Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

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

“What’s he say?” she said.

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

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

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

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

“She will.”

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

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

“It must be a relief.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I say: tomorrow we know.”

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

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