A Guest of Honour (9 page)

“If I want to read law, I don't know where I'll go,” Stephen said, pleased.

“Not law, for you,” Hjalmar said. “If you've got to get out, you can't practise law in another country. That's the way to get caught.”

“Come on, Hjalmar, you drop-out, you could do some teaching at a college preparing people for university, you could contribute something to the nation.”

Wentz poured Dando another glass of aquavit. “Kant and Hegel for the graduates of the mission schools.” Smiling at himself: “If I remember anything to teach.”

“If you can teach, you should,” Bray said. And added, turning to Margot Wentz, “Why do we say that with such certainty, always? How does one know what is right for other people to do?” She took it with a considering smile, like an apology. She said quietly to her daughter, “And how was your cocktail party?”

The girl shrugged and looked into a distance.

“The trade commissioner for the People's Republic of China, wasn't it?” said Hjalmar, for the guests, knowing perfectly well what it was. “Very elegant. With paper lanterns and fireworks. Yes!” He pulled a comically impressed face, as at the feat of a precocious child.

Emmanuelle suddenly grinned delightfully. “You should've seen Ras bowing from the waist. Everybody bowing from the waist. A eurythmics class. A man's invited Ras and me to some youth thing in China. He had a long talk with me—through an interpreter of course. Asked me how I'd broken free of neo-colonialist influence. I didn't know what to say.”

Her brother said to her, “Why does Ras always say ‘longwedge' for ‘language', he talks about African ‘longwedges'? Sounds so funny.”

“Go to hell.” Emmanuelle sat up straight.

Stephen laughed, protested. “No, really, why does he … I mean it sounds … I always notice it. …”

She was raised like a cobra, her small head ready to strike. “Get back to your beer bottles.”

His half-afraid, uncomfortable laughter made him writhe; but she was the one who left the room, ignoring everyone. “Hi, Emmanuelle, where're you going?” Dando called. “Aren't you going to play the flute for me tonight? What have I done to you, my beauty? Come here!”

“Not Emmanuelle,” said Margot Wentz.

“She's good, she's good,” Dando said to Bray.

“Yes, you must hear her another time,” her mother said.

“But there's no one to teach her, here, that is the trouble,” Hjalmar said. “She's really very talented. She plays the violin, too. She gets it from Margot's father, it's rather nice, she was named for him, too. Emmanuel Gottlieb, the physicist, you might have heard of … ?”

Margot Wentz waved away the possibility.

“You should hear how she can play African instruments, Colonel Bray,” Stephen said. “That little hand-piano thing? What she gets out of it! The thing you play with your thumbs.”

“You know Ras Asahe, from broadcasting?” said Hjalmar. “He's going to do a programme with her playing local instruments. I don't know what it's about. He has all sorts of ideas.”

“I used to know his father,” Bray said. “They're a bright family.”

Everyone was rather tired. There was the sort of silence that winds up an evening. Hjalmar Wentz looked quickly at his wife, and then slowly from Dando to Bray. He spoke in a low tone, a gesture to the presence of the boy, Stephen. “One doesn't know quite what do do, in these circumstances. You saw tonight. He takes her about everywhere.
He must be at least twelve years older; a man of the world. Normally one wouldn't hesitate to put a stop to it. If he were a white man. But as it is, it's awkward. … As soon as Margot says anything to Emmanuelle, she thinks … As if, with us, that would ever come into it!” His face was full of the hurt his daughter had no doubt not hesitated to fling at him.

Stephen proclaimed his presence. “Emmanuelle'll use anything to get her own way.”

But Margot Wentz had the closed, dreamy face of one who is angry to hear private matters put before strangers. They spoke of trivial, friendly things for a few minutes before leaving.

The invitation to lunch with Mweta came with a telephone call from Joy Mweta herself. Bray had already talked to her at various receptions and they had danced together—for the first time in all the years he had known her—at the Independence Ball. “You know where we're living now, of course?” she said in her cheerful, chuckling voice, and they laughed. The newspapers had made much of the fact that until the day the President moved into what had been the Governor's Residence, he had continued to live in the little three-roomed, tin-roofed house in Kasalete Township which had been his home ever since he and Joy came to the capital from Gala. “Is it a formal lunch?” She was a little scornful— “Adamson just wants to see you. At least I hope it will be only you. My baby says to me, mama, why do all these people come and live with us?”

“Which baby is that? Telema?”

“You're behind the times! Telema's in standard six. And Mangaliso's nearly ten—the one that was born after you left. The baby's another boy, Stanley, he's two-and-a-half.”

“Good work, Joy. How's Stanley's Gala? I need someone to practise on, someone not old enough to be too hard on my mistakes.”

“Oh what do you think! Do I talk English to my children?”

He had the use of the Bayleys' second car, now, so he drove himself to the Governor's Residence—nobody remembered, yet, to call it the
Presidential Residence. There had always been some sort of attempt at a characterless formal garden on the entrance side—pot-bellied palms and beds of regimented annuals—but he was pleased to see, while he was stopped at the gates for the sentries to check his bona fides by telephone with the house, a family of women, children, and cooking pots whose presence was given away by a thread of smoke coming from the shrubs behind the guard-house. Perhaps they were even kinsfolk of Joy or Mweta; Bray wondered how Mweta would deal with the rights of the extended family, in a house obviously large enough, on the face of it, to accommodate one and all.

Of course, it didn't look like a house; at least, not in Africa. He felt this with a chill, for Mweta, as Vivien's old Renault gritted over the raked gravel to the entrance. It was neo-classical, with a long double row of white pillars holding up a portico before a great block of local terracotta brick and mica-tinselled stone, row upon row of identical windows like a barracks. The new coat-of-arms was in place on the façade. The other side, looking down upon the park as if Capability Brown had been expected but somehow failed to provide the appropriate sweep of landscaped lawn, artificial lake, pavilion, and deer, was not so bad. The park itself, simply the leafier trees of the bush thinned out over seven or eight acres of rough grass, was—as he remembered it—full of hoopoes and chameleons who had been there to begin with, anyway. It had been saved because one of the first Governors had wanted it to simulate the conditions of the local golf-course—he practised his drives from the double-staircased terrace.

A black man in the white drill, gloves, and red fez worn by domestic servants at colonial residences opened the door, and a young, top-heavy black man wearing blue pin-stripe and a white carnation ushered Bray to a private sitting-room. He was Mweta's new secretary, but there was also a young white man hovering with an aide-de-camp's social ease. Bray had heard about him: formerly a P.R.O. at the biggest mining house, who had been taken on mainly to protect Mweta from the availability to his people that had characterized him as a party leader. They still expected simply to be able to walk in and talk to Mweta; no black secretary could hope to withstand the importuning of women from the Church of Zion or old peasants with a grievance, when such people were told that it was now necessary to apply in writing for an interview with the President.

“What luck for me, Colonel Bray, I'm Clive Small, my aunt Diana Raikes used to be a friend of your wife's, I remember her reading out a letter from your wife just before you left this country that time—most impressive. I think it was one of the things that roused my interest in the place—I was a student, still.” The young white man's red-tanned forehead was gilded with hair bright at the brow-line and temples, he had the well-cut lips and slightly bushy, antennae-eyebrows of a man attractive to women. He wore skin-fitting linen trousers and a gay pink shirt, and gently took over from the elderly African butler the preparation of the martini jug. “You know I like to fuss with this, Nimrod. We've got a new division-of-labour system going in this department.”

“The President will be with you in a few moments, sir.” The secretary turned from Bray to Small in an exchange of the casual, cosy asides of people who breathe fumes of power and palace intrigue so habitually that these seem to them an air like any other. “Did you prevail?”

The black man heh-hehed that things couldn't have gone otherwise: “Well, what could he say? ‘We very much regret'—all that kind of thing.”

“The big man will be de-lighted. Just wait. De-lighted. And Douglas? I'll bet his nose is ninety degrees out of joint. Mm?”

When Mweta came in, they stood aside, flanking him, smiling as if they had produced him.

He wore the sensible if stylistically confused tunic that had been adopted by the Party, years ago (somewhere between a Mao blouse and a bush jacket) but there was something turned-out about him. He came to Bray before Bray could approach. Their hands held fast, they almost swayed, smiling, Mweta laughing up at him, and the two others standing there, smiling. “About time. About time,” Mweta kept saying. “Always across the room, in the crowd! I just catch your eye, and then there's another face there.”

“It's strange to be stopped on the road and see you go by, waving at us all.”

Mweta hunched his shoulders and laughed like a boy who has had to show off a little. “But it was always for you, if you were there, James, you know that, it was certainly for you.”

The butler was carrying round a tray with Mr. Small's martinis,
and a glass of orange squash for Mweta. Yet Mweta's voice and spirits rose, in the talk and laughter, just as if the alcohol were rising in his bloodstream as in the others'. He had always had this self-intoxication, this flooding vividness that was at once what brought people to him and what their presence released in him. Years ago, he would turn up in a village on his bicycle and before he'd got his breath back from the ride there would be a group around him, and his voice quickly heard above the others, holding the others. Later his face gleamed wet with excitement when he would talk for two hours to some football ground holding a crowd tight as cells in one organism, a monster speaking his name as if booming from the mouth of a cave: MWETA. He developed the technique of long pauses, space for swelling, echoing, wavering response. They yelled; he took it; he began to speak once more. Once Olivia had been overcome— “There's something horrible—it's as if they coax some precious secretion from him—like ants stroking captive aphids.”

The secretary, Wilfrid Asoni, had the beaming professional ploy of making the President's interests his own. “Mr. President, it seems we can thank Colonel Bray for the services of our friend Clive, here. Oh indirectly, I mean, but just the same.”

“Oh your sphere of influence, again, Mweta,” said Bray. “Imagine how it's going to be, operating internationally—I wonder if U.N. realizes.”

“No, no, yours, James.”

“Well, even if you think so, don't tell them. You mustn't be too friendly with a has—been like me.”

“But you were, how shall I say, born out of your time—”

“—deported out of it, anyway, wouldn't you say, sir,” Small slipped in, through laughter.

“—You're now at last where you belong,
now, now,
building the state with us. Isn't that so? Of course!”

Their raised voices and laughter brought the high, overlarge room down to comfortable size. Blue cigarette smoke hung a haze over the view through the french doors of the bush in the park, retreated into the heat-haze of midday. Now and then Bray's attention drifted out there in counterpoint to the talk; the shimmering tremble seemed to spread through his own consciousness, smoothing, soothing, wavering it away into a state of suspension; the small happiness of warm climates.
Into the close male company came Joy Mweta, followed, or rather preceded, circled, and assailed by several of her children and a prancing dog. For a few minutes there was pandemonium in the room; Bray had not seen two of the children before, the third had been an infant when he left the country: they wore white socks and the eleven- and ten-year-old had already lost the shyness of African children and talked confidently to their elders, demanding and complaining; only the little one clung to his mother's hams and peeped round suspiciously. Mweta spoke to them in Gala and they spilled out onto the terrace; then the dog showed a preference for the shade of the room, and the carpet, and the littlest boy rushed in again to get him out. His brother and sister followed; Clive Small swung the little one round. “By the legs! By the legs!” the others begged. “Your mother's made that taboo, Mangaliso, she's afraid I might drop you on your head and you'll be bottom of the class ever after.”

“I'm thirteenth and there are thirty—five in our class,” the child volunteered to Bray.

The smallest climbed onto Mweta, a wet—lipped little creature, breathing heavily, with round, exposed nostrils and round eyes that make a reproach of every black infant's face.

“I haven't told you,” Bray said, “I'm a grandfather. I got a cable only this morning. Venetia's had a daughter.”

“Venetia!” Mweta was shaking his head. “You remember I used to take her for a ride on the back of my bicycle? —And she used to make posters for us,” he said to Joy, whom he had married after Venetia had gone to school in England. “Yes, this little girl was a very young supporter of PIP. Posters announcing the date and place of meetings and so on. And slogans. Clive, she once showed such a poster to the Colonial Secretary—who was it, then, James? That's right—he was here after the first London talks with Shinza, that time—and he went on a tour of the Gala district, of course”—everyone laughed— “to see where all this independence nonsense started, and to see what sort of fellow this Bray was who didn't seem to be stopping it—and while he was in the
boma
that day and he went home to the D.C.'s house for lunch, he asks this little girl, the D.C.'s daughter, what's that nice picture you're painting, and Venetia says, it's not a picture, it's a poster, look! What's it for, little girl? Can't you see? she says. For the PIP rally, of course!”