Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“I told you I could smell drains or money.” All the tendons and muscles of Emmanuelle’s brown hands showed with anatomical precision as she buttered a piece of bread.

“What you going to do?” Margot Wentz said.

He appealed to Bray: “What they tell me I have to, eh? Get the builder along and discuss it with the inspector.”

“Have some more salad, Colonel Bray? No? — What builder?” Margot Wentz put down her fork and waited for the answer with the patience of one who knows all the answers she can expect.

Her husband gave her a quick glance. “Well, Atkinson — who else?”

“I don’t think Atkinson will work for us again, Hjalmar.”

Stephen was holding out his plate for another helping of meat; he shook it impatiently, wanting to speak but occupied with the surveillance of what he was getting. “Knock out a few bricks, what’s the big fuss?”

“The water. The regulations.” His mother laid out the facts gently.

“Agh … it’ll be a year before they send someone again, and if they do, well, there’re the air bricks, you knock out a few bricks, that’s all—” The boy was cutting up food, spearing it, now he stopped his mouth with it while his sister, her hands idle on the table, said, “Close your eyes and wait for them to go away, Hjalmar.” Her own narrow black eyes acknowledged Bray’s presence a moment, the pupils seemed actually to contract closed, falling asleep, and then come to life blackly liquid again, and, just as he was thinking how the girl never smiled, she smiled at him, the brilliant, vivid, humorous smile of a deep self — confidence.

Lunch broke up abruptly among the preoccupations of Hjalmar, his wife, and the son; Stephen was summoned by the barman, a coloured man with a strand of silky black moustache. “The trouble is you’re too soft with these guys. Someone’s only got to say he comes from the water board or something … it’s not the end of the world …?” Stephen’s lingering reproach was sympathetic, directed from the door. The barman showed the servant’s facility for pretending not to hear when in his employer’s quarters. Bray felt oddly grouped with him as the man stood there easing his feet in shoes that had cut — outs to accommodate bunions. Hjalmar swallowed his coffee because Margot Wentz reminded him that he had to be at the station in half an hour; she explained to Bray, “If you’re not there when the train comes in, they just take the stuff out of the refrigerated truck and dump it on the platform in the sun.”

“Where’ve you got the invoices?”

“All right, all right, it’ll come to me in a minute—” She got up to follow an instinct that would lead her to the point at which, in the morning’s tread up and down between corridor and kitchen, storeroom and office, she had set down the papers.

Emmanuelle went over and kissed her father on the forehead, for her mother’s benefit. Margot Wentz, picking up glasses to look over the invoices she had found in her handbag, paused as the girl pushed aside with her lips the strand of bright hair that stretched across the baldness; there was on the older woman’s face a groping recognition; and then she turned away in herself and with a hitch of the nose to settle her glasses, peered down at the invoices.

Although Hjalmar was in a hurry he made slow progress with Bray down the passage, talking and pausing to make his point. It was the railways, now; a high incidence of accidents since Africans had been taken on as engine drivers. Bray said, “Drinking seems to be the trouble.” Hjalmar Wentz found it absolutely necessary to place on record in some way the assumptions, the misrepresentations that threatened all round. He invoked Mweta without name, the touchstone of a personal pronoun on which the voice came down with passing emphasis, signally, instantly understood. He said passionately, “Of course they are drinking. They have to show somehow to themselves that the new life is good. How do these whites think their great — grandfathers behaved when they first got wages for a week’s work in a factory in Europe, eh? These Englishmen — their great — grandfathers were getting drunk on cheap gin, and they turn up their noses at the Africans.… But he knows how to go about it, he knows the thing to do. Now he makes it an offence to drink before you go on duty, one drink and you’re out of the job. Sensible, reasonable. You’ll see, soon, eh, the men themselves will impose a code of behaviour — the railways won’t be any worse than before.”

Bray went to the public booth on the veranda to telephone Mweta’s private secretary, Wilfrid Asoni. But he was “not available”; Clive Small, the PRO, came to the telephone as a substitute. He was enthusiastically pleasant; he was sure the President would be delighted and so on— “Do you think it’s possible for me to see him tomorrow?” Small would certainly do his best; as Bray knew, of course, the Big Man had only just come back — Small would leave an urgent note for Asoni — there was all the confident sycophancy of the professionally agreeable in the voice. Then Bray phoned the Bayley house, but was relieved that there was no one home; he did not want to go about among the group of friends until he had seen Mweta. He had half meant to mention to Hjalmar Wentz that it was not necessary to tell Roly Dando he was there, he would do so himself tomorrow. Well, he had said nothing. He decided to leave it all to chance, and even took the car into town to do some shopping; as always, when you lived in a remote posting, there were small comforts that were exotic to the general stores at home. And then it was an event to walk into a bookshop again, even the rather poor one here, stocked mainly with last year’s best sellers and James Bond. He bought himself a paperback Yeats, a book of essays by an African professor of political science at an East African university, a reprint of Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin— everything come upon was a treasure. For a half — hour he forgot why he was in the capital. He bought a stapler and a couple of ball — points that seemed an improvement on the usual kind, trying them out on the recommendation of a pretty little African shopgirl with a crêpey black pompadour and painted eyes. There were children’s books on display and he almost bought a couple of Tin — Tin — for the children, the girl and those little boys, one at either hand of Rebecca Edwards, coming across the open ground between his house and the Tlumes’. But he put the books back on the stand. He collected all the copies — three weeks old — of overseas newspapers and journals he didn’t subscribe to, and came out laden.

When he got back to the Silver Rhino there was a message from the President’s secretary’s office. There was an appointment for him at eleven — fifteen tomorrow morning. Hjalmar Wentz, who had taken the message, showed the opposite of curiosity — in fact, Bray felt overestimated by Wentz’s determinedly laconic discretion, which assumed that Bray’s position was all along some confidential, influential one, for which the banishment to the bush on a vague educational project was a front. “Oh — by the way, if Roly comes into the bar, you won’t say I’m here, will you? I’m going to ring him tomorrow, but I don’t feel particularly sociable at the moment, it would mean a heavy — drinking evening if the two of us get together—”

“Good thing you said so. I’ll warn Stephen.”

His daughter lifted the counter — flap of the office and walked through. Her jutting hip — bones pegged a skimpy cotton dress across her flat belly, she carried a music — case of the kind that children swing. “Emmanuelle, if you should see Mr. Dando, don’t say anything about Colonel Bray being here.”