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Land Affairs turned up and took me for a drive, he had some chore and I suppose looked for useful company. Did you know there’re still land mines not cleared in the Eastern province?—
    â€”Good grief, I’d been told it was all clear except for the frontier in the West! We’d better look into that with Safety and Security—Defence, maybe. Was he fishing again, an Agency sardine or two to dish up for his boss’s reports to the Minister? As he was doing with me, as well, when we lunched. We’ll never get these guys in Government to understand we have to keep out of political issues—or seem to. As if sinking a borehole in this village before that doesn’t become political. What does he think
about IT—or does he only utter on land? If you see him again, bring it up; he must sit at all manner of closed meetings with his Director, he must have a general idea of what the Government’s prepared to do, we have to gather what we can to work on for cooperation from it. They can’t expect to leave it all to the big network donors … as you noticed, their stocks have gone wa-ay down, anyway.—
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    The Hendersons put Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma and his wife along with the name of the Director of Land Affairs himself on the list for a cocktail party marking the Agency’s decade of service in Africa. The Director brought his wife, his Deputy came alone. As if there was no wife; but there’s always a wife, somewhere. When Roberta, co-host with the Hendersons, greeted him she was about to add as a pleasantry, I forgot the avocados, but did not. Turned with other pleasantries to a man from Home Affairs, arrived with the Minister of Welfare (rumours of another kind of affair, there) who always tried to manoeuvre her sisterly into a corner with some urgent situation of women that must be brought to the attention of the Agency.
    These first weeks of Alan Henderson’s return were taken up in collaboration with the local World Health Organisation representative in meetings arranged for a senior man from WHO headquarters who was touring the continent in a campaign against HIV AIDS. There were visits to rural counselling centres set up in army surplus tents and to an old hospital still known by the name of a deceased English queen, now a hospice—euphemism for the last of the Stations of the disease. The Agency Administrator’s Assistant had had to face, and walk
away from, to life—starvation in Bangladesh, in India, not just the living human head resculptured by it, but its final power manifest, wreaked upon the feet, the skeleton of feet no longer for standing, the feet, the hands, the hands the very last web-hold on existence. People deployed on the ground (as opposed to those tours of duty looking down from cloud-high windows of metropolitan headquarters) are like doctors, they must do what they have to do without the fatality of identification with sufferers. But in this red-brick relic of imperial compassion for its subjects the long-established discipline become natural to her failed; suddenly was not there. She groped for it within herself; the anguish of the bodies on beds and mats entered in its place. She could not look, she had to look , at the new-born-to-die and the rags of flesh and bone that were all that was left of the children they were to become if they did survive weeks, months, maybe a year. Food and clean water (the succour ready to be provided on other tours of duty): useless here.
    Silenced by what they had seen, the official group was taken to a Holiday Inn where the Agency had arranged a private room and coffee was served. She was hearing as echoes sounding off the walls the practical responses to—what? Incurable. Something incurable in the nature of human life itself, taking many forms of which this was the latest, arising, returning in endless eras and guises—disease, wars, racism. That’s how people come to