The Drifters (14 page)

In addition to this peculiarity, the Vwarda was notable for its chasms, its waterfalls, and especially its population of hippopotamuses, crocodiles and exotic water birds. It was a great river, one of the world’s fascinating waterways, and I thought it an act of genius that the Negroes of the region had named their new republic in its honor.

The atypical part of Sir Charles’s character stemmed from the fact that he in no way resembled an English country gentleman. He was a tall man, grossly fat, sloppy in appearance, and with a petulant droop to his mouth that caused it to quiver at moments of excitement, so that he gave the impression of being a crybaby devoid of either resolution or courage. He wore baggy suits, often stained with gravy, and his nails were rarely filed. Worst of all—and this often convinced strangers that they were dealing with a fool—when he talked he bumbled, repeating words and falling back upon the stock phrases of the anti-intellectual British ruling class. He was fond of ‘I shouldn’t wonder’ and ‘Mark you,’ and often used ‘As a matter of fact’—which he pronounced ‘mettra feet’—two or three times in a paragraph. He also chewed his words, repeating phrases three or four times at the start of a statement, and I can recall numerous conversations regarding the dam in which he would preface every comment with ‘Well now, I mean, yes, it’s something we’ve got to face up to, haven’t we?’ repeated three or four times. He was partial to rhetorical questions and ended almost every positive statement with one: ‘We shouldn’t want that to result, should we?’ In my early days of work with him I used to answer the questions, and he was always surprised that I had bothered: ‘We don’t want to clutter up this business with a lot of unnecessary words, do we?’

If one looked merely at the sillier aspects of Sir Charles’s
deportment during the first stage of a discussion, one would be justified in concluding that he was a fool, but as negotiations deepened and his unflagging devotion to humanity and the rights of the Vwarda Negroes manifested itself, one had to conclude that here was a true public servant, a gentleman who would have lent dignity to any government of which he was a part. As I reported to my superiors in Geneva: ‘If Vwarda and the other Negro republics had a couple of hundred Sir Charles Brahams, it would be safe to invest anywhere in Africa, with the assurance that we would get a fair break … and not a penny more.’ Shortly before my arrival in Vwarda the Queen of England decided to make Charles Braham a knight in recognition of his services in the Congo, and many people in Vwarda told me, ‘There wasn’t a person out here who asked, “Why him?”—but when he reported to Buckingham Palace, sloppy, sixty pounds overweight, repeating his words and looking like someone out of the nineteenth century, people asked, “Did they get the names mixed up?” ’

In early 1959 Lady Emily Braham died, leaving behind a thin, dark-haired girl of seven. Since I reached Vwarda only at the end of that year, I never knew Lady Emily; I saw only her photographs in voile and lace at various government functions, a petite woman ill-mated to the gross man who stood beside her in his ill-fitted uniforms.

I did, from the first, know the child Monica; indeed I served as a kind of mother to her, taking care of the various duties that her mother would have performed had she been alive. My first glimpse of the child came one hot afternoon when my plane from Geneva cut in from the Atlantic, flew up the Congo to the Banga, turned south, passed over the high swamp where the rivers started, picked up the Vwarda and followed its dramatic course through mountains and veldt, to land at the capital. In those early days there were few Negro officials in evidence, and I was met by Sir Charles, stamping around in a heavy blue suit and directing the porters how and where to take my stuff: ‘We don’t want him here without any luggage, do we? Mmmmmm, yes, watch that, eh?’ He seemed quite the fool and I was distressed that it was he with whom I would have to negotiate.

As he led me to his government car, a highly polished Rolls-Royce bearing the new seal of Vwarda, I saw peering
from a rear window the small, beautifully formed face of a little girl. When I sat down beside her, she demurely stroked her long dark braids and looked up at me with an impish look in her very dark eyes as she said, ‘I expected you to yodel. You’re from Switzerland, aren’t you?’

‘I’m from Indiana, really. I work in Switzerland.’

‘Have you learned to yodel?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Then go back and learn.’

This jolted me and I leaned forward to study the child, but as I did so, Sir Charles said, ‘Mustn’t mind her. Since her mother’s death she’s incorrigible.’ Monica stuck her tongue out at me, then winked and to my surprise, uttered a very good yodel which echoed through the Rolls. ‘She learned it from the gramophone,’ Sir Charles said.

I cabled my maid in Geneva to send me down a carton of those imaginative toys which the Swiss make so well, but when I gave them to Monica, she spurned them, passed them on to the children of her Negro maid, and told me, ‘What I’d really like is some dirndl dresses.’ When they arrived, I became her favorite uncle.

She loved music, and through the years, as I returned at frequent intervals to inspect the dam we were building along the upper reaches of the Vwarda, I brought her gramophone records of all kinds and through her kept vaguely aware of rock-and-roll, the Merseyside beat and soul. She seemed to need music, and whenever she heard that I was about to leave Europe for Vwarda, she would send me urgent letters, explaining which records she wanted; she loved the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and a group called Procol Harum, but she did not care for American styles, except for one particularly violent group called Canned Heat. When she first ordered these records, I tried playing them at home before taking them out to Africa but found I had no capacity for judging whether the strange wild sounds were musical or not. I simple delivered the records and watched as Monica devoured them; I was not then aware of the destructive lyrics that accompanied the music. In my naïveté I supposed that the words were gibberish, unaware of the fact that to the young people they were a call to revolution.

When Monica was sixteen her father asked me if I would supervise her placement in a good English school; he could recommend several which might be inclined to
accept her in view of the tradition surrounding his family name, but he could not himself get away from Vwarda to make the choice, so in the European spring of 1968 I found myself touring rural England with a dossier on Monica Braham, including a photograph of a striking child with black eyes and dark hair and the frail beauty of an elf. I was surprised at the first two schools when the headmistress took one look at the photograph and said, in effect, ‘Oh, dear! And she was raised by her father with native servants. This one’ll be difficult to handle.’ The experienced teachers saw something in the photograph I didn’t and refused her a place in their schools.

However, at the school I liked best, St. Procas north of Oxford,’ the headmistress studied Monica’s credentials, which included high marks in various standard examinations, and said, ‘I’m not at all sure this is the school for young Monica. She looks a most unsettled sort, but we had her cousin Victoria Braham, and she proved a sturdy child.’ St. Procas took her, on speculation as it were, but they were never happy with their decision.

In the late autumn of 1968 an urgent cable from Vwarda begged me to fly to St. Procas to see if I could do anything to keep the school from expelling Monica, so I interrupted some work I was doing on behalf of Ansett Airways in Australia and returned to Europe to find that St. Procas had every reason to expel young Monica. When I reached the school the headmistress said with open hostility, since I was the man who had persuaded her to accept Monica and was therefore responsible for her escapades, ‘Your Monica disappeared from school for three days. She seems to have run off with an older man who delivers chocolates to a store in the village. We believe she and this man went to cover in a hotel in Cirencester. I suppose we could assign a detective to the matter and prove her delinquency, but we prefer not to know the details.’ She was determined to expel Monica forthwith, but I prevailed upon her to give the child a second chance.

‘Child?’ the headmistress echoed in astonishment. ‘Have you seen her?’

When Monica appeared she seemed a whole epoch older; she was only sixteen, but the braids were gone, the frailty had given way to an appealing maturity, and her face had lost its childish quality. She was a woman, much older than her years, much more cunning than either I or the
headmistress. There was an amused smile at the corner of her beautiful lips, as if she knew some vital secret that we did not; but there was nothing coarse or provocative about her. She did not challenge us or defy us to expel her; quite the contrary, she was totally adorable and my first impulse was to take her in my arms and kiss her as I had so often done when arriving or departing from her African home. But a change had overtaken her which would prevent me henceforth from greeting her as a child. She was extremely beautiful and was aware of it.

‘Hello, Uncle George,’ she said with quiet dignity, extending her hand.

‘What’ve you been up to?’ I asked.

‘I thought it was time …’ She did not end the sentence. Shrugging her slim shoulders, she smiled and looked away.

I managed to keep her in St. Procas, but a month later I was called back to the school. The headmistress told me she had found the girls on Monica’s hall smoking marijuana, and while there was no substantive proof that Monica had been involved, one of the girls had reported, under pressure it was true, that Monica had bought the marijuana during her expedition to Cirencester, and I was asked to interrogate her about this, because the school was again on the verge of expelling her but wished to be just.

It was a wintry day and I met Monica in a glass-enclosed porch where the younger mistresses of the school met for afternoon tea. One or two of them wandered in as we talked, and I noticed that as soon as they spotted Monica, they backed away in a hurry. I asked my acquired godchild about the marijuana, and I phrased the question so as to let her know that I expected a truthful answer; she might refuse to answer, but if she told me anything, I was certain it would be the truth. ‘Marijuana’s nothing,’ she said contemptuously. ‘They get uptight.’

‘Did you bring it into the school?’

‘I’ve tried it. All the girls have.’

‘Don’t you think it’s dangerous?’

‘Uncle George! It’s like a martini for you … a gin and bitters for Daddy. If you’re a drunk, such drinks are trouble. Taken sensibly, they’re nothing.’

‘Are you smoking regularly?’

‘What’s regularly?’ she asked, not defiantly but with an impudent interest in my opinion,

‘Did you bring it into the school?’

‘Ellen brought it in. Marjorie brought it in. I could name six other girls who brought it in.’ Then she smiled and added, ‘In small quantities.’

‘But the large quantity? Who brought that?’

‘I think I’ve about used up St. Procas,’ she said, and we left it at that.

‘We’ll move her to another school next year,’ I assured the headmistress.

‘We think she’d better move now.’

‘But with her father in Africa …’ I prevailed upon the good lady to keep Monica for the rest of 1968–69, and this was a mistake, because in late February, I was summoned to school, where a distraught headmistress shouted at me, ‘Take her out! This day! Out!’

With some difficulty, and with the aid of a fourteen-year-old girl who lived on Monica’s hall, I pieced together what had happened. On three days a week the school imported from the city of Oxford a music teacher, a tall, gangling, tousled-haired young man who had studied in Paris and whose classes on the appreciation of Beethoven and Stravinsky were, as the girls said, ‘super.’ He was about twenty-two years old and came from a family of most limited means with whom he still lived. He had attended one of the redbrick universities in the Midlands and had graduated with honors, but the shyness which had always marked him had been erased neither by that university nor by his stay in Paris. He was a big, awkward, likable oaf, and one day in January, Monica boasted to her hallmates, ‘I’ll bet I could get his pants off in three weeks.’

Bets were made and placed in the keeping of the fourteen-year-old who told me the story: ‘The rules were simple. We were to give Monica every assistance … even the girls who had bet against her had to help … What I mean is, we were to make it easy for her to be alone with him. But the other rule was that at least two girls from the committee …’

‘What committee?’

‘The ones who wrote out the rules.’

‘You mean you put this in writing?’

‘Sure.’ She rummaged among her papers and handed me the typewritten rules: ‘It is agreed that Monica cannot simply claim that she had intercourse with Mr. Dankerly. At least two members of the committee must be in a position to see them in bed, or whatever.’

Monica had gone to work on Mr. Dankerly with a professional skill acquired from her earlier bout with the chocolate salesman from Cirencester. She let him know that she considered him the best teacher at St. Procas, also the most understanding and the gentlest. Having said this latter, she told him he was also very manly and she supposed he had played rugger at university. But what attracted her most, she said, was his years of experience in Paris, where, as she phrased it, ‘a man must learn all there is to know about love from those French girls.’ When she said this she was aware that Mr. Dankerly was breathing deeply, and that night she informed her dormitory, ‘The bet’s won. I’ll have his pants down next Friday.’

On Friday the girls arranged it so that the music room was left unattended. Actaully, it was flanked on all sides by sentries plus the designated witnesses, and as one of the latter reported to the group, ‘When they were rolling around on the floor you couldn’t be dead sure they were making love, but they certainly could have been.’

That night Monica announced calmly that she had won the bet; then she added a bit of information which quite startled the girls, nurtured as they had been on the super-capable love-making of Albert Finney and Richard Burton in their movies: ‘Poor fellow, he knew absolutely nothing and I had to show him how to manage.’ It was a very sobering end to an escapade.