Just the Memory of Love

by Peter Rimmer

“Mary-Lou.”

  “Now we are getting to the truth.”

  “Anything you said about America they took as a personal affront.”

  “As Josephine said last night, you can’t judge a country by one person or even two. The woman was after you. They all want to mother you, Will.”

  “Not all of them. Shit, my knees are stiff. Sorry, Jo. That was a damn good party. Someone find me a box of matches and I’ll have the fire going. The ash will still be hot.”

  “You still want to go tobogganing?” said Randolph, who had just woken up. “Where’s Anna?”

  “Gone to make tea,” said Josephine, pulling back the last heavy curtain. “It’s so beautiful outside. Anna said she would look for some aspirins. Do you know it’s half-past ten in the morning? In the old days we would all have gone to church.”

  The thought of their father hung over the silence which was broken by Anna pulling back the partition with one hand while balancing the tray on the other.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she said. “Mother’s taken tea up to Dad and he’s quite rational but tired. Doesn’t want to get out of bed. Will really is a boy scout. Look at that fire.”

  “We’re all going tobogganing after breakfast,” he said, balancing a log in the flames. The tea when it came to him tasted better than all the wine the previous night. When he had finished his second cup of tea, he stood up. “Come on. Let’s go and find the toboggans. We’ll run the slope from the clifftop down into the dale. The girls can cook breakfast while we pull out the sledges.”

  “Don’t you want an aspirin before you go?” said Anna to the disappearing backs of the three brothers.

  Will had pushed back his empty breakfast plate. The racing red toboggan was outside the back door with the big yellow sledge that Red Langton had bought for his children before the war, and a fresh cup of tea was steaming at his elbow. He was as excited as a schoolboy. Josephine was seated next to him and all of them were dressed and ready for the snow.

  “I’m rejoining the committee of the anti-apartheid movement,” she said, now that he had finished his breakfast. “We are looking for donations, Will. Look, Zambia is liberated but South Africa is still in shackles. Can I put you down for a hundred thousand pounds?”

  “No.”

  “Fifty then.”

  “No,” said Will, not even turning to his sister.

  “Then ten thousand, for goodness’ sake?” said Josephine.

  “Not a penny.”

  “Are you telling me you support apartheid?”

  “No, Josephine, I don’t. But you are all looking at Africa through your eyes and you can’t really see what is going on. Did you know the World Council of Churches gave money to the terrorists in Rhodesia?”

  “Of course they did. For humanitarian purposes. Clothing. Medicine. That kind of thing.”

  “Which freed up the rest of the money to buy guns that will haunt Africa for generations. You can throw an AK-47 in the river mud, pull it out twenty years later and kill someone with it. In Rhodesia, what you call freedom fighters turned their guns on each other in their fight for power. I don’t want my money turned into guns by power-hungry despots, however rational they sound to you on their way to power. Yes, some of the people in the liberation movements are genuine. Many of them. You are, Josephine, I know that and never doubted it. It’s the wolves in the sheep’s clothing that worry me and they have no principles or the slightest concern about the men and women in the villages. Mobutu in Zaire is a ruthless dictator who uses white mercenaries with American backing to keep in power while he robs his people and accumulates money in Swiss banks. Ask our brother, Byron. He makes his fortune out of helping the likes of Mobutu. Maybe South Africa will be different. I hope so for the sake of the people, but in Africa there are far worse things than apartheid, however appalling that may sound. No, I’m going back to Africa to help the people who need to be helped, not a bunch of exiles who want to send their sons to Stanmore on money meant for the benefit of their people.”

  “But first we must get rid of apartheid.”

  “You do it your way, Josephine, and I’ll do it mine. That was a lovely breakfast. Thank you both for doing the cooking.”

  At twelve o’clock the sun came out and snow began to fall from the trees. The slope they had known all their lives served them well and after the second run down the hill – Randolph on the racing toboggan face down, the others sitting upright on the big yellow sledge – said there was no strength left in his body to walk back up the hill.

  “We should be with Mother,” said Josephine.

  “I want a long walk after my journey from America,” said Will. “You go on in.”

  The others walked away, pulling the sledges behind them, and left him alone. In front of him the apple orchard was bare and to his right, dollops of snow were sliding off the fir trees. He was due to leave for London early the following day to catch his flight to Johannesburg. The Zambian High Commission had told him to apply for an extension to his visitor’s permit in Lusaka. From Johannesburg he would fly to Salisbury and take the train to Victoria Falls. He had sent a cable to Horst Kannberg, his one-time partner, poste restant, please forward, and hoped the smallness of the town would deliver his message. With the political change in Rhodesia, the border was open again. All the telephone lines to Mongu had been out of order for months.

  He walked back up the hill towards the cliff and the memories were still as vivid as they had been twenty-three years before. The times with Lindsay Healy and Shelley Lane were unimportant in comparison, a passage of time.

  At the top of the cliff he looked down on Dancing Ledge. The swimming pool, cut from the natural rock for war refugees, was still down below and he could see the small cave so important in the years of his childhood. Snow was on the top of the rocks, but nearer the sea the spray had stopped the snow from collecting. The path down to the ledge was visible through the melting snow. The ritual of walking down to where they had met took him ten slow minutes and then he was looking into the dark water of the winter pool.

  For half an hour he stared into the empty water but nothing came up to the surface. All the images were in his mind. With a sigh, he turned and once again began the long journey back to Africa. It was how it had been those twenty-three years ago and nothing now was going to make it change. Maybe the girl had never existed.

  Part 7

  1981 to 1986

  1

  By September 1985, five and a half years after Horst Kannberg had taken him on the Zambezi Queen the Third upriver to Barotseland, the terrible drought was in its third year. It was the same year that Lloyd’s of London underwriters wrote insurance policies against computers becoming obsolete within five years, a crucial contract unknown to Byron Langton at the time. Will had found Hilary at forty-seven an old man and Mary his wife, who was ten years older, a walking skeleton. Even then there had been very little food. The mission was falling down; unpainted walls, the ground bare of grass with underfoot a quarter inch of dry dust. There was no glass in the schoolroom windows and someone had taken off the door for firewood. The only sign of trees were stumps too low to the ground to yield a sliver of firewood and too stubborn to yield up their roots. Soon after Will arrived, the Zambezi River dropped from lack of rain in Angola and even the low draught of the Zambezi Queen would have floundered on the rocks amid the white-water rapids. It had taken Will a year of argument and bribery to bring in his first shipment of medicine, powdered milk and protein-rich biscuits. The extension of his visitor’s permit had cost him one hundred pounds in English pound notes, the local party official scornful of kwachas, the Zambian currency, which most often halved in value by the week. The man had given Will a six months’ extension and every six months had come for his one hundred pounds. Everything brought into the country attracted import duty, whether a gift to the country or not, and twice whole consignments, paid for by Will against a letter of credit after leaving the British port, were lost on the new, Chine
se-built rail link from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. What had frustrated Will most was that no one seemed to care. The party had its sinecure in a one-party state and that was all that mattered. Finally Will had reverted to importing through the apartheid ports in South Africa, paying extra for the long-distance trucks from South Africa to deliver the lifeblood of the mission.

  Before leaving London, Will had redeemed his guns, the ones left to him by Hannes Potgieter, from the pawnshop and sold the Zambezi Bar on terms to the ex-Rhodesian manager. The years of independent rule had not been kind to Zambia.

  “What’s happened?” Will had asked Hilary Bains a week after his return.

  “Oh, it’s probably my fault as much as anyone’s.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You see that young girl over there with the baby tied to her back? She’s twelve years old and Mary delivered her baby. The baby is a little girl and in twelve years’ time, she will have a baby tied to her own back. By then her mother will have given birth to ten or eleven babies of which one may have died. In the old days, before the white man brought in his obstetrics, that young girl would have had a thirty per cent chance of dying in childbirth and if she had lived through the birth, her daughter would have had a twenty per cent chance of reaching puberty. In the last five years we have had a ten per cent per annum increase in the population in my area of Barotseland which means that every seven years – seven years, Will, not seventy – the population is doubling but not the land or the water. With that kind of population explosion you soon don’t have enough renewable firewood, and what’s left of the game is pushed into the arid areas to die. They blame colonialism for the woes of Africa and they are right because charity like ours has maintained the population explosion while the administrative system of the West, which would have urbanised the majority of the people, has been replaced by ignorant corruption. Don’t blame them. There weren’t twenty blacks with degrees when the British handed them administration of the country. We are, to quote a phrase you used to use at school, farting against thunder which from a man of the cloth is an uncouth expression. You see, Will, they can’t have one thing without the other. They can’t have the benefits of our civilisation without the know-how to make the money to pay for it.”

  “So what’s going to happen?” asked Will.

  “Famine and war. War and famine. When there is too little for too many they fight over what’s left.”

  “Can we do anything about it?”

  “Yes. Bring back a government that maintains the rule of law and isn’t corrupt.”

  In the second week of Will’s return to Africa, the trackers had arrived at the run-down mission station. Sixpence conducted the interview in Lozi with Fourpence and Onepenny squatting in the dust, nodding their heads and grinning. There was still no grey in their curly heads or wispy beards. After ten minutes of polite generalities about the weather, the families of the trackers still left in their ancestral village, wives, children and grandchildren, Will cut the conversation short, extracting pained expressions from all three black faces. He had broken the African rules of etiquette.

  “What happened to the big bonus from the crocodile hunt?” There was complete silence outside the clinic under the one tree that had not been cut down for firewood. The smiles were wiped from their faces. Will knew the money generated for them by Laurie Hall would have kept their families in food for two generations. They would have gone back to their villages as rich men. “What happened to all that money?”

  “The cattle, they died. We were hunters. They sold us bad cattle. The wives and children of our friends were jealous. Our friends were jealous. Somehow the cattle died and then no one jealous. We went back to the base camp where Onepenny dream three nights you coming back. So we wait. We wait many years and each year Onepenny dream three nights in succession you come back. So we wait.”

  “The house was washed away.”

  “Hut of Baas Hall not swept away. We build our huts by the river and wait for you to return.”

  “And if I had not returned?” snapped Will.

  “We would have waited. To dream the same dream for three nights certain one day you return. Now you return. Now you give us jobs and tourists come back and we have money to send back to our families.”

  “There will never be any more tourists.”

  “Why?” asked Sixpence.

  “The airport at Mongu is now tribal grazing and tribal fields. No planes can land.”

  “They can come up by road.”

  “The roads have been washed away, and no one has done any repairs since the British resident left Mongu at independence.”

  “Then they come up by boat like you,” said Sixpence, showing a full display of rotten teeth.

  “The river is dropping. No rain. A heavy boat with supplies and tourists will not get through the rapids. You can have a job on the mission to pay for your food. I am not going back to base camp.”

  “What are you doing here? Why you come back?”

  “To build a school. To build a hospital. To help the poor people.”

  “Why?” asked Sixpence. “You are a hunter. We are trackers. That is our job.”

  After a week the trackers had come to him where he was trying to help Mary in the clinic saying, “We are going back to the base camp to wait for you. We are trackers. Women clean floors.”

  “I’m not coming back,” said Will patiently. “Can’t you see?”

  “You will,” said Sixpence and all three of them shook Will’s hand in the African tribal handshake. They were smiling happily. With a blanket each over their shoulders, barefoot, with no food, they set off to cut the Zambezi and make the long walk along the banks of the river to base camp. They had left their rifles hidden in the rondavel built by Laurie Hall yet there was no ammunition left for the guns.

  “What do I do with them?” Will asked Mary.

  “There is always time in Africa. Time is eternal. They talk to God through their ancestors. They become Christians because they believe Christ will sit them nearer to God in heaven. Time is eternal. These people have always looked upwards to the heavens, not in words to their own selfishness. They believe their ancestors live forever and one day they will become an ancestor to help their children on earth, to speak to their grandchildren in dreams. We Europeans have become so insular we only think of ourselves and our own comfort. Only here, in terrible hardship, can we find our God. They will wait for you, Will Langton, and there is nothing you can do about it. You became part of their lives. Maybe that is the real reason you came back to Africa.”

  “I came back to help the mission, to return the money that came out of Africa. I am not responsible for the trackers. They had money from us to go back to their village.”

  “They lost it. To them, you are still responsible for their mortal lives.”

  “How can a man be permanently responsible for another man?”

  “They asked Queen Victoria for protection. The men in Lusaka took away British protection from Barotseland without the Lozis’ consent. You gave the trackers protection and took it away without their consent.”

  “For God’s sake, Mary. We whites were kicked out. UNIP, the bloody party, would not renew my concession. They even kicked out the chief. They can’t kick us out and still want protection. Shit, this conversation is just bloody silly. I’m going to give them a proper school and a hospital. What more can I bloody do?”

  “Will, please don’t swear on the mission.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary. I’m just a little frustrated. I can’t seem to get anything done here. All that money in England to spend and nothing happening. I never knew how difficult it would be to give away my money to people who really need it.”

  “Maybe you should ask God.”

  “Mary, you know I’m not religious.”

  “If you lose your God, you lose everything. Find your God again, Will.”

  Penny Bains, the surviving child of Hilary and Mary, came to Will three days
after the trackers had left the mission.

  “Can I talk to you?” said Penny.

  “Of course you can.”

  “I don’t have many people to talk to in English. How do I apply for a British passport?”

  “Well, I suppose you go to the British High Commission in Lusaka and fill in some forms. Birth certificate. Parents’ birth certificates. Their marriage certificate. Why, Penny?”

  “I know it will be terrible for Mother and Father but they can’t go on holding me here just because Malcolm died of malaria when he was twelve years old. I’m nineteen now and need a life. Working sunup to sundown with little appreciation and no pay is not my idea of fun. Mum and Dad decided themselves they wanted to be missionaries, not me. I’ve never even been to school. What I know, and that isn’t very much, I learnt through correspondence courses and the few hours my parents could put aside for my education. Zambia is finished. They are wasting their time. The powers that be don’t even want us here. Just look at the place.”

  “That’s why I am going to build a new school and a hospital.”

  “No one will appreciate it and if they do the party will take the credit. I want to get out of Africa and never have to see the place for the rest of my life. Please help me? I don’t have a passport or a ngwee to my name, and I’m screaming bored with being taken for granted. If my parents want to find God by working all day and half the night for other people, I don’t. I want to have some fun. Is that so wrong in life? … What did you do at my age?”

  “I came to Africa.”

  “Then it was British. This is a mess and will stay a mess whatever we do on the mission.”

  “I’ll talk to your parents.”

  “Oh, I’ve tried that. Everything comes back to God. Frankly, I don’t think there is a God, just a system invented by man to make people like my parents throw away their lives to make poor people healthy enough to have a miserable life in poverty and behave themselves while they are suffering for fear of burning in hell. One of the books I’ve been reading says that people should mind their own business. These people lived far better lives before the British arrived. Sure, they died young but isn’t it better for a few to die young and happy than the whole damn lot live in misery? They are multiplying like flies all because of us. We’ve interfered with the balance of nature.”