And Bray the good — humoured friend was saying, “Oh I make do with this old thing on the ground, as you see—” while Rebecca in the same blazing, flirtatious, exaggerated way she had used with him, attacked— “Gordon, for heaven’s sake! Don’t put the idea into their heads! At least leave Bray in peace with his tree, you don’t know how he loves his tree—”
While they all went on talking in this friendly ease he noted the slip — even she with all her apparent skill, born of long practice. For a woman to use a man’s surname like that couldn’t be mistaken as formality; it was a tell — tale inverted intimacy, sticking out, so to speak, from under the hastily made bed. He felt some small satisfaction in catching her out. She said, “I’d better leave you two, much as I like your company — Aleke needs his secretary. I’m about half an hour late already.” “Phone the fellow and tell him you’re taking the afternoon off,” the handsome man instructed. “D’you want me to do it?” “Oh no Gordon, I can’t, he gave me yesterday and tomorrow’s the weekend anyway. Everything’ll be piled up for Monday.” He shrugged. “Well get cracking then, if you got to go, go—” She put her head on one side: “Keys?” He tossed car keys to her; she missed, they both ducked for them. “No wonder my sons can’t play cricket—” He gave her a pat on the backside. “Shoo! And no damn nonsense about overtime or anything. D’you hear? There are people coming at six. D’you hear me?”
She ran, turning her head back to them, nodding it like a puppet’s. Her thighs jerked as they did the day she came out of the water, on the island.
The children were climbing the fig tree and pelting each other with its shrivelled fruit; they had never behaved like that before, eithersubdued little creatures, running in with a sidelong glance and saving their fierce quarrels and boastful games for when they were living by some law of their own away from the awesome grown — ups. By contrast, Bray’s daughters had been such self — assured children, perfectly composed in conversation with a visiting Colonial Secretary at nine or ten, politely offering an opinion to an African nationalist over lunch at fourteen. Like their mother, they could talk to anybody and kept their distance from everybody.
The husband stood about with the instant and meaningless friendliness of the wanderer. This way he was at home in the bars and hotels of Africa; a man who, since he never stays anywhere long, assumes the air of the familiar personality at once, wherever he is. This way he would stand about in conversation with the garage proprietor in a remote Congo village where (as he was relating to Bray) his car had broken down, just as he now did with the middle — aged Colonel for whom his wife did a bit of typing. He was “crazy enough” to have business interests in the Congo— “But I’ve had the fun and games. I’ve pulled out. There’s still money to be made there, mind you. But the Belgians have moved back in such a big way and they push everybody else out … the Congolese wide boys would rather work with the devils they know than with devils like me. They would.” (Shinza’s old saw about Mweta coming up again in a new context.) “I know a chappie — Belgian chappie — who’s back for the fourth time. First he had a natural gas concession up in the Kivu — the volcanic lakes, there’s a fortune lying there for someone, someday, if you can live that long. Then he was in industrial diamonds in the Kasai, they were going to break away and he was all set to get a consortium to finance their diamond industry when they kicked out Union Minière.” He gave his slow, relishing smile, sharp yet humorously worldly, the teeth good. “Don’t know what it was the third time round. Now he’s in the currency racket between Lubumbashi and the Zambian border. He told me he feels ‘useless’ in Europe. Here he says people want help to keep things going — they’ll take it whatever way they can get it, and they know you don’t get it out of the goodness of someone’s heart. While the Russians and the Chinese and Americans are each watching to see what the other one will give, you have to go on living.”
“You think of us as devils?” Bray said.
Present company was waved away. “You know as well as I do. White men don’t hang around in Black Africa for their health or anybody else’s. Wherever a vacuum comes up, there are the boys who won’t hesitate to fill it. Good God, you should just meet some of them the way I do. — Okay that’s enough — out of that tree, now. And clear the mess you’ve made on that table — James’ll never let you put up a tree — house if you drop things on his papers—” He grinned at his own audacity, always confident it would be well received, at once took command again: “Wha’d’you think of it, putting Becky in that sort of accommodation, though? If they need her they must damn well find somewhere for her to live, eh? There must be a house in this place. And if there isn’t, they must find one. That’s the way it is — you want somebody’s services, you have to be prepared to pay for them. I told Aleke straight off, yesterday: you need her, you find her a house.”
“I think Edna Tlume’s quite a help, in a way.” It was impossible to make any remark that did not have, to his own ears, an absurd innuendo.
“Oh that woman’d do anything for Becky. But the point is the house is a slum. Two rooms and no bathroom of her own. Can’t live like that. I said look, if I had one week, I bet I’d find a house — your government’s prepared to pay for it?” The children stood around the man proudly. “See!” Suzi thrust out her dry little hand with its blackened encrustations where Rebecca applied wart — remover to the middle finger. She was wearing a bracelet made of threaded mahogany beans, shook it up her arm with a sudden feminine gesture.
The children had cleared away the fruit they had pelted onto the table. He blew brittle leaf webbed in dust and spider — spit from his letter. It had gone completely from his mind. The little troupe chattered off the way Rebecca always appeared and disappeared, through the thin — leafed trees. The letter came back. He asked Mweta not to forget to arrange for him to be invited to the Party Congress. He mentioned what progress was being made with the education centre. “It could turn out to be rather like the workingmen’s clubs in Britain in the nineteenth century. Here in these country places where men are beginning — though of course they don’t put a name to it — to have a new consciousness of themselves as something more than units of labour, they are ready to take anything that’s going: may come in useful. Whether someone gives judo classes or explains the different ways of dealing with the law of supply and demand … I wanted to suggest to the local PIP branch that they might use the centre as a place for a more general political instruction than the sort of hiphoorah stuff that comes out of party meetings. It would help combat unruliness, too. I would always rather go on the assumption that above people’s heads is higher than the people who instruct them are likely to believe.”
The style and reasoning of such letters was something he picked up with a pen. It functioned of itself. For a lifetime — lying suddenly in his mind, the word associated with advertisements for expensive Swiss watches: lifetime. The habits of a lifetime. He felt himself outside that secure concept built up coating by coating, he was exposed nakedly pale as a man who has been shut away too long from the sun. The girl presented herself face — to-face, fact — to-fact with him, a poster — apocalypse filling the sky of his mind. Thought could crawl all over and about her, over the steadfast smile and the open yellow eyes and in and out the ears and nostrils. He sat for a moment exactly as if he had swallowed an unfamiliar pill and waited for the sensation of the drug to unfold itself. Then the telephone rang in the house. It was Malemba in great excitement: the lathes from Sweden had arrived. He went to borrow a truck (the obliging Indian traders again), pick up Malemba, and fetch the machinery from the road — transport depot.