A Guest of Honour Read online

  “Yes, I suppose I won’t know my way around when I get into town.”

  “Oh, it’s still not New York or London, don’t worry.” The man spoke with an accent, and a certain European kind of resignation. They laughed. “Well, in that case, we’ll probably bump into each other in Great Lakes Road.”

  “Please! Nkrumah Road.”

  “I said I should have to learn my way round all over again.”

  The man looked about quickly and lowered his voice. “This country can do with a few more white people like you, take it from me. People with some faith. Sometimes I even think I’m down South again, that’s a fact. I’ve said it to my wife.”

  A young black man with sunglasses and a thick, springy mat of hair shaped to a crew-cut by topiary rather than barbering had cut through the crowd with the encircling movement of authority. “This way, Colonel, sir. Your luggage will be brought to the entrance, if you’ll just give me the tickets—”

  The other man, bobbing in the wash of this activity yet smiling at it in hostly assumption of his own established residence in the country, was talking across the black man and the exchange of pleasantries, tickets, thanks: “—at the Silver Rhino, of course, you remember the place. Any time—we’d be very pleased—”

  He thanked him, listening to the two men at once and hearing neither, and followed the firm rump in white shorts past barriers and through the reception hall. “That’s all right, officer, this is Colonel Bray.” “I’m looking after Colonel Bray, no need to bother him.” A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, “Just a minute. I don’t know about this—” but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, “That’s okay, chum, it’s our ole friend Mr. Kabata.” The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. Mr. Kabata said, “What’s the matter with these people. Excuse me, I’ll get a boy,” and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. The porter addressed both men as Mukwayi, the respectful term become servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man.

  There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. Beside him, Kabata’s strong thighs filled the seat. “It’s not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I’d have waited to get it I would have turned up I don’t know when. You know how it is just at the moment. Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sékou Touré.” There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta’s face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. He said, “All very festive,” but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. The young man said, “You are from Gala district.” “I was. Why, are you from there?” “From Umsalongwe. But my mother is a Gala. I have visited that place.” “Oh have you? Recently or when you were a child? Perhaps I was still there then?” “I think they’ll be very pleased to see you back there.” He laughed. “I wonder if I’ll get that far.”

  “Oh, you must make trip” the young man said proudly. “I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. The road is much improved, much improved. You’ll see. You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock.” Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. The car was approaching, was carrrying him through the market quarter of the town. Under the mango trees, barbers’ mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed.

  The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando—a Welshman—newly appointed as Attorney—General. When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. They gave him the African cook’s special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again—he had done so in advance by letter—that he had an official lunch to attend. Bray’s ears were filled with the strange echoes of exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept.

  There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider’s web made by the supporting beams of the roof. The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, here and there showed a single stray strand out of place. The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath’s weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released.

  The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. The stale cool air of the room had heated; yet weariness receded, his head was left high and dry of it. There was silence and then he heard that there were voices in the silence droning somewhere, breaking off for breath, laughing—not softly, but softened by being almost out of earshot. Not quite. A voice separated, wound nearer, there was the starting up of a hiss (a hose, he thought) and he made out a word: not just as a particular combination of articulated sounds, but a meaning: “later on,” the compound word for this phrase, in the language that was spoken round the capital, and that he had never really known well.

  He got up and went over to the main house for a bath. The sun in the garden was burning, dazzling, seizing. In the bathroom flies were buzzing themselves to death against the windowpanes. Roly was a bachelor and his house was the particular mixture of tranquil luxury and unchangeable dreariness that is a condition of households where white men live indulged in the sole charge of black male servants. The cistern of the lavatory drizzled into the pan constantly and couldn’t be flushed properly, and the towels were stiff as a dress-shirt (Olivia had taken years to get people to learn to rinse the soap out of the washing), but an old fellow in a cook’s hat put tea under the trees for him and carried off his crumpled suit to be pressed without being asked. A youth was cutting the tough grass with a length of iron bent at the end. Coarse and florid shrubs, hibiscus with its big flowers sluttish with pollen and ants and poinsettia oozing milky secretion, bloomed, giving a show of fecundity to the red, poor soil running baked bald under the grass, beaten slimy by the rains under the trees, and friable only where ants had digested it and made little crusty tunnels. A rich stink of dead animal rose self-dispersed, like a gas, every now and then as he drank his tea, and he got up and looked around, as he had done so many times before, and with as little success, to see if a rat or mole were rotting somewhere. Whatever it was could never be found; it was the smell of growth, they had long ago decided, at Gala, the process of decay and regeneration so accelerated, brought so close together that it produced the reek of death-and-life, all at once. He strolled to the limits of the garden and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, but the grasses and thornbush on the other side (Dando’s place was eight miles out of town) were too entangled for walking where there was no path. He list
ened to the bush and had the old feeling, in the bush, of being listened for. There were—or used to be—leopards on the outskirts of the town; Dando had once had his dog taken. He walked a hundred yards or so up the road, and, meeting a man on a bicycle, greeted him in the language that had come back to him as he lay in the room.

  At six Roland Dando came home. He gazed anxiously from the car, as if, despite the telephone call, he were not sure if Bray had been safely received, but once he set eyes on him behaved as if they had seen each other a week ago. He was indiscreet, like many people who live alone, and brought back with him from the town—a child bulging with favours from a party—all the anecdotes and gossip of the Independence celebrations, producing, in a clinging fluff of supposition and rumour, bits and pieces of real information and opinion about Mweta’s position and the sort of team he had gathered around him. Another tray came out under the trees, this time with whisky and gin. An old black Labrador with corns on his elbows stood slowly swinging his tail before Dando as he talked. Jason wouldn’t bring home any golden fleece, believe you me (Jason Malenga was the new Minister of Finance); no, it wasn’t a bad thing that the British Chief of Police wasn’t being kept on, people always judged by the Congo, the idiots, but the African deputy, Aaron Onabu, was perfectly capable of taking over from that dodderer anyway; Talisman Gwenzi was first class, and a real Mweta man, David Sambata was an unknown quantity for Agriculture, what black knew a thing about agriculture, anyway; Tom Msomane was a corruption risk—there was reason to believe there’d already been something shady over a land deal for a community development—but he was from the right tribe, Mweta knew he couldn’t attempt to hold the show together without at least three Msos in the cabinet.

  Dando pulled ticks off the dog’s neck and burst them under his shoe while he drank and dealt out judgements. Out of a kind of jealousy of the new young men from Britain and America who were so careful to show their lack of colour-feeling by avoiding tainted words and addressing people by polite forms, he recklessly used the old settler vocabulary that reflected an attitude he had had no part of, ever. Roly Dando could say what he liked: Roly Dando hadn’t “discovered” the blacks as his fellows only yesterday. “Of course, Mweta has to hand out a job to everybody. Every pompous jackass from the bush who filled his pipe with tobacco bought with dues from the local party branch. They’re all heroes, you know, heroes of the struggle. Struggle my arse. Edward Shinza’s one of the few who did his stretch and got his head split open that time by Her Majesty’s brave boys, and where’s he—back in the Bashi Flats among his old wives, for all I know, no one even mentions his name.”

  “But Shinza’s here for the Independence ceremony?”

  Roly glared. “Nobody gives a damn where he is.”

  “But he is in town, now?”

  “I don’t know where the hell he may be.”

  “You mean Edward’s not going to take part in the celebrations? That’s not possible. He’s not come up to town?”

  “You can see he hasn’t been given a cabinet post. I don’t suppose he’s going to turn up for the honour of standing in the crowd and waving a flag, eh?”

  “But that’s ridiculous, Roly. You know Shinza. He knows what he wants. I had the impression he’ll be ambassador to U.N. Give time for Mweta to shine on his own for a bit, and any tension between them to die down. Of course he should have got Foreign Affairs. But that’s between the two of them.”

  “You might ask Mweta, if you get a chance to talk to him, ask him if he isn’t going to find a piddling little job somewhere, something with a decent label to it, for poor old Shinza, he was banging on the Colonial Secretary’s door with a panga while Mweta was a snotty picannin singing hymns up at the mission school.” Dando glowered pettishly over his third or fourth gin and ginger beer. He was given to putting himself on strange mixtures. He would drink one for several months and then switch, for similar good reasons (it was more digestible, it was less likely to produce an after-thirst) to another.

  “Oh Mweta’s not like that.”

  “You know Mweta. I know Mweta. But there’s the President, now. If there’s a father of the state, it’s got to be him or no one.”

  “I certainly had the impression whatever tension there was had eased up, last time I saw Mweta in London.”

  “Yes, ‘poor old Shinza,’ that’s what everyone says. Poor old Dando.” Dando did not explain the shift of reference. Perhaps he simply remarked upon his own getting older; undoubtedly he looked older. His small nose showed unexpectedly beaky now that the skin had sunk on either side.

  Bray had a lot of questions, not all of them kind, to ask about other people. Some of the answers were extraordinary; the two men quickened to the exchange of astonishment, ironic amusement, and (on Dando’s part) scornful indignation with which he told and Bray learned of the swift about-face by which some white people turned a smile on the new regime, while others had already packed up and left the country. “Sir Reginald himself will present Mweta with a butawood lectern and silver inkstand, it’s down for Tuesday afternoon.” Dando was gleeful. Sir Reginald Harvey was president of the consortium of the three mining concessionaire companies, and it was common knowledge that, as a personal friend of Redvers Ledley, the most unpopular governor the territory had ever had, he had influenced the governor to outlaw the miners’ union at a time when Mweta and Shinza were using it to promote the independence movement. There was a famous newspaper interview where he had called Mweta “that golliwog from Gala, raising its unruly and misguided head in the nursery of industrial relations in this young country.” “—It’s enough to make your hair stand on end,” said Dando; and enjoyed the effect. The People’s Independence Party, at the time, had taken Harvey’s remark as an insulting reference to Mweta’s hair; he still had it all, and it certainly would be in evidence on Tuesday.

  Bray repeated what had been said to him at the airport that morning—that some of the white people still living in the capital would be more at home down South, in Rhodesia or South Africa. “Who was that?” “I don’t know-one of the people from the plane—a baldish fair man with an accent, I didn’t catch the name. He’d recently moved up here.”

  “Oh Hjalmar Wentz—must have been. He and his wife took over the Silver Rhino last year. I like old Hjalmar. He’s just been to Denmark or somewhere because his mother died. We’ll go in and have a steak there one evening, they’re trying to make a go of it with a charcoal grill and whatnot.”

  “What happened to McGowan?”

  “Good God, they’ve been gone at least five or six years. There’ve been three other managers since then. It’s difficult to do anything with that place now; it’s got the character of the miners’ pub it was, but it’s very handy for the new government offices, not too overaweing, so you get quite a few Africans coming in. A genteel lot, very conscious of their dignity, man-about-town and all that, you can imagine how the white toughies feel about all those white collars round black necks in the bar. Hjalmar’s as gentle as a lamb and he has to keep the peace somehow. Oh I’ll tell you who’s still around though—Barry Forsyth. Yes, and making money. Forsyth Construction. You’ll see the board everywhere. They tell me he’s got the contract for the whole Isoza River reclamation scheme—employs engineers from Poland and Italy.”

  Because of the mosquitoes, they moved into the house. The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls. There was no air at all in the living-room, and a strong smell of hot fat. Every now and then, while dinner was awaited, their conversation was backed by intensely sociable sounds-sizzling, scraping, and high-pitched talk-let in from the kitchen as the servant went in and out, laying the table. There was another large meal, and an exchange about a bottle of white wine between Dando and his cook, Festus.

  “Of course I don’t open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”

  “Well it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round
flat bottle put in the fridge.”

  “You say I cook chicken, isn’t it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”

  “Pink. It’s pink. I specially didn’t say anything about the colour because I didn’t want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”

  They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It’s not an exaggeration to say that what they’re having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven’t replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You’ve only replaced one of his functions. You’ve still got to get country people to realize that these functions are now distributed among various agencies: it’s no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance—and yet that’s what people would have done in the old days, isn’t it?”

  “In bush stations there wasn’t anything we weren’t responsible for.”

  “Exactly. But now people have to learn that there’s a Department of Public Health to go to.”

  “A good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration’s like, it won’t be like that.”

  “The magistrates are all right, don’t you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I’m not worried at that level. The Bench doesn’t change of course.”

  Bray laughed at Dando’s expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.

  “They’ll die off, I suppose. There’s that to be said for it. But God knows what we’ll get then.”