Bray had been sung to so many times by black schoolchildren. “Another time, I hope.”
“My wife teaches the choir. She also teaches the first and second grade.” The young woman was smiling, looking up from one to the other.
“I thought you were one of the young schoolgirls!” Bray said, and they laughed.
“Well, I am teaching her for her Standard Six exam. She goes next month to town for it. She has had four children, you see, her studies were interrupted. But I teach her when I can. She wants to write the teacher’s exams eventually.”
“It’s lucky for you that you married a teacher.” Bray tried to draw her into the conversation.
“And I am working for my O levels, the Cambridge Certificate,” the schoolmaster said, with the urgency of a man who has no one to turn to. “I have here the English paper — not the one I will have to write myself, you understand—’
“I know — a specimen.”
“Yes, the paper written by the students in 1966—you understand. I have a difficulty because there are some words not possible to find—” He went over to the table and brought a small, old, school dictionary.
“I see — well, that wouldn’t have the more unusual words, would it—”
The wife swiftly helped him to find the paper and his exercise book. He went down the paper with his eyes, lips moving a little. Bray noticed how tight his breathing was, as if he had a chest cold. “This one word here — here it is, ‘mollify’ …?”
Bray wanted to laugh, the impulse caught him by the throat as a cough rises; he took the examination paper to play for time, in order to pretend, out of the “civilized” courtesy of his kind, that uncertainty about the meaning of the word was something anyone might share — and this in itself was part of the very absurdity: the assumptions of colonial culture. He read, “Write one of the following letters: (a) To a cousin, describing your experiences on a school tour to the Continent; (b) to your father, explaining why you wish to choose a career in the navy; (c) to a friend, describing a visit to a picture gallery or a film you have enjoyed.”
The schoolmaster wrote down the meaning of “mollify” and showed those questions, ticked off in red ink, that he had been able to answer. “This will be the third time I try,” he said, of the examination.
“Well, good luck to you both.”
“When she goes for the Standard Six she takes our choir along for the big schools competition. Last month they won the best in Rongwa province. Now we don’t know — but we hope, we hope.” The schoolmaster smiled.
He was shown the football field the pupils had levelled; a little way behind was a mud house, shaped European — style with a veranda held up by roughly dressed tree — trunks, which must have been where the schoolmaster and his family lived. An old woman was doing some household chore with pots, outside, in the company of two or three small children. The schoolmaster said, “If there was someone I could ask, like I ask you—” but he was embarrassed to appear to grumble and began to talk about his pupils again.
Bray, feeling as he had felt a thousand times before in this country, the disproportionate return he was getting for a commonplace expression of interest, said, “What do you feel is your biggest problem at the moment?” and was surprised when, instead of turning again to his expectations of the Education Department under Independence, the man took time to think quietly, in the African lack of embarrassment at long pauses, and said, “We have to make the parents let the girls come to school. This is what I have been trying to do for years. Our girls must be educated. I can show you the figures — in nineteen — sixty-five, no nineteen — sixty-four, yes … we had only nine girls, and they left at the end of two years. Yes, two years. I cannot persuade the parents to keep them on. But I try, try. I go to the parents myself, yes, in the country. I talk to the chiefs and tell them, look, this is our country now, how can the men have wives who are not educated? There will be trouble. We must have the girls in school. But they don’t want to hear. I went to see the par — ents, I talk to them. Yes, well, this year we manage to keep twenty — one girls and some are in the Standard Three class already. I talk to the people slowly.” The man smiled and took one of his gasping breaths; his hand took in the bush, his suburbia. “I go and tell them. I’ve got my bicycle.”
Bray remembered that things were different now, even at Pilchey’s. “Why don’t you come up to the hotel this evening — I’m staying the night. We could talk some more.”
The schoolteacher had the suddenly exhausted look of a convalescent. He screwed up his eyes hesitantly, as if there must be something behind the invitation that he ought to understand. “At what time, sir?”
“Come up after supper. We’ll have a beer. And your wife, too, of course.”
The man nodded slowly. “After supper,” he repeated, memorizing it.
When Bray got back to the hotel Mrs. Pilchey was at her desk in the bar, doing accounts. Her big head of thick, reddish — blond hair had been allowed to fade to the yellow — stained white of an old man’s moustache. She looked up over her glasses and then took them off and got to her feet with the pigeon — toed gait of heavy, ageing women. “I thought it sounded like you, when the boy told me.” Sex had died out of the challenging way she had had with men; it was bluff and grudging. They had never liked each other much, in the little they had known of each other, and extraordinarily, the old attitude fell into place between them as if the ten years didn’t exist. There was laughter and handshaking. “A big Bwana with grey hair at the sides, and he can talk Gala. Well, there didn’t used to be any white hairs — but I thought, that’s Colonel Bray! No, well, I heard you were out, anyway, so I’m not as clever as I fancy myself—”
He said, “So you’re carrying on alone? Olivia and I heard when Mr. Pilchey died.”
“Five years,” she said. There were pencil caricatures of Oscar Pilchey behind the bar, done in an attempt at Beerbohm’s style. “I don’t think he’d have been able to stand it if he’d been here now.”
Bray had sat down at the bar. “It’s a tremendous job for a woman on her own.”
“I don’t know about that, I’ve been in the hotel business twenty — five years, as you know. But to cope with it the way it is now, it’s enough to drive you nuts, that I can tell you.”
“Shouldn’t you have someone to help you — a manager or an assistant?” He asked for a gin and tonic and she tipped the bottle where it hung upside down over its tot measure and prepared the drink with a kind of grim insolence of practised movements that was in itself a contempt for those for whom it was all very well to talk. “You can’t get anybody to do anything. They don’t care. They want to be rich. They want to learn to fly aeroplanes. That’s what I get told by one of my kitchen boys, yes, I’m not telling a lie. He doesn’t want to scrub the tables, he can go to town and learn to fly an aeroplane now.”