A Guest of Honour

Chapter 5

Bray bought himself a secondhand Volkswagen from someone “getting out” and drove north to take up his appointment. He left the capital on a low grey morning that would lift to a hot day; Roly Dando had gone to work but Festus in his cook’s hat and the garden boy stood by to watch him go. Vivien Bayley had brought a present of whatever Penguins she could find at the local bookshop: Diary of a Nobody, The Three Caesars, Stamboul Train, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Plague—“Well, I always think you want to read things you know when you’re living away somewhere, alone.” They were in a basket on the back seat with a bottle of whisky and some files that had come up from the Ministry of Education at the last minute. He drove out through the main street of the town and saw Mrs. Evelyn Odara trying to park her car outside the new post office and several other people whose faces were now familiar to him, going about their daily business. The vendors of wooden animals were polishing them under the flame trees; the unemployed were hawking plastic bags of tomatoes. As the town ravelled out towards the gold mines lorries swayed past him filled with concrete pipes and building materials, stiff pig carcasses from the cold storage and rattling crates from the brewery. Then there were the landscaped approaches to the mine properties themselves, all flowery traffic roundabouts, signboards, and beds of cannas and roses, and then the stretches of neat colour — washed rectangles of housing for the African miners, a geometric pattern scribbled over by the mop — heads of pawpaw trees, smoking chimneys, washing lines, creepers and maize patches, and broken up by the noise and movement of people. In twenty minutes it was all gone; he passed the Bush Hill Arms, its Tudor façade pocked with wasp nests and a “For Sale” notice up (someone else “getting out”), and then there was nothing at all — everything: the one smooth road, the trees, the bamboo, and the sudden open country of the dambos where long grasses hid water, and he saw at last, again, the single long — tailed shrike that one always seemed to see in such places, hovering with its ink — black tail — plume like the brushstroke of a Chinese ideograph.

He drove all morning and met not more than a dozen cars and the top — heavy bus that apparently still did the journey from the Tanzania border twice a week. Where there were African villages, a few bicycles and stragglers appeared on the road. Bags of charcoal leaned here and there on the edge of the silent forest. People lived deep inside this environment as if it were a house; their individual shelters were flimsy. He kept remembering — no, experiencing — things like this, that he had forgotten. In England, sometimes, over the years, he had had dreams that seemed to happen in this country, but it wasn’t this country at all; and even conscious recollection was nothing but psychological memory — something selected to match the emotions engendered in a particular place at specific times.

Dando’s house, left behind, was no more present than Wiltshire. He enjoyed a kind of freedom that he knew would last only until his recognition of his surroundings passed into unthinking acceptance, and he could no longer hold back and view them as the past revisited or a present not yet broken into.

He called at the White Fathers’ Mission at Rungwa River, but Father Benedict was away and he could see that none of the younger ones knew who he was. The swallows still twittered in and out of their mud nests in the refectory, where he was given tea. A loud clanging that he knew so well came from a length of iron suspended from a tree and beaten with a stick, announced the end of school and the hot peace was invaded by yells and the muffled stampede of bare feet. The Fathers were good enough to sell him a couple of gallons of petrol, one working the hand — pump with a grin, his rosary swinging, the other standing by with his hands folded into the sleeves of his cassock and his big, blueish, celibate’s feet placed close together in their rough sandals. The Fathers were shy as young girls. The African schoolboys scuffled and chattered at a distance, and when he called out a greeting, laughed and called back.

There were large villages near the road in this part of the country, smoking up through the forest. The cultivation of land by lopping off the branches of trees and burning them round the trunk, for potash, made druidic circles everywhere. New signs pointed into the bush: “Freedom Bar,” “New York Bar,” “Independence Bar”—crooked letters in English painted on bits of wood. But the generation that had grown up in ten years was as poor and dull — skinned as their fathers had been.

He had had the intention to spend the night at the old Pilchey’s Hotel at Matoko, the usual half — way house. He arrived there earlier than he had thought he would; he was half in mind to drive on but did not know if the government rest — house that used to be at the cattle dipping station, sixty miles north, was still open. The tarred road was long left behind and the ugly little red car looked, as he got out and smoothed his rumpled shirt into his trousers, as cars always did up here. The undersides of the mudguards were rimmed with clay and the fender was plastered with the broken bodies and strange — coloured innards of dead insects.

Heat and silence fell upon him. He tramped over the cracked veranda and looked into the dark of the hotel: a smell of beeswax and insecticide, no one in sight. He knew where the bar was and the sound of his own footsteps accompanied him there, but the door was locked and he felt sure the ship’s bell that hung beside the name “Davy Jones’ Locker” was purely decorative. Back he went to the veranda; there was no main entrance, but screen doors all over the place that gave out long — drawn, dry squeaks behind him and led to a deserted dining — room with fan — folded table napkins and dim green corridors of closed doors. A child’s cot piled with old pillows and the broken marble from an old — fashioned washstand stood where the corridor turned; there was a tray with two empty beer bottles and glasses on the floor.

He went back to the veranda and stretched out his heavy long legs from a chair. He knew this hour; everyone was asleep. If he sat for any length of time he himself would fall into an afternoon sloth. There were borders of orange lilies in the garden, and the same huge sagging aviary, like a heavy spider’s web, behind which blue cranes and guinea fowl pecked at their own feathers in some affliction induced by confinement. He could see their jerking, worrying heads. The farming land was good around here, and when the white farmers got merry in the bar it used to be the thing to bundle one of their number in with the birds. A vast sense of unreality came over him. He noticed a brass bell — push, gleamingly polished, and stuck a forefinger at it, not expecting anything in the way of response. But after a while a very young waiter appeared, with a red fez and a tin tray. He asked for a cold beer and was told Doña was sleeping; the bar would open now — now. “Is it still Doña Pilchey?” Yes, Doña Pilchey was sleeping. This was not Gala country yet, but the local language was related. He spoke to the boy in Gala and was understood; they agreed that the luggage should come out of the car even though he couldn’t have a room until Doña Pilchey woke up. Was the kitchen locked? No, it seemed the kitchen was open. The youngster would make him some tea in the meantime.

While he was drinking it, the shadow of one of the big trees fell across the veranda and seemed to bring a breeze. The heat of the afternoon turned, as it did quite suddenly; one of the guinea fowl began to call. He was no longer used to driving for hours at a stretch. His big body was restless with inactivity. He walked off nowhere in particular, though he knew this road that led from the main road to the Matoko boma about two miles away. The red sand was pleasant to tread on — he had not walked at all, really, in the month in the capital, except in the streets of the town; no one walked — and the coarse sleek grass leaned beneath its own weight on either side of the road, as high as his shoulders. Scarlet weavers with black masks flicked up out of it and hung upside down at the entrance to their nests. A rough driveway marked with whitewashed stones and aloes curved up to a small schoolhouse on a rise and down again. He took the little detour to give some sort of shape to his stroll. There was the school garden — a patch of maize and beans, some staked tomatoes — the length of dangling iron that was the school bell, and, as he walked past the open doorway, the schoolmaster himself sitting at work. The man jumped up and at once started apologizing as if guilty of a grave breach of hospitality and respect. “No sir, I am very sorry, sir, I was just taking the chance to get a little study—” Bray greeted him in Gala, giving him the form of address to be used by respectful pupils towards the master, to put him at ease.

The man was shyly delighted and immediately brought out all he had to offer — the school register, the exercise and text — books of the pupils, all the time explaining and answering Bray’s questions in a slow, anxious way. A pupil who had been sitting with him at the deal table where he was working sat, unable to go on, her hand on her place in a book, listening and smiling faintly in greeting. She looked like a grown woman, but irregular schooling often meant that African schoolchildren were far older than whites. The schoolmaster himself was very thin, black and pigeon — chested under a woollen pullover. His two — roomed school was seven years old; there were some desks but the smaller children, the schoolmaster explained, still sat on the floor. Some of the children who lived far away stayed in children’s huts in the village and walked home at weekends. “This year we are sixty — five” he said, “our biggest year so far. And twenty — one are girls.” He proudly showed a single poster on the damp — mapped walls: OUR LAND — a smiling miner working down a gold mine; smiling fishermen hauling in a catch; a smiling woman picking some crop. Population statistics in green, revenue figures in red. “From the Education Department. Oh yes, we are beginning to get nice, nice things. I am filling in the forms. Now we will get them. I wish you were here when the children are in school, they would sing for you.”

Bray had been sung to so many times by black schoolchildren. “Another time, I hope.”

“My wife teaches the choir. She also teaches the first and second grade.” The young woman was smiling, looking up from one to the other.

“I thought you were one of the young schoolgirls!” Bray said, and they laughed.

“Well, I am teaching her for her Standard Six exam. She goes next month to town for it. She has had four children, you see, her studies were interrupted. But I teach her when I can. She wants to write the teacher’s exams eventually.”

“It’s lucky for you that you married a teacher.” Bray tried to draw her into the conversation.

“And I am working for my O levels, the Cambridge Certificate,” the schoolmaster said, with the urgency of a man who has no one to turn to. “I have here the English paper — not the one I will have to write myself, you understand—’

“I know — a specimen.”

“Yes, the paper written by the students in 1966—you understand. I have a difficulty because there are some words not possible to find—” He went over to the table and brought a small, old, school dictionary.

“I see — well, that wouldn’t have the more unusual words, would it—”

The wife swiftly helped him to find the paper and his exercise book. He went down the paper with his eyes, lips moving a little. Bray noticed how tight his breathing was, as if he had a chest cold. “This one word here — here it is, ‘mollify’ …?”

Bray wanted to laugh, the impulse caught him by the throat as a cough rises; he took the examination paper to play for time, in order to pretend, out of the “civilized” courtesy of his kind, that uncertainty about the meaning of the word was something anyone might share — and this in itself was part of the very absurdity: the assumptions of colonial culture. He read, “Write one of the following letters: (a) To a cousin, describing your experiences on a school tour to the Continent; (b) to your father, explaining why you wish to choose a career in the navy; (c) to a friend, describing a visit to a picture gallery or a film you have enjoyed.”

The schoolmaster wrote down the meaning of “mollify” and showed those questions, ticked off in red ink, that he had been able to answer. “This will be the third time I try,” he said, of the examination.

“Well, good luck to you both.”

“When she goes for the Standard Six she takes our choir along for the big schools competition. Last month they won the best in Rongwa province. Now we don’t know — but we hope, we hope.” The schoolmaster smiled.

He was shown the football field the pupils had levelled; a little way behind was a mud house, shaped European — style with a veranda held up by roughly dressed tree — trunks, which must have been where the schoolmaster and his family lived. An old woman was doing some household chore with pots, outside, in the company of two or three small children. The schoolmaster said, “If there was someone I could ask, like I ask you—” but he was embarrassed to appear to grumble and began to talk about his pupils again.

Bray, feeling as he had felt a thousand times before in this country, the disproportionate return he was getting for a commonplace expression of interest, said, “What do you feel is your biggest problem at the moment?” and was surprised when, instead of turning again to his expectations of the Education Department under Independence, the man took time to think quietly, in the African lack of embarrassment at long pauses, and said, “We have to make the parents let the girls come to school. This is what I have been trying to do for years. Our girls must be educated. I can show you the figures — in nineteen — sixty-five, no nineteen — sixty-four, yes … we had only nine girls, and they left at the end of two years. Yes, two years. I cannot persuade the parents to keep them on. But I try, try. I go to the parents myself, yes, in the country. I talk to the chiefs and tell them, look, this is our country now, how can the men have wives who are not educated? There will be trouble. We must have the girls in school. But they don’t want to hear. I went to see the par — ents, I talk to them. Yes, well, this year we manage to keep twenty — one girls and some are in the Standard Three class already. I talk to the people slowly.” The man smiled and took one of his gasping breaths; his hand took in the bush, his suburbia. “I go and tell them. I’ve got my bicycle.”

Bray remembered that things were different now, even at Pilchey’s. “Why don’t you come up to the hotel this evening — I’m staying the night. We could talk some more.”

The schoolteacher had the suddenly exhausted look of a convalescent. He screwed up his eyes hesitantly, as if there must be something behind the invitation that he ought to understand. “At what time, sir?”

“Come up after supper. We’ll have a beer. And your wife, too, of course.”

The man nodded slowly. “After supper,” he repeated, memorizing it.

When Bray got back to the hotel Mrs. Pilchey was at her desk in the bar, doing accounts. Her big head of thick, reddish — blond hair had been allowed to fade to the yellow — stained white of an old man’s moustache. She looked up over her glasses and then took them off and got to her feet with the pigeon — toed gait of heavy, ageing women. “I thought it sounded like you, when the boy told me.” Sex had died out of the challenging way she had had with men; it was bluff and grudging. They had never liked each other much, in the little they had known of each other, and extraordinarily, the old attitude fell into place between them as if the ten years didn’t exist. There was laughter and handshaking. “A big Bwana with grey hair at the sides, and he can talk Gala. Well, there didn’t used to be any white hairs — but I thought, that’s Colonel Bray! No, well, I heard you were out, anyway, so I’m not as clever as I fancy myself—”

He said, “So you’re carrying on alone? Olivia and I heard when Mr. Pilchey died.”

“Five years,” she said. There were pencil caricatures of Oscar Pilchey behind the bar, done in an attempt at Beerbohm’s style. “I don’t think he’d have been able to stand it if he’d been here now.”

Bray had sat down at the bar. “It’s a tremendous job for a woman on her own.”

“I don’t know about that, I’ve been in the hotel business twenty — five years, as you know. But to cope with it the way it is now, it’s enough to drive you nuts, that I can tell you.”

“Shouldn’t you have someone to help you — a manager or an assistant?” He asked for a gin and tonic and she tipped the bottle where it hung upside down over its tot measure and prepared the drink with a kind of grim insolence of practised movements that was in itself a contempt for those for whom it was all very well to talk. “You can’t get anybody to do anything. They don’t care. They want to be rich. They want to learn to fly aeroplanes. That’s what I get told by one of my kitchen boys, yes, I’m not telling a lie. He doesn’t want to scrub the tables, he can go to town and learn to fly an aeroplane now.”

Bray smiled. “And who told him that?”

“You’re asking me!” But her quick freckled hand, doing what had to be done, wiping the wet ring left by the ice bucket, made it clear that she knew that he knew quite well. “I can only say, since last week I can’t sack any one of these fine pilots out of my kitchen without asking the Ministry of Labour first. You know that, of course? Published last week. I got a circular from the hotel — keepers’ association, though what they think they’re going to be able to do about it — I must get the permission of the labour officer in my area, whoever that is, I don’t know, and what the gentleman whoever — he-is knows about my business—”

They both laughed; her accusation of what Bray was, of all that he had been, he and his kind, was laid out flatly between them along with the plaster Johnny Walker and the S.P.C.A. tin for small change. She sat down again at the set of books beside her glass of beer.

He said, “I can sympathize; it must be hellish difficult for you.”

She didn’t believe him; it was all very well for people like him who hadn’t had to make a living, who were sent out by the British government for a few years and took sides with the blacks because they didn’t have to stay and live with them if they didn’t want to. But she went on, letting him hear it all. “My old Rodwell, Rodwell that worked for Oscar from before we were married. They come here the other day to ask him to show his Party card. I ask you! All he knows is he’s the best — paid cook in the country; twenty — five years he’s been running his kitchen here. Party card! And they turn nasty! They wouldn’t think twice about beating him up on his way down to the compound at night. He says to me, Doña, what can I do—? The bunch of thugs.” She wouldn’t say “the PIP”; by the refusal to name names she was able to say what she pleased without being provocative. There was a curious kind of intimacy of insult in their chat. He said of the new powers the Minister of Labour had taken on himself, “The trouble is there’s danger of unemployment rising, just at present.”

“Well, a lot of people are selling up — if you can find anyone to buy. When these pilots and other gentlemen come back hungry looking for their jobs they’ll be in for a big surprise. The Quirks have gone, last month. Johnny Connolly says he’ll send his cattle to the abattoir at Gala if he can’t get rid of the dairy as a going concern. Lots of people.”

“Oh I’m sure farmers are nervous. But I don’t think it’s a few white people leaving that means much to the labour position. It’s the inevitable hiatus between now and the time when the development plans get going — the harbour at Kundi’s coming, I understand. And the draining of the swamp land round the Isoza area. There aren’t more unemployed people, now, than there were under the colonial administration; it’s just that they naturally have the feeling they’ve done with living in the villages at subsistence level and there’s a danger they may flock to the towns and the mines, where there’s no hope of work for them, really. It could be the old story of peasants without skills leaving the land.”

“Well exactly, what do they know,” she said, “all these years they’ve had their cassava and their goats and their beer. And happier than we are, believe me.”

There was the sound of cars drawing up and voices from the veranda. The two waiters went in and out the bar with orders which she dispensed deftly, the smoke of the cigarette in the corner of her mouth making her keep one eye narrowed. Moving about, she had the big head and pouter chest dwindling to unimportance of the caricatures on the wall. In between times she returned to her accounts, looking down her cheeks at the figures she ticked off while talking to Bray. He asked directly, “Do Africans come here now?”

“It’s the law,” she said, as directly. “My boys serve them if they come. It’s very few; they like their own beer, of course, in their khayas, that’s what they want.… They sit on the veranda and as long as they behave themselves, that’s all right. They know they’ve got to behave themselves.”

“And do the farmers still put chaps in the aviary on Saturday nights?”

She laughed and put down the pen, shaking her head in pleasure. “Oh those were the good days, ay? My, what a night we used to have sometimes. And Christmas and New Year! What a lot of life our crowd here used to have in them. Oscar used to say never again, never again. And every time — good God, ay? Ah, that’s all gone, now.”

She had cast disgruntledness, blood back in her face, moisture of laughter in her eyes — the brief jauntiness of an old dog remembering to wag its tail. He was touched, as always, by a sign of life; but even in the odd moment of warmth she kept in her face an aggression of pride and inferiority: not that he and his kind had deigned, had known how to enjoy themselves!

When he had bathed and changed for dinner she bustled into him in one of the passages, jingling keys. “Sure you got everything you want? Towels, soap — all right? I never know, these days.” He reassured her. The white men were still drinking on the veranda, and the bar was comfortably full, too. Darts were being played and the news was crackling over the radio. There were no black men. The dinner gong had been sounded up and down the corridors, verandas and annexes that made up the complex of the hotel, and the lights were on in the dining — room, but no one made any move to go and eat. He did not feel like sitting in there on his own. But on the veranda he knew no one except perhaps one face — a man with a head of blond bristles catching the light like the fine hairs on a cactus; probably Denniston, who used to be in the mounted police. He ordered a drink and watched the frogs keeping an eye on the humans with pickpocket wariness while snatching flying ants that fell to the veranda floor from the light. Mrs. Pilchey’s cat came to stalk the frogs in turn, and he chased it away. For the first time, he felt an interest in the stuff from the Education Department that was lying in the car; the little school and the schoolmaster roused him to it. He felt some stirrings of purpose towards this job that was not real to him because he was not sure what it ought to be. He had accepted it in his mind as taken on “for his own reasons”: not to be questioned, for the time being, but about which there must be no illusions of objective validity. He went to the car for the file; he could just glance over it while finishing his drink before dinner.

As he walked back to the veranda, the schoolmaster was standing on the steps in an army — surplus overcoat, hat in hand. Bray had the impression that he had been waiting about in the shadows, perhaps not sure, among all the white men’s faces heavily blocked out of the dark by the streaming light, which was the one he sought. “Oh good … splendid … this’s my glass, I think—” and they sat down. He ordered the beer that the other said he would have. “I don’t know whether I ever introduced myself, Bray, James Bray — and yours …?”

The schoolmaster cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Reuben Sendwe. Reu — ben Send — we.” Then he nodded in acknowledgement of this identity and sat back again.

He was, of course, used to being summoned and talked at; Bray knew that being able to drink up at the hotel wouldn’t change that. One could perhaps only make him forget himself. Bray began to talk about himself, about how he had worked in the British administration, been district commissioner in the Gala district, and then become “unpopular”—as he put it — with the Colonial Office. “But that’s all ancient history, not of much interest”—he wanted to know more about the school, about schools and teaching, generally, in this district. Sendwe had got what secondary school education he had at the mission at Rongwa. Naturally he knew Father Benedict. “The Fathers told me this morning that the government is going to take over the school. What do you feel about it?” Sendwe said, “I wish, sir, I knew how much money our government has got.” “Yes, money—? Go on.” He licked his dry lips, “If our government has plenty money, then we must take over all the mission schools. If we did not have the missions when I was small, there was no secondary school for me. The English government had only that one small school at the boma, you know? But if there is the money then it is the best thing for all education to be the same, for all children to get the same chance. And then you see, our government can’t think, all right, there is a mission school there, near that village or that village, so why must we build another school — you know what I’m saying?”

“Oh yes, exactly—”

“That was what the English government did, but our government must not now do the same. That is why we must close the mission schools. Not because the Fathers are not good men. I don’t say that. Nobody of our people says that. The Europeans mustn’t say we are throwing out the mission people; we must have our own schools in our country, that’s all. I just want to know if we have got money.”

“I think you have,” Bray said, “but not the teachers, that’s going to be the trouble. I hope you can persuade the mission teachers to give over the running of their schools to the government, but to stay on and teach. Even then hundreds of teachers will have to be recruited from somewhere — somewhere outside.”

“If we have got the money,” he said, with satisfaction.

“Does the Education Department help you with your own studies? Where do those lessons you showed me come from — a correspondence course?”

He shook his head and coughed. “I pay myself.… From London.”

The veranda was emptying and cars were driving away although a hard core of drinkers remained noisily in the bar. Mrs. Pilchey came bearing down across the veranda with authority. “Doesn’t anybody intend to eat tonight?” she said at large. She was level with Bray and he half — rose politely. “I certainly do. Shan’t be too long.”

Sendwe was standing up. She looked at him. “Well, how did the sheep go down?” she asked in her loud voice. “Oh, you know Mr. Sendwe, Mrs. Pilchey—” “Of course I know Sendwe.” The schoolmaster’s hand went out for his hat and clutched it automatically from the chair. He stood there in the overcoat and, the way the veranda globe shed its glare, his eyes couldn’t be seen at all in his thin black face. He said, “Oh madam, I should come to thank you. It was very, very nice. But I was sick since then.”

She kept the stance of someone waylaid. “Celebrations too much for you were they?”

“I have a very bad cold” he said. And as she was going he took courage and appealed. “The children were very, very happy with the meat. I thank you very much.”

“That’s okay,” she said briskly, on a rising note, and was gone with the heavy tread, listing a little to one side, of one who has been too many years on her feet.

He sat smiling. “It was a whole sheep,” he said. “The hotel gave it to the school for Independence. Oh it was a very nice present. Oh the children were happy.” He coughed again, took some beer, and went on coughing. When he had recovered his breath, Bray said, “What about dinner, now? What d’you say?”

“I have had a meal.”

“Oh, are you sure? You don’t feel like something else, now?”

“No, I don’t feel hungry ever since I have this cold again.” He was still breathless from the coughing bout.

Bray said, “Are you doing something for it?”

“I went again to the clinic. They say I must go to the hospital for tests.” He mentioned the name of the TB hospital in the capital. He held up three fingers. “I was there for seventeen months three years ago. But they cured me. It’s only about two, three weeks now I’ve got this very bad cold. I don’t feel hungry.”

“I see. Well then, let’s have another beer.” But they did not sit down again. “When will you go?”

The man smiled. “It’s very far.”

“But you shouldn’t wait.”

“When I write the O levels,” he said. He seemed suddenly confused by the feeling that the visit was over and he did not know the right way to conclude it without leaving without what he had come for. “Sir, I want to ask if you can write to me about my young brother. He wants to learn farming — European farming. He’s working there at Mr. Ross’s farm and Mr. Ross is good, he teaches him while he’s working there. Now for a long time he wants to go to the farmers’ school, we heard about it. If you can please send to me the papers for him — I can help him to fill in everything … to apply.… If you can just send me the papers ….”

Bray explained that he was not going to the capital, but north; but he would arrange to have particulars about the agricultural college sent. The figure in the army overcoat plunged into the darkness, bisected diagonally for a moment by the light cast by the hotel. Bray turned to the dining — room, where some men were eating and talking with the gusto of old friends getting together. The thud of the waiters’ bare feet shook the boards; he ordered a half — bottle of wine and propped up, where he could glance at it, a report picked out at random from the file he was still carrying about with him. Already he was falling into the bachelor habit of reading while he ate. While he remembered, he made a note to send the schoolmaster an Oxford dictionary.

So that was starting all over again; he was half — amused, half self — contemptuous. The man was so desperately poor in everything — what was there that he didn’t need? Olivia said, “Kindness is ridiculous.” She had meant here; then. She had had to organize jumble sales so that the charitable white wives could provide a clinic for African children, while the mines were paying dividends of millions a year to shareholders in England. She had had to put on white gloves for opening charity bazaars; out of the newspaper pictures taken when they arrived in London in the sensation of their recall from the territory, had looked a civil servant and his lady disconcertingly like the class and kind of couple on whom white settlers had depended so long.

After dinner he went off to his room past Davy Jones’ Locker and the flushed faces there — a large Englishman with the administrator’s gait of a man eternally carrying papers under his arm.

He lay in a bed that, like nearly all hotel beds, was too small for him, and read. Mrs. Pilchey’s clip — on bed lamp had a broken neck and he turned on the bulb in the ceiling. It shone at a point just between his eyes. He read through everything there was in the Education Department’s file; very little, in terms of something to go on. In most places figures were not analysed properly, and the frequent “unforeseen circumstances” that caused a high percentage of failures, or the abandonment of modest experimental schemes, were never explained. When he turned out the light the silence was deep, deeper; as if the night measured the distance he already had come.

Chapter 6

He spent his first week in Gala occupied with what he described in letters to England as housewifery. The house, vacated by an accountant declared redundant under the new system of administration, had no cook and no curtains. He stayed in the local hotel while word — of-mouth brought applicants for the post, and the Indian tailor consented to make the curtains. Mr. Joosab was distressed at Bray’s choice of material, but Bray and Olivia had always liked the maroons and blacks, the oranges and browns, and the gnomic texts in Swahili or Gala printed on the cloth local women wrapped round themselves and their babies — he didn’t have to bother with considerations of what was or was not considered suitable for a D.C.’s house, this time.

The broad main street that was Gala had been tarred along its high — cambered middle but the rose — tan earth remained in a wide border down either side, splotched, pocked, and sometimes blotted out in deep shadow from the mahogany trees that hung above it. Gala was an old place as colonial settlements go; and even before it became a British outpost, Tippo Tib had established one of his most southerly slave depots there — to the north of the village there was the site of his Arab fort. Walls had fallen down in the village but trees remained; too big to be hacked out of the way of the slave — caravan trail; too strong to be destroyed by fire when British troops were in the process of subduing the population; revered by several generations of colonial ladies, who succeeded in having a local by — law promulgated to forbid anyone chopping them down. Their huge grey outcrops of root provided stands for bicycles and booths for traders and craftsmen; the shoemaker worked there, and the bicycle and sewing — machine repairer. There was a slave tree (the trade had been conducted under it as lately as a hundred years before) that the same English ladies had had enclosed in a small paved area and railing, with a plaque quoting Wilberforce. It was down in the part of the village where, Bray found, the beginnings of industry had started up since he last saw the place. Young workers from the fish — meal plant and lime works hung about there, now, playing dice and shedding a litter of potato crisp packets.

His big figure in the grey linen bush jacket and trousers he had found for himself in the capital moved busily back and forth across the road from sun and shade in and out of the interior of the shops. The familiar smells assailed him — calico, paraffin, millet, sacks of dried kapenta with the tin scoop stuck among the musty little fish; the old feel of grains of spilt sugar and maize meal gritted between the soles of shoes and the cracked concrete floors. In the tailor’s shop, sweetness of cardamoms hanging about the bolts of cloth and shiny off — cuts of lining. The same framed pictures of Edwardians with long cigarette holders and shooting sticks; a photograph of Mweta in his toga beside the old one of the Queen. Mr. Joosab and his son, Ahmed, were almost the first people from the old days whom Bray spoke to. (The hotel had changed hands; there were black clerks in the post office, now.) Joosab was a pale fat man in shirtsleeves, with a tape measure worn like an order over his waistcoat. His soft laugh was nearly soundless; he stood there with Ahmed, who was thin, dark, and had grown up — as Bray remembered the mother — with that obsessed, slightly mad look that comes of having very black eyes with a cast.

“The Colonel, it’s the Colonel, you have come back to us ….” Joosab’s bright gaze darted, brimmed and danced like an embarrassed girl’s. “My second son, Ahmed … you don’t remember the Colonel (he was a small child, eh, Colonel) … Colonel Bray? Of course you remember! The District Commissioner, and Mrs. Bray — oh what a nice lady!”

The thick glossy straight hair seemed to rise and sink on the boy’s head in a speechless response of embarrassment.

“Well, the Colonel … my, we’ll be glad to have you back. I’ve often said to my wife, we don’t have a gentlemen like the Colonel, again! Oh Mr. Maitland, he came when you left, he was a nice gentlemen, oh yes. And then Mr. Carter, and then there was Mr. Welwyn — Jones. But not a long time, I think he was only here about fifteen month … oh the Colonel …”

“And how’ve you been, Mr. Joosab, how are things going?”

He was still laughing soundlessly, spreading his smooth hands like a member of a welcoming committee. “Oh all right, yes, I can say all right”—he suppressed a coquettish little shrug, as if he had almost let slip a secret— “of course things are a bit unsettled, business has dropped off a bit, oh that’s only natural, of course, Colonel. I’m not complaining — you understand? Our community supports the government a hundred per cent. We are contributing to Party funds — last year more than five hundred pounds. And we have the assurance of the President — oh yes, we have had that. Of course a lot of people have gone — you know, the old Government people, all gone. Oh I know how they feel, I can imagine. Dr. Pirie and Mrs. Pirie, gone back to England, sold their place. He built a lovely house a few years ago, on the lake, when he retired, you know. But of course they don’t want to stay now, naturally.… Why should they … Up in your house”—he meant the D.C.’s residence—” there’s Mr. Aleke now, with his wife and seven or eight little children. Yes. The place looked perfect when you and Mrs. Bray were there, Colonel — the garden, it was wonderful! Mrs. Bray’s garden. And what was the other lady — Mrs. Butterworth? Oh yes, what a nice lady. You know I made the first pair of ladies’ slacks for her? I said, but Mrs. Butterworth, madam, I never made for ladies. But she was a lady who like to get what she want, you know. You can do it, she say, you can do it! And Mr. Playfair. He won the golf championship again this year. He’s still here, and Mr. Le Roy, and the Andersons up at the club — Mr. Anderson’s still the chairman of the committee, they’re putting on a show there, this month. I think it’s Mr. Parsifal again who arrange it, you know he’s a very clever man—” He related all the details of the activities of the white community in which he had never had any part. “Oh there’s quite a lot from the old days,” he promised. “You’ll see, Colonel—” It was not that he had forgotten that these were the people who had demanded that the Colonial Office have Bray removed, but that he remembered only too well — it was his way of dealing with events, to shield himself and others from danger by bowing in all directions at once.

Most of the white tradespeople in the village greeted Bray with professional cheerfulness overlaying a certain stony — facedness. They had not forgotten either; but someone would be getting his custom. He had no particular awareness of his “position” among them; the past in relation to Mweta and Edward Shinza and the country’s future meant something to him, but the past in relation to his difficulties with the Colonial Service and the settlers was simply an outdated conflict in which each side had acted — fair enough — according to the convictions in a particular historical situation, a situation that no longer existed. Not objectively, and not for him; he had been away, and come back clear of it. The fact that he was sent to his old district did not seem of any particular significance to him except that it sensibly took advantage of the fact that here he knew the language and the people; he did not see himself as coming back to a place from which he had been driven out — of what relevance to the present was that sort of petty triumph?

But for the residents who had stayed behind, he had not come anew, but returned; he, about whom ten years ago they had held a public meeting in that same hotel where he was now staying, he, whom they had petitioned the Governor to remove from office. On the first Saturday morning in the village, he realized this; a bother, more than anything else. They came into town to do their shopping as they had always done and he moved, alone, among them. They greeted him, even stopped to talk, women with their baskets, or men with carriers of tinned beer hooked between thumb and forefinger, making use of the conversational conventions of the English background they shared with him, so that the first pause became the opportunity to say, “Well, Alcocks’ won’t keep a chicken for me if I don’t hurry up and fetch it” or “Robert’ll be cooling his heels outside the post office — I’d better be getting along,” but they made him (not vain and therefore the least self — conscious of men) aware that they were confronted with him. He bore them no grudge whatever. Which, he realized with slightly exasperated amusement at himself and them, was insufferable, if it should be found out.

In a first letter to Gala, Olivia had written, “I suppose it was strange to see the old house!”—but he had not even gone so far as to take a walk up the road to the ugly residence that existed in his mind not as a place so much as an interior life hollowed out by experiences that had been dealt with there. One day he would go and see Mr. Aleke’s “seven or eight” children playing in the garden, and tell Olivia about it.

As he went in and out of the Fisheagle Inn he was sometimes arrested, from the veranda, by the sight of the lake. The sign of the lake: a blinding strip of shimmer, far away beyond the trees, or on less clear days, a different quality in the haze. For a moment his mind emptied; the restless glitter of the lake, the line of a glance below a lowered eyelid — for it was not really the lake at all that one saw, but a trick of the distance, the lake’s own bright glare cast up upon the heated atmosphere, just as the vast opening out of pacing water to the horizon, once you got to its bush — hairy shores, was not really the open lake itself at all, but (as the map showed) only the southernmost tip of the great waters that spread up the continent for six hundred miles and through four or five countries. It was then, just for a moment, that this symbol of the infinity of distance, carrying the infinity of time with which it was one, released his mind from the time of day and he was at once himself ten years ago and himself now, one and the same. It was a pause not taken account of. He went on down the veranda steps, intent on buying some bit of equipment for his house.

He was able to move in by the second weekend. Of course he had presented himself to the people at the boma. He’d had a talk with Aleke, the first African District Commissioner — but they didn’t call them D.C.s any more, they were known as Provincial Officers. And he’d seen Sampson Malemba, the local Education Officer, who happened to be an old friend, principal of the African school when Bray was in office. Aleke was just the sort of “new African” the settlers would dislike most: fat, charming, his Mweta tunic hitched up by solid buttocks, he spoke fluent informal English, lolled behind his desk like a schoolboy, and was seen chewing a piece of sugar — cane while having his shoes shined under the trees. The settlers were at home with the conventional pompousness of half — educated Africans — men in undertaker’s suits, bespectacled, throat — clearing; they recognized the acceptable marks of civilization in this caricature of an image of themselves, even if they were beer — drinking farmers in crumpled shorts. It remained to be seen if Aleke were to be efficient, into the bargain; from the little Bray had heard, it was likely. He said cheerfully he didn’t know what he could do for Bray — he had been asked to “do everything necessary to facilitate,” etc., and it was up to Bray to tell him what that might be. “Could I have somewhere to work — that’s the main thing.” Aleke found this very funny. “I mean can you spare me an office and a share in a typist — I’m sure you’re short — staffed.” “An office! Naturally! But the typist isn’t very pretty, I’m afraid. I’ll introduce you.” He rang a bell and in came a typical second — grade male clerk with an old man’s bony back and an adolescent face drained of vitality by home — study courses. “Mr. Letanka. He will be helping you all he can.” When the clerk had gone, Aleke was still amused: “So there you are. But I have applied for a really efficient and beautiful secretary, first priority, so maybe our standard will improve.”

Aleke urged him to get settled into his house before “we get down to anything serious”; it was an amiable enough way of postponing the problem of not knowing what to do with him.

The moving in didn’t amount to much. The various purchases he had made during the week stood dumped about in the living-room. Mr. Joosab had been good enough to send his son and one of his daughters over to put up the curtains. Stretched across the windows they looked like tablecloths; they didn’t meet. And when they were drawn back they sagged skimpily. He didn’t know what exactly was wrong; he thought of Olivia and smiled. He had a young servant called Mahlope, which meant in Gala, “the last one of all,” who was already wearing the long white apron to buy which he had at once requested money the moment he was engaged. He had covered the concrete floors of the house with the inevitable thick layer of red polish in preparation for Bray’s arrival and the two men spent the Saturday afternoon arranging — with sure instinct for the placing of one of the government issue morris chairs, the utilization of an old brass picture hanger to hold the bathroom mirror high enough for Bray to see himself shave — the unchanging white — bachelor household that was as old as settlement itself. Mahlope put a tattered embroidered doily under the leather frame that held a picture of Venetia with a blurred little mummy, her new baby; and set down the whisky, gin, a bent opener and glasses in their permanent position on what was listed in the house inventory as the “occasional” table. Already the kitchen smelled of paraffin, on which the refrigerator ran, and the living-room of flea powder, for a house that stood empty for more than a few days always became a playground for fleas, and Bray had had his ankles bitten through his socks while simply visiting the house.

He had begun to wake up early again, as he used to do in Africa. The servant was about, chanting under his breath, from half — past five. Bray ate his first Sunday breakfast in the garden on a morning scented with woodsmoke. It came back to him — all, immediate, as with the scent of a woman with whom one has made love. The minute sun — birds whirred in the coarse trumpets of flowers. Delicate wild pigeons called lullingly, slender in flight and soft of voice, unrecognizable as the same species as the bloated hoarse creatures who waddle in European cities. In perfect stillness, small dead leaves hung from single threads of web, winking light. A tremendous fig tree was perhaps several trees, twisted together in a multiple trunk twenty feet up and then spreading wide and down again in a radius of interlaced branches. Little knobbly figs fruited all over it, borne directly on the old, hard wood of the trunk. Skinny wasps left them and fell into the jam. He felt an irrational happiness, like faint danger. He dragged a rickety trestle table ringed with the marks of potted plants, under his tree, and wrote letters and read the papers Olivia had sent, sybaritic in the luxury of being alone.

But the afternoon was long. In the air were the echoes of other people’s activity; the distant plock of tennis, the swirl of arriving and departing cars at the other houses in the road, the sky ringing like a glass with the strike of church bells distorted aurally as the lake, from the hotel veranda, was distorted visually. There was a kind of thickening of the background silence, a vague uproar of Sunday enjoyment from the direction of the African township away over to the east. He thought he would look around there; he hadn’t, yet. Of course, he had known it very well when he was D.C., he had spent a lot of time down there; too much, for some people’s liking. But he knew that it had changed since then, grown; and there was a whole new housing scheme and a hostel for the industrial workers.

Raw red roads led off through the trees. People were strolling, pushing their bicycles as they talked; women held their children against their skirts as he passed, boys laughed and threw mango pits at each other, there were little groups of religious sects holding meetings under the trees, young couples in their best clothes and old men hauling wood or charcoal on sleds, Sunday no different from any other day, for them. The bright little new houses looked stranded in the mud; the forest had been cleared for them. There were some trampled — looking patches of cassava and taro and a beached, derelict car or two. The houses had electric light and children were playing a game that seemed to consist of hitting the telephone poles with sticks. They yelled defiantly and gaily at the white man in the car.

He saw the hostel on the rise that had been a kind of buffer, hiding the black village from the white; a modern, institutional building around which stalls and hawkers’ carts had collected like hovels without the palace walls. But he turned instead down into the old town that he remembered, and plunged along the unmade streets among close shacks, donkeys, dogs, and people. The old town was filthy and beautiful; in this low — lying ground palms grew, giving their soaring proportion to the huddle, and lifting the skyline to their pure and lazy silhouette. The place stank of beer, ordure, and smoke. The most wretched hovel had its setting of sheeny banana leaves, with a show of plenty in the green candelabra of pendant fruit, and its pawpaw trees as full of ripening dugs as some Indian goddess. Green grew and tangled everywhere out of the muck, rippled and draped over rotting wood and rusted iron. Romantic poverty; he would rather live here, with the rats under the palm trees, than up on the rise in those mean, decent cubes already stained with bare earth: that was because he would never have to live in either. A little naked boy waved with one hand, clutching his genitals with the other. An old man took off his hat in greeting. Bray knew no one and knew them all. There was an anonymity of mutual acceptance that came to him not at all in England and hardly ever in Europe — in Spain, perhaps, one market morning among the butting bodies and smiles of busy people whose language he didn’t speak. It wasn’t losing oneself, it was finding one’s presence so simply acknowledged that one forgot that outwardly one moved as a large, pink — faced Englishman, light — eyed and thick — eyebrowed behind the magnification of glasses, encased yet again, as in a bubble of another atmosphere, in the car. He drove slowly round with unself — conscious pleasure, not quite sure where he was going yet feeling that the turns he took were familiar ones, the way past the houses of people he once visited or knew. And then he came out at the nameless stretch of communal ground where the bus sheds were, and goats sought discarded mango skins, and women and children sat contentedly under the trees.

It was here, in this space to which people drifted on a Sunday, that the drumming came from, the drumming he had heard over in the town. There were little shops blaring jazz, with open verandas on which men stood or sat drinking. In the open ground in front of one was a wall — less thatched shelter beneath which tall drums were mounted over charcoal embers. When Bray’s car came to a stop, it was in the middle of a pause; a young boy was using a goat’s-skin bellows to flush the embers into heat to make the drums taut. Only one drum was keeping a dull beat going so that the rhythm could be taken up at any point, at any time. The undertone thudded gently through the chatter round about and the jazz. Bray just sat in the car in the midst of it all. Babies broke away and staggered onto the clearing, to be pursued and snatched up by older children. Others cried or were suckled. The women talked absorbedly and gazed about, alert to the children, but they had the smiling air of women who are spectators of their men. Some of the men were drinking, others stood together, fallen away from the centre of their activity. Somebody got on his bicycle and rode away; someone else arrived. The undertone of the drum was counterpointed by a louder beat, breaking over it from another drum; the drummer, putting an ear low, was not satisfied with the quality of the resonance and the counterpoint died away. The drummers were absorbed in tending the drums and did not speak to or look at the drinkers or anybody else. Their faces and hair were powdered with dust. They ordered the boy about and his strong pointed elbows moved in and out over the bellows; red eyes opened and closed in the charcoal. But with the brief counterpoint that was taken up and died away again, a middle — aged man with clips on his trousers had begun to tread, alone, in the clearing. Another joined him, and then another. Slowly, what had gone slack between the drinkers and the idlers was pulled close again; the drums were drawn in, the men were drawn in; there was an ever — mounting yet steady and serene jumble of movement and drums, shuffle, pause, and beat, that in all its counterpoint of sound and movement was yet the sum of one beat, experienced as neither sound nor movement, the beat of a single heart in a single body. It was not orgiastic or ecstatic, but just a Sunday afternoon dance; Bray lifted his long legs out of the car and stood leaning an arm on the boot, among the onlookers. People seemed to know who he was. A remark passed between them now and again; he asked a question or made an observation, as one does, out of proximity. An old man confirmed that the bars were fairly new. A young man waited for the old one to move on and then dismissed all that he had said: this bar was three years old. And the dance was an old — style thing that the old — fashioned people did. If I were you I’d be dancing, Bray said. The young man looked derisive and a woman laughed. The stamp and beat came up through Bray’s feet and theirs as if they were all standing on deck over an engine room.

A black Mercedes with the flourish of new officialdom about it drew an admiring acknowledgement of turning heads. It had stopped short, suddenly, in the middle of people. Bray was surprised by the approach of one of the white — collared, dark — suited passengers, who had jumped out and was hurrying over with long strides before which way was made for him. “Are you all right?” Before Bray could answer, the face of the mayor was thrust out of the back window of the car, and the voice called across in English, “Have you lost yourself, Colonel? Can we help?”

Bray had met the mayor a few days before, with Sampson Malemba. “No, no, just passing the time.” And then he thought it polite to go over to the car. “Thanks all the same.” “Sure you’re okay?” The mayor, a large man with his hair parted in the centre over his unmistakably Gala face, was dressed for some official occasion; or maybe he was simply enjoying paying visits in his handsome car, accompanied by relatives or friends dressed in their best.

Little boys raced behind the car while it swayed off gracefully. People were grinning at Bray, as one who had brought them distinction. Someone said, “That’s the biggest car in Gala,” and the old man, who had appeared again, said, “The mayor, you know who it is? The mayor!” The women giggled at his slowness. “He knows, he knows.” There was no envy of the mayor, with his splendid car manifesting his favoured position; only pride.

It was still light when Bray got back to the house and he wandered about the garden and then out across the bush perhaps in response to some faint promptings of habit reaching out from the life in Wiltshire — he and Olivia exercised themselves as regularly as city people did their dogs. The bats were beginning to fly over the golf — course and the club — house was already swelling orange with lamp — shaded light. Sunday evening: most of the white community were there, drinking after sport. He had put up his name for membership, again; the secretary’s face, when he filled in the form, was flat with the effort to disguise astonishment. But it was not a gesture of bravado, let alone a desire to rub his countrymen’s noses in the “triumph” of his return. He had always done things whose directness was misunderstood; it was not even the “hand of friendship” he was extending — simply an acceptance that he was living in Gala again, among these people, and did not regard them as outcast any more than he had shared their view, in other times, that the Galaians were beyond the pale of the community. When Olivia came, she might want to use the club swimming pool, anyway; the only one in the district. One had to make use of what there was. And then, of course, since Independence, the club had made the usual gesture of such dying institutions; the mayor had been made a member, ex officio, and so had Aleke, as P.O. — not that he supposed they had ever put a foot in the place.

There were thirty or forty cars parked under the trees; an Alsatian dog barked behind the closed windows of one. Excited by the darkening twilight, white children shrieked as they ran about the lawns. The building was adaptable; could be a real asset. As Bray went up the steps and heads were lifted here and there at the veranda tables outside the bar, he was thinking that it would be perfectly adequate for an adult education centre. In the smaller rooms the trade unions could hold night classes for apprentices, Sampson Malemba could run literacy courses, and the big dining — room could serve as a hall for performances by school choirs and so on.

He greeted a few people he knew. A beautiful blonde with a child on her hip and one by the hand stood patiently at the reception desk while her husband and another man, in club blazers, could not tear themselves away from the high emotion of companionship that comes from victory on court or course. Bray begged pardon past them, but they did not see him — except the children, whose blue eyes, wide in the moments before sleep, followed him to the notice board. His name was up, all right, but there was no seconder’s beside it. Broken bursts of singing sounded like a party going on; the repetition of the opening bars on a piano made him realize that it must be a rehearsal in progress: the theatrical production Joosab had mentioned.

He began that week to tackle a programme he had worked out for himself. Long talks with Malemba made it clear that it would be senseless to base a report and recommendations on existing schools and available figures for children of school — going age. The province was huge; a whole European country could fit into it. The last census was seven years old, and had scarcely pretended to accuracy. You couldn’t simply divide off the map into suitable chunks and allot a certain number of new schools to each, such — and-such a number of educational facilities to the square hundred miles. Sampson Malemba wanted a large new secondary school at Gala itself; but what was needed was a careful coordination of educational facilities over the whole province, from primary to school — leaving at least at the English O level, with provision for late starters and others, not suited by potential or opportunity to academic education, to be diverted to technical colleges of an elementary kind. “How many children in the primary schools of the province can be expected to be at secondary school level in, say, five years? Enough to fill the places in a new secondary school? More than we’ll have places for? So many that it would be better to have a new secondary school somewhere else?” But Sampson Malemba couldn’t answer that; “Exactly. It will depend on how many new primary schools we need and can get.” And that in turn depended not only upon how many children were in school, but how many could be in school. “And how many teachers we can hope to claim from the general pool.” “Ah, that’s the trouble.” Malemba was always happiest to agree. But Bray had decided that if he himself was to be any use at all, he must combine a down — to-earth acceptance of limitations with a certain obstinacy; he must assume they would be overcome.

He set out to go through the whole province, district by district and village by village, visiting schoolmasters and headmen and collecting the facts. He intended to make his own census of children of school — going age and youths, already in some form of occupation, who were still malleable enough to benefit from something more than a smattering of literacy. He didn’t see how he could begin to consider what ought to be done next until this was done. He began with Gala itself and its satellite villages, and meant to move out in a wider radius each day, each week, until he had covered the whole province from the lake to the Bashi Flats. He would return home every night so long as that was possible, then, as the circles carried him further from the centre, he would spend each night at a point convenient for the range of the next day’s inquiry. Malemba went with him round about Gala itself; it was all rather like a school inspection, with the inevitable assembly of children, the anxious formality of teachers — and at the end of the visit a sense that politeness had dissipated any real contact with the giggling, expectant faces of the children, turning blindly to the sun of attention, and the half — educated, poorly paid teachers garrulous or tongue — tied with their inadequacies. He came home each day that first week with a sense of the deadness of what was passing for education in these bare schoolhouses with their red earth playground stamped hard by the children’s naked feet. The children were squirming with life and the cold grease of third — rate instruction by rote staled in their minds, day by day. He wrote in his notebook: If all M’s government can do is extend dingy light of knowledge we brought, not much benefit. He felt that he himself was not qualified to find the radical solution that was needed; neither was the Ministry of Education, with its advisers, the capable English don who had been headmaster of a famous public school thirty years before, and the American on loan from a Midwest university’s African Studies programme. They were all men for whom the structure of education was based on their own educational background and experience; even he himself, who had lived in Africa so long, tended to think of needs in relation to the educational pattern familiar to him, and to fail to do so in terms of the child for whom what was taught at school did not have the confirmation of being part of his general cultural pattern at home. What was needed was perhaps someone with a knowledge of the latest basic techniques of learning. Someone who could cut through the old assumptions that relied so heavily on a particular cultural background, and concentrate on the learning process itself. That should be freed to form its own correlation to a relevant culture. “Write a letter to a friend describing a trip abroad with your aunt”—he thought often of the schoolmaster at Matoko.

To get to the fishing communities farther up the lake he left his car at the fish — freezing plant at the southern tip and went by water, hitch-hiking, more or less, on the cumbersome, home — made boats of the independent fishermen. Some of them were traders rather than fishermen, really; they went where the kapenta were running, and then sold them by the eighty — pound sack wherever on the lake they were scarce. Boundaries were ignored by these boats; they put in wherever there was a likely village, and the men aboard spoke Swahili as well as Gala — Swahili had come down, hundreds of years ago, from the East Coast and was the lingua franca of the lake, even though the inland people, so far south, did not speak it. Locked in the middle of the continent, the lake villagers had something of the natural worldliness of seaport inhabitants, and the sense of individualistic independence of those whose range takes in the tilting, glittering horizon forever receding before the boat. They laughed and joked and talked fish prices around Bray; his Gala was so good again, now that he was speaking it every day, that he could take part in the talk and even pick up the Swahilisms that crept into it. Hour after hour he sat on his berth of sacks of dried kapenta, exchanging his Karel l’s for their pipe tobacco, the boat dipping and lifting over the immense glare of the lake. His English face turned stiff and red and then, as if some secretion of pigment, that had ceased functioning in the years he had been away, began to be produced by his body again, his arms and hands and face became richly burnished and the face in the shaving mirror was a holiday face. No matter how animated the talk was, the voices were lost out on the lake as completely as a dropped coin ingested by the waters. To him the scape — radiance of water and sky, a kind of explosion of the two elements in an endless flash — was beautiful, with the strange grip of sensuosity of place, of something he had never expected to see again. This was it. One couldn’t remember anything so physical. It couldn’t be recaptured by cerebration; it had to be experienced afresh. The fish eagles gave their banshee whistles, a sound from the dark side of the sun. Now and then the water boiled with the tails of churning shoals, rock — bream feeding on kapenta, tiger fish snapping at rock — bream, fish eagles and gulls hovering, swooping and snatching. To his companions, the place was a condition — weather, luck (with the fish), distance to the next objective. His mind idled; did this add another meaning to the theory of aesthetics that held that beauty was an incidental product of function? Beauty could also be another way of reading circumstances in which a function — in this case fishing for a living — took place. One of the men put a finger to the right side of his nose and cleared the left with a sharp snort, into the lake. The water that same exquisite pale element through which the fish shone, bore the snot flushed efficiently away.

On shore, there were whole communities of several thousand people where the children didn’t go to school, just as (Aleke complained when Bray got back to Gala) the men didn’t pay taxes. “While you’re about it, up there, perhaps you could think of something we can do about that.” Aleke spoke in the dreamy humour of a man slightly dazed with problems. “The government tells me that after the miners, those fellows are the biggest money — earners in the country, but they don’t want to know about income tax. All you can get out of them is that they’ve always paid hut tax. Income tax is something for white men to pay. Must they become white men just because we’ve got our own government? Good God, man, what sort of thing is this independence!” Thinking of the fishermen, Bray laughed rather admiringly. “Well, they’re self — employed, illiterate, and extremely shrewd — quite a combination for an administration to beat.” “I mean, how can you assess their earnings? It’s not a matter of keeping two sets of books. It’s all in here”—Aleke poked a finger at his temple— “what auditor can get at that?” “Organize them in cooperatives,” Bray said, still amused.

“Well, there is the big trawler company.”

“Yes, but that’s a foreign company, the men who work on the trawlers are just employees. I mean the people who fish and trade for themselves. Oh, it’ll come, I suppose.”

“Those people? They don’t want to hear from us what’s good for them!”

“Never mind, Aleke, the president favours free enterprise.” They both smiled; this was the way in which Mweta gave poker — faced reassurance to the mining companies, without offering direct affront to members of the government who feared economic colonialism.

“D’you bring any fish?” Aleke asked, shoving papers into drawers; Bray had walked in as he was going home for lunch.

“Didn’t think about it! But I’ll remember next time. What does your wife like? I saw a magnificent perch.”

“Oh she’s from town, she wouldn’t touch anything out of the lake. But I won’t have the kids the same. I told her, they must eat the food that’s available, there where they live. So she says what’s wrong with meat from the supermarket?”

“I’ll bring you a perch, next time.”

“Yes, a nice fish stew, with peppers, I like that.” He had taken up a nailfile and was running the point under the pale nails of his black hands as if he were paring a fruit. “I’m full of carbon. I have to do my own stencils, even. I shouldn’t really go home to eat today, the work’s up over my head, man. Honestly, I just feel like driving all the way and kidnapping a decent secretary from the Ministry.” Grumbling relaxedly, he left the offices with Bray; one of his small sons had come down on a tricycle to meet him and was waiting outside, nursing a toe that had sprung a bright teardrop of blood: while they examined the hurt the drop rolled off the dusty little foot like a bead of mercury. The boy had ridden against the low box — hedge of Christ — thorn that neatly bordered the bomas entrance. All bomas in the territory had Christ — thorn hedges, just as they had a morris chair to each office and a standard issue of inkpots. “Look at that,” Aleke said in Gala. “It’s gone deep. What a plant.”

“Why not have it dug out, get rid of it,” said Bray.

Aleke looked uncertain a moment, as if he could not remember why this was unlikely. Then he came to himself and said in English, “You’re damned right. I want this place cleared.”

“You could have mesembryanthemums — ice-plant,” Bray said. But Aleke had the tricycle, hanging by a handlebar, in his one hand, and was holding his child under the armpit with the other, urging him along while he hopped exaggeratedly, “Ow, ow!”

You had only to leave a place once and return to it for it to become home. At the house Bray came through the kitchen and asked Mahlope to fetch his things from the car; Mahlope had a friend sitting there who rose at once. Bray acknowledged the greeting and then was suddenly aware of some extraordinary tension behind him. His passage had caused a sensation; he made an involuntary checking movement, as if there were something shocking pinned on his back. The face was staring at him, blindly expectant, flinching from anticlimax. The anticlimax hung by a hair; then it was knocked aside: “Kalimo!” The man started to laugh and gasp, saved by his name. The face was one from another life, Bray’s cook of the old time, in the D.C.’s house. The salutations went on for several minutes, and then Kalimo was in perfect possession of the occasion. He said in English, “I’m here today, yesterday, three day. No, the boy say Mukwayi go Tuesday, come back Friday. I’m ready.” Bray’s eyes followed into the labyrinth of past commonplace the strings of Kalimo’s apron, tied twice under his arms, in the way he had always affected. “How did you find me?”

“Festus he send me. He send me say, Colonel he coming back, one month, two month, then go to Gala. I’m greet my wife, I’m greet my sons. They say where you go? No, I’m go to Gala. Colonel him back. No, I go. I must go.”

They began to talk in Gala, which was not Kalimo’s mother tongue — since he came from the South where he had first begun to work for the Brays many years ago — but which, like Bray, he had learned when he moved with the Brays to Gala. They exchanged family news; Bray fetched the picture of Venetia’s baby. The pleasurable excitement of reunion hung over his solitary lunch, with Kalimo bringing in the food and being detained to talk.

But later in the afternoon, when he had sat for an hour or two writing up his notes on the lake communities, he came to the problem of Mahlope: what was to be done about Mahlope? Kalimo had taken over the household as of right; Bray felt the old fear of wounding someone whom circumstances put in his power. It was out of the question that he should send Kalimo away. He belonged to Kalimo; Kalimo had come more than a thousand miles, out of retirement in his village, to claim him. The thought appalled him: to cook and clean for him as if his were the definitive claim on Kalimo’s life.

He went into the kitchen where Kalimo, hearing him begin to move about, was making tea. Bray had seen Mahlope through the living-room window — put out to grass, literally: swinging at it with a home — honed scythe made of a bit of iron fencing. “Kalimo, did you talk to Mahlope about the job?” He spoke in Gala. “Mukwayi?’” I took on Mahlope to look after the house, you see.”

Kalimo made the deep hum with which matters were settled. He had got older; he drew out these sounds now, like an old man in the sun. “Mahlope will be for the garden, and to clean the car. I am your cook. And he has the washing to do. We always had a small boy for the outside work.”

“Yes, but I’m not the D.C. any more, you must remember. And I’m here on my own. This isn’t the big house, with a whole family. I don’t need more than one person to look after me.”

Kalimo swilled out the teapot with boiling water, measured the tea into it, poured on the water, and replaced the lid, carefully turning it so that the retaining lip was in the right place.

“One person to cook and wash and everything — just for me.”

“Does Mukwayi want cake with tea, or biscuit?”

Of course, Kalimo would have baked cakes, put the household on a proper footing, against his return. He made Bray feel the insolence of teaching a man his own business, of so much as bringing up the subject.

Kalimo carried the tray into the living-room. As he put it down he said, “I have always looked after you. Cooking, washing, outside — it’s the same for me.”

Bray said, “You are not tired?”

He had sat down at his table. Kalimo looked down at him, and smiled. “And you? You are not tired.”

“All right. I’ll explain to Mahlope. We’ll keep him until we can find him another job. You can make use of him — the garden, whatever you think.”

After dinner he wrote to Olivia. Well, you won’t have any doubts about how I’m being looked after from now on; Kalimo has turned up. He heard through the grape — vine — took him a month to get here, by bus and on foot. I’m embarrassed but suppose I’m lucky. The bad old good days come back.

Shinza. Edward Shinza. Even the occurrence of Kalimo was a reminder. He ought to go and see him; it was easy to assume to himself that he thought of it often; he did not, in fact. The work he was doing, unchecked by distraction or interruption, filled his mind. In the capital, work would have been compressed into a few hours a day, jostled by other demands and the company of friends. But now although he was often conscious of being alone — alone at night, with a Christmas bee dinning at the light, and the bare furniture taking on the waiting — room watchfulness of a solitary’s surroundings; alone in the garden, reading letters and papers at his table under the fig tree — the interviews, the paper — work, were a preoccupation that expanded to take up the days and long evenings. Dando had just written again and asked among other things, whether he had seen Shinza — Dando’s writing was so difficult to read and covered so closely the sheets of thin paper that his were the sort of letters one put aside to read more attentively another time. Roly would have gone off with a bottle to get drunk with Shinza long ago, by now. He throve on dissatisfactions, paradox and irony. He would have made himself welcome with a man at his own funeral, if that were a possible occasion for friendship and solidarity. Whenever Bray saw himself coming into Shinza’s company once again, he felt suddenly that there would be nothing to say: he was brought back by Mweta, now he was working for Mweta. It was better to concentrate on such practical matters as the possibility of resuscitating the old woodworking and shoemaking workshop in the town and expanding it to become a sort of modest trades school. He discussed this with Malemba. The Education Department had abolished these rural workshops on the principle that everyone was to get a proper education now; the black man was no longer to be trained just sufficiently to do the white man’s odd jobs for him. “But what about mechanics and plumbers, if you’re going to raise the standard of living? And you’re still going to need village carpenters and shoemakers for a long, long time in communities like this one where people haven’t yet completely made the changeover to a money economy and buying their needs in the stores. If we can train people in crafts that will give them a living, we’ll have some alternative to the drift to the towns. It’s a better idea than labour camps, eh?” Malemba, Bray saw, would be glad to have the suggestion come from him; Malemba himself thought it unrealistic for the government rural workshops to have been closed, but did not wish it to be thought, in educational circles in the capital, that he was a backward provincial when it came to demanding higher education for the people. Malemba was not a sycophant but he needed a little stiffening of confidence; it was one of the small satisfactions that Bray had set himself to find worth while, to see that through their working together, Malemba was beginning to gain it.

Yet he said to Aleke, “I’d like to look in on Edward Shinza one of these days.” He was in Aleke’s house — his own old house — on a Saturday afternoon: there was no exchange of invitations for drinks and dinners between officials as there had been when officialdom was white, but Aleke had said, “Why don’t you come over to my place?” and so clearly meant the open invitation that Bray had taken it up as casually and genuinely. The radio, as always, was playing loudly on the veranda. Some of the seven children pushed toy cars through tracks scratched in the earth of the tubs where Olivia had once grown miniature orange trees.

“The road’s very bad that way, they tell me,” Aleke said, lazily, though not exactly without interest.

Bray realized that he had brought up the subject because, although he would go and see Shinza openly, would tell Mweta so himself — indeed Mweta would expect him to seek out Shinza — he had some cautious reluctance to have Aleke reporting that he had visited Shinza. It should be established that it was not a matter of any interest to anyone except himself.

Mrs. Aleke brought tea and was sent away to fetch beer instead; she tried to clear the veranda of children, but Aleke was one of those plump, muscular men whose self — confidence, apparently made flesh, exerts a tactile attraction over women and children. His small sons and daughters ran back to press against his round spread thighs. He spoke of his wife as if she were not there. “She’s a woman who can’t get children to listen. The same with the chickens. She chases them one way, they go the other.”

“They’re naughty.” She looked helplessly and resentfully at the children.

“We used to hear my mother’s voice.” He fondled the children; it was easy for him. When he had had enough he would pick them off himself like burrs. She said to Bray, “And your wife is coming here? This place’s dead. There is nothing in the shops, I wish I could get away to town, honestly.”

But she was drawn, like the children, to her husband, though she did not quite touch him. He shooed them all away, just as easily, with a gesture of demanding air.

Bray felt a small rankling in himself for having put his acquaintance with Aleke momentarily on a footing of caution. Why should Aleke even think of him in terms of political manoeuvre? Telling Mweta what he thought was one thing; anything that might be construed as political action was another, and something he set himself outside from the beginning of his return. This disinterest was only confirmed by the right to look up an old friend, whoever he might be.

The unease — living alone one became too self — regarding — had the effect of making his plans turn out to take into account the Bashi Flats — Shinza’s area. He went off one morning, meaning to go through the mountains where the iron-ore mine was, on the way, and to take a week over it. He remembered that Shinza liked cheroots, and called in at the boma as he left Gala; there was a new box in the desk Aleke had allotted him. The office door opened on someone who had been about to open it from the other side — a young white woman stood with her hands, palm open, drawn back at the level of her breasts. He smiled politely and then saw that she knew him; it was Rebecca Edwards, of Vivien’s house in the capital. While he rummaged for the cigars, she explained that she had come up to work for Aleke. “Roly said he’d written to you, so I told Vivien not to bother.” Of course there had been something in Dando’s letter — an illegible name. “Was there anything I could have done for you?”

“Oh no, you know how they are down there. The whole network has to be alerted everytime somebody moves.”

He left a good — bye message with her, for Aleke. “He must be triumphant. He’s been threatening to storm the Ministry and carry off a secretary.”

“I came quietly,” the girl said, with her good chap smile.

It had rained in the night and the elephant grass was matted with brilliant dew. He could hear his tyres cutting the first tread of the day into the wet packed sand on the road; his blunted sense of smell revived to something of the animal’s keen nose. Bamboo, rocks, lichens — they stood out fresh as a rock — painting doused with water. Ten miles or so from Gala he picked up a young man who was trudging along with a cardboard suitcase. There were other people here and there on the road, women with bundles and pots, barefoot country people criss — crossing the forest and the grass in the ordinary course of their daily lives as clerks and shoppers move about the streets of a town, but this man in shirt — sleeves with new shoes spattered with mud was, at a glance, outside this activity: Bray stopped just ahead of him, and he got into the car without a word. “I’m going to the mine — that direction. How far’re you going?” “That will be all right.”

The presence in the car changed the mood of the morning; the sensuous pleasure of it sank back. The sunlight was empty upon a heavily charged object: the man breathed quietly, his lips closed with a small sound now and then on something he had not said aloud, and Bray saw, out of the corner of his eye, curly lashes slow — blinking and a line of sickness or strain marking the coarse cheek. His trousers were very clean and had the concave and convex lines of having been folded small in a suitcase. Once he took the ball — point pen out of his shirt — pocket and clicked the point in and out in a beautiful, matt — black hand.

Bray did not know whether the youngster was merely paralysed by the social proximity of a white man — so often the old dependencies, the unformulated resentments, the spell in which even the simplest of confrontations had been held so long, struck dumb — or whether he did not want to speak or be spoken to. Yet his presence was extraordinarily oppressive. Bray tried Gala; the young man said, without response, “I am returning home.” How long had he been in town? “Two months and seventeen days.” Bray did not want an interrogation; the man accepted a cigarette and Bray let the motion of the car and the focus of the passing road contain them dreamily.

The iron-ore mine was a purplish — red gash in the foothills before the pass. A sandcastle mountain of the same colour had been thrown up beside it, bare of the green skin of bush and grass that hid this gory earth on the hills. A new road led to it; on a nearby slope, a settlement was drawn and small figures were set down here and there, moving thinly. As the car came nearer they became the demonic figures of miners everywhere, faces streaked with lurid dirt under helmets, gumboots clogged with clay — the dank look of men who daily come back from the grave.

“I’m going to call in on someone who has a place about three miles on …?”

“Yes sir.”

Bray had thought he would get off at the mine; that was what was understood — but it didn’t matter. “Just tell me when we get near your village.” The young man heavily waved a hand to suggest an infinite distance, or indifference. They drove to the cattle ranch that had been remote fifteen years ago, when George Boxer settled there. Now there were a mine and telephone wires, over the hill. Boxer was still there, still wearing immaculately polished leather leggings, and attended by three Afghan hounds lean and wild in locks of matted hair. Boxer was one of those men whose sole connection with the world is achieved through a struggle with nature. The affairs of men did not engage his mind. Men themselves, white or black, had a reality for him only insofar as they were engaged with him in that struggle. Whether the man who searched with him for a lost heifer or worked with him to repair a fence was black or white was not a factor: the definitive situation was that of two men, himself and another, in conflict with dry rot in a fence — post, or with the marauding leopard who, too, was after the heifer. He had not joined in the settlers’ hue and cry against Bray ten years ago for the same reason that he hadn’t joined the exodus of settlers with the coming of independence: it was not that he had no feelings about colour, but that he had no communion with human beings of any colour. Circumstances — Bray’s circumstances, then — had made Boxer look like a friend simply because he was indifferent to being an enemy, but Bray had always known that this appearance had no more meaning in its way than that other, physical, appearance of Boxer’s — he wore the clothes, maintained the manners and household conventions of his public — school background not as if these were the manifestations of a place in a highly evolved society, but as if they were the markings, habits, and lair with which, unconscious of them (like any hare or jackal), he had been born.

Bray was directed down from the house to one of the cattle camps to find Boxer. While they were talking, looking at Boxer’s two fine bulls that he had bred himself, Bray forgot his passenger. Boxer began to walk Bray up to the house past the car: “There’s someone I’m giving a lift.” Boxer glanced at the passenger, swept aside the pause— “I’ll get something sent down to him. You’ll have lunch, of course.” But Bray insisted that tea or a drink was all he could stay for. They went into the living-room-cum-library that Boxer had panelled in the local mahogany; it was dimly like a headmaster’s study, although the reference books were agricultural. The tea — tray had a silver inscription, the inherited English furniture was set about as Bray now remembered the room. They talked about the mine. “Any chance of a find on your property? I suppose you’ve had it prospected?” Boxer took a can of beer out of a cabinet filled with tarnished decanters. “I don’t have to worry. There’s nothing. The Company’s gone over every inch. At one time I had it all planned — there’d be a vein here; how much I’d be paid out; the twenty thousand acres I’d had my eye on to buy down on the Bashi Flats. Kept me amused many nights. Awake, anyway.”

The books on cattle breeding had pushed the Mort d’Arthur, the Iliad and Churchill’s memoirs to the top shelves but there were book — club novels and The Alexandria Quartet in paperback accessible among the farming journals, and some seedpods and a giant snail — shell lying among rifle cartridges on a tray. — Bray remembered George Boxer’s wife, a black — haired woman with green eyes, pretty until she smiled on little, stained, cracked teeth. They had had a son; just entered Sandhurst, Boxer said, as if reminded of something he hadn’t thought of lately.

“Why the Bashi?” Bray asked. “I shouldn’t have thought it was the place for cattle.”

“No, no, that’s the point — it’s a lot of nonsense about the low altitude and so on. I’ve gone into the whole business thoroughly for ten years, I’ve collected sample pasture, recorded water supplies, collected every kind of tick there is all over this country. And you can take my word, there are no fewer tick — borne diseases up here than on the Flats, it’s exactly the same problem, and the natural pasture is infinitely better. If the water — conservation scheme goes ahead — the flood — water diversion one, I mean — I think one wouldn’t have to supplement feed at all, not even in August — November, before the rains. You could keep your pasture going right round the year. And you’d have no problem about watering your cattle. You see, at the moment, when the floods recede, everything drains away quickly to the south.”

“But I’ve seen ground water there right through the dry season.”

“No, no, you haven’t. Not clean water. Swamp soup, that’s all. You can’t go through the winter on that. That’s why you get the big cattle migration every year, and that’s how foot — and-mouth has spread, every time there’s been an outbreak. Pick it up on the Angolan border and trek it back to the Flats in November.” He drank beer and tea indiscriminately as he talked — his was the dehydration of fatigue, he had been up all night with his cattlemen and the dogs after a hyena that had killed three calves in the last month. The elegant dogs had cornered and killed it; it had not needed even a final shot. They lay and panted around him, their film — star eyelashes drooping over unseeing eyes, too nervously exhausted to sleep with them closed. But Boxer was fired with the chance — not to communicate but to expound aloud, reiterate, the tactics, successes and reverses of his year — in, year — out campaign in the calm bush where, through the windows, as the men talked they could see his cattle move, cropping singly, stumblingly, or driven — far off — flowing in brown spate close through the thin trees. He took Bray to a bathroom where, in aspirin bottles in the cupboard, there were labelled specimens of all the varieties of ticks to be found in the country— “All that I’ve been able to identify, so far—” He made the reservation with the objective modesty of scientific inquiry. Many of the ticks were alive, living in a state of suspended animation for months without food or air. In the disused bath, silverfish moths wriggled; Boxer turned a stiff, squeaky tap to flush them out. There were peeling transfers of mermaids and sea — horses on the pink walls of this laboratory.

Boxer showed no interest or curiosity in Bray’s return to the country or his activities now that he was there. But Bray was quick to see that some use could be made of George Boxer’s knowledge, if one could find the right way to approach him. No good suggesting that he offer his services to Mweta’s agricultural planning committee — human contact on any abstract level reduced him to cold sulks. “If you come into Gala sometime — I mean if you’re coming anyway — perhaps you would talk to the people doing the animal husbandry course we’re hoping to set up. We want to get the old craft schools going again on a new basis — a modest trades school, of course with practical farming techniques lumped along with anything else that’s useful. I don’t see why it should be left to agricultural colleges — even if we had one. It might fit in with your own line of inquiry — the chaps could collect grasses and stuff from the places where they run their cattle.”

“Oh Gala. I don’t think I’ve been more than once since Caroline left — Caroline’s in England.”

“Well, when she gets back, no doubt you’ll find yourself coming to town again, and then—?”

“Must be more than two years. Time flies. I don’t suppose the place has changed. Amazing; don’t know where the days go to. When did you people come back?”

“Olivia’s following. I’ve been here — yes, I suppose it’s more than three months. She was supposed to come as soon as Venetia’s baby was born—”

Boxer looked round the pink walls, over his neat bottles of ticks. “Her bathroom,” he said. He meant the wife with the bad teeth. “What in the world d’you need two bathrooms for.” A comfortable feeling of understanding, based idiotically, Bray felt, on misunderstanding, encircled them. Olivia was coming; how quickly three months had gone by.

It was absurd to bother to set things straight with Boxer. They went on talking in the tacit ease of men who have drifted the moorings of family ties.

When Bray got back to his car, his passenger had gone. Boxer called a servant; the meal taken to the man had been eaten. They looked about for him but he was not to be found. Bray felt slightly rebuffed, as if there had been some sort of response expected from him that he had failed to understand. “He wasn’t a very forthcoming passenger,” he said, with the defence of a philosophical irony. “Probably just out of clink,” Boxer said. “Head was shaved, eh, I noticed.”

Bray went over the Bashi Mountain pass, thumping on the worn springs of the car through sudden U — shaped dips into stream — beds, shuddering over rises covered with loose stones. He spent the first night in the old government rest hut at Tanyele village. Under the mopane trees pink and mauve flowers bloomed straight out of the sandy soil, without visible stem or leaf, as if stuck there by children playing house. At first he thought of them as irises (irises in bloom round the lily pool in Wiltshire) but then they fell into place as the wild lilies that Venetia and Pat used to pick when, as small girls, they had the treat of being allowed to go on a tax — collecting tour with him. He heated himself a tin of curry and rice; there had used to be an old cook attached to the rest — house who wore a high chef’s hat and made ground — nut stew on a Primus.

He woke next day to the gentle tinkle of goats’ bells and went to visit the local schoolmaster. Everybody seemed to remember him; he drank beer with Chief Chitoni and his uncle, the old Regent who had kept the stool warm when Bray was D.C., and was presented with a fierce white fowl and some sweet potatoes. At a decent distance from Tanyele, he untied the fowl’s legs and let it loose in the bush; someone appeared among the trees and he hoped it was not a Tanyele villager. Then he saw that it was, in fact, his passenger, still carrying his cardboard suitcase. Bray smiled; the other did not seem to feel any bond of acquaintance, but climbed into the car once more as if they had met by appointment. At the next night’s stop, he insisted on sleeping in the car and kept himself aloof from the people of the village. His shoes were grey with dried mud, now, broken in to the form of his feet, and when he moved his arms, a strong, bitter blast of sweat filled the car. But it was as if whatever had been locked inside him now escaped, harmless, a pungent dread. The stink was nothing; that dark, depersonalized, vice — hold of presence had become a tired, dirty body that had walked a long way in the sun. On the third day he suddenly asked Bray to stop the car; Bray thought he wanted to relieve himself but after disappearing among the trees for a moment or two he came back and said, “I stay here, sir.” There was a charcoal burners’ camp nearby.

Bray spent two more days criss — crossing the higher part of the Flats from village to village on rough tracks. The exhaust pipe kept falling off the car and was repaired in various ways in every village. On the morning of the sixth day the Volkswagen was poled across the river and the silent motion, after the perpetual rattling of the car, was a kind of presage: Shinza was on the other side. In the light, sandyfloored forest he came upon movement that he thought, at a distance, was buck feeding; it was women gathering sour wild fruit, and they turned to laugh and chatter as he passed.

The trees ended; the scrub ended; the little car was launched upon a sudden opening — out of flowing grass and glint of water that pushed back the horizon. He had always felt here, that suddenly he saw as a bird did, always rising, always lifting wider the ring of the eyes’ horizon. He took off his glasses for a moment and the shimmering and wavering range rushed away from him, even farther.

The dabs and shapes of hot blue water gave off dark looks from the endless bed of soft grasses. Small birds flicked like grasshoppers from the feathered tops. There was a smell of space, here. Thousands of head of cattle on this plain; but they were lost specks, no bigger than George Boxer’s ticks in the grass. The road was terrible; the violence of progress across calm and serenity could only be compared to the shock of a plane hit about by airpockets in a clear sky. Herdsmen stood to watch, unmoved, speculative, as he negotiated runnels cross — furrowed by the tracks of the sleds used to drag wood. Ilala palm began to appear in the grass, the flanges of the leaves open like a many — bladed pen — knife. Feeling his way through the past, he drove, without much hesitance at turnings, to Shinza’s village. A new generation of naked children moved in troops about the houses, which were a mixture of the traditional materials of mud and grass, and the bricks and corrugated iron of European settlement. Some of the children were playing with an ancient Victorian mangle; Belgian missionaries from the Congo and German missionaries from Tanganyika had waded through the grass all through the last decade of the nineteenth century, dumping old Europe among the long — horned cattle.

Shinza lived now (so he was directed) behind the reed wall of a compound set apart like a chief’s — in fact, it turned out to be part of Chief Mpana’s quarters. Inside were various mud outhouses and an ugly brick house with a pole — and-thatch veranda, and scrolled burglar — proofing at the windows like that of the European houses in the suburbs of the capital. There were no children in here. It was very silent. An old woman lay on her side in the sun, completely covered by cotton rags except for her bare feet. Bray had the feeling that if he touched her with his foot she would roll over, dead.

As if he were in a deserted place, he wandered round instead of knocking at the door. He looked in on a dark, dank hut that held nothing, in its gloom, but two motorcar tyres and an old steel filing cabinet beside a pile of rotting sleeping mats. As he turned back to the sun, a man appeared, tall, small — headed, in grey flannel trousers and a sports — coat, like a schoolmaster or a city clerk. “Yes?” he said rudely, not approaching.

“Is Edward Shinza here, d’you know?”

The man did not answer. Then he approached to look over Bray more closely. “You want to see Shinza?”

“They tell me he lives here, now. Is he around?”

The man stood, refusing to be pressed. “I don’t know if he’s here.”

“Could you perhaps ask, for me?”

“You want to see him.” The man considered.

“I’m an old friend.”

“I don’t know. I’ll see if he’s here. At the moment.”

The man went into the house but Bray had the impression that he left it again by a back door; he saw someone come into vision a moment, crossing the yard. Bray stood in the sun. The old woman did not stir. There was a smell of hides. The man came back. “Come on.” They went into the house, into a sort of parlour with a wasp’s nest in the corner, and volumes of Hansard on a sideboard. The man waited in silence beside him like a bodyguard. They sat on the hard chairs for long minutes. The gloom of contrast with the sun outside lifted. Then Shinza came in, hands in the pockets of a dressing — gown, barefoot, feeling for a cigarette. But it would not be the first cigarette of the day; the immediate impression was not of a man who had just got up, but of one who had not slept at all.

Chapter 7

So you decided to come and see me anyway.”

Edward Shinza, smiling, his nostrils open and taut, unmistakable. “James … you Englishmen, you do what you want.” He made a face fearful of consequences, but exaggerated into a joke.

There’s something different (Shinza had Bray’s hand casually, he held the matchbox between thumb and first finger at the same time): it was a tooth, a broken front tooth — that was it. Shinza now had a front tooth broken off in a curve, already so long done that it was smooth and rounded like the edge of any other tooth. He lit the cigarette and then looked at Bray, head drawn back, and said, still making fun of him, “You know it’s nice to see you, James, it’s nice, it’s — I should make a speech, honestly, I’d like to—” He deliberately ignored the dressing — gown, as if it were the way he chose to dress. He told the onlooker, in Gala, to leave but return in an hour, apparently careless of the fact that Bray could understand what was said.

But when he turned back to Bray and said in English — the remark was a paraphrase of one of Mweta’s slogans before large gatherings— “So you’re helping to build a nation, ay …” Bray thought that he had intended him to know that in an hour he expected to be rid of him, like any other guest.

“Weren’t you the one who taught him speech — making?”

Shinza was light — coloured for a Gala; he tenderly rubbed his yellow — brown breast where the gown fell open. A few peppercorns round the nipples, like the tufts that textured the skin of his face, sprouting from the surface pocked and cratered by some far — off skin affection, childhood smallpox or adolescent pimples. The furze ran together over the curves of the mouth, making a vague moustache. It emphasized the smile again, under the wide, taut nostrils. “A good teacher. But I didn’t teach him how to shut people up. He learnt by himself. Or perhaps others help him; I don’t know.” He made the mock — fearful face again, as if it were something Bray would recognize.

“Ah, come now — it was visualized as a one — party state from the beginning, you’d always said the — what was it you called it—?”

“Kiddies’ parliament,” Shinza fished up, dangling the phrase detachedly; a smile for it.

“Kiddies’ parliament — that’s it — the kiddies’ parliament Africans think reproduces Westminster in their states was not going to waste time and money in this one.”

“Of course, and I was damn well right, man. And now your boy would like to see me choose a fancy name and start an opposition party to draw into the open all the people around him he’s afraid of — a nice, harmless little opposition you can defeat at the polls by that unity — is-strength speech — making I taught him. Or by getting his Young Pioneers to beat up voters — it always looks nicer than turning on people who’ve made PIP and put him up there in the Governor’s house, ay? — Why do we stand?” He dumped on the table the clean washing — faded check shirts, crudely embroidered sheets — that was laid on an ugly brown sofa, and spread himself with careless luxury, flexing his neck against its back with the chin — movements of a man aware that he has not shaved.

There were so many ways by which they could have arrived at this point. Bray had been aware of it as to be approached through layer by layer of past associations, present preoccupations, the half — intimate trivia with which one mind circles another before establishing on what level they are to be open to one another, this time. But they had fallen through tentativeness at once; nothing stood between them, no protection. They might have opened their mouths and begun to speak out of the unsaid, as a man addresses a dark room. Bray said, “From the day I arrived, I tried to talk to him. I’d thought — if you and he weren’t hitting it off — you might go to United Nations for a time.”

Shinza watched him, lolling in a kind of faint, distantly bitter amusement at a spectacle that ceased to concern, a mouthing figure in an action from which the sound has been cut off. “Oh yes, United Nations,” he said kindly.

Bray sat down on the sofa.

Shinza continued to bear with him, smiling.

It was a powerful indifference, not listless. A lion fixes its gaze on no object, does not snap at flies. Old Shinza. But he’s not old at all, fifty — four or — five, about a year older than I am. Bray was aware of the vigour of Shinza’s breast, rising and falling, the strong neck shining a little with warmth — a body still a man’s body and not an old man’s, although the face for years had had the coded complexity of experience and drink.

“I got the impression that there were things between you I wasn’t supposed to know about.”

“Of course, James, of course. How else could Mweta explain? Of course; terrible things—” He began to laugh and put his hand on Bray’s knee. “He didn’t want to have me around. That’s all it is. It sounds so silly, ay, how could he say to you, I don’t want Shinza. I — don’t-want-Shinza. Shinza’s big black face in the papers. Shinza’s big mouth open in the cabinet. Shinza asking questions when I make my deals with the mining companies. The British. The Americans. The French. Why. How. How much. And who for. Better have that mister what’sisname, the young Englishman who jumps about licking, a nice, friendly dog, you pay him and he makes bow — wow, that’s all. No Shinza asking damn questions. Before, he used to ask me what questions to ask. Now he’s the one who has to give answers.”

“Shut people up?” Another meaning to the phrase that had fallen casually, earlier, suddenly opened. “You said something just now — what did you mean exactly?”

Shinza was stroking his neck under his unshaven, lifted chin, smiling, giving him one ear. He righted himself and smiled at Bray. Then all expression died. He said, “Oh, bush stories, like the chap you had in your car.”

“That youngster? The one I picked up?”

Shinza kept the moment suspended, watching without much interest, from an inner distance.

Bray was rushed by unmatched thoughts; had he mentioned the boy to Shinza? He said, at once conscious of the idiocy of it, “But he hardly had a word to say for himself.”

“Yes, shut up. He’d been shut up.” Shinza made a point of the broken — toothed smile at his smart play on words.

Two months and seventeen days.

He’s probably just out of clink.

“Where?”

“Oh Gala, of course. You know District Chief of Police Lebaliso. And the Provincial Officer, Aleke. Of course you know them.”

“What was the charge?”

“Charge? What charge? No charge; no trial. Just taken inside.”

“And what’d he done?”

“Worked at the fish — meal factory.”

Bray made a sudden, uncontrolled gesture for Shinza’s attention — and Shinza gave way, calmly: “Spoke to the other chaps about pay and conditions and so on. Told them something of how the fishing concessions with the company work. The time the government renewed the concessions for another five years — you know …”

Mweta’s minister had renewed the contract with the British — Belgian trawling company under terms that transferred a percentage of the stock to the government, but left the wages of the workers at the level of colonial times.

Bray sat forward clumsily, his hands dangled between his knees.

Shinza stuck another cigarette in his mouth, spoke round it, standing up to thrust for the matches in the dressing — gown pocket. “There were a few little meetings down in the township — the men from the factory and the lime — works fellows. The trade — union steward didn’t like it. The Young Pioneers didn’t like it.”

“They arrested the boy?”

“I suppose you call it that. They took him away and locked him up; they had a lot of questions to ask, it took two months or so, and now you gave him a lift home.” Shinza finished it off abruptly, like a fairy story for a child.

“More than two months.” About the time he had arrived in Gala. “I never heard a word.”

“No,” said Shinza, biting off the end of a yawn, “not a word. From Lebaliso? From Aleke?”

“Whose responsibility would an order like that be? Who signs? There’s no preventive detention law in this country now.”

“Oh well, there’s the tradition, from the old days of the Emergency.” There was the growing feeling that Shinza was closing the conversation.

“But whose orders?”

Shinza said patiently, boredly, “Lebaliso. Aleke.”

“I’d like to talk to the boy.”

“He’s had enough ‘questions,’” said Shinza.

“It’s possible that Mweta doesn’t know,” Bray said.

Shinza laughed. Bray was standing about; he did not know where to put himself, he heard his own shoes creaking. Shinza’s legs were thrust before him under the dressing — gown, the eyes held in a disgusted, amused sympathy. Bray said, “I mustn’t take these away with me again”; he put the box of cigarillos on the washing. “Your old brand.”

Shinza got up, the situation now on his own terms. “God, man, I love those things. I smoke these damned cigarettes nowadays, someone brings them in for me. Can you get me some more of those, James? I’d like a case, send them to me from England, eh?” When his man came in he ignored him and sauntered Bray through a kitchen and out of the house to another house, a mud — and-thatch one.

“The beer she makes isn’t too bad,” he said by way of introduction to a young woman who scuttled behind the dirty curtain that divided the house into two rooms. He called after her and in a moment she came back with a clean dress on and her feet hobbling into shoes. “She’s just had a baby,” he said, in Gala. “Where’s your son, Talisa, show off your son,” and she laughed and answered in the spirit of the dialogue before a stranger, “Why can’t you let him sleep, why do you have to look at him all the time?” “You’re jealous. I’ve got a lot of children, one more doesn’t matter to me. — It’s her first,” he said to Bray, and went behind the curtain, where there were laughter and argument, and he came out tugging the dressing — gown straight with one hand, crimping his eyes as he blew cigarette smoke upwards to keep it away from the tiny baby he held, wearing only a little vest, in his other hand. It was pink — brown, faintly translucent, with minute hands and feet stirring, and a watch — sized, closed face. The girl took the cigarette out of Shinza’s mouth as she gazed at the baby, and with the first finger of his other hand he delicately traced the convolutions of its ear, whose lines were still compressed from the womb. It peed in a weak little arc, like the squirt from some small sea — creature disturbed in its shell. Shinza laughed, making lewd remarks, almost tossing it to the mother, while she was joyously fussed and embarrassed and bore it away behind the curtain, where it burst into surprisingly powerful yells that rivalled its father’s laughter. He moved about looking for a cloth. The mud room smelled coolly of fetid infant, beer, woodsmoke. There were clothing, cooking pots, newspapers, a radio, a brand — new perambulator of the kind you see in European parks — the decent disorder of intimacy. A trunk with labels from Southampton docks, San Francisco, and New York (Shinza was of the generation that got scholarships to attend Negro universities in America; Mweta was born too late for that and went straight into politics from school) had a lace mat and fancy coffee service set out upon it. Shinza grabbed a garment of some kind and mopped his chest, tossing the rag into a corner. A kitchen table with an old typewriter was his desk. There was a packing — case of books in disarray; behind it, the only adornment on the walls, a football — team group — Nkrumah, cross — eyed Fanon, mascot Selassie, Guevara, a face among others that was Shinza himself: a meeting of Afro — Asian countries in Cairo, the beginning of the Sixties. Shinza saw Bray looking, and said, “Rogue’s gallery.” He was smoking one of the cigars; he had the authority, pitched here in this mud tent, of a commander in the field.

They drank home — brew and talked general politics in a distracted fashion, for Shinza was twice called out (in the sun, men waited like horses, moved away to speak with him), the girl and baby were about. None of these things was allowed to interrupt the talk, not because Shinza was giving Bray his full attention but because all that passed between them was peripheral, to Shinza.

The second time Shinza returned to the hut, Bray stopped him as he came in: “How far did it go with the boy?”

Shinza made a pantomime of jerking his head, blinking. “What?”

“‘Questions,’ you said. Enough ‘questions’?”

Shinza kept the cold butt of the cigar in his mouth. “Oh you know what questions amount to, James.”

“Do I?”

“And after all, Mweta’s your man, you have certain ideas about him, about us ….”

Bray hardened in the indifference as flesh contracts in a cool breeze.

“Questions’ve got to get answers. Somehow. If not one way then the other. You know.”

“I want to know what happened.”

Shinza said, explaining to a child, “James, his head wouldn’t answer, so they put their questions on his back.”

“I see.”

“You can see the questions on his back. You want to see them? I’ll fetch him for you.” As if to get it over with, he became whimsically determined, now, to have Bray examine the exhibit. “I don’t want you to believe any wild stories from the bush — I’ll fetch him and you can look. No, no, you stay, I’ll fetch him for you.”

Bray was left standing alone in the presence of Shinza’s things. The girl was quiet behind the curtain — it seemed that she was listening; she did not come out.

Quickly Shinza was in the room again, marshalling the youngster ahead. The boy gave no sign of recognition — Bray’s greeting died, irrelevant. Shinza said in Gala, “Bend over.” He lifted the boy’s shirt. The boy stood, legs apart, hands braced on his knees. He did not look round. From his waist, narrowed by the weight of his body falling away from the spine, his back broadened to the muscles under the shoulder, yellowish round the waist, powder — grey in the shallow ditch on either side of the vertebrae, stale brown over the muscles and shoulders. The pores of the skin were raised, grainy with hardened sebaceous secretion that had not been released by fresh air and sun for a long time. Skin that had lost its gloss like the coat of an animal kept in confinement; Bray knew that skin; had not seen it since the days when he was on the magistrate’s bench, as D.C., and prisoners had come before him. In the house in Wiltshire, such things — the reality of such things had no existence.

He was so awakened by the fact of the skin that the weals that had healed across it, tender, slightly puckered strips with the satiny look of lips, scarcely gave up their meaning. Scars, yes, wounds, yes, the protest, the long memory of the body for all that is done to it — the anger of pimples, rough patches, all recording, like messages scratched on the bark of a tree. The small depression in the rib cage, low down on the left — hand side, for instance: where did that come from? A congenital deformation? A stunting of the bone through some early nutritional deficiency? — He ran his finger over the braille of a scar — then took it away, burned with embarrassment. The boy remained bent, an object, as he must have been made to bend for the blows themselves. Some of the scars were no more than faint marks left paler than the surrounding skin, blending into it, forgetting, soon to link imperceptibly with the other skin cells. That one must have gone deep and gaped on the flesh, to have had to make such a thick ribbon of scar tissue to make it whole. Suddenly he saw the pattern of the blows, sliced regularly across the back as the cuts in a piece of larded meat. On the calf — muscle of one strong, rachitically bowed leg another pale slash showed through the sparse hairs. Bray described it in the air an inch or two away from the flesh, looking at Shinza: and that?

“Somebody missed,” Shinza said. His lips lifted, the parenthesis of surrounding beard moved back; he showed his teeth a moment, and then the grin sank away as the lips slid down over the teeth again.

It might have been an old scar from some innocent injury — a fall, an accident — unconnected with the prison at Gala, but Shinza had no time for such niceties of distinction. Bray saw that to him all wounds were one; and that his own.

“What could they get from him that was worth this.”

And now Shinza really grinned, putting his palm on the boy’s rump as on a trophy. He said with the pleasure of being proved right, “Good old James, just the same as ever.”

Bray said in Gala, “Why doesn’t he get up—” and Shinza, recalled to something unimportant, gave the rump a friendly clap and said in English, “Okay. That’s it.”

The boy pushed his shirt into his shorts. Bray wanted to say something to him but when he looked at him the boy at once fixed his eyes on Shinza.

“Well then,” Bray said, “what did he have to keep to himself that would make him take this?”

“James, James. You see a hero behind every bush, when you come back here. He told them whatever he knew as soon as they took him. Right away. Without a scratch. But they had some questions he didn’t know the answers to. It’s a method; if someone won’t talk, never mind why, you’re not expected to know why — let him have it. It’s routine.”

“We know. Of course it’s happening all over the world. But in what sort of places.”

Shinza said, “This place, James.” And he gave a short laugh and added, “Ay?”

Bray said, “It’s still possible Mweta doesn’t know.”

Shinza considered an academic question; “Not about this one, no — keep up with every little instance, you can’t expect that.” To the boy, “All right.”

The boy looked at Bray at last, and gave him the polite form of leavetaking, in Gala. Shinza recalled him and tossed over a packet of the cigarettes he had put aside for the cigars. The boy took them without a word and left.

Bray said, “The thing to do is to take a statement. A statement made before both of us.”

Shinza was looking at him almost with fondness. “Those days are over.”

“You give up too easily, Shinza.” Bray took on in mock submission the naïveté imputed to him. He waited for Shinza to accept this form of refutation, to begin to speak.

“Oh yes,” Shinza said, “I’m just a lazy bastard, rusting away. Plotting. No, no, not plotting, rotting. Whatever they like to think, it’s up to them. A case for lung cancer. Some say liver. — Tell me, how’s old Dando? And the old crowd, in London? I hear from Cameron now and then, if you ever see him, tell him where I am we use the talking drums, that’s why I don’t write.” The girl came out with the baby, now wide awake again, and they sat, lordly, drinking more beer and talking the sort of joking nonsense between old friends that admits a third presence.

Shinza left open no way that led to himself. But leaving, Bray said, “I’ll be back.” It hung in the air, a remark in bad taste. Of course Shinza understood that he meant to see Mweta; but Shinza was merely lingering politely at the reed fence, smiling, his attention cocked, like a dog’s ears pointed backward, elsewhere. “You making a long stay this time?” he remarked absently to Mweta’s guest.

“If I thought I could achieve anything.”

Shinza ignored the question implied. “What’s it again, James — schools? Wha’d’you know about schoolmastering.”

“I’m working with Sampson Malemba on the schools, for one thing — looking at the whole educational system, really; technical schools, trades schools, that’s what’s needed, too — a modest start with adult education for the new sort of youngsters coming along with a bit of industry going, now, in Gala itself.”

The lime works. The fish — meal factory, where his passenger came from.

Shinza nodded.

Bray said suddenly, “Anything you need, Edward …”

They stood there at a distance for a moment.

“Oh well, the cigars — you said you’d get them for me from England. That’d be fine, you know.” Shinza was smiling.

With his hands dragging down the dressing — gown pockets so that his muscular buttocks jutted along as he walked, he disappeared into the house where Bray had waited for him. Bray did what he had to do; went to the school in the village, drove on twenty miles to the White Fathers’ Mission school, turned, at last, back along the road he had come and passed without stopping the children still making a hobby — horse out of the old mangle, the goats, the bicycles, the mud houses, and the reed stockade where Shinza was. But Bray got through it all with blind attention, holding off a mental pressure that built up, waiting for the gap through which it would burst. The wobbling of the gear — shaft in his palm over the terrible road became the expression of a trembling of his hand itself, suppressed. Two months and seventeen days. Back here only a few months and already it’s begun — the beating up, the putting away. An old story. No wonder Shinza couldn’t resist the opportunity to sneer at his reaction. He had never counted himself among those whose radical liberalism amounts to no more than an abstract distaste for coercive methods. He had never before found himself out in that particular kind of dishonesty. Over the years he had accepted — at a distance — some ugly facts if, unfortunately, they appeared unavoidable to gain the social change he believed in. He struggled to set aside the vision of the boy’s back. He’d forgive a great deal to see achieved the sort of state that Shinza and Mweta had visualized together for the country.

But the “questioning” of the boy stood between Shinza and Mweta.

And himself? Would he forgive himself? Perhaps this agitation of his was a matter of not wanting to get his own hands dirty. That was his kind of dishonesty. Let it be done if it must be, but not by me, let me not put my hand to it, not by even so much as a signature at the bottom of a report on education. Was that it?

Yet he had an impulse to go straight to the capital at once; to Mweta; as if that would do away once and for all with ambiguities: his own as well as those of what had happened. — Aleke? He ought at least to talk to Aleke first, get the facts straight. Aleke must have been the one to take authority, to sign. He saw Aleke and himself, moving in and out about houses, boma, village street in Gala, entwining waving antennae when their paths crossed, senselessly as ants. But Aleke would never have shut a man away on his own initiative; then was it Aleke taking orders from Lebaliso? Aleke and Bray laughed at Lebaliso, a jerky little man who had taken over from Major Conner, whose batman he had been in the war. Lebaliso was a nonentity; Aleke certainly was not: both would do as they were told. Aleke was an efficient civil servant, independent but not politically minded or politically ambitious. If an order came from the capital, and it did not touch upon the day — to-day smooth running of his local administration, he would simply sign. Easy — going, confident, sitting on his veranda working at his papers among the noise of children, he knew what he was doing and presumed the people up there at the top knew what they were doing, too. After all, the government was PIP. On the solid convictions of people like Aleke governments come to power but are never threatened; Aleke would never change his mind about Mweta, or anything else.

Mweta had given Justice to Justin Chekwe; Bray didn’t know him well, but Roly Dando called him a Gray’s Inn pin — up boy— “Who knows what really lies under that nylon wig, I sat next him at dinner and caught him admiring himself in a soup spoon—” Dando talked so much: “Once you’ve been given Justice, you don’t have much to do with justice any more. You keep the peace the way the big boys want it kept. Same with the Attorney — General’s job — a pair of Keystone Cops, Justice and I, really, that’s all. He’ll be all right, I suppose, so long as Mweta stays on the straight and narrow.” He would phone Dando as soon as he got home; and decided as suddenly that it was not the thing to do. The house had a party line and anyway the local exchange would hear every word. He recoiled from Roly’s ventriloquist patter coming out of the distance.

While Bray was with Shinza he had felt like an adult reluctant to believe that a favourite child has lied or cheated. He was afraid, in Shinza’s house, that Mweta did know. But now — alone to the horizon of gentle grasses with no sign from another human except the flash of a paraffin tin carried on a woman’s head — he felt there was the possibility that Mweta really did not know, that the size of this unwieldy country with its communications that dwindled out in flooded tracks and ant — eaten telephone poles made it feasible for people to take the law into their own hands while behind the red brick façade of the President’s Residence, telephones, telex, and the planes coming to the airport down the road brought Mweta closer to Addis, New York, and London than to this grass — inundated steppe, soughed down under the empty sky.

In the pass (driving directly now, he covered in one day what had taken him three) the confidence went again, as unreasonably. Rough, dark — flanked mountains enclosed the road and himself. Shinza had another kind of confidence, one that Bray was provoked by, not just in the mind, but in the body, in the senses; Shinza moved in his immediate consciousness, in images so vivid that he felt a queer alarm. A restlessness stirred resentfully in the tamped — down ground of his being, put out a touch on some nerve that (of course) had atrophied long ago, as the vagus nerve is made obsolete by maturity and the pituitary gland ceases to function when growth is complete. Shinza’s bare strong feet, misshapen by shoes, tramped the mud floor — the flourish of a stage Othello before Cyprus. He was smoking cigarettes smuggled from over the border; friends across the border: those who had cigarettes probably had money and arms as well. And the baby; why did the baby keep cropping up? — Shinza held it out in his hand as casually as he had fathered it on that girl. He did not even boast of having a new young wife, it was nothing to him, nothing was put behind him….

The man will change his life, Bray thought burningly. Mweta became no more than the factor whose existence would bring this about, rouse it into being. Shinza might as well have been thirty as fifty — four. No, it wasn’t that he was an ageing man who was like a young man — something quite different — that he was driven, quite naturally, acceptedly, to go on living so long as he was alive. You would have to have him drop dead, to stop him.

The house in Wiltshire with all its comfortable beauty and order, its incenses of fresh flowers and good cooking, its libations of carefully discussed and chosen wine came to Bray in all the calm detail of an interesting death cult; to wake up there again would be to find oneself acquiescently buried alive. At the same time, he felt a stony sense of betrayal. Olivia moved about there, peppermints and cigarettes on the night — table, her long, smooth — stockinged legs under skirts that always drooped slightly at the back. A detail taken from a painting, isolated and brought up close to the eye. He suddenly tried to remember what it was like to be inside Olivia’s body. But he could not. All that he produced, driving through the scrubby forest alone, was the warm reflex of a beginning erection in response to the generalized idea of the warmth inside women, any woman. His mind switched to Mweta again, and his body shrank. He ought not, he was perhaps wrong to question Mweta about anything. He had made it clear from the beginning that he would not presume on any bond of authority arising out of their association because he saw from the beginning that there was always the danger — to his personal relationship with Mweta — that this bond might become confused with some lingering assumption of authority from the colonial past. I mustn’t forget that I’m a white man. A white man in Africa doesn’t know what to see himself as, but mentor. He looks in the mirror, and there is the fatal fascination of the old reflection, doesn’t matter much, now, whether it’s the civil servant under a topi or the white liberal who turned his back on the settlers and went along with the Africans to Lancaster House. If I don’t like what Mweta does, I’d better get out and go home to Wiltshire. Write an article for the New Statesman, from there. He almost spoke aloud to himself. He wished Olivia would be at the house in Gala, when he came back. He suddenly felt alone, as he might have felt cold, or tired. He began to write a letter to Olivia in his head, telling her to make up her mind and come quickly. He felt he missed her very much.

He would have liked to get back to Gala the next night — could have done it, prepared to drive through the night until one or two in the morning — but he stuck reluctantly to his original intention to make a loop on his return so as to include the Nome district. On paper, it was the site of a resettlement scheme; the people were poor and apathetic, one came upon them laboriously picking about some task in the forest with the dazed faces of those who are underfed from the day they are no longer suckled. Some villages had no school hut at all. Filthy and silent, children appeared from the forest and sold him those mushrooms big as plough disks that grew at this time of year. Their cool flesh gave off a soothing cellar — smell; the depressing odour of luxury in the midst of human poverty that he always recognized as peculiar to Africa. Here in the forest there were extravagant left — overs from some feast of gods — huge mushrooms, lilies blooming out of sand — but no ordinary sustenance for the people.

He drove the last lap back to Gala in a complete preoccupation of the will to get there, tense for any change of rhythm that might indicate trouble in the car, crossing off the hours and miles with each look at his watch. When at last he turned into the main street and the mahogany trees swallowed him in their well — deep shade and quiet he saw the shops were shut — it was Sunday. He went to the office just the same; Aleke might be there, doing some work. But there was nobody. The Christ — thorn had been dug up. He could hardly go to Aleke’s house — his own old house — and confront him in the midst of the Dinky cars and the children. The same old sound of Sunday drumming thudded faintly through the afternoon. The gleaming backs of cars huddled round the club. A car turning into the entrance paused as he drew level and the occupant was grinning at him invitingly, importantly. Broughton, the secretary, mouthing something at him. He rolled down the window and grimaced politely to show he couldn’t hear. “You don’t answer your phone. I’ve been trying to get you all week. Your application’s been approved by the committee. Henderson seconded it. So there you are, I knew you’d be pleased but you’ve been the devil to get hold of.” They were blocking the entrance and the man gestured and drove in, expecting Bray to follow, his face bright with the readiness to resume the barely interrupted chat.

Henderson was the owner of one of the two local drapers’ shops: preparing the ground against Olivia’s return, thoughtful man. Bray drove on down the quiet dirt road past the half — hidden houses, past a male Gala “nanny” wheeling a white child, and the children and dogs of one of the black administrative officials who had moved into government houses, bounding round a meeting of flashing new bicycles. His eye separated from the other greenery the towering, spreading outline of the fig tree; nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And all the while, when everything was as it is now, the boy had been shut up in the prison in the bush outside the town.

Mahlope had cut the grass on the verges of the road before the house. Aprons were spread stiffly dried on the hibiscus hedge. Bray had a revulsion against entering the empty, closed — up bungalow where all he would meet were the signs of his own occupancy. His sense of urgency was thrown back at him, an echo.

He began to lug his things out of the car and dump them on the grass. The soft questioning of children’s voices rang through the sunny quiet; he looked round and saw a woman and three small figures coming across the half — cleared scrub between his house and the one from which he was pleasantly isolated. Their heads were wrapped in something — towels. But everything — the club secretary’s happy interest, people with their heads wrapped up in towels — was simply part of the distance that had been put between himself and the life of this familiar place by what he had heard existed there, beneath these appearances of which he himself was part.

It was the girl, Rebecca Edwards, again, with three of the numerous children who overran the Bayleys’ house in the capital. Soapy trickles ran from under the turban down her temple and cheek. Bray said to the children, “Been swimming, eh?” and the smaller one clutched his mother’s thigh. She wiped away the soapy tear. “Oh, it’s awful to worry you — you see there suddenly isn’t a drop of water, and I’d just put this stuff on our hair …” Another tear ran down and fell on her bare foot. “If we could stick our heads under the garden tap—” “Heavens, come to the bathroom. I’ll open the house.” She and the children all wore cheap rubber — thonged sandals. They trooped in behind him, driving away the silence with their squelching footsteps and displacing the emptiness with their invading bodies. He pushed open the stiff bathroom window, he turned on the taps; there were exclamations of relief when the water gushed out— “It’s even hot,” he said, and left them to it.

There was unopened mail addressed in familiar hands, newspaper rolls; the cardboard folders of notes and papers, as he had left them: DISTRICT, SCHOOLS, POPULATION UNDER 18. He put a carbon between two sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter. He began a letter to Mweta; and then pulled out a cheap blue pad, the only kind you could buy in Gala stores, and began to write by hand, a letter or the draft of a letter. Before he could touch any of this again — the folders and notes — before there was any point in going on, he must have an answer from Mweta. The stammering, repetitive questions of a small child whose need for expression runs ahead of its vocabulary came muffled from the bathroom. He tore the wrappers off a couple of newspapers and rolled them the opposite way to flatten them. What he wrote, what he was saying to Mweta was not about the boy at all.… the whole opposition between you is false, I don’t believe it’s based on any real difference of approach at all, but you have pushed Shinza into the position where if he is to do anything at all he must oppose you, and not in a negative way. He must set up something against what you are setting up without him. If you behave differently in power from the way you did before, so of course would he.… If you had him with you, now, both of you would be facing the same problems of adjustment, and there’s a pretty good chance, taking into account the closeness of the old association, you’d come to the same sort of solution. Don’t you see? To put it at its worst, it would at least ensure a kind of complicity … at least you’d avoid finding yourself in the position where you’d have to do some of the things you’ll find you have to do now…. Rebecca Edwards and her children came to thank him; with an abstracted awareness of bad manners, he realized that he hadn’t even asked how she came to be making for this house; where she had come from.

“Did you find somewhere to live? You’re not still at the Inn?” She explained that she had moved into the house across the scrub, was sharing it with the agricultural officer, Nongwaye Tlume, and his wife. “I don’t mind, there’s a kind of extra kitchen attached to that rondavel outside. Anything to get out of the hotel, anyway, it was costing me such a lot of money.” The children’s hair was rough — dried and spiky, hers was combed out neatly like a wet dark fringe all round. Her bare big forehead and the wings of her nose shone faintly from the ablutions. She had yellow eyes, like a pointer he had once had. The four went off the way they had come, through the scrub. Poor thing; there was some story there nobody bothered to ask — she and her children could have stayed in this house instead of the Fish — eagle Inn while waiting to move in to the Tlumes’, he should have thought of it. Probably that was something of the kind that Roly had expected of him. … I can’t believe Shinza would have made a move to oust you, standing beside you as it were. No moral reason, but because there’s always been something secretive in his nature, some pleasure in being behind the scenes, recognized for his importance only by a few people in the know… he likes to be the face you can hardly make out between the other faces, but there.… And he has a laziness about people — you know that — he can’t be bothered with the continuity of day — to-day contact, shaking hands and grinning crowds. He’s essentially a selfish and withdrawn man — I mean success would become vulgar to him, he would always have left that part of it to you….

Kalimo arrived back and cooked him some supper. Afterwards he stood under the fig tree in the dark, smoking one of the big cigars he didn’t allow himself too often. There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn — off rags of darkness itself. He wondered with whom he could take the traditional refuge of dropping in for a drink. Not the club, the new member taking up his rights. Not Aleke. He could go to that girl, Rebecca Edwards, one of the group in the capital. But he and she would have nothing to talk about; his mind was blank of small talk. He leant against the tree and the cigar burned down to a finger of firm ash. Ants ran alerting a fine capillary tree of nerves over his back.

He went inside and wrote to his wife, suggesting that she make up her mind and fly out within the next two weeks. He had to go to the capital in any case, and this would mean that he could meet her and drive her back on the same trip. After he had signed, he wrote: All our reasons for your not coming seem to be simply because we can’t put a name to why you should come. It was a love letter, then. He scored it out. He wrote, experimentally, All our reasons for your coming seem to be defeated by some unknown reason for your not coming. He felt he did not understand what he had said. He did not stick down the envelope. He put it with the pages he had covered for Mweta; about Mweta.

In the morning, he left the pages there. At least until he had spoken to Aleke. At least until then.

Aleke and his new secretary were starting the day with a cup of coffee when he arrived at the offices. It was an atmosphere he had known all his life — what he thought of as “all his life,” the years in Africa. The offices still stuffy but cool before the heat of the day, the clerks talking lingeringly over their shoulders as they slowly began their to — and-fro along the passages; the time before the satchel of mail came in. Aleke filled his pushed — back chair and questioned Rebecca Edwards with the banter of a working understanding.

“You didn’t forget to stick in Paragraph B, Section Seventeen, eh, my girl.” She leaned against the windowsill, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. “I did not.” Of course, she could be counted on to take work home over the weekend; Aleke said it himself: “You’re an angel. And will you get that file up to date by Friday? Cross your heart?” He had for Bray the smile with which a busy man greets one who has been off on some pleasure — trip. “Well, how was the bush? Get through all right?” There was chatter about the condition of the road. “Mr. Scott said to Stanley Nko, ‘The best thing would be for the Bashi Flats to secede….’” (Nko had taken over from the white Provincial Manager of Public Works, Scott.) Quoting, Aleke was immensely amused at this solution to the problem, and they all laughed.

“Could I have a word with you, Aleke?” Bray asked.

“Oh sure, sure.”

Rebecca Edwards tactfully made to leave at once. “Here, here, don’t forget these—” A file was waved at her.

Aleke got up, took the lavatory key from its tidy nail, and went off for the daily golden moment, saying, “Be with you right away — if you want to listen to the news—” He gestured at the transistor radio on his desk.

Chapter 8

Aleke was washing his hands with boma soap, drying them on the strip of boma towel.

“I gave a young fellow a lift,” Bray said.

Aleke began to nod and turned smiling at a story he could guess— “Long as he didn’t bash you over the head. It’s getting as bad as down in town. What’d he take off you? Some of these fellows from the fish factory — I don’t stop for anybody, any more, honestly.”

“Yes, from the fish factory — but he’d just come out of prison. He’d been inside more than two — and-a-half months. No trial. No charges laid. Here in Gala, in Lebaliso’s jail.”

Aleke sat down at his desk and listened to something he knew instead of guessed. He put out his hand and switched on the fan; he probably did this every morning at exactly the same time, to ward off the heat as it came. His face was open to Bray. “You know about it,” Bray said.

“Lebaliso kept me in the picture.”

“So it was Lebaliso’s decision?”

“We’d been keeping an eye on that fellow a long time. Shinza’s chap.”

Bray said, “What d’you mean, Shinza’s chap?”

“There’re a lot of Bashi working here now. Shinza sees they make a nuisance of themselves now and again. In the unions and so on.”

“Aleke.” Bray made the attempt to lift the whole business out of the matter-of-fact, where Aleke let it lie like a live bomb buried in an orderly garden. “Aleke; Lebaliso shut up a man for two months and seventeen days.”

“From what I was told, this one was a real trouble — maker. I mean, it’s not my affair, except that what’s good for the province concerns me. From that point of view, I’m expected to keep an eye on things. If there’s likely to be any trouble, I just like to know what I’m expected”—in mid — sentence he changed his mind about what he was saying— “well, I must be kept more or less in the picture.”

“And what you see is Lebaliso taking the law into his own hands.”

Aleke was friendly, tried to invoke the amusement at Lebaliso he and Bray had shared. “Of course I said to him at the beginning, the magistrate’s the man to go to with your troubles. Not me. Anyway it seems something had to be done about that fellow. They wanted to know a bit more about him.”

Bray said, “Was Onabu the one who was interested?” Aaron Onabu was Chief of Police, in the capital.

Aleke agreed rather than answered. “I suppose so.”

Bray said, bringing out each word steadily, “And I never heard a word from anyone in Gala.”

“We-ll, you’ve had other things to do but think about old Lebaliso up there—” The hand waved in the direction of the prison, behind the trees, behind the village. “We’ve all got enough on our hands. But this girl, Bray — I’m telling you, my life is different now. When I want something, it’s there. If I forget something, she’s remembered. And give her anything you want done, too. If you want your reports typed. She’ll do it; she’s a worker, man.”

Bray watched the fan turning its whirring head to the left, the centre, the right, and back again, the left, the centre, the right, and back again. He wanted to ask: And are there others up there — with Lebaliso? But the telephone rang and while Aleke’s warm, lively voice rose and fell in cheerful Gala, he felt the pointlessness of pursuing this business through Aleke and, signalling his self — dismissal, left the room.

In his office he set himself to put some order into the files he kept there; they were constantly being moved back and forth between the boma and the house. The office was not exclusively for his use and Godfrey Letanka, the clerk, came carefully in and out. He gave him some typing to be done; he couldn’t bring himself to take advantage of that girl. The heat grew and filled the small room; he stood at the window and looked across the village muffled in trees. At twelve o’clock it was alive with bicycles taking people home to the African township for lunch, black legs pumping, shouts, talk, impatient ringing of bells. He went out and the sun was dull, behind cloud, on his head; he had the feeling that he was not there, in Gala, really: that he had lost external reality. Or conversely that he carried something inside him that set him apart from all these people who were innocent of it, uninfected. What was he doing among them? He dropped at Joosab’s a pair of pants with a broken zip; Joosab stitching, moulding layers of interlining upon a lapel, the naked bulb over his sewing machine, Mweta on the wall. Joosab’s brother — in-law and mother — in-law had just been to Mecca, and the brother — in-law was in the shop, wearing his white turban. “Home again, Colonel.” Joosab celebrated the two travellers, one from the bush, one from the pilgrimage, in vicarious pleasure. “Your tuhn will come, your tuhn will come, Ismail.” The brother — in-law was generously reassuring from the bounty of his importance. “More than fifteen year now, I been thinking next year and next year … but seriously, Colonel, I have plans to make the trip.” At the general store, where he had to pick up a cylinder of domestic gas, changes were in process: a cashier’s turnstile was being set up at the new EXIT ONLY — a second door formerly blocked by rolls of linoleum and tin baths. Already men and women in the moulded plastic sandals that were now worn by all who could afford shoes were shoving and shuffling for a share of supermarket manna — a free pocketcomb with every purchase above two — and-sixpence. An old crazy woman who wandered the streets of Gala had somehow got in behind the turnstile and was singing hymns up and down the lanes of tinned food and detergents.

He took a detour past the prison instead of going home. He thought there was a track that led round the hill behind the hospital to the prison road. It was as he remembered; followed by the yapping dogs of a squatter family, he came out upon the road and saw it up ahead, like any military camp or prison in Africa, a bald place with blind low buildings exposed to the sun. He did not know what he expected: there was a new, very high fence of diamond mesh wire, barbed on top, rippling tinny light; the new flag drooped. He had been inside many times, while he was D.C. He knew the hot, white courtyard and the smell of disinfectant and sour manioc. No political prisoner had been kept there, during the British administration; they had been sent to detention camps in the various emergencies. He had seen those, too; encampments set down in remote places where no one lived, and, inside, the weeks, months, years, passed in heat and isolation. People had been beaten in them; died of dysentery. A commission of inquiry hadn’t healed them or brought them back to life. His agitation on the journey from the Bashi suddenly became something inflated. It sank out of an abnormal glare; he considered it dispassionately. He had looked on that scarred back; but was it really something so inconceivable, for Mweta, for himself — for anybody who had ever ventured out of Wiltshire? His hands had shaken — over that, a commonplace horror?

To condemn it was as much the centre of his being as the buried muscle that pumped blood in his breast. But to tremble virginally at the knowledge that it happened, here under his nose …

Part of common knowledge. The air we breathe; I have lived my whole life with that stink in my nostrils. Why gag, now? You work with the stink of violence in your nose just as a doctor must work within the condition of disease and death.

The screw of noon turned upon everything. It held in the breathless house when he sat down to the lunch Kalimo had burned. (Kalimo was much less efficient than he had existed in memory, in Europe; or was it just that Kalimo was older, old? — Bray noticed a bluish ring like the ring around the moon demarking the brown iris from the red — veined yellow of the man’s eyeballs.) The more he thought about confronting Mweta the more urgently doubtful he became about his own purpose, and beyond it the shadowy matter — like the area of darkness over a suspect organ in an X — ray plate — of his own authority. If the affair of the boy were an example of abuse by some official making free of new — found power, the conversation with Aleke in itself might be enough to put a stop to this particular incident; Aleke would pass the word to Lebaliso, and Lebaliso would be afraid to act again to please (presumably) some local PIP lordling. The intervention of Mweta might go one step further and ensure the censure of Lebaliso. But there would continue to be other such incidents about which nobody would hear, about which there would be nobody to pass the word. The only way they could be counted upon not to happen at all would be if things were to go well enough, long enough, in the country for a code of efficiency to supersede the surrogate of petty power among administrators and officials. Then only the sort of abuses, involving profit rather than flesh, that are tacitly time — honoured in the democratic states of the West and East, would remain. And for the country to go well enough, long enough, Mweta needed the help of Shinza.

But if what happened to the boy was what Onabu ordered, from the capital?

If such things were part of the regular activities of the Special Branch, State Security — whatever name such an organization chose to go by? His mind went cold with refusal. Yet he had lived so long, and so long here, among white and black, that he half — knew it could not be otherwise. And if that were so, then more than ever what was pointed to was that the country could not afford to have Mweta make an enemy of Shinza.

Mweta was in a neighbouring state on a few days’ official visit. Bray could not see him at once. He did not post the letter he had written him; the one to Olivia, either. He went about the house and the boma and the broad, shade — dark main street that was Gala like someone who has packed his belongings and sent them ahead to some unknown destination. He kept away from the few people — the Alekes, the Tlumes — he had got to know. One lunchtime on his way home he stopped for a beer at the “native” bar near the vendors’ trees. Young men from the industries were there; the elite of Gala, with money coming in regularly every week instead of intermittently, from the occasional cash crop. Old men sat alone at dirty trestles over a mug of home brew, blear and tattered, turning coins and snuff from cotton tobacco bags in that miserly fingering — over with which the aged spin out time left to them. The young ones drank European bottled beer from the local factory and he listened to them arguing about soccer and the price of batteries for radios. Some wore PIP badges as others wore buttons given away by a soft drink company. They ignored him suspiciously; one of the old ones shifted on his seat in a gesture of respectful salute.

At the turn — off to the road where his house was he caught up with Aleke’s secretary, trudging along in the heat. Above big sunglasses her forehead shone damp and white. She said, “It’s only another hundred yards,” but got into the car. “The clutch’s gone on my old faithful — going to cost me fourteen pounds.” “It’s madness to walk in this heat. I can always give you a lift to work.”

She said, “Well, I didn’t want to force you to go up and down at eight and twelve and so on, just because of me … I mean, you don’t have to keep office hours, do you …”

The house was cool, stuffy, dim, empty; Kalimo had drawn the curtains against the heat, thin and violently coloured as flags against the light. It was true; he didn’t have to keep office hours, his job was his own invention, he was responsible only to himself. Those were the conditions he had wanted, in order to make himself useful. The small clink of a cup replaced in a saucer and the faint screech of his knife accompanied him at table in the dim room. Well, there was no reason why anyone else should have to walk in the sun, just because he did not have to be back at the boma or anywhere else, at two; while he was having coffee he sent Kalimo over with a note and the Volkswagen key, telling the Edwards girl to use it. Kalimo said, “The Doña she very please, she say thank you, she must fetch children, thank you.”

He carried some work out under the fig tree; while compiling his own reports he had also sent to England for whatever literature on education systems in underdeveloped countries was available. A tome dealing with Latin America was among the stuff that had arrived while he was at the Bashi. He set himself to read and take notes; the unfamiliar Spanish names provided grist for the tread of his attention, gone smooth and glassy: he plodded on in heat thickening the atmosphere like gelatine setting a liquid. The garden was a bad place at that time of day. The white of the sun under cloud moved a welder’s flame along the outlines of branches and skinny leaves and thrust into the nerve that throbbed, a Cyclopean eye, between his eyes. Yet it was too much trouble to move indoors. At half — past four, since that was the time colonial officials had come home, Kalimo brought tea, and Bray asked for cold water as well. It hurt his teeth and seemed to touch the nerve achingly in that third eye. He left the books under the tree and went into the shrouded living-room, the calm decision coming to him matter — of-factly as he entered: he would go to the capital tomorrow. He lay down on the sofa, whose loose cover hitched up under his weight, and smoked a cheroot. His mind was blank of what he had read. He slept; and must have been asleep more than two hours.

He was waking up in a cooling, darkening room from which the day was withdrawing in a pinkish darkness reflected from one of those brilliant sunsets outside the veranda. The air was mottled with rose and dark like the inside of an eyelid. A shape moved in the room. She was putting the keys down on the table without a sound, keeping her eyes on him so as not to wake him. She stopped as a child does in the game of “statues,” as he saw her. There was a ringing in his ears — the ringing of crickets all round the house, from the garden. He put out the dark shape of his arm — to receive the keys; a gesture of apology.

And then, with a second’s hesitation, she turned with that sideways movement of the hips with which a woman moves between pieces of furniture, came over, and took the forearm — not the hand — in the strange grip of consolation, a kind of staying. As if he were falling asleep rather than waking, he saw with great awareness and clarity what he had scarcely taken in at the time: her hands drawn back, palm open, her breasts offered by the involuntary gesture of backing away, the first day he walked into her as he opened the office door and she was standing there behind it.

They were looking at each other but the faces were concentrations in the half — light, not to be made out as features. He said, “Sit down,” and turned his forearm in her grip to take her wrist and press it towards the sofa.

“The door was open,” she said, sitting there beside him. Darkness was running together all over the room. A mirror of lemon — coloured light hung in the doorway.

“I don’t know when I’ve had such a headache.”

“Oh did you? The humidity was terrible about three o’clock.”

“The Volksie behave itself?”

“It was a blessing. The children were way over the other side of town, at the Reillys’.”

He would get up, turn on the lamp, offer her a drink. While he thought this he was taken by such desire that his whole body felt swollen with it, the awful undifferentiated desire that he hadn’t felt since he was an overgrown youth.

In spite of this, he was not one; he kissed the mouth and caressed the flesh with the skill of experience, got up to make sure Kalimo was not in the house and to lock the doors, and stood there a moment, looking down at the glimmering shape of the body that he had unwrapped from its disguising clothes, the prototype at once familiar and a marvel. He remembered to ask her whether it was all right, and the voice said in the dark, “No,” trusting him. He began to make love to her, they began to make love to each other fiercely and while his body raced away from him — extraordinarily, he was thinking of Shinza. Shinza’s confident smile, Shinza’s strong bare feet, Shinza smoking cigars in the room that smelled of baby. Shinza. Shinza. He brought a small yell of triumph from her; and again.

She took up her clothes by feel and went to dress in the bathroom. For him, with the light, there sprang back the sofa, table of untidy papers, bookcase with its huddle of books tented on one shelf and its spike of invoices and spare light bulbs. A cockroach ran under the rug. He pulled on his trousers and shirt and went to the kitchen for water for drinks. But she came out and said softly, plainly, “What about your boy? I’d better go.” She meant that the servant might already have noticed the darkness and the locked door; if anyone saw her now he would put a face to the unusual circumstances.

She was gone before there was the necessity for some sort of show of tenderness, of a change in their acquaintance as strangers. She was gone down through the garden and, he supposed, across the empty scrub. He heard the dogs bark at her approach; she was home already. He realized that he had made love to her without seeing her face. He was alone again in the quiet house; and now remembered that it was Kalimo’s evening off to go to church; otherwise the old man could so easily have come battering at the door. The moon had come up and shone upon the books he had left in the garden as it does upon the stones in a graveyard.

He banged the Bashi dust out of his suitcase and put a few things in it again. He tried to put through a call to Roly Dando but after an hour the exchange rang back to say there was no reply. He took a lamp and changed a worn tyre on the car. Flying ants came to the light and shed their wings like soapflakes underfoot. There was the smell of his sweat, and, as he worked, very faintly, that other odour. He had a shower and at ten o’clock felt very hungry and put together a strange meal out of all the small souvenirs of past meals that Kalimo hoarded in the refrigerator. He left early, getting up before light. The trees of Gala had not yet come to life with birds, but the main street was not quite empty. An old man rested on the post office steps, his day’s journey already begun, patiently digging a jigger from his big toe.

Bray reached the capital by lunchtime next day and did not go to Dando; instead he went straight to the Silver Rhino and took a room there. “No difficulty about that,” Margot Wentz said dryly, and, keys in hand, flung open the doors of empty rooms and rondavels for him to choose from.

“Of course things’ll pick up again, it’ll pick up again now.” Hjalmar Wentz was awaiting their return to the office, watching their faces as they appeared. His wife ignored the remark. “Don’t go in for lunch, eat with us,” Hjalmar put in, and she said to Bray, “Of course, you remember where to come — just down the passage here, to the right. You don’t mind waiting till about two? I can’t get out of the kitchen before then.”

Hjalmar seemed in a state of happy alarm over his arrival. They went into the bar and he appropriated an order of Danish beers meant for someone else. The bar was full, even if most of the rooms were empty. The fan on the low ceiling churned voices that it seemed had not stopped since Bray had left the capital last time. “If the Czechs can turn them out at five pounds a thousand, there’s nothing in it for us….” “He used to be down in Zambia, with the R.S.T. crowd, little plump Scotsman, you remember …” “… played to a five, but that was when I was a lot younger …” “… yes, but what’s the point, you can’t work on less than twenty — five per cent, a waste of time …” “… at head office in Nairobi, I said, you might get away with that sort of attitude … stupid bastard …” White men in bauxite, in road construction, in mining equipment, in technical aid, textiles and tin, black men from Agriculture, Public Works, Posts and Telegraphs — the Ministries down the road. The black ones were more carefully dressed than the white and most spoke a back — slapping, jolly English instead of the local language. They were youthful and good — looking, with their little ears, round black heads, and black hands, among the bald pale heads and drooping, gin — flushed ears. “I was at his home yesterday, my dear chap, I know him well, ever since we were at teacher — training in Salonga …” “… very inconvenient, the wife said to me, ‘How was it Mr. Mapira didn’t see you at Chibwe’s place’—oh yes — there’s nothing you can keep from a wife, good Lord—” “… have a chat with the Minister next week, yes that’s what I intend …” “… these garage chappies, man, something should be done about them, I mean they charge a person what they like….”

The tiny Viking ships of the mobile above the bar spun slowly in the sluggish draft; Hjalmar was plunged into an account of the Silver Rhino’s finances and the terms of sale under which the place had been acquired. His voice burrowed through the babble with the obliviousness of a man for whom everything around him is a manifestation of the problem that possesses him. He could never sell so long as the legality of the original sale was not settled, meanwhile the first mortgage wasn’t met and the bank refused to give a second mortgage because of the dispute about ownership. The builder was “getting impatient” over the alterations he had done when they took over; everything would be all right if the brewery would advance money in exchange for a share, but now with the new legislation the breweries weren’t supposed to advance to people who were resident aliens and not citizens of the country.

Living alone, remote from the demands of friendship for the past few months, Bray had become unaccustomed to this European intimacy, this steamy involvement in other people’s lives. All he could do was prompt with the sort of brief questions that enabled Hjalmar Wentz to unburden himself — though it was an unburdening only of the facts: Bray could sense that they construed a kind of front— “Margot and I think …” “… all we really need, then, is, say, another year to get straight”—out of a more private struggle that could not be talked about. Wentz was saying, after a pause, “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to talk to Ras Asahe….” The haggard, handsome Scandinavian face seemed to be waiting, as if for a blow. The cuts of strain slashed across the cheekbone under each eye. “He has an uncle on the board — you know.” All large white companies had a token black man on their boards. “A word from there, and everything … well. It would get us out of a hole for the meantime.”

“Yes, if the brewery were to be persuaded—”

Wentz was still waiting, ready not to flinch. He said, “But Emmanuelle is not easy to deal with. My wife — Margot — we don’t know how Emmanuelle would react. And apart from that, what would it look like, I mean to the man? Up till now, we’ve never encouraged it, this friendship with Emmanuelle.”

Now that he had delivered the slap himself, he was in some way released. “How do you think things are going?”

“I should ask you. I’m too far away from the centre.”

Wentz opened his hands at the room, interlocked them under his chin. “What? This? The black ones have got the government jobs they wanted, and the white ones are in business as usual—they are happy, nothing’s changed. He’s been very clever. You should hear them: what a marvellous chap he is, what a stable government … Oh he’s been very clever. When you think what they said about him before, eh? All that business about flight of capital is forgotten, they want to stay put and get good quick returns. Of course the honeymoon isn’t over. I only talk about what I see. The black people — after all, who are they, here? — the people who have moved up into administrative power, the white — collar people who aren’t somebody’s clerk any more, and the mine workers who are moving up into the jobs they could have done before and were kept out of because of the white man. So I say it’s going very well. He’s doing very well. What it’s like for the rest of the country — I never get farther than the vegetable farm where Margot gets the stuff for the hotel, I drive there with the van twice a week, and that’s what I know of the country!” He laughed at himself. “What’s happening up there?”

“Well, there’s a bit of industry beginning around Gala itself — but the new agreement over the fishing concessions leaves the whole lake area just as it was, and the Bashi Flats need about everything you can name before one could think of resettlement schemes there — roads, control of flood waters — everything.”

Hjalmar objected. “The royalty on the fishing rights is increased by about twenty per cent, I think. The money’s not all going out of the country any more.”

“But wages in the fish industry haven’t gone up one penny. Of course there’s the Development and Planning Commission — something may come out of that, for the lake people. And the Bashi — they need it even more. But the potential of the fishing industry is there for the taking….”

“Schemes, commissions, plans — well, poor devils — it’s their affair, isn’t it,” said Hjalmar Wentz. “It’s not for you and me, it’s not our life, they have to work it out for themselves.” He took a deep breath and held it a moment: his eyes were following the movement of someone across the room, and then he gave an anticipatory smile as his daughter came up. “Emmanuelle, you remember Colonel Bray? He’s staying with us this time—” She was saying with the inattentive correctness of one performing an errand, “Someone called Thomson — Waite is here to see you. He has a black attaché case with initials. The hair in his nose is dyed by nicotine.” “Good God, Emmanuelle.” Her father laughed, showing her off to Bray. The girl, perfectly serious and distant, bit at a hangnail on her thumb. “So you can decide whether you will see him or not. I should say he comes from a bank or a health department; he’s sniffing about after something.” “Oh God. I better go. Did you put him in the office?” Hjalmar went ahead of her with his head thrust before him anxiously. Bray saw him look round to ask her something but she had turned away through the tables.

Bray had a shower and sat in a broken deck — chair in the garden, waiting for lunch. He read in the morning paper that Mweta had returned from his state visit. Unity had been reaffirmed, useful proposals had been made, the 50-million-pound hydro — electric scheme to serve the two countries jointly had been agreed upon in principle … the leading article questioned the economics of the scheme, as opposed to its value as a demonstration of Pan — African interdependence. There is no doubt whatever that this country sees its destiny always as part of the greater destiny of the African continent … no doubt that President Mweta, the day he took up the burdens of office, has taken along with responsibilities at home the ideal of an Africa that would present an entity of international cooperation to a world that has so far signally failed to resolve national contradictions. But we must not waste our own resources in order to foster cooperation across our borders. We have, in the lake that forms our northern border, a potential source of electric power that renders unnecessary any such scheme in the South, a scheme that by its nature would place our vital industrial development ultimately at the mercy of any instability that might manifest itself in our neighbour’s house….

Hjalmar’s daughter walked right past him across the grass with Ras Asahe, deep in low — voiced conversation. They ignored the figure behind the paper; living in a hotel, the girl carried her private world about her in the constant presence of anonymous strangers. A piping scale climbed and descended; she must have a recorder. The pair settled down somewhere on the grass quite near, and he heard Emmanuelle’s clear, decisive voice: “Somebody told me it was just like a sneeze” and the man’s deep, derisive voice: “Good God, that’s how you whites prepare girls. If you’d been an African, you’d know how to make love, you’d have been taught.”

“Oh you’re so bloody superior, you’ve got the idea nobody else knows how to live.”

There was silence. Then Bach on the recorder, piercing, trilling, on and on, up and up, sustaining high notes in a gleeful, punishing scream.

At the round table in the Wentzes’ quarters the chaps of Margot Wentz’s heavy white arms hung majestically over the dishes as she served. She had powdered her face but the smell of hotel gravy clung about her. Every now and then she gazed on her son Stephen as at a gobbling pet dog at his dinner — dish, half affectionate, half repelled. He had his father’s blond handsome face, blown up to the overgrown proportions of young white men born in Africa and forced by sport and the sun, like battery chickens. Hjalmar Wentz kept arching his eyebrows and blinking, fighting off a daze of preoccupation. He gave in to laughter against himself: “The fellow who approved the plan for the servants’ rooms just stamped it without looking. He was going back to England anyway, couldn’t care a damn. The whole thing is against municipal regulations, there aren’t enough air bricks — can you imagine, the water main is connected in such a way we haven’t been paying for the water used down there?”

“I told you I could smell drains or money.” All the tendons and muscles of Emmanuelle’s brown hands showed with anatomical precision as she buttered a piece of bread.

“What you going to do?” Margot Wentz said.

He appealed to Bray: “What they tell me I have to, eh? Get the builder along and discuss it with the inspector.”

“Have some more salad, Colonel Bray? No? — What builder?” Margot Wentz put down her fork and waited for the answer with the patience of one who knows all the answers she can expect.

Her husband gave her a quick glance. “Well, Atkinson — who else?”

“I don’t think Atkinson will work for us again, Hjalmar.”

Stephen was holding out his plate for another helping of meat; he shook it impatiently, wanting to speak but occupied with the surveillance of what he was getting. “Knock out a few bricks, what’s the big fuss?”

“The water. The regulations.” His mother laid out the facts gently.

“Agh … it’ll be a year before they send someone again, and if they do, well, there’re the air bricks, you knock out a few bricks, that’s all—” The boy was cutting up food, spearing it, now he stopped his mouth with it while his sister, her hands idle on the table, said, “Close your eyes and wait for them to go away, Hjalmar.” Her own narrow black eyes acknowledged Bray’s presence a moment, the pupils seemed actually to contract closed, falling asleep, and then come to life blackly liquid again, and, just as he was thinking how the girl never smiled, she smiled at him, the brilliant, vivid, humorous smile of a deep self — confidence.

Lunch broke up abruptly among the preoccupations of Hjalmar, his wife, and the son; Stephen was summoned by the barman, a coloured man with a strand of silky black moustache. “The trouble is you’re too soft with these guys. Someone’s only got to say he comes from the water board or something … it’s not the end of the world …?” Stephen’s lingering reproach was sympathetic, directed from the door. The barman showed the servant’s facility for pretending not to hear when in his employer’s quarters. Bray felt oddly grouped with him as the man stood there easing his feet in shoes that had cut — outs to accommodate bunions. Hjalmar swallowed his coffee because Margot Wentz reminded him that he had to be at the station in half an hour; she explained to Bray, “If you’re not there when the train comes in, they just take the stuff out of the refrigerated truck and dump it on the platform in the sun.”

“Where’ve you got the invoices?”

“All right, all right, it’ll come to me in a minute—” She got up to follow an instinct that would lead her to the point at which, in the morning’s tread up and down between corridor and kitchen, storeroom and office, she had set down the papers.

Emmanuelle went over and kissed her father on the forehead, for her mother’s benefit. Margot Wentz, picking up glasses to look over the invoices she had found in her handbag, paused as the girl pushed aside with her lips the strand of bright hair that stretched across the baldness; there was on the older woman’s face a groping recognition; and then she turned away in herself and with a hitch of the nose to settle her glasses, peered down at the invoices.

Although Hjalmar was in a hurry he made slow progress with Bray down the passage, talking and pausing to make his point. It was the railways, now; a high incidence of accidents since Africans had been taken on as engine drivers. Bray said, “Drinking seems to be the trouble.” Hjalmar Wentz found it absolutely necessary to place on record in some way the assumptions, the misrepresentations that threatened all round. He invoked Mweta without name, the touchstone of a personal pronoun on which the voice came down with passing emphasis, signally, instantly understood. He said passionately, “Of course they are drinking. They have to show somehow to themselves that the new life is good. How do these whites think their great — grandfathers behaved when they first got wages for a week’s work in a factory in Europe, eh? These Englishmen — their great — grandfathers were getting drunk on cheap gin, and they turn up their noses at the Africans.… But he knows how to go about it, he knows the thing to do. Now he makes it an offence to drink before you go on duty, one drink and you’re out of the job. Sensible, reasonable. You’ll see, soon, eh, the men themselves will impose a code of behaviour — the railways won’t be any worse than before.”

Bray went to the public booth on the veranda to telephone Mweta’s private secretary, Wilfrid Asoni. But he was “not available”; Clive Small, the PRO, came to the telephone as a substitute. He was enthusiastically pleasant; he was sure the President would be delighted and so on— “Do you think it’s possible for me to see him tomorrow?” Small would certainly do his best; as Bray knew, of course, the Big Man had only just come back — Small would leave an urgent note for Asoni — there was all the confident sycophancy of the professionally agreeable in the voice. Then Bray phoned the Bayley house, but was relieved that there was no one home; he did not want to go about among the group of friends until he had seen Mweta. He had half meant to mention to Hjalmar Wentz that it was not necessary to tell Roly Dando he was there, he would do so himself tomorrow. Well, he had said nothing. He decided to leave it all to chance, and even took the car into town to do some shopping; as always, when you lived in a remote posting, there were small comforts that were exotic to the general stores at home. And then it was an event to walk into a bookshop again, even the rather poor one here, stocked mainly with last year’s best sellers and James Bond. He bought himself a paperback Yeats, a book of essays by an African professor of political science at an East African university, a reprint of Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin—everything come upon was a treasure. For a half — hour he forgot why he was in the capital. He bought a stapler and a couple of ball — points that seemed an improvement on the usual kind, trying them out on the recommendation of a pretty little African shopgirl with a crêpey black pompadour and painted eyes. There were children’s books on display and he almost bought a couple of Tin — Tin — for the children, the girl and those little boys, one at either hand of Rebecca Edwards, coming across the open ground between his house and the Tlumes’. But he put the books back on the stand. He collected all the copies — three weeks old — of overseas newspapers and journals he didn’t subscribe to, and came out laden.

When he got back to the Silver Rhino there was a message from the President’s secretary’s office. There was an appointment for him at eleven — fifteen tomorrow morning. Hjalmar Wentz, who had taken the message, showed the opposite of curiosity — in fact, Bray felt overestimated by Wentz’s determinedly laconic discretion, which assumed that Bray’s position was all along some confidential, influential one, for which the banishment to the bush on a vague educational project was a front. “Oh — by the way, if Roly comes into the bar, you won’t say I’m here, will you? I’m going to ring him tomorrow, but I don’t feel particularly sociable at the moment, it would mean a heavy — drinking evening if the two of us get together—”

“Good thing you said so. I’ll warn Stephen.”

His daughter lifted the counter — flap of the office and walked through. Her jutting hip — bones pegged a skimpy cotton dress across her flat belly, she carried a music — case of the kind that children swing. “Emmanuelle, if you should see Mr. Dando, don’t say anything about Colonel Bray being here.”

“I never see Mr. Dando,” she said fastidiously.

Bray laughed, and her father was forced to smile, admitting: that’s how she is.

Bray took a beer to the same rickety deck — chair in the garden, his back to the bar and the hotel. Suddenly two sticky hands smelling of liquorice pressed over his eyes, and the chair was jiggled and bumped amid giggles. Vivien Bayley’s children ambushed him, while Vivien, grown pregnant since he saw her last, stood waiting by, smiling for it to be over. “Enough now. You’ve given James a surprise. Now let him get up. Enough, Eliza! Enough!”

He gathered a couple of the children by arms and legs, and came over to her, limbs agitating in all directions. He dropped them on the grass, and kissed her. She had the neglected air — forgetful of herself — of a child — bearing woman. “We saw you at the traffic lights at the railway bridge. They insisted.”

The children were yelling, “Caught you, caught you!”

“I phoned when I arrived, just after lunch.”

“I’d gone to pick them up at school. Neil’ll be thrilled. He’s just been to Dar-es-Salaam for a week and it’s so flat to be home again. James, you’re looking slim and beautiful, and as you see—” They laughed together, over her.

“I’ve sweated it off, Christ, it’s been killing sometimes this month.”

“Well, I know, but mine isn’t the kind that will melt, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, it’ll be shed all at once one day, though, and no keeping off bread—” Their liking for each other came alive instantly, as it always did, the pilot flame turned up by meeting.

She carried him off for dinner; that was the way it was, in the capital, nothing had changed. Homeward traffic was thick in the hour after the shops closed; an hour later, and the streets would be those of a country town, warm and empty in the dark. They passed Mweta’s residence with the sentries in their boxes. In the Bayleys’ garden Vivien brought him up to date, while the children ate their supper on the grass. The Pettigrews had been posted to Beirut, and were pleased, Jo — Ann would do some work at the university there; David Rathebe, the South African refugee, had disappeared for two months and reappeared, he was supposed to have been in Algiers; Timothy Odara had been offered the Secretaryship for Health, but Evelyn had made him refuse because she wanted him to take up a post — graduate research scholarship in America. They hadn’t seen much of Mweta and Joy, though the children had been to a birthday party at the Residence last week; Joy had got rid of the flower — arranging Englishwoman and was much happier, running the place very competently in her own way, with the help of that nice sensible woman, an aunt of hers, who had been housekeeper for twenty years or so to the General Manager of one of the gold — mining companies. Mweta was certainly being very successful in wooing foreign capital, at the industrial level, if not on the international money marts; there was even going to be a Golden Plate dinner where white businessmen could meet the President at a cost of a mere fifty pounds a ticket, money to go to the university scholarship fund.

Neil Bayley came home and was the centre of tumbling, shouting children. He still looked more like a student than a registrar. It was natural for him to deal with a number of different people and situations at once; he plunged into greetings for Bray, shadow — boxed his son, patted his wife on the backside: “How-you, girlie? Good God, I’ve just been acting father — confessor to a gorgeous, red — haired eighteen — year-old peach — of-a-thing … if you … bloom’d come off if you so much as … They’re told they can come to me to discuss any problem so long as it’s not sex, religion, or politics, James.”

After a lot of wine at dinner Bray felt the desire to talk mastering him. He wanted to talk about Shinza, to bring the figure of Shinza, barefoot in his dressing — gown, up over their horizon; to see what Neil would look up and interpret it as. He talked round the figure in his mind, instead. What were the rumours of Mweta’s difficulties with some of the Ministers? Any idea of the basis? “Paul Sesheka’s always given a bit of trouble, from the beginning, as you know,” Neil said. “And there’s been some talk lately about Dhlamini Okoi lobbying for him — the allocation of funds vote, and so on. A lot of squabbling about that because inevitably, everyone wants to be able to say they’ve done this and that for the development of the area they come from. Everybody wants to be the brown — eyed boy back home, because he’s got them a cotton ginnery or an abattoir. Nobody wants to leave it to the development planning commission to decide which area needs what. Yes, Okoi and Moses Phahle’ve been showing signs of making ready to attach themselves to Sesheka, as if the pilot fish’s going places — but I don’t know, I can’t see Sesheka really threatening Mweta, do you? I don’t see him lasting five minutes with Mweta, I don’t think he has the stuff. He wavered badly over this hydro — electric scheme, now. You must have read that? First he pressed the P.M. to go ahead, he “regretted” that so little was being done to demonstrate the practical friendship and brotherhood and so on with neighbouring African territories. Then he suddenly changed his mind and put forward the claims of the lake for a scheme of our own — which wouldn’t be a bad idea, if it weren’t for the fact that we’d have to bear the whole cost alone, whereas the other scheme’s a shared one and anyway the finance is already assured, America and West Germany and France are paying—”

“That’s the line the morning paper took, I saw.”

“I know. Just coincidence. I don’t think Sesheka has any influence there. That’s just Evan Black wanting to keep the circulation up by being provocative.”

Vivien said, “Unfair, Neil. You know Evan thinks the people up north are being forgotten.”

“But if it were someone more forceful than Sesheka, would Mweta have to worry?” Bray asked.

Neil belched, shaking his head, and when he could speak: “Aha! But that’s another story, James. That’s always something to worry about; if it were to be a Tola Tola, for instance, even if there isn’t any genuine grievance for him to climb up by.”

“You don’t think there’s any genuine grievance?”

“No I don’t. By genuine grievance I mean that Mweta would have to be failing to make use of what is available to him for this country.”

“Hjalmar tells me industrialists are paying fifty pounds just to dine with him.”

Neil grinned. “My God, he’s a glutton for punishment, old Mweta.”

They talked of Bray’s work and Bray told an anecdote or two about Gala — how his name had been up at the club for weeks until the bold draper seconded it. Vivien was in conversation with a friend on the telephone; she came back after a while and said, “Did you know Mweta’s going to speak over the radio at midnight? Apparently it’s been announced every hour all afternoon.”

Neil opened another bottle of wine. “The contract’s been given to the Chinese. France, West Germany and America have called off the loan. Or they’re going to build both dams — the lake one as well. My, my. We can’t go to bed.”

Vivien looked at Bray. She said, “He’s tired, he’s driven hundreds of miles.”

He was feeling embarrassed for Mweta. Why midnight? Who advised him about such things? Perhaps he didn’t know that Hitler used to choose odd hours of the night or early morning for his speeches, entering through the territory of dreams, invading people’s minds when blood pressure and nervous resistance are at lowest ebb. “Certainly midday would be a pleasanter time to report back on his dam.”

“Joy says he’s never in bed before three, anyway.”

Neil began to scratch his neck restlessly. “Shall we phone Jenny — penny and Curtis and get them to join the vigil?” Vivien said mildly, since nothing would stop Neil if he felt the need of company, “We haven’t seen James for months, I want to talk to James. Rebecca writes she’s got a house quite near you? — thank heaven she’s out of the hotel. I do think your Aleke should have seen there was somewhere for her to live before getting her up there. What sort of man is he? You know, with Rebecca, people just exploit her.” She looked for reassurance.

Bray was saying, “Half a house. She’s sharing with some people—” while Neil gave his short laugh and said fondly, “Poor old backwoods Becky, we must write to her.”

“But Aleke — you think he’s all right?”

“Darling, of course he’ll make a pass at her, if that’s what you mean.” Neil cut across. “What else do you expect? She has that effect, our Becky.”

Defending her against Aleke, Vivien said, “It’s not right that this idea should’ve somehow … she’s quite the opposite, if you really know her — she doesn’t try for men at all. But it’s just a kind of awful compassion …”

Neil said aggressively, “Oh really, is that what you females call it.”

“Oh I know you don’t like the idea. That there could be anything about you.” She was talking to her husband, now; slowly they were beginning to pick up words like stones.

Bray felt unimportantly ashamed of his casualness. But all he said was, in the same tone, “Aleke’s a good chap to work for, I should think. Her children have got in to the local school.”

At midnight Mweta’s voice filled the room. They sat dreamily still, not looking at each other. Vivien’s right hand was pressed against the side of her belly to quiet the only movement in the room, stirring there. Mweta announced the immediate introduction of a Preventive Detention Bill.

Chapter 9

It was all there, set out again in the morning paper. As he read he heard Mweta’s voice, as if it were addressed to him. Emergency regulations had been invoked to bring the Bill into force immediately without the usual parliamentary procedure. The step had been “taken with the greatest reluctance” but “without any doubt of the necessity.” “I would be betraying the people, the sacred trust of their future, if I did not act swiftly and without hesitation. … Certain individuals have begun to gnaw secretly at the foundations of the state which the people have laid down so firmly through their work and dedication. Certain individuals are incapable of understanding the transformation of personal ambitions, petty aims, into the higher cause of securing the peace and progress of the nation — a cause that even the humblest people of our nation have shown themselves equal to in the short time since we have had our country in our own hands. Certain individuals are ready to destroy the general good for the sake of petty ambitions. They are weak and few, and so long as you trust and support your leaders, you need not fear them. They are small as ants. But they are also greedy as ants; if we say, oh, it’s only a few ants, we may wake up one day and find the floorboards collapsing beneath all we are building. We must take the powers to stop the rot before it starts, to act while there is still time to turn these people from the mistakes they have fallen into, and to show them where their true interest, like yours and mine, really lies—”

The paper reproduced across five columns the picture of Mweta smiling from the doorway of the plane as he arrived back in the country a few days before, and the leading article, suppressing the question mark, pointed out that there was no cause for confusion and alarm; the President would not have left the country if he had not felt fully in control of the situation.

The waiters shouted to each other as they went about the rondavels at the Silver Rhino, banging on the doors to deliver early morning tea and newspapers. (Between finger and thumb, Bray pinched off a couple of ants that had quickly found the sugar.) A boiler was being stoked up. The off — key musical gong that was played up and down corridors and garden to announce meals drew close and faded, as the girl’s recorder had done the day before. Footsteps clipped over the concrete paths with the purpose of morning. The taps on the washbasin began to creak and fart as the plumbing was taxed. Bray was taken by the flow of these things — bathroom ritual, clothes put on, breakfast eaten — and brought to the point where, five minutes before eleven — fifteen, he had the door opened to him under the portico with the white pillars to which he had come a number of times in his life: to pay respects as a D.C. newly appointed; to plead for Mweta’s release from confinement; to answer the complaints made against himself by the white residents of Gala province.

Out of the trance of commonplace that had brought him here, Bray in the waiting room of the Presidential Residence became intensely alert. He could feel the rapid beat of his heart in the throb of the hand, on the chair — arm, that held the cigarette burning away. He distinguished the quality of the room’s silence, and the displacement of his own presence there, like the rise in the volume of water when some object is lowered into it. At the same time he was going over rapidly and fluently, in words instead of those surges of imagery and emotion with which a meeting is usually rehearsed, what was to be said. He was possessed with the calm, absolute tension of excitement. It was the first time for a very long time. He opened the windows above the window — seat and the park out there — thin trees standing quietly in the heat, a pair of hoopoes picking on the grass — existed within a different pace, like a landscape seen through the windows of an express train.

The secretary, Asoni, came in quickly. “You understand, Colonel, if it had been anybody else it would have been out of the question today, as I said to Mr. Small. There is really no time for private interviews.… We are only just back, and now this other—” The sides of his mouth pulled down, proprietorial, brisk, impulsive. “If it had been anybody else I couldn’t … but I have just managed to fit you in …” It was the manner of the waiter, exacting dependence on his goodwill for a decent table. Small looked round the door: “I’m fascinated by the splendid work you’re doing in the North.” It had all the conviction of a stock phrase; simply substitute “in the South” or “the swamps” or wherever the individual had happened to have been since Small saw him last. “I know the Big Man’s longing to see you, nothing would induce him to miss that, though he’s up to his ears. Unfortunately, it’ll just have to be rather brief, alas, I’m afraid.”

Bray was not forthcoming with any assurance that he would not prolong the visit. Chatting, the two of them escorted him out into the corridor, where they were held up by the passage of a giant copper urn or boiler being shuffled along on the heads and arms of workmen. Wilfrid Asoni turned, with a theatrical gesture to Small.

“What in God’s name d’you think you’re doing?” Small stood his ground before the procession. The men lost coordination under the burden, and their gleaming missile swayed forward. “Why wasn’t that thing brought through the service entrance? The kitchens — why don’t you use the kitchen door, eh? Who allowed these men to come this way?” Servants and explanations appeared. The kitchen doors were too small. “You can’t just bring men through the Residence, you know that. You know that perfectly well, Nimrod. Good God, anybody just walking through the place, anybody who says he’s a workman?” He and Asoni looked to each other. “That’s security for you, eh? — Well, get the thing out of the way, get it in here, come on, come on …” The men backed off through the double doors of a reception room in a bewildered posse, to let Bray and Asoni and Small pass. The two had lost interest in Bray. “Fantastic!” “You’re certainly right, Clive.” “But seriously, eh?” “That’s Colonel Onabu’s security, yes.” “Well, I know who’s going to hear about that.” “I hope so. I certainly hope so.” “I’ll be on that telephone in five minutes. Unless you’d rather do it?” Wilfrid Asoni slipped into the President’s study and closed the door on his own voice switched to the official calm of the doctor entering the ward of an important private patient. He appeared again at once and opened the door for Bray absently. Bray caught a brushing glimpse of his plump sculptured face, the eyes set in the black skin smoothly as the enamelled eyes of ancient Greek figures, already turned to the piece of importance he shared with Small.

Mweta was on his feet behind the company director’s desk, leaning forward on his palms. There was always the second, on first entering his presence, like the pang of remembering the first sight of someone with whom one long ago fell in love. He came round with that smile — a toothpaste — advertisement smile, really, in the associations of Europe, but in Africa the smile of a boy come upon on the road somewhere, biting into sugar — cane — and took Bray’s hands in his elegant dark ones. A kind of current of euphoria went through the two men. “If you’d said to me, who’d you like to be there when you get home, James would have been the answer. Oh but it’s tiring, eh, James? — years ago, you didn’t tell me, you didn’t warn about that. From the moment the plane arrived, three, four meetings a day — and the lunches, and the cocktail parties, the dinners— And twice it happened there was something special to discuss before a conference — the only time was before breakfast or after midnight.”

“Well, you’ve always had the stuff it takes. All those miles on the bicycle; that was the right preparation.”

“Anyway, we got what we wanted. And this is one of the times when a tied loan is an advantage, eh, all the equipment and materials and skilled manpower comes from the financing countries. They’re paying and their men’ll see to it that the job is done. No throwing up your hands over this delay and that. No defaulting contractors to blame, while we pay. D’you know we’ll get six thousand kilowatt hours a year, when it’s fully operative. We could sell to the Congo, Malawi — Zambia, even — who knows, it’s possible they’ll get out of Kariba. Our lake scheme in the North was just one of those dreams, you know, nice dreams we had before Independence. It’s not a proposition, compared with this. The main thing is money — it’s exactly twice as hard to get money for a scheme that benefits a single state as it is to get the same money to benefit two. And you’ve got to try for it alone. I can tell you, James, it’s all the difference in the world, it’s the difference between going as a beggar and going as statesmen. That’s one thing I’ve learnt.”

There was a tea table near the woolly sofa, now, with a couple of black leather airport chairs for talks less formal than those conducted across the desk. They came to rest there.

Bray said, out of the warmth and ease, “That seems to have gone off splendidly. But what bothers me is the other. Last night.” It seemed a piece of cruelty to speak. Mweta’s eyes winced. He folded his arms to recapture the ease. “I don’t understand, James.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

Mweta’s eyes continued to flicker. He said, smiling, “You heard what I said.”

“Oh that. What you had to say. But what you think about it? The real reasons why you’ve found it necessary? I wasn’t coming to talk to you about this at all—”

Mweta made an eager, dismissing gesture; Bray came to see him because he was Bray.

“No — I had a reason”—a rebuff for them both— “there was a young man I picked up on the road to the Bashi last week. I discovered later that he’d been in detention at Gala prison for almost three months — he didn’t need to wait for your new law. I was going to talk to you about him, I didn’t know whether you knew, though of course I could tell that Onabu knew, this sort of authority — I don’t know what to call it — came from up there, from Onabu.… But that’s not what matters. I mean, it matters enormously in itself, but there’s something much more important, and now, since last night, even more important. The boy, the Detention Bill, they’re the effect.”

Mweta sat back in himself, arms still crossed, in the determined, flexed attention that Bray knew so well. His face had smoothed momentarily as if he were to be let off; then the flick in his eyes came again. Bray was aware of it all the time.

“—That’s not what matters. Because it seems clear to me that what happened to the boy, the Detention Bill — they’re inevitable, essential, you can’t do without them, your reason being what it is—”

Mweta came in quickly but distrusting: “Yes, my good reason. I’m not going to stand by and let this country be ruined by trouble — makers.”

“What do you call trouble — makers, Mweta?”

“You get people who see Independence right from the beginning as a free — for-all. Grab what you can … They’re always there. You have to deal with them. You know that. I don’t like it, but I have to do it.”

“You’re better off than most, here. You’ve got a good chance of giving people what they lack.”

Mweta said, “James, that’s not the point. You could give them all a house with electric light and a clean — hands job and you’d still have trouble from some people.”

“Then there’s something else that’s bothering them.”

Mweta gave a little snorting smile. “You’re quite right, it’s power, that’s what they want. Somebody wants power and there’s only one way for such a person to try and get it. He must use every poor fellow who’ll listen to him, he must stir them up with talk they don’t understand, so they’ll be only too ready to believe we’ve bamboozled them, too, and from this it follows so easily to convince them that if this country isn’t the Garden of Eden, that’s got nothing to do with their inadequacies and our difficulties. — James — we’ll clean up that young rubbish and show the people behind them it’s no good. You can believe me. I don’t want the Detention thing a day longer, after that.”

An irritable spark like static electricity ran between them. “There won’t be an after that. You’ll need to keep that bill forever, if you don’t do something about the reason why you need it in the first place. If you’d do that you wouldn’t be obliged to ‘deal’ with it. The way you have to deal with it now. This way you don’t like, Mweta—”

Mweta was about to answer and did not. He smiled at Bray to shut him out. “Well, go on.”

“I believe some of those ants of yours are nibbling under their own benches in the House.”

Mweta’s mouth moved and settled.

“ ‘They are being watched,’” Bray said, “Well and good. And who else? Who else is being watched? And why? Mweta, why? What for? I can’t help feeling convinced that if you’d given him a ministry there’d have been no trouble. From him. He’d have dealt with the trouble.”

“He’s the one who’s always made it,” Mweta said. Then suddenly, like an actor going out after his audience he turned shining eyes and eager — hunched body, all gathered up in a stalking intensity and burst out, beguiling, gesturing— “Shinza! From the day of self — rule he began to turn his criticism on us. From that day. Always looking at me and shaking his head inside. Whatever it was we were discussing. No trust any more for anybody. He made up his mind he had to watch the rest of us the way he used to watch them. Yes! You remember? At the talks in London, he was always the one would come out and say, afterwards, ‘I don’t think so — and-so means what he says, he’s playing for time.’ ‘So-and-so’s going to do what the Colonial Secretary says.’ ‘This one must be made to back down….’ He watched them for us while we were too busy thinking what point to make next. He found out things I hadn’t noticed, often he was right, he could warn you. But among ourselves! Our own men! In the Central Committee, among the ministers! How can you work like that? James, James”—his voice dropped to patient reasonableness, soft and dramatic— “I can tell you, his eyes were on the back of my head. I ask him something — I went to him as I always did, you understand — he was my father, my brother — he listens with a smile on his face and his eyes closed.” Mweta was standing over Bray. He hung there, paused, breathing heavily, gasping, almost, like a man about to sob, deserted by words. “‘I hadn’t understood the issue properly.’ ‘Did I realize who I was dealing with?’—With his eyes closed. To smell me out. Yes, like he did the Englishmen in Lancaster House, making the noises in the throat and looking like they’re falling asleep just when they’re ready to get you. It was mad, eh? All right. I said to myself, he’s your father, your brother. All right. But let him come out in the open. Let him speak what he thinks at the time for these things, like anybody else. This is a government, not a secret society. Open your eyes and look at me, Shinza. But I kept quiet. A long time, a long, long time. Did I ever say anything to you? That last time in London? You never knew what it was like. I was ashamed, you understand, I didn’t want you to know how he was behaving. I didn’t want to believe it myself. But I can’t think about myself any more. If I do, I must get out”—he strode to the window and flung away the park, out there, rippling in the still heat— “We’re not in the bush in Gala any more, with nothing but each other. Eight million people are in this country. I can’t be tied by the hind leg like a cow. When Clough and the British Chief of Staff met for the defence agreement and the question of a base on the southern border came up, Clough starts outlining what he ‘believes’ I’d agree to, and, my God, it’s clear to me that he’s got a pretty good idea before where we’ll make a concession and where we’ll stick fast — the missile base question, for example. Clough obviously knew we were going to bargain with that, he was prepared, he made no bones about it — and so I said to him — that is, I made a point of raising an objection to something that we really had no objection to at all, just to see what his reaction would be. And he came out with it just like that: ‘But I understood that this would be acceptable to your government.’—From where did you understand, I said. Who gave you to understand? Of course, he got out of that one somehow. But later on I asked him, alone. ‘I was given to understand.’ He looked at me as if I was mad, as if I didn’t know. You can’t blame him. Who gave you to understand? —He had had talks with Clough: ‘Of course, Shinza knew my predecessor well.’ It was often useful to chat beforehand. Much progress had been made quietly, in the past. And so on. What could I say? Well, that time no damage was done. Luckily. But that’s the kind of thing. Look at the minority report he put in. And that’s something you knew about. You know what you thought of that. Yes, well, a bit tactless, that’s what you said to me. But you’re not one to say much, and I know you were worried, whatever you said. I have eight millions on my hands, James, and I can only look after them my own way.”

“You’ve forced him into a kind of opposition that isn’t there, between you.”

Mweta’s hands dropped, swung helplessly. “Not there! If you give him that much, he’ll swallow your arm. You only think of him years ago.”

“Yes, he has changed,” Bray said. “But you know I’ve seen him.”

“No,” Mweta said. “No, I tell you I didn’t know.”

It was the first time, the first time since he was that boy with a guitar, on a bicycle, that Bray didn’t know whether Mweta was speaking the truth.

“When?”

“That was where I was going — last week, on the Bashi road.”

“Oh. I see.”

“No you don’t see. I wrote something to you — didn’t send it, the business about the boy bothered me.… But I wanted to tell you, I can’t believe Shinza would make a move to oust you if he were with you. If you were still in it together. The differences you had in the Party, just before independence — that’s not to be taken as conclusive. He’ll fight you there because he believes that the Party should stand for certain things, the Party shouldn’t take account of the government’s limitations, even if they’re enforced by circumstance: that’s what the Party’s there for, in a state like this one. To keep in front of the government the original idea of what Independence should mean, to oppose that idea all the time against the government’s acceptance of what is expedient, consistent with power. The dialectic, in fact. That’s what his opposition within the Party really means.”

“Oh we all know about his early Marxist training. His six weeks in 1937. We’ve heard all about that from him a dozen times. We all know he was the intellectual of the Party while we were the bush boys. We’ve had all that.”

Bray said, “What I’m getting at is there’s something in him that would always make him want to be a power, but not the one … that’s more or less what I said. You’d distrust a moral reason why I think he wouldn’t threaten you, just as I should myself.… But this isn’t a moral reason, it’s a matter of temperament. Temperament exhibited and proven over a long, long time.… He wants only to be known to the few people in the know. That’s enough for him. He enjoyed helping to ‘make’ you; why didn’t he employ the same energy to make himself?” (He thought, do I touch on vanity there; no, Mweta knows he didn’t need making in any sense implying inadequacy.) “Because he hasn’t the will to lead, really, he doesn’t want it. He didn’t want it. It’s a weakness, if you like, a kind of arrogance. Let someone else be out there handled by the crowd.”

Mweta had the weary obstinacy of one who is following his own thoughts. “He’d have done exactly the same in my place.”

“If he were with you,” Bray said, “If you were together, Mweta … you’d both be in the same place. He’d be seeing things from where you are, and that makes all the difference. Power compromises,” he added, with a gesture of embarrassment for that sort of phrase. “He wouldn’t have so much fire in his belly if he were sitting at table in this house.”

Mweta folded the fingers of one hand over the knuckle of the other and pressed it, testingly. Bray suddenly saw that he was fighting for control, holding together some trembling part of himself. I have hurt him, I hurt him by so much as acknowledging the other one’s existence. They couldn’t change the relation in which they had stood to each other, he — Bray — and Mweta; he must have endorsement from me, that is my old role. Anything else is betrayal. It was stupid; and Mweta was not. But the boy on the bicycle; when Mweta’s with me he can’t get away from the boy on the bicycle. The President wants love and approval, unrelated to the facts, between us. When it comes to us.

Bray felt a hardening distaste for the arrogant bare feet, the cigar at the centre of the broken — toothed grin in the thick beard. He said, “If I were you I’d send for Shinza. Now.”

Mweta’s voice cracked his own silence. “But you disapprove of preventive detention. If Shinza came in with me you’d see both of us backing it.” He gave a cold and patronizing laugh.

“There’d be no need.”

Mweta was looking at the big frame he knew so well, as if for a place where it would give. “You think so? What about Shinza’s crowd? They’d follow him? — There’d always be need.” He got up and walked round the desk, glancing at the papers there like half — recognized faces waiting to attract his attention; turned abruptly and came and stood near Bray’s chair. “I’ve got no message for Shinza,” he said.

“I’m not a messenger.”

“But the best thing you can do is make him understand that what he’s doing isn’t any use. He’s not going to bring it off, whatever he thinks he’s aiming at. He’s making a fool of himself. Or something worse. Really James, if you are worried about Shinza, tell him to leave it alone, don’t encourage him.”

It was a hit. “Encourage?”

“As you said, the friendship of the old days, and so on.”

“I didn’t say, Mweta,” said Bray, gently. “And the past — well that’s what it is. You two, you and Shinza, it’s a matter of state, now, and I can’t have any part in it. I can only tell you what I think about you two; but that’s all. What I think, what I believe, urgently believe.”

“All right, all right. All the same, when you see him you’ll tell him what you think.”

Bray said, “Don’t you want me to see Shinza?”

Mweta said sadly, with a touch of the politician’s deftness at the same time, “James, I would never tell you what you should do. Good God.”

But I ought to know it — what I should do. “I’m your visitor here.”

Mweta said emotionally, “You’re home.”

Bray said, “What happens when the Party Congress comes up? Next month?”

Mweta was still chairman of PIP, and Shinza, as a regional chairman, was on the Executive.

“We meet. If he comes.”

“How do you mean?”

Mweta waited a second and then said, “He’s not always at his place, these days. So they say.”

“But he’d come for the Congress, of course.” Bray’s tone changed; he made it sound almost as if he were joking: “Maybe you’ll have it out, then. Eh? Something very down — to-earth about Party congresses. — Tell me, what sort of people are you going to detain with your new Act — are they all kids like the fish factory one I picked up? What do you hope to hear from them?”

“That’s Onabu’s affair. He’s got men who know the right questions.”

“All the fish — factory lad did was explain the fishing concession to some people at the hostel. Of course the Union found this annoying. Or out of order, or something. But it hardly seems to call for two months and seventeen days in jail. Time to ask a great many questions.”

Mweta said, “Well, all that will be looked after now, thank heavens, local police people won’t be able to do what they like. There are proper provisions and checks in the Act — Chekwe worked it out with Dando very carefully. — That silly boy wasn’t badly treated?”

Bray said, “He was beaten. There doesn’t seem much point in testifying to that, now. — You don’t really mean that every time a workman grumbles this is at the instigation of Shinza? Granted, his ideas may influence the Bashi people in our part of the country. But what about people elsewhere? Can everything that bothers you be laid at his door?”

“That’s what the questions are for — to find out whose door. And if it’s Shinza’s — you wouldn’t believe it?”

“I’d have to. It wouldn’t change my belief that it didn’t — doesn’t need to happen. You don’t have to make an enemy out of Shinza.”

Mweta was shaking his head against the words as they came at him. “Believe me, James, believe me.”

Yet he didn’t want Bray to go; there was always, between them, the sense of being held in a strong current. Out of it, in opposition, they floundered, and were drawn back.

Bray said suddenly, “You’re not going to arrest Shinza?”

“If that should ever be necessary it would be a bad day for us.” It was parenthetic, a private reference to the old triumvirate: himself, Bray, and Shinza.

Bray felt a useless resistance and alarm: Mweta retreated, out of reach, into the old relationship, as if what the President did was another matter. Bray was led, stumbling and reluctant, to talk of other things: “And Aleke? What do you think of Aleke?” “Oh, quite competent, I think.” “A bit easy — going, mm?” “Oh … I can’t fairly judge that. It depends what you want of him, anyway. He’s got a good civil — service temperament.” “Exactly, exactly. That’s just what I mean. But he gives you what you need?”

Bray stopped, and smiled. “I don’t know whether I’m doing what you need from me.”

“But how’s it going, James?”

Bray kept the smile, answering slowly and politely. “I’ve covered the whole province. I’ve made my own census of the educable population, you might say, a pretty broad age limit. Now I must collate the stuff and write a report. That’s it, more or less. It should be a fairly accurate sample guide for the rest of the country. Once it’s done, it’ll be easy to do the same sort of thing for the other provinces, the work could be allotted to local people. Then I shouldn’t have to spend more than a few weeks in each. I don’t know how much longer I’ll need to stay in Gala; I’ll see Kamaza Phiri.”

“Good, you’ll see Phiri …”

“He wrote with some suggestion that I ought to put what he calls pilot schemes into operation in Gala. Before moving on. I’d written him a note on an idea I had for a technical school of a kind. I thought we might take over the club”—they both laughed— “but I think I’d better do what I have to do to complete the report — I’d better move off to the other provinces soon.”

Mweta said, “But if Phiri wants to set up something in Gala. There’s no hurry to leave Gala.”

“Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; but that’s when I’m alone, you know. It’s something to do with the atmosphere of the place, the smell of it and so on. But my old house and the boma—they leave me cold. I suppose leaving the old life the way I did … Sometimes I feel I’ve never been away; sometimes I feel I’ve never come back.”

“I don’t think you should be in any hurry. Is the house you’re in all right, there? We really ought to be able to get you a decent house, James. If you hear of any people who are leaving, any settler’s house you know about, you must write — the government could buy a house like that for you.”

“Oh the house is perfectly all right for my purpose. There’s a magnificent fig in the garden.”

“There should be a really nice house for you and Olivia. It worries me. Not one of those British shacks. She can’t come to live like that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the house! For a few months, it’s perfectly adequate. I don’t know whether Olivia will come, now. She’s hung on so long, you know.”

“Don’t be in a hurry,” Mweta said, looking at him, open. “You know, it’s a funny thing, all these years — I always thought of you as if you were still there, in Gala. And even when I went there; I expected you. I think of you in Gala. Like myself. I’m in Gala, too. That was the time”—he drew first his lower lip under his teeth, then his upper lip. “Now I must rely on Simon Thabo.” Thabo was Provincial Minister for Gala. “You can’t talk to him, James. If I send for him he says to me, don’t concern yourself, Mr. President, everything is under control. You know how some Africans are, James, you know how we are? He has certain ways of saying things, certain words he repeats. And he always talks in English, the special English he learnt at that public administration course run by the mission down in Zambia. I say to him, don’t tell me what the police chief said, saluting in front of you, don’t tell me that. Tell me what people said, what you heard. … I could get more from five minutes’ talk with you, James, than I get from all his reliable sources and what — not.”

Bray thought of the boy who had been locked up, while he was living in the house with the fig tree less than five miles from the prison. “I’m in the dark.”

“Thabo is not a person you can talk to,” said Mweta. “With you there, I … I know that whatever you say to me, you have this country”—his fingers knocked at his breast— “inside — and you will see, you will see, I can’t let personal feelings in this. And you won’t either. I have to know what’s happening there. From someone who understands.”

— Shinza. Shinza. “I didn’t even know that Lebaliso had people in jail,” Bray said.

“It’s a big country. Impossible to prevent these things. Little policemen feeling big. We will learn.” He meant it, in spite of his Detention Act. Bray watched him. He said, in a rush, “James, we are disappointing you. Good God.” Bray sheltered for a moment, like a match alight between his palms, an idiotic vanity; conscious that it was so: prime ministers and presidents as confrères now, and still he turns this way. To me. Mweta was saying, “You must help us, James. We need you, just like always.” That’s why he is where he is; the politician’s unfailing instinct for taking up the advantage he’s put you at. Bray was fascinated, as a man who knows he has had a lot to drink does not realize that the judgement is arrived at under the influence. He answered what was not at issue; Mweta could regard it as a code: “If only this education thing of mine makes sense.” And Mweta let him talk. “After all, I’m not an expert, I go by what I see to be necessary, a very home — made pragmatism, and the shortcomings of education as I know it. Must it be a white — collar affair? Do the lake people need to produce lawyers? What about literate fishermen, able to run their own cooperative from top administration to control of spawning grounds? If we’ve got nothing, if we’re starting from scratch, then can’t we escape the same old educational goals? I wish I knew more. I feel the answer lies somewhere in educational techniques as much as in organization. I don’t know enough about them.”

The talk turned to the fishing communities Bray had visited. Bray criticized the terms of the new concession without further mention of the boy who had been detained for doing so, and Mweta listened with that flickering of the eyelids of a man to whom words are whips, blows, and weapons, taken on the body and given on the bodies of others. He agreed that the concession was hardly an improvement on colonial times, so far as direct benefit to the fishermen was concerned, but argued that the increased royalty made it worth while. “Five years, James. Five years is nothing. By then we’ll be in a much better position to take over the fishing industry not as an isolated thing, but as part of the whole development of the lake country. I’m hoping for a fifteen — million loan or a new road up there, some of the money coming from the company itself, and the rest from the countries the company represents. Then none of our surplus fish will go up the lake for small profits, but down here and to the markets in the South.”

“The fishermen have to wait.”

Mweta said, at one with him, “I know. But that’s what we are having to do all the time — strike a balance. I don’t want anybody to have to wait a whole generation, that’s all. That’s the aim I set for us.”

“The pity is that there will be preventive detention to deal with impatience.”

“James,” Mweta said. He was seated again; he leant forward and put his hand on Bray’s big knee. “It will not be used for that. I promise you. It was not intended for that.” He sat back. His face shone like the faces of black schoolchildren Bray had seen, tense with effort and enlightenment.

Bray felt the corruption of experience; perhaps things happen here as they do because we bring from the old world this soiled certitude that makes anything else impossible. He said, “Once the law is there, there’s no way of not using it.”

In the old days they would have sat down to stew and bread and strong tea supplied by Joy, or not eaten at all until there was time for such a meal, but Mweta must have had to accept along with the turning of night into day on planes and the suitability of any hour as a working hour, the stodgy snacks that fuelled that sort of life. They had sandwiches and coffee on a tray; washing down the triangles of bread like labourers they discussed Mweta’s ministers, Mweta confiding doubts and Bray making observations that neither would speak of to anyone else. Mweta still wanted Talisman Gwenzi for Finance, he was a better economist than Jason Malenga and generally much shrewder, but who else would there be for Mines who understood as Gwenzi did that looking after Mines was purely a matter of a grasp of international finance, on the one hand, and handling local labour relations on the other — it wasn’t a knowledge of ores and mining techniques the Minister needed, all that was the affair of the companies. “If I had two more Gwenzis!” Mweta said enviously, “Just two more!” “One for Finance and one for Foreign Affairs, eh?” “That’s it.” And Gwenzi had pushed ahead the Africanization ideal magnificently — and put the onus on the companies. In two years, through intensive training courses devised and taught by the companies, all labour up to the level of Mine Captain would be African. Mweta swallowed his coffee. “A few years ago we weren’t even trusted to use dynamite down there.” They both laughed. “—Of course there may have been other reasons for that.” “Last time I was here Phiri was talking about training people for mining administration at the School of Further Education.” “The trouble is once you start a course like that, you’re going to get a lot of teachers resigning from the ordinary schools. They’ve got the basic education to qualify — and of course what an administrative job on the mines will pay compared with what you’ll get as a teacher … I think something like a Mine Secretary would get twice as much as a school headmaster …? We can’t afford to drain our resources in one place to fill up in another.” “The best thing to do would be to channel people off at high — school level — have scholarships for the school — leavers to go on to the course at F.E., just as you have scholarships for teacher — training.”

Mweta crunched a paper napkin into a ball and aimed it at the wastepaper basket. “Time, again, time. In the meantime, we’ve got to keep the Englishmen.” Mweta called all white men Englishmen: South Africans, Rhodesians, Kenyans, and others who sold their skills up and down Africa. “Talk to Phiri about it, though, it’s an idea.”

Mweta’s mind moved among problems like the attention of a man in charge of a room full of gauges and dials whose wavering needles represent the rise and fall of some unseen force — pressure, or electricity. He spoke now of the move he had taken a few weeks before, the surprise expulsion of the leader in exile and group of refugees from the territory adjoining the western border of the country. These people had been living in the country since before Independence; in fact, one of the first things he had done when he got responsible government as a preliminary to Independence was to insist that Jacob Nyanza, David Somshetsi, and their followers be given asylum. He couldn’t receive them officially, for fear of the reactions from their country; but they had a camp, and an office in the capital, financed by various organizations abroad who favoured their cause. Outwardly, he maintained normal though not warm relations with the president of their country (there was an old history of distrust between them, dating from the days when Mweta and Shinza were seeking support from African countries for their independence demands); from time to time there had been statements from President Bete vaguely threatening those “brother” countries which sheltered their neighbours’ “traitors.” Mweta explained how it had become impossible to let Nyanza and Somshetsi stay. Of course, he had publicly denied President Bete’s assertion that Nyanza and Somshetsi were acquiring arms and preparing to use the country as a base for guerrilla raids on their home country. … He turned to Bray, pausing; Bray gestured the inevitability. “They didn’t care any more” Mweta said. “They didn’t even take the trouble to conceal anything. Nyanza flew in and out and there were pictures of him in French papers, shaking hands all round in Algiers. They kept machine guns in the kitchen block the Quakers built for them at the camp — yes, apparently there were just some potatoes piled up, supposed to be covering—” He and Bray had a little burst of tense laughter. “So there was nothing else I could do.”

Bray took out a cigar and held it unlit between his lips. And so Nyanza and Somshetsi had had to move on, over the border to the next country, to the north — east, a country which was not part of the new economic federation which was about to link their country and Mweta’s.

“I saw Jacob Nyanza. Nobody knows. I saw him before they went. He was always a more reasonable chap than Somshetsi.” Mweta stopped; of course, he would have hoped that Nyanza, if not Somshetsi, would understand. But apparently it had not been so. Bray lit the cigarillo and Mweta followed the draws that burgeoned the blunt head into fire. He did not smoke or drink: influence of the Presbyterian mission where he had gone to school. “You saw what Tola Tola had to say at Dar-es-Salaam?” Bray’s lips opened and closed regularly round the cigar. He nodded.

“It was good, eh?”

Bray said, smoke curling round the words, “One of the best speeches there.”

“This morning there’s a call to say he’s going to Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki.” In the House some of Mweta’s most important front — benchers had questioned the expenditure of the Foreign Minister on travel and produced a log — book of his journeys, showing that since Independence he had been in the country for only a matter of weeks. “Yes, if I had another Gwenzi,” he said. “Albert is busy broadening the mind, isn’t that what you say. If someone invited him to drink a glass of iced water at the North Pole, he’d go. It’s very difficult for me to do anything. He gives me his good reasons … you know? And of course he is capable. They listen to him—” He meant in the world outside. Albert Tola Tola was also an Mso, the only one with a key cabinet post; what Mweta really was discussing was the fact that Tola Tola, capable or no, could not be replaced without betraying the electoral pact with the Mso, and could not be kept without agitation from Mweta’s men looking for a good reason to have him out. And beneath this tacit acceptance of facts was another that could not be taken for granted — if Tola Tola were given another portfolio, did Mweta believe that he would become one of the ants? Did Mweta fear there was a possibility of a disaffected Tola Tola being drawn to discuss his grievances with others — Neil Bayley had mentioned the Minister of Development and Planning, Paul Sesheka, Moses Phahle, and Dhlamini Okoi. Tola Tola was a brilliant man; sophistication had taught him the showmanship of the common touch as a formidable substitute for what Mweta had naturally.

Bray was able now to talk about the Bashi Flats as an issue apart from the question of Shinza — Shinza or no Shinza, there must be roads, there must be an energetic move to make the Bashi less like another country in comparison with the area round the capital and the mines. “The trouble is there’s nothing there,” Mweta said.

“No, nothing in terms of what is exploitable, what’s attractive to foreign capital. But the people, Mweta.”

“Unless there’s a mineral discovery of some kind — there’s a geological survey due out there in the next few months, Swedes — the only thing is cattle. And even then. I mean they come down on the hoof — what slaughter cattle there is.”

The Flats were one of the few parts of the country not infested with tsetse fly, the carrier of the cattle disease trypanosomiasis, but cattle were used mainly in the traditional way, as a form of wealth and capital possession within the tribes. Bray said, “You’ll have to change all that. Get beef cattle — raising going there on a commercial basis. Then you’ll be able to stop importing meat from the South. And it’ll be uneconomic to have the stuff coming down on the hoof — you’ll have a good reason for building roads.”

Mweta began to make notes of their conversation. “I want to come out there with you and have a good look round. I’ll fly to Gala next month some time and we’ll go up. And then later in the year we’ll go to the lake. Perhaps I can bring Joy and the kids, if Olivia’s there they can have a holiday for a few days while you and I — there’s that house for me, you know, I’ve never seen the place—” The fishing company had presented the President with a “lodge” on the lake, at the time of Independence. “In the meantime, James, you will write to me, ay? A letter every now and then. Let me hear. We mustn’t lose touch.”

He insisted that Bray stay in the capital for the rest of the week. “You’ll come to the dinner. The one with the white businessmen. I’ll tell Asoni.” Mweta threw back his head and his shoulders heaved loose with laughter. “You know what they wanted to know? If they must build a special lavatory for me.” Years before, when some minor royalty came to the territory, PIP had made political capital out of such unpromising material as a “comfort station” for the Royal Highness, quick to point out that this small building cost more than the type of house provided for an African family down in the native town. While they laughed Bray remembered it was Shinza’s idea; Shinza had a sure instinct for the concrete issue, however unimportant, and knew how to make his opponents look absurd as well as reprehensible.

When he got back to the Silver Rhino and went to the reception desk for his key, he stood there, the man who finds himself on stage in the middle of a play he knows nothing about: Hjalmar Wentz and his daughter were passing and repassing one another excitably in the cage formed by counter, desk, and safe. Hjalmar faltered, greeted Bray, but the girl was in a high passion: “Just wish to Christ you wouldn’t go on about the war of the generations, that’s all. Things you read in the English papers. It’s got nothing to do with the generations.” Hjalmar’s thin — skinned blond face was red along the cheekbones and under the streaks of yellow hair on the dome of his forehead. Her black eyes shone with the glitter of an oil — flare on night water, her breathing sucked hollows above her collar — bones. She shuffled a pile of letters together and walked out; Bray caught the musky whiff of anger as she lifted the flap of the counter and exposed her little shaved armpit, licked with sweat.

Emmanuelle had heard about her parents’ plan to ask Ras Asahe to intervene on their behalf with the brewery. “God knows who told her,” her father said, and Bray saw that Hjalmar must have told many people besides himself. The impossible thing was that she wasn’t angry because they’d thought of using Asahe, but because they had hesitated to do so, been afraid to suggest it to her … she was furious about that. She had raged at them for “driving everybody crazy” when they knew all along something could be done. She had said to her father, “Your scruples make me want to vomit.” He said to Bray, “Of course children must assert themselves, it’s inevitable, and in each generation the form that opposition takes is always impossible for parents to understand.”

Bray had heard the girl’s reaction to that. He said, “You’ll be able to go ahead and see what you can do through Ras Asahe, anyway,” but he was aware that the practical aspect was something Hjalmar Wentz looked at without recognition now. The red faded patchily from his head as his hands touched about the familiar objects on the desk.

The girl was doubled up in one of the sagging deck — chairs in the garden. Bray tried to walk quickly past so that she would not have to pretend not to see him, but she said, in the rough sulky voice of a child making amends for bad behaviour, at the same time unable to disguise her lack of interest in the trivial preoccupations of other people, “How was your shopping?”

He stopped, to show that everything was all right between her and the world. “Oh I wasn’t looking for anything special, you know.”

She was picking at some invisible irregularity beneath the skin of her upper arm, picking at it with her nail and then cupping her hand over the dark, smooth knob of her shoulder. She said, “They are ridiculous. Oh nice … but that doesn’t change it — ridiculous. They shouldn’t ever have come to live here — a gesture, that’s all. My father’s so romantic. Everything he’s ever done was a romance.” While she spoke she scratched at the grain of skin until whatever it was was lifted off, and a dark and brilliant eye of blood sprang against the flesh. She squinted down and put her mouth to it tenderly.

Bray said, “Even Germany?”

“Particularly Germany.” She kept sucking the blood and then looking at the place. “He can’t manage ordinary life at all, and she can’t stand that. And who blames her. What’s the point of shambling around from country to country. What’s the point of being saved from gas ovens, for that.”

He laughed at her, but she suddenly became shocked at herself, if he would not be. “We’re such bloody yahoos, my brother and me. I’m just as bad, in my way. That’s another thing. My mother wrings her hands because we’ve grown up wild in Africa, so uncultured, without the proper intellectual training of the Europeans who wanted to murder her.”

“And you think you’re wild?”

“D’you think we’d survive, if we were like them.”

There was this continual presence of people brushing against him, like so many cats weaving through his legs. And they were all so brimful of assertion and demand, eyes turned upon you, car doors banging, entrances and exits opening and closing the aperture of your attention as the pupil of an eye reacts to light and dark. The impulse to express this to someone glanced off with the flat remark to Vivien Bayley: “I hardly realized how solitary I’ve been.”

Before he could get in touch with Roly Dando, Dando telephoned. “Didn’t get a wink of sleep the night you arrived, I hear.” Bray, standing in the veranda telephone booth beneath the picture of Mweta, on which scribbled numbers had encroached, smiled at the aggressive cackle. “I gather you haven’t lost any. The President tells me you and Chekwe did a good job.” “Oh bloody hell, Bray. I can always be counted on to do a good job. Not so bad as it would be if I hadn’t been here. That’s all I ask, lad. That’s as much as I expect of myself.”

At dinner at his house, he said, “That’s how I’d define the function of the law in any country you’d like to name, today. That’s what the principle of justice has come to — you control how far the smash and grab goes. Settle for that. Better regularize it than allow the rule of law to be lopped off and carried aloft by the dancing populace, ay? So you have your immigrant quotas in Britain, so the British won’t turn on the blacks next door, and you have your censors back in the newspaper offices in Czechoslovakia, so the Russians won’t come back instead.” He drank a mixture of lemon juice, soda, and a white spirit in a bottle without a label. “Popococic gets it for me — slivovitz. The Yugoslav trade commissioner. Pure spirit’s less trying on the kidneys. That’s what’s really on my mind these days — believe me, your ideals only function when you’re healthy, they only give you any trouble when everything’s working well inside. I’ve got this damn prostate thing, getting up to pee every hour and if I’m caught out somewhere having to stand with one leg round the other to hold it in.” His face was petulant with dismay and consternation at a machine that refused to work properly. He had got thin; his voice, for the size of that shrinking head, sounded bigger than ever. The old Labrador lay panting between them on the grass. At the bottom of the garden the gardener and a friend were playing chisolo on a board scratched out of the red earth, a gramophone screeching very faintly behind the urging grunts and cries with which the stone counters were encouraged to progress from one hole to another.

“You can have an operation, Roly.” The twigs of the thorn — trees on the close horizon ran hair thin, jet and hard as if the pink sky had cracked intricately, like a piece of fine china.

“Yes, I know, you wait and see what it’s like. I’d pack up and go off to sit on my arse somewhere, but what’s the point. All countries are the same. We’re all backward people. Might just as well stay put where I am instead of taking up a new lot.”

“Whose idea was the Detention Bill?”

Dando showed that the question was irrelevant: “Cyprian Kente’s I suppose. Has a lot of ideas. Or a gift for coming out with what others don’t want to be the first to say. Mweta has an unspoken thought, Kente brings it right out loud where it can’t be suppressed, you see.”

Kente was the Minister of the Interior. “Mweta mentioned only you and Chekwe.”

“Call in the scribes. We’ve got the right words. I was able to get in my word, anyway. There’s a clause that the Act’s got to come up for renewal every year. That’s my little clause.”

The cicadas began a chorus of doorbells that no one would ever answer. Bray said, handling both Dando and himself gently, “And it will be renewed every year. Long after everyone’s forgotten quite what it was for in the first place.”

“Well, wha’do I care. It’s my conscience clause, laddie. I put it there. The temptation of virtue, justice, if anyone should like to fall to it. Available. You see what I mean.” His cheek lifted with a twinge of inner discomfort. The Labrador got up slowly and put its snout on his knee, but was pushed away.

“And Mweta says he won’t keep the Act a day longer than he needs it.”

Dando’s restlessness produced an irritable delight at Bray. “The humanitarian at the court of King Mweta. Oh shit, James. You’re the one who said to me anyone’d be a fool if he thought he could take my job without doing things he didn’t like.”

“Any other reason you know of besides Shinza?”

“No. Not really. You can’t take Sesheka seriously. A bit of nuisance with out — of-works — not unemployed, strictly speaking, they trek in from the lands to town.… But you know how many Bashi are in industry, road — building, railways. Always have been. Nearly a third of the labour force. Shinza’s opposing the PIP unions through them, very definitely so.”

Bray said, “Preventive detention to deal with that?”

Dando put his hands on the rests of his chair and heaved himself out. “He’s no green boy like ours. It’s a small start. He’s got friends outside and maybe friends inside as well — there are people who’d perhaps be prepared to take a ride on his back. He’s been treated like dirt, mind you — Just a minute.”

He tramped off in his schoolboy sandals to the shelter of a hibiscus hedge and against the insects’ shrilling Bray heard him piddling slowly and loudly.

Festus came round from the back of the house with a bowl of fresh ice. He took the opportunity of Dando’s absence coupled with the evidence that he was also in hearing distance, to accuse. “Why Muk-wayi doesn’t stay with us this sometime?” He withheld the ice until Bray answered.

“I didn’t know I was coming, Festus, I tried to phone …”

The excuses were accepted and the ice put down, in the convention, invented by white men long ago and become, curiously, part of the old black man’s dignity, that his “master’s” concerns were his own.

“Kalimo goes all right?” he said severely. Bray had written to Dando to thank Festus, when Kalimo turned up. They chatted a moment, falling into the local tongue, which Bray spoke with some hesitancy, helped out with a word here and there supplied by Festus. Making in his throat the deep, low exclamations of pleasure and politeness, he collected an empty soda bottle or two and went off as Dando appeared.

“—Yes, poor bloody Shinza. Poor bloody Edward.” Dando looked tranquil now. He began to pour fresh drinks.

“He’s got a new young wife and a baby,” Bray said with a smile. “He’s flourishing.”

“The old devil!” Dando was delighted; he himself took new life from the thought.

And cigarettes from over the border; and a house in Mpana’s compound. But Bray didn’t say it. It was none of his business. Dando said gleamingly, “D’you tell the good news to Mweta?”

Bray said, watching him, “I told him to send for Shinza. Even now.”

“If he ever sends for Shinza now, it won’t be on a gilt — edged card.”

Bray said, after a moment, “I thought that was the one thing you’d jib at — touching Shinza.”

Dando put his drink down patiently, gave a short, sharp, instructive laugh. “I work for Mweta, my boy.”

Bray got back to the hotel very late from Dando’s; it was impossible to spend an evening there without drinking too much and he had to drive with conscious carefulness. He saw a pair of eyes, two feet above the roadside: a small buck, feeding. The cold smell of heavy dew was voluptuous through the car window.

Hjalmar Wentz was still up. In the stuffy office that had no direct access to a window or door, the odours that his wife had swept and scrubbed and banished from the public rooms of the hotel collected in unstirring layers — smoke, insect repellent, boiled cauliflower, spilt beer. Hjalmar’s head shone under a lamp; as always he was surrounded by invoices and newspaper cuttings. He had confided to Bray, once: “I know of a refugee in London who’s been able to live off his files of cuttings. People pay him to consult them. A professor from the University of Budapest, had to get out in Fifty — six.”

He said to Bray in the confidence of the night, “The other day — did Emmanuelle say anything? Margot saw her talk to you in the garden.”

Bray lied, quoting Turgenev. “ ‘An honourable man will end up by not knowing where to live’—that was more or less it.”

A look of shy, weary pleasure crossed the face like a hand. “Good God. She’s strange, that girl of mine. But you know who’d told her about Ras Asahe? Stephen. Her brother. He told Margot. Usually Emmanuelle doesn’t get on with him at all. That terrible mutual antagonism of brother and sister. Thomas Mann only dealt with the reverse side of it in his incest themes—” The lie was life — giving, and he kept Bray from bed, their voices sounding through the small — hour deadness of the hotel like the conversation in people’s dreams, the secret activity of mice, and the steady jaws of cockroaches.

The House was sitting that week; there had been no need to call an emergency session. He walked in on the second reading of the Detention Bill. It was difficult for a man his size to be unobtrusive; as he stooped quietly along the polished wooden pew — wall that divided the visitors’ gallery from the members, several faces on the floor flashed aside in recognition. The beautiful chamber, panelled in wood from the Mso forests with its watermark of faint stripes, was murmurous as a schoolroom. It smelled like a church. There were one or two in togas — among the cabinet, Dr. Moses Phahle and little Dhlamini Okoi, fine Italian shoes showing beneath the robes — but most of the members wore formal Western clothes with the well — being and assurance peculiar to black men. Roly Dando’s narrow white face barred and marked by thick — rimmed spectacles and toothbrush moustache was a fetish object set among them.

With the sudden change of atmosphere from sun and traffic outside, these impressions came to him like the tingling of blood in a limb coming to life. Through the susurrus there was the voice of Kente, Minister of the Interior, an order paper crunched in his fist. “… What ordinary, peaceful citizen has anything to fear? What is this ‘web of intimidation’ that the Honourable Member for Inhame speaks about? Where does he get his language from? It is clear to us in this House that it has nothing to do with the realities of life in this country. It is clear to us that it comes from overseas, the Honourable Member has been reading too many spy stories — this House is no place for James Bonds and Philbys—”

He got some of the laughter he wanted, but not much; though hardly anyone had escaped the evangelism of James Bond, many had not heard of Philby. The Speaker, sitting lop — sided against his tall chair as if his curly white wig weighed him down, had his attention caught by Cyrus Goma, now member for one of the north — eastern constituencies, already half — risen from his seat. So Goma had adopted the toga; while he spoke he settled the free end of it like an old lady putting her shawl straight, fastidiously, his jutting chin held jackdaw style towards one shoulder — just as Bray remembered it — his face tight, eyes screwed up, while his voice remained soft and reasonable. “We have accepted the necessity of this Bill. That is one thing. But we must not allow ourselves to think that people who are worried about it, who have grave doubts about it, are something to poke fun at. I suggest to the Honourable Minister of the Interior that such people are sincere; they should not be ridiculed. A Preventive Detention Act is no laughing matter. We did not laugh when the British imposed one on us.” There was a sudden contraction of attention in the House. “We did not laugh in the camps in the Bashi—” Someone called, “Yes, Bashi!” “—and at Fort Howard.” He paused a mere instant, but it was just long enough. “Howard!” “Bashi!” “Howard!” The Speaker called the House to order. Cyrus Goma swayed slightly and began to speak again, reasonably, softly. “Our President didn’t laugh when he spent seventeen months shut up there. He suffered because it was necessary to win our freedom. If we must accept that it is now necessary for us to introduce preventive detention, that is no occasion for laughter.”

There was a distrustful hush; momentary. A spatter of hard — palmed applause that, as it sought to assert itself, was pressed out by a kind of rise of temperature in the House. On his feet, someone shouted, “If you want to cry for traitors!” The assembly seemed to fuse in hostility, presenting a bristling corporate surface, the back of some huge animal rippling at Goma. But from the direction of the hand — clapping someone else took the floor, a young man, hippo — faced with minute ears, who rested a tapering, ringed hand on his huge backside. His English was strongly accented. “Can the Minister explain why the Bill was not fust put before the Central Committee? Correct me, but as far as I am aware this is the fust time it has not been done. The Party has not approved this Bill because the Party was not informed about it. Is the Central Committee going to be a rubber stamp, just to come down like that on decisions already made by the Government? Is that it?”

Cyprian Kente smiled, taking the House into his confidence at the naïveté of the question. “The Honourable Member is aware that this was a decision taken by the President under Emergency Powers.”

The huge schoolboy figure was obstinate.

“The President is also the President of the Party. Did he consult his Central Committee. That is what I am asking.”

Mweta, clear — faced, with the immediate, calming authority of a man who appears always to take everyone’s point of view seriously, rose in place of Kente. “I would like to reassure the Honourable Member, because I know the devotion he has brought to the Party ever since he was one of the outstanding organizers of Party youth. I share with him the concern that the People’s Independence Party — which you, and I, and all of us made — should continue to carry out through this government the policies it has hammered out of the will of our people. In urgent response to certain information, I took the step of introducing a Preventive Detention Bill without having had the opportunity to present the Bill to the Central Committee. But I would like to point out that I took this step in full consultation with the Cabinet. And out of the eight members of the Central Committee, five are members of the cabinet.” A triumphant hum of assent; he cut it short, modestly, continuing, “When this measure is presented to the Congress of the Party next month, I have no doubt that it will have the endorsement not only of the remaining members of the Central Committee, but also of Congress as a whole, granting a country — wide mandate for what was in the first place a majority decision by the full representation of the Central Committee in the Cabinet.” The stir of disagreement on the back benches was tramped out by the applause of well — polished shoes drumming the floor. Mweta’s supporters beamed and overflowed confidence. Carried by it, he did not allow himself to be swept away, but swiftly turned the momentum towards the dissidents: his voice rose clear out of the clamour. “In this first year of our nationhood we stand together in a way that perhaps will never be repeated. In the years of our children and our childrens’ children, if God blesses our country with the peace and stability we are striving for, the business of running this country may be no more than a piece of efficient administration by professionals. But we are brothers in arms. We are the people who demanded freedom when we didn’t have more than one pair of pants. Yes, we are the people — Cyrus Goma, the member for Selusi, myself, many, many faces I see here — who sat in prison together not because we wanted to destroy but because we wanted to create a new life for the people of Africa. We are the people who made the struggle and the same people who are now doing the governing. We are the first crop. That’s what the people who used to run us call it. And it’s true that they sowed the dragon’s teeth of colonialist repression and up we came, a generation breathing fire.… We have learned the hardest way since our schooldays what unity demands from us — and how, without it, nothing, nothing that is any good to any of us, can be gained or kept. Small doubts and differences — we respect them in each other. They are family opinions. They don’t touch the fact that we are one….”

Cyrus Goma with his hand blinkered against the side of his face, his eyes turned to Mweta, and on his face the expression of a man who cannot be reached. Dando looking bored. Bray moved out ahead of the press of people as the House adjourned for lunch; only the journalists preceded him — one small black man in a paisley waistcoat had already gained one of the streamlined glass telephone booths and was mouthing away. President calls for unity: of course. Bray stalked slowly down the flowered drive to the visitors’ parking ground and had to pause, not knowing for a second whether to jump back or forward before a mini — jeep swivelling out of the members’ car park. The driver was the huge young man who had brought up the question of the Central Committee. Braking, he bounced himself so high he almost hit the canvas roof, and coming down, gave an open — and-shut grin at the plight of the two near — victims, Bray and himself.

Bray was to meet Neil Bayley for lunch. An Italian who had drifted down from the Congo had opened a pizzeria just behind the Central African Stores — it was filled with the younger white people of the town; no African would pay six shillings for a circle of charred dough smeared with tomato and anchovy. When the small white population tired of eating pizza, the Italian would have to open a fish — and-chip shop, where the Africans would patronize him. But for the present it was evident that this was the place to go in a town where there was nowhere to go; under the bunches of raffia onions and the blare of “Arrivederci Roma” pretty secretaries from ministries, embassies, and missions and men from other ministries, embassies, and missions (Conferences are great places for picking up birds, Neil Bayley remarked) were occupied in the early moves of sexual attraction, most easily established across a table. Like everyone else, Neil Bayley and Bray drank the house wine in Coca — Cola glasses, and Bayley’s big river — god’s head with the red — blond curly beard gazed out in pleasure across the room between his bursts of intensely lively concentration on what he was saying. “Yes, yes, of course, Goma’s a subtle bastard, and when he opens his mouth he’s not only speaking for himself, you can count on that. What others can’t say because they’re in the cabinet, our Cyrus says from the floor.”

“He managed to get them to imagine themselves shut up in Bashi and Fort Howard again, this time by their own people … in one sentence … and the pause was just calculated.… Then before anyone could put a finger on what he was saying he brought up Mweta’s seventeen months, the great example of sacrifice … a paragon of loyalty!” Bray laughed with admiration.

“Oh he slips the knife between the ribs while appearing to give a pat on the back.”

“It was a good piece of cape — work. Quite something to watch.”

Neil Bayley presented a handsome, chin — lifted profile to the room, waving the carafe for more wine. “Tastes a bit metallic, ay? Matured in genuine old paraffin tins. — Oh he’ll have a long life in politics, that boy.”

“He’s had a long one, already. He was national organizer for a while, when Shinza was Secretary — General.”

“Is that so? I didn’t realize. James, you’re a walking archive — archives? How would you say it? Have some more. But Mweta can wrap them all up in a neat little parcel.”

“Yes, he did that,” said Bray.

“He’s convinced you he needs preventive detention,” Bayley said, his splendid pink face gleaming with wine — half a question, half a determination.

“Mweta’s a strange man.”

“How d’you mean, James?” Bayley had a passion for springing the lock of confidence; it was part of his “technique” with women — they became fascinated by the man who had made them give themselves away — but he enjoyed exercising his persuasive, bullying, blackmail skill with anyone.

Bray arranged the olive pits on his plate: first in a row of nine, then in two rows, one of five and one of four. He smiled.

“What d’you mean? You believe him and you don’t want to? You don’t believe him and you do want to? Come on. You must have all the facts. Come on, now, James.”

He gave Neil Bayley the look of an older man, smiling, keeping a younger man waiting. Bayley looked sceptical.

“He calls for an act of faith.”

Neil Bayley raised his golden eyebrows. He decided it was meant satirically; so that was what it became. Bray slipped out of his hands under cover of the exchange: “Interesting. Interesting. His early training with the White Fathers.” “It was the Presbyterians. He’s not a Catholic.” “Oh of course. This wine has a touch of carbide … Nepenthe. Lethe. I’m gone. I swoon.”

Roly Dando and a man with a white crew — cut, young face, and frowning smile, appeared peering over the crowded tables and their low — lying smoke. “Come on, mop up the vino on your chins and let us take over.” Dando introduced his companion, an American jurist who was on his way home from South Africa and Rhodesia, where he had been an observer at political trials. He had the conscious naturalness of the distinguished in unsuitable surroundings; anyone but Roly would have given him frozen Dublin Bay prawns and Chablis at the Great Lakes Hotel. “What’re you doing here with old Bray? Run out of popsies?” Dando and Neil Bayley genuinely bristled towards each other, although Dando was the old seal, long outcast from lordship of the harem by the young bull smiling down at him with strong white teeth and shining lips. Bayley found the war — time sexual slang quaint: “bint,” “popsie”; he had been a small boy evacuated to the country with a label round his neck, while dapper Captain Dando (there was a photograph Festus kept dusted on Dando’s mantelpiece) carried his cane under an arm through the streets of Cairo. “Just showing James the field, Roly. Of course you’ve played it, no interest to you.” Dando disapproved of American usage, the American idiom, especially in the mouth of the registrar of a university. But the visiting jurist gave a concupiscent chuckle, anxious to be simple and human.

“And how did you find South African justice, Mr. Graspointner?” The river — god was not only handsome and amusing, he also knew who Edward Graspointner was (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, author of standard works on international law) and he knew how to introduce a subject on which he himself was prepared to expand eloquently.

“Well, I must say that I found the conduct of the court unexceptionable. It was something of a surprise. It was an open court. It was an impartial court — although, as you know, some of the accused were white, some coloured. The judge was an Afrikaner. But the conduct of the court was equal to the highest standards of jurisprudence as we know it anywhere in the free world. Justice was done according to the law.”

“According to the law. Ah yes. But what of the law, Mr. Graspointner? The laws of the Republic of South Africa are unique in the world for their equation of the legitimate aspirations of the majority of the population with crime, with treason. Legitimate aspirations as defined in the U.N. Bill of Rights. Would you agree?”

“Broadly, yes. That is so.”

“Then was what you saw justice, or a going through the motions of justice? A lot of wigged heads jumping through the hoop. Is justice a piece of machinery or an ethical concept? Does the promulgation of a law make that law just? Can justice be done through it? I thought the answer to that question had been given at Nuremberg.”

“It was not given at Nuremberg. It has never been given anywhere,” Dando said, with testy patience. “For the simple reason that there is no such thing as international law in the sense of an international standard of justice. International law is a code for Interpol, for refugee — swopping and spy exchange, for boundary blood — feuds and squabbles over airspace and the three — mile limit for herring fleets. Justice is an empirical affair arranged by each country in order to perpetuate a particular social system. You should know that. Bill of Human Rights! Why not the Sermon on the Mount? Good ringing phrases, man.”

“Of course I met a lot of troubled people down there. Very, very troubled about just that issue, Professor Bayley—”

“What a human climate to exist in! Could you live in a place like that?” Neil Bayley’s thighs rolled apart, his arms fell wide, he seemed to make free of the whole black continent, the muddy banks of the Niger and the Congo, the forests and the deserts, the shy Batwa and shrivelled Bushmen, the lovely prostitutes of Brazzaville and the eager schoolchildren of Gala. “Could you, Graspointner?”

“Well, I don’t know. One mustn’t be too hasty about this. One person told me his raison d’être was to stay there in opposition, just be there, obstinately, even if he couldn’t do much to change things. I’m not a revolutionary, he said. I haven’t the courage to risk prison. But I can’t let them get away with it unwitnessed. I have to stay and oppose in my mind. It’s my situation; I haven’t any other that means anything.”

“Disgusting!”

“Of course, in daily life, he admitted … you develop a certain in — sensitivity … you let things pass that … eh?” The American turned to draw in Bray.

Bray offered, “I read something the other day — every nation has its own private violence … after a while one can feel at home and sheltered between almost any borders — you grow accustomed to anything.” And he thought, where did I get that from? Somewhere in Graham Greene? Why do I keep turning to other people’s opinions, lately, leaving myself out.

Neil Bayley stood up, blocking the waiter’s path. “Yes, thank you very much. At least one can choose one’s own violence. They’re not all equally vile, that’s the point. And I won’t have it that we’re all equally culpable. Flabby sentiment. So you could live there, James, a white man, and ‘oppose in your mind’?”

Dando said, “Don’t be more of an academic idiot than you have to, Neil. Of course he couldn’t live there. Christ, he was being run out of this country by the British while you were still—”

“—Yes, yes — a snotty — nosed piccanin having his backside striped in Exeter, Devonshire.” Bayley knew Dando’s pejorative in all its variations. They laughed; a noisy table in the loud room. Bayley sat down again for a glass of Dando’s wine and Bray was given a fine cigar with the jurist’s initials on the band. “I have a friend gets them in from Cuba, God knows how. The band’s put on in Tampa, I guess.”

He thought, I have a friend, too, who likes cigars.

He had to leave the company to pick up a borrowed dinner jacket and trousers for the Golden Plate dinner from the wife of the secretary to the Minister of Development and Planning — resourceful Vivien had arranged it. Gabriel Odise’s wife was a social welfare worker and the offices of her department were in the old part of the town, the strip of human habitation along the line of rail that once was all the town had been. A few old mupapa trees humped their roots out into the street, there; there was the cod — liver-oil smell from sacks of dried kapenta, and the strange sweet reek of dangling plucks in a butcher’s. A pair of Congo prostitutes, heads done up like bonbons in turbans, sat on the kerb giggling down at their painted toenails and gold sandals, and looked up smiling, as he stepped past. They wore the pagne and brief blouse that bared a little roll of shining brown middle, making local women look dowdy and respectable in their cheap European dresses. The internal staircase of the Social Welfare Department was stained and splashed with liquid in which ants had died and dust had dried, and the wall alongside it bore witness to the procession of people who hung about the place, for one reason or another, enduring by scribbling not the obscenities of the literate, but the pot — hook names and signature flourishes of the semiliterate. People sat tightly on one or two benches; the rest squatted on the corridor floor and moved their legs and bundles stoically away and back again to make way. While he waited among them — the only white person — he glanced down out of a window and saw in the courtyard at least another hundred and fifty people gathered on a ground worn bare by feet and bodies, under trees shabby as lamp — posts with the rub of human backs. Those in the corridor watched without resentment as he was beckoned in to Mary Odise’s room ahead of them. She was a pretty girl with the air — hostess neatness that African woman often assume with responsible jobs; as she let him in, her eyes went in quick tally over the crowd, with the look not so much of assessing numbers as of estimating the weight of what lay upon them, there on their impassive faces. A diagnostic look. She had a pink rose in a glass on her desk; the worn floorboards were scrupulously clean and there was the taint of baby — sick and dirty feet that can never be scrubbed out of rooms where the poor and anxious are received. The courtroom in Gala used to smell like that.

He tried on the dinner jacket and measured the pants against his side, waist to ankle. She took good — natured pleasure in the fact that they would seem to do. “The tie! I forgot to ask about the tie.”

“I can easily buy one. It’s extraordinarily nice of you … you’re sure your brother doesn’t mind?”

“He has two and never wears them. They used to be working clothes, for him — he’s got a band, they’re playing at the Great Lakes Hotel. They wear silver jackets now, with blue lapels — terrible! And the dry cleaners here don’t know how to do them. He’ll just have to give them away when they get too dirty.” She folded the suit expertly and put it in a strong paper carrier that bore the legend: I’ve Been Saving At The Red Circle Supermarket.

“Very overworked, Mary?”

She was fastidious to avoid the gushing complaint that was a convention among white colleagues.

“Not really. You can only see a certain number of people in one day. And if you try to rush it, you can’t help them. I’m attached to the Labour Department now, and I get all these people referred to me from the Labour Exchange.”

“So many old women and children — don’t look particularly employable, to me.”

“They’re not looking for work. They’re looking for relations who come here from the bush on the chance of getting jobs. They don’t know where the person they’re looking for is, they don’t know where he works — if he works. What are you to do? They have no money. You find them sleeping down at the bus depot. The Labour Department doesn’t know what to do with them. They send them to me.” She gave her gentle, sympathetic laugh. “I’ve suggested setting up a shelter — there’s the old market building, for instance, I thought of that. But the Chief Welfare Officer points out that we’d be taking responsibility for them … they really shouldn’t be here. They’d just stay on endlessly, some of them. It’s a headache.”

“What on earth do you do?”

Mary Odise had trained as a social worker in Birmingham, where she had investigated the wife — beating, child — neglect and drunkenness of the people who had brought white civilization to her country. At one of the Independence parties he found himself sitting with her and she mimicked for him an Englishwoman, pouring out the sordid tale of her woes, who once said, “I don’t feel so ashamed with you, dearie, as you’re a blackie.”

She was professional. “Give them bus fare and try to persuade them to go back home. But now we issue bus chits instead — they were taking the money and hanging on. Yesterday my junior found out some of them have begun to sell the bus chits.” She was laughing softly as she showed him out. As the door opened there was a listless surge in the corridor: eyes turned, bodies leaned forward. He was stopped on the stairway by an old man with a piece of paper so often folded that it was dividing into four along the dirt — marked creases. A garbled name on it looked as if it might be that of a building firm; he shook his head, pointed at the queue in the corridors, and gave the old fellow half — a-crown. He was careful not to speak a word in Gala or the local language. To these poor country people, by long experience, whiteness was power; if it were to be made accessible to them through their own tongue, how would he escape the importunity of their belief? Next thing, I’ll be making an ass of myself, trailing old people round to find wretched yokels who are hawking tomatoes somewhere.

The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the dampspotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still in it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies any more. Ras will lend you his. It’s just like two pieces of black ribbon, crossed over in front.” Ras Asahe was with the Wentz family; drinks were on the round table under the drawn — down lamp. There was the atmosphere of solicitude and consideration that comes after a successfully resolved family upheaval: Asahe must have been approached about his uncle.

“Sure, if you want to pop over to my place?”

But Bray was quite satisfied with the tie he had. Hjalmar was laughing loudly at Asahe’s description of an exchange with the director of broadcasting programmes in English, whose deputy he was. Apparently the man was a South African — Asahe imitated the Afrikaner accent: like many educated men in the territory, Asahe had been to university for a time, down South, as well as having worked in broadcasting in England. “… It happens to be standard BBC pronunciation, I told him. ‘Hell, man, well it’s not standard our pronunciation.’—I won’t be surprised if the rumour goes round from him that I’m a neo — imperialist….”

Hjalmar kept glancing at his wife to see if she were amused. She held her eyebrows high, like an ageing actress. Emmanuelle was inwardly alight, flirting with her father and even her brother, calling her mother “darling”—for the benefit of Ras Asahe or perhaps to present for herself a tableau of family life as she imagined it to be for other people.

It was a warm, singing evening with the moon rising on one side of the sky while a lilac — grained sunset had not yet receded into darkness on the other. There was the smell of boiled potatoes given off all over Central Africa, after nightfall, by some shrub. By the time he got to the tobacco sales hall where the Golden Plate dinner was being held, it was dark. He had not wanted to go, really — Mweta embarrassed him slightly by the invitation — but the cars converging on the grounds, the white shirt — fronts and coloured dresses caught in headlights, and the striped canvas porte-cochère with its gold — braided commissionaires created a kind of simple anticipation of their own. The warm potato — smell and the mixture of black and white faces in the formally dressed herd pressing to the entrance were to him evidence that this was not just another municipal gathering — this was Africa, and this time Africans were honoured guests, being met with a bow and a smile. There was a satisfaction — naive, he knew; never mind — in this most obvious and, ultimately, unimportant aspect of change. It did not matter any more to the Africans whether white people wanted to dine with them or not; they themselves were now the governing elite, and the whites were the ones who had to sue for the pleasure of their company. Fifty pounds a head for a ticket; he waited in line behind a rusty — faced bald Englishman and a lively plump Scot with their blond wives, and a black lady, probably the wife of some minor official, who had faithfully assumed their uniform of décolleté and pearls. She smelled almost surgically of eau — de-Cologne. The African Mayor and the white President of the Chamber of Commerce dealt jointly with the receiving line, dispensing identical unctuousness.

The tobacco sales hall had been decided upon because not even the Great Lakes Hotel’s Flamingo Room was big enough to accommodate the guests expected. The bare walls were entirely masked by red cotton; an enormous coloured poster of Mweta hung amid gold draping above the dais where the main dignitaries were to sit; stands of chemically tinted lilies and gilded leaves stood between long tables and at the four corners of a specially constructed dance floor like a boxing ring.

The perfect reproduction of municipal vulgarity was softened by a homely and delicate fragrance of tobacco leaves, with which the building was impregnated and which prevailed, despite the smell of food and women’s perfume. Bray was conscious of it when his mind wandered during the speeches. The Mayor spoke, the President of the Chamber of Commerce spoke, a prominent industrialist spoke, the chairman of the largest mining company spoke. Through grapefruit cocktail, river fish in a pale sauce (Tilapia Bonne Femme, in the illuminated lettering of the menu), some sort of beef evidently brought down on the hoof from the Bashi (Boeuf en Casserole aux Champignons), he sat between Mrs. Justin Chekwe, wife of the Minister of Justice, and Mrs. Raymond Mackintosh, wife of an insurance man who was one of the last white town councillors left in office. The white matron, like a tourist proudly determined to use her phrase — book sentences to demonstrate how much at home she feels, leant across him to say to the black matron, “Mrs. Mweta looks so young, doesn’t she? What a responsibility, at her age. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to cope. Doesn’t the hall look beautiful? One doesn’t realize how much really hard work goes into these functions — you should have seen our chairwoman, Mrs. Selden — Ross, up a ladder hammering nails into that material.” She added in a lower tone to Bray, “We begged it all from the Indians, you know.” Mrs. Chekwe, sullen with shyness, her neck and head propped up on the bolster of flesh held aloft by her corsets, did not know what to do with the fish, since, unlike the more experienced Bray and Mrs. Mackintosh, she could not overcome repugnance and eat it. She murmured, “Oh yes,” and again, “Oh yes?” varying the tone to a polite question. For his ten minutes’ attention to Mrs. Chekwe, he thought he might do better by talking in Gala, but decided it might be misinterpreted, on the one hand (Mrs. Mackintosh) as showing off and sucking up to the blacks, and on the other hand (Mrs. Chekwe) as patronage and the inference that her English was not good. However, he knew she came from the Northern Province and he managed a not too halting chat with her about the changes in the town of Gala and the whereabouts of various members of her family. Mrs. Mackintosh was talkative, one of those spirited colonial ladies— “It’d take more than this to throw me”: she was referring, of course, to her problems as a member of the ladies’ committee, but she gave him a game look that swept in present company. She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country, and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive — economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered — that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

He had been placed at the main table, but right at the end — a name fitted in after the seating plan had been made up. The industrialist spoke of the huge new assembly plant for cars (a British — American consortium) that would employ five hundred workers, and said how stable government and “sensible conditions” for foreign investment were attracting capital that turned its back on neighbouring territories with their “impossible” restrictions on the foreign ownership of stock and “wild demands” for nationalization of industry; “here industry and the nation will go forward together.” Sir Reginald Harvey, chairman of the gold — mining companies, spoke in a tone of modest, patriarchal pride, “allowing himself boldly to say that the mining industry, whose history went back to before the turn of the century, “brought to this part of Africa the first light of hope after the centuries — long depredation and stagnation of the slave trade. On the basis of the auriferous rock discovered then, in the eighteen — nineties, the modern state of today has been founded….” It was not even necessary for him to mention that forty per cent of the national income came from the mines; everyone in the hall was aware of that as unquestioningly as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. The mining industry was continuing to open up new fields of endeavour … there had been a temporary setback at the old Mondo — Mondo mine — but the tireless research, on which the company spent over a million a year in its efforts to better mining techniques and raise production, might soon make it possible to overcome these difficulties and reopen the mine … the mining companies and the nation would go forward….

Applause was regular and vociferous, descending on cue as each speaker closed his mouth. Black cheeks gleamed, the blood rose animatedly in white faces while in the minds of each lay unaffected and undisturbed the awareness that what the industrialist had said was, “You’ll use our money — but on our terms,” and what the chairman of the gold — mining group had said was, “We don’t intend to reopen the Mondo — Mondo mine because our shareholders overseas want big dividends from mines that are in production, not expansion that will create employment but take five or six years before it begins to pay off.” The director of the cold — storage company, whose butcher shops all over the country had served Africans through a hatch segregated from white customers until a PIP boycott three years before had forced a change, charmingly insisted that the black guest across the table from him accept a cigar. “Put it in your pocket, then. Smoke it at home when you feel like it.” Mr. Ndisi Shunungwa, Secretary General of the United Trades’ Union Congress, who had once said, “They got in with a bottle of gin and a Bible — let’s give them back what they brought and tell them to get out,” solicitously fished under the table to retrieve the handbag of the wife of the Director of Medical Services. A plump and grateful blonde, she was apologetic: “Oh I am a nuisance … oh, look, you’ve got all dusty on your arm.… Oh I am …”

Mweta spoke very briefly. From where he was seated, Bray was presented with the profile, the high, round black brow, the little flat ear, the flash of the eye beneath womanish curly lashes, the strong lips that were delicately everted in speech. All who worked together for the country were countrymen, Mweta said. “From the earliest days of our struggle” he had never thought of citizenship as a matter of skin colour. If it was wrong to profit by the colour of the skin, it was also wrong to discriminate against a colour of the skin. He understood “this dinner was the most expensive meal any of us here has ever eaten.” There was laughter; he smiled briefly, but he was serious, candid, a man who had lived until less than a year ago in a tinroofed, two — roomed, black township house: “—but the cost is really much higher even than that, the price of this happy meeting has been paid over more than fifty years by the labour of the people of this country and the energetic foresight of those from outside who had faith in its development.”

Loud music unfurled over the talk and clink of plates, and the harrassed stump of sweating waiters. Joy Mweta was steered out onto the dance floor by one of the white men. Voices rose in adjustment to the noise; the Congolese band played their particular hiccuping rhythm, marked by South American rattles and clappers. Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter. Some of the white men began to drift together as they did at club dances, and the black men were drawn to the male camaraderie of whisky and business talk. White wives went off to the cloakroom close as schoolgirls, and came back with faces animated by a good laugh about the whole affair. Black wives sat patiently, born to endure the boredom and neglect of official occasions. Dancing with a dutiful Bray, Mrs. Mackintosh was made careless now by gin and tonic. She giggled at the red bunting that covered the walls. “Bummed it from the coolies, my dear. They cheated the poor bloody native for so many years, they can afford to give away something now.”

He danced with Evelyn Odara. She dragged him off to be introduced to an elegant girl he had noticed passing with unseeing eyes the African wives dumped like tea cosies and the white women watching her with their men, a white dress and dangling glass earrings making her black satin skin startling. Doris Manyema. But he had met her before, during the Independence celebrations. She had just been appointed the country’s cultural attaché at United Nations; she received congratulations with guarded, confident disdain — it was as if one could look at her only through glass, this beauty who would take her place neither in the white man’s back yard nor in the black man’s women’s quarters. She was going by way of Algiers; they talked of Ben Bella and Boumedienne for a few minutes and then a young white man who had been waiting for an opportunity to join in, meanwhile looking at her nipples touching against the inside of her dress and touching at his own blonde moustache in a kind of unconscious reflex, passed some remark about Tshombe’s death. “I lost my bet he’d get out of prison there. I worked out the chances — you know, how many times he’d survived by the skin of his teeth before — fed ’em to a computer. Marvellously wily fellow, he was. I’m in insurance — actuary, you see,” he said, a disarming apology for talking shop. Doris Manyema did not look at him, saying to Bray, “I hope Tshombe rots in hell.” “Oh come now.” The young man, jollying, bridling sexually. “I just took a sporting interest.” Her long eyes looked down along her round cheekbones, her small nose distended slightly at the nostrils. “We don’t share the sporting instincts of you people. Your blood sports of one kind and another. They only kept him alive that long because of Mobutu. Otherwise he ought to’ve been thrown in a ditch the way he did with Lumumba.” The young man asked her to dance and led her off by the elbow, golden sideburns very dashing. “A handsome couple,” Evelyn Odara said, with her man’s laugh. She was draped like a solid pillar in florid robes; Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses were flashing as they did when he made a political speech, but he was dancing with his apologetic blonde, smiling down sociably with his head drawn back from her, while she had on her face the circumspect, wide — eyed look of a woman who is dancing with her pelvis pressed against a strange man. As the evening went on, roars of laughter came from the groups of hard drinkers; they began to forget the presence of Africans and tell their obscene stories. The black men gathered here and there and spoke in their own language, pas devant les enfants. In the men’s room, one of the white men standing beside Bray took a quick look round and said to a companion, “Thank Christ it’s gone off all right, eh, Greg? Jesus, but it’s heavy going with these chaps. And one mammy I had to push round the floor — I’m telling you, I needed to go into low gear to get that arse on the move.”

The confusion of noise was interrupted suddenly by the band stopping. People broke off talk and looked around. There was some sort of stir; people, began to crowd up; a different kind of buzz started and was hushed again. Mweta with Joy was parting a way through the guests, his guitar in his hands. That was how Bray saw it: his guitar. But of course it was not that guitar, it was simply one handed over from a member of the band in answer to a suggestion or request, maybe even Mweta’s own sudden idea. Anyway, he was walking almost shyly, Joy by the hand and the guitar in the other, with the look of half — anticipation (he had loved that guitar) and half — pride (he had liked the pleasure village people took in the performance) he used to have when he got off the bicycle and the guitar slid from his back. Without any announcement, quite naturally, they stepped up onto the dais and he began to play, while she brought her hands together once or twice, straightened her young, slack, motherly body in its schoolgirlish pink dress, smiled, and then began to sing with him. Their voices were soft and in perfect harmony. They sang some banal popular song from an American film of the Fifties.

The whites applauded thunderously; delight came from them: perhaps it was an unconscious relief at seeing this black man of all black men in the old, acceptable role of entertainer. The Africans merely looked indulgent; after forty years of being told when to come and go, when to stand and when to take your hat off, a black president himself decided upon procedure. Then Mweta handed his wife down from the dais, gave back the guitar and left the hall through an avenue of people who surged forward spontaneously under the bright glance of that black face, that smile of vulnerable happiness.

He thought of how he had said to Bayley of Mweta, “He calls for an act of faith.” What he had really meant was it takes innocence, a kind of innocence, to ask for an act of faith. He was talking to the Director of Information, who, as the first black journalist in the territory, had come to interview him years ago when the summary recall to England had just been announced. “What was worrying me most, I was worrying you would notice that I had no shorthand at that time …” They laughed, in the convention that the past is always amusing. But he was experiencing a clenched concern for this being that was Mweta, a contraction of inner attention, affection and defensiveness on behalf of Mweta, defensiveness even against himself, Bray. He was hyperperceptive to the world threatening to press the spirit of Mweta out of shape — white businessmen, black politicians, the commanding flash of Ndisi Shunungwa’s rimless glasses, the OAU — his mind picked up random threats from memory, newspapers, and the actuality around him. There must be one being you believe in, in spite of everything, one being!

The band inflated the hall with noise again. At once the guests were deafeningly set in motion, drinking and dancing.

Next morning when he was on the road back to Gala trees and bamboo clumps came at him monotonously and his mind settled upon the past few days as if they had been lived by somebody else.

A hennish anxiety, last night.

Write to me. Write to me. We must keep in touch. About Shinza, of course; go back to Gala and keep an eye on Shinza. Don’t forget to keep in touch about Shinza.

Call for an act of faith: it takes innocence. Bunk. It’s an act of incipient Messianism — oldest political trick in the world.

I suppose so.

There was a salutary aftertaste in jeering at himself for being taken in.