This Side Jordan (11 page)

‘Where’s Aya?’ he demanded, ‘and the relatives?’

‘In there,’ Nathaniel said. ‘When I saw you downtown you said you wanted to talk to me alone.’

‘So I did,’ Victor said absentmindedly.

They were silent for a while.

‘Did Aya tell you?’ Victor asked finally.

‘No.’ Nathaniel tried not to sound annoyed. ‘About what?’

‘About Charity.’

‘Who – Charity Donkor? You still seeing her?’

Victor laughed.

‘Seeing her –’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve been seeing her. The great fetish from the north has worked.’

Nathaniel looked at him sharply.

‘You mean she’s –’

Victor nodded.

‘Wonderful what the right fetish can do, isn’t it?’

‘Is it yours,’ Nathaniel demanded, ‘the child?’

‘Naturally,’ Victor said. ‘She’s been living with me for – oh, I don’t know how long.’

‘Are you sure it’s yours, though?’ Nathaniel insisted. ‘I mean –’

Victor grinned.

‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘Don’t be shy about saying it. Charity is a whore by nature. But I’m pretty sure it’s mine, as it happens. Not her principles, you understand. It was only that she liked what I had to offer. My offering to the fetish was to her taste.’

Nathaniel gazed into his glass of warm beer, smelling its sour yeastiness. He was willing to say anything, but he was not sure what Victor wanted to hear. The folds of flesh around Victor’s eyes were creased into jeering laughter. Nathaniel felt that Victor must think of him as stolid and humourless.

‘Make no mistake about it,’ Victor continued. ‘I was honoured, man. Why, she never even asked me for money. That’s not her usual habit, you know.’

Grotesquely waving one hand to the rhythm, he sang a verse from the ‘Club Girl’ calypso:

‘My beloved,’ Victor said. ‘That’s how she used to be with men. She is a fine woman, my beloved. Don’t you agree?’

‘Aya will be furious,’ Nathaniel said abruptly. ‘At you, I mean.’

‘Oh, come now. Aya knows what Charity’s like. She’s too loyal to admit it, that’s all. Besides, who said I was going to forget about marrying?’

‘I don’t understand –’

Victor looked suddenly tired and the heavy features of his face went slack.

‘Charity wants to leave her husband,’ he said quietly, ‘and come to me. You see, she’s grateful. She really wants that baby.’

Nathaniel looked at him, unable to speak. Charity was grateful. She was so grateful she wanted to ruin Victor’s life. Of course, it didn’t appear that way to her. She would cook for him, sleep with him, bear his child, and be – what she was.

‘You won’t –’ Nathaniel stammered.

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t be crazy, man. It’s impossible.’

‘I need a wife,’ Victor said. ‘Isn’t Aya always telling me?’

‘Look – ’ Nathaniel said desperately, ‘don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mind what she’s done in the past, or how many men she’s slept with and got paid for it. But she went to
the fetish priest, Victor, and she can’t read or write – she doesn’t know – she doesn’t know anything –’

‘So?’ Victor’s eyebrows went up.

‘So you couldn’t stand it,’ Nathaniel said firmly. ‘You’re an educated man. You need some woman who –’

‘I know – one of the “been-to” girls,’ Victor snarled. ‘One of the girls who straighten their hair and forget how to speak Twi and tell you they can’t possibly eat African chop, thank you, it doesn’t agree with their stomachs. Is that what you mean?’

‘They’re not all like that,’ Nathaniel said hopelessly. ‘Why do you exaggerate every time? What’s the matter with you, man? You hate all the old ways, and now you go and hate all the new ones as well. You’ve got to stand by something.’

‘All right,’ Victor said. ‘I’ll stand by Charity, then.’

‘Listen, Victor, you’re educated. Maybe you don’t like it, but that makes you different. You hear? Why hide from it?’

‘Is that what you think?’ Victor said slowly. ‘Is that what you think of me, that I hide from it?’

‘I don’t mean it bad,’ Nathaniel said quickly. ‘You know that. But why don’t you do something, Victor? Look at you – you could get a better job – easily. Marry a nice girl who would help you. What’s the matter? You want to hold onto the mud with both hands, just because everything above that isn’t perfect?’

‘Go on,’ Victor said, between his teeth. ‘Is there much more to the lecture?’

‘There’s no more,’ Nathaniel said, surprised at his own calm. ‘Only – I remember a proverb from a long time ago – “I face upwards and can’t see Nyankopon, but what of you sprawling downwards?”’

‘Fine,’ Victor said sullenly. ‘That is the difference between us, then? Good. I’m glad to know it.’

‘If I can’t say something to you, who can?’

Victor’s eyes flickered amber. He meant to hurt now.

‘You can’t see the sun, but you think there’s something there, don’t you? You put your faith in Ghana, don’t you? The new life. Well, that’s fine, boy. That’s fine for you. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a dead body lying unburied. You wait until after Independence. You’ll see such oppression as you never believed possible. Only of course it’ll be all right then – it’ll be black men oppressing black men, and who could object to that? There’ll be your Free-Dom for you – the right to be enslaved by your own kind. You can see it happening already. We’ve been ruled too long by strangers, Nathaniel. We’ve got the slave mentality. I don’t mean we’re humble. Slaves aren’t humble; they’re ruthless. They don’t want freedom for everybody – all they want is to be the man who holds the whip. Maybe we’ll learn differently, in a hundred years or so. Maybe we’ll have civil war, and maybe we’ll need it. Who knows? But I’m afraid I haven’t got your optimism. You can keep Ghana. I’ll take Charity.’

The cruelty in Victor’s ugly-handsome face all at once dissolved, and there was in his eyes an anguish that made Nathaniel turn away, not wanting to see it.

Then Victor heaved his shoulders in a vast shrug, and his laughter rumbled.

‘You see?’ he cried. ‘You see? Charity and I will go fine together. It’s like my mother says – it’s a pity to spoil two families.’

Nathaniel looked at him squarely.

‘You really mean it? You’ll let her – you’ll have her –’

‘Oh yes,’ Victor said cheerfully, ‘I’m serious, all right.’

He reached out and laid his hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder.

‘You won’t understand, boy,’ he said quietly, ‘but I’m fond of that woman. You see, whatever I do, she’ll think it’s great.’

Nathaniel’s throat hurt, as a woman’s might, with unshed tears.

N
o moon, no touch of wind, and the night was soft and smothering, like black velvet against the face. Johnnie walked up the wooden steps to the Cunninghams’. Even in the dull glow of the stoep-light the bungalow’s creaking age was all too apparent. Slatted shutters hung crazily at prison-narrow windows. The square yellow stoep-pillars were weather-gnawed. Shrubs, planted long ago, had grown beyond control, until now they formed a miniature jungle. A tangle of bougainvillaea all but obscured one wall, and the blossom clusters hung down like bunches of crimson grapes. The veranda was enmeshed in a net of morning-glory vines, and the moonflower delicately stretched its strong green tentacles around the door.

Johnnie knocked.

‘Who is it?’ Helen’s voice was tense. ‘Oh – it’s you, Johnnie. Come in. I’m nervous as a cat when Bedford’s not here.’

‘I thought you might be,’ Johnnie said. ‘I just came over to make sure you were all right.’

‘Oh, quite all right, thanks. I’ve got the children off to bed, and I was having a quiet drink by myself. Will you join me?’

Helen’s long hair was drawn back and coiled haphazardly at the nape of her neck. She wore a white housecoat, its collar splotched with facepowder. On her feet were the cheap toe-thong sandals which the Africans made out of old car tyres and scraps of leather. Almost any other woman would have been painfully embarrassed to greet a visitor. Not Helen. She wore the soiled housecoat as though it were a court gown, and the car-tyre sandals like glass slippers.

‘I know it’s stupid to mind being alone,’ she said, ‘and after all, Bedford will be back from Takoradi tomorrow. I wouldn’t mind, if only we had a decent bungalow with screens. I know I talk about it too much. Bedford says it’s courting disaster, to worry so much – about the children, I mean. Perhaps it is. But so many things can happen to a child here. Tetteh killed a puff-adder in the front garden last week. It was coiled up under a hibiscus bush. Kathie had brought me a flower from that bush, not ten minutes before. If she’d gone a little closer –’

She broke off and began to shiver, the way she had that day in Johnnie’s office.

‘It’s not only the wild-life,’ she went on, ‘it’s – oh – malaria, dysentery, the sudden high fevers. Two years ago there was an outbreak of unidentified fever. The Evans’ little girl had it. I went over one morning to see if I could do anything, and I – I was with her when she died. I was pregnant with Kathie at the time – perhaps that’s partly why the whole thing unnerved me so much. The child had convulsions and then – I guess her heart just stopped. When Bedford came home that night, he found me holding Brian in my arms – too tightly: the child was terrified – and I couldn’t stop crying. At least, Bedford says it was that way. I didn’t remember, the next day. I guess I went off my head, a little. I remember, afterwards, though, thinking I had to go back to England. But of course
I couldn’t. It still happens – that sense of desperation, the feeling that something will happen to them, and it’ll be my fault for not taking them home –’

Her handsome face was haggard.

‘It’s awful to feel afraid all the time,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I feel so – ashamed. But I can’t seem to stop it.’

‘Why don’t you take them back to England, then? I know you wouldn’t want to be separated from Bedford for such a long time, but –’

‘If I left Bedford alone out here,’ Helen said, ‘he’d drink himself to death in six months. I thought you realized. Everyone else does.’

She suddenly jumped to her feet.

‘Hear it? That shushing sound – the wind’s coming towards us. It’s going to rain. I just know it.’

‘Does that bother you?’

‘The storms are so fierce here, not like rain at home. I wonder if I should close the children’s windows now?’

‘Can’t you do it when it starts raining?’

‘You don’t know our windows,’ Helen said. ‘Those horrible old wooden shutters. They bang and crash so. The wind turns violent all at once. It doesn’t give one time to shut everything.’

As she was speaking, the wind came, bringing with it the smell of rain, a moist earth smell. The wooden shutters began clattering. Helen ran into the children’s room while Johnnie shut the windows in the main room.

He could hear Brian’s excited chattering and Helen telling him to hush or he’d waken Kathie. Then Kathie’s sleepy confused crying. Finally Helen quieted them and came back.

Then the rain. It was as though the clouds had formed a solid bowl across the sky, and the bowl had now tipped,
spilling its entire contents in a sudden deluge. The water drove into the ground, hammered and thudded at trees and bungalow. A ravenous wind tore at the bougainvillaea and casuarina branches.

Sometimes white, sometimes blinding blue, the lightning switched on and off, each flash close enough to light the room. The thunder that followed was an explosion so deafening that the steady roar of the rain seemed subdued by comparison.

‘I hope Miranda won’t mind it,’ Johnnie said.

‘Oh dear. I do hope not. But you can’t possibly go out in this, can you?’

‘No,’ he reassured her, ‘I can’t.’

She was sitting on the edge of her chair.

‘I wonder if I ought to go in to the children again –’

‘They’re all right,’ Johnnie said. ‘You’re more frightened than they are.’

‘It’s true,’ Helen said, as though she resented it. ‘They’re never very bothered. Brian loves storms. I can’t understand it.’

‘They’ve lived here all their lives. They don’t know anything else.’

‘Why is it that the lightning always comes so close here, Johnnie? I never remember it like that at home. It seems evil and malicious, doesn’t it? That’s what all of Africa is like to me – vicious. It’s all in the same pattern. The sea, the sun, the storms, that snake the other day, even the people. Cruel and hard and menacing.’

‘If you hate it so much here,’ Johnnie said, ‘why doesn’t Bedford get a job in England?’

She hesitated.

‘Well, it’s the money, really,’ she replied. ‘We wouldn’t do half as well in England. We’ve got to think about Brian’s
schooling. Bedford wants him to go to Walhampton – that’s Bedford’s old school, you know.’

So that was it. Brian would go to Bedford’s old school, and they would make a gentleman of him there. He would be charming, well-mannered and without any real qualifications. He would be one of the relics of a dead age, the men who insert advertisements in the Situations Wanted: ‘Public school man, go anywhere, do anything’. For this, the Cunninghams were chained to Africa as long as Africa would have them.

‘That makes it difficult,’ Johnnie said.

Helen gave him an odd glance.

‘I hope you never discover how difficult.’

She picked up her glass and rose unsteadily to her feet.

‘Another?’

‘No, thanks,’ Johnnie said, ‘and – I don’t honestly think you should, either.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘One in the family is quite enough, isn’t it?’

She turned to Johnnie with a sudden vehemence.

‘Shall I tell you the chief reason why we can’t go back to England?’ she cried. ‘It’s because Bedford can’t get a job there. He can do a little of everything and not enough of anything. And even if he could get a job, he couldn’t hold it. Do you know the last job he had in England? He was office manager for a tuppenny-ha’penny firm that manufactured glass eyes for teddy bears. I expect that sounds riotously funny to you. And he was sacked – yes, even from that. It was the only job he’d been able to find at home, the only job of any kind. Now do you see?’

Johnnie nodded wordlessly.

‘Sometimes I worry myself sick that he’ll lose this job,’ Helen said. ‘And he mustn’t. He mustn’t! It isn’t all his fault. He did awfully well in the war, you know. He was very well
thought of. We hoped those contacts might help, but they didn’t seem to, much. If he’d ever been able to get a really decent post after the war, I think he might have been quite different. But – it hasn’t worked out that way.’

And Johnnie, listening to her, knew that it could scarcely have worked out any other way. Bedford’s world was dead, and he did not know the language or currency of the new. Nobody wanted gentlemen nowadays. They were like the beautifully carved monstrosities Johnnie used to see when he went to furniture auctions with Janowicz – cheap enough to get, but what could you do with them, who had room for them any more?

Helen’s mouth twisted.

‘It’s all very well to say it mustn’t happen,’ she said, ‘but he will lose this job, Johnnie. He might just have managed to hang onto it, if Africanization hadn’t come along. What’s the point in everyone wondering who’ll be the first to go? They all know perfectly well it’ll be the Cunninghams.’

She put her hands to her forehead and pressed her fingers against the bone.

‘It’s true that I’m afraid of Africa,’ she whispered, ‘but – if we’re sent home, what shall we do? What will become of us?’

There was nothing he could say to her. If he had known any reassurance, he would have used it on himself.

The rain had stopped, as suddenly as it began. For the moment, the storm was over. He could go home.

When Johnnie walked into Mandiram’s it was mid-afternoon. Cora should be finished her shopping by now.

She was looking at brocades. She smiled at Johnnie and made small winglike gestures with her hands. He explained that James needed the car and driver, and would she mind his driving her home instead.

‘Oh – thank you,’ Cora said, as though he had made the request purely out of a desire for her company. ‘I shan’t be long. You won’t mind waiting a moment?’

She turned again to the clerk, a Hindu youth with a long mournful face and pimply skin. He drew out several bolts of cloth, handling them tenderly, flicking the brocade over his arm to display the material’s radiance, touching here and there. Cora’s hands lingered on one.

‘How much?’

Johnnie was surprised at the intensity of longing in her voice.

‘Thirty-eight and six a yard,’ the clerk said nasally. ‘Feel it, madam. Best Indian brocade. All hand-woven.’

The brocade was scarlet, with small perfectly woven peacocks in turquoise and thread of silver. With her dark hair, Miranda could have worn such a material. But on Cora it would be even worse than the insipid colours she normally wore. She would look like a poorly stuffed antique chair with frail wooden arms and legs.

She turned to Johnnie.

‘Do you like it? I know it’s an extravagance, rather –’

Johnnie struggled to be tactful.

‘It’d make a nice cocktail outfit –’

Cora seemed to stiffen and draw away.

‘Oh no – ’ she stammered, ‘I wouldn’t wear it –’

She stroked the material.

‘I know it wouldn’t be – becoming – on me. I collect these brocades. Sometimes I get remnants and they’re much cheaper. I keep them in a little mahogany box. James had it made for me, just for the purpose. My bits and pieces – that’s what I call them. I just – well – I look at them, you know.’

She turned once more to the clerk.

‘Half a yard, please,’ she said defiantly.

At the Thayers’ bungalow, Johnnie helped Cora to carry in her parcels.

‘I wonder –’ she hesitated, then rushed on breathlessly, ‘I know you must be in a hurry to get home, but – would you stay for a cup of tea – or a beer?’

‘I won’t have tea, thanks – Miranda will be expecting me. But I’d like a beer.’

She went to summon the steward, and Johnnie looked around. Big faded English roses were profusely printed on the chintz curtains, and the walls were faded rose, hung with innumerable little watercolours of Windsor Castle, the Lake Country, a Kentish oasthouse. The sideboard was crowded with pewter and copper objects – candleholders, mustard pots, beer mugs, snuff jars. A leather band bearing a dozen horse-brasses was tacked on the wall beside the door, and on the other side there hung an enormous copper bed-warmer with a long walnut handle. In one corner stood a grandfather clock, its brass pendulum backed with a panel depicting nymphs and shepherds.

Cora returned and sat down primly.

‘I always like this room,’ Johnnie lied obligingly. ‘It’s so un-African.’

She began to unfold, like some pale graveyard peony in the charitable sun.

‘In the old bungalow, we had such a lot of African things about – ebony heads, fetish figures, goldweights – stuff that James had picked up. I simply put it all away when we moved in here. I sent to Harrods for the curtain material. James wanted mammy-cloth, but I said no, Africa shan’t enter here at all. Just this one small place – I felt I’d earned the right. Of course, James likes Africa.’

‘And you don’t.’

‘No – ’ even her voice was pastel, ‘no, I don’t.’

She poured a cup of tea from a china teapot shaped like Ann Hathaway’s cottage.

‘Getting this bungalow meant a great deal to me,’ she said. ‘It’s the first one I’ve wanted to fix properly, like a – a real home. The others were far too dilapidated. We’ve lived in so many old bungalows.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘No – you really can’t imagine –’ it seemed unfair that anguish should be condemned to chirp and tweet in that bird-voice, ‘you really can’t, Johnnie. No one can, who hasn’t lived here as long as we have.’

‘Oh – well, I suppose that’s right.’

‘The first five years I was here,’ Cora said, ‘we lived in a bush station in Ashanti. It was really the jungle, you know, but one never called it that. The whole place seemed to be shut in, enclosed, so hot and dank, as though it were under glass. The first year, I had malaria three times, and James nearly died of typhoid. The nearest doctor was in Kumasi, fifty miles away. That may not sound far, but the roads were only bush tracks. I had to take James by myself, in the truck. We were the only Europeans in the place, you see. None of the African drivers would help me – they were too frightened of catching typhoid, and they were certain he’d die on the way. I suppose they thought his spirit would curse them or something. My steward-boy came along – I told him I’d take James’ whip to him if he didn’t. I would have, too. He was useless, though – quite terrified. He was only a child, really, just thirteen. It took me a day and a night to reach Kumasi. The night was the worst. Of course, I had James’ revolver.’