Bray repeated what had been said to him at the airport that morning — that some of the white people still living in the capital would be more at home down South, in Rhodesia or South Africa. “Who was that?” “I don’t know-one of the people from the plane — a baldish fair man with an accent, I didn’t catch the name. He’d recently moved up here.”
“Oh Hjalmar Wentz — must have been. He and his wife took over the Silver Rhino last year. I like old Hjalmar. He’s just been to Denmark or somewhere because his mother died. We’ll go in and have a steak there one evening, they’re trying to make a go of it with a charcoal grill and whatnot.”
“What happened to McGowan?”
“Good God, they’ve been gone at least five or six years. There’ve been three other managers since then. It’s difficult to do anything with that place now; it’s got the character of the miners’ pub it was, but it’s very handy for the new government offices, not too overaweing, so you get quite a few Africans coming in. A genteel lot, very conscious of their dignity, man-about-town and all that, you can imagine how the white toughies feel about all those white collars round black necks in the bar. Hjalmar’s as gentle as a lamb and he has to keep the peace somehow. Oh I’ll tell you who’s still around though — Barry Forsyth. Yes, and making money. Forsyth Construction. You’ll see the board everywhere. They tell me he’s got the contract for the whole Isoza River reclamation scheme — employs engineers from Poland and Italy.”
Because of the mosquitoes, they moved into the house. The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls. There was no air at all in the living-room, and a strong smell of hot fat. Every now and then, while dinner was awaited, their conversation was backed by intensely sociable sounds-sizzling, scraping, and high-pitched talk-let in from the kitchen as the servant went in and out, laying the table. There was another large meal, and an exchange about a bottle of white wine between Dando and his cook, Festus.
“Of course I don’t open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”
“Well it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round flat bottle put in the fridge.”
“You say I cook chicken, isn’t it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”
“Pink. It’s pink. I specially didn’t say anything about the colour because I didn’t want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”
They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It’s not an exaggeration to say that what they’re having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven’t replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You’ve only replaced one of his functions. You’ve still got to get country people to realize that these functions are now distributed among various agencies: it’s no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance — and yet that’s what people would have done in the old days, isn’t it?”
“In bush stations there wasn’t anything we weren’t responsible for.”
“Exactly. But now people have to learn that there’s a Department of Public Health to go to.”
“A good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration’s like, it won’t be like that.”
“The magistrates are all right, don’t you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I’m not worried at that level. The Bench doesn’t change of course.”
Bray laughed at Dando’s expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.
“They’ll die off, I suppose. There’s that to be said for it. But God knows what we’ll get then.”
“I met Gwenzi’s brother in London one day while he was at Gray’s Inn; he told me he was going to be the first African at the bar here.”
When Dando’s opinion of someone was really low he did not seem to hear his name. “Don’t think I don’t know I’ve got some bad times coming to me,” he said, as if taking up, in private, current talk about himself. “When I said yes to Mweta I knew it and every time I walk past the title on my office door I know it. The day will come when I’ll have deportation orders to sign that I won’t want to sign. Warrants of arrest. Or worse.” He ate a mouthful of the left-over granadilla pudding, and there was the smallest tremor, passing for a moment through his head. “Poor old Dando.”
“Anyone who’s stayed on is a fool if he hasn’t thought about that,” said Bray.
“And I’ll be instructing the State Prosecutor to act when I’d rather not, too. That I can count on. What if Shinza should make a bit of trouble at the next elections, what if he were to feel himself bloody well discounted as he certainly is, and start up a real opposition with all the tricks that he taught PIP, eh? What if he brought the whole Lambala-speaking crowd out in a boycott, with all the old beatings-up at the polls, hut burnings — you think I wouldn’t find myself the one to put Shinza inside, this time?”
“Well, I know. But why on earth should it come to that?”
“I knew it when I said yes to Mweta. Poor bloody Dando. The blacks’ dirty work isn’t any cleaner than the whites’. That’s what they’ll be happy to note. But what their contented little minds will never know is that I knew it when I took the job, I knew it all along, and I’ll say it now as loud as I’d say it then—”
“Who’ll be happy?”
Dando refilled the brandy glasses again. “My colleagues! Those worthy fellows who’ve gone down South to Rhodesia and South Africa where they can feel confident they’ll never have a black man on the Bench to give a verdict as biased as a white man’s. — My colleagues, Tencher Teal and Williamson and De l’Isle!”
It was after midnight when they got to bed. Bray went to the kitchen to fill his brandy glass with water for the night. Cockroaches fled, pausing, from what they regarded as positions of safety, to twirl their antennae. A furry black band of ants led up a cupboard door to some scrap that had flicked from a plate. He stood at the sink, drinking cold water and looking at the avocado pear pip growing suspended by three matchsticks in the neck of a pickle jar of water on the sill. He was conscious of a giddy swing of weight from one foot to the other that was not of his volition; it seemed he had been standing there a long time — he was not sure.
He heard Dando, forced by the old Labrador into the garden, walking about outside the guest hut and talking reproachfully to the dog; and then it was morning and Festus’s assistant was at the door with the early tea.