A Guest of Honour

Chapter 10

Beneath the fig tree he sat day after day compiling his report. There was no more rain; at night the stars formed encrustations of quartz across the sky, bristling light, and the smallest sound rang out. Kalimo laid ready a fire of logs on which the dried lichens were frilled medallions of grey and rust.

In the imposed quiet of Gala he found himself held in a kind of aural tension — something cocked within him, as in an animal in the dream that is grazing. Listening; he would raise his head from the papers and the hum of the tree’s proliferate and indifferent life — rustling, creeping, spinning, gnawing, crepitating, humming — did not lull him. Gala had the forest village’s eerie facility of covering everything, of swallowing everything, sunk out of sight by the closing in of a weight of green. Down under the mahogany trees the same foreshortened black figures went. No sound from bare feet in the dust; voices flitted like birds caged by the branches. Slave raids, punitive expeditions of Portuguese and English — the wake of perpetually renewed foliage came together behind them. The distant clangor and grind of the small industrial quarter was muffled out in the same way. Nothing happened in the open in this small, remote, peaceful crossroad. All change was a cry drowned by the sea of trees. A high — pitched note, almost out of range. (In a noon pause, one morning, he experienced in fantasy this same quiet of sun and heavy trees existing while things went wrong — he saw a car burning, bleeding bodies far down under the shifting shade — pattern of the trees. It lasted a vivid moment; his skin contracted — it seemed prompted physically, like the experience of déjà vu—a rill of cool air had got between his damp shirt and warm back.)

He began at once to spend a lot of time down at Sampson Malemba’s house in the old township.

Kamaza Phiri had made available an immediate grant to get a technical school going. Bray had said to him, “You realize that what Malemba and I are doing is a bit of mouth — to-mouth resuscitation on the old government workshops your department closed? The whole thing’s contrary to policy.” Phiri’s palms expanded, tea — rose coloured. “It’s an experiment for the purposes of the Bray Report”—the side of Bray’s mouth went up in amusement at the term— “I’m prepared to go along with it.”

Sampson Malemba was filled with a meticulous enthusiasm. He was making a round of the factories to talk to people about what initial courses were most needed. He had written off to Sweden for prices of machine — shop equipment. “Why Sweden, Sampson?” But at the table in his kitchen with its flowered oil — cloth he had done his homework; “The agreement — you know. The loan the government got: there’s a balance of credit there for agricultural and industrial machinery.”

They had a plan for small village centres to be run as ancillaries to the main one in Gala itself — each chief was to be asked to build a large hut where basic equipment would be provided by the scheme for the teaching of shoemaking, carpentry, and, most important, maintenance and simple repair of the motorized farming equipment the agricultural department lent to these communities. Malemba had had a brilliant idea: mechanics in the two local garages would be paid to give night classes in the villages, or, if these were too out of the way, weekend courses. The great problem for every branch of instruction was to find people qualified to give it; but if one let oneself be deterred by that, both were sanguinely aware nothing could be done in Africa at all. The garage mechanics were the sort of model makeshift solution to be tried for in every instance — they spoke the language, and although proper apprenticeship as motor mechanics had never been established for Africans under colonial rule, they had, while working for Bwana, became skilled all the same. In Gala they had kept the cars and tractors of the white community going for years; their own community had had neither.

Another problem was a place to house the centre. Bray felt fairly strongly that it should not be in the old African quarter or even in the new housing and hostel area, but in the “town” itself. It was important for ordinary Galaians to make a stake, firmly, in what had always been the white man’s and was now the white man’s and the black officials’ preserve. He wanted the people who merely came into town to work, buy, or comply obediently with one or another of the forms of administration that ruled their lives, to establish once and for all that they belonged there, too. The club, the Sons of England Hall, the Princess Mary Library — they had passed by these for too many years. He wanted them to claim the town at last. He did not say this in so many words, as he went to see various people with a view to finding premises. (It was not for nothing, after all, that he had once been a civil servant.) But in the apparent simplicity of his approach — as if this were a routine matter of no unusual significance — there was something that, in spite of, perhaps because of, the old, innately unaggressive manner that many of them remembered in him from before, roused that unforgiving resentment towards one who always seems to have the moral advantage. His audaciousness was of the quiet sort, too, a joke played upon him by his background, producing in him a parody of the stiff upper lip. He approached the secretary of the club, even though he and Mweta had laughed at the very idea; one had to give the club members a chance. It was rather like the chance Dando had to give parliament to rescind the Preventive Detention Act. He suggested to the secretary that the disused billiard room — the generation of billiard players had died off, the squash courts were popular now — might be used for adults’ secondary school classes Sampson Malemba himself intended to teach. The billiard room had a separate entrance from the club complex’s general one. The classes would be held at night only. Then there was the big barn or shed that, as he (Bray) remembered, was put up to house the pack (years ago there were drag hunts in Gala and someone had brought out from Ireland the hounds who had died, one by one, of biliary fever; but not before they had bequeathed the occasional U — shaped ears that still appeared, in the odd generation of local curs). That shed would make an adequate workshop for fitting and turning classes, and as it was well away from the main building, would not interfere with members’ activities in any way.

“You see we’re going to be a bit like one of those big universities, with their faculty buildings distributed through different quarters of the city,” Bray said in gentle self — deprecation. He and Sampson Malemba — sitting inside the club for the first time in his life — caught each other’s eye and smiled.

But the secretary seemed afraid that a smile might give away the whole club to the black victors as a wink at an auction sale knocks down a job lot. He said, weightily, “I understand.” He would, of course, put the matter before the committee — Bray must write a letter, setting out the facts, etc. “Yes, Mr. Malemba will do that — the scheme is under his department.” Again, the secretary “understood”; but he could tell them straight off (and here he did smile, the beam of regrettable bad news) that the billiard room was jam — packed with scenery and props, the dramatic and operatic section had claimed it years ago, he couldn’t even get his boys in there to clean up the place. And that barn— “You do mean the one down near the compound, just by the seventh tee?”—that barn was where the green — keeper kept his stuff, the mowers and so on, and, to tell the truth, some of the caddies dossed down there; “I know about it and I don’t know about it — you know.” He became expansive with conscious good nature now that he was disposing of his visitors. “Perhaps we can enrol the caddies,” Bray said, feeling like a jolly missionary. The secretary was a big fellow whose thighs rubbed together as he left his chair; his short hair was so wetted with pomade that he had always the look of one who has just emerged from the shower. He laughed along with the black man, although he had not actually spoken to him apart from the initial introduction. He ushered them out with an arm curved in the air behind their shoulders. “Colonel, have you mentioned your scheme to any of the people here? I mean, just in the course of conversation?” It was the reasonable, flattering tone he might have used to encourage a member who had a good second — hand squash racket to dispose of; he knew Bray hadn’t so much as had a drink in the bar since he’d been told his membership was approved. And Bray murmured, straight — faced, “I haven’t been much in Gala lately, I haven’t had a chance, really …”

In the car he said, “What a mistake about the caddies. The golfers will take it as the knell of doom: now we are going to take away their caddies and educate them.”

“I would like very much to put them in school.” Malemba was dogged. “Those kids know nothing but to smoke cigarette ends and gamble with pennies.”

“Good God! The caddies will see their doom in us, as well. They’ll be at the barricades along with the members, defending the place with golf — clubs.”

There must have been an emergency meeting of the club executive. Within a week there was a letter in the mail brought up by messenger from the boma. Inside, the communication itself was addressed to The Regional Education Officer, Mr. Sampson Malemba, and marked “Copy to Colonel E. J. Bray, D.S.O.” The members of the Gala Club, while always willing to serve the community as the Club had done since its inception in 1928, felt that the club buildings and outhouses were inappropriate and unsuitable as a venue for adult education classes. The purpose of the Club was, and always had been, to provide recreational facilities, and not educational ones, whose rightful and proper place was surely in schools, church halls, and other centres devoted to and equipped for instruction. Therefore, it was with regret, etc.

He phoned Sampson Malemba, who had one of the few telephones in the African township, but there was only a very small child repeating into the mouthpiece the single inquiring syllable, “Ay? Ay? Ay?” With the mail was a note from Aleke, beginning dryly, “I hear you’re back.” He had not been to the boma, it was true; he had all his papers at home, and for the present Malemba was the only official it was necessary for him to see. Anyway, Aleke invited him to supper that evening; to look me over, to see how well I was managed, in the capital? He thought, I wish I knew, myself.

When he walked up the veranda steps of what had once for so long been his own house, the first thing he saw was the girl. Rebecca Edwards — she had her back to him. She was pouring orange squash for the cluster of barefoot children, black and white, whose hands and chins yearned over the table top, and she turned, jerking her hair away where it had fallen over her face, as the other people greeted him. She said gaily, naturally, “Welcome back — how was everybody?” not expecting an answer in the general chatter. It was all right; he realized how he stonily had not known how he would face the girl again, not seen since that twilight. Of course it was because of her that he had not gone to the boma, it was because of her that he had arranged for the mail to be sent to him every day. He had not wanted to be bothered with the awkward business of how to treat that girl. The days that had elapsed had restored the old level of acquaintanceship. Or the incident was as peripheral to her as it was to him; her friends in the capital hinted as much, in their concern about her.

Sampson Malemba was there (his shy wife hardly ever came to such European — style gatherings, even if they were held by Africans); Nongwaye Tlume, the agricultural officer, and his wife; Hugh and Sally Fraser, the young doctors from the mission hospital; and Lebaliso, dropped in an uncomfortable old deck — chair before the guests as if by a gesture of Aleke’s, saying, There, that’s all he is — a bit of a joke with his 1914–1918 moustache aping the white man he replaced, and his spit — and-polished shoes — brown and shiny as his cheeks — giving away long apprenticeship in the ranks. Malemba and Bray at once began to talk about the letter. Over beer, and with the comments of the company, it appeared much funnier than it was. In fact, the first sentence in particular, the one about the Club having “served the community” since 1928, with its still inevitable assumption that the “community” meant the whites only, made them laugh so much, with such an exchange of wild interjections, that one of the smallest children (a Tlume offspring) crept up the steps towards the noise in dribbling — mouthed fascination, and then rose swaying to its feet like a snake charmed before music. Rebecca Edwards picked it up and cuddled it before the trance could turn to fear.

“And where do you go from there?” Fraser asked; he looked like a stage pirate, black curly hair, and hairy tanned forearms, a touch of beer foam at his lips.

“What do you say, Sampson?” Bray challenged.

“We’ll have to consider.”

“There goes the schoolmaster!” Aleke’s remarks were amiable, critical, a hand rumpling his guests’ hair.

Hugh Fraser rolled his eyes. “Let us preserve for ever the venerable, ivy — covered walls of the Gala Club, steeped in the history of so many memorable Saturday night dances, and so many noble performances of Agatha Christie.”

“No, but really, James?” Aleke said lazily. He kept cocking an eyebrow at the Tlume infant, and slowly, it slid from Rebecca’s lap and crawled to his leg.

“It’ll have to be the Gandhi Hall, next. Don’t you think, eh, Sampson.”

“Simple enough. Get an order to commandeer whatever premises you need.” Everyone laughed again in acknowledgement of the context of Sally Fraser’s remark — the aura of Bray’s friendship with the President.

“Oh, I’m not an Aleke or a Lebaliso!”

The policeman took it as a compliment, chuckling round to the company, pleased with himself: “Now Colonel, now Colonel …” Aleke half — acknowledged the feint by pulling a face. At that moment his wife said that food was ready and he announced, “Aren’t I the cleverest damn P.O. there has ever been in Gala district? You know who cooked? My secretary, here. Yes”—she was smiling, shrugging it off, as he hooked an arm round her neck— “I get her to cook, too.” “Nonsense. I gave Agnes the recipe, that’s all.” “She’s been here the whole afternoon, making dinner for me,” Mrs. Aleke said calmly. “I gave you the afternoon off, didn’t I, Becky? I’m the best boss you’ve ever had, aren’t I, Becky?”

Bray had not bought anything for the Edwards children but the Bayleys had. He was able to say to the girl now, “Vivien sent some things for you — a parcel. I’m sorry I haven’t delivered it yet.”

“Oh it doesn’t matter. I can send one of the children.” She extricated herself gently from Aleke’s big forearm.

Next day he went to see Joosab. There could be something in the club secretary’s suggestion that one might “mention the scheme in the course of conversation”—if not with Gala Club members, then with a member of the Indian community. Joosab said nothing; his large black eyes in wrinkled skin the colour and texture of a scrotum kept their night — light steadiness through Bray’s outline of the scheme, the confidence about the white club’s refusal, and what he knew was coming: the suggestion that the Gandhi Hall and the private Indian school of which it was part could provide premises. Although the Indians of Gala were mainly Moslem, like many such communities in Africa, they claimed Gandhi for the prestige he had brought to India and the third world in general, and perhaps also had some vague notion — in the uncertainty of their own position among Africans — that the Mahatma’s condemnation of caste and race prejudice might somehow soften incipient African prejudice against themselves. Of course the hall and school were in what was known — according to colonial custom by which the whites had placed various races at different removes from themselves — as the “bazaar,” a small quarter, not more than a few streets, behind the Indian stores on the fringe of the white town. “But this will be a good thing, don’t you think, Joosab — to break down these worn old distinctions of who belongs where, which are taking so long to die …? Your people would be setting an example to the Europeans that should make them think again … and it certainly couldn’t seem less, to the Africans, than proof of your good faith as citizens of this country.… Don’t mistake me, either — we hope any Indians who are interested will take any course that may be useful, Joosab—”

Bray had never called him “Joosab” before, without the prefix “Mr.”; the tailor was aware that if it had been dropped now, this was not because of the distance that other white people put between himself and them by not granting it to him, but because it had come to these two men that they had known one another a long time, and through many changes.

He smiled, “All our people have received education, Colonel. Since the first days, we have had our own school.”

“I know. In fact, I’m counting on getting some teachers from you … I intend to see Mr. Patwa about that.”

Outside the shop, one of Joosab’s grandchildren was sitting on a gleaming new tricycle, ringing the bell imperiously while being pushed along by a ragged little African male “nursemaid”; every time the boy straightened himself, grinning, panting, the small girl screamed at him in furious Gujerati.

Permission came from the committee of the Indian school for the Gandhi Hall and the school wood — workshop to be used by the adult — education scheme, with the provision that this should not interfere with ordinary school hours or days of religious observance. Bray was writing a letter of thanks for Malemba and himself, sitting in his usual place under the fig tree. One of the Edwards children appeared — he didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl, they all had the same cropped hair and shorts. A clear, girl’s voice asked for the parcel for mummy. Rebecca Edwards was in her shabby car in the road with the other two children. She waved apologetically. He carried out the Bayley present and they chatted at the car window; inside, her boys were blowing up a plastic seal and giant ball, their swimming trunks tied round their heads — it was Sunday morning. He said to them all, “Water is the natural element of this family. I associate you with water.”

She smiled, looking at her children. “I like your new office; I always see you sitting there when I pass. Like Buddha under the sacred banyan. But what a good place to work. Certainly an improvement on the boma.”

“Well, it was you who pointed out to me that I was superfluous at the boma.”

“I? But I’ve never done anything of the kind?”

“Don’t worry — and now I’m grateful. It’s magnificent, my fig, isn’t it. Now that it’s cooler it’s a perfect place to be.”

She was quick to be alarmed and embarrassed. The blood died back from her face, leaving only a brightness in the eyes. “But when did I say it?”

“Oh never mind. You were being considerate and excused me for not thinking to give you a lift when your car was in the garage.”

“Oh then — but you misunderstand—”

“Yes, I know, one sometimes hits on a little truth, just by mistake.” She was soothed, if slightly puzzled. Nothing was said for a few moments, they simply paused quietly with the morning sun on their faces, as people do, outdoors. “What happened about the Indians?”

“We’re getting the Gandhi Hall so long as it isn’t on high — days and holidays. Fair enough.”

“Oh that’s good.”

He said, “Poor devils. What could they say. They hope it may help.”

She shook her head interrogatively, making a line between her eyes. “Of course it’ll help. It’s a start for you.”

“Help them. If things should look like going badly for them sometime.”

“They’re all right, though? Nobody’s said a word about them?”

He said to her, “They see what’s happened round about. Kenya, Uganda. Rumbles in other places. Everywhere they kept out of the African movements in order to keep in with the Colonial Office, they hesitated to give up a British nationality until it wasn’t worth the paper it was declared on. When I was here, before, they refused to let the PIP branch hold meetings in the Gandhi Hall, and the bigwigs on the Islamic committee never failed to inform me of the fact. Now they’re going to allow a lot of bush Africans in where they’ve never set foot before — it’s in the same sort of hope, although their situation isn’t exactly a reversal of what it was … there’s no alternative power now, it’s the Africans or nothing. But the instinct’s the same. The instinct to play safe; why does playing safe always seem to turn out to be so dangerous?”

“It’s unlucky.” She said it with the conviction that people give only to superstition.

He laughed. But she said firmly — she might have been reading a palm, “No, I mean it. Unlucky because you’re too scared to take a chance.”

“It’s unlucky to lack courage?”

“That’s it. You have to go ahead into what’s coming, trust to luck. Because if you play safe you don’t have any, anyway.”

“It’s forfeited?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re right so far as the Indians are concerned … whatever their motives for giving us the hall — whether they had decided to give it to us or not, it’s not going to count if things go wrong.”

He saw in her face that she suddenly thought of his connection with Mweta; that recognition that always embarrassed him because it seemed to invest him with a sham importance. “Why do you say if things go wrong?”

His tone was quick to disclaim. “A profound cycle of change was set up here three or four hundred years ago, with the first of us foreign invaders. We’re inclined to think it comes to a stop, full circle, with Independence … but that’s not so … it’s still in process — that’s all. One mustn’t let oneself forget. And as for the invaders — we still don’t know whether, finally, the remnants will be spewed out once and for all, or ingested. So far, the states that go socialist become the most exclusively African, the capitalist ones have as many or nearly as many descendants of the invaders as they did before. Not surprising. But it can all alter …”

“My people went to settle in England — my parents,” she said. “I don’t know … I feel I’d be too lazy, you know? I’m not talking about washing dishes — I mean, to live another life.”

“Where were you before here?”

“Oh, Kenya. I was born there, and my brother. When he was replaced he went down to Malawi, and when Gordon — my husband’s contract wasn’t renewed we pushed off to Tanzania, to begin with. Clive was born there.” She dangled her hand over the child’s nape, and he wriggled it off. He said, “Is he coming to swim with us?”

“Silly-billy, we came to pick up the present from Vivien, you know that—” The children began to clamour to open it. When she drove off they were worrying at the wrappings like puppies wrangling over a bone. She turned to smile good — bye; she was getting a line of effort between her brows.

He went back to his fig tree and sat there before the notes, reports, and newspaper cuttings that awaited him. He lighted a cigar and flicked away ants that dropped from the branches and crawled over the lines of his handwriting. There was the problem of the bottleneck that would arise if, in the zeal of getting every child to school, the output of primary schools exceeded the number of places available in secondary schools. It was comparatively easy to build and staff primary schools all over the country; but what then? Kenya. He saw that he had made a note: For every child who wins entry into secondary schools in Kenya, four to five fail to find a place. He wrote, in his mind but not on the paper before him. There must be a realistic attempt to turn primary — school leavers towards agriculture, where for the next two generations, at least, most will need to make their lives, anyway. His eye ran heedlessly as one of the ants down the table he had made of the number of teachers, schools, and government expenditure on education in comparable territories. There was a letter from Olivia, with photographs: Venetia’s baby lay naked, looking up with the vividness of response that is the first smile. Shinza had held the pinkish — yellow infant in one hand. The third page of Olivia’s letter, lying uppermost, took up like a broken conversation: not at all, as you might expect, one of your own over again. A different sort of love. You know, it’s closer to the ideal where any child, just because it is a child, makes the same claim on you. I feel freed rather than bound. He contemplated with fascination that distant landscape of the reconciliation of personal passion and impersonal love, of attachment and detachment, that had been her liberal — agnostic’s vision of grace. As it turned out, grandmotherly grace. His wife was nearly his own age; they had married during the war. A few years younger than Shinza. Her attainment was the appropriate one, matched step by step to the stage of her life; he felt a tenderness towards the blonde slender girl with the small witch’s gap between her front teeth, who had become this — it was like the recollection of someone not heard of for many years, of whom one has asked, “And what happened to …?”

There was a note from Mweta in the mail, too. The plain typewritten envelope had given no indication of who the writer might be, and when he opened the sheet inside and saw the handwriting it was with a sense of the expected, the inevitable, rather than surprise. Mweta hoped the grant “was enough”; he urged again — what about a decent house? When was Olivia coming? He had thought he would have a letter by now, but perhaps Bray had been on the move again, about the country? “We mustn’t lose touch.”

Every time Bray met the fact of the letter on the table he was gripped by a kind of obstinacy. The letter was a hand on his shoulder, claiming him; he went stock-still beneath it. His mind turned mulishly towards the facts and figures of his report: this is my affair, nothing else. This is my usefulness. He would not answer the letter; his answer to Mweta would be no answer.

A day or two later he was writing the letter in his head, accompanied by it as he walked across the street in Gala. You know me well enough to know I cannot “move about” the country for you: I can’t inform on Shinza to you, however carefully we put it, you and I. You can’t send me in where Lebaliso can’t effect entry, I cannot be courier — cum-spy between you and Shinza. I did not come back for that.

The letter composed and recomposed itself again and again. Once while he was tensely absorbed in a heightened version (this one was a letter to make an end; after it was sent one would get on a plane and never be able to come back except as a tourist, gaping at lions and unable to speak the language) he met the Misses Fowler at the garage. He had not seen the two old ladies since his return from England, although he had made inquiries about them and meant to visit them some time. They were trotting down from the Princess Mary Library with their books carried in rubber thongs, just as they did ten or fifteen years ago, when they used to lunch with Olivia at the Residence on their twice — monthly visit to town. Disappointed in love during the war — before-the-last, they had come “out to Africa” together in the early Twenties and driven far up the central plateau in a Ford (Miss Felicity, the elder, had been an ambulance driver in that war). They grew tea on the slopes of the range above the lake and were already part of the landscape long before he had become D.C. of the district. Miss Adelaide ran a little school and clinic at their place; they saw courtesy, charity, and “uplift” as part of their Christian duty towards the local people, although, as Felicity freely confessed to Olivia, they would not have felt comfortable sitting at table with Africans the way the Brays did. When the settlers met at the Fisheagle Inn to press for Bray’s removal from the boma because of his encouragement of African nationalists, the Fowler sisters rose from their seats in dissent and protested. Apart from Major Boxer (who had done so by default, anyway), they were the only white people who had defended him.

Adelaide did most of the talking, as always, taking over Felicity’s sentences and finishing them for her. They were mainly concerned with Olivia — she was at home in Wiltshire, wasn’t she? She would be there?

“Are you going over on a visit?”

“Oh, no — we’re—”

“You must have heard that we’re leaving,” Adelaide stated. “Surely you’ve heard.”

It seemed necessary to apologize, as if for lack of interest.

“There are so many things I don’t seem to hear.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you see much of them,” Felicity said, meaning the local white residents.

“Oh, it’s all right, everything is quite amicable, you know. — I’ve so often thought of coming to see you, and then I kept promising myself, when Olivia comes—”

Adelaide’s old head, the thin hair kept the colour and texture of mattress coir, under a hairnet, tremored rather than was shaken. She said firmly, “Our time has run out. We are museum pieces, better put away in a cupboard somewhere.”

He said, “I should have thought you would have been quite happy to let it run out, here. You really feel you must leave your place? I think you’d have nothing to worry about, you’d be left in peace?”

Felicity said, “We’ve had these inspectors coming — Adelaide had to guarantee that we’d not lay anybody off, in the plantation, you know. And they have a new native inspector for the schools — he wanted to know if I was following the syllabus and he—”

“There’s nothing the matter with that, Felicity.” Adelaide spoke to her and yet ignored her. “But we’re too old, James. You can’t stay on in a country like this just to be left in peace.”

They chatted while Bray’s tyres were pumped and his battery topped up with water. He promised to write to Olivia and tell her the Misses Fowler were coming. He saw that Adelaide’s books were Lord Wavell’s memoirs and a Mickey Spillane.

They went off down the street under the trees, Adelaide with her white cotton gloves and hairnet, Felicity in her baggy slacks and men’s sandals. Old Adelaide (they used to call her Lady Hester Stanhope, they used to laugh about her, he and Olivia) was not a romantic, after all. She had not been a liberal and now she was not a romantic. The old girls hadn’t wanted to sit in their drawing — room with Africans, but now they did not expect to be left in peace there. They had recognized themselves for an anachronism.

By such encounters as this, remote from him, really, his mind was tipped. Again, the letter was mentally torn up. Thrown to the winds. What sort of priggish absurdity did he make of himself? The virginal drawing away of skirts from the dirt. I am not — this, not — that. What am I, then, for God’s sake? A boy scout? Clapping my hand over my backside? A vast impatience with himself welled up; and that was something new to him, too, another kind of violation — he had never before been sufficiently self — centred to indulge in self — disgust. There had always been too much to do. But now I refuse, I refuse to act. Because it’s not my place to do so.

He thought again: then go away, go back to the house in Wiltshire. Finish the damned education thing. May be some use, can’t do any harm. What you set out to do.

Yet like the gradual onset of a toothache or a headache came the recurrent tension that he was going to see Shinza, couldn’t stop himself, would one day find himself calmly making the small preparations to drive back to the Bashi. He would go to Shinza again, and he would know why when he got there.

Chapter 11

The Tlumes, the Edwards girl and her children, the Alekes and Bray — they drifted together and saw each other almost every day without any real intimacy of friendship. Gala was so small; the Tlumes and the Alekes, along with a few other officials’ families, were isolated from the black town; Rebecca, because she was a newcomer living under conditions new to the white community, and Bray, because of the past, both were isolated from the white town. Bray often shared the evening meal at the Malembas down in the old segregated township, but also he sometimes would be summoned by a barefoot delegation of Edwards and Tlume children to come over and eat at the Tlume house across the vacant piece of ground. And the Alekes’ house — his own old house — by virtue of its size was the sort of place where people converged. His bachelor shelter, without woman or child, remained apart, the table laid for a meal and shrouded against flies by Kalimo’s net.

They were all going to the lake for the day, one weekend, and he found himself included in the party. An overflow of children and some picnic paraphernalia were dumped at his house as his share of the transport; the children sang school songs to him as he drove. On arrival, the company burst out of the cars like a cageful of released birds and scattered with shouts and clatter. Bray and Aleke were left to unpack; Aleke had brought a scythe in anticipation of the waist — high grass on the lake shore and took off his shirt while he cleared a space as easily as any labourer outside the boma. He had sliced a small snake in two — a harmless grass — snake. He put it aside, in schoolboy pleasure, to show the others, and, wiping the blade with a handful of grass, stood eyeing Bray amusedly. He remarked, “So we’re getting rid of Lebaliso.”

“You’re what?”

Aleke lowered his young bulk into the cut grass and took one of the two — week-old English newspapers Bray had brought along. “The note came yesterday. He doesn’t know yet. Transferred. To the Eastern Province. Masama district.” His interest was taken by a frontpage picture showing people in androgynous dress — boots, mandarin coats, flowing trousers, leis and necklaces, waxwork uniforms — and a few elderly faces in morning coats and top — hats, advancing like an apocalyptic army, under the caption PEER’S SON WEDS: WEDDING GUESTS JOIN VIETNAM PROTEST MARCH.

It was Bray’s turn to watch him. “Aren’t you surprised, then?”

Aleke smiled; it seemed to be at the picture. Then he looked up. “No, I’m not surprised.”

“Well I am!”

Aleke’s big face opened in a laugh; he was tolerant of power. If Bray could go to the capital and have the ear of the President, well, that must be accepted as just another fact. Of course Aleke, too, in his way, wanted to do his job and be left alone.

Bray said, “Well, it’s a good thing, anyway.” Aleke was amiably unresponsive. He lay back on one elbow, his thick hairless chest and muscular yet sensuously fleshy male breasts moved by relaxed, even breathing. He was rather magnificent; Bray thought flittingly of old engravings of African kings, curiously at ease, their flesh a royal appurtenance. “Of course he might just as well have got promotion for his powers of foresight. Still, that youngster should have brought an action against him.”

They fell silent, turning over the pages of the papers. Bray was reading a local daily that came up from the capital twenty — four hours late. Gwenzi, Minister of Mines, appealed to the mine workers not to aspire “irresponsibly” to the level of pay and benefits that the industry had to pay to foreign experts; the experts would “continue to be a necessity” for the development of the gold mines over the next twenty years. A trade union spokesman said that some of the whites had “grown from boys to men” in the mines; why did they have to have paid air tickets to other countries and special home leave when they “lived all their days around the corner from the mine?” The Secretary for Justice denied rumours that a ritual murder, the first incident of its kind for many years, was in fact a political murder, and that an inquiry was about to be instituted.

Cut grass swathes glistened all round; the voices of the women, calling in children, came sharply overhead and wavered out across the water. Winter hardly altered the humidity down at the lake; the air was so heat — heavy you could almost see each sound’s trajectory, like the smoke left hanging in space by a jet plane.

After lunch, Nongwaye Tlume got talking to some fishermen and borrowed their boat. It was too small to hold all the children safely; Bray intervened, and had to take two of the younger ones, with Rebecca in charge, in a pirogue. Aleke and his seventh child slept in an identical glaze of beer and mother’s milk.

The big boat went off with cheers and waves, pushed out of the reeds by splay — footed, grunting fishermen. Bray paddled the rough craft scooped out of a tree — trunk with the careful skill of his undergraduate days. He kept close to the shore; his load seemed tilted by the great curve of the lake, rising to the horizon beyond them, glittering and contracting in mirages of distance. They had the sensation of being on the back of some shiny scaled creature, so huge that its whole shape could not be made out from any one point. The other boat danced and glided out of focus, becoming a black shape slipping in and out of the light of heat — dazzle and water. The faces of the brown and white children and the girl were lit up from underneath by reflections off the water; he had the rhythm of his paddle now, and saw them, quieted, with that private expression of being taken up by a new mode of sensation that people get when they find themselves afloat.

The girl had half — moons of sweat under the arms of her shirt. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her rather coarse, stubby feet were washed, like the children’s, by the muddy ooze at the bottom of the pirogue. He realized how solemnly he had applied himself to his paddling, and the two adults grinned at each other, restfully.

The children wanted to swim; everywhere the water was pale green, clear, and flaccid to the touch, gentle, but too deep for them where the shoreline was free of reeds and followed a low cliff, and with the danger of crocodiles when the pirogue came to the shallows. Bray struck out for a small island shaved of undergrowth six feet up from the water to prevent tsetse fly from breeding; the children were diverted, and forgot about swimming. But when he slowly gained the other side of the island, there was a real beach — perfect white sand, a baobab spreading, the boles of dead trees washed up to lean on. The girl grew as excited as the children. “Oh lovely — but there can’t be any danger here? Look, we can see to the bottom, we could see anything in the water from yards off—”

He and the girl got out of the pirogue and lugged it onto the sand; it was quite an effort. Their voices were loud in this uninhabited place. His shorts rolled thigh — high, he waded in precaution from one end of the inlet to the other; but there were no reeds, no half — submerged logs that might suddenly come to life. “I think it’s perfectly safe.” The children were already naked. She began to climb out of her clothes with the hopping awkwardness of a woman taking off trousers — she was wearing a bathing suit underneath, a flowered affair that cut into her thighs and left white weals in the sun — browned flesh as she eased it away from her legs. She ran into the warm water, jogging softly, with a small waddling fat black child by one hand and a skinny white one gaily jerking and jumping from the other.

He had stretched himself out on the sand but stood up and kept watch while they were in the water, his short — sighted gaze, through his glasses, patrolling the limpid pallor and shimmer in which they were immersed. The black baby was a startlingly clear shape all the time, the others would disappear in some odd elision of the light, only a shoulder, a raised hand, or the glisten of a cheek taking form. Where no one lives, time has no meaning, human concerns are irrelevant — an intense state of being takes over. For those minutes that he stood with his hand shading his eyes, the most ancient of gestures, he was purely his own existence, outside the mutations of any given stage of it. He was returned to himself, neither young nor middle — aged, neither secreting the spit of individual consciousness nor using it to paste together the mud — nest of an enclosing mode of life. He smoked a cigar. He might have been the smoke. The woman and children shrieked as a fish exploded itself out of the water, mouth to tail, and back again in one movement. He saw their faces, turned to him for laughing confirmation, as if from another shore.

She brought the children back and stood gasping a little and pressing back from her forehead her wet hair, so that runnels poured over neck and shoulders, beading against the natural waxiness of the skin. “It’s — so — glorious — pity — you — didn’t—” She had no breath; undecided, she went in again by herself, farther out, this time. He felt he could not stand watching her alone. It would be an intrusion on her freedom, out there. He sat with his arm on one knee, vigilant without seeming so, sweeping his glance regularly across the water. That wet, femininely mobile body, tremblingly fleshy, that had stood so naturally before him just now, the sodden cloth of the bathing suit moulding into the dip of the navel and cupping over the pubis, the few little curly hairs that escaped where the cloth had ridden up at the groin — so this was what he had made love to. This was what had been there, that he had— “possessed” was a ridiculous term, he had no more possessed it than he did now by looking at it. This was what he had entered. Even “known,” that good biblical euphemism, was not appropriate. He did not know that body — he saw now with compassion as well as male criticalness, as she was coming out of the water towards him a second time, that the legs, beautiful to the knee, with slim ankles, were thick at the thigh so that the flesh “packed” and shuddered congestedly. She stretched out near him; she was sniffling, smiling with the pleasure of the water. No one was there except the two small children. He said to her as he might have said in a meeting in another life, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

The words lay with the sun on her closed eyelids. After a moment, she said, guardedly, “Why?”

He felt culpable of having heard her talked about in the capital. He didn’t answer at once.

“Because it’s as if it never happened.”

“Then that’s all right,” she said. She lay quite still; presently she sat up and asked for a cigarette, bundling the towel round herself with a complete lack of vanity.

“It’s almost like the beaches at Lake Malawi.”

“Is it? I never ever got to Malawi. We were going there on local leave the year I was kicked out, so it never came off. We used to picnic here with my children, years ago.”

“This beach?” she said.

“Oddly enough, I’ve never been to this particular beach before — didn’t know it existed, till we found it today. — Farther along, we used to go, up past Execution Rock, you know: on the main shore.”

“What’s Execution Rock?”

“You don’t know the legend? Well, closer to us than a legend, really. The Dolo, the tribe of the paramount chief around here, used to have a trial of endurance for their new chief — elect. Before he could take office he had to swim from the mainland to the island. If he managed it, he would be rowed back in triumph. If not, he was supposed to be carted off and executed by being thrown from Execution Rock. That part of it’s never been done in living memory, but the channel swim was still carried out until very recent times — the predecessor of the present chief did it. He was still alive when we came to live here.”

She said, “Is your wife as attached to this place as you are?”

He smiled, half — pleased, half — misunderstood— “Am I so attached?”

She did not want to presume on any knowledge of him. “But you’ve come back.”

“I can’t go explaining to everybody — but how difficult it is when people impose an idea of what one does or is.… And others take it up, so it spreads and goes ahead….” (He realized, with quick recovery, that while he was ostensibly speaking of himself he was suddenly doing so in paraphrase of thoughts about her, the image of her as presented by their friends in the capital, that he had steered away from a few minutes before.) “Coming back’s a kind of dream, a joke — we used to talk about my part after Independence like living happily ever after. Mweta was in and out of jail, I was the white man who’d become victim, along with him, of the very power I’d served. I was a sort of symbol of something that never happened in Africa: a voluntary relinquishment in friendship and light all round, of white intransigence that can only be met with black intransigence. I represented something that all Africans yearned for — even while they were talking about driving white people into the sea — a situation where they wouldn’t have had to base the dynamic of their power on bitterness. People like me stood for that historically unattainable state — that’s all.” He thought, am I making this up as I go along? Did I always think it? — I did work with Mweta, in London, on practical things: the line delegations took, proposals and memoranda and all the rest of the tug — of-war with the Colonial Office. “But the idea persists … Aleke thinks, now, Lebaliso’s been removed at my pleasure. I can see that. He tells me this morning about Lebaliso being given the boot as if remarking on something I already know.” He gave a resigned, irritated laugh. Of course, she would be not supposed to know about Lebaliso — Aleke’s typist. But it gave him some small sense of freeing himself by refusing to respect the petty decencies of intrigue. He knew nothing about Lebaliso’s transfer, and had as little right as she to hear it before the man did himself. “There was a young man — Lebaliso beat him up, in the prison here. He was being detained without being charged. I found out by chance.”

“I suppose Aleke thinks you told them — the President.”

“But of course, I did. And now it’s assumed that all I had to do was ask the President to remove Lebaliso — and it’s done!”

“Just the same, the President must have thought that you thought it would be a good thing. I mean, he’s known you a long time. Whether you asked him or not.”

He instructed himself. “I’m responsible for Lebaliso’s removal, whether I want to be or not.”

“But you think it’s a good thing he’s going? Then why does it matter?”

“There’s a Preventive Detention Act. What he did’s been legalized, now. The principle on which he could’ve been removed seems somewhat weakened.”

She drew up her big thighs, so that, knees under her chin, they hid her whole body. She was removing sand from between her toes. “Perhaps Mweta did it to please you,” she said. At the same moment they noticed the children had disappeared into the bush. “Where’ve they got to?” There was the rambling cadence of small voices. They both made across the heavy sand. He carried back the skinny little white boy, she had the black one, indicating in dumb show how the fat rolls round his thighs outdid the cheeks of his bottom. The child lay looking up at her with the lazy pleasure of one to whom being carried is his due. “I believe you’ve got a grandchild?”

“Yes, a girl.” They smiled. “It seems very, very far away.”

“You’ve never seen it,” she said.

“Oh, photographs.” He gave a little demonstrative jerk at his burden. “This is yours — I ought to know by now, but there are so many always—” Although the boy was dark — haired, as she was, he was completely unlike her, yet with a definitive cast of face that suggested a marked heredity — black eyes under eyebrows already thick and well shaped, berry — coloured lips with a dent in the lower one: there was a man there, despite the poor little legs dangling from scabbed bony knees, and the cold small claws hoary with dirt — grained chapping. Her children were neglected — looking, stoically withdrawn in their games and gaiety as children are when they must accustom themselves to constant and unexplained changes of background and ever new sets of “aunties” and “uncles.”

“He’s Gordon all over again,” she said, as at something that couldn’t be helped. “Not just the looks. The way he speaks, everything. It’s funny, because he’s been with me all the time, I don’t think Gordon’s lived with us for more than three or four months since he was able to walk.”

“They were worried about you, at the Bayleys’.” He was careful how he phrased it. “Whether you’d be happy working for Aleke.”

“Aleke’s a darling. He really is, you know. It’s all a lot of bluff, with him. He likes to think he’s driving me with a whip. Good Lord, he doesn’t know some of the people I’ve worked for. There are some bastards in this world. But I don’t think a black could ever be quite like that.”

“Like what?” The children were playing at the water’s edge again, and he and the girl strolled along the beach.

“Get pleasure out of making you feel about so big. I mean they’re as casual as all hell, they borrow money from you and you never get it back — things like that. But they don’t know how to humiliate that way.”

“—Not Aleke?”

“Oh yes — my first pay check. But that he did pay back. Last month again, and now he’s not so prompt. I don’t mind — that house is really too expensive for them, you know. There’s too much room for relations and they all have to eat, even if it’s only mealie porridge. Agnes’s bought a washing — machine, as well. They’re paying off for furniture.”

“Still, it must put your budget out somewhat.”

She threw away a piece of water — smoothed glass she had picked up. “Aleke! You know what he said — but quite seriously, helping me, you know — when I said that I must have the loan back this month or I couldn’t pay my share of the Tlume household? He would speak to the Tlumes for me, he would explain that with the move, and so on, and the car repairs, I’m rather short….”

“You’d better not tell the Bayleys.”

“Oh but Aleke’s fine. I remember once, in Rhodesia, Gordon turned up and found I couldn’t take any more of that old horror I was working for, Humphrey Temple. He wouldn’t even let me go to pick up my salary. He went up to the offices himself, walked straight into Temple’s room and demanded an apology.… Nobody in that office even had the faintest idea who this cocky man was….” She laughed. She said, returning to the Bayleys’ concern, “It’s all right here, for me. At the beginning, I thought I’d just have to pack up and give in. Go back. I felt I’d been mad.… But that was just the usual panic, when you move on.”

“It is isolated. Won’t you be lonely?” He almost added, quite naturally, “—after I’m gone,” not in the sense of his individual person, but of the presence of someone like himself, a link between the kind of life that had existed for white people and created these remote centres, and their future, different life which had not yet cohered.

“I didn’t think about that. You know how when you think only about getting away — that seems to solve everything, you don’t see beyond it. And then when you are — safe … it turns out to be the usual set of practical things, finding somewhere to live, looking for a school … But it’s better, for me. You know how nice they all are, down there. I love those people but”—she looked away from him, out over the lake, then took refuge in a kind of deliberate banality— “I — got — sick — of — them.” There was the pause that often follows a half — truth.

The tempo of their communication switched again. They talked about the lake, and his journeyings round about. “You realize how hard it is to grasp change except in concrete terms. In Europe if you had been away ten years and then come back, you would see the time that had elapsed, in new buildings, landscapes covered with housing schemes, even new models of cars and new styles of clothing on people. But there’s nothing that didn’t look as it did before — the lake the same, the boats the same, the people the same — not so much as a bridge or a road where there didn’t use to be one. And yet everything has changed. The whole context in which all this exists is different from what it has ever been. And then, on top of it, I went to see an old friend … a contemporary of mine, you see, and in him you could see the ten years — grey hairs, a broken tooth, the easy signs that make you feel you know where you are. But he turned out to have a new — born son — there was a baby born the same time as I got a grandchild!”

“Nothing so extraordinary about that,” she said, inquiringly amused.

“But confusing,” he said, also laughing.

“I don’t see why. Perhaps he’s a grandfather as well.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Several times over. He had many other sons, as I remember.”

“Oh, an African.”

“Have you ever heard of Shinza — Edward Shinza?”

“Can’t remember. I suppose so. A political leader? I usually know the names of the cabinet ministers but after that I give up. You’ll find I’m an ass at politics, I’m afraid. Not like Vivien.”

“He’s an old friend. He was the founder of PIP.”

She said, “You know everybody.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s the trouble.”

“Let me paddle on the way back, will you?” she said. “My God, this lake is wonderful. It makes all the difference.”

“To what?”

She looked for a moment as if she did not know, herself. “To living here.” Sunburn highlighted the flanges of her nostrils and her cheekbones, and her lips looked dry — she seemed to have brought no make — up with her with which to make repairs. It was true that there was a deliberate lack of flirtatiousness in her. It was almost an affront. Her yellow, lioness gaze rested on the children.

That evening when the whole party was back home, he walked across the vacant ground to get rid of the bits and pieces children had left in his car. She was playing chess on the veranda with Nongwaye Tlume; they had a modern gas — lamp that gave an underworld, steel — coloured light. She dumped the miscellany on a chair and walked with him through the garden which had no fence and was marked off from the scrub only by a few heads of zinnia and the shallow holes and tracks made by children. “I taught Nongwaye to play but now he beats me regularly. When I grumble he says it’s an old African custom, to beat women — but he’s so westernized he does it at chess.” Strolling, chatting, her arms crossed over her breasts, she ended up nearer his house than the other one, and came in for a drink. “Is it too cool to sit under the fig?”

“No, no, I’d love to sit under the famous fig.”

He had a little candlestick with a glass mantel. It lit the fissures and naves of the great tree like a lamp held up in a cave; even at night the bark was overrun by activity, streaming with ants and borers indentured for life.

“You seem to get on very well in the Tlume household.” It interested him that a woman who appeared to have little or nothing of the liberal principles and fervour that would make the necessity a testing virtue, should find living with an African family so unremarkable. She apparently had been brought up in the colonial way, and had lived her life in preserves on the white side of the tracks, wherever she had been.

She said, “They just are very nice people. I was lucky. It’s a hell of a risk, to share a house.”

“You haven’t found them rather different? — you know, in the small ways that count rather a lot when you’re living together.”

“Well, it is another thing, of course — when you live with people. For the last year or two I’ve been working with Africans and then in our crowd at the Bayleys’ there were African friends; but I’ve never lived with them before. But as I said this afternoon … at the time, I didn’t think about anything … and I had to get out of that hotel and the chance came up. … Of course it is a bit different — there’s not much privacy in the house, we really do all live together, I mean, it’s not the arrangement of these are my quarters and those are yours, that I’d assumed. They just take it for granted; we eat together, people wander in on you all the time.… But at the same time there is a kind of privacy, another kind. They never ask questions. They simply accept everything about you.” When he came back out of the house with their beer, she said, “Of course, Gordon’s up in arms. I wrote to tell him where we were and, naturally, that brought a letter from him. I got it last week — what sort of educational background for his children and all that. He nearly had a fit. Whenever he gets all concerned he writes these sort of lawyer’s letters, so snooty and silly. He sees us sitting in the yard eating mealie porridge out of a big pot — you don’t know Gordon’s imagination.” She laughed derisively but almost proudly.

“Where is Gordon?” he said, as if he knew him.

“I hate to tell you.” Half confidential, half enjoying an opportunity to shock. “In the Congo, with that old bastard Loulou Kamboya”—she saw him trying to place the name— “no, not a politician, just an ordinary crook. Well, extraordinary. Gordon met him in a bar in Zambia, Loulou goes all over the place in his black Mercedes. Gordon went into the souvenir business with him. Loulou’s got a ‘factory’ making those elephant — hair bracelets. He supplies all kinds of hideous things — fake masks and horn carvings. He wanted to get down to South Africa to make contacts in the curio racket there, but of course they wouldn’t let him in. So Gordon went for him. There was going to be a fortune in it, they were going to have a network over Africa from east to west and north to south — you know. I don’t know what’s happened — it seems to have faded out. In this last letter Gordon says he’s taking a job on the Cabora Bassa thing — the dam. He worked on Kariba, of course: that was when I went to Salisbury. He’s an engineer when he has to be. — If you ever want any elephant — hair bracelets, I’ve got a surplus stock.”

He would be like the Tlumes and never ask questions — that is, questions that were intrusive. But she had introduced the subject of this man, the husband; he seemed hardly more than an anecdote. Bray said, “Well, at least he isn’t a mercenary. When you said Congo—”

“Oh, I’m sure Loulou’s done his share of gun — running, but that really would be too profitable to let anyone in on. Gordon Edwards wouldn’t be included in that.” It was a kind of parody of the solid suburban housewife’s plaint that her husband was always bypassed by promotion. He was entertained by this sturdy dryness that he had not seen in her before. She began to tell him anecdotes about life in the capital, involving Dando, people at the various ministries and the university, both of them laughing a good deal. They were the stories of an intelligent secretary, background observation; if there were any that were the stories of an intelligent mistress, she didn’t include them. He walked her home across the scrub again and gave her a good — night peck on the cheek, the convention between the men and women of the group to which he and she had belonged, in the capital. She was a courageous and honest girl and he had the small comfort of feeling he had put things right between them. He had a distaste for false positions. Even tidying minor ones out of the way was something. He did it as he would tidy his table when there seemed no way of tackling what he really had to do. When he met her during the week, buying icecream for the children, he offered to take them all to the lake again at the weekend — he wanted to have a talk to the people at the fish — freezing plant.

But she telephoned on Friday night — Sampson Malemba was in the room with him, they were working — and said that the children had been asked to a party and were “mad keen” to go, so — It didn’t matter at all, he’d take them another time maybe (he had always the feeling even while he spoke of everyday plans, that he might be gone, quite suddenly, before they were realized). Then he thought he might have sounded a little too relieved at not having the bother of the outing, and added— “Of course, you come along if you want to — if you’ve nothing better to do? I have to go, anyway.” She said she’d let him know on Saturday morning, if that was time enough? He felt the reciprocal tolerance of one preoccupied person towards the preoccupations of another.

Malemba sat waiting with his head tilted back, tapping a pencil on his big yellow teeth; it was a question of money, money, again now. There was an old police compound — a square of rooms round a courtyard — that they could acquire very cheaply and convert into classrooms at the cost of a few hundred pounds. The existing grant was already earmarked for other things; Malemba said, “If you wrote and asked for more?

“To whom?”

He looked at Bray and shrugged.

Yes, he had only to ask Mweta; he said, “Suppose I were to write to my friend the American cultural attaché, down there. They’re keen on educational projects. Of course, they like the big ones that show — like the university. But lecture rooms — that’s the way to put it — it might just ring the bell for us.”

He heard her coming through the screen door of the veranda while he was finishing breakfast. She was wearing men’s blue jeans and her rubber — thonged sandals, and was pleased to be in good time. She looked very young — he did not know how old she would be, round about thirty, he supposed. Kalimo had carefully tied up with string saved from the butcher’s parcels a package of food: “What’s inside?” Bray asked, and Kalimo counted off with a forefinger coming down on the fingers of the other hand— “Ah-h loaste’ chicken, eggs with that small fish in, ah — h tomatoes, blead, sa’t, litt’e bit pepper. No butter. You must buy butter.” It was the picnic he had always prepared, down to the stuffed eggs with anchovy, that Olivia had taught him to make, and the paper twists of salt and pepper. “Don’t bother with butter, it’ll just melt” the girl said. He stopped on the way out of the village and bought a bottle of wine instead.

She had a small radio with her, and when he had warned her she might have quite a long wait for him at the freezing plant— “Not the most attractive place in the world to hang about in, either”—she had taken something to read out of his bookshelves, more with the air of wanting to be no trouble than anything else. It was pleasant to have company in the car; she lit cigarettes for them both and the dusty road that climbed down through the mountains was quickly covered. So far as he had taken notice of her at all, he had always felt rather sorry for the girl whose life overlapped the lives of others but was without a centre of its own. Now she seemed like one of those hitchhikers who let the world carry them, at home with anybody in having no home, secure in having no luggage, companionable in having no particular attachment. She might have flagged him down on the road, just for the ride. He left the car in what shade he could find at the fish factory; the trees between the buildings and the rough wharf had been hacked down and the dust was full of trampled fish entrails hovered over by wretched dogs and flies. He saw her at once settle down to make herself comfortable, opening the doors of the car for a draught, and hanging the little radio, aerial extended, from the window.

There had been a dispute at the fish factory reported in the papers the week before; some sort of dissatisfaction over the employment of what were termed “occasional” workers — it was not very clear. What he had come for was additional data on the number of families and the extent of the area they were drawn from, as represented in the records of men employed on the company’s trawlers; there was some discrepancy, in his notes, between the educational needs of the population based on the number of workers who, although scattered, could be considered local, and the actual size of this population — which might be much less, if the workers in fact came largely from communities much farther up the lake and left their family units behind. Lake men had a migratory tradition that pre — dated colonial settlement; they had gone where the trade was, where the fish ran. It was sometimes difficult to find out to which community they belonged. For themselves, unlike other groups whose home ground was twice defined, once by tribal tradition and again by the colonial district system, they belonged, as they would say “to the water,” a domain whose farther side, away up in other territories of Africa, they had never seen.

The freezing plant section had the morgue atmosphere of men in rubber aprons hosing down concrete floors, and sudden reminders of blood and guts that no hygiene could do away with entirely. He saw the white manager for a minute, a man seamed, blotched and reddened from a lifetime of jobs like this, dirty, but routine as a city office, in the wilderness, in the sun. He was handed over to a grey — eyed coloured man with uplifting texts in his office. The records were not too satisfactory; Bray asked if he could talk to one of the shop stewards — the union records might make more sense. The clerk became vague and left the room— “Just a minute, ay?” He came back with the composed face of an underling who has passed on responsibility. “The manager says we don’t know if he’s here today, they doesn’t work Saturday, only if it’s overtime.” Bray had seen that some people were working. “Yes, some are working overtime this morning, but I don’t know …” Uneasy again, the clerk took him down to the cleaning and packing floor. He seemed to have the helpless feeling that Bray would single the man out instantly; in fact, one of the section overseers, a big, very black man standing with gumboots awash where the fish were being scaled, looked up alertly and caught the clerk’s eye. He came with the matter — of-factness of one who is accustomed to being summoned. Bray introduced himself and the man said with almost military smartness, “Good morning, sir! Elias Rubadiri,” but couldn’t shake hands because his were wet as the fish themselves. Scales gleamed all over him, caught even in his moustache, like paillettes on a carnival Neptune. They went out into an open passageway to talk; oh yes, there were union records. But the man who kept them wasn’t there, they were locked up. Where? Oh at his house, that man’s house. Could one go to see him, then? — The scales dried quickly out in the open air, he was rubbing them off his hands, shedding them. “He’s not there….” There was that African pause that often precedes a more precise explanation. Bray switched to the intimacy of Gala, and the overseer said, “You know, the other day … he got hurt on the head.”

Then they began to talk. Rubadiri was one of those half — educated men of sharp intelligence, touchy with whites yet self — assured, and capable of a high — handed attitude towards his own people, who appear in authority all over the place after independence is achieved. PIP was kept alive by such people, now that the old brazier — warmth of interdependency that was all there was to huddle round had been replaced by the furnace blast of power. There was no sense in the dispute — that was how he presented it to Bray. The old men and women who were employed by the fish — drying “factory”— “those sticks in the sand with a few fish — you’ll see out there”—were not capable of any other work. They did not keep regular hours of employment, they were sick one day, they started only in the afternoon the next, they had pains in the legs — he laughed tolerantly. “It gives them something to do, the money for tobacco.” Of course, the company did own the fish — drying, it had been there, a small private concession that they had bought up along with some boats and the use of this landing stage when the factory was started. It produced a few thousand bags of dried fish a year, that went to the mines — but that demand was dwindling because even before Independence the mines had almost abandoned migratory labour and workers who lived with their families were not given rations as compound workers had been. For the rest of the market, the company had the fish — drying and fish — meal factory in Gala, as Bray must know, where the whole thing was done by machinery. So these people here — his hand waved them away— “the company just lets them stay.” The union that had been formed when the factory started didn’t recognize them.

When he began to talk about the “trouble” of the previous week he took on a closed — minded look, the look of a man who has stated all this before a gathering, repeated it, perhaps, many times, with a hardening elimination of any doubt or alternative interpretation.

“Now some people come along and say, the fish — dryers work here, they work for the same company, why aren’t they in the union? They say, they are paid too little, it’s bad for us if somebody accepts very low pay. How do we know, if there’s trouble, if one day we strike, they won’t be brought in to do our work?” He lifted his lip derisively and expelled a breath, as if it were not worth a laugh. “Of course they know, the same time, that’s all rubbish. How can women and old men do our work? All they could do is wash the floors! They don’t understand the packing, and the freezing plant machinery.”

“Why do these others bother about them, then?”

“Why? Sir, I’ll tell you. These are people who say they are PIP, but they are not PIP. They want to make trouble in the union for PIP. They want to make strikes here. I know them. They only want trouble.”

“They’re not lake people?”

He looked surly. “They are from here. But they have got friends — there”—he stabbed a finger in the air— “in the factory in Gala, there in town — I know.”

“So there was a row,” Bray said.

“Trouble, trouble, at the meeting. Some of our people want to expel them from the union. Then there was fighting afterwards … trouble.”

“And you — do you want them expelled?”

He smiled under his ragged moustache at Bray, professionally. “PIP doesn’t have to be told to look after the workers here. They must change their ideas and see sense.”

Bray talked to him a little longer, getting some useful information about the origins of the trawler and factory workers; it turned out that Rubadiri himself had his wife and family not in the immediate area, but in one of the villages farther up the lake.

Bray knew that he had kept the girl sitting in the car nearly an hour, but when he made out the racks of drying fish looking like some agricultural crop stacked in the sun away over the far side of the jetty, he went up quickly to have a look. It was true that it was more like some local fishermen’s enterprise than part of a large, white company’s activities. Just a bit larger — not more elaborate — than any of the home — made fish — drying equipment you saw wherever there were huts, as you went up the lake shore. The usual racks made of reeds and bound with grass, on which split Nile perch and barbel were draped stiff as hides, yellowish, rimed with salt, and high — smelling. The ground was bare, the verge of the lake was awash with tins and litter, and certainly no one was working. But of course it was Saturday. Naked children and scavenging dogs were about; then he noticed that a series of derelict sheds under one rotting tin roof were not storage sheds at all, although they stank like them, but were inhabited. There were no windows, only the dark holes of doorways. Faces loomed in the darkness; now he saw that what he had taken for rubbish lying about were the household possessions of these people. There were no traditional utensils, of clay or wood; and no store — bought ones, either — only the same sort of detritus as scummed the edge of the lake, put into use, as if these people lived from the dirt cast off by a community that was already humble enough in itself, using the cheapest and shoddiest of the white man’s goods. There were no doors to the sheds. He felt ashamed to walk up and stare at the people but he walked rapidly past, a few feet away, in the peculiar awe that the sight of acquiescent degradation produces in the well — fed. The malarial old lay about on the ground outside, legs drawn up as if assuming an attitude for traditional burial. Vague grins of senility or malnutrition acknowledged him from those black holes of doorways, gaping like foul mouths. He saw that there were no possessions within, only humans, inert, supine, crawled in out of the sun. A girl with the lurch of a congenitally dislocated hip came out with the cripple’s angry look that comes from effort and not ill — temper, and put on a beggar’s anticipation. A crone looked up conversationally but found it too much effort to speak.

He went back round the freezing plant to the car and said to Rebecca, “Come here a minute. I want to show you something.”

They walked rapidly, she subdued yet curious, glancing at him. “Christ, what a smell—” They passed the racks. He took her by the arm and steered her along the line of sheds. His grip seemed to prevent her from speaking. She said, “But it’s horrible.” “I had to show you.” They spoke under their breath, not turning to each other. The crippled girl, the crone, the quiet children watched them go.

Back at the car she burst out. “Why doesn’t someone do something about them? Who are they?”

He nodded. “I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t somehow exaggerating. I mean, this is still a poor country. Life in the villages isn’t all that rosy.”

“But this! In tribal villages they may not have the things they have in town, but they do have their own things, you can see they are living. In that place they have nothing, Bray, nothing. No necessities for any kind of life.”

“Just what struck me. They’re somehow stripped.”

“How do they keep alive at all?”

“They’re fish — dryers.” He began to tell her the story while they drove away and left the place behind them.

At last he said, “Well — let’s find somewhere to eat,” and slowed down to consider. She gave a little shudder: “Somewhere beautiful.”

“Where we were the other day?”

“Oh, lovely.” But when he stopped along the lake shore track and prepared to settle, she looked uncertain.

“Isn’t this the place?”

She said, “I thought you meant the island—”

“All the way over to the island?”

“Never mind, this’s fine—”

“Well, if you’re in no hurry to get back, I’m certainly not. Waitlet’s see if I can find a boat—”

She kept protesting, but she couldn’t disguise her hope. There were two pirogues, much patched with tin, dragged up among the reeds. A fisherman was picking over a net. There was a short exchange of cheerful greetings in Gala and then they were given the choice of craft. They took the one that seemed to ship the least water, and they had two paddles this time. Their progress was erratic but she was determined to do her part, flushed and self — forgetful in a way that was unusual in an attractive woman. Once they were past fourteen they were never free of a nervous awareness of how they must be appearing; he had seen it in his daughters.

She was right. The island, the beach, were worth the trouble. She was proprietorial with pleasure. “Have you ever seen such perfect sand? And look — a back — rest, and you can face the water—” They had a swim first, undressing and dressing again without false modesty, each not looking the other’s way. Then Kalimo’s lunch was unpacked. “Have one of the eggs with little fishes in it, come on.” They ate greedily, and drank the warm red wine. She really was too fat — thighed for those old trousers, now that she had eaten they were drum — tight over the belly, as well. What did one mean by an “attractive” girl, then? Was her face pretty? It was a square, ruddy brown — skinned face, he did not like such broad jaws, when she became middle — aged she would be handsome and jowly. She had a good forehead, in profile, under the straight black hair — her hair was very black. And, of course, lovely eyes, those yellowy, lioness eyes. No, “attractive” meant just that — a drawing power that had nothing to do with the beauties and the blemishes, the disproportions and symmetries existing together in the one woman. She used no perfume but the warm look of the tiny cup formed by the bones at the base of her full neck made you want to bury your face there where the body seemed to breathe out, to smoke faintly with life.

They lay down on the sand, side by side; she had taken one of his cigars and was enjoying it. Every now and then, to ask a question or make a point, she raised herself sideways on one elbow, a hand thrust up into her untidy hair, the other hand half beneath her body, covering the falling together of her breasts in the neck of her shirt. Whatever she was, she was not a coquette.

“How long is your contract — with Aleke?”

“Eighteen months.”

“And after that — you’ll go back?”

“Where?” she said. He was thinking of the capital, it was a habit of mind for him to think in terms of some base. “I don’t know what it’ll be. Maybe we’ll go to South Africa. Because of Cabora Bassa.”

“It’s in Mozambique, miles from anywhere.”

“But he’ll be working for South Africans. He’ll be paid in South African currency. But perhaps I’ll just renew — another eighteen months here. We’ll see. Anyway I want to put Alan and Suzi into a boarding school.”

“But not in South Africa.”

“Well, yes. I don’t fancy the idea of Rhodesia. And they can’t stay here much longer—” She was anxious not to hurt his feelings — she saw all occupations in personal terms — by suggesting that his great plans for education in the country were not good enough. “It’s just that, with the schools newly integrated, the standard has dropped like hell, and, you know, one can’t let one’s children come out of school half — baked.”

“Of course. For the time being only the African children benefit, while the white ones are at a bit of a disadvantage. But you wouldn’t really consider sending them to South Africa?”

She said again, “Oh I don’t know, they say the schools are good.”

He saw that she was thinking of the money; there was a chance that there would be money in South Africa, to pay for them. Under the surface, her life was laid on bedrock necessities like this, that made luxuries out of scruples as well as emotions. But he said, gently, “Here you are all living happily with the Tlumes. And you’ll send them there, to be brought up in the antiquated colonial way, to consider that their white skin sets them above other people.”

She smiled, slightly embarrassed and defiant. “Well, what about me? It was like that in Kenya. It’s only while they’re at school; they’ll grow out of it again.”

“Not everyone can be as natural as you,” he said.

She turned on her elbow again. “I don’t quite understand how you mean that.”

“You cling to reality,” he said. “They couldn’t condition you into the good old colonial abstractions — a nigger’s a nigger and a white man’s an English gentleman. You obstinately stick to other criteria — I don’t know what they are, but they certainly aren’t based on colour.”

“It’s a big fuss about nothing. If that was all you had to worry about …” She dropped her head, rolled back. Perhaps she was thinking about her “other criteria”—what they were. Perhaps she was dissatisfied with them — with herself. It was easy to decide for her that necessity ruled her life with beautiful simplicity, even where it was makeshift and compromised. What criterion was there for this invisible man to whom she was married but with whom she never seemed to live? And the obliging reputation she had among husbands of the little group left behind in the capital? He felt again as he had the first time they had been on the island beach, only this time she, this young woman, was present as he was in the state of immediate existence, curiously quiet and vivid, unmediated by what they both were in relation to other people and other times.

The fish eagles hunched indifferently on a dead tree out in the lake. If he tried to follow their gaze over the water, his own faltered out, dropped in distance; theirs was beyond the capacity of the human eye as certain sounds go beyond the register of the ear. She said, “Not as if they were ever going to be South Africans.”

“It’s a contradiction of your realism, you know. You can’t be realistic without principles — that’s just the convenient interpretation, that the realist accepts things as they are, even if those things express an unreal situation, a false one. You’re the one who should see over the head of that situation, and instinctively reject it even as a temporary one, for your children. That’s the practical application of principle.”

She mumbled into her crossed forearms, “I’ll remember that.”—He saw from the movement of her half — concealed cheek that she was smiling.

Ah yes, how nice to set oneself up as the mentor of a rather lonely young woman, to explain her to herself. “We’d better move, soon.”

She said, preoccupied, “And how long have you still got?”

“That’s up to me.”

“Your contract’s with yourself.” She was generously envious.

“Very convenient. And only I know what the terms are. Or I ought to.”

“Then you probably do.”

“Do I?”

“Oh yes. People do. We know all about ourselves. Al — ll about it.” She was scratching her scalp and paring the collected road — dust from beneath her nails, concentratedly, as if she were alone. He thought defensively, how very natural she was; he had always liked so much Olivia’s fastidiousness, her almost awesome lack of little disgusting personal habits. Olivia could never have gone to bed with someone who picked his nose….

They lingered on the island, and on the shore when they returned and paid for the use of the leaky pirogue, chaffing with the bandylegged fisherman in his athletic vest and torn pants. He seemed surprised at being paid at all; so far as he was concerned, he was busy with his net and they were welcome to his boat in the meantime.

But once he saw the money in his hand, he must suddenly have thought of something he wanted to buy, for he looked at it smiling, as if to say, what use is this to me? He said to Bray, in Gala, can’t you give me two — and-nine more? Bray didn’t have the change but the girl did, and they paid up, amused. So the drive back was started well on in the afternoon, and it was slower going, climbing the pass instead of descending it. They had just come out onto the savannah when Bray felt that there was a puncture. They changed the tyre without much trouble but did not get back home till well after dark. “This’s one of the times when one would like a good little restaurant to appear magically in Main Road, Gala.” She said something about having to get back to the children, anyway; but when they drove along under the weak, far — apart street — lights of the road where they lived, she seemed to forget her concern, and came into the house with him. Kalimo had the fire lit; the ugly room was perfumed with the soft, dry incense — smell of mukwa wood. They had bought a couple of bream at the lake, and wanted to cook them over the wood — ashes, but Kalimo carried them off. “Don’t fry them Kalimo, for heaven’s sake — grilled not fried—”

She laughed to see him trying to prevail. “If you are worried about the children …? You could dash over now? Kalimo won’t be ready for an hour if I know him.”

She went as if she had been intending to do so, but he saw that she wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t said anything; and she was back within ten minutes. She had put on lipstick and her hair was brushed back, lank from the lake. She herself had the look of a child fresh from the bath. “Everything all right?”

“Oh Lord, yes. Fed, in bed. Trust Edna Tlume for that.” She had brought a packet of marshmallows: “For afterwards, with the coffee. Don’t you love them toasted?”

When Kalimo came in to clear the table he looked disapproving; she was squatting before the fire, watching carefully while the pink sweetmeats swelled on the end of a fork, wrinkled and slightly blackened. “Try one, Kalimo” she waved the fork at him, but he stumped out — the kitchen was the place for cooking.

She smoked one of Bray’s cigars. It was half — past ten by the time he heard Kalimo lock the kitchen door. She was resting her head and arms on her knees. He stroked her hair; such a banal caress — it did for dogs and cats, as well. She jerked up her head — in repudiation or response, he didn’t wait to understand — he put his face down to that small cup of bone at the base of her full neck and was at once launched, like the wooden cockleshell upon the lake, on the tide of another being, the rise and fall of her breathing, the even, hollow knock of her heart, the strange little sound of her swallowing.

She was smiling at him, slightly sadly.

“How long can you stay?”

“As long as we want.”

He began to kiss her, for last time as well as this time, and he pressed his palm protectively on her belly and the round hardness of her pelvis in the tight, worn old jeans that didn’t become her. It was all understood, between them. He undressed her and took her to his bed in that bare, male room which he had never shared with a woman; at once a schoolboy’s room and a lonely old man’s room, the room left behind him and the room somewhere ahead of him in his life. But the narrow bed was full again, he was full again, and it was all there, the body that had run shaking into the water, the big legs shuddering, the breasts swaying. This time he saw every part of it, watched the nipples turn to dark marbles rolling in his fingers, found the thin, shining skin with a vein like an underground stream running beneath it, where the springy soft hair ended and the rise of the thigh began, had revealed to him the aureole of mauve — brown skin where the cheeks of the backside divided at the end of her spine. All this and more, before he hung above her on his knees and she said with her practical parenthesis, “It’s all right” (knowing how to look after herself, trusted not to make any trouble) and she reached up under his body and took the whole business, the heavy bunch of sex, in her hands, expressing the strangeness, the marvel of otherness, between the two bodies, and then he entered all that he had looked on, and burst the bounds of his body, in hers.

She was a woman full of sexual pride. She said, “You had a lot of semen.” His mouth and nose rested in her hair, smelling the dank, flat lake water. Beneath one instant and the next, he slept and woke again; his hand left her humid breasts and trailed, once, down the trough formed by the rise of her hip from her rib — cage, as the strings of a guitar are brushed over as it is laid aside.

They put out the light, now, and in the dark he began to talk. It was the old story; the unburdened body unburdens the mind. Hence the confidences betrayed, the secrets sprung, beans spilled, in beds. He was aware of this but talked to her just the same; about Shinza. “—I have this unreasonable idea that when I see him again — I will know.”

“That’s what I thought. About you and me. If—if—it should come to that — again — I thought, then I’ll know.”

“What?” he said, teasingly. His sex lifted its blunt head and gently butted her, a creature disturbed in its sleep.

“What we would do,” she said.

He drove to the Bashi that week. At the European — style house in Chief Mpana’s compound, the man in clean grey flannels and polished shoes was summoned by a child. He said that Shinza was sick. Bray said that he was sorry; could he go over and see him in his house, then?

“No, he’s sick.”

But surely, just to greet him? What was the illness?

He was asleep. He was asleep because he was sick.

“If I wait a while?” Bray said.

The man had eyes like the inside of a black mussel shell, opaque and with a membranous shine, as if they had been silvered over with mercury. Although his face was lean, the lids were plump and smooth. He said, “He’s sick.” It was the contemptuous obtuseness that had done so well for colonial times; the white man could be counted upon to turn away and leave you alone: dumb nigger.

“If he knew I was the one who was here, he would want to see me.”

“He’s sick.”

Bray went back to the car and smoked one of his cigars. There was a big box for Shinza on the seat. He should have left them for him, anyway; he was on his way back to the house with the cigars in his hand when he had an impulse to skirt it and go to the big hut where Shinza and the girl and the baby lived. Only children were about in the yard. The door was open, and before he knocked softly he saw, with a wave of familiarity, the deal table stacked with papers, the trunk with the coffee set displayed, the family group of leaders askew on the wall — then Shinza’s girl, Shinza’s wife appeared, carrying the baby, no longer pinkish yellow; it had taken on colour as a pale new leaf does. She greeted him shyly, formally. He apologized; and how was Shinza feeling?

She said, “Oh? Oh he is all right,” suddenly speaking in mission schoolgirl’s English. “But I thought he was ill in bed?” She stood and looked at him for a moment, deeply, startled, caught in his presence as in a strong light. Then she went over and closed the door behind him. It was dim and secure in the room; the thatch creaked, an alarm clock ticked. Hardly able to see her, he said, “What’s happened to Shinza?” His voice sounded very loud to him.

She leaned forward— “He’s away again. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Over the border?”

She grew afraid at what she had done. “I think so.”

He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll go quickly. If anybody sees me, I’ll say you wouldn’t let me see him. It’s all right.”

The baby’s arms and legs, where he lay on her lap, waved like the tentacles of some vigorous underwater creature. She said, “Must I tell him you came?”

“If you don’t think it will get you into trouble with him.”

“I’ll tell him.”

The baby gave a little shriek of joy. He whispered, “Your son’s a fine boy,” and took the cigars back with him, in case she decided to forget that he had come.

Chapter 12

The new chief of police had arrived; a man from the Central Province, but a Dendi, one of the Gala — speaking tribes. “Ex-middleweight,” Aleke said, “Once had a go for the title about ten years ago, they tell me.”

“Punch-drunk?”

“Oh no, no he’s all right up there.” Aleke laughed.

Rebecca told him, “The new police chief’s been in to ask for you.” “Really? What should he want me for?” The next time he was at the boma, she put her head around the door quickly— “He’s here again.” A few minutes later Aleke’s voice mingled with another in the corridor, and Aleke brought in a man as tall as Bray himself, with the flat — nostrilled but curved nose that the mingling of the blood of Arab slavers with the local populations had left behind. Evidently the nose had not been broken although the whole face had a boxer’s asymmetry. Aleke went off. “I’ll tell the boy to bring you tea.”

“I’m glad to know you are here in this district, Colonel, it’s an honour.”

“And you — are you pleased with your new posting?”

The exchange of genialities went on.

“Oh yes, well, you get accustomed to this moving about. We are still reorganizing, you know. The country is young, isn’t it so? Well, I’m just getting organized — there are always little things, when you take over. But I don’t think I’ll have trouble. There will be no irregularities from now on. From now on everything will be”—he spread his fingers and jerked his hands apart— “straight — right—” And he laughed, disposing of peccadilloes.

“I’ve heard of your reputation in the ring,” Bray said. “I’m going to have to ask you to come along and give us some tips at the centre. We’re going to have various recreation clubs there, as well.”

“Oh, a pleasure, a pleasure, if I can fit it in — this job of mine is really full time — you never know when you can count on being free for a few hours, just to take it easy—” The affability of a man making promises he knew he would not be asked to fulfil.

And the girl had said, perhaps Mweta did it to please you. There would be “no irregularities, now”; also to please me? There wasn’t anything else the policeman could have come to see him for. Bray sat in the worn chair at the desk that was not really his, and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. His hands pushed the skin back from the sides of his nose over the cheekbones, pressed up the slack of his neck, lifted the eyebrows out of shape. Shinza was over the border; with friends, there; again. The wife said that: again. Shinza goes back and forth over the border, and perhaps they know about it — he saw the pleasant, battered face of the policeman who replaced Lebaliso — perhaps they know, and perhaps they don’t. Mweta would be wounded because no letter came. It would be so simple to take a sheet of paper and write: you were right about Shinza not being at home, he goes and comes across the border, his wife says. You may have some ideas about who it is he sees over there.

He was very short — sighted and taking off his glasses had the effect of drawing the world in towards him as a snail does its horns. The greenery outside the window was blurred. The titles of the reference books on the dusty shelf — trade directories, an ancient Webster’s — were illegible to him. He sat in this visually contracted world, obstinately, doing nothing. But his mind could not be held back; it was after Shinza, ferreting down this dead end and that, following and discarding scraps of fact and supposition.

He had told Rebecca he hadn’t been able to see Shinza because Shinza was ill; everyone else was vague about his purposes and destinations, anyway. She spent a lot of time at the house, now. At first she came only at night, disappearing from the Tlumes’ after they had gone to bed, coming across the scrub with her little pencil — torch, and being escorted home by the hand through the dark trees at two or three in the morning. The nights were so blackly brilliant then, the stars all blazing low together like a meteor tail, and the cicadas and tree — frogs silenced by the chilled air; they could hear each other breathing as they quickly covered the short distance. When he came back the fire was fragrant ash, the room warm; each evening consumed itself, and left no aftermath. Then she began to come to eat with him and would stay the night, leaving only just before Kalimo unlocked the house in the early morning, and before “the kids burst in” to her room up the road. She told him that as it grew light she and Edna Tlume would sit and drink coffee together in the kitchen — Edna got up very early to do her housework before going on duty at the hospital.

“What do the Tlumes think?”

“Oh they are very discreet. I told you. They don’t think anything.”

In spite of himself, he remembered the ease with which they talked of her, from hand to hand, down in the capital.

“D’you know what Edna said? ‘After all, where is your husband? A girl must have a man.’ It was so African.”

She was standing at his table, where he sat with his papers. He drew her in and pressed his face to her belly through the stuff of her skirt, then pushed up her sweater and took out her breasts, releasing the warm breath of her body that was always enclosed by them. She had a way of standing quite still, with patient pleasure, while she was caressed. He found it greatly exciting. He had not thought her body beautiful at first but as it became familiar it became imbued, transparent, with sensation — it was the shape, texture and colour itself of what was aroused in him.

She moved unremarkably into the empty house with ordinary preoccupations of her own; cobbled at children’s crumpled clothes, sitting on the rug before the fire, wrote letters in her large, sign — writer’s hand, did things to her hair, shut up on Sunday afternoons in his bathroom. She brought over her sewing machine and began to remake the curtains. “When your wife comes she’ll have a fit, seeing these awful things.”

Olivia had written saying that she really promised to come, now, by November — it was the shy, culpable letter of a spoilt little girl who knows she’s been exploiting the will to have things her own way. November was a long way off, to Bray. All time concepts seemed to be stretched; or rather, unrealizable. Next week and November were both equally out of mind. He did not know where he would be, any time other than the present. He did not know what he meant by that: where he would be. There was a growing gap between his feelings and his actions, and in that gap — which was not a void, but somehow a new state of being, unexpected, never entered, unsuspected — the meaning lay. He sat in the same room with the girl and wrote to Olivia, saying with affectionate reproach, November was about time, but it was a pity she was missing the winter, which she might have forgotten was so lovely, in Gala. There was nothing in the letter that touched upon him. All the easy intimacy it expressed was extraneous; the thin sheets lay like a shed snakeskin retaining perfectly the shape of a substance that was not there. He folded the letter and put it in the envelope.

Rebecca was doing some typing for him; that was inevitable. She looked up, mouthing a word; then focused, giving a quick faint smile. He said to her, “Edward Shinza was away when I drove to the Bashi.”

She had often a slight air of apprehension when he began to talk to her, as if she were afraid she might misunderstand — even in bed in the dark he would sense it.

“He was over the border. It’s not too difficult to come and go across the north — west border there, in the Bashi. Miles of nothing, the Flats run out into half — desert, there’s only the one border post on the Tanga River. That little wife of his more or less told me he’s been before. — Don’t look so worried!” Her face had gone broad, smoothed tight of expression.

“I’m wondering if it isn’t Somshetsi he goes to see. You remember about those two? — Mweta expelled them a couple of months ago because old President Bete accused him of allowing them to set up a guerrilla base on our side of the Western border.”

“And if he’s going to see them …?”

He drew a considering breath; his waist was as slim as it was when he was twenty — five but like many muscular men of his height, he had developed a diaphragm — belly — it could be drawn up into his expanded chest, but there was no ignoring the fact that it pouted out over his belt when he forgot about it. He shifted the belt. “There’s a piece in one of the English papers. Apparently Somshetsi and Nyanza have split. Somshetsi’s the man, now. He denounced Nyanza for wasting funds and not taking advantage of opportunities for furthering plans of liberation and so on. Whatever’s behind that, if Somshetsi could see any chance of a change here, a change that would allow his group to come back and base itself here, why shouldn’t he be very interested? Where they are now, they’re the width of a whole country away from their own. No possibility of any attempt to infiltrate. Where they are, there’s no common border with their country. Shinza could be their chance.”

All her comments were half — questions. “If he really means to make trouble here.”

“What I’m thinking is that if Shinza had retired to raise another family he wouldn’t be slipping over the border to Somshetsi.”

“What could he get out of it?”

“I don’t know.” His mouth was stopped at the point of hearing himself say aloud, Shinza might get support, through Somshetsi, from other sources that would like to see Mweta out; might get arms, might form some sort of alliance with Somshetsi — Shinza! A flash of absurdity. Shinza and Mweta belonged in the context of the fiery verbal wrangles at Lancaster House, with the conventional sacrifices and sufferings of an independence struggle with a power that, in contrast to the settlers who believed it existed to represent their interests, was simply choosing the time to let go. Shinza was better suited to the role of President to Mweta’s Prime Minister, than to intrigue in the bush.

There was a small knock, low down, on the screen door of the veranda. Rebecca called out, “Yes, Suzi?” The children never ran in without knocking carefully; he wondered whether she had trained them, or whether they had some sort of instinctive delicacy or even fear of finding out what the grown — ups assumed they were not supposed to know. The little girl’s voice was muffled.

“Come inside and tell me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The child banged through the door and rushed to her mother with some complaint about the boys.

“Don’t take any notice. They’re just silly.”

“I’m goin’a tell them they just silly.”

Rebecca smiled in culpable alarm to him. “Oh no, don’t tell them. It’s a secret, just for you and me.”

The child’s indignation calmed as he called her over and gave her a cigar — box of mahogany — tree beans he had collected for her from the tree outside Sampson Malemba’s house. “Someone must make holes so’s I can make a necklace.”

He was very polite and courteous with children; the perfect uncle, again. “I haven’t got the right tool to drill holes, Suzi, but I’ll get them done for you down at the Gandhi School, if you can give me a little time.”

The little girl said confidently, “My daddy will do it for me when he comes.” The children seemed to have no sense of time; they spoke of their father as if he were part of their daily life.

When the child had gone she sat with her hands between her spread thighs, staring at the typewriter. She turned and said, “You’ll be going down again now.” She meant to the capital; to Mweta.

“That I will not.”

“No?”

“No.”

She had not followed properly, lagged somewhere: she looked stoically forlorn. He noticed only that, not knowing any particular cause, and came over to touch her absently, gently; there was so much in each other’s lives into which they did not, would never inquire — never mind, he could offer the annealment of the moment. He stroked a forefinger across her eyebrows, drawing them there above the strong lashes always tangled together a little where upper and lower met at the outer corners of those eyes, the colour of tea, today. None of her children had her eyes.

“It would be fatal,” he said.

He walked away from her. He felt, almost accusingly, you would have to have known me all my life to understand. But he went on talking, as if he were talking to Olivia, who would feel exactly as he did; except that he didn’t talk to Olivia any more, even in letters. While he spoke he was aware of an odd, growing sense of being alone, like coldness creeping up from the feet and hands. And while his matter — of-fact, steady voice was in his ears he thought suddenly — an urgent irrelevance, striking through his consciousness — of death: death was like that, the life retreating from the extremities as a piece of paper burns inwards towards the centre, leaving a cold ring of grey.

“I understood perfectly what I was doing … when Shinza and Mweta started PIP it was something I believed in. The apparent contradiction between my position as a colonial civil servant and this belief wasn’t really a contradiction at all, because to me it was the contradiction inherent in the colonial system — the contradiction that was the live thing in it, dialectically speaking, its transcendent element, that would split it open by opposing it, and let the future out — the future of colonialism was its own overthrow and the emergence of Africans into their own responsibility. I simply anticipated the end of my job. I … sort of spilled my energies over into what was needed after it, since — leaving aside how good or bad it had been — it was already an institution outgrown. Stagnant. Boma messengers, tax — collecting tours — we were a lot of ants milling around rigor mortis with the Union Jack flying over it.… But now I think I ought to leave them alone.”

She was sitting very straight, as if what he said drew her up, held her. “Why is it so different? You must know what you think would be the best, the best government, the best—”

“For them — that’s it. Why should I be sure I know? Why should I be sure at all? It was different before. That was my situation, I was in it, because I was part of the thing they were opposing, because I could elect to change my relation to it and oppose it myself — you see? Now I should be stepping in between them — even if it were so much as the weight of a feather, influencing what happens, one way or the other — it would still be on the principle of assuming a right to decide for them.”

She was indignant on his behalf. “Mweta wants you to persuade Shinza! But if they ask you!”

“That doesn’t change my position, if Mweta wants to make use of the temptation held out to me, if it suits him to—”

After a moment, she said, “What about people who go and fight in other people’s wars. Just because they believe one side’s right. What about something like the Spanish Civil War.”

He smiled, rubbed his nose, lifted his head as if for air. “The distance between the International Brigade and the mercenaries in the Congo, Biafra …!”

She began to type again, slowly. The taps were hesitant footsteps across the space that separated them.

“The trouble is, I mean — you are so — you are in it. You don’t care about anything else, do you?”

“Oh, everybody ‘loves’ Africa.”

“You live in your beautiful house stuck away in England as if your life’s over. I mean, nothing awful ever happens, you read it all in the papers, you drive away from it all in your nice car, like some old—”

“Retired colonel.”

There were almost tears in her eyes, she had not meant to say that; affection came over him as desire.

“This is the place where everything’s happened to you. Always.”

“There was the episode of the war.”

“You never talk about it,” she said.

“This’s the continent where everything’s happened to you,” he said.

“Oh well, I was born here. No choice.”

“Dear old colonel, dreaming of the days when he was busy fomenting a revolution behind the boma.”

“You’re here. You love that man, that’s the trouble,” she said with a kind of comic gloom.

“Which man?” he said, making a show of not taking her seriously by appearing to take her very seriously.

“Well, both of them, for all I know. But Mweta, I can see it. And so all that stuff about interfering and so on is counted out. You are tied to someone, it goes on working itself out, like a marriage, no matter what happens there are always things you still count on yourself to do, because after all, there it is — what you’d call your situation. Stuck with it. What can you do? You’ll forget what people say, what it looks like, what you think of yourself. You simply do what you have to do to go on living. I don’t see how it can be helped.”

He held in his mind at the same time scepticism for her “uplifting” notion of that higher, asexual love (a hangover from some Anglican priest giving the sermon at the Kenyan girls’ school?) along with a consciousness of being flattered — moved? — at her idea of him as capable of something she saw as unusual and definitive; and the presence of Mweta, Mweta getting up behind his desk.

“You’d be off like a shot to tell Mweta that Shinza does cross the border, and that what he probably does there is make contact with Somshetsi.”

She scarcely waited for him to finish. Her head cocked, her full, pale, creased lips drawn back, the line pressed together between her eyebrows— “Yes, yes of course I would. It’s natural!”

“I don’t much believe in that sort of love,” he said, as if he were talking to her small daughter.

“Oh well, that’s English. It must come out somewhere — this idea you mustn’t show your feelings.”

“My dear little Rebecca, the English have become just about the most uninhibited people in the world. You haven’t been to England for a long time; love is professed and demonstrated everywhere, all the kinds of love, all over the place. It’s quite all right to talk about it.”

“I’ve never been. — But just the same, you don’t come from that generation, Bray — ah yes, the old taboos still stick with you—” They lost what they had been talking about, in teasing and laughter.

After they had eaten, she was crouched at the fire and suddenly read aloud from her book: “ ‘People have to love each other without knowing much about it.’”

He was searching through a file and looked up, inattentive but indulgent.

She was leaning back on her elbow, watching him. “So you see.”

Then he understood that she was referring to himself — and Mweta.

They (he and she) had never used the word, the old phrase, between themselves, not even as an incantation, the abracadabra of love — making. “What’s the book?”

She smiled. “You remember the day you went to the fish — freezing plant? I took it before we left.” She held out the exhibit; it was Camus, The Plague—one of the paperbacks that Vivien had given him when he came to live in Gala.

Already a past in common.

What am I doing with this poor girl? To whom will she be handed on? And why do I take part in the relay?

He was teaching her the language — Gala. His method was a kind of game — to get her to start a sentence, a narrative, and if she didn’t know the right word for what she wanted to say, to substitute another. She would start off, “I was walking down the road — I went on until I passed a little house covered with … with …” “Come on.” “With … porridge …” They laughed and argued; if the sentences were not simply ridiculous, they might turn into bizarre comments on the local people, sometimes on themselves.

He fished for a cigarillo in his breast pocket and went to sit in the morris chair with the lumpy cushion, near her. She hitched herself over and leaned her back against his legs. He said in Gala, do you have to go home tonight? She answered quite correctly, looking pleased with herself as the words came, no, tonight I am going to — could not find the word “stay”—sleep at the house of my friend. And tomorrow? And yesterday? He tested her tenses and the terms of kinship he had been teaching her over the past few days. Yesterday I stayed at the house of my cousin, tomorrow I am going to my (mother’s brother) uncle, the day after that I am going to my brother — in-law’s, and on Friday I am going to my grandmother’s. “Very good!” he said in English, and switched back to Gala— “And after that will you come back to your friend?” She was an apt pupil; she remembered the one term she had not used: in Gala, there was no general word for “home,” children had to use the word for parents’ house, men referred to “the house of my wife,” and women referred to “the house of my husband.” “Wait a minute …” She went over the sentence in her mind— “Then I will go to the house of my husband.”

She had it right, paused a moment, smiling in triumph — and suddenly, as he was smiling back at her, an extraordinary expression of amazement took her face, a vein down her forehead actually became visibly distended as he looked at her. This time the game had produced something unsaid, with the uncanny haphazardness of a message spelled out by a glass moving round the alphabet under light fingers.

She tried to pass it off by saying, ungrammatically, in the non sequitur tradition of the game, my husband is away from home in the fields.

Then she said, in English, “I had a letter from Gordon. He might come to see the children.”

“So he’s coming.”

“I only heard a few days ago. You never know with him, I’ll believe it when he arrives. That’s why I haven’t said anything. But then this afternoon Suzi said that to you about the beans—”

“When?” he said.

Now that she had confessed she was unburdened, at ease, almost happy. “This next week. If he does.”

But he knew she knew that the man was coming — the day, the date. He said, “What will you do?”

She said, “He’ll probably stay at the Fisheagle Inn. Edna really hasn’t a bed for him.”

She would have arranged everything; after all, she sewed curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

She spent the night at “her friend’s.” She lay in the bath, her body magnified by the lens of water, and, while he gazed at her, said dreamily, “I don’t suppose Olivia will ever know about me.”

“I suppose not.”

“You wouldn’t tell her?”

“Probably not.”

“I don’t know — I would have thought you are the kind of couple who tell everything.”

We were, we were. “You’re anxious about Gordon?” Still dressed, he sat on the edge of the bath; her brown nipples stuck out of the water, hardened by the cool air, the weight of her breasts when she had suckled children had stretched the skin in a wavering watermark. It was a young (she was only twenty — nine, he knew by now), damaged body, full of knowledge. “Oh Lord no.”

“Somebody might be kind enough to tell him. I suppose everyone knows. The whole village.” He had never thought about it before; it might be a scandal, for all he knew, among what was left of the white locals. If no one had seen the pencil — torch and the two figures crossing the piece of bush in the early hours of the morning, then it was unlikely that Kalimo had not gossiped to other servants.

“I don’t think so.” She was thinking of the loyal Tlumes, the Alekes; the white people she really knew only as the parents of children who were at school with hers. “He lives in a world of his own. Just every now and then he remembers our existence. You’ll like Gordon, you’ll see. He’s a very likeable person. Everyone does.”

She might have been talking of an old friend, rather a character. He said, “I’ll believe in him when I see him.”

“Oh I know.” On an impulse she got out of the bath and streaming wet, with wet fingers, undid his shirt and pants and pressed herself against him, a contact at once nervously unpleasant and yet delightful.

Early in the morning he woke with a fierce contraction of dismay, it seemed because Kalimo was at the door and she was still there — they must have overslept. His clenched heart swept this knowledge into some other anguish, left from the day before. Kalimo opened the door but did not bring in coffee. In fact, it was much earlier than coffee — time, and he had come to tell Bray that there was someone to see him. Bray half — understood, and forgot the girl, calling out, “Kalimo, what on earth is it all about — say what you mean, come here—” And Kalimo opened the door and stood facing the bed, after one quick glance not seeming to see, either, the woman stirring. “Mukwayi, he say he the brother of your friend, there — there—”

Outside the kitchen door, under the skinny paw — paws in the strangely artificial light of dawn, a young man stood hunched against the chill.

Shinza wanted to see him. “At Major Boxer’s place! He’s there now?”

“Yes. Or you can tell me what day you are going to come. He will come there.”

He watched the man off, one of those figures in shirt and trousers who are met with on all the roads of the continent, miles from anywhere ahead, miles from anywhere behind, silent and covering ground. The red sun came up without warmth behind the paw — paw trees, as between the fingers of an outstretched hand. It struck him full in the eyes and he turned away. He walked round the front of the house and stood under the fig. As many arms as Shiva, and dead — still, always stiller than any other tree, even in the calm and silent morning, because its foliage was so sparse, in old age, that air currents did not show. It was surrounded by its own droppings; fruit that had dried without ripening and fallen, dead leaves, grubs and cocoons. She came out of the house dressed, looked once behind her and then came over to him.

“I may go off, today or tomorrow, for a day. No, not to the capital. He wants to talk to me — from the Bashi.”

As she went across the rough grass he was struck by the subdued look of her, and called softly, “Rebecca!” She paused. “All right?” —Of course, Kalimo had walked in on them; he must know anyway, but all the same … She nodded her head vehemently, the way her children sometimes did. It was only when he was on the road that the thought crossed his mind that he had not noticed whether Kalimo showed any particular attitude in his manner when he served breakfast. Kalimo’s proprietorial dependency had belonged to Olivia and himself as the couple, the family; yet he had not, even by the quality of a silence, asserted Olivia’s presence — in-absence. Perhaps in some subconscious way even Kalimo found Bray’s presence different, in relation to himself, from what it had been before — he remained a servant, but although nothing was changed materially for him the emotional dependency between ruler and ruled was gone. With the dependency went the proprietary rights, also the concern. Or maybe Kalimo was just older, and seeing Olivia as part of a past.

Because of the iron-ore mine, the Bashi road as far as Boxer’s was kept in fair repair. There were the usual work gangs making good in the dry season the pot holes and washaways of summer, and every now and then he was waved onto a detour by a barefoot labourer prancing with a red rag on a stick, but he still reached the farm by two in the afternoon. He was slightly dazed from having driven so long without a stop. Boxer’s polished leggings shone in the sun. “I don’t know what the old devil wants.” He absolved himself at once of any association with Shinza or anybody else. “But it’s all right with me, if you’ve got doings with him. Take your time. He came to see me once to borrow money!” It was one of the few things that could make Boxer laugh: the idea that he might have any money lying around to lend. He was also making use of the dry season — to put up some new farm building. Bray had to look at a consignment of precast concrete blocks that couldn’t be laid properly because they were all out of true. “Bloody things taken from the moulds before they’re dry!” The blocks came from the new factory at Gala; Bray had to promise to complain.

Boxer went on with the job of sorting out the usable blocks, calling, “Where’s that boy? I don’t know where milord is himself, though I know he’s arrived because I saw his father — in-law’s car down over at my dam — but he’s left someone here to look out for you.” His face reflected emotions that had nothing to do with what he was sayingannoyance at each fresh evidence of misshapen cement, distrust of the judgement of the two black cattlemen who were working under his eye. The scout had disappeared. “Oh well, must’ve gone to fetch him. You can go along into the house. I don’t mind. Pour yourself a drink or ask in the kitchen for some tea.”

One of the Afghans followed Bray back to the house. The signs of division of the rooms between the various functions of the household during a previous occupancy — the Boxers as a family — were becoming completely overlaid by the single — mindedness of an existence so perfectly contained by the preoccupation of cattle breeding that it really had no diversity of functions to be reflected. The living-room, going the way of the bathroom that Bray remembered from last time, was slowly losing the character of its old designation as phials of vaccine, pamphlets on feeds, dried specimens of pasture grasses had settled among the tarnished silver and the Staffordshire dogs, and three pairs of boots, still encrusted with summer mud, had found an obviously permanent home on a small red — gold Shiraz next to the sofa. It wasn’t that nothing was put away in the right place, but there was no longer any place in the house that was not appropriate for anything. Bray opened the liquor cupboard and took a can of beer from among bottles of bloat medicine. He heard a car and took out a second can. The beautiful male dog that looked so humanly feminine — a kind of inversion of anthropomorphism — got up gracefully within its fringes of fur and barked beside Bray at the door as it saw a black man get out of the car. Shinza wore a gay shirt flapping over his trousers, sandals that he had to grip with his toes as he walked. There was an almost West African swagger about him. He ignored the noise of the dog and came up the steps to the veranda and the open living-room with the air of self — conscious disingenuousness that was instantly familiar — film actors, sports champions, they came at the TV camera lazily, like that, fresh from some triumph or other. The car was a big old American one, all snub surfaces gleaming under dust, lying heavily on its worn springs.

“That’s a very grand affair.”

Shinza was grinning, coming in to Bray’s greeting. “Well, in those days you were generous to your Tribal Authority, you know. Chief Mpana was one of your big men.”

“So you married Chief Mpana’s daughter?”

“You know her, you’ve met her!” Shinza put his hand on the head of the dog, murmuring something admiring to it, and it growled and wagged its feather — boa tail.

“Yes indeed I have, she’s a charming girl. You’re lucky.”

“The car’s not in all that good condition.” Shinza laughed, sat himself down and glanced with a guest’s mild interest round Boxer’s room, seeing it as one of those white men’s lairs that even he, who had lived in Europe and America, sometimes found inexplicable.

“How is she? And the son?”

“It was nice of you to come and see her.”

“Unfortunately you’d gone out to get cigarettes.”

Shinza’s flash — a gap — grin of admittance, mutual acceptance — at once converted the casual atmosphere to another voltage. He waited while Bray poured the beer, but with an air of having got down to the ground between them. “That hasn’t been worrying me.” Bray made a face questioning the wisdom of such trust. “I know I had nothing to worry about. But I wanted to have a talk with you — you know, I want to tell you a few things, I want to show you—” He closed his teeth under open lips, his hands round the beer mug made, half — comically, a gesture of directing an invisible head to face something. “That’s all. A lot of things we decided a long time ago. Not only in London. Before that, right at the beginning, eh, here at home. What’s happening to all that, eh? What’s happening to it, James?”

His voice mastered the questions rhetorically. The half — insulting, preoccupied reserve that had discounted Bray’s presence when they talked in the house in the Bashi might never have existed. Now an old intimacy was taken for granted just as easily as it had been taken for dead. Shinza could move among examples, anecdotes, and private thoughts without bothering about sequence, because the links were there, in Bray’s mind as in his own. He accused, demanded, derided — speaking for them both. “Kayira sits in the House of Chiefs — that old criminal who raped a child a few years ago and told the judge it was his right as a chief. Those ignorant old men were going to be stripped of their ‘rights,’ of all their forms of parasitism, and made to stand on merit — but have you heard a mention of abolishing the House of Chiefs? No, you’ve only heard that the House is going to be enlarged so that those fat men in blue suits can spread themselves comfortably. — Painted, you know. Made nice. Mweta still talks about the need to forget tribal differences — that’s how it’s put now, you don’t say abolish tribalism because you might make the fat old men shake — but all the time he’s improving the House of Chiefs. Because they’re going to sit there — as long as he’s where he is. Mweta likes to make speeches about the time when we each had only one pair of pants — the trouble is, he doesn’t remember that we also knew, then, what we wanted. We were going to make this country over from top to bottom. Right? Turn the whole thing over, just like you kick an anthill, and make new lives for all those people running about not understanding where they were going. Right, James? But what are the signs? Reginald Harvey tells him that unless the gold price rises the company can’t think of opening marginal — production mines, and he takes it without a word. Well, not without a word, Harvey’s got plenty of words, Harvey’s only got to mention that the company can get a far bigger return by expansion in South Africa, and he falls over backwards to say how he appreciates what a favour the company’s doing by earning dividends here at all. But was that the idea! — Oh yes, I know, within two years all work up to the level of mine captain will be Africanized. So what? What sort of windowdressing is that if new jobs are not being created at the same time. We move up into the seats of the expatriate whites, and go on earning dividends for them when they go back ‘home’ to retire? Was that the idea? Christ, James, what were we talking about all those years, if it was for this? He handles the English and Americans like glass — because we need foreign capital. But if you keep going to the old places for it you keep on getting it on the same old terms. A child should be able to see that. And the profits are geared to their economies, not ours. The great new sugar scheme we’ve heard so much about — what’s it amount to? They’ll get sugar at a preferential price, while we could be growing rice instead and getting a better price in the open market. We’re exporting our iron ore at their price and buying back their steel at their price. We’re still selling our cotton and buying their cloth — the Czechs offered to send us the technical aid for a textile mill, but the tied loan he got from the Japanese for the cotton gin stipulates they get the whole crop. So we’re back where we were. Wearing the cloth they make and sell back to us. We could have had the same as Nyerere’s got — a textile mill as well as our cotton gin, a textile mill set up by the Chinese, all the know — how we want, and the whole thing financed interest — free. What’s he afraid of? He’ll only play the game with the devil he knows, eh? Apart from one or two big schemes that aren’t off the paper yet, and a couple of bad new contracts for the expansion of existing industry, like the deal with the fishing concessionaires, a useless thing if ever there was one, a mess — apart from that, what’ve we got? — The Coca — Cola bottling plant and a factory for putting transistors from Germany into plastic cases, because our labour’s cheaper than Europe’s, and they get a bigger profit when we buy the radios? Are we only educating our people to need the things they sell? Good God, are we to pass from exporting raw materials only to bottling, assembling — never making?”

“It’s a slow start, yes.”

“A start! Where’s it headed for?” Shinza waited as if for the echo to die away. “It’s not the start we planned at all. He’s forgotten! Forgotten what this country meant to do. What we promised. Bush politicians’ big promises. Now let them bottle cold drinks while they wear out their freedom shirts.” He gave a bellow of a laugh. “Couldn’t you sit down and cry?” he said. “James, couldn’t you howl like a bloody dog?”

“Shinza, I suppose I’m naturally more detached about it than you—” And then in the raw atmosphere Shinza had stripped down between them, he said aloud what he was thinking— “It’s a terrible clarity you have … you know …? But perhaps it’s easy … perhaps you expect too much too quickly, because you’re not in the dust that’s raised, you haven’t had to do any of it — I see that in myself now that I’m stuck with this education project. Mweta’s had only a few months.”

“—Yes, and the twenty per cent of the budget that was going to go into education, how does it look so far? You’re penny — pinching to get anything done, eh? Meantime another thirty thousand kids are starting to draw their sums in the dirt in our so — called schools. And soon another fifteen thousand youths will leave half — baked and wander off to the towns.”

“It won’t be more than twelve per cent of the budget, certainly.”

“A few months! James, we know that a few months is a long time for us. PIP has become a typical conservative party — hanging on wherever he can to ties with the old colonial power, Western — orientated, particularist. It’s a text — book example. His democracy turns out to be the kind that guards the rights of the old corporate interests more than anyone else’s — the chiefs, religious organizations, precolonial nations. Foreign interests. All that lot. In seven months you show which way you’re going. It’s right from the start or it’ll be never. Look around you. This continent, this time. You don’t get years and years, you don’t get second chances.”

It was said coldly, an accomplished fact; and yet also a strange mixture of threat and concern. At the same time as his argument carried Bray with him, the presence of Bray brought out in him an old responsibility for Mweta.

“I don’t agree he’s done as badly as you think. But the general direction—”

Shinza was watching him, fishing a cigarette out of the sagging breast pocket of the holiday shirt made of Japanese cotton, and the recognition of the admittance he had drawn from Bray — now appearing — grew beneath the control of his face as Bray was speaking.

“—The way he’s going, I’m inclined to agree about that.” Bray made a gesture of impatient self — dismissal. “I’m sure it’s not the way it should be. If you and he meant everything — then. I must judge by what was visualized then. The sort of state you had in mind, that I believed you to have in mind when I”—his voice disowned him, as it always did, fastidiously, when it came to defining his part in a struggle he did not claim his own— “decided to go along with you. It’s true — what you were absolutely clear about was that coming to power wasn’t going to be a matter of multiplying the emancipated, while the rest of the people remained a class of affranchised slaves—” He referred with a smile to the phrases from Fanon. “It’s never been put better.”

“—That’s been forgotten. And something else we got from Fanon: ‘The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’”

“I don’t remember …?”

“Look it up,” said Shinza. “Look it up.”

“It’s a long time since I read him. — I wonder now if you were clear enough in your minds about how to go about getting what we were so sure you wanted. The less simple objectives remained very much in a sort of private debate between you and Mweta—”

“—And you,” Shinza said.

“—A handful of others, not even a handful. It couldn’t be helped. Everything was hell — bent on the business of organizing PIP purely and simply as a force that would get independence. How many people could be expected to see beyond that. Well it’s an old story, not worth discussion — one of the results of the policy we”—he was suddenly speaking of himself as part of the colonial administration— “had of discouraging political parties until such time as they burst forth as mass movements — and then in due course they could be counted upon to become potentially violent and could be banned in the interests of law and order.… But the effect was to make parties like PIP miss out the vital stage of their function as political schools and ideological debating forums, a means of formulating the blind yearning to have into something that would hold good beyond the”—his hand spiralled through the air— “grand anticlimax of paper freedom. That really wasn’t touched on — a practical means of taking hold not of the old life out of the white man’s hands, but a new kind of life that hasn’t yet been. It just wasn’t touched on. Only among ourselves. And at the back of the minds of even the most intelligent and reasonable people there’s a vague intoxication of loot associated with seeing the end of foreign rule. Loot of one kind or another … it doesn’t have to be smashing shopwindows, you know. Even the imponderables can be loot. ‘We’ll shop around when the time comes.’”

“Maybe.” Shinza made the concession of one who does not agree. “Maybe I should blame myself. I should have seen.”

“What could you have done, with things as they were?”

“I should have seen what he was.”

Bray gave a little snort of a laugh. “I always say the same thing. It always comes round to the same thing. It should have been both of you. It was the two of you. One didn’t know what originated with which one — of course always granting the influence of your trade union experience. One couldn’t foresee how he would develop after a split. Or how you would, for that matter.”

“I’ve always known what we were going to do. Nothing’s changed at all with me. I was just too damned lazy, I suppose … you’ve got to give yourself a kick in the backside sometime.” He put his hands behind his head, smiling, making his words ambiguous by the easy gesture.

“You definitely don’t consider starting a new party?”

Shinza was shaking his head before the words were out. “I’ve told you. PIP is this country — just as he says, PIP made it. Everything must come from PIP. He would like a purified party, of course, degutted like the bloody fishing concession. PIP is the party I started.”

“It was meant as a leading question,” Bray said.

“I don’t hide from you. You see it all exactly as I do, you haven’t changed either, it’s just you’ve got the same polite nice way of speaking you always had, really nice, covering it up … James! But if you had to choose between Mweta and what happens to this country — Good God!”

“He said more or less the same to me.” It was dryly, gently set aside; he smiled.

“With one essential difference, of course, whatever he decides for this country must be right.” Shinza stretched his toes like fingers and clenched the leather button that held each sandal.

“No, no — just the implication that I would do what is usually known as ‘anything’—in other words, something that went against my grain — because it might help.” Still the old maid, setting the mats straight, he thought.

“Help? What?” said Shinza. “To hold the country together almost exactly as it was before? To keep the sort of status quo the Europeans call stability — the stability of overseas investment, the stability of being so poor your feast comes once a year when the caterpillars hatch on the mopane? But we want an instability, James, we want an instability in the poverty and backwardness of this country, we want the people at the top to be a bit poorer for a few years now, so that the real, traditional, rock — bottom poverty, the good old kind that ‘never changes’ in Africa, can be broken up out of its famous stability at last, at long, long last, dragged up from the shit—”

How demandingly, alive, they both reached out — he and Mweta. Bray said, “I must tell you, he may have some idea about your going over the border. He mentioned something — before I came to see you again. I didn’t take much notice at the time.”

“Borders! Doesn’t mean anything in the Bashi,” Shinza said. “People are wandering over after their goats, every day. You forget we’re the same people on both sides.”

“If I can imagine what you’re doing there, it’s reasonable that he may.”

Shinza was drawing and swallowing smoke with absent appetite. Once a cigarette was lit it remained in the side of his mouth until it burned down to his lips.

Bray said, “What’s it all about — Somshetsi and Nyanza?”

“The usual thing, in exile.” The glance held, direct, as if to prevent Bray’s mind from venturing off this chosen interpretation of the question. “They haven’t been getting on too well.… Nyanza’s always been a pretty easy — going chap, sitting back and waiting for the fruit to fall. When Mweta said go, he just went straight to Somshetsi”—he jerked his bearded chin—” ‘pack up’; never occurred to him to make a bit of fuss, to let a few friends know.… I mean they could have played for time, there could have been denials, protests to the High Commissioner for refugees at U.N. —”

They grinned. “Considering the way they were scrupulously observing the conditions of hospitality,” Bray said; and waved his own provision aside.

Shinza said matter — of-factly, “Well, that’s about it. Somshetsi thinks Nyanza will just make himself comfortable wherever he gets pushed off to next. Somshetsi wants to get going. He doesn’t see himself dying in bed with the grandchildren round. Of course there’s help to be found if you show you’re moving.”

“Not much you can do if you’re the width of a whole country away.”

“No, that’s true.” Shinza agreed with detachment.

“I can see what you can offer — promise — Somshetsi, but I don’t quite see what he has worth offering you.”

There was the understanding between them of people who are both lying; Shinza’s flexed bare yellow toes with their thick, uncut nails; the silence, strangely easy. With tremendous effort to break free: “Unless you’re thinking of going in for a guerrilla war.”

“And then?”

It was being drawn out of him; Shinza wouldn’t say it for himself. “I suppose — you could give him a leg up over the border, he could bring the arms from outside, you could do things together. Just as the South African and the Rhodesian guerrillas do, through Zambia. Only more successfully, I should think. It would depend whether you’re prepared to use violence.”

Shinza’s head nodded, hearing a lesson by rote. Then he said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.”

Perhaps he referred to the hopelessness of starting a new party, perhaps — he gave a half — comic shudder — he implied that he couldn’t win a guerrilla war if he were so unwise as to start one.

“You’re going to turn up at the Party Congress?”

“Turn up? It sounds like a dance hall.” He rose from the base of the spine, straight — backed. “I’m on the Executive. Still. I’m going to be there.”

“Bravo!”—How easily I fall whichever way he aims.

“And you’re going to be there?”

The answer came pat, in the same mood. “I’m a Party member. I suppose I still am? But of course I don’t belong to any delegation I know of.”

“Oh he’ll see to that. You remind him.” Shinza said in a satisfied way that made Bray uneasy, “Good God, I wanted to talk to you, you know, James? It’s all right, all right. I knew it would be all right. You can’t be fooled.”

“Shinza, I just have a — well — mad hope. About the Congress. You may be able to do something about the — direction. That’s the place.”

“Well, come and see. Come and give us a hand.” Shinza was not good at being hearty; he gave his smoker’s wheezy laugh at himself. “Come and be frog — marched out with me, it’ll be like the old days.”

The dog had got up and stood swaying its plumes in the veranda doorway. Boxer appeared, making his approach exaggeratedly forewarned by grunting as he mounted the steps, sighing and whew — ing; the dog was puzzled. Boxer spoke to the black man sitting in his living-room with the offhand, demonstrable ease of one whose forms of intimacy, if they exist, are thereby defined as something far removed from this. “You flourishing, Shinza? Of course. What’s the grass been like this year? Of course, you’re bored by cattle, I know. But your father — in-law — he must have a nice five or six hundred head, eh? One never can get at the figure. But those chaps down there have got sizeable herds, all right. I wouldn’t mind a share. Was there much redwater this year? It’s been a bugger, here. I’ve lost fifteen or sixteen of my beasts.”

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

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

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

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

Chapter 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Finn squinted down at his chest and said as if putting a hand on the head of a dog that had accompanied him everywhere, “Sylvanus Olympio.”

“But alas, assassiné—he’s dead.” Bray turned to Agnes, giving her the advantage.

The Finn said unmoved, “Never mind,” in a tone that implied he was a good fellow anyway, dead or alive, in fact better than some who were still about, perhaps in this room.

Agnes’s patronage collapsed into the African internal feminine giggle that paralysed her, and, by a quick glance, infected Edna. This uninhibited and inoffensive amusement at his expense, along with a lot of beer, melted the Northerner. He began to dance wildly, but preferred to do so on his own. He was so thin that the only curve in his entire form was the curve of his sex in the shrunken jeans.

The immigration officials had impounded his money at the frontier. Bray said, “That’s quite normal, any country’ll do it — he hasn’t a return ticket. They have to protect themselves in case they get stuck with him here.”

“So we’ll have to be keeping him in pocket — money in the meantime.” The Frasers considered him, parenthetically.

“Oh he won’t have any great needs.”

Aleke smiled and remarked to Rebecca, “We can write to immigration? The mission would give a guarantee for him, ay? Maybe we can get them to release part of the money.”

“That would be marvellous,” Hugh Fraser said. “He must report to the Police Commissioner, by the way, while we’re in town.”

“But I don’t think the Commissioner is.” Aleke looked undecidedly at Bray for a moment, and then said to him in the far — away manner with which he referred to such matters, “There was the rumour of some trouble up at the iron-ore mine.”

“Oh? What sort?”

“Nobody knows how these things start, until afterwards. Something about overtime.”

The union had just agreed to a forty — eight-day cool — off period before any strike would be recognized. “Striking?”

“Apparently.”

“We heard a truckload of local PIP boys’d been seen driving up the Bashi road,” Fraser said. “We’ll know tomorrow when the broken heads start coming in to the hospital. Ota, better not knock yourself out, old son, you may have to start work sooner than you think.”

“That’s okay. I rather bandage heads than bury.” The light, light blue eyes that had emptied themselves of Europe turned with neither compassion nor judgement on Africa. His rib — cage heaved under the freedom shirt and he began to dance again.

“Where’d he get it, anyway?” Rebecca said.

“A man give it to me,” he said. “I stayed in his hut, it was a small place, banana leaves on the roof, but it’s cool inside. At the end of the time, you know, he say, it’s not a new shirt — but he give it to me.”

“We must get him a Mweta one now that he’s here. Not secondhand. We can afford it.” Rebecca’s new comradely way of talking to Bray. Not entirely new; it was rather the way she had been when she was odd — woman-out in the Bayley set in the capital, rather the way she talked to the men there. The usual concealment of the whereabouts of another kind of relationship existing within the general company, maybe. Her other new manner — the oblique flirtatiousness — also showed under the surface now and then. Speaking not to him but at him, she asked, “Wasn’t there a strike at the fish factory not long ago?”

“Oh they’re a difficult lot. Always something simmering there. But that was settled, that other business.” Aleke answered for everyone.

Bray felt her attention on him. He said, “All’s peaceful on the lake. We should take advantage of it and go down. What about Sunday?” Everyone was enthusiastic. “I’ll bring the food. Kalimo will get busy. No, no — it’s my party.” “What’s the spear — fishing like?” Gordon wanted to know from him at once. “I hope to God you’ve got my gear up here?” he added to Rebecca, and she said, indulgent, pleasing— “All in the brown tin trunk. All intact.” “I’ve never tried, but it should be good.” “We’ll have a go, anyway, eh? You’ve got a boat?” “There are pirogues everywhere and anybody’ll let you use one.”

“You won’t need it,” Rebecca assured enthusiastically. “There are millions of fish. They were swimming in and out my legs. You don’t need to go miles out into the lake. They’re everywhere round the island.”

The husband began to question her closely and patiently, as one does when making certain allowances for personal characteristics one knows only too well. “If she’s once had a good time in a place, she exaggerates like hell, this girl.”

Her eyes shone, brimmingly; it was her way of blushing, and she pressed back her square jaw before the two of them. Gordon Edwards turned to appreciate her with Bray. “Have you ever seen anyone so much like Simone Signoret? Have you ever? The set of that head on the thick neck? The shape of the jaw?”

She did not look at him. She flew out appropriately, animatedly, at the husband. “She’s fat and middle — aged. She’s got a double chin!”

“Bunk. I just hope you’ll age the way she has, that’s all. Consider yourself damn lucky.”

He wasn’t sure who Simone Signoret was — an actress, of course, but he and Olivia hardly ever saw a film. “Well, I hadn’t really noticed …”

“That old bag!”

They laughed together at her indignation.

He was living at the Tlumes’ all right; he would appear, talking already before he entered, at any time of day — the perfectly brushed, white-streaked hair, the olive, tanned skin, the black eyes resting confidently round the room. He treated everyone as if he had known him all his life and decided unquestioningly into what part of his own established pattern of relationships with the world each person would fit. So Bray, in whom he had been quick to recognize a long — time professional wielder of authority just as he would impartially have recognized the particular usefulness of a currency smuggler or a doctor who wouldn’t be unwilling to help out with an abortion, was at once assumed to be the ally for various decisions to be taken up not so much against Rebecca as sweeping her unprejudicedly aside.

“No sense at all in sending Alan and Suzi off to some school while the little one stays at home. They’re all still at an age when they need their mother and a proper family life. What’s the point of a woman having children if she doesn’t bring them up? She was so mad keen for babies. It’s a crazy idea to uproot them again for a few months — it just depends how long it takes for me to arrange things, and she joins me. What’s the point of having to pack up all over again, in the meantime? The trouble is, wherever she finds herself she begins to arrange things as if she was going to be there forever. This place. I mean, have you ever heard …? I find her landed here like a bird on a bloody telegraph pole. I should have done as I wanted in the first place, and sent her to her mother in England. ‘She didn’t want to be so far away.’ But what could be farther from anywhere? Camping out with the locals, not even a bathroom of her own. This’s no place for my boys to grow up. Becky tells me proudly they’re learning to speak Gala. Where in the world are they going to need to speak Gala, for Christ’s sake? Who’s going to understand their Gala?” He laughed, “In England? In France? In Germany? How would I get around with Gala instead of French, and my bit of Portuguese I’ve picked up — I was in Angola for a while, you know, one of the best times of my life, as it turned out”—he smiled, showing his charming, slightly translucent — looking teeth, a man with no regrets, and offered at least half the story— “Good God, just the other side of Benguela, the spear — fishing! It looks like Greece — bare yellow rock and blue sea. Not a tree or a blade. I was doing a contract for the harbour at Lobito. Every weekend we used to go off across the desert and pick our bit of coast. Garoupinhas—like that. Well, I learnt Portuguese among other things. I can make myself understood … and now there’s a contract for Cabora Bassa, the dam — you know? The French and Germans are going to build it for South Africa and the Portuguese. I get on well with Continental engineers — we’ve worked together before. I’m tempted to go back to engineering. For a while, anyway. So my Portuguese’ll come in handy again, in Mozambique. You find yourself stuck in the bloody hot bush, miles from nowhere, it helps if you can chat the local storekeeper or the police, they’ll do things for you. I like ice in my drinks … This may be a particularly hot spot in other ways”—the understanding was that this was between themselves, not for Rebecca’s ears— “you’ve probably read about the terrorists’ threat to blow up the thing while we’re busy on it. Well, I don’t want to die for the South African and Mozambique governments any more than I want to die for anybody else. The blacks or the whites — they’re not getting this one. Personally, I don’t think there’ll be a chance for them to come near — the whole thing’ll be guarded like a military installation. You can trust the South Africans for that. Nowhere’s what one can call safe, anyway. I wonder about here. The strikes going on up at the iron mine. I know these countries; once they start with labour troubles, it’s sticks and stones and they don’t care who it is who gets in their way. One road out and a small plane twice a week — one mustn’t forget that. D’you think it’s all right? Well — I trust you to know that if ever it looks as if it’s going wrong, you’ll tip her off and see that they go without waiting for trouble to come. I know you’d do that?”

“Of course.”

“Because you can see how Becky is — she never believes that anyone would do her any harm. To come to the bundu in the first place — just mad. Well, if you want one of the good — looking sexy ones you settle for having to do the thinking yourself, don’t you? Can’t have everything—” His daughter had come up to him and he wound up the visit, talking of the mother but playfully transferring the reference as if it were applied to the daughter, hooking her ragged strands of hair behind her ears with his first finger, turning her meagre urchin’s face to rub noses with his own. “Is that all you’ve got to wear, your brother’s old pants? Lovely bird like you? Shall we go and buy you a decent dress?” She did not speak, only nodded her head vehemently to everything. It was true that there was something shabby and deprived about Rebecca’s children. Bray had a curious loyal impulse to distract the father’s attention from this by changing the subject. “What sort of equipment have you got for the lake — you don’t mean diving suit and oxygen and all that?”

And so Gordon Edwards insisted, at the lake on Sunday, that he try spear — fishing with him. There were several pairs of goggles, flippers and three spear — guns. He found a strange and delightful engulfment, freed from association with anything else he had ever experienced. He caught only one small fish, while the other, of course, expertly got quite a catch, including a Nile perch weighing about fifteen pounds. Once they met underwater, the two men, coming up to face each other at the end of the gliding momentum of their web — extended feet. He met the smile behind the goggle — plate, the wet — darkened hair, the undulating body; the encounter hung a moment in that element.

“Well, how’d you like it?” She was waiting for them when they came back.

“Oh wonderful. I felt like a fish in water—”

Nothing would persuade Aleke or Tlume to go down. “And these’re the guys who shout about other people exploiting their natural resources, ay, James?”—Gordon Edwards, cocking his head at them. Aleke said from under a hat, lying in the shade, “My country needs me. Life too valuable.”

The Frasers’ rumour was borne out. While they were all at the lake that day a party of PIP thugs drove through the workers’ quarters on the bald hillside at the iron-ore mine and kicked over the Sunday cooking fires that were going outside nearly every house, burned bicycles, and in one case, killed somebody’s tethered goat. Aleke related all this later — when they got back from their picnic there was an urgent message for him from the new Commissioner of Police, Selufu, to come to the mine. There was a moment when Aleke half — suggested Bray should go with him but it was no sooner broached than both of them, for different reasons, let it pass, as if it had not been serious. Perhaps Aleke had been told to let it be seen that Shinza’s old friend had, in fact, some quasi — official status in the interests of Mweta; perhaps he merely had been told to make Bray feel important.… On the other hand, if he had no directive from above, maybe the moment the words were out of Aleke’s mouth he had wondered whether an uncertain quantity like the Colonel should be allowed an inside view of difficulties in the district. They had never talked again about the boy Lebaliso had beaten in Gala prison.

But down at the boma next day Aleke, his fan turning from side to side all morning although the winter weather was pleasant, talked about Sunday’s affair rather as if it had been a rowdy football match. He was critical of such behaviour but described it with gusto. “One old woman was worried as hell about her sewing machine — she ran out with it on her head, I don’t know where she thought she was going — and a fellow”—he always called PIP militants “the fellows”— “made a grab at her more out of devilment than anything. A policeman grabbed him, so she puts down the machine and she starts punching and kicking the fellow while the policeman’s holding him.… You’ve never heard such a carry — on. And the women are always the worst … our women! Nothing gives me a headache like one of those old mothers when she starts yelling.”

The PIP “fellows” had gone to the mine with the purpose of supporting the union officials’ decision (made against the decision of the miners themselves) not to start a wildcat strike. They said they wanted to hold a meeting at the mine— “to let them know that not only the union but PIP expects them to go to work,” Bray supplied. “Exactly,” Aleke said. “The fellows say it was going to be a peaceful appeal to loyalty and so on. And nothing would have happened, man, if the moment the lorry arrived at the compound everyone hadn’t started shouting, specially those old ones. …” A few heads had been broken; not enough to create an emergency at the Mission hospital. “You’re lucky, Aleke, when I was doing your job, I’d have had them all up before me in court next day.”

“Don’t I know it.” Aleke offered good — natured professional sympathy. Although he described the night with such laconic detachment, he and Selufu apparently acted efficiently. Selufu arrested most of the PIP fellows and they had been remanded for preparatory examination by the Gala magistrate. It was all as it should be; Bray allowed some inner tension to relax. Of course he wondered about Shinza — there in the area of the mine the week before the proposed strike. Well, Shinza would see that the PIP militants at least had been arrested.

Mweta’s letter came back promptly; Bray certainly would be invited to the Congress — under what label, he didn’t say. As Bray knew, the Congress was going to be held in the capital this time. (There was already much criticism over this move; it had always been held in the small village of Yambo, on the border of Central Province and Gala, where just after the war the first successful political demonstration and the first arrests by the British administration had taken place.) Mweta ignored the fact that Bray hadn’t written the letters he had wanted from him and simply said, as if there had been no silence of rebuff in this area of their relationship, he wondered what Bray thought about the dispute at the iron mine?

He wrote at once from under his fig tree that what interested him was the pattern emerging from disputes like those at the fish factory and the mine. In both cases it was the same: an issue raised by the workers was not backed by their shop stewards and other union officials, who were also PIP officials. The issue in both cases was an agreement reached between the union and the employers which apparently was not acceptable to the workers as a whole: in the fish factory, the status of so — called casual labour (and Mweta knew, he had told him himself, how those people were employed and lived); at the mine, a question of rates of pay for overtime. It seemed clear that PIP interference in the unions was in danger of defeating the function of a trade union itself — to represent the workers’ interests as against those of the employer. This was what could happen where the interests of the employer and the state appeared to coincide, and the government, in turn, was the Party. It led to labour unrest without union leadership which had the confidence of the workers sufficiently to be able to control them. “If you destroy the unions, you need the police — more and more police. At the beginning. In the end, of course, it’s peaceful, because the workers have no more rights to assert. State and employer, knowing what’s best for the economy, decide what they need and don’t need. And there’s a name for that, too.” Taking his tongue out of his cheek, he remarked that he would look in on the court when the PIP militants appeared; it was a good thing for the Party that they had been arrested and committed for trial.

She came early one morning that week, but not so early that Kalimo was not about somewhere. She closed the bedroom door quietly behind her and he heard a hoarse morning voice, his own: “Lock it.” She was dressed ready for work, with a file under her arm. The room was dim and a bit musty from the night, his clothes lying about, the private odours of his body. The sun pressing against the curtains emblazoned their emblems of fish, cowrie, cockerel and coffee — bean like flags and they threw rich garish glows across the room. He propped himself up in bed on one elbow but did not let himself become fully awake. She smelled of cold water and toothpaste, her heart beat lightly and quickly with the energy of one who is already up and about. His had still the slow heavy beat of sleep. With his abrasive beard and night body — warmth he blotted out this surface dew of morning hygiene and found her underneath. With closed eyes he took off her freshly — put-on clothes, tugging and fumbling with blunt fingers. It was not a matter of undressing her, it was a matter of baring her sexuality, as one speaks of baring one’s heart. She went down into the banked — up, all — night warmth of his bed and took him in her mouth, the soft hair of her head between his legs. In an intensity that had lain sealed in him all his life (dark underground lake whose eye he had never found) barrier after barrier was passed, each farthest shore of self was gained and left behind, words were reunited with the sweet mucous membrane from which they had been torn.

She took a clean handkerchief from his drawer, dipped it in the glass of water beside his bed and wiped herself — face, armpits, sex. She didn’t want to meet Kalimo or Mahlope on the way to the bathroom. She dressed.

“I’ll get up and see if it’s all clear.”

“I’m going the golf — course way — the car’s down near the fourth hole. Said I had to go early to do some work I brought home and didn’t do last night.”

“It’s all right — I hear them in the kitchen.” For these practical whispers words would do.

She was gone.

She had not been with him more than half an hour. It was strangely like the very first time she had come. The very re — enactment itself was the measure of the difference: a ritual that had once been gone through in ignorance without remotely knowing what its real meaning could come to be.

He walked into town because he had to use the perfect coordination and balance in his body. Coming down into the long main road under the splendid trees he had a vivid sense of all the things he enjoyed; riding through light and shade in Wiltshire or years ago at Moshi in Tanganyika, finning along in slow motion on the bed of the lake last week — it was all one with an awareness — every minute detail leaving a fresh pug — print — of this road, this place. Everything was immediate and verifiable on a plane of concrete existence. The precise spiciness of the dry season when the dust had not been wetted for several months; the ting of bicycle bells plucking the air behind him; two children wearing only vests and passing a mealie — cob from mouth to mouth; the crows cawing out of sight. An ordinary morning that was to him the sunny square: the last thing the condemned prisoner would ever see, and would see as long as he lived.

The courthouse was part of the old administrative building where people came to collect pensions and pay taxes. Outside a group of ancient women were smoking pipes. Their bodies, bare from the waist except for beads tangled with their dugs, rose snakelike from the coils of cloth in which they squatted. They did not speak. Clerks, hangers — on, young men in white shirts and cheap sunglasses brushed past them. He went into the room that still smelled like a schoolroom; he himself had once sat up there on the rostrum and fiddled with the carafe covered with a glass. On one of the benches among other people, he was the only white man. His two neighbours talked across to each other behind his shoulders, not rudely, but in the assumption that he couldn’t understand what they were saying and therefore wasn’t there. They were discussing a debt owed to one or both of them; clearly they were such close friends it didn’t matter which. They had the same cowboy jeans imported by local Indian stores, the same sort of Japanese watches with a thick gilt band, the same topiary skill of the open — air barbers had shaped their dense hair into the flat — topped semblance of an en brosse cut. The three tribal scars on each cheekbone were worn with no more significance than a vaccination mark.

PIP Young Pioneers solidly filled the first two rows of benches. Most could scarcely be called youths any more. The adolescent force that lingers heavily beyond its season in those whose hopes have not been realized was in their postures and restlessness. They gazed and shuffled, brazen and sullen. Some wore PIP forage caps, others wore the torn sweatshirt of the family’s idle son, and one had a transistor radio with him that a court orderly with creaking boots came across to warn him not to use. He continued to hold it to his ear now and then, just not turning the knob, under the orderly’s eyes.

The usual beggars and eccentrics who had nowhere else to feel themselves accepted along with other people, were deep in blank preoccupation; an old man had the worried, strainedly alert look that Bray knew so well — a kind of generalized concern in the face of the helplessness of all black people before the boma and the law. He wondered who the country women outside were; probably relations of men from the mine who were involved in the case. There were other, “respectably” dressed men and women from the African townships who must be relations, too. The familiar atmosphere of resignation and fear of authority that sat upon country courtrooms and made one the innocent and guilty was stirred by the arrival of the accused filing into the dock just as the slow whirling into action of the ceiling fans, set in motion at the same moment, began to slice the stale air. The court was full and faces kept peering in the windows from a gathering crowd outside. There was even the straggling boompah of a band out there — abruptly silenced. The eleven accused were too many for the small dock and like people whose seats at a theatre have been muddled up, they shifted and changed places and at last some were given chairs in the well of the court. A special detail of Selufu’s men had come in with them, and ranged themselves round the visitors’ gallery. The court rose; the black magistrate came in and seated himself before the carafe. He was an ex — schoolmaster and lawyer’s clerk from another province and now and then he used an interpreter to translate for him into English when he was not sure that he had fully appreciated the nuance of some expression in Gala. Bray had met him at Aleke’s; a cheerful, intelligent man who appeared morose on the bench.

An Indian lawyer from the capital had come down to conduct the defence. The men in the dock moved out of their stoic solidarity to get a good look at him; probably they had not seen him before. The indictment was read. He stroked back the shiny hair at his temples as he listened, as if he were still ruffled from the journey. In his quick, soft, Gujerati — accented English he asked at once for the trials to be separated: that of the nine men who were accused of trespassing and wilful damage to property to be heard independently of that of the two accused of assault and an offence under the Riotous Assemblies Act. The request was granted; the cases were remanded until two separate dates a week or two ahead. The attorney objected that there was not sufficient time to prepare the defence; the cases were postponed still further ahead. Bail was renewed for the nine, but refused for the other two. The Young Pioneers creaked their benches and make tlok! noises in their throats like the warning notes of certain birds. More faces bobbed at the windows. One of the pair who had been refused bail was a slim young man whose bare neck had the muscular tension of a male ballet dancer; he kept twisting his head to look imperiously, frowning like Michelangelo’s David, round at the crowd. Whenever he did so there was a surge in the two front rows, the force there shifted its weight in precarious balance between his look and the stolidity of Selufu’s policemen.

The lawyer was objecting to the refusal of bail; the prosecutor was adamant. The magistrate appeared not to be listening to either; he confirmed that bail would not be granted. That was all.

As the prisoners went out, making use of their numbers by making a slow progress of it, they began to sing a PIP chant and the two who were going off to the cells yelled slogans, the old slogans of pre — Independence days. Bray allowed himself to be carried and hindered by the courtroom crowd. Women in their church — going clothes opened their mouths calmly and ululated. The magistrate banged his gavel and was resigned to being ignored; he mouthed what must have been an adjournment and walked out. Another case was to be heard and the exhibits, including a bicycle with one wheel missing, were carried in while the police moved along the rows of benches and were held adrift, clumsily bobbing. It was difficult to tell whether the movement through the door was people pressing in or the court being cleared. It was not an angry but a strangely confident crowd, talking and shifting about in possession. The ululating women stood where they had risen from the benches, and swayed. It was like being caught up in a dance with them; he was taller than anybody and as he was pressed and shifted he could see everything, the PIP claque taking up the prisoners’ chant and moving their heads like hens as they urged themselves through the people, the bewildered face of the old beggar, the young men turning vividly from side to side. He wanted to grin: a bespectacled white totem, waving ridiculously about on the wake of backsides swinging their cotton skirts magnificently as bells. Slowly the whole crowd, and he with it, was drawn through the door as water circles the hole in a bathtub.

Outside, the three — man band whose evangelical beat derived from the Salvation Army was banging away falteringly. The PIP contingent went into discussion among the spectators and lingering courtroom crowd. There was a coming and going of individual PIP men, racing between the gathering and the office of the court; everyone was waiting for the nine to appear after completing bail formalities. When they did come out, rather sheepish, like people disembarking from a journey before the eyes of friends, the whole crowd was moved from the old — fashioned open verandas and yard of the building by the police. There was a momentary loss of direction when they might have dispersed; and then someone made for the piece of open ground on the other side of the road, next to the Princess Mary Library. The band tramped across, playing. The PIP Young Pioneers began an impromptu meeting; he waited a moment, beside the uneven pillars of the tiny, tin — roofed parthenon the ladies of the British Empire Service League had raised, to listen. The speaker stood on a wooden crate that had been abandoned by some shopkeeper and not yet carried off bit by bit by people looking for firewood. PIP had brought freedom and people who did not obey the orders of PIP were fools … there was nothing in the country that was not the business of PIP … PIP had not got rid of the white man to be told what to do by black men who were just as bad.… You were not allowed to talk about something that was in the courts but he would still tell everybody this — people who defied the trade unions defied the government, and PIP knew what to do with them.

He began to walk away and stepped round a scuffle that had kicked up — sudden blows between young men, and stones flying. He was in the path of one; it got him on the side of the neck: his hand went up with the involuntary movement of slapping a fly. A woman passerby gasped, “Oh sorry, sorry, Mukwayi …”

The sting drew no blood. He had caught the stone as it fell into his open collar; he pushed it into his pocket.

There were several irritable incidents in Gala that day. Not all appeared to be concerned with the trial, but were released by the roused confidence of the courtroom crowd that affected the atmosphere of the village as a heat wave affects the citizens of a cold country.

“They ought to be rounded up and put to work on the roads,” Mr. Deal at the supermarket said to him confidentially, wrapping the pound of ham that he had bought. “Lot of hooligans and no one to give them the language they understand, any more. All they’ve learnt is how to thieve better. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you my losses since I’ve converted to self — service. This place just isn’t ready for it — you’ve got to have civilized people.”

A small girl trader had ranged her few undersized tomatoes on the pavement. He was buying some when Gordon Edwards came by and at once suggested they have a beer at the Fisheagle. No black face had yet dared appear in the inside bar at the Fisheagle; the patrons were talking about golf and a European motor rally that had been shown on TV the night before.

Gordon Edwards told an amusing story about a friend of his who, after serving in the Mozambique channel on a patrol ship whose purpose was to intercept ships carrying cargoes for Rhodesia, had resigned and himself become a successful middleman in the sanctionsbreaking business, getting out tobacco and taking in machinery. While Edwards talked his eye kept wandering to Bray’s neck. “Something’s bitten you.”

His expression implied that he was unaware of it. The small stone lay among the other kind of currency in his pocket as the fact of what had happened in the early morning lay in his mind among the ready pleasantries of small talk.

The nine men were found guilty and fined. The other two never came to trial at all; on the special intervention of the President the case against them was dropped.

Chapter 14

Almost every day, there were reports of disturbances in one or other of the provinces.

Everyone who could afford a TV set continued to watch the syndicated programmes from America and England — sport, popular science, old Westerns, and (if they were white people) the interminable serialization of The Forsyte Saga. Edna Tlume had hired a set and the full complement of the household was generally to be found in the darkened Tlume — Edwards living-room during the hours when the station in the capital was open. There was a news round — up once a day (Ras Asahe was the commentator for a while) but the station could not afford a permanent team of cameramen and reporters to film live events at home. The dim room — blaring with music and barking recorded voices, smelling of grubby children, curry powder from cheap meals, and Nongwaye’s medicated tobacco — where a football game in Madrid was being played or a trial of Vietcong refugees was flickering into focus, was more real than what was happening in the neighbouring province and the next village. The heavy green of Gala hung shutting that out.

As his bulk blackened the doorway Rebecca would get up quietly from her canvas chair and slip away from the audience; everyone else remained absorbed. He and she were seldom bothered by the children now; he sometimes thought — and at once forgot again — he ought to remind her that they shouldn’t be allowed to become addieted to the box. She sat with her children resting against her, each one in physical contact with some part of her, the littlest sometimes falling asleep in her lap; what they drew from her, then, was enough and more to counteract what passed before their eyes and skimmed their understanding. There was fellow — feeling with them; he knew that steady current of her body, its lulling and charging effect. No harm could come while one breathed in time with that flesh.

The husband, Gordon Edwards, had gone away again. He had not found out if she had slept with him — never would, he knew even as, at the moment of putting aside her legs with his knee and entering her body himself, he would think of it. It was not in her eyes, anyway, as she lay as she sometimes liked on top of him and looked into his face as only lovers do, her face open to him. She complained that because he was short — sighted his eyes were intensely blank in passion, he was concealed from her. “I can’t ever see what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking then.” But she was the one with secrets. Yet her lioness — coloured eyes (browner with the pupils dilated) were not secretive. The flirtatious animation she had put on like some curious form of reserve when the husband was there was gone, too. She had been clever to come to him that one morning, so that there was no question, once the other had left, that they would have to find a way to come together again: it was already done, they had never been anything else but together, beneath the convenient collusion of friends and circumstances. Yet there was nothing “clever” in her, in those eyes. She was simply all there, nothing withheld, nothing reserved, not even her secrets. So there was a stage you could reach where even the relationships each had with other people belonged to the relationship with one another. That could contain everything, encompass everything, not resignedly but in a fine sort of greed. If I’m too old for virginity of any kind to be anything but ridiculous in me, then allow that so must she be, in her way, too. It wasn’t, after all, naïveté that enabled her to improve the curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

He wrote to Olivia about the strikes, lock — outs, and the confused expressions of dissatisfaction that, in the bush, took the form of tribal wrangling. He did not suggest to her that this atmosphere was the reason why she should not come. But neither, in their letters, any longer wrote as if she were coming. He did not wonder why she, for her part, should have dropped the idea, because — he realized quite well — it suited him that she had done so so tacitly. He wrote her about cattle slaughtered in vengeance, huts burned, the proposed amendments to the Industrial Relations Act that would make strikes illegal for teachers and civil servants. She wrote about the beautiful officer’s chest, circa the Napoleonic wars, that she and Venetia had found in a village antique shop, and a jaunt to London to see a play about the incestuous homosexual love between two brothers that couldn’t have been shown while the Lord Chamberlain still had the right of the blue pencil. Their younger daughter Pat had been home on a visit from Canada. Venetia and her husband and baby spent a lot of time in the house in Wiltshire; photographs of the baby, laughing on flowery grass, were enclosed. He kept coming upon them in the broken ashtray in the sideboard which Kalimo had considered safe keeping, and was wedging them round the edges of the frame that already held a picture of Venetia and the infant, on an afternoon when Rebecca came in all smiles and relief to tell him that it was all right, her period had turned up after all. She had been nearly a week overdue. She took off his glasses and kissed him frantically, gratefully; “Though if it ever did happen, I could go to England. I always think that.”

He poured tea for her and stroked her hair. “England?”

“It’s illegal to have something done here.”

So there was no child from him this time; but there could be, any time. He could see that she was afraid of it and accepted being afraid. She had told him she couldn’t take the pill because it made her get fat.

Sampson Malemba and his wife were coming to supper. It was taken for granted that Rebecca was in the position of the woman of the house, now. She helped Kalimo when he would allow it; Kalimo kept Mahlope firmly confined to outdoor work — Mahlope’s vegetable garden supplied the Tlume and Aleke households as well as its own. Mrs. Malemba (much too shy to call any white person by his first name or to invite anyone to call her by hers) would come to Bray’s house if he asked the Malembas alone. She was content not to talk at all except for her extremely polite responses to offers of food and drink, and as soon as there was a mew from the bundle of infant she always had with her she would disappear into the kitchen to feed or tend it. Rebecca managed to draw her out a little; Rebecca was a woman whom other women liked, anyway, but these days it was easy for Bray or her to be nice to other people. They had awakened together in the morning and, when everyone parted for the night, would be going to sleep together in his narrow bed; this was the source of an overflowing generosity of spirit.

The adult — education-centre-cum-trades-school was going surprisingly well. Sampson had clerks from the boma running literacy classes for older people in the townships. Bray had persuaded the most unlikely people among the white community to teach various skills at the Gandhi Hall workshop; white people, in a skin — wrinkle of apprehension hardly interpreted, were beginning to feel that perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea, so long as it didn’t cost you anything, to make a gesture of cooperation towards the blacks who were running the show. He also quietly counted on the ordinary, unconfessed pleasure anyone takes in demonstrating what he knows. The Americans had supplied a couple of surprisingly useful workers as well as money — not Peace Corps people, but Quakers of some sort — who were teaching fitting and turning, motor winding and various other skills that fitted in with the needs of the beginnings of light industry in the Gala area, and they took their jeep into the country to teach people how to use and maintain the heavy agricultural machinery that was available on loan from Nongwaye Tlume’s department. Even Boxer had come down for a week and enjoyed talking uninterruptedly, in an intensive course on animal husbandry. The Americans had a tape recorder and the whole thing was preserved for use again and again; as Boxer spoke in Gala, it could be played to and understood by people in the remotest village. Boxer stayed with Bray; Rebecca had had to keep away, of course, not even an early morning visit was possible. Boxer was up at five and moving about his room. He brought with him that old — maidish bachelor cosiness which he assumed he and his host shared: there was the feeling that he thought it would be ideal if they could live together permanently. He was the sort of man in whom sexual desires die early; perhaps he was already impotent? He talked about Shinza without prompting: the continuing trouble at the iron-ore mine was due to the meddling of “his lordship,” coming from the Bashi in his “pa-in-law’s” car and getting at people. The Mineworkers’ Union secretary had come from the capital to see what was up, but who would listen to him? — they were all Mpana’s crowd, and they would listen to whomever Mpana told them. And Mpana told them to listen to his son — in-law, his lordship Shinza. Boxer gave the facts as a piece of local gossip.

The morning Boxer left she came at lunchtime and they made love. The lunch table waited, draped in Kalimo’s mosquito — net cover. She said while they ate, gay to be rid of the visitor, “Why’s he such a depressing man?”

“Because he’s a vision of myself without you.”

She laughed with pleasure and indignation. “You! Ever like him!”

“Everybody has a private vision of what he could be at the other end of the scale, the very bottom. Nobody else recognizes it, only oneself.”

She was filled with curiosity. “Extraordinary that you should ever think of yourself in terms of him. The private vision must also be the most unlikely thing that could ever happen. Quite crazy.”

“But haven’t you got one?”

“Have I? I don’t know.” After a moment she said, “Oh yes. After all, I left the capital because of it.” And now she was sombre, dreamy, while he was talkative and hungry.

The centre was perhaps even achieving something useful; he worked on at it with Malemba in spite of all that was happening. It continued to exist and to take up daily action while the context — of the country and of his mind — in which it had that existence was broken up and riding at different levels, swirling and giddying. The practical working intimacy with good solid sensible Sampson Malemba, the attentive faces gathered at the Gandhi Hall or the converted police compound, the Quakers’ jeep carrying the momentum of its own dust to villages down on the lake savannah or towards the Bashi — all this purposefulness was taking place on a land — floe on which people moved about their business unaware that their environment had broken free and was being carried, a house riding upon a flood, the furniture still in place and the pot — plants in the windows. What one does oneself every day is real, he thought; she was sitting on the bed under the reading lamp, picking hard skin off her little toes (“It’s my winter layer peeling off — in the summer when I wear sandals all the time I don’t get it”).

He woke in the small hours of the mornings and his mind punched the facts out of the clarity of darkness. Shinza always had been able to count on influence with the advanced sections of the community, the workers, through his connections with the trade unions. On the side he also had had a useful pull on tribal loyalties through his relationship with the Paramount Chief’s family — he was a nephew, if Bray remembered correctly. It was mainly because of him that the Lambala — speaking people — an offshoot of the Gala, distributed widely through the Bashi country — had been kept within PIP from the beginning. With his marriage to Mpana’s daughter he must now greatly have extended his support, and taken into his influence not only Mpana’s considerable following at home but also the scattered thousands who had always formed a large part of the labour force all over the country. Mpana was the man who, in Bray’s time, had been appointed Tribal Authority by the colonial government when it deposed the Paramount Chief, Nagatse, for intransigence and support of the nascent PIP; with Independence, Nagatse had been reinstated as Paramount Chief and Mpana found himself once again an ordinary chief with a souvenir of better times — his battered American car. Well, Shinza drove that car, these days. It was a logical enough alliance, marriage apart. Mpana and his people certainly would not forgive Mweta the demotion; however far removed from theirs Shinza’s cause was, if it opposed Mweta, it would serve their own.

And Shinza? Nagatse had been one of his converts, his “enlightened chief who wasn’t afraid of a nationalist movement. Mpana had been one of the “good government boys,” a stooge Shinza made fun of, which was his sharp and generous way of despising. Family feeling would hardly change that; but no doubt expedience did. Shinza had curious friends, everywhere, these days.

Sometimes as he lay awake among these facts it seemed to him that Shinza’s roster of friends now constituted a stark assembly — in assessment, in the dark. He placed Mweta before them. He could not decide what Mweta would do, should do. If I were Mweta — but the point was, he was not. He tried to rid himself of lifelong preconceptions, discard the last hoary virginity. But there was always another and another — if he could come to the end of them! His mind was freed by the night. If there was a revolution to let people out from under intimidation, exploitation, and release them from the chalk circle drawn by the wrong sort of power, how far could the revolution go to protect itself and what it gained for people? How far, before it slowly picked up the rubble of the same walls and weapons it had smashed; began to use them against what it called the counter — revolutionaries? What were counter — revolutionaries? The enemies of the revolution, or revolutionaries who thought the revolution was being betrayed? Shinza and Mweta had both identities dubbed on them, each by the other. Shinza believed that Mweta had betrayed the principles of the revolution, and was its enemy; Mweta believed the same of Shinza. And he wanted them both to be wrong. He wanted to believe that together, neither would sell out the new life more than the daily attrition of human fallibility in power made inevitable. He defined it precisely as that to himself, to hold his ground that what he believed was flatly reasonable.

Sometimes, as the dead silent interval (minutes? hours?) between the cessation of night — sounds and the beginning of predawn sounds was invaded by a shrill unison of birds chipping away the dark, the hard — edged facts in his mind arranged themselves differently. The importance of Shinza’s alliances sank; Mweta had only to reinstate Shinza beside him, placate Mpana with some provincial office, disengage PIP’s domination of the trade unions — it could be done. And Shinza had said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.” With his roster of allies — Mpana; perhaps even some of Nagatse’s people; a following in the trade union movement whose strength and numbers one couldn’t assess; that wild business of Somshetsi over the border — could he have any real chance?

But this was choosing to ignore, behind closed eyes where everything was present at once, other facts, boulders of facts. Tom Msomane, the Minister of Labour, said one day that industrial unrest was not based on “real demands” but “agitation,” and the next day was at pains to cover up this implication that there was political dissatisfaction among the workers. How many of the strikes and disputes were blown on by Shinza’s inspiration? One could be crediting him with too much or too little. And what was the sense of thinking that all Mweta had to do was lift PIP’s heavy hand off the back of the unions — Mweta believed that the way to expand the economy quickly for the benefit of the workers themselves, and everybody else in the country, was to support investor — employers by guaranteeing a docile labour force.

Surrounding this firmament of facts that could not be reconciled was its own atmosphere — emotion like the layer of spit an insect wraps round the great concern of its existence, its eggs: he resented Shinza because he thought Shinza was right, and he resented Mweta because he could not admit that Mweta was wrong. And at the same time (four o’clock, now, five?) he was ready to turn over, like a tombstone, his own judgement, and find there beneath only the sort of things that lie under stones.

He would get up and go to pee in the stuffy bathroom. He used the basin, running the water softly as a flush in order not to disturb her with the noise of the lavatory. Once he suddenly remembered with obstinate urgency something Shinza had said— “… people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’” What was the context? Shinza had said, look it up. He padded down the passage to the living-room and turned on the light. The ashtrays were coldly full. There were raisin stalks in the fireplace and a cup of scummy coffee on his table. He was naked and knelt, dangling, the wet touch of himself against his own ankle, searching through the government — issue bookshelf. He had brought Fanon to Africa with him, after all. The pages of the paperback had gone the colour of the shaded nicotine stain round a cigarette butt. He found the place: “ ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary way towards rational knowledge the people must …” He went back a few lines, for the sense. “… yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, the unreal, the idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi — darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of ‘Treason!’ But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary road towards rational knowledge the people must also give up their too — simple conception of their overlords.”

He went back to bed and lay again, awake, with her head on his arm and her leg slid up between his; if she rose anywhere near the surface of consciousness she moved her lips against the hair of his chest. All the hours of these nights when he was in turmoil he was also in the greatest peace. He was aware of holding these two contradictions in balance. There was once a crony of his mother’s who used to say gleefully of anyone who found himself suddenly subjected to extraordinary demands — Now he knows he’s alive.

He wondered if she had known what she was saying.

He saw the silver aerials of the two police jeeps lashing along through leaves and brush, full of Selufu’s men. He was coming home in the afternoon from a village that would one day be in the suburbs of Gala. That was how one got to know what was going on: one saw something, heard something. He mentioned it to Aleke when he called in at the boma, and Aleke must have telephoned Selufu once he was out of the room. Anyway, by next afternoon everybody knew what had happened. A labourer on the construction of the railway, now within forty miles of Gala, had been killed. The other workers downed picks in protest against working conditions; they threatened the Italian foremen. One of these drove to Gala half through the bush, half on forest track. When Selufu’s policemen got to the construction site they found that the people of the village of Kasolo, nearby, from where casual labour for this stage of the construction was recruited, had carried the dead labourer home for burial and in a kind of mourning frenzy gone straight from the funeral to join forces with the strikers. The foremen had locked themselves in the railway car they slept in; a freight car had been burned and equipment had been tipped into the river.

“Things are hotting up a bit before the Congress,” Aleke offered, as if that were simply to be expected. He and Bray and Rebecca were drinking tea to give some purpose to their standing about in Aleke’s office. Now, while Selufu was without the best men of his small force, some obscure trouble had started between the Young Pioneers of PIP and the workers at the fish — meal and lime factories, down in the industrial area of Gala town itself. It spread to the townships after working hours, and there was even a triumphant roving gang who wandered through the town and the main street. Rebecca had encountered them driving home; she repeated, “I hooted and they sort of parted to let me through, yelling all the time, but I don’t think it was at me.” Perhaps she wanted to be told she had been foolhardy, or insouciantly bold; what she questioned was her own behaviour rather than the gang’s. He said to her, “Well, you should have been able to make that out?” pretending to chide her as her instructor in the language. “All I could hear was something about ‘we are coming’ “—she repeated the phrase in Gala, for confirmation.

“People like a bit of excitement, that’s all, that’s the impression I got this morning.” Aleke had been called to the township to drive around with the mayor, Joshua Ntshali. Selufu was no fool and thought that a show of civil service and civic authority might not only disguise his shortage of police but even suggest that the presence of policemen was not necessary. “Quite a few people were home from work for no reason — we saw them standing about outside the houses, they ought to’ve been out of the way at work by that time. — People who’ve got nothing to do with the fish — meal factory or the lime works. One said he’d taken the day off because his wife and mother didn’t want to stay home alone. Another one’s wife wouldn’t let him go because she was afraid he would get into trouble in town. And so on. It’s ridiculous. Josh gave him a lecture that covered everything from how to keep a wife in place to his responsibility for the health of the famous city of Gala. Turned out he was a cleaner at the abattoir.”

But there was more than excitement at the hostel, the big new block on the hill that once separated white Gala from the native town, keeping it out of sight. “If these youngsters are out — of-works who attach themselves to the Young Pioneers what are they doing living there?” Bray asked. The hostel was supposed to accommodate unmarried men who were employed in industry and public works.

“That’s what I said to old Ntshali. It’s a municipal affair. That hostel is full of people who haven’t any right to be there — they have no jobs, they just move in and share the rooms of their relations who are working in the town.”

“Then PIP should disown them.”

“PIP doesn’t disown any of our people,” Aleke said.

“My dear Aleke, PIP can and does — what about the iron miners who defied the union?”

Aleke granted it with a smile, passing no judgement. “That hostel’s a bad idea anyway, whoever it was thought it up.”

“Of course. Too much like a compound. It was planned by people who still thought in terms of migrant workers.” He added, for Rebecca, “—The last white village board, before Independence; it was their baby.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Aleke said. “How do you go about getting everyone to know there’s going to be a curfew tonight, in a place that hasn’t got a newspaper? Selufu insists we need a curfew for a day or so.”

Rebecca said, “The radio?”

“Well, no … I don’t know.” Aleke and Bray both knew the objections to that; one didn’t want to publicize over the whole country the impression — hardly borne out — that Gala was in a state of emergency.

He looked at Aleke. “Of course, it’ll probably be in the news service — curfew imposed and so on.” But that was different from broadcasting an injunction to the people of Gala, a warning that everyone else would hear.

“Selufu wants a van with a loudspeaker to go round.”

“That’s certainly the best.”

“But he hasn’t got a police van to spare — they’re all up in the bush at the railway.”

“What’ll you do?” Rebecca said. She came and stood beside Bray. They were looking out across the neat boma garden (hibiscus had been planted where the Christ — thorn had pierced the toe of an Aleke child) down the slope of the town half — hidden by the cumulus of evergreen, where a part of the market with its splotches of vegetable colour, a top — heavy, faded yellow bus with its canvas flaps waiting at the open ground of the bus depot, the yard of Parbhoo’s store with its Five Roses advertisement on the roof, and the comfortable, squatting queue of women and babies outside the clinic, were all in the frame of vision. The usual bicycles and pedestrians moved in the road, bicycles bumping down over the bit where the five hundred yards of tar that had been laid in front of the boma ended and there was a rutted descent to the dirt. He had the feeling — parenthetic, precise — that they were both suddenly thinking of the lake at the same time. The lake with its upcurved horizon down which black pirogues slid towards you. The lake still as a heat — pale sky.

Aleke said, “Borrow PIP’s, I suppose. They’re the only people who’ve got one ready fitted — out.”

For some reason or other Rebecca wanted him to come to the Tlumes’ for lunch — usually she was busy fetching the children from school and feeding them, unless they happened to be going home with school friends and she could come to him. He agreed without thinking about it, anyway, because he had had a call at the boma about noon from Joosab, and had to go off and see him, knowing before he got there what the urgent and apologetic summons would be about. Sure enough, I.V. Choonara of the Islamic Society was in Joosab’s tailor shop. There among the ironing board, the sewing machine and the counter with its long — beaked shears attached to a string, the two elderly gentlemen “expressed the worries of the community” about the Gandhi Hall and School. He was giving his twice — weekly class to the local PIP branch there — the economic basis necessary for Pan — African aims. The Islamic committee members wondered whether it was wise to have these young men gathering at the Indian school just now.… What they really hinted was that they wanted to close the school and workshop to the adult education centre while there was disturbance about. He was not surprised; though he privately doubted whether this PIP class would have been likely to turn up anyway, for the time being. Several Indian stores in town had kept their wooden shutters down, he’d noticed that morning.

At the Tlumes’ Rebecca and the assortment of black and white children she had brought home from school were already at table. There was lemonade and a cake. “They insisted you must be here”; he realized that it was her birthday, not one of the children’s. “Didn’t I know when your birthday was?” She laughed— “I think I once must have told you. When I wanted to know your astrological sign.” “Mine’s a fish,” the little one, Clive, said.

He could kiss her for her birthday, in front of the children. Although she was apologetic for making him suffer the noisy and not very palatable lunch — party she was rather happy and flattered at being the centre of the children’s attention. They had presents for her — drawings and painted plaster — of-Paris objects made at school. Clive reminded that Daddy’s present was on top of the wardrobe. A fancywrapped box held a transparent stone on a silver chain. The kind of thing that comes from Ceylon and is set by Indian jewellers in Dares — Salaam or Mombasa. Suzi made her put it on and all through the meal it dangled where those breasts of hers were pressed against their own divide in the neck of her dress. She must have kept the parcel specially to open on her birthday.

Whether Selufu had sent for them or not a reinforcement of police from other posts appeared round the town in the afternoon. Dazed and dusty, they stood with the faceless authority of strangers on the street corners, outside the African bar, at the bootblacks’ and bicycle menders’ pitches in the gigantic roots of the mahogany trees of the main street, under the slave tree in the industrial end of town. He was about everywhere, trying to find something decent to buy Rebecca, and there was nowhere he didn’t come upon them.

What could one find in Gala? He even went back to Joosab’s to ask whether any of the Indian shops, who had had nothing to show him but Japanese cottons, didn’t have some elegant silk sari hidden away against the marriage of a daughter. But there was nothing; not even a good bottle of French perfume at the chemist’s— “no call for that.” In the end he bought her a leather suitcase produced from a back room in the gents’ outfitting corner of Deal’s supermarket; it was the only beautiful thing he could find in Gala, must have been there for years, too expensive to sell — standing wrapped in a cheap travelling rug since before he left, ten years ago. He carried it to the Volkswagen, not entirely satisfied, but it was better than nothing, and had to halt before crossing the road while the PIP loudspeaker van went past. A buried voice bellowed forth in a terrific blare that could not fail to be heard but whose sense could not be made out. Frank Rogers, owner of the bottle store, the Fisheagle Inn, former mayor of Gala, and once one of the organizers of the move to have the D.C. recalled, stood waiting beside him. Rogers’ teeth had gone the same rusty yellow as his golden hair. He grinned. “Not walking out on us again, Bray, are you?”

“Farewell present for one of my staff at the education centre.”

Of course, everyone knows Bray’s got a woman — first he took up with the wild men among the blacks, now he comes back to find himself a floozy, safe from any trouble at home. That’s the big attraction for white men like him — do what you like, the blacks don’t care. — He knew that old rumours about his keeping black women had been revived, the moment he had come back to Gala — all hankerings after their own back yards were projected by indignant whites onto those who shared their colour but not their politics. Would the undoubted existence of a white mistress prove less of a smear than the mere fabrication of a black one? It would have been amusing to know if a white mistress were considered a lesser or greater sign of degeneracy.

And would Olivia, in her way, mind a black woman less than this white one? (She knew of the lovely black girl he had been so attached to in Dar-es-Salaam, before his marriage.) Would she find a black girl more understandable, in him? Not because she thought black women didn’t count on her level, but because she herself had found many of them beautiful, and could well imagine a man might find in Africans certain qualities that Western women had traded for emancipation. It would be interesting to know that, too; but there again, he never would. Olivia would never know about this girl, never suffer. This fact seemed incontrovertible while at the same time he was living with the girl, had no plan or thought that did not assume her presence. The idea of “giving up” the girl didn’t exist; and yet there was the equal acceptance that Olivia would in some way remain unharmed, untouched, embalmed in the present. All his life he had lived by reason; now unreason came and paradoxically he was resolved; whole; a serpent with its tail in its mouth. An explanation? The point was that he didn’t feel any necessity to ask an explanation of himself. None at all.

Tom Msomane’s Permanent Secretary for Labour flew to Gala to look into the Kasolo railway affair, landing on the airstrip near the prison watched by bare — bellied children. But by then the whole thing was settled. Three men who were alleged to be responsible for throwing government property into the Solo River were awaiting trial and the rest had gone back to work; only the Italian who had bounced through the bush for help refused to return. The Permanent Secretary was welcomed by a big beer — drink at Kasolo village, where he made a speech telling the villagers how the railway would bring more money and work to the district.

Caleb Nyarenda was a guest of the Alekes while he was in the area. He was a small, bushy — haired lively man who belched a lot behind a neat hand while he drank strong tea and told anecdotes from the days when he had been a burial society collector in the capital. Perhaps he still had too much of a professionally tactful no — farther-than-the-door manner with people; he remarked that the Kasolo villagers had been very friendly, but “no one came forward to tell me what was really going on. ‘Oh that business last week’ “—he showed how they waved it away—”—after all I didn’t come up for a wedding.”

“Well, they were just pleased to see you, that’s all,” Aleke said. “People like to think the government takes notice of them.”

“Heaving one of those great big earth — eating things into the river, that’s some way to get noticed!” Nyarenda laughed, looking round for confirmation.

Someone mentioned the Italian foreman, who was still in Gala, sitting all day on the veranda of the Fisheagle Inn, dark glasses observing without being observed, the cross round his neck gleaming on the curly — haired breast in his open shirt. Bray could speak a little Italian and made a point of being friendly if he happened to pass. The foreman told him he was going to hitch a lift to the capital as soon as he could get his things from the site; then he was going home to Foggia, and the company could sue him if it wanted to. “He says the Virgin Mary saved his life once, but you could never be sure she would do it again. ‘—Do it in time, again’ was what he actually said.”

“That’s the man who pushed my trolley round for me in the supermarket yesterday.” Agnes Aleke wore the wig and eye make — up, reserved for special occasions, all day while the Permanent Secretary was there, not out of a desire to attract him but to set some sort of standard for the remote Northern Province.

“Didn’t he realize you were government property?” Nyarenda was quick.

Agnes stood with her hand on her hip. “All I can tell you, that’s the first time in my life a white man ever offered to carry anything for me.”

“And the blacks?” Edna Tlume said in her soft voice.

“Oh them. Don’t talk about them. You don’t even expect it of them.”

While the banter went on, Aleke turned, in conversation aside with Bray, to the Kasolo villagers again. He had accompanied Nyarenda, of course. “They want a dam there, I’m told, but they wouldn’t discuss it with him. I asked why but they said he’s an Mso, why should he tell the government to make a dam for the Gala? Naturally, he’ll see that dams are built for the people where he comes from.” Aleke shrugged and laughed.

“But why didn’t he bring up the subject?”

“How’s he to know what they want?”

Aleke’s system of leaving well enough smoothed over; if order were restored and the people had had some pride in entertaining an important representative of the government even if they had no personal confidence in him, why turn their attention back to their dissatisfactions? Well, if the dam were discussed and then not built, Aleke would be the man who’d have to deal with the resentment.

Gala township calmed down, too; Mr. Choonara consented to have the Gandhi School opened to the use of the centre again. At the iron mine there continued to be trouble of one kind and another. The phosphate mines in the Eastern Province threatened a wildcat strike. One broke out among the maintenance depot workers and drivers of the road transport company, which carried mail and newspapers to Gala. For a week Gala was without papers, and letters were long delayed. In spite (or perhaps precipitated by the silence?) of irregular mails, Rebecca got a letter from her husband. He had apparently changed his mind about boarding school for the children; he had entered them for a school in South Africa.

“That where he is?”

“He wrote from Windhoek, but the school’s in Johannesburg.”

“And the little one?” Bray said. With the father’s face; surely too young for school — only five years old.

“He’ll stay with Gordon’s sister. For a while. That’s more or less the idea. She’s got twin girls his age. — So’s Gordon can see something of him.”

He said to her, “Didn’t he ask you to come, too?”

She had a shy, cocky way of concealing a danger once it was over. “Yes, he wanted us all to leave — but I’ve explained, I can’t break a government contract, and there’s the money — and the money from the house, too, I can’t just leave that here, all in a minute….”

“What house?”

“The house in Kenya — my father built a house for us when we got married. It was sold last year and we managed to get the money out and bring it here. But you can’t get money transferred from here to South Africa, now.”

“Oh my God.” He saw her stranded in Johannesburg: Gordon Edwards ensuring the ice for his whisky far away in the Mozambique bush; himself unreachable. It was one of those prescient visions of destitution and abandonment that come in childhood at the sight of a beggar asleep in the street.

“What does he say?”

“About me?” Her voice slowed. “But I told him. I couldn’t come. I ought to finish my contract. At least I can’t leave unless Aleke can get somebody else.”

Her full, square jaw set but her eyes were exposed, held by him, like hands quietly lifted at gunpoint.

They went on to talk about the practical details of the children’s departure.

That night at the end of love — making she began to cry. He had never seen her cry before. The tears, released, like his semen, trickled into her hair and the hollow of his neck. He put up his hand to make sure and his fingers came away wet as if from a wound he had not felt. She didn’t bury her head or hide her face; she was lying on her back within his arm. He thought of the little boy, and said, “I know. I know.” He smeared the tears against himself. Because she was not a woman who wept, she became for a few moments just like those others he’d known, who did, and there was nothing to offer her but the usual comfort — he kissed her eyes and ran his tongue over the eyelids. She said, “He’s so independent, but all the same … little, isn’t he?”

He brought her an aspirin and a glass of water and she slept, snoring a bit because of the weeping. A process of dismemberment began to take place in him. She would go with her children. He would tell her. He held her and the current of her body carried him, as if nothing had changed, finally to sleep.

In the morning they overslept and it was impossible to begin to talk. She could not come to him in the evening; Nongwaye was away in the bush and Edna was on night duty, so she had to sleep at home with the children. He went over for supper and again there was no chance — it was Friday and the children were allowed the treat of staying up late. He and the girl played musical chairs with them. She was full of private jokes and was happy and when the children had gone to bed it was not the time to make her sad again. She was happy because Edna’s mother was coming to look after the family next day, and he had promised that they would go alone to the lake. Every day made what he had to say more difficult. Driving to the lake brought back each time a renewal of the first time they had been there alone together. They went to the island — these days they took the spear — fishing equipment with them — and she got her first fish. It was spring; the heat that built up over the two months before the rains was beginning, and he had to drag up the pirogue and balance it against the rocks to make shade — the baobab was not yet in leaf. Even then, the stasis of one o’clock was formidable. Drawn up into their covert of shadow they talked in the mood of animated confidence that, for them, went with being at the lake. At one point she said, “… and when I was miserable — you know. It really was that I hardly mind at all. It’s awful, isn’t it. I look forward to you and I … not having them around, just … The trouble is I want to burst with joy at the idea of us being left alone—” and for a moment he did not quite realize what she was saying — he had forgotten, in the familiarity and pleasure of the day, what it was that had to be said by him.

And so it was not said; there was no need for it.

The children left Gala by car with the United Nations husband — and-wife medical team who were on loan to advise on the country’s health services. They were old friends of Rebecca from her time in one African country or another, and were returning to the capital after a trip to the lake communities. In the capital, Vivien saw the children off in the care of a friend of hers who was travelling on the same jet to Johannesburg.

In the last days before her children went Rebecca was sometimes sad, and wept again — but perhaps this time really because of the parting from them. They were too excited by the importance they assumed and the prospect of flying to their father to have much emotion left — and now and then, when they were babbling all at once about Johannesburg and what “we” were going to do there, there would be a moment of vacancy in the face of one or the other, and the remark— “Silly, Mummy won’t be there yet.” They seemed to believe — or had been told by her? — that she would be following soon. Perhaps it was true, and she had not told him.

Edna Tlume was found sobbing in the Volkswagen after the children left; she had gone there to be alone, and had to be brought out and comforted. Her starched uniform was crushed as if she’d been violated and the ink from the two ballpoints she kept with the scissors in her neat nurse’s pocket had leaked a stain. She said to Bray while Rebecca went to fetch a lemon for tea, “Don’t tell her — I would never leave my children, never. Don’t tell her.”

It was not necessary to creep out of his house back to her rooms at the Tlumes’ before it was light, now. Gordon telephoned from Johannesburg when the children arrived; it was a radio telephone call, the reception very poor, but sufficient for her to understand that all was well.

They sat under the fig, afterwards, she with her sandals kicked off and her feet up because they were swollen from the heat. “He wanted to be remembered to everyone — the Tlumes, and you.”

He said to her, “He asked me to see that you and the children got out in good time, if ever I thought it necessary.”

She was tranquil. “Oh? Well now there’ll be no need for that.” She put out her palm for his, and their hands hung, loosely clasped, between the two chairs.