| s-2
| So we try it out here. |
| s-3
| I don't know; we'll see. |
| s-4
| I read you were coming back, there was an article in the paper, my wife Margot sent it to me in Switzerland, so I thought it was you. |
| s-5
| You were just in front of me when we got out in Rome. |
| s-6
| Yes, I suppose I won't know my way around when I get into town. |
| s-7
| Oh, it's still not New York or London, don't worry. |
| s-8
| The man spoke with an accent, and a certain European kind of resignation. |
| s-9
| They laughed. |
| s-10
| Well, in that case, we'll probably bump into each other in Great Lakes Road. |
| s-11
| Please Nkrumah Road. |
| s-12
| I said I should have to learn my way round all over again. |
| s-13
| The man looked about quickly and lowered his voice. |
| s-14
| This country can do with a few more white people like you, take it from me. |
| s-15
| People with some faith. |
| s-16
| Sometimes I even think I'm down South again, that's a fact. |
| s-17
| I've said it to my wife. |
| s-18
| A young black man with sunglasses and a thick, springy mat of hair shaped to a crew-cut by topiary rather than barbering had cut through the crowd with the encircling movement of authority. |
| s-19
| This way, Colonel, sir. |
| s-20
| Your luggage will be brought to the entrance, if you'll just give me the tickets... |
| s-21
| The other man, bobbing in the wash of this activity yet smiling at it in hostly assumption of his own established residence in the country, was talking across the black man and the exchange of pleasantries, tickets, thanks: |
| s-22
| at the Silver Rhino, of course, you remember the place. |
| s-23
| Any time... we'd be very pleased... |
| s-24
| He thanked him, listening to the two men at once and hearing neither, and followed the firm rump in white shorts past barriers and through the reception hall. |
| s-25
| That's all right, officer, this is Colonel Bray. |
| s-26
| I'm looking after Colonel Bray, no need to bother him. |
| s-27
| A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, Just a minute. |
| s-28
| I don't know about this... but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, That's okay, chum, it's our ole friend Mr. Kabata. |
| s-29
| The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. |
| s-30
| Mr. Kabata said, What's the matter with these people. Excuse me, I'll get a boy, and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. |
| s-31
| The porter addressed both men as Mukwayi, the respectful term became servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man. |
| s-32
| There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. |
| s-33
| Beside him, Kabata's strong thighs filled the seat. |
| s-34
| It's not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. |
| s-35
| The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I'd have waited to get it I would have turned up I don't know when. |
| s-36
| You know how it is just at the moment. |
| s-37
| Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sekou Toure. |
| s-38
| There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta's face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. |
| s-39
| He said, All very festive, but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. |
| s-40
| The young man said, You are from Gala district. |
| s-41
| I was. |
| s-42
| Why, are you from there? |
| s-43
| From Umsalongwe. |
| s-44
| But my mother is a Gala. |
| s-45
| I have visited that place. |
| s-46
| Oh have you? |
| s-47
| Recently or when you were a child? |
| s-48
| Perhaps I was still there then? |
| s-49
| I think they'll be very pleased to see you back there. |
| s-50
| He laughed. |
| s-51
| I wonder if I'll get that far. |
| s-52
| Oh, you must make trip the young man said proudly. |
| s-53
| I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. |
| s-54
| The road is much improved, much improved. |
| s-55
| You'll see. |
| s-56
| You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. |
| s-57
| My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock. |
| s-58
| Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. |
| s-59
| Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. |
| s-60
| The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. |
| s-61
| He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. |
| s-62
| The car was approaching, was carrying him through the market quarter of the town. |
| s-63
| Under the mango trees, barbers' mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. |
| s-64
| It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed. |
| s-65
| The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando – a Welshman – newly appointed as Attorney-General. |
| s-66
| When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. |
| s-67
| They gave him the African cook's special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. |
| s-68
| Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again – he had done so in advance by letter – that he had an official lunch to attend. |
| s-69
| Bray's ears were filled with the strange echoes of exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. |
| s-70
| He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept. |
| s-71
| There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider's web made by the supporting beams of the roof. |
| s-72
| The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, here and there showed a single stray strand out of place. |
| s-73
| The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. |
| s-74
| The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath's weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released. |
| s-75
| The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. |
| s-76
| Bray felt he must be somewhere about; it was difficult to imagine this time without him. |
| s-77
| It was his as much as Mweta's. |
| s-78
| But no one seemed to have seen him, or to know whether he was, or had been, in the capital. |
| s-79
| There were other faces from the past; |
| s-80
| William Clough, the Governor, lifting his bristly eyebrows in exaggerated greeting at Mweta's banquet, the way he used to do on the tennis court in Dar-es-Salaam. |
| s-81
| James, you must come and say hello to Dorothy before we leave. |
| s-82
| I daren't say dine – we're homeless, you know... |
| s-83
| Uncle Willie's Independence Joke, Vivien said. Produces a hearty, man-of-the-world laugh from Africans. |
| s-84
| The kind of laugh they've picked up from people like Uncle Willie said Neil. |
| s-85
| Still, the Cloughs pursued Bray through Vivien. |
| s-86
| Aunt Dorothy says her secretary's been trying to get hold of you. |
| s-87
| They want you for drinks on Monday. |
| s-88
| I'd go if I were you, or she'll tell everyone in London you were buttering up to the Africans and didn't want to see them. |
| s-89
| He laughed. |
| s-90
| No, it's true |
| s-91
| She says that about me, to my mother. |
| s-92
| And she knows quite well that we'd never see each other in London either. |
| s-93
| The Cloughs had moved into the British Consulate for the last week or two before their departure, a large, glassy, contemporary house placed to show off the umbrella thorn-trees of the site, just as in an architect's scale model. |
| s-94
| The consul and his wife had been swept into some back room by the presence of aides, secretaries, and the necessity to keep their cats out of the way of Lady Dorothy's dog. |
| s-95
| There was some sort of scuffle when Bray arrived... |
| s-96
| he saw the consul's wife, whom he had met briefly, disappearing upstairs with her head bent consolingly to a Siamese. |
| s-97
| Flower arrangements were placed everywhere, as if there were illness in the house. |
| s-98
| Well, the job is done, one asks nothing more but to fold one's tents. |
| s-99
| He's a good chap, if they'll let him alone, he's learnt a lot, and one's done what one could... |
| s-100
| if he keeps his head, and that one can't be sure of, not even with him, mmh? not even with him. |
| s-101
| An elderly servant came in with a silver tray of glasses and bottles, and Clough interrupted himself to say with the sweet forbearance of one who does not spare himself, encouraging where others would give way to exasperation, It would be so nice if we could have a few slices of lemon... and more ice? |