Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Bray sat down on the stool with the ox-thong seat the boys at the carpenter’s shop had made for him. There was nothing to offer but patience.

“I told her that was exactly the way I used to feel in Austria. Funnily enough, just what I used to think. And then she went to her room with the skis and I never saw her again. I had to go down to the cold storage in town and when I got back I was told she’d left for Matinga.”

“Didn’t see her again?”

He began to talk excitedly. “I mean we expected her Sunday night, sometime, that’s all, we didn’t think anything.… On Sunday I’m just seeing that the chairs are put out in the beer garden, and Timon comes up, there’s a phone call. Well, you know … I said, let someone else take it, can’t you. Then he said, it’s from Dar-es-Salaam, it’s Miss Emmanuelle. I told him, Dar-es-Salaam! It’s Matinga! I wasn’t worried, I thought, she wants to stay another night.”

“She phoned you from Dar-es-Salaam?”

“She was on the airport. I didn’t believe her. She kept on telling me, listen, Ras and I are in Dar-es-Salaam, we are leaving for London in a few minutes. She couldn’t hear me well. I shouted to her, live with him here, Emmanuelle. You don’t have to run away. She lost her temper. She said didn’t I realize she wasn’t ‘playing the fool’—those were her exact words — she wasn’t ‘playing the fool,’ Ras was in great danger and he couldn’t have stayed. That’s what she said.”

“And the announcement on the radio?”

Hjalmar was sunk back in the chair. “Well, we were cut off then. I phoned, I tried to get a connection from here … by the time we got through to Dar-es-Salaam again they were gone. Margot wouldn’t believe me, I had to repeat over and over again, everything, like I’m telling you … She went hysterical, why hadn’t I called her to the phone. And then Stephen heard on the news that Asahe, with a white girl and so on — no name — had slipped out of the country. They must have been at our airport in the afternoon waiting for the plane just two miles from where we were sitting in the hotel. People say he was in some political trouble. Can you think why he should be in political trouble?”

He was eager to turn this mind to reasonable supposition. “Hjalmar, honestly, whenever we spoke together he gave me the impression of being a staunch supporter of whatever the government might choose to do. Perhaps some pressure of personalities, at work …? But suppose someone were trying to jostle him out of his position at the radio, he wouldn’t have to disappear out of the country, would he.”

“I’ve been to the police.” He shrugged. “I tried to get hold of Roly but he wasn’t in town, I couldn’t … all she says, I want to know word for word … why didn’t you call me to the phone. Night and day.” He leaned forward and whispered into Bray’s face: “I don’t know any more what Emmanuelle said on the phone. I don’t know if perhaps she didn’t say something else, I don’t know if I talked to her at all.”

Bray did what he would not have known how to do a year ago. He gripped Wentz’s two hands, pinned them a moment on the chair arms. “What about Dando …?”

Such bewilderment came into the face, such confusion that he dropped the question. The man obviously had fled without waiting for Dando to return; somehow let go, lost hold … No wonder Rebecca was uneasy to be with him.

“London’s a good place for them to have gone. You will hear soon from her there. One can always arrange things in London — friends, money, and so on.” Olivia. But quick on the thought, reluctance: to spin a new noose, draw this house and Wiltshire together, produce, in Emmanuelle, evidence that a life unknown to Wiltshire existed here. As if somehow the lines of the girl could be traced in Emmanuelle, so different!

It was not possible to give Hjalmar Wentz any relief. He could not be distracted. If one did try, there was blankness; what had happened had run rank over his whole mind and personality for the time being. It was destroying him but at the same time it was all that held him together: attempt to disentangle him and he would fall apart sickeningly.

So it was Emmanuelle; Emmanuelle and Ras Asahe; the Friday afternoon and the telephone call from Dar-es-Salaam on Sunday night. The three of them sat in the old Colonial Service chairs in Bray’s living-room for the next few evenings while Hjalmar Wentz talked. His face had taken on a perpetually querulous expression and the middle finger of each hand, inert on either arm of the worn chair, twitched so that the tendons up to the wrist trembled under the skin.

“When she went with me to the storeroom, I wonder if she didn’t want to talk to me … eh? Perhaps I said something … I put her off without knowing …”

“Oh I don’t think so. You and she get on so well. If she’d meant to say anything, she’d’ve, well …”

The blue eyes continued to search inwardly. Bray took the glass away from the hand and topped up the whisky, but drink didn’t help, you couldn’t even make him drunk, he held the glass and forgot it was there. “Why say that about ‘feeling you could do anything’? I should have said, what d’you mean, ‘anything.’”

Rebecca had remarked to Bray, “It’s better for him to drive us crazy about what he thinks he did wrong, poor soul — at least it keeps him from thinking how calculating she was — right down to the business of her skis.”

But Bray could not help looking for some reassurance that would hold. “Hjalmar, was what she did so extraordinary to you — after all? You say she’s really very attached to the man. Perhaps you even feel responsible in a way, for the loyalty she probably feels to him? Because you and Margot — well, your children grew up in an atmosphere where Africans were regarded as people in need of championing — you know what I’m getting at? — If something terrible threatened him (we have to believe her) and she helped him to get away, well … you yourself, in Germany when Margot …”

He didn’t know what there was in this that was so destructive to Hjalmar. He saw the face of a man falling, falling, crashing from beam to beam through glass and dust and torn lianas of the shelter that this ritual of discussion built to contain him. Into the silence lying like an irredeemable act between the two men, came the sound of Rebecca singing to herself in the shower under the impression that she could not be heard above the noise of the water. Bray found himself, appallingly, smiling. In Hjalmar’s face only the fine fair skin seemed intact, the bone structure seemed to have loosened and his mouth was always a little parted as if he lacked oxygen. Now something faintly stirred there, a kind of coordination in the eyes, an awareness of the existence of other people, as if his wild glance had fallen upon a scrap of undated newspaper picked up in the rubble.

Bray began to carry drinks and glasses into the garden. In his present state Wentz noticed neither abrupt changes of subject nor apparently aimless activities. He picked up a stool and newspaper, stood a moment, slowly put the paper down, then picked it up and followed slowly to the fig tree. The dust in the air at the time of the year made a chiffon sky after sunset, matt grey and pink, and the atmosphere was thickened with the same colours reflected on soft, invisible suspensions of dust. Bray lit the lamp; Hjalmar said, “I’m sorry I walked in on you like this.”

“It’s quite all right.”

But his self — protective stiffness seemed curiously to succeed in helping Wentz as all his sympathetic responsiveness had not. “No, I shouldn’t be here. You ought’ve been left alone. I know that.”

“It doesn’t matter, Hjalmar. In the end the only secrets one cares to keep are those one has with oneself — and even that’s a mistake.”