Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Of course he knew!” Roly spoke with the unchallengeable authority of friendship on a plane none of the others had shared. “He’s got nothing to do with that lot of spiritual bed-wetters finding a surrogate for their fears in his death! He knew what’s meant by the forces of history, he knew how risky the energies released by social change are. But what’s the good. They’ll say ‘his blacks’ murdered him. They’ll go one further: they’ll come up with their guilts to be expiated and say, yes, he certainly died with Christian forgiveness for the people who killed him, into the bargain. Christ almighty. We’ll never get it straight. They’ll paw over everything with their sticky misconceptions.” Roly spent the night because of the curfew. She heard him snoring in the room next to the one she had been given.

Vivien talked to her a lot about her children, about Clive and Alan and Suzi, but she herself was not thinking about them at all. She began to bleed although it was not the right time and it was then that she thought: so it never happened; there never will be a child. Vivien put small activities in her way as if driving some lost creature, out of kindness, along a track. “I think you ought to go and see Margot. If you feel like it. She’s very down. She really would like to know about Hjalmar, though of course she wouldn’t say it.” So she took Vivien’s car and drove to the Silver Rhino. It was the first time she had driven since that day. The car was the same kind — an old-model Volkswagen. Her feet and hands managed of themselves. It was only five days ago.

It had rained all night again and the morning was beautiful. (Put on the green dress, Vivien said.) There were soldiers on guard round the post office and broadcasting studios, people were cordoned off from the area where the newspaper offices had been stoned. Outside the railway station and bus depot hundreds of women, children, and old people sat in bright heaps among household goods and livestock in the strong sun high with the stink of urine and rotting vegetables; there were no trains or buses running.

And everywhere the rain and heat brought out flowers. The soldiers in their drab battledress stood under blossoming trees, poinsettia and hibiscus were crudely brilliant as carnival paper blooms in the driveway of the Presidential Residence that was said to be empty. In the old garden of the Silver Rhino an enormous American car was parked, with an older but scarcely lesser one behind it. There were nylon curtains in the balcony of windows round the rear of the new one, and ocelot-patterned seat covers. Some African men in pyjamas were sitting on the grass outside one of the bungalows — she did not really notice, on her way to the main building. But one of them got up and came forward with arms wide, a huge, fat man with a cigar in his mouth and a leopard — skin toque on his head: Loulou, Loulou Kamboya, Gordon’s ex-partner from the Congo. “Madame Edouard — I say I know dat girl walking! What you make here?” “Loulou — and you?” He took her by the shoulders, beaming at her, an enormous grape-black face with thick ridges of flesh that pressed back against the ears and even up the forehead from the frontal ridge. “I make everywhere business. You know Loulou. But what this fighting, eh? They mad, eh? I sit here, I come yesterday one week wid my people, nothing for do, nothing. Sometime I think I go faire une petite folie—” He laughed hugely. She knew from Gordon that “faire une petite folie” meant to find a girl and make love; Loulou and Gordon spoke French together, the Congo French spoken by semiliterate Africans, mixed with Lingala words and Belgian usage, but Loulou had always been proud of being able to speak to her in English so that she wouldn’t feel left out. “Et les bébés, they grow okay? Where Gordon? He making cash again or no? Ah Gordon, if he stay this time now with me, you have plenty dresses! I make the big time — that’s right, I say the big time, eh? — I hear in cinéma! Oh business continue to go good but now this damn war or what. What? What? Eh? I here wid my people yesterday week already.”

“Where are you making for?”

“I go for South. Down, down. Far for here. I have ticket but the plane don’t go. You see, I want to go for Jewburg. You remember?”

Yes, she remembered; he had always had a yearning to see Johannesburg. He had refused to be convinced that South Africa didn’t let in black men from other countries as a rule, and that if he did get in he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his habitual freedom of bars and girls.

“You know — I got business there now. I send goods already three time — thirty thousand francs. Pay in Switzerland. Not Congo.” He roared with laughter at the old story. “But you sick, Madame Edouard? What makes this—” He drew his ringed hands dolefully down his face. “You short money?”

“No, nothing. I’m all right. — I’ll see you again when I come out? I’ve got to go and look for Mrs. Wentz.”

“Anytime. Anytime. Look like I stay for Christmas.”

Her fingers felt damp and twitchy. When he had drawn that face, only succeeding in looking comic, she had felt tears coming back to her suddenly again. At the Bayleys’ she had gone dry: as you speak of a cow going dry.

Margot Wentz had let her hair outgrow its dye. While they talked she looked all the time at that inch or two of speckled white and gilt at Margot’s hairline. It was perhaps a sign of private mourning. They sat in the little sitting-room at the round table with the fringed cloth. Coffee was set out ready, with thin silver teaspoons and a silver cream jug in the shape of a tulip. They discussed Hjalmar as if he had had an illness and had been advised to go to Gala to recuperate. Rebecca said he had been looking much better lately. The work he was doing, pottering about the garden, seemed good for him. She said, in a sort of final explanation for everything that was left unsaid: “He offered to stay to look after the house,” and a look of trapped distress came over Margot Wentz’s face because now they had come up inevitably against what had happened: to that day when Rebecca and Bray left Gala. Every time Bray’s name had occurred in Rebecca’s account of Hjalmar’s life in Gala, Margot’s left cheek had moved a little as if a string jerked inside there, but now she could not avert herself any longer. She said something about that terrible business, about what a wonderful man he was; she stared at Rebecca, unable to go on. She looked magnificent; hers (unlike Loulou’s) was a face made to express tragedy.

They drank more coffee and Rebecca asked about the hotel and the son, Stephen. “No one knows what will happen,” Margot said, almost grandly. “I have no money to go, if I want to. And even if we want to, the airport is closed. I suppose the frontiers too. Hjalmar wouldn’t be any better off here—” and then remembered that if he had not stayed to “look after the house” he might have been dead, and had again that look of dislocation that Rebecca saw her presence brought to people’s faces. Rebecca asked about the daughter and that was better; she was settling down in London— “Of course, there are all the things Emmanuelle never had, all the concerts and recitalsmusic is her life, you know.” When she got up to leave, Margot said to her, “Rebecca, if you should need anything. I don’t know what — somewhere to stay, perhaps?” But she thanked her, there was nothing, she was staying with the Bayleys of course. “I see you’ve an old friend of ours in the hotel — the famous Loulou Kamboya.”

“Oh him.” Margot’s voice was dry. “He’s travelling with his own prostitutes, never mind his drivers and secretaries. It’s a good thing for my licence the police’ve got other things to do, or I’d be in trouble for running a brothel.”