A Guest of Honour

Chapter 1

A bird cried out on the roof, and he woke up. It was the middle of the afternoon, in the heat, in Africa; he knew at once where he was. Not even in the suspended seconds between sleep and waking was he left behind in the house in Wiltshire, lying, now, deep in the snow of a hard winter. The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon … the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating and the light from red shades, the silky colours of Olivia’s things — the rugs, cherry- and satin-wood pieces — and the red earth pots, bits of beadwork, the two fine carvings they once found in the Congo. A few days ago he was in that house, packing to leave in the flat progression of practical matters by which decision is broken up into reality. If you have any trouble with the boiler, for heaven’s sake let Mackie look at it before you send to town. — What a pity you gave away your shorts. — There’s no knowing if I’ll be anywhere where I could dare appear in shorts, any more. — But your waist measurement hasn’t changed by so much as half an inch — I know by your pyjama trousers, I use exactly the same measurement for new elastic as I always did. —

Three months before, Adamson Mweta stood outside a steak house in Kensington and said to him, Of course you’ll come back to us now! He had driven home, slowing down on the empty road that led through the fullness of a deserted summer twilight, at last, to the house. Housing estates overrun villages all over England, but here the process had been reversed; the house had once been a manor (Olivia thought that, even earlier, it had been a priory) but in the nineteenth century the village was depopulated by the drift to industrialized towns, lost its autonomy, and died; the shop-cum-post-office had closed, the cottages had fallen down; the woods and meadows took over the fields, only a few houses remained, to be bought by the people whose longing for country life discounted the inconvenience of isolation. As Olivia said, it ought to have been a sad-feeling place but it wasn’t; there was instead a renewal: the country had come back, bringing the reassurance of stubborn peace and fecundity, a beginning again. And they were only two-hours-and-a-bit from London, their daughters and their friends. He had kept up, since he finally left Africa ten years ago, a close contact with Adamson Mweta and the other leaders of the African independence movement. He spent a great deal of time going back and forth to London to advise them when they conferred with the Colonial Office, and to do what he could to smooth the way for various delegations that came to petition against the old constitution and to negotiate independence for their country. It was there, in this Central African territory, that he had been a colonial servant until the settlers succeeded in having him recalled and deported for his support of the People’s Independence Party. He said to his wife, “Mweta’s invited me to come back as their guest.”

“Well, you ought to be at the Independence celebrations, if anyone is. That’s marvellous.” She used to make packages of sandwiches for Mweta to take with him when he cycled for miles about Gala province at weekends, speaking at meetings.

He said to Adamson Mweta before they parted the next day, “Olivia won’t be able to come out to Independence, unfortunately — our elder daughter’s expecting a child just round about that time.”

Mweta said, with his slow shy smile that always seemed to grow like a light becoming more powerful, as his eyes held you, “You mean little Venetia? She going to be a mother?”

“I’m afraid so,” he mumbled in his Englishman’s way.

“Well, that’s good, that’s good. Never mind, Mrs. Bray will join you later.”

“I imagine by the time she’s prepared to trust the baby to Venetia the celebrations’ll be over.”

“That’s what I mean — you’ll be more or less settled by the time she arrives.”

They were standing at the door of Mweta’s taxi; there was a sudden uprush of feeling between the two men; the Englishman stood there, the small, quick black man took him by the biceps, hard, through his dark suit, as in his own country he would have linked fingers with a brother. Under the release of physical contact, he said to Mweta, “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” and Mweta said, “You — I told you we expect you back, now.”

“But what would I do? What use should I be to you?” He was so accustomed to effacing himself in the hours of discussion of constitutional law and political tactics (a white man, an outsider offering impersonal service for whatever it was worth) — a strong consciousness of his own being flooded him as if a stimulant had been injected into his veins.

“Whatever you like! It’s all ours! We need you; whatever you like!” Mweta broke away and jumped into the taxi.

The pale stone façade with its stone lintels and sills worn smooth as a piece of used soap was directly on the empty road but the real face of the house was the other side. Sheltered by the building the garden was a grassy look-out over fuzzy colours of flowers, bees, and early moths to the long valley. He and Olivia gardened on summer evenings, not seriously, as she did during the day, but desultorily pulling out a tall rank weed here or there, for the pleasure of feeling its roots yield from the humus and bring up, in the crumbs clinging to that beard grown underground, a smell of earth rich as fruit-cake. They had laid flag-stones under the walnut trees for the white wooden chairs and table, so that it wouldn’t be too damp. They drank whisky there, or even the coffee after dinner. Sometimes before the dusk wavered the wood away into the distance, he went out into the sunlight that collected like golden water in the dip of the meadows and shot a partridge. There was no one to bother about shooting rights. Afterwards as the evening faded he cleaned the gun almost by feel and the clean, practical smell of gun-oil conveyed the simple satisfaction of the task. Olivia played records with the living-room windows wide open so that the music came out to them.

This summer it was Stravinsky and Poulenc; she was of the generation and class that paid other women to knit and now that she herself was about to be a grandmother she made funny stuffed toys for nieces and nephews. She had a cigar box full of odd buttons, as a supply of eyes, but she put it away from her because one of the things she had hated when she was young was the show of dissembling older women made when confronted with something vital to them.

“I suppose we said many times we’d come back when they got their independence.” She gave a small, self-questioning shrug, admitting the glibness of another kind of daily talk in another time.

“It’s not because of what one said.” But both knew that; in those days, the important thing was to give Adamson Mweta faith in himself by positing a future that was real because you, a white person with nothing personal to gain by it, showed you believed it would come about.

Gazing out across the valley and then calmly at him, she had her look of wanting to find out exactly what they were talking about.

He said, “Certainly I thought of going back, then. Hypothetically. Before we left. — Just as I knew we should have to leave.”

“Poor Adamson, it looked pretty hopeless at times. And yet it’s come so quickly. Ten years!” Ten years since they had been deported from the territory, ten years since she was a youngish woman of forty, and the girls were still schoolgirls. “Historically, yes, it would happen — but not to Adamson, and not to us?”

The house they had bought, filled with possessions that had been stored all the years they were in Africa, the garden they had made, spoke for them. It was not a house to be quitted.

“They expect you back,” she said with pride.

“Adamson was in the flush of victory, all right. I think he’d have embraced Henry Davis.” Davis was the settler M.P. who had been responsible, at one stage, for getting Mweta banished to the far Western Province.

“He naturally assumes you’ll come out of exile.” They laughed. But they were talking of Mweta; the strange shyness of twenty-two years of marriage made it impossible for her to say: Do you want to go? The passionate beginning, the long openness and understanding between them should have meant that she would know what he wanted. And in a way she did know: because it was for them a code so deeply accepted that it had never been discussed-one was available wherever one was of use. What else was there to live by? And so the question of what they were talking about really amounted to her hidden, pressed-down, banked-over desire to know whether this house, this life in Wiltshire, this life — at last — seemed to him the definitive one, in the end. Because she was suddenly realizing that it had been so for her. She was, after all (in the true sense of after all that had gone before) an Englishwoman. She had taken out of storage the furniture and family possessions that had been nothing but a nuisance to her when they left England together twenty years ago, and, putting them in place, inevitably had accepted the life the arrangement of such objects provided for, and her comfortable private income made possible. In the room they had decided upon for his study, the desk from her great-grandfather that had naturally become his — a quiet field of black-red morocco scratched with almost erased gold — was a place to write the properly documented history of the territory (Mweta’s country) that had never been done before; not the boxwood Colonial Office desk at which one dealt with government forms and made the empirical scribbles of administration or politics, written one day and screwed into a ball the next.

In the scented, mothy evening she felt the presence of the house like someone standing behind her. She did not know whether he felt it too; and she could not try to find out because if it turned out that he didn’t — she had a premonition, sometimes, that in middle age you could find you had lost everything in a moment: husband-lover, friend, children, it was as if they had never happened, or you had wandered off from them without knowing, and now stood stock-still with the discovery.

They watched the moths in the tobacco flowers. She said in her sensible, inquiring, Englishwoman’s voice behind which generations of her kind had sheltered, “Did Mweta say how long?”

“It was very much a gesture! He was tremendously in the air!”

“No, but he’d already mentioned it yesterday, isn’t that so? You misunderstood him yesterday. A year? Six months? — What?”

White people given appointments in African countries after independence were usually employed on contract. “Good Lord, I’ve no idea, I’m sure he hasn’t either. It’s all in the air.”

Olivia went in to change the record and because it was, unexpectedly, Mozart — the harp and flute concerto — he lit a cigar to smoke while he enjoyed it. She wandered down to the herb garden and brought back a branch of dill; “There he is,” she said. It was their owl, a youngster who had hatched out down in the field and was heard every night. She remarked that tomorrow she must pick the dill for drying. Everything was just as it was. But everything was changed. All had turned over in the barrel of the world and steadied itself again. She knew, if he didn’t, that he was going.

It was night in Europe all the way. Dark rain in the afternoon in London when the plane took off, at Rome the airport a vast, bleary shopwindow shining blurred colours through rain. He hauled down his coat again to get out at Athens. The metal rail of the steps wheeled against the plane was icy-wet to his palm and in the streaming rain he did not smell the Aegean or thyme, as he had remembered from other journeys to Africa. Inside the airport under the yellow light the passengers sat down again on exhausted-looking chairs, bundled deep in their heavy clothing. An old woman with crinkly grey hair woke up at her post outside the lavatory and opened the door, smiling and grasping a filthy cleaning rag. He walked around to ease the cramp in his knees but there was a small circumference and within a few strides one found oneself back again at the shop, before which women and child passengers were drawn to gaze at embroidered aprons and evzone dolls. A girl of ten or eleven with the badges of the cantons of Switzerland sewn to the sleeve of her coat had exactly the look of Venetia at that age. He bought a postcard of brilliant blue sea and dazzling white ruins and tried to write, in what he could remember of Greek: Winter and darkness here but in Cambridge, perhaps, there’s already spring yelling its head off? My love to you, James. Venetia had had a first in Greek, herself, only a year ago, and could laugh over the mistakes.

But that was the end of Europe. At Kano a huge moon shone and in a light brighter than a European winter afternoon the passengers made their way across the tarmac at three in the morning against the resistance of a heat of the day persisting all through the night as the sun persists in a stone it has warmed. There was a smell of wood-smoke; the men moving about beneath the belly of the plane had bare black feet. When the passengers climbed aboard again, their clothes felt hairy and the plane was airless. He put the coat away on the rack, apologizing, trying not to hamper other people in the general move to rearrange gear; the anticipation of arrival, still some hours off, aroused in them not so much common purpose as a spread of instinct, as in the lifted heads of a herd become aware of the promise of water. When the sun rose some slumped off into sleep, but women began to examine the plastic bags in which they kept their hats, and, as the hard beams of the sun struck into the cabin on hairnets, pale lips, and stubble, queues formed for the lavatories. While he was writing on the customs and immigration form, BRAY, Evelyn James, and the number of his passport, someone was reading his name over his shoulder; he flexed it awkwardly, not because he minded, but in mild embarrassment. The queue for the lavatory moved along a notch, he glanced up and the man, carrying a flowered sponge-bag, caught his eye with a tired vacant stare that changed to an expression of greeting. The woman who had dozed beside him all night communicating the intimate rhythm of her breathing but never exchanging a word, suddenly began to talk like a bird who has the cover taken off its cage. He wedged himself between the seats to recover the shoe she had lost somewhere over a distant desert; she laughed, protested apologetically, and shook cologne down into her freckled bosom. Dragging back the little curtain from the oval window, she looked into the dazzling glare of space and said, “Glorious morning up here!” and they discussed with animation the cold and sudden winter that was left behind.

As he did not have a window seat he did not see the bush and the earth red as brick-dust and the furze of growth along the river-beds: not until the plane had come to a stop on the runway, and they were waiting for the health inspector to come aboard. He unhooked his safety belt and leaned over to look at an angle through the bleary lens on the far side of the aisle; and there it was, tiny and distorted and real, bush, earth, exactly as it remained in his mind always, without his thinking about it. It was underfoot. It was around. A black man in khaki shorts (used to be a white man in white stockings) sprayed a cloyingly perfumed insecticide over the passengers’ heads as a precaution against the plane harbouring mosquitoes and tsetse flies. The doors opened; voices from without came in on currents of air; he emerged among the others into heady recognition taken in at all the senses, walking steadily across the tarmac through the raw-potato whiff of the undergrowth, the fresh, early warmth on hands, the cool metallic taste of last night’s storm at the back of the throat, the airport building with the five pink frangipani and the enclosure where out-of-works and children still hooked their fingers on the diamondmesh wire and gazed. The disembarking passengers were all strangers again, connected not with each other but to the mouthing, smiling faces and waving hands on the airport balcony. He knew no one but the walk was processional, a reception to him, and by the time he entered the building over the steps where, as always, dead insects fallen from the light during the night had not been swept away, it was all as suddenly familiar and ordinary as the faces other people were greeting were, to them. Waiting to be summoned to the customs officers’ booths, the companions of the journey ignored each other. Only the man with the flowered sponge-bag, as if unaware of this useful convention, insisted on a “Here we are again” smile. “You’re Colonel Bray?” He spoke round the obstacle of a woman standing between them. “Thought I recognized you in Rome. Welcome back.” “I must confess I don’t remember you. I’ve been away a long time.” The man had long coarse strands of sun-yellowed hair spread from ear to ear across a bald head and wore sunglasses that rested on fine Nordic cheekbones. “I’ve only just come to live here — from down South. South Africa.” He made a resigned grimace assuming understanding— “My wife and I decided we couldn’t stick it any longer. So we try it out here. I don’t know; we’ll see. I read you were coming back, there was an article in the paper, my wife Margot sent it to me in Switzerland, so I thought it was you. You were just in front of me when we got out in Rome.”

“Yes, I suppose I won’t know my way around when I get into town.”

“Oh, it’s still not New York or London, don’t worry.” The man spoke with an accent, and a certain European kind of resignation. They laughed. “Well, in that case, we’ll probably bump into each other in Great Lakes Road.”

“Please! Nkrumah Road.”

“I said I should have to learn my way round all over again.”

The man looked about quickly and lowered his voice. “This country can do with a few more white people like you, take it from me. People with some faith. Sometimes I even think I’m down South again, that’s a fact. I’ve said it to my wife.”

A young black man with sunglasses and a thick, springy mat of hair shaped to a crew-cut by topiary rather than barbering had cut through the crowd with the encircling movement of authority. “This way, Colonel, sir. Your luggage will be brought to the entrance, if you’ll just give me the tickets—”

The other man, bobbing in the wash of this activity yet smiling at it in hostly assumption of his own established residence in the country, was talking across the black man and the exchange of pleasantries, tickets, thanks: “—at the Silver Rhino, of course, you remember the place. Any time — we’d be very pleased—”

He thanked him, listening to the two men at once and hearing neither, and followed the firm rump in white shorts past barriers and through the reception hall. “That’s all right, officer, this is Colonel Bray.” “I’m looking after Colonel Bray, no need to bother him.” A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, “Just a minute. I don’t know about this—” but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, “That’s okay, chum, it’s our ole friend Mr. Kabata.” The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. Mr. Kabata said, “What’s the matter with these people. Excuse me, I’ll get a boy,” and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. The porter addressed both men as Mukwayi, the respectful term become servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man.

There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. Beside him, Kabata’s strong thighs filled the seat. “It’s not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I’d have waited to get it I would have turned up I don’t know when. You know how it is just at the moment. Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sékou Touré.” There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta’s face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. He said, “All very festive,” but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. The young man said, “You are from Gala district.” “I was. Why, are you from there?” “From Umsalongwe. But my mother is a Gala. I have visited that place.” “Oh have you? Recently or when you were a child? Perhaps I was still there then?” “I think they’ll be very pleased to see you back there.” He laughed. “I wonder if I’ll get that far.”

“Oh, you must make trip” the young man said proudly. “I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. The road is much improved, much improved. You’ll see. You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock.” Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. The car was approaching, was carrrying him through the market quarter of the town. Under the mango trees, barbers’ mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed.

The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando — a Welshman — newly appointed as Attorney — General. When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. They gave him the African cook’s special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again — he had done so in advance by letter — that he had an official lunch to attend. Bray’s ears were filled with the strange echoes of exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept.

There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider’s web made by the supporting beams of the roof. The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, here and there showed a single stray strand out of place. The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath’s weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released.

The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. The stale cool air of the room had heated; yet weariness receded, his head was left high and dry of it. There was silence and then he heard that there were voices in the silence droning somewhere, breaking off for breath, laughing — not softly, but softened by being almost out of earshot. Not quite. A voice separated, wound nearer, there was the starting up of a hiss (a hose, he thought) and he made out a word: not just as a particular combination of articulated sounds, but a meaning: “later on,” the compound word for this phrase, in the language that was spoken round the capital, and that he had never really known well.

He got up and went over to the main house for a bath. The sun in the garden was burning, dazzling, seizing. In the bathroom flies were buzzing themselves to death against the windowpanes. Roly was a bachelor and his house was the particular mixture of tranquil luxury and unchangeable dreariness that is a condition of households where white men live indulged in the sole charge of black male servants. The cistern of the lavatory drizzled into the pan constantly and couldn’t be flushed properly, and the towels were stiff as a dress-shirt (Olivia had taken years to get people to learn to rinse the soap out of the washing), but an old fellow in a cook’s hat put tea under the trees for him and carried off his crumpled suit to be pressed without being asked. A youth was cutting the tough grass with a length of iron bent at the end. Coarse and florid shrubs, hibiscus with its big flowers sluttish with pollen and ants and poinsettia oozing milky secretion, bloomed, giving a show of fecundity to the red, poor soil running baked bald under the grass, beaten slimy by the rains under the trees, and friable only where ants had digested it and made little crusty tunnels. A rich stink of dead animal rose self-dispersed, like a gas, every now and then as he drank his tea, and he got up and looked around, as he had done so many times before, and with as little success, to see if a rat or mole were rotting somewhere. Whatever it was could never be found; it was the smell of growth, they had long ago decided, at Gala, the process of decay and regeneration so accelerated, brought so close together that it produced the reek of death-and-life, all at once. He strolled to the limits of the garden and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, but the grasses and thornbush on the other side (Dando’s place was eight miles out of town) were too entangled for walking where there was no path. He listened to the bush and had the old feeling, in the bush, of being listened for. There were — or used to be — leopards on the outskirts of the town; Dando had once had his dog taken. He walked a hundred yards or so up the road, and, meeting a man on a bicycle, greeted him in the language that had come back to him as he lay in the room.

At six Roland Dando came home. He gazed anxiously from the car, as if, despite the telephone call, he were not sure if Bray had been safely received, but once he set eyes on him behaved as if they had seen each other a week ago. He was indiscreet, like many people who live alone, and brought back with him from the town — a child bulging with favours from a party — all the anecdotes and gossip of the Independence celebrations, producing, in a clinging fluff of supposition and rumour, bits and pieces of real information and opinion about Mweta’s position and the sort of team he had gathered around him. Another tray came out under the trees, this time with whisky and gin. An old black Labrador with corns on his elbows stood slowly swinging his tail before Dando as he talked. Jason wouldn’t bring home any golden fleece, believe you me (Jason Malenga was the new Minister of Finance); no, it wasn’t a bad thing that the British Chief of Police wasn’t being kept on, people always judged by the Congo, the idiots, but the African deputy, Aaron Onabu, was perfectly capable of taking over from that dodderer anyway; Talisman Gwenzi was first class, and a real Mweta man, David Sambata was an unknown quantity for Agriculture, what black knew a thing about agriculture, anyway; Tom Msomane was a corruption risk — there was reason to believe there’d already been something shady over a land deal for a community development — but he was from the right tribe, Mweta knew he couldn’t attempt to hold the show together without at least three Msos in the cabinet.

Dando pulled ticks off the dog’s neck and burst them under his shoe while he drank and dealt out judgements. Out of a kind of jealousy of the new young men from Britain and America who were so careful to show their lack of colour-feeling by avoiding tainted words and addressing people by polite forms, he recklessly used the old settler vocabulary that reflected an attitude he had had no part of, ever. Roly Dando could say what he liked: Roly Dando hadn’t “discovered” the blacks as his fellows only yesterday. “Of course, Mweta has to hand out a job to everybody. Every pompous jackass from the bush who filled his pipe with tobacco bought with dues from the local party branch. They’re all heroes, you know, heroes of the struggle. Struggle my arse. Edward Shinza’s one of the few who did his stretch and got his head split open that time by Her Majesty’s brave boys, and where’s he — back in the Bashi Flats among his old wives, for all I know, no one even mentions his name.”

“But Shinza’s here for the Independence ceremony?”

Roly glared. “Nobody gives a damn where he is.”

“But he is in town, now?”

“I don’t know where the hell he may be.”

“You mean Edward’s not going to take part in the celebrations? That’s not possible. He’s not come up to town?”

“You can see he hasn’t been given a cabinet post. I don’t suppose he’s going to turn up for the honour of standing in the crowd and waving a flag, eh?”

“But that’s ridiculous, Roly. You know Shinza. He knows what he wants. I had the impression he’ll be ambassador to U.N. Give time for Mweta to shine on his own for a bit, and any tension between them to die down. Of course he should have got Foreign Affairs. But that’s between the two of them.”

“You might ask Mweta, if you get a chance to talk to him, ask him if he isn’t going to find a piddling little job somewhere, something with a decent label to it, for poor old Shinza, he was banging on the Colonial Secretary’s door with a panga while Mweta was a snotty picannin singing hymns up at the mission school.” Dando glowered pettishly over his third or fourth gin and ginger beer. He was given to putting himself on strange mixtures. He would drink one for several months and then switch, for similar good reasons (it was more digestible, it was less likely to produce an after-thirst) to another.

“Oh Mweta’s not like that.”

“You know Mweta. I know Mweta. But there’s the President, now. If there’s a father of the state, it’s got to be him or no one.”

“I certainly had the impression whatever tension there was had eased up, last time I saw Mweta in London.”

“Yes, ‘poor old Shinza,’ that’s what everyone says. Poor old Dando.” Dando did not explain the shift of reference. Perhaps he simply remarked upon his own getting older; undoubtedly he looked older. His small nose showed unexpectedly beaky now that the skin had sunk on either side.

Bray had a lot of questions, not all of them kind, to ask about other people. Some of the answers were extraordinary; the two men quickened to the exchange of astonishment, ironic amusement, and (on Dando’s part) scornful indignation with which he told and Bray learned of the swift about-face by which some white people turned a smile on the new regime, while others had already packed up and left the country. “Sir Reginald himself will present Mweta with a butawood lectern and silver inkstand, it’s down for Tuesday afternoon.” Dando was gleeful. Sir Reginald Harvey was president of the consortium of the three mining concessionaire companies, and it was common knowledge that, as a personal friend of Redvers Ledley, the most unpopular governor the territory had ever had, he had influenced the governor to outlaw the miners’ union at a time when Mweta and Shinza were using it to promote the independence movement. There was a famous newspaper interview where he had called Mweta “that golliwog from Gala, raising its unruly and misguided head in the nursery of industrial relations in this young country.” “—It’s enough to make your hair stand on end,” said Dando; and enjoyed the effect. The People’s Independence Party, at the time, had taken Harvey’s remark as an insulting reference to Mweta’s hair; he still had it all, and it certainly would be in evidence on Tuesday.

Bray repeated what had been said to him at the airport that morning — that some of the white people still living in the capital would be more at home down South, in Rhodesia or South Africa. “Who was that?” “I don’t know-one of the people from the plane — a baldish fair man with an accent, I didn’t catch the name. He’d recently moved up here.”

“Oh Hjalmar Wentz — must have been. He and his wife took over the Silver Rhino last year. I like old Hjalmar. He’s just been to Denmark or somewhere because his mother died. We’ll go in and have a steak there one evening, they’re trying to make a go of it with a charcoal grill and whatnot.”

“What happened to McGowan?”

“Good God, they’ve been gone at least five or six years. There’ve been three other managers since then. It’s difficult to do anything with that place now; it’s got the character of the miners’ pub it was, but it’s very handy for the new government offices, not too overaweing, so you get quite a few Africans coming in. A genteel lot, very conscious of their dignity, man-about-town and all that, you can imagine how the white toughies feel about all those white collars round black necks in the bar. Hjalmar’s as gentle as a lamb and he has to keep the peace somehow. Oh I’ll tell you who’s still around though — Barry Forsyth. Yes, and making money. Forsyth Construction. You’ll see the board everywhere. They tell me he’s got the contract for the whole Isoza River reclamation scheme — employs engineers from Poland and Italy.”

Because of the mosquitoes, they moved into the house. The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls. There was no air at all in the living-room, and a strong smell of hot fat. Every now and then, while dinner was awaited, their conversation was backed by intensely sociable sounds-sizzling, scraping, and high-pitched talk-let in from the kitchen as the servant went in and out, laying the table. There was another large meal, and an exchange about a bottle of white wine between Dando and his cook, Festus.

“Of course I don’t open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”

“Well it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round flat bottle put in the fridge.”

“You say I cook chicken, isn’t it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”

“Pink. It’s pink. I specially didn’t say anything about the colour because I didn’t want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”

They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It’s not an exaggeration to say that what they’re having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven’t replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You’ve only replaced one of his functions. You’ve still got to get country people to realize that these functions are now distributed among various agencies: it’s no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance — and yet that’s what people would have done in the old days, isn’t it?”

“In bush stations there wasn’t anything we weren’t responsible for.”

“Exactly. But now people have to learn that there’s a Department of Public Health to go to.”

“A good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration’s like, it won’t be like that.”

“The magistrates are all right, don’t you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I’m not worried at that level. The Bench doesn’t change of course.”

Bray laughed at Dando’s expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.

“They’ll die off, I suppose. There’s that to be said for it. But God knows what we’ll get then.”

“I met Gwenzi’s brother in London one day while he was at Gray’s Inn; he told me he was going to be the first African at the bar here.”

When Dando’s opinion of someone was really low he did not seem to hear his name. “Don’t think I don’t know I’ve got some bad times coming to me,” he said, as if taking up, in private, current talk about himself. “When I said yes to Mweta I knew it and every time I walk past the title on my office door I know it. The day will come when I’ll have deportation orders to sign that I won’t want to sign. Warrants of arrest. Or worse.” He ate a mouthful of the left-over granadilla pudding, and there was the smallest tremor, passing for a moment through his head. “Poor old Dando.”

“Anyone who’s stayed on is a fool if he hasn’t thought about that,” said Bray.

“And I’ll be instructing the State Prosecutor to act when I’d rather not, too. That I can count on. What if Shinza should make a bit of trouble at the next elections, what if he were to feel himself bloody well discounted as he certainly is, and start up a real opposition with all the tricks that he taught PIP, eh? What if he brought the whole Lambala-speaking crowd out in a boycott, with all the old beatings-up at the polls, hut burnings — you think I wouldn’t find myself the one to put Shinza inside, this time?”

“Well, I know. But why on earth should it come to that?”

“I knew it when I said yes to Mweta. Poor bloody Dando. The blacks’ dirty work isn’t any cleaner than the whites’. That’s what they’ll be happy to note. But what their contented little minds will never know is that I knew it when I took the job, I knew it all along, and I’ll say it now as loud as I’d say it then—”

“Who’ll be happy?”

Dando refilled the brandy glasses again. “My colleagues! Those worthy fellows who’ve gone down South to Rhodesia and South Africa where they can feel confident they’ll never have a black man on the Bench to give a verdict as biased as a white man’s. — My colleagues, Tencher Teal and Williamson and De l’Isle!”

It was after midnight when they got to bed. Bray went to the kitchen to fill his brandy glass with water for the night. Cockroaches fled, pausing, from what they regarded as positions of safety, to twirl their antennae. A furry black band of ants led up a cupboard door to some scrap that had flicked from a plate. He stood at the sink, drinking cold water and looking at the avocado pear pip growing suspended by three matchsticks in the neck of a pickle jar of water on the sill. He was conscious of a giddy swing of weight from one foot to the other that was not of his volition; it seemed he had been standing there a long time — he was not sure.

He heard Dando, forced by the old Labrador into the garden, walking about outside the guest hut and talking reproachfully to the dog; and then it was morning and Festus’s assistant was at the door with the early tea.

Chapter 2

A helicopter snored over the celebrations, drowning the exchange of greetings when Bray was introduced to someone in the street, expunging conversation in bars and even speeches. Nobody knew what it was for — a security measure, some were satisfied to assume, while others accepted it as vaguely appropriate, the symbol of progress inseparable from all industrial fairs and agricultural shows and therefore somehow relevant to any public display. There was a moment in the stadium at the actual Independence ceremony when he heard it on the perimeter of the sky just as Kenyatta began to speak, and he and Vivien Bayley, the young wife of the registrar of the new university, sitting beside him, collided glances of alert apprehension — but although the helicopter did not exactly go away, it did not appear overhead, and supplied to the ringing amplification of the speeches only the muted accompaniment of the snorer who has turned over, now, and merely breathes rather audibly. Later it was discovered to have been giving flips at half — a-crown a time to a section of the population who were queueing up, all through the ceremony, at the nearby soccer field; a publicity stunt for an international cigarette-making firm.

Neil Bayley was the one to find this out, because of some domestic mishap or misunderstanding that made his arrival at the distinguished-visitors’ stand very late. Bray was conscious of furious tension between the young couple at his side as he sat with the great stir of tiers of people behind, and the space in front of him, before the velvet-draped and canopied dais, filled with press photographers and radio and television crews, who all through the solemnities raced about bent double on frantic tiptoe, snaking their wires, thrusting up their contraptions, manipulating shutters and flashlights. It was as if with all made splendidly ready for a theatrical performance, a party of workmen with their gear had been left behind. This activity and the risen temper along the back of a silent quarrel beside him provided the strong distraction of another, disorderly level of being that always seemed to him to take away from planned “great moments” what they were meant to hold heady and pure. Here was the symbolic attainment of something he had believed in, willed and worked for, for a good stretch of his life: expressed in the roar that rocked back and forth from the crowd at intervals, the togas, medalled breasts and white gloves, the ululating cries of women, the soldiers at attention, and the sun striking off the clashing brass of the bands. Or in the icecream tricycles waiting at the base of each section of an amphitheatre of dark faces, the mongrel that ran out and lifted its leg on the presidential dais?

Mweta had the mummified look of one who has become a vessel of ritual. But once the declaration of independence was pronounced he came, as out of a trance, to an irresistibly lively self, sitting up there seeing everything around him, a spectator, Bray felt, as well as a spectacle. Bray was half-embarrassed to find that he even caught his eye, once, and there was a quick smile; but Mweta was used to having eyes on him, by now. He talked to the elderly English princess who sat beside him with her knees peaked neatly together in the Royal position curiously expressive of the suffering of ceremonies, and Bray saw him point out the contingent of Gala women, their faces and breasts whitened for joy, who were lined up among the troops of musicians and dancers from various regions.

And yet when that ceremony was over, and in between all the other official occasions — State Ball, receptions, cocktail parties, banquets, and luncheons — a mood of celebration grew up, as it were, outside the palace gates. He attended most of the official occasions (he and Roly saluted each other with mock surprise when they met in the house, half-dressed in formal dinner clothes every night) but the real parties took place before and after. These grew spontaneously one out of the other, and once you had been present at the first, you got handed on to all the others. He really knew only some of the people but all of them seemed to know about him, and many were the friends of friends. Dando took him to the Bayleys; but Neil was a friend of Mweta, and Vivien was the niece of, of all people, Sir William Clough, the last governor, who had been a junior with Bray in the colonial service in Tanganyika. The Bayleys were friends of Cyprian Kente, Mweta’s Minister of the Interior, and his wife Tindi, and Timothy Odara, one of the territory’s few African doctors, whom Bray, of course, knew well. Through each individual the group extended to someone else and drew in, out of the new international character of the little capital, Poles, Ghanaians, Hungarians and Israelis, South African and Rhodesian refugees.

After the State Ball there was a private all-night party in a marquee. Roly Dando had promised to drop by, and of course Bray was with him. Many other people Bray had seen at the ball streamed in in their finery: they had contributed to the arrangements for this party. Cheers went up from the people already present who had not been at the ball; they had decided to dress for once, too, and the two groups of women mingled and exclaimed over each other, everyone began to talk about what the ball was like, champagne came in, a Congolese band whipped up their pace, and the absurd and slightly thrilling mood of the State Ball and the cosy gaiety of the party swept together. The tent was filled with chairs and divans borrowed from people’s houses, and flowers from their gardens. Someone had put up a board with a collage of blown-up pictures of Mweta — speaking, laughing, yawning, touching a piece of machinery with curiosity, leaving, arriving, even threatening. The trouble everyone had taken gave a sense of occasion to even the wildest moments of the night. Vivien Bayley, queenly at twenty-six, with her beautiful, well-mannered, disciplined face, came to hover beside Bray between responsible permutations about the room to make sure that this young girl was not being bothered too much by the attentions of someone older and rather drunk, or that young man was not being overlooked by the girls who ought to be taking notice of him. Bray surprised her by asking her to dance, swaying stiffly to a rhythm he didn’t know, but nevertheless keeping the beat, so that they wouldn’t make fools of themselves among the complicated gyrations of the Africans. “I’m so glad you dance,” she said; he was ashamed that he had asked her only out of politeness. “Neil won’t — I think it’s a mistake to let oneself forget these things because of vanity. Tindi Kente is a wonderful dancer, wonderful, isn’t she — just like a snake brought out by music, and sometimes he’ll try with her. He loves to flirt with her when Cyprian’s not looking, but get her doing her marvellous wriggle on the floor and he just stands there like Andrew, dragging his feet.” Andrew was probably one of her children; being accepted with such immediate casual friendliness by everyone was rather like being forced to learn a foreign language by finding oneself alone among people who spoke nothing else: it was assumed that he would pick up family and other relationships merely by being exposed to them.

Someone called to Vivien and they were drawn away from the dancers to a crowded table. A young woman leaned her elbows on it and her white breasts pursed forward within the frame of her arms. “Have my glass,” she said, as there were no spare ones to go round. She went off to dance, holding in her stomach as she squeezed past and balanced her soft-looking body. The heat was heightened by drink and animation and the glass filled by the long, narrow black hand of his neighbour was marked by the fingerprints of the white woman who had relinquished it. “You don’t remember me? — Ras Asahe, I came to your place in England once.” The young man said he was in broadcasting now, “so-called assistant to the Director of English Language Services.”

“And how’s your father? Good Lord, I’d like to see him again!” Joseph Asahe was one of Edward Shinza’s lieutenants in the early days of PIP.

“He’s old now.” It was not the right question to have asked; what the young man dismissed was any possible suggestion that he was to be thought of in connection with Shinza. His clothes, watch, cufflinks were those of a man who feels he must buy the best for himself, he had the Mussolini-jaw quite common among the people in the part of the country he came from but those hands were the lyrical, delicately strong, African ones that escaped the international blandness of businessmen’s hands as Bray had marvelled to see them escape the brutalizing of physical hardship. Convicts broke stones with hands like that, here.

They made conversation about the radio and television coverage of the celebrations, and from this broke into talk that interested them both — the problem of communication in a country with so many different language groups. “I wonder how much use could be made of a radio classroom in country schools, whether it couldn’t help considerably to ease the shortage of teachers, here, and maintain some sort of standard where teachers are perhaps not very well qualified. I’d like to talk to somebody about it — your man? I’m not keen to go straight to the Director-General—”

“It won’t make much difference. They”—Ras Asahe meant the whites— “all know that after the end of the year they’ll be on contract, and that means they’ll be replaced in three years. Not that they ever made an effort. Sheltered employment all these years, what d’you expect? You don’t need ideas, you don’t need to move out of your chair, you simply go on producing a noise out of the magic box to keep the natives quiet — and now, boom, it’s all gone, including the only incentive they ever had, their pension. They’re pathetic, man; certainly they haven’t much to offer when they look for jobs with the BBC. They’re just not going to find any. They want to go, they’re longing to, you can see they can’t stand the sight of your face when you’re working together — which makes things very pleasant, you can imagine—” A slim little white girl slipped between them and took up Ras Asahe’s hand with the gold-metal watch-bracelet as if it were some possession she had put down— “Save me from Daddy Dando.”

“—I could give you a dozen examples of the sort of thing that happens — the ceremony this afternoon: like a horse-race, man — the arrangements were exactly what they used to use for the charity Christmas Handicap, what else do they know? Suggest what you like, they just talk it away into the cigarette smoke, nobody even listens.” The girl was there in their conversation like a photograph come upon lying between the pages of a book; Bray was not sure whether she was child or woman: thin collar-bones, a long neck with a face hardly wider, pale and sallow, a big, thin, unpainted mouth, black hair and glittering, sorrowful black eyes. She wore a dress made of Congo cloth.

“Suppose at the end of the year they were not put on contract? What about the golden handshake — wouldn’t it be cheaper, in the end?”

“Not if there’s no preparation of replacements being done in the meantime. I tried two years ago to initiate a pilot scheme to send local people away for training in broadcasting techniques — nothing doing. If I had to take over the English-language services tomorrow, you know what I’d have to do it with — a bunch of Lambala and Ezenzeli speakers from the vernacular sections and some refugee schoolteachers from South Africa.”

The girl sat and saw nothing, like an animal out of breath, holed up against danger.

Bray had to rise to be introduced to a big woman marking time on the edge of the dancers with the American, Curtis Pettigrew: she was a West African whom Timothy Odara had married since Bray saw him last. She spoke with an American intonation, too, and in her flamboyant national dress, dragged round her as if snatched straight from the brilliant bolt on a shop counter, she seemed in every way twice the size of the local African women, who were usually kept at home, and showed it. Pettigrew was hailed by someone, and Bray and the woman were left facing each other like the dancers; she put her hand on his arm. While they moved off, she said, “Guess what my name is?” and when he looked embarrassed— “Same as yours, I believe. Evelyn.” “But they call me James.” “I should damn well hope so. Well, I’ve picked someone my own size at last tonight. We could just sweep the others off the floor.” She maintained contact all round her as they danced, talking over his shoulder to this one, putting out a broad calloused brown foot in a gold sandal to nudge that one in the calf. “Get her to sing,” Dando called out proudly. “Not tonight, Dandy-Roly, I’m on my best behaviour.” “That’s what I mean!” “Would it embarrass Evelyn if Evelyn sang?” she asked Bray. “Not in the least. What sort of thing?” “Well, what’d you think? What do I look as if I’d sing?” She had the self-confidence of a woman of dynamic ugliness. “Wagner?” A snort of pleasure: “Go on! I’ve got a voice like a bullfrog. It’s terrible when I sing the old chants from home but it’s not so bad in English — English is such a rough-sounding language anyway.”

Vivien Bayley’s urgent face took up conversation in passing, “—that’s Hjalmar Wentz’s daughter — you were sitting with.”

“The Oriental-looking little girl with Ras?”

“Yes, lovely creature, isn’t she? Margot would only let her come if I promised to keep her wholesomely occupied. You didn’t leave her with Ras?”

He moved his shoulders helplessly. The dancers were falling back round a Polish agriculturalist who was teaching a gangling Englishman and two young Africans an Eastern European peasant dance. The Congolese band had no idea what music would do, and produced a stomping crescendo; then one of the Poles played the piano, and Neil Bayley moved in on the drums. The undergraduate form of self-expression that emerges where Englishmen want to give themselves to celebration imposed itself for a while. Someone left, and reappeared with another case of champagne. The wine was warm, but an early-hours-of-the-morning rain came out like sweat, and coolness blew in on necks and faces. Later the Odara woman sang the new national anthem in a beautiful contralto, her big belly trembling under the robe. The young bachelors romped and the tousled girls, passing close by, or smiling suddenly at people they weren’t aware of, gave up the scent of cosmetics and perfume heated on their bodies. Then there was breakfast at the Bayleys’; a thinning of faces, but some had kept reappearing all through the night in the changing light, and now, against the rippling pink-grey sky behind the Bayleys’ veranda, over the smell of coffee, a curled blonde head with gilt hoops in the ears, shining straps that had worn a red track on a plump white back, Timothy Odara’s starched and pleated shirt-front and dead buttonhole — all had the melodrama of circus figures. They said good night to each other in the bright slanting sun and the Bayley children were already out on the grass in their pyjamas, riding bicycles.

In a few days the faces had lost the stylized, apparition-quality of that first night, the night of the Independence Ball, and become, if not familiar, at least expected. A young woman was in and out the Bayleys’ house, sometimes adding to, sometimes carrying off with her the many children who played there. She was Rebecca, Rebecca Edwards, like a big, untidy schoolgirl in her cotton shirt and sandals, the car key on her forefinger jingling harassedly. She was always being sent to pick up people when arrangements went wrong; she came for Bray one afternoon in an old station wagon littered with sweet-papers, odd socks, and Dinky toys. It was she who had given her glass to him that night at the Independence party; the Pole who had danced the gazatska became the man with whom he gravitated to a quiet corner so that they could talk about the curious grammar-structure of Gala and the Lambala group of languages. The atmosphere at the parties was what he thought it must have been at gatherings described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. Children swept in and out, belligerently pleasure-seeking. Babies slept in dark rooms. Food was cooked by many hands. Invitations were measured only by how long the beer and wine lasted out. He felt himself the — aged relative, a man of vague repute come from afar to the wedding, and drawn helplessly and not unenjoyably into everything. It was, in a curious way, an extension of what he was at the official receptions, where many people had little idea who the white stranger was, sitting in a modest place of honour; and once, at a press dinner, Mweta’s reference to the presence of “one of the fairy godmothers” who had been “present at the christening and had returned for the coming-of-age of the State” went, thank God, unnoticed as a reference to himself. It became his Independence story; as the story of the cigarette company’s helicopter was Neil Bayley’s, related again and again while the private drama between husband and wife that had made it pass unremarked at the time was quite dropped out of the context.

Bray asked everywhere about Edward Shinza; certainly he was not in evidence at any official occasion. Bray felt he must be somewhere about; it was difficult to imagine this time without him. It was his as much as Mweta’s. But no one seemed to have seen him, or to know whether he was, or had been, in the capital. There were other faces from the past; William Clough, the Governor, lifting his bristly eyebrows in exaggerated greeting at Mweta’s banquet, the way he used to do on the tennis court in Dar-es-Salaam. “James, you must come and say hello to Dorothy before we leave. I daren’t say dine — we’re homeless, you know—”

“Uncle Willie’s Independence Joke,” Vivien said. “Produces a hearty, man-of-the-world laugh from Africans.”

“The kind of laugh they’ve picked up from people like Uncle Willie,” said Neil.

Still, the Cloughs pursued Bray through Vivien. “Aunt Dorothy says her secretary’s been trying to get hold of you. They want you for drinks on Monday. I’d go if I were you, or she’ll tell everyone in London you were buttering up to the Africans and didn’t want to see them.” He laughed. “No, it’s true. She says that about me, to my mother. And she knows quite well that we’d never see each other in London either.”

The Cloughs had moved into the British Consulate for the last week or two before their departure, a large, glassy, contemporary house placed to show off the umbrella thorn-trees of the site, just as in an architect’s scale model. The consul and his wife had been swept into some back room by the presence of aides, secretaries, and the necessity to keep their cats out of the way of Lady Dorothy’s dog. There was some sort of scuffle when Bray arrived — he saw the consul’s wife, whom he had met briefly, disappearing upstairs with her head bent consolingly to a Siamese. Flower arrangements were placed everywhere, as if there were illness in the house.

“Well, the job is done, one asks nothing more but to fold one’s tents….. He’s a good chap, if they’ll let him alone, he’s learnt a lot, and one’s done what one could … if he keeps his head, and that one can’t be sure of, not even with him, mmh? Not even with him.” An elderly servant came in with a silver tray of glasses and bottles, and Clough interrupted himself to say with the sweet forbearance of one who does not spare himself, encouraging where others would give way to exasperation, “It would be so nice if we could have a few slices of lemon … and more ice? — Yes, all I’ve said to Mweta, again and again — make your own pace. Make your own pace and stick to it. He knows his own mind but he’s not an intransigent fellow at all — well, of course, you know. Some time ago — a word in your ear, I said, you’d be unwise to lose Brigadier Radcliffe. Well, they’ve been clamouring away, of course, but he’s refused to touch the army. Oh, I think I can say we’ve come out of it quite good friends.” It was a modest disclaimer, with the effect of assuming in common the ease with Africans that he believed Bray to have. He looked pleasantly into the martini jug and put it down again patiently. The elderly servant who brought ice and lemon had the nicks at the outer corner of the eyes that Northern Gala people wore. “That’s perfect. Thank you so much.”

Bray greeted the servant in Gala with the respectful form of address for elders and the man dumped the impersonality of a servant as if it had been the tray in his hands and grinned warmly, showing some pigmentation abnormality in a pink inner lip spotted like a Dalmatian. The ex-Governor looked on, smiling. The servant bowed confusedly at him, walking backwards, in the tribal way before rank, and then recovering himself and leaving the room with an anonymous lope.

“I’ll pour Dorothy’s martini as well, maybe that’ll bring her. If only one could be transported on a magic carpet … anyway, we shall have three months in London now, with perhaps a week or two in Ireland. What’ve you been doing all these years in your ivory tower in Wiltshire? Were you a golfer, I can’t quite remember …?”

“It was tennis … and afterwards we took the girls for beer to the old Dar-es-Salaam hotel with the German eagle?”

Dorothy Clough came in and Clough cried out, “Does it fit? Come and have a drink with James—”

“My dear James— it must be a hundred years—”

“We’ve had a crate made to transport Fritzi, and she’s been trying it on him.”

“My niece Vivien found a carpenter. She has the most extraordinary contacts, that girl. It’s very useful!”

William Clough took a pecking sip at his martini. He said with gallant good humour, “Reposting was child’s play compared with this. One has had to learn how to camp out … I’m sure it’s terribly good, keeps the mind flexible.”

“Denis thinks your angle lamp’s been left at Government House, did he tell you?” Dorothy Clough sat forward in her chair, as if she had alighted only for a moment.

“For heaven’s sake, let them have it, it’s someone else’s turn to burn the midnight oil there, now — wha’d’you say, James …”

Roly Dando asked with grudging interest about the visit. “He’s never been sent anywhere where there was anything left to do,” he said. “Clough only goes in for the last year, after self-government’s been granted and the date for independence’s been given. An early date.”

Bray was slightly embarrassed by gossip, when quite sober, and said hesitantly, smiling, “The impression was that he and his wife were slipping away quietly after the field of battle.”

“Since he arrived eighteen months ago there’s been damn all for him to do except go fishing up at Rinsala.”

At the Pettigrews’ house that night, Dando’s voice came from the group round someone basting a sheep on the home-made spit: “… damn all except go fishing with his secretary acting ghillie….” Rebecca Edwards had just told Neil Bayley that Felix Pasilis, the Pettigrews’ Greek friend, was furious with her because she’d forgotten some essential herb that he wanted for his sheep— “If I were Felix I’d make you go back home and get it, my girl,” Neil said, and the look of inattentive exhaustion on her rather heavy young face moved Bray in fellow-feeling to distract attention from her, saying, “My God, I’m afraid I behaved like a child at Cloughs’! I showed off by making a point of speaking to the servant in Gala.” Neil and Rebecca Edwards laughed. “Poor Uncle Willie.” “He was quite a nice young man in Dar-es-Salaam. He took Swahili lessons conscientiously and he certainly spoke it better than I did.” They laughed at him again.

Everyone was gathering round for servings from the roast sheep, and the fair stocky man from the airport signalled a greeting with a piece of meat in his fingers. “Wentz, Hjalmar Wentz, we met on the plane.”

“How are you? Roland Dando said we probably should be seeing you at the Rhino.” They moved off with their plates of food, and Wentz said to a woman settled in one of the canvas chairs, “Margot, here is Colonel Bray.”

“No, no, please stay where you are.”

In the fuss to find somewhere to sit he saw the light of the fire under the spit running along the shiny planes of the woman’s face as it did on glasses and the movement of knives and forks. Bright hair was brushed up off a high round forehead and behind the ears, in a way he associated with busy, capable women.

“Try some, Margot, it’s wonderful—”

“Aren’t I fat enough—” But she took a tidbit of crisp fat from her husband’s fork.

“To tell the truth, this’s the first time for a week we’ve had time to sit down to eat. Honestly. Margot’s had to be in the kitchen herself from six in the morning, and some nights it’s been until ten. She literally hasn’t sat down to a meal….”

“Oh, not quite … I must have had hundreds of cups of coffee….”

“Yes, with one hand while you were busy stirring a pot with the other. The cook went to the Independence ceremony and we haven’t seen him since — just for the afternoon, he said, just to see the great men he’s seen in the papers — well, what can you say?”

“We felt it was his day, after all.” The woman showed a well-shaped smile in the dark.

Bray asked, “How on earth have you managed?”

She gestured and laughed, but her husband was eager to break in, holding up his hands over the plate balanced on his knees— “A hundred and twenty-two for dinner! That’s what it was on Thursday. And yesterday—”

“Only a hundred and nine, that’s all—” They laughed.

Bray raised his beer mug of wine to her.

“What about my assistant cook? You mustn’t forget I’ve got help,” she said. Wentz put down his glass beside his chair, to do the justice of full attention to what he was going to say. “Her assistant cook. I got him from the new labour exchange— I thought, well, let’s try it, so they send him along, five years’ experience, everything fine.”

His wife was listening, laughing softly, sitting back majestically for a moment. “Fine.”

“Five years’ experience, but d’you know what as? — You know the barbers under the mango trees there just before you get to the second-class trading area?”

“Our son’s comment was the best, I think. ‘Mother, if only Barnabas had worked for a butcher and learnt to cut meat instead of hair!’”

“Well, here’s to three crazy people,” said Wentz, excitedly picking up his glass. “Everyone knows you must be crazy to come of your own free will to one of these countries.”

“Colonel Bray isn’t going to run a hotel.” She had a soft, dry voice and her accent was slighter than her husband’s.

“I’m not as brave as you are.”

“Oh, how do you know?” said Wentz. “We didn’t know what we were going to land up doing, either.”

She said quietly, “We certainly didn’t think we’d be the proprietors of the Silver Rhino.”

“Anyway, that’s another story. — I heard you were going to the Ministry of Education?” said Wentz.

“Oh, did you?” he laughed. “Well, perhaps I am, then. I should think the bar of the Silver Rhino’s as good a place as any to learn what’s really going on.”

“If you want to hear how much ugliness there is — yes.” Mrs. Wentz had the tone of voice that sounds as if the speaker is addressing no one but himself. “How people still think with their blood and enjoy to feel contempt … yes, the bar at the Silver Rhino.”

“Our son Stephen is looking after it tonight. It’s amazing how he deals with those fellows — better than I do, I can tell you. He keeps them in place.”

“We promised him a liberal education when we left South Africa, you see.” Mrs. Wentz had put down her food and she sat back out of the light of the fire, a big face glimmering in the dark, caverns where the eyes were.

“He’s at Lugard High, taking the A levels,” said Wentz, innocently. “—You’re not going to finish?” The white blur of her hand moved in a gesture of rejection—“You have it, Hjalmar.”

It rained and people felt chilly on the veranda and drifted indoors. There was a group in loud discussion round the empty fireplace where the beer bottles were stacked. “… banging on the Governor’s door with a panga when the others were still picannins with snotty noses …” Now Dando had the sulky outraged attention of a young patriot from the social welfare department, the glittering-eyed indifference of Doris Manyema, one of the country’s three or four women graduates, and the amused appreciation of a South African refugee whose yellow-brown colour, small nose and fine lips set him apart from the blackness of the other two. In the light, Margot Wentz’s head was the figurehead of a ship above the hulk of her body: a double-chinned, handsome dark blonde, the short high nose coming from the magnificent forehead, water-coloured eyes underlined with cuts of fatigue deep into each cheek. With an absent smile to Bray across the room, she took up, for a moment, an abandoned beauty. When he joined the group, they were listening to her. “We don’t have to argue; we can take it that colonialism is indefensible, for us, no? You think so, I think so — right. But the forty-seven—” “Forty-eight”— Timothy Odara’s eyes were closed; leaning against the wall he kept his lips drawn back slightly, alert. “—I’m sorry, forty-eight years you were under British rule, digging their mines, building roads for them, making towns, living in shanties and waiting on them, cleaning up after them, treated like dirt — now it’s all over, you really think there was any way at all you could enter the modern world without suffering? You think there was someone else would have given you the alphabet and electricity and killed off the malaria mosquito, just for love? The Finns? Swedes? The Russians? Anybody? Anyone who wouldn’t have wanted the last drop of your sweat and pride in return? These are the facts. From your point of view, as it luckily lasted less than two generations, wasn’t it worth it? Would anybody have let you in for nothing? Anybody at all? Wouldn’t you have to pay the price in suffering? That’s what I’m asking—”

“Oh you make the usual mistake of seeing the life of the African people as a blank — and then the colonialists come along and we come to life — in your compounds and back yards.”

She was shaking her head slowly while Odara was speaking. “All I’m saying, don’t wear the sufferings of the past round your necks. What does independence mean — I don’t use ‘freedom,’ I don’t like the big words — what does your independence mean, then?”

“The past is useful for political purposes only” said Hjalmar, as he might have said: she’s right.

Someone said, “Watch out for the man from the CIA.” “Down with neo-colonialism.”

“Of course, Curtis,” said Hjalmar. “But if you have to do it by keeping that forty years or whatever sitting at the table with you and your children — ach, it’s not healthy, it makes me sick. What do they want to hear how you had to go round to the back door of the missionary’s house?—”

Mrs. Odara had joined the group, ruffling a big, silver-nailed hand through Curtis Pettigrew’s crew-cut hair. “Oh God, Timothy, not that again.”

“—Let them hold up their heads naturally in their own country without having to feel defiant about it!”

Odara laughed. “But it always comes down to the same thing: you Europeans talk very reasonably-about that sort of suffering because you don’t know … you may have thought it was terrible, but there’s nothing like that in your lives.”

Bray saw Margot Wentz put up her head with a quick grimace-smile, as if someone had told an old joke she couldn’t raise a laugh for.

“Well, here you’re mistaken,” her husband said, rather grandly, “we lived under Mr. Hitler. And you must know all about that.”

“I’m not interested in Hitler.” Timothy Odara’s fine teeth were bared in impatient pleasantness. “My friend, white men have killed more people in Africa than Hitler ever did in Europe.”

“But you’re crazy,” said Wentz gently.

“Europe’s wars, white men’s killings among themselves. What’s that to me? You’ve just said one shouldn’t burden oneself with suffering. I don’t have any feelings about Hitler.”

“Oh but you should,” Mrs. Wentz said, almost dreamily. “No more and no less than you do about what happened to Africans. It’s all the same thing. A slave in the hold of a ship in the eighteenth century and a Jew or a gipsy in a concentration camp in the nineteen-forties.”

“Well, I had my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in the detention camp at Fort Howard, the guest of Her Majesty’s governor,” said Odara, “that I know.”

“Her two brothers died at Auschwitz,” Hjalmar Wentz said; but his wife was talking to Jo-Ann Pettigrew, who offered blobs of toasted marshmallow on the end of a long fork.

“For God’s sake, Timothy, stop baring your teeth and sink them into something.” Evelyn Odara spoke to her husband as no local woman would dare; yet he ignored it, as if turning the tables on her with his countrymen’s assumption that what women said was not heard, anyway. He said angrily to Wentz, directing the remark at the wife through the husband, “What did you get in return that was worth it?”

Margot Wentz said, looking at no one, “That one can’t say.” She waggled her fingers, sticky from the marshmallow, and her husband took his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her.

It was the evening when Bray, Neil, Evelyn Odara, one of the South African refugees, the Pettigrews, and a few others set off for the Sputnik Bar. While Bray was standing about in the group with the Odaras and the Wentzes, Jo-Ann Pettigrew, having failed to get him to eat her last marshmallow, put it in her mouth and signalled to everyone there was something they must hear. “Rebecca’s been to the Sputnik and she says it’s terrific now. They’ve knocked out a wall into that sort of yard thing and they have dancing. With girls laid on.”

Neil said, “Hey? And which one of us’s been taking Rebecca to the Sputnik?”

Laughter rose. “Well, why don’t we all go, that’s what I want t’know.” The young Pettigrew woman was always in a state of enthusiasm; her long curly hair had sprung out, diademed with raindrops, because she had done her marshmallow toasting outside over the spit fire. She was an anthropologist, and Bray accepted this as an explanation for her passion for arranging excursions, on which she carried her baby tied on her back, African style.

“Who was it? Out with it!” There was a roar again.

“No, no — well, Ras took her—”

“Oh Ras, was it?”

“Sputnik Bar, eh?” “So that’s it, now.”

Rebecca Edwards came in from the veranda, smiling good-naturedly, inquiringly, under the remarks shied at her. She said, “There’re bulbs like you see in films round the star’s dressing-table, and they light up and spell INDEPENDENCE HURRAH.”

In great confusion, there and then they decided to go. Dando refused and Vivien had to go home to the children, and Rebecca Edwards protested that hers were alone too. Neil insisted that Bray must come; he was one of those people who, late at night, suddenly have a desperate need of certain companions. But when Neil, Bray, Evelyn Odara and the South African got down to the second-class trading area, the others hadn’t arrived. They went into the Sputnik Bar for a moment, meeting music like a buffeting about the head, and then someone said that he thought the arrangement had been to meet at the railway crossing. There began one of those chases about in the night that, Bray saw, Neil Bayley fiercely enjoyed. They went all the way back into town to the flats where the Edwards girl lived — Neil stood on the moonlit patch of earth in front of the dark building and called up, but there was no response. They stopped somewhere to give a man a lift; he was caught in the lights, hat in hand; only his clean white shirt had shown on the dark road. He answered Neil with a liberal use of Bwana, as a white man would expect if he were to do such a thing as stop for a black one on the road, and when he got into the car beside Bray and the South African, sat among these black and white city people like a hedgehog rolled into itself at a touch. Bray, back in this country once more, again aware of his own height and size and pinkness almost like some form of aggression he wasn’t responsible for, knew that the fellow was holding himself away from contact with him. The voices of Evelyn, Neil, and the South African flew about the car; they passed the shadows of the mango trees in the bright moonlight, lying beneath the trees like sleeping beasts; a donkey cropping among broken china on a refuse mound; the colours on the mosque almost visible, the silvered burglar grilles on the elaborate houses of the Indian sector. The second-class trading area had been laid out long ago and haphazardly; shops cropped up suddenly, streets met, the car plunged and rolled. All was shuttered under already bedraggled flags and bunting, black and deserted except for the bars-little shops crudely blurred with light, juke-box music and the vibrancy of human movement and noise.

Bray offered to be left outside the Sputnik in case the other members of the party turned up. For ten or fifteen minutes he strolled in the street whose vague boundaries were made by feet and bicycle tyres rather than the strip of tar considered sufficient by the white city council of the old days. The cement verandas of the Indian shops were quays in the dust; snippets of cloth had been swept off them everywhere — that was where the African men employed by the Indians sat at their sewing machines during the day. The shutters and chipped pillars were plastered with stickers of the flag and Mweta in a toga. Young boys peering above the paint that blacked out the shop-front entrance of the Sputnik picked at the stickers on the breath-gummy, manhandled glass and giggled at Bray. The doorway was constantly blocked by befuddled men making to get out and undecided men looking in.

How confused our pleasures are, he thought, and walked slowly up the street again, past a man who had got as far as the clustered bicycles and lay sprawled in the warm dust. The unmade road level had worn so deeply away from a shop veranda that the cement platform was the right height for sitting on. The din from the bar was companionable, like a reassurance that there was life going on in the house, and he smoked a cigar, releasing the fragrant, woody scent in the air stained with those old smells brought out by dampness — urine and decaying fruit. After ten years, the light of the town was still not big enough to dim the sky; there was no town for thousands of miles big enough for that. Ropes and blobs of stars ran burningly together; he let himself grow dizzy looking. Then Bayley’s car came back, and they decided to give up hope of the rest of the party and have a quick beer before going home to bed. The old part of the bar, a shop furnished with benches and rough eating-house tables, was full of the local regulars sitting over native beer and taking no notice of the band pressed deafeningly into a corner. In the new beer-garden — a yard more or less cleared (the dustbins still stood overflowing) and set out with a few coloured tables with umbrellas over them — there were some bourgeois Africans with women, and a couple or two dancing; Evelyn Odara waved at someone she knew. Bottled European beer was being drunk here. Neil had friends everywhere, and went in search of the proprietor, a handsome, greedy-faced young black man, ebullient with plans for making money. He settled down with them and brought, in answer to Neil’s insistence and insisting, for his part, laughingly, that they didn’t exist — three of his “girls” to join them. “You’ll do the kids a favour. Just about this time the police comes along on a round, and they’re not supposed to be here alone, you see — this town’s backward, man.” Beer arrived with the girls— “No, no, its a pleasure to have you and your friends in my little place. Of course, it’s not nicely fixed up yet … we wanted to have some night life for the celebrations. I’m paying the band alone twenty pounds a night, I’m gonna have a posh bar out here with whisky and ice for the drinks, everything nice … for high-class trade from town, you understand.”

The three women were cheaply smart, with the shine of nylon tightly stretched over plenty of sturdy black leg. They had the rather appealing giggling pleasure in being dressed up for the part, of those who haven’t been in the business long. They were pretty, with straightened hair, painted eyes, and purplish-painted lips. But the coloured bulbs that spelled out INDEPENDENCE HURRAH had been fused by the rain, and were not working.

It was true that Edward Shinza was not in the capital; given the past, this absence could not have been more pointed. For Bray himself, it was an absence somehow always present.

Chapter 3

The drives home at night on the dirt road to Dando’s were punctuated by the death-thump of nightjars who sat stupidly in the path of the car and then rose too late to escape, just as they used to on the roads at Gala. In daylight their broken bodies were slowly ironed into the dust by tyres passing and repassing over them. He and Olivia had kept a log-book of bird life in and around Gala; it had bothered them to think how, since there was no way to avoid killing these birds in the dark, one gradually got accustomed to it, so that the thump of their bodies against the car went unremarked as the shot of hard-back beetles striking the windscreen. One didn’t even notice, any more, that the dead birds were beautiful with their russet and black markings. They had tried to make a study of the nightjars’ habits, one summer, to determine what it was that made them partial to the roads; came to the conclusion that lice under their wings caused them to try repeated dustbaths. Yes, Africa was a kind of study, then, with detached pleasures and interests, despite his involvement in politics.

During the week of the celebrations it was difficult to get into town without being held up somewhere by a right of way cleared for some dignitary or other. Traffic officers in white gauntlets zoomed arabesques on their motorcycles, soldiers in well-ironed khaki blocked the road and held back children, women, idlers and bicycles; sometimes a band came tootling and mildly blaring in the vanguard, and there were always flags. Then came the Daimler or Mercedes with the President of this or the Prime Minister of that, deep inside; often it was only after his car had gone by that one realized who it must have been, the kernel of so many supernumerary, black, bespectacled faces emerging from the identical perfect grooming of dark suits and snow-white shirt collars. Once it was the English royalty with her grey-permed lady-in-waiting, and once Mrs. Gandhi; and, while in the car with Vivien Bayley, Bray was even held up by Mweta himself. The Bayley children climbed out onto the roof and bonnet of the car to cheer, Mweta was in his orange toga in his open car, he was borne past with the unseeing smile that already, in a few days, he had learnt to sweep across faces become all one, to him. Vivien said sadly, “Magnificent, isn’t he? Ours is the best-looking of the lot.”

“I wonder if he’s enjoying it. He’s certainly carrying it off just as we always expected he should.”

“What’s he say?” she said.

“I haven’t spoken to him, really — not where one could talk properly.”

As usual, a traffic policeman drew up the rear of the entourage with a figure-of-eight flourish about the empty road and the traffic broke loose again, hooting at sluggish and dazed pedestrians. The Bayley children fought and struggled to get back into the car through the windows, pulling at each other’s legs; shy black children looked on, one giggling nervously behind the thumb in her mouth. A young woman swung her baby onto her back, tied it firmly in her cloth, and put a small child on the luggage rack of her bicycle before wobbling off while keeping up a shouting, laughing exchange with a woman on the kerb. Bulging cartons tied with rope were loaded onto heads, bigger children took smaller ones on their backs, a group of young men on bicycles lounged and argued and the bells of other bicycles trilled impatiently at them. An advertising jingle from a transistor radio held intimately to a young man’s ear as he walked, rose and tailed off through the people. “I want to give the little girl my flag,” said Eliza Bayley. “Well, hurry up about it, then. No — the rest of you stay where you are.”

They watched the fat little white girl, usually belligerent with her own kind, go up as if to the platform at a prize-giving, and hand to the black child with the thumb in its mouth one of the small, flimsy flags hastily printed in Japan in time to catch the Independence trade. People were tramping and drifting past the obstacle of the car. “Are they enjoying it?” said Vivien. There had been a sports rally, and a police band and massed school choirs concert, as well as the rather peculiar historical pageant that had gone on for hours at the stadium. Tribal dancing and praise-songs alternated with tableaux of Dundreary whiskered white men showing chunks of gold-ore to splendidly got-up chiefs; it had all to be kept vague in order not to offend the tribal descendants of Osebe Zuna II with a reminder that the old man had given away the mineral rights of the territory to white men for the price of a carriage and pair like the Great White Queen’s and a promise of two hundred pounds a year, and in order not to offend the British by reminding them that, at the price, they had got the whole country thrown in. Schoolgirls bobbing under gym frocks and helmeted miners epitomized the present on much safer ground.

Bray and Vivien speculated about the celebrations in the African townships and villages. “Beer-drinks? Big barrels of it … and meat roasted, and a place cleared for dancing—” Vivien transposed the fountain of wine and the village square of Europe. In the back of the car the children were quarrelling; the little girl was self-righteously boastful about her gift of a flag. “How I do dislike Eliza sometimes,” Vivien said in an undertone. Self-doubt, that he thought of as the innocence of intelligent people, often gave a special beauty to her face. She was candid not in the usual sense of being critical of others, but of herself. “D’you think she’ll feel it?”

“She will.”

“That’s something one never imagines. That you can feel the same sort of antipathy towards your own child as you would towards anyone else. In a way, won’t it be a relief to get older and to have made all these pleasant little discoveries, once and for all.”

“Oh but I’ve reached that stage, long ago!” He was amused and perhaps slightly flattered that the girl should forget they belonged to different generations.

“It must be a relief.”

“One can’t be sure. There may still be shocks.”

“But you don’t think so?” —A statement more than a question. He had the feeling she was talking about marriage, now: her own; and his, that she knew had lasted twenty-two years — people talked of Olivia and himself linked in the same breath, as it were, but it was as a combination of two intact personalities rather than the anonymous, double-headed organism, husband-and-wife; perhaps it was something she attained to, not very hopefully, with her Neil.

“Well, no. But some people get angrier and somehow wilder as they get old. Take Tolstoi. Some of the late Yeats poems — it seems to me old age must be like that for quite a lot of people. More often than the evening-of-life stuff. Good God, which would be worse?”

She said, as if it were all much more serious for her, “I don’t think I’ve read them. Except one. About an old man—”

“‘The devil between my thighs’—that one?”

“Yes — but surely sex is the least of it. There are other things one’d like to be sure to be done with.”

“What about the things one’d never conceived of. Even the simple hardening of arteries could turn you into a grasping hag who’d suspect the people she used to love of stealing out of her purse.”

“But can you imagine it ever happening to you?” They were stopped by a red light and she turned to look at him, a young woman’s face just beginning to take on the permanent expression of the emotions and self-disciplines that were making over her features in their likeness.

“Of course not”; and his middle-aged calm, that was in itself an acceptance of such horrors to come, belied the reassurance of his words. She smiled.

Dando suggested they should eat at the Silver Rhino — he came, with the air of putting an end to something, from the kitchen, where there was the question of whether or not dinner had been expected to be provided at the house that evening. “Who’s on, who’s off, hopeless chewing the rag about it.” They had a drink in the garden, and put on their jackets to go to town as soon as it got dark. Festus was loading his bicycle onto the luggage grid on the roof of the car; he, at least, was going to some sort of festivity. “What’s it, Festus?” Dando asked, when Bray inquired.

It was a “boxing fight” at the stadium. “I must come half-past seven.”

“I know, I know, don’t panic. You’ll be there.”

The black man sat in the back of the car in a white shirt and grey pants, smelling of carbolic soap. He repeated, nevertheless, “Half-past seven.”

“I hope you’ll be in as good time with breakfast tomorrow as I’ll get you to the stadium tonight.”

Festus gave him a look registering the intention to answer, but in the meantime rolled down the window and yelled out. A faint cry went up from the servants’ quarters. Festus bellowed; and this time the youngster came running to open and close the gates behind the car. As the headlights threw a bright dust-opaque ramp into the sky, Festus took up Dando. “When I’m don’t come, you tell me.”

“Just be sure you remember you’ve eight miles to ride after refreshment, that’s all.”

“I say: tomorrow we know.”

Bray turned and offered a cigarette over his shoulder. Festus took it, but without the complicity of a smile against Dando; he had the preoccupation of someone off duty.

After they had dropped him not at the stadium but at a street corner that he pounced upon (clutching Dando by the shoulder to make him stop the car) in an intention clearly held all along but not conveyed, Dando drove to the Great Lakes Hotel instead of the Rhino; he thought he must have left his glasses there, over lunch. The Great Lakes had been built several years before by the biggest gold-mining company because there was nowhere suitable to entertain principals from Britain and America. It was designed, down to the last doorhandle and ashtray, by a prizewinning contemporary British architect who had never been to Africa; the lacy cement lattice that served in place of walls between the public rooms and the patio had not provided for the acute angle at which rain swept in during the wet season; the thick-carpeted boxes of bedrooms depended entirely upon air-conditioning for ventilation and kept out the perfect, sharp air of the dry season. The patio was now partly glassed in, the rain-damaged raw silk had been replaced with nylon; the hotel was no longer beautiful but had adapted itself for survival, as a plant goes through mutations imposed by environment.

Some sort of official cocktail party was ending as they arrived and the lategoers had got as far as the patio round the pool, standing about in suddenly intimate groups talking still in the voices of a crowded room. The tiny pennants of the country’s own new airline stood among wisps of lettuce in the Golden Perch Room; Dando and Bray passed through to another bar, with greetings and snatches of talk catching at them. Roly Dando’s running commentary was carelessly loud enough to be heard by anybody, had they been listening. No one was. Heads lifted, eyes turned to follow, faces were glazed with the cosy daze of sundowner time. “… Raymond Mackintosh, no less. I wonder what he’s crawling up Norman’s arse for now. Look at it. — Well, Raymond, here’s to your first million. — Hullo Joe, hasn’t the steak gone down yet?” A black man waved with an important smile, looking up from the depths of a conversation that brought him forward in his chair, knees wide, trousers straining, to confer with the white man opposite him. “—Joe Kabala was here with Stein at lunch, as well. The milling company. Going to be the first black one on that board, wait and see. A lovely champion of private enterprise, keeping the seat warm for white capital investment and raking in the director’s fees. He’s starting to eat smoked salmon, I saw it myself…. — Hadn’t you better be going home to your children?” Rebecca Edwards peered round a rubber plant at the sound of Dando’s voice. She was drinking beer with Curtis Pettigrew, obviously come straight from work, with untidy paper carriers from the supermarket dumped beside her. “The dinner’ll be dried out again, Curtis. It’s all right for a bachelor like me to come home when I please.”

They were waylaid by an FAO man and Father Raven, who ran the refugee education scheme at Senshe. Bray had already been out there and at Bill Raven’s request had made some notes, at odd times at home in Dando’s rondavel, for a simple course in economic administration. “You don’t happen to speak Portuguese? The Zambians have dumped a batch of Frelimo chaps on us”—Raven was half-thrilled at the dilemma. The FAO man offered to take Bray to see the experimental farm he was setting up in the South; “If I’m still around, I’d like to go with you.”

He went off after Dando, who was up at the bar having an argument with his friend Coningsby, the manager, about the Austro-Hungarian empire and the character of Franz Josef. Dando was accustomed to knowing more about any subject than the person who took him up on it, and in the absence of better intellectual stimulus, enjoyed the advantage in a grudging way; Bray remembered that this was what had happened to men who lived in a restricted circle and read a lot. The bush mentality was not what people thought; it could take the form of a burning compulsion to explain to somebody — anybody, the driver of the road transport, the district vet — the workings of the Common Market or Wittgenstein’s theories.

Bray always found bar-stools uncomfortable — he was too big to accommodate himself without prodding someone with his shoulder or knee — and he was best off with one elbow on the bar and the rest of him turned towards the room. He drank whisky and watched them all. It was a daydream from the past, with incongruities that made it of the present. A small party of white people out to dinner came in, the patina of well-being on heads fresh from the hairdresser, faces shiny from a second shave. Laughter, the worldly kind that causes quiet paroxysms beneath well-fitting suits, had taken a huddle of three white men sitting farther up the bar counter as they said to each other urgently, “Wait — wait—” and then added a twist to the anecdote that set them off again. A black man in an American tartan jacket was with another in a dark-blue suit, talking to him without looking at him, his mind elsewhere. Orange fingernails scratched up cashew nuts; a woman who called everybody “sweetie” protested because there was no olive in her martini, protested again when the barman was reproached. Two more black men came in and looked over the heads conspiratorially, haughtily, then saw the raised finger of the man in tartan and broke into the sort of hearty formalities of hand-shaking and back-slapping that the white men would have winked about before, but that now simply brought a momentary distant look to their eyes.

The occasion for the party with the ladies was clearly the need to entertain a tall, blond young man from out of town to whom they all listened with the bright show of attention accorded to wits or experts. He was what is recognized as a Guards officer type, perhaps a little too typical ever to have been one. Not so young as all that, either; his small, handsome, straight-backed head on broad shoulders had longish, silky hair thinning on the pate, and when he smiled his teeth were bony-looking. He had a way of bearing down with his nostrils and drawing air audibly through them, to express exasperation or raise a laugh. Certainly his friends found this irresistible. His diction was something no longer heard, in England, anyway. Most likely explanation was that he must have taken part in amateur theatricals under the direction of someone old enough to have modelled himself on Noel Coward. Amateur theatre had been popular among the civil servants and settlers; even Olivia had once appeared in one of those dusty thrillers set in Lord Somebody’s country house.

“… Oh Lord yes. Her father’s getting right out too. Right out. The place at Kabendi Hills has gone. Carol’s heart — broken over the horses … to Jersey, I think.… Chief Aborowa said to me last week, there’s going to be trouble over the culling — some of these chaps’ve had that bloody great government stud bull the department’s spent a fortune on — and I said, my dear chap, that’s your worry, I hope there’ll be a couple of billion gallons of sea between me and your cows and your wives and the whole damned caboodle.… ‘I don’t want Pezele near my stool.’ I said don’t be a damned fool, Aborowa — as soon as I see him alone there’s no nonsense, I talk to him like a Dutch uncle, we were drinking brandy together—”

“—Priceless!” One of the women was so overcome she had to put down her glass.

“—Heavens, that’s nothing — Carol buys old Aborowa’s wife’s corsets for her.”

More laughter.

“His senior wife. Poor old baggage, she doesn’t know where the bouz begins and the derrière ends. Colossal. Such a dear old soul. I don’t know what she’ll do without Carol, they adore Carol. Yes, buys her corsets for her, bloomers, I don’t know what … Special department at Harrods, for the fat ladies of circuses or something …” He drew breath through pinched nostrils while they looked at each other delightedly. “I don’t know who’s going to replace that service when we go, I can tell you, central government or provincial authority or what the devil these gentlemen’re going to call themselves. M’lord Pezele — great fat Choro gentleman from the Eastern Province, he is — comes along in his brand-new jeep (I’ve been requisitioning for four years to get our jalopies replaced, but no dice), he stumps into the Great Place: ‘My appointment with Chief Aborowa is at nine-thirty’—he’s looking at his watch. Thinks he’s at the dentist. And there’s the old man over at his house, looking forward to a nice chat over a nip.”

The black man with the friend in the tartan jacket said pompously to the black barman, in English, “The service is very bad here. I asked for ice, didn’t I?”

But no one was listening except Bray.

“… happy to get eight per cent on short-term investment instead. Five years is all they work on in these countries, you know.”

Dinner music had started up in the dining-room, and the trailing sounds of a languid piano came from a speaker above the bar.

“Oh there’ll be no difficulty whatsoever, there, that we’re confident….” The white businessmen, now that they were serious again, had the professionally attentive, blandly preoccupied faces of those men, sitting in planes and hotels in foreign countries, who represent large companies.

“… your odd Portugoose wandering in from over the border … wily fellows, your Portugooses, but my boys always managed … now get this straight, Pezele, when I’m gone you can stew in your own uhuru, but while I’m doing my job … political officer, is he? — then tell him when he can read English well enough to understand other people’s confidential reports that’ll be time enough to get his sticky fingers—” The blue eyes, dilated fishily with vehemence, caught Dando and Bray on their way out of the bar with a half-smile of acknowledgement of the empathy counted upon in every white face.

“Moon, June, spoon,” Dando was saying, “who in the devil wants that drivel? I must speak to Coningsby. It’s even relayed in the lavatory. Can’t hear yourself piss in this place.”

The Silver Rhino was a short way out of town, built, like most of the hotels of these territories in the colonial era, on the Great North road that goes from country to country up through Central and East Africa. Ten years ago it had been a place where white people from the town and the mines would go for a weekend or a Sunday outing; there was fishing nearby and a tame hyrax and caged birds in the garden. But now the capital was spreading towards the old hotel, the lights of scattered houses were webbed in the bush, there were street names marking empty new roads, several Ministries had moved out that way. Bray heard that the site for the new university was to be there. “Yes — but that’s all changed again,” said Dando, sitting to the steering wheel as if it were the head of a reckless horse. “The university’ll be on the west slope of the town, most likely. And now that they’ve put up a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound Ministry of Works, it’s finally occurred to them that all government buildings ought to be in one area. So they’re going to build another Ministry where the others’re going up. A thousand acres, just below Government House and the embassies. Which is what could have been seen by anybody except a specially imported town planning expert, in the first place.”

“What’s going to be done with the building here?”

Dando accelerated, providing a flourish to his answer. “Raise battery hens in it, for all I know. Poor old Wentz. He doesn’t have much luck with his investments. He’s still in some sort of mess over the title deeds to the hotel — I keep promising him I’ll go over the papers with him, he’s in the hands of that bloody fool McKinnie, remember McKinnie and Goldin? He came up here and bought the place and signed the agreement, and then when his wife and family followed, there was some damn fool clause he should never have agreed to. They nearly didn’t get possession.”

“Good God. They had to leave South Africa because of some political trouble, didn’t they?” Bray had the mild interest of one who is passing through.

“Don’t know about had to. She was nervous and wanted to go — Hjalmar’s wife. She’s Jewish — he got her out of Germany in thirty-six, you know, though he’s not a Jew himself. Smuggled her over the border. It’s a terrible story. Of course he wasn’t allowed to marry her in Germany. He couldn’t even tell his family, couldn’t trust anybody. Just disappeared, with her. Incredible story. You wouldn’t think Hjalmar would have the guts, but he did it. He could have been in a concentration camp along with them if he’d been caught.”

A string of coloured bulbs was looped from pillar to pillar on the Silver Rhino’s familiar old wide veranda. Africans sat about on hard chairs drinking beer. Some were accompanied by women, who were, of course, accompanied by babies. Little children played with empty beer bottles and climbed the low veranda wall. The telephone booth that had always been there had a large portrait of Mweta, surmounted with a gold rosette, pasted on the door; people had scribbled numbers on the margin. Inside the hotel the mouldering butterfly-wing pictures had been replaced by some rather good Congo masks and the walls had been plainly whitewashed — otherwise it was all much as Bray remembered it. In the dining-room there was a hooded construction like a wishing well for grilling meat over an open flame, but it was not in use that night and the steaks came from the kitchen. Since Bray was last in Africa there had been the advent of the deep-freeze, and now he found himself eating these steaks everywhere: large, thick wads of meat that, once cut into, had the consistency of decomposing rags. “She usually makes a mushroom sauce, something special,” Dando grumbled. “All these places are the same, they start off all right.” Hjalmar Wentz had seen them — probably it would be impossible to go there for a meal without involving oneself in a visit to the Wentzes — and he came over to the table. He wore cotton trousers and a green knit shirt wrinkled round his chest and held out his hands apologetically. “Good God, you must excuse me — I wanted you to come and have a martini or something first, but what goes on here … I can’t tell you— The chamber of commerce is having a lunch tomorrow and this morning when I got the crayfish from the station we found it was all bad. The lot. Margot’s concocting something else, a miracle of the loaves and fishes … is that wine all right? Roly, I want you to try a Montrachet I found … but that’s steak, eh? Well, we can’t offer you crayfish tonight. But next time, remind me, you must try it … so light and dry.” He sat and drank a glass of wine with them, and they talked British politics; he would lose the thread, reluctantly, now and then, and look about him in the necessity to be elsewhere, and then return irresistibly to the talk. When the coffee came he said, “Oh Margot wants you to have coffee with us, later. With luck we’ll be out of the kitchen by ten. Come to our palace. Roly knows.” “Stephen in the pub?” said Roly. “He may be. I’m not sure. The barman ought to be there tonight.” The waiters had been looking anxiously at him for some time; he hurried off.

The bar was stifling, with the cool, sour undersmell of liquor. A fan made a mobile of tiny Viking ships, the sort of thing sold in airport shops, bob slowly like unevenly weighted scales. “How old are you, young man?” Dando called out to a plump, fair boy with a dent in his chin. Apparently it was an old joke; Stephen Wentz smiled and showed off a little as he put down a bottle of brandy and two fancy goblets. “Old enough to know what you like, Mr. Dando.” “Hjalmar’s son and heir. All these bottles will be his, some day.” Hjalmar Wentz appeared with the embarrassed air of someone who has just taken his leave; he spoke to the boy. Dando held his brandy glass like a bird between two hands. “I’ve just been telling that son of yours I’ll have to report you to the police for employing a minor in a bar.” “Never mind, you should see the trouble we have sometimes to keep out the babies on backs.”

“We saw them outside,” Bray said. “It looked very homely.”

“That’s Margot,” Hjalmar was expansively confidential. “They love to come here. She goes around giving the kids sweets. All the other hotels, of course, they’re trying to get them to leave the kids at home.”

Most of the Independence-week visitors had left but the bar was half-full with the regulars, a mixture of white and black, some of whom obviously had come in together. Smaller fry from the staff of visiting dignitaries were quartered at the Rhino — a Senegalese secretary, two men from the Ivory Coast — and there were newspapermen and a Filipino couple working for a United Nations demographic commission (Dando pointed them out) with friends from the Ghanaian Embassy. One or two of Mweta’s junior lieutenants in routine administrative jobs mingled with these cosmopolites, but Dando remarked, “They’re still at the dedicated, puritanical stage, in the government — first’ll come the bribery and the purges, then’ll come the normal drinking in pubs, along with ordinary mortals like ourselves. They’ll settle down.” He was greeted by many people; even Bray saw faces that he had come to know, by now. But they did not join anyone; Dando, sitting in damp shirt-sleeves in a stifling bar in this company, was contentedly meditative, for once; like a man at home in the chatter of his own kitchen. A little later they were summoned to the Wentzes’ flat. There was something strongly European about the little living-room they entered, despite the transparent lizards on the walls and the nondescript, locally made furniture. It was the table that did it: a round table with a heavy, curlicued central leg, and a yellow cloth falling flounced, a lamp in the middle. Within the circle of its light there was a European interior, an interior contained by the early darkness of winter afternoons, the wet, tapping winds of winter nights. But the windows were wide open to lukewarm darkness and the ear-ringing racket of insects.

Coffee and a black-rich chocolate cake with a bowl of whipped cream stood on the table. Dando ate three pieces. Margot Wentz had the calm of preoccupation or exhaustion. She seemed hardly aware of Dando and Bray, beyond the necessity to feed them, and it was unlikely that she had known, earlier, that they were in the hotel. She gave a wavering smile now and then, in answer to one of the guests, but she did not seem to hear her husband although he talked on, relating anecdotes that drew upon and assumed her participation, and quoting her opinions as if she were confirming them.

“A schnapps with the coffee,” he insisted, and although Bray wanted no more to drink Roly Dando said, “Ah, lovely,” and Hjalmar, still blond and handsome in a sun-toughened, run-down way, began to shuffle about the room opening cupboards and fussing like an old man. “It’s aquavit, should be here … where now … I’m half a Dane, you know, it’s my national whad’you-call it, tipple, yes….” Good God, what only isn’t pushed in here….” Piles of torn-off envelopes with stamps fell to the floor, curled-up photographs, bank deposit slips, box-top free offers of this and that. He began to look behind the volumes of philosophical and political works that filled rickety bookshelves; there were books all over the room, Shaw and O’Neill and Dos Passos and Auden, in English, Hesse, Hauptmann and Brecht and Rilke in German, psychology in German and English — a quick glance established that this was the remnant of the once-indispensable library of people young in Europe in the Thirties who had not had the money or the space to add to it, nor the strength of mind ever to leave it behind.

“What is it that you want, Hjalmar?” Margot Wentz said suddenly in a ringing voice, patient and strong. She had her back to him.

“No, it’s all right, the aquavit, wasn’t there a bottle still from Christmas, the one Vibeke — I’m just — wait a minute—”

She got up with the determined sleep-walking gait of someone who has the plan of cupboards, nooks, niches, and their contents clear in her mind as a cross-section of an anthill under glass, and took a bottle from behind a stand of gramophone records in worn covers. “Here you are, Hjalmar.”

He went on marvelling over how he had thought it was here or there, he knew he had put it somewhere, and she continued to stand for a moment, looking at him as if waiting for the whir of some piece of clockwork to die down.

Their daughter, Emmanuelle, slipped in and cut herself a piece of cake. “Yes, I know you,” she said directly to Bray when her father began the introductions; the night at the Independence party, when she had sat like a small animal holed up against pursuit and had not so much as acknowledged the presence of the middle-aged stranger talking to Ras Asahe, was suddenly presented as a shared intimacy. She deliberately cut the cake at an angle, apparently to avoid the filling, careless of the fact that she had spoiled it for the next person. She sat nibbling little broken-off pieces, holding them in long, thin, sallow hands. Her hunched shoulders showed deep hollows above and below collar-bones on which the greenish slippery skin shone in the heat. In a way she reminded Bray of one of those pictures of Oriental famine victims — all eyes and bones; but her legs under the short shapeless dress were beautiful, the thighs slender but feminine, the kneecaps round.

Stephen was straightening the books his father had disarranged. “Oh, ma, I’ve got the name of the stuff to kill those things.”

“What things?” said his mother, not turning.

“Those things that are eating the bindings.”

“Silverfish,” she said.

“You can get it from the chemist. It’s called Eradem, you just sprinkle it on the shelves.”

She said, “He knows how to stop them being eaten up but he never opens one.”

Wentz was talking to the two guests but the interjection came from him like a voice taking over a medium. “What time has he got. You know he hardly gets through the schoolwork.”

“That’s right.”

His attention hung in the air a moment, probing her; then he took up again the discussion of the new university, disagreeing with Bray that the concentration ought to be on the sciences, in particular engineering.

“Well I don’t see how any one of these new African universities is going to find enough students of a suitable educational level to fill places in half-a-dozen different faculties,” Bray was saying. “The sensible solution would be for those countries linked by geographical, economic, and other ties to plan a kind of federation of higher education, each university concentrating on one or two faculties, and drawing upon all the territories for students. Here, I think the university should start off by offering degree courses in engineering and medicine only. The people who want to read the humanities have Makerere and Lusaka to go to. That way you could build up firstclass teaching staff and equipment, instead of spreading the jam so thin and lowering standards.”

“Then you’ll still have to have some kind of interim programme — I don’t know … something between the school and the university. For the general level of education of your youngsters — also the ones who are going to go to the universities in neighbouring countries, nnh?”

“No one’s questioning that,” Dando said. “It’s a recognized principle — a school of further study or some such.”

“But what’s against combining it with the university, then? That’s what they’re really doing, by lowering the entrance qualifications here. You just take a little longer to go through your degree course, that’s all. But if the university would specialize, Colonel, then you’ve got to have this extra school or whatever, another foundation, another administration, just for the people who are going to study law or languages somewhere outside.”

“What’s needed is technologists, mining engineers, electrical engineers, my dear Hjalmar, not a lot of patriotic idiots writing theses on African literature!” Dando exploded.

“If I want to read law, I don’t know where I’ll go,” Stephen said, pleased.

“Not law, for you,” Hjalmar said. “If you’ve got to get out, you can’t practise law in another country. That’s the way to get caught.”

“Come on, Hjalmar, you drop-out, you could do some teaching at a college preparing people for university, you could contribute something to the nation.”

Wentz poured Dando another glass of aquavit. “Kant and Hegel for the graduates of the mission schools.” Smiling at himself: “If I remember anything to teach.”

“If you can teach, you should,” Bray said. And added, turning to Margot Wentz, “Why do we say that with such certainty, always? How does one know what is right for other people to do?” She took it with a considering smile, like an apology. She said quietly to her daughter, “And how was your cocktail party?”

The girl shrugged and looked into a distance.

“The trade commissioner for the People’s Republic of China, wasn’t it?” said Hjalmar, for the guests, knowing perfectly well what it was. “Very elegant. With paper lanterns and fireworks. Yes!” He pulled a comically impressed face, as at the feat of a precocious child.

Emmanuelle suddenly grinned delightfully. “You should’ve seen Ras bowing from the waist. Everybody bowing from the waist. A eurythmics class. A man’s invited Ras and me to some youth thing in China. He had a long talk with me — through an interpreter of course. Asked me how I’d broken free of neo-colonialist influence. I didn’t know what to say.”

Her brother said to her, “Why does Ras always say ‘longwedge’ for ‘language’, he talks about African ‘longwedges’? Sounds so funny.”

“Go to hell.” Emmanuelle sat up straight.

Stephen laughed, protested. “No, really, why does he … I mean it sounds … I always notice it. …”

She was raised like a cobra, her small head ready to strike. “Get back to your beer bottles.”

His half-afraid, uncomfortable laughter made him writhe; but she was the one who left the room, ignoring everyone. “Hi, Emmanuelle, where’re you going?” Dando called. “Aren’t you going to play the flute for me tonight? What have I done to you, my beauty? Come here!”

“Not Emmanuelle,” said Margot Wentz.

“She’s good, she’s good,” Dando said to Bray.

“Yes, you must hear her another time,” her mother said.

“But there’s no one to teach her, here, that is the trouble,” Hjalmar said. “She’s really very talented. She plays the violin, too. She gets it from Margot’s father, it’s rather nice, she was named for him, too. Emmanuel Gottlieb, the physicist, you might have heard of …?”

Margot Wentz waved away the possibility.

“You should hear how she can play African instruments, Colonel Bray,” Stephen said. “That little hand-piano thing? What she gets out of it! The thing you play with your thumbs.”

“You know Ras Asahe, from broadcasting?” said Hjalmar. “He’s going to do a programme with her playing local instruments. I don’t know what it’s about. He has all sorts of ideas.”

“I used to know his father,” Bray said. “They’re a bright family.”

Everyone was rather tired. There was the sort of silence that winds up an evening. Hjalmar Wentz looked quickly at his wife, and then slowly from Dando to Bray. He spoke in a low tone, a gesture to the presence of the boy, Stephen. “One doesn’t know quite what do do, in these circumstances. You saw tonight. He takes her about everywhere. He must be at least twelve years older; a man of the world. Normally one wouldn’t hesitate to put a stop to it. If he were a white man. But as it is, it’s awkward. … As soon as Margot says anything to Emmanuelle, she thinks … As if, with us, that would ever come into it!” His face was full of the hurt his daughter had no doubt not hesitated to fling at him.

Stephen proclaimed his presence. “Emmanuelle’ll use anything to get her own way.”

But Margot Wentz had the closed, dreamy face of one who is angry to hear private matters put before strangers. They spoke of trivial, friendly things for a few minutes before leaving.

Chapter 4

The invitation to lunch with Mweta came with a telephone call from Joy Mweta herself. Bray had already talked to her at various receptions and they had danced together — for the first time in all the years he had known her — at the Independence Ball. “You know where we’re living now, of course?” she said in her cheerful, chuckling voice, and they laughed. The newspapers had made much of the fact that until the day the President moved into what had been the Governor’s Residence, he had continued to live in the little three-roomed, tin-roofed house in Kasalete Township which had been his home ever since he and Joy came to the capital from Gala. “Is it a formal lunch?” She was a little scornful— “Adamson just wants to see you. At least I hope it will be only you. My baby says to me, mama, why do all these people come and live with us?”

“Which baby is that? Telema?”

“You’re behind the times! Telema’s in standard six. And Mangaliso’s nearly ten — the one that was born after you left. The baby’s another boy, Stanley, he’s two-and-a-half.”

“Good work, Joy. How’s Stanley’s Gala? I need someone to practise on, someone not old enough to be too hard on my mistakes.”

“Oh what do you think! Do I talk English to my children?”

He had the use of the Bayleys’ second car, now, so he drove himself to the Governor’s Residence — nobody remembered, yet, to call it the Presidential Residence. There had always been some sort of attempt at a characterless formal garden on the entrance side — pot-bellied palms and beds of regimented annuals — but he was pleased to see, while he was stopped at the gates for the sentries to check his bona fides by telephone with the house, a family of women, children, and cooking pots whose presence was given away by a thread of smoke coming from the shrubs behind the guard-house. Perhaps they were even kinsfolk of Joy or Mweta; Bray wondered how Mweta would deal with the rights of the extended family, in a house obviously large enough, on the face of it, to accommodate one and all.

Of course, it didn’t look like a house; at least, not in Africa. He felt this with a chill, for Mweta, as Vivien’s old Renault gritted over the raked gravel to the entrance. It was neo-classical, with a long double row of white pillars holding up a portico before a great block of local terracotta brick and mica-tinselled stone, row upon row of identical windows like a barracks. The new coat-of-arms was in place on the façade. The other side, looking down upon the park as if Capability Brown had been expected but somehow failed to provide the appropriate sweep of landscaped lawn, artificial lake, pavilion, and deer, was not so bad. The park itself, simply the leafier trees of the bush thinned out over seven or eight acres of rough grass, was — as he remembered it — full of hoopoes and chameleons who had been there to begin with, anyway. It had been saved because one of the first Governors had wanted it to simulate the conditions of the local golf-course — he practised his drives from the double-staircased terrace.

A black man in the white drill, gloves, and red fez worn by domestic servants at colonial residences opened the door, and a young, top-heavy black man wearing blue pin-stripe and a white carnation ushered Bray to a private sitting-room. He was Mweta’s new secretary, but there was also a young white man hovering with an aide-de-camp’s social ease. Bray had heard about him: formerly a P.R.O. at the biggest mining house, who had been taken on mainly to protect Mweta from the availability to his people that had characterized him as a party leader. They still expected simply to be able to walk in and talk to Mweta; no black secretary could hope to withstand the importuning of women from the Church of Zion or old peasants with a grievance, when such people were told that it was now necessary to apply in writing for an interview with the President.

“What luck for me, Colonel Bray, I’m Clive Small, my aunt Diana Raikes used to be a friend of your wife’s, I remember her reading out a letter from your wife just before you left this country that time — most impressive. I think it was one of the things that roused my interest in the place — I was a student, still.” The young white man’s red-tanned forehead was gilded with hair bright at the brow-line and temples, he had the well-cut lips and slightly bushy, antennae-eyebrows of a man attractive to women. He wore skin-fitting linen trousers and a gay pink shirt, and gently took over from the elderly African butler the preparation of the martini jug. “You know I like to fuss with this, Nimrod. We’ve got a new division-of-labour system going in this department.”

“The President will be with you in a few moments, sir.” The secretary turned from Bray to Small in an exchange of the casual, cosy asides of people who breathe fumes of power and palace intrigue so habitually that these seem to them an air like any other. “Did you prevail?”

The black man heh-hehed that things couldn’t have gone otherwise: “Well, what could he say? ‘We very much regret’—all that kind of thing.”

“The big man will be de-lighted. Just wait. De-lighted. And Douglas? I’ll bet his nose is ninety degrees out of joint. Mm?”

When Mweta came in, they stood aside, flanking him, smiling as if they had produced him.

He wore the sensible if stylistically confused tunic that had been adopted by the Party, years ago (somewhere between a Mao blouse and a bush jacket) but there was something turned-out about him. He came to Bray before Bray could approach. Their hands held fast, they almost swayed, smiling, Mweta laughing up at him, and the two others standing there, smiling. “About time. About time,” Mweta kept saying. “Always across the room, in the crowd! I just catch your eye, and then there’s another face there.”

“It’s strange to be stopped on the road and see you go by, waving at us all.”

Mweta hunched his shoulders and laughed like a boy who has had to show off a little. “But it was always for you, if you were there, James, you know that, it was certainly for you.”

The butler was carrying round a tray with Mr. Small’s martinis, and a glass of orange squash for Mweta. Yet Mweta’s voice and spirits rose, in the talk and laughter, just as if the alcohol were rising in his bloodstream as in the others’. He had always had this self-intoxication, this flooding vividness that was at once what brought people to him and what their presence released in him. Years ago, he would turn up in a village on his bicycle and before he’d got his breath back from the ride there would be a group around him, and his voice quickly heard above the others, holding the others. Later his face gleamed wet with excitement when he would talk for two hours to some football ground holding a crowd tight as cells in one organism, a monster speaking his name as if booming from the mouth of a cave: MWETA. He developed the technique of long pauses, space for swelling, echoing, wavering response. They yelled; he took it; he began to speak once more. Once Olivia had been overcome— “There’s something horrible — it’s as if they coax some precious secretion from him — like ants stroking captive aphids.”

The secretary, Wilfrid Asoni, had the beaming professional ploy of making the President’s interests his own. “Mr. President, it seems we can thank Colonel Bray for the services of our friend Clive, here. Oh indirectly, I mean, but just the same.”

“Oh your sphere of influence, again, Mweta,” said Bray. “Imagine how it’s going to be, operating internationally — I wonder if U.N. realizes.”

“No, no, yours, James.”

“Well, even if you think so, don’t tell them. You mustn’t be too friendly with a has — been like me.”

“But you were, how shall I say, born out of your time—”

“—deported out of it, anyway, wouldn’t you say, sir,” Small slipped in, through laughter.

“—You’re now at last where you belong, now, now, building the state with us. Isn’t that so? Of course!”

Their raised voices and laughter brought the high, overlarge room down to comfortable size. Blue cigarette smoke hung a haze over the view through the french doors of the bush in the park, retreated into the heat-haze of midday. Now and then Bray’s attention drifted out there in counterpoint to the talk; the shimmering tremble seemed to spread through his own consciousness, smoothing, soothing, wavering it away into a state of suspension; the small happiness of warm climates. Into the close male company came Joy Mweta, followed, or rather preceded, circled, and assailed by several of her children and a prancing dog. For a few minutes there was pandemonium in the room; Bray had not seen two of the children before, the third had been an infant when he left the country: they wore white socks and the eleven- and ten-year-old had already lost the shyness of African children and talked confidently to their elders, demanding and complaining; only the little one clung to his mother’s hams and peeped round suspiciously. Mweta spoke to them in Gala and they spilled out onto the terrace; then the dog showed a preference for the shade of the room, and the carpet, and the littlest boy rushed in again to get him out. His brother and sister followed; Clive Small swung the little one round. “By the legs! By the legs!” the others begged. “Your mother’s made that taboo, Mangaliso, she’s afraid I might drop you on your head and you’ll be bottom of the class ever after.”

“I’m thirteenth and there are thirty — five in our class,” the child volunteered to Bray.

The smallest climbed onto Mweta, a wet — lipped little creature, breathing heavily, with round, exposed nostrils and round eyes that make a reproach of every black infant’s face.

“I haven’t told you,” Bray said, “I’m a grandfather. I got a cable only this morning. Venetia’s had a daughter.”

“Venetia!” Mweta was shaking his head. “You remember I used to take her for a ride on the back of my bicycle? — And she used to make posters for us,” he said to Joy, whom he had married after Venetia had gone to school in England. “Yes, this little girl was a very young supporter of PIP. Posters announcing the date and place of meetings and so on. And slogans. Clive, she once showed such a poster to the Colonial Secretary — who was it, then, James? That’s right — he was here after the first London talks with Shinza, that time — and he went on a tour of the Gala district, of course”—everyone laughed— “to see where all this independence nonsense started, and to see what sort of fellow this Bray was who didn’t seem to be stopping it — and while he was in the boma that day and he went home to the D.C.’s house for lunch, he asks this little girl, the D.C.’s daughter, what’s that nice picture you’re painting, and Venetia says, it’s not a picture, it’s a poster, look! What’s it for, little girl? Can’t you see? she says. For the PIP rally, of course!”

Bray was nodding and laughing.

“She was proud of her painting. Eh?” said Mweta. “Why not?” And they all laughed again, and drew from Bray his version of the story, with interjections from Mweta, who grew more excited with every flourish.

“Years afterwards,” Bray said, “Venetia took me aside and asked me, very seriously, to tell her the truth: was it partly through her that I got kicked out? She said that ever since she’d grown up she’d begun to think about it and have it on her conscience.”

Mweta’s eyes narrowed emotionally. “Venetia! She must come here with her husband, eh, James. She should have been with us for Independence.”

“What about a photograph?” Small said to Asoni. “Wilfrid’s dying to try out his new camera, sir.”

They all straggled onto the terrace; the heat seemed to foreshorten them, their voices rang against the façade of the house. Bray and Mweta stood together, Bray stooping and embarrassed, Mweta smiling with a hand on his arm. The dog ran across the picture. The secretary took it again. Then there was one with Joy and the children; they put their feet together and folded their arms.

“We’re getting a swing and slide,” Mangaliso said.

“And a jungle gym.” The little one spoke to Bray for the first time.

“The Princess said it.”

Joy laughed. “Yes, the Princess was full of good ideas. She was telling me everything I should do. She said we should wall off a part of the garden and make it specially for the children, with swings and so on. You know, I mean she is used to living in this sort of place. She said you must have somewhere your own — specially for kids.”

“Oh they got on like a house on fire,” Mweta said. “Joy knows all the secrets of Buckingham Palace.”

“Nonsense, she doesn’t even live there.”

“And the wife of the Chinese Ambassador, they were great friends too. She speaks English quite well.”

“She wants me to come to Peking and speak about African women.” Joy challenged him, smiling at Bray.

“Joy was always a great asset,” Bray said.

“That’s what I tell him.”

The children had pulled off their shoes and socks and the close fuzz on the baby’s head was full of grass. A guilty wet patch had no sooner appeared on his trousers before the heat began to dry it again. One of the white-suited domestics hovered in the shadow of the house with the announcement of lunch, but could not find an opportunity to catch anyone’s attention. The secretary and the P.R.O. were fiddling with the Polaroid camera. Then the picture emerged, and everyone crowded to see. By now the party had been joined by a woman with blonde baby-hair drawn up on top of her head in thin curls. Like many women, she bore the date of her vintage year in the manner of her make-up: the pencil-line of the Dietrich eyebrows on the bald fine English skin above each blue eye, the well-powdered nose and fuchsia-pink mouth. She wore navy blue with a small diamond brooch somewhere towards one shoulder. Bray was introduced to Mrs. Harrison with the quick, smooth exchange of people who have learned the same basic social conventions in the same decade and country. Mweta and Bray and Joy were gossiping about the Independence celebrations; the children were jumping up round Wilfrid Asoni and Small, reaching for the camera. “Wait, wait, Mangaliso — do you want your picture taken? Not even with Bimbo?”

Mrs. Harrison’s high clear Englishwoman’s voice sailed in: “Children — I wonder who’s been borrowing my sécateur? Do you know, Mangaliso? I should think Mangaliso might know, wouldn’t you, Telema?”

The children dropped to earth, cut down. They stood there, wriggling, turning their feet on the grass, looking at each other. Under her eyes were made plain the shoes and socks tossed about, the wet patch drying between the little one’s legs.

“Mangaliso!” said Joy.

“I shall give you a pair of sécateur for your birthday,” the woman said to the child, “but you must be sure not to borrow mine. I need my sécateur, you know.”

He smiled at her, frowning, pleading to be out of the limelight; he had taken the pruning — shears, but he didn’t know what “sécateur” meant.

“That’s a good boy,” Mrs. Harrison said. “Mrs. Mweta, I’m afraid if you don’t go into lunch cook’s soufflé will be a pancake. He’s in quite a state.”

“Oh my goodness — what time is it? We were having a photo — Adamson, we must have lunch.” She was laughing and bustling, confused. The children were sent off, with some difficulty; Mrs. Harrison was standing in the sitting — room, her eyes taking some sort of private inventory, when the party filed through. Then they had to wait a few minutes for Joy, who had taken the children to their quarters. She came back giggling and apologizing and fell in with Bray. “They can’t understand why we don’t eat together any more.”

“Well, can’t you, sometimes? When you’re alone.”

“Never alone!” she explained, with a slight lift of the shoulders to indicate Small and Asoni. “Even if there’re no visitors.”

“You’re not letting that Mrs. Whatnot run the place?” Bray said accusingly.

She laughed at him. “No, no, there’s a cousin of mine from home, and my sister-in-law’s little sister. They’ve come to help. You know, during the celebrations there were some days when I never had time to see the children at all.” She had dropped her voice, perhaps because the atmosphere of the cool dining-room, as they entered, was so different from the noisy family party on the terrace. Her large, matronly but still young body took the chair at the foot of the table sub-duedly. Mweta took the head with something like resignation, as if it were the conference table. Behind each person a servant stood. Mweta did not even seem aware of their presence, but Joy would catch the smooth inattention of one or another, now and then, and half-whisper something in the local language. There was smoked salmon. And a cheese soufflé, and cold duck. Mweta, while talking about American foreign policy, carefully removed every vestige of the thin layer of aspic that covered the meat. “I really don’t see it matters whether it’s due to having got overinvolved in Vietnam, or whether, as this authority you’ve mentioned says, America’s reached the end of an outward-looking phase and must concentrate on problems at home, or because, as some of my ministers have it, she has found influence hard to buy even with dollars. If America wants to withdraw”—he put up his palms— “all right, she’s strong enough to do it. If she says to the hungry, no wheat unless you can pay, right, she does it. And the old scare story about who’s going to fill the vacuum — not interested any more. But we can’t do that. The only surplus the African states have got is a surplus of debts and need. We’re struggling. We’re forced to buy maize from South Africa, this from that country, that from the other, we are tied together like a three — legs race with all sorts of people. The economic structure of colonial times trips us up all the time. Of course we have to help each other. — But mind you, that doesn’t mean we always understand each other’s problems. It doesn’t mean I must let myself be told by the OAU how to run this country, eh?” He looked at the dome of pink mousse being offered at his elbow and said to his wife, “I thought we were going to have ordinary food in the middle of the day-wasn’t that decided, from now on?”

“Yes, I know—”

“No fancy things. Just a bit of fruit.”

“Yes, Mrs. Harrison says it is fruit — made of fruit.”

He hesitated and then plunged the spoon with a squelch and put a dollop on his plate. “What am I to Obote? The lime for the cement he’d have to pay a third again as much for if he had to import it from somewhere else. What’s Nyerere’s health to me? The low tariff for our goods at Dar-es-Salaam—”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you, Adamson — what are the prospects for Kundi Bay?”

“Better ask Mr. Small about that. He’s just been there water-skiing.” Mweta smiled and shovelled up the last of the pudding.

“Well, I can’t give you an expert opinion on its prospects as a harbour, but I was telling Mr. President it certainly has great possibilities as a resort. The beaches are better than those on the Mombasa stretch, far more beautiful. Marvellous skin-diving and goggling — what you need is to interest Mr. Hilton in putting up one of his hotels.”

“It’s within a hundred miles of the game park at Talawa — Teme, another tourist attraction,” Asoni announced to Bray. He murmured agreeably in polite English response; he and Olivia and the children had camped there at Kundi, once, when it was nothing more than a fishing village, though it was said to have been used as a harbour for slavers early in the nineteenth century, and there were the remains of a small fort. Just before Independence a team of Italian experts had been out to examine the possibility of building a harbour big enough to handle tankers and large merchant vessels. “When’s the report to be published?” His voice dodged round the starched sleeve of a servant.

‘Oh it’s being studied,” said Mweta, with a smile that closed the subject. Joy Mweta was saying, “I want Adamson to build a little house down there. The children have never seen the sea. Just a small little house, you know?”

“The only thing was, I got absolutely eaten up by tsetse fly, my arm was like a sausage. No, not the beach — on the road, the road from the game park.”

“—But that will be eliminated,” Asoni said, “they will be eradicated. It has been done in the North. The department has it in hand. Anything can be done, today. We are living in the age of science. The mosquito has gone. The tsetse will go.”

“It will be paradise.” Mweta gave one of his famous gestures, one hand opening out the prospect over the table, the long room, the country, and laughed. As they rose from their chairs, he squeezed Bray’s arm, hard, a moment.

After coffee in the sitting — room Mweta took Bray to his study. The Harrison woman had come in a convention of apology glossing firmness, to speak to Joy Mweta about something, and Joy had gone to her at once with the half — nervous, prideful air of a favoured pupil summoned by the headmistress. Clive Small said as Mweta passed, “By the way, sir, I’ll take care of those people from Fort Howard if the call comes through.”

“And Wilfrid knows about it?” He turned, and he and Asoni exchanged a few words in Gala. “All right. But please, if the chief’s brother insists …”

“No need to worry, I’ll handle him like a butterfly,” said Small, tightening his handsome mouth. He saluted Bray gaily. “Hope very much to see you again, sir.”

The corridors of the place were paved with echoing black and white tiles. Mweta held open the door, first, into a men’s cloakroom. When Bray came out of the lavatory Mweta was standing there waiting for him; they might have been on some London railway station. Bray was amused, with the touching sense of finding the friend, intact, behind the shifting superimpositions of a public self. One did not have to say, confronting the portrait in the toga, is this what he is now? The figure in the toga, the sacred vessel on the velvet-draped dais, they were all simply this rather short man with his head thrown back, in full possession of all these images. He did it all the way he used to jump on the bicycle and pedal to the next village and the next.

Yet the study was oppressive. Heavy curtains made a maroon, churchy light. An enormous desk with a leather top. Leather chairs. A sofa upholstered in something woolly with a tinsel thread running through it. It might have been the office of a company director; it had all been furnished for him by someone who saw him as another sort of tycoon, a black villager who found himself, by political accident, nominal supra-chairman of the mining companies that were the country. It probably had been done, indeed, by somebody on loan from the Company — who else would there have been who had any ideas of how a top man should be set up? But this speculation came from hostility towards the room; perhaps it was merely the way the Governor had left it, like the rest of the house.

Mweta hesitated at the big chair behind the desk but walked away again. He began to walk about the room as if they were waiting for someone. “I never dreamed it would be so long. Every day I wanted to phone and say come over …? I felt worried about it, eh? You wouldn’t believe me but there isn’t a half-hour — every day — there hasn’t been a half-hour — when there wasn’t something that had to … somebody to see …”

“But that’s how it must be,” Bray said, from the sofa.

“Yes, I know. But if you’re here, James—”

“Doesn’t matter who’s here.”

“I suppose so.” His eyes disowned the jolly, officially welcoming tone of lunch, that kept creeping back in intrusion.

Bray said, “You’re the President.”

“But not with you.”

“Oh yes.” Bray put himself firmly in his place.

Mweta looked deserted. He had the strange combination — the smile affirming life, and in the eyes, the politician’s quick flicker. “I don’t even know where my books are. I think they must still be over at Freedom Building.”

“I was up there to have a look at the old place on Friday.” The shoddy block behind the main streets of the town, leased from an Indian merchant, had been PIP headquarters from the years when all they could afford was one back room.

“Well, Freedom Building is over at parliament now!”

“Of course it’ll be seen to that the Party machine doesn’t run down,” Bray said.

But Mweta had not forgotten the polite English way of making a warning sound like an assumption. He laughed.

“How could that be?”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. Specially in the rural areas. People could feel nearly as remote from what goes on in parliament as they did when it wasn’t their government, you know.”

“That’s what I’ve got ministers of local government for. And I’ll still see as many people as possible, myself. I want to tour the whole country at least every few months, but already I’ve had to take on this fellow … at Freedom Building people used to come and see me any time of the day or night, and sometimes when Joy got up in the morning she found someone already sitting in the yard….”

“He’s essential, I should say. For the time being, anyway. People will get used to it. They’ll learn to understand.”

“Oh he manages very well. But it’s not what I want.”

“What’s she doing here — the Englishwoman?”

“She was here before — she did the flower vases, things like that,” said Mweta. “And for the celebrations, Joy wanted someone, she wasn’t sure she could manage.”

“Everything went off splendidly,” said Bray. “Not a hitch anywhere.”

“Let’s go out there.” Mweta stood up in the middle of the room as if he were shedding it. They took the first door from the corridor into the park and fell into strolling step together, over the rough grass and under the sprinkled shade, as they had done, walking and talking, years ago. Mweta was smaller and more animated than Bray, and seen from the distance of the house, as they got farther away their progress would have been a sort of dance, with the small man surging a step ahead and bringing up short the attention of the taller one. They paused or went on, in pace with the rise and fall of discussion. Mweta was telling a story that displayed the unexpected shrewdness of Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, about whom Bray had heard many doubts expressed, not only by Roly Dando. “Of course if I’d kept Foreign Affairs for myself, Tola Tola would have been the one for Finance, but it was decided I couldn’t hope to do it.”

“No, how could you.” No mention of the obvious choice of Shinza.

“Well, others have tried. In any case”—they exchanged a look— “Tola Tola’s always there if Malenga needs advice.” Again, in spite of the silence over Shinza, so much taken for granted between them brought a qualifying remark: “If Malenga would ever admit it.”

They dismissed this with smiles. “What I might do”—Mweta gave way to the urge to seek reassurance for the rightness of decisions already made— “in a few months time — next year — if I reshuffle, I’d give Tom Msomane the Interior, shift Talisman Gwenzi to Finance, perhaps a double portfolio, let him keep Mines—” Bray’s silence stopped him. “I know what people say about Tom. But he’s a chap who can handle things, you know? — he’s shrewd but he can pick up a delicate situation without smashing it. He’s got, you know, tact. And for the Interior — problems of refugees, deportations, and so on. You should see the file. Just waiting for the celebrations to be over, and then they must be opened.” He gave a rough, nervous sniff. “I am thinking seriously about Tom.”

Bray said, “But for the Interior. Doesn’t he take too personal a view? Won’t he be inclined to settle old scores?”

“Well, maybe, that may be, but being in office, the responsibilities and so on. I think he’ll be all right. Sometimes you have to take one risk against another.”

Bray didn’t know whether Mweta was inviting a question about Mso support, or not. His face was screwed up, momentarily, in a grimace against the sun or his thoughts; perhaps he felt he had made enough confessions.

“I’d rather see him safe in Posts and Telegraphs, myself.”

Mweta nodded to acknowledge the joke, rather than in agreement.

“Adamson, you never thought about Shinza — for Foreign Minister?” He phrased it carefully that way, but Mweta was quick to take it up the way it really was— “Look, I’m prepared to do something for Edward because”—he shook his head wildly as if to get rid of something— “because he thinks he taught me everything, and — because the past is the past, I’m not the one to try to get away from that. — But what it can be, I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

“He’s a brilliant man.”

“You still think so?”

“Oh come, you know so.”

“James,” Mweta said, making it clear this was to please him, “what can I offer Shinza? You think an under — secretaryship or something like that? Because that’s all I’ve got. And it wouldn’t be what he wants. He wants to change the world and use me and this country to do it for him, never mind what happens to the country in the meantime. I can make him an under-secretary — that’s all.”

“You can’t do that.”

Mweta opened his firm lips and closed them again without having spoken.

“I should be inclined,” said Bray, hearing himself come out more gently pontifical than he had wished, “to find him some special position not directly involved in actual government, but recognizing his claims to elder-statesmanship-out-of-office. Mm? I should have thought he’d have done darned well as representative at U.N., for instance. For a start.” He remained old-maidishly composed while Mweta stared at him in bitter astonishment. “Our ambassador to United Nations? Edward Shinza? After what he said? After what he said to the Commonwealth Secretary? His so-called minority reports at the last conference, not six months before Independence? After what we’ve had from him?”

“Make him spokesman for the majority and you’ll see. You talk as if he’d started a rival party.”

“He acts as if he has! A lot of people think it would be better if he had! Come out in the open!” Mweta began levelling with his heel a trail of fresh molehills on the grass. “—What a nuisance, these things — If he stops sulking away down there at home, well … It’s up to him….”

“I hope you’re not going to let him sulk.”

“You’ve been to see him, James?”

“I don’t know if I’ll get the chance. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be here for Independence.”

Mweta shrugged; appealed suddenly. “We’re going to talk every few weeks like this. We’ll make it a regular thing.” They had turned back towards the house, rising red and solid out of the hazy, unassertive shapes of the bush.

“But my dear Adamson, I shall have to go back pretty soon. I was thinking of next week. You’re all getting down to work again now. Time the guests left.”

Mweta stopped again. “Back? But you are back.”

“I don’t know what I could do, if I stayed,” Bray said, smiling.

The conventions would make it easy for them both; whenever they reached this point they had simply to go on following his polite pretence that he had never thought of himself as anything but a visitor, and Mweta’s polite pretence that a place had been provided for him as something other than that. It was so easy, very tempting — he looked at the ugly house looming up in their way — one could walk round the past they had inhabited, as one does round a monument.

“No, no, now don’t—” Mweta said with some difficulty, as years ago he would have said of someone from the Colonial Office: “They mustn’t come their English with me.” He said grudgingly, “What is it you’re doing over there in England, really?”

“Yes, it’s a very lazy sort of life, I suppose, it’s quite astonishing how well one takes to doing very little—” Bray turned the question to an accusation, cheerfully admitted; making it easy for the other man — it was part of the game.

Mweta didn’t answer, implying that this sort of waffle could not reach him. But he didn’t do much better, himself; in the cross voice that disguises lack of conviction, using the hearty “we,” he said, “What nonsense to talk about going next week. We can’t allow that.”

They turned to other things. Mweta wanted to discuss the Kundi harbour report, after all, now that they were alone. He watched Bray’s face when he came to the points about which he himself was particularly worried. There was the old sense of seeking correction of his own assumptions and findings. Then they found themselves back at the house again, with the young men in attendance, Joy going in and out, and the Harrison woman pouring tea. Telephones rang, the secretary brought in a cable, Mweta was called away and Bray waited to say good — bye to him. When he returned the convention fell quickly into place again; it was all bonhomie, playful scolding and exaggeratedly graceful regrets, plans, and promises— “We don’t want to hear this talk about England, ay?” “All right, not a word about England.” “I’ve told him, England’s for old men to go back and die in, ay?” Joy would phone again; they would be meeting at a reception the following week, anyway. Mweta’s lively hand was firm on his shoulder. Yes, that was fine, Bray said. (He would be gone by then; his flight was already booked.) Mweta insisted on coming out onto the steps of the entrance. He looked young, quick, beaming, waved his hand with a pause, like a salute, and then turned away inside at once. Already he existed like that, for the future, in Bray’s mind. He would have rejected with distaste any suggestion that Mweta had been a protégé, but he did have, that day, the sense of relinquishment with which, as an interested party, an older person sees a young one launched and going out of sight.

For some reason he had not given Olivia an exact date for his return, though his seat on the plane was booked; he was thinking he perhaps might stop off in Spain for a week, on the way. He had never really had a proper look at the Prado.

Three days before he was to leave a letter came, delivered by hand. Mweta asked him to accept an immediate appointment as special educational adviser — a newly created post — to investigate the organization of schools, technical schools, and adult education projects in the provinces, beginning with the largest, the northern province, Gala. He stopped himself from reading it through again. He passed it over to Roly Dando.

“Someone thought that one up quickly,” Dando said.

They roared with laughter, not because anything was funny, but because Bray was moved and excited in a way that couldn’t be acknowledged. Shut away there behind a Great Wall of responsibilities, echoed by sycophants, surrounded by the jailers of office, Mweta had torn out of the convention: Mweta hadn’t believed any of it for a minute.

Dando couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Bray’s been offered the Ministry of Pot-hooks and Carpentry, is that it — oh yes, but what he’d really been angling for was Pectoral Development and Backscratching, well, so I’ve heard.” People laughed but understood that there was something in it; appointments were being handed out every day as the administrative changeover took place and various development plans got off to a start. Most of the appointees were unpronounceable names and black faces that the white shopkeepers and mine officials had never heard of before. But in law, agriculture, public health and education, there were many white men: foreign experts, and a few familiar faces, like that of Colonel Evelyn James Bray, who, in the old days, had shown themselves more concerned with the interests of the Africans than with the life of the white people in the colony. Among the group in which Bray moved in the capital, friends of friends passed through on their way to new projects or jobs in different parts of the country; there was much talk of the finance, equipment, staff or lack of it, that people expected to manage with. Bray was simply another one of them, not quite sure how he would set about what he was supposed to achieve, given no assurance of any particular resources being available to him. Most people thought that this job of his had been an understood thing all along; no one seemed to remember that he had been going home. The drinking party that Roly Dando had arranged as a send-off became just another gathering out at Dando’s place.

The day the letter arrived, a fierce stab of uncertainty had come to Bray when he returned to the room in the garden with it in his pocket. If it had come only three days later, he would have been gone. It would never have brought him back.

Mweta was in Nairobi at a meeting with Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Nyerere, and he did not see him again. When he had talked to the Minister of Education, discussed the terms of reference of his job and settled that he would go to Gala within two weeks, he wrote to Olivia. He told her he “suspected” the job had been created specially in order to offer him something; he did not need to tell her that it was one that needed doing and that perhaps he might be able to do better than most people — she would know that as well as he did. He poked fun at it a little, and said that he’d promised to undertake a trial period of six months or so, long enough to have a good look around and write some sort of preliminary report. He was to get a government house — back to the old “basic furniture supplied.” By the time he’d made sure it was habitable, and that he could get on with some work there, she would come out and join him. Surely Venetia could be trusted to manage the baby by herself, by then? — The only thing he did not tell her was that he had had his seat on a flight back to England when Mweta’s letter came.