' Sit down, please,’ said this servitor and she sat down and saw all around her plates of eggs, bacon, tomatoes, sausages.
‘Do you have any coffee?' she said to this servant, it being the first time in her life she had addressed one – a black one, that is.
'Oh yes, please, coffee. I have coffee for the missus,' said the old man eagerly and poured coffee which she was agreeably surprised to see coming strong from the silver spout.
She served herself an egg, and a curl of bacon, and then in strode the master. He flung down some bit of metal on to a chair, pulled out a chair with a scrape and sat.
‘Is that all?’ said Barry, despising her plateful and piling his. ' Go on, force yourself. '
She took another egg and asked, knowing she did not sound as casual as she had intended, ‘And where is your wife, did you say?'
' Gadding. Woman gad, didn't you know?'
She smiled politely: she had understood some hours ago that feminist revolution had not reached everywhere in the world.
He piled on eggs and bacon, he drank cup after cup of coffee, then said he had to go around the farm to see what the kaffs had got up to while he was away. She should come too, and see for herself.At first she said no, but then yes, at his frowning stare. ' Always hard to get, ' was his comment, but apparently without anything behind it. She would have liked it if he had said, Go into that room, you'll find a bed, get into it and I'll be along. Instead she spent some hours bumping in an old lorry from one point on the farm to another, where a group of blacks, or some mechanic or overalled person waited for him, and where he gave orders, argued, disagreed, gave in with, ' Yeah, okay, you may be right, we'll try it your way, ' or ' For Christ's sake look what you've done, I told you, I told you, didn't I? Now do it again and get it right this time. ' She had no idea what she was seeing, what everyone was doing, and while smelly cows did appear, which she knew was to be expected on a farm, she did not understand anything at all and her head ached. Back at the house tea appeared when he clapped his hands. He was sweaty, his face was red and wet, he had grease on his sleeve: she was finding him irresistible, but he said he would bloody well have to go and do some paperwork, this government was killing them with paper, and could she look after herself until lunchtime. She sat on the verandah that was closed in around her by glare, on some reassuringly recognisable cretonne, and looked at magazines, from South Africa. Presumably his wife's world: and hers, too.
An hour passed. Lunch. Meat, a lot of it. Rose did know that meat was politically incorrect, but she adored it and ate a lot.
Then she was sleepy. He was giving her looks that she thought might be interpreted as a come on but it seemed not, for he said, 'I'm for a kip. Your room's through there.'
With this he strode off in one direction, and she found her case standing on a stone floor beside a bed on which she fell and slept until she heard a loud clap of hands and the shout of 'Tea'. She tumbled off the bed, and found Barry on the verandah, his long brown legs stretched out in front of him for what seemed like yards, in front of a tea tray.
‘I could sleep for a week,’ she said.
‘Oh, go on, you didn't do too badly last night, snoring away on my shoulder. '
‘Oh, I didn't...’
‘Yes, you did. Go on, pour. You be mother. '
Outside spread the African afternoon, all yellow glare and the songs of birds. There was dust on her hands, and on the floor of the verandah.
' Bloody drought. It hasn't rained properly on this farm for three years. The cattle aren't going to last out if it doesn't rain soon.'
‘Why this farm?'
' Rain shadow. Didn't know that when I bought it. '
'Oh.'
‘Well, I hope you' re beginning to get the hang of it. Well, at least if you' re going to go back and write that we are a lot of Simon Legrees you'll have taken the trouble to see for yourself. '
She did not know who Simon Legree was, but supposed that, logically, he must be a bit of a white racist. 'I'm doing my best.'
'And no one can do better than that.'
He was fidgeting again, and up he jumped. 'I'm going to have a look at the calves. Want to come?'
She knew she should say yes, but said she would stay and sit.
' Pity my better half isn't here. You' d have someone to gossip with. '
Off he went, and returned as the dark came down. Supper. Then there was the radio news where he swore at the black announcer for mispronouncing a word, and then said, ' Sorry, I've got to get my head down. I'm all in.’And off he went to bed.
And that was how a stay of what turned out to be five days went on. Rose lay awake in her bed and hoped that the sounds she heard were his feet moving stealthily towards her, but no such luck. And she did go around the farm with him, and did try to take in what she could. During the course of conversations which always seemed to be too brief and curtailed by some urgency or other, all of them dramatic in a way that seemed – surely? -excessive – a broken-down tractor, a bush fire, a gored cow -she had learned that her old pal Franklin was ' one of the worst of that gang of thieves' , and that her idol Comrade Matthew was as corrupt as they come, and had as much idea ofrunning a country as he, Barry Angleton, had of running the Bank of England. She dropped the name Sylvia Lennox, but while he had heard of her, all he knew was that she was with the missionaries in Kwadere. He added that once, when he was a kid, no one had a good word for the missionaries, who were educating the kaffs above their station, but now people were beginning to think, and he agreed with them, mind you, that it was a pity they hadn't been educated all the way, because a few properly educated kaffs were what the country needed. Well, you live and learn.
His wife did not return while Rose was there, though she telephoned with a message for her husband.
'Good thing you're there,' said this complacent wife, 'give him something to think about beside himself and the farm. Well, men are all the same. '
This remark, in the time-honoured words of the feminist complaint, but so far from the sophistications of Rose's women's group, allowed her to reply that men were the same the whole world over.
' Anyway, tell my old man that I'm going over to Betty's this afternoon and I'm bringing back one of her puppies. ' She added: ‘And now you just be fair to us for once and write something nice.'
Barry received this news with, ‘Well, she' d better not think that dog is going to sleep on our bed the way the last one did. '
The next stop on Rose's itinerary, which had been planned to be the first, had not Fate and Barry Angleton intervened, was an old friend of Comrade Johnny's, Bill Case, who had been a South African communist, had been in jail, had fled to take refuge in Zimlia, and to continue his career in law, speaking for the underdog, the poor, the maltreated who were turning out to be more or less the same under a black government as under a white one. Bill Case was famous, and a hero. Rose was looking forward to hearing from him at last, ' the truth' about Zimlia.
As for Barry, for whom she would have parted her legs any time, the most she got out of him in that way was his remark when he dropped her in town that if he wasn't a married man he would ask her out to lunch. But she recognised it as a gallantry as routine as his, ' So long. Be seeing you. '
Bill Case... about the South African communists under apartheid it has to be said first that few people have ever been as brave, few have fought oppression more wholeheartedly – wait, though: at the very same time the dissidents in the Soviet Union were confronting the communist tyranny with equal dedication. Rose had dealt with the problem of how the Soviet Union was turning out by not thinking about it: it wasn't her responsibility, was it? And she had not been in Bill Case's house an hour before she learned this was his attitude too. For years he had claimed that the Soviet Union was a new civilisation which had for ever abolished the old inequalities, race prejudice for the present purpose being the most relevant. And now even in the provinces, which is where Senga was situated, capital city or not, it was being admitted that the Soviet Union was not what it had been cracked up to be. Not admitted of course by the black government, committed to the glories of communism. But Bill was not talking about that great failed dream, but a local one: Rose was hearing from him what she had been listening to for days from Barry Angleton. At first she thought Bill was amusing himself and her by parodying what he must know she had been hearing, but no, his complaints were as real and as detailed and angry as the farmer's. The white farmers were badly treated, they were the scapegoat for every government failure, and yet they had to provide the foreign currency, they were being taxed unfairly, what a pity this country had allowed itselfto become the little arselicker and lackey of the World Bank and the IMF and Global Money!