A Guest of Honour (76 page)

Although there was the half—sheet of paper in the coat pocket, there was also what Bray had said the night before they left Gala. She had told him—not in so many words—the only thing she feared about Gala was being sent away, and he said, I know; but I'll be there. And when she had said, how can we go together, and he knew England was in her mind, he had said, perhaps we can manage. He had said:
we'll decide what to do.
(Sitting one afternoon in something called the Ceylon Tea Shop, she suddenly remembered that precisely.) We'll decide what to do. Perhaps the code of the paper didn't read that he was going to set her down somewhere, gently, regretfully. It might have meant they were going to Sardinia, where the spear—fishing was so good. No, not really that … but somewhere together outside Gala; they had never had any existence, outside Gala.

In the teashop with the blown—up photographs of tea-estates and the framed quiz
How Much Do You Know about Tea?
facing her, she came back again to the fact that on that last night they had not made love properly. It was she who had decided, because they were both so tired and had to get up early, that they wouldn't finish it. He fell asleep inside her body and there was the thought, like a treat, that
they would make love in a big bed for the first time the next night, in the capital. So he had never come to her, she had never come to him; it had never been reached, that particular compact of fulfilment. She passed through days now when she was racked by an obsession of regret about this. Of all the deprivation, the loss, the silence, the emptiness, the finality, this became the most urgent, and the cruellest, because urgency itself was a form of mockery thrown back at her from the blank of death: there was nothing for it to be directed at. She told herself that they had made love a hundred times, the compact was made—what did one more time matter? But she hungered for that one last time. It had been given up, for nothing, lost along with the rest, for no reason. She asked herself again and again what difference it would have made. But the answer was fiercely that she wanted it. It was hers. Before death came. It had belonged to her; it was not death that had taken it—what death took was unarguable—it had been forgone. She thought about it so much that she produced in herself the physical manifestations of the unfinished act. The lips of her body swelled and she knew with horror the desire of that night that now would never be satisfied.

She felt afraid of herself.

The smell of stale cigarettes in ashtrays was the smell of Gala after burnings.

Walking round the shivering ponds, down the avenues of leaves sodden as old newspaper under the trees of parks, she saw the nodules of next year's buds on the stripped branches, the callousness of the earth endlessly renewing itself. Would she, too, seek again—she tried to reduce it to the baldest fact—that coming up of one flesh against another until like a little stone breaking at last the surface of a still pool, sensation in ring after ring flows out from that little stone, that pip fructifying from its hiding place, the plumb centre of her being … she thought: that's all it is. She grew afraid. It would come back, commonplace desire. Everything else would come round again; be renewed. She sat in the bus and felt the threat of ordinary bodies around her.

There were days when hammering fists of anguish ceased for no more reason than they would begin again. Then she cried. She had begun to do exercises on the floor of the hotel room every morning because she had read in some newspaper that you could get through
long periods simply by going through the motions of some routine, and she lay there on the maid's Hoovered carpet and the tears ran from the outer corners of her eyes. She wept because the sense of Bray had come back to her so strongly, as if he had never been dead on that road and it had never happened. What was she doing in the hotel room? The sense of him was restored to her and she did not have to look for signs of him or question him, because he was gone and there was nothing more to find. And so he died, for her, again. The Irish maid came to clean and the marks of weeping could not be hidden from those hen-sharp eyes beneath the hackle-like fringe; she said that she'd just heard how her children were missing her. The lie became a tenderness towards them and a longing to see them; and the fantasy of walking with them in London changed to an intention. In a few days she would work out what sort of letter to write to Gordon about them. She did not know how or why she expected Gordon to hand the children over to her. She supposed everything might even seem to go on as before, with Gordon satisfied that he had a wife and children somewhere, only just a little more remote than they had always been.

One afternoon she was coming out of the supermarket in the suburban shopping street near the hotel when somebody said her name. It came like a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned. A tall, very slender girl with a narrow, sallow face curtained in straight black hair was leaning casually on a wheeled shopping basket. It was Emmanuelle. “I thought it was you but it couldn't be—are you over on holiday?”

“My family live in England. I've been here about two weeks.” She held tightly closed her packet containing one pear and one orange; evidence of her solitariness. “And you—you live round about?”

Emmanuelle's hair wrapped itself across her neck like a scarf, in the wind. “We're just down the road. Beastly basement flat. But we're getting a big studio next month—if we don't go back, instead.”

“Back? Could Ras go back?”

“It's someone else.”

“I'm sorry—I just thought—”

They stood there talking, two women who had never liked one another much. Emmanuelle's elegant hands mimed a sort of trill of inconsequence along the handle of her basket. “That's all right. No
drama. We're friends and all that. I'm living with Kofi Ahuma—he's just published his first novel, but now his father's in favour again in Ghana, and he can indulge his homesickness. So we may go to Ghana. Are your children with you? We're producing a children's play together—he wrote it and I did the music. It's on at the Theatre Club for the next three days, they might enjoy it.”

“No, they're not here.”

Emmanuelle gave the quick nod of someone who reminds herself of something that hasn't interested her very much. “Oh my God—you were in that awful accident, weren't you?” She was mildly curious. “What happened to Colonel Bray—he was beaten up?”

“He was killed.”

“How ghastly.” She might have left Ras but she was still armed with his opinions. “Of course, he was with Shinza and that crowd. Poor devil. These nice white liberals getting mixed up in things they don't understand. What did he expect?”

The two airlifts of troops who were flown in at Mweta's request for help from Britain succeeded in bringing order to the country for the time being. It was the same order of things that had led to disorder in the first place. But Mweta was back in his big house and Shinza was in exile in Algiers and Cyrus Goma, Basil Nwanga, Dhlamini Okoi and many others were kept in detention somewhere and—for the time being—forgotten.

Hjalmar Wentz was unharmed in the house in Gala and it was he who packed up Bray's things after Bray's death and sent them to his wife, Olivia.

No one could say for certain whether, when Bray was killed on the way to the capital, he was going to Mweta or to buy arms for Shinza. To some, as his friend Dando had predicted, he was a martyr to savages; to others, one of those madmen like Geoffrey Bing or Conor Cruise O'Brien who had only got what he deserved. In a number devoted to “The Decline of Liberalism” in an English monthly journal he was discussed as an interesting case in point: a man who had “passed over from the scepticism and resignation of empirical liberalism to become one of those who are so haunted by the stupidities and evils in human affairs that they are prepared to accept apocalyptic solutions, wade through blood if need be, to bring real change.”

Hjalmar Wentz also put together Bray's box of papers and gave them over to Dando, who might know what to do with them. Eventually
they must have reached the hands of Mweta. He, apparently, chose to believe that Bray was a conciliator; a year later he published a blueprint for the country's new education scheme, the Bray Report.

Nadine Gordimer's many novels include
The Lying Days
(her first novel),
The Conservationist,
joint winner of the Booker Prize,
Burger's Daughter, July's People, My Son's Story, None to Accompany Me, The House Gun
and, most recently,
The Pickup,
winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Africa. Her collections of short stories include
Something Out There
and
Jump.
In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives
in South Africa.

NOVELS
The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist / Burger's Daughter / July's People
A Sport of Nature / My Son's Story / None to Accompany Me
The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

STORY COLLECTIONS
The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country
Friday's Footprint / Not for Publication
Livingstone's Companions
A Soldier's Embrace / Something Out There
Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black / Life Times

ESSAYS
The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (
with David Goldblatt
)
Lifetimes under Apartheid (
with David Goldblatt
)
The Essential Gesture — Writing, Politics and Places (
edited by Stephen Clingman
)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR
Telling Tales

Copyright © Nadine Gordimer, 1970

First published in Great Britain in 1970

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408832646

Visit
www.bloomsbury.com
to find out more about our authors and their books. You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can
sign up for newsletters
to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers