He thought, I have a friend, too, who likes cigars.
He had to leave the company to pick up a borrowed dinner jacket and trousers for the Golden Plate dinner from the wife of the secretary to the Minister of Development and Planning — resourceful Vivien had arranged it. Gabriel Odise’s wife was a social welfare worker and the offices of her department were in the old part of the town, the strip of human habitation along the line of rail that once was all the town had been. A few old mupapa trees humped their roots out into the street, there; there was the cod — liver-oil smell from sacks of dried kapenta, and the strange sweet reek of dangling plucks in a butcher’s. A pair of Congo prostitutes, heads done up like bonbons in turbans, sat on the kerb giggling down at their painted toenails and gold sandals, and looked up smiling, as he stepped past. They wore the pagne and brief blouse that bared a little roll of shining brown middle, making local women look dowdy and respectable in their cheap European dresses. The internal staircase of the Social Welfare Department was stained and splashed with liquid in which ants had died and dust had dried, and the wall alongside it bore witness to the procession of people who hung about the place, for one reason or another, enduring by scribbling not the obscenities of the literate, but the pot — hook names and signature flourishes of the semiliterate. People sat tightly on one or two benches; the rest squatted on the corridor floor and moved their legs and bundles stoically away and back again to make way. While he waited among them — the only white person — he glanced down out of a window and saw in the courtyard at least another hundred and fifty people gathered on a ground worn bare by feet and bodies, under trees shabby as lamp — posts with the rub of human backs. Those in the corridor watched without resentment as he was beckoned in to Mary Odise’s room ahead of them. She was a pretty girl with the air — hostess neatness that African woman often assume with responsible jobs; as she let him in, her eyes went in quick tally over the crowd, with the look not so much of assessing numbers as of estimating the weight of what lay upon them, there on their impassive faces. A diagnostic look. She had a pink rose in a glass on her desk; the worn floorboards were scrupulously clean and there was the taint of baby — sick and dirty feet that can never be scrubbed out of rooms where the poor and anxious are received. The courtroom in Gala used to smell like that.
He tried on the dinner jacket and measured the pants against his side, waist to ankle. She took good — natured pleasure in the fact that they would seem to do. “The tie! I forgot to ask about the tie.”
“I can easily buy one. It’s extraordinarily nice of you … you’re sure your brother doesn’t mind?”
“He has two and never wears them. They used to be working clothes, for him — he’s got a band, they’re playing at the Great Lakes Hotel. They wear silver jackets now, with blue lapels — terrible! And the dry cleaners here don’t know how to do them. He’ll just have to give them away when they get too dirty.” She folded the suit expertly and put it in a strong paper carrier that bore the legend: I’ve Been Saving At The Red Circle Supermarket.
“Very overworked, Mary?”
She was fastidious to avoid the gushing complaint that was a convention among white colleagues.
“Not really. You can only see a certain number of people in one day. And if you try to rush it, you can’t help them. I’m attached to the Labour Department now, and I get all these people referred to me from the Labour Exchange.”
“So many old women and children — don’t look particularly employable, to me.”
“They’re not looking for work. They’re looking for relations who come here from the bush on the chance of getting jobs. They don’t know where the person they’re looking for is, they don’t know where he works — if he works. What are you to do? They have no money. You find them sleeping down at the bus depot. The Labour Department doesn’t know what to do with them. They send them to me.” She gave her gentle, sympathetic laugh. “I’ve suggested setting up a shelter — there’s the old market building, for instance, I thought of that. But the Chief Welfare Officer points out that we’d be taking responsibility for them … they really shouldn’t be here. They’d just stay on endlessly, some of them. It’s a headache.”
“What on earth do you do?”
Mary Odise had trained as a social worker in Birmingham, where she had investigated the wife — beating, child — neglect and drunkenness of the people who had brought white civilization to her country. At one of the Independence parties he found himself sitting with her and she mimicked for him an Englishwoman, pouring out the sordid tale of her woes, who once said, “I don’t feel so ashamed with you, dearie, as you’re a blackie.”
She was professional. “Give them bus fare and try to persuade them to go back home. But now we issue bus chits instead — they were taking the money and hanging on. Yesterday my junior found out some of them have begun to sell the bus chits.” She was laughing softly as she showed him out. As the door opened there was a listless surge in the corridor: eyes turned, bodies leaned forward. He was stopped on the stairway by an old man with a piece of paper so often folded that it was dividing into four along the dirt — marked creases. A garbled name on it looked as if it might be that of a building firm; he shook his head, pointed at the queue in the corridors, and gave the old fellow half — a-crown. He was careful not to speak a word in Gala or the local language. To these poor country people, by long experience, whiteness was power; if it were to be made accessible to them through their own tongue, how would he escape the importunity of their belief? Next thing, I’ll be making an ass of myself, trailing old people round to find wretched yokels who are hawking tomatoes somewhere.
The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the dampspotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still in it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies any more. Ras will lend you his. It’s just like two pieces of black ribbon, crossed over in front.” Ras Asahe was with the Wentz family; drinks were on the round table under the drawn — down lamp. There was the atmosphere of solicitude and consideration that comes after a successfully resolved family upheavaclass="underline" Asahe must have been approached about his uncle.
“Sure, if you want to pop over to my place?”
But Bray was quite satisfied with the tie he had. Hjalmar was laughing loudly at Asahe’s description of an exchange with the director of broadcasting programmes in English, whose deputy he was. Apparently the man was a South African — Asahe imitated the Afrikaner accent: like many educated men in the territory, Asahe had been to university for a time, down South, as well as having worked in broadcasting in England. “… It happens to be standard BBC pronunciation, I told him. ‘Hell, man, well it’s not standard our pronunciation.’—I won’t be surprised if the rumour goes round from him that I’m a neo — imperialist….”
Hjalmar kept glancing at his wife to see if she were amused. She held her eyebrows high, like an ageing actress. Emmanuelle was inwardly alight, flirting with her father and even her brother, calling her mother “darling”—for the benefit of Ras Asahe or perhaps to present for herself a tableau of family life as she imagined it to be for other people.
It was a warm, singing evening with the moon rising on one side of the sky while a lilac — grained sunset had not yet receded into darkness on the other. There was the smell of boiled potatoes given off all over Central Africa, after nightfall, by some shrub. By the time he got to the tobacco sales hall where the Golden Plate dinner was being held, it was dark. He had not wanted to go, really — Mweta embarrassed him slightly by the invitation — but the cars converging on the grounds, the white shirt — fronts and coloured dresses caught in headlights, and the striped canvas porte-cochère with its gold — braided commissionaires created a kind of simple anticipation of their own. The warm potato — smell and the mixture of black and white faces in the formally dressed herd pressing to the entrance were to him evidence that this was not just another municipal gathering — this was Africa, and this time Africans were honoured guests, being met with a bow and a smile. There was a satisfaction — naive, he knew; never mind — in this most obvious and, ultimately, unimportant aspect of change. It did not matter any more to the Africans whether white people wanted to dine with them or not; they themselves were now the governing elite, and the whites were the ones who had to sue for the pleasure of their company. Fifty pounds a head for a ticket; he waited in line behind a rusty — faced bald Englishman and a lively plump Scot with their blond wives, and a black lady, probably the wife of some minor official, who had faithfully assumed their uniform of décolleté and pearls. She smelled almost surgically of eau — de-Cologne. The African Mayor and the white President of the Chamber of Commerce dealt jointly with the receiving line, dispensing identical unctuousness.