The Book of Secrets (40 page)

Seventeen years ago he asked, Tell me, Pius, would you do it again, has it been worth it? I could understand the question then, though I couldn’t feel the urgency, the anxiety behind it. Now, closer myself to his own circumstance, I hear his question only too clearly.

As my answer, three months ago, I would have proudly displayed to anyone letters from my former students, all doing well abroad — testimony enough to warm the heart of any retired teacher. I might have pointed out a visiting former student or two, if they were around, or a young bank official from among my more recent accomplishments. I would have confessed to dire financial straits, yes, but I would have shown all the satisfaction of having done a job well, having influenced a generation of students. Surely there is something to be said for that, even in this cynical age?

But there was more to my life than the satisfaction of teaching. There was Rita, the girl who so ensnared the earnest young teacher that I was; and there was the angry, later sad, Desouza, with whom I could not develop a complete friendship because of Gregory; and there was Gregory, whose companionship I valued but could never quite understand.

I am not one to dwell upon paths not taken, to speculate on what might have been. Here I am, where I have arrived; this is my
credo. Gregory would say, To live is to risk, and so you did not live. To which my schoolgirls of 1950 would put a more filmic gloss: “The world belongs to the one who loves.”

But at least late in life this kindness has been conferred upon me, an unexpected, perhaps undeserved, gift: I have sat with Rita as I could not have in the past and admired her openly, and we discussed the question I had been afraid to ask myself before, about my relationship with her and what it could have been. And I allowed myself to go back to that evening in Gregory’s house, and I cannot turn away from it now.

I have with increasing interest and frequency been dipping into the pages of Gregory’s posthumous collection
Havin’ a Piece
, which Rita gave to me. It has brought back many memories of Dar as it used to be, some simply by the description of a familiar subject in a poem, others more obliquely. For example, the poem “Pili-Pili Bizarre” — punning on the words “bizari” (spice) and “bazaar” in typical Gregory fashion — describes a spice shop such as the one Pipa had, the likes of which still exist at the odd corner. There is an angry, irreverent though moving poem, “Kalima,” which begins: “There is no Deity but He / Who plucks out the heart of a woman / and serenades the night with her screams.” It refers, I believe, to Pipa’s son Amin’s funeral, which seemed to affect Gregory profoundly, and is a testament, moreover, to his denial of God and redemption. And I have no doubt who the brown man of this little poem is:

All these Dar poems are haphazardly distributed throughout the volume and cry out for a context. At some future time I shall perhaps make a study of these poems of my friend and explain their references to this city in which he served for so many years.

That Gregory, through his poems, should remind me now of Pipa is not altogether remarkable, only indicative of the small place and the times we lived in. More intriguing for me has been the presence in his collection of some poems dedicated to “A. C.” who clearly was a woman. One of these poems has an explicit reference to Kampala, Uganda. Gregory told me he’d been in Uganda in the early thirties, as, of course, had the Corbins, who were transferred there from Dar. Could Gregory have known the Corbins — was the A. C. of the poems in fact none other than Anne Corbin? The thought, a dim possibility at first, kept recurring with greater force and conviction. Yes, why not — after all, how many Britons had lived in Uganda in the early thirties? And if I was right, then all the years I had known him, Gregory had known Alfred Corbin, whom I was to resuscitate decades later.… How our paths have crossed and recrossed.

A few days after my last meeting with Rita in the coffee shop, I finally went to the Anglican church office to collect the box Gregory had left me. On my way I stopped briefly and somewhat guiltily at the grave I had not seen for over ten years. The site was well tended, like the others there, and that morning cut flowers had been placed upon it. The headstone looked more modest than I remembered, the engraving upon it quite bleakly to the point: “Richard Gregory, 1908-1972.” Inside the office I identified myself to the young priest (his predecessor, Mr. Anscombe, whom I had known, had passed away, I was told), who took me to
a storeroom. Without too much effort, and to my great relief, we managed to find my cardboard box against the far wall, somewhat misshapen but otherwise intact, at the bottom of a pile of similar boxes. It was marked “To Mr. Pius Fernandes (to be picked up),” and had been secured carefully with sisal twine. I couldn’t help thinking, with gratitude, that old Mr. Anscombe, who had first brought me the news that Gregory had left me the box, had shown remarkable prescience in believing that I would come for it one day.

As I had already guessed long before, most of the contents of the box were textbooks and binders filled with notes for courses. But there were other things, more personal, which in an instant drew me away from Shakespeare and Dickens. There was a thick bundle of staff photographs, from Boyschool — looking through them in sequence one had the eerie sense of the school staff ageing. In his early photographs, Gregory had not been as unkempt and overweight as he was in later years, though he had always been stocky. My own youth in some of them came as a rude shock. There were three issues of the
Manchester Guardian
, for which Gregory wrote a column called “Bwana Notes.” Three hardback exercise books contained drafts of poems and, I believe, an abandoned novel. There were newspaper cuttings of reviews of two of his books. And, finally, there were bundles of letters, ordered roughly by chronology, and secured with twine. The four letters that I had written to him from London were among these, as were dozens from his students at Boyschool. Then, among letters from numerous people I didn’t know, I found a number from Alfred and Anne Corbin, confirming my growing belief that the three had known each other in Uganda. Not an earth-shaking discovery at this stage, but a relief; a small victory; a gift, if you will, from Richard Gregory. There were just three letters from Alfred Corbin, all written within a few weeks of each other in 1935, and eighteen from Anne, written at various periods between 1937 and 1972.

I have been deeply touched by this bequest, which I had spurned once and forgotten for so long. The box contains, as I had thought, the debris of a life; but this debris is also a wealth. I don’t know what I will make of all this — perhaps there is another project here for a retired schoolteacher. Perhaps I will be able to answer for Gregory his own question, more generously than he himself was able.

Gregory had been such a fixture at Boyschool, such a part of the local life and lore, that it always came as something of a surprise to be reminded that he had been elsewhere in Africa. He would admit to it — he’d been in Uganda before Dar — but he made it obvious he had no intention of dwelling on the subject; it was none of your business.

It had been a short stay, 1933-34, and, I always assumed, not a very happy one. It was not hard to imagine a younger, more brash Gregory, a poet straight from London, offending the small local community of officials and being left without friends. The Corbins, however, and especially Anne, took a liking to him.

Entebbe
15/3/35

Dear Richard,

You should by now have settled in your new position in Dar. I trust the town and its inhabitants are more to your liking.
Excerpts of your essay have circulated in the upper echelons (among “the gods”) and H. E. himself asked me if you were indeed a socialist s—–. What I said of you does not bear retelling, but you have been redeemed if only as a somewhat eccentric literary type with connections to the London papers.

I am afraid that Commissioner Barnes came to you before I could quite write to you myself. I met him here last month at the Police Conference, at which he brought out a fountain pen which I found rather disturbingly familiar-looking. It was a Waterman with a very distinct design, and I told Barnes — who caught me staring at it — that it reminded me very much of one I had lost years before. It could still be yours, for all I know, was his response. He said the police clerk in Dar had bought it from an Indian called Pipa a few years ago and presented it to him. I told him that a young man called Pipa had run a shop in the town of Kikono where I had been
ADC
at the start of the War, and that I had lost my diary with the pen. This set the commissioner’s police brain ticking. Well, the long and short if it all is that he has set his mind upon raiding the Indian’s store. Such raids, for stolen property, are quite common, and I myself have been party to a few in Moshi and Dar. I told Barnes that in the — extremely unlikely — event of his finding my diary, he was to place it in your hands immediately …

Anne remembers you fondly. The Ladies’ Reading Group has folded, much to her annoyance, and regrouped as the Child Welfare Clinic. Washing and weighing native babies is not quite in her line of interest and she looks forward to the Little Theatre’s production of Shaw’s
Pygmalion.
The garden thrives.

Yours truly,
Alfred

Entebbe
17/4/35

Dear Richard,

I am sorry about the fiasco. I had no idea the police would take you along on the raid, and I apologize, again, for involving you in this silly affair. You are probably right that the fire was no accident. Your conjecture that Pipa is just the kind of shopkeeper who would hoard a diary is somewhat disturbing. I had hoped that it was dead and buried. The idea of it lying hidden in an Indian duka is revolting.

The diary, a gift from my mother, contains entries I began upon departure for East Africa, and is a record mostly of my first posting as
ADC
in the town of Kikono next to the German border. I met the shopkeeper Pipa in the most odious circumstances there, engaged in a scuffle with two askaris and my cook, who had objected to his transferring a large quantity of German mail into our postal system. He had come from nearby Moshi to take part in a local festival. Later he married a local Shamsi girl who was in my employ at the time. I gave the couple permission to stay in my district when the War broke out, and later Military Intelligence found use for the man’s connections in German East. Soon afterwards when the Germans occupied Taveta on the border, I evacuated my station upon instructions from my
DC
and proceeded to Voi. It was in Voi that I first missed my diary, and I recalled writing in it in Kikono immediately before meeting a delegation of the town’s elders. I had placed the diary and pen on a chair before going out to the meeting. I have given up hope of ever getting it back.

Anne sends her kindest. Your suggestion of using a native girl in the role of Eliza Doolittle raised some laughs. The police captain’s wife can do the Cockney accent quite well.

As ever,
Alfred

Entebbe
3/5/35

Dear Richard,

The woman you met in the shop was Pipa’s second wife. The first wife, as I think I wrote earlier, was a most striking-looking woman called Mariamu. She was also in the most pathetic of circumstances you can imagine, suffering ill treatment at the hands of her family, and in particular her stepfather. Before she entered my employ I rescued her from a ghastly exorcism rite.

After my departure from the town, Mariamu met a tragic fate — she was brutally murdered. I conducted a brief investigation into the affair after the War, when I was
DC
in Moshi, but came up with nothing conclusive. What I found appalling was the lack of interest shown by the family in pursuing the matter further — the crime was not reported to military or civilian authority. All this is ancient history now.

We are preparing for home leave, after which I take up my new posting, whatever the gods ordain. Rumour has it that this time it may not be in East Africa.

Anne sends her warmest.

Yours truly,
Alfred

How remarkably close Corbin came to his lost diary — first as
DC
in Dar, when on any day he himself could have walked into Pipa Store but, purely by chance, didn’t; and twelve years after he left Dar, when Commissioner Barnes’s policemen raided the store and were outwitted, leaving behind them a fire for which Pipa was able to win damages. I can only smile at the thought of Gregory in the store, among the spice crates and gunnies, following behind the inspector in charge, sniffing around, observing
much but picking up nothing to dirty his hands. Did he feel like a dupe, then — or did he enjoy the experience? I remember him at the funeral of Pipa’s young son Amin; he could have let out that he knew something of the boy’s father, but he didn’t. He did mouth the Kalima with the others, to send off the coffin, and wrote an emotional poem about the wastefulness of a child’s death.