Darkest England (19 page)

I controlled my desire to laugh. It would have been funny had it not been so desperately sad. He seemed to have little doubt as to what would happen to the eland once the bull caught up with her.

He need have no such fears, I assured him. The role of the eland bull was always played by some elderly relative, well beyond marriageable age. As for my intentions towards Beth, they were as honourable as I was sure his were towards me.

In that case – boomed the frockless prelate – I was making things damned difficult. How was he to save me from myself if I went on being myself? The essence of his plan was to persuade people that I was actually not unlike them. That meant learning to live in England as the English would expect. It did not mean running around his garden in the altogether, making great calf-eyes at his daughter. Instead of becoming more like them, I had deceived his only daughter in to becoming more like me. How on earth did I expect to get ahead when I carried on in such a
fashion? He had worked long and hard to lure the locals towards the impression that I was, basically, a deserving case. And he had bent over backwards to convince the powers that be of my genuine refugee status, assuring them I was in sore need of every scrap of asylum I could muster, being virtually hunted to extinction within my own land and destined, if ever I had the misfortune to be sent home, to be shot by the Beastly Boer and my hide pegged to the farmyard gate.

And this was how I repaid him! By darting about, mimicking a bloody stag in the rutting season. It was too bad.

And for these nightly cavortings to be happening just as things were going right was a tragedy. People were coming round. The temperature of the warming process was up by several degrees. Certainly we had had our little set-backs, but these were things of the past. The villagers of Little Musing, even if they did not yet quite see me as one of them, were increasingly of the view that, given time, one day I might almost
be
one of them.

But now, he was sorry to tell me, there were mutterings. The sight of a foreigner making free with their flying ants, at a time of scarce resources and high unemployment, had upset them. And could they really be blamed?

Then they also complained about what he rather mystifyingly called my ‘relationship' with Beth, for, difficult though it was for me to grasp, the young men of the village felt about this almost as badly as they did about my theft of their flying fauna.

I said that Beth's fear of the mockery she excited in the village whenever she showed herself hardly suggested a feeling of kindness or real interest among the males of Little Musing.

Smiling a less than convincing smile, Edward Farebrother remarked ruefully that we did not seem to be getting through to each other, did we? It was not a question of kindness, as I put it, but of scarce resources. In an area where young men struggled to find wives, I was seen as reducing the available pool of females of marriageable age, thereby depriving young men of the chance of procreation.

Remembering what we had seen and suffered on the Green Meadow Estate, at the hands of the offspring of just such young males, I said that even if it were true that I had removed Beth from the marriage pool, was I not doing everyone a service by preventing yet more unwanted progeny and sparing the wretched young women, whom these young males got with child and then deserted, from further pain and suffering? And fairly regular beatings?

It was exactly this sort of attitude that marked me out, fumed the good ex-Bishop, I was seen as a threat, not only to local flora and fauna, but to the traditional English way of life.

The retired sky-pilot pushed his black quills of hair off his pale forehead and grew gloomier still. Already there were fears that if more of my sort settled in Little Musing, it would be only a matter of time before flying ants appeared on the school menu, and people were expected to worship the moon, and women ran around the streets showing their behinds.

People would not take this lying down. Oh, no! I had been reported to the authorities as a bogus asylum-seeker. A grave charge. Teams of investigators were combing the country, determined to root out such fraud and save the Exchequer millions of pounds, and here I was, flitting around the garden in the altogether, consuming precious local resources. I was asking for it, wasn't I?

What I was asking for, I explained in simple terms, was the answer to a mystery which intrigued much of the civilized world. The Children of the Sun, those they thought of as the men of half creation, buff and ochre, cream and yellow, white and mauve, had long wondered and speculated about the River of Promises that had flowed out of England for centuries. Where did it rise, this mighty river? We did indeed believe that the source lay in the Palace of the Monarch. I had been sent to confirm this, and I was determined to keep faith with my people and travel to the source of this mighty river which had once watered half the globe.

Unless I journeyed to see the Queen I would be said to have failed my friends and sponsors, who had backed my expedition. I would make a last attempt to reach the source of the River of Promises. Even if I perished in the attempt.

Perished
. He took the word out of my mouth, you might say, and, in a fashion we would perhaps find vulgar, began rolling it between his rather full lips as if he tasted in it some rare savour; beginning his meal with the great P that had about it, say, the nutty tingle of roasted ant-bear; lingering lovingly over the main course of the rolled R, followed by the silken hiss of snake flesh; finishing on a tiny D for dessert, that had the salty bite of lizard's tail.

Per-ish-ed
! Once again the ex-episcopal lips pursed, with the explosive little sound of the bowstring, and propelled the word into the world. Perish the thought! said the good grounded Bishop. Though I could not know then what he wished to perish. But I noticed that he shook his head like a sleeper troubled by dreams of snakes. And then, in that rather endearing way of the English caught in the grip of some emotion of which they feel a certain shame, or
embarrassment, he immediately changed the subject to one in which they are quite at home and expect the foreigner to be discomfited.

What did I and my kind believe to be the best form of sexual congress? the gravity-struck missionary demanded. Single or multiple spouses?

Indeed, the question had the desired effect. My surprise must have shown on my face, and the fallen one pressed his advantage. Surely there was nothing strange in a desire for knowledge of our customs? And surely he was entitled to ask? Beth was his daughter, after all, and he was permitted to know something of me before I made him a grandparent.

The sexual obsessions of the English seem to us distressingly narrow. Any of our people coming after me may wish to know that English sexual activity seems to fall roughly into two parts: those convinced that people wish to rape them; and those who wish to rape someone themselves.

Wishing to return to Beth and the Eland Dance, and being unwilling to encourage this nonsense, and feeling little certainty that the subtleties of our relations would be understood, I explained, very simply, that among our people one partner sufficed, but others married many wives. Among the !Kung, for instance, the rule was single wives when the food was scarce, many when the rains were good. Either way, partnerships were lifelong, unless adultery was proven.

This surprised him. In England, said the ex-Bishop, adultery played an important role in the God-given scheme of things. Men were designed for promiscuity. One did not condemn married partners for consorting with others – as he was sorry to hear we did in my part of the world.
Therefore one did not regard my lusting after one's daughter as anything other than quite sacred, really.

This surprised me. Why then was he protesting about the Eland Dance?

In England, the good priest replied, his voice rising like the ascending swallow's, lust, in and out of marriage, was regarded as very natural: a Minister of the Crown, for example, who fornicated with a female camp-follower was only obeying the direction of his genes. However, adultery was one thing; incompatibility was quite another. A chappie from a different background who took advantage of a simple country girl, dressing her up in skins and playing hump-the-heifer in his own backyard! That put all heaven in a rage. And he was playing with bloody fire!

And then he fell again to making a meal of the word
PERISHED
, repeating it over and over. Realizing he had lost sight of me, I left him to his lipping and pouting and returned to the garden, somewhat cast down by this inexplicable outburst.

More surprises were in store for me. Instead of my fair, fat eland, ready to recommence the dance, I found the garden empty and the fire dying.

Watching me over the fence were my neighbours, Peter the Birdman and Julia.

Cooking and eating that ostrich egg, said Peter, was a bad thing. Meat was murder, but cooking and eating an egg was infanticide. One person's egg was another creature's agony. An omelette was a massacre of the innocents – and, man of peace though he was, a person who went around eating innocent ova deserved all he had coming to him.

If I was looking for Beth, Julia smiled, I had come to the wrong place.

Then Miss Desdemona, the rent collector, came by, swinging her shopping bag, and Peter went and hid inside his house, and Julia announced that she would not be paying rent to live beside an ex-Bishop who kept a menagerie in his garden.

Miss Desdemona looked at me and in her quiet voice she said that if I was looking for Beth, I would find her in Goodlove Castle, to which her father had delivered her. Her cousin, the Lord of Goodlove Castle, had accepted her, on loan, as it were, and because the ex-Bishop believed she would be safe there from people like me. I had arrived in the nick of time. Pointing north, where lay the great estates of Lord Goodlove, she urged me to save her. If it was not already too late.

Removing my shoes, I set off at a trot we can keep up for twenty miles, without effort. I ran through the churchyard where the dead lay sleeping; crossed the stream where the ducks gathered and shouted; padded over the humpback bridge; passed the station; and set off through the fields, crossing over vales and hills, lonely as a cloud that floats on high. On and on, until I arrived at a long, tall wall and a great black gate, so high it seemed to imprison even our mother and father the moon, throwing black bars across that holy face.

From somewhere behind the wall I heard a sound which stopped me in my tracks. I heard it not with my ears; that sound bites straight through the stomach walls and seizes the heart. I stood unable to believe it. I was in England, yet I heard the full-maned, sharp-fanged music of the hunting lion.

I stood too long. Somewhere in the darkness now I heard it: the snorting, galloping pursuit of a horse of a different colour. A large hunter with little sense of smell
and bad eyesight, thinking he moved silently while he signalled, with every crashing step, his purpose.

As I turned to run something sharp as a porcupine quill struck my right shoulder. Even as I plucked it out, I knew what I would find. My pace was slowing, my legs turning traitor, as those of the springbuck will do when the arrow strikes and points the poison on its way. I plucked from my shoulder a sharp, ugly, little dart, light as an arrow, and as deadly. From far off the lion roared somewhere in the darkness into which I now fell face first, the taste of earth in my mouth.

Chapter Seven

Struggling out of that darkness into which I had been plunged by the ugly barb fired into my shoulder, mouth dry, eyes sticky with sleep, I realized I had been manacled to the steel floor of a moving vehicle reeking of dog, rubber boots, shot-gun cartridges and over-ripe game bird, a species I reckoned to be something like our
korhaan
.
¹

Once again on my English travels I had come to my senses to find myself a prisoner. Hands and feet strapped as tightly as the ant-bear who, trussed with sinew by the hunters, is slung from a spear, and marched home to the cooking pot. In my drugged state I wondered if I had been taken by cannibals.

The hunter who had brought me low – his rifle propped against the dashboard – bent over the steering wheel. I could not see him clearly, for a mesh of steel protected his driving compartment from my prison. But I could smell
him well enough, for his dung signature rose pungently above the competing scents of birds and boots. He blended whisky, honey, cow-dung, tobacco and ashes.

I studied his neck. And learnt a great deal. A stiff neck; a proud nape; a neck that knew no bounds: and felt itself to be head and shoulders above all rivals. And was pleased to say so. It was no mere mute column of flesh and bone this neck, but an oratorical advocate of its own grace and strength. I had known such necks. I had heard their speeches before: high and mighty words that led one ever downward – to the prison cell and to the grave.