A Guest of Honour (3 page)

At six Roland Dando came home. He gazed anxiously from the car, as if, despite the telephone call, he were not sure if Bray had been safely received, but once he set eyes on him behaved as if they had seen each other a week ago. He was indiscreet, like many people who live alone, and brought back with him from the town—a child bulging with favours from a party—all the anecdotes and gossip of the Independence celebrations, producing, in a clinging fluff of supposition and rumour, bits and pieces of real information and opinion about Mweta's position and the sort of team he had gathered around him. Another tray came out under the trees, this time with whisky and gin. An old black Labrador with corns on his elbows stood slowly swinging his tail before Dando as he talked. Jason wouldn't bring home any golden fleece, believe you me (Jason Malenga was the new Minister of Finance); no, it wasn't a bad thing that the British Chief of Police wasn't being kept on, people always judged by the Congo, the idiots, but the African deputy, Aaron Onabu, was perfectly capable of taking over from that dodderer anyway; Talisman Gwenzi was first class, and a real Mweta man, David Sambata was an unknown quantity for Agriculture, what black knew a thing about agriculture, anyway; Tom Msomane was a corruption risk—there was reason to believe there'd already been something shady over a land deal for a community development—but he was from the right tribe, Mweta knew he couldn't attempt to hold the show together without at least three Msos in the cabinet.

Dando pulled ticks off the dog's neck and burst them under his shoe while he drank and dealt out judgements. Out of a kind of jealousy of the new young men from Britain and America who were so careful to show their lack of colour-feeling by avoiding tainted words and addressing people by polite forms, he recklessly used the old settler
vocabulary that reflected an attitude he had had no part of, ever. Roly Dando could say what he liked: Roly Dando hadn't “discovered” the blacks as his fellows only yesterday. “Of course, Mweta has to hand out a job to everybody. Every pompous jackass from the bush who filled his pipe with tobacco bought with dues from the local party branch. They're all heroes, you know, heroes of the struggle. Struggle my arse. Edward Shinza's one of the few who did his stretch and got his head split open that time by Her Majesty's brave boys, and where's he—back in the Bashi Flats among his old wives, for all I know, no one even mentions his name.”

“But Shinza's here for the Independence ceremony?”

Roly glared. “Nobody gives a damn where he is.”

“But he is in town, now?”

“I don't know where the hell he may be.”

“You mean Edward's not going to take part in the celebrations? That's not possible. He's not come up to town?”

“You can see he hasn't been given a cabinet post. I don't suppose he's going to turn up for the honour of standing in the crowd and waving a flag, eh?”

“But that's ridiculous, Roly. You know Shinza. He knows what he wants. I had the impression he'll be ambassador to U.N. Give time for Mweta to shine on his own for a bit, and any tension between them to die down. Of course he should have got Foreign Affairs. But that's between the two of them.”

“You might ask Mweta, if you get a chance to talk to him, ask him if he isn't going to find a piddling little job somewhere, something with a decent label to it, for poor old Shinza, he was banging on the Colonial Secretary's door with a
panga
while Mweta was a snotty picannin singing hymns up at the mission school.” Dando glowered pettishly over his third or fourth gin and ginger beer. He was given to putting himself on strange mixtures. He would drink one for several months and then switch, for similar good reasons (it was more digestible, it was less likely to produce an after-thirst) to another.

“Oh Mweta's not like that.”

“You know Mweta. I know Mweta. But there's the President, now. If there's a father of the state, it's got to be him or no one.”

“I certainly had the impression whatever tension there was had eased up, last time I saw Mweta in London.”

“Yes, ‘poor old Shinza,' that's what everyone says. Poor old Dando.”
Dando did not explain the shift of reference. Perhaps he simply remarked upon his own getting older; undoubtedly he looked older. His small nose showed unexpectedly beaky now that the skin had sunk on either side.

Bray had a lot of questions, not all of them kind, to ask about other people. Some of the answers were extraordinary; the two men quickened to the exchange of astonishment, ironic amusement, and (on Dando's part) scornful indignation with which he told and Bray learned of the swift about-face by which some white people turned a smile on the new regime, while others had already packed up and left the country. “Sir Reginald himself will present Mweta with a
buta
wood lectern and silver inkstand, it's down for Tuesday afternoon.” Dando was gleeful. Sir Reginald Harvey was president of the consortium of the three mining concessionaire companies, and it was common knowledge that, as a personal friend of Redvers Ledley, the most unpopular governor the territory had ever had, he had influenced the governor to outlaw the miners' union at a time when Mweta and Shinza were using it to promote the independence movement. There was a famous newspaper interview where he had called Mweta “that golliwog from Gala, raising its unruly and misguided head in the nursery of industrial relations in this young country.” “—It's enough to make your hair stand on end,” said Dando; and enjoyed the effect. The People's Independence Party, at the time, had taken Harvey's remark as an insulting reference to Mweta's hair; he still had it all, and it certainly would be in evidence on Tuesday.

Bray repeated what had been said to him at the airport that morning—that some of the white people still living in the capital would be more at home down South, in Rhodesia or South Africa. “Who was that?” “I don't know-one of the people from the plane—a baldish fair man with an accent, I didn't catch the name. He'd recently moved up here.”

“Oh Hjalmar Wentz—must have been. He and his wife took over the Silver Rhino last year. I like old Hjalmar. He's just been to Denmark or somewhere because his mother died. We'll go in and have a steak there one evening, they're trying to make a go of it with a charcoal grill and whatnot.”

“What happened to McGowan?”

“Good God, they've been gone at least five or six years. There've
been three other managers since then. It's difficult to do anything with that place now; it's got the character of the miners' pub it was, but it's very handy for the new government offices, not too overaweing, so you get quite a few Africans coming in. A genteel lot, very conscious of their dignity, man-about-town and all that, you can imagine how the white toughies feel about all those white collars round black necks in the bar. Hjalmar's as gentle as a lamb and he has to keep the peace somehow. Oh I'll tell you who's still around though—Barry Forsyth. Yes, and making money. Forsyth Construction. You'll see the board everywhere. They tell me he's got the contract for the whole Isoza River reclamation scheme—employs engineers from Poland and Italy.”

Because of the mosquitoes, they moved into the house. The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls. There was no air at all in the living-room, and a strong smell of hot fat. Every now and then, while dinner was awaited, their conversation was backed by intensely sociable sounds-sizzling, scraping, and high-pitched talk-let in from the kitchen as the servant went in and out, laying the table. There was another large meal, and an exchange about a bottle of white wine between Dando and his cook, Festus.

“Of course I don't open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”

“Well it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round flat bottle put in the fridge.”

“You say I cook chicken, isn't it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”

“Pink. It's pink. I specially didn't say anything about the colour because I didn't want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”

They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It's not an exaggeration to say that what they're having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven't replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You've only replaced one of his functions. You've still got to get country people to realize that these
functions are now distributed among various agencies: it's no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance—and yet that's what people would have done in the old days, isn't it?”

“In bush stations there wasn't anything we weren't responsible for.”

“Exactly. But now people have to learn that there's a Department of Public Health to go to.”

“A good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration's like, it won't be like
that.”

“The magistrates are all right, don't you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I'm not worried at that level. The Bench doesn't change of course.”

Bray laughed at Dando's expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.

“They'll die off, I suppose. There's that to be said for it. But God knows what we'll get then.”

“I met Gwenzi's brother in London one day while he was at Gray's Inn; he told me he was going to be the first African at the bar here.”

When Dando's opinion of someone was really low he did not seem to hear his name. “Don't think I don't know I've got some bad times coming to me,” he said, as if taking up, in private, current talk about himself. “When I said yes to Mweta I knew it and every time I walk past the title on my office door I know it. The day will come when I'll have deportation orders to sign that I won't want to sign. Warrants of arrest. Or worse.” He ate a mouthful of the left-over granadilla pudding, and there was the smallest tremor, passing for a moment through his head. “Poor old Dando.”

“Anyone who's stayed on is a fool if he hasn't thought about that,” said Bray.

“And I'll be instructing the State Prosecutor to act when I'd rather not, too. That I can count on. What if Shinza should make a bit of trouble at the next elections, what if he were to feel himself bloody well discounted as he certainly is, and start up a real opposition with all the tricks that he taught PIP, eh? What if he brought the whole Lambala-speaking crowd out in a boycott, with all the old beatings-up at the polls, hut burnings—you think I wouldn't find myself the one to put Shinza inside, this time?”

“Well, I know. But why on earth should it come to that?”

“I knew it when I said yes to Mweta. Poor bloody Dando. The blacks' dirty work isn't any cleaner than the whites'. That's what they'll be happy to note. But what their contented little minds will never know is that I knew it when I took the job, I knew it all along, and I'll say it now as loud as I'd say it then—”

“Who'll be happy?”

Dando refilled the brandy glasses again. “My colleagues! Those worthy fellows who've gone down South to Rhodesia and South Africa where they can feel confident they'll never have a black man on the Bench to give a verdict as biased as a white man's. —My colleagues, Tencher Teal and Williamson and De l'Isle!”

It was after midnight when they got to bed. Bray went to the kitchen to fill his brandy glass with water for the night. Cockroaches fled, pausing, from what they regarded as positions of safety, to twirl their antennae. A furry black band of ants led up a cupboard door to some scrap that had flicked from a plate. He stood at the sink, drinking cold water and looking at the avocado pear pip growing suspended by three matchsticks in the neck of a pickle jar of water on the sill. He was conscious of a giddy swing of weight from one foot to the other that was not of his volition; it seemed he had been standing there a long time—he was not sure.

He heard Dando, forced by the old Labrador into the garden, walking about outside the guest hut and talking reproachfully to the dog; and then it was morning and Festus's assistant was at the door with the early tea.

A helicopter snored over the celebrations, drowning the exchange of greetings when Bray was introduced to someone in the street, expunging conversation in bars and even speeches. Nobody knew what it was for—a security measure, some were satisfied to assume, while others accepted it as vaguely appropriate, the symbol of progress inseparable from all industrial fairs and agricultural shows and therefore somehow relevant to any public display. There was a moment in the stadium at the actual Independence ceremony when he heard it on the perimeter of the sky just as Kenyatta began to speak, and he and Vivien Bayley, the young wife of the registrar of the new university, sitting beside him, collided glances of alert apprehension—but although the helicopter did not exactly go away, it did not appear overhead, and supplied to the ringing amplification of the speeches only the muted accompaniment of the snorer who has turned over, now, and merely breathes rather audibly. Later it was discovered to have been giving flips at half—a-crown a time to a section of the population who were queueing up, all through the ceremony, at the nearby soccer field; a publicity stunt for an international cigarette-making firm.

Neil Bayley was the one to find this out, because of some domestic mishap or misunderstanding that made his arrival at the distinguished-visitors' stand very late. Bray was conscious of furious tension between the young couple at his side as he sat with the great stir of
tiers of people behind, and the space in front of him, before the velvet-draped and canopied dais, filled with press photographers and radio and television crews, who all through the solemnities raced about bent double on frantic tiptoe, snaking their wires, thrusting up their contraptions, manipulating shutters and flashlights. It was as if with all made splendidly ready for a theatrical performance, a party of workmen with their gear had been left behind. This activity and the risen temper along the back of a silent quarrel beside him provided the strong distraction of another, disorderly level of being that always seemed to him to take away from planned “great moments” what they were meant to hold heady and pure. Here was the symbolic attainment of something he had believed in, willed and worked for, for a good stretch of his life: expressed in the roar that rocked back and forth from the crowd at intervals, the togas, medalled breasts and white gloves, the ululating cries of women, the soldiers at attention, and the sun striking off the clashing brass of the bands. Or in the icecream tricycles waiting at the base of each section of an amphitheatre of dark faces, the mongrel that ran out and lifted its leg on the presidential dais?