by Alec Waugh
There are certain men to whom power on this scale has a deleterious affect, and the private citizen cannot be blamed for looking forward with a gloating appreciation of ‘time’s revenges’ to the day when a pompous and self-important Governor will find himself an impoverished nonentity in Bath or Cheltenham. No one could have had that feeling in the case of Selwyn-Clarke. His life’s work is medicine. His entry in Who’s Who gives social services as his chief recreation. He saw his governorship in terms of its responsibilities, not of its rewards. But he must have wondered whether, through the impossibility of meeting his fellows upon equal terms, he was not in danger of seeing his problems out of focus. He could never check up on himself, in the way that a cabinet minister can, in his club and at week-end house-parties, among men and women of equal stature in other walks who do not feel any necessity to treat him with special deference. The Governor of a British Colony can never relax in his own colony. The fortunes and future of everyone he meets are dependent on his approval of them. There is no neutral ground. And the Governor of the Seychelles can never get away from his own colony, in the way that a West Indian Governor can.
There are further corollaries to this geographical isolation. There is no newspaper—no paper at least that contains any news. Papers arrive from England three months late. The electric current is cut off during the hours of daylight so that electric radios are of little use. Very few people listen in. The Government issues a daily single-sheet bulletin of headlines. But the average inhabitant has no idea of what is happening in the world outside. His discussion of politics and world events is based on curiosity and conjecture. The Governor, on the other hand, receives necessarily a certain amount of confidential information. His opinions are based on facts known to nobody else upon the island; which limits his freedom even when he is discussing matters that have no bearing on island politics. Every Intelligence Officer has recognised the difficulty of not being able to remember on the spur of the moment whether he has acquired a piece of information from a newspaper or a Top Secret document. If he is prudent, he confines his conversation in public to sport, personalities, and smoking-room anecdotes. When Selwyn-Clarke heard his guests discussing the Korean War, he had to withhold his opinion, since his guests would suspect, even if there were no justification for the suspicion, that his views were based on knowledge.
His personal isolation was further increased by his wife who had been with him during the first part of the governorship, having felt it her duty during its later stage to stay in England with her daughter.
Selwyn-Clarke is a teetotaller; not for reasons of principle, but because he dislikes the taste of alcohol. Though he appreciates good food, he is abstemious. On evenings when he had no guests, he was served in his study with a sandwich and a cup of tea; the most solitary man in the Indian Ocean.
Through the weeks before he left, he must have counted the days to his departure. Surrounded with criticism and opposition, I doubt if he realised how many genuine supporters he had among the more responsible sections of the community.
In the week before he sailed, the Seychellois—the official mouthpiece of the Taxpayers Association, printed the following paragraph. “Dr. P. S. Selwyn-Clarke is at last leaving the Seychelles. It being for ever, we can but rejoice. We wish him the best of health, bon voyage and ‘ad multos annos’. But not here— GAU LEAMUS IGITUR.”
I imagine that he read it, because he went out of his way to mention on three separate occasions that he had not seen a copy of the paper for six months. I doubt if he let it worry him. But I am sure he would have been pleased could he have realised with what contemptuous indignation it was read by the majority of the petit blonds and the Britain-born members of the club, and the delighted amusement with which they noted that his enemies had not even the gumption to spell their insult accurately.
I hope that his last days in Mahé made amends. He must surely have been touched by some of the incidents that were attached to the series of good-bye parties that were given in his honour. The parties themselves were, the majority of them, routine testimonials that would have attended the departure of any Governor. The civil servants could scarcely have failed to give a reception for him. But there were certain episodes in those last sixty hours, when I as his guest accompanied him from one function to the next, that were not stereotyped perfunctory routine.
There was, for instance, the vin d’honneur given him by the Chinese community. He had always taken the keenest interest in their welfare. He had not forgotten the courage the Chinese had displayed when the Japanese had occupied Hong-Kong. They had been tortured, many of them had been killed, but they had not betrayed the British. He considered that he owed his own life to their loyalty. Members of the Chinese community had been frequent guests at Government House, and they had made an especial effort to finish the building of their new club house in time for its inauguration to coincide with his farewell party.
That must have touched him, and he must have been touched by the present he received from the civil servants—an album, beautifully lettered by one of the teaching fathers, containing photographs of all the projects that had been undertaken during his régime. It made an impressive record—the labourers’ cottages, the school, the swimming-bath, the pier, the levelling of the sports ground, the prison, the juvenile delinquents’ home, the experimental stations for agriculture, the dairies, and the bacca gardens. There it stood, in brick and cement and terraced hillsides, the record of his three years’ stewardship. I had not realised till I saw the book how much he had achieved. I am sure he was gratified at his colleagues choosing just that way of testifying to their regard for him.
He must have been touched, too, by the good-bye at the pier. The Kampala was due to sail at daybreak. But his official departure was fixed for the previous evening. It was a wet and squally day. In the morning it had been reasonably sunny. And the Governor and I had strolled down to Matins through the garden. After the service we had gone round the prison. The prisoners were assembled, and he made them a good-bye speech, in which he referred to his own prison experiences in Hong-Kong. Among the prisoners I noticed the chauffeur of the ‘Bon Courage’. He winked in a fellow-conspiratorial manner. He clearly did not bear me the least ill-will.
The sun was still shining as I watched from the verandah of my bedroom the Kampala glide to its anchorage outside St. Anne. But within half an hour the sky had darkened, the outline of Praslin was invisible, tropical rain was rattling on corrugated iron, and the head of police was ringing up to know whether our ceremonies should take place on the pier or under cover.
I was reminded during the next three hours of the scene in War and Peace, where a regiment is to be inspected by a general and an order to wear greatcoats is endlessly given and countermanded. Every time the sun gave an indication of appearing, it was decided to have the guard paraded in the open. Then down came the rain. Finally it was agreed to hold the ceremony under cover.
It proved to be a wise decision. The rain was falling in straight hard lines as we drove to the pier. The roads were puddled and the native population cowered under porticos and awnings. The rain destroyed the picturesque quality of the occasion, but from Selwyn-Clarke’s point of view rain made the afternoon. Had the sun been shining and the sky been blue, it would have been natural to expect a large assembly. There is so little to do in Mahé, that any unusual event is an occasion. But there is no particular pleasure on a wet, muddy day in having stockings and skirts and trousers splashed. He must have been surprised by the large ‘turn out’. The officials would regard it as a matter of duty to attend. But the planters were under no such compunction, and there were standing in that draughty shed several whom he must have thought his enemies. Nor could he have expected to meet a group of teen-age schoolgirls from a village fourteen miles away. But most of all he was pleased by the number of children that had come to see him. He loved children, particularly very small children. His very great modesty would not allow him to believe that t
he children had come there of their own volition. “It was their parents’ idea to bring them,” he said later, “but I’m glad their parents should know that I should want to see them.”
As the launch with its high pile of farewell flowers drew out from the pier, I hoped that these last hours had made it possible for him to look back on his governorship with pride and happiness, in terms of achievement and success.
The Kampala was anchored under the lee of St. Anne. As the launch drew up under the gangway I saw Frank Mayston and Armande leaning over the taffrail, watching our arrival. For the last three days they had been scarcely out of one another’s company. They had come out early, to lunch on board, to make a picnic of their last day together.
I started to unpack. I had the same cabin and the same steward that I had had on the way out. It seemed that very much more than ten weeks had passed since I unpacked here on that hot, wet afternoon.
I came on deck to find Leslie Harris in the bar.
“I’ve a bottle cooling,” he informed me.
Before we were half-way through it, Armande and Mayston joined us. That Thursday morning when they had stood facing each other on the steps of the court-house I had thought it was all like something in a film. It was even more so now.
“What’ll you have?” he asked her.
“Anything soft.”
They sat beside us on a sofa, holding hands. Mayston was very voluble, enquiring about the ceremony, who had been there, had there been any incidents, as usual asking questions. She did not speak at all, just sat there looking round her, nodding to her acquaintances across the room.
Boat day is an event in Mahé, and it was a big hour for her. You need a pass to come on board, and just that amount of influence is required to make it a point of pride among the Seychelloises to put in an appearance. The evening would have been incomplete for Armande unless she had been seen in the bar in Mayston’s company; in the same way that the romance would have been incomplete if she had not sauntered with him, in full view, along the water-front, or if she had had no present, no handkerchief or bangle—the equivalent of an engagement ring—to show her friends. Her eyes shone as she sat there, her hand in Mayston’s, looking round her, now and again sipping at her straw.
Geoffrey Moss wrote in one of his stories in Defeat, of “the eternal quality that flickers somewhere in supreme beauty”. There is that same quality in love—a dwelling upon another plane. In a few hours’ time these two would have said good-bye, in all human probability for ever. At eleven the last launch would leave; less than five hours’ time. Yet they were happy, boundlessly, blissfully. All this long afternoon they had been together—in the shared delight of each other’s youth and ardour. Their sun was setting now, but they were still citizens of their enchanted country. There was a glow about them.
The dinner bells began to chime.
“Do you mind if we join you?” Mayston asked.
He was shy, I fancied, if not of being alone with her in public, at least of making conversation with her with others watching him. He felt closer to her discussing local gossip with Leslie and myself, holding her hand under the table. She scarcely spoke throughout the meal, but she consumed a sustaining amount of nourishment.
The room began to empty and the Goanese stewards started to lay breakfast. “What about another drink?” I asked.
“We’ll join you later,” Mayston said.
The Governor had not come in to dinner. He was busy on his ‘thank you’ letters. His pretty secretary was sitting in the passage, ready with advice should he require it. We passed her on our way. “Join us when you’re through,” I said.
She laughed. “I shan’t be through till the last launch sails.”
We went up into the smoking-room; a number of gay parties were on the point of becoming rowdy, but the table we had had before dinner was still unoccupied. The glasses had been cleared away, but the ash-tray was littered with Armande’s mauve-lip-sticked cigarette stubs. I felt of a sudden more than middle-aged.
“What about another bottle?” I said to Leslie.
“Just the job.”
The barman had been wisely provident; he kept his refrigerator supplied. Middle-age has its own rewards; its own matured and satisfying preferences. A taste for champagne is one of them. In my twenties I had despised it as a vulgar, ostentatious drink. In boîtes where it was ‘obligatoire’, I would tell the waiter in a lordly way that he could put a gold-foiled bottle in a bucket if he liked and I would pay for it, but I was going to drink a real wine, Beaune or Chambertin. In my thirties I patronised it. It was very well, I said, in its own time and place, at eleven o’clock in the morning, with a dry biscuit after a heavy night, or before a long, several-coursed dinner, instead of a martini, with small hot sausages. But most men after forty, if they have not switched to spirits, find that champagne does something for them that no other wine can do. I was lucky in that my taste for it began to mature at the very moment in the late ’30s when Krug 1928 was moving to its majestic peak. I do not expect to see a wine like that again—in depth of colour, body, full-blooded fragrance. But the Heidsieck ’43 that I drank in the Kam pala was fresh and clean with a light April quality. “I’ll remember our good-bye,” I said to Leslie.
It takes about ninety minutes to drink a second bottle. We had each two-thirds of a glass left when Mayston and Armande joined us. They looked in a kind of daze. He ordered for himself a beer, for her a Coca-Cola. They sat on the sofa, not talking, holding hands. It was the first time I had seen him silent.
They had met less than a week ago, in the knowledge that in four days’ time they would be going out of each other’s lives for ever. They had had to snatch at every moment. In its circumstances and setting it was in many ways the perfect idyll. It had no tragic quality. They were both very young, with everything ahead of them. In retrospect it would mean probably more to him than her. He might be a long time finding her successor, while for her, who was ‘not exactly tame’ … there would soon be a man-of-war in port. In six weeks he would be thinking more often of her than she of him. But at the moment it was on her account that I felt sympathy. It is always the harder for the one who is left behind. She would feel sad to-morrow, wistful and abandoned, sitting on the steps of her bungalow by the steep cut of the Beauvallon Gap.
We finished our last glass of wine. Leslie rose. “I’m going down to the barber’s shop; I want some chocolates for Lily.”
We followed him.
The residents, like swarming locusts, had been at work upon the store all day, but there was still quite a little left. Mayston began to pile Armande like a Christmas tree with eau-de-Cologne, chocolates, talcum powder.
“What about a wrist-watch?” He asked it, as an afterthought. But to our surprise the barber had a last remaining one; small, silver-faced, with a corded bracelet; a style that was very much the mode. Armande’s eyes glistened at the sight of it. A wrist-watch for a Seychelloise is far more than a convenience, a means to tell the time; it is a badge of rank, like the red flannel on a colonel’s tunic, a proof of power.
“You put it on for me. That’ll bring good luck,” she said.
She was a tallish girl, but the watch fell loosely. I had not realised before how delicately shaped her hands and feet were— quelles fines attaches.
“Will you be able to tighten it?” he asked.
She nodded. She was staring at the thin band upon her wrist, as though she could not believe that it was there. I did not think that I needed to feel sorry for her any longer. She would hardly be able to wait for daylight to display her trophy.
Seven of us had joined the ship; three of whom were unlikely to see Seychelles again. We were all three on deck early the next morning to take our last look at Mahé. Selwyn-Clarke was in a dressing-gown; Campbell was dapper and athletic in white starched shorts. I stood beside him. It was a grey, sunless morning; the peaks of Trois Frères were shrouded. Rain drifted intermittently like a series of gauze curtains across Vi
ctoria. Sailings at daybreak after a late night’s pouring on the boat are an anticlimax. The familiar life of the town had started. We could see through glasses the bustle of early traffic along the esplanade. I could picture Leslie Harris on the balcony of the Continental in his polka-dot blue silk dressing-gown. Armande would be at the market, displaying her left wrist; over the hills Maurice Michaud would be pottering about his farmyard, barefooted and unshaven, shouting at his labourers, abusing them and grinning simultaneously. No one was noticing the Kampala. As far as the island was concerned she had sailed when the last launch went. We were no longer a part of the life that we were watching.
The police launch left. The steps were lifted and the anchor weighed. The engines began to throb. I turned to Campbell.
“Two months ago this must have been the last thing that you foresaw?”
He shrugged. “One’s a fool to look ahead too far.”
