Dream of Darkness, page 4
As I waited for my connection, which might take two minutes or an hour depending on vagaries beyond the grasp of British Telecom, a hand grasped my shoulder and a voice whispered in my ear, ‘You’re under arrest’.
I span round so violently I almost fell off my stool and the man who’d come up behind me had to steady me.
‘Dear, dear,’ he said. ‘Who’s got a bad conscience, then?’
‘Bill,’ I said. ‘You bastard!’
Bill Bright was, for me, the perfect type of colonial Englishman, hard-working, fearless, fair minded; a little naïve at times, at others a compelling visionary, he loved Africa and its people with a real fervour. We’d first met as subalterns in the KAR mess, and kept in touch ever since. He farmed up in the northern region of Uganda now, and normally there was no more welcome sight than those broad shoulders and that mahogany tanned face with its thatch of sun-bleached hair. Tonight I felt like keeping as low a profile as possible, so my welcoming smile may have been a bit forced.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ I said. ‘Bit early in the year for you to be visiting the fleshpots, isn’t it?’
‘Ocen got some unexpected leave. He loves to play farmer, so I thought I’d pop down to K and sort my bank manager out.’
This hit me like an accusation. Ocen Okoya was Bright’s brother-in-law, and a captain in the Ugandan army. As an Acholi, and distantly related to the brigadier of that name whose death Amin had probably arranged, he was just the kind of officer the conspirators would want out of the way before the coup. And after? We’d been promised bloodless. I could only hope there were enough political restraints on Idi to force some kind of attempt to keep that promise.
‘Is Apiyo with you?’ I asked.
It had come as a considerable shock to the old white establishment when, shortly after Independence, Bill Bright had married Ocen’s twin sister, Apiyo. She’d trained at Makerere as a teacher and was twice as clever as most of the white die-hards, but the best they could find to say was that maybe, with the uncertainties of post-Independence life ahead, wily old Bill was taking out a bit of extra insurance.
The only truth in this was that Bright, fearing a crack down on black-white relationships, had insisted on marriage, which was always what he’d wanted anyway. Apiyo had been the one to resist. I think it was possibly Bill’s insistence that he wanted a family, but only in wedlock, that carried her. Bright was not the kind of settler who scattered little brown bastards all over Africa. Now they had a son, Allan, who was five or six.
‘No. She’s not crazy about Kampala and she doesn’t get much chance to see Ocen these days. You must come and visit soon. And better still, when are you going to stop hiding this lovely wife and kiddie of yours at home and bring them out for a bit of sunshine?’
My marriage had surprised Bill almost as much as his had surprised the ex-pat set. Nor had he understood when I explained about Sarah having to stay in London to finish her doctorate. Then she became pregnant, and John Varley had been firm in his diagnosis that it would be most unwise for her to travel to a new life in East Africa till the child was born. With the Head of Africa as my father-in-law, there was no problem about a temporary home-posting, which I knew Joe would have liked to make permanent to keep his daughter and grandchild close to him. I liked neither the climate nor the routine work I was doing, but in the end I might have given way if the Tories hadn’t got back in and started off that chain of events which was to throw the Commonwealth into such a turmoil. Archie Archbell had been adamant that he needed me. The situation was critical. This was no time for new boys. My experience and expertise would be invaluable. I suspect, also, that at a very early stage he’d got Idi Amin lined up as his boy and thought that my old acquaintance with the man would be helpful.
Reluctantly, my father-in-law had given way, bolstered by the fact that Sarah was remaining behind for a while to complete the PhD thesis postponed by the birth of our daughter. But now it was complete, and my doctor wife and baby daughter were flying out to join me.
Bill Bright was delighted when I told him, but disappointed when I added that, to start with at least, we would be setting up home in Kenya.
‘But you’ve spent most of your time working in ’ganda since you came back,’ he protested. ‘Seems daft to be commuting over the border!’
‘We’ll see how things go,’ I said. I couldn’t tell him tonight that no sane man was going to bring his wife and kid into a country that had just suffered a military coup, not till the dust settled, anyway.
‘Your call to Nairobi, sir.’
I excused myself and went to one of the phones on the wall beyond the desk. They were screened off from each other, but I was aware of Bill, standing within earshot, behind me.
‘Archie,’ I said. ‘Just to say I’ll be on my way back tonight. I presented the figures on that new fertilizer spray and I think there’s a real interest.’
‘You reckon they’ll want to go ahead?’ growled Archbell.
‘You always get some nervousness when something new comes along, but yes, I’m pretty confident.’
‘So I should go ahead with re-routing the consignment, you think?’
‘It would be silly not to make arrangements.’
We were talking about what would happen when Obote came hot-footing it back from Singapore, once news of the coup reached him. He wouldn’t fly to Entebbe, that was sure. Most probably he’d end up at Nairobi, and while the Kenyans could not afford to be seen openly aiding the overthrow of a friendly neighbouring country’s legitimate government, there were plenty of political and business interests there who’d be delighted to see Obote toppled. The longer the resistance to the coup was deprived of its main focus, the easier things would be, and, as any traveller knows, there are a thousand ways you can bugger a man around at an airport.
‘Excellent,’ said Archbell gloatingly. ‘Good work. See you soon.’
I put the phone down. Bill Bright was looking at me speculatively. He never pried openly, but I sometimes got the feeling he felt I was a pretty odd kind of agricultural advisor. Perhaps the fact that he never talked farming with me was the biggest giveaway of his suspicions.
‘Fancy a beer?’ he said.
‘Quick one,’ I said. ‘Down here. No time to go up to the night-club, if it was feathered fanny and fancy prices you had in mind.’
‘No. I’ll leave that to Idi and his mates.’
He would have noticed my shock if he’d been looking at me, but when I followed his gaze, I realized there was nothing provocative in his remark. He was looking across the lobby to where Amin and his friends had just emerged from the lift. The waiting tourists parted before him like water before an oil tanker.
‘Big bugger, isn’t he?’ said Bill. ‘I don’t know what he’s like as a general, but he was a lousy cook.’
Bright, like me, had encountered Amin in the KAR.
I said, ‘It’s not like you, Bill, to carp at people getting on in their own country.’
He said, ‘I’m no dewy-eyed liberal, Nigel. There’s black shits as well as white, and some of the tales I’ve heard about our fat friend … What the hell! I’m not going to have to serve under him, am I? Let’s go and get that drink!’
4
It was a world of infinite greens. They exploded against her eyes, sparkling, bubbling, streaming, coiling; they caressed her body, green fingers stroking, green lips kissing, green tendrils grasping; they even sounded in her ears, with a reef-like roar and a merman’s whisper; and she knew that all she had to do was open her mouth and the green taste would, in a second, fill her belly and her lungs and make her part of that greenness for ever.
She kicked hard, rose swift, and burst into the air. Above her the blue sky, before her the yellow sands, and all around the green Channel, rising and falling with lazy strength, indifferent, alike, to the keels which laboured through and the hulks which rotted beneath her restless waters. Sairey threw back her head and sent a cry of pure delight to join the scream of the gulls overhead.
‘Good?’ said Celia Ellis in her ear.
‘Great!’ exclaimed Sairey.
She hadn’t felt like that an hour earlier when the alarm had gone off. One of the penalties of staying with Aunt Celia was that you were invited, in terms which brooked no refusal, to join in her pre-breakfast dip. Considerations of season or weather were rarely allowed to interfere, and Sairey could recall, as a child, running back to Dunelands with goosepimples that felt like cobbles, while Celia strolled behind in her ancient tartan beach robe, oblivious to the cold.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ said Celia. ‘Floating in a Spanish swimming pool’s all right, but it’s no preparation for real water.’
Piqued, Sairey said, ‘Race you to the shore!’ and plunged forward in a furious crawl, which she kept up till she grounded in the shallows.
Shaking the water from her eyes, she stood up and saw her seventy-year-old aunt vigorously towelling herself down while her two dogs, Mop, a Sealyham, and Polly, a Red Setter, gambolled madly around her.
‘You’re better than you used to be,’ said Celia. ‘But more rhythm, less effort, would double your speed. Go on, you two. Get yourselves wet!’ She hurled a stick into the water and the dogs rushed past Sairey in excited pursuit.
‘Aren’t they marvellous?’ said Sairey, laughing. ‘They never get any older, do they?’
‘No?’ Celia looked at her speculatively. ‘It was Twig and Dancer when you lived here with me. They died within a month of each other, not long after you went back to Masham Square. You must remember that?’
‘Of course I remember,’ said Sairey indignantly. ‘I didn’t mean I thought Polly and Mop were the same dogs.’
This was true. She hadn’t meant that, but she realized she had meant something even odder; that, just as this narrow English Channel stretching out before her was part of the one great sea, so the two dogs were part of that energy which involved all dogs, and from it they derived an immortality far more important than their limited lifespan. And herself? Such a context for herself solved all those problems of loss and gain, of past and future, which smudged the bluest of her horizons with threatening cloud.
At least for the moment, she was well. The Dream had not returned since the day her coat had reappeared, and the improvement in her health and spirits had been so marked that even Vita had seemed pleased. Typically, as Sairey had come to view her departure to America with less and less concern, so Vita seemed to grow more unhappy about it.
‘It’s only for a short while,’ she said. ‘If there’s any trouble, leave a message on my answering machine and it will get to me.’
‘And what will you do? Drop everything and fly home?’ asked Sairey gaily. ‘Vita, I’ll be all right. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to going down to Dunelands.’
It was true. In many ways it was like going home, for this, more than anywhere else, had been her home. Here her remembered life began when, after her mother’s death, Celia had taken responsibility for her upbringing until her father had come back to Masham Square six years later with a new wife. London had been marvellous for an adolescent girl, but she had never lost her taste for the peace of Dunelands, the undemanding affection of the dogs and the uncomplicated directness of Aunt Celia’s care.
It was only gradually that she came to realize what Celia must have given up to care for first her brother, then her father, and now her niece. Marriage, children of her own, possibly a career, perhaps (for she seemed to have few) even friends. It was easy to take such devotion for granted in the same way as she took Polly and Mop’s. Perhaps her first mature thought had been her awareness of this danger.
She towelled herself vigorously, staring out to sea.
‘I sometimes think it would be nice to stay in the water for ever,’ she said.
‘I thought that’s what they called drowning,’ said Celia. ‘Let’s get back and see what we can find for breakfast.’
As they walked up the beach towards the villa, Sairey said, ‘When you brought me back here from Africa, what was I like?’
‘Good Lord, child, what kind of question’s that? You were yourself, what you are now, in the making.’
‘Was I very unhappy?’
‘Of course you were unhappy,’ snapped Celia. ‘Your mother was dead, your father was still in Africa, you’d been uprooted and brought back to this cold climate by a tedious old aunt who didn’t let you have all your own way. Hardly a recipe for unconfined joy, was it?’
‘But I always remember being happy here.’
They had paused while Celia unlocked the gate in the fence which ran round Dunelands’ large garden. The fence was tall and made of tungsten steel, with a double row of barbed wire at the top. The gate had a magnetic lock, and prospective callers at the house had to make contact through an intercom to be vetted before Celia activated the unlocking switch inside. The building itself had the same high standard of security doors and windows. When Celia had first required these, they had been regarded as evidence of mental eccentricity brought on by memories of the Mau Mau attack, but the intervening years had rendered them far less eccentric in rural England.
‘I’m glad you were happy,’ said Celia, urging the dogs through the gate. ‘Children should be happy. It colours the whole of life. I tried to make your father’s childhood happy after our mother died, but it wasn’t always easy.’
‘Well, you succeeded with me,’ said Sairey. ‘Aunt Celia, do you remember before we left Africa, Daddy showing me Mummy in her coffin and you having to take me out of the room?’
This was the first time she had ever hinted details of the Dream to anyone except Vita, and her aunt’s reaction made her feel she’d been wise to keep quiet. Her face contorted with shock and pain, as though she’d been physically assaulted. For a moment she seemed unable to speak, and when she did, the words came out with a harsh force that made her customary brusqueness seem mild.
‘No, I don’t remember that. How could I, when it never happened? When they found her she’d been lying in the African sun with African wildlife … for heaven’s sake, child, you don’t think they were going to pretty her up for a lying-out, do you? There, don’t upset yourself. I don’t mean to be rough, but I know what strange things can get into a young woman’s mind. I hope Vita Gray remembers, too. These psychiatrists love to make normal things seem odd. So wipe your eyes, or I’ll make you go back and wash your face in the sea!’
Sairey had not been aware that she was crying, till Celia’s comic threat made her laugh.
‘There, that’s real April weather for you,’ said Celia. ‘How like your mother you look sometimes.’
‘I don’t think so,’ denied Sairey strongly. ‘She had lovely long blonde hair and was so tall and willowy.’
‘She was five feet seven and wore a thirty-six “B” cup,’ said Celia dismissively. ‘I helped her choose her wedding dress. About your size, I should say. As for the hair, if you didn’t wear yours shorn like a convict, it would grow just like hers. Tall and willowy indeed. You’d think you were talking about Fanny.’
‘Would you? Well, I’m certainly not!’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘What is there to get on with?’ demanded Sairey. ‘Privacy is no crime,’ reproached Celia. ‘I treasure mine. But your father ought to … never mind. Listen, Sairey, don’t rush to meet unhappiness. Fanny is Fanny. You are you. There’s room for both of you in the world, isn’t there, even under one roof? And never forget, this is your home too. And it’ll belong to you one day, after I’m gone, as long as you take on these monsters with it!’
The dogs jostled to nuzzle at her hand as if aware they were being spoken of. Sairey reached forward, hugged the old woman and kissed her on the cheek. Celia, who never encouraged such open displays of affection, looked a touch disconcerted.
‘What was that for?’ she asked.
‘For telling me this is my home. It’s always felt like it. And for caring so much about me.’
‘Lots of people care about you!’ Celia said, almost angrily.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Sairey placatingly.
But she didn’t.
5
On the second Sunday of her stay, Sairey might have been spared the morning bathe. Celia was going to early Communion – another form of ritual cleansing, she offhandedly described it – and felt that this was sufficient substitute for braving a drizzling dawn on the beach.
She left Sairey in bed, but shortly after the front door had clicked shut behind her, the sky brightened and the sun broke through and it suddenly seemed to Sairey that she could enjoy both moral credit and physical pleasure by taking her pre-breakfast swim anyway. Flinging off the sheet before she could change her mind, she pulled on her costume, grabbed a towel and headed out of the house.
Polly and Mop were there to greet her, barking impatiently at the security gate, as if they personally had never had any doubt about her intentions. The sun gave off a great deal more light than heat, and the proportions of moral credit and physical pleasure changed as she ran down the beach, determined to get it over with. But as always, once in the water, she found herself converted to a denizen of this three-dimensional world and most reluctant to leave it.
When finally she could no longer pretend that the water wasn’t chilly and her skin wasn’t starting to crinkle at the edges, she headed for the shore. And saw she wasn’t alone.
A man was squatting on the sand next to her towel.
She halted, waist-deep in water.
The man rose, picked up her towel and came to the water’s edge.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and very black. He was middle-aged with greying hair and a thin, almost ascetically serious face heavily scarred on the right cheek. He held out the towel towards her. A fine silver chain moved on his wrist. She heard its faint chime clearly and realized that the sea was at that brief still point which marks the turning of the tide.
