African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [41]
I put them down in Mutare’s main street, and was sorry to see them walk away, turning to wave and call back farewells. Then I parked and went into the new hotel.
FATHERS AND SONS. NOT TO MENTION MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
I sat in the Leisure Area. I do not see how it could be called a lounge or even a sitting-room. I was reflecting that recently, in one of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Four Seasons in Hamburg, I had breakfasted in that dining-room once found in every hotel, a long tall-ceilinged room with chintz curtains at long windows. There were white damask tablecloths, heavy cutlery and–this is what marked it out from your common hotel–jam in pots, with a spoon. Old-fashioned charm is what rich people want to pay for. No doubt, quite soon, a hundred thousand characterless modern hotels will be pulled down and replaced with loving copies from the past. Meanwhile, new countries hastening to prove their worth in the company of nations, are building modern hotels.
At the table next to me sat two middle-aged men, white, farmers, and I listened to The Monologue–President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe’s motorcade, and, too, angry exchanges about Squatters and the inadequacies of the Minister of Agriculture. With my other ear I listened to two Swedes, man and woman, who were working on a scheme for retraining and resettling Freedom Fighters. They were talking about the whites near their Resettlement Scheme, who were doing everything to make their work difficult. They lowered their voices to say the new bureaucracy was impossible, almost as hampering as the retrograde whites. They decided to go to Harare and see a certain Minister (black), first making sure his assistant (white) would put some sense into his head. ‘Of course you can’t expect things to come right so quickly,’ said these reasonable souls. I went on sitting with the two farmers on one side and the two Swedes on the other, and watched people coming in and out, white and black, in groups and families, and among them quite a few of that new breed, the international Aid workers. The waiters were all black, lively, and with a confidence and ease it was pleasant to watch.
Soon a young couple, white, came to join the Swedes. They were of that immediately recognizable kind, children of the 1960s who, if too young to have actually partaken of the delights of that decade, were stamped by it. They are genial, anxious always to present to everyone a willed innocence, are open to every idea going, sensible or not, from pacifism to vegetarianism or aromatherapy and UFOs, and they know that if it does not seem everything is for the best in all possible worlds, then in some mysterious way this will come to pass. These were in their late twenties. They had to discuss with the Swedes if they could come to the Resettlement Scheme to work. The young woman was a physiotherapist, the young man wanting desperately to help people, but without special training. Both were Zimbabweans, and from this area.
Now, out of its sequence, I shall describe a later visit to a couple I had known well in the old days. The middle-class everywhere complain about poverty; for some reason or other, no matter how much money they have, it is never as much as they are due. This is not an original observation, but on this trip it was being given startling new life. The couple I was visiting were both getting on, like me. They were in their sixties. They had retired from civil service jobs. Both were full of health, energy and complaints. Their house was a large bungalow, many-roomed, with verandahs all around it, and it sat in two acres of land, full of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. Everything in the house had the sparkling cherished look which is not often seen in Britain, where women work, or do not have the time for this level of housework. It is the look that goes with servants. This couple employed two servants, men. ‘But I am afraid poor Anne has to do some of