A Guest of Honour (72 page)

She was a long time in the culvert by the road. Her nails were full of red earth. The red earth walls, staunched with tufts of dead grass, rose on either side of her. With her head pressed against them she waited for it to happen to her, too. There was earth and saliva in her mouth. She was gulping and howling like an animal. She heard the tearing of flames and saw the thick smoke.

And then there was silence. Behind the sound of burning, nothing. The burning died away and there was only the smell and the smoke.

She had run towards him at first when they started pulling him out of the car. He had got to his feet and looked straight at her without seeing her because of that shortsightedness. But in the same split second he was brought down beneath them and the sound of the blows on the resistance of his big body sent her crazedly hurling herself through the grass, fighting it. She was turning her ankles, running, her stumbling scramble led her off down a kind of slope cut into the ground. And she was there, deep in the ditch beyond the grass. But she was not twenty yards from them, from him, and she knew it would come to her, it was no use, she was held by the walls, waiting for them.

She was sure they must be there in the silence.

She did not move. The smoke no longer poured up; it was thin, hanging in stillness. She did not know how much time passed. But
the silence was empty; above, in the tops of the long grasses between her and the road, scarlet weaver-birds flicked, swung, and chirped a question. More time passed. She got up and tried to climb out of the culvert but the walls were too high. She wandered along out the way she had been driven in, up the diagonal cutting made by the roads department. She pushed weakly through the heavy grass. The car was on its side, blackened, the seats still smouldering, the road full of glass.

He was clear of it. He was in the road unharmed by the fire. Unharmed. She began to sob with joy because he was not burned, she went concentratedly but not fast—she could not move fast—towards him, towards his legs rolled apart. She walked all round him, making some sort of noise she had never heard before. Round and round him. His body—the chest, the big torso above the still narrowish male waist that he kept, for all his weight—was something staved in under the dirtied bush jacket, out of shape, but he was still there. The whole of him was there. Strange, soft-looking patches of earth and blood; but the whole bulk of him, complete. A lot of dirt and blood on the face, a sort of grimace, lips slightly drawn back as when he was trying to unscrew something tight.

Suddenly she saw that his glasses were smashed into his cheekbones. The frame lay near his ear but glass was embedded there in the firm flesh just below that tender, slightly shiny area of skin that was always protected by his glasses. The glass was pressed in so hard that the flesh was whitened and had scarcely bled. She went down on her knees and with a shaking impatience in her fingers began to try to take out the broken glass. She was concerned only not to hurt him, it was difficult to do without hurting him.

After a little while she went and sat on the white-washed milestone at the side of the road. His eyes were not open but the lids were not quite closed and showed a line of glint. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and cleaned the earth from beneath her nails, carefully, one by one. It was very hot. Sweat ran down the sides of her face and under the hair, on her neck. She watched him all the time. She became aware of a strange and terrifying curiosity rising in her; it was somehow connected with his body. She got up and went over to this body again and looked at it: this was the same body that she had caressed last night, that she had had inside her when she fell asleep.

The basket and his briefcase had been flung out of the car and so
were not burned. She picked them up and balanced the briefcase across the basket beside him, to keep the sun off his face.

And more time went by. She sat on in the road. Her shirt was wet with sweat and she could smell it. Sometimes she opened her mouth and panted a little; until she heard the sound, and stopped. She was beginning to feel something. She didn't know what it was, but it was some sort of physical inkling. And then she thought very clearly that the flask was still in the basket and got up firmly and fetched it and poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic cup. As she saw liquid there, it all came back to her with a rush, to the glands of her mouth, to her nerves, to her senses, to her flesh and bones—she was thirsty. She drank it down in one breath. Then for the first time she began to weep. She was thirsty, and had drunk, and so it had happened: she had left him. She had begun to live on. Desolation beat down red upon her eyelids with the sun and the tears streamed from her eyes and nose over her earth-stained hands.

Some people came down the road. An old man with safety-pins in his earlobes and a loin-cloth under an old jacket stopped short, saying the same half-syllable over and over. There were little children watching and no one sent them away. All she could do before the old man was shake her head, again, again, again, again, again at what they both saw. The women sent up a great sigh. Bray lay there in the middle of them all. They brought an old grey blanket of the kind she had seen all her life drying outside their huts, and an old door and they lifted him up and carried him away. They seemed to know him; he belonged to them. The old man with the safety-pins said to her in revelation, “It is the Colonel! It is the Colonel!”

She did not know him any more. She had left him. She was walking along the road between the cotton-covered, great soft hanging breasts of two women, she was alive.

They took them to an hotel that was closed or deserted. The building was boarded up and there was some sort of huge aviary outside but no birds in it, the wire doors open and a lot of burst mattresses and rubbish piled there. They took him to their own quarters, to one of their mud houses, and laid him on an iron bedstead in the cool dimness. It was the old man's bed and there was a pillow-case embroidered free-hand with yellow crosses, red birds with blue eyes, and blue flowers with red leaves. The women sat with him and clapped their hands together soundlessly and kept up a kind of
archaic groan, perhaps it was praying, perhaps it was just another human sound she had never heard before. She rested her head against one of the big breasts on cloth that smelt of woodsmoke and snuff. The D.O. from the Matoko
boma
came and took her away in his landrover, and his little wife, looking rather like Edna Tlume, seemed afraid of her and put her to bed in what was obviously the marital bed. A white doctor in priest's robes came and gave her an injection; they put her to sleep because she was not dead. She understood; what else could they do with her? She slept the whole night and in the morning found herself in a big bed, after all those nights in the narrow one.

Neil and Vivien Bayley appeared to take her to the capital. She wore one of the D.O.'s wife's dresses and she had nothing but the picnic basket and the briefcase.

At the Bayleys' house the children were all over her, pulling at her, chattering, asking where Clive and Alan and Suzi were. Vivien used the adult formula: “You mustn't worry Rebecca, she's very, very tired,” but to them she was the familiar Rebecca into whose car they used to be piled for entertainments and expeditions. All Vivien's children went through a stage of being rudely aggressive towards their mother; Eliza yelled, “It's not fair! Rebecca's nicer than you!” A scene swept through the house, banging doors, raising voices.

Neil's way was to say whenever he came into the house, “I think we all need a brandy.” They did not seem able to talk to her without all three of them having a drink in their hands. She drank to make it possible for the Bayleys but she would not take the pills Vivien gave her because then she had to go and lie down and sleep, and when she woke there was a moment when she didn't know it had happened and she had to discover it again. Vivien said, “I think it'd be a good idea if we made you some dresses.” The sewing machine was brought into the living-room and Vivien kept up a sort of monologue while she sewed, handing bits of the finishing over to her to be done. She was wearing Vivien's clothes, which fitted her better than the D.O.'s wife's dress had. She remembered and said to Vivien, “Did you send back the dress to Matoko?” Vivien said gently, “No, but I will when the transport starts running again, don't worry.”

She was turning up a hem. The material was pale green cotton. She said, “What will they do with him?”

Vivien's hands were taken slowly from the machine, her face had an imploring look. “They've cabled his wife to see if she wants his body flown back.”

The airport was closed, they had told her. He would be kept lying somewhere, there were refrigerators for that sort of thing. No one knew when planes would leave again. She had tried to make a joke about the airport, saying, “So your riot bag's just standing by,” but Vivien had taken it as a reminder of something unspeakable and could not answer.

With the brandy glasses in their hands they talked about what had happened. Out of that day—yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that: slowly the succeeding days changed position round it—another version came into double exposure over what she knew. The men who had attacked were a roving gang made up of a remnant from the terrible riots that had gone on for a week centred round the asbestos mine. A Company riot squad led by white strangers— “
You see,”
Vivien interrupted her husband, “I knew they'd get round to using those men from the Congo and Mweta wouldn't be able to stop them. I knew it would happen”—had opened machinegun fire on strikers armed with sticks and stones. The white men dealt with them out of long experience of country people who needed a lesson in the name of whoever was paying—they burned down the village. The villagers and the strikers had made an unsuccessful raid on the old Pilchey's Hotel, where the mercenaries had quartered themselves. Someone had put up those road-blocks, probably with the idea of ambushing the white men (hopeless, they had left already, anyway). … It was said that the one who started the hut-burnings was a big German who didn't travel in the troop transports but in his own car.

Vivien said, “But this was a little Volkswagen, and there was a woman in it.”

“To asbestos miners an army staff car's the same as any other kind. A car's a car.” Neil spoke coldly to her. “Nobody knows anything, any more, when things get to the stage they are now. I don't suppose Mweta knew they would machine-gun people. Burn their houses over their heads. He just put it in the hands of the Company army, left it to their good sense … that's quite enough.”

She offered the information, “The people who helped us knew Bray.
An old man with safety-pins in the holes in his ears. He knew him from before.”

Neil had put the brandy on the floor. His hands were interlocked between his knees, his big, bright, bearded head (river-god's head, Bray had once called it) stared down through his legs so that the veins showed in his rosy neck. He said thickly, sternly, “Yes, they knew him. But it only takes a handful of strangers. Miners are recruited all over the country. God knows who
they
were. Nobody knows who the white men were. White men from somewhere. Perhaps they travel in Volkswagen cars, perhaps they cart women around with them. Putting up their road-blocks a mile from those people who'd known him for twenty years was a bunch of men who'd never seen him before. That's all.”

Agnes Aleke came to see her. Agnes was wearing her smooth wig, she was smartly dressed, and she cried all the time. “If only you'd come in the plane with me, if you'd come when I went.” Through Bray's death she seemed to experience in her plump voluptuous little body all that she had feared for it. Rebecca sat with her in the garden and held her hand to comfort her; Vivien carried out tea. “Come and stay with me, Rebecca, come to my mother's place. It's a nice house. Oh how I hated that place, that Gala, don't show me that place again, never—and how you must hate us—I said to my mother, she will hate us and why shouldn't she.” They embraced, Rebecca patting her gently while she sobbed. Vivien said with firm kindness, “What do you think of our dressmaking, Mrs. Aleke? You know Rebecca and I made that dress she's wearing, ourselves.”

Roly Dando came. It was in the late afternoon; they all drank. Thin little Roly had about him the air—taint, portent—of one who knows what is going on in a time of confusion and upheaval, when what official information there is ceases to be trustworthy. It was known that Mweta was not at the President's Residence; his messages to the people continued to be issued, but from some unknown retreat. His television appearances were, it was said, old films to which new taped statements were—not too well—matched. None of this was mentioned. But they talked. Dando seemed convinced that Shinza was over the border, planning a guerrilla insurrection. Dhlamini Okoi and the Minister of Health, Moses Phahle, had disappeared and were obviously with him. Goma was said to be in prison; there were so
many people in prison that if someone wasn't seen for a few days it was presumed that that was where he must be. Neil said, “Roly, is it true that Mweta has asked for British troops?”

Roly sat there in the dusk with his sinewy shrunken neck pulled up very straight from his collar; he did not seem to hear. He rose to fetch another drink and hesitated on the way, where Rebecca sat. He put his hand on her head:
“La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, La Filie aux Yeux d'Or.”
He stalked awkwardly to the veranda table and poured himself something. He came back and sat on the arm of her chair, his arm round her, touching her neck as he talked, as he grew a little drunk, unable even now to resist the dismal opportunity to take advantage of his grief to fondle a woman. He was talking of Bray. “The thing is, of course, all our dear friends abroad will say he was killed by the people he loved and what else can you expect of them, and how ungrateful they are, and all that punishment-and-reward two-and-two-makes-four that passes for intelligent interpretation of events. That's the part of it that would rile him. Or maybe amuse him. I don't know.”