quarters

High Society in the bachelors' quarters

By Tutu Ba

WE in the bachelors’ quarters decided to become social and, by way of in augurating our new policy, to have a dinner party.

We had been the guests at many a one, and knew that such an occasion was quite solemn, with full ritual being observed from soup to liqueurs.

With great misgiving we invited four people. Two we knew we could count up on to act as if nothing untoward were happening (when we knew there would be plenty); the other two, a Mister and Missus, we felt might be difficult. “Missus” was very much so-so and still clung to her drawing-room status among the coconuts.

She was a very attractive woman, and perfect in appearance. She discussed the correct lighting of a cigarette with as much intellectual intensity as she des cribed native culture —about which she, and everyone else, knew nothing.

Her husband talked whenever she stopped. He stared at you through thick rimmed glasses, making you feel as though you were merely a specimen under a microscope—which, actually, you were.

He, too, clung to his drawing-room ways, though more in self-defence than any thing.

WE convinced ourselves from the start that only three things could mar the dinner party; Andrew, Homer and Cleopatra. Respectively these were our house-boy, our dog, and our neigh bour’s pregnant nanny-goat.

Andrew had been carefully coached and “polished” for the occasion by various practical demonstrations of how knives, forks, and plates, etc., should be laid on a table, and not simply left to lie where they fell in the general chaos which ac companied Andrew’s domestic activities.

Homer, apart from exhibiting a com pletely brainless skull at such simple com mands as “come inside,” “go outside,” “sit up” and “lie down” had at least reached the stage where he “left the room.” so we would be spared embarrassment m that direction.

Our third and greatest fear, even in cluding Andrew, was Cleopatra. Of late Cleo had made it clear that she was “expecting,” and doubly clear that the place of her choice was a clump of banana trees which grew immediately outside our living-room window. And, to prove her claim, she rarely left the place.

We were prepared to co-operate. All we asked in return was that Cleo should sleep that night peacefully. After all, there was bound to be enough entertainment without her.

THE guests arrived and nominated their choice of sherry or peppermint.

Dinner arrived all too soon; hut the sooner it was done with, the better, we felt, for all concerned.

The carefully rehearsed and direly threatened Andrew got stage fright and panicked as early in the proceedings as the soup. The veneer of poise and confi dence dropped from him like a cloak.

The clean white singlet with which he

had been issued not two hours previously had evidently been considered too good to be used, and had been replaced by one of a dirty yellow and ancient vintage.

Each time he appeared bearing a plate which only remained horizontal on its tray by virtue of the saint who looks after bachelors, a different side of the singlet had slipped from his shouldeis.

Each time he left the dining-room the right side would be drooping across his chest; in the kitchen he would hitch it up and reappear with the left side dang ling. His new white shorts were carefully hidden —and thus saved from soiling— by a lava-lava of faded design.

In the consternation of finding glass ware, cutlery and crockery, not to men tion an odd item here and there of kitchen-ware, distributed about the table, one of us forgot to tell him to bring serviettes and simply said: “Carry ’im tow-el along all man.”

At the mere mention of such a com plicated process, Andrew’s mind dissolved into complete chaos.

He fluttered around the table an in stant and then vanished, to appear later

bearing a towel from the bathroom, which he dangled above the table in the hope that it might be the right thing.

We tried hard to conceal the fact that things were not going as well as they should, fearing it might throw Andrew in to a worse state than ever, if that were possible. We could only hope that he might spill the dessert on the floor—or, at the worst, over one of us—and not over one of the guests.

But he managed to bring the plates in full and take them away empty, without accident; and when a crash from the kitchen announced the commencement of the washing-up our feeling of relief was

profound.

The dinner was a success, we liked to think. Over our liqueurs in the lounge we heard Andrew strumming his guitar over the washing-up water.

Cleo behaved until the guests were gone. Then, with the psychology which only another goat could understand, she picked herself up, dug a little hole be neath my bedroom floor, and, much to Homer’s delight, gave birth to twins.