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Mr Mafente now fell back a step to take his place half a pace behind his leader’s right elbow; and Mr Chikwe faced them both, unsmiling.
Good morning to you, Mr Chikwe,’ said Mr Devuli.
Good morning to you, Mr Devuli. Mr Kwenzi is just finishing his breakfast, and will join us in good time. Mr Kwenzi was working all through the night on the proposals for the new constitution.’
As Mr Devuli did not answer this challenge, but stood, vague, almost swaying, his red eyes blinking at the passers-by, Mr Mafente said for him: ‘We all admire the conscientiousness of Mr Kwenzi.’ The we was definitely emphasized, the two young men exchanged a look like a nod, while Mr Mafente tactfully held out his right forearm to receive the hand of Mr Devuli. After a moment the leader steadied himself, and said in a threatening way that managed also to sound like a grumble: ‘I, too, know all the implications of the proposed constitution, Mr Chikwe.’
‘I am surprised to hear it, Mr Devuli, for Mr Kwenzi, who has been locked up in his hotel room for the last week, studying it, says that seven men working for seventy-seven years couldn’t make sense of the constitution proposed by Her Majesty’s Honourable Minister.’
Now they all three laughed together, relishing absurdity, until Mr Chikwe reimposed a frown and said: ‘And since these proposals are so complicated, and since Mr Kwenzi understands them as well as any man with mere human powers could, it is our contention that it is Mr Kwenzi who should speak for our people before the Minister.’
Mr Devuli held himself upright with five fingers splayed out on the forearm of his lieutenant. His red eyes moved sombrely over the ugly façade of the Ministry, over the faces of passing people, then, with an effort, came to rest on the face of Mr Chikwe. ‘But I am the leader, I am the leader acknowledged by all, and therefore I shall speak for our country.’
‘You are not feeling well, Mr Devuli?’
‘No, I am not feeling well, Mr Chikwe.’
‘It would perhaps be better to have a man in full possession of himself speaking for our people to the Minister?’ (Mr Devuli remained silent, preserving a fixed smile of general benevolence.) ‘Unless, of course, you expect to feel more in command of yourself by the time of – he brought his wrist smartly up to his eyes, frowned, dropped his wrist – ‘ten-thirty a.m., which hour is nearly upon us?’
‘No, Mr Chikwe, I do not expect to feel better by then. Did you not know, I have severe stomach trouble?’
‘You have stomach trouble, Mr Devuli?’
‘You did not hear of the attempt made upon my life when I was lying helpless with malaria in the Lady Wilberforce Hospital in Nkalolele?’
‘Really, Mr Devuli, is that so?’
Yes, it is so, Mr Chikwe. Some person bribed by my enemies introduced poison into my food while I was lying helpless in hospital. I nearly died that time, and my stomach is still unrecovered.’
I am extremely sorry to hear it.’
‘I hope that you are. For it is a terrible thing that political rivalry can lower men to such methods.’
Mr Chikwe stood slightly turned away, apparently delighting in the flight of some pigeons. He smiled, and inquired: ‘Perhaps not so much political rivalry as the sincerest patriotism, Mr Devuli? It is possible that some misguided people thought the country would be better off without you.’
‘It must be a matter of opinion, Mr Chikwe.’
The three men stood silent: Mr Devuli supported himself unobtrusively on Mr Mafente’s arm; Mr Mafente stood waiting; Mr Chikwe smiled at pigeons.
‘Mr Devuli?’
‘Mr Chikwe?’
‘You are of course aware that if you agree to the Minister’s proposals for this constitution civil war may follow?’
‘My agreement to this constitution is because I wish to avert bloodshed.’
‘Yet when it was announced that you intended to agree, serious rioting started in twelve different places in our unfortunate country.’
‘Misguided people – misguided by your party, Mr Chikwe.’
‘I remember, not twelve months ago, that when you were accused by the newspapers of inciting to riot, your reply was that the people had minds of their own. But of course that was when you refused to consider the constitution.’
‘The situation has changed, perhaps?’
The strain of this dialogue was telling on Mr Devuli: there were great beads of crystal sweat falling off his broad face, and he mopped it with the hand not steadying him, while he shifted his weight from foot to foot.
‘It is your attitude that has changed, Mr Devuli. You stood for one man, one vote. Then overnight you became a supporter of the weighted vote. That cannot be described as a situation changing, but as a political leader changing – selling out.’ Mr Chikwe whipped about like an adder and spat these two last words at the befogged man.
Mr Mafente, seeing that his leader stood silent, blinking, remarked quietly for him: ‘Mr Devuli is not accustomed to replying to vulgar abuse, he prefers to remain silent.’ The two young men’s eyes consulted; and Mr Chikwe said, his face not four inches from Mr Devuli’s: ‘It is not the first time a leader of our people has taken the pay of the whites and has been disowned by our people.’
Mr Devuli looked to his lieutenant, who said: ‘Yet it is Mr Devuli who has been summoned by the Minister, and you should be careful, Mr Chikwe – as a barrister you should know the law: a difference of political opinion is one thing, slander is another.’
‘As, for instance, an accusation of poisoning?’
Here they all turned, a fourth figure had joined them. Mr Kwenzi, a tall, rather stooped, remote man, stood a few paces off, smiling. Mr Chikwe took his place a foot behind him, and there were two couples, facing each other.
‘Good morning, Mr Devuli.’
‘Good morning, Mr Kwenzi.’
‘It must be nearly time for us to go in to the Minister,’ said Mr Kwenzi.
‘I do not think that Mr Devuli is in any condition to represent us to the Minister,’ said Mr Chikwe, hot and threatening. Mr Kwenzi nodded. He had rather small direct eyes, deeply inset under his brows, which gave him an earnest focussed gaze which he was now directing at the sweat-beaded brow of his rival.
Mr Devuli blurted, his voice rising: ‘And who is responsible? Who? The whole world knows of the saintly Mr Kwenzi, the hardworking Mr Kwenzi, but who is responsible for my state of health?’
Mr Chikwe cut in: ‘No one is responsible for your state of health but yourself, Mr Devuli. If you drink two bottles of hard liquor a day, then you can expect your health to suffer for it.’
‘The present health of Mr Devuli,’ said Mr Mafente, since his chief was silent, biting his lips, his eyes red with tears as well as with liquor, ‘is due to the poison which nearly killed him some weeks ago in the Lady Wilberforce Hospital in Nkalolele.’
‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said Mr Kwenzi mildly. ‘I trust the worst is over?’
Mr Devuli was beside himself, his face knitting with emotion, sweat drops starting everywhere, his eyes roving, his fists clenching and unclenching.
‘I hope,’ said Mr Kwenzi, ‘that you are not suggesting I or my party had anything to do with it?’
‘Suggest!’ said Mr Devuli. ‘Suggest? What shall I tell the Minister? That my political opponents are not ashamed to poison a helpless man in hospital? Shall I tell them that I have to have my food tasted, like an Eastern potentate? No, I cannot tell him such things – I am helpless there too, for he would say – black savages, stooping to poison, what else can you expect?’
‘I doubt whether he would say that,’ remarked Mr Kwenzi. ‘His own ancestors considered poison an acceptable political weapon, and not so very long ago either.’
But Mr Devuli was not listening. His chest was heaving, and he sobbed out loud. Mr Mafente let his ignored forearm drop by his side, and stood away a couple of paces, gazing sombrely at his leader. After this sorrowful inspection, which Mr Kwenzi and Mr Chikwe did nothing to shorten, he looked long at Mr Chikwe, and then at Mr Kwenzi. During this three-sided silent conversation, Mr Devuli, like a dethroned king in Shakespeare, stood to one side, his chest heaving, tears flowing, his head bent to receive the rods and lashes of betrayal.
Mr Chikwe at last remarked: ‘Perhaps you should tell the Minister that you have ordered a bulletproof vest like an American gangster? It would impress him no doubt with your standing among our people?’ Mr Devuli sobbed again, and Mr Chikwe continued: ‘Not that I do not agree with you – the vest is advisable, yes. The food tasters are not enough. I have heard our young hotheads talking among themselves and you would be wise to take every possible precaution.’
Mr Kwenzi, frowning, now raised his hand to check his lieutenant: ‘I think you are going too far, Mr Chikwe, there is surely no need …’
At which Mr Devuli let out a great groan of bitter laughter, uncrowned king reeling under the wet London sky, and said: ‘Listen to the good man, he knows nothing, no – he remains upright while his seconds do his dirty work, listen to the saint!’
Swaying, he looked for Mr Mafente’s forearm, but it was not there. He stood by himself, facing three men.
Mr Kwenzi said: ‘It is a very simple matter, my friends. Who is going to speak for our people to the Minister? That is all we have to decide now. I must tell you that I have made a very detailed study of the proposed constitution and I am quite sure that no honest leader of our people could accept it. Mr Devuli, I am sure you must agree with me – it is a very complicated set of proposals, and it is more than possible there may be implications you have overlooked?’
Mr Devuli laughed bitterly: ‘Yes, it is possible.’
‘Then we are agreed?’
Mr Devuli was silent.
‘I think we are all agreed,’ said Mr Chikwe, smiling, looking at Mr Mafente who after a moment gave a small nod, and then turned to face his leader’s look of bitter accusation.
‘It is nearly half past ten,’ said Mr Chikwe. ‘In a few minutes we must present ourselves to Her Majesty’s Minister.’
The two lieutenants, one threatening, one sorrowful, looked at Mr Devuli, who still hesitated, grieving, on the pavement’s edge. Mr Kwenzi remained aloof, smiling gently.
Mr Kwenzi at last said: ‘After all, Mr Devuli, you will certainly be elected, certainly we can expect that, and with your long experience the country will need you as Minister. A minister’s salary, even for our poor country, will be enough to recompense you for your generous agreement to stand down now.’
Mr Devuli laughed – bitter, resentful, scornful.
He walked away.
Mr Mafente said: ‘But Mr Devuli, Mr Devuli, where are you going?’
Mr Devuli threw back over his shoulder: ‘Mr Kwenzi will speak to the Minister.’
Mr Mafente nodded at the other two, and ran after his former leader, grabbed his arm, turned him around. ‘Mr Devuli, you must come in with us, it is quite essential to preserve a united front before the Minister.’
‘I bow to superior force, gentlemen,’ said Mr Devuli, with a short sarcastic bow, which, however, he was forced to curtail: his stagger was checked by Mr Mafente’s tactful arm.
‘Shall we go in?’ said Mr Chikwe.
Without looking again at Mr Devuli, Mr Kwenzi walked aloofly into the Ministry, followed by Mr Devuli, whose left hand lay on Mr Mafente’s arm. Mr Chikwe came last, smiling, springing off the balls of his feet, watching Mr Devuli.
‘And it is just half past ten,’ he observed, as a flunkey came forward to intercept them. ‘Half past ten to the second. I think I can hear Big Ben itself. Punctuality, as we all know, gentlemen, is the cornerstone of that efficiency without which it is impossible to govern a modern state. Is it not so, Mr Kwenzi? Is it not so, Mr Mafente? Is it not so, Mr Devuli?’
Dialogue (#u3776eae9-781d-5be9-ac14-65c9509fa16a)
The building she was headed for, no matter how long she delayed among the shops, stalls, older houses on the pavements, stood narrow and glass-eyed, six or eight storeys higher than this small shallow litter of buildings which would probably be pulled down soon, as uneconomical. The new building, economical, whose base occupied the space, on a corner lot, of three small houses, two laundries and a grocer’s, held the lives of 160 people at forty families of four each, one family to a flat. Inside this building was an atmosphere both secretive and impersonal, for each time the lift stopped, there were four identical black doors, in the same positions exactly as the four doors on the nine other floors, and each door insisted on privacy.
But meanwhile she was standing on a corner watching an old woman in a print dress buy potatoes off a stall. The man selling vegetables said: ‘And how’s the rheumatism today, Ada?’ and Ada replied (so it was not her rheumatism): ‘Not so bad, Fred, but it’s got him flat on his back, all the same.’ Fred said: ‘It attacks my old woman between the shoulders if she doesn’t watch out.’ They went on talking about the rheumatism as if it were a wild beast that sunk claws and teeth into their bodies but which could be coaxed or bribed with heat or bits of the right food, until at last she could positively see it, a jaguar-like animal crouched to spring behind the brussels sprouts. Opposite was a music shop which flooded the whole street with selections from opera, but the street wasn’t listening. Just outside the shop a couple of youngsters in jerseys and jeans, both with thin vulnerable necks and untidy shocks of hair, one dark, one fair, were in earnest conversation.
A bus nosed to a standstill; half a dozen people got off; a man passed and said: ‘What’s the joke?’ He winked, and she realized she had been smiling.
Well-being, created because of the small familiar busyness of the street, filled her. Which was of course why she had spent so long, an hour now, loitering around the foot of the tall building. This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thin drift of cloud across pale blue sky, she checked, or rather tested, by a deliberate use of the other vision on the scene: the man behind the neat arrangements of coloured vegetables had a stupid face, he looked brutal; the future of the adolescents holding their position outside the music-shop door against the current of pressing people could only too easily be guessed at by the sharply aggressive yet forlorn postures of shoulders and loins; Ada, whichever way you looked at her, was hideous, repulsive, with her loose yellowing flesh and her sour-sweat smell. Etc, etc. Oh yes, et cetera, on these lines, indefinitely, if she chose to look. Squalid, ugly, pathetic … And what of it? insisted her blood, for even now she was smiling, while she kept the other vision sharp as knowledge. She could feel the smile on her face. Because of it, people going past would offer jokes, comments, stop to talk, invite her for drinks of coffee, flirt, tell her the stories of their lives. She was forty this year, and her serenity was a fairly recent achievement. Wrong word: it had not been tried for; but it seemed as if years of pretty violent emotions, one way or another, had jelled or shaken into a joy which welled up from inside her independent of the temporary reactions – pain, disappointment, loss – for it was stronger than they. Well, would it continue? Why should it? It might very well vanish again, without explanation, as it had come. Possibly this was a room in her life, she had walked into it, found it furnished with joy and well-being, and would walk through and out again into another room, still unknown and unimagined. She had certainly never imagined this one, which was a gift from Nature? Chance? Excess? … A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly she looked at the word love, which her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen, and said to herself: Now it’s enough, it’s time for me to go in.
She looked at the vegetable stall, and entered the building, holding the colours of growth firm in her heart (word at once censored, though that was where she felt it). The lift was a brown cubicle brightly lit and glistening, and it went up fast. Instead of combating the sink and sway of her stomach, she submitted to nausea; and arrived at the top landing giddy; and because of this willed discoordination of her nerves the enclosed cream-and-black glossiness of the little space attacked her with claustrophobia. She rang quickly at door 39. Bill stood aside as she went in, receiving her kiss on his cheekbone, which felt damp against her lips. He immediately closed the door behind her so that he could lean on it, using the handle for a support. Still queasy from the lift, she achieved, and immediately, a moment’s oneness with him who stood giddily by the door.
But she was herself again (herself examined and discarded) at once; and while he still supported himself by the door, she went to sit in her usual place on a long benchlike settee that had a red blanket over it. The flat had two rooms, one very small and always darkened by permanently drawn midnight blue curtains, so that the narrow bed with the books stacked up the wall beside it was a suffocating shadow emphasized by a small yellow glow from the bed lamp. This bedroom would have caused her to feel (he spent most of his time in it) at first panic of claustrophobia, and then a necessity to break out or let in light, open the walls to the sky. How long would her amiability of the blood survive in that? Not long, she thought, but she would never know, since nothing would make her try the experiment. As for him, this second room in which they both sat in their usual positions, she watchful on the red blanket, he in his expensive chair which looked surgical, being all black leather and chromium and tilting all ways with his weight, was the room that challenged him, because of its openness – he needed the enclosed dark of the bedroom. It was large, high, had airy white walls, a clear black carpet, the dark red settee, his machine-like chair, more books. But one wall was virtually all window: it was window from knee height to ceiling, and the squalors of this part of London showed as if from an aeroplane, the flat was so high, or seemed so, because what was beneath was so uniformly low. Here, around this room (in which, if she were alone, her spirits always spread into delight) winds clutched and shook and tore. To stand at those windows, staring straight back at sky, at wind, at cloud, at sun, was to her a release. To him, a terror. Therefore she had not gone at once to the windows; it would have destroyed the moment of equality over their shared giddiness – hers from the lift, his from illness. Though not-going had another danger, that he might know why she had refrained from enjoying what he knew she enjoyed, and think her too careful of him?
He was turned away from the light. Now, perhaps conscious that she was looking at him, he swivelled the chair so he could face the sky. No, this was not one of his good days, though at first she had thought his paleness was due to his dark blue sweater, whose tight high neck isolated and presented his head. It was a big head, made bigger because of the close-cut reddish hair that fitted the back of the skull like fur, exposing a large pale brow, strong cheekbones, chin, a face where every feature strove to dominate, where large calm green eyes just held the balance with a mouth designed, apparently, only to express the varieties of torment. A single glance from a stranger (or from herself before she had known better) would have earned him: big, strong, healthy, confident man. Now, however, she knew the signs, could, after glancing around a room, say: Yes, you and you and you … Because of the times she had been him, achieved his being. But they, looking at her, would never claim her as one of them, because being him in split seconds and intervals had not marked her, could not, her nerves were too firmly grounded in normality. (Normality?) But she was another creature from them, another species, almost. To be envied? She thought so. But if she did not think them enviable, why had she come here, why did she always come? Why had she deliberately left behind the happiness (word defiantly held on to, despite them) she felt in the streets? Was it that she believed the pain in this room was more real than the happiness? Because of the courage behind it? She might herself not be able to endure the small dark-curtained room which would force her most secret terrors; but she respected this man who lived on the exposed platform swaying in the clouds (which is how his nerves felt it) – and from choice?
Doctors, friends, herself – everyone who knew enough to say – pronounced: the warmth of a family, marriage if possible, comfort, other people. Never isolation, never loneliness, not the tall wind-battered room where the sky showed through two walls. But he refused common sense. ‘It’s no good skirting around what I am, I’ve got to crash right through it, and if I can’t, whose loss is it?’
Well, she did not think she was strong enough to crash right through what she most feared, even though she had been born healthy, her nerves under her own command.
‘Yes, but you have a choice, I haven’t, unless I want to become a little animal living in the fur of other people’s warmth.’
(So went the dialogue.)
But he had a choice too: there were a hundred ways in which they, the people whom she could now recognize from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognized them, she would say; how many people do we know (men and women, but more men than women) enclosed in marriages, which are for safety only, or attached to other people’s families, stealing (if you like) security? But theft means not giving back in exchange or kind, and these men and women, the solitary ones, do give back, otherwise they wouldn’t be so welcome, so needed – so there’s no need to talk about hanging on to the warmth of belly fur, like a baby kangaroo, it’s a question of taking one thing, and giving back another.
‘Yes, but I’m not going to pretend, I will not, it’s not what I am – I can’t and it’s your fault that I can’t.’
This meant that he had been the other, through her, just as she had, through him.
‘My dear, I don’t understand the emotions, except through my intelligence, normality never meant anything to me until I knew you. Now all right, I give in …’
This was sullen. With precisely the same note of sullenness she used to censor the words her healthy nerves supplied like love, happiness, myself, health. All right this sullenness meant: I’ll pay you your due, I have to, my intelligence tells me I must. I’ll even be you, but briefly, for so long as I can stand it.
Meanwhile they were – not talking – but exchanging information. She had seen X and Y and Z, been to this place, read that book.
He had read so-and-so, seen X and Y, spent a good deal of his time listening to music.
‘Do you want me to go away?’
‘No, stay.’
This very small gift made her happy; refusing to examine the emotion, she sat back, curled up her legs, let herself be comfortable. She smoked. He put on some jazz. He listened to it inert, his body not flowing into it, there was a light sweat on his big straining forehead. (This meant he had wanted her to stay not out of warmth, but for need of somebody there. She sat up straight again, pushed away the moment’s delight.) She saw his eyes were closed. His face, mouth tight in an impersonal determination to endure, looked asleep, or –
‘Bill,’ she said quickly, in appeal.
Without opening his eyes, he smiled, giving her sweetness, friendship, and the irony, without bitterness, due from one kind of creature to another.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
The piano notes pattered like rain before a gust of wind that swept around the corner of the building. White breaths of cloud were blown across the thin blue air. The drum shook, hissed, steadily, like her blood pumping the beat, and a wild flute danced a sky sign in the rippling smoke of a jet climbing perpendicular from sill to ceiling. But what did he hear, see, feel, sitting eyes closed, palm hard on the armrest for support? The record stopped. He opened his eyes, they resolved themselves out of a knot of inward difficulty, and rested on the wall opposite him, while he put out his hand to stop the machine. Silence now.
He closed his eyes again. She discarded the cross talk in her flesh of music, wind, clouds, raindrops, patterning grass and earth, and tried to see – first the room, an insecure platform in height, tenacious against storm and rocking foundations; then a certain discordance of substance that belonged to his vision; then herself, as he saw her – at once she felt a weariness of the spirit, like a cool sarcastic wink from a third eye, seeing them both, two little people, him and herself, as she had seen the vegetable seller, the adolescents, the woman whose husband had rheumatism. Without charity she saw them, sitting there together in silence on either side of the tall room, and the eye seemed to expand till it filled the universe with disbelief and negation.
Now, she admitted the prohibited words love, joy (et cetera), and gave them leave to warm her, for not only could she not bear the world without them, she needed them to disperse her anger against him: Yes, yes, it’s all very well, but how could the play go on, how could it, if it wasn’t for me, the people like me? We create you in order that you may use us, and consume us; and with our willing connivance; but it doesn’t do to despise …
He said, not surprising her that he did, since their minds so often moved together: ‘You are more split than I am, do you know that?’
She thought: If I were not split, if one-half (if that is the division) were not able to move in your world, even if only for short periods, then I would not be sitting here, you would not want me.
He said: ‘I wasn’t criticizing. Not at all. Because you have the contact. What more do you want?’
‘Contact,’ she said, looking at the cold word.
