Life Times Stories Part 18

'And the other sides? Facing the house?' The young man looked over to his wife, whose feet were together under her long skirt, cup neatly balanced on her lap, and eyes on cup, inattentive; then he smiled to Mr and Mrs Naas. 'We don't want to live in the country and at the same time be disturbed by neighbours' noise.'

Naas laughed and put a hand on each knee, thrusting his head forward amiably; over the years he had developed gestures that marked each stage in the conclusion of a land deal, as each clause goes to comprise a contract.

'You won't hear nothing but the birds.'

On a Thursday afternoon Doctors Milton Caro, pathologist, Grahame Fraser-Smith, maxillo-facial surgeon, Arthur Methus, gynaecologist and Dolf van Gelder, orthopaedic surgeon, had an encounter on Houghton Golf Course. Doctors Caro, Fraser-Smith, Methus and van Gelder are all distinguished specialists in their fields, with degrees from universities abroad as well as at home, and they are not available to the sick at all hours and on all days, like any general pract.i.tioner. In fact, since so many of the younger medical specialists have emigrated to take up appointments in safer countries America, Canada, Australia patients sometimes have the embarra.s.sment of having recovered spontaneously before arriving for appointments that have to be booked a minimum of three months ahead. Others may have died; in which case, the ruling by the Medical a.s.sociation that appointments not kept will be charged for, is waived.

The doctors do not consult on Thursday afternoons. The foursome, long-standing members of the Houghton Club, has an almost equally long-standing arrangement to tee off at 2 p.m. (Caro and van Gelder also take long walks together, carrying stout sticks, on Sunday mornings. Van Gelder would like to make jogging a punishable offence, like drunken driving. He sees too many cases of attributable Achilles tendonitis, of chondromalacia patellae caused by repet.i.tive gliding of the patella over the femur, and, of course, of chronic strain of the ligaments, particularly in flat-footed patients.) On this particular afternoon Fraser-Smith and van Gelder were a strong partners.h.i.+p, and Methus was letting Caro down rather badly. It is this phenomenon of an erratic handicap that provides the pleasure mutually generated by the company. The style of their communication is banter; without error, there would be nothing to banter about. This Thursday the supreme opportunity arose because it was not Methus, in his ham-handed phase, who sent a ball way off into a grove of trees, but Fraser-Smith, who on the previous hole had scored an eagle. Van Gelder groaned, Fraser-Smith cursed himself in an amazement that heightened Caro's and Methus's mock glee. And then Caro, who had marked where the ball fell into shade, went good-naturedly with Fraser-Smith, who was short-sighted, over to the trees. Fraser-Smith, still cursing amiably, moved into the grove where Caro directed.

'Which side of the bush? Here? I'll never find the sodding thing.' At Guy's Hospital thirty years before he had picked up the panache of British cuss-words he never allowed himself to forget.

Caro, despite the Mayo Clinic and distinguished partic.i.p.ation at international congresses on forensic medicine, called back in the gruff, slow homeliness of a Jewish country storekeeper's son whose early schooling was in Afrikaans. 'Ag, man, d'you want me to come and bleddy well hit it for you? It must be just on the left there, man!'

Exactly where the two men were gazing, someone something that must have been crouching rose, a shape broken by the shapes of trees; there was an instant when they, it, were aware of one another. And then whoever or whatever it was was gone, in a soft cras.h.i.+ng confusion among branches and bushes. Caro shouted ridiculously, he was the first to admit 'Hey! Hey!'

'Well,' (they were embellis.h.i.+ng their story at the clubhouse) 'I thought he'd pinched old Grahame's ball, and I wanted to say thanks very much, because Methus and I, we were playing like a pair of clowns, we needed some monkey-business to help us out . . .'

Fraser-Smith was sure the creature had gone up a tree, although when the foursome went to look where he thought it had climbed, there was nothing. Methus said if it hadn't been for all the newspaper tales they'd been reading, none of them would have got the mad idea it was anything but a man one of the black out-of-works, the dronkies who have their drinking sessions in there; wasn't it true they were a problem for the groundsmen, no fence seemed to keep them and their litter out? There were the usual empty beer cans under the tree where Fraser-Smith said he . . . 'Anyway, the papers talked about a monkey, and we all saw this was something big . . . a black, that's all, and he got a scare . . . you know, how you can't make out a black face in shadow, among leaves.'

Caro spoke aside: 'A black having a c.r.a.p, exactly . . .'

But van Gelder was certain. No one had seen, in the moment the being had looked at the foursome, and the foursome had looked at it, a face, distinct garments, limbs. Van Gelder had observed the gait, and in gait van Gelder read bones. 'It was not a monkey. It was not a man. That was a baboon.'

The couple didn't have much to say for themselves, that day while Naas Klopper was showing them over the Kleynhans place. In his experience this was a bad sign. Clients who took an instant liking to a property always thought they were being shrewd by concealing their keenness to buy under voluble fault-picking calculated to bring down the price. They would pounce on disadvantages in every feature of aspect and construction. This meant the deed of sale was as good as signed. Those who said nothing were the ones who had taken an instant dislike to a property, or as if they could read his mind, because, h.e.l.l man, he was an old hand at the game, he never let slip a thing uncannily understood at once that it was a bad buy. When people trailed around in silence behind him he filled that silence entirely by himself, every step and second of it, slapping with the flat of a hand the pump of whose specifications, volume of water per hour, etcetera, he spared no detail, opening stuck cupboard doors and scratching a white-ridged thumbnail down painted walls to the accompaniment of patter about storage s.p.a.ce and spotless condition; and all the time he was wanting just to turn round and herd right out the front door people who were wasting his time.

But this girl didn't have the averted face of the wives who had made up their minds they wouldn't let their husbands buy. Naas knows what interests the ladies. They don't notice if guttering is rotted or electrical wiring is old and unsafe. What they care about is fitted kitchen units and whether the new suite will look right in what will be the lounge. When he pointed out the gla.s.sed-in stoep that would make a nice room for sewing and that, or a kiddies' playroom (but I don't suppose you've got any youngsters? not yet, ay) she stood looking over it obediently through her big round gla.s.ses as if taking instructions. And the lounge, a bit original (two small rooms of the old farmhouse from the twenties knocked into one) with half the ceiling patterned pressed lead and the other 'modernised' with pine strips and an ox-wagon wheel adapted as a chandelier she smiled, showing beautiful teeth, and nodded slowly all round the room, turning on her heel.

Same thing outside, with the husband. He was interested in the outhouses, of course. Nice double shed, could garage two cars full of junk, naturally, when a place's been empty, only a boy in charge Kleynhans's old boy, and his hundred-and-one hangers-on, wife, children, whatnot . . . 'But we'll get that all cleaned up for you, no problem.' Naas shouted for the boy, but the outhouse where he'd been allowed to live was closed, an old padlock on the door. 'He's gone off somewhere. Never here whenever I come, that's how he looks after the place. Well I wanted to show you the room but I suppose it doesn't matter, the usual boy's room . . . p'raps you won't want to have anybody, like Mrs Klopper, you'll rather do for yourselves? Specially as you from overseas, ay . . .'

The young husband asked how big the room was, and whether, since the shed was open, there was no other closed storage room.

'Oh, like I said, just the usual boy's room, not very small, no. But you can easy brick in the shed if you want, I can send you good boys for building, it won't cost a lot. And there's those houses for pigs, at one time Kleynhans was keeping pigs. Clean them up no problem. But man, I'm sure if you been doing a bit of farming in England you good with your hands, ay? You used to repairs and that? Of course. And here it doesn't cost much to get someone in to help . . . You know' (he c.o.c.ked his head coyly) 'you and your wife, you don't sound like the English from England usually speak . . . ? You sound more like the English here.'

The wife looked at the husband and this time she was the one to answer at once, for him. 'Well, no. Because, you see we're really Australian. Australians speak English quite a lot like South Africans.'

The husband added, 'We've been living in England, that's all.'

'Well, I thought so. I thought, well, if they English, it's from some part where I never heard the people speak!' Naas felt, in a blush of confidence, he was getting on well with this couple. 'Australian, that's good. A good country. A lot like ours. Only without our problems, ay.' (Naas allowed himself to pause and shake his head, exclaim, although it was a rule never to talk politics with clients.) 'There's a lot of exchange between sheep farmers in Australia and here in South Africa. Last year I think it was, my brother-in-law had some Australian farmers come to see him at his place in the Karoo that's our best sheep country. He even ordered a ram from them. Six thousand Australian dollars! A lot of money, ay? Oh but what an animal. You should see bee-yeu-tiful.'

In the house, neither husband nor wife remarked that the porcelain lid of the lavatory cistern was broken, and Naas generously drew their attention to it himself. 'I'll get you a new one cheap. Jewish chappies I know who run plumbing supplies, they'll always do me a favour. Anything you want in that line, you just tell me.'

In the garden, finally (Naas never let clients linger in a garden before entering a house on a property that had been empty a long time a neglected garden puts people off), he sensed a heightened interest alerting the young couple. They walked round the walls of the house, shading their eyes to look at the view from all sides, while Naas tried to prop up a fallen arch of the wire pergola left from the days when Mrs Kleynhans was still alive. To tell the truth the view wasn't much. Apart from the koppie behind the house, just bare veld with black, burned patches, now, before the rains. Old Kleynhans liked to live isolated on this dreary bit of land, the last years he hadn't even let out the hundred acres of his plot to the Portuguese vegetable farmers, as he used to. As for the garden nothing left, the blacks had broken the fruit trees for firewood, a plaster Snow White had fallen into the dry fishpond. It was difficult to find some feature of interest or beauty to comment on as he stood beside the couple after their round of the house, looking across the veld. He pointed. 'Those things over there, way over there. That's the cooling towers of the power station.' They followed his arm politely.

Of course, he should have suspected something. Unlikely that you could at last get rid of the Kleynhans place so easily. When they were back in town in Klopper's Eiendoms Beperk and Juffrou Jansens had brought the necessary doc.u.ments into his office, it turned out that they wanted to rent the place for six months, with the option of purchase. They didn't want to buy outright. He knew it must be because they didn't have the money, but they wouldn't admit that. The husband brushed aside suggestions that a bond could be arranged on a very small deposit, Naas Klopper was an expert in these matters.

'You see, my wife is expecting a child, we want to be in the country for a while. But we're not sure if we're going to settle . . .'

Naas became warmly fatherly. 'But if you starting a family, that's the time to settle! You can run chickens there, man, start up the pigs again. Or hire out the land for someone else to work. In six months' time, who knows what's going to happen to land prices? Now it's rock bottom, man. I'll get you a ninety-per-cent bond.'

The girl looked impatient; it must have been embarra.s.sment.

'She my wife she's had several miscarriages. A lot depends on that . . . if this time there's a child, we can make up our minds whether we want to farm here or not. If something goes wrong again . . . she might want to go back.'

'To Australia.' The girl spoke without looking at the men.

The Kleynhans place had been on Klopper's Eiendoms Beperk's books for nearly three years. And it seemed true what the husband said, they had money. They paid six months' rent in advance. So there was nothing to lose, so far as Mathilda Beukes, nee Kleynhans, who had inherited the place, was concerned. Naas took their cheque. They didn't even want the place cleaned up before they moved in; energetic youngsters, they'd do it themselves. He gave them one last piece of advice, along with the keys. 'Don't keep on Kleynhans's old boy, he'll come to you with a long story, but I've told him before, he'll have to get off the place when someone moves in. He's no good.'

The couple agreed at once. In fact, the husband made their first and only request. 'Would you see to it, then, that he leaves by the end of the week? We want him to be gone before we arrive.'

'No-o-o problem. And listen, if you want a boy, I can get you one. My garden boy knows he can't send me skelms.' The young wife had been stroking, again and again, with one finger, the silver-furred petal of a protea in an arrangement of dried Cape flowers Naas had had on his desk almost as long as the Kleynhans place had been on his books. 'You love flowers, ay? I can see it! Here take these with you. Please; have it. Mrs Klopper makes the arrangements herself.'

A baboon; unlikely.

Although the medical profession tacitly disapproves of gratuitous publicity among its members (as if an orthopaedic surgeon of the eminence of Dolf van Gelder needs to attract patients!) and Dr van Gelder refused an interview with a fat Sunday paper, the paper put together its story anyway. The journalist went to the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Medical School, and snipped out of a long disquisition recorded there on tape a popular account, translated into ma.s.s-circulation vocabulary, of the differences in the skeletal conformation and articulation in man, ape and baboon. The old girls yellowing along with the cuttings in the newspaper group's research library dug up one of those charts that show the evolutionary phases of anthropoid to hominid, with man an identikit compilation of his past and present. As there was no photograph of whatever the doctors had seen, the paper made do with the chart, blacking out the human genitalia, but leaving the anthropoids'. It was, after all, a family paper. WILL YOU KNOW HIM WHEN YOU MEET HIM? Families read that the ape-like creature which was 'terrorising the Northern Suburbs was not, in the expert opinion of the Professor of Anthropology, likely to be a baboon, whatever conclusions his respected colleague, orthopaedic surgeon and osteologist Dr Dolf van Gelder, had drawn from the bone conformation indicated by its stance or gait.

The Johannesburg zoo stated once again that no member of the ape family was missing, including any specimen of the genus anthropopithecus, which is most likely to be mistaken for man. There are regular checks of all inmates and of security precautions. The SPCA warned the public that whether a baboon or not, a member of the ape family is a danger to cats and dogs, and people should keep their pets indoors at night.

Since the paper was not a daily, a whole week had to go by before the result of the strange stirring in the fecund mud of a.s.sociation that causes people to write to newspapers about secret preoccupations set off by the subject of an article, could be read by them in print. 'Only Man Is Vile' (Rondebosch) wrote that since a coronary attack some years ago he had been advised to keep a pet to lessen cardiac anxiety. His marmoset, a Golden Lion tamarin from South America, had the run of the house 'including two cats and a Schipperke' and was like a mother to them. He could only urge other cardiac sufferers to ignore warnings about the dangers of pets. 'Had Enough' (Roosevelt Park) invited the ape, baboon, monkey, etc. to come and kill her neighbour's dog, who barked all night and was responsible for her daughter's anorexia nervosa. Howard C. b.u.t.terfield III had 'enjoyed your lovely country' until he and his wife were mugged only ten yards from the Moulin Rouge Hotel in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. He'd like to avail himself of the hospitality of 'your fine paper' to tell the black man who slapped his wife before s.n.a.t.c.hing her purse that he had broken her dental bridgework, causing pain and inconvenience on what was to have been the holiday of a lifetime, and that he was no better than any uncivilised ape at large.

Mrs Naas Klopper made a detour on her way to visit her sister Miemie in Pretoria. She had her own car, of course, a ladies' car Naas provided for her, smaller than his Mercedes, a pretty green Toyota. She hadn't seen the Kleynhans place for, oh, four or five years before the old man died. A shock. It was a mess; she felt sorry for that young couple . . . really.

She and her sister dressed up for each other, showing off new clothes as they had done when they were girls; the clean soles of her new ankle-strap shoes gritted against the stony drive as she planted the high heels well apart, for balance, and leant into the back of the car to take out her house-warming present.

The girl appeared in the garden, from the backyard. She must have heard the approach of a car.

Mrs Naas Klopper was coming towards her through weeds, insteps arched like proud fists under an intricacy of narrow yellow straps, the bombe of b.r.e.a.s.t.s flas.h.i.+ng gold chains on blue polka dots that crowded together to form a border at the hem of the dress. The girl's recognition of the face, seen only once before, was oddly strengthened, like a touched-up photograph, by make-up the original hadn't been wearing: teeth brightly circled by red lips, blinking blue eyes shuttered with matching lids. Carried before the bosom was a large round biscuit drum flas.h.i.+ng tinny colours.

Mrs Naas saw that she'd interrupted the girl in the middle of some dirty task of course, settling in. The dull hair was broken free of the knot, on one side. Hooked behind an ear, it stuck to the sweaty neck. The b.r.e.a.s.t.s (Mrs Naas couldn't help noticing; why don't these young girls wear bras these days) were squashed by a shrunken T-s.h.i.+rt and the feet were in split takkies. The only evidence of femininity to which Mrs Naas's grooming could respond (as owners of the same make of vehicle, one humble, one a luxury model, pa.s.sing on the highway silently acknowledge one another with a flick of headlights) was the Indian dingly-danglys the girl wore in her ears, answering the big fake pearls sitting on Mrs Naas's plump lobes.

'I'm not going to come in. I know how it is . . . This is just some of my b.u.t.termilk rusks you liked.'

The girl was looking at the tin, now in her hands, at the painted face of a smiling blonde child with a puppy and a bunch of roses, looking back at her. She said something, in her shy way, about Mrs Naas being generous.

'Ag, it's nothing. I was baking for myself, and I always take to my sister in Pretoria. You know, in our family we say, it's not the things you buy with money that counts, it's what you put your heart into when you make something. Even if it's only a rusk, ay? Is everything going all right?'

'Oh yes. We're fine, thank you.'

Mrs Naas tried to keep the weight on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet; she could feel the spindle heels of her new shoes sinking into the weeds, that kind of green stain would never come off. 'Moving in! Don't tell me! I say to Naas, whatever happens, we have to stay in this house until I die. A person can never move all the stuff we've collected.'

What a shy girl she was. Mrs Naas had always heard Australians were friendly, like Afrikaners. The girl hardly smiled, her thick eyebrows moved in some kind of inhibition or agitation.

'We haven't got too much, luckily.'

'Has everything arrived now?'

'Oh . . . I think just about. Still a few packing cases to open.'

Mrs Naas was agreeing, s.h.i.+fting her heels un.o.btrusively. 'Unpacking is nothing, it's finding where to put things, ay. Ag, but it's a nice roomy old house-'

A black man came round from the yard, as the lady of the house had, but he didn't come nearer, only stood a moment, hammer in hand; wanting some further instructions from the missus, probably, and then seeing she was with another white person, knowing he mustn't interrupt.

'So at least you've got someone to help. That's good. I hope you didn't take a boy off the streets, my dear? There are some terrible loafers coming to the back door for work, criminals my! you must be careful, you know.'

The girl looked very solemn, impressed. 'No, we wouldn't do that.'

'Did someone find him for you?'

'No well, not someone here. Friends in town. He had references.' She stopped a moment, and looked at Mrs Naas. 'So it's all right, I think. I'm sure. Thank you.'

She walked with Mrs Naas back to the car, hugging the biscuit tin.

'Well, there's plenty to keep him busy in this garden. Shame . . . the pergola was so pretty. But the grapes will climb again, you'll see, if you get all the rubbish cleared away. But don't you start digging and that . . . be careful of yourself. Have you been feeling all right?' And Mrs Naas put her left hand, with its diamond thrust up on a stalagmite of gold (her old engagement ring remodelled since Naas's prosperity by a Jew jeweller who gave him a good deal), on her own stomach, rounded only by good eating.

The girl looked puzzled. Then she forgot, at last, that shyness of hers and laughed, laughed and shook her head.

'No morning sickness?'

'No, no. I'm fine. Not sick at all.'

Mrs Naas saw that the girl, expecting in a strange country, must be comforted to have a talk with a motherly woman. Mrs Naas's body, which had housed Dawie, Andries, Aletta and Klein Dolfie, expanded against the tight clothes from which it would never burgeon irresistibly again, as the girl's would soon. 'I'll tell you something. This's the best time of your life. The first baby. That's something you'll never know again, never.' She drove off before the girl could see the tears that came to her eyes.

The girl went round back into the yard with her tall stalk, flat-footed in the old takkies.

The black man's gaze was fixed where she must reappear. He still held the hammer; uselessly. 'Is it all right?'

'Of course it's all right.'

'What's she want?'

'Didn't want anything. She brought us a present this.' Her palm came down over the grin of the child on the tin drum.

He looked at the tin, cautious to see it for what it was.

'Biscuits. Rusks. The vrou of the agent who let this place to us. Charles and I had to have tea with her the first day we were here.'

'That's what she came for?'

'Yes. That's all. Don't you give something take food when new neighbours move in?' As she heard herself saying it, she remembered that whatever the custom was among blacks and G.o.d knows, they were the most hospitable if the poorest of people he hadn't lived anywhere that could be called 'at home' for years, and his 'neighbours' had been fellow refugees in camps and military training centres. She gave him her big, culpable smile to apologise for her bourgeois naivety; it still surfaced from time to time, and it was best to admit so, openly. 'Nothing to get worried about. I don't mean they're really neighbours . . .' She made an arc with her chin and long neck, from side to side, sweeping the isolation of the house and yard within the veld.

The black man implied no suggestion that the white couple did not know their job, no criticism of the choice of place. Hardly! It could not have been better situated. 'Is she going to keep turning up, hey . . . What'll she think? I shouldn't have come into the garden.'

'No, no, Vusi. She won't think anything. It was OK she saw you. She just naturally a.s.sumes there'll be a black working away somewhere in the yard.'

'And Eddie?'

She placed the biscuit tin on the kennel, with its rusty chain to which no dog was attached.

'OK, two blacks. After all, this is a farming plot, isn't it? There's building going on. Where is he?'

'He went into the house as soon as I came back and told him . . .'

She was levering, with her fingernails, under the lid of the tin. 'Can you do this? My fingers aren't strong enough.'

The black man found the hammer in his hand, put it down and grasped the tin, his small brown nose wrinkling with effort. The lid flew off with a tw.a.n.g and went bowling down the yard, the girl laughing after it. It looped back towards the man and he leant gracefully and caught it up, laughing.

'What is this boere food, anyway?'

'Try it. They're good.'

They crunched rusks together in the sun, the black man's attention turning contemplatively, mind running ahead to what was not yet there, to the shed (big enough for two cars) before which the raw vigour of new bricks, cement and tools was dumped against the stagnation and decay of the yard.

The girl chewed energetically, wanting to free her mouth to speak. 'We'll have to get used to the idea people may turn up, for some reason or another. We'll just have to be prepared. So long as they don't find us in the house . . . it'll be all right.'

The black man no longer saw what was constructed in his mind; he saw the rusty chain, he leant again with that same straight-backed, sideways movement with which he had caught the lid, and jingled the links. 'Maybe we should get a dog, man. To warn.'

'That's an idea.' Then her face bunched unattractively, a yes-but. 'What do we do with it afterwards?'

He smiled at her indulgently; at things she still didn't understand, even though she chose to be here, in this place, with Eddie and with him.

The white couple had known two black men would be coming but not exactly when or how. Charles must have believed they would come at night, that would be the likeliest because the safest; the first three nights in the house he dragged the mattress off her bed into the kitchen, and his into the 'lounge', on which the front door opened directly, so that he or she would hear the men wherever they sought entry. Charles had great difficulty in sleeping with one eye open; he could stay awake until very late, but once his head was on a pillow sleep buried him deep within the hot, curly beard. She dozed off where she was meetings, cinemas, parties, even driving after around half past ten, but she could give her subconscious instructions, before going to bed, to wake her at any awaited signal of sound or movement. She set her inner alarm at hair-trigger, those three nights. An owl sent her swiftly to Charles; it might be a man imitating the call. She responded to a belch from the sink drain, skittering in the roof (mice?), even the faint thread of a cat's mew, that might have been in a dream, since she could not catch it again once it had awakened her.

But they came at two o'clock on the fourth afternoon. A small sagging van of the kind used by the petty entrepreneurs in firewood and junk commerce, dagga-running, livestock and human transport between black communities on either side of the borders with Swaziland, Lesotho or Botswana, backed down to the gate it had overshot. There were women and children with blankets covering their mouths against the dust, in the open rear. A young man jumped from the cab and dragged aside the sagging, silvery wire-and-scroll gate, with its plate 'Plot 185 Koppiesdrif'. Charles was out the front door and reversing the initiative at once: he it was who came to the man. His green eyes, at twenty-eight, already were narrowed by the plump fold of the lower lid that marks joviality whether cruelly shrewd or good-natured in middle age. The young black man was chewing gum. He did not interrupt the rhythms of his jaw: 'Charles.'

The couple had not been told what the men would look like. The man identified himself by the procedure (questions and specific answers) Charles had been taught to expect. Charles asked whether they wouldn't drive round to the yard. The other understood at once; it was more natural for blacks to conduct any business with a white man at his back door. Charles himself was staging the arrival in keeping with the unremarkable deliveries of building material that already had been made to the new occupiers of the plot. He walked ahead of the van, businesslike. In the yard another young man got out of the cab, and, with the first, from among the women swung down two zippered carry-alls and a crammed paper carrier. That was all.

The women and children, like sheep dazed by their last journey to the abattoir, moved only when the van drove off again, jolting them.

Charles and the girl had not been told the names or ident.i.ty of the pair they expected. They exchanged only first names Eddie was the one who had opened the gate, Vusi the one who had sat beside the unknown driver and got down in the yard. The girl introduced herself as 'Joy'. One of the men asked if there was something to eat. The white couple at once got in one another's way, suddenly unrehea.r.s.ed now that the reality had begun, exchanging terse instructions in the kitchen, jostling one another to find sugar, a knife to slice tomatoes, a frying pan for the sausages which she forgot to p.r.i.c.k. It seemed there was no special att.i.tude, social formula of ease, created by a situation so far removed from the normal pattern of human concourse; so it was just the old, inappropriate one of stilted hospitality to unexpected guests that had to do, although these were not guests, the white couple were not hosts, and the arrival was according to plan. When sleeping arrangements came up, the men a.s.sumed the white couple were sleeping together and put their own things in the second bedroom. It was small and dark, unfurnished except for two new mattresses on the floor separated by an old trunk with a reading lamp standing on it, but there was no question of the other two favouring themselves with a better room; this one faced on the yard, no one would see blacks moving around at night in the bedroom of a white man's house.

The two zippered carry-alls, cheap copies of the hand luggage of jet-flight holidaymakers, held a change of jeans, a couple of s.h.i.+rts printed with bright leisure symbols of the Caribbean, a few books, and in Eddie's a mock-suede jacket with Indian fringes, Wild West style. As soon as they all knew each other well enough, he was teased about it, and had his quick riposte. 'But I'm not going to be extinct.' The strong paper carrier was one of those imprinted with a pop star's face black kids shake for sale on the street corners of Johannesburg. What came out of it, the white couple saw, was as ordinary as the loaves of bread and cardboard litres of mageu such bags usually carry; a transistor-tape player, Vusi's spare pair of sneakers, a pink towel and a plastic briefcase emptied of papers. Charles was to provide everything they might need. He himself had been provided with a combi. He went to the appointed places, at appointed times, to pick up what was necessary.

The combi had housewifely curtains across the windows a practical adornment popular with farming families, whose children may sleep away a journey. It was impossible to tell, when Charles drove off or came back, whether there was anything inside it. On one of his return trips, he drew up at the level crossing and found himself beside Naas Klopper and Mrs Naas in the Mercedes. A train shuttered past like a camera gone berserk, lens opening and closing, with each flying segment of rolling stock, on flashes of the veld behind it. The optical explosion invigorated Charles. He waved and grinned at the estate agent and his wife.

They had used all three Holiday Inns in the vicinity. They had even driven out to cheap motels, which were safer, since local people of their cla.s.s would be unlikely to be encountered there, but the time spent on the road cut into the afternoons which were all they had together. Besides, he felt the beds were dirty a superficial papering of laundered sheets overlaid the sordidness that was other people's s.e.x. He told her he could not bear to bring her to such rooms.

She did not care where she was, so long as she was with him and there was a bed. She said so, which was probably a mistake; but she wanted, with him, no cunning female strategy of being desired more than desiring: 'You are my first and last lover.' She was not hurt when he did not trade at least that there had not been anything like it before, for him, if he could not commit himself about what might come after. He was uneasy at the total, totted-up weight of precious privilege, finally, in his hands. He worried about security her security. What would happen to her if her husband found out and divorced her? She didn't give this a thought; only worried, in her sense of responsibility for his career, what would happen if his wife found out and made a scandal.

His wife was away in Europe, the house was empty. A large house with a pan-handle drive, tunnelled through trees, the house itself in a lair of trees. But you are never alone in this country. They are always there; the house-boy, the garden-boy mowing the lawn. They see everything; you can only do, in the end, what it is all right for them to see and remember. Impossible to take this newly beloved woman home where he longed to make love to her in his own bed. Even if by some pretext he managed to get rid of them, give them all a day off at once. They changed the sheets and brushed the carpets; a tender stain, a single hair of unfamiliar colour impossible. So in the end even his room, his own bed, in a house where he paid for everything nothing is your own, once you are married.

Ah, what recklessness the postponement of gratification produces, when it does not produce sublimation. (Could Freud have known that!) He had come back to the parking lot from the reception desk of a suburban hotel, his very legs and arms drawn together stiffly in shock; as he was about to enquire about bed and breakfast (they always asked for this, paid in advance, and disappeared at the end of an afternoon) he had seen a business acquaintance and a journalist to whom he was well known, coming straight towards him out of the hotel restaurant, loosening their ties against the high temperature. She drove off with him at once, but where to? There was nowhere. Yet never had they reached such painful tension of arousal, not touching or speaking as she drove. In the heat wave that afternoon she took a road to the old mine dumps. There, hidden from the freeway by Pharaonic pyramids of sand from which gold had been extracted by the cyanide process, she took off the wisp of nylon and lace between her legs, unzipped his beautiful Italian linen trousers, and, covering their bodies by the drop of her skirt, sat him into her. In their fine clothes, they were joined like two b.u.t.terflies in the heat of a summer garden. When they slackened, had done, and he set himself to rights, he was appalled to see her, her lips swollen, her cheekbones fiery, the hair in front of her ears ringlets of sweat. In a car! The car her husband had given her, only a month before, new, to please her, because he had become aware, without knowing why, he couldn't please her any more. She, too, had nothing that was her own; her husband paid for everything that was hers. She said only one thing to him: 'When I was a little girl, I was always asking to be allowed to go and slide down the mine dumps. They promised to take me, they never did. I always think of that when I see mine dumps.'

But today she had thought of something else. He made up his mind he would have to take into his confidence a friend (himself suspected of running affairs from time to time) who had a cottage, at present untenanted, on one of his properties. There, among the deserted stables of an old riding school, mature lovers could let their urgencies of s.e.x, confessional friends.h.i.+p and sweet clandestine companions.h.i.+p take their course in peace and dignity. The bed had been occupied only by people of their own kind. There was a refrigerator; ice and whisky. Sometimes she arrived with a rose and put it in a gla.s.s beside the bed. He couldn't remember when last he read a poem, since leaving school; or would again. She brought an old book with her maiden name on the flyleaf and read Pablo Neruda to him. Afterwards they fell asleep, and then woke to make love once more before losing each other safely in the rush-hour traffic back to town. (After the encounter at the hotel, they had decided it was best to travel separately.) They were secure in that cottage for as long as they would need security. Sometimes he would find the opportunity to remark: we are not children. I know, she would agree. He could be rea.s.sured she accepted that love could only have its span and must end without tears. One late afternoon they were lying timelessly, although they had less than half an hour left (it was the way to deal with an a.s.sociation absolutely restricted to the hours between three and six), naked, quiet, her hand languidly comforting his lolling p.e.n.i.s, when they heard a scratching at the ox-eye window above the bedhead. He sat up. Jumped up, standing on the bed. She rolled over on to her face. There was the sound of something, feet, a body, landing on earth, scuffling, slap of branches. A spray of the old bougainvillaea that climbed the roof snapped back against the window. The window was empty.

He gently freed her face from the pillow. 'It's all right.'

She lay there looking at him. 'She's hired someone to follow you.'

'Don't be silly.'