Going Home - Doris May Lessing [109]
HE (suddenly shooting up in bed): Darling, wake up! I have an idea!
SHE (sleepily): Would you like one of my sleeping tablets, darling?
HE: Darling, I said I had an idea. Listen…
SHE: Oh very well. What is it, darling?
HE: You know that damned outfit of that scoundrel Katilungu?
SHE: Since you never talk about anything else, darling…
HE: But listen. I’ve thought of a way to break it.
SHE: No! How, darling?
HE: What do you think of this? I’m going to take all the better-paid workers and tell them they are too good to associate with that rough lot of Katilungu’s, and I shall form another union. And when Katilungu tells me that his union is representative of all the workers, I shall be able to say it isn’t. All I have to do is to flatter a few of the types who think they’re better than the others. What do you think?
SHE: Darling, you’re wonderful. (She turns over and goes to sleep.)
HE (to himself in the dark): And I only earn £5,000 a year!
The reason why I think this dialogue is not so far-fetched is because when I interviewed a certain high official in Southern Rhodesia, he said to me: ‘Do you know how I got my Trade Union Bill through? I sat in the House afternoon after afternoon, and I looked at the faces of all those who were my opponents either to the left or to the right, and suddenly I had an idea. What do you think?’
‘I really can’t!’
‘I thought: I’ll put all my opponents on to the Select Committee, so they’ll have to take the responsibility. Good, eh?’
And he radiated an innocent delight at his own shrewdness.
A Colonial good-time evening: sundowners in the hotel, while the long yawn of the hours ahead deepens. The idea of food recedes under a tide of alcohol. We move to one bachelor flat, then, collecting people as we go, to another and then another. Eartha Kitt’s records, talk about the South of France where people will go, or dream of going, on the next leave. Talk about the colour bar. More talk about the colour bar. The musicals now running in London. The colour bar.
The young woman journalist, aged twenty-three, who by eleven in the evening has drunk more than a bottle of whisky, without apparent ill-effects, suddenly becomes very confidential about her own private view of the colour bar, which, it seems, is not the official one, but unfortunately is so thick-tongued one cannot understand what she is saying. She goes home, dignified by an immense private sorrow which is incommunicable, supported on either side by a young man.
Whereupon the survivors tell how old so and so has just broken the record between here and Salisbury, at the cost of a cracked axle, so as to fit in a week-end party; and how somebody else took a horse into the ballroom at the big official dance in L.
Never have I been anywhere where the feeling of boredom, of boredom crystallized into activity and alcohol for salvation’s sake, is so strong as in the little mining towns of Northern Rhodesia. Never, that is, since my adolescence in Salisbury, which, from the dusty distances of the Copper Belt, seems like an oasis of civilization.
Back in the hotel, Eileen is still awake, mournful in the dark behind a cigarette. She has not told me the whole truth, she says. She came up to the Copper Belt really not for the money, but because last year she had been going out with a man, but he suddenly dropped her and came north to copper. So she had come, too, not to get him back, but simply to confront him, and say to him: ‘But why, Johnnie? Just tell me why?’ That evening, luckily, she was sitting on the hotel verandah with her new friend, when who should come and sit at the next table with a group of men but Johnnie? ‘I nodded to him and said, “Is that you, Johnnie? Well, I didn’t know you were up here.” And after dinner he came up to me and said: “How about a drive?” And I said, “Thank you, but I’m tired this evening. Another time, Johnnie.” So I hope tomorrow my new one will ask me so that I can say I am engaged. Not that