A Guest of Honour (31 page)

The confusion of noise was interrupted suddenly by the band stopping. People broke off talk and looked around. There was some sort of stir; people, began to crowd up; a different kind of buzz started and was hushed again. Mweta with Joy was parting a way through the guests, his guitar in his hands. That was how Bray saw it: his guitar. But of course it was not that guitar, it was simply one handed over from a member of the band in answer to a suggestion or request, maybe even Mweta's own sudden idea. Anyway, he was walking almost shyly, Joy by the hand and the guitar in the other, with the look of half—anticipation (he had loved that guitar) and half—pride (he had liked the pleasure village people took in the performance) he used to have when he got off the bicycle and the guitar slid from his back. Without any announcement, quite naturally, they stepped up onto the dais and he began to play, while she brought her hands together once or twice, straightened her young, slack, motherly body in its schoolgirlish pink dress, smiled, and then began to sing with him. Their voices were soft and in perfect harmony. They sang some banal popular song from an American film of the Fifties.

The whites applauded thunderously; delight came from them: perhaps it was an unconscious relief at seeing this black man of all black men in the old, acceptable role of entertainer. The Africans merely looked indulgent; after forty years of being told when to come and go, when to stand and when to take your hat off, a black president himself decided upon procedure. Then Mweta handed his wife down from the dais, gave back the guitar and left the hall through an avenue of people who surged forward spontaneously under the bright glance of that black face, that smile of vulnerable happiness.

He thought of how he had said to Bayley of Mweta, “He calls for
an act of faith.” What he had really meant was it takes innocence, a kind of innocence, to ask for an act of faith. He was talking to the Director of Information, who, as the first black journalist in the territory, had come to interview him years ago when the summary recall to England had just been announced. “What was worrying me most, I was worrying you would notice that I had no shorthand at that time …” They laughed, in the convention that the past is always amusing. But he was experiencing a clenched concern for this being that was Mweta, a contraction of inner attention, affection and defensiveness on behalf of Mweta, defensiveness even against himself, Bray. He was hyperperceptive to the world threatening to press the spirit of Mweta out of shape—white businessmen, black politicians, the commanding flash of Ndisi Shunungwa's rimless glasses, the OAU—his mind picked up random threats from memory, newspapers, and the actuality around him. There must be one being you believe in, in spite of everything, one being!

The band inflated the hall with noise again. At once the guests were deafeningly set in motion, drinking and dancing.

Next morning when he was on the road back to Gala trees and bamboo clumps came at him monotonously and his mind settled upon the past few days as if they had been lived by somebody else.

A hennish anxiety, last night.

Write to me. Write to me. We must keep in touch.
About Shinza, of course; go back to Gala and keep an eye on Shinza. Don't forget to
keep in touch
about Shinza.

Call for an act of faith: it takes innocence. Bunk. It's an act of incipient Messianism—oldest political trick in the world.

I suppose so.

There was a salutary aftertaste in jeering at himself for being taken in.

Beneath the fig tree he sat day after day compiling his report. There was no more rain; at night the stars formed encrustations of quartz across the sky, bristling light, and the smallest sound rang out. Kalimo laid ready a fire of logs on which the dried lichens were frilled medallions of grey and rust.

In the imposed quiet of Gala he found himself held in a kind of aural tension—something cocked within him, as in an animal in the dream that is grazing. Listening; he would raise his head from the papers and the hum of the tree's proliferate and indifferent life—rustling, creeping, spinning, gnawing, crepitating, humming—did not lull him. Gala had the forest village's eerie facility of covering everything, of swallowing everything, sunk out of sight by the closing in of a weight of green. Down under the mahogany trees the same foreshortened black figures went. No sound from bare feet in the dust; voices flitted like birds caged by the branches. Slave raids, punitive expeditions of Portuguese and English—the wake of perpetually renewed foliage came together behind them. The distant clangor and grind of the small industrial quarter was muffled out in the same way. Nothing happened in the open in this small, remote, peaceful crossroad. All change was a cry drowned by the sea of trees. A high—pitched note, almost out of range. (In a noon pause, one morning, he experienced in fantasy this same quiet of sun and heavy trees existing while things went wrong—he saw a car burning, bleeding bodies far
down under the shifting shade—pattern of the trees. It lasted a vivid moment; his skin contracted—it seemed prompted physically, like the experience of
déjà vu
—a rill of cool air had got between his damp shirt and warm back.)

He began at once to spend a lot of time down at Sampson Malemba's house in the old township.

Kamaza Phiri had made available an immediate grant to get a technical school going. Bray had said to him, “You realize that what Malemba and I are doing is a bit of mouth—to-mouth resuscitation on the old government workshops your department closed? The whole thing's contrary to policy.” Phiri's palms expanded, tea—rose coloured. “It's an experiment for the purposes of the Bray Report”—the side of Bray's mouth went up in amusement at the term— “I'm prepared to go along with it.”

Sampson Malemba was filled with a meticulous enthusiasm. He was making a round of the factories to talk to people about what initial courses were most needed. He had written off to Sweden for prices of machine—shop equipment. “Why Sweden, Sampson?” But at the table in his kitchen with its flowered oil—cloth he had done his homework; “The agreement—you know. The loan the government got: there's a balance of credit there for agricultural and industrial machinery.”

They had a plan for small village centres to be run as ancillaries to the main one in Gala itself—each chief was to be asked to build a large hut where basic equipment would be provided by the scheme for the teaching of shoemaking, carpentry, and, most important, maintenance and simple repair of the motorized farming equipment the agricultural department lent to these communities. Malemba had had a brilliant idea: mechanics in the two local garages would be paid to give night classes in the villages, or, if these were too out of the way, weekend courses. The great problem for every branch of instruction was to find people qualified to give it; but if one let oneself be deterred by that, both were sanguinely aware nothing could be done in Africa at all. The garage mechanics were the sort of model makeshift solution to be tried for in every instance—they spoke the language, and although proper apprenticeship as motor mechanics had never been established for Africans under colonial rule, they had, while working for
Bwana,
became skilled all the same. In Gala they had
kept the cars and tractors of the white community going for years; their own community had had neither.

Another problem was a place to house the centre. Bray felt fairly strongly that it should not be in the old African quarter or even in the new housing and hostel area, but in the “town” itself. It was important for ordinary Galaians to make a stake, firmly, in what had always been the white man's and was now the white man's and the black officials' preserve. He wanted the people who merely came into town to work, buy, or comply obediently with one or another of the forms of administration that ruled their lives, to establish once and for all that they belonged there, too. The club, the Sons of England Hall, the Princess Mary Library—they had passed by these for too many years. He wanted them to claim the town at last. He did not say this in so many words, as he went to see various people with a view to finding premises. (It was not for nothing, after all, that he had once been a civil servant.) But in the apparent simplicity of his approach—as if this were a routine matter of no unusual significance—there was something that, in spite of, perhaps because of, the old, innately unaggressive manner that many of them remembered in him from before, roused that unforgiving resentment towards one who always seems to have the moral advantage. His audaciousness was of the quiet sort, too, a joke played upon him by his background, producing in him a parody of the stiff upper lip. He approached the secretary of the club, even though he and Mweta had laughed at the very idea; one had to give the club members a chance. It was rather like the chance Dando had to give parliament to rescind the Preventive Detention Act. He suggested to the secretary that the disused billiard room—the generation of billiard players had died off, the squash courts were popular now—might be used for adults' secondary school classes Sampson Malemba himself intended to teach. The billiard room had a separate entrance from the club complex's general one. The classes would be held at night only. Then there was the big barn or shed that, as he (Bray) remembered, was put up to house the pack (years ago there were drag hunts in Gala and someone had brought out from Ireland the hounds who had died, one by one, of biliary fever; but not before they had bequeathed the occasional U—shaped ears that still appeared, in the odd generation of local curs). That shed would make an adequate workshop for fitting and turning
classes, and as it was well away from the main building, would not interfere with members' activities in any way.

“You see we're going to be a bit like one of those big universities, with their faculty buildings distributed through different quarters of the city,” Bray said in gentle self—deprecation. He and Sampson Malemba—sitting inside the club for the first time in his life—caught each other's eye and smiled.

But the secretary seemed afraid that a smile might give away the whole club to the black victors as a wink at an auction sale knocks down a job lot. He said, weightily, “I understand.” He would, of course, put the matter before the committee—Bray must write a letter, setting out the facts, etc. “Yes, Mr. Malemba will do that—the scheme is under his department.” Again, the secretary “understood”; but he could tell them straight off (and here he did smile, the beam of regrettable bad news) that the billiard room was jam—packed with scenery and props, the dramatic and operatic section had claimed it years ago, he couldn't even get his boys in there to clean up the place. And that barn— “You do mean the one down near the compound, just by the seventh tee?”—that barn was where the green—keeper kept his stuff, the mowers and so on, and, to tell the truth, some of the caddies dossed down there; “I know about it and I don't know about it—you know.” He became expansive with conscious good nature now that he was disposing of his visitors. “Perhaps we can enrol the caddies,” Bray said, feeling like a jolly missionary. The secretary was a big fellow whose thighs rubbed together as he left his chair; his short hair was so wetted with pomade that he had always the look of one who has just emerged from the shower. He laughed along with the black man, although he had not actually spoken to him apart from the initial introduction. He ushered them out with an arm curved in the air behind their shoulders. “Colonel, have you mentioned your scheme to any of the people here? I mean, just in the course of conversation?” It was the reasonable, flattering tone he might have used to encourage a member who had a good second—hand squash racket to dispose of; he knew Bray hadn't so much as had a drink in the bar since he'd been told his membership was approved. And Bray murmured, straight—faced, “I haven't been much in Gala lately, I haven't had a chance, really …”

In the car he said, “What a mistake about the caddies. The golfers
will take it as the knell of doom: now we are going to take away their caddies and
educate
them.”

“I would like very much to put them in school.” Malemba was dogged. “Those kids know nothing but to smoke cigarette ends and gamble with pennies.”

“Good God! The caddies will see their doom in us, as well. They'll be at the barricades along with the members, defending the place with golf—clubs.”

There must have been an emergency meeting of the club executive. Within a week there was a letter in the mail brought up by messenger from the
boma.
Inside, the communication itself was addressed to The Regional Education Officer, Mr. Sampson Malemba, and marked “Copy to Colonel E. J. Bray, D.S.O.” The members of the Gala Club, while always willing to serve the community as the Club had done since its inception in 1928, felt that the club buildings and outhouses were inappropriate and unsuitable as a venue for adult education classes. The purpose of the Club was, and always had been, to provide recreational facilities, and not educational ones, whose rightful and proper place was surely in schools, church halls, and other centres devoted to and equipped for instruction. Therefore, it was with regret, etc.

He phoned Sampson Malemba, who had one of the few telephones in the African township, but there was only a very small child repeating into the mouthpiece the single inquiring syllable, “Ay? Ay? Ay?” With the mail was a note from Aleke, beginning dryly, “I hear you're back.” He had not been to the
boma,
it was true; he had all his papers at home, and for the present Malemba was the only official it was necessary for him to see. Anyway, Aleke invited him to supper that evening; to look me over, to see how well I was managed, in the capital? He thought, I wish I knew, myself.

When he walked up the veranda steps of what had once for so long been his own house, the first thing he saw was the girl. Rebecca Edwards—she had her back to him. She was pouring orange squash for the cluster of barefoot children, black and white, whose hands and chins yearned over the table top, and she turned, jerking her hair away where it had fallen over her face, as the other people greeted him. She said gaily, naturally, “Welcome back—how was everybody?” not expecting an answer in the general chatter. It was all
right; he realized how he stonily had not known how he would face the girl again, not seen since that twilight. Of course it was because of her that he had not gone to the
boma,
it was because of her that he had arranged for the mail to be sent to him every day. He
had not wanted to be bothered
with the awkward business of how to treat that girl. The days that had elapsed had restored the old level of acquaintanceship. Or the incident was as peripheral to her as it was to him; her friends in the capital hinted as much, in their concern about her.