The Governor's Lady

by Norman Collins

  Financially, it was a write-off. It paid no dividends, owned no assets except practically valueless land, utterly obsolete rolling-stock. But it was still part of the Imperial network. It joined an inland British Colony —a mere foreign island in the middle of hostile Africa—with the remote ocean. And every ant-indented sleeper along its six-hundred-and-fifty wandering miles was British, too.

  Even that, however, in Sir Gardnor’s eyes did not excuse its elementary wrongness, its irrelevance. A glance out of the train window was enough to show. Different ecology. Different tribes. Different customs. Different loyalties. Different sins. Nothing to do with his own beloved Amimbo.

  That was why, with no argument at all, Sir Gardnor required all new members of his staff to make the proper approach; the one that took so much longer.

  There was no denying, the young man kept reminding himself, that it was a privilege to serve under such a figurehead. Sir Gardnor Hackforth was already famous; something of a living legend in the Service.

  At forty-five he was head and shoulders above anyone else, and there seemed no Proconsular heights to which he might not eventually climb. He was there at his own wish in Amimbo at this moment: that much was common knowledge. But when he was ready—it was understood that, by now, there had been a hint here, a word dropped in the right quarter there—he could take his choice. A really fat Governorship. A Governor-Generalship perhaps. Even Delhi possibly. Or Westminster. The Lords, of course; and his own Department.

  In the meantime, Sir Gardnor was finishing his book. It was the book that had got young Harold Stebbs the job. He was scarcely the type to which an Interview Board could be expected to warm irresistibly. Altogether too self-effacing; too diffident. No presence; and too many of his sort coming forward nowadays, the Chief Establishment Officer considered.

  Asked the key-question of how he thought he would behave in a civil emergency if he should find himself the sole representative of British authority, he had replied, briefly but damagingly, that he had never been in such circumstances, and so did not know. Pressed to amplify an answer, quite so disastrous, he had mumbled something about supposing that things would sort themselves out in the end somehow because they usually did; worst of all, and he had been content to leave it at that.

  It was not until the observer from Finance and Estimates asked the other key-question, ‘Are you afraid of figures?’, that the interview really-came to life at all. For the answer came back as an uncompromising ‘No’. The observer became interested and began to probe. Series, it turned out, were Harold Stebbs’s speciality. Not series of anything in particular; just series. Numbers in the abstract; the very purest of pure mathematics. His last year at Cambridge, he explained, had been devoted to them.

  Because the Finance Observer felt himself getting out of his depth, he switched the conversation to statistics. Was Mr. Stebbs interested in anything so ordinary as statistics? he asked. And again the answer came back promptly. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘They’re the raw material.’ The observer felt that he had got him there. ‘Isn’t it the figures that are the raw material, Mr. Stebbs?’ he asked in a voice that carried with it just the right note of superiority and rebuke. ‘Aren’t the statistics the finished product?’

  And once more there came the prompt, singularly mannerless reply. ‘Statistics are just tables,’ he said. ‘A clerk can get out statistics. They don’t necessarily mean anything. It’s only when you begin to analyse them they become interesting. It all shows up in the presentation. With figures…’

  The Establishment Officer coughed. He did not like conversations that were conducted across the chair. ‘And are you interested in people as well as figures, Mr. … er … Stebbs?’ he asked.

  Not that people apparently mattered for the job. Sir Gardnor had made that perfectly plain in his last memorandum. ‘I am not looking for a leader of men, a Milner,’ he had written in his elegant, only mildly undecipherable longhand. ‘I am not searching for a District Officer, or Chief Magistrate or even an observant Tax Collector. All that I require is an intelligent, educated assistant with a good head for figures to work beside me for the next twelve months. I have already indicated that the Chief Secretary can spare no one. If the Office is unable to provide such a clerk, possibly one of the Merchant Banks…’

  It was because the Appointments Board, sitting there in that quiet room in Whitehall, had decided that Harold Stebbs was not a leader of men, that he now found himself somewhere on the Equator, standing in the shade of the Chevrolet, scratching his ankle where he had just been bitten, and watching while the native driver and his assistant changed the wheel.

  Like the boatmen, they were tremendous hammerers. The din alerted the whole countryside. A flock of white egrets mounted frantically into the air from the adjoining marsh like disembodied spirits; and soon an entire rose-garden of flamingoes joined them and moved off as well. The sky became carmine, striped with black, as they passed over.

  The hammering continued. When one engineer got tired, the other took over. From time to time, their attention strayed. They hammered out dents that they had just noticed in the wings. They removed deposits of rock-hard mud from under the chassis. Somewhere underneath they found a small angle-bracket. They hammered that, too. It broke. They threw it away. They returned to the rear-axle. They hammered even harder. The hammer broke. They rested.

  Because the tool-kit was open, one of them tried the wheel-brace. As a make-shift hammer, it was no more than second-rate. It bent. But as a wheel-brace, it was perfect. They tried fitting it into one of the nuts. Then onto all the nuts in turn. It matched. They tried turning it. The nuts loosened, and came away. With cries of appreciation and delight, they tried tightening them up again. They succeeded. They forgot why they had started. They undid and re-did. They lost one of the nuts altogether. They quarrelled. Then they remembered the flat tyre. They burst out laughing.

  With a suddenness that was alarming, the sun dipped abruptly behind the distant range of blue hills. As it dipped, it appeared to be accelerating. At one moment it had been floating clear; huge and red and angry-looking. At the next, it was declining so fast that the mountains appeared to be stretching up to eat it. Soon the teeth had done their work, and a large chunk was missing. Then there was only half a sun. Then no more than a flaming rim. Then the eclipse was complete.

  Harold turned towards the drivers.

  ‘Where do we spend the night?’ he asked.

  The mechanics rose politely to their feet and stood to attention while he addressed them.

  ‘Yassaar,’ the man in charge answered. ‘Spend the night. Yassaar. Bad wheel. Very bad wheel. Soon drive on now, saar. Spend the night. Yassaar.’

  Harold’s ankle was itching badly by now. Already it had begun to swell.

  The rest-houses on the route proved to be well-spaced rather than comfortable. They were as pleasant to leave next morning as they had been to arrive at over-night. And there was a sameness about them. The same whitewashed mud walls, and the same corrugated iron roof. The same tin washing-basin set on an enamelled metal tripod, with a bucket underneath it to receive the slops. The same earth-closet. The same hospital-type bed, with its castors resting in saucers of paraffin to discourage the creepie-crawlies. And the same rearing white catafalque of the mosquito-net.

  On his first night under one of them, Harold had learnt to hate all mosquito-nets. Mere heat and stickiness were one thing. Heat and stickiness, plus suffocation and imprisonment, were quite another. In the end, he had kicked his way out in desperation. Wriggled his feet about in the darkness. In consequence his other ankle was now bitten and badly swollen, too.

  Nor had sleep for the past five nights been blissful and unbroken. There had been thunderstorms overhead; howlings and roarings through the surrounding night. And, the dawn-chorus, too, had proved to be uncongenially strident, like Fun Fair music. One particular bird appeared to be following Harold about. Either it, or its twin, had landed on his roof each morning. A larg
e bird with hard feet, it trampled noisily on the corrugated iron sheeting. It whistled. It screamed. It imitated car-brakes. It hooted. It made a sound like corks popping. It laughed. It evacuated.

  But already the journey and the little prison-like rest-houses were in the past. The Chevrolet mounted a small hill with the Government wireless station on the summit. And there, in the plain below, shimmering in the heat, lay Amimbo.

  Harold told the car to stop, and climbed out. He had forgotten about all his tiredness and bad nights by now. He was excited again, remembering that he was the one who had been selected.

  The capital itself was not in the least like the hand-book photograph. That had been in plain black-and-white. Whereas Amimbo itself, even from a distance, was pure Kodachrome. Red roofs. Yellow and green banana-trees. Purple, scarlet and orange of the flowering shrubs. Pale lavender-tinted smoke rose vertically into the still African air. Even the sky was Kodachrome, too. A clear robin’s-egg blue overhead, it changed to indigo in the distance and ended on the far horizon in a bank of battleship grey storm-clouds.

  Even so, the photograph was a help. Harold could identify all the principal landmarks. The railway-station, with its nursery layout of sidings. The Anglican cathedral, looking like a village church in Kent. The gas-holder, recently repainted, and now standing out in its new coat of screaming vermilion. The basilica of the Roman Catholic Mission. The cattle-market. The mosque. The cricket-ground. The barracks. The Victoria Gardens. Government House and the law courts. The hotel. The administrative offices. The hospital. The Asian section. And, half-a-mile or so to the west towards the river, the Residency.

  The Residency was pure white. Like icing. With a confectioner’s portico overlooking the main lawn. From Telegraph Hill, the sightseer could look straight down into the grounds. The drive was of bright red gravel. It kept disappearing and re-emerging, obscured in places by its own bright avenue of flame-trees.

  And, as Harold followed it with his eyes, he felt that he had been along it before, many times. Knew what it was like, even where it dipped and hid itself behind the trees and hillocks. Knew what lay beyond. The terrace. The flower-beds with their concealed sprinklers. The bungalow within the grounds.

  Knew the inside of the house, too. The hallway with The Book on the polished mahogany table. The tapestry and gilt furniture in the drawing-room. The pictures. The staircase with the big Royal portrait at the top. The double-doors, green baize covered and studded with brass nails on the non-domestic side, which led through to the Governor’s official suite. Knew, too, the doorway in the West Wing; the one leading to the side of the house which the Governor, for some reason, never visited.

  And, as he stood there with the sweet, stale heat of the valley breathing up on him, he shivered. He must, he realised, be even more exhausted than he thought he was.

  The rest of the ride was easier: there was nothing to it.

  The dirt track down the mountainside ended sharply. Suddenly the boulders and the potholes ceased, and they were on tarmac. It was a real road again. The native driver roared along it, marvelling that his petrol had not run out. For him, this was home again and he was happy. Even though there was nothing in front, he sounded his horn in fierce, jubilant blasts. He thought about beer and women and his new bicycle. He remembered his small son for whom he had bought the present of a toy watch with a brightly decorated dial. He sang. He narrowly avoided a stationary ox-cart. He shouted at the occupant. He remembered to go carefully. Bent forward over the driving-wheel, he concentrated. Turning his head over his shoulder, he addressed his passenger.

  ‘Amimbo, Saar,’ he said. ‘Two minutes more, Saar, Amimbo.’

  He hit a chicken.

  Chapter 2

  There was no one there to meet him when Harold Stebbs finally reached the hotel. Not that this was unreasonable. By road, journeys from the coast could not be calculated to the exact hour; or even to the exact day, for that matter.

  But at least the hotel was expecting him. The polite Indian clerk at the Reception Desk immediately produced from under the counter a large, important-looking envelope with the words ‘Chief Secretary’ inscribed at the bottom left-hand corner.

  ‘For you, sir. By hand this morning. And your key, sir,’ he said. ‘Please to make sure to return it to us when you next choose to leave us again.’

  The letter was from Mr. Frith, Assistant Chief Secretary. It was bleakly welcoming. One of the Government bungalows, it explained, would be ready by the end of the month, or shortly afterwards. For a short stay, it went on, the Royal Albert Hotel should really prove quite comfortable. And could Harold Stebbs please be over at the Assistant Secretary’s office sharp at 8.30 next morning? If, in the meantime, he wanted anything he had only to pick up the receiver and ask for the Government switchboard.

  While Harold was still reading he was aware that the Indian clerk was watching him intently. And with good reason. No matter how closely the clerk had held the envelope up to the naked light-bulb above his desk he had not been able to make out anything but the outline of Mr. Frith’s signature.

  Catching Harold’s eye, he smiled with a glitter of fine white un-European teeth.

  ‘You come this way, sir? I show you your room. Good comfortable quarters. Very pleased to have you with us. Government accommodation. First class. I will send for the iced water. Very cold indeed, sir.’

  Already Harold’s two suit-cases were being carried in. They did not look new any longer. And, after the hysterical lurchings of the Chevrolet the room seemed strangely stationary.

  It was not, by rest-house standards, at all a bad room, but scarcely home. There was a sofa of sorts, as well as a bed. A wardrobe with a long, mistily-discoloured mirror. A handbasin. A chest of drawers with one of the wooden handles missing. A wastepaper basket that had been used by someone who had been eating fruit. An upright chair, that remained upright so long as it was resting up against something. And a large framed reproduction of ‘The Last Supper’, faded to a mere outline sketch after long years of exile in the bright African sunlight.

  Harold wondered what the Government bungalow was going to be like.

  In the meantime, there was his unpacking to do. He was precise and methodical. First, because he was hot and he could feel the sweat running in little trickles between his shoulder blades, he stripped down to his underpants. Next, he opened up his cases, setting out everything in little piles upon the sofa—his shirts here, his vests there, his socks neatly arranged beside them.

  Then he opened the bottom drawer of the wardrobe to begin putting his things away and found that a colony of minute white ants had moved in before him. Disturbed by the light, they now seethed over each other, trying frantically to re-insert themselves into the cracks in the woodwork.

  He was still wondering where people in the tropics kept their clean laundry, when there came a knock on the door.

  Still in his underpants, he went over and opened it. But it was not the iced-water that the Indian clerk had promised. Instead, Harold found himself confronted by a small, rather crumpled figure wearing a badly-knotted Club tie. One uncertain, damp-looking hand was already raised to knock again if necessary.

  ‘Oh, good evening. I’m Frith. Mr. Frith,’ the man said. ‘May I come in? I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  Harold Stebbs stood back. He wished now that, instead of simply stripping down to his underpants, he had changed them for a fresh pair. And the room behind him looked frankly ludicrous. It might have been the tail-end of a not too-successful jumble sale.

  ‘You must excuse all this,’ he said lamely. ‘I… I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Oh, don’t apologise, please,’ Mr. Frith begged him. ‘It’s my fault breaking in on you like this. May I sit here?’ He moved a heap of socks and handkerchiefs from the end of the sofa, and then turned nervously to Harold again. ‘They did give you my letter, didn’t they? They don’t always, you know.’

  ‘As soon as I got here,’ Harold told him. �
�You said 8.30 in the morning. I’ll be there.’

  Mr. Frith passed a moist, creased-up handkerchief across his forehead.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘It’s been changed. It’s tonight, H.E. wants you. For dinner. That is, if you’re not too tired, of course.’

  He gave a little sigh as he said it, and simply sat there, looking vacantly around him. Harold noticed that he had a slight twitch, a tic, on the left side of his face. It kept bringing his under eyelid into a humourless, un-meaningful wink.

  Harold Stebbs came over to the sofa.

  ‘I’m afraid that I can’t offer you a drink,’ he told him. ‘You see, I haven’t got anything.’

  Mr. Frith looked up.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Just ring. The service is terrible. But they’ll come eventually. Better keep a bottle in your room. It’s the only way. And soda for me. Don’t touch the water. It’s typhoid.’

  The bell pull had a china handle. As Harold tugged at it, he could hear a long scraping of wires along the corridor outside, but nothing else. Mr. Frith was listening intently, too.

  ‘Better shout,’ he said. ‘Open the door and call “Boy”. You’ll get used to it.’ He gave Harold a sympathetic smile. ‘You know why you’re here, of course,’ he went on. ‘It’s the book. H.E.’s going up country tomorrow, and wants you to get on with it. It’s months behind already. H.E.’s getting in rather a state.’

  Mr. Frith dropped his voice a little, and continued almost as though talking to himself.

  ‘I’m afraid your predecessor made a complete mess of it. Not that it matters. H.E.’s been revising it all again. You’ll have to make a fresh start anyhow.’ He turned to Harold accusingly. ‘You did ring, didn’t you? Perhaps you’d better shout again.’