A Guest of Honour Read online

  He went off after Dando, who was up at the bar having an argument with his friend Coningsby, the manager, about the Austro-Hungarian empire and the character of Franz Josef. Dando was accustomed to knowing more about any subject than the person who took him up on it, and in the absence of better intellectual stimulus, enjoyed the advantage in a grudging way; Bray remembered that this was what had happened to men who lived in a restricted circle and read a lot. The bush mentality was not what people thought; it could take the form of a burning compulsion to explain to somebody—anybody, the driver of the road transport, the district vet—the workings of the Common Market or Wittgenstein’s theories.

  Bray always found bar-stools uncomfortable—he was too big to accommodate himself without prodding someone with his shoulder or knee—and he was best off with one elbow on the bar and the rest of him turned towards the room. He drank whisky and watched them all. It was a daydream from the past, with incongruities that made it of the present. A small party of white people out to dinner came in, the patina of well-being on heads fresh from the hairdresser, faces shiny from a second shave. Laughter, the worldly kind that causes quiet paroxysms beneath well-fitting suits, had taken a huddle of three white men sitting farther up the bar counter as they said to each other urgently, “Wait—wait—” and then added a twist to the anecdote that set them off again. A black man in an American tartan jacket was with another in a dark-blue suit, talking to him without looking at him, his mind elsewhere. Orange fingernails scratched up cashew nuts; a woman who called everybody “sweetie” protested because there was no olive in her martini, protested again when the barman was reproached. Two more black men came in and looked over the heads conspiratorially, haughtily, then saw the raised finger of the man in tartan and broke into the sort of hearty formalities of hand-shaking and back-slapping that the white men would have winked about before, but that now simply brought a momentary distant look to their eyes.

  The occasion for the party with the ladies was clearly the need to entertain a tall, blond young man from out of town to whom they all listened with the bright show of attention accorded to wits or experts. He was what is recognized as a Guards officer type, perhaps a little too typical ever to have been one. Not so young as all that, either; his small, handsome, straight-backed head on broad shoulders had longish, silky hair thinning on the pate, and when he smiled his teeth were bony-looking. He had a way of bearing down with his nostrils and drawing air audibly through them, to express exasperation or raise a laugh. Certainly his friends found this irresistible. His diction was something no longer heard, in England, anyway. Most likely explanation was that he must have taken part in amateur theatricals under the direction of someone old enough to have modelled himself on Noel Coward. Amateur theatre had been popular among the civil servants and settlers; even Olivia had once appeared in one of those dusty thrillers set in Lord Somebody’s country house.

  “… Oh Lord yes. Her father’s getting right out too. Right out. The place at Kabendi Hills has gone. Carol’s heart—broken over the horses … to Jersey, I think.… Chief Aborowa said to me last week, there’s going to be trouble over the culling—some of these chaps’ve had that bloody great government stud bull the department’s spent a fortune on—and I said, my dear chap, that’s your worry, I hope there’ll be a couple of billion gallons of sea between me and your cows and your wives and the whole damned caboodle.… ‘I don’t want Pezele near my stool.’ I said don’t be a damned fool, Aborowa—as soon as I see him alone there’s no nonsense, I talk to him like a Dutch uncle, we were drinking brandy together—”

  “—Priceless!” One of the women was so overcome she had to put down her glass.

  “—Heavens, that’s nothing—Carol buys old Aborowa’s wife’s corsets for her.”

  More laughter.

  “His senior wife. Poor old baggage, she doesn’t know where the bouz begins and the derrière ends. Colossal. Such a dear old soul. I don’t know what she’ll do without Carol, they adore Carol. Yes, buys her corsets for her, bloomers, I don’t know what … Special department at Harrods, for the fat ladies of circuses or something …” He drew breath through pinched nostrils while they looked at each other delightedly. “I don’t know who’s going to replace that service when we go, I can tell you, central government or provincial authority or what the devil these gentlemen’re going to call themselves. M’lord Pezele—great fat Choro gentleman from the Eastern Province, he is—comes along in his brand-new jeep (I’ve been requisitioning for four years to get our jalopies replaced, but no dice), he stumps into the Great Place: ‘My appointment with Chief Aborowa is at nine-thirty’—he’s looking at his watch. Thinks he’s at the dentist. And there’s the old man over at his house, looking forward to a nice chat over a nip.”

  The black man with the friend in the tartan jacket said pompously to the black barman, in English, “The service is very bad here. I asked for ice, didn’t I?”

  But no one was listening except Bray.

  “… happy to get eight per cent on short-term investment instead. Five years is all they work on in these countries, you know.”

  Dinner music had started up in the dining-room, and the trailing sounds of a languid piano came from a speaker above the bar.

  “Oh there’ll be no difficulty whatsoever, there, that we’re confident….” The white businessmen, now that they were serious again, had the professionally attentive, blandly preoccupied faces of those men, sitting in planes and hotels in foreign countries, who represent large companies.

  “… your odd Portugoose wandering in from over the border … wily fellows, your Portugooses, but my boys always managed … now get this straight, Pezele, when I’m gone you can stew in your own uhuru, but while I’m doing my job … political officer, is he?—then tell him when he can read English well enough to understand other people’s confidential reports that’ll be time enough to get his sticky fingers—” The blue eyes, dilated fishily with vehemence, caught Dando and Bray on their way out of the bar with a half-smile of acknowledgement of the empathy counted upon in every white face.

  “Moon, June, spoon,” Dando was saying, “who in the devil wants that drivel? I must speak to Coningsby. It’s even relayed in the lavatory. Can’t hear yourself piss in this place.”

  The Silver Rhino was a short way out of town, built, like most of the hotels of these territories in the colonial era, on the Great North road that goes from country to country up through Central and East Africa. Ten years ago it had been a place where white people from the town and the mines would go for a weekend or a Sunday outing; there was fishing nearby and a tame hyrax and caged birds in the garden. But now the capital was spreading towards the old hotel, the lights of scattered houses were webbed in the bush, there were street names marking empty new roads, several Ministries had moved out that way. Bray heard that the site for the new university was to be there. “Yes—but that’s all changed again,” said Dando, sitting to the steering wheel as if it were the head of a reckless horse. “The university’ll be on the west slope of the town, most likely. And now that they’ve put up a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound Ministry of Works, it’s finally occurred to them that all government buildings ought to be in one area. So they’re going to build another Ministry where the others’re going up. A thousand acres, just below Government House and the embassies. Which is what could have been seen by anybody except a specially imported town planning expert, in the first place.”

  “What’s going to be done with the building here?”

  Dando accelerated, providing a flourish to his answer. “Raise battery hens in it, for all I know. Poor old Wentz. He doesn’t have much luck with his investments. He’s still in some sort of mess over the title deeds to the hotel—I keep promising him I’ll go over the papers with him, he’s in the hands of that bloody fool McKinnie, remember McKinnie and Goldin? He came up here and bought the place and signed the agreement, and then when his wife and family followed, there was some damn fool clau
se he should never have agreed to. They nearly didn’t get possession.”

  “Good God. They had to leave South Africa because of some political trouble, didn’t they?” Bray had the mild interest of one who is passing through.

  “Don’t know about had to. She was nervous and wanted to go—Hjalmar’s wife. She’s Jewish—he got her out of Germany in thirty-six, you know, though he’s not a Jew himself. Smuggled her over the border. It’s a terrible story. Of course he wasn’t allowed to marry her in Germany. He couldn’t even tell his family, couldn’t trust anybody. Just disappeared, with her. Incredible story. You wouldn’t think Hjalmar would have the guts, but he did it. He could have been in a concentration camp along with them if he’d been caught.”

  A string of coloured bulbs was looped from pillar to pillar on the Silver Rhino’s familiar old wide veranda. Africans sat about on hard chairs drinking beer. Some were accompanied by women, who were, of course, accompanied by babies. Little children played with empty beer bottles and climbed the low veranda wall. The telephone booth that had always been there had a large portrait of Mweta, surmounted with a gold rosette, pasted on the door; people had scribbled numbers on the margin. Inside the hotel the mouldering butterfly-wing pictures had been replaced by some rather good Congo masks and the walls had been plainly whitewashed—otherwise it was all much as Bray remembered it. In the dining-room there was a hooded construction like a wishing well for grilling meat over an open flame, but it was not in use that night and the steaks came from the kitchen. Since Bray was last in Africa there had been the advent of the deep-freeze, and now he found himself eating these steaks everywhere: large, thick wads of meat that, once cut into, had the consistency of decomposing rags. “She usually makes a mushroom sauce, something special,” Dando grumbled. “All these places are the same, they start off all right.” Hjalmar Wentz had seen them—probably it would be impossible to go there for a meal without involving oneself in a visit to the Wentzes—and he came over to the table. He wore cotton trousers and a green knit shirt wrinkled round his chest and held out his hands apologetically. “Good God, you must excuse me—I wanted you to come and have a martini or something first, but what goes on here … I can’t tell you— The chamber of commerce is having a lunch tomorrow and this morning when I got the crayfish from the station we found it was all bad. The lot. Margot’s concocting something else, a miracle of the loaves and fishes … is that wine all right? Roly, I want you to try a Montrachet I found … but that’s steak, eh? Well, we can’t offer you crayfish tonight. But next time, remind me, you must try it … so light and dry.” He sat and drank a glass of wine with them, and they talked British politics; he would lose the thread, reluctantly, now and then, and look about him in the necessity to be elsewhere, and then return irresistibly to the talk. When the coffee came he said, “Oh Margot wants you to have coffee with us, later. With luck we’ll be out of the kitchen by ten. Come to our palace. Roly knows.” “Stephen in the pub?” said Roly. “He may be. I’m not sure. The barman ought to be there tonight.” The waiters had been looking anxiously at him for some time; he hurried off.

  The bar was stifling, with the cool, sour undersmell of liquor. A fan made a mobile of tiny Viking ships, the sort of thing sold in airport shops, bob slowly like unevenly weighted scales. “How old are you, young man?” Dando called out to a plump, fair boy with a dent in his chin. Apparently it was an old joke; Stephen Wentz smiled and showed off a little as he put down a bottle of brandy and two fancy goblets. “Old enough to know what you like, Mr. Dando.” “Hjalmar’s son and heir. All these bottles will be his, some day.” Hjalmar Wentz appeared with the embarrassed air of someone who has just taken his leave; he spoke to the boy. Dando held his brandy glass like a bird between two hands. “I’ve just been telling that son of yours I’ll have to report you to the police for employing a minor in a bar.” “Never mind, you should see the trouble we have sometimes to keep out the babies on backs.”

  “We saw them outside,” Bray said. “It looked very homely.”

  “That’s Margot,” Hjalmar was expansively confidential. “They love to come here. She goes around giving the kids sweets. All the other hotels, of course, they’re trying to get them to leave the kids at home.”

  Most of the Independence-week visitors had left but the bar was half-full with the regulars, a mixture of white and black, some of whom obviously had come in together. Smaller fry from the staff of visiting dignitaries were quartered at the Rhino—a Senegalese secretary, two men from the Ivory Coast—and there were newspapermen and a Filipino couple working for a United Nations demographic commission (Dando pointed them out) with friends from the Ghanaian Embassy. One or two of Mweta’s junior lieutenants in routine administrative jobs mingled with these cosmopolites, but Dando remarked, “They’re still at the dedicated, puritanical stage, in the government—first’ll come the bribery and the purges, then’ll come the normal drinking in pubs, along with ordinary mortals like ourselves. They’ll settle down.” He was greeted by many people; even Bray saw faces that he had come to know, by now. But they did not join anyone; Dando, sitting in damp shirt-sleeves in a stifling bar in this company, was contentedly meditative, for once; like a man at home in the chatter of his own kitchen. A little later they were summoned to the Wentzes’ flat. There was something strongly European about the little living-room they entered, despite the transparent lizards on the walls and the nondescript, locally made furniture. It was the table that did it: a round table with a heavy, curlicued central leg, and a yellow cloth falling flounced, a lamp in the middle. Within the circle of its light there was a European interior, an interior contained by the early darkness of winter afternoons, the wet, tapping winds of winter nights. But the windows were wide open to lukewarm darkness and the ear-ringing racket of insects.

  Coffee and a black-rich chocolate cake with a bowl of whipped cream stood on the table. Dando ate three pieces. Margot Wentz had the calm of preoccupation or exhaustion. She seemed hardly aware of Dando and Bray, beyond the necessity to feed them, and it was unlikely that she had known, earlier, that they were in the hotel. She gave a wavering smile now and then, in answer to one of the guests, but she did not seem to hear her husband although he talked on, relating anecdotes that drew upon and assumed her participation, and quoting her opinions as if she were confirming them.

  “A schnapps with the coffee,” he insisted, and although Bray wanted no more to drink Roly Dando said, “Ah, lovely,” and Hjalmar, still blond and handsome in a sun-toughened, run-down way, began to shuffle about the room opening cupboards and fussing like an old man. “It’s aquavit, should be here … where now … I’m half a Dane, you know, it’s my national whad’you-call it, tipple, yes….” Good God, what only isn’t pushed in here….” Piles of torn-off envelopes with stamps fell to the floor, curled-up photographs, bank deposit slips, box-top free offers of this and that. He began to look behind the volumes of philosophical and political works that filled rickety bookshelves; there were books all over the room, Shaw and O’Neill and Dos Passos and Auden, in English, Hesse, Hauptmann and Brecht and Rilke in German, psychology in German and English—a quick glance established that this was the remnant of the once-indispensable library of people young in Europe in the Thirties who had not had the money or the space to add to it, nor the strength of mind ever to leave it behind.

  “What is it that you want, Hjalmar?” Margot Wentz said suddenly in a ringing voice, patient and strong. She had her back to him.

  “No, it’s all right, the aquavit, wasn’t there a bottle still from Christmas, the one Vibeke—I’m just—wait a minute—”

  She got up with the determined sleep-walking gait of someone who has the plan of cupboards, nooks, niches, and their contents clear in her mind as a cross-section of an anthill under glass, and took a bottle from behind a stand of gramophone records in worn covers. “Here you are, Hjalmar.”

  He went on marvelling over how he had thought it was here or there, he knew he had put i
t somewhere, and she continued to stand for a moment, looking at him as if waiting for the whir of some piece of clockwork to die down.

  Their daughter, Emmanuelle, slipped in and cut herself a piece of cake. “Yes, I know you,” she said directly to Bray when her father began the introductions; the night at the Independence party, when she had sat like a small animal holed up against pursuit and had not so much as acknowledged the presence of the middle-aged stranger talking to Ras Asahe, was suddenly presented as a shared intimacy. She deliberately cut the cake at an angle, apparently to avoid the filling, careless of the fact that she had spoiled it for the next person. She sat nibbling little broken-off pieces, holding them in long, thin, sallow hands. Her hunched shoulders showed deep hollows above and below collar-bones on which the greenish slippery skin shone in the heat. In a way she reminded Bray of one of those pictures of Oriental famine victims—all eyes and bones; but her legs under the short shapeless dress were beautiful, the thighs slender but feminine, the kneecaps round.

  Stephen was straightening the books his father had disarranged. “Oh, ma, I’ve got the name of the stuff to kill those things.”

  “What things?” said his mother, not turning.

  “Those things that are eating the bindings.”

  “Silverfish,” she said.

  “You can get it from the chemist. It’s called Eradem, you just sprinkle it on the shelves.”

  She said, “He knows how to stop them being eaten up but he never opens one.”

  Wentz was talking to the two guests but the interjection came from him like a voice taking over a medium. “What time has he got. You know he hardly gets through the schoolwork.”