African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [37]
‘How long?’ he demanded, at once suspicious. I recognized the tone. He thought I was putting him off with a lie, and wanted to get rid of him. Here was another white cruelty and I was reverting to type.
I had hoped to stop here, perhaps for a cup of tea, at the Macheke Hotel, for old times’ sake, but now knew that this must not happen. Because times had changed we–black and white–might drink a cup of tea together, but that was not the point. I wanted the past to envelop me, but the pressure of his misery would make that impossible. I said, ‘Just for a few minutes, that’s all.’
‘I can walk,’ he said, bitterly.
‘No, no. I’ll just slow down for a minute or two.’
But now two landscapes were in my mind and I could not make sense of what I saw. The main road was in a different place. Yes, there was the garage, post office, store, a bar…and a hotel. A hotel in that place? I asked him, ‘Do you know if they have changed the route of the main road?’
He said, ‘It has always been the main road.’
In his lifetime, the main road had always run here.
I turned off to the left, where the railway had to be, and there were the dusty, dispirited blue gums and the railway lines beyond. The same. I stopped the car. Where was the hotel? Surely that could not…it was derelict, unused. A low brick building, like a long shed, had a couple of small doors into rooms that were evidently small, and another door into the bar. Yes, I had seen the wonders of the great world since I was in Macheke or Mashopi, but surely this could not be the Macheke Hotel where through all those weekends we drank, danced, flirted and played politics? How many couples had actually been able to dance in the smallish room I saw through dirty windowpanes? And was that the dining-room where we ate those lengthy and companionable meals, Mrs Boothby maternally on the watch. (I was working hard to retrieve her real name.) How many tables would it, did it, hold? And the bar? It had been crowded with men in the Air Force uniform farmers. But it was a narrow cubbyhole of a place. Yet I had been a grown-up person here, not a child; I was not an adult visiting scenes from childhood…the verandah that ran all along the building did have room for a couple of small tables: it was more of a passage than a verandah. Yet here we had certainly sat drinking…yes, of course, people sat all along that low wall, which was by the main road from Salisbury to Umtali, and part of the pleasure was watching the occasional car whirl past in clouds of pale dust (sandveld dust, not the heavy red dust of Lomagundi) or perhaps it stopped, and out stepped…a stranger, or someone we knew who had driven down from Salisbury to join us…or driven up from Umtali, knowing we would be there. A stranger would at once cease to be one, absorbed at once into the elation, the high spirits, for we were good company, and–I later realized–surprising company, because we were such a mixed group, people who in England could never meet because of that class system of theirs, but here cockneys, Brummies, Scotties, everybody, joked with young men who had interrupted Cambridge and Oxford to learn to fly and–possibly–die over Europe, or Burma, or India. And the local girls, and girls from Britain and South Africa or who were refugees from somewhere or other. And yet all these people had squashed ourselves along that verandah? No, that was why we spent so much time under the blue gums, near the tracks, where there was room to spread out.
And now for the bedrooms…the strongest, the most disturbing of all my memories of old Macheke was at the back of the hotel, the bedroom block. There were ten or twelve rooms, in two lines, back to back, opening on to narrow verandahs. With an apology to the young man, who was now bent sideways against the seat, an arm over his face, to shut out the cruel and deceiving world–shut me out, probably, who for no reason at all had stopped by this building fit only for demolition–I quickly got out and went around the old hotel to the back, and saw only rubble, crowding overgrown shrubs, trees. I was