Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Barely a month went by peacefully for Mweta. If he thought the rebels in the unions had been dealt with at the Congress, the most favoured workers, who had not made common cause with them, had received no such chastening. The “loyal” mineworkers began to renew the pay demands for parity with expatriate white miners that he had refused with his famous “empty hand” argument before. For the time being, he kept out of the dispute publicly, while first Ndisi Shunungwa — his “coming man”—then the Labour Minister’s secretary, and finally Talisman Gwenzi, the Minister of Mines himself, intervened. Yesterday’s newspaper arrived on Bray’s and Aleke’s desks each morning with the daily report of meetings and talks whose outcome — failure — was “not disclosed.” Aleke remarked, “Mweta should tell them where to get off — he’s the only one they’ll listen to.” Bray did not say, he can hardly show the necessity to do that, now. “That’s what he’s got Gwenzi for.” But it was hard, for people who had long been ruled by a faceless power across the seas not to see authority solely in the face of the individual from among themselves who had taken over in their name. “The government” was so long the alien, abstract puissance; “the leader” their own flesh-and-blood man.

He wondered whether perhaps — for Shinza — one of those strange lulls would now come about; one of those apparently inexplicable breaks in African political life when someone turns away just as he seems about to close his grasp. He had contemplated (with strong unease) Shinza disappearing into the hiatus of that hut smelling of woodsmoke and sour baby, talking, smoking, while an old body slept in a bundle of rags outside in the yard waiting to die as Shinza waited — for what, sign or time, Bray did not know. But Shinza sent for him to come to Boxer’s ranch. They had just spent the day at the lake, on their island — he and the girl. It was much too hot and she was in full war-paint of the sun; streaks of scarlet down her shins and calves, across nose, cheekbones and round high forehead. “I hope you’re not in for heat stroke”; but she kissed him with burning swollen lips that suggested she was ready to make love. They were both rather exhausted and this seemed to put a fine edge of enervation on their nerves; since he had been back the urgency between them had been constant — sometimes he had to seize her hand and press it on his sex.

Under the rusty old shower she said between gasps and gulps, “I forgot to tell you — old Boxer turned up while you were away. Came to look for you at the boma.”

“—Stay a bit longer, you may have a slight temperature.”

Her hair conducted streams over her face, she pressed her thighs together and stood pigeon-toed in the cold water. She shouted, “He won’t be at the ranch.”

“How d’you know?” It was a good thing her eyes were closed; the shower belched forth a dead insect with long filaments of drenched legs, and he flicked it unnoticed off her belly. “Oh how could I forget — just let me tell you—” She stepped out blindly onto the soggy mat and felt to turn off the tap, forcing him to come out of the bath too— “That’s enough hydrotherapy now, Bray. — Because he’s in England. He’s gone back to England! His wife died. So now he’s gone back to England!” They both began to giggle. “Well what’s so funny? I told you, his wife died!” But they laughed more than ever. “Is he coming back? Did he say for good?” “Of course not. He’s coming back. He’s just gone because she died … to see if she did, really, I suppose … I don’t know …”

He made to kiss her on her sunburned eyelids, her neck, but suddenly she resisted with a kind of exasperated embarrassment even while she laughed. In just exactly that way her son, the little one, clenched his face, laughing or crying, and kicked to be free of her sometimes when she snatched him up. Bray fought her but her eyes flew open and he saw — accusation, complicity; an absent wife, a dead wife. “Come on. Pat yourself dry. I’m going to put some cream on your shoulders.” They went quiet and purposeful over the small task.

In the morning she rested her face against his back while he was shaving, her sleep-slack arms round his middle. So pleasantly hampered, he cleared away in swathes of the razor the snowman’s face in the mirror, and freed his own to meet him, talking at himself, while they gossiped about the capital. He told how Vivien had said it was surprising none of them had taken Shinza as a lover. “Was that what she said—‘taken,’ I mean? That’s her upbringing coming out, dear old Vivien, when it comes to things like that she thinks she’s back in one of the stories of her grandmother — or perhaps it’s her great — grandmother? — she was a famous Edwardian beauty with a lord for a husband and she would decide on this man or that. Never mind what he thought about it.”

“Have you told Vivien?”

He felt a wet felt tip draw a line up the groove of his spine: her tongue. “Not directly. But when I write of course it’s always ‘we did this, we did that.’”

“Because I had the impression she knows about us.”

“She always knows about these things, Vivien. She knows but she never talks.”

Of course Vivien has been discreet before; perhaps even when it came to her own husband and her friend. “And she’s never wrong about people — her judgement,” the mouth behind him was saying.

He wanted to say, “She doesn’t like Gordon,” but his half — closed eyes, directing the shaving of his neck in the mirror, shamed him out of it amusedly. Without glasses, with the blood drawn freshly to the surface of the skin, the younger man whom for some not very convincing reason every man thinks of as his definitive self was almost present in the heavy, strongly planed flesh of the face that he supposed represented him. He saw that face with calm equanimity, feeling her at his back.

When she left for the boma he promised to try and return that same night; gave a gentle, reassuring smile to reassert a certain perspective: “—And I’ll find out whether Madame Boxer was dead or only shamming,” but she busied herself with the heel of her shoe, which she said was loose, and rushed back to the house to change into a pair of red sandals. Red shoes Oriane de Guermantes had preoccupied herself with in order to evade the news that Swann was dying: but Rebecca wouldn’t know who Oriane and Swann were, it was with Olivia that he had reread Proust one winter in Wiltshire. Exactly the sort of treat retirement promises to compatibility beyond passion. One (final?) kick of the prostate and so much for that.

Boxer’s house appeared shut up; the servants’ children were taking advantage of the luxury of playing on the veranda. Round the back, the kitchen was sociably full, with the cook and his friends among pap-encrusted pots soaking in water, jars of milk set to sour, the smell of meat burning on the stove and beer being drunk from jam tins. The cook gave Bray an hospitable tot of the sour thin stuff — in a white man’s glass — and sent a young boy to direct him to Shinza. The heat shimmered up from the cattle camps all around but Bray, out in the bush without the crevices of evasion which the shelter of the town offered, had taken it into his lungs, now, his body learnt again to exist within it, drawing it in and sweating it out without resistance like some perfectly adapted organism that maintains the exact temperature of the environment it enters, at one with it.

Shinza and Basil Nwanga were in a little home-made house in European style that belonged to the teacher at the farm school. Shinza pressed upon him a leg of boiled fowl he had in his hand— “No, go on, go on.” “But I can have something else — I’ll help myself—” “Take it, man”—Nwanga grinned— “he’s already helped himself to everything there was—” “Who ate the other leg?” Shinza challenged him.