The Dust Diaries (37 page)

The ground begins to level off. Flat slabs of rock are layered on either side of me, embedded in the slope at the same obtuse angle like the body of a great stone ship, sinking into the mountain. I pick up a path, a narrow red earth track that meanders through acres of bright green, sharp-bladed grass and sparsely spread bushes punctuated with the domes of brown-red termite mounds. I walk through this landscape for about half an hour, the peaks of the mountains on the Mozambique border steep-sided in the distance, sharp-edged against a brilliant blue sky.

Then, coming through a gap between two huge boulders that lean and touch above me as if they are kissing, I am in a sculpture park. The path carries on meandering before me but the bright grass and the bushes have been replaced by a field of granite standing stones, contorted and sculpted by erosion into individual pieces of natural art, standing apart from each other on the sandy, scrub-grass soil. The larger ones look like half-finished Henry Moores (I think of the sculptures on the streets of Harare), while the clusters of smaller ones remind me of the ranked armies of miniature clay soldiers buried with the ancient Chinese emperors. I walk on through these rocks alone, feeling as if I am trespassing, a child in the giant’s garden.

Eventually the alien landscape of stone gives to a more familiar view. For the first time all morning the ground begins to fall away again, and I find myself emerging into the side of a long green valley, flanked with rolling hills that could be in the Brecon Beacons back home. The floor of the valley, though, is African. Blond savannah grass cut through by a thin river, flecked white over patches of rapids. Above the low hills on the other side, the earth gives to stone again; a ragged line of high peaks, cradling the blue sky between them, marking the border with Mozambique.

I stop to make and eat a sandwich at a ranger’s hut a little further down the valley’s side. The ranger is there, a wiry Zimbabwean in the dark green uniform of the national park: safari shirt with sleeves rolled to above his elbows, shorts, walking boots, a bush hat and a rectangular plastic name badge on his chest, with his name, MOSES, printed on it in clear white capitals.

Moses tells me the rangers live up here for up to a month at a time, alone, except for the walkers who come and stay in the park. I ask him how many walkers are in the park today. He says there is an overland tour group due to arrive soon, but they’ll be going back down later.

‘You will be the only person in the park tonight,’ he tells me matter-of-factly.

I ask him if there is anything I should watch out for.

‘Not really,’ he says, whittling at a stick with his sheath knife. ‘Just be careful for the gaboon viper, they are sometimes here, and if they bite you, that is very bad news.’

He is smiling, but I can tell he is serious. I ask him what to do if I do get bitten. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Wait for me to find you. Do not try and walk, that will just spread the venom around your body more quickly. Stay still, and wait for me to find you.’ He doesn’t say if he means find me alive or just find me.

Voices behind us signal the arrival of the overland group. Moses stands and looks up at them through his binoculars and I go to fill up my water bottle at a tap inside the hut. When I come out Moses still has the binoculars held up to his face. I ask him if he is counting them. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am looking for the pretty girls.’ He brings the binoculars down and turns to face me, a broad smile opening over his white teeth, shaking his head. ‘But no luck, there are none in this group today.’

I shoulder my rucksack and set off before the group arrive. As I have said, I want to be alone today. I haven’t brought a tent so I head off looking for a suitable cave in which to set up camp and spend the night. Moses pointed one out to me at the northern end of the flat plain in the middle of the valley. He said it was called the Red Cave, and looking through his binoculars I could just make out its dark fissure in the rock, like a blinded eye looking out from the grey stone beneath a that of grassy hair.

The walk through the valley floor to the cave is an easy one. The heat of the sun is already softening, the tall grass that stretches away on either side of the path is alive with insects and the sky is clear above me. I reach the end of the valley where the ground begins to rise and the grass gives way to rocks again, strewn and tumbled at first, then solid cliff faces, a waterfall gushing from a narrow gap in their granite wall.

The Red Cave has obviously seen recent habitation. There is still dried grass matting the floor, the charred pock-mark of an old fire surrounded by some stones, and even stubs of candles melted onto the rocks against the back wall. But it hasn’t been just people who have been here before me. I notice what look like leopard prints in the dust around the old fire, a concentric pattern of them, closing in on its scorched patch as if its flames have been hunted, not extinguished.

I lay out my sleeping mat, hang up some damp clothes, leave my rucksack in the back of the cave and go out to gather some firewood. By the time I return the light is already draining from the sky. I build a fire over the ashes of the old one and set a match to the dry grass at its centre. The wood takes easily, crackling into flame. Using the fire to cook some noodles, I sit by its heat, watching the sky bleach, then darken to evening, then night. I am sat back from the lip of the cave which is set in a shelf of rock about three metres off the ground. There is an overhang above the mouth and the cliff closes in on it to the right, leaving a jagged portal a few metres across and several metres high through which I watch the view: rocky outcrops against a backdrop of the bare valley wall. Eventually, when the sky is deepening to an indigo blue, a few stars come out, low and bright above the black silhouettes of the hills. There is a steady dripping at the back of the cave, and just once the dark spark of a bat signs itself off through the space of air in front of me. The silence is heavy, thick and black.

I sit there, in the live light of the fire and think of the story Canon Holderness told me, wondering if it is a product of the mirror-man again. Betty Finn, stranded in her house, saw you through your loneliness. Ray Brown, the literature academic, saw you through your poetry, and Canon Holderness, who lives with the love of a woman at the centre of his life, has placed such a love at the centre of yours. All three of them reflecting your story through the prisms of their own experiences. But increasingly, as I sit there at the cave mouth, testing what I know of your life against this new element, it does seem to make sense.

There are several poems which backlit by this love affair gain a new resonance. ‘Eurydice’, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is one. In the last verse the myth’s heroine addresses her lover:

Can you ever lose me out of your song?

Can I ever lose you out of my love?

Must we put our passion back to school?

Must we two to lock hands wear the body’s glove?

For my sake turn from this world beneath!

For you I turn from that world above!

Eurydice and Orpheus. The mythic touchstone of parted lovers, turning away from each other because of the presence, not the absence, of love.

Another poem, ‘Found’, also sounds a new note in the light of Holderness’ story. It appears early in the book of poetry you published just before you left for Africa, and now I can’t help but see the characters of you and Ada imbricated in its lines:

Yes, I have found thee, and no longer now

Seems song a mirage, or romance a dream;

And I will sing, altho’ I am not he

Whom thou hast deemed best worthy of thy grace –

Heart of thy heart and all in all to thee.

Thanks be to God that I have seen thy face!

A goal of bliss before my song is set,

Altho’ its consummation comes not yet!

And of course there is your will in the archives:

‘I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to
Mrs Ada Neeves
of
Icklesham. Rye, Sussex’.

There, it would seem is the final proof of the veracity of Holderness’ story. Your last testament.

And already, sitting in the Red Cave, the impulse to explain, to remember in story, is overtaking me. Already I am colonising your life with my imagination, re-casting you as another of the remittance men of Rhodesia: in Africa not because of what didn’t exist for you at home, but because of what did. Is that how this love affair informs your life? When you left Ada and Theresa you were obeying the majority’s moral code, bending to society’s will. And then, in Mashonaland, you lived by the knowledge formed in the crucible of that loss and for the rest of your life you never followed society or the word of authority again. And you never left anyone again. Is that how the story goes? Is that how it all fits in place? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The truth is that I do not know, cannot know exactly what happened or why. I can have the facts—your letters, photographs, people’s memories, the Last Will and Testament—and from these I can know the punctuation points of your life. But between those punctuation points is everything I do not know, everything that does not last, and it is only that which will ever really tell me what happened between you and Ada Sargent. Why you left her and her daughter. Why she married another man. Why you never returned and why you only wrote her name in your will years later, when you were blind and dying in your hut at Maronda Mashanu. It is these intimate diaries of our lives that tell the true history. The emotions that pass in a moment like light passing over skin, the seams of thought layered deep in our minds at every instant, the impulses, observations, nuances. The daily epiphanies, the tone and timbre of a voice, the fleeting expression of a face, the few breaths alone, head craned back studying the stars in a black sky. But these diaries of our lives are written in dust; they are not what remain. History scatters them and leaves only the stories, the writing, the punctuation points and the narratives imagined by those in our future as they try to understand their past, as they try to fill the gaps left by the dust dairies of our intimate selves.

The Enkeldoorn to Umvuma road, Charter District, Southern Rhodesia

The back wheel of the Royal Enfield Model C motorbike is still spinning, but slowing down, the silences between each swishing brush of its tyre against the buckled mudguard getting longer. Shuw…shuw…shuw…shuw. With each pass of the guard a little dust falls from the rubber tread to the road beneath. It lands in the dark pool of oil bleeding from the bike’s engine, the pipes and heavy carburettor hanging from its frame like the powerful chest of a cheetah. The pool of oil spreads, seeping into the dirt and moving over itself with slow, liquid determination. Eventually its dark edge touches and gathers around the tip of the metal hand-brake on the left handlebar, marooning its steel in a lake of oil. A file of ants crossing the road to the dust-grain volcano of their nest’s entrance are caught in its thick slide. One of them struggles in its darkness, another is already dead, carried along on its flow, slow-turning like a log on water, or a body, passed along the hands of mourners at a funeral.

The oil continues to spread, beneath the bike and around the distorted front wheel, its spokes snapped and bent, until an arm of its flow touches the pale swirls of hair on the gazelle’s underside. The animal lies in front of the prone motorbike, its spine broken and its hind legs splayed awkwardly behind it. The onward flow of oil gathers at its body, then disperses to either side along the line of its belly. The gazelle’s shallow, rapid breathing is the only sound other than the turning rear wheel, and the rise and fall of its black-striped ribcage the only other movement. If you were close enough to its face you would be able to see a reflection of this scene in the convex surface of its open eye. The broken bike, the long, straight road narrowing into the distance and by the side of the road, an umbrella tree with a gathering of vultures waiting patiently in its branches, shitting their positions and stretching their wings as they watch the scene on the road like theatregoers watching the final act of a play.

The man who is also lying in the road would not appear in this dark reflection, because he is behind the gazelle, ten or twelve feet closer to Enkeldoorn, which is where he was travelling to when the buck leapt out of the bush and into the path of his motorbike. He is lying face down in the red dust, his arms by his sides and his knees drawn up towards his stomach. Although he is too far away to be touched by the oil there is another dark pool spreading from under his head, matting in his greying hair and his ginger moustache. Unlike the gazelle he is not breathing, and over the next week many people, black and white, will hold Arthur Cripps responsible for his death.

The man is Jack Beardsley, one-time British East Africa merchant turned Southern Rhodesian farm manager. Jack came to Africa at the end of 1900 with his fiancée, Charlotte. He was thirty, she was nineteen. Charlotte’s father had forbidden their marriage on the grounds of Jack’s character, so Jack had taken the man’s daughter without his permission. They set up in Mombasa and Jack began his own import and export business. For a while their new life looked promising, although Charlotte missed England terribly and often woke Jack with her early-morning crying. Eventually, one morning three years after they had come to Africa, he woke not because of her crying, but because of her silence. He could not even hear his young wife breathing and when he turned on his side he found a note on the pillow where her head should have been. Her father had sent her money for passage back to England. She had left him.

Charlotte’s departure left Jack bitter with the world, and his bitterness spread through him the way the oil is spreading now around the body of the gazelle, which is still breathing, fast and shallow, blinking the flies from its eyes. Like the spark that starts the fire, the bitterness spread to the rest of his life and especially into his luck. His business began to fail. He married again, the daughter of a colonial office clerk who died giving birth to their first child. The child, a son, was taken away by his parents-in-law, back to England, where Charlotte had gone too. Jack thought it was as if the country was taking back everything he valued, punishing him for taking Charlotte away all those years before. But then, not content with taking his life away, England came to him, bringing with her a war which brought the end of his business, and in 1918, when it was all over, he found himself old, bankrupt and with a set of rotting teeth that seemed the manifestation of the pain festering inside him. But he would not return to England. That, for Jack, would have been to admit his failure. So he moved further south instead, to the Charter District of Mashonaland, where he secured a position managing a large cattle and tobacco farm outside the dead-end town of Enkeldoorn. But the farm was not a good environment for him and he became sullen and even more lonely than he had been in the crowded streets of Mombasa, with too many hours to consider the mistakes and regrets of his life.