Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“I’d rather see him safe in Posts and Telegraphs, myself.”

Mweta nodded to acknowledge the joke, rather than in agreement.

“Adamson, you never thought about Shinza — for Foreign Minister?” He phrased it carefully that way, but Mweta was quick to take it up the way it really was— “Look, I’m prepared to do something for Edward because”—he shook his head wildly as if to get rid of something— “because he thinks he taught me everything, and — because the past is the past, I’m not the one to try to get away from that. — But what it can be, I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

“He’s a brilliant man.”

“You still think so?”

“Oh come, you know so.”

“James,” Mweta said, making it clear this was to please him, “what can I offer Shinza? You think an under — secretaryship or something like that? Because that’s all I’ve got. And it wouldn’t be what he wants. He wants to change the world and use me and this country to do it for him, never mind what happens to the country in the meantime. I can make him an under-secretary — that’s all.”

“You can’t do that.”

Mweta opened his firm lips and closed them again without having spoken.

“I should be inclined,” said Bray, hearing himself come out more gently pontifical than he had wished, “to find him some special position not directly involved in actual government, but recognizing his claims to elder-statesmanship-out-of-office. Mm? I should have thought he’d have done darned well as representative at U.N., for instance. For a start.” He remained old-maidishly composed while Mweta stared at him in bitter astonishment. “Our ambassador to United Nations? Edward Shinza? After what he said? After what he said to the Commonwealth Secretary? His so-called minority reports at the last conference, not six months before Independence? After what we’ve had from him?”

“Make him spokesman for the majority and you’ll see. You talk as if he’d started a rival party.”

“He acts as if he has! A lot of people think it would be better if he had! Come out in the open!” Mweta began levelling with his heel a trail of fresh molehills on the grass. “—What a nuisance, these things — If he stops sulking away down there at home, well … It’s up to him….”

“I hope you’re not going to let him sulk.”

“You’ve been to see him, James?”

“I don’t know if I’ll get the chance. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be here for Independence.”

Mweta shrugged; appealed suddenly. “We’re going to talk every few weeks like this. We’ll make it a regular thing.” They had turned back towards the house, rising red and solid out of the hazy, unassertive shapes of the bush.

“But my dear Adamson, I shall have to go back pretty soon. I was thinking of next week. You’re all getting down to work again now. Time the guests left.”

Mweta stopped again. “Back? But you are back.”

“I don’t know what I could do, if I stayed,” Bray said, smiling.

The conventions would make it easy for them both; whenever they reached this point they had simply to go on following his polite pretence that he had never thought of himself as anything but a visitor, and Mweta’s polite pretence that a place had been provided for him as something other than that. It was so easy, very tempting — he looked at the ugly house looming up in their way — one could walk round the past they had inhabited, as one does round a monument.

“No, no, now don’t—” Mweta said with some difficulty, as years ago he would have said of someone from the Colonial Office: “They mustn’t come their English with me.” He said grudgingly, “What is it you’re doing over there in England, really?”

“Yes, it’s a very lazy sort of life, I suppose, it’s quite astonishing how well one takes to doing very little—” Bray turned the question to an accusation, cheerfully admitted; making it easy for the other man — it was part of the game.

Mweta didn’t answer, implying that this sort of waffle could not reach him. But he didn’t do much better, himself; in the cross voice that disguises lack of conviction, using the hearty “we,” he said, “What nonsense to talk about going next week. We can’t allow that.”

They turned to other things. Mweta wanted to discuss the Kundi harbour report, after all, now that they were alone. He watched Bray’s face when he came to the points about which he himself was particularly worried. There was the old sense of seeking correction of his own assumptions and findings. Then they found themselves back at the house again, with the young men in attendance, Joy going in and out, and the Harrison woman pouring tea. Telephones rang, the secretary brought in a cable, Mweta was called away and Bray waited to say good — bye to him. When he returned the convention fell quickly into place again; it was all bonhomie, playful scolding and exaggeratedly graceful regrets, plans, and promises— “We don’t want to hear this talk about England, ay?” “All right, not a word about England.” “I’ve told him, England’s for old men to go back and die in, ay?” Joy would phone again; they would be meeting at a reception the following week, anyway. Mweta’s lively hand was firm on his shoulder. Yes, that was fine, Bray said. (He would be gone by then; his flight was already booked.) Mweta insisted on coming out onto the steps of the entrance. He looked young, quick, beaming, waved his hand with a pause, like a salute, and then turned away inside at once. Already he existed like that, for the future, in Bray’s mind. He would have rejected with distaste any suggestion that Mweta had been a protégé, but he did have, that day, the sense of relinquishment with which, as an interested party, an older person sees a young one launched and going out of sight.

For some reason he had not given Olivia an exact date for his return, though his seat on the plane was booked; he was thinking he perhaps might stop off in Spain for a week, on the way. He had never really had a proper look at the Prado.

Three days before he was to leave a letter came, delivered by hand. Mweta asked him to accept an immediate appointment as special educational adviser — a newly created post — to investigate the organization of schools, technical schools, and adult education projects in the provinces, beginning with the largest, the northern province, Gala. He stopped himself from reading it through again. He passed it over to Roly Dando.

“Someone thought that one up quickly,” Dando said.

They roared with laughter, not because anything was funny, but because Bray was moved and excited in a way that couldn’t be acknowledged. Shut away there behind a Great Wall of responsibilities, echoed by sycophants, surrounded by the jailers of office, Mweta had torn out of the convention: Mweta hadn’t believed any of it for a minute.

Dando couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Bray’s been offered the Ministry of Pot-hooks and Carpentry, is that it — oh yes, but what he’d really been angling for was Pectoral Development and Backscratching, well, so I’ve heard.” People laughed but understood that there was something in it; appointments were being handed out every day as the administrative changeover took place and various development plans got off to a start. Most of the appointees were unpronounceable names and black faces that the white shopkeepers and mine officials had never heard of before. But in law, agriculture, public health and education, there were many white men: foreign experts, and a few familiar faces, like that of Colonel Evelyn James Bray, who, in the old days, had shown themselves more concerned with the interests of the Africans than with the life of the white people in the colony. Among the group in which Bray moved in the capital, friends of friends passed through on their way to new projects or jobs in different parts of the country; there was much talk of the finance, equipment, staff or lack of it, that people expected to manage with. Bray was simply another one of them, not quite sure how he would set about what he was supposed to achieve, given no assurance of any particular resources being available to him. Most people thought that this job of his had been an understood thing all along; no one seemed to remember that he had been going home. The drinking party that Roly Dando had arranged as a send-off became just another gathering out at Dando’s place.