What Am I Doing Here? (2 page)

I had not noticed that my face was covered with mosquito bites.

I flew to the North in a chartered plane. I felt the film was going to
look
spectacular but was not much to do with my book. The star did not look like a Brazilian slave trader as much as a bad-tempered European woman. I mistimed one of my anti-malarials and forgot about it.

A week after coming back to England I took another prophylactic and had a seizure: shivers followed by a temperature. It was not serious. I thought nothing of it.

A week later I took another pill and this time had a shaking fit and raging fever. I had recovered by the morning. The doctors and I agreed it was probably a reaction to the pill.

 

The young doctors were reluctant to put me on quinine without a go-ahead from the Professor. He is one of the most brilliant clinical physicians in this country - which leads the world. In the Far East he has made advances in the study of cerebral malaria. He dazzles me with his mind and his wisdom.

He comes into the room with a stethoscope round his neck:

‘How are you?'

‘Look at the temperature chart.'

He looks at the chart, he looks up and grins:

‘I'm always mistrustful of patients who diagnose their own diseases. I suspect they may have healing powers, or selfhealing powers, of which we know nothing.'

He goes. I lie back on the pillow and shut my eyes. The Professor has made me happier than he can imagine.

He is a world authority on snake-bites.

In comes Assunta with the morning tea.

‘Like a cup-a-tea, Bruce?'

‘I'd love a cup of tea, Assunta.'

She brings the tea and we settle in for our daily morning talk.

‘You know, Assunta, it may be malaria after all.'

‘These doctors,' she sighs. ‘They not always know . . . Sometimes you know and they not know . . . I have terrible time with my last child . . . '

‘When was that, Assunta?'

‘My little girl is fourteen.'

She is going to tell me another story.

‘My husband and I . . . we have three children . . . so I take the pill . . . and I get fat . . . I get so fat people say: “Assunta you're pregnant” . . . I say, “I can't be pregnant . . . I take the pill . . . I have my periods . . . Regular . . . ” But I feel something inside . . . It is not a baby . . . It not move . . . I have three babies and they move . . . So my husband, he take me to hospital . . . They make more scan . . . And one day doctor and nurses come . . . My husband come . . . He white like a sheet . . . The doctor hold my hand . . . He say, “Be calm, Assunta. Be calm . . . ” I
NOT
calm! “Assunta,” he say. “You really want this baby?” “Yes, now I want baby . . . ” Now really I worry . . . “What the matter?” “Be calm, Assunta,” he say. “Be calm . . . Assunta, the baby in your body have no arms and no legs. You not want child like that . . . ”

‘I go up and down . . . I go up . . . I go down . . . I no breathe . . . The nurse she have needle and I sleep . . . So I wake in morning and I am drunk . . . “Where am I?” I say the nurse . . . “Assunta, you still in hospital . . . ” And the nurse . . . she put in front of me piece paper . . . “Please sign” . . . I am so drunk I sign . . . O my God I sign away baby . . . O Mary forgive me! But no . . . I stay in hospital three months . . . The baby not move . . . Every week . . . Scan . . . Scan . . . Scan . . . Back . . . front . . . side . . . Always same: “Assunta, your baby, it have no arms and no legs . . . ” So comes time for baby to be born. The doctors say me, “Assunta, you want injection? . . . You not want to see baby? . . . ” “
NO!
” I shout. “I want see baby . . .
MY
baby! I see my baby! . . . With my eyes! . . . ' So the baby come . . . And I look . . . And I see the little hand . . . My baby is normal! Normal . . . '

I am crying. I find it hard to cry, but I am crying.

‘I look at doctor and I say, “You, you, you . . . you . . . you fuckin' bastard! You tell me my baby have no arms and no legs . . .” The doctor . . . he go away . . . I am happy . . . Happy, Bruce . . . So happy! . . . I hold my child . . . I thank the Virgin . . . I crying . . . So comes next morning . . . the nurses all around . . . I still crying . . . “Please, please tell doctor forgive what I say him . . . ” The nurses say, “No, Assunta. You are right . . . All hospital know you right . . . ”But tell doctor forgive me!” I still crying . . . So comes the morning . . . The doctor, he knock my door . . . He bring
BIG
bouquet of flowers . . . I never saw flowers like . . . BIG, BIG coronations! . . . And big box chocolates and little clothes for my baby. He take my hand . . . He smile . . . ”Assunta, you right to call me fucking bastard!”

 

M
y mother has come back front her cataract operation. For years she has felt hemmed in by the murk. The colours amaze her.

‘Your father's eyes are blue again.'

My father has the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen in a man. I do not say this because he is my father. They are mariner's eyes, level and steady. On the Malta convoys they scanned the surface of the sea for mines, or the horizon for an enemy warship. They are the eyes of a man who has never known the meaning of dishonesty. They have never tempted him to anything mean or shoddy.

My mother's eyes are brown and lively, with suggestions of Southern ancestry.

When my mother, Margharita, was in hospital he found a photograph I had feared was lost. He had it taken at Hove in 1940 before going to sea. The photo shows the clear blue eyes, that can only be blue, gazing squarely at the camera from under the patent leather peak of his naval officer's cap. My mother kept it by her bedside. I would kiss it before going to bed. My first memory of him is on my third birthday, the 13th of May 1943. He took us bicycling near Flamborough Head, the grey Yorkshire headland that Rimbaud may have seen from a brig and put into his prose-poem
Promontoire.

He rigged up an improvised saddle for me on his crossbar, with stirrups of purple electric wire. I pointed to a squashed brown thing on the road.

‘What's that, daddy?'

‘I don't know.'

He did not want me to see something dead.

‘Well, it looks to me like a piece of hedgehog.'

My father was not looking in the box of old photos for the one of himself, but for one of his father's yacht, the
Aireymouse.
In the Twenties and Thirties my grandfather, a Birmingham lawyer, owned a vessel of legendary beauty. She was a teak, clipper-bowed ketch built at Fowey in Cornwall in 1898; she had once been rigged as a cutter. An aireymouse is a bat and, under her bowsprit, there was the figurehead of a bat with outstretched wings. The bat had disappeared by my father's day.
Aireymouse
had brown sails dyed with cutchbark, a brass ship's bell, and a gold line from stem to stern.

My grandfather died in 1933, and
Aireymouse
had to be sold. She needed expensive repairs to her stanchions. Neither my father nor his brothers and sister could afford them. They sold her for
£
200. For my father alone it was the loss of a lover.

He had other boats - the
Nocteluca,
the
Dozmaree,
the
Nereid,
the
Sunquest
— but he shared them with others, and none matched the boat of his dreams.

I do not think he could bring himself to find out what had happened to
Aireymouse.
He heard rumours. In Guernsey a car had driven over the pier and landed on her deck — without doing too much damage. Or she was a rotting house-boat in the mud of a West Country creek. Or an incendiary bomb had hit her in the War. He came to accept that she was gone, but never quite believed it. On our sailing holidays we all believed that one golden evening, off Ushant or in the Race of Alderney, two sails would appear on the horizon and the ethereal craft would heave into view. My father would raise his binoculars and say the words he yearned to say: ‘It's
Aireymouse.
'

He became resigned. My parents no longer went to sea. They bought a camping van and travelled all over Europe. My father kept a sailor's log-book of their journeys, and read road-maps as if they were charts.

He had also dreamed of making one trade-wind passage to the West Indies. He never found the time to get away. Too many people depended on his legal advice. He would come home exhausted in the evenings after grappling with the problems of National Health Service hospitals. After his retirement, he had an arthritic hip and I feared he would go into decline. Once the operation had been performed, he was young again.

Four years ago my brother took him on the trade-wind passage. The boat was a modern yacht to be delivered to Antigua. But the owners had made her top-heavy with expensive junk. In a following sea, she did a fifty-degree roll and they had to turn back to the Cape Verde Islands. My father looked younger than ever after his adventure, but it was a disappointment.

Three days before Margharita went to hospital, he found himself talking on the phone to a man who said: ‘I've been looking for you for a long time.' Was Charles Chatwin related to the pre-war owners of
Aireymouse
?

‘I am,' said my father. ‘She was our boat.'

‘I've bought her,' the man said.

The man had found her up the River Dart. He fell in love with her and bought her. He took her to a yard in Totnes. The deck was gone. Many of the oak timbers were gone. But the teak hull was in perfect condition.

‘I'm going to reconstruct her,' the man said. Could he count on Charles's help?

Charles will be eighty this year.

Let us pray he will sail on
Aireymouse.

 

T
he coup began at seven on Sunday morning. It was a grey and windless dawn and the grey Atlantic rollers broke in long even lines along the beach. The palms above the tidemark shivered in a current of cooler air that blew in off the breakers. Out at sea — beyond the surf — there were several black fishing canoes. Buzzards were circling above the market, swooping now and then to snatch up scraps of offal. The butchers were working, even on a Sunday.

We were in a taxi when the coup began, on our way to another country. We had passed the Hotel de la Plage, passed the Sûreté Nationale, and then we drove under a limply-flapping banner which said, in red letters, that Marxist-Leninism was the one and only guide. In front of the Presidential Palace was a road-block. A soldier waved us to a halt, and then waved us on.

‘Pourriture!' said my friend Domingo, and grinned.

Domingo was a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth. He was the direct descendant of Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave-dealer about whom I was writing a book.

Domingo had two wives. The first wife was old and the skin hung in loose folds off her back. The second wife was hardly more than a child. We were on our way to Togo, to watch a football game, and to visit his great-uncle who knew a lot of old stories about the slaver.

The taxi was jammed with football fans. On my right sat a very black old man wrapped in green and orange cotton. His teeth were also orange from chewing cola nuts, and from time to time he spat.

Outside the Presidential Palace hung an outsize poster of the Head of State, and two much smaller posters of Lenin and Kim II Sung. Beyond the road-block, we took a right fork, on through the old European section where there were bungalows and balks of bougainvillea by the gates. Along the sides of the tarmac, market-women walked in single file with basins and baskets balanced on their heads.

‘What's that?' I asked. There was some kind of commotion, up ahead, towards the airport.

‘Accident!' Domingo shrugged.

The women were screaming, and scattering their yams and pineapples, and rushing for the shelter of the gardens. A white Peugeot shot down the middle of the road, swerving right and left to miss the women, and then, we heard the crack of gunfire.

‘C'est la guerre!' our driver shouted, and spun the taxi round.

‘I knew it.' Domingo grabbed my arm. ‘I knew it.'

The sun was up by the time we got to downtown Cotonou. In the taxi-park the crowd had panicked and overturned a brazier. A stack of crates had caught fire. A policeman blew his whistle and bawled for water. Above the rooftops, there was a column of black smoke, rising.

‘They're burning the Palace,' said Domingo. ‘Quick! Run!'

We ran, bumped into other running figures, and ran on. A man shouted, ‘Mercenary!' and lunged for my shoulder. I ducked and we dodged down a sidestreet. A boy in a red shirt beckoned me into a bar. It was dark inside. People were clustered round a radio. Then the bartender screamed (wildly, in African) at me. And suddenly I was out again on the dusty red street, shielding my head with my arms, pushed and pummelled against the corrugated building by four hard, acridly-sweating men until the gendarmes came to fetch me in a jeep.

‘For your own proper protection,' their officer said, as the handcuffs snapped around my wrists.

The last I saw of Domingo he was standing in the street, crying, as the jeep drove off, and he vanished in a clash of coloured cottons.

 

In the barracks guardroom a skinny boy, stripped to a pair of purple underpants, sat hunched against the wall. His hands and feet were bound with rope, and he had the greyish look Africans get when they are truly frightened. A gecko hung motionless on the whitewash. Outside the door there was a papaya with a tall scaly trunk and yellowing fruit. A mud-wall ran along the far side of the compound. Beyond the wall the noise of gunfire continued, and the high-pitched wailing of women.