My Secret History (45 page)

I said nothing, only watched, remembering the earth tremor.

“Oh, yes. Festus was a very bright chap,” he said. “Years ago.”

He wanted to reminisce. He wasn’t even thirty-five, and he was looking backwards.

I said, “Which bar near the museum?”

“Waste of time,” he said. “Have a drink, Andy.”

“I’ve got one, thanks.”

I don’t want to spend another night in this place, I thought.

Potter said, “Did you see Festus following Alma out the door?” He smacked his lips. “I can see him driving his hand smartly up her jumper.”

Nor did I want to ponder that.

“I think I’ll go down to the jazz club,” I said.

Potter frowned. “I might as well go with you.”

We went together in my car. The bar didn’t have a name, but it was easy to spot—all the cars, all the music and noise. It was Dixieland music, and the bar looked like a little roadhouse anywhere in the world. We parked under a thorn tree and pushed through the crowd on the veranda—they were all talking about the earth tremor, what it had felt like, what they had thought it
was. They had the tipsy hysteria of survivors, congratulating themselves that they were still alive.

At the bar Potter said, “Can’t even get a bloody drink.”

I saw a very pretty blonde, about twenty or so, talking to a big bald man on a settee against a wall. The man got up and went into the other room. I said to myself, Oh well.

I went over and sat down next to the blonde. She smiled at me, but more in surprise than in welcome.

“Hello,” I said, and just saying that single word convinced me that I was drunk. “How about that earthquake—amazing huh?”

She sighed. She said with feeling, “It frightened me rigid. Everyone thinks it was so funny. I hated it.”

I wanted her to say more—it was what I wanted to hear. To encourage her I said, “Hey, I was scared shitless.”

“You’re an American,” she said.

“How did you know that?”

She smiled again, and then laughed softly.

I said, “Are you with anyone tonight?”

“Yes. He’s just gone to the loo.”

I said, “Then listen carefully. Meet me on the steps of the library at six-thirty tomorrow. Okay?”

She nodded, because the big bald man was approaching with a look of alertness on his face and that same tension was visible on his scalp, too. I excused myself and ducked out, amazed at my boldness.

On the way back, Potter said, “What did I tell you? Waste of time.”

I saw her through a break in the hedge, and I lingered because I was so relieved. She was sitting on the low steps of the library, smoking a cigarette. She did not have the thoughtful and vexed expression of a person waiting for a stranger, but rather she
looked contented, with light on her face, the last bright sunshine before the sun dropped beneath the trees. In that moment before we met I had the irrational thought that we knew each other and were friends. Of course it wasn’t true. It was a good feeling though—happiness and flickering hope. She was smiling.

She stood up and stamped on her cigarette when she saw me crossing the road. With the sun in her hair and in her summer dress she was very pretty. She was nearly as tall as me. She looked confident, and it was only when she spoke that I realized she was shy—but shy in an English way, watchful and formal and a little hesitant.

“Shall we get a drink somewhere?” I had asked her, trying not to stare at her.

And she was saying, Oh, yes—That’s fine—Wherever you say.

I said, “What about the Veranda?”

It was a bar that adjoined the Speke Hotel.

“Isn’t that expensive?” she said, and smiled again.

I was touched, because it wasn’t expensive at all, but just another bar in a town that was full of them.

“You’re a student,” I said. Students were always thinking about money and economizing in bewildering ways.

“Yes. I’m getting a Dip Ed.”

“And what are you going to do with it?”

“Go into the bush and teach,” she said, with such eager independence that I felt excluded and already a bit abandoned.

At the Veranda we found a table under the trees, which had strings of lights in their branches. They were flame trees, and a blossom plopped on the table as soon as we sat down.

“Maybe I should wear it in my hair,” she said, and picked it up and fixed it over her ear. She looked exotic.

Then she glanced into her compact mirror and frowned. “God, I look stupid!” She clawed it out of her hair.

The waiter brought us our drinks. She sipped hers and seemed detached and appreciative. I guzzled mine out of nervousness and said, “I didn’t think you’d be there.”

“I didn’t think I would either,” she said. “I’m fussy about being picked up.”

“You must be. I mean”—I was still guzzling—“you let me pick you up.”

“I had other plans but they fell through,” she said.

There was not the trace of a smile on her lips.

“Really?” I said. “That bald guy? Was he busy?”

“He’s actually very nice. He’s an anthropologist, studying the Bwamba. He’s frightfully het up about their circumcision ceremonies.”

“So you were going to meet him, were you?”

She laughed and said, “Don’t listen to me. I didn’t have any other plans. I went to the dentist today and had a tooth pulled. To tell you the truth I didn’t think I was going to make it to the library. But I’m glad I did.” She took another sip of her drink. “I feel better already.”

“I was glad to see you.”

“You mean that, don’t you?” She touched my hand, but casually, as though in a reflex, like touching wood for luck.

She inhaled the fragrance of the flowers around us and said how happy she was to be here.

“In this bar?”

“In Africa.”

“Why is it that people in Africa are always talking about being in Africa?” I said. She did not reply, so I went on, “It might be nice to live somewhere else, in order to talk about something else.”

“I came here to teach,” she said. It sounded like a reproach, but it was the strength of her conviction that made it seem so. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

I knew exactly how she felt: it was the way I had felt in Nyasaland, my first year.

She loved being in Africa. Very well, so did I. And so I chattered and boasted, trying to impress her, because I wanted to see her again. I was the acting director of the Institute, I said. I ran the place, I had eighty students and five part-time lecturers. I didn’t tell her that everyone else had quit and gone home, that I was the only person left to do the job and as soon as a qualified African applied I would be replaced. I told her that we had regional centers all over Uganda and that I would shortly be setting off to visit them.

“I’d love that kind of job,” she said. “One that involved traveling up-country.”

“You’re welcome to come along.”

“You don’t need my help,” she said.

She was very firm—I admired her for it. But I was also wondering how it was possible to tempt her.

I could see that she had a definite objective—being in Africa, teaching in the bush, being independent. She was a free spirit, and she knew what she wanted. I could not be part of her plans. My job was here, in Kampala. And I had no other plans.

I was careful in my questions. I did not want to be disappointed by any of her replies. She said she was a Londoner; she had gone to Oxford; she liked Wordsworth and D. H. Lawrence; she was a socialist, her father worked for the Water Board, she had acted in various plays—Rosalind in
As You Like It
in a student production. This was just chat; I did not want to go any deeper and discover that she had a lover.

“Please let me pay my share,” she said, when the waiter brought us the bill.

She meant it—it was another example of her insistence on being independent. I was impressed but a little uneasy—I wasn’t used to women paying their way.

I said, “Do you want to see the best view in Kampala?”

She seemed puzzled but said yes, and I drove her to Wireless Hill. We parked on the edge of the summit and looked out at all the lights. This hill was a place for furtive lovers who had cars—there were two other cars parked nearby, and people embracing on the front seats of them. The lights were scattered in the bowl of the town, and behind the mosque and the cathedral and the illuminated mansions and monuments was the impenetrable blackness of the Ugandan forest on one side, and Lake Victoria in the distance, under a warm and pockmarked moon.

I kissed her, and we embraced innocently for a while, just holding on, as though consoling each other. I wanted more but I didn’t know what to say.

Finally I said, “I really like you.”

“You hardly know me.”

“I know enough.”

Then she relented. “I’m glad you like me,” she said. “I like you too.”

As she said it I saw that the car parked next to mine was Graham Godby’s old Austin. Inside, Alma Godby’s head was jammed against the rear window. An African with her, smiling
with effort, his eyes popping, I saw very clearly was Festus Okello. They looked as though they were beating time to music with their wagging heads. But I knew better, and just as Alma’s head seemed to flatten against the glass and slip down, I turned away.

It was embarrassing because it was predictable, the Kampala custom of getting laid on Wireless Hill. It was always adulterous expatriates, and I saw there was something selfish and routine about it. I had parked there many times in just that way—because this was where you took the person you couldn’t take home; it was more secret than a borrowed apartment or the little hotel in Bombo that we called the knocking-shop. This was where an adulterer took someone to be safe from his mistress. It was one of the darker and more desperate places. I had once found that thrilling, but when I saw Alma and Festus in that trembling car I became flustered. It seemed to me a bad beginning for us.

I said, “I like you so much that”—thinking fast—“I don’t want to sleep with you.”

She was silent. Then she snorted. “What a strange thing to say. God, you’re funny!”

“I mean, I’m happy being with you,” I said, hurriedly. “I mean, for now. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m very interested in sex.”

She was looking out of the front window and smiling at the lights.

“That’s very reassuring.”

She had an English person’s devastating knack for balancing a statement between irony and sincerity.

“Sometime we must try it,” she said. “But it might help if you knew my name.”

Her name was Jennifer—Jenny; though she didn’t tell me until the next day. It was her way of teasing me and also of making me wait. This time I waited for her, at the swimming pool. She said she swam most days.

“Don’t you?”

“I can’t do it here,” I said. “It gives me the creeps to stand around in my bathing suit while Africans hang on the fence watching. Look at them.”

There were five ragged Africans clinging to the chainlink fence that surrounded the pool, and others lay on the grass, looking in. They were there all day, watching the expatriates in the swimming pool, wearing small tight bathing suits, splashing or sunning themselves. The nakedness fascinated the Africans, and the idea of people lying in the sun was such a novelty that the Africans simply gaped, wondering why they didn’t move. Whites in the sun had the torsion and muscularity of snakes, and like snakes the most they did was blink.

I avoided the place usually, though this voyeurism seemed an appropriate African response to whites in Uganda who stared at bare-breasted tribeswomen or Karamojong warriors who never bothered to conceal their thick floppy cocks.

“I give African kids swimming lessons,” Jenny said. “I’ve taught some of the students to swim.”

“I wouldn’t swim here. I’d hate Africans staring at me.”

“That’s just silly. That’s snobbery.”

It was our first disagreement. She was intelligent, logical, and articulate; but I also felt she was wrong.

“You probably dislike swimming.”

“I used to be a lifeguard.”

That night I took her to the Hindoo Lodge. Jenny liked the place—vegetarian food served at communal tables. The waiters were Brahmins, though they wore grubby pajamas. I saw my friends Neogy and Desai and I introduced Jenny. They smiled from a nearby table and watched her eat. It was the only orthodox restaurant in town—water in brass jars, a washroom in back, no knives or forks. Jenny made no fuss, though she had a little difficulty managing the rice with her fingers.

“Those men are staring at me,” she said.

“Because you’re eating with your left hand.”

“So what?”

“You’re suppose to eat with your right hand, and make love with your left.”

“Tell them I’m ambidextrous,” she said.

After that we often ate out—at the Sikh’s, at the Grand Hotel and the Greek’s, at Fatty’s and the Chez Joseph. I introduced her to spending Sunday afternoons strolling at the Botanical Gardens among milling Indians, and usually we had tea afterwards
at the Lake Victoria Hotel. I was very happy, except when Jenny said how much she was looking forward to finishing her diploma course and her posting up-country. She spoke enthusiastically of the isolation of teaching school in the bush, in places like Gulu or Arua, or even more distant towns like Pakwach and Kitgum and Moroto, haunts of naked cattle rustlers with flopping dongs.

I did not want her to go, but I never said so. I said that I might visit her. In the meantime we could spend our time together, if she happened to be free.

“I happen to be free,” she said.

“I have to visit some listening groups,” I said. “Would you like to come along?”

“What’s a listening group?”

“We used to have tutors all over the country, but the government cut our budget. So I organized groups in outlying villages and gave each group a radio. We broadcast lessons to them over Radio Uganda—English, political science, African history, whatever. Every few months I visit the groups to see whether any problems have arisen.”

“Where do you go?”

“Everywhere.”

The morning Jenny and I left Kampala was one of the happiest in my life. It was sunny, and we raced under a blue sky, going west towards Kabale, past the rivers and the swamps that were choked with feathery papyrus, and the smoky villages that lay under scarred baobab trees, and the plains of Ankole where there were giraffes and gazelles. We stopped in Mbarara for lunch at the little hotel. As we ate, a Land-Rover drew up—some tourists and guides in safari clothes, hacking jackets and broad-brimmed hats and big boots; they were hunters, and very excited to be in this apparent wilderness. After lunch we sped off again towards Kigezi District, where the road twisted around the low hills and volcanoes.