The Old Drift Page 14

  ‘Yes, you never know,’ Sir Stewart laughed, his monocle blank in the firelight. ‘African politics is a risky business. Do not sleep too deeply, my dear friends. They may just slit your throat in the night.’

  * * *

  ‘I should have known,’ Ronald fumed. He and Agnes were lying in her bed. It had irked him to have to sneak into her room. It wasn’t hard to find – he knew the corridors of this manor like the lines of his palm – but he’d had to traverse too many of them to reach her. His own room was alarmingly close to the servants’ quarters, where the bowing and scraping muntus lived, with their hats like upside-down buckets and their shirts like folded serviettes, those dogs standing on their hind legs, those fools who waited in a line every night for their measly glass of port. It was all so excruciating. When he thought of what Sir Stewart had said at the end of the evening in front of that racist muzungu and that jabbering muntu – ‘Tell us about this charming patron of yours. Agnes?’ – Ronald felt the humiliation might swallow him whole.

  ‘Why do they say we can’t marry here?’ Agnes warbled tearily.

  ‘Of course we can,’ he grumbled. ‘Not officially, no. But that is just a matter of time.’

  ‘It was – awful – Ronnie,’ she said, the words coming out in wet bursts. ‘The girl – Miss Higgins – I thought – we might – be friends. But then—’

  ‘We will find other friends, darling. We do not need these…these hypocrites!’

  ‘But why did you say you were my protégé? Are you ashamed of us?’

  ‘Never!’ he said angrily. ‘I told you. I wrote Sir Stewart a letter announcing our engagement. They were expecting our arrival today, so my letter must have come. Bloody Henry Mulenga! He’s the one who receives the mail now and reads it to the old man. He’s become very free with his position. He must have changed my words! It’s plagiarism!’

  ‘Libel,’ she corrected miserably.

  ‘I should have known,’ he said again. ‘Ba Golo speaks with two tongues.’

  ‘But you said he was a kind man. You said—’

  ‘Kind? Ha!’

  Now he told her the other reason the workers had given Sir Stewart the nickname Chipembele, The Rhino – how often Ronald himself had seen the bwana marching around the estate, shouting furiously, beating the workers with his big black stick, choking them. In the old days, he had even smashed their heads against trees. Chipembele abutabele abamkombo mkwa, they called him. The rhinoceros who comes and destroys everything when you’re away hunting.

  ‘He seemed so forward-thinking,’ she murmured.

  ‘Do you not see how we were given separate rooms? Like a colour bar? We are not welcome here.’

  ‘But Ronnie, where will we go? If marriage isn’t legal, then we’re not safe here either.’

  ‘We will go to Lusaka. I have people there.’

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘Aggie. You are my family now.’

  He ran his fingertip over her closed eyelids, purplish and smooth and quivering, like Lake Shiwa on a windless day. He kissed her forehead, then her lips. They made lonely and hushed – and therefore heated – love. Afterward, they fell asleep in her bed, their limbs entwined.

  * * *

  When Ronald woke up the first time that night, his elbow was strung with pins and needles.

  ‘Do you hear it?’ Agnes hissed.

  ‘What?’ he winced, pulling his arm out from underneath her and stretching his fingers.

  ‘Lorna’s violin! In the turret. I think—’

  ‘That’s just the hyenas,’ he mumbled and went back to sleep.

  The second time he woke up, she said her leg was itching. He lit the kerosene lantern and examined her calf under its spooky light. It was covered in pink bumps with white centres like little eyes. He tucked the mosquito net around them more tightly and went back to sleep.

  When he woke up the third time, she was gone. He checked the en suite, but she wasn’t there. The light in the bedroom was the colour of 5 a.m., maybe 6. The morning drums would begin beating soon. He pulled on his sweat-stiff shirt, dust-cuffed trousers and tight dress shoes.

  He opened the door, looked left and right, and raced down the dark corridor, trying not to skid on the flagstones. A rectangle of light glowed before him like a door to heaven – the courtyard. He ran towards it, then he saw Ba George and slowed to a trot. The old butler was wearing a suit, a bow tie squeezing the hanging skin at his neck, and holding a spotty tray. His carriage was painfully erect.

  ‘Mwashibukeni, Ba Lonode.’ Ba George bowed his head fondly.

  ‘Eyamukwayi, bashikulu,’ Ronald panted. ‘Do you know where Miss Agnes is?’

  ‘Mm?’ The old man frowned. ‘Ah, mwebantu, katwishi. I do not know.’

  They walked together a few paces. Ba George asked after Ronald’s parents.

  ‘We have not gone to see them yet, but I will take her to the village soon.’

  ‘That is very good,’ Ba George said in a disapproving tone, as if he suspected that Ronald would do no such thing. Ronald smiled stiffly, eager to leave the conversation.

  ‘Ah, look!’ Ba George pointed. ‘There is your Missus Aganess.’

  Ronald was so relieved that he didn’t even hear Ba George’s ‘your’, the butler’s kind acknowledgment. But he felt it – that Agnes belonged to him – as he looked out into the old courtyard.

  It was a ruin: riven pavestones, piles of broken rocks, ancient hydrangeas clinging together in cracked pots. Barefoot, in her paisley dress, Agnes was standing in front of the birdbath, which was a statue of a woman, head tilted, one knee bent, the hem of her robes curled upward to form the basin. There wasn’t much water inside, and what was there was bluegreen with mildew.

  Some tiny creature had decided, nevertheless, that it was sufficient to its needs. It fluttered in the water, strumming up and settling down, sending a spray into the air as fine as the mists of Surrey. Agnes’s face was carved in a look of concentration, her hands raised as if holding a small bowl up to the statue. It took Ronald a moment to understand that she was cupping the air around the winged creature, touching its motions, reading its splashing since she could not see it.

  The sun rose an inch and cleared the horizon, sending a ray into the courtyard that touched the droplets that had collected on her forearms, making a flashing rash in her skin. Argus. Ronald remembered it from one of Carolyn’s mythology books. A monster covered with eyes.

  ‘Did you see that?’ He turned to Ba George. The old butler was frowning and peering at the woman in the courtyard. He slowly nodded his head. But when Ronald looked back at Agnes, the light had shifted, or she had. The eyes in her skin were closed. Agnes brought her cupped hands together and the flurry above the birdbath ceased.

  Ronald walked across the flagstones and touched her shoulder gently. Agnes turned to him and cracked her hands open slightly. ‘I think it’s a butterfly.’

  He looked inside. It was not a butterfly but a dragonfly – no, a pair of dragonflies, locked in sexual congress, their iridescent wings still spinning in the pink cage of her fingers.

  1964

  Agnes woke with a start. Something was gripping her ankle – a cold, wet hand. She shook her leg free and turned on her side. She had been dreaming of a forest of blueblack trees – the ones at Shiwa? Lurking in the hollows of their roots was a crouched presence, a hand reaching through the dark. The stretching tendons. The grip. Agnes shivered and patted for the other pillow. Ronald was gone – already at work probably. What time was it? She heard doves cooing and a scratching sound, moving in mesmeric loops. She stretched out her leg and there it was again – a hand closing around her ankle. She sat up.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she whispered.

  The scratching sound ceased. ‘Mwauka bwanji, Madamu?’

  ‘Grace?’ Agnes smelled the girl’s familiar odour now – Str
ike soap and Sun Beam polish and beefy sweat. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘Me, am just creening, Madamu.’

  ‘Ka-leaning,’ Agnes said irritably and collapsed back onto her side.

  Grace’s English irked Agnes to no end. The girl called the kitchen the chicken and sometimes forced Agnes to get up so that she could wash the shittybeds, which Ronald had explained was the local word for bedsheets.

  ‘Do you think your fixation on the girl’s pronunciation is a latent sign of coroniarism?’ he had deadpanned.

  When Agnes got the joke, she was mortified. Just because she was British and had moved to Africa – to be with him, mind you! – that did not make her a colonialist. She was nothing like Grandpa Percy, who, yes, had occasionally said things about the ‘lower races’, and used uncouth words like ‘nigger’ and ‘Kaffir’, and treated his time in Africa as a sort of jolly jaunt.

  ‘Am velly solly for creening, Madamu,’ Grace said now. ‘But it is late. Past twove o’crock. The peepo are coming for the patty pa aftanooni. Bwana says I must shine the floze—’

  ‘Why?! Why must you perpetually shine the floors? They’re already a bloody hazard!’

  Agnes did not appreciate such tokens of luxury as reflective and hygienic floors. She had wet her socks. She had slipped. It was easier to blame the maid than face her true terror of hurting herself in this unfamiliar place. Agnes had already gathered posies of bruises on her legs and arms, not just from stumbling over furniture but also from tripping over Grace herself, who was always underfoot, creening things. Once, Agnes had walked straight into the girl, standing fully upright in a doorway.

  ‘Waiting!’ Agnes complained. ‘For me to crash into her! She’s up to something.’

  ‘She is up to nothing,’ Ronald snorted. ‘This house is never properly clean.’

  ‘Then fire her!’

  Ronald did not. Grace came with the house, which came with his job. He was on the planning committee for the country’s first national university, a highly prestigious position. He had taken on the assignment with energy and aplomb, as a member of the elite in Lusaka, the capital.

  Life here had been a rather more difficult adjustment for Mrs Agnes Banda, however. There was so much to adjust to. The extra oil in the food, the dearth of salt. The shower that was either freezing cold or blazing hot but never comfortably warm. (Ronald had laughed: ‘How is a woman familiar with English weather baffled by this?’) The nighttime racket was unbearable. Dogs accusing each other across town. Mosquitoes dive-bombing her ears. A demented rooster that couldn’t distinguish sunlight from street light and announced the dawn every hour to cover its bets. (‘Don’t worry,’ Ronald had said, ‘that chicken will get eaten or that light will get broken.’)

  Easy enough for him to say. He always slept right through the nightly cacophony, while Agnes lay there, vibrating with pique. This upended their balance: he woke a few hours after she had finally dozed off, parallel universes staggered by twelve hours. She often slept late into the day, getting up in time to join him for one of Mr Sakala’s elaborate lunches – crumbling chicken fricassee or ersatz beef Wellington, bland and congealing. Marriage, career, Africa itself – something had exposed the many ways they were at odds. Alone and aggrieved, at home all day, Agnes often caught herself berating the workers, ranting over trivialities. A princess shouting at the pea under the mattress.

  ‘This is not the time to creen the bedroom,’ she hissed at Grace now. ‘I’m sleeping.’

  The words deflated like punctured balloons as they left her lips. I’m sleeping: what a self-defeating thing to say. Grace did not reply but the scratching sound started up again, just slightly softer. Agnes sighed and reached out from under the covers to turn on the radio beside the bed.

  ‘Lusaka calling,’ the broadcaster purred. He announced a radio play about wamunyama, the local word for vampires. Then came the world news, which was mostly about the prospect of a second Clay vs Liston fight. A dulcet voice advertising Palmolive. Satchmo growling like a pleased honeybear. Cutting through his song came a yawning sound – the front door opening.

  Grace stopped polishing. Her bare feet pittered across the floor. She cracked the bedroom door. The two women listened to the voices knocking about the walls of the house. Agnes identified Ronald’s tenor, a man’s wheezing voice, and the kind of laugh that belonged to a big woman.

  ‘Madamu, they are hee-ya. You must get up now.’

  Agnes dragged herself vertical. Her toes fumbled under the bed, seeking her slippers. Grace snatched her to her feet and pulled her away from the bed.

  ‘No, Madamu, you must be looking nice!’

  They stepped over to the wardrobe together and Agnes rifled among the hanging clothes for a decent skirt and shirt. She changed into them and accepted Grace’s adjustments.

  ‘Iye, Madamu, but this ka blouse is small-small. Too much nshima!’

  ‘What? Oh, yes, well. I didn’t eat lunch today at least,’ said Agnes, diving into the jumble at the bottom of the wardrobe, feeling for the mules with the block heel and the bow over the toes. She sat on the bed so Grace could strap them onto her feet with fingers still sticky from floor polish. Grace was perfunctory with Agnes’s body and matter-of-fact about her blindness. In this sense, at least, she was preferable to Mr Sakala, who served Agnes’s meals cut into child-sized bites and never failed to remind her that his wife was praying for the return of her sight.

  ‘Do not forget the ling, Madamu,’ said Grace, placing the cold band in Agnes’s palm.

  The Marriage Ordinance had finally been changed to allow Africans to marry, which meant that Agnes could marry her African, Ronald. They hadn’t bothered with a church ceremony, but he had brought home a licence and a ring – copper with a malachite stone, he’d said.

  Agnes slid it on and stood. Her heart sank. Talking to Grace was one thing. Talking to Ronald’s sophisticated friends was another. There would be no hiding behind her Englishness.

  ‘Come with me?’ she begged, reaching for Grace’s hand.

  Grace squeezed it peremptorily and let it drop. ‘Ah no, Madamu, you must go, you.’

  * * *

  Agnes felt her way out of the bedroom, Grace’s scorn – or was it pity? – washing up her back. She moved slowly towards the sitting room, her hand slipping from the wall every so often to adjust her skirt. When she reached the corner, she paused, nerves twinkling in her stomach. How absurd it was! This trial of being a wife to a man. The flat pat of Ronald’s step approached.

  ‘Darling.’ He kissed her cheek. He took her elbow and escorted her into the sitting room.

  ‘This young man is Rick,’ he said, directing her attention to the right.

  ‘How d’you do?’ Agnes reached for the proffered hand and tried to curtsy the Zambian way Ronald had taught her – her left hand cupping her right elbow, both knees bending a little.

  ‘No, no,’ came a British voice. ‘We’re equals here! None of this grovelling business.’

  ‘And this is Phil, my colleague,’ Ronald redirected her attention to the left. Feeling admonished, Agnes reached out and shook this hand firmly, no curtsying this time.

  ‘Hm? Ronald,’ said Phil. ‘Is this woman of yours a chair that her legs do not bend?’

  ‘Philemon is correct,’ came a booming voice. This was apparently Mercy, the big woman Agnes had heard from the bedroom. ‘She must show rispect. She must even go bare-chested to the parents!’

  ‘And last but not least is Sue,’ said Ronald.

  ‘My name is Masuzio,’ a lovely contralto voice objected in a singsong.

  ‘Ah! Imwe!’ Ronald exclaimed. ‘We have become Africanised?’

  ‘Why should I use a nickname? Just because the British cannot pronounce my name?’

  Agnes swallowed. ‘So nice to meet you,’ she said, ‘Mazoozio.’

  ‘Good effort!�
�� Masuzio laughed. ‘Top marks.’

  Agnes sat, trying to keep track of the names attached to the four voices: Phil and Mercy, Rick and Sue – no, Masuzio. They were all African except for Rick, a British researcher. Ronald had told her last night how Rick and Masuzio had met. Masuzio, fresh out of secondary school, had been leaning against a wall at the boma in Chinsali, wearing a miniskirt. Rick had been riding his bicycle through town, wearing shorts. They had both looked at each other and thought: Nice legs! Agnes had been scandalised by this story until Ronald reminded her that he had first seen her in a tennis skirt.

  ‘Cheers!’ he said now, placing a drink in her hand. ‘To Agnes!’

  Agnes smiled bravely and held her glass in front of her, waiting for the clinks to come.

  ‘So,’ Mercy spoke in the loud voice of someone who mistakes blindness for deafness. ‘Did you bare your breasts to your mother-in-law before the wedding?’

  Agnes choked on her gin and tonic.

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud, Mercy,’ Rick muttered.

  Agnes cleared her throat. ‘I haven’t met Ronald’s parents,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  There was an awkward silence. Agnes felt as if she were floating in a chilly sea of sweat.

  ‘Well, when you do,’ said Mercy, ‘and you will, the custom is to take off your shirt—’

  ‘Must we perpetuate these primitivities?’ Masuzio cut in.

  ‘Ah, you, Sue!’ Mercy groused. ‘To bare the breasts is not primitive. It is even political! Mama Chikamoneka bared her breasts to the colonial secretary and she is a heroine!’

  Agnes had heard about this on the radio. In 1960, the British colonial secretary, Ian Macleod, had flown in for a state visit and found a crowd of protestors at the airport, carrying signs that said things like THE DAYS OF MISRULE ARE NUMBERED and NO ROOM FOR WHITE SETTLERS. Some older women in the protest had stripped to their waists to shame him.