“How are you? Roland Dando said we probably should be seeing you at the Rhino.” They moved off with their plates of food, and Wentz said to a woman settled in one of the canvas chairs, “Margot, here is Colonel Bray.”
“No, no, please stay where you are.”
In the fuss to find somewhere to sit he saw the light of the fire under the spit running along the shiny planes of the woman’s face as it did on glasses and the movement of knives and forks. Bright hair was brushed up off a high round forehead and behind the ears, in a way he associated with busy, capable women.
“Try some, Margot, it’s wonderful—”
“Aren’t I fat enough—” But she took a tidbit of crisp fat from her husband’s fork.
“To tell the truth, this’s the first time for a week we’ve had time to sit down to eat. Honestly. Margot’s had to be in the kitchen herself from six in the morning, and some nights it’s been until ten. She literally hasn’t sat down to a meal….”
“Oh, not quite … I must have had hundreds of cups of coffee….”
“Yes, with one hand while you were busy stirring a pot with the other. The cook went to the Independence ceremony and we haven’t seen him since — just for the afternoon, he said, just to see the great men he’s seen in the papers — well, what can you say?”
“We felt it was his day, after all.” The woman showed a well-shaped smile in the dark.
Bray asked, “How on earth have you managed?”
She gestured and laughed, but her husband was eager to break in, holding up his hands over the plate balanced on his knees— “A hundred and twenty-two for dinner! That’s what it was on Thursday. And yesterday—”
“Only a hundred and nine, that’s all—” They laughed.
Bray raised his beer mug of wine to her.
“What about my assistant cook? You mustn’t forget I’ve got help,” she said. Wentz put down his glass beside his chair, to do the justice of full attention to what he was going to say. “Her assistant cook. I got him from the new labour exchange— I thought, well, let’s try it, so they send him along, five years’ experience, everything fine.”
His wife was listening, laughing softly, sitting back majestically for a moment. “Fine.”
“Five years’ experience, but d’you know what as? — You know the barbers under the mango trees there just before you get to the second-class trading area?”
“Our son’s comment was the best, I think. ‘Mother, if only Barnabas had worked for a butcher and learnt to cut meat instead of hair!’”
“Well, here’s to three crazy people,” said Wentz, excitedly picking up his glass. “Everyone knows you must be crazy to come of your own free will to one of these countries.”
“Colonel Bray isn’t going to run a hotel.” She had a soft, dry voice and her accent was slighter than her husband’s.
“I’m not as brave as you are.”
“Oh, how do you know?” said Wentz. “We didn’t know what we were going to land up doing, either.”
She said quietly, “We certainly didn’t think we’d be the proprietors of the Silver Rhino.”
“Anyway, that’s another story. — I heard you were going to the Ministry of Education?” said Wentz.
“Oh, did you?” he laughed. “Well, perhaps I am, then. I should think the bar of the Silver Rhino’s as good a place as any to learn what’s really going on.”
“If you want to hear how much ugliness there is — yes.” Mrs. Wentz had the tone of voice that sounds as if the speaker is addressing no one but himself. “How people still think with their blood and enjoy to feel contempt … yes, the bar at the Silver Rhino.”
“Our son Stephen is looking after it tonight. It’s amazing how he deals with those fellows — better than I do, I can tell you. He keeps them in place.”
“We promised him a liberal education when we left South Africa, you see.” Mrs. Wentz had put down her food and she sat back out of the light of the fire, a big face glimmering in the dark, caverns where the eyes were.
“He’s at Lugard High, taking the A levels,” said Wentz, innocently. “—You’re not going to finish?” The white blur of her hand moved in a gesture of rejection—“You have it, Hjalmar.”
It rained and people felt chilly on the veranda and drifted indoors. There was a group in loud discussion round the empty fireplace where the beer bottles were stacked. “… banging on the Governor’s door with a panga when the others were still picannins with snotty noses …” Now Dando had the sulky outraged attention of a young patriot from the social welfare department, the glittering-eyed indifference of Doris Manyema, one of the country’s three or four women graduates, and the amused appreciation of a South African refugee whose yellow-brown colour, small nose and fine lips set him apart from the blackness of the other two. In the light, Margot Wentz’s head was the figurehead of a ship above the hulk of her body: a double-chinned, handsome dark blonde, the short high nose coming from the magnificent forehead, water-coloured eyes underlined with cuts of fatigue deep into each cheek. With an absent smile to Bray across the room, she took up, for a moment, an abandoned beauty. When he joined the group, they were listening to her. “We don’t have to argue; we can take it that colonialism is indefensible, for us, no? You think so, I think so — right. But the forty-seven—” “Forty-eight”— Timothy Odara’s eyes were closed; leaning against the wall he kept his lips drawn back slightly, alert. “—I’m sorry, forty-eight years you were under British rule, digging their mines, building roads for them, making towns, living in shanties and waiting on them, cleaning up after them, treated like dirt — now it’s all over, you really think there was any way at all you could enter the modern world without suffering? You think there was someone else would have given you the alphabet and electricity and killed off the malaria mosquito, just for love? The Finns? Swedes? The Russians? Anybody? Anyone who wouldn’t have wanted the last drop of your sweat and pride in return? These are the facts. From your point of view, as it luckily lasted less than two generations, wasn’t it worth it? Would anybody have let you in for nothing? Anybody at all? Wouldn’t you have to pay the price in suffering? That’s what I’m asking—”
“Oh you make the usual mistake of seeing the life of the African people as a blank — and then the colonialists come along and we come to life — in your compounds and back yards.”
She was shaking her head slowly while Odara was speaking. “All I’m saying, don’t wear the sufferings of the past round your necks. What does independence mean — I don’t use ‘freedom,’ I don’t like the big words — what does your independence mean, then?”
“The past is useful for political purposes only” said Hjalmar, as he might have said: she’s right.
Someone said, “Watch out for the man from the CIA.” “Down with neo-colonialism.”
“Of course, Curtis,” said Hjalmar. “But if you have to do it by keeping that forty years or whatever sitting at the table with you and your children — ach, it’s not healthy, it makes me sick. What do they want to hear how you had to go round to the back door of the missionary’s house?—”
Mrs. Odara had joined the group, ruffling a big, silver-nailed hand through Curtis Pettigrew’s crew-cut hair. “Oh God, Timothy, not that again.”
“—Let them hold up their heads naturally in their own country without having to feel defiant about it!”
Odara laughed. “But it always comes down to the same thing: you Europeans talk very reasonably-about that sort of suffering because you don’t know … you may have thought it was terrible, but there’s nothing like that in your lives.”