With this mysterious, sexless narrator, its accent on minute physical detail, unnamed people and equally undetermined African settings — its lack of every sort of formal designation — the book was like a nouveau roman of the Robbe-Grillet school. The prose moved slowly over the surface of things like an insect for long unparagraphed pages, followed by bouts of nervous, often inconsequential, and always inconclusive dialogue, as though in a badly transcribed tape-recording, succeeded finally by passages of bleak psychological and sexual description, flat as a medical manual.
Ole Timbutu. A Kenyan. I was curious about him and his biography on the back flap was as vague as anything in his book. Kenya has very little modern literature in English to say the least — and none at all, I was sure, in the style of the nouveau roman. Ole Timbutu seemed an unlikely figure — and White Savages an unlikely novel — to emerge from a decade of African Uhuru, from the extrovert, beer-laden social temper of Nairobi. The book, despite its savage themes, used forms and made assumptions which were sophisticated and civilised to a degree. It smelt of the Left Bank, not the African plainslands. There was some innate contradiction in all this which I couldn’t fathom.
The town was surrounded by clumps of shimmering, bluish trees — behind the airport and running up the hills and through the suburbs of straw and tin shacks — and their scent was everywhere in the air, a tangy smell, far from romance, like part of a cold cure. The porter carrying their bags wheezed heavily and hoarsely. Asthmatic. Eucalyptus. The smell was everywhere, everyone permanently out of breath. The sign at the airport, giving the name of the town they had come to, said ‘8159 feet above sea level’.
What country? It could only be Ethiopia, the capital Addis Ababa, 8,000 feet up, the start of the trip which Helen Jackson and George Graham had made about East Africa in 1966. But subsequently, such easy interpretation became more difficult — the action of the characters more vague, their dialogue more allusive. The two people, the two ‘White Savages’ and their bleak love-making, seemed to fade into the groves of eucalyptus around the town like figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting.
But then, forty pages in, I came to a passage which reminded me of something I couldn’t at once place.
‘Africa,’ she said, ‘is not all fat-lipped. The man we spoke to last night at the Perroquet had very thin lips.’
‘He was not Bantu. These people are Semitic. Africa south of here is fat-lipped. The people here regard all other Africans as slaves. This is an old Kingdom cut off from the world on top of a mountain where everyone is thin and proud.’
‘They have almond eyes in faces from a Byzantine fresco,’ she said. ‘I should like to look like them.’ She stirred the tall glass of white rum with a cherry stick.
‘It is a fairy story here,’ he said, ‘that is ending. The old men with sticks and lanterns against the night are dying. The frescoes are fading.’
And then I knew what it was: these descriptions of Ethiopians in their isolated Christian kingdom almost exactly paralleled the physical characteristics of the Princess. I saw her face quite clearly with these identical attributes: the almond eyes, huge pools in the thin face from some Coptic Church painting.
And then it struck me who ever had written these precise physical descriptions must have actually been to, or lived in Ethiopia. The novel was far too detailed to have been worked up by Ole Timbutu from the hearsay of some Nairobi journalist. And who the hell was Ole Timbutu? He was beginning to seem less and less real a figure — his authorship a pure fiction. So who had written the novel?
The woman with almond eyes, I thought, and a face from a Byzantine fresco. The woman who had studied in Paris, who had an air at once intensely civilised and savage. Margaret Takazze had most of the necessary attributes for authorship of this tale, just as her sex would have made her the least suspicious of shadows. She could have very well met and talked with the two protagonists of the story, without their being the least suspicious of her.
Was it possible? If it was, there was an uncomfortable corollary to her story: she had been pursuing someone called George Graham; she must have known his name. And I was George Graham. But we were two different people as she must so readily have confirmed at the reception when we had met a week before. She had asked me just that, to be sure — ‘Are you George Graham, the one that made the film?’ and yes, I’d said, I was. I was.
And then I began to think that there was just too much convenient and inconvenient fate in the whole business — yes, I thought just that, so that it wasn’t long before I discounted the idea of her authorship, or her involvement with these two figures lost in time, which she had resurrected and which I was trying to. It was too long a shot by far.
But I was wrong.
I called her at the UN guides centre but she was out with a group. So, taking White Savages with me, I went downstairs to the Conference building to see if I could find her. It didn’t take long. She was at the top of the escalator on the 4th floor standing beside a model of the UN building, explaining the various departments and their functions to twenty or so speechless, middle-aged visitors. I joined them casually, watching her, dressed now in something native to her kingdom, sari-like, in green silk, sparkling in stripes and patterns of gold. She recognised me at once with a brief smile, as though I was expected, just a taste of conspiracy in her expression, I thought.
‘Hello?’ A question as well as a greeting.
‘I like the book, what I’ve read of it. Are you free at all later? Could we talk?’
‘Yes,’ she said without any surprise. ‘This is my last tour. Meet me in the coffee shop on the ground floor in the UN Plaza apartments at five o’clock. Go out the visitors’ entrance here, up First Avenue, right on 48th, and you can’t miss the block on your left. A great big phallus. Coffee’s at the bottom.’ She was precise as she was outspoken in her arrangements.
‘Fine. I’ll bring the book,’ I said brightly. Then I added: ‘I’d like you to autograph it for me.’ But she didn’t reply, her head half turned away towards her flock. Just her eyes came back to me, swinging round, fixing me with their dark beams, briefly pondering.
Guy Jackson was back in his office when I called to thank him for his weekend invitation. He was in a cooler, less obsessive mood.
‘Fine then. Meet me here at three o’clock next Friday and we may avoid the rush hour out of town. We don’t want to be late. It’s the twins’ birthday. Helen’s organised a tea-party for them with their grandfather.’ It was as if we had never spoken of his jealousy, of his wife’s infidelity — or at least as if these were not his problems, but simply part of an interesting movie we had both recently seen and discussed. But I had to draw him back to the plot.
‘I’m sorry to drag it up again — but what sort of detective agency did you use in Nairobi six years ago. Who was it — who did the actual following?’
Jackson sighed. ‘I don’t know who it was. It was part of a security company out there, supplying guards for banks and so on. The man I dealt with was a Rhodesian. He gave me the reports. That’s all I ever saw.’
‘You never heard of an African involved in it all — a man or a woman?’
‘No. Why?’
‘I was just thinking. Curious. I couldn’t imagine there being any private detective agencies in a place like Nairobi. I thought gossip would do all that kind of work for you out there. Did you keep the reports — were they very complete?’