A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “But my dear Adamson, I shall have to go back pretty soon. I was thinking of next week. You’re all getting down to work again now. Time the guests left.”

  Mweta stopped again. “Back? But you are back.”

  “I don’t know what I could do, if I stayed,” Bray said, smiling.

  The conventions would make it easy for them both; whenever they reached this point they had simply to go on following his polite pretence that he had never thought of himself as anything but a visitor, and Mweta’s polite pretence that a place had been provided for him as something other than that. It was so easy, very tempting—he looked at the ugly house looming up in their way—one could walk round the past they had inhabited, as one does round a monument.

  “No, no, now don’t—” Mweta said with some difficulty, as years ago he would have said of someone from the Colonial Office: “They mustn’t come their English with me.” He said grudgingly, “What is it you’re doing over there in England, really?”

  “Yes, it’s a very lazy sort of life, I suppose, it’s quite astonishing how well one takes to doing very little—” Bray turned the question to an accusation, cheerfully admitted; making it easy for the other man—it was part of the game.

  Mweta didn’t answer, implying that this sort of waffle could not reach him. But he didn’t do much better, himself; in the cross voice that disguises lack of conviction, using the hearty “we,” he said, “What nonsense to talk about going next week. We can’t allow that.”

  They turned to other things. Mweta wanted to discuss the Kundi harbour report, after all, now that they were alone. He watched Bray’s face when he came to the points about which he himself was particularly worried. There was the old sense of seeking correction of his own assumptions and findings. Then they found themselves back at the house again, with the young men in attendance, Joy going in and out, and the Harrison woman pouring tea. Telephones rang, the secretary brought in a cable, Mweta was called away and Bray waited to say good—bye to him. When he returned the convention fell quickly into place again; it was all bonhomie, playful scolding and exaggeratedly graceful regrets, plans, and promises— “We don’t want to hear this talk about England, ay?” “All right, not a word about England.” “I’ve told him, England’s for old men to go back and die in, ay?” Joy would phone again; they would be meeting at a reception the following week, anyway. Mweta’s lively hand was firm on his shoulder. Yes, that was fine, Bray said. (He would be gone by then; his flight was already booked.) Mweta insisted on coming out onto the steps of the entrance. He looked young, quick, beaming, waved his hand with a pause, like a salute, and then turned away inside at once. Already he existed like that, for the future, in Bray’s mind. He would have rejected with distaste any suggestion that Mweta had been a protégé, but he did have, that day, the sense of relinquishment with which, as an interested party, an older person sees a young one launched and going out of sight.

  For some reason he had not given Olivia an exact date for his return, though his seat on the plane was booked; he was thinking he perhaps might stop off in Spain for a week, on the way. He had never really had a proper look at the Prado.

  Three days before he was to leave a letter came, delivered by hand. Mweta asked him to accept an immediate appointment as special educational adviser—a newly created post—to investigate the organization of schools, technical schools, and adult education projects in the provinces, beginning with the largest, the northern province, Gala. He stopped himself from reading it through again. He passed it over to Roly Dando.

  “Someone thought that one up quickly,” Dando said.

  They roared with laughter, not because anything was funny, but because Bray was moved and excited in a way that couldn’t be acknowledged. Shut away there behind a Great Wall of responsibilities, echoed by sycophants, surrounded by the jailers of office, Mweta had torn out of the convention: Mweta hadn’t believed any of it for a minute.

  Dando couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Bray’s been offered the Ministry of Pot-hooks and Carpentry, is that it—oh yes, but what he’d really been angling for was Pectoral Development and Backscratching, well, so I’ve heard.” People laughed but understood that there was something in it; appointments were being handed out every day as the administrative changeover took place and various development plans got off to a start. Most of the appointees were unpronounceable names and black faces that the white shopkeepers and mine officials had never heard of before. But in law, agriculture, public health and education, there were many white men: foreign experts, and a few familiar faces, like that of Colonel Evelyn James Bray, who, in the old days, had shown themselves more concerned with the interests of the Africans than with the life of the white people in the colony. Among the group in which Bray moved in the capital, friends of friends passed through on their way to new projects or jobs in different parts of the country; there was much talk of the finance, equipment, staff or lack of it, that people expected to manage with. Bray was simply another one of them, not quite sure how he would set about what he was supposed to achieve, given no assurance of any particular resources being available to him. Most people thought that this job of his had been an understood thing all along; no one seemed to remember that he had been going home. The drinking party that Roly Dando had arranged as a send-off became just another gathering out at Dando’s place.

  The day the letter arrived, a fierce stab of uncertainty had come to Bray when he returned to the room in the garden with it in his pocket. If it had come only three days later, he would have been gone. It would never have brought him back.

  Mweta was in Nairobi at a meeting with Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Nyerere, and he did not see him again. When he had talked to the Minister of Education, discussed the terms of reference of his job and settled that he would go to Gala within two weeks, he wrote to Olivia. He told her he “suspected” the job had been created specially in order to offer him something; he did not need to tell her that it was one that needed doing and that perhaps he might be able to do better than most people—she would know that as well as he did. He poked fun at it a little, and said that he’d promised to undertake a trial period of six months or so, long enough to have a good look around and write some sort of preliminary report. He was to get a government house—back to the old “basic furniture supplied.” By the time he’d made sure it was habitable, and that he could get on with some work there, she would come out and join him. Surely Venetia could be trusted to manage the baby by herself, by then?—The only thing he did not tell her was that he had had his seat on a flight back to England when Mweta’s letter came.

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Bray bought himself a secondhand Volkswagen from someone “getting out” and drove north to take up his appointment. He left the capital on a low grey morning that would lift to a hot day; Roly Dando had gone to work but Festus in his cook’s hat and the garden boy stood by to watch him go. Vivien Bayley had brought a present of whatever Penguins she could find at the local bookshop: Diary of a Nobody, The Three Caesars, Stamboul Train, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Plague—“Well, I always think you want to read things you know when you’re living away somewhere, alone.” They were in a basket on the back seat with a bottle of whisky and some files that had come up from the Ministry of Education at the last minute. He drove out through the main street of the town and saw Mrs. Evelyn Odara trying to park her car outside the new post office and several other people whose faces were now familiar to him, going about their daily business. The vendors of wooden animals were polishing them under the flame trees; the unemployed were hawking plastic bags of tomatoes. As the town ravelled out towards the gold mines lorries swayed past him filled with concrete pipes and building materials, stiff pig carcasses from the cold storage and rattling crates from the brewery. Then there were the landscaped approaches to the mine properties themselves, all flowery traffic roundabouts, signboards, and beds of cannas and roses, and then the stretches of neat colour—washed
rectangles of housing for the African miners, a geometric pattern scribbled over by the mop—heads of pawpaw trees, smoking chimneys, washing lines, creepers and maize patches, and broken up by the noise and movement of people. In twenty minutes it was all gone; he passed the Bush Hill Arms, its Tudor façade pocked with wasp nests and a “For Sale” notice up (someone else “getting out”), and then there was nothing at all—everything: the one smooth road, the trees, the bamboo, and the sudden open country of the dambos where long grasses hid water, and he saw at last, again, the single long—tailed shrike that one always seemed to see in such places, hovering with its ink—black tail—plume like the brushstroke of a Chinese ideograph.

  He drove all morning and met not more than a dozen cars and the top—heavy bus that apparently still did the journey from the Tanzania border twice a week. Where there were African villages, a few bicycles and stragglers appeared on the road. Bags of charcoal leaned here and there on the edge of the silent forest. People lived deep inside this environment as if it were a house; their individual shelters were flimsy. He kept remembering—no, experiencing—things like this, that he had forgotten. In England, sometimes, over the years, he had had dreams that seemed to happen in this country, but it wasn’t this country at all; and even conscious recollection was nothing but psychological memory—something selected to match the emotions engendered in a particular place at specific times.

  Dando’s house, left behind, was no more present than Wiltshire. He enjoyed a kind of freedom that he knew would last only until his recognition of his surroundings passed into unthinking acceptance, and he could no longer hold back and view them as the past revisited or a present not yet broken into.

  He called at the White Fathers’ Mission at Rungwa River, but Father Benedict was away and he could see that none of the younger ones knew who he was. The swallows still twittered in and out of their mud nests in the refectory, where he was given tea. A loud clanging that he knew so well came from a length of iron suspended from a tree and beaten with a stick, announced the end of school and the hot peace was invaded by yells and the muffled stampede of bare feet. The Fathers were good enough to sell him a couple of gallons of petrol, one working the hand—pump with a grin, his rosary swinging, the other standing by with his hands folded into the sleeves of his cassock and his big, blueish, celibate’s feet placed close together in their rough sandals. The Fathers were shy as young girls. The African schoolboys scuffled and chattered at a distance, and when he called out a greeting, laughed and called back.

  There were large villages near the road in this part of the country, smoking up through the forest. The cultivation of land by lopping off the branches of trees and burning them round the trunk, for potash, made druidic circles everywhere. New signs pointed into the bush: “Freedom Bar,” “New York Bar,” “Independence Bar”—crooked letters in English painted on bits of wood. But the generation that had grown up in ten years was as poor and dull—skinned as their fathers had been.

  He had had the intention to spend the night at the old Pilchey’s Hotel at Matoko, the usual half—way house. He arrived there earlier than he had thought he would; he was half in mind to drive on but did not know if the government rest—house that used to be at the cattle dipping station, sixty miles north, was still open. The tarred road was long left behind and the ugly little red car looked, as he got out and smoothed his rumpled shirt into his trousers, as cars always did up here. The undersides of the mudguards were rimmed with clay and the fender was plastered with the broken bodies and strange—coloured innards of dead insects.

  Heat and silence fell upon him. He tramped over the cracked veranda and looked into the dark of the hotel: a smell of beeswax and insecticide, no one in sight. He knew where the bar was and the sound of his own footsteps accompanied him there, but the door was locked and he felt sure the ship’s bell that hung beside the name “Davy Jones’ Locker” was purely decorative. Back he went to the veranda; there was no main entrance, but screen doors all over the place that gave out long—drawn, dry squeaks behind him and led to a deserted dining—room with fan—folded table napkins and dim green corridors of closed doors. A child’s cot piled with old pillows and the broken marble from an old—fashioned washstand stood where the corridor turned; there was a tray with two empty beer bottles and glasses on the floor.

  He went back to the veranda and stretched out his heavy long legs from a chair. He knew this hour; everyone was asleep. If he sat for any length of time he himself would fall into an afternoon sloth. There were borders of orange lilies in the garden, and the same huge sagging aviary, like a heavy spider’s web, behind which blue cranes and guinea fowl pecked at their own feathers in some affliction induced by confinement. He could see their jerking, worrying heads. The farming land was good around here, and when the white farmers got merry in the bar it used to be the thing to bundle one of their number in with the birds. A vast sense of unreality came over him. He noticed a brass bell—push, gleamingly polished, and stuck a forefinger at it, not expecting anything in the way of response. But after a while a very young waiter appeared, with a red fez and a tin tray. He asked for a cold beer and was told Doña was sleeping; the bar would open now—now. “Is it still Doña Pilchey?” Yes, Doña Pilchey was sleeping. This was not Gala country yet, but the local language was related. He spoke to the boy in Gala and was understood; they agreed that the luggage should come out of the car even though he couldn’t have a room until Doña Pilchey woke up. Was the kitchen locked? No, it seemed the kitchen was open. The youngster would make him some tea in the meantime.

  While he was drinking it, the shadow of one of the big trees fell across the veranda and seemed to bring a breeze. The heat of the afternoon turned, as it did quite suddenly; one of the guinea fowl began to call. He was no longer used to driving for hours at a stretch. His big body was restless with inactivity. He walked off nowhere in particular, though he knew this road that led from the main road to the Matoko boma about two miles away. The red sand was pleasant to tread on—he had not walked at all, really, in the month in the capital, except in the streets of the town; no one walked—and the coarse sleek grass leaned beneath its own weight on either side of the road, as high as his shoulders. Scarlet weavers with black masks flicked up out of it and hung upside down at the entrance to their nests. A rough driveway marked with whitewashed stones and aloes curved up to a small schoolhouse on a rise and down again. He took the little detour to give some sort of shape to his stroll. There was the school garden—a patch of maize and beans, some staked tomatoes—the length of dangling iron that was the school bell, and, as he walked past the open doorway, the schoolmaster himself sitting at work. The man jumped up and at once started apologizing as if guilty of a grave breach of hospitality and respect. “No sir, I am very sorry, sir, I was just taking the chance to get a little study—” Bray greeted him in Gala, giving him the form of address to be used by respectful pupils towards the master, to put him at ease.

  The man was shyly delighted and immediately brought out all he had to offer—the school register, the exercise and text—books of the pupils, all the time explaining and answering Bray’s questions in a slow, anxious way. A pupil who had been sitting with him at the deal table where he was working sat, unable to go on, her hand on her place in a book, listening and smiling faintly in greeting. She looked like a grown woman, but irregular schooling often meant that African schoolchildren were far older than whites. The schoolmaster himself was very thin, black and pigeon—chested under a woollen pullover. His two—roomed school was seven years old; there were some desks but the smaller children, the schoolmaster explained, still sat on the floor. Some of the children who lived far away stayed in children’s huts in the village and walked home at weekends. “This year we are sixty—five” he said, “our biggest year so far. And twenty—one are girls.” He proudly showed a single poster on the damp—mapped walls: OUR LAND—a smiling miner working down a gold mine; smiling fishermen hauling in a catch; a
smiling woman picking some crop. Population statistics in green, revenue figures in red. “From the Education Department. Oh yes, we are beginning to get nice, nice things. I am filling in the forms. Now we will get them. I wish you were here when the children are in school, they would sing for you.”

  Bray had been sung to so many times by black schoolchildren. “Another time, I hope.”

  “My wife teaches the choir. She also teaches the first and second grade.” The young woman was smiling, looking up from one to the other.

  “I thought you were one of the young schoolgirls!” Bray said, and they laughed.

  “Well, I am teaching her for her Standard Six exam. She goes next month to town for it. She has had four children, you see, her studies were interrupted. But I teach her when I can. She wants to write the teacher’s exams eventually.”

  “It’s lucky for you that you married a teacher.” Bray tried to draw her into the conversation.

  “And I am working for my O levels, the Cambridge Certificate,” the schoolmaster said, with the urgency of a man who has no one to turn to. “I have here the English paper—not the one I will have to write myself, you understand—’

  “I know—a specimen.”

  “Yes, the paper written by the students in 1966—you understand. I have a difficulty because there are some words not possible to find—” He went over to the table and brought a small, old, school dictionary.

  “I see—well, that wouldn’t have the more unusual words, would it—”

  The wife swiftly helped him to find the paper and his exercise book. He went down the paper with his eyes, lips moving a little. Bray noticed how tight his breathing was, as if he had a chest cold. “This one word here—here it is, ‘mollify’ … ?”