Nadine Gordimer: A Guest of Honour

A bird cried out on the roof, and he woke up. It was the middle of the afternoon, in the heat, in Africa; he knew at once where he was. Not even in the suspended seconds between sleep and waking was he left behind in the house in Wiltshire, lying, now, deep in the snow of a hard winter. The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon … the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating and the light from red shades, the silky colours of Olivia’s things — the rugs, cherry- and satin-wood pieces — and the red earth pots, bits of beadwork, the two fine carvings they once found in the Congo. A few days ago he was in that house, packing to leave in the flat progression of practical matters by which decision is broken up into reality. If you have any trouble with the boiler, for heaven’s sake let Mackie look at it before you send to town. — What a pity you gave away your shorts. — There’s no knowing if I’ll be anywhere where I could dare appear in shorts, any more. — But your waist measurement hasn’t changed by so much as half an inch — I know by your pyjama trousers, I use exactly the same measurement for new elastic as I always did. —

Three months before, Adamson Mweta stood outside a steak house in Kensington and said to him, Of course you’ll come back to us now! He had driven home, slowing down on the empty road that led through the fullness of a deserted summer twilight, at last, to the house. Housing estates overrun villages all over England, but here the process had been reversed; the house had once been a manor (Olivia thought that, even earlier, it had been a priory) but in the nineteenth century the village was depopulated by the drift to industrialized towns, lost its autonomy, and died; the shop-cum-post-office had closed, the cottages had fallen down; the woods and meadows took over the fields, only a few houses remained, to be bought by the people whose longing for country life discounted the inconvenience of isolation. As Olivia said, it ought to have been a sad-feeling place but it wasn’t; there was instead a renewal: the country had come back, bringing the reassurance of stubborn peace and fecundity, a beginning again. And they were only two-hours-and-a-bit from London, their daughters and their friends. He had kept up, since he finally left Africa ten years ago, a close contact with Adamson Mweta and the other leaders of the African independence movement. He spent a great deal of time going back and forth to London to advise them when they conferred with the Colonial Office, and to do what he could to smooth the way for various delegations that came to petition against the old constitution and to negotiate independence for their country. It was there, in this Central African territory, that he had been a colonial servant until the settlers succeeded in having him recalled and deported for his support of the People’s Independence Party. He said to his wife, “Mweta’s invited me to come back as their guest.”

“Well, you ought to be at the Independence celebrations, if anyone is. That’s marvellous.” She used to make packages of sandwiches for Mweta to take with him when he cycled for miles about Gala province at weekends, speaking at meetings.

He said to Adamson Mweta before they parted the next day, “Olivia won’t be able to come out to Independence, unfortunately — our elder daughter’s expecting a child just round about that time.”

Mweta said, with his slow shy smile that always seemed to grow like a light becoming more powerful, as his eyes held you, “You mean little Venetia? She going to be a mother?”

“I’m afraid so,” he mumbled in his Englishman’s way.

“Well, that’s good, that’s good. Never mind, Mrs. Bray will join you later.”

“I imagine by the time she’s prepared to trust the baby to Venetia the celebrations’ll be over.”

“That’s what I mean — you’ll be more or less settled by the time she arrives.”

They were standing at the door of Mweta’s taxi; there was a sudden uprush of feeling between the two men; the Englishman stood there, the small, quick black man took him by the biceps, hard, through his dark suit, as in his own country he would have linked fingers with a brother. Under the release of physical contact, he said to Mweta, “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” and Mweta said, “You — I told you we expect you back, now.”

“But what would I do? What use should I be to you?” He was so accustomed to effacing himself in the hours of discussion of constitutional law and political tactics (a white man, an outsider offering impersonal service for whatever it was worth) — a strong consciousness of his own being flooded him as if a stimulant had been injected into his veins.

“Whatever you like! It’s all ours! We need you; whatever you like!” Mweta broke away and jumped into the taxi.

The pale stone façade with its stone lintels and sills worn smooth as a piece of used soap was directly on the empty road but the real face of the house was the other side. Sheltered by the building the garden was a grassy look-out over fuzzy colours of flowers, bees, and early moths to the long valley. He and Olivia gardened on summer evenings, not seriously, as she did during the day, but desultorily pulling out a tall rank weed here or there, for the pleasure of feeling its roots yield from the humus and bring up, in the crumbs clinging to that beard grown underground, a smell of earth rich as fruit-cake. They had laid flag-stones under the walnut trees for the white wooden chairs and table, so that it wouldn’t be too damp. They drank whisky there, or even the coffee after dinner. Sometimes before the dusk wavered the wood away into the distance, he went out into the sunlight that collected like golden water in the dip of the meadows and shot a partridge. There was no one to bother about shooting rights. Afterwards as the evening faded he cleaned the gun almost by feel and the clean, practical smell of gun-oil conveyed the simple satisfaction of the task. Olivia played records with the living-room windows wide open so that the music came out to them.

This summer it was Stravinsky and Poulenc; she was of the generation and class that paid other women to knit and now that she herself was about to be a grandmother she made funny stuffed toys for nieces and nephews. She had a cigar box full of odd buttons, as a supply of eyes, but she put it away from her because one of the things she had hated when she was young was the show of dissembling older women made when confronted with something vital to them.

“I suppose we said many times we’d come back when they got their independence.” She gave a small, self-questioning shrug, admitting the glibness of another kind of daily talk in another time.

“It’s not because of what one said.” But both knew that; in those days, the important thing was to give Adamson Mweta faith in himself by positing a future that was real because you, a white person with nothing personal to gain by it, showed you believed it would come about.

Gazing out across the valley and then calmly at him, she had her look of wanting to find out exactly what they were talking about.

He said, “Certainly I thought of going back, then. Hypothetically. Before we left. — Just as I knew we should have to leave.”