by Paul Theroux
10
Alec had managed a tea estate, and Munday in town for the week’s supplies looked forward to the older man’s company while Emma visited her friends and used the British Council Library. It was some relief from what after a year had become monotony in the village. Alec had sat, often jeering humorously with his cronies, and sometimes with the African girl who lived with him, whose picture appeared on the yellow tea wrapper—in the picture she was holding a similar packet of tea. Munday had never seen Alec in England; today he was alone in the crowded pub, looking burdened by his heavy suit and rather older: a sunburn had always masked the boozy floridness of his face and without it the patches of bright veins only emphasized his pallor. But his voice was the old familiar trumpet and his shouted Swahili caused several people nearby to turn and listen, and Alec, noticing their curiosity, had continued. Only when Munday was seated beside him did Alec lower his voice and resume in English.
“You reminded me,” Munday had said, and he told his story of having spoken Swahili to the porter at Waterloo. What had made him feel ridiculous in Emma’s eyes impressed Alec, and Alec said, “So you’re still the bwana mkubwa. That happened to me once in Marseilles. I opened my mouth to speak French and out came 'Kuja hapaV Baffled those frogs, I can tell you.”
“My porter was insulted,” said Munday.
“Served him right,” said Alec. “The striking classes always have it their own way, what? Here, let me get you a drink.” Alec pushed his way to the bar and returned with a pint. “A handle, right? I never forget a thing like that.” He raised his glass and said, “Confusion to your enemies, death to mine! Alfred, it’s like old times.” Then Munday said he had just come from Harley Street, and Alec had made the remark about the ten guineas.
“He told me I was perfectly all right,” said Munday.
“Maybe you are!”
“Maybe so,” said Munday. “But I certainly don’t feel it.”
“You are looking a bit unbuttoned,” said Alec. “I’m not surprised. I haven’t felt at all well since I stepped off that plane. Not at all.”
“Who’s running the estate now?”
“My branch manager,” said Alec, and he snorted at the contemptuous joke. “I hope it goes bust. They had no right nationalizing me. I was employing four hundred pickers—I’ve heard they’re down to a hundred and fifty now. They haven’t a bloody clue. And here I am.” Alec looked disgustedly around the pub.
Munday didn’t encourage him in his anger. He had seen Alec aggrieved before, and aggrieved Alec turned abusive, inviting witnesses to his pain. Munday respected the vigor of Alec’s settler opinions, though he always steered him away from the talk about Africans, which strained Munday’s loyalties. He wished to keep them separate, the Africans in the village, Alec and his cronies in Fort Portal. What he admired in Alec was the knowledge he had—a subtle expression of his attachment to the country—of the local flora, the names of wild flowers and trees, the types of grass; Alec made distinctions about landscape few Africans made, and he remembered Alec drunk one night outside a bar he called “The Gluepot,” stooping to the sidewalk and plucking a flower and holding the frail shaking blossom in his large fingers to identify it. Munday had once considered writing an anthropological study of people like Alec, the tribalism of the post-war settlers, but he felt he might have lost them as friends if he did that. Then his Saturdays would have been empty.
“The last time I saw you wearing a suit was at the Omukama’s funeral,” said Munday.
“Remember that?” said Alec. “That was a bash! All those women screeching, those sort of round horns they were blowing. The High Commissioner was there —God, he hated me. I got pissed as a newt afterward with Jack at The Gluepot.” Alec shook his head and smiled.
“Do you ever see him?”
“Jack? Not really. The last I heard he was applying to London Transport. Imagine Jack driving a bus!”
“He can do better than that, surely,’.’ said Munday, though he saw Jack clearly in the badge and uniform of a bus driver.
“A foreman on a tea estate? There’s nothing for him here. He’ll be bloody lucky to have a job at all.”
“Emma’s seeing Margaret this afternoon.”
“Margaret! Wasn’t she a dragon? Always reminded me of that film actress whose name I can never think of when I want to. I remember the night she came after Jack. We were drinking late at the hotel—Jack had his African popsie. ‘Excuse me/ I says and Margaret tore a strip off them both, told Jack she never wanted to see him again. I could hear her all the way out to the garden, swearing like a navvy. I’ll never forget that.”
“We were at the camp then.”
“You missed all the fireworks,” said Alec.
“Not exactly. Emma saw Margaret at Allibhai’s that Saturday and got a blow by blow description.”
“He got the boot, too, Allibhai. I expect I’ll be seeing him in Southall one of these days.”
“Do you live out that way?”
“Bleeding Ealing—not far off. I hate the place. Ever been there? It’s a five-bob ride on the Underground, ancl I’m paying the earth for a one-room flat —that’s what they call a bedsitter these days. Australians upstairs, always stamping on the floor, South Africans, you name it. Beside me there’s a family of Maltese—kids all over the place, God only knows where they sleep. It’s a right madhouse, toilets flushing, water running, radios playing. African bloke lives somewhere in the building. One day I saw him in the hall and says, ‘Kitu gani?’ ‘I am an engineering student,’ he says and gets all shirty with me. Filthy? You have no idea. Leaves turds the size of conger eels in the pan for the next person to admire. The pubs are a disgrace, all noise and music, television sets, and these horrible little chaps in old clothes with sequins pasted to their faces—queers, I fancy. Look at that bloke there.”
Alec, breathless from his tirade, nodded at a tall young man in a black cape who was standing at the bar with his back to them. He held a glass of red wine in one and and in the other a chain leash. A wolfhound with damp hair squatted panting beside him, its long tongue drooping and quivering.
“Ever see anything like it?” said Alec.
A woman entered the bar, striding past Munday and Alec. She wore a bowler hat tipped back on her head, a fox-fur coat, a shirt and tie, striped trousers and black patent leather shoes; a young man, shorter than she, with long hair and a pale face and faded velvet jacket, held her hand. The woman ordered a whisky for herself, a beer for her companion. She talked loudly to the barman while her companion smoked.
“They’re all on drugs,” said Alec. “It’s incredible how this country’s gone downhill. Saw a couple of queers the other day having it off in Walpole Park. And the prices! I pay ten quid a week for a room barely big enough to swing a cat in.”
“We’re not paying a lot,” said Munday, “but we’re finding the country a bit of a strain. The cold toilet in the rented house. It gets so dark. And those country roads. It’s all retired people.”
“I keep thinking,” said Alec, “there should be a pub somewhere in London where blokes like us from the bundu could go and talk over old times. Sort of club.”
“Malcolm used to drink at The York Minster.”
“Poor Malcolm. They say he looked awful toward the end. Where was that? Nairobi?”
“Mombasa.”
“No, I’m sure it was Nairobbery.” Alec smiled grimly. “I’d even settle for that.”
Munday was jostled by a man with a briefcase. He said, “It’s filling up.”
“Packed. Where do they all come from?” Alec clamped his lips together. “If this was the hotel they’d all know me, everyone of them. Hi Alec.”
“Have you thought of moving out of London? Maybe into the country?”
“I would, but”—Alec leered—-“There’s no nyama there.” It was a settler euphemism, the Swahili word for meat, and he made it sound vicious.
“Is there any here?”
“Animals,
” said Alec. “Read the cards at the news agents! Notting Hill Gate’s a good place for them.
‘Dancing Lessons,' ‘French Lessons,’ ‘Games Mistress,’ and whatnot. Some are quite young, just getting started. I usually ring up ‘Dusky Islander Seeks Unusual Position’—I always liked the black ones. They’re not a patch on those Toro girls but at my age you can’t be choosy. I’m past it—I admit it—but they don’t mind.” Alec sipped his beer and said, “We didn’t know when we were well off. But it’s too late for that now. It’s all finished. We’re stuck here. I suppose we should make the best of it."
Munday objected but said nothing. Alec, fifteen years his senior and with little education, was including him in his declaration of futility. He said, “I’ve been thinking of perhaps going back.”
Alec said, “They’ll kill you.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why don’t you then?”
“My heart,” said Munday.
“What a shame.” Alec sounded as if he meant it. “Money’s a problem, too,” said Munday. “I can’t get another research grant unless I finish this book.” Alec smiled. “You’re a liar,” he said. “Emma’s got pots of money. We all knew that.”
Munday stared at him, but his stare turned sheepish. He said, “And I hated being a white man.”
“I thought you rather fancied it.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Munday.
“I never thought much about it myself.”
“Maybe that’s why you lasted so long.”
“Twenty-three years,” said Alec, and gulped the last of his beer.
Munday bought the next round of drinks, and when he returned with them Alec was singing softly,
“Mary had a little lamb,
It was mzuri sana;
It put its nose up Mary’s clothes Until she said, ‘Havana' ”
“Reminiscing again?” said Munday.
“Remember that little road to Bundibugyo, over
the mountains? And the pygmies—what a nuisance they were, little buggers.”
“In the Ituri Forest.”
“The rain-forest! It was so dark there. The ferns were four feet high. We used to park there, Jack and I, and wait for the tea lorries from the Congo. It was easier for them to sell it on the black market than bring it by road to Leopoldville. They were a rum lot, those Congolese lorry drivers—spoke French worse than me. And that’s saying something.”
“I didn’t realize you were involved in smuggling,” said Munday, and he saw Alec brighten and purse his lips with pride.
“I kept quiet about it there—highly illegal, you know,” said Alec. He winked. “I’m a smuggler from way back. Where’d you think I got all those crates of Primus Beer? That was a good beer. Not like this stuff—tastes like soap to me.”
Alec told a smuggling story: a late night on the Congo border—a poker game in a candle-lit hut in the forest—the drivers showing up drunk with the tea chests and arguing about the price—Alec choosing the biggest African and knocking him to the floor— not a peep from the others—tossing them out “bodily” —and Munday was taken back to the lounge of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel; he was listening to Alec, who would soon start arguing endlessly about the merits of the “head shot” over the “heart shot/’ He was forgetting the Bwamba village, as far from him then as Four Ashes was now, and cheered by the old man’s company and the long whine of the locusts. But he was not so absorbed in the story that he failed to see that what had brought him to London was what had made him look up Alec at the hotel on a Saturday; he saw his motive. The woman in the church hall had asked him how he stood it: he had not mentioned those weekends. He listened to Alec without enthusiasm and saw himself as a small anxious man, and Alec rather foolish, supporting each other. He was depressed—that woman’s word— for so much had changed, traveling to London would be an inconvenient and expensive habit, and really Four Ashes was farther from any relief than that little village beyond the mountains.
“We’ better eat something or we’ll both be under the table.”
Alec had the macaroni and cheese, Munday the hot-pot—the barman shoveled and clapped the meals to the plates, cracking the spoon against their edges to clear it—and both men sat, jammed together on the wooden bench, balancing their plates on their knees and raising their forks with great care. Alec reminisced about the five-bob lunch at the Uganda hotel, but in each reminder of the place Munday saw a new aspect of the ritual he had invented for himself there, and he wanted to be away from Alec, to return to the black house with Emma and verify his fear. Pehaps he had imagined the panic; much of his Africa seemed imaginary, and distant and ridiculous.
“I’ll tell you who I did see,” said Alec. “It was over in Shepherd’s Bush. I was waiting for a bus by the green. Bloke walked by and I thought to myself, I know him. It was Mills.”
“Ah, Mills,” said Munday. But he was thinking of Alec, in the grayness of Shepherd’s Bush, waiting for a bus—the tea planter with four hundred pickers, who had employed a driver, when few did, for his new Peugeot sedan.
“The television man,” said Alec. “Education for the masses.”
“I remember Mills.”
“He remembered you,” said Alec. “We had a natter, he said to drop in sometime. I said fine, but I doubt that I will. I never liked him. I liked her, though.”
“So did I.”
“I should say you did!” Alec gave Munday a nudge. He narrowed his eyes and said, “He never knew, did he?”
“I hope not. It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t what you’d call an affair. But she meant a lot to me. I wondered what happened to her.”
“Like everyone else,” said Alec. “They’re all here, bleeding to death.”
“Did he say he lived in Shepherd’s Bush?”
“No, I think he said Battersea. He works in Shepherd’s Bush—that’s where the studios are. You thinking of paying him a visit?”
“Not him,” said Munday. “But I’d like to see Claudia.”
“Drinking still makes me randy, too,” said Alec, and he laughed.
“I had thought I might go over to the British Museum. And I was planning to leave a message for a Bwamba chap in Mecklenburg Square. I don’t know,” said Munday, pausing. “If Claudia’s home—”
“They’re in the book, and the phone’s over there,” said Alec. “Give her a ring. I’ll get the next round#” He stood up and gave Munday’s shoulder a friendly push. “Get on with it.”
When Munday came back to the bench, Alec said, “I watched you phoning. It reminded me of that night at the hotel—remember?—when Emma was in Kampala and old Mills on safari. ‘Who’s he ringing?’ I wondered—you were so damned secretive! And then I saw your car parked in the Mills’s driveway that Sunday morning.”
“She’s home,” said Munday. “She invited me over for tea.”
“Are you going?”
“I’d like to see her again.”
“I remember that night so well.”
“That was the first time,” said Munday. “There weren’t many others.”
“Mind what you do.” There was pleasure in Alec’s face. “It’s like old times,” he said. “Wish I had Rosie here.”
“I won’t do much,” said Munday. “She said her daughter’s due home from school—little Alice.”
“Jesus, now I remember the story. She saw you in bed with the old lady and said, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ ”
“Where are you off to?” asked Munday quickly.
“Notting Hill Gate for me. Dusky Islander, I expect,” said Alec jauntily. “Some bitch in white garters in an unmade bed in a basement flat to insult my body—you should try it sometime, Alfred old man.” He sighed. “Then I’ll go back to my room in the monkey house and watch television. That’s all I do. I’m getting more like them every day.”
“I’d better be off,” said Munday.
“How are things up-country?” Alec was stabbing his umbrella into the carpet. “
Emma her old sketching self?”
“She’s fine, sends you her regards,” said Munday, but he thought, up-country: it was the way Alec had always referred to the Yellow Fever Camp on a Saturday night. But this time they would part in a cold London drizzle, Alec to his bedsitter, Munday to Four Ashes.
Outside the pub Alec held his collar together at his throat and looked at the street and the dripping brown sky. He said, “This fucking city, and none of them know it.”
“You should come down and see us some time," said Munday.
“No fear,” said Alec. “But give Emma my love—I still have her picture of my estate. The pluckers. The gum trees. That hill.”
“She’ll be pleased.”
Alec leaned closer, breathing beer; he said with feeling, “Tea’s a lovely crop, Alfred.”
The walked in different directions, but met again by accident a few minutes later near the Leicester Square tube station. Alec was walking up Charing Cross Road. He smilied at Munday and called out, “Kwaheri!”—and people turned—and then stooping in the rain and still gripping his collar he continued on his way, trudging into the raincoated crowd of shoppers.
Munday walked by the house several times, preparing himself to meet her by calling up her face and rehearsing a conversation. He almost went away. His interest in seeing her, encouraged by Alec, had dwindled as soon as Alec had left him; now it had nearly vanished and there was moving him only a youthful muscle of curiosity. In the taxi he had felt a jumping in his stomach, that pleasurable tightness that precedes sex, but he had stopped the taxi on the other side of Chelsea Bridge so that he could cut across the park, and the pleasure left him. He saw two black boys, running through the trees, chasing each other with broom handles, skidding over a landscape where they didn’t belong. Their flapping clothes annoyed him. His feet were wet. He resented his fatigue; the speed of the taxi, the noise and fumes of the city had tired him, he was unused to those assaults on his senses, and already he felt that the trip to London was wasted. His mid-afternoon hangover drugged him like a bad meal. He wanted to lie down somewhere warm and sleep.
