The Last King of Scotland (1998) (23 page)

Perkins said, “Make him like a president should be. Other-wise Britain is finished in Uganda. And that will go for you, too, probably.”

I felt ill suddenly. The smell of Weir’s cigarette was making me queasy and light-headed. He still wasn’t saying anything, but it was as if he was looming in front of me as the other two continued talking in pressing tones.

“How about tranquillizers?” Stone said brightly.

Weir’s drooping face had dilated to twenty times its natural size, it somehow seemed. That was the image in my head as I listened to the cajoling voices of the other two – and when they asked me once more if I’d agree to dope Amin, I didn’t know what to say. In the end I left it open.

P
erkins was right about one thing. Amin really did crack down on the British in Uganda during the next few days. It was almost as if he knew exactly what was going on – as indeed he claimed to. “Be careful,” as Popitlal had said to Merrit and me as he got into the Land Rover all those months ago. “It will be your turn soon. First wahindi, then muzungu.”

Well, it was Merrit’s turn and that of a host of other Brits throughout the country. But not mine. Amin was furious on account of the Douglas-Home speech, and he ordered a series of summary expulsions. Some of the British who stayed were forced to carry him in a litter through the streets as a sign of their devotion, others to kneel in front of him and take an oath of fealty. Perkins lodged a formal protest.

Amid all this, however, I somehow managed to escape attention. I wasn’t expelled, I wasn’t even called to carry the litter. Meanwhile, my duties as presidential physician remained agreeable. Every now and then I was called to treat another of Amin’s children, but it was hardly the kind of work one could call stressful.

“You’re obviously his lordship’s favoured son,” Spiny Merrit said sourly, when he came to see me on his way to the airport.

He looked unwell, thin and drawn – Joyce had gone home a month earlier, I learned – and it was all he could do not to blame me for the fact that the clinic had been run into the ground. Since I left, he said, there had been army raids on the equipment and several of the auxiliaries had disappeared.

“I was the last white there in the end,” he exclaimed. “Ivor went, the Cubans…If you had stayed, it would have helped.”

I said nothing. I felt it was an unreasonable line for him to take, but also that nothing would have been gained from trying to defend myself at that stage.

When I talked to Marina about Merrit going – during our boat trip, several days later – she wasn’t surprised.

“It’s not just him, you know. Bob says we might have to go ourselves if it gets any worse.”

I didn’t mention the conversation at the Embassy. I presumed that she wouldn’t have been told about it, and from the way she talked about her husband and other pieces of Embassy business it seemed I was right.

“Everything is rather strange at the moment,” she said. “We’ve had a bit of a time with Archie Weir. They’ve called him back. Too cosy with Amin, Bob said. I always thought he was odd anyway. Too quiet. I don’t trust people who are too quiet.”

“He’s gone back to London?”

“Scotland. He’s been retired.”

“Why?”

“They – ” she paused for a second, as if wondering whether to take me into her confidence – “say he gave Amin an invasion plan for Tanzania, that he drew up the maps and munitions lists.”

I thought of Weir’s face, inflating above me, and the smell of cigarettes. “Why on earth would he do that?”

She shook her head. “I’ve no idea. None of us do. Look, I really ought not be talking about it. Bob would hit the roof…”

As for the trip itself, initially everything went well, once Marina got over her surprise about it being just me and her.

“I thought we were having a big party,” she said. “I’ve brought far too much to eat.”

I’d hired the boat, and a nine-foot rod, from a boy at one of the villages on the Entebbe peninsula. Marina had brought a cool-box, and a basket full of food. The driver from the Embassy helped her carry them down to the pier, which stretched out between two beds of reed.

While the boat boy fiddled with the engine, we watched the villagers lowering large bundles of split wood into the water. These stained the surface with a milky, poisonous cloud. Fish began to flop up.

As the villagers were splashing about in the shallows, collecting up the dead fish, the boy managed to get the motor going. We pushed off with a flourish, leaving the boy and Marina’s driver at the edge. The driver looked a bit of a thug, I remember thinking – watching us intently as he stood there, legs astride, arms folded.

We were soon chugging happily along. I moved us away from the reeds into deep water, the wake from the propellor rippling out behind. After the rains, the streams were in full spate and the lake was swollen. The current, usually imperceptible, was making its presence known with little shreds of foam on top of the small waves. Overhead, the sky was bright blue.

“Do you think it’s poisonous to humans?” Marina asked, looking back at the bundles of branches.

“I suppose it might be if you drank some of the water there and then. We should have stayed and waited for the kill to end. Apparently they catch hundreds in one go.”

She touched the big, triple-hooked spoon at the end of the rod, which was leant up on the bows.

“It seems a bit easier than doing it this way.”

“But less sporting,” I said.

I moved the handle of the motor a little to the right to take us out of the way of one of the many sandbanks and large, tangled expanses of water hyacinth on the surface of the lake. The boat moved to the left accordingly (it was only a single-cylinder motor but did the job perfectly), and we sped on.

“The hyacinths were introduced by Belgian colonists in Rwanda, Colin – at the hospital – said,” I told her. “He was the one who was going to come with us.”

“Why couldn’t he?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Something on. Anyway, the hyacinths…They stole up the Kagera River, and now they are colonizing like mad. A million plants a year from a single flower, according to Colin. The hydroelectric people are worried it will clog up the whole lake. It’s the same with Nile perch, in fact. We – the British – brought them here in the fifties, and now they’ve eaten up all the smaller fish. So we’ll be doing the world a favour if we catch one.”

“Look,” said Marina, pointing behind me. “Weaver birds.”

I twisted around, making the boat sway slightly. Sure enough, on the far side of the sandbank – which was gliding away from us now, as if it had been shot out of the stern – were the little yellow baskets of woven straw in which they make their nests.

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “It’s funny, when we went up to Murchison Falls, we saw fish-traps, and they were just that shape. Made of cane. You’d think they’d seen the nests and got the shape from them.”

Once we entered a clear patch of water, I cut the motor and reached over for the rod. “Let’s give it a go here,” I said.

Taking care not to snag her, I sent the spoon some twenty yards out over the water.

“That was a good one,” she said.

“Not really,” I said, reeling it in with little bursts. “I used to be able to do it better.”

After a few more casts – and no bites – I suggested that she have a go. I stood behind her, holding her wrist as I showed her how. I felt the heat of our two bodies close together.

“Now reel it in,” I said.

We stood there silently in the swaying boat, under those African clouds touched with pink and red, and the only sound was the clicking of the line coming in and the lapping of the water against the side.

“Maybe I’m doing it wrong,” she said, as the glittering lure suddenly flipped up out of the water.

I caught hold of the dripping line. “You’ve got to be patient. If you want it too much, they won’t take. It’s the unwritten rule of fishing.”

“I don’t think it’s me,” she said, handing back the rod. “You do it.”

I cast out again, really putting my back into it this time. The line shot out, half as much again. But this time, too, nothing bit.

“Let’s move somewhere else,” I said.

“There might be some near that island,” she suggested.

She pointed over to the west, where the outline of some trees and rocks stood up against the horizontal plane of water. I fired up the motor again and set off in that direction. Marina was sat in the stern, the wind moving her hair as she looked out over the water. I wondered what she was thinking.

“What about crocodiles?” she said, turning round.

“I guess there must be some. But you’re more likely to catch bilharzia.”

“That’s the snail thing, isn’t it?” she said. “The one that lays its eggs in you.”

“More or less,” I said, grinning at her. “We could stop here.”

“Castaways,” she said, with an engaging giggle.

The island was partly swallowed up by reeds, but there were a few gaps. I nosed the boat through one, to discover a small sandy beach. I cut the engine and we slid towards it. Then, unsteady in the rocking boat, I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers, Marina laughed at me as I hopped out to tie us up against a tree. As I did so, there was a clatter. We both jumped. A flight of ducks, just like British mallards, rose up out of the reed bed. We watched them fly up, six or seven, scattered at first and then falling into triangle formation. I splashed back towards the boat, my bare feet sinking into the sand.

“I thought the noise of them was a gunshot,” she said. “What’s that over there?”

Where she was pointing, the outline of a vessel was increasing in size as it came towards us. We suddenly heard music.

“Maybe it’s Amin, maybe it’s the Ugandan Navy,” Marina ventured.

I laughed. It was certainly possible. I stood and watched with her, the water cool around my ankles. Eventually the vessel got near enough for us to see that it was a passenger steamer. Low in the water, it had the words MV
Lumumba
printed on the side. There were two decks, all filled with people, some of whom waved at us as they went by. On one of the decks you could just make out the black boxes of two loudspeakers. The music was strong at that point, you could feel the beat of it across the water. But I couldn’t work out the tune, and neither could Marina.

“I can’t place it,” she said.

“Quick,” I said. “You better get out.”

I had noticed the wake of the steamer coming towards us. I pulled the boat right up to the shore so that she could get out without getting wet. I held her hands as she trod carefully over the edge. We stood in the sand, waiting for the wake to hit. As it turned out, it was much smaller than I’d expected, just rocking the boat a little.

Then we got out the picnic stuff and laid it on a grassy patch. After we had eaten – the sandwiches made me think of Amin – we lay side by side on the grass, the hot sun licking the moisture off our brows. At one point an owl, its feathers brown and honey-coloured, settled in the tree above, seemingly oblivious to us. It only stayed for a minute or two, turning its head from side to side like a look-out, before flying off again.

“It must have just been resting,” she said. “On its way across the lake.”

“The owl of Minerva rises after dusk.”

“What?”

“Wisdom is hindsight. The Greeks thought owls were the servants of the goddess of wisdom.”

“They thought everything was like that, didn’t they?” she said, brushing some crumbs off her. “Everything full of magic, everything following a pattern.”

I thought, Lord knows why, that it was a hint. That this was the moment to lean over her, sending a tremor, a wake through the two of us under that hot sun, to put my hand lightly on her stomach, delicate as where the lake’s slate-like layers of green and silver met the sky. Instead, I kissed her tenderly on the arm, just below the sleeve of her summer dress.

She sat up with a start, her shoulder bashing into my nose, and scrambled to her feet.

“What are you up to?” she shouted. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

She brushed frantically at where I had kissed her, as if there was an insect there.

“I…”Istuttered.

“Take me back now,” she said. “Right now. I don’t know what you thought, but it obviously wasn’t what I was thinking. I’m married to the British Ambassador!”

She went towards the boat, getting her dress wet. Sheepishly, I started putting the picnic things back in the basket, before joining her. She was looking out over the water again, her hands clutching her sopping dress, her face pinched like a pair of pliers.

The outboard played up when I tried it, and for a dreadful second I thought we were going to be stranded on the island. Castaways indeed. But on the fifth pull the cord snickered back into the housing at the right tension, and a burst of blue smoke came out.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, after we’d gone a little way. “I got the wrong end of the stick.”

“There is no stick,” she said. “I don’t know what you were thinking of. I don’t know what idea you had of me, but I had a very different idea of you.”

We passed the journey back to the mainland in silence, me looking ahead for the landmark of the village, her staring coldly at the fishing rod lying in the bottom of the boat. I felt vaguely guilty, but not as uncomfortable as perhaps I ought to have been.

∗

Vagueness, a freedom and an evasion. Vagueness, it could be something to do with feathers, or waves. Trying to be exact as I write, the material resisting me, I think about what that word means on days like today – days when the wind moans in the loose pane of the bothy and the seagulls sound like children in the grey, leaping skies.

It is a winter wind, lost in April and venting its frustration on ships and trees. There’s a myth – up here in the north-west – that the island was whipped up in a storm, that it disappeared and landed elsewhere, settling, as one of the tourist brochures rather poetically has it, ‘like a butterfly on the churning waters’.

The poor rowan outside is back in leaf, but it is still bitterly cold. There is some honeysuckle growing round the porch which I am amazed has survived the storms. I myself have been keeping indoors, alternating coffee with whisky late into the nights, breaking off every now and then to watch television. They’ve just shown a programme in which a princess is executed in Saudi Arabia. I imagine Amin, with a big scimitar.