The Governor's Lady

by Norman Collins

  They had reached the end of the path and Harold held out his hand to say good-bye.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ was all he said. ‘I’ll think very carefully about what you’ve told me.’

  But Mr. Ngono was reluctant to leave.

  ‘There is one other matter’, he explained. ‘Also of the greatest delicacy. And of the very highest importance.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘It is the jury,’ Mr. Ngono told him. ‘For a trial of such great importance there will be a jury, you bet. It is the jury by law that has to say that Old Moses is the murderer. I desire most earnestly to be a member of that jury. How otherwise can we be damn well sure of the verdict?’

  When Harold did not reply, Mr. Ngono looked up anxiously. Had he once again, he wondered, gone too far? He saw now that it might have been better to take things more slowly: to have revealed the danger and then, some other time, over a drink perhaps as an Englishman would have done, to have raised the matter of jury service.

  So again he switched the conversation.

  ‘I am still most unhappily worried about your poor eye,’ he said. ‘It is weeping again. I can see that tears are coming out from beneath the eye-shade. It is boracic powder that is needed. One small pinch in warm water at every bedtime, and also on rising. It is what the missionaries use.’

  Chapter 32

  It was inadvisable, Papa Fernandez said, for Lady Anne to remain where she was. The climate of Amimbo was apparently notorious for its ill-effects on mental cases. The soil, too, and the water were both highly suspect. Nucca was where Papa Fernandez recommended: a complete rest in agreeable surroundings until she was well enough to face the long voyage home.

  It was certainly undeniable that, so far, Papa Fernandez had been proved right. The ice-packs and the bleeding had brought down the temperature. The native concoction that he had prescribed had helped with the headaches. And the burning sulphur had fumigated an entire wing of the Residency. A colony of minute white ants, which previously had been swarming up and down the walls like vapour, gave up and moved over into what had been Sir Gardnor’s quarters. Lady Anne meanwhile continued to get better.

  That was why Sybil Prosser, yellower and more gaunt-looking than ever, had called in to see Harold. She sat opposite to him on one of the hardback chairs, wiping her upper lip where the office tea had left a thick brown stain across it.

  ‘She’s been asking for you,’ she said, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t have come. I suppose it’s all right. But don’t let her talk too much. And don’t believe everything she tells you. She’s still all mixed-up inside. I know: I’ve had to listen to her.’

  ‘Six o’clock then?’ Harold asked.

  ‘Better make it six-thirty,’ Sybil Prosser told him. ‘The doctor wants her to sleep all she can. And don’t expect too much. I’m warning you.’

  The curtains were still drawn across the windows, but the drugget had been taken up, and the place looked like a bedroom again. There were flowers where the sulphur saucers had been set.

  And Lady Anne herself was sitting up. Her eyes were closed, but the pillows were piled up behind her as if she had been reading. The paleness was not surprising considering all the blood that Papa Fernandez had been draining away from her. But she was recognisably Lady Anne again.

  ‘Well, I’ve brought him,’ Sybil Prosser announced. ‘And I’m staying here while you talk to him. If I don’t, you’ll only overdo it.’

  She sat herself down as she said it, and began to ease her shoes off.

  ‘He’s only got ten minutes,’ she added. ‘Then I’m putting him out again.’

  Lady Anne opened her eyes, rather slowly and deliberately, it seemed, as though she had been awake all the time. But it was not at Harold that she was looking. It was at the nurse who had been sitting over by the window.

  ‘Oh she can go if you want her to,’ Sybil Prosser said. ‘I told you: I’m stopping.’

  Lady Anne waited until the nurse had left the room. Then she turned to Harold.

  ‘Sybil got you here, didn’t she?’ she asked.

  She was not looking at him as she spoke, had not looked at him since he had entered the room, in fact. She was simply staring down at the smooth white sheet that the nurse had tugged at automatically as she had passed the bed.

  ‘She just told me you were well enough,’ Harold replied.

  Lady Anne shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘Am I?’ she asked. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘She’s a lot better,’ Sybil Prosser observed firmly. ‘You can see she is.’

  Lady Anne closed her eyes. She seemed to be living in a remote, separate world of her own.

  ‘I didn’t want to see you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to see anyone.’

  She was addressing Harold now: speaking to him, but still not looking at him.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Sybil Prosser contradicted her. ‘You said so.’

  ‘Then I don’t remember. I can’t remember anything now.’

  There was just the smallest movement of her shoulders again. It made her merge more completely into the pillows.

  Sybil Prosser got up and came over to where Harold was sitting. Because she was such a tall woman, she had to bend over to speak to him. It was necessary to get low. She was whispering.

  ‘Can you see her being able to attend the trial?’ she asked. ‘How could she be the slightest use to them?’

  Before Harold could reply, Lady Anne had already spoken. She still had her eyes closed.

  ‘I’ll be all right if someone reminds me when it is,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know the date, or anything.’

  Sybil Prosser gave the bed a little pat.

  ‘Not to worry,’ she said. ‘Not to worry.

  But Lady Anne refused to be put off so easily.

  ‘Will you be there?’ she asked.

  She was speaking to Harold again.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then I’ve got to be there, too.’

  Lady Anne had opened her eyes, and she turned her head so that she could watch Harold’s face.

  ‘What are you going to say?’ she asked him.

  ‘Just tell them what I saw.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  She was staring hard at him now.

  ‘I saw Old Moses. I was the first one to get there. I tried to stop him.’

  Lady Anne seemed to be pondering.

  ‘Was I there?’ she asked.

  ‘You were facing me.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Yes, over on the far side.’

  ‘Over on the far side,’ she repeated the words slowly. ‘But what was I doing? I must have been doing something. I just can’t remember.’

  ‘You were looking at Sir Gardnor.’

  ‘Was … was he dead by then?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Lady Anne started crying.

  ‘Poor Gardie,’ she said. ‘Poor Gardie.’

  Sybil Prosser’s hand came down on Harold’s arm.

  ‘That’s all,’ she told him. ‘You’ve had your ten minutes.’

  It was Mr. Frith who suggested that Harold should dine with him up at the Milner Club; they both needed something to take them out of themselves, he reckoned.

  Even so, Mr. Frith was not at his most responsive. Still off the bottle, he had been in the bar since before seven drinking nothing but ginger ale. And the stuff did not agree with him, he kept telling himself. He had undone the two bottom hooks on his cummerbund by the time Harold joined him.

  ‘My God,’ he greeted him, ‘what a day. Didn’t get a stroke of work done. Just been going over the arrangements.’

  Ever since the date of the trial had been fixed, no one in Government Service had been talking about anything other than the arrangements.

  Quite suddenly, Amimbo had become the centre of the world, and people were getting ready to pour into it. There was not just Government accommodation to be considered: there were the hotels as well. T
he telegraph facilities—notoriously inadequate even when there was nothing happening—were being given a thorough going-over. And the Railway Company, taken entirely by surprise, had been warned that the Coronation Flyer would have to pull extra rolling-stock as soon as the invasion started.

  ‘It’s not simply the press,’ Mr. Frith continued. ‘They’re bad enough. There’s an American broadcasting company, too. Says it wants to send a team over. God knows where we’re going to put them all, or how long they’ll be here. Have to see that the hard liquor doesn’t run out.’

  After all, it was a political murder trial; and it would have seemed nothing less than unfaithful to Sir Gardnor’s memory to allow the international corps to go away again with the impression that the capital city of Amimbo was simply some sort of colonial shanty-town.

  ‘It’s about the trial that I wanted to have a word with you,’ Harold told him.

  Mr. Frith did not lift his eyes from the glass with the silly bubbles bursting aimlessly on top.

  ‘What about it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Lady Anne.’

  ‘Well, what about her?

  Mr. Frith’s maimer was noticeably stiffening. He wanted to forget the trial, not talk about it. Also he detested junior members of the Service getting themselves mixed up in matters outside their own department.

  ‘It’s the state she’s in,’ Harold explained. ‘She’s been really frightfully ill, remember. If she had to go into the witness-box, the strain would be just too much for her. I don’t like to think what would happen.’

  Mr. Frith tried hard to be bland and non-committal.

  ‘Oh, I think we can leave the C.J.’s office to look after all that, don’t you?’ he asked.

  The gin-and-tonic that Mr. Frith had given him had made Harold feel better. But it had also made him inclined to be argumentative. He was now in a mood when he couldn’t bear to see other people allowing things to go wrong.

  ‘As a matter of fact, sir, that’s just what I don’t think,’ he said. ‘It’s merely so much legal routine for them. Naturally, they want her in Court so that they can get the whole case over. They don’t know what she’s been through already. I do.’

  Mr. Frith was scrutinising Harold closely. He seemed to be unusually emphatic, even emotional, this evening. It occurred to Mr. Frith that perhaps the young man had been drinking, and he decided that he had better keep his eye on him.

  ‘She’s got her doctor,’ he replied. ‘It’s entirely up to him. If she isn’t well enough, they’ll have to postpone. That’s what’s worrying ‘em.’

  ‘Then they’ve got plenty to worry about,’ Harold replied. ‘I’ve just been up to the Residency. I’ve seen her.’

  Mr. Frith was very careful to keep his temper under control. It was not easy. All the rubbishy ginger ale inside him had left him feeling irritable and snappy. And the mention of the Residency had been the last straw. He had always resented the fact that, in Sir Gardnor’s day, he had remained a visitor; an outsider who was brought in only when the A.D.C. wanted to make up the numbers.

  But he remembered his manners. He hadn’t brought Harold out to the Club to have a row with him.

  He looked very deliberately at the big, library clock with the name ‘Benson’s’ written in bold lettering across the dial, and got up from his chair.

  ‘Shall we go through and dine?’ he asked.

  It was as they sat down that Mr. Frith realised that he couldn’t eat anything. The ginger ale had destroyed his appetite, washed it away completely. And, because he couldn’t simply sit there at the table doing nothing, he ordered himself a whisky.

  It was his first whisky that week, and he savoured it. Also, he could feel it doing him good. The sick headache that had been hanging over him all day abruptly left him, and his nervous tic disappeared. By the time the boy had been over to his table for the third time, Mr. Frith began to blossom. He remembered that he was the man who had just been promoted Chief Secretary, and he temporarily forgot the intrigues both in Amimbo and in Whitehall that had prevented him from going even higher. He felt benign and began congratulating Harold anew, for taking charge of things on safari; predicting a great future for him.

  That was why it was such a pity that Harold should have had to mention the name of Mr. Ngono. Ever since the tragedy, Mr. Ngono had taken to waiting disconsolately for hours on end, perched on the wooden bench in the front hall hoping to catch Mr. Frith as he passed by; and, in the end, Mr. Frith had been compelled to give orders to have him removed.

  ‘What the hell difference does it make that he was there when you got back?’ he demanded. ‘You could have sent him away again, couldn’t you?’

  ‘If I had,’ Harold replied, ‘I shouldn’t have picked up one or two rather interesting pieces of information.’

  Mr. Frith drew down the corners of his mouth.

  ‘From him?’ he asked. ‘He was just bamboozling you. Ngono’s never spoken a word of truth so long as I’ve known him.’

  ‘I know, sir, but…’

  ‘Come on. Out with it,’ Mr. Frith told him. ‘What was it? He wouldn’t have been there if he didn’t want something.’

  Harold steadied himself.

  ‘As a matter of fact, he wants to serve on the jury,’ he replied. ‘He thinks the others may have been got at.’

  Mr. Frith drained off his whisky.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘So that’s his game. Might have guessed it.’

  Mr. Frith had swung round in his chair to see where the table-boy had got to. When he had located him, he pointed down towards his empty glass.

  ‘Anyhow, he’s wasting his time. It was decided last week. There’s going to be an all-white jury. Too much at stake to take any risks.’

  ‘But that’s not all,’ Harold said. ‘Mr. Talefwa’s organising a campaign. He’s bribing the witnesses.’

  Mr. Frith pushed his chair back from the table.

  ‘When you’ve been out here as long as I have,’ he replied, ‘you’ll expect the witnesses to be bribed. I’ve never known a big trial where they haven’t been. That’s why it’s an all-white jury.’

  He ran his handkerchief across his forehead as he was speaking.

  ‘Let’s have our drinks out on the terrace,’ he added. ‘Cooler there.’

  The new surroundings seemed to agree with him. He undid his jacket, and put his feet up on the chair opposite.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘You outlasting the Governor like this. Never thought you would. Wanted me to find a replacement for you when he got back. Told me it was urgent.’

  Chapter 33

  So far, Harold had been proved right.

  War Drum, in its biggest type, opened up the attack the very next morning, ‘AN AFRICAN CHILLON’ was how the headline ran, and Mr. Talefwa spared nobody. ‘The eyes of blind Justice,’ he wrote, ‘are running tears of blood. Her cheeks bright crimson from her weeping. Her screams stifled by Authority.’

  Old Moses, he pointed out, had now been held in custody for the better part of a month ‘on charges fabricated by certain persons in high places anxious to conceal the true identity of the murderers,’ and he asked the simple question: ‘Did, or did not, the writ of Habeas Corpus run south of the equator?’

  Then came the big climax, the battle-call to ‘all men of goodwill, regardless of race, colour, religion, nationality, sex, calling, occupation, address or other barrier.’

  In short, War Drum was opening a fighting-fund for the defence of Old Moses. To be known as ‘Save a Brother’, it invited subscriptions as much from ‘the affluent European business community with their American cars’ as from ‘the toiling Africans who may have to snatch bread from open hungry mouths of children to spare even a copper coin with which to fight the police and their false informers.’

  ‘Leading international lawyers, High Court judges, learned counsel and humble magistrates throughout the entire civilised world will,’ he finished up, ‘be keeping their eyes, skinned l
ike hawks, on the attempted crucifixion in Amimbo.’

  Mr. Frith was asking for Harold as soon as he arrived at the office. But it was not about War Drum: Mr. Frith was far too much preoccupied to think about that.

  ‘You’re the man I want,’ he said, without even glancing up. ‘Got something for you.’

  He had a telegram in his hands, and he was still reading. When he had finished, he went back to the beginning and started all over again.

  Then he looked across at Harold.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ he told him. ‘We’ve got a new Governor coming out.’

  ‘Who’s it to be, sir?’

  Mr. Frith passed the telegram over to him.

  ‘Read it yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s Top Secret, mind.’

  Not that there could really be much point about secrecy by now. The Whitehall release date for the Gazette was tomorrow. A news-leak, via Amimbo, for the evening papers seemed the sort of risk that even the most cautious public servant might occasionally have to take.

  Harold read the telegram carefully. It was simple, formal and straightforward. Also, final; not by any means the sort of telegram that you could argue about. He tried, therefore, to make the best of it.

  ‘It’s not quite so bad as it might be, sir,’ he said. ‘It gives us nearly three weeks to get ready.’

  Mr. Frith was gazing out of the window at the spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

  ‘And do you imagine Lady Anne’ll be well enough to be moved by then?’ he asked.

  Harold remembered the look of that sick-room, with the nurse over by the window and Sybil Prosser with her eyes fastened on the bed.

  ‘Not a hope, sir,’ he said. ‘Just not a hope.’

  ‘Then where the hell are we going to put him?’

  The question was addressed to the open window.

  ‘What about my bungalow, sir?’ Harold suggested. ‘After all, it’s just alongside.’

  Mr. Frith gave a sudden little start, and became Chief Secretary again.

  ‘Dammit man,’ he said, swivelling round, ‘he is the Governor, you know. If he had got to go anywhere, he’ll have to have my place. That is, if there isn’t room for both of them.’