He wrote to Olivia about the strikes, lock — outs, and the confused expressions of dissatisfaction that, in the bush, took the form of tribal wrangling. He did not suggest to her that this atmosphere was the reason why she should not come. But neither, in their letters, any longer wrote as if she were coming. He did not wonder why she, for her part, should have dropped the idea, because — he realized quite well — it suited him that she had done so so tacitly. He wrote her about cattle slaughtered in vengeance, huts burned, the proposed amendments to the Industrial Relations Act that would make strikes illegal for teachers and civil servants. She wrote about the beautiful officer’s chest, circa the Napoleonic wars, that she and Venetia had found in a village antique shop, and a jaunt to London to see a play about the incestuous homosexual love between two brothers that couldn’t have been shown while the Lord Chamberlain still had the right of the blue pencil. Their younger daughter Pat had been home on a visit from Canada. Venetia and her husband and baby spent a lot of time in the house in Wiltshire; photographs of the baby, laughing on flowery grass, were enclosed. He kept coming upon them in the broken ashtray in the sideboard which Kalimo had considered safe keeping, and was wedging them round the edges of the frame that already held a picture of Venetia and the infant, on an afternoon when Rebecca came in all smiles and relief to tell him that it was all right, her period had turned up after all. She had been nearly a week overdue. She took off his glasses and kissed him frantically, gratefully; “Though if it ever did happen, I could go to England. I always think that.”
He poured tea for her and stroked her hair. “England?”
“It’s illegal to have something done here.”
So there was no child from him this time; but there could be, any time. He could see that she was afraid of it and accepted being afraid. She had told him she couldn’t take the pill because it made her get fat.
Sampson Malemba and his wife were coming to supper. It was taken for granted that Rebecca was in the position of the woman of the house, now. She helped Kalimo when he would allow it; Kalimo kept Mahlope firmly confined to outdoor work — Mahlope’s vegetable garden supplied the Tlume and Aleke households as well as its own. Mrs. Malemba (much too shy to call any white person by his first name or to invite anyone to call her by hers) would come to Bray’s house if he asked the Malembas alone. She was content not to talk at all except for her extremely polite responses to offers of food and drink, and as soon as there was a mew from the bundle of infant she always had with her she would disappear into the kitchen to feed or tend it. Rebecca managed to draw her out a little; Rebecca was a woman whom other women liked, anyway, but these days it was easy for Bray or her to be nice to other people. They had awakened together in the morning and, when everyone parted for the night, would be going to sleep together in his narrow bed; this was the source of an overflowing generosity of spirit.
The adult — education-centre-cum-trades-school was going surprisingly well. Sampson had clerks from the boma running literacy classes for older people in the townships. Bray had persuaded the most unlikely people among the white community to teach various skills at the Gandhi Hall workshop; white people, in a skin — wrinkle of apprehension hardly interpreted, were beginning to feel that perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea, so long as it didn’t cost you anything, to make a gesture of cooperation towards the blacks who were running the show. He also quietly counted on the ordinary, unconfessed pleasure anyone takes in demonstrating what he knows. The Americans had supplied a couple of surprisingly useful workers as well as money — not Peace Corps people, but Quakers of some sort — who were teaching fitting and turning, motor winding and various other skills that fitted in with the needs of the beginnings of light industry in the Gala area, and they took their jeep into the country to teach people how to use and maintain the heavy agricultural machinery that was available on loan from Nongwaye Tlume’s department. Even Boxer had come down for a week and enjoyed talking uninterruptedly, in an intensive course on animal husbandry. The Americans had a tape recorder and the whole thing was preserved for use again and again; as Boxer spoke in Gala, it could be played to and understood by people in the remotest village. Boxer stayed with Bray; Rebecca had had to keep away, of course, not even an early morning visit was possible. Boxer was up at five and moving about his room. He brought with him that old — maidish bachelor cosiness which he assumed he and his host shared: there was the feeling that he thought it would be ideal if they could live together permanently. He was the sort of man in whom sexual desires die early; perhaps he was already impotent? He talked about Shinza without prompting: the continuing trouble at the iron-ore mine was due to the meddling of “his lordship,” coming from the Bashi in his “pa-in-law’s” car and getting at people. The Mineworkers’ Union secretary had come from the capital to see what was up, but who would listen to him? — they were all Mpana’s crowd, and they would listen to whomever Mpana told them. And Mpana told them to listen to his son — in-law, his lordship Shinza. Boxer gave the facts as a piece of local gossip.
The morning Boxer left she came at lunchtime and they made love. The lunch table waited, draped in Kalimo’s mosquito — net cover. She said while they ate, gay to be rid of the visitor, “Why’s he such a depressing man?”
“Because he’s a vision of myself without you.”
She laughed with pleasure and indignation. “You! Ever like him!”
“Everybody has a private vision of what he could be at the other end of the scale, the very bottom. Nobody else recognizes it, only oneself.”
She was filled with curiosity. “Extraordinary that you should ever think of yourself in terms of him. The private vision must also be the most unlikely thing that could ever happen. Quite crazy.”
“But haven’t you got one?”
“Have I? I don’t know.” After a moment she said, “Oh yes. After all, I left the capital because of it.” And now she was sombre, dreamy, while he was talkative and hungry.
The centre was perhaps even achieving something useful; he worked on at it with Malemba in spite of all that was happening. It continued to exist and to take up daily action while the context — of the country and of his mind — in which it had that existence was broken up and riding at different levels, swirling and giddying. The practical working intimacy with good solid sensible Sampson Malemba, the attentive faces gathered at the Gandhi Hall or the converted police compound, the Quakers’ jeep carrying the momentum of its own dust to villages down on the lake savannah or towards the Bashi — all this purposefulness was taking place on a land — floe on which people moved about their business unaware that their environment had broken free and was being carried, a house riding upon a flood, the furniture still in place and the pot — plants in the windows. What one does oneself every day is real, he thought; she was sitting on the bed under the reading lamp, picking hard skin off her little toes (“It’s my winter layer peeling off — in the summer when I wear sandals all the time I don’t get it”).
He woke in the small hours of the mornings and his mind punched the facts out of the clarity of darkness. Shinza always had been able to count on influence with the advanced sections of the community, the workers, through his connections with the trade unions. On the side he also had had a useful pull on tribal loyalties through his relationship with the Paramount Chief’s family — he was a nephew, if Bray remembered correctly. It was mainly because of him that the Lambala — speaking people — an offshoot of the Gala, distributed widely through the Bashi country — had been kept within PIP from the beginning. With his marriage to Mpana’s daughter he must now greatly have extended his support, and taken into his influence not only Mpana’s considerable following at home but also the scattered thousands who had always formed a large part of the labour force all over the country. Mpana was the man who, in Bray’s time, had been appointed Tribal Authority by the colonial government when it deposed the Paramount Chief, Nagatse, for intransigence and support of the nascent PIP; with Independence, Nagatse had been reinstated as Paramount Chief and Mpana found himself once again an ordinary chief with a souvenir of better times — his battered American car. Well, Shinza drove that car, these days. It was a logical enough alliance, marriage apart. Mpana and his people certainly would not forgive Mweta the demotion; however far removed from theirs Shinza’s cause was, if it opposed Mweta, it would serve their own.