A Guest of Honour (58 page)

Shinza had gone straight back to the Bashi—had left the capital, anyway: “—I'll see you at home, then,” presumably meaning Gala. Without him, it was almost as if nothing had happened. All these people before Mweta, old men in leopard skins with seed—bracelets rattling on their ankles as they mimed an old battle—stride in flat—footed leaps that made the young people giggle, church choirs with folded hands, marching cadets, pennants, bands, dancers, ululating women, babies sucking breasts or chewing roasted corn cobs, men parading under home—made Party banners—the white—hot sun, dust, smell of maize—beer, boiling pluck and high dried fish: the headiness of life. Bray felt it drench him with his own sweat. If he could have spoken to Mweta then (a gleaming, beaming face, refusing the respite of the palanquin, taking the full glory of sun and roaring crowd) he would have wanted to tell him, this is theirs always, it's an affirmation of life. They would give it to another if, like a flag, you were hauled down tomorrow and another put up in your place. It's not what should matter to you now. And he wondered if he would ever tell him anything again, anything that he believed himself. The other night was so easy; how was it possible that such things could be so easy. Suddenly, in the blotch of substituted images, dark and light, that came with the slight dizziness of heat and noise, there was Olivia, an image of a split second. It was easy with her, too. She did not ask; he did not broach. It made him uneasy, though, that she and Mweta should be linked at some level in his mind. Of course, there was an obvious link; the past. But a line between the stolid walk down the carpark to lobby for Shinza (“Semstu, my old friend”), and the presence of the girl—always on him, the impress of a touch that doesn't wash off—could only be guilt—traced. And guilty of what? I have gone on living; I don't desire Olivia: something over which one hasn't any control; and the things I believe in were there in me before I knew Mweta and remain alive in me if he turns away from them.

He felt, with the friendly Hjalmar at his side and the amiable crowd around him, absolutely alone. He did not know how long it lasted; momentary, perhaps, but so intense it was timeless. Everything
retreated from him; the crowd was deep water. A breeze dried the sweat in a stiff varnish on his neck.

They went to the Bayleys' house for a drink afterwards. Roly was there, Margot Wentz, and a few others. “How've you survived?” Neil Bayley meant the tedium of Congress. Bayley was “worried about the Big Boss”; “But you should have been there,”—Hjalmar was comforted somewhere within himself by the contact with the crowd of simple people at the rally. “They love him, you know, they love him.” An expression of impatience passed over Margot's face; it recurred like an involuntary nervous twitch, these days, when Hjalmar was talking. Bayley said Mweta was being “ridden hard” by Chekwe, his Minister of Justice, and others. They wanted Tola Tola out of Foreign Affairs, for one thing. “Well, I know Mweta wasn't too happy with him at the beginning—you remember that question in the House about his globe—trotting”—Bray smiled— “but he's done pretty well, in fact, I'd say—wouldn't you?”

“Yes—but those very people who accused him of spending too much time up in jets—they're the ones who're too friendly with him now, for Chekwe's liking. Chekwe says he's got contacts with Shinza's crowd.”

Hjalmar deferred the company to Bray. “Is there anything in that?”

“We've seen this week what Shinza's support consists of.”

Roly Dando waved his pipe. “Bray for one.”

Neil said, “You found him impressive?—When I read what he says I think what a bright guy, he's right, most of the time. But if he's talking to me—I mean if he's there in the flesh and I'm listening—he makes me bristle. I don't like the chap.”

Vivien's body had the collapsed—balloon look of a woman who has recently given birth. In its frame of neglected hair that lay stiff as if sculptured, a verdigris blonde—her beautiful face kept its eternal quality through the erosive noise of children and transient talk. “He's a very attractive man. I'm surprised none of us has taken him for a lover.”

“You've never met him. Schoolgirl crush.” Her husband did not let the remark pass.

“I have. I met him at a reception the first year we were here.”

“—Once her passion is roused, she never forgets, my she—elephant

“And I talked to him three days ago. We met at Haffajee's Garage.” Everyone laughed, but she remained composed.

“Delightful rendezvous—”

“We were buying petrol. He remembered me at once.”

“This positive neutralism is a very fine idea and all that, but we have to be a little practical, nnh?” Hjalmar said. “Wherever it's attempted the Russians or the Chinese or the Cubans come in and you're back in the cold war; it's like driving a car, nnh—if you stay in neutral, you can't move. … He wouldn't be any more nonaligned than Mweta. And as the West is frightened of ideas like his, the East would be the ones to get him. It's between two sets of vultures.”

“Ah well, that's the art of it. Keeping the flesh on your bones. That's what our bonny black boys've got to master.”

Bray said to Dando, “Do you think Mweta's having a try?”

Dando chewed on his pipe with bottom teeth worn to the bone. “We've talked about it a hundred times. You know quite well what I think; what you want is to confirm what you think. Because you've woken up out of your bloody daydream at last … I don't know what did it … now you don't like what you see. I'm in the stronger position because I've never expected to see anything I'd like”—there was laughter; even Margot smiled— “Mweta's not a man to take great risks, he's not a radical in the smallest fibre of his body. To make great changes here you've got to take the most stupendous risks; he's chosen to play for half—safety for the simple reason he
isn't capable of anything else
and in his bones he's the sense to know it. He's chosen his set of vultures because he thinks he can gauge from experience the length of their beaks; all right—now he's seeing how much flesh he can keep from them.”

He found himself speaking to Dando, to them all, looking at the faces, one to the other. “Why are we so sure one set of beaks is so much more dangerous than another?—Because of the prisons, the labour camps, the thousands of dead in the Soviet Union over the years; because the Great Leap Forward's been overtaken by civil wars in China; because of Hungary, because of Czechoslovakia, Poland—yes, I know. But we're people who know what's wrong with the West, too, the slavery it practised with sanctimony so long, the contempt it showed to the people it exploited—and still shows, down south on this continent. The mirror—image of itself that it sets up in
the privileged black suburbia that takes its place … The wars it perpetuates in the cause of the ‘free world' … If positive neutralism is the ideal, but the third world boils down to Roly's art of living between two sets of vultures, why can we be so sure it mightn't conceivably be more worth while to see how much flesh one can save in an association with the East? Why? Because we ‘belong' to the West? Express our views—hold them—by the permissiveness of the West? … tied to it by that permissiveness? Roly—myself—I don't think he'll say he's ever believed anything else—would you agree we've always accepted what Sartre once wrote, that socialism is the movement of man in the process of re—creating himself?—Is that or is that not what we believe?—Whatever the paroxysms of experiment along the way—whether it's Robespierre or Stalin or Mao Tse—tung or Castro—it's the only way there is to go, in the sense that every other way is a way back. What do you want to see here? Another China? Another America? If we have to admit that the pattern is likely to be based on one or the other, which should we choose?”

“You're saying socialism is the absolute?” Neil loved strong sentiments, as a form of entertainment. He at once took charge. “The standard of reference by which any political undertaking is to be judged?”

“Yes! Must be, if we believe, people like Roly and me, what we've been saying all our lives—the lawyer and the civil servant. Yes! What else?”

“But I am still a lawyer and you are no longer a civil servant,” Dando said, looking at him. Their eyes engaged; and then he withdrew, under Dando's gaze of a man who stands watching another go out of sight.

The talk had gone back to Tola Tola, the Foreign Minister. “But what about the Msos,” Hjalmar was insisting. “Neil—how will Mweta get him out without causing trouble for himself there?”

Neil Bayley stood about among his seated guests like a ringmaster, running his hands up through his bright curly aureole of beard and hair. “Ah, there's the advantage of the strange position of Tola Tola—although he's nominally Mso, it seems he actually comes from the Congo … someone's dug that up. It's clearly not an Mso name … is it, James? Tola Tola?”

“Probably not; you don't get the two—syllable repetition …”

“—So even though he's got an Mso seat, there's some”—he swivelled his hand right and left, fingers fanned stiffly— “ambiguity about the whole business. But Mweta'd have to put an Mso in his place, that's the snag. Apparently the Msos would want Msomane. Or rather Msomane would want to make sure he was the man. He's mad keen to get rid of Labour, which is hardly surprising.”

Bray said, “Neil, would you say Mosmane was one of the people who're pushing Mweta?”

“Depends what way. It's always a tricky business to keep the Mso faction happy. Without making too much of them.”

“I don't mean that. Would he have had enough influence with Mweta to get him to approve the Company setting up its private army?”

“Is that story true?”

“Hjalmar has to be told twenty times if it's something he doesn't want to believe,” Margot said. “You'd have to run him over with a tank first.”

“My source of information only mentioned armoured cars,” Bray put in lightly to protect poor Hjalmar. And Vivien's clear commanding voice that stamped her origin as undeniably as any princely birthmark on the backside of a foundling: “Hjalmar, I'm just like you. I wouldn't have believed it if one of the Company mothers who picks up children at Eliza's school hadn't told me how much safer she feels now. —I told her how much less safe
I
feel.”

Neil still held the floor. “Cyprian Kente's more likely to be the one who's done the pushing, and even Guka, maybe. If your Interior and Defence boys give advice, it's difficult not to take it.”

“And no one's asked any questions in the House.”

“It's been done so discreetly … the first anyone heard was when these men appeared out of the blue last month at Ngweshi Mine—the report was that ‘police' reinforcements had come down from here. Then it leaked out that they were a new kind of police.… But when the House sits again”—his mind went back to the “worry” about Mweta he had begun with earlier. “Of course, it
looks
so sinister. I don't doubt that he's tough enough to keep it under control. But it would have been better to keep the Company in the background—could have been called a force of civilian reservists, some such. He's been badly advised to let the Company's name come in openly—I
wouldn't agree that he shouldn't use the resources of the Company if he needs them, one may have to use existing resources—”

“It doesn't help me to talk about the Company as if it were a natural phenomenon,” Vivien said. “It still looks like the old days we read about down in Zambia and Rhodesia, with the old Chartered policing the place for the Great White Queen.… What sort of thugs will the Company recruit, anyway? It's terrifying. All those mercenaries from the Congo wandering around Africa looking for a job …”

“I gather it's a black affair, mainly, no whites—” Neil dismissed her.

“And the Company administrators are running an
army?
You believe that?” Vivien laughed at him.

“Well I suppose they've borrowed a few people from George Guka. Anyway, you're exaggerating as usual.”

Vivien's speckled blue eyes balanced the two men in a sceptical challenge, inquiringly. “Tell Rebecca I'm keeping my riot bag packed. … I
am
so glad that Gordon's disappeared again, everyone is always much more content without him.” Perhaps Rebecca had made a confidante of her; Bray didn't know. But she spoke so easily, linking him naturally with Rebecca as a friend who lived in the same place; it might have been—as this was Vivien—a way of showing him her acceptance of his relationship and her calm and capable intention to protect Rebecca and him from the others.

He said, “Oh the children didn't seem to think so. They loved having him around.”

“Yes, exactly, Gordon rouses expectations and that's always exciting—he makes people feel all sorts of things are going to be changed. But if he stays, they aren't. So it's always better for him to move on, you know. Now they'll see him in the school holidays, and that will be fun for them without lasting long enough for any damage to be done. Rebecca shouldn't worry about them. She's managed awfully well. I really ought to send our young to my mother or somewhere for a while; they've been too unrelievedly in my company. Neil objects for some reason or other.” He knew she didn't believe it; she was establishing, in this company, the ordinariness of Rebecca's situation. But her husband said swaggeringly, “I'm
here,
my girl, not digging some bloody dam for Vorster and Caetano at Cabora Bassa.”

Ras Asahe and Emmanuelle burst in with a few of Ras's satellites.
One was a lecturer at the university, a young black man who caught a pink end of tongue between his perfect teeth in amusement as Neil, his registrar, mimicked the staff at a recent meeting, drawing him into a professional privilege of burlesquing their institution. The gathering began to change character, with more drinks and disjointed chatter. The subjects they had been talking about were dropped; whether this was a matter of mood, or because it was not possible, once again now, for black and white to talk in a general way of these things without seeming to extract from the blacks secret loyalties and alliances that might be dangerous for them. It had been like that before; before Independence, when the Governor's hospitality in detention camps and prisons waited at the other end of candour become indiscretion. The ease in between—the ease of a few months ago—belonged to a time when the people from Europe were neither in a position of power on their own behalf, nor as witnesses of a situation in which the Africans had something to fear from each other. He felt a wave of impatience with the capital. While he was drinking and lending himself to the air that it was “marvellous” to be back among these friends again, he wanted to be off, driving alone through the night for home, Gala.