— The incidence isn’t quite the same. Vera escaped with her life. Living here is dangerous, even this garden, this house, if people come to rob they shoot or knife as well, if you walk up the wrong street and there’s a demonstration on, you can get tear-gassed or shot; you’ll learn all about this, why it is like that—
— I’m streetwise.—
— No, much more than streetwise — you have to be. You have to accept there are risks you can’t do anything much about. Certain aspects of Vera’s work simply add a few more. Ivan wants to avoid them.—
— Well, anything. Anything. It’s not meant to be a career for life, is it? — He hid in sulks his irritation with his father, with both of them.
— All the same— Ben paused, to reject the too emotional ‘unhappy’. —I don’t want you to be bored.—
He didn’t answer, sat there sucking at the hollow inside his lower lip. He knew they wanted him to get up and go into the house so that they could discuss him. He didn’t move. Vera rose with a leisureliness that challenged him, touching a plant, wiping greenfly off its buds as she left.
— See you later. — Ben followed.
In the bedroom she stood by while he changed into jeans and running shoes. Ben had always liked to run when something was troubling him; a good household remedy. Each has his or her own. Standing in underpants taking the jeans from the generous wall-cupboards the parents of her first husband had fitted, he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs — so important if a man is to be a good lover — frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. She regarded him as if he were a statue; one of the works of limbs and torsos he used to sculpt.
— He doesn’t really mean it, about working at the Foundation. He’s not disappointed at all, I assure you.—
— Well, it’s the one positive answer he gave me.—
— He wants to show he doesn’t take this whole mock exile seriously, whatever we do. It’s a kind of flirtation with us.—
Adam went to work at Promotional Luggage. Profits were steeply down, with the recession and labour disputes, travel costs rising with the devalued currency, it wasn’t the time to take on unnecessary staff. But Ben knew he couldn’t hope to find anything else for the young man; his A-level achievements didn’t qualify him for something above the rank of junior clerk anywhere else, and where that kind of opening did happen to exist businesses were finding it expedient to Africanize. No one wanted to be seen to employ a white foreigner on some sort of sabbatical, even as a favour to a friend.
Adam was too young to be a salesman — who would give orders for expensive briefcases to a boy with Pre-Raphaelite locks, Ben was amused to think.
— Let him start at the bottom. Messenger and tea-boy. Like any black boy.—
That’s Vera, of course.
— Fax and automatic coffee dispensers now. You know that.—
A place was made for him that hadn’t existed, in design and production, he could learn something there. Ben had an arrangement with his partner, to which Vera was not privy, to pay the salary himself. Apparently Ivan had not provided for Adam to receive any allowance in his banishment; he couldn’t go about penniless and it would have been humiliating for him to have to accept what would have looked like a schoolboy’s pocket-money from Vera and Ben. He spent most of the first month’s salary on compact discs for the player that was in his luggage. Vera’s house was filled with the one intrusion she hadn’t thought of complaining of in anticipation, to Ben. Many desperate voices, accompanied by a heavy beat that she heard without distinction as Michael Jackson, resounded from what had been Ivan’s room.
Chapter 21
Zeph Rapulana dines on board the Drommedaris now.
He has moved more or less permanently from Odensville, where he built a home for his family in the temporary settlement area secured, and, leaving the backyard cottage, has taken a house in a modestly affluent suburb vacated by a white couple who have left in the latest count of emigration to America or Australia. What has been abolished along with the laws of segregation is the law and custom, more deeply entrenched than any law, that only white people could live in these pleasant areas. Anyone who can afford to pay the rent or buy property may do so now. Many whites who want to see racial prejudice abolished and have applauded its passing nevertheless comment high-mindedly whenever a black man or woman is successful enough in their — the whites’—world of professions, finance and business to move into one of the formerly white compounds. There are so many blacks living in degrading poverty, how can a black man live it up with a tree-filled garden, lock-up garage for his car, and neighbourhood security watch? For one to want justice for black people, they must all qualify by being poor. He ought to be living a dozen to a shack without light amid shit running from broken drains. He ought to be standing before a farmer’s door shut in his face, saying without menace, non-violently, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children. Never. Whatever you do to us. Never. And we’ll never penetrate your boardrooms, we’ll never enter and take the place behind the desk in the chairman’s office, don the robes of the judge, fit the uniform of the commander-in-chief.
When Vera comes to have coffee with him they sit and compare notes. Vera is sharp-tongued about the patrons of the Drommedaris, teases him a little, in his position as an infiltrator of a new kind. He’s calm as the old kind. — Of course, underneath that smoked salmon stuff and the wine they keep pouring I understand they’re having problems in taking a black man seriously. Of course I understand that. — He is neither sarcastic nor facetious.
Vera smiled. — ‘I know the white man’.— And they laughed.
— Well, I’ve been learning about him a long time.—
— But you get on with them — not just amiability; I mean you get them to take you: seriously. Have your say in decisions.—
— Slowly, slowly — yes. — He is a director on the boards of several finance companies, a development foundation, two banks. — I think I’m not decorative enough to be put in the window.—
— Oh I don’t think so! My bet is they certainly counted on you being decorative enough, with your credentials from the housing commission, they thought that looks good, you don’t need to say anything round the boardroom table, you’ll lend them enough credibility for progress just by being there, and then they find they haven’t got a dummy, they’ve got you. I could have warned them.—
— I’m just a schoolmaster who’s trying to educate them to diversify their excess profits into enterprises that will benefit our people whose labour made those profits. That’s all. Cheap bonds for housing, technical training instead of casinos, backing for blacks to get into setting up our own financial institutions — and the right kind of co-operation to make sure we don’t fail while we’re gaining experience. It’s like everything else with us blacks, Vera; fail, and it’s proof you can’t succeed because black can’t succeed. It’s a trap; give us funds and no access to expertise along with them. ‘See what happened? They can’t do it’.—
— Probably we’re going to nationalize banks — and then?—
He bent towards her with a gentle smile. — I think your politics are a bit different from mine, Vera.—
She was sitting back in her chair with the coffee cup on the arm, legs stretched and crossed at the ankle. With him there was no haste in communication; in every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together. — Private enterprise … I think you’re getting me to see it your way, sometimes.—