Behind the hotel the ground lifted steeply to the hilltop. It was bare, rocky ground, with a few msasa trees standing poised there like birds ready to take wing, so light and airy were they in the greenish starlight.
The back veranda had a dozen tables and four or five big braziers sending up roaring red flames from beds of crimson coal. The flames hissed slightly, and swayed as the waiters hurried back and forth making currents of air. There was a light, dry scent of fire, and the smell of chilled winter leafage, and, stronger than these, as strong as the smell of food, the cold, heavy smell of half-frozen metal. The tables were of green metal but there was a cloud of cold on the green, and the women exclaimed and wrapped up their arms—the cold had stung bare flesh, and Maisie held out a big white arm into the light of the flames to show—what of course they could not see in the shifting light—gooseflesh because of the frosty table. They sat exclaiming and enjoying the cold—one of the sharpest pleasures of living in hot countries is this—to savour the vivifying degrees of cold on a winter’s night. Wine came and soon they were all a little tight: they knew they had to be a little drunk to float over the reefs of the evening. When the food came, they ate for the most part in silence, wrapped up, and holding out their hands in between mouthfuls to the brazier nearest to them, whose flames forked dangerously, swaying as the air poured in down the hillside past rocks and tree trunks. And besides, they were three couples, and they had come to dance. Martha longed to go inside and dance with Thomas. She saw how Maisie’s eyes returned again and again to Athen, and how Millicent played with her food and watched Anton—she was waiting to dance with him.
The food was not very good. They made up with the wine. Martha saw Athen sitting a little back from the table, examining a globule of pale, straw-coloured wine enclosed in frosted glass. The grave, dark face had a small, bitter smile as he lifted the cool, pale gold globe to taste the wine. He sat with the glass in his thin, brown hands, turning it, feeling the chill of the wine coming through the glass on to his skin—then lifting to taste again. It was quite a good wine; good wine still came in, through Portuguese East Africa, in spite of the war. Athen sniffed the wine and lingered over it, and Martha saw a small, scrambling soldier in sweaty khaki rinsing out his mouth with dark wine and spitting; then putting back his head to let the thick, heavy wine run down his throat—she saw him, this roughened fighting man, head back, his white, strong teeth bubbling with thick red, his eyes closed under a pouring yellow sunlight; she saw glossy, dark lashes lying close to the worn skin of the tired fighting man as he shut his eyes momentarily, standing in the sunshine on the hillside, while the wine, strong and purple, ran down his gullet and, where he had spat it from a dry mouth into the dust, made a bubbling, dark stain.
There he sat, across the table, Athen Gouliamis from Greece, small, pale, troubled, his cap of black hair glinting in the starlight, his pale suit flickering red where the flame-light ran over it, and he looked at the fine globule of glass in his hand and at the pale, golden wine with its minute bursting bubbles and its cloud of frost.
Athen felt her looking, lifted his dark eyes, and smiled at her.
‘Well, comrade Martha,’ he said simply, in a way which continued the conversation from outside Maisie’s bar. ‘Well, comrade? It’s all too hard for us—that’s the truth. And now I shall drink to you.’ He drank, and then, as he did so, turned his face so that when he let his glass lower, he was looking at Maisie. He smiled, a simple, tender smile straight into her face.
‘I can’t dance these dances, Maisie. I’ve only done village dancing.’
‘Like me,’ said Thomas at once. ‘Before I came to this promising continent, I’d never done anything but village dancing. But now I can do this.’ He stood up, held out his right arm in a stiff half-circle, half shut his eyes, and circled across the flagstones between the fires, his face smirking in a parody of—well, it was like Anton’s stiff, correct dance across the dance floor.
But as he came back and saw Anton’s smile, he bent and put his arm around him in a bear’s hug. ‘Ah, Anton,’ he said, ‘Anton, there’s no hard feelings, you understand.’
Anton looked sarcastic for a moment—since after all, it was he who might be expected to have the hard feelings—and had not Thomas just been making fun of his dancing?
Instead of being angry he got up slowly, stiffly, as if he were going to be angry, his face clenched in a mask that threatened, while his lips maintained a small, humorous smile which insisted: I’m not really serious! Then, having confronted Thomas as if he were going to run a bayonet through him, he extended his arms with a deliberate, self-conscious smirk. Thomas frowned: for a moment he did not like it. Martha certainly did not like it. In that second when the tall, handsome man shifted his pose from aggression to a simpering invitation which was meant to be a woman ready to dance, there was a painful reality in it. Then Thomas bowed, put his hand correctly on Anton’s back and the two men circled among the braziers, Thomas with a look of stiff, self-conscious pride modelled on Anton’s look when he held Millicent, and Anton smiling foolishly, which is how Martha had seen Millicent look at Anton. But there was nothing in Anton’s parody which showed Millicent’s anxiety.
People at near tables laughed. One or two clapped. Then, when the two men were down the other end of the building, they abruptly fell apart. There was a sudden loud noise of raised voices and Martha saw that Thomas faced a man in loud argument, while Anton stood to one side, watching. Then Anton and Thomas strolled back. Anton smiled still, with a look of pleasure because he had unbent, he had been able to play the fool. But Thomas looked black and scowled.
‘Silly fool,’ growled Anton, without heat, about the man Thomas had quarrelled with.
‘I’ll kill him,’ said Thomas briefly. There was a look on his face she had never seen—there was a simplicity of hatred on it, and she felt she did not know him. She put out her hand to touch his sleeve. He felt the touch, jerked away his hand which clenched into a weapon, then, seeing it was Martha, his mind told his hand to go loose. But it trembled in the effort of losing its tension of hate. He sat down, or rather collapsed, his legs shooting out in front of him, and he sat staring before him, breathing heavily, up the dark hillside with its airy, illuminated trees.
Anton did not want to lose the ease his moment’s clowning had earned him. He said to Millicent: ‘Gnâdige Frau!’ and made her a small, smiling bow. He held out his arm. Millicent smiled with devotion, put her hand with its scarlet nails on his sleeve, and stepped across the paving stones, through the tables where people were again absorbed in their own affairs, into the dance room. The rose-coloured lights from the braziers flickered in Millicent’s white skirts and melted her hair into a mass of gleaming copper.
At the table, they listened to Thomas’s heavy breathing. Maisie said: ‘Ah, hell, Thomas, man, if someone says something to upset you, then you forget it.’
Thomas looked at her without replying.
Athen rose, indicating with his eyes that Maisie must go with him. As he went past Thomas he laid his hand on Thomas’s shoulder; which tensed in rejection of sympathy.
Athen followed Maisie into the dance room. Maisie’s broad, blue hips, held in corsets, swayed regally like a matron’s, up and down. Her bare neck, where it merged into her back, was a deep, fair smooth expanse, and her hair fell down over it in a gleaming coil, the same colour as the dry-scented, pale gold wine. As they reached the dance floor, the small, dark Greek put out his hand and swung her around to face him—‘like a warrior-king’, thought Martha, so simple and commanding was that gesture. But then, as the big woman turned, smiling, the two fell apart, and Athen stood ready for instruction, and their faces concentrated in the effort of learning and teaching the mysteries of the dance as suitable for the Parklands Hotel. The dim light of the big room, lit by the flowering colours of the women’s dresses and the white patches which were people’s faces, received Athen and Maisie, who circled slowly off past Anton and Millicent.
‘Nothing.’
‘But of course it’s something.’
‘Why do you want to know?’ He looked at her as if he did not like her.
‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’
‘No. But supposing this is what I am and you don’t like it?’ He held the back of his hand to his mouth and took a piece of flesh between his teeth. His eyes stared, the flames made red lights in the whites.
‘Why do you say that? Why is it so important?’
‘Ah, forget it.’
‘All right then, we’ll forget it.’
She sat inside her beautiful dress, shut out, cold, wanting to cry. More, she was afraid. She had not imagined Thomas’s face like this—black, clenched, hurtful.
‘Well, all right then,’ he said at last. ‘If you’re going to sit there, like that, I’ll tell you.’ He sat for a while looking at the end of the space full of people and flaming braziers: at the table where there had been the quarrel. But Martha could only see two men, two women—a party out for the evening. ‘See that crowd down there—see that bastard there—well, it doesn’t matter. You’ll never meet him, he’s not in your orbit. He wouldn’t have been in mine, except for the war. His name is Tressell.’ He stopped.
‘Tressell?’ she prompted.
‘Yes, I tell you, it’s so bad even saying the name makes my head start throbbing! Sergeant Tressell. Yes. He was in charge of the Africans on the last camp and I was under him. He was supposed to be supervising their welfare and my job was to carry out his orders. Food and sanitation—that sort of thing.’ He sat silent, looking up the hill. The music came very loud from inside. Martha saw the four people get up from the end table and come closer on their way inside to dance. A man, presumably Tressell, turned his head to stare long and deliberately at Thomas, who stared back, his eyes narrowed.
A rather heavy man in a badly cut dinner jacket, escorting a woman with yellow hair and freckled shoulders.
‘Thomas,’ said Martha.
‘Yes. Well, all right. What does it matter? I’m surprised at it all myself. I knew I hated him for the rest of my life, but when the war was over, I thought it wouldn’t matter so much. I thought: Right, the Tressells can go back to their pig-sties now and you can just shut up and forget it. But I didn’t forget it.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘How can I tell you when you are so disturbed about it?’
‘Yes, I am, I don’t know why.’ She was. She felt as if she had never really known Thomas and as if loving him were a mistake if not worse. His face frightened her.
‘Then how do you expect me to tell you—oh, all right then. I was under Sergeant Tressell in No. Four Camp for months. He was just a bastard. But that wasn’t it—he was a bastard out of carelessness, out of sheer indifference—that was what killed me. How can I explain it? Well, he’d go to the stores to issue rations. It was a sort of weekly thing, we all went to the stores with forms and orders and a lot of fuss. There’d be three thousand African soldiers let’s say, and the rations should be so and so. But the rations would be four hundred men short. He’d stand there and the clerk from Centre D’d say: “So many men.” And Tressell would say: “So and so many pounds of meal, so and so many pounds of beans”—always short. Sometimes not much, sometimes badly short. Just because he couldn’t be bothered—that was the point. Do you understand? That was the point. Or I’d go to him and I’d say, clicking to attention and saluting’—here Thomas’s body stiffened as it remembered how he had saluted: ‘I’d say, “Reporting the latrines for D Block.” And he’d say, all injured and peevish because I was disturbing him, “Ah, Christ man, forget it will you? The latrines have been up the pole for weeks.” “Yes, Sir, that’s why I’m reporting them.” “Oh, forget it, go away. Go and read a nice book.” That was his idea of a really funny joke. He’d say: “Go and read a nice book,” and kill himself laughing. Then there was a day a man collapsed in a stroke at drill. I knew enough medicine to know he was in danger. I reported it, and Tressell said: “Send the bastard back to his hut, he is scrimshanking.”’
Martha said: ‘But Thomas, it goes on all the time.’
‘Yes, I know that. But Sergeant Tressell was too much for me. I couldn’t stand it. I went to the CO and I said: “Sir, I understand why we nationals of countries who were actually invaded by Germany are too dangerous to fight Germans, you have to keep us cleaning latrines for the safety of Zambesia—okay, as a principle I understand it. But speaking personally,” I said, “send me to the war somewhere, I’ll guarantee I’ll kill Germans for you.”’
‘That wasn’t exactly accurate, anyway!’
‘That’s what the CO said. He said: “Stern, you’ve let your feelings distort the facts.” He was a decent fellow that commanding officer. That’s the word for it. He told me to sit down and have a drink. We had a drink. Then we played some chess. Then next day I went back to taking orders from Sergeant Tressell.’
It seemed for a time as if this was all. The waiter brought a couple more bottles of wine. The music stopped inside for a moment, and then started again. While it was quiet, they could hear the small night noises from the wild hillside.
‘What happened to the man who was scrimshanking?’
‘Ah, forget it, forget it, you sit there listening. It’s driving me mad.’
‘Let’s go and dance then!’
‘Christ, Martha, at the moment you look just like my wife. She does that too. I can see her thinking: Thomas always makes so much trouble for himself.’
‘I wasn’t thinking that at all.’
Behind Thomas, through the dance-room door, came the man in a badly fitting dinner suit. He looked steadily, with hard, narrowed eyes at Thomas. Who seemed to feel it. He slowly turned his head. The two men looked at each other. Then the man walked off to his table.
‘He came out hoping to catch me alone.’
‘No, he didn’t!’
‘You mean, you hope he didn’t. You think I’m inventing Sergeant Tressell.’ Twenty yards away, the man sat, by himself, drinking Scotch and looking steadily across at Thomas. ‘I tell you, it was Sergeant bloody Tressell that finally made me understand the world.’
Now the woman with the bare, freckled shoulders came out and went to sit by, presumably, her husband.
‘There you are,’ said Martha. ‘He was just waiting for his wife.’
‘We are being saved from violence by our women,’ said Thomas. ‘Think of it!’
‘What happened to the man who was shamming sick?’
‘He died. He had bilharzia and hookworm and malaria and should never have been a soldier at all. Well, if we were going to use such criteria as good health to choose black soldiers, there wouldn’t have been any. Three weeks later the same thing happened: I said to Tressell: “Sir, do you remember the man who died—it’s going to happen again, unless you give orders for so and so to be discharged.” He couldn’t remember the man who died. He couldn’t see the point at all. He said: “Ah man, you kikes kill me.”’
‘Ah,’ said Martha involuntarily.
‘No, it’s not that. I thought so for a time. You anti-semitic bastard I thought. But he wasn’t even anti-semitic, that’s the point.’
At the other table, the man was telling his wife something. Presumably about Thomas. His gestures, his face, expressed moral indignation. She was listening sympathetically to a tale of outrage.
‘It’s like this, Martha. That husband of yours—oh, all right then, not him, it’s in bad taste to say things about one’s mistress’s husband. There are men who if you order them to shoot fifty men they lie awake all night worrying if there’s a man short—the indent would show a man short. Well, that’s what we understand now, the clerk’s attitude to murder. The little clerks in power are dangerous. That’s the German contribution to human knowledge. But we don’t begin to understand murder through good humour, murder through sheer bloody good-humoured carelessnes
s. I’d say to Tressell: “Sir…” “Ah hell, it’s the kike again, what’s eating you this time, kike?” I’d say: “Sir, the rations are fifty men short.” “Oh, for crying out aloud man, what’s eating you?”’
‘“But there’s not enough food to go around, Sir.”’
‘“Oh, bugger off. Go and read a good book!”’
‘Do you imagine he was selling the stuff? I thought for a while, now this is interesting, the rich, white Herrenvolk, they have inherited traits from their impoverished ancestors—they pinch food and sell it, just like us poor swine from the European heartland. They’re human after all, I thought. But not on your life. He couldn’t be bothered. When another man died and I said to him: “So and so is dead,” he said: “Good Kaffir that, I liked him.” I tell you, these people are capable of killing off an entire black population out of stupidity—it’s my dog, my dog likes it when I hit him. Well, perhaps we’ll have another world war in order to learn about murder by good-natured stupidity—that’s the South African style. There are national styles in murder. I used to look at Tressell and think, if I was black I’d have to live every day of my life under that swine. I got to hate Tressell so much that—I used to look at him and try and work out ways to kill him. I thought, I’ll fix you, you bastard. I went to him and I said: “Sir! I think it would be a good idea if the lazy, ignorant, filthy savages were taught some lessons. Speaking as the Medical Corps, that’s what I think. I suggest you authorize me to give them some lectures.” He looked suspicious. “They’re a danger to all civilized people, the filthy swine,” I said. Then he cheered up. “Ja,” he said. “Bright idea that—now we’ve got all the stinkers in one place in uniform, might as well use our opportunities, eh, kike?”’
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