A Guest of Honour (62 page)

Neither away in England, nor the other end of the world …

He thought he didn't sleep but he must have, because the words hung there.

A man was sitting with Rebecca in the living-room. The room was dimmed against the heat.

But Hjalmar Wentz was in the Silver Rhino; in the capital!

Wentz and Rebecca sat deep in the sagging old morris chairs on either side of the empty fireplace, sunk in the silence of each being unable to explain his presence to the other. So great was the awkwardness that neither could get up.

“Well Hjalmar! What are you doing here!” He released them, Rebecca's eyes signalling a complicated anguish, warning, heaven knows what, Hjalmar saying with a painful smile, “Well, you did ask me, perhaps you remember … ?”

The fact that his platitude of greeting had been taken as a protest warned him more explicitly than Rebecca's eyes. “I just never thought I could get you up here no matter how hard I tried … this is splendid … when did you arrive … are you”—but the eyes, absolutely yellow now with intensity, signalled—”… you drove up all the way?”

A shaky gesture—a smile that twitched faultily and an attempt at humour: “Don't ask—I got here. And Rebecca gave me a nice lunch.”

“That's splendid. I simply gawked … couldn't believe it. I've been off trudging round some schools … just eating dust all day. I must have a shower—was there a terrible wind, here, last night?” They talked about the weather; “Well, some tea first and a bath later.
Wash the dust down instead of off … have you got your things in, did Kalimo look after you all right?”

“Yes, yes—Rebecca gave me a very good lunch, avocados fresh from the tree, everything, the service was first class!” The voice seemed to wind automatically out of the stiff blond face. Bray and the girl were standing round him as if at the scene of an accident. She said, “I must dash.” “My best to Aleke,” Bray said, but followed her to the garden by way of the kitchen on the pretext of ordering tea.

She was waiting for him. “Something ghastly—you didn't hear the radio?—Ras Asahe's fled the country. Emmanuelle went with him.”

“Why should Asahe do that? Are you
sure?
Has he—”

“Only mentioned Emmanuelle. ‘I suppose you know Emmanuelle's gone away,' he said to me, but I was afraid to ask, I was afraid he wouldn't stay calm. Oh my God, I thought you'd never come. I phoned the
boma
and said I couldn't come back, I was feeling ill or something. I couldn't leave him alone. I don't know what's happened … with them. He doesn't mention Margot. ‘Emmanuelle's gone'—that's all. And then we just sat with nothing to say. I don't know what he thinks about finding me in the house as if I owned the place. Well—I don't think he notices anything at the moment. But why come
here?
Why to you?”

“Oh my darling … I'm sorry … don't worry.” He looped her hair behind her ears—she was so pretty, now, with her hair grown. He wanted to kiss her, and doing so, not caring that Kalimo had come out to throw tea-leaves on the compost, felt the whole warm body fill the shape it had made for itself within him.

“How long will he stay?”

“My love, don't worry.”

“Now I won't be able to come here tonight.” She suddenly pressed her pelvis up against him in misery.

“Bloody hell. Oh come, why shouldn't you. We simply won't offer any explanation, that's all.”

“Yes. Yes. —Oh why choose here, why couldn't he have gone somewhere else.”

“It's all right, it's all right.” He stroked her hair as if it were some delightful new texture he had never had in his fingers before.

“Would you like to make love to me now?”

“Of course.”

“Damn him,” she said. They nursed each other against their resentment.

He went with her to her car, touching her hair. As she started the engine she turned to him a smile of pure happiness. “So I'm coming.” He nodded vociferously. She lingered over him a moment longer: “You've got dust in every line of your face.” He understood what she was saying. “I know, my darling.”

And there was the man and his misery waiting.

Bray went in, to him.

He felt conscious of his own height, his heavy, healthy muscular bulk—his wholeness—as he stood there; it seemed to owe an apology, to be an affront. He took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his bush jacket and gestured it to Hjalmar before taking one.

“Anyone have any idea why Asahe should have done it?” he said.

The haggard blond face winced into life. “He was at the hotel on Wednesday evening—she rushed in and said she was going out for an hour. She came back very late—must have, I had already tidied up and gone to bed, and she wasn't home yet. Then on Thursday I understand she took some clothes to the cleaner and insisted they must be done the same day. Apparently she begged Timon—the head—waiter—you know—it was his day off and she asked him to pick them up when he came from town. She didn't want her mother to know about it, you see—so she must have already decided then.… Friday she was quite normal, quite normal, nothing … and in the afternoon she said she was going with a few friends for the weekend at Matinga, to the dam. She even, came into the office and asked me to get her water skis out of the storeroom. Can you believe it?” The face went blank again. He got up suddenly, struggling slowly out of the chair so that Bray had to hold back the urge to put out his hands to help him, as from interference in a private act that should not be observed. The man walked across the room, his jacket peaked up crushed over his shoulders; faltered in sudden loss of purpose. “She was with me in the storeroom and we looked among the rubbish for the water skis. She said to me had I never tried, and I told her we didn't do it when I was a youngster, and she said but you used to ski properly in the snow and you use the same muscles—she said I must come one day and try. She said, you feel powerful, don't you, when everything is rushing past—you feel you can do anything you want.”
He began to shake his head very hard in order to be able to go on. “She actually went with me to get the water skis.”

Bray sat down on the stool with the ox-thong seat the boys at the carpenter's shop had made for him. There was nothing to offer but patience.

“I told her that was exactly the way I used to feel in Austria. Funnily enough, just what I used to think. And then she went to her room with the skis and I never saw her again. I had to go down to the cold storage in town and when I got back I was told she'd left for Matinga.”

“Didn't see her again?”

He began to talk excitedly. “I mean we expected her Sunday night, sometime, that's all, we didn't think anything.… On Sunday I'm just seeing that the chairs are put out in the beer garden, and Timon comes up, there's a phone call. Well, you know … I said, let someone else take it, can't you. Then he said, it's from Dar-es-Salaam, it's Miss Emmanuelle. I told him, Dar-es-Salaam! It's Matinga! I wasn't worried, I thought, she wants to stay another night.”

“She phoned you from Dar-es-Salaam?”

“She was on the airport. I didn't believe her. She kept on telling me, listen, Ras and I are in Dar-es-Salaam, we are leaving for London in a few minutes. She couldn't hear me well. I shouted to her, live with him here, Emmanuelle. You don't have to run away. She lost her temper. She said didn't I realize she wasn't ‘playing the fool'—those were her exact words—she wasn't ‘playing the fool,' Ras was in great danger and he couldn't have stayed. That's what she said.”

“And the announcement on the radio?”

Hjalmar was sunk back in the chair. “Well, we were cut off then. I phoned, I tried to get a connection from here … by the time we got through to Dar-es-Salaam again they were gone. Margot wouldn't believe me, I had to repeat over and over again, everything, like I'm telling you … She went hysterical, why hadn't I called her to the phone. And then Stephen heard on the news that Asahe, with a white girl and so on—no name—had slipped out of the country. They must have been at our airport in the afternoon waiting for the plane just two miles from where we were sitting in the hotel. People say he was in some political trouble. Can you think why he should be in political trouble?”

He was eager to turn this mind to reasonable supposition. “Hjalmar, honestly, whenever we spoke together he gave me the impression of being a staunch supporter of whatever the government might choose to do. Perhaps some pressure of personalities, at work … ? But suppose someone were trying to jostle him out of his position at the radio, he wouldn't have to disappear out of the country, would he.”

“I've been to the police.” He shrugged. “I tried to get hold of Roly but he wasn't in town, I couldn't … all she says, I want to know word for word … why didn't you call me to the phone. Night and day.” He leaned forward and whispered into Bray's face: “I don't know any more what Emmanuelle said on the phone. I don't know if perhaps she didn't say something else, I don't know if I talked to her at all.”

Bray did what he would not have known how to do a year ago. He gripped Wentz's two hands, pinned them a moment on the chair arms. “What about Dando …?”

Such bewilderment came into the face, such confusion that he dropped the question. The man obviously had fled without waiting for Dando to return; somehow let go, lost hold … No wonder Rebecca was uneasy to be with him.

“London's a good place for them to have gone. You will hear soon from her there. One can always arrange things in London—friends, money, and so on.” Olivia. But quick on the thought, reluctance: to spin a new noose, draw this house and Wiltshire together, produce, in Emmanuelle, evidence that a life unknown to Wiltshire existed here. As if somehow the lines of the girl could be traced in Emmanuelle, so different!

It was not possible to give Hjalmar Wentz any relief. He could not be distracted. If one did try, there was blankness; what had happened had run rank over his whole mind and personality for the time being. It was destroying him but at the same time it was all that held him together: attempt to disentangle him and he would fall apart sickeningly.

So it was Emmanuelle; Emmanuelle and Ras Asahe; the Friday afternoon and the telephone call from Dar-es-Salaam on Sunday night. The three of them sat in the old Colonial Service chairs in Bray's living-room for the next few evenings while Hjalmar Wentz talked. His face had taken on a perpetually querulous expression and the middle
finger of each hand, inert on either arm of the worn chair, twitched so that the tendons up to the wrist trembled under the skin.

“When she went with me to the storeroom, I wonder if she didn't want to talk to me … eh? Perhaps I said something … I put her off without knowing …”

“Oh I don't think so. You and she get on so well. If she'd meant to say anything, she'd've, well …”

The blue eyes continued to search inwardly. Bray took the glass away from the hand and topped up the whisky, but drink didn't help, you couldn't even make him drunk, he held the glass and forgot it was there. “Why say that about ‘feeling you could do anything'? I should have said, what d'you mean, ‘anything.'”

Rebecca had remarked to Bray, “It's better for him to drive us crazy about what he thinks he did wrong, poor soul—at least it keeps him from thinking how calculating she was—right down to the business of her skis.”

But Bray could not help looking for some reassurance that would hold. “Hjalmar, was what she did so extraordinary to you—after all? You say she's really very attached to the man. Perhaps you even feel responsible in a way, for the loyalty she probably feels to him? Because you and Margot—well, your children grew up in an atmosphere where Africans were regarded as people in need of championing—you know what I'm getting at?—If something terrible threatened him (we have to believe her) and she helped him to get away, well … you yourself, in Germany when Margot …”

He didn't know what there was in this that was so destructive to Hjalmar. He saw the face of a man falling, falling, crashing from beam to beam through glass and dust and torn lianas of the shelter that this ritual of discussion built to contain him. Into the silence lying like an irredeemable act between the two men, came the sound of Rebecca singing to herself in the shower under the impression that she could not be heard above the noise of the water. Bray found himself, appallingly, smiling. In Hjalmar's face only the fine fair skin seemed intact, the bone structure seemed to have loosened and his mouth was always a little parted as if he lacked oxygen. Now something faintly stirred there, a kind of coordination in the eyes, an awareness of the existence of other people, as if his wild glance had fallen upon a scrap of undated newspaper picked up in the rubble.

Bray began to carry drinks and glasses into the garden. In his present state Wentz noticed neither abrupt changes of subject nor apparently aimless activities. He picked up a stool and newspaper, stood a moment, slowly put the paper down, then picked it up and followed slowly to the fig tree. The dust in the air at the time of the year made a chiffon sky after sunset, matt grey and pink, and the atmosphere was thickened with the same colours reflected on soft, invisible suspensions of dust. Bray lit the lamp; Hjalmar said, “I'm sorry I walked in on you like this.”

“It's quite all right.”

But his self—protective stiffness seemed curiously to succeed in helping Wentz as all his sympathetic responsiveness had not. “No, I shouldn't be here. You ought've been left alone. I know that.”

“It doesn't matter, Hjalmar. In the end the only secrets one cares to keep are those one has with oneself—and even that's a mistake.”

“I don't follow you.”