In a first letter to Gala, Olivia had written, “I suppose it was strange to see the old house!”—but he had not even gone so far as to take a walk up the road to the ugly residence that existed in his mind not as a place so much as an interior life hollowed out by experiences that had been dealt with there. One day he would go and see Mr. Aleke’s “seven or eight” children playing in the garden, and tell Olivia about it.
As he went in and out of the Fisheagle Inn he was sometimes arrested, from the veranda, by the sight of the lake. The sign of the lake: a blinding strip of shimmer, far away beyond the trees, or on less clear days, a different quality in the haze. For a moment his mind emptied; the restless glitter of the lake, the line of a glance below a lowered eyelid — for it was not really the lake at all that one saw, but a trick of the distance, the lake’s own bright glare cast up upon the heated atmosphere, just as the vast opening out of pacing water to the horizon, once you got to its bush — hairy shores, was not really the open lake itself at all, but (as the map showed) only the southernmost tip of the great waters that spread up the continent for six hundred miles and through four or five countries. It was then, just for a moment, that this symbol of the infinity of distance, carrying the infinity of time with which it was one, released his mind from the time of day and he was at once himself ten years ago and himself now, one and the same. It was a pause not taken account of. He went on down the veranda steps, intent on buying some bit of equipment for his house.
He was able to move in by the second weekend. Of course he had presented himself to the people at the boma. He’d had a talk with Aleke, the first African District Commissioner — but they didn’t call them D.C.s any more, they were known as Provincial Officers. And he’d seen Sampson Malemba, the local Education Officer, who happened to be an old friend, principal of the African school when Bray was in office. Aleke was just the sort of “new African” the settlers would dislike most: fat, charming, his Mweta tunic hitched up by solid buttocks, he spoke fluent informal English, lolled behind his desk like a schoolboy, and was seen chewing a piece of sugar — cane while having his shoes shined under the trees. The settlers were at home with the conventional pompousness of half — educated Africans — men in undertaker’s suits, bespectacled, throat — clearing; they recognized the acceptable marks of civilization in this caricature of an image of themselves, even if they were beer — drinking farmers in crumpled shorts. It remained to be seen if Aleke were to be efficient, into the bargain; from the little Bray had heard, it was likely. He said cheerfully he didn’t know what he could do for Bray — he had been asked to “do everything necessary to facilitate,” etc., and it was up to Bray to tell him what that might be. “Could I have somewhere to work — that’s the main thing.” Aleke found this very funny. “I mean can you spare me an office and a share in a typist — I’m sure you’re short — staffed.” “An office! Naturally! But the typist isn’t very pretty, I’m afraid. I’ll introduce you.” He rang a bell and in came a typical second — grade male clerk with an old man’s bony back and an adolescent face drained of vitality by home — study courses. “Mr. Letanka. He will be helping you all he can.” When the clerk had gone, Aleke was still amused: “So there you are. But I have applied for a really efficient and beautiful secretary, first priority, so maybe our standard will improve.”
Aleke urged him to get settled into his house before “we get down to anything serious”; it was an amiable enough way of postponing the problem of not knowing what to do with him.
The moving in didn’t amount to much. The various purchases he had made during the week stood dumped about in the living-room. Mr. Joosab had been good enough to send his son and one of his daughters over to put up the curtains. Stretched across the windows they looked like tablecloths; they didn’t meet. And when they were drawn back they sagged skimpily. He didn’t know what exactly was wrong; he thought of Olivia and smiled. He had a young servant called Mahlope, which meant in Gala, “the last one of all,” who was already wearing the long white apron to buy which he had at once requested money the moment he was engaged. He had covered the concrete floors of the house with the inevitable thick layer of red polish in preparation for Bray’s arrival and the two men spent the Saturday afternoon arranging — with sure instinct for the placing of one of the government issue morris chairs, the utilization of an old brass picture hanger to hold the bathroom mirror high enough for Bray to see himself shave — the unchanging white — bachelor household that was as old as settlement itself. Mahlope put a tattered embroidered doily under the leather frame that held a picture of Venetia with a blurred little mummy, her new baby; and set down the whisky, gin, a bent opener and glasses in their permanent position on what was listed in the house inventory as the “occasional” table. Already the kitchen smelled of paraffin, on which the refrigerator ran, and the living-room of flea powder, for a house that stood empty for more than a few days always became a playground for fleas, and Bray had had his ankles bitten through his socks while simply visiting the house.
He had begun to wake up early again, as he used to do in Africa. The servant was about, chanting under his breath, from half — past five. Bray ate his first Sunday breakfast in the garden on a morning scented with woodsmoke. It came back to him — all, immediate, as with the scent of a woman with whom one has made love. The minute sun — birds whirred in the coarse trumpets of flowers. Delicate wild pigeons called lullingly, slender in flight and soft of voice, unrecognizable as the same species as the bloated hoarse creatures who waddle in European cities. In perfect stillness, small dead leaves hung from single threads of web, winking light. A tremendous fig tree was perhaps several trees, twisted together in a multiple trunk twenty feet up and then spreading wide and down again in a radius of interlaced branches. Little knobbly figs fruited all over it, borne directly on the old, hard wood of the trunk. Skinny wasps left them and fell into the jam. He felt an irrational happiness, like faint danger. He dragged a rickety trestle table ringed with the marks of potted plants, under his tree, and wrote letters and read the papers Olivia had sent, sybaritic in the luxury of being alone.
But the afternoon was long. In the air were the echoes of other people’s activity; the distant plock of tennis, the swirl of arriving and departing cars at the other houses in the road, the sky ringing like a glass with the strike of church bells distorted aurally as the lake, from the hotel veranda, was distorted visually. There was a kind of thickening of the background silence, a vague uproar of Sunday enjoyment from the direction of the African township away over to the east. He thought he would look around there; he hadn’t, yet. Of course, he had known it very well when he was D.C., he had spent a lot of time down there; too much, for some people’s liking. But he knew that it had changed since then, grown; and there was a whole new housing scheme and a hostel for the industrial workers.
Raw red roads led off through the trees. People were strolling, pushing their bicycles as they talked; women held their children against their skirts as he passed, boys laughed and threw mango pits at each other, there were little groups of religious sects holding meetings under the trees, young couples in their best clothes and old men hauling wood or charcoal on sleds, Sunday no different from any other day, for them. The bright little new houses looked stranded in the mud; the forest had been cleared for them. There were some trampled — looking patches of cassava and taro and a beached, derelict car or two. The houses had electric light and children were playing a game that seemed to consist of hitting the telephone poles with sticks. They yelled defiantly and gaily at the white man in the car.