'Oh, we get a grant from the local provincial government--' but Molly Blackhurst cut in.
'Don't let her fool you - most of the running costs come out of her own pocket." 'I cheat my husband on the housekeeping,' Tara laughed, dismissing it lightly.
'Would it be possible for us to drive around the squatter slums?
I'd like to see them." Moses looked at Molly, but she bit her lip and glanced at her wristwatch.
'Oh, damn, I have to get back,' and Tara intervened quickly.
'Don't worry, Molly. I can drive Moses around. You get on back and I will drop him off at your house later this evening." In the old Packard ,they bumped over the sandy tracks amongst the overgrown dunes, where the Port Jackson willow had been cleared to make way for hutments of rusty corrugated iron and cardboard and tattered plastic sheeting. Now and then they stopped and walked amongst the shanties. The south-easter was roaring in off the bay, filling the air with a mist of dust. They leaned against it as they walked.
The people knew Tara and smiled and called greetings to her as she passed, and the children ran to meet her and danced around her begging for the cheap boiled sweets she kept in her pocket.
'Where do they get water?" Moses asked, and she showed him how the older children had banded old oil drums with discarded car tyres.
They filled the drums at a communal water tap at the boundary of the official township a mile away, and rolled the drums back to their hovels.
'They cut the Port Jackson willow for fuel,' Tara told him. 'but in winter the children are always full of colds and flu and pneumonia.
You don't have to ask about about sewerage--' she sniffed at the thick odour of the shallow toilet pits, screened with strips of old burlap.
It was half dark when Tara parked the Packard at the back door of the clinic and switched off the engine. They sat quietly for a few minutes.
'What we have seen is no worse than a hundred other shanty towns, places where I have lived most of my life,' Moses said. 'I am sorry." 'Why do you apologize?" Moses asked.
'I don't know, I just feel guilty." She knew how inadequate it sounded and she opened the door of the Packard.
'There are some papers I must get from my office. I won't be a minute, and then I will drive you back to Molly's house." The clinic was deserted. The two nurses had locked up and gone home an hour before. Tara let herself in with her own key and went through the single consulting room to her own office. She glanced at herself in the mirror above the washstand in the corner as she washed her hands. She was flushed and her eyes sparkled. She was so accustomed to the squalor of the squatter camps that it had not depressed her as it once had; instead she felt tingling alive and strangely elated.
She stuffed the folder of correspondence and bills into her leather sling bag and locked the drawer of her desk, made sure the plug of the electric kettle was pulled out of the wall-socket and that the windows were closed, then switched off the lights and hurried out into the consulting room. She stopped with surprise. Moses Gama had followed her into the building and was sitting on the white draped examination bed against the far wall.
'Oh,' she recovered. 'Sorry I took so long--' He shook his head, then stood up and crossed the tiled floor. He stopped, facing her. She felt awkward and uncertain as he studied her face solemnly.
'You are a remarkable woman,' he said in a deep quiet voice that she had not heard him use before. 'I have never met another white woman like you." She could think of no reply, and he went on softly, 'You are rich and privileged. You are gifted with everything that your life can offer you, and yet you come here. To this poverty and misery." He reached out and touched her arm. His palm and the inside of his fingers were a pale rose colour, contrasting vividly with the back of his hand and his dark muscular forearm, and his skin felt cool.
She wondered if it were really so, or if her own skin was hot.
She felt hot, she felt a furnace glow deep within her. She looked down at his hand on her smooth pale arm. She had never been touched by a black man before, not deliberately, not lingeringly like this.
She let the strap of the sling bag slide off her shoulder and it fell to the tiled floor with a thud. She had been holding her own hands clasped in front of her hips in an instinctively defensive gesture but now she let them fall to her sides, and almost without conscious volition arched her back and pushed her lower body towards him.
At the same time she raised her head and looked squarely into his eyes. Her lips parted and her breathing quickened. She saw it reflected in his own eyes and she said, 'Yes." He stroked her arm, up from the elbow to the shoulder, and she shuddered and closed her eyes. He touched her left breast and she did not pull away. His hand closed around her, she felt it fill his grip, and her flesh hardened, her nipple swelled and thrust out into his palm and he squeezed her. The feeling was so intense it was almost painful and she gasped as it rippled down her spine spreading like wavelets when a stone is thrown into a quiet pool.
Her arousal was so abrupt that she was unprepared. She had never considered herself a sensual person. Shasa was the only man she had ever known and it took all his skill and patience to quicken her body, but now at a touch her bones well soft with desire and her loins melted like wax in the flame and she could not breathe, so strong was her need of this man.
'The door,' she blurted. 'Lock the door." Then she saw that he had already barred the door, and she was grateful for it, for she felt that she could not have brooked the delay.
He picked her up quickly and carried her to the bed. The sheet that covered it was spotless and so crisply starched that it crackled softly under her weight.
He was so huge that he terrified her, and though she had borne four children, she felt as though she was being split asunder as his blackness filled her, and then the terror passed to be replaced by a strange sense of sanctity. She was the sacrificial lamb, with this act she was redeeming all the sins of her own race, all the trespasses that they had committed against his ]people down the centuries; she was wiping away the guilt that had been her stigmata since as far back as she could remember.
When at the end he lay heavy upon her with his breathing roaring in her ears and the last wild convulsions racking hisgreat black muscles, she clung to him with a joyous gratitude. For he had, at one and the same time, set her free from guilt and made her his slave for ever.
Subdued by the sadness of after love, and by the certain knowledge that her world was for ever altered, Tara was silent on the drive back to Molly's home. She parked a block before she reached it, and keeping the engine running she turned to examine his face in the reflection of the street lights.
'When will I see you again?" she asked the question that countless women in her position had asked before her. Do you wish to see me again?" 'More than anything else in my life." She did not at that moment even ttiink of her children. He was the only thing in her existence.
'It will be dangerous." 'I know." 'The penalties if we are discovered - disgrace, ostracism, imprisonment. Your life would be destroyed." 'My life was a sham,' she said softly. 'Its destruction would be no great loss." He studied her features carefully, searching for insincerity. At last he was satisfied.
'I will send for you, when it is safe." 'I will come immediately, whenever you call." 'I must leave you now. Take me back." She parked at the side of Molly's house, in the shadow where they could not be observed from the road.
'Now the subterfuge and dissembling begins,' she thought calmly.
'I was right. It will never be the same again." He made no attempt to embrace her, it was not the African way.
He stared at her, the whites of his eyes gleaming like ivory in the half dark.
'You realize that when you choose me you choose the struggle?" he asked.