— You don’t like I must keep the keys. Isn’t it. I can see all the time, you don’t like that.—
She began to shake her head, arms crossed under her breasts, almost laughing; lying, protesting for time to explain—
— No, I can see. But I’m work for you. Me, I’m your boy, always I’m have the keys of your house. Every night I take that keys with me in my room, when you go away on holiday, I’m lock up everything … it’s me I’ve got the key for all your things, isn’t it—
— July, I want to tell you—
The ten fingers of his hands, held up, barred what she thought, she wanted. — In your house, if something it’s getting lost it’s me who must know. Isn’t it? A-l-l your things is there, it’s me I’ve got the key, always it’s me—
— July, you don’t ask me—
— Your boy who work for you. There in town you are trusting your boy for fifteen years. — His nostrils were stiff dark holes. The absurd ‘boy’ fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon? The shift boss had used it; the word was never used in her house; she priggishly shamed and exposed others who spoke it in her presence. She had challenged it in the mouths of white shopkeepers and even policemen. — Trust you! Of course we trusted you—
They had moved closer together. She put a fist, hard claim, upon his arm.
— No. No. You don’t like I must have these keys.—
— July you don’t ask me — you’re just telling me. Why don’t you let me speak? Why don’t you ask me?—
He drew his head back to his steady neck, to look at her.
— What you going to say? Hay? What you can say? You tell everybody you trust your good boy. You are good madam, you got good boy.—
— Stop saying that.—
— She speak nice always, she pay fine for me when I’m getting arrested, when I’m sick one time she call the doctor. — He gave a laugh like a cry. — You worry about your keys. When you go away I’m leave look after your dog, your cat, your car you leave in the garage. I mustn’t forget water your plants. Always you are telling me even last minute when I’m carry your suitcase, isn’t it? Look after everything, July. And you bringing nice present when you come back. You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s still all right. Myself, I’m not say you’re not a good madam — but you don’t say you trust for me. — It was a command. — You walk behind. You looking. You asking me I must take all your books out and clean while you are away. You frightened I’m not working enough for you?—
— If you felt I shouldn’t have asked you to clean out the bookshelves that time, why didn’t you say so? What were you afraid of? You could always tell me. You had only to say so. I’ve never made you do anything you don’t think it was your job to do. Have I? Have I? I make mistakes, too. Tell me. When did we treat you inconsiderately — badly? I’d like to know, I really want to know.—
— The master he think for me. But you, you don’t think about me, I’m big man, I know for myself what I must do. I’m not thinking all the time for your things, your dog, your cat.—
— The master. Bam’s not your master. Why do you pretend? Nobody’s ever thought of you as anything but a grown man. My god, I can’t believe you can talk about me like that … Bam’s had damn all to do with you, in fifteen years. That’s it. You played around with things together in the tool shed. You worked for me every day. I got on your nerves. So what. You got on mine. That’s how people are. — She flowered into temper. — But we’re not talking about that. That’s got nothing to do with now. That’s over—
He flickered his eyes. — How you say it’s over—
— Over and done with. You don’t work for me any more, do you.—
— You not going pay me, this month?—
— Pay you! — She glowed and flashed. He continued a kind of fastidious pretence of insensitivity to a coarse and boring assault. — You know we can pay you what you used to get, but we can’t pay you for—
— African people like money. — The insult of refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding.
— You know quite well what I mean … For what’s happened. It’s different here. You’re not a servant.—
— I’m the boy for your house, isn’t it? — He made a show of claiming a due.
— What’s the good of going on about that? It’s six hundred kilometres over there — her arm flung across before his face the useless rope of a gesture that would fall short of what had disappeared into the bush. — If I offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you — if that hurt your feelings … I know I don’t know, I didn’t know, and I should have known — The same arm dangled; she didn’t know, either, if he understood the words; she dropped fifteen years of the habit of translation into very simple, concrete vocabulary. If she had never before used the word ‘dignity’ to him it was not because she didn’t think he understood the concept, didn’t have any — it was only the term itself that might be beyond his grasp of the language. — If I ask you for the keys now it’s not the key of the kitchen door! It’s not as a servant you’ve got them. Is it? But a friend — he asks, he asks … and he gives back … and when he wants something again, he asks again.—
He produced the keys in his palm. — Take it. It’s not the keys for your kitchen. Fifteen years I’m work for your kitchen, your house, because my wife, my children, I must work for them. Take it.—
— If all you can think about is what happened back there, what about Ellen?—
The name of his town woman fell appallingly between them, something neither should dare take up.
— What is happening to Ellen? Your wife and your children were here, and all those years Ellen was with you. Where is she, in the fighting there? Has she got something to eat, somewhere to sleep? You were so concerned about your wife — and what does she think about Ellen?—
He had stopped instantly the blinking pantomime of derision. He might take her by the shoulders; they stepped across fifteen years of no-man’s-land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other’s breath before they turn away to the regulation number of paces, or conspirators who will never escape what each knows of the other. Her triumph dissembled in a face at once open, submissive, eyes emptied for a vision to come, for them both.
He shuddered in affront and temptation; she saw the convulsion in his neck and understood he would never forgive her the moment. Her victory burned in her as a flame blackens within a hollow tree.
A servant replied uninterestedly to a dutiful enquiry on the part of the good madam who knows better than to expose herself to an answer from the real facts of his life: —I think Ellen she’s go home to her auntie there in Botswana. Small small village. Like my home. Is quiet there for black people.—
He put the keys in his pocket and walked away. His head moved from side to side like a foreman’s inspecting his work-shop or a farmer’s noting work to be done on the lands. He yelled out an instruction to a woman, here, questioned a man mending a bicycle tyre, there, hallooed across the valley to the young man approaching who was his driving instructor, and who was almost always with him, now, in a city youth’s jeans, silent as a bodyguard, with a string of beads resting girlishly round the base of his slender neck.