He was a little younger than my oldest son and if I had gone to Addis Ababa to spend a year and write back in the middle thirties as I had planned I would have known him when he was twelve since his best friend then had been the son of the people I was going out to stay with. But I had not gone because Mussolini’s armies had gone instead and my friend that I had been going out to stay with had been moved to another diplomatic post and so I had missed the chance to know G.C. when he was twelve. By the time I met him he had a long, very difficult and unrewarding war behind him plus the abandonment of a British Protectorate where he had made the start of a fine career. He had commanded irregular troops, which is, if you are honest, the least rewarding way there is to make a war. If an action is fought perfectly so that you have almost no casualties and inflict large losses on the enemy it is regarded at Headquarters as an unjustified and reprehensible massacre. If you are forced to fight under unfavorable conditions and at too great odds and win but have a large butcher bill the comment is, “He gets too many men killed.”
There is no way for an honest man commanding irregulars to get into anything but trouble. There is some doubt as to whether any truly honest and talented soldier can ever hope for anything except to be destroyed.
By the time I met G.C., he was well started in another career in another British Colony. He was never bitter and he did not look back at all. Over the spaghetti and the wine he told us of how he had been reproved by some newly arrived expatriate civil servant for using a bad word which might be overheard by this young man’s wife. I hated for G.C. to have to be bored by these people. The old Pukka Sahibs have been often described and caricatured. But no one has dealt much with these new types except Waugh a little bit at the end of Black Mischief and Orwell completely in Burmese Days. I wished Orwell were still alive and I told G.C. about the last time I had seen him in Paris in 1945 after the Bulge fight and how he had come in what looked something like civilian clothes to Room 117 of the Ritz where there was still a small arsenal to borrow a pistol because “They” were after him. He wanted a small pistol easily concealed and I found one but warned him that if he shot someone with it they probably would die eventually but that there might be a long interval. But a pistol was a pistol and he needed this one more as a talisman than a weapon, I thought.
He was very gaunt and looked in bad shape and I asked him if he would not stay and eat. But he had to go. I told him I could give him a couple of people who would look after him if “They” were after him. That my characters were familiar with the local “They” who would never bother him nor intrude on him. He said no, that the pistol was all he needed. We asked about a few mutual friends and he left. I sent two characters to pick him up at the door and tail him and check if anybody was after him. The next day their report was “Papa nobody is after him. He is a very chic type and he knows Paris very well. We checked with so and so’s brother and he says no one pursues him. He is in touch with the British Embassy but he is not an operative. This is only hearsay. Do you want the timetable of his movements?”
“No. Did he amuse himself?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“I’m happy. We will not worry about him. He has the pistol.”
“That worthless pistol,” one of the characters said. “But you warned him against it, Papa?”
“Yes. He could have had any pistol he wished.”
“Perhaps he would have been happier with a stinger.”
“No,” the other character said. “A stinger is too compromising. He was happy with that pistol.”
We let it go at that.
G.C. did not sleep well and often would lie awake most of the night reading. He had a very good library at his house in Kajiado and I had a big duffel bag full of books that we had arranged in empty boxes in the mess tent as a library. There was an excellent bookstore in the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi and another good one down the road and whenever I had been in town I bought most of the new books that looked worth reading. Reading was the best palliative for G.C.’s insomnia. But it was no cure and I would often see his light on all night in his tent. Because he had a career as well as because he had been brought up properly he could have nothing to do with African women. He did not think they were beautiful either nor attractive and the ones I knew and liked the best did not care for him either. But there was an Ismaili Indian girl who was one of the nicest people I have ever known and she was completely and hopelessly in love with G.C. She had convinced him that it was her sister, who was in strictest purdah, who loved him and she sent him gifts and messages from this sister. It was a sad but also clean and happy story and we all liked it. G.C. had nothing to do with the girl at all except to speak pleasantly to her when he was in her family’s shop. He had his own white Nairobi girls that he was fond of and I never talked with him about them. Mary probably did. But we had no personal gossip among the three of us on serious personal things.
In the Shamba it was different. There and in the lines there were no books to read, no radio, and we talked. I asked the Widow and the girl who had decided she wished to be my wife about why they did not like G.C. and at first they would not tell me. Finally the Widow explained that it was not polite to say. It turned out that it was a question of smell. All people with the color of skin I had smelled very badly usually.
We were sitting under a tree by the bank of a river and I was waiting for some baboons that, by their talking, were working down toward us.
“Bwana Game smells good,” I said. “I smell him all the time. He has a good smell.”
“Hapana,” the Widow said. “You smell like Shamba. You smell like smoked hide. You smell like pombe.” I did not like the smell of pombe and I was not sure I liked smelling like it.
The girl put her head against the back of my bush shirt, which I knew was salty with dried sweat. She rubbed her head against the back of my shoulders and then the back of my neck and then came around for me to kiss her head.
“You see?” the Widow asked. “You smell the same as Ngui.”
“Ngui, do we smell the same?”
“I don’t know how I smell. No man knows. But you smell the same as Mthuka.”
Ngui was sitting against the opposite side of the tree looking downstream. He had his legs drawn up and was resting his head against the tree. He had my new spear beside him.
“Widow, you talk to Ngui.”
“No,” she said. “I look after girl.”
The girl had laid her head in my lap and was fingering the pistol holster. I knew she wanted me to trace the outline of her nose and her lips with my fingers and then touch the line of her chin very lightly and feel the line where she had her hair cut back to make a square line on the forehead and the sides and feel around her ears and over the top of her head. This was a great delicacy of courtship and all I could do if the Widow was there. But she could explore too, gently if she wished.
“You hard-handed beauty.”
“Be good wife.”
“You tell Widow go away.”
“No.”
“Why?”
She told me and I kissed her on top of the head again. She explored very delicately with her hands and then picked my right hand up and put it where she wished it. I held her very close and put the other hand where it should be.
“No,” the Widow said.
“Hapana tu,” the girl said. She turned over and put her head facedown where it had been and said something in Kamba that I could not understand. Ngui looked down the stream and I looked up it and the Widow had moved behind the tree and lay there with our fused, implacable sorrow and I reached up to the tree and got the rifle and laid it by my right leg.