A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Bray wanted to laugh, the impulse caught him by the throat as a cough rises; he took the examination paper to play for time, in order to pretend, out of the “civilized” courtesy of his kind, that uncertainty about the meaning of the word was something anyone might share—and this in itself was part of the very absurdity: the assumptions of colonial culture. He read, “Write one of the following letters: (a) To a cousin, describing your experiences on a school tour to the Continent; (b) to your father, explaining why you wish to choose a career in the navy; (c) to a friend, describing a visit to a picture gallery or a film you have enjoyed.”

  The schoolmaster wrote down the meaning of “mollify” and showed those questions, ticked off in red ink, that he had been able to answer. “This will be the third time I try,” he said, of the examination.

  “Well, good luck to you both.”

  “When she goes for the Standard Six she takes our choir along for the big schools competition. Last month they won the best in Rongwa province. Now we don’t know—but we hope, we hope.” The schoolmaster smiled.

  He was shown the football field the pupils had levelled; a little way behind was a mud house, shaped European—style with a veranda held up by roughly dressed tree—trunks, which must have been where the schoolmaster and his family lived. An old woman was doing some household chore with pots, outside, in the company of two or three small children. The schoolmaster said, “If there was someone I could ask, like I ask you—” but he was embarrassed to appear to grumble and began to talk about his pupils again.

  Bray, feeling as he had felt a thousand times before in this country, the disproportionate return he was getting for a commonplace expression of interest, said, “What do you feel is your biggest problem at the moment?” and was surprised when, instead of turning again to his expectations of the Education Department under Independence, the man took time to think quietly, in the African lack of embarrassment at long pauses, and said, “We have to make the parents let the girls come to school. This is what I have been trying to do for years. Our girls must be educated. I can show you the figures—in nineteen—sixty-five, no nineteen—sixty-four, yes … we had only nine girls, and they left at the end of two years. Yes, two years. I cannot persuade the parents to keep them on. But I try, try. I go to the parents myself, yes, in the country. I talk to the chiefs and tell them, look, this is our country now, how can the men have wives who are not educated? There will be trouble. We must have the girls in school. But they don’t want to hear. I went to see the par—ents, I talk to them. Yes, well, this year we manage to keep twenty—one girls and some are in the Standard Three class already. I talk to the people slowly.” The man smiled and took one of his gasping breaths; his hand took in the bush, his suburbia. “I go and tell them. I’ve got my bicycle.”

  Bray remembered that things were different now, even at Pilchey’s. “Why don’t you come up to the hotel this evening—I’m staying the night. We could talk some more.”

  The schoolteacher had the suddenly exhausted look of a convalescent. He screwed up his eyes hesitantly, as if there must be something behind the invitation that he ought to understand. “At what time, sir?”

  “Come up after supper. We’ll have a beer. And your wife, too, of course.”

  The man nodded slowly. “After supper,” he repeated, memorizing it.

  When Bray got back to the hotel Mrs. Pilchey was at her desk in the bar, doing accounts. Her big head of thick, reddish—blond hair had been allowed to fade to the yellow—stained white of an old man’s moustache. She looked up over her glasses and then took them off and got to her feet with the pigeon—toed gait of heavy, ageing women. “I thought it sounded like you, when the boy told me.” Sex had died out of the challenging way she had had with men; it was bluff and grudging. They had never liked each other much, in the little they had known of each other, and extraordinarily, the old attitude fell into place between them as if the ten years didn’t exist. There was laughter and handshaking. “A big Bwana with grey hair at the sides, and he can talk Gala. Well, there didn’t used to be any white hairs—but I thought, that’s Colonel Bray! No, well, I heard you were out, anyway, so I’m not as clever as I fancy myself—”

  He said, “So you’re carrying on alone? Olivia and I heard when Mr. Pilchey died.”

  “Five years,” she said. There were pencil caricatures of Oscar Pilchey behind the bar, done in an attempt at Beerbohm’s style. “I don’t think he’d have been able to stand it if he’d been here now.”

  Bray had sat down at the bar. “It’s a tremendous job for a woman on her own.”

  “I don’t know about that, I’ve been in the hotel business twenty—five years, as you know. But to cope with it the way it is now, it’s enough to drive you nuts, that I can tell you.”

  “Shouldn’t you have someone to help you—a manager or an assistant?” He asked for a gin and tonic and she tipped the bottle where it hung upside down over its tot measure and prepared the drink with a kind of grim insolence of practised movements that was in itself a contempt for those for whom it was all very well to talk. “You can’t get anybody to do anything. They don’t care. They want to be rich. They want to learn to fly aeroplanes. That’s what I get told by one of my kitchen boys, yes, I’m not telling a lie. He doesn’t want to scrub the tables, he can go to town and learn to fly an aeroplane now.”

  Bray smiled. “And who told him that?”

  “You’re asking me!” But her quick freckled hand, doing what had to be done, wiping the wet ring left by the ice bucket, made it clear that she knew that he knew quite well. “I can only say, since last week I can’t sack any one of these fine pilots out of my kitchen without asking the Ministry of Labour first. You know that, of course? Published last week. I got a circular from the hotel—keepers’ association, though what they think they’re going to be able to do about it—I must get the permission of the labour officer in my area, whoever that is, I don’t know, and what the gentleman whoever—he-is knows about my business—”

  They both laughed; her accusation of what Bray was, of all that he had been, he and his kind, was laid out flatly between them along with the plaster Johnny Walker and the S.P.C.A. tin for small change. She sat down again at the set of books beside her glass of beer.

  He said, “I can sympathize; it must be hellish difficult for you.”

  She didn’t believe him; it was all very well for people like him who hadn’t had to make a living, who were sent out by the British government for a few years and took sides with the blacks because they didn’t have to stay and live with them if they didn’t want to. But she went on, letting him hear it all. “My old Rodwell, Rodwell that worked for Oscar from before we were married. They come here the other day to ask him to show his Party card. I ask you! All he knows is he’s the best—paid cook in the country; twenty—five years he’s been running his kitchen here. Party card! And they turn nasty! They wouldn’t think twice about beating him up on his way down to the compound at night. He says to me, Doña, what can I do—? The bunch of thugs.” She wouldn’t say “the PIP”; by the refusal to name names she was able to say what she pleased without being provocative. There was a curious kind of intimacy of insult in their chat. He said of the new powers the Minister of Labour had taken on himself, “The trouble is there’s danger of unemployment rising, just at present.”

  “Well, a lot of people are selling up—if you can find anyone to buy. When these pilots and other gentlemen come back hungry looking for their jobs they’ll be in for a big surprise. The Quirks have gone, last month. Johnny Connolly says he’ll send his cattle to the abattoir at Gala if he can’t get rid of the dairy as a going concern. Lots of people.”

  “Oh I’m sure farmers are nervous. But I don’t think it’s a few white people leaving that means much to the labour position. It’s the inevitable hiatus between now and the time when the development plans get going—the harbour at Kundi’s coming, I understand. And the draining of the swamp land round the I
soza area. There aren’t more unemployed people, now, than there were under the colonial administration; it’s just that they naturally have the feeling they’ve done with living in the villages at subsistence level and there’s a danger they may flock to the towns and the mines, where there’s no hope of work for them, really. It could be the old story of peasants without skills leaving the land.”

  “Well exactly, what do they know,” she said, “all these years they’ve had their cassava and their goats and their beer. And happier than we are, believe me.”

  There was the sound of cars drawing up and voices from the veranda. The two waiters went in and out the bar with orders which she dispensed deftly, the smoke of the cigarette in the corner of her mouth making her keep one eye narrowed. Moving about, she had the big head and pouter chest dwindling to unimportance of the caricatures on the wall. In between times she returned to her accounts, looking down her cheeks at the figures she ticked off while talking to Bray. He asked directly, “Do Africans come here now?”

  “It’s the law,” she said, as directly. “My boys serve them if they come. It’s very few; they like their own beer, of course, in their khayas, that’s what they want.… They sit on the veranda and as long as they behave themselves, that’s all right. They know they’ve got to behave themselves.”

  “And do the farmers still put chaps in the aviary on Saturday nights?”

  She laughed and put down the pen, shaking her head in pleasure. “Oh those were the good days, ay? My, what a night we used to have sometimes. And Christmas and New Year! What a lot of life our crowd here used to have in them. Oscar used to say never again, never again. And every time—good God, ay? Ah, that’s all gone, now.”

  She had cast disgruntledness, blood back in her face, moisture of laughter in her eyes—the brief jauntiness of an old dog remembering to wag its tail. He was touched, as always, by a sign of life; but even in the odd moment of warmth she kept in her face an aggression of pride and inferiority: not that he and his kind had deigned, had known how to enjoy themselves!

  When he had bathed and changed for dinner she bustled into him in one of the passages, jingling keys. “Sure you got everything you want? Towels, soap—all right? I never know, these days.” He reassured her. The white men were still drinking on the veranda, and the bar was comfortably full, too. Darts were being played and the news was crackling over the radio. There were no black men. The dinner gong had been sounded up and down the corridors, verandas and annexes that made up the complex of the hotel, and the lights were on in the dining—room, but no one made any move to go and eat. He did not feel like sitting in there on his own. But on the veranda he knew no one except perhaps one face—a man with a head of blond bristles catching the light like the fine hairs on a cactus; probably Denniston, who used to be in the mounted police. He ordered a drink and watched the frogs keeping an eye on the humans with pickpocket wariness while snatching flying ants that fell to the veranda floor from the light. Mrs. Pilchey’s cat came to stalk the frogs in turn, and he chased it away. For the first time, he felt an interest in the stuff from the Education Department that was lying in the car; the little school and the schoolmaster roused him to it. He felt some stirrings of purpose towards this job that was not real to him because he was not sure what it ought to be. He had accepted it in his mind as taken on “for his own reasons”: not to be questioned, for the time being, but about which there must be no illusions of objective validity. He went to the car for the file; he could just glance over it while finishing his drink before dinner.

  As he walked back to the veranda, the schoolmaster was standing on the steps in an army—surplus overcoat, hat in hand. Bray had the impression that he had been waiting about in the shadows, perhaps not sure, among all the white men’s faces heavily blocked out of the dark by the streaming light, which was the one he sought. “Oh good … splendid … this’s my glass, I think—” and they sat down. He ordered the beer that the other said he would have. “I don’t know whether I ever introduced myself, Bray, James Bray—and yours … ?”

  The schoolmaster cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Reuben Sendwe. Reu—ben Send—we.” Then he nodded in acknowledgement of this identity and sat back again.

  He was, of course, used to being summoned and talked at; Bray knew that being able to drink up at the hotel wouldn’t change that. One could perhaps only make him forget himself. Bray began to talk about himself, about how he had worked in the British administration, been district commissioner in the Gala district, and then become “unpopular”—as he put it—with the Colonial Office. “But that’s all ancient history, not of much interest”—he wanted to know more about the school, about schools and teaching, generally, in this district. Sendwe had got what secondary school education he had at the mission at Rongwa. Naturally he knew Father Benedict. “The Fathers told me this morning that the government is going to take over the school. What do you feel about it?” Sendwe said, “I wish, sir, I knew how much money our government has got.” “Yes, money—? Go on.” He licked his dry lips, “If our government has plenty money, then we must take over all the mission schools. If we did not have the missions when I was small, there was no secondary school for me. The English government had only that one small school at the boma, you know? But if there is the money then it is the best thing for all education to be the same, for all children to get the same chance. And then you see, our government can’t think, all right, there is a mission school there, near that village or that village, so why must we build another school—you know what I’m saying?”

  “Oh yes, exactly—”

  “That was what the English government did, but our government must not now do the same. That is why we must close the mission schools. Not because the Fathers are not good men. I don’t say that. Nobody of our people says that. The Europeans mustn’t say we are throwing out the mission people; we must have our own schools in our country, that’s all. I just want to know if we have got money.”

  “I think you have,” Bray said, “but not the teachers, that’s going to be the trouble. I hope you can persuade the mission teachers to give over the running of their schools to the government, but to stay on and teach. Even then hundreds of teachers will have to be recruited from somewhere—somewhere outside.”

  “If we have got the money,” he said, with satisfaction.

  “Does the Education Department help you with your own studies? Where do those lessons you showed me come from—a correspondence course?”

  He shook his head and coughed. “I pay myself .… From London.”

  The veranda was emptying and cars were driving away although a hard core of drinkers remained noisily in the bar. Mrs. Pilchey came bearing down across the veranda with authority. “Doesn’t anybody intend to eat tonight?” she said at large. She was level with Bray and he half—rose politely. “I certainly do. Shan’t be too long.”

  Sendwe was standing up. She looked at him. “Well, how did the sheep go down?” she asked in her loud voice. “Oh, you know Mr. Sendwe, Mrs. Pilchey—” “Of course I know Sendwe.” The schoolmaster’s hand went out for his hat and clutched it automatically from the chair. He stood there in the overcoat and, the way the veranda globe shed its glare, his eyes couldn’t be seen at all in his thin black face. He said, “Oh madam, I should come to thank you. It was very, very nice. But I was sick since then.”

  She kept the stance of someone waylaid. “Celebrations too much for you were they?”

  “I have a very bad cold” he said. And as she was going he took courage and appealed. “The children were very, very happy with the meat. I thank you very much.”

  “That’s okay,” she said briskly, on a rising note, and was gone with the heavy tread, listing a little to one side, of one who has been too many years on her feet.

  He sat smiling. “It was a whole sheep,” he said. “The hotel gave it to the school for Independence. Oh it was a very nice present. Oh the children were happy.” He coughed again, took som
e beer, and went on coughing. When he had recovered his breath, Bray said, “What about dinner, now? What d’you say?”

  “I have had a meal.”

  “Oh, are you sure? You don’t feel like something else, now?”

  “No, I don’t feel hungry ever since I have this cold again.” He was still breathless from the coughing bout.

  Bray said, “Are you doing something for it?”

  “I went again to the clinic. They say I must go to the hospital for tests.” He mentioned the name of the TB hospital in the capital. He held up three fingers. “I was there for seventeen months three years ago. But they cured me. It’s only about two, three weeks now I’ve got this very bad cold. I don’t feel hungry.”

  “I see. Well then, let’s have another beer.” But they did not sit down again. “When will you go?”

  The man smiled. “It’s very far.”

  “But you shouldn’t wait.”

  “When I write the O levels,” he said. He seemed suddenly confused by the feeling that the visit was over and he did not know the right way to conclude it without leaving without what he had come for. “Sir, I want to ask if you can write to me about my young brother. He wants to learn farming—European farming. He’s working there at Mr. Ross’s farm and Mr. Ross is good, he teaches him while he’s working there. Now for a long time he wants to go to the farmers’ school, we heard about it. If you can please send to me the papers for him—I can help him to fill in everything … to apply .… If you can just send me the papers ….”

  Bray explained that he was not going to the capital, but north; but he would arrange to have particulars about the agricultural college sent. The figure in the army overcoat plunged into the darkness, bisected diagonally for a moment by the light cast by the hotel. Bray turned to the dining—room, where some men were eating and talking with the gusto of old friends getting together. The thud of the waiters’ bare feet shook the boards; he ordered a half—bottle of wine and propped up, where he could glance at it, a report picked out at random from the file he was still carrying about with him. Already he was falling into the bachelor habit of reading while he ate. While he remembered, he made a note to send the schoolmaster an Oxford dictionary.