William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

Von Bishop looked up. He felt suddenly weak with relief, a tingling in his knee joints, a slackening of his bowels. Finally it was all over. Two days late, but at last it was finished. The dispatch rider was holding his hands above his head in an attitude of surrender.

“Oh, it’s all right,” von Bishop said, smiling broadly. “You don’t need to bother with that now.”

Sir Nigel Macmillan’s house in Nairobi looked rather like a larger version of the grey granite bungalows that can be found in the more genteel streets of any Scottish country town. It too was stone, the roof was slate, the guttering ornamental and cast iron, the windows leaded. The only concession to the African climate was a wide, pillared verandah on which were arrayed pots of plants and wooden chairs and settees, and which over-looked neatly mown lawns and weed-free gravel paths. In 1917 Sir Nigel had lent it to the British and Empire forces in East Africa for use as a sanatorium. For officers only.

Felix Cobb sat bolt upright in one of the armchairs, his spectacles held in both hands, staring blankly at the trio of African gardeners hoeing a flower bed. In his lap was a letter and a copy of the local newspaper, The Leader of East Africa , which he’d just been reading. He looked like a man who had just received a nasty shock.

To compose himself he picked up the letter, put his spectacles on and read it again. It was brief and from his mother.

Stackpole Manor

30 August 1918

Darling Felix,

We were most distressed to hear of your accident with the bomb-gun, but relieved to know that you are steadily recovering from your injuries.

I am writing in haste to tell you of your father. I am sorry to say that he has become progressively more unwell since your departure for the war. After much heart-searching and lengthy consultation with Dr Venables, Cressida and I have decided that it would be best for everyone if he went away for a while. Dr Venables has found a quiet and pleasant nursing home near Bournemouth, called St Jude’s. He says it comes highly recommended. Dr Venables hopes that when this war is finally over and you and Gabriel come home life may eventually return to normal.

Nigel Bathe has a splendid new pair of hands and is much more his old self. Your friend Holland has gone to Russia to join a revolution there. He telephoned the other day to ask news of you.

With fondest love from us all,

Mother

Felix put the letter down, momentarily overcome with sadness for his old mad father. He wished he had written home with the news about Gabriel at the time. It was going to be impossibly hard to relate the facts of his death now. He smiled ruefully. He was full of retrospective wisdom, twenty-twenty vision as far as his hindsight was concerned.

He stood up, his right hand going automatically to the back of his head to feel the bumps and ridges of his scar there. As he got to his feet the newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor. He bent down to retrieve it and felt the giddiness come on as the blood rushed into his brain.

He tucked the newspaper under his arm. He needed to wait a while longer before he could bring himself to read it again. He walked down the steps into the garden.

He had made an almost complete recovery since the day Wheech-Browning had blown him and Captain Pinto up with the Stokes gun bomb. A chunk of shrapnel had fractured his skull at the back of his head and caused lesions to the occipital area of the brain. The swirling ropes of smoke he had seen at the time of the explosion had in fact been a symptom of the partial blindness caused by his injury. What happened subsequently was that only parts of his eye could see. It was like looking through a shattered pane of frosted glass. The remaining shards were the blind areas, demarcated by a swirling effervescent grey smoke, like a cloud of glittering mica dust. The partial blindness had lasted for nearly four months, then it slowly began to clear as his wound healed. The only lingering effect was, he discovered, that it returned for a day or so if he was ever close to a loud noise. A viciously slammed door, a high pitched shout, gunshots.

He was to be invalided out of the army and was due to sail back to England from Mombasa in three weeks’ time. Those intervening weeks were to be spent convalescing on Temple Smith’s farm near Kilimanjaro. That, at least, had been the plan. Everything had changed since he’d read today’s newspaper. For a year now he’d been waiting in hope for the news it contained.

As he drew near a group of patients, a curiously shaped man detached himself from it and came sidling up. It was the Rev Norman Espie, Temple’s father-in-law and an annoyingly regular visitor to the ‘gallant injured boys’ in the sanatorium. It was through Espie, though, that Felix had renewed his acquaintance with Temple, and he was grateful to him for that.

The Rev Norman Espie ducked a non-existent shoulder and held up three fingers in front of Felix’s eyes.

“How many fingers, Lt Cobb?”

“Three, Reverend,” Felix said impatiently. Espie always did this. “I’m not blind.”

“Praise the good Lord,” Espie said. “Temple has asked me to relay the message that he will meet you at the Norfolk Hotel at ten of the clock, the morn’s morn.”

“Ah. I’m afraid there’s been a change in plan. I won’t be coming now. At least, not for a while.”

“Goodness me. Not any sign of a relapse, I trust.”

“No. I have to go to Dar-es-Salaam.”

“Dar! What on earth for, my dear young man?”

“Official business. To do with the death of my brother. Temple will understand.”

Felix repeated his apologies and left the Rev Normah Espie to his visiting. He walked back to his seat on the verandah. What he had told Espie wasn’t strictly true. It was a plan he’d concocted only minutes before. He still had arrangements to make, official permissions to secure, but he had every intention of going to Dar.

He sat down and opened The Leader again. It contained a long article about the surrender of the German forces at Abercorn in Northern Rhodesia on the twenty-fifth of November.

…von Lettow made this formal statement of surrender in German and then repeated it in English. General Edwards accepted the surrender on behalf of His Majesty King George V. Von Lettow was then presented to the officers present, and in return introduced his own officers. The German forces numbered 155 Europeans, 30 of whom were officers, medical officers and higher officials, and 1,168 askaris,

Then followed a list of those German officers who had surrendered. Felix’s heart began to beat faster as he searched again for the one name he was looking for. He felt a slight sensation of nausea when he found it. “Von Bishop, Erich, Capt of Reserve.” Von Bishop was still alive. Fate had allowed him to survive the war. Felix shut his eyes and conjured up an image of Gabriel’s severed head. The waxy skin, the staring eyes, the dull tousled hair. He thought of his half-eaten body in the trampled grass. The questions that had nagged relentlessly at him for a year rose again in his head. What had happened to Gabriel out there on the plateau? What hellish torments had he endured?

He opened his eyes again and looked out at the quiet garden, with its civilized lawns and groups of strolling invalids. Since this war had begun not one thing in his life had turned out the way he had planned. Oxford, Charis, the search for Gabriel, the hunt for von Bishop. He realized that he’d been a soldier now for nearly two and a half years — since July 1916—and he had never fired a shot in anger. What kind of a war was it where this sort of absurdity could occur? And yet he’d been sick, half-starved, insanely bored, had seen his brother hideously murdered, shared a house with a syphilitic Portuguese who spoke no English and been almost killed by a bomb fired by his own side. He knew that he was not responsible for the way events had turned out, that it was futile to expect that life could in some way be controlled. But surely everyone had some vestigial power to influence things at his disposal? He had sworn to himself that before he left Africa, before he was done with this mad, absurd war, he was going to exercise that power and fire at least one shot in anger. He was going to put a bullet in von Bishop’s brain. As far as he was concerned his war would not be over until then.