Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  So we got home fagged and dusty and wanting to flop in our chairs with a b. & s.—and we found this horribly non-flop man waiting for us. Ted introduced me.

  “I’m afraid your boy seems to have run off,” he said. “He didn’t like the look of me, no doubt. I hope you’ll forgive my using your room, Mrs Jackland. You have made it very pleasantly inhabitable.”

  That all looks perfectly polite, written down like that, but he’s got a sneery way of saying things, as tho’ it was terribly gracious of him to bother to apologize, and quite surprising our house wasn’t a pig-sty! I couldn’t help wanting to get my own back.

  “That was Ted,” I said. I tinkled my little glass bell. Elongo came in at once, wearing his white housecoat and skull-cap. I was watching Mr de Lancey sideways to see how he took it, but he just stared contemptuously at Elongo.

  “Pass tea-chop,” I said, as tho’ everything was just ordinary. Elongo bowed in his dignified way and left. One up to the Jacklands!

  “Didn’t you get my message, sir?” said Ted. “We weren’t expecting you till Tuesday.”

  “I rather fancied a couple of days’ fishing. I expected to find Mrs Jackland here, but not wanting to force my company on her I set up camp in that clearing down river. I have simply been taking advantage of your admirable mosquito-defences in the evening. I haven’t suffered one whit from your boy running off.”

  “He’s bush Kiti,” said Ted. “We’re still training him.”

  “I stick to Ibibio. They’ve been in contact with the white man for long enough to have a reasonable idea of what they can get away with. In the words of the poet, they steal in measure.”

  “I’m absolutely certain Elongo isn’t a thief,” I said.

  “My dear Mrs Jackland, of course he’s not. Very few Africans are. To be a thief you need to have a clear notion of property, of a society in which everything has an owner with an absolute right to it. The African grasp of such ideas is, to put it mildly, erratic. The cattle Fulani has it, for instance, as applied to cattle. If you took one of his cows from him you would be a thief, but take almost anything else and you would merely be stealing. All Africans steal, from the emir in his palace to the fisherman in his canoe. If your boy does not, he is not merely an exception, he is a nonpareil.”

  Oh, I wish I could … It’s the tone you can’t write down, even if you’ve got the exact words. The beastly man was amused, not just at the idea of stealing being different from thieving, which I suppose some people would think was clever—I mean amused at telling me ’cos he knew I was too stupid to think of something like that for myself.

  “Ted told me …” I said, but then Elongo came in with the tea things. I was going to explain about Ted’s Resident at Jos who used to drive his Morris out to the Plateau and just leave it in the open for days on end while he tried to talk to the savage tribes up there and no one ever touched it. Of course I didn’t want to talk about stealing in front of E. Mr de Lancey didn’t care.

  “Wonder where he’s been hiding,” he said, staring at him while he moved around. “It’s quite a good sign him showing up like that the moment you came back. Years ago, when I was fresh out, I was idiot enough to bring a bulldog bitch with me. Inevitably I spent half my time nursing her from one disease to the next, but I’d got her pretty well seasoned by my first leave. You remember Pop Allen, Jackland? Died in Bauchi in ’seventeen. He took her over. I got a letter from him before I’d been home a week. Apparently the moment I was out of the house Doris had vanished too. Allen had sent the boys out to hunt, offered a reward and so on. He realized I’d be cut up about losing her. I wrote back, of course, telling him it was all my fault bringing her out in the first place. Six months later, my first evening back on seat, I was sitting out on the veranda when Doris crawled up the path. She was skin and bone. Sores all over her body. One eye gone. She died in my arms.”

  “How awful,” I managed to say. Goodness, he was lucky he didn’t find himself with an eye gone! Really! Our boy, my Elongo, in our dining­-room, drawling away about him as tho’ he was no better than a dog! I said I’d just run and clean up but as soon as I’d got away I snatched up a bit of charcoal and drew a picture of Mr de Lancey on the wall of my little room. I made him a French poodle, all bobbed and clipped and pom-pommed, wearing a monocle. It was terribly like. I longed to fetch Ted and show him. And at least it made me feel better enough to go back and make tea-chat after I’d changed into a frock.

  It was all horribly sticky at first. He must have known I absolutely loathed him. And there was absolutely nothing to talk about, not even small-talk. For instance he can’t stand dance-music—his favourite records are by someone called Bartok—at least he hasn’t brought them, thank heavens. He thinks Rupert Brooke is a bad poet! And I hardly know anyone in the service, ’part from the ones I met coming up. Or the people he knows back home. (His face when I said Daddy was an auctioneer!) Poor Ted’s better than me at hiding his hates. He was just ghastily embarrassed and scraped away at his pipe (which of course he couldn’t light tho’ if we’d been alone he’d have done it like a shot). And worst of all I could see Mr de Lancey was really rather enjoying it all inside him, finding out what a dreadful common little wife Ted had picked up. It was one of the worst half-hours I’ve ever had in my life, bad as when Daddy insisted on asking people to dinner.

  I was just thinking at last I could ring for Elongo to come and clear away so Ted could take the man off to his office or somewhere to look at files or something when Mr de Lancey said, “Jackland tells me you are an artist, Mrs Jackland.”

  “I only try and paint a bit,” I said.

  “May I see?”

  Oh, how I longed to say no! Vulgar little daubs by Jackland’s ugly common little wife. I glanced at Ted, begging him to get me out of it, but tho’ I did catch his eye he looked away. He knew what Mr de Lancey would think, too. So there was nothing for it. I fetched the album I’d been putting together before the tour, mostly river paintings. I couldn’t say anything—I’d have choked. I just gave it him.

  He screwed in his monocle and slowly, slowly opened the album at the beginning. The first picture is a quick sketch I did of a fisherman throwing his net, the sort you get right straight off or tear up. He looked at it. I could hear Ted’s pipe-scraping and the evening dove-calls and the tick-tick of things in the thatch. At last he turned the page. I could have screamed, waiting for the axe to fall. Then after five pages he looked up and opened his eye muscles so that the monocle dropped on to its string and stared at me with his horrid pale eyes. It was as tho’ I’d been a cockroach on his breakfast tray.

  “These are extraordinarily good, Mrs Jackland.”

  IT ABSOLUTELY ISN’T FAIR!!! Why should darling, kind, decent Ted, whom I truly love, not be able to understand, when horrible, horrible Mr de Lancey could see at once? In fact I saw Ted’s jaw drop and he picked up his cup and took a swig to hide it but it was all cold dregs and he almost choked. I didn’t understand at first. Nobody’s ever said anything like that before—only people who don’t know being polite—I’m almost crying with a stupid sort of happiness now while I’m writing. The point is, you see, he meant it. And he knew. He wasn’t being nice. He hadn’t any reason at all to say anything nice—quite the opposite. Oh!! (Pull yourself together, Bets!)

  Well, of course I couldn’t do anything except stammer. I’m simply not used to people thinking anything I do is any good. I don’t know how to behave. Mr de Lancey looked at me as tho’ he still thought I was a perfect fool, then put his monocle in and went back to the album.

  “Who taught you to do this wash?” he said.

  He tilted the book towards me so I could see. It was the one of the rapids at Kiti. I’d got the sky just right, hazed but huge. All that emptiness, and Africa going on for ever underneath it.

  “’Fraid I just taught myself,” I said. “I saw some Japanese pictures and thought I’d like to
copy their kind of wash. It took me ages to learn, and it’s still not quite the same.”

  “Ordinary camel-hairbrush?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “No wonder it took a bit of learning. The Japs have a different trick.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Ignorance has its rewards, and this is evidently one of them.”

  He went through the whole album, looking at every picture as tho’ he was reading the pages of a difficult book. I caught Ted’s eye. He was still totally amazed, I could see, dear man, but he made a thumbs-up sign to me. I rang my bell and Elongo came and cleared away. I don’t suppose Mr de Lancey even noticed him.

  I hadn’t finished doing the album and there were some loose pictures in the back. He took them out one by one to look at them. I’d forgotten, but I must have shoved in the sketches of KB’s wives and the copies I’d made for the old brute. I’d been meaning to mount the copies to make them look a bit special, but what with Ted’s guinea worm and then getting ready to go on tour I’d not got round to it. I only remembered when I saw Mr de Lancey comparing two, glancing from one to the other. He put three on one side before he closed the album. I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, which is quite extraordinary ’cos it’s never happened to me before.

  “May I buy these three, since you have duplicates?”

  I just shook my head. I couldn’t say anything. I must have reached out without thinking, ’cos next thing he was handing me the three pictures. Oh, he knew all right. They were the real ones, the ones I’d done in the harem.

  “The copies are for old Kama Boi,” said Ted. “Betty did them because she wanted to stick to the originals.”

  “I wouldn’t have credited the brute with an eye for aesthetics,” said Mr de Lancey.

  “He appears to have,” said Ted. “He sent a runner asking me to take Betty on tour so that she could paint his domains.”

  (So that was alright. Only I wasn’t interested any longer. Nor was Mr de Lancey.)

  “Seriously, Mrs Jackland,” he said. “I would very much appreciate it if you would let me buy something. I am not asking for a gift. I prefer to buy. I like to think that I have built my collection out of my own resources. I grew up surrounded by paintings and sculptures, many of them first rate, and though as a younger son I had to start afresh and my finances limit me to water-colours, I have the nucleus of a satisfactory little collection waiting in England to comfort me in my retirement.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try and think of something.”

  “Please do,” he said.

  After that Ted took him off to the office to go through files for a bit so I could make arrangements for supper. We’d been meaning to have a picnic out of tins and then fall into bed, but of course with Mr de Lancey there we had to lay on something. Dinner was sticky in a different kind of way, tho’ Mr de Lancey did most of the talking. At first it was about being sick. Ted’s guinea worm. He wanted to know all the ugsome details and tell us much worse things which had happened to other people. Another of his little hobbies, like collecting water-colours! He’s famous for his medicine chest, which he takes everywhere, full of his own special remedies. Hope he’s never here when I go down with something!

  After that we got on to the subject of schools. Quite a lot of the Political Officers are a bit potty about which school they were at, and ride eighty miles to see someone who was there too so they can swap stories about when they were boys and what’s happened to the other boys. It matters. Mr de Lancey was at Winchester, but Ted was at somewhere called Garsford where they wore sandals and called each other by their Christian names. (So stupid of them to choose that for him. He does mind being different.) Mr de Lancey isn’t quite so sneery now when he talks to me, but he obviously still thinks I’m stupid and need things explained. Actually what he said was quite amusing. His idea was that the reason we are so keen on Indirect Rule is ’cos we think it works like a public school. At places like Eton and Winchester the masters use the big boys to govern the rest, and the big boys have special privileges and are very grand so they feel it’s worth their while keeping order in the school. That’s what we’re doing here with the emirs. Course, there’s one big difference—in the schools the big boys keep leaving and the little boys grow up and do the governing. Mr de Lancey thinks it’s poppycock to suppose that’s ever going to happen here.

  “The analogy is not of Zarafio taking over from Kama Boi, which heaven forfend,” he said. “It is of your boy there and his kind taking government into their hands. You won’t see that in our lifetime, or our children’s, eh, Jackland?”

  Ted just grunted. He’s often said the same to me, but he wasn’t in a good mood. Mr de Lancey hadn’t been talking about his idea just to amuse me—he’d been using it to get at Ted about having gone to a school where they didn’t have prefects or fagging. No wonder Ted laughed so loud when I took him into my room at bed-time and showed him my poodle!

  Tues March 25

  Oh dear, I don’t understand at all! Me, I mean. I thought I’d made up my mind to be good, and all along I must have been only pretending. It’s difficult to explain, ’cos nothing’s really happened, but it has, and now everything’s different again.

  I didn’t realize then but I think it must have begun in the middle of last night. I was lying awake, thinking. It hadn’t been as nice as usual—Ted rather rough and careless. I hadn’t thought I’d minded. It was so easy to understand after a day like that. With Mr de Lancey all day long, first in the office going through files, and then riding down river with him to try and deal with the fishing-rights problem—it’s all to do with some islands which are supposed to be in Kiti but a lot of Sokowa have moved in and our District Head down there has been quite spineless and KB hasn’t done anything and Ted won’t go over his head which Mr de Lancey thinks he ought to—all desperately complicated and frustrating, specially with our people letting Ted down the whole way when Mr de Lancey has got his lot toeing the line. And then to come back and listen all evening to me and Mr de Lancey jawing about pictures—terribly interesting for me, but I shouldn’t have hogged the whole evening like that … well, no wonder he wanted to show whose wife I was.

  As I say, I thought I was being very loyal and understanding while it was happening, but then I woke up in the middle of the night and I found I was lying there brooding about me and Ted and Kama Boi and his wives, and wondering what the difference really was, and remembering how I’d felt that time at Tefuga when I thought Ted had let me down so, and how I was somehow going to use s** to get my own back, and then I’d been ashamed in the morning. But now here Ted was using it, his way, to get his own back … I lay awake quite a long time, thinking that sort of round-and-round night thoughts, and then I fell asleep. In the morning I just put it all aside, I thought. But I can’t have.

  I’d better explain that one of the things I’d been jawing about with Mr de Lancey was doing a picture specially for him. I felt v. nervous about it, in case it wasn’t good enough, so I suggested I actually did one of him fishing, so if it didn’t turn out quite right for his collection it’d still be a sort of keepsake. He agreed to that, so we settled he’d go down and start fishing soon as it was light and I’d come down a bit after and try and do a picture. I told him about a place I’d looked at once or twice, just below his camp, but hadn’t tried ’cos it needed a bit more interest in the foreground.

  So down I went with Elongo to carry my things. It wasn’t too hot yet, and the river had bits of mist on it I didn’t want to lose, and tho’ I was still nervous I was excited too at having the chance to show what I could really do. But I got a terrible shock when I got there, ’cos I could hardly see Mr de Lancey at all! I knew where he was, I mean. That was obvious—only too obvious!—but I couldn’t see him! It turned out he does his fishing from inside a special little mosquito-net tent with only his rod poking out. I
was amazed. I mean somebody who understood so much not seeing how impossible that was going to be, a fuzzy shapeless blur, not interesting at all, just puzzling. I was terribly disheartened but I settled down under my brolly to make the best of it. I soon found out why he’d needed it, tho’. The place was swarming with flies. I’d been meaning to send Elongo back but I kept him to whisk them off me.

  I didn’t bother about the thing at first. I was in a hurry to catch the mist and the shadows along the far bank which would be gone in half an hour. I’d been expecting to put Mr de Lancey near the middle, but instead I left a blank at the side for the near bank and the thing and laid on one of my washes for the sky and another for the sheeny water with the mist just fading and dabbed in the far bank—all not bad—and then I had to decide what to do about the thing. It was terribly awkward. I was sure it was going to spoil what might have been quite a nice little picture. I did a few trial sketches on a spare sheet but it wouldn’t come right, then in the middle of that I had an idea—one of my cartoony ones—so I dashed it down and showed it to Elongo. He saw the joke at once and laughed his lovely round African laugh.

  “What’s up?” called Mr de Lancey.

  The rod went down, the thing shuddered and collapsed, and out he came.

  “My arm was getting tired,” he said. “I could do with a rest.”

  I ought to explain he was tiger-fishing. You can’t eat tiger-fish but they’re terrifically game. You catch them by casting a “spoon” out and trolling it back which makes it look like a silver fish in the water and the tiger-fish grab it. Only they hadn’t so far.

  He strolled across to look. I was embarrassed but I had to let him see what Elongo had been laughing at. I’d drawn him huddled into his thing and labelled it “White Man Fishing” and next door I’d drawn one of our natives casting his net with that big open gesture and labelled it “Black Man Fishing”, tho’ you could see the joke without reading the labels—at least Elongo had. Mr de Lancey didn’t laugh, but he sounded a bit amused. Then he looked at the painting.