Dream of Darkness, page 2
I didn’t take long to make up my mind. I honestly thought I could do some good, and at the same time I rather fancied the excitement. Frankly, a career spent giving real agricultural advice, which I had to do as my cover, would have come, on the excitement scale, somewhere alongside a curacy in the Home Counties!
Another factor was that I liked, and was impressed by, Joe Lightoller. He’d been on the Bureau’s African operation from the start in the West, when first Ghana, then Nigeria and Sierra Leone got independence, and was now following the hauling down of the flag in the East. His designation was Controller, Africa, a large-sounding title. Controller, I learned, was the highest rank of a fieldman in the Bureau. I also learned that the term ‘Bureau’ was only used for official aid and advisory services. In its more obscure form, it was always called ‘the Co-op’ and its committees and working units, too, were called ‘coops’.
Back in London, there was a Head of Africa section who had responsibility for the overview of the whole continent, Commonwealth and not. Within a couple of years, Joe Lightoller was recalled to take over this job, and he got his knighthood with it, as a reward for the excellent work he’d done. This was a rare distinction, as honours usually only come with retirement. Even the lowliest and least regarded Co-op executive usually manages an OBE. To get a simple MBE you must really get up someone’s nose!
When Joe, now Sir Joe, went, he was replaced in Nairobi by Archie Archbell, a character I shall have more to say about later. I missed Joe’s light touch and easy manner. Archbell was harder to work under and eventually it was to gain a bit of at least temporary relief from him that made me accept the offer of a London attachment in 1968. Also, it had been more than five years since I last got back and I was keen to spend some time with my sister and my father, who was in failing health. I’d heard about ‘swinging London’ but this was the first time I’d experienced it. I was bowled over! After the initial shock, I found that, on the whole, I loved it. All the mean-spirited, joyless, repressive elements of British society seemed to have been swept aside in a great explosion of life and colour.
I was helped by being invited not long after my return to a party given by Joe Lightoller. It was a mixed do, with the oldies (every one of whom seemed to have made some concession, whether of hairstyle or shirt colour, to the spirit of the age!) being well diluted by a bunch of energetic youth. One of these was the loveliest girl I had ever seen, wearing a skirt which many tribes of Central Africa would have found too revealing. I was converted to minis and the permissive society instantly. I asked her to dance, then had to ask her to show me how. I was sure she would turn out to be a precocious sixteen-year-old, her head full of flower power and Sergeant Pepper.
Instead, she turned out to be twenty-three, a Cambridge graduate currently writing a doctoral thesis on D. H. Lawrence, and, best of all, she was Joe Lightoller’s only daughter, Sarah. I asked her for a date. When I woke up the next day, I thought I must have been drunk to do it and delirious to imagine she’d agreed.
But there was nothing to lose by turning up at the place my delirium suggested for the assignation.
She was there, lovely and lively as I recalled. Madness turned to miracle, and six months later we were married.
I’ve brought you thus far in my life because the main part of what I want to write about begins thereafter. There’ll be plenty of people who say I am bound by honour and by law to keep my mouth shut. But I have long debated whether a signature scribbled on a piece of paper a quarter of a century ago should bind a man to silence for ever about crimes committed in his country’s name.
Crimes may seem a strong word. But wouldn’t you say that assisting a man many think of as the black Hitler to gain and to remain in power was a crime? Or giving a helping hand to those breaking sanctions imposed against a country in revolt against the Crown? Or, to give a more recent example, when an undercover meeting is arranged with two ANC spokesmen and, on their way to the secret rendezvous in Botswana, their car is forced off the road and both are killed, wouldn’t you then get a strong whiff of criminality?
But as I said earlier, I am no holier-than-thou saint. The public weal is certainly part of my motivation, but I won’t hide the fact that private woe is there, too. Loyalty is two-way traffic. I have been treated shabbily, even dishonestly, by men who were my superiors. And if their honesty is in question in personal dealings, how can I accept their reassurances that whatever I found dubious in their policies and practices over the years was perfectly justifiable in some broader picture?
You must judge for yourselves. Me, I’m just an old Africa hand who got involved in what he thought was a game preservation safari, and can’t understand why he saw so many leopard skins and elephant tusks being hauled back to the coast.
2
‘Your father would like a word, I think,’ said Fanny at breakfast one morning, about ten days after their return from Spain.
Sairey had little doubt what the word was about. She had tried with some success to conceal the worst effects of her lack of sleep, and her father’s preoccupation with his memoirs might have enabled her to get away with it a good deal longer. But Fanny’s keen eye missed little.
She went into her father’s study and found it empty, but a still-smouldering cigarette promised he’d be back soon.
The study was very much a ‘man’s room’, in the old-fashioned sense. A few tusked or toothy heads protruding from the panelled walls would not have looked out of place, but Ellis, fortunately, had never been that kind of white African. What did cover the walls were photographs. All his life, or at least its surface, was here. Like a visitor to an art gallery, Sairey wandered round the room.
Here he was, aged about five, with his father and sister, outside their farmhouse near Nyeri. Half a dozen Kikuyu farmhands grinned at the group from a respectful distance, their broad smiles contrasting with the Whites’ solemnity. Sairey looked at the nineteen-year-old Celia and could already see in that slim, upright figure and thoughtful gaze the much-loved, middle-aged aunt who had once more taken over a mother’s role, forty years on. A photo of her in her thirties on Camber Sands with her invalid father showed little change, but the crouched and wizened figure in the wheelchair was unconnectable with the broad-shouldered, vital man outside his Kenyan farmhouse.
Sairey let her gaze slip to the young Kikuyu. Had any of them been involved in the raid which destroyed his life, she wondered? But there was no way of looking beneath those smiling faces. She passed on.
Group photographs, formal and informal, dominated; her father tassel-capped at school, bare-headed at university, peak-capped in the KAR, bare-headed again at the hauling down of the Union Jack in Nairobi in ’62, greytoppered at his wedding … she moved her gaze rapidly on.
Here he was being married again, casually dressed this time in a light linen suit, with Fanny, cool in a flowered summer dress, by his side. There were no black faces in this group, except in contrast with Fanny’s pale, flawless skin which was, apparently, impervious to the African sun. Nigel Ellis looked uncharacteristically nervous. Most of the surrounding guests looked suitably cheerful except for one, a bulky, snarling man whose head was thrust forward in the questing pose of a hungry bear.
She remembered noticing him particularly when she first saw the photo. He must have made a deep impression for, though it was years since she could recall looking at this group, she was suddenly convinced that this was the man she’d seen driving slowly round the Square that night the Dream returned.
She shuddered, and moved on in search of her father.
The very last of the pictures showed him alone for once, grey-toppered again, standing outside Buckingham Palace examining his retirement MBE. Sairey had taken a whole roll of snaps, but Ellis had shown little interest till Fanny said, ‘In this one, you look as if she’d just given you a corgi dropping.’
‘How apt,’ he’d said, and chosen that photo as his record of the award.
The door opened and he swept in. Tall and rangy, with the deep tan of Africa hardly touched by seven years in England, he looked more like a bushranger than a civil servant, which is what appeared on his passport.
‘Hello, sweetie,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘Not sleeping so well, I hear.’
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Just a bit of insomnia, that’s all.’
‘You reckon? Look, I’d like John Varley to take a look at you, OK? Now I know you’re eighteen and, by one of those laws which they passed behind my back, that makes you adult and able to say yea or nay to being examined, but for my sake, just so that I can cross one worry off my list of a thousand, see John, will you?’
‘All right,’ she said. There was no way of arguing with him, or, at least, no way which would not leave her feeling more like eight than eighteen.
‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘I was just looking at these old photos before you came in. This man at your wedding, who’s he?’ She pointed at the ursine man.
Nigel Ellis said, ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason. He just looks very … striking. In a rather nasty way.’
It was the right thing to say, it seemed.
‘That’s not so far from the truth. His name’s Archbell. Archie to his friends, such as they are.’
‘What was he doing at your wedding?’
‘He was by way of being my boss in Africa. Also, Fanny was his secretary. So it would have been difficult not to invite him. If ever you meet him, run a mile, even if he does seem to be on a chain! Now I must dash. Got to see a publisher. Don’t I sound high-powered!’
He swept up some papers from his desk and was gone.
This had been the pattern of their relationship for as long as she could recall – brief intense encounters, sudden departures. She wanted to explain to him that she needed long sessions of examination and reflection to get to know people. She’d made few close friends at school because the sheer pace of life and the multiplicity of personnel had made it difficult to work things through. His judgements were swift, piercing, accurate, but rather limited in their understanding of an opposite nature. She could have told him, of course, only there never seemed time. And also, perhaps because there never seemed time, she never felt close enough for the kind of openness such a telling would require.
Two days later, John Varley came. He was grey-haired, studiously tweedy, and smelt of black twist. He had been her mother’s doctor and attended at her birth, so his face, his tweed, his tobacco, were among her very first sensations. His bedside manner was matter-of-fact and avuncular. Most people found it very reassuring. So, for colds and colics, did Sairey, but it was the magical end of medicine she felt in need of now.
He gave her a thorough check, prodding her with fingers and questions. She saw no reason not to answer honestly, except that she generalized the Dream into its vague swirl of supporting nightmares. Somehow, to be specific smacked, she didn’t know why, of betrayal. Otherwise, she was quite open and John Varley listened very well. He knew a good listener was worth his weight in attendance fees.
The examination finished, he said, ‘All right. Get dressed. Lovely tan, by the way. Bet you turned a lot of heads in Spain.’
He grinned and winked as he said it. Is he going to start asking about boyfriends, she wondered? Put it all down to Freud and hormones?
Instead, he said casually, ‘Saw your grandfather the other day.’
‘He’s not ill, is he?’
‘Sir Joe? Good Lord, no,’ he laughed. ‘We were playing golf. But he’d be pleased to know you’d be concerned.’
‘Of course I’d be concerned. Just because he and Daddy … well, I make my own decisions now.’
She didn’t believe it, and suspected Varley didn’t either. Sir Joseph Lightoller, her maternal grandfather, hadn’t figured large in her upbringing. He had attempted a takeover after his daughter died and Aunt Celia brought the young Sairey back to Britain. Celia had resisted politely, he had been foolish enough to persist, upon which she had let him see what a formidable woman she was.
There’d been two further causes of distancing. The first was Ellis’s remarriage, and the second had something to do with work. Sairey took very little interest in her father’s job, accepting at face value his offhand assurance that it was boringly centred on ploughs and oxen and crop rotation. But boring though it might have been, he’d certainly been furious when he was made to give it up and settle down to working in London, some years earlier. Nor did the pleasures of early retirement seem to have cooled that rage.
‘Sir Joe was saying it’s a long time since he saw you,’ pursued Varley. ‘Look, I don’t want to interfere, and if there’s an absolute injunction against you seeing him or me mentioning him, just say so. I always play house-rules.’
‘I told you, I make my own decisions,’ she said, pulling her tee shirt over her head, then reconstructing her olive-tipped spikes of hair in the mirror.
‘You certainly do about your hair,’ he laughed. ‘He feels concerned about you too, you know.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Time flies. I may just have time to squeeze a gin and tonic out of that mean old parent of yours.’
‘But what about …?’
‘Nothing to worry yourself with,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ll drop some gunge in. One of your spikes is wilting, I think! Bye.’
She heard his light tread run nimbly down the stairs. She counted to ten, then went out of the room.
Downstairs, John Varley was helping himself to his drink.
‘What’s the verdict?’ said Ellis. ‘Same as before?’
‘Nothing’s ever the same as before,’ said Varley. ‘But a not dissimilar syndrome, certainly, though rather more acute.’
‘You said she’d grow out of it, then,’ said Ellis accusingly.
‘Did I? In some ways, of course, she’s still growing. This started after your return from Spain, I gather, Fanny?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So, tell me again exactly what’s happened, what you’ve observed. It’s no use asking that husband of yours. He wouldn’t observe Christmas if he didn’t get cards.’
Fanny talked, Varley listened. Finally, Ellis broke in irritably, ‘Come on. What do you suggest by way of treatment?’
‘It’s not a dose of flu, Nigel,’ said the doctor. ‘I’d guess that her last year at school, full of “A” levels and entrance exams, took more out of her than you realized. She relaxed in Spain, but now she’s back, she knows the work is all going to start up again. This is a very sketchy amateur analysis, you understand.’
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘Specialist help,’ said Varley, very positively.
‘A shrink, you mean?’ said Fanny, raising her exquisitely groomed eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t a couple of weeks in Kent with Celia do the trick?’
‘A couple of weeks in Spain with you didn’t,’ said her husband sharply.
‘Yes, but she’s always got on so much better with Celia,’ said Fanny, unaffected by the gibe. ‘And honestly, Nigel, can you see the poor child talking to a stranger? It would be a waste of time and money.’
Nigel Ellis had no immediate counter to this objection, but Varley said, ‘I wasn’t thinking of a stranger, necessarily. I was wondering about Vita Gray.’
There was a pause. Fanny smiled expectantly at her husband, who said, finally, ‘Would that be wise?’
‘Because Vita Gray’s a family friend, you mean? If you’re going to object to both strangers and friends, that, of course, limits the field considerably.’
‘No need for sarcasm,’ growled Ellis. ‘All right. Vita it shall be.’
Sairey went quietly back upstairs. On this occasion she felt no guilt at all about eavesdropping. At one point she’d felt like bursting in and demanding to know what the hell they thought they were doing making decisions about her health behind her back. She was an adult and entitled to make her own decisions. Except (and this was what kept her fury in check) that she didn’t feel very adult, not unless depression and insecurity were adult conditions too, and she didn’t want to believe that.
Back in her room, she sat on her bed. After a while, her father tapped at her door, but she called out that she was resting. She heard Varley leave. A little later her father, too, went out. She knew she was safe now for Fanny would not trouble her. But still she sat on the bed and thought of nothing. This was the nearest she dared come to sleep. How long it was before she lay down, she did not know. Suddenly she realized that instead of the wall, she was looking up at the ceiling, focusing on a patch of rough plaster, relict of some old repair, familiar to her as long as she could remember, and which had probably been there in those early, unrecapturable years before they’d gone to join her father in Africa. It was shaped like a star. She lay and looked at the star and concentrated on not falling asleep. But she was too exhausted to resist for long.
At first it was a new dream that came, strange but not frightening, its central image a face that came swimming out of darkness, the face of the boy in the park, but with eye and nose undamaged and only a smile on his lips, no blood. The contusion on his cheek had hardened into a star-shaped scar. She smiled back in pleasure and felt the warm stirrings of sexual arousal. But then he was gone and instead, she was in her father’s arms and the face she was looking at was her mother’s, deathly pale in her coffin. Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!
She awoke.
A heavy-featured woman with intense blue eyes was sitting by the bed, regarding her gravely.
‘Hello, Sairey,’ the woman said.
‘Hello, Vita,’ whispered Sairey Ellis.
