Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire, and ogle the merchandise. I hear the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to hold and have.
That is how I came to be on the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the things I can’t do now — to speak out unless inspired. And most extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by the fruit barrow, repeating in so friendly a manner, “Hallo, George!”
We were bound for the south. When our education, what we could get of it from the north, was thought to be finished, one by one we were sent or sent for to London. John Skinner, whom we called Skinny, went to study more archaeology, George to join his uncle’s tobacco farm, Kathleen to stay with her rich connections and to potter intermittently in the Mayfair hat shop which one of them owned. A little later I also went to London to see life, for it was my ambition to write about life, which first I had to see.
“We four must stick together,” George said very often in that yearning way of his. He was always desperately afraid of neglect. We four looked likely to shift off in different directions and George did not trust the other three of us not to forget all about him. More and more as the time came for him to depart for his uncle’s tobacco farm in Africa, he said, “We four must keep in touch.”
Before he left, he told each of us anxiously, “I’ll write regularly, once a month. We must keep together for the sake of the old times.” He had three prints taken from the negative of that photo on the haystack, wrote on the back of them, “George took this the day that Needle found the needle,” and gave us a copy each. I think we all wished he could become a bit more callous.
During my lifetime I was a drifter, nothing organized. It was difficult for my friends to follow the logic of my life. By the normal reckonings I should have come to starvation and ruin, which I never did. Of course, I did not live to write about life as I wanted to do. Possibly that is why I am inspired to do so now in these peculiar circumstances.
I taught in a private school in Kensington for almost three months, very small children. I didn’t know what to do with them but I was kept fairly busy escorting incontinent little boys to the lavatory and telling the little girls to use their handkerchiefs. After that I lived a winter holiday in London on my small capital, and when that had run out I found a diamond bracelet in the cinema for which I received a reward of fifty pounds. When it was used up, I got a job with a publicity man, writing speeches for absorbed industrialists, in which the dictionary of quotations came in very useful. So it went on. I got engaged to Skinny, but shortly after that I was left a small legacy, enough to keep me going for six months. This somehow decided me that I didn’t love Skinny, so I gave him back the ring.
But it was through Skinny that I went to Africa. He was engaged with a party of researchers to investigate King Solomon’s mines, that series of ancient workings ranging from the ancient port of Ophir, now called Beira, across Portuguese East Africa and Southern Rhodesia to the mighty jungle city of Zimbabwe, whose temple walls still stand by the approach to an ancient and sacred mountain, where the rubble of that civilization scatters itself over the surrounding Rhodesian waste. I accompanied the party as a sort of secretary. Skinny vouched for me, he paid my fare, he sympathized by his action with my inconsequential life although, when he spoke of it, he disapproved.
A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it. Skinny, when I had broken off our engagement, lectured me about this, but still he took me to Africa knowing I should probably leave his unit within a few months.
We were there a few weeks before we began inquiring for George who was farming about four hundred miles away to the north. We had not told him of our plans.
“If we tell George to expect us in his part of the world, he’ll come rushing to pester us the first week. After all, we’re going on business,” Skinny had said.
Before we left, Kathleen told us, “Give George my love and tell him not to send frantic cables every time I don’t answer his letters right away. Tell him I’m busy in the hat shop and being presented. You would think he hadn’t another friend in the world, the way he carries on.”
We had settled first at Fort Victoria, our nearest place of access to the Zimbabwe ruins. There we made inquiries about George. It was clear he hadn’t many friends. The older settlers were the most tolerant about the half-caste woman he was living with, as we found, but they were furious about his methods of raising tobacco which we learned were most unprofessional and in some mysterious way disloyal to the whites. We could never discover how it was that George’s style of tobacco farming gave the blacks opinions about themselves, but that’s what the older settlers claimed. The newer immigrants thought he was unsociable and, of course, his living with that woman made visiting impossible.
I was myself a bit put off by this news about the brown woman. I was brought up in a university town to which came Indian, African, and Asiatic students in a variety of tints and hues. I was brought up to avoid them for reasons connected with local reputation and God’s ordinances. You cannot easily go against what you were brought up to do unless you are a rebel by nature.
Anyhow, we visited George eventually, taking advantage of the offer of transport from some people bound north in search of game. He had heard of our arrival in Rhodesia and though he was glad — almost relieved — to see us, he pursued a policy of sullenness for the first hour.
“We wanted to give you a surprise, George.”
“How were we to know that you’d get to hear of our arrival, George? News here must travel faster than light, George.”
“We did hope to give you a surprise, George.”
We flattered and “Georged” him until at last he said, “Well, I must say it’s good to see you. All we need now is Kathleen. We four simply must stick together. You find, when you’re in a place like this, there’s nothing like old friends.”
He showed us his drying sheds. He showed us a paddock where he was experimenting with a horse and a zebra mare, attempting to mate them. They were frolicking happily, but not together. They passed each other in their private play time and again, but without acknowledgment and without resentment.