Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Come up after supper. We’ll have a beer. And your wife, too, of course.”

The man nodded slowly. “After supper,” he repeated, memorizing it.

When Bray got back to the hotel Mrs. Pilchey was at her desk in the bar, doing accounts. Her big head of thick, reddish — blond hair had been allowed to fade to the yellow — stained white of an old man’s moustache. She looked up over her glasses and then took them off and got to her feet with the pigeon — toed gait of heavy, ageing women. “I thought it sounded like you, when the boy told me.” Sex had died out of the challenging way she had had with men; it was bluff and grudging. They had never liked each other much, in the little they had known of each other, and extraordinarily, the old attitude fell into place between them as if the ten years didn’t exist. There was laughter and handshaking. “A big Bwana with grey hair at the sides, and he can talk Gala. Well, there didn’t used to be any white hairs — but I thought, that’s Colonel Bray! No, well, I heard you were out, anyway, so I’m not as clever as I fancy myself—”

He said, “So you’re carrying on alone? Olivia and I heard when Mr. Pilchey died.”

“Five years,” she said. There were pencil caricatures of Oscar Pilchey behind the bar, done in an attempt at Beerbohm’s style. “I don’t think he’d have been able to stand it if he’d been here now.”

Bray had sat down at the bar. “It’s a tremendous job for a woman on her own.”

“I don’t know about that, I’ve been in the hotel business twenty — five years, as you know. But to cope with it the way it is now, it’s enough to drive you nuts, that I can tell you.”

“Shouldn’t you have someone to help you — a manager or an assistant?” He asked for a gin and tonic and she tipped the bottle where it hung upside down over its tot measure and prepared the drink with a kind of grim insolence of practised movements that was in itself a contempt for those for whom it was all very well to talk. “You can’t get anybody to do anything. They don’t care. They want to be rich. They want to learn to fly aeroplanes. That’s what I get told by one of my kitchen boys, yes, I’m not telling a lie. He doesn’t want to scrub the tables, he can go to town and learn to fly an aeroplane now.”

Bray smiled. “And who told him that?”

“You’re asking me!” But her quick freckled hand, doing what had to be done, wiping the wet ring left by the ice bucket, made it clear that she knew that he knew quite well. “I can only say, since last week I can’t sack any one of these fine pilots out of my kitchen without asking the Ministry of Labour first. You know that, of course? Published last week. I got a circular from the hotel — keepers’ association, though what they think they’re going to be able to do about it — I must get the permission of the labour officer in my area, whoever that is, I don’t know, and what the gentleman whoever — he-is knows about my business—”

They both laughed; her accusation of what Bray was, of all that he had been, he and his kind, was laid out flatly between them along with the plaster Johnny Walker and the S.P.C.A. tin for small change. She sat down again at the set of books beside her glass of beer.

He said, “I can sympathize; it must be hellish difficult for you.”

She didn’t believe him; it was all very well for people like him who hadn’t had to make a living, who were sent out by the British government for a few years and took sides with the blacks because they didn’t have to stay and live with them if they didn’t want to. But she went on, letting him hear it all. “My old Rodwell, Rodwell that worked for Oscar from before we were married. They come here the other day to ask him to show his Party card. I ask you! All he knows is he’s the best — paid cook in the country; twenty — five years he’s been running his kitchen here. Party card! And they turn nasty! They wouldn’t think twice about beating him up on his way down to the compound at night. He says to me, Doña, what can I do—? The bunch of thugs.” She wouldn’t say “the PIP”; by the refusal to name names she was able to say what she pleased without being provocative. There was a curious kind of intimacy of insult in their chat. He said of the new powers the Minister of Labour had taken on himself, “The trouble is there’s danger of unemployment rising, just at present.”

“Well, a lot of people are selling up — if you can find anyone to buy. When these pilots and other gentlemen come back hungry looking for their jobs they’ll be in for a big surprise. The Quirks have gone, last month. Johnny Connolly says he’ll send his cattle to the abattoir at Gala if he can’t get rid of the dairy as a going concern. Lots of people.”

“Oh I’m sure farmers are nervous. But I don’t think it’s a few white people leaving that means much to the labour position. It’s the inevitable hiatus between now and the time when the development plans get going — the harbour at Kundi’s coming, I understand. And the draining of the swamp land round the Isoza area. There aren’t more unemployed people, now, than there were under the colonial administration; it’s just that they naturally have the feeling they’ve done with living in the villages at subsistence level and there’s a danger they may flock to the towns and the mines, where there’s no hope of work for them, really. It could be the old story of peasants without skills leaving the land.”

“Well exactly, what do they know,” she said, “all these years they’ve had their cassava and their goats and their beer. And happier than we are, believe me.”

There was the sound of cars drawing up and voices from the veranda. The two waiters went in and out the bar with orders which she dispensed deftly, the smoke of the cigarette in the corner of her mouth making her keep one eye narrowed. Moving about, she had the big head and pouter chest dwindling to unimportance of the caricatures on the wall. In between times she returned to her accounts, looking down her cheeks at the figures she ticked off while talking to Bray. He asked directly, “Do Africans come here now?”

“It’s the law,” she said, as directly. “My boys serve them if they come. It’s very few; they like their own beer, of course, in their khayas, that’s what they want.… They sit on the veranda and as long as they behave themselves, that’s all right. They know they’ve got to behave themselves.”

“And do the farmers still put chaps in the aviary on Saturday nights?”

She laughed and put down the pen, shaking her head in pleasure. “Oh those were the good days, ay? My, what a night we used to have sometimes. And Christmas and New Year! What a lot of life our crowd here used to have in them. Oscar used to say never again, never again. And every time — good God, ay? Ah, that’s all gone, now.”

She had cast disgruntledness, blood back in her face, moisture of laughter in her eyes — the brief jauntiness of an old dog remembering to wag its tail. He was touched, as always, by a sign of life; but even in the odd moment of warmth she kept in her face an aggression of pride and inferiority: not that he and his kind had deigned, had known how to enjoy themselves!

When he had bathed and changed for dinner she bustled into him in one of the passages, jingling keys. “Sure you got everything you want? Towels, soap — all right? I never know, these days.” He reassured her. The white men were still drinking on the veranda, and the bar was comfortably full, too. Darts were being played and the news was crackling over the radio. There were no black men. The dinner gong had been sounded up and down the corridors, verandas and annexes that made up the complex of the hotel, and the lights were on in the dining — room, but no one made any move to go and eat. He did not feel like sitting in there on his own. But on the veranda he knew no one except perhaps one face — a man with a head of blond bristles catching the light like the fine hairs on a cactus; probably Denniston, who used to be in the mounted police. He ordered a drink and watched the frogs keeping an eye on the humans with pickpocket wariness while snatching flying ants that fell to the veranda floor from the light. Mrs. Pilchey’s cat came to stalk the frogs in turn, and he chased it away. For the first time, he felt an interest in the stuff from the Education Department that was lying in the car; the little school and the schoolmaster roused him to it. He felt some stirrings of purpose towards this job that was not real to him because he was not sure what it ought to be. He had accepted it in his mind as taken on “for his own reasons”: not to be questioned, for the time being, but about which there must be no illusions of objective validity. He went to the car for the file; he could just glance over it while finishing his drink before dinner.