The couple’s social life was extensive, expansive; not much use for Arthur’s little home-built terrace bar. The company’s public relations dinners and working breakfasts were eaten and libated in restaurants. Norma and her husband were guests at the national day celebrations of foreign embassies and the homes of Government officials, even a Minister in whose projects of urban renewal the company was involved, or expected to be. She bought Arthur silk shirts and a brocade cummerbund for important formal occasions; the couple came back through the electronic Open Sesame of their gates and made love in the house of their achievement. There was no question of jealousy; this need, hers of him, made Norma’s success his as well, just as, when they met, she was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. What he had done, was doing, was still in the process of creating, there’s no end to it, is that containment of everything they are — Norma, himself, their children — which is home, the organism that expresses, and grows in, status.
Norma, of course, has changed outwardly with status. Reduced rather than grown … slimmed away the stockiness with diet, massage and the gym she insists they go to together; changed the colour of her hair and smoothed the bluntness of her face with beauty treatments, professional make-up before official occasions. She wears the female tycoon outfits of crossdressing masculine suits with the jacket open over flouncy blouses which reveal the beginning of the valley between breasts. She has shed everything of the old days Underground, the dossing-down anywhere, the risky missions that mustn’t be questioned, the hunter’s eye of the Plain Clothes political police at the corner — everything but the bonding then, way back, with the comrades, many of whom are now in Government and parastatal organisations. That’s still there: a new kind of Underground. To be counted on. The people who lost power have their sneering accusatory term for it: nepotism. As if they didn’t do it, jobs for pals, in their day. But their pals had not suffered, had done nothing to deserve reward. Unless for their evil. And where in the world is there a political party in power, a government, that does not take the right to appoint its proven colleagues from the guerrilla times of opposition, parliamentary let alone revolutionary, to important cabinet portfolios and other high positions?
Norma was more than competent. There didn’t need to be any snide justification cited for her appointment: she simply fulfilled every principle of the new order of fitness for public life and responsibility, even the professional scepticism of the newspaper editorials granted her highly intelligent use of experience gained in various sectors, and if she was not black, at least she qualified for that other, the gender principle industry as well as Government was expected to follow: she was a woman appointee. Often she was the Company board’s choice to be negotiator on joint projects with the Government. That would be one of the occasions when her photograph would appear in the newspapers. When representatives of the World Bank or the Group of 8 visited the country official invitations came to her and her partner (secretaries had been instructed to avoid gender forms of address which stereotype the concept of a couple, there are dignitaries linked together as two men or two women). So sometimes Arthur was in the photograph, too, if half-hidden between other heads. At such gatherings there was always, naturally, the Minister or Minister’s Deputy from Norma’s old days who had put her on the list the important visitors should meet, be aware of. A consciousness that might be recalled some time, useful to the comrade become colleague, in her advancement.
The house with the Cape Dutch gable continued to keep up; the furniture that already had been changed since the basic stuff that was all they could afford when they moved in was replaced by something more comfortable and of better quality. Arthur caught his Norma looking about her, shifting in a chair, and it was as if he read it, said it for her. And for himself. — Shouldn’t we look for one of those leather seating units you can move around, compose the way you like, you know, more places for people to group in. — Journalists came to interview Norma, TV crews were often there to film the encounter for overseas series seeking the opinions of prominent people outside Government but active in the progress of the country. There had also grown up the tradition, following that of other people living in their kind of suburb, of giving a quasi-official party on some private occasion — birthday or wedding anniversary. Norma would call in an Indian caterer, old comrade who had made his particular way to thrive in new circumstances.
— I love the feel of leather. — She seemed already to be arranging the units, this way or that, in their livingroom. They decided it was not worth the trouble to advertise furniture for sale and have people coming to view. The Cape Dutch gable was hardly the place for yard sales. They donated the old stuff to a shelter for the homeless aged Welfare told her about; a van came to take it away, there was a grateful letter from the trustees of the place, it was somehow nice to think that the acquisition of an indoor setting adequate to the distinction of the gabled facade of their life at this stage also benefitted others who had the misfortune to have descended to the nadir.
It was shortly after the new furniture had been put in place (how he and she enjoyed themselves trying out the combinations, a mating dance, with her pleasure at the smooth cling of the leather to her bare legs when he and she collapsed on the seats!) that the accident happened. She was driving from a late meeting. At the sharp turn off the main road that led to the quickest, familiar way to the Cape Dutch gable, a car came from somewhere — a blind blunder into her. Her car was flung away with the whole passenger side punched to a crumple. The impact was as if an invisible blow in the face but she was unhurt. And so was the driver of the other car. There followed the usual procedures, that Arthur took care of. Police report, wreck towed away, insurance claimed; his line. It was clear Norma was not at fault; but maybe neither was the other driver. The traffic lights were not functioning at the crossroads he came from; if anyone was culpable it was the city traffic department. One of the deficiencies of ordinary capacity in administration, now; the fascistracists everywhere, anywhere, were always more efficient than the free.
She had a company car but it was being serviced that particular day and the car she was driving was their own, the family one — Arthur too, in his slow but satisfactory advance to Assistant General Manager had his company car. It’s a man’s affair, buying a car. A woman chooses the colour and has a preference for the profile, as the vehicles stand patient for acquisition in ballroom-showrooms, but the man looks under the hood and has a criterion of safety features and local availability of spares, to be met. Arthur visited dealers and brought home brochures. They studied them together, flipping with an admiring detachment past the ultimate luxury models but agreeing that they didn’t want another station wagon, they had moved out of the utility class, the boys were old enough now not to climb on the seats and household supplies were delivered, not loaded and lugged from a supermarket. The decision was made for the latest good model in an upper price range (as the salesman placed it in his hierarchy) but not excessively high. So long as it had automatic transmission and the other requirements Arthur tried out on his test drive, the car was the right one to glide through the Open Sesame gates as one of the appropriate complements to what had been made, what was being made, of the home behind the gable. Norma wanted the colour to be blue; only black or red was on the dealer’s floor, but a blue model would be available in a few days.