— What are the children doing? Anyone interested in going into politics, like Dad?—
— Studying. — Subject closed.
One evening they had a second whisky and time had passed so unnoticed that she suggested some supper. The driver and bodyguards were already being fed maize meal and stew when she went to the kitchen to see what she and Tomasi could offer.
Over canned soup and cold chicken he told her of a farm in the Southern Province. — Your own farm? — Yes, he had a farm. (Doesn’t everyone in government acquire a farm or farms, don’t ask about how, nothing to do with the questions of land redistribution; but this was none of her business, certainly not at her own table with a guest.)
The next time the black car brought distinction to Tomasi’s yard the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs invited her to visit his farm the coming weekend. When she told him there were two gatherings she was obliged to attend he merely substituted: —The weekend after, then.—
— Oh I don’t want to spoil your plans, Gladwell, please—
— It’s the same for me. I go all the time.—
So that is home, the family home, not the official residence (to which she has never been invited) that must be in the suburb of guard-houses manned before swimming-pool and tennis-court endowed gardens, where Government office-bearers and foreign diplomats lived. She looked forward with mild curiosity to meeting the wife and family. He must belong somewhere else outside the parliamentary suit — as he did with the old uncle and aunt, that glimpse she’d had of him in personal mufti. The black car was at the gates early, not unexpected of this stickler for all disciplines. She recognised one of the bodyguards doubling as driver; perhaps, unlike the destination of the other outing on which she’d accompanied the Deputy-Director, the area they were bound for in this vast country presented some possible threat which made the discreet, disguised-by-function presence of at least half his usual Security a precaution? So she and Gladwell were together on the back seat, very comfortable, he had no need to give any attention to the road, his man at the wheel had the air of a horse making surely for the stable.
It was far away. They rose and descended round a mountain pass, and caused people in two country towns to stare back at the majestic car’s glossy blackness as the populace in distant times and far countries must have watched a royal carriage go by. In the third town he stopped (the other journey, he’d paused at a roadside store), this time before the town’s landmark, a supermarket, and went in attended by the driver-bodyguard, perhaps only to carry provisions. She had her own secreted in her largest straw bag. The shaming resort to charity: a dose of sugar in place of an answer to the state of beggary. The children were there, the same children. She handed out a pack of sweets. The bodyguard and his charge returned loaded with food — must have been a long list from the wife. Then his man was in attendance on a visit to a liquor store behind the battered iron-pillared-and-roofed pavement that was the style of old frontier towns — along with the shopkeeper’s Jewish name was pioneer immigrant provenance: I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. Bottles clanked in the trunk as the car moved off and the driver-bodyguard was instructed in their language to halt and rearrange his packing of provisions. Once more, refreshment had been brought for her; this time it was imported mineral water.
They talked between comfortable intervals — unlike his imposed silences — watching the country go by. The candelabra aloes were in bloom, flaming votive offerings to the ultimate cathedral that is the late winter sky when the heat has come, as it does, before the rains, a scouring to the bone that needs a term other than the one named Spring in Europe. The Cultural Attaché of the British had remarked to her at dinner last week, August’s the cruellest month, not T. S. Eliot’s April.
They came to the kind of terrain where activity by man has made savannah of what once was forest. Sparse scrub was nature’s attempt to return among weathered rubble, half-buried rust-encrusted unidentifiable iron parts, even a jagged section of a wall where foundations traced by weeds outlined what might have been a building. Beyond some sort of slag heaps a rise where the picked-over remains of what must have been elaborate structures — houses? — of a considerable size, in scale with the giant hulks of fallen trees too heavy to have been carted away for firewood, still made their statement as an horizon. In other parts of the country she had seen farmsteads abandoned by whites pillaged for whatever might be useful; nothing of this extent. — What was here?—
— Used to be a mine. Long time ago. Before.—
— Copper?—
— Yes.—
— But what happened? Why isn’t it still worked?—
— I don’t know. Maybe the ore was finished — but in the war they say it was attacked and flooded, underground, the pumps were smashed. You can ask the Minister of Mines; the Buffalo Mine.—
There was a great deal of entertaining up at the Manager’s house, weekends. On Monday morning a member of the kitchen and ground staff whose job it was set off to walk fifty miles to town with the master’s note for the liquor store. A case of Scotch whisky. The man walked back with twelve bottles in the case on his head, arriving Friday. Every Friday. The feat was a famous dinner-party story, each weekend: that’s my man — what heads they have, eh, thick as a log.
A stop at the last town to buy supplies the driver-bodyguard loaded. I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. A case of Scotch whisky. Twelve bottles on the head. That’s my man. Thick as a log. That’s my man.
Buffalo Mine.
The name is a hook, the anecdote comes up with it. (The driver-bodyguard has reduced speed in response to her movement, upright in her seat looking back at the site.)
First time in Africa? First time yes India Bangladesh Afghanistan not here.
Not only a dinner-party story of the long dead. What an old rogue, but such style! They don’t make them like that anymore. Tax evasion’s about the only territory of adventurers now. A child half-listening, an adolescent bored with the tradition of family fables recounted to later generations, around other tables, about that extraordinary character, the grandfather.
Been here before.
Not in her person. But in her blood-line. The history to which she belongs. There it was — is — Buffalo Mine. One of the houses that were up there on the rise she’s looking at was where the dinner parties heard the famous story, drank the whisky arrived every Friday. Every Friday head thick as a log.
— You know the Minister? I’ll introduce you. — Gladwell is in the position to obtain any privilege a curious visitor might wish.
— Enos can tell you all about these old places.—
She sank back in her seat as if dismissing a passing interest.
Nearby was her destination, their destination, the Deputy-Director’s farm. She had had in prospect a solid Colonialverandahed farmstead taken over: there, looking on wattle-fenced cattle kraals, mud huts, a troop of sheep and goats, chickens taking a dust-bath under roses gone wild, a scatter of children bowling old tyres, was a house set down out of the sky complete from California. The expanse of glass behind the patio preened in reflected splendour of the sun, a satellite dish held its great ear to the world. Close by was a structure she recognised as a powerful electricity generator. Men and women came out of the back of the house to the double garage whose fine wooden doors rolled away as the driver-bodyguard touched the electronic gadget in his hand. The people were servants or perhaps relatives (she had observed how poorer members of an official’s family often served in both capacities), some hastened to unload the car, a woman in a flounced floral overall that needn’t necessarily mean she was cooking or cleaning, but a mark of status, hugged the master of the house and brought her palms together in greeting to his guest. She was ready to meet the wife in the house and perhaps some of the couple’s grown children — of course the wife would speak English — anyway the social capabilities of her own training were automatically at hand for all such encounters.