He drove all morning and met not more than a dozen cars and the top — heavy bus that apparently still did the journey from the Tanzania border twice a week. Where there were African villages, a few bicycles and stragglers appeared on the road. Bags of charcoal leaned here and there on the edge of the silent forest. People lived deep inside this environment as if it were a house; their individual shelters were flimsy. He kept remembering — no, experiencing — things like this, that he had forgotten. In England, sometimes, over the years, he had had dreams that seemed to happen in this country, but it wasn’t this country at all; and even conscious recollection was nothing but psychological memory — something selected to match the emotions engendered in a particular place at specific times.
Dando’s house, left behind, was no more present than Wiltshire. He enjoyed a kind of freedom that he knew would last only until his recognition of his surroundings passed into unthinking acceptance, and he could no longer hold back and view them as the past revisited or a present not yet broken into.
He called at the White Fathers’ Mission at Rungwa River, but Father Benedict was away and he could see that none of the younger ones knew who he was. The swallows still twittered in and out of their mud nests in the refectory, where he was given tea. A loud clanging that he knew so well came from a length of iron suspended from a tree and beaten with a stick, announced the end of school and the hot peace was invaded by yells and the muffled stampede of bare feet. The Fathers were good enough to sell him a couple of gallons of petrol, one working the hand — pump with a grin, his rosary swinging, the other standing by with his hands folded into the sleeves of his cassock and his big, blueish, celibate’s feet placed close together in their rough sandals. The Fathers were shy as young girls. The African schoolboys scuffled and chattered at a distance, and when he called out a greeting, laughed and called back.
There were large villages near the road in this part of the country, smoking up through the forest. The cultivation of land by lopping off the branches of trees and burning them round the trunk, for potash, made druidic circles everywhere. New signs pointed into the bush: “Freedom Bar,” “New York Bar,” “Independence Bar”—crooked letters in English painted on bits of wood. But the generation that had grown up in ten years was as poor and dull — skinned as their fathers had been.
He had had the intention to spend the night at the old Pilchey’s Hotel at Matoko, the usual half — way house. He arrived there earlier than he had thought he would; he was half in mind to drive on but did not know if the government rest — house that used to be at the cattle dipping station, sixty miles north, was still open. The tarred road was long left behind and the ugly little red car looked, as he got out and smoothed his rumpled shirt into his trousers, as cars always did up here. The undersides of the mudguards were rimmed with clay and the fender was plastered with the broken bodies and strange — coloured innards of dead insects.
Heat and silence fell upon him. He tramped over the cracked veranda and looked into the dark of the hoteclass="underline" a smell of beeswax and insecticide, no one in sight. He knew where the bar was and the sound of his own footsteps accompanied him there, but the door was locked and he felt sure the ship’s bell that hung beside the name “Davy Jones’ Locker” was purely decorative. Back he went to the veranda; there was no main entrance, but screen doors all over the place that gave out long — drawn, dry squeaks behind him and led to a deserted dining — room with fan — folded table napkins and dim green corridors of closed doors. A child’s cot piled with old pillows and the broken marble from an old — fashioned washstand stood where the corridor turned; there was a tray with two empty beer bottles and glasses on the floor.
He went back to the veranda and stretched out his heavy long legs from a chair. He knew this hour; everyone was asleep. If he sat for any length of time he himself would fall into an afternoon sloth. There were borders of orange lilies in the garden, and the same huge sagging aviary, like a heavy spider’s web, behind which blue cranes and guinea fowl pecked at their own feathers in some affliction induced by confinement. He could see their jerking, worrying heads. The farming land was good around here, and when the white farmers got merry in the bar it used to be the thing to bundle one of their number in with the birds. A vast sense of unreality came over him. He noticed a brass bell — push, gleamingly polished, and stuck a forefinger at it, not expecting anything in the way of response. But after a while a very young waiter appeared, with a red fez and a tin tray. He asked for a cold beer and was told Doña was sleeping; the bar would open now — now. “Is it still Doña Pilchey?” Yes, Doña Pilchey was sleeping. This was not Gala country yet, but the local language was related. He spoke to the boy in Gala and was understood; they agreed that the luggage should come out of the car even though he couldn’t have a room until Doña Pilchey woke up. Was the kitchen locked? No, it seemed the kitchen was open. The youngster would make him some tea in the meantime.
While he was drinking it, the shadow of one of the big trees fell across the veranda and seemed to bring a breeze. The heat of the afternoon turned, as it did quite suddenly; one of the guinea fowl began to call. He was no longer used to driving for hours at a stretch. His big body was restless with inactivity. He walked off nowhere in particular, though he knew this road that led from the main road to the Matoko boma about two miles away. The red sand was pleasant to tread on — he had not walked at all, really, in the month in the capital, except in the streets of the town; no one walked — and the coarse sleek grass leaned beneath its own weight on either side of the road, as high as his shoulders. Scarlet weavers with black masks flicked up out of it and hung upside down at the entrance to their nests. A rough driveway marked with whitewashed stones and aloes curved up to a small schoolhouse on a rise and down again. He took the little detour to give some sort of shape to his stroll. There was the school garden — a patch of maize and beans, some staked tomatoes — the length of dangling iron that was the school bell, and, as he walked past the open doorway, the schoolmaster himself sitting at work. The man jumped up and at once started apologizing as if guilty of a grave breach of hospitality and respect. “No sir, I am very sorry, sir, I was just taking the chance to get a little study—” Bray greeted him in Gala, giving him the form of address to be used by respectful pupils towards the master, to put him at ease.
The man was shyly delighted and immediately brought out all he had to offer — the school register, the exercise and text — books of the pupils, all the time explaining and answering Bray’s questions in a slow, anxious way. A pupil who had been sitting with him at the deal table where he was working sat, unable to go on, her hand on her place in a book, listening and smiling faintly in greeting. She looked like a grown woman, but irregular schooling often meant that African schoolchildren were far older than whites. The schoolmaster himself was very thin, black and pigeon — chested under a woollen pullover. His two — roomed school was seven years old; there were some desks but the smaller children, the schoolmaster explained, still sat on the floor. Some of the children who lived far away stayed in children’s huts in the village and walked home at weekends. “This year we are sixty — five” he said, “our biggest year so far. And twenty — one are girls.” He proudly showed a single poster on the damp — mapped walls: OUR LAND — a smiling miner working down a gold mine; smiling fishermen hauling in a catch; a smiling woman picking some crop. Population statistics in green, revenue figures in red. “From the Education Department. Oh yes, we are beginning to get nice, nice things. I am filling in the forms. Now we will get them. I wish you were here when the children are in school, they would sing for you.”