A Guest of Honour (71 page)

“I'm not like you. It doesn't matter for me. But there's one thing that matters a lot—I'd decided I couldn't stay down there among my friends any longer, before it began with you and me. I came to Gala because I wanted to get away from that.”

A moment later she said, “You're thinking about the first time, in your living-room.”

“Yes.”

“You're right. It did seem it was like the others.”

“You wanted to show me I had a need of you before I could begin to feel sorry for you.”

“You were, already. That poor girl with her kids. And where's the husband?”

“Yes. I ought to have offered you my house instead of letting you pay for those weeks at the Fisheagle.”

“But after you went down to see Mweta and came back again you made it right. From the day we went to the lake it was all different. I was different.”

“Were you?”

“You made me different.”

“Have I reformed you, my darling, your paunchy old lover. You don't want other men any more.” But he knew it made her sad to hear him refer to himself as getting old.

“Living with you is different from anything else.”

“But it has been for me, too.”

“Oh don't say that.”

“Why not?”

“Not has been.”

“My darling! I just mean the time at Gala, that's all. Kiss me.” He turned to her quickly a moment.

She rested content, against his shoulder; she waved at a solitary figure at the roadside.

“You don't think Gordon has … well … presented you with a certain element of weakness?”

“How d'you mean?”

“Well you told me he would never dream of thinking you could be interested in men.”

She gave a small chuckle. “That's because Gordon's so sure of himself in everything. Gordon can cope.”

“But that's arrogance, pride. You've proved it a weakness in him, haven't you?”

“In a way. But you say you believe in sexual freedom.”

“We're talking about Gordon—he doesn't see it as sexual freedom, it's quite the opposite—he doesn't even see the possibility of sexual freedom for you.”

“Of course it wasn't sexual freedom. Just that the whole thing didn't mean much. Whether he thought me incapable of bothering about any man, or I thought it didn't matter whether I did or not—it all amounted to the same thing.” Her weight was slack and warm against him. “I'm very jealous of Olivia. I suppose that's what it is: I have a horrible feeling when I think of her.”

“Why do you think you're so jealous, since you're different from me, with my stupid sexual jealousy about the other men?”

“I don't know.” She seemed to wait for the answer to come to her. “Because
you
don't separate sex and love. —Do you? If you slept with her again it would be because you love her.”

What she had said did not conjure up for him Olivia, but Gordon—the red road was drawn away under his eyes through the windscreen already dirtied with insects, and it was Gordon he saw, talking away, coming across the strip of scrub between his house and the Tlumes'.

“I don't know why—I feel so marvellously sleepy. Keep sort of dropping off.”

She slept for more than half an hour, thirty or forty miles. His mind was calm. It was not that he had no doubts about what he was doing, going to do; it seemed to him he had come to understand that one
could never hope to be free of doubt, of contradictions within, that this was the state in which one lived—the state of life itself—and no action could be free of it. There was no finality, while one lived, and when one died it would always be, in a sense, an interruption. He went over and over in his mind the possibilities of raising money for Shinza quickly. Perhaps, the way things were going, Shinza would be dead before he could arrange anything; perhaps Shinza would go into exile over the border, and Mweta would hang on a while. Perhaps there would be many more burned houses, more blood running as easily as chickens' blood in fighting in which the real cause was not understood, in which the side-reactions of little groups of people battled out apparently uselessly the passions of the real struggle to which their situation—the years of slavery, isolation, colonization—committed them. There would be waste and confusion. He was party to it, part of it. The means, as always, would be dubious. He had no others to offer with any hope of achieving the end, and as he accepted the necessity of the end, he had no choice.

The instincts in himself that he had unconsciously regarded as the most civilized, unwilling to risk—as a fatal contradiction in terms—his own skin or that of others for the values of civilization, were outraged. He was aware (driving between the swish of tall grass stroked by the car's speed) of going against his own nature: something may be worth suffering for as a matter of individual conviction, but nothing is worth bringing about the suffering of others. If people kill in a cause that isn't mine, there's no blood on my shoes; therefore stand aside. But he had put aside instead this “own nature.” It was either a tragic mistake or his salvation. He thought, I'll never know, although other people will tell me for the rest of my life. Rebecca's hair fluttered against his shoulder in the draught from the window. He passed a swampy
dambo
and there were the widow-birds hovering their long black tails. A snake lay coiled in the road and he avoided it; the next car would kill it. There was also in his mind the possibility that he would go and see Mweta one last time, in the capital. The preposterousness of the thing lay like a jewel that has fallen into a pool and rolled among the stones like any other pebble. If one could pick it out … and even now, since only audacity was possible, Mweta might seize upon Shinza, not the enemy but the only chance. … He saw himself actually walking up the steps to the red brick façade of
that huge house; he supposed the image would fade out as the shape of an hallucination born of obsession fades, with health, into an empty wall.

His mind scarcely ran ahead to Shinza, because
that
he was being borne towards as surely as the road was the one to the capital. Haffajee's Garage. And if Shinza had moved off to another part of the country, it did not matter. He had the list. Shinza was not a man who depended on you; it was rather that he banked on what you would have to do, driven from within yourself. He knew one doesn't ask of a man what is not there already.

And if Hjalmar is attacked in the house?—Why should that be, there was no anti-white feeling as such in Gala's state of siege. But by hazard—someone with a petrol-soaked rag flaming on a stick turning down one street rather than another; one of Fielding's vigilantes losing his nerve at a shadow? But what Hjalmar had in him was survival. Hjalmar would not escape that. It was in his instinct for staying put, there in Gala; he fears nothing so much as the situation of his marriage. —I'll have to go and see Margot, he thought, feeling the girl give a shuddering sigh in her sleep; I can tell her quite honestly he's not making a bad recovery. Curiously, although the nervous breakdown had had the effect of making Hjalmar lose interest in what was once his passion to talk politics, so that they had never talked of what was happening as anything more coherent than a series of sensational village events, he had the impression now that Hjalmar understood perfectly what his—Bray's—position in Gala had been these last weeks, as if the shattering of Hjalmar's own core had opened and laid twitching bare a heightened receptivity to the unspoken, to the inner reality that such talk itself buries. Hjalmar had made a remark, one of the nights when they had watched the township burning from the garden: “The fire's in the minds of men, not in the roofs of houses”—it came from somewhere in Dostoevski.

Rebecca woke up. Her cheek was marked with the folds of his bush jacket, her eyes were still dazed and darkened with sleep. He stopped the car a minute for her. She found herself a culvert and came back along the road in the sun, smiling, twirling a lily she had picked. She was wearing her old jeans and moved a little awkwardly, perhaps conscious that they showed her to be as she had always been, a bit heavy in the thigh. She looked so young when she woke up—like that every morning. Life seemed to breathe out of her skin as vapour does
through the earth above a mineral spring; wherever he touched her neck or face there was a pulse beating.

They stopped late to eat Kalimo's lunch, sitting on the newspaper wrappings because the ground was richly damp. They felt lazy to talk about anything important, after all; it would carry away into the quiet and airy savannah forest as their voices must be doing, wandering, far. There was no sound of birds, in the middle of the day. But Rebecca did say to him, at last, pouring the coffee from the thermos, “If it's not going to be Switzerland, well, what?”

“I'll know in a few days. I'll tell you just a few facts for now, because I shouldn't talk about this at all. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”

“Not even here?” She lifted a hand at the forest, half-joking.

“But when I know exactly, I'll tell you everything. Because you must know.”

The dappled shade made a shawl on her arms, her eyes were on him. “So far it's just this—there may be something I can do—for Shinza. And I will do it. Whatever it is.”

She did not say, what about me? She got up as if to begin tidying up the remains of the meal and then came over behind him where he squatted on his haunches and put her arms around his neck and pressed his head back against her belly.

He said, “I'll tell you everything.”

“I know you will. This time.”

She came and squatted in front of him and took off his glasses. She touched the skin round his eyes and played the old game, looking into the shortsighted opacity that she complained of. He said, “If I start kissing you we'll never get there.” She picked up the thermos. “Shall I pour the rest away?”

“Well, we might still feel like some later.”

“It won't be hot.”

“Never mind, it'll be wet.”

As they moved back to the car two children appeared out of the forest; or they had been there, behind the trees, patiently watching for the moment to come forward. She gave into their cupped hands the remains of the bread and cheese and the last of the eggs with small fish in them. Before the car had driven off the two frail figures had disappeared once more into the forest.

Not long after they came upon what was evidently a road-block that
had been half cleared. Branches and stones had been dragged aside and there was just sufficient room for the car to pass. There was nobody about, but it was not far from the turn-off to the cattle-dipping station sixty miles from Matoko. No rain had fallen yet in this part of the country; towards three o'clock the heat and the monotonous rhythms of motion, of the hot current of air coming past the windows with the sound of someone whistling through his teeth, now made him drowsy. They changed over; Rebecca drove but he did not sleep, merely stretched himself as much as he could in the small car and rested his eyes away from the hypnotic path of the road. Now he was the one to light cigarettes for her. He had shut his eyes for a moment, when he heard her make a small sound of impatience beside him, and he roused himself and saw that up ahead, quite far, was another road-block. There was a heat—mirage that magnified the jumble of branches and green; they couldn't make out very well whether it stretched across the whole road or not. She slowed down and they kept their eyes strained on the obstacle. But of course she could see so much better than he. “Damn it, it
is
right across. Now wha'd'we do?”

“Just keep going slowly.” He put his head out the window; the grass was very high, elephant grass, very dry, last season's grass still standing; a dead tree had been dragged into the road, roots and all, broken branches had been piled upon it. She stopped and turned off the engine.

“Let's have a look. You stay in, a minute.”

He walked slowly to the barrier, climbed over to the other side, walked up and down it and climbed back. He came to the car, smiling. “How energetic are you feeling? We'll have to do some hard labour.” She got out and they started with the easy stuff, the broken branches. But the tree trunk, with its dead roots clasping a great boulder of red earth with which it must have been uprooted in some storm, would not budge. She began to laugh helplessly at their grunting efforts. “Wait a moment, my girl. What about trying the jack? If we get it under this hollow bit here, maybe we can get a little elevation and then heave.”

The jack wasn't kept in the boot, in the front, but under the back seat, because the clamp that held it in its proper place had been broken ever since he bought the car. He got in and dumped the picnic
basket on the front seat and jerked up the back one in a release of dust. At the same time something burst out of the grass, he felt himself grabbed by the leg, by the waist, and he was caught between the steering wheel and the driver's seat, somehow desperately hampered by the size and strength of his body. At once there were people all round and over and in the car, there had been no sound and now there was nothing but yells and shouts and his great, his lung-bursting, muscle-tearing effort and he did not know if they were yelling, the men who were upon him, or if Rebecca was screaming. Even greater than his effort to defend himself was his terrible effort to make himself heard by her, to reach her with his voice and make her run. They had his legs out of the car and the back of his neck hit the rim of the floor and he was deafened, his voice became a silent scream to him as pain felled him for a moment, but then a brute strength burst up in him and he got to his feet, he was aware of himself staggered gigantically to his feet among men smaller than he. Then he was below them, he was looking up at them and he saw the faces, he saw the sticks and stones and bits of farm implements, and sun behind. Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a word of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I've been interrupted, then—