A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  When the papers came he read through them at the odd angle of people who wear bifocal lenses and asked how much money she wanted to draw. She said she thought all of it.

  He made the fatherly suggestion: “Don’t you want rather to transfer it wherever you’re going? Where do you go?”

  She had thought only of coming here: that was where she had been going. She said, “England.”

  His short soft forefinger was a pendulum. “You know if you take your money to England, you don’t get it out again? You have it here in Switzerland, you can write to us from anywhere in the world, we send money to you. It’s better you take now only what you need, and I transfer to England what you are going to need there—where it is? London?—Whatever bank you say.”

  “Any bank—I don’t know any.”

  She signed some papers. He wrote down the particulars of the sum to be paid into the account of Jean-Louis Kamboya, of Lubumbashi. “Congo Kinshasa, no?” He was proud to know the difference. “With this Congo and that Congo—” He gave her a slip for the teller and shook hands, “I wish you a pleasant stay, dear lady. Unfortunately this is not the best time. You should come in springtime, neh?”

  Downstairs white male hands with a gold wedding ring counted out fifteen hundred Swiss francs in notes and clipped them together. She was like Loulou’s girl, now, with a variety of currencies about her.

  And now it was done. Her own footsteps died away behind her as she came out through the great doors and she was confronted with figures in raincoats and overcoats hurrying all round her, the sound of children’s inquiring voices in German. Now she had no purpose at all and bewilderedly she met the shops full of suède coats and crocodile-skin luggage (real, not like Loulou’s), the splendid toyshops, shops with rosy salami and horseshoe-shaped sausages, showcases of steel and gold and diamond watches, shops with fur boots. A constant waterfall streamed down the inside of a window filled with bowls of roses, lilies and orchids, magnifying them and somehow setting them out of reach as the lenses of goggles did the wild gardens under water in that other lake that was left behind. In a confectioner’s women bought cakes and ate them at the counter. A blast of heat at the door kept the chill out and while she drank a cup of coffee in the vanilla-scented room where everybody was eating sweet things she watched fingers pointed at this cake or that and felt her legs warmed by the central heating. Out in the street she wandered on past a tiny buried square with a lichened statue deep in hand-shaped leaves cast like old chamois gloves. She had never seen a chestnut tree before but she recognized the conkers children played games with in the English storybooks of her childhood. It began to rain; an old fat woman sold roast chestnuts from a brazier kept aglow under an umbrella. In the tram going back up the hill she sat among the housewives going home with their morning’s shopping, already equipped in full dress against the coming of winter—coats, boots, umbrellas, gloves; even the little children with their gumboots and duffles zipped up tubbily. They seemed so placid, matter-of-factly prepared for hazards all foreseen in an environment of their own where all risks were known ones. But of course, it was never really like that: even these damp pink noses (even Herr Weber) could be invaded in their lawful feather-beds by the violence of sudden love or death.

  She felt so cold and bloodless that she ordered a glass of red wine in the hotel lounge. It was furnished with rickety antiques and family portraits and ended in a little conservatory where the common plants that grew everywhere at home, in Africa, were warmed by central heating and trained up the glass from pots. A young couple were sitting there, stirring the cream on their coffee and slowly finishing bowls of berries sprinkled with sugar. They murmured to each other in German—something like, “Good … ?” “Oh very good”—and went on dreamily licking the spoons. The girl wore trousers and a sweater with a string of pearls, she was tall and narrow-footed and remote. The man, shorter than she, looked not quite at home in rather smart casual clothes and had a worried little double chin already beginning beneath his soft face. The girl yawned and he smiled. It was the stalemate of conversation, the listlessness of a newly married couple who have never previously been lovers. “Very good,” he said again, putting his bowl on the tray.

  The wine rose to her head in a singing sensation and she thought of them sitting on politely round a coffee table for ever, he slipping down into fatness and greyness, she never released from her remoteness, while their children grew, waiting to take their places there. She became aware of an ornamental clock ticking away the silence in the room between herself and the couple.

  Chapter 23

  And so she came to England, flying over a grey sea with scum floating like spit, a sea into which the sewers of Europe emptied; over European cities made up of grey blocks like printers’ lugs.

  Her parents were living there. But the fact was just an address to which she had written letters and not a place probably within an hour’s journey of the streets she knew now, in London, where people walked off into a thickening of mist as if off the end of the world. She made no attempt to get in touch with her family. She wandered the streets and rode the buses going to see all the things that stood for this city. If there was a lane that said “To Samuel Johnson’s House,” she took it; if there was a brochure, she bought it. She waited on the steepening stairways of tube stations, descending into darkness. She crossed bridges and smelled the musk of churches. She passed the pubs full of beer—coloured light where people stood close-packed, touching. She was among them in trains where they stood close-packed, not touching. She read the messages: in the tube, a girl dropping paper panties from between forefinger and thumb—Give Your Dirty Washing To the Dustman; in the Soho chemists’, Pregnancy Test—24-Hour Service. She went along the titles of second-hand books on a barrow off Old Compton Street; the faces of old men under the yoke of sandwich-boards; the look-out of touts standing like shopwalkers outside strip clubs.

  She crossed between the puddles from the fountain and the legs of the people who sat all day with their packs and guitars, marooned on that traffic island that was Piccadilly Circus. A young Jesus in dirty white robes had a ring of frizzy-maned disciples. Girls in Red Indian fringes rested on boys in fur-trappers’ jackets. They streamed past, around, behind her in Shaftesbury Avenue, cowboys with belts as wide as corsets, pale girls with long tangled hair, long bedraggled coats and broken boots like the waifs in illustrations to school-prize editions of Dickens; gipsies, Eastern mendicants, handsome bandits with mustachios, a bullfighter in green velvet pants and bolero, coming full on at her. What did this cold fiesta know of the reality of hot sun on a burning car? Of the load of mauve flowers carried by the trees in the village where chickens tied by the leg were mashed into blood and guts under men’s feet—a moment of sudden displacement came to her like the dazzling dark brightness that follows a blow. She went unrecognized here; she was the figure with the scythe.

  Yet this was where Bray came from: there were faces in which she could trace him. An elderly man in a taxi outside a restaurant; even a young actor with sideburns and locks. He might have once been, or become, any of these who were living so differently from the way he did. It was as if she forayed into a past that he had left long ago and a future that he would never inhabit. She wandered the bypasses of his life that he had not taken, meeting the possibility of his presence. It came to her as a kind of wonder, an explanation. Of what? His life? His death? Her experience of living with him? Something of all three. She had started off with the knowledge that she would not live with Gordon again. It was the first positive thing she knew after the moment, on the road, when she had become conscious of thirst; she had said to Vivien, “I will never live with Gordon again.” Now she began to have an inkling of why she knew this. This place where Bray had come from was full of faces that he was not, that he had chosen not to be. He had made his life in accordance with some conscious choice—beliefs, she supposed, that she also supposed she didn’t properly understand. It didn’t have much to do with b
eing what her father would have called a nigger-lover. But it had something to do with life itself. Gordon was always trying to outwit; Bray lived not as an adversary but a participant. She had never lived with anyone like that before. And once you did, you couldn’t live again with a Gordon, who wanted only to “make his pile and get out”—always to the next country just like the last and the next “opportunity” just like the last: to make his pile and get out. Bray’s way had ended on the road as if he hadn’t mattered any more than a bunch of chickens tied by the leg—yes, the explanation given by the people in the capital was nothing to her, meaningless against the fact of his death as she had heard it and seen and felt it in flesh as she picked glass from his cheek. Whoever they were, they had killed him like a chicken, a snake hacked in the road, a bug mashed on a wall, and what they had done was pure faceless horror to her, the madness of waiting in the ditch, the earth under her fingernails. But she was sure he would have known who they were. He would have known why it had happened to him. Old lecherous Dando, trying to feel the beginning of her breast from over her shoulder, was right about that.

  She kept still the piece of paper with the particulars of the Swiss account in his handwriting; she carried it around with her in the pocket of the new coat she had bought herself in one of the shops full of lights flashing on and off to nasal music. He had smuggled the money out because he loved her, that she also knew. But this did not please her as proof, because (taking the paper out in tubes, buses, on park benches) it meant at the same time that he accepted they would part, that there was a life for her to live without him. And—cracking the code further—at the time when it was written, that meant he would go back one day to Olivia; not that he would be dead.

  She thought of Olivia as an empty perfume bottle in which a scent still faintly remains. She had found one on one of the shelves in the wardrobe of her hotel room: left there by some anonymous English woman, an Olivia. She knew nobody in the city of eight millions. She had nothing in common with anyone; except his wife.

  At times she was strongly attracted by the idea of going to see Olivia and his daughters. But the thought that they would receive her, accept her in their supremely civilized tolerance—his tolerance—this filled her with resentment. She wanted to bare her suffering, to live it and thrust it, disgusting, torn live from her under their noses, not to make it “acceptable” to others.

  She had bought herself warm clothes and now looked like anyone else, as she went about. After an exchange with the Irish maid in the hotel on the subject of the ages, temperaments, and proclivity to illness of their respective children, she thought of how she would send for her children and perhaps live in London with them. It was not so much a plan as a daydream—walking with them over the piles of fallen leaves in the parks. The Irish maid was the only person she talked to and the conversation began the moment the woman opened the door with her pass key every day and went on, impossible to stem, until a final burst of the Hoover drowned parting remarks. The answers to questions about children were factual but it was Bray she was speaking of when husbands were discussed, and he was alive, waiting for her to come back to whatever part of Africa it was they lived. The maid was satisfied without any precise definition: she referred to Africa as “out there” and looked sympathetic. “I had to leave me job down in the men’s university hostel after twelve years becaz the coloureds was needlin’ each other in the bathroom—I saw the pots of vaseline. I went straight down to the superintendent, I said, all those coloureds the government’s lettin’ in, I’m not used to things like that, I said, my husband wouldn’t let me stay another day—I won’t stand for that, I said, thank you very much.”

  Although there was the half—sheet of paper in the coat pocket, there was also what Bray had said the night before they left Gala. She had told him—not in so many words—the only thing she feared about Gala was being sent away, and he said, I know; but I’ll be there. And when she had said, how can we go together, and he knew England was in her mind, he had said, perhaps we can manage. He had said: we’ll decide what to do. (Sitting one afternoon in something called the Ceylon Tea Shop, she suddenly remembered that precisely.) We’ll decide what to do. Perhaps the code of the paper didn’t read that he was going to set her down somewhere, gently, regretfully. It might have meant they were going to Sardinia, where the spear—fishing was so good. No, not really that … but somewhere together outside Gala; they had never had any existence, outside Gala.

  In the teashop with the blown—up photographs of tea-estates and the framed quiz How Much Do You Know about Tea? facing her, she came back again to the fact that on that last night they had not made love properly. It was she who had decided, because they were both so tired and had to get up early, that they wouldn’t finish it. He fell asleep inside her body and there was the thought, like a treat, that they would make love in a big bed for the first time the next night, in the capital. So he had never come to her, she had never come to him; it had never been reached, that particular compact of fulfilment. She passed through days now when she was racked by an obsession of regret about this. Of all the deprivation, the loss, the silence, the emptiness, the finality, this became the most urgent, and the cruellest, because urgency itself was a form of mockery thrown back at her from the blank of death: there was nothing for it to be directed at. She told herself that they had made love a hundred times, the compact was made—what did one more time matter? But she hungered for that one last time. It had been given up, for nothing, lost along with the rest, for no reason. She asked herself again and again what difference it would have made. But the answer was fiercely that she wanted it. It was hers. Before death came. It had belonged to her; it was not death that had taken it—what death took was unarguable—it had been forgone. She thought about it so much that she produced in herself the physical manifestations of the unfinished act. The lips of her body swelled and she knew with horror the desire of that night that now would never be satisfied.

  She felt afraid of herself.

  The smell of stale cigarettes in ashtrays was the smell of Gala after burnings.

  Walking round the shivering ponds, down the avenues of leaves sodden as old newspaper under the trees of parks, she saw the nodules of next year’s buds on the stripped branches, the callousness of the earth endlessly renewing itself. Would she, too, seek again—she tried to reduce it to the baldest fact—that coming up of one flesh against another until like a little stone breaking at last the surface of a still pool, sensation in ring after ring flows out from that little stone, that pip fructifying from its hiding place, the plumb centre of her being … she thought: that’s all it is. She grew afraid. It would come back, commonplace desire. Everything else would come round again; be renewed. She sat in the bus and felt the threat of ordinary bodies around her.

  There were days when hammering fists of anguish ceased for no more reason than they would begin again. Then she cried. She had begun to do exercises on the floor of the hotel room every morning because she had read in some newspaper that you could get through long periods simply by going through the motions of some routine, and she lay there on the maid’s Hoovered carpet and the tears ran from the outer corners of her eyes. She wept because the sense of Bray had come back to her so strongly, as if he had never been dead on that road and it had never happened. What was she doing in the hotel room? The sense of him was restored to her and she did not have to look for signs of him or question him, because he was gone and there was nothing more to find. And so he died, for her, again. The Irish maid came to clean and the marks of weeping could not be hidden from those hen-sharp eyes beneath the hackle-like fringe; she said that she’d just heard how her children were missing her. The lie became a tenderness towards them and a longing to see them; and the fantasy of walking with them in London changed to an intention. In a few days she would work out what sort of letter to write to Gordon about them. She did not know how or why she expected Gordon to hand the children over to her. She supposed everything
might even seem to go on as before, with Gordon satisfied that he had a wife and children somewhere, only just a little more remote than they had always been.

  One afternoon she was coming out of the supermarket in the suburban shopping street near the hotel when somebody said her name. It came like a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned. A tall, very slender girl with a narrow, sallow face curtained in straight black hair was leaning casually on a wheeled shopping basket. It was Emmanuelle. “I thought it was you but it couldn’t be—are you over on holiday?”

  “My family live in England. I’ve been here about two weeks.” She held tightly closed her packet containing one pear and one orange; evidence of her solitariness. “And you—you live round about?”

  Emmanuelle’s hair wrapped itself across her neck like a scarf, in the wind. “We’re just down the road. Beastly basement flat. But we’re getting a big studio next month—if we don’t go back, instead.”

  “Back? Could Ras go back?”

  “It’s someone else.”

  “I’m sorry—I just thought—”

  They stood there talking, two women who had never liked one another much. Emmanuelle’s elegant hands mimed a sort of trill of inconsequence along the handle of her basket. “That’s all right. No drama. We’re friends and all that. I’m living with Kofi Ahuma—he’s just published his first novel, but now his father’s in favour again in Ghana, and he can indulge his homesickness. So we may go to Ghana. Are your children with you? We’re producing a children’s play together—he wrote it and I did the music. It’s on at the Theatre Club for the next three days, they might enjoy it.”