Pauline drove out in the direction of Soweto but could not risk getting too near, with the girls in the car. There were police patrol cars everywhere. From the vantage point where Pauline, Carole and Hillela stopped, the distant cubes of Soweto houses were miles of tombstones in a vast graveyard; yet all the life that was gone from the city was down there; if you had been able to get near enough.
Alpheus and his girl were walking out of the yard gate as Pauline and the girls arrived home. He opened the gate for the car, and Pauline paused as it passed him. — The stay-at-home seems to be fairly successful. We’ve just been into town.—
Alpheus and his girl were dressed to stroll out on a public holiday. He had a way of standing quietly as if waiting to be dismissed. He smiled. — Thank you.—
In the yard, Pauline sat a moment with her hands on the steering-wheel. — What does he thank for? The information? He’s always like that. If every black were like him, nothing would ever change. If Joe hadn’t told him to, he wouldn’t even have supported the strike. Maybe it’s a mistake to have removed him from the condition of his own people. I don’t know, anymore.—
Carole and Hillela also stayed at home when the school held its prayers and celebrations for the Republic. On the day, Pauline and Joe kept open house for friends as depressed and confused as themselves; when Hillela left to go and lunch at Olga’s (a compensation offered for the postponed shopping trip) they were arguing over Mandela’s reasons for calling off the stay-at-home on its second day — as for the national convention, no-one had ever expected for a moment the government would consider that.
— This is the lovely young daughter I didn’t have.—
It was too chilly to swim, but in Olga’s pavilion beside the pool Jethro carried round a whole poached salmon — the stately pink corpse laid out with the cook’s radish roses and swags of golden mayonnaise — and Hillela was allowed a glass of the French champagne served in honour of some guests, in the way of Arthur’s business, from another country. The lady was settled in her chair like a beautifully-marked butterfly — amber hair and the deep blue oval of a sapphire on each earlobe, pale fingers banded with gold and diamonds and tipped with red nails. She made soft noises of approval over Hillela. Jethro paused in his procession to beam on the girl, while everyone except Arthur smiled at them both. — Miss Hilly, you been there to my country again? You staying all the time here in Jo’burg now, you don’t like go there sometime see you daddy?—
Olga charmed, speaking to him in the third person. — Next time Jethro goes home, he’s going to take Miss Hilly with him, isn’t that right? — And Jethro bowed his way round, laughing.
— He thinks of the children in this house as his own.—
— How wonderful. You can’t get anybody loyal like that, not in Europe, not at any price.—
Olga took care not to neglect her young niece in the presence of distinguished company. She turned aside from talk of the villa in Italy, belonging to these guests, which she and Arthur were being pressed to visit, and had a confidential moment with Hillela. — How is Pauline … I worry about Pauline. What is the point of all the things she gets herself involved in. That bus boycott — they had to pay in the end, surely. The Republic — it’s been declared … And she neglects herself. She used to be so striking-looking. If you live here you must abide by the law of the country.—
Olga and Arthur believed you must abide by the law of the country but were once again making contingency plans not to go on living there.
— There’s a delightful place on the market, not far from ours. I think the position’s even better than ours. Why don’t you buy a little pied-à-terre in Italy? It’d be lovely to have you as neighbours now and then—
— The way things are going, it might have to be more than that! — Olga laughed when she said it, and the butterfly lady did not pause to take in the inference: —Though I can understand, if I lived in this beautiful country, with those wonderful vineyard estates at the Cape, and those marvellous beaches, so clean — not like Europe — uncrowded, I wouldn’t see much reason to go anywhere else—
Arthur broke in when he saw an advantage in doing so. — We’ve got a place at the Cape. Nice place right on the best beach in the country. You can come out and spend as long as you like there, any time.—
— I still think we should take up Michael’s offer to look round for us in Italy.—
Arthur had a way of blinking, refusing to acknowledge the regard of others, conversely, as Pauline always felt that regard, sought it. His head hung forward from his thick shoulders while he chewed — like an ox, yes.
Hillela had her first driving lesson on the day a republic was declared; the day on which one drives for the first time is like that on which one first found one’s balance on a bicycle — something never forgotten. Her cousin Clive had just passed his driving test. Stopping, starting, giggling at herself, with Clive sitting beside her she went up and down Olga’s long drive the whole afternoon, pausing only when admiring Jethro came over the lawn with the cream scones and tea, and finally ending her first journey only when Olga called out that drinks were being served, and the car must be ‘put to bed’. Very carefully Hillela drove it successfully into its bay beside Arthur’s two other cars.
Clive presented his pupil, an arm across her shoulders the way he would walk off a sports field with a fellow player. — You should just see how quickly Hillela caught on. She can even declutch properly, already. — By some quirk of heredity, he had Pauline’s black, demanding eyes, and the red, live mouth of the handsome male. No-one took a photograph. But Olga kept the image of the pair, the children belonging to her sister Ruthie and herself, so full of their little achievements, so happy, so innocent in their burgeoning, although she could never place the day, the year when it was imprinted.
Olga drove her niece back to Pauline’s house. She embraced her and held her hands before letting her leave the car. She seemed saddened by something she could never say — all children who are sent to boarding-school know this mood in adults, who have exiled them.
— I’ll see you next Monday, then, Olga. And thanks for a lovely day.—
Olga took comfort and forgiveness. — Oh yes, darling. And I know exactly what we’re going to buy. Monday — if everything’s all right. But I’m sure this whole business is over now.—
Nelson Mandela went Underground after the All-In African Conference Pauline had attended in Maritzburg. When he surfaced he was tried and imprisoned; and when he was taken from prison and tried once again, this time for treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment, no-one was allowed to record the speech he made from the dock; so the schoolgirl Hillela, present when her aunt played a tape-recording of his speech made at Maritzburg, was one of the few people to hear the sound of Mandela’s voice for many years, and perhaps to remember it. She had the opportunity to do so, anyway.
Through the high hum of the blood in adolescence, that distances the voices of adults, the tense discussions between Pauline and Joe continued as if taking place somewhere else and from time to time breaking in with a name or phrase overheard. It was cold; the snug of a sweater round the neck; a fire at night; it must have been June. Mandela was the name. From that Underground where he had gone he sent portents and messages like those the Latin writers Hillela was having to construe for the winter exams said came from the flight of birds or from sibyls speaking through the mouths of caves. Pauline supported Mandela’s call for an international economic boycott of South Africa. ‘Supported’, when obtruding from adult conversation at Olga’s, applied to whether or not a divorced wife received alimony from an ex-husband, or whether a relative was adequately provided for by her family. (For example Len — his daughter understood from oblique references — did not ‘support’ her.) ‘Supported’, in Pauline and Joe’s dialogue which plunged into tunnels of silence or absent attention to other things but never ceased, perhaps not even in dreams, meant that one or both of them thought they had found some sort of sign. Not the sure and certain instruction they had been waiting for, but something to which one could attach oneself, and feel the tug of history. Pauline supported economic boycott as a way out: for the thousands of blacks imprisoned and banned as, it seemed, the dismal only result of the politics of protest; for the whites, her friends, braver than herself, who were also banned or imprisoned as part of the same tactical failure Mandela admitted. And for herself, companion of the blacks’ route, with nowhere to go now that marches were banned, fearful of and not free to enter (a family, a husband’s surer contribution within legal opposition to consider) the unimaginable darkness of the Underground — for her, rescue from being stranded, from ending up white as her sister Olga was white.