The Book of the Heathen (24 page)

On one occasion recently he had been rumoured to have returned late at night drunk, unable to disembark from the boat that carried him without falling into the mud of the bank and then being unable to rise again. The boatman had sent for Perpetua and Felicity, and the two women had sat with Klein and tended to him until dawn, when others of his flock had arrived and carried him to his bed without anyone else having seen him.

‘Will you abandon Kirasi completely?' Cornelius asked him. I saw what an effort this was for him.

‘Perhaps. The place is falling down anyway. Any new Jerusalem needs to be built here, on the river, closer to the affairs and the hearts of men.'

‘Jerusalem,' Cornelius repeated softly.

‘Are you concerned for your bastard child's grave? You surprise me, Mr van Klees, you truly do. Leave the child be; she's where she belongs. It was a short and unhappy existence, nothing more. Why do you insist on turning it into the stick with which to constantly beat yourself?'

‘It was a simple question,' Cornelius said. He signalled to me to reassure me that he would not rise to the man's goading.

‘Ah, is that all it was,' Klein said. ‘Then there is nothing I can tell you.' He paused and looked directly at Cornelius. ‘Your woman, on the other hand, were you to ask me about that so-called “wife” you once professed to have, then perhaps I might have been able to tell you something more enlightening.'

I saw the alarm come into Cornelius's eyes, like a sudden flash of passing light reflected there.

‘He knows nothing,' I said to him.

‘Oh?' Klein said. ‘Then ask Perpetua here. Ask her if she didn't only a week ago encounter a group of those poor unfortunate women from Port Elys on their way to the colony at Ososo, all degraded and worn out and cast away from the place. Ask her. Or perhaps you believe she too will only lie to you.' He fluttered his hands as though to suggest disinterest, and then he nodded at Perpetua to speak.

‘I saw them,' she said. She spoke directly to Cornelius.

Port Elys was renowned for its brothels, for the women it attracted when there was nowhere else left for them to go. It was where, all those years ago, Klein had sent the mother of Cornelius's child. Ososo was the largest leper colony on the river.

‘Was Evangeline among them?'

‘Ha! Evangeline,' Klein said.

‘That was her name.'

‘It was what you called her, van Klees, nothing more. And you called her it because it felt better to you that way, because it was better than calling her what she was.'

Cornelius kept his eyes on Perpetua as Klein spoke.

The woman shook her head.

‘Then what?'

‘There was another woman there, a woman suffering greatly, who asked me if you were still here. She said she had long ago met Evangeline, and that she had asked after you. She had asked this woman to find out if you were still here.'

‘If you still existed to haunt her as you once existed to blight her life,' Klein shouted.

‘If you were still here,' Perpetua repeated.

‘Did you tell her I was?' Cornelius asked her.

‘Of course she did. The truth is air, light and warmth to these women.'

Klein grabbed Perpetua by the arm and pulled her back to him. ‘Tell him what you told her.'

‘I told her that you were still here, that the woman's child still lay at Kirasi, and that you still visited there.'

‘Thank you,' Cornelius said.

‘Thank you for what?' Klein said. ‘She told it all to a woman on her way to Ososo. Do you imagine she was going to be cured there and return to resume her calling at Port Elys, meet this
wife
of yours and tell her the good news? How long do you think they last at Ososo? What, six months, twelve? That's it, my friend – your small and flimsy piece of news has been extinguished.'

Cornelius continued to look at Perpetua. Her eyes averted from Klein seemed to deny what he said and I saw what slender hope Cornelius took from this.

‘How long is it?' Klein said, diverting Cornelius from the woman.

‘Nine years,' Cornelius said.

‘Nine years in Port Elys on her back. How do you imagine a woman can live for so long like that? Or perhaps the passing years are of no consequence to her, not now, not now that she is damned to an eternity of suffering. Perhaps it is only that knowledge which allows her to live with herself and what she has become.' He paused, hoping for some response from Cornelius, and when none came, he went on: ‘And never forget this, van Klees, she is there because of her liaison with you,
you,
and for no other reason. You blame me for sending her, for banishing her, but she knew as well as I did, as you did then and do still, that there was no other road open to her. You think the death of her sickly child, your so-called daughter, upset the balance of her mind, but that is only another excuse you make for youself so that you might live with the consequences of your actions.'

I hoped Perpetua might say something more to give Cornelius hope or to divert Klein's provocations from him, even at risk to herself, but she said nothing. I regretted that she had not trusted Cornelius sufficiently to visit him privately with the news, instead of first giving it to Klein to sharpen to this point.

Abbot, who had so far remained silent, said that he thought Cornelius and Klein were behaving disgracefully. Neither man acknowledged him.

Klein pushed Perpetua back to where Felicity waited, her part played.

I began to wonder if her story hadn't been an elaborate lie, one she had been forced into telling by Klein to further antagonize Cornelius.

The rain, which streamed into the building all around us, gradually slowed and then ceased. Men reappeared in the compound outside and resumed their work on the boats. The mound of blackened debris stood like a small black pyramid at the centre of the yard. Cornelius had ordered the balls of rubber to be destroyed out of sight of the compound, but the men entrusted to this had halved their effort by building the fire where its remains now stood.

Klein left us, beckoning Perpetua and Felicity to him as he went.

Abbot, embarrassed to be left alone with Cornelius and myself after what had happened, made a further cold remark about how Cornelius had behaved, and he too went back outside, waiting only until Klein and the women had gone from view before stepping out into the mud.

‘Are you all right?' I asked Cornelius.

‘Her name is Evangeline,' he said.

‘I know,' I told him.

He looked out beyond the flooded compound and the river, a look so hard that he might have believed that if he held the gaze for long enough he would have seen the lost and distant woman looking back at him.

There was nothing more I could say to him, nothing that might reassure or calm him, and certainly nothing that would not now force him to further expose and uselessly re-examine his grief.

I left him where he stood and went to examine the sodden mound of the fire.

21

The following four mornings, Nash rose before any of us and began his interrogation of Frere. We were again told to stay away from the garrison and the gaol while this took place. Even though allowed otherwise, I made no attempt to visit Frere as Nash began his assault upon him.

Each afternoon, Nash returned to his quarters, saw no-one, and spent several hours there transcribing the notes he had taken. It was in all our interests, he repeatedly insisted, that the fullest account possible be kept of these proceedings. He was accomplished in shorthand and promised us that an accurate record was being made of everything that passed between himself and Frere. We would none of us see this record, of course, but we were asked to believe in its integrity.

On the second morning of this questioning, Abbot arrived at the quarry to discover a sealed package on his desk marked confidential. He opened it to find a copy of the quarry's working accounts over the previous eighteen months. Whole swathes of figures had been underlined and circled and dotted with question marks like trees on a map. This was accompanied by a letter from Nash insisting that from that day forward, work in the place be suspended indefinitely. He was acting on orders; no-one was accusing Abbot of mismanagement or falsification.

Abbot spent several hours reading from these accounts and comparing them with his own. The tallies differed endlessly and he was at a loss to understand how these new figures had been calculated, and by whom, and to what end. Some of the pages were signed in verification with the names of shipping agents in Impoko and Stanleyville, our line of dispatch; the Board of the defunct Railway Company had submitted its records of quarry labour used and ballast supplied; other concerns sent in their own reports. For eighteen months, it seemed, others had been at work on these contradictory tallies, and Abbot was stunned by the blow. He insisted to anyone who would listen that he had recorded accurately and honestly all the rock blasted and removed, all the wages for the labour supplied.

He waited until the evening and sought Nash out, taking Fletcher with him to confront the man.

Nash affected surprise at the furore he had caused. He listened to Abbot's outrage and then repeated that neither he nor the directors were accusing Abbot of malpractice, merely pointing out that grave discrepancies existed between labour and cost expended and benefits achieved. What good, he said, was a week of a man's labour, when all there was to show for that labour was a pile of rubble of no use to anyone? It was an unassailable argument where effort and achievement, cost and profitability were all part of the same miserable, deflated equation.

Fletcher said little in Abbot's defence, merely nodding in confirmation or agreement when called upon by Abbot to do so. Nash remained calm throughout. He had been given no other choice but to suspend work at the quarry. It was part of his reason for being there. And yes, he had known from the moment of his own briefing by the Board in London that this drastic course of action was needed and would be taken.

But Abbot continued to rage like a spoilt child. He insisted on re-submitting his own accounts to the Company, and Nash told him he was at perfect liberty to do so, but that he ought to be aware of how this might affect his chances of future employment by the directors. Abbot stopped shouting at this. He was a man who had raced screaming to the edge of a cliff only to find himself with neither the voice nor the energy to take those final steps over its rim. He gathered up his ledgers and left Nash and Fletcher alone.

Fletcher told me afterwards that he had asked Nash about his own position at the Station and that he had learned all he needed to know by Nash's first evasive answer. Nash, he said, was a man who liked to control the pace and direction of the race, and was considerably less certain of himself when issues were forced beyond that control. He told me it was something I would do well to remember.

Having spent the late afternoons writing up his reports, Nash would then feel himself at liberty to wander among us, watching and assessing us as we worked, calculating the web of connections between us, and between ourselves and Frere, and all the time insisting that these encounters were nothing more than coincidental, men socializing, men relaxing after the rigours of their day's labour.

It was clear to us that whatever was happening between himself and Frere, the questioning was proceeding to Nash's satisfaction.

He joined in our discussions and complaints. He shared our meals and asked us about our lives and pasts and the families we had left behind us. He showed us pictures of his own mother and father and of the fiancÈe he hoped soon to marry. By ‘soon' he meant five years, and he hoped the woman would come out to him when he was settled here. He alone staked his belief in the woman's devotion and patience.

This suggestion that he saw his own future in the place – Naiyasha and Tanaland were the places he mentioned – surprised us; we had imagined him returning to London when he was done with us, imagined only ourselves wandering aimlessly into the void of his absence and recommendations. He would become a gentleman farmer, he said, and a Colonial administrator. The coming years, the new century, would see a need for men like him.

Abbot surprised me by sitting late into the night with the man; I saw how quickly he had learned to tack into those same favourable passing winds, and listening to his feigned interest in everything Nash now said was as painful as listening to the secrets of any pathetic man.

Before leaving him, I asked Nash how long he thought his interrogation of Frere would last, and instead of telling me it was none of my business, as I had expected, he said casually that he would not be seeing Frere for three or four days. He saw my surprise at this, and said he needed time to reflect on what he had already been told. He would say no more.

‘Go and see him,' he said off-handedly, turning back to Abbot, to the bottle and glasses which stood between them. ‘I assure you, he will complain of no mistreatment from me.'

Outside, I heard their shared laughter. I wondered at the speed of Abbot's change of heart, at what reassuring glimpses of his own future he yet hoped to secure.

*   *   *

I encountered Bone standing on a high bank overlooking the swollen river. Small islands raced downriver, whole trees with their families of apes and flocks of roosting birds intact.

It was mid-morning, a time when I would have expected him to be occupied at the garrison.

He looked up at my approach, but made no effort to leave. I sensed his resentment at something before he spoke.

‘Nash?' I said.

He spat into the water beneath him. His few teeth were darker than ever, and when he chewed or opened his mouth, his whole face took on a faintly imbecilic look.

‘“Make the most of what little time remains to you here, Sergeant Bone,”' he said.

‘You, too,' I said.