A Guest of Honour Read Online Free Page B

kitchen as the servant went in and out, laying the table. There was another large meal, and an exchange about a bottle of white wine between Dando and his cook, Festus.
    â€œOf course I don’t open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”
    â€œWell it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round flat bottle put in the fridge.”
    â€œYou say I cook chicken, isn’t it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”
    â€œPink. It’s pink. I specially didn’t say anything about the colour because I didn’t want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”
    They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It’s not an exaggeration to say that what they’re having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven’t replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You’ve only replaced one of his functions. You’ve still got to get country people to realize that thesefunctions are now distributed among various agencies: it’s no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance—and yet that’s what people would have done in the old days, isn’t it?”
    â€œIn bush stations there wasn’t anything we weren’t responsible for.”
    â€œExactly. But now people have to learn that there’s a Department of Public Health to go to.”
    â€œA good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration’s like, it won’t be like
that.”
    â€œThe magistrates are all right, don’t you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I’m not worried at that level. The Bench doesn’t change of course.”
    Bray laughed at Dando’s expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.
    â€œThey’ll die off, I suppose. There’s that to be said for it. But God knows what we’ll get then.”
    â€œI met Gwenzi’s brother in London one day while he was at Gray’s Inn; he told me he was going to be the first African at the bar here.”
    When Dando’s opinion of someone was really low he did not seem to hear his name. “Don’t think I don’t know I’ve got some bad times coming to me,” he said, as if taking up, in private, current talk about himself. “When I said yes to Mweta I knew it and every time I walk past the title on my office door I know it. The day will come when I’ll have deportation orders to sign that I won’t want to sign. Warrants of arrest. Or worse.” He ate a mouthful of the left-over granadilla pudding, and there was the smallest tremor, passing for a moment through his head. “Poor old Dando.”
    â€œAnyone who’s stayed on is a fool if he hasn’t thought about that,” said Bray.
    â€œAnd I’ll be instructing the State Prosecutor to act when I’d rather not, too. That I can count on. What if Shinza should make a bit of trouble at the next elections, what if he were to feel himself bloody well discounted as he certainly is, and start up a real opposition with all the tricks that he taught PIP, eh? What if he brought the whole Lambala-speaking crowd out in a boycott, with all the old beatings-up at the polls, hut burnings—you think I wouldn’t find myself the one to put Shinza inside, this time?”
    â€œWell, I know. But why on earth should it come to that?”
    â€œI knew it when I