Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  With this were two cuttings, short obituaries. He’d made a good start in the Navy, winning a gunnery prize (absurdly named the Goodenough), but had retired for health reasons while still a junior officer. A decade later he went out to West Africa and took part in the Ashanti wars. There was also a medal in the box, a Distinguished Service Order awarded in 1898 for bravery in action the previous year. One of the cuttings, entitled “Henderson, the Man Who Fell Asleep and Doubled His Life,” launched into a colourful tale, but half was missing. All I could glean was that an African chief had threatened him with death, and he managed to escape somehow by dozing off. Mother had told us this too, adding that Henderson returned with the spear.

  As if to underline this last point, she’d enclosed a snapshot of the weapon, perhaps the only photo in the house taken by her. (It seemed too inept to be one of Jon’s, foggy with movement and overexposure.) The intriguing thing about the picture was a human figure: a man I didn’t know—certainly not my father—the cut of his jacket suggesting a demob suit of the late 1940s. He was tall and broad-shouldered, yet stooped, his back to the camera, his head just turning towards the lens, a hand stretching for the spear. The figure seemed furtive, yet familiar, like a glimpse of the auteur in one of Hitchcock’s films.

  Lottie came to help less often towards the end. By then I was down to the cellar, to jelly moulds, canning jars, and baffling Victorian gadgets.

  The last thing I dealt with was a plywood cubicle in the corner furthest from the window. My fathers darkroom.

  We burned with curiosity about this place when we were young. It was always kept locked. Mother said it was full of poisonous chemicals, and anyway she’d no idea where Jon had kept the key. This may have been true; I couldn’t find one. But the little room had to be cleaned out now. I forced the hasp with a screwdriver, a deed that seemed a greater violation of the past than anything else I did that summer at Tilehouse Street.

  Dust lay in a fine snowfall over a sink, draining-board, an enlarger, and shelves of squat brown bottles. I lifted a glass stopper and got a brassy whiff of hypo. The last person to breathe that was my father; for a moment he was a presence, not an idea.

  Beneath the enlarger was a metal box, heavy and padlocked. So I did another break and enter. It was full of photographic paper, yellowed and useless. But underneath were several notebooks. Jon’s! I thought. But they were dated 1899 and filled with a scrawl I’d seen before, though here it was shakier and more crabbed than in the letters about fruit trees.

  Henderson’s papers. Some of them, at least. But why would my father have locked them away down here?

  The handwriting was a challenge. I didn’t have time to read the notebooks properly until I got them home. The first two or three were about Africa, the rest about a long voyage, many years earlier, to the South Pacific. Apart from dog-ears and some wine or tea stains, they seemed to be just as Henderson had left them. There were no notes from Jon, no torn-out pages, no indication why he’d hidden them away. The memoirs seemed nothing more than a curiosity, a relic like so many others from our family’s past.

  Months later, in Vancouver, I began to see their true significance. I brought photocopies on my own trip to the South Seas; now I’ve read them through so many times I know whole passages by heart. And I believe I’ve retraced a wheel of cause and effect, set in motion by Frank Henderson, which has rolled down upon our lives through a century: on Jon’s, Mother’s, mine, and therefore yours. I hope my conclusions are the right ones. To me they seem inescapable. I long to know how all this looks to you.

  Over to Frank.

  Two

  ENGLAND

  Frank Henderson’s first notebook:

  Tilehouse Street, Hitchin. April, 1899

  NEARLY TWO YEARS SINCE I LEFT AFRICA, and they’ve passed like a rail journey one hardly notices because ones been absorbed in a good meal, a conversation, a card game, a burgeoning romance, whilst hundreds of miles rush by beyond the carriage window.

  I’ve neglected these “Occasional Papers” of mine. When one is busy living life one can’t find the time to record it. I’m not among those diligent souls who produce a journal entry every day, if only to note the weather and that nothing happened to them. When on duty, of course, one has to keep a field diary, but despite many resolutions to continue such a regimen on leave, I seldom stick to it. The best I usually manage is a few scribbles on the backs of envelopes, scraps of cartridge paper, brown bags, and the like. I simmer upon a subject that interests or troubles me; then, when a head of steam is raised, I ransack these fragments, gather my recollections with a good cigar, and set down an account in the belief that it may be of interest to myself in later years when memory shall have dimmed, and perhaps to members of the family. A curious habit—to write to one’s future self, of whose existence one can have no certainty, but enough of us do so that we human beings must be a hopeful lot. Or is it simply that were vain?

  Much has happened, of the best and worst, and before returning to duty I feel compelled to set down certain things.

  Whilst up in London in the autumn of ’97 to deliver my report to the Colonial Office, I was asked to lunch at York House by an old shipmate, Prince George. He was most eager to hear about my African experiences, especially the time I’d spent as a captive of Samory, self-styled “King” of the Sofas. I felt well enough to accept this kind invitation, and we had an animated evening.

  Just as I was leaving (after brandy, of which we had both partaken rather freely), the Prince gripped my arm.

  “They’ve broken her up, Jackdaw—had you heard?—and not before time.” For a moment he’d lost me; nobody had called me that in years. It was the nickname he and his late brother, Prince Eddy, had bestowed on me when we were all in the Navy together. He was referring to our old corvette Bacchante, whose decks we’d trodden from 79 to ’82.

  “Don’t you ever wonder whether that voyage of ours lay under a curse, Jackdaw? Dear Eddy dead within ten years! The admiral nearly dead. You half dead at twenty-five. And that poor devil who saw the Flying Dutchman and fell from aloft. Not to mention the time she nearly sank. I say Bacchante was a dashed unlucky ship!” He downed his glass and gave a searching look. “No sailor should say this of any vessel, especially one he’s served in. But I’ll say it now—I’m glad she’s gone!” His look changed to one of shock at what he had just uttered.

  It didn’t surprise me to learn that Bacchante had gone to the scrapyard. She sailed like a bathtub, and though she handled well enough under power, her bearings sometimes heated up at speed, a habit the engineers were never able to cure. But I was indeed surprised to hear him speak about those years at all, given other things that happened on that voyage, and the low, sensational attacks on Prince Edwards memory more recently. Bacchante and Eddy were subjects I preferred to avoid.

  Before I could think how to respond, the strange look was gone from the Princes face, and he was speaking with his normal geniality:

  “And now! What if you don’t go and get yourself captured by fanatical savages! My God, Henderson, you’ve a gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maxwell cabled. It’s good to see you alive. We feared the worst. Rotten luck about the eye, but at least it’s not your shooting eye. Come to Sandringham when you feel up to it, and I’ll wager we’ll see you get as good a bag as ever. Now off you go, Jackdaw, old man.” He gave my shoulder a farewell pat, then spoke again as I reached the door.

  “Wait. Do you remember what I asked you last time we met, before you went out to Ashanti?”

  I said I wasn’t sure. We’d had a long conversation.

  “I asked whether you thought it a good idea for me to become engaged to my late brother’s fiancée.”

  “I hope I said yes, P.G.”

  “You did. Nearly everyone thought it was a capital scheme. Including May herself, thank goodness. There were one or two wet blankets—churchmen for the most part—who thought it a trifle soon. But dash it all, we waited over a year. An
yway, my point is this: Don’t you wait too long. What are you now? Wrong side of forty?”

  “Thirty-eight last month. But I dare say I look twice that.”

  “I must say, Jackdaw, that you haven’t looked so seedy since they took you off the active list. For heaven’s sake go down to the country, get some rest, and find a good woman to look after you. Do as I say. A good woman. Not the other sort. Goodbye, old man.”

  We Henderson’s are not the marrying kind. My father was the only one of five to succumb to domesticity, though he and my mother made up for the others by producing nine children, of whom seven live. Of these, I’m the first to wed and, I fear, may be the last, all of us now getting on in years.

  Since the recent events in the Gold Coast I’d become resigned to the prospect of a bachelor life. What woman would want a man with a lonely eye and his constitution racked by equatorial fevers? But, as it happened, Prince George’s advice did not fall on stony ground.

  Last summer, whilst visiting my mother in Suffolk, I was invited to a garden party at Bifford Hall near Sudbury, and there ran into someone I’d not seen in almost twenty years. Ivry Fonnereau and I had been close as children. Our parents were fast friends, and we’d struck a youthful echo of that friendship, climbing trees and poaching birds’ eggs at nine or ten, teaching one another waltzes at twelve or thirteen, and going on sketching picnics. Ivry was the first person who said I could draw (the first whom I believed, at any rate). For my fourteenth birthday she gave me a box of watercolours, and in an amateurish way I’ve painted ever since. At about this time we declared ourselves madly in love, but that bud was nipped when I had to sign aboard the Swiftsure as a cadet. We wrote back and forth, but saw little of each other over the next few years, and in the awkwardness of late adolescence nothing more was said of love.

  In 1879, when we were both just twenty, I sailed on Bacchante for the three-year voyage around the world with Prince Eddy and Prince George. (The young Princes were then midshipmen; I, their senior by a few years, was a sub-lieutenant.) On my return to England in 1882, I learnt that Ivry had married. She was widowed most sadly a few years later when her husband lost his life during the attempted relief of General Gordon. They’d had no children.

  It was a glorious afternoon at Bifford Hall in the rolling west Suffolk countryside, the gardens a sparkle of colour around emerald lawns, the whole in a golden setting of ripe wheat. The air was rich with floral scents, both from the blooms and the assembled ladies, and beneath the murmur of human voices lay a drowsy hum of bees. I recognized Ivry immediately—she’d hardly changed, except in the acquisition of a fetching maturity and grace. This thought prompted some childishness in me, and I thought I’d have a spot of fun.

  A circular thatched summerhouse romantically sited beneath a tall wellingtonia gave me the idea, for it reminded me of the West African fetish-hut that claimed my eye. I slipped inside. “Frank,” she called. “Come out of there. I saw you go in. It is you, isn’t it? They said you’d be here. Why are you hiding from me?” While she approached, I popped out the artificial eye made for me in London—a good replica of my lost organ—and slipped in a tiger’s eye I’d chanced to buy that week at an Ipswich taxidermist’s. It had been lying in my pocket for days, irresistible as a firecracker; this seemed the ideal chance to let it off. Attempting a tigerish stance and growl, I emerged from the summerhouse blind side to Ivry.

  The wheeze was a great success. For all her misfortunes and her grace, she was still the spunky girl I remembered. Her champagne flew one way, her hat into a hydrangea, and the two of us seized one another by the elbows and laughed our heads off. She was looking splendid in a slim lavender skirt that flared just above her neat ankles, her blouse was the last word in fashion, with those puffed sleeves that show off a slender woman’s frame so well.

  I confessed to her that my prank was not original, relating how some years ago in the South China Sea I’d met Sir Charles Brooke, the famous White Rajah of Sarawak. He’d lost an eye during a battle with headhunters in his jungle kingdom, and the only replacement he could obtain locally was one intended for a hunting trophy. “It keeps the wizards away and draws the girls,” the Rajah had confided with a feline wink. “Don’t know why, but it does. Best damned thing I’ve bought in all me life.”

  “Frank, really!” Ivry exclaimed—she kept glancing up at my face and biting her lower lip to stifle her amusement. “You always were a naughty boy. Your stories are improper as ever. Obviously you’ve been a bachelor much too long.”

  Ivry and her unmarried sisters were living only three miles from Riverhill, my mothers house in the country near Ispwich, where I spent as much of my convalescence as possible.

  After the wild savannah, the many months under canvas and stars, and the roomy life of the colonies, I find I cannot long remain content here at Hitchin with sundry brothers and sisters, older than myself and still disposed to treat me as a boy—at thirty-eight! The hemmed streets and suburban atmosphere of the town become irksome. Our narrow house, so capacious in my child’s eye, appears to me as a birdcage. I prefer Suffolk, England’s sunniest county, projecting like a squire’s belly into the sea. The tropics it will never be, but it strikes me as the most agreeable spot within an hour or two of London for someone who has shaken out his tent in empty places. Such splendid open vistas and weather-beaten coasts.

  Riverhill commands a fine view of water-meadows falling down to the River Gipping and Bramford church. The locals say a hunting lodge once stood on its lofty site. The present house is about thirty years old and vaguely Elizabethan, its promiscuous architect allowing himself a crenellated tower. The owner, having built so solidly and fashionably, expected to enjoy the bucolic pleasures of the place for many years. But scarcely had the mortar set between the bricks when evil befell him in the shape of the Great Eastern Railway. Surveyors determined that the Norwich line had to run between river and hill, cleaving his property—its very name—with steel.

  Having exhausted himself in futile litigation, the poor fellow watched while an army of navvies advanced with picks and shovels, with moleskin trousers and steaming mugs of tea, to carve a muddy wound across the land he loved, not a hundred yards from his French windows. This done, the iron Behemoth rattled the panes, snorting past at fifty miles per hour, leaving a sooty dragon in the sky that sank upon his garden with the breath of hell.

  Riverhill’s owner fell into melancholic decline, becoming so withdrawn that his own servants scarcely saw him. Old friends were sent packing. Health and hygiene were neglected. One day a maid found him hanging from an attic beam, martyred to the modern age by his own hand.

  Soon the unfortunates ghost was seen, rushing from the house to shake its airy fist at passing trains. The property was put up for sale by the mans estate. Needless to say, prospective buyers were not abundant. The servant who would work there after dark could not be found. So it was that this ample house and still delightful garden (winds obliging) fell within the slim resources of my widowed mother and my brother Henry, twelve years my senior and a confirmed bachelor. My devout mother has no dread of ghosts, and Henry has been enthralled by trains since he was a boy. For staff they manage with two or three worthies of the Nonconformist chapel, who venture from the village in daylight hours. In short, they are happy at Riverhill, and I am always glad to impose upon their hospitality, staying with them for as long as they will have me, between obligatory Hitchin visits.

  Ivry and I were therefore able to see rather a lot of one another, and I grew stronger daily in her company. We took long carriage rides and country rambles, went painting as we’d done so many years ago, sailed at Woodbridge, golfed at the Aldeburgh links. At Ivry’s side I felt fourteen again, and my old affections were rekindled. I hardly dared hope that these feelings might be reciprocated, but to my great surprise and joy they were. On a glorious Sunday afternoon last November, a thirsty walk made us stop for drinks at the Wild Man. She joked about my being a wild man, and I asked if she would m
arry such a creature. Ivry agreed there and then to become my wife! Our wedding is to be in June.

  Riverhill, Bramford. September, 1899.

  IN THE MONTHS SINCE MY LAST ENTRY I have decided, after much reflection, that I must go into matters I should give a great deal to leave untouched. What follows is strictly confidential, to be seen by no one, not even my dear wife, until after I am dead. It is mainly for her sake that I write, for should my end come sooner than expected, or in a way that seems sudden or strange, these scribbles may afford her something of an explanation. And I have always believed that explanations, however distressing, are more consoling than mysteries.

  Before I am again posted overseas these papers will be left with Mr. Gerald Samuels, a London solicitor unconnected to the family whom I have known most of my life—we were at school together. He is a man in whom my eventual reader may place the utmost trust.

  It was my intention, until now, to write nothing of my capture and confinement by the Sofas—especially the personal aftermath of that experience—beyond the official report I filed two years ago with the Colonial Office. During those early months back in England a certain euphoria came over me, despite my physical weakness, followed by a disinclination to say another word on my African troubles. I think this began soon after the visit to Prince George, when my tongue had wagged rather freely under the influence of the royal decanter.

  I should perhaps abide by the secretive instinct and cast aside this pen. But now that I’m a married man, I can no longer think only of myself. A conviction has come over me—or comes over me at times—that a sinister pattern may lie behind widely separated events: namely, that my West African difficulties may not be altogether unrelated to certain things I witnessed many years before, as a young man in the South Seas. Should anything happen to me I could not bear for my beloved wife to blame herself, to think there was something she might have done or might not have done that could have made a difference. I am also sensible that my “explanation” may be nothing more than the ravings of an Englishman who has spent too long in the tropics, far from home, hearth, and the clime for which Nature intended him.