A Guest of Honour (42 page)

The gathering at the Tlumes' house was unlike the usual absent drift towards the Alekes' or the Tlumes' for an hour after work, when often one of Edna's relations or some subdued minor official, new to
his Africanized job, sat without speaking, and children wandered in and out with their supper in their hands. There were even one or two faces that didn't belong; a telephone engineer Gordon Edwards had travelled with, and the blonde receptionist from the Fisheagle Inn. She was the one who had brought the thigh—high skirt to the village (there was a time—lag of a year or so between the beginning of a fashion in Europe and its penetration to the bush) but she sat in this mixed company with those famous thighs neatly pressed together as a pair of prim lips. The doctors Hugh and Sally Fraser from the mission hospital were there with a young Finn who had just walked down from West Africa—his rucksack leaned against the wall. He wore a shirt with the face of some African leader furred and faded by sweat and much washing, and was prematurely bald on top, like a youthful saint in a cheap religious picture. Sampson Malemba had changed into his best dark suit after the dirty business of loading and unloading machinery. Aleke was wearing a brown leather jerkin with fringes—Gordon's present; how did he know just what would sit splendidly on Aleke's powerful male breasts? But there was the impression that Gordon Edwards acquired things that remained in his possession like clues to the progress of his life if one could read them: he happened to be here at a certain time, and so picked up this, happened to be there, and so was around when that was available. And in the same fortuitous fashion, it fell out that these things suited this one perfectly or were exactly what that one would like.

Alekes, Tlumes, Frasers—all accepted Bray's presence with Gordon Edwards without a sign. It might have been agreed upon, it was such a cosy, matter—of-fact conspiracy of friends: he did not quite know whether he was chief protagonist or victim? Everyone was so gay. Sometimes he felt as if
he
were a deceived husband; Rebecca wore a new dress (another present?) and when he danced with her had the animated, lying look of a young girl. Who could believe, as she had implied, that that lithe and handsome little man didn't sleep with her? Physical jealousy suddenly weakened his arms so that he almost dropped them from her. Between chatter she expected him to lip—read— “I'll try and come early one morning.” He murmured, “No, don't.” She pulled a face, half—hurt. She said, “Let's go to the lake again.
You
suggest it. On Sunday.” A family party. He felt himself smiling, the cuckold—lover: “All right, I'll be host.” Gordon Edwards danced again
and again with the tall refined tart from the Fisheagle; he must be the reason why she was present. Perhaps, then, he was staying at the hotel after all? It was impossible to say to Rebecca, does he sleep in this house? Idiot, idiot. He saw himself amusedly, cruelly, as he had done so often since he had come back here, where all should have had the reassuring familiarity of the twice—lived, the past. Aleke took over the Fisheagle blonde; his large, confident black hands held her softly as he did his children's pigeons, she kept her false eyelashes down on her cheeks, she had moved from the shelter of the settlers' hotel into the Tlumes' house as if on a visit to a foreign country. Agnes Aleke was wearing the wig Rebecca told Bray she had ordered by post and looked like a pretty American Negress. She talked to the Finn about her longing to visit the cities of Europe, holding her head as a woman does in a new hat. To him they were battlegrounds where the young turned over rich men's cars and camped out in the carpeted mausoleums of dead authority, not her paradise of shops. “ ‘Nice things'?” he said in his slowly articulated Linguaphone English. “Here you have the nice things—the shape of the trees, the round sun, these beaudiful fruits”—he was balancing on his knees a mango, caressing it. She flirtatiously patronized his lack of sophistication— “This shirt? You got it in Africa? Who's that president or whatever it is?”

The Finn squinted down at his chest and said as if putting a hand on the head of a dog that had accompanied him everywhere, “Sylvanus Olympio.”

“But alas,
assassiné—
he's dead.” Bray turned to Agnes, giving her the advantage.

The Finn said unmoved, “Never mind,” in a tone that implied he was a good fellow anyway, dead or alive, in fact better than some who were still about, perhaps in this room.

Agnes's patronage collapsed into the African internal feminine giggle that paralysed her, and, by a quick glance, infected Edna. This uninhibited and inoffensive amusement at his expense, along with a lot of beer, melted the Northerner. He began to dance wildly, but preferred to do so on his own. He was so thin that the only curve in his entire form was the curve of his sex in the shrunken jeans.

The immigration officials had impounded his money at the frontier. Bray said, “That's quite normal, any country'll do it—he hasn't a return
ticket. They have to protect themselves in case they get stuck with him here.”

“So we'll have to be keeping him in pocket—money in the meantime.” The Frasers considered him, parenthetically.

“Oh he won't have any great needs.”

Aleke smiled and remarked to Rebecca, “We can write to immigration? The mission would give a guarantee for him, ay? Maybe we can get them to release part of the money.”

“That would be marvellous,” Hugh Fraser said. “He must report to the Police Commissioner, by the way, while we're in town.”

“But I don't think the Commissioner is.” Aleke looked undecidedly at Bray for a moment, and then said to him in the far—away manner with which he referred to such matters, “There was the rumour of some trouble up at the iron-ore mine.”

“Oh? What sort?”

“Nobody knows how these things start, until afterwards. Something about overtime.”

The union had just agreed to a forty—eight-day cool—off period before any strike would be recognized. “Striking?”

“Apparently.”

“We heard a truckload of local PIP boys'd been seen driving up the Bashi road,” Fraser said. “We'll know tomorrow when the broken heads start coming in to the hospital. Ota, better not knock yourself out, old son, you may have to start work sooner than you think.”

“That's okay. I rather bandage heads than bury.” The light, light blue eyes that had emptied themselves of Europe turned with neither compassion nor judgement on Africa. His rib—cage heaved under the freedom shirt and he began to dance again.

“Where'd he get it, anyway?” Rebecca said.

“A man give it to me,” he said. “I stayed in his hut, it was a small place, banana leaves on the roof, but it's cool inside. At the end of the time, you know, he say, it's not a new shirt—but he give it to me.”

“We must get him a Mweta one now that he's here. Not secondhand.
We
can afford it.” Rebecca's new comradely way of talking to Bray. Not entirely new; it was rather the way she had been when she was odd—woman-out in the Bayley set in the capital, rather the way she talked to the men there. The usual concealment of the whereabouts of another kind of relationship existing within the general company, maybe. Her other new manner—the oblique flirtatiousness
—also showed under the surface now and then. Speaking not to him but at him, she asked, “Wasn't there a strike at the fish factory not long ago?”

“Oh they're a difficult lot. Always something simmering there. But that was settled, that other business.” Aleke answered for everyone.

Bray felt her attention on him. He said, “All's peaceful on the lake. We should take advantage of it and go down. What about Sunday?” Everyone was enthusiastic. “I'll bring the food. Kalimo will get busy. No, no—it's my party.” “What's the spear—fishing like?” Gordon wanted to know from him at once. “I hope to God you've got my gear up here?” he added to Rebecca, and she said, indulgent, pleasing— “All in the brown tin trunk. All intact.” “I've never tried, but it should be good.” “We'll have a go, anyway, eh? You've got a boat?” “There are pirogues everywhere and anybody'll let you use one.”

“You won't
need
it,” Rebecca assured enthusiastically. “There are millions of fish. They were swimming in and out my legs. You don't need to go miles out into the lake. They're everywhere round the island.”

The husband began to question her closely and patiently, as one does when making certain allowances for personal characteristics one knows only too well. “If she's once had a good time in a place, she exaggerates like hell, this girl.”

Her eyes shone, brimmingly; it was her way of blushing, and she pressed back her square jaw before the two of them. Gordon Edwards turned to appreciate her with Bray. “Have you ever seen anyone so much like Simone Signoret? Have you ever? The set of that head on the thick neck? The shape of the jaw?”

She did not look at him. She flew out appropriately, animatedly, at the husband. “She's fat and middle—aged. She's got a double chin!”

“Bunk. I just hope you'll age the way she has, that's all. Consider yourself damn lucky.”

He wasn't sure who Simone Signoret was—an actress, of course, but he and Olivia hardly ever saw a film. “Well, I hadn't really noticed …”

“That old bag!”

They laughed together at her indignation.

He was living at the Tlumes' all right; he would appear, talking already before he entered, at any time of day—the perfectly brushed,
white-streaked hair, the olive, tanned skin, the black eyes resting confidently round the room. He treated everyone as if he had known him all his life and decided unquestioningly into what part of his own established pattern of relationships with the world each person would fit. So Bray, in whom he had been quick to recognize a long—time professional wielder of authority just as he would impartially have recognized the particular usefulness of a currency smuggler or a doctor who wouldn't be unwilling to help out with an abortion, was at once assumed to be the ally for various decisions to be taken up not so much against Rebecca as sweeping her unprejudicedly aside.

“No sense at all in sending Alan and Suzi off to some school while the little one stays at home. They're all still at an age when they need their mother and a proper family life. What's the point of a woman having children if she doesn't bring them up? She was so mad keen for babies. It's a crazy idea to uproot them again for a few months—it just depends how long it takes for me to arrange things, and she joins me. What's the point of having to pack up all over again, in the meantime? The trouble is, wherever she finds herself she begins to arrange things as if she was going to be there forever.
This
place. I mean, have you ever heard … ? I find her landed here like a bird on a bloody telegraph pole. I should have done as I wanted in the first place, and sent her to her mother in England. ‘She didn't want to be so far away.' But what could be farther from anywhere? Camping out with the locals, not even a bathroom of her own. This's no place for my boys to grow up. Becky tells me proudly they're learning to speak Gala. Where in the world are they going to need to speak Gala, for Christ's sake? Who's going to understand their Gala?” He laughed, “In England? In France? In Germany? How would I get around with Gala instead of French, and my bit of Portuguese I've picked up—I was in Angola for a while, you know, one of the best times of my life, as it turned out”—he smiled, showing his charming, slightly translucent—looking teeth, a man with no regrets, and offered at least half the story— “Good God, just the other side of Benguela, the spear—fishing! It looks like Greece—bare yellow rock and blue sea. Not a tree or a blade. I was doing a contract for the harbour at Lobito. Every weekend we used to go off across the desert and pick our bit of coast.
Garoupinhas—
like that. Well, I learnt Portuguese among other things. I can make myself understood … and now
there's a contract for Cabora Bassa, the dam—you know? The French and Germans are going to build it for South Africa and the Portuguese. I get on well with Continental engineers—we've worked together before. I'm tempted to go back to engineering. For a while, anyway. So my Portuguese'll come in handy again, in Mozambique. You find yourself stuck in the bloody hot bush, miles from nowhere, it helps if you can chat the local storekeeper or the police, they'll do things for you. I like ice in my drinks … This may be a particularly hot spot in other ways”—the understanding was that this was between themselves, not for Rebecca's ears— “you've probably read about the terrorists' threat to blow up the thing while we're busy on it. Well, I don't want to die for the South African and Mozambique governments any more than I want to die for anybody else. The blacks or the whites—they're not getting this one. Personally, I don't think there'll be a chance for them to come near—the whole thing'll be guarded like a military installation. You can trust the South Africans for that. Nowhere's what one can call safe, anyway. I wonder about here. The strikes going on up at the iron mine. I know these countries; once they start with labour troubles, it's sticks and stones and they don't care who it is who gets in their way. One road out and a small plane twice a week—one mustn't forget that. D'you think it's all right? Well—I trust you to know that if ever it looks as if it's going wrong, you'll tip her off and see that they go without waiting for trouble to come. I know you'd do that?”

“Of course.”

“Because you can see how Becky is—she never believes that anyone would do her any harm. To come to the
bundu
in the first place—just mad. Well, if you want one of the good—looking sexy ones you settle for having to do the thinking yourself, don't you? Can't have everything—” His daughter had come up to him and he wound up the visit, talking of the mother but playfully transferring the reference as if it were applied to the daughter, hooking her ragged strands of hair behind her ears with his first finger, turning her meagre urchin's face to rub noses with his own. “Is that all you've got to wear, your brother's old pants? Lovely bird like you? Shall we go and buy you a decent dress?” She did not speak, only nodded her head vehemently to everything. It was true that there was something shabby and deprived about Rebecca's children. Bray had a curious loyal impulse to
distract the father's attention from this by changing the subject. “What sort of equipment have you got for the lake—you don't mean diving suit and oxygen and all that?”