The White Father (3 page)

He finished the letter, sealed it and took it into the kitchen.

“Here you are,” he said to the postman. “You have plenty of time to reach the town before sunset.”

“Yes, sir,” said the postman. He drained the last of his bottle of Free and stood up. His cap, which had lain on the kitchen table, was given a brisk rubbing, no doubt to remove any possible trace of decadent Ngulu influence. He put it on, saluted awkwardly and said, “Thank you, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Goodbye,” said Shrieve affably.

He saw the postman out of the door past the still menacing Amy and into his jeep. Whatever the relations between the tribes it was his business to treat all people with equal politeness.

The postman flashed a malevolent glance at Amy, smiled widely and woodenly at Shrieve, then drove off. He seemed deliberately to choose the dustiest parts of the track, and the jeep was soon lost to view behind clouds of red dirt.

“I think I’ll have a bottle of Free myself,” said Shrieve, coming up to Amy and patting her bottom affectionately.

She went silently to the ice-box and brought him a bottle but no glass. She always took an hour or two to get over the postman’s visits. Shrieve smiled at her, but she didn’t respond, so he patted her again, only harder this time, and went back to the living-room, picked up the remaining letters and took them out to the veranda. He settled into a chair, and drank from the cold bottle.

No one in England, he thought, could possibly imagine his contentment. No one could even imagine his sense of physical well-being as he sat on his veranda drinking the sweet fizzy drink and gazing up the dirty village street at the scruffy Ngulu huts. Raising his eyes a little he could see the distant mountains, ranged along the horizon like the
permanent
obsessions of man, rising from the miles of scrub and
bush of the plain like death and consciousness and love and the nature of beauty and whether or not there is a god. One spent one’s life on the plain, managing as best one could, but always aware of the impassable mountains and the limits they set to human ambition, human thought, human achievement,
defining
the world in which man moves. Hazily purple now in the late afternoon sun, they offered neither threat nor
encouragement
, they simply were.

Recalled from their distance by the coldness of the bottle in his hand, Shrieve pondered the nature of a world in which a soft drink could become so powerful a symbol. Originally one of the many such products manufactured in the Deep South of the United States, Free had been taken over by a far-seeing businessman, injected with carbon dioxide and sent out to conquer the world. This it had done in less than twenty-five years. “Feel Free!”, the original American
advertising
slogan, had become an international password, translating easily into every tongue. Free penetrated the iron curtain, the bamboo curtain, the curtains of Moslem harems. Often the object of outraged fulminations by viniculturists and dentists, Free was non-alcoholic and basically harmless. Indeed a UNESCO survey showed that in no less than six
underdeveloped
countries Free provided the majority of the population with the greater part of its sugar intake. Bottling plants sprang up all over the globe, an army of eager young publicists made sure that Free enterprise worked. In Bulgaria, wrote a contributor to an Anglo-American monthly, empty bottles of Free were great prestige symbols: people in the poorer quarters of Sofia, he stated, used them as flower-vases, but only on Sundays. In Djakarta and Beirut attempts to ban the drink as immoral were believed to have weakened the respective governments. A left-wing English weekly
editorialised
bleakly that “The whole concept of Freedom has been tarnished for a generation.” Free love became universally acceptable. Freedom-loving democracies, East and West, could do nothing to stop Free being for all.

It wasn’t a bad drink, Shrieve considered, and quite good
when you were hot and it was cold. Besides, there wasn’t anything else to be had in that part of the world except beer, and since beer was forbidden to the Ngulu, Shrieve felt he had to limit himself, too. He kept beer in the house, but drank it only indoors and alone. There was a story, much laughed over in the capital, that Free hadn’t been doing too well in the colony until the arrival of one of the clever young publicists. He examined the situation for a week, then started, at
laughably
small expense, a rumour that Free (known locally and even more than usually confusingly as Uhuru) increased the size of male genitals while shrinking those of females. Now there was a bottling plant in the capital, and every other soft drink was out of business. One could still get Rose’s Lime Juice and Schweppes’s Tonic Water in the bars, of course, and there were those who stuck by Kia-Ora, but to all intents and purposes Free had taken over the whole market. The rush of independence through Africa did nothing to slow sales: the name could be faulted nowhere except Angola, where Free was banned. Yet even there it could be bought: a subsidiary of an enormous mining company in Kasai smuggled it across the border in vast quantities and at huge profit. At
independence
celebrations advertising and political banners became inextricably muddled, and it was said by the more cynical that in one of the ex-French territories there had been riots when the population discovered that free elections had nothing to do with Free.

Shrieve put down his bottle, a lingam of modest, pale pink glass, described by an irate sociologist as the ideally simple and immoral brand image, and picked up his letters. The first was from his father. Shrieve was fond of his father, who never complained of loneliness or abandonment, though he suffered in fact from both. Thomas Shrieve’s wife had left him when Hugh was eight months old. He was a dull sort, she had told her friends, and you could never imagine anyone having the nerve to call him Tom. He got her down. He had a small private income, enough to live on but not enough to live well—it was a useful excuse not to work, to potter about for a
lifetime
.
He grumbled continually about the rising cost of living, and ignored the fact that his investments showed a
corresponding
increase.

His wife had tried to get him to do something, but he was incurably lazy, and when she saw that nothing was to be made of him, that she had made a total misjudgement, she gave up and attached herself to a bustling, energetic man who owned a chain of garages and spoke with a lower-class accent. Mr Shrieve referred to him loftily as “rather a flashy type”, but was sufficiently piqued to draw on unsuspected reserves of meanness and refuse a divorce. Mrs Shrieve changed her name by deed-poll and disappeared from his life. For a time she would enquire through a lawyer about Hugh, but after a few years these enquiries ceased. Her son had no recollection of her at all. Brought up by his father and a series of more or less kindly housekeepers (none of whom stayed very long), he was sent early to preparatory school, and his knowledge of normal family life was confined to occasional visits to the homes of his school friends. He often felt ashamed that he could not return such invitations, for his father always said that the situation was a little difficult, and if Hugh didn’t mind, it would save a lot of embarrassment if his friends didn’t come to stay. Hugh sometimes refused invitations he would have liked to accept because of the difficulty of explaining this to his friends and their puzzled mothers. He became a shy boy, and the shyness was encouraged by his father who fancied himself as an experienced misogynist. Rather a dim man in reality, Mr Shrieve saw himself as vaguely scholarly and believed he had the air of a distinguished recluse, though he spent a lot of time at his club and his reading was limited to war memoirs and detective stories.

The absence of anything but matronly women in his
upbringing
led Hugh to a straightforward alarm in the presence of girls. They weren’t, he decided early, a bit like boys in the way they behaved. Nonetheless he developed the normal appetites of a young man, and after his tortured embarrassment with English women he found the Ngulu charmingly
unselfconscious
and naturally sensuous. He would often compare the women of his tribe with such English women as he met on his visits to the capital, and these critical observations
confirmed
his opinion that the Ngulu carried themselves better, were warmer in manner, and better looking. They were, certainly, warmer, but men such as Robbins expressed
aghastness
at the idea that they were beautiful. “You’re going native, Shrieve,” they would say. “Poor old Shrieve. Have another beer.” But he continued to find the long jaws and naked breasts of the tribe more attractive than the powdered décolleté of any number of London débutantes.

His father’s letter said that the winter had been bad and that his chest had given him a lot of trouble. (Ten pipes a day, Shrieve thought, could not help.) There had been a tremendous row in the Conservative Club about last year’s accounts and the election of a new Treasurer. Several members, given full titles and ranks, had resigned. Mr Shrieve hadn’t resigned himself, though he’d been tempted to do so, because he was one of the oldest members of the Club, and they should set an example to the younger ones. The Club itself had to come before personal feelings. He had had quite a to-do with General Aldous about it. His new housekeeper seemed fairly
satisfactory
so far, but she didn’t put enough salt in the vegetables. That seemed to be about all the news from Surrey. He must close now, but he hoped his son was having a good time and sent his best wishes.

Shrieve smiled as he finished the letter. His father wrote every six weeks on thick cream paper. In order not to exceed the air mail weight limit he had to confine himself to a few sheets, and he wrote only on one side of these. Whether this was, as it seemed, a transparently obvious device to avoid writing at greater length Shrieve could not decide, but it was delightfully characteristic and even rather lovable. It would be nice to see the old man again when he went home. They wouldn’t have anything to say to each other, but they would say it with mutual satisfaction.

The next letter was from Jumbo Maxwell. During the war
Shrieve had found himself serving, happily, in a special branch of the Navy devoted to midget submarines. Not all the group had survived, but those who had remained, at least in theory, solemnly sworn to at the end of the war, good friends for life. Of them all, Jumbo had been the least likely to come through unscathed; he was frightened, incompetent, often a genuine menace to the safety of the others. But somehow they had tolerated him, made him their mascot, and saved him time and time again from disaster. It was, perhaps, appropriate that he should now be the most anxious to keep up the spirit of comradeship, for he had benefited from it most at the time. Shrieve did not really care about what had or hadn’t happened to his colleagues; serious life had started after the war was over. But he was amused by Jumbo’s efforts to keep the distant shared experience alive. The clumsiest of good fellows, boisterous, dishonest, misinformed, Jumbo bumbled now round the edges of Shrieve’s mind like an amiable pensioned-off donkey, giving an occasional full-throated bray.

It was a typical Jumbo letter, full of references to people called Skipper and Jimmy and Blanco whom Shrieve found it hard to recognise. The nicknames were automatic and quite unimportant—all First Lieutenants were called Jimmy, for instance—but Jumbo used them like a secret code, as though they indicated something special about each man. He wrote in a bonhomous, back-slapping style that made Shrieve wince and smile.

“I see,” the letter ended, “you’re having a spot of pother out there with the black chappies. Mind you don’t give them everything they ask for, they might eat you. And don’t get yourself chopped up or anything, old boy, because we
count
on
you
for the next reunion. It should be a jolly good show—good eats and plenty of booze. Last time we all got absolutely plastered drinking healths to you. I was slewed to the gills, and poor old Ludo had to be carried away in a taxi. So come on home, Hugh my boy, let’s see you among us for a change. Break your long vigil over the dark night of Africa or however it goes, and have a booze-up with the boys.”

He might, too, Shrieve thought. It would be amusing to see the idiotic Jumbo and the rest of them again, to see how they had made out. They’d probably find him a bit of an odd bird now, settled as they were in ordinary English lives. Jumbo had repeatedly told him what they were all up to, but he hadn’t ever been sufficiently interested to remember.

The last letter was from his aunt Grace, an amiable woman of sixty-two who had a great knot of white hair with which she never seemed satisfied. She was continually taking it down and rearranging it, her hands swooping back and forth across her head, her mouth full of pins through which she chattered incomprehensibly. Her husband had died two years earlier, eighteen months after retiring from a stockbroking firm. He seemed to decide, Aunt Grace had written, that there wasn’t anything left in life that he wanted to do. He had left a considerably larger fortune than anyone expected, and his widow could have lived wherever she liked, but she decided to stay in the small house in Cartersfield to which they had retired. She was happiest when her children and grandchildren came to stay, devoting her time to simple, unexacting charities, such as the relief of unmarried mothers and the visiting of the sick and aged. She did this with something of an old-fashioned air which many of the visited resented, but her sweetness usually won them round in the end. She was, too, a great letter-writer, and Shrieve would regularly receive long accounts of life in and around the small Berkshire town. Since Shrieve had never visited it, the gossip meant nothing to him: but it was always nice to get letters from England.

As he sat on the veranda reading about how the vicar, who was called Henderson, had been quarrelling again with Mrs Hobson, the Brigadier’s widow, the three children came shrilling up. The eldest, a girl called Dayu, was carrying the baby whom Shrieve had named Thomas, after his grandfather. Unlike Mr Shrieve, though, Thomas was always called Tom. Dayu was ten, and her brother Kwuri seven. Tom was almost the same colour as his half-brother and -sister, but he had fair fuzzy hair where theirs was black. He also had blue eyes,
which the Ngulu considered a sign of great good fortune.