A Guest of Honour (2 page)

“It was very much a gesture! He was tremendously in the air!”

“No, but he'd already mentioned it yesterday, isn't that so? You misunderstood him yesterday. A year? Six months?—What?”

White people given appointments in African countries after independence were usually employed on contract. “Good Lord, I've no idea, I'm sure he hasn't either. It's all in the air.”

Olivia went in to change the record and because it was, unexpectedly, Mozart—the harp and flute concerto—he lit a cigar to smoke while he enjoyed it. She wandered down to the herb garden and
brought back a branch of dill; “There he is,” she said. It was their owl, a youngster who had hatched out down in the field and was heard every night. She remarked that tomorrow she must pick the dill for drying. Everything was just as it was. But everything was changed. All had turned over in the barrel of the world and steadied itself again. She knew, if he didn't, that he was going.

It was night in Europe all the way. Dark rain in the afternoon in London when the plane took off, at Rome the airport a vast, bleary shopwindow shining blurred colours through rain. He hauled down his coat again to get out at Athens. The metal rail of the steps wheeled against the plane was icy-wet to his palm and in the streaming rain he did not smell the Aegean or thyme, as he had remembered from other journeys to Africa. Inside the airport under the yellow light the passengers sat down again on exhausted-looking chairs, bundled deep in their heavy clothing. An old woman with crinkly grey hair woke up at her post outside the lavatory and opened the door, smiling and grasping a filthy cleaning rag. He walked around to ease the cramp in his knees but there was a small circumference and within a few strides one found oneself back again at the shop, before which women and child passengers were drawn to gaze at embroidered aprons and
evzone
dolls. A girl of ten or eleven with the badges of the cantons of Switzerland sewn to the sleeve of her coat had exactly the look of Venetia at that age. He bought a postcard of brilliant blue sea and dazzling white ruins and tried to write, in what he could remember of Greek: Winter and darkness here but in Cambridge, perhaps, there's already spring yelling its head off? My love to you, James. Venetia had had a first in Greek, herself, only a year ago, and could laugh over the mistakes.

But that was the end of Europe. At Kano a huge moon shone and in a light brighter than a European winter afternoon the passengers made their way across the tarmac at three in the morning against the resistance of a heat of the day persisting all through the night as the sun persists in a stone it has warmed. There was a smell of wood-smoke; the men moving about beneath the belly of the plane had bare black feet. When the passengers climbed aboard again, their clothes felt hairy and the plane was airless. He put the coat away on the rack, apologizing, trying not to hamper other people in the general
move to rearrange gear; the anticipation of arrival, still some hours off, aroused in them not so much common purpose as a spread of instinct, as in the lifted heads of a herd become aware of the promise of water. When the sun rose some slumped off into sleep, but women began to examine the plastic bags in which they kept their hats, and, as the hard beams of the sun struck into the cabin on hairnets, pale lips, and stubble, queues formed for the lavatories. While he was writing on the customs and immigration form, BRAY, Evelyn James, and the number of his passport, someone was reading his name over his shoulder; he flexed it awkwardly, not because he minded, but in mild embarrassment. The queue for the lavatory moved along a notch, he glanced up and the man, carrying a flowered sponge-bag, caught his eye with a tired vacant stare that changed to an expression of greeting. The woman who had dozed beside him all night communicating the intimate rhythm of her breathing but never exchanging a word, suddenly began to talk like a bird who has the cover taken off its cage. He wedged himself between the seats to recover the shoe she had lost somewhere over a distant desert; she laughed, protested apologetically, and shook cologne down into her freckled bosom. Dragging back the little curtain from the oval window, she looked into the dazzling glare of space and said, “Glorious morning up here!” and they discussed with animation the cold and sudden winter that was left behind.

As he did not have a window seat he did not see the bush and the earth red as brick-dust and the furze of growth along the river-beds: not until the plane had come to a stop on the runway, and they were waiting for the health inspector to come aboard. He unhooked his safety belt and leaned over to look at an angle through the bleary lens on the far side of the aisle; and there it was, tiny and distorted and real, bush, earth, exactly as it remained in his mind always, without his thinking about it. It was underfoot. It was around. A black man in khaki shorts (used to be a white man in white stockings) sprayed a cloyingly perfumed insecticide over the passengers' heads as a precaution against the plane harbouring mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The doors opened; voices from without came in on currents of air; he emerged among the others into heady recognition taken in at all the senses, walking steadily across the tarmac through the raw-potato whiff of the undergrowth, the fresh, early warmth on hands, the cool
metallic taste of last night's storm at the back of the throat, the airport building with the five pink frangipani and the enclosure where out-of-works and children still hooked their fingers on the diamondmesh wire and gazed. The disembarking passengers were all strangers again, connected not with each other but to the mouthing, smiling faces and waving hands on the airport balcony. He knew no one but the walk was processional, a reception to him, and by the time he entered the building over the steps where, as always, dead insects fallen from the light during the night had not been swept away, it was all as suddenly familiar and ordinary as the faces other people were greeting were, to them. Waiting to be summoned to the customs officers' booths, the companions of the journey ignored each other. Only the man with the flowered sponge-bag, as if unaware of this useful convention, insisted on a “Here we are again” smile. “You're Colonel Bray?” He spoke round the obstacle of a woman standing between them. “Thought I recognized you in Rome. Welcome back.” “I must confess I don't remember you. I've been away a long time.” The man had long coarse strands of sun-yellowed hair spread from ear to ear across a bald head and wore sunglasses that rested on fine Nordic cheekbones. “I've only just come to live here—from down South. South Africa.” He made a resigned grimace assuming understanding— “My wife and I decided we couldn't stick it any longer. So we try it out here. I don't know; we'll see. I read you were coming back, there was an article in the paper, my wife Margot sent it to me in Switzerland, so I thought it was you. You were just in front of me when we got out in Rome.”

“Yes, I suppose I won't know my way around when I get into town.”

“Oh, it's still not New York or London, don't worry.” The man spoke with an accent, and a certain European kind of resignation. They laughed. “Well, in that case, we'll probably bump into each other in Great Lakes Road.”

“Please! Nkrumah Road.”

“I said I should have to learn my way round all over again.”

The man looked about quickly and lowered his voice. “This country can do with a few more white people like you, take it from me. People with some faith. Sometimes I even think I'm down South again, that's a fact. I've said it to my wife.”

A young black man with sunglasses and a thick, springy mat of hair shaped to a crew-cut by topiary rather than barbering had cut through the crowd with the encircling movement of authority. “This way, Colonel, sir. Your luggage will be brought to the entrance, if you'll just give me the tickets—”

The other man, bobbing in the wash of this activity yet smiling at it in hostly assumption of his own established residence in the country, was talking across the black man and the exchange of pleasantries, tickets, thanks: “—at the Silver Rhino, of course, you remember the place. Any time—we'd be very pleased—”

He thanked him, listening to the two men at once and hearing neither, and followed the firm rump in white shorts past barriers and through the reception hall. “That's all right, officer, this is Colonel Bray.” “I'm looking after Colonel Bray, no need to bother him.” A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, “Just a minute. I don't know about this—” but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, “That's okay, chum, it's our ole friend Mr. Kabata.” The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. Mr. Kabata said, “What's the matter with these people. Excuse me, I'll get a boy,” and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. The porter addressed both men as
Mukwayi,
the respectful term become servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man.

There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. Beside him, Kabata's strong thighs filled the seat. “It's not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I'd have waited to get it I would have turned up I don't know when. You know how it is just at the moment. Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sékou Touré.” There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta's face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. He said, “All very festive,” but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. The young man said, “You are from Gala district.” “I
was.
Why, are you
from there?” “From Umsalongwe. But my mother is a Gala. I have visited that place.” “Oh have you? Recently or when you were a child? Perhaps I was still there then?” “I think they'll be very pleased to see you back there.” He laughed. “I wonder if I'll get that far.”

“Oh, you must make trip” the young man said proudly. “I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. The road is much improved, much improved. You'll see. You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock.” Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. The car was approaching, was carrrying him through the market quarter of the town. Under the mango trees, barbers' mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed.

The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando—a Welshman—newly appointed as Attorney—General. When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. They gave him the African cook's special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again—he had done so in advance by letter—that he had an official lunch to attend. Bray's ears were filled with the strange echoes of exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept.

There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider's web made by the supporting beams of the roof. The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, here
and there showed a single stray strand out of place. The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath's weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released.

The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. The stale cool air of the room had heated; yet weariness receded, his head was left high and dry of it. There was silence and then he heard that there were voices in the silence droning somewhere, breaking off for breath, laughing—not softly, but softened by being almost out of earshot. Not quite. A voice separated, wound nearer, there was the starting up of a hiss (a hose, he thought) and he made out a word: not just as a particular combination of articulated sounds, but a meaning: “later on,” the compound word for this phrase, in the language that was spoken round the capital, and that he had never really known well.

He got up and went over to the main house for a bath. The sun in the garden was burning, dazzling, seizing. In the bathroom flies were buzzing themselves to death against the windowpanes. Roly was a bachelor and his house was the particular mixture of tranquil luxury and unchangeable dreariness that is a condition of households where white men live indulged in the sole charge of black male servants. The cistern of the lavatory drizzled into the pan constantly and couldn't be flushed properly, and the towels were stiff as a dress-shirt (Olivia had taken years to get people to learn to rinse the soap out of the washing), but an old fellow in a cook's hat put tea under the trees for him and carried off his crumpled suit to be pressed without being asked. A youth was cutting the tough grass with a length of iron bent at the end. Coarse and florid shrubs, hibiscus with its big flowers sluttish with pollen and ants and poinsettia oozing milky secretion, bloomed, giving a show of fecundity to the red, poor soil running baked bald under the grass, beaten slimy by the rains under the trees, and friable only where ants had digested it and made little crusty tunnels. A rich stink of dead animal rose self-dispersed, like a gas, every now and then as he drank his tea, and he got up and looked around, as he had done so many times before, and with as little success, to see if a rat or mole were rotting somewhere. Whatever it was could never be found; it was the smell of growth, they had long ago decided, at Gala, the process of decay and regeneration so accelerated,
brought so close together that it produced the reek of death-and-life, all at once. He strolled to the limits of the garden and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, but the grasses and thornbush on the other side (Dando's place was eight miles out of town) were too entangled for walking where there was no path. He listened to the bush and had the old feeling, in the bush, of being listened for. There were—or used to be—leopards on the outskirts of the town; Dando had once had his dog taken. He walked a hundred yards or so up the road, and, meeting a man on a bicycle, greeted him in the language that had come back to him as he lay in the room.