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Chapter Three
Guy pictured Samantha as he had first known her, years ago, on his father’s farm outside Bulawayo. He had been born a Rhodesian and still thought of himself as a Rhodesian, although there was no such place anymore.
He wasn’t a ‘Whenwe’ - one of those whites who hankered after the colonial past “Whenwe knew Africa at its best”; “Whenwe had fine, loyal servants”, or whatever was the rosy image and the regret at its passing. Guy was a Rhodesian because he had been fashioned by the promise, the openness, the security of the veld as it existed in the 1960s. He felt alive only when he smelt red African earth after rain, or sweet mimosa thorn, or steaming dung. And he came truly alive - confident, content - when he sensed the deep solitude and simplicity of the Bush; when he could walk all day, merely listening to bird calls, examining the ants and the songololos, and stand in frozen silence, observing a kudu observing him.
Samantha, aged nine, was a year older than he when she arrived at the farm from overseas. She too was an only child, with parents surprisingly like his own in their ways. The Cartwrights and the Walkers, though continents apart, were life-long friends. They managed to meet almost once a year, either in ‘the African Bush’, or in the medieval city of York.
“Walker comes from Old English, wealcere,” Sam insisted on explaining, years later, when they were almost grown up and holidaying in Britain.
Cartwright and son spent much more time with the Walkers after Guy’s mother left the farm. She had run off with a neighbouring farmer, causing a scandal which, in a community as small and isolated as theirs, lasted all of Guy’s boyhood. So Guy went to boarding school and travelled with his father to Britain for most of the holidays. Guy treated Sam almost as a sister, but he could never get used to the much encouraged idea of adopting Sam’s mother as his. He wasn’t a Walker.
From her new-found knowledge at university Sam had told him: “A walker was some-one who trod cloth in the fulling process - as Piers Plowman described in the 14th century:
Cloth that cometh fro the wevying - “that’s weaving, Guy, in case you don’t know” -
Is nought comely to were
Tyl it be fulled under fote
“Fuller and Tucker and several other English surnames derive from the same source. But in my case I feel I must also have ancestors who trod grapes in Greece or Spain, and danced the tarantalla. I do know that a Walker, Mary, was one of the earliest feminists. In the 1860s she wore men’s clothes, and in the late 1800s she established a women’s colony known as ‘Adamless Eve’. I hope it was power, not sex, she was into in that oldtime, single gender commune. Unfortunately Mary Walker was an American - but then the English Walkers managed to get around in the world.”
Samantha drew breath, but only to keep going.
“There are a dozen places around Britain named after us - and even more Walker-related towns in the United States. Canada has a Walkerton, and both Australia and South Africa have Walkervilles, not to mention the Bahamas. . .”
“Sam.”
“Yes?”
“Put a sock in it.”
Fortunately Guy had adjusted to her chatter when they first met as children on the Matabeleland farm.. Though he was only eight, and she a whole year older - and a faster-growing girl - it was his world they played in. She had never seen an anthill as tall as a tree before, or a kraal, or a guinea fowl, or a kweta daubed white for his circumcision initiation. Guy, under his African sky, could make Sam keep quiet at times - especially that time she was so frantic to see a black kweta boy, just circumcised, painted white, and hidden from all women.
Samantha’s curiosity turned to semantics, and she caught its virus soon after entering university. A year later Guy was packed off in a different direction, protesting. His protests were not at losing his only real friend, but because he was due to spend four years at Oxford. He lasted two; returned home to join the Bulawayo Chronicle and, disillusioned at local newspaper standards, came back to Britain to seek his fortune in Fleet Street. His career started much deeper in the counties than he had hoped. It was at a parish-pump weekly in Kent, though he spent as much time as he could with a girl who had a flat up in London. He soon lost touch with Samantha and the Walkers.
He thought of her often though, his only friend, his tom-boy friend. By the time she entered university her lissome figure, still taut with too much energy, had filled out a little. Her red hair she now used as a flame, tossing it into any company she was in, her red lips and tongue stirring things until the conversation, or some-one in the company, caught fire.
Samantha, despite her child-holidays in the Rhodesian bush under the tutelage of Guy, could not abide silence, tranquillity, or any occasion which offered neither excitement nor tension. He worried, a little, about her sex life at university. He did not know why, but he hoped quite desperately that she was not sleeping around - not sleeping even with one man. It kind of affected their innocent past, he thought, knowing the thought was childishly emotional if not illogical.
As the years went by he found far more real, far more serious things to think about. And each year after that, the problems grew bigger. Bigger than both of them. Bigger than his career as an investigating journalist and writer. Bigger, perhaps, than London itself.
He had virtually forgotten his only friend when, one day while sitting alone in an Indian restaurant in South Kensington, he noticed the back of a red head at the next table. At first he was deeply absorbed in his own thoughts, in the crises facing him - facing the entire community - a crisis so potentially violent he thought of it sometimes as just a bad movie, or merely a nightmare. But the criminals were real, and they had sucked them into their paranoid drama when he had stumbled, almost accidentally, into there plot - but was unable to expose it.
Then the voice near his left ear disturbed him. He looked up at the back of the chair jostling his table. . . and he knew instantly.
Samantha, in flamboyant yellow-and-black, was berating - enthralling - two turbanned men. Guy eavesdropped unashamedly, until she turned suddenly and caught him at it. Afterwards, he realised that she had been aware of his solitary presence for some time; that she had been talking at him- a presumed stranger behind her - instead of to her two friends.
“Well?” she demanded, scraping her chair round so that her turquoise eyes could bore straight into the stranger at her back, “What do you think? You’d better join in, rather than be an audio-voyeur.”
“Hello Sam.”
She peered at him uncertainly, then, “Guy!” she shouted, leaping from her chair. She hugged him, kissed him, and threw several disjointed questions at him, almost simultaneously. Not waiting for answers, she turned back to her table.
“This is Guy Cartwright,” she said, “the famous Fleet Street” - she wiggled the quotes with outstretched fingers melodramatically - “by-lined writer. Yes, I’ve seen your name, even in women’s magazines, bylined as ‘top Fleet Street journalist’. Good Gah-hd Guy, how can you use such trite labels? What is ‘top’ supposed to mean? Are you an editor-in-chief, or are you below the top, one of a thousand lesser ‘tops’? And Fleet Street - there aren’t any journalists in Fleet Street any more are there? They’ve all gone down to the Thames. . .it may dilute their drinks, but it doesn’t prevent them from destroying our language.”
Hardly pausing for breath she turned back to her table.
“Boys!” The turbanned gentlemen both blinked. “. . .You’re looking at an interesting phenomenon of the English. Guy is a pretentious name, taken from Latin or more likely the French in the eleventh century, and bestowed on this child of Africa. Cartwright, however, is a good solid Old English name like mine. His Big Daddy, if I may gleefully misuse an Americanism, would have been a specialist carpenter. President Carter’s ancestors merely drove carts - but Guy’s ancestor built them. He was what Old English termed a ‘wryhta’ . . . just as Guy is a writer today. . . only Chaucer - to whom I have introduced you Boys - speaks of a ‘well good wright, a carpenter’, so Guy’s Big Daddy built the chariots which Carter drove. Speaking of chariots, that’s a French word, from which the name Cartier is derived and . . .”
“Sam. . .”
“Sorry Guy, I’m so excited, seeing you again. Why didn’t you ever phone or visit York? You knew how to reach Dad and Mum? Why?”
Guy thought it better to leave that grim discussion until Sam’s friends had departed. It turned out they were two of her students at the self-styled “Business College’ where she taught English to immigrants. Some teacher! thought Guy, this pertly posturing vision in red-black-yellow.
It was soon apparent that, while Samantha was wildly unpredictable in every other respect, she was still programmed totally into her own philologically unscientific, unorthodox romance with the English language. It also occurred to Guy that their fortuitous meeting might be an answer - the only answer - to the problems he was facing alone. Their reunion might just save him from the increasing, seemingly overwhelming danger he faced.
Guy thought: Sam is safe, uncaring, unafraid. She’s come back into my life at a moment when my world, and perhaps the environment and values of our entire, self-absorbed little London society, are disintegrating. She’s not like Jenny. Jenny was one of the worst examples of what was happening to them all. It was she who had brought on the present crisis. Jenny, the blue-eyed innocent, with her pouting lips and decadent baby-talk. Yet, for all her weakness and corruption, Jenny was a direct victim of the forces he was uncovering. And she wasn’t the first victim. She may have been eliminated only because of her connection with him.
When the two businessmen, Sam’s students, had made their salaams, Samantha sat - still and silent for once - watching him.
“Okay, Guy, what’s wrong?”
Not much. Not important, now that you are here.”
His attempt at gallantry lay flat on the table between them.
“What’s haunting you? Is it something in your work? Something you’ve found out.”
“Found out? Ja, I’ve found it out alright”
“Don’t say ‘Yah’, you know I hate it.”
It was a reaction echoing from their past. Guy almost smiled.
“Anyway,” she brushed back a lock of flame, “what do you know that’s bothering you so much? . .Why don’t you go to the police?”
“The police!” He thought of everything he knew about the Metropolitan Police; of the events of the past month, of the past five years. “The police. They’d be the last who could help.”
“Well? Tell me about it!” Red nails rapped on the table. “Why won’t you tell me about it,” she almost shouted.
Guy thought that he could detect - below the loud, lilting voice – a whine, almost.
Sam, he told himself, is so self-absorbed she believes the ultimate sin is not to indulge her curiosity. But my problem - our problem - is far too complex for mere little confessions to the Prof. She is, in her manner, offering help, though. And perhaps she can help.
He thought of his options. Stay here? But do what? Or, get out? But for how long? I need to escape the traps being set in London. I need distance from the demons. I need first to gather - outside of London - the forces which can combat the evils destroying my life here, destroying everyone in this place. And I need Sam, so independent, so sure, so secure in her funny little language obsession.
“Sam, why don’t we go round the world?”
She threw back her red mane and laughed. “Guy, you quivering arsehole, what for?”
Guy hated her foul tongue, and he knew she was aware of it. She enjoys lashing me with its dirt, he told himself. But I must get away. If I don’t leave soon - now - they’ll get me. I’m in no shape to fight back. I need time, a month perhaps, to recuperate, change my identity, regain control of my emotions since. . . since Jenny. . .
I need time.
“Sam, I mean it. Let’s do a round-the-world-in-eighty days. You’re on about the “English-speaking world”, but you’ve never seen it, apart from those islands in the Med. . . and Bulawayo. Let’s go and look at the whole ‘English-speaking world!’.”
You mean like Gibraltar where we found that marvellous English cemetery for soldiers killed in the Napoleonic Wars?”
“Yes, the great Rock of Gibraltar and its fish-and-chip shops, pubs and the bed-and-breakfasts. A prosaic Little England, with its resolutely unilingual English-speakers, successfully repelling the pincer movement of Spanish flamenco dancers and Moroccan camel-traders.”
They laughed at their images.
“Don’t remember Gibraltar like that, Guy. Think rather of that romantic, moss-covered churchyard under the Rock, with those marvellous gravestones commemorating brave sailors killed at Trafalgar. I’d like to go there again, to collect the epitaphs.”
“And fly to Malta too, I suppose, that standard-bearer of middle-class English culture, where the English ex-pats try to keep alive suburban values on top of the ruins of some prehistoric civilisation.”
“Yes. And Corfu! Guy, you know you love Corfu. We spent so much time on the beaches, in the tavernas, sailing on the Adriatic, that I never had time to absorb its English culture. I must read the Durrells again. And we ought to go to back to Dubrovnic and see that place where Richard the Lion Heart was held captive in the Crusades. And to Avignon, where England’s finest liberal - your favourite - John Stewart Mill lies buried. And. . .”
Guy knew he had her then.
“Sam, we saw all those interesting little spheres of English influence when we were kids. I’m talking about a quick tour of the Earth - to the old African colonies, to the Raj, to Australia, America, through Oceania and along the sailing routes of Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook. . .”
Samantha decided instantly that she would set out with him on a ‘research project’ into the development and decay of the international English tongue. She would wander across the globe with him, plucking the linguistic flowers and digging out the weeds which contaminated ‘her’ language. With her impulsive nature and craving for new experiences, how could she resist it, thought Guy.
She was miffed when he declined to share accommodation with her on their global tour. “It’ll be half the price, you silly prick. You can sleep in an armchair if you wish to; with a gun and a knife under your pillow.”
She believed she was joking.
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