The White Father

by Julian Mitchell

  Deeply troubled, he hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him—home? To James Weatherby’s flat, his possible love-nest. And then he remembered that James Weatherby had failed to attend Mallory’s gathering. He hoped that nothing had happened to make James withdraw his support. Everything was suddenly very gloomy.

  8

  EDWARD, in academic dress, his mortar-board beneath his arm, saw Jackie Harmer across the hall of the Examination Schools and looked away. Sure he liked her, sure she was a great kid, but not, thank you, just now. Besides, she looked silly with her blonde hair tucked away as though it was shameful, peeping like the frill of a petticoat from under that grotesque black pointed academic hat. Let’s hope she hasn’t seen me, I can’t, this morning, assemble the easy jauntiness we use for a——

  “Hello, Edward.”

  “Jackie! Hello!”

  She came up to his shoulder; she looked scared. Well, he was scared, too. He wished the viva was over, that was all. So you get a first, so you get a second, what’s that to do with living, kid? Quite a lot, actually.

  He pulled himself together. “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste, Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” said Jackie. Like Edward, she hoped for a good degree. In the jazz crowd among which they both moved, they had been speculated about, smiled knowingly at. They had smiled knowingly back without becoming more than just good friends.

  “Been reading your notes?” said Edward.

  “Oh good heavens, of course not. I mean, I’ve tried. But they might be about biochemistry for all the attention I can focus. I’ve been moping round the house, trying to avoid my mother. We keep meeting, though. On the stairs and places. She gives me a ghastly smile and says ‘What are you going to do now, Jackie?’ That now is like the knell of doom.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Exactly.”

  “And I haven’t a clue, of course. I suppose I shall have to teach or something. Or be a journalist, like Judy. I’m not quick like her, though. I’m such a plodder. I get the facts right, I mean, but I’d never be first with the news.”

  “I’ve been staying with Pete and Judy,” said Edward. “We’ve been playing some jazz around and about. Pete hopes to have his club going soon, with a real combo. God knows where he’s going to get the money, though.”

  “Perhaps I could be a waitress. A hostess. I could dance with the clients.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be quite that kind of club.”

  “I’d do anything to get away from my mother,” she said.

  A bell rang, and a man began to read out instructions. Those for History vivas had to go upstairs. As they walked along Edward tried to analyse his feelings, and decided he didn’t have any. So if I get a first, that’s a snook at getting a job, and if I don’t, that’s a cockup for me, but hell, I haven’t a chance. A couple of years of eighteenth century electioneering would be like marking time on cotton wool. Soft, but getting nowhere. What do I want, for Christ’s sake? What, Edward Gilchrist, do you want? Oh, shut up.

  The candidates assembled and a don called their names. Then he read out the times at which they would be wanted. The times were crucial: congratulatory firsts would be invited in at the beginning, then the straightforward degrees, then the doubtful ones, who’d get the full treatment.

  “Gilchrist, ten o’clock.”

  For a moment he wasn’t sure what it meant, then it became all too clear. A formal viva, not a first. A dreary, definite, shameful, pointless, boring and unalterable formal second. Or third.

  Jackie stiffened beside him and said, “Oh God.” She was to appear at eleven-thirty. That meant a long viva, a chance, at least, of a first.

  “Congratulations,” said Edward, hollowly.

  She was very pale. “What about you?”

  “Formal.”

  “It may be a first.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Jackie,” he said

  She looked briefly at him, then away. “I’m going for a walk. I can’t possibly sit here for two hours, I’d go mad.”

  “Have a coffee with me later,” said Edward. “The Rawlinson, ten-fifteen?”

  “All right.” She seemed to have become even smaller. “Good luck,” she said, without looking at him. Then she went out.

  “D’you think we’re allowed to smoke?” said a man.

  “Christ, no,” said a girl. She was sitting down, dangling her long black-stockinged legs. “This is holy ground.”

  Most of the candidates wandered away. Edward went to the window and leaned out. A sprinkler was whirling busily over the grass of a small courtyard, and a gardener was carefully trimming the edges of the borders. The sun was warm on the yellow stone.

  Christ and damn and shit, if I’d worked, if I’d only worked. I’m afraid, Gilchrist, you have no one to blame but yourself. The purpose of a university is to spread learning, but it cannot be expected to force learning upon the students. You spent, I believe, a certain amount of time in the libraries; you are not, I’m told, a fool. But intelligence alone has never sufficed here, and without hard work, good, honest, hard work, no one can obtain the highest honours. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed, Gilchrist. I only hope that the lesson you have learned today will not quickly be forgotten. I pray that you will not make the same mistakes as you go out to attempt the Honours School of Life.

  Ha, ha.

  Edward’s feet ached, and he went and sat down. The previous morning he had gone to Patrick Mallory’s at eleven where he had been greeted by the young man, whose name, it appeared, was Clive Carver. The letters were all ready for him to deliver.

  “I don’t know why Patrick makes all this fuss,” Carver had said. “Anyone would think the Post Office was on strike. But he likes the idea of personal delivery. He’s full of quirks like that.”

  Edward had spent the entire day delivering fourteen letters (three had been entrusted to the G.P.O., one to Clavering, and Shrieve was taking the other two with him to his anthropological lecture). It had been like one of those initiative tests devised by the Army: he had been to Kensington, Chelsea, Westminster, St John’s Wood, Hampstead, Maida Vale (he had often wondered where it was), Lambeth, Bloomsbury and Chiswick. Edward had read somewhere that two undergraduates claimed to have called at every station on the underground system in under eighteen hours. He didn’t see how they could possibly have done it.

  In the evening he had worked with Pete on the song for next Tuesday’s audition. The song seemed pretty good, but it would really need an invisible choir in the background. Perhaps they kept one somewhere in the Brachs Building for emergencies. Pete had agreed to accompany him—he could play an adequate piano. But Edward was to play himself, too, and perhaps even play and sing, if they’d let him. He hadn’t met Fred Martin, but he imagined him as small and Jewish, in shirt-sleeves and heavy rims, chewing on a cigar. Edward had seen a great many back-stage musicals.

  His name was called, and he got up feeling a sudden shiver of excitement. Perhaps after all he was going to be congratulated on the most dazzling first of the decade.

  He was invited to sit in front of a long table, round three sides of which were his examiners. They were introduced, and he nodded briefly at each one. The chairman then made a pleasant comment on his European History paper, a fierce-looking lady asked him three questions about the Parliaments of Elizabeth the First, a man with a stammer asked him about his essay in the General Paper on Rubens, and then the chairman was thanking him for coming and asking him to invite Mr Gilman to step in, please.

  When he got to the Rawlinson, Jackie was already there, an empty cup of coffee before her. It was a big, dim café, the haunt of their student days, and now, in vacation, it seemed as vastly empty as a railway station at midnight.

  “How did it go?”

  “It went. One of them asked me if I liked Rubens.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sort of. But it hasn’t got much to do with history, has it?”

  He we
nt and bought two coffees. The Rawlinson’s brew was notoriously bad and unreasonably expensive, but there was a fat woman behind the cash register who knew him well and said, “Fancy seeing you.” When he got back to Jackie’s table he saw that there was, as usual, a fine sand of cigarette ash over the sugar-bowl. It was, somehow, comforting.

  “It’s no use looking panicky like that,” he said as he sat down, meaning to be kind, “they won’t be impressed. And anyway, they won’t eat you. They’re people we may even have met at parties, you know. I mean, they’re human.”

  “So,” said Jackie, “am I.”

  “Sure, sure. Will you stay on and do research if you get a first?”

  “Yes. I think I really do have an academic sort of mind. Slow but methodical, you know. What are you going to do?”

  “God knows. Play with Pete for a bit, I suppose. He seems to want me. But he won’t always want me. I dare say I’ll be bowler-hatted in a couple of months.”

  Jackie looked at him, puzzled by the self-contempt in his voice. “You’re funny, Edward,” she said. “You could be good at so many things, but you never seem to try.” She blushed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that, it just seemed to come out by itself.”

  “It’s all right. It’s rather what I think myself.”

  “Why don’t you ever try?”

  “I’m frightened I might succeed, I expect.”

  She pulled her gown about her shoulders, thinking Edward was odd, very odd. The oddness had been fine while they were undergraduates, stimulating, edgy, creative; but now they were suddenly grown up, as it were, and it seemed the opposite—dampening, dull, destructive. She looked at him as he fidgeted over his coffee. She wondered suddenly how much, if at all, she liked him.

  “Let’s walk through Christ Church meadow,” he said. “It’ll steady your nerves.”

  “I’ve been there already.”

  “Along Addison’s Walk, then. Mesopotamia. Whatever that place behind Magdalen’s called.”

  “All right. But you’ll have to ask me questions.”

  “Certainly not. I’ll tell you about the Ngulu.”

  She was pushing some notes into her bag and looked up in surprise. “About the who?”

  “I’ll tell you as we walk along.”

  *

  Shrieve had decided not to take the early train with Edward, but to hire a car so that he could drive to his father’s that evening to spend the week-end. He had only spent a few days with his father so far, and a week-end away from London might do him some good. He found himself fretting in Weatherby’s small flat, and though the weather was still not what he considered warm, London was stuffy. He had occasional headaches and felt constipated. He wanted to get away.

  He drove through Henley, enjoying the summer woods and the river glinting in the sun. There were tents along the bank: it must be nearly regatta time. Hearty Englishmen would put on bright pink ties. Bright pink wasn’t the right colour for hearty Englishmen, but it revealed the basic clothes fetichism of Europeans which was so notably lacking among the Ngulu. The Ngulu regarded clothes as inessential. The women’s skirts were functional, increasing the area of lap for holding babies, shelling beans and other feminine activity. The men’s loincloths were skimpy in the extreme; they hadn’t even discovered the usefulness of shields for warfare.

  That morning Shrieve had had a letter from Mackenzie, reporting that all seemed well. Amy sent her love, an old man had died, another girl had been born. There was, however, one worrying thing. Mackenzie had written that he supposed it was usual for the Ngulu to hang up the skins of the calves they killed, but at the moment one was stinking rather. The Luagabu, he had concluded, were getting over-excited about the coming independence. Bloaku had been down and they’d had a big feast and a lot of them had got drunk. Nothing serious, though, yet.

  The Ngulu always hung up their calf-skins, and they always stank. But they had been up before Shrieve left and should not be stinking still. The smell had virtually ceased before his departure, in fact. Could they have killed another? That would be unprecedented and bad. Waite had reported the killing of a bull before the first world war which had been followed by some disaffection and talk about being bewitched. Shrieve hoped that nothing like that was happening now. Mackenzie, visiting them once a week, would never be able to judge the feeling of the chiefs. They had been stolid in accepting Shrieve’s departure, but with their sense of time he might just as well not exist by now. They probably thought he was dead and never going to return. Yet they had always welcomed him profusely after previous absences.

  The danger was that, thinking he was dead, they might believe that all they were going to get from the white man from now on was Mackenzie once a week. If they believed that, they might easily panic. One of them might set himself up as a witch doctor (one had done so at the time of the trouble Waite had reported), as though there was, after all, some continuity of superstition which remained invisible to the white men who lived among them. Waite had said that his witch doctor hadn’t done much, just sat glumly in his hut making everyone else feel glum too. The Ngulu had shaken their heads a lot and refused to work, and they’d complained that nothing would go right till the spirit which was bewitching them went away. The witch doctor had explained that he had been the first to detect the evil spirit, so it was up to him to get rid of it. The only method he could think of was to sit still and wait for it to get fed up and go away of its own accord. Waite had been unable to do anything. The bewitchment had gone on for three weeks, and ended without any ritual or ceremony. The witch doctor said that the spirit had gone away now, and so he had gone back to being an ordinary Ngulu. The bull had been killed a fortnight before it all started, no one claiming to know how or by whom.

  Nothing similar had happened since, and it was assumed that the Ngulu must then have been still close enough to their previous unprotected existence to remember, at least occasionally, some of their ancient rituals. But it was only a hypothesis. Shrieve hoped that nothing like that was going to happen again. It was most probable that a calf had simply died.

  He worried on at the matter, gradually pushing it to the back of his mind. The letters for the professors of anthropology were in his case, with the lecture he was to deliver. The lecture was on the Ngulu attitude to death, and it wouldn’t last very long, because the Ngulu attitude to death was so very simple. They took the corpse out of the village and threw stones at it for a morning, to drive out any spirit who might have crept in, then they wrapped what remained in rushes and carried it down to the river. They dug a hole by the bank, dumped the body in, threw more stones at the grave till it was covered (to keep the dead man’s ghost from climbing out and eating the cattle), then went home singing. It was possible, of course, that the death of the old man whom Mackenzie had mentioned might have led to something: perhaps the Ngulu thought his ghost had got out and eaten the calf. That would be very upsetting for them.

  Shrieve wondered how his paper would be received. He was to address a sub-section of a large conference held in several empty Oxford Colleges by something called the Congress for Underdeveloped Nations and Territories. It didn’t sound quite English—conference would have been the English word, Shrieve felt. It was probably one of those international organisations. The prospectus announced distinguished men from all over the world, mostly anthropologists, but also some economists, sociologists and “political experts”. The theme of the conference was “The Underdeveloped Countries and the West”—a theme wide enough to embrace absolutely everything. Shrieve had noticed with relief that his study-group consisted almost entirely of anthropologists. He hoped it would prove to be one of those encyclopaedic symposia in which people compared notes on their researches.

  Shrieve had spent two years at Jesus before the war and not returned afterwards. (His academic status, he supposed, was doubtful.) He had met James Weatherby his first night in Hall, and they’d stayed friends ever since. Though for the moment, Shrieve thought g
rimly, their friendship seemed slightly cool. When he had rung James to ask why he hadn’t been at Mallory’s meeting, James had replied airily that he was terribly sorry, pressure of work and all that, and he was sure he wasn’t missed. And of course Shrieve did understand, didn’t he, that as a civil servant it was a little ticklish for him to be involved in that sort of thing. He did hope Shrieve hadn’t minded. Had the interview with Filmer gone well?

  “I’m really not sure, James,” Shrieve had said.

  “Oh, why not? I saw Filmer this morning and he said he’d much enjoyed talking to you and that you’d seemed satisfied.”

  “He did, did he? I don’t know whether to be satisfied or not, James, to be honest. I’d like to talk to you about it. Are you free for half an hour this evening?”

  Weatherby had prevaricated. Shrieve suddenly suspected that the reason he hadn’t come to the meeting was that he’d used it as an excuse to go and see the mystery woman who had rung when Shrieve had first arrived in the flat. (She hadn’t rung again.) He was prevaricating now, perhaps, because he was going to see her tonight, too. Everyone, Shrieve thought as he came into Oxford, seemed to be living a double life. Perhaps people were right, and he’d become naive from living too long in Africa. But James and Jumbo were certainly disabusing him about modern English morals. If there was really a woman in James’s life, that was, and he wasn’t quietly backing out of the Ngulu problem.

  Lunch was in a College new to Shrieve, Nuffield, a monstrously ugly huddle of mock-Cotswold almshouses with a tower with a spire and no room in the car park. The porter directed him across a quadrangle to a long, low room where people were talking and reading papers. In term-time it was, presumably, the Common Room. He looked anxiously round, seeing no one he knew.