Sometimes, striking two rocks against each other and inhaling, he can reinvoke this state, this smell, this taste: gunpowder, iron, heat, a steady thudding in the veins.
The secret behind the telephone call, and behind his mother’s smile, is revealed at the mid-morning break, when Mr Gouws motions him to stay behind. There is a false air about Mr Gouws too, a friendliness he mistrusts.
Mr Gouws wants him to come to tea at his home. Dumbly he nods and memorizes the address.
This is not something he wants. Not that he dislikes Mr Gouws. If he does not trust him as much as he trusted Mrs Sanderson in Standard Four, that is only because Mr Gouws is a man, the first male teacher he has had, and he is wary of something that breathes from all men: a restlessness, a roughness barely curbed, a hint of pleasure in cruelty. He does not know how to behave towards Mr Gouws or towards men in generaclass="underline" whether to offer no resistance and court their approval, or to maintain a barrier of stiffness. Women are easier because they are kinder. But Mr Gouws — he cannot deny it — is as fair as a person can be. His command of English is good, and he seems to bear no grudge against the English or against boys from Afrikaans families who try to be English. During one of his many absences from school Mr Gouws taught the parsing of complements-of-the-predicate. He has trouble catching up with the class on complements-of-the-predicate. If complements-of-the-predicate made no sense, like idioms, then the other boys would also be having trouble with them. But the other boys, or most of them, seem to have attained an easy command of complements-of-the-predicate. The conclusion cannot be escaped: Mr Gouws knows something about English grammar that he does not.
Mr Gouws uses the cane as much as any other teacher. But the punishment he favours, when the class has been too noisy for too long, is to order them to put down their pens, shut their books, clasp their hands behind their heads, close their eyes, and sit absolutely still.
Save for Mr Gouws’s footfalls as he patrols up and down the rows, there is absolute silence in the room. From the eucalyptus trees around the quadrangle comes the tranquil cooing of doves. This is a punishment he could endure forever, with equanimity: the doves, the soft breathing of the boys around him.
Disa Road, where Mr Gouws lives, is also in Reunion Park, in the new, northern extension of the township where he has never explored. Not only does Mr Gouws live in Reunion Park and cycle to school on a bicycle with fat tyres: he has a wife, a plain, dark woman, and, even more surprising, two small children. This he discovers in the living room of 11 Disa Road, where there are scones and a pot of tea waiting on the table, and where, as he had feared, he is at last left alone with Mr Gouws, having to make desperate, false conversation.
It gets even worse. Mr Gouws — who has put aside his tie and jacket for shorts and khaki socks — is trying to pretend to him that, now that the school year is over, now that he is about to leave Worcester, the two of them can be friends. In fact he is trying to suggest that they have been friends all year: the teacher and the cleverest boy, the class leader.
He grows flustered and stiff. Mr Gouws offers him a second scone, which he refuses. ‘Come on!’ says Mr Gouws, and smiles, and puts it on his plate anyway. He longs to be away.
He had wanted to leave Worcester with everything in order. He had been prepared to give Mr Gouws a place in his memory beside Mrs Sanderson: not quite with her, but close to her. Now Mr Gouws is spoiling it. He wishes he wouldn’t.
The second scone sits on the plate uneaten. He will pretend no more: he grows mute and stubborn. ‘Must you go?’ says Mr Gouws. He nods. Mr Gouws rises and accompanies him to the front gate, which is a copy of the gate at 12 Poplar Avenue, the hinges whining on exactly the same high note.
At least Mr Gouws has the sense not to make him shake hands or do something else stupid.
They are leaving Worcester. His father has decided that his future does not after all lie with Standard Canners, which, according to him, is on its way down. He is going to return to legal practice.
There is a farewell party for him at his office, from which he returns with a new watch. Shortly thereafter he sets off for Cape Town by himself, leaving his mother behind to supervise the moving. She hires a contractor named Retief, striking a bargain that for fifteen pounds he will convey not only the furniture but the three of them too, in the cab of his van.
Retief’s men load the van; his mother and brother climb aboard. He makes a last dash around the empty house, saying goodbye. Behind the front door is the umbrella stand that usually holds two golf clubs and a walking stick but is now empty. ‘They’ve left the umbrella stand!’ he shouts. ‘Come!’ calls his mother — ‘Forget that old umbrella stand!’ ‘No!’ he shouts back, and will not leave until the men have loaded the umbrella stand. ‘Dis net ’n ou stuk pyp,’ grumbles Retief — It’s just an old piece of pipe.
So he learns that what he thought was an umbrella stand is nothing but a metre length of concrete sewer-pipe that his mother has painted green. This is what they are taking with them to Cape Town, along with the cushion covered in dog-hairs that Cossack used to sleep on, and the rolled-up netting-wire from the chicken-coop, and the machine that throws cricket balls, and the wooden stave with the Morse code. Labouring up Bain’s Kloof Pass, Retief’s van feels like Noah’s Ark, bearing into the future the sticks and stones of their old life.
In Reunion Park they had paid twelve pounds a month for their house. The house his father has rented in Plumstead costs twenty-five pounds. It lies at the very limit of Plumstead, facing an expanse of sand and wattle bush where only a week after their arrival the police find a dead baby in a brown paper packet. A half-hour walk in the other direction lies Plumstead railway station. The house itself is newly built, like all the houses in Evremonde Road, with picture windows and parquet floors. The doors are warped, the locks do not lock, there is a pile of rubble in the backyard.
Next door live a couple newly arrived from England. The man is forever washing his car; the woman, wearing red shorts and sunglasses, spends her days in a deckchair sunning her long white legs.
The immediate task is to find schools for him and his brother. Cape Town is not like Worcester, where all the boys went to the boys’ school and all the girls to the girls’ school. In Cape Town there are schools to choose among, some of them good schools, some not. To get into a good school you need contacts, and they have few contacts.
Through the influence of his mother’s brother Lance they get an interview at Rondebosch Boys’ High. Dressed neatly in his shorts and shirt and tie and navy-blue blazer with the Worcester Boys’ Primary badge on the breast pocket, he sits with his mother on a bench outside the headmaster’s office. When their turn comes they are ushered into a wood-panelled room full of photographs of rugby and cricket teams. The headmaster’s questions are all addressed to his mother: where they live, what his father does. Then comes the moment he has been waiting for. From her handbag she produces the report that proves he was first in class and that ought therefore to open all doors to him.
The headmaster puts on his reading-glasses. ‘So you came first in your class,’ he says. ‘Good, good! But you won’t find it so easy here.’
He had hoped to be tested: to be asked the date of the battle of Blood River, or, even better, to be given some mental arithmetic. But that is all, the interview is over. ‘I can make no promises,’ says the headmaster. ‘His name will go down on the waiting list, then we must hope for a withdrawal.’