bulged over his belt, and polyester suit trousers that must have been bought second-hand from his employer. Many of the small-business owners around Durban weren’t rich, having come with nothing from places like Edinburgh and Belfast to join in the boom. They brought their frugal habits, supplementing their income by selling their old clothes to their workers.
Archie stood in the corridor, waiting for her to invite him inside.
—Comrade Ann, good afternoon. Or I see it is already good evening.
—Hello, Archie.
He smiled at her and sniffed the air ostentatiously. She saw that the heel of his shoe was bound with Sellotape. He must be the same size as her son. She had bought extra pairs of shoes in Paris for Paul and was keeping them in boxes until he wore out the others.
—I have been sent by the other comrades to inform you that, while we are waiting for Neil, you have truly awakened our appetites.
—It’s a leg of lamb, Archie. It’s done and I am still waiting for my husband to pitch up. You think I should make everyone a plate?
—I believe it would be appreciated.
Archie came inside and took his usual chair at the table. He helped her to carve the lamb and put it on plates. She thought that Archie didn’t seem to have distinct political views. He seemed to be listening and trying to make up his mind. He was unusual by the standards of the Free University, which ran the gamut from outspoken communists to Christian socialists, pan-Africanists, black nationalists, revolutionary Muslims.
There were the more practical members of the Free University who believed in a non-racial future, but pursued their business in the interim. That meant Royal Saloojee, the dentist who also had a stake in an insurance brokerage. Roy had latched onto Neil when he sold them life cover. Now he was selling insurance for fire and water damage, for illness and death benefits, to comrades, not to say doing their teeth on the side. He had put a bridge in for her.
Archie helped Ann take the plates to the living room. He gave everybody a serviette, knife and fork, and then sat down to eat in front of the telephone. Nadia arrived and made herself at home. She sat beside Roy the dentist. He had brought some forms for her to sign dealing with the annual renewal of her policy. She tried to read through them while keeping half an ear on the proceedings. The discussion, which had been scheduled on Fanon, began without Neil.
Ann watched without wanting to take part. She didn’t have any ideas of her own. There was some other principle in her heart today. She saw that, in each hour of this day, she had been unwilling to concede any defeat, whether to Lavigne or the Jaguar. Not to the Rabies nor to Curzon College, not to Neil, not to her son Paul, who needed to drink at sixteen and had landed them all in hot water. It was only at the spectacle of Nadia that her heart had turned over. She was sure that she had lost even before she started to resist. Her husband wouldn’t leave her in the lurch. At the same time he was capable of making her leave him.
What was there to do? Her adversaries had the upper hand. Curzon College was as secure in its mentality as the Vatican. They made her ashamed to use the same language. The degeneration was there in the schools, in the misery of offices where they fingerprinted native men and where young white men scolded older men like Archie, and in the drumhead courts, and the racial signs posted along the beaches and in the bus stops, enforced by the Black Marias, which carried a dozen men in their cages.
Neil appeared as the members of the Free University had begun to drift away. Archie had already left in Roy’s car. Lelo, Nadia, and John Mantis were at the door, where Neil talked to them for a few minutes and walked them to the end of the driveway. Then he came into the kitchen, looking surprised as if he had heard something unexpected, and unbuttoned his jacket to put it over the back of a chair. He sat down.
In his shirt Neil was thinner and younger than the image fixed in her memory, his beard scarcely speckled with grey. He was again the man she had married in an Arniston church. In London or Paris, at thirty-five, Neil would count as a young man. Here he had Methuselah’s responsibilities.
—I’m sorry, Ann. I should have warned you when the day went to pieces.
—You should be sorry.
She forgave him at once.
—I really didn’t have time to get to a telephone. There was the issue of bail money. I had to go to the bank to get a draft. Some of the students had to be ferried between the police station and their homes. One lived far into Springfield, next to the power station. He says all the youngsters have asthma. He wanted me to write a petition for them. But forget about all of that. Tell me what happened with Lavigne.
—He had a new complaint about Paul’s objection to military cadets. In any case he had nothing to offer. Unless we come up with a donation to the music building he’s planning to put Paul on the bus at mid-term, with all his belongings.
Neil settled into his chair before he looked back at her.
—He’s blackmailing us over a bottle of brandy?
—Two bottles. And the petition Paul started.
—This country is full of surprises, Ann, but I have never heard of a school blackmailing the parents before.
—Given what crooks they are behind the scenes, Paul might be better off at dhs. For a government school, it gets good results. Didn’t Sartre want them to shut down every French private school?
—I’m not defending the existence of these schools, Ann. You and Gert wanted to send him there. It wasn’t my choice. But now Paul is well established. I suppose if we have to pay Lavigne, we can pay him with the money left over from my mother’s estate. I have never had to draw on that capital before.
It sounded as if Neil, who was without emotion under most circumstances, was growling at her. He was in the grip of some unfamiliar emotion. Ann wasn’t sure that her husband was adapted to real frustrations. He wished for a world in which fair play was the norm and believed, following Sartre’s example, that injustice must be strenuously opposed in each detail. And yet politics, even in this country, was one grey thing opposing another. She couldn’t teach him this, didn’t necessarily want him to submit to this fact, and therefore had the sensation of being far away from Neil. He had said nothing to push her away and yet the prick of it was as real as when her hand found a safety pin in her purse.
Neil had some news of his own.
—You won’t believe what I heard today. I worked out why Edward Lavigne’s name sounded familiar. It turns out his older brother Percy is the deputy dean. He may be the acting dean next year.
—I don’t believe you.
—I have no idea why nobody said anything to me either. I just never put two and two together. And it’s an unusual last name. They must be quite a pair. I’ve had dealings with this Percy character and he’s every bit as slippery as you describe Edward. Rumour has it that he feeds the Security Branch information on the lecturers. You can’t take rumours for granted, of course, but it sounds as if the younger one might also have a similar understanding with the police.
—I don’t believe it.
—Wait a minute and I’ll tell you something else. They say a few years ago Edward was arrested in Pretoria. They dropped the homosexuality charges before the Sunday newspapers could get hold of it. You know how they’ll print anything on the back page if they get the chance. But why did they drop the charges?
