The Setting Sun (40 page)

After lunch in the canteen, we walk the streets. I don’t care how tired I get because I can always sleep on the plane. I want to squeeze the pips from these last few hours. Finding ourselves outside St Xavier’s school where, in Kipling’s novel, Kim was educated, I insist Rajeev poses for a farewell photograph. He seems oddly shy to start with, as though I’ve proposed something indiscreet, but finally agrees. We then catch an auto-rickshaw to the Ballard estate, the model suburb built by the British during World War One on land reclaimed from the newly excavated Alexandra docks. It’s a beautifully regular quarter, spacious and uncluttered after so much of Mumbai, the buildings uniform and in good repair. This would have been the last Bill saw of the city before embarking on his final voyage home. We pause at the war memorial, topped with Georgian gas-lamps and decorated with reliefs of lions. One facet pays homage to the port workers who volunteered for the ill-fated campaign against the German forces in Tanganyika in 1917. I’m delighted by this adventitious link to my childhood. Then it’s a farewell tea at the Britannia café, run by an acquaintance of Rajeev’s.

‘I’m tired,’ he suddenly announces, walrus moustache drooping lugubriously, as we sip tea and eat tiny, over-sweet cakes.

‘Shall we head back?’

‘No, I mean really tired. I’m getting old.’

‘Nonsense, it’s getting up at five in the morning to exercise. No wonder you feel whacked.’

‘Still,’ he smiles, ‘another day closer to retirement. Then I’ll do what you’re doing. Research. I can’t wait. You saw all those boxes in Special Branch?’ He rubs his hands. ‘It’s that – or something on the history of comics.’

I laugh. His mobile goes. Again, the bizarre wait until it rings off and Rajeev texts back. My question can’t be stifled any longer.

‘Rajeev, what’s “raw”? I’ve seen it in the papers,’ I hazard, somewhat ashamed of my dissembling.

‘Roar?’

‘R-A-W.’

He looks at me quizzically. ‘Oh, you mean Research and Analysis Wing,’ he says at last. ‘Something like your MI6.’

Bill was right. Things are often not quite what they seem in India. It all falls into place. This is why Rajeev was able to see the intercepts warning of the Mumbai attacks. And how his ubiquitous contacts were able to dig up so much useful information for me. And his bizarre way with his phone. That day in Elphinstone archives, I couldn’t have fallen on anyone more useful for my quest. I smile at the irony of photographing Rajeev outside St Xavier’s, for the school was Kim’s springboard towards the imperial secret service. But Rajeev looks more like my idea of Kipling’s Lama, with his wise yet unworldly expression.

‘I’d never even have got going on this trip, if it hadn’t been for you. I’d have probably ended up fried on a beach in Goa.’

‘Nonsense, dear man. Wish I could have helped more. It’s been worth it?’

I nod sagely. ‘Can’t believe how much I’ve learned. And what luck I’ve had.’

‘That’s the joy of research, isn’t it? The serendipity. But if you don’t seize your breaks, you’re wasting your time, no? I thought when I first saw you, here’s someone like me, who wants to find things out. I told you once that you’d have made a good detective. Like your father.’

We embrace at Flora Fountain on the old Hornby Road, surrounded by the monumental buildings of the Raj. It seems so long ago that I was making my way to Elphinstone for the
first time. With a strong pang of loss, I watch Rajeev cross the street, shoulders hunched, looking restlessly left and right as he dodges vehicles, until he disappears into the crowds on the pavement opposite. There’s nothing for it but to head back to the hotel and pack. It seems to take only minutes to settle up, make the return drive to the airport and check in. All the while I review what’s happened during the last few weeks. Leaving aside the first two or three years of my life, which are almost devoid of memories, I knew Bill for barely eight or nine years. By coming to India I’ve doubled the extent of my knowledge of his life. It’s a gift I could never have anticipated. And what I’ve discovered hasn’t tarnished my childhood memories. By setting them in motion once again, in a nuanced and complex interaction with a previously unknown Bill, my trip has made them even more precious. To extend J.M. Barrie’s metaphor, December roses can have a richer and more subtle scent than their summer forerunners.

When the engines open to full throttle for take-off, I take a last look out of the window. The lights of the Dharavi slums recede like glow-worms, before they’re hidden behind the terminal building. As we draw abreast of it, I see tiny figures on the roof. They’re armed. The bumpy tarmac drops seamlessly away and soon we’re banking westwards towards the greeny-lilac afterglow of the sunset.

They’re late for the airport. His father’s waiting in the passage, wearing a dark blue Aertex shirt, khaki shorts and white knee-length stockings, hair impeccably Brylcreemed after his shower. But despite the encouraging smiles, his grey eyes are full of concern. The boy swivels one last look round his room, taking in the yellow football in the corner, leather flaking from the thrashing it gets up on the flat roof. There’s a brand-new one waiting for him in England, courtesy of his grandmother in Norfolk. He sees the blistered flip-flops by the bed, the tattered raffia Zulu skirt on the hook, the Dan Dare annuals on the bedside table, Tunney’s lead curled carefully on the windowsill. He’s got everything for the journey, his royal blue and cream BOAC sports bag with Rider Haggard’s
Nada the Lily,
his sandwiches and the short-sleeved Fair Isle sweater, like his father’s, which his mother knitted for the night-flight and the cool days of an English spring
.

He feels for his Airfix box, checking it’s protected by the pullover. It contains the Lancaster bomber which he wheedled as a final farewell present. 18s/6d, it says on the front, but they paid forty East African shillings. He feels a little ashamed. But he doesn’t want to be looked down on in the Modelling Club when he arrives at junior school. He feels in his pocket for the English ten-bob note his parents have provided to buy tuck and the Humbrol camouflage paints to decorate the plane. Then he tightens the elephant-hair bangle which Kimwaga’s sent down from Tabora
.

‘He says he’s sorry he can’t come himself,’ his father had announced the previous day, ‘his little girl’s unwell. But he wants you to have this,’ he added, adjusting the bracelet to go over the boy’s wrist. ‘It’s to keep off the evil eye, Kimwaga says.’

As the Land Rover crosses Selander Bridge, the boy stares out to sea. It’s low tide and the muddy creek’s draining fast, scoring crazy channels in the sand as it races reefwards. In the distance, white triangles of dhow sail show against the cloudy ivory and grey of the late afternoon sky. Almost every day now, for the past four weeks, he’s been down on the beach. Even this morning there was one last swim. He hasn’t been able to stop since at last learning how at the Gymkhana Club. He wanted to travel with Dar brine on him, to prolong the connection as long as possible; but his mother insisted the boy shower, or he’d itch all the way to London
.

London. All of a sudden, the enormity sinks in. The boy fiddles furiously with the elephant-hair bangle. Yet he’s been so looking forward so to the East African Airways flight which starts in Dar and calls at Zanzibar before its final destination, Nairobi. There, they’ll change onto the much bigger BOAC plane. Will it still be the Bristol Britannia, the ‘whispering giant’, for the long haul to Europe via Khartoum and Benghazi? Or one of the new VC-10s, more impressive, but which skip some of the stops where desert winds blow? Either way, it means another stamp in his Junior Jet Club logbook, giving him enough for a visit to the pilot’s cabin on his flight home. And there’ll be peppermint creams. Every unaccompanied child has them showered on him by the crew
.

Now, at the last minute, the boy doesn’t want any of it. When will he see the dogs again, and Kimwaga, who’s looking after them back in Tabora during this temporary assignment in Dar, where his father’s the acting chief game warden? He yearns for his minder’s encouraging smile and woodsmoke smell. Will Kimwaga be willing to move with them to Addis Ababa, in eighteen months’ time? What about all his friends from St Michael’s, some of whom live here in the capital? In his suitcase is the paper napkin they all signed, offering their good wishes, that last night in the refectory. Even beastly Brother Rayner gave him a pat on the head. A handful of his comrades has already left for England and others will be going in the autumn, to schools with gritty-sounding names like Stonyhurst and Ratcliffe College
.

‘Make sure you write every Sunday, won’t you,’ his father smiles uncertainly, ‘and we’ll write every week as well. We’ll keep you up to speed with all the news about Kimwaga’s baby. And Tunney and Dempsey. You’ll have Ames if you feel homesick. Barney’s in Cambridge and he’ll take you out from time to time for a slap-up tea. He’s getting a big red sports car now, a 1935 MG. Much more stylish than a DKW.’

And there’s more advice on how to conduct himself in his early days at an English school. There’ll be one other pupil joining this summer term, his mother’s found out, so he won’t be the only new boy
.

‘You’ll soon be pals,’ his father reassures him
.

And his family? When will he see them again? The summer term only lasts a couple of months, and then he’ll spend the early part of the holidays with his grandparents in Cornwall before coming home in August. Cornwall. His heart sinks. He was there the previous year, endless blank days while his grandfather smoked cigarettes and watched racing all afternoon on the black-and-white television. Nothing like the coffee farm on the edge of the Rift Valley near Mbeya. Walks with his grandmother were the only distraction, but it rained so much that they sometimes couldn’t get out for days, their only visitor the grocer’s boy clunking up the lane from Constantine on his bicycle. Eventually, the boy complained of feeling ill. What else could explain the deadening sense of colourlessness? When his grandmother took him to the doctor, the man fussed and tested and asked question after question. He’d once lived in Kenya and talked fondly of life there. Slowly the boy could feel himself reviving. Eventually the doctor turned to his grandmother
.

‘Madam, the problem’s simple. The boy’s not ill. He’s bored. Very, very bored.’

And that was how he discovered boredom. Cornwall, boredom, horse racing. Horse racing, boredom, Cornwall. Forever associated now. He prays school will be different
.

August. It seems – what’s that word his old headmaster Father McCarthy loves? – aeons away. He can barely remember the previous one, so packed are the days out here. The boy feels his lip’s betraying wobble. But he mustn’t cry. Shaka didn’t blub when he was exiled. But why didn’t he ask to carry on at St Michael’s until he was thirteen? Why was he so keen to take the entrance exams early? It’s the weight of expectation, he senses that dimly. He has to be as good as the brothers who’ve preceded him. If only he hadn’t gone along with it. Then there’d be more trips, like the one to the Ugalla River, fishing holidays in the Southern Highlands, or nights camping in the wide bowl of the Ngorongoro Crater, hyenas howling hungrily nearby
.

On the platform steps behind the wing of the Dakota, the boy turns back. He’s not far below the level of his parents, who stand with other well-wishers on the flat roof of the tiny airport building. It’s only fifty yards but he knows the chasm can’t be bridged. Too late to go back and melt one last time into the cuddles he’s just received, enjoy the whispers of encouragement from his mother, his father tousling his head, saying he expects 100 runs before the end of May. He has one arm now round his wife’s waist. She’s wearing a busy floral print dress and scrunches her habitual tissue in one hand. For once the boy doesn’t mind. His younger brother’s making faces, screwing his nose up, half-mocking, half-comradely
.

The world turns watery as the steward calls him into the cabin, the interior hot and sticky despite the ceiling fans, gyrating elliptically. His canvas bucket seat is on the same side as the terminal. Unfortunately, there’s a large man next to the window. He, too, must have people on the rooftop, because he keeps leaning forward and blocking the view, fatty folds of neck bunching as he twists his crew-cut head. The boy catches glimpses of his family but despite his frantic waving, they can’t seem to tell where he is. For a moment the clouds part and the sunset seems to be sucked into his father’s pupils, like the orange-red blur of a Polaroid flash. He raises a hand to shield his eyes against the glare and they disappear in shadow
.