Tefuga (15 page)

“The copies are for old Kama Boi,” said Ted. “Betty did them because she wanted to stick to the originals.”

“I wouldn't have credited the brute with an eye for aesthetics,” said Mr de Lancey.

“He appears to have,” said Ted. “He sent a runner asking me to take Betty on tour so that she could paint his domains.”

(So
that
was alright. Only I wasn't interested any longer. Nor was Mr de Lancey.)

“Seriously, Mrs Jackland,” he said. “I would very much appreciate it if you would let me buy something. I am not asking for a gift. I prefer to buy. I like to think that I have built my collection out of my own resources. I grew up surrounded by paintings and sculptures, many of them first rate, and though as a younger son I had to start afresh and my finances limit me to water-colours, I have the nucleus of a satisfactory little collection waiting in England to comfort me in my retirement.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll try and think of something.”

“Please do,” he said.

After that Ted took him off to the office to go through files for a bit so I could make arrangements for supper. We'd been meaning to have a picnic out of tins and then fall into bed, but of course with Mr de Lancey there we had to lay on something. Dinner was sticky in a different kind of way, tho' Mr de Lancey did most of the talking. At first it was about being sick. Ted's guinea worm. He wanted to know all the ugsome details and tell us much worse things which had happened to other people. Another of his little hobbies, like collecting water-colours! He's famous for his medicine chest, which he takes everywhere, full of his own special remedies. Hope he's never here when I go down with something!

After that we got on to the subject of schools. Quite a lot of the Political Officers are a bit potty about which school they were at, and ride eighty miles to see someone who was there too so they can swap stories about when they were boys and what's happened to the other boys. It matters. Mr de Lancey was at Winchester, but Ted was at somewhere called Garsford where they wore sandals and called each other by their Christian names. (So stupid of them to choose that for him. He does mind being different.) Mr de Lancey isn't quite so sneery now when he talks to me, but he obviously still thinks I'm stupid and need things explained. Actually what he said was quite amusing. His idea was that the reason we are so keen on Indirect Rule is 'cos we think it works like a public school. At places like Eton and Winchester the masters use the big boys to govern the rest, and the big boys have special privileges and are very grand so they feel it's worth their while keeping order in the school. That's what we're doing here with the emirs. Course, there's one big difference—in the schools the big boys keep leaving and the little boys grow up and do the governing. Mr de Lancey thinks it's poppycock to suppose that's ever going to happen here.

“The analogy is not of Zarafio taking over from Kama Boi, which heaven forfend,” he said. “It is of your boy there and his kind taking government into their hands. You won't see that in our lifetime, or our children's, eh, Jackland?”

Ted just grunted. He's often said the same to me, but he wasn't in a good mood. Mr de Lancey hadn't been talking about his idea just to amuse me—he'd been using it to get at Ted about having gone to a school where they didn't have prefects or fagging. No wonder Ted laughed so loud when I took him into my room at bed-time and showed him my poodle!

Tues March 25

Oh dear, I don't understand at all! Me, I mean. I thought I'd made up my mind to be good, and all along I must have been only pretending. It's difficult to explain, 'cos nothing's really happened, but it has, and now everything's different again.

I didn't realize then but I think it must have begun in the middle of last night. I was lying awake, thinking. It hadn't been as nice as usual—Ted rather rough and careless. I hadn't thought I'd minded. It was so easy to understand after a day like that. With Mr de Lancey all day long, first in the office going through files, and then riding down river with him to try and deal with the fishing-rights problem—it's all to do with some islands which are supposed to be in Kiti but a lot of Sokowa have moved in and our District Head down there has been quite spineless and KB hasn't done anything and Ted won't go over his head which Mr de Lancey thinks he ought to—all desperately complicated and frustrating, specially with our people letting Ted down the whole way when Mr de Lancey has got his lot toeing the line. And then to come back and listen all evening to me and Mr de Lancey jawing about pictures—terribly interesting for me, but I shouldn't have hogged the whole evening like that … well, no wonder he wanted to show whose wife I was.

As I say, I thought I was being very loyal and understanding while it was happening, but then I woke up in the middle of the night and I found I was lying there brooding about me and Ted and Kama Boi and his wives, and wondering what the difference really was, and remembering how I'd felt that time at Tefuga when I thought Ted had let me down so, and how I was somehow going to use s** to get my own back, and then I'd been ashamed in the morning. But now here Ted was using it, his way, to get
his
own back … I lay awake quite a long time, thinking that sort of round-and-round night thoughts, and then I fell asleep. In the morning I just put it all aside, I thought. But I can't have.

I'd better explain that one of the things I'd been jawing about with Mr de Lancey was doing a picture specially for him. I felt v. nervous about it, in case it wasn't good enough, so I suggested I actually did one of him fishing, so if it didn't turn out quite right for his collection it'd still be a sort of keepsake. He agreed to that, so we settled he'd go down and start fishing soon as it was light and I'd come down a bit after and try and do a picture. I told him about a place I'd looked at once or twice, just below his camp, but hadn't tried 'cos it needed a bit more interest in the foreground.

So down I went with Elongo to carry my things. It wasn't too hot yet, and the river had bits of mist on it I didn't want to lose, and tho' I was still nervous I was excited too at having the chance to show what I could really do. But I got a terrible shock when I got there, 'cos I could hardly see Mr de Lancey at all! I knew where he was, I mean. That was obvious—only too obvious!—but I couldn't see him! It turned out he does his fishing from inside a special little mosquito-net tent with only his rod poking out. I was amazed. I mean somebody who understood so much not seeing how impossible that was going to be, a fuzzy shapeless blur, not interesting at all, just puzzling. I was terribly disheartened but I settled down under my brolly to make the best of it. I soon found out why he'd needed it, tho'. The place was swarming with flies. I'd been meaning to send Elongo back but I kept him to whisk them off me.

I didn't bother about the thing at first. I was in a hurry to catch the mist and the shadows along the far bank which would be gone in half an hour. I'd been expecting to put Mr de Lancey near the middle, but instead I left a blank at the side for the near bank and the thing and laid on one of my washes for the sky and another for the sheeny water with the mist just fading and dabbed in the far bank—all not bad—and then I had to decide what to do about the thing. It was terribly awkward. I was sure it was going to spoil what might have been quite a nice little picture. I did a few trial sketches on a spare sheet but it wouldn't come right, then in the middle of that I had an idea—one of my cartoony ones—so I dashed it down and showed it to Elongo. He saw the joke at once and laughed his lovely round African laugh.

“What's up?” called Mr de Lancey.

The rod went down, the thing shuddered and collapsed, and out he came.

“My arm was getting tired,” he said. “I could do with a rest.”

I ought to explain he was tiger-fishing. You can't eat tiger-fish but they're terrifically game. You catch them by casting a “spoon” out and trolling it back which makes it look like a silver fish in the water and the tiger-fish grab it. Only they hadn't so far.

He strolled across to look. I was embarrassed but I had to let him see what Elongo had been laughing at. I'd drawn him huddled into his thing and labelled it “White Man Fishing” and next door I'd drawn one of our natives casting his net with that big open gesture and labelled it “Black Man Fishing”, tho' you could see the joke without reading the labels—at least Elongo had. Mr de Lancey didn't laugh, but he sounded a bit amused. Then he looked at the painting.

“Coming along admirably,” he said. “Have you ever looked at anything by Bonington?”

“Only in books, I'm afraid. I can see they must be lovely.”

“I have a very decent specimen. I often wish I could have risked having it with me. I mention it because it catches the morning light on the Grand Canal in much the same way you have. I shall be very glad indeed to add this to my collection, Mrs Jackland—it will be adequate compensation for your refusal to let me buy the ones of Kama Boi's wives … I suppose you're still adamant about that?”

“Fraid so. They're rather special. I'll never do anything like them again.”

“Oh, I hope you will. You seem to me to have immense potential. It's very rare, the combination of freshness of eye with natural technical skill. I'd be interested to know why those three pictures mean so much to you.”

I didn't like telling him, but I managed to stammer a bit about how the harem upset me, and how I'd tried to paint those women as they ought to have been, only KB didn't let them.

“And what do you make of old Kama Boi himself?” he said.

“I think he's perfectly disgusting,” I said. “If you've made him one of your prefects then I think you're running a very bad school and I'm not going to send my sons to it!”

“Fortunately a remote contingency,” he said with a snickering little laugh—thinking of Ted and Garsford perhaps! Then he asked if he might smoke and lit one of his sickly cigarettes (like an R.C. church) and looked at my sketches of the thing.

“I had not realized the problem,” he said. “Of course I have never seen my tabernacle from the outside. It looks almost transparent when I am in it. I see I must endure the flies for a while, so that you can portray the man himself.”

“Well, it would make it easier,” I said.

He turned to Elongo and rattled away at him in Hausa about clearing the thing away up the bank. Never asked me, of course. Fussy little instructions which I was sure Elongo hadn't understood, but E. pretended he had (Africans always do) and started off. I knew Mr de Lancey wanted a reason for shouting at him for a fool in front of me, so I called after him in Kiti to undo the guy-ropes first.

“Is that Kiti, Mrs Jackland?”

“Yes, I've been learning it, for something to do. Elongo's Hausa isn't very good, nor's mine, so we talk in Kiti.”

“That's rather enterprising of you. I'm told it is far from straightforward, even by the standards of native languages.”

Suddenly, then, out of nowhere, I knew this was what I'd been waiting for! That's what I mean about pretending to be good. It wouldn't have been any use me nagging at Ted or … I don't know what else I could have done. I mean even when Mr de Lancey turned up I couldn't possibly have told him, straight out like that, and he couldn't have listened, either. So I just said to myself it was all none of my business and I was a loyal little wife and so on. Now, though, when the chance came, I
had
to take it. It was almost as tho' something outside me, something much stronger than me, was telling me what to do! I was still v. careful, tho'. I had to make it seem like an accident.

“Oh, it's a pig!” I said. “All those tones! I'm getting quite good at household things and fairy-stories and so on, but … for instance, when we were at Tefuga some women came to me with an extraordinary story about someone burning a village and killing the men and selling the others as slaves because they couldn't pay their taxes, I think …”

“Really?”

“Well, it was something like that but the woman was talking in whispers because she was frightened of letting Zarafio's spearmen know she was there …”

“You told your husband about this, of course.”

“Oh, yes. He said it was all to do with a Tuareg raid in 1917.”

“That certainly occurred.”

“Well, you see, that's what I mean about Kiti being difficult to understand. I actually asked the woman when it happened and she said two rains ago. I'm almost sure. I couldn't ask her a lot, with the spearmen so close.”

“You imply that they were there to prevent you talking to the women.”

“Oh, yes. You see, Zarafio didn't want me coming on tour at all so he tried to make things as difficult as possible. He tried to pretend it was because he was a strict Mohammedan, and when I started doctoring the wives and children and practising my Kiti he kicked up a fuss.”

“What utter impertinence.”

“Yes, but you see … well, it was a bit tricky for Ted. Suppose Zarafio had complained to Kaduna, you never know what Kaduna will do, do you? They always take both sides. They might have said Zarafio was in the wrong but I'd better not go on tour next time, anyway. We didn't want that at all.”

“It was still utter impertinence.”

“Well …”

“You think it was more than that? That there was some motive in preventing you from communicating directly with this woman?”

“There were three of them, actually. One of the others tried to tell me about something that happened during last rains, a murder, as far as I could make out.”

“There are no murders in Kiti on the files for 1923.”

“That's what Ted said. It's so difficult to know, isn't it? Specially if they won't complain about what's happened to them. I tried to ask the women if anything bad had happened at Tefuga—both these other things were up in the north, I think—and they just slunk away.”