THE HOME FROM HOME 51

holding his fez to his chest, a man of about thirty-
five; Souri, the cook, a very old toothless man, in a
long white robe; Laminah, the second boy, very
young, in shorts and a little white jacket like those
barbers wear, with a knitted woollen cap on his head
crowned by a scarlet bobble. It was several days
before I learnt their names, and I could never fully
understand what they said to me. I told them to
come back next day, but they haunted the hotel from
that moment, the two older men appearing suddenly
in the passage, standing silently in front of me with
lowered head and fez pressed to the chests. I never
knew what they wanted; they always waited for me
to speak. It was only later that I realised Amedoo
was as shy as myself. I couldn't have imagined then
the affection I would come to feel for them.

Our relationship was to be almost as intimate as a
love-affair; they were to suffer from the same worn
nerves; to be irritated by the same delays; but our life
together, because it had been more perfectly rounded,
seemed afterwards less real. For there is so much
left over after a love-affair; letters and mutual friends,
a cigarette case, a piece of jewellery, a few gramo-
phone records, all the usual places one has seen each
other in. But I had nothing left but a few photo-
graphs to show that I had ever known these three
men; I would never again see the towns we had passed
through together and never run into them in
familiar places,*

* Six years later when the fortune of war brought me back to
Freetown, I met Laminah and asked after Amedoo. He browse
into peals of laughter, "Old cook/' he said, "he all right, but
Amedoo he under ground." (1946). • * * •