Certain differences of approach have become apparent
David, forewarned of terrible news, had been expecting to meet many things when he let himself into his house; but he had not expected to meet Alexanian, who strode out of the kitchen wearing an apron and swinging a dishcloth, as soon as the front door shut. Alex, coming close, embraced him in a way strangely natural, though it was still most affecting to feel the clasp of his arms, and to hear him say: ‘My friend, my friend!’
David, in sudden fear, asked: ‘What is it, Alex? Has anything–’
‘No, no!’ Alex, deeply moved, reassured him as quickly as he could. ‘Nicole is resting upstairs. But all is well.’
‘And Timmy?’
‘In hospital, of course. I saw him this morning. The verdict is satisfactory progress.’
‘Well, thank God for that!’ David put down his suitcase, and passed his hand across his eyes. The return home, which he had been dreading, was at least accomplished without further terrors. ‘But Alex – what on earth are you doing like that?’
Alexanian looked down at his plastic apron, which bore emblems of kitchenware above the motto ‘Come And Get It!’ and could only have been imported from America, and smiled at last. ‘I am housekeeping, naturally. What else? Ah, you should have tasted my kosher corned beef hash at lunchtime!’
‘You mean, you’re doing everything?’
‘With the help of Martha, yes. I thought it better. I would have brought some servants with me, but – well, suddenly Nicole cannot bear the sight of a black face. You can understand that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ David answered, though it was in fact the most wretched epitaph which could ever have been devised for their long and faithful sojourn in Pharamaul. ‘I’m terribly grateful to you, Alex.’
‘Bitte sehr.’ Alexanian pointed towards the hall table. ‘There is one important letter for you. At least, it looks important. From the Palace.’
‘Then it’s not important.’ But David slit open the ornate, embossed envelope none the less. It was, as he had been expecting, a summons to see the President. The wording was curt, and specified that he was to report immediately on his arrival.
For the first time in his official life, David did nothing at all about it. He was not going to be hurried, or bullied, or pressured, on an evening such as this. Upstairs, he talked for a long time with Nicole, a wan shadow of the wife he had left behind him, so short a while ago, and then with Alex again. He visited his son in hospital, and the sight of the pale, pinched face, and the forearm which was now brought to an obscene halt by a bulging, square-cut bandage, swept him near to tears again.
He comforted Martha, still terrified by a world which had been so cruelly turned upside down. He drank as much as he felt like drinking, which was a good deal. Then he drove out to the Palace – the centre, the mainspring of all this filth and misery.
He was stopped by armed policemen, and his identity checked, three times before he entered the Palace: once at the main gates, once again when he was halfway up the drive, and then on the front doorstep itself. But when at last he was admitted, he found that, inside the great house, all was utterly still, as if the whole Palace were brooding on fate – its own, and that of the hundreds of thousands of people for whom it was the symbol and the sword of power.
Presently the butler returned, treading the marble hallway as if proud of his echoing footfalls; and when David was ushered into the presence, he found that he was to meet President Dinamaula, not in his small private study, but in the huge colonnaded salon where formal meetings and official parties were held.
Though this was an obvious piece of stage management, David was not in the mood to be daunted, and he made the long approach to the President’s desk at his own easy pace. No dictator’s tricks were going to get him down, ever again … Dinamaula was staring at him as he approached, his face set in the same brooding watchfulness as seemed to infect the Palace itself. But close to, his glance was baleful, and it was reflected in his voice as he spoke: ‘You are late. You arrived in Punta Maula more than five hours ago. Why did you not report, as I ordered?’
David stood in front of the desk. He knew that he was not going to be asked to sit down, and the discourtesy confirmed him in his mood. There was nothing more to be lost, on this enemy ground; all was gone already.
‘I had a lot of things to see to.’
‘Then you disobeyed my order deliberately?’
‘I was in no hurry to meet a man who could sanction what was done on the aboura.’
It astonished David to hear his own voice saying such a thing, and clearly it astonished Dinamaula even more. There was quite a long interval before he retorted: ‘I will not allow you to be insolent, whatever mood you are in! You are blaming me, because of your personal troubles.’ His voice, for a moment, held some genuine regret. ‘Do not blame me for your son’s hand. It was done by one of those murderers.’
David, afraid of losing his self-control at this direct reference, answered harshly: ‘I do blame you! You have poisoned this country, so that a good man like my houseboy can go mad, and commit a terrible crime like that. My son is maimed for life. My wife …’ he swallowed the rest of the sentence; he could not allow this stranger to come so near, ‘But don’t call that man a murderer. It’s you who are the murderer, hundreds of times over!’
Yet even as he said it, he was conscious more of sadness than of anger. Was this how it was all to end, with a slanging match and a final burst of temper? Were nearly fifteen years of hope and hard work, real achievement and real heartbreak, now to be distilled down to contempt and disillusion, on both sides?
In his mood of black despair, David might, even then, have tried for something different, some revival of hope, if Dinamaula had not taken up his challenge, with ferocious ill humour.
‘You forget yourself!’ the President snarled at him. ‘It is not for the first time … What you call murder was no more than justice, and if you had been there, instead of fooling about in London – without my permission – you would have known it! Colonel Mboku is in full charge of security, and if he tells me there is a plot against me, beginning with a march on the capital, I don’t question his judgement and I don’t sit back and wait for it to happen. I strike first! I tell him to crush it!’
‘Very convenient,’ David answered. ‘Nothing like a man who can carry out orders. But there will come a time when Mboku will tell himself to crush you.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Haven’t you heard about African colonels? They take over from presidents. I could give you quite a list, but why should I bother? You’ll have to watch Mboku for the rest of your life. It could be a short watch.’
Dinamaula, clearly enraged, stood up. The idea of keeping the Chief Secretary on his feet, like a schoolboy in front of a headmaster, was not working out; the other man stood too tall for that kind of discipline and, in his present mood, was far too unruly for discipline of any kind to have much effect.
‘If that’s the way you feel,’ Dinamaula said, on the same snarling note, ‘why the hell did you come back here? Why didn’t you stay with your precious friends in London, working out how to get Pharamaul back into the Scheduled Territories Office? I’m sure that silly little Welshman would be glad to pay your salary!’
Shorn of its foolish and insulting aspects, this was a question to which David, and Nicole with him, had given hours of thought, and it turned out to be an easy one to answer, even as late as this.
‘Because I still want to stay on here, and help clear up the mess.’
‘Very noble of you, old boy!’ It occurred to David that Dinamaula might well have drunk just as much as himself, with the same sort of effect. ‘Unfortunately for you, fortunately for us, there isn’t any mess, as you call it. The country is back to normal, Colonel Mboku has imposed law and order–’
‘He can’t rule Pharamaul just with guns.’
‘I rule Pharamaul. Colonel Mboku takes care of security on my behalf. And Joseph Kalatosi is entirely competent–’
‘Kalatosi is a thief.’ It was the second time that David had interrupted, and now he pressed home the advantage. ‘You know it, and I know it, and when the time comes to balance the books, everyone else will know it. And that’s really what I’m talking about, not about a bloody-minded policeman shooting up a grandstand full of people because he doesn’t like them. Balancing the books … You took over this country as a going concern, and we were glad to hand it over like that – law and order taken for granted, without bullets, money in the bank, an honest civil service, a police force with a fine man in charge – in charge of fine men. That was the whole idea of our being here. Now it’s all gone, every single thing I’ve mentioned; all the building-up, all the hard work, all running away into the ground with the blood, with the money … Don’t you see, you’ve thrown away a whole century! You’re back where you started, where your grandfather started. He set himself up as a king, he killed off all the opposition, and ruled as a tyrant–’
‘Do not speak of Maula the Great so insultingly!’
‘You know it’s true. And even he didn’t go as far as you have done. He would never have spent or stolen all the money, and then borrowed some more, and kept on spending or stealing that.’
‘I’ve told you before, finance is our own affair. We do not belong to you any longer. Pharamaul is not a farela, a little dog, any more.’
‘It never was.’
‘It was, it was!’ Dinamaula shouted. ‘I was a farela myself. Remember what they used to call me? – the Resident Commissioner’s little dog. And when I tried to do something about it, I was thrown out, exiled. You got me exiled. Well, now it’s my turn.’
David, surprised at last, stared at him. ‘You can’t be serious.’ But he knew that he was. This was what Godbold – the wise, defeated, superannuated man – had told him: that the exile had never been forgiven. He asked the most important question of his life. ‘Is that what went wrong between you and me?’
‘It was the start of it, yes.’
‘But honestly, I don’t understand.’
‘What white man can ever understand Africa?’ Dinamaula answered contemptuously. ‘I will tell you exactly what went wrong, if you like. Certainly the exile was the start of it. Do you expect me to forget that I was kicked out of my homeland, and had to spend five years in a place like Acton?’
‘But you did seem to have forgotten it. Don’t you remember how we talked on Independence Day? At the garden party here? You said’ – the day and the words now seemed so far away that David could hardly recall them without embarrassment – ‘you said to me, “It means a great deal to me that you are staying on. Let us make this a real country.”’
Dinamaula himself was far from embarrassment; the recollection only angered him. ‘At that moment, I probably meant it. The trouble was, you never left the Governor-General’s garden party.’
‘What?’
‘You still saw yourself as the colonial boss in a white helmet. You still tried to keep this country a little offshoot of England. You still tried to tell me what to do. You still tried to stop every new idea I had.’ He mimicked: “It’ll cost too much. You can’t afford it. You’re not ready for it.”’ He went on with his recital of grievance, building up to a pitch of bitter anger. ‘You even tried to stop us joining UN! That was just a bluff, and I called it. We did join UN, and I found out what African independence can really mean, and I did make a real country out of Pharamaul, in spite of you, in spite of idiots like the Urles. Perhaps it really started with something that stupid American senator said, years ago. He was giving me the new-boy lecture – in this very room! He said: “As long as you have people like the Urles and Mr Bracken in your corner, you won’t go far wrong.” Bloody insolence! As if you people were still my managers, my handlers!’
‘It was nothing like that at all. All I wanted was to work out some kind of partnership.’
‘With your lot as the senior partners, forever! Well, thank God you didn’t fool me for long!’
In the ebb and flow of this strange night-time charade, conducted without witnesses, without an audience, on the enormous shadowy stage of what had now come to be called, David remembered, the ‘Throne Room’, there could be no decision, no sort of shape to the scene, no clear view of either the beginning or the end. All they were doing, he realized, was to stand face-to-face and fire off the last of the ammunition, the dross of discontented minds, with Dinamaula still proudly enthroned and himself still walking his lonely tightrope.
The bitterness of his impotence suddenly overwhelmed David; sorrow and despair, rage and alcohol, all swept him onwards, on a great wave of denunciation.
‘Well, you certainly got your wish … You’re in the driver’s seat, and no one else dares say a word to you … You’re having your good time now. They all did, didn’t they – Nkrumah, Sukarno, the Nigerians – they all had a wonderful time, till the bills came in and the whole thing blew up. Kaunda will be next! But God damn it! Those were just joke countries! Ours was going to be different!’
‘It is not “ours”!’ Dinamaula shouted, catching fire from David’s own tone. ‘It is mine!’
David laughed, and he felt – he knew – that it was to be his last laugh in Pharamaul. ‘For how long? Till the bills come in? Till the Russians take up their mortgage? Till Mboku gets drunk and puts a bullet through your skull? Either way, the country will be ruined, because it is yours, because you are like all the others – vain and greedy and corrupt. Africa has been half crucified by you people, and now you’re doing the same thing to Pharamaul. You’re the last of a rotten first crop–’
The furious bellow echoed and re-echoed throughout the vast reaches of the room, setting the vaulted ceiling ringing: ‘Silence! I could order you to be killed for that!’ And then three final, violent words: ‘You are dismissed!’