Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

When Mweta came in, they stood aside, flanking him, smiling as if they had produced him.

He wore the sensible if stylistically confused tunic that had been adopted by the Party, years ago (somewhere between a Mao blouse and a bush jacket) but there was something turned-out about him. He came to Bray before Bray could approach. Their hands held fast, they almost swayed, smiling, Mweta laughing up at him, and the two others standing there, smiling. “About time. About time,” Mweta kept saying. “Always across the room, in the crowd! I just catch your eye, and then there’s another face there.”

“It’s strange to be stopped on the road and see you go by, waving at us all.”

Mweta hunched his shoulders and laughed like a boy who has had to show off a little. “But it was always for you, if you were there, James, you know that, it was certainly for you.”

The butler was carrying round a tray with Mr. Small’s martinis, and a glass of orange squash for Mweta. Yet Mweta’s voice and spirits rose, in the talk and laughter, just as if the alcohol were rising in his bloodstream as in the others’. He had always had this self-intoxication, this flooding vividness that was at once what brought people to him and what their presence released in him. Years ago, he would turn up in a village on his bicycle and before he’d got his breath back from the ride there would be a group around him, and his voice quickly heard above the others, holding the others. Later his face gleamed wet with excitement when he would talk for two hours to some football ground holding a crowd tight as cells in one organism, a monster speaking his name as if booming from the mouth of a cave: MWETA. He developed the technique of long pauses, space for swelling, echoing, wavering response. They yelled; he took it; he began to speak once more. Once Olivia had been overcome— “There’s something horrible — it’s as if they coax some precious secretion from him — like ants stroking captive aphids.”

The secretary, Wilfrid Asoni, had the beaming professional ploy of making the President’s interests his own. “Mr. President, it seems we can thank Colonel Bray for the services of our friend Clive, here. Oh indirectly, I mean, but just the same.”

“Oh your sphere of influence, again, Mweta,” said Bray. “Imagine how it’s going to be, operating internationally — I wonder if U.N. realizes.”

“No, no, yours, James.”

“Well, even if you think so, don’t tell them. You mustn’t be too friendly with a has — been like me.”

“But you were, how shall I say, born out of your time—”

“—deported out of it, anyway, wouldn’t you say, sir,” Small slipped in, through laughter.

“—You’re now at last where you belong, now, now, building the state with us. Isn’t that so? Of course!”

Their raised voices and laughter brought the high, overlarge room down to comfortable size. Blue cigarette smoke hung a haze over the view through the french doors of the bush in the park, retreated into the heat-haze of midday. Now and then Bray’s attention drifted out there in counterpoint to the talk; the shimmering tremble seemed to spread through his own consciousness, smoothing, soothing, wavering it away into a state of suspension; the small happiness of warm climates. Into the close male company came Joy Mweta, followed, or rather preceded, circled, and assailed by several of her children and a prancing dog. For a few minutes there was pandemonium in the room; Bray had not seen two of the children before, the third had been an infant when he left the country: they wore white socks and the eleven- and ten-year-old had already lost the shyness of African children and talked confidently to their elders, demanding and complaining; only the little one clung to his mother’s hams and peeped round suspiciously. Mweta spoke to them in Gala and they spilled out onto the terrace; then the dog showed a preference for the shade of the room, and the carpet, and the littlest boy rushed in again to get him out. His brother and sister followed; Clive Small swung the little one round. “By the legs! By the legs!” the others begged. “Your mother’s made that taboo, Mangaliso, she’s afraid I might drop you on your head and you’ll be bottom of the class ever after.”

“I’m thirteenth and there are thirty — five in our class,” the child volunteered to Bray.

The smallest climbed onto Mweta, a wet — lipped little creature, breathing heavily, with round, exposed nostrils and round eyes that make a reproach of every black infant’s face.

“I haven’t told you,” Bray said, “I’m a grandfather. I got a cable only this morning. Venetia’s had a daughter.”

“Venetia!” Mweta was shaking his head. “You remember I used to take her for a ride on the back of my bicycle? — And she used to make posters for us,” he said to Joy, whom he had married after Venetia had gone to school in England. “Yes, this little girl was a very young supporter of PIP. Posters announcing the date and place of meetings and so on. And slogans. Clive, she once showed such a poster to the Colonial Secretary — who was it, then, James? That’s right — he was here after the first London talks with Shinza, that time — and he went on a tour of the Gala district, of course”—everyone laughed— “to see where all this independence nonsense started, and to see what sort of fellow this Bray was who didn’t seem to be stopping it — and while he was in the boma that day and he went home to the D.C.’s house for lunch, he asks this little girl, the D.C.’s daughter, what’s that nice picture you’re painting, and Venetia says, it’s not a picture, it’s a poster, look! What’s it for, little girl? Can’t you see? she says. For the PIP rally, of course!”

Bray was nodding and laughing.

“She was proud of her painting. Eh?” said Mweta. “Why not?” And they all laughed again, and drew from Bray his version of the story, with interjections from Mweta, who grew more excited with every flourish.

“Years afterwards,” Bray said, “Venetia took me aside and asked me, very seriously, to tell her the truth: was it partly through her that I got kicked out? She said that ever since she’d grown up she’d begun to think about it and have it on her conscience.”

Mweta’s eyes narrowed emotionally. “Venetia! She must come here with her husband, eh, James. She should have been with us for Independence.”

“What about a photograph?” Small said to Asoni. “Wilfrid’s dying to try out his new camera, sir.”

They all straggled onto the terrace; the heat seemed to foreshorten them, their voices rang against the façade of the house. Bray and Mweta stood together, Bray stooping and embarrassed, Mweta smiling with a hand on his arm. The dog ran across the picture. The secretary took it again. Then there was one with Joy and the children; they put their feet together and folded their arms.

“We’re getting a swing and slide,” Mangaliso said.

“ And a jungle gym.” The little one spoke to Bray for the first time.

“The Princess said it.”

Joy laughed. “Yes, the Princess was full of good ideas. She was telling me everything I should do. She said we should wall off a part of the garden and make it specially for the children, with swings and so on. You know, I mean she is used to living in this sort of place. She said you must have somewhere your own — specially for kids.”

“Oh they got on like a house on fire,” Mweta said. “Joy knows all the secrets of Buckingham Palace.”

“Nonsense, she doesn’t even live there.”

“And the wife of the Chinese Ambassador, they were great friends too. She speaks English quite well.”

“She wants me to come to Peking and speak about African women.” Joy challenged him, smiling at Bray.