I felt the fine Italian hand of le dieu caché in the design of the cemetery. Nelson denied it was his idea. The mother committee had evolved it, according to Nelson, and he’d merely gone along.
It was true about the sword. Harold had drawn his rapier, which was one of the props in their act. He was very apologetic about it. He kept explaining. He seemed unable to refer to the cemetery as anything other than The Necropolis. They had been in the necropolis and had seen figures, seemingly armed, rushing toward them. In fact one woman had been carrying a hoe, was all. I’m afraid I am not longsighted, Harold said.
Julia wanted me to know that they had no fear of remote places. They had just performed at Moeng College, did I know where that was? It was in wild mountains. The High Commission had never given them to understand there was anything particularly different about this place, Tsau. I was by then informing them bit by bit that Tsau was in fact different, that it was a closed project — which I tried to elucidate for them — but I kept reiterating that everything would be all right and that their visit would be enjoyable all around. I wanted to preshape things as much as I could before Denoon broke the surface. I knew he was going to see a plot. He was certain for some reason that the British High Commission particularly wished Tsau ill. He was always ready to cite chapter and verse on the British High Commission, more than any other embassy, working hand in glove with the South Africans. He claimed to know for a fact that among British intelligence types the paranym for Africa was the Zoo.
I made introductions. I think they were frightened of Dirang Motsidisi, who had been in the original intercepting party. A dung cart arrived to take luggage. There was a water jug and a damp towel in it, which Harold and Julia made use of, taking off their pith helmets and tamping their necks and faces.
Physically, these were interesting people. They were middleaged but very impressive and fit-looking. They were middleaged in the way actors are middleaged, which seems different. Harold was a fine figure of a man. He was made for tights. I loved his big, martial jaw and full head of gray hair worn leonine. It was crimped across the back where the helmet band had pressed. His eyebrows were the color of brass. He had carriage. They both did. They seemed like dancers. Julia was wiry and small, with a headstrong-looking face. She was fatigued. The flesh beneath her eyes was soft and looked crosshatched. They were both in safari kit. I knew she had no breasts to speak of, despite the brave cups in her shirtfront. Her upper chest was bony. Her hair was gray-blond, cleverly streaked, cut shortish. Harold was not perfect, on closer scrutiny. His magnificent nose had a slightly dropped septum, which would have made no difference except that the interior of his nose was rather vermilion, so you noticed. Also there were a couple of liver spots on his forehead which hadn’t been visible before he had performed his mini-toilette just now. They must have been touched up. His eye whites were congested, but that could have been due to fatigue and nothing worse.
As I led the way into town my personal fixation on the relationship between looks and fate revived. How old was Julia? My mother’s age, roughly? What was I going to look like in twenty or so years? What was the kind of roughing it I seemed to be committing myself to going to do to me? What was the consequence going to be of living where you kept running out of moisturizer? What was Harold’s story? Clearly his physical envelope qualified him for something loftier than being a strolling player in places like this.
They seemed to like me. Julia’s voice was her creature. It had an adorable rasp to it. Harold had a rich, capacious voice I could tell would be capable of great projection. Then there was Nelson’s fine voice. I was assigned to be the only lakhoa in Tsau with a nondescript voice. It was true that they seemed to like me, but they were showing not the least surprise at finding someone like me in a place like Tsau. I don’t know exactly what I thought they should think, what more wonderful situation I was clearly more appropriate for, someone so youngish and smashing as myself, but I was a little undermined.
They were especially British, which worried me. They weren’t incidentally British, like British aid workers you might encounter in Africa. They were paid exemplars. Nelson’s hostility to Britain started with the British refusal to do sanctions against South Africa and stretched backward through items like their letting Mussolini through the Suez Canal so he could invade Ethiopia, which according to Nelson wouldn’t have happened otherwise. He was encyclopedic. By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. And if you mentioned anything favorable you’d be reminded that if you put it in the box with everything else and shook it all up, what you would come out with would still be the British Empire. Also he referred to himself as a birthright Fenian. This had osmosed to him through his father from an even more diehard nationalist uncle, so diehard that he had briefly been a blueshirt and gone to fight alongside the Germans, the great enemy of his enemy. Of course, for his father, that had been going too far, and when the uncle visited after the war there had been cataclysmic scenes, drink-based and violent, ultimately.
I had a slight coup. Harold had calmed down. He said Place — the Seacoast of Illyria, and then What country, friends, is this? I said Twelfth Night. I’m not sure how I knew, since Shakespeare is a blur to me, Hamlet and Macbeth excepted. Harold noticed that I knew, nicely. I took them straight to the guest quarters at Mma Isang’s. My excuse for not taking them up to the plaza first, for formalities, was that they needed desperately to rest and get hold of themselves.
Foreign Bodies
An hour later I was trying to impress on Denoon that he was not dealing with evil people here, so far as I could tell. As I’d approached the octagon I’d heard the thudding of the generator and guessed correctly that Nelson was radioing Gaborone for explanations. Somebody who’d witnessed Harold and Julia’s arrival had run to him with the essentials. Nelson already knew more about the visitors than I did, viz. that Harold had played Richard the Lion-Hearted’s best friend in a BBC-TV series in the sixties. The explanation for their presence was that there was someone new running the British Council and also that the person at Local Government and Lands who should have known enough to block the visit was on holiday. The government was being apologetic. We would have Harold and Julia for four days, no more.
He seemed to be reconciling himself to the intrusion, albeit with little side trips into grumbling about Shakespeare. The chronicle plays were royalist propaganda of the purest sort and did I know that in them only kings were allowed to speak from a seated position? Proroyalism was the secret core of the impotence of British socialism. It all came down to something as intractable as not liking it that America emerged from so unsatisfactory a culture as Britain. I feel about England the way Blake did, he said.