Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Well. Of course we got there early and we had to wait. But the scene was very impressive, the peers and peeresses in their scarlet robes.…’ I went on, warming to the subject, and adding a few imaginatively colourful details for good measure. I was rewarded by seeing the wariness vanish and his face break open into a real smile.

  He said, ‘Do you know, I have come to Mr Chirk’s house many times, he is very hospitable, but you are the first Englishman I have met here.’

  ‘Have you known him long?’

  ‘About a year. Since I came here, from Kisumu. He is very kind; sometimes I come in the evening and we listen to good music together. We do not talk about England, though, only about our problems here in Africa. He is a very nice man but he does not seem to want to talk about England, he does not have any Englishmen for friends. I do not understand that.’

  He gave a little sigh. This had disappointed him. It was an old story, I thought: he had hoped Chirk would open a new world to him, but men like Chirk can never do that, they are always a dead end. I felt sorry for Ralph Chirk. Young men like this one would come to him ignorant and remain ignorant because he could give them nothing; he could only impart goodwill and that is never enough. And once they had found that out they would move on and leave Chirk alone – always alone, with his sycophants, his hangers-on, his formless goodwill and his hygienic religion.

  ‘If you like,’ I said, ‘we could go down to the hotel and have a beer.’

  He glanced towards Chirk and hesitated, but only for a moment.

  ‘I should like that very much,’ he said.

  The Youth Centre was three mud rooms with cement floors and a corrugated iron roof. The carpenter’s shop was empty except for some competent looking drawings on the blackboard and a roughly made chair. In the metal shop there was a simple forge, an anvil, a clamp and some hammers; the only completed work was a metal wash-stand and an old oil lamp, inexpertly smartened up with aluminium paint. In the third room, two plump girls were working treadle sewing-machines with their big, splayed bare feet and on the veranda a scowling boy was mending an ancient bicycle. No one else was there except a crowd of half-naked children playing the usual game of Grandmother’s Footsteps: when we moved, they moved silently behind us; when we turned to look at them they froze, shaking with giggles.

  ‘The sewing-machines are on loan from the Singer Company,’ Jason explained. ‘We are otherwise very short of materials – that is our difficulty. But the pupils are not here because the staff has not been paid. The carpenter is a good man, he comes in the evenings sometimes, without pay, but the blacksmith is angry and has gone back to his shamba.’

  ‘Why have they not been paid?’

  He frowned, looking very stern and young. ‘The centres are semi-autonomous. That is, the Government pay half and the people pay half – they get money from rates and from selling beer. But the Government only pays its share when the people have paid. They used to have an old woman here who made good beer, but she died and they have not bothered to replace her. The people in this district are lazy and ignorant. They do not understand the principle of Self-Help. That is my job, to teach them.’

  He squared his shoulders proudly under his white shirt. ‘This afternoon, there will be a meeting of the Locational Council and the parents of the boys and I shall try to explain things to them. The boys who come here are not clever boys, like the boys who get into the secondary schools. So it is not always easy to explain to their parents that they must be educated too. I am afraid it may take a long time.’ He grinned and then a look of tense anxiety came into his face. ‘I do hope you won’t be bored.’

  I was charmed, both by his solicitude and by the quaintly public school inflexion in his voice. The English leave behind such curious legacies: football, court-houses that are really meant for playing squash, the accent of Eton and Harrow.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I won’t be.’

  I was further from being bored than I had ever been. As we walked away from the centre towards the lake and the jetty and the single, dusty street of wooden shops, I felt an upsurge of happiness, the absurd, irrational happiness that tingles behind the eye, the happiness I had felt almost constantly since I had arrived in Africa. It was a feeling I am half-ashamed to admit to – there is something so naïve, so irresponsible about happiness. No European should be happy in Africa, there are too many problems we have either created or not tried hard enough to solve: guilt is our portion. I can only say I didn’t feel it though I wasn’t blind to the things I had read about before I came – my mother’s training has ensured that I always do my homework well – or to the things I had seen: the malnutrition; the settler problem; the tribal problem; the economic problem. I wasn’t blind, but I saw things through rose-coloured spectacles; looking back, I can remember how the flamingoes turned a stinking, brown lake the colour of a rose.

  This lake was grey-blue, rippling on white sand. The smell of drying fish was hideous. The dried fish were ridiculously small. The fisherman selling them was small and plump with a round, plump, cheerful face. I said to Jason, ‘Tell him these fish should have been thrown back in the lake.’

  The man laughed and answered, in English, ‘The women like them small. If I have no little fish, they won’t buy.’

  ‘But if you catch all the little fish, they can’t breed and soon there will be no fish in the lake. Then you will starve.’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘But if I don’t have the small fish for the women, my family will starve. My wives, my children, and my old mother.’ His eyes shone at me gaily, bright as copper coins in the sun.

  Jason said, ‘It is not a joke. You have to think of the future. What will your children eat if you use up all the fish?’

  His smile vanished and he looked at Jason with a sullen expression. ‘There is plenty fish in the lake,’ he said. He added something in Swahili; the words spurted out with a contemptuous sound. Jason listened, frowning. Then he shouted something angrily, waving his hands. The man spat on the ground and then laughed as we walked away.

  ‘He is a foolish, ignorant man,’ Jay said. We reached the Land Rover and he leaned against it limply. His whole body seemed suddenly boneless with despair. ‘There are so many who are ignorant and foolish, how can you teach them? It is the same in everything. The doctor at the hospital, the African doctor says that he knows they only scrub out the health clinics when he comes to visit them. I know a dresser – trained for four years in a big hospital in Nairobi – who fills the syringes with water when the children come for injections and sells the penicillin. What can you do?’ His voice rose. ‘You talk to them, they listen – and then they laugh and go back to doing just what they were doing before.’

  He was almost in tears. I remembered something Agnew had said. ‘Once we’ve gone, the Administration will go to hell. Not because we haven’t trained them as well as we could – though we haven’t trained enough of them – but because they won’t keep their tempers. We’re crafty, we’ve learned to be patient, but they won’t be patient. They’ll shout and bully.’

  I said, ‘You have to go slowly. You can’t change things overnight.’

  He said distractedly, ‘But there is so little time.’

  ‘It doesn’t help to get worked up about it.’

  ‘No.’ He rolled his eyes shyly. ‘No. But it makes me ashamed when they will not learn. They are my people and I want to respect them.’

  There was Agnew’s answer I thought, ridiculously pleased. A white man could afford to be patient with ignorance and folly. He might work with skill, care, even with love, but he was never completely involved; he was safe behind centuries of superiority, safe behind his white skin. He could afford to be indulgent, Jason couldn’t. The fisherman’s poverty and stupidity was his poverty and stupidity, not something to endure philosophically or to make jokes about at the club. And he had so little to fight it with, no tradition of leadership, no inherited ex
perience – nothing, except his youth and his sincerity, those terribly inadequate weapons. In his white shirt and grey flannels – a curiously natty, urban figure in that flat, yellow landscape – he looked very frail and gallant. I felt two things; the almost physical fear with which you dread a child’s disappointment and also a kind of envy. The things he had to face in this young-old continent were simple, basic; food or hunger, disease or health, life or death. To live here – not to be him, just to live here – would be a good kind of life; purpose and truth breaking through the clouds of staleness and anxiety, like the sun.

  Though the Locational Council meeting was boring it was a pleasant boredom; since I understood nothing I could relax into a complete suspension of effort. Jason talked in Swahili, reading from notes. I was reminded of a boy reading the lesson in church. His speech was translated into local dialect by the Chief, a large, loosely-assembled man with a big face and ruined nose who wore a pin-striped city suit with wide, old-fashioned lapels. It was very hot under the tin roof of the hall. The air was so warm and moist that it was almost tangible; you felt you could scoop it up in a spoon. An insect buzzed continually. In the front row, the old men went to sleep, like old men everywhere. I think I went to sleep myself. I don’t remember the end of the meeting, only going out into the white light that stung the eyeballs and having a long, halting conversation about football with the Chief.

  Two children were standing by the Land Rover, a boy in baggy khaki shorts and a smaller girl in a green dress that reached half-way down her muddy, thin calves. The boy spoke to the Chief who asked Jason a question. He shrugged his shoulders and turned to me.

  ‘Do you mind if the girl comes with us? Her brother says she has to go to hospital.’

  He spoke as if my convenience mattered more than anything else. I said, surprised, ‘Of course not.’

  The Chief spoke to the girl who climbed into the back of the truck. She was tiny, with stick-like limbs and enormous, expressionless eyes. I smiled at her while Jason talked with the Chief and she stared back at me blankly.

  As we drove off I asked Jay what was wrong with her.

  ‘The Chief says she has a bad kidney disease. The doctor thinks she will die.’

  I looked round. She was crouching on the metal seat, knees drawn up to her bare chest, still as a hare in its form. ‘Is there anything we can do? Would she like anything?’

  He didn’t answer. There wasn’t any answer. I fumbled in my coat pocket for the bar of melting chocolate that was left from the picnic lunch Mrs Agnew had packed for me. I held it out to her. She didn’t move so I tossed it onto the seat beside her. Watching her in the mirror, Jason spoke to her and she whispered softly, ‘Asanti sana.’

  ‘She says, “Thank you”,’ Jason said.

  Agnew was in a gloomy mood. There was to be a social evening at the club and a showing of film transparencies on the projector.

  ‘It’ll be boring beyond belief,’ he warned me. ‘Fantom, my D.O. Two is just back from home leave and he’s got a whole series of what you might call the English Scene. Beefeaters, Trooping the Colour, the lot. And Prout’s got a whole lot too. Self and Family on the beach at Mombasa. Curious isn’t it, how the ordinary Englishman, the sort of chap who barely ever glances in a mirror, can set out to bore everyone to death with pictures of himself? I mean, for Christ’s sake, I know what Prout looks like – not a bad-looking chap in a beefy way but I’ve got him here, I can look at him sixty times a day. I don’t need to look at him on a screen to refresh my memory, do I?’

  ‘I’m afraid you do.’ Mrs Agnew looked up from her interminable knitting. She was an addict, a chain-knitter, her hands in a constant flutter of needles and wool. ‘Unless you’d like to send a note down to say you’re not well? I did think you were starting a cold this morning.’

  Agnew hesitated, fear of boredom and pride in his health battling within him. ‘No,’ he said, sighing, ‘I’ll have to turn up.’ He looked at me despondently. ‘But there’s no reason on earth why you should. Unless you’re dead keen, that is.’

  ‘Not really.’ I had arranged to meet Jay at the hotel, in the outer bar. The inner bar, a cosier place, had a notice up, Residents Only. I had never seen a resident there, I don’t believe there were any, but it was always full of local Europeans stuffing themselves on free olives and nuts. I said, ‘Unless – oh, never mind.’ The idea seemed about as futile as giving a sick child chocolate.

  ‘What?’ Agnew’s blue eyes looked straight at me.

  I felt oddly exposed. I explained about Jay; Agnew knew I had been seeing a lot of him in the last two weeks. ‘It struck me that he might enjoy this evening’s show rather more than we would. The Trooping of the Colour part, anyway. He’s awfully keen on England.’ I smiled boyishly.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Agnew said in a light, dry voice.

  I said, with affected ingenuousness, ‘You did say Africans could come to the club as visitors? I know I’m only a temporary member but does that mean I can’t introduce guests?’

  He gave me a sharp look but he was too honest to take advantage of this let-out. ‘No. No, of course not.’ His wife gave a little, suppressed sigh. Frowning, he glanced at her. She had ducked her head and was counting the stitches on her needles with great concentration. ‘What do you think, dear?’

  ‘Twenty-four, twenty-five.…’ She looked up, but with a vacant expression, her lips continuing to move. ‘I don’t really know,’ she said.

  Husband and wife looked at each other. I was reminded of the family obligation to show a common front, to hide the grisly secret from the stranger.

  ‘Nbola’s a pleasant youngster,’ Agnew said heavily.

  Mrs Agnew smiled. When she smiled, her false teeth clicked like her knitting needles.

  ‘You’ll have to ask the committee’s permission, won’t you, dear?’ She gave me a cold look and went back to counting her stitches.

  Prout said, ‘It’s out of the question. We’re showing our holiday slides.’

  He glared challengingly at the only other member of the club committee we had been able to muster at short notice. He was a small man in faded khaki with patches of dark sweat under his arms. He had a round, soft face; he looked a little like a neurotic pug. He smiled with nervous geniality, first at Prout, then at Agnew. ‘It might be a bit dull,’ he murmured.

  ‘I don’t suppose young Nbola would mind,’ Agnew said. He smiled, though his eyes looked tired.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said the neurotic pug. He looked with shy hope at Prout who scowled at his beer. Hope dying, he added, ‘Though perhaps that isn’t quite the point.…’

  ‘It certainly isn’t,’ Prout said. He drained his glass and set it down on the table with a thump, pale, hairy fists tightly clenched on either side of it.

  Agnew looked blank and fingered the wart on his cheek.

  ‘What is the point then?’ I asked pleasantly.

  Prout looked at me. He said, enunciating each word very slowly and clearly as if I were deaf or unutterably stupid, ‘Why – I might show a picture of Mrs Prout in a bathing costume.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Mr Nbola would mind that either,’ I said. Pug Face let out a nervous titter. Prout stood up; the skin round his nose had gone so pale that it was almost grey.

  ‘My God – that’s all we want. A lot of bloody niggers pawing over our women. God – this is the only place we can enjoy ourselves without having them breathe down our necks. If you want to go off with them, that’s your look-out. I daresay Ralph Chirk can find plenty more little black pals for you to play with. But don’t bring them here, stinking the place out.’

  He turned and stalked across the long, church-social room; his buttocks quivered and his shoes creaked at every step. The door slammed behind him.

  Pug Face said, unnecessarily, ‘Of course, James really does feel very strongly.’ He jumped to his feet. ‘What about a little liquid refreshment?’ He bore our glasses over to the bar. Agnew’s eyes met mine guiltily.


  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was afraid the answer might be no. But – but it’s a bit like a parody, isn’t it?’

  I said, ‘In a year, maybe less, the people you’re so anxious to keep out of your holy club will be your rulers, won’t they?’

  He said, quite sharply, ‘Meantime I have to keep the peace. I can’t order the committee to change the rules.’

  ‘It mightn’t do any harm. Conceivably, it might do some good.’

  His face folded into lines of tiredness and anxiety; he looked like a man preparing to fight a battle he did not quite believe in.

  ‘Perhaps. But, to be honest with you, a lot of the chaps we have here aren’t – aren’t much. I don’t just mean that they’re not liberal intellectuals. I mean that in England they wouldn’t have anything like the status they have here – responsibilty, servants, things like that. They know this, at bottom, and it makes them jumpy. You can’t ask too much of limited people, you know – you can’t get a chap out to build roads and pay him the sort of salary we pay him and expect him to turn out a kind of Bertrand Russell.’

  ‘No. But you could expect someone better than Prout.’

  ‘Most of them are better. He’s an extreme case. Though I don’t suppose you’d find anyone who really wanted Africans in this club – except Chirk, perhaps, and he’s not a member anyway. They need somewhere to escape to – somewhere they won’t have them breathing down their necks, as Prout says.’ He sighed and leaned forward, rubbing his pudgy cheeks with the heel of his hand. ‘Look – I don’t doubt Nbola is infinitely superior, both as a man and as an intelligence to poor James Prout. Prout isn’t an intelligence really, he’s just a set of reactions. You puts your penny in and the record pops up. But that isn’t to say Prout isn’t important, or that it isn’t worth keeping him happy. In fact he’s very important. He’s a bloody good agricultural officer. The work he’s done round here is as good as any in East Africa. And that makes him important, not just to us but to Africa – far more important than your friend Chirk, for example.…’