A Guest of Honour (64 page)

Along with the newspapers and other mail was a letter from Olivia. Bray had left it there though he had seen it at once when the girl put down the bundle—it lay under their eyes a moment while he was already tearing wrappers off the newspapers. He opened it now.

“… I mean to be on your back, hour after hour on the floor.”

The large well-formed, well-educated handwriting covered thin sheets without a word crossed out-the marriage of a son of some old friends, Venetia's new car, the Labour Party's Brighton conference—
I sat watching on TV while you were in the smoke and heat of Shinza's battle with Mweta. Joosab's cinema, of all places—do you remember when it was opened, just before we left, and little Indian girls garlanded all the white ladies with hibiscus full of ants, so we were scratching ourselves politely all through the speeches.…

“A sign of weakness. It's fatal to show a sign of weakness. She accuses me of weakness. She says I had no authority over the children. But she also blames herself. D'you know why?” Hjalmar began to laugh weakly, unable to help himself. “D'you know what Margot said?”

His eye was following Olivia's letter as he listened to Hjalmar …
you are having a so much more interesting time … my poor dull news … I sometimes worry. I wonder where we'll take up again. Of course I should have come, but the fact that I didn't … shows that it wasn't possible for us.

“She said, I blame myself. A Jewish father would have had some authority over his daughter. He would have seen that she was provided with a proper musical education. He would have found somewhere better for his children to live than buried in this place. A Jew would have done better.”

In the appalled silence the weak giggle spilt over, again. “I know I'm not well. But that's true—she said it.” The terrible weak laughter was suddenly a fiercely embarrassed apology—not for himself, but for his wife.

“Poor Margot,” Bray said.

“I left all the keys, I left the van outside the bar, and I walked to the main road with my things. She was carrying a vase of flowers into the entrance and she saw me putting the keys down.”

I sometimes worry—he
skipped the lines he had read before—
You may be bored, now, in Wiltshire. And the place is looking so beautiful. I have come to love it more and more. It seems to me the only home I ever had, not excepting Dargler's End.
—Her father's house. Olivia was one of those people who have had so happy a childhood that they cannot be thrown back into a state of insecurity, whatever else they may suffer.

“So you don't get rid of me.”

“You stay, Hjalmar.”

“You don't come out with a thing like that—just on the moment,” Wentz said. “She had been thinking it for years, eh?”

Rebecca appeared with her wet hair combed as it had been the first day she had come to the house, only now it was long. He got up oddly ceremoniously, his wife's letter in his hand, and for the first time touched Rebecca in Hjalmar Wentz's presence, lifting the wet hair and kissing her on the cheek. “I'm going to Malemba's.” She sat down in the sun near Hjalmar with a bit of sewing; it was a dress for her little daughter and it lay in her lap for a moment under her eyes and Bray's as the letter had done.

Rebecca and Hjalmar waved; he drove off down the road. The eldest
Malemba boy was cementing the cracks in the concrete veranda of the Malemba house, and the younger children were standing about waiting for an opportunity to dabble in the mess. Sampson was still waiting for the house he had been promised when he became Provincial Education Officer; Bray had often remarked that the Malembas ought to have the house
he
had been given, but Sampson, in whom courtliness always took precedence over right, refused to hear of it. Sampson took him into the little living-room with its framed school certificates and palette-shaped, plastic-topped coffee table before the sofa. He said, “Sampson, I think you ought to have a gun with you at night. Something to frighten anyone off with.”

Malemba said, “It's all right. I've got my cousin coming with me all the time now.”

“I'm glad. D'you think you can look after yourselves?”

“He's a man who carries a knife.” Sampson sat with his hands dangling between his knees heavily, as if already he disowned them for what they might do.

The streets of the township were lively as a market, on a Saturday morning. Children, bicycles, slow-moving sociable people-the car was carried along through this, rather than progressed. Bray bought a newspaper-cornet filled with peanuts (for the Tlume children; he and Rebecca were going there for lunch) and while he and the vender completed the transaction a head popped in the car window on the other side—a young man, Tojo Wanje, who had been attentive and argumentative at Bray's night classes. They went to the King Cole Bar on the corner. Tojo wore transparent moulded plastic sandals with broken straps, azure sunglasses shaped like a car windscreen, and used a folded newspaper to emphasize what he said. “This Tola Tola, what's he want? What's he want?” He had a way of laughing, head up, open-mouthed, vivacious. “I don't know—you think it's the Msos?” “This paper! I don't learn nothing!” “No, well I think they're not being given much information. Or they're told not to use what they've got.” “Then why must I pay sixpence? I'll rather buy myself a beer.” Bray bought two more bottles and the young man, who was a foreman at the lime works, told him there had been a fight the day before, pay-day. “These men, we call them the Big Backs-you know, they work putting the bags on the trucks, and they're strong. Two new men were just taken on this week and when we were waiting at
the pay office the Big Backs started kicking up a trouble, they told the new men to show their cards. So they show their union cards but they haven't got party cards. Well, they were beaten up. I don't know. Their money was gone, they were kicked on the ground. Then we made a complaint to the union—I myself, I said to them, who are these bulls, these shoulders without brains—oh, I think I better not open so wide in future!” And delighted, he roared with laughter. “But there is fighting, fighting all the time. —They don't care to raise production,” he added, to show his tuition had not been wasted.

At first it looked as if Tola Tola would not be brought to trial immediately; he was, after all, being held under the Preventive Detention Act and in theory could be detained indefinitely—at least until the Act came up for yearly review as Dando had provided when it was framed. The pay dispute on the mines was not settled, and a two-week “cool-off” period which the unions managed to get the miners to agree to was broken by a wildcat strike. It was supposed to be a token one-day affair and restricted to the mine with the biggest production, but some categories of workers did not return to work the following day, and it dragged on sporadically, complicated by internal disputes not only between the mineworkers' unions and the miners, but also among groups of the miners themselves. “It's deteriorating into gang warfare,” Bray remarked one night at the Tlumes'. “Another chance for the whites down South to say how blacks don't understand anything but tribalism.”

“Well it's our own fault,” Nongwaye said, frowning with reasonableness. “It
is
the Galas and Msos who are beating each other up.”

“They're turning on themselves in frustration because the unions've lost control. The unions are strung up between the government and the miners. They've made promises to both they can't fulfil for either.”

“So those idiot Galas take it out on the Msos.” Nongwaye was Gala himself, and spoke as if of a family failing.

“Nobody understands anything but tribalism,” said Hjalmar. He, Bray and the girl had become so close, in a parenthetic way, that she was able to fling out her bare arm half-comically, half-consolingly, and give his shoulder a squeeze. And wan though it was, the remark almost succeeded in being a joke against himself.

It was probably because of the strike position that Mweta and Justin Chekwe were in no hurry to have a political trial. If people were in a quarrelsome mood, a trial would bring out more dissension for them to identify themselves with, or the confirmation of other grievances, perhaps opposed to their own, that would nevertheless widen the reference of dissatisfaction and rebelliousness in general. But the strike grew and spread anyway, its two aspects somehow coexisting in a third: that whatever the miners did in place of work—strike or quarrel among themselves over it—the mines could not run without them. Hardly later than Shinza had said, all the gold mines were out, and the coal, iron-ore, and bauxite ones followed. At the gold mines near the capital the Company army used tear gas and baton charges to disperse a huge march of miners making for the President Residence. The mine and capital hospitals were full of people suffering temporary blindness from tear gas, Vivien Bayley wrote; “bloody Albert Tola Tola can be thanked for all this. We know that he whipped up his little flop on the battle-cry that Mweta didn't have the strong arm to hold down the unions and Shinza. Now Mweta's showing the beastly kind of muscle they want. Why didn't he stand out on that balcony of his and talk to them? They didn't have so much as a stone. Even Neil says it was the last chance. They didn't come to kill him, they came to talk to him because they won't talk to Chekwe and his crowd. Hjalmar was right to flee from the wrath of Margot without waiting for the wrath of the Big Boss and the Company to fall upon this place (don't tell him I said so). My riot bag stands packed.”

It was true that the day before the trial of Tola Tola and his co-accused opened (it was suddenly announced: Dando, perhaps, getting tough, standing out obstinately against Chekwe for his inch of the rule of law?) Mweta arrested twenty—three trade unionists. “That's the way to do it,” Aleke sat back in his big office chair and dropped his chin to his chest with a grin. “Selufu says there were others, too. And now he expects he'll get the okay to put away a few people here we can do without at the moment.”

“What was there to stop him? If there'd been any rioting at the iron mine, he'd have made arrests—but the strikers seem to be keeping their heads there better than most.”

“These aren't actually strikers he's thinking of—some of the wise guys here in town. Prevention is better than cure. But ever since you
caught Lebaliso on the wrong foot that time, everyone here is v-e-r-y careful.” He laughed good-naturedly at Selufu's difficulty.

“Oh that.”

“You've forgotten?” Aleke's was a reminder of the graceful removal of Lebaliso from the scene rather than of the boy whose back was scarred.

“No. But everyone else has. Selufu has nothing to worry about.”

“Oh he's ambitious, Selufu. He's a bright fellow. No flies on that nose of his.”

“I hope he'll use his zeal to deal with the people who've threatened Sampson.”

At least Selufu was managing so far to prevent the Young Pioneers from Gala from “settling” in their own way, this time, the strike at the iron-ore mine; apparently he had set up police check-points that investigated all vehicles and people on foot approaching the mine or compound. Of course this would also make things difficult for Shinza—for any of his people from outside who were working with the strikers; but Shinza's men were obviously so well established in leadership among the workers themselves that this might not be important. And Shinza? His “headquarters” at Boxer's ranch were very near the mine. —Shinza was probably miles away in some other part of the country, if not over the border. Yet if he wanted to see Shinza now, their old agreed meeting place was out of the question.

Mweta made a vengeful speech on television; a fly crawled and lingered, bloated hairily out of focus by the cameras, round the marvellous smile become an aggressive mouth. In the Tlumes' hot dark living-room the sound failed a moment and the white teeth seemed to be snapping at the fly.… The voice came back: he was “finished with patience,” he would “rub out the vermin,” “burn the dirty rags that carry filthy subversion.” He spoke of the Tola Tola affair openly although it was
sub judice.
A state of emergency was proclaimed over the whole country; there was a curfew in the capital. An interview with the Chairman of the Company—obviously a statement prepared in consultation between the Company and the government—was given a full page in the newspapers. The strike crisis had already “done untold damage” to the country's prospects of foreign aid and investment. The country should not be “misled into the belief that it was only private investment—which people were comfortingly told
was ‘economic imperialism,' ‘exploitation,' and other catchwords of Communist propaganda—that would be lost.” International financial aid organizations, without which he would emphasize none—
none
—of the major development projects could be achieved, depended heavily on reports from industry for “stability collateral” when allotting funds. (His voice in the ear of the World Bank?) … The Company, which had played a major part in making the country's economy one of the healthiest in Africa, would cooperate in every possible way (recruiting more men for their private army, buying more guns?) with President Mweta to restore industrial peace and prosperity.

They listened to every news broadcast in silent concentration. At meals, not the clink of a spoon. In the stifling nights under the fig, Bray and Hjalmar with their shirts off, only the pale blurs of their chests giving away their presence with the girl. In the bathroom, with the little transistor radio on the windowsill while he shaved and she lay still in the bath (under-lake landscape, white rock of flesh, garden of dark weed, clinging snails of nipples; he had floated up, face to face with another man there); even in the bar of the Fisheagle Inn, once, among the white men who cut off their talk and stared ahead while the fan sent currents shivering across their sweating foreheads, hearing the voice and waiting for it to be over.
Waiting for it to be over.
In the white shops of the main street the shopkeepers and white residents had this same air; a habit of mind saw what was happening in the country in terms of “trouble among the natives” that, while it made one uneasy, would be put down, dealt with, pass incomprehensibly as it had come (“they” didn't know themselves what it was all about, never knew what they wanted). Be dealt with by whom? Pass into what? Their long isolation as settlers in this remote place under the mahogany trees had not prepared them to take the proposition further. With their reason they knew this was a foreign country now (a colonial country belongs to the colonizers, not the colonized who serve them), but their emotions refused to ratify reason. Someone in the bar at the Fisheagle remarked of Mweta, “Sir Reginald'll have to clear up the mess for him, as usual,” and then they all went back to their gin and cold beer and weekend golf scores. Bray, swallowing his own beer, alone after a nod from one or two faces, felt no resentment or real dislike; but rather the sort of half-interested disbelief, undeniable inner recognition, with which one goes back to an institution—
school, barracks—and smells again the smell of the corridors and sees again the same curling notices on the baize. He had been here; he was one of these people in the colour of his skin and the cast of his face.