It was easy to see this use of ancestor worship as a political tactic shrewd peasants had thought of beyond the rational ingenuity of lawyers; but there were moments when, listening to the people’s spokesmen, she felt confusion and uncertainty— not about them, but in herself; whether the only validity of their claim lay outside the political struggle, outside the challenging of laws made by governments that rise and fall, in the continuation of life itself from below and above the very ground that sustained it. What other claim is there that holds? The wars fought over land, the boundary proclamations, the paper deeds of sale — each cancels the other. What was she — the Foundation — working for, if not for that claim? But it didn’t look good enough in legal plea — peasant mysticism can’t be codified as a legal right — it was too good, for that. With a shift in a chair or a half-smile she and Lazar passed over the instruction from the ancestors and took that which came from their own strategical experience in opposing the law through its interstices, which consisted mainly in delaying tactics. The action of re-evicting the people would be held off — maybe so long that the present policies of land ownership would be torn up. Who knows? Such things are not discussed with Lazar; he is young, and would not understand that doubts do not mean that belief in the necessity of the work she does is abandoned. And even while this case was occupying her, Oupa came with a favoured opening: they’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem, he’s got a problem. The owner of that apartment building where he was living was seeking the eviction of some tenants.
— The problem is, rooms on the roof. There are many people living up there.—
— But who pays rent for the rooms?—
— Well, that’s it. The tenants of the flats let them out to, say, one person or two. Then those people take in more. People who work in the day let the bed to people who work at night and sleep in the day. It’s like that.—
Yes, it was like that; when the apartments were built for white people, for their occupancy, their way of life, for the white millennium, when they lived in the apartments, each had the right to one of the rooms to accommodate a servant.
— I didn’t know about it. So I haven’t got anyone up there.—
They laughed together at the missed opportunity.
But the ‘problem’ remained, between them on Mrs Stark’s desk. Oupa had received an eviction order along with the other black tenants. The Foundation would have to look into it, take it up on behalf of them all. Oupa had been so proud, so happy to move in. Yet he was cheerful; she noticed he was wearing a new lumber-jacket, brown suede, and he asked his old adviser and friend something he’d never done before — she didn’t know he went to the theatre — whether a current play was to be recommended? He had about him the confidence of a young man elated to find himself attractive to a chosen girl; well, circumstance kept his wife away in another part of the country, absence makes room for other attachments, and perhaps they were parted, emotionally, by reasons only absence makes clear. She filed at court an intention to defend against the eviction order; she had to find time to interview the other tenants. Along the corridors of Delville Wood the old, faint signals from One-Twenty-One were jammed by the static of complaint, voluble indignation that buzzed about her in flats she had never before entered, and by the sight of the cubicles on the windswept roof, water dribbling from the communal washrooms, spirit stoves beside makeshift beds that in her clandestine occupancy of the white millennium had existed above her head while she was making love.
Ben — Ben was negotiating finance for the new enterprise in which he had involved himself. Promotional Luggage. She made staggering, clownish movements of hands and head when, that evening, she heard the name, the term. What did it mean?
The gestures offended. He read scorn or ridicule into them, and she felt exasperation at having to deny these. He had to be coaxed to explain coldly. Suitcases and briefcases designed exclusively for executives, to their requirements and incorporating their logos in materials superior to some embossed stamp. Custom-made. Business has its jargon just as the test-cases of the Foundation have. After a bath to wash away the ancestral instruction from beneath the earth and the sense of lying, herself, buried in One-Twenty-One with reality windswept and forlorn ignored above her head (for if you deny any time, any part of your life, you have no continuity of existence), she dressed and perfumed herself to go with Ben to a business dinner. They agreed it was inexplicable that people in business seem to have no feeling for the privacy of leisure; apparently they are lonely after the occupation of the day and want to fill this vacuum with a continuation of the same company and the same talk over an extended taking of food and drink.
He looked at her in detail, a sculptor’s eye for line and volume, her legs patterned in a filigree of lacey black stockings, her waist marked with a wide belt, her face made up sufficiently to conform with what would be expected of her. For her it was a calculation; for him it put something of the fascinating distance between them that had existed when he first saw her, unapproachable, somebody else’s wife.
— You look lovely.—
— My old glad rags.—
In the car he took up what her banal show of modesty provided the opportunity to say. — Unless I do something about making some money now we’re going to be without resources when we’re really old. (My god, I’m beginning to use their vocabulary.) Hard up. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what Promotional Luggage is about.—
They had never talked about provision for some long survival. A country where there was so much death — why should you need to choose your own solution. — If you can believe we’re going to live so long.—
— It’s easy to think there’s the option of dying before you run out of cash.—
— We’ll always have somewhere, Ben. We’ve always got the house.—
She had taken him in there, into the booty from her relationship with another man; he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor to provide for her through Promotional Luggage. She put out a hand and squeezed his thigh, a compact, one of the bargains constantly negotiated by marriage.
The restaurant is called the Drommedaris, after the ship that carried the first European to the country; it’s fashionable for cartels that own hotels and restaurants to feel they honour history and claim patriotism with such names. History and patriotism implying settler history and patriotism. They are the clubs whose entry requirements are that the applicant shall be expensively dressed and willing to pay one hundred per cent profit on a bottle of wine. The password comes from the client’s own cabalistic vocabulary — promotion — and is evidenced without being pronounced: up-market. Everyone’s main course is served at the same moment by waiters who, taking the cue from the senior among them like members of an orchestra with one eye on the conductor, simultaneously flourish silver-plated covers from the plates. Revealed are not four-and-twenty blackbirds (she catches Ben’s eye across the table) but attempts at culinary distinction and originality that combine incompatible ingredients in — fortunately — an unidentifiable mixture. Eat. It’s expensive, therefore it’s a privilege, she admonishes herself. It you don’t like it, you’re a prig. Between courses a fake silver egg-cup of watery ice cream is served that coats the palate it is supposed to clear for more eating; a ritual someone in the cartel has picked up in eagerness to claim elegance as well as history, patriotism etc.