Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He lay in a bed that, like nearly all hotel beds, was too small for him, and read. Mrs. Pilchey’s clip — on bed lamp had a broken neck and he turned on the bulb in the ceiling. It shone at a point just between his eyes. He read through everything there was in the Education Department’s file; very little, in terms of something to go on. In most places figures were not analysed properly, and the frequent “unforeseen circumstances” that caused a high percentage of failures, or the abandonment of modest experimental schemes, were never explained. When he turned out the light the silence was deep, deeper; as if the night measured the distance he already had come.

He spent his first week in Gala occupied with what he described in letters to England as housewifery. The house, vacated by an accountant declared redundant under the new system of administration, had no cook and no curtains. He stayed in the local hotel while word — of-mouth brought applicants for the post, and the Indian tailor consented to make the curtains. Mr. Joosab was distressed at Bray’s choice of material, but Bray and Olivia had always liked the maroons and blacks, the oranges and browns, and the gnomic texts in Swahili or Gala printed on the cloth local women wrapped round themselves and their babies — he didn’t have to bother with considerations of what was or was not considered suitable for a D.C.’s house, this time.

The broad main street that was Gala had been tarred along its high — cambered middle but the rose — tan earth remained in a wide border down either side, splotched, pocked, and sometimes blotted out in deep shadow from the mahogany trees that hung above it. Gala was an old place as colonial settlements go; and even before it became a British outpost, Tippo Tib had established one of his most southerly slave depots there — to the north of the village there was the site of his Arab fort. Walls had fallen down in the village but trees remained; too big to be hacked out of the way of the slave — caravan trail; too strong to be destroyed by fire when British troops were in the process of subduing the population; revered by several generations of colonial ladies, who succeeded in having a local by — law promulgated to forbid anyone chopping them down. Their huge grey outcrops of root provided stands for bicycles and booths for traders and craftsmen; the shoemaker worked there, and the bicycle and sewing — machine repairer. There was a slave tree (the trade had been conducted under it as lately as a hundred years before) that the same English ladies had had enclosed in a small paved area and railing, with a plaque quoting Wilberforce. It was down in the part of the village where, Bray found, the beginnings of industry had started up since he last saw the place. Young workers from the fish — meal plant and lime works hung about there, now, playing dice and shedding a litter of potato crisp packets.

His big figure in the grey linen bush jacket and trousers he had found for himself in the capital moved busily back and forth across the road from sun and shade in and out of the interior of the shops. The familiar smells assailed him — calico, paraffin, millet, sacks of dried kapenta with the tin scoop stuck among the musty little fish; the old feel of grains of spilt sugar and maize meal gritted between the soles of shoes and the cracked concrete floors. In the tailor’s shop, sweetness of cardamoms hanging about the bolts of cloth and shiny off — cuts of lining. The same framed pictures of Edwardians with long cigarette holders and shooting sticks; a photograph of Mweta in his toga beside the old one of the Queen. Mr. Joosab and his son, Ahmed, were almost the first people from the old days whom Bray spoke to. (The hotel had changed hands; there were black clerks in the post office, now.) Joosab was a pale fat man in shirtsleeves, with a tape measure worn like an order over his waistcoat. His soft laugh was nearly soundless; he stood there with Ahmed, who was thin, dark, and had grown up — as Bray remembered the mother — with that obsessed, slightly mad look that comes of having very black eyes with a cast.

“The Colonel, it’s the Colonel, you have come back to us ….” Joosab’s bright gaze darted, brimmed and danced like an embarrassed girl’s. “My second son, Ahmed … you don’t remember the Colonel (he was a small child, eh, Colonel) … Colonel Bray? Of course you remember! The District Commissioner, and Mrs. Bray — oh what a nice lady!”

The thick glossy straight hair seemed to rise and sink on the boy’s head in a speechless response of embarrassment.

“Well, the Colonel … my, we’ll be glad to have you back. I’ve often said to my wife, we don’t have a gentlemen like the Colonel, again! Oh Mr. Maitland, he came when you left, he was a nice gentlemen, oh yes. And then Mr. Carter, and then there was Mr. Welwyn — Jones. But not a long time, I think he was only here about fifteen month … oh the Colonel …”

“And how’ve you been, Mr. Joosab, how are things going?”

He was still laughing soundlessly, spreading his smooth hands like a member of a welcoming committee. “Oh all right, yes, I can say all right”—he suppressed a coquettish little shrug, as if he had almost let slip a secret— “of course things are a bit unsettled, business has dropped off a bit, oh that’s only natural, of course, Colonel. I’m not complaining — you understand? Our community supports the government a hundred per cent. We are contributing to Party funds — last year more than five hundred pounds. And we have the assurance of the President — oh yes, we have had that. Of course a lot of people have gone — you know, the old Government people, all gone. Oh I know how they feel, I can imagine. Dr. Pirie and Mrs. Pirie, gone back to England, sold their place. He built a lovely house a few years ago, on the lake, when he retired, you know. But of course they don’t want to stay now, naturally.… Why should they … Up in your house”—he meant the D.C.’s residence—” there’s Mr. Aleke now, with his wife and seven or eight little children. Yes. The place looked perfect when you and Mrs. Bray were there, Colonel — the garden, it was wonderful! Mrs. Bray’s garden. And what was the other lady — Mrs. Butterworth? Oh yes, what a nice lady. You know I made the first pair of ladies’ slacks for her? I said, but Mrs. Butterworth, madam, I never made for ladies. But she was a lady who like to get what she want, you know. You can do it, she say, you can do it! And Mr. Playfair. He won the golf championship again this year. He’s still here, and Mr. Le Roy, and the Andersons up at the club — Mr. Anderson’s still the chairman of the committee, they’re putting on a show there, this month. I think it’s Mr. Parsifal again who arrange it, you know he’s a very clever man—” He related all the details of the activities of the white community in which he had never had any part. “Oh there’s quite a lot from the old days,” he promised. “You’ll see, Colonel—” It was not that he had forgotten that these were the people who had demanded that the Colonial Office have Bray removed, but that he remembered only too well — it was his way of dealing with events, to shield himself and others from danger by bowing in all directions at once.

Most of the white tradespeople in the village greeted Bray with professional cheerfulness overlaying a certain stony — facedness. They had not forgotten either; but someone would be getting his custom. He had no particular awareness of his “position” among them; the past in relation to Mweta and Edward Shinza and the country’s future meant something to him, but the past in relation to his difficulties with the Colonial Service and the settlers was simply an outdated conflict in which each side had acted — fair enough — according to the convictions in a particular historical situation, a situation that no longer existed. Not objectively, and not for him; he had been away, and come back clear of it. The fact that he was sent to his old district did not seem of any particular significance to him except that it sensibly took advantage of the fact that here he knew the language and the people; he did not see himself as coming back to a place from which he had been driven out — of what relevance to the present was that sort of petty triumph?