Hjalmar deferred the company to Bray. “Is there anything in that?”
“We’ve seen this week what Shinza’s support consists of.”
Roly Dando waved his pipe. “Bray for one.”
Neil said, “You found him impressive? — When I read what he says I think what a bright guy, he’s right, most of the time. But if he’s talking to me — I mean if he’s there in the flesh and I’m listening — he makes me bristle. I don’t like the chap.”
Vivien’s body had the collapsed — balloon look of a woman who has recently given birth. In its frame of neglected hair that lay stiff as if sculptured, a verdigris blonde — her beautiful face kept its eternal quality through the erosive noise of children and transient talk. “He’s a very attractive man. I’m surprised none of us has taken him for a lover.”
“You’ve never met him. Schoolgirl crush.” Her husband did not let the remark pass.
“I have. I met him at a reception the first year we were here.”
“—Once her passion is roused, she never forgets, my she — elephant
“And I talked to him three days ago. We met at Haffajee’s Garage.” Everyone laughed, but she remained composed.
“Delightful rendezvous—”
“We were buying petrol. He remembered me at once.”
“This positive neutralism is a very fine idea and all that, but we have to be a little practical, nnh?” Hjalmar said. “Wherever it’s attempted the Russians or the Chinese or the Cubans come in and you’re back in the cold war; it’s like driving a car, nnh — if you stay in neutral, you can’t move. … He wouldn’t be any more nonaligned than Mweta. And as the West is frightened of ideas like his, the East would be the ones to get him. It’s between two sets of vultures.”
“Ah well, that’s the art of it. Keeping the flesh on your bones. That’s what our bonny black boys’ve got to master.”
Bray said to Dando, “Do you think Mweta’s having a try?”
Dando chewed on his pipe with bottom teeth worn to the bone. “We’ve talked about it a hundred times. You know quite well what I think; what you want is to confirm what you think. Because you’ve woken up out of your bloody daydream at last … I don’t know what did it … now you don’t like what you see. I’m in the stronger position because I’ve never expected to see anything I’d like”—there was laughter; even Margot smiled— “Mweta’s not a man to take great risks, he’s not a radical in the smallest fibre of his body. To make great changes here you’ve got to take the most stupendous risks; he’s chosen to play for half — safety for the simple reason he isn’t capable of anything else and in his bones he’s the sense to know it. He’s chosen his set of vultures because he thinks he can gauge from experience the length of their beaks; all right — now he’s seeing how much flesh he can keep from them.”
He found himself speaking to Dando, to them all, looking at the faces, one to the other. “Why are we so sure one set of beaks is so much more dangerous than another? — Because of the prisons, the labour camps, the thousands of dead in the Soviet Union over the years; because the Great Leap Forward’s been overtaken by civil wars in China; because of Hungary, because of Czechoslovakia, Poland — yes, I know. But we’re people who know what’s wrong with the West, too, the slavery it practised with sanctimony so long, the contempt it showed to the people it exploited — and still shows, down south on this continent. The mirror — image of itself that it sets up in the privileged black suburbia that takes its place … The wars it perpetuates in the cause of the ‘free world’ … If positive neutralism is the ideal, but the third world boils down to Roly’s art of living between two sets of vultures, why can we be so sure it mightn’t conceivably be more worth while to see how much flesh one can save in an association with the East? Why? Because we ‘belong’ to the West? Express our views — hold them — by the permissiveness of the West? … tied to it by that permissiveness? Roly — myself — I don’t think he’ll say he’s ever believed anything else — would you agree we’ve always accepted what Sartre once wrote, that socialism is the movement of man in the process of re — creating himself? — Is that or is that not what we believe? — Whatever the paroxysms of experiment along the way — whether it’s Robespierre or Stalin or Mao Tse — tung or Castro — it’s the only way there is to go, in the sense that every other way is a way back. What do you want to see here? Another China? Another America? If we have to admit that the pattern is likely to be based on one or the other, which should we choose?”
“You’re saying socialism is the absolute?” Neil loved strong sentiments, as a form of entertainment. He at once took charge. “The standard of reference by which any political undertaking is to be judged?”
“Yes! Must be, if we believe, people like Roly and me, what we’ve been saying all our lives — the lawyer and the civil servant. Yes! What else?”
“But I am still a lawyer and you are no longer a civil servant,” Dando said, looking at him. Their eyes engaged; and then he withdrew, under Dando’s gaze of a man who stands watching another go out of sight.
The talk had gone back to Tola Tola, the Foreign Minister. “But what about the Msos,” Hjalmar was insisting. “Neil — how will Mweta get him out without causing trouble for himself there?”
Neil Bayley stood about among his seated guests like a ringmaster, running his hands up through his bright curly aureole of beard and hair. “Ah, there’s the advantage of the strange position of Tola Tola — although he’s nominally Mso, it seems he actually comes from the Congo … someone’s dug that up. It’s clearly not an Mso name … is it, James? Tola Tola?”
“Probably not; you don’t get the two — syllable repetition …”
“—So even though he’s got an Mso seat, there’s some”—he swivelled his hand right and left, fingers fanned stiffly— “ambiguity about the whole business. But Mweta’d have to put an Mso in his place, that’s the snag. Apparently the Msos would want Msomane. Or rather Msomane would want to make sure he was the man. He’s mad keen to get rid of Labour, which is hardly surprising.”
Bray said, “Neil, would you say Mosmane was one of the people who’re pushing Mweta?”
“Depends what way. It’s always a tricky business to keep the Mso faction happy. Without making too much of them.”
“I don’t mean that. Would he have had enough influence with Mweta to get him to approve the Company setting up its private army?”
“Is that story true?”
“Hjalmar has to be told twenty times if it’s something he doesn’t want to believe,” Margot said. “You’d have to run him over with a tank first.”
“My source of information only mentioned armoured cars,” Bray put in lightly to protect poor Hjalmar. And Vivien’s clear commanding voice that stamped her origin as undeniably as any princely birthmark on the backside of a foundling: “Hjalmar, I’m just like you. I wouldn’t have believed it if one of the Company mothers who picks up children at Eliza’s school hadn’t told me how much safer she feels now. — I told her how much less safe I feel.”
Neil still held the floor. “Cyprian Kente’s more likely to be the one who’s done the pushing, and even Guka, maybe. If your Interior and Defence boys give advice, it’s difficult not to take it.”
“And no one’s asked any questions in the House.”
“It’s been done so discreetly … the first anyone heard was when these men appeared out of the blue last month at Ngweshi Mine — the report was that ‘police’ reinforcements had come down from here. Then it leaked out that they were a new kind of police.… But when the House sits again”—his mind went back to the “worry” about Mweta he had begun with earlier. “Of course, it looks so sinister. I don’t doubt that he’s tough enough to keep it under control. But it would have been better to keep the Company in the background — could have been called a force of civilian reservists, some such. He’s been badly advised to let the Company’s name come in openly — I wouldn’t agree that he shouldn’t use the resources of the Company if he needs them, one may have to use existing resources—”