She had a way of screwing up her eyes and opening her mouth, lips drawn back, mimicking the expression of someone straining to hear aright. — If you’re happy to come back to this from your meetings of the NEC, your big decisions, no complaints … —
— How can I have complaints when so many have come back to nowhere at all. At least we have dirty blankets.—
She ignored the smile. — And how does that help them?—
It was Vera Stark to whom she suddenly felt she could unburden herself; the farce of self-sacrifice when it was not necessary might have to be kept up with the wife of the leader in whose house she and Didymus had spent the first night, but Vera, while counted upon to understand perfectly the necessity for such tactics within that circle, was outside it. There were whites who had been in exile, but Vera had not; there were whites who shared the wariness of return, Vera was not one of them. Unburden to her and, by implication of a grant of intimacy, place responsibility on her.
When Vera answered the telephone with the usual cheerful how-are-you, there was a pause.
— Lousy. — And then that cry of a laugh.
Vera, good old Vera, didn’t make the usual facilely sympathetic noises. — Let’s have lunch today. Have you time?—
— I just have to get out of this place.—
On the site of the small restaurant where young Vera and her wartime lover had sat longing to embrace, the place now transformed into a takeaway outlet with additional vegetarian menu and tables open to all races, Sibongile was first to arrive. Her crossed legs were elegant in black suede boots draped to the knee.
— I love those boots. London boots.—
Vera had the generosity, towards women who still make their appearance seductive, of a woman confident that she was once successfully seductive herself and now knows she may only occasionally, and in an abstracted way, herself be merely pleasing.
The two women kissed and each gave a squeeze to the other’s arm as men greet one another with a mock punch.
— Do you? Yes, London. I suppose they give me away.—
They ordered a meal. Vera, whatever was the special for the day; her guest reading up and down the menu and asking for what was not on it — fish, was there no fish? The waiter smilingly patient, addressing her respectfully as mama, persuasive in what he somehow correctly divined was their shared mother tongue that this dish or that was (back to English) very, very nice, tasty.
Vera read the message of the fish. Lousy; everything lousy, not even possible to get what you wanted to eat.
With the waiter gone the required time had passed for her companion to be able to speak. She described the hotel — the ‘accommodation’ she kept calling it, by turns derisive, angry, disgusted, despairing, and — being Sibongile, Sally — giggling sharply. — But Didy! I don’t know, he seems ready to accept anything, he’s meek! Like a rabbit, quiet, nibbling at whatever’s given to him.—
That veteran of prisons and interrogation. That fox at infiltration, raiding under the eyes of the police and army. They laughed at the notion.
— I’m telling you! He seems to be living in the past, a time warp, we’re still some sort of refugee, we must suffer in noble silence — for what the cause doesn’t need any more. While he’s meeting members of the Government, for God’s sake! The Boers fawning all over us, inviting us to official dinners, getting themselves photographed with us for the papers! But he won’t tell anyone on the NEC, straight out, we must have something decent to live in if we’re to function properly at that level. They’re never going to find anything, that I know. We’ll have to do it ourselves … I’ll have to do it … but in the meantime! That flea-pit, I wouldn’t put a dog in it, and you know I don’t like dogs. I never dreamt I’d think back on our basement London flat and the one we had in Stockholm, those grey days — my God, I do.—
So Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained the personae of Sally and Didy, the code names of their old concourse with whites. They came to stay with the Starks. — Ben, you should just see the Hillbrow dump! Not just the dirt Sally goes on about … people sit around in the bar lounge watching television all day long, sprawled there sucking Coca-Cola, nothing to do and nowhere to go. She’s years from that kind of slum atmosphere, even though they’re her own people … she and Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl existence they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo.—
Ben defined the element exile had, at least, brought into the Maqomas’ life. — Privacy; they’ve had it in London for years, now.—
There was no reflection between the Starks that their privacy was invaded for the five weeks Sally and Didy lived with them. Their own relationship was at the stage when the temporary presence of others was revivifying. They had an extra bathroom; that was the only condition of middle-class existence that had any importance for them.
Sally and Didy’s late-born daughter, Mpho, arrived from her school in England. She stayed indiscriminately, a weekend here, a week there, between her grandmother’s house in Alexandra township and the Starks’ house, sleeping in the bed and among the curling pop-star posters and odd trinkets that had survived their daughter Annick’s adolescence and absence. The Maqoma daughter was a sixteen-year-old beauty of the kind created by the cross-pollination of history. Boundaries are changed, ideologies merge, sects, religious and philosophical, create new idols out of combinations of belief, scientific discoveries link cause and effect between the disparate, ethnically jumbled territorial names make a nationality out of many-tongued peoples of different religions, a style of beauty comes out of the clash between domination and resistance. Mpho was a resolution — in a time when this had not yet been achieved by governments, conferences, negotiations, mass action and international monitoring or intervention — of the struggle for power in the country which was hers, and yet where, because of that power struggle, she had not been born. This schoolgirl combined the style of Vogue with the assertion of Africa. She was a mutation achieving happy appropriation of the aesthetics of opposing species. She exposed the exaggeratedly long legs that seem to have been created not by natural endowment but to the specification of Western standards of luxury, along with the elongated chassis of custom-built cars. The oyster-shell-pink palms of her slender hands completed the striking colour contrast of matt black skin with purple-red painted fingernails. Her hair, drawn back straightened and oiled to the gloss of European hair, was gathered on the crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese style, that fringed her shoulders. Despite all this, Mpho did not have the aspirant beauty queen’s skull grin but a child’s smile of great sweetness, glittering in her eyes. Out of her mouth came a perky London English. She could not speak an African language, neither the Zulu of her mother nor the Xhosa of her father. — Oh but I understand, mother dear, I can follow— And she would open her eyes wide and roll her head, appealing to high heaven in exactly the gesture of the mother with whom she was arguing.
— Yes, but who knows you understand when you never answer, people will think you’re an idiot, my retarded child. You’re going to have lessons.—
— Well, that’s pretty humiliating for you, ma, isn’t it — have your daughter taught our language as if it’s French or German or something.—
Sally appealed to their hosts, Vera and Ben — Listen to that. My girl, that is exactly what has been done to our people, you, your father, me. We’ve been alienated from what is ours, and it’s not only in exile. Your father’s descended from a great chief who resisted the British more than a hundred years ago — you have a name to live up to! You were robbed of your birth — that should have been right here. Take back your language.—