Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  “Nothing real, though. That was Africa for her. And Ted. When did she die, Nigel?”

  “1960. I was in Chile. Cancer of the liver. She used to write when I was away, but she didn’t mention it.”

  “No. The Africa paintings were good—they must have been. She knew and de Lancey knew. You haven’t got any of them?”

  “I think when the news came about my father she deliberately destroyed everything. When I was at Cambridge I found a book about tribal masks on a second-hand bookstall and gave it her for a birthday present. I thought they were stunning, in their own right, and she’d be interested for other reasons, but she barely glanced at it. ‘All those old horrors,’ she said.”

  “But she didn’t burn Ted’s stuff? You said that’s where you found the diary.”

  “When I got back from Chile I went through her papers. There wasn’t much, and all in order. She didn’t want any fuss for people to remember her by. Almost the only unexplained item was a banker’s order for a firm in Liverpool. I queried it. They turned out to be a warehouse firm who were storing three trunks. I went up to look. They were my father’s possessions, with a note from de Lancey saying he had checked them. My mother had begun to pay the storage fees the moment the boxes had come, though she hadn’t even got a job then and must have been desperate for money. There were my father’s guns she could have sold.”

  “She couldn’t face it.”

  “I suppose so. The diary was among my father’s clothes, wrapped in a silk petticoat she must have left behind.”

  “He might have nicked the petticoat while she was packing. To remind him.”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the diary?”

  “No. I think I’ve worked out what may have happened about that. One or two things the Sarkin said. I’d tried to ask him several times before but he’d ducked the question. In fact one of the reasons I agreed to take him to Tefuga was that I thought he might tell me now.”

  “It matters, doesn’t it?”

  “It matters to me whether my mother deliberately left the diary for my father to find. The Sarkin’s attitude was curious. The truck broke down and we talked for a while. He seemed positively anxious to explain himself to me. Second time that had happened—it was about his political career before. He had very strong feelings about my mother, gratitude but also caution. As a young man he had regarded her as a powerful witch, and had thought of the diary as a fetish object. When I asked him whether she’d given it to him to bury he said he didn’t remember, but then he thought for a bit and explained in hypothetical terms that he would not have done what she wanted. Then he decided to leave.”

  “What had he got against burying it?”

  “Too dangerous. They’d only just got rid of one magical presence, remember. She may even have told him what she says in the diary, that she thought of it as a sort of juju and wanted it to be absorbed back into Kiti. And a termites’ nest, remember. I think that might have bothered him more than somewhat. In my parents’ minds the notion that white people were really termites was no more than an amusing fairy-tale, but especially in the light of Femora Feng’s dream it meant much more than that to the Kitawa. What happens if you feed a nest of termites on a fetish object prepared by a white witch? Hordes of white men coming and taking your country from you? He probably didn’t formulate the danger in terms like that, he’d just decided it was dangerous. But he had to put it somewhere. Somewhere it would be under control. Somewhere which was as far as possible not part of Kiti. He was Messenger by now, in and out of the office. What’s more, the office was supposed to be termite proof. My guess is he hid it in there.”

  “And Ted found it.”

  “There’s one more thing to go on. The Sarkin told me something new about Femora Feng’s dream. That seems to have modified itself quite a bit as time went on, but in its earliest form the termite hadn’t got a woman’s face, and then after it had killed the horse Elongo hit the termite with a mattock so that it broke into pieces and crawled away. The Sarkin told me with some emphasis that he still regarded the dream as significant, but not to have been referring to his eventual political triumph and Nigerian independence. It was the Incident which remained the significant event in his eyes. This explains something which has been puzzling me all along, which was his general helpfulness to us—it’s not usual in Third World countries for public figures to welcome reminders of the colonial past and their own more primitive behaviour. But in the Sarkin’s case it was the Incident which had originally invested him with his authority among the Kitawa, and with Nigeria so clearly on the edge of political breakdown he was glad of a chance to emphasize the non-political basis of that authority.”

  “Go back to the dream.”

  “Sorry. In his reading of the dream the death of the black horse symbolized not simply the deposition of Kama Boi but the total loss of authority on the part of the Hausa. This was immediately followed in the dream by Elongo hacking the termite to pieces which then crawled away. Now, when he’d told me about his political career in our earlier talk he’d laid great emphasis on the short tenure of British Political Officers at Kiti. This was another source of his power. You can think of each brief ineffective tenure as a piece of termite. But how conceivably could Elongo have been said to have caused this to happen? Suppose my father had lived, he might have stayed at Kiti for some time. From Kaduna’s point of view that would neatly solve the joint problem of a post which nobody wanted to go to and an officer whom it might be embarrassing to post elsewhere. But in what conceivable way could Elongo be said to have caused my father’s death? The only interpretation I have arrived at was that it was his failure to do what my mother asked him with the diary which was the crucial act. He put it in the office.”

  “He couldn’t read, Nigel. He couldn’t have understood.”

  “He wouldn’t need to. He would simply link the effect back to the cause, in exactly the same way that I am doing, only he would see a magical mechanism whereas I believe I see a psychological one. Shall we go on?”

  “Wait. I’ve just thought of something. The picture she did of Salaki. On their way back from the village. He was going to hang that in his office. That would have been with his stuff, wouldn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Perhaps Bevis nicked it when he was packing up.”

  “Possibly. I think more likely my father destroyed it after he’d read the diary. I don’t see how he could bear to look at it.”

  “Poor Ted.”

  “You have to think of him slogging the days away with no one to talk to. His career, such as it was, was in ruins. Though nobody in fairness could have blamed him for the Incident—in fact he’d consistently warned that the consequences of deposing Kama Boi were unpredictable—he was still the man on the spot, the natural scapegoat. Though he would probably not have lost his job there was little likelihood of promotion, and very little chance of transfer to another colony where my mother could bring the child. From now on he would only see her on leave. Added to that his enemy, de Lancey, had beaten him. It’s clear from the diary that he resented that very deeply. Then the process of clearing up and reorganization after the Incident would have imposed an appalling load of work. In the middle of all this he stumbles on the diary. I imagine him starting to read it, coming to one of the intimate passages, not being able to face it, but then not being able to leave it alone either. Constant little dips. Soon searching for the stimulus of erotic recall. And then the ambush of finding out my mother’s collusion with de Lancey, her deliberate deceit and betrayal.”

  “It wasn’t like that, Nigel.”

  “Not in our eyes, perhaps. In his, though … and then the Incident. I must have read her account of talking to Femora Feng and then painting the women at least a hundred times. I still can’t tell, but my impression of Femora Feng as a Lenin-like figure has hardened. A very remarkable woman, using h
er own will and drive to convert and control a small group, who in turn subvert a larger group and thus tip the balance of a poised moment of crisis. I think when my mother came to the painting-ground Femora Feng had been trying to persuade the women that now was the moment for the revolutionary act. My mother’s appearance was an epiphany. First by her words she seemed to tell them that the White Man had sent Azikofio to Tefuga to be a sacrifice, so that the juju-power of Kama Boi could be restored to the ancestors, and then by her paintings she showed them how the sacrifice was to be carried out. And after that the women would be, in my mother’s words, beautiful and whole.”

  “Not Betty’s fault.”

  “Certainly not at the rational level. My father could hardly blame her for that any more than he could for the death of Salaki, which she could also be said to have caused and must have been another serious blow. In any case some kind of revolt by the Kitawa was clearly due to happen. The depredations of the Hausa had increased dramatically over the past few years as Kama Boi lost his control of his followers. In the end, from a pragmatic viewpoint, it could hardly have worked out better—less than a dozen dead, and the event itself shocking enough to force the British to impose and the Hausa to accept a more reasonable system. A full-scale rising would have been a disaster for all sides.”

  “I think things have a pattern, Nigel. She didn’t mean it, but still it was meant.”

  Jackland shrugged, not prepared to argue the point, but perhaps also not so ready since his African experience to dismiss such ideas as meaningless.

  “Let’s go onto the other question,” he said. “This is what really interests me. One of the things I tried to put over in my script was the parallel between the relationship of the Kitawa to Kama Boi and that of my mother to my father.”

  “Oh, yes. She says so, doesn’t she?”

  “And she was beginning to mind, I think. It’s difficult for us to grasp what a male-dominated world that was, how absolutely she was supposed to exist for him. How little what she thought or felt mattered. Her exploration of her own sexuality, for instance … he just grunted and fell asleep.”

  “She was getting tired of that.”

  “Yes, I think so. It had been too much—too good to last, to coin a phrase. The question is, though, was there not merely a parallel relationship? Was there also a parallel Incident? Did my mother take her cue from the dancers? Did she, subconsciously at least, revolt too?”

  “How?”

  “She finished the diary. I am struck by the deliberate decision to try to write that final sequence as though without foreknowledge of the event. She didn’t quite manage it. There are no exclamation marks, for instance—as though she didn’t dare risk letting go as she used to. It’s a symptom of the effort needed, at a time of great stress and bewilderment, too. She then gave the diary to Elongo and asked him to bury it in a termites’ nest. I find it hard to believe that that was all the effort was for. In any case I now think that Elongo didn’t do what she asked. He hid it in the office instead. As you say, he couldn’t have known what might happen if my father found it and read it, but my mother would. She had an unusual empathy with the Kitawa—a feeling for how their minds worked. So the question is, was she at any level aware of what Elongo would in fact do?”

  He kept his tone dry, perhaps trying to persuade himself that the answer was now of no more than academic interest. Miss Tressider hunched her shoulders as though about to retract her head between them. Her face changed, the archaic smile becoming more pronounced and her other features assuming the unparticularized look of early statues, pure female nature as yet unprinted by the single soul. Jackland waited, watching her, no doubt aware that her knack of assuming the surface appearance of the part she was asked to play might be deceptive. It gave no guarantee that what issued between the smiling lips was truth.

  He started the tape but turned the sound low. There was in any case no more dialogue, only the noises of bush and river, the rustle of papers as Piers Smith worked in the littered office or a two-step from the gramophone as he sat in the darkening dining-room with the brandy bottle at his elbow and dusk fading quickly from the river beyond the mosquito-wire.

  “All this is guesswork on my part, of course,” said Jackland.

  “It’s the same as the other thing,” said Miss Tressider. “She didn’t mean it, but it was meant.”

  “Subconsciously? I don’t believe in a power out there, making things happen in an aesthetically satisfactory manner. God, the great script-writer. I can just about take the idea of people feeling compelled at an irrational level to conform to a subconsciously perceived pattern.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Africa was over, you see.”

  “Did she know? Then? Did she actually want to finish things off?”

  “No. Yes. I suppose when she said good-bye she thought he’d be coming home on leave and then she’d persuade him to look for a job in England. What d’you think it would have been like, Nigel? The evenings, for instance, with the kids in bed upstairs—a coke fire, those browny hearth-tiles—Ted on one side sucking at his pipe and reading his National Geographic, her on the other, looking across at him. Up in the attic his trunks, full of Africa—albums, papers, knick-knacks, old uniform. Or lying awake at night, him snoring beside her. If she moved her hand she could touch his side—just under the pyjamas and the skin, still there—Africa.”

  Miss Tressider gazed at the screen, which showed the D.O.’s office, corrugated iron, gracelessly inappropriate to the lush and twining riverine trees beyond. Africans, three men and a woman, sat listlessly by the door. Piers Smith marched into view, his shoulders squared but his step uneven. He had not shaved for two or three days. He spoke briefly and with an irritated gesture to the natives, who rose, picked up their belongings and moved away. He went into the office. A moment later the clerk came hurrying out. The door closed.

  “We’re on firm ground again,” said Jackland. “All that is in the inquiry papers.”

  “There’s a doctor at my hospital,” said Miss Tressider. “He’s nuts on my tick—he adores it. He says it gets born and mates and climbs a bit of grass and then goes into a sort of coma. It can wait for years like that, till a warm-blooded animal comes by. Then it jumps and clings and sucks its meal of blood and falls off and lays its eggs and dies. That’s all it’s there for.”

  She looked flushed, as if back in her fever, and spoke of the mystic moment in a dreamy whisper. On the screen the office stood dead centre. With the sound still low they could not hear the shot, but could tell the instant from the flurry of green doves (supposedly feeding among the trees beyond but in fact trapped by local bird-catchers and then released by Trevor Fish crouching out of sight with the cage) as they rose all together and whirred away across the river.

  About the Author

  Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.

  The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).

  A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

  Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to re
produce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1986 by Peter Dickinson

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  978-1-5040-0491-6

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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