The Sweetest Dream (42 page)

‘Joshua will not like doing that, Father,' said Rebecca.

‘And you would not like doing it either, Rebecca, so we are
in difficulties.'

‘It is Joshua's work, not mine.'

‘And so here is a little difficulty for you to sort out, Sylvia,
and I shall be waiting with interest to see how you do it.'

He got up, said goodnight and went to his bed, and Rebecca,
without looking at Sylvia, said goodnight and left.

 • • •

It was a month later. The hole in the shed wall was mended, and
there was a lock and a key. Around two of the grass shelters were
blinds made of the hessian used to bale tobacco, which could be
adjusted to keep out wind and dust, if not heavy rain. A new hut
had been built, with grass walls and grass roof, a big one, with
holes cut in the walls to let in light. It was cool and fresh inside.
The floor was of stamped earth. In it the really sick people could
shelter. Sylvia had cured cases of long-standing deafness, caused
by nothing worse than old impacted wax. She had cured cataracts.
She had got medicines from Senga and was able to do something
for the malaria cases, but most of them were old sufferers. She set
limbs and cauterized wounds and sewed them up, and gave out
medicines for sore throats and coughs, sometimes using, when
they ran out, old wives' cures remembered by Father McGuire
from Ireland. She had a maternity clinic, and delivered babies. All
this was satisfactory enough, but she was in permanent frustration
because she was not a surgeon. She needed to be. Bad and urgent
cases could be driven to a hospital twenty miles away but
sometimes delays were damaging, or fatal. She ought to be able to do
caesareans and appendixes, amputate a hand, or open up a badly
fractured knee. There was a shadowy area where it was hard to
say if she was on the right side of the law or not: she might slice
an arm to get at an ulcer, open up a suppurating wound to clean
it, using surgeons' instruments. If only she had known how badly
she would need a surgeon's skills then, when she was taking all
kinds of courses that were not useful to her now . . .

She was also doing the kind of work that did not come the
way of doctors in Europe. She had toured nearby villages to
inspect water supplies, and found dirty rivers and polluted wells.
Water was running low at this time of the year, and often stood
in stagnant pools that bred bilharzia. She taught women from
these villages how to recognise some diseases and when to bring
sufferers in. More and more people came in to her, because she
was being seen as a bit of a miracle worker, chiefly because of
ears syringed free of wax. Her reputation was being spread by
Joshua, for it helped his reputation, tarnished by association with
the bad doctor. He and Sylvia were ‘getting on', but she was
overlooking his often violent accusations of the whites. Sometimes
she cracked with, ‘But, Joshua, I wasn't here, how could I be to
blame?'

‘That is your bad luck, Doctor Sylvia. You are to blame if I
say so. Now we have a black government what I say goes. And
one day this will be a fine hospital, and we'll have our own black
doctors.'

‘I hope so.'

‘And then you can go back to England and cure your own
sick people. Do you have sick people in England?'

‘Of course we do.'

‘And poor people?'

‘Yes.'

‘As poor as we are?'

‘No, nothing like.'

‘That is because you have stolen everything from us.'

‘If you say so, Joshua, then so it is.'

‘And why aren't you at home looking after your own sick
people?'

‘A very good question. I often wonder the same thing.'

‘But don't leave just yet. We need you until we get our
doctors.'

‘But your own doctors won't come and work in poor places
like this. They want to stay in Senga.'

‘But this won't be a poor place. It will be a fine rich place,
like England.'

Father McGuire said to her, ‘No, listen to me, my child, I'm
going to talk to you seriously, as your confessor and adviser.'

‘Yes, Father.'

This had become a little comic turn: while it was not true to
say she had shed her Catholicism, she was certainly having to
redefine her beliefs. She had become a Catholic because of Father
Jack, a lean austere man, consuming himself with an asceticism
that didn't suit him. His eyes accused the world around him, and
his movements were all vigilance against error and sin. She had
been in love with him, and she believed he was not indifferent
to her. So far, he had been the love of her life. Father Jack had
stood for priesthood, for the Faith, for her religion, and now she
was in this house in the bush with Father McGuire, an easy-going
elderly man who loved his food. You would think that on a diet
of porridge and beef and tomatoes and mostly tinned fruit, seldom
fresh, that it was not possible to be a gourmet. Nonsense. Father
Kevin shouted at Rebecca if the porridge wasn't right, and his
beef had to be just so, medium rare, and the potatoes . . . Sylvia
was fond of Kevin McGuire, he was a good man, as Sister Molly
had said, but what she had responded to was the passionate
abstinence of a very different man, and to the glories of Westminster
Cathedral and–once–a brief trip to Notre Dame which burned
in her memory like everything she loved most made visible. Once
a week on Sunday evenings at a little church made of unadorned
brick, furnished with local native stools and chairs, the people of
the district came for Mass, and it was conducted in the local
language, and danced . . . the women got up from their seats and
powerfully danced their worship, and sang–oh, beautifully, yes,
they did–and it was a noisy convivial occasion, like a party.
Sylvia was wondering if she had ever really been a true Catholic,
and if she was one now, though Father McGuire, in his role as
her mentor, reassured her. She asked herself if in the little chapel
where the dust drifted in, the service had been conducted in
Latin, and the worshippers had stood and kneeled and responded,
according to the old way, she would have liked that better. Yes,
she would, she hated the Mass as conducted by Father Kevin
McGuire, she hated the fleshy dancing, and the exuberance of
the singing which she knew was a loosening of the bonds of their
poor restricted lives. And she certainly did not like the nuns in
their blue and white habits, like schoolgirls' uniforms.

He said to her, ‘Sylvia, you must learn not to take things so
hard.'

She burst out, ‘I can't bear it, Father. I can't endure what I
see. Nine-tenths of it is unnecessary.'

‘Yes, yes, yes. But that is how things are. It is. How they are
now. They will change, I am sure. Yes, surely they will change.
But, Sylvia, I see in you the stuff of martyrs, and that is not good.
Would you go to the stake with a smile, Sylvia? Yes, I believe
you would. You are burning yourself up. And now I am going
to prescribe for you, just as you do for these poor people. You
must eat three proper meals a day. You must sleep longer–I see
the light under your door at eleven or twelve, or later. And you
must take yourself off for a walk every evening into the bush. Or
go and visit. You can take my car and see the Pynes. They are
good people.'

‘But I don't have anything in common with them.'

‘But, Sylvia, aren't they good enough for you? Did you
know they sat the war out in that house–under siege they were.
Their house was set on fire over their heads. They are brave
people.'

‘But in the wrong cause.'

‘Yes, that is so, yes surely it was, but they aren't devils just
because the new newspapers say all white farmers are.'

‘I'll do my best to be better. I know I get too involved.'

‘You and Rebecca–both of you are like little rock rabbits in
a drought year. But in her case she has six children and none of
them get enough to eat. You don't feed yourself out of some sort
of. . .'

‘I've never eaten that much. I don't seem to care about
food.'

‘A pity we couldn't share out some characteristics between
us. I like my food, God forgive me, I do.'

 • • •

Sylvia's life had become the circuit from her little room to the
table in the main room, down to the hospital, then back, around
and around. She had scarcely even been in the kitchen, Rebecca's
domain, had never entered Father McGuire's room, and knew
that Aaron slept somewhere at the back. When the priest was not
at the supper table, and Rebecca said he was sick–yes, he often
got sick–Sylvia went into his room for the first time. There was
a strong smell of fresh and stale sweat, the sour odours of sickness.
He was up on his pillows, but sliding sideways, his head loose on
his shoulders. He was very still, though his chest heaved. Malaria.
This was the quiescent part of the cycle.

Small windows, one cracked, stood open above wet earth,
from where came freshness, to compete with the smells. Father
McGuire was cold, he was damp, his sweaty nightshirt clung to
him, his hair was matted. Hot season or not, he could catch cold.
Sylvia called Rebecca and the two women heaved the protesting
man to a chair, a grass one, which settled under his weight.
Rebecca said, ‘I want to change the bed when Father is sick but
he always says No, no, leave me.'

‘Well, I am going to change it.'

The change was accomplished, the patient lay back, and then,
while he complained his head ached, Sylvia gave him a blanket
bath. Rebecca averted her eyes from the evidence of the Father's
manhood and kept muttering that she was sorry. ‘I am so so sorry,
Father, I am so so sorry.'

A fresh nightshirt. Lemonade. A new cycle began, with the
savage shakings and sweats of malaria, while he clenched his teeth
and clutched at the iron rails at the top of his bed. The ague,
the quartan fever, the tertian fever, the shakes, the rigours, the
seizures, the trembles, of the disease that not so long ago had bred
in the London marshes, in the Italian marshes, and had been
brought home from anywhere in the world where there were
swampy places, had not been witnessed by Sylvia until she had
come here, though she had read it up on the plane. And now it
seemed there was never a day when some wan depleted person
did not collapse on the reed mats under the grass roofs and lie
shaking.

‘Are you taking your pills?' Sylvia shouted–it makes you
deaf, malaria does, or the pills do–and Father McGuire said he
took them but, since he had the shakes three or four times a year,
believed he had gone past the help of pills.

When he had finished with this bout, he was newly soaked,
and the bed was changed again. Rebecca showed her weariness
as she carried out the sheets. Sylvia asked if there was not a woman
in the village who could help with the washing? Rebecca said
they were busy. ‘Then what about your sisters?' she said to the
sick man. He said, ‘I don't think Rebecca would like that.' Rebecca
was jealous of her position, and did not want to share it. Sylvia
had given up trying to understand these complicated rivalries, so
now suggested Aaron. The priest attempted a jest, that Aaron was
an intellectual now and could not be asked to do such work: he
was at the beginning of a study with Father McGuire that would
make him a priest.

Would Aaron be too good to go through and around the trees
and shrubs to look for mosquito larvae? ‘I think you will find he
is too good for that.' ‘Then, why not the nuns?' Sylvia refrained
from saying that they did not seem to do much, but Father
McGuire said they wouldn't know larvae when they saw some.
‘Our good sisters are not all that keen on the bush.'

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in any water they can find. The
black wrigglers, as energetic in this phase of their lives as they
will be when seeking whom they may devour, can be in the furl
of an old dried pawpaw leaf, or in a rusted biscuit tin lid hidden
under a bush. Yesterday Sylvia had seen the wrigglers in a tiny
hollow excavated by a rivulet escaping from a flood, under the
arching roots of a maize plant. The sun was sucking up the water
as she watched, the wrigglers were doomed, so she did not kill
them, but two hours later there was a downpour, and if they had
not been washed out on to the earth to die, they were
triumphantly completing their cycle.

Father McGuire seemed semi-conscious. She thought that he
was worse than he knew–long term; he would get over this
attack soon. Because he was ruddy-faced, a certain underlying
pallor, even yellowness, was not easily seen. He was anaemic.
Malaria does that. He should take iron pills. He should take a
holiday. He should . . .

Outside in the night white shapes swirled in the wind from
approaching rain: the big wash Rebecca had done earlier. Sylvia
sat by the dozing man, waiting for the next paroxysm, and looked
round the room, her attention free.

Brick walls, like hers, the same split-reed ceiling, the brick
floor. In a corner a statue of the Virgin. On the walls the Virgin
again, conventional representations inspired, if distantly, by the
Italian Renaissance, blue and white and with downcast eyes, and
surely out of place here in the bush? But wait, on a stool of dark
wood, and of the same dark wood, a native Mary, a vigorous
young woman, was nursing a baby. That was better. Hanging
from a nail on the wall near the bed, where the priest could reach
it, was a rosary of ebony.

In the Sixties, the tumults of ideology that afflicted the world
had taken a local shape in the Catholic Church, in a bubbling
unrest that had attempted to dethrone the Virgin Mary. The Holy
Mother was
out
, and with her went rosaries. Sylvia had not had
a Catholic childhood, had never dipped her fingers into the Holy
Water stoups, or wound pretty rosaries around them, or crossed
herself or swapped Holy cards with other little girls. (‘I'll give
you three St Jeromes for one Holy Mother.') She had never
prayed to the Virgin, only to Jesus. Therefore, when she joined
the Church, she did not miss what she had never known, and
only slowly, when meeting older priests or nuns or church
members, had learned that a revolution had taken place which
had left many in mourning, and particularly for the Virgin. (She
would be reinstated, decades later.) Meanwhile, in places of the
world where eyes vigilant for heresy or backsliding did not reach,
priests and nuns kept their rosaries and their Holy Water, their
statues and pictures of the Virgin, hoping that no one would
notice.