Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The books on cattle breeding had pushed the Mort d’Arthur, the Iliad and Churchill’s memoirs to the top shelves but there were book — club novels and The Alexandria Quartet in paperback accessible among the farming journals, and some seedpods and a giant snail — shell lying among rifle cartridges on a tray. — Bray remembered George Boxer’s wife, a black — haired woman with green eyes, pretty until she smiled on little, stained, cracked teeth. They had had a son; just entered Sandhurst, Boxer said, as if reminded of something he hadn’t thought of lately.

“Why the Bashi?” Bray asked. “I shouldn’t have thought it was the place for cattle.”

“No, no, that’s the point — it’s a lot of nonsense about the low altitude and so on. I’ve gone into the whole business thoroughly for ten years, I’ve collected sample pasture, recorded water supplies, collected every kind of tick there is all over this country. And you can take my word, there are no fewer tick — borne diseases up here than on the Flats, it’s exactly the same problem, and the natural pasture is infinitely better. If the water — conservation scheme goes ahead — the flood — water diversion one, I mean — I think one wouldn’t have to supplement feed at all, not even in August — November, before the rains. You could keep your pasture going right round the year. And you’d have no problem about watering your cattle. You see, at the moment, when the floods recede, everything drains away quickly to the south.”

“But I’ve seen ground water there right through the dry season.”

“No, no, you haven’t. Not clean water. Swamp soup, that’s all. You can’t go through the winter on that. That’s why you get the big cattle migration every year, and that’s how foot — and-mouth has spread, every time there’s been an outbreak. Pick it up on the Angolan border and trek it back to the Flats in November.” He drank beer and tea indiscriminately as he talked — his was the dehydration of fatigue, he had been up all night with his cattlemen and the dogs after a hyena that had killed three calves in the last month. The elegant dogs had cornered and killed it; it had not needed even a final shot. They lay and panted around him, their film — star eyelashes drooping over unseeing eyes, too nervously exhausted to sleep with them closed. But Boxer was fired with the chance — not to communicate but to expound aloud, reiterate, the tactics, successes and reverses of his year — in, year — out campaign in the calm bush where, through the windows, as the men talked they could see his cattle move, cropping singly, stumblingly, or driven — far off — flowing in brown spate close through the thin trees. He took Bray to a bathroom where, in aspirin bottles in the cupboard, there were labelled specimens of all the varieties of ticks to be found in the country— “All that I’ve been able to identify, so far—” He made the reservation with the objective modesty of scientific inquiry. Many of the ticks were alive, living in a state of suspended animation for months without food or air. In the disused bath, silverfish moths wriggled; Boxer turned a stiff, squeaky tap to flush them out. There were peeling transfers of mermaids and sea — horses on the pink walls of this laboratory.

Boxer showed no interest or curiosity in Bray’s return to the country or his activities now that he was there. But Bray was quick to see that some use could be made of George Boxer’s knowledge, if one could find the right way to approach him. No good suggesting that he offer his services to Mweta’s agricultural planning committee — human contact on any abstract level reduced him to cold sulks. “If you come into Gala sometime — I mean if you’re coming anyway — perhaps you would talk to the people doing the animal husbandry course we’re hoping to set up. We want to get the old craft schools going again on a new basis — a modest trades school, of course with practical farming techniques lumped along with anything else that’s useful. I don’t see why it should be left to agricultural colleges — even if we had one. It might fit in with your own line of inquiry — the chaps could collect grasses and stuff from the places where they run their cattle.”

“Oh Gala. I don’t think I’ve been more than once since Caroline left — Caroline’s in England.”

“Well, when she gets back, no doubt you’ll find yourself coming to town again, and then—?”

“Must be more than two years. Time flies. I don’t suppose the place has changed. Amazing; don’t know where the days go to. When did you people come back?”

“Olivia’s following. I’ve been here — yes, I suppose it’s more than three months. She was supposed to come as soon as Venetia’s baby was born—”

Boxer looked round the pink walls, over his neat bottles of ticks. “Her bathroom,” he said. He meant the wife with the bad teeth. “What in the world d’you need two bathrooms for.” A comfortable feeling of understanding, based idiotically, Bray felt, on misunderstanding, encircled them. Olivia was coming; how quickly three months had gone by.

It was absurd to bother to set things straight with Boxer. They went on talking in the tacit ease of men who have drifted the moorings of family ties.

When Bray got back to his car, his passenger had gone. Boxer called a servant; the meal taken to the man had been eaten. They looked about for him but he was not to be found. Bray felt slightly rebuffed, as if there had been some sort of response expected from him that he had failed to understand. “He wasn’t a very forthcoming passenger,” he said, with the defence of a philosophical irony. “Probably just out of clink,” Boxer said. “Head was shaved, eh, I noticed.”

Bray went over the Bashi Mountain pass, thumping on the worn springs of the car through sudden U — shaped dips into stream — beds, shuddering over rises covered with loose stones. He spent the first night in the old government rest hut at Tanyele village. Under the mopane trees pink and mauve flowers bloomed straight out of the sandy soil, without visible stem or leaf, as if stuck there by children playing house. At first he thought of them as irises (irises in bloom round the lily pool in Wiltshire) but then they fell into place as the wild lilies that Venetia and Pat used to pick when, as small girls, they had the treat of being allowed to go on a tax — collecting tour with him. He heated himself a tin of curry and rice; there had used to be an old cook attached to the rest — house who wore a high chef’s hat and made ground — nut stew on a Primus.

He woke next day to the gentle tinkle of goats’ bells and went to visit the local schoolmaster. Everybody seemed to remember him; he drank beer with Chief Chitoni and his uncle, the old Regent who had kept the stool warm when Bray was D.C., and was presented with a fierce white fowl and some sweet potatoes. At a decent distance from Tanyele, he untied the fowl’s legs and let it loose in the bush; someone appeared among the trees and he hoped it was not a Tanyele villager. Then he saw that it was, in fact, his passenger, still carrying his cardboard suitcase. Bray smiled; the other did not seem to feel any bond of acquaintance, but climbed into the car once more as if they had met by appointment. At the next night’s stop, he insisted on sleeping in the car and kept himself aloof from the people of the village. His shoes were grey with dried mud, now, broken in to the form of his feet, and when he moved his arms, a strong, bitter blast of sweat filled the car. But it was as if whatever had been locked inside him now escaped, harmless, a pungent dread. The stink was nothing; that dark, depersonalized, vice — hold of presence had become a tired, dirty body that had walked a long way in the sun. On the third day he suddenly asked Bray to stop the car; Bray thought he wanted to relieve himself but after disappearing among the trees for a moment or two he came back and said, “I stay here, sir.” There was a charcoal burners’ camp nearby.