Olura (15 page)

The facts. All right, you shall have them brutally. When the holiday started, I was prepared for whatever might happen. If Leopold wanted me, he could have me. I admired him greatly, and it was
to be the final gesture of my trust. You are not to comment. The only person who has a right to, and to laugh, is Philip.

Those two long conferences with the Commonwealth Relations Office, keeping Leopold in London when he should have been at home leading his people to social democracy, had worn him out. I remember
his saying that the real choice before a new country was whether to shoot all its lawyers or all its economists, and that neither of them was worth the trouble. Cyril Flanders was grieved by his
bitterness.

It was that sort of cynicism which made Cyril feel that Leopold Mgwana had more in common with the Establishment than with us. Personally I did not think he had changed in anything essential. It
stands to reason that Prime Ministers enjoy the society of Prime Ministers; or, if they don’t, at least they must have enough unspoken thoughts in common to be at ease. But I did notice that
his interests had widened. And I saw more than anyone of the little leisure he had. Often he would telephone me when some official dinner was over, and ask if he might come round for an hour.

There is always truth in what Cyril says, and he is so appreciative of all I do. He explained that the reason why Leopold gave less importance to our advice and guidance was that we allowed him
to feel that we had less admiration for him. Above all he needed rest, and to be persuaded all over again that what mattered was not authority, but our ideals of brotherhood and democracy. It was
my duty, Cyril thought, to take him away from London and try to break down his growing reserve.

I thought at first of Italy or France, but the hotels are so alike—all with the same routine and little hope of privacy. Cyril suggested the Hostal de las Olas where he stayed last year.
He was sure we should not be bothered by any publicity.

So it was I who invited Leopold. He was at first uncertain, and said that for my sake he did not think we should leave together. I told him that was ridiculous: that no intelligent person paid
any attention to such nonsense. But if he preferred it, I would drive down some days beforehand and arrange his holiday like any private secretary. That would not arouse any comment, and if it did
I didn’t care.

When I arrived and booked our rooms, I did not mention the name of Mgwana to the desk. Cyril might think the hotel too remote for publicity, but I knew from experience that we should have the
news hawks round at once. So I simply told the management that a friend of mine would shortly join me, and let them believe that he was some distinguished American of colour.

While I waited for him I was lonely. I felt that people thought I had no right to be there. There were Frenchmen who looked away from me, and people who could not understand why I was there
alone, why I had chosen that hotel instead of some international palace for the rich. I couldn’t help feeling that I was offering myself like the beautiful spies of fiction. And then I would
ask myself
why not
? They too, if they actually exist, serve something bigger than themselves.

Once away from the Group, this whole thing seemed to me artificial. It was real enough in one sense, for I knew very well that Leopold was physically attracted by me; but in another sense it was
not real at all. He had a curious, fierce sentimentalism which was too purely African to understand. Our deep and affectionate friendship was potentially critical—a silly word which I use in
the sense of the heat and silence of an atomic plant—but never looked like getting out of control.

So there I was, alone, forced to introspection, persuading myself that I hadn’t any exaggerated worth and that anyway what Leopold needed from me was work and time and sympathy. But I
couldn’t be calm about it. It was I who had gone critical. That ought to be a humiliating confession and yet I am not in the least ashamed of it.

When I first noticed Philip he aroused my curiosity. He was very English—tall and sandy-haired with a face which was bumpy rather than craggy and an eagerness to go forward which made him
look as if his shoulders stooped, though they didn’t. He too seemed out of place in the hotel. Very subtly. One would never have guessed it by watching him, for he was always swinging about
the bar and the dining-room, chatting to everybody with an unusual command of foreign languages.

He made no special effort to talk to me. That annoyed me. I knew I had made an impression on him, but he didn’t take the trouble to follow it up. He was behaving just as if he had been
snubbed, and decided that I was too difficult. One might have thought he was only interested in his Basque peasant girls.

It was July 20th at 11.45 precisely—there’s a time and a date for you, and does it matter to anyone but me?—and I was coming back from a long, weary walk during most of which I
had been worrying and worrying about Cyril’s extrordinary innocence. I had never confided anything about my private life to him; he probably thought that I was discreetly promiscuous. Perhaps
it was not fair to expect him to understand the relationship between Leopold and me. But didn’t he have a dirty mind? I mean by that a conventional mind, not clean thinking, prejudiced. Did
he, could he believe that Africans were so strongly sexed that they behaved like animals? No more true of them than of healthy men anywhere! Didn’t all this talking round the point of love
and admiration imply that he thought, like some wretched, poor white in the southern states, that Leopold would jump at an affair with any moderately attractive white woman? Cyril is a saint, of
course, but I saw it as revolting. If there was one thing certain about Leopold it was that he had complete command over his own actions and emotions.

We were the only two people—Philip and I, I mean—on miles of windswept beach. The wind was tearing at my cloak and the seas were like green and white dinosaurs, hungry after their
long journey and leaping at me because I was the first vulnerable, lonely thing to be tortured. And this man was going to pass me without a word.

I made him cross the river with me to this inn. He had absurd false modesty and did not like the precious Basque villagers to see him without his trousers. So I lent him my red cloak. I thought
that would embarrass him even more, but it didn’t. He is quite uninhibited whenever he sees a richness of humour.

Since the curiosity of each had been at work on the other, we reached at once a strange, challenging sort of intimacy. My impression was that he had had little experience of women of
character—leaving out philologists, of course, as I think it is fair to do. Philip would say that I am generalising on insufficient evidence. But it stands to reason.

I had not forgiven him for ignoring me, and I thought him too self-satisfied to be really likeable. He sat there stuffing grilled prawns and swilling white wine as if he were wholeheartedly
content with the world as he found it. His eyes were intolerable. I felt that if he made love to me I should be enjoyed rather like the prawns. No more and no less. And yet when he paid some
attention to what I was saying instead of the way I was made, he showed an amused tenderness as if he were trying to tell me that philologists didn’t do that kind of thing to little girls. I
said to myself that he was academic and limited and patronising, but now and then he reminded me of my father. The same sort of dry, outrageous humour. He did not fit into any of the monotonous
pigeon-holes where I kept my admirers.

Leopold arrived that evening. I introduced Philip and noticed that his manners were perfect—natural, but with just the right tone of respect. Both of them seemed to appreciate something in
the other which I could not altogether understand. I had that maddening impression that after ten minutes they had formed a club to which women were not admitted, and later on I mentioned it to
Philip.

‘Oh, we were just glorying in you!’ he said.

I replied that I did not like being treated as a museum exhibit, and that of course started him off on lovely, obscure nonsense about Aphrodite rising innocently from the sea and puzzled by the
goings-on of ordinary human beings. Period: Late Hellenistic, he added—just to make it all safely impersonal.

The next morning I thought Leopold looked tired after his journey, and persuaded him to stay in bed. The sun was hot, and the beach opposite the hotel was crowded. So I walked along the sands
towards the rocks near the mouth of the estuary where I had met Philip the day before. He was there, with a blue, sheltered pool rising and falling at his feet, as the surf crashed against the
other side of the promonotory.

I discovered that he knew very little about me, but at least had heard of my father. It was rather a tense morning. I did not want to lecture him about my interests; on the other hand I was not
going to let him shrug me off as a wealthy society girl whose intelligence was not worth bothering with. And on the top of that he made me self-conscious about my apple-green and white. Anyway he
deserved it, and I meant him to remember me in future.

In the afternoon I drove Leopold along the coast nearly as far as Santandér. He was rested, and fascinated by country so different to anything he had ever seen. Cyril had at least been
right in his choice of a place for us. When we came back very late I went up to my room, feeling rewarded for doing my duty by such a sense of joy and flowering.

It was a hot, humid night after the storm., In the late evening we had seen the flanks of those huge, round hills steaming like horses. When Leopold came up at about midnight, he looked as if he
expected me to be dressed for winter. One would have thought that he at any rate would be accustomed to women wearing as little as they pleased. But I suppose there are conventions as illogical as
our own. A girl is probably considered an abandoned hussy if she doesn’t have the proper little pattern of scars or something on her right breast.

Leopold had brought with him a draft of the proposed agenda for the Addis Ababa meeting. He wanted me to read through it all and tell him what would be the attitude of my Group if the
resolutions of the conference recommended direct action in states where Africans were not yet free and equal citizens. I said that I thought it would depend on the wording and the circumstances.
For me and my friends violence was always wrong. But, so long as it was recognised to be wrong, it might sometimes be justifiable without being condoned. He was afraid that point might be too
subtle for inexperienced politicians.

I worked on the papers till it was nearly half past one, trying to suggest phrasing which Cyril would approve. Then I went into the bathroom. There was half a man hanging down from the little
window with a camera round his neck.

Can you imagine the shock and the vileness of it? He looked dead. At first it was not so much that which appalled me as what he believed, what he intended. Obviously he had hoped to get a shot
of my bed through the open bathroom door.

But nothing quite fitted. He could never have done it secretly because of the flash. Perhaps he thought he would have time to escape. Perhaps he meant to try and blackmail me on the spot.
Another funny thing was that the bathroom door was shut. I am almost sure that I left it a little open—which would be much more convenient if somebody wanted first to listen and then to throw
it wide open suddenly.

I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. I was like someone killed instantaneously. I told Leopold to look. The effect on him was to make him savagely angry. Against me, it almost seemed. There
was a yellow light in his eyes. Then he stood very still, looking at that limp thing. He said that the man must have been pushed through the window already dead, and that we were not only
compromised but should be accused of murder.

I could not believe that. I told myself that it was I who must do something. This was my civilisation, not his. Spain or not, instinctively I must be nearer to it than he. And Philip nearer
still. I asked him if I should fetch Philip.

He was doubtful. In spite of their mutual admiration society he did not know what kind of a person Philip was. I did. He was not committed to anything at all except scholarship, but he had
kindness and absolute integrity. I did not understand—then—how anyone could have moral courage without a set of firm beliefs, but I was sure he would help me, because he would be
outraged at what had been done, not because he was attracted by me.

Leopold considered that neither of us should open the door or go out, since we did not know who might be waiting in the passage nor what sort of trap had been set. I wasn’t going to open
the door anyway. I knew very well how Philip could get to my room. It was two balconies away from his, and I had often seen him leaning on the railings.

When we had turned out the light, everything outside was dark. So I risked it. Philip was asleep. He did not make any remark or want to know what it was all about. He just came. And when he had
looked into my bathroom, he believed at once in our innocence. Only afterwards I saw how wonderful it was that he should be so confident.

He did what we ought to have done—feeling the man and making certain that he was really dead. He treated the body as if it had never been alive at all, calling it Punch or The Puppet or
something. It was heartless—like those horrible, falsely humorous expressions of soldiers by which they prevent themselves feeling what they know they ought to be feeling. It only breeds more
killing if you shrug your shoulders and say a man ‘has had it’ when he is dead.

Under Philip’s influence Leopold showed that he was not either as resigned or as sensitive as I had thought. Together they pulled the body into the bathroom and laid it face upwards on the
floor.

I recognised him. It was Alberto Livetti. He was notorious for his lack of scruples and his enterprise. He was just the man to make his way into an hotel and try to get pictures of a Prime
Minister and his girl friend. I couldn’t speak. There was a stupid inhibition which any woman would understand and, besides that, a second shock, for I never thought he would try to degrade
me all over again after what had passed between us.