‘Just the idea.’ His head was low; now he looked round towards me without lifting it, sideways, and I knew quite well that what he was really asking about was the unknown territory of adult life where one would choose to die. But I wasn’t equal to that. He was. He blurted, ‘I feel sorry I didn’t love him.’
I looked at him without excuses. The one thing I hope to God I’ll never do is fob him off with them.
I said, ‘There may be talk among the boys — but you know he went after the right things, even if perhaps it was in the wrong way. The things he tried didn’t come off but at least he didn’t just eat and sleep and pat himself on the back. He wasn’t content to leave bad things the way they are. If he failed, well, that’s better than making no attempt. Some boys’ — I was going to say ‘fathers’ but I didn’t want him to go attacking all the scions of stock-broking houses — ‘some men live successfully in the world as it is, but they don’t have the courage even to fail at trying to change it.’
He looked satisfied. He is only a little boy, after all; he said with a rough sigh, ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble through politics, haven’t we.’
‘Well, we can’t really blame this on politics. I mean, Max suffered a lot for his political views, but I don’t suppose this — what he did now — is a direct result of something political. I mean — Max was in a mess, he somehow couldn’t deal with what happened to him, largely, yes, because of his political actions, but also because … in general, he wasn’t equal to the demands he … he took upon himself.’ I added lamely, ‘As if you insisted on playing in the first team when you were only good enough — strong enough for third.’
As he followed what I was saying his head moved slightly in the current from the adult world, the way I have sometimes noticed a plant do in a breath of air I couldn’t feel.
In the end he has to take on trust what he is told; the only choice he can exercise is by whom. And he chooses me. At times I’m uneasy to see how sceptically he reports what he is told by others. But the reaction will come with adolescence, if I’m to believe what I’ve been told is ‘healthy development’. He’ll tear me down. But with what? Of course I’d craftily like to find out, so that I can defend myself in advance, but one generation can never know the weapons of the next. He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly on the back near the thumb just as he used to do suddenly, for no reason I knew, when he was little. It must be five years since he stopped doing it, out of embarrassment or because he didn’t need to. But there was no one to see, in the empty car park. He said, ‘What are you going to do today? Is Graham coming over?’
‘I don’t think so. I saw him this morning, he was there for breakfast.’
‘I expect Jellings’ll put Max in prayers tonight. Usually when a relation dies he’s in prayers.’
So Max would have a service for his soul in the school chapel. There wouldn’t be any other. It wasn’t likely they’d pray for him, the ones he worked with, the ones he betrayed. Max wasn’t anybody’s hero; and yet, who knows? When he made his poor little bomb it was to help blow the blacks free; and when he turned State witness the whites, I suppose, might have taken it as justification for claiming him their own man. He may have been just the sort of hero we should expect.
I’ve noticed that Bobo always senses when I am about to go. He said, ‘Let me turn the car for you?’ and I didn’t dare suggest that he might get into trouble if anyone saw him, but obediently moved over to the passenger seat as he got out and came round to the driver’s side. He drove once right round the parking ground and then I said, ‘That’s enough. Hop out.’ He laughed and pulled a face and put the brake on. ‘See you Sunday week, then. And you’re bringing what’s-his-name —’
‘Lopert.’
‘I don’t think I’ve met him, have I? What about Weldon, doesn’t he want to come too?’ Weldon is another of the boys who live too far away to be able to go home on Sunday outings; all last term Bobo brought him to the flat.
‘I expect he’ll be going with the Pargiters.’
‘Have you two quarrelled or something?’
‘No, well, he’s always talking about “munts” and things — and when we get hot after soccer he says we smell like kaffirs. Then when I get fed up he thinks it’s because I’m offended at him saying I’m like a kaffir — he just doesn’t understand that it’s not that at all, what I can’t stand is him calling them kaffirs and talking as if they were the only ones who ever smell. He just laughs and is as nice as anything … He doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong in it, to him. Nearly all the boys are like that. You get to like them a hell of a lot, and then they say things. You just have to keep quiet.’ He was looking at me frowningly, his face stoical, dismayed, looking for an answer but knowing, already, there wasn’t one. He said, ‘Sometimes I wish we were like other people.’
I said, ‘What people?’
‘They don’t care.’
‘I know’. In full view of blank school buildings we exchanged the approved cheek-kiss expected of mothers and sons. ‘Next Sunday.’
‘Don’t be late. Don’t forget to get up, the way you always do.’
‘Ne-ver! The nartjies!’ He turned back for me to thrust the paper carrier through the window, and I saw him career off up the drive with the bulge buttoned under his blazer, feet flying, whorl of hair sticking up on the crown. I felt, as I sometimes do, an unreasonable confidence in Bobo. He is all right. He will be all right.
In spite of everything.
Chapter 2
From a long way off the city on a Saturday sounded like the roar of a giant shell pressed against my ear. I had absently taken a wrong turning on the way back and approached by a route that went through one of the new industrial areas that are making the country rich — or rather, richer. Caterpillar tractors were grouped as statuary in the landscaped gardens of the factory that made them. For more than a mile I was stuck behind a huge truck carrying bags of coal and the usual gang of delivery men, made blacker by gleaming coal-dust, braced against the speed of the truck round a blazing brazier. They always look like some cheerful scene out of hell, and don’t seem to care tuppence about the proximity of the petrol tank. Then when I got into the suburbs I had another truck ahead of me, loaded with carefully padded ‘period’ furniture to which black men clung with precarious insouciance. They didn’t care a damn, either. There was a young one with a golfer’s cap pulled down over his eyes who held on by one hand while he used the other to poke obscene gestures at the black girls. They laughed back or ignored him; no one seemed outraged. But when he caught my smile he looked right through me as though I wasn’t there at all.
In the suburban shopping centre I stopped to pick up cigarettes and something from the delicatessen. I had a cup of coffee in a place that had tables out on the pavement among tubs of frostbitten tropical shrubs. It was almost closing time for the shops and the place was crowded with young women in expensive trousers and boots, older women in elegant suits and furs newly taken out of storage, men in the rugged weekend outfit of company directors, and demanding children shaping ice cream with their tongues. A woman at the table I was sharing was saying, ‘… I’ve made a little list … he hasn’t got a silver cigarette case, you know, for one thing … I mean, when he goes out in the evening, to parties, he really needs one.’
And when he goes down to the bottom of the sea? Will he need a silver cigarette case there?