by Peter Rimmer
Will hung his feet over the bed. First, he would make himself a cup of tea and then he would go up to the house and tell Hilary Bains what had been happening in the family. Maybe he would have a better insight into the years of his own life, of Byron’s and Jo’s, Randolph’s, his brothers and sister. They say with age grows wisdom, he told himself, but Will was not sure. Man seemed never to be getting anywhere if you discounted his fancy cars and all that modern science provided, thrusting him skyward to a concrete home. Hilary was right. Everything changed but everything stayed the same… When he had drunk his tea he would go up and ask Hilary again about his God. The man must still believe in his God? Hilary was a missionary. Hilary was a priest… He put on his underpants and a pair of shorts. A couple of wild geese, spur-winged geese, flew low, rushing over the flowing water.
The river captain was still asleep and the two black crewmen had taken the small motorboat they carried to go fishing. He had heard them go and even understood a little of what they had said, the language of the Lozi, the indigenous people of Barotseland, still echoing in the back of his mind from somewhere in his distant past. Will climbed up to the deck above, an open platform with an open, canvas roof, camp chairs and wooden tables bolted to the floor to stop theft in port as much as going overboard in the rapids. In the front was a bar with an insulated metal cylinder for hot water which he checked before lighting the gas. The sweet smell of the morning river, moisture swirling half a metre above the flow like lace, brought more memories from the past, good memories that drifted him on to a sharp jab of bittersweet pain.
He could still hear the old riverboat captain snoring down below and when the water boiled again – the crew had made theirs earlier – he dropped a teabag in a mug and made his morning tea. There was no sound or movement from the brooding house on the high bank of the river, not even sight of the dog. Old noises from the bush tickled his memory, asking him to give them names, and when the tea was cool enough he drank and it tasted good, better than the whisky. Memories as clear as the morning sun… Trying to do another man a favour was a foolish thing. No one knew the real thoughts of another person, no matter how much they spoke. That which he thought he wanted from the last of his life, did Hilary? Peace and serenity, were they not above material comfort? The older he had grown, the less he had understood… There was not a sound of man, the motorboat long silent, the crewmen fishing for river bream, probably content with their world. Maybe he needed Hilary more than Hilary needed him, his carefully thought-out altruism really selfishness. Was he more probably the lonely man in a sea of people, family and friends? Was he looking back to Hilary for his youth that had gone? Even his own mind changed with the constant flow of his thoughts. What had been the point of it all, or did there have to be a point, just the struggling pace of the ages?
“Water hot?” He had not even noticed the captain cease his snoring, let alone get up and mount the ladder.
“Yes, oh yes. Just boiled… Morning to you… Sleep well?… Lovely morning.” Loudly, Will ran out of trivialities. The old captain was spare with words, probably never concerned himself with polite conversation. “We’ll be here a few days if it’s all right by you?”
“Your friend all right?… Suits me. You pay by the day… Nice place he’s got,” and the old, craggy man with the captain’s cap firmly on his head nodded up the bank. He said it in a tone that indicated there were few places like that in the world.
“Bloody crew buggered off. No sweat. Fish for breakfast. Those two are good, man. Very good… Wouldn’t mind parking the old girl here forever.”
His name was Cookson, second-generation African. Father had come up with the pioneer column as a kid. Ox-wagons. With Selous and Johnson. He had told some of his story on the journey upriver, how he had taken a load of maize meal upriver in the ’92 drought, risking his boat, heavy in the water with food for the starving, sacks of maize stacked everywhere, and when he got where he was going the authorities wanted him to pay for the unloading so the old man had gone back fully loaded and some of the people died of starvation. The African thorns were not all on the trees. Will wondered how much British aid reached further than the new political elite, yesterday’s politically correct, yesterday’s great men of Africa. Will watched the captain make his tea and sit down to watch the river and say not a word. Half a tree, mostly submerged, floated down in midstream and from the bank a voice began to sing, perfectly in time, and the tune was a hymn Will had first heard at his public school, the same school Hilary had attended, paid for by the Langtons. Searching the bank between the trees where the sun was seeking out the inner sanctum, Will made out the reed-walled, roofless enclosure, the shower bucket on high, the white hair of Hilary, and sensed the perfect happiness of his friend enjoying his shower in the African morning, the yellow sunrays that bathed a man in light not sweat, a welcome sun to be enjoyed and sung to in praise of God or the joy of living. Will got up and took himself down the ladder, across the rickety jetty and up the steep steps to the thatched house. The old dog stood and watched him, wagging his tail. It was a very beautiful day.
Both chairs were on the veranda, waiting for a guest, but Will stood with the dog, enjoying the flowing majesty of the Zambezi River down below. He could see Captain Cookson smoking a pipe and smell the harsh tobacco, raw on the sweet air of the unspoilt bush veld. The back door clanged. The plaintive call of a fish eagle echoed down the river.
“Good morning, old friend,” said Hilary, putting a tray of coffee on the veranda wall. “I trust you slept the good sleep of the just. May I offer you coffee from our own trees? I will show you around in a while.”
“You were cheerful under the shower.”
“I was. And so I should have been. What more could a man of my age want for? You see, William, before you tell me about the family and all the plans they have made for me again, with all the love and goodwill of wonderful people, I want to show you my life. When you left last night I sat and thought, something I am good at with all this solitary practice. Maybe some of us reach a point in life where we wish to be alone, free of having to interact pleasantly with our fellow man. I have done my work, they have told me that in no uncertain words. I have lost my own family twice and been away from my adopted family for forty years… How do you take your coffee, William? Better put in your own milk powder and sugar.”
The old dog sat down next to Hilary and closed its eyes, taking no more interest in the visitor.
“I am a lot more organised than you imagine. Behind the trees down there at the river is a windmill and pump I salvaged from the Carters. My word, I wonder where they are now? They ran cattle as well as growing tobacco, maize and a few coffee trees. The cattle needed water away from the river and the windmills pumped up water from boreholes. By the time my pupil agreed I could live in the old house, the tobacco farms had collapsed, the borehole pumps had stopped working for lack of a squirt of oil and everything else had gone to pot. The joke is, William, the new government are offering these farms to foreign owners as no one else is willing to work them, but that’s digressing. With the first expedition – and that it was, Livingstone would have been proud of us and envious of our four-wheel drives – I brought in cement among my provisions and some old friends from the mission who had some concern for their old teacher, something lacking in London among the new generation of theologians, we moved three windmills up here. One we put near the river to pump up to an intermediate concrete reservoir which I use as a swimming pool, the second to pump to a second reservoir and the third to pump up into my header tank and give me running water and waterborne sewerage. Voilà, we have luxury! The whole job took four days. I have a wood-burning stove for my cooking, paraffin for light and mostly I sleep when the sun goes down, or more rightly, lie in bed and think in the dark with the wonderful sounds of Africa all around me, and rise with the dawn… Please, help yourself to more coffee. I salvaged a few old coffee trees and run water to them from the overflow of the header tank which wat
ers the rest of my kitchen garden. Here I live with my memories and, largely, I am content, as content as man ever finds himself.”
“But are you happy on your own, Hilary?” asked Will Langton.
“The question is, would I be happier surrounded by a lot of people? You and I, William, would come to each other as strangers, for a while chewing over common memories, as I would with Jo, maybe Byron, even old stick-in-the-mud Randolph, but that would last a week. Don’t you lot worry about Hilary. When you have been through the little ups and downs of my life, this is paradise. Come on, put down your coffee and I will show you something.”
Walking back through the lounge, free of flying bats during the day, Hilary led the way through a door in the corner across from the big stone fireplace. It was the most beautiful room of the house and ran some sixty feet along the side away from the river and the damp swirls of early morning river mist. There were big windows along the length of the room and outside an equally long veranda which brought light into the library but stopped the rays of the sun damaging the books. Along the inside wall, from floor to ceiling, were row upon row of books with a sturdy iron grille, that slid open in sections, guarding every one of them.
“I regret to say my pupil was more interested in politics than books and when they took out the Carters’ furniture, they couldn’t get at the books and left them alone. I had been in the house with the Carters and knew where they kept the spare key… I may spend hours of my time with dead men but some of them talk more sense than the news magazines they bring me with my provisions. I have been making a great study of the evolution of man, from Darwin onwards, and it has disturbed my faith, William. Maybe we have not evolved long enough to understand whether man made God or God made man. Science can make a lot in the testaments smack of fiction, well-meaning fiction, but stories disguised to improve the acceptability of the religious. I think that is where a lot of the Church’s mumbo jumbo comes from. I wonder whether much written in the Bible was not for the good of the Church rather than the glory of God.”
Hilary walked down the row of books. “In all my life I could never absorb all the wisdom in these books… Yes, of course, there are times when I would like to discuss what I read with the likes of you but then again so few in your world have time to read, let alone think about what they read. They are prisoners of the television set, caught in its beam as I was last night by the beam of your light. The fear I have is millions watching the same picture, everybody impregnated with the same thoughts, unable to search for truth on their own. Come, let me show you round my estate. Then, when all that has been done, you shall tell me of your family. Maybe the good captain will join us for lunch, a vegetarian lunch as I have no meat at present. Come, good William Langton, white knight come to save me from the dark truths of Africa, let me show you my kingdom on earth and introduce you to some of my friends, all animal, but friends.”
They walked and talked for two hours, visiting the fowls, the well-fenced kitchen garden roofed with wire mesh, the flourishing coffee trees and tea bushes, the nests of numerous birds without disturbing them, a throwback to their boyhood, and the rest of the small territory of a few acres that made up the life of Hilary Bains. They sat on the edge of the improvised swimming pool, the early sun growing hot on their bodies.
“You might say swimming in the water you drink is unacceptable. Well, I share this water with a whole range of animals and birds. There are no crocodiles in my pool to drag the animals to their deaths. It’s a kind of friendly place for everyone, and well used… Randolph has had a good life, a normal life if there is such a thing, and I hope and pray the cancer is not too painful which I know it will be. There is something to being killed by a bullet,” and Hilary leant forward and stared into the water for a long time, Will leaving him alone with his memories.
“Take a wife,” Hilary said, still staring into the water. “You can have some children. People do anything in this day and age. Will, I appreciate you coming all the way to one of the remotest places on earth. You can rest at home with a clear conscience if that is what you want. I don’t think I wish to return to England and the reason has nothing to do with the lack of my own money or the acceptance of your charity once again.” Will tried to speak but Hilary raised his hand and went on, not permitting an interruption. “I don’t think I could condone the society in which you westerners live. I think the hypocrisy of social democracy would make me an unhappy man. Any society that bases itself on the ability to lie successfully is one that a simple old priest would prefer to leave alone.
“I am a hermit and have been these past few years. Not a recluse, a hermit, a man who has taken himself away to think. My hope was to find my God again who had been lost to me by the Church, by a Church that practised liberation theology and provided guns to kill men in the name of their righteousness. In the process, created monsters that then dined off their fellow humans’ flesh… I came to think, not for a brief moment of doubt, but for hours and days and weeks, and I hope I have made some sense of it. The most simple truth, the very pains of Christ’s teachings and those of Socrates, is that it is better to do that which is right as opposed to that which is wrong. I began the pursuit of this truth when I left the Church and I asked everyone I met with a grasp of my language, ‘Is it better to do that which is right as opposed to that which is wrong?’ expecting simple, quick answers. To my surprise, no one gave me an immediate answer and when they did the most common response was ‘Well, it depends’. And, when I probed, the real answer to my everlasting horror was ‘Everything is right if you can get away with it’. The crystal definition of right and wrong had gone from the world. No one knew, let alone practised, the difference between right and wrong and if we cannot start our lives on that most basic of premises, then we are doomed to destruction and there is no God in his mystical heaven who will be our salvation. The goodness of God lives in ourselves, and if the people have been brainwashed so they know not the difference between right and wrong, how can God be inside any one of them? We alone among all the animals on earth have the power to reason. We have the power of understanding the difference between right and wrong and without exercising that power, all the comforts of modern life will come to nothing.
“Ever since man came out of the forest, he has looked for a way of conducting his affairs in mutual benefit and he has looked for a god, and when he finds either he inflicts his great prize on everyone around him. And because of this, and because the premise on which he built his authority was false, he has failed. At my seminary, we were told to believe in every word of the Bible as gospel, the truth, not to be argued with but to be used as the pillar to spread the word of God. Believe in me with blind faith and everything I say. Believe that God made Heaven and earth in six days as we see it now. That is not true and we know it’s not true and we have proof that it’s not true. We came out of the primeval swamps, we evolved and are still evolving, and so now the theologians argue that God created the life that came from the primeval swamp. It is a fact that the matter, the original substance that makes up you and me, is as old as the universe, so they separate the body from the soul and tell us the soul is eternal… People just don’t know what to believe anymore, ecclesiastical or temporal. I mean, what is the point of being good if there is no spiritual reward? We might as well be bad and enjoy ourselves, proving that it’s better to be wrong than right. But right has its way and the bodily comforts turn to mental misery as they drink and drug and fornicate to enjoy themselves, having lost the harmony and peace in their souls.
“Your social democracy is based on the pillars of the majority always being right. Sadly, it’s the other way round. The majority are usually wrong when it comes to government as they will always vote for a man who will give them something for nothing and the man who warns them that they are borrowing from their great-grandchildren to pay for their unworked-for lifestyles is swept away. The great-grandchildren cannot vote. Hurray for democracy and its human right to do exactly what we
want. It is the human right of a man to spill his seed into the bottom of another man… It is against the laws of nature and therefore, if I believe in God, against the laws of God as God created nature, man and woman, and he did not create a third sex somewhere in the middle. But the gays have political clout in the new democracy and therefore they are right.
“In your society you are not governed by the best man, who will always govern in the way that is right as opposed to that which is wrong, you are governed by the most accomplished liar who has five years to reward himself, mainly his ego, before he is thrown out where he can think of some new angle to lie about to keep him and his cronies in power. One minute they are sweeping into power on the back of a gullible democracy by nationalising everything and then sweeping in to the same seat of power on the waves of privatisation and not one of the politicians could give a tinker’s cuss as to which one was right because it no longer matters provided you win. Would the Americans have gone to war with Nazi Germany if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain? Of course not. They would have watched happily while the German army crushed Russia and lived with Hitler as easily as they lived with Stalin. The European Union would have been in place in 1940 without the destruction of people and property. Do you think the Americans would have applied sanctions to Nazi Europe? Refused to do business with an all-powerful Europe still in control of its colonies? What American business, American trade, required was the Europeans to destroy each other and benevolent America to pick up the pieces. Even then the right and wrong of German National Socialism was not the issue, the issue was trade and the war goes on. We are quite capable of giving everyone on earth a comfortable, material life but we don’t. We can fly to the moon but we cannot govern ourselves any better than the city states of Ancient Greece. In most parts of the world we have retrogressed. It is the way of man, the make-up of the animal that often finds it difficult to live within himself, let alone within a community. The confusion is righteousness and the gullibility of people so easily manipulated by their own stupidity. We are sick in body and go to the best doctor our money can buy. We are sick for good government and yet we elect people without the slightest skill to perform the job in hand. Can you imagine if we ran a business with every decision subject to the whim of people unskilled in the art of management? No, there is too much in your new democracy, a word with as many meanings as love, which leaves my heart sick so I will stay and live in my heritage, with my books, and see if by chance I can make some sense out of the whole nonsense of life, the eternal and endless why, what was it for, what was it all about. There is nothing else for me. I am sure I will die in ignorance like the rest of mankind, but I won’t be fooled by a charlatan masquerading as a good man, clothed in the camouflage of social democracy. No, let me alone.”
