15

The days which followed were days of uncertainty and waiting for all of us – days of activity, of preparation, of stock counted, of ledgers and accounts completed, of timetables made good. I was exhorted daily by Abbot to ensure that all my own accounts and my Company map-making were up to date. He intended presenting to whoever was sent to us as complete a dossier as possible of all our various works, and my maps, he flattered me, would be as clear an indication as any of what we had all, in our separate endeavours, achieved there over the previous months.

He showed me the charts he himself had compiled – charts on which the columns rose and rose in accordance with this lofty purpose. And in an unguarded moment he even confessed to me that he hoped to gain promotion for himself as a consequence of this inspection. I allowed him to indulge himself in this fantasy, allowed him to go on behaving as though he and not Frere were the true focus of the enquiry. In a report I had once read undertaken by the Native Protection Committee – the greatest joke of the age – I had seen the members of a now defunct French Station referred to as the ‘cheating and unscrupulous instruments of rapacious, pitiful and never-ending folly’, and the description had stayed with me. Cornelius had read it, too. He said our native workers and gatherers regarded us as flabby, weak-eyed devils, and said he hoped our investigators did not deem it necessary to ask them what they knew or thought of what had happened. Sanity and desire, he said, quoting, I imagined, from one of his beloved Belgian poets, become breezes and now winds blowing away from us. Abbot, of course, laughed in the face of all this doom-laden rhetoric.

It was only as he left me that Abbot suggested that the person best served by all our efforts over the coming days would be Frere himself, but when I asked him to explain himself he became defensive and said that his observation needed no explanation.

Cornelius gathered together his quartermasters and began a thorough stock-taking of our rubber and other trade goods. I asked him why he bothered, knowing that his records of stock and trading were the most complete of any of us. He told me he was doing it because whoever was sent to visit us and enquire into Frere would also be required to report on how well or how badly things were going here. He looked around us as he spoke. The same had happened before, he said. No opportunity to inspect us and report back would be wasted. And Abbot, for all his other failings, understood this perfectly. He even instructed his native staff to find the Company uniforms with which they had been issued upon their appointments, but which few had worn beyond their first week of work.

As I had anticipated, only Fletcher openly refused to undertake Abbot’s bidding. He had started repairs to the damaged jetty, but this was slow work in the swollen river and the wharf would remain unusable for a long time after our visit. This distressed Abbot the most. He authorized the hiring of more labour, but Fletcher told him there was no more labour to be had, that too many men had returned to their homes and lost crops.

With the jetty out of operation we were losing trade. Boats could no longer be tied up to await unloading, and anchorage in even the calmer channels was precarious. Some vessels approached us, were warned of the delay, and then signalled their intent to continue downriver. We had no fixed contracts with most of these men, and berate them or plead with them as Abbot might, there was nothing he could do to entice them to us.

Two days following this unhappy conversation with Fletcher, Abbot had even greater problems of his own.

The fallen wall of the quarry had never been cleared from where it lay once the workers’ corpses had been retrieved, and following this, as part of an attempt to better drain the swamp of the quarry floor, Abbot had ordered a mound of clay pipes to be carried and restacked beneath the slumped mass. These pipes had already been waiting there three years ago upon my arrival. They were sent originally when that early great expansion was still anticipated, ready to drain the surrounding land for workers’ sheds.

According to Abbot’s own account, there had been thirty thousand of these pipes, each with an inner vitreous glaze, each a yard long, and each designed to fit tightly inside another. He frequently told us how vast an area of land might be drained when the need arose – something he alone still professed to anticipate. The rest of us considered them something of a folly, home to rats and snakes and whatever else stumbled into them.

It took four days to move the pipes, and Abbot inspected each one of them as they were laid in their new resting place. He discarded those that were cracked or broken, surprisingly few considering how long they had been there. It was his intention to lay some of these pipes out on the quarry floor to show our visitors how he intended to better drain it. I had seldom seen him so enthusiastic – one might almost say manic – in his work. A plan all of his own making, dependent on nothing from anyone else but their labour. He even drew his own map of the proposed drainage pattern. And when the floor was drained, he said, then more of the quarry might be opened up for working, and following that the drained land might be used for building.

This was as specific as he was prepared to be, and if any of us saw the obvious flaws in this plan, then we kept our mouths shut. We saw what he was doing and why he was doing it, but none of us, I believe, accepted his argument that our displays and achievements there would have any bearing on what now happened to Frere.

And then, the night after the pipes had been placed ready for their use, there was a further fall in the quarry when the wall adjacent to the recent collapse, weakened by the heavy rain, gave way over an even wider area and fell. The vast majority of the stacked pipes were smashed and buried, and of all those already laid out in lines, over half were covered and the rest shaken out of their neat, promise-filled pattern and scattered.

The fall happened during the night and the first we heard of it was when a party of workers came into the compound at dawn. They went to Abbot’s office and waited in silence for him to appear. Cornelius was the first to arrive, but when he asked them why they were there they refused to tell him, saying that Abbot had warned them to speak to no-one else of his plans. Cornelius knocked on Abbot’s door.

I went with the two men and the workers back to the quarry, where we surveyed the damage from the far rim of the excavation. Men were already digging for the pipes as they had earlier dug for their companions. Upon realizing the full extent of what had happened, of what had been so suddenly snatched from his grasp, Abbot fell to his knees and started to groan in his despair. He asked me over and over what had possessed him to move the pipes after they had stood for so long and so safely in one place.

Cornelius and I saw how little had been truly lost in the fall, and how much unnecessary labour was now likely to be wasted. We told Abbot that the situation was not as bad as he believed, but in response to this he simply stared at us and asked us if we knew how much each one of the pipes had cost, and how much besides they represented.

Water continued to fall from the quarry rim in narrow spouts, silvered where it caught the sun, and feathered to spray before it hit the floor. Men used these falls to shower themselves after their labours. Abbot refused to go down into the workings and confront the disaster any more closely.

Even from that height it was clear to us that few of the pipes survived intact.

Abbot pressed his face into his hands. ‘What will they say?’ he said. ‘What will they say?’ And for the first time since I had known him, I felt a genuine sympathy for the man. My mother had once told me that there was no distinction to be made between cheap dreams and noble dreams in the minds of the men who harboured either.

‘What will they say? What will they say?’

And my father had told me I would encounter a thousand Abbots, and that any man of worth, any decent man, might best be judged by his decency, that he would succeed or fail, live or die by it. I had never fully believed either of them, but looking at Abbot contemplating his own crushed dream beneath him, I came much closer to an understanding of what I had been told.

‘What will they say? What will they say?’

Cornelius and I left him and returned to the Station.