In a Free State (16 page)

It was something he had defined more than once. But he pretended to fumble for the words. ‘A breakdown. It’s like watching yourself die. Well, not die. It’s like watching yourself become a ghost.’

She matched his tone. ‘Did it last long?’

‘Eighteen months.’

She was impressed. He could tell.

With a chuckle, as though speaking to a child, he said, ‘Look
at that lovely tree.’ She obeyed. And when the tree had been looked at, he said, solemnly again, ‘Africa saved my life.’ As though it was a complete statement, explaining everything; as though he was at once punishing and forgiving all who misunderstood him.

She was stilled. She could find nothing to say.

*

This was the famous view. This was the openness the sky had been promising. The land dropped and dropped. The continent here was gigantically flawed. The eye lost itself in the colourless distances of the wide valley, dissolving in every direction in cloud and haze.

Linda said, ‘Africa, Africa.’

‘Shall we stop and have a look?’

He pulled in where the verge widened. They got out of the car.

‘So cool,’ Linda said.

‘You wouldn’t believe you were almost on the Equator.’

They had both seen the view many times and neither of them wanted to say anything that the other might have heard before or anything that was too fanciful.

‘It’s the clouds that do it,’ Linda said at last. ‘When we first came out Martin took photographs of clouds all the time.’

‘I never knew Martin was a photographer.’

‘He wasn’t. He’d just got himself a camera. He used to use my name when he sent the film off to be processed, so that no one at Kodak would think he’d taken the pictures. I suppose they must get an awful lot of junk. After he got tired of clouds he began crawling about on his hands and knees snapping toadstools and the tiniest wildflowers he could find. The camera wasn’t built for that. All he got were greeny-brown blurs. The people at Kodak dutifully sent every blur back, addressed to me.’

They were in danger of forgetting the view.

‘So cool here,’ Bobby said.

A white Volkswagen went past, travelling out of the town. A white man was at the wheel. He blew his horn long and hard when he saw Bobby and Linda, and accelerated down the hill.

‘I wonder who he’s showing off to,’ Bobby said.

Linda found this very funny.

‘It’s absurd,’ Bobby said, when they were sitting in the car again, ‘but I feel all this’ – he indicated the great valley – ‘belongs to me.’

She had been close to laughter. Now she leaned forward and laughed. ‘It
is
absurd, Bobby. When you say it like that.’

‘But you know what I mean. I couldn’t bear looking at this if I didn’t know that I was going to look at it again. You know,’ he said, sitting up, as stiff as a driving pupil, looking left and right, driving off, ‘I never knew a place like Africa existed. I wasn’t interested. I suppose, like you, I thought of tribesmen and spears. And of course I knew about South Africa.’

‘I’ve just thought. We haven’t heard the helicopter for some time.’

‘Helicopters don’t have much of a range. It’s almost the only thing I learned in the Air Force.’

‘Bobby!’

‘Just National Service.’

‘Do you think they’ve got the king?’

‘It must be awful for him,’ Bobby said, ‘having to run from the wogs. I am in a minority on this, I know, but I always found him embarrassing. He was far too English for me. We’ll see what his smart London friends do for him now. Such a foolish man. I feel sure some of them put him up to all this talk of secession and so on.’

‘ “I say, awfully stuffy here, with all these wogs, what?” ’

‘And they found it very charming and funny. I never did, I must say. You know, there’s going to be an awful lot of ill-informed criticism. And we won’t be exempt. Serving dictatorial African regimes and so on.’

‘It’s something that worries Martin,’ Linda said.

‘Oh?’

‘The criticism.’

‘I am here to serve,’ Bobby said. ‘I’m not here to tell them how to run their country. There’s been too much of that. What sort of government the Africans choose to have is none of my business. It doesn’t alter the fact that they need food and schools and hospitals. People who don’t want to serve have no business here. That sounds brutal, but that’s how I see it.’

She didn’t respond.

‘It isn’t a popular attitude, I know,’ he said. ‘What is it our Duchess says?’

‘Duchess?’

‘That’s how I call her.’

‘You mean Doris Marshall?’

‘I bend over “black-wards”. Isn’t that what she says?’

Linda smiled.

‘Very original,’ Bobby said. ‘But I don’t know why we think the Africans don’t have eyes. You think the Africans don’t know that the Marshalls are on the old South African railroad?’

‘She’s South African.’

‘As she tells everybody,’ Bobby said.

‘ “And proud of it, my dear.” ’

‘ “When I was steddying ittykit in Suffafrica –” ’

‘That’s it,’ Linda said. ‘You’ve got it exactly. And there’s this thing about “glove-box”. Do you know about that?’

‘You mean you don’t say glove-compartment.’

‘You always say glove-box.’

‘ “Because it’s ittykit in Suffafrica, my dear.” ’

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ Linda said.

‘I think the sooner they finish putting the screws on Denis Marshall and send the two of them packing to South Africa, the better for everybody.’

She rearranged the scarf around her hair and rolled down the window a little.

‘It’s almost cold,’ she said, and took a deep breath. ‘That’s the nice thing about the capital. The open fires.’

After the way they had just been talking, this expatriate commonplace disappointed him. He said, ‘The nicest thing about the capital is this. This drive back. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.’

‘Stop it. You’ll make me sad.’

‘There’s a splendid thing I read by Somerset Maugham somewhere. He’s not much admired now, I know. But he said that if you wanted only the best and held out for it, really held out, you usually got it. I must say I’ve begun to feel like that. I feel we can always do what we really want to do.’

‘It’s easy for you now, Bobby. But you were saying there was a time when you didn’t even know a place like Africa existed.’

‘I know now.’

‘I know it too. But it doesn’t help. I may want to stay, but I know I can’t.’

She closed the window and took a deep breath again. She gazed at the wide valley.

She said, ‘If I weren’t English I think I would like to be a Masai. So tall, those women. So elegant.’

It was a compliment to Africa: he took it as a sign of her new attitude to him. But he said, ‘How very Kenya-settler. The romantic blacks are the backward ones.’

‘Are they backward? I was thinking of the
manyattas
or whatever they are. Like the drawings in a geography book. You know, your little hut, your tall fence, and bringing home your cattle for the night to protect them against marauders.’

‘That’s what I meant. Peter Pan in Africa.’

‘But doesn’t the pre-man side of Africa have this effect on you sometimes?’

He didn’t reply. They both became embarrassed.

He said, ‘I can’t see you in a
manyatta
, I must say.’

She accepted that.

A little later she said, ‘Marauders. I love that word.’

The emptiness of the road couldn’t now be taken for granted. Traffic to the capital was light but steady: old lorries, tankers driven by turbaned Sikhs, a few European and Asian cars, African-driven Peugeot estate-cars, often looking brand-new, always speeding, packed with rocking Africans.

These Peugeot cars were the country’s long-distance taxi-buses. One, horn blaring, surprised and overtook Bobby on a steep slope. The Africans in the back turned round to smile. Linda looked away. The horn continued. Almost immediately the road curved and the Peugeot’s brake-lights came on.

‘I can’t understand why some people like to drive with their brakes,’ Bobby said.

Linda said, ‘For the same reason that they sell their spare tyres.’

Bend by bend, brake-lights intermittently flashing, the Peugeot pulled away.

‘It was one of the things I noticed when I first came out,’ Linda said. ‘Nearly everybody you met had been in an accident or knew someone who had been in an accident. There were so many people in splints in the compound it looked like a ski resort.’

It was an old joke, but Bobby acknowledged it. ‘There was an accident right here not long ago. One of our Singer-Singer Sikh friends turned off his ignition, to coast down. But somehow that locked his steering.’

‘What happened?’

‘He ran off the road and was killed.’

‘Martin says they are the worst drivers.’

‘Whenever you see a Mercedes in the middle of the road you can be sure it’s an Asian at the wheel. I can’t stand those shops. They don’t sell the Africans a pack of cigarettes. They sell them just one or two cigarettes at a time. They make a fortune out of the Africans.’

‘A good way of getting something out of them is to say, “Hello,
isn’t this made in South Africa?” They get so terrified they virtually give you the shop free.’

She stopped then, feeling she had gone too far.

*

At last they were at the foot of the cliff and on the floor of the valley. The sun was getting high; the land was scrub and open; it became warm in the car. Linda rolled down her window a crack. At the other side of the valley the escarpment was blurred; colour there was insubstantial, like an illusion of light and distance. They were headed for that escarpment, for the high plateau; and the road before them was straight.

Sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour: without effort or thought Bobby was accelerating, drawn on by the road. Here, after the hillside windings, the adventure of the drive as speed, distance and tension always began. As he concentrated on the car and the black road, Bobby’s sense of time became acute. Without looking at his watch he could measure off quarter-hours.

A derelict wooden building; a warning to slow down, on a washed-out red-and-white roadside board and then in elongated white letters on the road itself. Aright-angled turn over the narrow-gauge, desolate-looking railroad track; and the highway became the worn main road of a straggling settlement: tin and old timber, twisted hoardings, a long wire fence with danger signs stencilled in red, dirt branch-roads, trees rising out of dusty yards, crooked shops raised off the earth. And then, making the road narrow, an African crowd.

They wore felt hats with conical crowns and brims pulled down low. Many were in long drooping jackets, brown or dark-grey, which looked like cast-off European clothes. Quite a few, men and women, were brilliantly patched. Two or three men with pencils and pads were marshalling the Africans into open lorries with high canopy-frames. Policemen in black uniforms watched.

‘They are restless today,’ Linda said.

Bobby, driving very slowly, let the old joke pass. Africans stared from the road and down from the lorries, their black faces featureless below their felt hats. Bobby began a low wave but didn’t complete it. Linda, encountering stares, adjusted her scarf and looked straight ahead. Even when they had passed the crowd Bobby continued to drive slowly, anxious not to appear to be running away. In the rear-view mirror the blank-faced Africans with their patches and hats grew small. Out of the settlement, past a curve, Bobby checked again: the road behind showed clear.

The light hurt. Linda put on her dark glasses. The scrub stretched in every direction and seemed to end only with the hazy mountains. In the high sky clouds grew swiftly from the merest white wisps, became silver and black with storm, then disintegrated and reshaped. Bobby and Linda didn’t talk. It was some time before Bobby took the car up to speed again.

Linda said, ‘You know what they’re up to, don’t you?’

Bobby didn’t reply.

‘They are going to swear their oaths of hate. You know what that means, don’t you? You know the filthy things they are going to do? The filth they are going to eat? The blood, the excrement, the dirt.’

Bobby leaned over the wheel. ‘I don’t know how much of those stories one can believe.’

‘I believe you know. It’s been going on all weekend in the capital.’

‘There’s an awful lot of gossip in the capital. Some people will insist on their thrills.’

‘Hate against the king and the king’s people. And against you and me. I can do without that sort of thrill.’

‘I know, I know. You think oaths, you think terrorists and
pangas
. But that’s not the issue today, thank goodness. And you know, all I believe they do is to eat a piece of meat. I don’t think they even eat it. They just bite on it.’

‘Well, I suppose going up to Government House to eat dirt
and hold hands and dance naked in the dark is no better and no worse than going up to sign the visitors’ book.’

She laughed. It broke the mood.

‘I must say I didn’t like the looks we got there,’ Bobby said. ‘For a minute it made me feel we were back in the old days. I would’ve hated to be here then, wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I would have adjusted. I adjust very easily.’

‘I wonder whether we aren’t a little jealous of the president and his people. At a time like this we feel excluded, and naturally we resent it. I’m sure we would like them a lot more if they were more easygoing. Like the Masai. Speaking personally, I haven’t found any … “prejudice”.’

Above her dark glasses her narrow forehead twitched. ‘Oh, it’s easy for you, Bobby.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think it’s going to rain this afternoon. Just when we leave the tar. I’m looking at those clouds piling up there. If you travel a lot with Martin you get this eye for clouds. That untarred bit of road is my private nightmare. Just half an hour of rain and it’s all mud. I can’t stand skids. It’s like being in an earthquake. It’s the one thing that really makes me hysterical. That and earthquakes.’

‘I wouldn’t say the clouds are “piling up”.’

‘Still, wouldn’t it be romantic if we had to spend the night at the colonel’s, watching the rain come sweeping in across the lake?’