The Tomorrow-Tamer (15 page)

“They don't know anything outside this place,” she said. “I don't care if I can't understand what they're saying to each other. I'm not interested, anyway.”

Then her glance went to Ayesha once more.

“But why were they so angry–about her? I know it was mean, and I said I was sorry. But the way they all looked–”

“Ayesha was found by the police in Lagos,” I said reluctantly. “She was sent back to this country because one of the constables recognized her speech as Twi. We heard about her and offered to have her here. There are many like her, I'm afraid, who are not found or heard about. She must have been
stolen, you see, or sold when she was very young. She has not been able to tell us much. But the Nigerian police traced her back to several slave-dealers. When they discovered her she was being used as a child prostitute. She was very injured when she came to us here.”

Ruth put her head down on her hands. She sat without speaking. Then her shoulders, hunched and still, began to tremble.

“You didn't know,” I said. “There's no point in reproaching yourself now.”

She looked up at me with a kind of naive horror, the look of someone who recognizes for the first time the existence of cruelty.

“Things like that really happen here?”

I sighed. “Not just here. Evil does not select one place for its province.”

But I could see that she did not believe me. The wind was beginning to rise, so we went indoors. Ayesha carried the stool, Ruth lifted my red throne, and I limped after them, feeling exhausted and not at all convinced just then that God was in His heaven. What a mercy for me that the church in whose mission school I had spent much of my adult life did not possess the means of scrutinizing too precisely the souls of its faithful servants.

We had barely got inside the bungalow when Ayesha missed the monkey. She flew outside to look for it, but no amount of searching revealed Ankyeo. Certain the monkey was gone forever, Ayesha threw herself down on the damp ground. While the wind moaned and screeched, the child, who never wept for herself, wept for a lost monkey and would not be comforted. I did not dare kneel beside her. My leg was too unreliable, and I knew I would not be able to get up again.
I stood there, lumpish and helpless, while Ruth in the doorway shivered in her thin and daisied dress.

Then, like a veritable angel of the Lord, Yindo appeared, carrying Ankyeo. Immediately I experienced a resurrection of faith, while at the same time thinking how frail and fickle my belief must be, to be so influenced by a child and a silver-furred monkey.

Yindo grinned and knelt beside Ayesha. He was no more than sixteen, a tall thin-wristed boy, a Dagomba from the northern desert. He had come here when he was twelve, one of the scores of young who were herded down each year to work the cocoa farms because their own arid land had no place for them. He was one of our best garden boys, but he could not speak to anyone around here except in hesitant pidgin English, for no one here knew his language. His speech lack never bothered him with Ayesha. The two communicated in some fashion without words. He put the monkey in her arms and she held Ankyeo closely. Then she made a slight and courtly bow to Yindo. He laughed and shook his head. Drawing from his pocket a small charm, he showed it to her. It was the dried head of a chameleon, with blue glass beads and a puff of unwholesome-looking fur tied around it. Ayesha understood at once that it was this object which had enabled Yindo to find the monkey. She made another and deeper obeisance and from her own pocket drew the only thing she had to offer, a toffee wrapped in silver foil which I had given her at least two weeks ago. Yindo took it, touched it to his talisman, and put both carefully away.

Ruth had not missed the significance of the ritual. Her eyes were dilated with curiosity and contempt.

“He believes in it, doesn't he?” she said. “He actually believes in it.”

“Don't be so quick to condemn the things you don't comprehend,” I said sharply.

“I think it's horrible.” She sounded frightened. “He's just a savage, isn't he, just a–”

“Stop it, Ruth. That's quite enough.”

“I hate it here!” she cried. “I wish I were back at home.”

“Child,” I said, “this is your home.”

She did not reply, but the denial in her face made me marvel at my own hypocrisy.

 

Each Friday Dr. Quansah drove over to see Ruth, and usually on these afternoons he would call in at my bungalow for a few minutes to discuss her progress. At first our conversations were completely false, each of us politely telling the other that Ruth was getting on reasonably well. Then one day he dropped the pretence.

“She is very unhappy, isn't she? Please–don't think I am blaming you, Miss Nedden. Myself, rather. It is too different. What should I have done, all those years ago?”

“Don't be offended, Dr. Quansah, but why wasn't she taught her own language?”

He waited a long moment before replying. He studied the clear amber tea in his cup.

“I was brought up in a small village,” he said at last. “English came hard to me. When I went to Secondary School I experienced great difficulty at first in understanding even the gist of the lectures. I was determined that the same thing would not happen to Ruth. I suppose I imagined she would pick up her own language easily, once she returned here, as though the knowledge of one's family tongue was inherited. Of course, if her mother had lived–”

He set down the teacup and knotted his huge hands together in an unexpressed anguish that was painful to see.

“Both of them uprooted,” he said. “It was my fault, I guess, and yet–”

He fell silent. Finally, his need to speak was greater than his reluctance to reveal himself.

“You see, my wife hated England, always. I knew, although she never spoke of it. Such women don't. She was a quiet woman, gentle and–obedient. My parents had chosen her and I had married her when I was a very young man, before I first left this country. Our differences were not so great, then, but later in those years in London–she was like a plant, expected to grow where the soil is not suitable for it. My friends and associates–the places I went for dinner–she did not accompany me. I never asked her to entertain those people in our house. I could not–you see that?”

I nodded and he continued in the same low voice with its burden of self-reproach.

“She was illiterate,” he said. “She did not know anything of my life, as it became. She did not want to know. She refused to learn. I was–impatient with her. I know that. But–”

He turned away so I would not see his face.

“Have you any idea what it is like,” he cried, “to need someone to talk to, and not to have even one person?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have a thorough knowledge of that.”

He looked at me in surprise, and when he saw that I did know, he seemed oddly relieved, as though, having exchanged vulnerabilities, we were neither of us endangered. My ebony cane slipped to the ground just then, and Dr. Quansah stooped and picked it up, automatically and casually, hardly noticing it, and I was startled at myself, for I had felt no awkwardness in the moment either.

“When she became ill,” he went on, “I do not think she really cared whether she lived or not. And now, Ruth–you know, when she was born, my wife called her by an African name which means ‘child of the rain'. My wife missed the sun so very much. The rain, too, may have stood for her own tears. She had not wanted to bear her child so far from home.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled, the dark features of his face relaxing, becoming less blunt and plain.

“Why did you leave your country and come here, Miss Nedden? For the church? Or for the sake of the Africans?”

I leaned back in my mock throne and re-arranged, a shade ironically, the folds of my lilac smock.

“I thought so, once,” I replied. “But now I don't know. I think I may have come here mainly for myself, after all, hoping to find a place where my light could shine forth. Not a very palatable admission, perhaps.”

“At least you did not take others along on your pilgrimage.”

“No. I took no one. No one at all.”

We sat without speaking, then, until the tea grew cold and the dusk gathered.

 

It was through me that Ruth met David Mackie. He was an intent, lemon-haired boy of fifteen. He had been ill and was therefore out from England, staying with his mother while he recuperated. Mrs. Mackie was a widow. Her husband had managed an oil palm plantation for an African owner, and when he died Clare Mackie had stayed on and managed the place herself. I am sure she made a better job of it than her husband had, for she was one of those frighteningly efficient women, under whose piercing eye, one felt, even the oil palms would not dare to slacken their efforts. She was
slender and quick, and she contrived to look dashing and yet not unfeminine in her corded jodhpurs and open-necked shirt, which she wore with a silk paisley scarf at the throat. David was more like his father, thoughtful and rather withdrawn, and maybe that is why I had agreed to help him occasionally with his studies, which he was then taking by correspondence.

The Mackies' big whitewashed bungalow, perched on its cement pillars and fringed around with languid casuarina trees, was only a short distance from the school, on the opposite side of the hill to the village. Ruth came to my bungalow one Sunday afternoon, when I had promised to go to the Mackies', and as she appeared bored and despondent, I suggested she come along with me.

After I had finished the lesson, Ruth and David talked together amicably enough while Mrs. Mackie complained about the inadequacies of local labour and I sat fanning myself with a palm leaf and feeling grateful that fate had not made me one of Clare Mackie's employees.

“Would you like to see my animals?” I heard David ask Ruth, his voice still rather formal and yet pleased, too, to have a potential admirer for his treasures.

“Oh yes.” She was eager; she understood people who collected animals. “What have you got?”

“A baby crocodile,” he said proudly, “and a cutting-grass–that's a bush rat, you know, and several snakes, non-poisonous ones, and a lot of assorted toads. I shan't be able to keep the croc long, of course. They're too tricky to deal with. I had a duiker, too, but it died.”

Off they went, and Mrs. Mackie shrugged.

“He's mad about animals. I think they're disgusting. But he's got to have something to occupy his time, poor dear.”

When the two returned from their inspection of David's private zoo, we drove back to the school in the Mackies' bone-shaking jeep. I thought no more about the visit until late the next week, when I realized that I had not seen Ruth after classes for some days. I asked her, and she looked at me guilelessly, certain I would be as pleased as she was herself.

“I've been helping David with his animals,” she explained enthusiastically. “You know, Miss Nedden, he wants to be an animal collector when he's through school. Not a hobby–he wants to work at it always. To collect live specimens, you see, for places like Whipsnade and Regent's Park Zoo. He's lent me a whole lot of books about it. It's awfully interesting, really it is.”

I did not know what to say. I could not summon up the sternness to deny her the first friendship she had made here. But of course it was not “here”, really. She was drawn to David because he spoke in the ways she knew, and of things which made sense to her. So she continued to see him. She borrowed several of my books to lend to him. They were both fond of poetry. I worried, of course, but not for what might be thought the obvious reasons. Both Ruth and David needed companionship, but neither was ready for anything more. I did not have the fears Miss Povey would have harboured if she had known. I was anxious for another reason. Ruth's friendship with David isolated her more than ever from the other girls. She made even less effort to get along with them now, for David was sufficient company.

Only once was I alarmed about her actual safety, the time when Ruth told me she and David had found an old fishing pirogue and had gone on the river in it.

“The river–” I was appalled. “Ruth, don't you know there are crocodiles there?”

“Of course.” She had no awareness of having done anything dangerous. “That's why we went. We hoped to catch another baby croc, you see. But we had no luck.”

“You had phenomenal luck,” I snapped. “Don't you ever do that again. Not ever.”

“Well, all right,” she said regretfully. “But it was great fun.”

The sense of adventure had returned to her, and all at once I realized why. David was showing Africa to her as she wanted to be shown it–from the outside.

I felt I should tell Dr. Quansah, but when I finally did he was so upset that I was sorry I had mentioned it.

“It is not a good thing,” he kept saying. “The fact that this is a boy does not concern me half so much, to be frank with you, as the fact that he is a European.”

“I would not have expected such illogicalities from you, Dr. Quansah.” I was annoyed, and perhaps guilty as well, for I had permitted the situation.

Dr. Quansah looked thoughtfully at me.

“I do not think it is that. Yes–maybe you are right. I don't know. But I do not want my daughter to be hurt by any–stupidity. I know that.”

“David's mother is employed as manager by an African owner.”

“Yes,” Dr. Quansah said, and his voice contained a bitterness I had not heard in it before, “but what does she say about him, in private?”

I had no reply to that, for what he implied was perfectly true. He saw from my face that he had not been mistaken.

“I have been away a long time, Miss Nedden,” he said, “but not long enough to forget some of the things that were said to me by Europeans when I was
young.”

I should not have blurted out my immediate thought, but I did.