This Side Jordan (12 page)

Johnnie looked at her in astonishment.

‘You drove a truck through that kind of country – by yourself?’

‘Well, I had to, you see,’ Cora sounded almost apologetic. ‘There was no one else to do it.’

All the adjectives of mediocrity applied to Cora. She was faded, pallid, lukewarm. Had it actually happened? He could see from her face that it had. He knew nothing of that Africa, and now it was gone.

‘Can you see – a little – why I wanted this bungalow, Johnnie? I waited a long time for it. And for James’ position here, as manager. A very long time.’

The social position and the big new bungalow – these were her harvest, after a lifetime.

‘Do you know,’ Cora said, ‘the Cunninghams actually thought they ought to have this bungalow, when it was built. Can you believe it?’

‘Well – ’ Johnnie said awkwardly, ‘I suppose they didn’t realize – and they were thinking of the children –’

Cora laughed, and Johnnie felt apprehensive.

‘Yes, the children. Helen ranted and raved and finally told me I hated children and was doing it out of spite. I didn’t tell her, of course. Why should I?’

‘Tell her?’

‘Not many people here know,’ Cora said, almost proudly, as though the secret were to her some kind of power. ‘It was two years after I came to this country. I had a bout of malaria, and the baby was born two months premature. It was a perfect little girl. I saw her. She was all formed, very tiny and thin, of course. But she was dead.’

She saw his expression.

‘You don’t need to worry,’ she said quickly. ‘I won’t tell Miranda – I wouldn’t upset her.’

But Johnnie was not thinking of Miranda. He was wondering how many heat-sodden afternoons Cora spent here, her fingers stroking the silken eternal skin of the brocade.

‘It never occurs to Helen –’ Cora said. ‘She just doesn’t see – well, never mind. At least, they’ll be the first to go.’

It was the first time she had mentioned Africanization. Johnnie looked at her questioningly.

‘You know what I mean,’ she went on. ‘I haven’t much faith in the Africans’ ability, but really and truly, almost anyone could do Bedford’s job, couldn’t they?’

‘What do you think will happen to – to the rest of us?’

Cora sat perfectly still. Even her hands were quiet, but he saw they were knotted tightly together.

‘Oh, Johnnie – ’ she whispered, ‘I’m frightened.’

‘But you’ve no cause to be –’

‘Yes – more than anyone. You’re young enough to start again.’

‘But James won’t – there’s no chance – the Firm would never –’

‘Once it begins,’ Cora said, ‘where does it stop? They’ll be everywhere, the Africans, everywhere.’

‘Is James –?’

He could not say it, but she understood.

‘He says not. He keeps telling me not to worry. Men always say that, don’t they? I suppose it’s their way of fighting a situation they can’t alter. They keep on saying don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, and all the time there’s a sort of brittle irritation in their voices that betrays them. He hardly eats a thing these days, and at night I hear him getting up and trudging all around the bungalow, until I think I’ll go out of my mind. I know I oughtn’t to be talking like this. You won’t
say anything, will you? I can’t talk about it to James, of course. He has to keep up the pretence that everything’s all right. But he’s afraid, too. I know he is. What’ll happen to us? Where will we go?’

‘You’d have a pension –’

‘Do you know what it amounts to? We’d be able to live, but only just. We had hoped to save enough, by the time he retired, to buy a house in Cornwall and have at least – oh, you know, a country girl or someone, to cook and that sort of thing –’

Her yellow parchment face crumpled.

‘I can see myself in some hateful poky little flat,’ she said. ‘Do you know, Johnnie, I haven’t cooked meals in twenty years? It’s funny, isn’t it? The whole thing is really almost funny. What will I do? What will I be able to do?’

The fall of a dynasty. All at once, he could see her in the hateful flat, too. It would be small, of necessity, and James would clutter it with the ebony heads and the brass figurines she loathed. James, obsessed with Africa’s rejection of him, would prophesy doom: Africans had been fine when they were bushmen but they were ruined now; Africans would never make a go of governing themselves; the Firm’s West African branch would be bankrupt within a decade – mark his words. James would have no one else to talk to, and she would hear it all, day after day, until he or she died.

She would be tired all the time, for physical work was now completely alien to her. The flat would get drabber as she slowly stopped trying. The tines of the forks would be clotted with egg-yolk she somehow hadn’t been able to wash off. Forgotten dabs of milk pudding would sour in little bowls on shelves. The sinks would be brown as tea. She would wear
shapeless cardigans and heavy shoes, and would cry because she could not get the coal fire lighted.

Cora had waited patiently to reap the harvest of her exile. And now even that meagre fruit seemed likely to be destroyed by a storm she had never foreseen and would never comprehend.

T
raditionally, Sunday was the time for curry lunch parties. The genuine Coasters’ curry was an imposing meal consisting of curried lamb or veal so peppery that even the most hardened gullet required a frequent antidote of chilled beer, and a conglomeration of side-dishes, each ingredient chopped or grated very finely – groundnuts, coconut, green peppers, bananas, paw-paw, tomatoes, onions, okra, oranges, pineapple, and any other tid-bits that the cook’s imagination might discover. The Cunninghams’ cook was particularly adept at preparing curry, and Helen made full use of his one great talent. On this Sunday, as on so many others, the cars began arriving at the Cunninghams’ about eleven.

Johnnie stood at the window and watched the nearby bungalow.

‘She’s got quite a throng there this morning. Isn’t that Nelson’s car? He’s manager of Coast Chemists. And there’s old Cruikshank – contractor’s agent – got a new Humber, I see.’

‘You should have gone,’ Miranda said. ‘Why didn’t you?’

Johnnie turned from the window.

‘I didn’t especially want to go without you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Miranda said, ‘but I simply couldn’t. The last time I thought I’d pass out with hunger before they finally served lunch at three-thirty. And then the curry gave me the most awful indigestion. I wish you’d gone, though. You enjoy curry, and Helen’s always so pleased when people do. She hasn’t got another good word to say for Kwaku, but she maintains he makes the best curry in the country. He’s never been known to serve less than fifteen side-dishes, she says.’

‘He cheats,’ Johnnie said. ‘He serves everything twice – raw banana and fried banana, and counts it as two.’

‘I sometimes wonder how the Cunninghams can afford these curry lunches. Not so much the food, but the drink. It adds up.’

‘They can’t afford it,’ Johnnie replied, ‘but their credit’s good. For how much longer, I wouldn’t like to say.’

Miranda glanced at him sharply.

‘You’ve heard more, then? About Africanization?’

‘We’ve heard nothing else all week. Bulletins from Head Office nearly every day, telling us what to do and how to do it. The Firm’s very much in earnest. Black men in, white men out – for all the junior posts, anyway. That’s as far as they’ve gone at the moment. But once they get their African sales-managers and confidential secretaries and pattern-researchers, what will they look for next? An African personnel man to replace Bedford, then an African accountant to replace me.’

‘What does James say?’

‘James isn’t budging an inch. He’s simply ignored instructions. Sooner or later, though, the London office is going to realize that nothing’s been done, and then what?’

‘I’ve told you what I think will happen,’ Miranda said promptly, ‘but of course you haven’t paid a blind bit of notice.’

‘And what do you think will happen, then?’

‘The Firm can’t afford to let everyone go. They need some continuity. But the only Europeans who do stay will be those who show they can work with Africans.’

‘Well, that’s just too bad. You don’t know what it’s like, Manda. I’ve tried out four new clerks in the past fortnight, and not one is any damn good. And that’s simple work. What would it be like in more responsible jobs? Besides, I’m not exactly enthralled by the idea of having African colleagues.’

‘That’s what really decides your opinion about Africanization,’ she said angrily.

After lunch, while Miranda lay down for a rest, Johnnie went out to the garage to tinker with the car. It was not a type of work he enjoyed, but Bedford had emphatically told him that one could not trust African mechanics.

Whiskey was shutting up the kitchen for the afternoon, and as Johnnie walked past, the old man gave him a hostile glance. He and Whiskey had been on bad terms ever since the loan business.

As Johnnie had predicted, Whiskey had not used the money for his brother’s court case at all. He had turned up the following week with a girl he called a ‘small wife’. Whiskey and his old wife had no children – a state that was, apparently, considered a disgrace. The old man had finally succumbed and taken another wife, hopefully. African Christians, of course, weren’t meant to practise polygamy, but many still did. Perhaps if they termed the second one ‘small wife’ they felt it scarcely counted. This girl was fourteen, but she was as ripe and developed as necessary.

Johnnie worked on the car for nearly an hour. The garage door was open, but it was hot and airless inside. Bad as it was, though, it was better than taking the car out onto the drive,
where he would have had the sun on his neck the whole time.

He straightened and reached for a cigarette. It was then that he became aware of the watcher.

The girl had slipped into the garage so silently he had not heard her. Whiskey and the old woman must be having their afternoon nap, or they would never have allowed her out of their sight. She stood in the doorway, her large dark eyes fixed on him. She wore a length of mammy cloth casually wrapped around her waist, and on top nothing but a shift cut in a deep half-moon at the neck and leaving her round brown breasts partly exposed. She seemed to hover as though prepared every instant to turn and disappear.

The afternoon was quiet, all the morning noise of the house hushed in the time of intense heat. No stewardboys sang mournful lovesongs as they worked; no brown women pounded fu-fu with the resounding mortar and pestle. Even the raucous blackbirds and the white egrets were still, wings folded in baobab or niim tree.

Everyone seemed asleep except himself and this girl.

Moved by some inner compulsion he dared not consciously consider, Johnnie stepped closer to her. She stiffened but did not move. Watchful as a jewel-eyed lizard, she held herself quiet.

Johnnie reached out one of his hands, and touched her breast.

There was a sense of unreality about it, as though it did not matter what happened because it was happening only in a lone mind and no one could look there or know at all. He knew the unreality was unreal, the girl actual, but he did not believe it.

She averted her eyes from his. She was tense, but he was certain that she had been awakened by someone, sometime,
before she came here to be the wife of a man old enough to be her grandfather.

He knew the whole thing was impossible. But his body would not obey his mind’s frantic command to turn and go.

Then she looked at him.

Johnnie disentangled himself abruptly and jerked away. The girl’s eyes were filled with a quivering rabbitfear, the flutter of the frail furred thing caught, the bird that dances witless before the snake.

Comprehension filtered slowly into his mind. She was a bush-girl, and he, a whiteman, was of a species so strange to her that she could not see him as a man at all.

But the concept that had made her afraid to stay, also made her afraid to go. Doubtless she had been warned against displeasing him.

He had not intended his half-instinctive action to lead anywhere. He had not really intended anything. But he had wanted her. He had wanted a bush-girl. And she had rejected him.

Swiftly and without thought, Johnnie hit her hard across the face. He felt a quick flare of pleasure, then nothing. She crouched on the ground and her breath came jaggedly, soundlessly. He turned and walked back into the bungalow.

A few minutes later he heard her screams. The blow must have made a betraying welt. Whiskey was beating her. Johnnie grasped the chair-arm and closed his eyes. But he did not go out to stop the beating. It was none of his business.

He felt afraid, yet even in his fear he knew it would be passably all right. Whiskey would never speak of this day – not to Miranda, or anyone, for it gave the old man too good a trump card. Whiskey would be quick to realize that however
poorly he worked from now on the master would never dare to sack him. Johnnie was quite safe.

Monday mornings, always difficult for Bedford, seemed to be growing a little more grim each week. This morning he had passed Johnnie’s office without his usual greeting, and for several hours had maintained absolute silence. At mid-morning, however, Johnnie heard him shouting in the corridor.

At first Johnnie paid no attention, but when his clerks began to giggle softly, he left his office and went out to see.

Bedford’s face was suffused with a purple rage. Before him stood Kojo, the Stores Clerk. Kojo was young, but he was one of the better clerks. He was bright; he knew his job; and lately he had carried a heavier work-load than usual, since Bedford had taken to drifting around to Johnnie’s office so much, ostensibly to give reassurance but actually to receive it.

‘You damn idiot!’ Bedford’s bull-voice must have reached all the way out to the street. ‘What do you mean he didn’t have any in stock? How could he run out of typewriter ribbons? Probably had some in the back of the shop. Couldn’t be bothered to look, that’s all.’

‘He looked, sir.’

‘Well, you should’ve told Chebib he’s got to keep things in stock, if he wants our trade. Why didn’t you get ’em somewhere else?’

‘The chit was made out for Chebib, sir, and so I had to come back, first, and get it changed.’

‘Why didn’t you make him go and get them at another place, then?’

‘I did that with the carbon paper, the last time, sir, and you said I was not to do it.’

‘The hell I told you that!’ Bedford bellowed. ‘Never said
any such thing! That’s the trouble with you people. You’re all alike. Never know what to do unless somebody tells you. Don’t think, that’s your trouble. You’re all the same. Not one of you uses his head.’

Johnnie stopped listening. He had heard it all many times before. He looked at the African boy. Always, before, under such circumstances, the faces of African clerks had been defiant or filled with a sullen hatred. But this time it was different.

Kojo looked patient, indifferent, almost bored.

Johnnie knew, with sudden sick certainty, that Kojo could handle Bedford’s job quite easily, if he were given the chance.

The old order was changing already. The African clerk did not any longer need to look defiant or sullen. Kojo knew he could afford to wait.

For the first time, in the eyes of an African clerk, Johnnie saw that Africanization, like Independence, would go ahead whatever he or anyone else thought of it.

Perhaps a similar concept had penetrated Bedford’s fury, for he broke off in mid-sentence, as though he had forgotten what he was going to say. He frowned, trying to recall, then he waved the boy away, wordlessly. His face was drawn and grey. He looked up and saw Johnnie.

‘Oh – you heard, then,’ Bedford mumbled. ‘Stupid – to lose one’s temper.’

Miranda sat under the niim tree, half asleep in the bright air that at midday was becoming steamy once more. The season had kindled a flame tree into flower. Its blaze of red blossoms covered the top branches, spilling embers down onto the ground. A gold and ebony salamander lay sleek and still in its
hunting blind, the bed of marigolds. A pair of mudwasps, trailing hair-thin legs like vines, came out of their dwelling, a tube of clay they had painstakingly built on the stoep wall. Their dance was slow and perfectly measured, the dance of hunting, their delicate poisonous bodies absorbed in the dream-like gyrations of their flight. A battalion of warrior ants threaded its persistent way across the garden. They left a path in the dust, and all the larger creatures, even the dragon-lizards, moved out of the way. On the bungalow walls the big spiders had come out to weave the gossamer of death.

Johnnie told Miranda about Bedford. She was silent for a moment.

‘It’s a terrible shame,’ she said finally.

‘He’s a rank imperialist, you know,’ Johnnie said with a wry smile.

‘Don’t make fun of me,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s not so simple when you know the person.’

‘No. It’s never so simple then.’

‘Where does it leave you, Johnnie?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it means that your idea is the only practical one, after all. That would be a laugh, wouldn’t it?’

‘Johnnie – if you could discover a few really promising clerks, why couldn’t you begin giving them extra training?’

‘Surreptitiously, you mean? Without James’ knowledge? My own Africanization project?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Just whose jobs do you think these model blacks would take over, Manda?’

‘There are those four bachelors,’ she said without hesitation. ‘What are their names? Cooper’s one, I think. I scarcely know them.’

‘It’s all right to boot a man out, then, as long as you don’t know him personally?’

‘They’re awfully young,’ she protested. ‘It might be a disappointment to them, but I can’t think it would ruin their careers.’

‘Perhaps not. But don’t you see that any training scheme would entail the co-operation of all concerned? And James still believes he can defeat Africanization ostrich-fashion, by ignoring it.’

‘You think James won’t change – ever? Even if the London office –?’

‘It isn’t that he won’t change. He can’t. He’s too old and he feels too strongly on the subject.’

‘Well, even so, if you had some boys who seemed to be administrative material,’ Miranda said determinedly, ‘you could find some way of letting the Firm know –’

Johnnie looked at her steadily. There was an inexorable logic in her idea. But it seemed strange, coming from Miranda. Then he saw that she had no idea of the implications in the scheme she presented so blithely.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I could do that.’

It was true. All he needed was a handful of promising candidates, boys of Kojo’s calibre. They need not be trained in any specialized way. They need only exist – gold-ore ready to be mined. He might contrive then to let Head-office know that, despite James’ inertia, Africanization could be achieved promptly if the right man handled it. Inquiries would be made, and with any luck, he would be allowed to go ahead. James would be replaced. The new manager would be more in tune with the times, and Johnnie would act as his lieutenant. Johnnie’s advice would be asked, and he would have to reveal
the fact that Kojo could step into Bedford’s shoes. The old guard would all go.