A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Shinza didn’t rise; challengingly casual, by white men’s standards—but he made a real effort to talk to Boxer about the things that interested him. Shinza, unexpectedly, knew quite a lot about cattle; as he did about everything one doubted in him. His attitude towards Boxer reminded Bray of that of a grown man visiting one of his old housemasters; a combination of kindliness and slightly resentful pity, with the consciousness of having outdistanced the teacher beyond even his understanding. When Shinza had gone off in Mpana’s old car, Boxer said innocently, “Now let’s settle down and have a drink. I hope to Christ you didn’t give him anything. He’s much too grand to pay back.”

  “But I thought you’d refused him a loan.”

  “You’re damn right I refused. Donkey’s years ago. He wanted money to start the political business—their party—you know. But Mpana, that other old devil, he once asked a bull off me, for studno wonder his herd’s so flourishing. Never saw a penny. I’ll go down there one day and look over his heifers and say, look, old man, I recognize my daughters in your house—you know the sort of thing, he’d appreciate it.”

  He had to spend the evening with Boxer. A long—interred loneliness—born not so much of solitude as of single—mindedness—stirred to weak impulse in the man. Cloudy bottles of wine bought from the Lebanese importer on some rare visit to the capital were brought out and opened without comment (Boxer, like Shinza, had a certain delicacy) but in a sense of occasion. Boxer talked incessantly as usual, with lucid precision and even with style, of his animal husbandry, pasture ecology, and his extraordinary observation of the strange form of life manifested in ticks—a description of the sub—life of the silence and patience of parasitism. He was oddly changed without his hat; his forehead, half—way up where the hat rested day in and day out, was white and damp—looking, creased as a washerwoman’s palm. Real nakedness belongs to different parts of the body in different people; here was where his nakedness was, in this exposed cranium, luminous as the wine went down and produced a sweat. Never mind the ticks—he himself appeared to Bray as some strange form of life. Bray listened with the bored fascination with which once, just before he left England, he had sat with Olivia through a space film, his own sense of life lying strongly elsewhere.

  Chapter 13

  He was writing to Mweta when he looked up just as the yellow dress that he knew so well became visible, approaching through the scrub. She was hidden and appeared again, nearer; he stood up to wait. Just this way sometimes, in the early mornings or evenings, he kept dead still while a female buck that probably fed on the golf—course during the night moved silently, quite near. But his body had associations of its own with the yellow dress, robust but no less tender; there was a surge of pleasure that he would press against her in a moment, when they met. And then she came hurrying out onto the garden grass and there was a check—something different about her—as if she had sent someone else, smiling, in her place. As she reached him he saw that, of course, her hair was pulled up and tied back. He said, “Darling, I was hoping you’d notice the car was back, as soon as you got up—” and as he put his hand out behind her head he was suddenly checked again, and this time of her volition as she stopped dead a foot away from him, her palms raised for silence or to hold him off, her face bright, conspiratorial, pained and yet half—giggling. “They’re just behind me—the children, Gordon. We’re coming to invite you to drinks for him tonight. I’ve told him I’ve been doing typing for you in the evenings. It’s all right.”

  His body died back first, before his mind. He said, “Why bring him here, Rebecca?”

  She was gazing at him, passionately, flirtatious, giggling, ablaze. He had never seen her like that. “The children, you ass. They keep on talking about you. It’s obvious we’re running in and out your house all the time. It’d look funny if we didn’t come now.”

  “My God, why didn’t you say when he was coming. I could have stayed away for a few days.” He withdrew into what she had called his “elderly” voice, meaning, he knew, in her generous and unresentful way, that it put the distance of social background, education and assurance, rather than age, between them.

  “Oh don’t be idiotic.” She pleaded, tears like tears of laughter standing hot in her eyes. “It’s perfectly all right. You don’t know him. He’d never think anything. He’s not like that. He’s very attractive to women. It never occurs to him that I could ever look at anybody else. I’ve told you. He’ll go away again soon. It’s quite all right.”

  She stood there, a schoolgirl about to stuff her hand into her mouth to stifle a give—away of hysterical guilt before authority. He was amazed at her as much as angry at himself for in some way appearing to himself as a fool. He was about to say, And what we think—my dear girl, doesn’t it occur to you that I don’t really want to meet him—but the children running like puppies before the man burst into chatter, almost upon them, and a voice that he thought of immediately as somehow Irish in its effortless persuasiveness was making an entry, talking, talking— “—That’s a tree for a tree—house, Clivie, now! That’s what you call a tree! You could build one big enough to put a camp bed in, there—” “And a stove, to cook—” The skinny little girl jumped up and down for attention. “I’ll show you—I always climb it!”—The smaller boy scrambled ahead, ignoring his mother and Bray. “Don’t you say good morning to James, don’t you say good morning?” She caught him up and held him struggling— “Leave me! Leave me! Leave me!” She laughed, imprisoning him vengefully, while he kicked and blazed at her, his black eyes fierce with tears.

  “Becky, for God’s sake—why does it have to be mayhem and murder wherever we walk in.”

  She dropped the child, laughing at its huge rage and at the reproach. The little boy trying half—fearfully to kick at his mother’s shins always had had the definitive cast of features that in a child shows a strongly inherited resemblance. Now Bray saw the face that had been there in the child’s. The husband was surprising; but perhaps he would have been so however he had materialized, simply because he hadn’t existed for Bray at all. He was unusually good—looking in a very graceful and well—finished way, rather a small man—but, again, that was perhaps only from Bray’s height. Five foot ten or so—tall enough to stand sufficiently for male pride above Rebecca. He wore young men’s clothes elegantly, tight beige trousers belted on the hips, a foulard tied in the open neck of his shirt. Rebecca in her yellow dress and rubber—thong sandals looked shabby beside him. He wore a small bloodstone on one of the little fingers of his strong, olive—coloured hands and his face was smoothly olive—coloured with the large, even—gazing shining black eyes of the little boy, and the dull—red fresh mouth. On the man the face had a C—shaped line of laughter just marking the end of the lips on either side, and fine quizzical spokes at the outer corners of the eyes. His dark hair was prematurely silvering, like an actor’s streaked for distinction. He was saying, “I suppose you’re used to all this racket my crowd kick up. I think Becky’s let them run a bit wild, she’s too soft. Yes—I’m going to have to tan your bottoms for you—” He turned with a mock growl on the children, who shrieked with laughter, the little one still with tears undried. “—But that’s a marvellous tree there you’ve got for a tree—house, I don’t think I’d be able to keep my hands off it, even if I didn’t have any children around, I’d have a little retreat of my own up there, electric light, and pull the ladder up after me—”

  And Bray the good—humoured friend was saying, “Oh I make do with this old thing on the ground, as you see—” while Rebecca in the same blazing, flirtatious, exaggerated way she had used with him, attacked— “Gordon, for heaven’s sake! Don’t put the idea into their heads! At least leave Bray in peace with his tree, you don’t know how he loves his tree—”

  While they all went on talking in this friendly ease he noted the slip—even she with all her apparent skill, born of long practice. For a woman to use a man’s surname like that couldn’t be mistaken as formality; i
t was a tell—tale inverted intimacy, sticking out, so to speak, from under the hastily made bed. He felt some small satisfaction in catching her out. She said, “I’d better leave you two, much as I like your company—Aleke needs his secretary. I’m about half an hour late already.” “Phone the fellow and tell him you’re taking the afternoon off,” the handsome man instructed. “D’you want me to do it?” “Oh no Gordon, I can’t, he gave me yesterday and tomorrow’s the weekend anyway. Everything’ll be piled up for Monday.” He shrugged. “Well get cracking then, if you got to go, go—” She put her head on one side: “Keys?” He tossed car keys to her; she missed, they both ducked for them. “No wonder my sons can’t play cricket—” He gave her a pat on the backside. “Shoo! And no damn nonsense about overtime or anything. D’you hear? There are people coming at six. D’you hear me?”

  She ran, turning her head back to them, nodding it like a puppet’s. Her thighs jerked as they did the day she came out of the water, on the island.

  The children were climbing the fig tree and pelting each other with its shrivelled fruit; they had never behaved like that before, eithersubdued little creatures, running in with a sidelong glance and saving their fierce quarrels and boastful games for when they were living by some law of their own away from the awesome grown—ups. By contrast, Bray’s daughters had been such self—assured children, perfectly composed in conversation with a visiting Colonial Secretary at nine or ten, politely offering an opinion to an African nationalist over lunch at fourteen. Like their mother, they could talk to anybody and kept their distance from everybody.

  The husband stood about with the instant and meaningless friendliness of the wanderer. This way he was at home in the bars and hotels of Africa; a man who, since he never stays anywhere long, assumes the air of the familiar personality at once, wherever he is. This way he would stand about in conversation with the garage proprietor in a remote Congo village where (as he was relating to Bray) his car had broken down, just as he now did with the middle—aged Colonel for whom his wife did a bit of typing. He was “crazy enough” to have business interests in the Congo— “But I’ve had the fun and games. I’ve pulled out. There’s still money to be made there, mind you. But the Belgians have moved back in such a big way and they push everybody else out … the Congolese wide boys would rather work with the devils they know than with devils like me. They would.” (Shinza’s old saw about Mweta coming up again in a new context.) “I know a chappie—Belgian chappie—who’s back for the fourth time. First he had a natural gas concession up in the Kivu—the volcanic lakes, there’s a fortune lying there for someone, someday, if you can live that long. Then he was in industrial diamonds in the Kasai, they were going to break away and he was all set to get a consortium to finance their diamond industry when they kicked out Union Minière.” He gave his slow, relishing smile, sharp yet humorously worldly, the teeth good. “Don’t know what it was the third time round. Now he’s in the currency racket between Lubumbashi and the Zambian border. He told me he feels ‘useless’ in Europe. Here he says people want help to keep things going—they’ll take it whatever way they can get it, and they know you don’t get it out of the goodness of someone’s heart. While the Russians and the Chinese and Americans are each watching to see what the other one will give, you have to go on living.”

  “You think of us as devils?” Bray said.

  Present company was waved away. “You know as well as I do. White men don’t hang around in Black Africa for their health or anybody else’s. Wherever a vacuum comes up, there are the boys who won’t hesitate to fill it. Good God, you should just meet some of them the way I do. —Okay that’s enough—out of that tree, now. And clear the mess you’ve made on that table—James’ll never let you put up a tree—house if you drop things on his papers—” He grinned at his own audacity, always confident it would be well received, at once took command again: “Wha’d’you think of it, putting Becky in that sort of accommodation, though? If they need her they must damn well find somewhere for her to live, eh? There must be a house in this place. And if there isn’t, they must find one. That’s the way it is—you want somebody’s services, you have to be prepared to pay for them. I told Aleke straight off, yesterday: you need her, you find her a house.”

  “I think Edna Tlume’s quite a help, in a way.” It was impossible to make any remark that did not have, to his own ears, an absurd innuendo.

  “Oh that woman’d do anything for Becky. But the point is the house is a slum. Two rooms and no bathroom of her own. Can’t live like that. I said look, if I had one week, I bet I’d find a house—your government’s prepared to pay for it?” The children stood around the man proudly. “See!” Suzi thrust out her dry little hand with its blackened encrustations where Rebecca applied wart—remover to the middle finger. She was wearing a bracelet made of threaded mahogany beans, shook it up her arm with a sudden feminine gesture.

  The children had cleared away the fruit they had pelted onto the table. He blew brittle leaf webbed in dust and spider—spit from his letter. It had gone completely from his mind. The little troupe chattered off the way Rebecca always appeared and disappeared, through the thin—leafed trees. The letter came back. He asked Mweta not to forget to arrange for him to be invited to the Party Congress. He mentioned what progress was being made with the education centre. “It could turn out to be rather like the workingmen’s clubs in Britain in the nineteenth century. Here in these country places where men are beginning—though of course they don’t put a name to it—to have a new consciousness of themselves as something more than units of labour, they are ready to take anything that’s going: may come in useful. Whether someone gives judo classes or explains the different ways of dealing with the law of supply and demand … I wanted to suggest to the local PIP branch that they might use the centre as a place for a more general political instruction than the sort of hiphoorah stuff that comes out of party meetings. It would help combat unruliness, too. I would always rather go on the assumption that above people’s heads is higher than the people who instruct them are likely to believe.”

  The style and reasoning of such letters was something he picked up with a pen. It functioned of itself. For a lifetime—lying suddenly in his mind, the word associated with advertisements for expensive Swiss watches: lifetime. The habits of a lifetime. He felt himself outside that secure concept built up coating by coating, he was exposed nakedly pale as a man who has been shut away too long from the sun. The girl presented herself face—to-face, fact—to-fact with him, a poster—apocalypse filling the sky of his mind. Thought could crawl all over and about her, over the steadfast smile and the open yellow eyes and in and out the ears and nostrils. He sat for a moment exactly as if he had swallowed an unfamiliar pill and waited for the sensation of the drug to unfold itself. Then the telephone rang in the house. It was Malemba in great excitement: the lathes from Sweden had arrived. He went to borrow a truck (the obliging Indian traders again), pick up Malemba, and fetch the machinery from the road—transport depot.

  The gathering at the Tlumes’ house was unlike the usual absent drift towards the Alekes’ or the Tlumes’ for an hour after work, when often one of Edna’s relations or some subdued minor official, new to his Africanized job, sat without speaking, and children wandered in and out with their supper in their hands. There were even one or two faces that didn’t belong; a telephone engineer Gordon Edwards had travelled with, and the blonde receptionist from the Fisheagle Inn. She was the one who had brought the thigh—high skirt to the village (there was a time—lag of a year or so between the beginning of a fashion in Europe and its penetration to the bush) but she sat in this mixed company with those famous thighs neatly pressed together as a pair of prim lips. The doctors Hugh and Sally Fraser from the mission hospital were there with a young Finn who had just walked down from West Africa—his rucksack leaned against the wall. He wore a shirt with the face of some African leader furred and faded by sweat and much washing, and was prematurely bal
d on top, like a youthful saint in a cheap religious picture. Sampson Malemba had changed into his best dark suit after the dirty business of loading and unloading machinery. Aleke was wearing a brown leather jerkin with fringes—Gordon’s present; how did he know just what would sit splendidly on Aleke’s powerful male breasts? But there was the impression that Gordon Edwards acquired things that remained in his possession like clues to the progress of his life if one could read them: he happened to be here at a certain time, and so picked up this, happened to be there, and so was around when that was available. And in the same fortuitous fashion, it fell out that these things suited this one perfectly or were exactly what that one would like.

  Alekes, Tlumes, Frasers—all accepted Bray’s presence with Gordon Edwards without a sign. It might have been agreed upon, it was such a cosy, matter—of-fact conspiracy of friends: he did not quite know whether he was chief protagonist or victim? Everyone was so gay. Sometimes he felt as if he were a deceived husband; Rebecca wore a new dress (another present?) and when he danced with her had the animated, lying look of a young girl. Who could believe, as she had implied, that that lithe and handsome little man didn’t sleep with her? Physical jealousy suddenly weakened his arms so that he almost dropped them from her. Between chatter she expected him to lip—read— “I’ll try and come early one morning.” He murmured, “No, don’t.” She pulled a face, half—hurt. She said, “Let’s go to the lake again. You suggest it. On Sunday.” A family party. He felt himself smiling, the cuckold—lover: “All right, I’ll be host.” Gordon Edwards danced again and again with the tall refined tart from the Fisheagle; he must be the reason why she was present. Perhaps, then, he was staying at the hotel after all? It was impossible to say to Rebecca, does he sleep in this house? Idiot, idiot. He saw himself amusedly, cruelly, as he had done so often since he had come back here, where all should have had the reassuring familiarity of the twice—lived, the past. Aleke took over the Fisheagle blonde; his large, confident black hands held her softly as he did his children’s pigeons, she kept her false eyelashes down on her cheeks, she had moved from the shelter of the settlers’ hotel into the Tlumes’ house as if on a visit to a foreign country. Agnes Aleke was wearing the wig Rebecca told Bray she had ordered by post and looked like a pretty American Negress. She talked to the Finn about her longing to visit the cities of Europe, holding her head as a woman does in a new hat. To him they were battlegrounds where the young turned over rich men’s cars and camped out in the carpeted mausoleums of dead authority, not her paradise of shops. “ ‘Nice things’?” he said in his slowly articulated Linguaphone English. “Here you have the nice things—the shape of the trees, the round sun, these beaudiful fruits”—he was balancing on his knees a mango, caressing it. She flirtatiously patronized his lack of sophistication— “This shirt? You got it in Africa? Who’s that president or whatever it is?”