Various Flavors of Coffee (42 page)

My articles
appeared, and for a few weeks I knew what it was to be fêted.There were invitations to private houses
—soirées
at which I was expected to thrill the company with tales of bloodthirsty savages and the exotic otherness of Africa, all neatly wrapped up with the convenient platitude that Trade would one day turn the place into another Europe. I disappointed. In my articles I had been forced to water down my opinions or face having my pieces rejected, but in the drawing rooms of Mayfair and Westminster I was less circumspect. I pointed out that the only bloodthirsty savages I had met were wearing white skins and the khaki uniforms of the French and British armies; that what we now called Trade was simply a continuation of slavery by more devious means; that the natives I had lived among were as sophisticated in their way as any society I had come across in Europe. People listened to me politely, and then said things like,“But in that case, Mr.Wallis, what is to be Done with Africa?”

And I answered, “Why, nothing. We should clear out—admit we don’t own any part of it, and just go. If we want African coffee, we should pay Africans to grow it. Pay a bit more, if necessary, so that they have a chance to get themselves started. It’ll be to our benefit in the long run.”

It was not the answer they wanted to hear. London just then was in the grip of a strange coffee mania. The Brazilian government was now part of the growers’ cartel, and was supporting the world price with huge loans taken out on the London Stock Exchange: these were generally over-subscribed within hours of being issued, and as the price climbed ever higher, people were scrabbling to invest in whatever way they could. Nobody wanted

to be told that this economic miracle was founded on despair and misery. Those who had started the evening hanging on my every word had let go their grasp long before the end.That suited me: I was not there to make myself popular.

But I was also aware, sometimes, of sidelong glances, even be-fore I had had my say: older women who hurried away their unmarried daughters, husbands who steered their wives to the other side of the room. I was disapproved of, it seemed, and not only for my opinions on Africa.

At one of these
occasions I met George Hunt again. My old friend had grown fat and affable: he had his own magazine now, a literary journal called something like
The Modern View.
After I had driven away my listeners with my own modern views, we walked together to his club, and ensconced ourselves in a fine drawing room on the second floor, where he ordered brandies and cigars.

We chatted of this and that for a while, and then he said suddenly,“Did you know Rimbaud?”

“Who?”

“Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet. Don’t tell me you’ve not heard of him?” I shrugged.“But that’s extraordinary. He was based in Harar, like yourself—a coffee merchant, too, though he would have been working for a French concern. His verses are quite remarkable—though I gather he had stopped writing by then: he wrote most of them while he was still a youth, the catamite of that old toad Verlaine, here in London. . . .” He stopped. “You really knew nothing about this?”

“Someone told me about him,” I said tersely.“I’m sorry to say I didn’t believe a word of it. And no, we didn’t overlap—Rimbaud left Harar just before I arrived. In fact, I took on the lease of his house.”

“Incredible.” Hunt signaled to a club servant for two more

brandies.“Of course, his time out there was somewhat scandalous. There was a rumor about a native concubine—some slave girl he bought off an Arab trader, and then abandoned when he went back to France. But he was a broken man by then, they say.”

I nodded slowly.There was a small click in my mind, and suddenly my story rewrote itself yet again.
She speaks English like a Frenchman....
What else might such a man have taught her? The knowledge that some people will tell themselves any lie for love? But these were things to be mulled over another time, in private.

Hunt was taking a pull on his cigar. “But I imagine out there that sort of thing isn’t altogether unexpected. Doubtless you had some adventures in that line yourself.” He regarded me with greedy eyes.

“Are his poems any good?” I asked, ignoring his question.

He shrugged.“They’re revolutionary, and these days that’s what matters.
Vers libre—
that’s what they’re all writing now. The Irish poets are quite interesting at the moment, then of course there are the Americans—everyone wants to be Whitman—English poetry’s shot to hell.” He tapped ash into a saucer.“But you were going to tell me about your escapades.”

“Was I?” I said shortly.

“You wrote to me at the time, as I recall . . . Something about falling in love with a native?” he prompted, undeterred. He glanced around. “Come on, man. No one can hear us. And of course I shan’t repeat any . . . interesting confidences.”

I suddenly understood why I had been the object of those disapproving glances.“So there’s been gossip?”

He smirked, then hastily backtracked as he remembered that if there had been, it could only have originated from him. “Speculation, Robert, speculation.There
was
a native girl, though, wasn’t there? A Hottentot Venus?”

“There was a girl,” I said. “And I did fancy myself in love with her, for a while.”

“I see.” He puffed at his cigar again, and watched me through a skein of gray smoke, thick and soft as wool.“Perhaps it’s a tale you would prefer to set down on paper. I need authors, you know.”

“My poetry days are over.”

“I wasn’t necessarily referring to verse.” He picked up his brandy and addressed its amber depths. “I don’t only publish the
View.
There are books for discerning gentlemen readers as well. I get those printed in Paris.”

“Pornography, you mean?”

“If you like. I thought perhaps—now that you’re a writer, and presumably one in need of an income . . . And the African slant could be terrific. I hear those women, with their hotter blood, are quite something. What about a Negro
Fanny Hill,
or a
My Secret Life
amongst the natives? I know it would sell.”

“I’m sure it would,” I said, setting down my glass.“But I am not the man to write it.” Suddenly I felt quite nauseous. The smoke from his cigar caught in my throat, sour and bilious. I got to my feet. “Good-night, George. Find some other mug to provide your titillation.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. “Don’t be too hasty, Robert.You must know you can’t live off Teruda forever. My writers—I look after them. An article here, a poem placed there . . . You’re just the sort of man who could benefit from being read in our pages. We’ve published Ford Madox Ford, you know.”

“Go screw yourself, George.”

He smirked wearily.“Don’t be so bloody conventional.”

As I walked out he called after me, “I see Pinker’s daughter Emily sometimes.”

I stopped in the doorway.

“She made a rather good marriage. To a complete crashing bore.You’re well out of it there.”

I did not turn round. I continued on my way.

[
sixty-eight
]

mily was a chapter in my life that I knew was closed,

but her father was another matter. Finally, I could put it off no longer. I went down to Limehouse and sent my card in to his office.

He made me wait—of course. As I sat in one of the anterooms I watched an endless procession of porters and storemen filing past me with jute sacks on their shoulders—not filing, in fact, so much as
marching,
each man moving at a smart pace out to where a line of lorries waited in the street. I wondered why they did not store them in the warehouse, but perhaps that had been put to other uses now.

Then I saw a face I recognized—Jenks, the secretary, although he was clearly rather more than a secretary now: he had two assistants running after him as he hurried back and forth directing the loading.“Jenks,” I called out.

“Oh, hullo, Wallis. We heard you were back. And you’ve cut your hair.” It was a strange comment: I had had many dozens of haircuts since I saw him last. “We wondered when we would see you.” He continued moving as he spoke, so that like his assistants I

was obliged to get to my feet and follow him. “There,” he said to one of them. “Up there, on the third floor. Do you see? Space for at least another five hundred.”

I stopped, silenced by what I saw in front of me.

The warehouse was not just full: it was crammed. On every side walls of coffee sacks reached up toward the roof. There were no windows—just a couple of arrow slits in the endless heights, where sacks had been piled up against the real windows, and a sliver or two of light sneaked past. Squeezed in between the great stacks were tiny pathways and winding corridors, staircases made of sacks, wormholes . . . there must have been over fifty thousand bags in that warehouse alone.

There was an open sack near where we stood. I reached down and pulled out a few beans, sniffing them.“Indian typica, if I’m not mistaken.”

Jenks nodded.“Your palate was always accurate.”

I looked up to where the towers of sacks vanished into the gloom.“Is it all the same? What’s it for?”

“You had better come upstairs,” Jenks said.

Pinker was sitting
at his desk.The tickertape machine was chattering quietly to itself; he was holding the paper tape in his cupped hands, reading the symbols and then dropping it, picking it up again almost immediately to read the symbols that had replaced them, like someone drinking from a fast-flowing river.

“Oh, there you are,Wallis. Back at last,” he said, as if I had just been down to the West End for lunch.“How was Africa?”

“Africa was not a success.”

“So I surmised.” He had still barely looked at me, continually running his thumbs over the strange rubric emitted by the machine. “The warehouse is very full,” I commented when he said nothing further.

“That?” He sounded surprised. “That is nothing. You should see the bonded stores. I have four now; all larger than this, all filled to capacity. I am having to rent extra space until it is over.”

“Until what is over?”

He looked at me then, and I was struck by how much like Emily he was, physically. But in his eyes there was a strange light, a kind of nervous excitement.

“My army is almost ready, Wallis,” he said. “We are nearly at strength.”

He had had
a revelation, Pinker explained. He had grasped, finally, that the coffee market was cyclical. If the price went up, plantation owners planted more, but since those seedlings took four years to produce a crop, the effects on the market were not felt un-til then. Four years after a price rise, therefore, a glut occurred, the coffee that had been planted in the years of shortage coming onto the market in ever-increasing quantities, until over-supply caused the price just as inevitably to fall, and plantation owners either went out of business or switched to other crops. Four years later, this then caused another shortage; prices rose, and the planters expanded all over again.

“An eight-year cycle, Wallis. As immutable, as inexorable, as the waxing and waning of the moon. The cartel can mask it, but they cannot eradicate it. And once I realized that, I knew I had him.”

“Had who?”

“Why, Howell, of course.” Pinker smiled tightly. “He will be howling soon enough.” He stopped, and looked almost surprised. “You have made me witty, Robert.”

He had been waiting years, he said, for the cycle to come around to the point at which the price would be under pressure from the natural rhythms of the market.

“And that moment is now? I thought the consensus in London is that the price will go higher?”

He shrugged. “The Brazilian government claims it will. They have this new scheme—valorization, they call it. They are taking out vast loans to buy up their farmers’ coffee, and so smooth its passage on to the market. But it cannot last. The market is like a river: you can only dam it for so long.When the dam bursts, it will take everything with it.”

He crossed to a map of the world which dominated one wall.“I have been making my preparations, Robert.You have seen some of them downstairs—but those are just the visible ones. It is the invisible ones that will make the difference. Networks—alliances— treaties. Arbuckle on the West Coast. Egbert’s in Holland. Lavazza in Milan.When we act, we act together.”

“You have formed your own cartel?”

“No!” He spun round. “We have formed the opposite of a cartel—an association of companies who believe in freedom, the free movement of capital.You rejoin us at an auspicious moment.” “Ah—I have not come to ask for my job back. Just to apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“For letting you down.”

He frowned. “But all’s well. Emily is satisfactorily married. Hector’s death, of course, was a tragedy—but it was an accident of his own making: these things happen.And in the meantime, Robert, I am in need of someone with your expert knowledge of coffee.”

“What you have in your warehouse now is scarcely coffee.” “Yes. And do you know something? Thanks to our advertising,

the customer believes it tastes better than the finest arabica. If you put a cup of Castle and a cup of Harar mocca side by side, it is the Castle they would prefer.A housewife’s nose, it seems, is even more easily led than what is in your trousers.”

“You despise your customers,” I said, surprised.

He shook his head. “I do not despise them. I have no feelings for them whatsoever. In a successful business there is no room for sentiment.”

“Be that as it may, I have no place here. I intend to make my living by my pen from now on.”

“Ah, yes—I read those articles of yours. They were amusingly written, if a little misguided. But Robert, there is no reason at all why you should not continue to write for the newspapers as well as work for me. In fact, it might be useful. I could suggest some avenues for you to explore, set you right about certain matters—”

“That isn’t quite how it works.”

“Then you will want to settle up.” His voice had barely changed, but there was a dangerous glint in his eye that had not been there previously. “Three hundred a year, wasn’t it? And you managed—what? Six months? Let us say you owe a thousand, and not bother with the small change.” He held out his hand.“A check will do.”