Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  “I’ll always love you, Livvy, at your very, very worst.”

  And so it happened, on the back seat of an Alvis. And that was only the first time. Being desired seemed to feed desire. I loved him, thought of him all the time, thought of ways to see him, to please him. We’d meet twice a week, around three, when I finished serving at the pub. We usually went to the gravel pit. When school resumed it wasn’t so easy to get together, but my uniform drove him crazy when we did.

  He bought me “the Pill,” as we called it then, a ring of twenty-one days. “More infallible than the Pope, Liv,” and I found that very funny. The pills made me keener—though whether it was the hormones or the freedom, I don’t know. Perhaps it was simply that he had got them for me, a secret calendar of love.

  Once a week, once a fortnight, once a month. As the weather cooled, so did Victor Lumley. His work, he said, hardly a moment to himself. Each wait seemed an age; I became sad, suspicious, angry. My schoolwork suffered. And I got careless with the plastic wheel of fortune. I was on Sunday when it was Wednesday, didn’t know if I’d taken too many or too few. I “missed.”

  One day Mother said, “Pop round to the corner for twenty Seniors, would you, Liv? Be a dear.” He was slipping away from us both.

  By the middle of November I knew about you. I was sure. I told him. And of course that was the end. He took it calmly, like a thief who’s always known he’ll be caught. We wriggled into our clothes on the back seat of his leathery car. He drove me home. Said nothing. Nothing until he pecked me on the cheek. Goodbye, little Liv.

  You were born in a discreet nursing home in Harrow. All winter and spring I tried to believe a message would come, or the bell would ring and there’d be Lumley on the doorstep: Get your hat and coat, little Liv, I’m taking you away from all this. Or at least a solicitor’s letter in Dickens mode, saying an anonymous benefactor had made provisions for your upkeep. (The things one imagines at sixteen!) But by June, as I waited to burst like an over-watered melon, I’d faced the obvious: your father had vanished from the Earth.

  There’d been no sign of him whatsoever since the November day I told him my news. I kept it from Mother for another six weeks—until she made a remark about my figure: “I think you’ve had too much Christmas, dear. You’re looking rather plump.” I burst into tears. It was Twelfth Night. We were going round the house gathering up cards and decorations. Lottie had just gone back to London. Mother used to say the Christmas magic turns bad if you leave decorations up after Twelfth Night.

  She guessed immediately who it was. “Oh, Livvy,” she said, “you’re not! How could you? Oh Livvy, if only you knew! If only.…” (At the time I thought she meant nothing more than if only I knew the consequences.) There were scenes, tears, late-night conversations. And anger. How I’d let her down. Let down my father. “What will I tell him if he walks in that door tomorrow? What will you tell him? Go on, Olivia. Answer me that!” I felt kicked. And I fancied that you spun inside me, a dolphin somersault of fear, though surely it was much too soon. Then Mother turned her anger on herself. “Where have I gone wrong? I ask myself that every night, wide awake at three in the morning. I should have foreseen this with fatherless girls. I should have been stricter. I should have sold this house and raised the money and sent you to boarding school.” And she’d looked at me with swimming eyes, “Oh, Liv. Not you! Not you. With Lottie I … I shouldn’t say this, but your sister’s.… She’s flighty. But not you. Not my solid, sensible Olivia!”

  “You mean your big frumpy Olivia. Who’d want her? Isn’t that the real reason you’re so surprised? Go on, say it! Anyway, I seem to remember I wasn’t the only person in this house rather charmed by the cad in question.…” I was full of tearful apology as soon as I’d let that out.

  Lottie should have been the one in trouble. And part of me was glad I’d beaten my sister to something, even heartbreak and disgrace. Mother had never said so, but we knew that in her eyes Lottie had the looks and I was the brain.

  I remember reaching the age when one first becomes aware of looks, of lonely selfhood staring from its cave of flesh and bone. Lottie had taken off her dressing-gown at bedtime and was studying herself naked in the bathroom mirror: a northern blonde with narrow hips and our father’s level sapphire gaze. I joined her: a tall Mediterranean brunette, darker and more strongly built, with a nose like the sharp edge of the number four. Straight and classical, Mother said, but I knew it was too big. Lottie said I must have been switched by Gypsies, or adopted. (That will strike you as ironic.) She meant, of course, I am lovelier.

  I found consolation in the puddly old looking-glass beneath the spear. Unlike the bathroom mirror, this was a lens of magic possibilities. If I stared hard enough I could see an African girl gazing back at me: her dark eyes, full lips, pantherine body, the ripple and spring of her hair. I would never grow up to be one of these English with their cracked-meringue complexions. I was the fruit of Henderson’s love for a native queen, descended from people who fought lions and tigers, tamed elephants, tossed assegais. Mine was the dark beauty of the spear.

  Years later I learnt there were no tigers in Africa, and no blood line between Henderson and us. Now, when I look at photographs of Lottie and me in our teens, it seems silly to have been so insecure. If my sisters looks hadn’t been so exceptional, I wouldn’t have felt outshone. I was leggy and coltish, not plain. I drew my share of stares from men who should have known better. Men like Mr. Lumley.

  We got beyond recrimination and began to talk over what to do. Mother pestered the Ministry until there was no room for doubt: the RAF had never had a Victor Charles Lumley, wing commander or otherwise. Who he was, how he’d found us, and how he forged Jon’s handwriting, we never found out. I suppose he went through public records. In those days handwriting was in wider use; it can’t have been hard to dig up a licence application, a building permit.

  The buttons were explained by a dealer in militaría who’d moved to Hitchin from the Portobello Road. “I’ve ‘eard it said, miss—you didn’t get this from me—that if you want to age a bit of metal you bury it in a chicken run. Don’t know what it is those birds eat, but a couple of months in there is good for two ‘undred years.” The Royston house with the grand drive turned out to belong to a stockbroker who spent half his time in Spain. And I’d never thought to note down the number of the Alvis that smelt like a glove.

  Mother was too embarrassed to approach the police until some time after our own investigation stalled. An inspector listened sympathetically. “If your daughter had been under sixteen at the time, madam, we could do him for offences against a minor. You might consider a civil suit, breach of promise for example. But unless you’ve got physical evidence—a letter making explicit undertakings, a ring, preferably inscribed—breach of promise is a hard one. Paternity suit might be an option, once the child’s born and you know its blood type. Also difficult to win.

  “Fraud, however, is a criminal matter. Sos impersonating an officer of the Crown. I’ll check and see if that applies to retired officers. It may not. Our friend seems to know what he’s doing. And we still have to catch him first.” Then he brightened. “But there’s a good chance this gentleman may be ‘known to police,’ as we say. You’ll be hearing from me in due course.”

  He did ring two or three times to say he was still on the case. I think he felt sorry for us. But it was the sixties—drugs, sit-ins, Vietnam demonstrations, the crime wave. How much police time would have gone to tracking down a confidence man whose only loot was a woman’s self-respect?

  “Whatever decision you take, Livvy, I’ll support you in it.” Mother was hard to read. Was this support, or fence-sitting? It was already a bit late in the day for the first option. You may not believe me when I say this, but I never considered it. I can’t say why. It wasn’t religious scruples. Or even ethical ones. I just knew it wasn’t something I could do. Perhaps you owe your existence to nothing loftier than my dread of hospitals.

  So, ke
ep you, or give you up? Picturing life after you, with or without you, took a stretch of imagination I couldn’t manage. In the small hours, those four o’clock oh-my-God awakenings, I’d be ruled by the heart: how could I even think of giving up my flesh and blood? But in the day, struggling with school, I’d harden. You were still a hypothetical being. (Until you got too big to ignore, till the heartburn, the itching, the sweats.) My life as a mother was as hard to conjure from the future as my life on the old-age pension.

  There was also Lottie. I hesitate to say this because I don’t want you to blame her. If you blame anyone it must be me. Perhaps you’ve had a happy life so far, a better upbringing than I could have given you. Perhaps the decision I took was for the best. (How often I’ve told myself this!) But I feel I owe you a full account. Lottie did not sit on the fence. “Liv, understand. You’ve got to ask yourself what kind of life you and the child will have. If you keep it you can forget about university, film, career. You can say goodbye to marriage, or any kind of live-in man. Men don’t take on other peoples brats. The few that do are nutters and diddlers, most likely. Come to London right away, there’s someone you ought to meet.”

  This person was Annette, a former housemate of Lottie’s who’d made the same “mistake” as I and taken the high road. She was living on National Assistance in a tower block. There I saw a future all too clearly. No sleep, no job, no friends for more than half an hour, an endless round of noise and nappies. And other women in the building—five, ten years further down the same road, their children like vicious monkeys, and tales of pederastic babysitters, loopy social workers, court orders, foster homes.

  Mother offered help, of course, and if we’d been closer she might have swayed me. But the thought of being cooped up in Hitchin for the next twenty years, dependent and beholden, frightened me as much as Annette’s tower block. I decided there was no life for you and me together. My course no longer seemed selfish, merely the best thing.

  The nursing home people knew exactly what to say. An older, financially secure, childless couple “from a good background.” Able to offer you the best in life. A fresh start on both sides. Complete anonymity and confidentiality. Your existence legally erased from my life; mine erased from yours. Once you left my body we would never meet again. And no, Mrs. Wyvern—we call everyone here “Mrs.” by the way—no, we always find it’s best for all concerned if you don’t hold the baby. Not even for a moment.

  Four

  ENGLAND

  Frank Henderson’s second notebook:

  Riverhill, Bramford. September, 1899. No. 2

  I AWOKE AFTER ONLY AN HOUR OR SO. The bonfires had been revived, and by their light I saw Samory and his chiefs watching me. Their expressions seemed to have changed for the better. They told me they had once again “examined my head” and found I was a “good man,” adding it was a lucky thing for me I had not been afraid to visit the King, and had not spurned his splendid hospitality.

  From what Abu Bukari and Siraku later told me, it is clear that I owe my very life to dozing off. There were two factions among Samory’s thanes: one wishing to cultivate good relations with us; the other favouring my execution, for reasons of revenge and as a warning to the Great Powers that they should stay out of the Hinterland. Until my nap, these foes of mine had been on the point of carrying the debate, for the column that had brought in Fergusons head included many Sofas who had lost sons and brothers to our marksmanship at Dawkita.

  Siraku—reluctant jailer!—told me later that it was past his understanding why all our heads hadn’t been cut off at once.

  Despite his mens thirst for revenge, my falling asleep in Samory’s presence had precisely the opposite effect such behaviour might produce before Her Majesty the Queen Empress. To nod off was to pay him the ultimate compliment on his hospitality and rectitude. My snores fell on their ears as the very balm of diplomacy. To do mischief to such a trusting soul was, for them, unthinkable.

  I have spent enough time in Africa and other parts of the world to comprehend their logic, and I wish I could claim that I had had the foresight, sang-froid, and Thespian gifts to counterfeit such an efficacious snooze. But I confess I was simply worn out. I would have slept on a railway track or a Hindoo fakir’s bed of nails. It was pure luck.

  Samory began our new entente by allowing a semblance of a Christian burial for poor Ferguson’s remains. He appealed to my brotherly feelings as a co-religionist, alluding through his interpreter to those parts of the Bible shared by Christian, Mohammedan, and Jew. “English, Sofa, both are people of the Book!” He smiled broadly, uttering the names of Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, the Angel Gabriel, and other patriarchs and celestial characters familiar to us all. Samory then offered a burial site not far from the Prophet’s hallowed ground.

  This I couldn’t accept, having heard Ferguson’s opinion of the Prophet on many occasions. I believe I fulfilled what would have been my dear friend’s wishes, choosing a pretty spot under a venerable baobab beside a striking outcrop. Here the fields ended and the bush began. Ferguson’s sagacious spirit, thought I, would be happy roaming the wild Africa he loved, and to which he was born, for all his cultured ways. I fashioned a little cross of acacia wood, and uttered what I could muster of the burial service, which, as a boy, I’d heard my father perform so many times with far greater eloquence.

  Samory gave me rather comfortable quarters—a compound of three huts on a small courtyard, the fourth side being a wall with a door to the “street,” a malodorous alley in which both cattle and citizens routinely ease their bodies, as they do in all these towns. He told me I should have the same rights “as a son,” and would be secure against intrusion, for these included the right to flog anyone who was tiresome. The people were intensely curious, many never having seen a white man. The length and straightness of my nose (often compared by my friends to a jib-boom) excited interest; they stared at my proboscis and then patted their fingers in a straight line against their own squat snubs, uttering brune, brune with much laughter.

  Samory laid great stress on his friendship for the English, disclaiming the need for any border treaty. As for the “incident” at Dawkita, he accounted for it in an original manner, saying that it was not his sons fault, nor my fault, “it was God.” Be that as it may, he was not disposed to leave further campaigning in the hands of the Deity alone. Rifles and ammunition were the object of his desires, and he asked me whether I would have these sent to him when I returned to the coast, along with friction tubes for the guns, percussion caps, and brass for cartridges. Such matters, I told him, rested with the Governor and not with me. Clearly he had decided to let me go, probably to have me gone before I died, causing him further political embarrassment.

  The dysentery was upon me again, and I kept indoors for some days, feeling very much the want of meat, which I had eaten only three or four times in the past month. The stores given back to me by the Prince were biscuits, tinned jam, and whisky. Once, I found old Siraku helping himself to my biscuits while he thought I was comatose, and I spoke pretty sharply to him. He said he would tell his master that I was treating him badly and not giving him food. I said, “Go! And I shall tell your master that whenever my men have biscuits, you have biscuits; and when they have whisky, you have whisky.” His jaw fell some inches at this, and he implored me not to do so, for whisky-drinking would mean death.

  One afternoon, as I was resting, I heard a feminine giggle at my door, and sent Siraku to investigate. The rascal returned with a young girl who, he said, had been sent by Samory to be my “wife.” She entered casually, wearing nothing more than a scanty loincloth and some strings of shell beads. She was disgracefully young, her half-grown bosom firm and high, almost at her armpits. I could not avoid a close inspection of her person for she herself invited it, drawing my attention to a sunburst tattooed around each nipple. More exactly, it was scarification, inscribed for life on her dark skin by means of small raised cicatrices neatly laid out in lines and spirals like the toolin
g on a Spanish saddle.

  I declined this signal act of hospitality—gracefully, I hoped—by pleading illness. Siraku shook his head and muttered, saying the mother of the girl would not be pleased.

  I left Haramonkoro in the first week of May, near as I can reckon, having with me sixteen of my own people and an escort of nine Sofas, bearing a letter and a gift of two heavy gold anklets for the Governor, Sir William. The rains had still not broken, though their threat could be read in the sky: great purple cauliflowers rearing in the west. Samory himself saw us off, accompanying us a mile or so on a sorrel pony. He took these moments to reveal more of poor Ferguson’s death.

  It seems that after I went out to palaver with the Prince that day at Dawkita, and it became clear no truce would be arranged, Gimalah and Ferguson fell back on Wa after dark as we had planned. They formed the men into a hollow square, with Ferguson and the other wounded in the middle. It was pitch black, and they were under fire from Sofas hidden in the woods, shouting, “The English run! The English run!”

  The square could not be maintained; the only thing was for the Hausas to make their way to the Volta as best they could, and regroup there at first light. In the course of this rout, Ferguson fell from his stretcher. He lay on the ground all night, unable to move or even crawl for cover because of the state of his leg. Two Sofas came upon him in the morning. He held them at bay with a revolver, which afterwards proved to be empty. When he refused to give up this weapon, they shot him and cut off his head.

  Samory did not exactly keep his bargain with me to release all my surviving men and stores, saying that he would give the rest to the next Englishman commissioned to visit him.

  I tried to recover some of my own necessaries from the hand of the plunderer. At length my toothbrush was graciously restored, also a shaving-glass, one side of which was a magnifier, deemed by the marabouts to be uncanny. My hairbrushes I demanded in vain; Samory refused to hand them over. Since he is bald as a coot, it’s a mystery to me what on Earth he did with them.