Admiring Silence Read online

  Mr Willoughby mulled me over for a few minutes, throwing in a question or a remark between silent appraisal while I muttered and smiled heroically. ‘What are you studying? Will you be able to do anything with it afterwards? Is the British government paying for you? I suppose we’ve given your country independence. Do you think it’s too soon? What’s the political situation like?’ In the end I told him that the government had legalized cannibalism. He must have thought I said cannabis, because he asked me if I thought that should happen here too. Everyone seemed to think so, as if there didn’t seem to be enough abandoned behaviour already. I told him that the President had syphilis, and was reliably reputed to be schizophrenic; he was practically blind and was drunk by about three in the afternoon every day. Everybody knew this and avoided calling on him after that hour because his behaviour could be dangerously erratic when under the influence. I said that in my father’s house all the beds were made of gold, and until I was sixteen, servants bathed me in milk and then rinsed me in coconut water every morning.

  He smiled suddenly and told me about the year he had spent in France when he was younger. It had done his French no end of good. He had lived in the country, staying with a farming family and working for an estate agent who was a friend of his father. It had been warm most of the time, but the winter was quiet and long. We kicked this around for a while before he returned to the attack, giving me a long glinting stare before he spoke. ‘There was a chap at school, a darkie like you. Splendid runner. He was Mohammedan, though. I can’t remember where he came from, somewhere in darkest Africa. Black as the ace of spades, he was, but splendid runner. Natural athlete, and one of nature’s gentlemen.’ So I told him that I used to wake up at four in the morning, milk the cows, weed the fields, help with the harvest and then run six miles to school on an empty stomach every day. Then one afternoon a European official from the Education Department visited our school, an Inspector of Schools. He stood in front of our class and chatted for a few minutes, then suddenly he asked me a question, but I was too feeble with hunger to answer.

  ‘What was the question?’ Mr Willoughby wanted to know, leaning forward with interest, his face alight, eyes burning with attention.

  ‘He wanted to know who was the first European to eat a banana,’ I told him.

  Mr Willoughby nodded slightly, approvingly. ‘Good question. Then?’

  Well, normally I knew the answer to this question all right, – and at this point I gave Mr Willoughby an interested glance: did he know the answer to this historically vital question? Wasn’t his nod just a little too casual? – but on that afternoon I just did not have the strength to say it aloud. Somehow the European official seemed to know this, to understand the state I was in, and brought his ear close to catch my whispered reply. Alexander the Great, I croaked. After that he adopted me and gave me huge meals to eat every day and a second-hand bicycle so I didn’t have to run six miles every morning and paid my fees through school, which at that time were thirty-two shillings a term. Mr Willoughby pondered on this, and when he spoke his eyes were muddy with feeling. ‘That was that made it all worthwhile. Was it fair to abandon the Empire? Was it fair to them?’ he asked. I knew who he meant by them. And in all this time I could see out of the corner of my eye how Emma and her mother were laughing and telling stories, while I had to sit in bright attention in case Mr Willoughby began a flanking attack or a slithery guerrilla raid.

  I don’t imagine the effortless affection I saw between them that first time, because I saw it again on other occasions. But Mrs Willoughby was not happy about me. It was not me as such, but that she wanted better for her daughter, a more normal friendship, an untroubled future. Later, when Emma told her we had decided to live together, she looked at her hands in silence for a moment and then said, ‘I’ll go and make some tea.’ She returned after a few minutes with tea and biscuits, settled herself down carefully, and with the measured gaze and voice of someone doing everything to be reasonable, she asked Emma: ‘Aren’t you too young?’ I saw the effort it took her not to bluster or shout, not to get up and hurl the steaming teapot at me and then bundle me out of her house with imprecations and insults and accusations. ‘Have you had news from your family recently?’ she asked as she handed me a cup of tea. As was her habit with me, she did not wait for my answer but carried on talking. ‘I hope everyone is well. Will you be taking her away with you? I hope not. You must make sure that all this does not interfere with your studies. After all, that’s what you’re here for.’

  Her tight dissembling smile never wavered; if anything, it grew more assured as she worked herself into the part. Not a word about what was really making her unhappy with the new (informal) addition to the family. And because she was dissembling, Emma took up her challenge and confronted her on all her objections, even the ones she did not raise. No, I’m not too young. You were already a mother when you were my age. Of course it won’t interfere with our studies. Why are you making such a fuss? Is it because he’s black? On that last question, Mrs Willoughby looked pained; she refused to stoop to that level of discussion. Look who’s coming to dinner. The damage was already done by then, and I am not sure that I played the principal part in causing it. In any case, mother and daughter had by this time settled into a routine of attrition and ambush which would sometimes break out into open war. When Emma became pregnant (unplanned), Mrs Willoughby launched an all-out assault, enlisting Mr Willoughby, middle-class respectability, the future, the welfare of the unborn child . . . in short, Holy Matrimony, adoption or abortion. And Emma on her part resisted with relish and zest, repelling attack after attack with contemptuous assurance.

  ‘But think of the child,’ Mrs Willoughby demanded. ‘What will it think of itself? It’ll be neither one thing nor the other. And think of what it will be like to be born to an unmarried couple.’

  ‘I am thinking of the child! That’s exactly what I’m doing,’ Emma declared. ‘I don’t want her oppressed by all your obsessions with class and neighbours and foreigners.’

  It was gruesome stuff. Mr Willoughby watched with his eyes sparkling, glancing at me now and then with surprise when an atrocity took place. His look said: are you really responsible for all this? When he was called upon to intervene he took so long to think of something wise and mollifying that the women soon ignored him and returned to work. I think he preferred it that way. I was only rarely called upon to say anything in the open battlefield, although at times Emma looked accusingly at me and made me feel that I might have offered more support had I been of a less spineless constitution. Mr Willoughby and I were required to be present as a kind of strategic reserve, to be deployed if matters became desperate. In the end, Mr Willoughby was brought into action as it became clear that Emma was immovable. He invited me to the pub.

  ‘Dreadful,’ he said after sipping at his beer, so I tried mine and was forced to agree. I was quite used to Mr Willoughby by now. We had been seeing a lot of each other since we met the year before. ‘Would you like some faggots?’ he asked, glaring at the handwritten menu on the blackboard. The other items were mixed grill, sausages, baked beans, or macaroni cheese. That’s what pub food was like in those days, even in Blackheath. ‘Used to have faggots at school. In Kent. Everyone but Lawson used to ask for seconds. Kitty Lawson.’ I nodded and Mr Willoughby nodded back and briefly shut his eyes. Yes, we knew Lawson. Awkward customer, too big for his boots. The memory of Kitty Lawson made Mr Willoughby’s face glum, or perhaps it was the thought of the faggots all those years ago. So I began to tell him about the free milk they used to give us at school and his eyes lit up as usual at the prospect of an Empire story. As soon as we arrived at school we lined up under the shade of the huge mango tree which stood in the middle of our assembly yard, humming devotional songs while the milk was warming in the urns. The teachers walked among us uttering softly spoken greetings and a quiet word of approbation where it was deserved. The milk was flavoured with cardamon and cinnamon, and generously sugared. The f
irst mouthful was like sipping nectar. Then we were offered a choice of the fruit in season: oranges, melons, mangoes, jackfruit, lychees and, of course, bananas. Then we strode to our well-lit classrooms to break the chains of ignorance and disease which had kept us in darkness for so long, and which the Empire had come to bring us respite from. That was what school was like for us. Mr Willoughby shook his head at the beauty of it all, and sipped at his beer to disguise the emotion he felt. He sat with his eyes lowered, his hand clenched round his glass, shaking his head now and then as the scale of the tragedy returned to him. ‘It wasn’t right, to abandon them like that,’ he said. ‘Cruel. Think of all the terrible things they’ve been doing to each other since we left.’

  ‘Shall we go back then?’ I asked, and saw Mr Willoughby’s eyes leap with amazed interest.

  ‘Not possible,’ he said after a moment, his mouth a thin bitter line, his eyes shifting into the middle distance. ‘Everything’s turned to shite. Let’s have some faggots.’

  They looked like shite when they arrived, too, generous lumps of dark, solid shite squatting in a shallow pool of brown gravy. After we had contemplated our faggots for several pregnant seconds, Mr Willoughby said, ‘My face is inclined to be round, but not oval.’ I waited, but when there was no more I nodded sympathetically. Must have been something Kitty Lawson said. Whatever mission Mr Willoughby was sent on in the war of Holy Matrimony he never performed, or if he did then he was too subtle for me. There was a moment when I thought we had got to it. ‘Sambo,’ he said as we rose to leave the pub. It looked like a dramatic change of tactics, to chase me away with racist abuse, but I wasn’t sure if Mr Willoughby had the talent for that kind of rough stuff. His eyes were blazing again. ‘The darkie at school. We used to call him Sambo. I knew it would come back to me. Splendid runner. Black as the ace of spades. I expect he’s President-for-Life in his country now. What will your chaps out there say about all this? Complete mess.’ But he did not seem interested in my reply and I mumbled audibly, smiled brightly and said nothing.

  Good old Mr Willoughby. He probably thought of it himself. What will your chaps out there say about all this? Mrs seemed too caught up in the heat of battle to have given the matter any thought. Emma asked, of course, and I told her that they were bound to make a fuss, at first. She chose to be satisfied with that. I say chose because there was something reluctant in her eyes, but perhaps she thought we would go into it later.

  Everything went into abeyance with Amelia’s arrival as we all abandoned whatever else we were doing to cluster round the baby while it shitted and screamed. She screamed a lot, so much that I sometimes felt that the revulsion she felt for what she had been landed into was tragic. Everyone said it was normal, or she had colic or whatever, but I could not help feeling that she was raging with self-pity. It didn’t do her any good, of course. She was here, she was wanted, she was loved, she didn’t have a chance. Whenever she was given the opportunity, she clung to her mother’s breast as if to freedom itself. Life’s like that, clinging futilely to the very objects that imprison us.

  The moment of her arrival was the climax of weeks of preparation and anxiety, desultory and spasmodic at first but growing into all-consuming absorption. There were new bits of furniture to acquire, bedding, a bucket for the nappies, baby lore to mug up on, names to play with, bulletins on the expectant mother’s condition to keep abreast of, the approach of celibacy to reflect on, etc. Emma’s alarming size, apart from anything else, gave her a veto on every decision, but in any case, to hear her speak you would not have thought this was happening to her for the first time. Years of education and training had prepared her for just this moment. She had known for years that she was going to have a baby girl called either Amelia or Beatrice (sometimes Beatrix). Her thesis was set aside, and instead of Lukács and Benjamin and Heidegger – this was before Foucault and Derrida dominated her discourse – it was Dr Spock’s text we attended to. So it was appropriate that when the critical moment arrived our lives were sharply focused on the baby’s coming. Its undaunted completeness and surprising mobility – I had somehow expected it to lie still – provided miraculous closure to the narrative fragment. Mr and Mrs Willoughby, me, a friend of Emma’s from the university called Judy, we all gathered round the bed at various times to share in the drama. I basked in the approval the nurses bestowed on me when I came visiting, and smilingly complied when they encouraged me to sit on Emma’s bed and hold her hand, and was even happy enough to make the infantile noises that they seemed to think necessary for the baby’s health and well-being. I have to confess that Amelia did seem to like the silly antics I used to perform, and would take time off from her combative engagement with existence to kick her feet in the air and make squeaky noises as she was supposed to.

  Emma herself was surprisingly casual about everything, more interested in talking about the meals I was cooking for myself in her absence and in the friends she had made in the ward, than about the tribulations and agonies her body had recently suffered. That she had done all that made her seem even more heroic. I had been there, of course, starving and dying for a pee while Emma went red with her efforts and groaned for release, and the midwives bustled in and out with what seemed to me to be gloating callousness. You did this to yourself, so stop moaning, I imagined them saying.

  So I joined in the fuss we made of the mother and child, and felt rewarded and proud of our joint efforts, but I must confess that when we got back to our flat I began to see a different aspect of our achievement. For a start, Emma did not seem quite so casual with only me around. The things I said appeared to irritate her. When I checked a crisis she was having with the baby in Dr Spock and read her what it said there, her eyebrows flew up in disbelief while she carried on as if I had not spoken. She only smiled at me if I rolled about on the floor making silly noises, like a puppy. Or when I lay beside her while the baby eventually slept and stroked the parts of her body she allowed.

  Amelia seemed to like it in the flat. Her range of noises extended, and she even fell silent at times, though anguished screams still tore through her at frequent intervals.

  Emma and her mother were absorbed with the baby, handling her with a breezy familiarity which seemed effortless. They watched her and stroked her, guessed at and debated the sources of her frowns and screams and mocking gurgles. Emma seemed to forget herself at these times, in a way she only rarely did when I was around – as when I rolled about and played the fool. Perhaps she was afraid I despised her pleasure, mocked her for descending effortlessly into instinct. It was one of her ideas, that women are crushed by their finer feelings, which they are socialized to consider essential to their nature. They are trained to sacrifice themselves, she would say, and only find fulfilment when they become servants to their children. Perhaps her mother’s pleasure allowed her to shelve these concerns. Mr Willoughby, when he was invited to the feast, hovered prettily at the edges of the firelight, making wise and comforting noises, and baring his teeth at the baby.

  Mr and Mrs brought gifts with them whenever they came (every day), from washing-up liquid to a kilo of beef. She washed the nappies in the bath while he took the baby for a little stroll round the dog-turd-littered pavements, so that Emma could have a snooze. Then Mrs made tea, fed the baby and cooked the beef (as it may be) they had brought with them. She even stayed the odd night, for some reason, sleeping on the floor in our bedroom – I had been evicted earlier for talking in my sleep and waking up the baby. ‘What was I saying?’ I asked her, but she said she could not understand the language. It was a distressing episode. At times I felt invisible to them. My voice sounded strange when I spoke in their midst, as if I was speaking in an incomprehensible tongue. I found myself losing track, confusing words, and becoming tongue-tied. When they talked about me (or even to me), it felt that they were pitying me, that I was a victim of unavoidable natural forces, a cyclone or a cholera epidemic or an inherited deformity.

  At times Emma gave me suspicious looks, wonde
ring if I was making fun of them. ‘Why don’t you and Dad go and wet the baby’s head?’ she suggested.

  We sat in the almost empty pub (it was just 6.30), holding on to our glasses and not speaking. When I glanced at Mr Willoughby, his eyes were dancing on me, which made me want to cry out and run screaming into the gloom. He was hungry for an Empire story, but my tongue felt leaden and discoloured, my head pounding with discontent. In the end I started to tell him about the English hospital sister who saved my life. I had gone to the hospital to say goodbye to an aunt who was just about to expire from a complex amalgam of bush yaws, leprosy, bilharzia and infectious boils, all of which are brought on by inherited effects of dissipation and lasciviousness. As I was descending the stairs on my way out, I was suddenly overcome by the onset of a tropical ague. I collapsed on the steps, where the sister found me and had me carried to a bed. She did not leave my side until I was fully recovered two weeks later, bathing my brow with watered wine, and placing her wetted handkerchief in my mouth so I could drink. It was a simple story of everyday imperial heroism, but the emphasis was wrong in my telling. Mr Willoughby did not seem too discontented, although I could tell he had not found the story as moving as some of the others, and the artist in me felt a twinge of disappointment at this failure.

  ‘Getting on all right at work?’ he asked after we had sat for another eternity, gripping our glasses in silence. I had just started my first job then, teaching in a school full of ignorant and deranged maniacs who seemed afraid of me, a strange but gratifying response. The school smelled of sweaty necks and burnt stew. I found my new job a daily persecution, and was constantly afraid that the schoolchildren were going to rise in rebellion and force humiliations on me. My constant vigilance, above any other consideration, was to pre-empt this fate, to survive each day, each hour, without falling victim to the savagery I could see barely checked in the children’s faces and in their shouted exchanges. Some of the older boys stood taller than me, and the girls were well into child-bearing age, yet they seemed selflessly to devote their energy and passion to antics and abuse, to acting like the kindergarten age-group in a baboon homestead.