The Drifters (13 page)

They walked up the hill away from the beach, past the myriad bars where other girls who had landed jobs were beginning to congregate, and into the center of town where restaurants of all nations posted on their windows the names of the travel clubs from Copenhagen, Berlin and London whose members could pay for their meals with the dinner chits the clubs issued. Some of the cheaper restaurants displayed as many as twenty-four decalcomanias, but the girls were not interested in dinner, so they went directly to the Alamo, whose violent music they could hear a block away. Inside, the American soldiers and sailors were having the last noisy drink of the weekend before starting back
to their bases on the far side of the mountains, and all of them greeted Ingrid with cheers and kisses, for she did much to make their visits happy. The three sailors who had entertained Britta the night before made a series of whirlwind proposals … they had an apartment … she could use it … there was food in the refrigerator … and next weekend she could decide whether she wanted to live permanently with any of them. She thought how surprised they would be if they knew how close she was to saying yes; she even studied the three to see which she would choose if she had to. She asked, ‘When do you start driving back to Rota?’ and they said, ‘At midnight,’ and she pressed the hand of the least objectionable and said, ‘I’ll be around to say goodbye.’

But sometime around ten the bartender appeared, tall, longhaired and generally presentable. She restrained herself from running up to him and waited until Ingrid called her over. ‘Joe, this is Britta. The Norwegian I’ve been telling you about.’

Joe looked up from his beer bottles and said, ‘I noticed you last night. Think you could run the place?’

‘Yes … if you’d be patient the first days.’

He smiled and said, ‘It isn’t the days that are the problems. It’s the nights.’

‘I am not afraid of nights,’ Britta said.

‘When did you say you were leaving, Ingrid?’

‘The ticket reads Wednesday.’

‘Can
you
start work Wednesday?’

‘Oh yes!’ She had not wanted to sound too eager, but she could not restrain herself.

‘I’ll have to move her things into the apartment,’ Ingrid said.

‘Why not?’

‘She can use the sleeping bag.’

‘Why not?’

When Joe went back to the bar, Britta said, ‘I want to move in right now. No, I won’t wait till tomorrow, because something might go wrong. He might see another girl who looked better, but if I’m sleeping at the foot of his bed …’

‘Few girls look better than you,’ Ingrid assured her. ‘Come along. We’ll get your gear.’

Britta walked back to the Northern Lights as if the pavements of Torremolinos were clouds. She wanted to sing and to kiss everyone who passed, and at the hotel she
ran up to the Swedish manager and said, ‘I’ve found a job. You said it couldn’t be done, but I’ve found a job.’ She took his two hands and danced, then went to the tour desk and announced in a voice that could be heard throughout the lobby, ‘You can take my name off tomorrow’s list, I’m not flying back to Tromsø.’ Mette was not in the room, so Britta left her a hastily scrawled note: ‘I found a way to stay here. Hope you do too.’

When he took her clothes to Jean-Victor’s apartment, he and Sandra were in bed, and without getting up they welcomed her, told her how to find the sleeping bag with the tartan cover, and directed its placement on the floor. Sandra said, ‘You’d better pin a note to it: “This bed belongs to …” What’s your name?’

‘Britta. I’m from a little town in northern Norway.’

‘Narvik?’ Sandra asked brightly. ‘My father fought at Narvik.’

‘Even farther north. Tromsø.’

‘Daddy was there too. In a destroyer. He says it’s wildly beautiful.’ Sandra maintained a running comment about her father and the battles he had engaged in off the Norwegian coast. Obviously she liked her father, and Britta said, ‘My father was in the mountains signaling your ships,’ whereupon Sandra leaped from her bed, naked, and ran to kiss their new guest. ‘You’ll like it here,’ she said warmly.

And in the second week, after Ingrid had returned to Sweden, Britta lay one night in the tartan sleeping bag and heard Jean-Victor and Sandra in their bed and thought of Joe sleeping alone in the big bed, and the arrangement seemed ridiculous, so quietly she crept out of the sleeping bag, walked the short distance to Joe’s bed, and shook him gently by the shoulder, saying, ‘It’s no fun down there,’ and he said sleepily, ‘Come in here where it’s warm,’ and the pathway back to Tromsø closed forever.

An Englishman is never at home except when he is abroad.

There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods.—Hazlitt

Finally we arrived at that mysterious plateau where the rivers begin, and wherever I went I was attended by a thousand birds of colorful plumage. If I tried to cross the swamp I saw before me hundreds upon hundreds of hippopotamuses who lazily moved aside at my approach. And if I went to the dry areas I found myself surrounded by a multitude of wild animals, some of whom I could not even identify, so abundant were the species, and I said, ‘This is Africa, the real Africa that will never perish so long as the plateaus are preserved and the men who govern them share their responsibilities one with the other.’ For remember that it was a black guide who had brought me to this place, to share its wonders with me.

—Lord Carrington Braham, February 1899

A great empire and little minds go ill together.—Burke

  Hire the morally handicapped. It’s more fun.

The blunders of youth are preferable to the success of old age.—Disraeli

For more than eighty years we have been the wards of Great Britain. Today we become the friends of Great Britain and I am certain that it will be as difficult for us to be peaceful friends as it was to be obedient wards. Many Englishmen lie dead in this land, heroic men who
fought our fathers to establish empire here; and beside them lie many of my ancestors, who tried to prevent empire from intruding on our ancient ways. Out of those battles we built a mutual respect, upon which we shall operate in the future. In Vwarda there will always be a home for such Englishmen as choose to live with us. In Vwarda there will always be businesses for Englishmen to run, offices for them to fill, jobs for them to perform, because I promise you this, the Negro Republic of Vwarda will never be an anti-white government, for we have learned how fruitful the cooperation of white and black can be.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make promising.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of Paradise.

—Mark Twain

The stability of England is the security of the modern world.—Emerson

It is my pleasure to confer upon you this Knighthood in honor of the great services you provided our former subjects in British Congo and the creative assistance you gave our newest ally, the Republic of Vwarda, in the critical days when it was designing the patterns under which it would operate.

Sex to a young girl is like a bed of flowers to a honeybee. She can sense its existence even though she has not yet seen it.

All empire is no more than power in trust.—Dryden

All government is the same.

(Scrawled in the margin of the book)

Please behave like decent young ladies and gentlemen. No suicides, no dynamiting, no abortions.—Sign in a Torremolinos hotel

Of the six young people I was to meet that year, the one I was closest to was a dark-haired English girl whose family I had known in the Republic of Vwarda when I was arranging industrial loans during that exciting decade when African Negroes were assuming control of their governments.

At first I did not work directly with the new Negro president of Vwarda, nor even with members of his cabinet, for in that beginning period the new nation had no Negroes sufficiently informed to handle the economics of an international loan. I conducted my discussions principally with Sir Charles Braham, in many ways the archetype of the British colonial servant, in others about as atypical as you could find.

He was archetypal because of his education at a good public school plus later attendance at Oxford, two experiences which imparted that serene mixture of cool superiority and amateurish bumbling which mark the English gentleman. He had been born into one of the historic rural families, which gave him the appreciation of nature so common in the best Englishmen. And he had grown up in an atmosphere of public service, his various uncles having distinguished themselves in places like India and Afghanistan; it was said by the shopkeepers of his home county that ‘the Brahams are so incapable of handling their own affairs that the only thing they can be trusted with is public service … especially in the colonies.’ Sir Charles’s father, having started his career in Vwarda when it was known as the British Congo, terminated it in London as cabinet minister specializing in empire problems.

I was not surprised, therefore, when reporting to Sir Charles’s office in Vwarda, to find framed behind his desk this motto:

With Sir Charles this boast was not pompous; he believed that the duty of empire was to bring order into any part of the world which strove to discard ancient patterns and accept new. In 1948, when the British government proposed that he give up his comfortable job in London and go out to the British Congo to help whip that faltering colony into shape, he never thought of protesting, for this was the kind of challenge a gentleman accepted. As he told his wife on the day of his appointment to the Congo, ‘It gives us an opportunity to put into practice what we’ve been talking about here in London.’ He was also mindful of the fact that he would be following in the footsteps of his father, ‘and it isn’t preposterous to think that perhaps I, too, may be recalled one day to serve in the cabinet, mayn’t I?’

His record in Africa had been outstanding and he should have been brought home in 1958, but that was the year the British Congo was scheduled to become Vwarda, and he had been designated by the Queen to supervise the transition, a ticklish job which he performed with such ease and good will that both England and the new nation wanted him to stay on for just a few more years. Government knew that he was not the stuff from which cabinet ministers were made and judged it propitious to leave him in Vwarda, where he served a useful purpose.

Now, in September 1968, when spring was blossoming in heavy splendor, he was ending his twenty-first year of service and had come to think of Vwarda as his homeland and these people as his charges, whether they were, as in the past, the illiterate and savage servants of an empire or, as now, the well-intentioned rulers of a wealthy new republic. He was fond of saying at banquets, ‘I was seconded here for a crisis job of four months. I have stayed twenty-one years. Either the crisis was bigger than they thought, or I was smaller.’

He had behaved with a certain grace in those years of change, shifting from his role as representative of the Queen, with all the panoply and prerogative that this conferred, to his present role of paid public employee of the
Negro republic. It had not been an easy transition—overlord in be-medaled uniform one day, hired hand in blue serge the next—but he had drawn upon his training as a gentleman and had shown lesser men how easy it was to take orders from Negroes to whom they had been giving orders only the week before. Observers could not detect whether Sir Charles was indeed embittered by this dramatic shift in fortune. He said simply, ‘Vwarda is my home and all men are obligated to till their own gardens, aren’t they?’

The only petulance Sir Charles ever demonstrated came in his private talks with me. We spent some months together, trying to wrap up the loan which would enable Vwarda to build its hydroelectric dam, and sometimes late at night, when things had gone wrong, he would confide his disappointments. In his huffing, stumbling manner he would growl, ‘Thing I object to most is the damned postage stamps. In the old days we had those superb stamps … great dignity … portrait of the Queen … splendid etching, just that and nothing more … subdued color, marvelous design … and those simple words … British Congo. Now what do we have? These damned tropical birds and animals … looks like a bloody zoo … and the new name plastered over everything … no taste … no feeling for dignity and propriety.’ Later I found that his real complaint was against the change in name. One night when we had taken on a rather heavy burden of gin at the British Club—formerly the Colonial Club, one of the stuffiest in the empire—he confided: ‘Thing I simply cannot understand is why they felt they had to drop that splendid old name British Congo … you knew what it was, where it was, what it meant. What does the new name stand for? A bloody river that not one person in a thousand ever heard of. Vwarda!’ He snorted with contempt, then quickly apologized: ‘I must tell you, though, that these blighters are damned decent to work for … and they do pay their bills, first of every month. Fact is, if the truth were known, it’s somewhat better working for Vwarda that it was working for the Labour Government in London, what?’

About the Vwarda River, Sir Charles was wrong. It was far from an unknown waterway, because those of us who were interested in geography had always loved this famous river with its unique history. Far to the north, at a swamp
imprisoned within a cup of mountains, much rain fell, and depending upon the season of the year and the set of the wind on a particular day, the swamp drained sometimes into River Banga, which debouched into the Congo and thus into the Atlantic; at other times into the Vwarda River, which crossed to eastern Africa and emptied into the Indian Ocean, finally making its way to the Pacific. Thus two drops of water falling from the same cloud and landing in the same spot might ultimately travel to different river systems and enter two different oceans on opposite sides of the world, thousands of miles apart.