The bar was stifling, with the cool, sour undersmell of liquor. A fan made a mobile of tiny Viking ships, the sort of thing sold in airport shops, bob slowly like unevenly weighted scales. “How old are you, young man?” Dando called out to a plump, fair boy with a dent in his chin. Apparently it was an old joke; Stephen Wentz smiled and showed off a little as he put down a bottle of brandy and two fancy goblets. “Old enough to know what you like, Mr. Dando.” “Hjalmar’s son and heir. All these bottles will be his, some day.” Hjalmar Wentz appeared with the embarrassed air of someone who has just taken his leave; he spoke to the boy. Dando held his brandy glass like a bird between two hands. “I’ve just been telling that son of yours I’ll have to report you to the police for employing a minor in a bar.” “Never mind, you should see the trouble we have sometimes to keep out the babies on backs.”
“We saw them outside,” Bray said. “It looked very homely.”
“That’s Margot,” Hjalmar was expansively confidential. “They love to come here. She goes around giving the kids sweets. All the other hotels, of course, they’re trying to get them to leave the kids at home.”
Most of the Independence-week visitors had left but the bar was half-full with the regulars, a mixture of white and black, some of whom obviously had come in together. Smaller fry from the staff of visiting dignitaries were quartered at the Rhino — a Senegalese secretary, two men from the Ivory Coast — and there were newspapermen and a Filipino couple working for a United Nations demographic commission (Dando pointed them out) with friends from the Ghanaian Embassy. One or two of Mweta’s junior lieutenants in routine administrative jobs mingled with these cosmopolites, but Dando remarked, “They’re still at the dedicated, puritanical stage, in the government — first’ll come the bribery and the purges, then’ll come the normal drinking in pubs, along with ordinary mortals like ourselves. They’ll settle down.” He was greeted by many people; even Bray saw faces that he had come to know, by now. But they did not join anyone; Dando, sitting in damp shirt-sleeves in a stifling bar in this company, was contentedly meditative, for once; like a man at home in the chatter of his own kitchen. A little later they were summoned to the Wentzes’ flat. There was something strongly European about the little living-room they entered, despite the transparent lizards on the walls and the nondescript, locally made furniture. It was the table that did it: a round table with a heavy, curlicued central leg, and a yellow cloth falling flounced, a lamp in the middle. Within the circle of its light there was a European interior, an interior contained by the early darkness of winter afternoons, the wet, tapping winds of winter nights. But the windows were wide open to lukewarm darkness and the ear-ringing racket of insects.
Coffee and a black-rich chocolate cake with a bowl of whipped cream stood on the table. Dando ate three pieces. Margot Wentz had the calm of preoccupation or exhaustion. She seemed hardly aware of Dando and Bray, beyond the necessity to feed them, and it was unlikely that she had known, earlier, that they were in the hotel. She gave a wavering smile now and then, in answer to one of the guests, but she did not seem to hear her husband although he talked on, relating anecdotes that drew upon and assumed her participation, and quoting her opinions as if she were confirming them.
“A schnapps with the coffee,” he insisted, and although Bray wanted no more to drink Roly Dando said, “Ah, lovely,” and Hjalmar, still blond and handsome in a sun-toughened, run-down way, began to shuffle about the room opening cupboards and fussing like an old man. “It’s aquavit, should be here … where now … I’m half a Dane, you know, it’s my national whad’you-call it, tipple, yes….” Good God, what only isn’t pushed in here….” Piles of torn-off envelopes with stamps fell to the floor, curled-up photographs, bank deposit slips, box-top free offers of this and that. He began to look behind the volumes of philosophical and political works that filled rickety bookshelves; there were books all over the room, Shaw and O’Neill and Dos Passos and Auden, in English, Hesse, Hauptmann and Brecht and Rilke in German, psychology in German and English — a quick glance established that this was the remnant of the once-indispensable library of people young in Europe in the Thirties who had not had the money or the space to add to it, nor the strength of mind ever to leave it behind.
“What is it that you want, Hjalmar?” Margot Wentz said suddenly in a ringing voice, patient and strong. She had her back to him.
“No, it’s all right, the aquavit, wasn’t there a bottle still from Christmas, the one Vibeke — I’m just — wait a minute—”
She got up with the determined sleep-walking gait of someone who has the plan of cupboards, nooks, niches, and their contents clear in her mind as a cross-section of an anthill under glass, and took a bottle from behind a stand of gramophone records in worn covers. “Here you are, Hjalmar.”
He went on marvelling over how he had thought it was here or there, he knew he had put it somewhere, and she continued to stand for a moment, looking at him as if waiting for the whir of some piece of clockwork to die down.
Their daughter, Emmanuelle, slipped in and cut herself a piece of cake. “Yes, I know you,” she said directly to Bray when her father began the introductions; the night at the Independence party, when she had sat like a small animal holed up against pursuit and had not so much as acknowledged the presence of the middle-aged stranger talking to Ras Asahe, was suddenly presented as a shared intimacy. She deliberately cut the cake at an angle, apparently to avoid the filling, careless of the fact that she had spoiled it for the next person. She sat nibbling little broken-off pieces, holding them in long, thin, sallow hands. Her hunched shoulders showed deep hollows above and below collar-bones on which the greenish slippery skin shone in the heat. In a way she reminded Bray of one of those pictures of Oriental famine victims — all eyes and bones; but her legs under the short shapeless dress were beautiful, the thighs slender but feminine, the kneecaps round.