| s-103
| Same as yours, I believe. |
| s-104
| But they call me James. |
| s-105
| I should damn well hope so. |
| s-106
| Well, I've picked someone my own size at last tonight. |
| s-107
| We could just sweep the others off the floor. |
| s-108
| She maintained contact all round her as they danced, talking over his shoulder to this one, putting out a broad calloused brown foot in a gold sandal to nudge that one in the calf. |
| s-109
| Get her to sing, Dando called out proudly. |
| s-110
| not tonight, Dandy-Roly I'm on my best behaviour. |
| s-111
| Would it embarrass Evelyn if Evelyn sang? she asked Bray. |
| s-112
| not in the least. |
| s-113
| What sort of thing? |
| s-114
| Well, what'd you think? |
| s-115
| What do I look as if I'd sing? |
| s-116
| She had the self-confidence of a woman of dynamic ugliness. |
| s-117
| A snort of pleasure: |
| s-118
| Go on! |
| s-119
| I've got a voice like a bullfrog. |
| s-120
| It's terrible when I sing the old chants from home but it's not so bad in English – English is such a rough-sounding language anyway. |
| s-121
| Vivien Bayley's urgent face took up conversation in passing,... that's Hjalmar Wentz's daughter... you were sitting with. |
| s-122
| The Oriental-looking little girl with Ras? |
| s-123
| Yes, lovely creature, isn't she? |
| s-124
| Margot would only let her come if I promised to keep her wholesomely occupied. |
| s-125
| You didn't leave her with Ras? |
| s-126
| He moved his shoulders helplessly. |
| s-127
| The dancers were falling back round a Polish agriculturalist who was teaching a gangling Englishman and two young Africans an Eastern European peasant dance. |
| s-128
| The Congolese band had no idea what music would do, and produced a stomping crescendo; then one of the Poles played the piano, and Neil Bayley moved in on the drums. |
| s-129
| The undergraduate form of self-expression that emerges where Englishmen want to give themselves to celebration imposed itself for a while. |
| s-130
| Someone left, and reappeared with another case of champagne. |
| s-131
| The wine was warm, but an early-hours-of-the-morning rain came out like sweat, and coolness blew in on necks and faces. |
| s-132
| Later the Odara woman sang the new national anthem in a beautiful contralto, her big belly trembling under the robe. |
| s-133
| The young bachelors romped and the tousled girls, passing close by, or smiling suddenly at people they weren't aware of, gave up the scent of cosmetics and perfume heated on their bodies. |
| s-134
| Then there was breakfast at the Bayleys'; a thinning of faces, but some had kept reappearing all through the night in the changing light. |
| s-135
| They said good night to each other in the bright slanting sun and the Bayley children were already out on the grass in their pyjamas, riding bicycles. |
| s-136
| In a few days the faces had lost the stylized, apparition-quality of that first night, the night of the Independence Ball, and become, if not familiar, at least expected. |
| s-137
| A young woman was in and out the Bayleys' house, sometimes adding to, sometimes carrying off with her the many children who played there. |
| s-138
| She was Rebecca, Rebecca Edwards, like a big, untidy schoolgirl in her cotton shirt and sandals, the car key on her forefinger jingling harassedly. |
| s-139
| She was always being sent to pick up people when arrangements went wrong; |
| s-140
| she came for Bray one afternoon in an old station wagon littered with sweet-papers, odd socks, and Dinky toys. |
| s-141
| It was she who had given her glass to him that night at the Independence party; |
| s-142
| the Pole who had danced the gazatska became the man with whom he gravitated to a quiet corner so that they could talk about the curious grammar-structure of Gala and the Lambala group of languages. |
| s-143
| The atmosphere at the parties was what he thought it must have been at gatherings described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. |
| s-144
| Children swept in and out, belligerently pleasure-seeking. |
| s-145
| Babies slept in dark rooms. |
| s-146
| Food was cooked by many hands. |
| s-147
| Invitations were measured only by how long the beer and wine lasted out. |
| s-148
| He felt himself the middle-aged relative, a man of vague repute come from afar to the wedding and drawn helplessly and not unenjoyably into everything. |
| s-149
| It was, in a curious way, an extension of what he was at the official receptions where many people had little idea who the white stranger was, sitting in a modest place of honour; |
| s-150
| and once, at a press dinner Mweta's reference to the presence of one of the fairy godmothers' who had been present at the christening and had returned for the coming-of-age of the State went, thank God, unnoticed as a reference to himself. |
| s-151
| It became his Independence story; as the story of the cigarette company's helicopter was Neil Bayley's, related again and again while the private drama between husband and wife that had made it pass unremarked at the time was quite dropped out of the context. |
| s-152
| Bray asked everywhere about Edward Shinza; certainly he was not in evidence at any official occasion. |