A Guest of Honour Read online

  A GUEST OF HONOUR

  NADINE GORDIMER

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Four

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Five

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Six

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Author

  An honourable man will end by not knowing where to live.

  —Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

  Many will call me an adventurer—and that I am, only of a different sort—one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.

  —Ernesto “Che” Guevara

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  A bird cried out on the roof, and he woke up. It was the middle of the afternoon, in the heat, in Africa; he knew at once where he was. Not even in the suspended seconds between sleep and waking was he left behind in the house in Wiltshire, lying, now, deep in the snow of a hard winter. The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon … the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating and the light from red shades, the silky colours of Olivia’s things—the rugs, cherry- and satin-wood pieces—and the red earth pots, bits of beadwork, the two fine carvings they once found in the Congo. A few days ago he was in that house, packing to leave in the flat progression of practical matters by which decision is broken up into reality. If you have any trouble with the boiler, for heaven’s sake let Mackie look at it before you send to town. —What a pity you gave away your shorts. —There’s no knowing if I’ll be anywhere where I could dare appear in shorts, any more. —But your waist measurement hasn’t changed by so much as half an inch—I know by your pyjama trousers, I use exactly the same measurement for new elastic as I always did. —

  Three months before, Adamson Mweta stood outside a steak house in Kensington and said to him, Of course you’ll come back to us now! He had driven home, slowing down on the empty road that led through the fullness of a deserted summer twilight, at last, to the house. Housing estates overrun villages all over England, but here the process had been reversed; the house had once been a manor (Olivia thought that, even earlier, it had been a priory) but in the nineteenth century the village was depopulated by the drift to industrialized towns, lost its autonomy, and died; the shop-cum-post-office had closed, the cottages had fallen down; the woods and meadows took over the fields, only a few houses remained, to be bought by the people whose longing for country life discounted the inconvenience of isolation. As Olivia said, it ought to have been a sad-feeling place but it wasn’t; there was instead a renewal: the country had come back, bringing the reassurance of stubborn peace and fecundity, a beginning again. And they were only two-hours-and-a-bit from London, their daughters and their friends. He had kept up, since he finally left Africa ten years ago, a close contact with Adamson Mweta and the other leaders of the African independence movement. He spent a great deal of time going back and forth to London to advise them when they conferred with the Colonial Office, and to do what he could to smooth the way for various delegations that came to petition against the old constitution and to negotiate independence for their country. It was there, in this Central African territory, that he had been a colonial servant until the settlers succeeded in having him recalled and deported for his support of the People’s Independence Party. He said to his wife, “Mweta’s invited me to come back as their guest.”

  “Well, you ought to be at the Independence celebrations, if anyone is. That’s marvellous.” She used to make packages of sandwiches for Mweta to take with him when he cycled for miles about Gala province at weekends, speaking at meetings.

  He said to Adamson Mweta before they parted the next day, “Olivia won’t be able to come out to Independence, unfortunately—our elder daughter’s expecting a child just round about that time.”

  Mweta said, with his slow shy smile that always seemed to grow like a light becoming more powerful, as his eyes held you, “You mean little Venetia? She going to be a mother?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he mumbled in his Englishman’s way.

  “Well, that’s good, that’s good. Never mind, Mrs. Bray will join you later.”

  “I imagine by the time she’s prepared to trust the baby to Venetia the celebrations’ll be over.”

  “That’s what I mean—you’ll be more or less settled by the time she arrives.”

  They were standing at the door of Mweta’s taxi; there was a sudden uprush of feeling between the two men; the Englishman stood there, the small, quick black man took him by the biceps, hard, through his dark suit, as in his own country he would have linked fingers with a brother. Under the release of physical contact, he said to Mweta, “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” and Mweta said, “You—I told you we expect you back, now.”

  “But what would I do? What use should I be to you?” He was so accustomed to effacing himself in the hours of discussion of constitutional law and political tactics (a white man, an outsider offering impersonal service for whatever it was worth)—a strong consciousness of his own being flooded him as if a stimulant had been injected into his veins.

  “Whatever you like! It’s all ours! We need you; whatever you like!” Mweta broke away and jumped into the taxi.

  The pale stone façade with its stone lintels and sills worn smooth as a piece of used soap was directly on the empty road but the real face of the house was the other side. Sheltered by the building the garden was a grassy look-out over fuzzy colours of flowers, bees, and early moths to the long valley. He and Olivia gardened on summer evenings, not seriously, as she did during the day, but desultorily pulling out a tall rank weed here or there, for the pleasure of feeling its roots yield from the humus and bring up, in the crumbs clinging to that beard grown underground, a smell of earth rich as fruit-cake. They had laid flag-stones under the walnut trees for the white wooden chairs and table, so that it wouldn’t be too damp. They drank whisky there, or even the coffee after dinner. Sometimes before the dusk wavered the wood away into the distance, he went out into the sunlight that collected like golden water in the dip of the meadows and shot a partridge. There was no one to bother about shooting rights. Afterwards as the evening faded he cleaned the gun almost by feel and the clean, practical smell of gun-oil conveyed the simple satisfaction of the task. Olivia played records with the living-room windows wide open so that the music came out to them.

  This summer it was Stravinsky and Poulenc; she was of the generation and class that paid other women to knit and now that she herself was about to be a grandmother she made funny stuffed toys for nieces and nephews. She had a cigar box full of odd buttons, as a supply of eyes, but she put it away from her because one of the things she had hated when she was young was the show of dissembling older women made when confronted with something vital to them.

  “I suppose we said many times we’d come back when they got their independence.” She gave a small, self-questioning shrug, admitting the glibness of another kind of daily talk in another time.

  “It’s not because of what one said.” But both knew that; in those days, the important thing was t
o give Adamson Mweta faith in himself by positing a future that was real because you, a white person with nothing personal to gain by it, showed you believed it would come about.

  Gazing out across the valley and then calmly at him, she had her look of wanting to find out exactly what they were talking about.

  He said, “Certainly I thought of going back, then. Hypothetically. Before we left. —Just as I knew we should have to leave.”

  “Poor Adamson, it looked pretty hopeless at times. And yet it’s come so quickly. Ten years!” Ten years since they had been deported from the territory, ten years since she was a youngish woman of forty, and the girls were still schoolgirls. “Historically, yes, it would happen—but not to Adamson, and not to us?”

  The house they had bought, filled with possessions that had been stored all the years they were in Africa, the garden they had made, spoke for them. It was not a house to be quitted.

  “They expect you back,” she said with pride.

  “Adamson was in the flush of victory, all right. I think he’d have embraced Henry Davis.” Davis was the settler M.P. who had been responsible, at one stage, for getting Mweta banished to the far Western Province.

  “He naturally assumes you’ll come out of exile.” They laughed. But they were talking of Mweta; the strange shyness of twenty-two years of marriage made it impossible for her to say: Do you want to go? The passionate beginning, the long openness and understanding between them should have meant that she would know what he wanted. And in a way she did know: because it was for them a code so deeply accepted that it had never been discussed-one was available wherever one was of use. What else was there to live by? And so the question of what they were talking about really amounted to her hidden, pressed-down, banked-over desire to know whether this house, this life in Wiltshire, this life—at last—seemed to him the definitive one, in the end. Because she was suddenly realizing that it had been so for her. She was, after all (in the true sense of after all that had gone before) an Englishwoman. She had taken out of storage the furniture and family possessions that had been nothing but a nuisance to her when they left England together twenty years ago, and, putting them in place, inevitably had accepted the life the arrangement of such objects provided for, and her comfortable private income made possible. In the room they had decided upon for his study, the desk from her great-grandfather that had naturally become his—a quiet field of black-red morocco scratched with almost erased gold—was a place to write the properly documented history of the territory (Mweta’s country) that had never been done before; not the boxwood Colonial Office desk at which one dealt with government forms and made the empirical scribbles of administration or politics, written one day and screwed into a ball the next.

  In the scented, mothy evening she felt the presence of the house like someone standing behind her. She did not know whether he felt it too; and she could not try to find out because if it turned out that he didn’t—she had a premonition, sometimes, that in middle age you could find you had lost everything in a moment: husband-lover, friend, children, it was as if they had never happened, or you had wandered off from them without knowing, and now stood stock-still with the discovery.

  They watched the moths in the tobacco flowers. She said in her sensible, inquiring, Englishwoman’s voice behind which generations of her kind had sheltered, “Did Mweta say how long?”

  “It was very much a gesture! He was tremendously in the air!”

  “No, but he’d already mentioned it yesterday, isn’t that so? You misunderstood him yesterday. A year? Six months?—What?”

  White people given appointments in African countries after independence were usually employed on contract. “Good Lord, I’ve no idea, I’m sure he hasn’t either. It’s all in the air.”

  Olivia went in to change the record and because it was, unexpectedly, Mozart—the harp and flute concerto—he lit a cigar to smoke while he enjoyed it. She wandered down to the herb garden and brought back a branch of dill; “There he is,” she said. It was their owl, a youngster who had hatched out down in the field and was heard every night. She remarked that tomorrow she must pick the dill for drying. Everything was just as it was. But everything was changed. All had turned over in the barrel of the world and steadied itself again. She knew, if he didn’t, that he was going.

  It was night in Europe all the way. Dark rain in the afternoon in London when the plane took off, at Rome the airport a vast, bleary shopwindow shining blurred colours through rain. He hauled down his coat again to get out at Athens. The metal rail of the steps wheeled against the plane was icy-wet to his palm and in the streaming rain he did not smell the Aegean or thyme, as he had remembered from other journeys to Africa. Inside the airport under the yellow light the passengers sat down again on exhausted-looking chairs, bundled deep in their heavy clothing. An old woman with crinkly grey hair woke up at her post outside the lavatory and opened the door, smiling and grasping a filthy cleaning rag. He walked around to ease the cramp in his knees but there was a small circumference and within a few strides one found oneself back again at the shop, before which women and child passengers were drawn to gaze at embroidered aprons and evzone dolls. A girl of ten or eleven with the badges of the cantons of Switzerland sewn to the sleeve of her coat had exactly the look of Venetia at that age. He bought a postcard of brilliant blue sea and dazzling white ruins and tried to write, in what he could remember of Greek: Winter and darkness here but in Cambridge, perhaps, there’s already spring yelling its head off? My love to you, James. Venetia had had a first in Greek, herself, only a year ago, and could laugh over the mistakes.

  But that was the end of Europe. At Kano a huge moon shone and in a light brighter than a European winter afternoon the passengers made their way across the tarmac at three in the morning against the resistance of a heat of the day persisting all through the night as the sun persists in a stone it has warmed. There was a smell of wood-smoke; the men moving about beneath the belly of the plane had bare black feet. When the passengers climbed aboard again, their clothes felt hairy and the plane was airless. He put the coat away on the rack, apologizing, trying not to hamper other people in the general move to rearrange gear; the anticipation of arrival, still some hours off, aroused in them not so much common purpose as a spread of instinct, as in the lifted heads of a herd become aware of the promise of water. When the sun rose some slumped off into sleep, but women began to examine the plastic bags in which they kept their hats, and, as the hard beams of the sun struck into the cabin on hairnets, pale lips, and stubble, queues formed for the lavatories. While he was writing on the customs and immigration form, BRAY, Evelyn James, and the number of his passport, someone was reading his name over his shoulder; he flexed it awkwardly, not because he minded, but in mild embarrassment. The queue for the lavatory moved along a notch, he glanced up and the man, carrying a flowered sponge-bag, caught his eye with a tired vacant stare that changed to an expression of greeting. The woman who had dozed beside him all night communicating the intimate rhythm of her breathing but never exchanging a word, suddenly began to talk like a bird who has the cover taken off its cage. He wedged himself between the seats to recover the shoe she had lost somewhere over a distant desert; she laughed, protested apologetically, and shook cologne down into her freckled bosom. Dragging back the little curtain from the oval window, she looked into the dazzling glare of space and said, “Glorious morning up here!” and they discussed with animation the cold and sudden winter that was left behind.

  As he did not have a window seat he did not see the bush and the earth red as brick-dust and the furze of growth along the river-beds: not until the plane had come to a stop on the runway, and they were waiting for the health inspector to come aboard. He unhooked his safety belt and leaned over to look at an angle through the bleary lens on the far side of the aisle; and there it was, tiny and distorted and real, bush, earth, exactly as it remained in his mind always, without his thinking about it. It was underfoot. It was around. A
black man in khaki shorts (used to be a white man in white stockings) sprayed a cloyingly perfumed insecticide over the passengers’ heads as a precaution against the plane harbouring mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The doors opened; voices from without came in on currents of air; he emerged among the others into heady recognition taken in at all the senses, walking steadily across the tarmac through the raw-potato whiff of the undergrowth, the fresh, early warmth on hands, the cool metallic taste of last night’s storm at the back of the throat, the airport building with the five pink frangipani and the enclosure where out-of-works and children still hooked their fingers on the diamondmesh wire and gazed. The disembarking passengers were all strangers again, connected not with each other but to the mouthing, smiling faces and waving hands on the airport balcony. He knew no one but the walk was processional, a reception to him, and by the time he entered the building over the steps where, as always, dead insects fallen from the light during the night had not been swept away, it was all as suddenly familiar and ordinary as the faces other people were greeting were, to them. Waiting to be summoned to the customs officers’ booths, the companions of the journey ignored each other. Only the man with the flowered sponge-bag, as if unaware of this useful convention, insisted on a “Here we are again” smile. “You’re Colonel Bray?” He spoke round the obstacle of a woman standing between them. “Thought I recognized you in Rome. Welcome back.” “I must confess I don’t remember you. I’ve been away a long time.” The man had long coarse strands of sun-yellowed hair spread from ear to ear across a bald head and wore sunglasses that rested on fine Nordic cheekbones. “I’ve only just come to live here—from down South. South Africa.” He made a resigned grimace assuming understanding— “My wife and I decided we couldn’t stick it any longer. So we try it out here. I don’t know; we’ll see. I read you were coming back, there was an article in the paper, my wife Margot sent it to me in Switzerland, so I thought it was you. You were just in front of me when we got out in Rome.”