“It would be fatal,” he said.
He walked away from her. He felt, almost accusingly, you would have to have known me all my life to understand. But he went on talking, as if he were talking to Olivia, who would feel exactly as he did; except that he didn’t talk to Olivia any more, even in letters. While he spoke he was aware of an odd, growing sense of being alone, like coldness creeping up from the feet and hands. And while his matter—of-fact, steady voice was in his ears he thought suddenly—an urgent irrelevance, striking through his consciousness—of death: death was like that, the life retreating from the extremities as a piece of paper burns inwards towards the centre, leaving a cold ring of grey.
“I understood perfectly what I was doing … when Shinza and Mweta started PIP it was something I believed in. The apparent contradiction between my position as a colonial civil servant and this belief wasn’t really a contradiction at all, because to me it was the contradiction inherent in the colonial system—the contradiction that was the live thing in it, dialectically speaking, its transcendent element, that would split it open by opposing it, and let the future out—the future of colonialism was its own overthrow and the emergence of Africans into their own responsibility. I simply anticipated the end of my job. I … sort of spilled my energies over into what was needed after it, since—leaving aside how good or bad it had been—it was already an institution outgrown. Stagnant. Boma messengers, tax—collecting tours—we were a lot of ants milling around rigor mortis with the Union Jack flying over it.… But now I think I ought to leave them alone.”
She was sitting very straight, as if what he said drew her up, held her. “Why is it so different? You must know what you think would be the best, the best government, the best—”
“For them—that’s it. Why should I be sure I know? Why should I be sure at all? It was different before. That was my situation, I was in it, because I was part of the thing they were opposing, because I could elect to change my relation to it and oppose it myself—you see? Now I should be stepping in between them—even if it were so much as the weight of a feather, influencing what happens, one way or the other—it would still be on the principle of assuming a right to decide for them.”
She was indignant on his behalf. “Mweta wants you to persuade Shinza! But if they ask you!”
“That doesn’t change my position, if Mweta wants to make use of the temptation held out to me, if it suits him to—”
After a moment, she said, “What about people who go and fight in other people’s wars. Just because they believe one side’s right. What about something like the Spanish Civil War.”
He smiled, rubbed his nose, lifted his head as if for air. “The distance between the International Brigade and the mercenaries in the Congo, Biafra … !”
She began to type again, slowly. The taps were hesitant footsteps across the space that separated them.
“The trouble is, I mean—you are so—you are in it. You don’t care about anything else, do you?”
“Oh, everybody ‘loves’ Africa.”
“You live in your beautiful house stuck away in England as if your life’s over. I mean, nothing awful ever happens, you read it all in the papers, you drive away from it all in your nice car, like some old—”
“Retired colonel.”
There were almost tears in her eyes, she had not meant to say that; affection came over him as desire.
“This is the place where everything’s happened to you. Always.”
“There was the episode of the war.”
“You never talk about it,” she said.
“This’s the continent where everything’s happened to you,” he said.
“Oh well, I was born here. No choice.”
“Dear old colonel, dreaming of the days when he was busy fomenting a revolution behind the boma.”
“You’re here. You love that man, that’s the trouble,” she said with a kind of comic gloom.
“Which man?” he said, making a show of not taking her seriously by appearing to take her very seriously.
“Well, both of them, for all I know. But Mweta, I can see it. And so all that stuff about interfering and so on is counted out. You are tied to someone, it goes on working itself out, like a marriage, no matter what happens there are always things you still count on yourself to do, because after all, there it is—what you’d call your situation. Stuck with it. What can you do? You’ll forget what people say, what it looks like, what you think of yourself. You simply do what you have to do to go on living. I don’t see how it can be helped.”
He held in his mind at the same time scepticism for her “uplifting” notion of that higher, asexual love (a hangover from some Anglican priest giving the sermon at the Kenyan girls’ school?) along with a consciousness of being flattered—moved?—at her idea of him as capable of something she saw as unusual and definitive; and the presence of Mweta, Mweta getting up behind his desk.
“You’d be off like a shot to tell Mweta that Shinza does cross the border, and that what he probably does there is make contact with Somshetsi.”
She scarcely waited for him to finish. Her head cocked, her full, pale, creased lips drawn back, the line pressed together between her eyebrows— “Yes, yes of course I would. It’s natural!”
“I don’t much believe in that sort of love,” he said, as if he were talking to her small daughter.
“Oh well, that’s English. It must come out somewhere—this idea you mustn’t show your feelings.”
“My dear little Rebecca, the English have become just about the most uninhibited people in the world. You haven’t been to England for a long time; love is professed and demonstrated everywhere, all the kinds of love, all over the place. It’s quite all right to talk about it.”
“I’ve never been. —But just the same, you don’t come from that generation, Bray—ah yes, the old taboos still stick with you—” They lost what they had been talking about, in teasing and laughter.
After they had eaten, she was crouched at the fire and suddenly read aloud from her book: “ ‘People have to love each other without knowing much about it.’”
He was searching through a file and looked up, inattentive but indulgent.
She was leaning back on her elbow, watching him. “So you see.”
Then he understood that she was referring to himself—and Mweta.
They (he and she) had never used the word, the old phrase, between themselves, not even as an incantation, the abracadabra of love—making. “What’s the book?”
She smiled. “You remember the day you went to the fish—freezing plant? I took it before we left.” She held out the exhibit; it was Camus, The Plague—one of the paperbacks that Vivien had given him when he came to live in Gala.
Already a past in common.
What am I doing with this poor girl? To whom will she be handed on? And why do I take part in the relay?
He was teaching her the language—Gala. His method was a kind of game—to get her to start a sentence, a narrative, and if she didn’t know the right word for what she wanted to say, to substitute another. She would start off, “I was walking down the road—I went on until I passed a little house covered with … with …” “Come on.” “With … porridge …” They laughed and argued; if the sentences were not simply ridiculous, they might turn into bizarre comments on the local people, sometimes on themselves.
He fished for a cigarillo in his breast pocket and went to sit in the morris chair with the lumpy cushion, near her. She hitched herself over and leaned her back against his legs. He said in Gala, do you have to go home tonight? She answered quite correctly, looking pleased with herself as the words came, no, tonight I am going to—could not find the word “stay”—sleep at the house of my friend. And tomorrow? And yesterday? He tested her tenses and the terms of kinship he had been teaching her over the past few days. Yesterday I stayed at the house of my cousin, tomorrow I am going to my (mother’s brother) uncle, the day after that I am going t
o my brother—in-law’s, and on Friday I am going to my grandmother’s. “Very good!” he said in English, and switched back to Gala— “And after that will you come back to your friend?” She was an apt pupil; she remembered the one term she had not used: in Gala, there was no general word for “home,” children had to use the word for parents’ house, men referred to “the house of my wife,” and women referred to “the house of my husband.” “Wait a minute …” She went over the sentence in her mind— “Then I will go to the house of my husband.”
She had it right, paused a moment, smiling in triumph—and suddenly, as he was smiling back at her, an extraordinary expression of amazement took her face, a vein down her forehead actually became visibly distended as he looked at her. This time the game had produced something unsaid, with the uncanny haphazardness of a message spelled out by a glass moving round the alphabet under light fingers.
She tried to pass it off by saying, ungrammatically, in the non sequitur tradition of the game, my husband is away from home in the fields.
Then she said, in English, “I had a letter from Gordon. He might come to see the children.”
“So he’s coming.”
“I only heard a few days ago. You never know with him, I’ll believe it when he arrives. That’s why I haven’t said anything. But then this afternoon Suzi said that to you about the beans—”
“When?” he said.
Now that she had confessed she was unburdened, at ease, almost happy. “This next week. If he does.”
But he knew she knew that the man was coming—the day, the date. He said, “What will you do?”
She said, “He’ll probably stay at the Fisheagle Inn. Edna really hasn’t a bed for him.”
She would have arranged everything; after all, she sewed curtains against the arrival of Olivia.
She spent the night at “her friend’s.” She lay in the bath, her body magnified by the lens of water, and, while he gazed at her, said dreamily, “I don’t suppose Olivia will ever know about me.”
“I suppose not.”
“You wouldn’t tell her?”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t know—I would have thought you are the kind of couple who tell everything.”
We were, we were. “You’re anxious about Gordon?” Still dressed, he sat on the edge of the bath; her brown nipples stuck out of the water, hardened by the cool air, the weight of her breasts when she had suckled children had stretched the skin in a wavering watermark. It was a young (she was only twenty—nine, he knew by now), damaged body, full of knowledge. “Oh Lord no.”
“Somebody might be kind enough to tell him. I suppose everyone knows. The whole village.” He had never thought about it before; it might be a scandal, for all he knew, among what was left of the white locals. If no one had seen the pencil—torch and the two figures crossing the piece of bush in the early hours of the morning, then it was unlikely that Kalimo had not gossiped to other servants.
“I don’t think so.” She was thinking of the loyal Tlumes, the Alekes; the white people she really knew only as the parents of children who were at school with hers. “He lives in a world of his own. Just every now and then he remembers our existence. You’ll like Gordon, you’ll see. He’s a very likeable person. Everyone does.”
She might have been talking of an old friend, rather a character. He said, “I’ll believe in him when I see him.”
“Oh I know.” On an impulse she got out of the bath and streaming wet, with wet fingers, undid his shirt and pants and pressed herself against him, a contact at once nervously unpleasant and yet delightful.
Early in the morning he woke with a fierce contraction of dismay, it seemed because Kalimo was at the door and she was still there—they must have overslept. His clenched heart swept this knowledge into some other anguish, left from the day before. Kalimo opened the door but did not bring in coffee. In fact, it was much earlier than coffee—time, and he had come to tell Bray that there was someone to see him. Bray half—understood, and forgot the girl, calling out, “Kalimo, what on earth is it all about—say what you mean, come here—” And Kalimo opened the door and stood facing the bed, after one quick glance not seeming to see, either, the woman stirring. “Mukwayi, he say he the brother of your friend, there—there—”
Outside the kitchen door, under the skinny paw—paws in the strangely artificial light of dawn, a young man stood hunched against the chill.
Shinza wanted to see him. “At Major Boxer’s place! He’s there now?”
“Yes. Or you can tell me what day you are going to come. He will come there.”
He watched the man off, one of those figures in shirt and trousers who are met with on all the roads of the continent, miles from anywhere ahead, miles from anywhere behind, silent and covering ground. The red sun came up without warmth behind the paw—paw trees, as between the fingers of an outstretched hand. It struck him full in the eyes and he turned away. He walked round the front of the house and stood under the fig. As many arms as Shiva, and dead—still, always stiller than any other tree, even in the calm and silent morning, because its foliage was so sparse, in old age, that air currents did not show. It was surrounded by its own droppings; fruit that had dried without ripening and fallen, dead leaves, grubs and cocoons. She came out of the house dressed, looked once behind her and then came over to him.
“I may go off, today or tomorrow, for a day. No, not to the capital. He wants to talk to me—from the Bashi.”
As she went across the rough grass he was struck by the subdued look of her, and called softly, “Rebecca!” She paused. “All right?” —Of course, Kalimo had walked in on them; he must know anyway, but all the same … She nodded her head vehemently, the way her children sometimes did. It was only when he was on the road that the thought crossed his mind that he had not noticed whether Kalimo showed any particular attitude in his manner when he served breakfast. Kalimo’s proprietorial dependency had belonged to Olivia and himself as the couple, the family; yet he had not, even by the quality of a silence, asserted Olivia’s presence—in-absence. Perhaps in some subconscious way even Kalimo found Bray’s presence different, in relation to himself, from what it had been before—he remained a servant, but although nothing was changed materially for him the emotional dependency between ruler and ruled was gone. With the dependency went the proprietary rights, also the concern. Or maybe Kalimo was just older, and seeing Olivia as part of a past.
Because of the iron-ore mine, the Bashi road as far as Boxer’s was kept in fair repair. There were the usual work gangs making good in the dry season the pot holes and washaways of summer, and every now and then he was waved onto a detour by a barefoot labourer prancing with a red rag on a stick, but he still reached the farm by two in the afternoon. He was slightly dazed from having driven so long without a stop. Boxer’s polished leggings shone in the sun. “I don’t know what the old devil wants.” He absolved himself at once of any association with Shinza or anybody else. “But it’s all right with me, if you’ve got doings with him. Take your time. He came to see me once to borrow money!” It was one of the few things that could make Boxer laugh: the idea that he might have any money lying around to lend. He was also making use of the dry season—to put up some new farm building. Bray had to look at a consignment of precast concrete blocks that couldn’t be laid properly because they were all out of true. “Bloody things taken from the moulds before they’re dry!” The blocks came from the new factory at Gala; Bray had to promise to complain.
Boxer went on with the job of sorting out the usable blocks, calling, “Where’s that boy? I don’t know where milord is himself, though I know he’s arrived because I saw his father—in-law’s car down over at my dam—but he’s left someone here to look out for you.” His face reflected emotions that had nothing to do with what he was sayingannoyance at each fresh evidence of misshapen cement, distrust of the judgement of the two black cattlemen who were working under his eye. The scout had disappeared. “O
h well, must’ve gone to fetch him. You can go along into the house. I don’t mind. Pour yourself a drink or ask in the kitchen for some tea.”
One of the Afghans followed Bray back to the house. The signs of division of the rooms between the various functions of the household during a previous occupancy—the Boxers as a family—were becoming completely overlaid by the single—mindedness of an existence so perfectly contained by the preoccupation of cattle breeding that it really had no diversity of functions to be reflected. The living-room, going the way of the bathroom that Bray remembered from last time, was slowly losing the character of its old designation as phials of vaccine, pamphlets on feeds, dried specimens of pasture grasses had settled among the tarnished silver and the Staffordshire dogs, and three pairs of boots, still encrusted with summer mud, had found an obviously permanent home on a small red—gold Shiraz next to the sofa. It wasn’t that nothing was put away in the right place, but there was no longer any place in the house that was not appropriate for anything. Bray opened the liquor cupboard and took a can of beer from among bottles of bloat medicine. He heard a car and took out a second can. The beautiful male dog that looked so humanly feminine—a kind of inversion of anthropomorphism—got up gracefully within its fringes of fur and barked beside Bray at the door as it saw a black man get out of the car. Shinza wore a gay shirt flapping over his trousers, sandals that he had to grip with his toes as he walked. There was an almost West African swagger about him. He ignored the noise of the dog and came up the steps to the veranda and the open living-room with the air of self—conscious disingenuousness that was instantly familiar—film actors, sports champions, they came at the TV camera lazily, like that, fresh from some triumph or other. The car was a big old American one, all snub surfaces gleaming under dust, lying heavily on its worn springs.
A Guest of Honour Page 30