Going Home - Doris May Lessing [31]
All morning in bed he collected facts from books and newspapers piled all over and around and above him. He lived in a cocoon of paper. ‘How many miles from the earth to the moon?’ he would inquire sternly. ‘How many miles is it around the earth? You don’t know. I know you don’t know. Well, read this. Do you know anything about the habits of the termite? Do you understand the chemistry of the soil? Of course not.’ And he thrust into my hands half a dozen books and cross-examined me about them afterwards.
He wore a hat on top of his long, yellowing white hair, a thick jersey over his pyjamas, and between long, narrow, sarcastic lips was always clenched a pipe.
‘My little bird,’ he would say to his hulking old wife. ‘Do you know how many miles from here to Venus?’
‘No, my sweetheart, no, my angel, you know I don’t.’
‘No, I know.’ And he puffed with satisfaction at his pipe.
Mrs Boles was content to be stupid; and she would gaze fondly at her clever husband from her bed where she was reading some love-story. One of my duties was to read to her, but I never got farther than half a page, for Mr Boles listened, his long, white moustaches writhing with incredulous scorn, while she gave him nervous glances and my voice faltered to a stop. ‘You cannot fill that child’s mind with that nauseating rubbish.’
‘No, my heart, no, my dove.’ And she took back the romance from my hand and patiently read it to herself with her weak red-rimmed eyes.
Mr Boles was an old China hand, and spent many hours enlightening my political ignorance about the Far East. He was Far Eastern expert for the newspaper, and no crisis occurred anywhere beyond the Mediterranean without an illuminating article from him. It was he who greeted the Communist revolution in China with the words: ‘There have always been war-lords in China,’ and he who put Mr Nehru in his place when he became Prime Minister of India with: ‘Familiar as I am with Bombay bazaar agitators…’
Several years later, in another town, just after I had read a paper to the Left Club on the Chinese Revolution, I got a message from him to go to his office in the newspaper building. I went at once, and found him behind his desk, his long hair on his neck, his long moustaches drooping as usual over thin, cold lips, his hat on his head and scarf around his neck in case of draughts. It was a very hot afternoon just before the rains.
‘Sit down,’ he said. I sat, unwillingly, for if I say that at that time I was politically active the phrase can give no idea of the amount of agitation I and my fellow Socialists got through in a week. We considered a day wasted in which we had not been to at least four meetings, after we had done a full day’s work in our respective offices.
Mr Boles told me a long story about how a group of anarchists had blown up a power station in Japan in, I think, 1905. I listened patiently, critical of the deplorable tactics of these misguided revolutionaries, for I was at that time undergoing a thorough course based on the Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B).
When he had finished, I said, puzzled, ‘Well?’
He was watching my face with cold, narrow, blue eyes.
‘I wanted to let you know,’ he said, ‘that we have our eyes on the power-station.’
Since I was late for a meeting, I thanked him and hurried off; it was some days before I had time to think about what he had said; and even so it was months before it occurred to me that he had been warning me that the CID, because of his vigilance and political nous, considered us likely blowers-up of the Salisbury power-station.
The third time I stayed in Umtali was just after the beginning of the war. Most of the young men