A Guest of Honour Read Free Page A

Colonel Bray, no need to bother him.” A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, “Just a minute. I don’t know about this—” but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, “That’s okay, chum, it’s our ole friend Mr. Kabata.” The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. Mr. Kabata said, “What’s the matter with these people. Excuse me, I’ll get a boy,” and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. The porter addressed both men as
Mukwayi,
the respectful term become servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man.
    There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. Beside him, Kabata’s strong thighs filled the seat. “It’s not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I’d have waited to get it I would have turned up I don’t know when. You know how it is just at the moment. Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sékou Touré.” There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta’s face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. He said, “All very festive,” but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. The young man said, “You are from Gala district.” “I
was.
Why, are youfrom there?” “From Umsalongwe. But my mother is a Gala. I have visited that place.” “Oh have you? Recently or when you were a child? Perhaps I was still there then?” “I think they’ll be very pleased to see you back there.” He laughed. “I wonder if I’ll get that far.”
    â€œOh, you must make trip” the young man said proudly. “I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. The road is much improved, much improved. You’ll see. You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock.” Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. The car was approaching, was carrrying him through the market quarter of the town. Under the mango trees, barbers’ mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed.
    The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando—a Welshman—newly appointed as Attorney—General. When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. They gave him the African cook’s special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again—he had done so in advance by letter—that he had an official lunch to attend. Bray’s ears were filled with the strange echoes of