The occasion for the party with the ladies was clearly the need to entertain a tall, blond young man from out of town to whom they all listened with the bright show of attention accorded to wits or experts. He was what is recognized as a Guards officer type, perhaps a little too typical ever to have been one. Not so young as all that, either; his small, handsome, straight-backed head on broad shoulders had longish, silky hair thinning on the pate, and when he smiled his teeth were bony-looking. He had a way of bearing down with his nostrils and drawing air audibly through them, to express exasperation or raise a laugh. Certainly his friends found this irresistible. His diction was something no longer heard, in England, anyway. Most likely explanation was that he must have taken part in amateur theatricals under the direction of someone old enough to have modelled himself on Noel Coward. Amateur theatre had been popular among the civil servants and settlers; even Olivia had once appeared in one of those dusty thrillers set in Lord Somebody’s country house.
“… Oh Lord yes. Her father’s getting right out too. Right out. The place at Kabendi Hills has gone. Carol’s heart — broken over the horses … to Jersey, I think.… Chief Aborowa said to me last week, there’s going to be trouble over the culling — some of these chaps’ve had that bloody great government stud bull the department’s spent a fortune on — and I said, my dear chap, that’s your worry, I hope there’ll be a couple of billion gallons of sea between me and your cows and your wives and the whole damned caboodle.… ‘I don’t want Pezele near my stool.’ I said don’t be a damned fool, Aborowa — as soon as I see him alone there’s no nonsense, I talk to him like a Dutch uncle, we were drinking brandy together—”
“—Priceless!” One of the women was so overcome she had to put down her glass.
“—Heavens, that’s nothing — Carol buys old Aborowa’s wife’s corsets for her.”
More laughter.
“His senior wife. Poor old baggage, she doesn’t know where the bouz begins and the derrière ends. Colossal. Such a dear old soul. I don’t know what she’ll do without Carol, they adore Carol. Yes, buys her corsets for her, bloomers, I don’t know what … Special department at Harrods, for the fat ladies of circuses or something …” He drew breath through pinched nostrils while they looked at each other delightedly. “I don’t know who’s going to replace that service when we go, I can tell you, central government or provincial authority or what the devil these gentlemen’re going to call themselves. M’lord Pezele — great fat Choro gentleman from the Eastern Province, he is — comes along in his brand-new jeep (I’ve been requisitioning for four years to get our jalopies replaced, but no dice), he stumps into the Great Place: ‘My appointment with Chief Aborowa is at nine-thirty’—he’s looking at his watch. Thinks he’s at the dentist. And there’s the old man over at his house, looking forward to a nice chat over a nip.”
The black man with the friend in the tartan jacket said pompously to the black barman, in English, “The service is very bad here. I asked for ice, didn’t I?”
But no one was listening except Bray.
“… happy to get eight per cent on short-term investment instead. Five years is all they work on in these countries, you know.”
Dinner music had started up in the dining-room, and the trailing sounds of a languid piano came from a speaker above the bar.
“Oh there’ll be no difficulty whatsoever, there, that we’re confident….” The white businessmen, now that they were serious again, had the professionally attentive, blandly preoccupied faces of those men, sitting in planes and hotels in foreign countries, who represent large companies.
“… your odd Portugoose wandering in from over the border … wily fellows, your Portugooses, but my boys always managed … now get this straight, Pezele, when I’m gone you can stew in your own uhuru, but while I’m doing my job … political officer, is he? — then tell him when he can read English well enough to understand other people’s confidential reports that’ll be time enough to get his sticky fingers—” The blue eyes, dilated fishily with vehemence, caught Dando and Bray on their way out of the bar with a half-smile of acknowledgement of the empathy counted upon in every white face.
“Moon, June, spoon,” Dando was saying, “who in the devil wants that drivel? I must speak to Coningsby. It’s even relayed in the lavatory. Can’t hear yourself piss in this place.”
The Silver Rhino was a short way out of town, built, like most of the hotels of these territories in the colonial era, on the Great North road that goes from country to country up through Central and East Africa. Ten years ago it had been a place where white people from the town and the mines would go for a weekend or a Sunday outing; there was fishing nearby and a tame hyrax and caged birds in the garden. But now the capital was spreading towards the old hotel, the lights of scattered houses were webbed in the bush, there were street names marking empty new roads, several Ministries had moved out that way. Bray heard that the site for the new university was to be there. “Yes — but that’s all changed again,” said Dando, sitting to the steering wheel as if it were the head of a reckless horse. “The university’ll be on the west slope of the town, most likely. And now that they’ve put up a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound Ministry of Works, it’s finally occurred to them that all government buildings ought to be in one area. So they’re going to build another Ministry where the others’re going up. A thousand acres, just below Government House and the embassies. Which is what could have been seen by anybody except a specially imported town planning expert, in the first place.”
“What’s going to be done with the building here?”
Dando accelerated, providing a flourish to his answer. “Raise battery hens in it, for all I know. Poor old Wentz. He doesn’t have much luck with his investments. He’s still in some sort of mess over the title deeds to the hotel — I keep promising him I’ll go over the papers with him, he’s in the hands of that bloody fool McKinnie, remember McKinnie and Goldin? He came up here and bought the place and signed the agreement, and then when his wife and family followed, there was some damn fool clause he should never have agreed to. They nearly didn’t get possession.”
“Good God. They had to leave South Africa because of some political trouble, didn’t they?” Bray had the mild interest of one who is passing through.
“Don’t know about had to. She was nervous and wanted to go — Hjalmar’s wife. She’s Jewish — he got her out of Germany in thirty-six, you know, though he’s not a Jew himself. Smuggled her over the border. It’s a terrible story. Of course he wasn’t allowed to marry her in Germany. He couldn’t even tell his family, couldn’t trust anybody. Just disappeared, with her. Incredible story. You wouldn’t think Hjalmar would have the guts, but he did it. He could have been in a concentration camp along with them if he’d been caught.”
A string of coloured bulbs was looped from pillar to pillar on the Silver Rhino’s familiar old wide veranda. Africans sat about on hard chairs drinking beer. Some were accompanied by women, who were, of course, accompanied by babies. Little children played with empty beer bottles and climbed the low veranda wall. The telephone booth that had always been there had a large portrait of Mweta, surmounted with a gold rosette, pasted on the door; people had scribbled numbers on the margin. Inside the hotel the mouldering butterfly-wing pictures had been replaced by some rather good Congo masks and the walls had been plainly whitewashed — otherwise it was all much as Bray remembered it. In the dining-room there was a hooded construction like a wishing well for grilling meat over an open flame, but it was not in use that night and the steaks came from the kitchen. Since Bray was last in Africa there had been the advent of the deep-freeze, and now he found himself eating these steaks everywhere: large, thick wads of meat that, once cut into, had the consistency of decomposing rags. “She usually makes a mushroom sauce, something special,” Dando grumbled. “All these places are the same, they start off all right.” Hjalmar Wentz had seen them — probably it would be impossible to go there for a meal without involving oneself in a visit to the Wentzes — and he came over to the table. He wore cotton trousers and a green knit shirt wrinkled round his chest and held out his hands apologetically. “Good God, you must excuse me — I wanted you to come and have a martini or something first, but what goes on here … I can’t tell you— The chamber of commerce is having a lunch tomorrow and this morning when I got the crayfish from the station we found it was all bad. The lot. Margot’s concocting something else, a miracle of the loaves and fishes … is that wine all right? Roly, I want you to try a Montrachet I found … but that’s steak, eh? Well, we can’t offer you crayfish tonight. But next time, remind me, you must try it … so light and dry.” He sat and drank a glass of wine with them, and they talked British politics; he would lose the thread, reluctantly, now and then, and look about him in the necessity to be elsewhere, and then return irresistibly to the talk. When the coffee came he said, “Oh Margot wants you to have coffee with us, later. With luck we’ll be out of the kitchen by ten. Come to our palace. Roly knows.” “Stephen in the pub?” said Roly. “He may be. I’m not sure. The barman ought to be there tonight.” The waiters had been looking anxiously at him for some time; he hurried off.