The White Father (6 page)

“And there’s really nothing more to be said?”

“No,” said Robbins. He spread his fat fingers over the blotter. “Sometimes I feel like a bloody Arab: everything is in the hands of Allah. But then I try and remember we were here to get things out of the hands of Allah and into the hands of men.”

“That’s hardly the left-wing view.”

“Maybe not. There are personal attacks on us in the
newspapers
already, you know. I’m a sanguinary would-be dictator. I don’t think they know about you yet.”

“It wouldn’t worry me if they did,” said Shrieve. “My conscience is clear.”

“So is mine, for Christ’s sake. But no one cares what you feel about yourself. And quite right, too, in a way. But it hurts, you know. It hurts. Damn it, it isn’t as though we were exploiting them, like the mineral companies, like that bloody Free. No, we don’t take a penny from them, we’re paid from home. But they think it’s all the same thing, they think we’re here as a cynical cover for gigantic capitalist exploitation.”

“Perhaps we are, in a way. We never say anything against it, do we?”

Robbins looked at him in amazement. “Are you serious?”

“Not very.”

“But we’re not allowed to talk politics. That’s why we’ve been so bloody useful. And let’s hope that they’ll stick to some semblance of our impartiality, otherwise it’s going to be second cousins twice removed in every little post office and government bureau in the country. And that won’t be the worst, either.”

“You make it sound,” said Shrieve, “like the British cabinet.”

Robbins laughed. “Still reading the left-wing press, I see.”

“Oh, the papers get out to the bush eventually, you know. Look, I promised your wife that you wouldn’t be late for dinner. We ought to be on our way.”

“Not for twenty minutes,” said Robbins, making a face at the papers on his desk. “Go and have a drink in the Victoria, and I’ll join you there when I’m through with all this bumf.”

“All right,” said Shrieve. He didn’t like the Victoria, a bar which was always full of businessmen and civil servants who thought him mad to live with the Ngulu. But a couple of drinks there would bring him up to date on what they were thinking in the capital. He got the papers in the bush, all right, but they took their time to arrive, and he sometimes felt that if Russia and America dropped bombs on each other, he would be the last white man in the world to hear the news.

*

The plane sank through soggy banks of cloud, and then there was England, a sprawl of suburban houses and rubbish tips and roads and odd bits of green, and then they were down and it was drizzling. Tired and fuzzy after the long journey, Shrieve pulled the collar of his coat closer about his neck and shivered. As he went into the Airport buildings he knew he would soon have a cold. It was always the same, returning to England—the rain, and what seemed unendurable chilliness. After a couple of weeks (and often a bout of flu, too), he would be used to it again. A few weeks later and he would be trying to readjust to Africa.

It was seven years since he had last been in London and he observed many changes as the bus carried him along the Great West Road. The horrifying ugliness of the houses had not
altered, but there were major roadworks going on everywhere, a flyover at Chiswick, another at Hammersmith, and from these he saw many tall buildings which he didn’t recognise, and something that could only be called a skyscraper in Earls Court. Where he had spent a lot of time in the past, stuck in traffic jams, the bus now sailed briskly above the old
congestion
. Perhaps England was finally getting itself a modern road system.

From the Air Terminal (itself completely new) he took a taxi to the small Bloomsbury hotel where he always stayed. As the cab carried him through the centre of London he found that much here, too, had changed. A vast roadwork was under construction at Hyde Park Corner, and there was a dual carriageway in the Park. Everywhere there were glossy new buildings, all glass and bright colours, and everything seemed less drab, less austere, than when he had last been home. The boom years had left their mark in every street, with new paint and new construction, and most of the grime which Shrieve remembered as the quintessence of London seemed to have been washed, literally, away, though the traffic was appalling. (If England really was getting a modern road system, it clearly hadn’t reached London yet.) There seemed, too, to be far more advertisement hoardings than on his previous visit, and wherever he looked petrol, cigarettes, beer, airlines,
newspapers
, sauces, trumpeted their own merits. He noted in particular a ubiquitous advertisement which showed an English mother urging her child to feel Free.

When the taxi drew up at the number he had given, he found that his hotel had vanished, and in its place stood a seven-storey block of offices.

“How long has this been here?” he asked the driver.

“Oh, a few years now, guv. You must have been away a long time.”

“Yes,” said Shrieve. “I have.”

The taxi-driver took him to another street, full of hotels like the one which had been pulled down. Shrieve chose one at random, wondering what had happened to Mr and Mrs Abbot
who had been so kind to him. They had retired, perhaps, to a little cottage, or a bungalow somewhere by the sea. Mr Abbot had always said he liked the sea. What did people do when they retired, when the house was pulled down and they had to go away?

He washed and had lunch, tough lamb and watery vegetables, then lay down to catch up on the night’s sleep he had lost on the plane. He woke, much refreshed, at six. It was almost midsummer, and though he found it cool, the long evening was warm and pleasant. He rang his father and said he would be down the following evening, news which his father took with no sign of excitement. He walked for a while round the Bloomsbury squares, deploring the functional ugliness of the parking meters, a horrible innovation, then strolled down towards Charing Cross Road and Trafalgar Square. He would eat in Soho, he decided, but first he would wander along wide Whitehall and look at the monuments which sustained his existence: the Horse Guards, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey.

By now the great press of evening traffic had eased and the red double-decker buses moved in unhampered grandeur past Charles I, past the Cenotaph, to Parliament Square. He watched them with the same schoolboy’s excitement as on his first eight-year-old visit to London. But with the excitement was mingled awe: awe for the small area of monuments and houses and offices in which the shaping decisions of so many centuries had been made; awe, too, for those decisions themselves and all they had meant; awe, above all, for the spirit and purpose of the nation here expressed in stone and glass and wood. Over there in the House of Commons had been debated the principles on which England had flourished; behind stood the great
departments
of government where those principles had been, were still being, translated into action. And here was he, one of the men the decisions finally reached, thousands of miles away, doing their duty beneath a different sun.

Big Ben chimed the half hour and he caught himself
shivering
with pleasure. The squat towers of the Abbey were
magnificently strong above the skirling traffic. If the Empire had had a heart, a hub, it was here, church, Parliament and government surrounding a green square with statues. Shrieve found he was smiling uncontrollably, standing in the middle of the pavement, while the indifferent Londoners hurried past. He was exhilarated, he could hardly believe that he could be so glad to be back, to be home. For this was home, these buildings from which a nation throbbed its lifeblood across the globe, the ancient place of crowning, the modern centre of administration. Here, far more than in his father’s house, he felt an intimacy with brick and stone; to thoughts of this grass, these trees, he turned in African moments of despondency.

He crossed the road to the square. His heart full, he stroked the bark of a tree, then bent down and touched the English grass.

E
DWARD GILCHRIST
squatted over the small section of mosaic floor he had been excavating all afternoon, his mind running on hard labour.

Bare-torsoed, lean, blue-jeaned Ed, one-time pop-idol and modern pianist, is serving his three-year term (for inciting to riot) on special government projects. The kid whose tremolo made even the nurses faint in teenage dance-halls from coast to coast is learning the blues the hard way. Says Ed, “Blues, like jeans, can get to be too confining a form to work in, which is why I’m calling my forthcoming autobiography
A
La
 
Re
cherche
de
Jean’s
Blues,
but, man, you can tell the fans the Romans sure built their villas square.” Ed, due out soon, his auburn hair crew-cut in prison fashion, has been boning up evenings on Roman history, his current stint being an archaeological gig in the woods near Cartersfield, site of State Jail 69. “It’s better than playing,” says deadpan Ed. “Using your hands, you get to have a real understanding of the labouring man. Like I’d always led a kid-glove-compartmentalised-type life till I came here. Now I realise that even a pick can swing.” “But Ed,” I said, “you always used your hands, you were a pianist, remember?” “Sure,” said Ed, still deadpan, “but tell the fans that this time I’ve really scaled the bottoms.” Just how low can you get? Who would have thought the smiling heart-throb would end up scraping Roman pavement instead of getting under your skin? But that’s how it goes, folks, that’s the way the teen ages.

I must stop talking to myself in this ridiculous fake language, I’m an intelligent man. You, Edward Gilchrist, are an
intelligent
man. Your parents provided you with the finest education that an English boy can have. Few indeed are those privileged to pass from a leading public school to one of the best
universities
in the land. And what have you done with the opportunities created for you by the self-sacrifice and devotion of your parents? You have squandered your days in nihilistic and anarchical talk and your nights in so-called jazz music. You have spent but few hours in the great libraries of Oxford, and all too many in the disreputable coffee bars of the city and in the unsavoury furnished rooms of your unkempt friends. What arts, what letters, what society, what, above all, philosophy have you taken as your model? As for the arts, the answer is clear: you have chosen to imitate the music of illiterate negroes. As for letters, you have studied the history of your country—with what diligence we shall learn in a few weeks. As for society, you have dwelt among the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and bearded. As for philosophy, you have sought only the
destructive
, the anti-social, the negative. You believe in nothing, you hold nothing dear; you seek for no god, you offer no comfort to others; you scorn the devil even as the devil has surely put you to scorn. You who once served as an officer of the Crown have become an empty shell, deifying your rootlessness, your desperate nothing.

No, he wouldn’t say that. Have become an empty shell. Before I pass sentence, have you anything to say? Nothing, my lord. Something shall come of nothing. I have no hesitation in sentencing you, Edward Gilchrist, twenty-three, of the parish of Cartersfield with Mendleton in the county of
Berkshire
, to hard labour. In a sense, as you will, I hope, come to realise, it is a punishment you have chosen for yourself, a return to society for all you have so thoughtlessly taken. And may God have mercy on your soul.

On yours, too, mate.

Edward eased his back and shifted along the pavement. The white passageway now stretched dirtily for seven or eight feet, a thin red stripe running down one side. It could hardly have been a very important passage, he thought: it looked more like the sort of dank hall that ran from gun-room to gentlemen’s cloakroom in a large Victorian house. Silly, really, to spend your last free holiday before life is Real Life is Earnest digging
up a Roman villa. Instead of squatting at the bottom of a deep trench with your shirt off when the sun doesn’t even get far enough down to tan you, you could be doing something to the point. To the point? What point?

Real alienation, this. Christ, all that Oxford talk. This soil is real all right. It smells real, it smells good and dirty the way soil ought to smell. Pavement’s real, too, shows someone real once lived here and had a real house. Ours is a continuously inhabited island. I am deep in the heart of England. It smells damp and dirty, as it should.

“How are you getting on down there?”

Edward jumped. “Please don’t do that,” he said. In his surprise his elbow had knocked into the wall of the trench and a thin trickle of soil had fallen on the piece of pavement he had just uncovered.

“Sorry,” said Mr Armitage. He was the Ministry of Works archaeologist in charge of the excavation. He began to climb down the ladder into the ditch.

“There’s nothing new to see,” said Edward. “I’ve moved a couple of feet further forward, that’s all.”

“Any small finds?”

“Bits of pottery. Nothing interesting.”

Armitage glanced at the shards. “No sign of post-holes, I suppose?”

“None at all.”

“I still feel that this was probably a covered way between the main house and the outbuildings, you know. You will keep a sharp lookout for fragments of wood, won’t you?”

“It might just have had a sort of pergola—nothing but a trellis and some roses. Vines, perhaps.”

Armitage nodded, looking slowly along the walls of the trench. Then he climbed up the ladder again. “Good luck,” he said from the top.

“Thanks,” said Edward. He had little idea of what he was doing, except in the most obvious sense. He had simply read about the excavation in the local paper, come to have a look and found that his services would be welcome. At least, that was to
put it rather strongly: they wouldn’t be unwelcome, Armitage had said. He took up a spade or a trowel as ordered and dug or scraped where he was told, taking, he noticed, far more care about it than the professionals who tended to shovel where he would sift. Armitage and his assistant, Mrs Blewett,
occasionally
inspected his work, but always refrained from comment. They would gaze at the variously coloured layers of earth in a trench and nod as though satisfied. Edward was strictly amateur. His finds so far had been two brass clips and an indecipherable coin.

He bent again to the pavement and brushed away the fall of earth. Wouldn’t the Romans have laughed to see us solemnly sieving their rubbish heaps? Is their central-heating really all that clever? Didn’t they perhaps regard it with the same blasé air that we regard ours? What are archaeologists two thousand years hence going to say about the ruins they dig up? The once-powerful British Empire was rich both at home and abroad. Pottery from as many as seven thousand different potteries has been found all over the world. These shards confirm the existence of major trade routes. The remains of narrow and winding roads throughout Britain indicate that, though difficult and slow, journeys were possible between the main cities.

But no, that’s all fantasy. Future historians will know all too much about every detail of our lives. Microfilms, card-indices, photostats, tapes, records, books and books of surveys and statistics and analyses—Christ, there are people spending their lives telling us how we are living, and without them we would hardly know. There will be nothing for the future to explain, if there is a future, that is. Poor bloody
undergraduates
in 3960. Perhaps they’ll have abolished the viva by then. About bloody time, too.

Edward’s viva was still to come. Notably weak on the Romans and the Dark Ages, he had been reduced to writing a jejeune and deliberately unfinished essay on Hadrian, in the hope that the examiners would assume it was only shortage of time that prevented him from displaying further knowledge.
Jutes, Danes, Saxons and Angles were all the same to him, but there was something to be said for the Romans, they were at least reasonably efficient. The invaders who succeeded them had no sense of order at all, and most of them couldn’t even spell their names right. He hoped, without much confidence, that his brief archaeologising might help him to remember about the importance of burial sites as opposed to crematoria. But his mind usually ran on other things.

Your salad days are over now, Edward. They’re not, daddy-o, not over by any means. Work, who wants to work? The only work worth doing is play, and the only play worth anything is work. Play? No. You’ve got to be left alone, that’s all that matters, you’ve got to stay clear. So you’ve got to have money. So Ed Gilchrist has to make that Top Twenty chart soonest. Backing, that’s the secret. You can sing terribly and get away with it if only you have the right backing. The right backing and the right kind of number. Must make Pete
Harrisson
take it all more seriously. Thinks he’s too good for pops. Write our own tunes, lyrics, arrangements, snatch all the wages that way, strike real pay dirt. Dirt. Hell, that man’s coming for a drink. Must finish that song tonight, too. Heavy beat, that’s essential. But strings, too, whining away for
sentiment
. The kids are suckers for sentimental rhythm. Good title, that, Sentimental Rhythm. Probably been used. A bit thirties, too. Perhaps that’s what I ought to go for, old standards. Never make it as a rock singer, too old at twenty-three. Got to be still at bloody school.

Come on, come on, another foot before we pack it in. How dull can a pavement get? The question is what to sing at the test recording. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Make a song of that. Don’t call me, darling, I’ll call you, just the way I used to do. Call you names. Before we say goodbye. No. I called and called the number that you gave me. Been done. Busy line. Good number, Busy Line. Must keep it very, very simple for the pop charts, don’t want more than one idea.

“Do you want some tea, Edward?” said Belinda Hayes, peering down at him. She was reading Archaeology and
Anthropology at Cambridge, and her status on the site was therefore slightly higher than Edward’s.

“Tea? What’s the time?”

“About half past five.”

“God, I must go. I mean, no thanks, Belinda, sorry. There’s a man coming for drinks, and I promised I’d be home.”

He straightened up and looked at his day’s work. It wasn’t in the least impressive.

“Find anything?” said Belinda.

“Absolutely nothing. I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s anything to find.”

He handed his trowel and other implements up to Belinda, then the small tray of dun-coloured shards. As he climbed the ladder out of the trench he said, “Goodness, the sun’s still shining.”

“How now, old mole,” said Belinda.

He put on his shirt and they went together towards the small hut which was the excavation’s headquarters. Armitage and Mrs Blewett were poring over some fragments of glazed pottery.

“I must go now, I’m afraid,” Edward said.

Armitage looked hurt, Mrs Blewett surprised. The very latest one could get anything to eat in Cartersfield was eight o’clock, and no one had seen either of them leave the site before seven forty-five.

“See you all tomorrow,” said Edward, slinging his old mackintosh over his shoulder.

“Bye,” said Belinda. She watched him go down the path that led through beeches and oaks to the lane. Edward had told his mother that Belinda Hayes was a nice girl, but he couldn’t take her seriously when he saw nothing of her all day but her bottom. Besides, it was impossible to establish anything more than a friendly working relationship with a girl who had never even heard of Charlie Parker.

When he came to the road he wiped his hands on the thighs of his jeans and threw the mackintosh into the back of the 1937 Ford Ten which he had bought the previous year for
seventy-five
pounds and to his parents’ horror. It worked, just, and
though it was very draughty, he used it to transport the members of the Oxford band with which he played when they had an engagement outside the university. It had become known as The Bandwaggon. He wiped his feet carefully on the verge, got in, turned the car in the gateway and set off home to Mendleton.

He felt tired. He wasn’t used to physical labour or to being outdoors all day. But it might, one never could tell, prove genuinely useful at the viva to have scrabbled away for a couple of weeks at a dreary bit of pavement. In spite of playing a lot of jazz, he had worked hard, if unconventionally, and there was a chance, a slight but real chance, that he might get a First. That would make his parents shut up. He could stave off the horrors of a permanent job for several years while pretending to do some research—something simple and factual, casting yet another thin ray of light on some minor aspect of
eighteenth-century
electioneering. It was a well-covered field, and the rules for covering what remained had been laid down by the great Namier in such a way that you scarcely had to think for yourself at all.

Acknowledgements are due to the librarians of the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the County Library of Flint: also to my supervisor, without whose unfailing
enthusiasm
I should never have had the heart to finish this work, and to his wife, whose support in difficult times has been invaluable: to Professors Regius and Emeritus: to Miss Phoebe Reynolds, who uncomplainingly typed no less than eighteen different versions of the manuscript: and to Miss Anne Culhampton. Miss Culhampton, a copy editor of the university press which is publishing this work, deserves more praise than I can fairly give her: both style and logic improved markedly under her direction. Finally, I should like to point out that this bloody rubbish has cost me four valuable years of my life, and that if there are any errors in it, they are entirely due to the incompetence of the people I have thanked above, whose names it would be invidious to repeat, and I couldn’t care less, anyway.

I couldn’t ever be a don, you have to be fundamentally serious, you have to apply yourself with intellectual rigour. And anyway, they probably won’t let me research, they think I’m just frivolous. I’m not frivolous, damn it, I’m too serious, that’s my trouble. How can anyone serious spend years fiddling with scholarship? How can they think it seriously matters, those balding, bespectacled, frivolous, essentially frivolous, research students? They can’t face seriousness, they hide under their documents, archives, statistics. Nice to have letters after your name, yes, makes you feel safe, earns you a better salary, yes, yes, yes. Better than sweating away seriously in a secondary modern school. Not for me.