Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“How can we go together. Overseas,” she said slowly, using the colonial’s term, loaded with distance and unattainableness.

“We’ll see. Perhaps we can manage. We’ll decide what to do. I can’t stay here, my darling.” He stroked her hair, it had grown, it was growing very long. She said, “What are you thinking?”

He smiled at her. “—What a pity, in a way.”

It was she who thought of Hjalmar. They agreed, of course he would go down to the capital with them. “And it’ll make it easy for him to make it up with the family. I mean it won’t look as if he’s come crawling back.” He went to the garden to tell Hjalmar; the good-looking blond head was bent, skull asserting itself gradually now through the thinning hair and drawn bright skin, reading George Orwell’s letters over the top of rather than through rimless lenses. Hjalmar took the glasses off and listened with detached reasonableness. Then he got up, closing the book, nodding in understanding. He asked a few factual questions about the journey — there were no roadblocks, no difficulty on that stretch of road, eh? Bray said he’d heard nothing like that. Hjalmar went purposefully indoors; there was his voice remarking something to Rebecca, and her laugh.

Bray turned off the light so that the colour shrank away into darkness as a piece of paper, swollen with the glow of flame, suddenly turns black and shrivels. In the dark he felt one or two of the big ants that journeyed ceaselessly over the fig crawl blunderingly over his foot. The multiple trunks of the tree, twisted together forty feet up, made the shape of a huge wigwam under the spread of its enormous, half-bald branches. How old was it? As old as the slave-tree? He had found thickened scars where at some point or other in its life there had been an attempt to hack it down. A reassuring object, supporting life even in the teeming parasites whose purpose of existence was to eat it out from within; an organism whose heart couldn’t be got at because it was many trees, each great arterial trunk rotting away in the embrace of another that held still the form of sap and fibre; a thing at once gigantic and stunted, in senile fecundity endlessly putting out useless fruit on stumps and in crotches. But only for trees is it enough simply to endure; not for human beings. The black heat was stirred by small whirls of air currents, somewhere in its density the tree frogs clinked ceaselessly. He had known this night a thousand times.

He went into the house, stood looking at the table of papers, left it and went into the bedroom where Rebecca was already emptying drawers. The spear-fishing goggles and guns were dumped in a corner. “We can stick them in one of those big laundry baskets of Kalimo’s. I would have liked to go one last time to the lake.” He said, “They say the spear-fishing’s wonderful in Sardinia.” “Sardinia, here we come.” She waved a blue snorkel. She stood as if she were momentarily giddy: “It doesn’t seem real, does it?”

“No. It never does.” Very far back in his mind, he had been putting these clothes in this suitcase in Wiltshire. A sentence came to him idiotically, like the line of a popular song: Your waist measurement hasn’t changed for ten years. Now, as then, a decision became the progression of small practical tasks. He found a basket for the spear — fishing gear; in the end he did shuffle together all the papers and files from his table and look around for something to pack them in. There was a thin plywood box of the tea-chest kind that he thought would do, if he could clean it out a bit. He had turned it upside-down and was banging at the base; Hjalmar appeared and watched a moment with the tentative air of someone who doesn’t know whether or not to help or give advice. “And how’re you getting on? Finished already?”

Hjalmar sat down on the edge of an old veranda chair whose legs splayed under weight. He said shyly, “I think I’ll stay and keep an eye on things in the house.”

Bray was picking an old label off the box. A small cockroach flashed from beneath, fell to the floor and was caught by his sole. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, you know.”

“That’s okay. Maybe I’ll come down soon. If I get lonely or so. Do you want to take the Orwell?”

“Good lord, keep the books. There’s nowhere to put them.”

Rebecca appeared with an armful of children’s worn-out sandals. “What’s this about?”

“Hjalmar’s decided to hang on a bit.”

“Oh. Have you?” she said, friendly, awkward, to make it seem neither unreasonable nor unexpected.

Hjalmar gave a short laugh— “It may sound crazy, but you know I want to finish the paving out there under the tree. I hate to leave it half-finished — you know? Then I’ll be able to decide the … the next thing. Only I must do it first. It’s such a mess there with the fruit dropping and the leaves on that uneven ground. When it’s paved all you need to do is just sweep it off.”

“That reminds me — money for Mahlope and Kalimo. If I give you a cheque could you pay them? And please — phone Aleke for me, tomorrow — tell him I decided to get Rebecca out.” He wrote the cheque to the amount of three months’ wages for each servant and enough left over to keep the house running for a while, but Hjalmar put it in his wallet without glancing at it. Bray looked at the chest with a sudden infirmity of purpose. “Hjalmar — if I leave this stuff, could you pack it away for me sometime? And then if you come down, either you could bring it or—?”

“Of course, no trouble. I’ll see to everything.”

While they fetched and carried and threw away, turning out the life of Bray’s house as one turns out a drawer, Hjalmar busied himself making tea.

He said to the girl as the three of them drank it, “I like this house. I’m going through a bad time but just the same I like this house.” She stood there strangely with the cup in her hand and Bray saw her looking, looking, eyes averted, round the ugly, shabby, impersonal furniture, the chairs they had talked in, the table they had eaten at. There was a moment’s embarrassment, as if something too intimate had been spoken aloud. But most of that night she struck him as vividly animated — suppressing animation. The thought even crossed his mind once: perhaps she is elated without knowing it at moving towards her children again.

They went to the narrow bed in which somehow or other they had slept many nights, folded together or rolled away to the edges in the heat, always touching at some point, at shoulder or foot, or hair to hand, as if one sympathetic nervous system took over and controlled two bodies in a special tolerance. They had both had a shower and lay naked without covering and without having dried themselves properly — evaporation at least gave the sensation of coolness. She said, “I want to feel you in me but we won’t make love.”

“We’ll have a big bed at the Great Lakes. They must have big beds.”

“Will we get there in one day?”

“We’ll just keep on driving, mmh?” He had his hand on her face and he felt her smile.

Sometime later the rain came. Thunder bore down grandly upon the roof, he half-woke and saw his foot coming down on the quick cockroach, a shiny almond. He had softened and fallen away from the warm tunnel of her. The forest of heavy rain hid them, and they slept.

In the morning there was a world that had cast its skin. All the green glistened like dragonfly wings drying in the sun. The jacarandas had shed their shape in fallen flowers on the ground. Glossy starlings flashed about; Hjalmar was out there, seeing how his brick mosaic had stood up to the wet.

Mahlope put the three suitcases and the basket with Gordon Edwards’ spear-fishing equipment into the car. Kalimo trotted back and forth with his hands under his apron, watching. Bray had told him Doña was going to her friends in the capital. To him the capital was the two Poles and all the great cities and places of the earth: if you got there, you were near everywhere. “And bring my greetings to the children, please,” he said in English to Rebecca, smiling and repeating in a comforting rumble, “Yes … yes … mm’h …” When they said good — bye he handed over the basket they always took with them for picnics at the lake. “Is it eggs with small fish in, as well?” Bray said. The old man hunched with laughter— “Those eggs you like it, blead, litt’e bit cheese—”