Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The words lay with the sun on her closed eyelids. After a moment, she said, guardedly, “Why?”

He felt culpable of having heard her talked about in the capital. He didn’t answer at once.

“Because it’s as if it never happened.”

“Then that’s all right,” she said. She lay quite still; presently she sat up and asked for a cigarette, bundling the towel round herself with a complete lack of vanity.

“It’s almost like the beaches at Lake Malawi.”

“Is it? I never ever got to Malawi. We were going there on local leave the year I was kicked out, so it never came off. We used to picnic here with my children, years ago.”

“This beach?” she said.

“Oddly enough, I’ve never been to this particular beach before — didn’t know it existed, till we found it today. — Farther along, we used to go, up past Execution Rock, you know: on the main shore.”

“What’s Execution Rock?”

“You don’t know the legend? Well, closer to us than a legend, really. The Dolo, the tribe of the paramount chief around here, used to have a trial of endurance for their new chief — elect. Before he could take office he had to swim from the mainland to the island. If he managed it, he would be rowed back in triumph. If not, he was supposed to be carted off and executed by being thrown from Execution Rock. That part of it’s never been done in living memory, but the channel swim was still carried out until very recent times — the predecessor of the present chief did it. He was still alive when we came to live here.”

She said, “Is your wife as attached to this place as you are?”

He smiled, half — pleased, half — misunderstood— “Am I so attached?”

She did not want to presume on any knowledge of him. “But you’ve come back.”

“I can’t go explaining to everybody — but how difficult it is when people impose an idea of what one does or is.… And others take it up, so it spreads and goes ahead….” (He realized, with quick recovery, that while he was ostensibly speaking of himself he was suddenly doing so in paraphrase of thoughts about her, the image of her as presented by their friends in the capital, that he had steered away from a few minutes before.) “Coming back’s a kind of dream, a joke — we used to talk about my part after Independence like living happily ever after. Mweta was in and out of jail, I was the white man who’d become victim, along with him, of the very power I’d served. I was a sort of symbol of something that never happened in Africa: a voluntary relinquishment in friendship and light all round, of white intransigence that can only be met with black intransigence. I represented something that all Africans yearned for — even while they were talking about driving white people into the sea — a situation where they wouldn’t have had to base the dynamic of their power on bitterness. People like me stood for that historically unattainable state — that’s all.” He thought, am I making this up as I go along? Did I always think it? — I did work with Mweta, in London, on practical things: the line delegations took, proposals and memoranda and all the rest of the tug — of-war with the Colonial Office. “But the idea persists … Aleke thinks, now, Lebaliso’s been removed at my pleasure. I can see that. He tells me this morning about Lebaliso being given the boot as if remarking on something I already know.” He gave a resigned, irritated laugh. Of course, she would be not supposed to know about Lebaliso — Aleke’s typist. But it gave him some small sense of freeing himself by refusing to respect the petty decencies of intrigue. He knew nothing about Lebaliso’s transfer, and had as little right as she to hear it before the man did himself. “There was a young man — Lebaliso beat him up, in the prison here. He was being detained without being charged. I found out by chance.”

“I suppose Aleke thinks you told them — the President.”

“But of course, I did. And now it’s assumed that all I had to do was ask the President to remove Lebaliso — and it’s done!”

“Just the same, the President must have thought that you thought it would be a good thing. I mean, he’s known you a long time. Whether you asked him or not.”

He instructed himself. “I’m responsible for Lebaliso’s removal, whether I want to be or not.”

“But you think it’s a good thing he’s going? Then why does it matter?”

“There’s a Preventive Detention Act. What he did’s been legalized, now. The principle on which he could’ve been removed seems somewhat weakened.”

She drew up her big thighs, so that, knees under her chin, they hid her whole body. She was removing sand from between her toes. “Perhaps Mweta did it to please you,” she said. At the same moment they noticed the children had disappeared into the bush. “Where’ve they got to?” There was the rambling cadence of small voices. They both made across the heavy sand. He carried back the skinny little white boy, she had the black one, indicating in dumb show how the fat rolls round his thighs outdid the cheeks of his bottom. The child lay looking up at her with the lazy pleasure of one to whom being carried is his due. “I believe you’ve got a grandchild?”

“Yes, a girl.” They smiled. “It seems very, very far away.”

“You’ve never seen it,” she said.

“Oh, photographs.” He gave a little demonstrative jerk at his burden. “This is yours — I ought to know by now, but there are so many always—” Although the boy was dark — haired, as she was, he was completely unlike her, yet with a definitive cast of face that suggested a marked heredity — black eyes under eyebrows already thick and well shaped, berry — coloured lips with a dent in the lower one: there was a man there, despite the poor little legs dangling from scabbed bony knees, and the cold small claws hoary with dirt — grained chapping. Her children were neglected — looking, stoically withdrawn in their games and gaiety as children are when they must accustom themselves to constant and unexplained changes of background and ever new sets of “aunties” and “uncles.”

“He’s Gordon all over again,” she said, as at something that couldn’t be helped. “Not just the looks. The way he speaks, everything. It’s funny, because he’s been with me all the time, I don’t think Gordon’s lived with us for more than three or four months since he was able to walk.”

“They were worried about you, at the Bayleys’.” He was careful how he phrased it. “Whether you’d be happy working for Aleke.”

“Aleke’s a darling. He really is, you know. It’s all a lot of bluff, with him. He likes to think he’s driving me with a whip. Good Lord, he doesn’t know some of the people I’ve worked for. There are some bastards in this world. But I don’t think a black could ever be quite like that.”

“Like what?” The children were playing at the water’s edge again, and he and the girl strolled along the beach.

“Get pleasure out of making you feel about so big. I mean they’re as casual as all hell, they borrow money from you and you never get it back — things like that. But they don’t know how to humiliate that way.”

“—Not Aleke?”

“Oh yes — my first pay check. But that he did pay back. Last month again, and now he’s not so prompt. I don’t mind — that house is really too expensive for them, you know. There’s too much room for relations and they all have to eat, even if it’s only mealie porridge. Agnes’s bought a washing — machine, as well. They’re paying off for furniture.”

“Still, it must put your budget out somewhat.”

She threw away a piece of water — smoothed glass she had picked up. “Aleke! You know what he said — but quite seriously, helping me, you know — when I said that I must have the loan back this month or I couldn’t pay my share of the Tlume household? He would speak to the Tlumes for me, he would explain that with the move, and so on, and the car repairs, I’m rather short….”