A Guest of Honour (23 page)

Bray had a shower and sat in a broken deck—chair in the garden, waiting for lunch. He read in the morning paper that Mweta had returned from his state visit. Unity had been reaffirmed, useful proposals had been made, the 50-million-pound hydro—electric scheme to serve the two countries jointly had been agreed upon in principle … the leading article questioned the economics of the scheme, as opposed to its value as a demonstration of Pan—African interdependence.
There is no doubt whatever that this country sees its destiny always as part of the greater destiny of the African continent … no doubt that President Mweta, the day he took up the burdens of office, has taken along with responsibilities at home the ideal of an Africa that would present an entity of international cooperation to a world that has so far signally failed to resolve national contradictions. But we must not waste our own resources in order to foster cooperation across our borders. We have, in the lake that forms our northern border, a potential source of electric power that renders unnecessary any such scheme in the South, a scheme that by its nature would place our vital industrial development ultimately at the mercy of any instability that might manifest itself in our neighbour's house….

Hjalmar's daughter walked right past him across the grass with Ras Asahe, deep in low—voiced conversation. They ignored the figure behind
the paper; living in a hotel, the girl carried her private world about her in the constant presence of anonymous strangers. A piping scale climbed and descended; she must have a recorder. The pair settled down somewhere on the grass quite near, and he heard Emmanuelle's clear, decisive voice: “Somebody told me it was just like a sneeze” and the man's deep, derisive voice: “Good God, that's how you whites prepare girls. If you'd been an African, you'd know how to make love, you'd have been taught.”

“Oh you're so bloody superior, you've got the idea nobody else knows how to live.”

There was silence. Then Bach on the recorder, piercing, trilling, on and on, up and up, sustaining high notes in a gleeful, punishing scream.

At the round table in the Wentzes' quarters the chaps of Margot Wentz's heavy white arms hung majestically over the dishes as she served. She had powdered her face but the smell of hotel gravy clung about her. Every now and then she gazed on her son Stephen as at a gobbling pet dog at his dinner—dish, half affectionate, half repelled. He had his father's blond handsome face, blown up to the overgrown proportions of young white men born in Africa and forced by sport and the sun, like battery chickens. Hjalmar Wentz kept arching his eyebrows and blinking, fighting off a daze of preoccupation. He gave in to laughter against himself: “The fellow who approved the plan for the servants' rooms just stamped it without looking. He was going back to England anyway, couldn't care a damn. The whole thing is against municipal regulations, there aren't enough air bricks—can you imagine, the water main is connected in such a way we haven't been paying for the water used down there?”

“I told you I could smell drains or money.” All the tendons and muscles of Emmanuelle's brown hands showed with anatomical precision as she buttered a piece of bread.

“What you going to do?” Margot Wentz said.

He appealed to Bray: “What they tell me I have to, eh? Get the builder along and discuss it with the inspector.”

“Have some more salad, Colonel Bray? No?—What builder?” Margot Wentz put down her fork and waited for the answer with the patience of one who knows all the answers she can expect.

Her husband gave her a quick glance. “Well, Atkinson—who else?”

“I don't think Atkinson will work for us again, Hjalmar.”

Stephen was holding out his plate for another helping of meat; he shook it impatiently, wanting to speak but occupied with the surveillance of what he was getting. “Knock out a few bricks, what's the big fuss?”

“The water. The regulations.” His mother laid out the facts gently.

“Agh … it'll be a year before they send someone again, and if they do, well, there're the air bricks, you knock out a few bricks, that's all—” The boy was cutting up food, spearing it, now he stopped his mouth with it while his sister, her hands idle on the table, said, “Close your eyes and wait for them to go away, Hjalmar.” Her own narrow black eyes acknowledged Bray's presence a moment, the pupils seemed actually to contract closed, falling asleep, and then come to life blackly liquid again, and, just as he was thinking how the girl never smiled, she smiled at him, the brilliant, vivid, humorous smile of a deep self—confidence.

Lunch broke up abruptly among the preoccupations of Hjalmar, his wife, and the son; Stephen was summoned by the barman, a coloured man with a strand of silky black moustache. “The trouble is you're too soft with these guys. Someone's only got to say he comes from the water board or something … it's not the
end of the world … ?”
Stephen's lingering reproach was sympathetic, directed from the door. The barman showed the servant's facility for pretending not to hear when in his employer's quarters. Bray felt oddly grouped with him as the man stood there easing his feet in shoes that had cut—outs to accommodate bunions. Hjalmar swallowed his coffee because Margot Wentz reminded him that he had to be at the station in half an hour; she explained to Bray, “If you're not there when the train comes in, they just take the stuff out of the refrigerated truck and dump it on the platform in the sun.”

“Where've you got the invoices?”

“All right, all right, it'll come to me in a minute—” She got up to follow an instinct that would lead her to the point at which, in the morning's tread up and down between corridor and kitchen, storeroom and office, she had set down the papers.

Emmanuelle went over and kissed her father on the forehead, for her mother's benefit. Margot Wentz, picking up glasses to look over the invoices she had found in her handbag, paused as the girl pushed
aside with her lips the strand of bright hair that stretched across the baldness; there was on the older woman's face a groping recognition; and then she turned away in herself and with a hitch of the nose to settle her glasses, peered down at the invoices.

Although Hjalmar was in a hurry he made slow progress with Bray down the passage, talking and pausing to make his point. It was the railways, now; a high incidence of accidents since Africans had been taken on as engine drivers. Bray said, “Drinking seems to be the trouble.” Hjalmar Wentz found it absolutely necessary to place on record in some way the assumptions, the misrepresentations that threatened all round. He invoked Mweta without name, the touchstone of a personal pronoun on which the voice came down with passing emphasis, signally, instantly understood. He said passionately, “Of course they are drinking. They have to show somehow to themselves that the new life is good. How do these whites think their great—grandfathers behaved when they first got wages for a week's work in a factory in Europe, eh? These Englishmen—their great—grandfathers were getting drunk on cheap gin, and they turn up their noses at the Africans.… But
he
knows how to go about it,
he
knows the thing to do. Now he makes it an offence to drink before you go on duty, one drink and you're out of the job. Sensible, reasonable. You'll see, soon, eh, the men themselves will impose a code of behaviour—the railways won't be any worse than before.”

Bray went to the public booth on the veranda to telephone Mweta's private secretary, Wilfrid Asoni. But he was “not available”; Clive Small, the PRO, came to the telephone as a substitute. He was enthusiastically pleasant; he was sure the President would be delighted and so on— “Do you think it's possible for me to see him tomorrow?” Small would certainly do his best; as Bray knew, of course, the Big Man had only just come back—Small would leave an urgent note for Asoni—there was all the confident sycophancy of the professionally agreeable in the voice. Then Bray phoned the Bayley house, but was relieved that there was no one home; he did not want to go about among the group of friends until he had seen Mweta. He had half meant to mention to Hjalmar Wentz that it was not necessary to tell Roly Dando he was there, he would do so himself tomorrow. Well, he had said nothing. He decided to leave it all to chance, and even took the car into town to do some shopping; as always, when you lived in
a remote posting, there were small comforts that were exotic to the general stores at home. And then it was an event to walk into a bookshop again, even the rather poor one here, stocked mainly with last year's best sellers and James Bond. He bought himself a paperback Yeats, a book of essays by an African professor of political science at an East African university, a reprint of Isaac Deutscher's
Stalin—
everything come upon was a treasure. For a half—hour he forgot why he was in the capital. He bought a stapler and a couple of ball—points that seemed an improvement on the usual kind, trying them out on the recommendation of a pretty little African shopgirl with a crêpey black pompadour and painted eyes. There were children's books on display and he almost bought a couple of Tin—Tin—for the children, the girl and those little boys, one at either hand of Rebecca Edwards, coming across the open ground between his house and the Tlumes'. But he put the books back on the stand. He collected all the copies—three weeks old—of overseas newspapers and journals he didn't subscribe to, and came out laden.

When he got back to the Silver Rhino there was a message from the President's secretary's office. There was an appointment for him at eleven—fifteen tomorrow morning. Hjalmar Wentz, who had taken the message, showed the opposite of curiosity—in fact, Bray felt overestimated by Wentz's determinedly laconic discretion, which assumed that Bray's position was all along some confidential, influential one, for which the banishment to the bush on a vague educational project was a front. “Oh—by the way, if Roly comes into the bar, you won't say I'm here, will you? I'm going to ring him tomorrow, but I don't feel particularly sociable at the moment, it would mean a heavy—drinking evening if the two of us get together—”

“Good thing you said so. I'll warn Stephen.”

His daughter lifted the counter—flap of the office and walked through. Her jutting hip—bones pegged a skimpy cotton dress across her flat belly, she carried a music—case of the kind that children swing. “Emmanuelle, if you should see Mr. Dando, don't say anything about Colonel Bray being here.”

“I never see Mr. Dando,” she said fastidiously.

Bray laughed, and her father was forced to smile, admitting: that's how she is.

Bray took a beer to the same rickety deck—chair in the garden, his
back to the bar and the hotel. Suddenly two sticky hands smelling of liquorice pressed over his eyes, and the chair was jiggled and bumped amid giggles. Vivien Bayley's children ambushed him, while Vivien, grown pregnant since he saw her last, stood waiting by, smiling for it to be over. “Enough now. You've given James a surprise. Now let him get up. Enough, Eliza!
Enough!”

He gathered a couple of the children by arms and legs, and came over to her, limbs agitating in all directions. He dropped them on the grass, and kissed her. She had the neglected air—forgetful of herself—of a child—bearing woman. “We saw you at the traffic lights at the railway bridge. They insisted.”

The children were yelling, “Caught you, caught you!”

“I phoned when I arrived, just after lunch.”

“I'd gone to pick them up at school. Neil'll be thrilled. He's just been to Dar-es-Salaam for a week and it's so flat to be home again. James, you're looking slim and
beautiful,
and as you see—” They laughed together, over her.

“I've sweated it off, Christ, it's been killing sometimes this month.”

“Well, I know, but mine isn't the kind that will melt, I'm afraid.”

“Oh, it'll be shed all at once one day, though, and no keeping off bread—” Their liking for each other came alive instantly, as it always did, the pilot flame turned up by meeting.

She carried him off for dinner; that was the way it was, in the capital, nothing had changed. Homeward traffic was thick in the hour after the shops closed; an hour later, and the streets would be those of a country town, warm and empty in the dark. They passed Mweta's residence with the sentries in their boxes. In the Bayleys' garden Vivien brought him up to date, while the children ate their supper on the grass. The Pettigrews had been posted to Beirut, and were pleased, Jo—Ann would do some work at the university there; David Rathebe, the South African refugee, had disappeared for two months and reappeared, he was supposed to have been in Algiers; Timothy Odara had been offered the Secretaryship for Health, but Evelyn had made him refuse because she wanted him to take up a post—graduate research scholarship in America. They hadn't seen much of Mweta and Joy, though the children had been to a birthday party at the Residence last week; Joy had got rid of the flower—arranging Englishwoman and was much happier, running the place very competently
in her own way, with the help of that nice sensible woman, an aunt of hers, who had been housekeeper for twenty years or so to the General Manager of one of the gold—mining companies. Mweta was certainly being very successful in wooing foreign capital, at the industrial level, if not on the international money marts; there was even going to be a Golden Plate dinner where white businessmen could meet the President at a cost of a mere fifty pounds a ticket, money to go to the university scholarship fund.

Neil Bayley came home and was the centre of tumbling, shouting children. He still looked more like a student than a registrar. It was natural for him to deal with a number of different people and situations at once; he plunged into greetings for Bray, shadow—boxed his son, patted his wife on the backside: “How-you, girlie? Good God, I've just been acting father—confessor to a gorgeous, red—haired eighteen—year-old peach—of-a-thing … if you … bloom'd come off if you so much as … They're told they can come to me to discuss any problem so long as it's not sex, religion, or politics, James.”