*
Agostinho Neto was another friend of the General who had become President of his country. Hillela waited safely in Angola while the General and his son advanced, captured airstrip by airstrip, village by village and town by town, towards the capital she had never seen. She must have lived for seven or eight months in that hotel in Neto’s capital, with one trip to England to see the namesake. She took Nomo to visit the Holland Park couple with whom they had stayed when she was small — at ten, what long thin black legs she had! The wife babbled on about her surely going to be a dancer or a model, she kept talking, afraid Hillela would take advantage of any gap to ask if she and her child could occupy the guest room again. But Hillela was in no need of being taken in; she had been provided with a flat by some organization or other, she didn’t name it, and, as the husband remarked, it was idiotic to be nervous, so obvious Hillela was not short of money, the child was at Bedales, and how well Hillela looked, prettier than ever. She was vague when asked what she was doing in Africa — Luanda, of all places. She had worked with various refugee organizations but now was not sure what would come next. From the way she got into the taxi he found for her when she left, from the way she settled herself and quickly remembered to smile through the window, her mind already discarding the visit like a used ticket, he knew — he couldn’t say why — what had come next was a new lover, and whatever role that meant. Once she had gone, the wife agreed: there was nobody quite like her; awful and rather marvellous.
The General came to Luanda expectedly unexpectedly, every few weeks. It was not only to fill with the scent of his after-shave, the grunts as he did his twenty morning push-ups on the carpet, the glowing weight of his body in bed, a room registered in the name of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, but also to consult with Neto and others in the Organization of African Unity. Alliances must be negotiated with foresight. Self-assured of winning his war, he was already looking towards his stature in peace. She always knew if he had arrived and entered the room while she was absent; his presence expanded it before she noticed his bag or the newspapers spilled on the bed. She was alone in that presence — he had been in town since the previous night and was out at a meeting — on a day when the telephone rang and it was not he ready to say where to join him for lunch. There was someone to see her, downstairs. Who? A woman asking for her.
What woman? — The lady won’t give her name.—
A strange hackle of fear rose from somewhere long quieted. She stood for an instant once again behind the refrigerator door and felt the thud of her own death.
— I don’t see people who won’t say who they are.—
The telephone rang again and it was the General. The young man behind the reception desk came running out on his two-inch-heeled shoes, bum-tight black pants waggling, to open the lobby doors as she passed. Colonists never leave; they leave their blood and style behind. He wore a pendant on a glossy chain dipping down into his open-necked shirt, like any Portuguese dandy, and in his watered-down African face his eyes were the polished aubergine-coloured ones — like her own. — That ’oman, she speak Portuguese to me. — But he saw madam was not interested, she had the face of someone who has just come from her bath and her mirror and is ready to be received by company that commands the best table in the restaurant.
The next afternoon the persistent caller was there again. — I tell her, without she says the name (a shrug in the voice) — she say, Mrs Nunes.—
A General’s consort meets many people and does not always remember doing so, particularly if they are wives, who appear only in marginal social contexts and usually don’t have much to say. It might be that this was one of those whose offers of invitations to visit she had accepted without any intention of pursuing.
Hillela came down into the lobby, thirty-three next birthday, not grown tall, grown to be a young woman with deep breasts and a curly head well-balanced on a straight neck, shiny cheeks without make-up, a black, brightly-suffused gaze.
A woman was sitting on the plastic-covered bench where only the nightwatchman ever sat. Her skirt was arranged round her knees and her feet were neatly together, pushed up by high-heeled sandals. She pressed the heel of her palms on the bench and got up. She came slowly nearer; stopped.
— I’m Ruth.—
The young woman tilted her head a moment; but the other was right, there was no need to make any other claim.
— The housekeeper here’s a friend of mine, she often talks about the people who come to stay, it’s only natural. She said there was someone with an unusual, pretty name—‘Hillela’. She’d never heard of anyone called that before — I didn’t say anything but I thought, what a great coincidence. So I asked what you were like, about how old …—
— Won’t you have some tea or something cool to drink.—
As if this were one of the wives to whom politeness was due. That’s what came out. That’s all. She heard the slither and clip of high heels behind her. They sat down between potted palms. No-one appeared to serve them. A long, long silence, twenty-nine years of silence uncoiled around the two women, it stretched and stretched to its own horizon, like the horizon drawn by a landscape of cloud rimmed by space, seen from a plane thousands of feet removed from the earth, from reality. Silence was another dimension: ‘mother’, ‘daughter’.
— You don’t mind my coming.—
The remark did not break the silence, it was nothing, swallowed up by it. She shook her head.
She got up and pressed a bell on the wall.
— Really — I’m not thirsty. Don’t bother.—
But she was pressing the bell again and again, it could be heard shrilling from behind the louvres of the patio bar.
Even for one so used to adapting to others, so skilled and quick to adjust, how does one talk when one doesn’t know to whom one is talking — acquaintance, secret friend, someone standing in a relationship never tried out? There was at least something in the silence, something to say — You live in Mozambique.—
— I did, in Lourenço Marques — used to be, Maputo now … We moved here in the late Sixties, my husband thought there was more opportunity. With the oil, you know.—
Vasco. The name torn in pieces and stuffed into a bin with the crusts of school sandwiches. To have inside me a man who has nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife, this is my child, my dog. The woman had the creamy opaque skin of the generation that used face powder, the skin of Olga. The high brow of Pauline was still smooth and the neck unlined but its fullness quilted. The beautiful painted mouth, shiny as tar in the photograph beside the silver dish of Liquorice All-Sorts, opened on false teeth. — How is Pauline? Is she still married to old Joe? And Olga? I don’t suppose I’d recognize them, now — or them me (acknowledging good-humouredly the hair dyed red). Olga must be sixty! — she’s the eldest, and I’m fifty-three, I was twenty-one when you were born. Sixty! But I’m sure she won’t look it, she was always afraid of using herself up — you know? Precautions. ‘Don’t cry, it makes your eyes red.’ Even when we were children, she used to cream her elbows and knees when she got out of the bath. She was so pretty and so afraid — at fourteen, of wrinkles! I threw her into terrible confusion when we were young girls and I read somewhere that if you shaved your legs you lost your sex appeal — she was always perfectly depilated. Well, anyway, all she got was Arthur … I suppose he’s still around—