In a Free State (20 page)

Bobby saw the fineness of the African’s features, the special, dead blackness of the skin, and recognized him as a man of the king’s tribe. Bobby was at once deeply angry. The African, aware of Bobby’s scrutiny, frowned harder.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

Bobby pushed the door open so violently that the African was hit and thrown off balance.

The African recovered and scrambled away from the car. He said, ‘What?’ and opened his mouth to say more. But then he just looked at Bobby with shocked, liquid eyes, the disintegrating large sponge in his left hand, the metal-handled cleaner still in his right.

‘Look at what you’ve done,’ Bobby shouted. ‘You’ve ruined
my windscreen. You’ve ruined all my windows. You’ve knocked several hundred shillings off the resale value. Who’s going to give me that? You?’

‘Insurance,’ the African said. And again he seemed about to say something else; but the words didn’t come.

‘Oh yes, you are very clever. Like all your people. You always know. Insurance? I want it back from you.’

Bobby took a step towards the African. The African stepped back, awkward in his dungarees.

The three other Africans stood still, in their dingy blue dungarees, one next to the door of the office, against the white wall, one in front of the yellow board, one beside the petrol pump.

‘I’m going to have you sacked,’ Bobby said. ‘Sent back to your people. Who’s the manager here?’

The African standing against the white office wall raised his hand. He was the man with whom Bobby had dealt, the man who had given the change. He hesitated, then he came towards Bobby. He stood a few feet away, held his hands behind his back and said, ‘Manager.’

Company policy, clearly; but Bobby doubted whether this manager had it in his power to recruit and sack.

‘I’ll be dropping a note to your head office,’ Bobby said. He took out an envelope and ballpoint pen from the pocket of his native shirt. ‘Who’s your superior? Who your boss-man?’

‘Dis’ sup’indant. Ind-ian.’

‘The old Asian trick of remote control. He come here today, your district superintendent?’

‘Today no. Home. He live there.’ The manager waved towards that part of the town Bobby had just driven through.

‘Oh yes, they’re all hiding today. Give me his address. Boss-man, where he live?’ And while he scribbled on the envelope, with such impatience that he almost immediately stopped writing words and then, deliberately, was just making marks, he said, ‘These people shouldn’t be employed. They and their king have had it all
their own way for too long. But their little games are over now. Look at my windscreen.’

The manager looked, leaning to one side to show that he looked.

The small African had begun to relax within his dungarees. He was looking down penitentially at the oily yard, still holding his sponge and cleaner, his little mouth set.

Bobby resented this inattention. He said, ‘This is something for the police.’

The African looked up, his eyes wide with terror. Again he opened his mouth to talk but said nothing. Then, making a gesture as if he was ready to throw aside the tools of his trade, the sponge and the metal-handled cleaner, he turned and began to walk, kicking out in his dungarees, to the edge of the yard.

‘I’m a government officer!’ Bobby shouted.

The African halted and turned, ‘Sir.’

‘How dare you turn your back on me while I’m addressing you?’

Native shirt swinging, crooking his right arm, pulling back his open palm, Bobby advanced on the small African.

The African was making no effort to dodge the blow. There was only expectation in his glittering eyes.

The other three Africans stood where they were, one in front of the yellow board, one next to the pump, the manager near the car.

‘Bobby,’ Linda said, through the half-open car door. Her voice was neutral, without reproof; she spoke his name as though she had known him a long time.

‘How dare you turn your back on me?’

‘Bobby.’ She had opened the car door and was preparing to get out.

All four Africans stood just where they were as, yellow native shirt dancing, Bobby bustled back to the car. And they remained where they were while Bobby started the car and drove down to the edge of the yard. There he stopped.

‘That damned address,’ Bobby said. ‘Where did I put it?’ He
acted out an angry search for the envelope on which he had written nothing.

‘I think we can forget that,’ Linda said.

‘Oh no.’

‘Drop a note to head office, as you said. I don’t think we should go chasing any address that man has given.’

He still searched.

Very quickly, then, with a revving of the engine, a burst of blue smoke and a squeal of tyres, he turned left, heading out of the town, giving up the district superintendent.

The four Africans stood where they were.

*

‘The humiliation,’ he said, restless in his seat.

Linda said nothing.

The town was quickly past: three or four big concrete sheds and a foundry among the empty overgrown lots of an ‘industrial estate’, a stretch of bumpy dual-carriageway, washed-out hoardings with their close-to-Caucasian pictures of laughing Africans, the highway again, and then on a hillside rows and rows of unpainted wooden huts, relics of a failed colonial plantation.

‘The humiliation.’

Rainclouds darkened the far hills to the right, and the mountains in the distance were hidden. But to the left, where the land was open, the sky was still high, and when the sun struck through the clouds the wet road glistened and the fenced pasture-land was the freshest green.

Suddenly Bobby braked, but with care, without skidding, and pulled in at the side of the road. The road was empty; the manoeuvre was safe. The left wheels sank in soft grass and mud; but he had kept the right wheels on the tar. He bent over the steering-wheel and knocked his forehead lightly against it. Raising his head, resting his right elbow on the wheel, he jammed his palm
against his mouth, held his forehead and looked down, and jammed his palm against his mouth again.

‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘How awful.’

Clouds raced in the sky. The fields darkened and lit up. Now it was like dusk; now it was afternoon.

‘Awful,’ he said, hitting his mouth with the heel of his palm. ‘Awful.’

He held the wheel with both hands and leaned right over it, the sleeves of the native shirt riding down his arms, pink from the day’s exposure.

Linda said nothing. She didn’t turn to look. Her dark glasses gave nothing away.

Bobby looked up. ‘I know the king’s people,’ he said. ‘He probably is a Christian. He goes to church every Sunday. He keeps his clothes very clean. He washes and irons his own two shirts very carefully. His wife does a little teaching in the school in their village in the Collectorate. He reads. He had that foolish little paperback in the back pocket of those dungarees.’ Bobby was thinking of his own houseboy, who was also small and fine-featured and of the king’s tribe: a churchgoer and a reader of devout or educational primers in the second, moneyless half of the month, a drinker in the first half, often tortured by hangovers, light and silent then, with an additional quality of delicacy. Bobby said softly, ‘God.’ Then, leaning again on the steering-wheel, he made himself think of the bar of the New Shropshire. ‘God. God.’ He looked up. ‘God.’ But now his voice had changed. ‘God, how beautiful.’ He was speaking of the play of sunlight in the green field.

At last Linda responded. She turned to look at the field.

Bobby said, ‘And now I’ve destroyed his pathetic little dignity.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Linda said. She saw the tears in Bobby’s eyes, and her manner altered. ‘I don’t think he even knew what it was all about. And anyway they needed a ticking off. It certainly hasn’t done them any harm. You should have seen that lavatory. You know, I believe I still have that key.’

‘Perhaps I should go back.’

‘Whatever for? That would really frighten them. They might even send for the police.’

‘I’ll probably burst into tears.’ His eyes, already clearing up, had just brimmed over. He smiled.

‘I doubt it. I think it might get you angry all over again if you went back and found them laughing all over the place.’

‘I’ll go back.’

‘I’ve been through this so often with my houseboys. You lose a dozen tins of powdered milk, and you tick them off. There is the most terrible scene, and you start walking about your own house on tiptoe. You expect suicide at least, but in the quarters they are having a high old time. They’ve called in all their friends and they are killing themselves with laughter.’

‘We misinterpret their laughter,’ Bobby said, his hand playing with the gear lever.

‘That may well be. It’s embarrassment or disapproval or something like that. Sammy Kisenyi was telling me. And some European probably told him. But I feel that some of it is good old-fashioned laughter.’

Bobby turned on the ignition.

Linda gave a yelp, lifted up her shirt, twisted violently in her seat towards the door.

‘I’ve been stung! See what it is. I can’t bear to look.’

Remaining twisted on her left hip, keeping her shirt lifted, she gazed up at the roof through her dark glasses, while Bobby looked. Just below her ribs he saw the red rising bump.

‘What is it?’ Linda called. ‘What is it?’

‘I can see where it bit you. But I can’t see it.’

‘Oh my God.’

She remained rigid and Bobby studied the body which now, like a child, she displayed: the thin yellow folds of the moist skin, the fragile ribs, the brassiere, put on for the day’s adventure, enclosing those poor little breasts, and below the waistband of
her blue trousers the undergarments that looked as strapped and surgical as the brassiere.

He bent over and kissed the red bump. Linda dropped her eyes from the roof of the car to the top of Bobby’s head. She was careful now to hold her shirt up to keep it from covering Bobby’s head; and she was also careful to stay still, not to disturb him.

He kissed the bump again and asked, ‘Is it better now?’

‘It is better.’

He took his head away. She straightened up and dropped her shirt.

‘I hope you don’t misinterpret my intention,’ Bobby said.

‘Oh, Bobby, that was one of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me.’

‘Oh dear,’ he said, starting the car. ‘You make it sound like childbirth.’

‘Women can believe anything.’

She spoke sharply. But it was what he was expecting. It gave the mood a balance; and it was as friends, personalities established, personalities accepted, that they started again on the road.

It became very dark. The black, over-charged clouds were low; the last streak of light on the green field faded. And the rain did come, hard, drowning the sound of the engine, spattering white on the tar. There was no longer a view; there was only rain. It was cosy in the car.

*

‘These scratches,’ Bobby said. ‘I suppose I’ll get used to them. I was bitten by my mother’s dog once. You can imagine the upset. For me, for my mother, and the poor dog. It was a pretty bad bite. It came out, curiously enough, as two perfectly parallel lines. Just below my calf. The dog is dead now. I still have the marks and, you know, I am rather pleased to have them.’

A little later he said, ‘A doctor gave me some tranquillizers once. This was some years ago. I had a recrudescence of my old trouble and I thought I was going to get my breakdown all over again. I don’t suppose you ever lose the fear, really.’

‘Tranquillizers. Oh dear. Don’t tell me you’re on those.’

‘Listen. He gave me the tranquillizers. Harmless-looking little white tablets. They had a very strange effect. After three days – do you really want me to tell you?’ He smiled.

‘Do.’

‘After three days they burnt the skin off the tip of my penis.’

Linda didn’t hesitate. ‘How awful for you.’

‘Absolutely scorched.’ He was still smiling.

*

The rain continued.

‘It’s strange,’ Bobby said. ‘I never learned to drive until I came out here. But during my illness I always consoled myself with the fantasy of driving through a cold and rainy night, driving endless miles, until I came to a cottage right at the top of a hill. There would be a fire there, and it would be warm and I would be perfectly safe.’

‘Rain outside, fire inside. That’s always romantic.’

‘No doubt. Very romantic. But it gave me much comfort.’ There was a hint of reproof in his voice. ‘And then there was this room I saw myself in. Everything absolutely white. White curtains, blowing in with the breeze. White walls, white bed. Lots of tall windows, all open. Outside, the greenest of hills and, at the bottom, a very blue sea.’

‘It sounds like a hospital on some Greek island.’

‘I suppose it was just that. A wish to give up, to be nothing, to do nothing. Just watching yourself become a ghost. I used to spend hours every day in that room. And every night. I didn’t have a bedside table. I used to put my watch on the floor. One morning I stepped on it and broke the glass. I was going to have
it mended, but then I changed my mind and decided not to mend it until I got better.’

‘Now that is macabre.’

‘Walking around with a smashed watch. It’s just the sort of sick thing you can do. But the most terrifying thing is how quickly you can adapt to having your whole life written off. At first I used to say, “I’m going to get better next week.” Then it was next month. Then it was next year.’

‘Isn’t there some kind of shock treatment?’

‘Like the tranquillizers. I didn’t know anything about anything. I thought psychiatry was an American joke and a psychiatrist was someone like Ingrid Bergman in
Spellbound
.’

‘It dates us. Wasn’t that a gorgeous film?’

‘Wasn’t it. In a way, you are right about the shock, though. That was how I started to get better. This psychiatrist I used to go to, the one who cured his rheumatism by telling himself he was only frightened of dying, he said to me after one session, “My wife will give you a lift into town.” I had never met his wife. I sat in the drawing-room and waited for her. He was that sort of psychiatrist. No surgery, just his house. Perhaps I should have waited somewhere else. I heard this woman talking to some other people. Then I heard her say in her bright voice, “But I can take you in. I’ve got to take in one of Arthur’s young queers.” She didn’t know I was right there. I thought everything I’d told the man was confidential. I don’t believe I’ve ever hated anybody so much in my life. I really wanted them both to die. It was unfair really, because he’d done a good job with me. I suppose without knowing it I was getting better. But this shock, as you say, gave me the jolt I needed.’