Short of Glory (31 page)

‘We’d have had to take him to a hospital in a black area.’

‘Or if he hadn’t had someone to bribe for him?’

‘He’d have waited with the others.’

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘Paying is the only way to avoid waiting in Africa. All over the continent people spend most of their time waiting.’

‘It’s still terrible.’

‘Look, anywhere else in Africa he wouldn’t have got proper treatment at all.’ She sounded aggressive and irritable as if he had been making a personal criticism. She held up
her hand. ‘All right, it’s wrong, I agree, I’m not arguing with that. I mean, I don’t like having to bribe people. But what do you do about it? It’s not going to
change peacefully because people don’t want it to change and if you try to change it violently who suffers most? All the Deuteronomies. And not just at the time of change either. In the long
run as well. Unless he had family in high places his kind would always be hungry in black Africa. They are everywhere else and they would be here.’

Patrick wished he had not begun. He had as yet no wish to explore their differences and did not like the hardness in her tone. He tried to sound conciliatory but knew it would fail because he
was unable to capitulate. ‘Yes, okay, but I’m not talking about the future or about the rest of Africa or anything general. It’s only particulars. I keep coming back to
particulars. It just seems to me that it ought to be possible to arrange things so that Deuteronomy gets the same kind of treatment as you and I. I mean, simply in terms of resources.’

‘Yes, it ought to be.’ She drove on in silence.

Patrick silently blamed Chatsworth for having got Deuteronomy drunk.

They were greeted at the door of Joanna’s bungalow by Beauty, the exquisite miniature maid. Beauty looked solemn. ‘Madam, there are many dead people.’

Joanna stiffened and clutched Patrick’s arm automatically, which made him feel instantly better. ‘What do you mean? Belinda—’

Beauty took her hand with irresistible simplicity. ‘Come, I show you.’

Patrick followed them into the sitting-room. He was slightly ashamed to realise that his main concern was that the evening seemed to be going from bad to worse. Beauty pointed to a glass cabinet
in which were painted china figures in eighteenth-century costume. Most had fallen over.

‘Belinda did this before I put her to bed. I am very sorry for her, madam.’

Joanna put her forehead against Patrick’s shoulder for a moment. He took her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Beauty, I’ll put them up again. They’re not broken.’

‘I am very sorry, madam.’

‘It’s all right. Nothing has happened. You can go to bed now.’

‘Thank you, madam.’ She glanced demurely at Patrick and glided from the room.

Joanna put her arms around his neck. ‘I’m sorry, too.’

‘For what?’

‘For being so awkward.’

‘You weren’t. You were helpful.’

‘D’you fancy burnt cottage pie?’

He kissed her. ‘I fancy you.’

‘Instead?’

‘Before and after.’

She bit his neck. ‘Instead would be too good to be true.’

H
e took a taxi to work from Joanna’s the next morning. In the car he gazed out of the window, in the office at the files; in each case
without seeing. Philip was drafting and again wanted no assistance. Clifford was seeing the MFA about the ministerial visit, having left an instruction that the last memorandum on transport
arrangements was to be disregarded. Patrick was to make no further arrangements without further conference. He filed the last instruction, ready for its resurrection.

He felt drenched in Joanna. His senses had become conditioned to her presence and he was constantly wanting to touch, to turn, to speak to her. Although he had showered he could still detect the
smell of her skin on his, elusive and tantalising. It reminded him of pine-needles. Presumably it was something she wore.

The first sentence of the previous year’s review of trading trends between the UK and Lower Africa spoke of a possible upturn although, after allowing for inflation, it was equally
possible that the overall context was that of a downturn. He read the sentence seven or eight times, musing on whether or not he was in love.

His eye wandered across a couple of pages of trading statistics. He took a sheet of drafting paper from Philip’s pile and made a simple calculation. Assuming that there were roughly four
thousand million people in the world and that roughly half of those were women, about a quarter – five hundred million – should be within the age range within which he might reasonably
expect to fall in love. Most people, he knew, chose their mates from a very small sample, usually no more than the lower double figures, and most people considered themselves to have been in love
with their mates at some time. Even if he assumed, therefore, that he was likely to fall in love with no more than one in a hundred – a more stringent selection than was common – this
still left him with the possibility of falling in love with five million women. And even if he divided this figure by ten there were half a million women he could fall in love with. It seemed
unreasonable to settle upon one, especially the first. He drank his coffee, doodled on the drafting paper and concluded that if he could think about it in this way he could not be in love.

Nevertheless, it felt as though he were. At least, his feelings accorded with other people’s descriptions of their feelings. Perhaps everyone was wrong. Reception rang through to say that
two policemen were asking for him.

They stood by the desk, pale and burly with cropped hair and sullen faces. He assumed it was something to do with Whelk.

‘Are you Patrick Stubbs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you the owner of a red Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you account for your movements yesterday evening?’

Everyone in reception was listening whilst pretending to work. ‘Well, I was having dinner with a friend.’

‘What time did you go to dinner?’

‘At about seven-thirty or eight.’

‘What time did you return?’

‘Well, I was out all night, I think, yes.’ He wondered if Jim had set this up. ‘But I wasn’t with the Toyota. I didn’t drive it at all last night.’

The policemen looked disappointed. Someone driving the said Toyota had caused a riot in Kuweto the previous evening. The police had made arrests following a robbing and stabbing incident and a
crowd had gathered outside the police station. They were dispersing peacefully when the red Toyota appeared. Driven from the first in a reckless manner it then began to chase the crowd, making
several runs through them and charging any who remained. No one was killed but one of the arrested men had escaped and a policeman lost both his shoes trying to get out of the way. The crowd later
re-formed and, believing the incident to have been the work of the police, stoned police premises and vehicles for most of the night until pacified by police reinforcements.

‘Do you have any idea who might have driven your vehicle, sir?’

Patrick spent most of the next thirty minutes or so on the telephone, first to Chatsworth, who was not up, then to Jim, who was not in, then to Jim’s superior who said that if
Chatsworth’s release conditions had been breached – as it seemed on the face of it that they had – he would be locked up again.

Chatsworth was finally roused by Sarah at the third attempt. He was unrepentant. ‘Stopped the riot, you mean,’ he said, ‘not caused it.’

‘That’s not what they say.’

‘You can’t trust them. They’re policemen. Biased.’

‘They’re talking of locking you up again.’

‘Typical. Try to help the buggers and that’s what they do to you.’

‘You’d better give me a full account before I talk to them again and before the ambassador finds out.’

They met in an Austrian coffee shop near the embassy. It was run by a morose Viennese who practically never spoke but would leave his customers to sit all day over a newspaper and a coffee.
Chatsworth was late. He parked the bakkie half on the pavement and came in wearing Patrick’s corduroy jacket.

‘Sarah said she’d never seen you wear it and it’s cooler than mine. I’ll put it back, don’t worry. Found a packet of Durex in the pocket. Is that what you use with
“in-due-course”?’

Patrick could not remember when he had last worn the jacket nor for whom the unopened packet had been intended. This was not how the conversation should have started.

Chatsworth helped himself to sugar. ‘Can’t use them myself. Instant deflation. It just won’t take them. Sarah had never seen any before.’

‘You showed them to her?’

‘Filled one with water to demonstrate. She could hardly stand for laughing.’

Chatsworth’s account of the evening, when it came, was rambling and incomplete. He confessed that his memory might be hampered by the effect of Lion beer, a brand popular with blacks, but
insisted that his interpretation of events was correct. He had deliberately gone to Kuweto knowing he was not allowed but assuming, rightly, that the bakkie’s new diplomatic number plate
would ensure that he wasn’t stopped. There was, after all, a chance that Whelk might be there; he could’ve gone native. He had known a chap in the Army, chap called Peters, who had gone
native in Borneo after an exercise. Turned up three years later with seven wives. Anyway, after driving around for a while without seeing much that looked like action he went into one of the beer
halls.

‘I was the only white bloke there. They all looked as if they’d never seen one before. Felt a bit out of place, to be honest. I wasn’t going to stay for more than a quick one
but then there was a bit of a shindig in one corner and a chap got knifed so I thought I’d stick around. They were still giving me some pretty odd looks so I bought a few drinks. Must say,
once they got used to me they were all very friendly. Quite pleasant once you get to know them. I had to keep nipping outside to see if the bakkie was okay and then it occurred to me to get a
couple of them to sit in it and guard it, with me keeping them in drink. That worked all right. They were very willing.

‘Anyway, I bought a few more drinks – don’t forget I owe you, by the way – and got talking, which was pretty difficult because they don’t all speak English. Most of
them aren’t even Lower African. They come from black Africa to work. I didn’t know that. Well, you know how one thing leads to another sometimes – perhaps you don’t –
d’you ever get pissed?’ He broke off and looked at Patrick with an air of serious enquiry.

Patrick remembered going backwards into the restaurant pool. ‘I get a bit tipsy sometimes.’

‘That all?’

‘Yes. Being drunk is like being ill.’

Chatsworth looked at him as at one who thinks that Buddhism consists merely in shaving one’s head. ‘Well, I can assure you that one thing does sometimes lead to another and this time
I ended up offering lifts home to a few of them. I suppose you’ll say I shouldn’t have but it seemed a good idea at the time. In the end, what with the bakkie guards who’d got
some of their mates in and this other lot, there must’ve been about twenty of the buggers crammed into the back, all singing and dancing and what-have-you. There was also a few in the cab
with me. It still stinks a bit, actually, but I’ll clean it out.

‘So, off we set and I thought to myself, why stick to the roads when you’ve got a cross-country vehicle with good headlights? It does it good to do what it’s designed for now
and again, like the rest of us. Also, they lived at every bloody point of the compass so it was handy to cut about a bit. ’Course, it then turned out that they were as clueless as I was about
where they lived. Fortunately, we lost a few overboard otherwise I’d still be delivering them. But it was all okay, no problem, until this to-do with the police.’

He leant earnestly across the table and held up his spoon. ‘You may get another story from them but I can’t help that. What I’m telling you is what happened so far as I’m
concerned. Now, what they’d done was arrest these blokes for something or other and they’d made a bog-up of it. There was a sort of demo going on outside one of their forts. Demo
– riot, really, just beginning. They hadn’t got a grip of it and they weren’t going to, I could see that straight away. Seen a lot of that sort of thing in Belfast. If you
don’t get a grip straight away you lose control. Anyway, I’d dropped off or lost all my passengers by then so I thought I’d give the police a hand. I mean, imagine it – fort
surrounded by a couple of hundred murderous natives running up and down, all pissed as rats and howling for the blood of the defenders. Rourke’s Drift all over again. And then you pitch up
with the cavalry. What do you do? You’d do what I did, wouldn’t you? You’d charge ’em.’ Chatsworth’s thin face was eager and his eyes were bright with the
memory. ‘It was a wonderful sight. Solid mass of rioters in the headlights, great black wall because they thought I was going to slow down. Then they were all arms and legs and teeth
scrabbling all over the place, trying to get out of the way. Some of them jumped right up in the air like grasshoppers. Must’ve landed behind me. Then I reversed through them, then forward
again. Did it four times altogether. Wasn’t anyone left after that so I waved goodbye to the defenders and came home.’ He shook his head. ‘Goes to show you can’t trust the
fuzz, doesn’t it? No matter where you are. When you first said they’d reported it I thought you meant they wanted to pass on their thanks. I was ready to let you share the credit, too.
Would it help if I went to see them, to sort things out, you know?’

‘No.’

‘S’pose you’re right. Don’t know why it is but this sort of thing nearly always happens when I try to be helpful. No gratitude. What’s more, I caught one hanging
around the house when I got back.’

‘One what?’

‘Black. Young chap.’

‘That was Stanley, Sarah’s son.’

‘Is he supposed to be here?’

‘Not really, no. He’s going soon.’

‘Just as well, then.’

‘What’s just as well?’

Awkwardness was rare in Chatsworth but it showed clearly this time. ‘Just as well I saw him off.’