Denise wrote her own confident letters of application, now giving the post office box number of her father’s workplace for convenient reply. She read the format out to the parents for approval, and was granted several interviews in favourable response. With her very first job she could choose! Their Denise! Again the three conferred, Denise and the parents; Abraham knew something of the business world, even if he was only a factory foreman. She made the right choice: a trainee in a bank. All personnel white like her. Her starting salary was low, but enough for their girl to clothe herself, pay for daily minibus transport, enjoy a little independence, and it meant Elsie didn’t have to take care of an old white lady anymore — work she’d found to help pay the business school fees. But it appeared that their girl had made one friend during the business school courses, after all. Denise’s appointment at the bank was to begin on the first day of the coming month, two weeks ahead; she was having a holiday, a reward she deserved after her success in her courses, helping Elsie at home to make new curtains and riding into the city quite often to see the friend. She even spent a night at the friend’s family house, there was a party. In the white suburbs, they were, house and party, of course.
Abraham found the words after he and Elsie were in the dark in bed. — D’you think she’s told this friend. — Told what. — As if there was nothing that would come out, nothing to explain. — Who she is. Us. Here. — Must have. Otherwise what’d the friend think of never being invited back. Here.—
There was no resentment or hurt in the fact that their girl did not bring her friend home to them. Other play-whites did so, they knew, with genuinely trusted white pals, in particular that band of whites, Communists, Lefties, Liberals of one kind or another who wanted to prove themselves against the race laws. But their girl was not a play-white. She was fully entitled to be at those parties in the suburbs, sleeping over in a white’s house. They knew and their girl knew what they wanted for her and she should claim for herself in order to fulfil that want.
Yet when she told them, she and her girlfriend had found a bachelor flat in the city they could afford and would be moving in together — it was the home address she’d given to the bank — they felt something suddenly fallen away from them. Under the very ground they themselves had prepared. That feeling, in their hanging hands, on their faces: it was so — so what? Unreasonable. Shaming. Silly. What on earth was the matter with them, you Abraham (her look), you mama Elsie (his look)? This was the next, the right and vital step in moving out of the cramped life they had and into the life that had everything. For her to leave them was the natural process of their act of love for her. Freed.
The friend Angela had found a job in an attorney’s office near the bank, the housing arrangement was convenient for both and they got along well together. Abraham and Elsie drew some of their small savings to help Denise buy a refrigerator and her share of the basic furniture needed. They were taken to see the flat and met the girl Angela; it was clear she knew what to expect and was friendly and respectful in the normal way of young adults meeting someone’s parents. So this girl Angela was in the compact as well. They never visited the flat again; but Denise came home — must still be home, a flat that’s passed from occupant to occupant, marks on the walls not your own, can’t be home — she came to them often. Nearly every Sunday, Christmas and birthdays, theirs and hers (calculated as the Sunday she was found in the church toilet), sometimes sleeping the night in her old bed. Such a good girl. Others with her circumstances would have disappeared, disowned them. And that they would have understood as the final act, in their love. God’s will. If he allowed the laws — laws that made it necessary — to be the acts of people who prayed obedient to him in their whites’ churches. This was a proviso that Abraham, growing older, had but would not pass on to Elsie, wounding her with his lapse of faith. Oddly, if there was anyone he might have conveyed it to it could have been his Jewish boss, he’d been working at the factory for more than twenty-five years and it was to himself, the foreman, that the boss one day confided he hadn’t been away ill for a week, his absence was because he had been taking his wife back and forth to doctors for tests that showed she had cancer.
A foundling. Who was this girl they decided was Denise? A chosen one, having no provenance, she could make for herself two lives, one where she was cradled and loved and learnt to talk, communicate in the intimate taal of a designated township, learnt to walk — walk out into the second, other life: everything.
Denise and her flatmate had boyfriends. Angela, many. The weekends when Abraham-and-Elsie’s girl was home with them, the current chap could come and make love to Angela in the flat. She never let on — that was the phrase her best friend could be assured of — where that conveniently absent best friend was. Denise, after a few trials that didn’t get as far as bed, had only one boyfriend. When she knew Angela would be out for a late night, they could go to bed in the room she shared with Angela; their turn to make love. They had met at a party, the customary first stage in the white middle-class ritual of mating choices — the birthday of one of the other girls who worked in the bank. He was a technician with a company selling and servicing television sets; a young man from the lower end of that class, his father a retired post-master. Afrikaans was the home language but the mother was of English-speaking origin, so he was fluent in both, and attractively intelligent. A bee scenting something in her pollen: he lent books to his girl; they were there beside her bed when he wasn’t and Angela was sleeping off wine and a wild night. They were novels and travel books. He was saving for a trip overseas, he knew what he wanted to see in his life, London, Paris, Rome. And Venice, she would add; one of the books described the Piazza San Marco, and the gondolas. Who, of either of them, could have said what decided they would marry — the love-making in her bed, the freedom beyond that she had gained for herself, the freedom he was aware of, the world outside the country, the city of a bank and a television sales shop? These were the components of falling in love; marriage was the accepted social means of protecting this and giving it permanence with an official license and vows in a church.
There the usual, simple progression of the mating ritual was neither usual nor simple. Denise had told Mike — not who she was because she didn’t, couldn’t know — who her Mama and Daddy were, and taken him back over the line she had crossed under their loving guidance, to meet them. He spoke Afrikaans with Abraham and Elsie, a common language brings ease, it didn’t matter that the young white man was in a Coloured township, a Coloured home for the first time (a kind of foreign travel). Being in love is a state of the continuous present, the now; he was living only in the context of his girl’s eyes and breasts and sweet thrilling entry to her body. This unfamiliar, forbidden separate place of colour she had been nurtured in was of no account to him; all that he had been nurtured to believe about the taint of contact with those of a different tint was irrelevant: being in love converted him from milk-imbibed racism, weaned him at a single encounter. And, of course, the fact was that his girl was not theirs, Abraham’s and Elsie’s, she was white — he knew better than anyone how white in all the physical characteristics cited by those claiming these as superior to the characteristics of all others in the official racial categories laid down by law and followed by the church. To record that Abraham and Elsie were overjoyed at a coming marriage of the girl who had been their Denise to a good young white man with a steady job (his own family speaking Afrikaans — a kind of link even though there probably wouldn’t be the usual parents-in-law one) would be to understate the solemnity of that joy. First they had let her go; now the foundling had been found by one of her own kind. Everything: it was about to be achieved with this marriage.