Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

There was a note from Mweta in the mail, too. The plain typewritten envelope had given no indication of who the writer might be, and when he opened the sheet inside and saw the handwriting it was with a sense of the expected, the inevitable, rather than surprise. Mweta hoped the grant “was enough”; he urged again — what about a decent house? When was Olivia coming? He had thought he would have a letter by now, but perhaps Bray had been on the move again, about the country? “We mustn’t lose touch.”

Every time Bray met the fact of the letter on the table he was gripped by a kind of obstinacy. The letter was a hand on his shoulder, claiming him; he went stock-still beneath it. His mind turned mulishly towards the facts and figures of his report: this is my affair, nothing else. This is my usefulness. He would not answer the letter; his answer to Mweta would be no answer.

A day or two later he was writing the letter in his head, accompanied by it as he walked across the street in Gala. You know me well enough to know I cannot “move about” the country for you: I can’t inform on Shinza to you, however carefully we put it, you and I. You can’t send me in where Lebaliso can’t effect entry, I cannot be courier — cum-spy between you and Shinza. I did not come back for that.

The letter composed and recomposed itself again and again. Once while he was tensely absorbed in a heightened version (this one was a letter to make an end; after it was sent one would get on a plane and never be able to come back except as a tourist, gaping at lions and unable to speak the language) he met the Misses Fowler at the garage. He had not seen the two old ladies since his return from England, although he had made inquiries about them and meant to visit them some time. They were trotting down from the Princess Mary Library with their books carried in rubber thongs, just as they did ten or fifteen years ago, when they used to lunch with Olivia at the Residence on their twice — monthly visit to town. Disappointed in love during the war — before-the-last, they had come “out to Africa” together in the early Twenties and driven far up the central plateau in a Ford (Miss Felicity, the elder, had been an ambulance driver in that war). They grew tea on the slopes of the range above the lake and were already part of the landscape long before he had become D.C. of the district. Miss Adelaide ran a little school and clinic at their place; they saw courtesy, charity, and “uplift” as part of their Christian duty towards the local people, although, as Felicity freely confessed to Olivia, they would not have felt comfortable sitting at table with Africans the way the Brays did. When the settlers met at the Fisheagle Inn to press for Bray’s removal from the boma because of his encouragement of African nationalists, the Fowler sisters rose from their seats in dissent and protested. Apart from Major Boxer (who had done so by default, anyway), they were the only white people who had defended him.

Adelaide did most of the talking, as always, taking over Felicity’s sentences and finishing them for her. They were mainly concerned with Olivia — she was at home in Wiltshire, wasn’t she? She would be there?

“Are you going over on a visit?”

“Oh, no — we’re—”

“You must have heard that we’re leaving,” Adelaide stated. “Surely you’ve heard.”

It seemed necessary to apologize, as if for lack of interest.

“There are so many things I don’t seem to hear.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you see much of them,” Felicity said, meaning the local white residents.

“Oh, it’s all right, everything is quite amicable, you know. — I’ve so often thought of coming to see you, and then I kept promising myself, when Olivia comes—”

Adelaide’s old head, the thin hair kept the colour and texture of mattress coir, under a hairnet, tremored rather than was shaken. She said firmly, “Our time has run out. We are museum pieces, better put away in a cupboard somewhere.”

He said, “I should have thought you would have been quite happy to let it run out, here. You really feel you must leave your place? I think you’d have nothing to worry about, you’d be left in peace?”

Felicity said, “We’ve had these inspectors coming — Adelaide had to guarantee that we’d not lay anybody off, in the plantation, you know. And they have a new native inspector for the schools — he wanted to know if I was following the syllabus and he—”

“There’s nothing the matter with that, Felicity.” Adelaide spoke to her and yet ignored her. “But we’re too old, James. You can’t stay on in a country like this just to be left in peace.”

They chatted while Bray’s tyres were pumped and his battery topped up with water. He promised to write to Olivia and tell her the Misses Fowler were coming. He saw that Adelaide’s books were Lord Wavell’s memoirs and a Mickey Spillane.

They went off down the street under the trees, Adelaide with her white cotton gloves and hairnet, Felicity in her baggy slacks and men’s sandals. Old Adelaide (they used to call her Lady Hester Stanhope, they used to laugh about her, he and Olivia) was not a romantic, after all. She had not been a liberal and now she was not a romantic. The old girls hadn’t wanted to sit in their drawing — room with Africans, but now they did not expect to be left in peace there. They had recognized themselves for an anachronism.

By such encounters as this, remote from him, really, his mind was tipped. Again, the letter was mentally torn up. Thrown to the winds. What sort of priggish absurdity did he make of himself? The virginal drawing away of skirts from the dirt. I am not — this, not — that. What am I, then, for God’s sake? A boy scout? Clapping my hand over my backside? A vast impatience with himself welled up; and that was something new to him, too, another kind of violation — he had never before been sufficiently self — centred to indulge in self — disgust. There had always been too much to do. But now I refuse, I refuse to act. Because it’s not my place to do so.

He thought again: then go away, go back to the house in Wiltshire. Finish the damned education thing. May be some use, can’t do any harm. What you set out to do.

Yet like the gradual onset of a toothache or a headache came the recurrent tension that he was going to see Shinza, couldn’t stop himself, would one day find himself calmly making the small preparations to drive back to the Bashi. He would go to Shinza again, and he would know why when he got there.

The Tlumes, the Edwards girl and her children, the Alekes and Bray — they drifted together and saw each other almost every day without any real intimacy of friendship. Gala was so small; the Tlumes and the Alekes, along with a few other officials’ families, were isolated from the black town; Rebecca, because she was a newcomer living under conditions new to the white community, and Bray, because of the past, both were isolated from the white town. Bray often shared the evening meal at the Malembas down in the old segregated township, but also he sometimes would be summoned by a barefoot delegation of Edwards and Tlume children to come over and eat at the Tlume house across the vacant piece of ground. And the Alekes’ house — his own old house — by virtue of its size was the sort of place where people converged. His bachelor shelter, without woman or child, remained apart, the table laid for a meal and shrouded against flies by Kalimo’s net.

They were all going to the lake for the day, one weekend, and he found himself included in the party. An overflow of children and some picnic paraphernalia were dumped at his house as his share of the transport; the children sang school songs to him as he drove. On arrival, the company burst out of the cars like a cageful of released birds and scattered with shouts and clatter. Bray and Aleke were left to unpack; Aleke had brought a scythe in anticipation of the waist — high grass on the lake shore and took off his shirt while he cleared a space as easily as any labourer outside the boma. He had sliced a small snake in two — a harmless grass — snake. He put it aside, in schoolboy pleasure, to show the others, and, wiping the blade with a handful of grass, stood eyeing Bray amusedly. He remarked, “So we’re getting rid of Lebaliso.”