She laughed at him for everything.
Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed. He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and
some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left. She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money he still saw in his mother's thin hands the pitiful notes and coins put there by his father at the month's end, and at first, when he voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher than a top civil servant's. All this Gloria changed, brushing it away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality, for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country could easily see to it that money flowed her way. It was she who quietly diverted big sums that flowed in from charities and benefactors into her own accounts. 'Oh, be a fool then,' she cried when he protested. 'It's in my name. It's not your responsibility.'
Battles for someone's soul are seldom as clear and easy to see – and as short – as the one where the devil battled for Comrade Matthew's. And Zimlia, ill-governed before on ill-digested Marxism and tigs and tags of dogma, or remembered sentences from textbooks on economics, now rapidly plunged into corruption. Immediately the currency began its steady, but rapid devaluation. In Senga the fat cats got fatter every day, and out in places like Kwadere money that had descended in a trickle now dried up altogether.
Gloria grew more fascinating, more beautiful, and richer, acquiring another farm, a forest, hotels, restaurants – and wore them like necklaces. And now when Comrade President Matthew went abroad to meet his favourite people, the immensely rich, dissolute and corrupt rulers of the new Africa and new Asia, he did not sit silent when they displayed their wealth and boasted of their avarice. Now he could boast of his and did, and when these men showed how they admired him, giving him gifts and flattery, that empty place in him where there would always be a thin stray dog with its tail between its legs was filled, at least for a time, and Gloria caressed and stroked and petted and nuzzled and licked and sucked and held him against those great breasts and kissed the old scars on his legs. 'Poor Matthew, poor poor little boy.'
The evening before Sylvia had left for London she had stood on the path just where the oleanders and hibiscus and plumbago bushes ended, and looked down at the hospital with more than the forgivable amount of pride. Anyone could use the word ' hospital' now of that cluster of buildings. No money had come through Comrade Mandizi for a long time, but the plunging Zimlia currency meant that small sums in London became large ones here. Ten pounds, the cost of a small carrier bag of groceries in London, here built a grass hut or replenished the stock of painkillers or malaria tablets.
There were two ' wards' down there now, long grass-roofed sheds, the grass close to the ground on one side where rain most often came, and high on the other. In each were a dozen pallets with good blankets and pillows. She was planning another shed, for the existing beds were filling up with the victims of this AIDS, or Slim, that the government had just decided to fully and frankly acknowledge, with appeals to foreign donors for help. Sylvia knew that in the village these were called ' the dying huts' , and she planned to build another, for patients who were merely malarial, or in labour – more ordinary pains of the flesh. She had had built a proper little house of brick, which she called the consulting-room, and in it was a high bed, made by lads from the village, of leather thongs stretched on a frame and on that a good mattress. Here she examined people, prescribed, set arms and legs, bound up wounds. In all this she was assisted by Clever and Zebedee. She had paid for the new buildings, and for medicines – paid for everything. She knew that in the village some said, And why should she not pay? She stole it all from us in the first place. It was Joshua who inspired this grumbling. Rebecca defended her, telling everyone that without Sylvia there would be no hospital.
On the evening after Sylvia returned from London, standing exactly in the same spot, she looked down at her hospital and was attacked by that failing of the heart and purpose that so often afflicts people just back from Europe. What she saw down there, the assemblage of poor huts or sheds, was tolerable only if she did not think of London, or Julia's house, with its solidity, its safety, its permanence, each room so full of things that had an exact purpose, serving a need among a multiplicity of needs, so that every day any person in it was supported as if by so many silent servitors with utensils, tools, appliances, gadgets, surfaces to sit on or to put things on – an intricacy of always multiplying things.
In the early mornings Joshua rolled from his place near the log that burned in the middle of the hut, reached for the pot where last night's porridge congealed, dug out from it with the stirring stick some lumps which he ate swiftly, supplying his stomach with its necessity, drank water from a tin jug that stood on the ledge that ran around the hut, then walked a few steps into the bush, urinated, perhaps squatted to shit, took up his stick that was made from bush wood, and walked the mile to the hospital, where he slid his back down the tree, to sit there, all day.
Surely she, a 'religious' as Rebecca called her – 'I told them in the village that you are a religious'-should be admiring this evidence of the poor in wealth, and probably of spirit, though she did not see herself as equipped to judge that. That great heap of a city, covering so many square miles, so rich, so rich — and then this group of paltry sheds and huts: Africa, beautiful Africa, which oppressed her spirits with its need, wanting everything, lacking everything, and everywhere people white and black working so hard to – well, what? To put a little plaster on an old weeping wound. And that was what she was doing.
Sylvia felt as if her own real self, her substance, the stuff of belief, was leaking away as she stood there. A sunset, a rainy season's going down of the sun... from a black cloud low on the red horizon shot heavy thick rays like spikes of gold that radiate around a saint's head. She felt mocked, as if a clever thief were stealing from her and laughing as he did it. What was she doing here? And what good did she really do? And above all where was that innocence of faith that had sustained her when she first came? What did she believe in, really? God, yes, she could say that, if no one pressed for definitions. She had suffered a conversion, as classic in its symptoms as an attack of malaria, to The Faith – which is what Father McGuire called it, and she knew that it had begun because ofascetic Father Jack, with whom she had been in love, though at the time she would have said it was God she loved. Nothing was left of all that brave certainty, and she knew only that she must do her duty here, in this hospital, because Fate had set her down here.