A Guest of Honour (33 page)

Every time Bray met the fact of the letter on the table he was gripped by a kind of obstinacy. The letter was a hand on his shoulder, claiming him; he went stock-still beneath it. His mind turned mulishly towards the facts and figures of his report: this is my affair, nothing else. This is my usefulness. He would not answer the letter; his answer to Mweta would be no answer.

A day or two later he was writing the letter in his head, accompanied by it as he walked across the street in Gala.
You know me well enough to know I cannot “move about” the country for you: I can't inform on Shinza to you, however carefully we put it, you and I. You can't send me in where Lebaliso can't effect entry, I cannot be courier—cum-spy between you and Shinza. I did not come back for that.

The letter composed and recomposed itself again and again. Once while he was tensely absorbed in a heightened version (this one was a letter to make an end; after it was sent one would get on a plane and never be able to come back except as a tourist, gaping at lions and unable to speak the language) he met the Misses Fowler at the garage. He had not seen the two old ladies since his return from England, although he had made inquiries about them and meant to visit them some time. They were trotting down from the Princess Mary Library with their books carried in rubber thongs, just as they did ten or fifteen years ago, when they used to lunch with Olivia at the Residence
on their twice—monthly visit to town. Disappointed in love during the war—before-the-last, they had come “out to Africa” together in the early Twenties and driven far up the central plateau in a Ford (Miss Felicity, the elder, had been an ambulance driver in that war). They grew tea on the slopes of the range above the lake and were already part of the landscape long before he had become D.C. of the district. Miss Adelaide ran a little school and clinic at their place; they saw courtesy, charity, and “uplift” as part of their Christian duty towards the local people, although, as Felicity freely confessed to Olivia, they would not have felt comfortable sitting at table with Africans the way the Brays did. When the settlers met at the Fisheagle Inn to press for Bray's removal from the
boma
because of his encouragement of African nationalists, the Fowler sisters rose from their seats in dissent and protested. Apart from Major Boxer (who had done so by default, anyway), they were the only white people who had defended him.

Adelaide did most of the talking, as always, taking over Felicity's sentences and finishing them for her. They were mainly concerned with Olivia—she was at home in Wiltshire, wasn't she? She would be there?

“Are you going over on a visit?”

“Oh, no—we're—”

“You must have heard that we're leaving,” Adelaide stated. “Surely you've heard.”

It seemed necessary to apologize, as if for lack of interest.

“There are so many things I don't seem to hear.”

“Well, I don't suppose you see much of them,” Felicity said, meaning the local white residents.

“Oh, it's all right, everything is quite amicable, you know. —I've so often thought of coming to see you, and then I kept promising myself, when Olivia comes—”

Adelaide's old head, the thin hair kept the colour and texture of mattress coir, under a hairnet, tremored rather than was shaken. She said firmly, “Our time has run out. We are museum pieces, better put away in a cupboard somewhere.”

He said, “I should have thought you would have been quite happy to let it run out, here. You really feel you must leave your place? I think you'd have nothing to worry about, you'd be left in peace?”

Felicity said, “We've had these inspectors coming—Adelaide had
to guarantee that we'd not lay anybody off, in the plantation, you know. And they have a new native inspector for the schools—he wanted to know if I was following the syllabus and he—”

“There's nothing the matter with that, Felicity.” Adelaide spoke to her and yet ignored her. “But we're too old, James. You can't stay on in a country like this just to be left in peace.”

They chatted while Bray's tyres were pumped and his battery topped up with water. He promised to write to Olivia and tell her the Misses Fowler were coming. He saw that Adelaide's books were Lord Wavell's memoirs and a Mickey Spillane.

They went off down the street under the trees, Adelaide with her white cotton gloves and hairnet, Felicity in her baggy slacks and men's sandals. Old Adelaide (they used to call her Lady Hester Stanhope, they used to laugh about her, he and Olivia) was not a romantic, after all. She had not been a liberal and now she was not a romantic. The old girls hadn't wanted to sit in their drawing—room with Africans, but now they did not expect to be left in peace there. They had recognized themselves for an anachronism.

By such encounters as this, remote from him, really, his mind was tipped. Again, the letter was mentally torn up. Thrown to the winds. What sort of priggish absurdity did he make of himself? The virginal drawing away of skirts from the dirt. I am not—this, not—that. What am I, then, for God's sake? A boy scout? Clapping my hand over my backside? A vast impatience with himself welled up; and that was something new to him, too, another kind of violation—he had never before been sufficiently self—centred to indulge in self—disgust. There had always been too much to do. But now I refuse, I refuse to act. Because it's not
my place to do so.

He thought again: then go away, go back to the house in Wiltshire. Finish the damned education thing. May be some use, can't do any harm. What you set out to do.

Yet like the gradual onset of a toothache or a headache came the recurrent tension that he was going to see Shinza, couldn't stop himself, would one day find himself calmly making the small preparations to drive back to the Bashi. He would go to Shinza again, and he would know why when he got there.

The Tlumes, the Edwards girl and her children, the Alekes and Bray—they drifted together and saw each other almost every day without any real intimacy of friendship. Gala was so small; the Tlumes and the Alekes, along with a few other officials' families, were isolated from the black town; Rebecca, because she was a newcomer living under conditions new to the white community, and Bray, because of the past, both were isolated from the white town. Bray often shared the evening meal at the Malembas down in the old segregated township, but also he sometimes would be summoned by a barefoot delegation of Edwards and Tlume children to come over and eat at the Tlume house across the vacant piece of ground. And the Alekes' house—his own old house—by virtue of its size was the sort of place where people converged. His bachelor shelter, without woman or child, remained apart, the table laid for a meal and shrouded against flies by Kalimo's net.

They were all going to the lake for the day, one weekend, and he found himself included in the party. An overflow of children and some picnic paraphernalia were dumped at his house as his share of the transport; the children sang school songs to him as he drove. On arrival, the company burst out of the cars like a cageful of released birds and scattered with shouts and clatter. Bray and Aleke were left to unpack; Aleke had brought a scythe in anticipation of the waist—high grass on the lake shore and took off his shirt while he cleared a
space as easily as any labourer outside the
boma.
He had sliced a small snake in two—a harmless grass—snake. He put it aside, in schoolboy pleasure, to show the others, and, wiping the blade with a handful of grass, stood eyeing Bray amusedly. He remarked, “So we're getting rid of Lebaliso.”

“You're what?”

Aleke lowered his young bulk into the cut grass and took one of the two—week-old English newspapers Bray had brought along. “The note came yesterday. He doesn't know yet. Transferred. To the Eastern Province. Masama district.” His interest was taken by a frontpage picture showing people in androgynous dress—boots, mandarin coats, flowing trousers, leis and necklaces, waxwork uniforms—and a few elderly faces in morning coats and top—hats, advancing like an apocalyptic army, under the caption PEER'S SON WEDS: WEDDING GUESTS JOIN VIETNAM PROTEST MARCH.

It was Bray's turn to watch him. “Aren't you surprised, then?”

Aleke smiled; it seemed to be at the picture. Then he looked up. “No, I'm not surprised.”

“Well I am!”

Aleke's big face opened in a laugh; he was tolerant of power. If Bray could go to the capital and have the ear of the President, well, that must be accepted as just another fact. Of course Aleke, too, in his way, wanted to do his job and be left alone.

Bray said, “Well, it's a good thing, anyway.” Aleke was amiably unresponsive. He lay back on one elbow, his thick hairless chest and muscular yet sensuously fleshy male breasts moved by relaxed, even breathing. He was rather magnificent; Bray thought flittingly of old engravings of African kings, curiously at ease, their flesh a royal appurtenance. “Of course he might just as well have got promotion for his powers of foresight. Still, that youngster should have brought an action against him.”

They fell silent, turning over the pages of the papers. Bray was reading a local daily that came up from the capital twenty—four hours late. Gwenzi, Minister of Mines, appealed to the mine workers not to aspire “irresponsibly” to the level of pay and benefits that the industry had to pay to foreign experts; the experts would “continue to be a necessity” for the development of the gold mines over the next twenty years. A trade union spokesman said that some of the whites had
“grown from boys to men” in the mines; why did they have to have paid air tickets to other countries and special home leave when they “lived all their days around the corner from the mine?” The Secretary for Justice denied rumours that a ritual murder, the first incident of its kind for many years, was in fact a political murder, and that an inquiry was about to be instituted.

Cut grass swathes glistened all round; the voices of the women, calling in children, came sharply overhead and wavered out across the water. Winter hardly altered the humidity down at the lake; the air was so heat—heavy you could almost see each sound's trajectory, like the smoke left hanging in space by a jet plane.

After lunch, Nongwaye Tlume got talking to some fishermen and borrowed their boat. It was too small to hold all the children safely; Bray intervened, and had to take two of the younger ones, with Rebecca in charge, in a pirogue. Aleke and his seventh child slept in an identical glaze of beer and mother's milk.

The big boat went off with cheers and waves, pushed out of the reeds by splay—footed, grunting fishermen. Bray paddled the rough craft scooped out of a tree—trunk with the careful skill of his undergraduate days. He kept close to the shore; his load seemed tilted by the great curve of the lake, rising to the horizon beyond them, glittering and contracting in mirages of distance. They had the sensation of being on the back of some shiny scaled creature, so huge that its whole shape could not be made out from any one point. The other boat danced and glided out of focus, becoming a black shape slipping in and out of the light of heat—dazzle and water. The faces of the brown and white children and the girl were lit up from underneath by reflections off the water; he had the rhythm of his paddle now, and saw them, quieted, with that private expression of being taken up by a new mode of sensation that people get when they find themselves afloat.

The girl had half—moons of sweat under the arms of her shirt. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her rather coarse, stubby feet were washed, like the children's, by the muddy ooze at the bottom of the pirogue. He realized how solemnly he had applied himself to his paddling, and the two adults grinned at each other, restfully.

The children wanted to swim; everywhere the water was pale green, clear, and flaccid to the touch, gentle, but too deep for them
where the shoreline was free of reeds and followed a low cliff, and with the danger of crocodiles when the pirogue came to the shallows. Bray struck out for a small island shaved of undergrowth six feet up from the water to prevent tsetse fly from breeding; the children were diverted, and forgot about swimming. But when he slowly gained the other side of the island, there was a real beach—perfect white sand, a baobab spreading, the boles of dead trees washed up to lean on. The girl grew as excited as the children. “Oh lovely—but there can't be any danger here? Look, we can see to the bottom, we could see anything in the water from yards off—”

He and the girl got out of the pirogue and lugged it onto the sand; it was quite an effort. Their voices were loud in this uninhabited place. His shorts rolled thigh—high, he waded in precaution from one end of the inlet to the other; but there were no reeds, no half—submerged logs that might suddenly come to life. “I think it's perfectly safe.” The children were already naked. She began to climb out of her clothes with the hopping awkwardness of a woman taking off trousers—she was wearing a bathing suit underneath, a flowered affair that cut into her thighs and left white weals in the sun—browned flesh as she eased it away from her legs. She ran into the warm water, jogging softly, with a small waddling fat black child by one hand and a skinny white one gaily jerking and jumping from the other.

He had stretched himself out on the sand but stood up and kept watch while they were in the water, his short—sighted gaze, through his glasses, patrolling the limpid pallor and shimmer in which they were immersed. The black baby was a startlingly clear shape all the time, the others would disappear in some odd elision of the light, only a shoulder, a raised hand, or the glisten of a cheek taking form. Where no one lives, time has no meaning, human concerns are irrelevant—an intense state of being takes over. For those minutes that he stood with his hand shading his eyes, the most ancient of gestures, he was purely his own existence, outside the mutations of any given stage of it. He was returned to himself, neither young nor middle—aged, neither secreting the spit of individual consciousness nor using it to paste together the mud—nest of an enclosing mode of life. He smoked a cigar. He might have been the smoke. The woman and children shrieked as a fish exploded itself out of the water, mouth to tail, and back again in one movement. He saw their faces, turned to him for laughing confirmation, as if from another shore.