WHAT MAN PROPOSES
Serials 1 - 8
Cover blurb
“Obscurity, bane of my life, my foil, my folly, my fate...As a public servant I’m a component on a conveyor belt. I’m reassigned and recycled and someday the department will retire me. That’s a problem. That’s deadly to my peace of mind...That’s what triggered my way to die.”
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At the tail end of a colonial career and amid insurgency heralding white rule giving way to black, Mockford is stuck in the back of beyond. Spurious demigods like his colleagues will someday be replaced by a new lot who won’t know that “personable and popular Ol Mocky ever existed.” To leave a permanent memorial he plots a macabre way to end his life, though events run counter to plan. Instead of heroic status he’s arraigned for treason. Fate can’t be cheated though his efforts to do so are not in vain. Mockford gets the indelible legacy he craved, though infamy was the card fate dealt him.
Chapter 1
Sour grapes have nothing to do with it. Careers that evade the flop are less common than albino rats. Point me to young ambition graduating to geriatric fruition and I’ll point you to quirky bookkeepers. A convicted realist like me never looks through rose-tinted eyeballs. If some emotional baggage leaks from the account you’re about to read it’s not to convey a washed up crony who failed to make the grade. Yes, admittedly, Administrator Grade 2 in the service code is not the height of attainment. As for my final post in the hinterland of doomed Rhodesia, that’s nothing to celebrate either. My gripe and tangled innards are symptomatic of a disgruntlement more complex than humble bitterness. Half of it is traceable to an adolescent trick that wasn’t noteworthy enough for anyone to note – aside from a seamstress pins-in-mouth mother who told me I had ‘ants in my pants.’
A parent who penetrates schoolboy hang-ups is asking to be shocked by a looming fiasco. As it happened my mother was at the end of a salacious grapevine to hear of my father’s indiscreet fling with a commercial traveller who’d been stealing from him. I have to suppose that the proprietor of a candy shop in the swanky “Lanes” precinct of Brighton where exorbitant trinkets, boutiques and buskers cohabit, could allure a reasonably attractive working woman. The Brighton of the 50’s had yet to meet its downgraded fate as a crass Mecca for Bank holiday crowds from London and language school hangout for teens from the continent. There weren’t pinball machines on the Palace Pier nor did cod and chips consumed from newspaper have to compete with Indian and Chinese takeout kiosks. One might in those digressive days claim that Brighton was a resort without being facetious.
After the amicable split up three siblings skipped the awkward adolescent syndrome prognosticated for broken homes. With not a sigh or tear we transitioned to being raised by seperated parents in two households. Father’s candy emporium had a lot to do with such adaptability. In terms of popularity at school you might say that the shop was a gift that kept on giving. Consumable though out of date or damaged marzipan fruits, Belgian chocolate, Cornish fudge, Turkish locum, Montelimar nougat, Brighton rock and glace fruits from the Cape took up the back quarter of our garage, evicting a sea-rusted Morris station wagon to the brick driveway. Second road up from the Saltdean seafront, the unremarkable and ramshackle Mockford homestead looked across the Channel to France. Situated midway between the shop in Brighton and the ferry in Newhaven, it made commercial sense to live there for a businessman who brought delectables over from Calais and Ostend.
Mother’s “ants” critique cuts me harder now that I’m older than she lived to be. A congenital itch to go to B when you’re at A, and to C after you’ve got to B does not bode well for stability of character. I believe her comment was provoked by my plaintive begging to go to Charterhouse after my father, who would jump through burning hoops to deliver my uncanny whims, had got me into Lancing. The business was prospering, and my grades at a Brighton crammer weren’t bad enough to cancel a feral aptitude on the sports field. Don’t ask why boarding school caught my fevered fancy. I mean, what’s to like about sleeping in a uniform bed in a uniform dorm, speak a uniform vocabulary (topping! sneak!) in a uniform accent. To the extent that I knew the workings of my butterfly mind, I believe what took its fancy was the cadence it heard when I spoke the precocious words, ‘public school’; on top of which architecture and landscaping, Corinthian corridors, old stone, warm comradeship and cold snobbery mingled like whisky and Devon cream in Irish coffee.
Yes, I was a creep and ingrate for letting wander-lust curtail a dream come true. The pathetic fact is that during midterm hols, in my second year, a test match report told me that the England skipper was a product of Charterhouse. One might suppose that in my delirious content I would imbibe such underwhelming detail with a mental yawn. As pull effects go this one couldn’t be more petty and self-inflicted. A push effect therefore had to be trumped up to give the pull some plausibility. Here a cantankerous house master came to the rescue. The delicate Etonian who wore frameless spectacles perched on a little beak nose, had brittle shoulders belying a massive chip to which he vicariously treated me. I blame this pathetic specimen for my zany cover-up of a psychotic urge to swap a perfectly good school for another.
There are mothers who can tell off a son without telling him off. “Ants in the pants, Bertie,” mine said tousling my Vitalis hair. I actually began to put a hand down into my boxers. “It means unable to be still”, she said making a fish mouth. My father gave the idea his tight lipped treatment behind which I knew he was prepping to do what could be done about changing my school. Then fate took over. The shop went through a bad patch just then. Foul weather ruined the summer season; he couldn’t afford even my Lancing fees, and I completed my schooling back at the crammer. It set a life pattern: angst, false move, stymied predicament.
A cautionary note if my behaviour pattern is to be understood. The “ants” were inconspicuous to all but mother, and I did not always obey when they bit. Only near the end of a chequered career (euphemistic camouflage for ‘failed’) I began to grasp the goings on in my tight pugnacious gut. It nipped like a crab’s claw. As poignant as it was pathetic, I was scared stiff of being expendable. No – not in terms of record keeping skills but in the horrific sense of being extinguishable in the memory of people. I remember with what anguish I departed boarding school life one grey autumn afternoon. From the oaks I surveyed animated rugby fields reverberating with sharp orders and shrill whistle blows before I stole back to my house to take a last look at the now deserted dorm. Down the passage Petula Clark bellowed “Down Town” on a transistor radio. “When you’re alone and have nowhere to go...” The pit of my taught stomach dropped when I thought what the place would be like minus ‘Mockers’ (a nickname not transferrable to a government school ). Likeability is a double edged sword. The more liked the more one had to lose when it came to moving on. ...And on until it would be my turn for that anaesthetic from which none come around. Just how long will my persona survive? That’s where the traitor lived, the house nearest the club. He would tell these completely indecent stories...’ So long as there were people who’d known me so long would Bertram Mockford be mentionable. And that’s a problem. Public servants are a transitory lot. New intakes erase will erase memory of a cantankerous official. A canine impulse to leave my mark drove me to it. Obscurity – curse of my life, my foil, my folly, my fate! Well....I came to manhood and middle age no worse put together than the next moody and ambivalent fellow. That’s a miracle by itself.
*
The prisoner car has stopped yards short of the platform signboard. I burn my forehead on hot window bars trying to read the name in broken-up syllables. M- re-wa. A branchline station. Mrewa: a trading village in the Mangwenda tribal trust lands. Native population 78, white population 6. As a bean counter my head keeps out of date facts and stats like a dusty and discarded yearbook. Someone just cleared his throat in the car before mine. No one’s got off and there’s not a soul on the baking platform to get on. I swallow a mouthful of tepid train water, my knees pressed up to the metal sink, my splayed inner thighs scalded by the cracked leather bunk. I pump a second mouthful, swallowing avidly as if it would restore freedom. It would take holy water to obliterate the dull foreboding that’s been with me since I was apprehended, cuffed and bundled into the back of an army Landrover,
The mostly empty train, all windows down, all make belief gone that I entrained not for the holding cells under the High Court in Bulawayo, but on a work detail or to the Falls on a fishing excursion. God, how loathsome it all is! Could I really have.. Could I really....No, it’s nonsensical. I can find no words to give voice to my filthy predicament. A sense of loathing began to sicken me the moment the shock wore off. Another wrong move and I land on the finish block of life’s game board. That’s what started it, when I moved my counter to X after I dithered over moving it to Y. I think I can pinpoint my doom to certain hours of a certain dastardly day. Yes, I believe I can.
*
Why that Saturday was more loathsome than most. Knocking off at midday should not be a difficult privilege to appreciate; no one in his right mind grumbles at free time. In his right mind...Remove a disabling mental burden peppering a chronic querulous condition, substitute equanimity and lo and behold – I’d be a different and appreciative old sod off duty, active and productive. Where that would leave my doomed and beloved wife I’d need to think. She’s the placid domesticated one in our splendid isolation. Doris devotes herself to gardening. Our Landrover jalopy returns from her weekend sorties to Fort Vic laden with bulbs and cuttings, herb and vegetable seedlings, bags of verdant manure. When at home I let her arbitrate in her tolerable Shona, the frequent disputes between houseboy and cook, letting me kill time snoozing in the deckchair on the back patio before afternoon tennis at the club. I don’t play after our GP in Fort Vic diagnosed an erratic heartbeat. Still, I don’t dislike listening to and parrying the mediocre rubbish that’s club talk. This was before I lost the fabulous and fatuous weekend frame of mind. If not for my duties as club manager I’d escape with her. That’s the whole trouble: I’m not good when left to my own cranky devices. I need the bossiness and bustle of weekday work to feel positive and strong, though even then I’ve started being morbid. But I rave and ramble because I’m idle...Or is it I’m idle because I rave and ramble?
On that more than difficult Saturday I took my dyspepsia from the boy’s weekend curry to the deck chair from where clattering crockery and clunking cutlery in the lean-to scullery was about as much as I could take. The racket was bad enough. What was quite intolerable was how it seemed to belittle my thoughts and faecal reverie into which they frequently turn.
“Gladstone!” He can’t have heard. What the devil has he ever done to me to make me hate him? Tugging at the brim of Doris’ threadbare gardening bonnet I fooled myself that I’d take a nap. Suddenly I realized it wasn’t that... I really wanted to block out the servants’ shack, more particularly the peeling walls. Nothing to do with aesthetics – it was the idea of paperwork. It meant completing a Department of Works form and getting the DC to stamp it. Bureaucrats fiddling while Rome burns! The real bugbear was that I already had some personal paperwork in the system. The idea of launching more into it was too obscene for words. Eyes hard with defiance, I defied God to frustrate my application which was going to be our escape from what could be the last of my false moves. At times I feel I’m alone having God for a nemesis.
When the boy emerged he held his tin platter of meat and sudsa in outstretched arms as if to bring a sacrifice. Of course he had kicked open the screen door to the limit of the spring, leaving it to clang and re-clang behind him. Then he did the perverse and spiteful trick of padding by me, pretending I’m invisible, and eased his butt onto the waxed doorstep. Beneath my hat brim I threw a look towards the shack. I never could decide what to make of him, what was going through that tapered woollen head as he methodically masticated his meal. Treat him as comedy or threat? Anyway I thought, good luck to guerrillas (term used by London’s lying media for terrorists) getting him fired up to kill. My agitated foot on the dog’s prone belly had lulled her to sleep. By this time I was in a state of bemusement bordering on insanity. It was good that my head began to lull onto my chest, but the next minute tennis balls being knocked echoed from the over the hedge. “C’mon old boy”, I said in my gravelly dozing voice. Startled distempered eyes fixed on mine before the still sleek brown ridgeback stumbled upright. I gathered my own arthritic joints and followed her down to the broken fence marking the garden off with the club.
Chapter 2
Is there, I’ve had reason to wonder, something about the morbid or manly image I project that deters my sex from patronising me, but not women: they seem to get quite motherly and matronising to an extent that I can’t make my mind up to be offended or flattered. When Jane Collier, watching the game on court, greeted me with, “What’ve you done with Doris?” I took this impolite breeziness as a backhand compliment from the District Commissioner’s wife, and even returned it by calling off the dog; true to form it straightaway went sniffing at the Collier’s little shivery – breed. “Get you a drink?” sauntering over to the buma. “My darling thanks but one more game and I have to put out the grub.” So her question had been derogatory; Janet Collier was taking a snipe at my wife’s habitual escapades into town which everyone knew were really escapes.
From a tin bath of dry ice I selected a Tusker and snapped off the top with the opener tied to the bath handle. Under thatch the boma, supported by pitch-painted poles and beams had a bonfire pit in the cement floor for the Wednesday night ambivalent barbeque. Through leaping flames and crackling logs you bluffed yourself that it wasn’t a restive tribal reserve out there but a wild game reserve. “Nothing like the autumn sun,” I said putting my face up to be caressed by it, such vapid contentment compelling me to pour scorn on something.
“Good show,” I said pointing with the beer bottle, “Who was the taskmaster who got old whatsisname to mark the court properly?” “Don’t be funny. Winston’s gone home. John commandeered our garden boy. Goes to show, it wasn’t the paint dispenser thing after all. It’s the drinking that gives him the shakes.”
With a guttural concession I imbibed a panorama that never failed to uplift my direst mood. Mauve and orange bougainvillea cascading down thatch; banana palms backing and siding the tawny anthill sand tennis court; a strip of cultivated lawn; beach umbrella stuck through a hole in the green slatted table; and beyond the electrified fence some remaining Mopani and camelthorn trees masking the reality of irreversible erosion and deforestation.
True to form the District Commissioner, more energy than technique was bludgeoning a mixed doubles game to victory, oftentimes poaching the ball right off the racquet of his partner Claire Sturgeon. They were playing her husband Guy the Field Officer and Dolly McNeal, who in between operating the switchboard acted as the DC’s Secretary. Her husband District Officer Bill McNeal spent a lot of weekends in somewhat lax connubial circumstances hunting buck at a friend’s game ranch on the Savuti River twelve miles east on the Birchenough Bridge road.
The First Lady (appellation I gave the DC’s wife) now insolently skipped onto the issue her first greeting had skirted around, confident that my old world politeness would give her cool nosiness the liberty to poke a busy broom into my domestic and personal affairs. Those wide-set green eyes had a way not of boring into one but of excavating for passions – pathetic or emphatic. The unedifying fact was that her husband had let on that he made an application for which he saw no rhyme or reason, on my behalf. Caught between her cute poise and coarse meddling what choice did I have but, dog-eyed, make light of it? “It will be common knowledge so may as well...I have applied for a transfer and the DC is helping me. Your husband’s a good man.” Why it should make her crazily incensed I failed to understand at the time. “Darling, things aren’t really as bad as all that are they?” said the lady, letting her hard rest for a moment on my sleeve. “This is not everyone’s pick of stations, I confess, but... (looking at my lips). I mean you’ve been such a pet. It’s not as if you can right what’s wrong just by going...where?” I kept up my theatrical mannerism sensing the real cause and target of her fierce devotion, to bring out which I told the pet owner that there was a vacancy for a trainer on the cadet program in Bindura. By a spasmodic lunge at the ashtray she stubbed out a fleeting look of bemused ire and, displaying the elasticity of mind I anticipated, dumped her displeasure on my despised wife. “It takes a very good husband to make a sacrifice like that. I hope Doris thanks you for it.” I responded that I was acting out of enlightened self-interest – mine and Doris’. Much as I dislike disclosing it, my gloomy good looks have always reacted on possessive womanly instincts, but nonetheless it surprised me how Janet Collier degraded herself into jealousy of my making plans without thinking of her. About Doris and her unpopularity she seldom spoke – more seldom in fact than she did of my classy background testified by having written the Commonwealth Office exams, worked for a spell in Whitehall and transfer to Nairobi as quartermaster-general in the Kenyan Works department. It would have astonished her to learn that colleagues considered the unimpressive, in fact the regressive, latter part of her pet’s career and commiserated about her pet behind his back. She now frowned in struggling with the logic of my acts and plans, empathetically shaking her blond bobtail. “So it’s to be Bindura for just a year before you retire...Don’t say you scrapped the idea of buying a smallholding in the eastern highlands?”
“Hell no. Why should we.”A hand gesture on court saved us both trying to reconcile these conflicting statements. “That’s my signal,” she said resignedly. And smoothing the tennis frock over the golden thighs went to provision the tea table in the boma.
They came off court, the men prodding the ladies ahead. Bright faced and towelling his neck the DC was jubilant. We exchanged greetings very comfortably. His wife at the jugs said, “Orange squash, lemon squash? Dolly, Clair, Guy, John...? Dolly bubbling with victory said to her that it was a marvellous thing to have the DC back to form. “Not the slightest hint of elbow trouble.” “A marvel of primitive medicine,” said the DC with the mock grandeur and gusto appropriate for a man who governed a gargantuan district of indigenous peoples forever disputing and keeping tribal feuds alive. Guy the ass-licker Sturgeon turned to Janet Collier. “You knew your husband was taking muti?” She thereupon relayed the weird remedy for tennis elbow. A certain n’anga who cast the bone dices for a prominent chief to divine the cause of his bewitchment had given the DC some fruit and leaves from a Bloodwood tree to strap on his elbow at night. “It took under a week to fix what the physiotherapist couldn’t do with months of massage,” she laughed. The words ‘uncanny’ and ‘goes to show’ volleyed back and forth, followed by chitchat over n’angas who abused bone throwing for political incitement – utterly out of order seeing that the Hakata dice only represented the four human qualities of Manhood, Motherhood, Youth and Virginity. There ensued an interval for piling plates with oatmeal biscuits, seed cake and anchovy paste sandwiches. The avoidance of interest in the whereabouts of my wife became tangible. Never a man who could abide social etiquette I mischievously broke the barrier. “Oh, before I forget, Doris said tell everyone her niece was discharged from hospital and she’s helping her at home.” There was a shocked moment before Claire Sturgeon’s tactful, “All credit to Doris. In her shoes one would do the same.”
“But she’s not thinking of driving back tonight?”Dolly McNeal exclaimed.
“Doris do such a brainless thing – never!” said Janet Collier seeming to hint that she might be capable. Guy McNeal who had been studiously taciturn on the subject glanced at me with pitying condescension before launching into: “There are some who don’t want or seem to understand the risk....Putting lives on the line...Inviting trouble.... ” The mousy moustache, crew cut and more ginger growing out of different holes, radiated insolence. The appealing aspect was the clarity of what or who this was all about, and so the DC entering the fray met with chagrin on one side and glee on mine. The DC put on his official voice. “I can tell you as Chairman of the Civil Defence Committee that the For Vic road is under active surveillance. If you ask John du Ploy he’ll tell you what the police on their side are doing. The road’s our main artery and unless you hear from me to the contrary go on using it. That is the long and the short of it.”Putting down his plate he made the new foursome. “Janet, you and Guy, Dolly and me. Onto the court please.” It meant Claire Sturgeon was sitting out with a hyper-critical spectator, where she was concerned. I was casting the cold eye of an appraiser at Janet Collier’s slink rump as she bent to pick up a ball by the back fence when a fatuous remark interrupted my reflections. “Am I right – Doris is looking much better. She even seems to have put on a pound or two. “Could be....” With all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I conjured with the DC’s wife as a connubial prospect while deriding the appalling bore beside me, with legs like tree trunks and armpits like scabrous bogs. Believe it; the block of woman beside me exuded an all-too masculine BO. It was therefore with great relief that after no more than two games the Collier’s boy came to summon the DC to the radio, causing the Sturgeon stink bomb to go on court.
I had lit a fag, spoiled two sun drugged supine dogs and civilly savoured my delicious release when the DC’s Land Rover squealed to a stop on the upper road, from where a summons came. He must have stopped at the police camp considering the two sergeants with automatic weapons in the back. He sent me to tell the quartet on court to carry on and to hurry back. Invited along, I clambered up. The trouble spot was Gokwe; the village beerhall had burnt down early that morning. Could be accident, could be vandals, could be terrorists. No witnesses – believable ones, that is to say. The din of engine and rattle of body usurped the clamour of cicada beetles. The funnel of dust in our wake would take an interval to disperse upon which the beetle frenzy would be redoubled into, I imagined, a dire shriek at our disappearing wake: ‘At your own bombastic risk.’
I am a frank person. When upon leaving certain cells of my brain objected to the venture on vague grounds I silenced them, saying with unhappy clairvoyance, ‘I accept whatever the consequence, even if it means death.’ That my gallantry was about four parts in five illusion made it no less gallant for all that.
Gokwe was as Gokwe is, a village of 500 Africans and 40 whites, sitting plonk on the edge of the Mafungabusi Plateau, to the north the tribal reserve farmed at a subsistence level and
Some nebulous attempts at cattle raising. The white inhabitants of Gokwe were a mixed lot. Among them was the bank manager and his wife (popularly believed to be infected with Indian blood); a subordinate bank clerk; the owner of a tannery who described himself as President of the Hide Traders Association; a mechanic on the railway who kept two African women and their coloured children; and the white owner of a rundown commercial hotel, the bulk of whose business came from a beerhall and a liquor outlet. Dishevelled and exuding brandy on his breath he was clearly in no state to make sense of what or who caused the catastrophe. “You see, Mr Collier sir,” he cried, turning to me at the same time and clutching the insurance document, “I’m covered for fire and theft. They may call it a riot or act of war. You know how insurance companies are. There’s half a million in fittings, furniture and stock gone up in smoke, and that’s without the building. Is there a small chance that your police will get anything out of my boys? I couldn’t. They’re scared as hell.” Afternoon sun slanted between the lattice blinds throwing strips of light over the worn carpet; a metal filing cabinet on which stood a vacant canary cage; a mahogany desk with its veneer cracking and peeling; and a scuffed leather divan where a big ginger cat lay curled. “I’m not in such good standing with my bank as it is.” The stout Boer stood there baffled; paunch heaving; tipsy with words. The DC, pipe in hand felt for the pouch in his shirt pocket. “Pieter, I’m inclined to put more trust in headmen than workers. They have their ears to the ground. They are not so easily intimidated. We dropped off two policemen on the way at Chirundu’s kraal. More than anyone he’ll know something to help identify the arsonists if not the looters.” Kellerman in apoplexy seemed to spasmodically mouth ‘arson’, his insurer’s perennial smoking gun. Landing a firm but friendly hand on the distraught inebriate’s shoulder blade the DC guided him outside; hand shaking all round; before we swung into the vehicle leaving a befuddled hotelier veering between mollified and mortified. To me Collier was a man proof against classification. A gentleman in manner he was manipulative in practice. Unyielding by nature he disdained emotion and excess though could be zany enough to let distress disturb him. Yes nature had been prodigal in her complex gifts to Collier, but would in due course be remiss in letting his uncanny judgement fall prey to them.
*
Now in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind my skittish deviations old and new, but also their cause and ultimate purpose: to leave behind a perennial and indelible imprint proclaiming (a) that Bertram Mockford ‘had been here’ and (b) attesting to this fact by no orthodox memorial. Relying on time and distance muting the full and dishonourable truth I had visions of going out in a blaze of scandalous glory. Thumbing through my notes in a battered file that a state prosecutor might hit upon, I dimly evoke the return journey from Gokwe which subjected me to nightmarish though revelatory moments. I still squirm and emit low moans of remembered fatal attraction.
*
“That’s De Bruyn’s doing. Capable chap, always said so.” The DC nodded at brown acres planted with peanuts. Beyond it the bushveld lay under the twilight of darkening clouds. The two sergeants had walked to a cluster of huts apparent through breaks in the bush. “Chirundu was quite certain the attackers would have made off to the north-west of Gokwe. The village here would be the first one in that direction. I say, aren’t those vultures circling above there?’Three o’clock – do you see where I mean?” Removing my shades and squinting up: “Indeed!” “Perhaps a mile and a bit. Cut through the bush.” I took the wheel. Quite soon, before we were ready for a shock, a heaving hillock made of bustling and rapacious carnivore birds, a moping jackal at the edges, took fright at our approach and flapped away in ragged disorder. The raucous dispersion took a minute or more; we felt in no frantic hurry to inspect the focal point. From twenty yards off we made out scattered objects, sunrays piercing the clouds lit the stage props in celestial gold. No doubt remnants of a carcass...Nothing out of the ordinary due to the high incidence of cattle mortality on poor grazing land. It could be wild game; the Khami Dam reserve wasn’t 20 miles away and roving antelope get hunted for meat and skins. Our interest was the idle sort but soon we ambled to the site. It took more than a minute to register what it was met our disbelieving eyes and nonplussed foreheads. No carcass lay before us but human remains clean stripped – in fact humans’ remains. My involuntary grunts, just about articulate to sound like conversational pause fillers, put the onus on Collier to break the awestruck spell.
“What do you know...Crikey...(thumping fist into palm). The radio...Get the sergeants here...” He jogged to the vehicle, to the two-way radio, leaving me to get hold of my abysmally dumb self. Had I been capable of taking in the situation in the ordinary light of day, had not revulsion gripped me in morbid fascination, gluing my feet to the spot and my distended eyes to those skeletal corpses, not for anything in the world would I have gone and done the ridiculous things I subsequently did at an exorbitant price. Little by little, however, I began to fall into a reflective condition permitting me to cling to the trivial. When I took a look around (keeping respectful yards from the hallowed spot where who knew – inescapably human matter could be stepped upon – I spied items on ground and veld – or the implausible lack thereof – with clue potential. A multitude of shoe prints, overlaid and heading everywhere, though nothing of even one shoe to be seen; odd scraps of clothing scattered randomly, a few with blood stains; faded cap up in the fork of a tree; a solid wooden handle that could belong to an axe; and the bell-ringer, a discarded empty quart of Bols Brandy and a broken bottle of Seven Seas cane spirit.
Well – my fatal fixation had been given free rein and hung-dog I trod back from where Collier had driven off, presumably to the headman’s village to pick up the two sergeants – when the growing volume of my solitude began to weigh upon me in the clingy greyness. Not for the first time, and not for the last, I stared in dull discomfort of mind at prospects I couldn’t visualise but affording me a terrific amount of torment.
The Landrover’s appearance, veering between trees disrupted my...Call it a persecution mania for wont of a tame excuse. I believe I hummed my discomposure away as I stomped to greet Collier and police sergeants, acquainting them with my range of sketchy clues. Their crime scene inspection supported what the headman had openly confessed to them: a crime committed on the fleeing criminals which had been a matter of distancing the village from what went down in Gokwe more than a matter of meting out rough and ready tribal justice. Interrogation failed to identify the killers, or uncover the victims’ clothing. A docket would be opened on our return.
Back in my dusky living room among dark furniture and flouncy curtains eaten by the sun, it came back to me that I was hungry. The first thing I did, though I hadn’t drunk alone for as long as a can remember, was to pour a big Gordons’ and tonic. I took it to the kitchen. In the paraffin fridge I found a pork pie Doris had baked for my weekend, cut a heavy chunk and eat it with my fingers at the kitchen table. Meanwhile some mental arithmetic gave me heartburn and reflux, nor was the future one bit clearer for all the good it did. If Gladstone, say, had tackled my uncertainties they would have resembled tabulated outcomes by comparison. I waited for the electricity to come on at seven, and to the diesel-driven generator’s manly, deep throated panting I made my solemn way to the club. Not one colleague would put himself out to manage the pub, as we boastfully called it.
“Why the hell should I!” Aloud I swore, though to what purpose or object I hadn’t a clue.
Chapter 3
On bar duty I prided myself on tempering my inane aversion to club night. Never rude, curtly talkative, always aloof, my demeanour was quite unimpeachable. It was never my shortcoming, adaptation. Or laxity: within half an hour of opening I had served all the early regulars –populists as I candidly derided them. The women seldom showed up until past dinner time, the DC often later. I glanced around. Through a haze of cigarette smoke my two Dutch colleagues waved. I turned up the ceiling fan, lifted the counter flap and stepped out. From a rowdy table close by a police orderly named Blake shot out an arm.
I looked down and was about to circumvent it when he addressed me.
“The Hollanders are – suckers”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: the Hollanders are cocky buggers.”
“Are they?”
“How’s your wife?”
“Well thanks.”
“You lie – she’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: July was hot.”
“Do excuse me.”
Guffaws followed my incendiary getaway. I wheeled past other rowdy nobodies and bared my teeth down at De Groot and Volbreng ensconced on the tatty divan. From the back of it I told them they looked in damn rude health. “A stint in the sticks obviously did you no harm.” Faces screwed up at me were bright with rude pleasure. On the good side of thirty they worked for the Department of Agriculture and were based in Bikita for a period. I was reminded of Laurel and Hardy, the one squat, fair, blue-eyed, the other stringy and dark. They were generally regarded as free-thinking foreigners; at mention of them people wrinkled the nose. Out all week on field trips they hardly lost sleep over disgusted noses disfigured on their account.
De Groot put his glass of beer on the table and hung a bulky arm over the back of the sofa, the better to keep his ample face and arctic eyes on me. “Given those mission breakfasts you would feel like we do.” Which contained? “Red Bush tea, millet porridge, plate of ...pickled things.” Volbrecht poked a bony elbow at the other’s ribs and supplied the detail. “Beets, onions, peppers”.
“Man, five days of that. I believe the priests were sending the message Go! I tell you though, I feel two hundred percent better.”
“Mr Mockford – Bert, take everything with – how do you say – a pot of salt.” Volbrecht shoved De Groot away. “He’s a favourite at Inyati. They think he – how do you say – pees perfume. That’s how much the priest’s can’t stand him, why they don’t kiss the ground he walks on.”
“Inyati? – I was at Morgenster Mission not so long ago. Dutch Reform, not Jesuit. The ministers and wives run the show. No problematic beetroot there. I got a slap up meal.” They were studying me instead of listening. That’s what I was, the fragile old world accounting officer, a head of middle parted hair, unnerved by the day’s bizarre tabloid. They were angling to get my firsthand account. Frustrate this exquisite courtesy? Not I!
“Oh – that business. Most frigging thing watching a corpse being eaten to the bone.” My laughter was too real. With wrinkled brows that denoted difficult thought they were certain I’d had a helluva shock. Who told them? McNeal spilled the beans, on the way to the club. His wife had phoned the ranch. So, I thought, this explained adulterous McNeal abandoning his buck hunt for a rare weekend night in bed with his wife.
“You must have been – how do you say – cut up – seeing it.
“Yes ...dammit! I mean...no, not really.” I was aware of speaking with irritability, though I knew, to some extent, that I consciously overdid it. Why, I don’t honestly know. Post – how do you say – traumatic stress? I was on edge. They tried to calm things down. De Koort made a witty-wise remark. “At your mission they make food for the body, at our mission for the soul.” Perhaps he felt two hundred percent better ethically.
“A good soul may not be such a good thing to have,” I said. “Politically I mean.’ Faces fell. Indeed, ill-intentioned people, they dropped their voices, had reported the priests. “Inyati’s been visited by military authorities. Seems it’s a problem with loyalties. Jesuits don’t take sides. Or take the wrong side. Souls, in Father Jurgens’ bible, don’t participate in rebellion. Only people do. Anyway, corpses rot the same – black or white.” We seem to have talked ourselves into a corner. I took up their empty bottles.
From those wayward remarks in a beery bar room I, dense introvert, retained papers with my wayward scribbling. What made me do it was a special kind of flurried concern when I got home from locking up and cashing up.
Rot is the living process. Ending it rots more speedily than living it. Think of the soul made out of rubber. No stink of corpse-flesh. You can’t choose death. You can the manner of death. One might not be fit for the burial ground. The use of nature to leap over disintegration. Like in the wild. Reduce dying to comfort and cleanliness. Return to the nature. Man has a perfect right to dispense with what belongs to him There is a painless and easy alternative to ageing. No undertaker pampering the dead. How temptingly obvious all of it is. One can solve life’s mystery and miseries on a sheet of paper.
It must be, I reflected our chit-chat that had made me scribble such crazy rambling thoughts.
“Come tomorrow for lunch?” said Volbrecht as I turned to go. “We will braai Kudu steak and sausage from the Fort Vic butchery. If your good wife’s in situ you must bring her.”
“Thanks. Doris isn’t.
Some of the women had come in and had converged at the bar. On the way I drifted to the Men’s Room. At the urinal I encountered the postal clerk in tight trousers trying with fumbling fingers to extricate it. He inquired of me how I had liked Tandy Udders in the September Penthouse, and froze when I coughed, ha-ha-ha at him in the mirror over the hand basin. On the way to the bar I poked my head into the Games Room and removed beer bottles on the window ledge.
While enraptured by the muse of depiction I may as well sketch the clubhouse in the broader milieu of Bikita, seeing that between them I split the blame for my ignoble fate. Had my career ended on a proper village with decent amenities it’s in the realm of possibility that Fate might never have made of me a reckless casino chip.
The village (to give it the fanciful name to which my readers can relate) is home to a steady twenty eight government whites and a fluctuating fifty to sixty government natives. Except in school vacation everyone is an adult; the children of white parents are packed off to boarding schools and those of native parents to mission schools. Physically Bikita may be fobbed off as neither here nor there. Two hills, mauve and impassive, the outline of one resembling the antbear, encumber the village to the East and from which Bikita’s dialect name derives. A coy implant on the bushveld, it is situated a mile or so off the tarred road linking Fort Victoria the pioneer town, (a column despatched by empire builder Cecil Rhodes stuck the Union Jack into Waremba soil in 1890) and Umtali the gateway to Mozambique. Rattling into the village in a pickup or Landrover the dominant feeling is one of bending over a steaming basin. The police camp on the verge steams a little less, the administrative block and quaint Post Office on the basin bed steam rather more. Following tyre tracks forking between frangipani and marula trees, one comes upon the residential quarter of isolated bungalows cut by a rutted and potholed path into old and modern. On the left squat the original bungalows spacious to a fault and, I know too well, presenting a chronic ant problem. (“Ants in the pants Bertie boy!” I can hear a mother’s accusatory joke.) On the right are the later houses, tidy tile roofs, compact and termite proof, ironically erected not long before the rebellion got going. Absent a general dealer, the club bar keeps some tinned foods, candles, biltong sticks, sugary drinks, snack bars. The clubhouse, as old and pretentious as the Mockford residence flanking it, was once the DC’s residence. By expediently converting the veranda into a patio and breaking down dividing walls the clubhouse got a ‘Library’ a ‘Bar lounge’ a ‘Games Room’ a ‘Storeroom’ a ‘Ladies Cloak Room’ and a ‘Men’s Room,’ the lino of which has four rust stains imprinted by the legs of the old bathtub. If the course of life can branch in all sorts of weird directions why shouldn’t a venerable residence branch into a makeshift club?
Back home I lit a candle – on club night the generator gets turned off at eleven – and drank a tooth glass of fizzy Epson salts. My bilious head seethed with pictures and plans. The sitting room was rank with doggie smell. When I opened a window and the garden door the rheumatic canine stood up in his basket, arched his back and trod stiffly outdoors. It could have been auto suggestion or normal fatigue that made my legs suddenly grow heavy. I climbed into bed and promptly fell asleep. I hope to describe not relive what followed because in the morbid state I was it could be expected that would have a vivid and lifelike dream in all-too familiar settings. I was presiding over a tribal court beneath a wild fig tree. All was respectful and pukka, the headman at my side at the fold-up table, four witnesses and the litigant squatting barefoot on the ground. For no evident reason they began to point at me, gesticulating and chattering like vervet monkeys. This developed into much yelping and laughter, much hoarse and ugly chanting. I lost control and flew into a temper. It turned the unruliness into rage. They stood up, gesticulated and stamped their feet and broke into some kind of ritualistic dance. I froze in horror, such horror seeing what the vigour of the dancing was leading to, the shedding of sweaty black skins. Soon belligerent skeletons were threatening to overwhelm me. The headman banged the table with his sjambok. The skeletons advanced. I awoke to a door slamming. During the night a wind had got up. The mosquito net, smelling like a dirty net curtain, hung close to my upturned face. Groggily I levered off the bed. My breath tasted foul. I went to the bathroom, took a toothbrush from the cabinet, squeezed a slapdash of pink toothpaste, and ferociously, as if life depended on it, trammelled my chattering teeth.
Chapter 4
Three days after surreal club night, Dr Fairbody’s cold stethoscope and calloused fingertips roamed my torso. Had I not let my wife’s insipid compulsion prevail, I would have blamed the shoots of searing rib pains on my fallback cause indigestion, and swigged milk of magnesia from the bottle. But Doris coaxed me to imagine the worst and, what was more, dropped me off at the medical suites in Selous Avenue. Cut adrift from plausible excuses and feeling arse about face, I mounted the steps of the scaffold.
A stork of a man, grey haired, thin long nose, spry and all Adams apple – “Sit up”, Fairbody said, letting his frown condemn me to death. For a minute or so I caught ponderous breathing at the back of me while I imagined all sorts of diagnostic horrors. Next thing he was confronting me in a steady inquisition with his brand of stern humour. He had done that at my previous visit, I recalled, but I could afford then to scowl back. I forced my vest down my puckered skin and readied myself. It can’t be good news when your GP lapses into thought. Making up his mind he rubbed tapering fingers together, dispelling caution or something. “My boy,” he said suavely, “I’m going to have you admitted. The cardiac unit at Salisbury General – my nurse will make the appointment. No sense to play around with angina. You know what that is?”
“I believe so. I can’t be an outpatient?”
He did his frown. In a lets-be-frank manner he counted off my symptoms on his hand. “Chest pains, numbness in feet, shortness of breath. Blocked coronary arteries, my friend. That is not a minor condition. It’s causing a reduction of blood flow to your heart and your limbs. Next thing it might be more than symptoms. You hear what I’m saying. I must get you under observation.”
I bowed slightly. What else could I do?
He wheeled a chair to a work table. “Well” – with some zest, “you don’t smoke, drink in moderation, swim, watch your weight...Without leaving his seat Fairbody took time out to squint at the patient record on the table to his right. “I saw you …. When…? “He stabbed a finger. Ah, June. Hmm.” Again the meditation and finger tapping. “By the way (looking up) tell Doris I can’t repeat the prescription without her having a check up.” As he played at the municipal golf course with the DC I expected him to ask after him. I wondered, should I mention that Collier had bemoaned a loss at the four ball tournament due to Fairbody marking a wrong score on their card. At reception the beastly middle aged divorcee who always took an unconcealed dislike for me, handed my invoice which I disdainfully took by the tips of my fingers.
The booby! I thought as I walked two blocks to the hotel. And yet – what had Fairbody done to me? Diagnose the obvious. It was the thought of getting my death sentence from a sprightly suntanned man eight years my senior. That is what I took on the chin.
“What did he say?” Doris sat at one of the tables on the veranda, a pot of coffee and half an apple pie at her elbow.
“:Lazarus.” The veteran waiter in white drill and red cummerbund ambled over.
“Coffee, tea, Sir?”
“Bring me the peach parfait. Two scoops of ice cream and apple pie.”
“Very well Sir.”
She was looking at me. “Bert?”
“It was nothing – The ulcer playing up. I have to not eat acidy things.”
“Thank heaven (no exclamation mark in her tone). How very provoking for you, dear. You put tomato sauce or Worcester sauce on everything. Did he give you something to take – we can drop by the pharmacy.”
“No he didn’t. Fairbody said to tell you that he can’t repeat your prescription without you going for a check up. What is it you’re taking?”
Her arm beads responded by clicking down to the spindly wrist. I knew what she was taking. Prozac was on the label of a small bottle I happened upon at the bottom of her knickers drawer while looking for the little gold-plated nail scissors she didn’t like me to use for trimming my nostrils. I retain the smothered memory of her submissive and serene plea.
“Bert... I’ve been feeling so muddled....so on own lately. I don’t think I could bear it if your application was not approved and ...we had to live for another year in Bikita. When you got the – attack – whatever it was, I thought, oh my God. How is it going to affect your transfer? It drove me mad with worry. I couldn’t face more and more of Bikita. I know people have done their best to make friends. I mean, really I like Janet and Dolly. It’s just that....Anyhow, you are not ill. I’m worrying myself sick for something that’s not real.”
It struck me as my automaton knees went up and down, I knew about her medication. I knew nothing about her mind; that quite possibly behind Doris’ pitifully mundane and even childish talk there was a gated garden, dim and adorable, forbidden to me in my torpid disguise. I often noticed that living as we did with unending disappointments we became embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and a friend back in the days of Mombasa, she and her niece in Fort Vic, she and an old sweetheart, I and Collier, I and a native orderly, might have shared – a complaint, a joke, God, anything of a genuine kind. She would park her vulnerability in trite news and boring remarks whereas I, conveying my detached comments in artificial words that that set even my broken tooth on edge, inhibited further communication. Oh my bruised disappointment-battered spouse.
“So” I said indulgently, “it’s anxiety,”. “I should have known. Well, here we are. You can now pop back to Fairbody’s rooms to make an appointment. I in the meantime will see to the groceries and return the library books.”
“Thoughtful old you,” Doris said, delivering a twitchy tap on my wrist watch, prelude to going into bubbly inquisitive mode. “My dear, you’ll never guess who I saw less than one hour ago.”
“Here?”
“Right where we are sitting. – Our Bill McNeal! He came out of the lobby. He had a small travel bag and looked awfully self conscious. Wherever he parked it wasn’t at the hotel. He walked on further and turned the next corner, Imagine, here I was, a couple of yards from him and he didn’t look my way.”
“Is that right! In the middle of the week!”
Doris excited like a movie goer, said, “Bill’s goings on with the lodge manager’s wife may have moved to town.”
“Perhaps so. He was alone when you saw him, but...”
“Could be the woman left before Bill did. How very interesting. Poor unhappy Dolly. I mean what business could Bill have to stay over in town? Of course, he might have had a medical appointment the same as you had. We shouldn’t jump the gun and accuse him of being naughty. Still, I can’t imagine Bill in town without official leave or business. I do wish we could look at the hotel register. Hee hee, wouldn’t that be fun. Anyway he could have signed in under any name. Three star hotels are not too fastidious are they? Bert? Hello. Still with me?”
Still here. My vision and thoughts had been on Pioneer Street in the noonday calm. In front of the hotel parked cars were arrayed like hogs at a borehole. The morning bustle, such as it had been, had subsided and the town centre relapsed to its accustomed calm. Tree-lined pavement, nondescript pedestrians, slow traffic along either side of the central island, native cop on his box waving traffic through the vast intersection – accommodative of herds of stampeding elephant. Across the road a stork alighted on the roof of Barclays Bank. What was it to me whether McNeal had romped or rock and rolled? Since I always won the race between my fancy and reality, voyeurism never seduced me. Anyhow McNeal’s wife was hardly pure like the driven snow. Fornicators peopled the earth and multiplied. What allowed the scrap of nonsense to squirm into my thoughts was a diversionary mental tactic; I was loathe to assimilate the simple fact of being a candidate for heart attack or stroke, and the sombre theme into which that developed.
It was early November. The avenues of Salisbury are canopied and carpeted in pastel purple. Jakaranda month. We had bussed from Karoi to visit an old friend in hospital with lung cancer. Tom Reynolds, shrunken, in a blue hospital gown that drapes his body, is in a male ward. He is lucky to have visitors. His two ward companions are having their afternoon tea with a cheese and tomato sandwich. A loudspeaker in the corner broadcasts Springbok Radio. The bilingual request program: Hospitaal Tyd: A Pat Boon song, “Love Letters.”
Tom takes my wife’s arm in a desperate grip. “The only way I will leave here is under a sheet, Doris,” he says in a low croaky voice. “This is not a recovery ward.”
Doris pats his hand. Embarrassed I look away. I ask after his son and daughter-in-law and their baby girl in England. On the metal bedside table, a carafe of water, glass and a Bible make way for our bowl of fruit and new issue of Farmers’ Weekly.
Visiting time is up, we say goodbye. Tom’s eyes turn inward. I give him a quick hug, feel the protruding shoulder blades beneath thin gown. We leave Tom to the nurses, a sedated co-operative middle aged sportsman going to a sedate co-operative death.
Reshaping my flattened straw preparatory to slurping the puddle of parfait at the bottom of the glass I speculate whether I could bring to fruition the absurd scheme that then and there came to my wild thoughts for cheating (not the adulterous McNeal type) the decay which accompanied ageing. Before my health was public news I had to do something or our transfer hopes would blow up in my face. Doris saw that before I did. No King David to unfold my profound problem to the accompaniment of a harp, all I had was a depressed wife to console, and be consoled.
*
Next morning by eight o’clock junior colleagues had collected in my room, and we settled down to normal routine. The new cadet was searching for paper clips in my cupboard.
“Damned if I can find the box. Why do you hide them, Bert?”
“Because, Strang, of people like you,” said Barnard the postal clerk. “If Bert wasn’t casual he would keep stationary locked up and issue it by requisition.”
“In Mutare it was like that, but then we had double the staff. Tell me – what was that with Anderson this morning? I just asked him what the boy should cook for breakfast and he slammed the bedroom door on me. It’s a quarter to and already some applicants for firearm renewals are lined up by his locked room. Luckily the DC is at HQ for the rest of the week.”
Barnard was in a state of some elation. “How did you not know! The bachelor party at the Police rec. went into the wee hours. Mark van Dyk paid a troupe of strippers from Gwelo. They came in a minibus – a ramshackle lot.” Both looked at me searchingly. Perched on the corner of the table I knocked out my pipe on my boot and felt for the pouch in a jacket pocket. “My lips are sealed. You better go open up Anderson’s room. Dolly McNeal will have keys.” The workday was a rough but comradely affair.
I stood smoking at the window. Under the wild fig tree in the compound a cluster of messenger runners in khaki drills squatted, talking animatedly as it looked by the frenetic body language. Arms flayed and heads shook. I felt I was spying on subversive brigands. The conversation was not for my ears – or any white man’s. I would have liked the pantomime to go on and on but shortly it exploded with a flurry of arms and a peal of laughter which penetrated my window like a gunshot. At my table I consigned feelings of disaffection and nameless dread to paperwork. In summer my room was a daily affliction from nine to mid noon. From everywhere hot air radiated: the door, the asbestos ceiling, the north wall, the east wall, the open veranda shared by all the rooms which ran U-shaped around the sun-baked compound. The electric on top of the filing cabinet whirled warm air. I had wanted a room on the right side of the U in shade the whole afternoon, but the obstacles were insuperable; no room on that liveable side was fitted with a Chubb, and anyhow the Friday queue of disability recipients would interfere with the DC’s doorway. Perversely the native runners had their room on that temperate side. While I had to drape a towel over my chair to keep my back dry, the native complement brewed their tea in conditions fit for white men. The situation could have been designed to make me badly disposed to them. The runners in turn did not exactly dislike me, but were apprehensive when summoned and appeared before chinanasi (my given name in Shona for prickly pear) their faces expressive of timid bemusement. My office to give it that name contained nothing but some stick wood chairs, a table littered with local maps and personal memorabilia, my work table and a telephone.
I was engrossed in figures and jottings when I became aware of tentative polite tapping on the open door.
“Yes Rhodes, what is it?” The fellow put a hesitant foot inside the door.
“Seh! This man has come for his disability money.” A parched and bewildered face peered over his shoulder.
“But damn it all, Rhodes, you know as well as I do that disability is on Fridays. It’s been like that for Christ knows how long. Did you not tell him that?”
As if my rebuke had nothing to do with him, he turned to the applicant. There followed a drawn out exchange dotted with tongue clicking, exclamations and other sounds symbolic of hardship.
“Seh! The man says that the headman told him to go for his money today. He has walked a great distance.”
“In fact I remember this character. Hasn’t he got three fingers missing? He’s come before on Fridays. What’s different now?” Waiting for no response – indeed the impassive expressions of both of them conceded my point – I swore, got up and located the ledger in the cabinet.
“C’mon then, let’s have him.”
Rhodes took the man by the elbow and shuttled him forward, his air that of a man who had expected my eruption, and my surrender. The trouble maker was elderly though straight as a board. His clothing was random. An oversized threadbare coat gave way to undersized threadbare trousers and bony limbs and bare feet completed the scarecrow effect. The procedure was as deliberate as it was elaborate. Taking hold of the depleted hand the messenger pressed a thumb onto my inkpad. He then guided him to the open ledger and pressed down the thumb on the correct entry, taking care to get a clear fingerprint. I opened the Chubb, counted the notes and recounted then on the table. The messenger took the notes and recounted them onto trembling hands held rigidly and reluctantly forward as if to receive some fearful object. The business complete, the old fellow ducked at me, was turned around and marched outside clutching the notes in a deformed fist. With a curse I banged the Chubb closed.
Left to my own dolorous devices I did not resume work – not right away. I kept in a drawer of the cabinet amongst the files a bottle of some cod-liver oil compound from which I would swig at moments of lame exasperation. The label recommended the daily dose, and a list followed of what the tonic would do for body and mind. Today my contempt for instructions went deep, never mind from a damn patent remedy. My swig was a big one and looking at my face mirrored in the lid of my tin of pens and pencils, I saw that a brown smudge stained the ends of my carefully trimmed grey moustache. Looking back at me was a pair of very lethargic grey eyes on a forehead round and lightly freckled. More than a bastion of mutiny it seemed to me a blank wall. Yes – I said to myself, your character oscillates from one of those extremities to the other.
“Bert, g’morning!” called a lanky figure which had poised out on the veranda. “Meeting at half past in my room.” And away he hobbled, on crutches. Another day and another trial. DO Bill McNeal! I would trust a snake before that opinionated womaniser. Getting up, for my bare under thighs were damp, I stood at the window and stretched. Nothing moved. The native messenger would be sitting around in their cool room. Left to itself the inanimate world flourished. The tin roof of the vehicle park busily pumped waves of heat. To the right the blue post office frolicked in the waves it produced before it settled down like a tamed monster. My fingers drummed on the window ledge. That farcical exchange with the messenger and old maningy bothered me, why I hadn’t a clue. After all, vexing tribesmen s were the stock in trade of my job. Though my perennial compliant was of being bugged without mercy, I prided myself on reading these people like an open book. What was so different that morning? I had felt the old man’s obtuseness like a poke in the ribs, some joke at my expense. Normally white skin protected one’s inadequacies, allowing one to deal with blacks showing that aloofness which is the white man’s guard against provocation. Yet that morning I’d had a taste of plunging into a common cauldron. Undoubtedly my defences were low after yesterday in tinsel town. But with a convulsion start I recalled the wife’s dentures. My first sight on waking that morning was of Doris’ palate sunk in a solution. More than baldness or wrinkles or aches and pains, false teeth were a landmark in decay that continued in the grave. Klein the dentist in Fort Vic had fitted her a month ago. He claimed to be Catholic though I thought a Jew more likely. Whatever. Doris felt nauseas after an hour in the chair breathing in, despite Klein’s mask! sweet and sour herring. Fired up with life-giving contempt, I set my legs to the meeting.
Chapter 5
McNeal likes talking, likes to hear himself talk. He doesn’t get the floor too often, but the DC is at a Provincial meeting in Que Que. A Level 3 security threat gives the man a rare double excuse to conduct a meeting of real consequence. Government and civilian life cram into the DC’s office. There’s a sergeant from the Fort Victoria police fidgeting with a skew epaulette; there’s the District Magistrate wearing a blazer and canvas shoes; there’s a 2nd Lieutenant in counter insurgency who sports a red moustache that juts on either side of a boyish mouth; there’s the Secretary of Manicaland Chamber of Commerce who owns the hardware shop in Fort Victoria; there’s my Dutch crop experts discussing their grievances in eager undertones; there’s Guy Sturgeon reviewing beneath ginger eyebrows late arrivals at the door; there’s Blake and his obnoxious mates in single quarters. At the board table in the middle stood McNeal, letting it take the weight off his gammy leg. He reproachfully cleared his throat when a native messenger admitted me as the last arrival.
“I expect everyone has by now heard the rumour,” he began. He kept tapping a cane against his leg from which a plaster cast had been removed, a legacy from driving into a donkey on the dark road from Birchenough Bridge. The stick was a prop. He pointed it when putting the messengers through their morning drill, and they feared McNeal more than the DC himself. He now cut a debonair figure in immaculate tan shirt and cream slacks. Gyrating between charmer and disciplinarian he lived by the cast iron philosophy that you believed what natives told you at your peril. In Shona culture words had a function and information a motive. That is not to call the people liars. Factual truth is entirely lacking in their equipment; you only confuse a native by telling him to state the facts which depend on what he wants to accomplish. Hence McNeal’s rule of thumb, never take your boy at face value. As a matter of interest, I had learnt never to take what McNeil said at face value. I had learnt to fathom his motives. The junior echelons were wary of him too. After drinking and swapping dirty jokes with them, McNeil the very next day might deliver an earful over a petty infringement. With me he was respectful, less however than the DC to whom we both reported.
“Well,” he said addressing the 2nd Lieutenant while rapping the ordinance pretentiously on his open hand. “Having to pre-arrange travel will be a shakeup, make no mistake.
“A shakeup it may be,” said the young officer rather insolently. “Nonetheless Bill, it is standard practice when a district’s been infiltrated. The safety and security of civvies are paramount”.
McNeil took the rebuke nobly; he was the populist champion taking on officialdom. Curtailment of movement, he proved to colleagues, was not his cup of tea either. “I wish we could have gone on riding our luck,” he told the distressed audience. “Regrettably our fairyland conditions were not real. Anyhow people, the DC will post the details and procedures when he gets back.”
“I should clarify, Bill,” interjected the 2nd Lieutenant, “that the ordinance applies to official and personal travel. Convoy mandated in every case.” The insipient murmuring broke into outrage. A hand shot up.
“Hans?” At the name, and McNeil looking over to the Hollanders, hostile looks turned in that direction. Volbrecht made two unwise points. He and Kreef reported to the Ministry of Agriculture in Salisbury, and they had to meet set targets. Should they therefore apply for exemption to the Ministry? Amid a din of displeasure, I heard Guy Sturgeon behind my shoulder murmur, “Commie sympathisers.” McNeil knit his brows. “I suppose you want to know how I would act in your case?” he said in a disgruntled tone.
“Yes please,” said Kreef, seriously and firmly.
“Really?” McNeil’s inexperience allowed the exchange to become confrontational.
“Really.”
“Very well. This is what I would do...” His fingers fidgeted with the cane. Without raising his head he half furtively surveyed the room. An air of expectancy descended on the audience. McNeal cleared his throat. “In your position – which I acknowledge is not without complications – I would keep to the procedures and see if my work was affected. If it was ... I would eh....elevate the matter. Seeing you asked, that is what I would do. No more questions? Then I thank all for your attendance.”
The room cleared in somewhat of a shambles. Volbrecht and Kreef seemed to be ejected without actual manhandling. Left alone I sat at the big table pondering things. Developments had upset my calculations, such as they were. I had gone about with some half-formed ideas, which now took on a devil-may-care imperative. Passive dying and disgusting decay were not for me. I pulled the ropes. Only I would cut them. Give Nature or God the exclusive right to dispose of me on their cruel terms? Not I!
*
The news of the order spread like plague through Bikita and beyond. Feelings ran high. The fourteen messenger-runners carried tidings to their wives; the postal clerk informed the Fort the Victoria Postmaster, and he told the Barclays Bank manager who told his priest at the Anglican church; the Secretary of the Victoria Chamber of Commerce told her hairdresser whose boyfriend recounted the implications in graphic language at a dowdy hotel bar; single police quarters rocked with dissenting views; arguments between Blake and his two obnoxious housemates spilled into the clubhouse; there wasn’t a domain where the subject was not discussed ad lib.
Doris took it badly. My wife dumped her feelings as I wallowed in the coffin-like bathtub, talking through the gap in the door she held slyly ajar, like a peeping-tom. When had Doris last peeked at my dropsy manhood, not called upon to perform the bedtime duty since ...I don’t know, but years of her depression pills had kicked the ritual, in me too, over the rugby touch line. Now she probably mistook the way I sank my lower region into the bathwater for coyness.
“It puts a stop to my weekends in town,” she said tapping a bitten fingernail on the doorpost. “I can’t begin to think what I’ll do in Bikita all weekend. Go mad I suppose. As for Dolly, at least it won’t be such a bad thing. Not if it stops that husband gallivanting to his trysts. But Bill is sure to find a way, don’t you think? Sorry Bert. It really is none of my business. The truth is I can’t look at that couple. I don’t understand two people living in the same house knowing that cheating is going on. Anyway...To you it won’t make much of a difference. In two years I don’t believe you were out of Bikita more than ...Can’t remember the last time....Oh that’s right – Chipinga, Gwen’s wedding. That would’ve been...April! was it? Can’t wait to leave this place behind. Bert, thank God Fairbody gave you a clean bill of health. No stupid ordinance will stop the transfer.”
But something else will, I thought.
Boy oh boy – hey dear, Bindura here we come.”
She couldn’t hear me grunt. Or see my painful grimace.
*
At the ‘Dutch’ house it was diametrically opposite to the pitch of my plaintive spouse.
I entered quite genially. “Chaps, what’s your prognosis?” They were having their supper. Fish fingers, mash potato, canned peas. The boy was just sidling in with the tomato sauce. Kreef struggled with his puffy hands to unscrew the top. “We had an open one,” Hans breathed through a mouthful of mash. “Winston!”
“Seh?” from the kitchen door. Kreef brandished the bottle. “Wenna open one?”
The boy touched his head, looking everywhere except the telltale item.
“Other bottle, Winston, the one not finished.”
For the captive there was no wriggling out of it, and it would be just as well to record the unedifying finale.
Winston: That one is the tomato sauce.
Hans: We know.
Kreef: Get other bottle, in fridge.”
Winston (bemused): Seh?
Kreef (preceded by impatient humming): Obviously it’s been finished.
Hans (with a belch): Not by us.”
Kreef: What’s the pudding?
Hans (Shooing the boy back to the kitchen): The tinned peaches from yesterday, with custard.
It was the sort of tacky skirmish that would normally get me pumping. Not this evening. No sooner had Hans told me, in his Dickensian expression, to draw up a chair than the naked bulb on the ceiling dimmed – the one-minute signal before the generator cut out at the ungodly weekday hour of nine o’clock. This deepened what was disturbing me: my little harmless deception on the wife. Suddenly it had got not so harmless. It had got official – and personal. Should my heart ailment be discovered it would be the end for me. There’d be no transfer, no new lease of life. Hopes of a fresh beginning would vaporise. I’d be sentenced to spend the final year of a dead end career on this abominable station in the bush. . Fraudulent behaviour would go down as my epitaph. Only the stature of the DC lay between me and horrible oblivion. I’d got used to depending on Collier to watch my back. Now I didn’t know – the it might be too big , what with war on our doorstep and the military ordinance. Perhaps I was inventing troubles. I suppose I should have thought about the travel restrictions as irrelevant to my lot. Yet around that dim dinner table the prospects seemed too murky and fragile to bear. I wanted out of here. I wanted Doris, after I widowed her, out of here. We had friends, from our Kenya days, in Mombasa. She adored them and they her. I pray her last years by the Indian Ocean will be happy ones. Yet suicide and retirement were not the proposals I made, when at last conversation turned to that morning’s meeting. They would have taken the sort of courage I lacked. I believe that is why I made a surrogate proposal, which turned out to be more daring than anyone would have suspected at the time.
At the rickety table we conversed in the fume and flicker of their paraffin lamp. I blame the milieu for the disgruntled mood in which a told the agreeable chums how the tomato sauce was controlled in single quarters. The ‘2-bottle test’ Blake called it. One bottle, the one in use, was kept in the pantry under lock and key. A second one, the control bottle was in the fridge. The sauce in it was down to no more than one inch off the bottom. The least amount taken would be apparent. The props were set. Blake and co observed the boy itching for them to use that remnant of sauce so that the near full bottle in the pantry could be introduced. They don’t use it. They keep it in the fridge, one inch of untouchable tomato sauce. Wracked by frustrated temptation the boy dissembles before their gleeful eyes.
The boy had gone off. Hans called from the kitchen. “A busy schedule next week – tell Bert where we’ll be.” He was brewing a pot of coffee.
“Your sisal and soya bean projects?” I said. Kreef was scraping out a pipe with the end of a soup spoon. “Mission meals the whole week.” Hans came from the kitchen bearing a tray. “Food, food, and more food. That all you think about?”
“Yes – and you go there for conversation.”
“Why not? Our Jesuit friends have more to talk about than the boors we have for speaking to here...Present company excluded.”
I laughed. “Believe me, you took the words –
“Out of my mouth,” continued Hans. “That one I know.”
We drank some sort of chicory concoction out of tin mugs.
I said, “I want to ask you a favour...”
Kreef held a match to his pipe and lip-smacked the pungent mix into a perfect storm cloud. Hans put down his mug.
“I know this is out of the blue, though really it’s not... I’d like to see your projects. Can I?”
Hans aimed a long finger at me. “I think you really want to see Goodwill mission. Meneer Kreef?”
“You’ll have to be quick, Bert. We’re off on Monday – at cock’s crow.”
“Do you think dumb cluck Bill McNeil has any clue what procedure to follow? What do you think he’ll say about reactionary foreigners taking Bert on their illicit travel?”
“What he’ll say is, wait for the DC to come back,” I said, using my tongue to clear the old gums of coffee grinds.
“That’ll be?”
“A week from now. The DC’s gone fishing.”
“Incommunicado on Lake Kariba.”
“Inco...?”
“Can’t be reached. Leave it to me. Bill will give me the clearance. ” There and then I regretted my bravado. But that is the way I was made, impetuous first, persistent afterward. What about them? I asked. What if the mandarin in Salisbury told them: adhere to orders like everyone? “Then?” said Kreef, “then the department can take a walk.”
“Any interference in our work and two quick notes will go to the department,” Hans said.
“Saying?”
Please accept my resignation herewith.”
“Ah ha! – easy come easy go.” I eat my heart out. They had short contracts, long leave, no encumbrances and a gypsy life, forever on the verge of dismissal, forever on the verge of re-engagement. They’d work for the devil himself if the terms of contract were good. Such latitude to loiter through life was my wettest dream. Hans went on to affirm it.
“A resume of helping indigenous people with cultivation methods is a passport to everywhere.”
“Yah,” said Kreef flexing chubby pink arms. “Employers know it. That’s why they don’t mess with us.”
“Hans said, “The world is our...what do you say? That thing you eat from a shell?”
Oyster, you lucky louts!
*
I went to see McNeil’s first thing in the morning. Driven by impulse I had again put my impetuous head on a block. That I mostly kept it was half luck and half talent for turning a cocksure predilection to good account. What nagged me now was that talent, like metal, rusts from benign neglect and, in the coming fight I had no idea in what condition it was. What infantry battalion would go into action before inspecting their gun barrels and grenades for rust?
“I see your point,” McNeil said, glancing up at the clock behind me. “Waiting until the DC is back will ...”
“Create unease. As for the headmen they’d be insulted if I didn’t pitch. Not the best way to conduct affairs of state.”
“No...Impossible to delay your tax collection for a week?” My gentle head shaking put a damper on what clarity of thought he had; the DO was not an ‘early ‘morning’ person. “Or ...No....That wouldn’t do either I suppose. I never imagined you worked to a schedule so damn tight. I tell you, this little pumper (tapping the heart) would pack up under the strain.” He kept giving me searching looks, as if my story too might collapse under the strain of cross-examination. Had he not been dense from adulterous torpor and guilt he would have observed a desperado painted into a quick drying corner.
“Chum,” he said, visibly time-bound, “let me get my head around this. I’ve got old Galloway coming to see me about his farm workers. Again trouble with renewing permits. Damn the Irish.”
My fingers busily made tiny tears in the pre-drafted letter of consent in my live lap. Take a breather, I thought. Get on the wrong side of him and it’ll be game over. “Bill,” I said plaintively, “you’ve got enough on your plate. Nothing could be more routine than this. I can’t see it raising any eyebrows at all.” I could feel the rush of triumphal blood to my face. Gall below, gallantry above; lie telling is never quite sure that some pesky devil or vengeful god may not demolish a looming triumph. And beyond my reckoning McNeil produced the patronising card.
“Bert, we can handle it, you and I. Hell, if the two us, full of wisdom and years, can settle a petty –”
I interrupted. “Really, would I ask you to put your head on a block? Bill, this is routine stuff man! It’s not as if a convoy system is in place. It won’t be for a week at least. That’s will be the DC’s responsibility. I mean, who in god’s name would stop a tax collection?”
McNeil’s half glare half grin looked more indulgent than exasperated, though whatever his feelings they were not kind on me, probably poking fun along the lines, ‘The old boy’s cracking up, his retirement can’t come soon enough.’ I felt a bilious imperative to vomit browns and greens on his veldskoen (buckskin shoes), some of it smattering his knee length knitted socks. A thought of how feeble the plan really was did not hold me back, it turned me into the rampant bully who prods and shoves to provoke the bullied into lackadaisical fisticuffs.
McNeil had had enough. Drumming fingertips on the armrests of the swivel chair he signalled an intention to stand up. “Bertie boy,” he said not unkindly, “Cogs in the wheel – that’s all we are. Listen, what night can you and Doris come over for a game of rummy, Dolly wants to know?”
As if I hadn’t heard I said, “Another thing, remember that minor complaint lodged by Goodwill Mission, the priests, Jesuit fathers?
“Vaguely. One of our police took, stole, borrowed, I don’t know what. Who cares?”
“I do, Bill. A gold plated chalice went missing after he was seen coming out of the chapel where he’d had no business to be. The DC specifically asked me to recompense them. It was understood I’d do that next time I was thereabouts. I really must get out there this week.”
“What?” he said. “The missionaries aren’t running away.”
In the state McNeil was in he could not really be taken aback. A wary inkling of sorts kindled his eyes. He stood and beat his pockets to make sure of cigarettes. I made for the door.
“I really hope,” I said turning around, “there won’t be this trouble every time we want to go into town. I hate to think of Doris having to make an application to have her hair done or to visit family or whatever. Her hairdresser, you know, is the one around the corner of the hotel. She likes to meet friends on the veranda and chat over tea and cake. In fact last Wednesday I was with her. I suppose you didn’t know because you weren’t in the office that day. I had a doctor’s appointment. . I haven’t been for a while. Goodness me the place has gone downhill. Service not good either. Must have been what – around ten thirty in the morning. I believe we were the only table on the veranda. Doris likes her cuppa.” I hardly knew what I was automatically jabbering out of a fog. I only knew I had him completely at my mercy. I could enjoy myself. McNeil stood rigid. He had taken his hat off the hook. He held it midway to putting it on. I never saw such bewilderment. It was like when a woman slaps your face completely out of the blue. I had never seen the man not in command of his organic troops fighting petty civil wars.
“I don’t believe it’ll go that far,” he rasped. “There’s no reason why people should be stopped going into Fort Vic. To hell with it!”
Because I took advantage of a sinner; because I took advantage of his disadvantage; because I took advantage of my disadvantage, I went to my office with a sick heart through the white blaze of the sun
Chapter 6
At lunch hour I trod home to the Friday Kariba bream. Though I had got my way with McNeil, demeaning work had got its way with me. Beset by puzzled natives streaming in and out my door, the buoyancy of conquest died the lacklustre death of debacle. A summer downfall had rain splattering through my open window, mainly into a tin tub I had placed on the floor. It was either that or shutting the window and imprisoning the heady brew of bare feet, sodden rags and unwashed bodies. Even so, I felt giddy after the three hours allotted to ‘Lost Identity Papers’ were up.
“Canaan, tell these late comers to be on time next Friday,” I said to my messenger on the veranda.
He clicked his heels. “Sah!”
Locking my door and pocketing the key I veered past three nonplussed elderly men and a disappointed girl on the bench against the wall.
Hearing the front door close Doris greeted me in the passage leading to the kitchen,
“Why the mouth?”
“I feel down in it, if you want to know.”
“Dear oh dear. Wait – I’ll get you your ant-acids.” I said I had already taken milk of magnesia.
“At work? You keep medicine in the office?”
I put a hand to my nose. The smell of smoke-infused paper lingered. “Give me a minute.”
“Don’t be long. I already took your piece out of the pan.” She went through to the dining room to lay my place. At the cracked bathroom sink I wet the green block of Lifebuoy under a thin stream during which the tap fitting shuddered and emitted a manly groan. Smelling like a Laundromat I sat down to fried fish and boiled potatoes. I forked one in half and blew on it. Doris, who had seated herself across from me, talked to the top of my head. We never ate lunch together; it was one of those diminutive habits which spring eternal in wedded bliss, and go unremarked. Anyway Doris, bless her flapping heart, ate like a bird, diminutive morsels at intervals occasioned not by the clock but synchronised with her cavorting nerves. In the paraffin Frigidaire shelves were arrayed with receptacles of leftovers from which she, an addicted finger eater, fed. In between picking at some chicken or vinegary jerkins or pieces of red polony, she boiled water on the gas ring for cup after cup of orange coloured tea. But I can’t blame her entirely for the lonely lunch vigil. The fortnightly collection and payout took me for the day to different parts of the district, or sometimes overnight to the furthest reaches. Such were the mundane origins of the custom of eating separately which, to be frank, annoyed me no end. Under her watchful eye and busy mouth I felt....Well let me say it – a dribbling old fogy. The dining room, a semi-conscious torment with the hand-me-down government fixtures and fittings, the scratched mahogany sideboard, the once gay curtains faded to feverish yellow, ragged woven rugs on the unpolished parquet floor, aquatic green walls – helped to orchestrate our gloomy exchanges.
“You want water? Or there’s an open bottle of ginger beer in the fringe.”
“Thank you – no.”
“How’s the bream?”
“Okay. Very nice.” I jabbed a fork in, took a deliberate mouthful, swallowed and wiped my lips with pink-striped paper. Trying to be lovey dovey I said, “I don\t believe I told you this, my dear, I stopped eating and drinking together.” A drawn out and inquisitive, No....?
“Fairbody advised me not to. Aggravates the reflux apparently.”
“He did!” Unaccountably she brightened up. “Well well.”
I had thought that was the end of it, but it was the entree.
“Dear, speaking of which....What do you think about getting a second opinion? No, please wait. Ivan you see will be in Fort Vic the weekend after next. He and Clarice are stopping over on the way down to Durban. She phoned. It’d be a golden opportunity. They’ll be at my niece’s place. Won’t it be grand seeing them again.”
“Ivan?”
“Yes, Ivan. The physician? My niece’s step father? Come on dear – you remember, we visited them that time I renewed my passport. We had tea in their garden in Borrowdale.
A delightful home and part of Salisbury. You could easily be in the Cotswolds.”
I shifted my buttocks as if the chair had scalded me.
Doris said, “You really ought to let Ivan make his diagnosis. I mean our GP is not exactly the best doctor. You said so yourself. Lucky them, hey! Can’t think....When was the last time we had a holiday at the coast?”
“Mozambique? Ponte Del Or? July ‘71? ” I said, distinctly and slowly.
More often than not lately, I found myself talking to her in a faraway place, and now my dreamy wife now spun a best-case scenario. Assume they approve my transfer. (I like ‘they’ for the nondescript hand of bureaucrat fate.) I had lots of leave. Before taking up my theoretical job, before going to our pie in the sky Bindura, a holiday by the sea would be just the ticket. I dislike having my anxieties disrupted. I disliked it particularly when my worried stiff wife came between them and me. He way she went on, warbling on the telephone, merry-making mental plans for our relocation to a dreamy new life. In one of her tasteless former reveries, she couldn’t wait for when I would mentor starry eyed cadets in air-conditioned comfort, on everything from dress and demeanour to bookkeeping and tribal culture. She made herself forget our heaven would last a short eighteen months. And then? Oh God, he’d pray, let death come before compulsory retirement. They had no more than a dream home, in Melsetter in the Eastern Highlands, to retire to – on his pension, her dwindled legacy in pound sterling – and civil war clouds about to burst. No movement anymore...Except upstairs.”
Across the table her filmy look mistook my solemn exasperation for her stoic man in pain. I was neither specimen. Yet for the life of me I could not blame her for being unrealistic. She knew nothing of the diagnosed state of my ticker. And there was the appointment made for me at the cardiac unit; something else I had I kept from her. It suddenly occurred to me, I had no need to wait to get a second opinion from Ivan Green in Fort Victoria. I could see him in a matter of days, at the Salisbury hospital. Why in hell’s name don’t I keep the appointment! What is this drivel about making of myself a post humus spectacle! What – a skeleton will rub its hands for having sidestepped rotting in the ground? I, small shot Bertram Mockford, will become a big shot after my choreograph finale to life ordinaire amounting, when paired down to my raptor-picked skeleton, to a kid looking for adult attention. Just who did I think I, shemozzle making B M was fooling? Not waiting for the dessert of canned peaches embedded in green jelly, I sought refuge from the demeaning day, and took to my bed.
“I think I have a fever coming on. I shan’t go back to work,” I said. Doris, a born medicinal collector and dispenser, prescribed Disprin with a cold face cloth, which I rebuffed out of hand. I went to the telephone and rang up the secretary. By the time I had changed – my clothes cupboard was in the spare room – there were the pills, tooth glass and facecloth on the bedside table. She never took my obstinacy seriously; invariably I would take the remedy I had made a great fuss of dismissing. When I removed the doily on the jug there was a splayed mosquito floating in my drinking water. I lay on top of the bed covers, in boxers and singlet. Beyond the window the repulsive day lumbered forward. Drifting off into a one-man wrestling match I saw right through my plan, it had more holes than a Swiss cheese, too many inroads for a well-meaning wife and officious colleagues to get entangled in my business at every turn; never mind the spiked hazard contrived by wartime ordinances prohibiting this or limiting that.
I jerked awake. In the opposite bedside table Doris stored her medicine box. I got off the bed and kneeling on the mat, removed the heavy shoebox. I scrimmaged through tubes and bottles, reading labels as I went. Nystatin suspension. Thrush. One tablespoon per day after meals. Lansoprazole. Dyspepsia. Lansoprazole. 10ml before meals. BC56 cream. Wound healer. Chest-eeze. Bronchial. Rub on throat and chest at bedtime. Keep out of reach of children. None of it met my immediate needs. I was looking for the new lot of her sleeping pills. Already a good half dozen pills from a prior prescription nestled in a spare sock at the bottom of the linen cupboard. Dying, it struck me, involved more contretemps and complications than living. Give up the nonsense and let the reaper with a scythe creep up when my time came. The unassisted way was after all the least complicated and tidiest way to go. Then I found what I was looking for – her new box of Valium. “Symptom indications: “Insomnia or anxiety that is disabling, severe, and causing distress.” I shook out a blister
pack of six and slipped it under my side table. A lay down, turned on my side and dropped off. A sense of disorder affected my whole being. Afraid I would lose control I tried to fasten my attention on something – anything at all which had nothing to do with my fixating fear. I woke up and really did feel unwell – a fever, though no great shakes compared to the frantic deliriums I got in the old days, hunting with ‘Beaver’ Shaw in the Zambezi valley. And stung by the thought that a man did not get raging fevers from stamping grubby papers I felt the worse for it. My burning and roaming looks settled on the framed photographs among her pots and trinkets on the dressing table, the one piece of personal furniture in our bedroom. I can’t explain it but I had never been at one with most of her past. Perhaps Doris felt the same about me. Except for a dull wedding snap, the photographs did not have me in them. Looking at the people and the scenes always gave me a guilty sense of intrusion. I regarded her life in the frames as her one haunt that was safe from prying looks and disparaging talk. The fact that I know the black and white photographs from memory attests how many times I succumbed to stealing surreptitious looks: little Doris in a frock holding the hands of an able seaman dad in the Royal Navy and a mum in ambulance uniform; a skip in time to Doris my fiancé on the Hastings pier (taken by a roaming beach photographer) during the cricket festival; Doris in our Nairobi days posing under the gigantic tusks of a stuffed bull elephant; in groups with a friend on the Mombasa beachfront; with our steward and a frowning black piccanin before the portico of our hillside bungalow of fond memory; kneeling with her cousin atop the bridal falls at Inyanga.
I had to go to the lav. My pee, bright mustard in colour splashed, into the bowl. I decanted the water jug into the basin and watched the bedraggled mosquito go down the plug. Coming back to bed my spirits dived at the prospect of our two headboards set together like tombstones. I hallowed for fresh water. Doris must have delegated the houseboy – a bad mistake. Gladstone stepped over the threshold before he tapped with hesitant knuckles on the door. There he froze with a mystified look as if to say, ‘Here I am but don’t ask me why and what for’. I took one look and told him to go. When Doris came she wore rubber gloves. The kitchen was being fumigated. In summer we had to spray for cockroach very fortnight. She pulled off a glove and felt my forehead with the back of a bony hand. “Hmm...a touch of the old malaria, my boy. You stay there.”
She returned with a tray close on the dog’s happy tail: refill of water, a Doxycycline malaria pill and two big gin and tonics. Her sitting by me on the edge of the mattress made hardly a depression. Ivory pale legs (baggy shorts gave them the look of stems thrusting from a bulbous plant) let the floor take her weight – what there was of it to take. Sitting up against the pillow I swirled the ice cube around and took a testy slurp. She dipped a little finger in her drink and dabbed it on Sheba’s nose. I looked frostily down at eyes held up to mine, eager with expectancy. Doris said, “You want to be spoiled with gin, don’t you, doggy woggy woo.” Such were our fathomless exchanges.
“Dear – Something is bothering you, isn’t it? You haven’t been eating. What is it?” She leaned over to look me in the eye. “Bert, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” (very causally and grumpily).
“Don’t say nothing.”
The matter, I thought, was that you never had the letdowns I had. You the daughter of a seaman and a shorthand secretary, didn’t have the expectations I had. You don’t know what it’s like to have fate yanking them away, one after the other. You don’t know that my transfer hasn’t got a hope in hell. You don’t work every day with fools and misfits. You’re not planning to go out in a blaze of glory.”
“It’s not the old thing again – your dad’s suicide? You really never got over it did you? Twenty years is a long time. Hah – it’s longer than we’ve been married.” This is what never failed to shake me, her accuracy of perception. Not in a zillion days would it have occurred to me.
I said, “I told you it’s nothing. And stop going on about a second opinion. Fairbody’s good enough for me.”
Her long memory, too good for my liking, she reminded me that I had called our GP a quak.
“Ivan consults at the Salisbury Gen. At least he could refer you to the radiology department,” she said. “Who knows – your ulcer might not be the problem.”
“Who knows,” I said, a wicked chuckle in my voice, “if there’ll be a convoy going to Fort Vic on that weekend.”
The garden boy hailing a friend over the hedge mangled her response to this bitter reminder.
Gruffly she asked if I minded her closing the window.
Chapter 7
I call Saturday my letterbox day. On the way in to work it devolved on me to get the office mail. The designated person for the task was Sally McNeil but she worked a five day week. I popped over to the gaudy post office to fetch the mail bag. Sally would sort it in the office on Monday. At eight in the morning I made the detour I had grown into. Those hundred yards were like a syrupy tonic. The miniscule act of calling in for the post somehow belied the prevalent idea that everything about the station was bad. The gorgeous building rose up on the high ground marking off the different quarters. The police station and barracks lay fifty yards further up, the native dormitory beyond that. A rectangular eyesore of peacock blue, with a decorative iron balcony outside an upper window, the little post office reminded me of the Odeon in Brighton’s Kemp Town district. It had been a boyhood palace on Saturday morning matinees, one of which still kept me harking back to swaggering John Wayne in a bearskin cap in “Davy Crockett”, my East Sussex Boy Scout group in the stalls, sucking barley sugar.
For two or more years (I had stopped counting when I started regarding Bikita as a mild prison camp) my weekly detail to fetch the mail was something of a release valve. An old wild fig tree at the side made a calm roof over a heavy wooden table and benches. In the early morning cool I put my tea flask and food tin on the table, laid a place mat, opened the sandwiches and rusks, and ate breakfast as the starlings and Indian minors hopped about for crumbs and crusts. At 8.15 the door opened with much creaking and the postal clerk poked his neck out and nodded drowsily in my direction.
“Good morning, Jeffrey.”
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Lovelace was pale and pigeon-chested and seedy after a Friday night booze-up at the bachelors digs. He said, “If they don’t get me an assistant soon...My mate at the Umtali post office gets every other weekend off.”
“That’s a pucker post office, my lad.”
His transparent pixie ears lit up. “For two pins I’d put in my notice. Time I went back to city life.”
I said with light sarcasm, “Mind if I come in?”
“Not much in your bag...” He disappeared inside, and I followed. Behind the counter a glass with some milk stood on top of the low bar fridge. He took a swig and wiped his thin blond moustache with the back of a hand. Of the fourteen compartments just five had mail; the office compartment had our bag. He lifted it easily with one hand and threw it on the counter.
“Smoke, Bertie boy?” He held forth a pack of Camel.
I massaged my chest. “A little early for me.” Lovelace shook out a cigarette, slipped a lighter from his frilly shirt pocket, and as if pulling a trigger, lit up. A thin jet stream escaped his pale lips.
I clicked my tongue. “You had a shindig at your place by the looks of you.” He fixed a dubious look on me. “Bert, what do you want, that I act the culture vulture in this shithole?”
“My lad, you’re job’s secure. Don’t be such a jack-in-the box”. I tipped the contents of the mailbag onto the counter, and spread envelopes around like a croupier spreads the chips, scanning for any mail relating to me. I said flippantly, “You should bear in mind that employers in the cities have been spooked by township violence. They aren’t hiring I understood.”
Lovelace complained what “a hell of a night” it was. A constable “still wet behind the ears was sick like a dog” on their front step. In the process of listening to the effeminate voice I had the impression that one of the brown envelopes from the Department had my name in the window, causing me to nearly lose my hold on the counter. I remember ungluing the flap with a fingernail and starting to say: “Well, you’re old enough to know who to invite or disinvite” when the letter began talking to me in the matter-of-fact voice of bureaucracy.
Ministry of Internal Affairs. Recruitment
Ref. 21.735a/72
Date. 27/08/72
Mr B R Mockford
C/O Postmaster, Bikita
Victoria Province
Re. Application for ‘Training Officer’, Bindura Intake Centre
Dear Mr BR Mockford
Thank you for your application for the above vacancy.
I have to inform you that the CADET INTAKE CENTRE, Bindura has been closed until further notice. The vacancy for which you applied has therefore become redundant.
All applications have been filed and shall be reinstated as and when the facility re-opens.
Yours sincerely,
RP Mansdorf, Assistant Manager, Recruitment
If disquietude was audible Lovelace would have heard mine. When I turned demented eyes from the letter and looked at him, what came to mind was the hit parade’s topper which had people swooning, ‘Whiter shade of pale’. He was looking at me with the consternation of a gazelle just before you pull the trigger. “Umigosh – what’s up man!”
I stalled from shovelling the post back into the bag. For all he meant to me he might have been a dead homo walking. My letterbox day...I since have a different name for that early Saturday morning.
“Bert the smurt, you’re not going to croak on me are you? Must be a hell of a letter you got there.”
“Nothing,” I said with a catch in the old cretin throat. I slung the bag over a shoulder. “Jeff – you are hung over and I am sick. Another time, shall we?” Before I knew it I was alone and blundering along a path that lead to the offices.
“Alone” did I say? No. I had a black agony with me. I hurried to an inaudible distance and detonated it with a vengeful roar so that my temples throbbed and I heard the jovial voice of Mike Blake coming along the path from the police camp. “Good morning, good morning,” he called. In sidestepping me he caught a foot in a tuft of long grass and stumbled as he went by. “Driver waiting for me,” he said. “Must hurry” and the bogus guffaw faded along the path.
Thoughts which had nothing to do with the set-back, not to say body blow, not to say blockade, harked back twenty three years to the report of dad’s callous jump from Bournemouth’s Canford cliffs. He was not a depressant or a failure or a gambler or a suicide prospect. He wasn’t even a real adulterer. Dad never stopped being there for his ex-wife and children. That a poignant death was the card he would draw seemed implausible. If there was a calamitous element it would be his matter-of-fact demeanour which, for all anyone knew, was on him when he drew near the cliff face and the dead drop.
The rejection letter I thought, returning to my droll life, was a card dealt me by.... Fill in God or Fate or roll of loaded dice. I grabbed at a low hanging branch and let it spring back. My walk to work through a dappled blaze of African sun was the Via Dolorosa of a suicidal father’s son.
From nine to eleven-thirty I totted up weekly columns and closed off weekly records. I never believed that keeping compliant books had consequences. Were the station a county or town council in the old country, it would have done – at the least my output would be relayed up or down the chain of authority. Not in Africa. I knew of civil servants, and even a DC, who got broken by disbelief. They ended up abusing natives, verbally or physically, and were transferred or took early retirement. Hadn’t I passed through those hazardous phases in seven years, first in Karoi and now Bikita? They had inured me to vacuity. There were times I swear, when the native capacity to drive their white masters up the wall gave me a feeling treasonously close to admiration.
At last the work was done. Having nothing to fill the hour to knock-off, I tore a page of foolscap out of a pad and in a tempestuous muddle tried to write a normal letter. I don’t recall the last time I wrote to my wife – or to anyone besides my mother after the news of father reached me in Mombasa. What is the right tone for a letter to slip under the front door prior to embarking on the ultimate journey?
Saturday, 11.30
I trust you were Lillian’s regular gracious weekend guest. You will come back Monday to an empty house – I thought I’d remind you about my four day trip to Chirau’s tribal area. Part of it will be the normal disability payments at the leper clinic. I shall travel part of the way with Kreef and De Groot to have a look at their coffee growing experiment, and staying with them at Goodwill Mission for two nights. I don’t have to tell you how much I enjoy my long trips. It could be make-believing that I’m a David Livingston. It’s about the only scope available for heroics. Bill Johnson our favourite permitted me to go before the convoys start when the DC gets back. I had to fairly blackmail the sod. It could easily have waited for the DC to get back and do it by the rules. But you know me. I detest herd behaviour. About...
I paused. About what? Can’t bad news wait a week? And I didn’t know if I’d be capable of... it. The department’s letter wasn’t relevant. After my demise what difference would it make to Doris that my application came to nothing? So I inked over “about” and finished off with a future lie.
In less than two years we’ll be free as a bird to spend time with Ted and Louise in Mombasa, perhaps even look for a little place of our own nearby. Just think of that.
A safe drive back on Monday.
Bertie
The messenger who had been waiting for me to lift my head, tapped the open door
“What is it, Franklin?” “The DO, sah. He asks you to come to him.”
“Right.”
Chapter 8
Johnson was not alone. “Bert, come in! Close the door, there’s a good man.” The baptised choir boy face accosted me with a good-humoured smirk that caused my hand to dally on the door handle. At the table sat Colonel Rick Underwood, out of uniform.
“I believe you know Rick.”
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I could tell they had been talking about me. Underwood got up beaming. He greeted me with a very slow, very enveloping, strong, searching grip. He thought we were old golf chums. “Well, well. How long is it since you stopped playing? Dammit Bert, you and I played off the same handicap.” It had been a year and something, but I hunched up as if to say, ‘what does it matter?’ The Colonel carried straight on as if I had grabbed his ample hand and spoke the lyrics of the hit parade song, ‘Those were the days my friend, I thought they’d never end.’ And how was – ? He gave just gleaned information about Mrs Mockford. Admittedly we had played together, once, in a Sunday four ball during the brief time when, quite gregarious before Bikita soured me, I was a member of the Fort Victoria Golf and Country Club. That was as far as it got. Off the course I had no special reason or affinity to prop up the bar counter with a man like Underwood. What, I asked myself, could he want from me now?
He said, “I tell you, hey Bert, the club’s struggling. The younger members get called up. My boy’s on the eastern border for a month. Take a seat, chum.”
Johnson pulled the bell cord. The tea mamma appeared, and he asked for a plate of biscuits. The DC’s lap of luxury office had a teak table and upholstered for meetings. While Roebuck was on holiday, Johnson called staff meetings in this office on the flimsiest pretexts. The fans on the ceiling swirled, the elephant grey venetian blinds cast us in a pale opaque light. I sat facing the two at the oval table. Inconsequential banter filled the time until tea and a platter of Lobels assorted were brought in.
Johnson said, “Bert, it’s about your trip. Dirk’s in military intelligence now. He came to make certain...proposals.”
“Oh yes?”
Johnson’s tapered fingers were rapping out a ditty on the table.
“Bert,” the Colonel said, “everything’s messed up by this...war, if you want to call it that. Life is no longer so simple. God knows, convoys give me the shits. You’ll see for yourself when they start here...”
In a reluctant faint voice Johnson said to me, “I told Dirk I gave you the go ahead to travel without a convoy. Our friends Kreef and De Groot esquire are another matter. They travel without clearance. I’d thought I had overplayed my hand but Dirk is fine with it.”
The Colonel said quickly, “My purpose coming here wasn’t to check on you, Bill – or on you Bert. There’s absolutely no problem. Convoys can wait a week for the DC to come back. Until then you carry on with your routines.”
“That, Dirk, is what I thought I was doing,” I said, giving a Johnson a meaning-laden look. It was easy to see that they were skirting around the purpose of the meeting. Johnson sat back on his prominent shoulder blades as if it had nothing to do with him. He picked up biscuit after biscuit watching the Colonel befriend me as the golf chum I never was. It was like a rehearsal absent the main actor. A pause, as pregnant a one as ever paused, settled on the room. Were they waiting for me to play the absent actor or were these two conspirators going to?
Underwood took a sip of tea, pulled a face and pushed his cup away.
“Sorry, Dirk,” Johnson said. “Obviously was made with recycled leaves. It’s the weekend, you see.”
The Colonel leaned forward. “Bert, the fact is, your two colleagues are the ones I want to speak about.” I think I got their names right: De Groot and Kreef. May I?”
Through tight lips I said, “Colonel, I wonder they weren’t summoned here like I was. Then you could tell us all together whatever you came to tell.”
The ‘golfing chum’ met my words with hard eyes. Johnson wriggled to relieve his round ballistic buttocks which ladies found hard to resist. He leaned over to say to the Colonel, “I think we should...” The voice tailed off into inaudible murmurs which made Underwood lean his head sideways to catch the gist.
“Sorry, Bill,” I said, “I couldn’t hear what you said.”
“I said, I think we owe it to you to explain why your colleagues have been left out of this...meeting.”
“I see. My colleagues but not yours.”
The Colonel said, “Let’s keep it civil. Bert, the fact is we don’t altogether trust their... loyalty.”
“That,” I said, is because you don’t know them very well.”
“How well do you know them?”
“Dirk, let me put it this way,” I said. “Whatever reasons you may have for distrusting the two Hollanders, I never observed any.”
The colonel grunted and looked down. It amused me to wait for their move. They expected me, I saw, to amplify my tantalising statement. Silence reigned. Flies queued outside at a screened window; a cigarette stub in the ashtray lay atop yesterday’s ash; the offices were not cleaned on Saturday. Through the window came loud greetings. I knew of course why suspicion had congealed on staff like Kreef and De Groot. They were contracted rom Europe; they had no stake in the country; they acted as if natives were no different to Europeans; they treated the educated ones as equals and, most off-putting, were rumoured to sleep with black women. One more thing: the foreigners were too close for comfort with the Anglican and Jesuit missions.
Johnston at a nod from the Colonel, stood up and walked stiff legged to the desk. He wore perforated pied shoes. It was the weekend after. He picked up a file, came back and slid it over to him. Underwood looked at the file and put his hands together. It lay there like an accusation. Johnson sat down, falsely furrowing his brow at the clean biscuit platter, as if again disowning the whole business. To break the palpable tension Underwood cleared his throat.
“Bert, so you trust them?” he repeated.
I nodded, avoiding his cool gaze.
Lazily Underwood turned up the file cover and took up what was obviously a preselected sheet. He held it close to his face as if savouring the contents.
“Reported visits to Goodwill Mission, Gutu,” he read to me. “July to September:
12 July. 25 July. 3 August. 9 August. 22 Aug. 11 Sept. 26 Sept. Seven visits, Bert. Seven visits in three months.”
I sat back in my chair, saying nothing. Again fell the hungry silence.
“You don’t answer?” he said gently, looking straight ahead.
“Rick, I didn’t realise you asked a question,” I said. “To repeat – I have never seen or heard anything to make me not trust them. I will say, those frequent visits make sense. They have this farming project – growing coffee – not far from Goodwill Mission.”
Have you been?” he said. “I mean to the mission.”
“With them never.” Sometimes...Come on you crafty old man, how often exactly had you visited? Can you recall three, four, five or more such ominous occasions? How many would be innocent? So I read the Colonel’s looks. Verily I told him, “I did go there...what would it have been, nine months ago at least, perhaps longer. I could look up the record because I had a leaking radiator fixed by someone at the mission. It was on the way back from the Chirau tribe area. Tax collection and disability payments, were my excuse for being out there. Wait.
There was another time. Yes, I dropped off one of their crippled workers I picked up hobbling along the road. That would have been ... Let’s see...”
Johnson laughed out loud. “Bert, come on! You’re not under cross-examination for god sake.”
“Oh – I don’t know why but I thought I was.”
The Colonel pushed the file away. “Bert, I’m sorry, hey. On my word you are the last person I’d suspect of doing anything untoward. Look, I was told you’re going on Monday to Goodwill, with ...those two. I was hoping you might be able to be of assistance.”
My heart thumped with anger. I felt a right noodle, humiliated soon after being rejected. I shall go further and say that I knew they were playing some garbled double game with me.
All Adam’s apple and tact, he undressed the sordid help he was relying on me to provide. I was to report back on Goodwill Mission: the place, the priests and the comradely connections they displayed with my Laurel and Hardy Hollanders. I, in short, was to be a fly on the wall.
For a moment or two the Colonel and Johnson peered at me with smiling curiosity. They had done it at an earlier point of the meeting, but then I could afford to scowl back. I lapsed into thought – probably assumed. Making up my mind I rubbed my khaki drills above the knee. Then I said, still rubbing, not looking up: “I’m quite okay with doing what you asked. Not that I expect to come back with jaw-dropping intelligence for you.”
“That’s all right, Bert,” said my broad-grinned golf partner Colonel. “You must forgive me bothering you and putting you in a fix. I received a report and had to take the matter up. I’m quite satisfied that you will do what you can. Be discreet, that’s all.”
“If I’m wanted on the weekend,” I said to my co-conspirators as I stood and stretched, you know where to find me.”
Oh stupid and reckless me, no doubt, but after the tortuous morning I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.
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