That evening when the whole party was back home, he walked across the vacant ground to get rid of the bits and pieces children had left in his car. She was playing chess on the veranda with Nongwaye Tlume; they had a modern gas — lamp that gave an underworld, steel — coloured light. She dumped the miscellany on a chair and walked with him through the garden which had no fence and was marked off from the scrub only by a few heads of zinnia and the shallow holes and tracks made by children. “I taught Nongwaye to play but now he beats me regularly. When I grumble he says it’s an old African custom, to beat women — but he’s so westernized he does it at chess.” Strolling, chatting, her arms crossed over her breasts, she ended up nearer his house than the other one, and came in for a drink. “Is it too cool to sit under the fig?”
“No, no, I’d love to sit under the famous fig.”
He had a little candlestick with a glass mantel. It lit the fissures and naves of the great tree like a lamp held up in a cave; even at night the bark was overrun by activity, streaming with ants and borers indentured for life.
“You seem to get on very well in the Tlume household.” It interested him that a woman who appeared to have little or nothing of the liberal principles and fervour that would make the necessity a testing virtue, should find living with an African family so unremarkable. She apparently had been brought up in the colonial way, and had lived her life in preserves on the white side of the tracks, wherever she had been.
She said, “They just are very nice people. I was lucky. It’s a hell of a risk, to share a house.”
“You haven’t found them rather different? — you know, in the small ways that count rather a lot when you’re living together.”
“Well, it is another thing, of course — when you live with people. For the last year or two I’ve been working with Africans and then in our crowd at the Bayleys’ there were African friends; but I’ve never lived with them before. But as I said this afternoon … at the time, I didn’t think about anything … and I had to get out of that hotel and the chance came up. … Of course it is a bit different — there’s not much privacy in the house, we really do all live together, I mean, it’s not the arrangement of these are my quarters and those are yours, that I’d assumed. They just take it for granted; we eat together, people wander in on you all the time.… But at the same time there is a kind of privacy, another kind. They never ask questions. They simply accept everything about you.” When he came back out of the house with their beer, she said, “Of course, Gordon’s up in arms. I wrote to tell him where we were and, naturally, that brought a letter from him. I got it last week — what sort of educational background for his children and all that. He nearly had a fit. Whenever he gets all concerned he writes these sort of lawyer’s letters, so snooty and silly. He sees us sitting in the yard eating mealie porridge out of a big pot — you don’t know Gordon’s imagination.” She laughed derisively but almost proudly.
“Where is Gordon?” he said, as if he knew him.
“I hate to tell you.” Half confidential, half enjoying an opportunity to shock. “In the Congo, with that old bastard Loulou Kamboya”—she saw him trying to place the name— “no, not a politician, just an ordinary crook. Well, extraordinary. Gordon met him in a bar in Zambia, Loulou goes all over the place in his black Mercedes. Gordon went into the souvenir business with him. Loulou’s got a ‘factory’ making those elephant — hair bracelets. He supplies all kinds of hideous things — fake masks and horn carvings. He wanted to get down to South Africa to make contacts in the curio racket there, but of course they wouldn’t let him in. So Gordon went for him. There was going to be a fortune in it, they were going to have a network over Africa from east to west and north to south — you know. I don’t know what’s happened — it seems to have faded out. In this last letter Gordon says he’s taking a job on the Cabora Bassa thing — the dam. He worked on Kariba, of course: that was when I went to Salisbury. He’s an engineer when he has to be. — If you ever want any elephant — hair bracelets, I’ve got a surplus stock.”
He would be like the Tlumes and never ask questions — that is, questions that were intrusive. But she had introduced the subject of this man, the husband; he seemed hardly more than an anecdote. Bray said, “Well, at least he isn’t a mercenary. When you said Congo—”
“Oh, I’m sure Loulou’s done his share of gun — running, but that really would be too profitable to let anyone in on. Gordon Edwards wouldn’t be included in that.” It was a kind of parody of the solid suburban housewife’s plaint that her husband was always bypassed by promotion. He was entertained by this sturdy dryness that he had not seen in her before. She began to tell him anecdotes about life in the capital, involving Dando, people at the various ministries and the university, both of them laughing a good deal. They were the stories of an intelligent secretary, background observation; if there were any that were the stories of an intelligent mistress, she didn’t include them. He walked her home across the scrub again and gave her a good — night peck on the cheek, the convention between the men and women of the group to which he and she had belonged, in the capital. She was a courageous and honest girl and he had the small comfort of feeling he had put things right between them. He had a distaste for false positions. Even tidying minor ones out of the way was something. He did it as he would tidy his table when there seemed no way of tackling what he really had to do. When he met her during the week, buying icecream for the children, he offered to take them all to the lake again at the weekend — he wanted to have a talk to the people at the fish — freezing plant.
But she telephoned on Friday night — Sampson Malemba was in the room with him, they were working — and said that the children had been asked to a party and were “mad keen” to go, so — It didn’t matter at all, he’d take them another time maybe (he had always the feeling even while he spoke of everyday plans, that he might be gone, quite suddenly, before they were realized). Then he thought he might have sounded a little too relieved at not having the bother of the outing, and added— “Of course, you come along if you want to — if you’ve nothing better to do? I have to go, anyway.” She said she’d let him know on Saturday morning, if that was time enough? He felt the reciprocal tolerance of one preoccupied person towards the preoccupations of another.
Malemba sat waiting with his head tilted back, tapping a pencil on his big yellow teeth; it was a question of money, money, again now. There was an old police compound — a square of rooms round a courtyard — that they could acquire very cheaply and convert into classrooms at the cost of a few hundred pounds. The existing grant was already earmarked for other things; Malemba said, “If you wrote and asked for more?
“To whom?”
He looked at Bray and shrugged.
Yes, he had only to ask Mweta; he said, “Suppose I were to write to my friend the American cultural attaché, down there. They’re keen on educational projects. Of course, they like the big ones that show — like the university. But lecture rooms — that’s the way to put it — it might just ring the bell for us.”
He heard her coming through the screen door of the veranda while he was finishing breakfast. She was wearing men’s blue jeans and her rubber — thonged sandals, and was pleased to be in good time. She looked very young — he did not know how old she would be, round about thirty, he supposed. Kalimo had carefully tied up with string saved from the butcher’s parcels a package of food: “What’s inside?” Bray asked, and Kalimo counted off with a forefinger coming down on the fingers of the other hand— “Ah-h loaste’ chicken, eggs with that small fish in, ah — h tomatoes, blead, sa’t, litt’e bit pepper. No butter. You must buy butter.” It was the picnic he had always prepared, down to the stuffed eggs with anchovy, that Olivia had taught him to make, and the paper twists of salt and pepper. “Don’t bother with butter, it’ll just melt” the girl said. He stopped on the way out of the village and bought a bottle of wine instead.