Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“You’d better not tell the Bayleys.”

“Oh but Aleke’s fine. I remember once, in Rhodesia, Gordon turned up and found I couldn’t take any more of that old horror I was working for, Humphrey Temple. He wouldn’t even let me go to pick up my salary. He went up to the offices himself, walked straight into Temple’s room and demanded an apology.… Nobody in that office even had the faintest idea who this cocky man was….” She laughed. She said, returning to the Bayleys’ concern, “It’s all right here, for me. At the beginning, I thought I’d just have to pack up and give in. Go back. I felt I’d been mad.… But that was just the usual panic, when you move on.”

“It is isolated. Won’t you be lonely?” He almost added, quite naturally, “—after I’m gone,” not in the sense of his individual person, but of the presence of someone like himself, a link between the kind of life that had existed for white people and created these remote centres, and their future, different life which had not yet cohered.

“I didn’t think about that. You know how when you think only about getting away — that seems to solve everything, you don’t see beyond it. And then when you are — safe … it turns out to be the usual set of practical things, finding somewhere to live, looking for a school … But it’s better, for me. You know how nice they all are, down there. I love those people but”—she looked away from him, out over the lake, then took refuge in a kind of deliberate banality— “I — got — sick — of — them.” There was the pause that often follows a half — truth.

The tempo of their communication switched again. They talked about the lake, and his journeyings round about. “You realize how hard it is to grasp change except in concrete terms. In Europe if you had been away ten years and then come back, you would see the time that had elapsed, in new buildings, landscapes covered with housing schemes, even new models of cars and new styles of clothing on people. But there’s nothing that didn’t look as it did before — the lake the same, the boats the same, the people the same — not so much as a bridge or a road where there didn’t use to be one. And yet everything has changed. The whole context in which all this exists is different from what it has ever been. And then, on top of it, I went to see an old friend … a contemporary of mine, you see, and in him you could see the ten years — grey hairs, a broken tooth, the easy signs that make you feel you know where you are. But he turned out to have a new — born son — there was a baby born the same time as I got a grandchild!”

“Nothing so extraordinary about that,” she said, inquiringly amused.

“But confusing,” he said, also laughing.

“I don’t see why. Perhaps he’s a grandfather as well.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Several times over. He had many other sons, as I remember.”

“Oh, an African.”

“Have you ever heard of Shinza — Edward Shinza?”

“Can’t remember. I suppose so. A political leader? I usually know the names of the cabinet ministers but after that I give up. You’ll find I’m an ass at politics, I’m afraid. Not like Vivien.”

“He’s an old friend. He was the founder of PIP.”

She said, “You know everybody.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s the trouble.”

“Let me paddle on the way back, will you?” she said. “My God, this lake is wonderful. It makes all the difference.”

“To what?”

She looked for a moment as if she did not know, herself. “To living here.” Sunburn highlighted the flanges of her nostrils and her cheekbones, and her lips looked dry — she seemed to have brought no make — up with her with which to make repairs. It was true that there was a deliberate lack of flirtatiousness in her. It was almost an affront. Her yellow, lioness gaze rested on the children.

That evening when the whole party was back home, he walked across the vacant ground to get rid of the bits and pieces children had left in his car. She was playing chess on the veranda with Nongwaye Tlume; they had a modern gas — lamp that gave an underworld, steel — coloured light. She dumped the miscellany on a chair and walked with him through the garden which had no fence and was marked off from the scrub only by a few heads of zinnia and the shallow holes and tracks made by children. “I taught Nongwaye to play but now he beats me regularly. When I grumble he says it’s an old African custom, to beat women — but he’s so westernized he does it at chess.” Strolling, chatting, her arms crossed over her breasts, she ended up nearer his house than the other one, and came in for a drink. “Is it too cool to sit under the fig?”

“No, no, I’d love to sit under the famous fig.”

He had a little candlestick with a glass mantel. It lit the fissures and naves of the great tree like a lamp held up in a cave; even at night the bark was overrun by activity, streaming with ants and borers indentured for life.

“You seem to get on very well in the Tlume household.” It interested him that a woman who appeared to have little or nothing of the liberal principles and fervour that would make the necessity a testing virtue, should find living with an African family so unremarkable. She apparently had been brought up in the colonial way, and had lived her life in preserves on the white side of the tracks, wherever she had been.

She said, “They just are very nice people. I was lucky. It’s a hell of a risk, to share a house.”

“You haven’t found them rather different? — you know, in the small ways that count rather a lot when you’re living together.”

“Well, it is another thing, of course — when you live with people. For the last year or two I’ve been working with Africans and then in our crowd at the Bayleys’ there were African friends; but I’ve never lived with them before. But as I said this afternoon … at the time, I didn’t think about anything … and I had to get out of that hotel and the chance came up. … Of course it is a bit different — there’s not much privacy in the house, we really do all live together, I mean, it’s not the arrangement of these are my quarters and those are yours, that I’d assumed. They just take it for granted; we eat together, people wander in on you all the time.… But at the same time there is a kind of privacy, another kind. They never ask questions. They simply accept everything about you.” When he came back out of the house with their beer, she said, “Of course, Gordon’s up in arms. I wrote to tell him where we were and, naturally, that brought a letter from him. I got it last week — what sort of educational background for his children and all that. He nearly had a fit. Whenever he gets all concerned he writes these sort of lawyer’s letters, so snooty and silly. He sees us sitting in the yard eating mealie porridge out of a big pot — you don’t know Gordon’s imagination.” She laughed derisively but almost proudly.

“Where is Gordon?” he said, as if he knew him.

“I hate to tell you.” Half confidential, half enjoying an opportunity to shock. “In the Congo, with that old bastard Loulou Kamboya”—she saw him trying to place the name— “no, not a politician, just an ordinary crook. Well, extraordinary. Gordon met him in a bar in Zambia, Loulou goes all over the place in his black Mercedes. Gordon went into the souvenir business with him. Loulou’s got a ‘factory’ making those elephant — hair bracelets. He supplies all kinds of hideous things — fake masks and horn carvings. He wanted to get down to South Africa to make contacts in the curio racket there, but of course they wouldn’t let him in. So Gordon went for him. There was going to be a fortune in it, they were going to have a network over Africa from east to west and north to south — you know. I don’t know what’s happened — it seems to have faded out. In this last letter Gordon says he’s taking a job on the Cabora Bassa thing — the dam. He worked on Kariba, of course: that was when I went to Salisbury. He’s an engineer when he has to be. — If you ever want any elephant — hair bracelets, I’ve got a surplus stock.”