to be nice about motives.
Ralph saw the issue differently. The Eldreds and the Martins, he said, acted from a desire to make the world conformable. Grocer Martin would like to raise all tramps to the condition of account customers; Betty the grocer’s wife would like to see chain-smoking unmarried mothers scrub their faces and take communion monthly. Cold, poverty, hunger must be remedied because they are extreme states, productive of disorder, of psychic convulsions, of demonstrations by the unemployed. They lead to socialism, and make the streets unsafe.
Ralph passed judgement on his father, and on hers. He knew a poem; he would laugh, and say:
‘God made the wicked Grocer For a mystery and a sign.
That men might shun the awful shops And go to inns to dine.’
There it was – Ralph hated nothing more than meanness. It seemed to her that he had a spontaneous, uncalculated kindness. She was looking for no more and no less. She slept with him before – just before – the engagement ring was on her finger.
It was she who had made him the offer. When the time came – the one occasion, perhaps in a year, when they had the house at Dereham to themselves – she was seized by fear. Even the touch of his warm hands made her shiver. But he was a young man with little experience – or none, as she supposed – so perhaps the difference between terror and passion was not readily apparent to him.
After the deed was done, she worried a good deal about whether she might be pregnant. She thought of praying not to be, but she did not think she would have God’s ear. And besides, in the one way, disgrace would have delivered her. ‘I’ll look after you,’ Ralph had said. ‘If that happened, we’d just bring the wedding forward.’ When her period came – four days late, late enough to put her into a daze of panic and hope – she leaned against the freezing wall of her parents’ bathroom, against the hostile dark-green paint, and cried over the chance lost.
After this she seemed to lose her equilibrium; she had not thought of herself as a complicated person, but now all sorts of wishes and fears were fighting inside her head. Ralph suggested that they should bring the wedding forward anyway; marry as soon as she left her teacher-training college, not wait until the end of the summer. Uncle James came to meet her parents, and talked about this very interesting post that was going in Dar-es-Salaam.
Her mother thought that the climate might be unsuitable, but conceded that Anna had never had a day’s illness and had not been brought up to be a shirker. Betty thought, further, that the natives might not be nice. But what surprised Anna was how easily they fell in with James’ suggestion, how quickly they agreed that though the engagement had been unusually short the marriage might as well be in June. For the first time it occurred to her that they might be glad to have her off their hands. Think of the expenditure of emotion a daughter entails! With their daughter married, and at the other side of the world, they would have more energy for the affairs of strangers.
Of course there was something improbable, even hilarious, about the idea of being a missionary in Africa. She said, ‘I won’t have to wear a sola topi, will I? And be boiled in a pot?’
Ralph said, ‘I don’t think so. Uncle James has never been boiled. Not so far, anyway.’
Then Ralph came to her with the change of plan. If she agreed, they were not to go to East Africa at all. A job was waiting for them elsewhere, in a township called Elim. It was near Johannesburg, north of the city – not far from Pretoria either, he said, as if that would help her place it. He brought a book, newly published, called Naught for Your Comfort. If she would read it, he suggested, she would know why people were needed and why perhaps if they valued their own comfort they ought not to go. Then she could weigh up the options, think what was best for them. ‘And best for other people, of course,’ she said. At that time – the spring of 1956 – she could say such a thing with no ironical intent.
She read the book at once. It painted a picture of a hungry, bloody, barely comprehensible world. She felt ready to enter it. She did not know what use she could be, but Ralph seemed to think their work was cut out for them. And after all, comfort had never been one of her expectations.
She had dreamt about the book too, those last nights before they left England. The dreams seemed to heighten but not betray the text. Policemen strutted in the streets with machine-guns. Acts of Parliament were posted up on every street. The populace was cowed.
When she woke, she shuttled these nightmares out of her head. For one thing, the dream-streets of Elim were too much like the streets of East Dereham. For another thing, they had to jostle for space in her imagination with the images already there: missionaries’ tales and childhood geography texts, smudgy photographs of mean proportions; women with their teeth filed sharp, men with cicatrized cheeks. Some other part of Africa, no doubt. Some other time. Still she imagined savannah, long horizons, thatched rondavels standing in kraals: a population simply religious, hymn-singing, tractable. In real life, she had almost never seen a black man.
Ralph had said to Uncle James, ‘I hardly think my work at the hostel is going to have prepared me for Africa.’
Uncle James had said cheerfully, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing could prepare you for Africa.’
Her mother had given her a book called The Sun-Drenched Veld. She could read it on the ship, Betty advised. ‘One of the Windows on the World series, Anna. It cost 9/6.’ She picked it up on the day they quit Las Palmas, flicking its pages as they moved through waters where flying fish leapt.
It bore little resemblance to Father Huddleston’s text; but no doubt it was true, in its way. ‘In descriptions of African wildlife the zebra is often mentioned only in passing. Yet he is a lovely creature; a compact, sturdy little horse with neat mane and flowing tail. And no two of his kind are patterned alike! Having drawn his outline you can paint in the stripes as you please.’
When the sea made her dreamy, unable to concentrate, she gave up on the text, let the book close in her lap and rested her eyes on its cover. It beckoned the reader through arches of the coolest, palest peppermint, into an other-worldly landscape – pink and gold in the foreground, green hills rising in the middle ground and beyond them the lilac haze of mountains. She wondered if the illustrator had confused it with heaven; got his commissions mixed up, perhaps. But then she remembered a book she had seen on Ralph’s shelves – a book from his years as a fossil-hunter. The picture on the cover was much the same – strange, impossible colours. She had turned to the inside flap to see what was represented: On the shores of a Jurassic lagoon, the caption said. Amid the startling viridescence of the palms, Archaeopteryx flopped and swooped, feathers glowing with the deep autumn tints of a game bird. A little dinosaur, glinting like steel, scurried on spindle legs. The sky was a delicate eggshell. In the background shone a deeper aqueous blue-green – some vast and primitive ocean, with shores that had never been mapped.
But now, how small the sea appeared: a metallic dish, across which they inched. After dark the people who were sailing home stood at the rail, looking for the Southern Cross. And one night it appeared, lying just off-south, exactly where everyone had predicted it would be. Anna saw four dull points of light, pale, hardly distinguishable from the meagre scattering of stars around. She would not have noticed it, she thought, if it had not been pointed out.
They came into Table Bay in the rain, in drizzle and cloud which lifted from moment to moment, then descended again. Through the murk a solid dark mass became visible. ‘Table Mountain,’ someone told her. A pancake of grey cloud lay over it. The sun broke through, gleamed, was gone – then sent out another searching ray, like an arm reaching into a tent. She could see the contours of the mountain now – its spines of rock, and the ravines and crevices steeped in violet
