The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  At the far side of the plain came a taller ridge of mountains, some of whose peaks had snow on them even at this time of year. Varner chose a pass in order not to have to go too high, and they flew down a perilous-looking valley from the sides of which jutted great slabs of purplish rock. The valley narrowed as they flew, and suddenly Varner shouted back at Shrieve, “Here we go!” He pointed the nose of the aircraft upwards, and the ground slid rapidly away. In a moment they were over the pass and cruising down towards the capital, some thirty miles away in the foothills. In twenty minutes they had established contact with the control-tower, landed, and taxied up to the main building of the airport.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Shrieve, jumping down. His ears still roared with the noise of the engine, and his legs felt weak after the cramped plane. He stretched luxuriously and yawned. “Are you staying here for the night?”

  “Not me,” said Varner. “The wife gets all het up if I’m not home to keep her company. I’ll have a couple of beers, though. Buy a paper. Chat around.”

  They went into the airport bar and had a beer. Then Shrieve bought Varner another and said goodbye. He carried his cases out to the taxi-rank, past a large hoarding showing an African mother urging her son to feel Free, and ordered a cab to take him to the Elizabeth Hotel, a small undistinguished building with a few uncomfortable rooms run by a Jew called Simon Bensimon. Shrieve saw no point in paying heavily for the doubtful air-conditioning of the grand hotels. There were no feather-beds in the bush, and air-conditioning gave him a cold.

  After checking the time of his plane the following day, he rang Robbins’s home. It was six o’clock and the offices should all be closed. Robbins’s wife answered.

  “He’s not back yet,” she said. “Often he doesn’t get home till after eight.”

  “Good gracious. Would he mind me calling him at the office, do you think?”

  “Not at all. He’ll be glad to see you, I know. And tell him I’ve asked you to dinner, will you?”

  “That’s extremely kind of you,” said Shrieve.

  “See you shortly, then. Do try and make him come home at a reasonable time for a change.”

  Shrieve rang Robbins’s office and announced his arrival.

  “When are you leaving, old boy?” said Robbins.

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Hmm. Not wasting any time, are you? Never mind. Why don’t you come round now and we’ll have a natter. I’m booked solid tomorrow morning. Then you can come and dine with us.”

  “Your wife’s already asked me.”

  “Good, good. So you thought I’d be home by now, did you? I’m never there before sundown these days, I’m sorry to say. But come on round right away.”

  Shrieve walked the few blocks to the main administrative area and entered Robbins’s building, tall and white, with metal shutters against the late afternoon sun. He took the lift to the sixth floor.

  “Hello, hello,” said Robbins, “it’s good to see you, Hugh.” He was looking hotter than ever, but he seemed to have lost weight. Beneath his tan he looked drawn. “Jesus, but we’re working long hours here. You chaps out in the bush just don’t know what it’s like.”

  “But we do the real work,” said Shrieve, shaking Robbins’s hand. “You people just make paperwork for yourselves.”

  “You’re damned right,” said Robbins, sighing. “Ton after ton of forms repeating each other’s information. It’s the madness of our civilisation. We’ve taught the Africans to read and write so that they can fill in forms.”

  “You know what we use them for in the bush.”

  “Yes,” said Robbins, pushing papers about his blotter. “Now look here, Hugh, let’s get down to business and then we can enjoy the evening, right? First of all, what are your plans? You’ll be coming back in September, you said. That’ll give you about four months to pack and go away again.”

  “There’s no chance of being allowed to stay on?”

  “It’s most unlikely. They’re going to need all the administrative jobs they can get to pay off political debts. As for Europeans, they’ll need a few at headquarters still, and in the electric and water companies. Engineers won’t have to look far for work. But for district officers like Mackenzie and yourself the outlook’s frankly a bit bleak.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to go home. But I’d like to make sure first that whoever replaces me knows what he’s doing.”

  “He won’t,” said Robbins flatly. “There aren’t enough educated people to go round. Of course, if we’d had another ten years——”

  There was a silence while the two men contemplated the future of the colony. Then Robbins said, “The new university may help eventually, of course. But it’s still tiny, and hasn’t even got properly trained teachers yet. That’s a place where there’s still plenty of room for white men. You want to have a bash at teaching?”

  “I don’t think I could,” said Shrieve. “I’ve forgotten all my formal learning. And what use would English History be to these people? They want engineers and doctors, don’t they?”

  “That’s for sure,” said Robbins. He mopped his face with a large blue handkerchief. “Now, about your Ngulu. Everyone knows about the problem, thanks to your efforts, but no one has the first idea of a solution. What’s really going to count is the new administrator, right?”

  “Not really, no. However good my replacement is, there has to be some genuine threat of force to keep the Luagabu away.”

  Robbins sighed. “As if I didn’t know. It’s the same story everywhere. It’ll be like India and Pakistan if we’re not careful, with tribe murdering tribe along all the borders of the territories.”

  “Quite,” said Shrieve. “So what should I try and achieve at this conference?”

  “Guarantees. They won’t strictly be enforceable for the reasons we’ve discussed, but you can’t hope for more. You must try and get something written down. And at the same time, be chummy with the African delegates—you’re in a much better position to handle them than the men in Whitehall. Try and get them on your side, make it an old boy arrangement with them while you’re getting something written into the constitution.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “How should I know?” said Robbins. “But you could offer them drinks, couldn’t you?”

  Shrieve thought for a while. He couldn’t imagine himself asking the African leaders for drinks and broaching the subject with the casualness one read about in books.

  “And you think that’s all I can hope for?”

  “You must put what pressure you can on the Colonial Office, too, of course. Push from both sides at once. And the best of Nguluan luck.”

  “You think it’s all a waste of time?”

  “Not at all. But the effectiveness of the sanctions is what’s really going to matter, isn’t it? And as to them, no one can judge till they’ve been tested.”

  “If they’re really effective,” said Shrieve, “they won’t be tested at all.”

  Robbins nodded and mopped his face again.

  “And I’m likely to be replaced by someone’s great-nephew who’s been gadding indiscreetly round the capital and who’ll simply fret to get back.”

  “Not necessarily. There are a few African anthropologists—you might get one of them. But frankly I doubt it. How big is your tribe?”

  “Eight hundred and six. No, seven. There was a new baby last week.”

  “Congratulations,” said Robbins. “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

  “It’s still only a tiny tribe.”

  “But it doesn’t matter how few they are, they’re people who need help. The fewer there are, the more help that’s needed.”

  “Of course. But whether the politicians are going to see it that way or not is another matter.”

  “And there’s really nothing more to be said?”

  “No,” said Robbins. He spread his fat fingers over the blotter. “Sometimes I feel like a bloody Arab: everything is
in the hands of Allah. But then I try and remember we were here to get things out of the hands of Allah and into the hands of men.”

  “That’s hardly the left-wing view.”

  “Maybe not. There are personal attacks on us in the newspapers already, you know. I’m a sanguinary would-be dictator. I don’t think they know about you yet.”

  “It wouldn’t worry me if they did,” said Shrieve. “My conscience is clear.”

  “So is mine, for Christ’s sake. But no one cares what you feel about yourself. And quite right, too, in a way. But it hurts, you know. It hurts. Damn it, it isn’t as though we were exploiting them, like the mineral companies, like that bloody Free. No, we don’t take a penny from them, we’re paid from home. But they think it’s all the same thing, they think we’re here as a cynical cover for gigantic capitalist exploitation.”

  “Perhaps we are, in a way. We never say anything against it, do we?”

  Robbins looked at him in amazement. “Are you serious?”

  “Not very.”

  “But we’re not allowed to talk politics. That’s why we’ve been so bloody useful. And let’s hope that they’ll stick to some semblance of our impartiality, otherwise it’s going to be second cousins twice removed in every little post office and government bureau in the country. And that won’t be the worst, either.”

  “You make it sound,” said Shrieve, “like the British cabinet.”

  Robbins laughed. “Still reading the left-wing press, I see.”

  “Oh, the papers get out to the bush eventually, you know. Look, I promised your wife that you wouldn’t be late for dinner. We ought to be on our way.”

  “Not for twenty minutes,” said Robbins, making a face at the papers on his desk. “Go and have a drink in the Victoria, and I’ll join you there when I’m through with all this bumf.”

  “All right,” said Shrieve. He didn’t like the Victoria, a bar which was always full of businessmen and civil servants who thought him mad to live with the Ngulu. But a couple of drinks there would bring him up to date on what they were thinking in the capital. He got the papers in the bush, all right, but they took their time to arrive, and he sometimes felt that if Russia and America dropped bombs on each other, he would be the last white man in the world to hear the news.

  *

  The plane sank through soggy banks of cloud, and then there was England, a sprawl of suburban houses and rubbish tips and roads and odd bits of green, and then they were down and it was drizzling. Tired and fuzzy after the long journey, Shrieve pulled the collar of his coat closer about his neck and shivered. As he went into the Airport buildings he knew he would soon have a cold. It was always the same, returning to England—the rain, and what seemed unendurable chilliness. After a couple of weeks (and often a bout of flu, too), he would be used to it again. A few weeks later and he would be trying to readjust to Africa.

  It was seven years since he had last been in London and he observed many changes as the bus carried him along the Great West Road. The horrifying ugliness of the houses had not altered, but there were major roadworks going on everywhere, a flyover at Chiswick, another at Hammersmith, and from these he saw many tall buildings which he didn’t recognise, and something that could only be called a skyscraper in Earls Court. Where he had spent a lot of time in the past, stuck in traffic jams, the bus now sailed briskly above the old congestion. Perhaps England was finally getting itself a modern road system.

  From the Air Terminal (itself completely new) he took a taxi to the small Bloomsbury hotel where he always stayed. As the cab carried him through the centre of London he found that much here, too, had changed. A vast roadwork was under construction at Hyde Park Corner, and there was a dual carriageway in the Park. Everywhere there were glossy new buildings, all glass and bright colours, and everything seemed less drab, less austere, than when he had last been home. The boom years had left their mark in every street, with new paint and new construction, and most of the grime which Shrieve remembered as the quintessence of London seemed to have been washed, literally, away, though the traffic was appalling. (If England really was getting a modern road system, it clearly hadn’t reached London yet.) There seemed, too, to be far more advertisement hoardings than on his previous visit, and wherever he looked petrol, cigarettes, beer, airlines, newspapers, sauces, trumpeted their own merits. He noted in particular a ubiquitous advertisement which showed an English mother urging her child to feel Free.

  When the taxi drew up at the number he had given, he found that his hotel had vanished, and in its place stood a seven-storey block of offices.

  “How long has this been here?” he asked the driver.

  “Oh, a few years now, guv. You must have been away a long time.”

  “Yes,” said Shrieve. “I have.”

  The taxi-driver took him to another street, full of hotels like the one which had been pulled down. Shrieve chose one at random, wondering what had happened to Mr and Mrs Abbot who had been so kind to him. They had retired, perhaps, to a little cottage, or a bungalow somewhere by the sea. Mr Abbot had always said he liked the sea. What did people do when they retired, when the house was pulled down and they had to go away?

  He washed and had lunch, tough lamb and watery vegetables, then lay down to catch up on the night’s sleep he had lost on the plane. He woke, much refreshed, at six. It was almost midsummer, and though he found it cool, the long evening was warm and pleasant. He rang his father and said he would be down the following evening, news which his father took with no sign of excitement. He walked for a while round the Bloomsbury squares, deploring the functional ugliness of the parking meters, a horrible innovation, then strolled down towards Charing Cross Road and Trafalgar Square. He would eat in Soho, he decided, but first he would wander along wide Whitehall and look at the monuments which sustained his existence: the Horse Guards, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey.

  By now the great press of evening traffic had eased and the red double-decker buses moved in unhampered grandeur past Charles I, past the Cenotaph, to Parliament Square. He watched them with the same schoolboy’s excitement as on his first eight-year-old visit to London. But with the excitement was mingled awe: awe for the small area of monuments and houses and offices in which the shaping decisions of so many centuries had been made; awe, too, for those decisions themselves and all they had meant; awe, above all, for the spirit and purpose of the nation here expressed in stone and glass and wood. Over there in the House of Commons had been debated the principles on which England had flourished; behind stood the great departments of government where those principles had been, were still being, translated into action. And here was he, one of the men the decisions finally reached, thousands of miles away, doing their duty beneath a different sun.

  Big Ben chimed the half hour and he caught himself shivering with pleasure. The squat towers of the Abbey were magnificently strong above the skirling traffic. If the Empire had had a heart, a hub, it was here, church, Parliament and government surrounding a green square with statues. Shrieve found he was smiling uncontrollably, standing in the middle of the pavement, while the indifferent Londoners hurried past. He was exhilarated, he could hardly believe that he could be so glad to be back, to be home. For this was home, these buildings from which a nation throbbed its lifeblood across the globe, the ancient place of crowning, the modern centre of administration. Here, far more than in his father’s house, he felt an intimacy with brick and stone; to thoughts of this grass, these trees, he turned in African moments of despondency.

  He crossed the road to the square. His heart full, he stroked the bark of a tree, then bent down and touched the English grass.

  3

  EDWARD GILCHRIST squatted over the small section of mosaic floor he had been excavating all afternoon, his mind running on hard labour.

  Bare-torsoed, lean, blue-jeaned Ed, one-time pop-idol and modern pianist, is serving his three-year term (for inciting to riot) on special government projects.
The kid whose tremolo made even the nurses faint in teenage dance-halls from coast to coast is learning the blues the hard way. Says Ed, “Blues, like jeans, can get to be too confining a form to work in, which is why I’m calling my forthcoming autobiography A La Recherche de Jean’s Blues, but, man, you can tell the fans the Romans sure built their villas square.” Ed, due out soon, his auburn hair crew-cut in prison fashion, has been boning up evenings on Roman history, his current stint being an archaeological gig in the woods near Cartersfield, site of State Jail 69. “It’s better than playing,” says deadpan Ed. “Using your hands, you get to have a real understanding of the labouring man. Like I’d always led a kid-glove-compartmentalised-type life till I came here. Now I realise that even a pick can swing.” “But Ed,” I said, “you always used your hands, you were a pianist, remember?” “Sure,” said Ed, still deadpan, “but tell the fans that this time I’ve really scaled the bottoms.” Just how low can you get? Who would have thought the smiling heart-throb would end up scraping Roman pavement instead of getting under your skin? But that’s how it goes, folks, that’s the way the teen ages.

  I must stop talking to myself in this ridiculous fake language, I’m an intelligent man. You, Edward Gilchrist, are an intelligent man. Your parents provided you with the finest education that an English boy can have. Few indeed are those privileged to pass from a leading public school to one of the best universities in the land. And what have you done with the opportunities created for you by the self-sacrifice and devotion of your parents? You have squandered your days in nihilistic and anarchical talk and your nights in so-called jazz music. You have spent but few hours in the great libraries of Oxford, and all too many in the disreputable coffee bars of the city and in the unsavoury furnished rooms of your unkempt friends. What arts, what letters, what society, what, above all, philosophy have you taken as your model? As for the arts, the answer is clear: you have chosen to imitate the music of illiterate negroes. As for letters, you have studied the history of your country—with what diligence we shall learn in a few weeks. As for society, you have dwelt among the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and bearded. As for philosophy, you have sought only the destructive, the anti-social, the negative. You believe in nothing, you hold nothing dear; you seek for no god, you offer no comfort to others; you scorn the devil even as the devil has surely put you to scorn. You who once served as an officer of the Crown have become an empty shell, deifying your rootlessness, your desperate nothing.