A Guest of Honour (18 page)

“Must be more than two years. Time flies. I don't suppose the place has changed. Amazing; don't know where the days go to. When did you people come back?”

“Olivia's following. I've been here—yes, I suppose it's more than three months. She was supposed to come as soon as Venetia's baby was born—”

Boxer looked round the pink walls, over his neat bottles of ticks. “Her bathroom,” he said. He meant the wife with the bad teeth. “What in the world d'you need two bathrooms for.” A comfortable feeling of understanding, based idiotically, Bray felt, on misunderstanding, encircled them. Olivia
was
coming; how quickly three months had gone by.

It was absurd to bother to set things straight with Boxer. They went on talking in the tacit ease of men who have drifted the moorings of family ties.

When Bray got back to his car, his passenger had gone. Boxer called a servant; the meal taken to the man had been eaten. They looked about for him but he was not to be found. Bray felt slightly rebuffed, as if there had been some sort of response expected from him that he had failed to understand. “He wasn't a very forthcoming passenger,” he said, with the defence of a philosophical irony. “Probably just out of clink,” Boxer said. “Head was shaved, eh, I noticed.”

Bray went over the Bashi Mountain pass, thumping on the worn springs of the car through sudden U—shaped dips into stream—beds, shuddering over rises covered with loose stones. He spent the first night in the old government rest hut at Tanyele village. Under the mopane trees pink and mauve flowers bloomed straight out of the sandy soil, without visible stem or leaf, as if stuck there by children playing house. At first he thought of them as irises (irises in bloom round the lily pool in Wiltshire) but then they fell into place as the wild lilies that Venetia and Pat used to pick when, as small girls, they had the treat of being allowed to go on a tax—collecting tour with him. He heated himself a tin of curry and rice; there had used to be an old cook attached to the rest—house who wore a high chef's hat and made ground—nut stew on a Primus.

He woke next day to the gentle tinkle of goats' bells and went to visit the local schoolmaster. Everybody seemed to remember him; he drank beer with Chief Chitoni and his uncle, the old Regent who had kept the stool warm when Bray was D.C., and was presented with a fierce white fowl and some sweet potatoes. At a decent distance from Tanyele, he untied the fowl's legs and let it loose in the bush; someone appeared among the trees and he hoped it was not a Tanyele villager. Then he saw that it was, in fact, his passenger, still carrying his cardboard suitcase. Bray smiled; the other did not seem to feel any
bond of acquaintance, but climbed into the car once more as if they had met by appointment. At the next night's stop, he insisted on sleeping in the car and kept himself aloof from the people of the village. His shoes were grey with dried mud, now, broken in to the form of his feet, and when he moved his arms, a strong, bitter blast of sweat filled the car. But it was as if whatever had been locked inside him now escaped, harmless, a pungent dread. The stink was nothing; that dark, depersonalized, vice—hold of presence had become a tired, dirty body that had walked a long way in the sun. On the third day he suddenly asked Bray to stop the car; Bray thought he wanted to relieve himself but after disappearing among the trees for a moment or two he came back and said, “I stay here, sir.” There was a charcoal burners' camp nearby.

Bray spent two more days criss—crossing the higher part of the Flats from village to village on rough tracks. The exhaust pipe kept falling off the car and was repaired in various ways in every village. On the morning of the sixth day the Volkswagen was poled across the river and the silent motion, after the perpetual rattling of the car, was a kind of presage: Shinza was on the other side. In the light, sandyfloored forest he came upon movement that he thought, at a distance, was buck feeding; it was women gathering sour wild fruit, and they turned to laugh and chatter as he passed.

The trees ended; the scrub ended; the little car was launched upon a sudden opening—out of flowing grass and glint of water that pushed back the horizon. He had always felt here, that suddenly he saw as a bird did, always rising, always lifting wider the ring of the eyes' horizon. He took off his glasses for a moment and the shimmering and wavering range rushed away from him, even farther.

The dabs and shapes of hot blue water gave off dark looks from the endless bed of soft grasses. Small birds flicked like grasshoppers from the feathered tops. There was a smell of space, here. Thousands of head of cattle on this plain; but they were lost specks, no bigger than George Boxer's ticks in the grass. The road was terrible; the violence of progress across calm and serenity could only be compared to the shock of a plane hit about by airpockets in a clear sky. Herdsmen stood to watch, unmoved, speculative, as he negotiated runnels cross—furrowed by the tracks of the sleds used to drag wood. Ilala palm began to appear in the grass, the flanges of the leaves open like
a many—bladed pen—knife. Feeling his way through the past, he drove, without much hesitance at turnings, to Shinza's village. A new generation of naked children moved in troops about the houses, which were a mixture of the traditional materials of mud and grass, and the bricks and corrugated iron of European settlement. Some of the children were playing with an ancient Victorian mangle; Belgian missionaries from the Congo and German missionaries from Tanganyika had waded through the grass all through the last decade of the nineteenth century, dumping old Europe among the long—horned cattle.

Shinza lived now (so he was directed) behind the reed wall of a compound set apart like a chief's—in fact, it turned out to be part of Chief Mpana's quarters. Inside were various mud outhouses and an ugly brick house with a pole—and-thatch veranda, and scrolled burglar—proofing at the windows like that of the European houses in the suburbs of the capital. There were no children in here. It was very silent. An old woman lay on her side in the sun, completely covered by cotton rags except for her bare feet. Bray had the feeling that if he touched her with his foot she would roll over, dead.

As if he were in a deserted place, he wandered round instead of knocking at the door. He looked in on a dark, dank hut that held nothing, in its gloom, but two motorcar tyres and an old steel filing cabinet beside a pile of rotting sleeping mats. As he turned back to the sun, a man appeared, tall, small—headed, in grey flannel trousers and a sports—coat, like a schoolmaster or a city clerk. “Yes?” he said rudely, not approaching.

“Is Edward Shinza here, d'you know?”

The man did not answer. Then he approached to look over Bray more closely. “You want to see Shinza?”

“They tell me he lives here, now. Is he around?”

The man stood, refusing to be pressed. “I don't know if he's here.”

“Could you perhaps ask, for me?”

“You want to see him.” The man considered.

“I'm an old friend.”

“I don't know. I'll see if he's here. At the moment.”

The man went into the house but Bray had the impression that he left it again by a back door; he saw someone come into vision a moment, crossing the yard. Bray stood in the sun. The old woman did not stir. There was a smell of hides. The man came back. “Come on.”
They went into the house, into a sort of parlour with a wasp's nest in the corner, and volumes of Hansard on a sideboard. The man waited in silence beside him like a bodyguard. They sat on the hard chairs for long minutes. The gloom of contrast with the sun outside lifted. Then Shinza came in, hands in the pockets of a dressing—gown, barefoot, feeling for a cigarette. But it would not be the first cigarette of the day; the immediate impression was not of a man who had just got up, but of one who had not slept at all.

So you decided to come and see me anyway.”

Edward Shinza, smiling, his nostrils open and taut, unmistakable. “James … you Englishmen, you do what you want.” He made a face fearful of consequences, but exaggerated into a joke.

There's something different (Shinza had Bray's hand casually, he held the matchbox between thumb and first finger at the same time): it was a tooth, a broken front tooth—that was it. Shinza now had a front tooth broken off in a curve, already so long done that it was smooth and rounded like the edge of any other tooth. He lit the cigarette and then looked at Bray, head drawn back, and said, still making fun of him, “You know it's nice to see you, James, it's nice, it's—I should make a speech, honestly, I'd like to—” He deliberately ignored the dressing—gown, as if it were the way he chose to dress. He told the onlooker, in Gala, to leave but return in an hour, apparently careless of the fact that Bray could understand what was said.

But when he turned back to Bray and said in English—the remark was a paraphrase of one of Mweta's slogans before large gatherings— “So you're helping to build a nation, ay …” Bray thought that he had intended him to know that in an hour he expected to be rid of him, like any other guest.

“Weren't you the one who taught him speech—making?”

Shinza was light—coloured for a Gala; he tenderly rubbed his yellow—brown
breast where the gown fell open. A few peppercorns round the nipples, like the tufts that textured the skin of his face, sprouting from the surface pocked and cratered by some far—off skin affection, childhood smallpox or adolescent pimples. The furze ran together over the curves of the mouth, making a vague moustache. It emphasized the smile again, under the wide, taut nostrils. “A good teacher. But I didn't teach him how to shut people up. He learnt by himself. Or perhaps others help him; I don't know.” He made the mock—fearful face again, as if it were something Bray would recognize.

“Ah, come now—it was visualized as a one—party state from the beginning, you'd always said the—what was it you called it—?”

“Kiddies' parliament,” Shinza fished up, dangling the phrase detachedly; a smile for it.

“Kiddies' parliament—that's it—the kiddies' parliament Africans think reproduces Westminster in their states was not going to waste time and money in this one.”

“Of course, and I was damn well right, man. And now your boy would like to see me choose a fancy name and start an opposition party to draw into the open all the people around him he's afraid of—a nice, harmless little opposition you can defeat at the polls by that unity—is-strength speech—making I taught him. Or by getting his Young Pioneers to beat up voters—it always looks nicer than turning on people who've made PIP and put him up there in the Governor's house, ay?—Why do we stand?” He dumped on the table the clean washing—faded check shirts, crudely embroidered sheets—that was laid on an ugly brown sofa, and spread himself with careless luxury, flexing his neck against its back with the chin—movements of a man aware that he has not shaved.

There were so many ways by which they could have arrived at this point. Bray had been aware of it as to be approached through layer by layer of past associations, present preoccupations, the half—intimate trivia with which one mind circles another before establishing on what level they are to be open to one another, this time. But they had fallen through tentativeness at once; nothing stood between them, no protection. They might have opened their mouths and begun to speak out of the unsaid, as a man addresses a dark room. Bray said, “From the day I arrived, I tried to talk to him. I'd thought—if you and he weren't hitting it off—you might go to United Nations for a time.”

Shinza watched him, lolling in a kind of faint, distantly bitter amusement at a spectacle that ceased to concern, a mouthing figure in an action from which the sound has been cut off. “Oh yes, United Nations,” he said kindly.

Bray sat down on the sofa.

Shinza continued to bear with him, smiling.

It was a powerful indifference, not listless. A lion fixes its gaze on no object, does not snap at flies. Old Shinza. But he's not old at all, fifty—four or -five, about a year older than I am. Bray was aware of the vigour of Shinza's breast, rising and falling, the strong neck shining a little with warmth—a body still a man's body and not an old man's, although the face for years had had the coded complexity of experience and drink.

“I got the impression that there were things between you I wasn't supposed to know about.”

“Of course, James, of course. How else could Mweta explain? Of course; terrible things—” He began to laugh and put his hand on Bray's knee. “He didn't want to have me around. That's all it is. It sounds so silly, ay, how could he say to you, I don't want Shinza. I—don't-want-Shinza. Shinza's big black face in the papers. Shinza's big mouth open in the cabinet. Shinza asking questions when I make my deals with the mining companies. The British. The Americans. The French. Why. How. How much.
And who for.
Better have that mister what'sisname, the young Englishman who jumps about licking, a nice, friendly dog, you pay him and he makes bow—wow, that's all. No Shinza asking damn questions. Before, he used to ask
me
what questions to ask. Now he's the one who has to give answers.”

“Shut people up?” Another meaning to the phrase that had fallen casually, earlier, suddenly opened. “You said something just now—what did you mean exactly?”

Shinza was stroking his neck under his unshaven, lifted chin, smiling, giving him one ear. He righted himself and smiled at Bray. Then all expression died. He said, “Oh, bush stories, like the chap you had in your car.”

“That youngster? The one I picked up?”

Shinza kept the moment suspended, watching without much interest, from an inner distance.

Bray was rushed by unmatched thoughts;
had he
mentioned the
boy to Shinza? He said, at once conscious of the idiocy of it, “But he hardly had a word to say for himself.”