It must have done some good. To bring the past into the open — in particular the past she didn’t have in memory, only heard obliquely referred to by others — would draw the girl herself more into the open? At least, Pauline thought it might have done. She had suggested to Joe that through Portuguese legal colleagues in Mozambique they might try again to make contact with Ruthie; middle-aged, like the rest of them by now, though who could imagine Ruthie fortyish!
Joe could. — A woman alone, no profession, drifting. It’s downhill.—
— But she’s not alone.—
— A woman who had a lover years ago. D’you think that type of thing lasts? Fourteen years hanging around nightclubs and bars. Poor Ruth. What was it he was supposed to be? Disc jockey? Professional dancing partner?—
But Joe had things to think of other than writing to ask colleagues to investigate a family matter, the whereabouts of a woman last known to have been cohabiting with a Portuguese citizen of no fixed employment. If Ruthie came to mind it was incongruously as one of the sentimental Latin love songs to which she once danced all night would have sounded against the singing of political prisoners caged in the Black Maria between prison and court.
The adolescent children continued to live a normal life — if, Pauline objected, one could regard as normal any life in the context of what was happening. Joe did not agree wholly with Pauline, in practice — though of course he did in principle — that they were old enough to pitch the tenor of their young lives entirely to the defiant cries and dirges of the time and place in which they were growing up. The atmosphere at home was enough to counteract that of the school where — yes, he knew, he knew — at prayers every morning Hillela and Carole had to offer thanks for the infinite mercy of a God in whose name other children were given an inferior education, were banished with their mothers to barren reserves, and deprived of fathers forced to become migratory labourers in order that the children might not starve. That was what was happening in the Transkei, where the family had had such wonderful camping holidays, where they had bought delicious oysters for nothing — in the new currency, the equivalent of twenty-five cents a dozen! — from the Mpondo women who gathered them off the rocks. Carole, although only ten at the time of a great bus boycott, had been old enough to understand the issue through the cloud of sunset dust in which thousands of black people tramped at the roadside; for many weeks, when her mother had fetched her from school in the afternoons, they had not driven home to milk and biscuits but taken the road to Alexandra Township and picked up as many of those people as the car would hold. Carole sat on the knees of washerwomen and office cleaners, to make room; there was a rotting-cheese smell of dirty socks; she had been afraid when the police made her mother stop, asked for the passes of the black people, and told her she would be fined for overloading her car. Hillela was not living with the family then. She had been taken in later. The year before Sharpeville; so this epoch in Hillela’s history was dated, in Pauline’s house, by the public one, as at school human history was dated by the advent of Christianity, B.C. or A.D. By the time Hillela was living there, Pauline used to come home from regular visits to someone in prison (could it have been the red-haired woman?) and tell of the cockiness and courage of this person who must have been a friend — Carole knew her, Carole iced a cake Bettie baked for her, but the prison matron wouldn’t allow the prisoner to receive it; Pauline brought it home again and the girls ate it.
Hillela, too, had driven with Pauline on an issue that could be understood through participation. Pauline canvassed in a campaign for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum for white people to decide whether the country should leave the British Commonwealth and declare itself a republic with a whites-only government. Hillela had not been frightened when men or women who came to the door were rude to Pauline: and she and Pauline laughed and didn’t care, drove on comradely to the next street.
This seventeenth year — Hillela’s — Joe was sometimes away in country districts defending chiefs who were deposed by the government for resisting laws which forced their people to reduce their herds and give up grazing rights, huddle out of the way of whites. When he was home she or Carole would be sent to carry a cup of tea into his small study where he once looked up — a smile for Hillela — and told her he was ‘trying to find a legal needle in a haystack of bad laws — grounds to defend people who have no rights to defend, anymore’. At Olga’s Friday night seder there was in the background a radio report of the hut-burnings and murders between chiefs who, Joe told in the other house, opposed the government and those who were bribed to support it. Arthur did not submit to Olga’s objection that the temporal babble of the radio had no place in the timeless state of grace invoked at a Friday night ceremonial dinner. — A bunch of savages. What do they understand about culling, over-grazing. What’s the point of throwing out money trying to teach them something. Let them go ahead and kill each other, that’s all they know.—
There were no challenges over such statements in this house; Olga’s George IV table was a peat-coloured pool reflecting the flowers of the centre piece, the tiny silver nest of sugared almonds before each place, the agreeable controlled faces of Olga’s kind of people. Olga always took the option of compassionate distress, never choosing sides; her fears for herself were the basis of her abhorrence of violence. — My cook’s afraid to go home there. It’s too awful.—
Pauline and Carole were often out at protest meetings when Hillela came home from wherever it was she had been ‘with her friends’—the explanation Pauline accepted, so long as Hillela phoned to say if she wanted to spend the night with one of the friends, and left the telephone number where she could be reached; a reasonable enough rule. Hillela helped Carole paint banners, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC; at school the headmistress announced a special church service and election of a student committee to plan a celebration for the public holiday on which the republic was to be declared. Once Hillela was going into a coffee bar when she saw a straggle of people coming down the centre of the city street, white people gathering flanks of accompanying black bystanders as they hampered traffic, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC: she handed her guitar to one of her friends and watched the group as if it were a wedding procession. Suddenly she ran forward, waving wildly, grasped Carole’s hand; smiling, half-hopped-and-skipped, keeping up with her cousin and aunt for a few paces. Then she fell back. Pauline’s grand head, made out among many, was disappearing round the corner.
In the coffee bar Hillela was greeted: Are you nuts? Where’d you go off to like that? She and her friends took turns to play the guitar and they sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and a new hit from America, ‘We Shall Overcome’. The Greek proprietor did not mind these gatherings in Nick’s Café, renamed, to keep up with somebody’s times, somewhere, Arrivederci Roma; the impromptu music attracted custom. But when the kids started sharing round among themselves a home-rolled cigarette he recognized the scent of the stuff and lost his temper, chasing them out. At the same time — it must have been — a street or two away the police were breaking up an illegal procession. Pauline and Carole (she was under age, she would have had to appear in camera) were lucky not to have been among those arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. Of which Pauline was perfectly aware, Joe warned.