Agnes Aleke came to see her. Agnes was wearing her smooth wig, she was smartly dressed, and she cried all the time. “If only you’d come in the plane with me, if you’d come when I went.” Through Bray’s death she seemed to experience in her plump voluptuous little body all that she had feared for it. Rebecca sat with her in the garden and held her hand to comfort her; Vivien carried out tea. “Come and stay with me, Rebecca, come to my mother’s place. It’s a nice house. Oh how I hated that place, that Gala, don’t show me that place again, never — and how you must hate us — I said to my mother, she will hate us and why shouldn’t she.” They embraced, Rebecca patting her gently while she sobbed. Vivien said with firm kindness, “What do you think of our dressmaking, Mrs. Aleke? You know Rebecca and I made that dress she’s wearing, ourselves.”
Roly Dando came. It was in the late afternoon; they all drank. Thin little Roly had about him the air — taint, portent — of one who knows what is going on in a time of confusion and upheaval, when what official information there is ceases to be trustworthy. It was known that Mweta was not at the President’s Residence; his messages to the people continued to be issued, but from some unknown retreat. His television appearances were, it was said, old films to which new taped statements were — not too well — matched. None of this was mentioned. But they talked. Dando seemed convinced that Shinza was over the border, planning a guerrilla insurrection. Dhlamini Okoi and the Minister of Health, Moses Phahle, had disappeared and were obviously with him. Goma was said to be in prison; there were so many people in prison that if someone wasn’t seen for a few days it was presumed that that was where he must be. Neil said, “Roly, is it true that Mweta has asked for British troops?”
Roly sat there in the dusk with his sinewy shrunken neck pulled up very straight from his collar; he did not seem to hear. He rose to fetch another drink and hesitated on the way, where Rebecca sat. He put his hand on her head: “La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La Filie aux Yeux d’Or.” He stalked awkwardly to the veranda table and poured himself something. He came back and sat on the arm of her chair, his arm round her, touching her neck as he talked, as he grew a little drunk, unable even now to resist the dismal opportunity to take advantage of his grief to fondle a woman. He was talking of Bray. “The thing is, of course, all our dear friends abroad will say he was killed by the people he loved and what else can you expect of them, and how ungrateful they are, and all that punishment-and-reward two-and-two-makes-four that passes for intelligent interpretation of events. That’s the part of it that would rile him. Or maybe amuse him. I don’t know.”
Vivien’s beautiful controlled voice came out of the dark. “I wish we could know that James himself knew it wasn’t that, when it happened.”
“Of course he knew!” Roly spoke with the unchallengeable authority of friendship on a plane none of the others had shared. “He’s got nothing to do with that lot of spiritual bed-wetters finding a surrogate for their fears in his death! He knew what’s meant by the forces of history, he knew how risky the energies released by social change are. But what’s the good. They’ll say ‘his blacks’ murdered him. They’ll go one further: they’ll come up with their guilts to be expiated and say, yes, he certainly died with Christian forgiveness for the people who killed him, into the bargain. Christ almighty. We’ll never get it straight. They’ll paw over everything with their sticky misconceptions.” Roly spent the night because of the curfew. She heard him snoring in the room next to the one she had been given.
Vivien talked to her a lot about her children, about Clive and Alan and Suzi, but she herself was not thinking about them at all. She began to bleed although it was not the right time and it was then that she thought: so it never happened; there never will be a child. Vivien put small activities in her way as if driving some lost creature, out of kindness, along a track. “I think you ought to go and see Margot. If you feel like it. She’s very down. She really would like to know about Hjalmar, though of course she wouldn’t say it.” So she took Vivien’s car and drove to the Silver Rhino. It was the first time she had driven since that day. The car was the same kind — an old-model Volkswagen. Her feet and hands managed of themselves. It was only five days ago.
It had rained all night again and the morning was beautiful. (Put on the green dress, Vivien said.) There were soldiers on guard round the post office and broadcasting studios, people were cordoned off from the area where the newspaper offices had been stoned. Outside the railway station and bus depot hundreds of women, children, and old people sat in bright heaps among household goods and livestock in the strong sun high with the stink of urine and rotting vegetables; there were no trains or buses running.
And everywhere the rain and heat brought out flowers. The soldiers in their drab battledress stood under blossoming trees, poinsettia and hibiscus were crudely brilliant as carnival paper blooms in the driveway of the Presidential Residence that was said to be empty. In the old garden of the Silver Rhino an enormous American car was parked, with an older but scarcely lesser one behind it. There were nylon curtains in the balcony of windows round the rear of the new one, and ocelot-patterned seat covers. Some African men in pyjamas were sitting on the grass outside one of the bungalows — she did not really notice, on her way to the main building. But one of them got up and came forward with arms wide, a huge, fat man with a cigar in his mouth and a leopard — skin toque on his head: Loulou, Loulou Kamboya, Gordon’s ex-partner from the Congo. “Madame Edouard — I say I know dat girl walking! What you make here?” “Loulou — and you?” He took her by the shoulders, beaming at her, an enormous grape-black face with thick ridges of flesh that pressed back against the ears and even up the forehead from the frontal ridge. “I make everywhere business. You know Loulou. But what this fighting, eh? They mad, eh? I sit here, I come yesterday one week wid my people, nothing for do, nothing. Sometime I think I go faire une petite folie—” He laughed hugely. She knew from Gordon that “faire une petite folie” meant to find a girl and make love; Loulou and Gordon spoke French together, the Congo French spoken by semiliterate Africans, mixed with Lingala words and Belgian usage, but Loulou had always been proud of being able to speak to her in English so that she wouldn’t feel left out. “Et les bébés, they grow okay? Where Gordon? He making cash again or no? Ah Gordon, if he stay this time now with me, you have plenty dresses! I make the big time — that’s right, I say the big time, eh? — I hear in cinéma! Oh business continue to go good but now this damn war or what. What? What? Eh? I here wid my people yesterday week already.”
“Where are you making for?”
“I go for South. Down, down. Far for here. I have ticket but the plane don’t go. You see, I want to go for Jewburg. You remember?”
Yes, she remembered; he had always had a yearning to see Johannesburg. He had refused to be convinced that South Africa didn’t let in black men from other countries as a rule, and that if he did get in he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his habitual freedom of bars and girls.