Then the door opened, and Hermoine Hallet-McWilliam burst into the office. “Have you done that memo? Sir William’s asking where it is.”
For all her well-connected background, Hermione was badly challenged in the manners department. “Nearly finished, Hermione,” I said brightly, turning back to the computer.
“Can’t imagine what you’ve been doing,” she said. “Told you to do that an hour ago.” Then she picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Candida. Hi. Smee. Listen, you going to be Larkfield at the weekend? That’s completely brilliant. Ophelia’s coming with Hero and Perpetua. Well, fairly smart, I suppose. Absolutely. Quite agree. No, you’re quite right. Well, say hello to Lucretia for me. Bye.”
One of these days she would answer the phone to someone called Beelzebub.
Suddenly I was all softness and radiance in a powder-blue wrap. The sun was streaming down on us as we sat at my kitchen table. It was our first breakfast together.
“People can be really quite different from each other, can’t they, Oliver?” I said.
“Sorry, darling?”
“I, for example, like a warm currant tea cake for my breakfast. You, on the other hand, might prefer muesli, or scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, or bagels perhaps, with a range of cheeses,” I said, opening my immaculate fridge to reveal an array of tempting foodstuffs.
“Rosemary.” Hermione was standing above me, staring at me furiously. “I am not. Going. To ask you. Again. May I please have Sir William’s memo?”
I turned back, under Hermione’s gaze, to the computer and started typing out the handwritten memo which lay on the desk. It was another of Sir William’s mad attempts to make himself more famous.
23 JULY 1985
TO: ALL MEMBERS OF THE PUBLICITY DEPARTMENT
FROM: SIR WILLIAM GINSBERG
RE: CORPORATE PROFILE-RAISING
We are looking very very hard for ways of increasing public awareness of the socially responsible aspects of the company and myself as its chairman. In the light of the recent Live Aid concert it is very very important Ginsberg and Fink are seen to be doing their bit.
Suddenly the first birth pangs of an idea twinged in my brain. Startled by the sensation, I reached for the list of forthcoming Soft Focus programs, which was lying in a pile of papers on my desk. I scanned the list. There it was:
PROGRAM 25:In the wake of Band Aid and Live Aid, Soft Focus investigates the new phenomenon of charity in relation topopular culture, and looks at the contribution of various areas of the arts world to aid for the Ethiopian famine.
I reckoned it ought to be possible to get Sir William onto the program, although, obviously, it would have to involve a lot of consultation with the producer.
“Books.” Sir William banged his fist down on his large mahogany desk. “Ver’ good idea. Take ’em some books. Books all over the shop, clutterin’ the place up. Take ’em out in an airlift. Ties in smooth as a sewin’ machine. Ver’ good angle for an arts program.”
“Don’t you think the Ethiopians would rather have something to eat?” I said.
“No, no, no. Books. Just the ticket. Every man jack in the whole ruddy shootin’ match flyin’ out food. Need somethin’ to read while they’re waitin’ for it.”
“In fact, although naturally food is the pressing concern, there may actually be something interesting for us in the books concept.” Eamonn Salt, the press officer for the SUSTAIN charity, pulled at his beard. Sir William pulled at his beard too.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, indeed. We’re trying to get away from the dehumanizing of the indigenous African in the media famine coverage,” Eamonn went on in his flat monotone. “Introducing the notion of the learned African person, the intelligent African thirsting for knowledge to replace what we call the Starving Monkey Myth. Your idea might well have a role to play in increasing public empathy, though many of my colleagues would disagree. It’s a different school of thought. Though, of course, we’d be up against public outrage about waste of resources, charity for luxury. I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments.”
“Ver’ good. Arguments. Books. Just the ticket to get the Soft Focus lot goin’,” said Sir William.
“But would the Ethiopians be able to read the books if they’re in English?” I said.
“Ah, well, remember, the famine covers the whole of the Sahel. Your best bet might be to send them to the camps on the border between Abouti and Nambula. There are refugees from Kefti there who are highly educated. The Keftians have an excellent British-based education system,” said Eamonn.
“Where’s Kefti?” I said.
“Rebel province of Abouti, bordering Nambula, North Africa. The Keftians have been pursuing a somewhat bloody war for independence from the Marxist regime in Abouti for twenty-five years. Highly organized culture. The Sahel famine has hit them probably harder than anyone—it is impossible for the NGOs to get food aid to them because of the war and for diplomatic reasons. There is a major exodus from Kefti at present over the border into Nambula. Very, very severe malnourishment there.”
“What about taking out food with a few books thrown in?” I said.
“Ruddy good idea,” said Sir William. “First rate. Good thinkin’, gel.”
Fired up with unaccustomed zeal, I started organizing an appeal among the staff of the corporation for the food, rounding up remaindered books, looking into sponsored flights. I rang up Soft Focus and fixed up a meeting for a week’s time with Sir William, Oliver Marchant and me. A vision of Africa, with its tribes, drums, fires and lions, danced and twinkled. I thought of Geldof, I thought of purpose and meaning, I thought of relief workers being passionate, poor and self-sacrificing, saving the grateful Africans. But mainly I thought of Oliver.
CHAPTER
Three
Where’s my Kit-Kat?”
Henry was standing outside the cabana, looking around indignantly. The staff had finished breakfast and were wandering around the compound getting ready to go to the camp. Sian hurried over to Henry.
“My bloody Katerina Kit-Kat. I left it in Fenella Fridge and somebody’s Sophia Scoffed it.”
Sian was talking to him in a low voice, soothing him.
“Henry, you’re blind and stupid,” I called across. “It’s under the antibiotics. Go and have another look.”
“Ding dong!” he said, turning round and raising his eyebrows suggestively. “I do so love it when you get all strict,” and he sauntered back into the cabana, as Sian hurried after him.
The sun was starting to burn now. The first trails of smoke were beginning to rise above the camp and figures were moving slowly along the paths and across the plain: a boy leading a donkey carrying two bulging leather sacks of water, a woman with a pile of firewood on her head, a man in a white djellaba walking with a stick balanced on his shoulders, arms hanging lazily over the stick. In a few hours’ time the light would be blinding white and the heat would become claustrophobic. It was easy to imagine you were going to suffocate and stop breathing.
Betty came bustling across the gravel towards me. “I don’t want to intrude before you’ve started your day properly, dear,” she said, “though . . .”—she opened her eyes very wide and showed me her watch—“it is six o’clock. But I wondered if I could have a little word in your ear.”
Betty was round and in her late fifties. I knew what she wanted to have a little word about: Henry and Sian. She wouldn’t be up front about it. She wouldn’t say, “I don’t think you should let your assistant behave promiscuously with the nurses.” What she would do would be to tell me a little story about someone I’d never heard of who had once run a relief camp in Zanzibar or, perhaps, Chad. This person, surprise surprise, would have allowed their assistants to sleep with the nurses—and guess what? It would all have ended in an AIDS outbreak, earthquake or tidal wave and they would have decided that everyone should sleep in their own mud huts in future.
“Can we have a chat later?” I said, suddenl
y remembering the toothbrush and holding it up. “When I’ve finished my teeth?”
I finished the brushing, and scrunched across the gravel to my hut. I had a lot to do that day. I was the administrator of the camp, doing the organization for SUSTAIN, the charity which employed us all. I had been at Safila for just over four years. For the first two I had been assistant administrator, then I’d taken over the main job, with Henry joining as my assistant. I had to oversee supplies of food and drugs and medical equipment, the vehicles, the drinking water, the food—and the staff, which seemed to take up more time than anything.
I opened the piece of corrugated iron which served as a door, and stepped inside my hut. My home in Safila was a thatched circle of wood and mud, about twenty feet in diameter with a hard earth floor covered in rush mats. It smelt of dust. I had a metal-framed bed with a mosquito net, a desk, shelves for my books and files, two metal armchairs with hideous floral foam-rubber cushions, and a Formica coffee table. Everything was covered in sand. It got between your teeth, into your ears, your pockets, your pants. I was fond of my hut, though I think it was the privacy rather than anything else about it which held the appeal.
I say privacy, but two minutes later there was a halfhearted rattle at the door and Betty poked her head round, giving an understanding upside-down smile. She came in, without being asked, gave me a hug, and plonked herself on the bed. There was a scuffling in the ceiling, the ceiling being a large canvas sheet, which was there to catch creatures that would otherwise fall out of the thatch into the room.
“Hello, little friends,” said Betty, looking up.
Oh, no, oh, no. It was a bit early in the morning to have Betty in your hut.
“You’re worried, Rosie, aren’t you? And, do you know, I think you’re right to be worried.”
Here we go, I thought, Henry and Sian.
“It reminds me of when Judy Elliot was running Mikabele back in ’seventy-four. She’d had several arrivals in a very poor state, sent a message to head office asking for reinforcements and got her head bitten off for overreacting. Two months later there was a massive influx, a hundred a day dying during the worst of it, and of course she didn’t have the staff or the equipment.”
So it wasn’t Henry and Sian. It was the locusts.
“What have you heard? Do you think there’s anything in it?”
Over the four years I had been in Safila there had been several famine scares, hordes of refugees about to flood over the border bringing plagues of cholera, meningitis, elephantiasis, God knows what, but it had never, in all the time I had been in Safila, come to anything serious. Sometimes we suspected it was just a refugee ruse to get more food.
Betty gave a little toss of her head, offended. “You mustn’t think I’m in any way trying to tell you your job, Rosie dear. You know I have the greatest admiration for everything you do, the greatest admiration. But, you know, we must always listen to the voice of the African, the voice of Africa.”
Suddenly I wanted to bite Betty, or just sort of pummel her face for quite a long time.
“I’m worried too, Betty, but we can’t go raising an alert if we’ve nothing concrete to go on. Have you heard anything I haven’t heard?”
“They, the people, are our barometer, you know. And the Teeth of the Wind as the African calls them”—she paused for approval—“the Teeth of the Wind can be absolute shockers. They fly all day, you know. Miles and miles, they cover, thousands of miles.”
“I know, that’s what they were saying down at the distribution yesterday, but have you heard anything else?”
“When Mavis Enderby was in Ethiopia in ’fifty-eight there was a plague which gobbled up enough grain to feed a million people for a year. Of course, the thing that really worries me, as I was saying to Linda, is the harvest. Miles and miles across, these swarms are, blotting out the sun, black as soot.”
“I KNOW,” I said, more loudly than I meant to, which was stupid, as this was not the time to initiate a Betty-huff. “Has anyone said anything else to you?”
“They can eat their body weight of food in a day, you know, it’s really very worrying and what with the harvest due, and they can move so fast, great clouds of them . . .”
There was so much to do this morning. I simply had to get Betty to go, so I could think. “Thank you, Betty,” I said. “Thank you so much for your support. It is extremely worrying, but you know . . . a trouble shared . . . Now I really must get on, but thanks for bringing it up.”
It worked. Splendid. She took this as a cue to roll her eyes with affected modesty and rush over to give me a little hug. “Well, we’d best get down to the camp if we’re going to be back and ready in time for Linda’s new doctor,” she said, and gave me another little hug before departing.
That was the other thing. We had a new doctor arriving today, an American. Betty was leaving in three weeks’ time and he was going to replace her. We were supposed to be having a special lunch to welcome him. Linda, who was one of our nurses and rather uptight, had apparently worked with this man in Chad two years ago, but she wouldn’t tell us anything about him. All she did was make it very clear that she had been corresponding with him, and go all coy every time his sleeping arrangements were mentioned. I hoped he was going to be all right. We were such a small group, stuck together, all the relationships were finely balanced. It was easy to knock them off-kilter.
I sat down on the bed, and thought about what Betty had said. For all her annoying little ways, she was a very good doctor, and she did know her stuff as far as Africa was concerned. She seemed to have been working here since the early nineteenth century. There was an awful logic to these rumors. Kefti had just had the first good rains for several years. One of the cruelest ironies of Africa is that the first decent rains after a drought produce ideal conditions for locusts. Because they did, indeed, move so fast, a plague at harvest-time was one of the few things other than a war which could create an instant mass exodus.
I got up, fished out a file, and started looking through it. We tried to run an early-warning system for Kefti, but it wasn’t much help, because no one was allowed to go up there. We were banned from going by SUSTAIN because it was a war zone, and banned from going by the Nambulan government because they wanted to keep things sweet with the Aboutians, and the Keftians were fighting Abouti. All the information we had was in this file. It was full of charts about grain prices in the markets near the borders, graphs of the height and weight of children, sightings of movements of people over the border. I had looked at it two days ago. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I was just making sure.
I really needed to decide on a response quickly, because Malcolm was supposed to be arriving at eleven o’clock with the new doctor. Malcolm was the SUSTAIN field officer for the whole of Nambula. He was a bit of a prat, but if we were going to raise an alarm this was a good chance to do it. I decided to go down to the camp and talk to Muhammad Mahmoud. He would know what was up. I was feeling panicky. I had a drink of water, and tried to calm down.
When I stepped out into the white light, I saw Henry having an intimate chat with Sian outside her hut. He was chucking her under her chin in a cutesy-pie manner. She saw me watching, blushed and shot back inside the hut. Henry just raised his eyebrows and smirked—the arrogance of that boy.
“Henry Montague,” I said strictly. “Go to your room.”
He grinned gleefully. Henry had a smile which was almost too big for his face, in a widemouthed, upper-class way. He was always rather elegant, with dark hair hanging over his forehead in a foppish fringe, which presumably had been trendy when he last saw South Kensington. I was constantly trying to get him to fasten it back with a hair grip.
“I shall have words with you later,” I said. “In the meantime you can put the two cold boxes that are just inside the cabana into the Toyota. I want to go down to the camp and get back before Malcolm arrives.”
“Halliaow! Ding! Dong! Mistress Efficiency!” he said, putting his arm r
ound me in a manner which denoted no respect whatsoever. There would be no point in talking to him now about the Sian business. Any criticism or caution would be shaken off like drops of water from a high-spirited puppy after a swim.
We set off in the Toyota pickup in amiable silence. I decided not to bring up the locusts with Henry until I had talked to Muhammad. Muhammad Mahmoud was not an official leader in the camp. He was just brighter than anyone else, us included. Driving left no room for chat, anyway. Concentration was required, even if you weren’t at the wheel. Shaken and bounced around as if in a tumble dryer, you had to make your body relaxed but tense enough to react when you got thrown up off the seat and hit your head on the roof.
“I say! Hope you’ve got a sturdy bra on in there, old thing!” bellowed Henry. He used to say this every single time, imagining he had just thought of it.
We were winding down the steep sandy track into the camp now, looking over the huts, the white plastic arc of the hospital, the square rush-matting shapes which housed the clinic, the ration distribution, the market, the school. Over the last four years misery had gradually been replaced by mundanity for the refugees, and for us too. But by and large it was a contented mundanity. We drew from each other—the expats and the refugees. We went to their parties at night, with the drums and the fires, thrilling to the Africa of our childhood fantasies. We gave them the drugs, food and medical knowledge they needed. We rowed down the river, played with their kids and felt adventurous, and they took pleasure from our energy and naïve excitement at being in Africa. “We came out of the tunnel of our despair to find that we could not only live, but also dance,” Muhammad once said to me, in his absurdly poetic way. We had come through a crisis together and now we were happy. But the refugees here were entirely dependent on food from the West. It made them vulnerable.
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