Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Some sort of official cocktail party was ending as they arrived and the lategoers had got as far as the patio round the pool, standing about in suddenly intimate groups talking still in the voices of a crowded room. The tiny pennants of the country’s own new airline stood among wisps of lettuce in the Golden Perch Room; Dando and Bray passed through to another bar, with greetings and snatches of talk catching at them. Roly Dando’s running commentary was carelessly loud enough to be heard by anybody, had they been listening. No one was. Heads lifted, eyes turned to follow, faces were glazed with the cosy daze of sundowner time. “… Raymond Mackintosh, no less. I wonder what he’s crawling up Norman’s arse for now. Look at it. — Well, Raymond, here’s to your first million. — Hullo Joe, hasn’t the steak gone down yet?” A black man waved with an important smile, looking up from the depths of a conversation that brought him forward in his chair, knees wide, trousers straining, to confer with the white man opposite him. “—Joe Kabala was here with Stein at lunch, as well. The milling company. Going to be the first black one on that board, wait and see. A lovely champion of private enterprise, keeping the seat warm for white capital investment and raking in the director’s fees. He’s starting to eat smoked salmon, I saw it myself…. — Hadn’t you better be going home to your children?” Rebecca Edwards peered round a rubber plant at the sound of Dando’s voice. She was drinking beer with Curtis Pettigrew, obviously come straight from work, with untidy paper carriers from the supermarket dumped beside her. “The dinner’ll be dried out again, Curtis. It’s all right for a bachelor like me to come home when I please.”

They were waylaid by an FAO man and Father Raven, who ran the refugee education scheme at Senshe. Bray had already been out there and at Bill Raven’s request had made some notes, at odd times at home in Dando’s rondavel, for a simple course in economic administration. “You don’t happen to speak Portuguese? The Zambians have dumped a batch of Frelimo chaps on us”—Raven was half-thrilled at the dilemma. The FAO man offered to take Bray to see the experimental farm he was setting up in the South; “If I’m still around, I’d like to go with you.”

He went off after Dando, who was up at the bar having an argument with his friend Coningsby, the manager, about the Austro-Hungarian empire and the character of Franz Josef. Dando was accustomed to knowing more about any subject than the person who took him up on it, and in the absence of better intellectual stimulus, enjoyed the advantage in a grudging way; Bray remembered that this was what had happened to men who lived in a restricted circle and read a lot. The bush mentality was not what people thought; it could take the form of a burning compulsion to explain to somebody — anybody, the driver of the road transport, the district vet — the workings of the Common Market or Wittgenstein’s theories.

Bray always found bar-stools uncomfortable — he was too big to accommodate himself without prodding someone with his shoulder or knee — and he was best off with one elbow on the bar and the rest of him turned towards the room. He drank whisky and watched them all. It was a daydream from the past, with incongruities that made it of the present. A small party of white people out to dinner came in, the patina of well-being on heads fresh from the hairdresser, faces shiny from a second shave. Laughter, the worldly kind that causes quiet paroxysms beneath well-fitting suits, had taken a huddle of three white men sitting farther up the bar counter as they said to each other urgently, “Wait — wait—” and then added a twist to the anecdote that set them off again. A black man in an American tartan jacket was with another in a dark-blue suit, talking to him without looking at him, his mind elsewhere. Orange fingernails scratched up cashew nuts; a woman who called everybody “sweetie” protested because there was no olive in her martini, protested again when the barman was reproached. Two more black men came in and looked over the heads conspiratorially, haughtily, then saw the raised finger of the man in tartan and broke into the sort of hearty formalities of hand-shaking and back-slapping that the white men would have winked about before, but that now simply brought a momentary distant look to their eyes.

The occasion for the party with the ladies was clearly the need to entertain a tall, blond young man from out of town to whom they all listened with the bright show of attention accorded to wits or experts. He was what is recognized as a Guards officer type, perhaps a little too typical ever to have been one. Not so young as all that, either; his small, handsome, straight-backed head on broad shoulders had longish, silky hair thinning on the pate, and when he smiled his teeth were bony-looking. He had a way of bearing down with his nostrils and drawing air audibly through them, to express exasperation or raise a laugh. Certainly his friends found this irresistible. His diction was something no longer heard, in England, anyway. Most likely explanation was that he must have taken part in amateur theatricals under the direction of someone old enough to have modelled himself on Noel Coward. Amateur theatre had been popular among the civil servants and settlers; even Olivia had once appeared in one of those dusty thrillers set in Lord Somebody’s country house.

“… Oh Lord yes. Her father’s getting right out too. Right out. The place at Kabendi Hills has gone. Carol’s heart — broken over the horses … to Jersey, I think.… Chief Aborowa said to me last week, there’s going to be trouble over the culling — some of these chaps’ve had that bloody great government stud bull the department’s spent a fortune on — and I said, my dear chap, that’s your worry, I hope there’ll be a couple of billion gallons of sea between me and your cows and your wives and the whole damned caboodle.… ‘I don’t want Pezele near my stool.’ I said don’t be a damned fool, Aborowa — as soon as I see him alone there’s no nonsense, I talk to him like a Dutch uncle, we were drinking brandy together—”

“—Priceless!” One of the women was so overcome she had to put down her glass.

“—Heavens, that’s nothing — Carol buys old Aborowa’s wife’s corsets for her.”

More laughter.

“His senior wife. Poor old baggage, she doesn’t know where the bouz begins and the derrière ends. Colossal. Such a dear old soul. I don’t know what she’ll do without Carol, they adore Carol. Yes, buys her corsets for her, bloomers, I don’t know what … Special department at Harrods, for the fat ladies of circuses or something …” He drew breath through pinched nostrils while they looked at each other delightedly. “I don’t know who’s going to replace that service when we go, I can tell you, central government or provincial authority or what the devil these gentlemen’re going to call themselves. M’lord Pezele — great fat Choro gentleman from the Eastern Province, he is — comes along in his brand-new jeep (I’ve been requisitioning for four years to get our jalopies replaced, but no dice), he stumps into the Great Place: ‘My appointment with Chief Aborowa is at nine-thirty’—he’s looking at his watch. Thinks he’s at the dentist. And there’s the old man over at his house, looking forward to a nice chat over a nip.”

The black man with the friend in the tartan jacket said pompously to the black barman, in English, “The service is very bad here. I asked for ice, didn’t I?”

But no one was listening except Bray.

“… happy to get eight per cent on short-term investment instead. Five years is all they work on in these countries, you know.”