The lime works. The fish — meal factory, where his passenger came from.
Shinza nodded.
Bray said suddenly, “Anything you need, Edward …”
They stood there at a distance for a moment.
“Oh well, the cigars — you said you’d get them for me from England. That’d be fine, you know.” Shinza was smiling.
With his hands dragging down the dressing — gown pockets so that his muscular buttocks jutted along as he walked, he disappeared into the house where Bray had waited for him. Bray did what he had to do; went to the school in the village, drove on twenty miles to the White Fathers’ Mission school, turned, at last, back along the road he had come and passed without stopping the children still making a hobby — horse out of the old mangle, the goats, the bicycles, the mud houses, and the reed stockade where Shinza was. But Bray got through it all with blind attention, holding off a mental pressure that built up, waiting for the gap through which it would burst. The wobbling of the gear — shaft in his palm over the terrible road became the expression of a trembling of his hand itself, suppressed. Two months and seventeen days. Back here only a few months and already it’s begun — the beating up, the putting away. An old story. No wonder Shinza couldn’t resist the opportunity to sneer at his reaction. He had never counted himself among those whose radical liberalism amounts to no more than an abstract distaste for coercive methods. He had never before found himself out in that particular kind of dishonesty. Over the years he had accepted — at a distance — some ugly facts if, unfortunately, they appeared unavoidable to gain the social change he believed in. He struggled to set aside the vision of the boy’s back. He’d forgive a great deal to see achieved the sort of state that Shinza and Mweta had visualized together for the country.
But the “questioning” of the boy stood between Shinza and Mweta.
And himself? Would he forgive himself? Perhaps this agitation of his was a matter of not wanting to get his own hands dirty. That was his kind of dishonesty. Let it be done if it must be, but not by me, let me not put my hand to it, not by even so much as a signature at the bottom of a report on education. Was that it?
Yet he had an impulse to go straight to the capital at once; to Mweta; as if that would do away once and for all with ambiguities: his own as well as those of what had happened. — Aleke? He ought at least to talk to Aleke first, get the facts straight. Aleke must have been the one to take authority, to sign. He saw Aleke and himself, moving in and out about houses, boma, village street in Gala, entwining waving antennae when their paths crossed, senselessly as ants. But Aleke would never have shut a man away on his own initiative; then was it Aleke taking orders from Lebaliso? Aleke and Bray laughed at Lebaliso, a jerky little man who had taken over from Major Conner, whose batman he had been in the war. Lebaliso was a nonentity; Aleke certainly was not: both would do as they were told. Aleke was an efficient civil servant, independent but not politically minded or politically ambitious. If an order came from the capital, and it did not touch upon the day — to-day smooth running of his local administration, he would simply sign. Easy — going, confident, sitting on his veranda working at his papers among the noise of children, he knew what he was doing and presumed the people up there at the top knew what they were doing, too. After all, the government was PIP. On the solid convictions of people like Aleke governments come to power but are never threatened; Aleke would never change his mind about Mweta, or anything else.
Mweta had given Justice to Justin Chekwe; Bray didn’t know him well, but Roly Dando called him a Gray’s Inn pin — up boy— “Who knows what really lies under that nylon wig, I sat next him at dinner and caught him admiring himself in a soup spoon—” Dando talked so much: “Once you’ve been given Justice, you don’t have much to do with justice any more. You keep the peace the way the big boys want it kept. Same with the Attorney — General’s job — a pair of Keystone Cops, Justice and I, really, that’s all. He’ll be all right, I suppose, so long as Mweta stays on the straight and narrow.” He would phone Dando as soon as he got home; and decided as suddenly that it was not the thing to do. The house had a party line and anyway the local exchange would hear every word. He recoiled from Roly’s ventriloquist patter coming out of the distance.
While Bray was with Shinza he had felt like an adult reluctant to believe that a favourite child has lied or cheated. He was afraid, in Shinza’s house, that Mweta did know. But now — alone to the horizon of gentle grasses with no sign from another human except the flash of a paraffin tin carried on a woman’s head — he felt there was the possibility that Mweta really did not know, that the size of this unwieldy country with its communications that dwindled out in flooded tracks and ant — eaten telephone poles made it feasible for people to take the law into their own hands while behind the red brick façade of the President’s Residence, telephones, telex, and the planes coming to the airport down the road brought Mweta closer to Addis, New York, and London than to this grass — inundated steppe, soughed down under the empty sky.
In the pass (driving directly now, he covered in one day what had taken him three) the confidence went again, as unreasonably. Rough, dark — flanked mountains enclosed the road and himself. Shinza had another kind of confidence, one that Bray was provoked by, not just in the mind, but in the body, in the senses; Shinza moved in his immediate consciousness, in images so vivid that he felt a queer alarm. A restlessness stirred resentfully in the tamped — down ground of his being, put out a touch on some nerve that (of course) had atrophied long ago, as the vagus nerve is made obsolete by maturity and the pituitary gland ceases to function when growth is complete. Shinza’s bare strong feet, misshapen by shoes, tramped the mud floor — the flourish of a stage Othello before Cyprus. He was smoking cigarettes smuggled from over the border; friends across the border: those who had cigarettes probably had money and arms as well. And the baby; why did the baby keep cropping up? — Shinza held it out in his hand as casually as he had fathered it on that girl. He did not even boast of having a new young wife, it was nothing to him, nothing was put behind him….
The man will change his life, Bray thought burningly. Mweta became no more than the factor whose existence would bring this about, rouse it into being. Shinza might as well have been thirty as fifty — four. No, it wasn’t that he was an ageing man who was like a young man — something quite different — that he was driven, quite naturally, acceptedly, to go on living so long as he was alive. You would have to have him drop dead, to stop him.
The house in Wiltshire with all its comfortable beauty and order, its incenses of fresh flowers and good cooking, its libations of carefully discussed and chosen wine came to Bray in all the calm detail of an interesting death cult; to wake up there again would be to find oneself acquiescently buried alive. At the same time, he felt a stony sense of betrayal. Olivia moved about there, peppermints and cigarettes on the night — table, her long, smooth — stockinged legs under skirts that always drooped slightly at the back. A detail taken from a painting, isolated and brought up close to the eye. He suddenly tried to remember what it was like to be inside Olivia’s body. But he could not. All that he produced, driving through the scrubby forest alone, was the warm reflex of a beginning erection in response to the generalized idea of the warmth inside women, any woman. His mind switched to Mweta again, and his body shrank. He ought not, he was perhaps wrong to question Mweta about anything. He had made it clear from the beginning that he would not presume on any bond of authority arising out of their association because he saw from the beginning that there was always the danger — to his personal relationship with Mweta — that this bond might become confused with some lingering assumption of authority from the colonial past. I mustn’t forget that I’m a white man. A white man in Africa doesn’t know what to see himself as, but mentor. He looks in the mirror, and there is the fatal fascination of the old reflection, doesn’t matter much, now, whether it’s the civil servant under a topi or the white liberal who turned his back on the settlers and went along with the Africans to Lancaster House. If I don’t like what Mweta does, I’d better get out and go home to Wiltshire. Write an article for the New Statesman, from there. He almost spoke aloud to himself. He wished Olivia would be at the house in Gala, when he came back. He suddenly felt alone, as he might have felt cold, or tired. He began to write a letter to Olivia in his head, telling her to make up her mind and come quickly. He felt he missed her very much.