A Guest of Honour (12 page)

He drove all morning and met not more than a dozen cars and the top—heavy bus that apparently still did the journey from the Tanzania border twice a week. Where there were African villages, a few bicycles and stragglers appeared on the road. Bags of charcoal leaned here and there on the edge of the silent forest. People lived deep inside this environment as if it were a house; their individual shelters were flimsy. He kept remembering—no, experiencing—things like this, that he had forgotten. In England, sometimes, over the years, he had had dreams that seemed to happen in this country, but it wasn't this country at all; and even conscious recollection was nothing but psychological memory—something selected to match the emotions engendered in a particular place at specific times.

Dando's house, left behind, was no more present than Wiltshire. He enjoyed a kind of freedom that he knew would last only until his recognition of his surroundings passed into unthinking acceptance, and he could no longer hold back and view them as the past revisited or a present not yet broken into.

He called at the White Fathers' Mission at Rungwa River, but Father Benedict was away and he could see that none of the younger ones knew who he was. The swallows still twittered in and out of their mud nests in the refectory, where he was given tea. A loud clanging that he knew so well came from a length of iron suspended from a tree and beaten with a stick, announced the end of school and the hot peace was invaded by yells and the muffled stampede of bare feet. The Fathers were good enough to sell him a couple of gallons of petrol, one working the hand—pump with a grin, his rosary swinging, the other standing by with his hands folded into the sleeves of his
cassock and his big, blueish, celibate's feet placed close together in their rough sandals. The Fathers were shy as young girls. The African schoolboys scuffled and chattered at a distance, and when he called out a greeting, laughed and called back.

There were large villages near the road in this part of the country, smoking up through the forest. The cultivation of land by lopping off the branches of trees and burning them round the trunk, for potash, made druidic circles everywhere. New signs pointed into the bush: “Freedom Bar,” “New York Bar,” “Independence Bar”—crooked letters in English painted on bits of wood. But the generation that had grown up in ten years was as poor and dull—skinned as their fathers had been.

He had had the intention to spend the night at the old Pilchey's Hotel at Matoko, the usual half—way house. He arrived there earlier than he had thought he would; he was half in mind to drive on but did not know if the government rest—house that used to be at the cattle dipping station, sixty miles north, was still open. The tarred road was long left behind and the ugly little red car looked, as he got out and smoothed his rumpled shirt into his trousers, as cars always did up here. The undersides of the mudguards were rimmed with clay and the fender was plastered with the broken bodies and strange—coloured innards of dead insects.

Heat and silence fell upon him. He tramped over the cracked veranda and looked into the dark of the hotel: a smell of beeswax and insecticide, no one in sight. He knew where the bar was and the sound of his own footsteps accompanied him there, but the door was locked and he felt sure the ship's bell that hung beside the name “Davy Jones' Locker” was purely decorative. Back he went to the veranda; there was no main entrance, but screen doors all over the place that gave out long—drawn, dry squeaks behind him and led to a deserted dining—room with fan—folded table napkins and dim green corridors of closed doors. A child's cot piled with old pillows and the broken marble from an old—fashioned washstand stood where the corridor turned; there was a tray with two empty beer bottles and glasses on the floor.

He went back to the veranda and stretched out his heavy long legs from a chair. He knew this hour; everyone was asleep. If he sat for any length of time he himself would fall into an afternoon sloth.
There were borders of orange lilies in the garden, and the same huge sagging aviary, like a heavy spider's web, behind which blue cranes and guinea fowl pecked at their own feathers in some affliction induced by confinement. He could see their jerking, worrying heads. The farming land was good around here, and when the white farmers got merry in the bar it used to be the thing to bundle one of their number in with the birds. A vast sense of unreality came over him. He noticed a brass bell—push, gleamingly polished, and stuck a forefinger at it, not expecting anything in the way of response. But after a while a very young waiter appeared, with a red fez and a tin tray. He asked for a cold beer and was told
Doña
was sleeping; the bar would open now—now. “Is it still
Doña
Pilchey?” Yes,
Doña
Pilchey was sleeping. This was not Gala country yet, but the local language was related. He spoke to the boy in Gala and was understood; they agreed that the luggage should come out of the car even though he couldn't have a room until
Doña
Pilchey woke up. Was the kitchen locked? No, it seemed the kitchen was open. The youngster would make him some tea in the meantime.

While he was drinking it, the shadow of one of the big trees fell across the veranda and seemed to bring a breeze. The heat of the afternoon turned, as it did quite suddenly; one of the guinea fowl began to call. He was no longer used to driving for hours at a stretch. His big body was restless with inactivity. He walked off nowhere in particular, though he knew this road that led from the main road to the Matoko
boma
about two miles away. The red sand was pleasant to tread on—he had not walked at all, really, in the month in the capital, except in the streets of the town; no one walked—and the coarse sleek grass leaned beneath its own weight on either side of the road, as high as his shoulders. Scarlet weavers with black masks flicked up out of it and hung upside down at the entrance to their nests. A rough driveway marked with whitewashed stones and aloes curved up to a small schoolhouse on a rise and down again. He took the little detour to give some sort of shape to his stroll. There was the school garden—a patch of maize and beans, some staked tomatoes—the length of dangling iron that was the school bell, and, as he walked past the open doorway, the schoolmaster himself sitting at work. The man jumped up and at once started apologizing as if guilty of a grave breach of hospitality and respect. “No sir, I am very
sorry, sir, I was just taking the chance to get a little study—” Bray greeted him in Gala, giving him the form of address to be used by respectful pupils towards the master, to put him at ease.

The man was shyly delighted and immediately brought out all he had to offer—the school register, the exercise and text—books of the pupils, all the time explaining and answering Bray's questions in a slow, anxious way. A pupil who had been sitting with him at the deal table where he was working sat, unable to go on, her hand on her place in a book, listening and smiling faintly in greeting. She looked like a grown woman, but irregular schooling often meant that African schoolchildren were far older than whites. The schoolmaster himself was very thin, black and pigeon—chested under a woollen pullover. His two—roomed school was seven years old; there were some desks but the smaller children, the schoolmaster explained, still sat on the floor. Some of the children who lived far away stayed in children's huts in the village and walked home at weekends. “This year we are sixty—five” he said, “our biggest year so far. And twenty—one are girls.” He proudly showed a single poster on the damp—mapped walls: OUR LAND—a smiling miner working down a gold mine; smiling fishermen hauling in a catch; a smiling woman picking some crop. Population statistics in green, revenue figures in red. “From the Education Department. Oh yes, we are beginning to get nice, nice things. I am filling in the forms. Now we will get them. I wish you were here when the children are in school, they would sing for you.”

Bray had been sung to so many times by black schoolchildren. “Another time, I hope.”

“My wife teaches the choir. She also teaches the first and second grade.” The young woman was smiling, looking up from one to the other.

“I thought you were one of the young schoolgirls!” Bray said, and they laughed.

“Well, I am teaching her for her Standard Six exam. She goes next month to town for it. She has had four children, you see, her studies were interrupted. But I teach her when I can. She wants to write the teacher's exams eventually.”

“It's lucky for you that you married a teacher.” Bray tried to draw her into the conversation.

“And I am working for my O levels, the Cambridge Certificate,” the
schoolmaster said, with the urgency of a man who has no one to turn to. “I have here the English paper—not the one I will have to write myself, you understand—'

“I know—a specimen.”

“Yes, the paper written by the students in 1966—you understand. I have a difficulty because there are some words not possible to find—” He went over to the table and brought a small, old, school dictionary.

“I see—well, that wouldn't have the more unusual words, would it—”

The wife swiftly helped him to find the paper and his exercise book. He went down the paper with his eyes, lips moving a little. Bray noticed how tight his breathing was, as if he had a chest cold. “This one word here—here it is, ‘mollify' … ?”

Bray wanted to laugh, the impulse caught him by the throat as a cough rises; he took the examination paper to play for time, in order to pretend, out of the “civilized” courtesy of his kind, that uncertainty about the meaning of the word was something anyone might share—and this in itself was part of the very absurdity: the assumptions of colonial culture. He read, “Write one of the following letters: (a) To a cousin, describing your experiences on a school tour to the Continent; (b) to your father, explaining why you wish to choose a career in the navy; (c) to a friend, describing a visit to a picture gallery or a film you have enjoyed.”

The schoolmaster wrote down the meaning of “mollify” and showed those questions, ticked off in red ink, that he had been able to answer. “This will be the third time I try,” he said, of the examination.

“Well, good luck to you both.”

“When she goes for the Standard Six she takes our choir along for the big schools competition. Last month they won the best in Rongwa province. Now we don't know—but we hope, we hope.” The schoolmaster smiled.

He was shown the football field the pupils had levelled; a little way behind was a mud house, shaped European—style with a veranda held up by roughly dressed tree—trunks, which must have been where the schoolmaster and his family lived. An old woman was doing some household chore with pots, outside, in the company of two or three small children. The schoolmaster said, “If there was someone I could ask, like I ask you—” but he was embarrassed to appear to grumble and began to talk about his pupils again.

Bray, feeling as he had felt a thousand times before in this country, the disproportionate return he was getting for a commonplace expression of interest, said, “What do you feel is your biggest problem at the moment?” and was surprised when, instead of turning again to his expectations of the Education Department under Independence, the man took time to think quietly, in the African lack of embarrassment at long pauses, and said, “We have to make the parents let the girls come to school. This is what I have been trying to do for years. Our girls must be educated. I can show you the figures—in nineteen—sixty-five, no nineteen—sixty-four, yes … we had only nine girls, and they left at the end of two years. Yes, two years. I cannot persuade the parents to keep them on. But I try, try. I go to the parents myself, yes, in the country. I talk to the chiefs and tell them, look, this is our country now, how can the men have wives who are not educated? There will be trouble. We must have the girls in school. But they don't want to hear. I went to see the par—ents, I talk to them. Yes, well, this year we manage to keep twenty—one girls and some are in the Standard Three class already. I talk to the people slowly.” The man smiled and took one of his gasping breaths; his hand took in the bush, his suburbia. “I go and tell them. I've got my bicycle.”

Bray remembered that things were different now, even at Pilchey's. “Why don't you come up to the hotel this evening—I'm staying the night. We could talk some more.”

The schoolteacher had the suddenly exhausted look of a convalescent. He screwed up his eyes hesitantly, as if there must be something behind the invitation that he ought to understand. “At what time, sir?”

“Come up after supper. We'll have a beer. And your wife, too, of course.”

The man nodded slowly. “After supper,” he repeated, memorizing it.

When Bray got back to the hotel Mrs. Pilchey was at her desk in the bar, doing accounts. Her big head of thick, reddish—blond hair had been allowed to fade to the yellow—stained white of an old man's moustache. She looked up over her glasses and then took them off and got to her feet with the pigeon—toed gait of heavy, ageing women. “I thought it sounded like you, when the boy told me.” Sex had died out of the challenging way she had had with men; it was bluff and grudging. They had never liked each other much, in the little they
had known of each other, and extraordinarily, the old attitude fell into place between them as if the ten years didn't exist. There was laughter and handshaking. “A big
Bwana
with grey hair at the sides, and he can talk Gala. Well, there didn't used to be any white hairs—but I thought, that's Colonel Bray! No, well, I heard you were out, anyway, so I'm not as clever as I fancy myself—”

He said, “So you're carrying on alone? Olivia and I heard when Mr. Pilchey died.”

“Five years,” she said. There were pencil caricatures of Oscar Pilchey behind the bar, done in an attempt at Beerbohm's style. “I don't think he'd have been able to stand it if he'd been here now.”