The Van Den Sandts must have relied on me to lead Max by the penis, as it were, into the life he was born for; and I suppose that was why she was inclined to take with sophisticated tolerance, unlike my own parents, the fact that I got myself pregnant at eighteen. ‘It’s just a mistake, that’s all,’ she said in a sort of soothing baby talk, as if a puppy had wet the carpet. And after Max and I were married she looked at me with mock censure, raising her eyebrows and smiling when we came to lunch one day: ‘Oh look at its little belly, if you please! My dear, all the old cats are going to start counting soon — but we don’t care a fig for them, do we!’
Max’s face changed and without greeting her he turned and went out of the room. I found him in his old bedroom. ‘If I don’t bother about it, why should you?’ But what was a silly incident, to me, was the ruthless persistence of a social manner that had affectionately belittled him, all his life. Only a man could beget a child, yet she managed to make it something ‘clever’ and ‘naughty’ the children had done.
It was while I was pregnant, in 1952, that the Defiance Campaign began. Max was one of a group of white people who marched into an African area prohibited to whites, and he also went to Durban to camp with Africans and Indians on a public square in protest against segregation. Of course, the whole idea was to get oneself arrested and to go to jail. But the charges against Max were dropped, and although we never found out why, he was always convinced that his father had contrived it. If this was so, it was a terrible thing to do to Max; but of course they didn’t do it for Max, they did it for themselves. It wouldn’t have done for a prominent United Party MP to have a son in prison for defiance of colour bar laws, even though by that time the Nationalists had been in power for five years and Van Den Sandt had lost for good his chance of becoming a Cabinet minister. If Max wouldn’t act as a white man for white men, the Van Den Sandts wouldn’t let him act at all. That’s what they wanted to do to him. And then a time came when he made a bomb.
They were gathering together their weekend purchases all round me, the good citizens who never had any doubt about where their allegiance lay. The steady winter sun, so bone-warming, so reassuringly benign (perhaps we can’t help feeling that if we have the best climate in the world we must deserve it?) shone on the shapes of bottles of wine and whisky, the prawns and cakes and bunches of flowers, plain evidence of the superior living standards of white civilization, that they were taking home. I saw them give their children pennies to drop into the SPCA collection box and the hat of the black beggar. Home-made bombs have not shaken the ground under their feet, nor have the riots, the marches, the shootings of a few years back, though like all decent people, they deplore the inhumanity of violence, and, reserving the right of constitutional action to themselves alone, commend it to others as the only decent way to achieve change — should one want such a thing.
I too have my package of pork fillets and my chair in the sun; you would not know me from the others. We are all still alive and the cars are crawling impatiently one behind the other. Whereas Max is in the sea, in the soup, at the bottom of the sea; poor madman: I suppose it will be possible to say that, now, as it has been satisfactorily possible to say, in the end, of many who have proved awkward, including the one who didn’t know that a Prime Minister with a divine mission might need a silver bullet. Only madmen do such things. But can any white man who wants change really be all there? It’s a comforting thought.
Some of them would remember, today, that they were right not to take Max seriously, poor devil, when he made that frightful speech at his sister’s wedding. If they were castigated, well, the poor fellow was unbalanced. It was long before the bomb, Lord yes, long before it had come to that — long before we had come to a lot of things. Max and I were still together, Bobo was a little baby a few months old, we still, curiously, had some sort of place in the Van Den Sandt family life. It was after the Defiance Campaign affair, of course, but I suppose since Max’s part in that had been hushed up, the Van Den Sandts didn’t feel that that constituted a valid rift between Max and themselves. Only public injury counts, with them. In one of those twists of an ancient code degenerating far from its source that is characteristic of a civilization brought over the sea and kept in mothballs, the Van Den Sandts interpret honour as something that exists in the eyes of others; you can do each other to death, in private: shame or pain come only from what leaks out. A daughter’s wedding to a suitable candidate was a public occasion (they’d been done out of Max’s by my pregnancy even if Max would not have refused to play) and the bride’s only brother was a traditional participant in the jocular clannish emotionalism of the celebration. Therefore Max lost all other identity; the Van Den Sandts insisted that he must propose the toast to Queenie and her bridegroom. I think they felt confident that the convention of the occasion would carry him along as such things did for them, through everything; that, married, with a wife and baby of his own, the ceremonies and loyalties of his kind would hold sway over him at last, he would ‘rise to it’ irresistibly, like the good fellow any son of theirs must be, underneath, after all.
I was surprised that Max gave in; I had wondered if I’d be able to get him to go to the wedding at all. I thought it must be because of Queenie, of whom he was fond, in an unthinking sort of way — she was so pretty, one of those girls whom one sets aside in one’s mind from any further necessity to account for themselves.