A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Oh they got on like a house on fire,” Mweta said. “Joy knows all the secrets of Buckingham Palace.”

  “Nonsense, she doesn’t even live there.”

  “And the wife of the Chinese Ambassador, they were great friends too. She speaks English quite well.”

  “She wants me to come to Peking and speak about African women.” Joy challenged him, smiling at Bray.

  “Joy was always a great asset,” Bray said.

  “That’s what I tell him.”

  The children had pulled off their shoes and socks and the close fuzz on the baby’s head was full of grass. A guilty wet patch had no sooner appeared on his trousers before the heat began to dry it again. One of the white-suited domestics hovered in the shadow of the house with the announcement of lunch, but could not find an opportunity to catch anyone’s attention. The secretary and the P.R.O. were fiddling with the Polaroid camera. Then the picture emerged, and everyone crowded to see. By now the party had been joined by a woman with blonde baby-hair drawn up on top of her head in thin curls. Like many women, she bore the date of her vintage year in the manner of her make-up: the pencil-line of the Dietrich eyebrows on the bald fine English skin above each blue eye, the well-powdered nose and fuchsia-pink mouth. She wore navy blue with a small diamond brooch somewhere towards one shoulder. Bray was introduced to Mrs. Harrison with the quick, smooth exchange of people who have learned the same basic social conventions in the same decade and country. Mweta and Bray and Joy were gossiping about the Independence celebrations; the children were jumping up round Wilfrid Asoni and Small, reaching for the camera. “Wait, wait, Mangaliso—do you want your picture taken? Not even with Bimbo?”

  Mrs. Harrison’s high clear Englishwoman’s voice sailed in: “Children—I wonder who’s been borrowing my sécateur? Do you know, Mangaliso? I should think Mangaliso might know, wouldn’t you, Telema?”

  The children dropped to earth, cut down. They stood there, wriggling, turning their feet on the grass, looking at each other. Under her eyes were made plain the shoes and socks tossed about, the wet patch drying between the little one’s legs.

  “Mangaliso!” said Joy.

  “I shall give you a pair of sécateur for your birthday,” the woman said to the child, “but you must be sure not to borrow mine. I need my sécateur, you know.”

  He smiled at her, frowning, pleading to be out of the limelight; he had taken the pruning—shears, but he didn’t know what “sécateur” meant.

  “That’s a good boy,” Mrs. Harrison said. “Mrs. Mweta, I’m afraid if you don’t go into lunch cook’s soufflé will be a pancake. He’s in quite a state.”

  “Oh my goodness—what time is it? We were having a photo—Adamson, we must have lunch.” She was laughing and bustling, confused. The children were sent off, with some difficulty; Mrs. Harrison was standing in the sitting—room, her eyes taking some sort of private inventory, when the party filed through. Then they had to wait a few minutes for Joy, who had taken the children to their quarters. She came back giggling and apologizing and fell in with Bray. “They can’t understand why we don’t eat together any more.”

  “Well, can’t you, sometimes? When you’re alone.”

  “Never alone!” she explained, with a slight lift of the shoulders to indicate Small and Asoni. “Even if there’re no visitors.”

  “You’re not letting that Mrs. Whatnot run the place?” Bray said accusingly.

  She laughed at him. “No, no, there’s a cousin of mine from home, and my sister-in-law’s little sister. They’ve come to help. You know, during the celebrations there were some days when I never had time to see the children at all.” She had dropped her voice, perhaps because the atmosphere of the cool dining-room, as they entered, was so different from the noisy family party on the terrace. Her large, matronly but still young body took the chair at the foot of the table sub-duedly. Mweta took the head with something like resignation, as if it were the conference table. Behind each person a servant stood. Mweta did not even seem aware of their presence, but Joy would catch the smooth inattention of one or another, now and then, and half-whisper something in the local language. There was smoked salmon. And a cheese soufflé, and cold duck. Mweta, while talking about American foreign policy, carefully removed every vestige of the thin layer of aspic that covered the meat. “I really don’t see it matters whether it’s due to having got overinvolved in Vietnam, or whether, as this authority you’ve mentioned says, America’s reached the end of an outward-looking phase and must concentrate on problems at home, or because, as some of my ministers have it, she has found influence hard to buy even with dollars. If America wants to withdraw”—he put up his palms— “all right, she’s strong enough to do it. If she says to the hungry, no wheat unless you can pay, right, she does it. And the old scare story about who’s going to fill the vacuum—not interested any more. But we can’t do that. The only surplus the African states have got is a surplus of debts and need. We’re struggling. We’re forced to buy maize from South Africa, this from that country, that from the other, we are tied together like a three—legs race with all sorts of people. The economic structure of colonial times trips us up all the time. Of course we have to help each other. —But mind you, that doesn’t mean we always understand each other’s problems. It doesn’t mean I must let myself be told by the OAU how to run this country, eh?” He looked at the dome of pink mousse being offered at his elbow and said to his wife, “I thought we were going to have ordinary food in the middle of the day-wasn’t that decided, from now on?”

  “Yes, I know—”

  “No fancy things. Just a bit of fruit.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Harrison says it is fruit—made of fruit.”

  He hesitated and then plunged the spoon with a squelch and put a dollop on his plate. “What am I to Obote? The lime for the cement he’d have to pay a third again as much for if he had to import it from somewhere else. What’s Nyerere’s health to me? The low tariff for our goods at Dar-es-Salaam—”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you, Adamson—what are the prospects for Kundi Bay?”

  “Better ask Mr. Small about that. He’s just been there water-skiing.” Mweta smiled and shovelled up the last of the pudding.

  “Well, I can’t give you an expert opinion on its prospects as a harbour, but I was telling Mr. President it certainly has great possibilities as a resort. The beaches are better than those on the Mombasa stretch, far more beautiful. Marvellous skin-diving and goggling—what you need is to interest Mr. Hilton in putting up one of his hotels.”

  “It’s within a hundred miles of the game park at Talawa—Teme, another tourist attraction,” Asoni announced to Bray. He murmured agreeably in polite English response; he and Olivia and the children had camped there at Kundi, once, when it was nothing more than a fishing village, though it was said to have been used as a harbour for slavers early in the nineteenth century, and there were the remains of a small fort. Just before Independence a team of Italian experts had been out to examine the possibility of building a harbour big enough to handle tankers and large merchant vessels. “When’s the report to be published?” His voice dodged round the starched sleeve of a servant.

  ‘Oh it’s being studied,” said Mweta, with a smile that closed the subject. Joy Mweta was saying, “I want Adamson to build a little house down there. The children have never seen the sea. Just a small little house, you know?”

  “The only thing was, I got absolutely eaten up by tsetse fly, my arm was like a sausage. No, not the beach—on the road, the road from the game park.”

  “—But that will be eliminated,” Asoni said, “they will be eradicated. It has been done in the North. The department has it in hand. Anything can be done, today. We are living in the age of science. The mosquito has gone. The tsetse will go.”

  “It will be paradise.” Mweta gave one of his famous gestures, one hand opening out the prospect over the table, the long room, the country, and laughed. As they rose from their
chairs, he squeezed Bray’s arm, hard, a moment.

  After coffee in the sitting—room Mweta took Bray to his study. The Harrison woman had come in a convention of apology glossing firmness, to speak to Joy Mweta about something, and Joy had gone to her at once with the half—nervous, prideful air of a favoured pupil summoned by the headmistress. Clive Small said as Mweta passed, “By the way, sir, I’ll take care of those people from Fort Howard if the call comes through.”

  “And Wilfrid knows about it?” He turned, and he and Asoni exchanged a few words in Gala. “All right. But please, if the chief’s brother insists …”

  “No need to worry, I’ll handle him like a butterfly,” said Small, tightening his handsome mouth. He saluted Bray gaily. “Hope very much to see you again, sir.”

  The corridors of the place were paved with echoing black and white tiles. Mweta held open the door, first, into a men’s cloakroom. When Bray came out of the lavatory Mweta was standing there waiting for him; they might have been on some London railway station. Bray was amused, with the touching sense of finding the friend, intact, behind the shifting superimpositions of a public self. One did not have to say, confronting the portrait in the toga, is this what he is now? The figure in the toga, the sacred vessel on the velvet-draped dais, they were all simply this rather short man with his head thrown back, in full possession of all these images. He did it all the way he used to jump on the bicycle and pedal to the next village and the next.

  Yet the study was oppressive. Heavy curtains made a maroon, churchy light. An enormous desk with a leather top. Leather chairs. A sofa upholstered in something woolly with a tinsel thread running through it. It might have been the office of a company director; it had all been furnished for him by someone who saw him as another sort of tycoon, a black villager who found himself, by political accident, nominal supra-chairman of the mining companies that were the country. It probably had been done, indeed, by somebody on loan from the Company—who else would there have been who had any ideas of how a top man should be set up? But this speculation came from hostility towards the room; perhaps it was merely the way the Governor had left it, like the rest of the house.

  Mweta hesitated at the big chair behind the desk but walked away again. He began to walk about the room as if they were waiting for someone. “I never dreamed it would be so long. Every day I wanted to phone and say come over … ? I felt worried about it, eh? You wouldn’t believe me but there isn’t a half-hour—every day—there hasn’t been a half-hour—when there wasn’t something that had to … somebody to see …”

  “But that’s how it must be,” Bray said, from the sofa.

  “Yes, I know. But if you’re here, James—”

  “Doesn’t matter who’s here.”

  “I suppose so.” His eyes disowned the jolly, officially welcoming tone of lunch, that kept creeping back in intrusion.

  Bray said, “You’re the President.”

  “But not with you.”

  “Oh yes.” Bray put himself firmly in his place.

  Mweta looked deserted. He had the strange combination—the smile affirming life, and in the eyes, the politician’s quick flicker. “I don’t even know where my books are. I think they must still be over at Freedom Building.”

  “I was up there to have a look at the old place on Friday.” The shoddy block behind the main streets of the town, leased from an Indian merchant, had been PIP headquarters from the years when all they could afford was one back room.

  “Well, Freedom Building is over at parliament now!”

  “Of course it’ll be seen to that the Party machine doesn’t run down,” Bray said.

  But Mweta had not forgotten the polite English way of making a warning sound like an assumption. He laughed.

  “How could that be?”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Specially in the rural areas. People could feel nearly as remote from what goes on in parliament as they did when it wasn’t their government, you know.”

  “That’s what I’ve got ministers of local government for. And I’ll still see as many people as possible, myself. I want to tour the whole country at least every few months, but already I’ve had to take on this fellow … at Freedom Building people used to come and see me any time of the day or night, and sometimes when Joy got up in the morning she found someone already sitting in the yard….”

  “He’s essential, I should say. For the time being, anyway. People will get used to it. They’ll learn to understand.”

  “Oh he manages very well. But it’s not what I want.”

  “What’s she doing here—the Englishwoman?”

  “She was here before—she did the flower vases, things like that,” said Mweta. “And for the celebrations, Joy wanted someone, she wasn’t sure she could manage.”

  “Everything went off splendidly,” said Bray. “Not a hitch anywhere.”

  “Let’s go out there.” Mweta stood up in the middle of the room as if he were shedding it. They took the first door from the corridor into the park and fell into strolling step together, over the rough grass and under the sprinkled shade, as they had done, walking and talking, years ago. Mweta was smaller and more animated than Bray, and seen from the distance of the house, as they got farther away their progress would have been a sort of dance, with the small man surging a step ahead and bringing up short the attention of the taller one. They paused or went on, in pace with the rise and fall of discussion. Mweta was telling a story that displayed the unexpected shrewdness of Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, about whom Bray had heard many doubts expressed, not only by Roly Dando. “Of course if I’d kept Foreign Affairs for myself, Tola Tola would have been the one for Finance, but it was decided I couldn’t hope to do it.”

  “No, how could you.” No mention of the obvious choice of Shinza.

  “Well, others have tried. In any case”—they exchanged a look— “Tola Tola’s always there if Malenga needs advice.” Again, in spite of the silence over Shinza, so much taken for granted between them brought a qualifying remark: “If Malenga would ever admit it.”

  They dismissed this with smiles. “What I might do”—Mweta gave way to the urge to seek reassurance for the rightness of decisions already made— “in a few months time—next year—if I reshuffle, I’d give Tom Msomane the Interior, shift Talisman Gwenzi to Finance, perhaps a double portfolio, let him keep Mines—” Bray’s silence stopped him. “I know what people say about Tom. But he’s a chap who can handle things, you know?—he’s shrewd but he can pick up a delicate situation without smashing it. He’s got, you know, tact. And for the Interior—problems of refugees, deportations, and so on. You should see the file. Just waiting for the celebrations to be over, and then they must be opened.” He gave a rough, nervous sniff. “I am thinking seriously about Tom.”

  Bray said, “But for the Interior. Doesn’t he take too personal a view? Won’t he be inclined to settle old scores?”

  “Well, maybe, that may be, but being in office, the responsibilities and so on. I think he’ll be all right. Sometimes you have to take one risk against another.”

  Bray didn’t know whether Mweta was inviting a question about Mso support, or not. His face was screwed up, momentarily, in a grimace against the sun or his thoughts; perhaps he felt he had made enough confessions.

  “I’d rather see him safe in Posts and Telegraphs, myself.”

  Mweta nodded to acknowledge the joke, rather than in agreement.

  “Adamson, you never thought about Shinza—for Foreign Minister?” He phrased it carefully that way, but Mweta was quick to take it up the way it really was— “Look, I’m prepared to do something for Edward because”—he shook his head wildly as if to get rid of something— “because he thinks he taught me everything, and—because the past is the past, I’m not the one to try to get away from that. —But what it can be, I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

  “He’s a brilliant man.”

  “You still think so?”

&nbs
p; “Oh come, you know so.”

  “James,” Mweta said, making it clear this was to please him, “what can I offer Shinza? You think an under—secretaryship or something like that? Because that’s all I’ve got. And it wouldn’t be what he wants. He wants to change the world and use me and this country to do it for him, never mind what happens to the country in the meantime. I can make him an under-secretary—that’s all.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  Mweta opened his firm lips and closed them again without having spoken.

  “I should be inclined,” said Bray, hearing himself come out more gently pontifical than he had wished, “to find him some special position not directly involved in actual government, but recognizing his claims to elder-statesmanship-out-of-office. Mm? I should have thought he’d have done darned well as representative at U.N., for instance. For a start.” He remained old-maidishly composed while Mweta stared at him in bitter astonishment. “Our ambassador to United Nations? Edward Shinza? After what he said? After what he said to the Commonwealth Secretary? His so-called minority reports at the last conference, not six months before Independence? After what we’ve had from him?”

  “Make him spokesman for the majority and you’ll see. You talk as if he’d started a rival party.”

  “He acts as if he has! A lot of people think it would be better if he had! Come out in the open!” Mweta began levelling with his heel a trail of fresh molehills on the grass. “—What a nuisance, these things—If he stops sulking away down there at home, well … It’s up to him….”

  “I hope you’re not going to let him sulk.”

  “You’ve been to see him, James?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll get the chance. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be here for Independence.”

  Mweta shrugged; appealed suddenly. “We’re going to talk every few weeks like this. We’ll make it a regular thing.” They had turned back towards the house, rising red and solid out of the hazy, unassertive shapes of the bush.