by Ann Harries
‘I could have met an ocean, if I’d wanted to.’ His voice floated up softly between the columns. ‘Many men of my stature like to gaze upon a vast sweep of ocean. I could have built a seaside mansion like the others. But I prefer to pour my money back into Africa, into my railway. My railway is like a spine, a backbone, pushing its way up through the African hinterland right now, through the swamps, round the great lakes, soon to reach the deserts. Yes, I like that image – I’m giving the continent backbone, Wills. But what were we speaking of? Houses by the sea. Today we visited the little hut I’ve bought in Muizenberg. I can breathe there. The sea air clears my lungs. Sometimes I fancy I might die there, Wills, on the rim of the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘Let us not speak of death,’ said I, for want of any other reply.
‘Do you know how long they gave me to live when I was twenty?’ he demanded.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Six months. Six months, would you believe. And that was – how long? – nearly thirty years ago.’ He snorted derisively. ‘But the big question is: how long d’ye think they’ll remember me after I’ve died? Ten years? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? I would reckon a thousand. That’s the only thing that makes the thought of early death endurable – that what I’ve done will live on long after me.’
‘Your achievements must make you very happy,’ I said uncomfortably.
He pulled his gaze from the mountain to turn the full force of his ravaged face upon me. ‘Happy? I, happy? When there is still so much to be done?’ He lifted an arm as if it were made of lead. ‘Look at this pulse of mine, Wills.’
He rolled back his cuff and thrust his inside wrist beneath my nose. ‘Just look at it jumping!’ And indeed I could see a great blue knot in his wrist throbbing at a highly irregular rate. I fingered my own pulse and began counting in private while he said: ‘That’s my heart, Wills. It’s letting me down. So I’m relying on your nightingales. The day after tomorrow they’ll be released. A great flock of British birds, ready to breed on an African mountain. It does me good just to think about it.’ He inhaled deeply on the stub of his cigarette. ‘But leave that aside for the moment. I’ve called you here to thank you personally for your quick thinking last night. Don’t suppose Challenger really meant to shoot anyone – a little the worse for Cognac, and felt he had to make a show, you know, since losing the arm. I expect those psychology chappies from Vienna think they could explain it all to us – lot of nonsense, really. Anyway, thanks, old chap!’ He raised his glass and presented me with one of those elastic smiles which contract into melancholy a moment later.
He fell silent as he attended to the lighting and inhaling of his tobacco. A light breeze had sprung up, making such tasks more difficult. I sipped my whisky and enjoyed the warm glow in my head. The entire garden was humming with cicadas.
‘Your friend. His case interests me a great deal.’
‘My friend? Oh, you mean Oscar?’
Oscar. The word flew out of the back of my throat and hung like a bat between the colonnade columns, stretching and folding its wings. Stretch and fold. Oscar. It occurred to me that no other English word filled the mouth so completely. My own name was a mere twitch of the lips by comparison.
He exhaled a dense cloud of tobacco smoke. ‘Above all, one must stand by one’s friends, Wills. That is my first rule in life. I think I said this to you yesterday.’ The silence that followed was so lengthy I thought he had finished with this topic. Just as I was searching for an excuse to take my leave, he heaved a great sigh and started again. ‘I am a man to whom friendship means a great deal. Almost as much as my railway. I’ve seen pictures of Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s – friend … He bears an uncanny resemblance to a close friend of mine – who died many years ago now. When he died I thought I would never recover. I suppose you could say I still grieve for him. Another drink, Wills?’
‘No thank you. Well, perhaps, yes. May I recharge your glass?’
We resettled. I could feel every muscle in my body slacken and grow warm. Never had I drunk so much whisky in one sitting – and on an empty stomach at that.
‘He was a sunny-tempered kind of chap. Charming. Gregarious. Everyone loved him, including the ladies. He made me laugh. He had cheek. Do you know what he gave me, Wills? He gave me youth! I made him my chief clerk of the mining company. I lived with him in a shack in Kimberley not much bigger than a native’s hut. And not much better equipped. Material things have never meant much to me. Friendship means far, far more.’ These observations caused him to ruminate privately once again, with many a sigh and grunt. I felt compelled to remind him of my presence.
‘Would this have been before you came to Oxford, or after?’
Without moving his head to acknowledge my question, he appeared to address the mountain, or a star which flashed above it before the sun had fully set. ‘After. I’d made my fortune, after a fashion, in diamonds. Then gold was discovered up on the Witwatersrand. Beginning of all the trouble. I was up there inspecting the prospects, about to buy a block of claims, when news came that he was dying. I dropped everything to be at his side. I’ve often thought, if I hadn’t done that, I could have been the richest man in the world. But all I could think of was, how am I going to go on living when he’s gone?’
The rocky texture of the mountain had softened in the evening gloom. A purple mist melted the sharp edges where grey cliff plummeted into green ravine. The breeze was persistent. Dead leaves scuttled about. I might have grown cold had not my body been hot with whisky.
‘His death was so unnecessary. He’d fallen off a horse and landed on a thorn bush two years earlier. Those damned thorns had poisoned his system, his bones, in some way, and eventually they killed him. At his funeral I wept like a woman. I wanted to die myself – jump into his grave, that sort of thing. It was a bad time.’
The violet sky was suddenly pierced with alien stars. I found myself searching for the Southern Cross.
‘Jameson saved me,’ said the Colossus. ‘He pulled me up from the abyss. He gave me back my life. Wonderful doctor, actually. Wonderful friend too. Everyone loves him. We call him Jimjam. Silly name, I know, but it’s a mark of our affection.’ His queer soprano voice trembled. ‘I like to think now, in these troubled days, that I have given him back his life.’
‘He has much to be grateful for,’ I said guardedly.
‘Friendship, Wills, friendship and loyalty. These are the chief emotions, in my book. And gratitude. He went in without my authority, Wills, but I’d placed him on the Transvaal border in readiness.’
‘He meant well.’
‘Some show of strength was necessary. It still is, God help us all. There are more Britons in Johannesburg than there are Boer men and women in the whole of the Boer Republic; they’re responsible for nine-tenths of the wealth in the land – but they’re not allowed to vote. Pity you don’t play bridge, Wills.’
‘I need an early night. I wish I had your energy.’
‘Your friend. Where is he now?’
‘He’s somewhere in the north of France.’
‘I hear he is a bankrupt.’
‘His financial state is not good. He has become dependent on hand-outs.’
‘That so?’ I could see a light kindling in the Colossus’ damp eyes. ‘I have a certain sympathy with the chap, though in many ways he is a loafer of the very worst kind. Tell you what, Wills.’
‘Yes?’ I could almost hear the thought processes whirring in that great, untidy head.
‘I’d be happy to send him a few hundred – anonymously, of course. Would he accept it, d’ye think?’
‘There would be no question of that,’ I smiled.
At this point Huxley appeared, looking animated. ‘Mr Selous is here, sir,’ he announced, not even trying to keep the awe out of his voice.
‘Selous!’ I exclaimed, for a foolish moment thinking he meant the ornithologist.
My host smiled. ‘Yes, he works for me now – has done for the last ten years o
r so – up in what used to be called Mashonaland. He helped me gain the land for Her Majesty’s Empire. Come to think of it, I nearly employed his brother to bring the songbirds out. But the brother wouldn’t hear of it. Bit of a hermit by all accounts. You bird people are a funny, nervous lot… ah, Selous! Good to see you!’
The man who strode down the verandah had not changed much from the personage I had seen in that candle-lit club nearly fifteen years ago. A slightly receding hairline and a grey beard were all that pointed to the passing of time, but his step had retained its spring and his figure was that of a young man’s. He showed little interest in me when introduced, until I said, perhaps in a spirit of pique, and strengthened by whisky: ‘I once attended a talk you gave many years ago.’
‘And where would that have been?’ His teeth flashed ivory against his sunburnt skin.
‘A little club off Regent Street. Doorkeeper by the name of Lizzie. You were telling a group of gentlemen about your exploits.’
Selous glanced at the Colossus, who was stubbing out a difficult cigarette.
‘My dear chap, I fear you’ve made a mistake. I’ve never spoken in a little club off Regent Street – you’re confusing me with someone else.’ He turned away.
I smiled. ‘Perhaps.’
After bidding good evening to the two gentlemen I finally rose from my chair. My knees were weakened by alcohol: I felt I was stepping into dark, open pits as I made my way across the chequered floor of the verandah. But as I opened the door which led back into the house, my host turned his head and called out: ‘See one of my secretaries about writing a cheque for that charity we were talking about. Make it five hundred.’
‘It will be much appreciated.’
If it is not too late.
Great Granary 1899
At night, the mountain withdraws its power over this house. During the day the hybrid architecture, the settler furniture cheek by rough jowl with Louis-Quinze, the gloomy panelling, flags, maps and Zimbabwe birds are somehow yoked together by the great sandstone mass that heaves itself out of the Great Granary gardens: when the sun sets, the house loses impetus. It becomes a museum, a collection of items and styles. It is a house on show.
I remember seeing one of those Perspective Boxes made by the Dutchman van Hoogstraten which were all the rage a couple of centuries ago: one peered through a peephole into a model of a typical Dutch house and saw within it all manner of three-dimensional objects: coats hanging from hooks, cat before fire, corridors leading off to other rooms. But when one gazed with both eyes through a glass window at the back of the box, one saw that all these signs of habitation existed only in two dimensions, being painted with cunning perspective half on to the walls, half on to the floor, and at carefully calculated angles. So does everything in this Great Granary present itself as authentic, but in truth lacks a vital dimension.
Nowhere is this more true than in the bedroom of the Colossus. The great bay window now opens out on to nothing but darkness. The photographs and flags on the walls could be hanging in a schoolroom or a museum. Gone is his private church with its cliffs and kloofs. It occurs to me that my host was at his happiest living in a shack in Kimberley with his beloved. I stare at the before-and-after pictures of Colesburg Kopje and think of Miss Schreiner, who has sent me hither. Downstairs the Colossus entertains a miscellany of people: I hear the shrill mew of his laugh rise above the babble of conversation and the clatter of dishes. It seems safe to have turned on the electric lights.
As I stretch my hand out to touch the frame of the paired pictures, I realise I am still slightly drunk after my earlier interview with my host. The euphoria attendant upon alcohol still hovers in my head and makes me fearless. I flick open the frame. There is the safe, with its combination lock encircled with numbers. I close my eyes and open up that part of my memory which holds sounds. Outside, the insects are screaming out a torrent of sound which interferes with the rhythm I am trying to revive in my head. Click clickety click click. It is the sound of my father’s safety lock which I hear first, a succession of minute clicks which returns to me now and then in my dreams and causes me to awaken drenched in icy sweat and retching horribly.
I feel the chill of my father’s presence in this room and even look around.
My hand holds the lock with infinite tenderness. My wrist seems scarcely to move as I turn it clockwise: click click. It does not matter what the numbers are: it is the pitch and spacing of the sounds which I need to recreate. And then anti-clockwise: deck deck deck.
I feel yet the presence of my father in this room. I cannot banish him, for he now exists outside my thought processes.
Before making the final infinitesimal clockwise rotation of my wrist, I hold my breath and listen for sounds in the corridor. I have of course taken the precaution of closing the Colossus’ door, in the unlikely event that someone will come upstairs during the meal. Nothing stirs outside the bedroom door, though outside the window the air is thick with the groans and ululations of insects, frogs and night-birds.
With the final click of the safety lock, the door swings open as I know it will. The egg, the pistol and the nightingale are lined up at the front of the safe. Behind, as before, the shapes of the Zimbabwe phallic memorabilia and four bundles of papers, tied with thin ribbon, are dimly discernible.
I feel a sudden interest in the contents of these bundles. (My father is watching over my shoulder, equally interested.) I extend my hand into the jaws of the safe and withdraw the first packet.
It contains love letters of a somewhat florid nature. At first I think they might be from Miss Schreiner herself, improbable as it is that the Colossus would hoard such missives, but a glance at the diminutised name at the end of the letters soon gives me reason to believe that they were written a long time ago by a male hand. My curiosity having been satisfied on this account, I feel no interest as to the contents of the letters, not being of a voyeuristic disposition – as far as other men’s affairs are concerned, at any rate.
The second, thicker, bundle contains yellowing letters that date back some thirty years. The Colossus’ mother appears to have written to him every week after his departure for South Africa in 1870, to join one of his brothers on a cotton farm in Natal. I read quickly through the first letter, full of maternal solicitude for his poor health, and outrage that his brother had not been at the quayside to meet him. ‘Herbert has no right to go diamond hunting when his young brother (you may think that seventeen years is an advanced age, but a loving mother knows better) arrives alone in a wild and foreign land. No matter that a neighbour welcomes you in his stead: I have written to Herbert to express my displeasure.’ And so on. ‘I do not like the sound of your Kaffirs. Can it really be true that they carry their snuff boxes in a hole bored through their ears? You complain about their smell: has no one introduced them to the expedient of soap and hot water?’
The mother’s letters continue for some three years, responding in anxious detail to her son’s move from cotton to diamonds, and describing the minutiae of life at the vicarage: my own mother could have learnt much from her exemplary behaviour towards the poor and needy among the parishioners (I hear a sigh from the dead vicar at my shoulder). The last letter, written in a weaker hand, implores him not to return to England on her account: ‘My attack was nothing like as bad as you have been told. You are in the middle of your ice-making and water-pumping schemes: pray do not abandon these for your mother who has many years of health in her yet.’ The ink is a little smudged, whether by a false move of the hand or a small spillage of liquid, it is impossible to tell.
Having flicked through this bundle, I pause again to take stock of the sounds outside the bedroom door. The murmur from below has not changed in volume or intensity; I hear no servants creeping about. I am now curiously relaxed, even though my father’s presence lingers on: it is a benign presence; perhaps it will melt away before long. In any case, I now feel resigned to the flow of fate, as I recognise that logical sequence plays n
o part in this inverted world.
The third bundle consists of a series of wills. The Colossus wrote his first will at the age of nineteen, to judge by the date at the foot of the document. In it he left all his worldly goods to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, to be used for no less grand a project than the recivilisation of the earth through the extension of the Empire. I find my eyebrows –and my father’s – have risen a little.
The second will, written in Oxford a few years later, had even loftier ambitions and included a Confession of Faith. The young Colossus proposed the formation of a secret society to bring the whole uncivilised world under British rule: ‘Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it.’ (His Oxford education seems to have failed in the matter of colons or full stops.) He wished the United States to be recovered and filled with proud Englishmen instead of low-class Irish and German emigrants. In fact, most of the world was to be conquered by this secret society: the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Crete, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan. (His ambitions clearly have not diminished with time.)
In the next will, drawn up some ten years later, the plans for the secret society are spelt out in greater detail. The Colossus’ entire fortune is to be used to establish this secret group which must be organised along the lines of the Jesuit constitution. The purpose of the society is the same as before: to extend the British Empire across the length and breadth of the entire planet, with great men working in high places, bonded together by their clandestine membership.
I can hear footsteps mounting the stairs that lead to the landing. The footsteps are buoyant, and trip up the stairs two at a time. The Colossus’ bedroom is some distance from the landing: there are corridors and fire doors that have to be negotiated. I turn off the bedroom light and use my torch to examine the remainder of the bundle.
