The White Father Read online

  Recalled from their distance by the coldness of the bottle in his hand, Shrieve pondered the nature of a world in which a soft drink could become so powerful a symbol. Originally one of the many such products manufactured in the Deep South of the United States, Free had been taken over by a far-seeing businessman, injected with carbon dioxide and sent out to conquer the world. This it had done in less than twenty-five years. “Feel Free!”, the original American advertising slogan, had become an international password, translating easily into every tongue. Free penetrated the iron curtain, the bamboo curtain, the curtains of Moslem harems. Often the object of outraged fulminations by viniculturists and dentists, Free was non-alcoholic and basically harmless. Indeed a UNESCO survey showed that in no less than six underdeveloped countries Free provided the majority of the population with the greater part of its sugar intake. Bottling plants sprang up all over the globe, an army of eager young publicists made sure that Free enterprise worked. In Bulgaria, wrote a contributor to an Anglo-American monthly, empty bottles of Free were great prestige symbols: people in the poorer quarters of Sofia, he stated, used them as flower-vases, but only on Sundays. In Djakarta and Beirut attempts to ban the drink as immoral were believed to have weakened the respective governments. A left-wing English weekly editorialised bleakly that “The whole concept of Freedom has been tarnished for a generation.” Free love became universally acceptable. Freedom-loving democracies, East and West, could do nothing to stop Free being for all.

  It wasn’t a bad drink, Shrieve considered, and quite good when you were hot and it was cold. Besides, there wasn’t anything else to be had in that part of the world except beer, and since beer was forbidden to the Ngulu, Shrieve felt he had to limit himself, too. He kept beer in the house, but drank it only indoors and alone. There was a story, much laughed over in the capital, that Free hadn’t been doing too well in the colony until the arrival of one of the clever young publicists. He examined the situation for a week, then started, at laughably small expense, a rumour that Free (known locally and even more than usually confusingly as Uhuru) increased the size of male genitals while shrinking those of females. Now there was a bottling plant in the capital, and every other soft drink was out of business. One could still get Rose’s Lime Juice and Schweppes’s Tonic Water in the bars, of course, and there were those who stuck by Kia-Ora, but to all intents and purposes Free had taken over the whole market. The rush of independence through Africa did nothing to slow sales: the name could be faulted nowhere except Angola, where Free was banned. Yet even there it could be bought: a subsidiary of an enormous mining company in Kasai smuggled it across the border in vast quantities and at huge profit. At independence celebrations advertising and political banners became inextricably muddled, and it was said by the more cynical that in one of the ex-French territories there had been riots when the population discovered that free elections had nothing to do with Free.

  Shrieve put down his bottle, a lingam of modest, pale pink glass, described by an irate sociologist as the ideally simple and immoral brand image, and picked up his letters. The first was from his father. Shrieve was fond of his father, who never complained of loneliness or abandonment, though he suffered in fact from both. Thomas Shrieve’s wife had left him when Hugh was eight months old. He was a dull sort, she had told her friends, and you could never imagine anyone having the nerve to call him Tom. He got her down. He had a small private income, enough to live on but not enough to live well—it was a useful excuse not to work, to potter about for a lifetime. He grumbled continually about the rising cost of living, and ignored the fact that his investments showed a corresponding increase.

  His wife had tried to get him to do something, but he was incurably lazy, and when she saw that nothing was to be made of him, that she had made a total misjudgement, she gave up and attached herself to a bustling, energetic man who owned a chain of garages and spoke with a lower-class accent. Mr Shrieve referred to him loftily as “rather a flashy type”, but was sufficiently piqued to draw on unsuspected reserves of meanness and refuse a divorce. Mrs Shrieve changed her name by deed-poll and disappeared from his life. For a time she would enquire through a lawyer about Hugh, but after a few years these enquiries ceased. Her son had no recollection of her at all. Brought up by his father and a series of more or less kindly housekeepers (none of whom stayed very long), he was sent early to preparatory school, and his knowledge of normal family life was confined to occasional visits to the homes of his school friends. He often felt ashamed that he could not return such invitations, for his father always said that the situation was a little difficult, and if Hugh didn’t mind, it would save a lot of embarrassment if his friends didn’t come to stay. Hugh sometimes refused invitations he would have liked to accept because of the difficulty of explaining this to his friends and their puzzled mothers. He became a shy boy, and the shyness was encouraged by his father who fancied himself as an experienced misogynist. Rather a dim man in reality, Mr Shrieve saw himself as vaguely scholarly and believed he had the air of a distinguished recluse, though he spent a lot of time at his club and his reading was limited to war memoirs and detective stories.

  The absence of anything but matronly women in his upbringing led Hugh to a straightforward alarm in the presence of girls. They weren’t, he decided early, a bit like boys in the way they behaved. Nonetheless he developed the normal appetites of a young man, and after his tortured embarrassment with English women he found the Ngulu charmingly unselfconscious and naturally sensuous. He would often compare the women of his tribe with such English women as he met on his visits to the capital, and these critical observations confirmed his opinion that the Ngulu carried themselves better, were warmer in manner, and better looking. They were, certainly, warmer, but men such as Robbins expressed aghastness at the idea that they were beautiful. “You’re going native, Shrieve,” they would say. “Poor old Shrieve. Have another beer.” But he continued to find the long jaws and naked breasts of the tribe more attractive than the powdered décolleté of any number of London débutantes.

  His father’s letter said that the winter had been bad and that his chest had given him a lot of trouble. (Ten pipes a day, Shrieve thought, could not help.) There had been a tremendous row in the Conservative Club about last year’s accounts and the election of a new Treasurer. Several members, given full titles and ranks, had resigned. Mr Shrieve hadn’t resigned himself, though he’d been tempted to do so, because he was one of the oldest members of the Club, and they should set an example to the younger ones. The Club itself had to come before personal feelings. He had had quite a to-do with General Aldous about it. His new housekeeper seemed fairly satisfactory so far, but she didn’t put enough salt in the vegetables. That seemed to be about all the news from Surrey. He must close now, but he hoped his son was having a good time and sent his best wishes.

  Shrieve smiled as he finished the letter. His father wrote every six weeks on thick cream paper. In order not to exceed the air mail weight limit he had to confine himself to a few sheets, and he wrote only on one side of these. Whether this was, as it seemed, a transparently obvious device to avoid writing at greater length Shrieve could not decide, but it was delightfully characteristic and even rather lovable. It would be nice to see the old man again when he went home. They wouldn’t have anything to say to each other, but they would say it with mutual satisfaction.

  The next letter was from Jumbo Maxwell. During the war Shrieve had found himself serving, happily, in a special branch of the Navy devoted to midget submarines. Not all the group had survived, but those who had remained, at least in theory, solemnly sworn to at the end of the war, good friends for life. Of them all, Jumbo had been the least likely to come through unscathed; he was frightened, incompetent, often a genuine menace to the safety of the others. But somehow they had tolerated him, made him their mascot, and saved him time and time again from disaster. It was, perhaps, appropriate that he should now be the most anxious to keep up the spirit of comradeshi
p, for he had benefited from it most at the time. Shrieve did not really care about what had or hadn’t happened to his colleagues; serious life had started after the war was over. But he was amused by Jumbo’s efforts to keep the distant shared experience alive. The clumsiest of good fellows, boisterous, dishonest, misinformed, Jumbo bumbled now round the edges of Shrieve’s mind like an amiable pensioned-off donkey, giving an occasional full-throated bray.

  It was a typical Jumbo letter, full of references to people called Skipper and Jimmy and Blanco whom Shrieve found it hard to recognise. The nicknames were automatic and quite unimportant—all First Lieutenants were called Jimmy, for instance—but Jumbo used them like a secret code, as though they indicated something special about each man. He wrote in a bonhomous, back-slapping style that made Shrieve wince and smile.

  “I see,” the letter ended, “you’re having a spot of pother out there with the black chappies. Mind you don’t give them everything they ask for, they might eat you. And don’t get yourself chopped up or anything, old boy, because we count on you for the next reunion. It should be a jolly good show—good eats and plenty of booze. Last time we all got absolutely plastered drinking healths to you. I was slewed to the gills, and poor old Ludo had to be carried away in a taxi. So come on home, Hugh my boy, let’s see you among us for a change. Break your long vigil over the dark night of Africa or however it goes, and have a booze-up with the boys.”

  He might, too, Shrieve thought. It would be amusing to see the idiotic Jumbo and the rest of them again, to see how they had made out. They’d probably find him a bit of an odd bird now, settled as they were in ordinary English lives. Jumbo had repeatedly told him what they were all up to, but he hadn’t ever been sufficiently interested to remember.

  The last letter was from his aunt Grace, an amiable woman of sixty-two who had a great knot of white hair with which she never seemed satisfied. She was continually taking it down and rearranging it, her hands swooping back and forth across her head, her mouth full of pins through which she chattered incomprehensibly. Her husband had died two years earlier, eighteen months after retiring from a stockbroking firm. He seemed to decide, Aunt Grace had written, that there wasn’t anything left in life that he wanted to do. He had left a considerably larger fortune than anyone expected, and his widow could have lived wherever she liked, but she decided to stay in the small house in Cartersfield to which they had retired. She was happiest when her children and grandchildren came to stay, devoting her time to simple, unexacting charities, such as the relief of unmarried mothers and the visiting of the sick and aged. She did this with something of an old-fashioned air which many of the visited resented, but her sweetness usually won them round in the end. She was, too, a great letter-writer, and Shrieve would regularly receive long accounts of life in and around the small Berkshire town. Since Shrieve had never visited it, the gossip meant nothing to him: but it was always nice to get letters from England.

  As he sat on the veranda reading about how the vicar, who was called Henderson, had been quarrelling again with Mrs Hobson, the Brigadier’s widow, the three children came shrilling up. The eldest, a girl called Dayu, was carrying the baby whom Shrieve had named Thomas, after his grandfather. Unlike Mr Shrieve, though, Thomas was always called Tom. Dayu was ten, and her brother Kwuri seven. Tom was almost the same colour as his half-brother and -sister, but he had fair fuzzy hair where theirs was black. He also had blue eyes, which the Ngulu considered a sign of great good fortune.

  “Where have you been?” said Shrieve, taking the baby on his lap. He knew perfectly well that Amy told them to keep away from the bungalow when the postman came: she felt, no doubt, that their beauty and plumpness would make the Luagabu jealous. He might even try to carry them off. Though the Ngulu had only the barest sense of history, they knew that there were still some secret Ngulu slaves among the Luagabu—children captured in one of the distant raids who had been brought up simply as drudges. It was a fate Shrieve wished to avoid for the rest of the tribe.

  “We were playing with the other children,” said Dayu.

  “Which other children?”

  “The children of the chiefs.”

  The six chiefs held rather strictly to their superior status and their children did not officially play with other children. Amy’s children, since their adoption by Shrieve, counted as the children of chiefs. Quite how Tom was going to fit in, when he started getting around and talking more, was unclear. Babies were considered simply babies until they were five: after that the little class-system began. Since, however, the chiefs were chosen every year and not for life, the system continually broke down. Nonetheless it was something the Ngulu regarded as proper, and the children of newly elected chiefs could always be seen strutting about together for a few days after the election. If their practice did not always come up to their theory, the Ngulu continued to take the theory seriously. Many of their customs were based on an almost platonic notion of how things ought to be done which guided, though never rigidly, their behaviour. As long as you knew what was supposed ideally to happen, they seemed to think, you wouldn’t go too far wrong. Principles were only occasionally invoked.

  Such an occasion was the spring festival. Already, therefore, Dayu had limited her company, and that of her brothers, to their equals. Tom didn’t count as an equal yet, of course, but since Dayu looked after him all the time, he went where she went and had to make do with the company she chose. Shrieve wondered what on earth his son would make of English class distinctions. It was a question which could not be postponed for more than a few years, for Shrieve wanted Tom to have a good education, and no education at all was possible among the Ngulu. There was, it was true, a building known as the school, and the girls and younger boys went there during the mornings. But there was no teacher, the boys didn’t turn up after they were physically able to join the gangs that swooped about the village and the girls spent the time telling each other stories or playing a primitive but recognisable hopscotch. The Ngulu were classified in the capital as “ineducable”, and though they could read and write such simple signs as they used, these were few in number and they showed no interest in adding to them. The chief function of the school was as a crèche for the babies while their mothers got on with their morning work, for the girls took their siblings with them. At eight the children started to help their parents: at twelve they were considered adult. It was no society in which to prepare a boy for the sort of education Shrieve intended for his son.

  “Go and ask your mother for some Free,” he said.

  “Free! Free!” cried Kwuri, dancing round the veranda, then nestling under Shrieve’s right arm. He made round eyes at the baby who sat rather stiffly on his father’s lap, looking about with a disdainful air.

  “Go along, then,” said Shrieve, kissing the top of Tom’s head and passing him back to Dayu. “It’ll soon be suppertime.”

  The children went into the kitchen, Kwuri at speed, Dayu with the stateliness of one who shares the responsibility of motherhood. She wasn’t, in fact, far off it: menstruation usually began at eleven among the Ngulu girls, and they married at thirteen or fourteen.

  Shrieve stood up and stretched. Tomorrow there would be a noisy parade as the hunters set off, the children laughing and shouting beside them for several miles. Tonight there would be solemnly excited meetings to discuss the prospects of the expedition. And now it was evening, the sun casting long shadows across the village street and the women calling in their children from play. Now was the time the cattle would be being watered at the river, half a mile away. The men would be standing up to their knees in the current, washing themselves. The simplicities of life afforded Shrieve a great contentment.

  The distant mountains were fading but still just visible as a deep blue shadow against the still deeper blue of the sky. It was his village, they were his people, he loved them. He helped them, he advised them, he protected them: but what mattered was his love.

  2

  EVERYONE
in the capital was working against time. Independence was expected to begin early the next year, and there was an enormous amount still to be done. The administration was trying to train Africans for the take-over and to cope with double the usual amount of work as well. When men returned home late from their offices they were met by worried wives: with the rapid withering of empire ex-colonial officials were now two a penny in England, and unemployment harassed their dreams. Shrieve was shocked by the desperation in the air.

  Although he approved of the visit to England, Robbins said that it couldn’t have come at a worse moment—he needed every available man to help with what was being bitterly described in the clubs as the winding-up of the estate. No one could be spared to replace Shrieve, but an arrangement was worked out whereby Mackenzie, the officer in charge of the neighbouring Luagabu territory, would visit the Ngulu twice a week.

  “It’ll be like being one of those United Nations observers,” said Mackenzie. “I’ll be fired at by both sides.”

  He was a tall, dark-haired man, with a slight tic in his left cheek. His hand wandered up there when he was conscious of it, massaging his jaw. Where Shrieve loved and cherished, Mackenzie had to tolerate and rule. The Luagabu were often troublesome, and there had been recent outbreaks of violence against white shopkeepers. A Greek general store had been burned, and there had been attempts to blow up all the petrol dumps in the district. For a time martial law had been imposed.