Occasion for Loving

Seven

Ann Davis had not thought, when she left England, that she would be spending much time in Johannesburg. She enjoyed the feeling that she had left behind the risk of the Chelsea flat or Hampstead or Kensington house from which so many of her friends looked out, captured, unlikely to get at the world. Marrying Boaz, she had been admitted to the select band who returned only at intervals from teaching jobs in Ghana, study grants in America, or one of those world organisations, born of United Nations, that seek to make deserts bloom here, and limit teeming population there, in the more fatalistic wilderness of the earth. She thought of herself as lucky; and no one could suggest, even, that a return to South Africa, for Boaz, was a condonement of the white man’s way of life there, for he was returning only to do something that could not be done anywhere else — to study the black man’s music, part of the heritage that was becoming as much of a cult as it had once been culturally discounted. This was important to her, socially; she accepted it just as, if she had belonged to another set and another time, she would have accepted that it did not do to be in trade. She was not really concerned with politics. The surge of feeling against the barriers of colour was the ethos of the decade in which she had grown up; her participation in it was a substitute for patriotism rather than a revolt. She had no lasting feelings about the abstractions of injustice; like many healthy and more or less beautiful women, she could only be fired to pity or indignation by what she saw with her own eyes.

The field-trips with Boaz had not been a disappointment to her. She was seldom disappointed, anyway, but the very freshness that all things had for her tempted her away lightly from one to another. She played happily with the Pedi children, making stick boats to sail in the muddy river, and she got on well with the women despite the language difficulty. She had an intelligent grasp of the fundamental pattern of tribal life that the people tried to confuse — through secrecy, shyness, or a mistaken desire to please — before the eyes of strangers, and her good memory was often a help to Boaz. When she sat in the tent, under the lamp’s circling galaxy of insects, making fair copies of his sketch-notes of musical instruments, he was aware of no difference between her absorbed interest and his own. But the fact was that the day’s task was sufficient to her, while for him it stretched on to the distant end of his life, old age or death would interrupt him at it …

She began to stay behind in Johannesburg more and more, simply because there were so many things she was asked to do, and they were all new to her, just as the field-trips had been. The idea of living in the bush was somehow never unpacked, like one of those apparently essential garments that turn out not to be needed for the climate after all. When Boaz came home for a weekend, there was so much to tell him — they lay awake for hours, smoking in bed. He smiled in the dark and stroked her smooth, cool arm while she talked.

Patrick, their photographer friend, and his wife Dodo were a pair whose enthusiasms bloomed like daisies — hardly a week went by when she was not caught up in their activities, which invariably concerned some rearrangement of the physical world that contained them. They dug a swimming pool or knocked a wall down, lugged rocks for the garden, and swopped a twoseater for an old caravan; the house they lived in, the disposition of walls and chairs, car, trees and even landscape — these stood around them like a set of blocks that, in the hands of children, is constantly changing shape. Ann joined in this game of house with enthusiasm, enjoying the dirt and the mess and the picnicking that accompany amateur undertakings. She often thought that it would have been fun if she and Boaz could have lived with Patrick and Dodo instead of with the Stilwells, but of course Boaz thought the earth of the Stilwells. It didn’t much matter, anyway. She was free to do as she pleased and the Stilwells, nice enough in their way, did not bother her. Although she got on well with Jessie down at the Agency — indeed, it was through Jessie that she had got to know Len and thereafter, through Len, the city world of young black men and girls where she found herself so pleasantly accepted — Jessie at home was often, so to speak, out of sight for her. Just as, in a musical work, there may be whole phrases that are out of the range of your understanding for one stage of your life at least, if not for ever, so there are sometimes people whom some stage in one’s own life, or composition of one’s own self-hood, prevents one from following all the way. Ann saw the Stilwells’ life as a set of circumstances — children, the queer elder kid from some other marriage, ugly old house, not enough money. There it was, remote as old age. She did not think of it as something that had begun somewhere different and might be becoming something different. The present was the only dimension of time she knew; she woke every day to her freedom of it.

It was awful the way Jessie appeared sometimes, like a ruin. She could still look attractive, when she took the trouble. She did not seem to know or care that at times her face was stripped, more brutally than the gradual methods of ageing would ever come, finally, to do it, by the violence of the spirit over the flesh. There was always a great to-do, in a delayed-action, muffled sort of way, over anything that happened in the house — queer things did seem to happen to the Stilwells, like the arrival of the old man, that night, and then his dying somewhere in Europe, but even quite ordinary incidents did not pass off and get forgotten in the usual way. Most of the time, she, Ann, really could not say what it was all about. Some incident that would appear to bear no particular weight at the time, and that, if she noticed it at all, was out of mind next day, would apparently lie gathering force in some dusty corner of the shabby old house until one day, coming in out of the sunny world outside, the girl would suddenly become aware of a great rumbling disturbance passing through the human conduction system of the house — snatches of talk, looks exchanged — and would be astonished to recognise the tiny motif of the forgotten incident, now fully orchestrated. Who did this? Jessie, she supposed. Who else? Not much interested in the whole business, there was still a feminine tartness in this uncritical conclusion of Ann’s. Once Jessie’s attention was on something quite ordinary, it was lit with fancy lighting. There were shadows denser than objects and the gauze curtain of appearances melted away … If Jessie hadn’t looked at it, you would never have seen it like that. The evening she, Ann, had walked into the fuss over the kid Morgan — the way Jessie called out what had happened in that intense, ringing voice: she made you feel she expected something, some response that you didn’t have. Honestly, one did not know what to say to her. It simply didn’t seem very terrible that the poor kid slipped out to go dancing; only funny, because he was so nondescript. And, of course, it all blew over in a day or two.

The Stilwells’ friends and such of Boaz’s old friends whose affinity with him had survived a ten years’ absence provided her with the sort of company she was used to in England, but it was Len Mafolo who let her into company where she could shine. When she walked in among his white and black bachelor friends and their girls, it was as if she had been expected. With her looks, her kind of liveliness, her impatience with the limitations of a mapped-out way of life, and her background with Boaz, she would not have fitted in with the night-club and country-club set of the rich white suburbs; and among the office drab of people who mixed with blacks on a philanthropic, religious or political basis she would have been a note of scarlet. But among the show people, whose spendthrift vitality she could match, and the small group of black men who found life most approachable late at night, through talk, through music, through drink, and in the company of whites like themselves, she was at home.

For she was that new being — beginning to appear, here and there — for whom the black man in a white city waited. In her, the kicks and the snubs and the vengefulness and the hate met, complemented and merged with each other, two terrible halves of the vicious circle become whole, and healed. She was white, top-class beauty, young; young and beautiful enough for the richest and most privileged white man. She was not a woman who could not find a white man, nor was she one of the nuts, hankering for a black man as a shameful sexual aberration. Neither did she merely offer friendship, understanding, and fellow-feeling. The truth was, she looked the kind of girl who would call you Jim Fish, but dancing with her, sitting talking to her, you were man to her woman. The laws had not changed, the pass was still in your pocket; this simple miracle happened in spite of these things and far beyond them, in a realm where their repeal would have been powerless to release you anyway. It was not worth much — yet it was beyond price.

Ann took an innocent pleasure in her success. When she pushed her way into a crowded township room admiration and attention turned on her, warmly, familiarly, with all the jokes and liberty-taking that go with appropriation. There were one or two other white girls like her; not slumming, but full of joy, they could dance nearly as well as the black girls. But Ann quickly became as good as the best of the black girls; like them, she could dance with her whole body and use muscles that most white women do not know are theirs to command. Sometimes the other dancers would fall back around her and the young man who was feeling the aura of her shape in the air as they circled and stalked each other. A thrilling awareness of movement caught up the spectators, as if they suddenly could feel the world turning them in space. “Great kid! She’s terrific, this girl,” they would tell her, patronising, celebrating. The repetitive music, the coming and going of people, the animation of movement and the passivity of being available to whoever drew her into the dance made her tireless. She could have danced until she dropped. Once, on a Sunday afternoon when she had gone with Boaz and Len to have tea with his sister in her respectable Orlando house, she drew Boaz with her into a group dancing round a couple of penny whistle piccanins in the yard outside. The gathering spread into the township street and a journalist on a black paper got a picture of her, a white face whirling, and Boaz, knees splayed, among the crowd.

Len Mafolo was not much of a dancer but he liked to talk, comfortingly shut in by music and noise. He would be in the same corner from nine or ten until one in the morning, drinking, but not too much, and arguing in a slow, lofty way, as if for him getting at the truth was like picking one’s way breath-holdingly, toe-hold by toe-hold, down from some dizzy spire on which one found oneself stranded. He had almost at once forgiven Ann for going to the mine dances; it was a joke between them now. He understood her not very fastidious enthusiasm for anything new to her, and she understood his distaste for tribalism. He described her as a “wonderful kid”: with a pause and a shrugging snort to follow the impossibility of defining her. He liked white girls because those he knew were good to talk to as well as beautiful; she was also extraordinarily easy to work with, undiscouraged by the slowness and difficulty of getting people beyond the planning stage, tackling everything without fear of failure because she found it fun. “Don’t be so limp, Len,” she would say, fretting at his pessimistic objections.

The idea of taking round an exhibition of African paintings and sculpture — that was something he had been talking about for years, ever since he’d been a clerk at the Institute of Race Relations and had been put on to packing orders for their special Christmas cards every year. But the moment he talked to Ann about it, it began to take shape out of all sorts of impossibilities. There were not enough halls, particularly on the Reef, where the exhibition could be seen by white as well as black; “I tell you what — you need a caravan!” she said, “We’ll borrow Patrick’s — that’s it! They’ve just traded in their station wagon for a caravan.” And when he objected: “Who’s going to drive the thing around?” “Us!” she said, “You and I, of course.”

And so the impossibilities were changed, one by one. She was marvellous with the people they got to exhibit, too; if someone sent in something disappointing, she would stand looking at it with Len, and just as he was ready to say he supposed it was all right, an obstinate look would come over the bottom half of her face: “Let’s go and see him and make him dig up something better. Where does he live? Let’s go now—”

She called Mafolo “old Len”: the epithet for the childhood companion, the family friend … He got used to her, but sometimes when he looked at her and saw how she was like some lovely creature in its glossy coat, perfectly equal to its environment, he was seized with anxiety and hope. It was almost as if he were already reproaching himself for having missed something that, at the same time, he really knew never would be offered him.

The caravan exhibition was exactly the sort of venture that occupied Ann most happily. She knew a little bit about displaying works of art — in the fashionable sack-cloth-and-space way — because, although she did not take her attempts at various careers seriously, it was true that she had worked for a time in a small London gallery. She flew in and out of the house for nails, boxes, lengths of rope — all kinds of things — during the preparation of the exhibition. She was always running into Mrs. Fuecht, Jessie’s mother (who was in the house at the time), with the sort of object in her hands that must have appeared to require an explanation — the bathroom mirror, once, and another time a cooking-pot with an old sheet bubbling away inside it in a soup of purplish dye. The old lady showed no surprise, however — she was quite a surprise to come upon suddenly, oneself: rather an impressive old lady, slightly dotty, with the tragedy-queen air that Ann noticed often hung about aged women who were probably very attractive when young and who had given the greater part of their energies to love. “Your mother has been a beauty; she must have had lots of lovers, I suppose,” Ann said to Jessie. But Jessie laughed, and said in that menacing way of hers: “No, she was in love with me.” Perhaps Jessie was jealous of the old lady; certainly she had none of the old lady’s air. Ann always stopped, in passing, to exchange a few words with her; at least, that was what appeared to happen; what was really exchanged was a brief kindling of each other’s beauty, a flutter of recognition across fifty years. Once, the old lady seemed on the brink of beginning to talk to her — but it was not possible, that day. And one day her visit blew over, too, and she was gone.

Ann met Gideon Shibalo when she and Len were invited to take their travelling art exhibition round African, Indian and Coloured high schools. She had heard all about him before, of course; he was the man whose painting had attracted attention overseas and won him a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn’t been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport — he was involved in politics, the African National Congress movement. He came in during the school break and stood looking at his two pictures with the removed yet fascinated air with which one glances through an old photograph album. “Talented chap,” said Len, at his elbow.

“That’s a fact.” They burst into laughter and pushed each other about a little.

“My partner in crime,” Len indicated Ann.

“Again and again, I’ve wanted to see if we couldn’t get something more from you,” she said to Shibalo, “but he said it was hopeless, you don’t paint any more.”

Shibalo chuckled, considering himself. “Hopeless. Quite right.” He and Len had an exchange, punctuated by laughter, in Sesuto. “You should have come to see me anyway.” Shibalo turned to Ann.

“Why?” she said cheerfully. “Any hope? We’ll come if you’ve got something for us, any time.”

“I’ve put away childish things,” he said.

“Don’t you worry, he can still knock out a picture if he wants to,” Len encouraged and reproached, resentfully.

“Do you dislike being probed about not painting, or do you enjoy it?”

They all laughed. “Good God, I live on it. Where has my inspiration gone? Don’t I feel light, shape, colour, thickness, thinness, what-not? Don’t I want to express the soul of Africa? Don’t I want to make the line vibrate? Don’t my guts wriggle and send new forms to my finger-tips? That chap Gauguin started at forty, I’ve stopped long before.”

He scarcely looked at the other pieces of painting and sculpture that Len and Ann were modestly proud of, and when he sat drinking coffee with them remarked that the exhibition was really “a waste of time”. “The shock of modern art — we don’t need it around here, man. You can’t shock my kids in there, in my class we’ve got three who smoke dagga, and two pregnant. Not bad, eh? And they’re not even in matric yet.”

“Sounds like a very advanced class,” said Len to Ann.

She wagged her head: “He’s done wonders with them.”

But Shibalo’s tone changed suddenly and obstinately; he stood up now, apparently bored, and made some excuse to leave. “The ah — the headmaster wants to talk to me. I promised to drop in. About sports day.” He didn’t seem to care about them being aware that he was lying; he looked the last man in the world any headmaster would choose to organise a sports day.

As he left he said: “I might change my mind.”

“About what?” said Len.

“Painting something.”

“Oh, really?” said Ann.

“Under certain conditions.”

She was alert to amusement, but unsure; his voice was serious, impersonal, bargaining.

“I might paint you,” he said. And stooped his head under the doorway, and was gone.

Ann was used to the admiration and interest of men; it was only the absence of these things that she noticed. Ten days later, when the exhibition was at an Indian school, the headmaster invited Len and her to tea in the staff room, and introduced Shibalo among the other teachers. Shibalo did not say they had met before.

“What are you doing here?”

“Inter-school sports. Some arrangements have to be settled.”

At lunch-time he was still there, and they saw him coming slowly across the field, smoking, and blinking as if the sun hurt his eyes. Len went and waited in the doorway for him. He sat with them and picked at the ham rolls they had bought on the way out to the school, and drank the coffee Ann made. He had the confidence of someone who is wanted everywhere, the moody ease of the man who pleases everybody but himself. Within the week, he turned up again; he had happened to meet Len in a shebeen the evening before, and had taken him on to the Bantu Men’s Social Centre to provide an audience for his snooker game. Len had then had a lesson from him — Len’s first. The casual chances of city life had thrown the younger man into the company of Shibalo, and Len was rather proud, as quiet, studious people invariably are, to be taken up by someone bold and amusing. He described his efforts at the billiard table, giggling apologetically, rather enjoying the new business of making a fool of himself. “But when you pocket your white ball does that wipe out your whole score? Or what?”

“No, no, boy, don’t you remember, last night, when Robert Duze pocketed his, he just lost the points he should have made with that shot — It’s a good thing I’m a born teacher,” Shibalo complained to Ann.

“Good Lord, to think I had to come to the townships to get into the company of clubmen. Len — you know I do believe there’s a billiard table lying around somewhere in the Stilwells’ house. At least it looks like a billiard table, only very small.”

“Yes, yes, they do make half-size ones.” When she talked, Gideon Shibalo watched her rather than listened.

“Where did you see it?” Len was deeply interested and sceptical.

“In that sort of cellar or boot cupboard under the stairs. I’m sure they don’t want it — you know what that house is like. Perhaps you could buy it from them?”

Len and Shibalo laughed. Shibalo was delighted. “Can you see it? A donkey cart comes along 16th street in Alex and delivers a billiard table to his house. First they take the door down to get it in. Then they take down the inside walls … Then his landlady comes home …”

“Then they use the billiard table for a floor and build the house again on top. — But we could go and look at it, anyway?” said Len.

“I’ll ask Jessie what they think of doing with the thing, if anything.”

“You want to come and play tonight?” Shibalo asked Len.

“Thanks — I’m going to a concert with Ann and Boaz.”

Gideon was wandering about the caravan, quite at home now; he took down two pictures and exchanged their positions. “I might be there. I’m supposed to be there. — Who’s this guy out of the Bible?”

“Ann’s husband.”

“I’d like to meet your husband.”

She grinned at him. “He’d like to meet you.”

He had already turned to something else, in the manner of people who do not want to make the effort at real communication but toss a remark, like a small coin, as a signal of passing attention.

At the concert at the university they saw him on the other side of the hall, tall and carefully dressed, with a white woman whose short, flying grey hair and high pink brow made an authoritative head. He bent with her over the programme and seemed another person in this company.

Ann pointed him out to Boaz: “That’s Shibalo over there.” Boaz twisted in his seat to see; he knew the story of Gideon Shibalo’s scholarship and how he’d had to give it up for political reasons. There were quite a number of people that she knew, and her attention was caught, this way and that, as people came down the aisles. “Callie Stow, with him,” said Len. At intermission they saw the backs of Gideon Shibalo and the woman, in a group that rather held the floor. He did not turn his head.

Next day he came to the exhibition — which had moved on to another school — at lunch-time and brought a large bottle of beer with him. “What about some cheese for a change?” he said, looking at the ham rolls.

“How’d you like the music?” Len wanted an opening in order to give his own views on it.

“Wasn’t there.”

“We saw you.” Ann laughed at him.

But he was unperturbed. “One can go to a concert and not be there. Sometimes you just don’t hear the music.” He shrugged.

“Well, you missed something good.”

“No doubt, no doubt.” He was overcome by weariness at the reminder of the evening, and slid his legs out across the small space of the caravan. Ann was obliged to step over them to get past.

He began to appear sometime nearly every day. Len bought cheese rolls, and if he were not there by one, the two of them sat smoking and talking without a mention of lunch. If he had not come by a quarter to two, one of them would say, at last, “Well, I’m hungry,” and then they would eat hastily, as if they had forgotten the meal.

One night the three of them went to a boxing match together; Ann had never watched boxing before. “Put on your best dress,” Shibalo ordered. “I mean it. A woman’s got to look like it at the ring-side.” They sat in front among the black promoters and gangsters and their girls. The girls in their drum-tight dresses, heels thrusting their haunches this way and that, swaying earrings beside brown cheeks and full red lips, made a splendid, squealing show; Ann pounded her knees with excitement like a schoolboy. Shibalo held her elbow as if to hold her down and explained in a swift and urgent commentary all that was going on between the two forces struggling in the ring.

Shibalo had seats for a match in a nearby town, and they went in Ann’s car to see it. Ann was delighted with the extravagant descriptions of the fighters on the handbills and posters. The brutality of the sweat-slippery black bodies, colliding and heaving apart, the bloodied eyes and the grunts of pain had for her the licence of a spectacle; she enjoyed being swept up, bobbing and buoyant, in the noise and show-off of the crowd. They went a third and a fourth time, following the African boxing promotions from town to town. Then Len said, “I’ve had enough of this craze — no thank you.” Ann and Gideon went anyway, on their own. “You won’t leave me stranded in the middle of the night in Germiston location, or wherever it is?” she asked, smiling at him. “Come on. You’ll be all right.” He made no personal assurances.

She had dropped the joke of dressing-up by now and looked even more conspicuous in the black crowd, in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a dirty fight, and a close one, and the crowd first snarled and reviled and then celebrated wildly. Gideon Shibalo got his tickets free because he knew the promoters, but apparently he considered this sufficient honour for them and never spoke to them. He pushed a way through the crowd as if he knew they would make way for him; but his indifference was met, as he and Ann passed, with glances and remarks of recognition: the regulars had seen them before, now; the white girl and the teacher were part of the circus. A brazen little caricature with stiff straightened hair darted out long red finger-nails to feel Ann’s coat; someone smiled into her face.

The looks, the casual remark of faces in the crowd, set them together; it was a picture imposed from the outside, like a game that partners off strangers. Shibalo drove the car home that night. They laughed and talked all the way; neither had ever been so amusing when Len was there.

Next morning Shibalo telephoned her at the Stilwells’ house. Oddly, she was greatly surprised when she heard his voice; with Africans, she still expected to take the initiative in any attempt to keep up a friendship: they seldom did, perhaps to show you that they didn’t need you.

“Where’re you having lunch today?”

She was supposed to be out with the exhibition, as he must know. “I don’t know, Gid, I’ve got to go into town to do some shopping this morning.” “What about the Lucky Star or Tommie’s, then.” Those were the two places where coloured and white people mixed. “Oh, Lucky Star, I think.” She at once chose the one where she went often, where everyone she knew went and was seen.

She simply did not turn up at the Agency office, where Len usually picked her up with the caravan. At half past one, rather late, Shibalo came into the Lucky Star; she left the people she was talking to and went to him: “Come—” They had something so important to discuss that there was no need for pleasantries. He went swiftly to a table at the wall. “I felt bored stiff at the school today. Ugh, the smell of the place gets me down, the ink, the musty old books.” “Let’s have curry, then, Gid, that’s a good smell.” He looked at her slowly, resentfully, with a smile that was an open, blatant declaration, cock-sure of welcome, full of guile. “You’re the one that has the good smell. Everything you touch in the caravan is full of it. Even the coffee-cup. You hand someone a cup of coffee, and as he puts it up to his mouth there’s the smell of lilies.”

She gave the laugh that is as female as the special note that birds find when they want to call to their young. “Remember, lilies that fester smell far worse than old books.”

“Oh, I remember all right. I’m always careful not to keep them too long.”

They began to go about together. It was another craze, like the boxing one. Every day they ate at the Lucky Star; there was not much choice of places where they could eat, and the food was crude, but this did not worry them: they chose the same table each day, and had their tastes anticipated by the waiter just as, in other circumstances, they might have done at the smartest restaurant in town. And the habitués noted the beginnings of a new grouping in their composition, just as, if Ann had lunched with a white man at the Carlton Hotel, the daily presence of a champagne bucket at the table would have made the necessary announcement. There are certain human alliances that belong more to the world than to the two people who are amusing themselves by making them; this diversion taken up by Shibalo and Ann was one. She was not the first white woman who had been interested in him, but she was perhaps the best-looking, and certainly the least discreet. The open flirtation, for the fun of it, meant more than going to bed with a white woman who was frightened to be seen with you in the street.

Ann was scarcely attracted to him at all, in the strong and sudden way that she had felt matters settled beyond protest between herself and other men. Yet when she saw that he was aware of her, keenly but casually, granting her the power of her sex and beauty but in no way over-valuing her — she was like someone who has no intention of playing the game but finds his hand go out irresistibly to return the ball that comes flying at him. Her sex and her beauty were her talent, her life’s work, the grace of her being that other human beings felt in her; whatever else engrossed her was, in all innocence, mere pastime. The vivid sense of life that she felt when people saw her walk in with Shibalo, laugh at private jokes with him, drive away with him in her little car, came as much from a subtle use of her gifts as from his company. It was a new and amusing variation of their employment to show other men, simply by a companionable silence with Shibalo over a cup of coffee, that she could ignore them for a black man, if she pleased, in addition to all the other incalculables the hazard of her desirableness contained. Even in the restricted clandestine fringe of the city’s activities that was open to Shibalo and her, this was an attitude that carried some subterranean force and audacity, and was seen in the context of the white city, to which, after all, she belonged, and to which she could return whenever she chose.

One afternoon Shibalo remembered the billiard table: “What have you done about it?”

Len made a gesture that suggested the idea had never been serious.

“Ann, eh? What’s happened?” Len seemed always in a lower key than the other two, now, and Shibalo instinctively tried to counter this by an impatient quickening of his own vitality.

“I forgot all about it — so did you,” Ann said to Shibalo.

“I want to have a look at it. Come on, let’s go.”

They were packing up the exhibition; Patrick wanted his caravan back. Everything was dismantled, and lay about, ready to go into the crates. The sun made a structure of hazy blue bars out of the cigarette smoke.

Ann was examining her dirty hands with absorption. She looked up at the stacked pictures and the mess, from Len to Shibalo.

“Come on.” Shibalo was on his feet.

A mixture of opposition and indulgence characterised Ann’s response to him: “I haven’t said a word to the Stilwells, you know.”

But though Shibalo took it for granted that the whole interest in the billiard table was on behalf of Len, and Len found himself suddenly assumed to be taken up again, he would not go with them. “Look at this”—his satisfaction in the work to be done was obstinate.

As they were driving, Ann said, “You know Jessie Stilwell, don’t you?” “I suppose so.” When they got to the house there was silence, anyway. Not even the children were there, and the servant was in her own quarters. Ann’s voice sounded through the rooms and up and down the stairs; Shibalo’s was a murmur behind it. She lugged aside broken toy wagons, frayed baskets, mud-stiffened gardening shoes and an old chandelier, and there was the billiard table, wedged against the wall, on its side. “Match size. That’s what I thought. Most of the felt’s finished.” They tried to pull it upright, but there was no room to turn it over. “I’m sure they’ll be glad to get rid of it. Would you really take it?” She knew that he lived in Alexandra township, but she had never wondered how, in what sort of place, though she knew the cabins, shacks, backyard rooms and occasional neat houses of Alexandra. His shoulders hunched with his inward chuckle. “I might.”

“Have you got somewhere to put it?” On her haunches, she smiled at him in the gloom. “I’ve got a place — maybe. There’s a flat in Hillbrow.” “Hillbrow?” It was a white suburb. So often she felt he simply gave her an answer, any answer, while he was thinking of something else. “Yes,” he said, with a touch of reserve, “Couple of chaps I know. I stay there sometimes.” He chuckled again: “It might be a good idea to give them a present of a billiard table.” “It’s supposed to be for Len.” “Oh of course, I can take anyone there I like. They don’t play.”

They pushed the table back into position, grunting and laughing; Ann was in her element at this kind of headlong activity. A splinter from the leg went into Shibalo’s thumb, and though he said nothing beyond the first exclamation, when they came out of the storage-place she saw that his hand was trembling with pain. “Oh look, it’s an awful one.”

He held up his hand; the splinter was driven like a wedge into the smooth dark skin beside the second thumb joint. She tried to get it out, and while she did so, concentrating on the broken butt of wood that could be felt sharp, dead and hard against the live, cold thumb, his hand came alive to her. This was he, this big slim hand half-curled and slack, like a living creature itself. The fingertips throbbed faintly, their skin showed their own unique engraving of whorls. There was an expression in the set of the fingers as there is an expression in the features of a face.

For a moment the quality of the reality she was experiencing underwent a swift change. It was as if she woke up from an idle day-dream and found herself holding some unexplained object brought with her from a dream-world.

When the splinter was out they went into the living-room and had a drink. She had never had the house to herself before, that she could remember, and she felt herself in possession of it in a special way, as a child does when she creeps into a deserted house through a broken window. She took him upstairs to show him a woodcut in Jessie’s room, and some carved figures Boaz had picked up in his wanderings. Their movements from room to room, pauses in their chatter, had the rhythm of a dance through the house.

They were about to drive away when she found she had forgotten the car-keys and went running back into the house. As she raced downstairs again, she suddenly saw the profile of Mrs. Fuecht’s seated figure, through the open doorway into the dining-room. She stopped; in the moment, the old woman turned her head. The girl was drawn across the entrance hall, through the door, to the window where the old woman sat.

“Hullo. All alone?” The girl’s face had the blind eagerness of a face in a high wind; nerve-endings alive, responses on the surface, like the flash of sun or the shiver of wind on water.

The old woman scarcely existed in the moment. Her carefully powdered face was a mummification of such moments as the girl’s; layer on layer, bitumen on bandage, she held the dead shape of passion and vitality in the stretch of thick white flesh falling from cheekbone to jaw, the sallow eyes and straggling but still black eyebrows holding up the lifeless skin round them, and the incision of the mouth. The lips showed only when she spoke, shining pale under a lick of saliva:

“It seemed I never would be.”

The air bridled between them. “Can I get you anything?” said Ann.

The old woman smiled. “What?”

“I just wondered …”

“Oh, I know. Now and then one notices other people and is at a loss.”

The girl laughed and the old woman took it like a confession. But it was an exchange of confidences: she said, “As time goes by there seem to be more of them — other people. And then, all of a sudden, you’re one of them.”

Ann sat down on the edge of a small table.

“Weren’t you on your way?”

Their eyes met, blank and intimate. She got up. “I’ll be going then.” She paused, a bird balancing a moment on a telephone wire. “Goodbye.”

The old woman did not change the angle of her head over her book while the front door banged and the clip of heels faded down the path, but when the house was silent again, the alert spread of her nostrils slackened. The silence where the voices of the girl and the unknown man had sounded was the silence within her where many voices were no longer heard.

The day Jessie met them at lunch they had been moving Shibalo’s painting things from the back-room of a shop to the flat in the white suburb where he came and went as he pleased. Ann had not been there before; the tenants, two young men in advertising, were at work, but Shibalo was supplied with a key, and everything in the flat was in the natural state in which the owners’ continuing activities had left it — he constituted no interruption. There must have been some prearrangement between them, however, because he stacked some canvases in the wallcupboard in the bathroom, and pushed two easels in beside the ironing-board in the dingy kitchen before he dumped the rest in the living-room. Ann was deeply curious about the canvases and stacks of drawings gathered in newspaper—“all old stuff,” he said; whenever one was revealed she would stop dead to look at it in searching silence. She showed, too, the possessiveness on behalf of the artist that attacks ordinary people once they get to know a creative person; she began moving various objects out of the way to make room for pictures, and was irritated by the screen that was carefully placed as a target for a projector. “Why can’t that thing be rolled up somewhere? They can’t be using it all the time.”

Vanity made him ignore this partisanship out of embarrassment; like most artists of any kind he thought himself far above the measure of privilege that ordinary people might think it necessary to claim for him. He put a record on the player and sat back to listen; he watched her, as if he were lazily following the movements of a bee or a moth about the room.

She put down a canvas she had pulled free from some others. There was a flurry in her busyness. She looked at her hand, picked up the canvas again, and then put it back.

“Look,” she said, coming over to him.

On her forefinger, with its slender tip that bent back supplely as she stiffened it, there was a streak of fresh wet paint.

He pulled a face of concern and, smiling, leant out to pick up the turpentine bottle. He took his handkerchief and used it to clean her hand; then he leant out again and got a sheet of paper between his fingers and put the hand flat down upon it on the chair-arm, twisting her arm awkwardly as she half-sat. He drew round the outline of her hand with a stub of charcoal. The triumphant, challenging set of her face weakened; she kept her eyes down on her own hand. He picked it up and gave it back to her.

He jumped up from the chair and began to fool about with spontaneous energy. “I must do the honours of the house. Forgive the informality of this humble abode. It’s the girl’s day off. There are no snacks prepared. The champagne isn’t cold enough. But in the kitchen you’ll find the glasses, and somewhere”—his head disappeared into one of those unidentifiable space-saving cupboards that might store anything—“we’ll find the brandy.”

She took off her shoes and drank her fingerful with ginger ale, stretching herself on a plastic-thonged chair on the balcony. He had taken out a big, hairy white sheet of card and sat in the shaded doorway of the room behind her, drawing. “Let me see.” He took no notice so she got up and went to look. It was her profile, glancing over a naked back.

“How do you know that’s how I look?”

“You’re all the same,” he said, “that’s the beauty of it.”

She went back to the sun and sat on the balcony ledge, the sun contracting the skin on her back, her bare soles just in contact with the grooved tiled floor.

“One push,” he said, looking and looking at her.

She crossed her arms over her stomach, balancing carelessly. “Why not?” A reddish warmth from the tiles was reflected in her skin. Death never occurred to her except as a thrill in life; the drop behind her brought a special smile to her face.

When Jessie left them at the Lucky Star after lunch they went back to the flat. There was suddenly nowhere else to go, nothing else to do; the whole city seemed to let them pass unnoted as if some intense preoccupation between them made them invisible. They sat in the room with the curtains pulled against the sun, facing each other. Ann was not thinking of Shibalo but was filled with consciousness of Jessie. She was aware of her in broken images from their association, that was unimportant for her and had gone by, irrelevant. This strong awareness of the other woman made her roused and shaky inwardly, as one feels after an exchange that has left one goaded at the point of the moment to speak.

She went to the bathroom and did her hair and her face in a trance of skill; the smell of her trailed across the room. It was five weeks exactly since he had walked into the caravan. Time went so quickly for her; it had brought her here, now, quite suddenly. No good thinking of anything else.

They began to kiss and please each other with some rivalry, like a pair of peacocks showing off their feathers. If there was laughter, there was also fascination. At last there was solemnity too, but it was the hectic solemnity of surprising passion.

Eight

Because he was not much interested by her, Tom Stilwell made an effort to talk to Ann when he found her about. There were gaps in his attention to as well as his knowledge of her day-to-day life, and usually his attempts were of the well-how-are-you-getting-along-with-such-and-such variety. He asked her about the travelling exhibition one evening when she happened to be in to dinner, only to hear it had just closed. “Oh my God, everything’s always over before I get to see it. I suppose that Japanese film’s off by now too, darling?” he added to Jessie.

“Of course” she said cheerfully. “But there’s a new place to eat opened up where the old Bella Napoli used to be. We could try that before it goes bust, perhaps.”

They passed from this to discussion about whether, in general, group shows were more or less satisfying than one-man shows. “In any case, I imagine there isn’t anyone among the group you showed who could attempt a one-man show — except perhaps Shibalo.”

“Of course, yes. And he can get a gallery in town, any time he wants to,” said Ann.

“What about talking to Patrick Bold about the caravan now?” Tom said, half to Jessie.

“You can,” said Ann. “His brother’s taking it for the next six weeks or so.”

“We wouldn’t want it until about July — Jessie?” She had the component parts of a small doll beside her and was studying them between bites of apple. Her eyes hesitated over the coupling of this piece to that with obstinate enjoyment of the difficulties created by her ignorance of the principles of construction involved. “I’m not so sure.” She was not referring to the time, but to the fact that a house that was part of Fuecht’s estate might be available to them soon. It was a house at the sea where she had stayed as a child.

“How many would the caravan take?” The possibility of the house, vague as it was, stirred some opposition in Tom, as will any proposition that appears to bring to the active surface something one dislikes in the nature of someone one loves. He had the unexpressed knowledge, based on no facts and requiring none, that Jessie wanted to use the house because Fuecht was dead, perhaps to demonstrate that he was dead.

“It’s huge. Oh, six can sleep in it, easily,” Ann assured him at once, with the confidence of a butterfly telling a bird how to build a nest.

“The kids could double up, anyway. And one could take a tent as well. How about you and Boaz bringing along a tent?”

“Marvellous. But it depends when. Boaz is supposed to go up into Moçambique in the winter.” Ann was drawn to the problem of the doll. “Wait a minute, why don’t you try getting the head in first — then that bit”—she took up the torso irresistibly—“hooks in there. Ought to.”

Tom, too, picked up an arm, like the piece of a jigsaw that the passer-by feels sure he will drop into place unhesitatingly. He fitted the wire spring to the truncated shoulder and pushed it through one hole in the pink plastic body. Jessie watched with the silence of one who has tried all this before. The spring was too short to project through the hole on the other side, where the other arm was supposed to connect to it, and the hole was too small to allow fingers to enter and pull the spring through. “You need a bit of wire. Or tweezers would do.”

“Eyebrow tweezers? I’ll get mine,” said Ann, and left the room for a minute.

Jessie said to Tom softly, looking up over the doll. “She’s having an affair with Shibalo.”

Her tone was curiously reassuring and unconvincing.

“What on earth makes you say that?”

“I know. I was mad not to see it before.”

“Does Len say so?”

“I had lunch with them at the Lucky Star the other day.”

There was the almost dreamy quiet between them of a man and woman who have been sexual partners for an unbroken communion of some years. Like rain and tempest watched through the window of a warm, light room, they remembered wet and wildness out there.

Even while they were speaking, Ann’s voice, da-la-la-ing a phrase of a jazz song she liked, cut across theirs. In a moment she was in the room again, calling out, “This’ll do it,” and attention to the doll continued unbroken, each impatient of the other’s attempt to get it together.

Boaz came home that weekend, but as he arrived while the Stilwells were out, on Saturday night, the first they saw of him was on Sunday morning, when he and Ann emerged from the house about eleven o’clock and joined the others on the lawn. They were both still in pyjamas. Ann wore a short gown over the cotton romper arrangement in which she slept, and Boaz’s brown hand, dangling round her neck, stirred now and then in her tousled hair.

Jessie was lying on her stomach reading the papers and she turned dazedly on to her side, elbow propping up hand and head, at the approach. The lawn sprinkler was circling to provide a fountain in which the three little girls, Elisabeth naked and the other two in their pants, played. A couple whose sole claim to friendship rested on the exchange of such visits had dropped in on the Stilwells to drink some beer. Boaz agreed to have beer for his breakfast, and he and Ann settled themselves on the grass. Boaz was unshaven but looked handsome, squatting like an Arab with the planes of his olive-pale face shaded in by beard; the limits of its growth were clearly defined, like the markings on the face of some deer. As usual, since he was so often the returned traveller, talk took its impetus from him for a while, though he in no sense dominated the conversation but simply shared, in his friendly, serious way, what he had to say. He had lost a camera and given some other things of his a good dunking, getting through a swollen drift, and as he told the story now the mention of the district where this misadventure happened prompted a question from Redvers English, the visitor, about oil prospecting that he’d heard was going on there. Boaz had got mixed up with an oil-prospecting crowd the other day, and had an amusing story to tell about them; this led the talk out of his single stream into the general pool where everyone’s opinions, questions and desultory comments about what would happen to the tribes in the reserve if oil was found, made overlapping rings. Ann did not bother to take part in the conversation; only her laugh rang out now and then: she had pushed up the gown into the elastic legs of the romper and lay rolled over on to her back in the sun in feline laziness. The smooth skin of her knees soon took on a tight shine and the grain of her thigh-flesh came up rosy. She was not pensive, not “quiet”, not, perhaps, content. Nothing was projected from her. Jessie thought: she exists.

The pitch of the group rose a little with the beer and the hot sun. Olga English had one of those weeping laughs, maddening as the repetitive cry of certain birds; Jessie began to be irritated by her but Tom, though he did not like her very much, was in the sort of mood when one enjoys drinking and talking not particularly witty nonsense rather more with people one does not care much for than with friends who draw more strongly upon one’s personality. They had sent the children for biscuits and cheese, but although the sprinkler was deserted, the children had not come back. Warmed by beer, Tom in passing leant over Jessie with his arm round her and half-whispered, half-showed off, “Are you gloomy this morning, my love …” It did not matter what he said — he knew that increasingly over the last year there had been times when she was not carried along with the mood of the company; he liked to give a sign, any sign, that he was in touch with her. She had merely felt rather impatient for the Englishes to go, but the softness of the gesture suddenly did make her feel sad; she saw out of the corner of her eye — the small movement that betrays the presence of an enemy — a lover’s knot of raised blue vein showing on her left calf. In this full light it was obvious — she bent to examine the skin intently and saw that thin red-blue lines were spreading and branching from the vein, a faint map recording the advance of an invader. Madge and Elisabeth appeared at this moment, their dresses on but unbuttoned and with sashes hanging stringily. “About time, good heavens!” Jessie sprang up briskly. But they did not have the cheese with them, they had forgotten all about the cheese. Madge was crying. She held Elisabeth like a bailiff with his hands on a poacher. “Look what she’s gone and done.”

“Oh that blasted doll again. No, I can’t, I can’t,” Jessie held it up tragically, while the others laughed, though (since Ann’s eyes were closed) only Tom knew what at.

“Now the eyes have fallen back into its head.”

“Give here,” said Boaz. “Don’t worry, Madge, we’ll fix it for you,” and Madge went over at once to her new victim.

“If you knew the struggle we had with that thing the other night; Tom, Ann and I — we were all working on it.”

Tom’s and Jessie’s recollection of something else met suddenly over the bent heads of Boaz and the child. Ann rose up into the moment, stretching, smiling, yawning, “I’d better put some clothes on.” Moving sluggishly from hip to hip, she was arrested in her trail towards the house by some remark, and paused to stand talking to Olga English.

“Boaz doesn’t know, anyway,” Tom said. They had returned a number of times since the evening when Jessie first spoke of it to the business of Ann and Gideon Shibalo. They never talked about it for long, nor very fully; what she did was none of their business — not in the trite sense of minding one’s own business, but in the real sense that although she lived in the house they had nothing of the involvement with or concern for her that is the real reason for one human being being another’s keeper.

“She hasn’t told him.” It was a conclusion; this was an affair on the side (perhaps not even the first?) and not intended to break the marriage.

“It’ll be all right if only she goes on resisting the temptation to tell him,” said Tom.

“Quite.”

Tom felt sleepy after Sunday lunch and was lying on the bed in his clothes. “She takes it all very calmly,” he said, with a slight hesitation.

Jessie was pushing open all the windows and drawing the curtains closed; she turned her head to him and laughed.

“D’you think she sleeps with the two of them?” He was diffidently curious, with a touch of male fear of the female.

“She must. — I should think so, at the beginning, at any rate. The one may have become awfully familiar — you know — it may not seem like the same thing, perfectly harmless. — You never liked her much, did you?” she said, taking up the tone of curiosity.

“I don’t know. I was pleased that he was so thrilled with her—”

As he was dropping heavily asleep, Jessie’s voice woke him: “There was something wonderful about her today, though.” The quiet, ordinary voice startled him convulsively and his hand as it jerked out came into contact with the bony yet padded eminence of Jessie’s pelvis. In the dark behind his eyelids it was at once a skull turned up by a boot, and a grassy bank.

They went to a party, in the week that followed, with Ann. It was one of those shapeless parties that people give to introduce foreign visitors to a succession of faces they will never see again. Tom got trapped in a corner with a bore who always lay in wait for him at such parties, and Jessie drifted ruthlessly from group to group, finding herself talking to people whose identity she ought to have known, since they appeared to know her. The only liveliness came from the small company where Ann was. She herself held the same glass of gin and tonic the whole evening, but her presence roused an appetite for pleasure in the others around her, so that there was constant traffic between their corner and the bar. Laughter, raised voices and general animation surrounded her yet appeared to emanate from her; she was not looking her best that night, her hair was in need of a shampoo and the dress she wore was not a really good colour, but she had, Jessie recognised, the attraction for men of a woman who is excited by some private amorous involvement. It was a state both helpless and powerful. The attention was not something one set out for; but the power! The power came from the brief time of balance between two men, the extraordinary moment before guilt, shame or regret set in, when one gave to and took from each of them an identical pleasure. Jessie remembered with something of a shudder the discovery that one could make love to one man one night, and another the next: the taboo that had lived in one’s mind as a hoop of fire — and simply fell apart, as one jumped, a thing of tissue paper.

Tom was coming home one afternoon when he saw Ann’s car draw up outside the gate, Ann get out, and a man with a beard, whom he recognised as Gideon Shibalo, drive off again. When she caught up with him along the path, he said, “What’s happened to your car?” She laughed, gave him a look of surprise that might have been a rebuke. “I’ve lent it to Gid Shibalo.” The initiative seemed to have changed hands swiftly, so he said, “What is he doing these days?” They went up the steps together. “Teaching.” She smiled at him as he pushed open the door for her to enter; her hair was wet on the ends, she must have been swimming, and the powder had rubbed off her face on the cheek-bones and nose as the bloom rubs off the round prominences of a fruit. She never had the dazed look that, paradoxically, clouds the face of someone who has been doing intellectual work, she never carried the dull smell of smoky rooms, the staleness of ink, papers or cooking. She did not bring an ether of cold perfume, either. He felt it almost as an insult that he was unmoved by her living beauty. He went upstairs and said to Jessie: “So he’s driving around in Boaz’s car, now.”

“Oh, several times lately.” She answered with the impatience of someone who has something else to say.

“Didn’t he have a long-standing affair with that woman Callie Stow?”

“Mmm. A few others, too.”

Tom felt vaguely reassured; the thought of Boaz, whose name gripped his mind in unease, slackened and let go.

“My mother says the tenants are definitely going to be out by the end of May,” Jessie said, beginning to put papers and photographs steadily back into her dressing-table drawer, so that she could ignore any reaction he might be showing. She was talking about Fuecht’s house.

He was careful what he said. “But what’s it like? I mean have you any idea whether there’s enough furniture and so on …?” and while they talked Ann’s heels went lightly, loudly about the old wooden floors, and clattered away from them.

Although Morgan had gone straight from school to a farm — Tom had arranged for him to join the three sons of the professor of botany — the little girls were at home for ten days at Easter and Jessie felt obliged to come home to lunch with them every day. It was not so much that they needed her; the reprieve of responsibility for Morgan usually produced some compensatory piece of dutifulness towards the other children. The second day she found Gideon Shibalo sitting in the garden. The angle of the two chairs (they were set slightly awry, as if their original intimacy had been put out by the restless movement of occupants in tense discussion), the remains of some clumsy sandwiches, the torn lace of beer-foam dirtying a glass, the litter of cigarette stubs — all these conveyed to her a sudden hope of signs of crisis. But when she came down into the deep shade where they might have isolated themselves in a deadlock of reckoning, she was at once aware that her high pitch was wrong: there was nothing to meet it. Gideon greeted her and belched, raising his eyebrows at himself. He had the slightly out-of-place look that she noticed Africans sometimes had in a garden. Ann had kicked off her shoes and sat pinching up grass blades between her toes. The children were playing house not ten yards away, in the curtains of the pepper trees.

“Was there anything to eat?” Jessie asked, falling back on hospitality. Ann assured her that it was all right, they had found something. An air of normality, of commonplace almost, prevailed between the three of them; Jessie felt that she ought to throw it off, but she was hampered by what now seemed to her the impossible code of personal freedom by which they lived. How could she suggest to Ann that she did not want Gideon Shibalo there? Why should she not want him to come? Was Ann in the house as an appendage of Boaz? If — and it was unthinkable, with the concept of individual dignity that the Stilwells held, that it should be otherwise — she was nothing less than herself, then that selfhood was entitled to determine its own actions, and they should be seen as such, and not at the angle at which they lay across Boaz’s being. Why choose Boaz, and not her? Oh it was all right to choose him, for oneself — but one could not put a finger out to flick her direction to suit his. Jessie had a horror of the attempt by a third person to deflect the life of one to serve another; without God, the unquestionable existence of this horror beyond the strength of a moral sense was a scrap of torn paper from the difficult documentation that might put together his existence. Any influence directed by consideration of Boaz’s life should come only out of a private covenant — and, to Jessie, this did not mean marriage — between Ann and Boaz.

Yet she was resentful in some constant, concealed part of herself at Shibalo’s presence, as at the awareness that he was at the other end of telephone calls, and the regular sight of him driving the car—“Boaz’s car” as she and Tom referred to it lately, although Boaz had bought it for Ann. She was resentful and yet she sat and talked with them amiably, because she liked him. He treated her in a good-humoured, dry way, certain they would get on. Ann again did not talk much, though at least her air was animated. When she did say something, it was invariably a corroboration of, or corollary to, what Shibalo was saying: “He really did. You should have seen the faces of the others.” “—And then that was when you met him alone and said to him …”

“Look at your children,” Shibalo said at one point, pulling out a sheet of cardboard from under his chair. It was a sketch of active angles half-recognisable as legs and arms.

“Very smart.” He must have been there the whole morning, then.

He took it without rancour. “I’ll come and do one for you one day. I’m pretty hot on drawing kids these days.”

“Like circus dwarfs,” said Ann, with the intimacy of a repeated bait.

Jessie was conscious of being drawn into their ambiance as a privilege which she had not consented to accept. Once she had been let in on them, they could not let her go without the temptation to make her party to themselves in some way; she was the outsider who stumbles upon the secret and is offered, as the price, the excitement of sharing it.

There is a magnetic field in the polarity of two people who are conducting a reckless love affair; the insolence, emotional anarchy, uncalculatedness have the gratuitous attraction of exploding fireworks even for those who regard the whole thing as a bit ridiculous. Something of the showy flare caught Jessie, and, in a mood that had risen to sharp banter and some laughter, she went off with the two of them to take up Shibalo’s old casual invitation, given at the Lucky Star that day, that she might come and see what his new work was like.

Ann was gay, in the car, and leant forward with her elbows on the back of the front seat so that she could chatter to the two in front. Gideon was driving. For the first time since she had come to live in the house, Ann treated Jessie as her equal: equal of the freedom of her youth, her lack of conditioning responsibilities, her unreflective responses that made her flat “I love that”, “I hate this” an edict.

“Stop at the corner, Gid.”

“What for?”

“That shop has nuts. I’m dying for some walnuts.”

She dashed out of the car and back again with the supreme and arrogant self-consciousness of someone who feels she may be mentioned in her absence. Jessie saw her go straight to the counter to be served before others who were there before her, taking no account of them. She paused at the car window, on Gideon’s side, before she got in again. “Have one”—her face was beseeching, a big smile with the corners of the lips tensely pressed down, her forehead flushed like one of the children’s before they began to cry.

The flat that they went to was like many of those in which Jessie had lived. She looked at the draughty entrance with its list of occupants, under glass, its trough of pale plants, its one maroon and two yellow walls, and gave a grudging smile. The urban education: if someone managed to get out of the townships it would be to a place like this.

“How d’you find it, working here?” she asked.

“It’s just like having my own place,” he said, giving her the freedom of it grandly. “Nobody’s there all day and I can do just what I like. I’ll meet you up top—” He took the back staircase instead of the lift because he had to take care not to attract the attention of the caretaker; she must not suspect that her tenants were allowing a black man to use their flat. When the two women got to the flat door, he was already there, inside. “Come right in, just step over the mess”—he kicked away a parcel from the dry cleaner’s and a cardboard honeycomb of empty bottles. He pulled open the curtains in the living-room, picked up some letters, put a noisy Greek record on the gramophone, talking all the time with the relaxed busyness of someone who has just come home. Ann ripped the paper bandage off a magazine that lay among the letters and began to look through it. The purpose of coming there seemed to be forgotten. Jessie, kept standing by the presence all round her of objects meaningful to the lives of people she had never met, began to wander curiously around the room, touching this, glancing at that. She put her hand out to turn canvases without asking permission, for she had been asked twice to come and look at them. The third one was upside down; she righted it. It was a nude, Ann, flung down alive on the canvas as if on a rug. She turned another and another. They were all Ann, only in several she was black.

Gideon Shibalo came up beside her, professionally. “It’s the subject that takes your breath away, ay?” He laughed. “It’s not my new technique.” He began to put up for her, one by one, without comment, charcoal drawings and oils of children, friezes and splashes of children, old with the life of the street.

Nine

Gideon Shibalo sometimes had the use of a car, and sometimes had not. There were various complex arrangements, from time to time, with friends or relations. When he said, “I’ve got my car round the corner”, it could mean his own old black Studebaker that he had sold to his brother-in-law two or three years ago, or a Citroën that he was only keeping on the road until he could find a buyer on behalf of the owner — a friend who had gone to Nigeria — or even the little shaky “second car” of some white friends who didn’t need it over a weekend. At one time he had had Callie Stow’s car practically permanently; a tiny beige Austin with a feather duster on the back window-ledge, and a yellow duster, street-map and snake-bite outfit in the glove box. When he did not have a car he went back to the bus queues and the trains at which the people hurled themselves in the echoing caverns of the city station or the open veld sidings of the townships, marked by a single light that was still burning at dawn.

The black car was sold when he was going to take up his scholarship, that time; his sister’s husband had given him a hundred pounds down and hadn’t paid off much more in the three years since then. The hundred pounds had gone towards the air ticket to Rome. He had got the whole fare back, of course, but he hadn’t kept it; some of it had gone into politics, but most went during the months when he hadn’t worked, and drank and gave it away. He was teaching now and he could have bought some sort of a car again, but he did not think of it; it did not irk him to depend upon the chance offers of others, in fact he took them all for granted in the manner of a man who is fobbed off with an abundance of things he does not want.

For the past two years — longer; since the scholarship — he had been made free of a section of the white world, and had lived as much there as among the people in whose midst he was born. He did not have the obvious freedoms of the street and public places, of course, but was a frequenter of those private worlds where the rules of the street, the pronouncements of public sentiment, are disembodied voices shouting out of a megaphone — here, between four walls, the rules are quite different, and the sentiments diverse. He had never sat in school beside white children, or in a bus among white men and women, or shared with them any of the other commonplaces of life; he simply found himself taken right into their most personal lives, where all decisions are upon personal responsibility, and even punishment is self-meted. The first time he slept in a white man’s house was after a party, in the studio of a white painter who had liked his work and wanted to get to know him; there was a noisy quarrel, sometime towards morning, between the man and his wife, and the wife had rushed into the room and dumped a sleeping baby boy out of the way on Shibalo’s couch.

During the months when he was trying to get a passport he saw a great deal of the liberal and political whites who took up his case and introduced him to the moral twilight zone of influence; from a people without power, he had not known that even among those who made and approved the laws that prevented a man like himself from going where he pleased, there were men who might have been able to help him, not out of a desire to do so, but in response to pressure on some tender spot in their own armour of power-survival. You touched the right secret place and the spring flew open somewhere else: it hadn’t worked, as it happened, for him, but there were others for whom it had.

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. It was always easier to be drunk than sober, to exchange a confession than have a chat; even, he found, with amusement rather than surprise, to have a love affair than a friendship. He had found easy and mutual attraction between himself and several of the women. The affairs were short-lived, and, like dreams, never emerged into the light of day. This was not to say that they were nothing but sexual encounters — these were always far more than that, for even the most ordinary of sexual encounters was also the reaching out of two mysteries — but that they carried over nothing into the world of streets and public places. Nothing, nothing; if the two met in the street next day it was as if they had not met.

Callie Stow was something else again. The very first time he remembered seeing her face was in the confusion of that stage at a party when faces, furniture, objects began to present shifting levels for which his eyes could not make a sufficiently quick change of focus. As if he were on a trampoline, people now rose, now fell before him. He had seen her quite often before, but it was only when she became part of the onset of nightmare that he remembered her. She was a Scotswoman with a Scandinavian mother, and in her soft voice with a slight Glasgow accent she was talking to him as if he were perfectly sober. She told him that he had made a discovery, that was all, a discovery that would have had to come to him sometime, anyway. “There’s no time to go after what you want for yourself, you’ve got to be one of the crowd if you want your life to have any meaning to you,” she said. She had short, very clean hair that might have been blonde or already white, and the fine fair skin that those sort of Englishwomen have (he never did understand that Scots and English were not the same thing). She could have been any age; his grandmother, for all he knew; an Englishwoman with a skin like that, and blue eyes and no lipstick, might turn out to be anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. (Some sort of flowered dress, and a string of small pearls.) He thought about the matter-of-fact way she had spoken of the wall that reared up before him, although he was hazy about what she had said. When he met her again in someone else’s house less than a week later, he at once asked, “What was it about finding something out?”

She said precisely, “I said that you’d have had to discover sometime that you can’t do anything for yourself, and perhaps now was the time — that’s all.”

He gave his chuckle, and said sourly, “Thank you very much, but I don’t feel particularly philosophical about not being able to do anything for myself. Whether it’s the time or not.”

“No one would suggest you should,” she said. “It just seems to me that now you’ve had clearly shown to you that the only thing that means anything if you’re an African is politics. You’ve made the only choice. You don’t need philosophy; you’ve got necessity.”

“You’re not a painter,” he said.

“No, I am not a painter—” the tone of her voice granted a demand she respected but could not share. “What’s the good of saying that it’s terrible that you can’t be one? There it is. You’ve got politics, that’s all. Why drink yourself silly, mooning over the other? You’re a man of your time. Different times, there are different things to be done, some things are possible, some are not. You’re an African, aren’t you?”

He laughed but she pressed her chin back firmly: “Having a black skin doesn’t automatically mean that, you know.”

As he got to know this woman he made another discovery — one that she would not have been aware of, since she had no more self-consciousness than vanity. Although she shared a kind of life that was familiar to him, some outward identity of outlook as manifested in their being present together in the same room, smiling at the same remarks, at a party, for example, or sitting at the same conference table (as they were later to do) on a political action committee — this outward identity of outlook gave no indication of her control and direction by forces of whose possible existence he was not even aware. He had never known anyone before who was a rationalist by conviction and education. He was aware, dimly, that his actions were moved by the huge wheels of the need to create, to be free, and, clearly, the small wheels of wanting and taking. But for her nothing was empirical, no instinct was without sound objective backing, no action ran wild and counter to herself. All was codified, long ago, beginning when, as a child, she had listened to discussions between her free-thinking, Victorian socialist grandfather and her missionary father. As children are said to select automatically the foods that their bodies require, she rejected the faith of her father for the tenets of her grandfather, and went on to university to read political philosophy. Then she had studied labour organisation in England, and economics in Sweden. She was one of those who take an actual hand in rigging up the framework of civilisation; she had worked in refugee camps in Europe after the war, and in North Africa later, and had run an adult education scheme among African farm workers in Rhodesia. In South Africa she had written surveys of indentured and migratory labour for a world organisation, and was a standard figure among the organisers of various campaigns for civil rights that came into existence time and again, sometimes comparatively flourished and sometimes did not, and at last were banned, anyway. She had taken out South African papers at the beginning of the Fifties and so could not be deported; but she had had, of course, a spell in prison during one of the States of Emergency declared in times of African unrest.

There were books in her house on butterflies and architecture, cave paintings and birds, as well as the sociology and history and politics you would expect. It seemed to Shibalo that she had books on everything; for her it was not that the birds were simply there, flying around, mushrooms came up in the veld after rain. She possessed the world twice over; once as a natural phenomenon, a second time as a filing cabinet in which all creation existed again in the form of a name and description, all concurrent, all within the compass of one man’s experience. He was aware of this second possession as some kind of power over life; one he didn’t have, though he’d got his B.A. at Fort Hare, years ago.

Callie Stow darned his socks and thought nothing of waiting for him on a public street corner; but who would have dreamed that this woman with her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, and her calm white head (he thought of it, all his life, as “the professor’s head”), was getting into the small beige Austin driven by her lover? He was not unattracted by her, either; it was again a first time, the first time he had desired a woman mentally, been drawn to her through the processes of her thinking. In the end, the very thing that had made the open relationship possible killed it off, for him. He did not feel like her lover; she came out of prison and he came from “underground” where he had been lying low for a while, and she said, “Hullo my dear, it’s good to see you,” with the “ui” sound in “good” that he remembered so well. It was all right to say it, but he suddenly felt cheated and disappointed beyond words. He did not know what he wanted; he had not known it was not this. He moved away from her, taking with him a certain discipline of mind, an ability to get at arm’s length from himself, that he had got from her but that he could make use of only intermittently, since it was acquired and not inherent; it continued to be most easily at his command only when he found himself in her company or in the set within a set in which he had moved with her. In time he began to see it as an act that he could do to show how easy it was, really, to belong with them.

White friends like the young advertising men at the flat, who were not much interested in politics except as a subject for argument, enjoyed a black man’s joke at their own expense, and in several places Shibalo had quite a success with the well-timed remark, confiding, marvelling, assuming a naïvety they knew to be assumed: “I knew a white woman once who kept a snake-bite outfit in her car.” Pause: “Never drove through town without it.” (Of course he knew quite well that Callie Stow kept the snake-bite outfit in the car because she used to go climbing in the Magaliesberg on Sundays, with a woman friend.) They would laugh, but he would keep looking at them straight-faced and questioning: “I mean, a snake-bite outfit? The needles? The stuff in the little bottle? The knife to make the cut?” He shrugged and looked impressed. And they laughed indulgently at the calculatedness of the white man’s way of living.

He emerged from the mat of people on one side of the street, darted across, was taken in at once in the line of the bus queue. He had spent two or three nights at the flat, and now was lost to his hosts, with their casual friendliness and the excess of equipment which even the most modest or hard-up white person seemed to find it impossible to do without. Ahead of him a woman sat on the kerb unravelling her baby from the wrappings it had worn on her back; it had a hot, wet, but not a bad, smell. People were eating single bananas, bought for a penny from an Indian with a push-cart. The intersection at the corner was one of the main exits from town and great processions of white men’s cars and buses pulled up face to face. As the lights changed and the press began to move on, a drunk brown boy walked almost into a bus. He had straightened hair in a crew cut, wore a loose jacket, and carried at the end of his long arm a transistor radio covered with imitation crocodile skin. He wove through the sluggish cars, swinging back from one to bump the nose of another, and shouting modestly all the time, “Ya fuckin’ bastard …”

The bus settled low on its wheels as it filled up and then pushed a way into the traffic. Gideon Shibalo’s body adjusted itself to the pressure and jar of other bodies like the automatic accommodation of muscles to a bed whose discomforts are so familiar that they have acquired a certain comfort of their own. He read a column of newspaper between the angle of someone’s jaw and a dusty shoulder. The shriek and chitter of penny whistle music came from a loud speaker down on the heads of those, like himself, who occupied standing room; he looked up from the print along the lightly bobbing heads, seeing the amber of stale afternoon sun show dusty on the wool of the bareheaded ones; he thought: like the pin-heads of mould. If you saw us from high enough we would populate the earth like the furry patch spreading on a bit of cheese. He was smiling as he turned back to the paper. The smells of cheap soap, dirty feet, oranges, chips, and the civet smell of the perfume on a girl spooky-faced with white women’s make-up, were soon overcome by the warm, strong sourness of kaffir beer, given out from the pores of the men and shining on their faces like a libation.

As he walked through the township he called out to people he knew, stopped to talk, and, as the home-comers dispersed along the streets, passed for whole stretches, before houses, boarded-up shops, a church with uneven windows, a dry-cleaner’s, a coffin-maker’s, a men’s hairdresser’s, the insurance agent and the herbalist, without seeing what he passed, though he avoided surely the sudden ditches that sagged down beside the streets, the zigzag of brats and dogs and the occasional mule. He did not see all this, but he could have sat down in a room anywhere on earth and drawn it. If it were to be pulled down, bulldozed and smoothed flat for other occupants, he would not see it any less clearly, or forget a single letter of the writing on the hairdresser’s sign that got smaller as space on the board ran out. For years, up until the time the passport was refused, he had hated all such places, but once the passport was refused, once he began to spend most of his time among whites, the strong feeling died away. The passport had slammed in his face; lethargy can produce an effect outwardly very like content. He was drinking a lot then, and the township, with what he had thought of as its muck-heap tolerance, its unbearable gregariousness, its sentimental brutality, sheltered him. You could die of self-pity in those places; no one would harry you into feeling ashamed, or flog you on to your feet with bull about what you owe yourself, the way whites do to each other.

His relationship with the Stow woman was one that laid great emphasis on self-respect, and yet for him the real fillip of self-respect came when he was finished with her; it seemed possible to live again quite simply, without making a lot of talk about it. He was back at his teaching job, his lousy job; the crowded faces of hungry children facing his own every day; the timidity, earnestness, self-importance and pomposity of the other teachers in the staff-room, with their consciousness of themselves as “educated”. They were very conscious, too, that he was an “artist”, and reminded friends that he was a colleague of theirs. Hadn’t he competed with white artists and won a scholarship to go to Italy? In the city, too, in the white houses and flats where he was welcome, he was always accepted as a painter—“the one who was supposed to go to Rome”. He did not paint any more but he realised that this did not matter. It would not matter if he never painted again; he could live for the rest of his life, in the townships on the fact that he had once painted something that competed favourably against white artists, in the city on the fact that he was both a painter who had achieved notice overseas and a black man. The idea coldly frightened and fascinated him. It seemed the real reason why he could not paint. He chuckled over it and at the same time the fact of his amusement was the confirmation, the finish — let him laugh; he would never paint anything again.

After he had turned away from Callie Stow, like a man who goes out for an evening stroll and never comes back, he had come to see his own old view of his home as as inaccurate as hers: she thought of the townships as places exalted by struggle; like treasure saved from the rest of the plundering world in a remote cave, she believed the Africans kept love alive. He went about the townships again now almost as he had worn the coating of streets there as a child, without any moral or spiritual conception of them. He went in from the white world like an explorer who, many times bitten and many times laid low with fever, can go back unthinkingly into territory whose hazards mean no more to him than crossing a city street.

His room was far down from the terminus. Shoes scuffed and twisted against the uneven ground so that by the time you got there you had taken on again the dust and shabbiness of the place, you were given protective colouring. The room itself was in a row added behind a house that was solidly built for a location, a brick house with a verandah. A piece of bald swept ground before it was fenced in with scrap — railway sleepers, bits of corrugated iron, chicken-netting — and a dog on a chain attached to a wire that ran the length of the fence raced barking from end to end of the scope of its existence. The owners of the house, the old woman and her husband, sat on the verandah behind this fierce frieze and added figures on bits of smoothed sugar bag. There were tins of fire in the yard and the small children called out, some even in English, “Hello”, while the bigger ones, who were no longer friendly and had not yet learned the substitute of politeness, took no notice of who came or went.

Ida was in the room; he heard her gentle, breathy voice with the sound of agreement in it as he put his foot on the thick doorstep. Some shirts and socks were lying on the bed; she had a key and must have brought his washing. Sol was there too, a friend who drove a dry cleaner’s van. He challenged, with pleasure: “You’re not easy to get hold of, man! I’ve been here twice, everything locked up. I met the old man and he said he hadn’t seen you for two days.”

“Yeh, I know.” Shibalo grinned. He was looking round the room with the roving interest of one who wants to keep up with whatever life has been going on in his absence. “Did Bob do anything about the record player?” he said to the young woman.

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him. He might have tried to get hold of you.”

“Night duty?” he asked her.

She shook her head and moved her feet so that she could admire her patent shoes. “Day off.”

“Where’re you people going to eat?” Sol asked.

“I’ve eaten at my sister’s already,” the girl said.

“Well, what about it, then?” Sol gestured as if to set her about preparing a meal. She laughed, “I don’t think there’s anything.”

The room had the disturbed look of a place that is subjected to quiet neglect alternating with vigorous raids on its resources. A suitcase stuffed with papers had burst a lock on one side, there were paper-backs embossed with candle-drippings beside the bed, four or five different tobacco tins, some bottles of pills and a broken chain that had once been on the door. Sol sat in a smart yellow canvas chair shaped like a sling; it was of the kind advertised for “modern leisure living”. The black iron bed, book-shelf sagging under canvases as well as books, the cupboard where the girl Ida unearthed a tin of pilchards — each held objects that had been turned up in the rummage for something else, and never found their way back where they belonged. The window was overgrown with a briar of strips of wire and tin provided as burglar-proofing by the landlord, and as it gave no light or air anyway was covered with a strange little wool carpet. A primus, a basin of pots and dishes, and a big old typewriter, filled up the space between the legs of a table; there was a clean square on the top where the record player usually rested. The back of the door was covered with a huge travel poster reproducing a Romanesque madonna, and magazine cut-outs of Klee, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sidney Nolan and the Ife bronzes curled away from the walls. When they fell in an autumn of their own they were replaced by others, but the cutting of a photograph that had appeared in a newspaper when the Italian scholarship award was announced was stuck back again, and was already yellowed and brittle.

Ida went to the corner shop to get bread and polony and Shibalo took out the brandy bottle. Sol was talking politics — it was about some point that was going to come up for discussion at a meeting that he had wanted to canvass Shibalo — and looking over Shibalo’s newspaper at the same time. “There you are”—he chopped the side of his hand against a column. “There you are”—he took the glass of brandy and began again—“they want a conference. ‘Liberals and Progressives urge consultation with all races.’ There it is. What do we want to talk about, for Christ’s sake? Jabavu talked to them, Luthuli talked to them, talk, talk, what do we want to talk for when we’ve got the whole continent behind us?”

“A long way off,” Shibalo suggested. “Rhodesia, Portuguese East in between—” Sol stared at him to indicate that he knew better, whatever he might be saying: “Going, going, man.”

“You think Nkrumah’s going to sail round to Cape Town and land troops?”

“No, man. I didn’t say that. You know what I think. I think the guns are going to come in through Bechuanaland and Basutoland and the U.N.’s going to take over in South West.” He stopped at the obstacle of his own impatience because these things had not happened already.

“And the guns are going to come in from Southern Rhodesia and the Portuguese to blow those guns out.”

“So what do you want? You think we’ll have a nice talk to the whites and they’ll push the Government out and hand over to us?”

“Look — even when you’re being smart, you don’t get it straight. Most of the whites don’t want to talk to you, they wouldn’t be ready to talk to you until you’ve opened their brains with a panga. Make no mistake about it, they won’t waste any words on the blacks. They don’t want any palaver with black leaders because there are no black leaders so far as they are concerned, understand? They are the ones who decide what’s going to happen to us. Where we’re going to live. Where we’re going to work. What bloody stairs we’ll put our stinking black feet on — talk! My God, it’s only a miserable handful without a place up there in the Government between them, who want to talk. The others want to shoot it out, man, once they can’t wangle it out any longer with shit about homelands. But when it comes to shooting it out, stop dreaming, that’s what I’m telling you chaps. We may need sticks and stones and whatever we can lay our hands on, as well as the promises from our brothers out there.”

Sol, who spent his nights in such talk, could not lean forward in confirmation of points as he wished to, because the yellow chair was one that held its occupant rigidly back in repose, and tipped him out if he tried to make it more accommodating. But his face broadened in the relief of agreement, now and then, and now his lips lifted away from his big, uneven teeth and his mouth opened in a gesture of receptiveness, warm, encouraging. He and Shibalo held one another’s eyes for a few moments, drank the brandy, and felt the comfort and reassurance of an old complementary friendship. When Ida came back with the food they were loud in talk again.

“I don’t want blood! I don’t like blood!”

“… no, be honest, man — what’s the real reason? Why have you stayed with Congress, why have I stayed? No, it’s not because of non-violence—”

“I don’t want blood! I don’t like blood!” Sol got carefully out of his chair and took another brandy; this was one of the interjections he always murmured.

“We want guns, like everyone else. We’re prepared to fight with guns. We’re waiting here for guns, like manna from heaven. We’ve got round to feeling we can’t do anything without guns, isn’t that so? The only difference is that Congress doesn’t say this out loud, and the Africanists do.”

“Wait a moment, wait a sec … we don’t want to have to use guns, that’s the difference, but they don’t see any other way—”

“But we don’t see any other way, either, do we? Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been talking about all this time? We’re a banned organisation, man — you can get arrested tomorrow if you hold up your pants with a Congress badge.”

The young woman cut the bread and the meat. She did not take part in the talk, except to laugh occasionally, but she listened with the air of one who hears her own views expressed, and when she was in other company she always repeated what Shibalo said. She was a nurse, which, along with school-teaching and social welfare work, had been the ambition of most African girls with intelligence and drive above the average until a few years ago; now such girls wanted to be models or actresses. Influenced by them, she dressed in the latest fashion to filter down to mass-production, but had not straightened her hair and wore it grown long into a high bun on top of her head. There was no indication in her face of how old she might be; it was simply a statement of adult womanhood, that would last fresh and firm for a comfortable time. Shibalo had paid a lot of attention to her at a party one night, and then people had begun to ask them to parties together, as a couple. He was always affectionate with her at parties; there was something about her that fitted in with a light mood, that demanded that one should tease her about her gilt choker necklace and put one’s head on her shoulder after too many drinks. She knew that this display was misleading; they were not really a couple, that she could tell, though she had lived with him on and off for a year, and she did the things — like taking his washing away for him — that a casual bed-companion does not do, but that a woman does for her man.

“Ida — you want to sit here?” Sol made as if to get up when she brought him a plate of food. “Stay there, stay there—” she sat on the bed next to Shibalo. She felt very friendly and easy and fond, with Sol; to be one of them produced a welling-up in her, relaxing and secure. If they joked, she felt witty and lolled back on the bed; if they were at each other, hammer and tongs, she was excited; when they spoke of what she thought of as “taking over”, she felt an intoxicating superiority, the stiffness of face of one who has witnessed prophecy.

Sol was made slightly anxious by a certain shift in Shibalo’s thinking that he himself had not caught up with; this was how it occurred to him, but he was also aware that it might mean that Shibalo was moving off, abandoning a position that he, Sol, had thought was as immovable, for both of them, as the earth they stood on. He continued to argue disbelievingly: “You’re not serious about wondering why you’ve stayed with Congress? If you just like to talk, man, then it’s all right.”

Shibalo settled himself quietly and patiently. “I’m used to the people I work with. We’ve gone through a lot together — there’s this business of loyalty, eh?”

“Sure, sure.” Sol was warming, but wary.

“Right. But I didn’t begin to work with Congress as a friendship club, eh? I wanted to work to get things moving for us, eh? So why should I, or anyone else with an eye on the real objective, the only thing that counts, stick with any crowd if I see that some other crowd is getting something done? What does another name and another slogan mean to me? I’ve got no ambitions to climb up a party ladder, Sol. I just want to see the blacks stand up on their hind legs, that’s all. I don’t care if they give the thumbs-up or bow three times to the moon. The chaps in the street have got the right idea, man; I used to get wild when I’d see them join any campaign that looked like scaring the whites. If it was a Congress thing, yes, they were Congress men; if it was a PAC thing, yes, they were Africanists. But why not? I’m not sure I shouldn’t do the same thing.’

“Ah-h, you’re crazy,” Sol said disgustedly; his voice touched upon the idea again, the toe of a boot gingerly up-turning a dubious object. “What do you call that?”

“Guerilla politics, that’s what it is.”

“Again you talk as if there were no principles. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

Shibalo handed the brandy bottle to him. “Good God, Sol, no one’s going to care a damn for our principles in this business, in a hundred years’ time. They’ll simply write it down — they took control at such-and-such-date. They made a go of it, or they made a mess of it.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You used to go on about ends determining means, now you only scream for results. What about the difference in principles between the Africanists and us?”

“There isn’t any in the long run. There won’t be any. They want to get rid of the white man any way they can; Congress wants to submerge him in a non-racial state without cutting his throat first. The Africanists will find it necessary to hang on to the white man and employ him and his cash, Congress will find that he won’t come quietly. See?”

Sol began to laugh with savour at the neatness of it, and they laughed together. He felt that they had landed up side by side on the solid ground of accord, and said again, as they ate, “My God, it is something to feel the whole continent of them free up there — whenever I pick up the paper, man—”

But the death-embracing surrender of his will to paint had given Shibalo, in some unsought exchange, by a law of balance, a firm assurance and detachment in his approach to other things. He had gone through a form of submission so final that he could manage very well without illusions of any kind about the other circumstances of his life. He said serenely, “My brothers. My brothers. I’m not so sure about that.”

Later the two men went out to the house of a third friend. He was out, at the house of a fourth, and so they went on there. It was a night like others before and after, that ended neither late nor early, since no one thought of such conceptions; eventually, no one came in or out any more, and the last knot of talkers dissolved into the dark.

One evening some months later, when Ida was packing Shibalo’s dirty clothes into a department store paper carrier of the kind she carefully saved for this purpose, she found paint on a shirt. She said nothing; only wondered, in her practical way, how she would get it off.

Ten

In the Easter holidays, Shibalo was free all day. There was nowhere they could go together in town. Ann drove him out into the veld, kicking up a wake of dust in the face of the city where everyone was droning away at their jobs, and sending the little car scudding along the empty, week-day highways and lurching over dust roads and farm tracks. They never knew where they were making for, only what they were looking for, and if they saw a kloof, or the concentration of trees along a declivity that meant a hidden river, Ann found a way to it. They were safe from other picnickers during the week; only once a little troop of passing piccanins stood on the further bank of a river and looked with dull astonishment on the sight of a white girl and a black man eating together.

Ann was seized with the desire for water and grass and willow trees, sun and birds. She swam in the brown rivers, waving to him where he lay sipping beer; she emerged seal-wet and dried off in the warm smell of water-weed rising from her skin. She picked the fragile and sparse flowers of the tough veld with enthusiasm and then let them wither, and she brought a book with her that she never read. He watched her activities with the amusement of novelty. He was born in the townships and had never lived the traditional African life of raising crops and herding cattle, neither had he known the city white child’s attachment to a pastoral ancestry fostered from an early age by the traditional “treats” of picnics and camping. He belonged to town life in a way that no white man does in a country where it is any white man’s privilege to have the leisure and money to get out into the veld or down to the beaches. He could not swim, and felt no more urge to get into the water when she did than if she had had some special equipment for the environment — gills or fins — that he did not naturally possess.

Intense physical silences arose between them. Her smile, his lazy voice filled space no longer fretted and pressed in upon by the jostling of others outside the walls of the flat. The vision of each for the other was not broken up — like a pack of picture cards thumb-shuffled in quick succession — as it was in the clandestinity of the streets. And they had the touch of lordliness of people who are breaking the rules out of no stronger reason than mere inclination.

Yet even in the innocence of one of these Edens each retained something watchful of the other. When Boaz’s name came naturally into her conversation, neither paused; once when he mentioned something about his child, she betrayed no curiosity about the child’s mother, but only asked, with affectionate interest: “What’s he like?” The one time when each was not making an amused and attracted audience of the other was when they talked of the possibilities of his going to Europe to study and paint. The basis of an exciting sympathy between two people is often some obstacle that lies long-submerged in the life of one; he thinks he has accepted it until the resurrection of fresh feeling, the swaggering assertion of self, that comes with a love affair. She heard from him again and again, in the piece-meal way of such revelations, details of the story about the scholarship he had been unable to take up in Italy, because his record of political activity had prevented him from getting a passport. At the time he had turned his back on the alternative of signing away, on the exit permit that was offered him, his right to come home again. He had decided that he did not want to be a painter at the price of giving up his right to fight the system that demanded that price. He had made the decision long ago, in all the ways that a decision like that is made and ratified and accepted and forgotten — except by the one whose life is ringed by it as a tree is ringed, so that as time swells it must be taken into the flesh. He had talked it out in the fire of approval that warmed the group he worked with in politics. He had entered, through it, the solidarity of the wronged, with their pride in their formidability; he had been the cause célèbre, in demand at parties at the homes of leftist and liberal whites; he had boasted, drunk, when everyone was tired of him, and the others around him in the shebeen didn’t even know what he was talking about, of his defiant sacrifice. But lying with her head on his arm in a eucalyptus plantation while she described a life that might be possible for him in Italy or France, Greece, perhaps — he did not pay much attention to the geography, and she did not always identify the strange place-names — the whole balance of his existence seemed to fall on that side, and the weight of a struggle that was other people’s as well as his own did not count against it. He forgot he was an African, burdened, like a Jew, with his category of the chosen, and was aware only of himself as a man who was one of those who, even if they are only drawing pictures on the pavement, choose for themselves.

The eucalyptus plantation was not more than twenty minutes from town; it belonged to one of the dying gold-mines near Johannesburg. Ann was sure they couldn’t be seen there, though, leaning on her elbow, she could see men cross the veld from the shafthead not far away. The little old houses of the white married quarters near by were not lived in. She got up and began to pick the narrow leaves from her dress. “This is a good place to dump a body,” she said, with a laugh. “You know. You see those photographs on the front page with an arrow next to a tree — that’s where it was found after a three-day search.”

The dry, clean smell of the eucalyptus was strong; under the trees it was cool as menthol, in the hot sun it had the live fragrance of burning wood. There was no stir in the air but the leaves moved silently in the evaporation of heat as if unseen insects clambered among them. A dove throbbed regularly in the heart of the manmade wood. The city was so near they might have put out a hand and touched it.

“Do you think you are the kind that gets murdered?” he said proudly.

“… Nobody ever thinks they’re the kind. Who does get murdered anyway?” She appealed to him when she talked; he challenged her — that was their game of communication. Her eyes were lazily following the blanketed figure of a man on the veld path; he bent to pick up something, probably a safety pin he had dropped, and then took off the blanket, cast it out round himself, and secured it closely under his neck. They were both watching him now, and they laughed. “That’ll keep out the cold.” “He’s come up off shift,” Shibalo said. “It’s dark and wet down under the ground and now he’s going back to the compound for his phuthu and his nyama.”

“I wonder where he comes from,” she said. “These mines are worked out, or just about. We came this way one day when I first arrived — with the Stilwells and everybody. We saw them dancing at one of these mines.” The man walked on, unaware of their eyes on him, and disappeared out of sight round the yellow pyramid of a mine dump.

“People get murdered for money,” he said, lying back. “Where I come from it’s money. And women get murdered by men,” he added.

She looked at him, and smiled, and gave a brief toss of her head, to settle her hair and liven the angle of her neck.

Presently she came over and squatted beside him as if she were making herself comfortable at a fire, and said, “Boaz is coming home soon.”

“Wasn’t he home last weekend?”

“I mean he’s coming home to stay. For a while.”

“Your husband is your affair,” he said, stroking her ankle.

She liked to be free, but not as free as that. She smiled brilliantly and her forehead reddened. “I know,” she said, with an uprush of confidence and gaiety. Then suddenly: “Let’s go and buy lunch at Baumann’s Drift Hotel.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sure that would be lovely.”

“Why not? I mean it. I can go in and tell them I want lunch packed up to eat on the road, and a bottle of wine.”

“You can send the boy in to get it,” he said, grinning.

“That’s right.”

They got into the car and drove off over the veld to the track; the man they had seen, or another in a blanket like his, was sitting on an old oil drum, smoking a pipe. He was talking to another man who still wore his tin helmet and yellow oilskins from underground, and as the two looked up, unhurriedly and incuriously as the car brushed them, Shibalo slowed down and hailed them. They were suspicious and startled, and then their faces opened in delight. Whatever it was that he said seemed to shock them and make them laugh; they called back after him, still laughing. Ann was excited by the ease of this communication. “How did you know they’d understand?” “I talked to them in Shangaan. It’s the first language I ever spoke, up at my grandfather’s place. I could see they were Shangaans, they’re chaps from Moçambique. They were very polite.” “Did you see, the one had clay ringlets in his hair,” she said, her eyes shining. “Of course, that’s the right thing for a young man.” He was laughing with her, in a kind of pride.

They stopped just off the main road to eat the lunch they got from the hotel, and sat under a tree where any passing motorist who looked twice might see them. Neither mentioned the dangerous carelessness of this, or suggested that they might be more discreet. Ann met with the insolence of disregard the outraged curiosity of a woman who kept her face lingeringly turned toward them from a car window; she must have drawn her companion’s attention to the sight, for the car faltered before taking up the speed of its approach again.

That evening, on the way home from a party, some white friends that they were with tried to get Gideon into a night-club with them. Someone’s brother was a member and had a bottle there, and there was a black cabaret act: these were the grounds on which, rather drunk, the party thought they would bluff their way into admittance. The story was that Gideon was a singer himself and brother of the leader of the act. “He’ll sing for you, you’ll see”—the amiable insistence of one of the young white men produced in the manager, who had been summoned to deal with the crisis, the special shrewd sternness, the clench-teeth lunatic tact, of the man who smiles in the patron face all his life and loathes and despises it. The party stood round him in the dim entrance among gilt mirrors, cigar smoke and muffled music; their appearance, the pretty, animated women, the authoritative, light-hearted air of the men, was like a distressing caricature of the scene inside, where such people were being subserviently tended, and where drunken whimsicality, fumbling sex, and argumentativeness, were respectfully condoned.

“You’ll understand, Mr. Solvesen, sir, I can’t do it. I’d lose my licence. I dare not even let the artists sit down at a table after they’ve been on.” The man’s eyes were dead with rage against these arrogant young fools who pretended not to know the vast difference between natives employed to serve or entertain and some educated black bastard sitting himself down, like one of themselves, among the members. He wanted to throw them out, but a long discipline of sycophancy held him back: he had an idea that although the brother was an insignificant member he had been introduced by and sometimes was in the party of a wealthy and important financier.

Ann, who was leaning amiably against the red velvet wall and pinching the plastic laurels of a fake Caesar on a cardboard pillar, said, “Oh, poor little man, let’s leave him alone.”

The group left quite calmly, exchanging private jokes. The girl who had spoken was good-looking, sure of herself; could one understand them? Suddenly, for no reason at all, the man in evening dress felt like a lackey — but of course, a black man was good enough for them to laugh with and slap on the back.

Boaz came home at the weekend again; he had been moving about as much as he could in the Eastern and Northern Transvaal, but the summer — the rainy season — was not a good time for field-work, and at the beginning of April he meant to come home finally to prepare for a long field-trip during the dry winter months. He brought a bottle of aquavit with him, and although it was still warm enough to sit on the old verandah in the evening, he and Ann and the Stilwells drank it instead of their usual gin or beer. Two small glassfuls each produced that stoking-up of social responses that the neat liquor of cold countries is famous for, and by the time the servant Agatha called them to dinner they were ready to open a big flask of chianti that was being saved for a special occasion, and to make a banquet out of the stew. Jessie felt too lazy and disinclined to absent herself from the others to put the little girls to bed, and they ran in and out as they pleased, left out of, but nevertheless infected by, the grown-ups’ mood. Only Morgan, who had arrived from his farm holiday the day before, remained unaffected. “Give him a glass of wine,” Jessie said. But he did not want it. “For God’s sake, you’re old enough now,” she said. “It’s wasted on me,” he said, with a smile. “I don’t like the taste.” He was innocent of the despising look she rested on him. He was going back to school in the morning. His hair was sunburned along the hairline and shone phosphorescent there; brown skin made his face more definitive but his voice was finally breaking and the awkward uncertainty of its pitch seemed cruelly appropriate to him. He made her restless, like a piece of furniture that never looks right in any room. The conversation was lively with anecdote and mimicry and the broad verbal gestures of vigorous people among their own kind. The atmosphere was not cosy, stressing the relationships of the four men and women to each other, but independent: each individual enjoying the licence of an adulthood that had no rules except those of personal idiosyncrasy. Morgan sat quiet, as the bewildered will; he thought that he could think of nothing to say, but the fact was that he had nothing to say in the context of talk that, as usual among grown-ups at home, ran counter to the tenets of adulthood that they taught him. In order to qualify as an adult (they said) one had to be kind, controlled and respectful of human dignity. Yet they criticised their friends and the people they worked with, laughed and shouted each other down, and referred with veiled bawdy cynicism to love. He was afraid to admit to himself that the rules they thrust on him were merely some kind of convenience, some kind of fraud by devaluation; and he had no way of knowing the inner disciplines by which they lived.

He admired and was amused by his mother, as, bare-footed and flushed-faced, she cha-cha-cha-ed round the table with Boaz, between the stew and the fruit salad, or, with narrow eyes and a challenging grimace, forgot her food and waited to make a point. He was afraid to show his pleasure; he knew it so quickly grew into the pawing attention that irritated everyone.

All Jessie’s animation, that evening, was for Morgan. She was conscious of a picture of herself, as a woman is conscious of a picture of herself for the eyes of a lover.

When the Stilwells had gone upstairs to bed Boaz and his wife hung about a little longer. Boaz had the true scholar’s tendency to turn furtively, as to a secret assignation, to his work, to “finger it over”, as Jessie had once described it, after any sort of break from it. Quite naturally, for him, the boisterous evening ended in a quiet hour of the night when he might as well play over a few of the new tapes he had made in the bush. He went upstairs to fetch the portable player. Jessie, coming from the bathroom, said “I’ve left the alka-seltzer out.” They both thought of something they had been laughing over earlier and burst out laughing. Tom called from the bedroom “Good night”, and Boaz said, “I’m going to have a little music first.”

In the living-room, Ann lay on the divan watching him come in and said, automatically, “We ought to go up.” But she did not move, except to roll over on her stomach and rest on her elbows. Drumming and nasal humming began to come from the player, and she swayed and began to fit the words of a jazz-jargon song to it. “That’s it, that’s it,” he grinned as he went through a box of tapes. The tape in the player snapped and at once he was busy, exasperated and absorbed. When it was fixed, and the music began again, he said: “Come on?”

She had begun to examine her finger-nails; again and again she pushed down the surrounding skin and looked at her hands. She was frowning in deep concentration, the concentration of keeping something out, rather than in, but one of the penultimate ripples of drunkenness reached her and suddenly she rested her outstretched chin on her hands and flung her head back, smiling brilliantly, sleepily, uncontrollably.

“Isn’t this a good one?”

“So tender! What is it?”

“Makhweyana bow accompaniment. Zulu woman. It shouldn’t be on this tape, with that other snake-charmer thing, but I was short.”

“Gorgeous!” she said again, as a particular phrase in the song was repeated.

“Pasty-face,” he said. It was an overture of affection, to show he noticed her. In the generous outpouring of trivial intimacies when they first fell in love, she had told him how this had been a hated nick-name at her first school. He used it whenever he wanted to tell her he found her beautiful.

She did not attempt to brush the acknowledgement aside; as always, the temptation to accept it overcame her; denial would have been guile: the acceptance was innocent.

The mood between them was affectionate, and the mood of the evening behind them was one that suggested that men and women were neither good nor bad, happy nor unhappy, but taking pleasure here, suffering there, as they tried to live; rash, occasionally exalted, often funny. To be human was to bear with one another through all this. He was looking for another tape that he particularly wanted to play to her and telling her how he had come to make the recording, when she said, with obstinacy and even a little humour: “You know, this business of going about with Gideon Shibalo. I’ve been having a sort of”—she did not pause, but interrupted herself with a quick lurching sigh—“love affair.”

The second sentence was something she forced herself to say, for herself. He knew the moment she said Shibalo’s name; she saw it at once in the slackening of muscular tension in the line of his neck from ear to shirt collar. His ears went scarlet, like a girl’s. She watched these things although she didn’t want to. Boaz had a waxen, oriental skin in which the blood never showed unless he cut himself.

She spoke again before he could say anything. “Did you have any idea?” At the dinner table, she had told — very well — the story of the incident at the night-club. Now she tried to let herself off lightly by believing that she had really confessed then, in a way, in a general context of the culpability of experience.

He was frowning, to ask for time; he stayed her. He said, above some tumult, “You’ve made love to Shibalo?”

“I’ve told you.”

There was a silence; the first real silence of their lives together. She was sober, but the ultimate ripple of the wine’s tide just touched her, once more. Without meaning to, she made the funny, doleful smile, lips pursed down at the corners, eyebrows wide, that she used to draw his attention to, and make mock excuse for, some trivial blunder when she was doing drawings for him.

He smiled slightly, slowly, fascinatedly; it was as if she had done it on purpose, to play with him, to demonstrate a power over him, and from that moment she did begin to feel power.

He came and stood above her. He faced her without weapons and in an honesty as different from her own as his conception of work was different from hers. “What’s it all about, though?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. She spoke the truth, for her.

“It’s just one of these things that happen. Before you realise it …” She was ready to embroider, to invent, now, but he stopped her by squatting on the floor beside the divan and putting his hand in a sort of muffling caress over her face. “Poor Pasty-face.”

She sat up, offended. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you.”

“I mean don’t you believe about him and me?”

She felt that it was her eyes that made him walk about the room; they did not follow him so much as propel him.

“Yes, but you don’t know what it’s all about. You don’t tell me it’s because he talks to you, or because you admire him, or because he’s great in bed, or because you wanted to try a black man — I mean, it’s like a child picking daisies …” He was patient but distressed, and she was alert to the feeling that the distress was a moral one that by-passed her. Like many people who do not mean to wound but want merely to draw attention to themselves, she found it might be necessary to make her mark draw blood.

“Why should the reason matter?” she said, smiling at him. The unspoken “to you” stopped him as if she herself had risen from the divan and stood squarely in his way. How could she force him to say, in the debased verbal currency of the film close-up, do you still love me? Don’t you love me any more? The cat’s whine repelled him. He tried, in the moment, in his mind, to jumble the mumbo-jumbo so as to get sense and reality out of it: Is it me you still love or is it because you don’t love me — the worn units were idiotically unusable.

They talked a little while longer, but as though musing gently on something that had come upon them without volition — the inexplicable behaviour of friends, or a venture that had gone wrong through outside circumstances. “I suppose I ought to have come with you more.” “Nonsense. You can’t run away from these things.”

“Have you really never wanted to make love to anyone else since we’ve been living together?”

“I don’t think so. Oh, perhaps once—”

“Viveca, that time at Ellman’s?”

“Yes, well, she hadn’t changed a bit, she was as crazy as she used to be—” But it was still only just after midnight; the night stretched long as soon as their voices gave way to the creaks that went over their heads as the house eased itself.

They went upstairs with loosely linked hands. Castaways thrown together on the unfamiliar island, they moved about the room with a show of being at home, secretly watching each other. He never had asked her if she was still in love with him. Lying in bed she felt a lust like sudden generosity toward him, and longed to touch him.

Yet in the morning, when the whole business hung in wait with the smell of last night’s drinking in the house, and he asked, “Are you going to see Shibalo this week?” she wrapped the hair-combings from her brush round her finger and said, “I suppose so.”

Ten days later Boaz came home. There were sheafs of notes, drawings and photographs in the bedroom, and instruments and various African cooking utensils (these had nothing to do with his studies, but he picked them up anyway) littered the upstairs landing. He was in the house surrounded by these things all day and would have come downstairs perhaps only to the smell of dinner, in the evening, if someone had not broken in upon him from time to time. One of the children would stump slowly up the stairs, sent to say that lunch was ready, if he wanted some. Agatha would shout up the well, “Telephone for Baas Davis!”

Jessie appeared with a bottle of beer wearing a glass over its neck. “Still in a muck. How long is it going to take you to struggle out of this? I’d almost forgotten your existence.” “Oh, I’ve only started unpacking. Wait till I start editing my tapes; all sorts of horrible noises — you’ll remember I’m around then, all right.” He pushed at the papers before him with a gesture of washing his hands of them. He wore an old pullover as if he didn’t know that it was an exceptionally hot day, for April, outside. The beer seemed like an offering for an invalid. He took it from her and, fishing with one foot for his sandals under a chair, said, “You know about it, of course.”

“Yes.” Jessie stood blinking slowly, wary.

“What’s he like?”

“I like him,” she said.

He smiled. “That’s all right, you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I thought everything was fine with you two. Of course it may still be, you know. It may sound a vulgar way of putting it, to you, but these things blow over. You forget about them if you live together long enough.”

“Three years.”

She said encouragingly, “Not a bad basis. The trouble is that one always begins to think one owns a person. If you really could, you wouldn’t want them any more. I don’t think that’s bitchiness or neurotic; it comes from the destruction of polarity, and the tension of attraction that goes with it. Well, sex — love, whatever — apart, you have to let the other person live as he must. I don’t know why we always talk about power as if it were something generated by and operating only in politics. It’s a ghastly thing to resist taking hold of, anywhere. Oh I’m scared of it,” she shrugged in distaste, “and I’m always fondling it, like a dirty habit.”

They laughed, and went down to lunch. Tom was home, too, and the talk was of other things, not as if Shibalo did not exist, but in acceptance of the fact that he did, indeed. It could not be expected that the whole household should be stirred by his existence; Tom, Jessie, Elisabeth, Madge, Clem — Boaz had the pull of other lives about him, and felt comforted, and lonely.

The life of the house seemed to go on as usual for the next few weeks. The situation became, astonishingly, as impossible situations often do, part of the everyday comings and goings of eight people. The coarse, elastic fibres of being, that sustained so much, matted in the new tension.

Ann left the house, alone, three or four nights a week, and was often out all day. When she was at home she helped Boaz assiduously with his work, and would come swiftly downstairs every now and then, full of enthusiasm: “Look at this! Boaz copied it himself, made it himself from reeds. Look, he had to find the right grasses to bind it together, and everything!” Sometimes, when they were all in one room, she would seem to put herself apart from them — Boaz, Tom, Jessie — abandoning her usual way of lounging or squatting where she alighted, and holding her profile clear. Whenever she came upon Jessie in any part of the house she would take the initiative of a big, blazing smile — though, as Jessie remarked to Tom, “… I’m not going to ask her anything, for heaven’s sake.”

The Stilwells supposed the affair was tailing off, in the civilised way. There were two ways such adventures died, once they weren’t going to bring about a divorce: one, the primitive catharsis, with tears, threats of suicide, and a highly emotional reconciliation; two, the civilised way, with three-cornered talks, plenty of drinks, and an exaggerated courtesy. The Stilwells had heard Shibalo’s voice upstairs one afternoon; he was being shown Boaz’s collection of new instruments. Soon all three of them, Boaz, Ann and Shibalo, came down, and Shibalo stayed to dinner. He was charming, rather like a visiting celebrity determined to be natural.

Eleven

Every day when Ann went to meet Gideon she held in her mind a frame of awareness that might fall into place and mark it as the last time. There did not need to be an event or a decision, merely the word or the look, the turn of mood that would give the affair its meaning and the grounds for its destruction contained within the meaning. She neither dreaded this nor was curious about it, but it lent intensity to the inanimate witnesses of her movements — the grain of tables that she scratched with a fingernail as she talked to Shibalo, the colour and heat-tacky texture of the plastic covering on which she sat alone in the car waiting for him at mid-day. People’s faces she scarcely saw, for she was aware only, in the house, of what they might be thinking of her: a scribble of fears and impulses scratched them out, like the faces in the children’s picture-books that she saw lying about upstairs.

She could not stop seeing Gideon simply because Boaz was home; it had never occurred to her that she might not stop whenever she felt like it, but after she had told Boaz that night, she knew that this was not so simple: if she gave up seeing Gideon because Boaz had come home, it followed that she had begun a love affair with him only because Boaz was away.

The day after she had talked to Boaz, Gideon saw her standing on the balcony of the flat watching him as he came up the road. She stood there with her arms open, hands resting on the balcony rail, and he could feel her attention on him long before he could make out her face clearly. She smiled suddenly as her face came within distance of recognition, and turned and went into the flat, leaving a single trail of cigarette smoke moving gently, like a water-weed, in the air where she had stood. He hurried instinctively. In the flat she had arranged flowers that she had brought; she must have been there some time, but she wore a coat, as if she did not intend to stay. The coat came to his eye and suddenly created the status of a past tense between himself and this woman; how many times had he seen it, flung on the back seat of the car, hanging from her shoulders with the sleeves empty! He had slept with it rolled up under his head, under the blue gums. He said to her once, “Your coat’ll get dirty,” and she said, “That old thing — nothing harms it.” It had been to Norway and Turkey and Italy, this coat, that was shabby-smart and designed to make a girl like her look lost and in need of no home.

“Where’re you off to?”

“Nowhere.” She stood in the middle of the room.

He came over to her kidding, tenderly, lingeringly, “I ought to paint you in that coat. Trench warfare.” He touched the belt, fiddled with the buttons and slid his hand down into hers. They began to kiss; when she felt him about to release her she held him and when he felt her about to draw away he enticed her closer. “You’ll find another model,” she said. “What about a picnicker — wha’d’you-call-it, an open-air companion.” “That too, I suppose.”

The game of renunciation began. In it they felt the parenthetic closeness of two people who have shared an experience outside the separate involvement of each in his own background. The Stilwell house, that held every vibration of her voice and laugh, and had seen her every gesture, did not know her as she had her being among the objects and with the person in the flat. Like two men who have been stationed together in some foreign region, or a pair of children who return to family meals from an imaginary country, there was an existence in which they knew life and each other as nobody closer to them did. It became a refuge, too; doubts and decisions did not operate there, any more than public notices specifying enchanted circles which a black foot might not enter. As soon as she sat smoking in one of the chairs belonging to the two young advertising men she had seen only twice, and following, now with her eyes, now with the sense of an intensely-known presence, Gideon as he moved about the room, Boaz’s “What is it all about?” was dislodged and fell harmless.

She said, “I want you to come to the house. Meet Boaz.”

They were eating grapes, sitting in the car. He threw a couple into his mouth, ate them slowly, and spat the pips out of the window. She had no idea what he would say. Their relationship was a pure one, without questions or importuning. “If you think he would want to.”

“He’s nice,” she said. “It seems idiotic. I mean, we always both know people—” She spoke as if the affair had already died and become a friendship; while she was speaking she believed that, from that moment, it really had.

He did not know if what she said implied that her husband was used to her making love to other men; he felt himself, as he occasionally was, lost in this particular world, like a foreigner who speaks the language perfectly but is sometimes floored by some esoteric colloquialism. He was off-hand: “All right.”

She said no more about it, though several times she talked of Boaz when they were together, held him off at arm’s length and considered him. She seemed touchy that Gideon Shibalo should appreciate Boaz. The references, the anecdotes were not ones that reflected the personal relationship between Boaz and herself, but showed him, a figure on the horizon, against an impersonal light. Once Gideon was describing an acquaintance who had a special kind of perception: “He’ll see you walk in the door and he’ll know at once you haven’t eaten yet today and are not up to much. Or he’ll catch on from something you let slip without knowing it that you’re about to lose your job. He smells you out and then uses what he’s found out … Not always to do you any actual harm … but to make you feel afraid of yourself …”

She agreed about the existence of such people and remarked, a footnote in the flitting silence before they turned to something else, “Now someone like Boaz is just the opposite, you know.” She paused. “Just the opposite. He’s always amazed when you point out some weak spot in a person. He’s very self-absorbed, in a way, and he treats everyone as if they have the same standards and so on as he has himself. You can see a mile off that someone’s lying, or a perfect mouse, but he’ll treat them as if important work can be expected of them at any moment. Sometimes it’s just funny, of course, but at other times it’s wonderful. He never exposes people.”

One afternoon after they had had lunch together at the Lucky Star she began to drive across town in the direction of the Stilwells’ house. “Where’re you going?” “Home,” she said. “Drop me off somewhere?” “Come in for a bit.” She had the faraway look that seemed the nearest she ever got to depression; in the Lucky Star she had sat quietly, smoking, her hand secretly covering his every now and then to exclude him from the distance she kept from the rest of the room. Once at the house, she was cheerful and humorously at ease; how beautiful she looked, clipping across the floor in her high heels, the slim strong tendon to which her ankle narrowed at the back hollowed away on either side. There was no getting away from it, no black girl ever had ankles quite like that.

He had not given it a thought that the husband might be there, but when, after they had had the inevitable cup of tea and listened to a new record that Tom Stilwell had left in the living-room, she said, “Come up with me to see what Boaz is doing,” he felt no nervousness but a calm amiability to match hers. They went upstairs, talking. She was breathy, hospitable: “Mind your step there. Jessie’s children take a delight in creating hazards on the stairs. Oh, just look at this a minute — this is a wonderful timbila Boaz found, we’re trying to fix it—” They were standing on the landing, looking into a half-unwrapped parcel of sacking and newspapers, when Clem and a grubby friend appeared in one doorway and Boaz came along the passage from the bathroom. “Boaz, this is Gid,” said Ann. “Are you busy or can I bring him in to look at a few things?” Boaz had rigged up a darkroom in the bathroom, and his hands were full of wet prints pegged to a string. “Come in; let me get rid of these …”

Boaz had the great advantage of being on his own ground; the room, that Gideon had seen once before, briefly, was filled with the authority of work; the bed, the personal possessions and clothes scattered about were no more important than a few human necessities set up in the corner of a laboratory. Boaz pointed out various instruments, drawing attention, with the diffident modesty of a particular pride, to those he knew to be treasures. “This is quite interesting. The only thing I’ve ever seen at all related to it comes from Bangui, what used to be French Equatorial Africa … and this I think may be the only one left of its kind — beautiful, eh? It makes a mewing sound, rather disappointing after you’ve looked at it.” He paused and said half-questioningly, half taking it for granted, “I don’t know whether this sort of stuff means anything to you.” “Ah, it’s all Greek to me,” Gideon reassured him and laughed. “I remember a bit of tissue paper over a comb, at school. The kids hadn’t even begun the penny whistle craze in those days.” “Didn’t you have an old grandmother who sang you an old African song occasionally?” Boaz could not resist a flicker of professional interest. “No, no. I’m afraid not. I was brought up by an aunt, she was great on hymns.” Ann gave her usual performance, calling, “Wait, I can play this,” and determinedly producing a note blown out slowly as the thick bubble of a glass-blower. She drew them together in amusement, watching her. Boaz said, “But seriously, it’s quite amazing, you know. She’s intensely musical. She can sing almost anything. I mean, in African music the melodic patterns differ from area to area, according to the tone pattern of each tribe’s language — but she can sing accurately a song composed in any melodic pattern. And with wind instruments — a shipalapala, kwatha, anything like that — she controls her breath like an experienced trombone player!” They got down to the principles of construction of a group of instruments: Gideon challenged some of their features—“Why that bit of wood there? Seems crazy — why not the other way round?” and Boaz took the harp apart and, surrounded by bits of it, on the floor, demonstrated—“You’re way out. They know what they’re doing — you see, that conducts the vibration from the strings into here — like that. And if you put it anywhere else at all — see? It’s the principle of sympathetic resonation.” He looked up, intent and smiling. There was the atmosphere almost of gaiety that came of a new presence among extraordinary things that were familiar to the Davises. Ann, achieving a perfect balance between the two men, had a weightless freedom; she hummed, touched this and that, made a remark that brought the attention of both of them finely to her, like the eyes of runners breasting the tape — and came not so much as a feather’s breath down on the one side or the other. After perhaps half an hour, the three of them came downstairs, and, finding the Stilwells, joined them for drinks.

For Ann, all that was necessary would have been over, now; but Gideon hung on in some sort of perversity or fascination, and then it was dinner, and of course he stayed. As the room upstairs had been, another cell of the house was roused to the hum of company. Tom and Jessie not only seemed determined to take Gideon as just another guest who had dropped in — they appeared actually to regard him as one. He and Boaz were at the centre of the talk, all through dinner. Ann knew that Boaz was impressed with him; with Gideon and Boaz both at the table with her, she was expansively charming to everyone.

“Is it a fossil you’re preserving, or is it something living, that’s what I’m asking,” Gideon said, of Boaz’s studies in music.

“Both,” said Boaz, with a look that suggested this must be self-evident for two people like themselves. “The instruments will disappear altogether very soon. But the impulse to make music won’t die.”

“But can the drums and flutes and xylophones provide a tradition for chaps who’re now going to be playing the piano and the trumpet muffled with a tin pot — all right, then, say even the violin or the organ. You come to Schoenberg via Bach and those boys; can an African arrive at the same point straight from the talking drums and the rain-making dance played on an ox-horn covered with python skin and strung with monkey-guts?”

Jessie and Tom and Ann laughed, but Boaz was excited: “Now you’re getting to it. Once an African acquires all that the white civilisations have learnt about music, can he make use of a tradition that had not reached the same culmination, and perhaps was reaching in another direction?”

As usual, Gideon moved the food about his plate without eating it. He leaned back against his chair with a cigarette burning down in his hand and said, “The whites took away the African past; once we accepted the present from them, that was that.”

“The past is accomplished, living in your bones, you can’t lose it,” Tom said.

“No, you must lose it. When we accepted the white man’s present, of industrialisation and mechanised living, we took on his future at the same time — I mean, we began to go wherever it is he’s going. And our past has no continuation with this. So it is lost. For all practical purposes it is lost. I don’t know if perhaps a musician or a writer or somebody might be able to make use of it still. And, of course, though you can sign on for somebody else’s future, you can’t share their past; that’s why we haven’t got one.” He seemed to be showing off a little now, but merely to divert. He looked down over the slope of his slouched body like a man who exhibits a stump where an arm or leg should be. “That’s what’s wrong with us.”

Jessie was suddenly listening, as if she had been absent from the company and had returned, but before she could speak, Tom said “Peoples have survived a break with tradition before,” and Boaz said “What if the break had come from within?”

“It always comes from there! Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?” Jessie called to Gideon. But he seemed to move a step out of their claims on him every time; he murmured, “Christ came from inside. Yes. I suppose you could say that. I don’t know whether something like that would have happened to us. If we hadn’t signed up.”

He had never talked with Ann as he was talking that evening. Her impression of his presence came, not direct from himself, but as made by him upon the others. The least self-esteem demanded was a jealous, immediate assumption of the new valuation of him she saw in them. She was goaded to possessive pride in an aspect of the man, and therefore her association with him, she had been innocent of; she could not admit that while they found these things at once she had missed or ignored them.

She began to see something that it might be “all about”.

When she sat beside him in the car, now, she was aware of her distinction from the white faces passing in the street. They merged into a white blur, down there. Gideon became a black man to her; the black man that everyone pushed away, and that she, she, put her hand out and touched.

Twelve

The willows out in the veld where Ann and Gideon had picnicked a few weeks before were yellowing, but the garden was still dark and heavy. The tide of green had risen and risen with each rain; new growth overlapped old, the grass stood thick and soft. All around and overhead the leaves, layer on layer, shadow on shadow, swag on swag and tier on tier, were holed and lacy with the feasting of insects. Jessie sat reading, in the afternoons, among the remains of the banquet.

Recently she had begun reading again as she had done when she was seventeen or eighteen and it was possible for a particular book to influence her as the mind of no person she knew in the flesh could. The opening of a window or the snatch of some weird music from the house behind her kept her reminded, on the surface, where awareness of environment is automatically recorded, like a message taken in one’s absence, that Boaz was usually at home when she was. She felt not curiosity, but a shrinking away from what might be going on in him; she wanted to be left alone to no demands but her own. This adventure of Boaz’s wife would work itself out between them like so many others; since she (Jessie) was fond of him, she was slightly ashamed to find how now, once he knew, she felt herself disengaged from friendly involvement. She had been mixed up so many times with friends whose marriages or love affairs went awry because of another man or woman; the situation between Boaz and Ann was the same as the others — except that Gideon Shibalo was black, of course. That was the only difference. It was a difference that she assumed had very little significance for people like themselves — the Stilwells and Davises. It did mean that there was some element of calculable danger in the whole business for Ann, she supposed — making love to Shibalo was breaking the law — as against the incalculable dangers of pain and disruption present in every love affair.

But Boaz came down sometimes for a breath of air and his casual yet intimate presence, stretched on the grass beside her, or leaning forward in one of the old deck-chairs he had dragged up, brought them to the point when naturalness made it necessary to talk about Ann. Jessie did not ask him what was happening, but felt obliged, out of the only politeness she cared for, to acknowledge the subject of his silences. They were talking of Fuecht’s house at the sea; Jessie said, with the open-eyed assertion that was directed against Tom’s unexplained resistance to the place, “We can’t afford to turn up our noses at a free holiday. As I remember it, it was miles up the beach, which is nice. But it may be more built-up along there now, I don’t know; my stepfather had it let permanently for years, we were never offered it.”

“You want to go next month, you said?”

“If Tom definitely makes up his mind he won’t go in July. Are you going to Moçambique?”

He said, in an ordinary voice, frowning at her, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Is she not going to go with you?”

They looked at each other. “I haven’t asked her.” He added: “It may sound mad.”

“Oh no.”

“I don’t want to force her to decide. — Anything.”

“Yes?” Jessie spoke with her hand over her mouth.

“I’ve got to wait to see how she feels. I’d expect her to do the same for me, as long as she was interested enough. — I am,” he added.

“Well, that’s fine. It makes me sick when everybody’s playing. People show off so much in love affairs. You know, Boaz, I sometimes get afraid that everything we think of as love — even sex — is nearly always power instead. You know what I mean? Most of the time people don’t really want each other, they only want not to let go.”

He smiled. “Well, how are you to know?”

“Oh I know — you don’t. Certainly not when you’re in it. But so much of your life goes in this business of sex and love. It’s horrible to think that you may find that love wasn’t in it at all. You’ve just been manoeuvring. Like a pile of crocodiles on a mud-bank. Feel the sun and simply climb up on top of one another to find yourself no nearer to it when you get there.”

He was listening to her with the mixture of wariness and curiosity with which people see through a crack into another’s wilderness. But his whole being was tethered to the thought of Ann, himself and Shibalo, and he felt always the tug on his attention, pulling him back to it. Jessie said, and was ashamed of the obviousness, the lack of real concern, in the suggestion, “You don’t think that she wants you to kick up a hell of a row? Some women want to be beaten.”

“Ann’s not the sort who gets her kicks out of punishment. She’s a tremendously happy, pleasure-finding person. You know how she is.”

“I don’t know her at all,” said Jessie. “That’s it.”

“She can’t bear threats or rows. She knows nothing about the joys of crawling on your stomach and feeling remorse. She hates all that slimy stuff. Oh, you know how she is.”

Jessie kept smiling and shaking her head.

After a while he stood up, the movement bringing the grass around his feet alive with minute hoppers that exactly matched its brilliant green. He looked up at the house and at the sky, his long eyes shown by the unconfined light to be green, like black water where the sun strikes deep. The sky gave his face a blind look. He said under it, trying to see, “I ought to go to Moçambique. There’s that grant, you know; it’s practically sure I’m getting it.” She said, “Perhaps you can go a bit later. I don’t know … perhaps you ought to go anyway.”

“He’s an interesting chap. Hell of a lot going on there, I felt. He talks a lot and so on, but he’s really alive in secret behind that cover activity.” He drew them back to the evening a week ago.

“I like him,” Jessie said, meaning that she had admitted this before.

“Exactly. Not the sort of person you’d choose to play the fool with. Too vulnerable. You’d think twice.”

He went into the house and left her. His cigarette ceased to smoke in the sappy, succulent grass, but she saw him, his olive tan faded, with so much indoor work, to that smooth oriental pallor, his sallow hands and bare feet showing that hollow beside the tendon of each finger or toe that gives an impression of nervous energy. How bungling this beauty was, his and Ann’s, that had brought them senselessly together and given them the appearance of happiness in each other, both to themselves and onlookers. Take away the running blood, the saliva, the animation of breath, let the beauty harden into its prototypes, and even this would be found something they did not have in common, but that was diverse in the kind of consciousness that shaped it. He was opaque, his expression and posture the Bodhisattva’s outward cast of an inward discipline. She was one of those clay figures made by the Etruscans, grinning even from the gravestone.

Jessie began to write a letter to Morgan. She had brought a pad and a ball-pen out with her book, but had not used them. She wrote quickly now, tearing off one sheet after another, and looking up from time to time with her mouth parted. A barbet somewhere in the garden went off continuously like a muffled alarm clock. The afternoon was borne away steadily in the sound. She felt it going, left the letter for a moment, and when she looked back at the pages covered with the thinly-inked pattern made by the bad pen, suddenly thought: who is this for? It was one of those incoherent letters that, when you get one, causes you to remark that so-and-so seems to be in a queer state. So-and-so has not been censored by the usual wish to amuse or impress, to give a certain idea of himself.

“… little girls are always over at Peggy’s. I have the place to myself, except for Boaz, up in his room working. Everything disappears. It’s like it was when I was at home in Bruno’s house waiting to begin an imaginary life. I don’t seem to have had a second in between when I wasn’t completely concentrated on some person, blind, deaf, and busy. You remember those silk-worms, their jaws never stopped and if you were absolutely quiet in the room you could actually hear them going at it? — To have been so hungry, and not to have known why.”

“But then they were full, and suddenly knew how to spin silk.”

It would be idiotic to send it to Morgan; a nervous, hostile embarrassment came over her — it was a grown-up’s letter. She closed her fist on the sheets, squeezing them into a ball. They lay slowly opening on the grass while she dashed off the kind of note, full of studied friendly interest, that she sent to him every few weeks.

The children came home, and then Tom. “Why doesn’t Josias cut the grass?” The sun had gone down and the swells of growth made gentle troughs of shadow. Jessie answered as if to some criticism of one of her children, “It’ll be brown underneath. It’s nice.” “Yes, of course it would be brown, it’s been allowed to grow much too long.”

Madge edged herself on to her mother’s chair, pressing against her thigh. “State your case,” Jessie said, and smiled. “Oh Mummy…” the child scowled at her impatiently.

“I got good seats for Friday.”

“How many did you take?” A trio from Brazil was to play at the university hall, and Jessie wondered whether Boaz might not want to go too.

“Well, I took three … I didn’t think she’d be coming. But I suppose it looks funny not to ask.” Tom looked doubtfully at Jessie.

She smiled intimately, parenthetically. “She’ll probably be there with Shibalo.”

“I know. That’s what I thought.”

He squeezed her hand. Jessie turfed Madge off her chair like a bird pushing its fledgling out of a nest.

“We’d better not ask him to come?”

She murmured, “Difficult. Don’t know.”

She added, speaking low because although it was out of hearing the window was up there in the house behind them: “He really does seem to like Shibalo. You know how it is when the man really likes the other one. Everybody being so considerate, and no hard feelings. My heart sinks. It’d be much easier if he thought he was a louse and wanted to kick him in the backside.”

“Well of course that’s impossible this time.”

“Only because Boaz is so fastidious about everybody’s feelings, and wants her back a hundred-per-cent off her own bat! No coercion whatsoever, like a unicorn that you have to wait to have come and put its head down in your lap. It’s a lovely idea, it’s how it ought to be …”

“No, I mean because this is not a white man.”

Jessie shook her hand out of his and sat forward. “What has that got to do with it?”

“A lot. Quite a lot.”

“If you’d said that it had a lot to do with Ann I’d understand it. She wants to prove she can do exactly what she likes! She wants — well, then I’d understand it. From her point of view the whole thing has everything to do with his being a black! But Boaz, Boaz—? You know that Boaz truly never thinks about these things, he has no feeling about it at all, you’ve told me yourself that he was once keen on a black girl, he’s slept with black women—”

“Yes, yes—” Tom said for her in conclusion. “And Boaz cannot kick a black man in the backside.”

Jessie began to speak but she saw the expression on his face change to acknowledge another presence and realised that Boaz had come out of the house. The Stilwells tried to treat him without any obvious special consideration these days, but a certain concerned brusqueness sometimes crept into their manner. “I met John Renishaw today, he wants to know when you’re going to see him,” Tom said as Boaz came up.

“Christ, I want to know too. I promised weeks ago.”

“Well, you better do something about it, because he’s going to Cape Town for six weeks. — Hey, what have you got there—”

Clem and Elisabeth had smoothed out the sheets of Jessie’s crumpled letter and folded them into shapes that would hold water. “Water-bombs! Water-bombs!” Elisabeth shrieked and boasted, throwing hers, that she had filled at the garden tap.

“Don’t leave the water running,” said Jessie, in a voice of patient repetition.

“They’ve used some letter of yours!” Tom’s voice rose.

“I know. I’d thrown it away, anyway.”

“Why on earth …” He looked at her with amused, slightly aggressive curiosity.

“It was wrong.” She waved a hand to dismiss it.

While she returned to what she had been saying to Boaz, Tom glanced at the wet paper-shape covered with words running into each other. “Who was it to?”

“—Morgan—” she said in quick parenthesis.

“Why on earth write a long letter to Morgan and then throw it away.”

She looked at him for a moment to make him see that he was putting her to the trouble of providing an answer. “Haven’t you ever written a letter that had to be torn up?”

“But to Morgan?”

“Why not?” said Boaz.

Jessie smiled to discount his objection and opened her hands and clapped them loosely together before her again in indication of her own crazy lapse.

“You do that with love letters,” Tom said. “Write them and tear them up and write them again. What was it all about, though?”

“Oh nothing. Nothing for Morgan. Nothing that would interest him, that’s all.”

“But what was it about?” Tom was encouraging, cornering her.

“Well, if you really want to know.” Her face was a mixture of annoyance and the reluctant pleasure of giving oneself away. She said matter-of-factly, as if repeating something that she had heard or read, “I was just thinking how sex fills one’s life for so many years. Sex in its various aspects, I mean; looking for men, securing to yourself the chosen one, seeing children as the manifestation of the bond. It’s only when and if you’ve fulfilled all this that you begin to ask the purpose of it all—for yourself, not the biological one — and to want an answer with a new kind of passion.”

What she had just been saying brought her into two separate streams of unspoken communication with the two men. Boaz recognised the mood of what she had said when they were talking alone together earlier, and it sprang alive in silent reference between them. Between her husband and her were the tremendous attempts at knowing each how the other lived, and the knowledge that the measure in which these failed or succeeded is never known. “That wouldn’t be the accepted idea of fulfilment, simply a making-room for another want,” Tom said.

Sometimes they were all at home at this time of day, even Ann. She would hear the Stilwells’ talk as the Stilwells heard the children’s — half-listening, preoccupied. What were they saying? Always the same sort of thing; a drain was blocked, someone must take the car for servicing, who would pick up Clem from her swimming class, and had the renewal of the newspaper subscriptions been remembered? The enduring surface of marriage seemed to be made up of such things; they had little meaning, no interest, and they matted together as monotonously as a piece of basket-work. Her eyes rested often on Boaz. She liked him. They had always managed almost entirely without any paraphernalia to hold them up. She wondered if, in fact, he really liked living like that. It might have been to please her. She thought, with resentment making a quick fist inside her again, he would do almost anything to please her, but he could ask, as if prompted by the knowledge of some inadequacy in her that he did not admit, “Do you know what it’s all about?”

Gideon was doing a tremendous painting of her. It was larger than life and the incised line along the solid brushstrokes released the figure from the flat background. She kept going back to look at it while she was in the room with it, not as a woman admires herself in a flattering portrait, but in an excitable and terrifying curiosity: there was no surface likeness to provide reassurance; she knew it was the likeness of what he found her to be.

She had an awareness of him as a single creature unrelated to any other. She did not know his parents or his brothers and sisters, who might have shown less attractively the looks and movements she thought of as his alone, neither did she know his real friends (Len, she suspected, did not count as one), who might have exhibited views and opinions that, although she thought them entirely his own, in fact he shared with others.

She brought this awareness of the man she had just left into the company of the Stilwells and Boaz as unthinkingly as a dancer carries her posture from the rehearsal that has occupied her afternoon. They chatted as they had always done, sometimes joking, sometimes silent, often interrupted by children, now and then rising to an argument, or getting into a discussion. She was reassured, not only for herself, but also, oddly, for them all, by the ease with which she could resume her place among them. It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down, rather drunk, among the press at a party.

She was hardly aware of how she was going or what direction she was taking. The only conception she had of her life at that time came one evening when they were sitting outside after the sun went down. With her head tipped back over the hard rail of the chair she saw the upstairs windows of the house, open to the sky, space shading off into the high, last light. All the meaning of the almost-past summer gathered for her in the vision of Jessie’s old house — ugly old house — as it was this evening and had been so many evenings, with the windows open like hands and a first bat fluttering without sound, wandering and rising. None of the others saw the creature; it was only the acute angle at which she had let her head fall back that let her see it. It was in the air above them all, soft, deaf, remote, steered by warnings and attractions they lacked a sense to apprehend.

Boaz said to the Stilwells, “If I go to Moçambique, you don’t mind if she stays on here?”

“Naturally. If she doesn’t go with you.” There was a pause after Jessie spoke. “I must get started sometime,” Boaz said. “My whole organisation up there’ll break down if I don’t.”

Tom said, “And anything can happen — there could be a political blow-up at any time, you might not be able to get in.”

Behind this sensible talk the Stilwells saw that Boaz no longer assumed that the house was also Ann’s home whether he was there or not: it sounded as if he were already considering her life as separate from his own.

But he said, “If I’m not here, there’s no one who can do anything for her. At least if she’s living here she’s got some sort of a base …?” He added, “Without being unfair to Gideon Shibalo, he can’t actually look after her much.”

Jessie was not looking at him; she had her left elbow supported in her right hand, the left hand covering her face below the nostrils. He said to them, almost exasperated, with a little laugh, “I can’t say anything to him. And I can’t just leave her to it. Not really. I want to let her do what she has to, I mean she’s free to live her own way … but I can’t leave her to it — as things are.”

Tom’s father was spending a week in the house and Jessie went now to give him some newspaper cuttings on indigenous bulbs that she had kept for him. He had just come in from the garden, an old man whose weakening eyes always had happy tears in them, and he was full of pained shock over the condition of the rose bushes, the enjoyable shock of one eager to prescribe—“My dear, I find it difficult to credit … just shreds of leaf, shreds. What you want is to go out there of an evening with an ordinary bowl of water and a strong torch. You’ll attract those beetles in hundreds, simply fall in and get drowned, that’s all.”

“Really, Dad? Will they?” It was true that Gideon had nowhere to take Ann to.

“… done it time out of number. An ordinary mixing basin will do …”

Where did he come from, when he was not living secretly at that flat? Somewhere there was a wife, children, old friends, a kinship — a man’s life couldn’t be lived by permission in the hours when someone else didn’t need a flat.

“… when I was a boy, it was a paraffin flare. Tom’s got a strong torch, of course?”

“Oh I think so. Clem’s got one. From last Christmas — if it’s not broken.” They couldn’t go away together. He couldn’t keep her; not on an African schoolteacher’s earnings. Did it ever come to that? Jessie thought of the other white girl she knew who had fallen in love with an African; the girl had kept him, and saved the money to get them both to Ghana or Nigeria or somewhere. Shibalo, for all his talent, no matter what he was, was on the receiving side, and the receiving side was always at a disadvantage.

“A tin basin will do.”

She turned her attention to the old man with a special softening of desire to please, because she had not been listening to him. He seemed to her, as the old often do to the young, endearingly innocent. Children were supposed to be, but she seldom found them so. There was Morgan, apparently born with all kinds of terrible knowledge. What she thought of as innocence was the lack of evidence, in another, of the things she mistrusted in herself.

Gideon came to the house with Ann on Saturday afternoon. He brought sketches he had done of the children, from memory. He gave them in a negligent, off-hand way, but Jessie thought that they were purposely “interesting”. She felt sorry for him for the necessity he felt to try to put in a word for himself with her by flattery, even so obliquely. Again he stayed for dinner — or rather for a cold supper, for that was what it was. Old Mr. Stilwell had never mixed with black people socially in his own life, but he understood that his son “looked at things differently”, as he put it, and was rather proud of the open house kept by his son. He liked to shock acquaintances of his own kind and generation by swanking about the way he often sat down to dinner there, without blinking an eyelid, between black guests. In fact, the only black guest he had ever met there before was Len. Len was present again, and called him “sir” in the way that he liked young men to do. The old man lived alone and was excited by the company of young people and children, the wave of life caught him up roughly again. Laughter, raised voices, interruptions, things begun and not finished, things that never got said: this was the way it was; only when one was alone and it was over did the sentences get completed and end in silence.

His second gin (he had two every evening) warmed the impulse that is always there — to explain to the one in whose presence you have been silent all your life what you really have been thinking all the time. It was not truthful, but was simply the impulse made audible in phrases that would hold it harmlessly. He had cornered Gideon, and was saying with some of the charm he must have had when he was young, “I’ve always had a lot of respect for your people. And I’ve always found them show respect in return.” Later he became bolder, and more consciously candid: “After all, it’s nonsense to talk of marrying and all that — politicians’ scare-stories, I tell people. I’m sure none of us thinks of that. But you can’t tell me there’s any good reason why you and I shouldn’t be having a chat together in a drawing-room if the mood takes us.” Gideon listened to him with carefully narrowed attention: his head inclined as if he must be sure to be wily enough to miss no word of a daring and debatable argument. Tom said between closed teeth, “Oh Christ.” But Len, who got up to renew the old gentleman’s drink, was almost primly reproachful—“He’s a sweet old man”—and a spirit of outrageous undercurrent amusement suddenly took over the company. They drank quite a lot and the need to be tactful disappeared. Jessie no longer felt it necessary to bother whether, if Boaz found himself at one end of the table, while it had somehow come out that Gideon was sitting next to Ann at the other, it would look ominous or odd. Boaz and Ann, reminded by a turn of the talk of some old private joke, caught each other’s eyes and giggled.

“We never going to see you down at the office again?” Len said, turning to Ann. When he met her nowadays, he talked to other people, as if the two of them had quarrelled. He bore the slight that, so far as she was concerned, nothing had changed, she felt no less interested in him than she had ever done.

“Lennie, I’d love to get started on something. What’s new there for us?”

He looked pleased in spite of himself. “Always new. You’re a damned good unpaid worker, but like all people who don’t get paid you’re unreliable. Disappear in the middle of things, man.”

Her indignation was flirtatious. “I like that! There wasn’t a school or a hall within seventy miles we didn’t lug that caravan to.”

“Won’t you give me my job back?” Jessie called out. “As a paid worker, needless to say. I think I’ll leave the mortuary at the end of this month, I can’t stick it any longer.”

“It’s not our policy to employ whites where blacks will do.”

“Ha-ha. Don’t we know it; unless they’re unpaid and unreliable, eh?”

“Are you really giving up?” Boaz said to Jessie.

“Oh I must. I’m sick of the dying rich. Trouble is, what to do. The Agency job really did suit me down to the ground, you know. Useful, gregarious in a surface sort of way. Anonymous.”

“Work for me. I mean it,” said Boaz. “My things are in a hell of a mess. I must get someone to catalogue and type notes and so on.”

“Oh no,” she laughed and drew back, vehement. She sawed away at the leg of lamb with a rather blunt knife, while he went on, “Personal, convenient, learn in your own home. Write now for illustrated booklet.” She laughed but she felt in herself the symptom of a disease she had feared and forgotten, the set of opposition she had discovered nearly a year ago, when she and Tom first discussed the possibility of having the Davises to live in the house. It was just what she had been afraid of — the presence of strangers was influencing the way they lived, turning them to distractions that required the posturing that another pair of eyes on oneself demands. The Davises were drawing everyone into their own charged air; the whole house was the way things looked within such an atmosphere. Now came the suggestion that she should work with him, put herself in danger of assuming jealous concern for his research, of standing in a comradely working alliance with him as Ann was not. They would end up going to bed together, maybe? She felt a wild and stirring indignation, a struggle for life. No, no, she wanted to say to him, it would be too nice, it would be too convenient, it would be the end of me.

She did say, with the rudeness of fear, “I don’t want to be private secretary in my own house, Boaz old dear.”

“Len, I suspect you’ve got your shoes off under the table.” Tom was referring to a report in the morning paper that Rhodesian Africans had started a campaign to give up wearing shoes because “that was the custom before the white man came”.

“Why stop at shoes? My ancestors didn’t wear trousers either.” He buttered a piece of bread as if it were the object of bored distaste.

“That’s why I don’t understand politics,” Jessie said. “They never function at my level. Whatever goes on is either rigged by big money and diplomats or clowned about in the streets. Nothing in between seems to work.”

Ann pretended to lift up the cloth: “And he’s got knobbly toes, into the bargain!”

“Shaka’s warriors certainly wore sandals,” said Tom. “I don’t know about any others — Boaz? What d’you say?”

Gideon’s voice, once he had begun to speak, went on through interruptions without emphasis and with an indifference to whether it was lost or not. “People must have something, something not hard, that anyone can do. It may be meaningless (“Not meaningless, this,” Boaz said) but that doesn’t matter much. Take off your shoes. You don’t have to be able to understand what goes on at a meeting. You don’t have to read about it. You don’t have to pay two and six membership. Useless, harmless, but you feel you’re doing something.”

“It’s not harmless,” Boaz said across the voice.

“Take off your shoes. People can afford it. You don’t ask too much of them. You hold them together.”

“Whenever you talk about people — the people — I have the feeling I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Len said to Gideon. “You don’t mean yourself, do you?”

“Can’t ask them all the time to trust you, trust you. Let them have something they can do by themselves. Even if it’s meaningless and harmless.”

“No, you never mean yourself.”

Boaz leaned out across the table like the figure-head of a ship, his clear-cut lips shining wet from the gulp of wine he had just taken. “Not harmless. You know that. You know quite well what it is.”

“Take off your shoes.” The voice said it to himself, for the sound of it.

“Oh yes, not harmless at all. Exactly the same meaning as burning down a church or a school or a clinic or a cinema.”

“Take off your shoes.” Gideon smiled at no one in particular, then gave his little chuckle, and fixed his consciousness of the room on Boaz, like a drunk choosing a point of focus. He said, suddenly, “An act of pure rejection.”

“Exactly.”

His cigarette was burning down in the crumbled bread on his plate and he picked it up, saw that it was almost dead, and brought himself back to the company with an effort. “Beautiful, stripped, pure—” The words were unsheathed, one by one, like a man giving up knives.

“A pure rejection.”

The phrase held for a second; and then all the talk round the table piled upon it and buried it. “Not harmless to the people who do it, I mean; I’m not talking of the act itself—” “An anomalous glorification of the past, qua past …” “Damned silly to identify …” “More than that, dangerous, you can’t substitute magic for political power …” “… step out of his shoes and out of his power, I suppose.” Everyone said what he always said, in one form or another, in every context, seizing automatically on what there was in the subject for them. For Tom it was institutions — the difficulty, for new, intensely nationalistic black states, of finding institutions of law, commerce, education other than those associated with former subservience. For Jessie it was the notion that people could externalise an influence by making some common object of use symbolic of it, and then getting rid of the object. Ann argued with Len about what the others were saying, and Boaz and Gideon tried to analyse how far it was possible for a political movement to rule with and not become ruled by the release of irrational instincts. “Of course it’s dangerous, but what can we do in Africa? — colonialism was dangerous for the whites, it couldn’t last without a pay-off coming sixty years or so later, but what could they do? We can’t look much further than getting what we want—” No one had noticed that the old man, Tom’s father, sitting at table, had become congealed in expression and posture as if, while all around him was noise, agitation and mobility, he would never move again. Tom took him quietly out of the room and murmured to Jessie as he came back and swung a leg over his chair to sit again, “Just one gin too many, I think — he’s lying down.”

Len caught the domestic aside. “Passed out? Hell, he’s a nice old man.”

When Gideon had gone home (in Ann’s car) and everyone was on the way to bed, Boaz came down again to the living-room, where Tom was making notes for a lecture he was supposed to give at a discussion club the next week. They sloshed brandy into two glasses that already had been used and began, at first deliberately, then carried away by real interest, a long discussion about a book on Chinese navigation pre-dating the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Jessie banged with a shoe on the floor overhead; they laughed, so loudly that she banged again. With the drop of their voices, the talk lost momentum. Boaz yawned until he looked quite groggy; he wandered about the room and paused, and wandered again. His face shone waxy and his eyes were hidden like a clown’s in the diamond-shaped darkness made by the recess of shadow under each eyebrow and the triangle of plum-coloured skin cutting down the line of cheekbone from beneath.

“One thing I can’t stand,” he said, “the way he repeats a phrase or a sentence as if he gets some meaning out of it no one else does. That sort of withdrawal … You know what I mean — he makes you wait for him to return before you can go on with what you’re trying to say.” The moment he allowed himself to speak of Gideon, the brandy he had been drinking without apparent effect took hold of him like an arm hooked roughly round his neck. “If you knew the insane things that’ve been going on … the whole of tonight … ‘black bastard’ … Over and over again, to myself, while I was talking … like a maniac? ‘Black bastard’. All that filthy cock, man.”

He stretched himself on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

Thirteen

Gideon Shibalo got a message one day to go and see Sandile Makhawula at his shop. Sandile was his brother-in-law and they had remained friendly through Gideon’s long drift apart from his wife; in fact, all that was left of an old feeling and an old way of life was the uncomplicated ease Gideon felt on those occasional evenings when he remembered Sandile and dropped in on him. Sandile was light-skinned, rather an ugly yellow-brown, with narrow, tight-skinned eyes that added to his slightly Chinese look. He shaved his forearms and, resting on the counter in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, their smoothness, through which the roots of hairs showed dark like faults under tinted glass, betrayed a secret vanity. It was the sort of thing one could not guess at, so little did it match the rest of his character. The shop belonged to the father of the woman he had married; it had always sold sugar and mealie-meal and the cheaper brands of tinned food, as well as sweets and cigarettes and cold drinks — he had branched out into a radio repair business on the side. “Look at it,” he would say, indicating the old-fashioned wooden counter, worn away on top like a butcher’s block, the one small glass showcase filled with biscuits, cigarettes, cards of watch-straps, cotton reels and dead flies, and the valves and wires of dismantled radio sets lying among spiked slips of paper and tins of snuff. “I’m trying to make a go of it …” He made fun of his own ambitions to run the place like a shop in town, yet he went on doggedly, persuading the old man to get a modern cash register one year, taking another year to get him to allow the fly-embossed Zam-buk advertisements to be taken down and replaced with three dimensional displays showing hair-straighteners and deodorants. He would have a house in Dube one day — like all the other well-off shopkeepers, Gideon used to tease him. “Well, maybe; what else is there for me?”

He held Gideon in the special regard that people have for those who are free of their own ambitions; when he was with Gideon he felt that he himself was not entirely sold to and bound over by the goals set up for him and his kind. The fact that Gideon had slipped the moorings of his sister added to rather than detracted from this feeling of releaseful identification with Gideon, though Sandile had quite a strong family affection for her.

Gideon did not know when exactly Sandile had mentioned that he wanted to see him; he was very seldom in the township these days, and he merely happened to hear, from a casual encounter, that Sandile had been asking for him; at least two weeks went by before he remembered about it again, and called in at the shop. It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, and knee-deep in children; everything they had been sent to buy went up on to their heads: bags of mealie-meal, beer-bottles filled with milk. The thin little necks of the girls wobbled once as the burden was settled into place. “Dumela ‘me.” Gideon pushed his way through gossiping women, and the fat ones smiled at him while the thin ones merely looked interrupted. Sandile was serving a sullen man in a leather cap with ear-flaps; the face was the thick, deadened face, greasy with drink-sweat, work-sweat, that you saw all over the townships. Sandile gave a little signal acknowledging Gideon, and when he was free for a moment called over, “You see how it is … come in.” He meant into the tiny store-room, a home-made lean-to strengthened like a fortress, at the back of the shop.

Sandile scattered the children — importuning him with their demands for “Penny Elvies” (sweets named for the American rock-and-roll singer) or “Penny atcha”, an Indian pickle — by an exclamation ending in a loud click of the tongue at the back of the throat. They swerved away like hens.

“The happy capitalist, the exploiter of the people,” said Sandile. “Christ, man, this goes on until seven tonight.”

“How’s business?”

“Ach, I want to knock out the wall, re-do the whole place, make it self-service; you know — little gate you turn round to go in, plastic basket to select what you want, little gate to go out. But you’d have to frisk them first, that’s the trouble. Turn them upside-down and shake them out. Specially the old ones with the big bozies; you’d be surprised what goes in in front there. Last week the wholesaler comes along with a lovely display card with razor blades. ‘Why don’t you put this up, it increases sales twenty-five per cent, we’ve proved it.’ —Our people are backward, man, everything’s got to be where they can’t even stretch for it.”

“Come out for a drink,” said Gideon, consolingly.

Sandile took a cigarette from him and sat down on a packing-case, leaving a broken-backed kitchen chair for him. “How the hell can I? The old man’s gone to fix up about his cousin’s funeral.”

“Where’s Bella?” Sandile’s wife was a district nurse, working for the municipal health department, but on Saturdays she was usually free to help in the shop.

“The baby kept her up all night. Have a cold drink?”

“Coffee, that’d be fine.”

Sandile looked put out for just a second, then called to the shop. A very black youth with an open mouth and eyes that reflected the lean-to like convex mirrors brought an open packet of coffee-and-chicory mixture with a brand-picture of a house in the form of a steaming coffee-pot. This house was clearer to Gideon than the memory of any of the rooms he had ever lived in; how many times as a child had he been sent to buy that packet with the coffee-pot house on it. Clara (his wife) had still used it, in the house in Orlando. Callie Stow ground her own beans, and at the flat there was always instant coffee of some special bitter kind; for years now he had been drinking the coffee that white people drank. The sight of the packet with the picture gave him the sensation of looking at an old photograph.

“Half Nyasa,” Sandile said, of the youth. He was pumping a primus. “At least that’s my explanation. Dumb as he’s black, that’s all I can tell you. Don’t you know somebody for me? They can’t even measure out a shilling sugar without spilling. You could start operations for the recovery of waste sugar on this damned floor.” He stopped pumping and pointed in exasperation to the cracks in the floor-boards where, it was true, there was a dirty glitter, like mica. Suddenly he grew ashamed of his preoccupation with what — switching to objectivity, as he could — he thought to be the petty matters of shop-keeping.

“So they’re thinking seriously about taking up this rent campaign?” he said. “Bella’s got an old aunt and she’s fallen months behind and been given eviction papers, and — yesterday it was — someone came from Congress and had a talk with her.”

They talked politics for a while. The water boiled and Sandile made coffee. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you’d come in sometime,” he said, spooning sugar into Gideon’s cup.

“Hi, hi—” Gideon restrained him.

“All right, I’ll take it.” He poured another cup and Gideon sugared it for himself. “I’ve been asking for you, but you haven’t been around. Nobody’s seen you.”

“No, I know, I bumped into K. D. and he told me.” Sandile often had small plans or deals that involved Gideon — he had got Gideon’s record player cheaply for him, through one of the wholesalers, and he and Gideon borrowed odd sums of money from each other from time to time. This was the sort of thing they saw each other about. While Gideon put the cup of coffee to his mouth, Sandile said, “Clara was here. She was up here last week and she was talking to me a long time, and, well, she wants to come back to Jo’burg. It seems so, yes.” He was watching Gideon, embarrassed, yet alertly anxious, as if he hoped to disclaim responsibility for what he might have said.

Gideon had just filled his mouth with the warm liquid and for the moment the impact of its taste, flooding his body, produced by far the stronger reaction. What is the word for nostalgia without the sentiment and the pleasure nostalgia implies? The flavour set in motion exactly that old level of consciousness where, in the house of the old aunt with whom he had been farmed out as a schoolboy, matriculation was drawn like the line of the horizon round the ball of existence; where, later, in the two neat rooms in Orlando, he had paid off a kitchen dresser and drawn “native studies” on cheap scarves for a city curio shop. Threshing, sinking, sickening — the sensation produced by the taste became comprehension of what Sandile was saying. He put down the cup. “What about her job?”

Sandile shrugged and slowly took the plastic spoon out of the sugar; the damp brown stuff moved like a live mass.

“I don’t see the sense,” said Gideon, with the face of a man discussing the fate of a stranger.

“Well, she wants to come.”

“To you?” Gideon said.

Sandile looked at him.

“It’s not possible. Anything else is not possible. It’s absolutely out, that I can tell you.”

Sandile did not answer. Gideon wanted to get him to speak because he could not bear to have the matter, even in the abstract of words, thrust upon himself.

“Bella knows that little girl — from the hospital, of course. She thought it was more or less off with you two, lately. She’s seen her with another chap, and so on.” Sandile took a deep breath and stopped.

Gideon felt himself drawing further away every second; the cosy store-room with its high barred window, the deal table and the primus, the smell of paraffin and strong soap, the familiar face of Sandile and the taste of the coffee — a hundred doors were closing in him against these things.

“Right out, I can tell you.” He wanted to say, “It’s all finished with, years ago,” but he felt a horror of admitting that there was anything to talk of about himself and the woman who had been his wife. He said, “I haven’t even sent money for the child — not since about last January.”

“I know. I’ve been letting her have something.”

Gideon nodded. Sandile had never paid him the last hundred pounds for the car; it was fair enough.

Gideon didn’t know how to go, but he could not stay, so he stood up, and looked without seeing round the lean-to. “So long, Sandile.”

Sandile remained sitting, holding a stub of cigarette turned inward to his palm.

“That’s all,” said Gideon.

“O.K.,” said Sandile in deep uncertainty.

The living presence of his wife, in another town, had never influenced Gideon; he felt neither tied to her nor free of her: she was a curiously negative factor. It did not seem at all odd that he occasionally spoke about his child, as if the boy belonged to him alone. Clara had been young and pretty, and it had been all right for a year or two, while she was a school-teacher’s wife. Like most African wives, she stayed at home when he went out at night. She was proud that he could paint a bit and pleased that this sometimes brought in some extra money.

She would have been satisfied to see him go on painting scarves for the white shop in town, all his life; at least that was what he told himself when he began to find that he couldn’t talk to her on Sundays, when they were at home together. She looked at his paintings, when he really was beginning to paint, as the wife of a gangster might look at the guns and knives present in the house. She cared only for prettiness, for the little sweetnesses and frills that clerks acquire to soften the rough chunk of the labourer’s life. She was only concerned with covering ugliness and did not know the possibility of beauty. In three years he had outgrown her as inevitably as a child outgrows its clothes. Every time he looked back at her, she was lagging a little further behind. When he thought he was going away on the scholarship, it was natural that she should go to live in Bloemfontein with her mother and sister for the year that he would be away. Then had come the lengthy passport trouble, the postponement of the scholarship, the final refusal of the passport, and the months when he was mostly drunk and had no job. She had stayed on and on with her family, and she had quite a good job in a small factory. He and she simply lost sight of one another.

As he walked out of the shop and along the streets of Alexandra, the naked-bottomed children, the skeletal dogs, the young girls in nylon and the old women who shuffled along under the weight of great buttocks, the decaying rubbish in the streets, the patched and pocked houses, the bicycles shaking as if they would fall apart, the debased attempts at smartening up some hovels that made them look more sordid than those that were left to their rotting drabness — everything around him spoke of her. It was the ambition of her life to be clean and decent, yet this squalor thrust her existence upon him. Isolation rose higher in him every minute, a drug beginning to take effect at the extremities; it was his defence, but it was also alarming. From it he saw, fascinated, that she did not think it impossible to regard as “husband” a man she had lost touch with three years ago; she accepted what any housegirl or cook accepted — that a black woman cannot expect to live permanently with her man and children; she must shift about and live where and how poverty and powerlessness allow. He might have been an indentured labourer, away from home for long periods out of necessity. Three years’ absence had no significance for her so far as the validity of marriage was concerned.

He tried on himself some specific moment of her existence — licking her lips before she spoke, fastening a wide shiny belt round her middle — as a tongue goes to test the sensitivity of a tooth. She could have been one of the women passing him in the street. He was approaching the row of Indian shops at the top of the township, now, and there were some pretty ones about, girls coming from or going to the bus terminus. He saw the thickness of their calves and ankles, the selfconsciousness of their plastic smartness. He had in his mind, mixed with the shapes and colours, the coming together of objects and movement that was always working towards the moment when he began to paint — the thin wrists and ankles, the careless style of Ann. Little breasts of a woman who bore no children. Flat belly with the point of each hip-bone holding a skirt taut. Soft thin hands smelling of cigarette smoke. “What’ll we do today?” A woman without woman’s work or woman’s ambitions. The idea of her possessed his imagination entirely, so that when he went into a shop to buy cigarettes he unconsciously adopted the manner that came naturally to her, of assuming without offence that she must have what she wanted before anyone else’s claims of time or precedence.

There had been days, lately, when he had left the flat, the Stilwell house — all of them in the city, and their life there — with an almost gleeful sense of escape. He left them and plunged back where they couldn’t find him, couldn’t follow, didn’t know the internecine life of his home, the townships. All ambiguities fell away there, while he drank with Sol. They were never free, now, of him. The Stilwell house was grouped invisibly round him as an empty chair at a dinner table affects the seating of those present. But he could disappear where there was no trace of their existence, in the places to which they had banished his kind.

He turned back from the shops down one of the dirt streets. An orange-seller sat beside a bright pyramid, paring the hide of a horny big toe. Gideon walked past him and went to a yard he knew. He bought himself a brandy, but he spoke to no one and the usual talk of the other customers, of bribes to get houses, of how much a week went on hire purchase, of gambling, of police raids, of the man found murdered just near the bus sheds last night, did not draw him into its familiarity. He had meant to look in at his room, but he did not go there and took a bus to the city and went straight to the flat, where, taking on at once the automatic watchfulness that the city exacted from him as a presence that was perpetually clandestine, he went, hiding himself, up the back stairs and let himself in. When the door was safely locked behind him, he went into the living-room and sat smoking, in one of the big chairs. A knock came at the door but, as always when he was in the flat, officially there was nobody there to answer it. He heard the footsteps retreating down the corridor, and the sough of the lift dropping through the building. As he smoked he looked slowly round the objects in the room and, in the silence, a strange feeling came over his body: his skin contracted like the skin of water wrinkling under a shiver of wind.

The one place in which he felt in possession of himself was when he was in some small room with the men with whom he planned, argued, and several times had been in prison. They talked too much, they intrigued too much — these things he could criticise when he was away from them. But when he sat with them, again and again he was so much like them, so much one of them, that he was as guilty as they of the faults he criticised. Here he knew himself to be what Callie Stow had reminded him a black face didn’t necessarily make one — an African. Listening to Zeke Zwane who was pompous, or Mdaka Mkwambi who was long-winded, or Mabaso who was too cautious, or Dr Thabeng who saw himself as another Nkrumah, he was at peace, he was secure among the members of an outlawed organisation who themselves, as individuals, many of them, were banned from attending meetings anyway. Here there was no shade of ambiguity; he was a man who had given up the futility of a life of choice (oddly enough, he did not admit to himself that he was actually painting again; like his presence in the flat, the fact had no official existence) and accepted the one thing possible — struggle. The struggle of a beetle on its back, most of the time. Bungling, slow as history, muddled, impeded by ignorance, growing by fits and starts, crushed, unkillable — he belonged to it and whatever happened to it would happen to him.

Nguni was talking, in terms picked up from the liberation papers and news-sheets being printed all over the continent from Egypt to Cape Town, of “the weapon of withholding the people’s labour”.

They argued, as they had done since the failure of the last strike, to find out why it had failed. Everyone had a theory, something to fill the void of not knowing what to do next. Resolutions were approved to go from this, a special action committee, to the central committee of the national executive. Co-ordination, co-operation — all the big words flew about. People who had been lobbying watched those who had promised to back them up. The chap, Khoza, who thought slowly through a long discussion and then always came up with an objection just when the whole thing was threshed into agreement, began to talk. “I’d like to say one thing. We should put it to the national executive that we shouldn’t have a stay-at-home except in summer.”

Everyone ceased to listen the moment he opened his mouth. Someone gave a snorting laugh. Jackson Sijake, the lawyer, had professional attentiveness. “Yes? On what basis?”

“People need their pay more in winter. If a man loses a day’s money there’s no coal in the house, perhaps. It’s bad psychology.”

Thabeng flashed out at him, at everybody. “That’s something our people have got to learn. Man, you don’t get freedom from sitting over the fire, you can’t choose the weather the day you’re going to bring the country to a standstill.”

Gideon didn’t take Khoza seriously, but he put in, with his chuckle down in his chest, “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to plan a stay-at-home when it’s likely to be easier for us. Let’s think of everything, anything at all that will make the chances of success greater. But what we ought to do, man, is to concentrate on our organisation in small places. We must go all out to be active in the country, specially the Reef towns. It’s all too loose and patchy … complete stoppage here, everyone at work a few miles away. If you want to make a success you need months of preparation, getting people ready.”

“The most successful things have been things that have just come up — look at Kgosana’s march on Cape Town,” Nathan Xaba said. He had still the eyes of a countryman, intelligent, slow-blinking, as if he were looking into flames.

Sijake put his hand, with the thick linked watch-strap covering the wrist, palm down on his varnished chair-arm.

“That’s it. Enthusiasm, people get carried away, and then it’s gone. And what can happen to you as a result of a protest march? The leaders get arrested. Perhaps some of the crowd, too. But the rest go home, pleased with themselves. A strike calls for less excitement, more staying power, and your job at stake. That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on getting over to people.”

“You’ve forgotten that a march can end up with shooting,” Xaba said.

“Yes, with shooting. But when you’re dead you’re dead. You don’t have to think what’s going to happen to you next.”

Sijake was young and plump with a diaphragm that bulged his shirt-front over the belt of his trousers. He liked sports coats of hairy tweed, and his initials were embroidered, in tiny letters, unobtrusively, on his shirt-pocket. He had the authoritative manner that often goes with a smooth, square face. He had been, illegally, to Accra and to Cairo, and got back undetected. In prison he was the one who represented them all and prepared memoranda concerning their rights as prisoners, headed delegations to the governor, and primed them with answers for the Special Branch interrogations. He was constantly being arrested, between political imprisonments, for not having his identity or tax papers in order, for fast driving, and for breaking the banning order against his attendance at gatherings or travelling outside the area to which he was confined. He defended himself and was acquitted on one legal technicality or another, time and again. He and Gideon had done a lot of jobs together. With complicated arrangements that sometimes involved changes of borrowed cars from town to town they drove over the borders into Swaziland or Basutoland to visit people who were in exile since the last State of Emergency. Gideon was not under a territorial ban at present; Sijake said to him that night after the meeting, “You’ll be around in July, I hope?” He was referring to the school holidays.

The woman whose husband’s house they were in entered, looked at them as if she expected them to be gone, ignored their greeting and went out again. She was dressed in her day-clothes but her head was tied up for the night in a doek.

“Sure.”

“I think it would be a good thing if you went all over the Transvaal in that time — every dorp and little town. We’ll arrange contacts everywhere. Draw up a report on what they’re doing, how active branches, are and so on. Spend a few days wherever they need help with organising.” He added in English, “We’re lost in this rabbit burrow of underground, Boetie.”

Gideon had an impulse to give himself time by lying: “I don’t really know. I said something about doing some coaching. Indians whose kids are trying for matric.”

“We need someone to go, man, we need it.”

“I’ll let you know. I’ll find out what’s going on.”

There was a gleam on the bathroom floor that turned out to be a lipstick-case, and the dregs of red wine had dried sourly on glasses. “They must have had a party last night,” Ann said. “Were you there?”

“Looked in,” he said, without interest. “Their friends are not up to much.”

Although she liked the casualness with which he accepted the run of the flat, because that was just how she herself lived, there were times when he said something cold; a part of her held back for a moment from their presence together in the room and lagged shamefacedly towards some old loyalty. The two advertising men would have no idea that he dismissed them like that. The natural corollary to this thought — that he was living on them — did not come into it (she would have lived on anybody) but the hint that he exacted from them a price of their white privilege under the cover of friendship, set up a distant conditioned opposition.

She had introduced him to the idea of making his own frames for his paintings, because she thought the sort of thing the framers turned out imprisoned his work in something mass-produced and alien to it. Like Len before him, he was amused by the confident way she tackled obstacles: “How’re we going to make these corners right, they ought to be mortised or whatever it is.” “Ah, rubbish. That’s not necessary. There are all sorts of marvellous kinds of glue you can get. That stuff that little boys use — aeroplane glue. I’ll get it. The joins’ll be covered by the linen, anyway.”

They worked outside on the balcony, squatting on the floor, where the mess didn’t matter. He wore a blue and white Italian cotton shirt that she had bought him. She did not bother to paint her face and her grey eyes and thick eyebrows and lashes had the furry darkness of some creature surprised by daylight. They laughed and argued and got things wrong, lapsing into silences of fierce concentration. She broke finger-nails and every so often stopped to suck a finger that had got hurt. They tired and stopped to smoke, leaning against the balcony wall and hidden by it from everything but the living-room of the flat, and the sky. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be ready for a small exhibition — say, even by July. Eben Swart’s gallery would be good. Or the small one at Howe’s.”

“Wouldn’t have more than twenty pictures — counting the old ones that everyone’s seen too often.”

None of the seven or eight oils and numerous sketches he had done of her could be used; they smiled at each other at the thought of this. “Perhaps in another town,” she said. “On another planet,” he said. They continued to talk lazily of the chances of putting a worthwhile show together, and then, without any change of tone, he said, “I may not be here in July. Most likely not. Something I’ve got to do for Congress.”

She kept smiling at him, a dent between her eyebrows, her mouth pressed together as if she were sure he would go on to say something else. He said nothing and went on smoking.

“What sort of thing?”

He gestured, and the movement put the whole thing out of her ken, took him back to a place where she did not exist. “A lot of travelling about, talking and so on.”

“I’m supposed to go to Moçambique,” she said.

“Going to go?” His voice sounded hoarse with the effort at naturalness.

“Yes, I think I’ll go. Terrific trip.”

He put his hand on the flat of her waist, where her breath rose and fell evenly beneath her dress. He felt an immense pride in her beauty and her toughness. He was filled with arrogance about her. He lifted her pale face distorted between his hands, the lips showing a gleam of teeth, the eyes giving nothing away in their many-coloured mottling, their tinsel fragments imbedded in glassy shadow. She pushed up his loose-clinging shirt and rested her head on his bare chest. To him her eyes seemed closed, but she was gazing out of lowered lids at the smooth skin, hairless, contoured by ribs and muscle; the colour of aubergine, but there was no shine to it. She smoothed the ripple of a rib with one finger. She was ashamed to let him see something that troubled her lately when she was with him, though she forgot about it instantly they were not together: the dark positiveness of his skin, the mattness of it, the variations like markings shading one part of his body in difference from another — some nerve in her had become alive to it. She dwelt on it in secret as soon as she touched him.

She put out her tongue and passed it quick and hesitant where the skin slid over the rib. She was always afraid he would look her in the eyes and find her out. When he did see her her face was confused, open, something that had been there already breaking up, like a sky of merging and melting cloud. He saw there only what he was feeling himself, the irresolution and confusion that he felt between himself and the one thing that he had had proved to him, that he had decided on, finally, that lay at rock-bottom under all that now obliterated, now exposed it in his being: the validity of whatever he did with the group of men who met in the back rooms of shops and in other people’s houses. All warmth and truth was there; didn’t he know it? Away from that, cut off from it, when his life was over he would be a dead cat flung in the gutter. How could it become cloudy, receding? Something that didn’t strike him deep, where the will is? He lost himself, his confusion in the confusion of her face.