This was not a conference, it was a case of important moral significance to the government of their country! He was in the preparatory phase of his retirement, didn't he realise he was free at last. Freed to follow, for once, his avocation, in a country where there were archaeological sites you wouldn't find among the Makapan Caves and the dig where Mrs later identified as Mr Ples lay for millennia. The Norwegian they'd found compatible enough could take him to archaeological sites while he stayed on for a couple of weeks.
But you?
I'm a big girl… You wouldn't be seeing much of me anyway, the case's going to be heard in Bloemfontein.
They made love the night before she left. She said as they turned to sleep, under brief emotion difficult to control – heaven knows why, because the statement was in line with their plans for retirement – This probably will be my last big case, it'll drag on to the end, end of the year. As if as she spoke, a decision was made. The Mexican venture was only the first of those they were going to take, free together.
Benni knew from her Berenice experience in the public relations of advertising that black men in business generally left their wives at home when they came to cocktail parties and even dinners, the empty place beside them in the seating arrangements at official functions being cleared of cutlery, glasses, by a waiter, and in a private house dealt with by a shift-up closer of those seated. A black entrepreneur might bring a beautiful girlfriend along, on the side, made known only by her first name, barely introduced on the general understanding she wasn't really there.
There was Paul's return to the bush with his team of black as well as white mates – and you held your breath or didn't think about it: he seemed absolutely restored to strength enough to go out and live rough. The other factor was the relationship with their child. (Her friends remarking, what a good father, lucky you.) It was so normal, familial – after all that had happened – he had never confessed the deprivation, those times they sat apart, facing one another in the quarantine garden, the grown man's childhood, the past. Wouldn't it be part of what she ought to do to restore life in him, bring children and wives of his Thapelos, not just the ecological bushmates alone, home to the house, as a natural expression of what ordinary life is now that the colour you are doesn't compose it. So not just restore him; there's the unexamined sense that life can never be as it was. Something the new man may need to bring a new kind of relationship into the old one (left in the garden) that served – the attraction of opposites. Saturday braai on the terrace seems the occasion to invite Derek and Thapelo with emphasis that this includes wives and children. The mix of a few friends from the Agency includes a black photographer with his Afro-American girlfriend and a lesbian copywriter (white) who is surprised by the arrival of the dishy husband's bushmates, Thapelo and Derek.
– I wouldn't have thought as they prefer living away miles from anywhere their idea of pleasure would be to come back to all these swarming kids. -
Her Agency mate Berenice laughed at her over the salad they were making.
– You'll never understand what it means to be straight, my innocent darling. Get a life! -
Derek has four children and Thapelo three on their legs and a baby in a padded carry-cot decked with dangling toys. Derek's wife manages to look like the sexually challenging teenager she must have been, with nipples poking at a T-shirt but the set of years is in the angle of the cigarette in her mouth. Thapelo's is a beauty, a schoolteacher who could be one of the models in Berenice's campaigns to promote luxury cars or cosmetics. The tossing blond hair of Derek's woman, placing her as a sister rather than mother to her twelve-year-old daughter casting about her blond veil in the same way, is completed in contemporary fashionableness by the braided and beaded heads of Thapelo's woman and six-year-old daughter. The bushmates, including Paul – Berenice has no false modesty, existence is too ruthless for that – apparently go for showy species outside as well as inside the wilderness.
The children, for whom pizzas have been provided, race about in rivalry, covet one another's toys, invent games, hug lovingly, tussle savagely and have to be parted. The private schools they go to, these days, have black and white pupils and all the complexions and features characteristic of in-between colours; there is nothing unexpected for them in this gathering.
Who would have thought of the intellectually effervescent Thapelo – cool – as a family man. Here he is with the young climbing all over him. He shares, mouth by mouth turnabout, his piled plate with his younger daughter, steadies her on legs that have only recently begun to take her weight. Nicholas goes, as if in the superiority of his age making a claim to match, to hang on Paul's shoulder he can reach where his father is hunkered on the grass.
The three men who live another life in the wilderness cannot be together in any company without evoking it in references, discussion, argument between them, out of which every now and then they turn a passionate (rhetorical) question or a challenge of fact that ought to be known to the others around who surely don't know and maybe don't want to. But the company has been chosen expressly by Berenice-as-Benni to bring them – something – together, and her selection works well because the listening copywriter looks alternately sceptical, then attentively in agreement, and the photographer and the American break in or over the voices of the bushmates.
– What doesn't get published except in scientific-speak Mrs Jones or Mr Tshabalala don't understand, aren't meant to, is that those radioactive isotopes could fall into wrong hands, make black bombs radioactive-
The American has a voice insistent as a doorbell. – What the hell – oh hell, sure – is a 'black bomb'? I'm one of those dumb folk who don't hear you right. -
Her boyfriend must assert he's not with her there, he's a professional photographer in the advertising industry, he gets around, and he's a South African. – They're talking about Koeberg, the nuclear thing in the Cape. -
– No – these're some facts of the risks of a pebble-bed reactor that's high up on the planning board. -
– Well, you could say hugely adjunct to existing dangers of Koeberg, Derek. – Paul, animated on the familiar ground of grim reference, is addressing himself, with a droll distortion of his mouth, aside to the uninitiated.
– Look at these kids. Our kids. All our kids. D'you know about the danger, what babies could breathe in from the day they're born. Never mind all the security that's going to be installed. – Thapelo adds for the understanding of his mates alone – You can walk away from it. Shaya-shaya! -
The photographer throws up open palms. – All of us here are supposed to believe this. -
– So how far along is this pebble reactor thing, I mean is it in the works now? -
Doesn't the woman – Benni's told Paul the photographer's girlfriend is in banking – read the newspapers while she's visiting a country. Well we all follow only what we think affects us personally, soccer results or maybe with her it's the New York Stock Exchange and interest rates; now, it's better not to go further than the date of the next blood tests. He tells her what's at least been published for everyone to learn. – Eskom, that's the government's Electricity Supply Commission, got a licence from the National Nuclear Regulator before the end of last year. Although the Environmental Affairs Minister was challenged in court by Earthlife Africa and other groups, even the Cape Chamber of Commerce – businessmen who've usually got other things on their calculators than extinction by nuclear leaks… -