Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

We were, we were. “You’re anxious about Gordon?” Still dressed, he sat on the edge of the bath; her brown nipples stuck out of the water, hardened by the cool air, the weight of her breasts when she had suckled children had stretched the skin in a wavering watermark. It was a young (she was only twenty — nine, he knew by now), damaged body, full of knowledge. “Oh Lord no.”

“Somebody might be kind enough to tell him. I suppose everyone knows. The whole village.” He had never thought about it before; it might be a scandal, for all he knew, among what was left of the white locals. If no one had seen the pencil — torch and the two figures crossing the piece of bush in the early hours of the morning, then it was unlikely that Kalimo had not gossiped to other servants.

“I don’t think so.” She was thinking of the loyal Tlumes, the Alekes; the white people she really knew only as the parents of children who were at school with hers. “He lives in a world of his own. Just every now and then he remembers our existence. You’ll like Gordon, you’ll see. He’s a very likeable person. Everyone does.”

She might have been talking of an old friend, rather a character. He said, “I’ll believe in him when I see him.”

“Oh I know.” On an impulse she got out of the bath and streaming wet, with wet fingers, undid his shirt and pants and pressed herself against him, a contact at once nervously unpleasant and yet delightful.

Early in the morning he woke with a fierce contraction of dismay, it seemed because Kalimo was at the door and she was still there — they must have overslept. His clenched heart swept this knowledge into some other anguish, left from the day before. Kalimo opened the door but did not bring in coffee. In fact, it was much earlier than coffee — time, and he had come to tell Bray that there was someone to see him. Bray half — understood, and forgot the girl, calling out, “Kalimo, what on earth is it all about — say what you mean, come here—” And Kalimo opened the door and stood facing the bed, after one quick glance not seeming to see, either, the woman stirring. “Mukwayi, he say he the brother of your friend, there — there—”

Outside the kitchen door, under the skinny paw — paws in the strangely artificial light of dawn, a young man stood hunched against the chill.

Shinza wanted to see him. “At Major Boxer’s place! He’s there now?”

“Yes. Or you can tell me what day you are going to come. He will come there.”

He watched the man off, one of those figures in shirt and trousers who are met with on all the roads of the continent, miles from anywhere ahead, miles from anywhere behind, silent and covering ground. The red sun came up without warmth behind the paw — paw trees, as between the fingers of an outstretched hand. It struck him full in the eyes and he turned away. He walked round the front of the house and stood under the fig. As many arms as Shiva, and dead — still, always stiller than any other tree, even in the calm and silent morning, because its foliage was so sparse, in old age, that air currents did not show. It was surrounded by its own droppings; fruit that had dried without ripening and fallen, dead leaves, grubs and cocoons. She came out of the house dressed, looked once behind her and then came over to him.

“I may go off, today or tomorrow, for a day. No, not to the capital. He wants to talk to me — from the Bashi.”

As she went across the rough grass he was struck by the subdued look of her, and called softly, “Rebecca!” She paused. “All right?” —Of course, Kalimo had walked in on them; he must know anyway, but all the same … She nodded her head vehemently, the way her children sometimes did. It was only when he was on the road that the thought crossed his mind that he had not noticed whether Kalimo showed any particular attitude in his manner when he served breakfast. Kalimo’s proprietorial dependency had belonged to Olivia and himself as the couple, the family; yet he had not, even by the quality of a silence, asserted Olivia’s presence — in-absence. Perhaps in some subconscious way even Kalimo found Bray’s presence different, in relation to himself, from what it had been before — he remained a servant, but although nothing was changed materially for him the emotional dependency between ruler and ruled was gone. With the dependency went the proprietary rights, also the concern. Or maybe Kalimo was just older, and seeing Olivia as part of a past.

Because of the iron-ore mine, the Bashi road as far as Boxer’s was kept in fair repair. There were the usual work gangs making good in the dry season the pot holes and washaways of summer, and every now and then he was waved onto a detour by a barefoot labourer prancing with a red rag on a stick, but he still reached the farm by two in the afternoon. He was slightly dazed from having driven so long without a stop. Boxer’s polished leggings shone in the sun. “I don’t know what the old devil wants.” He absolved himself at once of any association with Shinza or anybody else. “But it’s all right with me, if you’ve got doings with him. Take your time. He came to see me once to borrow money!” It was one of the few things that could make Boxer laugh: the idea that he might have any money lying around to lend. He was also making use of the dry season — to put up some new farm building. Bray had to look at a consignment of precast concrete blocks that couldn’t be laid properly because they were all out of true. “Bloody things taken from the moulds before they’re dry!” The blocks came from the new factory at Gala; Bray had to promise to complain.

Boxer went on with the job of sorting out the usable blocks, calling, “Where’s that boy? I don’t know where milord is himself, though I know he’s arrived because I saw his father — in-law’s car down over at my dam — but he’s left someone here to look out for you.” His face reflected emotions that had nothing to do with what he was sayingannoyance at each fresh evidence of misshapen cement, distrust of the judgement of the two black cattlemen who were working under his eye. The scout had disappeared. “Oh well, must’ve gone to fetch him. You can go along into the house. I don’t mind. Pour yourself a drink or ask in the kitchen for some tea.”

One of the Afghans followed Bray back to the house. The signs of division of the rooms between the various functions of the household during a previous occupancy — the Boxers as a family — were becoming completely overlaid by the single — mindedness of an existence so perfectly contained by the preoccupation of cattle breeding that it really had no diversity of functions to be reflected. The living-room, going the way of the bathroom that Bray remembered from last time, was slowly losing the character of its old designation as phials of vaccine, pamphlets on feeds, dried specimens of pasture grasses had settled among the tarnished silver and the Staffordshire dogs, and three pairs of boots, still encrusted with summer mud, had found an obviously permanent home on a small red — gold Shiraz next to the sofa. It wasn’t that nothing was put away in the right place, but there was no longer any place in the house that was not appropriate for anything. Bray opened the liquor cupboard and took a can of beer from among bottles of bloat medicine. He heard a car and took out a second can. The beautiful male dog that looked so humanly feminine — a kind of inversion of anthropomorphism — got up gracefully within its fringes of fur and barked beside Bray at the door as it saw a black man get out of the car. Shinza wore a gay shirt flapping over his trousers, sandals that he had to grip with his toes as he walked. There was an almost West African swagger about him. He ignored the noise of the dog and came up the steps to the veranda and the open living-room with the air of self — conscious disingenuousness that was instantly familiar — film actors, sports champions, they came at the TV camera lazily, like that, fresh from some triumph or other. The car was a big old American one, all snub surfaces gleaming under dust, lying heavily on its worn springs.