Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

She said that night, “What you did — the money from the house — it’s not allowed, is it?”

He had been asleep for a blank second and her voice brought him back. “No, it’s illegal.” He found his hand had opened away, slack, from her breast; in sleep you were returned to yourself, what you dreamed you held fast to was nothing, rictus on a dead man’s face. She said, “It’s more in Gordon’s line. And if they find out?”

“What’s left of the settlers who had me deported will say they knew all along what kind I was.”

“And Mweta?”

Her nipple was slack for sleep, too. His hand could hardly make out the differentiation in texture between that area and the other surface of the breast; he dented the soft aureole with his forefinger until it nosed back. She shifted gently in protest at this preoccupation, evasion.

He was suddenly fully awake and his hand left her and went in the dark to feel for a cigarette on the one — legged Congo stool that was his bedside table. He smoked and began to talk about the day of the debate on the UTUC Secretary-General, told her how he had gone down to the carpark to persuade Semstu to support Shinza.

“You knew Semstu from before?”

“Oh yes, an old friend. That’s how I could do it. I’ve known him as long as Mweta and Shinza.”

“And Mweta?” she said again, at last.

“I had every intention of telling him. He knew anyway what I thought about the Secretary-General, so I don’t suppose it would have been much of a surprise.… But it seemed to me after all it was my own affair.”

“How d’you mean? You did it for Shinza.”

“For myself, I’m beginning to think. Shinza’s trying to do what I believe should be done here.”

She said, “I’m afraid you’ll get into trouble, Bray.”

“You’re the one who told me once that playing safe was impossible, to live one must go on and do the next thing. You proposed the paradox that playing safe was dangerous. I was very impressed. Very.”

“I didn’t know you then”—she always avoided the word “love,” like a schoolboy who regards it fearfully, as something heard among jeers.

“He will think you’re siding with Shinza,” she said, out of her own silence. “—Won’t he? What’ll he do about that?”

“I don’t think I can be regarded as a very dangerous opponent. Mweta’s the President; he can always get rid of me.”

“That’s what I mean. You may not be dangerous, but his feelings will be hurt … that’s dangerous.”

“Then for his part he’ll be able to say he threw me out because I was smuggling currency.”

She sat upright in the narrow bed. In the dark he saw the denser dark of her black hair, grown to her shoulders by now. “Oh my God. You see! I wish you hadn’t done it. It’s all right for someone like Gordon—”

“My darling … just a joke! … nothing will happen.” He drew her down, made a place for them again, told her all the things that neither of them, for different reasons, believed, but that both accepted for the lull before sleep. “I could see from the way it was managed, it’s perfectly safe.… Everybody considers currency laws, like income tax laws, fair game—”

“You are not everybody.”

They were overcome by the reassurance of being (in the sense of a state of being) so close together; something perfect and unreasonable, hopelessly transitory in its absolute security.

Aleke, to save himself the bother of deciding how to deal with any other situation, behaved as though of course everyone — Bray included — was satisfied to see Shinza put in his place. He asked questions about the “fireworks” with the knowing grin of a man who expects boys to be boys and politicians to be politicians. As he sent one of his children running to fetch cold beer and wrestled fondly with another who persistently climbed over the back of his chair onto his head, he kept prompting, “They let him have it, all right … he didn’t get away with it….” Bray was giving a matter-of-fact account of some of the main debates, summing up the different arguments and the points that emerged. He said, when the beer had arrived and they were drinking, “Your cynicism amazes me, Aleke.”

“Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m surprised. You don’t seem interested at all in the issues … they might just as well not exist. You see it as a contest.… They’re not concrete to you, then?”

If it were possible for someone of Aleke’s confidence to be embarrassed, he was. It took the form of a quick understanding that to accept the charge would be to decry his own intelligence, since he’d already refuted cynicism as an explanation, but to deny would bring the necessity to discuss the issues themselves — and overcome a disinclination, half-laziness, half-apprehension, to find himself and Bray in disagreement. He smiled. “… such a lot of talk. It’s only when it comes down to getting busy with administration that you c’n see how things are really going to work out. Didn’t you always find that? — You get some decision to cull all cows with a crooked left horn because that’s going to improve the stock in some way the brains up in the veterinary department’ve discovered, but the result is some people won’t pay taxes because it turns out that in Chief So — and-so’s area, all the cows’ve got damned corkscrew left horns—”

But the sidestep in itself was, Bray saw, a recognition of himself as an opponent.

“Anyway, perhaps we’ll get some peace and quiet now,” Aleke said sociably, to include his wife in the talk as she appeared shaking a packet of peanuts onto a saucer.

“Then take a week off, please, let’s have a holiday.”

“I didn’t say anything about a holiday — just that Edward Shinza will be out of the way, that’s all. — I’ve told you, you can go off to your mother if you want to, I’ll join James as a bachelor again—”

“I just hope he stays out of the way, then. I don’t like these night trips up to the iron mine and God knows where in the bush — and I’m alone here with the children.” She turned with her slightly sulky, flirtatious manner to Bray. “I’m scared.”

“I heard the same complaint from a young woman when I was up at the Congress. Only she’s scared of the Company’s private army. She’s afraid they’ve recruited Schramme and his out-of-work mercenaries.”

“Oh town. What’s there to be afraid of in town. It’s not like here with those bush — people from the lime works shouting in the streets, poor Rebecca, you remember in the car that time—”

“Yes, yes — but now Shinza’s back in the Bashi with his tail between his legs, the Party Congress is over, all that nonsense will stop

“Not only cynical; also very optimistic, Aleke.” For Agnes Aleke’s sake, he changed the subject. “Have you seen the Malembas since he’s been back? Sampson was a triumph with his resolution about the club, I’d no idea he was even contemplating it—”

“Malemba? Really?” Aleke murmured amusedly; and once he said as he drank his beer and gazed round with the preoccupied contemplative criticism of a man too busy to do what he felt he should, “Agnes, either fix up that place like you said or chop it down for firewood.”

His wife and Bray looked up uncomprehendingly a moment, and saw that he meant the old summerhouse in the garden. She said, for Bray’s benefit, “Oh no, we won’t pull it down. I want to make it nice again.”

Olivia had built it — or rather had it built, the prisoners coming over under guard to put up the mud-and-wattle walls and tie the thatch (tea and bread sent out to them from the D.C.’s kitchen). It had been for the children, the little girls, dressing up in their mother’s clothes and playing in there with their English governess, that girl with hefty freckled calves luminous with ginger hairs who (Olivia said) had been in love with him. But to him now it was Aleke’s house; as he walked up the fan of steep, uneven veranda steps or entered the rooms, he hardly remembered he had lived there.