'Ogguna Wanga-Butere is my superior,' Bobby said. 'He is my – "boss". I show him respect. And I believe he respects me.'
'I'm sorry, but when those names trip off your tongue like that, you make them sound very funny.'
'I very much feel that Europeans have themselves to blame if there's any prejudice against them. Every day the president travels up and down, telling his people that we are needed. But he's no fool. He knows the old colonial hands are out to get every penny they can before they scuttle South. It makes me laugh. We lecture the Africans about corruption. But there's a lot of anguish and talk. about prejudice when they rumble our little rackets. And not so little either. We were spending thousands on overseas baggage allowances for baggage that never went anywhere.'
'It was nice to have,' Linda said.
She was abstracted; her good humour had gone. Her bony forehead, curving sharply from the flat, thinning hair below her scarf, had begun to shine; above her dark glasses the worry-lines were beginning to show.
'Busoga-Kesoro brought me the papers. He said, "Bobby, this claim by Denis Marshall has been passed and paid. But we know he didn't take any baggage anywhere this last leave. What do we do?" What could I say? I knew very well there would be talk over the coffee-cups about my "disloyalty". But who are my loyalties to? I told B-K, "I think this should go up to the minister.", He was exaggerating his role; he was talking too much. He saw that; he saw he was losing Linda's interest. He leaned over the wheel, smiled at the road, shifted about on his seat and said, 'Where shall we stop for coffee?'
'The Hunting Lodge?'
He didn't approve. But he said, 'What a good idea. I hear it's under new management.'
She said in her new abstracted manner, 'After the property scare.
'The Asians did very well out of that.'
She didn't reply. He fell silent. He would have liked to abolish the impression of talkativeness, to be again, as at the beginning, the man with personality in reserve. But now the sombre person was she.
The road ran black and straight between· the flat scrub.
'I believe you are right,' he said after a time. 'The clouds are piling up. At times like this one doesn't know whether to press on or to hang back.'
His manner was conciliating. She made no effort to match it.
She said firmly, 'I want coffee.' They looked at the road.
'I'd heard,' he said, 'that Sammy Kisenyi wasn't the easiest of men. But I didn't know that Martin was so unhappy.'
She sighed. Bobby was stilled; he leaned back against his seat.
Then, stilling him further, keeping up the tension, Linda with great weary self-possession rearranged her hair and scarf.
Far away on the road something shimmered. It was more than a mirage. They concentrated on it. A mangled dog.
'I'm glad I've seen it,' Linda said. 'I was waiting for it.' Her tone was mystical. 'You always have to see one.'
'So you'll be leaving?'
'Oh, Bobby, it's so different for you. In your department the work goes on and there's always something to show. But radio is radio. You have to put out programmes. And if you're an old radio man, as Martin is, you know when you are putting out rubbish.
And surely the point of coming out here and giving up the BBC was to do something a little better than that. I suppose it's Martin's fault in a way. He was never one of the pushing P. R. O. types.'
'I see that. About the radio. I do feel they overdo the politics and the speeches. There could be a little more editing.'
'When I think that Martin was offered the job of Regional Director. But he said, "No. This is an African country. This is a job for someone like Sammy."
'They say that Sammy had a rough time in England.'
'Of course it hasn't been a disaster. There are still people in the BBC who remember Martin. When we were there on leave last year someone at the Club said to Martin, "Oh, but you're pretty high-powered over there, aren't you?"
'But of course. No one spoils his career by coming out here.
So you think you'll be going back. to England?'
'One has to think of the future. But England: I don't know.
Martin has put out feelers here and there. I have no doubt that something will happen.'
'I'm sure it will.' But his question hadn't been answered. He asked, 'Where do you think it'll be?' He waited.
She said, 'South.'
He said, 'My life is here.'
3
THE SCRUB, when it ruled, had appeared to stretch all the way to the escarpment across a flat valley. But for some time the land had been getting broken and greener. The escarpment still bounded the view, but less and less abruptly. There were now low, spreading, isolated hills; dark trees in the distance hinted at water and streams; here and there hummocked fields spoke of recent forests. Dirt roads began to meet the highway; simple road-signs gave the names of places, twenty, thirty, sixty miles away. There were a few small hoardings. Traffic was still light.
Linda said, in her even mystical voice, 'That's my favourite hill on this drive. It looks as though some giant hand had clawed down the side.'
The description was accurate. It was what Bobby himself felt about the hill.
He said, 'Yes.'
Ahead of them, a tall covered van entered the highway from a side road. Beagles pushed their heads above the tailboard of the van. Hanging on at the back, badly jolted, were two Africans in jodhpurs and riding boots, red caps and jackets.
'Such a strange part of Africa,' Linda said.
She sat up, took her bag from the floor and brought out her vanity case. She began to make her face up. Her mystical manner had disappeared. Bobby was now the gloomy one.
'When we were in West Africa for those few months,' she said, patting powder, squinting at the hand mirror, 'you would never have said that the Africans there were remotely English. But as soon as you crossed the border into the French place there you saw black men just like ours sitting on the roadside and eating French bread and drinking red wine and wearing little French berets. Now you come here and see these black English grooms.'
The road had begun to curve; the way ahead was no longer clear. They stayed behind the van with the yelping, interested beagles. The grooms eyed the car without friendliness. A sign announced the Hunting Lodge, one mile on.
'We'll have to be quick,' Bobby said. 'I don't like the way those clouds are piling up there.'
'I told you I was the expert.'
The road they turned off into dipped sharply from the embankment of the highway. It ran dark-red and narrow, with deep wheeltracks about a central ridge, between humped fields. Rain had fallen the previous day or. early that morning. The car slithered in the wheeltracks; the steering-wheel jumped in Bobby's hands.
'Still hasn't dried out,' Bobby said. 'It must have rained pretty hard.'
'It will rain again soon,' Linda said. But she didn't sound anxious.
The red road curved, following a shallow depression between gentle slopes. Bobby and Linda were enclosed by green; the highway was hidden. Not far ahead of them a line of trees, some white and leafless, marked the course of a stream. Beyond that the land sloped up again, parkland.
'Like England,' Linda said. 'Or Africa.'
Past a turning the land on the left was shaved of humps and was as flat as a swamp, with scattered tussocks of grass and reeds breaking the surface, as in a swamp. At one end of the levelled area was a derelict timber pavilion, the roof partly collapsed.
'Polo,' Linda said. 'Does Martin play?'
As they drove past they saw the ruin in elevation. Light showed through the missing boards in the exposed back wall at the top and between the broken planking of the steps below, so that the pavilion looked like a dark-grey cut-out against the green. The pavilion had not been built to last. It was a structure such as an army might put up and leave behind.