The gathering at the Tlumes’ house was unlike the usual absent drift towards the Alekes’ or the Tlumes’ for an hour after work, when often one of Edna’s relations or some subdued minor official, new to his Africanized job, sat without speaking, and children wandered in and out with their supper in their hands. There were even one or two faces that didn’t belong; a telephone engineer Gordon Edwards had travelled with, and the blonde receptionist from the Fisheagle Inn. She was the one who had brought the thigh — high skirt to the village (there was a time — lag of a year or so between the beginning of a fashion in Europe and its penetration to the bush) but she sat in this mixed company with those famous thighs neatly pressed together as a pair of prim lips. The doctors Hugh and Sally Fraser from the mission hospital were there with a young Finn who had just walked down from West Africa — his rucksack leaned against the wall. He wore a shirt with the face of some African leader furred and faded by sweat and much washing, and was prematurely bald on top, like a youthful saint in a cheap religious picture. Sampson Malemba had changed into his best dark suit after the dirty business of loading and unloading machinery. Aleke was wearing a brown leather jerkin with fringes — Gordon’s present; how did he know just what would sit splendidly on Aleke’s powerful male breasts? But there was the impression that Gordon Edwards acquired things that remained in his possession like clues to the progress of his life if one could read them: he happened to be here at a certain time, and so picked up this, happened to be there, and so was around when that was available. And in the same fortuitous fashion, it fell out that these things suited this one perfectly or were exactly what that one would like.
Alekes, Tlumes, Frasers — all accepted Bray’s presence with Gordon Edwards without a sign. It might have been agreed upon, it was such a cosy, matter — of-fact conspiracy of friends: he did not quite know whether he was chief protagonist or victim? Everyone was so gay. Sometimes he felt as if he were a deceived husband; Rebecca wore a new dress (another present?) and when he danced with her had the animated, lying look of a young girl. Who could believe, as she had implied, that that lithe and handsome little man didn’t sleep with her? Physical jealousy suddenly weakened his arms so that he almost dropped them from her. Between chatter she expected him to lip — read— “I’ll try and come early one morning.” He murmured, “No, don’t.” She pulled a face, half — hurt. She said, “Let’s go to the lake again. You suggest it. On Sunday.” A family party. He felt himself smiling, the cuckold — lover: “All right, I’ll be host.” Gordon Edwards danced again and again with the tall refined tart from the Fisheagle; he must be the reason why she was present. Perhaps, then, he was staying at the hotel after all? It was impossible to say to Rebecca, does he sleep in this house? Idiot, idiot. He saw himself amusedly, cruelly, as he had done so often since he had come back here, where all should have had the reassuring familiarity of the twice — lived, the past. Aleke took over the Fisheagle blonde; his large, confident black hands held her softly as he did his children’s pigeons, she kept her false eyelashes down on her cheeks, she had moved from the shelter of the settlers’ hotel into the Tlumes’ house as if on a visit to a foreign country. Agnes Aleke was wearing the wig Rebecca told Bray she had ordered by post and looked like a pretty American Negress. She talked to the Finn about her longing to visit the cities of Europe, holding her head as a woman does in a new hat. To him they were battlegrounds where the young turned over rich men’s cars and camped out in the carpeted mausoleums of dead authority, not her paradise of shops. “ ‘Nice things’?” he said in his slowly articulated Linguaphone English. “Here you have the nice things — the shape of the trees, the round sun, these beaudiful fruits”—he was balancing on his knees a mango, caressing it. She flirtatiously patronized his lack of sophistication— “This shirt? You got it in Africa? Who’s that president or whatever it is?”
The Finn squinted down at his chest and said as if putting a hand on the head of a dog that had accompanied him everywhere, “Sylvanus Olympio.”
“But alas, assassiné—he’s dead.” Bray turned to Agnes, giving her the advantage.
The Finn said unmoved, “Never mind,” in a tone that implied he was a good fellow anyway, dead or alive, in fact better than some who were still about, perhaps in this room.
Agnes’s patronage collapsed into the African internal feminine giggle that paralysed her, and, by a quick glance, infected Edna. This uninhibited and inoffensive amusement at his expense, along with a lot of beer, melted the Northerner. He began to dance wildly, but preferred to do so on his own. He was so thin that the only curve in his entire form was the curve of his sex in the shrunken jeans.
The immigration officials had impounded his money at the frontier. Bray said, “That’s quite normal, any country’ll do it — he hasn’t a return ticket. They have to protect themselves in case they get stuck with him here.”
“So we’ll have to be keeping him in pocket — money in the meantime.” The Frasers considered him, parenthetically.
“Oh he won’t have any great needs.”
Aleke smiled and remarked to Rebecca, “We can write to immigration? The mission would give a guarantee for him, ay? Maybe we can get them to release part of the money.”
“That would be marvellous,” Hugh Fraser said. “He must report to the Police Commissioner, by the way, while we’re in town.”
“But I don’t think the Commissioner is.” Aleke looked undecidedly at Bray for a moment, and then said to him in the far — away manner with which he referred to such matters, “There was the rumour of some trouble up at the iron-ore mine.”
“Oh? What sort?”
“Nobody knows how these things start, until afterwards. Something about overtime.”
The union had just agreed to a forty — eight-day cool — off period before any strike would be recognized. “Striking?”
“Apparently.”
“We heard a truckload of local PIP boys’d been seen driving up the Bashi road,” Fraser said. “We’ll know tomorrow when the broken heads start coming in to the hospital. Ota, better not knock yourself out, old son, you may have to start work sooner than you think.”
“That’s okay. I rather bandage heads than bury.” The light, light blue eyes that had emptied themselves of Europe turned with neither compassion nor judgement on Africa. His rib — cage heaved under the freedom shirt and he began to dance again.
“Where’d he get it, anyway?” Rebecca said.
“A man give it to me,” he said. “I stayed in his hut, it was a small place, banana leaves on the roof, but it’s cool inside. At the end of the time, you know, he say, it’s not a new shirt — but he give it to me.”
“We must get him a Mweta one now that he’s here. Not secondhand. We can afford it.” Rebecca’s new comradely way of talking to Bray. Not entirely new; it was rather the way she had been when she was odd — woman-out in the Bayley set in the capital, rather the way she talked to the men there. The usual concealment of the whereabouts of another kind of relationship existing within the general company, maybe. Her other new manner — the oblique flirtatiousness — also showed under the surface now and then. Speaking not to him but at him, she asked, “Wasn’t there a strike at the fish factory not long ago?”