A Guest of Honour (24 page)

After a lot of wine at dinner Bray felt the desire to talk mastering him. He wanted to talk about Shinza, to bring the figure of Shinza, barefoot in his dressing—gown, up over their horizon; to see what Neil would look up and interpret it as. He talked round the figure in his mind, instead. What were the rumours of Mweta's difficulties with some of the Ministers? Any idea of the basis? “Paul Sesheka's always given a bit of trouble, from the beginning, as you know,” Neil said. “And there's been some talk lately about Dhlamini Okoi lobbying for him—the allocation of funds vote, and so on. A lot of squabbling about that because inevitably, everyone wants to be able to say they've done this and that for the development of the area they come from. Everybody wants to be the brown—eyed boy back home, because he's got them a cotton ginnery or an abattoir. Nobody wants to leave it to the development planning commission to decide which area needs what. Yes, Okoi and Moses Phahle've been showing signs of making ready to attach themselves to Sesheka, as if the pilot fish's going places—but I don't know, I can't see Sesheka really threatening Mweta, do you? I don't see him lasting five minutes with Mweta, I don't think he has the stuff. He wavered badly over this hydro—electric scheme, now. You must have read that? First he pressed the P.M. to go ahead, he “regretted” that so little was being done to demonstrate
the practical friendship and brotherhood and so on with neighbouring African territories. Then he suddenly changed his mind and put forward the claims of the lake for a scheme of our own—which wouldn't be a bad idea, if it weren't for the fact that we'd have to bear the whole cost alone, whereas the other scheme's a shared one and anyway the finance is already assured, America and West Germany and France are paying—”

“That's the line the morning paper took, I saw.”

“I know. Just coincidence. I don't think Sesheka has any influence there. That's just Evan Black wanting to keep the circulation up by being provocative.”

Vivien said, “Unfair, Neil. You know Evan thinks the people up north are being forgotten.”

“But if it were someone more forceful than Sesheka, would Mweta have to worry?” Bray asked.

Neil belched, shaking his head, and when he could speak: “Aha! But that's another story, James. That's always something to worry about; if it were to be a Tola Tola, for instance, even if there isn't any genuine grievance for him to climb up by.”

“You don't think there's any genuine grievance?”

“No I don't. By genuine grievance I mean that Mweta would have to be failing to make use of what is available to him for this country.”

“Hjalmar tells me industrialists are paying fifty pounds just to dine with him.”

Neil grinned. “My God, he's a glutton for punishment, old Mweta.”

They talked of Bray's work and Bray told an anecdote or two about Gala—how his name had been up at the club for weeks until the bold draper seconded it. Vivien was in conversation with a friend on the telephone; she came back after a while and said, “Did you know Mweta's going to speak over the radio at midnight? Apparently it's been announced every hour all afternoon.”

Neil opened another bottle of wine. “The contract's been given to the Chinese. France, West Germany and America have called off the loan. Or they're going to build both dams—the lake one as well. My, my. We can't go to bed.”

Vivien looked at Bray. She said, “He's tired, he's driven hundreds of miles.”

He was feeling embarrassed for Mweta. Why midnight? Who advised
him about such things? Perhaps he didn't know that Hitler used to choose odd hours of the night or early morning for his speeches, entering through the territory of dreams, invading people's minds when blood pressure and nervous resistance are at lowest ebb. “Certainly midday would be a pleasanter time to report back on his dam.”

“Joy says he's never in bed before three, anyway.”

Neil began to scratch his neck restlessly. “Shall we phone Jenny—penny and Curtis and get them to join the vigil?” Vivien said mildly, since nothing would stop Neil if he felt the need of company, “We haven't seen James for months, I want to talk to James. Rebecca writes she's got a house quite near you?—thank heaven she's out of the hotel. I do think your Aleke should have seen there was somewhere for her to live before getting her up there. What sort of man is he? You know, with Rebecca, people just exploit her.” She looked for reassurance.

Bray was saying, “Half a house. She's sharing with some people—” while Neil gave his short laugh and said fondly, “Poor old backwoods Becky, we must write to her.”

“But Aleke—you think he's all right?”

“Darling, of course he'll make a pass at her, if that's what you mean.” Neil cut across. “What else do you expect? She has that effect, our Becky.”

Defending her against Aleke, Vivien said, “It's not right that this idea should've somehow … she's quite the opposite, if you really know her—she doesn't try for men at all. But it's just a kind of awful compassion …”

Neil said aggressively, “Oh really, is that what you females call it.”

“Oh I know you don't like the idea. That there could be anything about you.” She was talking to her husband, now; slowly they were beginning to pick up words like stones.

Bray felt unimportantly ashamed of his casualness. But all he said was, in the same tone, “Aleke's a good chap to work for, I should think. Her children have got in to the local school.”

At midnight Mweta's voice filled the room. They sat dreamily still, not looking at each other. Vivien's right hand was pressed against the side of her belly to quiet the only movement in the room, stirring there. Mweta announced the immediate introduction of a Preventive Detention Bill.

It was all there, set out again in the morning paper. As he read he heard Mweta's voice, as if it were addressed to him. Emergency regulations had been invoked to bring the Bill into force immediately without the usual parliamentary procedure. The step had been “taken with the greatest reluctance” but “without any doubt of the necessity.” “I would be betraying the people, the sacred trust of their future, if I did not act swiftly and without hesitation. … Certain individuals have begun to gnaw secretly at the foundations of the state which the people have laid down so firmly through their work and dedication. Certain individuals are incapable of understanding the transformation of personal ambitions, petty aims, into the higher cause of securing the peace and progress of the nation—a cause that even the humblest people of our nation have shown themselves equal to in the short time since we have had our country in our own hands. Certain individuals are ready to destroy the general good for the sake of petty ambitions. They are weak and few, and so long as you trust and support your leaders, you need not fear them. They are small as ants. But they are also greedy as ants; if we say, oh, it's only a few ants, we may wake up one day and find the floorboards collapsing beneath all we are building. We must take the powers to stop the rot before it starts, to act while there is still time to turn these people from the mistakes they have fallen into, and to show them where their true interest, like yours and mine, really lies—”

The paper reproduced across five columns the picture of Mweta smiling from the doorway of the plane as he arrived back in the country a few days before, and the leading article, suppressing the question mark, pointed out that there was no cause for confusion and alarm; the President would not have left the country if he had not felt fully in control of the situation.

The waiters shouted to each other as they went about the rondavels at the Silver Rhino, banging on the doors to deliver early morning tea and newspapers. (Between finger and thumb, Bray pinched off a couple of ants that had quickly found the sugar.) A boiler was being stoked up. The off—key musical gong that was played up and down corridors and garden to announce meals drew close and faded, as the girl's recorder had done the day before. Footsteps clipped over the concrete paths with the purpose of morning. The taps on the washbasin began to creak and fart as the plumbing was taxed. Bray was taken by the flow of these things—bathroom ritual, clothes put on, breakfast eaten—and brought to the point where, five minutes before eleven—fifteen, he had the door opened to him under the portico with the white pillars to which he had come a number of times in his life: to pay respects as a D.C. newly appointed; to plead for Mweta's release from confinement; to answer the complaints made against himself by the white residents of Gala province.

Out of the trance of commonplace that had brought him here, Bray in the waiting room of the Presidential Residence became intensely alert. He could feel the rapid beat of his heart in the throb of the hand, on the chair—arm, that held the cigarette burning away. He distinguished the quality of the room's silence, and the displacement of his own presence there, like the rise in the volume of water when some object is lowered into it. At the same time he was going over rapidly and fluently, in words instead of those surges of imagery and emotion with which a meeting is usually rehearsed, what was to be said. He was possessed with the calm, absolute tension of excitement. It was the first time for a very long time. He opened the windows above the window—seat and the park out there—thin trees standing quietly in the heat, a pair of hoopoes picking on the grass—existed within a different pace, like a landscape seen through the windows of an express train.

The secretary, Asoni, came in quickly. “You understand, Colonel, if
it had been anybody else it would have been out of the question today, as I said to Mr. Small. There is really no time for private interviews.… We are only just back, and now this other—” The sides of his mouth pulled down, proprietorial, brisk, impulsive. “If it had been anybody else I couldn't … but I have just managed to fit you in …” It was the manner of the waiter, exacting dependence on his goodwill for a decent table. Small looked round the door: “I'm fascinated by the splendid work you're doing in the North.” It had all the conviction of a stock phrase; simply substitute “in the South” or “the swamps” or wherever the individual had happened to have been since Small saw him last. “I know the Big Man's longing to see you, nothing would induce him to miss that, though he's up to his ears. Unfortunately, it'll just have to be rather brief, alas, I'm afraid.”

Bray was not forthcoming with any assurance that he would not prolong the visit. Chatting, the two of them escorted him out into the corridor, where they were held up by the passage of a giant copper urn or boiler being shuffled along on the heads and arms of workmen. Wilfrid Asoni turned, with a theatrical gesture to Small.

“What in God's name d'you think you're doing?” Small stood his ground before the procession. The men lost coordination under the burden, and their gleaming missile swayed forward. “Why wasn't that thing brought through the service entrance? The kitchens—why don't you use the kitchen door, eh? Who allowed these men to come this way?” Servants and explanations appeared. The kitchen doors were too small. “You can't just bring men through the Residence, you know that.
You
know that perfectly well, Nimrod. Good God, anybody just walking through the place, anybody who says he's a workman?” He and Asoni looked to each other. “That's security for you, eh? —Well, get the thing
out of the way,
get it in
here,
come on, come on …” The men backed off through the double doors of a reception room in a bewildered posse, to let Bray and Asoni and Small pass. The two had lost interest in Bray. “Fantastic!” “You're certainly right, Clive.” “But seriously, eh?” “That's Colonel Onabu's security, yes.” “Well, I know who's going to hear about
that.”
“I
hope
so. I certainly hope so.” “I'll be on that telephone in five minutes. Unless you'd rather do it?” Wilfrid Asoni slipped into the President's study and closed the door on his own voice switched to the official calm of the doctor entering the ward of an important private patient. He appeared again
at once and opened the door for Bray absently. Bray caught a brushing glimpse of his plump sculptured face, the eyes set in the black skin smoothly as the enamelled eyes of ancient Greek figures, already turned to the piece of importance he shared with Small.

Mweta was on his feet behind the company director's desk, leaning forward on his palms. There was always the second, on first entering his presence, like the pang of remembering the first sight of someone with whom one long ago fell in love. He came round with that smile—a toothpaste—advertisement smile, really, in the associations of Europe, but in Africa the smile of a boy come upon on the road somewhere, biting into sugar—cane—and took Bray's hands in his elegant dark ones. A kind of current of euphoria went through the two men. “If you'd said to me, who'd you like to be there when you get home, James would have been the answer. Oh but it's tiring, eh, James?—years ago, you didn't tell me, you didn't warn about that. From the moment the plane arrived, three, four meetings a day—and the lunches, and the cocktail parties, the dinners— And twice it happened there was something special to discuss before a conference—the only time was before breakfast or after midnight.”

“Well, you've always had the stuff it takes. All those miles on the bicycle; that was the right preparation.”

“Anyway, we got what we wanted. And this is one of the times when a tied loan is an advantage, eh, all the equipment and materials and skilled manpower comes from the financing countries. They're paying and their men'll see to it that the job is done. No throwing up your hands over this delay and that. No defaulting contractors to blame, while we pay. D'you know we'll get six thousand kilowatt hours a year, when it's fully operative. We could sell to the Congo, Malawi—Zambia, even—who knows, it's possible they'll get out of Kariba. Our lake scheme in the North was just one of those dreams, you know, nice dreams we had before Independence. It's not a proposition, compared with this. The main thing is money—it's exactly twice as hard to get money for a scheme that benefits a single state as it is to get the same money to benefit two. And you've got to try for it alone. I can tell you, James, it's all the difference in the world, it's the difference between going as a beggar and going as statesmen. That's one thing I've learnt.”