In the hotel’s glossy gallery of shops she amused herself. There were the carved tusks and cotton galabiyas she had once sold but there was also a jeweller’s with amber from the Persian Gulf and a boutique displaying silk tunics and suède jackets: she went in and suddenly was trying on the kind of clothes she had not worn since Olga had taken her shopping each change of season. The adjustable mirrors showed a triptych of anxious concentration, making decisions between garments she was not going to buy anyway. With this or that one, she met — stopped dead by, as it were — herself, remarkably elegant; a possibility never considered. A whole hour in the booth smelling of other women’s perfume! Agitated, she fished her shift and spiky necklace from behind the layers of fancy dress, but as she was about to leave the shop, came back and did buy something, a French bikini swimsuit she had seen in the window before she first entered. She had brought a traveller’s cheque along with her because the jaunt was in the company of someone she hardly knew, and Mrs Whaila Kgomani was no longer a beach girl.
The General came onto the terrace a moment after she was back there. He was carrying the blazer looped by one finger over his shoulder and his tie was loosened, but whatever experience he was fresh from left him unmarked in contrast with the attack of lust whose evidence was beside her in a black-and-gold plastic bag and the tendrils of hair stuck in sweat on her forehead. He was unperturbed at having missed lunch, or having been kept waiting by her when he did arrive: —I went to freshen up. — At ease with the rituals of five-star hotels, he looked a moment at his nails, twisting into place the ring that had been turned by a towel. The long time they had known each other — all that had passed since five-thirty that morning — made apologies understood, as between partners preoccupied in a joint enterprise not to be trivialised.
— Is everything all right? — Her words were almost those they had used to assure no bones were broken.
— That depends on him. — His eyes moved rapidly in confirmation of orders gone over. — Whether he resists — really. — The eyes fixed on her. — I’ve told them to be careful.—
She did not arrive back in Nairobi that night. Leonie was not worried; she had found the note, Hillela was safe with Reuel, splendid fellow, Leonie herself would be confident to go to the end of the world with him. If only she could convince the State Department to be as confident that he was the man to support.
They came to a country hotel. The wooden building stood on stilts among fever trees whose slender trunks gleamed phosphorescent green in a dark roaring with insect song. An old nightwatchman gave them a key attached to a slab of wood marked Room 8. They stood on a rickety gallery that was supposed to allow tourists to watch hippos come out of the river down below, but nothing moved in the frantically vibrating humidity. In Room 8 there was a fan that turned its face, clicking and creaking, this way and that over them as they lay naked. They had already touched and felt one another, that morning, and that kind of familiarity was natural to turn into the other between a sexually-experienced man and woman. Yet she was a surprise to the General as his big body blotted hers from the face of the fan and the chilled layer of his skin and hers melted in his heat. She bore his weight vigorously and gave him great joy. And he could see in the dark the river-shine of eyes and the white of teeth — she kept her eyes open and was smiling — and when he had done with her he had the best feeling of all, that all he had felt was only the possibility of what she could make him feel.
She was not sentimental in the morning, either. Each lay, before the other was aware, wakened by the farting grunts of hippos. — I thought it was you, snoring. — She leapt up, breasts jumping, wrapped the giraffe-printed bedcover round herself and went out to see the animals. He lay in the smell of her body, already specifically identifiable to him, and thought about the man who was his son.
Leonie had to admit: if the State Department wouldn’t, Hillela had the nous to take up with the General when he was on the up-and-up again. She must have had a pretty good inkling he was sure of getting back into power. Perhaps she even knew something conventionally well-informed circles on African affairs didn’t? The love affair with Reuel went on for several months, after it apparently had started — that time when they went to Mombasa together — before she broke off with Brad. She was back in Africa on two or three working trips during the period; though nobody but she and Brad themselves knew for sure when the break actually came? Brad’s mother — who couldn’t believe anyone could do such a thing — said it seemed she had stayed on in the brownstone (presumably platonically?) quite a while after she told Brad. And he never said a word to anyone. Probably ashamed to.
It was said she wanted to marry Brad to qualify automatically for American citizenship. That theory fell away as malicious gossip — she didn’t marry him, that was the point! Leonie defended her spiritedly, romantically; among the protégés two had ‘found each other’, there was a new career opening if the one in the brownstone had been abandoned. But the young white widow and her African child, ikon of liberation and reconciliation between the Third World and the Western World, taken on by a local Joseph who found room for her in a house with storm windows like their own, had no options, for others. In Committee, the ikon could only be turned to the wall. She ended there, for them. She had not even given the opportunity for an embarrassed farewell presentation.
At a bookshop in London Pauline met a friend who passed on news of Hillela she was not aware was already out of date. The friend had been to a seminar in Boston while on a visit to her daughter, married to a professor of International Relations, and actually heard Hillela speak. The name ‘Kgomani’ had meant she expected a black, and then she realized who this white girl must be. Pauline’s niece spoke very well, very knowledgeably, it turned out she was quite a figure in circles concerned with African problems, now. Somebody said her husband had been assassinated by the South African secret service, in Zambia? Yes, Pauline could confirm something like that had happened; the South Africans had denied it, of course, put the blame on rivalry among his own exiled comrades — sickening.
Pauline herself — Pauline and Joe — had left all that, left South Africa. She was defiantly miserable in London, with its civilised pleasures of parks and ponds, art galleries and theatres, pubs where house painters, advertising men and middle-class women up for a day’s shopping reached over each other’s shoulders for draught beer — democratic pleasures she had so enjoyed on the few visits as a tourist she, unlike her rich sister, had been able to afford. It was Pauline who had persuaded Joe they should leave. His offices had been broken into and some evidence stolen — who but the security police could have done that? The evidence was vital in a case he was defending; being Joe, he went doggedly through the proper channels, seeking an indictment against the police, working himself to death as a detective rather than a lawyer to find the individual culprits. And being successful, of course; exposing the false alibis, the cover-ups by one department of the police hierarchy for another, in cross-examination. For what? The men he was defending were members of the Black Consciousness movement, who rejected white participation in the liberation of the country. She burst out laughing every time she reminded him of this; she did so before friends as well as when they were alone. Her Saturday classes in the church had closed down. The South African Students’ Organization didn’t want black children to take white charity education, and what SASO said dwindled attendance as the students’ authority grew. The children sang freedom songs instead of the songs of gratitude they used to offer to Pauline and her helpers. One of the parents came to her to ask whether madam couldn’t make the children come back to her Saturday mornings? But there was nothing madam or the Soweto woman could do; that was exactly what the students, even quite small children, were saying: they had done nothing, they could do nothing, together. The other non-racial groups to which Pauline belonged had gone white. It was the only advice to be got out of Black Consciousness. Work to change your own people, not us. Joe kept suggesting there was still plenty to be done that was worthwhile at the Black Sash advice bureaux, where some women with views just as politically advanced as Pauline’s helped blacks resist by asserting to the limit such rights as they had. But Pauline could not take the place assigned to her, among whites. The revolutionary temperament that had been unsuccessful in driving her Underground more than ten years before became vanity that would accept black rejection only as some schism within the central movement towards liberation, not as the exclusion of whites like herself who were ready to opt out of their colour and class. — If it’s not simply a revival of the old split between the ANC and PAC, then what is it? If it’s not a revival that favours the others, because the ANC’s at a low ebb in influence within the country, at the moment?—