Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  “Now listen, Rabbit,” he said. “You’re going to have to start thinking differently about things. There’s a lot about Africa which’ll send you off your rocker if you keep trying to judge it by English standards. You’re not going to change it, so the only thing is to learn to like it, or at least put up with it.”

  “There’s lots of things I like,” I said. “Really. I love our house and I like most of the natives I’ve met. I don’t mean just the ones who’re special, like Elongo, but f’rinstance I do like Kimjiri, spite of his cooking and the racket his wives make. But I don’t like it being so hot and I don’t like smelly old men with flies crawling about on them.”

  I just stopped myself saying anything about the way KB had kept looking at me.

  “If it weren’t for that smelly old man you wouldn’t be here,” said Ted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re here because I’m here. Kaduna owe me a bigger post on a better station, with other white people around. There wouldn’t be much fuss about you coming out to join me somewhere like that. But they’re not normally happy about white women coming to places as cut off as Kiti. You don’t strike bargains with Kaduna, but there was a sort of understanding that if I took this posting you could come too. They want me here, you see, because they’ve got de Lancey at Birnin Soko. He’s dug himself in there very successfully. It’s one of their show places, roads, hospitals, schools, Emir due for an O.B.E. soon. De Lancey’s a goer, you see. Like Harry Bestermann but a sight more intelligent. He thinks you can do something about Africa, make it into a kind of black Europe one day. I don’t. I think you have to do things the African way or Africa will break you. That’s the difference between us, and it’s a difference that runs right through the service, to the very top. If you know the ropes you can usually find someone up there to take your side, specially when it comes to something like getting rid of an emir. Point is, de Lancey has pretty well got Soko the way he wants it and now he’s turning his attention to Kiti. It’s a delicate situation all round. One small thing could tip it. Technically de Lancey’s my superior, but Kiti is a separate emirate, so though I report to him I also report direct to Kaduna. De Lancey wants to come in here and start building roads and so on. In particular he’s got plans all drawn up for a bridge at Kiti, so he can open up the interior. Open it up for what, for god’s sake? There’s nothing there. But he’s bright enough to see he’s never going to get anywhere while Kama Boi’s Emir, so his first step is to try and get him out. My main business is to see he doesn’t get given a reason.”

  “But Kaduna are on your side?”

  “Kaduna are never on anybody’s side, at least no longer than the interval between one memo and the next. No, Kaduna can’t make up their mind. They don’t want to think about it. They’re terrified since Bestermann’s Patrol it might mean trouble and they wouldn’t find it so easy to hush things up the way they did in ’sixteen. But they want to keep de Lancey happy, because he’s made Soko into a show piece, so they aren’t going to tell him he can’t get his hands on Kiti and do the same here. Not till Kama Boi’s dead, at least, and they hate deposing chiefs. Bad advertisement for Indirect Rule. Their answer is to put a D.O. in here who’s on the other side and is senior enough to stand up to de Lancey.”

  “And then they’ve got to keep the D.O. happy by letting him have his own little wife with him.”

  “That’s about it.”

  The track got too narrow for two for a bit, so I rode ahead, not really thinking about what Ted had been telling me—really just brooding on my headache and the heat, tho’ it was only just after nine, and worrying about the poor horses. Soon as the track widened Ted trotted up beside me. He had been thinking.

  “I say, Rabbit,” he said. “I suppose it’s a bit rough on you. You’d have had much more fun on a bigger station, with other white women around, and tennis and all that.”

  “Oh, no, darling,” I said. “I was a bit frightened, I’ve got to admit. But now I’m here I’m glad. Just us two, alone.”

  “Me too,” he said. A funny little grunt. Hardly words at all, but I understood. Nicer than roses.

  Something strange. I don’t know what to do.

  After lunch, when Ted had gone back to his office, Elongo came in. I was lying in the long chair listening to the gramophone and reading what I’d written. It’s an awful lot but it just seems to come out of the end of the pencil without me having to think about it. Anyway I didn’t notice E. was there till I got up to wind the gramophone. He was standing against the back wall. I could hardly see his skin, just his robe and cap, like a ghost. I jumped a mile!

  “What is it?” I managed to say. In Hausa of course.

  “Madam go to Kiti this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Madam speak with Kama Boi?”

  (I’d better explain something. It doesn’t look fair, me making myself talk proper English and E. a sort of pidgin when we were both talking in Hausa and mine isn’t that hot either, but it was like that. The only Hausa he knows, almost, is about things like cleaning Ted’s boots and bringing our meals and so on, and even then he muddles in Kiti words. I made Kimjiri laugh yesterday when I used the Kiti word for “knife” which I’d picked up from Elongo—it was the best joke for years, a white woman talking bush African!)

  “I spoke to the Emir,” I said. I knew I ought to show him I thought it was cheek him not giving KB his proper title, but he was too serious to notice.

  “Madam see the women?”

  “I saw no women,” I said. There’d been quite a few in the market, actually, but I didn’t suppose he was talking about them. He stood still. I felt he was unhappy or frightened or something. I tried to help.

  “Why do you ask?” I said.

  “My sister is in the house of Kama Boi,” he said.

  “We did not go close to the house of the Emir,” I said. He was still terribly worried, I was sure.

  “What is the matter?” I said. “Is your sister unhappy?”

  “I do not know. I do not hear my sister speak. Kama Boi takes her.”

  “Takes her? Do you say he stole her?”

  Of course they taught us the words for stealing almost first thing, but I don’t think Elongo understood. Ted says Africans are naturally honest until we let them into our houses. Anyway, poor Elongo just gave a deep unhappy sigh and bowed and glided away, leaving me wondering what to do.

  The obvious thing is to consult Ted, but I don’t think I shall—not yet, anyway. From what he told me this morning Ted doesn’t like hearing accusations about KB, and I really don’t want him to take against Elongo, who I think is absolutely perfect, so I’m going to keep quiet till at least I know a bit more. But I would like to do something …

  Idea! I’m going to go and paint Kiti—I’ve simply got to. Terribly exciting. There’s something about Africa. I mean I don’t really like it, it’s so uncomfy in such a lot of ways, but my eye and my hand love it! I don’t think I’ve ever painted so well as I’ve started doing now, and there’s lots and lots of subjects at Kiti. So when I go I’ll take Elongo with me to carry things and help, and I’ll get Ted to ask KB for permish for me to paint his palace, and then I might be able to get him to send some of his women out to pose in front or something. Can’t think of a way of making sure E’s sister is one of them. I really need to find out more.

  Second idea! I’m going to get Elongo to teach me Kiti! I’ll teach him English in exchange. Give me something to do all these long hours when Ted’s working, and it’s too hot to paint. Yes, that’s rather a good idea. The other one I’m not sure about, but I think I’ll give it a try.

  Three

  “The same spirit,” said Miss Tressider. “That’s really nice. Things like holding my head right are easy once you’ve got that. I hope there’ll be time for me to have a chat with the old billy-goat when we’ve finished.”

>   She lolled naked on the bed of her small portable cabin—the “wholly separate accommodation” written into her contract. It and the three larger ones used by the unit formed a small encampment a few hundred yards downstream from the clearing in which the remains of The Warren stood. The hotel accommodation in New Kiti town had been judged for a number of reasons unsatisfactory.

  The air conditioner muttered away beneath the closed window. The glass was grey with river-mist and the light of dawn. Jackland, wearing a thin green cotton bath-robe, sat in an upright chair which he had tilted and was rocking with a push of his toe against the corner of the bed. His bed-roll lay in hummocks on the floor. Though their affair had begun abruptly only a few days earlier and was still fresh—still, for him, perhaps, astonishing—he had insisted that his age excused him from having to share a single bed all night. Indeed he did look older at the moment than he had when speaking to the camera, but this was mainly the effect not of his sleeping arrangements but of heavy reading spectacles, which somehow enhanced the hollows below his cheek-bones, edging the mildly haggard a year or two further towards the cadaverous.

  Miss Tressider had aged too, but more deliberately. On set she had contrived to seem barely into her twenties. Now she had relaxed to her own age, some ten years more. She had changed in other ways. It would have been difficult, of course, to imagine the woman who had stepped from the canoe lying in a pose of such feline languor, but there was more to it than that. Her off-stage face, though not so pretty as her press photographs, was much less run-of-the-mill than the one she had invented for her portrayal of Betty Jackland, mouth firm and with a hint of the archaic smile seen on early Greek statues, the chin somehow less bulky, the eyes sleepy and sly.

  “I keep saying you should have,” said Jackland.

  “And I keep saying not till it’s all over. Imagination’s more important than truth, Nigel. You can’t see it because you’re a journalist, really. Betty didn’t know the truth, did she? She didn’t have much clue what was going on, and none at all what would happen next. I don’t want to either. Knowing what’s next in the script is knowing too much—I have to imagine it away. All Betty knew was that Ted was her ticket of escape from that fucking awful father and she’d chosen fucking awful Africa instead, so now here she was in the stink and heat trying to find out how to love her funny old husband.”

  “Do you think she did?”

  “Oh, yes. Not the way she thought, though.”

  “I suppose he provided her with a more admirable and adequate father-figure than the one issued to her by the heavenly quartermaster.”

  “A bit of that. Oh, I don’t go for that sort of explanation much. It’s all too coggy. We aren’t made of separate bits and pieces. We’ve grown. Branches and roots and leaves aren’t the tree. The tree’s the pattern they make. When I get a part right it means I’ve managed to copy the pattern. I do it by imagination. I just need one or two things to go on. But it’s no use you telling me how Betty held her riding-crop unless I’ve grown into someone who’d hold it like that without thinking.”

  “My mother would not have lain around like a starlet attempting to catch the eye of the Playboy centrefold editor.”

  “Do you want me to be Betty all the time, Nigel?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you sure? Come here, then.”

  “I’m trying to read.”

  “Come here.”

  Jackland put his Economist down, removed his spectacles, rose and stood gazing down at her. She raised her left arm in succulent invitation while her right slipped languorously over the edge of the bed. He was shrugging himself out of his robe when with that lolling hand she caught the edge of the sheet and flipped it across her body, leaving only her head, arm and naked shoulder visible. She put the hand to her face and with the gesture of an uncle amusing small children by a variety of grimaces slid it downwards, wiping out Mary Tressider and replacing her with the woman who had landed from the canoe. Jackland looked for a moment at the young, tremulous, earnestly bewildered features, then nodded and pulled his robe back round him.

  “Am I to take it,” he said as he sat down, “that your current amiability towards me is an aid to you in your portrayal of a woman sexually involved with a much older man?”

  The harsh public tone was marked. He might have been in front of the cameras, pinning down the slitherings of some industrial spokesman. Miss Tressider twitched the sheet away and re-odalisqued, but answered as though also involved in an interview, cool and serious.

  “Oh no. I don’t need that. It’s in the imagination. Reality would get in the way.”

  Jackland put on his spectacles and started to read, or to pretend to. Miss Tressider stared at the ceiling.

  “Has it been bothering you, Nigel?” she said.

  “Not greatly, but it seems an obvious question to ask. One point that emerges strongly from the diary is the way in which two presumably inhibited and, so to speak, uneducated people should have contrived to get so much out of the sex act. One is bound to wonder what it might have been like for them.”

  “But we aren’t like that, are we? Besides, they were in love.”

  “I have the grace to pretend on suitable occasions.”

  “And sometimes I have the honesty not to act. You’re very self-centred­, aren’t you, Nigel? Have you actually loved anyone, ever?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Betty?”

  “Oedipally, you mean? Again, not …”

  “I don’t mean. Anyway I shouldn’t have asked. When it’s over you can tell me all about her. I’d like that. I rather go for old Ted, you know. I don’t think he was anything like the stick dear Piers is making him out. I can see quite a bit of him in you, Nigel.”

  “I find it hard to imagine anyone more totally different. He was a steady, decent, unimaginative elderly schoolboy who’d come to Nigeria because he could think of nothing better to do with his limited talents, and then proceeded to take the job too seriously for his own good. The only similarity I can perceive is that the old boy could express himself on paper. I’ve read his reports at Kaduna. He could put a case over and he had a spare, accurate, natural turn of phrase. You get the impression from the diary that de Lancey could run rings round him, but they were more evenly matched than you might imagine. Bugger! Where did he come from? That’s not supposed to happen in here.”

  Jackland had slapped at his shin while speaking and now brushed the flattened corpse of the mosquito away.

  “She, not he,” said Miss Tressider. “The blokes are vegetarians.”

  “Why me, anyway? There you are, laid out like a banquet for the Mayor and Corporation of Mosquito City and they home in on my sapless shanks.”

  “Female solidarity, I expect. Keep taking the pills and you’ll be all right.”

  “For malaria. There are plenty of other things. When I was doing the research for this job I read about an A.D.O. who ate some inadequately cooked river fish and contracted a parasite which burrowed into his brain and drove him mad. His servants sent for a doctor who rode thirty miles and arrived to find the man dying. As he bent over the bed to try the pulse the A.D.O. pulled a revolver from under his pillow and shot the doctor dead.”

  “Charming. Keep off fish, Nigel. Or go and sleep with the others. Anything else?”

  “Sleeping sickness, cholera, typhoid, black-water, tetanus, hepatitis—various parasites—there’s a guinea worm in the diary—tick fever—that’s in the diary too, Bestermann died of it—I believe there’s a specially nasty variant round here—river blindness—lot of that because of the spray from the rapids, in fact there’s a W.H.O. project on it at Kiti … You know, the insurance premiums alone on this trip would pay for an hour of screen time shot in the Home Counties …”

  “How did you get it off the ground, Nigel? I mean, I think it’s a terrific script—wild hor
ses wouldn’t have got me here for anything less—and even then if I hadn’t been breaking up with Alphonse—but how did you sell it to them? It isn’t the Raj, is it? No howdahs or durbars or tiger shoots, just three or four people sweating their lives away in a stinking jungle slum. By no means mass audience. How did you get them to spend the money?”

  “The rest of the series is dirt cheap. Me going to places where I’ve done programmes over the years and seeing what they look like now. Old film, talking heads, location shots. Finance department’s dream. I sold them that, then conned them into this as a spin-off. We’re doing this on the cheap too, all things considered.”

  “I’m not cheap.”

  “But you’re going to sell the series round the world, they think. My guess is very few networks will buy the whole package, just this and the episode that concerns them, if any.”

  “So it’s going to make a loss.”

  “Probably. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve been wanting to do this for over twenty years—effectively since I found the diary among my father’s kit.”

  “And I’ve been wanting to play Bernhardt playing Hamlet with a wooden leg. Can I get anyone to see … Among Ted’s kit, Nigel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But she says …”

  “She must have changed her mind.”

  “I suppose she could have put it there when the kit came back from Africa. It would be a way of getting rid of it. A bit like telling Elongo to bury it in the bush.”

  “No. It came with his stuff.”

  “He’d read it?”

  “One presumes so.”

  Miss Tressider closed her eyes. The archaic smile vanished. Her face became blank and then, without any apparent movement of muscle, underwent faint shifts, hints and suggestions of an underlying personality trying to emerge. She sighed and opened her eyes.

  “Thank God you didn’t tell me before,” she said. “It changes everything, doesn’t it? If he was going to read every word …”

  “She didn’t know that while she was writing it.”