Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  Jay said, ‘A great many Africans do impose on their English friends, Tom.’ He laughed suddenly, his hand in front of his mouth. ‘They trade on their sense of guilt.’

  I laughed. Everything was suddenly open and easy between us. We went out to the car; Louise drove, as she liked to do, and Jay got into the back, beside me.

  He said, ‘Are we going to your home in Putney now? Can we drive past Buckingham Palace?’

  ‘I’m afraid the Palace is a bit out of our way.’

  His face fell, but he said politely, ‘Never mind. Perhaps we can go to the Palace tomorrow. Is the Queen in residence now?’

  I had forgetten his obsession with the Royal Family. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘We can look in the Court Circular tomorrow,’ Louise said, and smiled at me in the driving mirror.

  Jay leaned forward, looking out of the window. His hands, very narrow-boned and delicate, rested on his thin, pointed knees. His protuberant lower jaw jutted against the fading light outside the car, his lips full, curved, and slightly blue in colour, his small ear lying flat against his head like a neat shell. Just behind it there was a scar where he had had a mastoid removed, a short, thick scar almost like a strip of leather grafted on to the flesh: it is a peculiarity of African skin that it sometimes heals like this. Otherwise his face and strong, graceful throat were without blemish. He had never had smallpox and his skin was smooth with a matt sheen like a dark rose petal: in different lights it shone with coppery glints or blue like a blackbird’s wing. In repose, he was a good-looking, healthy young man; talking or laughing, a delightfully handsome one. He turned to me now, smiling, his full, brown eyes liquid with emotion.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘this is the most wonderful moment of my life. For years it has been my dream to come to England. I cannot believe I am not dreaming now.’

  He spoke from his heart and I felt the prick of envy: it was something I had forgotten how to do. But I wished his wonderful moment had come to him in some more attractive place. Louise had turned off the main London road to avoid the rush-hour traffic and we were driving through a sad little street of shabby terrace houses, past a small general shop with a dusty display of ice-cream cartons in the window, and a depressed looking pub. (Actually, it was the kind of street that has always made me nostalgic: it is as if the cosy seediness, the gentle, rainy squalor – seen to perfect effect on a damp, declining afternoon – is a reminder of something lost. Even the smell of those streets, frying chips, dried dog dirt, the pervasive smell of leaves burning somewhere in a municipal park, is exciting, a memory you cannot quite run to earth. A memory of innocence perhaps, of a time further back; an adolescent trailing his first girl, a child running home after school to certain love, warmth and tea.)

  It struck me that Jay could hardly appreciate the evocative quality of this depressed, urban area. There was something both ridiculous and moving therefore in the way he turned his head from side to side like a boy on an adventurous journey. What tales he would have to tell when he got back to school! We passed a line of cheap shops, a brightly lit Tube station. He craned his neck to look at it with awe, as if it were a cathedral.

  I said, ‘This is all rather slummy. London is a hideously overgrown place. Tomorrow I’ll take you round and show you the sights.’

  ‘The Baden-Powell Institute and the Planetarium? I am very anxious to see the Planetarium.’

  ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, that is good of you.’

  His inflections, somewhat genteel and old-fashioned, were copied from Chirk, in whose bungalow we had met. His joy was all his own, a joy which seemed only restrained from breaking out into wild laughter and a noisy stream of talk by acquired dignity and instinctive politeness: he was with white people and white people are never noisy except when fighting or drunk. But he was stiff, almost shivering with his joy in everything about him; the lit, wet streets, the traffic jams, the bright shops, the prospect of visiting the Planetarium. His eyes were luminous, his voice quivered. ‘Tom, I am so very, very happy. My heart is full. I cannot believe that I am here at last, with you, in your own country. In the Land of the King’s Cows.’

  The words came out in an exuberant shout. I glanced nervously at the back of Louise’s head. Was there a chance she hadn’t heard? Of course there wasn’t. We had stopped at a traffic-light and she turned round. Her small, triangular face, like a pretty cat’s, was pink with amusement. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘what an old ass you are.’

  Chapter Two

  I am always embarrassed when Louise catches me out – reading A. E. Housman, for example, or weeping in the cinema. I am a rational man but one’s unconscious is stubbornly sentimental. I suppose there has to be some refuge for the deeply felt emotions, the romantic dreams that seem so comic as you grow older.

  I was born at Whitstable in the county of Kent. The Land of the King’s Cows is some miles out of the town, along the coast. It is an area of flat farmland intersected like a chequer-board with reedy dykes, bounded on the west by the arterial road and on the east by a narrow estuary, a foreshore of white broken shells and a long, curving sea-wall. I discovered it on my ninth birthday when my mother gave me a small green book entitled Rambles With Nature in the Isle of Thanet.

  My mother and I were very close. She was the widow of a bank clerk who died of Bright’s Disease a month before I was born. She had been devoted to her husband and my birth, so her friends said, saved her reason. She always spoke to me of ‘my husband’, never ‘your father’; perhaps, as she was an extremely prudish woman, she felt ‘your father’was too outspoken. So I grew up, not only without a father, but with the feeling that I had never had one. I never missed him. We lived in a small bungalow that had belonged to my mother’s father and I went to school in Canterbury. We were very happy. I can think of only two things that ever made me miserable: my mother’s refusal to buy me a bicycle, in case I was killed on the roads, and her belief in the importance of examinations.

  About once a week she told me that she was giving me a good start but that I must never forget I would have to make my own way in the world. Making my way depended on examinations; the grammar-school scholarship at eleven, school certificate, the university entrance. Looking back, these were the landmarks of my childhood.

  I suppose I might have had worse. Though I wasn’t a stupid child, I wasn’t brilliant and I was naturally lazy. It was my mother’s ambition that kept me in the stream of clever boys – her ambition coupled with a sort of insidious blackmail from her friends. These were mostly middle-aged women, spinsters or widows, devoted to my mother, who would whisper advice to me while she cut sandwiches in the kitchen. ‘You’re all she’s got you know, you mustn’t let her down.’ The hissed, female exhortations didn’t cloud my life but they narrowed it down; I always had the feeling that I was not doing as well as I ought to have done.

  All the same, I was happy. I enjoyed my mother’s comfortable pleasures. Tea in front of the fire in winter, in the rickety, south-facing veranda in summer; tea once a week in Canterbury when she came in to do a ‘little shopping’and meet me from school; tea on the shingle beach on fine summer days. We never went far afield, but once I could safely cross a road and had promised not to talk to strange men – she never said why – I was free to go where I liked, once my homework was done.

  After I had read Rambles With Nature, my favourite place was the Land of the King’s Cows. It was a lonely place, I liked to be alone and the name excited me – it changed a dullish stretch of coastline into an opulent, golden country, full of romantic possibilities. Even the cattle that grazed there were transformed; they were fat, lush cattle, the King’s Beasts, and I was their custodian. My mother was scornful of imagination except when it could be channelled into something positively useful like doing well in the Essay Paper, so all the imaginative games I ever played were set, out of her sight, among the hissing reeds of the dykes, on the white shell beach or in the stinking mud of the
estuary when the tide was out. I imagine I only went there on good days because it was a long walk, but it seemed to me afterwards that it was always summer there; the sky was always high and blue, the sun always hot, and the air was different from ordinary air; you drank it in with great, boisterous gulps like an eager novice swigging champagne.

  I took Louise there when we were first engaged because I remembered that it was usually deserted and I hoped to make love to her on the cropped grass behind the sheltering sea-wall. She lived with her mother and I lived with my mother, so our opportunities had been limited. The day was fine and Louise perfectly willing, but whenever we sat down and I began preparatory endearments, we discovered a cache of broken glass. It was as if some madman – or two madmen, an alcoholic and a patent medicine addict – had been having a field day, rampaging up and down those two miles of empty coast, sowing broken bottles like dragon’s teeth. We found beer bottles, lemonade bottles, gin bottles, whisky bottles, a magnum of champagne and numerous bottles of proprietary laxatives. After Louise had cut her wrist on a bottle of California Syrup of Figs that lay hidden in the grass, she became slightly hysterical. She said it was a terrible place, she was sure she could smell sewage and she couldn’t imagine why I had brought her here. By this time, the purpose of the exercise had become obscure to me too. We walked moodily home to find my poor mother extremely put out. She had prepared tea for us an hour earlier and the fish-paste sandwiches, though she had wrapped them in a damp napkin, were getting stale.

  I realized on that dreary walk home that I had not really taken Louise there to make love to her, but for sentiment’s sake; I had envisaged sitting there in that happy, golden place and having a good talk about myself – or about the person I would like to be. I felt a glum relief that I had not made such a fool of myself. She might have laughed at me.

  The incident confirmed my belief that any sincere emotion – any dream – was sometimes shameful and always funny.

  We never had that good talk – though Louise would never have laughed – and I never took her to the Land of the King’s Cows again. I didn’t want to, really; I had smelt the sewage too. I don’t think I had consciously thought about the place again, let alone spoken about it to anyone until I talked to Jay, one night when I

  was sufficiently loosened-up by gin.

  Though it wasn’t the gin entirely. The loosening-up was a process that began the moment I arrived in Africa, the moment in the plane when I first saw the top of Kilimanjaro jutting above the long, ridged, icing-sugar clouds, and the patches of green in the yellow land below, puddled with bright water. I had a sudden sense of relaxation, of freedom – that marvellous holiday feeling of being away from everyone who knows you. (Particularly the ones who love you and know you too well. Away from them you can be someone quite different, try out new opinions without someone raising an eyebrow to remind you that this was not what you thought before.)

  Not that I had wanted to get away from Louise. When the trip was first mooted – I had been taken on as a temporary consultant by the F.A.O. to advise on a Fisheries Project – we had hoped she would be able to come too. I had tried to raise an additional mortgage on the house but it was a time when credit was tight and Louise’s mother, who could easily have lent – or given – the cost of the fare and not missed it, said the heat and the travelling would be too much for Louise’s heart.

  The prospect of separation grieved us both. We had been married for twelve years, (during which time we had tried, and failed, to have a baby, bought a suburban house and furnished it with Louise’s mother’s furniture) and never been parted. We had been happy, shared jokes and friends, and still made love with pleasure when Louise was not, as she had often been recently, ‘too tired’. We were, I suppose, what would be called a well-integrated couple, though Louise occasionally reproached me for a few cranky ideas – such as hating smart restaurants, over-fed people, women dressed in mink – but never reproached me very much because she liked men who were eccentric, in moderation. I was moderate in all things, we both were.

  We were both a little smug.

  It was raining when I arrived in Africa; it was raining for the three days I was in Nairobi and it was still raining when I drove out of it, north towards Lake Victoria.

  The car and driver had been lent me out of some Government pool. The car was a long, grey Mercedes; the driver a contemptuous, elderly Kikuyu with a face like a smooth, black shield and thick, curling lips that showed blood-pink on their inner surfaces. He was contemptuous of the Masai who were starving because of the floods – the Masai were thieves, cattle-stealers, good-for-nothings. ‘They should cultivate their shambas’, he snarled biblically. He was contemptuous of the Europeans for instituting a relief campaign and of the Africans for not subscribing to it. He even drove his car with a kind of cold, skilled contempt in a series of alarming skids on the laterite roads: to an onlooker, it must have looked like a hippo waltzing. He was a disputatious, disagreeable, mean old man; also he had a bad stomach and the car was filled with his sour, cabbagy smell.

  Philip Agnew said, pitying, ‘I see they’ve given you Livingstone. They usually do. I suppose they like a chance to get him out of their hair in Nairobi, but it seems a tough introduction to Africa.’

  ‘He does seem a bit of a character,’ I admitted defensively.

  During the long drive I had had the happy feeling that everything was designed expressly to give me pleasure; the wart-hog, trotting through the bush, tail uplifted like a little flag; the flat thorn trees, stiff and grey; the old woman at the side of the road with a gouged skin and cut ear lobes looped over the tops of her ears. It was a feeling I had not had since I was a small boy playing in the Land of the King’s Cows and I was honoured by it: I did not want to dislike anyone.

  ‘He’s a foul old man,’ Agnew said cheerfully. ‘They’ve been trying to get him out of Government service for years. But they can’t. They can’t catch him out in anything. He doesn’t steal. He doesn’t drink. Doesn’t even use the car for his own private purposes.’

  He sighed and fingered a wart low down on his cheek. He was a plump, wrinkled man, pale as flour. He had a crumpled face and a sagging belly. His eyes were blue, bright and alert like the eyes of a strong, high-spirited boy and the sagging belly looked as if it would feel solid and tense, like a bag of muscle. He kept himself fit by playing squash before breakfast, a round of golf afterwards, and squash again before dinner in the evening. The golf-course I had seen as we drove up to the bungalow; a miniature copy of any green, well-tended playground in sub-rural Surrey. (Agnew came from Virginia Water.) But golf didn’t tone you up like squash, he said, crashing his pale, plump hand into the middle of his stomach as if he were banging a gong. I half-expected it to give off a sullen, ringing sound.

  ‘We had to build a new court-house the year I came here, so I designed it in the shape of a squash court. All you have to do is to move out the benches and paraphernalia in the evening. Very successful, really.’ He grinned. ‘Always make the fullest use of limited resources. That’s something you learn. Matter of fact I’ve done the same thing in each district I’ve been posted to when I could – must have built a dozen or more squash courts in my time.’

  ‘It seems an individual contribution to colonial rule.’

  He said, with pride, ‘I daresay they’ll still be standing long after we’re gone and forgotten. That won’t be long now, I daresay, and I don’t suppose there’ll be much left after a year or so. The golf-course won’t last, that’s certain. They’ll let it go to rack and ruin in a few months.’

  He sighed, this time deeply. The thought pained him. ‘Do you play?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  He looked at me with faint reproach. ‘Well – at least I can get you a drink.’

  Perhaps I have made him sound a fool. He wasn’t. He was intelligent and benign; within his paternal limits, a good administrator. He was also a good host and adviser. Though he seemed to know very li
ttle about the work of the Fisheries Station on the lake, he asked intelligent questions and listened attentively to the answers. He arranged for Livingstone to be occasionally ‘relieved’as he tactfully put it and lent me his own driver, a cheerful young Kisii with eyes as big as teacups. With Agnew’s help I got through the work in two-thirds of the time I had expected. Perhaps this was largely self-interest on his part, to speed the parting guest; it couldn’t be much fun putting up visiting firemen when they couldn’t even give you a good round of golf.

  Not that he ever showed boredom. He was very decent to me – writing about him I find it hard not to use his vocabulary – and I liked him very much. He was a very likeable man. He had come to Africa at a time when young district officers were dropped off with their bicycles on Monday mornings and collected again on Friday afternoons by the commissioner: he said things were better then. He knew a great deal about Africa and loved it without the usual exile’s irritability; if he was depressed by the knowledge that life there as he knew it was coming to end, he had his own avenues of escape. He loved birds and had made a study of the Lanner Falcon; he also knew how to make and use nose flutes. He made four or five a day out of old cigar cases, experimenting with the placing of the holes; sometimes, when I woke in the night, I heard him playing – an eerie, mournful, weeping sound like the crying of some strange bird.