A Guest of Honour
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
NADINE GORDIMER
An honourable man will end by not knowing where to live.
âIvan Sergeevich Turgenev
Many will call me an adventurerâand that I am, only of a different sortâone of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.
âErnesto “Che” Guevara
Chapter 1
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 thingsâthe rugs, cherry- and satin-wood piecesâand 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. âWhat a pity you gave away your shorts. âThere's no knowing if I'll be anywhere where I could dare appear in shorts, any more. âBut your waist measurement hasn't changed by so much as half an inchâI know by your pyjama trousers, I use exactly the same measurement for new elastic as I always did. â
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, unfortunatelyâour 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 meanâyou'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, “YouâI 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)âa 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. âJust as I knew we should have to leave.”
“Poor Adamson, it looked pretty hopeless at times. And yet it's come so quickly. Ten years!” Ten years since they had been deported from the territory, ten years since she was a youngish woman of forty, and the girls were still schoolgirls. “Historically, yes, it would happenâbut not to Adamson, and not to us?”
The house they had bought, filled with possessions that had been stored all the years they were in Africa, the garden they had made, spoke for them. It was not a house to be quitted.
“They expect you back,” she said with pride.
“Adamson was in the flush of victory, all right. I think he'd have embraced Henry Davis.” Davis was the settler M.P. who had been responsible, at one stage, for getting Mweta banished to the far Western Province.
“He naturally assumes you'll come out of exile.” They laughed. But they were talking of Mweta; the strange shyness of twenty-two years of marriage made it impossible for her to say: Do you want to go? The passionate beginning, the long openness and understanding between them should have meant that she would know what he wanted. And in a way she did know: because it was for them a code so deeply accepted that it had never been discussed-one was available wherever one was of use. What else was there to live by? And so the question
of what they were talking about really amounted to her hidden, pressed-down, banked-over desire to know whether this house, this life in Wiltshire, this lifeâat lastâseemed to him the definitive one, in the end. Because she was suddenly realizing that it had been so for her. She was, after all (in the true sense of after all that had gone before) an Englishwoman. She had taken out of storage the furniture and family possessions that had been nothing but a nuisance to her when they left England together twenty years ago, and, putting them in place, inevitably had accepted the life the arrangement of such objects provided for, and her comfortable private income made possible. In the room they had decided upon for his study, the desk from her great-grandfather that had naturally become hisâa quiet field of black-red morocco scratched with almost erased goldâwas a place to write the properly documented history of the territory (Mweta's country) that had never been done before; not the boxwood Colonial Office desk at which one dealt with government forms and made the empirical scribbles of administration or politics, written one day and screwed into a ball the next.
In the scented, mothy evening she felt the presence of the house like someone standing behind her. She did not know whether he felt it too; and she could not try to find out because if it turned out that he didn'tâshe had a premonition, sometimes, that in middle age you could find you had lost everything in a moment: husband-lover, friend, children, it was as if they had never happened, or you had wandered off from them without knowing, and now stood stock-still with the discovery.
They watched the moths in the tobacco flowers. She said in her sensible, inquiring, Englishwoman's voice behind which generations of her kind had sheltered, “Did Mweta say how long?”