A Guest of Honour Page 5

  “Who was it? Out with it!” There was a roar again.

  “No, no—well, Ras took her—”

  “Oh Ras, was it?”

  “Sputnik Bar, eh?” “So that’s it, now.”

  Rebecca Edwards came in from the veranda, smiling good-naturedly, inquiringly, under the remarks shied at her. She said, “There’re bulbs like you see in films round the star’s dressing-table, and they light up and spell INDEPENDENCE HURRAH.”

  In great confusion, there and then they decided to go. Dando refused and Vivien had to go home to the children, and Rebecca Edwards protested that hers were alone too. Neil insisted that Bray must come; he was one of those people who, late at night, suddenly have a desperate need of certain companions. But when Neil, Bray, Evelyn Odara and the South African got down to the second-class trading area, the others hadn’t arrived. They went into the Sputnik Bar for a moment, meeting music like a buffeting about the head, and then someone said that he thought the arrangement had been to meet at the railway crossing. There began one of those chases about in the night that, Bray saw, Neil Bayley fiercely enjoyed. They went all the way back into town to the flats where the Edwards girl lived—Neil stood on the moonlit patch of earth in front of the dark building and called up, but there was no response. They stopped somewhere to give a man a lift; he was caught in the lights, hat in hand; only his clean white shirt had shown on the dark road. He answered Neil with a liberal use of Bwana, as a white man would expect if he were to do such a thing as stop for a black one on the road, and when he got into the car beside Bray and the South African, sat among these black and white city people like a hedgehog rolled into itself at a touch. Bray, back in this country once more, again aware of his own height and size and pinkness almost like some form of aggression he wasn’t responsible for, knew that the fellow was holding himself away from contact with him. The voices of Evelyn, Neil, and the South African flew about the car; they passed the shadows of the mango trees in the bright moonlight, lying beneath the trees like sleeping beasts; a donkey cropping among broken china on a refuse mound; the colours on the mosque almost visible, the silvered burglar grilles on the elaborate houses of the Indian sector. The second-class trading area had been laid out long ago and haphazardly; shops cropped up suddenly, streets met, the car plunged and rolled. All was shuttered under already bedraggled flags and bunting, black and deserted except for the bars-little shops crudely blurred with light, juke-box music and the vibrancy of human movement and noise.

  Bray offered to be left outside the Sputnik in case the other members of the party turned up. For ten or fifteen minutes he strolled in the street whose vague boundaries were made by feet and bicycle tyres rather than the strip of tar considered sufficient by the white city council of the old days. The cement verandas of the Indian shops were quays in the dust; snippets of cloth had been swept off them everywhere—that was where the African men employed by the Indians sat at their sewing machines during the day. The shutters and chipped pillars were plastered with stickers of the flag and Mweta in a toga. Young boys peering above the paint that blacked out the shop-front entrance of the Sputnik picked at the stickers on the breath-gummy, manhandled glass and giggled at Bray. The doorway was constantly blocked by befuddled men making to get out and undecided men looking in.

  How confused our pleasures are, he thought, and walked slowly up the street again, past a man who had got as far as the clustered bicycles and lay sprawled in the warm dust. The unmade road level had worn so deeply away from a shop veranda that the cement platform was the right height for sitting on. The din from the bar was companionable, like a reassurance that there was life going on in the house, and he smoked a cigar, releasing the fragrant, woody scent in the air stained with those old smells brought out by dampness—urine and decaying fruit. After ten years, the light of the town was still not big enough to dim the sky; there was no town for thousands of miles big enough for that. Ropes and blobs of stars ran burningly together; he let himself grow dizzy looking. Then Bayley’s car came back, and they decided to give up hope of the rest of the party and have a quick beer before going home to bed. The old part of the bar, a shop furnished with benches and rough eating-house tables, was full of the local regulars sitting over native beer and taking no notice of the band pressed deafeningly into a corner. In the new beer-garden—a yard more or less cleared (the dustbins still stood overflowing) and set out with a few coloured tables with umbrellas over them—there were some bourgeois Africans with women, and a couple or two dancing; Evelyn Odara waved at someone she knew. Bottled European beer was being drunk here. Neil had friends everywhere, and went in search of the proprietor, a handsome, greedy-faced young black man, ebullient with plans for making money. He settled down with them and brought, in answer to Neil’s insistence and insisting, for his part, laughingly, that they didn’t exist—three of his “girls” to join them. “You’ll do the kids a favour. Just about this time the police comes along on a round, and they’re not supposed to be here alone, you see—this town’s backward, man.” Beer arrived with the girls— “No, no, its a pleasure to have you and your friends in my little place. Of course, it’s not nicely fixed up yet … we wanted to have some night life for the celebrations. I’m paying the band alone twenty pounds a night, I’m gonna have a posh bar out here with whisky and ice for the drinks, everything nice … for high-class trade from town, you understand.”

  The three women were cheaply smart, with the shine of nylon tightly stretched over plenty of sturdy black leg. They had the rather appealing giggling pleasure in being dressed up for the part, of those who haven’t been in the business long. They were pretty, with straightened hair, painted eyes, and purplish-painted lips. But the coloured bulbs that spelled out INDEPENDENCE HURRAH had been fused by the rain, and were not working.

  It was true that Edward Shinza was not in the capital; given the past, this absence could not have been more pointed. For Bray himself, it was an absence somehow always present.

  Chapter 3

  The drives home at night on the dirt road to Dando’s were punctuated by the death-thump of nightjars who sat stupidly in the path of the car and then rose too late to escape, just as they used to on the roads at Gala. In daylight their broken bodies were slowly ironed into the dust by tyres passing and repassing over them. He and Olivia had kept a log-book of bird life in and around Gala; it had bothered them to think how, since there was no way to avoid killing these birds in the dark, one gradually got accustomed to it, so that the thump of their bodies against the car went unremarked as the shot of hard-back beetles striking the windscreen. One didn’t even notice, any more, that the dead birds were beautiful with their russet and black markings. They had tried to make a study of the nightjars’ habits, one summer, to determine what it was that made them partial to the roads; came to the conclusion that lice under their wings caused them to try repeated dustbaths. Yes, Africa was a kind of study, then, with detached pleasures and interests, despite his involvement in politics.

  During the week of the celebrations it was difficult to get into town without being held up somewhere by a right of way cleared for some dignitary or other. Traffic officers in white gauntlets zoomed arabesques on their motorcycles, soldiers in well-ironed khaki blocked the road and held back children, women, idlers and bicycles; sometimes a band came tootling and mildly blaring in the vanguard, and there were always flags. Then came the Daimler or Mercedes with the President of this or the Prime Minister of that, deep inside; often it was only after his car had gone by that one realized who it must have been, the kernel of so many supernumerary, black, bespectacled faces emerging from the identical perfect grooming of dark suits and snow-white shirt collars. Once it was the English royalty with her grey-permed lady-in-waiting, and once Mrs. Gandhi; and, while in the car with Vivien Bayley, Bray was even held up by Mweta himself. The Bayley children climbed out onto the roof and bonnet of the car to cheer, Mweta was in his orange toga in his open car, he was borne past with the un
seeing smile that already, in a few days, he had learnt to sweep across faces become all one, to him. Vivien said sadly, “Magnificent, isn’t he? Ours is the best-looking of the lot.”

  “I wonder if he’s enjoying it. He’s certainly carrying it off just as we always expected he should.”

  “What’s he say?” she said.

  “I haven’t spoken to him, really—not where one could talk properly.”

  As usual, a traffic policeman drew up the rear of the entourage with a figure-of-eight flourish about the empty road and the traffic broke loose again, hooting at sluggish and dazed pedestrians. The Bayley children fought and struggled to get back into the car through the windows, pulling at each other’s legs; shy black children looked on, one giggling nervously behind the thumb in her mouth. A young woman swung her baby onto her back, tied it firmly in her cloth, and put a small child on the luggage rack of her bicycle before wobbling off while keeping up a shouting, laughing exchange with a woman on the kerb. Bulging cartons tied with rope were loaded onto heads, bigger children took smaller ones on their backs, a group of young men on bicycles lounged and argued and the bells of other bicycles trilled impatiently at them. An advertising jingle from a transistor radio held intimately to a young man’s ear as he walked, rose and tailed off through the people. “I want to give the little girl my flag,” said Eliza Bayley. “Well, hurry up about it, then. No—the rest of you stay where you are.”

  They watched the fat little white girl, usually belligerent with her own kind, go up as if to the platform at a prize-giving, and hand to the black child with the thumb in its mouth one of the small, flimsy flags hastily printed in Japan in time to catch the Independence trade. People were tramping and drifting past the obstacle of the car. “Are they enjoying it?” said Vivien. There had been a sports rally, and a police band and massed school choirs concert, as well as the rather peculiar historical pageant that had gone on for hours at the stadium. Tribal dancing and praise-songs alternated with tableaux of Dundreary whiskered white men showing chunks of gold-ore to splendidly got-up chiefs; it had all to be kept vague in order not to offend the tribal descendants of Osebe Zuna II with a reminder that the old man had given away the mineral rights of the territory to white men for the price of a carriage and pair like the Great White Queen’s and a promise of two hundred pounds a year, and in order not to offend the British by reminding them that, at the price, they had got the whole country thrown in. Schoolgirls bobbing under gym frocks and helmeted miners epitomized the present on much safer ground.

  Bray and Vivien speculated about the celebrations in the African townships and villages. “Beer-drinks? Big barrels of it … and meat roasted, and a place cleared for dancing—” Vivien transposed the fountain of wine and the village square of Europe. In the back of the car the children were quarrelling; the little girl was self-righteously boastful about her gift of a flag. “How I do dislike Eliza sometimes,” Vivien said in an undertone. Self-doubt, that he thought of as the innocence of intelligent people, often gave a special beauty to her face. She was candid not in the usual sense of being critical of others, but of herself. “D’you think she’ll feel it?”

  “She will.”

  “That’s something one never imagines. That you can feel the same sort of antipathy towards your own child as you would towards anyone else. In a way, won’t it be a relief to get older and to have made all these pleasant little discoveries, once and for all.”

  “Oh but I’ve reached that stage, long ago!” He was amused and perhaps slightly flattered that the girl should forget they belonged to different generations.

  “It must be a relief.”

  “One can’t be sure. There may still be shocks.”

  “But you don’t think so?” —A statement more than a question. He had the feeling she was talking about marriage, now: her own; and his, that she knew had lasted twenty-two years—people talked of Olivia and himself linked in the same breath, as it were, but it was as a combination of two intact personalities rather than the anonymous, double-headed organism, husband-and-wife; perhaps it was something she attained to, not very hopefully, with her Neil.

  “Well, no. But some people get angrier and somehow wilder as they get old. Take Tolstoi. Some of the late Yeats poems—it seems to me old age must be like that for quite a lot of people. More often than the evening-of-life stuff. Good God, which would be worse?”

  She said, as if it were all much more serious for her, “I don’t think I’ve read them. Except one. About an old man—”

  “‘The devil between my thighs’—that one?”

  “Yes—but surely sex is the least of it. There are other things one’d like to be sure to be done with.”

  “What about the things one’d never conceived of. Even the simple hardening of arteries could turn you into a grasping hag who’d suspect the people she used to love of stealing out of her purse.”

  “But can you imagine it ever happening to you?” They were stopped by a red light and she turned to look at him, a young woman’s face just beginning to take on the permanent expression of the emotions and self-disciplines that were making over her features in their likeness.

  “Of course not”; and his middle-aged calm, that was in itself an acceptance of such horrors to come, belied the reassurance of his words. She smiled.

  Dando suggested they should eat at the Silver Rhino—he came, with the air of putting an end to something, from the kitchen, where there was the question of whether or not dinner had been expected to be provided at the house that evening. “Who’s on, who’s off, hopeless chewing the rag about it.” They had a drink in the garden, and put on their jackets to go to town as soon as it got dark. Festus was loading his bicycle onto the luggage grid on the roof of the car; he, at least, was going to some sort of festivity. “What’s it, Festus?” Dando asked, when Bray inquired.

  It was a “boxing fight” at the stadium. “I must come half-past seven.”

  “I know, I know, don’t panic. You’ll be there.”

  The black man sat in the back of the car in a white shirt and grey pants, smelling of carbolic soap. He repeated, nevertheless, “Half-past seven.”

  “I hope you’ll be in as good time with breakfast tomorrow as I’ll get you to the stadium tonight.”

  Festus gave him a look registering the intention to answer, but in the meantime rolled down the window and yelled out. A faint cry went up from the servants’ quarters. Festus bellowed; and this time the youngster came running to open and close the gates behind the car. As the headlights threw a bright dust-opaque ramp into the sky, Festus took up Dando. “When I’m don’t come, you tell me.”

  “Just be sure you remember you’ve eight miles to ride after refreshment, that’s all.”

  “I say: tomorrow we know.”

  Bray turned and offered a cigarette over his shoulder. Festus took it, but without the complicity of a smile against Dando; he had the preoccupation of someone off duty.

  After they had dropped him not at the stadium but at a street corner that he pounced upon (clutching Dando by the shoulder to make him stop the car) in an intention clearly held all along but not conveyed, Dando drove to the Great Lakes Hotel instead of the Rhino; he thought he must have left his glasses there, over lunch. The Great Lakes had been built several years before by the biggest gold-mining company because there was nowhere suitable to entertain principals from Britain and America. It was designed, down to the last doorhandle and ashtray, by a prizewinning contemporary British architect who had never been to Africa; the lacy cement lattice that served in place of walls between the public rooms and the patio had not provided for the acute angle at which rain swept in during the wet season; the thick-carpeted boxes of bedrooms depended entirely upon air-conditioning for ventilation and kept out the perfect, sharp air of the dry season. The patio was now partly glassed in, the rain-damaged raw silk had been replaced with nylon; the hotel was no longer beautiful but had adapted itself for survival, as a plant goes throu
gh mutations imposed by environment.

  Some sort of official cocktail party was ending as they arrived and the lategoers had got as far as the patio round the pool, standing about in suddenly intimate groups talking still in the voices of a crowded room. The tiny pennants of the country’s own new airline stood among wisps of lettuce in the Golden Perch Room; Dando and Bray passed through to another bar, with greetings and snatches of talk catching at them. Roly Dando’s running commentary was carelessly loud enough to be heard by anybody, had they been listening. No one was. Heads lifted, eyes turned to follow, faces were glazed with the cosy daze of sundowner time. “… Raymond Mackintosh, no less. I wonder what he’s crawling up Norman’s arse for now. Look at it. —Well, Raymond, here’s to your first million. —Hullo Joe, hasn’t the steak gone down yet?” A black man waved with an important smile, looking up from the depths of a conversation that brought him forward in his chair, knees wide, trousers straining, to confer with the white man opposite him. “—Joe Kabala was here with Stein at lunch, as well. The milling company. Going to be the first black one on that board, wait and see. A lovely champion of private enterprise, keeping the seat warm for white capital investment and raking in the director’s fees. He’s starting to eat smoked salmon, I saw it myself…. —Hadn’t you better be going home to your children?” Rebecca Edwards peered round a rubber plant at the sound of Dando’s voice. She was drinking beer with Curtis Pettigrew, obviously come straight from work, with untidy paper carriers from the supermarket dumped beside her. “The dinner’ll be dried out again, Curtis. It’s all right for a bachelor like me to come home when I please.”

  They were waylaid by an FAO man and Father Raven, who ran the refugee education scheme at Senshe. Bray had already been out there and at Bill Raven’s request had made some notes, at odd times at home in Dando’s rondavel, for a simple course in economic administration. “You don’t happen to speak Portuguese? The Zambians have dumped a batch of Frelimo chaps on us”—Raven was half-thrilled at the dilemma. The FAO man offered to take Bray to see the experimental farm he was setting up in the South; “If I’m still around, I’d like to go with you.”