A Guest of Honour (37 page)

She laughed to see him trying to prevail. “If you are worried about the children …? You could dash over now? Kalimo won't be ready for an hour if I know him.”

She went as if she had been intending to do so, but he saw that she wouldn't have gone if he hadn't said anything; and she was back within ten minutes. She had put on lipstick and her hair was brushed back, lank from the lake. She herself had the look of a child fresh from the bath. “Everything all right?”

“Oh Lord, yes. Fed, in bed. Trust Edna Tlume for that.” She had brought a packet of marshmallows: “For afterwards, with the coffee. Don't you love them toasted?”

When Kalimo came in to clear the table he looked disapproving; she was squatting before the fire, watching carefully while the pink sweetmeats swelled on the end of a fork, wrinkled and slightly blackened. “Try one, Kalimo” she waved the fork at him, but he stumped out—the kitchen was the place for cooking.

She smoked one of Bray's cigars. It was half—past ten by the time he heard Kalimo lock the kitchen door. She was resting her head and arms on her knees. He stroked her hair; such a banal caress—it did for dogs and cats, as well. She jerked up her head—in repudiation or response, he didn't wait to understand—he put his face down to that small cup of bone at the base of her full neck and was at once launched, like the wooden cockleshell upon the lake, on the tide of another being, the rise and fall of her breathing, the even, hollow knock of her heart, the strange little sound of her swallowing.

She was smiling at him, slightly sadly.

“How long can you stay?”

“As long as we want.”

He began to kiss her, for last time as well as this time, and he
pressed his palm protectively on her belly and the round hardness of her pelvis in the tight, worn old jeans that didn't become her. It was all understood, between them. He undressed her and took her to his bed in that bare, male room which he had never shared with a woman; at once a schoolboy's room and a lonely old man's room, the room left behind him and the room somewhere ahead of him in his life. But the narrow bed was full again, he was full again, and it was all there, the body that had run shaking into the water, the big legs shuddering, the breasts swaying. This time he saw every part of it, watched the nipples turn to dark marbles rolling in his fingers, found the thin, shining skin with a vein like an underground stream running beneath it, where the springy soft hair ended and the rise of the thigh began, had revealed to him the aureole of mauve—brown skin where the cheeks of the backside divided at the end of her spine. All this and more, before he hung above her on his knees and she said with her practical parenthesis, “It's all right” (knowing how to look after herself, trusted not to make any trouble) and she reached up under his body and took the whole business, the heavy bunch of sex, in her hands, expressing the strangeness, the marvel of otherness, between the two bodies, and then he entered all that he had looked on, and burst the bounds of his body, in hers.

She was a woman full of sexual pride. She said, “You had a lot of semen.” His mouth and nose rested in her hair, smelling the dank, flat lake water. Beneath one instant and the next, he slept and woke again; his hand left her humid breasts and trailed, once, down the trough formed by the rise of her hip from her rib—cage, as the strings of a guitar are brushed over as it is laid aside.

They put out the light, now, and in the dark he began to talk. It was the old story; the unburdened body unburdens the mind. Hence the confidences betrayed, the secrets sprung, beans spilled, in beds. He was aware of this but talked to her just the same; about Shinza. “—I have this unreasonable idea that when I see him again—I will know.”

“That's what I thought. About you and me. If—
if
—it should come to that—again—I thought, then I'll know.”

“What?” he said, teasingly. His sex lifted its blunt head and gently butted her, a creature disturbed in its sleep.

“What we would do,” she said.

He drove to the Bashi that week. At the European—style house in Chief Mpana's compound, the man in clean grey flannels and polished shoes was summoned by a child. He said that Shinza was sick. Bray said that he was sorry; could he go over and see him in his house, then?

“No, he's sick.”

But surely, just to greet him? What was the illness?

He was asleep. He was asleep because he was sick.

“If I wait a while?” Bray said.

The man had eyes like the inside of a black mussel shell, opaque and with a membranous shine, as if they had been silvered over with mercury. Although his face was lean, the lids were plump and smooth. He said, “He's sick.” It was the contemptuous obtuseness that had done so well for colonial times; the white man could be counted upon to turn away and leave you alone: dumb nigger.

“If he knew I was the one who was here, he would want to see me.”

“He's sick.”

Bray went back to the car and smoked one of his cigars. There was a big box for Shinza on the seat. He should have left them for him, anyway; he was on his way back to the house with the cigars in his hand when he had an impulse to skirt it and go to the big hut where Shinza and the girl and the baby lived. Only children were about in the yard. The door was open, and before he knocked softly he saw, with a wave of familiarity, the deal table stacked with papers, the trunk with the coffee set displayed, the family group of leaders askew on the wall—then Shinza's girl, Shinza's wife appeared, carrying the baby, no longer pinkish yellow; it had taken on colour as a pale new leaf does. She greeted him shyly, formally. He apologized; and how was Shinza feeling?

She said, “Oh? Oh he is all right,” suddenly speaking in mission schoolgirl's English. “But I thought he was ill in bed?” She stood and looked at him for a moment, deeply, startled, caught in his presence as in a strong light. Then she went over and closed the door behind him. It was dim and secure in the room; the thatch creaked, an alarm clock ticked. Hardly able to see her, he said, “What's happened to Shinza?” His voice sounded very loud to him.

She leaned forward— “He's away again. Don't tell anybody.”

“Over the border?”

She grew afraid at what she had done. “I think so.”

He said, “Don't worry. I'll go quickly. If anybody sees me, I'll say you wouldn't let me see him. It's all right.”

The baby's arms and legs, where he lay on her lap, waved like the tentacles of some vigorous underwater creature. She said, “Must I tell him you came?”

“If you don't think it will get you into trouble with him.”

“I'll tell him.”

The baby gave a little shriek of joy. He whispered, “Your son's a fine boy,” and took the cigars back with him, in case she decided to forget that he had come.

The new chief of police had arrived; a man from the Central Province, but a Dendi, one of the Gala—speaking tribes. “Ex-middleweight,” Aleke said, “Once had a go for the title about ten years ago, they tell me.”

“Punch-drunk?”

“Oh no, no he's all right up there.” Aleke laughed.

Rebecca told him, “The new police chief's been in to ask for you.” “Really? What should he want me for?” The next time he was at the
boma,
she put her head around the door quickly— “He's here again.” A few minutes later Aleke's voice mingled with another in the corridor, and Aleke brought in a man as tall as Bray himself, with the flat—nostrilled but curved nose that the mingling of the blood of Arab slavers with the local populations had left behind. Evidently the nose had not been broken although the whole face had a boxer's asymmetry. Aleke went off. “I'll tell the boy to bring you tea.”

“I'm glad to know you are here in this district, Colonel, it's an honour.”

“And you—are you pleased with your new posting?”

The exchange of genialities went on.

“Oh yes, well, you get accustomed to this moving about. We are still reorganizing, you know. The country is young, isn't it so? Well, I'm just getting organized—there are always little things, when you take over. But I don't think I'll have trouble. There will be no irregularities
from now on. From now on everything will be”—he spread his fingers and jerked his hands apart— “straight—right—” And he laughed, disposing of peccadilloes.

“I've heard of your reputation in the ring,” Bray said. “I'm going to have to ask you to come along and give us some tips at the centre. We're going to have various recreation clubs there, as well.”

“Oh, a pleasure, a pleasure, if I can fit it in—this job of mine is really full time—you never know when you can count on being free for a few hours, just to take it easy—” The affability of a man making promises he knew he would not be asked to fulfil.

And the girl had said,
perhaps Mweta did it to please you.
There would be “no irregularities, now”; also to please me? There wasn't anything else the policeman could have come to see him for. Bray sat in the worn chair at the desk that was not really his, and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. His hands pushed the skin back from the sides of his nose over the cheekbones, pressed up the slack of his neck, lifted the eyebrows out of shape. Shinza was over the border; with friends, there; again. The wife said that: again. Shinza goes back and forth over the border, and perhaps they know about it—he saw the pleasant, battered face of the policeman who replaced Lebaliso—perhaps they know, and perhaps they don't. Mweta would be wounded because no letter came. It would be so simple to take a sheet of paper and write: you were right about Shinza not being at home, he goes and comes across the border, his wife says. You may have some ideas about who it is he sees over there.

He was very short—sighted and taking off his glasses had the effect of drawing the world in towards him as a snail does its horns. The greenery outside the window was blurred. The titles of the reference books on the dusty shelf—trade directories, an ancient Webster's—were illegible to him. He sat in this visually contracted world, obstinately, doing nothing. But his mind could not be held back; it was after Shinza, ferreting down this dead end and that, following and discarding scraps of fact and supposition.

He had told Rebecca he hadn't been able to see Shinza because Shinza was ill; everyone else was vague about his purposes and destinations, anyway. She spent a lot of time at the house, now. At first she came only at night, disappearing from the Tlumes' after they had gone to bed, coming across the scrub with her little pencil—torch, and
being escorted home by the hand through the dark trees at two or three in the morning. The nights were so blackly brilliant then, the stars all blazing low together like a meteor tail, and the cicadas and tree—frogs silenced by the chilled air; they could hear each other breathing as they quickly covered the short distance. When he came back the fire was fragrant ash, the room warm; each evening consumed itself, and left no aftermath. Then she began to come to eat with him and would stay the night, leaving only just before Kalimo unlocked the house in the early morning, and before “the kids burst in” to her room up the road. She told him that as it grew light she and Edna Tlume would sit and drink coffee together in the kitchen—Edna got up very early to do her housework before going on duty at the hospital.

“What do the Tlumes think?”

“Oh they are very discreet. I told you. They don't think anything.”

In spite of himself, he remembered the ease with which they talked of her, from hand to hand, down in the capital.

“D'you know what Edna said? ‘After all, where is your husband? A girl must have a man.' It was so African.”

She was standing at his table, where he sat with his papers. He drew her in and pressed his face to her belly through the stuff of her skirt, then pushed up her sweater and took out her breasts, releasing the warm breath of her body that was always enclosed by them. She had a way of standing quite still, with patient pleasure, while she was caressed. He found it greatly exciting. He had not thought her body beautiful at first but as it became familiar it became imbued, transparent, with sensation—it was the shape, texture and colour itself of what was aroused in him.

She moved unremarkably into the empty house with ordinary preoccupations of her own; cobbled at children's crumpled clothes, sitting on the rug before the fire, wrote letters in her large, sign—writer's hand, did things to her hair, shut up on Sunday afternoons in his bathroom. She brought over her sewing machine and began to remake the curtains. “When your wife comes she'll have a fit, seeing these awful things.”

Olivia had written saying that she really promised to come, now, by November—it was the shy, culpable letter of a spoilt little girl who knows she's been exploiting the will to have things her own way.
November was a long way off, to Bray. All time concepts seemed to be stretched; or rather, unrealizable. Next week and November were both equally out of mind. He did not know where he would be, any time other than the present. He did not know what he meant by that:
where he would be.
There was a growing gap between his feelings and his actions, and in that gap—which was not a void, but somehow a new state of being, unexpected, never entered, unsuspected—the meaning lay. He sat in the same room with the girl and wrote to Olivia, saying with affectionate reproach, November was about time, but it was a pity she was missing the winter, which she might have forgotten was so lovely, in Gala. There was nothing in the letter that touched upon him. All the easy intimacy it expressed was extraneous; the thin sheets lay like a shed snakeskin retaining perfectly the shape of a substance that was not there. He folded the letter and put it in the envelope.

Rebecca was doing some typing for him; that was inevitable. She looked up, mouthing a word; then focused, giving a quick faint smile. He said to her, “Edward Shinza was away when I drove to the Bashi.”