“Well, no. But some people get angrier and somehow wilder as they get old. Take Tolstoi. Some of the late Yeats poems — it seems to me old age must be like that for quite a lot of people. More often than the evening-of-life stuff. Good God, which would be worse?”
She said, as if it were all much more serious for her, “I don’t think I’ve read them. Except one. About an old man—”
“‘The devil between my thighs’—that one?”
“Yes — but surely sex is the least of it. There are other things one’d like to be sure to be done with.”
“What about the things one’d never conceived of. Even the simple hardening of arteries could turn you into a grasping hag who’d suspect the people she used to love of stealing out of her purse.”
“But can you imagine it ever happening to you?” They were stopped by a red light and she turned to look at him, a young woman’s face just beginning to take on the permanent expression of the emotions and self-disciplines that were making over her features in their likeness.
“Of course not”; and his middle-aged calm, that was in itself an acceptance of such horrors to come, belied the reassurance of his words. She smiled.
Dando suggested they should eat at the Silver Rhino — he came, with the air of putting an end to something, from the kitchen, where there was the question of whether or not dinner had been expected to be provided at the house that evening. “Who’s on, who’s off, hopeless chewing the rag about it.” They had a drink in the garden, and put on their jackets to go to town as soon as it got dark. Festus was loading his bicycle onto the luggage grid on the roof of the car; he, at least, was going to some sort of festivity. “What’s it, Festus?” Dando asked, when Bray inquired.
It was a “boxing fight” at the stadium. “I must come half-past seven.”
“I know, I know, don’t panic. You’ll be there.”
The black man sat in the back of the car in a white shirt and grey pants, smelling of carbolic soap. He repeated, nevertheless, “Half-past seven.”
“I hope you’ll be in as good time with breakfast tomorrow as I’ll get you to the stadium tonight.”
Festus gave him a look registering the intention to answer, but in the meantime rolled down the window and yelled out. A faint cry went up from the servants’ quarters. Festus bellowed; and this time the youngster came running to open and close the gates behind the car. As the headlights threw a bright dust-opaque ramp into the sky, Festus took up Dando. “When I’m don’t come, you tell me.”
“Just be sure you remember you’ve eight miles to ride after refreshment, that’s all.”
“I say: tomorrow we know.”
Bray turned and offered a cigarette over his shoulder. Festus took it, but without the complicity of a smile against Dando; he had the preoccupation of someone off duty.
After they had dropped him not at the stadium but at a street corner that he pounced upon (clutching Dando by the shoulder to make him stop the car) in an intention clearly held all along but not conveyed, Dando drove to the Great Lakes Hotel instead of the Rhino; he thought he must have left his glasses there, over lunch. The Great Lakes had been built several years before by the biggest gold-mining company because there was nowhere suitable to entertain principals from Britain and America. It was designed, down to the last doorhandle and ashtray, by a prizewinning contemporary British architect who had never been to Africa; the lacy cement lattice that served in place of walls between the public rooms and the patio had not provided for the acute angle at which rain swept in during the wet season; the thick-carpeted boxes of bedrooms depended entirely upon air-conditioning for ventilation and kept out the perfect, sharp air of the dry season. The patio was now partly glassed in, the rain-damaged raw silk had been replaced with nylon; the hotel was no longer beautiful but had adapted itself for survival, as a plant goes through mutations imposed by environment.
Some sort of official cocktail party was ending as they arrived and the lategoers had got as far as the patio round the pool, standing about in suddenly intimate groups talking still in the voices of a crowded room. The tiny pennants of the country’s own new airline stood among wisps of lettuce in the Golden Perch Room; Dando and Bray passed through to another bar, with greetings and snatches of talk catching at them. Roly Dando’s running commentary was carelessly loud enough to be heard by anybody, had they been listening. No one was. Heads lifted, eyes turned to follow, faces were glazed with the cosy daze of sundowner time. “… Raymond Mackintosh, no less. I wonder what he’s crawling up Norman’s arse for now. Look at it. — Well, Raymond, here’s to your first million. — Hullo Joe, hasn’t the steak gone down yet?” A black man waved with an important smile, looking up from the depths of a conversation that brought him forward in his chair, knees wide, trousers straining, to confer with the white man opposite him. “—Joe Kabala was here with Stein at lunch, as well. The milling company. Going to be the first black one on that board, wait and see. A lovely champion of private enterprise, keeping the seat warm for white capital investment and raking in the director’s fees. He’s starting to eat smoked salmon, I saw it myself…. — Hadn’t you better be going home to your children?” Rebecca Edwards peered round a rubber plant at the sound of Dando’s voice. She was drinking beer with Curtis Pettigrew, obviously come straight from work, with untidy paper carriers from the supermarket dumped beside her. “The dinner’ll be dried out again, Curtis. It’s all right for a bachelor like me to come home when I please.”
They were waylaid by an FAO man and Father Raven, who ran the refugee education scheme at Senshe. Bray had already been out there and at Bill Raven’s request had made some notes, at odd times at home in Dando’s rondavel, for a simple course in economic administration. “You don’t happen to speak Portuguese? The Zambians have dumped a batch of Frelimo chaps on us”—Raven was half-thrilled at the dilemma. The FAO man offered to take Bray to see the experimental farm he was setting up in the South; “If I’m still around, I’d like to go with you.”
He went off after Dando, who was up at the bar having an argument with his friend Coningsby, the manager, about the Austro-Hungarian empire and the character of Franz Josef. Dando was accustomed to knowing more about any subject than the person who took him up on it, and in the absence of better intellectual stimulus, enjoyed the advantage in a grudging way; Bray remembered that this was what had happened to men who lived in a restricted circle and read a lot. The bush mentality was not what people thought; it could take the form of a burning compulsion to explain to somebody — anybody, the driver of the road transport, the district vet — the workings of the Common Market or Wittgenstein’s theories.
Bray always found bar-stools uncomfortable — he was too big to accommodate himself without prodding someone with his shoulder or knee — and he was best off with one elbow on the bar and the rest of him turned towards the room. He drank whisky and watched them all. It was a daydream from the past, with incongruities that made it of the present. A small party of white people out to dinner came in, the patina of well-being on heads fresh from the hairdresser, faces shiny from a second shave. Laughter, the worldly kind that causes quiet paroxysms beneath well-fitting suits, had taken a huddle of three white men sitting farther up the bar counter as they said to each other urgently, “Wait — wait—” and then added a twist to the anecdote that set them off again. A black man in an American tartan jacket was with another in a dark-blue suit, talking to him without looking at him, his mind elsewhere. Orange fingernails scratched up cashew nuts; a woman who called everybody “sweetie” protested because there was no olive in her martini, protested again when the barman was reproached. Two more black men came in and looked over the heads conspiratorially, haughtily, then saw the raised finger of the man in tartan and broke into the sort of hearty formalities of hand-shaking and back-slapping that the white men would have winked about before, but that now simply brought a momentary distant look to their eyes.