Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  In his profession, the Kommandant had to agree it very often was, but he couldn’t see the relevance in the case of a man who had several prison sentences behind him. He felt himself once more succumbing not only to deference but also to a sense of unease that Miss Hazelstone’s conversation seemed to induce in him.

  ‘I never suffered from the same weakness,’ Miss Hazelstone continued primly. ‘If anything, I had difficulty finding anything to do that wasn’t depressingly good. Like the Devil, I too have felt how awful goodness is. So boring, but I daresay you don’t have the same opportunity for being nauseated by it.’

  ‘I daresay you’re right,’ said the Kommandant whose feeling of nausea sprang from quite different causes.

  ‘As you must have gathered, I have done my best to bring a little gaiety into my life,’ Miss Hazelstone went on. ‘I write for the papers, you know.’

  Kommandant van Heerden knew only too well.

  ‘A little column every now and then on fashion and tasteful living.’

  ‘I have read some of your articles,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘I do hope you didn’t follow my advice,’ Miss Hazelstone went on. ‘They were written with my tongue in my cheek, and I had great fun thinking up the most awful combinations of colours. Everybody took my recommendations seriously too. I think I can honestly say that I have made more homes unliveable in than all the termites in South Africa.’

  Kommandant van Heerden gaped at her. ‘Why on earth should you want to do that?’ he asked.

  ‘A sense of moral duty,’ Miss Hazelstone murmured. ‘My brother has given his life to spread light and goodness, I have merely sought to redress the balance. If people choose to follow my advice to put maroon wallpaper next to orange curtains, who am I to say them nay? People who believe that having a pink skin makes them civilized, while having a black one makes a man a savage, will believe anything.’

  ‘You mean to say you don’t believe in apartheid?’ the Kommandant asked in astonishment.

  ‘Really, Kommandant, what a silly question,’ Miss Hazelstone replied. ‘Do I behave as though I believed in it?’

  Kommandant van Heerden had to admit that she didn’t.

  ‘You can’t live with a Zulu for eight years and still believe in segregation,’ Miss Hazelstone went on. ‘As a matter of fact, the films I have just been looking at are ones I took of Fivepence. I wonder if you would care to see one.’

  Kommandant van Heerden hesitated. What he had already seen of the cook didn’t dispose him to want to see any more.

  ‘I admire your delicacy of feeling,’ Miss Hazelstone said, ‘but you need not hesitate. I don’t in the least mind sharing my memories with you,’ and she started the projector.

  A moment later the Kommandant saw on a screen at the far end of the room, the object of Miss Hazelstone’s passion, moving about the garden of Jacaranda House as it had been in the summer some years before. The film had been shot from the same angle and in the same corner of the garden as had its actor nearly a decade later. At first sight the Kommandant had the illusion that there had been no murder and that he had dreamt the events of the preceding days. It was an illusion that did not last. As the image of Fivepence grew larger on the screen, the Kommandant decided that he preferred the reality he had known to the fantastic scene he was now witnessing. There had, he noted, been something almost healthy about the corpse of Fivepence. Living, the Zulu cook had quite clearly been diseased.

  Tall and heavily built, he cavorted about the lawn like some appalling black nymph, and paused a moment to caress the bust of Sir Theophilus before kissing it passionately upon its unresponding mouth. Then he was off again, flitting about the garden and displaying his repulsive charms in a series of swirls and flounces designed to show off his garments to their very worst advantage. He was wearing a very short crimson frock trimmed with violet: as the Kommandant might have anticipated, it was made of rubber. As Fivepence executed his last pirouette and ended his performance with a curtsy, the Kommandant understood why Miss Hazelstone had murdered him. If the film was anything to go by, he had asked for it.

  The film ended and Miss Hazelstone switched off the projector. ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘I can see why you shot him,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘You can see nothing,’ Miss Hazelstone snapped. ‘What you have just seen appears to your crude mind to be quite horrible. To me it is beautiful.’ She paused. ‘That is life, a black man pretending to be a white woman, dancing steps of a ballet he has never seen, dressed in clothes made of a material totally unsuited to a hot climate on a lawn which was imported from England, and kissing the stone face of a man who destroyed his nation, filmed by a woman who is widely regarded as the arbiter of good taste. Nothing could better express the quality of life in South Africa.’

  Kommandant van Heerden was about to say that he didn’t think she was very patriotic, when Miss Hazelstone stood up.

  ‘I’ll get my suitcase. I have one packed ready,’ she said, and was moving towards the door when a dark shape hurtled through the french windows and threw her to the ground.

  It had taken Konstabel Els some time to locate the body of the Dobermann in the darkness, and in the end he had been guided more by smell than sight to the rubbish dump behind the house where Miss Hazelstone had deposited the dog. Carrying it carefully Els went back to the car and put the body in the boot. He climbed in and started the engine, and drove slowly off thankful that the Kommandant had not woken. It wasn’t until he had got halfway down the hill into town that the absence of snores from the back led him to realize that he had been mistaken.

  With a curse he turned the car and headed back to the Park. He stopped in the drive and looked about. Kommandant van Heerden was nowhere to be seen. Els left the car and walked round the house and found himself looking into the lighted drawing-room where the Kommandant and Miss Hazelstone were talking. In the darkness Els wondered what the hell was going on. ‘The sly old devil,’ he thought to himself at last. ‘No wonder he wouldn’t give me permission to come up here,’ and Els began to think he understood how it was that the Kommandant should be sitting chatting in a very friendly way with a woman who had a reward on her head. He knew now why the Kommandant had been so eager to pin the murder of Fivepence on Jonathan Hazelstone.

  ‘The old sod’s courting her,’ he thought, and a new respect for the Kommandant grew in Konstabel Els’ mind. His own courtships were always accompanied by threats of violence or blackmail and it seemed obvious that the Kommandant, whose own lack of charm almost equalled that of Els, would have to employ pretty drastic methods to make himself at all attractive to a woman of Miss Hazelstone’s wealth and social standing.

  ‘He goes and arrests her brother for murder, and then puts a price on the old bag’s head. What a way to get a dowry,’ Els exclaimed, and immediately thought how he could forestall the plan. With a rush he was across the lawn and into the room. As he hurled himself on the Kommandant’s fiancée he yelled, ‘I claim the reward. I captured her,’ and from the floor looked up and wondered why the Kommandant was looking so relieved.

  16

  To Kommandant van Heerden the transition of Miss Hazelstone from the mistress of Jacaranda House to the inmate of Fort Rapier Mental Hospital was a sad affair. As he watched the stretcher on which the old lady lay carried for the last time past the portraits of her ancestors in the fern-infested hall, he knew that an epoch was ending. No longer would Jacaranda House stand supreme in the eyes of Zululand society, the symbol of all that was best in the British occupation of Africa and an emblem of an aristocratic way of life. No more garden parties, no more grand balls, no more of those dinner parties for which Miss Hazelstone had such a reputation, nothing of importance would happen within these walls. The house would stand empty and sepulchral until the white ants or the demolition men cleared it away to make room for a new suburb. As Kommandant van Heerden turned off the lights and the house stood dark under the moon, he was filled with a great se
nse of loss. The old arrogance on which he had relied to sharpen his servility was gone. He was a free man, and the architect of his own freedom. It was the last thing that he wanted.

  It was a cortège which passed up the drive and out the contorted gates, a funeral cortège of motor cycles and police cars accompanying the ambulance in which Miss Hazelstone slept the sleep of the heavily sedated. In the driver’s seat of the leading car sat Konstabel Els, happy in the knowledge that he had earned his just reward, and behind him in the darkness Kommandant van Heerden wondered at the strangeness of fate which had made a creature like Els the instrument of the fall of the house of Hazelstone.

  It was not as if Els was clever, the Kommandant thought, as the procession wound its way through the unlighted streets of Piemburg, nor was there anything vaguely intentional about his activities which would explain their effect. Els was merely chance, random and trivial in its ways.

  ‘Entropy made man,’ the Kommandant said to himself, and opened the window. The car had begun to smell quite intolerable.

  ‘Els,’ said the Kommandant, ‘you need a bath.’

  ‘Me, sir?’ said Els.

  ‘You, Els. You stink.’

  ‘Not me, sir. That’s Toby.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Toby?’

  ‘The Dobermann, sir. He’s a bit high.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got the carcase of a rotting dog in the car?’ shouted the Kommandant.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ said Els. ‘He’s in the boot.’

  The Kommandant was about to say that he wasn’t going to share his car with a putrefying Dobermann, when they passed through the gates of Fort Rapier and drove up the drive to the Hospital.

  In the moonlight the buildings of Fort Rapier looked much as they had done when the garrison occupied the barracks. A few bars had been added here and there to convert an establishment which had been designed to keep people out into one that served to keep them in, but the atmosphere had not altered. Irrationality had kept its hold on the place.

  ‘Old traditions die hard,’ the Kommandant thought as the car stopped at the edge of the parade ground. He stepped out and patted a field gun that had once seen service at Paardeberg where his grandfather had slept through its bombardment and which now stood like an iron pensioner overlooking the lunacies of another generation.

  While Miss Hazelstone was taken into a ward reserved for the criminally insane, Kommandant van Heerden explained her case to the Superintendent, Dr Herzog, who had been summoned from his bed to deal with the case.

  ‘Couldn’t you have waited till morning?’ he asked grumpily. ‘I didn’t get to bed until one.’

  ‘I haven’t been to bed at all,’ said the Kommandant, ‘and in any case this is an emergency. Miss Hazelstone is something of a celebrity and her committal may arouse public comment.’

  ‘She certainly is, and it certainly will,’ said the doctor. ‘She happens to be the chief benefactress of this hospital.’

  ‘She has evidently been providing for her own future which will be to remain here until she decides to die,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Who has diagnosed her?’ asked Dr Herzog.

  ‘I have,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were qualified to.’

  ‘I know a criminal lunatic when I see one. The police surgeon and her own doctor will be up in the morning, and committal papers will arrive in due course.’

  ‘It seems rather irregular,’ said the doctor.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it is irregular,’ said the Kommandant. ‘But if you really want to know, we have pretty incontrovertible evidence that she has murdered someone. I won’t go into details but I can assure you that we have enough evidence to have her tried for murder. I think you understand that the trial of such a prominent person would not be in the public interest.’

  ‘Good God,’ said the doctor, ‘what is Zululand coming to? First her brother and now Miss Hazelstone.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the Kommandant. ‘It’s a reflection on our times.’

  Having ensured that Miss Hazelstone would be allowed no visitors and that she would have no access to the Press or to her lawyers, the Kommandant took his leave. Dawn had broken when he crossed the great parade ground, and a few grey figures had emerged from the wards and were shuffling about sadly in the early sunlight.

  ‘To think it had to end like this,’ the Kommandant thought and his mind dwelt not so much on Miss Hazelstone as on the Imperial splendour that had once marched red-coated and supreme across the square. He stood for a moment imagining the regiments that had passed the saluting base on which Miss Hazelstone’s grandfather had stood before going to their deaths on Majuba Hill and Spion Kop and then he turned away and climbed into his reeking car.

  When Miss Hazelstone woke to find herself in bed in a ward, she had difficulty understanding where she was. The decor and the row of beds brought back to her memories of her boarding school but her companions were hardly the gay carefree girls of her youth. Not that they were really gay, she thought lying back and studying the ceiling, merely expectant, which passed for gaiety. There was nothing remotely gay or expectant about the figures she could see now. Withdrawn into remote provinces of their own imaginations the patients wandered listlessly among the obstacles presented by reality. Miss Hazelstone looked at them and was tempted to follow their example. Only a sense of pride prevented her. ‘Such lack of style,’ she said to herself, and sitting on the edge of her bed looked round for her clothes.

  In the days that followed she clung grimly to her arrogance, firmly rejecting the unreal worlds the other patients pressed on her.

  ‘You may be,’ she told a patient who introduced himself as Napoleon, ‘though I doubt it. I am Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda House,’ and even the staff learnt that it was unwise to address her simply as Hazelstone.

  ‘Miss Hazelstone to you,’ she snapped at a sister who made the mistake.

  ‘One must keep up appearances,’ she told Dr von Blimenstein, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to deal with the new patient, and who was trying vainly to get Miss Hazelstone to recognize the sexual origins of her illness. Dr von Blimenstein was so wildly eclectic in her approach that it was difficult to tell which school of psychology she most favoured. She was known to prescribe electric-shock therapy in unlimited doses to the black patients, but with whites placed particular stress on sexual guilt as the cause of psychoses. She was so successful in this approach that she had once even managed to cure a keeper at the Durban Snake Park of his anxiety neurosis about snakes. His phobia had, he claimed, been brought on by his having been bitten on forty-eight separate occasions by snakes as venomous and varied as puff-adders, cobras, Gabon vipers, ringhals and asps, each of which had brought him to the verge of death. Dr von Blimenstein had convinced the poor man that his fears were purely sexual in origin and resulted from a feeling of inadequacy brought on by the realization that his penis was neither so long nor so potent as a mature python and had sent him back to work at the Snake Park where three weeks later he had been bitten, this time with fatal results, by a black mamba whose length he had been trying to measure by comparing it with his own erect member which he knew to be six inches long. ‘Nine feet three inches,’ he had just concluded, laying the mamba’s head against his glans penis. It was practically the last thing he could conclude, as the mamba with a ferocity fully justified by the absurd comparison plunged its fangs into its symbolic counterpart. After that Dr von Blimenstein had turned away from psychoanalysis and had favoured a more behaviourist approach.

  With Miss Hazelstone she decided there was no danger of such tragic results and she had encouraged the patient to record her dreams so that these could be examined for the symbolic meaning which would explain all her problems. The trouble was that Miss Hazelstone never dreamt and the concocted dreams that she supplied the doctor with were down-to-earth in the extreme. They were for one thing punctuated with phalluses and vaginas which no amount of symbolic inte
rpretation could turn into anything else.

  ‘How about snakes, or steeples?’ Miss Hazelstone inquired when the doctor explained how difficult it was.

  ‘I’ve never heard of people having dreams about penises before,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Probably wish-fulfilment dreams,’ Miss Hazelstone said and went on to describe a dream in which a creature called Els had struggled with a black dog on a lawn.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said von Blimenstein, ‘absolutely archetypal,’ and had begun to talk about the Shadow struggling with Instinctual Libido.

  ‘Yes, it struck me like that at the time,’ said Miss Hazelstone cryptically. After several weeks of these dreams the doctor had begun to think she would be able to write a monograph on ‘The Policeman Archetype in South African Psychology’ using this material.

  For Miss Hazelstone these interviews provided a break from the boredom of life in Fort Rapier.

  ‘Madness is so monotonous,’ she told the doctor. ‘You would think that fantasies would be more interesting, but really one has to conclude that insanity is a poor substitute for reality.’

  Then again, when she looked around her, there didn’t seem to be any significant difference between life in the mental hospital and life in South Africa as a whole. Black madmen did all the work, while white lunatics lounged about imagining they were God.

  ‘I’m sure the Almighty has more dignity,’ Miss Hazelstone said to herself, as she watched the shuffling figures moving aimlessly about the grounds. ‘And I’m sure He hasn’t delusions of grandeur.’

  *

  The news that his sister had finally been found and was now an inmate in Fort Rapier Mental Hospital came as no surprise to the Bishop of Barotseland.

  ‘She was never very sane,’ he told the Kommandant who came to see him personally to break the news, and demonstrated once more that lack of family loyalty the Kommandant found so deplorable in one who belonged to such an illustrious line, by adding, ‘The best place for her. She should have been certified years ago.’ The Bishop was shedding all his illusions, it seemed, and certainly he had ceased to feel kindly towards his sister and had stopped thinking she was merely mildly eccentric.