“Come on, Justin. Do not be shy.” I took his chin and turned it towards me; I am not afraid of him, as Henman is. I cannot be afraid of the child I looked after. (Of course, she did not look after him.)
“It belonged to someone.”
“I think it is a woman.”
His red lips smiled, and he looked away.
“Justin, what is the name of this woman?” And then his face began to collapse, like a balloon after the end of a birthday party. (His mother always came to his birthday parties. But I did the work. I blew up the balloons. I blew them up till my cheeks ached with blowing. Usually Tigger, his father, helped me. Miss Henman took a photo of Justin blowing out his candles, but I baked the cake and stuck in the candles. You have to be patient, since they keep falling over, and poor Miss Henman could not be patient.)
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.”
So then I knew it was important. But I let it rest, I will get there in the end. Akwat’empola atuuka wala. I can be cunning, when I need to.
“Justin, will you tell me why you stay in bed?”
And then he started to look disagreeable. I know that face very well. Already over a decade ago I remember how his lip would curl at the corner, and both nostrils would go a pointed shape, like a cow breathing out after it has been running. It was the only time Justin looked like his mother.
“I think you know. I bet my mother has told you. I’m supposed to be ill. Everyone says so. The doctors are doing a load of tests.”
“So are you ill, Justin? What do you think?”
“What do you think?” He turned the question to me.
His eyes were blue, and still very young. It was hard to tell him what I think.
I do not believe he has ever travelled. London is another world from Uganda. In my mind, the worlds clash sharply together like the brass cymbals in the church band. Maybe it is hard to know two worlds—
But all of a sudden I was very angry. I did not show it, but I wanted to strike him. I thought of the sickness in the villages. This mummy’s boy should be sent to Uganda. People younger than him are still dying of AIDS, losing their lives because of ignorance, although in Uganda we educate people, with leaflets and posters and plays in schools where AIDS is shown as a gorilla or a devil and the schoolchildren attack it with spears. Maybe clever Justin would laugh at that, but sometimes it is good for a message to be simple.
Let him see how everyone works, in Uganda. Even the very ill work harder than him. The sick people are panting in the heat in the fields, till they become too tired to feed their children. Let him see how some mothers, knowing they are dying, fill in Memory Books for their children, writing down everything the little ones need, names of the grandparents and cousins, stories about the children as babies. These are the Memory Books I used to print out on the photocopier of the Nile Imperial. Justin has a soft heart, he would sob if he read them. And there’s not enough medicine; some only have aspirin, while the bathroom cupboard here is stuffed with medicine. Expensive medicine, only half-used. Every kind of painkiller for Vanessa, because she is frightened of getting small headaches, vitamins for this overfed boy.
This boy who lies here all day, sucking sweets. Only the dying lie in bed in Uganda. I looked at his body. Fattish and white. I wanted to strike him, or shout with rage.
But instead, I surprised myself by starting to sing, and as I sang, I became less angry. What came from my lips was a nursery rhyme that we learned together when Justin was little, when Vanessa gave me a nursery-rhyme tape, ‘Traditional English Nursery Rhymes’, and told me to listen to it with Justin, because he knew only African songs. “Georgie Porgy, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry…”I sang very loudly, because I was angry, only two inches from his large pink ear, which made Justin jump like a startled kob, but then he smiled, and began to join in. “When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgy ran away.”
Of course, I have loved him since he was small. I know that he is sick in his soul. Now he is an adult, I pity him. And all the English. They’ve grown soft and weak.
“Mary, do you think I am ill?” he asked.
“Now I am here, you will get better.”
“Thank you, Mary. You’re wonderful.” The smile he gave me was warm and sweet. I thought, it is not his fault he is English. I remembered they can be kind, and polite. The educated ones have very nice manners; we Baganda people appreciate that.
He took hold of my hand again, and kissed it.
“I knew that you would save me, Mary.”
I did not say any more to him. Maybe the Henman had driven him crazy, always instructing him and asking him questions. Maybe that is why Justin sleeps all the time.
I shall find the girl who owned the necklace.
14
Vanessa tells herself to be calm, and yet she lies awake worrying.
It feels as if Mary is doing, well, nothing. Vanessa instructs herself: think positive.
Of course Mary will concentrate on Justin at first. And then she will have to recover from her journey. What matters is that we all get on.
She remembers, uncomfortably, more details of how things went wrong with Mary last time. Mary was asking for more money. Perhaps Vanessa had got just a tad out of date, but one couldn’t forever be raising wages…Happily this time she has been generous. Five hundred pounds a month, she reminds herself. She does the comforting sums yet again.
When Vanessa went to Kampala, the preceding year, she had discussed the staff question with several Europeans. They all admitted that wages were low, but most of them claimed to pay over the odds. The figures they quoted were amazingly low: 80,000 shillings a month for inside servants, 50,000 for a shamba boy to do the garden. (“I mean, the natives pay their people peanuts—15,000 a month, would you believe?”) 80,000 shillings was twenty-six pounds. That worked out at…Vanessa’s excitement increases. They are paying them six pounds a week out there, less than a pound a day! And that was thought generous.
Looked at in that light, Mary is rich. She is earning more than one hundred pounds per week. Thirteen times the wage of a servant in Uganda. Not that Mary is a servant here, of course. But Vanessa hopes that Mary will be grateful. In fact, perhaps Vanessa is paying her too much.
She doesn’t want Mary to think her foolish.
Vanessa tosses and turns, thoughtful. It would be awkward now to lower the wages, but perhaps she can approach it from another direction.
Does she really have to employ a new cleaner, now Mary is living here with them? Surely she will expect to clean, since that is what she did before? “I will leave it to her own common sense,” Vanessa tells herself, and begins to doze off. “I will get out the cleaning things, and leave them in the kitchen, next to the vacuum and the mop. And perhaps a shopping list, and some money, and the car keys, and perhaps the secateurs, as well, because Mary used to help Tigger in the garden, when he came round at weekends, and the roses do need pruning…Africans, after all, are basically farmers.”
“While you settle in, I will do the cooking,” she had said to Mary on her third day, after Mary had overslept again. “I expect you have jet lag. Never mind.”
And Vanessa does do the cooking, at first, and the shopping, as usual, from the supermarket, where she reckons she can ‘fly round’ in quarter of an hour and get enough food for the next few days. It isn’t her style to make a list, shop in bulk, fill up the freezer: she’s a working woman; she has no time. But on days when she isn’t at the university, she sometimes drives to the supermarket early, enjoying the feeling of virtue that brings, darts haphazardly down half-empty aisles, scooping up items that take her fancy, and then, when she tires of it, relapses to the checkout and scoots her trolley to the coffee shop, where she buys a giant latte and skims the paper while the frozen food gently defrosts at her feet.