A Guest of Honour (44 page)

The lawyer was objecting to the refusal of bail; the prosecutor was adamant. The magistrate appeared not to be listening to either; he confirmed that bail would not be granted. That was all.

As the prisoners went out, making use of their numbers by making a slow progress of it, they began to sing a PIP chant and the two who were going off to the cells yelled slogans, the old slogans of pre—Independence days. Bray allowed himself to be carried and hindered by the courtroom crowd. Women in their church—going clothes opened their mouths calmly and ululated. The magistrate banged his gavel and was resigned to being ignored; he mouthed what must have been an adjournment and walked out. Another case was to be heard and the exhibits, including a bicycle with one wheel missing, were carried in while the police moved along the rows of benches and were held adrift, clumsily bobbing. It was difficult to tell whether the movement through the door was people pressing in or the court being cleared. It was not an angry but a strangely confident crowd, talking and shifting about in possession. The ululating women stood where they had risen from the benches, and swayed. It was like being caught up in a dance with them; he was taller than anybody and as he was pressed and shifted he could see everything, the PIP claque taking up the prisoners' chant and moving their heads like hens as they urged themselves through the people, the bewildered face of the old beggar, the young men turning vividly from side to side. He wanted to grin: a bespectacled white totem, waving ridiculously about on the wake of
backsides swinging their cotton skirts magnificently as bells. Slowly the whole crowd, and he with it, was drawn through the door as water circles the hole in a bathtub.

Outside, the three—man band whose evangelical beat derived from the Salvation Army was banging away falteringly. The PIP contingent went into discussion among the spectators and lingering courtroom crowd. There was a coming and going of individual PIP men, racing between the gathering and the office of the court; everyone was waiting for the nine to appear after completing bail formalities. When they did come out, rather sheepish, like people disembarking from a journey before the eyes of friends, the whole crowd was moved from the old—fashioned open verandas and yard of the building by the police. There was a momentary loss of direction when they might have dispersed; and then someone made for the piece of open ground on the other side of the road, next to the Princess Mary Library. The band tramped across, playing. The PIP Young Pioneers began an impromptu meeting; he waited a moment, beside the uneven pillars of the tiny, tin—roofed parthenon the ladies of the British Empire Service League had raised, to listen. The speaker stood on a wooden crate that had been abandoned by some shopkeeper and not yet carried off bit by bit by people looking for firewood. PIP had brought freedom and people who did not obey the orders of PIP were fools … there was nothing in the country that was not the business of PIP … PIP had not got rid of the white man to be told what to do by black men who were just as bad.… You were not allowed to talk about something that was in the courts but he would still tell everybody this—people who defied the trade unions defied the government, and PIP knew what to do with them.

He began to walk away and stepped round a scuffle that had kicked up—sudden blows between young men, and stones flying. He was in the path of one; it got him on the side of the neck: his hand went up with the involuntary movement of slapping a fly. A woman passerby gasped, “Oh sorry, sorry,
Mukwayi …”

The sting drew no blood. He had caught the stone as it fell into his open collar; he pushed it into his pocket.

There were several irritable incidents in Gala that day. Not all appeared to be concerned with the trial, but were released by the roused confidence of the courtroom crowd that affected the atmosphere
of the village as a heat wave affects the citizens of a cold country.

“They ought to be rounded up and put to work on the roads,” Mr. Deal at the supermarket said to him confidentially, wrapping the pound of ham that he had bought. “Lot of hooligans and no one to give them the language they understand, any more. All they've learnt is how to thieve better. You wouldn't believe it if I told you my losses since I've converted to self—service. This place just isn't ready for it—you've got to have civilized people.”

A small girl trader had ranged her few undersized tomatoes on the pavement. He was buying some when Gordon Edwards came by and at once suggested they have a beer at the Fisheagle. No black face had yet dared appear in the inside bar at the Fisheagle; the patrons were talking about golf and a European motor rally that had been shown on TV the night before.

Gordon Edwards told an amusing story about a friend of his who, after serving in the Mozambique channel on a patrol ship whose purpose was to intercept ships carrying cargoes for Rhodesia, had resigned and himself become a successful middleman in the sanctionsbreaking business, getting out tobacco and taking in machinery. While Edwards talked his eye kept wandering to Bray's neck. “Something's bitten you.”

His expression implied that he was unaware of it. The small stone lay among the other kind of currency in his pocket as the fact of what had happened in the early morning lay in his mind among the ready pleasantries of small talk.

The nine men were found guilty and fined. The other two never came to trial at all; on the special intervention of the President the case against them was dropped.

Almost every day, there were reports of disturbances in one or other of the provinces.

Everyone who could afford a TV set continued to watch the syndicated programmes from America and England—sport, popular science, old Westerns, and (if they were white people) the interminable serialization of
The Forsyte Saga.
Edna Tlume had hired a set and the full complement of the household was generally to be found in the darkened Tlume—Edwards living-room during the hours when the station in the capital was open. There was a news round—up once a day (Ras Asahe was the commentator for a while) but the station could not afford a permanent team of cameramen and reporters to film live events at home. The dim room—blaring with music and barking recorded voices, smelling of grubby children, curry powder from cheap meals, and Nongwaye's medicated tobacco—where a football game in Madrid was being played or a trial of Vietcong refugees was flickering into focus, was more real than what was happening in the neighbouring province and the next village. The heavy green of Gala hung shutting that out.

As his bulk blackened the doorway Rebecca would get up quietly from her canvas chair and slip away from the audience; everyone else remained absorbed. He and she were seldom bothered by the children now; he sometimes thought—and at once forgot again—he ought to remind her that they shouldn't be allowed to become addieted
to the box. She sat with her children resting against her, each one in physical contact with some part of her, the littlest sometimes falling asleep in her lap; what they drew from her, then, was enough and more to counteract what passed before their eyes and skimmed their understanding. There was fellow—feeling with them; he knew that steady current of her body, its lulling and charging effect. No harm could come while one breathed in time with that flesh.

The husband, Gordon Edwards, had gone away again. He had not found out if she had slept with him—never would, he knew even as, at the moment of putting aside her legs with his knee and entering her body himself, he would think of it. It was not in her eyes, anyway, as she lay as she sometimes liked on top of him and looked into his face as only lovers do, her face open to him. She complained that because he was short—sighted his eyes were intensely blank in passion, he was concealed from her. “I can't ever see what you're thinking.”

“I'm not thinking then.” But she was the one with secrets. Yet her lioness—coloured eyes (browner with the pupils dilated) were not secretive. The flirtatious animation she had put on like some curious form of reserve when the husband was there was gone, too. She had been clever to come to him that one morning, so that there was no question, once the other had left, that they would have to find a way to come together again: it was already done, they had never been anything else but together, beneath the convenient collusion of friends and circumstances. Yet there was nothing “clever” in her, in those eyes. She was simply
all there,
nothing withheld, nothing reserved, not even her secrets. So there was a stage you could reach where even the relationships each had with other people belonged to the relationship with one another. That could contain everything, encompass everything, not resignedly but in a fine sort of greed. If I'm too old for virginity of any kind to be anything but ridiculous in me, then allow that so must she be, in her way, too. It wasn't, after all, naïveté that enabled her to improve the curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

He wrote to Olivia about the strikes, lock—outs, and the confused expressions of dissatisfaction that, in the bush, took the form of tribal wrangling. He did not suggest to her that this atmosphere was the reason why she should not come. But neither, in their letters, any longer wrote as if she were coming. He did not wonder why she, for
her part, should have dropped the idea, because—he realized quite well—it suited him that she had done so so tacitly. He wrote her about cattle slaughtered in vengeance, huts burned, the proposed amendments to the Industrial Relations Act that would make strikes illegal for teachers and civil servants. She wrote about the beautiful officer's chest, circa the Napoleonic wars, that she and Venetia had found in a village antique shop, and a jaunt to London to see a play about the incestuous homosexual love between two brothers that couldn't have been shown while the Lord Chamberlain still had the right of the blue pencil. Their younger daughter Pat had been home on a visit from Canada. Venetia and her husband and baby spent a lot of time in the house in Wiltshire; photographs of the baby, laughing on flowery grass, were enclosed. He kept coming upon them in the broken ashtray in the sideboard which Kalimo had considered safe keeping, and was wedging them round the edges of the frame that already held a picture of Venetia and the infant, on an afternoon when Rebecca came in all smiles and relief to tell him that it was all right, her period had turned up after all. She had been nearly a week overdue. She took off his glasses and kissed him frantically, gratefully; “Though if it ever did happen, I could go to England. I always think that.”

He poured tea for her and stroked her hair. “England?”

“It's illegal to have something done here.”

So there was no child from him this time; but there could be, any time. He could see that she was afraid of it and accepted being afraid. She had told him she couldn't take the pill because it made her get fat.

Sampson Malemba and his wife were coming to supper. It was taken for granted that Rebecca was in the position of the woman of the house, now. She helped Kalimo when he would allow it; Kalimo kept Mahlope firmly confined to outdoor work—Mahlope's vegetable garden supplied the Tlume and Aleke households as well as its own. Mrs. Malemba (much too shy to call any white person by his first name or to invite anyone to call her by hers) would come to Bray's house if he asked the Malembas alone. She was content not to talk at all except for her extremely polite responses to offers of food and drink, and as soon as there was a mew from the bundle of infant she always had with her she would disappear into the kitchen to feed or
tend it. Rebecca managed to draw her out a little; Rebecca was a woman whom other women liked, anyway, but these days it was easy for Bray or her to be nice to other people. They had awakened together in the morning and, when everyone parted for the night, would be going to sleep together in his narrow bed; this was the source of an overflowing generosity of spirit.

The adult—education-centre-cum-trades-school was going surprisingly well. Sampson had clerks from the
boma
running literacy classes for older people in the townships. Bray had persuaded the most unlikely people among the white community to teach various skills at the Gandhi Hall workshop; white people, in a skin—wrinkle of apprehension hardly interpreted, were beginning to feel that perhaps it wasn't a bad idea, so long as it didn't cost you anything, to make a gesture of cooperation towards the blacks who were running the show. He also quietly counted on the ordinary, unconfessed pleasure anyone takes in demonstrating what he knows. The Americans had supplied a couple of surprisingly useful workers as well as money—not Peace Corps people, but Quakers of some sort—who were teaching fitting and turning, motor winding and various other skills that fitted in with the needs of the beginnings of light industry in the Gala area, and they took their jeep into the country to teach people how to use and maintain the heavy agricultural machinery that was available on loan from Nongwaye Tlume's department. Even Boxer had come down for a week and enjoyed talking uninterruptedly, in an intensive course on animal husbandry. The Americans had a tape recorder and the whole thing was preserved for use again and again; as Boxer spoke in Gala, it could be played to and understood by people in the remotest village. Boxer stayed with Bray; Rebecca had had to keep away, of course, not even an early morning visit was possible. Boxer was up at five and moving about his room. He brought with him that old—maidish bachelor cosiness which he assumed he and his host shared: there was the feeling that he thought it would be ideal if they could live together permanently. He was the sort of man in whom sexual desires die early; perhaps he was already impotent? He talked about Shinza without prompting: the continuing trouble at the iron-ore mine was due to the meddling of “his lordship,” coming from the Bashi in his “pa-in-law's” car and getting at people. The Mineworkers' Union secretary had come from the capital to see what was up,
but who would listen to him?—they were all Mpana's crowd, and they would listen to whomever Mpana told them. And Mpana told them to listen to his son—in-law, his lordship Shinza. Boxer gave the facts as a piece of local gossip.