A Guest of Honour (46 page)

“Well, no … I don't know.” Aleke and Bray both knew the objections to that; one didn't want to publicize over the whole country the impression—hardly borne out—that Gala was in a state of emergency.

He looked at Aleke. “Of course, it'll probably be in the news service—curfew imposed and so on.” But that was different from broadcasting an injunction to the people of Gala, a warning that everyone else would hear.

“Selufu wants a van with a loudspeaker to go round.”

“That's certainly the best.”

“But he hasn't got a police van to spare—they're all up in the bush at the railway.”

“What'll you do?” Rebecca said. She came and stood beside Bray. They were looking out across the neat
boma
garden (hibiscus had been planted where the Christ—thorn had pierced the toe of an Aleke child) down the slope of the town half—hidden by the cumulus of evergreen, where a part of the market with its splotches of vegetable colour, a top—heavy, faded yellow bus with its canvas flaps waiting at the open ground of the bus depot, the yard of Parbhoo's store with its Five Roses advertisement on the roof, and the comfortable, squatting queue of women and babies outside the clinic, were all in the frame of vision. The usual bicycles and pedestrians moved in the road, bicycles bumping down over the bit where the five hundred yards of tar that had been laid in front of the
boma
ended and there was a rutted descent to the dirt. He had the feeling—parenthetic, precise—that they were both suddenly thinking of the lake at the same time. The lake with its upcurved horizon down which black pirogues slid towards you. The lake still as a heat—pale sky.

Aleke said, “Borrow PIP's, I suppose. They're the only people who've got one ready fitted—out.”

For some reason or other Rebecca wanted him to come to the Tlumes' for lunch—usually she was busy fetching the children from school and feeding them, unless they happened to be going home with school friends and she could come to him. He agreed without
thinking about it, anyway, because he had had a call at the
boma
about noon from Joosab, and had to go off and see him, knowing before he got there what the urgent and apologetic summons would be about. Sure enough, I.V. Choonara of the Islamic Society was in Joosab's tailor shop. There among the ironing board, the sewing machine and the counter with its long—beaked shears attached to a string, the two elderly gentlemen “expressed the worries of the community” about the Gandhi Hall and School. He was giving his twice—weekly class to the local PIP branch there—the economic basis necessary for Pan—African aims. The Islamic committee members wondered whether it was wise to have these young men gathering at the Indian school just now.… What they really hinted was that they wanted to close the school and workshop to the adult education centre while there was disturbance about. He was not surprised; though he privately doubted whether this PIP class would have been likely to turn up anyway, for the time being. Several Indian stores in town had kept their wooden shutters down, he'd noticed that morning.

At the Tlumes' Rebecca and the assortment of black and white children she had brought home from school were already at table. There was lemonade and a cake. “They insisted you must be here”; he realized that it was her birthday, not one of the children's. “Didn't I know when your birthday was?” She laughed— “I think I once must have told you. When I wanted to know your astrological sign.” “Mine's a fish,” the little one, Clive, said.

He could kiss her for her birthday, in front of the children. Although she was apologetic for making him suffer the noisy and not very palatable lunch—party she was rather happy and flattered at being the centre of the children's attention. They had presents for her—drawings and painted plaster—of-Paris objects made at school. Clive reminded that Daddy's present was on top of the wardrobe. A fancywrapped box held a transparent stone on a silver chain. The kind of thing that comes from Ceylon and is set by Indian jewellers in Dares—Salaam or Mombasa. Suzi made her put it on and all through the meal it dangled where those breasts of hers were pressed against their own divide in the neck of her dress. She must have kept the parcel specially to open on her birthday.

Whether Selufu had sent for them or not a reinforcement of police from other posts appeared round the town in the afternoon. Dazed
and dusty, they stood with the faceless authority of strangers on the street corners, outside the African bar, at the bootblacks' and bicycle menders' pitches in the gigantic roots of the mahogany trees of the main street, under the slave tree in the industrial end of town. He was about everywhere, trying to find something decent to buy Rebecca, and there was nowhere he didn't come upon them.

What could one find in Gala? He even went back to Joosab's to ask whether any of the Indian shops, who had had nothing to show him but Japanese cottons, didn't have some elegant silk sari hidden away against the marriage of a daughter. But there was nothing; not even a good bottle of French perfume at the chemist's— “no call for that.” In the end he bought her a leather suitcase produced from a back room in the gents' outfitting corner of Deal's supermarket; it was the only beautiful thing he could find in Gala, must have been there for years, too expensive to sell—standing wrapped in a cheap travelling rug since before he left, ten years ago. He carried it to the Volkswagen, not entirely satisfied, but it was better than nothing, and had to halt before crossing the road while the PIP loudspeaker van went past. A buried voice bellowed forth in a terrific blare that could not fail to be heard but whose sense could not be made out. Frank Rogers, owner of the bottle store, the Fisheagle Inn, former mayor of Gala, and once one of the organizers of the move to have the D.C. recalled, stood waiting beside him. Rogers' teeth had gone the same rusty yellow as his golden hair. He grinned. “Not walking out on us again, Bray, are you?”

“Farewell present for one of my staff at the education centre.”

Of course, everyone knows Bray's got a woman—first he took up with the wild men among the blacks, now he comes back to find himself a floozy, safe from any trouble at home. That's the big attraction for white men like him—do what you like, the blacks don't care.
—He knew that old rumours about his keeping black women had been revived, the moment he had come back to Gala—all hankerings after their own back yards were projected by indignant whites onto those who shared their colour but not their politics. Would the undoubted existence of a white mistress prove less of a smear than the mere fabrication of a black one? It would have been amusing to know if a white mistress were considered a lesser or greater sign of degeneracy.

And would Olivia, in her way, mind a black woman less than this white one? (She knew of the lovely black girl he had been so attached to in Dar-es-Salaam, before his marriage.) Would she find a black girl more understandable, in him? Not because she thought black women didn't count on her level, but because she herself had found many of them beautiful, and could well imagine a man might find in Africans certain qualities that Western women had traded for emancipation. It would be interesting to know that, too; but there again, he never would. Olivia would never know about this girl, never suffer. This fact seemed incontrovertible while at the same time he was living with the girl, had no plan or thought that did not assume her presence. The idea of “giving up” the girl didn't exist; and yet there was the equal acceptance that Olivia would in some way remain unharmed, untouched, embalmed in the present. All his life he had lived by reason; now unreason came and paradoxically he was resolved; whole; a serpent with its tail in its mouth. An explanation? The point was that he didn't feel any necessity to ask an explanation of himself. None at all.

Tom Msomane's Permanent Secretary for Labour flew to Gala to look into the Kasolo railway affair, landing on the airstrip near the prison watched by bare—bellied children. But by then the whole thing was settled. Three men who were alleged to be responsible for throwing government property into the Solo River were awaiting trial and the rest had gone back to work; only the Italian who had bounced through the bush for help refused to return. The Permanent Secretary was welcomed by a big beer—drink at Kasolo village, where he made a speech telling the villagers how the railway would bring more money and work to the district.

Caleb Nyarenda was a guest of the Alekes while he was in the area. He was a small, bushy—haired lively man who belched a lot behind a neat hand while he drank strong tea and told anecdotes from the days when he had been a burial society collector in the capital. Perhaps he still had too much of a professionally tactful no—farther-than-the-door manner with people; he remarked that the Kasolo villagers had been very friendly, but “no one came forward to tell me what was really going on. ‘Oh that business last week' “—he showed how they waved it away—”—after all I didn't come up for a wedding.”

“Well, they were just pleased to see you, that's all,” Aleke said. “People like to think the government takes notice of them.”

“Heaving one of those great big earth—eating things into the river, that's some way to get noticed!” Nyarenda laughed, looking round for confirmation.

Someone mentioned the Italian foreman, who was still in Gala, sitting all day on the veranda of the Fisheagle Inn, dark glasses observing without being observed, the cross round his neck gleaming on the curly—haired breast in his open shirt. Bray could speak a little Italian and made a point of being friendly if he happened to pass. The foreman told him he was going to hitch a lift to the capital as soon as he could get his things from the site; then he was going home to Foggia, and the company could sue him if it wanted to. “He says the Virgin Mary saved his life once, but you could never be sure she would do it again. ‘—Do it in time, again' was what he actually said.”

“That's the man who pushed my trolley round for me in the supermarket yesterday.” Agnes Aleke wore the wig and eye make—up, reserved for special occasions, all day while the Permanent Secretary was there, not out of a desire to attract him but to set some sort of standard for the remote Northern Province.

“Didn't he realize you were government property?” Nyarenda was quick.

Agnes stood with her hand on her hip. “All I can tell you, that's the first time in my life a white man ever offered to carry anything for me.”

“And the blacks?” Edna Tlume said in her soft voice.

“Oh
them.
Don't talk about them. You don't even expect it of them.”

While the banter went on, Aleke turned, in conversation aside with Bray, to the Kasolo villagers again. He had accompanied Nyarenda, of course. “They want a dam there, I'm told, but they wouldn't discuss it with him. I asked why but they said he's an Mso, why should he tell the government to make a dam for the Gala? Naturally, he'll see that dams are built for the people where he comes from.” Aleke shrugged and laughed.

“But why didn't
he
bring up the subject?”

“How's he to know what they want?”

Aleke's system of leaving well enough smoothed over; if order were
restored and the people had had some pride in entertaining an important representative of the government even if they had no personal confidence in him, why turn their attention back to their dissatisfactions? Well, if the dam were discussed and then not built, Aleke would be the man who'd have to deal with the resentment.

Gala township calmed down, too; Mr. Choonara consented to have the Gandhi School opened to the use of the centre again. At the iron mine there continued to be trouble of one kind and another. The phosphate mines in the Eastern Province threatened a wildcat strike. One broke out among the maintenance depot workers and drivers of the road transport company, which carried mail and newspapers to Gala. For a week Gala was without papers, and letters were long delayed. In spite (or perhaps precipitated by the silence?) of irregular mails, Rebecca got a letter from her husband. He had apparently changed his mind about boarding school for the children; he had entered them for a school in South Africa.

“That where he is?”

“He wrote from Windhoek, but the school's in Johannesburg.”

“And the little one?” Bray said. With the father's face; surely too young for school—only five years old.

“He'll stay with Gordon's sister. For a while. That's more or less the idea. She's got twin girls his age. —So's Gordon can see something of him.”

He said to her, “Didn't he ask you to come, too?”

She had a shy, cocky way of concealing a danger once it was over. “Yes, he wanted us all to leave—but I've explained, I can't break a government contract, and there's the money—and the money from the house, too, I can't just leave that here, all in a minute….”

“What house?”

“The house in Kenya—my father built a house for us when we got married. It was sold last year and we managed to get the money out and bring it here. But you can't get money transferred from here to South Africa, now.”

“Oh my God.” He saw her stranded in Johannesburg: Gordon Edwards ensuring the ice for his whisky far away in the Mozambique bush; himself unreachable. It was one of those prescient visions of destitution and abandonment that come in childhood at the sight of a beggar asleep in the street.

“What does he say?”

“About me?” Her voice slowed. “But I
told
him. I couldn't come. I ought to finish my contract. At least I can't leave unless Aleke can get somebody else.”

Her full, square jaw set but her eyes were exposed, held by him, like hands quietly lifted at gunpoint.

They went on to talk about the practical details of the children's departure.

That night at the end of love—making she began to cry. He had never seen her cry before. The tears, released, like his semen, trickled into her hair and the hollow of his neck. He put up his hand to make sure and his fingers came away wet as if from a wound he had not felt. She didn't bury her head or hide her face; she was lying on her back within his arm. He thought of the little boy, and said, “I know. I know.” He smeared the tears against himself. Because she was not a woman who wept, she became for a few moments just like those others he'd known, who did, and there was nothing to offer her but the usual comfort—he kissed her eyes and ran his tongue over the eyelids. She said, “He's so independent, but all the same … little, isn't he?”