A Guest of Honour (59 page)

Before he left he telephoned Rebecca at the
boma
and told her to send him a letter granting him her power of attorney. She sounded chastened, on the other end of a bad line, as people often do at the idea of urgency. He prepared himself to be kept a few days, hanging about in Roly's house. But she must have made some arrangement for the letter to come up by air courier in the government bag—he hoped she had not discussed the contents with Aleke—because it was delivered to him at Roly's very promptly, by government messenger. Folded as an afterthought round the formal letter whose wording he had dictated, was a half—sheet of green copy—paper with a foolish password of endearment scribbled on it; exclamation marks. She was an awkward letter—writer; the things he got from her reminded him of his daughters' letters from school. He carefully burned the half—sheet and smiled, aware that the other document was the kind that would be best burned, too.

But he took it to the bank and withdrew the money from the sale of the house Rebecca's parents had built for her when she married Gordon, the man everyone was more content without. Half the sum
would have equalled the maximum amount exchange control regulations permitted to be taken out of the country, and then only by people leaving permanently. In breakfast table conversations with Roly about foreign exchange, Roly was easily led to turn his tongue on the officials who didn't seem able to put a stop to money going out of the country illegally, just the same. He said it was well known how these things were done; there was one crowd, a South African white man and a couple of Congolese, who had agents in the capital and just plain smuggled the cash over to Lubumbashi and thence wherever the client wanted it, and there was a certain Indian down in Old Town who was known to have more reliable ways and means—a relation of the people who had taken over the garage since old Haffajee died. How was it done? Well, travel allowances for one thing; poor students going off on scholarships to study abroad; they were allowed a maximum allowance that was invariably in excess of the money they had, so they were paid a small percentage to take out someone else's money as their own. Businessmen; the wives of white Company officials going “home” on leave; Moslems going on a pilgrimage to Mecca—lots of people one wouldn't think it of were happy to earn their profit on the side.

He thought it might easily be that the Congolese would turn out to be Gordon's friends. It was not too difficult, through casual inquiry at the garage, to find out where to go in Old Town. Again with the sun on his head and purpose at his back he tramped over waste ground. If the elderly gentleman in the grey persian lamb fez knew who he was he showed no surprise; and perhaps he had long ceased to be surprised at the people he recognized. It was all satisfactorily concluded. Rebecca's name would never appear, in fact the elderly gentleman would never know it. The money, nearly four thousand pounds in English currency, twice that figure in local currency, would become Swiss francs in a numbered account. In due course Rebecca's signature would be lodged with the Swiss bank as the one required to draw on that account. He explained that delays in the transfer of the money—a piecemeal transfer, for example—would not do. This too, was accepted as a matter of routine practice: then the commission rate would be higher, of course. The money would be deposited within two or three weeks at most.

After it was done he walked back to the empty lot where African
and Indian children were playing together with hoops made of the tin strips off packing—cases. For the first time he could remember, the Volkswagen was reluctant to start, and they made a new game of helping him push it so that he could take advantage of a downward slope. As he got going and turned into the street a young man in the usual clerk's white shirt and sunglasses greeted him. He did not feel worried that he had been seen; such a worry had no reality for him because it had never seemed it could ever apply to him, have relevance to his way of life. He felt the commonplace peace of being on one plane of existence alone, for once: his mind was entirely occupied with practical matters to be ticked off one by one through a series of actions, before he could get away. The dentist; resoled shoes to be collected; wine as a present for his host.

On the way back to Dando's to pick up his things he was held up, as he had been once before, by the passing of the presidential car. The outriders on their motorcycles rode before and behind—the car was borne on the angry swarm of their noise.

He saw only the black profile of Mweta's face rushing away from his focus. The next time, next time they met—it was difficult to realize that it had ended like that, this time. But human affairs didn't come to clear—cut conclusions, a line drawn and a total added up. They appeared to resolve, dissolve, while they were only reforming, coming together in another combination. Even when we are dead, what we did goes on making these new combinations (he saw clouds, saw molecules); that's true for private history as well as the other kind. Next time we meet—yes, Mweta may even have to deport me. And even that would be a form of meeting.

Her car parked outside the Tlumes', Kalimo's washing on the bushes, the fig, like the trees over the main street, under a hide of coated dust, the quality of the silence that met him in his bedroom with the thin bright curtains and in the shabby living-room—he walked through the rooms with clenched hands, suddenly. All here; not a memory; life, now. He entered into it and took possession. Kalimo's welcome flowed over him like an expression of his own joy.

And soon she came, he heard her walking up the veranda steps and the squeak of the screen door that let her pass—in the rush of assurance that in a few seconds she would be standing there in the room, alive. There she was, herself. The self that couldn't be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was
there.
The moment he embraced her (slight awkwardness of disbelief that it was happening, taste of the inside of her mouth coming back to him, feel of the flesh on her back between his spread fingers) the sense of that self entered him and disappeared, a transparency, into familiarity. She wanted to hear “all the stories” with the amused eagerness of one who has been content, waiting behind—she hadn't envied him the capital or the company of her old friends. They ate their first meal: yes, that was exactly how she was, her way of considering, from under lowered eyelids, what she should help herself
to next. He kept pausing to look at her and she, every now and then, reached for his hand and turned it this way and that, squeezing the bones.

“You took the phone call very calmly.”

She was hardly expectant. She said with tentative curiosity, “You were very calm yourself.”

“Don't you want to know what I wanted the letter for? Aren't you concerned about what I did with it? Rebecca, I've taken your money out of the bank.”

She searched him for the joke. “No, really.”

“I did. The money from the house. I sent it away. It will be there for you in Switzerland whenever you need it. No one else can touch it, no one will block the account. You can use it wherever you are.”

She became at once tense and helpless, an expression that flattened and widened her face across the cheekbones. “Why? I'm not going away.”

“You must be safe. You and your children. Now I feel satisfied you are.”

“I see.”

“You don't see … you don't see …” He had to get up from the table and come over to her, enfold her awkwardly against his side. He took her arms away from her face; it was roused, red. A vein ran like a thickness of string down her forehead. He thought she was going to cry. He chivvied, humoured— “You're a very trusting girl, I could have run off with all your cash. You handed over without a murmur.”

She squared her jaw back against her soft full neck for self—control. “The trouble is that you never try to deceive me. I know what you will do and what you would not do. I could never change it.”

“At least
I hope
the money's in a Swiss bank. We'll know in a week or two whether it's there or whether I've been a gullible ass who's lost it for you.”

Between the “stories,” the unimportant news of friends, he talked a little of Congress: but it was massive in his mind, it could not be dealt with anecdotally, nor as an account of events, even an explanation. It broke, over the days, into the components most meaningful to him, and these took on their particular forms of expression and found their own times to emerge.

She said that night, “What you did—the money from the house—it's not allowed, is it?”

He had been asleep for a blank second and her voice brought him back. “No, it's illegal.” He found his hand had opened away, slack, from her breast; in sleep you were returned to yourself, what you dreamed you held fast to was nothing, rictus on a dead man's face. She said, “It's more in Gordon's line. And if they find out?”

“What's left of the settlers who had me deported will say they knew all along what kind I was.”

“And Mweta?”

Her nipple was slack for sleep, too. His hand could hardly make out the differentiation in texture between that area and the other surface of the breast; he dented the soft aureole with his forefinger until it nosed back. She shifted gently in protest at this preoccupation, evasion.

He was suddenly fully awake and his hand left her and went in the dark to feel for a cigarette on the one—legged Congo stool that was his bedside table. He smoked and began to talk about the day of the debate on the UTUC Secretary-General, told her how he had gone down to the carpark to persuade Semstu to support Shinza.

“You knew Semstu from before?”

“Oh yes, an old friend. That's how I could do it. I've known him as long as Mweta and Shinza.”

“And Mweta?” she said again, at last.

“I had every intention of telling him. He knew anyway what I thought about the Secretary-General, so I don't suppose it would have been much of a surprise.… But it seemed to me after all it was my own affair.”

“How d'you mean? You did it for Shinza.”

“For myself, I'm beginning to think. Shinza's trying to do what I believe should be done here.”

She said, “I'm afraid you'll get into trouble, Bray.”

“You're the one who told me once that playing safe was impossible, to live one must go on and do the next thing. You proposed the paradox that playing safe was dangerous. I was very impressed. Very.”

“I didn't know you then”—she always avoided the word “love,” like a schoolboy who regards it fearfully, as something heard among jeers.

“He will think you're siding with Shinza,” she said, out of her own silence. “—Won't he? What'll he do about that?”

“I don't think I can be regarded as a very dangerous opponent. Mweta's the President; he can always get rid of me.”

“That's what I mean. You may not be dangerous, but his feelings will be hurt … that's dangerous.”

“Then for his part he'll be able to say he threw me out because I was smuggling currency.”

She sat upright in the narrow bed. In the dark he saw the denser dark of her black hair, grown to her shoulders by now. “Oh my God. You see! I wish you hadn't done it. It's all right for someone like Gordon—”

“My darling … just a joke! … nothing will happen.” He drew her down, made a place for them again, told her all the things that neither of them, for different reasons, believed, but that both accepted for the lull before sleep. “I could see from the way it was managed, it's perfectly safe.… Everybody considers currency laws, like income tax laws, fair game—”

“You are not everybody.”

They were overcome by the reassurance of being (in the sense of a state of being) so close together; something perfect and unreasonable, hopelessly transitory in its absolute security.

Aleke, to save himself the bother of deciding how to deal with any other situation, behaved as though of course everyone—Bray included—was satisfied to see Shinza put in his place. He asked questions about the “fireworks” with the knowing grin of a man who expects boys to be boys and politicians to be politicians. As he sent one of his children running to fetch cold beer and wrestled fondly with another who persistently climbed over the back of his chair onto his head, he kept prompting, “They let him have it, all right … he didn't get away with it….” Bray was giving a matter-of-fact account of some of the main debates, summing up the different arguments and the points that emerged. He said, when the beer had arrived and they were drinking, “Your cynicism amazes me, Aleke.”

“Well, that's the first time I've ever been called that.”

“Exactly. That's why I'm surprised. You don't seem interested at all in the issues … they might just as well not exist. You see it as a contest.… They're not concrete to you, then?”

If it were possible for someone of Aleke's confidence to be embarrassed, he was. It took the form of a quick understanding that to accept the charge would be to decry his own intelligence, since he'd already refuted cynicism as an explanation, but to deny would bring the necessity to discuss the issues themselves—and overcome a disinclination, half-laziness, half-apprehension, to find himself and Bray in disagreement. He smiled. “… such a lot of talk. It's only when it comes down to getting busy with administration that you c'n see how things are really going to work out. Didn't you always find that?—You get some decision to cull all cows with a crooked left horn because that's going to improve the stock in some way the brains up in the veterinary department've discovered, but the result is some people won't pay taxes because it turns out that in Chief So—and-so's area,
all
the cows've got damned corkscrew left horns—”