A Guest of Honour (39 page)

She tried to pass it off by saying, ungrammatically, in the
non sequitur
tradition of the game, my husband is away from home in the fields.

Then she said, in English, “I had a letter from Gordon. He might come to see the children.”

“So he's coming.”

“I only heard a few days ago. You never know with him, I'll believe it when he arrives. That's why I haven't said anything. But then this afternoon Suzi said that to you about the beans—”

“When?” he said.

Now that she had confessed she was unburdened, at ease, almost happy. “This next week. If he does.”

But he knew she knew that the man was coming—the day, the date. He said, “What will you do?”

She said, “He'll probably stay at the Fisheagle Inn. Edna really hasn't a bed for him.”

She would have arranged everything; after all, she sewed curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

She spent the night at “her friend's.” She lay in the bath, her body magnified by the lens of water, and, while he gazed at her, said dreamily, “I don't suppose Olivia will ever know about me.”

“I suppose not.”

“You wouldn't tell her?”

“Probably not.”

“I don't know—I would have thought you are the kind of couple who tell everything.”

We were, we were. “You're anxious about Gordon?” Still dressed, he sat on the edge of the bath; her brown nipples stuck out of the water, hardened by the cool air, the weight of her breasts when she had suckled children had stretched the skin in a wavering watermark. It was a young (she was only twenty—nine, he knew by now), damaged body, full of knowledge. “Oh Lord no.”

“Somebody might be kind enough to tell him. I suppose everyone knows. The whole village.” He had never thought about it before; it might be a scandal, for all he knew, among what was left of the white locals. If no one had seen the pencil—torch and the two figures crossing the piece of bush in the early hours of the morning, then it was unlikely that Kalimo had not gossiped to other servants.

“I don't think so.” She was thinking of the loyal Tlumes, the Alekes; the white people she really knew only as the parents of children who were at school with hers. “He lives in a world of his own. Just every now and then he remembers our existence. You'll like Gordon, you'll see. He's a very likeable person. Everyone does.”

She might have been talking of an old friend, rather a character. He said, “I'll believe in him when I see him.”

“Oh I know.” On an impulse she got out of the bath and streaming wet, with wet fingers, undid his shirt and pants and pressed herself against him, a contact at once nervously unpleasant and yet delightful.

Early in the morning he woke with a fierce contraction of dismay, it seemed because Kalimo was at the door and she was still there—they must have overslept. His clenched heart swept this knowledge
into some other anguish, left from the day before. Kalimo opened the door but did not bring in coffee. In fact, it was much earlier than coffee—time, and he had come to tell Bray that there was someone to see him. Bray half—understood, and forgot the girl, calling out, “Kalimo, what on earth is it all about—say what you mean, come here—” And Kalimo opened the door and stood facing the bed, after one quick glance not seeming to see, either, the woman stirring.
“Mukwayi,
he say he the brother of your friend, there—there—”

Outside the kitchen door, under the skinny paw—paws in the strangely artificial light of dawn, a young man stood hunched against the chill.

Shinza wanted to see him. “At Major Boxer's place! He's there now?”

“Yes. Or you can tell me what day you are going to come. He will come there.”

He watched the man off, one of those figures in shirt and trousers who are met with on all the roads of the continent, miles from anywhere ahead, miles from anywhere behind, silent and covering ground. The red sun came up without warmth behind the paw—paw trees, as between the fingers of an outstretched hand. It struck him full in the eyes and he turned away. He walked round the front of the house and stood under the fig. As many arms as Shiva, and dead—still, always stiller than any other tree, even in the calm and silent morning, because its foliage was so sparse, in old age, that air currents did not show. It was surrounded by its own droppings; fruit that had dried without ripening and fallen, dead leaves, grubs and cocoons. She came out of the house dressed, looked once behind her and then came over to him.

“I may go off, today or tomorrow, for a day. No, not to the capital.
He
wants to talk to me—from the Bashi.”

As she went across the rough grass he was struck by the subdued look of her, and called softly, “Rebecca!” She paused. “All right?” —Of course, Kalimo had walked in on them; he must know anyway, but all the same … She nodded her head vehemently, the way her children sometimes did. It was only when he was on the road that the thought crossed his mind that he had not noticed whether Kalimo showed any particular attitude in his manner when he served breakfast. Kalimo's proprietorial dependency had belonged to Olivia and
himself as the couple, the family; yet he had not, even by the quality of a silence, asserted Olivia's presence—in-absence. Perhaps in some subconscious way even Kalimo found Bray's presence different, in relation to himself, from what it had been before—he remained a servant, but although nothing was changed materially for him the emotional dependency between ruler and ruled was gone. With the dependency went the proprietary rights, also the concern. Or maybe Kalimo was just older, and seeing Olivia as part of a past.

Because of the iron-ore mine, the Bashi road as far as Boxer's was kept in fair repair. There were the usual work gangs making good in the dry season the pot holes and washaways of summer, and every now and then he was waved onto a detour by a barefoot labourer prancing with a red rag on a stick, but he still reached the farm by two in the afternoon. He was slightly dazed from having driven so long without a stop. Boxer's polished leggings shone in the sun. “I don't know what the old devil wants.” He absolved himself at once of any association with Shinza or anybody else. “But it's all right with me, if you've got doings with him. Take your time. He came to see me once to borrow money!” It was one of the few things that could make Boxer laugh: the idea that he might have any money lying around to lend. He was also making use of the dry season—to put up some new farm building. Bray had to look at a consignment of precast concrete blocks that couldn't be laid properly because they were all out of true. “Bloody things taken from the moulds before they're dry!” The blocks came from the new factory at Gala; Bray had to promise to complain.

Boxer went on with the job of sorting out the usable blocks, calling, “Where's that boy? I don't know where milord is himself, though I know he's arrived because I saw his father—in-law's car down over at my dam—but he's left someone here to look out for you.” His face reflected emotions that had nothing to do with what he was sayingannoyance at each fresh evidence of misshapen cement, distrust of the judgement of the two black cattlemen who were working under his eye. The scout had disappeared. “Oh well, must've gone to fetch him. You can go along into the house. I don't mind. Pour yourself a drink or ask in the kitchen for some tea.”

One of the Afghans followed Bray back to the house. The signs of division of the rooms between the various functions of the household
during a previous occupancy—the Boxers as a family—were becoming completely overlaid by the single—mindedness of an existence so perfectly contained by the preoccupation of cattle breeding that it really had no diversity of functions to be reflected. The living-room, going the way of the bathroom that Bray remembered from last time, was slowly losing the character of its old designation as phials of vaccine, pamphlets on feeds, dried specimens of pasture grasses had settled among the tarnished silver and the Staffordshire dogs, and three pairs of boots, still encrusted with summer mud, had found an obviously permanent home on a small red—gold Shiraz next to the sofa. It wasn't that nothing was put away in the right place, but there was no longer any place in the house that was not appropriate for anything. Bray opened the liquor cupboard and took a can of beer from among bottles of bloat medicine. He heard a car and took out a second can. The beautiful male dog that looked so humanly feminine—a kind of inversion of anthropomorphism—got up gracefully within its fringes of fur and barked beside Bray at the door as it saw a black man get out of the car. Shinza wore a gay shirt flapping over his trousers, sandals that he had to grip with his toes as he walked. There was an almost West African swagger about him. He ignored the noise of the dog and came up the steps to the veranda and the open living-room with the air of self—conscious disingenuousness that was instantly familiar—film actors, sports champions, they came at the TV camera lazily, like that, fresh from some triumph or other. The car was a big old American one, all snub surfaces gleaming under dust, lying heavily on its worn springs.

“That's a very grand affair.”

Shinza was grinning, coming in to Bray's greeting. “Well, in those days you were generous to your Tribal Authority, you know. Chief Mpana was one of your big men.”

“So you married Chief Mpana's daughter?”

“You know her, you've met her!” Shinza put his hand on the head of the dog, murmuring something admiring to it, and it growled and wagged its feather—boa tail.

“Yes indeed I have, she's a charming girl. You're lucky.”

“The car's not in all
that
good condition.” Shinza laughed, sat himself down and glanced with a guest's mild interest round Boxer's room, seeing it as one of those white men's lairs that even he, who had lived in Europe and America, sometimes found inexplicable.

“How is she? And the son?”

“It was nice of you to come and see her.”

“Unfortunately you'd gone out to get cigarettes.”

Shinza's flash—a gap—grin of admittance, mutual acceptance—at once converted the casual atmosphere to another voltage. He waited while Bray poured the beer, but with an air of having got down to the ground between them. “That hasn't been worrying me.” Bray made a face questioning the wisdom of such trust. “I know I had nothing to worry about. But I wanted to have a talk with you—you know, I want to tell you a few things, I want to show you—” He closed his teeth under open lips, his hands round the beer mug made, half—comically, a gesture of directing an invisible head to face something. “That's all. A lot of things we decided a long time ago. Not only in London. Before that, right at the beginning, eh, here at home. What's happening to all that, eh? What's happening to it, James?”

His voice mastered the questions rhetorically. The half—insulting, preoccupied reserve that had discounted Bray's presence when they talked in the house in the Bashi might never have existed. Now an old intimacy was taken for granted just as easily as it had been taken for dead. Shinza could move among examples, anecdotes, and private thoughts without bothering about sequence, because the links were there, in Bray's mind as in his own. He accused, demanded, derided—speaking for them both. “Kayira sits in the House of Chiefs—that old criminal who raped a child a few years ago and told the judge it was his right as a chief. Those ignorant old men were going to be stripped of their ‘rights,' of all their forms of parasitism, and made to stand on merit—but have you heard a mention of abolishing the House of Chiefs? No, you've only heard that the House is going to be enlarged so that those fat men in blue suits can spread themselves comfortably. —Painted, you know. Made nice. Mweta still talks about the need to forget tribal differences—that's how it's put now, you don't say abolish tribalism because you might make the fat old men shake—but all the time he's improving the House of Chiefs. Because they're going to sit there—as long as he's where he is. Mweta likes to make speeches about the time when we each had only one pair of pants—the trouble is, he doesn't remember that we also knew, then, what we wanted. We were going to make this country over from top to bottom. Right? Turn the whole thing over, just like you kick an anthill, and make new lives for all those people running
about not understanding where they were going. Right, James? But what are the signs? Reginald Harvey tells him that unless the gold price rises the company can't think of opening marginal—production mines, and he takes it without a word. Well, not without a word, Harvey's got plenty of words, Harvey's only got to mention that the company can get a far bigger return by expansion in South Africa, and
he
falls over backwards to say how he appreciates what a favour the company's doing by earning dividends here at all. But was that the idea! —Oh yes, I know, within two years all work up to the level of mine captain will be Africanized. So what? What sort of windowdressing is that if new jobs are not being created at the same time. We move up into the seats of the expatriate whites, and go on earning dividends for them when they go back ‘home' to retire? Was that the idea? Christ, James, what were we talking about all those years, if it was for this? He handles the English and Americans like glass—because we need foreign capital. But if you keep going to the old places for it you keep on getting it on the same old terms. A child should be able to see that. And the profits are geared to
their
economies, not ours. The great new sugar scheme we've heard so much about—what's it amount to? They'll get sugar at a preferential price, while we could be growing rice instead and getting a better price in the open market. We're exporting our iron ore at their price and buying back their steel at their price. We're still selling our cotton and buying their cloth—the Czechs offered to send us the technical aid for a textile mill, but the tied loan he got from the Japanese for the cotton gin stipulates they get the whole crop. So we're back where we were. Wearing the cloth they make and sell back to us. We could have had the same as Nyerere's got—a textile mill as well as our cotton gin, a textile mill set up by the Chinese, all the know—how we want, and the whole thing financed interest—free. What's he afraid of? He'll only play the game with the devil he knows, eh? Apart from one or two big schemes that aren't off the paper yet, and a couple of bad new contracts for the expansion of existing industry, like the deal with the fishing concessionaires, a useless thing if ever there was one, a mess—apart from that, what've we got?—The Coca—Cola bottling plant and a factory for putting transistors from Germany into plastic cases, because our labour's cheaper than Europe's, and they get a bigger profit when we buy the radios? Are we only educating our people
to need the things
they
sell? Good God, are we to pass from exporting raw materials only to bottling, assembling—never making?”