The Sweetest Dream (56 page)

‘Yes, you did. Go on, pour. You be mother.'

Outside spread the African afternoon, all yellow glare and the
songs of birds. There was dust on her hands, and on the floor of
the verandah.

‘Bloody drought. It hasn't rained properly on this farm for
three years. The cattle aren't going to last out if it doesn't rain
soon.'

‘Why this farm?'

‘Rain shadow. Didn't know that when I bought it.'

‘Oh.'

‘Well, I hope you're beginning to get the hang of it. Well, at
least if you're going to go back and write that we are a lot of
Simon Legrees you'll have taken the trouble to see for yourself.'

She did not know who Simon Legree was, but supposed that,
logically, he must be a bit of a white racist. ‘I'm doing my best.'

‘And no one can do better than that.'

He was fidgeting again, and up he jumped. ‘I'm going to have
a look at the calves. Want to come?'

She knew she should say yes, but said she would stay and
sit.

‘Pity my better half isn't here. You'd have someone to gossip
with.'

Off he went, and returned as the dark came down. Supper.
Then there was the radio news where he swore at the black
announcer for mispronouncing a word, and then said, ‘Sorry, I've
got to get my head down. I'm all in.' And off he went to bed.

And that was how a stay of what turned out to be five days
went on. Rose lay awake in her bed and hoped that the sounds
she heard were his feet moving stealthily towards her, but no such
luck. And she did go around the farm with him, and did try to
take in what she could. During the course of conversations which
always seemed to be too brief and curtailed by some urgency or
other, all of them dramatic in a way that seemed–surely?–excessive–a broken-down tractor, a bush fire, a gored cow–she had learned that her old pal Franklin was ‘one of the worst
of that gang of thieves', and that her idol Comrade Matthew was
as corrupt as they come, and had as much idea of running a country
as he, Barry Angleton, had of running the Bank of England. She
dropped the name Sylvia Lennox, but while he had heard of her,
all he knew was that she was with the missionaries in Kwadere.
He added that once, when he was a kid, no one had a good word
for the missionaries, who were educating the kaffs above their
station, but now people were beginning to think, and he agreed
with them, mind you, that it was a pity they hadn't been educated
all the way, because a few properly educated kaffs were what the
country needed. Well, you live and learn.

His wife did not return while Rose was there, though she
telephoned with a message for her husband.

‘Good thing you're there,' said this complacent wife, ‘give
him something to think about beside himself and the farm. Well,
men are all the same.'

This remark, in the time-honoured words of the feminist
complaint, but so far from the sophistications of Rose's women's
group, allowed her to reply that men were the same the whole
world over.

‘Anyway, tell my old man that I'm going over to Betty's this
afternoon and I'm bringing back one of her puppies.' She added:
‘And now you just be fair to us for once and write something
nice.'

Barry received this news with, ‘Well, she'd better not think
that dog is going to sleep on our bed the way the last one did.'

The next stop on Rose's itinerary, which had been planned
to be the first, had not Fate and Barry Angleton intervened, was
an old friend of Comrade Johnny's, Bill Case, who had been a
South African communist, had been in jail, had fled to take refuge
in Zimlia, and to continue his career in law, speaking for the
underdog, the poor, the maltreated who were turning out to be
more or less the same under a black government as under a white
one. Bill Case was famous, and a hero. Rose was looking forward
to hearing from him at last, ‘the truth' about Zimlia.

As for Barry, for whom she would have parted her legs any
time, the most she got out of him in that way was his remark
when he dropped her in town that if he wasn't a married man
he would ask her out to lunch. But she recognised it as a gallantry
as routine as his, ‘So long. Be seeing you.'

Bill Case . . . about the South African communists under
apartheid it has to be said first that few people have ever been as brave,
few have fought oppression more wholeheartedly–wait, though:
at the very same time the dissidents in the Soviet Union were
confronting the communist tyranny with equal dedication. Rose
had dealt with the problem of how the Soviet Union was turning
out by not thinking about it: it wasn't her responsibility, was it?
And she had not been in Bill Case's house an hour before she
learned this was his attitude too. For years he had claimed that
the Soviet Union was a new civilisation which had for ever
abolished the old inequalities, race prejudice for the present purpose
being the most relevant. And now even in the provinces, which
is where Senga was situated, capital city or not, it was being
admitted that the Soviet Union was not what it had been cracked
up to be. Not admitted of course by the black government,
committed to the glories of communism. But Bill was not talking
about that great failed dream, but a local one: Rose was hearing
from him what she had been listening to for days from Barry
Angleton. At first she thought Bill was amusing himself and her
by parodying what he must know she had been hearing, but no,
his complaints were as real and as detailed and angry as the farmer's.
The white farmers were badly treated, they were the scapegoat
for every government failure, and yet they had to provide the
foreign currency, they were being taxed unfairly, what a pity this
country had allowed itself to become the little arselicker and lackey
of the World Bank and the IMF and Global Money!

During those days Rose finally understood something painful:
she had backed the wrong horse with Comrade Matthew. She
was going to have to climb down, retrack, do something to recover
her reputation. It was too soon for her to write an article describing
the Comrade Leader as he deserved: after all her last eulogy had
been only three months ago. No, she would sidetrack, find a little
diversion, use another target.

From Bill Case's house she moved to Frank Diddy's, the
amiable editor of
The Zimlia Post
, a friend of Bill's. The easy
hospitality of Africa appealed to her: it was winter in London,
and she was living free.
The Post
, she knew, was despised by
anyone of intelligence–well, most of the country citizens. Its
editorials all went something like this: ‘Our great country has
successfully overcome another minor difficulty. The power station
failed last week, due to the demands of our rapidly growing
economy, and, it is being said, to the efforts of South African secret
agents. We must never relax our vigilance against our enemies.
We must never forget that our Zimlia is the focus for attempts at
de-stabilisation of our successful socialist country. Viva Zimlia.'

Frank Diddy, she discovered, regarded this kind of thing as a
sop thrown out to appease the government watchdogs who
suspected him and his colleagues of ‘writing lies' about the country's
progress. The journalists of
The Post
had not had an easy time of
it since Liberation. They had been arrested, kept without charges,
released, rearrested, threatened, and the heavies of the secret
police, known in the offices of
The Post
simply as ‘The Boys',
dropped in to the newspaper's offices and the journalists' homes
threatening arrest and imprisonment at the slightest signs of
recalcitrance. As for the rest, the truth about Zimlia, she heard the same
as at Barry Angleton's and at Bill Case's.

She was trying to get an interview with Franklin, not daunted,
though she intended to ask him something like, They are saying
you own four hotels, five farms, and a forest of hardwoods, which
you are illegally cutting down. Is this true? She felt the worm of
truth must come wriggling out of the knotholes of concealment.
She was equal to him. He was a friend, wasn't he?

Though she always boasted of this friendship, in fact she had
not seen him for some years. In the matey days of early Liberation
she had arrived in Zimlia, telephoned and was invited to meet
him, though never alone, because he was with friends, colleagues,
secretaries, and on one occasion his wife, a shy woman who
merely smiled and never once opened her mouth. Franklin
introduced Rose as ‘My best friend when I was in London'. Then,
telephoning him from London, or on arrival in Senga, she heard
that he was in a meeting. That she, Rose, could be fobbed off
with this kind of lie was an insult. And who the hell did he think
he was? He should be grateful to the Lennoxes, they had been so
good to him.
We
had been so good to him.

This time when she telephoned Comrade Minister Franklin's
office, she was amazed to hear him come on the line at once, and
a hearty, ‘So, Rose Trimble, long time no see, you are just the
person I want to talk to.'

And so she and Franklin sat together again, this time in a
corner of the new Butler's Hotel lounge, a fancy place designed so
that visiting dignitaries should not make unfavourable comparisons
between this capital city and any other. Franklin was enormous
now, he filled his armchair, and his big face overflowed in chins
and shiny black cheeks. His eyes were small, though she
remembered them as large, winsome and appealing.

‘Now, Rose, we need your help. Only yesterday our Comrade
President was saying that we need your help.'

Professional
nous
told Rose that this last was like her own
‘Comrade Franklin is a good friend'. Everyone spoke of Comrade
Matthew in every other sentence, to invoke or curse him. The
words
Comrade Matthew
must be tinkling and purring through the
ether like the signature tune of a popular radio programme.

‘Yes, Rose, it is a good thing you are here,' he said smiling
and shooting at her quick suspicious looks.

They are all paranoid, she had heard from Barry, from
Frank, from Bill and from the guests who flowed in and out of
the Senga houses in easy colonial–whoa there!–
post
-colonial
manner.

‘So, Franklin, you are having problems, I hear?'

‘Problems! Our dollar fell again this week. It is a thirtieth of
what it was at Liberation. And do you know who is responsible?'
He leaned forward, shaking his plump finger at her. ‘It is the
International Community.'

She had expected to hear, South African agents. ‘But the
country is doing so well. I read it only today in
The Post
.'

He actually sat energetically up in his chair, to confront her
better, supporting his big body on his elbows. ‘Yes, we are a
success story. But that is not what our enemies are saying. And
that is where you come in.'

‘It was only three months ago that I wrote a piece about the
Leader.'

‘And a fine piece it was, a fine piece.' He had not read it, she
could see. ‘But there are articles appearing that damage the good
name of this country and accuse our Comrade President of many
things.'

‘Franklin, they are saying that you are all very rich, buying
up farms, you all own farms and hotels–everything.'

‘And who says that? It is a lie.' He waved his hand about,
dispelling the lies, and fell back again. She did not say anything.
He peeped at her, raising his head to do it, let it fall back. ‘I'm a
poor man,' he whined. ‘A very poor man. And I have many
children. And all my relatives . . . you do understand, I know you
do, that in our culture if a man does well then all his relations
come and we must keep them and educate all the children.'

‘And a very fine culture it is,' said Rose, who in fact did find
this concept heartwarming. Just look at herself! When she had
found herself helpless all those years ago, where had her family
been? And then the rich son of an exploiting capitalist family had
taken advantage of her . . .

‘Yes, we are proud of it. Our old people do not die alone in
cold nursing homes, and we have no orphans.'

This Rose knew was not the truth. She had been hearing of
the results of AIDS–orphans left destitute, ancient grandmothers
bringing up children without parents.

‘We want you to write about us. Tell the truth about us. I
am asking you to describe what you see here in Zimlia, so that
these lies do not spread any further.' He looked around the elegant
hotel lounge, at the smiling waiters in their liveries. ‘You can see
for yourself, Rose. Look around you.'

‘I saw a list in one of our newspapers. A list of the Ministers
and the top civil servants and what you all own. Some own as
many as twelve farms.'

‘And why should we not own a farm? Am I to be barred from
owning land because I am a Minister? And when I retire how
shall I live? I must tell you, I would much rather be a simple
farmer, living with my family on my own land.' He frowned.
‘And now there is this drought. Down in the Buvu Valley all my
animals have died. The farm is dust. My new borehole dried up.'
Tears ran down his cheeks. ‘It is a terrible thing to see your
mombies die. The white farmers are not suffering, they all have
dams and boreholes.'

It was occurring to Rose that here might be a subject. She
could write about the drought, which it seemed was afflicting
everyone, rain shadows or not, and that meant she would not
have to take sides. She didn't know anything about droughts, but
she could always get Frank and Bill to fill her in, and she could
cook up something that would not offend the rulers of Zimlia:
she did not want to end this profitable connection. No, she could
become an ecological warrior . . . these thoughts wandered
through her mind as Franklin made a speech about Zimlia's stand
in the forefront of progress and socialist accomplishment, ending
with the South African agents and the need for vigilance.