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  Such things hadn’t gone unnoticed by the captain’s men, though their observations were far less clinical. And new as the young girls were, with their proportion of hip and breast, to the subtlety and technique of the white man’s flirtation, they quickly adapted to it and responded easily and with remarkable enthusiasm. Something that took even the Frenchmen by surprise.

  So that evening, a new colony became part of the expanding French Empire and nine months later, almost to the day, the first coffee-coloured babies were registered by Governor Chaudenson and entered in his diary as: ‘The first children of Union’.

  Union in the twentieth century was an expensive but still, because of its distance by air from the African continent, a relatively exclusive holiday island. Fat, tired, anginic Parisian attorneys and similarly fat, tired, anginic Johannesburg goldbrokers, bored with the Seychelles and Mauritius, decided, in their attempts to delay the inevitable coronary, to holiday in Union.

  It was a very French island, despite its latitude, with the smell and touch of France. Advertisements for Perrier and Gauloise were everywhere. Renault 5s clattered down the cobbled streets, men put Vichy in their wine at lunchtime and ate apples with their cheese.

  Union made its own wine and brandy, farmed its own clams and scallops, collected unlimited lobsters and langoustines beyond the coral, grew its own coffee, aubergines, coconuts, pumpkins, melons, grapes, oranges, lychees and a dozen more fruits. Sunflowers and olives grew on the tidy terraced land off the mountain slopes above Petit Royan and its harbour. Avocado and fig trees lined the lanes from farm to farm and the southern sun and Indian Ocean breezes merged the seasons into perpetual summer.

  Union also had Guano, thousands of tons of it, exported every year as fertilizer to the arid agricultural wastelands of ailing Third World, developing Africa. Seagulls and cormorants took fish from the sea, processed them to their own advantage and then dropped the waste on to the scattering of rocks at the island’s northern tip. To encourage the birds further, concrete blocks had been dumped into the sea between the rocks forming a crescent-shaped breakwater, and from the air the white Guano-covered rocks looked like icing on the rich, spicy fruitcake of Union.

  Which is how Faraday first saw it. White-tipped, an island of greens and browns, enclosed in blue-green coral with a secondary boundary of white-sand beaches.

  There was a tingle of cassette-recorded bells and the seat- belt sign above Faraday reminded him to strap himself tight. Trays were taken, remaining Scotches were hurriedly swallowed, cigarettes smouldered black in their wells, seats sprung upright and the big Boeing’s tyres scorched the tarmac of Africa’s newest Marxist Republic.

  ‘The problem, Mateys, is how to keep here. With the best will in the world it’s going to be hard to stretch this one beyond a week. Even then we can just about keep it boiling. . .’

  ‘Simmering . . .’

  ‘. . . long enough for the Sundays to want a piece. I reckon come Monday and we’ll all have the old heavo! ’

  Faraday had read, heard and been frequently shocked by Alf Prentice. There was seldom a Mirror front-page foreign story that didn’t have his by-line and photograph, taken, Faraday now realized, a long time ago when he had hair and a chin.

  It was said that the stories-about Prentice were more outrageous than those he wrote - which was some boast, even by Mirror standards.

  There was the time when, in a spasm of well-rehearsed anti-colonial anger, mobs attacked the British Embassy in Djakarta. The ambassador and his staff were under siege for three hours as pre-Tunku-Abdul-Rahmans threw stones and beer bottles through the windows and hammered at the ornate oak front door with rolled up copies of the Strait Times. Some were seen spitting at the Lion and Unicom crest by the doorbell.

  Prentice, in one of those rare accidents of air travel, was in transit at Djakarta airport en route for Hong Kong and, hearing of the disturbance, tried to bribe his way past pre- Independence Customs and Immigration officials which, in those days, was a clumsy thing to do. They promptly arrested him and put him on the first flight out which so happened to be going to Singapore. From there he filed a story based on what a Malay lavatory attendant in Djakarta transit lounge had told him about the burning to the ground of the British Embassy and the dramatic exit of the British Foreign Office staff there.

  ‘I stood,’ he wrote from the Associated Press office in Singapore, ‘knee-high in rubble . . . the smouldering remnants of British rule around me.’

  Which led the Mirror front page, upset the Foreign Office and all Whitehall and particularly outraged the British Ambassador in Djakarta, because once the revolting Malays were satisfied a point had been made, the gardens of the unsmouldering Embassy were thrown open to them and with admirable public relations, tea was served to them on the lawn by the Embassy typists.

  Reuters later reported that the riot leaders, out of work owing to the capital-intensive programmes of the British rubber planters, had accepted employment as security guards, patrolling the grounds at something slightly above the current local rate of pay.

  There had been another occasion when the Personal Private Secretary of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus complained that Prentice had twice in three weeks reported his Beatitude’s death and that Presidential business could no longer be conducted in the Residence because of the flowers that were stacked in every room.

  Prentice was everything Faraday had imagined he wasn’t and nothing he should have been.

  He sat perched high on a barstool. The skin on his face and the backs of his hands was tinged blue and his large broad nose was reddish purple, criss-crossed with haemorrhaged veins unable to cope any longer with the torrents of blood-alcohol that was regularly pumped through them. It looked a very painful nose. And he had enormously fat jowls that hung each side of his mouth like water pouches on a donkey. Faraday watched their extraordinary effect, a trick of the eyes, whenever Prentice lifted the glass of gin and tonic to his lips. The jowls seemed to close around it, like a sea-amoeba trapping a sea insect.

  He had a very large stomach. It drooped and curved out from his chest like a ski-jump. When he sat, the fat rested comfortably on his thighs, but when he got up, which wasn’t often, the immense weight of the stomach fell, held, it seemed, only by his braces which became so taut that Faraday expected them to snap like an overstretched steel hawser.

  Prentice was Faraday’s first disappointment, but it made him no less fascinating, because Faraday realized that, for the first time in his short career, he was part of a famous circle, names that had reported in the first person from the Congo, Cairo, Aden, Angola, Cyprus, Suez, Sinai, Soweto, Baghdad, Beirut and all by-lines east to Vietnam and the beyond. They did not look the part, but that added to their credibility. Who, he thought, watching them now, would believe they represented the elite of the British Foreign Press Corps? And yet their credentials were impeccable. Or so it seemed to him.

  Prentice was talking again. His eyes were watering from the sting of the blue smoke that rose from a drooping, wet Silk Cut in his mouth. It appeared a habit of his to talk only when he was smoking.

  ‘So there you are, Mateys. Instead of our usual fart-arsing about, all trying to do our own little bit, we co-operate. A communal pot as it were . . . throwing in our little tit-bits. That way we can stretch it out here for as long as we like.’

  ‘Easy for you to stretch it out, Alf. The way your paper works you need only file two lines; the rest is made up of headline, by-line and your bleeding photo.’ It was Protheroe of the Mail.

  ‘Balls!’ said Prentice.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Protheroe, encouraged, and lifting his head to the others in the bar as if he was opening a public debate. ‘I reckon that photo of yours, Alf, was taken when you were giving away ten bob notes on Brighton Pier just after the war. Remember? Had to pat you on the back, hold up a copy of the Rag and say, “I spot you Mirrorman and
I claim the Mirrorman prize.” ’

  ‘Balls!’ said Prentice again, not looking up from his gin. ‘Anyway, it was never Brighton. That was the Express’s beat. We had Hastings and Weymouth.’

  ‘Well it’s about bloody time you changed the snap, Alf. No one’s ever going to pat you on the back with that one.’

  ‘Look, fart-face.’ Prentice squared on to Protheroe, swivelling painfully round on the barstool. ‘You look after your public relations and I’ll bloody-well manage mine.’

  Now Protheroe was perfectly able to look after his public image. In fact more and more frequently he found, nowadays, he was looking after Prentice’s as well, especially when events which had nothing to do with news-gathering made Prentice irresponsible and uncaring.

  At times of professional stress, that is, on those rare occasions when their separate and competing London newsdesks were demanding facts and genuine comment, they suddenly became a pair, inter-dependent, and sharing like a married couple.

  Protheroe’s journalistic record was, like Prentice’s, varied, unlikely and thoroughly pockmarked. Their joint survival in the trade was one of the marvels of Fleet Street. But the simple fact was that both had realized from their tea-boy days that there was much more to survival than success.

  Many unkind things were said about Protheroe and, unlike his own stories, most had some basis of truth. Like the time in 1953 when the Persian Prime Minister, Dr Moussedeq, having nationalized British oil interests, defied the Shah and, worse, the army. Protheroe, on a belated British Petroleum binge, heard about it during a midday Scotch and soda session, and quickly filed that the unlovable doctor had lost his government and was in chains. Which so happened to be true.

  It was the eighth Scotch and soda that did the damage because, after it, Protheroe decided to have Moussedeq sentenced and hung. Which so happened to be untrue.

  For two days the Mail held its breath, staring at its published exclusive, waiting for confirmation by official communiqué that never came. Protheroe still has the cable his Editor sent him: ‘EITHER MOUSSEDEQ HANGS OR YOU DO.’

  ‘Now come lads! Where’s the esprit? Where’s the communal pot?’

  The flat, dull Birmingham drawl was Doubleday’s, the ‘Expressman’. At times of strain, as this obviously was, he tried to act the peacemaker; it was his way of paying for a round. And anyway a communal pot suited Doubleday very well indeed, unable as he had always been to produce anything resembling original copy.

  ‘Alf’s right,’ Doubleday said. ‘There’s no need to break our necks on this one. Better we share.’

  ‘And what bleeding gems are you offering?’ asked Prentice. ‘A couple of commas and a full stop?’

  There was a crash as Prentice fell off his stool attempting to lunge at Protheroe. Protheroe in turn fell backwards into the arms of a passing waiter, a large mulatto who, with sincere apology and with both hands, lifted Protheroe on to Prentice’s stool and gave him Prentice’s drink, which reduced the watching Prentice lying on the floor, helplessly drunk, to a state of purple apoplexy. There was a sudden flurry of uniformed porters in the small reception area behind them. The lift doors opened and the collected Press Corps were suddenly silent. Then a gasp from Prentice on the floor and a groan from Protheroe and Faraday turned. J. J. Day-Lewis, tall, tanned and suitably dressed in a cream short-sleeved suit, walked across the foyer to a door marked TELEX, entered and locked the door after him. The dinner gong sounded and the Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph had gone to file his third story of the day.

  At that moment, six hundred miles due west, in an African capital not far from where the Zambesi River cascades over the Victoria Falls, five men sat around a large table in a dimly-lit office. It had been a thundery day, and the air was warm and sticky. The five were uncomfortable and hardly felt the breeze from the old-fashioned fan spinning on the ceiling. Two of them were in uniform, the other three wore lightweight tropical suits.

  On the table was a large-scale map of Central and Southern Africa with the Indian Ocean islands shown as inserts in the bottom right-hand corner. But their eyes were not on the map or on the manilla folders opened in front of them. They looked at the sixth man standing by the shuttered window, a small, plump man, wearing gold- rimmed spectacles and a badly-fitting, creased, light-grey double-breasted suit. He stood quite still, his arms folded, feet apart, staring intently at the shutters as if he was seeing art in the flaking, chipped, white-painted louvres.

  One of the uniformed men began to fidget with the row of coloured ribbons on his tunic, pulled out a packet of cigarettes, hesitated and put them back into his pocket again.

  They could hear the noise and bustle of evening traffic outside and the sounds from the open vegetable market nearby, but they waited in silence. There was, after all, nothing more to be said now, nothing more to be done. It had all been agreed, the plan had been thoroughly vetted and finally accepted with only the smallest occasional correction. Everything and everyone settled, except the date and the time and only the plump man at the window could supply that. It was after all his plan. It would have to be his decision.

  Outside there was a sudden, shrill squeal of car brakes and the plump man, seeming to take it as a cue, turned and walked back to his place at the head of the table. He pressed a button on the underside of the armrest of his chair and seconds later a door opened and a tall powerfully-built black guy came to attention and saluted. He was in uniform - at least it looked military - and he wore a beret. He didn’t have ribbons or insignias or any mark of rank, but his khaki shirt had epaulets, his khaki trousers had many pockets and his thick brown leather belt carried an ebony- handled revolver in a canvas holder.

  The plump man did not acknowledge the salute; instead he turned a page of the manilla folder and wrote seven words, a date and a time in Greenwich Mean Time. Still looking at the page he very quietly read out what he had written and only then did he look up. He watched the black guy stiffen. Then he nodded and the black guy sat down opposite him.

  Nodding in turn to the other men around him, the black guy took off his light green beret. On his tight curly hair was a small, bright-red skullcap.

  3

  ‘Mr President, are you or are you not a revolutionary?’ The question, delivered in the best broadcasting voice, came from the Beebman. He was long and thin and known in the trade as ‘cowboy’ from his habit of referring to himself and his camera crew as ‘goodies’ and everyone else as ‘baddies’, and generally doubling for John Wayne. He had the most enormous nose and Faraday couldn’t decide what he reminded him most of - Mr Punch or a predator bird like a vulture. The nose was awesome and many people continually wondered how he kept his balance with so much weight there, so much out of place. He sat in the centre seat of the front row, the long lens of the Beeb camera nestling over his neck and right shoulder.

  President Professor Albert Laurent looked up and smiled. The Beebman took it to be embarrassment and reckoned he’d scored a hit. But the President was genuinely amused. Possibly because he had published eleven books on political theory, including two acknowledged works on Rousseau and Burke, and another, while Professor at the Sorbonne, on the Politics of Revolution. So his views on these things were well known, at least to those who took the trouble to research them.

  He looked slowly around the room, at the collected journalists, television cameras and photographers. The television lights dazzled him and he hesitated.

  He was slightly built, not tall but proportioned in such a way that made him seem so. He had a narrow, high forehead and crinkly, greying hair, wavy at the sides and swept back over his ears. His eyes were green and his skin honey-coloured; he was what was called on the island a ‘Grand Blanc’, a member of the light-complexioned aristocracy. He had, as a young man when such things seemed important, traced his family back seven generations to M Christian Laurent, navigator of La Belle Marie, the man w
ho, for reasons that would never be known, did not see the coral reefs the night they tore open the brigantine’s hull. Laurent had left Paris three years ago to be at the bedside of his dying wife and then decided to spend the rest of his days on Union in retirement.

  The President sighed. ‘I am asked,’ he said in easy English, ‘whether I am a revolutionary. We must be careful, gentlemen, not to talk among ourselves in clichés or report them to others. To be a revolutionary can mean many things to many people. In its simplest form, it may only be what you English call “kicking against the pricks”.’

  ‘Switch off, Sid.’

  The Beebman, in his anxiety, turned so quickly that he knocked the camera to the right and for some seconds the cameraman found himself filming Alf Prentice picking his nose.

  ‘A revolutionary,’ President Laurent continued to the already bored Press Corps, ‘is that person who knows the present is just a staging post . . . a lever to move himself forward to a better life.

  ‘And so my friend,’ he was looking directly at the Beebman, ‘the answer to your question is Yes! I am a revolutionary because I am a disciple of progress.’

  The Beebman shifted uncomfortably in his chair. This wasn’t the answer he wanted at all. They certainly wouldn’t use this kind of rubbish on the Nine o’clock.

  ‘Are we going to have Communism, then?’ It was Prentice, still picking his nose. Faraday watched as he rolled whatever it was he found there into tiny black balls and flicked them at Mailman Protheroe three yards away. Faraday thought of the story of the man who picked his nose for five years and then his head caved in.

  ‘No!’ said the President, not looking up. ‘Not Communism.’