The Governor's Lady (28 page)

‘Is that what you have been wanting to see me about?' Harold asked him.

But Mr. Ngono was still playing for time.

‘It was to request an interview with Mr. Frith, our new Chief Secretary no less,' he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I wrote to him extending cordial and happy congratulations from all my staffs—those at the bar, at the dance-hall, at my import business and at the other various enterprises with which I am connected. Also on behalf of my father's tribe and his numerous villages. Very proud and well-deserved, I told him. He will most undoubtedly be Sir Frith before one can say Jack Robinson. But I have received only a most formal reply.'

‘But why do you want to see him?'

‘To pay those same profound compliments by word of mouth in person,' Mr. Ngono replied. ‘Why else should I want to bother anyone so extremely over-busy and fussed with affairs as our Chief Secretary? It was my father's express wish, you get it?'

The house-boy had come in with more ice, and then withdrawn again. He was somewhere behind the bead-curtain—still listening Mr. Ngono did not doubt; that was if the boy were not back already in the kitchen repeating what he had just overheard.

Mr. Ngono could afford to take no chances, and he acted brilliantly.

‘Your gramophone,' he said. ‘Manufactured, I see, by no other than His Master's Voice. I am exceedingly closely interested—with a view to securing the exclusive agency, of course. Either that, or Columbia. If I might be permitted to hear the tone for the purposes of comparison. Something loud and jazzy to be preferred. I shall represent the catalogue of all new records, too, most naturally.'

It was the Signals Officer, in an effort to keep up the friendly atmosphere of safari, who had insisted on lending the gramophone. Harold had not used it once since it had been left there. Mr. Ngono turned the machine at right angles so that the full blast of the music would be directed towards the bead-curtain.

Then he came over and put his mouth down close to Harold's ear.

‘It is urgently essential, real life-and-death in fact, that we speak where no one can hear us. The simultaneous moment the record stops it will be too late. I shall return to my chair and we will again loudly discuss the bloody weather.'

‘Then what do you want me to do?'

‘Invite me, I beg, to walk in your garden without being followed. Take a constitutional stroll with me, in fact. Shake up the jolly old liver before dinner. Then I will most certainly tell you all the dirt. Full dirt, and most alarming.'

It was pleasant enough outside. The sun was getting low by now, and the bank of flame trees beside the red gravel path was lit up only on the further side. Shoulder to shoulder, Harold and Mr. Ngono walked across the zebra pattern of yellow sunlight and thick shadow.

‘It is always most extremely unsafe to speak before the houseboys,' Mr. Ngono said reprovingly. ‘They repeat everything. Diabolical mimics, some of them, too. They take off everybody—you, me, the whole damn lot of us.'

They were twenty-five yards from the bungalow by now, and Mr. Ngono felt safer.

‘Exclusively, it is about the trial that I wish to speak to you. Already there are plots and counter-plots of immense wickedness being cooked up. They are saying that Old Moses is entirely innocent. They will seek to prove it so.'

‘Well, isn't that for the judge to decide?' Harold asked him.

Mr. Ngono shook his head.

‘By then it will be too late. Every single goddam witness will have
been bribed. In terms of great profitability, too. And certain most distinguished people, absolute top rung in all respects, will have been exposed to the very common gaze.'

‘You always get rumours before a big trial,' Harold told him.

This time Mr. Ngono had kept his voice quiet and level, but Harold could see that his hands were trembling.

‘These are not rumours and inventions,' he said. ‘Damn well, they're not. They are the most severe and practical facts. There is one wicked and evil man, entirely without conscience, working night and day making them come true. I am here at the most considerable bodily danger to give you warning.'

‘And where would I find this man?' Harold asked.

‘In the offices of
War Drum'
Mr. Ngono replied. ‘Seated in the editorial chair itself. He is the one in charge of all arrangements; extremely ingenious arrangements some of them. A most violent press campaign has been planned. And he has large sums of money. More than enough for all purposes. Entirely in notes, too.'

‘How do you know all this?'

Mr. Ngono hung his head for a moment.

‘He told me,' he said simply. ‘You see we were friends. Most intense personal friends. But unfortunately for entirely other reasons we have quarrelled. Everything I am now saying to you was confided under a vow of the closest sworn secrecy. Vows and everything. Absolutely sacred, in fact.'

‘You realise that I shall have to report this?' Harold asked.

‘But most naturally,' Mr. Ngono replied. ‘It is precisely to the very bloody letter what I have been trying to fix up for some time. Then Mr. Talefwa will undoubtedly be arrested and most severely punished, and he will regret very much having quarrelled with me.'

They had reached the end of the path and Harold held out his hand to say good-bye.

‘Thank you for coming,' was all he said. ‘I'll think very carefully about what you've told me.'

But Mr. Ngono was reluctant to leave.

‘There is one other matter', he explained. ‘Also of the greatest delicacy. And of the very highest importance.'

‘Well, what is it?'

‘It is the jury,' Mr. Ngono told him. ‘For a trial of such great importance
there will be a jury, you bet. It is the jury by law that has to say that Old Moses is the murderer. I desire most earnestly to be a member of that jury. How otherwise can we be damn well sure of the verdict?'

When Harold did not reply, Mr. Ngono looked up anxiously. Had he once again, he wondered, gone too far? He saw now that it might have been better to take things more slowly: to have revealed the danger and then, some other time, over a drink perhaps as an Englishman would have done, to have raised the matter of jury service.

So again he switched the conversation.

‘I am still most unhappily worried about your poor eye,' he said. ‘It is weeping again. I can see that tears are coming out from beneath the eye-shade. It is boracic powder that is needed. One small pinch in warm water at every bedtime, and also on rising. It is what the missionaries use.'

It was inadvisable, Papa Fernandez said, for Lady Anne to remain where she was. The climate of Amimbo was apparently notorious for its ill-effects on mental cases. The soil, too, and the water were both highly suspect. Nucca was where Papa Fernandez recommended: a complete rest in agreeable surroundings until she was well enough to face the long voyage home.

It was certainly undeniable that, so far, Papa Fernandez had been proved right. The ice-packs and the bleeding had brought down the temperature. The native concoction that he had prescribed had helped with the headaches. And the burning sulphur had fumigated an entire wing of the Residency. A colony of minute white ants, which previously had been swarming up and down the walls like vapour, gave up and moved over into what had been Sir Gardnor's quarters. Lady Anne meanwhile continued to get better.

That was why Sybil Prosser, yellower and more gaunt-looking than ever, had called in to see Harold. She sat opposite to him on one of the hardback chairs, wiping her upper lip where the office tea had left a thick brown stain across it.

‘She's been asking for you,' she said, ‘otherwise I wouldn't have come. I suppose it's all right. But don't let her talk too much. And don't believe everything she tells you. She's still all mixed-up inside. I know: I've had to listen to her.'

‘Six o'clock then?' Harold asked.

‘Better make it six-thirty,' Sybil Prosser told him. ‘The doctor wants her to sleep all she can. And don't expect too much. I'm warning you.'

The curtains were still drawn across the windows, but the drugget had been taken up, and the place looked like a bedroom again. There were flowers where the sulphur saucers had been set.

And Lady Anne herself was sitting up. Her eyes were closed, but the
pillows were piled up behind her as if she had been reading. The paleness was not surprising considering all the blood that Papa Fernandez had been draining away from her. But she was recognisably Lady Anne again.

‘Well, I've brought him,' Sybil Prosser announced. ‘And I'm staying here while you talk to him. If I don't, you'll only overdo it.'

She sat herself down as she said it, and began to ease her shoes off.

‘He's only got ten minutes,' she added. ‘Then I'm putting him out again.'

Lady Anne opened her eyes, rather slowly and deliberately, it seemed, as though she had been awake all the time. But it was not at Harold that she was looking. It was at the nurse who had been sitting over by the window.

‘Oh she can go if you want her to,' Sybil Prosser said. ‘I told you: I'm stopping.'

Lady Anne waited until the nurse had left the room. Then she turned to Harold.

‘Sybil got you here, didn't she?' she asked.

She was not looking at him as she spoke, had not looked at him since he had entered the room, in fact. She was simply staring down at the smooth white sheet that the nurse had tugged at automatically as she had passed the bed.

‘She just told me you were well enough,' Harold replied.

Lady Anne shrugged her shoulders.

‘Am I?' she asked. ‘How should I know?'

‘She's a lot better,' Sybil Prosser observed firmly. ‘You can see she is.'

Lady Anne closed her eyes. She seemed to be living in a remote, separate world of her own.

‘I didn't want to see you,' she said. ‘I didn't want to see anyone.'

She was addressing Harold now: speaking to him, but still not looking at him.

‘Yes, you did,' Sybil Prosser contradicted her. ‘You said so.'

‘Then I don't remember. I can't remember anything now.'

There was just the smallest movement of her shoulders again. It made her merge more completely into the pillows.

Sybil Prosser got up and came over to where Harold was sitting. Because she was such a tall woman, she had to bend over to speak to him. It was necessary to get low. She was whispering.

‘Can you see her being able to attend the trial?' she asked. ‘How could she be the slightest use to them?'

Before Harold could reply, Lady Anne had already spoken. She still had her eyes closed.

‘I'll be all right if someone reminds me when it is,' she said. ‘I don't even know the date, or anything.'

Sybil Prosser gave the bed a little pat.

‘Not to worry,' she said. ‘Not to worry.

But Lady Anne refused to be put off so easily.

‘Will you be there?' she asked.

She was speaking to Harold again.

‘I suppose so.'

‘Then I've got to be there, too.'

Lady Anne had opened her eyes, and she turned her head so that she could watch Harold's face.

‘What are you going to say?' she asked him.

‘Just tell them what I saw.'

‘What did you see?'

She was staring hard at him now.

‘I saw Old Moses. I was the first one to get there. I tried to stop him.'

Lady Anne seemed to be pondering.

‘Was I there?' she asked.

‘You were facing me.'

‘Was I?'

‘Yes, over on the far side.'

‘Over on the far side,' she repeated the words slowly. ‘But what was I doing? I must have been doing something. I just can't remember.'

‘You were looking at Sir Gardnor.'

‘Was … was he dead by then?'

‘I think so.'

Lady Anne started crying.

‘Poor Gardie,' she said. ‘Poor Gardie.'

Sybil Prosser's hand came down on Harold's arm.

‘That's all,' she told him. ‘You've had your ten minutes.'

It was Mr. Frith who suggested that Harold should dine with him up at the Milner Club; they both needed something to take them out of themselves, he reckoned.

Even so, Mr. Frith was not at his most responsive. Still off the bottle, he had been in the bar since before seven drinking nothing but ginger ale. And the stuff did not agree with him, he kept telling himself. He had undone the two bottom hooks on his cummerbund by the time Harold joined him.

‘My God,' he greeted him, ‘what a day. Didn't get a stroke of work done. Just been going over the arrangements.'

Ever since the date of the trial had been fixed, no one in Government Service had been talking about anything other than the arrangements.

Quite suddenly, Amimbo had become the centre of the world, and people were getting ready to pour into it. There was not just Government accommodation to be considered: there were the hotels as well. The telegraph facilities—notoriously inadequate even when there was nothing happening—were being given a thorough going-over. And the Railway Company, taken entirely by surprise, had been warned that the Coronation Flyer would have to pull extra rolling-stock as soon as the invasion started.

‘It's not simply the press,' Mr. Frith continued. ‘They're bad enough. There's an American broadcasting company, too. Says it wants to send a team over. God knows where we're going to put them all, or how long they'll be here. Have to see that the hard liquor doesn't run out.'

After all, it was a
political
murder trial; and it would have seemed nothing less than unfaithful to Sir Gardnor's memory to allow the international corps to go away again with the impression that the capital city of Amimbo was simply some sort of colonial shanty-town.