Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  For a few minutes, I don’t know how long, sleep or something like it blanketed my brain, jumbled up my thoughts – something about emeralds, very bright green, and two men in a taxi and a pond that seemed to be steaming, but I wasn’t sure whether because it was hot or cold. Then in the flash of a camera shutter – no, click, shutters clicked – there I was awake but having to remain as still as death, not a nerve-ending must be allowed to twitch. Because something extremely strange was happening to me and if I betrayed by the slightest movement that I was awake it would stop happening. That was part of the bargain, though how could it be a bargain since not a word had been said about it and even the thought of it hadn’t entered my head.

  But it was happening, anyway, and what was even more surprising, though only incidentally, was that the sensation of it made every other part of me feel more intensely: the ache of my shoulder-blades against the uneven rock and the thistle-stalks pressing into the back of my thigh, and the faint, very faint tingle of her breath on my neck. And the sensation did not blot out the little questions scudding across my brain such as why hadn’t I heard the szz of the zip being undone, or perhaps that was what had woken me, and why on earth this impulse, this wonderful impulse had come to her. But mostly I thought how cool and strong her fingers were. It couldn’t go on for ever, naturally, but each moment was undeserved delight which seemed to accumulate so that by the end I was flooded with gratefulness, though not of course only with gratefulness. She wiped her fingers on the nearest plant and looked at the pearly drops sliding down the green stalks. ‘Like cuckoo-spit,’ she said. ‘Did you call it cuckoo-spit when you were small?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking at the way the sun shone through the stalks of the daisies, if they were daisies, and flushed the drops the palest green you could think of, the green of the sea off Weymouth, or no, better, the pale glassy green of a beryl stone.

  ‘Or like a beryl,’ I said.

  ‘Too white, no, I see what you mean.’

  ‘That was wonderful, but –’

  ‘But why did I think of it? Well, you looked all right when you were asleep. Not so disapproving. You don’t mind being – obliged, do you? Oh, look, that must be them.’

  Miles away at the end of the ridge we were on, a little plane was heading south, gleaming silver against the grey-green veld. It seemed to move with drowsy slowness like a mayfly coming towards the end of its time, as though the hot sleepy afternoon had affected the engine. You could just about hear the calm drone in the distance and it came to me only then that what was so unsettling about these vast views was their quietness and that was what made me feel so insignificant. Nobody down below had learnt how to make a loud enough noise to be heard against the gentle day-long breathing of the wind. At which point, a thought struck me: suppose that this amazing, just concluded thing was something she also did for Bobs? A service, in fact, that she provided for all unsatisfactory admirers? One which, come to think of it, was what Jane had preferred, suggesting that I was in danger of being for ever typecast in the Cherubino role, fit to be tickled but unsuitable for any deeper engagement.

  It was odd to think of Helen and Jane Stilwell in the same breath. They had always seemed such opposites, the one serious and disciplined, the other frivolous and spoilt. But perhaps Helen had her playful side too, one which the sternness of her life had muffled until now. Even so, Bobs.

  ‘We haven’t got anything to drink, have we?’

  ‘No, the pilot took it all back with him.’

  ‘You should have asked him for a bottle. I need a drink badly.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  She led me back along the winding path through the tall daisies, at times almost as tall as she was. The wind seemed to whistle through the dry stalks, but perhaps that was an illusion too.

  She drove fast like a rally driver, cutting into the corners and accelerating out of the humps as though she was set on shaking the sweet languor out of my bones. The gum trees went flip-flip past us and the close-sounding rustle of their tops was drowned out by the roar of the Land-Rover’s engine being pushed along harder than it cared for.

  The D.O.’s compound was full of heat and silence. It was a relief to get inside the dark sitting-room.

  Almost without looking what she was doing, she pulled a bottle out of the D.O.’s drink cupboard. The bottle was dark and dusty, which didn’t mean it was going to be any good – and it wasn’t. She caught me looking at the label as I poured out.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s just plonk from the Cape. The Rhodies used it for petrol when the sanctions started to bite.’

  She snatched the tumbler from me – I couldn’t see any wineglasses – and drank half of it in one gulp, awkwardly with her elbow somehow in the wrong place like somebody smoking their first cigarette. Then she sat still in the dark sitting-room on an oxblood settee with the damp mushroomy smell all around us.

  ‘Oh what a mess,’ she said.

  Being part of the mess, it was hard to see it exactly in those terms. For me the day was still touched with magic, a freakish sort of magic but magic all the same. But it was hard to express that feeling without sounding like a guest saying a phoney thank-you at the end of a party. So I said nothing until the telephone jangled, which enforced silence anyway because the half-dozen houses with a phone in the scattered settlement shared a party line and we had to count the rings to see who the call was for.

  ‘Have you heard?’ It was Dodo, breathy, talking quick but loud so I could hear standing next to Helen.

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About the crash. They came down at Mosetse.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The investors, the money men. I’m on my way. It’s a hundred miles to the south, the other side of the border. I’ll pick you up.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You’re a nurse aren’t you? You’ve had training.’

  ‘No, whatever made you think that?’ she said, but he had already put the phone down. ‘Why should he think I’m a fucking nurse?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I said, but it was easy to see why anyone could think that.

  ‘I didn’t even get my first aid certificate at school. It’s awful, isn’t it? We must have been almost the last people to see the plane, perhaps we could have seen it crash if we had looked long enough.’

  ‘What good would that have done?’

  ‘No good,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t talking about good. But it would have been – something to see, like when you see an aeroplane droning overhead and you sometimes think perhaps this will be the moment when the engine cuts out and in a ghastly way you’re half-hoping it will be. Why is that? You don’t wish the people in the plane to be killed, do you? You just want a cheap thrill.’

  It was unlike her, this wandering imaginative turn, unlike my idea of her at any rate. Perhaps it only showed how upset she was.

  ‘I don’t know what use we could be,’ she went on. ‘The police and ambulances will be there hours before us if they aren’t there already.’

  ‘Dodo feels responsible for them, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, I’m not responsible for them. They chose to come up here in that stupid little plane. Get me another drink.’

  We had finished the bottle before Dodo’s hoot. He flapped open the passenger door, didn’t bother to get out, hardly spoke as we got in. His Land-Rover was the big-engined de luxe model and even on the up-and-down patched-up roads it tucked away the miles so that we were soon in unknown country, barren terrain with rocks strewn about and untidy thorn bushes. Now and then there was a muddy patch beside the road and half a dozen mangy cattle with cattle egrets sitting on their humps picking at their fleas. They waved us through at the border bridge, they had already heard about the crash.

  We must have gone another forty miles before I asked the question.

  ‘Did they survive, any of them?’

  ‘What do you bloody think? A twin-engined prop falls ten thou
sand feet on to a rock, what do you think your chances of survival are, a rough estimate will do, I don’t need it down to the third decimal point.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘OK, it’s a terrible thing, and I’m just grateful for you folks coming along. I’m hells sorry too.’

  He put his paw on Helen’s knee. She didn’t respond but didn’t take it away. A baboon, grey and sad-looking in the thickening light, hopped across the road. Helen turned her head to watch it scuttle under the rusty wire fence and into the bushes and I smelled the tang of the red wine on her breath.

  ‘This is all tribal trust land here, beats me how they can make a living off this scrub. They should have brought the Gulfstream. They could have landed it all right on the strip.’

  He seemed lost in distress, and I thought I had misjudged him.

  We came to some long, low white buildings beside the road: Pius XII Catholic Mission of Masvingo.

  ‘All gone, all gone to Zaka,’ cried the African standing by the road, ‘I will show you,’ and he jumped up into the back without waiting to be asked. He directed us off the road, along an upland track with the stony red earth criss-crossed by little dry watercourses. Over the next hill, we saw it. The last rays of the sun caught the fragments of metal lying half-way up the hill beyond. Below the wreckage at the foot of the slope there were three or four jeeps and vans parked, presumably the nearest point they could get to.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn, oh God, oh God.’ Dodo’s swearing sounded almost pious.

  Just above the jeeps the bodies were laid out covered with blankets. Beside each of them crouching on his knees in the blueberry and heather was a monk in a beige robe. Higher up were Africans moving about the hillside, collecting fragments of the wreckage. At the request of the policeman Dodo clambered up to identify the dead and came down again to tell us that they looked peaceful, it must have happened just like that and their bodies were not much, he couldn’t think of the word, and then said ‘marked’. The policeman said, in halting English, that they hit the side of the hill and mimed a glancing blow with one hand lightly brushing across the palm of the other.

  The head of the mission, a plump Irishman wearing dark glasses although the sun had gone behind the hill, said they would be glad to take care of the bodies in their chapel for the time being until the next of kin had been informed.

  ‘That would be very much appreciated, Reverend Father,’ Dodo said.

  ‘And if you and your friends would care to spend the night with us?’

  ‘That would be swell.’

  The Irishman hitched up his robe and began to scramble up the hill, calling to his brethren.

  ‘That will do now, boys. Just lend a hand, will you?’

  ‘There is another thing,’ Dodo said to the policeman.

  ‘Yessir?’

  ‘The plane was carrying valuable mineral samples, to be analysed down in Johannesburg, you understand.’

  ‘Yessir. Nothing will be moved. We will guard all your property. I will give you chitty.’

  ‘Well, chief, I have every confidence in your officers, but I have strict orders from the government to keep personal control of all mined material at all times. That is the condition of my licence and I want to do the right thing, because you folks have been good to me.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘So what I suggest is that we take those crates you have there down to the mission where the Reverend Father and I can keep an eye on them tonight.’

  ‘Yessir, all OK, sir.’

  ‘They’ll be under divine protection down there. No harm can come to them.’

  ‘No sir.’

  The inspector told his men to begin loading the square metal boxes into Dodo’s Land-Rover. Some were dented and a couple had burst, leaving weird splashes of yellow and pink and grey powder over the heathery hillside, but the bouncy heather and the glancing angle of the crash had preserved most of them. But then they were built to withstand impact. Unlike the investors.

  The boxes were so heavy that it took two policemen to carry each one, staggering down the overgrown slope. And when we bumped off down the track, even with the four-wheel drive Dodo could scarcely get the Land-Rover up the far side of the little dry watercourses.

  ‘My God they’re heavy,’ Helen said. ‘Do you think the weight could have –’

  ‘Don’t even ask,’ Waldo Wilmot said. ‘They should have brought the Grumman Gulfstream, takes twice the payload.’

  ‘Was it absolutely essential to take the samples with them?’

  ‘Honey, you want to play the D.A?’

  ‘I mean, the rocks could have gone down to Jo’burg by truck.’

  ‘Helen, can it. These are busy men, they’re only in Africa for two days. They can’t afford to wait a week for a goddamn truck.’

  ‘Greedy, you mean.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said busy, you meant greedy.’

  ‘Is that any way to speak of four decent men whose bodies are bumping down the track behind us at this very moment? All right, so they got a little excited like kids on Christmas Day, they wanted to open their presents. Is that so bad?’

  Dodo had a point, I thought. Their impatience was surely innocent, or at worst part of that same restless energy that had brought them here in the first place.

  But Helen was unmoved, with that set expression which was the nearest she came to letting anger show.

  ‘And here you are, rushing off with your precious minerals while your friends’ corpses bump along behind us, as you so charmingly put it.’

  ‘Look,’ said Dodo, ‘I have a legal responsibility for these rocks and I have an order from the police chief licensing me to carry out those responsibilities. That’s it, so shut the fuck up and let me get us out of here in one piece.’

  Our little cortège knocked and rattled its way down the track to the main road and turned right, back towards the mission. It was dark now and the purring of the big tyres on the tarmac and the huge deep-blue sky with every star pricking it so brightly affected me in an unexpected way hard to describe. I felt as though we had been winched up on to a more intense level of reality, or perhaps it was only the wind and the shock and the long drive. The whush-whush of the gum trees passing by and the little huddles of reed huts with their fires burning a hot red in the night and behind us John Stilwell and his fellow-investors – there was no way of denying the awful fact that I was happy.

  At the entrance to the mission there were two African boys holding tarry torches to guide us. In the smoky flicker their heads and forearms looked polished and unreal like blackamoor figures in a drawing-room. The main room inside the low plain building contained nothing but a long table and benches and a couple of posters on the wall, one about Lourdes and one about respecting womanhood or the Virgin, or a bit of both. We sat on the benches and the boys brought us bottles of local beer. It seemed odd to be sitting there drinking as the brothers came through carrying the four bodies each covered by a hairy blanket, the same oatmeal colour as their robes.

  ‘They’ll take them through to the chapel and keep a vigil there. Now as for the next step, were they Catholics, do you know?’

  The Irishman had turned to me and I did not like to say that except for John Stilwell I didn’t even know their names. It seemed fraudulent to be caught up in this cortege on such slender acquaintance. But Dodo answered the question for me.

  ‘Catholics, Father? Well, not John Stilwell, or Jack Greenbaum, certainly not him, Fonso Leonard, maybe, maybe not, Des Donovan, that’s the pilot, he sounds like a good bet.’

  ‘Well, we don’t want to divide up the poor souls tonight, do we? There’ll be soup and millet bread coming through in just a tick and Brother Anthony has some of his sweet and sour pork for us tonight. He’s from Hong Kong like most of our brothers. I fear that vocations don’t grow on trees in the old country any more.’

  Now that I got a proper look at the brethren, I saw that five out of the six around the table were Chi
nese.

  ‘Please, do engage them in conversation. They need to practise their English and out here we don’t get many guests, because of the situation. ’Tis a crying shame that you should come on such a terrible occasion. There is so much to see. We rear our own pigs, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t that great?’ said Dodo, slurping down the vegetable broth.

  After we had eaten, Father Ambrose said we would probably like to see the chapel. He still had his dark glasses on, so it wasn’t just the tropical glare he was protecting his eyes against. The bare whitewashed chapel was bigger than I had expected and my dread that we would be standing on top of the bodies was needless. The four oatmeal blankets lay in a line in front of the simple altar from behind which came a steady banging noise.

  ‘That’s Brother George. He says he’ll have the coffins knocked up by the morning, just plain gumwood. Do you want them covered till then? Personally, I don’t like to see them uncovered until they’re in their boxes.’

  ‘Covered? Oh I see, yes, I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘Good, well, we’ll just say a little prayer together.’

  He took off his shades revealing a nasty stye swelling over his left eye and intoned a short prayer which we couldn’t hear much of because Brother George was still hammering.

  ‘Well now, Bedfordshire I think,’ said Father Ambrose. ‘I won’t expect you up for our early Mass, but don’t mind us.’

  The bed in the little whitewashed cell off the passage leading to the chapel was fractionally softer than the one at the D.O.’s and I was off to sleep in no time. But the knocking of Brother George’s hammer kept me company in my dreams, that and the glow from the fires in the cooking huts, so mysterious in the black night but also so homely, so that they left a queer disoriented sensation as I sped by, reminding me that I was the restless wanderer and they were by their own hearth. It occurred to me as I drowsed off that my dreams might be haunted by the crash or by the four bodies lying under their oatmeal blankets a few yards along the passage, but nothing of the sort came into the rather sedate if incoherent narrative of my dreams, mostly about Pickup minor, a warty boy at school who had been interested in butterflies and moths and who now had become a jockey and appeared to be riding in a race against my father, who won the race except that the stewards, who included Cod Chamberlayne, said that he must be disqualified because it wasn’t a real horse and my father said a bookmaker couldn’t be a steward and so their verdict was invalid.