A Guest of Honour (4 page)

Mweta had the mummified look of one who has become a vessel of ritual. But once the declaration of independence was pronounced he came, as out of a trance, to an irresistibly lively self, sitting up there seeing everything around him, a spectator, Bray felt, as well as a spectacle. Bray was half-embarrassed to find that he even caught his eye, once, and there was a quick smile; but Mweta was used to having eyes on him, by now. He talked to the elderly English princess who sat beside him with her knees peaked neatly together in the Royal position curiously expressive of the suffering of ceremonies, and Bray saw him point out the contingent of Gala women, their faces and breasts whitened for joy, who were lined up among the troops of musicians and dancers from various regions.

And yet when that ceremony was over, and in between all the other official occasions—State Ball, receptions, cocktail parties, banquets, and luncheons—a mood of celebration grew up, as it were, outside the palace gates. He attended most of the official occasions (he and Roly saluted each other with mock surprise when they met in the house, half-dressed in formal dinner clothes every night) but the real parties took place before and after. These grew spontaneously
one out of the other, and once you had been present at the first, you got handed on to all the others. He really knew only some of the people but all of them seemed to know about him, and many were the friends of friends. Dando took him to the Bayleys; but Neil was a friend of Mweta, and Vivien was the niece of, of all people, Sir William Clough, the last governor, who had been a junior with Bray in the colonial service in Tanganyika. The Bayleys were friends of Cyprian Kente, Mweta's Minister of the Interior, and his wife Tindi, and Timothy Odara, one of the territory's few African doctors, whom Bray, of course, knew well. Through each individual the group extended to someone else and drew in, out of the new international character of the little capital, Poles, Ghanaians, Hungarians and Israelis, South African and Rhodesian refugees.

After the State Ball there was a private all-night party in a marquee. Roly Dando had promised to drop by, and of course Bray was with him. Many other people Bray had seen at the ball streamed in in their finery: they had contributed to the arrangements for this party. Cheers went up from the people already present who had not been at the ball; they had decided to dress for once, too, and the two groups of women mingled and exclaimed over each other, everyone began to talk about what the ball was like, champagne came in, a Congolese band whipped up their pace, and the absurd and slightly thrilling mood of the State Ball and the cosy gaiety of the party swept together. The tent was filled with chairs and divans borrowed from people's houses, and flowers from their gardens. Someone had put up a board with a collage of blown-up pictures of Mweta—speaking, laughing, yawning, touching a piece of machinery with curiosity, leaving, arriving, even threatening. The trouble everyone had taken gave a sense of occasion to even the wildest moments of the night. Vivien Bayley, queenly at twenty-six, with her beautiful, well-mannered, disciplined face, came to hover beside Bray between responsible permutations about the room to make sure that this young girl was not being bothered too much by the attentions of someone older and rather drunk, or that young man was not being overlooked by the girls who ought to be taking notice of him. Bray surprised her by asking her to dance, swaying stiffly to a rhythm he didn't know, but nevertheless keeping the beat, so that they wouldn't make fools of themselves among the complicated gyrations of the Africans. “I'm so
glad you dance,” she said; he was ashamed that he had asked her only out of politeness. “Neil won't—I think it's a mistake to let oneself forget these things because of vanity. Tindi Kente is a wonderful dancer, wonderful, isn't she—just like a snake brought out by music, and sometimes he'll try with her. He loves to flirt with her when Cyprian's not looking, but get her doing her marvellous wriggle on the floor and he just stands there like Andrew, dragging his feet.” Andrew was probably one of her children; being accepted with such immediate casual friendliness by everyone was rather like being forced to learn a foreign language by finding oneself alone among people who spoke nothing else: it was assumed that he would pick up family and other relationships merely by being exposed to them.

Someone called to Vivien and they were drawn away from the dancers to a crowded table. A young woman leaned her elbows on it and her white breasts pursed forward within the frame of her arms. “Have my glass,” she said, as there were no spare ones to go round. She went off to dance, holding in her stomach as she squeezed past and balanced her soft-looking body. The heat was heightened by drink and animation and the glass filled by the long, narrow black hand of his neighbour was marked by the fingerprints of the white woman who had relinquished it. “You don't remember me?—Ras Asahe, I came to your place in England once.” The young man said he was in broadcasting now, “so-called assistant to the Director of English Language Services.”

“And how's your father? Good Lord, I'd like to see him again!” Joseph Asahe was one of Edward Shinza's lieutenants in the early days of PIP.

“He's old now.” It was not the right question to have asked; what the young man dismissed was any possible suggestion that he was to be thought of in connection with Shinza. His clothes, watch, cufflinks were those of a man who feels he must buy the best for himself, he had the Mussolini-jaw quite common among the people in the part of the country he came from but those hands were the lyrical, delicately strong, African ones that escaped the international blandness of businessmen's hands as Bray had marvelled to see them escape the brutalizing of physical hardship. Convicts broke stones with hands like that, here.

They made conversation about the radio and television coverage of
the celebrations, and from this broke into talk that interested them both—the problem of communication in a country with so many different language groups. “I wonder how much use could be made of a radio classroom in country schools, whether it couldn't help considerably to ease the shortage of teachers, here,
and
maintain some sort of standard where teachers are perhaps not very well qualified. I'd like to talk to somebody about it—your man? I'm not keen to go straight to the Director-General—”

“It won't make much difference. They”—Ras Asahe meant the whites— “all know that after the end of the year they'll be on contract, and that means they'll be replaced in three years. Not that they ever made an effort. Sheltered employment all these years, what d'you expect? You don't need ideas, you don't need to move out of your chair, you simply go on producing a noise out of the magic box to keep the natives quiet—and now, boom, it's all gone, including the only incentive they ever had, their pension. They're pathetic, man; certainly they haven't much to offer when they look for jobs with the BBC. They're just not going to find any. They
want
to go, they're longing to, you can see they can't stand the sight of your face when you're working together—which makes things very pleasant, you can imagine—” A slim little white girl slipped between them and took up Ras Asahe's hand with the gold-metal watch-bracelet as if it were some possession she had put down— “Save me from Daddy Dando.”

“—I could give you a dozen examples of the sort of thing that happens—the ceremony this afternoon: like a horse-race, man—the arrangements were exactly what they used to use for the charity Christmas Handicap, what else do they know? Suggest what you like, they just talk it away into the cigarette smoke, nobody even listens.” The girl was there in their conversation like a photograph come upon lying between the pages of a book; Bray was not sure whether she was child or woman: thin collar-bones, a long neck with a face hardly wider, pale and sallow, a big, thin, unpainted mouth, black hair and glittering, sorrowful black eyes. She wore a dress made of Congo cloth.

“Suppose at the end of the year they were not put on contract? What about the golden handshake—wouldn't it be cheaper, in the end?”

“Not if there's no preparation of replacements being done in the meantime. I tried two years ago to initiate a pilot scheme to send
local people away for training in broadcasting techniques—nothing doing. If I had to take over the English-language services tomorrow, you know what I'd have to do it with—a bunch of Lambala and Ezenzeli speakers from the vernacular sections and some refugee schoolteachers from South Africa.”

The girl sat and saw nothing, like an animal out of breath, holed up against danger.

Bray had to rise to be introduced to a big woman marking time on the edge of the dancers with the American, Curtis Pettigrew: she was a West African whom Timothy Odara had married since Bray saw him last. She spoke with an American intonation, too, and in her flamboyant national dress, dragged round her as if snatched straight from the brilliant bolt on a shop counter, she seemed in every way twice the size of the local African women, who were usually kept at home, and showed it. Pettigrew was hailed by someone, and Bray and the woman were left facing each other like the dancers; she put her hand on his arm. While they moved off, she said, “Guess what my name is?” and when he looked embarrassed— “Same as yours, I believe. Evelyn.” “But they call me James.” “I should damn well hope so. Well, I've picked someone my own size at last tonight. We could just sweep the others off the floor.” She maintained contact all round her as they danced, talking over his shoulder to this one, putting out a broad calloused brown foot in a gold sandal to nudge that one in the calf. “Get her to sing,” Dando called out proudly. “Not tonight, Dandy-Roly, I'm on my best behaviour.” “That's what I mean!” “Would it embarrass Evelyn if Evelyn sang?” she asked Bray. “Not in the least. What sort of thing?” “Well, what'd you think? What do I look as if I'd sing?” She had the self-confidence of a woman of dynamic ugliness. “Wagner?” A snort of pleasure: “Go on! I've got a voice like a bullfrog. It's terrible when I sing the old chants from home but it's not so bad in English—English is such a rough-sounding language anyway.”

Vivien Bayley's urgent face took up conversation in passing, “—that's Hjalmar Wentz's daughter—you were sitting with.”

“The Oriental-looking little girl with Ras?”

“Yes, lovely creature, isn't she? Margot would only let her come if I promised to keep her wholesomely occupied. You didn't leave her with Ras?”

He moved his shoulders helplessly. The dancers were falling back
round a Polish agriculturalist who was teaching a gangling Englishman and two young Africans an Eastern European peasant dance. The Congolese band had no idea what music would do, and produced a stomping crescendo; then one of the Poles played the piano, and Neil Bayley moved in on the drums. The undergraduate form of self-expression that emerges where Englishmen want to give themselves to celebration imposed itself for a while. Someone left, and reappeared with another case of champagne. The wine was warm, but an early-hours-of-the-morning rain came out like sweat, and coolness blew in on necks and faces. Later the Odara woman sang the new national anthem in a beautiful contralto, her big belly trembling under the robe. The young bachelors romped and the tousled girls, passing close by, or smiling suddenly at people they weren't aware of, gave up the scent of cosmetics and perfume heated on their bodies. Then there was breakfast at the Bayleys'; a thinning of faces, but some had kept reappearing all through the night in the changing light, and now, against the rippling pink-grey sky behind the Bayleys' veranda, over the smell of coffee, a curled blonde head with gilt hoops in the ears, shining straps that had worn a red track on a plump white back, Timothy Odara's starched and pleated shirt-front and dead buttonhole—all had the melodrama of circus figures. They said good night to each other in the bright slanting sun and the Bayley children were already out on the grass in their pyjamas, riding bicycles.

In a few days the faces had lost the stylized, apparition-quality of that first night, the night of the Independence Ball, and become, if not familiar, at least expected. A young woman was in and out the Bayleys' house, sometimes adding to, sometimes carrying off with her the many children who played there. She was Rebecca, Rebecca Edwards, like a big, untidy schoolgirl in her cotton shirt and sandals, the car key on her forefinger jingling harassedly. She was always being sent to pick up people when arrangements went wrong; she came for Bray one afternoon in an old station wagon littered with sweet-papers, odd socks, and Dinky toys. It was she who had given her glass to him that night at the Independence party; the Pole who had danced the
gazatska
became the man with whom he gravitated to a quiet corner so that they could talk about the curious grammar-structure of Gala and the Lambala group of languages. The atmosphere at the parties was what he thought it must have been at gatherings
described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. Children swept in and out, belligerently pleasure-seeking. Babies slept in dark rooms. Food was cooked by many hands. Invitations were measured only by how long the beer and wine lasted out. He felt himself the -aged relative, a man of vague repute come from afar to the wedding, and drawn helplessly and not unenjoyably into everything. It was, in a curious way, an extension of what he was at the official receptions, where many people had little idea who the white stranger was, sitting in a modest place of honour; and once, at a press dinner, Mweta's reference to the presence of “one of the fairy godmothers” who had been “present at the christening and had returned for the coming-of-age of the State” went, thank God, unnoticed as a reference to himself. It became his Independence story; as the story of the cigarette company's helicopter was Neil Bayley's, related again and again while the private drama between husband and wife that had made it pass unremarked at the time was quite dropped out of the context.