said Your hair must be German because it’s thick, blond, and obedient. Now he was going gray. No, what she had actually said was You look like what you are, a scholar and a fine person. Then she had tacked on that he was beautiful.
She said, “We can postpone talking about the main event until another time. I appreciate you, Ray. You’re being very open. This has been your secret, really. I love you. I know you don’t enjoy talking about these things. About Rex. I do appreciate you.
“I wish you could love your brother.”
She had brought things to a close.
She pulled the lap of her skirt free and smoothed it out across her thighs. She began slowly inching the hem up, looking steadily at him.
“You seem to be a whore tonight,” he said.
“Always,” she said.
Sometimes Ray started his patter for the occasional groups of overseas educators who visited St. James by saying Welcome to the only completely circular campus in the known world. It was true, so far as he knew, but he had noticed that lately the rector was showing a clear preference for not having the school described primarily in terms of the ways in which it was very unlike what the visitors were used to. And there were so many ways in which it was very unlike. But it truly was interesting that when the All Saints Trust had gotten permission to build whatever it liked in the broad, rock-ridden depression in the raw bush west of the capital, somebody had chosen to lay out the grounds in the shape of the ancient Greek world-serpent eating its tail, which happened to be his own private metaphor for the educational process when he was feeling down. But there was no one still around from the founding days in the sixties who could say why it had been done. His guess was that it had been an attempt to cohere symbolically with the universal preference for the circular in Tswana culture, as in the kraals and huts. He liked to point out the circularity of St. James because it was interesting, but the place was so extensive that its circularity was only noticeable from the air. The circle had been filled in solidly with distracting features—nethouses, rondavels, ovaldavels, completely rectilinear ablution blocks, sports fields, a chapel in the form of a rondavel with a bell tower stuck onto it, fig tree groves, the piggery… The most southerly baobab in Africa grew on the grounds.
The four people in the group waiting for him to begin were obviously impressed with his office. He had his own oversized rondavel entirely to himself. They liked the zebra skin on the wall behind him and the jennet kaross covering a good deal of the floor. His desk chair was thronelike. This group was from Cyprus, two men and two women. They were very courteous. They spoke English, but hesitatingly. He had a circulating fan grinding out a breeze for them. It was trained directly at them and they were grateful. They had glanced uneasily up at a white spider pod the size of a doorknob clinging to the thatch directly above one of them. They probably liked, without knowing why, the pleasant dissonance between the associations they had for the primal versus the refined aspects of his office—the primal thatch smelling subtly like bread and the primal skins and the spider pod versus the refined glass-fronted bookcases and the orderly array of books and periodicals they displayed. When they were gone he would knock the spider’s nest down. The sad, comradely feeling he had for this group was real.
He began, “St. James College isn’t a college… nor is Moeding College in Otse a college, nor is the other one… Moeng College, in Moeng, of course. A college.” He heard himself sounding more British than usual. He’d just almost said And nor is. Sounding British happened to him at work if he didn’t watch himself. Four senior staff members and the rector were Brits.
“We’re a senior secondary school,” he said, and went on to explain that they might be considered a somewhat elite school because not all secondaries awarded the Cambridge certificate as they did. Beginning by saying St. James wasn’t a college always led to the temptation to tell about the Peace Corps volunteer teacher who’d taught for them for a year and then left after undergoing a breakdown and who in his terminal interview had said It looks like a bank but it isn’t a bank, It looks like a post office but it isn’t a post office, It looks like a restaurant but it isn’t a restaurant. That had been his explication of why he had never adjusted to Botswana. The discrepancy between what he thought institutions were supposed to be and what they were in Africa had been too much for him, among other things about the country. There were aspects of St. James that would fit into a litany about things not being what they seem. St. James was denominational but the All Saints Trust that sponsored it wasn’t a denomination. It was a peculiar institution. There were authentic religious involved in it, but a lot of the lay element in All Saints seemed to be ex–British military. The emissaries from the trust who came out to inspect every year all were. The trust was famously generous with bursaries in their schools in southern Africa, although he was picking up tremors and rumors that budget cuts were coming. Cuts would hurt. He would be all right. His position at St. James was good for as long as he wanted it. That had been arranged at a level far above the rector.
He handed out copies of the school brochure. There was a little conversation about the honors class he taught over at the university. They reported that Mr. Curwen the rector had told them how proud St. James was to have a scholar like him amidst their staff, a Miltonist! That was true. Curwen seemed genuinely glad he was there, culturally flattered, too, that an American seemed so interested in a poet he himself had been taught to revere but found unreadable. As the group left the office they could hardly miss the run of
The group was rising. They had been seated around a conference table set endwise against the front of his desk. The men were in coats and ties and the women in skirts and sleeveless blouses. The women’s forearms had left damp-prints in the finish of the table. He watched the damp-prints fade, annoyed because there was something he was forgetting to do. Curwen was outside, with an escort of Form Ten boys. One thing he had forgotten to mention was that the school was coeducational now, since a year ago. He heard Curwen’s enthusiasm.
At the last minute he remembered to present the cyclostyled handouts giving the last examination results for the school. He went out into the heat to watch them go, Curwen gesticulating. Curwen had put his robes on despite the fact that there were only four in this group. The man was endearing. They were headed for a tour of the ablution block.
Ray thought, How can he keep doing it?… But we all do and we all do it the same way, by not thinking about it. About half of the last graduating class at the university had failed to get placements with the government, which represented a severe public shock no one had gotten over. Batswana used the Boer term for the government of the day or reigning power, Domkrag, which meant lifting-jack. Some of us are doing our best, he thought, but Domkrag is broken, Domkrag isn’t working… But we do our best.
The other thing was to keep in mind what education was like not that far away, where the killing was still going on, Angola, students without limbs, from the land mines. He thought, Please raise your hands, Oh, sorry. He couldn’t think about it.
Thank God this isn’t the only thing I do, he thought.
They were in bed together, naked under one sheet, sitting up and talking. It was late.
“I gather you want this to be about my brother again,” Ray said.
She nodded, and he said, “Fine, but before I forget, let me give you another example of his, what shall I call it? his drive to be irritating. This is the kind of thing he was always doing. He was continually annoying his classmates by acting like a completely innocent literalist in the way he pronounced their names. Two examples: A girl named Margot became Margott. And someone named Lloyd he called Luh-loyd, pronouncing both l’s. This is a small thing, but it’s Rex.”
