Jump and Other Stories

Safe Houses

He’s one of those dark-haired men whose beards grow out rusty-red. He could have dyed his hair to match — more or less — but a beard is the first thing they’d expect to find you behind. He’s lived like this several times before; the only difference is that this time he came back into the country legally, came home — so much for the indemnity promised to exiles, so much for the changed era there, now bans on his kind of politics were supposed to be a thing of the past, he was supposed to be — free? He knows how their minds work — not much imagination, reliance on an Identikit compilation of how political subversives look and behave Underground. Underground: this time, as at other times, he’s aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. Selective crowds; he goes to football matches with beer in a knapsack, and a cap with a plastic eyeshade over his sunglasses, but not to pop concerts, where the police keep an eye on young leftists whose democratic recreation this is. He goes to the movies but not to concerts although he longs for the company of strings and brass; someone among his intellectual buddies from long ago would be bound to gaze at him, reaching back for recognition. Small gatherings where everyone can be trusted are traps; glowing with the distinction of the secret encounter with a real revolutionary, someone will not be able to resist boasting to another, in strictest confidence, and that other will pass on the luminous dusting of danger.

The good friends who provide a bed sometimes offer the use of a car as well, but driving alone is another sure way to be traced and picked up. He walks, and takes buses among ordinary workers and students. He’s a little too forty-five-ish, thickened around the jowl and diaphragm, to pass as a student but with his cravat of tangled black hair showing in the neck of a sweat shirt and his observance of the uniform jogging shoes with soles cushioned like tyres, he could be anyone among the passengers — the white artisans, railway and post office employees, even policemen. Reading a newspaper with its daily account of the proceedings at the group trial where he is a missing accused, worrying about these comrades in arms, he tries not to feel self-congratulatory at his escape of arrest, a form of complacency dangerous to one in his position, sitting there in a bus among people he knows would be glad to hand him over to the law; but he can’t suppress a little thrill, a sort of inner giggle. Perhaps this is freedom? Something secret, internal, after all? But philosophizing is another danger, in his situation, undermining the concept of freedom for which he has risked discovery and imprisonment yet again.

One afternoon in the city he was gazing inattentively out of the window waiting for the bus to set off when he became aware of the presence just seating itself beside him. Aware like an animal: scenting something different in the bus’s familiar sun-fug of sweat and deodorants, fruit-skins and feet. Perfume. Real perfume, at the price of a month’s wages of the other passengers. And a sound, a sound of silk as a leg crossed the knee of another leg. He straightened away from the window, looked ahead for a decent interval and then slowly turned, as if merely fidgeting because the bus was taking too long to leave.

A woman, of course — he’d scented that. Grey silk pants or some sort of fashionable skirt divided like pants, with an arched instep showing in a pastel sandal. Below the neckline of a loose blouse, silk slopes shining — breasts rising and falling. Out of breath. Or exasperated. He moved a little to give her more room. She nodded in acknowledgement without looking at him; she didn’t see him, she was going through some sort of dialogue or more likely monologue in her head, annoyance, exasperation twitched her lips.

Schoolgirls tramped onto the bus with their adolescent female odours and the pop of gum blown between their lips like the text balloons in comics. An old woman opened a bag of vinegary chips. The bus filled but the driver was absent.

This misplaced person, this woman, this pampered almost-beauty (he saw as she turned, throwing back her long, tiger-streaked hair cut in a parrot-poll over the forehead, and smiling on perfectly conformed teeth) had now accepted where she found herself. She indicated the driver’s seat. — What d’you think’s happened to him?—

Taking a leak. — Having a cup of coffee, I suppose. — They shared the polite moment of tolerance.

— I thought they had a strict timetable. Oh well. D’you know if this takes us along Sylvia Pass?—

— Pretty near the top of the Pass.—

She pulled a face and blinked her thick-lashed eyes in resigned dismay. Secretive, glossy eyes, knowing how to please, and folding at the outer corners an attractive, experienced fan of faint lines.

— Where do you want to get off?—

— That’s the problem — at the bottom of the Pass. I suppose I should have taken some other bus… I don’t know why taxis don’t cruise in this town as they do in any other civilized place! I’ve been looking for one for half an hour, traipsing…—

— There should have been taxis for tourists at any hotel.—

— No, no, I live here, but this just isn’t my day… my car’s stuck in a parking garage. Underground. Infuriating. Battery dead or something. I couldn’t find a telephone booth where the receiver hadn’t been torn out… this town! I had to ask a shopkeeper to let me phone for a mechanic… anyway, I couldn’t wait any longer, I’ve left the keys with the attendant.—

She felt better now that she had told someone, anyone. He was anyone.

When the driver appeared and fares were to be paid of course she had neither season card nor change for a ticket. While she scrabbled in her bag, gold chains on her wrists sliding, he gave the conductor two tickets.

— Oh you are kind… — She was suddenly embarrassed by her privileged life, by her inability to cope with what for all the people surrounding her on the bus was daily routine. In their ignoring of her she felt a reproach that she had never travelled on the bus before, perhaps not this bus or any bus, at least since she was a schoolchild. He was no longer anyone; somehow an ally, although from his appearance he probably could ill afford to waste a bus ticket on a stranger. Yet there was something in his self-assurance, the amusement in his regard, that suggested he was not merely one of the other passengers. Unsure of this, in a habit of patronage — she was the kind who would treat her servants generously but send her children to segregated schools — she chattered to him to show she considered him an equal. — You make the journey every day? Isn’t it always bliss to get home, out of this town?—

— Every day, no. But what’s wrong with the city? — Too full of blacks for you, now, lady, blacks selling fruit and cheap jewellery and knitted caps, dirtying the streets, too full of men without work for whom you see your bracelets and that swish Italian suède bag as something to be taken from you.

She shifted to safe generalization. — Oh I’m no city girl. Not anywhere.—

— But you live in one?—

— Well, you’d hardly know it was there, from my house. Luckily. It’s an old suburb … the trees — that’s one thing about Johannesburg, isn’t it, you can hide yourself in trees, just the highways humming, well out of sight!—

— Really? — He suddenly gave way in a great, open smile like the yawn of a predator.

She had the instinct to withdraw. — You don’t live here?—

— Oh yes, I’m living here.—

She suppressed her casual curiosity as unwise encouragement. — Could you tell me when to get off? The nearest stop to Sylvia Pass.—

She did not know if she imagined a pause.

— I’ll be getting off there.—

He stood behind her as she stepped down from the bus. They began to descend the steep and winding road. There was no distance between them but an aura which established they were not together, merely taking the same route. — Thank God it’s down and not up. My heels are not exactly appropriate for this.—

— Take them off. It’s safer. The surface is very smooth.—

— But it’s hot! I’ll burn my feet.—

She clattered along awkwardly, amused at her own manner of progress. — Isn’t it typical? I’ve been jogging around here every morning for years and I’ve never come down the Pass before.—

— It would be up the Pass, wouldn’t it — if you live at the bottom. Quite a strenuous jog. — An observation rather than a correction. And then — Typical of what?—

None of his business! Who was he to quiz a manner of speaking, as if to find out if it had some significance in her life.

Yet she attempted an answer. — Oh… habit, I suppose … doing what you’ve become used to, not noticing… where you really are—

And wondering, now, no doubt, whether it was possible that this man off the bus really could be living in the suburb of large houses hidden by trees where she lived, or whether he had left the bus to follow her, and was to be feared, although he was white, in this city where so much was to be feared. It was true that he had picked one of his maze of trails about the city and suburbs in order to walk with her — an impulse like any of the impulses with which he had to fill in the days of his disconnection from consecutive action. The unexpected was his means of survival. To be Underground is to have a go at living without consequences. The corrupt little wriggle of freedom — there it was again. Shameful but enjoyable.

— Here’s my corner. — She bent to pull the slipped strap of her sandal back over her heel and looked up ingratiatingly to soften dismissal.

— Goodbye then. — Again, that greedy warrior’s smile, contradicting the humble appearance.

As he turned his back she suddenly called as she might have remembered an instruction for some tradesman — Have you far to go — that was such a hot trek — would you like to come in for something cool to drink?—

This time she was not mistaken; there was a pause, still with his back to her. — I know I’m dying of thirst and you must be!—

So she drew him round, and murmuring casual thanks, he joined her. Now they were walking together. At one of the pillared entrances in white battlements topped with black iron spikes she pressed the button of an intercom panel and spoke. The flats of a stage set, the wide polished wooden gates slid back electronically. Trees, her trees led up to and overflowed the roof of the spread wings of the house. Small dogs jumped about her. Sprinklers arched rainbows over lawns. She called out in the joyous soprano used to summon faithful servants, and ice and fruit juice were brought onto a shaded terrace. Behind him the colours of Persian carpets, paintings and bowls of flowers blurred in the deep perspective of one of those huge rooms used for parties.

— You have a lovely home. — He said what was blandly expected of him as he drank juice in return for a bus ticket.

She came back with what was expected of her. — But too big. My sons are at boarding school. For two people… too much.—

— But the garden, the privacy.—

She was embarrassed to think how he must be envying her. — Oh yes. But most of the time I don’t use the rest of the place (a gesture to the room behind), I have my own little quarters on the other side of the house. My husband’s away such a lot on business — Japan, at the moment. That’s why I couldn’t even get anyone to come and fetch me from that wretched garage… his secretary’s such an idiot, she’s let his driver go. I always tell him, he’s drained her of all initiative, she’s so used to being ordered about. I can’t stand subservient people, can you — I mean, I want to shake them and get them to stand up—

— I don’t think I know any.—

— Ah, that shows you move in the right circles! — They both laughed. — But what do you do? Your profession, your work, I mean. — Careful to show that ‘work’ might be just as worthy as a profession.

Without realizing he could think so quickly, he began inventing one — a profession combined with ‘work’—that would fit his appearance, he began telling like a fairy tale, a bedtime story, it flowed from him taking turns and details as if it could be true, as if he were making an alternative life for himself — I’m in construction. Construction engineer — that’s where I was today, on some sites. Things go wrong… when you’re talking about stress in a twenty-storey building—

— Oh if it were to fall! I often look up and marvel how such piles hold together, in fact I don’t have much faith they will, I never walk under those pavement shelters you people erect for pedestrians while you’re building, I always walk in the street, I’d rather get run over, any time—

— Standards are pretty high, here; safety margins. You don’t have to worry. In some of the countries I’ve worked, it’s rather different. And one has always to think of how a construction will behave in an earthquake, how do you build over a fault in the earth, Mexico City, San Francisco—

— So you travel around, too. But not selling; building.—

— Sometimes pulling down. Preparing to rebuild. Destroying old structures. — No — he must resist the devilry of amusing himself by planting, in his fairy tale, symbols from his real life. As in all fairy tales, there were enough improbabilities his listener would have to pass over if not swallow. It surely must occur to her that a construction engineer would be unlikely not to utilize his own car, even if his working garb was appropriate to inspection of building sites. — Have you travelled much with your husband? Go along with him? — Best to know where she had been before elaborating on projects in Sri Lanka, Thailand, North Africa. No, she liked to go to Europe but hot places, crowded places, dirty places — no.

So he was free to transform his experience of guerrilla training camps in Tanzania and Libya, his presence in the offices of an exiled High Command in cities deadened by northern snows or tropical heat, to provide exotic backdrops for his skyscrapers. Anecdotes of bar encounters in such places — he merely changed the subjects discussed, not the characters — entertained her. He was at ease in his invented persona; what would a woman know about engineering? She said it was time for a real drink; ice was brought again, a trolley was wheeled out in which bottles were slotted, a manservant appeared with a dish of snacks decorated with radish roses.

— I don’t allow myself to drink on my own.—

— Why not? — He accepted the glass of whisky and ice she had prepared for him.

At first she seemed not to hear the personal question, busying herself at the trolley. She sat down on a swinging sofa, holding her drink, and let the sandals drop from her feet. — Afraid.—

— Of being alone?—

— No. Of carrying on with it. Yes, of being alone. Isn’t that why people drink — I mean really drink. But I suppose you’re often alone.—

— What makes you think that?—

But now it was he who need not be afraid: she had no inkling of anything real behind his fairy tales. — Well, the nature of your work — always moving around, no time for roots.—

— No trees. — He lifted his shoulders, culpable. — What about family…—

Should he have a family? — Dispersed. I don’t have what you’d call a family, really.—

— Your wife? No children?—

— I had one once — a wife. I have a grown-up daughter — in Canada. A doctor, a paediatrician, bright girl.—

That was a mistake. — Oh where? I have a brother who emigrated to Canada, he’s a doctor too, also a paediatrician, in Toronto.—

— Vancouver. She’s the other side of the country.—

— They might have met at some conference. Doctors are always holding conferences. What’s her name — She held out her hand to take his glass for a refill, gesturing him to be at ease. — Good lord, I haven’t asked you yours — I’m, well, I’m Sylvie, Sylvie—

— That’s enough. I’m Harry.—

— Well, maybe you’re right — that’s enough. — For someone met on a bus, when you haven’t travelled on a bus for, say, thirty years; she laughed with the acknowledgement to herself.

— I’ll leave you my card if you wish. — (His card!) They were both laughing.

— I’m unlikely to need the services of a construction engineer.—

— Your husband might. — He was enjoying his recklessness, teasing himself.

She put down her drink, crossed her arms and began to swing, like a child wanting to go higher and higher. The couch squeaked and she frowned sideways, comically. The whisky made her lips fuller and polished her eyes. — And how would I explain I got to know you, may I ask.—

Re-establishing reserve, almost prim, he ended the repartee. When he had emptied his glass he rose to leave. — I’ve imposed upon you too long…—

— No… no… — She stood up, hands dangling at her sides, bracelets slipping. — I hope you’re refreshed… I certainly am. — She pressed the button that opened her fortress and saw him to the gates. — Maybe — I don’t know, if you’re not too busy — maybe you’d like to come round sometime. Lunch, or a swim. I could ring you—

— Thank you.—

— When my husband is back.—

She gazed straight at him; as if he were an inferior reminded of his manners he produced a thank you, once more.

— Where can I reach you? Your phone—

He, who could pass a police station without crossing to the other side of the street, tingled all the way up from his feet. Caught. — Well, it’s awkward… messages… I’m hardly ever in—

Her gaze changed; now she was the one who was put in her place. — Oh. Well drop by sometime. Anyway, it was nice meeting you. You might as well take my number—

He could not refuse. He found a ballpoint in his trouser pocket but no paper. He turned his left hand palm up and wrote the seven digits across the veins showing on the vulnerable inner side of his wrist.

The number was a frivolous travesty of the brand concentration-camp survivors keep of their persecution; he noticed that when he got back to the house that was sheltering him at the time. He washed off her identification; it required the use of his hosts’ nailbrush. The Movement wanted him to slip out of the country but he resisted the pressures that reached him. He had been in exile too long to go back to that state of being, once he had come home. Home? Yes, even sleeping on the floor in somebody’s kitchen (his standard of shelter was extremely varied), going to football matches, banal movies, wandering the streets among the people to whom he knew he belonged, unrecognized, unacknowledged — that was home. He read every newspaper and had the rare events of carefully-arranged clandestine meetings with people in the Movement, but these were too risky for both himself and them for this to happen often. He thought of writing something; he actually had been an academic once, long ago, another life, teaching the laws that he despised. But it was unwise to have bits of paper around you, anything written down was evidence of your existence, and his whole strategy was not to exist, for the time being, in any persona of his past or present. For the first time in his life he was bored. He ate peanuts, biscuits, biltong, buying these small sealed packets and tearing them open, tossing the contents from his palm into his mouth before he’d even left the shop, as he had done when he was an overweight schoolboy. Although he walked the streets, he had thickened, rounding into that mound under the diaphragm. Whatever he thought of to fill the days and nights, he stopped short of doing; either it would involve people who would be afraid to associate with him, or would endanger those who would risk it. Oddly, after more than a week the phone number came back to him at the sight of his own inner wrist as he fastened his watchstrap. Sylvie — what was her name? Sylvie. Just that. Sylvie, Sylvia Pass. Perhaps the name was also the invention of the moment, out of caution, self-protection, as his ‘Harry’ had been. May I speak to Sylvie? Who? I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number—it would be the husband’s voice. And so she never had done anything stupid like picking up a man on a bus.

But from the point of view of his situation if anyone was safe this ‘Sylvie’ was. He went to the telephone in the silent empty house, his present precarious shelter, from which everyone else had gone to work for the day. She herself answered. She did not sound surprised; he asked if he might take up her offer of a swim. — But of course. After work? — Of course — after he’d left the dust and heat of the building sites.

She was dressed to swim, the strap of a two-piece suit showing above the neck of some loose-flowing robe, and the ridge of the bikini pants outlined under the cloth somewhere below where her navel must be. But she did not swim; she sat smiling, with the thigh-high split in the robe tucked closed round her leg and watched him as he emerged from the chintzy rustic change-room (my god, what luxury compared with his present sleeping quarters) and stalked down to the pool holding in his belly and conscious that this effort — with that diaphragm bulge — made him strut like a randy pigeon. She gave encouraging cries when he dived, he felt she was counting the lengths he did, backstroke, butterfly, crawl. He was irritated and broke water right at her bare feet with his greedy grin of a man snatching life on the run. He must not let that grin escape him too often. She wiggled her toes as water flew from him, his dripping pelt of chest hair, the runnels off his strong legs, spattering her feet. A towel big as a sheet provided a toga for him; wrapped in his chair, he was modestly protected as she was, whether or not she had sized him up like a haunch in a butcher’s shop.

The whisky and ice were wheeled out. The kitchen was forewarned this time; there were olives and salami, linen napkins. — Am I going to meet your husband before I go? — The man surely would be driving up any minute. It would be best for ‘Harry’ to get out of the towel and into his clothes in order to seem the stranger he was. He wanted to ask how she had decided to explain his presence, since she must, indeed, have so decided. The question was in his face although he didn’t come out with it. It suddenly seemed impatiently simple to him. Why not just say they’d met in a bus, what was there to hide — or were the circumstances of the casual acquaintance indeed too proletarian for the gentleman, beneath his wife’s dignity! If only they’d met in the Members’ Pavilion at the races, now!

— Not here. — It was brusque. — It was necessary to go to Hong Kong after Japan. Apparently opportunities are opening up there… I don’t know what it’s all about. And then to Australia.—

— Quite a trip.—

— So long as he’s back by the time the boys come home for the holidays at the end of next month. They expect to do things together with him. Fishing trips. Things I’m no good at. You’ve got a daughter — lucky. I go along, but just for the ride.—

— Well, I’m sorry—

— Another time. But you’re not going… you’ll stay for dinner. Just something light, out here, such a lovely evening.—

— But haven’t you other plans I’d be disturbing, friends coming? — Harry cannot attend dinner parties, thank you.

— Nothing. Not-a-thing. I’m planning an early night, I’ve been gadding too much. You know how friends imagine, when you’re alone, you can’t be left to yourself for a single evening. I’m sick of them.—

— Then I should push off and leave you in peace.—

— No, just a salad, whatever they’ve got — you’ll share pot luck—

Sick of them. A cure for boredom: hers. The paradox, rather than her company, was his enjoyment. He accepted the role so wide of his range; he opened the bottles of white wine — dry with the fish mousse, a Sauternes with the strawberries — in place of the man of the house.

Her fascination with their encounter rose to the surface in the ease over food and drink. — How many years is it since you met anyone you were not introduced to — can you remember? I certainly can’t. It’s a chain, isn’t it, it’s like Auld Lang Syne all the year, every year, it just goes on and on, a hand on this side taken by a hand on that side… it’s never broken into, always friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, whether they’re from Japan or Taiwan or London, down the road or god knows where.—

— Good friends. They’re necessary. — He was careful.

— But don’t you find that? Particularly for people like you and him — my husband — I mean, the circle of people who have particular business interests, a profession. Round and round… But I suppose it’s natural for us because we have things in common. I thought, that other day — when my car broke down, you know — I never walk around the streets like this, what have all these people to do with me—

It was coming now, of course, the guilt of her class in a wail of self-accusation of uselessness, of not belonging to real life. Hadn’t she shown a hint of it in the bus? But he was wrong and, in his turn, fascinated by the overturning of his kind of conventional assumption.

— They’re unreal to me. I don’t just mean because most of them are black. That’s obvious, that we have nothing in common. I wish them well, they ought to have a better life… conditions … I suppose it’s good that things are changing for them… but I’m not involved, how could I be, we give money for their schools and housing and so on — my husband’s firm does, like everybody else… I suppose you too … I don’t know what your views are—

— I’m no armchair politician.—

— I thought not. But the others — what have I in common with those whites, either… I don’t count in their life, and they don’t count in mine. And the few who might — who’re hidden away in the crowd in those streets (why is this town so ugly and dirty), it’s unlikely I’d recognize them. — She really was quite attractive, unaware of a crumb at the side of her mouth. — Even sitting next to me in a bus.—

They laughed and she made the move to clink glasses.

A black man in white uniform and cotton gloves hung about wearily; her guest was conscious of this witness to everything that went on in whites’ houses, but for once felt that his own whiteness guaranteed anonymity. She told the servant he could leave the table and clear it in the morning. Frog bassoons and fluting crickets filled comfortable silences. — I must go. — He spoke, not moving.

— What about a quick dip first. One for the road. — Although he had dressed, she had eaten dinner in her robe.

He was not eager to get into water again but it was a way of rounding off the evening and he felt there was a need for doing this definitively, for himself. There were too few safe subjects between them — she was more right than she knew — they had too little in common, the acquaintance had come to the end of its possibilities. He went to the change-room again.

The water crept like a cool hand over his genitals; she was already swimming. She doubled up and went under with a porpoise flip, and the light from the terrace streamed off her firm backside and thighs. She kept her distance in the water, they circled one another. Hitching herself out on long arms, she sat on the side of the pool and, again, he was aware of her watching him. He surfaced below where she sat, and suddenly, for a moment only, closed his hand on her wrist before leaving the pool, shaking himself like a dog, scrubbing at his arms and chest with the big towel. — Cold, cold.—

She repeated with a mock shiver — Cold, cold.—

They stood up, in accord to get dressed.

The ring of water in his ears jinglingly mingled with the sound of the frogs. He put his arms round her and in a rush of heat, as if all the blood in his chilled body had retreated to engorge there, pressed his genitals tightly against her. He felt an enormous thrill and a fiercely crashing desire, all the abstinence of a planned nonexistence imploded like the destruction of one of his imaginary twenty-storeys that she feared might fall on her head. She held him as he held her. There was no kiss. She broke away neatly and ran indoors. He dressed, raged against by his roused body, among the chintz drapings in the change-room. When he came out the water in the pool was black, with the reflection of stars thrown there like dying matches. She had turned off the terrace lights and was standing in the dark.

— Good night. I apologize.—

— I hope your car hasn’t been pinched. Should have brought it into the drive.—

— There is no car.—

He was too tired and dispirited to lie. Yet he must summon some slapdash resource of protection. — Friends were coming this way, they dropped me. I said I’d call a taxi to take me back.—

The dark and the cover of chanting frogs hid whatever she might be thinking.

— Stay. — She turned, and he followed her into the house, that he had not before entered.

They began again, the right way, with kisses and caresses. A woman his own age, who knew how to make love, who both responded and initiated, knowing what they wanted; in common. On this territory between them, there was even a kind of unexpected bluntness. Gently pinching his nipples before the second intercourse, she said — You’re not Aids positive, are you.—

He put a hand over the delight of her fingers on him. — A bit late to ask… Not so far as I know. And I’ve no reason to believe otherwise.—

— But you’ve no wife.—

— Yes, but I’m rather a constant character — despite my nomadic profession.—

— How will you explain you didn’t come home. — He laughed. — Who to?—

— The first day you were here… ‘awkward’, you said, for me to phone you.—

— There’s no one. There’s no woman I’m accountable to at present.—

— You understand, it’s none of my business. But we don’t want to make things difficult for either of us.—

The husband. — Of course, I understand, don’t worry. You’re a lovely — preposterous! — woman. — And he began to kiss her as if he were a cannibal tasting flesh.

She was a practical woman, too. Some time in the early hours he stirred with a grunt and found a strange woman standing over him in dawn shadows — oh yes, ‘Sylvie’. So that’s where, waking often in unfamiliar rooms, he was this time. He had learnt to be quick to adjust his sense of place.

— Come. There’s another bed. — He wandered behind her down a passage. She had made up a big bed in a guestroom; he stumbled into it and slept again.

In the morning at breakfast on her terrace she gaily greeted the black man who served them. — Mr Harry is a friend of the master, I asked him to stay the night with us.—

So she, too, had the skills of vigilance, making safe for herself.

Harry went back every night that week. Harry really existed, now, out of the nonexistence of himself. Harry the construction engineer, a successful, highly-paid, professionally well-regarded man of the world, with a passing fancy, a mistress not young but beautiful, a creature lavished by the perfumed unguents of care from the poll of curly tendrils he would lift to expose her forehead, to the painted nails of her pedicured toes. Like him, she had her erratic moments of anguish, caused by conflict with the assertion of reality — her reality — rising within her to spoil an episode outside her life, a state without consequences. These moments found their expression as non sequitur remarks or more often as gestures, the inner scuffle breaking through in some odd physical manifestation. One night she squatted naked on the bed with her arms round her knees, clasping her curled feet tight in either hand. He was disturbed, and suppressed the reason that was sending a sucker from the root of his life: after interrogation in detention he had sat on the floor of his cell holding his feet like that, still rigid with his resistance against pain. A sear of resentment: she—she was only interrogating herself. Yet of course he had feeling for her — hadn’t he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously — he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.

— A long phone call from Australia… and all I could think about while we were talking was how when we’re alone in here at night he never closes the bathroom door while he pees. I hear him, like a horse letting go in the street. Never closes the door. And sometimes there’s a loud fart as well. He never stops to think that I can hear, that I’m lying here. And that’s all I could think about while he’s talking to me, that’s all.—

He smiled at her almost fondly. — Well, we’re pretty crude, we men… but oh come on, you’re not squeamish — you’re a very physical lady—

— About love-making, yes … you think, because of the things I do, with you. But that’s different, that’s love-making, it’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about.—

— If sex doesn’t disgust you as a function of the body, then why so fastidious about its other functions? You accept a lover’s body or you don’t.—

— Would you still accept your lover’s body if she had, say, a breast off?—

He lay down beside her with a hand on the dune of her curved smooth back. — How do I know? What woman? When? It would depend on many things, wouldn’t it? I can say now, yes, just to say the right thing, if you want—

— That’s it! That’s what’s good! You don’t say the right thing, like other people.—

— Oh I do, I do. I’m very careful, I have a wary nature, I assure you.—

— Well, I don’t know you. — She let go of her feet and pulled the bow of her body back, under his palm. Restlessly she swiveled round to him pushing the fingers of her two hands up through the poll on her forehead, holding the hair dragged away. — Why do I let that bloody pansy hairdresser do this to me… I look common. Cheap, common.—

He murmured intimately. — I didn’t think so.—

On the bus, yes. — Maybe you wouldn’t have got off if I hadn’t looked like this. Where were you really going, I wonder. — But it was not a question; she was satisfied she wouldn’t get an answer, he wouldn’t come out with the right thing. She was not asking, just as she never questioned that he appeared as out of nowhere, every night, apparently dropped by taxi somewhere out of sight of the house. And he did not ask when the husband would come home; there would be a sign he would read for himself. Stretched out, she quietly took the hand that had been on her back and placed it between her thighs.

There was no sign, but at the end of that week he knew he would not go back again. Enough. It was time. He left as he had followed her, without explanation. Using the same trail for more than a week, he might have made a path for himself by which he could be followed. He moved from where he had been staying, to be taken in at another house. This was the family of a plumber, a friend of the Movement, not quite white, but too ambiguous of pigment for classification, so that the itinerant lodger could pass for a lighter relative. One of the youngsters gave up his bed; the lodger shared the room with three other children. Every day of the trial, new evidence brought by the Prosecutor’s state witnesses involved his name. It claimed him from every newspaper, citing several aliases under which he had been active. But not ‘Harry’.

He was making his way back to the plumber’s house one afternoon when the youngster, on roller skates, zigzagged up the street. The boy staggered to a halt, almost knocking him down, and he struck out playfully at him. But the boy was panting. — My dad says don’t come. I been waiting to tell you and my brother’s there at the other end of the street in case you take that way. Dad send us. They come this morning and went all over the house, only Auntie was there, Ma was also at work already. Looking for you. With dogs and everything. He say don’t worry for your things, he’s going to bring them where you can pick them up — he didn’t tell me nothing, not where, but that you know—

A cold jump of fear under his pectorals. He let it pass, and concentrated on getting out of the area. He took a bus, and another bus. He went into a cinema and sat through some film about three men bringing up a baby. When he came out of the cinema’s eternal dusk, the street was dark. Somewhere to go for the night: he had to have that, to decide where to go tomorrow, which hide on the list in his mind it was possible to use again. Likely that the list was not in his mind alone; nothing on it was left that could be counted on as safe, now.

He got out of the taxi a block away. He pressed the intercom button at the wide teak gates. There was the manservant’s accented voice on the other end.

— It’s Mr Harry.—

— Just push, Mr Harry. — There was a buzz.

Her trees, the swimming-pool; he stood in the large room that was always waiting for a party to fill it. On low tables were the toys such people give each other: metal balls that (as he set them in motion with a flick) click together in illustration of some mathematical or physical principle, god knows what… Click-clack; a metronome of trivial time. She was there, in the doorway, in rumpled white trousers, barefoot, a woman who expected no one or perhaps was about to choose what she would wear for an evening out. — Hul-Io. — Raised eyebrows.

— I had to go away unexpectedly — trouble with the foundations on one of our sites in Natal. I meant to phone—

— But phoning’s awkward. — She recalled, but quite serenely, only half-wishing to score against him.

— I’m not disturbing you…—

— No, no. I’ve just been tidying up… some cupboards … I get very careless—

When alone: so the husband wasn’t back yet. — Could I ask for a drink — I’ve had a heavy day.—

She opened her palms, away from her body: as if he need ask; and, indeed, the servant appeared with the trolley. — I put it outside, madam?—

Quite like coming home; the two of them settled back on the terrace, as before. — I thought it would be so nice to see you.—

She had dropped ice in his drink and was handing it to him. — It is nice.—

He closed his fingers round hers, on the glass.

After they had eaten, she asked — Are you going to stay? Just for tonight.—

They were silent a few moments, to the accompaniment of those same frogs. — I feel I’d like to very much. — It was sincere, strangely; he was aware of a tender desire for her, pushing out of mind fear that this, too, was an old trail that might be followed, and awareness that his presence was just a pause in which tomorrow’s decision must be made. — And what about you.—

— Yes, I’d like you to. D’you want to swim—

— Not much.—

— Well it’s maybe a bit chilly.—

When the servant came to clear the table she gave an order. — Ask Leah please to make up the bed in the first guest-room, will you. For Mr Harry.—

Lying side by side on long chairs in the dark, he stroked her arm and drew back her hair from her shoulder to kiss her neck. She stood up and, taking his hand, led him indeed to that room and not her own. So that was how it was to be; he said nothing, kissed her on the forehead in acceptance that this was the appropriate way for him to be dismissed with a polite good night. But after he had got naked into bed she came in, naked, drew back the curtains and opened the windows so that the fresh night blew in upon them, and lay down beside him. Their flesh crept deliciously under the double contact of the breeze and each other’s warmth. There was great tenderness, which perhaps prompted her to remark, with languid frankness, on a contrast — You know you were awful, that first day, the way you just thrust yourself against me. Not a touch, not a kiss. — Now between a sudden change to wild kisses he challenged her knowingly. — And you, you, you didn’t mind, ay, you showed no objection… You were not insulted! But was I really so crude — did I really…?—

— You certainly did. And no other man I know—

— And any other woman would have pushed me into the swimming-pool.—

They embraced joyously again and again; she could feel that he had not been with ‘any other woman’, wherever it was he had disappeared to after last week. In the middle of the night, each knew the other had wakened and was looking at the blur of sinking stars through the open windows. He was sure, for no logical reason, that he was safe, this night, that no one would know, ever, that he was here. She suddenly raised herself on one elbow, turning to him although she certainly could not read his face in the faint powdering of light from the sky. — Who are you?—

But he wasn’t found out, he wasn’t run to ground. It wasn’t suspicion founded on any knowledge relevant to his real identity; she knew nothing of the clandestine world of revolution, when she walked in the streets of the dirty city among the angry, the poor and the unemployed they had ‘nothing to do’ with her — she’d said it. Who he was didn’t exist for her; he was safe. She could seek only to place him intriguingly within the alternatives she knew of — was there some financial scandal behind his anonymity, was there a marriage he was running away from — these were the calamities of her orbit. Never in her wildest imagination could she divine what he was doing, there in her bed.

And then it struck him that this was not her bed: this time she had not taken him into the bed she shared with the husband. Not in those sheets; ah, he understood this was the sign he knew he would divine, when the time came. Clean sheets on that bed, not to be violated. The husband was coming home tomorrow. Just for tonight.

He left early. She did not urge him to stay for breakfast on the terrace. He must get back to bath and change… She nodded as if she knew what was coming. — Before getting to the site. — She waved to him as to a friend, down there at the gates, for the eyes of the manservant and a gardener who was singing a hymn while mowing the lawn. He had made a decision, in the respite she granted him. He would take a chance of leaving the city and going to a small town where there was an old contact, dropped out of activity long ago, who might be prevailed upon to revive old loyalties and take him in.

It was perhaps a mistake; who knows. Best safety lies in crowds. The town was too small to get lost in. After three days when the old contact reluctantly kept him in an outhouse in the company of a discarded sewing machine, stained mattresses and mouse droppings, he went out for air one early morning in his host’s jogging outfit looking exactly like all the other overweight men toiling along the streets, and was soon aware that a car was following. There was nothing to do but keep jogging; at a traffic light the car drew up beside him and two plain-clothes men ordered him to come to the police station with them. He had a fake document with him, which he presented with the indignation of a good citizen, but at the station they had a dossier that established his identity. He was taken into custody and escorted back to Johannesburg, where he was detained in prison. He was produced at the trial for which he had been the missing accused and the press published photographs of him from their files. With and without a beard; close-cropped and curly-headed; the voracious, confident smile was the constant in these personae. His successful evasion of the police for many months made a sensational story certain to bring grudging admiration even from his enemies.

In his cell, he wondered — an aside from his preoccupation with the trial, and the exhilaration, after all, of being once again with his comrades, the fellow accused — he wondered whether she had recognized him. But it was unlikely she would follow reports of political trials. Come to think of it, there were no newspapers to be seen around her house, that house where she thought herself safe among trees, safe from the threat of him and his kind, safe from the present.