A Guest of Honour (35 page)

“No, no, I'd love to sit under the famous fig.”

He had a little candlestick with a glass mantel. It lit the fissures and naves of the great tree like a lamp held up in a cave; even at night the bark was overrun by activity, streaming with ants and borers indentured for life.

“You seem to get on very well in the Tlume household.” It interested him that a woman who appeared to have little or nothing of the liberal principles and fervour that would make the necessity a testing virtue, should find living with an African family so unremarkable. She apparently had been brought up in the colonial way, and had lived her life in preserves on the white side of the tracks, wherever she had been.

She said, “They just are very nice people. I was lucky. It's a hell of a risk, to share a house.”

“You haven't found them rather different?—you know, in the small ways that count rather a lot when you're living together.”

“Well, it is another thing, of course—when you live with people. For the last year or two I've been working with Africans and then in our crowd at the Bayleys' there were African friends; but I've never lived with them before. But as I said this afternoon … at the time, I didn't think about anything … and I had to get out of that hotel and the chance came up. … Of course it is a bit different—there's not much privacy in the house, we really do all live together, I mean, it's not the arrangement of these are my quarters and those are yours, that I'd assumed. They just take it for granted; we eat together, people wander in on you all the time.… But at the same time there
is
a kind of privacy, another kind. They never ask questions. They simply accept everything about you.” When he came back out of the house with their beer, she said, “Of course, Gordon's up in arms. I wrote to tell him where we were and, naturally,
that
brought a letter from him. I got it last week—what sort of educational background for his children and all that. He nearly had a
fit.
Whenever he gets all concerned he writes these sort of lawyer's letters, so snooty and silly. He sees us sitting in the yard eating mealie porridge out of a big pot—you don't know Gordon's imagination.” She laughed derisively but almost proudly.

“Where is Gordon?” he said, as if he knew him.

“I hate to tell you.” Half confidential, half enjoying an opportunity to shock. “In the Congo, with that old bastard Loulou Kamboya”—she saw him trying to place the name— “no, not a politician, just an ordinary crook. Well, extraordinary. Gordon met him in a bar in Zambia, Loulou goes all over the place in his black Mercedes. Gordon went into the souvenir business with him. Loulou's got a ‘factory' making those elephant—hair bracelets. He supplies all kinds of hideous things—fake masks and horn carvings. He wanted to get down to South Africa to make contacts in the curio racket there, but of course they wouldn't let him in. So Gordon went for him. There was going to be a fortune in it, they were going to have a network over Africa from east to west and north to south—you know. I don't know what's happened—it seems to have faded out. In this last letter Gordon says he's taking a job on the Cabora Bassa thing—the dam. He worked on Kariba, of course: that was when I went to Salisbury. He's an engineer when he has to be. —If you ever want any elephant—hair bracelets, I've got a surplus stock.”

He would be like the Tlumes and never ask questions—that is, questions that were intrusive. But she had introduced the subject of this man, the husband; he seemed hardly more than an anecdote. Bray said, “Well, at least he isn't a mercenary. When you said Congo—”

“Oh, I'm sure Loulou's done his share of gun—running, but that really would be too profitable to let anyone in on. Gordon Edwards wouldn't be included in that.” It was a kind of parody of the solid suburban housewife's plaint that her husband was always bypassed by promotion. He was entertained by this sturdy dryness that he had not seen in her before. She began to tell him anecdotes about life in the capital, involving Dando, people at the various ministries and the university, both of them laughing a good deal. They were the stories of an intelligent secretary, background observation; if there were any that were the stories of an intelligent mistress, she didn't include them. He walked her home across the scrub again and gave her a good—night peck on the cheek, the convention between the men and women of the group to which he and she had belonged, in the capital. She was a courageous and honest girl and he had the small comfort of feeling he had put things right between them. He had a distaste for false positions. Even tidying minor ones out of the way was
something. He did it as he would tidy his table when there seemed no way of tackling what he really had to do. When he met her during the week, buying icecream for the children, he offered to take them all to the lake again at the weekend—he wanted to have a talk to the people at the fish—freezing plant.

But she telephoned on Friday night—Sampson Malemba was in the room with him, they were working—and said that the children had been asked to a party and were “mad keen” to go, so—It didn't matter at all, he'd take them another time maybe (he had always the feeling even while he spoke of everyday plans, that he might be gone, quite suddenly, before they were realized). Then he thought he might have sounded a little too relieved at not having the bother of the outing, and added— “Of course, you come along if you want to—if you've nothing better to do? I have to go, anyway.” She said she'd let him know on Saturday morning, if that was time enough? He felt the reciprocal tolerance of one preoccupied person towards the preoccupations of another.

Malemba sat waiting with his head tilted back, tapping a pencil on his big yellow teeth; it was a question of money, money, again now. There was an old police compound—a square of rooms round a courtyard—that they could acquire very cheaply and convert into classrooms at the cost of a few hundred pounds. The existing grant was already earmarked for other things; Malemba said, “If you wrote and asked for more?

“To whom?”

He looked at Bray and shrugged.

Yes, he had only to ask Mweta; he said, “Suppose I were to write to my friend the American cultural attaché, down there. They're keen on educational projects. Of course, they like the big ones that show—like the university. But lecture rooms—that's the way to put it—it might just ring the bell for us.”

He heard her coming through the screen door of the veranda while he was finishing breakfast. She was wearing men's blue jeans and her rubber—thonged sandals, and was pleased to be in good time. She looked very young—he did not know how old she would be, round about thirty, he supposed. Kalimo had carefully tied up with string saved from the butcher's parcels a package of food: “What's inside?”
Bray asked, and Kalimo counted off with a forefinger coming down on the fingers of the other hand— “Ah-h loaste' chicken, eggs with that small fish in, ah—h tomatoes, blead, sa't, litt'e bit pepper. No butter. You must buy butter.” It was the picnic he had always prepared, down to the stuffed eggs with anchovy, that Olivia had taught him to make, and the paper twists of salt and pepper. “Don't bother with butter, it'll just melt” the girl said. He stopped on the way out of the village and bought a bottle of wine instead.

She had a small radio with her, and when he had warned her she might have quite a long wait for him at the freezing plant— “Not the most attractive place in the world to hang about in, either”—she had taken something to read out of his bookshelves, more with the air of wanting to be no trouble than anything else. It was pleasant to have company in the car; she lit cigarettes for them both and the dusty road that climbed down through the mountains was quickly covered. So far as he had taken notice of her at all, he had always felt rather sorry for the girl whose life overlapped the lives of others but was without a centre of its own. Now she seemed like one of those hitchhikers who let the world carry them, at home with anybody in having no home, secure in having no luggage, companionable in having no particular attachment. She might have flagged him down on the road, just for the ride. He left the car in what shade he could find at the fish factory; the trees between the buildings and the rough wharf had been hacked down and the dust was full of trampled fish entrails hovered over by wretched dogs and flies. He saw her at once settle down to make herself comfortable, opening the doors of the car for a draught, and hanging the little radio, aerial extended, from the window.

There had been a dispute at the fish factory reported in the papers the week before; some sort of dissatisfaction over the employment of what were termed “occasional” workers—it was not very clear. What
he
had come for was additional data on the number of families and the extent of the area they were drawn from, as represented in the records of men employed on the company's trawlers; there was some discrepancy, in his notes, between the educational needs of the population based on the number of workers who, although scattered, could be considered local, and the actual size of this population—which might be much less, if the workers in fact came largely from communities
much farther up the lake and left their family units behind. Lake men had a migratory tradition that pre—dated colonial settlement; they had gone where the trade was, where the fish ran. It was sometimes difficult to find out to which community they belonged. For themselves, unlike other groups whose home ground was twice defined, once by tribal tradition and again by the colonial district system, they belonged, as they would say “to the water,” a domain whose farther side, away up in other territories of Africa, they had never seen.

The freezing plant section had the morgue atmosphere of men in rubber aprons hosing down concrete floors, and sudden reminders of blood and guts that no hygiene could do away with entirely. He saw the white manager for a minute, a man seamed, blotched and reddened from a lifetime of jobs like this, dirty, but routine as a city office, in the wilderness, in the sun. He was handed over to a grey—eyed coloured man with uplifting texts in his office. The records were not too satisfactory; Bray asked if he could talk to one of the shop stewards—the union records might make more sense. The clerk became vague and left the room— “Just a minute, ay?” He came back with the composed face of an underling who has passed on responsibility. “The manager says we don't know if he's here today, they doesn't work Saturday, only if it's overtime.” Bray had seen that some people were working. “Yes, some are working overtime this morning, but I don't know …” Uneasy again, the clerk took him down to the cleaning and packing floor. He seemed to have the helpless feeling that Bray would single the man out instantly; in fact, one of the section overseers, a big, very black man standing with gumboots awash where the fish were being scaled, looked up alertly and caught the clerk's eye. He came with the matter—of-factness of one who is accustomed to being summoned. Bray introduced himself and the man said with almost military smartness, “Good morning, sir! Elias Rubadiri,” but couldn't shake hands because his were wet as the fish themselves. Scales gleamed all over him, caught even in his moustache, like paillettes on a carnival Neptune. They went out into an open passageway to talk; oh yes, there were union records. But the man who kept them wasn't there, they were locked up. Where? Oh at his house, that man's house. Could one go to see him, then?—The scales dried quickly out in the open air, he was rubbing them off his hands, shedding
them. “He's not there….” There was that African pause that often precedes a more precise explanation. Bray switched to the intimacy of Gala, and the overseer said, “You know, the other day … he got hurt on the head.”

Then they began to talk. Rubadiri was one of those half—educated men of sharp intelligence, touchy with whites yet self—assured, and capable of a high—handed attitude towards his own people, who appear in authority all over the place after independence is achieved. PIP was kept alive by such people, now that the old brazier—warmth of interdependency that was all there was to huddle round had been replaced by the furnace blast of power. There was no sense in the dispute—that was how he presented it to Bray. The old men and women who were employed by the fish—drying “factory”— “those sticks in the sand with a few fish—you'll see out there”—were not capable of any other work. They did not keep regular hours of employment, they were sick one day, they started only in the afternoon the next, they had pains in the legs—he laughed tolerantly. “It gives them something to do, the money for tobacco.” Of course, the company did own the fish—drying, it had been there, a small private concession that they had bought up along with some boats and the use of this landing stage when the factory was started. It produced a few thousand bags of dried fish a year, that went to the mines—but that demand was dwindling because even before Independence the mines had almost abandoned migratory labour and workers who lived with their families were not given rations as compound workers had been. For the rest of the market, the company had the fish—drying and fish—meal factory in Gala, as Bray must know, where the whole thing was done by machinery. So these people here—his hand waved them away— “the company just lets them stay.” The union that had been formed when the factory started didn't recognize them.

When he began to talk about the “trouble” of the previous week he took on a closed—minded look, the look of a man who has stated all this before a gathering, repeated it, perhaps, many times, with a hardening elimination of any doubt or alternative interpretation.

“Now some people come along and say, the fish—dryers work here, they work for the same company, why aren't they in the union? They say, they are paid too little, it's bad for us if somebody accepts very low pay. How do we know, if there's trouble, if one day we strike,
they won't be brought in to do our work?” He lifted his lip derisively and expelled a breath, as if it were not worth a laugh. “Of course they know, the same time, that's all rubbish. How can women and old men do our work? All they could do is wash the floors! They don't understand the packing, and the freezing plant machinery.”