They managed to occupy opposing grounds on almost every issue; though politics was their favourite subject of dissension, the plight of the poor and oppressed in a land where there were plenty of both of these classes was another perennial winner.
Tara could usually find plenty to say about the insensitivity of the privileged rich white ruling classes, and the iniquity of a system which enabled a young man, whose only proven distinctions were a beautiful face and a rich and indulgent mother, to number amongst his playthings fifteen polo ponies, an SS Jaguar in British racing green with the special three and a half litre engine, and a De Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, while thousands of black children had their little bellies bloated with malnutrition and their legs bowed and deformed by rickets.
These subjects did not exhaust their genius at finding contentious issues. Tara had strong views on so-called sportsmen who went out into the veld armed with high-powered rifles to blast the innocent and beautiful animals and birds; nor did she approve of the obvious relish with which some witless young men regarded the slow but inexorable approach of war clouds for the promise of excitement that they seemed to offer. She was scornful of anyone who was satisfied with a second-class degree when it was apparent that with just a little application they could have finished an expensive education, denied to tens of thousands of others, with a cum laude degree in engineering.
On the other hand, Shasa thought it sacrilege that a girl who had the face and body of a goddess should try to disguise these facts in an attempt to be taken for a daughter of the proletariat. Nor did he approve of this same young woman spending most of her waking hours either in study, or in the slums and shanty towns that had sprung up on the Cape Flats, dishing out to snot-nosed piccaninnies free soup the ingredients of which she had helped obtain by standing on street corners with a beggar's box.
He especially did not like the medical students and newly qualified young doctors, bolsheviks one and all, with whom she spent so much time in her capacity as an unpaid and untrained nurse in the volunteer clinics, tending unwashed and highly infectious brown and black patients suffering from tuberculosis, syphilis, infant dysentery, scabies, the secondary effects of chronic alcoholism and all the other unlovely consequences of poverty and ignorance.
St Francis of Assisi was lucky he didn't have you to compete with - you'd have made him look like Attila the Hun. He found her friends boring in their serious singlemindedness, and ostentatious in their left-wing beards and shoddy dress.
They just lack any style or class, Tara. I mean, how can you bear to walk in the street with one of them?
Their style is the style of the future, and their class is the class of all humanity., Now you are even talking like one of them, for cat's sake! However, these differences were mild and without real substance when compared to their truly monumental disagreement on the subjects of Tara Malcomess chastity and virginity.
For God's sake, Tara, Queen Victoria has been dead for thirty-seven years. This is the twentieth century. Thank you for the history lesson, Shasa Courtney, but if you try to get your hand into my bloomers again I am going to break your arm in three separate and distinct places., What you have got in there isn't so bloody special. There are plenty of other young ladies, I "'Ladies" is a euphemism, but let that pass. I suggest that in the future you confine your attentions to them and leave me alone. That is the only sensible suggestion you have made all evening, Shasa told her in an icy fury of frustration and started the Jaguar sports car with a thunder of exhausts and superchargers that echoed through the pine forests and startled all the other couples parked in the darkness about the pseudo-Greek temple that was the memorial to Cecil John Rhodes.
They drove down the winding mountain road at a savage pace, and Shasa skidded the big sports car to a halt in the gravel in front of the double mahogany doors of the Malcomess home.
Don't bother to hold the door for me, Tara said coldly, and slammed it so hard that he flinched.
That had been two months before, and there hadn't been a day since then that Shasa hadn't thought of her. When he was sweating in the heat of the great pit of the H'ani Mine or poring over a contract with Abe Abrahams in the Windhoek office or watching the muddy brown waters of the Orange river being transformed into sheets of silver by the spinning overhead sprinklers of the irrigation equipment, Tara's image would pop uninvited into his mind.
He tried to erase it by flying the Tiger Moth so low that the landing wheels raised puffs of dust from the surface of the Kalahari, or by absorbing himself in precise and intricate acrobatic evolutions, the spin and barrel roll and stall turn, but as soon as he landed Tara's memory was waiting for him.
He hunted the red-maned Kalahari lions in the desert wilderness beyond the mystic hills of the H'ani, or immersed himself in the multifarious affairs of the Courtney compantudying under his mother, watching her methods and ies, s absorbing her thinking, until she trusted him sufficiently to put him in control of some of the smaller subsidiaries.
He played the game of polo with almost angry dedication, pushing himself and the horses under him to the outer limits, and brought the same single-minded determination to the pursuit and seduction of a daunting procession of women young and not so young, plain and pretty, married and single, more and less experienced, but when he saw Tara malcomess again he had the strange hollow feeling that he had only been half alive during those months of separation.
For her sister's wedding, Tara had put aside the pretentiously drab uniform of the left-wing intellectual, and as a bridesmaid she was dressed in grey silk with a blue sheen to it which, beautiful as it was, could not quite match the steely grey of her eyes. She had changed her hairstyle, cutting it short; the thick smoky curls formed a neat cap around her head, leaving the back of her long neck bare, and this seemed to emphasize her height and the length and perfection of her limbs.
They looked at each other for a moment across the length of the crowded marquee, and it seemed to Shasa that lightning had flashed across the tent; for an instant he knew that she had missed him as much and thought about him as often. Then she nodded politely and turned her full attention back to the man beside her.
Shasa had met him once before. His name was Hubert Langley and he was one of Tara's bleeding-heart brigade. He wore a shabby tweed jacket with leather elbow patches when most of the other male guests were in morning dress. He was an inch shorter than Tara, with steel-rimmed spectacles and prematurely thinning blond hair. His beard was the colour and texture of the plumage of a day-old chicken, and he lectured in sociology at the university.
Tara had once confided in Shasa. Huey is actually a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, isn't that remarkable? Her voice was awed. He is totally committed and he has an absolutely brilliant mind. One might call him a shining jewel in a greasy and grubby setting, Shasa remarked, thereby precipitating another of their periodic estrangements.
Now he watched as Huey laid one of his freckled paws on Tara's unblemished forearm, and when he touched Tara's cheek with his wispy moustaches and whispered one of the gems from that absolutely brilliant mind into her pink shelllike ear, Shasa realized that slow strangulation was too good for him.
He sauntered across the tent to intervene and Tara greeted him coolly, perfectly hiding the fact that her pulse was thumping loudly in her ears. She hadn't realized how intensely she had missed him until she watched him making his speech, urbane and self-assured, amusing and so infuriatingly good-looking.