The Dust Diaries (23 page)

On the Wednesday morning a mass was held at the new church in Maronda Mashanu. I walked there with Leonard while Sabethiel went on ahead of us with a canvas bag of altar objects clanking over his shoulder and his too-big Wellingtons slapping against his shins as he ran across the fields.

The church itself is a simple block building beside an ancient tree with a milk churn hanging from its lowest branch serving as a bell. Inside, Leonard changes into his preaching stole before carefully preparing the altar and supplicating himself in front of it, on his knees, his forehead resting on his hands and his hands resting in turn on the concrete of the altar step. A tail-less lizard runs a slalom between the silver paten, the candlesticks and the communion cup.

The church that morning is completely full. The women of the Mothers’ Union line the pews in their uniforms of bright blue head-scarves and aprons, and the old men in dark suits and deacons’ stoles play tall drums and shake maracas. Your name is mentioned again and again, in songs, in the sermon, in thanks and in prayers. The harmony singing is beautiful, weaving into itself and building to a crescendo until some of the women break from the pews and dance in front of the altar. I think of the reserved choir boys in Oxford. Leonard looks over it all, beaming and stamping his feet in time to the music.

After the service Leonard introduces me to some of the congregation, often in terms of their relationship to death rather than to other people. ‘This is Mary, her husband died two years ago, she had four children and lost three.’

Old edentate men and women introduce themselves to me according to whether you married them to their spouse, baptised them in the river, or did both. One woman’s back is bent with age and her face is obscured by a shawl over her head and a coloured cloth tied across her forehead. She grips my hand in both of hers and speaks to me in a hoarse whisper. Leonard bends to her mouth and then looks at me and says, ‘She says she loved Father Cripps like her own father.’ I ask him why her face is covered and he says simply, ‘Because leprosy took it away, yes.’

Flash bulbs of lightning at the open windows that line both walls of the church signal the coming of a storm, which is soon above us, the thunder cracking so hard that I feel it in my ribs. The downpour sheets the sky dark, filling in the windows with panes of rain. Those who were outside come running in, and are joined by groups of other people who had been driving on the road in open trucks, bundling in through the main door, their shoulders hunched and their clothes soaked tight to their skin. The church is packed, and the storm continues raging about us, flinging rain through the windows and exploding its thunder in the clouds. The noise of the water on the roof is so loud we have to shout to talk to each other, but then above it all I hear one woman’s voice start to sing. The shuffle of a maraca joins her and soon the congregation and the drenched refugees from the road are all singing, meeting the storm’s hymn with their own.

Four days after walking your road to Leonard’s farm, I am walking it back again, although this time I am not alone. Sabethiel walks beside me, as Leonard insisted he should, to take me to the bus stop in town where I will catch a bus south to Masvingo. Sabethiel speaks no English, and I speak no Shona, so we walk together silently under the growing heat of a morning sun and a clear sky, your red road crunching under our feet.

In the space of these four days my idea of you has changed from an elusive ancestor I pieced together in photos, letters, poems, to a remembered man, fleshed out with the stories and memories of Leonard and the others in Maronda Mashanu. The manifestation of your life in these memories has made you clearer to me in many ways, but more of a mystery in others. My intuition that you lived partly as a pursued man in Mashonaland has deepened, I feel more strongly than ever that your life of sacrifice was also somehow a life of personal penance. I know from the histories and the accounts I have read that the men and women who came to Africa a hundred years ago all had their reasons to come here: riches, God, hope, health. But for most there was often a reason to leave their homelands too, and it is this other reason I am looking for in you. I know why you came here, but why did you leave? I can’t be sure, only knowing what I do, but I am increasingly certain that your shadow granddaughter, who even Leonard said he knew nothing about, is a residue, a living proof of that reason.

And there is a name too. A new name that has fed my curiosity, one I have not previously encountered in your story. Before I left for Maronda Mashanu I spent two days in the dark wood reading rooms of the Zimbabwe National Archives, all the time I was allowed without the necessary permit from the Ministry of Information. In the archives I found more of your history. More letters, more manuscripts, more photographs (even one of my father aged four sitting on the knee of your brother, William). In one folder, between a map of the Sabi Valley and a school exercise book with your poems written across its grid of blue squares, I found your Last Will and Testament. It was in this will I found the new name. The will is short, sparse and simple, and the name appears in a codicil, added at a later date. It is the only name on the paper other than yours.

It is this name and the will that contains it that occupies my mind that day as I take a rattling bus from Chivhu further south to Masvin-go, then a battered taxi from the bus station on to the medieval ruins of Great Zimbabwe, where I set up my tent inside the huge walls of the ancient stone complex. I am still thinking of the name and your will the next morning when I wake before sunrise and walk up to the imposing structure of the ruins’ Great Enclosure. Entering into its circle through the west entrance, I sit on a pile of blue-grey stone beneath the tall conical tower at the heart of the edifice. I am alone. It is early, quiet, and for once the air is cool, empty of the heat that fills the day. I wait for the sun, which comes, blood-orange red, rising from behind the outer wall, picking out in silhouette the thin shards of stone planted like battlements, and the tops of the trees that have found root inside the shelter of this African castle. The sun rises higher, clearing the walls altogether and lighting the ground inside the enclosure. With it comes birdsong, long, urgent calls and higher signature tunes, played again and again on the clear air, and heat, which finds itself on my skin until the flesh on my forearms warms and the first pinpricks of sweat tingle between the hairs.

I sit there, at the centre of the ruins, almost ninety years after you sat here taking in the quality of these circles, pillars and domes so you could echo them when you built your church in that clearing beneath the kopje in Maronda Mashanu. In travelling here I have made that link complete in my mind. The shape of these ruins, and the shape of your church, Great Zimbabwe passed on into Maronda Mashanu, and then replicated again and again in the mission stations you built across Mashonaland. The pieces of your life coming together, more fragments joining to make your history whole. But now there is another fragment: this name, printed clearly in your will. The only name other than yours. The woman it belongs to is another part of your story, but one which echoes nowhere else in your life as I know it. Unless, of course the name is already an echo, a resonance of your past, and it is the cause of its existence there, not any consequence that I should be looking for.

I leave the Great Enclosure and make my way back to my tent lower in the valley. Coming over the lip of a hillock I disturb a baboon eating in a tree. I stop and it hangs for a second like a dark question mark, one arm hooked around a branch, before dropping to the ground and hunch-running over the horizon, leaving me looking at nothing but the swaying leaves where it has been. And that is how it is here, following your story in Zimbabwe one hundred years too late, picking up the fragments, uncovering your tracks. Fact and fiction, myth and history. Glimpses of things, suggestions in the corner of the eye which disappear or dissolve when you try to look at them head on.

1915

The Last Will and Testament of Arthur Shearly Cripps

I desire to be buried without a coffin or monument on the hill Makirri Maure on the farm Muckle Neuk. The farms of Money Putt and Maronda Mashanu shall be preserved as mission locations, free of any rent or labour tax to native tenants residing thereon.

CODICIL

I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to
Mrs Ada Neeves
of
Icklesham. Rye. Sussex.
England free and unencumbered by any death duties, or should the said Ada Neeves predecease me, then to her husband, or in the event of his death, to her children in equal shares the sum of £25 Sterling.

Signed with his own initials when he was blind.

Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

In the church at Icklesham. At her organ practice. Was that the first time he had seen her? Was that the first time they met? No, he doubts it. They must have met before. At services, in the village, when Reverend Churton took him on a round of the farms to introduce him.

‘May I introduce Mr Cripps, our new deacon?’ Then aside, usually to the man of the house, ‘A graduate of Oxford, and a blue to boot, you know?’

So no, not the first time they had met. But now, remembering, more than fifty years later, he thinks of it as the first. He remembers the light through the five frames of the chancel window. The way it fell over her where she played at the organ. And her singing…No, he doesn’t. He remembers she
was
singing, but he does not remember her singing. That has gone now. Now, in this rondavel, blind, he lives in a world of sound but he is deaf to the sounds of the past. Words, songs, they all pass so briefly. So few burn or brand on memory. But she was singing, he knows that. At the top of her voice, thinking she was alone. But she wasn’t alone. He was watching her, one hand still on the iron handle of the porch door.

Ada Sargent. But of course he didn’t know her name then. Just that he had disturbed her at her practice, and that he was as shocked as she was by their sudden meeting. By the silence in the church after the organ’s last note and by the other’s face, surprised, wide-eyed, staring at him through the frame of the chancel archway, the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments laid in the wall above them.

Then they had spoken, introduced themselves. He probably made apologies for disturbing her, he can’t remember. He knows she called him ‘sir’ and the sound of that word on her lips made a hollow in his chest. He didn’t want her to call him
sir
, he wanted to be close to her, even then, and that word
sir
did nothing but set them apart. But that is all. He can remember little else of what they said.

She was beautiful. Seventeen years old. He can’t see her young face now, but he knows she was beautiful. Blue eyes like his and blond hair; skin the colour of the ivory she kept her fingers on, as if to let go of those keys would mean disaster.

He’d left her to her practise that morning. Gone and busied himself in the vestry. But in the end he had just sat there, in the darkness, listening to her play and sing to herself, trying to decide whether to go out and speak to her again. He hadn’t; there had been no need.

Falling in love with her had been so easy. It happened over that summer, and again he can’t remember how: the words, the expressions, even their first kiss. All he knows is that there
were
words, expressions and kisses. He knows they happened but not how. He knows he had been happy, but not how. Perhaps it is always this way. Perhaps to be able to recall happiness in all its sensation would be too painful, even at the distance of fifty years. But it frustrates him that he cannot recall, relive, just remember. Vaguely, softly: a dull ache rather than the sharp stab he desires.

He had been lonely in Icklesham. It was his first posting, deacon at the town’s stocky Norman church. He liked the country, the low thorn hedges, the patchwork of arable land, the off-set roofs of the oast houses. The pearl-white sky that bore the light of the sea and the way the gulls came squalling in to the freshly ploughed fields, spattering the brown with their white like dashes of milk spilt across a table.

He had done some good walking there. To the hospital in Rye, along country lanes stumbling upon obscure peasants’ cottages, stone boxes with straw lids (not unlike his own rondavel, he realises). And he had enjoyed the work too. But he had been lonely, he remembers that. And that is why she had been so perfect, penetrating his solitude with her beauty and her smile.

To her, he supposed, he must have appeared quite exotic. Educated, a Trinity man. But to him, it was she who was exotic. And to think he had accepted so easily the matching of her love with his! As if it would always be that way. Only the young can meet such fortune with casual ease, he knows that now. Only the young can be unsurprised by love. If he had known then, when he was young, what he knows now, old, then maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would have happened differently and maybe his remembering would not be so painful, a dull ache, throbbing behind his blind eyes and beating in time with his heart.

She liked him to read to her, he remembers that.

‘
Beauty is truth and truth beauty—that is allye know on earth, and all ye need to know
’

A book’s shadow across his face which he takes away, letting the sun into his eyes which he shuts. Flashes of orange motes on the inside of his eyelids, the sound of a river beyond his feet and her hairpins, digging into his skin beneath his shirt as she rolls her head to look at the sky.

He lies on his back, the grass tickling the back of his neck with his arms out, palms up. The heat of the day collects in his hands until he feels as though he is holding two glowing balls of sunlight, an orb of warmth in each, tingling in the bowls of his fingers.

They talked about his grave, Keats’ grave. How they would visit it together one day. She’d said she would be able to tell it was a poet’s grave, she’d sense the words in the soil. Then his hand on her head, stroking down towards her temple, the heat of the sun in her hair. His other hand, free of the book now, on her chest. Her skin beneath her blouse and her heartbeat beneath her skin, distant, as if arriving in her body from deep in the ground.