by A. N. Wilson
Lennox leaned forward, offering the plate of turkey sandwiches, and seemed relieved when, with the wave of a languid sacerdotal hand (almost as if he were blessing them) Father Vivyan rejected the chance to share.
‘I’ll stick to your excellent whisky. Well, you are a busy man, Lennie, up here in your eyrie, looking down on the kingdoms of the world and the glories thereof.’
They were at the very top of LenMar House, and outside three vast plate-glass windows London stretched, a shimmering drizzle of street lamps and neon. Behind the sleek coiffure of Lennox could be seen the distant Tower of London and beyond it the floodlit dome of St Paul’s. From the window to his right the river wound seaward past the twinkling tower of Canary Wharf. Behind the monk’s head was the sprawl of south London – Streatham, Balham, East Dulwich, Sydenham, all indistinguishable in the murk.
‘You didn’t answer my letters, Lennie.’
‘I didn’t know how to.’
‘Do you remember meeting little Joshua Bindiga when you spent that month with us at the Redeemer?’
‘Of course.’
How much did the monk know about Lennox Mark and Bindiga? Lennox had expected, after the ‘demonstration’ in the forecourt, that the old man would take the chance to preach a sermon, but he was simply sitting there, with a huge slug of whisky, staring at Lennox with a slightly whimsical smile.
Of course he fucking well remembered meeting Bindiga as a schoolboy. That was the extraordinary fact about his month with the monks in Louisetown township: it could have made him a Christian saint – as it was, it gave him the crucial piece of good fortune which had enabled him to move from being a comfortably rich businessman to being a hitter, big indeed.
All manner of rumours circulated about how Lennox arrived from Africa, apparently from nowhere, and was able to buy The Daily Legion and the Sunday, the glossy magazine Gloss, a host of smaller publications including the surprisingly profitable The Seedsman, as well as a handful of local newspapers in England and Scotland. The prosaic truth was not (as rumour wished) that Lennox had a connection with the Mafia: nor that he had been adopted as the toy of a Texan heiress with a fetish for fat boys; nor that he had struck oil in the South China Sea. (All these stories found credence where two or three London journalists were gathered, and alcohol consumed.)
The Lennox Mark money came from copper: it was as simple as that: but he would not have held on to it, nor would the old man have been able to die on the family tobacco farm (when so many other Europeans were driven off their confiscated land), had he not befriended the General. In the civil war of ’81, which ended in a victory for Bindiga, the control of the copper mines at Kanni-Karkara had been the single most important factor in Zinariya’s economy. The prodigious, princely wealth of Lennox’s grandfather, and of the great-grandfather who had first sunk the shafts and sent African miners down into the red rock of the southern province during the 1890s – this vast wealth had evaporated. The old man, Lennox’s father, inherited none of the business acumen of his paternal line. The vagaries of the world stock markets before the Second World War ate into his huge capital. After the war, gin and frequent divorce made him sink from the princely class to being merely a man of means, Lennox’s various stepmothers managing to run up colossal debts doing nothing in particular in Monte Carlo, Nice, the Greek islands and London. His holdings in WAMO made him a key player when the future of the copper-mining industry was in question, but he had no subtlety, no foresight, no practical intelligence. By the end of the civil war, the old man was on a bottle and a half of Gordon’s each day and the fourth (or was it the fifth?) wife, as leathery and as foul-mouthed as her predecessors. Marooned on their farm in the northern province, they inveighed against the ‘fucking commie’ and against Lennox for ‘siding with the niggers’ against his own kind.
This had been Lennie’s real stroke of luck, genius, or both. He openly sided with the man who seemed to be intent on the destruction of all the European settlers. The last time Lennox had met that final stepmother, her stringy brown arm had stretched forth for the umpteenth cigarette of the afternoon and she had gluggled more poison from her tumbler.
‘Bin-digger’ – she evidently found it stylish to mispronounce the General’s name – ‘is a fucking commie.’ False teeth clinked against ice-cubes in her glass. ‘Red, nigger, bastard – right? And that white bastard – yes – that one’ – a long scarlet talon jabbed from the end of the nicotine-orange index finger – ‘that father of yours has done nothing – NOTHING – to stop it.’
The old man’s tendency to marry women who abused him, usually verbally, sometimes physically, had been one of Lennox Mark’s reasons for delaying marriage. The old man had spent his life in various pleasure spots which gave no obvious pleasure, numbing out their irrational angry whinnies by matching glass for glass their appetite for the sauce. Cirrhosis, which was an inevitability, was deemed by the final shrew a ‘relief’. Many a vsitor to the hotel bar in Eastbourne would hear, before her own liver gave out, how she’d got out of Lugardia in time; how it would have broken Jim’s heart if he’d lived to see what the niggers had done to his beloved Africa.
Lennox Mark’s own attitude had always been different. He was happy to see Lugardia die and Zinariya be born. He was not a defeatist. He saw in Bindiga a kindred spirit, a fellow scrambler up ladders, sailor near winds, cutter of corners.
‘You came in those days – no white boy from Queen Alexandra College came among us: but you came. For that month you came and lived with the fathers. You shat in a hole like an African. You taught me rugby. You remember? Drop goals?’
The General had grinned. This had been almost his first word to Lennox when he granted him an audience, after the revolution. The General’s advances in life had begun in that missionary school: his decisions to pass exams and get to Sandhurst had been made possible by the chance of being taught by the former Major Chell MC – now Father Vivyan. This was some feat – of push by Bindiga, of stringpulling by Chell. The strict requirement of the Zinariyan army was that soldiers be five foot six inches or above. The General was five foot four. This Napoleonic truth about him could be seen as a paradigm for all his further defiance of the fates. He knew how to take chances, when to change tack. All his advisers, LSE-trained, urged upon him the out-and-out nationalization of the mines in ’81. One last meeting at the Presidential Palace in Chamberlainstown (as it still was then) had clinched the matter.
‘Take over those mines, General, and all your international investors will pull out: tomorrow.’
Lennox knew that this was probably false, but he said it without a quaver in his voice. It might after all have been true.
‘Keep WAMO up and running, with its Dutch and American mining engineers, its British–Zinariyan management team working in partnership … and you’ll be able to fund a new Zinariya. Nationalize WAMO and the socialist experiment will never have a chance.’
So the bargain was struck and the General never had reason to regret the friendship he had forged with Lennox Mark.
As if Father Vivyan read the mind of Lennox Mark, and had himself been tracing the history of an African tragedy, interwoven with their personal destinies, as they sat in silence, the monk said:
‘We both supported Bindiga at the beginning.’
‘You more enthusiastically than I,’ said Lennox.
‘Look,’ said the monk, putting down his whisky glass and clasping his hands together. ‘You have read my letters to you. And you know why those people out there are staging a small protest. Last week the editor of the only liberal paper in Mararraba—’
‘The ex-editor of a paper which went kaput,’ corrected Lennox.
‘The paper was suppressed.’
‘It closed because no one bought it – because that kind of liberal horse-shit might go down very well in Hampstead but it means nothing in Africa.’
‘Hasirye was hanged,’ said the monk calmly. ‘Before that, he was almost certainly tortured. You are the o
nly Western newspaper proprietor with a first-hand knowledge of the situation in Zinariya. I am asking you why the death of Hasirye in a prison cell in Mararraba was not reported at all in The Daily Legion. On the day he died, your newspaper had the divorce of a young American film star on its front page.’
Lennox ate a sandwich to give himself time. He wanted to see whether the old monk still possessed any power over him: power to disconcert, to worry, to undermine.
Little by little, since Lennox’s first meeting with Joshua Bindiga twenty years ago, his dependence on the tyrant had increased. The Zinariyan government now effectively owned the mines. Lennox had never withdrawn his support. He supported Bindiga’s policy of sacking the British managers, then supported the policy of deporting all non-African engineers. When the first major disaster occurred – the collapse of the shafts which killed two hundred workers, some as young as twelve, Lennox Mark went in person to the chairman of Reuters News Agency and promised him, on his oath, that the story was a pack of lies put about by Bindiga’s political enemies. By the time Lennox Mark had acquired newspapers he was able to give enthusiastic support to Bindiga when he abolished the opposition. When the Alkawari! party was made illegal, L. P. Watson wrote a learned analysis of how ‘opposition’ in the Zinariyan context was really sedition; and he asserted that ‘the Zinariyan Gandhi’, Professor Galwanga, was really a crypto-terrorist. The Legions never missed an opportunity to dub the Zinariyan opposition in exile a nutcase. Dangerous. A traitor to his country.
‘Can there ever be a justification for printing what isn’t true?’ asked Father Chell. ‘What you know to be untrue?’
The silence was broken only by the squelch of mayo on iceberg as the proprietor chomped on his sandwich.
‘Lennie,’ the monk’s voice had sunk to the low murmur with which he spoke to women in his confessional, ‘Lennie! You know what that man is doing to Zinariya – to your country. You and I know more than ever gets reported in the papers here – the massacres, the tortures … You know better than I, God knows, what a sheer bloody mess he’s making of the economy.’
Lennox’s voice was husky in reply.
‘You supported him once. You educated him. You put him where he is.’
‘Don’t you think I have that on my conscience – every hour of every day?’
‘So my newspapers have to change policy to satisfy your conscience?’
‘Lennie, you know that’s an absurd remark.’
‘The President expelled you from Zinariya because you were plotting against him.’
‘That is also an absurd assertion – as you know.’
Now the bony jaw of Vivyan Chell jutted angrily.
‘The Happy Band of Pilgrims – wasn’t that its name? I remember it when I worked with you in Louisetown. In those days it was a youth club – kids came and learnt football. In the last decade or so’ – Lennie pronounced the word ‘decade’ in the American manner. There was a very faint twitching of disgust at this in the other man’s lips – ‘you’ve been teaching them some other things, those boys. The Happy Band have learnt bomb-making, commando tactics, sabotage …’
‘So, Bindiga’s Gestapo have been keeping you well supplied with propaganda.’
‘I notice you don’t deny making those kids into criminals.’ Lennox Mark grinned. The spell was not quite broken for him; he still felt the monk’s power to hypnotize him, but it was much weaker than he had feared. Once the words had begun, they flowed. He told Vivyan Chell that the disruptions in the mines, the industrial unrest, the small explosions in one of the shafts, the home-made bomb found on a public train pulling into Bindiga Central, Mararraba – all these had been traced to Happy Band activists.
‘My job is to be a priest,’ said Chell with a sort of eruptive energy. He boomed the words. ‘And let me tell you, while you mouth all this rubbish, if an assassin killed Bindiga now, this minute – if they held a knife to his throat’ – he mimicked slicing movements against his own throat with an index finger – ‘they’d be doing God’s work.’
NINE
In Lennox Mark’s house, five miles westward in Knightsbridge, his wife Martina reached to her right lobe and cupped the long honey-brown fingers in her own small white hand.
He now spoke to her in Checkpoint Charlie officer’s English.
‘Don’t try anything. Okay?’
The voice reminded her of the courtesy, and above all, of the cleanliness of her clients who were British army officers. That was after the move to Frankfurt. They were good payers, and sometimes they’d take you for a meal afterwards. Their shyness on arrival did not last once they were naked. She associated that army voice with the combination of social diffidence and urgent, thrusting action. It was while watching their white public school arses go up and down that she had formed to herself a notion of the world they came from. She literally lay back and thought of England, seeing quite clearly, like something vouchsafed in a vision, that this land would give her a new life. She had moved to London in ’66.
‘You can have my ear-rings,’ she said to the boy.
‘They’re diamonds. Right?’
‘Mm.’
‘Right?’ Her failure to give full verbal authentication of the genuineness of the rocks made him yank one ear roughly. For a moment she imagined that he would remove the ear-rings by force, without unscrewing the studs. One thing was for sure. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of showing fear. She was not going to plead with him. Instantly, the situation recalled those many experiences of being manhandled, the worst days when she worked the Russian sector in East Berlin. She had known sometimes that this was what the bastards needed, to hear her whimper, cry, beg. Then they’d be close to getting off and she could be left in peace. Sometimes, though, they wanted more than just to pull her hair, to wrench her shoulders, to rape her. They really needed, some of them, to cause damage: cuts, stitches, bruised or misshapen lips. She remembered a businessman in Frankfurt: no action, until he’d pummelled her face with his fists; then the shy, shrivelled little cock burst into life as she wept and bled. (The nose job, anyway the first, had been a surgical necessity.)
If those years taught one lesson it was that the more fear you showed, the more excited the bastards became.
‘Here – you can have them.’
She drew another hand up to his. She actually held his fingers for a moment. After she had unscrewed first one, then the other ear-ring, she held them out and looked into his eyes.
She sensed he was a good-looking boy under the hood, the cagoule, the jeans; but, oh no – he wasn’t going to have that.
There was a burglar alarm button by the front door. Upstairs, beside her bed, there was a ‘panic button’ which rang in the nearest police station without making any noise in the house. She knew that if he suspected her of raising an alarm, then he would panic – and in fear he might become more violent. She found herself, even while she plotted to press one button or the other, liking his strange eyes. And those hands. Those hands were very beautiful.
‘Rings,’ he said, seizing her hand roughly. ‘Now, the rings.’
She wore the plain gold ring which had been placed on her hand ten years before by Lennox Mark. There was also the large engagement ring clustered with diamonds and sapphires.
‘If you pull like that, they’re not going to come off.’
‘I’ll suck them.’
‘No!’
It was a command from her lips, not an imprecation. He disobeyed it, pulled his woollen mask down beneath his chin and lifted her small hand to his lips. She closed her eyes while he slurped and she felt her wedding ring disappear into his mouth. The insistent sucking sensation was not unpleasant. She tried, as the diamond ring slipped off too, not to like those lips.
‘Where’s the safe?’
‘I don’t have a safe.’
‘The safe with the other jewels. Necklaces. Crowns.’
‘I don’t have a crown.’
‘A house like this
?’ He stared about incredulously at the expanse of polished parquet, the marbled pillars; the enormous Empire looking-glass, the bust of Pitt the Elder on its vast black plinth. ‘In a house like this, there’s gotta be a safe.’
The voice had changed yet again; the English officer had seemingly been replaced by any south London youth playing truant from a remand home. (For, yes, she was coming to the realization that he was very young: a boy, not a man. There was something … she could not explain it to herself … something about the voice which was not right.)
‘Up!’
He was waving the knife at her now, directing her to the staircase.
She began to speak very loudly and very distinctly.
‘So you want to go upstairs and steal my valuables – my belongings.’
‘Where you from, then?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘That’s not English, how you talk.’
‘I’m from Switzerland!’
She almost shouted this.
‘I’ll give you any valuables you ask for, but I promise you, there’s nothing valuable UP HERE!’
In spite of her best resolutions, she could feel her voice, as she projected it, cracking with fear.
‘Don’t make me drag you, lady. Don’t make me cut your cunt.’
Obediently, she led him up the stairs.
TEN
‘Wasn’t Jesus a pacifist?’ Lennox asked.
‘But Saint Peter cut off the ear of the High Priest,’ said Father Vivyan approvingly. ‘I’m a soldier of Christ, Lennie. We’ve been waiting two thousand years for His Kingdom. I’m an old man. There isn’t much time left to me.’
‘So you’d sanction wars? Terrorism? I don’t believe I’m hearing this from you.’
‘I’m not sanctioning anything. I’m telling you what is inevitable. If you have injustice on the scale it exists in Zinariya, people will protest, they’ll fight, man!’
‘And what about this country? What do you think of dear old Blighty since your return?’
