“That’s the line the morning paper took, I saw.”
“I know. Just coincidence. I don’t think Sesheka has any influence there. That’s just Evan Black wanting to keep the circulation up by being provocative.”
Vivien said, “Unfair, Neil. You know Evan thinks the people up north are being forgotten.”
“But if it were someone more forceful than Sesheka, would Mweta have to worry?” Bray asked.
Neil belched, shaking his head, and when he could speak: “Aha! But that’s another story, James. That’s always something to worry about; if it were to be a Tola Tola, for instance, even if there isn’t any genuine grievance for him to climb up by.”
“You don’t think there’s any genuine grievance?”
“No I don’t. By genuine grievance I mean that Mweta would have to be failing to make use of what is available to him for this country.”
“Hjalmar tells me industrialists are paying fifty pounds just to dine with him.”
Neil grinned. “My God, he’s a glutton for punishment, old Mweta.”
They talked of Bray’s work and Bray told an anecdote or two about Gala—how his name had been up at the club for weeks until the bold draper seconded it. Vivien was in conversation with a friend on the telephone; she came back after a while and said, “Did you know Mweta’s going to speak over the radio at midnight? Apparently it’s been announced every hour all afternoon.”
Neil opened another bottle of wine. “The contract’s been given to the Chinese. France, West Germany and America have called off the loan. Or they’re going to build both dams—the lake one as well. My, my. We can’t go to bed.”
Vivien looked at Bray. She said, “He’s tired, he’s driven hundreds of miles.”
He was feeling embarrassed for Mweta. Why midnight? Who advised him about such things? Perhaps he didn’t know that Hitler used to choose odd hours of the night or early morning for his speeches, entering through the territory of dreams, invading people’s minds when blood pressure and nervous resistance are at lowest ebb. “Certainly midday would be a pleasanter time to report back on his dam.”
“Joy says he’s never in bed before three, anyway.”
Neil began to scratch his neck restlessly. “Shall we phone Jenny—penny and Curtis and get them to join the vigil?” Vivien said mildly, since nothing would stop Neil if he felt the need of company, “We haven’t seen James for months, I want to talk to James. Rebecca writes she’s got a house quite near you?—thank heaven she’s out of the hotel. I do think your Aleke should have seen there was somewhere for her to live before getting her up there. What sort of man is he? You know, with Rebecca, people just exploit her.” She looked for reassurance.
Bray was saying, “Half a house. She’s sharing with some people—” while Neil gave his short laugh and said fondly, “Poor old backwoods Becky, we must write to her.”
“But Aleke—you think he’s all right?”
“Darling, of course he’ll make a pass at her, if that’s what you mean.” Neil cut across. “What else do you expect? She has that effect, our Becky.”
Defending her against Aleke, Vivien said, “It’s not right that this idea should’ve somehow … she’s quite the opposite, if you really know her—she doesn’t try for men at all. But it’s just a kind of awful compassion …”
Neil said aggressively, “Oh really, is that what you females call it.”
“Oh I know you don’t like the idea. That there could be anything about you.” She was talking to her husband, now; slowly they were beginning to pick up words like stones.
Bray felt unimportantly ashamed of his casualness. But all he said was, in the same tone, “Aleke’s a good chap to work for, I should think. Her children have got in to the local school.”
At midnight Mweta’s voice filled the room. They sat dreamily still, not looking at each other. Vivien’s right hand was pressed against the side of her belly to quiet the only movement in the room, stirring there. Mweta announced the immediate introduction of a Preventive Detention Bill.
Chapter 9
It was all there, set out again in the morning paper. As he read he heard Mweta’s voice, as if it were addressed to him. Emergency regulations had been invoked to bring the Bill into force immediately without the usual parliamentary procedure. The step had been “taken with the greatest reluctance” but “without any doubt of the necessity.” “I would be betraying the people, the sacred trust of their future, if I did not act swiftly and without hesitation. … Certain individuals have begun to gnaw secretly at the foundations of the state which the people have laid down so firmly through their work and dedication. Certain individuals are incapable of understanding the transformation of personal ambitions, petty aims, into the higher cause of securing the peace and progress of the nation—a cause that even the humblest people of our nation have shown themselves equal to in the short time since we have had our country in our own hands. Certain individuals are ready to destroy the general good for the sake of petty ambitions. They are weak and few, and so long as you trust and support your leaders, you need not fear them. They are small as ants. But they are also greedy as ants; if we say, oh, it’s only a few ants, we may wake up one day and find the floorboards collapsing beneath all we are building. We must take the powers to stop the rot before it starts, to act while there is still time to turn these people from the mistakes they have fallen into, and to show them where their true interest, like yours and mine, really lies—”
The paper reproduced across five columns the picture of Mweta smiling from the doorway of the plane as he arrived back in the country a few days before, and the leading article, suppressing the question mark, pointed out that there was no cause for confusion and alarm; the President would not have left the country if he had not felt fully in control of the situation.
The waiters shouted to each other as they went about the rondavels at the Silver Rhino, banging on the doors to deliver early morning tea and newspapers. (Between finger and thumb, Bray pinched off a couple of ants that had quickly found the sugar.) A boiler was being stoked up. The off—key musical gong that was played up and down corridors and garden to announce meals drew close and faded, as the girl’s recorder had done the day before. Footsteps clipped over the concrete paths with the purpose of morning. The taps on the washbasin began to creak and fart as the plumbing was taxed. Bray was taken by the flow of these things—bathroom ritual, clothes put on, breakfast eaten—and brought to the point where, five minutes before eleven—fifteen, he had the door opened to him under the portico with the white pillars to which he had come a number of times in his life: to pay respects as a D.C. newly appointed; to plead for Mweta’s release from confinement; to answer the complaints made against himself by the white residents of Gala province.
Out of the trance of commonplace that had brought him here, Bray in the waiting room of the Presidential Residence became intensely alert. He could feel the rapid beat of his heart in the throb of the hand, on the chair—arm, that held the cigarette burning away. He distinguished the quality of the room’s silence, and the displacement of his own presence there, like the rise in the volume of water when some object is lowered into it. At the same time he was going over rapidly and fluently, in words instead of those surges of imagery and emotion with which a meeting is usually rehearsed, what was to be said. He was possessed with the calm, absolute tension of excitement. It was the first time for a very long time. He opened the windows above the window—seat and the park out there—thin trees standing quietly in the heat, a pair of hoopoes picking on the grass—existed within a different pace, like a landscape seen through the windows of an express train.
The secretary, Asoni, came in quickly. “You understand, Colonel, if it had been anybody else it would have been out of the question today, as I said to Mr. Small. There is really no time for private interviews.… We are only just back, and now this other—” The sides of his mouth pulled down, proprietorial, brisk, impulsive. “If it had be
en anybody else I couldn’t … but I have just managed to fit you in …” It was the manner of the waiter, exacting dependence on his goodwill for a decent table. Small looked round the door: “I’m fascinated by the splendid work you’re doing in the North.” It had all the conviction of a stock phrase; simply substitute “in the South” or “the swamps” or wherever the individual had happened to have been since Small saw him last. “I know the Big Man’s longing to see you, nothing would induce him to miss that, though he’s up to his ears. Unfortunately, it’ll just have to be rather brief, alas, I’m afraid.”
Bray was not forthcoming with any assurance that he would not prolong the visit. Chatting, the two of them escorted him out into the corridor, where they were held up by the passage of a giant copper urn or boiler being shuffled along on the heads and arms of workmen. Wilfrid Asoni turned, with a theatrical gesture to Small.
“What in God’s name d’you think you’re doing?” Small stood his ground before the procession. The men lost coordination under the burden, and their gleaming missile swayed forward. “Why wasn’t that thing brought through the service entrance? The kitchens—why don’t you use the kitchen door, eh? Who allowed these men to come this way?” Servants and explanations appeared. The kitchen doors were too small. “You can’t just bring men through the Residence, you know that. You know that perfectly well, Nimrod. Good God, anybody just walking through the place, anybody who says he’s a workman?” He and Asoni looked to each other. “That’s security for you, eh? —Well, get the thing out of the way, get it in here, come on, come on …” The men backed off through the double doors of a reception room in a bewildered posse, to let Bray and Asoni and Small pass. The two had lost interest in Bray. “Fantastic!” “You’re certainly right, Clive.” “But seriously, eh?” “That’s Colonel Onabu’s security, yes.” “Well, I know who’s going to hear about that.” “I hope so. I certainly hope so.” “I’ll be on that telephone in five minutes. Unless you’d rather do it?” Wilfrid Asoni slipped into the President’s study and closed the door on his own voice switched to the official calm of the doctor entering the ward of an important private patient. He appeared again at once and opened the door for Bray absently. Bray caught a brushing glimpse of his plump sculptured face, the eyes set in the black skin smoothly as the enamelled eyes of ancient Greek figures, already turned to the piece of importance he shared with Small.
Mweta was on his feet behind the company director’s desk, leaning forward on his palms. There was always the second, on first entering his presence, like the pang of remembering the first sight of someone with whom one long ago fell in love. He came round with that smile—a toothpaste—advertisement smile, really, in the associations of Europe, but in Africa the smile of a boy come upon on the road somewhere, biting into sugar—cane—and took Bray’s hands in his elegant dark ones. A kind of current of euphoria went through the two men. “If you’d said to me, who’d you like to be there when you get home, James would have been the answer. Oh but it’s tiring, eh, James?—years ago, you didn’t tell me, you didn’t warn about that. From the moment the plane arrived, three, four meetings a day—and the lunches, and the cocktail parties, the dinners— And twice it happened there was something special to discuss before a conference—the only time was before breakfast or after midnight.”
“Well, you’ve always had the stuff it takes. All those miles on the bicycle; that was the right preparation.”
“Anyway, we got what we wanted. And this is one of the times when a tied loan is an advantage, eh, all the equipment and materials and skilled manpower comes from the financing countries. They’re paying and their men’ll see to it that the job is done. No throwing up your hands over this delay and that. No defaulting contractors to blame, while we pay. D’you know we’ll get six thousand kilowatt hours a year, when it’s fully operative. We could sell to the Congo, Malawi—Zambia, even—who knows, it’s possible they’ll get out of Kariba. Our lake scheme in the North was just one of those dreams, you know, nice dreams we had before Independence. It’s not a proposition, compared with this. The main thing is money—it’s exactly twice as hard to get money for a scheme that benefits a single state as it is to get the same money to benefit two. And you’ve got to try for it alone. I can tell you, James, it’s all the difference in the world, it’s the difference between going as a beggar and going as statesmen. That’s one thing I’ve learnt.”
There was a tea table near the woolly sofa, now, with a couple of black leather airport chairs for talks less formal than those conducted across the desk. They came to rest there.
Bray said, out of the warmth and ease, “That seems to have gone off splendidly. But what bothers me is the other. Last night.” It seemed a piece of cruelty to speak. Mweta’s eyes winced. He folded his arms to recapture the ease. “I don’t understand, James.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
Mweta’s eyes continued to flicker. He said, smiling, “You heard what I said.”
“Oh that. What you had to say. But what you think about it? The real reasons why you’ve found it necessary? I wasn’t coming to talk to you about this at all—”
Mweta made an eager, dismissing gesture; Bray came to see him because he was Bray.
“No—I had a reason”—a rebuff for them both— “there was a young man I picked up on the road to the Bashi last week. I discovered later that he’d been in detention at Gala prison for almost three months—he didn’t need to wait for your new law. I was going to talk to you about him, I didn’t know whether you knew, though of course I could tell that Onabu knew, this sort of authority—I don’t know what to call it—came from up there, from Onabu.… But that’s not what matters. I mean, it matters enormously in itself, but there’s something much more important, and now, since last night, even more important. The boy, the Detention Bill, they’re the effect.”
Mweta sat back in himself, arms still crossed, in the determined, flexed attention that Bray knew so well. His face had smoothed momentarily as if he were to be let off; then the flick in his eyes came again. Bray was aware of it all the time.
“—That’s not what matters. Because it seems clear to me that what happened to the boy, the Detention Bill—they’re inevitable, essential, you can’t do without them, your reason being what it is—”
Mweta came in quickly but distrusting: “Yes, my good reason. I’m not going to stand by and let this country be ruined by trouble—makers.”
“What do you call trouble—makers, Mweta?”
“You get people who see Independence right from the beginning as a free—for-all. Grab what you can … They’re always there. You have to deal with them. You know that. I don’t like it, but I have to do it.”
“You’re better off than most, here. You’ve got a good chance of giving people what they lack.”
Mweta said, “James, that’s not the point. You could give them all a house with electric light and a clean—hands job and you’d still have trouble from some people.”
“Then there’s something else that’s bothering them.”
Mweta gave a little snorting smile. “You’re quite right, it’s power, that’s what they want. Somebody wants power and there’s only one way for such a person to try and get it. He must use every poor fellow who’ll listen to him, he must stir them up with talk they don’t understand, so they’ll be only too ready to believe we’ve bamboozled them, too, and from this it follows so easily to convince them that if this country isn’t the Garden of Eden, that’s got nothing to do with their inadequacies and our difficulties. —James—we’ll clean up that young rubbish and show the people behind them it’s no good. You can believe me. I don’t want the Detention thing a day longer, after that.”
An irritable spark like static electricity ran between them. “There won’t be an after that. You’ll need to keep that bill forever, if you don’t do something about the reason why you need it in the first place. If you’d do that you wouldn’t be obliged to ‘deal’ wit
h it. The way you have to deal with it now. This way you don’t like, Mweta—”
Mweta was about to answer and did not. He smiled at Bray to shut him out. “Well, go on.”
“I believe some of those ants of yours are nibbling under their own benches in the House.”
Mweta’s mouth moved and settled.
“ ‘They are being watched,’” Bray said, “Well and good. And who else? Who else is being watched? And why? Mweta, why? What for? I can’t help feeling convinced that if you’d given him a ministry there’d have been no trouble. From him. He’d have dealt with the trouble.”
“He’s the one who’s always made it,” Mweta said. Then suddenly, like an actor going out after his audience he turned shining eyes and eager—hunched body, all gathered up in a stalking intensity and burst out, beguiling, gesturing— “Shinza! From the day of self—rule he began to turn his criticism on us. From that day. Always looking at me and shaking his head inside. Whatever it was we were discussing. No trust any more for anybody. He made up his mind he had to watch the rest of us the way he used to watch them. Yes! You remember? At the talks in London, he was always the one would come out and say, afterwards, ‘I don’t think so—and-so means what he says, he’s playing for time.’ ‘So-and-so’s going to do what the Colonial Secretary says.’ ‘This one must be made to back down….’ He watched them for us while we were too busy thinking what point to make next. He found out things I hadn’t noticed, often he was right, he could warn you. But among ourselves! Our own men! In the Central Committee, among the ministers! How can you work like that? James, James”—his voice dropped to patient reasonableness, soft and dramatic— “I can tell you, his eyes were on the back of my head. I ask him something—I went to him as I always did, you understand—he was my father, my brother—he listens with a smile on his face and his eyes closed.” Mweta was standing over Bray. He hung there, paused, breathing heavily, gasping, almost, like a man about to sob, deserted by words. “‘I hadn’t understood the issue properly.’ ‘Did I realize who I was dealing with?’—With his eyes closed. To smell me out. Yes, like he did the Englishmen in Lancaster House, making the noises in the throat and looking like they’re falling asleep just when they’re ready to get you. It was mad, eh? All right. I said to myself, he’s your father, your brother. All right. But let him come out in the open. Let him speak what he thinks at the time for these things, like anybody else. This is a government, not a secret society. Open your eyes and look at me, Shinza. But I kept quiet. A long time, a long, long time. Did I ever say anything to you? That last time in London? You never knew what it was like. I was ashamed, you understand, I didn’t want you to know how he was behaving. I didn’t want to believe it myself. But I can’t think about myself any more. If I do, I must get out”—he strode to the window and flung away the park, out there, rippling in the still heat— “We’re not in the bush in Gala any more, with nothing but each other. Eight million people are in this country. I can’t be tied by the hind leg like a cow. When Clough and the British Chief of Staff met for the defence agreement and the question of a base on the southern border came up, Clough starts outlining what he ‘believes’ I’d agree to, and, my God, it’s clear to me that he’s got a pretty good idea before where we’ll make a concession and where we’ll stick fast—the missile base question, for example. Clough obviously knew we were going to bargain with that, he was prepared, he made no bones about it—and so I said to him—that is, I made a point of raising an objection to something that we really had no objection to at all, just to see what his reaction would be. And he came out with it just like that: ‘But I understood that this would be acceptable to your government.’—From where did you understand, I said. Who gave you to understand? Of course, he got out of that one somehow. But later on I asked him, alone. ‘I was given to understand.’ He looked at me as if I was mad, as if I didn’t know. You can’t blame him. Who gave you to understand? —He had had talks with Clough: ‘Of course, Shinza knew my predecessor well.’ It was often useful to chat beforehand. Much progress had been made quietly, in the past. And so on. What could I say? Well, that time no damage was done. Luckily. But that’s the kind of thing. Look at the minority report he put in. And that’s something you knew about. You know what you thought of that. Yes, well, a bit tactless, that’s what you said to me. But you’re not one to say much, and I know you were worried, whatever you said. I have eight millions on my hands, James, and I can only look after them my own way.”
A Guest of Honour Page 19
