A Guest of Honour (29 page)

“He's had a long one, already. He was national organizer for a while, when Shinza was Secretary—General.”

“Is that so? I didn't realize. James, you're a walking archive—archives? How would you say it? Have some more. But Mweta can wrap them all up in a neat little parcel.”

“Yes, he did that,” said Bray.

“He's convinced you he needs preventive detention,” Bayley said, his splendid pink face gleaming with wine—half a question, half a determination.

“Mweta's a strange man.”

“How d'you mean, James?” Bayley had a passion for springing the lock of confidence; it was part of his “technique” with women—they became fascinated by the man who had made them give themselves away—but he enjoyed exercising his persuasive, bullying, blackmail skill with anyone.

Bray arranged the olive pits on his plate: first in a row of nine, then in two rows, one of five and one of four. He smiled.

“What d'you mean? You believe him and you don't want to? You don't believe him and you do want to? Come on. You must have all the facts. Come on, now, James.”

He gave Neil Bayley the look of an older man, smiling, keeping a younger man waiting. Bayley looked sceptical.

“He calls for an act of faith.”

Neil Bayley raised his golden eyebrows. He decided it was meant satirically; so that was what it became. Bray slipped out of his hands under cover of the exchange: “Interesting. Interesting. His early training with the White Fathers.” “It was the Presbyterians. He's not a Catholic.” “Oh of course. This wine has a touch of carbide … Nepenthe. Lethe. I'm gone. I swoon.”

Roly Dando and a man with a white crew—cut, young face, and frowning smile, appeared peering over the crowded tables and their low—lying smoke. “Come on, mop up the vino on your chins and let us take over.” Dando introduced his companion, an American jurist who was on his way home from South Africa and Rhodesia, where he had been an observer at political trials. He had the conscious naturalness of the distinguished in unsuitable surroundings; anyone but Roly would have given him frozen Dublin Bay prawns and Chablis at the Great Lakes Hotel. “What're you doing here with old Bray? Run out of popsies?” Dando and Neil Bayley genuinely bristled towards each other, although Dando was the old seal, long outcast from lordship of the harem by the young bull smiling down at him with strong white teeth and shining lips. Bayley found the war—time sexual slang quaint: “bint,” “popsie”; he had been a small boy evacuated to the country with a label round his neck, while dapper Captain Dando (there was a photograph Festus kept dusted on Dando's mantelpiece) carried his cane under an arm through the streets of Cairo. “Just showing James the field, Roly. Of course you've played it, no interest to you.” Dando disapproved of American usage, the American idiom, especially in the mouth of the registrar of a university. But the visiting jurist gave a concupiscent chuckle, anxious to be simple and human.

“And how did you find South African justice, Mr. Graspointner?” The river—god was not only handsome and amusing, he also knew who Edward Graspointner was (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, author of standard works on international law) and he knew how to introduce a subject on which he himself was prepared to expand eloquently.

“Well, I must say that I found the conduct of the court unexceptionable. It was something of a surprise. It was an open court. It was an impartial court—although, as you know, some of the accused were white, some coloured. The judge was an Afrikaner. But the conduct of the court was equal to the highest standards of jurisprudence as we
know it anywhere in the free world. Justice was done according to the law.”

“According to the law. Ah yes. But what of the law, Mr. Graspointner? The laws of the Republic of South Africa are unique in the world for their equation of the legitimate aspirations of the majority of the population with crime, with treason. Legitimate aspirations as defined in the U.N. Bill of Rights. Would you agree?”

“Broadly, yes. That is so.”

“Then was what you saw justice, or a going through the motions of justice? A lot of wigged heads jumping through the hoop. Is justice a piece of machinery or an ethical concept? Does the promulgation of a law make that law just? Can justice be done through it? I thought the answer to that question had been given at Nuremberg.”

“It was not given at Nuremberg. It has never been given anywhere,” Dando said, with testy patience. “For the simple reason that there is no such thing as international law in the sense of an international standard of justice. International law is a code for Interpol, for refugee—swopping and spy exchange, for boundary blood—feuds and squabbles over airspace and the three—mile limit for herring fleets. Justice is an empirical affair arranged by each country in order to perpetuate a particular social system. You should know that. Bill of Human Rights! Why not the Sermon on the Mount? Good ringing phrases, man.”

“Of course I met a lot of troubled people down there. Very, very troubled about just that issue, Professor Bayley—”

“What a human climate to exist in! Could you live in a place like that?” Neil Bayley's thighs rolled apart, his arms fell wide, he seemed to make free of the whole black continent, the muddy banks of the Niger and the Congo, the forests and the deserts, the shy Batwa and shrivelled Bushmen, the lovely prostitutes of Brazzaville and the eager schoolchildren of Gala. “Could you, Graspointner?”

“Well, I don't know. One mustn't be too hasty about this. One person told me his
raison d'être
was to stay there in opposition, just be there, obstinately, even if he couldn't do much to change things. I'm not a revolutionary, he said. I haven't the courage to risk prison. But I can't let them get away with it unwitnessed. I have to stay and oppose in my mind. It's my situation; I haven't any other that means anything.”

“Disgusting!”

“Of course, in daily life, he admitted … you develop a certain in—sensitivity … you let things pass that … eh?” The American turned to draw in Bray.

Bray offered, “I read something the other day—every nation has its own private violence … after a while one can feel at home and sheltered between almost any borders—you grow accustomed to anything.” And he thought, where did I get that from? Somewhere in Graham Greene? Why do I keep turning to other people's opinions, lately, leaving myself out.

Neil Bayley stood up, blocking the waiter's path. “Yes, thank you
very
much. At least one can choose one's own violence. They're not all equally vile, that's the point. And I won't have it that we're all equally culpable. Flabby sentiment. So you could live there, James, a white man, and ‘oppose in your mind'?”

Dando said, “Don't be more of an academic idiot than you have to, Neil. Of course he couldn't live there. Christ, he was being run out of this country by the British while you were still—”

“—Yes, yes—a snotty—nosed piccanin having his backside striped in Exeter, Devonshire.” Bayley knew Dando's pejorative in all its variations. They laughed; a noisy table in the loud room. Bayley sat down again for a glass of Dando's wine and Bray was given a fine cigar with the jurist's initials on the band. “I have a friend gets them in from Cuba, God knows how. The band's put on in Tampa, I guess.”

He thought, I have a friend, too, who likes cigars.

He had to leave the company to pick up a borrowed dinner jacket and trousers for the Golden Plate dinner from the wife of the secretary to the Minister of Development and Planning—resourceful Vivien had arranged it. Gabriel Odise's wife was a social welfare worker and the offices of her department were in the old part of the town, the strip of human habitation along the line of rail that once was all the town had been. A few old
mupapa
trees humped their roots out into the street, there; there was the cod—liver-oil smell from sacks of dried
kapenta,
and the strange sweet reek of dangling plucks in a butcher's. A pair of Congo prostitutes, heads done up like bonbons in turbans, sat on the kerb giggling down at their painted toenails and gold sandals, and looked up smiling, as he stepped past. They wore the
pagne
and brief blouse that bared a little roll of shining brown
middle, making local women look dowdy and respectable in their cheap European dresses. The internal staircase of the Social Welfare Department was stained and splashed with liquid in which ants had died and dust had dried, and the wall alongside it bore witness to the procession of people who hung about the place, for one reason or another, enduring by scribbling not the obscenities of the literate, but the pot—hook names and signature flourishes of the semiliterate. People sat tightly on one or two benches; the rest squatted on the corridor floor and moved their legs and bundles stoically away and back again to make way. While he waited among them—the only white person—he glanced down out of a window and saw in the courtyard at least another hundred and fifty people gathered on a ground worn bare by feet and bodies, under trees shabby as lamp—posts with the rub of human backs. Those in the corridor watched without resentment as he was beckoned in to Mary Odise's room ahead of them. She was a pretty girl with the air—hostess neatness that African woman often assume with responsible jobs; as she let him in, her eyes went in quick tally over the crowd, with the look not so much of assessing numbers as of estimating the weight of what lay upon them, there on their impassive faces. A diagnostic look. She had a pink rose in a glass on her desk; the worn floorboards were scrupulously clean and there was the taint of baby—sick and dirty feet that can never be scrubbed out of rooms where the poor and anxious are received. The courtroom in Gala used to smell like that.

He tried on the dinner jacket and measured the pants against his side, waist to ankle. She took good—natured pleasure in the fact that they would seem to do. “The tie! I forgot to ask about the tie.”

“I can easily buy one. It's extraordinarily nice of you … you're sure your brother doesn't mind?”

“He has two and never wears them. They used to be working clothes, for him—he's got a band, they're playing at the Great Lakes Hotel. They wear silver jackets now, with blue lapels—terrible! And the dry cleaners here don't know how to do them. He'll just have to give them away when they get too dirty.” She folded the suit expertly and put it in a strong paper carrier that bore the legend: I've Been Saving At The Red Circle Supermarket.

“Very overworked, Mary?”

She was fastidious to avoid the gushing complaint that was a convention among white colleagues.

“Not really. You can only see a certain number of people in one day. And if you try to rush it, you can't help them. I'm attached to the Labour Department now, and I get all these people referred to me from the Labour Exchange.”

“So many old women and children—don't look particularly employable, to me.”

“They're not looking for work. They're looking for relations who come here from the bush on the chance of getting jobs. They don't know where the person they're looking for is, they don't know where he works—if he works. What are you to do? They have no money. You find them sleeping down at the bus depot. The Labour Department doesn't know what to do with them. They send them to me.” She gave her gentle, sympathetic laugh. “I've suggested setting up a shelter—there's the old market building, for instance, I thought of that. But the Chief Welfare Officer points out that we'd be taking responsibility for them … they really shouldn't be here. They'd just stay on endlessly, some of them. It's a headache.”

“What on earth do you do?”

Mary Odise had trained as a social worker in Birmingham, where she had investigated the wife—beating, child—neglect and drunkenness of the people who had brought white civilization to her country. At one of the Independence parties he found himself sitting with her and she mimicked for him an Englishwoman, pouring out the sordid tale of her woes, who once said, “I don't feel so ashamed with
you,
dearie, as you're a blackie.”

She was professional. “Give them bus fare and try to persuade them to go back home. But now we issue bus chits instead—they were taking the money and hanging on. Yesterday my junior found out some of them have begun to sell the bus chits.” She was laughing softly as she showed him out. As the door opened there was a listless surge in the corridor: eyes turned, bodies leaned forward. He was stopped on the stairway by an old man with a piece of paper so often folded that it was dividing into four along the dirt—marked creases. A garbled name on it looked as if it might be that of a building firm; he shook his head, pointed at the queue in the corridors, and gave the old fellow half—a-crown. He was careful not to speak a word in Gala or the local language. To these poor country people, by long experience, whiteness was power; if it were to be made accessible to them through their own tongue, how would he escape the importunity of
their belief? Next thing, I'll be making an ass of myself, trailing old people round to find wretched yokels who are hawking tomatoes somewhere.

The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the dampspotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still in it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies any more. Ras will lend you his. It's just like two pieces of black ribbon, crossed over in front.” Ras Asahe was with the Wentz family; drinks were on the round table under the drawn—down lamp. There was the atmosphere of solicitude and consideration that comes after a successfully resolved family upheaval: Asahe must have been approached about his uncle.

“Sure, if you want to pop over to my place?”