‘They’ve got it, they’ve got it. And Reba knows how to get it out of them.’ He spoke with the city man’s contempt for country people. ‘Reba’s in with the Chiefs, man. You should see the cattle they’ve got. Not the poor devils up in the mountains! Reba goes and sits and drinks beer with them, and talks and talks, man, and he tells them how when independence comes the new African government’s going to need houses for the ministers and people, in the town … he t-a-l-k-s to them …’ Breaking into Sotho, he showed me Reba palavering with the yokels — watching, with a white flick of his long eyes, my laughter. I wondered what he was putting up the performance for; what he had come for. But I had forgotten about this at the moment when I said, ‘And that’s what you’re doing in Johannesburg, trying to raise money for the tycoon’s houses’ — and neatly gave away to him the opening he wanted.
He looked at the piece of cheese he had just taken and pushed it away with the knife and got up, turning from the table. His full belly in the white shirt strained over his belt and he lifted it, expanding his chest in a deep breath. When he spoke again it was from another part of his mind: ‘No’ — softly, stiffly, as if it were none of my business — ‘No … not houses. That’s … that’s Reba’s’ — his hand made a loose, twirling gesture.
‘What d’you do — for a living, Luke?’ I came and stood in front of him with my arms folded. (He had told me that he was once a salesman for ladies’ underwear, in the townships.)
What a face, those extraordinary cloisonné eyes, you could put your finger on the eyeball to try the smooth surface. His chin lifted, to parry me, yet the smile, innocently blatant, would not be held back. The eyes filmed over as if someone had breathed on them. He grinned.
‘Oh, I know; you’re not the sort of person one can ask that.’
‘I’m with Reba — you know —’ He was laughing, fumbling.
‘No, no — I know you’re fully occupied, but how do you live? Haven’t you got a family somewhere?’
‘Not me. I travel solo.’ It’s taken for granted that we both know there’s a wife and children. He’s an expert at conveying what one might call sexual regret: the compliment of suggesting that he would like to make love to you, if time and place and the demands of two lives were different. I suppose he’s found that this goes down very well with the sort of white women who get to know black men like him; they feel titillated and yet safe, at the same time. In sounding for the right note to strike with me, he naturally tries this out among other things; I can’t very well tell him that I’ve had a black lover, years ago. He trailed the tips of his fingers along my ear and down my neck; a good move, if he’d only known it — I particularly like the rosy, almost translucent pads on the inner side of black hands, that look as if light were cupped in them.
He put his arms round me and mine went round his warm, solid waist. We rocked gently. I teased him: ‘I suppose you’re supported by the Communist Party’ — like all PAC people, he accuses the ANC of being led by the nose, first by Moscow and then by Peking.
‘That’s right, that’s it.’ And, laughing, we broke away and drifted round the room, he saying, ‘I admit everything,’ ‘I confess,’ and I bringing over our cups of coffee. He settled awkwardly, on a stool that was too low for him, legs bent apart at the knees. I took my corner of the sofa. ‘It’s nice to be here,’ he said. ‘This room. I run all around through this dirty town — ever since Thursday — and then this room. My, I remember the first night — you in your nightie, with a little red — red, was it? Red with just a little bit of a pattern, here and there —’ (My raw silk gown that I don’t usually wear, because you can’t wash the thing, but I put it on if someone turns up and I’m not dressed.) ‘— but you came to the door calm as anything, not afraid at all of the two strange blacks on your doorstep.’
Was it money? Sometimes he pays back and sometimes he doesn’t; I couldn’t remember whether he owes me anything at present. ‘I knew Reba,’ I put in, from my vantage on the comfortable sofa, not to make it too easy for him. ‘I’d seen Reba before.’
‘But you didn’t know who it was. You didn’t recognize him, I saw it. And you politely asked us in, just the same’ — a bit of business here — ‘and I even got a scrap of cold food from your supper … Liz …’ He was smilingly reproaching me, in flattery, for my good nature. ‘Lizzie …’ The play on my name, using incongruously, intentionally clumsily and quaintly, the form in which it is the kitchen girl’s generic, made a love-name of it.
‘I just didn’t know what else to say,’ I said flippantly, and caught again behind his eyes the recording of a piece of intelligence in words I did not know: he was encouraged to hope again, this time, I shouldn’t know what to say, and again I’d simply be bewildered into giving what was wanted of me.
He shifted heavily on the low seat and screwed up his eyes with a distressed movement of his head, as if someone were shining a light on him. It was a kind of pantomime of despair — for my benefit. He drew breath to speak, and then caught it up short, and let his hands express the attempt in a limp jerk. And yet behind the show he was putting on there was for me something real that he wasn’t aware of — the sense of this young black bull in the white china shop, with its nice little dinners and bookshelves and bric-a-brac and coffee-cup talk.
‘These few days,’ he said, ‘I’ve racked my brains … these few days! Morning to night, going here and going there. I’m telling you, it’s been a time …’
I said nothing, but waited, and he picked up the cue. ‘You see, if we’re going to keep anything alive, if we’re going to look after the chaps — there’s lawyers to pay all the time — now all these cases in the Eastern Cape —’
He drew me in with a look, and I nodded; twenty-one PAC men were charged with sabotage this week — it was a small mention in the paper, there are so many of these cases, all people who were detained a year ago and are only now beginning to be charged.
‘But doesn’t Defence and Aid provide lawyers?’ Always the orderly white mind, accustomed to dealing with disaster through the proper professional channels.
He put up a hand as if to say, not so fast. ‘They do, they do, to a certain extent — but you know how it is, there’re all sorts of snags, man. You know how these things are; it’s all got to be cut and dried and investigated and approved. And it’s not only legal defence you’ve got to worry about. It’s the families and so on.’ He looked straight at me for a moment with calm, oval eyes from which all communication seemed to slide wide away. ‘There are other problems.’ He saw nothing, while a fact was laid swiftly under my gaze.
I said, ‘I know so little these days. I have to believe what the papers say, there’s nothing going on in the townships, the underground’s broken for the time being.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s all you know, Liz, that’s all you need to know.’ He was flattering again. He knows we whites love to feel we are ‘all right’, to be trusted; and sufficiently ‘in’ to understand an unspoken confidence.
He said suddenly, ‘You remember Colonel Gaisford, hey?’ and I laughed and was about to say, God, that poor old codger — but it was a good thing I didn’t, because he went on — ‘He was a grand old man, one of the best, a good friend to us, a true friend’ — the sort of missionary phraseology that the colonel himself might have used. Colonel Gaisford was a man whose kind of goodness becomes naïvety in a situation whose realities he doesn’t understand. He went to jail last year, protesting quite truthfully that he didn’t know that the money in the charitable fund he was administering was being used to send people out of the country for military training. But I saw that Luke’s feeling for the old man, the man they used quite shamelessly, was genuine, and the hearty epithets were the only ones he had to convey a sense of nobility. ‘I’m telling you, you can’t replace a man like that. I mean we’ve had a few people helping us since then’ — he delicately mentioned one or two names; and now I had heard them, now I was aware of being drawn still further in — ‘but it hasn’t worked out too well.’