Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Suppose at the end of the year they were not put on contract? What about the golden handshake — wouldn’t it be cheaper, in the end?”

“Not if there’s no preparation of replacements being done in the meantime. I tried two years ago to initiate a pilot scheme to send local people away for training in broadcasting techniques — nothing doing. If I had to take over the English-language services tomorrow, you know what I’d have to do it with — a bunch of Lambala and Ezenzeli speakers from the vernacular sections and some refugee schoolteachers from South Africa.”

The girl sat and saw nothing, like an animal out of breath, holed up against danger.

Bray had to rise to be introduced to a big woman marking time on the edge of the dancers with the American, Curtis Pettigrew: she was a West African whom Timothy Odara had married since Bray saw him last. She spoke with an American intonation, too, and in her flamboyant national dress, dragged round her as if snatched straight from the brilliant bolt on a shop counter, she seemed in every way twice the size of the local African women, who were usually kept at home, and showed it. Pettigrew was hailed by someone, and Bray and the woman were left facing each other like the dancers; she put her hand on his arm. While they moved off, she said, “Guess what my name is?” and when he looked embarrassed— “Same as yours, I believe. Evelyn.” “But they call me James.” “I should damn well hope so. Well, I’ve picked someone my own size at last tonight. We could just sweep the others off the floor.” She maintained contact all round her as they danced, talking over his shoulder to this one, putting out a broad calloused brown foot in a gold sandal to nudge that one in the calf. “Get her to sing,” Dando called out proudly. “Not tonight, Dandy-Roly, I’m on my best behaviour.” “That’s what I mean!” “Would it embarrass Evelyn if Evelyn sang?” she asked Bray. “Not in the least. What sort of thing?” “Well, what’d you think? What do I look as if I’d sing?” She had the self-confidence of a woman of dynamic ugliness. “Wagner?” A snort of pleasure: “Go on! I’ve got a voice like a bullfrog. It’s terrible when I sing the old chants from home but it’s not so bad in English — English is such a rough-sounding language anyway.”

Vivien Bayley’s urgent face took up conversation in passing, “—that’s Hjalmar Wentz’s daughter — you were sitting with.”

“The Oriental-looking little girl with Ras?”

“Yes, lovely creature, isn’t she? Margot would only let her come if I promised to keep her wholesomely occupied. You didn’t leave her with Ras?”

He moved his shoulders helplessly. The dancers were falling back round a Polish agriculturalist who was teaching a gangling Englishman and two young Africans an Eastern European peasant dance. The Congolese band had no idea what music would do, and produced a stomping crescendo; then one of the Poles played the piano, and Neil Bayley moved in on the drums. The undergraduate form of self-expression that emerges where Englishmen want to give themselves to celebration imposed itself for a while. Someone left, and reappeared with another case of champagne. The wine was warm, but an early-hours-of-the-morning rain came out like sweat, and coolness blew in on necks and faces. Later the Odara woman sang the new national anthem in a beautiful contralto, her big belly trembling under the robe. The young bachelors romped and the tousled girls, passing close by, or smiling suddenly at people they weren’t aware of, gave up the scent of cosmetics and perfume heated on their bodies. Then there was breakfast at the Bayleys’; a thinning of faces, but some had kept reappearing all through the night in the changing light, and now, against the rippling pink-grey sky behind the Bayleys’ veranda, over the smell of coffee, a curled blonde head with gilt hoops in the ears, shining straps that had worn a red track on a plump white back, Timothy Odara’s starched and pleated shirt-front and dead buttonhole — all had the melodrama of circus figures. They said good night to each other in the bright slanting sun and the Bayley children were already out on the grass in their pyjamas, riding bicycles.

In a few days the faces had lost the stylized, apparition-quality of that first night, the night of the Independence Ball, and become, if not familiar, at least expected. A young woman was in and out the Bayleys’ house, sometimes adding to, sometimes carrying off with her the many children who played there. She was Rebecca, Rebecca Edwards, like a big, untidy schoolgirl in her cotton shirt and sandals, the car key on her forefinger jingling harassedly. She was always being sent to pick up people when arrangements went wrong; she came for Bray one afternoon in an old station wagon littered with sweet-papers, odd socks, and Dinky toys. It was she who had given her glass to him that night at the Independence party; the Pole who had danced the gazatska became the man with whom he gravitated to a quiet corner so that they could talk about the curious grammar-structure of Gala and the Lambala group of languages. The atmosphere at the parties was what he thought it must have been at gatherings described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. Children swept in and out, belligerently pleasure-seeking. Babies slept in dark rooms. Food was cooked by many hands. Invitations were measured only by how long the beer and wine lasted out. He felt himself the — aged relative, a man of vague repute come from afar to the wedding, and drawn helplessly and not unenjoyably into everything. It was, in a curious way, an extension of what he was at the official receptions, where many people had little idea who the white stranger was, sitting in a modest place of honour; and once, at a press dinner, Mweta’s reference to the presence of “one of the fairy godmothers” who had been “present at the christening and had returned for the coming-of-age of the State” went, thank God, unnoticed as a reference to himself. It became his Independence story; as the story of the cigarette company’s helicopter was Neil Bayley’s, related again and again while the private drama between husband and wife that had made it pass unremarked at the time was quite dropped out of the context.

Bray asked everywhere about Edward Shinza; certainly he was not in evidence at any official occasion. Bray felt he must be somewhere about; it was difficult to imagine this time without him. It was his as much as Mweta’s. But no one seemed to have seen him, or to know whether he was, or had been, in the capital. There were other faces from the past; William Clough, the Governor, lifting his bristly eyebrows in exaggerated greeting at Mweta’s banquet, the way he used to do on the tennis court in Dar-es-Salaam. “James, you must come and say hello to Dorothy before we leave. I daren’t say dine — we’re homeless, you know—”

“Uncle Willie’s Independence Joke,” Vivien said. “Produces a hearty, man-of-the-world laugh from Africans.”

“The kind of laugh they’ve picked up from people like Uncle Willie,” said Neil.

Still, the Cloughs pursued Bray through Vivien. “Aunt Dorothy says her secretary’s been trying to get hold of you. They want you for drinks on Monday. I’d go if I were you, or she’ll tell everyone in London you were buttering up to the Africans and didn’t want to see them.” He laughed. “No, it’s true. She says that about me, to my mother. And she knows quite well that we’d never see each other in London either.”

The Cloughs had moved into the British Consulate for the last week or two before their departure, a large, glassy, contemporary house placed to show off the umbrella thorn-trees of the site, just as in an architect’s scale model. The consul and his wife had been swept into some back room by the presence of aides, secretaries, and the necessity to keep their cats out of the way of Lady Dorothy’s dog. There was some sort of scuffle when Bray arrived — he saw the consul’s wife, whom he had met briefly, disappearing upstairs with her head bent consolingly to a Siamese. Flower arrangements were placed everywhere, as if there were illness in the house.