— Have you ordered it? — The question was her greeting as she flung down her briefcase and brushed his cheek as if he were a handkerchief passing her lips. — Because if you have, get on to the man and cancel. You haven’t signed anything, no? We can get a wonderful deal. — She named one of the great foreign luxury cars whose photographs they had flipped through in brochures. A co-director knew the right dealer well and she would meet him next day. Yes, she was aware of the fortune a car like that cost, but she had been promised — absolutely — there’d be a sizeable discount. And almost nothing in cash on the spot. The colleague could assure anybody of her position in one of the two largest construction firms in the country, payments no problem. The dealers know it’s good for their business to have prominent people choosing their make of luxury vehicle.
— Can you imagine yourself driving one of those! — As if he were a little boy with a dream to be fulfilled. Norma hugged him.
Later, after a happy, noisy meal with the boys — often their mother wasn’t there, she had business engagements — and the children had gone to bed, she smiled her jaunty grimace-way from the old days. — Why shouldn’t we take advantage of connections, like everybody else.—
The car was delivered. It was not blue but silvery and had the pedigreed scent of real leather seats, a console like that of the array of controls before the pilot of a plane. It was so long that it only just cleared the lowering of the roll-down doors in the garage. She was right, Arthur enjoyed driving the family on trips; when it was not in use, the pedigreed in its stable, it was another, an exalted attribute to the life being created in the house with the Cape Dutch gable Norma had chosen unerringly, that one look.
A year or more passed and Brett, the younger son, satisfactorily found a place along with his brother at the best of private schools. On the newspaper posters that couldn’t be read as the Assistant Manager of an insurance company was urged along by rush hour traffic, but whose headlines filled the wait at red lights, news from the world was often ousted by terse assertions of local corruption. Corruption in central government departments, regional, provincial structures, privatisation projects, land redistribution, mining or fishing rights, airline mergers — land, sea and air — the very air that was being circulated by the vehicle’s airconditioning. When he got home he read in the newspaper details of whatever the accusations and evidence were; and heard the assertions and denials on the radio, saw, with Norma over wine, the faces of those involved who consented to appear on TV to exonerate themselves in defence. Often the faces were those of official spokespersons rather than the individual him- or herself. It was so repetitive that it became if not boring — some of the names were fascinatingly unexpected — accepted, if within critical unease: a climate, a season. Living in it; not of it.
There was an evening unlike their evenings together with wine and television news. Norma switched off image and sound in mid-sentence. She sat with both hands round her glass looking into it.
Norma was not one for bad moods?
— Nothing. Problems at work.—
He mentioned a colleague of hers she had once spoken of as careless. She clicked her tongue in dismissal.
He waited, Norma always knew what she wanted to say and when. Timing was part of her efficiency, he admired how it had worked for her in her advancement.
— There’s an investigation started into the finances of the Company. The Government tenders we won last year.—
— But it all went well. You were satisfied? The projects were completed according to specification and so on — I mean, the Company’s not some little outfit taking on what it can’t deliver. —
— It’s the awarding of tenders. Who won the tender against others.—
Then it was flashed by on the newspaper posters in rush hour traffic, the latest scandal. CONSTRUCTION BECOMES CORRUPTION. He still believed it would be the members of the Board who would be investigated, and indicted if it were proved that bribery was involved in the awarding of contracts to the Company, though he was troubled about what this would mean for Norma’s career. Muddy water splashes, anyone in insurance cases that come to Court knows that.
A weekly paper that relied on sensational exposé for its circulation published names and details of company corruption and Norma — Norma’s name was among them. The pedigreed car she had bought at a ‘discount’, it is alleged (a newspaper has to be careful even if it has somehow found proof of a fact) was in recognition of the favour of putting in a good word to the ear of one of the members of the old comrades’ bond in the Government department calling for tenders. The holidays Arthur had understood were complement to business trips or were paid for as her yearly bonus as a Director — these were her share of bribes between the Company and various tender boards’ members with whom — wasn’t that time honourably dead and buried — she had dossed down Underground.
The billiard table, the birthday present of the mini billiard table! That’s where it started! If only he had realised then. And all the other achievements in his part of her advancement, the creation of the home for it behind the Cape Dutch gable — all carried out with the money in their joint bank account swelled by her. Directors in every kind of company award themselves bonuses when a company thrives, what was there to doubt in that? Don’t bother about anything it’s routine business expenses.
Arthur, for his part, through the insurance company knew good lawyers and engaged one to defend Norma in Court. The man insisted that he had obtained the best that could be expected: a heavy fine and suspended sentence, while two of the senior directors even lost their case on appeal to a higher Court and went to prison. Her background as a white who had suffered to bring about a just society, and the fact that she was female, the lawyer lectured, were the only mitigating factors in her favour. — Your wife is a gullible woman. Or so the judge has chosen to believe. — And even if this had saved Norma, Arthur felt angry at the insult to her intelligence, all she had been and was. And there was bewilderment in him, at his anger: would he rather accept that his Norma was deviously dishonest?
It all happens just at the time when the architect has presented plans for extensions to the house that will not impinge upon or spoil the profile of the Cape Dutch gable against the sky. The boys have had lessons and are fine swimmers by now, there is a plan for a free-form pool and patio with change-room and bar with refrigerator.
They sold the house with the Cape Dutch gable, these things not accomplished, the home being made of it not fully achieved. The estate agent told them the property market was in decline; the Cape Dutch gable went at too low a price. It changed ownership several times in a decade.
‘Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.’ Arthur: some years not long after, must have died; as the moment of that part of the process is termed.
‘Many times man lives and dies,
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul.’
We were very excited when they told us about the new house. We knew there was something going on, the parents don’t like to tell until something’s sure because kids ask so many questions. But since my father’s had his new big job, an office and everything in what’s called Regional Administration — whatever that is — he talks with his friends, when they drink beer at our old place, about rebuilding and clearing away street people and so on — our mother’s been greeting him with other long talk we catch a few words of as we run in and out from playing in the street.