by Joseph Hone
‘I was on an attachment in Nairobi – to the Kenyan Government. I wasn’t with the FO then.’
‘Yes, of course.’ The charade had gone far enough. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I know who was tailing us this morning. Some New York private eye business. I phoned them after the accident, found the card on the man. Now governments don’t hire private detective agencies to do their surveillance for them.’ I paused. Jackson had stopped fiddling with his wedding ring. ‘But husbands do. Why don’t you tell me? What were you having us tailed for?’
Guy Jackson smiled. He seemed as inappropriately suited to the role of jealous husband as to that of spy – his self-assurance so visible, like a silver spoon in his mouth.
‘Jealousy is a terrible thing,’ he said flatly. He might have been describing the British weather.
‘I know. She told me.’
‘You haven’t wasted much time, have you?’ He was suddenly brisk, affronted.
‘Listen, I only met your wife yesterday. You don’t think –’
‘Oh, it can happen in far less time than that, Marlow,’ he broke in. ‘My wife can be in bed with someone within an hour of meeting them,’ he went on eagerly, as though commending one of her virtues.
‘Women can, but seldom do.’ I laughed slightly. But he didn’t take it well. I could see he was badly smitten. ‘It usually takes longer than that, even these days,’ I added, trying to placate him. But this idea of sex delayed pleased him no more than the idea of a quick bang, and he said almost angrily: ‘But in any case, it wasn’t you. It was the real George Graham they were following.’
I smiled again. How quickly this haughty man had tumbled into a world of bedroom farce – of sleuths, French maids and trousers falling down – drawn to these mockeries of eavesdropping and double identity to avoid the tragedy of it all. And he was right: farce makes infidelity bearable – cauterises it, cheapens it, brings a belly laugh to kill it. Guy Jackson had found the Iago he needed in the squalid truths of a private eye. But it had kept his sanity, else he might have killed her, I thought. The outwardly calm and detached offer the best chances in that line. He was one of those husbands, I supposed, who at all costs have to ‘know’ of infidelity – who can only possess their women properly on tape or through detective-agency reports, always at second hand: men who cannot see or feel their wives except through the eyes – and in the arms – of another.
‘But,’ I said, ‘you knew the real George Graham had been taken, two weeks ago in London – that I’d replaced him. London explained all that to you.’
‘I was still interested. It’s become a habit.’
‘When did you first know about it – about him?’
‘Six years ago, just after she first met him, on one of our leaves in London. And afterwards in Nairobi, when we separated.’
‘You mean – you sent someone after them on that trip they made around East Africa?’ I was really surprised.
‘Yes – as far as anybody could follow them – in the circumstances. It’s pretty open country.’
To say the least, I thought. Taking the territorial imperative too far altogether.
‘God, what a habit,’ I said.
‘A habit of our trade, Marlow, or just – a bad habit?’ Jackson asked easily.
‘Neither,’ I lied. ‘I understand the professional habit and the personal temptation well enough. I meant what a habit in the circumstances. Your wife has been running round with a senior KGB officer for six years. And your private eyes never got that information for you.’
‘No, never. Just the evidence of personal, not a political infidelity,’ he said unctuously.
‘And what do you think now? Don’t you think she’s involved politically with him as well?’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s never been any evidence. Absolutely none. Just coincidence. Pure coincidence.’
‘I wish I could be as sure. I don’t trust coincidence in this business. It was just a “coincidence” – my own wife turning up in Moscow by chance one day – that sent me down for twenty-eight years.’
Light pierced the gaps in the tall buildings to either side of us, bright crystal knives of afternoon sun slanting from the west over the East River. The air-conditioning sighed from grilles beneath the sealed windows. I was tired again, suffocating in the false climate.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘the windows don’t open. Need a special key.’ He got up and turned the machinery down, then he came back towards me, clasping his hands religiously. ‘If you want to be sure – why don’t you try and find out yourself? You’re in a much better position, after all, than any agency, government or private. You’re George Graham, her lover.’ He paused, as if considering the excitement of the idea. ‘It must have been a cruel surprise – when you turned up here and not him. She must be curious, to say the least, about your provenance, about what’s happened to him. Doesn’t that give you quite a lever with her?’
‘Yes, I’d thought of that.’ What I really thought was that he wanted me to pimp for him now, to feed his jealous obsessions. ‘You forget, though, that’s not what I’m here for – to carry on your private eyeing for you.’
‘Oh, I don’t know – since you mention the political factor; this could be relevant to your job here: as well as being lovers she might just have been one of Graham’s KGB contacts. Even the “stayer” we’re all looking for.’
I remembered her conversation in the restaurant – how individual happiness must have links with a wider, social contentment. Guy Jackson’s idea hadn’t struck me before. But it did now. It was just conceivable, in the way that so much else in her life, that had seemed inconceivable, I now knew to be true.
‘It’s worth a try – looking at the whole thing in that way,’ he said.
‘You want it “that way”? That she should turn out to be a KGB agent? You want the punishment as well as the peeping?’
‘Of course not.’ He was suddenly back-tracking. ‘We’ve children, a family. I’ve a career. All that would be ruined.’
But he did want to see it that way, I think – in the corners, at the very far edges of his psychological horizon. A destructive sexuality lay at the heart of his confidence. This emotional masochism that made him tick, which gave him an obsessional vivacity, whenever he talked about his wife – was the same quality that was gradually eating away at him. He was a man living on a drug, and dying of it at the same time.
Yet, I thought, his curiosity about his wife was not so different from my own – we shared an interest in her; he seemed almost as ignorant as I was about her real nature, her past. So that all he had been really doing was encouraging me, for his own purposes, in a pursuit I had decided upon myself already.
‘Well, she shouldn’t know of all this in any case,’ he said, sitting down at his desk, picking up an FAO report, returning to his role as guardian of the world’s conscience. ‘I’m sure she’s never been – politically involved with him.’
‘Just her lover, not her commissar. I agree.’
‘There’s no need to chase after that hare. It was a bizarre thought, that’s all. You understand – living with a woman who –’ he paused, at a loss.
‘Has so many other lives?’
‘Yes‚’ he nodded. ‘Exactly. One becomes prey to the worst emotions.’ He spoke like a Victorian paterfamilias tempted by a shopgirl in the Bayswater Road. ‘And of course there’s another point, Marlow: without ever having been politically involved with him, she may, unwittingly, have passed on information – about my work, with the Foreign Office and so on. He may have used her.’
‘Nothing of that emerged when they interrogated him in London. I was told specifically – that he wasn’t involved with any women. Besides, London would have been on to you at once, surely, if he’d told them about her?’
‘Yes, they would. I’d thought of that. I’m sure it was nothing more than a genuine relationship. All the worse in one way, all the better in another. But we should keep it to o
urselves in any case, and I’ll call the man off. Forget the whole business.’
He and I were joined in a conspiracy now, for of course London ought to have been informed of this development at once, whether it was pure coincidence or not. But that was his decision. He was the liaison officer; I was just the stalking horse. And how, I wondered, should anyone ever know the truth of their relationship? If London, with all their tortuous tricks, had failed even to extract the fact of her existence from Graham, how should Jackson and I ever expect to discover whether they had ever been anything more than lovers? – or find out, which we seemed to want even more, the exact nature and emotional weight of their love? That part of her was surely safe from all our prying eyes – an affair securely locked in time, as it was distant in Africa. She had lost that love herself; how should we ever find it?
I felt this so clearly then that she was safely beyond our grasp, saying goodbye to Jackson in his grand office – like a solicitor and client who have completed the sad formalities relevant to a dead friend’s lost estate. And yet a week later a process started which was to lead me into Helen Jackson’s old life – which was to animate her past as sharply as though someone had filmed it all – or at least written a script of it.
6
I had been asked to a reception for new members of the Secretariat given jointly by the US government and the City of New York. The party was held on the top floor of the US delegation’s office opposite the UN building on First Avenue – a long room with a dreadfully slippery floor filled with a lot of awkward foreigners sliding about the place with tumblers of orange or tomato juice. It was an appalling occasion – of well-meant hospitality and formal speeches, which instead of all being delivered at once, which might have saved matters, came in fits and starts throughout the hour.
Between bouts of these kindly homilies on our expected participation in the social delights of New York, Wheel, who had come with me, introduced me to an African girl – beautiful in an un-African way: tall and skinny, everything about her – face, lips, legs – long and thin; semitic-looking, Arab blood from somewhere, a colour like a grey-blue dust powdered over her skin, and eyes the shape of oval saucers, tremendous pools, with circles of dark water in the middle.
She was from Ethiopia, distantly connected with the Royal family there. Recently, she had joined the UN as a guide – a Princess, no less. She was with her younger brother that evening, and he looked just like her. He was in movies – a producer in a company recently formed to make African films – and that was where the script began.
Michael and Margaret Takazze. I suppose he was in his mid–, and she in her late twenties. They had the air of two successful, vivacious, very confident orphans. There was about them the stamp of a long-isolated warrior civilisation, a temperament, I felt, at once intensely civilised and savage.
We talked a little about nothing, about my work in the UN among other things. And then she said, ‘Are you the George Graham that made that documentary on Uganda, that won a prize – what was it called, Michael?’
‘The Mountains of the Moon.’
‘Yes, that’s the one. It was good. Fine. I’ve seen it several times. It was on over here a few months ago, on the educational channel.’
I laughed, agreed that I was the man, and wished that there’d been some real drink about. It was one of Graham’s COI films about the Ruwenzori mountains in the Western Province of the country which I’d seen hurriedly before leaving London. But I’d never been to Uganda.
‘You must know Uganda well,’ she said. ‘Have you been back recently? I was at Makerere University there before I went to the Sorbonne.’
‘No, I’ve not been back, I’m afraid. All that was some time ago. I’ve rather forgotten it all,’ I said quickly, thinking wildly.
Then Wheel said, turning to the boy, ‘Have you found any good stories yet – for one of your African productions, Michael?’
‘Yes,’ he answered with almost tired assurance. ‘We’re working on it at the moment. An extraordinary story by a Kenyan writer, Ole Timbutu. Have you heard of him, Mr Graham?’
‘No, I – I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, he’s written a novel about it – White Savages. It came out here a few months ago. He’s adapting it.’
‘Oh yes? I didn’t see it. I’d like to.’
‘It’s a mad book,’ the Princess put in, smiling. ‘I hope you’d like it – it’s none too kind to the English.’
‘I hold no brief for the British in East Africa,’ I said. ‘What’s it all about?’
‘It’s the story behind Obote’s coup de palais, among other things,’ the Prince explained. ‘Two English people, a man and his mistress – she’s married to someone else – both working for British Intelligence; travelling around East Africa – a love affair – and then how they bring about the fall of King Freddie, betraying him.’
‘And it’s true,’ his sister added. ‘There were these two people – Timbutu got it all from a journalist on the Kenya Standard.’
‘A sort of spy story?’ I asked her carefully.
‘Yes, that’s the basis – but there’s the allegory, White Savages – the two people regress into savagery by the end.’
‘They eat each other?’ Wheel asked hopefully.
‘Metaphorically,’ agreed the Prince.
‘Quite a story,’ Wheel went on. ‘Full colour, wide screen.’
‘I’d certainly like to read the book,’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can get a copy?’
‘I’ve got several, I’ll lend you one. Be glad to hear what you thought of it,’ the Princess said graciously.
7
The novel arrived on my desk some weeks later, dropped by messenger from the Princess. On the same day, I received a note from Guy Jackson asking if I’d like to spend the following weekend with them upstate at his father-in-law’s house. They’d be travelling there by car on Friday afternoon and there’d be a place for me. I called Jackson at his office to thank him, but he wasn’t in.
Wheel and I had a drink together in the Delegates’ Lounge before lunch that day. ‘How are things going?’ he asked.
‘Coming along.’
What about your domestic arrangements – the apartment you were looking for with Mrs Jackson?’
‘Nothing came of it. I’m all right at the Tudor Hotel for the time being. They’ve moved me to a larger room at the back away from the traffic. And the Jacksons have asked me up to their place in the country next weekend.’
‘Oh, yes? Belmont – I don’t know it.’
‘But you know the Jacksons pretty well?’ I asked Wheel. ‘How did you happen across them in the UN? It’s a big place.’
‘No, not that well.’ Wheel seemed anxious to assure me, as though I’d accused him of social climbing. ‘I met him here at the bar. You may have noticed – very few Secretariat people come into the North Lounge at all. We’re a sort of Club, anyone who uses the place regularly. Guy is usually here every day – has two religious martinis, then lunch.’
It seemed a fair explanation. Yet I thought what unlikely friends they were – the meticulous, rather withdrawn Englishman and the gregarious, talkative Middle-West American – the bald and big-boned Wheel and this finicky, discreet Foreign Office figure whose hobby lay in the careful investigation of his cuckoldry. Unusual companions, as different from each other as a rodeo rider and a butterfly collector.
I went back to my office after lunch, closed the door, put aside a two-volume FAO report on the Implementation of Agrarian and Riparian Information for Small Farmers in South East Asia, and took a look at White Savages by Ole Timbutu.
It was a short book, told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a kind of God-like omnipresence, who, it seemed, had in part actually observed the activities of the two main characters (a man and a woman described simply as ‘He’ and ‘She’), and had filled in the rest from memory or imagination, one couldn’t be sure which.
With this mysterious, sexless
narrator, its accent on minute physical detail, unnamed people and equally undetermined African settings – its lack of every sort of formal designation – the book was like a nouveau roman of the Robbe-Grillet school. The prose moved slowly over the surface of things like an insect for long unparagraphed pages, followed by bouts of nervous, often inconsequential, and always inconclusive dialogue, as though in a badly transcribed tape-recording, succeeded finally by passages of bleak psychological and sexual description, flat as a medical manual.
Ole Timbutu. A Kenyan. I was curious about him and his biography on the back flap was as vague as anything in his book. Kenya has very little modern literature in English to say the least – and none at all, I was sure, in the style of the nouveau roman. Ole Timbutu seemed an unlikely figure – and White Savages an unlikely novel – to emerge from a decade of African Uhuru, from the extrovert, beer-laden social temper of Nairobi. The book, despite its savage themes, used forms and made assumptions which were sophisticated and civilised to a degree. It smelt of the Left Bank, not the African plainslands. There was some innate contradiction in all this which I couldn’t fathom.
The town was surrounded by clumps of shimmering, bluish trees – behind the airport and running up the hills and through the suburbs of straw and tin shacks – and their scent was everywhere in the air, a tangy smell, far from romance, like part of a cold cure. The porter carrying their bags wheezed heavily and hoarsely. Asthmatic. Eucalyptus. The smell was everywhere, everyone permanently out of breath. The sign at the airport, giving the name of the town they had come to, said ‘8159 feet above sea level’.
What country? It could only be Ethiopia, the capital Addis Ababa, 8,000 feet up, the start of the trip which Helen Jackson and George Graham had made about East Africa in 1966. But subsequently, such easy interpretation became more difficult – the action of the characters more vague, their dialogue more allusive. The two people, the two ‘White Savages’ and their bleak love-making, seemed to fade into the groves of eucalyptus around the town like figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting.
