The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  Though he considered this good news, Shrieve didn’t, he was sorry to say, feel that it affected the original problem he had raised, which was the containment of the Luagabu three days away from the capital.

  There would be a further provision, Filmer explained, fearing he had not made himself clear, which would guarantee the same continuity of British personnel in the independent Air Force. Three days by jeep would probably be an hour at most by jet fighter.

  Shrieve admitted that this news was encouraging.

  Filmer smiled. He looked surreptitiously at his watch and saw that it was time to bring the interview to a close. Shrieve would not, he was sure, forget that the Ngulu would continue, after independence, to enjoy full legal rights, including appeal to the Privy Council. This would prove an indubitable safeguard.

  Shrieve was about to say that he didn’t see quite how, when a buzzer (in fact pressed by Filmer’s own foot) rang on the desk.

  Filmer apologised for not being able to give Shrieve more time. He could assure him that the matter was being most carefully watched and that everything possible would be done. The Minister had asked him to say that he was most grateful to Shrieve for his memorandum, which he had found most interesting as well as useful. He, the Minister, had confessed to him, Filmer, that had it not been for his, Shrieve’s, memorandum, the seriousness of the Ngulu situation might easily have been underestimated. The Minister wished Filmer to express his warmest thanks to Shrieve.

  Shrieve had found himself looking at, then shaking, a large well-manicured hand. He thanked Filmer for sparing him so much of his time.

  Filmer said it had been a pleasure, and he hoped Shrieve would feel that their conversation had been constructive. He had himself found it most instructive.

  They took leave of each other with further protestations of a conventional nature, though afterwards Shrieve realised that Filmer had not actually risen from his desk. His handshake, however, had been manly, confidential and firm; it gave the appearance, like his clothes, of having been long and carefully studied.

  Outside, it was raining slightly. Shrieve shivered. He decided to walk a little to warm himself. The rain was only a drizzle, and it looked as though it might soon stop.

  The trouble with men like Filmer, he decided, heading for St James’s Park, was that they lived in a world where words were primitive signs again. Each adjective had a precise and limited meaning closed to anyone outside the inner circle. Phrases were used ritualistically, with invisible quotation marks round them to show they meant much more or much less than they appeared to mean. Without a long training in the subtleties of intonation one was like a tourist trying to translate with only a pocket dictionary. And then there was the business of how much time anyone was given, and whether he was shown to the door or not—it was all weighed, all significant. How did one discover the key to this symbolic world? He must ring James Weatherby and find out.

  Tomorrow, though, would do. First he had better try to puzzle out what Filmer had meant for himself. And besides, there was a lot on this evening. There was a meeting at Patrick Mallory’s, where he had to make a small speech to explain what it was all about. James was supposed to be coming, anyway. The meeting would probably go on till seven-thirty, say—it was called for six, but such gatherings always started slowly, with drinks and gossip and introductions while late arrivals entered with perfunctory apologies and complaints about the traffic. Of course, the traffic in London was terrible. And then, when he would be wholly exhausted, there would be Jumbo Maxwell to bore him till closing time.

  The rain suddenly became earnest and he sheltered under a tree with two nursemaids with prams. They made him think of his own childhood, of how little seemed changed for the English middle classes, despite their endless complaints. From what he had read, he had assumed that the nanny was only a cherished memory now, but here were two, in classic grey with hats of nannyish blue. He looked at the babies. One, not more than six months old, lay on its back, gender indeterminable, its blue eyes staring intently from a blotched red face at the toy dangling above it. Its hands waved slowly in tiny white mittens. The other was nearer eighteen months and recognisably female. She sat up, her hair a mass of golden curls, and crooned out at the rain. She leaned forward contentedly against the belt which restrained her, her hands in her lap. A baby’s hands, he thought, were hardly credible in their smallness and softness; they were like exact wax miniatures of adult hands.

  He thought of Tom, his half-savage son, of his miniscule fingers fiercely clutching his father’s thumb; babies were surprisingly strong. Poor Tom, thought Shrieve, he had no nanny, no pram, no one to push him about royal parks and shelter him under solemn English trees. He had only his mother, who carried him spreadeagled across her back, as all Ngulu women carried their babies, wrapped in a shawl. It must get very dull for a baby, seeing nothing but the back of his mother’s neck. Tom seemed to enjoy it, though. He was nearly two, and becoming quite a weight for Amy. He was beginning to stagger about on his chumpish little legs, wobbling from support to support, more determined each day. Dayu would stand some distance away and call him: he would look at her suspiciously. She would call again: he would look away. Then he would suddenly push off from whatever he was leaning against and plod unsteadily towards her, all concentration and effort. By the time Shrieve returned, Tom would probably be walking everywhere.

  Shrieve smiled to himself, thinking of his family. Kwuri regarded Tom somewhat ambiguously: a boy didn’t, after all, play with babies. But he was intrigued by his brother, and tried sometimes to teach him games that were far too advanced for him. Kwuri could count with stones and tried to teach Tom. Carefully holding up one stone, he would say “One”. Tom would reach for a stone, make an incomprehensible gurgle, then put it in his mouth.

  The nursemaids were regarding Shrieve with suspicion. Strange middle-aged men didn’t smile in that fond way while sheltering under trees unless they were up to no good. Shrieve had a sudden longing to write to Amy, to tell her he loved her and the children, to say what he was doing, that he would be home as soon as possible. But Amy couldn’t read, and he could hardly ask Mackenzie to tell her the things he wanted to say. What she would really like would be several affectionate pats on the bottom. The only real link between them was the postcards Shrieve sent every few days, brightly coloured ones of London sights and members of the royal family. Amy was very fond of pictures of the royal family.

  The shower pattered to a stop. Sighing, Shrieve went on his way, passing Buckingham Palace, of which he had already sent Amy several cards, and going through Belgravia towards his flat. The traffic was ominously thickening: it must be nearly five o’clock.

  Outside the flat he found Edward waiting.

  “Sorry I’m late. I got caught by a shower and stood under a tree with some nannies. I didn’t know they still existed.”

  “While there’s an England there will be nannies,” said Edward. “But a lot of them are foreign these days.”

  “Ah, the new internationalism.”

  “About time too,” said Edward. “Keeping Britain great is very dispiriting, like Canute with his waves.”

  “Canute?” said Shrieve. “Yes, perhaps.”

  Edward wondered how Shrieve in fact thought about England. Regretfully, probably.

  They began to discuss the meeting at Patrick Mallory’s. Edward had brought a notebook, his pen was full of ink; he was ready to be a real secretary or to pass for one, as required.

  “I don’t think, quite honestly,” said Shrieve, as they prepared to leave, “that this is going to be the slightest use.”

  “But people are always writing to The Times about things like this,” said Edward. “It’s almost obligatory.”

  “Precisely. It’s the done thing. And once it’s done, everyone forgets about it, the gesture has been made, concern has been expressed in the appropriate place, and we can all sit back and say with clear consciences that we’ve done what we can. No one’s going
to pay any attention whatever.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you saying that,” said Edward. “I mean, I’ve been wondering about it all along, but I thought you put quite a lot of stock by this letter.”

  “I did to begin with, I suppose. I think I believed in letters to The Times till I started talking to people here. Now I’m not so sure. There are so many letters with eminent signatures. Some people seem to make a profession of signing the damned things. I don’t think a letter will have any effect here. But people who live a long way from home take them seriously, you know. And that goes for African politicians, most certainly. We’re not going to affect anyone in England, but we might conceivably influence some of the delegates to the conference.”

  “Hmm,” said Edward. “Well, it’s better than nothing.”

  “I hope so,” said Shrieve. He looked gloomy.

  *

  Patrick and Lady Georgina Mallory lived in Mayfair. He was a tall, soft-spoken man whose bearing proclaimed his wartime service in the Guards. He had a long nose, slightly crooked from an enthusiastic rugger tackle at Eton, and grey eyes looked amusedly from beneath thin black eyebrows. His wife was almost as tall as her husband, with hair dyed grey to avoid the tiresomeness of ageing before the eyes of her friends. She chain-smoked cheap cigarettes, saying her tastebuds had been ruined for years. She had a hearty manner and a strong handshake, and she could pull herself straight and freeze those to whom she took a dislike with a disdain which her family had spent centuries in cultivating. Since she was tall, she had the air of looking, quite literally, down her nose at people.

  Shrieve was conscious of this look as his hand was gripped and he heard her saying, “At last, Mr Shrieve!” She might have been addressing a tardy delivery boy.

  The drawing-room was on the first floor, with windows opening on a balcony above Davies Street. Family portraits and indistinct, heavily framed landscapes, some of which bore the names of famous eighteenth-century English painters, hung round the walls, which were pale green. The room was dominated by two vast sofas, seating four or five medium-sized people and covered in a matching pale green. There was a small bureau covered with papers, and a great many invitation cards stood on the mantel of what looked like an Adam fireplace. Cards, too, were stuck haphazardly into the gilt moulding of the mirror above it.

  Withdrawing discreetly towards the fireplace, Edward observed that most of the cards were for charitable balls or ambassadorial extravaganzas. There were also invitations to weddings at St Margaret’s, Westminster, St Mark’s, North Audley Street, and Holy Trinity, Brompton. He had no time for further research, as Lady Georgina came sweeping towards him to ask if he would like a glass of sherry.

  Edward declined. To his chagrin, Lady Georgina merely smiled and swept off again without offering him anything else. He and Shrieve had been among the first to arrive. Only Dennis Moreland, a short, fat-cheeked man with thick black hair who ran a television series and wrote for one of the weeklies, had preceded them, and he was already apologising to Shrieve for having to leave in half an hour. Andrew Osborne, the lobby correspondent of one of the Sundays, arrived shortly afterwards. He had an incongruous R.A.F. moustache, one corner of which he pulled incessantly. Another to appear more or less on time was Charles Fraser, the U.N. correspondent of a respectable daily paper, whose coverage of the Suez adventure had pleased liberals almost as much as his unenthusiastic reports of the situations in half a dozen newly independent African countries had annoyed them. He had written, Shrieve considered, intelligently about the colony they were about to discuss: he had missed subtleties, of course, but for a man who had spent only three weeks in the country he was remarkably well informed. Bernard Clavering, the Labour M.P. whose articles on the future of socialism had been, some believed, responsible for one of the many recent dissensions within the party, arrived with Nicholas Sharpe, a journalist who had unsuccessfully stood against a Cabinet Minister at the last election, and a girl who worked on The Economist but whose name Shrieve did not catch.

  “I think,” said Mallory, going softly round his guests, “that we may as well start, don’t you? There’s only a couple more to come, and I expect some of us have dinner parties to attend.”

  Lady Georgina Mallory withdrew inconspicuously.

  When they had arranged themselves on the sofas and chairs, Mallory began by saying that they all knew roughly why they were there, and it wouldn’t take long. Hugh Shrieve would give a brief summary of the position, to make sure everyone was clear about it, and of course he’d be only too pleased to answer any questions. Briefly, the point of the meeting was to decide what were the best ways to bring pressure on the government to take the plight of the Ngulu—he stumbled slightly over the word and smiled charmingly at Shrieve—more seriously than seemed likely. It was agreed that a letter to The Times would be an obvious first step, but it was a question rather of what to do to follow it up. First, though, he would ask Hugh Shrieve to describe, as briefly as possible, the whole situation.

  Alarmed by the three references to brevity—did Mallory mean five minutes or twenty?—and by the unexpected announcement that they were to consider measures to follow the letter up, Shrieve rose self-consciously to his feet and leaned against the mantelpiece. He knew none of those present well, and some not at all. He began hesitantly to speak, repeating almost automatically what he had already said to so many people in London.

  While Shrieve spoke, Edward looked round the room. Mallory was sitting in a generous arm-chair between the two huge sofas, emphasising the general air of his presidency. Behind him, at the bureau, sat a young man of twenty-one or -two, rather good-looking, with black hair and long eyelashes over grey eyes. He was writing busily. Edward supposed that he must be Mallory’s secretary.

  After Shrieve had finished, there were a few questions. The girl from The Economist wanted to know what business interests were involved in the Ngulu territory.

  “None,” said Shrieve. “It’s a sort of reserve, you see. And it’s not good for anything very much except gentle farming. Which is why the Luagabu want it.”

  Clavering wanted to know what steps had been taken so far to approach the African delegates to the conference.

  “None that I know of. You see, it would hardly be for me to approach them in the colony—I’m a very minor figure in the Administration. Everyone from the Governor down would have been furious. Of course, the Governor may have been in contact with the political leaders about it—in fact he probably has been. But only to let them know the matter will be on the agenda, I expect. And the Africans aren’t due this end till next Monday.”

  “Make a note of that, Clive,” said Mallory to the young man at the bureau. “Does anyone know where they’ll be staying?”

  “Claridges,” suggested Dennis Moreland, and giggled.

  “We can find out easily enough. Clive—you’ll do that, will you?”

  “What are these Africans going to be like?” said Clavering. He was a burly man with glasses, and he kept running his hand over the back of his neck.

  “They will be educated,” said Shrieve. “They will also be unreasonable in public. In private they’ll probably be charming. I don’t know any of them very well personally—I’ve always been out in the bush. But those I have met always struck me as able and intelligent, and perfectly aware of the difficulties that will follow independence. They’re very anxious to preserve the dignity of their new sovereignty. Some of them have ambitions to become famous at the U.N.”

  “That seems exactly right,” said Charles Fraser. “Bloaku, who will certainly dominate the delegation, though the nominal leader will be Ukurua, of course, is a most sympathetic man. But he leads a fanatical party, which is why his public statements have to be intransigent. It’s inevitable, it seems. The violence of feeling that creates an independence party continues after independence has been promised.”

  “Any more questions?” said Mallory. “Right. Good. Now, Nicholas Sharpe has kindly drafted the lette
r to The Times for us. I’ve made one or two very small amendments—simply with an eye to capturing a couple of the more difficult signatures. Nicholas accepts them, by the way. I think I might as well read it out and see if there are any comments.”

  Shrieve and Edward had seen the letter before the meeting. It expressed anxiety about the future of a backward people in a distant part of a colony about to obtain its independence. The signatories hoped that the Ngulu would not suffer, either directly or indirectly, by the withdrawal of British rule. The letter was so phrased that conservatives would not be offended by any suggestion that independence was to be welcomed, nor liberals by the implication that it was not. It was so innocuous that Edward wondered whether even the most naïve of newly-independent African leaders would give it more than two seconds’ attention.

  When he had finished reading it, Mallory asked if anyone had any comments.

  “It’s a bit mild, isn’t it?” said Dennis Moreland.

  “Anyone else think that?” said Mallory.

  “Yes, I do,” said Andrew Osborne loudly. He tugged at his moustache. “I think that’s just a lot of hot air, frankly. But if you want all those wet people to sign, then all right.”

  “Well, that’s it, really, isn’t it?” said Mallory. He spread his hands as though to say there was no choice. “I’m afraid that if we’re to muster a decent list of names, we can’t be too outspoken. And you know it’s not a question of people being wet, Andrew. We can’t expect everyone to know as much as we do about the question. Naturally people don’t want to commit themselves to strong language unless they’re certain of the details. But they are prepared to sign a general statement of principle.”

  “Look,” said Osborne roughly. “That’s all very well for something controversial, but this issue is about as controversial as who won the last election.”

  Edward looked at him in surprise. The delicate malice of Osborne’s Sunday prose seemed to have no connection with this bluntness and aggression.