A Guest of Honour (41 page)

He had to spend the evening with Boxer. A long—interred loneliness—born not so much of solitude as of single—mindedness—stirred to weak impulse in the man. Cloudy bottles of wine bought from the Lebanese importer on some rare visit to the capital were brought out and opened without comment (Boxer, like Shinza, had a certain delicacy) but in a sense of occasion. Boxer talked incessantly as usual, with lucid precision and even with style, of his animal husbandry, pasture ecology, and his extraordinary observation of the strange form of life manifested in ticks—a description of the sub—life of the silence and patience of parasitism. He was oddly changed without his hat; his forehead, half—way up where the hat rested day in and day out, was white and damp—looking, creased as a washerwoman's palm. Real nakedness belongs to different parts of the body in different people; here was where his nakedness was, in this exposed cranium, luminous as the wine went down and produced a sweat. Never mind the ticks—he himself appeared to Bray as some strange form of life. Bray listened with the bored fascination with which once, just before he left England, he had sat with Olivia through a space film, his own sense of life lying strongly elsewhere.

He was writing to Mweta when he looked up just as the yellow dress that he knew so well became visible, approaching through the scrub. She was hidden and appeared again, nearer; he stood up to wait. Just this way sometimes, in the early mornings or evenings, he kept dead still while a female buck that probably fed on the golf—course during the night moved silently, quite near. But his body had associations of its own with the yellow dress, robust but no less tender; there was a surge of pleasure that he would press against her in a moment, when they met. And then she came hurrying out onto the garden grass and there was a check—something different about her—as if she had sent someone else, smiling, in her place. As she reached him he saw that, of course, her hair was pulled up and tied back. He said, “Darling, I was hoping you'd notice the car was back, as soon as you got up—” and as he put his hand out behind her head he was suddenly checked again, and this time of her volition as she stopped dead a foot away from him, her palms raised for silence or to hold him off, her face bright, conspiratorial, pained and yet half—giggling. “They're just behind me—the children, Gordon. We're coming to invite you to drinks for him tonight. I've told him I've been doing typing for you in the evenings. It's all right.”

His body died back first, before his mind. He said, “Why bring him here, Rebecca?”

She was gazing at him, passionately, flirtatious, giggling, ablaze. He had never seen her like that. “The children, you ass. They keep on talking about you. It's obvious we're running in and out your house all the time. It'd look funny if we didn't come now.”

“My God, why didn't you say when he was coming. I could have stayed away for a few days.” He withdrew into what she had called his “elderly” voice, meaning, he knew, in her generous and unresentful way, that it put the distance of social background, education and assurance, rather than age, between them.

“Oh don't be
idiotic.”
She pleaded, tears like tears of laughter standing hot in her eyes. “It's perfectly all right. You don't
know
him. He'd
never
think anything. He's not like that. He's very attractive to women. It never occurs to him that I could ever look at anybody else. I've told you. He'll go away again soon. It's quite
all right.”

She stood there, a schoolgirl about to stuff her hand into her mouth to stifle a give—away of hysterical guilt before authority. He was amazed at her as much as angry at himself for in some way appearing to himself as a fool. He was about to say, And what we think—my dear girl, doesn't it occur to you that I don't really want to meet him—but the children running like puppies before the man burst into chatter, almost upon them, and a voice that he thought of immediately as somehow Irish in its effortless persuasiveness was making an entry, talking, talking— “—That's a tree for a tree—house, Clivie, now! That's what you call a tree! You could build one big enough to put a camp bed in, there—” “And a stove, to cook—” The skinny little girl jumped up and down for attention. “I'll show you—I always climb it!”—The smaller boy scrambled ahead, ignoring his mother and Bray. “Don't you say good morning to James, don't you say good morning?” She caught him up and held him struggling— “Leave me! Leave me! Leave me!” She laughed, imprisoning him vengefully, while he kicked and blazed at her, his black eyes fierce with tears.

“Becky, for God's sake—why does it have to be mayhem and murder wherever we walk in.”

She dropped the child, laughing at its huge rage and at the reproach. The little boy trying half—fearfully to kick at his mother's shins always had had the definitive cast of features that in a child shows a strongly inherited resemblance. Now Bray saw the face that had been there in the child's. The husband was surprising; but perhaps
he would have been so however he had materialized, simply because he hadn't existed for Bray at all. He was unusually good—looking in a very graceful and well—finished way, rather a small man—but, again, that was perhaps only from Bray's height. Five foot ten or so—tall enough to stand sufficiently for male pride above Rebecca. He wore young men's clothes elegantly, tight beige trousers belted on the hips, a foulard tied in the open neck of his shirt. Rebecca in her yellow dress and rubber—thong sandals looked shabby beside him. He wore a small bloodstone on one of the little fingers of his strong, olive—coloured hands and his face was smoothly olive—coloured with the large, even—gazing shining black eyes of the little boy, and the dull—red fresh mouth. On the man the face had a C—shaped line of laughter just marking the end of the lips on either side, and fine quizzical spokes at the outer corners of the eyes. His dark hair was prematurely silvering, like an actor's streaked for distinction. He was saying, “I suppose you're used to all this racket my crowd kick up. I think Becky's let them run a bit wild, she's too soft. Yes—I'm going to have to tan your bottoms for you—” He turned with a mock growl on the children, who shrieked with laughter, the little one still with tears undried. “—But that's a marvellous tree there you've got for a tree—house, I don't think I'd be able to keep my hands off it, even if I didn't have any children around, I'd have a little retreat of my own up there, electric light, and pull the ladder up after me—”

And Bray the good—humoured friend was saying, “Oh I make do with this old thing on the ground, as you see—” while Rebecca in the same blazing, flirtatious, exaggerated way she had used with him, attacked— “Gordon, for heaven's sake! Don't put the idea into their heads! At least leave Bray in peace with his tree, you don't know how he loves his tree—”

While they all went on talking in this friendly ease he noted the slip—even she with all her apparent skill, born of long practice. For a woman to use a man's surname like that couldn't be mistaken as formality; it was a tell—tale inverted intimacy, sticking out, so to speak, from under the hastily made bed. He felt some small satisfaction in catching her out. She said, “I'd better leave you two, much as I like your company—Aleke needs his secretary. I'm about half an hour late already.” “Phone the fellow and tell him you're taking the afternoon off,” the handsome man instructed. “D'you want me to do
it?” “Oh no Gordon, I can't, he gave me yesterday and tomorrow's the weekend anyway. Everything'll be piled up for Monday.” He shrugged. “Well get cracking then, if you got to go, go—” She put her head on one side: “Keys?” He tossed car keys to her; she missed, they both ducked for them. “No wonder my sons can't play cricket—” He gave her a pat on the backside. “Shoo! And no damn nonsense about overtime or anything. D'you hear? There are people coming at six. D'you hear me?”

She ran, turning her head back to them, nodding it like a puppet's. Her thighs jerked as they did the day she came out of the water, on the island.

The children were climbing the fig tree and pelting each other with its shrivelled fruit; they had never behaved like that before, eithersubdued little creatures, running in with a sidelong glance and saving their fierce quarrels and boastful games for when they were living by some law of their own away from the awesome grown—ups. By contrast, Bray's daughters had been such self—assured children, perfectly composed in conversation with a visiting Colonial Secretary at nine or ten, politely offering an opinion to an African nationalist over lunch at fourteen. Like their mother, they could talk to anybody and kept their distance from everybody.

The husband stood about with the instant and meaningless friendliness of the wanderer. This way he was at home in the bars and hotels of Africa; a man who, since he never stays anywhere long, assumes the air of the familiar personality at once, wherever he is. This way he would stand about in conversation with the garage proprietor in a remote Congo village where (as he was relating to Bray) his car had broken down, just as he now did with the middle—aged Colonel for whom his wife did a bit of typing. He was “crazy enough” to have business interests in the Congo— “But I've had the fun and games. I've pulled out. There's still money to be made there, mind you. But the Belgians have moved back in such a big way and they push everybody else out … the Congolese wide boys would rather work with the devils they know than with devils like me. They would.” (Shinza's old saw about Mweta coming up again in a new context.) “I know a chappie—Belgian chappie—who's back for the fourth time. First he had a natural gas concession up in the Kivu—the volcanic lakes, there's a fortune lying there for someone, someday, if you can
live that long. Then he was in industrial diamonds in the Kasai, they were going to break away and he was all set to get a consortium to finance their diamond industry when they kicked out Union Minière.” He gave his slow, relishing smile, sharp yet humorously worldly, the teeth good. “Don't know what it was the third time round. Now he's in the currency racket between Lubumbashi and the Zambian border. He told me he feels ‘useless' in Europe. Here he says people want help to keep things going—they'll take it whatever way they can get it, and they know you don't get it out of the goodness of someone's heart. While the Russians and the Chinese and Americans are each watching to see what the other one will give, you have to go on living.”

“You think of us as devils?” Bray said.

Present company was waved away. “You know as well as I do. White men don't hang around in Black Africa for their health or anybody else's. Wherever a vacuum comes up, there are the boys who won't hesitate to fill it. Good God, you should just meet some of them the way I do. —Okay that's enough—out of that tree, now. And clear the mess you've made on that table—James'll never let you put up a tree—house if you drop things on his papers—” He grinned at his own audacity, always confident it would be well received, at once took command again: “Wha'd'you think of it, putting Becky in that sort of accommodation, though? If they need her they must damn well find somewhere for her to live, eh? There must be a house in this place. And if there isn't, they must find one. That's the way it is—you want somebody's services, you have to be prepared to pay for them. I told Aleke straight off, yesterday: you need her, you find her a house.”

“I think Edna Tlume's quite a help, in a way.” It was impossible to make any remark that did not have, to his own ears, an absurd innuendo.

“Oh that woman'd do anything for Becky. But the point is the house is a slum. Two rooms and no bathroom of her own. Can't live like that. I said look, if I had one week, I bet I'd find a house—your government's prepared to pay for it?” The children stood around the man proudly. “See!” Suzi thrust out her dry little hand with its blackened encrustations where Rebecca applied wart—remover to the middle finger. She was wearing a bracelet made of threaded mahogany beans, shook it up her arm with a sudden feminine gesture.

The children had cleared away the fruit they had pelted onto the table. He blew brittle leaf webbed in dust and spider—spit from his letter. It had gone completely from his mind. The little troupe chattered off the way Rebecca always appeared and disappeared, through the thin—leafed trees. The letter came back. He asked Mweta not to forget to arrange for him to be invited to the Party Congress. He mentioned what progress was being made with the education centre. “It could turn out to be rather like the workingmen's clubs in Britain in the nineteenth century. Here in these country places where men are beginning—though of course they don't put a name to it—to have a new consciousness of themselves as something more than units of labour, they are ready to take anything that's going: may come in useful. Whether someone gives judo classes or explains the different ways of dealing with the law of supply and demand … I wanted to suggest to the local PIP branch that they might use the centre as a place for a more general political instruction than the sort of hiphoorah stuff that comes out of party meetings. It would help combat unruliness, too. I would always rather go on the assumption that above people's heads is higher than the people who instruct them are likely to believe.”

The style and reasoning of such letters was something he picked up with a pen. It functioned of itself. For a lifetime—lying suddenly in his mind, the word associated with advertisements for expensive Swiss watches: lifetime. The habits of a lifetime. He felt himself outside that secure concept built up coating by coating, he was exposed nakedly pale as a man who has been shut away too long from the sun. The girl presented herself face—to-face, fact—to-fact with him, a poster—apocalypse filling the sky of his mind. Thought could crawl all over and about her, over the steadfast smile and the open yellow eyes and in and out the ears and nostrils. He sat for a moment exactly as if he had swallowed an unfamiliar pill and waited for the sensation of the drug to unfold itself. Then the telephone rang in the house. It was Malemba in great excitement: the lathes from Sweden had arrived. He went to borrow a truck (the obliging Indian traders again), pick up Malemba, and fetch the machinery from the road—transport depot.