A Guest of Honour (17 page)

Yet he said to Aleke, “I'd like to look in on Edward Shinza one of these days.” He was in Aleke's house—his own old house—on a Saturday afternoon: there was no exchange of invitations for drinks and dinners between officials as there had been when officialdom was white, but Aleke had said, “Why don't you come over to my place?”
and so clearly meant the open invitation that Bray had taken it up as casually and genuinely. The radio, as always, was playing loudly on the veranda. Some of the seven children pushed toy cars through tracks scratched in the earth of the tubs where Olivia had once grown miniature orange trees.

“The road's very bad that way, they tell me,” Aleke said, lazily, though not exactly without interest.

Bray realized that he had brought up the subject because, although he would go and see Shinza openly, would tell Mweta so himself—indeed Mweta would expect him to seek out Shinza—he had some cautious reluctance to have Aleke reporting that he had visited Shinza. It should be established that it was not a matter of any interest to anyone except himself.

Mrs. Aleke brought tea and was sent away to fetch beer instead; she tried to clear the veranda of children, but Aleke was one of those plump, muscular men whose self—confidence, apparently made flesh, exerts a tactile attraction over women and children. His small sons and daughters ran back to press against his round spread thighs. He spoke of his wife as if she were not there. “She's a woman who can't get children to listen. The same with the chickens. She chases them one way, they go the other.”

“They're naughty.” She looked helplessly and resentfully at the children.

“We used to hear
my
mother's voice.” He fondled the children; it was easy for him. When he had had enough he would pick them off himself like burrs. She said to Bray, “And your wife is coming here? This place's dead. There is nothing in the shops, I wish I could get away to town, honestly.”

But she was drawn, like the children, to her husband, though she did not quite touch him. He shooed them all away, just as easily, with a gesture of demanding air.

Bray felt a small rankling in himself for having put his acquaintance with Aleke momentarily on a footing of caution. Why should Aleke even think of him in terms of political manoeuvre? Telling Mweta what he thought was one thing; anything that might be construed as political action was another, and something he set himself outside from the beginning of his return. This disinterest was only confirmed by the right to look up an old friend, whoever he might be.

The unease—living alone one became too self—regarding—had the effect of making his plans turn out to take into account the Bashi Flats—Shinza's area. He went off one morning, meaning to go through the mountains where the iron-ore mine was, on the way, and to take a week over it. He remembered that Shinza liked cheroots, and called in at the
boma
as he left Gala; there was a new box in the desk Aleke had allotted him. The office door opened on someone who had been about to open it from the other side—a young white woman stood with her hands, palm open, drawn back at the level of her breasts. He smiled politely and then saw that she knew him; it was Rebecca Edwards, of Vivien's house in the capital. While he rummaged for the cigars, she explained that she had come up to work for Aleke. “Roly said he'd written to you, so I told Vivien not to bother.” Of course there had been something in Dando's letter—an illegible name. “Was there anything I could have done for you?”

“Oh no, you know how they are down there. The whole network has to be alerted everytime somebody moves.”

He left a good—bye message with her, for Aleke. “He must be triumphant. He's been threatening to storm the Ministry and carry off a secretary.”

“I came quietly,” the girl said, with her good chap smile.

It had rained in the night and the elephant grass was matted with brilliant dew. He could hear his tyres cutting the first tread of the day into the wet packed sand on the road; his blunted sense of smell revived to something of the animal's keen nose. Bamboo, rocks, lichens—they stood out fresh as a rock—painting doused with water. Ten miles or so from Gala he picked up a young man who was trudging along with a cardboard suitcase. There were other people here and there on the road, women with bundles and pots, barefoot country people criss—crossing the forest and the grass in the ordinary course of their daily lives as clerks and shoppers move about the streets of a town, but this man in shirt—sleeves with new shoes spattered with mud was, at a glance, outside this activity: Bray stopped just ahead of him, and he got into the car without a word. “I'm going to the mine—that direction. How far're you going?” “That will be all right.”

The presence in the car changed the mood of the morning; the sensuous pleasure of it sank back. The sunlight was empty upon a heavily
charged object: the man breathed quietly, his lips closed with a small sound now and then on something he had not said aloud, and Bray saw, out of the corner of his eye, curly lashes slow—blinking and a line of sickness or strain marking the coarse cheek. His trousers were very clean and had the concave and convex lines of having been folded small in a suitcase. Once he took the ball—point pen out of his shirt—pocket and clicked the point in and out in a beautiful, matt—black hand.

Bray did not know whether the youngster was merely paralysed by the social proximity of a white man—so often the old dependencies, the unformulated resentments, the spell in which even the simplest of confrontations had been held so long, struck dumb—or whether he did not want to speak or be spoken to. Yet his presence was extraordinarily oppressive. Bray tried Gala; the young man said, without response, “I am returning home.” How long had he been in town? “Two months and seventeen days.” Bray did not want an interrogation; the man accepted a cigarette and Bray let the motion of the car and the focus of the passing road contain them dreamily.

The iron-ore mine was a purplish—red gash in the foothills before the pass. A sandcastle mountain of the same colour had been thrown up beside it, bare of the green skin of bush and grass that hid this gory earth on the hills. A new road led to it; on a nearby slope, a settlement was drawn and small figures were set down here and there, moving thinly. As the car came nearer they became the demonic figures of miners everywhere, faces streaked with lurid dirt under helmets, gumboots clogged with clay—the dank look of men who daily come back from the grave.

“I'm going to call in on someone who has a place about three miles on … ?”

“Yes sir.”

Bray had thought he would get off at the mine; that was what was understood—but it didn't matter. “Just tell me when we get near your village.” The young man heavily waved a hand to suggest an infinite distance, or indifference. They drove to the cattle ranch that had been remote fifteen years ago, when George Boxer settled there. Now there were a mine and telephone wires, over the hill. Boxer was still there, still wearing immaculately polished leather leggings, and attended by three Afghan hounds lean and wild in locks of matted hair. Boxer was
one of those men whose sole connection with the world is achieved through a struggle with nature. The affairs of men did not engage his mind. Men themselves, white or black, had a reality for him only insofar as they were engaged with him in that struggle. Whether the man who searched with him for a lost heifer or worked with him to repair a fence was black or white was not a factor: the definitive situation was that of two men, himself and another, in conflict with dry rot in a fence—post, or with the marauding leopard who, too, was after the heifer. He had not joined in the settlers' hue and cry against Bray ten years ago for the same reason that he hadn't joined the exodus of settlers with the coming of independence: it was not that he had no feelings about colour, but that he had no communion with human beings of any colour. Circumstances—Bray's circumstances, then—had made Boxer look like a friend simply because he was indifferent to being an enemy, but Bray had always known that this appearance had no more meaning in its way than that other, physical, appearance of Boxer's—he wore the clothes, maintained the manners and household conventions of his public—school background not as if these were the manifestations of a place in a highly evolved society, but as if they were the markings, habits, and lair with which, unconscious of them (like any hare or jackal), he had been born.

Bray was directed down from the house to one of the cattle camps to find Boxer. While they were talking, looking at Boxer's two fine bulls that he had bred himself, Bray forgot his passenger. Boxer began to walk Bray up to the house past the car: “There's someone I'm giving a lift.” Boxer glanced at the passenger, swept aside the pause— “I'll get something sent down to him. You'll have lunch, of course.” But Bray insisted that tea or a drink was all he could stay for. They went into the living-room-cum-library that Boxer had panelled in the local mahogany; it was dimly like a headmaster's study, although the reference books were agricultural. The tea—tray had a silver inscription, the inherited English furniture was set about as Bray now remembered the room. They talked about the mine. “Any chance of a find on your property? I suppose you've had it prospected?” Boxer took a can of beer out of a cabinet filled with tarnished decanters. “I don't have to worry. There's nothing. The Company's gone over every inch. At one time I had it all planned—there'd be a vein here; how much I'd be paid out; the
twenty thousand acres I'd had my eye on to buy down on the Bashi Flats. Kept me amused many nights. Awake, anyway.”

The books on cattle breeding had pushed the
Mort d'Arthur,
the
Iliad
and Churchill's memoirs to the top shelves but there were book—club novels and
The Alexandria Quartet
in paperback accessible among the farming journals, and some seedpods and a giant snail—shell lying among rifle cartridges on a tray. —Bray remembered George Boxer's wife, a black—haired woman with green eyes, pretty until she smiled on little, stained, cracked teeth. They had had a son; just entered Sandhurst, Boxer said, as if reminded of something he hadn't thought of lately.

“Why the Bashi?” Bray asked. “I shouldn't have thought it was the place for cattle.”

“No, no, that's the point—it's a lot of nonsense about the low altitude and so on. I've gone into the whole business thoroughly for ten years, I've collected sample pasture, recorded water supplies, collected every kind of tick there is all over this country. And you can take my word, there are
no
fewer tick—borne diseases up here than on the Flats, it's exactly the same problem, and the natural pasture is infinitely better. If the water—conservation scheme goes ahead—the flood—water diversion one, I mean—I think one wouldn't have to supplement feed at all, not even in August—November, before the rains. You could keep your pasture going right round the year. And you'd have no problem about watering your cattle. You see, at the moment, when the floods recede, everything drains away quickly to the south.”

“But I've seen ground water there right through the dry season.”

“No, no, you haven't. Not clean water. Swamp soup, that's all. You can't go through the winter on that. That's why you get the big cattle migration every year, and that's how foot—and-mouth has spread, every time there's been an outbreak. Pick it up on the Angolan border and trek it back to the Flats in November.” He drank beer and tea indiscriminately as he talked—his was the dehydration of fatigue, he had been up all night with his cattlemen and the dogs after a hyena that had killed three calves in the last month. The elegant dogs had cornered and killed it; it had not needed even a final shot. They lay and panted around him, their film—star eyelashes drooping over unseeing eyes, too nervously exhausted to sleep with them closed. But Boxer was fired with the chance—not to communicate but to expound
aloud, reiterate, the tactics, successes and reverses of his year—in, year—out campaign in the calm bush where, through the windows, as the men talked they could see his cattle move, cropping singly, stumblingly, or driven—far off—flowing in brown spate close through the thin trees. He took Bray to a bathroom where, in aspirin bottles in the cupboard, there were labelled specimens of all the varieties of ticks to be found in the country— “All that I've been able to identify, so far—” He made the reservation with the objective modesty of scientific inquiry. Many of the ticks were alive, living in a state of suspended animation for months without food or air. In the disused bath, silverfish moths wriggled; Boxer turned a stiff, squeaky tap to flush them out. There were peeling transfers of mermaids and sea—horses on the pink walls of this laboratory.

Boxer showed no interest or curiosity in Bray's return to the country or his activities now that he was there. But Bray was quick to see that some use could be made of George Boxer's knowledge, if one could find the right way to approach him. No good suggesting that he offer his services to Mweta's agricultural planning committee—human contact on any abstract level reduced him to cold sulks. “If you come into Gala sometime—I mean if you're coming anyway—perhaps you would talk to the people doing the animal husbandry course we're hoping to set up. We want to get the old craft schools going again on a new basis—a modest trades school, of course with practical farming techniques lumped along with anything else that's useful. I don't see why it should be left to agricultural colleges—even if we had one. It might fit in with your own line of inquiry—the chaps could collect grasses and stuff from the places where they run their cattle.”

“Oh Gala. I don't think I've been more than once since Caroline left—Caroline's in England.”

“Well, when she gets back, no doubt you'll find yourself coming to town again, and then—?”