A Guest of Honour Read Free Page B

exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept.
    There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider’s web made by the supporting beams of the roof. The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, hereand there showed a single stray strand out of place. The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath’s weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released.
    The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. The stale cool air of the room had heated; yet weariness receded, his head was left high and dry of it. There was silence and then he heard that there were voices in the silence droning somewhere, breaking off for breath, laughing—not softly, but softened by being almost out of earshot. Not quite. A voice separated, wound nearer, there was the starting up of a hiss (a hose, he thought) and he made out a word: not just as a particular combination of articulated sounds, but a meaning: “later on,” the compound word for this phrase, in the language that was spoken round the capital, and that he had never really known well.
    He got up and went over to the main house for a bath. The sun in the garden was burning, dazzling, seizing. In the bathroom flies were buzzing themselves to death against the windowpanes. Roly was a bachelor and his house was the particular mixture of tranquil luxury and unchangeable dreariness that is a condition of households where white men live indulged in the sole charge of black male servants. The cistern of the lavatory drizzled into the pan constantly and couldn’t be flushed properly, and the towels were stiff as a dress-shirt (Olivia had taken years to get people to learn to rinse the soap out of the washing), but an old fellow in a cook’s hat put tea under the trees for him and carried off his crumpled suit to be pressed without being asked. A youth was cutting the tough grass with a length of iron bent at the end. Coarse and florid shrubs, hibiscus with its big flowers sluttish with pollen and ants and poinsettia oozing milky secretion, bloomed, giving a show of fecundity to the red, poor soil running baked bald under the grass, beaten slimy by the rains under the trees, and friable only where ants had digested it and made little crusty tunnels. A rich stink of dead animal rose self-dispersed, like a gas, every now and then as he drank his tea, and he got up and looked around, as he had done so many times before, and with as little success, to see if a rat or mole were rotting somewhere. Whatever it was could never be found; it was the smell of growth, they had long ago decided, at Gala, the process of decay and regeneration so accelerated,brought so close together that it produced the reek of death-and-life, all at once. He strolled to the limits of the garden and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, but the grasses and thornbush on the other side (Dando’s place was eight miles out of town) were too entangled for walking where there was no path. He listened to the bush and had the old feeling, in the bush, of being listened for. There were—or used to be—leopards on the outskirts of the town; Dando had once had his dog taken. He walked a hundred yards or so up the road, and, meeting a man on a bicycle, greeted him in the language that had come back to him as he lay in the room.
    At six Roland Dando came home. He gazed anxiously from the car, as if, despite the telephone call, he were not sure if Bray had been safely received, but once he set eyes on him behaved as if they had seen each other a week ago. He was indiscreet, like many