A World of Strangers

Prologue

I hate the faces of peasants.

I thought that the day the ship anchored at Mombasa, and I saw the Africans for the first time. The whole quayside was alive with them, their faces turned up momentarily from labour as we came in. In the quiet that followed the cessation of the ship’s engines, I saw them clearly. Heavy, mild, and brutish faces, on which emotion settles momentarily, from the outside, like a fly on the face of an ox, and is flicked away as a fly is flicked away, by an involuntary twitch that is nothing more conscious than the reaction of a muscle. I hated them in England, those faces in country lanes, red and smiling at nothing. These down among the crates on the quay shone black instead of red under the sweat, that was all, and the bloodshot eyes were brown instead of that bright vacant blue, appropriately the colour of blankness, space.

What happens to faces like these if, finally, goaded and pricked as slow beasts must be before anger rises through their turgid patience, they are roused? I could not imagine. I only knew the sharp, jowled, curved, and jutted faces of those shaped by books and doubts and ambitions, which, in anger, take on the splendid horror of Notre-Dame gargoyles. And the only Africans I had ever met with before were a few students at Oxford, and two writers and a painter in London, and they belonged in the gargoyle class, rather magnificently carved by their struggles to get there.

While I was thinking this, I was sitting in the launch that was taking us from the ship to the shore (our ship was too large to draw right into dock) beside Mrs Turgell and her daughter Rina, responding pleasantly to their exclamations at the beauty of the palm-trees. ‘The greenness! Can you believe it? It makes you thirsty!’ Mrs Turgell was saying, sitting up very straight like an excited child. And for once her daughter was almost like her, twisting her long young neck this way and that, and crying ‘Oh mummy! Do look!’ ‘Exactly like something out of Somerset Maugham!’ said Mrs Turgell, turning to me with that mixture of gaiety and appeal — you felt she so fervently wanted you to experience what she was experiencing that, however romantic and idiotic it might be, she was irresistible.’ Can’t you imagine degenerating most marvellously in one of those thatched huts, with a beautiful native girl, a Polynesian or something, with long black hair?’ ‘Mummy, you ass,’ said the daughter, in matter-of-fact reproach, but her mother put out her hand over mine in my lap for a moment, laughing.

Mrs Turgell did not flirt with me although she knew and I knew that I liked her better than her daughter. After all, she liked herself better than her daughter; it was one of those small tacit agreements taken for granted between us in our shipboard friendship, then about a week old. I was not quite — that expression beloved of women — young enough to be her son, because she was probably forty and I was twenty-six, but I was only eight years older than her daughter. I saw them both in the ship’s offices at Venice when we were queueing for our embarkation cards, and took a dislike to their familiar high English voices at once. By the time we touched Mombasa they were almost the only people on the ship with whom I had anything like a close acquaintance. I had made up my mind that they would not speak to anyone but the ship’s officers and the few Italians on whom I heard them flaunt their theatrical Italian, but Mrs Turgell slipped on to the stool beside me at the little bar before lunch one day and fell at once into her amiable chatter, apparently quite ready to overlook the fact that she had recognized me as one of the ‘stuffy English’ to whom she belonged and about whom she was often amusing as well as disparaging.

We spent the day ashore in Mombasa together, Mrs Turgell, Rina, and I; or rather Stella (as Mrs Turgell insisted I call her) and I were together, alternately losing and finding Rina the way one progresses when in the company of an unleashed puppy. When we got out of the docks, I wanted to get a taxi to take us into the town, but Stella insisted that it would be more fun to walk and ‘explore as we go’. (‘Explore’ was one of the bright schoolgirl words which abounded in Stella’s conversation.) We had not gone far up a wide road spattered with shade, fallen flowers, and seed-pods from brilliant trees when Rina disappeared into some sort of warehouse, her badly-fitting green slacks flapping against her long legs, her cheap sandals, bought in Port Said, with pictures of palm-trees painted on them in red and green, slapping against her thin bare feet. She wore a boy’s American shirt with a design of film-stars’ faces hanging outside the pants, and it was by this garment that her mother, charmingly dressed in some sort of full dress that showed her small pretty figure and bared the delicate flesh of her shoulders and the top of her breasts, recognized her in the gloom of the warehouse.

We went in after the girl and found some other passengers from the ship, the consul and his mother and wife, standing about and prodding at bundles of elephant tusks, tusks of all sizes, hanging from the roof and piled on the floor. With the knowledgeable eagerness with which people love to impart information of which they themselves were ignorant until a few minutes before, Rina and the rest of the little group passed on to us, interrupting and correcting each other, what the attendant of the warehouse had just told them about the prices of elephant tusks. The consul, although he had never before been stationed in Africa — he was on his way to take up an appointment in the Belgian Congo — murmured about the ivory market with the matter-of-fact acceptance of one accustomed to the exotic He had lived for years in the Balkans and in Turkey, I gathered. ‘The poor little things,’ said Rina, sliding her sandal over the short curve of a baby elephant’s tusk; and I could see that she was going to be another of those English women who can love only animals: the weak, dumb, and dependent.

We all struggled out into the sun again together, an untidy group, undecided about our destination. The consul’s wife said nothing but looked eloquently, and I guessed that she must have timidly expressed a wish aside to Rina in the dim warehouse, because Rina, slopping gawkily along, said, ‘Let’s find Kalindini Road. That’s the place where the shops are where you can buy topaz. Mummy, I want a big oblong topaz for my little finger.’ ‘They’re Indian jewellers, I believe,’ said the consul’s wife, politely, as if repeating something of no interest to herself. ‘Oh and I’d like to find the sandal-makers,’ said Stella; and the whole sight-seeing excursion threatened to fizzle out into one of those wearisome foreign shopping expeditions where the men trail around patiently behind the women.

The consul had joined the ship at Port Said. He had all the distinguishing physical characteristics of the ideal upper-middle-class Englishman which I had not. My appearance was such a thorough debunking of the wistful popular conception of what my sort of breeding and background ought to produce that it seemed deliberate, the gleeful contrivance of bored genes; though I didn’t delude myself with the consolation that by this fact I had escaped the insular Britannic stamp, prime on my rump, as it were. I have brown eyes and brown hair which is not as straight as an Anglo-Saxon’s should be, but my large features and too-big head set on my stocky body come straight out of Dickens and nowhere else. (Not one of Dickens’s slim Copperfields, but a friend of one of the heroes, one of those staunch friends with large, intelligent dark eyes to make up for their unattractiveness, etc. This was pointed out to me at Oxford, but I confirm it for myself.) The consul was tall — inevitably — sharp-kneed, large-footed, and broad-shouldered, and he had a long patrician face with thick eyebrows over fine grey eyes which looked blue when he was looking at the sea or the sky. He had all his hair and it was straight and grey. He was a Celtic type and I suppose was once dark-haired. His mother was exactly like him (I let the situation rather than biological correctness decide precedent here), almost as tall, every bit as distinguished. They used each other’s names all the time, like people in a play: ‘Mother, would you like your tea now?’ ‘Yes, Hugh, I think so.’ They never called the wife anything at all: ‘Where is she?’ ‘Down in the cabin, I suppose.’ Sometimes when the consul was forced, as he seemed to feel himself to be, to answer for her in her presence, he referred to her as ‘my wife’, giving a curiously legal ring to the designation, as a judge might speak of the defendant or the plaintiff. For the first few days, when we were passing through the Red Sea and lived in a spell of heat anyway, as if the world had stopped turning, so that recollection of whom we saw or what we did was dreamlike, she did not appear at all, so far as I knew. Heat or seasickness must have kept her to her cabin. The consul and his mother were alone at meals, and I played bridge with them several times in the air-conditioned card-room, where we sat around numbly like so much refrigerated food, and if our hands touched accidentally, recoiled at the fish-like contact of chilled flesh.

I had no idea of the existence of the wife until, on the first day on which we woke up in the Indian Ocean and the streaming, flapping, gusty life of the monsoon, I was attracted to a remote upper deck by the yapping of a dog, and found that there was indeed, not one dog, but three, housed in special kennels up there. All three were out of their kennels and were fawning in joy over a dumpy, lumpy little woman with tiny features buried in a big, round face. Bunches of curly brown hair, to which some sort of reddish dye gave a bright nimbus, made her face seem even bigger, and even I, who know nothing about the subtleties of women’s make-up, could see that there was something very wrong with the way she had applied hers. Her florid cheeks had rounds of another tone of red overlaying them. It was an astonishingly innocent face, in all its coarse crudity. She introduced me to the dogs and squatted, bunched up, on the deck, her arms round the neck and her cheek against the ears of the biggest one, a brown retriever. Like Rina, I supposed, she must be one of those women who love only dogs; but somehow I felt that this was in a different way and for different reasons — the woman hung round that retriever’s neck the first day I saw her the way a child communes in silent love with an animal when humans fail him. With her I should say it was not that she could not love anything other than animals, but that animals were all she had to love.

She certainly did look grotesquely out of place beside the consul and his mother. She always wore a great assortment of varied jewellery, as if in nervous confusion, not knowing which piece to choose, and that day in Mombasa, perhaps in honour of the jaunt ashore, she was even more recklessly adorned than usual. A tourist’s Egyptian necklace made after the style of the huge fringed bead collars from Tutankhamen’s tomb warred with a violently patterned dress, and there was a diamond fox-head with ruby eyes pinned on her bosom, and plastic cornflowers under the gay hair curling round her ear-lobes. In the Indian jeweller’s she sidled timidly and excitedly up to her husband and his mother where they stood, very tall and cool and pastel, near the door. In her little plump beringed hand she held cupped, like a drop of rain-water faintly tinged with rust, a large topaz. The consul looked down at her, his hands crossed on the walking-stick held in front of his white tropical suit. His mother held her white parasol similarly at rest. ‘Please to remember your size,’ he said. His voice, like his eyes, was fixed somewhere above the frizz of the reddish head. His wife went back to the counter, carefully keeping her hand level. I don’t know whether or not he bought her a topaz, in keeping with her stature or not, because, to my surprise and relief, Stella came up to me at that moment and whispered — ‘Let’s go. It’s a pity to waste the morning haggling in here. I don’t suppose they’re genuine anyway.’

The shop was full of people from the ship now — they kept coming in, as, in passing, they saw fellow passengers already inside, and soon every woman was fired with the desire to own a topaz. Some were arguing over carats and price, and one man, proud of his ability to deal with ‘the natives’ of any country, was informing the jeweller that if an expert in Johannesburg pronounced the stones synthetic, he would sue the Indian jeweller. Rina, long hip jutting as she leaned against the counter, was giving her opinion of each purchase in her loudest, highest English voice, and swooping about from group to group. ‘What?’ she called, looking up over the huddled bargaining heads. ‘No, I’m not coming. Mummy, you are frightfully mean! Can’t I have even a weeny one? Look at this smoky little thing.’ Her mother went over to her and they spoke in the low voices of controlled argument for a moment, but Stella joined me at the door, without her. ‘Come. Let’s be off,’ she said, shortly, because she was angry. But her good manners and the pleasing facade of even temperament she had been taught as a girl immediately gave cover to irritation. She said lightly, ‘I wonder what the story is behind the consul and that poor little creature?’

‘Well, she is rather awful, isn’t she? I mean you feel annoyed at his being so obviously ashamed of her, and at the same time you wouldn’t really care to have a wife like that for yourself.’

‘Oh she’s vulgar, all right,’ said Stella. ‘But so are they in their way — don’t you think? — Such official-looking impeccability, such diplomatic immunity from life itself! And that dragonish queenly old lady, with china tea in her veins and venom in her heart, I’m sure. Have you looked at their nostrils, those two? Positively curled back.’

I laughed. ‘What’s that significant of?’

‘I’m always afraid of those nostrils,’ she said wisely. Of course, Stella was just the sort of woman to believe in physiognomy and signs and portents, too.

‘Oh I do think people are fascinating! Don’t you?’ She was instantly buoyant again at the thought; she paused as we walked, overcome with an urgency of eagerness. I had noticed in her these very real moments of excitement and relief, when as now, by the pronouncement afresh of some commonplace generality, she reaffirmed or rediscovered for herself some concept of life that was important to her and which she sometimes lost or feared to lose.

As I have said, there was something about this woman which made one feel surly if one did not respond, as it was so easy to do, to the mood generated by her enthusiasms, even if one did not happen to share the enthusiasms themselves. I don’t think I find people ‘fascinating’ in quite the way she meant, but, just the same, we talked and laughed in a shared inconsequential lightheartedness all the way in the taxi that took us to Nyali Beach.

She was undressed before I was — I suppose she must have had her swimming suit on under her dress — and by the time I came out from behind my clump of bushes, clutching the rolled-up bundle of my shirt and trousers, she was already in the pale turquoise, transparent sea. Although (I calculated) she would be of the generation of the Twenties, when girls ‘did everything’ perhaps even more determinedly than they do now, her demeanour in the water immediately set her apart from the generation of the girls I knew and with whom I had swum at home, or on holidays in Italy or France. She did not swim at all, but floated gently, tamely, and conversationally, close in-shore. She did not wear a bathing cap, and her short, pretty blonde hair, like the make-up on her pretty face, remained perfect. You could see that all her life her body had been carefully shielded from the sun, and in place of the tanned legs and arms and the yellowish-brown necks I was used to associating with women, all her flesh shone pale and pearly under the shallow water and against the swimming suit which was a darker tone of the water colour. It was a remarkably youthful and pretty body (I’m afraid forty seemed old to me, for a woman), though not like a girl’s, softer than a young girl’s, and I admired it, though oddly enough I didn’t find I desired it I felt sorry I didn’t desire it; I supposed I was conditioned for ever to firm-fleshed girls with the limits of carefully-cultivated sunburn imposing a pattern counter to the pattern of their bodies.

I swam about a bit and then floated in the tepid calm with her for nearly an hour. After the dreary wet summer and the cold wet autumn at home — after a whole lifetime of dreary English winters and wet English springs — I was enchanted with the slack, warm beauty of the place. I seemed to feel an actual physical melting, as if some component of my blood that had remained insoluble for twenty-six years of English climate had suddenly, wonderfully, dissolved into free-flowing. I gazed in lazy physical joy at the lovely, smooth-patterned boles of the coconut palms, waving their far-off bouquets of green away above our heads, the water, and the white beach. I lifted an arm out of the water to feel the air, warm as the water. I dug my feet into the clean sand, so soft its substance was soft as the water. The last jagged crystal in my English blood melted away.

But Stella Turgell talked of Italy. Warmth and beauty and physical happiness meant Italy to her, though they might be experienced on a beach on the East Coast of Africa. She and her daughter had just spent nearly two months in Florence, and apparently Stella spent several months of each year somewhere in Italy — in Rome, Perugia, Venice, Garda, and, always, Florence. They did not seem to me to be really rich people, and I wondered what circumstances in their background gave them this freedom. Stella’s passion for Italy was nineteenth-century, Byronic — the nearest I can possibly bring it to the present day is to say that when it came to Italy and all things Italian, she saw everything like one of those young girls in Forster’s early novels about the English in Italy, girls who marry the libertine sons of dentists in places with names like Poggibonsi, or whose lives are changed irrevocably after being spectator to an Italian quarrel in an Italian square. The Italy of Moravia and the realist films did not exist for her. Her way of talking about Italy embarrassed me, even when we confined ourselves to discussing paintings and churches, though my mood that day when we were floating in the sea was such that nothing could irritate or embarrass me more than mildly.

As she talked I saw that her months in Italy were her life, so far as she was concerned; the rest of her time, spent, apparently, between her mother’s home in Devon and her husband’s farm in Northern Rhodesia, was impatiently and almost blindly lived through. Her only comment on the stay in Africa to which this voyage which we were sharing was carrying her, was to remark, closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose in pleasure at the breeze: ‘Well, six weeks from now, we’ll be on our way back. Not this way, of course. West Coast.’

‘To Europe?’

‘England. But not for long. By April I’ll be back at Pensione Bandolini.’

I pictured her, endlessly, tunelessly, coming down a hill road in Florence in the sunshine, a parasol open behind her head, pausing to smile at a bambino in the dust, waving her fluttering greeting and calling out in her clear English-voiced Italian to some peasant woman with black eyes, a black-downed lip, and ‘character’. The road, the child, the peasant — all were unreal. . I said: ‘Have you never lived in Africa?’

She said, without opening her eyes, ‘Rina was born in Rhodesia. When she was very young, I did.’

I wanted to say — that impossible question, idiotic, irresistible when you are on your way to live in a new country: What is it like? But I was aware that the fact that I was going out to live in Africa, and the fact that she was bound to it in some way, was a bond about which we never spoke; was something she would see that we stepped over or around, conversationally — something accepted and therefore not worth discussing, was it not? — her manner always seemed to imply, passing on rapidly and easily to the enchanting things about us, or left behind in the Mediterranean.

There was a moment of silence, and then she went on, lightly, almost as if I had spoken after all, ‘You must have an active and not a contemplative nature, to take Africa. My husband adores it. He rushes about the farm, completely absorbed from morning till night. The people are quite terrible. I shall never forget them. Their awful dinner parties. Awful food. Same people, same food, year after year, simply at this one’s house this week, someone else’s house the next Nothing to talk of but crops, female complaints, servants. Ugly, ugly. Nothing but ugliness.’

Suddenly she opened her eyes and drew herself upright, rising out of the water, and, shining, eager, she brought out one of her paralysing generalities again: ‘Beauty is the most important thing in life, don’t you think so?’

When people come out with statements like that, I always feel that I do not know what they are talking about. I flounder before this bold snatching-up put of the half-sensed, dimly-realized things I have only now and then thought I might have touched for a moment. Is this great glittering flashy fish what it was that brushed my hand then and then, rarely? Is that all — this impossible great artefact? I recoil from it. If that’s the case, I shan’t let my perception wander down there again.

I was sure that whatever this woman meant by ‘beauty’, whatever the word was a cover for, was the most important thing in her life. But I could not answer for it for myself, certainly not yet, not then. I said something empty, noncommittal, the kind of remark Americans put with glee into the mouths of the English in films. We came out of the water together, and parted to dress.

Just as we were walking back over the sand to where our taxi was waiting under the palms, we saw the long-legged figure of Rina, flying down a path through the bushes toward us. Some people from the ship who had hired a taxi to take a look around had dropped her at the beach. ‘Here, darling,’ said Stella, throwing her swimming suit to the girl. ‘Hop in quickly. It’s heavenly.’ But Rina would not swim. Stella went back to her dressing-place to fetch a towel she had forgotten, and the girl said, nibbling at a leaf she had in her hand: ‘I’m so glad mummy’s had such a lovely morning.’ I thought, what an odd, patronizing child she is; what queer creatures English girls’ schools turn out. (Already I found myself thinking of England and English institutions objectively.)

The taxi took the three of us up to the beach hotel and waited while we had tepid gin slings and a poor lunch. ‘Ugh!’ Stella made a face, though she laughed: ‘The moment you put your foot back here. Anything does.’

The warm gin made me feel benevolent. I even found myself bantering quite pleasantly with Rina. ‘We should have found an Indian restaurant in the town,’ she said.’ I’d have liked something hot and sharp to eat.’

We decided, anyway, not to risk the hotel coffee, but to go back to town and look for an Arab café. We did not find one, but trailing back in the direction of the docks, we passed a place that looked like an unsuccessful compromise between a continental café and a tea-shop. It was not quite open to the street and not quite enclosed. People sat, raised back from the street, and looked out from behind the briars and scrolls of a wrought iron shopfront which had been put up in place of the customary glass. The consul and his two women were sitting there, and they called down to us. We were burningly thirsty and we went in and sat at an adj-joining table. The consul’s party were just finishing lunch, and their coffee looked terrible, so, rather foolishly, at half past two on an afternoon of great heat, I ordered John Collinses for us. The place smelled of grilled steak and the drinks were a long time coming. A big fan went slowly in the middle of the ceiling, cutting up and pushing round shoal after shoal of warm air; it was odd to feel the movement of air past one’s face, entirely without the coolness associated with such movement. The place was almost empty and against the imitation log-cabin bar, a tall African waiter in a limp white robe and a red fez slept bolt upright. He wore fancy socks and a shabby version of the sort of pointed-toed patent dancing-shoes I had once seen in my father’s cupboard. His was the sweaty monkey-face that I associate with the few new-born babies I’ve been unable to avoid seeing; the sweat made it interesting by creating planes and highlighting creases that gave it that same innocent ancientness. The consul, who was sitting back with his elbow hooked round one of the iron curlycues on his chair, saw me looking at the man and waved his hand; a hand that, in movement, always looked as if it were giving an order. ‘There you are. Can you believe in the Mau Mau, here? We’re only three hundred miles from Nairobi, this is Kenya. You couldn’t credit it. Pangas and burnings. . And look at that. Wouldn’t want to harm a fly. . ’ As if to prove the consul’s point, a fly settled on the sleeping face and crawled up the left cheek from mouth to eye.

The amused bewilderment that must have shown rather stupidly on my face at that moment was not so much a sharing of the consul’s incredulity at the sight of the waiter in the face of facts, as a sudden realization about myself. I had spent the day in Mombasa like Sinbad the Sailor, seeking with my northern blood the old voluptuous adventure of warm seas and idleness in the sun. What about all the books I had read before I left England, all those books about Africa I had been reading for the past three or more years? The bluebooks, the leaflets, the surveys, the studies — the thick ones by professors of anthropology and sociology, the thin ones by economists and agronomists, the sensational ones by journalists? How far away was the scene of the Mau Mau situation in which my circle of friends and family had been so intensely interested, now that I was three hundred miles near to, instead of six thousand miles away from it?

I sat and drank my sweet drink and did not feel even the mildest self-reproach. In fact I felt rather pleased with myself, as if I had been absolved from one suspicion of priggishness, bookishness I had harboured against myself. I simply did not care at all. I had not made any attempt whatever to use the day; I hadn’t presented the letter of introduction I’d been given to a prominent government official, I hadn’t tried to see for myself anything of African labour conditions, housing, or political emergence. I began to feel overwhelmingly sleepy; I still found the big, wide, lax heat (like being involved in one of creation’s enormous yawns) pleasurable, my veins widened, my pores opened to it The two pretty women (I supposed one must admit that Rina was pretty too, if one considered the small head without its relation to that long body on which it was perched) looked very nearly female, instead of feminine, as if the food and liquor that relaxed their faces and the heat that made their hair cluster damply had melted away, along with the powder, that English cast of beauty — a real cast, in the concrete and not the figurative sense of the word — from which I have suffered all my life; yes, even as a child, even in the face of my mother.

We went back to the ship very content; I noticed that Rina sang softly to herself, like a child, when she felt at peace with the world. The launch was full, and I sat listening to the tired, giggling, or earnest voices, tense with the excitement of shopping, of our fellow passengers.

Once aboard, the Turgells and I retired to our cabins to sleep off the enervation of gin and sun. Before I lay down I saw for a moment in my porthole the round brilliant picture of the shore, a picture like those made up under glass on the tops of silver dressing-table utensils, out of butterfly wings. Glittering blue sky, glittering green palms, glittering blue water. When I stretched on the bunk, the little shelf of books beneath the porthole rose to eye-level. The Peoples of South Africa, The Problems of South Africa, Report on South Africa, Heart of Africa. I began to read the titles, the authors, the publishers’ imprints, rhythmically and compulsively. Suddenly, I felt the warm turquoise water swinging below me as I kept myself afloat. Sand like the dust of crystals was pouring through my fingers, hairy coco-nuts like some giant’s sex, swung far above my head, under the beautiful scimitar fronds of a soaring palm. Sinbad, Sinbad, Sinbad the Sailor.

I woke just after five o’clock and went up on deck. We were moving slowly out of the harbour, that smooth, silent retreat from the land while the ship is borne, not of its own volition, but under tow. Every time we left a port of call there was this strange moment, a moment of silence when here and there a hand lifted along the rail in a half-wave to the unknown figures standing on the shore, like a drooping flag stirring once in a current of air. Then the engines began beating, the ship turned in the strong wash of her own power, and we were no longer merely slipping out of human grasp, away, away, but heading on out to sea and our next objective, toward, toward. It was the time when we turned from the rail, sought each other’s company, pulled the chairs up round the small deck-tables, and summoned the bar steward. Stella arrived, freshly dressed and scented, carrying the Italian grammar which she studied assiduously an hour a day, then the consul, in shorts and white stockings which transformed his distinction into something vaguely naval. Soon Mamma followed, with her stiff, Queen Mary gait and her writing materials — she had always just written, or was about to write, letters. Rina, still in those dreadful green trousers that hung down slack where she hadn’t enough behind to fill them, came up with Miss Everard, the tall, handsome spinster of fifty who wore a man’s watch, and in the evening, magnificent gauze saris. She had been something called ‘household adviser’ to some Indian prince who, despite Indian democracy and Nehru, seemed to have lived in all the splendour of the old days of independent princely states. She was going to live with her brother in one of the British Protectorates in Africa, and she, too, was a passionate Italophile, scattering her speech with cara mia’s. Carlo, the fat partner of the duo of Carlo and Nino, in charge of the little mosaic-decorated bar outside the dining-room, stood back to usher the two ladies before him out on to the deck, but Everard swept him along with them, shrieking at him in aggressively musical Italian over her shoulder. It seemed that all her talking, and she was a vast and enveloping talker, was done over her shoulder. In passing, as it were, she had always the final word. She sat down with us, made herself comfortable, talking away to Carlo all the time, and only interrupted herself to say to us in English, as if the suggestion were absurd: ‘I’m not intruding?’ Before we could protest, she had ordered drinks for us, in Italian, with many gestures of stirring, of adding a soupçon of something, of putting in plenty of ice, and more terse interjections in English: ‘And you? Pink gin? An Americano? With or without bitters?’

Carlo, with his Hallowe’en pumpkin smile, his round amiable eyes, and those little feet in white pointed-toed shoes which supported him almost twenty-four hours a day on such missions, went off to his bar and came back with the specified variety of drinks, perfectly mixed, perfectly chilled, and accompanied by dishes of black and green olives. After the indifferent food, the heat, and the tepid, over-sweet drinks ashore, the sight and taste of his calm handiwork made one regard the big fat smiling man with almost sentimental relief — we were ‘home’, cherished, attended, indulged. I remarked to the consul, perhaps not-so-un-consciously paraphrasing Stella, that I thought luxury was one of the most important things in life. But he merely smiled, lifting his eyebrows in polite agreement with something he felt he had not heard aright, but which was not important enough to bear a repetition. Of course, he had not lived in England since long before the war; he knew nothing of the world in which I had grown up, where every small service you could afford to buy yourself was given you grudgingly, where, justly, no doubt, but drearily, nevertheless, you often had to retire with your host after dinner, not to the library for port and cigars, but to the kitchen for dish-washing.

The dense green coastline with the masts of coco-nut palms criss-crossed against the sky faded into distance and the radiance of a sunset that seemed to arise, like a halo, from, rather than be reflected in, the sea. But other coastlines, those of islands at all levels near and far in the distance, emerged before and sank away into light behind us, little coastlines with a pearly dip of beach, and the pinkish-mauve haze of pencilled boles, and the dark-green, almost blue, crowns of palm. Our table grew quite gay. The consul ordered another round of drinks and then I did. Rina went into competition with the consul, flipping olive pits into the water. Miss Everard began a long, animated discussion of the day ashore with me in French (she presumed I must speak something) to which I replied with equally obstinate animation in English. I absolutely refused to speak to Miss Everard in any language other than English; I had even managed to cultivate a questioning look in my eyes when she trotted out some old Latin tag.

The ship’s first officer, a dapper Triestino, more like a Frenchman than Italian in appearance, strolled past and was invited to join us. He was an obvious admirer of Stella, and complimenting her graciously in Italian as he sat beside her, brought a happy blush to her bosom and neck, as if her body had never learned the cultivated decorum of her face. Even the consul’s wife, coming bewilderedly and cautiously from the direction of her cabin, outrageously painted and in an ‘afternoon’ frock, fitted in somehow, and after changing her mind twice about her choice of a drink, settled beside me.

‘He seems a lot better since we sailed,’ she said to her husband, not noticing that she was interrupting. He shook two olive pits together in his hand and screwed up his face in her direction: ‘What is it you say?’ ‘I said Flopsy’s a lot better, dear.’

The consul said with rasping pity,’ My wife’s cat appeared to have some difficulty in digesting his luncheon fish, or whatever-it-was.’

It was clear that he intended the subject to be closed, so far as the general company was concerned, and so she turned to me and said, confidentially, ‘It was not fish, it was mince. But not ordinary mince, some spice was in it.’

Was she Welsh, perhaps, I wondered? There was a stilted-ness, an absence of elision in her speech which somehow was not English. Stella had suggested that she was an early indiscretion of the consul’s, from Turkey, or perhaps the Middle East; an indiscretion with which he found himself saddled, in honour bound, for the rest of his life. Certainly there was something Levantine if not Eastern in her appearance.

The consul grew positively gallant with Stella — the nearest he could ever get toward being flirtatious — and the eyes of old Montecelli, or whatever the first officer’s name was, swam bright and bulging as a Pekinese’s with smiling Mediterranean maleness. Everard (in English, astonishingly) told some really funny stories about her Indian prince and his household. Our laughter and our raised voices had the effect of isolating us rather enviably from the other passengers; they strolled past, or sat apart in their own little groups, like children who pretend not to know that there is a party in the next-door garden. How ridiculously much these trivial things matter in hotels and ships, how they reproduce in miniature the whole human situation, the haves and the have-nots, the chosen and the rejected, the prestige of the successful fight for the female, the singling out of their leader by the herd! All there, on the air-conditioned, safe, and sanitary liner, being worked out in the form of shuffle-board championships, the crossing-the-line ceremony, and the parties made up for the Captain’s ball. Psychologists say that the activities of children at play are one long imaginative rehearsal for life; adults, too, never stop muttering the lines and reproducing the cues, even on holiday; even between performances. Though none of these people with whom I sat drinking were people whom I would choose as friends, I was surprised and a little inclined to sneer at myself to find that I enjoyed the warm feeling of being one of the group, of belonging. Long after most of the other passengers had gone down to dress for dinner, we continued to sit on, drinking and laughing and talking noisy nonsense. When at last we rose we were agreed, with rather gin-borne accord and enthusiasm, that we should gather after dinner and make something of a party, so far as we were concerned, of the decorous dancing to the ship’s band which took place on those nights on which there was no cinema show.

‘I think Hugh has an arrangement for bridge,’ said the consul’s wife, the only hesitant voice. On dance nights she always put on silver sandals, and then if she was asked to dance blushed a refusal, not liking to deprive other wives or single women of a partner. The consul did not attend dances with her.

But this time the consul, brown knees together, rising elegantly from his chair as Stella, Rina, and Everard rose, said, with a handsome narrowing of his deep eyes, ‘Oh I think we might postpone the bridge, just this once.’

Stella, dragging Rina down the corridor which separated our cabins, blew me a mocking kiss as she disappeared, laughing.

I sat at the other end of the dining-room, far away from the Turgells and Miss Everard and the consul’s family. While I ate I saw Everard sweep in in green and gold, resplendent as the howdah with the foam-rubber cushions she had described earlier, but I did not catch a glimpse of any of the others. After dinner, in the lounge, the consul beckoned me over to a collection of chairs round two or three small tables he had had prepared for our party. He wore a black tie, but politely ignored my rather rumpled blue suit, too short over the behind, as all my suits seem to be. Mamma was absent, playing bridge, and the wife sat with the expectant face of a girl at her first party and the dreadful clothes of a provincial mayoress at a reception. The band was playing some jaunty old fox-trot from a Fred Astaire film I dimly remembered having been taken to see once with some cousins in the school holidays. One or two couples were hopping mildly round as if they were climbing, counter to the slight tilt of the floor, first this way then that. Everard came in, signalled that she would be with us at once, hung over the backs of the chairs of a group of Italians, declaiming in high-pitched Italian, and then swept out again as if with a sudden recall to purpose. Like the other member of the weather couple, rain and shine, Rina swept in through the other door and made for us. She wore one of those chiffon dresses, vaguely flowered, vague in cut, vague in fit, which so many of my young female compatriots own, a dress about as becoming, though much less revealing of the lines of the body than a winding-sheet. Round her neck was a thin chain with some weakly blue stone pendent from it. Only the tips of her ears, unexpectedly showing under her brushed-back hair, and unexpectedly adorned with little gold gipsy rings, gave a hint of life.

‘I must apologize for mummy,’ she said, rather breathless, pausing at the back of the consul’s wife’s chair a moment before she sat down beside me, dropping a limp beaded bag in her thin lap. ‘Fruit cup? How simply lovely.’ She lifted the plastic stirrer out of my Pimm cup and licked it. ‘She won’t be up, I’m afraid. She’s gone to bed.’ She shrugged her shoulders and her face, as if to say, well, that’s that. ‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ I said, amazed.

‘Is your mother not well?’ The consul’s wife leaned forward.

‘I say! I am sorry!’ said the consul.

‘Oh no,’ said the girl, with the air of someone in charge of a familiar crisis.’ She’s all right. She’s not ill. I’ve ordered a brandy for her. I’ll dash down again directly and make her take a sedative. It’s Africa,’ she added, matter-of-fact. ‘First day back in Africa, ashore today.’

‘But I thought Stella enjoyed today,’ I said. ‘She did enjoy it.’ I remembered the gaiety with which she had scuttled off to dress for the evening, blowing me a kiss from the corridor.

‘Just Africa,’ the child said wisely, almost bored. ‘It’s all right. I’ll give her a sedative and she’ll calm down and it’ll be out of her system.’ I realized that this old-young girl, this child-parent had made this journey with her mother many times since childhood. She was an old hand at — whatever it was that ailed her mother.

Rina danced with me, and then with the consul, and then excused herself, going serenely out to her charge and reappearing ten minutes later. ‘Reading,’ she said. ‘I’ve given her her pill.’ A little later, the girl disappeared again. This time she said to me on her return, ‘Asleep.’ There was a Paul Jones in progress and I saw that she was eager to be in it; I led her to the floor, lost her, and went back to my drink. She was obviously enjoying herself; she preferred a dance that was more of a boisterous game than a tête-à-tête contact between a man and a woman.

The evening was not exactly a success. Stella’s withdrawal was a betrayal of the mood in which the party had been spontaneously arranged; if the excuse had been one of the conventional ones of sickness, a headache, the commonplace jollity might have survived quite well in spite of her absence, but the uncomfortable oddity of her reason for absence seemed to show up the nature of the jollity for what it was — an alcohol-hearty camaraderie between rather incompatible strangers. Everard brought over two more officers and an amiable, fat Italian girl, and the party became very much her own. The consul excused himself early and went off unrepentant in the direction of the card-room. I was suddenly angry to find myself left with the wife, the frizz-haired, pathetic bore, with her plump silver shoes crossed at the ankle, patiently. Rather abruptly, I left too, going to my cabin by way of the deck.

I lay on my bunk, bored and wakeful. I felt a sickening at them all. A spoilt woman who got ill from the idea that she had put her foot back in Africa again. So that was the reason for the life of romantic, genteel exile in Italy: inability to face the husband, marriage, reality, inability to face even the fact of this inability, so that husband, marriage, reality took the discreet disguise of ‘Africa’. Poor devil of a husband, working his farm to foot the bill at the Pensione Bandolini. Even the daughter given the mock-Italian name, the label of escape, ‘Rina’, and taught to live her life on the move, because the mother could not bear to alight in the one place where she was, conventionally, bound to live.

And the other one, the diplomatic gentleman with his queenly dowager, dragging shamefully from country to country the suffering and insufferable ‘mistake’ he had made in one of them. Were these the sort of people Africa gets? Christ, poor continent!

Mombasa was our first port of call in Africa.