The Human Factor (15 page)

Castle remembered visiting one of those big houses, which had been preserved as a sort of museum, camped in by the manager of all that was left of the ostrich farm. The manager was a little apologetic about the richness and the bad taste. The bathroom was the high spot of the tour – visitors were always taken to the bathroom last of all – a bath like a great white double bed with gold-plated taps, and on the wall a bad copy of an Italian primitive: on the haloes real goldleaf was beginning to peel off.

At the end of dinner Sarah left them, and Muller accepted a glass of port. The bottle had remained untouched since last Christmas – a present from Davis. ‘Seriously though,' Muller said, ‘I wish you would give me a few details about your wife's route to Swaziland. No need to mention names. I know you had some Communist friends – I realize now it was all part of your job. They thought you were a sentimental fellow traveller – just as we did. For example, Carson must have thought you one – poor Carson.'

‘Why poor Carson?'

‘He went too far. He had contacts with the guerrillas. He was a good fellow in his way and a very good advocate. He gave the Security Police a lot of trouble with the pass-laws.'

‘Doesn't he still?'

‘Oh no. He died a year ago in prison.'

‘I hadn't heard.'

Castle went to the sideboard and poured himself yet another double whisky. With plenty of soda the J. & B. looked no stronger than a single.

‘Don't you like this port?' Muller asked. ‘We used to get admirable port from Lourenço Marques. Alas, those days are over.'

‘What did he die of?'

‘Pneumonia,' Muller said. He added, ‘Well, it saved him from a long trial.'

‘I liked Carson,' Castle said.

‘Yes. It's a great pity he always identified Africans with colour. It's the kind of mistake second-generation men make. They refuse to admit a white man can be as good an African as a black. My family for instance arrived in 1700. We were early comers.' He looked at his watch. ‘My God, with you I'm a late stayer. My driver must have been waiting an hour. You'll have to excuse me. I ought to be saying good night.'

Castle said, ‘Perhaps we should talk a little before you go about Uncle Remus.'

‘That can wait for the office,' Muller said.

At the door he turned. He said, ‘I'm really sorry about Carson. If I'd known that you hadn't heard I wouldn't have spoken so abruptly.'

Buller licked the bottom of his trousers with undiscriminating affection. ‘Good dog,' Muller said. ‘Good dog. There's nothing like a dog's fidelity.'

2

At one o'clock in the morning Sarah broke a long silence. ‘You are still awake. Don't pretend. Was it as bad as all that seeing Muller? He was quite polite.'

‘Oh yes. In England he puts on English manners. He adapts very quickly.'

‘Shall I get you a Mogadon?'

‘No. I'll sleep soon. Only – there's something I have to tell you. Carson's dead. In prison.'

‘Did they kill him?'

‘Muller said he died from pneumonia.'

She put her head under the crook of his arm and turned her face into the pillow. He guessed she was crying. He said, ‘I couldn't help remembering tonight the last note I ever had from him. It was waiting at the Embassy when I came back from seeing Muller and Van Donck. “Don't worry about Sarah. Take the first possible plane to L.M. and wait for her at the Polana. She's in safe hands.”'

‘Yes. I remember that note too. I was with him when he wrote it.'

‘I was never able to thank him – except by seven years of silence and . . .'

‘And?'

‘Oh, I don't know what I was going to say.' He repeated what he had told Muller, ‘I liked Carson.'

‘Yes. I trusted him. Much more than I trusted his friends. During that week while you waited for me in Lourenço Marques we had time for a lot of argument. I used to tell him he wasn't a real Communist.'

‘Why? He was a member of the Party. One of the oldest members left in the Transvaal.'

‘Of course. I know that. But there are members and members, aren't there? I told him about Sam even before I told you.'

‘He had a way of drawing people to him.'

‘Most of the Communists I knew – they pushed, they didn't draw.'

‘All the same, Sarah, he was a genuine Communist. He survived Stalin like Roman Catholics survived the Borgias. He made me think better of the Party.'

‘But he never drew you that far, did he?'

‘Oh, there were always some things which stuck in my throat. He used to say I strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. You know I was never a religious man – I left God behind in the school chapel, but there were priests I sometimes met in Africa who made me believe again – for a moment – over a drink. If all priests had been like they were and I had seen them often enough, perhaps I would have swallowed the Resurrection, the Virgin birth, Lazarus, the whole works. I remember one I met twice – I wanted to use him as an agent as I used you, but he wasn't usable. His name was Connolly – or was it O'Connell? He worked in the slums of Soweto. He said to me exactly what Carson said – you strain at a gnat and you swallow . . . For a while I half believed in his God, like I half believed in Carson's. Perhaps I was born to be a half believer. When people talk about Prague and Budapest and how you can't find a human face in Communism I stay silent. Because I've seen – once – the human face. I say to myself that if it hadn't been for Carson Sam would have been born in a prison and you would probably have died in one. One kind of Communism – or Communist – saved you and Sam. I don't have any trust in Marx or Lenin any more than I have in Saint Paul, but haven't I the right to be grateful?'

‘Why do you worry so much about it? No one would say you were wrong to be grateful. I'm grateful too. Gratitude's all right if . . .'

‘If . . .?'

‘I think I was going to say if it doesn't take you too far.'

It was hours before he slept. He lay awake and thought of Carson and Cornelius Muller, of Uncle Remus and Prague. He didn't want to sleep until he was sure from her breathing that Sarah was asleep first. Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on towards the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.

CHAPTER IV

1

O
NCE
a month on his day off Castle was in the habit of taking Sarah and Sam for an excursion into the sandy conifered countryside of East Sussex in order to see his mother. No one ever questioned the necessity of the visit, but Castle doubted whether even his mother enjoyed it, though he had to admit she did all she could to please them – according to her own idea of what their pleasures were. Invariably the same supply of vanilla ice-cream was waiting for Sam in the deep freeze – he preferred chocolate – and though she only lived half a mile from the station, she ordered a taxi to meet them. Castle, who had never wanted a car since he returned to England, had the impression that she regarded him as an unsuccessful and impecunious son, and Sarah once told him how
she
felt – like a black guest at an anti-apartheid garden party too fussed over to be at ease.

A further cause of nervous strain was Buller. Castle had given up arguing that they should leave Buller at home. Sarah was certain that without their protection he would be murdered by masked men, though Castle pointed out that he had been bought to defend them and not to be defended himself. In the long run it proved easier to give way, though his mother profoundly disliked dogs and had a Burmese cat which it was Buller's fixed ambition to destroy. Before they arrived the cat had to be locked in Mrs Castle's bedroom, and her sad fate, deprived of human company, would be hinted at from time to time by his mother during the course of the long day. On one occasion Buller was found spread-eagled outside the bedroom door waiting his chance, breathing heavily like a Shakespearian murderer. Afterwards Mrs Castle wrote a long letter of reproach to Sarah on the subject. Apparently the cat's nerves had suffered for more than a week. She had refused to eat her diet of Friskies and existed only on milk – a kind of hunger strike.

Gloom was apt to descend on all of them as soon as the taxi entered the deep shade of the laurel drive which led to the high-gabled Edwardian house that his father had bought for his retirement because it was near a golf course. (Soon after he had a stroke and was unable to walk even as far as the club house.)

Mrs Castle was invariably standing there on the porch waiting for them, a tall straight figure in an out-dated skirt which showed to advantage her fine ankles, wearing a high collar like Queen Alexandra's which disguised the wrinkles of old age. To hide his despondency Castle would become unnaturally elated and he greeted his mother with an exaggerated hug which she barely returned. She believed that any emotions openly expressed must be false emotions. She had deserved to marry an ambassador or a colonial governor rather than a country doctor.

‘You are looking wonderful, Mother,' Castle said.

‘I'm feeling well for my age.' She was eighty-five. She offered a clean white cheek which smelled of lavender water for Sarah to kiss. ‘I hope Sam is feeling quite well again.'

‘Oh yes, he's never been better.'

‘Out of quarantine?'

‘Of course.'

Reassured, Mrs Castle granted him the privilege of a brief kiss.

‘You'll be starting prep school soon, I suppose, won't you?'

Sam nodded.

‘You'll enjoy having other boys to play with. Where's Buller?'

‘He's gone upstairs looking for Tinker Bell,' Sam said with satisfaction.

After lunch Sarah took Sam into the garden along with Buller so as to leave Castle alone with his mother for a little while. That was the monthly routine. Sarah meant well, but Castle had the impression that his mother was glad when the private interview was over. Invariably there was a long silence between them while Mrs Castle poured out two more unwanted coffees; then she would propose a subject for discussion which Castle knew had been prepared a long time before just to cover this awkward interval.

‘That was a terrible air crash last week,' Mrs Castle said, and she dropped the lump sugar in, one for her, two for him.

‘Yes. It certainly was. Terrible.' He tried to remember which company, where . . . TWA? Calcutta?

‘I couldn't help thinking what would have happened to Sam if you and Sarah had been on board.'

He remembered just in time. ‘But it happened in Bangladesh, Mother. Why on earth should we . . .?'

‘You are in the Foreign Office. They could send you anywhere.'

‘Oh no, they couldn't. I'm chained to my desk in London, Mother. Anyway you know very well we've appointed you as guardian if anything ever happened.'

‘An old woman approaching ninety.'

‘Eighty-five, Mother, surely.'

‘Every week I read of old women killed in bus crashes.'

‘You never go in a bus.'

‘I see no reason why I should make a
principle
of not going in a bus.'

‘If anything should ever happen to you be sure we'll appoint somebody reliable.'

‘It might be too late. One must prepare against simultaneous accidents. And in the case of Sam – well, there are special problems.'

‘I suppose you mean his colour.'

‘You can't make him a Ward in Chancery. Many of those judges – your father always said that – are racialist. And then – has it occurred to you, dear, if we are all dead, there might be people – out there – who might claim him?'

‘Sarah has no parents.'

‘What you leave behind, however small, might be thought quite a fortune – I mean by someone out there. If the deaths are simultaneous, the eldest is judged to have died first, or so I'm told. My money would then be added to yours. Sarah must have
some
relations and they might claim . . .'

‘Mother, aren't you being a bit racialist yourself?'

‘No, dear. I'm not at all racialist, though perhaps I'm old-fashioned and patriotic. Sam is English by birth whatever anyone may say.'

‘I'll think about it, Mother.' That statement was the end of most of their discussions, but it was always well to try a diversion too. ‘I've been wondering, Mother, whether to retire.'

‘They don't give you a very good pension, do they?'

‘I've saved a little. We live very economically.'

‘The more you've saved the more reason for a spare guardian – just in case. I hope I'm as liberal as your father was, but I would hate to see Sam dragged back to South Africa . . .'

‘But you wouldn't see it, Mother, if you were dead.'

‘I'm not so certain of things, dear, as all that. I'm not an
atheist
.'

It was one of their most trying visits and he was only saved by Buller who returned with heavy determination from the garden and lumbered upstairs looking for the imprisoned Tinker Bell.

‘At least,' Mrs Castle said, ‘I hope I will never have to be a guardian for Buller.'

‘I can promise you that, Mother. In the event of a fatal accident in Bangladesh which coincides with a Grandmothers' Union bus crash in Sussex I have left strict directions for Buller to be put away – as painlessly as possible.'