“My people went to settle in England — my parents,” she said. “I don’t know … I feel I’d be too lazy, you know? I’m not talking about washing dishes — I mean, to live another life.”
“Where were you before here?”
“Oh, Kenya. I was born there, and my brother. When he was replaced he went down to Malawi, and when Gordon — my husband’s contract wasn’t renewed we pushed off to Tanzania, to begin with. Clive was born there.” She dangled her hand over the child’s nape, and he wriggled it off. He said, “Is he coming to swim with us?”
“Silly-billy, we came to pick up the present from Vivien, you know that—” The children began to clamour to open it. When she drove off they were worrying at the wrappings like puppies wrangling over a bone. She turned to smile good — bye; she was getting a line of effort between her brows.
He went back to his fig tree and sat there before the notes, reports, and newspaper cuttings that awaited him. He lighted a cigar and flicked away ants that dropped from the branches and crawled over the lines of his handwriting. There was the problem of the bottleneck that would arise if, in the zeal of getting every child to school, the output of primary schools exceeded the number of places available in secondary schools. It was comparatively easy to build and staff primary schools all over the country; but what then? Kenya. He saw that he had made a note: For every child who wins entry into secondary schools in Kenya, four to five fail to find a place. He wrote, in his mind but not on the paper before him. There must be a realistic attempt to turn primary — school leavers towards agriculture, where for the next two generations, at least, most will need to make their lives, anyway. His eye ran heedlessly as one of the ants down the table he had made of the number of teachers, schools, and government expenditure on education in comparable territories. There was a letter from Olivia, with photographs: Venetia’s baby lay naked, looking up with the vividness of response that is the first smile. Shinza had held the pinkish — yellow infant in one hand. The third page of Olivia’s letter, lying uppermost, took up like a broken conversation: not at all, as you might expect, one of your own over again. A different sort of love. You know, it’s closer to the ideal where any child, just because it is a child, makes the same claim on you. I feel freed rather than bound. He contemplated with fascination that distant landscape of the reconciliation of personal passion and impersonal love, of attachment and detachment, that had been her liberal — agnostic’s vision of grace. As it turned out, grandmotherly grace. His wife was nearly his own age; they had married during the war. A few years younger than Shinza. Her attainment was the appropriate one, matched step by step to the stage of her life; he felt a tenderness towards the blonde slender girl with the small witch’s gap between her front teeth, who had become this — it was like the recollection of someone not heard of for many years, of whom one has asked, “And what happened to …?”
There was a note from Mweta in the mail, too. The plain typewritten envelope had given no indication of who the writer might be, and when he opened the sheet inside and saw the handwriting it was with a sense of the expected, the inevitable, rather than surprise. Mweta hoped the grant “was enough”; he urged again — what about a decent house? When was Olivia coming? He had thought he would have a letter by now, but perhaps Bray had been on the move again, about the country? “We mustn’t lose touch.”
Every time Bray met the fact of the letter on the table he was gripped by a kind of obstinacy. The letter was a hand on his shoulder, claiming him; he went stock-still beneath it. His mind turned mulishly towards the facts and figures of his report: this is my affair, nothing else. This is my usefulness. He would not answer the letter; his answer to Mweta would be no answer.
A day or two later he was writing the letter in his head, accompanied by it as he walked across the street in Gala. You know me well enough to know I cannot “move about” the country for you: I can’t inform on Shinza to you, however carefully we put it, you and I. You can’t send me in where Lebaliso can’t effect entry, I cannot be courier — cum-spy between you and Shinza. I did not come back for that.
The letter composed and recomposed itself again and again. Once while he was tensely absorbed in a heightened version (this one was a letter to make an end; after it was sent one would get on a plane and never be able to come back except as a tourist, gaping at lions and unable to speak the language) he met the Misses Fowler at the garage. He had not seen the two old ladies since his return from England, although he had made inquiries about them and meant to visit them some time. They were trotting down from the Princess Mary Library with their books carried in rubber thongs, just as they did ten or fifteen years ago, when they used to lunch with Olivia at the Residence on their twice — monthly visit to town. Disappointed in love during the war — before-the-last, they had come “out to Africa” together in the early Twenties and driven far up the central plateau in a Ford (Miss Felicity, the elder, had been an ambulance driver in that war). They grew tea on the slopes of the range above the lake and were already part of the landscape long before he had become D.C. of the district. Miss Adelaide ran a little school and clinic at their place; they saw courtesy, charity, and “uplift” as part of their Christian duty towards the local people, although, as Felicity freely confessed to Olivia, they would not have felt comfortable sitting at table with Africans the way the Brays did. When the settlers met at the Fisheagle Inn to press for Bray’s removal from the boma because of his encouragement of African nationalists, the Fowler sisters rose from their seats in dissent and protested. Apart from Major Boxer (who had done so by default, anyway), they were the only white people who had defended him.
Adelaide did most of the talking, as always, taking over Felicity’s sentences and finishing them for her. They were mainly concerned with Olivia — she was at home in Wiltshire, wasn’t she? She would be there?
“Are you going over on a visit?”
“Oh, no — we’re—”
“You must have heard that we’re leaving,” Adelaide stated. “Surely you’ve heard.”
It seemed necessary to apologize, as if for lack of interest.
“There are so many things I don’t seem to hear.”
“Well, I don’t suppose you see much of them,” Felicity said, meaning the local white residents.
“Oh, it’s all right, everything is quite amicable, you know. — I’ve so often thought of coming to see you, and then I kept promising myself, when Olivia comes—”
Adelaide’s old head, the thin hair kept the colour and texture of mattress coir, under a hairnet, tremored rather than was shaken. She said firmly, “Our time has run out. We are museum pieces, better put away in a cupboard somewhere.”
He said, “I should have thought you would have been quite happy to let it run out, here. You really feel you must leave your place? I think you’d have nothing to worry about, you’d be left in peace?”
Felicity said, “We’ve had these inspectors coming — Adelaide had to guarantee that we’d not lay anybody off, in the plantation, you know. And they have a new native inspector for the schools — he wanted to know if I was following the syllabus and he—”
“There’s nothing the matter with that, Felicity.” Adelaide spoke to her and yet ignored her. “But we’re too old, James. You can’t stay on in a country like this just to be left in peace.”
They chatted while Bray’s tyres were pumped and his battery topped up with water. He promised to write to Olivia and tell her the Misses Fowler were coming. He saw that Adelaide’s books were Lord Wavell’s memoirs and a Mickey Spillane.