The Sweetest Dream

  She slept, woke and made tea–Rebecca would not return until supper time. She had made some biscuits for the visitor.

  The two men returned. Andrew was smiling, but tight-lipped and looked washed out: well, he had not slept.

  ‘And there is my tea,’ said Father McGuire. ‘I can tell you, my child, that I need it, yes I do.’

  ‘Well?’ said Sylvia to Andrew. She sounded aggressive, since she knew what he had seen.

  Six buildings, each holding four classrooms, bursting with children, from small ones to young men and women. They were all exuberantly welcoming, and all complained to this representative from the higher places of power that they needed textbooks, they had no textbooks. There was sometimes one textbook for the whole class. ‘How can we do our homework, sir? How can we study?’

  There was not a globe, nor an atlas, in the whole school. When he had asked, the children did not know what they were. Harassed and frustrated young teachers took him aside to beg him to get them books to teach them how to teach. They were eighteen or twenty years old themselves, without hardly any qualifications and certainly none to enable them to teach.

  Andrew had never seen a more depressing place: school it was not. Father McGuire had escorted him from building to building, striding through dust to get out of the sun and back into patches of shade, introducing him as a friend of Zimlia. His fame as Global Money–though Father McGuire had not mentioned the magic name–had permeated the whole school. He was greeted with cries of welcome and with songs, and everywhere he looked were expectant faces.

  The priest had said: ‘I shall tell you the history of this place. We, the Mission, ran a school here for years–since the colony began. It was a good school. We had no more than fifty pupils. Some of them are in government now. Did you know that most of the African leaders came from mission schools? During the war Comrade President Matthew promised every child in the country a good secondary education. The schools were rushed up everywhere, are multiplying now. There are not the teachers, there are not the books, there are no exercise books. When the government took over our school–that was the end. I do not think the children you saw today will end up in the cabinet, or indeed, not anywhere that requires an education.’

  Then, when he had drunk some tea, he said, ‘Things will get better. You are seeing the worst. This is a poor district.’

  ‘Are there many schools like this one?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Father McGuire equably. ‘Many. Very many.’

  ‘And so what will happen to those children? Though some of them seem to be adults.’

  ‘They will be unemployed,’ said Father McGuire. ‘They will be unemployed. Yes, surely they will.’

  ‘I suppose I had better be driving back,’ said Andrew. ‘I have a plane to catch at nine.’

  ‘And now, if I may be so bold as to ask, is there a possibility you may do something for us? The school? The hospital? Would you think of us when you return to the ease and the pleasantness of–where did you say you are located?’

  ‘New York. And I think you have misunderstood. We shall be directing money–a big loan, to Zimlia, but not . . .’

  ‘You mean, we are beneath your notice?’

  ‘Not beneath mine,’ said Andrew, smiling. ‘But Global Money aims at high levels of . . . but I’ll speak to someone. I’ll speak to Caring International.’

  ‘We would be duly grateful,’ said Father McGuire. Sylvia said nothing. The furrow between her eyes made her seem like a scowling little witch.

  ‘Sylvia, why don’t you come for a holiday to New York?’

  ‘And indeed you should,’ said the priest, ‘so you should, my child.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll think about it.’ She did not look at him.

  ‘And will you drop in something for us to the Pynes? Just drop it, no need to go in, if you are in a hurry.’

  They went to the Volvo and the sack for the Pynes was put in the back.

  ‘I’ll send you the books, darling,’ he said to Sylvia.

  A couple of weeks later a sack arrived, by special messenger, from Senga, by motorbike. Books, from New York, delivered by plane to Senga, collected by InterGlobe, who attended to the Customs, and brought them all the way here. ‘What did that cost?’ asked Father McGuire, offering tea to the exile from the bright lights of Senga.

  ‘You mean, all of it?’ said the messenger, a smart young black man, in a uniform. ‘Well, it’s here.’ He brought out the papers. ‘That will have cost the sender just on a hundred pounds, to get them here,’ he said, admiring the size of the sum.

  ‘We could build a reading room with that, or an infant’s nursery,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘We must not look a gift horse in the mouth,’ said the priest.

  ‘I’m looking at it in the mouth,’ said Sylvia. She was scanning the list of books. Andrew had given her list to his secretary, who had mislaid it. So she went to the nearest big bookstore and ordered all the bestsellers, feeling complacent, and even sated, as if she had actually read them herself: she did fully intend to start reading soon. The novels were all unsuitable for Sylvia’s library. In due course they were given to Edna Pyne, who complained continually that she had read all her books a hundred times. ‘To her who has, it shall be given.’

  The history of the hospital Andrew did not hear was this.

  During the Liberation War this whole area, miles of it, had been full of the fighters, because it was hilly, with caves and ravines, good for guerilla war. One night Father McGuire had woken to see standing over him a youth pointing a gun at him, and saying, ‘Get up, put your hands up.’ The priest was stiff with sleep and slow at the best of times, and the youth swore at him and told him he would be shot if he didn’t hurry. But this was a very young man, eighteen, or even younger, and he was more frightened than Father McGuire: the rifle was shaking. ‘I’m coming,’ said Father McGuire, clumsily getting out of bed, but he couldn’t keep his hands up, he needed them. ‘Just take it easy,’ he said, ‘I’m coming.’ He put on his dressing-gown while the gun waved about near him, and then he said, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We want medicine, we want muti. One of us very sick.’

  ‘Then come to the bathroom.’ In the medicine cabinet were not much more than malaria tablets and aspirin and some bandages. ‘Take what you need,’ he said.

  ‘Is that all? I don’t believe you,’ said the youth. But he took everything there was, and said, ‘We want a doctor to come.’

  ‘Let us go to the kitchen,’ said the priest. There he said, ‘Sit down.’ He made tea, put biscuits out, and watched while they vanished. He took a couple of loaves of Rebecca’s new bread and handed them over, with some cold meat. These things vanished into a cloth bundle.

  ‘How can I get a doctor here? What shall I say? You people keep ambushing this road.’

  ‘Say you are sick and need a doctor. When you expect him tie a bit of cloth to that window. We shall be watching and we’ll bring our comrade. He’s wounded.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said the priest. As the youth disappeared into the night he turned to threaten: ‘Don’t tell Rebecca we were here.’

  ‘So you know Rebecca?’

  ‘We know everything.’

  Father McGuire thought, then wrote to a colleague in Senga, saying a doctor was needed for an unusual case. He should drive out in daytime, not stop the car for anything, and be sure he had his gun with him. ‘And be careful not to alarm our good sisters.’ A telephone call: a discreet exchange, apparently about the weather and the state of the crops. Then, ‘I shall visit you with Father Patrick. He has had medical training.’

  The priest tied a cloth to the window and hoped Rebecca did not notice. She said nothing: he knew she understood much more than she let on. The car arrived with the priests in it. That night two guerillas appeared, saying their comrade was too ill to be moved. They needed antibiotics. The priests had brought antibiotics, together with a good supply of medicines. They were all handed over, while F
ather Patrick prescribed. Again the larder was emptied of what was left while two half-starving young men had eaten as much as they could.

  Father McGuire went on living in this house that anyone could enter at any time. The nuns lived inside a security fence, but he hated it: he said he felt like a prisoner even going inside it to visit them. In his own house, he was exposed, and he knew he was watched. He expected to be murdered: white people had been killed not far away. Then the war ended. Two youths came to the house and said they were there to say thank you. Rebecca fed them, when she was ordered to do it. She said to the priest, ‘They are bad people.’

  He asked what had happened to the wounded man: he had died. After that he saw them around: they were unemployed and angry because they had believed Liberation would see them in fine jobs and good houses. He employed one at the school as an odd-job man. The other was Joshua’s eldest son, who started school in a class full of small children: he spoke pretty good English, but could not read or write. Now he was sick, very thin, and with sores.

  Father McGuire did not mention these events to anyone, until he told Sylvia. Rebecca did not speak of them. The nuns did not know of them.

  He had to keep an ever-enlarging supply of medicines in his house, because people came to ask for them. He built the shacks and shed down the hill, and asked Senga for a doctor to come: Comrade President Matthew had promised free medicine for everybody. He was sent a young man who had not finished his medical training, because of the war: he had intended to be a medical orderly. Father McGuire did not know this until one night the young man got drunk and said he wanted to finish his training, could Father McGuire help him? Father McGuire said, When you stop drinking, I’ll write the letter for you. But the war had damaged this fighter, who had been twenty when it started: he could not stop drinking. This was ‘the doctor’ that Joshua had told Sylvia about. Father McGuire, in a chatty letter to Senga, complained that there was no hospital for twenty miles and no doctor. It happened that a priest visiting London had met Sylvia, with Father Jack. And so it had all happened.

  But there was a good hospital planned for ten miles away, and when that opened, this disgraceful place–Sylvia said–could cease to be.

  ‘Why disgraceful?’ said the priest. ‘It does good things. It was a good day for us all when you came. You are a blessing for us.’

  And why had the good sisters up the hill not been a blessing?

  The four who had seen out the dangers of the war had not always been behind their security fence. They taught at the school, when it had still been a good one. The war ended and they left. They were white women, but the nuns who replaced them were black, young women who had escaped from poverty, dreariness and sometimes danger into the blue and white uniforms that set them aside from other black women. They were not educated and could not teach. They found themselves in this place which was a horror to them, not an escape from poverty, but a reminder of it. There were four of them, Sister Perpetua, Sister Grace, Sister Ursula, Sister Boniface. The ‘hospital’ was not one, and when Joshua ordered them to come every day they were back where they had escaped from: under the domination of a black man who expected to be waited on. They found excuses not to go, and Father McGuire did not insist: the fact was, they were pretty useless. Gentility was what they had chosen, not suppurating limbs. By the time Sylvia arrived the enmity between them and Joshua was such that every time they saw him they said they would pray for him, and he taunted, insulted and cursed them in return.

  They did wash bandages and dressings while complaining they were dirty and disgusting, but their energies really went into the church which was as pretty and well-kept as the churches that had beckoned them to become nuns when they were girls. Those churches had been the cleanest and finest buildings for miles and now this one at St Luke’s Mission, like those, never had a speck of dust, because it was swept several times a day, and the statues of Christ and the Virgin were polished and gleaming, and when dust swirled the nuns were up shutting doors and windows and sweeping it up before it even settled. The good sisters were serving the church and Father McGuire, and, said Joshua, mimicking them, they clucked like chickens whenever he came near.

  They were often sick, because then they could return to Senga and their mother house.

  • • •

  Joshua sat all day under the big acacia tree while sunlight and shadow sifted over him, and watched what went on at the hospital, but often through eyes that distorted what he saw. He was smoking dagga almost continually. His little boy Clever was always with Sylvia, and then there were two children, Clever and Zebedee. They could not have been further from the adorable black piccanin with long curly lashes that sentiment loves. They were lean, with bony faces where burned enormous eyes hungry to learn and–it became evident–hungry for food too. They arrived at the hospital at seven, unfed, and Sylvia made them come up to the house where she cut them slabs of bread and jam, while Rebecca watched, and once remarked that her children did not get bread and jam, but only cold porridge, and not always that. Father McGuire watched and said that Sylvia was now the mother of two children and he hoped she knew what she was doing. ‘But they have a mother,’ she said, and he said no, their own mother had died on the violent roads of Zimlia, and their father had died of malaria, and so they had become Joshua’s responsibility: they called him Father. Sylvia was relieved to hear this history. Joshua had already lost two children–another had just died–and she knew why, and what the real reason was–not the ‘Pneumonia’ that was on their death certificates. So these two were not Joshua’s by blood: how useful, how painfully pertinent that old phrase had become. They were both clever, as Joshua had claimed for Clever: he said that his brother had been a teacher and his sister-in-law had been first in her class. The little boys watched every movement she made, and copied her, and examined her face and eyes as she spoke, so they knew what she wanted them to do before she asked; they looked after the chickens and the sitting hens, they collected eggs and never broke one, they ran about with mugs of water and medicines for the patients. They squatted on either side of her watching when she set limbs or lanced swellings, and she had to keep reminding herself they were six and four, not twice those ages. They were sponges for information. But they were not at school. Sylvia made them come up to the house at four o’clock, when she had finished at the hospital, and set them lessons. Other children wanted to join in: Rebecca’s, for a start. Soon, she was running what amounted to a little nursery school. But when the others wanted to be like Clever and Zebedee and work at the hospital, she said no. Why did she favour them, it wasn’t fair? She made the excuse that they were orphans. But there were other orphans at the village. ‘Well, my child,’ said the priest, ‘and now you begin to understand why people’s hearts break in Africa. Do you know the story of the man who was asked why he was walking along the beach after a storm throwing stranded starfish back into the sea, when there were thousands of them who must die? He replied that he did it because the few he could save would find themselves back in the sea and be happy.’ ‘Until the next storm–were you going to say that, Father?’ ‘No, but I might be thinking it. And I am interested that you might be thinking on those lines too.’ ‘You mean, I am thinking more realistically–as you put it, Father?’ ‘Yes, I do, I do put it like that. But I’ve told you often enough, you have too many stars in your eyes for your own good.’

  • • •

  The Studebaker lorry, an old rattler donated by the Pynes to the Mission, to replace the Mission lorry which had finally met its death, stood waiting on the track. Sylvia had told Rebecca to say in the village that she was going to the Growth Point and could take six people in the back. About twenty had already clambered in. With Sylvia stood Rebecca and two of her children–she had insisted they should have the treat, not Joshua’s children, not this time.

  Sylvia said to the people in the back that the tyres were very old and could easily burst. No one moved. The Mission had its name down for tyres, even
second-hand tyres, but it was a forlorn hope. Then Rebecca spoke in first one local language and then another and in English. No one moved and a woman said to Sylvia, ‘Drive slowly and it will be okay.’

  Sylvia and Rebecca jumped into the front seat with the two children. The lorry set off, crawling. At the Pynes’ turn-off they were waved down by the Pynes’ cook who said he had to get into the Growth Point, there was no food in his house and his wife . . . Rebecca laughed, and there was much laughter at the back and he climbed up, and fitted himself in somehow. Rebecca sat beside Sylvia and turned to watch the back–where they were laughing and teasing the cook: there was some drama Sylvia would never know about.

  The Growth Point was five miles from the Mission. The white government had created the idea that there should be a network of nuclei around which townships would grow: a shop, a government office, the police, a church, a garage. The idea was successful, and the black government claimed it as theirs. No one argued. This Growth Point was still in embryo but expanding: there were half a dozen little houses, a new supermarket. Sylvia parked outside the government office, a small building sitting in pale dust where some dogs lay asleep. Everyone piled out of the lorry, but Rebecca’s boys had to stay in it, to guard it, otherwise everything would be stolen off it, including the tyres. They were given some Pepsi and a bun each, with instructions that if anyone at all looked as if theft was planned one must run and tell their mother.