A Fool's Knot (2 page)

Father Michael sat down opposite the two men. In the years since his ordination as a missionary priest, he had experienced famine, disease and war. He had stalked death and it had lived alongside him. But throughout those years, he could recall no tragedy as sad as this.

 

 

 

August 1976

 

As she stepped from the train, Janet swung her haversack over her shoulder. The train had been crowded, so she hurried along the platform with ticket in hand in an attempt to avoid the perhaps inevitable queue at the barrier. The ticket collector was black and, remembering the car park attendant, she paused for a moment after handing over her ticket, half expecting him to speak to her in Swahili. “Move along please,” he said. She would soon have to get used to the idea that not everyone was Kenyan. And what difference would it have made if he had been Kenyan? A word of greeting and a single word of reply? What did it matter?

After a moment's indecision she walked towards the public telephones. From the inside pocket of her velvet jacket she took a tattered pink address book and looked up a number. The call took only a minute to complete.

An hour later she sat alone in a waiting room along one of the long meandering corridors of County Hall on the South Bank of the Thames. Her haversack was on the floor behind a hat stand in one corner of the room. Without it she looked considerably neater. Her jacket had weathered its two-year storage quite well. She had bought it for next to nothing in a jumble sale whilst at college and, having been told that Kenya was a ‘hot' country, she had decided not to take it with her. A white blouse, corduroy trousers and a pair of uncomfortably new shoes her mother had bought as a ‘coming home present' completed the picture. She had hardly been in the country for a day before her mother whisked her off to the shops, intending to buy her a complete new outfit. Janet had refused the offer and had provoked an argument. A pair of new shoes, declared ‘sensible' by her mother, was the pacifying compromise.

“Miss Rowlandson?”

Janet nodded.

“Sorry to keep you waiting for so long. Will you come in please?”

Janet stood up and crossed the rather cavernous waiting area into the adjoining office. She found herself strangely unused to the sound of English. Every statement she heard sounded like an apology.

“Good afternoon. Do sit down.”

Two women faced Janet across a small cluttered desk. They might have been pictures of the same woman taken at different times, so precisely did they fit within the same mould. One, frail, middle-aged and grey-haired wore half spectacles. The other, slight and slim, wore a sweater and trousers. Her spectacles were large, round and thick-rimmed. Both were incomparably neat and polite, so much so that Janet's first thought was to consider her own relative shabbiness. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea. There was a moment's organisation, during which the younger of the two arranged papers in front of the other, giving each sheet a title and function as she laid them individually onto the desk. The older of the two then spoke.

A few minutes passed in which introductions were made. Mrs Skemp and Miss Williams enquired after Janet's train journey. They had quite a discussion on the overcrowding on some routes. Mrs Skemp travelled from Notting Hill every morning by tube and her relationship with the Central Line was based more on hate than love. They wanted to know what she had done over the last few days and during her time in Kenya. Progressively Janet spoke for longer periods, no longer answering with merely factual information. After twenty minutes they had covered not only the two years in Kenya, but also the three years of her degree course in English Literature, her year of teacher training and even her school days, her membership of the Legion of Mary and the history of her holiday work in hospitals near her north Surrey home. Then came the real business of the meeting. Miss Williams spoke with a new directness.

“Can you tell us what it was that attracted you to Inner London, rather than, say, a borough closer to your family home?”

Janet answered as if her application had come about as a result of a long process of analysis and decision. In fact, some four months beforehand, she had suddenly realised that returning to England would involve getting some kind of job. Until then it had been a problem she could safely ignore. It was just too far away to deserve thought. When the time came round, however, she had realised that her two years of experience in Kenya would count for nothing. She would have to apply for posts as a newly trained teacher, still without having completed her qualifying probationary year. She had therefore placed a general enquiry to the Inner London Education Authority in the hope that such a large organisation would be bound to have at least something to get her started. At twenty-four, she had no designs yet on permanence.

“I've spent two years working with poor students in a poor area,” she said. “I want to apply the same principles in my future work. Where my mother lives is solidly middle class. They even still have grammar schools. I have a strong belief in the power of education to change people's lives, so I would like to work in Inner London.” Even as she spoke, she mused on the nature of self-deception. She surely did believe what she had just said. But how often in Kenya had she wanted to suggest to her students – especially the poorer ones – that they should think of doing something else with their time, something more likely to be of use and profit for them?

“I must say that you were very wise to have done something about finding a job before you got back,” said Mrs Skemp. “Most impressive. And tell me what you might see yourself doing five or six years from now. Are you ambitious at all? Have you considered setting yourself some career goals?”

“I have no idea at the moment. All I want to do is get myself established somewhere. And complete my probationary year, of course. It will always look strange, I suppose, that I didn't achieve that until three years after completing my training.”

There was a moment's silence. “I have a feeling that in your case it will have no long-term consequences,” said Mrs Skemp. There was another long pause as Miss Williams and Mrs Skemp consulted one another in near silence. They pointed at a couple of documents, whispered a little and nodded. Then Mrs Skemp looked Janet straight in the eye, her gaze angled above her half spectacles. “How does Clapham strike you?”

“Clapham,” Janet repeated. “It will be a long journey… A change of trains… but then I don't expect I'll stay at home with my mother once I have a salary of my own.”

“You realise of course that all of the posts we are currently recruiting for are late vacancies. Jobs are normally filled during the summer term…”

“I realise that,” interrupted Janet, not wanting to appear reluctant to accept the offer. “Clapham will be fine.”

“It's a Scale 1 post in the English Department at St Mary's. You might even get some A-level work in that school,” mused Miss Williams. “It's a really good opportunity. The post is vacant only because they have had a resignation on health grounds in the last two weeks.”

“That's fine.” And Janet was employed.

“There are a couple of forms to fill in. Miss Williams will give them to you on the way out. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Miss Rowlandson.” Mrs Skemp rose from her seat, leaned across the functional, local authority issue desk and offered a handshake.

Over a coffee in a nearby café, apparently squashed beneath Waterloo Station, Janet sifted though the papers she had been given. Thank goodness that was all over. She had no reason to be nervous and knew it. But she had been nervous, so much so that her voice had trembled and her facial muscles entered spasm. And now she was employed. She would ring the school from home tomorrow and arrange to visit the head. In a few years would she herself be a Mrs Skemp or a Miss Williams, a clone of professional woman, safe, dependable, even conventional? And what wonderfully overt concern the English expressed for the plight of others! Had she really lived for the last two years amidst poverty, disease and starvation to find that, on her return, the cause for greatest concern was the comfort of trains? How parochial even the professedly sophisticated seemed to be. Despite the lip service paid to ‘awareness' and ‘education', people here seemed to know as little about the world and its problems of poverty as the poor in Kenya knew of the problems of affluence. People everywhere lived small lives in small worlds, it seemed. Everything seemed to be fine until something from outside this limited universe levered its way into their lives. Then, she thought, the result was at best misunderstanding and at worst direct conflict. In a way, this inability of everyone she had met over the previous few days to visualise the life she had led during her two years in Kenya helped her to live with the sadness of Migwani's tragedy. If the affluent in Britain could not visualise a ‘different way', how could one expect an old man in Migwani to do it?

Outside, the rush hour was now in full swing. For some time she had been spared the experience of traffic jams and crowded trains. Now reunited with these joys, they somehow felt rather silly and pointless, perhaps even insane. Within a month she would be doing the same herself twice a day, without thought, without question.

Half an hour later she pressed the bell on the door of a semi-detached house in a quiet area deep within a west London suburb, after a rickety ride on a clanking District Line train. The door was opened by a tall red-haired man. He was plainly very happy to see her and shook her hand warmly as she stepped into the house.

“How did the interview go? Did you get it?” he asked.

“Yes. It was something of an anticlimax. It all seemed so easy.”

There followed the beginning of a ritual. He introduced his wife, whom Janet had never met, but whom Janet knew to be his second. Then, after taking Janet's jacket and haversack and hanging them on the coat rack, he showed her through into the living room, which was comfortably floral, overtly safe. He opened the sideboard and offered her a drink, but Janet, still standing, ignored his question. There was a tear in her eye as she started to speak.

“Dr Goodman,” she said hesitantly, “I have some bad news for you.”

 

 

 

January 1975

 

“Will you bring the arresting officer?” The sliding door over the small hatchway set in the wall snapped shut. The young man, who had been typing a record of the proceedings of the previous day's sitting of the magistrate's court, got up from his desk abruptly and left the room with perhaps over-stated purpose. The police station was only a stone's throw from the office, just across the main road. He walked briskly out of the District Officer's compound and crossed the road without looking. Traffic here announced itself noisily a minute or more before it approached. There was little else here to cloud the silence, save for an occasional call from a bulbul. Only the morning and evening bus to Katse and the occasional Ministry of Works lorry passed along that road, and both bus and lorry made so much noise and raised so much dust that you could generally see and hear them coming several minutes before they even reached the town.

 

After only a few seconds inside the police station, the young clerk was making his way back across the road accompanied by another young man dressed in the grey uniform and blue stockings of the Kenya Police.

“The arresting officer, sir,” said the clerk, showing the policeman through into the spacious, but largely bare office.

“Thank you, Syengo,” said John.

Syengo closed the door behind him and then returned to his typewriter in the adjoining room. His office was small and cramped, but extremely tidy and well ordered. He took great care with his work and was proud to be the clerk to the court. After all, he had only left school a year before and only six of his classmates had managed to find a job at all. What had happened to the rest he had no idea. Many of them had no doubt returned home after finishing school and were probably spending their time tending their father's cows. This made him feel even prouder. Others would be walking the streets of Nairobi, drifting from one casual job to another, living from hand to mouth. This comforted him greatly as he sat down again behind his desk, taking care to rearrange the pencils in his desk tidy so that they were all parallel, all facing the same way. Above all else he was grateful. He was grateful to his teachers, to the Government for employing him and to his father, who had paid the school fees and also helped him to get the job. He was already earning as much as a teacher in a primary school and had already saved enough to buy four bulls.

“It is stated that you, Mulindi Kisuva, did on the third of January 1975…”

The slow untrained clicking of the typewriter filtered through the partition into John's office. The policeman and two other men sat facing John. The three watched in silence until he had finished. John, after reading through what he had just written, replaced the top of his fountain pen and put it into the top pocket of his jacket.

“Constable,” said John without looking up, “since there seems to be some confusion surrounding the events in Nzawa last night, I have asked you to come here in order to listen to this statement which we have prepared. If this tallies with what you have been told by Mr Muchira, then we will have established that there is a case to answer.”