He would have liked to get back to Gala the next night — could have done it, prepared to drive through the night until one or two in the morning — but he stuck reluctantly to his original intention to make a loop on his return so as to include the Nome district. On paper, it was the site of a resettlement scheme; the people were poor and apathetic, one came upon them laboriously picking about some task in the forest with the dazed faces of those who are underfed from the day they are no longer suckled. Some villages had no school hut at all. Filthy and silent, children appeared from the forest and sold him those mushrooms big as plough disks that grew at this time of year. Their cool flesh gave off a soothing cellar — smell; the depressing odour of luxury in the midst of human poverty that he always recognized as peculiar to Africa. Here in the forest there were extravagant left — overs from some feast of gods — huge mushrooms, lilies blooming out of sand — but no ordinary sustenance for the people.
He drove the last lap back to Gala in a complete preoccupation of the will to get there, tense for any change of rhythm that might indicate trouble in the car, crossing off the hours and miles with each look at his watch. When at last he turned into the main street and the mahogany trees swallowed him in their well — deep shade and quiet he saw the shops were shut — it was Sunday. He went to the office just the same; Aleke might be there, doing some work. But there was nobody. The Christ — thorn had been dug up. He could hardly go to Aleke’s house — his own old house — and confront him in the midst of the Dinky cars and the children. The same old sound of Sunday drumming thudded faintly through the afternoon. The gleaming backs of cars huddled round the club. A car turning into the entrance paused as he drew level and the occupant was grinning at him invitingly, importantly. Broughton, the secretary, mouthing something at him. He rolled down the window and grimaced politely to show he couldn’t hear. “You don’t answer your phone. I’ve been trying to get you all week. Your application’s been approved by the committee. Henderson seconded it. So there you are, I knew you’d be pleased but you’ve been the devil to get hold of.” They were blocking the entrance and the man gestured and drove in, expecting Bray to follow, his face bright with the readiness to resume the barely interrupted chat.
Henderson was the owner of one of the two local drapers’ shops: preparing the ground against Olivia’s return, thoughtful man. Bray drove on down the quiet dirt road past the half — hidden houses, past a male Gala “nanny” wheeling a white child, and the children and dogs of one of the black administrative officials who had moved into government houses, bounding round a meeting of flashing new bicycles. His eye separated from the other greenery the towering, spreading outline of the fig tree; nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And all the while, when everything was as it is now, the boy had been shut up in the prison in the bush outside the town.
Mahlope had cut the grass on the verges of the road before the house. Aprons were spread stiffly dried on the hibiscus hedge. Bray had a revulsion against entering the empty, closed — up bungalow where all he would meet were the signs of his own occupancy. His sense of urgency was thrown back at him, an echo.
He began to lug his things out of the car and dump them on the grass. The soft questioning of children’s voices rang through the sunny quiet; he looked round and saw a woman and three small figures coming across the half — cleared scrub between his house and the one from which he was pleasantly isolated. Their heads were wrapped in something — towels. But everything — the club secretary’s happy interest, people with their heads wrapped up in towels — was simply part of the distance that had been put between himself and the life of this familiar place by what he had heard existed there, beneath these appearances of which he himself was part.
It was the girl, Rebecca Edwards, again, with three of the numerous children who overran the Bayleys’ house in the capital. Soapy trickles ran from under the turban down her temple and cheek. Bray said to the children, “Been swimming, eh?” and the smaller one clutched his mother’s thigh. She wiped away the soapy tear. “Oh, it’s awful to worry you — you see there suddenly isn’t a drop of water, and I’d just put this stuff on our hair …” Another tear ran down and fell on her bare foot. “If we could stick our heads under the garden tap—” “Heavens, come to the bathroom. I’ll open the house.” She and the children all wore cheap rubber — thonged sandals. They trooped in behind him, driving away the silence with their squelching footsteps and displacing the emptiness with their invading bodies. He pushed open the stiff bathroom window, he turned on the taps; there were exclamations of relief when the water gushed out— “It’s even hot,” he said, and left them to it.
There was unopened mail addressed in familiar hands, newspaper rolls; the cardboard folders of notes and papers, as he had left them: DISTRICT, SCHOOLS, POPULATION UNDER 18. He put a carbon between two sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter. He began a letter to Mweta; and then pulled out a cheap blue pad, the only kind you could buy in Gala stores, and began to write by hand, a letter or the draft of a letter. Before he could touch any of this again — the folders and notes — before there was any point in going on, he must have an answer from Mweta. The stammering, repetitive questions of a small child whose need for expression runs ahead of its vocabulary came muffled from the bathroom. He tore the wrappers off a couple of newspapers and rolled them the opposite way to flatten them. What he wrote, what he was saying to Mweta was not about the boy at all.… the whole opposition between you is false, I don’t believe it’s based on any real difference of approach at all, but you have pushed Shinza into the position where if he is to do anything at all he must oppose you, and not in a negative way. He must set up something against what you are setting up without him. If you behave differently in power from the way you did before, so of course would he.… If you had him with you, now, both of you would be facing the same problems of adjustment, and there’s a pretty good chance, taking into account the closeness of the old association, you’d come to the same sort of solution. Don’t you see? To put it at its worst, it would at least ensure a kind of complicity … at least you’d avoid finding yourself in the position where you’d have to do some of the things you’ll find you have to do now…. Rebecca Edwards and her children came to thank him; with an abstracted awareness of bad manners, he realized that he hadn’t even asked how she came to be making for this house; where she had come from.
“Did you find somewhere to live? You’re not still at the Inn?” She explained that she had moved into the house across the scrub, was sharing it with the agricultural officer, Nongwaye Tlume, and his wife. “I don’t mind, there’s a kind of extra kitchen attached to that rondavel outside. Anything to get out of the hotel, anyway, it was costing me such a lot of money.” The children’s hair was rough — dried and spiky, hers was combed out neatly like a wet dark fringe all round. Her bare big forehead and the wings of her nose shone faintly from the ablutions. She had yellow eyes, like a pointer he had once had. The four went off the way they had come, through the scrub. Poor thing; there was some story there nobody bothered to ask — she and her children could have stayed in this house instead of the Fish — eagle Inn while waiting to move in to the Tlumes’, he should have thought of it. Probably that was something of the kind that Roly had expected of him. … I can’t believe Shinza would have made a move to oust you, standing beside you as it were. No moral reason, but because there’s always been something secretive in his nature, some pleasure in being behind the scenes, recognized for his importance only by a few people in the know… he likes to be the face you can hardly make out between the other faces, but there.… And he has a laziness about people — you know that — he can’t be bothered with the continuity of day — to-day contact, shaking hands and grinning crowds. He’s essentially a selfish and withdrawn man — I mean success would become vulgar to him, he would always have left that part of it to you….