A Matter of Time

by Alex Capus

  Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson had never envisaged such a career for himself. If there were any justice in the world he wouldn’t be sitting at the tiller of a steam launch but high up on the bridge of a battleship. In command of three or four hundred impeccably turned-out Royal Navy ratings, he would receive his orders from Winston Churchill in person and his ship would be cruising the world’s oceans at twenty-five knots. Instead of that he commanded a river steamer equipped with a little brass steam whistle - a boat that leaked from stem to stern, was probably no longer seaworthy and had been named the Rose sometime in the previous century. Spicer-Simson knew the Rose well, having piloted her from England to Africa himself. The boat had dealt him a first humiliation even on that voyage, because he couldn’t risk putting out into the Atlantic but had been obliged to creep along the canals of France to Marseille, whence he sailed via Gibraltar and Dakar to Bathurst in the Gambia, carefully hugging the coast all the way. Once there he had installed his wife Amy in a bungalow in the government quarter and proceeded to chart the course of the Gambia River on behalf of the British Admiralty and Merchant Marine. Nigh on a thousand days

  had gone by since then, and Spicer-Simson was still puttering along the brackish river. Instead of three or four hundred naval ratings, his crew consisted of four gangling young blacks dressed in rags, who spent the whole time laughing inanely and jabbering away in their incomprehensible Wolof, and two unshaven, fever-ridden Irishmen who had long since ceased to care about anything.

  Geoffrey Spicer-Simson was a well-built man with broad, sloping shoulders, pale grey eyes and close-cropped hair. He sported a short, regulation beard, and the deep lines around his nose and mouth were eloquent of bravely suppressed resentment. It was true that his professional career had not gone well. Just short of his thirty-eighth birthday, he could well have been the oldest lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy and had long been waiting for promotion. He had now stuck it out in the Gambia for nearly three years, and throughout that time he had never tired of seeking instructions from London by mail and sending them straight back to one or another Admiralty department. When important personages visited the colony he tried to buttonhole them, spending his days at the officers’ club and his nights at any social functions to which he could gain access. He was at pains to cut a dignified figure - with his superiors as a matter of course, with his subordinates doubly so. When conversing at dinner he forced himself not to fidget but rested all ten fingertips - not his palms - on the table top. He was forever enjoining himself not to open his eyes too wide when speaking, for only the lower deck did that. A true commander of men regarded the world and his subordinates with composure, beneath drooping lids, and spoke slowly, very slowly, not turning his head abruptly like a chicken. Spicer-Simson could not, however, resist indulging in certain whims that were bound to seem extremely eccentric in an officer of the British Crown. He was notorious for stripping to the waist on every possible and impossible occasion, thereby disclosing that the upper part of his body was elaborately tattooed with snakes, butterflies and pre-Christian buildings. He had adopted a regrettably nasal way of speaking, which he considered refined. On social occasions he would boast of his adventures in distant lands, tell bizarre jokes, and could seldom refrain from

  singing sea shanties off-key. An expert in every field, he was always ready and willing to share his pearls of wisdom with renowned authorities. The first seaman ever to have negotiated the Yangtse’s perilous rapids, he had charted its delta single-handed and given a tow to some junks that would never have made it without his assistance. While out East he had learnt fluent Chinese and survived all manner of skirmishes with Chinese pirates. He had discovered a huge goldmine in Canada and taught Melanesian cannibals the British national anthem, accompanied Roald Amundsen to the south pole and partaken of many a cup of tea at Buckingham Palace.

  Spicer-Simson’s whole demeanour conveyed a marked degree of esteem for his own person, which alternated with ever-recurring, agonizing bouts of self-doubt. He lived in the hope, if not the certainty, that he would one day perform some exploit so outstanding that it would distinguish him from all other mortals in the eyes of posterity. If there was a certain social insecurity about him in spite of all his braggadocio, it was because he suspected that not everyone was aware of his exceptional qualities. He sometimes strove to articulate the idea of a better way of life, but he couldn’t find words to express it. This feeling of impotence made him angry, and he vented his anger on defenceless waiters and servants. The malicious pleasure he derived from doing so was succeeded by bitter remorse and an even more ardent desire to perform some great and exalted feat.

  But of this his superiors knew nothing. All they saw was the tattooed line-shooter, so all Spicer-Simson’s efforts came to naught and he was passed over for promotion time and time again. Although he attributed these persistent failures to despotism and nepotism on the part of his superiors, he could not ignore the fact that he had committed one or two pretty serious blunders in the course of his naval career, which would soon have spanned twenty years. In 1905, for example, while on manoeuvres in the English Channel, he had had the idea of fishing for submarines with a steel cable suspended between two destroyers. In the event, a periscope actually caught in the cable and the submarine it belonged to - a British submarine, not an enemy vessel - almost went to the bottom. On

  another occasion he ran his ship aground while trying to test the harbour defences at Portsmouth. This earned him his first court martial. He was reprimanded a second time when he rammed a liberty boat with his destroyer and several sailors lost their lives, so his posting to the Gambia in 1911 with the title ‘Director, Hydrographic Survey’ was less like promotion than a sentence of exile. What underlined this was that it was clear from the outset that his cartographic measurements would never be of any economic or military value. The Gambia River led straight through mangrove swamps from the Atlantic Ocean to the inhospitable wastes of the Sahel Belt, into which few Europeans ever strayed. The only river traffic apart from native craft consisted of a few rubber steamers, and even they had disappeared since the end of the rubber boom. SpicerSimson endured his futile occupation with true naval fortitude, puttered up and down the river for three or four weeks at a time, and then spent a week relaxing at his wife’s bungalow at Bathurst, forever hoping that he would someday be recalled to London.

  2

  Bitter Honey

  when anton ruter arrived in Dar-es-Salaam the only natural phenomenon in German East Africa that really made an impression on him was the Governors wife. He tried to conceal his disappointment, but there was no denying it: up to now the journey had been unspectacular, not to say boring. Travelling from Papenburg to Marseille in overheated trains with misted-up windows had been an ordeal. So had the crossing of the murky, wintry Mediterranean in the imperial mailboat Feldmarschall, whose hold was piled high with the first nine hundred crates containing the Gotzeris components. There were only a few passengers on board, and they all kept to their cabins because it rained and the ship pitched and tossed violently the whole time. At Port Said the Feldmarschall made a stop for coal, and halfway down the Suez Canal the cold of winter was replaced, from one hour to the next, by tropical heat. In the Red Sea the ship was escorted by dolphins whose cabrioles provided some entertainment, and there were occasional glimpses of the dark shapes of turtles put to flight by the ship’s engines. When the rain stopped, as it did from time to time, the three Papenburgers lolled in their deckchairs on the sun deck, gazing at the oily sea and the dark, monotonous African coastline.

  On 10 January 1914, when the ship left the spice island of Zanzibar behind her and finally headed west towards the mainland, passing Bagamoyo, the ancient Arab seaport and destination of countless slave and ivory caravans from the innermost depths of Africa, whose marketplace had in earlier times been a meeting place for Masai, Swahili and Bantu kings, Arab traders from Jidda, shipwrights from Kuwait, spice merchants from Bomb
ay and pirates from Shanghai - in short, when the

  Feldmarschall safely negotiated the gap in the reef and steamed into the bay of Dar-es-Salaam, 500 miles south of the equator, that too proved a disappointment. What Anton Ruter saw was a narrow strip of damp, sandy shore that ran around the bay in a wide arc, fringed by a long row of coconut palms with a handful of colonial buildings peeping from between them. But no dragons grazed among them, no fire-spewing volcanoes loomed behind them, and no second sun made a sudden appearance in the sky to neutralize the pull of the earths gravity. No Chinese junks or Arab dhows lay at anchor there, only the British merchantman Sheffield cheek by jowl with the grey, rain-streaked German cruiser Konigsberg, her gun turrets carefully shrouded in tarpaulins to protect them from the incessant downpour. Also to be seen were the huts of the customs authorities with their rusty corrugated-iron roofs, on which the rain beat an ear-splitting tattoo. The tracks were black with sludge from all the coal that got spilt on its way to the bunkers day after day.

  When the Feldmarschall came alongside the landing stage and the sailors threw out the mooring ropes, Anton Ruter stood beside the rail, watching the proceedings and marvelling at how familiar everything seemed. All that was novel and unfamiliar was the sweltering heat, the stifling humidity, and the fact that everything he touched was hot. The rail was hot. When he stepped back and leant against the steel bulkhead, that too was hot. Everything inside his cabin was hot with a vengeance. His toothpaste was hot. The water from the cold-water tap was hot. The bedclothes and pillow were hot and eternally damp with his sweat. The air he breathed was hot. The sea water with which the ship’s boys scrubbed the deck was hot. Even the rain was hot. Ruter suspected that nothing in the world around him would be cool for quite a while. He would soon discover that, in the tropics, not even the dead cooled down before the flesh fell off their bones. Equally novel and unfamiliar was the sweat that streamed down him - from his forehead into his eyes, down his cheeks into the corners of his mouth, off his chin onto his chest, and down his chest into his navel, where it collected before trickling down his stomach and thighs and into his shoes. Even the briefest little stroll on deck brought him to the brink of exhaustion - even unfolding and

  refolding his marine blueprints was physically demanding. But none of this possessed any exotic charm. It wasn’t romantic, just unpleasant.

  Stevedores secured the hawsers to the bollards, ran out the gangway and took receipt of the first pieces of baggage. Suddenly a military command rang out, followed by a clatter of boots and another shouted order. Drawn up on either side of the landing stage, two white NCOs and twelve askaris, or native soldiers, presented arms in the pouring rain. They were dripping wet and wore khaki drill uniforms, blue puttees and red fezzes adorned with white imperial eagles. Riiter was fascinated. The only blacks he had ever seen to date appeared in effigy on cocoa tins or on the collecting boxes of the Catholic mission to Africa. He had almost seen one in the flesh at Oldenburg’s regional exhibition in summer 1905, at which some Somali warriors had danced and sang, but the president of the Papenburg Gymnastics Club had fallen into the Japanese pool full of kobu fish and half the junior team had sicked up their rancid strawberry ices, so they’d forgone the Somali warriors and cut their visit short.

  There followed five minutes during which the medical officer, the port authorities and some hotel porters came hurrying aboard the Feldmarschall. When Anton Riiter redirected his attention to the blacks on the jetty, he discovered that they weren’t black at all but brown - not a particularly dark shade of brown, either - and that their appearance, once you’d got used to the colour of their skin, was far from exotic and quite ordinary. They weren’t performing any odd or outlandish procedures but handling ropes and toting crates and sacks like stevedores in harbours the world over. And the native soldiers weren’t drumming on their breasts with their fists, rolling their eyes or sticking out tongues adorned with tattoos. They were obediently standing at attention in the rain, looking as surly as soldiers tend to do, under the hawk-eyed gaze of their two red-faced corporals, whose names were probably Schmidt or Finkelhuber.

  So none of this was out of the ordinary, but... Five paces in front of the soldiers, also in the teeming rain, stood the Governor’s wife. With her left hand she was twirling her white parasol, from the rim of which raindrops were flying off in all directions, and with her right hand, which

  was raised, she was waving to the ship’s bridge. Riiter had never in his life seen such a creature - such an apparition of positively preternatural whiteness. Beneath her cartwheel-sized, snow-white hat, which had a pretty little bunch of white flowers stuck in its pink ribbon, two forgetme-not-blue eyes beamed at him from a soft, plump, milk-white face. Her smiling, pale pink lips were parted to reveal delicious little teeth like a string of pearls, and when she called something to the new arrivals through the rain, her neck developed a womanly little double chin. At the same time, Riiter glimpsed the tip of a rose-red tongue between her teeth. It occurred to him that courtesy demanded a response, so he raised his hand in greeting, whereupon Wendt and Tellmann, who had meanwhile joined him at the rail, followed his example. When he asked whether they had understood what the woman had called to them, they didn’t answer but went on gazing down at her. And when he repeated the question not only once but twice, young Wendt growled ‘Does it matter?’ out of the corner of his mouth. The woman was wearing a white linen gown that clung to her pneumatic hips, as luminescent as if the skirt harboured some mysterious light source. Visible above the bodice was a plump, snow-white cleavage, shimmering below the hem were a pair of white stockings, and her feet were shod in white silk shoes that had remained miraculously unbesmirched by the black mud beneath them. The three shipwrights stood there transfixed. They had never seen such a creature - such a woman, if she really was one - in all their lives. There was nothing of the kind in Papenburg.

  To crown everything, the snow-white apparition’s name was Schnee, Ada Schnee, nee Burlington, and she had grown up in New Zealand as the daughter of an Anglo-Irish sheep farmer.

  Beside her, two parasol-widths away beneath a black umbrella, stood her husband Heinrich Schnee, doctor of law, Imperial Governor of German East Africa, and, for the past two years, the colony’s supreme civil and military authority. A gaunt little man, he was attired in a black, gold-braided tunic and white trousers with red stripes. The officer’s sword at his side was far too long, so the tip of the scabbard almost brushed the concrete jetty. He was about the same height as his wife, possibly a trifle

  shorter or taller - it was hard to tell because he was wearing a cloth-covered cork sun helmet. The helmet was dyed golden-yellow in token of his official status and tipped with a gilded metal spike. Only forty-three years old, Schnee made a youthfully spry and wiry impression when seen from a distance, but closer inspection made it clear that he had aged prematurely like many Europeans resident in the tropics. His features were set in a rigid, formal expression, his lips were thin, his moustache looked as if it had been stuck to his lip for fun, and his neck was lined and leathery. When he offered his wife his arm prior to welcoming the Feldmarschalfc passengers at her side, he did so with the stiff courtesy of a well-preserved pensioner; and when he greeted the three shipwrights from Papenburg his address of welcome sounded studiously clipped and, at the same time, shy and hesitant, as if he were afraid the youngsters would laugh at his patriarchal mode of expression. The Papenburgers, who did not consider themselves youngsters for one thing and would never have dreamed of laughing at His Excellency for another, cleared their throats and replied in turn, combining their words of thanks with clumsy and inarticulate references to the trouble-free way in which the voyage had gone. Standing there with the rain beating down, the four men would never have surmounted the awkward silence that ensued if the Governor s wife hadn t sprung to their rescue. With a rippling laugh, she suggested that the gentlemen continue their conversation in the drawing room of the governors residence, where it was nic
e and dry and some light refreshments awaited them. She set her husband in motion with a flicker of an eyelid and encouraged Tellmann to follow him by touching him lightly on the elbow. Then she gave Riiter an enchanting smile and treated young Wendt to a glance that lingered on his face one well-calculated but almost imperceptible second too long, whereupon the two men set off up the white cement steps to the harbour road. The native soldiers and their corporals followed at a distance while the FeldmarschalTs derrick was swaying the first of nine hundred crates ashore. On her way up the steps the Governor s wife plied her guests with some interesting details about the new floating dock out in the roads, speaking German with a delightful English accent suggestive of dainty china tea services and picnics on lush green lawns. On reaching

  the top she extended her left arm with the grace of a ballerina, indicated a long, low warehouse near the railway station, and said:

  ‘We shall be storing the parts of your ship in that warehouse until you move on to Lake Tanganyika. You realize you’ll be keeping us company for a while?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Riiter.

  ‘You’re going to have to spend a few days here in Dar-es-Salaam. You’ll be staying at the Hotel Kaiserhof, near the governor’s residence.’

  ‘Very kind of you, Your Excellency,’ said Riiter, ‘but our orders are to proceed without delay to - ’

  ‘You’re planning to escape me?’ The Governor’s wife gave another rippling laugh. ‘You won’t succeed, I’m afraid the railway line isn’t finished yet. They still haven’t laid the last ten kilometres to the lake. You’ll have to put up with our company for two or three weeks, come what may.’

  At that moment, as if someone had turned off a tap, the rain ceased. A swiftly expanding patch of blue appeared in the overcast sky and the sun shone vertically down, its rays creating a delightful contrast between the red of the acacia blossoms and the gleaming white of the administration buildings. It was early afternoon, the drowsiest time of day. An ox cart was hauling a load of stones into town, an almost naked old woman carrying a bundle of brushwood in the opposite direction, a white-robed Arab whipping his donkey.