All This by Chance Read online

  Difficult to imagine, Lisa thought, as she sealed the envelope that Luke would take when he drove to the township the next day, how one’s life ran so smoothly, quickly, in the satisfactions of routine, in not contradicting her friends the sisters when they spoke of God’s will, but telling them that trying to do a job well, a day at a time, was really all she was up to. But an elation too, yes, it was actually that, at the words, the sentences even, she found she was now able to use with the patients, the women who walked such distances to her clinic, the ones who honoured her with such trust. She was diligent in entering onto index cards the details of conditions that were new to her, or puzzling, or contrary to what her training back at St Pancras may have led her to expect. She was glad that Bernard and her young assistant cared almost entirely for the pregnant women in the ward spoken of always as St Anne’s, and delivered their children. It was work Lisa knew she had no natural gift for, and was apprehensive when her help was called on. She felt the apprentice at such times, admiring the hard, intelligent focus of the now elderly woman who for forty years had worked and comforted in these same few rooms, liking her blunt humour in the evenings as she ate the simple meal with the sisters in their ‘refectory’, as they called it, the bare room with two trestle tables and a religious picture on the wall of a woman clutching her chest with an opened palm and her eyes rolled back. ‘Diagnose that one for me, Bernard,’ Lisa irreverently thought. She walked back home, dog-tired, taking in the late hush that came down on the Mission, the sky seeping into darkness, yet light there still behind the black tracery of trees. She liked the taste of the cooling air, the plaiting of scents from the trees through the hospital odours that were always there, the drift too of food and burning dung and fuel from the flimsy shelters near the boundary, the earth smells the coming night brought out. The sweetish distant odour too that she picked up at times as Declan approached and before he spoke to her, the telltale carcinoma biding its time. Not that she referred to that. Silence on God and on his health stood as the unspoken courteous brackets of their friendship.

  She liked the long, softly lit verandas of the schoolrooms as she glanced across to them. For a fraction they struck her as though she looked towards a lit-up riverboat, the wooden chapel too, with its small red light a mere speck through the mottled window, like some river craft as well. As if she had ever seen such a thing, apart from in movies at the Cameo, a childhood ago, at Surrey Crescent! ‘To see things exactly as they are.’ She had read that somewhere and written it as the motto on her homework books as a schoolgirl almost twenty years before. And here in Africa, a scientist, remembering an overblown old movie like Showboat! It amused her, lightened her, its ironic nudge. Declan laughed as she told him of it. He had dreams still, he told her, of winning games with sprightly back play, the most ungainly boy who ever pulled a rugby jersey on, even in jest. He had looked at her with an assessing sympathy. ‘We’re the sort,’ he said, ‘who finish up in places like this.’

  There seemed nothing strange in the rapport she felt with this overweight, ailing man with his comforting book of ancient poetry, his puzzling accent that oddly moved her as he sometimes quoted lines to her that were important to him. She imagined that even with his own people he would seem eccentric. As so might she, she admitted to her friend who was the senior teacher in the school, the heavy man whose jokes she had hated as he helped her from the jeep, that fevered day of her arrival six months before. He carried a tin thermos with him it seemed at all times. Even as he sat at the edge of ‘the playing field’, that big white-outlined stretch of earth where he sat on the comic slenderness of the unfolded shooting stick that supported him, calling out to the boys, flinging his arms to urge their sweep towards the goal. As he walked the Compound, speaking to workmen who kept the buildings, the grounds, the service buildings, the sheds with their pumps and generators, in ‘such grand shape there, men’, as he complimented even the least impressive of them, he cradled a thermos in the scoop of his arm. It was there to be placed on the small table between them when he strolled at times to the Residence in the evening while the classrooms burned with their riverboat lights and the boys applied themselves until one of them emerged and swung the heavy hand-bell that rang over the buildings, and night after night set up a flock of roosted birds which seemed never to get used to it. ‘Pavlov’s birds,’ Declan joked of them, ‘and we flatter ourselves we’re so very different, the way we obey the bell.’

  He eased between the edge of the table and the rail of the veranda behind him. He placed the thermos between himself and his young doctor friend, who had set two mugs for him to half-fill with the cold, sweetly sugared lemon tea. It amused him, as it did Lisa, what a ‘civilised world’ might have made of their casual ease together, a fat ageing cleric, he joked, a Jewish doctor from ‘the round earth’s imagined corner’, as he called her country. Our appearance, he assured her, too grotesque to give scandal even to the sharpest-eyed. Even to Father Ambrose.

  ‘Give scandal,’ she repeated, a mild mockery in her doing so. ‘Those weird phrases of yours.’

  ‘We are a religion of inflexible phrases.’ His leaning forward a little, hands spread on his knees, to catch his breath.

  ‘Surely all religions are? Don’t they have to be?’ But they leave it there. ‘The imponderables’, as Declan phrases it, batting them away. Often they might sit for five minutes, even ten, without feeling obliged to speak, then the metal side of the thermos tapping against their mugs as he again poured for them. ‘If lemon tea were a vice,’ he has told her, ‘it would spell eternal doom for me.’ He guessed at her smile, rather than seeing it against the dark. Two evenings a week, their sitting companionably. At times they tell each other about the country, the home, the families they come from. She will speak to him of Eva, her brother who seems always to crave what he feels eludes him, the quiet father she reveres. And Declan confessing, as he surprises himself by doing, that on his last trip home, six years back now, he was as ill at ease back there as ever he was out here. ‘Nowhere that isn’t foreign, that’s the fact of it.’ But she likes to imagine whatever it was, the ‘back there’ he speaks of. The big hills that frightened him as a boy and where he’d still not like to find himself alone, once the night was down. The wildness he told her where you step behind a rock, ten minutes from the house, and you are alone with Atlantic winds. ‘I was never good at that,’ he says, ‘being alone like that. Then you give yourself to a place like this and it’s the same again. Nothing like a community to bring that home.’ But his tone hoping not too much of it, the sadness at the back of what he said.

  She told him of Eva’s walking towards the tide. The will, she said, a human being can find, courage surely the hardest thing to comprehend? But details too that came to her as they sat together, random memories that faintly shamed her. Those quiet, narrow, decent neighbours in the Crescent she had no right to think herself apart from, and yet the wall, she could think of it as nothing other than that, when she tried to understand them. The mystery indeed her family must have been to them, the damaged relative they called grandmother, whom the neighbours kindly excused on the strength of ‘what she had been through’, whom none of them could understand a word of any more than she a word of them, but their smiling towards each other as they passed, the odd ribbons of rumour and gossip that trailed her. ‘The rotten times over there. We’ve no idea have we what she might have put up with.’ The relative who one night while the street and its modest houses slept had left her room with its miniature menorah on her dressing table and the photograph of her sister Sarah, from when Eva was still unborn and a secret from the family for so long, for some forever, and the tear across the photo that left only a hand across her sister’s shoulder. She left her room and went to the kitchen and turned the back-door key. Then once out into the night that was light enough to see one’s way in, she took a spade from the unlocked garden shed and carried it the forty yards to the Stoddarts’ white wooden state house on the other side of the s
treet. Mr Stoddart who fancied himself as a gardener and planted wide beds of geraniums on either side of his short drive, and in a strip the length of the house below the bedroom windows. In the light from the moon the leaves of the plants were like dull metal and the heads of the flowers blackened fists. Babcia bashed at them and sliced against the stems and at three in the morning Mr Stoddart and the neighbour who first heard the noise ran across the street and belted with their opened palms on the glass panels of the front door.

  The Crescent talked of it for weeks as the inexplicable thing it was, but considerately no one referred to it in the pharmacy, although it was in their minds as they watched the quiet courteous man and the pale teenage girl who was with him so often in the shop attending to them. Only Mr Ross and the girl in fact comprehending what had taken place, and his deciding not to pass on to his wife, or to the boy who was so easily upset, what the strange heavy religious fanatic who was Babcia’s only friend remembered and explained. When you first arrived at the camp, she said, and the cunning of its first deception, the rows of neat barrack buildings, the carefully tended paths, the sense that here you would find discipline, of course, but hygiene too, and even pleasantness, for outside each of the buildings the already planted and cheerful swathes of red geraniums. That first lie, Miss McGovern said, in so simple a thing as that.

  ‘My aunt was ill by that time,’ Lisa said. ‘Quietly mad, and so it was easy to pretend she was simply elderly and forgetful and since she only spoke properly in any case with that one friend, we could keep the fantasy up. That we were more or less normal, which of course we never were.’

  She hears the subdued rasp of his breath a few feet from across the table. ‘So there you are, Declan,’ she tells him, ‘that’s where I am from.’ He poured the last of the sweetened tea. He says, with the wry sardonic tone he reserved for the Mission’s superior, ‘I see our preserving angel makes his rounds.’

  The glimmer of Father Ambrose’s robe as he came towards them. The unexpected memory of the darkroom off one of the laboratories where her Scottish friend carried out his photographic work, that strange shaking of the solution in a shallow dish as he held with tweezers the corner of a sheet of paper, and the slow, slightly creepy emerging of the shapes it released. The priest’s long garment suddenly so close to them, a few feet from where they sat. The silence of his approach, his head invisible against the night, his folded hands a dark stain against the fall of his white soutane.

  ‘A pleasant evening, doctor.’

  ‘An evening for human fellowship, Father,’ Declan’s voice a shade this side of provocation.

  ‘You’re very welcome to join us,’ Lisa said.

  He bowed slightly towards her, ‘a fierce one for a touch of ceremony’, as Declan once said of him. She felt the inflexibility that chilled most of those he spoke with. She knew the boys feared him; the younger nuns preferred not to meet his glance, their answers timid should he speak to them.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Another time. We all have duties.’ He turned and the night took his walking towards the workmen’s area of the Compound. The men would stand from their sitting at the edge of the fire in their cooking hut, speak quietly and thank him for his visit, grateful for his attention to them, his asking was there anything he might do for them? And their respectful silence as he left them, their prodding at the fire until he must be some way off. Their knowing their good fortune, as he reminded them, to have work here at the Mission. Yes, Father. Lisa liked their singing that at times came across to the Residence later in the evenings. The warmth it conveyed, rather than any pleasure she might take from the music, where she knew her ear was at fault. Just tired men at the end of the day, content to sing together. The loveliness of wanting that. The freedom to do so.

  Declan broke in on what she knew was her too easy sentiment. ‘It is possible to be a good person and a bastard, you know that, don’t you, Lisa? It does not happen often but we are privileged with Ambrose to see a rare instance of the phenomenon.’

  They laughed as he stood and shook the empty thermos against his ear. He assured her, in what she presumed was a take-off of something likely to be heard in the hills back home, ‘When the drink’s gone entirely now there’s nothing for it but a man getting along back home.’ Then he too was gone into the night, his fading from her as Ambrose had done a few minutes before. She sat on at the table, holding her empty mug. The patterning of trees, still faintly darker against the dark. The dynamo behind the wards jerking as it sometimes did, the quick flickering of the lights. Then the silence, but not really that at all, the click and chirr and the high yelped scaling of an animal’s alarm. The trailing ropes and nets of stars as she looked up. So easy to take them for granted, then to be startled as one attended to their vast haul. One of them falling, scoring like a pen tip. The delight in simply taking them in.

  She urged herself to stand, to enter the small room whose walls leaped startlingly white as she touched the switch inside the door. The sisters’ rooms could not have been simpler than her own, the single bed with its furled netting, the desk with the bright slashes of her stacked books against the wall, the few cards she had pinned above them, the childish scrawl of a crayon drawing that amused her. David’s daughter had sent it with the words dictated for her mother to write, saying this was the picture of a tent Daddy had put up for her in the backyard because Sukos was a fun time and this was how their people had lived for so long but it had rained and the tent had leaned over and they had to come inside the house to sleep. And a big leaned-over upside-down V, meant to be a sagging tent, that Esther wanted her to see. Lisa easily imagined her niece’s father insisting as ever that his child be brought up with customs and celebrations he had been deprived of, his irritation at the elements thwarting his being the father he was determined to be. The comic little drawing bringing the family even to here, as she had written back, saying how people here lived in huts that looked a little bit like the one in the picture, but theirs stayed up even when it rained.

  She took off her smock and placed it on one of the hooks set on the wall by her bed. The freedom to stand in her underwear, with the chug of the wooden-bladed fan taking up its soothing beat as that too she turned on, and the small lamp on her desk, with her medical texts arranged between the bookends one of the workmen had made for her. She took a bottle of boiled water from what was called the ice cupboard, although the ice placed there by one of the house girls hours before had melted in the broad dish below the shelf. There was a small area where a bench held a paraffin stove which she seldom used, and the tin of biscuits with the swirled lettering of Huntley and Palmers on its tin lid.

  A bright cloth with a red and yellow pattern lay across the small table beside her bed. She disliked its garishness in the otherwise almost clinically simple room, but she knew it had been placed there as a gift when she arrived. To remove it would have been ungrateful. At first she thought there must be some local craft in the weaving of it, but a sister told her how Europeans began to crave things to remind them of where they came from, and this was from Italy, she would see that on the little label on the other side. She had felt a prickle of irritation she was assumed to be a home-sick foreigner, that any scrap of Europe somehow would soothe her. As she had told herself before she arrived, and said over and over after her first days of fever, whether she liked the place or not was not the point. But by now she accepted the arrogance even of that, of thinking one knows exactly what is right for one. As Declan had put it to her, in his ironic, good-humoured way, telling her as he sat with his broad white sleeves pulled back and rubbing at the rash that troubled his wrist, ‘We’re inclined to go off, you know, in a place like this. Not spectacular Joseph Conrad stuff, I don’t mean that. But gently, like mushy fruit. Yet there’s a certainty we can find here as well. Of another kind.’ She had laughed and told him he had lost her again.

  She undressed completely and stood in the tin trough beneath the shower. She reached up to the lever that, o
nce moved, dumped water from the cistern across her rather than allowing it to run down smoothly. Although the water was never cold, that sense of mild shock all the same as it broke across her. It had become something she looked forward to at the end of each day. Its quick battering lifted her mood and calmed her. She raised her arms to let a loose-fitting slip drop across her head, before sitting at her desk. She reached for her Adams & Maegraith, a volume bristling with yellow strips of paper to mark pages she returned to. It was a time she looked forward to each evening before she went to bed, her mind focused on finding what might be of use for the next day’s clinic. There was usually something she felt unsure of, some ailment she had not treated for maybe months, or not at all, and would be there waiting for her in ten hours’ time. She found what she was after, the Neil Mooser reaction that took her back to her friend in the lab holding up a guinea pig, noting the scrotal swelling, the name not too far from that of a colleague they both disliked. A disease, she now reread, ‘of poverty, human distress, and overcrowding’. Mild in children, increases in severity with rising age. An elderly man, unsure of his years, had come to the clinic that morning, and would be there again tomorrow. One of the sisters translated for her. He lived in a hut two hours’ walk away, with other elderly men who, she guessed, were outcasts of some kind. She read again the notes she had made once she examined him, and the few details he offered were written down. A recrudescence, from the symptoms she had noted. She had been too cautious in isolating him until she might feel more confident. His temperature was high; he had rubbed his thighs and upper arms to indicate the soreness in his muscles. She listened to the bronchial rasp of his chest. The sister had to raise her voice when she spoke to him, but his deafness would have been from quite another cause.