The Governor's Lady (2 page)

The young man avoided the missionary's pale, shining eyes and wished him—and his wife, too, for that matter—the very best of British luck: he had a feeling that they might be in need of it.

Conversation was impossible in the shore boat because the waves were too high. Even there in the shelter of the
Ancarses
, they were going up and down as though on a see-saw. The boat was an open one, with hot wooden seats. And there was a lot of water slopping around their feet in the bottom. The young man saw his two suitcases, very new and inexperienced-looking, swung out from the deck and placed by one of the boatmen in the centre of a dark, slimy patch where somebody had been cleaning fish or oiling something. They were light-coloured suitcases. Pale-fawn, from the Army and Navy. And, as he watched, he saw them begin to suck up the wet like lumps of sugar in a messy saucer. He would have moved them somewhere else if he had not felt so sea-sick. Not that it would have made any difference. They were shipping water continuously. Soon the suitcases would be wet all over.

In the meantime, the entire crew had gone down to the stern for a conference because the engine wouldn't start. There were five of them. Very black, and mechanics to a man. With bottoms up and heads down inside the small engine-house, they uttered shrill screams of pain and rage as they cut themselves or touched something painful. There were the sounds of banging and hammering. And more screams. One of them got his fingers crushed in a wrench. Then the graduate of the party, one-eyed and practically naked, thought of fuel. He poured a can of kerosene into the tank. A moment later, with a belching grey thundercloud from the exhaust and a noise like machme-gunning, they were on their way to the shore. In the confusion, the rest of the kerosene had gone over the missionary's hold-all.

It was Sir Gardnor's idea, this ridiculous disembarkation at Kiku of all places. Less than five hundred miles further to the south the
Ancarses
would ride into the sheltered natural harbourage of Nucca; and the passengers, politely waited on by the white-uniformed staff of the Royal West African Railroad, could travel by the chocolate-and-cream
Coronation Flyer
straight through to Amimbo.

By rail, the whole journey, from quayside to terminus, took only thirty-six hours. Unless, of course, there were elephants on the track; or a bridge, weakened by the rains, had collapsed into the mud-bath beneath it; or ants had eaten away too many of the sleepers.

Sometimes, too, the locomotive—of the 1902 class, and with as much polished brasswork as a fair-ground roundabout—would burst one of its tubes, or plough enthusiastically through the points at the only junction. Even allowing for all reasonable hazards, however, the journey by train was still three or four days quicker than by road.

That was because the road was not really a road at all. It started off all right. With lamp-posts; six of them. And flower-beds of pointsettia and bougainvillaea. And a glass-sided traffic control-box, complete with an umbrella over the top. This part of the road was fully metalled, and passed the new Post Office in one magnificent sweep. Then, when it reached the suburbs, the surface ceased abruptly. The contractor was still in prison.

The first section of the highway was Portuguese, and very unhealthy. It ran, mostly at sea-level, across a mangrove-swamp. And, in places, it disappeared completely.

The Minister of Highways was the brother-in-law of the unhappy contractor. In consequence, the Department tried to put the best possible face on things. Whenever a fresh submergence occurred, gangs of convict labourers were detailed to put down bundles of reeds to form a new foundation. It was not an easy task. The reeds simply floated away as soon as they were laid. Heavy stones and pieces of rock had to be placed on top of them. Then more reeds were added to cover up the rocks. Then rocks again to hold down the reeds. It was a life's work, this kind of road-building. The gangs toiled away day after day in the endless sunlight with nothing whatsoever to show for their labours. In sheer contentment, they chanted as they worked.

Every so often, the level of the piled-up rubbish would break the black, brackish surface of the water. Then a Mammy lorry would
attempt to pass. After hitting one or two of the larger concealed rocks, it would begin to settle. Soon the axles would be covered. Then the springs. There would be a scramble to unload. Finally, more boat than lorry, it would be half-floated, half-towed away, with the ruined cargo carefully packed inside again.

A little further inland, things got better. The road began to climb. It spiralled up and up through the red hills, getting cooler with every hairpin bend. Even here, however, there were difficulties. Every week or so, large portions of the sandstone, baked dry and flaky like pastry, detached themselves and went slithering down into the valley. Sometimes they carried the road with them, sometimes they merely lay across it, smothering the surface. Either way, it called for giant-size gardening to get things going again.

On the map, this portion of the road was still shown as a continuous thick black line, Thirty miles ahead, the thick black line gave way to a succession of little dots.

There things really began to grow desperate. The road-builders had given up trying. Or succumbed to sunstroke. The road simply went mad. It followed river-beds that flooded without warning. It tried to climb water-falls. It nosed its way into mountain culs-de-sac. It led to the edge of precipices. It went straight as an arrow across wide plains and then turned at right-angles because no one had remembered the lake on the other side. It plunged into forests. It ended. Only the larger kinds of American cars ever attempted the journey.

But Sir Gardnor insisted. It was part of his faith. He believed in that road. Even though at some point in its course from Amimbo, the nationality of the landscape invisibly changed—this thorn-bush British, that one Portuguese—it was undeniably, so the Governor said, God's intended passageway towards the open sea. The Arab slave-traders had used it for centuries.

The railway, on the other hand, was entirely artificial. It came thrusting through from the wrong direction. It was political, rather than natural. Only British Colonialism at its most obstinate would ever have thought of building it at all; or have succeeded.

Financially, it was a write-off. It paid no dividends, owned no assets except practically valueless land, utterly obsolete rolling-stock. But it was still part of the Imperial network. It joined an inland British Colony —a mere foreign island in the middle of hostile Africa—with the remote
ocean. And every ant-indented sleeper along its six-hundred-and-fifty wandering miles was British, too.

Even that, however, in Sir Gardnor's eyes did not excuse its elementary wrongness, its irrelevance. A glance out of the train window was enough to show. Different ecology. Different tribes. Different customs. Different loyalties. Different sins. Nothing to do with his own beloved Amimbo.

That was why, with no argument at all, Sir Gardnor required all new members of his staff to make the proper approach; the one that took so much longer.

There was no denying, the young man kept reminding himself, that it was a privilege to serve under such a figurehead. Sir Gardnor Hackforth was already famous; something of a living legend in the Service.

At forty-five he was head and shoulders above anyone else, and there seemed no Proconsular heights to which he might not eventually climb. He was there at his own wish in Amimbo at this moment: that much was common knowledge. But when he was ready—it was understood that, by now, there had been a hint here, a word dropped in the right quarter there—he could take his choice. A really fat Governorship. A Governor-Generalship perhaps. Even Delhi possibly. Or Westminster. The Lords, of course; and his own Department.

In the meantime, Sir Gardnor was finishing his book. It was the book that had got young Harold Stebbs the job. He was scarcely the type to which an Interview Board could be expected to warm irresistibly. Altogether too self-effacing; too diffident. No presence; and too many of his sort coming forward nowadays, the Chief Establishment Officer considered.

Asked the key-question of how he thought he would behave in a civil emergency if he should find himself the sole representative of British authority, he had replied, briefly but damagingly, that he had never been in such circumstances, and so did not know. Pressed to amplify an answer, quite so disastrous, he had mumbled something about supposing that things would sort themselves out in the end somehow because they usually did; worst of all, and he had been content to leave it at that.

It was not until the observer from Finance and Estimates asked the other key-question, ‘Are you afraid of figures?', that the interview really-came
to life at all. For the answer came back as an uncompromising ‘No'. The observer became interested and began to probe. Series, it turned out, were Harold Stebbs's speciality. Not series of anything in particular; just series. Numbers in the abstract; the very purest of pure mathematics. His last year at Cambridge, he explained, had been devoted to them.

Because the Finance Observer felt himself getting out of his depth, he switched the conversation to statistics. Was Mr. Stebbs interested in anything so ordinary as statistics? he asked. And again the answer came back promptly. ‘Naturally,' he said. ‘They're the raw material.' The observer felt that he had got him there. ‘Isn't it the
figures
that are the raw material, Mr. Stebbs?' he asked in a voice that carried with it just the right note of superiority and rebuke. ‘Aren't the statistics the finished product?'

And once more there came the prompt, singularly mannerless reply. ‘Statistics are just tables,' he said. ‘A clerk can get out statistics. They don't necessarily mean anything. It's only when you begin to analyse them they become interesting. It all shows up in the presentation. With figures…'

The Establishment Officer coughed. He did not like conversations that were conducted across the chair. ‘And are you interested in people as well as figures, Mr. … er … Stebbs?' he asked.

Not that people apparently mattered for the job. Sir Gardnor had made that perfectly plain in his last memorandum. ‘I am not looking for a leader of men, a Milner,' he had written in his elegant, only mildly undecipherable longhand. ‘I am not searching for a District Officer, or Chief Magistrate or even an observant Tax Collector. All that I require is an intelligent, educated assistant with a good head for figures to work beside me for the next twelve months. I have already indicated that the Chief Secretary can spare no one. If the Office is unable to provide such a clerk, possibly one of the Merchant Banks…'

It was because the Appointments Board, sitting there in that quiet room in Whitehall, had decided that Harold Stebbs was not a leader of men, that he now found himself somewhere on the Equator, standing in the shade of the Chevrolet, scratching his ankle where he had just been bitten, and watching while the native driver and his assistant changed the wheel.

Like the boatmen, they were tremendous hammerers. The din alerted the whole countryside. A flock of white egrets mounted frantically into the air from the adjoining marsh like disembodied spirits; and soon an entire rose-garden of flamingoes joined them and moved off as well. The sky became carmine, striped with black, as they passed over.

The hammering continued. When one engineer got tired, the other took over. From time to time, their attention strayed. They hammered out dents that they had just noticed in the wings. They removed deposits of rock-hard mud from under the chassis. Somewhere underneath they found a small angle-bracket. They hammered that, too. It broke. They threw it away. They returned to the rear-axle. They hammered even harder. The hammer broke. They rested.

Because the tool-kit was open, one of them tried the wheel-brace. As a make-shift hammer, it was no more than second-rate. It bent. But as a wheel-brace, it was perfect. They tried fitting it into one of the nuts. Then onto all the nuts in turn. It matched. They tried turning it. The nuts loosened, and came away. With cries of appreciation and delight, they tried tightening them up again. They succeeded. They forgot why they had started. They undid and re-did. They lost one of the nuts altogether. They quarrelled. Then they remembered the flat tyre. They burst out laughing.

With a suddenness that was alarming, the sun dipped abruptly behind the distant range of blue hills. As it dipped, it appeared to be accelerating. At one moment it had been floating clear; huge and red and angry-looking. At the next, it was declining so fast that the mountains appeared to be stretching up to eat it. Soon the teeth had done their work, and a large chunk was missing. Then there was only half a sun. Then no more than a flaming rim. Then the eclipse was complete.

Harold turned towards the drivers.

‘Where do we spend the night?' he asked.

The mechanics rose politely to their feet and stood to attention while he addressed them.

‘Yassaar,' the man in charge answered. ‘Spend the night. Yassaar. Bad wheel. Very bad wheel. Soon drive on now, saar. Spend the night. Yassaar.'

Harold's ankle was itching badly by now. Already it had begun to swell.

The rest-houses on the route proved to be well-spaced rather than
comfortable. They were as pleasant to leave next morning as they had been to arrive at over-night. And there was a sameness about them. The same whitewashed mud walls, and the same corrugated iron roof. The same tin washing-basin set on an enamelled metal tripod, with a bucket underneath it to receive the slops. The same earth-closet. The same hospital-type bed, with its castors resting in saucers of paraffin to discourage the creepie-crawlies. And the same rearing white catafalque of the mosquito-net.

On his first night under one of them, Harold had learnt to hate all mosquito-nets. Mere heat and stickiness were one thing. Heat and stickiness, plus suffocation and imprisonment, were quite another. In the end, he had kicked his way out in desperation. Wriggled his feet about in the darkness. In consequence his other ankle was now bitten and badly swollen, too.