The Book of Secrets (3 page)

Thomas led him to a corrugated-iron shed, a blazing furnace of a place. This was the Customs House, where a long line of Europeans and a few American hunters awaited inspection. An Indian clerk sat at a table, filling out forms in quadruplicate, periodically releasing an angry or fuming passenger with a hoarse “Next!” and a stamp on a passport. He saw and acknowledged Thomas. Beads of sweat fell visibly from his brow onto the papers he wrote on. From time to time he would move an index finger across his forehead and sweep a rain of sweat onto the earthen floor.

“You have a gun, sir?” asked Thomas.

“A rifle …”

“Not to worry.”

Thomas looked away with the air of someone ready to wait indefinitely, and Corbin looked outside through the barred window at the sunny courtyard, ready to do the same but with less composure.

“Please point out your baggage, sir,” said Thomas suddenly.

Corbin did so. Then by some unseen magic all his belongings appeared at the head of the queue and he was summoned with a deference the other Europeans could not challenge. His gun and ammunition registered, he was whisked with style out of Customs and his baggage loaded by a porter onto a cart bound for the Mombasa Club up the road.

Only then did it occur to Corbin to enquire about the man into whose hands he had put himself, now walking solidly beside him. “Don’t worry, sir,” said the man, but the special treatment at Customs had cost five rupees.

They walked through the exclusive English settlement called The Point, strewn without regard for economy or geometry with picturesque villas in lush gardens connected to each other by roads barely better than tracks. The sun-hat was heavy on his head; without it, he understood, he would collapse. The temperature was ninety, he felt clammy, and the slight breeze from the ocean lacked the spirit to revive. Not too soon, it seemed, the large white building of the Club appeared in sight. With a relief that overwhelmed him, Corbin almost ran into its spacious shade.

The manager, Hanning, greeted him with a lemonade. He was a big red-faced man with thin yellow hair and a handlebar moustache, and wearing a rather sparkling white shirt and tie for the time of day. He’d had a swim and a bath, it appeared. Thomas left, promising to return. Corbin took a small table inside the bar, next to the doorway, through which he could look out at the verandah and the garden. There were two other entrances to the bar, one leading from the dining room where lunch was being served by black waiters in kanzus and red fezzes. There were African hunting and war trophies on the walls; a niche held an Arab copper-work jar under a pair of daggers. Behind the bar, at which stood a barman looking busy, were three group photographs of men with hunting or fishing spoils. A corridor past the snooker room led to a small number of guest rooms, to one of which Corbin was
presently shown. The window faced the back, and he could see part of the road leading down to the old town.

3 March

The room is large and airy. It has two beds, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a mirror, otherwise it is absolutely bare. There is no carpet. Several passengers on board ship called this club the best in Africa! …

4 March

“Venice has its gondola, London its cab, and Mombasa has its gharry, as I always say,” says Hanning. He is a drifter, who answered the Club’s notice, which was placed in the Cape Town
Times
, and came over to see the place, he says. The gharry is a tram running on rails and pulled by one or two natives. It is the only way to travel on the island, I am told. The
PC
is away and I might as well enjoy the metropolis while I can, before I get posted somewhere where I’ll be lucky to have a roof over my head. He has given me a list of the sites to visit. The Club has a small guide book, which he has lent me to browse through. The old Portuguese fort is a must. The old name of Mombasa was Mvita, for war.… Then the ancient mosque, the northern harbour where the dhows anchor, the water gate. And, no visitor to Mombasa misses the boat ride around the island …

The Club verandah looked upon a dense garden of brilliant colours running all the way to the cliff edge, which was demarcated by a wire fence and white stones. Beyond lay the ocean, its shimmering, misty horizon a fitting sight for an expatriate or tourist or colonial servant to contemplate over a cocktail.

He began his sightseeing the same day. A tram had been called,
and it emerged now from under the shade of a bougainvillaea bush. It was rolled noisily to the rail and lifted upon it, after which he sat on the wooden seat under its canopy and was pushed and free-wheeled all the way down the tree-lined shady Kilindini Road.

If The Point presented meditative vistas — dreamy groves, brightly coloured gardens, vast ocean, coral cliffs — Mombasa town assailed all the senses at once. The smells of overripe pineapples and mangoes, the open drains, animal droppings; costumes of a dozen cultures and the babble of as many languages.

He played tennis every evening at the Sports Club while he waited for the Provincial Commissioner, the
PC
. At the new and already potholed cricket pitch he watched a friendly game on the first Sunday he was there: Indians versus the English, one tribe on either side of the pitch. It was a clear rout of the ragged Indians, most of whom had never held a bat before and had merely been assembled for the Englishmen’s pleasure. Dinner parties at the Club degenerated into drunken orgies, after which members had to be assisted into their trams. On the second Sunday of his stay, he participated first in an oyster picnic on the shore, followed by a “cocktail parade,” in which the object was to mix enough drinks to knock oneself out.

There was one lion trophy on the wall beside the bar. A fierce, huge head, its mouth stretched wide open, the contemplation of which could make your stomach turn, your hair rise. As you turned away uneasily from this meeting you might be told by the barman that this lion had carried off twenty-seven victims in Tsavo: a coolie from an open railway carriage; an unknowing porter from a campfire away over a four-foot fence before his companions discovered him missing, the following day finding his bloodied clothes, some bones, and a severed head; a sleeping labourer dragged out from between two oblivious companions
inside a tent … and so the bloody toll went. If it was late in the afternoon, your attention would invariably drift, from that vanquished terror on the wall to the oversized human head below it, belonging to its hunter, Frank Maynard, who was sitting at a small table holding a whisky. There were stories about him, too, but they were told in his absence.

He was a big man in army khaki, who came every day for his sundowner. From where he sat he quietly watched all the goings-on in the room — the bluster and chit-chat, the deals and complaints, the dart and card games, of the merchants, the officials, and the engineers. His presence, once he arrived, like the man-eater’s above him, became part of the character of the room. The hair on his large head was brown and sparse, he wore a small moustache, and the cold green eyes revoked any trace of warmth betrayed by the faint toothy smile at his lips. Nevertheless, he was liked and much respected for what he was, the more so for the predicament in which he had (unfairly, it was said) been put.

Frank Maynard was a captain in the King’s African Rifles who would pursue a recalcitrant animal or tribesman with like ferocity and ruthlessness. Currently he was on suspension pending an inquiry regarding his conduct on a punitive expedition against a tribe and was biding his time on the coast.

On several occasions Corbin’s eyes had met and acknowledged that searching look from the trophy wall. Then one day, after he had been deposited at the Club door by a tram after a sightseeing tour, as he sat in the bar wiping sweat from his brow and contemplating his second bath, despairing over yet another change of clothes, Alfred Corbin’s eyes fell briefly on the soldier. That momentary look seemed to spark a resolve, for Maynard got up, and with slow deliberate steps came straight towards his table.

“Frank Maynard,” he said, shaking hands and sitting down.

“Corbin, Alfred Corbin.”

“So I’ve heard, old chap.”

Corbin tried not to feel like a mouse under that overbearing
smile, that brilliant predatory gaze, not to become too conscious of the heads turned to stare at them from the bar. He was waiting for his first posting in Africa, and this was a man who had trampled the land from corner to corner, slept in the forests and killed its wildlife and natives.

“I knew your brother in India. Robert. Good man.”

“In the Punjab?”

Maynard nodded. The same amused look.

“And I met Kenneth in Voi. Didn’t get to know him well, though, he was on his way out — home leave, it was, and Nyasaland after that, I believe.”

They had a drink together. The lion on the wall, Maynard told him, catching his gaze, had measured nine-foot-eleven, tip to tip, nose to tail; it took eight men to carry it.

The following evening Corbin was invited for supper.

Maynard kept rooms on the second storey of an Arab house on the Kilindini Road, not far from the Club. He greeted Corbin at the door in a yellow kanzu and a tasselled red fez. The reception room was furnished simply in the Arab style and they sat on pillows. Maynard produced a hookah and Corbin a cheroot. By this time the younger man was more composed, the other relaxed and less intimidating. A woman suddenly entered the room with a sharp rustle of clothing which made Corbin start. She was strikingly beautiful, a half-caste of partly Arab or Indian blood, partly African. The short length of buibui, worn around her shoulders over a colourful dress, was what had rustled; she hovered around them for a while before finally taking a stool some distance away.

“Stop gaping, man!”

Corbin raised an eyebrow. Maynard chuckled.

“A few years ago practically every man in Nairobi kept a native girl — or two or three. Now they are more civilized and busy with each other’s wives.”

The night was cool, a light breeze blew in through the open
window; there was a mosque not far off, from which the muezzin’s “Allahu Akber” presently came through clearly. Below, from the courtyard of the building came the sounds of boys playing, men chatting on stone benches by the little garden, probably over their coffee. Over whiskies Corbin and Maynard talked of their schools, their families. Maynard’s was a banking family; his refusal to join his father caused him much guilt and brooding. He was now estranged from his family.

The woman got up and left the room again with the distinct rustle of her buibui. She returned with a pitcher of water for washing hands. Then she brought their food: meat curry, and rice and bread. They drank more whisky and had plum pudding from home for dessert.

“I don’t always eat this much, but in company I tend to indulge. Africa teaches you how little food you really need, and how much we in civilized England tend to overeat.”

They sat up late into the evening. Maynard did most of the talking, mostly about Africa. He loved it and he hated it, above all he feared it for what it could do to him. “This is a savage country, and it could turn you into a savage. It is so easy to be overcome by its savagery, to lose one’s veneer of Western civilization. This is what I have learned, what I dread most. So in a way I look forward to leaving it. But I have nowhere to go. India, perhaps. Egypt …”

He respected the African, yet would call him nigger. He loved animals. He had killed scores of both. He believed in Empire, but had no patience with settling the country with whites. “I,” said the soldier, “respect the African — as a redoubtable enemy or as a friend. I would kill him with as little compunction as he would me. But the settler, and the low class of official we have in East Africa — excuse me, Corbin, but there are not enough of you here — despises the black and would use me to kill him.”

They sat in silence for a long time. The courtyard below was quiet now. The moon had risen and passed the window and was
somewhere above the house. From outside came the sound of frogs and night insects, with the richness of a symphony, it seemed, when he paid attention to it, and from the kitchen came the occasional clatter of utensils. One more time Corbin glanced around the room, preparing mentally to leave. There was one question he had about this man, based on what he had heard at the parties and picnics. But it was not his place to ask.