Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. Hilary Mantel
got through.’
‘Well, I take your word for it. But still, what a hole it is, Gaborone. Bunch of tarts sitting in the dust outside selling woolly hats. Sit by the pool, play the fruit machines, bugger all else to do.’ He paused, the tirade halted by a scruple of politeness. ‘Was that where you lived?’
‘Well no, actually, we lived in a much smaller place. We used to go up to Gaborone for a bit of excitement.’
‘You poor things, that’s all I can say. And you were in Zambia too? I’ve been to Lusaka, done a couple of stopovers. They’re thieves in Lusaka. They’ll take the wheels off your hire-car as soon as look at you. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels.’
She smiled. ‘My friend wasn’t amused,’ the steward said.
‘No, I’m sure. It was very trying when they took your wheels off. It was quite common though. You could never plan on being anywhere by a set time.’
‘And there was never any sugar. I take sugar, in coffee.’
‘It’s true, there were a lot of shortages.’
‘I’ve not been out that way for a while. They tell me it’s worse now.’
‘Oh, Africa’s always worse.’
‘Quite the cynic.’
‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘I think I was just there for too long. I liked it, in a way. At least, I’m glad I went there. I wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘I expect you’ll find your Saudi lifestyle very different.’
‘Yes, I expect I will.’
He was hovering, waiting to tell her some horror stories. There were always stories out of the Middle East, and no doubt Jeff Pollard would have told her some, if he had not been so anxious to recruit Andrew for his building project. But her tone wrapped up the conversation. ‘Sure on that brandy?’ the steward said; and moved away. The slightest encouragement, and he would have asked, ‘Do you remember that Helen Smith case?’
A dozen people had raised the question, in her two-month stay in England. It was strange how it had stuck in people’s minds, considering how little they usually remembered of what they read in the newspapers: young north-country girl, a nurse, found dead after an all-night party; nurse’s father, dogged ex-policeman, off out there to get at the truth. And then the inquests, and the coroner’s reports, and the hints of diplomatic cover-ups and skulduggery in high places; the pleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places. The press reports had left an image in people’s minds, of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and sour; so now when you were off to Jeddah, people said, ‘Don’t fall off any balconies, will you?’ It became monotonous. And their talk had left an image in her mind, which she did not like but could not now eradicate; the image of the broken body, still in its mortuary drawer.
A part of her, now, thought the persistence of the image sinister; a part of her said, things happen everywhere, and after all, she said, comforting herself, there’s only the world. Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought you had left behind in one country catch up with you in the next, and old problems resurface, but if you are lucky you carry as part of your baggage the means of solving those problems and accommodating those habits, and you take with you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere. I make large claims for myself, she thought. She pushed up the window shade and looked out, into featureless darkness. There was no sensation of movement, no intimation that they were in flight. She closed her eyes. Sleep now, she coaxed herself. Tomorrow I will have people to meet and there will be a good deal to do. How pleased I will be, to do it; and to be there, at last.
It was at the Holiday Inn, Gaborone – but in the bar, not in the coffee shop – that Andrew had met Jeff Pollard. They had run into him once before, in Lusaka, and not liked him particularly; but now Pollard was offering a job, and Andrew needed one. His contract in Botswana was a month away from its termination date, and they were already packing and selling things off. The U K building trade had slumped into what seemed chronic recession; they didn’t know what they were going to do. They didn’t want to stay in Botswana, even if there had been the option. With the advent of the black-top road across the South African border, life had changed for the worse, their severe small-town isolation ended, the single street full of new faces. It was true that you could go as far as Johannesburg now without steeling yourself for the journey over dirt roads; it ought to have been an advantage, but in fact it made life too easy. They were a direct connection on the string of dorps that ran across the Transvaal and over the frontier; the day would come soon when they would feel like a suburb.
At this point – one morning over breakfast – Andrew had said, ‘What about the Middle East?’
‘Oh no,’ she’d said. ‘I’d have to go around with a headscarf on all day. I couldn’t put up with that.’
‘Fran,’ he said, ‘we have to make some money. We haven’t made any here. I thought we would, but it’s not worked out. We have to get something behind us.’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
She had known he was serious; because he addressed her by her name. It had not escaped her notice that women were always using men’s christian names, but that men only did it when there was something in the offing: a rebuke, a plea. Andrew had never been communicative, so it had been necessary to notice these things. He was a silent man, who never asked for anything, or set arrangements in train, or egged life on; instead he waited for what he wanted, with a powerful, active patience which seemed to surround him, like an aura: an aura of forbearance, of self-control. His patience was not like other people’s, a rather feeble virtue, which had, by its nature, to be its own reward; it was a virtue like a strong magnet, which drew solutions to problems. And now drew Jeff Pollard.
Jeff Pollard was a sometime employee of Turadup, William and Schaper, a firm known throughout the construction business as Throw’em Up, Bill’em, and Scarper. Since the European Development Fund had decided to finance the building of the black-top road, he had been in and out of southern Africa, weighing up prospects and buying people drinks. He was a man of thirty-five, unmarried, with a loose and dusty appearance and shifting eyes; he had a grey-white skin, but the back of his neck was at all times mysteriously and painfully sunburned. He had an unsparing fund of anecdote, a knowing, dirty laugh; a British passport, and a vaguely Australian accent. He wore his shirt open, and around his neck on a chain a small block of gold incised with the legend CREDIT SUISSE. When the Shores were leaving Africa there had been a lot of people like Jeff around, doing their recruiting in golf-club bars. They were cowboys, headhunters, entrepreneurs; anywhere they hung their hat was their domicile, for fiscal purposes.
Turadup had got a toe-hold in Zambia before the bottom dropped out of copper, putting up expatriate housing in Kabwe, the mining town that had once been known as Broken Hill; then when Zambia went down the drain they moved south a bit, putting in an unsuccessful tender for work on the new international airport at Gaborone; then picking up work around that city, piping water and building a clinic for a shanty town that had become permanent faute de mieux. They operated over the South African border too, putting up a much-needed casino in a bantustan. But since the early 1970s the Middle East had been what they called their major theatre of operations. It happened that at the time when Andrew Shore was ready to move on, Turadup’s Saudi Arabian manager, a man called Eric Parsons, was in Johannesburg trawling for expertise; and on that day – always described by Andrew as ‘the day I ran slap-bang into Pollard’ – the relevant phone number was handed over, and their future was set in train. ‘Give old Eric a call,’ Jeff said. ‘You can’t lose by it.’
Andrew first poured himself a brandy; then he sat for some time, and regarded the phone in their bungalow, like a man in a trance, or a man praying. Then he picked up the receiver; the lines were not down that day, and it was