A Guest of Honour (11 page)

“He's essential, I should say. For the time being, anyway. People will get used to it. They'll learn to understand.”

“Oh he manages very well. But it's not what I want.”

“What's she doing here—the Englishwoman?”

“She was here before—she did the flower vases, things like that,” said Mweta. “And for the celebrations, Joy wanted someone, she wasn't sure she could manage.”

“Everything went off splendidly,” said Bray. “Not a hitch anywhere.”

“Let's go out there.” Mweta stood up in the middle of the room as if he were shedding it. They took the first door from the corridor into the park and fell into strolling step together, over the rough grass and under the sprinkled shade, as they had done, walking and talking, years ago. Mweta was smaller and more animated than Bray, and seen from the distance of the house, as they got farther away their progress would have been a sort of dance, with the small man surging a step ahead and bringing up short the attention of the taller one. They paused or went on, in pace with the rise and fall of discussion. Mweta was telling a story that displayed the unexpected shrewdness of Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, about whom Bray had heard many doubts expressed, not only by Roly Dando. “Of course if I'd kept Foreign Affairs for myself, Tola Tola would have been the one for Finance, but it was decided I couldn't hope to do it.”

“No, how could you.” No mention of the obvious choice of Shinza.

“Well, others have tried. In any case”—they exchanged a look— “Tola Tola's always there if Malenga needs advice.” Again, in spite of the silence over Shinza, so much taken for granted between them brought a qualifying remark: “If Malenga would ever admit it.”

They dismissed this with smiles. “What I might do”—Mweta gave way to the urge to seek reassurance for the rightness of decisions already made— “in a few months time—next year—if I reshuffle, I'd give Tom Msomane the Interior, shift Talisman Gwenzi to Finance, perhaps a double portfolio, let him keep Mines—” Bray's silence stopped him. “I know what people say about Tom. But he's a chap who can handle things, you know?—he's shrewd but he can pick up a delicate situation without smashing it. He's got, you know, tact. And for the Interior—problems of refugees, deportations, and so on. You should see the file. Just waiting for the celebrations to be over, and then they must be opened.” He gave a rough, nervous sniff. “I am thinking seriously about Tom.”

Bray said, “But for the Interior. Doesn't he take too personal a view? Won't he be inclined to settle old scores?”

“Well, maybe, that may be, but being in office, the responsibilities and so on. I think he'll be all right. Sometimes you have to take one risk against another.”

Bray didn't know whether Mweta was inviting a question about Mso support, or not. His face was screwed up, momentarily, in a grimace against the sun or his thoughts; perhaps he felt he had made enough confessions.

“I'd rather see him safe in Posts and Telegraphs, myself.”

Mweta nodded to acknowledge the joke, rather than in agreement.

“Adamson, you never thought about Shinza—for Foreign Minister?” He phrased it carefully that way, but Mweta was quick to take it up the way it really was— “Look, I'm prepared to do something for Edward because”—he shook his head wildly as if to get rid of something— “because he thinks he taught me everything, and—because the past is the past, I'm not the one to try to get away from that. —But what it can be, I don't know, that's my trouble.”

“He's a brilliant man.”

“You still think so?”

“Oh come, you know so.”

“James,” Mweta said, making it clear this was to please him, “what
can I offer Shinza? You think an under—secretaryship or something like that? Because that's all I've got. And it wouldn't be what
he
wants. He wants to change the world and use me and this country to do it for him, never mind what happens to the country in the meantime. I can make him an under-secretary—that's all.”

“You can't do that.”

Mweta opened his firm lips and closed them again without having spoken.

“I should be inclined,” said Bray, hearing himself come out more gently pontifical than he had wished, “to find him some special position not directly involved in actual government, but recognizing his claims to elder-statesmanship-out-of-office. Mm? I should have thought he'd have done darned well as representative at U.N., for instance. For a start.” He remained old-maidishly composed while Mweta stared at him in bitter astonishment. “Our ambassador to United Nations? Edward Shinza? After what he said? After what he said to the Commonwealth Secretary? His so-called minority reports at the last conference, not six months before Independence? After what we've had from him?”

“Make him spokesman for the majority and you'll see. You talk as if he'd started a rival party.”

“He acts as if he has! A lot of people think it would be better if he had! Come out in the open!” Mweta began levelling with his heel a trail of fresh molehills on the grass. “—What a nuisance, these things—If he stops sulking away down there at home, well … It's up to him….”

“I hope you're not going to let him sulk.”

“You've been to see him, James?”

“I don't know if I'll get the chance. I couldn't believe he wouldn't be here for Independence.”

Mweta shrugged; appealed suddenly. “We're going to talk every few weeks like this. We'll make it a regular thing.” They had turned back towards the house, rising red and solid out of the hazy, unassertive shapes of the bush.

“But my dear Adamson, I shall have to go back pretty soon. I was thinking of next week. You're all getting down to work again now. Time the guests left.”

Mweta stopped again. “Back? But you are back.”

“I don't know what I could do, if I stayed,” Bray said, smiling.

The conventions would make it easy for them both; whenever they reached this point they had simply to go on following his polite pretence that he had never thought of himself as anything but a visitor, and Mweta's polite pretence that a place had been provided for him as something other than that. It was so easy, very tempting—he looked at the ugly house looming up in their way—one could walk round the past they had inhabited, as one does round a monument.

“No, no, now don't—” Mweta said with some difficulty, as years ago he would have said of someone from the Colonial Office: “They mustn't come their English with me.” He said grudgingly, “What is it you're doing over there in England, really?”

“Yes, it's a very lazy sort of life, I suppose, it's quite astonishing how well one takes to doing very little—” Bray turned the question to an accusation, cheerfully admitted; making it easy for the other man—it was part of the game.

Mweta didn't answer, implying that this sort of waffle could not reach him. But he didn't do much better, himself; in the cross voice that disguises lack of conviction, using the hearty “we,” he said, “What nonsense to talk about going next week. We can't allow that.”

They turned to other things. Mweta wanted to discuss the Kundi harbour report, after all, now that they were alone. He watched Bray's face when he came to the points about which he himself was particularly worried. There was the old sense of seeking correction of his own assumptions and findings. Then they found themselves back at the house again, with the young men in attendance, Joy going in and out, and the Harrison woman pouring tea. Telephones rang, the secretary brought in a cable, Mweta was called away and Bray waited to say good—bye to him. When he returned the convention fell quickly into place again; it was all
bonhomie,
playful scolding and exaggeratedly graceful regrets, plans, and promises— “We don't want to hear this talk about England, ay?” “All right, not a word about England.” “I've told him, England's for old men to go back and die in, ay?” Joy would phone again; they would be meeting at a reception the following week, anyway. Mweta's lively hand was firm on his shoulder. Yes, that was fine, Bray said. (He would be gone by then; his flight was already booked.) Mweta insisted on coming out onto the steps of the entrance. He looked young, quick, beaming, waved
his hand with a pause, like a salute, and then turned away inside at once. Already he existed like that, for the future, in Bray's mind. He would have rejected with distaste any suggestion that Mweta had been a protégé, but he did have, that day, the sense of relinquishment with which, as an interested party, an older person sees a young one launched and going out of sight.

For some reason he had not given Olivia an exact date for his return, though his seat on the plane was booked; he was thinking he perhaps might stop off in Spain for a week, on the way. He had never really had a proper look at the Prado.

Three days before he was to leave a letter came, delivered by hand. Mweta asked him to accept an immediate appointment as special educational adviser—a newly created post—to investigate the organization of schools, technical schools, and adult education projects in the provinces, beginning with the largest, the northern province, Gala. He stopped himself from reading it through again. He passed it over to Roly Dando.

“Someone thought that one up quickly,” Dando said.

They roared with laughter, not because anything was funny, but because Bray was moved and excited in a way that couldn't be acknowledged. Shut away there behind a Great Wall of responsibilities, echoed by sycophants, surrounded by the jailers of office, Mweta had torn out of the convention: Mweta hadn't believed any of it for a minute.

Dando couldn't keep his mouth shut. “Bray's been offered the Ministry of Pot-hooks and Carpentry, is that it—oh yes, but what he'd really been angling for was Pectoral Development and Backscratching, well, so I've heard.” People laughed but understood that there was something in it; appointments were being handed out every day as the administrative changeover took place and various development plans got off to a start. Most of the appointees were unpronounceable names and black faces that the white shopkeepers and mine officials had never heard of before. But in law, agriculture, public health and education, there were many white men: foreign experts, and a few familiar faces, like that of Colonel Evelyn James Bray, who, in the old days, had shown themselves more concerned with the interests of the Africans than with the life of the white people in the colony. Among
the group in which Bray moved in the capital, friends of friends passed through on their way to new projects or jobs in different parts of the country; there was much talk of the finance, equipment, staff or lack of it, that people expected to manage with. Bray was simply another one of them, not quite sure how he would set about what he was supposed to achieve, given no assurance of any particular resources being available to him. Most people thought that this job of his had been an understood thing all along; no one seemed to remember that he had been going home. The drinking party that Roly Dando had arranged as a send-off became just another gathering out at Dando's place.

The day the letter arrived, a fierce stab of uncertainty had come to Bray when he returned to the room in the garden with it in his pocket. If it had come only three days later, he would have been gone. It would never have brought him back.

Mweta was in Nairobi at a meeting with Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Nyerere, and he did not see him again. When he had talked to the Minister of Education, discussed the terms of reference of his job and settled that he would go to Gala within two weeks, he wrote to Olivia. He told her he “suspected” the job had been created specially in order to offer him something; he did not need to tell her that it was one that needed doing and that perhaps he might be able to do better than most people—she would know that as well as he did. He poked fun at it a little, and said that he'd promised to undertake a trial period of six months or so, long enough to have a good look around and write some sort of preliminary report. He was to get a government house—back to the old “basic furniture supplied.” By the time he'd made sure it was habitable, and that he could get on with some work there, she would come out and join him. Surely Venetia could be trusted to manage the baby by herself, by then?—The only thing he did not tell her was that he had had his seat on a flight back to England when Mweta's letter came.

Bray bought himself a secondhand Volkswagen from someone “getting out” and drove north to take up his appointment. He left the capital on a low grey morning that would lift to a hot day; Roly Dando had gone to work but Festus in his cook's hat and the garden boy stood by to watch him go. Vivien Bayley had brought a present of whatever Penguins she could find at the local bookshop:
Diary of a Nobody, The Three Caesars, Stamboul Train, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Plague—
“Well, I always think you want to read things you know when you're living away somewhere, alone.” They were in a basket on the back seat with a bottle of whisky and some files that had come up from the Ministry of Education at the last minute. He drove out through the main street of the town and saw Mrs. Evelyn Odara trying to park her car outside the new post office and several other people whose faces were now familiar to him, going about their daily business. The vendors of wooden animals were polishing them under the flame trees; the unemployed were hawking plastic bags of tomatoes. As the town ravelled out towards the gold mines lorries swayed past him filled with concrete pipes and building materials, stiff pig carcasses from the cold storage and rattling crates from the brewery. Then there were the landscaped approaches to the mine properties themselves, all flowery traffic roundabouts, signboards, and beds of cannas and roses, and then the stretches of neat colour—washed rectangles of housing for the African
miners, a geometric pattern scribbled over by the mop—heads of pawpaw trees, smoking chimneys, washing lines, creepers and maize patches, and broken up by the noise and movement of people. In twenty minutes it was all gone; he passed the Bush Hill Arms, its Tudor façade pocked with wasp nests and a “For Sale” notice up (someone else “getting out”), and then there was nothing at all—everything: the one smooth road, the trees, the bamboo, and the sudden open country of the
dambos
where long grasses hid water, and he saw at last, again, the single long—tailed shrike that one always seemed to see in such places, hovering with its ink—black tail—plume like the brushstroke of a Chinese ideograph.