“Let’s face it, MM,” (I am now really irritated) “would you have put up those jokes of yours in an English hospital?”
“Of course I wouldn’t. Never said I would. But the English are not supposed to have a sense of humour to begin with. And this is not England, is it? Look outside. What do you see? Sunshine! Life! Vitality. It says to you: Come out and play. Make love! Live! And these dusky imitators of petit bourgeois Europe corrupted at Sandhurst and London School of Economics expect me to come here and walk about in a bowler hat and rolled umbrella like a fucking banker on Cheapside. Christ!”
We all laugh and applaud the brief oration. Except Dick. He is watching intently as Mad Medico perspiring refreshes his glass with campari and soda, drops in two ice cubes and licks his fingers.
Dick, it turns out, is the founding editor of a new poetry magazine in Soho called Reject. Prompted by Mad Medico he tells the story, at first reluctantly and in instalments of one sentence or two a piece.
“How did it begin? I am sure Ikem will be interested to hear.”
“Oh, simply by placing advertisements in well-known literary journals calling for manuscripts rejected by other poetry magazines. Simple.”
“That was three years ago?”
“Well, almost four.”
“And it caught on?”
“Our success was immediate and total.”
From now something like animation begins to enter his voice. The expression on his face changes too. At first it looks like a sneer but is presumably his own way of pride. He is now more open-handed with information. “In under two years we exploded the pretensions of the poetry establishment and their stuffy party organs. It was the most significant development in British poetry since the war.”
The group gradually splits in two: Ikem and the editor at one end of the bar with Elewa sticking to them, understanding little; and Mad Medico joining Beatrice and me.
“I am sorry to tell you this,” MM says to Beatrice, “but you waited five years too late to meet Chris. He and Sam were much nicer people then.”
“Who wasn’t? But five years ago BB was below the legal age and would have been of limited interest to me.”
“I beg your pardon,” she says.
“Really, they were such fun then, he and Sam,” says MM almost to himself. He stirs the tiny iceberg floating in his Scotch with his index finger. A touch of genuine wistfulness has come into his voice. And his eyes.
“You know, MM,” I say, “you are the only person in this country—perhaps in the whole wide world who calls him Sam still.”
“Yes and I’ll be damned if I should ever join your ridiculous Excellency charade. I would sooner be deported!”
“Sam is even more ridiculous, you know. It’s a name that no longer fits the object. But then you have never been a good judge of what fits or doesn’t… which is your great attraction.”
“Thank you,” he says with an embarrassed, boyish smile. At such moments the mischievous lad living inside him peers through his eyes. Beatrice who has said very little up to now asks pointedly: “Tell me, would you walk up to your Queen and say, ‘Hi, Elizabeth’?”
“To hell, I wouldn’t. But why are all you fellows so bent on turning this sunshine paradise into bleak Little England? Sam is no bloody queen. I tell you he was such a nice fellow in those days. He had a wholesome kind of innocence about him. He was… what shall I say? He was morally and intellectually intact—a kind of virgin, if you get my meaning. Not in its prudish sense, of course. He was more assured, knew a lot more than his fellow English officers and damn well spoke better English, I tell you. And yet he could still be pleasantly surprised by things… I found that so healthy and so attractive… You know I found him a girl once…”
“Who?” asks Elewa shifting sideways on her bar-stool to join our group and bringing Ikem and his poetry friend in tow—the last ostensibly unwilling.
“His Very Excellency, your ladyship,” says Mad Medico bowing. “I found him this girl after he left the Camberley hospital.”
“I had no idea you had a procuring past,” says Dick with a solemnity that seems surprising even for him.
“Well, you might call it that,” says Mad Medico. “You must look at it this way, though. A nice young fellow comes all the way from the warmth of Africa to the inhospitable climate of an English hospital—no pun intended, by the way. And he is recovering miserably from double pneumonia. The least I could do was fix him up with a warm friendly girl to cheer him up. Nothing serious. A reasonable magistrate would let me off, I’m sure.”
“But woman done suffer for dis world-o,” says Elewa.
“A modern Desdemona, I see. Did she cheer him up?” asks Beatrice totally ignoring Elewa’s more basic solidarity call.
“Did she indeed! He couldn’t get her out of his system for years. He called me up the next morning. ‘Uncle John,’ he said, ‘you wicked old soul.’ And the way he laughed and seemed happy with the world after that! I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if he also called long distance to Chris at the London School of Economics… Did he?”
“Well, almost. That was a famous story. He didn’t wait too long to tell me, I can tell you.”
“What did he tell you?” From Beatrice.
“NTBB.”
“NT what?”
“BB. You’ve just been told, BB. That’s what my friends at the radio station write in bold yellow letters across the face of records too dirty to play on the air.”
“It means Not To Be Broadcast,” explains Ikem again. “Chris might have added though that it doesn’t now apply to dirty records alone. Anything inconvenient to those in government is NTBB.”
“Quite right. I should have added that. My primary duty as Commissioner, you see, is to decide what is inconvenient and inform Ikem who promptly rejects the information… But going back to the more interesting subject, I confess I broke the code later and divulged the secret to BB.”
“To me?” asked Beatrice, wide-eyed. “My own Beatrice?”
“Yes, I told you, didn’t I, of the girl with the… how shall I call it… the invigorating tongue.”
“Oh! It’s the same girl? Oh my God!” We both burst into a laugh which left everyone in the cold as it were.
“You two seem to know something that even the procurer here doesn’t appear to have heard,” said MM, “but never mind.”
The poetry editor has been trying for some time to recapture his lost little audience disrupted by Elewa’s defection at the prospects of low talk. He makes one last bold bid and takes the entire company. The expression on his face has been quite funny for some time too. Actually he has an extremely expressive face if by expressive one means a constant procession of shadowy grimaces all of them indeterminate. You cannot look at him and say: now he is sad, or he is enjoying himself now. You always have to wait and figure it out and still you are not entirely sure. And then all of a sudden you are angry with yourself for letting your mind engage with so much trouble on something so inconsequential. He is that kind of infuriating person. His expression now is a puritanic scowl without the moral gravity of a puritan.
“We were so successful,” he is saying, as though unaware that his story was ever interrupted, “that it became difficult to be sure that all the stuff that came in was bona fide Reject. We did insist on the rejection slip accompanying every manuscript but anybody can make up a rejection slip. You know what I mean. Most magazines are pretty sloppy about their slips… Like some girls, you know. Present company of course excepted… They don’t print them at the Royal Mint… So there was really no way we could be absolutely certain that what we were getting was always genuine Reject. But as I was telling you…” It seems that having got everyone again to listen to him his one desire now is to show his indifference to the rest of us by pretending to talk still to Ikem alone. Some people have nerve. “… our biggest problem was our success. We were soon printing no more than a fraction, a tiny fraction, of the manuscripts that came in. F
or a while I even toyed with the idea of a companion magazine to be called Reject Two or Double Reject which, I can tell you, would have been just as successful as Reject. But in the end I had to decide against it. Spreading yourself too thin, you know.”
“Fascinating,” says Ikem. “When Chris fires me here perhaps I could hop across and run Double Reject for you. I’m totally taken with the idea.”
“You’re the editor of the local…”
“Rag called the National Gazette,” says Mad Medico. “Ikem is a fine journalist… But shit! Who am I to be awarding him marks? Anyway, his brilliant editorials did as much as anything else to save me from the just consequences of my indiscretion. But what I want to say really is that he is an even finer poet, in my opinion one of the finest in the entire English language.”
“Yes, John told me what a fine poet you are. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t yet read anything of yours but I certainly will now.”
“Take your time,” says Ikem. “And remember MM is not a disinterested witness. I did him a good turn.”
“And I didn’t tell you either,” said MM, “that girl there sitting meekly and called Beatrice took a walloping honours degree in English from London University. She is better at it than either of us, I can assure you.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I understand that the best English these days is written either by Africans or Indians. And that the Japanese and the Chinese may not be too far behind,” said Dick with somewhat dubious enthusiasm.
PERHAPS MM had a point when he said Beatrice waited too long to meet me. Sometimes I wonder myself whether our relationship is not too sedate, whether we are not too much like a couple of tired swimmers resting at the railing. An early scene returns to my memory, a scene from two years ago and more, stored away in incredible detail and freshness yet, as I think of it, suffused also with ethereality.
I offered to take Beatrice to the Restaurant Cathay and she said no. Chez Antoine? Still no. They were her two favourite places—not too large, no glaring lights and good food. What would she like to do then?
“Can I come home with you?”
“But of course,” was all I could find to say right away. I was still not sure that I had heard right. She divined the puzzlement in my mind and offered something like an explanation. “We’ve both had a long day. All I want to do now is sit still somewhere and listen to records.”
“Wonderful!” Of course she had been to my place quite a few times before but the initiative had never come from her. It was not coyness but she had a style and above all a pace that I decided from the very beginning to respect. After the few whirlwind affairs I had had in my time including a full-fledged marriage in London for six months I was actually ready and grateful for BB’s conservative style. Sometimes when I thought of her what came most readily to my mind was not roses or music but a good and tastefully produced book, easy on the eye. No pretentious distractions. Absolutely sound. Although I realized the folly of it I could not help comparing BB and my ex-wife. Louise was so bent on proving she had a mind of her own she proved instead totally frigid in bed despite weekly visits to the psychiatrist. There was another type—at the opposite pole—the aspirant sex symbol, flaunting her flesh before you. I’d met her too. Her style usually worked for a while and then out of nowhere a coldness descended into your soul and you wanted only to tell her to cut out the moans and all that ardent crap and get to it fast. Beatrice is a perfect embodiment of my ideal woman, beautiful without being glamorous. Peaceful but very strong. Very, very strong. I love her and will go at whatever pace she dictates. But sometimes I just wonder if I am not reading her signs wrong; if as MM says, without fully intending it, I have become too wizened by experience; if I have lost the touch, so to say.
Neither of us was really hungry. So we decided on a bottle of wine and some fried shrimps. My cook, Sylvanus, was always upset if a guest came and he was not allowed to display the full extent of his culinary arts. Even as we ate his exquisite shrimps he kept at us.
“Make I fix madame small sometin,” he pleaded. We begged him not to worry and he went away but soon returned to hover around the door of the kitchen. He could not understand how two grown people could eat nothing but “crayfish” for dinner.
“Or sometaim you wan go for hotel?” he said. And when Sylvanus said that you had to swear that his cooking was better than that of any chef, French, Italian or whatever on the west coast of Africa.
“No Sylvanus,” said Beatrice trying to mollify him, “we no de go anywhere. We jus wan sidon for house. Make you take evening off. If at all oga wan anything I fit getam for am.” I knew at once and she soon realized she had committed a blunder. Sylvanus did not exactly storm out but his resentment was very clear on his face and in the tone of his goodnights.
“Do you know why I wanted us to come here and stay by ourselves?”
“Well, yes and no.”
“OK, let’s have the yes first.”
“You don’t want to be seen too often with me in public.” It sounded premeditated but wasn’t. Beatrice didn’t reply at once; she seemed to be weighing the point as if to say: there may be something there. Then she shook her head gently a few times and said simply: “It was a year today that you first asked me to dinner here.”
I was completely overwhelmed with feelings I had been skirting for months. I drew her to me on the sofa and kissed her—a little too roughly perhaps. I thought of making apologies for my own forgetfulness. With any other girl I would have proceeded to do so at once. But with her I couldn’t pretend. I am not the anniversary kind and it would be utterly deceitful to say it just escaped my mind. I kissed her again and said instead: “You are a great girl.” We were silent for quite a while.
“How long has Ikem known that Joy girl?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you. I had only seen her a couple of times before this afternoon.”
“She seems so young. And so illiterate. What can he possibly be saying to her?” I asked.
“Ikem doesn’t say much to any girl. He doesn’t think they have enough brains.”
“Good for him, the great revolutionary.”
“Well, you know, I am exaggerating a little. But really women don’t feature too much in his schemes except as, well, comforters. I think that’s about the only chink in his revolutionary armour… Do you notice how much he resents you now?” she asked in a sudden change of tack. “I don’t think you are even aware of it. It bothers me because it wasn’t there before. I can see plenty of trouble ahead for the two of you.”
“Oh, you exaggerate. But you are right about the resentment. And I think it is quite natural. Especially since the coup and Sam’s elevation and to a lesser degree mine. Literally Sam is now my boss and I am Ikem’s boss.”
“Do you mean Ikem is jealous of you two?”
“Yes, why not? But I resent him just as much. Perhaps more, for his freedom.”
“I don’t understand you people.”
“Very simple really. It goes back, you see, to our first days at Lord Lugard College. Ikem was the brightest in the class—first position every term for six years. Can you beat that? Sam was the social paragon… He was the all-rounder—good student, captain of the Cricket Team, Victor Ludorum in athletics and, in our last year, School Captain. And girls worshipped at his feet from every Girls’ School in the province. But strangely enough there was a kind of spiritual purity about Sam in those days despite his great weakness for girls. Maybe not purity but he seemed so perfect and so unreal, in a way.”
“Too much success.”
“Perhaps. Too much success. He never failed once in anything. Had the magic touch. And that’s always deadly in the long run. He is paying the bills now, I think. And if we are not lucky we shall all pay dearly. How I wish he had gone to Medical School which had been his first ambition. But he fell instead under the spell of our English headmaster who fought the Italians in Abyssinia in 1941 and had a sword from an Ethiopian prince to prove it. So
Sam enrolled in the first school cadet corps in the country and was on his way to Sandhurst.”
“I asked you about Ikem not His Excellency,” says BB, a mischievous twinkle in her eyes and snuggling closer to me.
“It’s your fault. You are such a good listener.”
“And you haven’t said anything about yourself,” she adds, ignoring my backhanded compliment.
“We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others. Ikem may resent me but he probably resents Sam even more and Sam resents both of us most vehemently. We are too close together, I think. Lord Lugard College trained her boys to be lonely leaders in separate remote places, not cooped up together in one crummy family business.”
“OK, Ikem was the intellectual, Sam the socialite, what about you?”
“I have always been in the middle. Neither as bright as Ikem and not such a social success as Sam. I have always been the lucky one, in a way. There was a song we sang as children, do you know it? The one in front spots evil spirits, the one at the rear has twisted hands, the one in the middle is the child of luck. Did you sing it? I was the child of luck.”
“Can I tell you something? You promise not to be angry? Promise? Well, you fellows, all three of you, are incredibly conceited. The story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you… But please go on.”
“Actually you are quite right. That’s what I’ve just said myself. We tend sometimes to forget that our story is only one of twenty million stories—one tiny synoptic account. But that’s the only one I know and you are such a sweet listener as I said.”
“A sweetener? A sweetener has its reasons… By the way do you keep a detailed diary of what is happening day to day? I think you should. But please go on.”
“I do keep a journal. But, no let’s change the subject. Tell me something for a change.”
“Today is your day… Why should His Excellency resent the two of you? He has all the success.” I sense she merely wants me to keep talking. About anything. She finds my voice soothing, perhaps. At the same time she has such a quick mind and such a knack for asking inconvenient questions, like a precocious child.