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—”
But the sidestep in itself was, Bray saw, a recognition of himself as an opponent.
“Anyway, perhaps we’ll get some peace and quiet now,” Aleke said sociably, to include his wife in the talk as she appeared shaking a packet of peanuts onto a saucer.
“Then take a week off, please, let’s have a holiday.”
“I didn’t say anything about a holiday — just that Edward Shinza will be out of the way, that’s all. — I’ve told you, you can go off to your mother if you want to, I’ll join James as a bachelor again—”
“I just hope he stays out of the way, then. I don’t like these night trips up to the iron mine and God knows where in the bush — and I’m alone here with the children.” She turned with her slightly sulky, flirtatious manner to Bray. “I’m scared.”
“I heard the same complaint from a young woman when I was up at the Congress. Only she’s scared of the Company’s private army. She’s afraid they’ve recruited Schramme and his out-of-work mercenaries.”
“Oh town. What’s there to be afraid of in town. It’s not like here with those bush — people from the lime works shouting in the streets, poor Rebecca, you remember in the car that time—”
“Yes, yes — but now Shinza’s back in the Bashi with his tail between his legs, the Party Congress is over, all that nonsense will stop
“Not only cynical; also very optimistic, Aleke.” For Agnes Aleke’s sake, he changed the subject. “Have you seen the Malembas since he’s been back? Sampson was a triumph with his resolution about the club, I’d no idea he was even contemplating it—”
“Malemba? Really?” Aleke murmured amusedly; and once he said as he drank his beer and gazed round with the preoccupied contemplative criticism of a man too busy to do what he felt he should, “Agnes, either fix up that place like you said or chop it down for firewood.”
His wife and Bray looked up uncomprehendingly a moment, and saw that he meant the old summerhouse in the garden. She said, for Bray’s benefit, “Oh no, we won’t pull it down. I want to make it nice again.”
Olivia had built it — or rather had it built, the prisoners coming over under guard to put up the mud-and-wattle walls and tie the thatch (tea and bread sent out to them from the D.C.’s kitchen). It had been for the children, the little girls, dressing up in their mother’s clothes and playing in there with their English governess, that girl with hefty freckled calves luminous with ginger hairs who (Olivia said) had been in love with him. But to him now it was Aleke’s house; as he walked up the fan of steep, uneven veranda steps or entered the rooms, he hardly remembered he had lived there.
Barely a month went by peacefully for Mweta. If he thought the rebels in the unions had been dealt with at the Congress, the most favoured workers, who had not made common cause with them, had received no such chastening. The “loyal” mineworkers began to renew the pay demands for parity with expatriate white miners that he had refused with his famous “empty hand” argument before. For the time being, he kept out of the dispute publicly, while first Ndisi Shunungwa — his “coming man”—then the Labour Minister’s secretary, and finally Talisman Gwenzi, the Minister of Mines himself, intervened. Yesterday’s newspaper arrived on Bray’s and Aleke’s desks each morning with the daily report of meetings and talks whose outcome — failure — was “not disclosed.” Aleke remarked, “Mweta should tell them where to get off — he’s the only one they’ll listen to.” Bray did not say, he can hardly show the necessity to do that, now. “That’s what he’s got Gwenzi for.” But it was hard, for people who had long been ruled by a faceless power across the seas not to see authority solely in the face of the individual from among themselves who had taken over in their name. “The government” was so long the alien, abstract puissance; “the leader” their own flesh-and-blood man.
He wondered whether perhaps — for Shinza — one of those strange lulls would now come about; one of those apparently inexplicable breaks in African political life when someone turns away just as he seems about to close his grasp. He had contemplated (with strong unease) Shinza disappearing into the hiatus of that hut smelling of woodsmoke and sour baby, talking, smoking, while an old body slept in a bundle of rags outside in the yard waiting to die as Shinza waited — for what, sign or time, Bray did not know. But Shinza sent for him to come to Boxer’s ranch. They had just spent the day at the lake, on their island — he and the girl. It was much too hot and she was in full war-paint of the sun; streaks of scarlet down her shins and calves, across nose, cheekbones and round high forehead. “I hope you’re not in for heat stroke”; but she kissed him with burning swollen lips that suggested she was ready to make love. They were both rather exhausted and this seemed to put a fine edge of enervation on their nerves; since he had been back the urgency between them had been constant — sometimes he had to seize her hand and press it on his sex.
Under the rusty old shower she said between gasps and gulps, “I forgot to tell you — old Boxer turned up while you were away. Came to look for you at the boma.”