Days of Your Fathers (11 page)

‘Yes. Luck. A little tilting of the balances. I don't know how they do it. But it's no good telling me – or most of us out here – that they can't.'

‘If I told you that they couldn't, I should be unworthy of priesthood,' the archdeacon answered gently, knowing himself to be on the solid ground of theology.

‘They have powers we have not got?'

‘We have all the powers that they have. But to use them – that demands, I fear, a simplicity which only our saints can attain.'

To him, as a deeply read churchman, every religion – of the past or of primitive present – had its value in so far as it foreshadowed the mysteries of the Faith. He believed with all his heart that those truths which man had feebly tried to utter through myth and magic were finally formulated by God in Christianity. Thus the prayers of the Church for rain and for delivery from storm and tempest were the divinely established ritual, but not the only possible ritual.

‘I thought you would be the last person to approve,' said Lee-Armour wonderingly.

‘I did not say I approved,' the archdeacon replied. ‘Only that I believed. Dear son, I have been in Africa long enough to know that sometimes, very rarely, men are given control over rain and over animals. I myself am so made that I have never doubted God shut the mouths of the lions for Daniel in the den. Nevertheless one's faith is firmer when one has seen – as I have seen – the tribal priest shut the mouths of the crocodiles at the bathing pool.'

‘Yes,' said Lee-Armour, ‘I've heard of that. It's quite safe to swim when he has given the word.'

‘I found it so.'

‘Then you at least will understand that I am paying a small price for my Bagai.'

‘The price was twelve hundred pounds,' Archdeacon Toby answered, smiling. ‘Not a big cheque for me to draw, I think, for rain and peace. And for my own peace, too. Shall we go back to the hotel? I want to tell the governor that there has been a mistake, a very subtle mistake, and that the money has now been debited to the right account.'

Exiles

Pain, slight but continuous, limited any excited curiosity about the English passing through his life, pink ghosts who looked through him and flowed onwards unseeing. Before he left Africa he had been told that among the young he would find no colour prejudice, but that he must expect little more than politeness from their fathers. Both, to start with, would be neutral. He had found the official warning pretty true until his accident.

In the hospital there had been no such neutrality, nothing but sympathy and undisturbed kindliness. All of them understood how desolate an experience it was to be maimed by a careless driver in so foreign a country. He had been content to trust the hypnotic confidence of surgeons until they returned him to normal life, telling him to come back once a week for examination. They even cared how much money he had and how he would live. That astonished him. The overcrowded hospitals of his own country inevitably threw their patients out as soon as possible and told them to get on with their business as best they could.

He was all right. He had enough money – after spending so little for so long – to live at the hotel in the market town where the ambulance had taken him. He would have preferred London and less loneliness, but shrank from being mauled once a week by strange doctors with whom he had no bond. That was natural enough. Yet the indifference of provincial life depressed him. There was no one to talk to – about pain or kindness or Africa or anything else.

Not that he was ever ignored. He was a young curiosity like the talking mynah hopping about its cage behind the cashier's desk. His waiter, the hotel staff, the receptionist were punctilious in remarking that it was a nice day or
asking how his leg was. When it rained, somebody always said: ‘I expect you wish you were back in Africa.' He did, but not for the reason they thought. The rain revived his memories of pouring, tropical warmth. It was not rain which he hated, but the lack of any sun warm enough to dry.

After leaving his solitary table in the dining-room he sat in a corner of the lounge where his face faded into the dark wallpaper behind. He felt an instinctive sense of security as if he were a child watching inexplicable strangers from the embracing roots of a tree. But he did not want security. He had enough of it.

He asked himself what he did want. The answer was immediate. Freedom from pain and a girl – though that could lead to unthinkable humiliation since as yet there had been little sign of returning virility. Perhaps above all he wanted someone with whom to laugh noisily and happily. Little hope of that. Talk was not important to these English. Also they could not always understand what he said unless he spoke slowly. It was not in his nature to speak slowly. Words should tumble like water in and out of the shade and over the shallows of laughter.

Outside, in the street, an unreal procession passed the window. Mostly they were young and gay. They were not so lively as his own people, but at least they gave the impression of being glad to be together, of not requiring any definite action or objective before they could appear alive. Large men, their backsides moulded to the seats of cars, passed across his front on their way from the bar to the Gents Lavatory. That was the only effect on them of alcohol. Then two middle-aged women in pink hats entered his lonely half of the lounge, saw him, started and changed their minds about sitting down. Did they think he was likely to dance and shout, or to show indecent interest in their clumsy bodies?

An old man came into the lounge from the twilight of the street. Perhaps not so old. It was hard to tell with some of these up-country Englishmen. They remained slim instead of acquiring the weight and dignity of age, and their blood-shot eyes had still some sparkle of youth. In London he had
seen few such men; in this market town there were more. That was to be expected. The retired clerks in the villages of his own land did not look so spirited as the old farmers.

His casual glance of inspection was answered and held, while the other at once and eagerly crossed the room.

‘May I sit down?' he asked.

Too gentle a request and strange. It was for the young to ask the old if they might sit down.

‘Ah, but we are not in your country,' said the grey-haired stranger, smiling as if he were able to read thoughts.

‘I am not a West Indian.'

He was weary of being taken for a West Indian, but a little startled by the abruptness of his own reply. He assured himself that it was not due to shame because his own warlike people had captured and sold slaves; it was simply that a difference of manners existed between West Indian and African, perhaps resembling that between American and European. One gave little importance to dignity and the other gave too much.

‘I know you are not. I recognised the tribal mark.'

‘You have been in my country?' he asked.

‘I was a district commissioner for twenty years.'

That was difficult. He had been brought up on so many stories of District Commissioners – of their justice, their humanity, their occasional uncomprehending cruelty. His grandfather grumbled that the country had been better off under the British. His father said neither better nor worse, but that now they had freedom; now they were men. For himself the life before independence was hazy and hard to explain. Governors, district commissioners and the rest of them were a mystery of the past. They had no right on their side, so they ought to have been hated. Yet they had not been hated.

‘Did you like my people?'

‘I loved them. I always shall. How did you hurt your leg?'

‘A car hit me. I have been in hospital.'

‘Here?'

The tone of voice suggested that it was so rustic a hospital or perhaps so unlikely a town.

‘All of them looked after me. I have never known such kindness.'

‘Yes, they would,' he agreed. ‘The surgeons are first-rate and have time for the personal touch as well. I meant that in London you would not feel so far from home.'

The old man broke into a Swahili which was purer and more fluent than his own, the words singing like rain on burned, eroded ground. He did not want to reply, but the grey evening of a grey town was unsuited to the language which this former giver of law spoke with such commanding joy. Yet, after all, it was irresistible. The words began to tumble out of him – of his home, his parents and the cattle, of the customs of England, of his examinations passed and his hope of a place in a university.

‘And somebody is keeping the eye of a father on you?'

He lied cheerfully that somebody was, for it was not good to be thought without powerful friends. But men are busy.

‘Are you married?' he asked this elder. ‘Have you many children?'

‘No, I never married. There was no time.'

It seemed curious that a boss politician who had enjoyed such opportunities for making money should not now be comforted by sons and grandsons.

‘At least you are now at home,' he said. ‘And that is good, very good.'

‘At home, yes. But when a man has given his life, it stays where he gave it. I do not see what they see.' He opened his yellow hand towards two prosperous, pink salesmen exchanging heavily printed cards as they left the bar. ‘I do not feel what they feel. That is why I could not pass one of my people without seeing if he was in need.'

He sounded like a missionary with this talk of love and
his
people. That could never have been the way of district commissioners. They had been great men, too proud to seek companionship from wounded students. They did not, he was sure, ask if they might sit down.

It was his hour for the special, weekly visit to the hospital. He struggled to his feet, the bright steel supports faintly clinking between knee and ankle.

‘I will drive you there and wait for you.'

‘I am a man,' he answered resentfully. ‘I will go out alone.'

Red Carpet Treatment

To a tired American who, on her second day in England, had just missed her train back to London and had two hours to wait for another, it had looked all that a small hotel ought to be – green and white, built in the days before Stanborough had become an industrial town, with a front door opening upon a quiet courtyard flanked by eighteenth-century houses.

Inside, however, it was utterly without welcome. Two old ladies were knitting on a sofa. A retired military man – at a guess – was asleep in front of an inadequate electric fire. A party of three men in a corner had busy glasses and ash-trays in front of them, but seemed affected by the general hush.

She just sat. Nobody paid any attention to her. It was nearly as cold as the railroad junction. After a while the uncompromising back of the manageress was to be seen behind the glass of the combined bar and office at the back of the lounge.

‘Three doubles, please!'

The manageress carried a tray of whiskies over to the three men. She showed exemplary patience at the disturbance.

‘Can I have some dinner?' Janet asked as she passed.

‘I am sorry, dinner is finished.'

‘A sandwich will do.'

‘I am sorry, we do not serve food in the lounge to non-residents.'

The creature vanished among its account books and bottles. Janet felt that the universe had run down and time had ceased. The two old ladies tottered off to bed. The
major woke himself up with a complicated snore, looked anxiously round the lounge and marched out.

The three men were left, enjoying themselves decorously over drinks. Their quietness annoyed her. If they couldn't be more lively after those large doses of alcohol, when could they be? They were tall, dressed in good tweeds and in their thirties. All looked exasperatingly alike, though she had to admit that they weren't. One was clean-shaven; one had a dark moustache; and the third a fair moustache.

They had looked up and smiled at her encounter with that intolerable woman, but Janet had not responded. A minute later she decided that the smiles were sympathetic, but it was too late. They ignored her politely – all except fair moustache of whose eyes she was occasionally aware.

Twenty interminable minutes passed. An unshaven porter in dirty shirt and green baize apron put his head through the bar hatch and said:

‘Time, gentlemen, please!'

Dark moustache looked at his watch.

‘Nonsense – it's not half past ten yet! And this lady has been waiting half an hour to be served.'

‘The missus says it's time,' replied the porter.

He crashed down the bar hatch with the finality of a guillotine and disappeared.

Janet got up, thankful that the spell which had condemned her to see and not be seen was broken. The three men also rose.

‘Madam,' said fair moustache, ‘I can only hope that you have graced this country long enough to know that all our hotels are not like this.'

‘I guess there are hellholes everywhere,' Janet replied a little too emphatically, and then smiled.

They stood before her with such an air of concern and apology. They swayed very gently like benevolent elephants, but there was nothing else in speech or manner to suggest that the order of ‘three doubles' had been repeated for most of the evening.

‘Mike,' asked clean-shaven, ‘the red carpet?'

‘Indubi-dubitably, Jim,' answered Mike-fair-moustache.
‘The lady has been humiliated, and she shall leave this hellhole, as she so rightly described it, with befitting dignity.'

Forty feet of bright crimson carpet ran from the front door across the lounge, past the bar hatch and down a passage. Jim and Mike walked straight out of the door with the leading edge. Dark moustache reluctantly followed with the rear end as if he were holding up a bride's train. They spread the carpet down the steps and across the courtyard.

Their attitudes respectfully suggested Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak. She hesitated. But there was no other way of leaving the hotel. She walked the length of the carpet disapprovingly, then giggled and swept the three a graceful curtsey.