“Which baby is that? Telema?”
“You’re behind the times! Telema’s in standard six. And Mangaliso’s nearly ten — the one that was born after you left. The baby’s another boy, Stanley, he’s two-and-a-half.”
“Good work, Joy. How’s Stanley’s Gala? I need someone to practise on, someone not old enough to be too hard on my mistakes.”
“Oh what do you think! Do I talk English to my children?”
He had the use of the Bayleys’ second car, now, so he drove himself to the Governor’s Residence — nobody remembered, yet, to call it the Presidential Residence. There had always been some sort of attempt at a characterless formal garden on the entrance side — pot-bellied palms and beds of regimented annuals — but he was pleased to see, while he was stopped at the gates for the sentries to check his bona fides by telephone with the house, a family of women, children, and cooking pots whose presence was given away by a thread of smoke coming from the shrubs behind the guard-house. Perhaps they were even kinsfolk of Joy or Mweta; Bray wondered how Mweta would deal with the rights of the extended family, in a house obviously large enough, on the face of it, to accommodate one and all.
Of course, it didn’t look like a house; at least, not in Africa. He felt this with a chill, for Mweta, as Vivien’s old Renault gritted over the raked gravel to the entrance. It was neo-classical, with a long double row of white pillars holding up a portico before a great block of local terracotta brick and mica-tinselled stone, row upon row of identical windows like a barracks. The new coat-of-arms was in place on the façade. The other side, looking down upon the park as if Capability Brown had been expected but somehow failed to provide the appropriate sweep of landscaped lawn, artificial lake, pavilion, and deer, was not so bad. The park itself, simply the leafier trees of the bush thinned out over seven or eight acres of rough grass, was — as he remembered it — full of hoopoes and chameleons who had been there to begin with, anyway. It had been saved because one of the first Governors had wanted it to simulate the conditions of the local golf-course — he practised his drives from the double-staircased terrace.
A black man in the white drill, gloves, and red fez worn by domestic servants at colonial residences opened the door, and a young, top-heavy black man wearing blue pin-stripe and a white carnation ushered Bray to a private sitting-room. He was Mweta’s new secretary, but there was also a young white man hovering with an aide-de-camp’s social ease. Bray had heard about him: formerly a P.R.O. at the biggest mining house, who had been taken on mainly to protect Mweta from the availability to his people that had characterized him as a party leader. They still expected simply to be able to walk in and talk to Mweta; no black secretary could hope to withstand the importuning of women from the Church of Zion or old peasants with a grievance, when such people were told that it was now necessary to apply in writing for an interview with the President.
“What luck for me, Colonel Bray, I’m Clive Small, my aunt Diana Raikes used to be a friend of your wife’s, I remember her reading out a letter from your wife just before you left this country that time — most impressive. I think it was one of the things that roused my interest in the place — I was a student, still.” The young white man’s red-tanned forehead was gilded with hair bright at the brow-line and temples, he had the well-cut lips and slightly bushy, antennae-eyebrows of a man attractive to women. He wore skin-fitting linen trousers and a gay pink shirt, and gently took over from the elderly African butler the preparation of the martini jug. “You know I like to fuss with this, Nimrod. We’ve got a new division-of-labour system going in this department.”
“The President will be with you in a few moments, sir.” The secretary turned from Bray to Small in an exchange of the casual, cosy asides of people who breathe fumes of power and palace intrigue so habitually that these seem to them an air like any other. “Did you prevail?”
The black man heh-hehed that things couldn’t have gone otherwise: “Well, what could he say? ‘We very much regret’—all that kind of thing.”
“The big man will be de-lighted. Just wait. De-lighted. And Douglas? I’ll bet his nose is ninety degrees out of joint. Mm?”
When Mweta came in, they stood aside, flanking him, smiling as if they had produced him.
He wore the sensible if stylistically confused tunic that had been adopted by the Party, years ago (somewhere between a Mao blouse and a bush jacket) but there was something turned-out about him. He came to Bray before Bray could approach. Their hands held fast, they almost swayed, smiling, Mweta laughing up at him, and the two others standing there, smiling. “About time. About time,” Mweta kept saying. “Always across the room, in the crowd! I just catch your eye, and then there’s another face there.”
“It’s strange to be stopped on the road and see you go by, waving at us all.”
Mweta hunched his shoulders and laughed like a boy who has had to show off a little. “But it was always for you, if you were there, James, you know that, it was certainly for you.”
The butler was carrying round a tray with Mr. Small’s martinis, and a glass of orange squash for Mweta. Yet Mweta’s voice and spirits rose, in the talk and laughter, just as if the alcohol were rising in his bloodstream as in the others’. He had always had this self-intoxication, this flooding vividness that was at once what brought people to him and what their presence released in him. Years ago, he would turn up in a village on his bicycle and before he’d got his breath back from the ride there would be a group around him, and his voice quickly heard above the others, holding the others. Later his face gleamed wet with excitement when he would talk for two hours to some football ground holding a crowd tight as cells in one organism, a monster speaking his name as if booming from the mouth of a cave: MWETA. He developed the technique of long pauses, space for swelling, echoing, wavering response. They yelled; he took it; he began to speak once more. Once Olivia had been overcome— “There’s something horrible — it’s as if they coax some precious secretion from him — like ants stroking captive aphids.”
The secretary, Wilfrid Asoni, had the beaming professional ploy of making the President’s interests his own. “Mr. President, it seems we can thank Colonel Bray for the services of our friend Clive, here. Oh indirectly, I mean, but just the same.”
“Oh your sphere of influence, again, Mweta,” said Bray. “Imagine how it’s going to be, operating internationally — I wonder if U.N. realizes.”
“No, no, yours, James.”
“Well, even if you think so, don’t tell them. You mustn’t be too friendly with a has — been like me.”
“But you were, how shall I say, born out of your time—”
“—deported out of it, anyway, wouldn’t you say, sir,” Small slipped in, through laughter.
“—You’re now at last where you belong, now, now, building the state with us. Isn’t that so? Of course!”
Their raised voices and laughter brought the high, overlarge room down to comfortable size. Blue cigarette smoke hung a haze over the view through the french doors of the bush in the park, retreated into the heat-haze of midday. Now and then Bray’s attention drifted out there in counterpoint to the talk; the shimmering tremble seemed to spread through his own consciousness, smoothing, soothing, wavering it away into a state of suspension; the small happiness of warm climates. Into the close male company came Joy Mweta, followed, or rather preceded, circled, and assailed by several of her children and a prancing dog. For a few minutes there was pandemonium in the room; Bray had not seen two of the children before, the third had been an infant when he left the country: they wore white socks and the eleven- and ten-year-old had already lost the shyness of African children and talked confidently to their elders, demanding and complaining; only the little one clung to his mother’s hams and peeped round suspiciously. Mweta spoke to them in Gala and they spilled out onto the terrace; then the dog showed a preference for the shade of the room, and the carpet, and the littlest boy rushed in again to get him out. His brother and sister followed; Clive Small swung the little one round. “By the legs! By the legs!” the others begged. “Your mother’s made that taboo, Mangaliso, she’s afraid I might drop you on your head and you’ll be bottom of the class ever after.”