Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  On the bank behind him stood a young black boy beside a table, and on the table was a huge horn gramophone. This was the source of the light operetta.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said James, ‘he’s gone doolally.’

  ‘Not the first time it’s happened,’ said Tarbuck. ‘Caruso, I think. I like Caruso.’

  I was unable to contribute. The Hinckes-Bird plan was forcing giggles into my throat. Grace was still, very still. So very sober and contained.

  ‘Stay on board until I’ve dealt with it, if you want, dearest,’ said James.

  Mr Hargreaves brought his hand up to his head and saluted us. He was standing to attention on the jetty. The jetty was a series of boards lashed with algae-covered ropes to six rusted drums. These undulated as our wash slapped against them, but Mr Hargreaves kept his balance by straddling his pink legs.

  Then our steel hull bumped the jetty.

  Mr Hargreaves wobbled manfully – and fell on his back. Like the Scotsman, he had nothing under his shirt but his pride. My trained eye spotted a livid rash on his buttocks. I blushed. Edward – naked men do not turn a hair on my head, but Mr Hargreaves was representing His Majesty’s Government, and I felt all Africa staring at him (and thereby at us).

  He scrambled upright and resumed his former posture, as if nothing had happened. A sudden misgiving seized me. I had felt we were on the verge of a great adventure, in those patient days at Buea: flying like the hornbills did, breaking from the treetops below and gliding for ages over the valleys. Now I saw our time here as more like the lumbering whirr of one of the coleoptera, its wings scarcely carrying its heavy body from twig to twig. Mr Hargreaves was getting me off to a very poor start, in other words.

  As the gangplank was set down, James and Tarbuck had a hurried confabulation, under their breath. The best course of action, Tarbuck decided, was to humour the fellow. James, discarding ‘indirectness’, decided to adopt a middle course. He stepped off the boat and held out his hand.

  ‘Hello, Hargreaves,’ he said. ‘James Arkwright, your successor. Trust you’re in good health. You’ve forgotten your breeches, by the way. Bad form.’

  James did it very well, however silly it sounds on paper. Officially, he was now the District Officer. I don’t know what that made Mr Hargreaves.

  The fellow took the proffered hand limply and frowned. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but I simply can’t wear them.’ He wore thick, round spectacles, with a cracked right lens. He peered through these at James. I wished James would say something. It was awfully silent, apart from the clucking of water under the jetty.

  Then Hargreaves turned his head towards the boat. His skin was a mass of sweat, and somewhat soiled, so that the drops made stripes over his cheeks. The effort to see screwed his face up so much that his top teeth, yellow as old ivory, showed their gums.

  ‘Company?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that old Tubby Tarbuck?’

  ‘Yes, and –’

  ‘Who’s that with him, skulking in the shadows? Don’t say they’ve paid for a damn clerk, the money-pinching buggers! And there’s another! Two bloody aide-de-camps, as it were?’

  ‘Mrs Charlotte Arkwright, my wife. Grace Tarbuck, the Reverend Tarbuck’s daughter.’

  Hargreaves blinked and peered again. His teeth shot back in and his hands became tight little fists, his body beginning to curve into a pugilist’s crouch.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘oh dear God.’

  ‘She’s a nurse, Hargreaves.’

  The silly man started to back away, gripping his shirt tails and stretching them almost to his knees. It now makes me think of some of our shell-shock victims, but it didn’t then.

  ‘Protocol!’ he moaned. ‘They’ll kill me for this!’

  In the same posture, he backed up the first dilapidated flight of steps beneath the main building and paused before the tin-covered staircase leading to the veranda. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he shouted, ‘but the damn buggers didn’t tell me!’

  He disappeared up the staircase and into the building. James turned as Tarbuck, Grace and myself joined him on the jetty. There was an odour of alcoholic vapours above the river-mud’s stench.

  ‘Welcome to the circus,’ said James. ‘All we need is a few buckets of flour.’

  The boy, no doubt obeying some previous instruction, had replaced Caruso with – ‘God Save the King’! The record was so warped that the gramophone needle bobbed up and down like a sewing machine’s. We were forced to remain respectfully at attention with the jetty swaying under us, and I felt a perfect fool as well as seasick. I wondered if this was all expressly designed to make us feel that – foolish, I mean. The record came to an end in a great hiss and the boy removed the needle.

  There was a moment of peace, then. None of us wanted to move or to say anything. Well, we were home, James and I. Home at last! Our first proper home, Edward. A rather marvellous moment. The first creature stepping from the primordial swamp and setting its print on the sand ...

  ‘Poor man,’ Grace said. ‘Poor, poor man.’

  That broke it completely. Perhaps nursing has dulled my sympathies. I used to disagree with the instruction (in our training and our manuals) that chronic alcoholism should be treated as for lunacy. Now I concur. But I am writing a little from hindsight, for Mr Hargreaves has very little sympathy from me, owing to his deleterious character and the problems he has caused us already in just a few days. I will write about these in my next letter, when I am feeling less weary. I have ‘come down’ as they say – and anyway, James is being paddled off to Ikasa for urgent supplies at any minute. The post leaves there every week, I have now discovered, by carrier to Kumba. He has very little to carry, it is said, but a lot to sell. One of James’s first projects is to give the poor fellow a motorcycle. Tarbuck claims that this will hold him up, as he will have to wheel the cycle as well as carry his pack.

  I am never sure when someone is being serious, here. It is just as you say of gentlemen’s clubs, Edward. But it is hardly Africa’s fault if she is too much of this world to be thoroughly real.

  I am very well, though very tired – and so is James (very well, not very tired).

  With much love,

  Charlotte

  Bamakum, May 13th, 1921

  Dear Edward and Joy,

  It is raining fat balusters, not stair-rods, outside. Tarbuck and daughter have done their exploring up-river and have just stopped for the night. He will take my letter in the morning.

  If it were not for the wetness, it would not be as hot as the hottest day in London. However, I am adapting to the stiflingness. There is a little respite when the storm starts, from the moisture-laden gusts, but the sponge quickly fills up. Goodness knows what germs must be swimming around in every intake of breath I draw. So far, I have not been ill. I am too busy to be ill, and too far from help.

  You will be wondering why a married man was given such a far-flung post. Or, indeed, why the post is here at all. The first is because Mr Hargreaves’s predecessor as well as Mr Hargreaves himself were both bachelors, and both went dotty. I am to keep James from going dotty. The Colonial Office never considered who was to keep me from going dotty. The second is less easily answered, but to do with blank spaces on maps pinned on London walls, and the wealth that might lie in the virgin forest around us. This wealth could be anything from tin through manganese to (of course) gold and diamonds. James says he thinks timber is the real wealth, but no one is interested. Also, there are numerous inhabitants – whole tribes, apparently – who do not yet know that they have the British flag (or any flag) flapping above their heads. They probably do not even know that there is such a thing as an albino who is not an albino. It is James’s job to let them know. This means, unfortunately, that he must go ‘on tour’ every so often. I stay to look after the servants, of which we have several too many (of which we have several, I meant to say).

  Alas, the story of Hargreaves is not only depressing, but horrible and even tragic. I find I have recorded it rather minute
ly. I will try to be brief (for the carrier’s sake, who still awaits his motorcycle!), but I know you like this sort of thing, Edward. There is not very much magic in it, of the African kind, however.

  I need to go back to our arrival. Well, finding our way about the compound took no more than a matter of minutes: a chop-shed, a cookhouse, a thatched privy, a simple guest bungalow, an overgrown cemetery, a ruined construction of rusting girders at the edge of the bush, and a lot of spotless red earth in a yard full of chickens between the cookhouse and the main building. Someone had erected a solid wire fence around all this, now bent double under creepers. The servants emerged and shook their new massa’s hand and that of his missus. They seemed shy, even cowed. The forest was even taller, close to. It cast all into shade (James said we will be grateful for that when the sun comes out). The river lapped at a slippery bank on which, at various times, concrete lumps, iron posts, and even sandbags had been arranged and forgotten. They are still there, and shall remain a little longer, for there is never enough time!

  Now for the interior description. The main building is as simple a construction inside as it is outside, being divided into four rooms, two each side of a narrow hallway. However, we could hardly move through it for tea-chests, broken chairs, legs of tables, rolls of canvas, empty whisky bottles, shards of glass, books – even half-finished paintings done on planks of wood. Our first task, then, was to clear a path, not through African vegetation, but through European dross. We found Hargreaves in the gloom of the shuttered main bedroom, apparently insensible on the bed, a sheet pulled taut up to his chin.

  ‘He might be feverish,’ I whispered.

  ‘Deal with it, nurse,’ said James.

  Welcoming host was transforming into guest-who-falls-sick-on-you with each additional box unloaded from the vessel. James directed operations by the jetty, hoping it wouldn’t collapse. The second bedroom was condemned and filled with the dross. The afternoon sky turned cindery-black, and the figures started to scuttle seconds before the devil’s tattoo was tapped above my head and water drew its shiny gauze curtain across the scene. (The house, being roofed entirely in corrugated iron, is a tin rolling down a pebbly slope when it rains. We all have to bawl at each other.)

  My patient’s temperature was only slightly higher than normal. I’m sure mine was rocketing: the heat in the bedroom was infernal. I treated the rather pustulent rash as for severe bedsores, since it seemed to resemble the latter. The main difference being that it wasn’t on his back, but extended from his buttocks to his navel. I mopped it with spirits of wine from my medicine chest and dusted it over with dusting powder. Grace was an excellent assistant. She dealt with the filthy bed covers, and helped me improvise a bed cradle from a tea-chest (removing the lid, bottom and one side) to let air at the rash (what air there was). I am quite sure he was awake the whole time, with a queer little smile, but the odd man made no attempt to communicate. Odd, or crazed – I am not sure which.

  From the paintings propped about the place, I came down on crazed. They were mostly a portrait of something between a knight in a helmet and a rhinoceros. It stared out through piggy eyes in front of a lot of lurid leaves, like tongues of patients with interesting diseases. The oil paint was as thick as dried mud, and half of it had ended up on the walls. Some had a name neatly printed at the bottom: Sir Steggie. The Reverend suggested a good dose of Gospel light might drive away the shadows, and so Grace read bits of the Bible aloud in each room. I forget which bits. She then sat with Hargreaves while I supervised the placing of our luggage. Then the rain stopped, and everybody was splashing out again.

  Have I mentioned the veranda? It runs around the front and side of the house, reached by the covered steps that look alarmingly like Sir Steggie’s plated nose. At the back of the house there is another flight of steps, so warped and half-rotted as to be unusable. These go up to an equally uncertain little veranda before a locked door which is discovered, from the inside, by lifting a tatty muslin curtain in the narrow hallway. This makes the back of the house look like the front. James has therefore christened it ‘Janus Mansions’.

  My patient remained unstirrable, but not insensible. We had to sleep the first few nights on mattresses in the main room. This contained a worn sofa, two heavy wooden tables and a crooked sideboard, but no chairs. Tarbuck slept in the guest bungalow, on a hammock of green canvas. Green canvas is the only material apart from glass and corrugated iron which ants do not eat. It is all that stands between the white man in Africa and utter disintegration. Ants are swept off the beds and tables and walls, pour from the tap in the kitchen before any water gurgles out (brown as rust, and tepid, from the rain tank at the back), drown in old tins scattered outside, wind like an electric flex to the chop-shed (wherein they do indeed appear to pierce the tins), or the palm-thatched bathing hut of a privy with its tea-chest of a seat and its flowery pudding bowl (I spare no details, you see). In the end, the smaller variety are treated as dust is in England.

  In the smoky cookhouse we discovered a lot of bright blue stains on every surface. According to the servants, this was ‘magic powder’ for killing the ants. I must write to the manufacturers of Reckitt’s Blue to tell them of this second role. ‘The real answer,’ I informed them, ‘is to keep everything absolutely spotless, which means swept and scrubbed.’ The cook told me that it was Pa Hargreaves’s idea, so I will need to do a lot of persuading.

  When I returned to my patient, at dusk, the door was locked. We left his portion of supper outside it (fresh yams and cooked bananas from our stay in Ikasa) covered with a bowl. It was quickly consumed – by the ants. We were too tired to bother with him, frankly. But it was not at all comfortable; we felt like intruders. Most bothersome, and quite without justification. This was our home now, I thought, as yesterday it was his.

  Tarbuck and Grace (she was lodged in the hallway, at her insistence), retired early. James and I chatted around the table, and after a while we moved out on to the veranda; the night air was gusty and almost cool. The holes in the mosquito nets are patched with varieties of pretty but ineffective lace curtain. Here, on the river margin, we are a brief and very welcome intrusion on the world of the mosquito. They have been at it for hundreds of millions of years. I wish we did not know that. To believe one is younger than the mosquitoes by half a week is much more manageable. James’s pipe spared him much of the slaughter.

  Anyway, we donned our mosquito boots and sat it out by the hurricane lamp. I quote from the diary that I started typing there and then. Sorry if it is a bit flowery. I have always believed that good diaries are written in a literary manner. You know I have plans for a book.

  ‘The view from the veranda is so lovely tonight, now the storm’s mist has cleared; the near-full moon has risen high above the river, turning it to molten silver (or mercury, as James has just suggested. But that reminds me of thermometers). Even the boat’s funnel, to the left side, looks like a castle’s turret. Tarbuck called the forest “awfully inconvenient”, at dinner, but right now it is jolly romantic, tall as two houses on the far bank, looped with elegant creepers and washed in blueish hues that make it dreamlike, fantastical. Added to this are the flickering fireflies, the usual “scree-scree” of the cicadas, the million burbling frogs, and the ever-changing talk of the bigger beasts concealed around us – whooping, shrieking, giggling and grunting, or mournfully repeating the same note. “Macrological”, James calls it, but I dare not show my ignorance. We think we can hear lots of methodical tom-toms, too, but we cannot distinguish the beat from that of our own hearts. (Well, James will insist on taking my hand and kissing its knuckles.) It is all much noisier than in Buea, which makes me think how I am at last in real Africa, the Africa James talked so much of at Hetherington’s. How far away seems that place, now! – those neat lawns, the doctors rattling up the drive, the cheeky young chaps on their crutches or in their bath chairs, smiling through their “fags”, and the bland skies of England over it all. I can’t bear to think of those ca
rbolic corridors, now – down which I might still be perpetually moving were it not for my darling James!’

  There, Edward – is that not proof that I am not at all disenchanted with my husband, as you veiledly suggested in your last letter!?

  We talked of improvements, as if we were in a villa on the Metropolitan Line. Some had been brought with us: a tin hip bath with a lid (it doubles as a trunk on tour); a tin bucket with a wooden seat (no guesses); a muslin-curtained meat safe; and bolts of patterned cloth for curtains, tablecloths, napkins and so forth. James sited the croquet pitch, I sited the shrubbery, flower, and vegetable garden. Against the mouldering voraciousness of this place, we set our standards.

  We called the houseboy and interrogated him. The facts about John Simkins Hargreaves, BA Oxon, were these.

  ‘Massa DO’ had drunk through the stocks of sundowners some time ago, and set out for Ikasa in an old, half-rotten pirogue, hauled from the sludge. It had sunk, and for some time they all thought he was drowned. Like a miracle (or a restless ju-ju spirit!) he had returned a few days later, much the worse for wear – found, at any rate, sprawled in the cookhouse one morning, his clothes in rags, his face covered in ants.