Already the flight was an hour late. Yet the plane was there and no one could give a reason for the delay. The passengers pressed around the open door to the tarmac, engaging the guard there in conversation as a way to reach the air. “Marcella,” called out a familiar voice from the doorway. “And Geoffrey.” The crowd parted and David passed through the gap, neat in an army officer’s uniform.
“I should have made arrangements for you in the VIP lounge. I am so sorry for the delay. Marcella, I wanted to apologise for not attending your carol party. I had to return to Dar. Happy Christmas, by the way. Geoffrey, are you sure you are well enough to travel? Do you remember me?”
“David was the one who took you to hospital,” I prompted.
“Oh, I didn’t recognise you in your uniform.” Geoffrey’s look of surprise at the approach of a friendly soldier turned into comprehension.
“Well, you were hardly in a state for formal introductions when we met.”
“I wanted to thank you. For everything you did. You may have saved my life.”
“No, no, please. I just happened to trip over you.”
“I didn’t know you were an army officer.”
“Oh, this uniform business ... don’t think about it. Marcella, I see you got your passport all right. I think you had no more trouble with the Assistant Passport Officer?”
“No ... no.” And I knew then that my passport had nothing to do with Geoffrey.
“Here’s my card.” He offered one to each of us. It said he was a captain in the Tanzanian army. “I sometimes visit London. Perhaps I’ll see you.”
“I’ll give you my card.” Geoffrey fumbled with his briefcase.
“Not necessary. I know where to find you. Come with me.” He touched Geoffrey’s shoulder, led us through the knot of tourists, murmured something to the soldier on the door, and guided us across the shimmering tarmac to shake our hands at the base of the aeroplane steps. “Goodbye, my friends. No, au revoir is better.”
The modern migrant, I just expounded for my paper, the notepad resting on knees warmed by a blazing fire, goes where his colonisers came from. It’s not now the monsoon drifts that take us east and west, mingling the shades of brown around the equator, as natural as wind-borne seeds. Now the Algerians go north to France, against the current, the Nigerians to England, the Vietnamese to the USA, transplants obtrusive in the landscape. It used to be, I’ve said, that the migrant travelled until he found a place that reminded him of home and there he settled, his strangeness mitigated by this familiarity. Goans sailing three thousand miles to Zanzibar found the same ocean, the same sort of boats, rice, palm trees, trade, the same heat, the same wind. Now though, I’ve explained, it isn’t a climate suited to his clothing that the migrant seeks, but a familiarity with the language and official ways of late-departed rulers. It’s not trade they follow but the tailings of their missing wealth.
So, you see, with hindsight, it was just inevitable that I went to England. Ali never stood a chance with his old- fashioned bait of Oman. My terrors, the business with the passport, the slip of Mrs F’s tongue, my deceitful heart, my restless stubborn ways, Geoffrey’s bang on the head, even the mere fact of Geoffrey, all these were nothing in the greater sweep of things, just stones on a road that I had no choice but to walk down.
I am making sense for the takers of sense, spending my Christmas vacation at Moore writing a paper on human migration. I keep from them inconvenient news, that my friends were all adventurers, all in London by their own mischievous choice, for the moral climate and the trade, ready to depart when the season closed or the wind changed. For the students I try to offer something truer and more complicated, because they are children and deserve something better than simple sense, and I have an unused capacity for love.
At Cookham College my researches moved on and, spurred by Mr Drummond’s “cesspool of wickedness,” I went backwards from Bayswater to Zanzibar. I first learned, with disappointment, that the name came from the Persian, zangh for black and bar for coast—nothing more interesting than some early Persian traveler’s view of it as the place where black people lived. But later I found a different, better, explanation: that the name came from Zayn Za ’ Barr, Arabic for, “fair is the land.” We Arabs had brought poetry to the name, feeling, perhaps, that now it had been made part of the Omani sultanate, it deserved a more gorgeous history.
The fair land; the black coast; the cesspool of wickedness. This, I discovered, was the other pleasure in research: not only do all things and people turn out to be connected, but every connection turns out to be unreliable. No one, any more than me, can say exactly where she came from or who she is. I am setting about introducing this subversive concept into my spring courses. They said I could teach anything.
I STAYED WITH HIM JUST SIX WEEKS.
We were tired, arriving in England on the day after Christmas, Geoffrey so sleepy on the journey that I worried he might turn out to be unconscious. In the bus from the
