When they got back at two in the morning the cottage was in darkness as they had left it, but the door stood open as if they were expected. He felt round the jamb for the light switch. Again, there was the shock of light on a disorder; a blinding exposure. This time, it was she herself who called out: Rey! And he was beside her, but could not make what was there fly back to the way it was before — clothes, paper-spewing suitcases, books, the stuffing from eviscerated cushions — as a film run in reverse. There was no-one waiting. This was confirmed at once; the cottage was small. Whoever had ransacked it had found or not found what they wanted and gone. But this time, this exposure, was different. What had been turned up in the middle of the night had no context of other lives to resorb it. They went back to the house they had left and threw pebbles at the windows until the gentle-complexioned white man came down in a handsome towelling gown and took them in. Next day they went to stay with other friends-of-friends. Every day, her lover believed, must be lived at a further remove from the cottage. Nothing was ever to be restored of the life she lived there. Only the object that he himself had thrown aside, the toy orang-outang with the beard-comb, had become something in place, lying on the floor where it was dropped among its torn gold wrappings as if it had drawn down everything about it.
He was convinced that he was going to be arrested. Whether this was so or not nobody can say. Many premises are raided; there are not always consequences of the kind he foresaw, building up for her and for those who sheltered them a case against himself. Fear and self-esteem — his conviction of his own threat to others confirmed as it could be only by the assumption of himself being in danger — burned his old resentments as the fuel of elation. He made love more often than ever, and each race to the finish might be the last. His face presented itself as the face that must be looked at as a last look, at any ordinary moment of the day. She opened white-wine bottles and no-one knew the other tipsiness that animated her, now. She confided in no-one; no longer, not she. Sitting a moment on someone’s desk, swinging her legs and chattering; no-one knew that next day she might not be there, one day soon would simply not be there. She and he: gone.
He did not even risk going back for what might be left of ‘his book’. A friend-of-a-friend would go to the cottage and send later whatever papers were there. He — and the little girl, of course — would bum a few clothes (friends who weren’t in danger surely owed them that much) and disappear as they were. The only problem was money. — I can manage, I don’t care. But with you … Maybe you should follow.—
For the first time, there was fear to be seen in her shining, opaque black eyes. — I’ll get money. For both.—
It must have been in June 1963, exact date unknown, she left South Africa. Whether by air under assumed names, or by some Underground route overland, they were gone, she and whoever the man was. His name does not appear in any accounts of resistance during the period, his book seems never to have been published. No-one even gives him the credit for having been the one who, however reluctantly, moved her on.
*
It was to Joe Hillela went so that she wouldn’t be left behind. To his rooms, asking to see him and sitting in the waitingroom among clients. These were blacks as well as whites, sharing the same chairs and journals, The Motorist and Time passed on, perhaps, from the household of one of Joe’s new partners, the English Guardian and local liberal reviews she recognized as from the stacks in Pauline’s livingroom. She didn’t have to pass time with any of these. Joe appeared as soon as her name was taken in to him. Being Joe, there was no demonstration of surprise, pleasure or displeasure. He simply put up a hand and flagged a quiet, coaxing movement. He stood back to let her pass before him through his doorway: Joe, the smell of the shaving cream standing like a tongue’d icecream cone on the bathroom shelf, the buzzing cello voice sustained behind the high babble at family meals. He kissed her gently and held a moment the fingers of the hand she awkwardly took back.
— How have you been? — Even when she and his own daughter were children he had always treated them like grown-up ladies; she was under an old guidance, taking a chair he displaced from where clients customarily faced him across his desk. He drew up another, leaving his professional place empty. Her face was ready to fawn in parrying smiles, culpability, girlish charm at the formula of insincere reproaches that did not come; months and months, not a word, thought you’d forgotten us!
— Oh fine. I’m working in an advertising agency. Oh yes, and they haven’t kicked me out yet, marvel of marvels. I’ve actually been there — what — about six months or so.—
She knew his pace. He didn’t pretend not to be studying her. The last season of good clothes Olga used to supply was lost, along with the cottage, but friends who had offered her ‘something to wear’ had not failed to notice she took the best garments, not the most ordinary, hanging in their modest cupboards. For this visit she had picked a full black skirt that sank round from her small waist as she made herself comfortable, and an Indian shirt of thin red silk slit from a high collar down her brown neck to her wide-set breasts. Thin chains slid in and out of the opening as she gestured.
— There were quite a few jobs before then? Turnover pretty high? — They laughed together, after so long, she and Joe.
— Don’t tell me! You were right about qualifications … you have to be prepared to take anything.—
— Anything?—
— Well, just about.—
After a moment, he spoke. — You didn’t take ‘anything’.—
There was the ‘on my honour’ tone of childhood. — I didn’t—
He confirmed with his slow turn of the head, aside.
— We don’t have the right to ask, anyway. — But he saw she was still so young that she was afraid of references to the family’s rejection of her; the taboo she had broken made responsibility towards her a taboo subject, as well. Her mouth opened a moment, in unease. It seemed to him to contradict the new maturity, clenched hardness, of the way her cheekbones stood out. (She had lost weight after the abortion.) The eyes, without the differentiation between iris and pupil that makes it possible to read eyes’ expression, were drawn miserably half-closed and then opened again, full on him. Her concern and confusion jumped at him like the attention of an affectionate puppy. — Of course, of course you’ve got the right, of course you have! You’ll always have, I promise you!—
He was able to turn the emotion to a gentle, shared joke that gracefully accepted bonds between him and her, belonging to but surviving the past. — Now that’s the correct way with the verb! Future tense! You and Carole used to drive us crazy by using it in the context of something already achieved: ‘I did my homework last night, I promise you’—