A Guest of Honour (34 page)

She brought the children back and stood gasping a little and pressing back from her forehead her wet hair, so that runnels poured over neck and shoulders, beading against the natural waxiness of the skin. “It's—so—glorious—pity—you—didn't—” She had no breath; undecided, she went in again by herself, farther out, this time. He felt he could not stand watching her alone. It would be an intrusion on her freedom, out there. He sat with his arm on one knee, vigilant without seeming so, sweeping his glance regularly across the water. That wet, femininely mobile body, tremblingly fleshy, that had stood so naturally before him just now, the sodden cloth of the bathing suit moulding into the dip of the navel and cupping over the pubis, the few little curly hairs that escaped where the cloth had ridden up at the groin—so this was what he had made love to. This was what had been there, that he had— “possessed” was a ridiculous term, he had no more possessed it than he did now by looking at it. This was what he had entered. Even “known,” that good biblical euphemism, was not appropriate. He did not know that body—he saw now with compassion as well as male criticalness, as she was coming out of the water towards him a second time, that the legs, beautiful to the knee, with slim ankles, were thick at the thigh so that the flesh “packed” and shuddered congestedly. She stretched out near him; she was sniffling, smiling with the pleasure of the water. No one was there except the two small children. He said to her as he might have said in a meeting in another life, “I'm sorry about what happened.”

The words lay with the sun on her closed eyelids. After a moment, she said, guardedly, “Why?”

He felt culpable of having heard her talked about in the capital. He didn't answer at once.

“Because it's as if it never happened.”

“Then that's all right,” she said. She lay quite still; presently she sat up and asked for a cigarette, bundling the towel round herself with a complete lack of vanity.

“It's almost like the beaches at Lake Malawi.”

“Is it? I never ever got to Malawi. We were going there on local leave the year I was kicked out, so it never came off. We used to picnic here with my children, years ago.”

“This beach?” she said.

“Oddly enough, I've never been to this particular beach before—didn't know it existed, till we found it today. —Farther along, we
used to go, up past Execution Rock, you know: on the main shore.”

“What's Execution Rock?”

“You don't know the legend? Well, closer to us than a legend, really. The Dolo, the tribe of the paramount chief around here, used to have a trial of endurance for their new chief—elect. Before he could take office he had to swim from the mainland to the island. If he managed it, he would be rowed back in triumph. If not, he was supposed to be carted off and executed by being thrown from Execution Rock. That part of it's never been done in living memory, but the channel swim was still carried out until very recent times—the predecessor of the present chief did it. He was still alive when we came to live here.”

She said, “Is your wife as attached to this place as you are?”

He smiled, half—pleased, half—misunderstood— “Am I so attached?”

She did not want to presume on any knowledge of him. “But you've come back.”

“I can't go explaining to everybody—but how difficult it is when people impose an idea of what one does or is.… And others take it up, so it spreads and goes ahead….” (He realized, with quick recovery, that while he was ostensibly speaking of himself he was suddenly doing so in paraphrase of thoughts about her, the image of her as presented by their friends in the capital, that he had steered away from a few minutes before.) “Coming back's a kind of dream, a joke—we used to talk about my part after Independence like living happily ever after. Mweta was in and out of jail, I was the white man who'd become victim, along with him, of the very power I'd served. I was a sort of symbol of something that never happened in Africa: a voluntary relinquishment in friendship and light all round, of white intransigence that can only be met with black intransigence. I represented something that all Africans yearned for—even while they were talking about driving white people into the sea—a situation where they wouldn't have had to base the dynamic of
their
power on bitterness. People like me stood for that historically unattainable state—that's all.” He thought, am I making this up as I go along? Did I always think it?—I did
work
with Mweta, in London, on practical things: the line delegations took, proposals and memoranda and all the rest of the tug—of-war with the Colonial Office. “But the idea persists … Aleke thinks, now, Lebaliso's been removed at my pleasure.
I can see that. He tells me this morning about Lebaliso being given the boot as if remarking on something I already know.” He gave a resigned, irritated laugh. Of course, she would be not supposed to know about Lebaliso—Aleke's typist. But it gave him some small sense of freeing himself by refusing to respect the petty decencies of intrigue. He knew nothing about Lebaliso's transfer, and had as little right as she to hear it before the man did himself. “There was a young man—Lebaliso beat him up, in the prison here. He was being detained without being charged. I found out by chance.”

“I suppose Aleke thinks you told them—the President.”

“But of course, I did. And now it's assumed that all I had to do was ask the President to remove Lebaliso—and it's done!”

“Just the same, the President must have thought that you thought it would be a good thing. I mean, he's known you a long time. Whether you asked him or not.”

He instructed himself. “I'm responsible for Lebaliso's removal, whether I want to be or not.”

“But you think it's a good thing he's going? Then why does it matter?”

“There's a Preventive Detention Act. What he did's been legalized, now. The principle on which he could've been removed seems somewhat weakened.”

She drew up her big thighs, so that, knees under her chin, they hid her whole body. She was removing sand from between her toes. “Perhaps Mweta did it to please you,” she said. At the same moment they noticed the children had disappeared into the bush. “Where've they got to?” There was the rambling cadence of small voices. They both made across the heavy sand. He carried back the skinny little white boy, she had the black one, indicating in dumb show how the fat rolls round his thighs outdid the cheeks of his bottom. The child lay looking up at her with the lazy pleasure of one to whom being carried is his due. “I believe you've got a grandchild?”

“Yes, a girl.” They smiled. “It seems very, very far away.”

“You've never seen it,” she said.

“Oh, photographs.” He gave a little demonstrative jerk at his burden. “This is yours—I ought to know by now, but there are so many always—” Although the boy was dark—haired, as she was, he was completely unlike her, yet with a definitive cast of face that suggested
a marked heredity—black eyes under eyebrows already thick and well shaped, berry—coloured lips with a dent in the lower one: there was a man there, despite the poor little legs dangling from scabbed bony knees, and the cold small claws hoary with dirt—grained chapping. Her children were neglected—looking, stoically withdrawn in their games and gaiety as children are when they must accustom themselves to constant and unexplained changes of background and ever new sets of “aunties” and “uncles.”

“He's Gordon all over again,” she said, as at something that couldn't be helped. “Not just the looks. The way he speaks, everything. It's funny, because he's been with me all the time, I don't think Gordon's lived with us for more than three or four months since he was able to walk.”

“They were worried about you, at the Bayleys'.” He was careful how he phrased it. “Whether you'd be happy working for Aleke.”

“Aleke's a darling. He really is, you know. It's all a lot of bluff, with him. He likes to think he's driving me with a whip. Good Lord, he doesn't know some of the people I've worked for. There are some bastards in this world. But I don't think a black could ever be quite like that.”

“Like what?” The children were playing at the water's edge again, and he and the girl strolled along the beach.

“Get pleasure out of making you feel about
so
big. I mean they're as casual as all hell, they borrow money from you and you never get it back—things like that. But they don't know how to humiliate that way.”

“—Not Aleke?”

“Oh yes—my first pay check. But that he did pay back. Last month again, and now he's not so prompt. I don't mind—that house is really too expensive for them, you know. There's too much room for relations and they all have to eat, even if it's only mealie porridge. Agnes's bought a washing—machine, as well. They're paying off for furniture.”

“Still, it must put your budget out somewhat.”

She threw away a piece of water—smoothed glass she had picked up. “Aleke! You know what he said—but quite seriously, helping me, you know—when I said that I must have the loan back this month or I couldn't pay my share of the Tlume household? He would speak to
the Tlumes for me, he would explain that with the move, and so on, and the car repairs, I'm rather short….”

“You'd better not tell the Bayleys.”

“Oh but Aleke's fine. I remember once, in Rhodesia, Gordon turned up and found I couldn't take any more of that old horror I was working for, Humphrey Temple. He wouldn't even let me go to pick up my salary. He went up to the offices himself, walked straight into Temple's room and demanded an apology.… Nobody in that office even had the faintest idea who this cocky man was….” She laughed. She said, returning to the Bayleys' concern, “It's all right here, for me. At the beginning, I thought I'd just have to pack up and give in. Go back. I felt I'd been mad.… But that was just the usual panic, when you move on.”

“It is isolated. Won't you be lonely?” He almost added, quite naturally, “—after I'm gone,” not in the sense of his individual person, but of the presence of someone like himself, a link between the kind of life that had existed for white people and created these remote centres, and their future, different life which had not yet cohered.

“I didn't think about that. You know how when you think only about getting away—that seems to solve everything, you don't see beyond it. And then when you are—safe … it turns out to be the usual set of practical things, finding somewhere to live, looking for a school … But it's better, for me. You know how nice they all are, down there. I love those people but”—she looked away from him, out over the lake, then took refuge in a kind of deliberate banality— “I—got—sick—of—them.” There was the pause that often follows a half—truth.

The tempo of their communication switched again. They talked about the lake, and his journeyings round about. “You realize how hard it is to grasp change except in concrete terms. In Europe if you had been away ten years and then come back, you would
see
the time that had elapsed, in new buildings, landscapes covered with housing schemes, even new models of cars and new styles of clothing on people. But there's nothing that didn't look as it did before—the lake the same, the boats the same, the people the same—not so much as a bridge or a road where there didn't use to be one. And yet everything has changed. The whole context in which all this exists is different from what it has ever been. And then, on top of it, I went to see
an old friend … a contemporary of mine, you see, and in
him
you could see the ten years—grey hairs, a broken tooth, the easy signs that make you feel you know where you are. But he turned out to have a new—born son—there was a baby born the same time as I got a grandchild!”

“Nothing so extraordinary about that,” she said, inquiringly amused.

“But confusing,” he said, also laughing.

“I don't see why. Perhaps he's a grandfather as well.”

“Oh, I'm sure. Several times over. He had many other sons, as I remember.”

“Oh, an African.”

“Have you ever heard of Shinza—Edward Shinza?”

“Can't remember. I suppose so. A political leader? I usually know the names of the cabinet ministers but after that I give up. You'll find I'm an ass at politics, I'm afraid. Not like Vivien.”

“He's an old friend. He was the founder of PIP.”

She said, “You know everybody.”

“Yes,” he said, “that's the trouble.”

“Let me paddle on the way back, will you?” she said. “My God, this lake is wonderful. It makes all the difference.”

“To what?”

She looked for a moment as if she did not know, herself. “To living here.” Sunburn highlighted the flanges of her nostrils and her cheekbones, and her lips looked dry—she seemed to have brought no make—up with her with which to make repairs. It was true that there was a deliberate lack of flirtatiousness in her. It was almost an affront. Her yellow, lioness gaze rested on the children.

That evening when the whole party was back home, he walked across the vacant ground to get rid of the bits and pieces children had left in his car. She was playing chess on the veranda with Nongwaye Tlume; they had a modern gas—lamp that gave an underworld, steel—coloured light. She dumped the miscellany on a chair and walked with him through the garden which had no fence and was marked off from the scrub only by a few heads of zinnia and the shallow holes and tracks made by children. “I taught Nongwaye to play but now he beats me regularly. When I grumble he says it's an old African custom, to beat women—but he's so westernized he does it at chess.” Strolling, chatting, her arms crossed over her breasts, she
ended up nearer his house than the other one, and came in for a drink. “Is it too cool to sit under the fig?”