The Old Drift Read online

  The funny thing was, Agnes couldn’t remember the look of black and white any more. When she concentrated on the words, all she felt was a vague sense of contrast, a drama of darkness and light. Why should colour mean so much? Oh, the slings and arrows! Agnes decided to loosen like the strings of a racket, to let the flung orbs get stuck, to grow around them. People would stare. Let them! She wouldn’t see their eyes anyway.

  She thought of Althea Gibson. The black American with the power drives and the gangly reaches, the Negress who had triumphed at Wimbledon even though it had reached 39°C, who had kissed the Queen’s hand and sung jazz at the Astor. That was the future of race relations. Yes, Agnes had always been rather shallow, but as is often the case, this turned out to be rather an advantage when it came to love.

  * * *

  There was no way to climb the thorny wall that sprung up between Agnes and her parents when she told them, however. They didn’t even know about whom she was speaking at first.

  ‘Oh…delightful! An engagement! He…where did…?’ Carolyn sounded flustered.

  ‘Here, of course,’ said Agnes. ‘He’s very kind, as you know. Quite serious. Awfully witty.’

  They were sitting in the conservatory, tea cooling in china cups. Agnes was lying on a bench, feigning a casual posture, a hand propping her head up. On the wrought-iron table, there was a breakfast spread – scones and blackcurrant jam, a jar of rustling cereal, a jug of fresh milk.

  ‘Ahem,’ George cleared his throat. ‘Agnes, darling, did you say you met here?’

  ‘Yes, your visitor, Papa. Here for the holidays? The engineering student.’

  ‘Roland?’ George asked, perplexed.

  ‘Who?’ asked Carolyn. ‘Goodness…not French, is he?’

  ‘Dear God, no!’ Agnes said automatically, then paused. ‘Well, he is…non…British.’ She breathed in the scent of her mother’s perfume and the sugary tea and the roses unwinding from their buds. ‘It is Papa’s visitor,’ she said. ‘But his name is Ronald. And we’re in love.’

  ‘Hmm…hrm?’ George murmured like a record that has stopped but has yet to be turned.

  ‘Technically, you’re from there, too, Mummy. Northern Rhodesia. Lovely place, apparently. Didn’t Grandpa Percy know Ronald’s sponsor, Sir Stewart?’

  ‘Christ!’ Carolyn sputtered. ‘Rhodesia…dear child…You have no…’

  ‘I know you never talk about it – you barely lived there – but Grandpa Percy told me stories when he visited. When I was a girl.’ Agnes smiled. ‘About the hotel and the Italian man they put up on the mantel to sing like a bird and the great waterfall, one of the seven wonders…’

  ‘Victoria Falls, hmm,’ George said distractedly.

  ‘George!’ Carolyn admonished.

  ‘But Papa, you married a schoolteacher!’ Agnes said. ‘You always said love is blind!’

  ‘Not that blind,’ George murmured with an awkward laugh.

  Agnes hung her head, trying not to weep. Her parents’ silence swelled and reddened and seemed to suppurate like a wound. Finally, in a voice Agnes had never heard before – gapless, as if no longer needing to accommodate her husband or as if they now spoke as one – her mother issued their final words on the matter:

  ‘You have disgraced us. Your grandfather would roll in his grave. You had better pray that this Kaffir has not yet laid a finger on you. Because if he has, I promise you, he will hang.’

  1963

  They got on a ship and sailed away. It wasn’t easy. Ronald was largely unfamiliar with British bureaucracy; Agnes could barely manage a meal on her own, much less a voyage to Africa. They found an unlikely ally in Mrs Wainscroft, who was more delighted than dismayed by all the drama. ‘Your dear mother has some nerve, given where she’s come up from!’ she said. Crafty old Crofty knew her business. She helped Agnes withdraw money from the trust that had come into effect two years earlier. She accompanied them on their train to Liverpool and arranged for tickets for the next voyage on the Braemar Castle to Mombasa – Agnes in First Class, Ronald in Third. ‘Common enough to have a Negro porter,’ she said. ‘Just don’t act like you’re equals.’

  For two weeks, Agnes and Ronald travelled in parallel across the Indian Ocean, conversing discreetly, eating separately. When the ship docked in Mombasa, they met as planned at the exit. Ronald bowed slightly, ‘Madam,’ he said, and guided her down the plank and off the ship, his hand lightly grazing her arm and her back. They were both thrumming with joy. It was a relief to be in contact again – they had just reached that stage of love when bodies become mutually addicted. They stood a moment on the bustling dock together, the murmurous rumble of the city before them, the low roar of the sea behind.

  In between the pinkening passengers disembarking, brown boys raced around calling out their services. Ronald whistled for one. Though he was sweating and uncomfortable in his new suit – ordered specially for him at Hogg’s, Sir Stewart’s London tailor – he was glad to have it on. He felt his body relax into the familiar gestures of hierarchy. He pointed, instructing a boy to carry their trunks as he steered Agnes by the elbow through the motley crowd towards the cars cross-hatching the square directly in front of the docks. He secured a Model T Ford taxi and negotiated the price with the driver as the boy loaded their trunks into the boot. He paid the boy in British shillings – docking his tip for his open-mouthed stare at Agnes, whose sweat had drenched her dress transparent – and helped her into the cracked leather interior.

  ‘Old Town,’ he said to the driver, who had taken up the boy’s stare as if they had simply changed shifts. Ronald shut his door with a creaky bang and off they went, slowly navigating the throng.

  After one night here in Mombasa to recover from the long sea crossing, they would take a car to Nairobi and fly to Mpika. Then they would pick up his cousin’s car and drive west to Shiwa Ng’andu, the closest thing to a British estate in all of Northern Rhodesia. There, Agnes could be wined and dined and cocooned in English custom, smoothing her transition into Africa. Ronald also felt obliged to express his gratitude for the bursary he had received from Sir Stewart Gore-Browne to study in England, to express how honoured he was to be one of the great man’s ‘sponsored boys’. In truth, Ronald was keen to stage a prodigal son’s return. His white bride-to-be would be like a trophy on his arm as he mounted the hill of cypress trees and entered through the gates to Shiwa Ng’andu.

  ‘But what is it?’ asked Agnes. ‘I know it’s your family home, but what is the history of this…She-war Nigandoo?’

  During his time at university, Ronald had learned that ‘history’ was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground. This, he knew, was what Agnes would expect to hear. So Ronald skipped the real story: the southern migration of the Bemba tribe from the north in the seventeenth century, the battles with other tribes and the bargains with Arab slave traders that had left only a straggling group of warriors wandering the great plateau with its many lakes, carting around a wooden carving of a crocodile, their chitimukulu’s totem, until one day, in the valley at the base of a circle of rocky hills, they came across a sapphire lake, shiwa, with a dead crocodile, ng’andu, on its shores – a sign that they should settle there. Instead Ronald began the story with a white man, one he knew Agnes would recognise from her Grandpa Percy’s stories.

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘The most famous man who ever lived in Africa? He died there?’

  The driver, so pimply it looked like his cheeks were crammed with seeds, gawked from the rearview mirror. Ronald gave him a look, mentally docked his tip too, and took her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dr Livingstone died near Shiwa, a little bit south. He even wrote down in his diaries that he had received his death sentence there! Be
cause that was where his favourite dog had died.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she said. She paused. ‘What sort of dog?’

  ‘What sort of—?’ He thought. ‘A poodle, I believe.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I had no idea that they had poodles in Africa. It died of…the heat?’

  ‘Chitane? No, he was eaten by a crocodile.’

  Agnes laughed but Ronald was not joking.

  ‘They buried Chitane there,’ he said. ‘You can even hear his barking in the night.’

  ‘How dreadful!’ Agnes looked genuinely distraught, sweat bubbling on her upper lip, streaks of red across her forehead. ‘Wait. If he was eaten, what on earth did they bury?’

  But Ronald had already moved on to the next great white man of Shiwa Ng’andu.

  ‘Sir Stewart Gore-Browne came to Africa in 1911 to trace the borders between the Congo, Tanzania and Rhodesia. He followed the maps and built tall wooden beacons to mark the borders. And after he finished parcelling the land, Gore-Browne travelled deep into…’

  ‘…the heart of darkness,’ Agnes inserted dreamily, bringing him up short.

  ‘Hrm? No!’ Ronald protested. ‘It is not so dark. There is bush, yes. But these hills have some pinkish rocks. And at times the sand, it can be white, like salt. Very bright.’

  ‘Oh, I just meant—’

  ‘Yes, it is true in a way, it was a voyage,’ he remarked. ‘Gore-Browne was tracing the footsteps of Dr Livingstone’s last journey. But he was also looking for land to settle.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why does a man settle? Every man in this world must stake his claim!’

  ‘But why in Africa?’

  Ronald paused. One rumour was that Gore-Browne hadn’t had enough money or clout to make it as a landowner in England, so he had decided, like many men of that generation, to go where pale skin and a small inheritance went a great deal further. Ronald decided to tell Agnes the other rumour.

  ‘They say he was heartbroken. There was a woman. Lorna.’

  ‘Ah,’ Agnes smiled knowingly, in all her twenty-year-old wisdom. ‘I see.’

  ‘At any rate, Shiwa Ng’andu was the most beautiful place Sir Stewart had ever seen. He saw it first at sunrise. There were animals on the shore – zebra, kudu, reedbuck – and the lake was shining. It was a paradise.’

  ‘Hmm, yes,’ Agnes murmured. ‘What’s that poem again?’

  Moved by his own words, Ronald was now caught in a cascade of memories. He had spent his childhood on the shore of that lake, he and his friends dipping their amateur canoes in the water, more concerned about crocodiles and hippos than the view. His adolescence had transformed the castle up on the hill into a second home. He became the lucky student who could roam the dark corridors, pluck books from the shelves, eat fancy dinners served by men twice his age – his own uncle once – and gaze idly through a turret window at the two blues beyond: the sapphire lake under the turquoise sky…The car jolted forward and broke Ronald’s reverie.

  ‘On his first night by the lake, Sir Stewart received a sign. He saw a rhinoceros.’

  ‘Marvellous!’ Agnes crooned. ‘I’ve always loved the look of them. Pyramid on the face.’

  ‘Some people say the spirit of this lake, Ng’andu, it resembles this animal – a smooth dark body and one horn of ivory. But the black rhinoceros, it is very dangerous. Chipembele. It was the first one Sir Stewart had ever seen in Africa. Very big. He shot it—’

  ‘Oh no!’ The pulse in Agnes’s collarbone fluttered.

  ‘—brought him the big horn. That is why we call the old man Chipembele.’ Ronald cleared his throat, declining to mention the other reasons for the nickname.

  ‘Chee-pem-BERRY…Chee-PEM-bellay…’ Agnes was trying to pronounce the word.

  ‘Chipembele,’ he repeated. ‘So, Sir Stewart decided he must build a house above the lake. An English estate. And a place with a dairy, shops, school, tailor, post office, clock tower—’

  ‘Oh!’ Agnes laughed. ‘Like a village!’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he smiled. ‘You see. We both have villages in our countries!’ He squeezed her hand. ‘After the First World War, he came back and bought the 2,300 acres from bee-sack.’

  ‘Berserk?’

  ‘No, bee sack,’ he said, then spelt out the acronym. ‘B-S-A-C. The British South Africa Company. That is who was selling the land at that time.’

  ‘Not the Crown?’

  ‘The Company,’ he said. ‘Cecil Rhodes’s company. Rhodes is the one who bought the land from our chiefs. Many of them did not understand these bargains. They gave away their mineral rights for trifles: blankets and guns mostly. But in the end,’ he shrugged, ‘what can you do? They sold the land to Mr Rhodes. And Mr Rhodes sold the land to Sir Stewart.’

  ‘Hrmp,’ said Agnes – the universal sound for ‘I am satisfied with this story but I still have questions’ – and leaned back in her seat. The taxi was stuck in traffic, surrounded by the running patter of touts and hawkers selling maize, rabbit (live, skinned, pelt), wallets, fruits, cigarettes. Ronald wondered what Agnes would think if she could see these young boys threading around the dusty vehicles, forming a shifting tangle of humans and things. He looked out of his open window at the sights of almost-home: flame trees competing with jacarandas and bougainvillea for beauty. Flashes of brown skin that made him want to jump out and walk among the people, descend into that warm bath of personhood. And the sun! The sun in its constancy, hot and high in the sky, neither anticipated nor avoided. Just there, not even worth discussing.

  When they arrived at their hotel, it turned out that crafty old Crofty had booked them separate rooms. Ronald grudgingly admitted that this was safer. Kenya was a newly independent nation and there was no need, as he told Agnes, ‘to be canarying in the coal mine of racial equality’. He promised he would sneak into her hotel room later. But by the time he had found it, let himself in and crawled under her mosquito net, Agnes was asleep, her tousled head the picture of fluster and flush. For a moment, he thought he saw an eye opening in the middle of her forehead – no, it was just the moon flashing through the parted curtains. He kissed her where the moonlight had flickered and left her to her beauty sleep.

  * * *

  Because Ronald was Agnes’s ‘caretaker’, as he informed the busybodies at the Nairobi aerodrome, brandishing a Wainscroftian letter of confirmation, they could sit next to each other on the flight to Mpika. The rest of the passengers fell into their accustomed segregation, but no one batted an eye when he slid in beside Agnes. She seemed sleepy in the way of a baby who wants to forget the danger it’s in. But Ronald still found the motions of aeroplanes disturbing – like being in a canoe, except you might rock one way and never rock back, and you never see the waves coming. More to distract himself than to amuse her, he regaled Agnes with more Shiwa Ng’andu stories, shouting over the engines’ buzz.

  Ronald Banda had grown up in the staff compound, in a brick house with a chimney, under the shade of the imported blue gum trees. Every day, he went to Timba school, where he was taught English, Latin, maths and agriculture, with selected doses of British ‘culture’: drawing, hymns, a Christmas play for the chapel service. After their lessons, the Shiwa kids were free to roam. They pushed tyres with sticks or kicked patchwork balls made of plastic bags or old rubber. They climbed trees and hunted kalulu and jumped through the spray from the gardeners’ hoses and played field games like tug-of-war and egg-and-spoon. They loitered in the shop to bother the Indian shopkeeper Mr Shem, or in the office to bother the Jewish bookkeeper Ba Fritzi.

  The best times were when they gathered in the welfare centre to watch films. Ba Golo, as they called Gore-Browne, had brought a projector from England in the 1940s. The machine, with its rattling hot glow, had screened boring films at first: English Gardens, The Queen’s Guards. Then the westerns came, with their horses and guns, low-slung voices and
twanging music. The first time a Shiwa audience saw John Wayne die, the women started up a fanfare of mourning like he was a long lost relative. When Wayne came back to life in the very next film, the audience erupted again.

  ‘But why?’ asked Agnes. ‘Were they happy?’

  ‘No!’ Ronald laughed. ‘They said it was cheating!’

  Treats like cinema night were rare. The boys were expected to work. Ronald helped in the lime and orange orchards, the trees like brides with their white flowers and jewels of fruit. He would fetch logs from the woodpile to be fed into the boilers, tip piles of orange blossoms into the big copper vats where they would be pulped into a sludge through which steam would pass. There they would condense, leaving behind their precious, fragrant residue. Essential oils had been Shiwa’s primary source of income until the sadness disease came and killed the citrus trees.

  ‘Sadness disease?’ asked Agnes.

  ‘Yes, a fungus called tristeza,’ said Ronald. ‘Ah, but sometimes I think Shiwa is cursed!’

  The pitch of the aeroplane’s engines changed. The captain announced their descent.

  * * *

  The drive from Mpika to the estate was identical to the ones in Kenya – tediously bumpy – except for the newly paved Great North Road, which felt as smooth as the tarmac in England. Agnes, her head out the passenger window, took in the smells: sunbaked earth, the coppery funk of untempered sweat, a sprig of fruit, the rot of rubbish, woodsmoke, the green smell of green leaves. She tried to match these scents with the images she had of Africa from books: little round huts and little black men and flat trees and elephants and dust. The only thing she could confirm thus far was the dust. And the heat, which was positively melting. It was all terribly exciting, nonetheless. And what bliss to touch Ronald again. Every time their skin brushed, a wave crashed through her, a thrilling crest of anticipation. They would be alone together again soon.