They went off down the street under the trees, Adelaide with her white cotton gloves and hairnet, Felicity in her baggy slacks and men’s sandals. Old Adelaide (they used to call her Lady Hester Stanhope, they used to laugh about her, he and Olivia) was not a romantic, after all. She had not been a liberal and now she was not a romantic. The old girls hadn’t wanted to sit in their drawing — room with Africans, but now they did not expect to be left in peace there. They had recognized themselves for an anachronism.
By such encounters as this, remote from him, really, his mind was tipped. Again, the letter was mentally torn up. Thrown to the winds. What sort of priggish absurdity did he make of himself? The virginal drawing away of skirts from the dirt. I am not — this, not — that. What am I, then, for God’s sake? A boy scout? Clapping my hand over my backside? A vast impatience with himself welled up; and that was something new to him, too, another kind of violation — he had never before been sufficiently self — centred to indulge in self — disgust. There had always been too much to do. But now I refuse, I refuse to act. Because it’s not my place to do so.
He thought again: then go away, go back to the house in Wiltshire. Finish the damned education thing. May be some use, can’t do any harm. What you set out to do.
Yet like the gradual onset of a toothache or a headache came the recurrent tension that he was going to see Shinza, couldn’t stop himself, would one day find himself calmly making the small preparations to drive back to the Bashi. He would go to Shinza again, and he would know why when he got there.
Chapter 11
The Tlumes, the Edwards girl and her children, the Alekes and Bray — they drifted together and saw each other almost every day without any real intimacy of friendship. Gala was so small; the Tlumes and the Alekes, along with a few other officials’ families, were isolated from the black town; Rebecca, because she was a newcomer living under conditions new to the white community, and Bray, because of the past, both were isolated from the white town. Bray often shared the evening meal at the Malembas down in the old segregated township, but also he sometimes would be summoned by a barefoot delegation of Edwards and Tlume children to come over and eat at the Tlume house across the vacant piece of ground. And the Alekes’ house — his own old house — by virtue of its size was the sort of place where people converged. His bachelor shelter, without woman or child, remained apart, the table laid for a meal and shrouded against flies by Kalimo’s net.
They were all going to the lake for the day, one weekend, and he found himself included in the party. An overflow of children and some picnic paraphernalia were dumped at his house as his share of the transport; the children sang school songs to him as he drove. On arrival, the company burst out of the cars like a cageful of released birds and scattered with shouts and clatter. Bray and Aleke were left to unpack; Aleke had brought a scythe in anticipation of the waist — high grass on the lake shore and took off his shirt while he cleared a space as easily as any labourer outside the boma. He had sliced a small snake in two — a harmless grass — snake. He put it aside, in schoolboy pleasure, to show the others, and, wiping the blade with a handful of grass, stood eyeing Bray amusedly. He remarked, “So we’re getting rid of Lebaliso.”
“You’re what?”
Aleke lowered his young bulk into the cut grass and took one of the two — week-old English newspapers Bray had brought along. “The note came yesterday. He doesn’t know yet. Transferred. To the Eastern Province. Masama district.” His interest was taken by a frontpage picture showing people in androgynous dress — boots, mandarin coats, flowing trousers, leis and necklaces, waxwork uniforms — and a few elderly faces in morning coats and top — hats, advancing like an apocalyptic army, under the caption PEER’S SON WEDS: WEDDING GUESTS JOIN VIETNAM PROTEST MARCH.
It was Bray’s turn to watch him. “Aren’t you surprised, then?”
Aleke smiled; it seemed to be at the picture. Then he looked up. “No, I’m not surprised.”
“Well I am!”
Aleke’s big face opened in a laugh; he was tolerant of power. If Bray could go to the capital and have the ear of the President, well, that must be accepted as just another fact. Of course Aleke, too, in his way, wanted to do his job and be left alone.
Bray said, “Well, it’s a good thing, anyway.” Aleke was amiably unresponsive. He lay back on one elbow, his thick hairless chest and muscular yet sensuously fleshy male breasts moved by relaxed, even breathing. He was rather magnificent; Bray thought flittingly of old engravings of African kings, curiously at ease, their flesh a royal appurtenance. “Of course he might just as well have got promotion for his powers of foresight. Still, that youngster should have brought an action against him.”
They fell silent, turning over the pages of the papers. Bray was reading a local daily that came up from the capital twenty — four hours late. Gwenzi, Minister of Mines, appealed to the mine workers not to aspire “irresponsibly” to the level of pay and benefits that the industry had to pay to foreign experts; the experts would “continue to be a necessity” for the development of the gold mines over the next twenty years. A trade union spokesman said that some of the whites had “grown from boys to men” in the mines; why did they have to have paid air tickets to other countries and special home leave when they “lived all their days around the corner from the mine?” The Secretary for Justice denied rumours that a ritual murder, the first incident of its kind for many years, was in fact a political murder, and that an inquiry was about to be instituted.
Cut grass swathes glistened all round; the voices of the women, calling in children, came sharply overhead and wavered out across the water. Winter hardly altered the humidity down at the lake; the air was so heat — heavy you could almost see each sound’s trajectory, like the smoke left hanging in space by a jet plane.
After lunch, Nongwaye Tlume got talking to some fishermen and borrowed their boat. It was too small to hold all the children safely; Bray intervened, and had to take two of the younger ones, with Rebecca in charge, in a pirogue. Aleke and his seventh child slept in an identical glaze of beer and mother’s milk.
The big boat went off with cheers and waves, pushed out of the reeds by splay — footed, grunting fishermen. Bray paddled the rough craft scooped out of a tree — trunk with the careful skill of his undergraduate days. He kept close to the shore; his load seemed tilted by the great curve of the lake, rising to the horizon beyond them, glittering and contracting in mirages of distance. They had the sensation of being on the back of some shiny scaled creature, so huge that its whole shape could not be made out from any one point. The other boat danced and glided out of focus, becoming a black shape slipping in and out of the light of heat — dazzle and water. The faces of the brown and white children and the girl were lit up from underneath by reflections off the water; he had the rhythm of his paddle now, and saw them, quieted, with that private expression of being taken up by a new mode of sensation that people get when they find themselves afloat.
The girl had half — moons of sweat under the arms of her shirt. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her rather coarse, stubby feet were washed, like the children’s, by the muddy ooze at the bottom of the pirogue. He realized how solemnly he had applied himself to his paddling, and the two adults grinned at each other, restfully.
The children wanted to swim; everywhere the water was pale green, clear, and flaccid to the touch, gentle, but too deep for them where the shoreline was free of reeds and followed a low cliff, and with the danger of crocodiles when the pirogue came to the shallows. Bray struck out for a small island shaved of undergrowth six feet up from the water to prevent tsetse fly from breeding; the children were diverted, and forgot about swimming. But when he slowly gained the other side of the island, there was a real beach — perfect white sand, a baobab spreading, the boles of dead trees washed up to lean on. The girl grew as excited as the children. “Oh lovely — but there can’t be any danger here? Look, we can see to the bottom, we could see anything in the water from yards off—”