He was very short — sighted and taking off his glasses had the effect of drawing the world in towards him as a snail does its horns. The greenery outside the window was blurred. The titles of the reference books on the dusty shelf — trade directories, an ancient Webster’s — were illegible to him. He sat in this visually contracted world, obstinately, doing nothing. But his mind could not be held back; it was after Shinza, ferreting down this dead end and that, following and discarding scraps of fact and supposition.
He had told Rebecca he hadn’t been able to see Shinza because Shinza was ill; everyone else was vague about his purposes and destinations, anyway. She spent a lot of time at the house, now. At first she came only at night, disappearing from the Tlumes’ after they had gone to bed, coming across the scrub with her little pencil — torch, and being escorted home by the hand through the dark trees at two or three in the morning. The nights were so blackly brilliant then, the stars all blazing low together like a meteor tail, and the cicadas and tree — frogs silenced by the chilled air; they could hear each other breathing as they quickly covered the short distance. When he came back the fire was fragrant ash, the room warm; each evening consumed itself, and left no aftermath. Then she began to come to eat with him and would stay the night, leaving only just before Kalimo unlocked the house in the early morning, and before “the kids burst in” to her room up the road. She told him that as it grew light she and Edna Tlume would sit and drink coffee together in the kitchen — Edna got up very early to do her housework before going on duty at the hospital.
“What do the Tlumes think?”
“Oh they are very discreet. I told you. They don’t think anything.”
In spite of himself, he remembered the ease with which they talked of her, from hand to hand, down in the capital.
“D’you know what Edna said? ‘After all, where is your husband? A girl must have a man.’ It was so African.”
She was standing at his table, where he sat with his papers. He drew her in and pressed his face to her belly through the stuff of her skirt, then pushed up her sweater and took out her breasts, releasing the warm breath of her body that was always enclosed by them. She had a way of standing quite still, with patient pleasure, while she was caressed. He found it greatly exciting. He had not thought her body beautiful at first but as it became familiar it became imbued, transparent, with sensation — it was the shape, texture and colour itself of what was aroused in him.
She moved unremarkably into the empty house with ordinary preoccupations of her own; cobbled at children’s crumpled clothes, sitting on the rug before the fire, wrote letters in her large, sign — writer’s hand, did things to her hair, shut up on Sunday afternoons in his bathroom. She brought over her sewing machine and began to remake the curtains. “When your wife comes she’ll have a fit, seeing these awful things.”
Olivia had written saying that she really promised to come, now, by November — it was the shy, culpable letter of a spoilt little girl who knows she’s been exploiting the will to have things her own way. November was a long way off, to Bray. All time concepts seemed to be stretched; or rather, unrealizable. Next week and November were both equally out of mind. He did not know where he would be, any time other than the present. He did not know what he meant by that: where he would be. There was a growing gap between his feelings and his actions, and in that gap — which was not a void, but somehow a new state of being, unexpected, never entered, unsuspected — the meaning lay. He sat in the same room with the girl and wrote to Olivia, saying with affectionate reproach, November was about time, but it was a pity she was missing the winter, which she might have forgotten was so lovely, in Gala. There was nothing in the letter that touched upon him. All the easy intimacy it expressed was extraneous; the thin sheets lay like a shed snakeskin retaining perfectly the shape of a substance that was not there. He folded the letter and put it in the envelope.
Rebecca was doing some typing for him; that was inevitable. She looked up, mouthing a word; then focused, giving a quick faint smile. He said to her, “Edward Shinza was away when I drove to the Bashi.”
She had often a slight air of apprehension when he began to talk to her, as if she were afraid she might misunderstand — even in bed in the dark he would sense it.
“He was over the border. It’s not too difficult to come and go across the north — west border there, in the Bashi. Miles of nothing, the Flats run out into half — desert, there’s only the one border post on the Tanga River. That little wife of his more or less told me he’s been before. — Don’t look so worried!” Her face had gone broad, smoothed tight of expression.
“I’m wondering if it isn’t Somshetsi he goes to see. You remember about those two? — Mweta expelled them a couple of months ago because old President Bete accused him of allowing them to set up a guerrilla base on our side of the Western border.”
“And if he’s going to see them …?”
He drew a considering breath; his waist was as slim as it was when he was twenty — five but like many muscular men of his height, he had developed a diaphragm — belly — it could be drawn up into his expanded chest, but there was no ignoring the fact that it pouted out over his belt when he forgot about it. He shifted the belt. “There’s a piece in one of the English papers. Apparently Somshetsi and Nyanza have split. Somshetsi’s the man, now. He denounced Nyanza for wasting funds and not taking advantage of opportunities for furthering plans of liberation and so on. Whatever’s behind that, if Somshetsi could see any chance of a change here, a change that would allow his group to come back and base itself here, why shouldn’t he be very interested? Where they are now, they’re the width of a whole country away from their own. No possibility of any attempt to infiltrate. Where they are, there’s no common border with their country. Shinza could be their chance.”
All her comments were half — questions. “If he really means to make trouble here.”
“What I’m thinking is that if Shinza had retired to raise another family he wouldn’t be slipping over the border to Somshetsi.”
“What could he get out of it?”
“I don’t know.” His mouth was stopped at the point of hearing himself say aloud, Shinza might get support, through Somshetsi, from other sources that would like to see Mweta out; might get arms, might form some sort of alliance with Somshetsi — Shinza! A flash of absurdity. Shinza and Mweta belonged in the context of the fiery verbal wrangles at Lancaster House, with the conventional sacrifices and sufferings of an independence struggle with a power that, in contrast to the settlers who believed it existed to represent their interests, was simply choosing the time to let go. Shinza was better suited to the role of President to Mweta’s Prime Minister, than to intrigue in the bush.
There was a small knock, low down, on the screen door of the veranda. Rebecca called out, “Yes, Suzi?” The children never ran in without knocking carefully; he wondered whether she had trained them, or whether they had some sort of instinctive delicacy or even fear of finding out what the grown — ups assumed they were not supposed to know. The little girl’s voice was muffled.