A Sin of Omission Page 4

  It was Albert, too, who coached him for the College Vow – the solemn committal to vocation which every student made on enrolling. ‘As it’s a vow,’ Albert had said more seriously than usual, ‘and vows can’t be broken, you must be absolutely sure you want to make it. If you’re in doubt you must tell the Warden now.’

  ‘I want to make it,’ said Stephen.

  ‘They say that only half the fellows end up keeping it.’

  ‘I will keep it.’

  Nor could Stephen doubt that the vow could be anything but binding after the Archbishop of Canterbury himself had given the sermon on Founders’ Day, setting forth the urgent need of providing ministrations in the colonies and the consequences of a Failure of Faith.

  ‘How lamentable the extent to which darkness, ignorance, heathenism and idolatry prevail among those who have been ignorant of the covenant of grace. But,’ and he had paused and gazed around at the assembled students, ‘if there are degrees of wretchedness, surely it is they who have once tasted of the heavenly gift but who have forgotten the covenant of baptism and retained the name without the character of a Christian, it is they who are undoubtedly the most wretched of all.’

  With the fear of such a wretchedness ringing in their ears, the vow was taken, student by student, before the Warden and the assembled clergy, before the benefactors of the College in their grandeur and their eminence, crowded into the College Chapel.

  Stephen, awaiting his turn, had gazed along the pews in search of Albert, seated among the students who had been inducted the year before. Albert winked, nodded encouragingly, made a small gesture of support and Stephen had stood, slight and graven-faced under the weight of music, the smell of incense, of pomade and lavender and musty kneelers, enraptured by the vision of the clergy in their robes, the Bishop’s mitre, the gleaming cross.

  Struck by the magnificence of God.

  At last he had stood before the Warden: ‘Is it your deliberate intention to devote yourself, with all the powers of mind and body, which God in His goodness has given you, to His service in the ministry in the Church of England in the distant dependencies of the British Empire or in the Foreign Mission Field?’

  ‘It is my solemn intention,’ Stephen replied – as Albert had coached him.

  It was not long after, alert to aptitude and sympathies, that their tutor suggested that Albert should go to British Kaffraria instead of India. Stephen had agreed – delightedly – to teach Albert the rudiments of Xhosa. In exchange, Albert would coach him in Latin and Greek, a pre-requisite after ordination as a deacon to the elevation of the priesthood. ‘Maybe, one day we’ll both be bishops, Stephen!’ Albert had exclaimed. They had laughed together at the absurdity of Stephen in a mitre or Albert as a prelate.

  Until that time Stephen’s mother tongue had almost been lost to him. After the age of twelve, when he had been sent to the Native College in Grahamstown, speaking it had been forbidden during school hours. As students came from many different regions, English was an easier choice than Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu or Tswana, even in the dormitories at night. Here, at the Missionary College in Canterbury, any African language was completely unknown.

  Stephen had not spoken a word of Xhosa since leaving the Cape – not until he was asked to teach Albert conversation. In tutoring, the words and their alliteration returned to him like a refrain and the first few tentative phrases that grew between them made an intimacy, a shared purpose that held promise for their work together in Kaffraria.

  The Warden, too, had assured his students that if an African – or Indian or Melanesian or Chinese or any foreign student – taught a designated English classmate his native tongue they could well be posted together. Experience had taught him that such mutual support would help the English clergyman to understand his foreign flock and would obviate – for the ‘native’ – the risk of what he called ‘back-sliding into heathen ways’: a bolster against the ‘barbarous influences’ that could be exerted on a young missionary returning alone to his own people. With an English missionary at his side, the Warden had declared, each would hold steady to his purpose. That the Englishman, and not the native, might have wavered in resolve was not conceded.

  Yet the Warden knew all too well the chief cause of ‘backsliding’. He had a sheaf of reports from colonial bishops in India, China, Kaffraria, the Cape: the isolated missionary without a wife, lured to immorality or worse. Or, more frequently, the demanding, selfish English spouse wrecking the vocation of a worthy man!

  The Church was littered with such cases.

  At Nodyoba, Stephen had no wife – either to support him or exert a baleful influence on his vocation. The mission community was surrounded by heathen homesteads. The young men had gone away to work at the diamond fields or in distant towns, the girls – traditional and illiterate – tilled the fields. Most of the converts at his mission were displaced: the elderly, the widowed, the destitute, the feeble, the very young. There were few with even a rudimentary education.

  In England he had been too young, too preoccupied, too astonished by his situation to think of anything else. He had neither thought of women in his enthusiasm for his calling nor doubted the incalculable distance between him and the pale girls that he encountered in Canterbury. Then, one day, he had been walking down the high street on his way back to College from his lessons at the hospital. He was brought up short.

  Stopped. Gazed.

  There, in the window of Mr Baldwin’s Photographic Studio, there among the small and modest rows of prints of comely matrons, bewhiskered gentlemen, solemn children; there, among the crinolines, the lace tippets, the furled parasols – a black face.

  It was a woman.

  So unexpected, so utterly arresting.

  Underneath the picture was a caption: ‘Kaffir Woman’.

  He had stood, the small gusts of autumn wind sliding round the corner and catching the brim of his hat, the cold fingering his neck within the stiff starched collar. All the other portraits were marked with a name, a rank, a place. But she – she was Kaffir Woman. A generic for all women from southern Africa: a species, a type.

  As was he: Kaffir Man.

  To be wondered over.

  The woman in the portrait was turned to the left, her face untouched by consciousness of the lens, detached from this sombre city with its towers and turrets, its cold damp wind, its ivied walls.

  Stephen put his hand on the knob of the door of the shop and pushed gently. A bell tinkled as he entered. The man behind the counter looked at him keenly – a collector’s fervour – as if already lining up a shot. ‘Can I help you?’

  At a loss to know what to say, to admit the irrational impulse of barging in, Stephen stammered, ‘What is the cost of taking my picture?’

  He did not know why he had said it when he had scant money in his pocket. Was it some vague wish to be placed beside her in the window? A complementary specimen?

  The portrait was far more than he could afford and he owed Albert tea – a dozen teas – but he counted out his coins, promising to pay the balance on collection, and pulled his collar straight. The photographer hesitated, clearly weighing up the chance of an interesting picture against Stephen’s commitment to pay. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come this way.’

  Stephen was ushered into a studio. He was shown a mirror and adjusted his necktie. What luck that he had borrowed one of Albert’s hats for the visit to town, his own shabby as a workman’s. He rubbed the dome with his handkerchief, smoothing the nap, and patted his hair. It was styled as Mzamo’s had always been, with a parting down the centre. He had waited, watching, as the man prepared the glass, painted on collodion and then, adjusting his instruments, indicated that Stephen should take up a position with one hand on the back of an ornamental chair placed before a draped curtain. Stephen had stood – quite agonisingly frozen – in a posture of feigned repose, one leg flexed across his ankle, cane and hat on the seat of the chair.

  He stood very upright, his hand at his hip.


  He set his gaze beyond the man behind the camera, staring into infinity as she had done, a counterpoint to her angled stance.

  Set side by side, their glances would cross.

  Kaffir Man.

  When the picture had been taken he said, ‘Who is the lady in the portrait in the window?’

  ‘There are many portraits of ladies in the window.’

  ‘The black woman.’

  ‘Ah! She was a member of a choir that came to London some time ago. I went up to take their likenesses. They performed energetic heathen dances. Most exotic!’

  ‘She is not dressed like a heathen.’

  ‘No. They were engaged to show their savagery but I believe they were members of a Nonconformist church choir. They even sang before the Queen. A great fuss was made of them and – the lady herself told me – they were entertained most royally in a number of grand houses. She even sported a string of pearls some toff had given her. I took her picture when she was not performing.’

  Stephen smiled. Should he have come dressed in skins and feathers?

  He left the shop and stooped to look again at the print of that serene and haunting face.

  It was a week later that he had returned to collect his photograph. As he entered the shop he noticed that the display in the window had changed. She was no longer there.

  The photographer brought out the portrait of Stephen and handed it to him with some pride. It was a fine likeness. There he stood, keen and upright in his overcoat and shining boots.

  ‘Thank you,’ Stephen said. ‘My mother will be pleased with this.’He scanned it again and slipped it into its cover. Then he said, rather awkwardly, not looking at the man, ‘What has happened to the picture of the native lady whose portrait was in your window?’

  ‘I have changed my display and most of the prints have been claimed. I do not expect that lady to come for hers. She has returned to the Cape. It was a trifle for my own interest.’

  ‘Is there a copy?’

  The man appraised Stephen with the hint of a leer. ‘Five shillings for the original.’

  Twice what he’d paid for his own picture.

  ‘I will come tomorrow.’

  ‘Mind where you get the money.’

  Stung, Stephen had left the shop.

  Chapter Three

  It was the first time that Stephen had asked – directly – to borrow money. He knew it was the surest way to strike at the heart of friendship but he had no choice. And Albert, rather too heartily, had said, ‘Of course, old chap!’ He’d cocked his head, anticipating an explanation. How could Stephen tell him it was to pay for the photograph of an unknown woman?

  ‘Broke an instrument at a lesson in the hospital,’ Stephen had said unconvincingly, knowing he could not even go to confession and admit to such a lie without the priest notching up a ‘?’ against his name, proof, yet again, that Warden Bailey had been misled in admitting ‘foreigners’ to the College.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Albert scrummaging in his drawer under his shirts, ‘I don’t have an awful lot …’ Nor – a guilty omission – did he tell Stephen that, at last, he had been invited by Miss Wills, the Precentor’s daughter, to have tea with her family that Sunday afternoon and that he had intended to buy her a small gift. ‘How much do you need?’he’d said, hiding his vexation.

  ‘Five shillings.’

  Albert had coloured, hesitated, dived into the drawer again. ‘I’m sure I can manage that.’

  It was a lie, too.

  When Stephen had gone with the money in his pocket, hastening downtown before his errand could be discovered, Albert had had to ask a senior student if he could beg a florin from him, mortified by his own request and so earnest in his promises to repay within a week that the young man had said, with a knowing grin, ‘I won’t charge interest, Newnham. If it’s all in pursuit of Miss Wills I won’t begrudge you!’

  With which, ears flaming, Albert had escaped.

  Nor, when Stephen returned hastily to College in time for prep, could he show the picture to anyone. Especially Albert.

  He hid it inside a book face to face with his own photograph, a slip of tissue paper between them, and wrestled with some way to pay his debt – knowing he could not. And no matter how he longed to ask Albert what he thought of that face – too distinctive to be posing, too detached to be self-aware – it must remain a secret, a deception.

  Albert’s preoccupations at that time were no secret. After he had repaid his debt to his fellow student – an urgent letter to his mother had sufficed – he took to loitering about at Dr Wills’s gate at recreation time.

  Clearly, Albert Newnham was in love.

  He daydreamed in tutorials, mooned about, even in chapel, spent far longer in confession than before and did not suggest tea to Stephen for a fortnight. If Stephen was relieved to accept no favours – some remission from debt – he was alarmed at Albert’s sudden inattention to their plan to go together to Kaffraria. Besides, courtship was a harrowing business, with exchanged letters, visits which were cut short by maiden aunts or happily prolonged through their absence, glances in church, detours round the Cathedral Close, dawdling after service near the Sunday school where Miss Unity was mistress. Stephen was impatient to meet the paragon who had claimed his friend’s attention.

  When she was introduced to him, she clasped his hand so long his palm began to sweat: such neat small teeth, her upper lip a little damp in her anxiety to please.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Mana?’

  ‘Miss Wills.’

  At tea he watched her. She was decisive in everything she did, a merry girl with vivacious little hands, darting and busy. She reminded him of a musical box: open the lid and the notes would trip out, without pause or seeming continuity until they stopped – suddenly – eager to be wound again.

  Like Albert, she laughed at everything, cocking her head with its short dark ringlets of springy curls. She chattered in a way he found incomprehensible in a woman, alighting on every subject, fluttering away again. She was too eager to please. She hadn’t half the dignity he thought necessary in a missionary’s wife. She had none of the authority of a Mrs Rutherford or the tough self-discipline of Mrs Turvey, the wife of the Principal of the Native College in Grahamstown, who could arrange a meal for a hundred without complaint, stay up all night sewing the students’ clothes and still appear at matins before breakfast.

  At Mfundisi Rutherford’s mission and even in Grahamstown, the Xhosa girls were quiet, detached, eyes respectfully cast down. But they were capable and strong. They could hoe the fields, clean the church, carry water, wood and forage – even those destined to be teachers or preachers’ wives. They had a keen self-reliance and a power to slight as subtle as it might be silent. There was nothing inherently submissive as there was in the unmarried ladies he had met in Canterbury.

  He often looked at the picture of the woman, hidden in his prayer book. That was the face of a missionary’s wife!

  Luminous, sufficient.

  No, compared with her, Unity Wills was not a woman. She was a girl. She would always be a girl. She was not a soldier of Christ. She was a Sunday worshipper in her best bonnet.

  ‘My busy little woman!’ Albert called her, chuckling up his shoulders, twinkling behind his spectacles, pink about the neck.

  Stephen had smiled. How foolish Englishmen could be!

  Foolishness could be indulged but not insanity!

  ‘I have asked Unity – Miss Wills – to marry me,’ Albert had announced.

  ‘Marry you?’ Stephen was aghast. ‘What about our mission?’

  ‘She will make a very fine missionary’s wife,’ retorted Albert. ‘After all, her father was once a Fellow of our College.’ He was flustered, casting around. ‘She knows all about missionaries! She will teach the mission children.’

  ‘There may not be any mission children to teach, Albert!’ exclaimed Stephen. ‘We may have to start from scratch, build ourselves a hut in the bush, cook on a fire and face hostil
e tribesmen who have never heard of Christ. We might even have to fight for our lives!’

  ‘It’s too late now!’ Albert had been more abject than angry. Then he bristled a little and said, ‘I didn’t think I had to ask your permission to get married!’

  ‘You don’t.’ Stephen had turned away. ‘But you have no idea what you are going to.’

  Nor, Stephen knew, had he.

  He had been held a virtual hostage since he was nine years old, an ecclesiastical experiment, a pastiche of an Englishman. Only the remnants of his real provenance remained: his black face.

  Stephen rode all day. He stopped only once at a stream to water the horse and sat awhile on flat rocks under a tree. He was hungry but, on searching his saddlebag, he discovered that he had left his food behind in his hurry. No one was about. New homesteads, replacing those that had been burned by the rebels, clustered forlornly on the open hillsides. The Ngqika had cleared out the Mfengu in their passage through the Amathole the year before. The fields had been raided, trampled by men, not by browsing cattle. But the people had begun to drift back to rebuild their homes. Here and there a newly planted field had begun to sprout. As Stephen sat in the shade and his horse cropped the grass at the edge of the stream, he watched the first smoke of afternoon cooking fires drift up from thatched roofs, and a dog, disturbed by his presence, barked from a yard.

  He considered approaching a nearby homestead and asking for food but decided against it. Despite being a clergyman, he could not forget, in this neighbourhood, that he was a stranger and a Ngqika, not an Mfengu – nor that his father had been councillor to a Ngqika chief.

  He rode on and at dusk he came to the outskirts of the town. He passed through the quiet side streets to the huts and shacks where the Xhosa lived. There was a man, Eleazor Mbanda, who had worked at the Native College in Grahamstown as an assistant to the carpenter until he had removed to this village and set up on his own. Remembering Eleazor, he had sent a message with a carter a few days before his arrival in the hope that Eleazor would care for his horse while he travelled on to Queenstown by train.