A Guest of Honour (38 page)

She had often a slight air of apprehension when he began to talk to her, as if she were afraid she might misunderstand—even in bed in the dark he would sense it.

“He was over the border. It's not too difficult to come and go across the north—west border there, in the Bashi. Miles of nothing, the Flats run out into half—desert, there's only the one border post on the Tanga River. That little wife of his more or less told me he's been before. —Don't look so worried!” Her face had gone broad, smoothed tight of expression.

“I'm wondering if it isn't Somshetsi he goes to see. You remember about those two?—Mweta expelled them a couple of months ago because old President Bete accused him of allowing them to set up a guerrilla base on our side of the Western border.”

“And if he's going to see them … ?”

He drew a considering breath; his waist was as slim as it was when he was twenty—five but like many muscular men of his height, he had developed a diaphragm—belly—it could be drawn up into his expanded chest, but there was no ignoring the fact that it pouted out over his belt when he forgot about it. He shifted the belt. “There's a piece in one of the English papers. Apparently Somshetsi and Nyanza
have split. Somshetsi's the man, now. He denounced Nyanza for wasting funds and not taking advantage of opportunities for furthering plans of liberation and so on. Whatever's behind that, if Somshetsi could see any chance of a change here, a change that would allow his group to come back and base itself here, why shouldn't he be very interested? Where they are now, they're the width of a whole country away from their own. No possibility of any attempt to infiltrate. Where they are, there's no common border with their country. Shinza could be their chance.”

All her comments were half—questions. “If he really means to make trouble here.”

“What I'm thinking is that if Shinza had retired to raise another family he wouldn't be slipping over the border to Somshetsi.”

“What could he get out of it?”

“I don't know.” His mouth was stopped at the point of hearing himself say aloud, Shinza might get support, through Somshetsi, from other sources that would like to see Mweta out; might get arms, might form some sort of alliance with Somshetsi—Shinza! A flash of absurdity. Shinza and Mweta belonged in the context of the fiery verbal wrangles at Lancaster House, with the conventional sacrifices and sufferings of an independence struggle with a power that, in contrast to the settlers who believed it existed to represent their interests, was simply choosing the time to let go. Shinza was better suited to the role of President to Mweta's Prime Minister, than to intrigue in the bush.

There was a small knock, low down, on the screen door of the veranda. Rebecca called out, “Yes, Suzi?” The children never ran in without knocking carefully; he wondered whether she had trained them, or whether they had some sort of instinctive delicacy or even fear of finding out what the grown—ups assumed they were not supposed to know. The little girl's voice was muffled.

“Come inside and tell me. I don't know what you're talking about.”

The child banged through the door and rushed to her mother with some complaint about the boys.

“Don't take any notice. They're just silly.”

“I'm goin'a tell them they just silly.”

Rebecca smiled in culpable alarm to him. “Oh no, don't tell
them.
It's a secret, just for you and me.”

The child's indignation calmed as he called her over and gave her
a cigar—box of mahogany—tree beans he had collected for her from the tree outside Sampson Malemba's house. “Someone must make holes so's I can make a necklace.”

He was very polite and courteous with children; the perfect uncle, again. “I haven't got the right tool to drill holes, Suzi, but I'll get them done for you down at the Gandhi School, if you can give me a little time.”

The little girl said confidently, “My daddy will do it for me when he comes.” The children seemed to have no sense of time; they spoke of their father as if he were part of their daily life.

When the child had gone she sat with her hands between her spread thighs, staring at the typewriter. She turned and said, “You'll be going down again now.” She meant to the capital; to Mweta.

“That I will not.”

“No?”

“No.”

She had not followed properly, lagged somewhere: she looked stoically forlorn. He noticed only that, not knowing any particular cause, and came over to touch her absently, gently; there was so much in each other's lives into which they did not, would never inquire—never mind, he could offer the annealment of the moment. He stroked a forefinger across her eyebrows, drawing them there above the strong lashes always tangled together a little where upper and lower met at the outer corners of those eyes, the colour of tea, today. None of her children had her eyes.

“It would be fatal,” he said.

He walked away from her. He felt, almost accusingly, you would have to have known me all my life to understand. But he went on talking, as if he were talking to Olivia,
who would feel exactly as he did;
except that he didn't talk to Olivia any more, even in letters. While he spoke he was aware of an odd, growing sense of being alone, like coldness creeping up from the feet and hands. And while his matter—of-fact, steady voice was in his ears he thought suddenly—an urgent irrelevance, striking through his consciousness—of death: death was like that, the life retreating from the extremities as a piece of paper burns inwards towards the centre, leaving a cold ring of grey.

“I understood perfectly what I was doing … when Shinza and Mweta started PIP it was something I believed in. The apparent contradiction
between my position as a colonial civil servant and this belief wasn't really a contradiction at all, because to me it was the contradiction inherent in the colonial system—the contradiction that was the live thing in it, dialectically speaking, its transcendent element, that would split it open by opposing it, and let the future out—the future of colonialism
was
its own overthrow and the emergence of Africans into their own responsibility. I simply anticipated the end of my job. I … sort of spilled my energies over into what was needed after it, since—leaving aside how good or bad it had been—it was already an institution outgrown. Stagnant.
Boma
messengers, tax—collecting tours—we were a lot of ants milling around
rigor mortis
with the Union Jack flying over it.… But now I think I ought to leave them alone.”

She was sitting very straight, as if what he said drew her up, held her. “Why is it so different? You must know what you think would be the best, the best government, the best—”

“For them—that's it. Why should I be sure I know? Why should I be sure at all? It was different before. That was my situation, I was in it,
because
I was part of the thing they were opposing,
because
I could elect to change my relation to it and oppose it myself—you see? Now I should be stepping in between them—even if it were so much as the weight of a feather, influencing what happens, one way or the other—it would still be on the principle of assuming a right to decide
for them.”

She was indignant on his behalf. “Mweta wants you to persuade Shinza! But if they ask you!”

“That doesn't change my position, if Mweta wants to make use of the temptation held out to me, if it suits him to—”

After a moment, she said, “What about people who go and fight in other people's wars. Just because they believe one side's right. What about something like the Spanish Civil War.”

He smiled, rubbed his nose, lifted his head as if for air. “The distance between the International Brigade and the mercenaries in the Congo, Biafra … !”

She began to type again, slowly. The taps were hesitant footsteps across the space that separated them.

“The trouble is, I mean—you are so—you
are
in it. You don't care about anything else, do you?”

“Oh, everybody ‘loves' Africa.”

“You live in your beautiful house stuck away in England as if your life's over. I mean, nothing awful ever happens, you read it all in the papers, you drive away from it all in your nice car, like some old—”

“Retired colonel.”

There were almost tears in her eyes, she had not meant to say that; affection came over him as desire.

“This is the place where everything's happened to you. Always.”

“There was the episode of the war.”

“You never talk about it,” she said.

“This's the continent where everything's happened to you,” he said.

“Oh well, I was born here. No choice.”

“Dear old colonel, dreaming of the days when he was busy fomenting a revolution behind the
boma.”

“You're here. You love that man, that's the trouble,” she said with a kind of comic gloom.

“Which man?” he said, making a show of not taking her seriously by appearing to take her very seriously.

“Well, both of them, for all I know. But Mweta, I can see it. And so all that stuff about interfering and so on is counted out. You are tied to someone, it goes on working itself out, like a marriage, no matter what happens there are always things you still count on yourself to do, because after all, there it is—what
you'd
call your situation. Stuck with it. What can you do? You'll forget what people say, what it looks like, what you think of yourself. You simply do what you have to do to go on living. I don't see how it can be helped.”

He held in his mind at the same time scepticism for her “uplifting” notion of that higher, asexual love (a hangover from some Anglican priest giving the sermon at the Kenyan girls' school?) along with a consciousness of being flattered—moved?—at her idea of him as capable of something she saw as unusual and definitive; and the presence of Mweta, Mweta getting up behind his desk.

“You'd be off like a shot to tell Mweta that Shinza does cross the border, and that what he probably does there is make contact with Somshetsi.”

She scarcely waited for him to finish. Her head cocked, her full, pale, creased lips drawn back, the line pressed together between her eyebrows— “Yes, yes of course I would. It's natural!”

“I don't much believe in that sort of love,” he said, as if he were talking to her small daughter.

“Oh well, that's English. It must come out somewhere—this idea you mustn't show your feelings.”

“My dear little Rebecca, the English have become just about the most uninhibited people in the world. You haven't been to England for a long time; love is professed and demonstrated everywhere, all the kinds of love, all over the place. It's quite all right to talk about it.”

“I've never been. —But just the same, you don't come from that generation, Bray—ah yes, the old taboos still stick with you—” They lost what they had been talking about, in teasing and laughter.

After they had eaten, she was crouched at the fire and suddenly read aloud from her book: “ ‘People have to love each other without knowing much about it.'”

He was searching through a file and looked up, inattentive but indulgent.

She was leaning back on her elbow, watching him. “So you see.”

Then he understood that she was referring to himself—and Mweta.

They (he and she) had never used the word, the old phrase, between themselves, not even as an incantation, the abracadabra of love—making. “What's the book?”

She smiled. “You remember the day you went to the fish—freezing plant? I took it before we left.” She held out the exhibit; it was Camus,
The Plague
—one of the paperbacks that Vivien had given him when he came to live in Gala.

Already a past in common.

What am I doing with this poor girl? To whom will she be handed on? And why do I take part in the relay?

He was teaching her the language—Gala. His method was a kind of game—to get her to start a sentence, a narrative, and if she didn't know the right word for what she wanted to say, to substitute another. She would start off, “I was walking down the road—I went on until I passed a little house covered with … with …” “Come on.” “With … porridge …” They laughed and argued; if the sentences were not simply ridiculous, they might turn into bizarre comments on the local people, sometimes on themselves.

He fished for a cigarillo in his breast pocket and went to sit in the
morris chair with the lumpy cushion, near her. She hitched herself over and leaned her back against his legs. He said in Gala, do you have to go home tonight? She answered quite correctly, looking pleased with herself as the words came, no, tonight I am going to—could not find the word “stay”—sleep at the house of my friend. And tomorrow? And yesterday? He tested her tenses and the terms of kinship he had been teaching her over the past few days. Yesterday I stayed at the house of my cousin, tomorrow I am going to my (mother's brother) uncle, the day after that I am going to my brother—in-law's, and on Friday I am going to my grandmother's. “Very good!” he said in English, and switched back to Gala— “And after that will you come back to your friend?” She was an apt pupil; she remembered the one term she had not used: in Gala, there was no general word for “home,” children had to use the word for parents' house, men referred to “the house of my wife,” and women referred to “the house of my husband.” “Wait a minute …” She went over the sentence in her mind— “Then I will go to the house of my husband.”

She had it right, paused a moment, smiling in triumph—and suddenly, as he was smiling back at her, an extraordinary expression of amazement took her face, a vein down her forehead actually became visibly distended as he looked at her. This time the game had produced something unsaid, with the uncanny haphazardness of a message spelled out by a glass moving round the alphabet under light fingers.