She shook her head uncertainly, a small gesture of disagreement. He glanced at her and his eyes brightened a little with surprise. ‘What do you mean? Don’t you agree?’ he asked.
She would rather not have spoken, in case she had misunderstood him. Estella had told her that sometimes she jumped in when she, Estella, had not finished what she was saying, but Michael waited eagerly for her to speak. ‘That isn’t true, you know that isn’t true. It isn’t only our little aches that move us . . . You can’t speak for everyone like that,’ she said. She spoke uncertainly, wondering if she was about to make a fool of herself. ‘Perhaps I did not understand what you meant. I thought you said that we only care about ourselves. But people give their lives to things, dedicate themselves. I don’t mean just the obvious things like freedom or God but to a way of living or to knowledge. How can you say that nothing moves us? Those are just words . . .’
‘I was building myself up nicely to a tragic mood,’ he said, smiling but looking miserable and depressed. ‘And now you’re spoiling it. You’re probably right . . . It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about that old man recently. I wanted to say something about that, but everything is so complicated. It’s impossible to know just where to begin. You want to say only what you mean, so you can control it and give it shape, so you can keep it neat. But little jagged ends appear, and when you push them in something else bumps up or tears off.’
He sighed and looked away. Dottie waited silently, hearing the noises of the streets and the barking of the Alsation next door as if they were sounds in a dream. She heard Laura shouting at Daisy to be quiet and imagined an ancient scene of a village clearing on a day of rest, with dog and mistress contesting proprieties.
He turned back to her suddenly, resolutely. ‘My mother cut herself off from him. She went away and never spoke to him once after that. He married again when he was in his fifties, just before the war. His new wife was only twenty or so. She was about six months younger than my mother. She stormed off, my mother, I mean . . . disgusted, angry. When I was small she never talked about him, and I suppose he did not really exist for me. I had some vague idea, but my other grandparents were so solidly there that their . . . concreteness made everything about him seem even more unreal.
‘We lived in Ghana for most of my childhood, the Gold Coast. My father was an official in the National Bank, and all that distance made it easier too. We came back for holidays but those were busy times . . . and we soon stopped doing that, anyway. That was how it went on, year after year, one thing after another until he died. He left her what he had, quite a fair amount of money, and left the house to her children. That’s me,’ he said with a smile, tapping himself on the chest. ‘There’s only me. I had a younger brother, but he died in 1948 when we were in the Gold Coast. That was sad. He was so small. I’ve always missed him. Anyway, it took the solicitors over a year to find my mother. I don’t suppose they hurried too much. I was out of the country, on my first assignment abroad. Well, assignment rather glorifies it but I was working anyway. I was sent to the Congo where the attention of the world was focused in gruesome fascination. After that I was really too busy. I spent a year in East Africa, then south to Zambia and Rhodesia. So much was happening: revolutions, wars of independence, forced marriages. Economies were collapsing, prisons were overflowing and the new barons were keeping students of human drama riveted on their tragic soap operas. Whenever I came back to Manchester – that was where we lived, Wilmslow actually – it was only for a couple of weeks or so, and then off to work again. England seemed like a place that was consumed with itself, tardily hugging its inheritance to itself, afraid that unclean hands would soil and pilfer it. They should know, having ransacked everybody else’s shrine for the greater glory of their own selves. England seemed irrelevant, preoccupied with a vision of a world that had passed, constantly huffing and puffing at the indignities heaped on it. My mother told me about the house I had inherited and I told her to have it rented out. I was too busy to deal with it, too involved in real life to want to have anything to do with all that materialism and stocks and shares crap. We idealists talk like that, you know,’ he said, mocking himself.
‘I don’t even remember what she called him. Did she say your grandfather has died or my father is dead? I don’t remember what she said. The questions came to me while I was in hospital in Kampala. I had lots of time on my hands then, nearly three bed-ridden weeks, suffering from fever and other interesting complications. I had hoped to do a piece on a rebel group that was operating near the western border with the Congo. Everyone at that time wanted to do a piece on the rebels and the mercenaries. The world wanted to hear the butchers speak for themselves, wanted to get as close as they could to their blood-dimmed vision. A local reporter set it up for me, but everybody got too greedy and angry. We were very nearly shot and were certainly well beaten for our troubles. Not much ceremony or crazy dancing, no unspeakable rites with this crowd of natives. Crash! Bang! Take that you bastard! It was more like that. Then we had to make our way through territory neither of us knew. By the time we found help we were very frightened men, and I had picked up some kind of fever. I still wonder that they let us off so easily.’
2
He had thought of himself as making Conrad’s journey in reverse. With luck, and if all went well, he would get as far as Kisangani, the old Stanleyville, and Stanley Falls Station before that. Conrad called it the Inner Station. The heart of darkness! It was on an old trade route from the east coast which had been in use for at least a hundred years or more. Slavers and ivory hunters had tramped and marched those mountain paths, and set up their wretched and short-lived kingdoms to harvest the bounty of the land. The upper reaches of the river were dotted with old fortresses and the overgrown ruins of towns the Waswahili robber barons had built for their host. It was only the heart of darkness if you approached it from the other end.
They bribed the border guard, as they would have done almost anywhere in the world. Border guards knew it was their due and would consider that they had been treated with cavalier contempt if their palms were not properly greased. No one told them anything or asked them anything, no doubt assuming they were smugglers or mercenaries, or scientists or Peace Corps volunteers. It hardly mattered in the chaos of that time. They drove their pick-up to the prearranged place and waited for two days. Lemuel Mpira, the man who had arranged it all, was a Luo from Mombasa, working for the Standard. He could not speak the language here, but his Kiswahili was enough to get all their needs seen to, and his French was fluent and perfect. With those two languages he thought they would get by. Michael was really only a passenger, and had only got on the trip because he had struck up a friendship with Lemuel who had kindly invited him along.
They found an assorted bunch of thugs when they got to the camp, which was overcrowded and filthy beyond conception. They were willing enough to talk but Michael could not really take what they were saying seriously. At times he thought he was misunderstanding, that his French was not good enough, but Lemuel translated. Listening to their grandiose talk, it was possible to believe the stories of nuns stripped and raped on the forest floor, and opponents dismembered after death. It was wounded, psychopathic talk camouflaged by words like justice and freedom.
The condition of the republic gave concerned people of good-will no other choice but to take up arms against the tyranny, they said. It was no longer a matter for personal decision. The circumstances demanded only one course of action. Rebellion and retaliation! That was how it had to be.
Until when? How would it all end?
There would be no end, they said, repeating the cry among themselves and then grinning with delight at the celebration of their strength and unity.
They must have sensed his scepticism, or perhaps his questions revealed his dislike.
3
‘I heard about your mother, and the young wife,’ Dottie said later. ‘But I didn’t know that was why your mother left. My friend Bren
da . . . she met someone who was an old neighbour of your grandfather’s. At a British Legion function. These neighbours used to live in Broomfield Road, not far from you.’
Michael looked at Dottie with an amazed smile. ‘What did the neighbours say? Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘She used to be a teacher at the school, and her husband was a banker. She taught your mother, she was her teacher. It’s incredible,’ Dottie said, pausing to let the thought sink in. ‘She said your mother was gifted . . . a musician. And Dr Murray used to come to the concerts to listen to her. He only had eyes for her, this teacher said.’
‘She loved him. When I came back from Kampala I was still ill, and she took time off from her job to look after me. I asked her not to. There was no need, I thought. I needed to be alone at that time. Everything was almost too much . . . but also I knew how important it was to her that she was a working woman. She’d worked all her life after she left her father. It didn’t occur to me until later that she might have been thinking of the other son, my brother. She was a teacher then too, when we were in Ghana. I don’t think she stopped working then. She never mentioned that but it might have been on her mind.
‘Anyway, during those weeks we talked a great deal about him. My grandfather, I mean. He was like an emperor, she said. And she stood up tall on her toes with her arms held out and her head lifted. That story about going to the school concerts, she told me that as well. How he came and intimidated the teachers with his fierce adulation for his daughter. She talked of other things about being a child. Her mother, she said, was just a memory of a woman who smelt of medicine and who cried often. She saw a picture of her in the papers my grandfather left, and she realised that she knew nothing about her. She could not even remember how she looked. Most of the time she talked about him. How he took her everywhere and guarded her as if she was a precious possession. How he thundered at her when she neglected herself or forgot to aim high enough. How he encouraged her and how much he loved her. She wept and wept as she told me her story, and made me weep too that I had not known him.
‘What else did they say about her?’ he asked after waiting for a moment.
‘The other children used to tease her because she was black,’ Dottie said, and exchanged a smile with Michael. ‘But there was no malice in it, apparently. I think the teacher said they used to rib her about it. At first I heard that she had been killed in the war. The woman in the library told me that, I think, but the neighbour knew that she had gone north to take a job as a teacher.’
‘Carlisle,’ Michael said, nodding. ‘That was her first job.’
Dottie thought of saying something about Carlisle, mentioning her own history, but decided against it. ‘The young wife and her child were killed in the bombing, visiting relatives somewhere on the coast. Southampton or Portsmouth, or something like that,’ Dottie said.
‘There was a child? I didn’t know that. I don’t think my mother ever saw them after they were married. She was a nurse in his clinic, you know. The woman he married . . . It must’ve started when my mother went away to college to do her training in Nottingham. The woman . . . the nurse . . . I don’t know what to call her . . . she came to stay in the house during term. My mother found out when she came down for her holidays. I don’t know what she found out but you can imagine. She confronted him with her discovery and he got so angry, was so livid with rage at the accusations she made against the young woman, that he was unable to do anything but stammer. Then he stepped forward and slapped her.’
Shame on you, he had said. Perhaps it was fear or outrage that made her do it, but she screamed at him that he was the one who was shameful. And he had better not lay hands on her again or she would leave. She was not going to accept that kind of treatment from anyone. Realising what he had done, he tried to speak to her, apologising and uttering endearments. She shrugged off his approaches and refused to talk to him for days. He tried to laugh the argument off, teasing her and pretending to be abjectly contrite. In an attempt to placate her, he never mentioned the young woman and never allowed her to come by the house. After several days had passed, and his bantering had got him nowhere, he tried to break her silence by having a solemn and serious confrontation with her. Her hostility shocked him, and he became afraid of what might happen, of words said that would be impossible to take back. But she had become reckless with her power, and when she realised that he was pleading for her return she set as her condition the termination of that disgusting affair with a woman less than half his age, and younger than his own daughter. At the very least she should no longer be employed in his clinic. Could he not see that she was only after him for his wealth? She said other things, and in the end he could not contain his anger at the injustice of his daughter’s words, and he hit her again in the face.
That’s enough of that, you filthy old man, she said and left. She had packed a few things and gone from the house within half an hour. He made no effort to stop her. It was the last time she saw him, when he stepped forward to hit her with a look of disgust on his face. She found out later, from people she was still in touch with, that he was planning to marry the woman. She could not return after that. It made all of them look ridiculous, she thought, like a bunch of hot-blooded foreigners. So she put as much distance between them and her as she could, and took the job in Carlisle because it was the farthest one of all the ones she was offered. Jobs were plentiful then, and she could have found work nearer if she had wanted.
‘Can you imagine this skinny black woman storming off to Carlisle to teach music in a school there? That was where she met my father. He was working in a bank, and was a local fencing champion. He claims he could’ve gone further if he really wanted, but I don’t know. One of the teachers at the school was a fencing enthusiast too, so my father used to go to the school gym to practise. From what they say now, I think it was a stormy and passionate courtship. They were married the following year. My father’s people came from Cumbria and they were tickled pink by the thought of a dusky bride for their boy. He was a headmaster of a local grammar school and a magistrate, a local pillar of his community. His wife had been a professional actress in her youth and was distantly related to nobility or something. Even until today she refuses to be exact, preferring to keep the game going with innuendo and half-clues.
‘During the reception after my parents’ wedding, some local dinosaur came to commiserate with my grandfather over the coffee-coloured piccanin that would soon be tramping heedlessly over the flower-beds. My grandfather laughed at him and told him to take himself off. Actually his exact words were “Bugger off out of my party, you unpleasant man.” ’
‘They are wonderful people and they made my mother welcome and helped her to forget him. Then I came and then my younger brother, then the war and Gold Coast. It was easy to make a new life, to start again. Everything was changing, the whole world was different.’
‘Was she not tempted? Did she not try to get in touch with him?’ Dottie asked. The light had very nearly gone. They had been talking for a long time and she knew they would have to stop soon. There would be other times, she thought, to tell him about herself and about Sharon, and to hear about him and the places he had seen. Hudson was already asleep on the settee beside her, breathing softly in his innocent abandoned way. She would carry him to his bed in a minute, she thought, reluctant to lose the moment.
‘I asked her,’ he said, sounding very tired. He said no more for a long while, as if preferring not to continue. ‘I asked her about that when we were talking about him. She said nothing at all, but you could see how she felt. It was a stupid thing to ask her, insensitive. She thought I wanted her to accept the guilt for what had happened . . . Later she told me that she thought about him every day for all those twenty years. Twenty-two years! Over a stupid quarrel like that!’
4
There was a monastery in the village where his grandparents lived. He always visited it when he went to see them. It was mostly ruins bu
t there were many walls and buttresses still standing. When he was younger he used to explore the cellars, some of which were now only wells in the earth because the floors above had gone. In adolescence he had found the desolation of the ruins comforting, and imagined that he could hear the gloomy chants of the monks in the winter winds. He would stand leaning against the walls in wintry sunlight and weave stories round himself, witnessing terrible scenes of injustice and performing heroic acts of rescue. Were it not for his fortunate presence, a charming town full of innocents would be taken and razed by bandits! Invariably he fell in love with a Viking princess. His grandparents teased him about the red in his hair, claiming that it was the Viking in him coming out. When he was a child they used to give him Viking nicknames: Canute the Incontinent or Olofson the Grizzler. His grandmother told him blood-curdling tales of raids and slaughter. How the Vikings swooped down on coastal settlements and riverside villages for loot, pillage and rape. She recounted long stories of incredible journeys from the fog-ridden shores of north-western Europe to all the corners of the known world. Normandy, Sicily, Libya, Anatolia and the Americas.
When he went to see the monastery the last time, it was with his father. They had all gone down to stay for a few days after Michael’s return from Kampala. One afternoon his father came with him for a walk, linking arms to give him some support. They were usually easy and comfortable in each other’s company, sharing many interests and opinions. Perhaps also they were wary of each other, careful not to offer a challenge or give offence. Michael pointed to electric pylons and cables that cut off the horizon from the monastery site. He said something about the insensitivity of bureaucrats or engineers, or whoever it was that made decisions of this kind at the electricity board. They could’ve found somewhere else to put them, he said irritably.
Dottie Page 34
