I had often thought later — in England, when my writing career appeared not to be starting — of that joyous time of pretend-writing in the department. It took me six years to see what was wrong with that article about the beauty competition. The seventeen-year-old writer was too falsely knowing: his judgements, the angle of his observations, his jokes suggested he knew another, better world. That phantom world, which came with the first, innocent wish to be a writer, was hard to get rid of.
And it occurred to me now, considering Blair’s freer movements in De Groot’s verandah and a laugh bigger than I remembered, that at about the same time Blair might have come to the realization that the character he had been presenting to the world — the self-made man, still striving, looked up to by all, correct, with the manners of his special community — was in some essential way false to himself. He might have been granted another vision of his isolated community living in the debris of old estates; he might have taken their story back and back, to unmentionable times. And he might have decided then — like me as a writer — to remake himself.
We met at about half-past four. Blair left us at about six, when it was beginning to grow dark and cooking smoke from the chattering settlements below began to rise through the bush. We talked of meeting again. He mentioned dinner in his bungalow. (I thought of the burden on his houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman.)
There was no further meeting. He didn’t live. I was left only with those ninety minutes, and, as can happen after an unexpected or brutal event, ironies began to attach to every gesture and statement of Blair’s that came back to me. It is hard to believe on such occasions that a person doesn’t have, deep down, at some hidden level, an intimation that he has closed the circle and is near the end of things, and hard to believe that this knowledge doesn’t break through a person’s words and actions in a coded way.
And, in fact, at that last meeting Blair did speak, if not in code, in an oblique way of things that were important to him. Breaking into something De Groot was saying, he said, quite early on, spacing out the words, and with pointing gestures that made him seem enormous in the little verandah, “I know that the world I will be leaving is better than the one I came into.” That was a simple racial statement, easy to understand. It explained his passion, his politics; and it was true: the revolution he had taken part in had succeeded.
But then a little later he softened the aggression of those big gestures. We were talking of insurance companies and medical tests, and he told a story of going to get a test in a clinic in New York. After his details had been taken down, he was given a dressing gown and told to go to a cubicle and undress. The dressing gowns were in four colours. The colours had no significance and the gowns were given out at random, but when the gowned men gathered in a waiting room, dressing-gown colour groups tended to form. He might have begun this as a serious story, but when De Groot and I laughed at the absurd picture he was creating, he laughed too.
Much later on, when De Groot was talking of tribal politics in East Africa, Blair gave the conversation an unexpected turn. We were all tribalists and racialists, he said; we could all easily fall into that kind of behaviour, if we thought we could get away with it. He told another story. He was in New York, at a railway station, and standing in line to buy a ticket. (He had a United Nations posting and New York was the setting of many of his stories.) The couple at the head of the line were causing a delay. They were an Asian couple: Blair couldn’t say whether they were Filipinos or Malays or Indonesians or Chinese. They couldn’t speak English. It took a long time for the clerk to establish where they wanted to go; and it was only after the clerk had given the tickets that the man began to look for money to pay. Blair found himself saying, “What’s the matter with that damned Jap?” And the white man in front had turned and looked at Blair with great disregard.
It was a simple story; Blair and I had grown up surrounded by rougher racial manners and hearing much worse things about all races. But this was more than a story Blair was telling against himself. This was a story to tell us where he had got to; it was an offering to the two of us sitting with him in the fading light. Taken together with what he had said earlier in the afternoon, it was like a statement, made without excuse or apology, that after the passion of his politics he could now be another kind of man, ready for new relationships. De Groot, with his sensitivity in these matters, would have picked up something like that during his own meeting with Blair; and I found myself moved by what I thought Blair was saying. He expected his racial passion to be understood; he didn’t think he had to explain it. That was impressive; it made me think afresh of his lost community in the blighted cocoa woods. I also liked the generosity, and the clumsiness, of his last story. The statement he had made could have been made only obliquely or in code, and with that kind of clumsiness; that was moving in itself. All three of us might have found plain words difficult.
For the rest of the time De Groot talked about the Swahili culture of the coast. This would have pleased Blair, the idea of the antiquity of Africa, the idea of African history, though he would not have been able truly to share De Groot’s enthusiasms. He had got his certificates and external degrees, but he was not in any wider sense a well-read or educated man. He would have had no idea of the cultures De Groot was talking about, no feeling for the dates or periods.
But here too he wished to show himself in a new light. He played down whatever pleasure he might have felt at this talk of African history, and he said at a certain moment, “Sometimes here, when people start talking about gold and ivory, you can believe you’re living in Biblical times. You almost expect them to start talking of peacock feathers.”
This appeared to be a reference to the job he had come out to do for the government, and it appeared to confirm compound stories that Blair had run into trouble with some politicians. They had expected him only to put a squeeze on the Asian community. He was doing a lot more: he had begun to look at the smuggling out of ivory and gold. This was as much of a drain on the country’s resources as the dealings of the harassed businessmen in the capital. It was well known that this kind of smuggling was being done by important men in the party, who (because of the regulations controlling the movement of people, and the innumerable new laws) now ruled in the interior with all the authority of old-fashioned chiefs, and (in spite of the talk of the socialist restructuring of society) often were connected to the old chiefly families.
De Groot said, after Blair had left, “He should be careful. They are not all like the president. There are some very wild men out there, and they can be pretty crude. The new power has gone to their heads. They feel they can do anything.”
I got another version of the same message from Richard some days later. He stopped me in the compound and said, “I have been looking up your friend’s record. He’s not exactly Mr. Clean, is he?” I knew then that Blair had begun to tread on important toes, and that Richard was already revolving in his head his defence of the regime, polishing his phrases, against anything that Blair might make public.
IT WAS as brutal and messy as De Groot had suggested it might be. And so shocking — even to Richard — that for some days no announcement was made of Blair’s death; no one would have known how to present it. Instead, there were rumours, some of them inspired by people who would have wanted Blair out of the way. The first was that he was killed in a brothel just outside the capital. Another was that there had been some kind of Asian conspiracy. Yet another, coming very quickly afterwards, was that his bungalow on the compound had been burgled, his papers and everything else of value stolen, and his houseboy had vanished. There was some truth in the last part of the story. His houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman, wasn’t seen again.