The Drifters (17 page)

The one new thing about Monica that I noticed in these three weeks when I was trying to tame her was that sometimes she spoke in a deep, husky voice which I had not heard before; it was as if she were a boy entering adolescence, for at other times she would forget the new voice and speak like a girl of seventeen, but when she caught herself doing this she would quickly speak the next sentence in her deep voice. When I asked about this, she said, ‘I’m practicing my bedroom voice.’

Like other prematurely developing young girls in the various parts of the world I have worked in, she had discovered, either through experiment or through discussions with older women that there were several ways in which a girl could with seeming innocence touch a man and get him started thinking. For example, one morning when I was standing at the window, looking out at the statue of Lord Carrington Braham and recalling Monica’s prediction that in the next riots the young hotheads would tear the old man down, she came up behind me and ran two fingers down my spine. It produced quite an electric shock, which I am certain she intended, for when I turned to look at her,
she was smiling that mischievous half-smile, but it showed not the open joy of a child who has played a clever trick but the calculating wit of a woman who has said to herself, ‘Let’s see if he’s a man or not.’

She also took my arm a good deal, pressing her fingers into the inner turn of my elbow, and when we were seated she was apt to grasp me by the knees. I affected not to know what she was doing, but she would not let me get away with that, for once when I had been lecturing her about the necessity for her focusing upon some one thing she wished to do when she got back to London, she drew back, looked at me provocatively and said, ‘Do? I’m going to become the mistress of the first millionaire I meet.’ Then, to break the spell, she gave me a brushing kiss, ending up with her lips close to my ear and whispering, ‘Sometime it would be fun to give you a real kiss, Uncle George.’

Her father was absent during most of this time, gone into the jungle on his final inspection tour, carrying on as if he were still in charge of Vwarda’s economic development. He knew that both President M’Bele and the new Minister of Economics, young Thomas Watallah, would prefer to have him leave, but he felt that it was his duty to inspect each ramification, so he spent the last hot days of March slogging his way into remote areas, perspiring constantly, giving the local chieftains his old brand of encouragement: ‘We don’t want the new man to find things sloppy, do we?’

At one interval, when he returned home, he asked me suddenly, ‘I smelt a strange odor near Monica’s room. Tell me, Fairbanks, is she smoking marijuana?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it serious? Like heroin?’

‘I don’t know too much about it. I wouldn’t touch it myself, but from what I hear, it’s a phase young people go through.’

‘Would you speak to her about it? Please? We don’t want a drug addict on our hands, do we?’

I asked him why he didn’t speak to her, and he said, ‘She’d never listen to me in serious affairs. Mettra fect, she doesn’t listen to me at all, does she?’ And he was off again, this time to the far northeast where the primitive tribes concentrated and where he was held in much affection, for he was the only government official who had ever appeared in their kraals; there was not much likelihood that young
Thomas Watallah would ever bother with that part of Vwarda. The new officials being appointed across Africa preferred cities like Paris and New York; it required an Englishman trained in the hard school of colonial service to appreciate that the farthest corner of a realm was still part of that realm.

As Sir Charles had requested, I spoke to Monica about her use of marijuana, and she laughed at me. ‘Mary Jane? It’s nothing but a pleasant way to relax. Like I said, an evening cocktail but less dangerous to your health.’ She was most eager that I try the weed for myself, but this I did not care to do, for the sickly smell that emanated from her room did not attract me. Furthermore, my attention was diverted from marijuana by an extraordinary development which I could not have foreseen. At six o’clock one evening Monica told me hurriedly, ‘Dress, Uncle George. We have a guest for dinner.’ She would not tell me who it was, but at eight a young, handsome, well-dressed Negro man knocked at our door, and Monica announced, ‘Mr. Thomas Watallah, come to dine with the Brahams.’ With elaborate courtesy she showed him into the living room, handed him a whiskey, and plied him with questions, whose answers she attended to with a sincerity that obviously pleased the new administrator.

At dinner she directed the conversation so that Watallah could appear at good advantage, and afterward, as he and I stood smoking, she came up quietly behind him and ran her hand down his spine, saying, ‘Mr. Watallah, if you have any intelligence, which I know you have, you’ll refuse to take this house if the government wants to give it to you. Insist on a new one.’ She then led him about, showing him the various things that were wrong, and when they returned from the upstairs it was obvious that they had been kissing.

She told me, ‘Uncle George, Mr. Watallah is going to take me to the discotheque. ‘I’ll see you later, but don’t wait up.’

Six days later President M’Bele summoned me to the presidential residence; I supposed that he wanted to talk about the extension of electricity services to the northeast, a project that Sir Charles had been pressing upon the government and which our company had agreed to finance, but his concern was quite different. ‘We’ve been friends for ten years now,’ he said bluntly, ‘and you’ve done many
things to help us. Now you must do another. I want you to put Monica Braham on a plane to London. Immediately.’

‘Sir Charles is with the tribes in the northeast. I couldn’t get in touch …’

‘Don’t get in touch with anyone. Get that girl out of Vwarda. Immediately.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Marijuana?’

‘No Watallah.’

‘Thomas?’

‘Yes. She’s been carrying on a flagrant affair with him. Night clubs. Kissing in the cinemas. They’ve been sleeping together in a little house on Esplanade, and you know he has a wife and two children.’

‘I didn’t know, Your Excellency.’ It has always seemed strange to me how easily one accepts the custom of referring to the head of state as Your Excellency, not because it flatters the recipient, but rather because the governing of any large unit of mankind is a most difficult job deserving of respect. I remember reading about how John F. Kennedy’s close cronies were celebrating with him on election night, and it was ‘Jack this’ and ‘Jack that,’ but next morning when the results were known, everyone instinctively drew back and spoke to him as ‘Mr. President.’ It was with no sense of condescension that I referred to this hard-working Negro lawyer as Your Excellency, for he was facing a difficult problem and needed help.

‘You know why she’s doing it,’ he said with some bitterness. ‘She’s angry that Sir Charles is being sent home. She’s even more angry that his place is being taken by young Watallah, who of course is not fitted for the job but who’s the best we have at the moment. And she wants to show us up—petty, petty motivation—to show up the government of a supplanting state.’ He rose offered me his hand and said, ‘I’ll send Thomas to a meeting of economics officials at Addis Ababa. If the truth were known, most of these young men want cabinet positions only so they can travel. I’m told it’s the same in Latin America.’

He walked me to the door, his arm in mine, then stopped and held onto me as he said, ‘You musn’t come to wrong conclusions about us, Mr. Fairbanks. I doubt that Vwarda or Congo or Zambia or Tanzania—they’re the new republics I know best—are any worse off than Angola and
Moçambique, which are still ruled by Portuguese white men, or Rhodesia, which is ruled by its own white men. At this given moment we may be worse off, but today is a prelude to tomorrow, and in the long run a self-governing democracy with all citizens enfranchised has got to be best. Don’t lose heart. In ten years Thomas Watallah and his crew will probably nationalize the dam, but whom will that hurt, really?’

As if he wished to reassure me of his constructive intentions, he walked with me all the way to my car, concluding: ‘But I want Miss Braham out of here at once. For her safety, not mine. You see, Thomas Watallah’s wife comes from a tribe which kills women who steal other women’s husbands, and she has many relatives in this city, That’s why I had to appoint him to the cabinet. The tribesmen would not understand that she’s sleeping with Thomas just for the fun of it. They might think she intends stealing him, and this they would not permit.’ When I returned to the Braham bungalow I found two men I had not seen before standing on the opposite side of the street … not doing anything … not going anywhere … just standing.

It was a lot easier for President M’Bele to order Monica out of his country than for me to get her out. For one thing, her father was well lost in the eastern jungle and would remain incommunicado for a week, by which time Monica had to be back in England. Naturally I tried to send him messages, but they piled up in the eastern capital, awaiting his return from the frontiers. I tried also to communicate with Sir Charles’s relatives in England, and although I got back some disheartening cables, for none of them wanted Monica, the real veto came not from England but from Vwarda, when Monica said flatly, ‘I will not go live with those old farts.’

At this I grew angry and said, ‘Young lady, do you realize that this marks a turning point in your life? What you and I decide these next two days will determine the kind of person you’ll be.’

‘You decide?’ she asked in disgust. ‘Who in hell are you to decide anything?’

‘I’m not your father,’ I said. ‘But I’m an older person who loves you very much … who wants to get you safely
out of here … before they do the job.’ I pointed to the two watchers, two very black men from a jungle tribe. ‘I suppose you know about them?’

‘Thomas told me they might show up. I’m not worried.’

‘I am. And on Thursday you board that plane for London and …’

‘I will not go to London. I will not go to London.’

‘Where do you propose going?’

‘Where I’d like to go is California.’

‘What would you do there?’

‘But I haven’t the money right now. I may have it later.’

‘Why California?’

‘There’s a place out there you probably never heard of. Haight-Ashbury. The kids say it’s sensational.’

‘That was a few years ago, Monica. Today it’s a savage dump for broken young people. In Haight-Ashbury you’d last a week.’ I sat her down and summarized a crop of recent articles I’d read on the collapse of this particular dream, but she refused to listen, saying, ‘Mallorca’s also good. Or I might try Berlin. They say it swings.’

‘Monica! You’re seventeen. You’re going back to school.’

Rising and taking a position from which she could stare down at me, she said, ‘Get it in your noodle, I’m not going back to school.’

She was firm in her refusal that I had to drop the subject. Pulling her down into a chair beside me, I asked, ‘Why the rebellion?’ and she said simply. ‘Because I despise everything my father stands for. If school and family in England produced him, I want no part of either.’

I started to protest, but she cut me off: ‘Did you see the contempt President M’Bele had for him the other morning? Father ought to be the one sent home, not me.’

‘Why are you so savage?’

‘Because it breaks my heart to see a man who could have been quite fine … he could have been, you know. He’s wasted his life on such false values.’

‘He helped a nation evolve.’

‘For all the wrong reasons. Do you know why he’s hanging on … in spite of the indignities heaped upon him by these Negroes? Because he thinks in the back of his trivial little mind that one of these days the Negroes will have to call England back to govern. And he’ll be the governor general, and live in the big house the way his father did.’

That was the first indication I had that the real cause of
her irritation was the manner in which the Negroes had treated her father. Her resentment ran deeper than she allowed herself to show, and her curious affair with Thomas Watallah made sense only if seen in this light. When the Negroes struck at her father, they struck at her, and she was prepared to fight back.

The longer we talked in those final days, when I tried to keep her under house arrest pending the arrival of her plane, the more convinced I became that it was the values of her father’s wasted life that she was rejecting and not her father himself. ‘I love him,’ she confessed one night, ‘in spite of his fuddy-duddy ways and his little-boy petulance. I’m much more a man than he is.’

She was also much more a woman, for although I tried to keep her safely in the house, which was now guarded by a federal policeman, she managed to slip past each of us—and for what purpose do you suppose? To have dates with Thomas Watallah prior to his departure for Addis Ababa. She went boldly to his office, made him take her to dinner at a public restaurant, accompanied him to the home of a friend and spent the night with him. When he smuggled her back to our place he took me aside and spoke like any man who has grown tired of an affair with an importuning woman: ‘Please, convince her to leave me alone. It could be very damaging for both of us.’ He was a good-looking young chap, apparently not too bright, but with an ambitious wife who was determined to make him president after M’Bele was shot. He had been gratified, no doubt, that a beautiful granddaughter of Lord Carrington Braham had wanted to sleep with him, but now he found her tedious. ‘You will help me, won’t you?’ he asked as he slipped out a side door.

That was the end of the Thomas Watallah affair, for Monica sensed that he would be relieved to see her board the plane. ‘He’s as dumb as everyone said,’ she told me at breakfast.

‘He’s smart enough to disengage from you,’ I said, hoping to jolt her into facing the facts.

‘If they ever make him president, Vwarda is doomed.’ She was quite content to see no more of him, but this decision projected us both into a new set of problems. One of the airlines that flew into the capital was Lufthansa, the well-run German outfit, and its crews were popular, for the young men were handsome and well groomed and the
stewardesses were trim. They spoke English well and had a historic sense of mission in southern Africa. They were especially well received in centers like Johannesburg and Salisbury, where many white men felt that except for certain regrettable excesses, Adolf Hitler had understood world problems rather more clearly than his contemporaries. In Vwarda the young Germans were, in a sense, idolized by Englishmen who, through following the liberal principles of men like Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, had lost an empire. Monica, for example, often wore an iron cross suspended from a silver chain, and boys of her group were prone to display swastikas, not because they had Nazi tendencies but because they knew if infuriated their parents, many of whom, like Sir Charles, had fought against the Germans in World War II. When some outrageous idiocy was promulgated by the new Negro republics, and Vwarda produced more than its share, these young Europeans were apt to say among themselves, ‘Hitler died before his time.’