Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“I think Edna Tlume’s quite a help, in a way.” It was impossible to make any remark that did not have, to his own ears, an absurd innuendo.

“Oh that woman’d do anything for Becky. But the point is the house is a slum. Two rooms and no bathroom of her own. Can’t live like that. I said look, if I had one week, I bet I’d find a house — your government’s prepared to pay for it?” The children stood around the man proudly. “See!” Suzi thrust out her dry little hand with its blackened encrustations where Rebecca applied wart — remover to the middle finger. She was wearing a bracelet made of threaded mahogany beans, shook it up her arm with a sudden feminine gesture.

The children had cleared away the fruit they had pelted onto the table. He blew brittle leaf webbed in dust and spider — spit from his letter. It had gone completely from his mind. The little troupe chattered off the way Rebecca always appeared and disappeared, through the thin — leafed trees. The letter came back. He asked Mweta not to forget to arrange for him to be invited to the Party Congress. He mentioned what progress was being made with the education centre. “It could turn out to be rather like the workingmen’s clubs in Britain in the nineteenth century. Here in these country places where men are beginning — though of course they don’t put a name to it — to have a new consciousness of themselves as something more than units of labour, they are ready to take anything that’s going: may come in useful. Whether someone gives judo classes or explains the different ways of dealing with the law of supply and demand … I wanted to suggest to the local PIP branch that they might use the centre as a place for a more general political instruction than the sort of hiphoorah stuff that comes out of party meetings. It would help combat unruliness, too. I would always rather go on the assumption that above people’s heads is higher than the people who instruct them are likely to believe.”

The style and reasoning of such letters was something he picked up with a pen. It functioned of itself. For a lifetime — lying suddenly in his mind, the word associated with advertisements for expensive Swiss watches: lifetime. The habits of a lifetime. He felt himself outside that secure concept built up coating by coating, he was exposed nakedly pale as a man who has been shut away too long from the sun. The girl presented herself face — to-face, fact — to-fact with him, a poster — apocalypse filling the sky of his mind. Thought could crawl all over and about her, over the steadfast smile and the open yellow eyes and in and out the ears and nostrils. He sat for a moment exactly as if he had swallowed an unfamiliar pill and waited for the sensation of the drug to unfold itself. Then the telephone rang in the house. It was Malemba in great excitement: the lathes from Sweden had arrived. He went to borrow a truck (the obliging Indian traders again), pick up Malemba, and fetch the machinery from the road — transport depot.

The gathering at the Tlumes’ house was unlike the usual absent drift towards the Alekes’ or the Tlumes’ for an hour after work, when often one of Edna’s relations or some subdued minor official, new to his Africanized job, sat without speaking, and children wandered in and out with their supper in their hands. There were even one or two faces that didn’t belong; a telephone engineer Gordon Edwards had travelled with, and the blonde receptionist from the Fisheagle Inn. She was the one who had brought the thigh — high skirt to the village (there was a time — lag of a year or so between the beginning of a fashion in Europe and its penetration to the bush) but she sat in this mixed company with those famous thighs neatly pressed together as a pair of prim lips. The doctors Hugh and Sally Fraser from the mission hospital were there with a young Finn who had just walked down from West Africa — his rucksack leaned against the wall. He wore a shirt with the face of some African leader furred and faded by sweat and much washing, and was prematurely bald on top, like a youthful saint in a cheap religious picture. Sampson Malemba had changed into his best dark suit after the dirty business of loading and unloading machinery. Aleke was wearing a brown leather jerkin with fringes — Gordon’s present; how did he know just what would sit splendidly on Aleke’s powerful male breasts? But there was the impression that Gordon Edwards acquired things that remained in his possession like clues to the progress of his life if one could read them: he happened to be here at a certain time, and so picked up this, happened to be there, and so was around when that was available. And in the same fortuitous fashion, it fell out that these things suited this one perfectly or were exactly what that one would like.

Alekes, Tlumes, Frasers — all accepted Bray’s presence with Gordon Edwards without a sign. It might have been agreed upon, it was such a cosy, matter — of-fact conspiracy of friends: he did not quite know whether he was chief protagonist or victim? Everyone was so gay. Sometimes he felt as if he were a deceived husband; Rebecca wore a new dress (another present?) and when he danced with her had the animated, lying look of a young girl. Who could believe, as she had implied, that that lithe and handsome little man didn’t sleep with her? Physical jealousy suddenly weakened his arms so that he almost dropped them from her. Between chatter she expected him to lip — read— “I’ll try and come early one morning.” He murmured, “No, don’t.” She pulled a face, half — hurt. She said, “Let’s go to the lake again. You suggest it. On Sunday.” A family party. He felt himself smiling, the cuckold — lover: “All right, I’ll be host.” Gordon Edwards danced again and again with the tall refined tart from the Fisheagle; he must be the reason why she was present. Perhaps, then, he was staying at the hotel after all? It was impossible to say to Rebecca, does he sleep in this house? Idiot, idiot. He saw himself amusedly, cruelly, as he had done so often since he had come back here, where all should have had the reassuring familiarity of the twice — lived, the past. Aleke took over the Fisheagle blonde; his large, confident black hands held her softly as he did his children’s pigeons, she kept her false eyelashes down on her cheeks, she had moved from the shelter of the settlers’ hotel into the Tlumes’ house as if on a visit to a foreign country. Agnes Aleke was wearing the wig Rebecca told Bray she had ordered by post and looked like a pretty American Negress. She talked to the Finn about her longing to visit the cities of Europe, holding her head as a woman does in a new hat. To him they were battlegrounds where the young turned over rich men’s cars and camped out in the carpeted mausoleums of dead authority, not her paradise of shops. “ ‘Nice things’?” he said in his slowly articulated Linguaphone English. “Here you have the nice things — the shape of the trees, the round sun, these beaudiful fruits”—he was balancing on his knees a mango, caressing it. She flirtatiously patronized his lack of sophistication— “This shirt? You got it in Africa? Who’s that president or whatever it is?”

The Finn squinted down at his chest and said as if putting a hand on the head of a dog that had accompanied him everywhere, “Sylvanus Olympio.”

“But alas, assassiné— he’s dead.” Bray turned to Agnes, giving her the advantage.

The Finn said unmoved, “Never mind,” in a tone that implied he was a good fellow anyway, dead or alive, in fact better than some who were still about, perhaps in this room.

Agnes’s patronage collapsed into the African internal feminine giggle that paralysed her, and, by a quick glance, infected Edna. This uninhibited and inoffensive amusement at his expense, along with a lot of beer, melted the Northerner. He began to dance wildly, but preferred to do so on his own. He was so thin that the only curve in his entire form was the curve of his sex in the shrunken jeans.