A Guest of Honour (20 page)

But the “questioning” of the boy stood between Shinza and Mweta.

And himself? Would he forgive himself? Perhaps this agitation of his was a matter of not wanting to get his own hands dirty. That was his kind of dishonesty. Let it be done if it must be, but not by me, let me not put my hand to it, not by even so much as a signature at the bottom of a report on education. Was that it?

Yet he had an impulse to go straight to the capital at once; to Mweta; as if that would do away once and for all with ambiguities: his own as well as those of what had happened. —Aleke? He ought at least to talk to Aleke first, get the facts straight. Aleke must have been the one to take authority, to sign. He saw Aleke and himself, moving in and out about houses,
boma,
village street in Gala, entwining waving antennae when their paths crossed, senselessly as ants. But Aleke would never have shut a man away on his own initiative; then was it Aleke taking orders from Lebaliso? Aleke and Bray laughed at Lebaliso, a jerky little man who had taken over from Major Conner, whose batman he had been in the war. Lebaliso was a nonentity; Aleke certainly was not: both would do as they were told. Aleke was an efficient civil servant, independent but not politically minded or politically ambitious. If an order came from the capital, and it did not touch upon the day—to-day smooth running of his local administration, he would simply sign. Easy—going, confident, sitting on his veranda working at his papers among the noise of children, he knew what he was doing and presumed the people up there at the top knew what they were doing, too. After all, the government was PIP. On the solid convictions of people like Aleke governments come to power but are never threatened; Aleke would never change his mind about Mweta, or anything else.

Mweta had given Justice to Justin Chekwe; Bray didn't know him well, but Roly Dando called him a Gray's Inn pin—up boy— “Who knows what really lies under that nylon wig, I sat next him at dinner and caught him admiring himself in a soup spoon—” Dando talked so much: “Once you've been given Justice, you don't have much to do with justice any more. You keep the peace the way the big boys want it kept. Same with the Attorney—General's job—a pair of Keystone Cops, Justice and I, really, that's all. He'll be all right, I suppose, so long as Mweta stays on the straight and narrow.” He would phone Dando as soon as he got home; and decided as suddenly that it was
not the thing to do. The house had a party line and anyway the local exchange would hear every word. He recoiled from Roly's ventriloquist patter coming out of the distance.

While Bray was with Shinza he had felt like an adult reluctant to believe that a favourite child has lied or cheated. He was afraid, in Shinza's house, that Mweta
did
know. But now—alone to the horizon of gentle grasses with no sign from another human except the flash of a paraffin tin carried on a woman's head—he felt there was the possibility that Mweta really did not know, that the size of this unwieldy country with its communications that dwindled out in flooded tracks and ant—eaten telephone poles made it feasible for people to take the law into their own hands while behind the red brick façade of the President's Residence, telephones, telex, and the planes coming to the airport down the road brought Mweta closer to Addis, New York, and London than to this grass—inundated steppe, soughed down under the empty sky.

In the pass (driving directly now, he covered in one day what had taken him three) the confidence went again, as unreasonably. Rough, dark—flanked mountains enclosed the road and himself. Shinza had another kind of confidence, one that Bray was provoked by, not just in the mind, but in the body, in the senses; Shinza moved in his immediate consciousness, in images so vivid that he felt a queer alarm. A restlessness stirred resentfully in the tamped—down ground of his being, put out a touch on some nerve that (of course) had atrophied long ago, as the vagus nerve is made obsolete by maturity and the pituitary gland ceases to function when growth is complete. Shinza's bare strong feet, misshapen by shoes, tramped the mud floor—the flourish of a stage Othello before Cyprus. He was smoking cigarettes smuggled from over the border; friends across the border: those who had cigarettes probably had money and arms as well. And the baby; why did the baby keep cropping up?—Shinza held it out in his hand as casually as he had fathered it on that girl. He did not even boast of having a new young wife, it was nothing to him, nothing was put behind him….

The man will change his life, Bray thought burningly. Mweta became no more than the factor whose existence would bring this about, rouse it into being. Shinza might as well have been thirty as fifty—four. No, it wasn't that he was an ageing man who was like a
young man—something quite different—that he was driven, quite naturally, acceptedly, to go on living so long as he was alive. You would have to have him drop dead, to stop him.

The house in Wiltshire with all its comfortable beauty and order, its incenses of fresh flowers and good cooking, its libations of carefully discussed and chosen wine came to Bray in all the calm detail of an interesting death cult; to wake up there again would be to find oneself acquiescently buried alive. At the same time, he felt a stony sense of betrayal. Olivia moved about there, peppermints and cigarettes on the night—table, her long, smooth—stockinged legs under skirts that always drooped slightly at the back. A detail taken from a painting, isolated and brought up close to the eye. He suddenly tried to remember what it was like to be inside Olivia's body. But he could not. All that he produced, driving through the scrubby forest alone, was the warm reflex of a beginning erection in response to the generalized idea of the warmth inside women, any woman. His mind switched to Mweta again, and his body shrank. He ought not, he was perhaps wrong to question Mweta about anything. He had made it clear from the beginning that he would not presume on any bond of authority arising out of their association because he saw from the beginning that there was always the danger—to his personal relationship with Mweta—that this bond might become confused with some lingering assumption of authority from the colonial past. I mustn't forget that I'm a white man. A white man in Africa doesn't know what to see himself as, but mentor. He looks in the mirror, and there is the fatal fascination of the old reflection, doesn't matter much, now, whether it's the civil servant under a topi or the white liberal who turned his back on the settlers and went along with the Africans to Lancaster House. If I don't like what Mweta does, I'd better get out and go home to Wiltshire. Write an article for the
New Statesman,
from there. He almost spoke aloud to himself. He wished Olivia would be at the house in Gala, when he came back. He suddenly felt alone, as he might have felt cold, or tired. He began to write a letter to Olivia in his head, telling her to make up her mind and come quickly. He felt he missed her very much.

He would have liked to get back to Gala the next night—could have done it, prepared to drive through the night until one or two in the morning—but he stuck reluctantly to his original intention to
make a loop on his return so as to include the Nome district. On paper, it was the site of a resettlement scheme; the people were poor and apathetic, one came upon them laboriously picking about some task in the forest with the dazed faces of those who are underfed from the day they are no longer suckled. Some villages had no school hut at all. Filthy and silent, children appeared from the forest and sold him those mushrooms big as plough disks that grew at this time of year. Their cool flesh gave off a soothing cellar—smell; the depressing odour of luxury in the midst of human poverty that he always recognized as peculiar to Africa. Here in the forest there were extravagant left—overs from some feast of gods—huge mushrooms, lilies blooming out of sand—but no ordinary sustenance for the people.

He drove the last lap back to Gala in a complete preoccupation of the will to get there, tense for any change of rhythm that might indicate trouble in the car, crossing off the hours and miles with each look at his watch. When at last he turned into the main street and the mahogany trees swallowed him in their well—deep shade and quiet he saw the shops were shut—it was Sunday. He went to the office just the same; Aleke might be there, doing some work. But there was nobody. The Christ—thorn had been dug up. He could hardly go to Aleke's house—his own old house—and confront him in the midst of the Dinky cars and the children. The same old sound of Sunday drumming thudded faintly through the afternoon. The gleaming backs of cars huddled round the club. A car turning into the entrance paused as he drew level and the occupant was grinning at him invitingly, importantly. Broughton, the secretary, mouthing something at him. He rolled down the window and grimaced politely to show he couldn't hear. “You don't answer your phone. I've been trying to get you all week. Your application's been approved by the committee. Henderson seconded it. So there you are, I knew you'd be pleased but you've been the devil to get hold of.” They were blocking the entrance and the man gestured and drove in, expecting Bray to follow, his face bright with the readiness to resume the barely interrupted chat.

Henderson was the owner of one of the two local drapers' shops: preparing the ground against Olivia's return, thoughtful man. Bray drove on down the quiet dirt road past the half—hidden houses, past a male Gala “nanny” wheeling a white child, and the children and dogs
of one of the black administrative officials who had moved into government houses, bounding round a meeting of flashing new bicycles. His eye separated from the other greenery the towering, spreading outline of the fig tree; nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And all the while, when everything was as it is now, the boy had been shut up in the prison in the bush outside the town.

Mahlope had cut the grass on the verges of the road before the house. Aprons were spread stiffly dried on the hibiscus hedge. Bray had a revulsion against entering the empty, closed—up bungalow where all he would meet were the signs of his own occupancy. His sense of urgency was thrown back at him, an echo.

He began to lug his things out of the car and dump them on the grass. The soft questioning of children's voices rang through the sunny quiet; he looked round and saw a woman and three small figures coming across the half—cleared scrub between his house and the one from which he was pleasantly isolated. Their heads were wrapped in something—towels. But everything—the club secretary's happy interest, people with their heads wrapped up in towels—was simply part of the distance that had been put between himself and the life of this familiar place by what he had heard existed there, beneath these appearances of which he himself was part.

It was the girl, Rebecca Edwards, again, with three of the numerous children who overran the Bayleys' house in the capital. Soapy trickles ran from under the turban down her temple and cheek. Bray said to the children, “Been swimming, eh?” and the smaller one clutched his mother's thigh. She wiped away the soapy tear. “Oh, it's awful to worry you—you see there suddenly isn't a drop of water, and I'd just put this stuff on our hair …” Another tear ran down and fell on her bare foot. “If we could stick our heads under the garden tap—” “Heavens, come to the bathroom. I'll open the house.” She and the children all wore cheap rubber—thonged sandals. They trooped in behind him, driving away the silence with their squelching footsteps and displacing the emptiness with their invading bodies. He pushed open the stiff bathroom window, he turned on the taps; there were exclamations of relief when the water gushed out— “It's even hot,” he said, and left them to it.

There was unopened mail addressed in familiar hands, newspaper rolls; the cardboard folders of notes and papers, as he had left them:
DISTRICT, SCHOOLS, POPULATION UNDER 18. He put a carbon between two sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter. He began a letter to Mweta; and then pulled out a cheap blue pad, the only kind you could buy in Gala stores, and began to write by hand, a letter or the draft of a letter. Before he could touch any of this again—the folders and notes—before there was any point in going on, he must have an answer from Mweta. The stammering, repetitive questions of a small child whose need for expression runs ahead of its vocabulary came muffled from the bathroom. He tore the wrappers off a couple of newspapers and rolled them the opposite way to flatten them. What he wrote, what he was saying to Mweta was not about the boy at all.…
the whole opposition between you is false, I don't believe it's based on any real difference of approach at all, but you have pushed Shinza into the position where if he is to do anything at all he must oppose you, and not in a negative way. He must set up something against what you are setting up without him. If you behave differently in power from the way you did before, so of course would he.… If you had him with you, now, both of you would be facing the same problems of adjustment, and there's a pretty good chance, taking into account the closeness of the old association, you'd come to the same sort of solution. Don't you see? To put it at its worst, it would at least ensure a kind of complicity … at least you'd avoid finding yourself in the position where you'd have to do some of the things you'll find you have to do now….
Rebecca Edwards and her children came to thank him; with an abstracted awareness of bad manners, he realized that he hadn't even asked how she came to be making for this house; where she had come from.

“Did you find somewhere to live? You're not still at the Inn?” She explained that she had moved into the house across the scrub, was sharing it with the agricultural officer, Nongwaye Tlume, and his wife. “I don't mind, there's a kind of extra kitchen attached to that rondavel outside. Anything to get out of the hotel, anyway, it was costing me such a lot of money.” The children's hair was rough—dried and spiky, hers was combed out neatly like a wet dark fringe all round. Her bare big forehead and the wings of her nose shone faintly from the ablutions. She had yellow eyes, like a pointer he had once had. The four went off the way they had come, through the scrub. Poor thing; there was some story there nobody bothered to ask—she
and her children could have stayed in this house instead of the Fish—eagle Inn while waiting to move in to the Tlumes', he should have thought of it. Probably that was something of the kind that Roly had expected of him.
… I can't believe Shinza would have made a move to oust you, standing beside you as it were. No moral reason, but because there's always been something secretive in his nature, some pleasure in being behind the scenes, recognized for his importance only by a few people in the know… he likes to be the face you can hardly make out between the other faces, but there.… And he has a laziness about people—you know that—he can't be bothered with the continuity of day—to-day contact, shaking hands and grinning crowds. He's essentially a selfish and withdrawn man—I mean success would become vulgar to him, he would always have left that part of it to you….