The fullness overflowed into her friendships with women. She fell in love — the young mother’s equivalent of the school-girl pash — with this one or that, spent her days in the bosom company of the favourite and their pooled children, while Whaila was behind the tin security fence in town or out at the camp conferring with Nkomo’s men. Sela is the only one who has ever heard from her again. At one time, Hillela left Whaila’s bed only to walk down to Sela’s house. The children played in the garden, looked after by Sela’s relatives, and the two women settled in the cosy dark cool of the livingroom. Sela had her own car but her lively friend scarcely ever could get her to go out; she sat in calm and stillness, strangely like an object of contemplation rather than in contemplation. Before it, everything could spill over, spill out. There must have been many things about Hillela which she alone could tell; she has never offered them to anybody.
Selina Montgomery and Hillela Kgomani — personages in some race joke: there was this black woman married to a white man, and this white woman married to a black man … The quartet would have made a neat quadrilateral relationship if not a perfect circle, had Whaila had time for social life that did not in some way further the cause, and if Russell Montgomery had been materially present. Among the crocheted doilies of missionary artisanship and hammered copper plates representing idealized tribal maidens or trumpeting elephants that were African bourgeois taste, there hung in the dimness Edward Lear watercolours of Italy and Stubbs sporting prints swollen with humidity and spotted as blighted leaves. Russell St. John Montgomery was an engineer whose family made a colonial fortune two generations earlier in those raw materials that were exported and sold back, transformed, to those who could afford them. He himself was transformed; he came back to Africa as the member of the family who married a black girl instead of paying her forebears a few British pence a day to labour in field, plantation or mine. She was older than Hillela and had been married twelve years; his engineering projects, begun before independence to help build her new Africa, were more and more delegated to other hands and he spent more and more of his time attending to inherited interests in England and Scotland.
The children with whom Nomzamo played, decorating mud pies with the torn bloody strips of poinsettias and serving them on the split giant pods of the mahogany tree, were not really Sela’s but those of her relatives — she had no servants but many collateral retainers who lived in the back yard and the empty rooms of the house, and brought in at eleven and four o’clock cucumber sandwiches or soda-tasting scones on the tea-tray. A photograph of two coloured boys in kilts stood on the piano. (They had not come out beautifully black as the namesake.) A schoolgirl in a pork-pie hat smiling obediently to a photographer’s command over the crinkly plait fallen across her shoulder, looked down at her mother from the wall. Sela’s children were in England at the schools Russell and his sisters had attended. — He entered them when they were born. — She had a way of stopping to reflect after a short statement; and then saying something that, perhaps, was not what she might have said. — It’s very hard to get into those schools, apparently.—
— I wish I’d known you when we were in England! A house in London and one in Scotland! But you weren’t there, Sela, were you — why aren’t you ever there?—
Sela’s heavy and beautiful head was coiffured in sculptural wedges that seemed carved not combed into place, like those of the wooden figures vendors from Zaïre hawked in Cairo Road. She wore the gold, garnet and diamond Victorian ear-rings of Russell’s family jewels dangling to her neck, and from there down the matronly dresses and, no matter how great the heat, the tight varnish of stockings and the high-heeled shoes of a colonial generation of white women who had been her teachers. — When I was studying for my thesis, I stayed there. When I was young. The children were small. But Russell will invite you to his house. Russell has a lot of visitors, his friends. When you go back, you’ll see him.—
— Oh no, we’re here for good. Well, quite a long time. However long it takes, Whaila says.—
Sela had great delicacy. Her manner stopped any indiscretion that might be coming from Hillela about what it was rumoured was being planned behind the tin security fence; whatever indiscreet fantasy of imminent triumph and freedom, down South, the young girl was about to flaunt.
— But don’t you like London, Sela? I had such a good time. To have a house in London, of your own! I’ve never been to Scotland, but I suppose that must be something, too. Why don’t you spend part of the year there? Isn’t it lonely for Russell? I was so often alone in London when Whaila had to go away — I couldn’t stand it, I moved in with friends.—
— There’s this house to see to. My family. Always a lot of problems with our families, such big families … now my father is dead and my mother has to deal with the uncles. The children come out for the holidays — in their summer, over there. And there’s the garden.—
If Hillela did not find her friend in the dark house within its cave of towering trees, she was in her garden, the tightly-stockinged legs kneeling on a sack and the other family’s jewels looping forward over her flesh-ringed soft neck. Sela talked of her gardening as she might have been expected to talk of her profession as a physicist — with the achievement and concomitant responsibility of a vocation. She was the first woman in her country to graduate with a Master’s degree in science, one of the first to have a university education at all, let alone at an Ivy League American institution. She was not teaching at the local university ‘at present’, she said, in the tone of an official communiqué, and had not for a length of time she did not mention. On one of the few occasions when she appeared at a gathering, Hillela heard her respond to the reproachful bonhomie of one of the deans of the university. — It wouldn’t be fair for me to take a teaching post, I am away so much, you see, in England. — Her little white friend came up to her and embraced her, and Sela did not know why; well, she was an impulsively affectionate girl and the atmosphere at parties went to her head.