by Adam Thorpe
‘It’s not human,’ I whispered.
James blinked for a moment. Then he, too, saw it. He struck his palm with his fist.
‘Good God,’ he said.
Mr Henry looked about him and sniffed. ‘Dat beef done go now,’ he said.
We relaxed.
‘It’s smaller than it should be,’ said James. ‘Maybe it’s a baby.’
Baluti shook his head. ‘No Pa, dat dere be a big-big old chap. Dat be a chief.’
The wrists and ankles had been tied carefully to tent pegs, but these came out of the soft earth easily. It took all of us, however, to turn the animal over. (Except Augustina, who had her face in her hands, grinning through her fingers.) The back of the poor creature was silver-grey, like the hair of a dignitary. It had calluses on it, and fat white ticks.
‘What a frightfully repulsive act, James,’ I said.
‘It’s an animal,’ he replied. ‘A fierce, bloodthirsty one. Think of it as a wolf.’
But I couldn’t, Edward. A gorilla is simply too human-looking, even ravaged as this one was. I absolutely insisted that it should be buried, and only just prevented Baluti from hacking off the head. He claimed that the white traders paid five shillings and sixpence for an adult skull. They are turned into ashtrays, would you believe! We did allow the servants, however, to take a tooth each, as protection. The teeth were extracted easily: it was evidently an old specimen. Quiri (or Quicksilver, as I prefer to call him) had run back for a shovel and several pairs of gloves. We dug a rough hole a few yards from the path, which instantly welled up with swampy water. Gloved and with much grunting, we carried the gorilla to its final rest. James reckoned it weighed thirty stone. Its devourers floated up, settling like a skin on the water. We then covered it in humus, branches, and leaves. I wove a simple cross out of twine.
The servants now only use the path if they have one of those teeth in their pocket, or hanging around their neck. A fetish, Edward, to ward off the gorilla’s ghost.
The wretched man appeared, just before dinner, covered in insect bites and dirt, creasing up his panama in his hands. A sheepish Mawangu was in tow. I’m afraid I rose and retired to the bedroom without a word of greeting. His very presence made me feel sick. But I heard the interchange through the wall, the walls being paper thin (Edward, that is unfair – I am not at all nosy).
‘Listen, Hargreaves, she’s jolly upset by something we found on the path. Next to the tin of golden syrup.’
There was a mumble I couldn’t quite catch. Something like, ‘Oh, the gorilla, I wondered where it had gone.’
The bedroom, if I wasn’t mistaken, was filling up with his smell, both sour and sugarish.
‘Yes, the gorilla,’ said James. (Stronger, be stronger, I was thinking.) ‘Waste of golden syrup, dear chap. Hoping it’s not a dry run for another. One of life’s necessities, golden syrup. Only nineteen left, now. Under lock and key, of course. Safe from sticky fingers, as it were.’
James had rehearsed this approach over tea. I, being of the gentler sex, had wanted a violent rebuke. James had said that it never pays to go overboard, in Africa. Humour works best. A chap in that state can’t cope with humour.
I think James had miscalculated. My ear was now pressed to the wall. There was no mistaking the content, now.
‘God, you do cheer me up, Arkwright old chap. As does your lovely wife. Quite the best fetish a fellow could have, out here.’
I heard James dismissing Mawangu sharply, then there was a sort of shuffling noise, a thumping sound, a cry – and I immediately rushed around and into the room. Hargreaves was crumpled up against the wall, looking astonished, with blood on his lips. There was glass glittering on the rug: the cracked right lens of his spectacles had now shattered. The frames lay at his feet. James was in a sort of half-crouch, nursing his fist. Hargreaves picked his spectacles up, held his hand across his mouth, then studied his hand.
‘Your husband’s cut my lip,’ he said, looking at me.
He then pulled out a canine, holding it up like a magician. James stood straight, looking rather anxious, or perhaps pained. I’ve never understood this hitting thing between men, but now I felt rather satisfied, I’m afraid. However, I kept my mouth shut.
‘A stitch in time, Hargreaves,’ James said.
(I thought: what a wonderful pun! Did he mean it?)
‘The next time I might send you packing,’ he continued. ‘Put that thing under your pillow. Your spirit friends might leave you thruppence.’
‘It was only a bloody animal,’ growled the wretched man. He had quite forgotten the insult towards me, which had actually triggered the blow. ‘You’ve bust my glasses as well, damn you. What did you think? That I was planning to do it to you or something? No such luck.’
‘You can dine separately tonight,’ said James, not quite as steadily as before. ‘You’re a stain on the Colonial Office, and therefore on your country. Unless you apologise, and start behaving yourself, I will be writing a full report on the matter, for Headquarters. There’s creosote in the office, for the lip.’
Hargreaves began to smile, then winced. ‘Do what you bloody well like, Arkwright. And keep your bloody creosote. I don’t need it. That’s the whole point, you idiot. I don’t need it.’
He walked out of the double doors on to the veranda. The night was terribly loud – full of the usual frogs and cicadas and so on, but almost painfully cacophonous now. He dragged open the netted veranda door (it sticks) and backed down the steps carefully, dabbing his chin with his wrist. At the bottom he looked up, grinning crookedly.
‘It was quite dead, wasn’t it?’ he called.
James nodded, but that was all. I think he was speechless with rage. From my position at the window, it looked as if Hargreaves was peering blindly, holding his spectacles to his face, genuinely eager to know. Muttering to himself, he then wandered off in the direction of the cookhouse.
James pointed out to me, in weary disgust, what I had just missed: Hargreaves’s question implied that they had pegged the poor creature down alive. But in that case, I pointed out, its legendary strength should have made escape simple.
Without further comment, he went with me into the office and checked in the old school tuck-box of his that serves as our personal medical case. A syringe and one of the morphine bottles had gone. James sat down, drawn and slightly trembling.
‘If Tarbuck doesn’t get back in the next day or so,’ he said, ‘I’m going to put that fellow on the first canoe that passes. I don’t mind him pilfering our drinks cabinet, but I stop absolutely at theft of medical equipment. That’s the absolute rottenest.’
‘I haven’t seen any canoes pass,’ I pointed out. ‘But I’m sure he’d be happy with one of his crocodiles.’
‘Like Adonis on the blasted dolphin,’ sighed James. ‘What a smasher of a notion, darling. Meanwhile, everything has to be kept under lock and key. He only has to take our quinine bottles and we’re finished. It nearly finished Livingstone, you know, having his medicine box cabbaged. Saved by Stanley.’
The Reverend Tarbuck and his daughter steamed into our bay the following afternoon, to our immense delight – and theirs. They had met with some impressive adventures, which he is to add to his book. The natives they had met were astonished at their whiteness, and considered them phantoms. The very pretty phantom was Grace: I heroically insisted they stayed more than one night in order to recover their strength and a bit of weight, positively pouring my extra-strong beef tea down their throats (we have it in powdered form, of course) and persuading both of them that the stimulating properties of my White Wine Whey were medicinal, not bibulous. (In case you don’t know it, Edward, I merely add sherry to boiling milk and cream off the resultant curd. A peptonising powder is optional. All our milk is condensed, it goes without saying.)
Grace spent most of the time in bed – a camp bed in our own room (James slept in the hallway, Tarbuck on the sofa in the main room). She was utterly exhausted, but not ill. I treated
her as an invalid, however. Hargreaves stayed in his hut, scowling at the world. He reminded me of a dog in the kennel, tail thoroughly between his legs. James and I spent a lot of the time talking with the Reverend about many matters, not just Hargreaves. It was most useful. Grace joined us for most meals, but was very quiet. Sharing a room, we talked a little before going to sleep. This should have been a great pleasure, but was marred by her inability to sound interesting, whatever the topic. I coaxed out of her a pale account of the journey up-river, but it might as well have been a day’s outing on the Thames, for all it stimulated me. I think she is a kind of saint, very pure and selfless and of course young. Perhaps saints are a little dull, in the end. One wants to plump her up, like a pillow, to give her more character. I felt thoroughly stuffed with selfishness in her presence, anyhow.
You would say she was a prig. I would not go that far. In twenty years she might be, but right now she is too innocent. I fear for her, here.
She talked of Hargreaves as if he needed saving. She went out to see him when she should have been resting, one afternoon. I kept an eye on them through the bedroom window. He seemed to be smiling and talking with her pleasantly enough. She returned quite flushed and animated, saying that he had taken a copy of one of her Baptist tracts. I think of them as the Devil and the Angel – they will still be together on that wretched little steamer, a day away from the Mission Station, as I write these words. I feel I have failed with the fellow, as I have quite failed to wrest James from his gin.
That is all the news. Hargreaves said goodbye perfunctorily and didn’t bother to wave from the poop, by the way. It is terribly moist today, so please send us some of your drought. The keys stick and the paper is all corrugated. This morning I found a couple of jiggers in my toes. I’m too tired to explain what that means, but it is nothing to do with the one-step. All right – if you don’t remove the blighters, your legs eventually drop off.
With much love to you and to Joy,
Charlotte
Bamakum, September 20th, 1921
Dear Edward,
Either you have forgotten your poor, far-flung sister, or your letter has been lost somewhere between Ulverton and Bamakum. Or eaten by ants. Or swallowed by a mamba. Do not put anything with it that might be construed as treasure: even a snapshot of an English country garden can be framed prettily in carved mahogany and sold in the market for two shillings.
We do hear, however, that England is so dry and hot without us that people in London have been choked in a gale by clouds of dust, the Thames is a trickle, and silk-hatted pedestrians are measuring 107 degrees under their black hats after ten minutes’ exertion! I know this because we have just received our month’s worth of The Times – to the end of July. Maybe September is full of wet and cold, but I am still in July, I’m afraid. Here we do not have to have black hats in order to have our brains boiled, of course. I read also that the West End is full of girls taking cocaine. Here my servants all chew something called a cola-nut, which I’m beginning to believe is just as efficacious, though James tells me it’s no more potent than powdered coffee.
So much has happened that I am forced to write anyway. Here, the chief complaint is a chronic malady called rainitis. Its effects are the same as over-prolonged sea-bathing in the summer: exhaustion, depression, palpitation, loss of appetite, lassitude, and sleeplessness. This is no coincidence: the air is so saturated with water, whether actually falling in curtains or no, that one swims through it all day. This is why our heat is not to be measured in degrees but in ripples. Today I measured a million-and-one ripples per inch of air, so there. At dusk and at dawn we are shrouded in mist. A palpable miasmic mist, I’m afraid. I have had a touch of fever and passed with flying colours. I feel thoroughly baptised, now: I was worried when Africa would choose to bless me with her hot hand.
Events are more jagged, as it were, elsewhere. James has learned that the auction of the plantations went off very badly. That is, no one wanted to buy them. They are probably to be returned to the Germans, who will have to be kept an eye on. Let us hope their defeat in the war will have caused them to lose their appetite for massacres and assorted cruelties. There is a vein of natural justice in the world, but it always arrives after the crime.
The canoe that brought the bundle of our Times, three Vogues, and a single veteran Tatler, also carried a letter from Tarbuck, with unwelcome news.
Mr Hargreaves left the Mission Station just before the cargo boat arrived, which was to return with him on the final leg to Victoria. When I say ‘left’, I mean disappeared. One of the fresh cadets thought he had seen a white fellow in a battered panama paddling furiously in a dug-out, up-river – which means this way. I do hope he isn’t thinking of ‘dropping in’. I keep glancing up at the window, thinking I see his face leering in, one eye hidden behind a dirty lens, the other horribly clear. He really did resemble a pirate, standing there in the steamer as it moved off. Now he must resemble Ben Gunn, the maroon.
Grace is grief-stricken, apparently. I really think Hargreaves had some devilish hold over her. Perhaps she finds missionary cadets lacking in spunk, as you find modern girls lacking in profundities.
James has drawn up all the necessary plans for the making of the road. His grand project is to link Ikasa with Kumba. We hope to have a small generator soon, just enough to drive a wireless, or whatever generators do. Then we can wire the world our news.
I have some hens. Augustina cooks the eggs reluctantly, since she insists that Pa Arkwright will be made sterile by them. I say nothing, of course. Whether it is the rain, or the isolation, James’s problem (I don’t mean the gin) weighs on me now, and makes me feel sad.
Once the sky stops moving its pianos about, the path-track-road will be cleared to the nearest village, which will then open up the interior to us. I expect my bush hospital to flourish. It languishes in puddles, now.
I wish I lived under thatch. Tin and rain are made only to come together in noise.
Please, please write,
Charlotte
Bamakum, May 1st, 1922
My dear Edward,
You say you found my last two letters full of domestic trivia, that I should be plumbing the depths of this ancient continent. I am not sure which two you mean: I have sent at least three since Christmas. You have written once in November, and now yours of April 3rd. Are you annoyed at my pestering you to reply? Or at my suggestion that Joy should tell you how to write of the little things? I don’t want to fall out with you, not from this far.
I cannot write about Africa but in the way that I do. I am proud of being a ‘modern girl’, if that’s what I am. Dancing on my own to my jazz gramophone records does not make me ‘shallow’ or ‘flippant’ or ‘facetious’. I know you were saying this of society in general, but it came like a tract, and hot on the heels of your doubting whether my ‘mental life’ was sensitive enough for ‘the wholesome wisdom of natural Africa’. I don’t take Africa like a cup of Oxo, I can assure you. Africa takes me. You wish me to listen to her ‘occult rhythms’ and report back, so that your masculine reason can ‘synthesise and give it shape’. But if I did that, dear Edward, Africa would gobble me up like a crocodile, or an army of driver ants. You would find me (if you bothered to come out here yourself instead of singing your folksongs im hintersten Berkshire, or at least out on its wildest frontier) engulfed by psychological creepers, too heavy for my slender trunk. I admire some of your views, and wish your books good wind, but my job out here is to do with serum and calico and disinfectant and decent, womanly advice.
Anyway, I have quite another ‘interference’ than a warped ragtime record. I have a baby. This baby is not mine, of course. I hope what I am about to tell you will not be judged by you as vulgar, or trivialising, or ‘de-bunking’. But I must explain how I came about adopting this child. Probably for good.
About a fortnight ago, a message was wired from the Mission Station: poor Grace Tarbuck, who had been ill for some time, had died. The great
shock was that she had been delivered of a child the day before. Apparently, this was a surprise to everyone, including her father. James agreed that I should make the trip straight away, which I did. Down-river, this takes only four days by canoe. I took two servants with me, Quiri and Baluti. Baluti paddled, and we rested in villages on the way (James has organised all this very well). Poor Tarbuck was in a hopeless state, completely stricken with shock and grief. Grace had been weakened by a recent bout of enteric fever, and the crisis of the birth itself had resulted in a severe haemorrhaging from an internal typhoid ulcer which had not yet healed. (Is there time for these details in your Nature worship, Edward? They are very common out here.) If it hadn’t been for the baby, she would have lived, I am sure. She is buried in the Mission cemetery, under a small acacia tree. The whole station had the most extraordinary atmosphere, as if a great light had gone out.
An African ayah was nursing the baby, and I asked Tarbuck what should be done with it. (The baby is fully white, by the way.) By asking this, I was also hoping to find some clue as to the identity of the father. Unless Grace really was holier than even we realised, and God the Father was to blame again, then I reckoned some fresh-cheeked cadet to be responsible. Tarbuck was stricken as much by the shock of finding his angel fallen, as by her death. He had no idea who the culprit might be, at first. I asked him who had been present at the Mission nine months ago (the baby was born full-term). He ran through four or five names, dismissing all of them in turn as ‘quite beyond the bounds of credibility’. Looking at his present lot, terribly young and pimply and almost vulgarly pure, all apparently from Macclesfield, I found little to disagree with there. His white assistant, Mr Horace Wilson, is fifty-five, with a limp, severe smallpox scars, and no hair.
