Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The baby’s arms and legs, where he lay on her lap, waved like the tentacles of some vigorous underwater creature. She said, “Must I tell him you came?”

“If you don’t think it will get you into trouble with him.”

“I’ll tell him.”

The baby gave a little shriek of joy. He whispered, “Your son’s a fine boy,” and took the cigars back with him, in case she decided to forget that he had come.

The new chief of police had arrived; a man from the Central Province, but a Dendi, one of the Gala — speaking tribes. “Ex-middleweight,” Aleke said, “Once had a go for the title about ten years ago, they tell me.”

“Punch-drunk?”

“Oh no, no he’s all right up there.” Aleke laughed.

Rebecca told him, “The new police chief’s been in to ask for you.” “Really? What should he want me for?” The next time he was at the boma, she put her head around the door quickly— “He’s here again.” A few minutes later Aleke’s voice mingled with another in the corridor, and Aleke brought in a man as tall as Bray himself, with the flat — nostrilled but curved nose that the mingling of the blood of Arab slavers with the local populations had left behind. Evidently the nose had not been broken although the whole face had a boxer’s asymmetry. Aleke went off. “I’ll tell the boy to bring you tea.”

“I’m glad to know you are here in this district, Colonel, it’s an honour.”

“And you — are you pleased with your new posting?”

The exchange of genialities went on.

“Oh yes, well, you get accustomed to this moving about. We are still reorganizing, you know. The country is young, isn’t it so? Well, I’m just getting organized — there are always little things, when you take over. But I don’t think I’ll have trouble. There will be no irregularities from now on. From now on everything will be”—he spread his fingers and jerked his hands apart— “straight — right—” And he laughed, disposing of peccadilloes.

“I’ve heard of your reputation in the ring,” Bray said. “I’m going to have to ask you to come along and give us some tips at the centre. We’re going to have various recreation clubs there, as well.”

“Oh, a pleasure, a pleasure, if I can fit it in — this job of mine is really full time — you never know when you can count on being free for a few hours, just to take it easy—” The affability of a man making promises he knew he would not be asked to fulfil.

And the girl had said, perhaps Mweta did it to please you. There would be “no irregularities, now”; also to please me? There wasn’t anything else the policeman could have come to see him for. Bray sat in the worn chair at the desk that was not really his, and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. His hands pushed the skin back from the sides of his nose over the cheekbones, pressed up the slack of his neck, lifted the eyebrows out of shape. Shinza was over the border; with friends, there; again. The wife said that: again. Shinza goes back and forth over the border, and perhaps they know about it — he saw the pleasant, battered face of the policeman who replaced Lebaliso — perhaps they know, and perhaps they don’t. Mweta would be wounded because no letter came. It would be so simple to take a sheet of paper and write: you were right about Shinza not being at home, he goes and comes across the border, his wife says. You may have some ideas about who it is he sees over there.

He was very short — sighted and taking off his glasses had the effect of drawing the world in towards him as a snail does its horns. The greenery outside the window was blurred. The titles of the reference books on the dusty shelf — trade directories, an ancient Webster’s — were illegible to him. He sat in this visually contracted world, obstinately, doing nothing. But his mind could not be held back; it was after Shinza, ferreting down this dead end and that, following and discarding scraps of fact and supposition.

He had told Rebecca he hadn’t been able to see Shinza because Shinza was ill; everyone else was vague about his purposes and destinations, anyway. She spent a lot of time at the house, now. At first she came only at night, disappearing from the Tlumes’ after they had gone to bed, coming across the scrub with her little pencil — torch, and being escorted home by the hand through the dark trees at two or three in the morning. The nights were so blackly brilliant then, the stars all blazing low together like a meteor tail, and the cicadas and tree — frogs silenced by the chilled air; they could hear each other breathing as they quickly covered the short distance. When he came back the fire was fragrant ash, the room warm; each evening consumed itself, and left no aftermath. Then she began to come to eat with him and would stay the night, leaving only just before Kalimo unlocked the house in the early morning, and before “the kids burst in” to her room up the road. She told him that as it grew light she and Edna Tlume would sit and drink coffee together in the kitchen — Edna got up very early to do her housework before going on duty at the hospital.

“What do the Tlumes think?”

“Oh they are very discreet. I told you. They don’t think anything.”

In spite of himself, he remembered the ease with which they talked of her, from hand to hand, down in the capital.

“D’you know what Edna said? ‘After all, where is your husband? A girl must have a man.’ It was so African.”

She was standing at his table, where he sat with his papers. He drew her in and pressed his face to her belly through the stuff of her skirt, then pushed up her sweater and took out her breasts, releasing the warm breath of her body that was always enclosed by them. She had a way of standing quite still, with patient pleasure, while she was caressed. He found it greatly exciting. He had not thought her body beautiful at first but as it became familiar it became imbued, transparent, with sensation — it was the shape, texture and colour itself of what was aroused in him.

She moved unremarkably into the empty house with ordinary preoccupations of her own; cobbled at children’s crumpled clothes, sitting on the rug before the fire, wrote letters in her large, sign — writer’s hand, did things to her hair, shut up on Sunday afternoons in his bathroom. She brought over her sewing machine and began to remake the curtains. “When your wife comes she’ll have a fit, seeing these awful things.”

Olivia had written saying that she really promised to come, now, by November — it was the shy, culpable letter of a spoilt little girl who knows she’s been exploiting the will to have things her own way. November was a long way off, to Bray. All time concepts seemed to be stretched; or rather, unrealizable. Next week and November were both equally out of mind. He did not know where he would be, any time other than the present. He did not know what he meant by that: where he would be. There was a growing gap between his feelings and his actions, and in that gap — which was not a void, but somehow a new state of being, unexpected, never entered, unsuspected — the meaning lay. He sat in the same room with the girl and wrote to Olivia, saying with affectionate reproach, November was about time, but it was a pity she was missing the winter, which she might have forgotten was so lovely, in Gala. There was nothing in the letter that touched upon him. All the easy intimacy it expressed was extraneous; the thin sheets lay like a shed snakeskin retaining perfectly the shape of a substance that was not there. He folded the letter and put it in the envelope.

Rebecca was doing some typing for him; that was inevitable. She looked up, mouthing a word; then focused, giving a quick faint smile. He said to her, “Edward Shinza was away when I drove to the Bashi.”