part of Kuweto and it was generally agreed – at least, confidently asserted by Clifford and not disputed by anyone else – that he had not been abducted but had fled there. He would probably turn up for work as usual the next day.
Despite the anger, which remained with him like a tolerable ache, Patrick enjoyed driving the Rolls. It was big, stately and surprisingly responsive. He felt that perhaps he would prefer Simon’s job to his own. Musing on this reminded him that there was still no news of his car; Miss Teale’s last report, blithely delivered, was that the ship bringing it and his baggage was overdue.
They reached the embassy an hour or so before the minister was to have his informal talks in the MFA. He bustled about with cheerful brusqueness, exhorting Anthony and the press section to get the newspapers interested in what had happened. He announced two or three times that the time had come to abandon his low profile in the interest of ‘eyeball to eyeball dialogue throughout the whole of Lower Africa’.
Various versions of the story later appeared in British and Lower African newspapers. The one that most appealed to the minister had a picture of him alongside a picture of Mrs Acupu, the Kuwetan community leader who was visiting Britain and whose excess baggage was being transported in Patrick’s freight. The picture was captioned, ‘British Minister Begins Black Dialogue’, and the article described how the minister had intervened in a confrontation between blacks and the police which had begun after a car was driven at a policeman. After calming the crowd, the minister was cheered out of Kuweto. Mrs Acupu, the article concluded, was visiting Britain.
The story that went round the embassy, spread during frequent confidential disclosures by Clifford ‘within these four walls’, was that Patrick had panicked and run over the ambassador at the critical moment, provoking the crowd to riot.
Patrick’s principal concern, the moment he got back, was to find out what had happened when Jim had called on Joanna that morning. He also wanted to talk to her about the events in Kuweto. In fact, he wanted to talk to anyone not connected with them but particularly to her because she would be warm and sympathetic and would take his side. Instead he got Beauty, who said that Joanna had come back from shopping and gone out again. She had gone to have coffee with someone whose name Beauty could not remember. Beauty giggled as she apologised.
He had hardly put the telephone down when Jim rang. He had heard what had happened. ‘Your people all okay?’
‘No problems,’ said Patrick. ‘A pair of dirty ambassadorial trousers, that’s all.’
‘I guess I should’ve advised you not to go. It’d be my head on the block if anything went wrong.’
‘There was no trouble anyway. There wasn’t a problem until people thought there was, and that made it one.’
‘Your people or my people?’
‘Both. They both got it wrong.’
Jim chuckled. ‘That’s the way it is round here. You’re learning.’
‘It was all completely unnecessary. It needn’t have happened.’
‘’Course it’s not necessary, but it happens just the same.’ Jim broke off and gave an instruction to someone else in the room. ‘We should have a beer and a chat some time.’
‘We should, yes, I’d like that.’ Patrick did not have to pretend; even this conversation was a relief. A talk with Jim would be refreshing. They would at least be discussing the same thing.
‘Yeah, well, I’ll ring you.’ Jim’s voice was curt, as if he felt he had gone too far. He rang off without saying goodbye.
18
The minister was to discuss Arthur Whelk at the MFA, amongst other subjects of which Patrick was not informed. The ambassador suggested that Chatsworth should come to the reception later in the afternoon in case the minister wanted to meet him.
‘Nothing to hide by then. We’ll have had it out with them one way or another, for good or ill. And your man will be able to report on any progress.’
‘There hasn’t been any.’
Sir Wilfrid put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder. ‘Don’t be negative. One of the curses of the Service. Don’t let it grip you so soon.’ He bent his head. ‘Shouldn’t dwell on the morning’s business if I were you. No one blames you and it’ll be forgotten in no time. Bring young Chatsworth along. He’s presentable and he’ll be company for you.’
When Patrick got home at lunchtime he found that Rachel had gone off in a taxi to do some interviews. Chatsworth sat in one of the wicker chairs on the veranda, his feet on another. He was sharpening the spear again. ‘One for you on the table.’
‘Thanks.’
He pointed with the spear at the pool, which was clean and brilliant. ‘Had a dip with Rachel this morning. Bit sharp round the balls but all right. Ordered some more chemicals.’
‘Who’s Rachel interviewing?’
‘Haven’t a clue.’
‘She didn’t say?’
‘Not to me.’
Chatsworth’s tone sounded more definite
than the apparent offhandedness of his words but it was clear no more would be learned from him just then. ‘The ambassador’s invited you to this reception to meet the minister this afternoon,’ said Patrick.
Chatsworth nodded as if this were no more than he had expected. ‘’Fraid I won’t have much to report. Got a telegram from the office this morning asking all sorts of damn fool questions about what I was doing and wanting answers by yesterday. Rang them back and gave them a piece of my mind. Pointed out they were lucky I wasn’t still in clink and that I wasn’t getting any benefit from my salary here anyway. Then they tried to ask a lot of stupid questions about Whelk and I had to shut them up. You’d think they’d never heard of security. Thick as a wet fog on a Sunday, some of these people in business. And I thought when I left the army I was joining a world of sanity and reason.’ He sipped his drink. ‘I owe you for that call, by the way. Don’t forget it.’ The telephone rang. ‘If that’s them again, tell them I’m wrestling with gorillas.’
Sarah came out and said quietly that it was for Patrick. Her manner was subdued and he could tell immediately that she was troubled by something. The caller was Joanna. She wanted to know what time she should appear at the reception; also, whether he had learned any more about what people were to wear. Hearing her made him realise how much he wanted to speak to her. All he wanted to say about the events in Kuweto that morning threatened to gush out but he was constrained by the businesslike nature of the conversation; also, he was learning that things came out wrongly on the telephone. ‘What did Jim want?’ he asked. He had not meant to ask so blatantly.
‘What? Oh, he just wanted to talk. He wasn’t horrible or anything. I gave him a cup of coffee and he talked about Belinda. He only stayed about fifteen minutes.’
Patrick did not want to appear jealous and knew he should not go on. ‘Does he often do that?’
‘Well, sometimes, not often. He just drops in.’
There was now a slight defensiveness in her tone which he knew he had provoked. He resolved to show more interest in Belinda in future and changed the subject to Rachel and Chatsworth.