The plane, a shabby old Dakota, bumped twice in the noonday heat, then settled down on its steady course, due east for Windhoek, and thence for Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia. The navigator, chewing on a sandwich, mumbled into his microphone: ‘Port Victoria Tower – Port Victoria Tower – GAKC airborne – course oh-nine-oh for Windhoek – ETA fifteen hundred hours,’ and then (in defiance of the regulations) switched off his radio. The pilot checked their altitude, set the automatic controls, and sat back in his seat, hands clasped behind his head. Another routine trip, Pharamaul to the mainland, was under way.
But this time it was not quite a routine trip, the pilot mused, glancing briefly downwards and to his left, where the eastern coastline of Pharamaul was already slipping away astern of them. For this was an official charter party, no less, with a secret take-off time and top Government priority; the plane reserved for Dinamaula, and the chap who was bear-leading him back to England. No other passengers allowed, no freight, above all no Pressmen … It must have been an expensive job, to commandeer the whole plane, and throw a dozen fare-paying customers off it. Big deal, the pilot thought sourly: excuse my expense account … But presumably it was worth it, if only to make sure that Dinamaula got away without an uproar.
The pilot glanced behind him, through the open door into the main passenger space. Dinamaula, sitting by himself, was staring out of the nearest window; the man in charge of him also sat alone, across the aisle, reading some papers. Chummy little gathering. The pilot turned his head slightly, to wink at the navigator, and got an answering grin. The same thought had struck them both: that Dinamaula and his official guard weren’t very likely to start chatting away like bosom pals, either now or at any other time on the flight to England. For one of them was being chucked out, and the other was the trigger-man.
Dinamaula had no thoughts, as he stared out of the plane window at Pharamaul’s vanishing coastline, and the cloud-mottled grey surface of the South Atlantic; not even the bitter thoughts of an expatriate, not even the foreboding of a prisoner. This had been his mood for a long time now – a sort of emptiness of spirit and will – and he was carrying his vacuum with him into exile. Nothing had happened to him for many weeks past, while he had lain in his guarded lodgings at Port Victoria; there had been no sort of climax or crisis before he left; even the actual leaving of his homeland had been featureless.
Twenty-four hours later, in London, he was to read in the Daily Thresh that ‘ten thousand loyal tribesmen stamped and wept, as their beloved chief was snatched away like a branded criminal’. But in sober fact no one had seen him off at Port Victoria, since no one save three or four Government House officials had known for certain that he was leaving.
He did not want to look back at Pharamaul; he did not want to feel anything; he did not want to think at all. For him, the last few months had been wholly pointless, and it was right that this moment should match them precisely. He had come to Pharamaul with bright hope, stayed briefly and unhappily, and been ordered to leave. He was numbed, not by pain or grief or anger, but by the abject nothingness that pervaded his spirit.
He was looking down at the blank sea, because it was the thing nearest in view, the only available feature. He did not want to look inwards, anywhere within the plane, because the only feature there was David Bracken, and he did not wish to see any other human being, and David Bracken least of all, because Bracken was the man who held his leash.
David Bracken had many thoughts, almost too many to contain in one brain at one time; perhaps he had all the thoughts which Dinamaula did not have, as well as all his own … Though it had happened a full week ago, the shock of Shebiya was still with him; his dreams at night had a disgusting clarity, his thoughts by day were loathsome and tainted. Indeed, there had been times during the past week when he had been obsessed by a physical revulsion against all black men, so that even the trusted Maula policemen at Gamate, or the ancient servants at Government House, were all lumped together in his mind as murderers, sexual fiends, deadly enemies. The task of acting as ‘Conducting Officer’ to Dinamaula had seemed grotesque and deeply offensive for that very reason, though now that the thing was in train, he simply wanted to discharge it smoothly, without mistakes or complications. But he did not specially want to talk to Dinamaula, lately head of that barbarous tribe.
The immediate past had been full of incident, and of work which came as a relief from thought. The journey down from Shebiya, where Simpson and Crump had been left behind to restore order and separate the true criminals from their hapless followers, had been swift; within half a day David had been back at Gamate – a Gamate sullen but quiet, resting firmly upon a brusque military rule. For now there were soldiers everywhere: standing guard on Government buildings, clamping down on meetings, enforcing strict curfew, patrolling at night – and also shaving in the open air while stripped to the waist, peeling potatoes, brewing tea, and spoiling all the children.
Their red sweating faces and honest, nasal Lancashire accents could now be seen and heard all over Gamate, as homely and reassuring as the police on a Liverpool street corner. On the night of their arrival there had been one minor riot on the aboura ground, swiftly and bloodily quelled, followed by a vast, night-long round-up of prisoners and suspects. After that, there had been nothing but good behaviour, the length and breadth of the town.
In Gamate, also, had been the assembled Press; and to them, David had given the first eye-witness account of what had happened up at Shebiya. He had told his story simply, with nothing left out, allowing the ghastly detail to have its effect; it was as if he were speaking from a raw, bruised memory which was still photographically clear. He did not say ‘I told you so’, nor even infer it; there was no fun in being right, when the cost was Cynthia Ronald and all the others … When he had finished, the questions were few, and markedly subdued.
‘Can we get any photographs?’ asked Clandestine Lebourget. ‘People ought to see this.’
‘I agree with you,’ said David, from his position at the head of the table on the Residency stoep. ‘But they’ve all been buried, and the crosses have been burned. There’s really nothing left to photograph.’
‘Can we go up?’ asked Tulbach Browne.
‘No,’ answered David.
‘Why not?’ asked Axel Hallmarck.
Forsdick, the acting Resident Commissioner, sitting at David’s side, answered for him.
‘The whole Shebiya area has been closed off,’ he said abruptly. ‘Military precaution … We’re not allowing anyone in, till things are back to normal.’
‘That’s pretty high-handed,’ said Tulbach Browne querulously. ‘How do we know–’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ broke in David, in a sudden blind rage. ‘Can’t you leave it alone, even now? The Ronalds and Father Schwemmer have been murdered, in this hideous way. The police are rounding up all the people responsible, and trying to make some sense out of the place. We don’t want anyone or anything to get in the way of that process.’
In the pause that followed, David took a fresh grip on himself. It was beyond doubt that Shebiya must be isolated, until its guilt had been purged and its evil nature disinfected; but, to be absolutely fair, no one who had not seen the things that had happened there could be expected to appreciate their implications … He had said nothing in detail about the execution of Gotwela and Zuva; he carried in his head the wording of Simpson’s official report, the version they had jointly agreed to stick to: ‘Total casualties at the recapture of Shebiya were twenty – four U-Maula dead, including the three ringleaders – Gotwela, Puero, and Zuva.’ Perhaps the true story would all come out one day, perhaps it would simply pass into tribal legend, and be lost to the censorious world … When he had left the village, Shebiya had not been talkative, on that or any other topic.
The voice of Father Hawthorne broke in on his thoughts. The priest, his white cassock tastefully arranged over his knees, was leaning forward, a look of honest perplexity on his face.
‘What I cannot understand,’ he intoned, as if wrestling with a lowbrow devil, ‘is the – er – unfortunate death of Father Schwemmer. That gentle, saintly man …’ He raised his clasped hands; it had always looked wonderful on television. ‘You mean that they actually crucified him?’
‘Yes,’ said David.
‘A deed of madness!’ exclaimed Father Hawthorne. ‘Those poor, misguided children!’
David looked at him. ‘Yes, indeed. Misguided, greedy children.’
‘What do you mean by “greedy”, Mr Bracken?’
‘I should have told you that they ate him as well.’
That had been the end of the Press conference.
Now the navigator walked back, down the aisle of the gently rocking plane.
‘We’re coming down for Windhoek, in South-West,’ he said, speaking impartially to both David Bracken and Dinamaula. ‘We’ve just got to fuel-up – take about ten minutes – and then we’ll push on to Livingstone.’
‘Thank you,’ said David.
‘You can stay on board,’ said the navigator, ‘or have a stroll around on shore, whichever you like.’
For the first time, David looked directly at Dinamaula, and their eyes met.
‘Whichever you like,’ said David, repeating the navigator’s words. There was no change in the passive mask of Dinamaula’s face. He did not care much either way, but he was remembering that Windhoek was virtually South African territory, and recalling his last visit there, when he had been roughly directed to the fly-blown cubbyhole labelled ‘Non-European Lounge’.
‘I would prefer to remain on board,’ he answered, briefly and coldly.
‘All right,’ said David, and nodded to the navigator. ‘We’ll stay where we are.’ He turned away from Dinamaula again, his palms suddenly sweating. To himself, he thought: Bloody-minded bastard – the way you feel about me is nothing to the way I feel about you.
After Windhoek it grew hotter, and the plane bumped and lurched without respite as it weaved its swift way into the heart of Africa. Their course was now north-east, across the seven hundred miles of barren scrub that separated them from Livingstone, where they would catch the London plane. Dinamaula still stared out of his window, preserving alike his silence and his indifference; below him, the grey of the sea had given place to the brown wilderness that was the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert.
There were dried-out watercourses, huge tracts of greenish swamp, stunted bush, dusty pathways leading from one hill to the next, hundreds of miles of ruffled yellow sand – all the arid defeat of nature that made up Northern Bechuanaland. It unrolled below him like an endless scorched ribbon, negative and worthless – a waste-product of Africa. But it was not more empty or more barren than his thoughts.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that David Bracken was reading. He put his hand over his brow, shutting out the sunlight, and tried to sleep.
David Bracken was not reading; he was staring at a piece of paper which he had drawn by chance out of his briefcase, and seeing, beyond the typescript, its meaning in action. The paper was headed: ‘Chief-Designate Dinamaula: Arrangements for Transfer to London.’ It was the bloodless, gutless word ‘transfer’ that had set him remembering again.
The Government Secretariat at Port Victoria had been tremendously busy during the last few days. Page-long telegrams went off to London, and were answered as copiously. Top-secret memoranda were drawn up; law books consulted; police reports correlated; tentative, conditional questions put confidentially to Crump at Shebiya, Forsdick at Gamate, the Army headquarters at Port Victoria, the town council, the headmen of outlying tribes, the two remaining Regents of the Maulas. Out of all these, and a hundred telephone calls, and a dozen inter-office discussions, and the final queries to the Scheduled Territories Office, and the final decisions, had come one single, anticlimactic answer.
On the appointed morning, there were assembled in the Governor’s room, to hear this answer, the Governor himself, Aidan Purves-Brownrigg, David Bracken, a police sub-inspector, and Chief-Designate Dinamaula.
David wished that it might have been a more impressive ceremony, and he continued to wish this, with increasing embarrassment, right to the end. It reminded him of nothing so much as a prefects’ meeting at school, convened to discipline some senior malefactor who secretly terrorized them all … The Governor was ill at ease, and showed it by a fussy briskness of manner; Aidan, who had done most of the work during the last few days, was deadly tired, and lounged back in his chair like an elegant corpse; David was in one of those brand new, involuntary moods when he could not bear the presence of a negro … Only the policeman, who stared at Dinamaula, and Dinamaula, who looked with sullen boredom at the Governor, were normal.
The Governor was not doing well; it was as if, at this season of his life, his fortitude and self-command ebbed and flowed by turns, and this was a time of ebb. He talked round the subject of the current unrest in Gamate for some ten minutes; then suddenly he went off at a tangent, trying to connect Dinamaula directly with the shambles up at Shebiya. The charge could not be made to stick, and he realized it; and it did not matter anyway, for a very good reason which David and all the others knew. But still he pecked away at it, like a bird obsessed by a false, unhatchable egg.
‘We have information,’ said the Governor laboriously, looking down at his papers instead of at Dinamaula, ‘that your cousin Zuva called on you just before he left to go up to Shebiya. Is that so?’
Dinamaula nodded carelessly. ‘Yes.’
‘Ah … Did you give him any instructions?’
Dinamaula’s eyebrows rose fractionally. ‘How could I do that?’
‘Perfectly easily. Because you are his superior – his chief.’
‘That is not so.’
‘Well, the chief-designate, then,’ corrected the Governor testily. ‘I hope we can dispense with quibbling … What exactly did you tell him to do, when he reached Shebiya?’
‘I did not tell him anything. I did not know he was going to Shebiya.’
‘What instructions did you give him?’
‘None.’
‘Or instructions to be relayed to Gotwela?’
‘None.’
‘His call on you, at that particular time, was simply a coincidence, then?’
‘It was a call.’
The Governor sighed, fluttered some papers, tried again. ‘What about the strike, then, here in Port Victoria? That was obviously organized under your direction.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, come now! The ringleaders are known to have called on you, shortly before the strike started.’
‘I do not even know who the ringleaders are.’
‘Are you pretending that this was another coincidence?’
‘I am pretending nothing.’
This was getting them nowhere, thought David irritably; it was merely embarrassing – and the silly part was that they didn’t need to get anywhere, as far as Dinamaula was concerned. He was trussed and bound already; all they needed to do was to pull the trigger. The Governor must have been struck by the same thought at the same moment, for with a suddenness equally unreal he stopped his cross-examination, and embarked straightway upon Act Two – the final one.
‘Be that as it may,’ he said, unexpectedly and nervously, ‘I have come to the conclusion that you are and have been directly connected with serious disturbances in various parts of Pharamaul, that you are a focus of intrigue and indiscipline, and that you cannot remain in this country.’ It was a painful moment; the Governor was not even looking at Dinamaula, but simply reading from a sheet of paper in front of him. The resemblance to that anxious head prefect grew stronger moment by moment. ‘In pursuance, therefore, of the powers legally vested in me–’ the ridiculous phrase rolled off his tongue like a rehearsed line in a stilted play, ‘–you are hereby ordered to leave the Principality of Pharamaul forthwith, and you are not to return save with the express approval of Her Majesty’s Government.’
Like the policeman, David was watching Dinamaula at that moment, and for the very first time he saw a change in the other man’s expression. So far, it had always been guarded, sullen, or indifferent; now for a brief and moving moment, the pain of the wound they were inflicting glowed in his face. There was an instant of absolute, hurt amazement; the mask slipped, showing them all a stricken man. Then Dinamaula said, with difficulty: ‘But my rights as chief? My inheritance?’
‘They are in abeyance,’ said the Governor.
‘For how long?’
‘Indefinitely.’
Behind Dinamaula’s shocked face, David tried to see the dead bodies of Shebiya, the white horror that had been Cynthia Ronald. He saw them, but not clearly; he tried to hate Dinamaula, but his hatred was not pure. Perhaps it was the Governor’s fault – the unimpressive Governor who had started like an amateur inquisitor and ended like a spiteful nanny; perhaps it was the policeman’s – the bovine, bunkered guardian of the law. Perhaps it was Aidan’s – the smooth, weary political executive who had organized the machinery for this rout. Perhaps it was his own fault, because he realized, in spite of his hatred, that there were dappled shades of right and wrong in this matter, and that the only things in black and white were the people concerned.
Perhaps it was Dinamaula’s fault, or his strength, or his cleverness, that he could not be hated unconditionally. This seemed especially true when Dinamaula said, ‘Surely I have a right to appeal against this decision?’
‘You can pursue that in London,’ answered the Governor. ‘However, I can hold out no hope.’
‘But can I never return?’
‘I really have no idea,’ said the Governor, and rose to end the ceremony.
After that, it was simply office routine; and the routine had brought the two of them to this point of time and place, six thousand feet up, two hundred miles from Livingstone, on the crooked pathway to exile in England.
Like all airline pilots, from EL AL of Israel to Pan-American, whose routes took them anywhere near the Victoria Falls, a few miles south of Livingstone, this pilot circled the falls twice, at low altitude, before coming in to land. As David had expected, and indeed had been looking forward to, their plane made a double circuit, its port wing obligingly dipped to give them an uninterrupted view.
The view was the finest in Africa; trees, stray herds of game racing away from the plane’s shadow, lush green vegetation, broad slow-moving water – and then the sudden majestic cleft in the surface of the earth, down which the water plunged in a roaring curtain nearly a mile across. At that season, the water was at a low level, giving them a clear vista of the whole falls, free from the blanket of mist that followed the rainy spell; but still the smoking clouds of spray and spume caught the evening sun, billowing upwards, towering above a gorge deeper than Niagara, wilder than Nature itself.
Before it, ranged in tiers, were other earlier gorges, incredibly old; an ancient framework dried out and disused when Africa itself was young, but still lending to these thunderous waters the awe of vast antiquity.
Both Dinamaula, and David who had moved across the plane to the seat behind him, watched entranced; no matter how many times one had seen this wonder, its massive power and torrential beauty made it freshly irresistible.
Dinamaula looked at the scene with wide eyes, roused at last from his lethargy. David, gazing his fill, was struck by one crystal-clear resolve: that, in spite of everything, he would never leave Africa.
It was after Livingstone that the two of them started to talk.
They started because it suddenly seemed foolish and artificial to do otherwise, and because they were now sitting side by side, in the big, comfortable BOAC plane, and silence at such close quarters was more awkward than speech. Above all, it seemed that silence was wasteful; they might be on opposite sides of a fence – black man and white, discredited chief and official warder – but they could still learn from each other, still lean over that fence and see what lay on the other side … As soon as they were airborne, the pretty blonde stewardess offered them drinks; David had a martini, Dinamaula a whisky and soda. Out of the corner of his eye, David saw Dinamaula’s fingers clasped round the tumbler: he had a sudden vision of the same black hand resting on Cynthia Ronald’s bosom – and then his brain cleared, and he said, to himself but almost aloud, ‘This man did not do that,’ and he turned, and remarked out of the blue: ‘I’d like to talk, unless you want to sleep.’
Dinamaula was not surprised, nor was there any need for elaboration, for he spoke his own thoughts straight away: ‘I don’t expect to sleep … I would like to talk, about anything at all … But I am not happy, and not very friendly.’
David grinned. It was the kind of answer he had hoped for, the kind that – given the necessary guts or pride – he would have wished to produce himself, in the same circumstances. ‘Fair enough. I’ve got one or two reservations myself.’
Dinamaula sipped his drink. The plane droned on, steady as a ship in a calm sea; the blonde stewardess walked up and down the aisle, dispensing a many-phased largesse of alcohol, smiles, and a shapely turn of thigh and bosom.
‘What are your reservations?’ asked Dinamaula presently.
‘Shebiya,’ answered David. There seemed no sense in not going straight to the point. ‘And before that, the riots at Gamate. And some of the things you said about running the country … What are yours?’
Dinamaula brooded, but his face was not sullen; it was simply young and hurt. ‘Being kicked out, at twelve hours’ notice,’ he said briefly. ‘Being treated like a child all the time … Being patronized. Mr Bracken, can you tell me exactly where I went wrong?’
Kampala welcomed them, beautifully sited at the head of Lake Victoria, less beautifully sited on the exact line of the Equator at the height of summer. The night was unbearably hot, smelling of burnt grass and greasy woodsmoke; the small airport building was like an inferno. Inside it, some Americans bought leopardskin slippers and carved wooden antelopes, argued about the prices, changed their minds and thrust their purchases back at the Baganda salesman; a whining, suet-faced English child ran berserk among the coffee tables; a grey nun whispered to another grey nun, eyes downcast, fingers busy with beads. Above the tarmac and the waiting plane, the stars were cool and remote, aloof from the travellers pinioned to the burning earth.
‘You brought it on yourself, and I honestly can’t express it in any other way,’ said David, pursuing his patient argument. The lights in the plane were going out one by one, as the passengers settled down to sleep. ‘I’m not saying that your ideas aren’t good ones, or that they wouldn’t work out, but you tackled the whole thing in the wrong way, right from the beginning.’
‘I only wanted to improve things,’ said Dinamaula, not for the first time. ‘The whole place seemed so out of date – like a museum, a museum of the nineteenth century. I wanted to make it take a step forward.’
‘All right … So do we … But you’ve got to use the existing channels, you’ve got to fit your plans in with what’s going on already. Andrew Macmillan, for example. You should never have got across him, the way you did.’
‘He annoyed me, from the very first day. It was ridiculous, intolerable. He always treated me like a schoolboy.’
‘Quite so. And what you did wrong was not to make allowances for him.’
‘Allowances? Why should I?’
‘Because he was an old-fashioned civil servant, near the end of his career … Don’t forget he was old enough to be your father – almost your grandfather … Of course he was slow, he was schoolmasterish, he tried to discipline you … But on the other hand, he did know the territory from end to end, far better than you did, and he did have its interests at heart. And, you see, once you turned awkward and unco-operative, from his point of view, he had to crack down. We all did.’
‘You seemed to be enjoying it,’ said Dinamaula sourly.
David shook his head. ‘No – no one on our side could enjoy that sort of waste, that sort of destruction.’
Khartoum came, after the long, thousand-mile night haul over the desert and the foothills of Ethiopia. When the moon glinted, it glinted on the River Nile, a mile below them, its banks pricked here and there by nomad fires. At Khartoum, grave men in fezzes served them coffee; the spacious room was peaceful, the service quick and courteous. The blonde hostess bid them goodbye, smiling, saying: ‘This is where I have to hand you over to a brunette … I hope you’re not going to talk all night.’ She knew who Dinamaula was, as did all the crew; BOAC had been alerted some days before. But they had all looked at him with warm and friendly eyes; not like the tall Arabs of Khartoum, who, when they were not serving, stared at Dinamaula the negro with the rich contempt of a purer race.
After Khartoum, the chips were down.
‘I had nothing to do with that horrible thing at Shebiya,’ said Dinamaula. ‘I only had a few vague hints about it from Zuva – nothing definite, nothing to go on. If I had known, of course I would have told you.’
‘We still think it was partly your fault – a chain-reaction from the rest.’
‘I know you do … The strike at Port Victoria was my fault – I thought that was a good idea. And some of the riots at Gamate, too. I wanted to get my own back … But of course the people who did most of the planning at Gamate were the Press.’
‘They were no friends of yours,’ said David, hardly.
‘Perhaps not … It was flattering, though.’
‘There’ll be a lot of that in London, too. I honestly think it would be a mistake to get mixed up with them.’
‘Is that an official warning?’
‘Sort of.’
Cairo, at dawn, smelt like an ancient sewer; the stink hit them instantly, as soon as the plane door was opened and a fat Egyptian official waddled in and began, with rare effrontery, to spray them with disinfectant … But the airport bar on the upper floor was cool, and the view arresting; to the east, the desert dawn was just coming up, streaked with purple and pink and yellow. As they took off again, and rose above the Delta of the Nile, the new sun illumined a thousand streams and a thousand glistening mudbanks; and then suddenly the pure blue of the Mediterranean was the only thing in view.
‘Pharamaul can’t stand still,’ said Dinamaula. ‘No country in Africa can. We both agree on that … But how is Pharamaul going to make any real progress in any direction, if you block new ideas all the time.’
‘We don’t,’ said David.
‘You blocked me.’
‘Only because you wanted to move too fast … But, of course, in the future, it will make progress. It’s bound to, and we all want it to.’
‘I should like to see that get under way … Do you think I ever will?’
‘I hope so.’
‘As chief?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘I’d like to go back one day.’
‘There would have to be all sorts of safeguards.’
‘But even so … Tell them that, if you get the chance. I love that funny little country.’
‘So do I.’
Rome on its seven small hills was elegant, sunlit, and noisy – noisy with planes taking off, turbo jets screaming as they warmed up, motor scooters weaving to and fro across the tarmac, Italian carabinieri and officials demonstrating their manhood and their influence at the tops of their voices. The little shops and boutiques were full of bright clothing, good-looking leather goods, jewellery, silk scarves. When the two of them sat on the terrace, waiting for their flight to be called, the morning air was magical.
‘Only a few more hours,’ said David, watching without guile a ravishing Air France hostess perched on the back of a Vespa motor-scooter, her legs as smooth and as tantalizing as her parted lips. ‘Aren’t you tired?’
Dinamaula smiled. ‘Not at all … After all, we’ve only been talking for twenty-six hours … You should belong to my tribe, Mr Bracken. This would just be a preliminary chat.’
High above the Alps, level with the crest of Mont Blanc gleaming like a snowy sheath on their left hand, Dinamaula suddenly said: ‘Of course, there never was an actual girl.’
‘Girl?’ repeated David, who had been watching the white encrusted hills and the wreaths of mist below.
‘A white girl. The one I was supposed to be going to marry.’
David turned, surprised at last. ‘Why on earth didn’t you say so, then?’
‘I told you – Macmillan annoyed me … And also, I wanted to reserve my right to marry anyone I chose, black or white, if I wanted to. Why shouldn’t I? There’s no law against it.’
‘But there’s a tremendously strong custom. A mixed marriage would have split the tribe.’
‘They would have come round to it. They did come round to it.’
‘But it wouldn’t have been a good idea, anyway. That’s not the future pattern of Pharamaul.’
‘Perhaps not. But don’t you see? – I wanted to feel free – free to rule, free to marry, free to ignore nagging and criticism. After all, I was the chief. That is what a chief should be.’
‘You really should have told us that there wasn’t an actual girl.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’
London Airport was almost fogged in, with a cloud base at a mere five hundred feet; when they dropped through it, bumping and side-slipping, the thousands of wet-roofed houses, the thousands of streets, the sheer sprawling mass of the city took them by surprise. Could they really be poised in flight above eight million people? … It would be raining in Whitehall, thought David; the murky gloom of the Scheduled Territories Office would be murkier still. He longed for Pharamaul, and dry sunshine, and his known friends, and Nicole.
Zipping up his overnight bag as they joined the disembarking queue in the aisle, he remarked idly: ‘I shall be getting married when I go back to Port Victoria.’
Dinamaula asked, in a voice totally expressionless: ‘Are you going to marry a white girl?’ and they both suddenly burst out laughing.
They were both still laughing when they got off the plane, to be met at the barrier by a surging mob of Pressmen and photographers, hundreds of onlookers, and a deputation from the League for the Advancement of Coloured People, bearing dripping banners which proclaimed: ‘WELCOME DINAMAULA, VICTIM AND DUPE OF COLONIALISM!’ They were all held in check by a single policeman, who murmured: ‘Spectators behind the white line, please.’
‘Dinamaula was smiling bravely through his misery,’ commented the Daily Thresh next morning. ‘If there is any medal for men going into exile, he should have it tomorrow.’
‘The ineffable Mr David Bracken,’ said the New Nation’s most bile-ridden columnist, later that week, ‘stepped off the plane wearing a somewhat inane grin, which he did not trouble to conceal. It could have been a grin of triumph. Whatever prompted it, it was in execrable taste. Is it too much to ask that when minor Government officials are entrusted …’