Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
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he got an answer from the operator in Gaborone. He told her what he wanted: Johannesburg. There seemed to be a party going on in the background. He could hear women laughing, and what was perhaps crockery being smashed. The operator came back once or twice, bellowing in his ear, but she didn’t forget him entirely; in time she came up with what might be her best offer, a line to Mafeking. He took it. A guttural voice answered him in Afrikaans. Seconds later he was speaking to Eric Parsons, at his hotel. It was the Carlton, he noted; Turadup did not penny-pinch.
He did not suggest making the drive to Johannesburg, but waited until Parsons said, ‘I’ll come to you then, shall I?’ He knew how he would employ the time, as he drove to Gaborone to meet Parsons; he pictured himself at the wheel of his truck, the empty road and the low brown hills unwinding before him, while his practised eye was half-alert for cattle and children, and his inner will concentrated, mile after mile, upon making Parsons offer him more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in his life. This, in due course, Parsons did.
The details were fixed up, at the President Hotel this time (there being, in Gaborone, a choice of two) over a tough T-bone steak and a glass of Lion lager. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation’s only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window of the President Hotel’s gift shop; crocodile handbags, skin rugs, complete bushmen kits with arrows and ostrich shells, direct from the small factory in Palapye which had recently started turning them out. ‘I can hardly believe I’m finished in Africa,’ he said.
When he arrived home late that afternoon, Frances was on the stoep packing a tea-chest, wrapping up their dinner service in pieces of the Mafeking Mail. ‘Well, did you do it?’ she said. She straightened up and kissed his cheek.
‘Yes, I did it, it’s all fixed. But we can’t go together – I have to be in the Kingdom before they’ll grant you a visa. When we finish up here I’m to fly to Nairobi, and pick up a businessman’s entry permit – then once I’m in, Turadup will fix it for me to stay. They’re in a hurry.’
‘Why? Has someone quit without notice?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘I would have asked.’
‘I didn’t think of it.’
‘So you won’t even be coming to England first?’
‘And stay with your mother?’
‘It looks as if I’ll have to.’
‘Well listen, Fran, we won’t be apart for long. And by the time you get out to Jeddah, we’ll be fixed up with a house, and everything will be ready for you.’
‘I’d rather go with you. But I suppose they have their rules. Oh, look, am I to pack these?’ She held out a candlestick, one of a pair from a local pottery, rough, heavy, unglazed.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Souvenir. Take those funny baskets as well, the ones that fall over.’
She began to wrap the candlestick, rolling it in her hands. ‘Are you sure that this is the right thing to do?’ she said. ‘Is this what you want?’
‘They’re doubling my salary,’ he said flatly.
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
She turned away and bent over the tea-chest again, cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.
‘We could be in and out within three years,’ he said. ‘Your salary is paid in riyals, tax-free. All you need out of it is your day-to-day living expenses and you can bank the rest where you like, in any currency you like. Turadup are offering free housing, a car allowance, paid utilities, yearly leave ticket, school fees – though of course –’
‘That would be plain greedy,’ she said, ‘having children so that you could get their school fees paid.’
‘Pollard did say –’ He looked at her in slight anxiety. ‘He said that his only reservation was how you’d settle in. As you’ve been a working woman.’
‘I won’t be able to work?’
‘Unlikely, he thinks.’
‘Well, if you’re going to earn all that money, I’m sure I can occupy myself. After all, it’s not for ever, is it?’
‘No, it’s not for ever. We should think of it as a chance for us, to build up some security—’
‘Will you pass me those salad bowls?’
Andrew was silent. He passed them, one by one. Why, really, should she share his vision of their future? She had come to Africa at her own behest, a single woman, one of the few recruited for her line of work. She had lived alone before they met; for three nights in succession, he had sat by himself, seemingly disconsolate, on a corner stool in the bar of an expatriate club, not even looking her way, but concentrating hard; until she had asked him to go home with her. She had fed her dog, and then cooked eggs for them, and asked him what he wanted out of life. Later, in the sagging double bed with which her government bungalow was furnished, he had lain awake while she slept, wishing furiously for her to act and understand; and although it had taken a little time to work, within a matter of weeks she had turned to him and said, ‘We could get married if that’s what you want.’
So perhaps, too, he should have wished her into suggesting Saudi Arabia; then she would have known it was her own decision. But from what he had heard it was a part of the world in which women’s decisions did not operate. He made a leap of faith: it will be all right, I know it will. ‘Frances,’ he said, ‘we won’t go unless you want to.’
She slotted a wrapped teacup into place. ‘I want to.’
It had been raining, earlier that day, and there was a heavy, animal scent of drenched earth and crushed flowers. In the kitchen their housemaid, Elizabeth, was washing glasses – pointless really as they would soon be crated up – and they could hear the separate clink that each one made as she put it down on the draining-board. The dogs and cats were coming in to be fed, wandering to the back door to wait around, like the Victorian poor. ‘I really think we ought,’ Andrew said.
‘In point of fact, I don’t think we’ve anywhere else to go.’ She picked up a broad felt marker and daubed their name on the side of the tea-chest, SHORE, FRAGILE. GABORONE – LONDON.
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘No point.’
She crossed out LONDON, wrote JEDDAH. Another pang stabbed her, as sharp as the first. She imagined herself already in Saudi, a discreet teetotal housewife, homesick for this place that was not home in another place that was not home. It was almost dark now; the air was cooling, the sun dipping behind the hill. ‘What was Jeff Pollard doing, recruiting you? I thought he was trying to persuade everybody what a grand life it was as a freelance consultant?’
‘Well, it can’t be such a grand life, because he’s just signed up with Turadup himself. He’s going to manage their Jeddah business; he’s had experience out there, of course.’
‘So you mean you’ll be working with him?’
‘There is that tiny drawback.’
‘I hope we don’t end up living near him as well.’
‘They do pay for your housing, so it’s probably a case of taking what you’re given.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said, ‘but just try to ensure that what we’re given doesn’t include Pollard. Do you think they’ll all be like him?’
‘He’s a type. You get them everywhere. But Parsons isn’t like that.’
‘I suppose he’s another type.’
‘Yes, you’d know the one. Genial old duffer. Safari