A Guest of Honour (28 page)

He tramped off in his schoolboy sandals to the shelter of a hibiscus hedge and against the insects' shrilling Bray heard him piddling slowly and loudly.

Festus came round from the back of the house with a bowl of fresh ice. He took the opportunity of Dando's absence coupled with the evidence that he was also in hearing distance, to accuse. “Why
Muk-wayi
doesn't stay with us this sometime?” He withheld the ice until Bray answered.

“I didn't know I was coming, Festus, I tried to phone …”

The excuses were accepted and the ice put down, in the convention, invented by white men long ago and become, curiously, part of the old black man's dignity, that his “master's” concerns were his own.

“Kalimo goes all right?” he said severely. Bray had written to Dando to thank Festus, when Kalimo turned up. They chatted a moment, falling into the local tongue, which Bray spoke with some hesitancy, helped out with a word here and there supplied by Festus. Making in his throat the deep, low exclamations of pleasure and politeness, he collected an empty soda bottle or two and went off as Dando appeared.

“—Yes, poor bloody Shinza. Poor bloody Edward.” Dando looked tranquil now. He began to pour fresh drinks.

“He's got a new young wife and a baby,” Bray said with a smile. “He's flourishing.”

“The old devil!” Dando was delighted; he himself took new life from the thought.

And cigarettes from over the border; and a house in Mpana's compound. But Bray didn't say it. It was none of his business. Dando said gleamingly, “D'you tell the good news to Mweta?”

Bray said, watching him, “I told him to send for Shinza. Even now.”

“If he ever sends for Shinza now, it won't be on a gilt—edged card.”

Bray said, after a moment, “I thought that was the one thing you'd jib at—touching Shinza.”

Dando put his drink down patiently, gave a short, sharp, instructive laugh. “I work for Mweta, my boy.”

Bray got back to the hotel very late from Dando's; it was impossible to spend an evening there without drinking too much and he had to drive with conscious carefulness. He saw a pair of eyes, two feet above the roadside: a small buck, feeding. The cold smell of heavy dew was voluptuous through the car window.

Hjalmar Wentz was still up. In the stuffy office that had no direct access to a window or door, the odours that his wife had swept and scrubbed and banished from the public rooms of the hotel collected in unstirring layers—smoke, insect repellent, boiled cauliflower, spilt beer. Hjalmar's head shone under a lamp; as always he was surrounded by invoices and newspaper cuttings. He had confided to Bray, once: “I know of a refugee in London who's been able to live off his files of cuttings. People pay him to consult them. A professor from the University of Budapest, had to get out in Fifty—six.”

He said to Bray in the confidence of the night, “The other day—did Emmanuelle say anything? Margot saw her talk to you in the garden.”

Bray lied, quoting Turgenev. “ ‘An honourable man will end up by not knowing where to live'—that was more or less it.”

A look of shy, weary pleasure crossed the face like a hand. “Good God. She's strange, that girl of mine. But you know who'd told her about Ras Asahe? Stephen. Her brother.
He
told Margot. Usually Emmanuelle doesn't get on with him at all. That terrible mutual antagonism of brother and sister. Thomas Mann only dealt with the reverse
side of it in his incest themes—” The lie was life—giving, and he kept Bray from bed, their voices sounding through the small—hour deadness of the hotel like the conversation in people's dreams, the secret activity of mice, and the steady jaws of cockroaches.

The House was sitting that week; there had been no need to call an emergency session. He walked in on the second reading of the Detention Bill. It was difficult for a man his size to be unobtrusive; as he stooped quietly along the polished wooden pew—wall that divided the visitors' gallery from the members, several faces on the floor flashed aside in recognition. The beautiful chamber, panelled in wood from the Mso forests with its watermark of faint stripes, was murmurous as a schoolroom. It smelled like a church. There were one or two in togas—among the cabinet, Dr. Moses Phahle and little Dhlamini Okoi, fine Italian shoes showing beneath the robes—but most of the members wore formal Western clothes with the well—being and assurance peculiar to black men. Roly Dando's narrow white face barred and marked by thick—rimmed spectacles and toothbrush moustache was a fetish object set among them.

With the sudden change of atmosphere from sun and traffic outside, these impressions came to him like the tingling of blood in a limb coming to life. Through the susurrus there was the voice of Kente, Minister of the Interior, an order paper crunched in his fist. “… What ordinary, peaceful citizen has anything to fear? What is this ‘web of intimidation' that the Honourable Member for Inhame speaks about? Where does he get his language from? It is clear to us in this House that it has nothing to do with the realities of life in this country. It is clear to us that it comes from overseas, the Honourable Member has been reading too many spy stories—this House is no place for James Bonds and Philbys—”

He got some of the laughter he wanted, but not much; though hardly anyone had escaped the evangelism of James Bond, many had not heard of Philby. The Speaker, sitting lop—sided against his tall chair as if his curly white wig weighed him down, had his attention caught by Cyrus Goma, now member for one of the north—eastern constituencies, already half—risen from his seat. So Goma had adopted the toga; while he spoke he settled the free end of it like an old lady putting her shawl straight, fastidiously, his jutting chin held jackdaw style towards one shoulder—just as Bray remembered it—his face
tight, eyes screwed up, while his voice remained soft and reasonable. “We have accepted the necessity of this Bill. That is one thing. But we must not allow ourselves to think that people who are worried about it, who have grave doubts about it, are something to poke fun at. I suggest to the Honourable Minister of the Interior that such people are sincere; they should not be ridiculed. A Preventive Detention Act is no laughing matter. We did not laugh when the British imposed one on us.” There was a sudden contraction of attention in the House. “We did not laugh in the camps in the Bashi—” Someone called, “Yes, Bashi!” “—and at Fort Howard.” He paused a mere instant, but it was just long enough. “Howard!” “Bashi!” “Howard!” The Speaker called the House to order. Cyrus Goma swayed slightly and began to speak again, reasonably, softly. “Our President didn't laugh when he spent seventeen months shut up there. He suffered because it was necessary to win our freedom. If we must accept that it is now necessary for us to introduce preventive detention, that is no occasion for laughter.”

There was a distrustful hush; momentary. A spatter of hard—palmed applause that, as it sought to assert itself, was pressed out by a kind of rise of temperature in the House. On his feet, someone shouted, “If you want to cry for traitors!” The assembly seemed to fuse in hostility, presenting a bristling corporate surface, the back of some huge animal rippling at Goma. But from the direction of the hand—clapping someone else took the floor, a young man, hippo—faced with minute ears, who rested a tapering, ringed hand on his huge backside. His English was strongly accented. “Can the Minister explain why the Bill was not fust put before the Central Committee? Correct me, but as far as I am aware this is the fust time it has not been done. The Party has not approved this Bill because the Party was not informed about it. Is the Central Committee going to be a rubber stamp, just to come down
like that
on decisions already made by the Government? Is that it?”

Cyprian Kente smiled, taking the House into his confidence at the naïveté of the question. “The Honourable Member is aware that this was a decision taken by the President under Emergency Powers.”

The huge schoolboy figure was obstinate.

“The President is also the President of the Party. Did he consult his Central Committee. That is what I am asking.”

Mweta, clear—faced, with the immediate, calming authority of a
man who appears always to take everyone's point of view seriously, rose in place of Kente. “I would like to reassure the Honourable Member, because I know the devotion he has brought to the Party ever since he was one of the outstanding organizers of Party youth. I share with him the concern that the People's Independence Party—which you, and I, and all of us made—should continue to carry out through this government the policies it has hammered out of the will of our people. In urgent response to certain information, I took the step of introducing a Preventive Detention Bill without having had the opportunity to present the Bill to the Central Committee. But I would like to point out that I took this step in full consultation with the Cabinet. And out of the eight members of the Central Committee, five are members of the cabinet.” A triumphant hum of assent; he cut it short, modestly, continuing, “When this measure is presented to the Congress of the Party next month, I have no doubt that it will have the endorsement not only of the remaining members of the Central Committee, but also of Congress as a whole, granting a country—wide mandate for what was in the first place a majority decision by the full representation of the Central Committee in the Cabinet.” The stir of disagreement on the back benches was tramped out by the applause of well—polished shoes drumming the floor. Mweta's supporters beamed and overflowed confidence. Carried by it, he did not allow himself to be swept away, but swiftly turned the momentum towards the dissidents: his voice rose clear out of the clamour. “In this first year of our nationhood we stand together in a way that perhaps will never be repeated. In the years of our children and our childrens' children, if God blesses our country with the peace and stability we are striving for, the business of running this country may be no more than a piece of efficient administration by professionals. But we are brothers in arms. We are the people who demanded freedom when we didn't have more than one pair of pants. Yes, we are the people—Cyrus Goma, the member for Selusi, myself, many, many faces I see here—who sat in prison together not because we wanted to destroy but because we wanted to create a new life for the people of Africa. We are the people who made the struggle and the same people who are now doing the governing. We are the first crop. That's what the people who used to run us call it. And it's true that they sowed the dragon's teeth of colonialist repression and up we came, a generation
breathing fire.… We have learned the hardest way since our schooldays what unity demands from us—and how, without it, nothing,
nothing
that is any good to any of us, can be gained or kept. Small doubts and differences—we respect them in each other. They are family opinions. They don't touch the fact that we are one….”

Cyrus Goma with his hand blinkered against the side of his face, his eyes turned to Mweta, and on his face the expression of a man who cannot be reached. Dando looking bored. Bray moved out ahead of the press of people as the House adjourned for lunch; only the journalists preceded him—one small black man in a paisley waistcoat had already gained one of the streamlined glass telephone booths and was mouthing away. President calls for unity: of course. Bray stalked slowly down the flowered drive to the visitors' parking ground and had to pause, not knowing for a second whether to jump back or forward before a mini—jeep swivelling out of the members' car park. The driver was the huge young man who had brought up the question of the Central Committee. Braking, he bounced himself so high he almost hit the canvas roof, and coming down, gave an open—and-shut grin at the plight of the two near—victims, Bray and himself.

Bray was to meet Neil Bayley for lunch. An Italian who had drifted down from the Congo had opened a pizzeria just behind the Central African Stores—it was filled with the younger white people of the town; no African would pay six shillings for a circle of charred dough smeared with tomato and anchovy. When the small white population tired of eating pizza, the Italian would have to open a fish—and-chip shop, where the Africans would patronize him. But for the present it was evident that this was the place to go in a town where there was nowhere to go; under the bunches of raffia onions and the blare of “Arrivederci Roma” pretty secretaries from ministries, embassies, and missions and men from other ministries, embassies, and missions (Conferences are great places for picking up birds, Neil Bayley remarked) were occupied in the early moves of sexual attraction, most easily established across a table. Like everyone else, Neil Bayley and Bray drank the house wine in Coca—Cola glasses, and Bayley's big river—god's head with the red—blond curly beard gazed out in pleasure across the room between his bursts of intensely lively concentration on what he was saying. “Yes, yes, of course, Goma's a subtle bastard, and when he opens his mouth he's not only speaking for himself, you
can count on that. What others can't say because they're in the cabinet, our Cyrus says from the floor.”

“He managed to get them to imagine themselves shut up in Bashi and Fort Howard again, this time by their own people … in one sentence … and the pause was just calculated.… Then before anyone could put a finger on what he was saying he brought up Mweta's seventeen months, the great example of sacrifice … a paragon of loyalty!” Bray laughed with admiration.

“Oh he slips the knife between the ribs while appearing to give a pat on the back.”

“It was a good piece of cape—work. Quite something to watch.”

Neil Bayley presented a handsome, chin—lifted profile to the room, waving the carafe for more wine. “Tastes a bit metallic, ay? Matured in genuine old paraffin tins. —Oh he'll have a long life in politics, that boy.”