Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Neil and Vivien Bayley appeared to take her to the capital. She wore one of the D.O.’s wife’s dresses and she had nothing but the picnic basket and the briefcase.

At the Bayleys’ house the children were all over her, pulling at her, chattering, asking where Clive and Alan and Suzi were. Vivien used the adult formula: “You mustn’t worry Rebecca, she’s very, very tired,” but to them she was the familiar Rebecca into whose car they used to be piled for entertainments and expeditions. All Vivien’s children went through a stage of being rudely aggressive towards their mother; Eliza yelled, “It’s not fair! Rebecca’s nicer than you!” A scene swept through the house, banging doors, raising voices.

Neil’s way was to say whenever he came into the house, “I think we all need a brandy.” They did not seem able to talk to her without all three of them having a drink in their hands. She drank to make it possible for the Bayleys but she would not take the pills Vivien gave her because then she had to go and lie down and sleep, and when she woke there was a moment when she didn’t know it had happened and she had to discover it again. Vivien said, “I think it’d be a good idea if we made you some dresses.” The sewing machine was brought into the living-room and Vivien kept up a sort of monologue while she sewed, handing bits of the finishing over to her to be done. She was wearing Vivien’s clothes, which fitted her better than the D.O.’s wife’s dress had. She remembered and said to Vivien, “Did you send back the dress to Matoko?” Vivien said gently, “No, but I will when the transport starts running again, don’t worry.”

She was turning up a hem. The material was pale green cotton. She said, “What will they do with him?”

Vivien’s hands were taken slowly from the machine, her face had an imploring look. “They’ve cabled his wife to see if she wants his body flown back.”

The airport was closed, they had told her. He would be kept lying somewhere, there were refrigerators for that sort of thing. No one knew when planes would leave again. She had tried to make a joke about the airport, saying, “So your riot bag’s just standing by,” but Vivien had taken it as a reminder of something unspeakable and could not answer.

With the brandy glasses in their hands they talked about what had happened. Out of that day — yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that: slowly the succeeding days changed position round it — another version came into double exposure over what she knew. The men who had attacked were a roving gang made up of a remnant from the terrible riots that had gone on for a week centred round the asbestos mine. A Company riot squad led by white strangers— “ You see,” Vivien interrupted her husband, “I knew they’d get round to using those men from the Congo and Mweta wouldn’t be able to stop them. I knew it would happen”—had opened machinegun fire on strikers armed with sticks and stones. The white men dealt with them out of long experience of country people who needed a lesson in the name of whoever was paying — they burned down the village. The villagers and the strikers had made an unsuccessful raid on the old Pilchey’s Hotel, where the mercenaries had quartered themselves. Someone had put up those road-blocks, probably with the idea of ambushing the white men (hopeless, they had left already, anyway). … It was said that the one who started the hut-burnings was a big German who didn’t travel in the troop transports but in his own car.

Vivien said, “But this was a little Volkswagen, and there was a woman in it.”

“To asbestos miners an army staff car’s the same as any other kind. A car’s a car.” Neil spoke coldly to her. “Nobody knows anything, any more, when things get to the stage they are now. I don’t suppose Mweta knew they would machine-gun people. Burn their houses over their heads. He just put it in the hands of the Company army, left it to their good sense … that’s quite enough.”

She offered the information, “The people who helped us knew Bray. An old man with safety-pins in the holes in his ears. He knew him from before.”

Neil had put the brandy on the floor. His hands were interlocked between his knees, his big, bright, bearded head (river-god’s head, Bray had once called it) stared down through his legs so that the veins showed in his rosy neck. He said thickly, sternly, “Yes, they knew him. But it only takes a handful of strangers. Miners are recruited all over the country. God knows who they were. Nobody knows who the white men were. White men from somewhere. Perhaps they travel in Volkswagen cars, perhaps they cart women around with them. Putting up their road-blocks a mile from those people who’d known him for twenty years was a bunch of men who’d never seen him before. That’s all.”

Agnes Aleke came to see her. Agnes was wearing her smooth wig, she was smartly dressed, and she cried all the time. “If only you’d come in the plane with me, if you’d come when I went.” Through Bray’s death she seemed to experience in her plump voluptuous little body all that she had feared for it. Rebecca sat with her in the garden and held her hand to comfort her; Vivien carried out tea. “Come and stay with me, Rebecca, come to my mother’s place. It’s a nice house. Oh how I hated that place, that Gala, don’t show me that place again, never — and how you must hate us — I said to my mother, she will hate us and why shouldn’t she.” They embraced, Rebecca patting her gently while she sobbed. Vivien said with firm kindness, “What do you think of our dressmaking, Mrs. Aleke? You know Rebecca and I made that dress she’s wearing, ourselves.”

Roly Dando came. It was in the late afternoon; they all drank. Thin little Roly had about him the air — taint, portent — of one who knows what is going on in a time of confusion and upheaval, when what official information there is ceases to be trustworthy. It was known that Mweta was not at the President’s Residence; his messages to the people continued to be issued, but from some unknown retreat. His television appearances were, it was said, old films to which new taped statements were — not too well — matched. None of this was mentioned. But they talked. Dando seemed convinced that Shinza was over the border, planning a guerrilla insurrection. Dhlamini Okoi and the Minister of Health, Moses Phahle, had disappeared and were obviously with him. Goma was said to be in prison; there were so many people in prison that if someone wasn’t seen for a few days it was presumed that that was where he must be. Neil said, “Roly, is it true that Mweta has asked for British troops?”

Roly sat there in the dusk with his sinewy shrunken neck pulled up very straight from his collar; he did not seem to hear. He rose to fetch another drink and hesitated on the way, where Rebecca sat. He put his hand on her head: “La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La Filie aux Yeux d’Or.” He stalked awkwardly to the veranda table and poured himself something. He came back and sat on the arm of her chair, his arm round her, touching her neck as he talked, as he grew a little drunk, unable even now to resist the dismal opportunity to take advantage of his grief to fondle a woman. He was talking of Bray. “The thing is, of course, all our dear friends abroad will say he was killed by the people he loved and what else can you expect of them, and how ungrateful they are, and all that punishment-and-reward two-and-two-makes-four that passes for intelligent interpretation of events. That’s the part of it that would rile him. Or maybe amuse him. I don’t know.”

Vivien’s beautiful controlled voice came out of the dark. “I wish we could know that James himself knew it wasn’t that, when it happened.”