The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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impress him no doubt with your standing among our people?’ Mr Devuli sobbed again, and Mr Chikwe continued: ‘Not that I do not agree with you – the vest is advisable, yes. The food tasters are not enough. I have heard our young hotheads talking among themselves and you would be wise to take every possible precaution.’
Mr Kwenzi, frowning, now raised his hand to check his lieutenant: ‘I think you are going too far, Mr Chikwe, there is surely no need …’
At which Mr Devuli let out a great groan of bitter laughter, uncrowned king reeling under the wet London sky, and said: ‘Listen to the good man, he knows nothing, no – he remains upright while his seconds do his dirty work, listen to the saint!’
Swaying, he looked for Mr Mafente’s forearm, but it was not there. He stood by himself, facing three men.
Mr Kwenzi said: ‘It is a very simple matter, my friends. Who is going to speak for our people to the Minister? That is all we have to decide now. I must tell you that I have made a very detailed study of the proposed constitution and I am quite sure that no honest leader of our people could accept it. Mr Devuli, I am sure you must agree with me – it is a very complicated set of proposals, and it is more than possible there may be implications you have overlooked?’
Mr Devuli laughed bitterly: ‘Yes, it is possible.’
‘Then we are agreed?’
Mr Devuli was silent.
‘I think we are all agreed,’ said Mr Chikwe, smiling, looking at Mr Mafente who after a moment gave a small nod, and then turned to face his leader’s look of bitter accusation.
‘It is nearly half past ten,’ said Mr Chikwe. ‘In a few minutes we must present ourselves to Her Majesty’s Minister.’
The two lieutenants, one threatening, one sorrowful, looked at Mr Devuli, who still hesitated, grieving, on the pavement’s edge. Mr Kwenzi remained aloof, smiling gently.
Mr Kwenzi at last said: ‘After all, Mr Devuli, you will certainly be elected, certainly we can expect that, and with your long experience the country will need you as Minister. A minister’s salary, even for our poor country, will be enough to recompense you for your generous agreement to stand down now.’
Mr Devuli laughed – bitter, resentful, scornful.
He walked away.
Mr Mafente said: ‘But Mr Devuli, Mr Devuli, where are you going?’
Mr Devuli threw back over his shoulder: ‘Mr Kwenzi will speak to the Minister.’
Mr Mafente nodded at the other two, and ran after his former leader, grabbed his arm, turned him around. ‘Mr Devuli, you must come in with us, it is quite essential to preserve a united front before the Minister.’
‘I bow to superior force, gentlemen,’ said Mr Devuli, with a short sarcastic bow, which, however, he was forced to curtail: his stagger was checked by Mr Mafente’s tactful arm.
‘Shall we go in?’ said Mr Chikwe.
Without looking again at Mr Devuli, Mr Kwenzi walked aloofly into the Ministry, followed by Mr Devuli, whose left hand lay on Mr Mafente’s arm. Mr Chikwe came last, smiling, springing off the balls of his feet, watching Mr Devuli.
‘And it is just half past ten,’ he observed, as a flunkey came forward to intercept them. ‘Half past ten to the second. I think I can hear Big Ben itself. Punctuality, as we all know, gentlemen, is the cornerstone of that efficiency without which it is impossible to govern a modern state. Is it not so, Mr Kwenzi? Is it not so, Mr Mafente? Is it not so, Mr Devuli?’
The building she was headed for, no matter how long she delayed among the shops, stalls, older houses on the pavements, stood narrow and glass-eyed, six or eight storeys higher than this small shallow litter of buildings which would probably be pulled down soon, as uneconomical. The new building, economical, whose base occupied the space, on a corner lot, of three small houses, two laundries and a grocer’s, held the lives of 160 people at forty families of four each, one family to a flat. Inside this building was an atmosphere both secretive and impersonal, for each time the lift stopped, there were four identical black doors, in the same positions exactly as the four doors on the nine other floors, and each door insisted on privacy.
But meanwhile she was standing on a corner watching an old woman in a print dress buy potatoes off a stall. The man selling vegetables said: ‘And how’s the rheumatism today, Ada?’ and Ada replied (so it was not her rheumatism): ‘Not so bad, Fred, but it’s got him flat on his back, all the same.’ Fred said: ‘It attacks my old woman between the shoulders if she doesn’t watch out.’ They went on talking about the rheumatism as if it were a wild beast that sunk claws and teeth into their bodies but which could be coaxed or bribed with heat or bits of the right food, until at last she could positively see it, a jaguar-like animal crouched to spring behind the brussels sprouts. Opposite was a music shop which flooded the whole street with selections from opera, but the street wasn’t listening. Just outside the shop a couple of youngsters in jerseys and jeans, both with thin vulnerable necks and untidy shocks of hair, one dark, one fair, were in earnest conversation.
A bus nosed to a standstill; half a dozen people got off; a man passed and said: ‘What’s the joke?’ He winked, and she realized she had been smiling.
Well-being, created because of the small familiar busyness of the street, filled her. Which was of course why she had spent so long, an hour now, loitering around the foot of the tall building. This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thin drift of cloud across pale blue sky, she checked, or rather tested, by a deliberate use of the other vision on the scene: the man behind the neat arrangements of coloured vegetables had a stupid face, he looked brutal; the future of the adolescents holding their position outside the music-shop door against the current of pressing people could only too easily be guessed at by the sharply aggressive yet forlorn postures of shoulders and loins; Ada, whichever way you looked at her, was hideous, repulsive, with her loose yellowing flesh and her sour-sweat smell. Etc, etc. Oh yes, et cetera, on these lines, indefinitely, if she chose to look. Squalid, ugly, pathetic … And what of it? insisted her blood, for even now she was smiling, while she kept the other vision sharp as knowledge. She could feel the smile on her face. Because of it, people going past would offer jokes, comments, stop to talk, invite her for drinks of coffee, flirt, tell her the stories of their lives. She was forty this year, and her serenity was a fairly recent achievement. Wrong word: it had not been tried for; but it seemed as if years of pretty violent emotions, one way or another, had jelled or shaken into a joy which welled up from inside her independent of the temporary reactions – pain, disappointment, loss – for it was stronger than they. Well, would it continue? Why should it? It might very well vanish again, without explanation, as it had come. Possibly this was a room in her life, she had walked into it, found it furnished with joy and well-being, and would walk through and out again into another room, still unknown and unimagined. She had certainly never imagined this one, which was a gift from Nature? Chance? Excess? … A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly she looked at the word love, which her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen, and said to herself: Now it’s enough, it’s time for me to go in.
She looked at the vegetable stall, and entered the building, holding the colours of growth firm in her heart (word at once censored, though that was where she felt it). The lift was a brown cubicle brightly lit and glistening, and it went up fast. Instead of combating the sink and sway of her stomach, she submitted to nausea; and arrived at the top landing giddy; and because of this willed discoordination of her nerves the enclosed cream-and-black glossiness of the little space attacked her with claustrophobia. She rang quickly at door 39. Bill stood aside as she went in, receiving her kiss on his cheekbone, which felt damp against her lips. He immediately closed the door behind her so that he could lean on it, using the handle for a support. Still queasy