“It’s the right way,” Ghita said.
Sarah drained her tea and set down the cup. “Very well then. So you go and eat and get your strength up and I’ll stay here for a little while, dear, because this place is talk, talk, talk, as you will already have appreciated. And don’t touch the goat curry, darling, however much you like goat. Because that young Somali chef, who is a gifted boy and will one day become a fine lawyer, has a blind spot where goat curry is concerned.”
Ghita never knew how she got through the first day of the focus group on Self-Sustainment, but by the time the bell sounded for five o’clock—though the bell was only in her head—she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had not made a fool of herself, had spoken neither too much nor too little, had listened with humility to the opinions of older and more knowledgeable participants, and had taken copious notes for yet another unread EADEC report.
“Glad you came?” Judith asked her, cheerfully grabbing her arm as the meeting broke up. “See you down the club, then.”
“This is for you, darling,” said Sarah, emerging from a staff hut to hand her a brown envelope. “Enjoy your evening.”
“You too.”
Sarah’s handwriting came straight out of a school copybook.
Ghita dear. Captain McKenzie occupies Entebbe tukul which is number fourteen on the airstrip side. Take a hand-torch with you for when the generators are switched off. He will be happy to receive you at nine o’clock after your dinner. He is a gentleman so you need have no fear. Please give him this note so that I can be sure it has been sensibly disposed of. Take very good care of yourself now and remember your responsibilities as regards discretion.
Sarah
The names of the tukuls read to Ghita like regimental battle honours in the village church close to her convent school in England. The front door to Entebbe was ajar, but the mosquito door inside it was wedged tight. A blue-shaded hurricane lamp burned and Captain McKenzie sat in front of it, so that as Ghita approached the tukul she saw only his silhouette, bowed over his desk while he wrote like a monk. And because first impressions counted greatly with her, she stood a moment observing his craggy look and extreme stillness, anticipating an unbending military nature. She was about to tap on the door frame but Captain McKenzie had either heard or seen her or guessed her, because he sprang to his feet and made two athletic strides to the mosquito door and pulled it back for her.
“Ghita, I’m Rick McKenzie. You’re bang on time. Got a note for me?”
New Zealand, she thought, and knew she’d got it right. Sometimes she forgot her knowledge of English names and accents, but this was not one of the times. New Zealand and on closer inspection nearer to fifty than thirty, but she could only guess this from the hairline cracks on the gaunt cheeks and the silver tips to the trim black hair. She handed him Sarah’s note and watched while he turned his back on her and held the note to the blue lamp. By the brighter glow she saw a sparse, clean room with an ironing board and polished brown shoes and a soldier’s bed made the way she was taught to make her bed at convent school, with hospital corners and the sheet folded over the blanket at the top, then folded back on itself to make an equilateral triangle.
“Why don’t you sit yourself over there?” he asked, indicating a kitchen chair. As she moved towards it, the blue lamp moved behind her, to settle on the floor at the centre of the doorway to the tukul. “That way nobody gets to see in,” he explained. “We’ve got full-time tukul-watchers here. Take a Coke?” He handed it to her at arm’s length. “Sarah says you’re a trustworthy person, Ghita. That’s good enough for me. Tessa and Arnold didn’t trust anyone except each other in this. And me because they had to. That’s the way I like to work too. You came up on a Self-Sustainment jag, I hear.” It was a question.
“The Self-Sustainment focus group was a pretext. Justin wrote to me asking me to find out what Tessa and Arnold were doing in Loki in the days before she died. He didn’t believe the story of the gender workshop.”
“He’s damn right. Got his letter?”
My identity paper, she thought. My proof of good faith as Justin’s messenger. She passed it to him and watched while he stood up, pulled on a pair of austere steel-framed spectacles and stepped obliquely into the arc of the blue lamp, keeping himself out of the eyeline of the door.
He handed the letter back. “So listen up,” he said.
But first he turned on his radio, anxious to establish what he pedantically termed the level of acceptable sound.
Ghita lay on her bed, under a single sheet. The night was no cooler than the day. Through the netting that surrounded her she could watch the red glow of the mosquito coil. She had drawn the curtains but they were very thin. Footsteps and voices kept passing her window and every time they passed she had an urge to leap out of bed and shout “Hi!” Her thoughts turned to Gloria, who a week ago, to her confusion, had invited her to a game of tennis at the club.
“Tell me, dear,” Gloria had asked her, having trounced her six games to two in each of three sets. They were walking arm in arm towards the clubhouse. “Did Tessa have some kind of crush on Sandy, or was it the other way round?”
At which Ghita, despite her addiction to the altar of truth, lied straight and fairly into Gloria’s face without even blushing. “I am quite sure there was nothing of the kind on either side,” she said primly. “Whatever makes you think that, Gloria?”
“Nothing, darling. Nothing at all. Just the way he looked during the funeral, I suppose.”
And after Gloria, she went back to Captain McKenzie.
“There’s this crazy Boer who runs a food station five miles west of a little town called Mayan,” he was saying, keeping his voice just below Pavarotti’s. “Bit of a God-thumper.”
18
His face had darkened, its lines deepened. The white light of the huge Saskatchewan sky could not penetrate its shadows. The little town was a lost city, three hours’ rail ride out of Winnipeg in the middle of a thousand-mile snowfield, and Justin walked in it determinedly, avoiding the gaze of rare passers-by. The constant wind from the Yukon or the high Arctic that all year round whipped across the flat prairie, icing the snow, bending the wheat, buffeting street signs and overhead wires, raised no points of colour on his hollowed cheeks. The freezing cold—twenty and more below zero—only spurred his aching body forward. In Winnipeg before he took the train here, he had bought a quilted jacket, a fur cap and gloves. The fury in him was a thorn. A rectangle of plain typing paper nestled in his wallet: GO HOME NOW AND KEEP QUIET OR YOU JOIN YOUR WIFE.
But it was his wife who had got him here. She had worked his hands free, untied his hood. She had raised him to his knees at the bedside and by stages helped him to the bathroom. Cheered on by her, he had hauled himself to a standing stoop with the aid of the bathtub, had turned on the shower tap and hosed down his face and shirt front and the collar of his jacket, because he knew—she warned him—that if he undressed he would not be able to dress himself again. His shirt front was filthy, his jacket was smeared with vomit but he managed to mop them fairly clean. He wanted to go back to sleep but she wouldn’t let him. He tried to brush his hair but his arms wouldn’t go that high. He had a twenty-four-hour stubble but it must stay there. Standing made his head swim and he was lucky to reach the bed before he toppled over. But it was on her advice that, lying in a seductive half-swoon, he refused to pick up the telephone to the concierge or invoke the medical skills of Dr Birgit. Trust nobody, Tessa told him, so he didn’t. He waited till his world had righted itself, then stood up again and reeled across the room, grateful for its miserable size.
He had laid his raincoat over a chair. It was still there. To his surprise so was Birgit’s envelope. He opened the wardrobe. The wall-safe was built into the back of it, its door closed. He tapped out the date of his wedding day, almost fainting from the pain each time he prodded. The door popped open to reveal Peter Atkinson’s passport slumbering peacefully inside. His hands battered but seem
ingly unbroken, he coaxed the passport out and fed it into his inside jacket pocket. He fought his way into his raincoat and contrived to button it at the neck, then at the waist. Determined to travel light, he possessed only a shoulder bag. His money was still inside it. He collected his shaving things from the bathroom and his shirts and underclothes from the chest of drawers and dropped them into it. He placed Birgit’s envelope on top of them and closed the zip. He eased the strap over his shoulder and yelped like a dog at the pain. His watch said five in the morning and it seemed to be working. He lurched into the corridor and rolled himself along the wall to the lift. In the ground floor lobby two women in Turkish costume were operating an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner. An elderly night porter dozed behind the reception desk. Somehow Justin gave his room number and asked for his bill. Somehow he got a hand into his hip pocket, detached the notes from their wad and added a fat tip “belatedly for Christmas.”
“Mind if I grab one of these?” he asked in a voice he didn’t recognise. He was indicating a cluster of doorman’s umbrellas that were jammed into a ceramic pot beside the door.
“Many as you like,” the old porter said.
The umbrella had a stout ash handle that came up to his hip. With its aid he crossed the empty square to the railway station. Reaching the steps that led up to the concourse he paused for a rest and was puzzled to find the porter at his side. He had thought it was Tessa.
“Can you make it?” the old man asked solicitously.
“Yes.”
“Shall I get your ticket?”
Justin turned and offered the old man his pocket. “Zurich,” he said. “Single.”
“First class?”
“Absolutely.”
Switzerland was a childhood dream. Forty years ago his parents had taken him on a walking holiday in the Engadine and they had stayed in a grand hotel on a spit of forest between two lakes. Nothing had changed. Not the polished parquet or the stained glass or the stern-faced châtelaine who showed him to his room. Reclining on the daybed on his balcony, Justin watched the same lakes glistening in the evening sun, and the same fisherman huddled in his rowing boat in the mist. The days passed uncounted, punctuated by visits to the spa and the death knell of the dinner gong summoning him to solitary meals among whispery old couples. In a side street of old chalets, a pallid doctor and his woman assistant dressed his bruises. “A car smash,” Justin explained. The doctor frowned through his spectacles. His young assistant laughed.
By night his interior world reclaimed him, as it had every night since Tessa’s death. Toiling at the marquetry desk in the window bay, doggedly writing to Ham with his bruised right hand, following the travails of Markus Lorbeer as retold by Birgit, then gingerly resuming his labour of love to Ham, Justin was conscious of a dawning sense of his own completion. If Lorbeer the penitent was in the desert, purging his guilt with a diet of locusts and wild honey, Justin too was alone with his destiny. But he was resolved. And in some dark sense purified. He had never supposed that his search would have a good end. It had never occurred to him that there could be one. To take up Tessa’s mission—to shoulder her banner and put on her courage—was purpose enough for him. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.
But when he remembered the eternal night of the black hood and smelled his own vomit, when he surveyed the systematic bruising of his body, the oval imprints of yellow and blue that ran like coloured musical notes across his trunk and back and thighs, he experienced a different kind of kinship. I’m one of you. I no longer tend the roses while you murmur over your green tea. You needn’t lower your voices as I approach. I’m with you at the table, saying yes.
On the seventh day Justin paid his bill and, almost without telling himself what he was doing, took a post-bus and a train to Basel, to that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharmagiants have their castles. And there, from a frescoed palace, he posted a fat envelope to Ham’s old dragon in Milan.
Then Justin walked. Painfully, but walked. First up a cobbled hill to the mediaeval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to free thinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river’s edge, and from a children’s playground gazed upward in near-disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharma-billionaires, at their faceless barracks ranged shoulder to shoulder against the individual enemy. Orange cranes fussed restlessly above them. White chimneys like muted minarets, some chequered at the tip, some striped or dazzle-painted as a warning to aircraft, poured their invisible gases into a brown sky. And at their feet lay whole railways, marshalling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.
Drawn forward by a force he had ceased to define, Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of rundown housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant labourers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant tree-lined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically-friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and further up, and then right up into the sky above his head, that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower-blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.
How long he remained there, alone, trapped like some insect at the triptych’s base, he had no notion then or later. Sometimes it seemed to him that the building’s wings were closing in to crush him. Sometimes they were toppling down on him. His knees gave way and he discovered he was sitting on a bench, on some bit of beaten ground where cautious women walked their dogs. He noticed a faint but pervasive smell and was for a moment returned to the mortuary in Nairobi. How long do I have to live here, he wondered, before I stop noticing the smell? Evening must have fallen because the coppered windows lightened. He made out moving silhouettes and winking pinpoints of computer blue. Why do I sit here? he asked her as he went on watching. What am I thinking of, except you?
She was sitting beside him, but for once she had no answer ready. I am thinking about your courage, he replied for her. I am thinking, it was you and Arnold against all this, while dear old Justin worried about keeping his flower beds sandy enough to grow your yellow freesias. I am thinking I don’t believe in me any more, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will—which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man—or woman—should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: good evening, it’s me your humble servant, Justin. I’m a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won.
From Main Street of the little town Justin turned left and north-west onto Dawes Boulevard, taking the full blast of the prairie wind on his darkened face as he continued his wary examination of his surroundings. His three years as Economic Attaché in Ottawa had not been wasted. Though he had never been here in his life, everything he saw was familiar to him. Snow from Hallowe’en to Easter, he remembered. Plant after the first moon in June and harvest before the firs
t hard frost in September. It would be several weeks yet before scared crocuses started appearing in the tufts of dead grass and on the bald prairie. Across the road from him stood the synagogue, feisty and functional, built by settlers dumped at the railroad station with their bad memories, cardboard suitcases and promises of free land. A hundred yards on rose the Ukrainian Church and along from it the Roman Catholics, the Presbyterians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists. Their car parks were got up like electrified horse-pens so that the engines of the faithful could be warmed while their owners prayed. A line of Montesquieu drifted through his head: there have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.