Dream of Darkness, page 10
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After lunch, Celia paid the bill and asked the waiter to ring for a taxi.
‘I shan’t come back to the house, dear,’ she said. ‘Give my apologies to Vita. If I’m lucky with connections, I can get back to Dunelands before Mop and Polly start tearing the place to pieces. Come and see us soon.’
‘I will,’ promised Sairey.
She stood outside the restaurant and waved till the taxi was out of sight. Behind her there was a discreet cough, and a voice said, ‘Miss Ellis.’
She turned and found herself looking at the thin, greying black man she had last seen running along the sands at Camber.
‘As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted,’ he said gravely. Then he allowed a brilliant smile to split his face.
Sairey did not respond.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘What do you mean by frightening my aunt?’
‘Yes, she was frightened, wasn’t she?’ he said reflectively. ‘I could see that, even at a distance. I’m sorry she feels like that about black men.’
‘It’s nothing to do with colour,’ retorted Sairey. ‘No one likes being watched, that’s all. And followed. You did follow her, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did,’ admitted the man. ‘I went back to the beach a couple of times in the hope of resuming my talk with you, then started hanging around the house. It took me a little while to work out you’d actually gone. Slow learner, that’s what they said about me, right from the mission school down to Balliol.’
If this was meant as a credential, it wasn’t going to work, but simple curiosity was more than enough to make Sairey’s reluctance merely token when he went on, ‘Let me buy you a drink. That pub across the road serves nice beer.’
‘Now ain’t dis de life,’ he said, as he placed her glass inside the brass guard-rail that ran round the top of the wrought-iron table. ‘The black boy’s dream, sitting in an English pub drinking English beer with a beautiful blonde English girl.’
Sairey, finding it difficult to feel insecure in such surroundings, said with a crispness Aunt Celia might have envied, ‘Look, can we drop this inverted racism and get down to business? Who are you? What do you want with me?’
He sipped his beer and said, ‘Well, well, you’re your father’s daughter, surely.’
‘You know my father?’
‘We’ve met. A man of fierce passions. But even fiercer loyalties. I wonder if his ex-employers understand that? And what of you, Miss Ellis? What do you understand?’
‘Less, every time you open your mouth. Who are you, anyway?’
‘I’m sorry. Peter Kanyagga. Peter to my friends.’
It sounded vaguely familiar but she couldn’t work out why.
‘And your business, Mr Kanyagga?’ Again, pure Aunt Celia.
‘Information officer with the Kenyan High Commission,’ he said. ‘Basically, I’m a journalist. I cut my teeth on student papers at Oxford twenty years ago. Happy days. Swinging sixties, flower power, love, love, love. A time of hope. Where has it all gone?’
He looked at her appealingly, and she said in irritation, ‘That’s for your generation to answer. You’re the ones who lost it. Anyway, you seem to have done all right for yourself.’
‘Because I’m here enjoying European comforts instead of squatting in a mud hut back home? Perhaps you’re right, but it sometimes seems a paradox to me that education should qualify a man not to live in his own country. Perhaps not to die there, either. Do I sound maudlin? It’s your strong beer. Also, I’m a long way from home.’
‘What do you want with me, Mr Kanyagga?’ demanded Sairey.
He played with his glass and said, ‘I’m a man beset by uncertainties, Miss Ellis. Perhaps you can help resolve them. Your father is writing his memoirs, I believe. What do you know of them?’
‘Nothing,’ she said forcefully. ‘And certainly nothing I’m going to tell you.’
‘If that’s all you know, then I cannot feel deprived,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you something, then. My country has been in a delicate position since the Big Man died. You know, Jomo Kenyatta, our great leader whom you British locked up for so many years. Since his death, things have been … uneasy. Ordinary men will stumble in a big man’s shoes, eh? But things usually work themselves out. Unfortunately these years have seen the emergence of an anti-government group, Mwakenya. Constructive criticism is always welcome, of course, but this organization is basically a bunch of left-wing terrorists funded by the communist regime which now governs our neighbour, Uganda …’
‘Yes, I do read the papers,’ interrupted Sairey. ‘And I’ve got a slightly less biased view of the situation. But what has it got to do with me or my father?’
‘I’ll tell you. It’s rumoured that in his memoirs, your father makes allegations about eminent Kenyans – politicians, public figures, businessmen – which could seriously damage their reputations, and possibly destabilize the country.’
‘False allegations, I presume?’ said Sairey. ‘And where is all this leading?’
But Kanyagga had suddenly lost interest in her. He was looking over her shoulder and not liking what he saw. Then his face split into a welcoming smile, like a politician’s who sees the TV camera swing towards him, and he stood up and said, ‘Well, hello. Nice surprise. What are you doing in this neck of the woods?’
Sairey turned, to see a man bearing down on them. He was burly, with a thatch of thick, silvering hair on his bear-like head. She recognized him at once, though it took a second longer to find his name.
Archbell. Archie Archbell, who’d been her father’s, and her stepmother’s, boss in Africa. He was shaking Kanyagga’s hand and saying, ‘I’ve got a little boat moored down here. Try to get down whenever I can for a spot of sailing. What about you?’
As he spoke, Archbell’s eyes were greedily quartering her. He quite literally looked hungry. Then his gaze met hers, locked, and in a blink became avuncularly jovial.
‘Bless me, isn’t it Nigel’s girl, little Sairey? I’m sorry, not so little now, but when I first knew you, well, good days, good days, long gone, alas. You probably don’t recall me, my dear?’
‘You’re Mr Archbell,’ she said.
‘You do remember,’ he said delightedly. ‘Once seen never forgotten. But you two …?’
‘I also knew Mr Ellis, back in the old days,’ said Kanyagga. ‘I saw him recently and he said Sairey was staying down here, suggested I should look her up.’
It occurred to Sairey that this pair were lying like mad and, stranger still, that each knew the other knew he was lying, but didn’t care.
She stood up. Whatever Kanyagga had been going to say, he clearly wasn’t going to say now, and she felt a strong desire to be out of Archbell’s company.
To her surprise, the Kenyan seized her arm and said, ‘No. You stay and finish your drink. I really should have been on my way five minutes ago, but my sexist upbringing made me unwilling to leave a lady unescorted in a drinking house. Now, however, if Mr Archbell doesn’t object …’
‘Object? A pleasure, dear boy.’ But Archbell’s eyes as he watched Kanyagga leave were hard as a hunter’s watching his prey escape. He now bought himself a drink and sat down next to Sairey.
‘Strange coincidence,’ he said. ‘Meeting like this, out here in the sticks.’
‘Very strange,’ agreed Sairey. ‘Are you still in the Diplomatic Service, Mr Archbell?’
‘What? Oh yes.’ He seemed amused. ‘Not all of us can afford to take early retirement like Nigel.’
‘Afford? But Daddy’s always complaining what a miserable pension he gets.’
‘We only get what we pay for, Sairey,’ said Archbell. ‘But if he sold that mausoleum in Masham Square and set up house somewhere like this, he could live comfortably on the change.’
‘I doubt if Fanny would like that.’
‘Fanny? Oh yes. I was forgetting he’d married again. How is she, dear little Fanny?’
There was an undercurrent of malicious laughter beneath almost everything he said, and his eyes were roaming once more, like hands in an Italian disco.
‘She’s OK,’ said Sairey, rising abruptly. ‘I’ve got to go now. Goodbye.’
‘No, wait,’ said Archbell. ‘Let me give you a lift. My car’s outside.’
‘It’s no distance. I’ll walk.’
‘I insist. There’s something I want to say to you. About your father.’
It was the only formula which could have made her get into his car, which turned out to be not the lecher’s limousine she expected, but a muddy Land Rover, smelling of fish. She sat as far from Archbell as she could manage, but in any case he turned out to be a careful driver, keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.
‘Your father and I used to be good friends,’ he said. ‘But we’ve drifted apart. No one’s fault. When you leave an organization, you often feel excluded by the mere fact that life goes on within it as if you’d never existed. Biggest sacrifice a man makes is to give up the key to the executive washroom.’
‘Look, I’m sorry you and Daddy should have fallen out,’ said Sairey, ‘but what’s it got to do with me?’
‘Nothing, of course. But running into you like this made me wonder if perhaps you might not be ideally placed to act as a sort of go-between.’
‘For a reconciliation, you mean?’ said Sairey, surprised into amusement.
Archbell chuckled and said, ‘Hardly. For a warning, really.’
‘A warning? About what?’
‘He’s rather irritating some of his old colleagues. You probably know how abrasive he can be. They are men of influence. They can choke a man socially with very great ease. Shut off contacts, depress perks, make life less comfortable. I speak from sincere friendship.’
It didn’t sound convincing.
Sairey said, ‘Is this about the memoirs?’
‘Memoirs? Good Lord, is he writing some memoirs? I expect I’ll figure somewhere in them.’
Again the mocking undertone, the deliberate lack of effort to sound convincing.
‘What precisely do you want me to say to him, Mr Archbell?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. No need to make a production number out of it. Just tell him we had a drink, I ran you home. Oh, and don’t forget to tell him you bumped into Mr Kanyagga too. But he’ll probably know that already, as it was his suggestion that Kanyagga should look you up, isn’t that what he said? Well, here we are!’
He pulled into the narrow driveway alongside Vita’s house, jumped nimbly from his seat and was round at Sairey’s door before she’d unfastened her belt.
As he handed her down, Vita appeared from the rear garden. She stood in front of the Land Rover with that utter tranquillity which was equally far from vulgar curiosity and rude indifference.
Sairey said, ‘This is Mr Archbell. He used to work with Daddy. This is Vita Gray.’
‘Delighted,’ said Archbell.
‘Come into the garden and have some tea.’
She led the way into the back garden. The Telegraph had been removed from the bench, but Out of Africa remained on the table.
Vita said, ‘Sit down. I’ll fetch another cup.’
She went in to the house. After a moment, Sairey said, ‘Excuse me,’ and followed her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘Bringing him back.’
‘He brought you, I thought.’
‘Yes, but … look, do you mind if I duck out? I wouldn’t mind having a bit of time to myself. I’ve got things to think out.’
‘Of course,’ said Vita, putting a slab of the infamous seed cake on a plate. ‘I’ll take care of Mr Archbell.’
‘Thanks,’ said Sairey. ‘Oh, and Aunt Celia’s gone straight home. She sends her apologies.’
‘For going home?’ Vita allowed herself a smile. ‘Someone should write a paper on English occasions of apology.’
Up in her room, Sairey busied herself tidying her tangled bed clothes. Mrs Teal, Vita’s local cleaning lady, had enquired if she should put the newcomer’s room on her list, but Sairey, whose experience of cleaners was that they always wanted to ‘do’ you at the most inconvenient moment, had said no. The result was that she lived in some chaos.
As she worked, she let her mind drift round and round Kanyagga and Archbell. Both were trying to use her in some way, but she could not see how. Was there some link between their appearance and her father’s wish to pack her off to America? Selfishly, she felt that these were complications she could do without. Getting herself right was the important, the necessary thing. Right, she could face up to anything life might throw at her. Till then, she didn’t want to risk any encounter which might bring back nights of terror and days of weariness.
She stayed upstairs for twenty minutes, till she heard Archbell’s Land Rover grind away. As she went downstairs, she felt such a tremendous sense of relief at being alone with Vita once more that when she met her in the kitchen, she impulsively hugged her and kissed her cheek.
She felt Vita go tense for a moment, then relax, but it was controlled relaxation and Sairey stepped back saying, ‘Oops. Sorry. Patients must not hug their therapist, right? But I just felt so safe with you, Vita, and wanted to say thanks. Is that OK?’
Vita said, ‘What therapists want is to hear patients saying goodbye, because they feel so safe with themselves.’
It was a typical rejoinder but not delivered with her usual, calm detachment. She replaced the untouched seed cake in its tin and went through to the living room. Sairey followed.
Vita said, ‘It’s been a broken kind of day. We’ll try a session tonight, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Whatever you … Yes, that’s fine with me,’ said Sairey. ‘That’s fine.’
The session went well. Sairey had come to be able to interpret Vita’s reaction as she came out of her trance, even though it was a matter of a millimetre’s difference in the compression of her lips and a few degrees of difference in the angle at which she held the cassette as she said, ‘Now?’
Though it was their usual practice that Sairey didn’t listen to the tapes till the following morning, Vita always made this offer, insisting that the tapes were Sairey’s property.
‘No, thanks,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll get an early night. It was all right, was it?’
‘I don’t understand the question,’ said Vita. ‘By the way, you’ve left a book on the garden table and the dew won’t do it any good.’
Feeling reproved, Sairey went to collect Out of Africa. The night was warm for the time of year. There was a full moon, but some trick of the atmosphere seemed to distort it so that it looked rhomboid rather than round, and its light was draped like a gauze curtain over the countryside, concealing as much as it revealed. There were sounds, rustlings and scutterings in the grass, and Sairey thought of the night she had run across the road into the park and met Allan Bright. Perhaps if she walked across the garden now, beyond the old magnolia tree towards the smudgily silhouetted hedgerow, she would find him again …
It seemed to her as she looked that part of the hedge detached itself, rose, sank, and became part of the hedge again.
She went back into the house and locked the door behind her.
When she got into bed, she felt too tired to read, and had switched off the light, when it drifted into her quiescent brain where her familiarity with Kanyagga’s name came from.
In Out of Africa there was an old man called Kanyagga whose adopted son was tragically killed in a shooting accident.
She sat up, put the light on and picked up the leather-bound volume to check her memory.
It fell open at a thin airmail envelope which she had no recollection of using as a bookmark. She took it out and noted with the lack of surprise that comes with a sense of nightmare logic that it marked the passage in which Kanyagga dictated an account of the expenses incurred in bringing up the dead boy. And on the thin blue paper was printed FOR YOUR FATHER TO COUNT THE COST.
She tore the envelope open. It contained several sheets of almost transparently thin paper. She unfolded them and sifted quickly through them. They all bore a stamped heading – COMMISSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS – KAMPALA – 1987. The first was a photocopy of several passages of minuscule handwriting of various lengths. The others, using a typeface almost as small, were transcripts of the handwritten passages, or so she worked out from an eye-straining comparison of first lines. She got out of bed and held the sheets under the bedside lamp to aid her reading.
It started … no Panel Beaters today …
When she had finished she sat perfectly still and tried to concentrate on comprehending what she had read. But all the time, a strong sense of resentment came welling up inside her. It wasn’t fair that this day, which had started off with her mother’s letter, should end with this. All she wanted was to be left alone to heal. All these interruptions, mental and physical, were too much to bear. She tried to channel her resentment towards reason. Who was responsible for putting this load on her? Who had been here today. Celia? No, she couldn’t believe it. Archbell? Of him, she could believe anything. And Kanyagga? There was nothing to stop Kanyagga from slipping into the garden, dropping his message and slipping out again.
In fact, there was nothing to stop anyone. But she was certain it was one of the two men. Kanyagga had been interrupted in his talk with her. Perhaps he had intended to hand the envelope over in the pub. Its position in the book pointed to him. But Archbell was the one who’d definitely been in the garden. She tried to recall anything significant in their conversation as they drove to the house, but all she could remember was her distaste for his company.
Vita would help her sort all this out, she decided, heading for the door. Vita understood everything.
Then she paused, and at last remembered something significant about her drive with Archbell. He hadn’t once had to ask for directions.
That meant, at the very least, he had been watching the house.
At the very least.
She went to the window and looked out into the night. The cloud was low and there was no starlight or moon-light to reflect off the river.
