When they stopped outside a big raw brick-house in a clump of gum trees that she thought ugly, he remarked that she must go around to the front and up the steps and in, while he went to the kitchen to order breakfast. It was still only half past seven, a time when normally she would expect to sleep another hour. The sun stood high, it was hot, the colours were too bright, all scarlets and purples and strong greens and a pinkish dust lay about everywhere. Her shoes almost disappeared into it.
As he went off she had heard, 'My wife's away this week. I've got to organise the bloody kitchen myself.' This had not sounded like an invitation to get into bed and skip the preliminaries. As she reached the top of the steps, and was on a verandah open on three sides that at first she thought was a still unfinished room, he appeared briefly to say, 'There's a bloody crisis with the barns. Go in and the boy'll give you your breakfast. I'll be with you shortly. '
She did not eat breakfast. She did not want any now. But she went into a big room which made her think it could do with some softening up, nice cushions perhaps? – and through it to a room where a large table stood, with an old black man, smiling.
' Sit down, please,’ said this servitor and she sat down and saw all around her plates of eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sausages.
‘Do you have any coffee?' she said to this servant, it being the first time in her life she had addressed one – a black one, that is.
'Oh yes, please, coffee. I have coffee for the missus,' said the old man eagerly and poured coffee which she was agreeably surprised to see coming strong from the silver spout.
She served herself an egg, and a curl of bacon, and then in strode the master. He flung down some bit of metal on to a chair, pulled out a chair with a scrape and sat.
‘Is that all?’ said Barry, despising her plateful and piling his. ' Go on, force yourself. '
She took another egg and asked, knowing she did not sound as casual as she had intended, ‘And where is your wife, did you say?'
' Gadding. Woman gad, didn't you know?'
She smiled politely: she had understood some hours ago that feminist revolution had not reached everywhere in the world.
He piled on eggs and bacon, he drank cup after cup of coffee, then said he had to go around the farm to see what the kaffs had got up to while he was away. She should come too, and see for herself.At first she said no, but then yes, at his frowning stare. ' Always hard to get, ' was his comment, but apparently without anything behind it. She would have liked it if he had said, Go into that room, you'll find a bed, get into it and I'll be along. Instead she spent some hours bumping in an old lorry from one point on the farm to another, where a group of blacks, or some mechanic or overalled person waited for him, and where he gave orders, argued, disagreed, gave in with, ' Yeah, okay, you may be right, we'll try it your way, ' or ' For Christ's sake look what you've done, I told you, I told you, didn't I? Now do it again and get it right this time. ' She had no idea what she was seeing, what everyone was doing, and while smelly cows did appear, which she knew was to be expected on a farm, she did not understand anything at all and her head ached. Back at the house tea appeared when he clapped his hands. He was sweaty, his face was red and wet, he had grease on his sleeve: she was finding him irresistible, but he said he would bloody well have to go and do some paperwork, this government was killing them with paper, and could she look after herself until lunchtime. She sat on the verandah that was closed in around her by glare, on some reassuringly recognisable cretonne, and looked at magazines, from South Africa. Presumably his wife's world: and hers, too.
An hour passed. Lunch. Meat, a lot of it. Rose did know that meat was politically incorrect, but she adored it and ate a lot.
Then she was sleepy. He was giving her looks that she thought might be interpreted as a come on but it seemed not, for he said, 'I'm for a kip. Your room's through there.'
With this he strode off in one direction, and she found her case standing on a stone floor beside a bed on which she fell and slept until she heard a loud clap of hands and the shout of 'Tea'. She tumbled off the bed, and found Barry on the verandah, his long brown legs stretched out in front of him for what seemed like yards, in front of a tea tray.
‘I could sleep for a week,’ she said.
‘Oh, go on, you didn't do too badly last night, snoring away on my shoulder. '
‘Oh, I didn't...’
‘Yes, you did. Go on, pour. You be mother. '
Outside spread the African afternoon, all yellow glare and the songs of birds. There was dust on her hands, and on the floor of the verandah.
' Bloody drought. It hasn't rained properly on this farm for three years. The cattle aren't going to last out if it doesn't rain soon.'
‘Why this farm?'
' Rain shadow. Didn't know that when I bought it. '
'Oh.'
‘Well, I hope you' re beginning to get the hang of it. Well, at least if you' re going to go back and write that we are a lot of Simon Legrees you'll have taken the trouble to see for yourself. '
She did not know who Simon Legree was, but supposed that, logically, he must be a bit of a white racist. 'I'm doing my best.'
'And no one can do better than that.'
He was fidgeting again, and up he jumped. 'I'm going to have a look at the calves. Want to come?'
She knew she should say yes, but said she would stay and sit.
' Pity my better half isn't here. You' d have someone to gossip with. '
Off he went, and returned as the dark came down. Supper. Then there was the radio news where he swore at the black announcer for mispronouncing a word, and then said, ' Sorry, I've got to get my head down. I'm all in.’And off he went to bed.
And that was how a stay of what turned out to be five days went on. Rose lay awake in her bed and hoped that the sounds she heard were his feet moving stealthily towards her, but no such luck. And she did go around the farm with him, and did try to take in what she could. During the course of conversations which always seemed to be too brief and curtailed by some urgency or other, all of them dramatic in a way that seemed – surely? -excessive – a broken-down tractor, a bush fire, a gored cow -she had learned that her old pal Franklin was ' one of the worst of that gang of thieves' , and that her idol Comrade Matthew was as corrupt as they come, and had as much idea ofrunning a country as he, Barry Angleton, had of running the Bank of England. She dropped the name Sylvia Lennox, but while he had heard of her, all he knew was that she was with the missionaries in Kwadere. He added that once, when he was a kid, no one had a good word for the missionaries, who were educating the kaffs above their station, but now people were beginning to think, and he agreed with them, mind you, that it was a pity they hadn't been educated all the way, because a few properly educated kaffs were what the country needed. Well, you live and learn.
His wife did not return while Rose was there, though she telephoned with a message for her husband.
'Good thing you're there,' said this complacent wife, 'give him something to think about beside himself and the farm. Well, men are all the same. '
This remark, in the time-honoured words of the feminist complaint, but so far from the sophistications of Rose's women's group, allowed her to reply that men were the same the whole world over.
' Anyway, tell my old man that I'm going over to Betty's this afternoon and I'm bringing back one of her puppies. ' She added: ‘And now you just be fair to us for once and write something nice.'
Barry received this news with, ‘Well, she' d better not think that dog is going to sleep on our bed the way the last one did. '
The next stop on Rose's itinerary, which had been planned to be the first, had not Fate and Barry Angleton intervened, was an old friend of Comrade Johnny's, Bill Case, who had been a South African communist, had been in jail, had fled to take refuge in Zimlia, and to continue his career in law, speaking for the underdog, the poor, the maltreated who were turning out to be more or less the same under a black government as under a
white one. Bill Case was famous, and a hero. Rose was looking forward to hearing from him at last, ' the truth' about Zimlia.
As for Barry, for whom she would have parted her legs any time, the most she got out of him in that way was his remark when he dropped her in town that if he wasn't a married man he would ask her out to lunch. But she recognised it as a gallantry as routine as his, ' So long. Be seeing you. '
Bill Case... about the South African communists under apartheid it has to be said first that few people have ever been as brave, few have fought oppression more wholeheartedly – wait, though: at the very same time the dissidents in the Soviet Union were confronting the communist tyranny with equal dedication. Rose had dealt with the problem of how the Soviet Union was turning out by not thinking about it: it wasn't her responsibility, was it? And she had not been in Bill Case's house an hour before she learned this was his attitude too. For years he had claimed that the Soviet Union was a new civilisation which had for ever abolished the old inequalities, race prejudice for the present purpose being the most relevant. And now even in the provinces, which is where Senga was situated, capital city or not, it was being admitted that the Soviet Union was not what it had been cracked up to be. Not admitted of course by the black government, committed to the glories of communism. But Bill was not talking about that great failed dream, but a local one: Rose was hearing from him what she had been listening to for days from Barry Angleton. At first she thought Bill was amusing himself and her by parodying what he must know she had been hearing, but no, his complaints were as real and as detailed and angry as the farmer's. The white farmers were badly treated, they were the scapegoat for every government failure, and yet they had to provide the foreign currency, they were being taxed unfairly, what a pity this country had allowed itselfto become the little arselicker and lackey of the World Bank and the IMF and Global Money!
During those days Rose finally understood something painful: she had backed the wrong horse with Comrade Matthew. She was going to have to climb down, retrack, do something to recover her reputation. It was too soon for her to write an article describing the Comrade Leader as he deserved: after all her last eulogy had been only three months ago. No, she would sidetrack, find a little diversion, use another target.
From Bill Case's house she moved to Frank Diddy's, the amiable editor of The Zimlia Post, a friend of Bill's. The easy hospitality of Africa appealed to her: it was winter in London, and she was living free. The Post, she knew, was despised by anyone of intelligence – well, most of the country citizens. Its editorials all went something like this: 'Our great country has successfully overcome another minor difficulty. The power station failed last week, due to the demands of our rapidly growing economy, and, it is being said, to the efforts of South African secret agents. We must never relax our vigilance against our enemies.
We must never forget that our Zimlia is the focus for attempts at de-stabilisation of our successful socialist country. Viva Zimlia.'
Frank Diddy, she discovered, regarded this kind of thing as a sop thrown out to appease the government watchdogs who suspected him and his colleagues of 'writing lies' about the country's progress. The journalists of The Post had not had an easy time of it since Liberation. They had been arrested, kept without charges, released, rearrested, threatened, and the heavies of the secret police, known in the offices of The Post simply as 'The Boys', dropped in to the newspaper'soffices and the journalists' homes threatening arrest and imprisonment at the slightest signs ofrecalci-trance. As for the rest, the truth about Zimlia, she heard the same as at Barry Angleton's and at Bill Case's.
She was trying to get an interview with Franklin, not daunted, though she intended to ask him something like, They are saying you own four hotels, five farms, and a forest of hardwoods, which you are illegally cutting down. Is this true? She felt the worm of truth must come wriggling out of the knotholes of concealment. She was equal to him. He was a friend, wasn't he?
Though she always boasted of this friendship, in fact she had not seen him for some years. In the matey days of early Liberation she had arrived in Zimlia, telephoned and was invited to meet him, though never alone, because he was with friends, colleagues, secretaries, and on one occasion his wife, a shy woman who merely smiled and never once opened her mouth. Franklin introduced Rose as 'My best friend when I was in London'. Then, telephoning him from London, or on arrival in Senga, she heard that he was in a meeting. That she, Rose, could be fobbed off with this kind of lie was an insult. And who the hell did he think he was? He should be grateful to the Lennoxes, they had been so good to him. We had been so good to him.
This time when she telephoned Comrade Minister Franklin's office, she was amazed to hear him come on the line at once, and a hearty, ' So, Rose Trimble, long time no see, you are just the person I want to talk to. '
And so she and Franklin sat together again, this time in a corner of the new Butler's Hotel lounge, a fancy place designed so that visiting dignitaries should not make unfavourable comparisons between this capital city and any other. Franklin was enormous now, he filled his armchair, and his big face overflowed in chins and shiny black cheeks. His eyes were small, though she remembered them as large, winsome and appealing.
'Now, Rose, we need your help. Only yesterday our Comrade President was saying that we need your help. '
Professional nous told Rose that this last was like her own ' Comrade Franklin is a good friend' . Everyone spoke of Comrade Matthew in every other sentence, to invoke or curse him. The words Comrade Matthew must be tinkling and purring through the ether like the signature tune of a popular radio programme.
‘Yes, Rose, it is a good thing you are here, ' he said smiling and shooting at her quick suspicious looks.
They are all paranoid, she had heard from Barry, from Frank, from Bill and from the guests who flowed in and out of the Senga houses in easy colonial – whoa there! – post-colonial manner.
' So, Franklin, you are having problems, I hear?'
'Problems! Our dollar fell again this week. It is a thirtieth of what it was at Liberation. And do you know who is responsible?' He leaned forward, shaking his plump finger at her. 'It is the International Community. '
She had expected to hear, South African agents. ‘But the country is doing so well. I read it only today in The Post'
He actually sat energetically up in his chair, to confront her better, supporting his big body on his elbows. ‘Yes, we are a success story. But that is not what our enemies are saying. And that is where you come in. '
' It was only three months ago that I wrote a piece about the Leader.'
'And a fine piece it was, a fine piece.' He had not read it, she could see. But there are articles appearing that damage the good name of this country and accuse our Comrade President of many things.'
'Franklin, they are saying that you are all very rich, buying up farms, you all own farms and hotels – everything.'
‘And who says that? It is a lie. ' He waved his hand about, dispelling the lies, and fell back again. She did not say anything. He peeped at her, raising his head to do it, let it fall back. ' I'ma poor man, ' he whined. ' A very poor man. And I have many children. And all my relatives... you do understand, I know you do, that in our culture if a man does well then all his relations come and we must keep them and educate all the children. '
'And a very fine culture it is,' said Rose, who in fact did find this concept heartwarming. Just look at herself! When she had found herself helpless all those years ago, where had her family been? And then the rich son of an exploiting capitalist family had taken advantage of her...
'Yes, we are proud of it. Our old people do not die alone in cold nursing homes, and we have no orphans. '
This Rose knew was not the truth. She had been hearing of the results of AIDS – orphans left destitute, ancient grandmothers bringing up children without parents.
‘We want you to write about us. Tell the truth about us. I am asking you to describe what you
see here in Zimlia, so that these lies do not spread any further. ' He looked around the elegant hotel lounge, at the smiling waiters in their liveries. ‘You can see for yourself, Rose. Look around you. '
‘I saw a list in one of our newspapers. A list of the Ministers and the top civil servants and what you all own. Some own as many as twelve farms. '
‘And why should we not own a farm? Am I to be barred from owning land because I am a Minister? And when I retire how shall I live? I must tell you, I would much rather be a simple farmer, living with my family on my own land. ' He frowned. ‘And now there is this drought. Down in the Buvu Valley all my animals have died. The farm is dust. My new borehole dried up. '
Tears ran down his cheeks. 'It is a terrible thing to see your mombies die. The white farmers are not suffering, they all have dams and boreholes.'
It was occurring to Rose that here might be a subject. She could write about the drought, which it seemed was afflicting everyone, rain shadows or not, and that meant she would not have to take sides. She didn't know anything about droughts, but she could always get Frank and Bill to fill her in, and she could cook up something that would not offend the rulers of Zimlia: she did not want to end this profitable connection. No, she could become an ecological warrior... these thoughts wandered through her mind as Franklin made a speech about Zimlia's stand in the forefront of progress and socialist accomplishment, ending with the South African agents and the need for vigilance.
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