That would be fruitless, not to mention humiliating.
So it’s just gone. Overs.
Soon, the ring is probably buried, that being the nature of sand. Tons of it, and constantly shifting. Swept by waves into dunes; tumbled and banked by undertows. We can be fools, can’t we, for love? Deluded. The whole obscure machinery coming in to play alongside the regular dredging of the notorious sandbar across the harbour mouth, countering littoral drift.
So the ring may not, after all, be buried forever. May not have been buried for even that long. Might have been spewed up by the trailing suction-hopper dredger near Tramps or Vetch’s and some lucky bastard found it with a metal detector, and sold it at Hard Times Pawn down Point Road. Which means, perhaps, that once upon a time, for real, the ring might come to encircle someone else’s dreams. And if nothing else, it makes a lovely story.
Unbeknown to Mark, his mother had intervened with his fiancée to patch things up through a series of handwritten pleas, letters scripted in a deliberate, upright hand.
Following the curves of Felicity’s copperplate, oddly pleased to hold the power of this rock, paper, scissors in her hand, Nora thought of iron, steel, tin . . . brass, nickel . . . some other clever alloy, anything solid that would allow love to prove its mysterious mettle.
And so there came the day that Mark and Nora were married. Not that it made any difference. Because then there were all the days that came after.
Dates have their significance for family and forensics. Yet figures are seldom the acid test of the individual. Number-crunching crunches; the cogs in the vast machinery grind. That, Halley would happily inform you – if she’s not in the spiteful mood of mine to know and yours to find out – is why rust resembles dried blood.
So yes, it was early 1960, and a child was conceived in the after-shadow of Sharpeville. Tumbled in the wake of the flood, the turn of the rising tide.
Deep and wide, they sing in church, Deep and wide, There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide. Plunge right in, Cleanse my sins, There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.
Sharpeville, she later supposes, is one conceivable marker, though it glanced past some windows unnoticed, misapprehended by those who took it for a passing effect of weather, an inland pressure front curving towards the coast.
Passes and permits, the black leadership declared, These are their water pipe, and we will close it off.
Or as Nora read in a cutting from The Star that her sister Agnes mailed with a letter from Vanderbijlpark: ‘Police open fire under a hail of stones’. The opening volley of a gathering storm; a mourning tent of darkened sky thrown over the early Sixties, pegged to the ground with tense, booming wires against the winds of change.
Though Halley’s conception, really, was predictably prosaic. The father (not yet hers, after all) was on the razz, thrusting blindly, bluntly, in riotous conjuncture. The mother (similarly no relation) might be imagined more quietly, much less simply, as wanting to make from this some love.
Love me, she urged.
I am, he grunted.
Possibly, she lay back looking over Mark’s solid shoulder, her gaze tracing the blotched water marks on the ceiling, drawing their indistinctions into . . . amoebae, clouds, group areas, crosswords, galaxies, paper dress patterns, my goodness, a foetus!
When it came to marriage, theirs was more a shot in the dark than made in heaven, and to establish the State of the Union, it’s important to understand that Mark Murphy liked Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, a blaring, razzling trumpet brash enough to blast the rainy-day blues into the shine of the good time; he was keen on Sophiatown music, Charlton Heston, Charles Bronson. Brigitte Bardot. His brand was Texan Plain, a pack a day. His aftershave, Old Spice.
And Nora Hoare? She liked Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Ransom 20 Special Filter Mild. Made a box of twenty last a week, meaning Monday to Sunday, the full seven days. She found Dick van Dyck a laugh a minute, and both the Hepburns were gorgeous, in their different ways. She loved Hey, there, Georgie girl, and her scent was 4711, or Chanel No 5 as an extravagant gift. And if you were bringing chocolates, please: make it Cadbury’s Milk Tray, not Black Magic, which was soft-centred pastel fondant, the chocolate too dark. And when it came to flowers: glads, definitely, best you didn’t even consider tacky carnations.
Of course these are over-simplifications, a list invariably listing and leaving out, close-fisted against the indignant exclusions which are beating at the door, unable to see eye to eye.
So, if you like, add that both Mark and Nora had a thing for Frank Sinatra’s crooning; that they loved to sing, and really could. That he played with a band called The Metronomes, and when he wasn’t blowing the sax or doing a Lemmy Mabaso kwela on the penny whistle, he had a soft spot for the bottle while she barely touched a drop and sang solo with the ensemble choir at Manning Road Methodist.
Seeing her there, for the first time, he thought he’d met an angel, he told people later, pausing for effect before playing the fool, explaining that it didn’t take him long to come down to earth.
There were the newlyweds, settling into a flat near Tollgate Bridge on Durban’s Berea. In April 1960, had they looked outside themselves, behind them or in front, there would have been the day they could see a huge black cloud crowd moving marching making its way towards the city centre from the depths of Cato Manor, swelling closer and closer from over the ridge and far away, more than enough menace for an anxious population to consider a horde.
Figures in classic khaki gardeners’ outfits and floppy hats; kitchen boys in white shorts suits edged with red braid; factory workers in overalls hanging loose over worn, stretched singlets. Other protesters wear nothing but long, long-sleeved shirts, as if they have freshly fallen from an old-fashioned bed. There are some in checkered twill clerks’ trousers, the peaked cloth caps of delivery boys. Yet others go sweatily bare-chested and might be naked for all it can be determined, their bodies concealed below the waist by the density of the crowd. Among the throng are women, too. Some in house-girls’ dustcoats; in office skirts and blouses; in full, circle skirts sashed at the waist. Women in mismatched, make-do tops, or with lengths of printed fabric wound beneath the arms, a bulky knot holding the drape together across the breasts.
Hundreds of blacks. Thousands. Workers, the unemployed, rough-shod individuals and some studying correspondence, all determined to be people. Some men have sticks in hand, some – Jesus, are those pangas? as they churn through the whites’ green suburbs, having broken the police line. The mass picks up form and movement on the way, swelling into a collective that includes black men in jackets and snappily pressed slacks, women in flared coats over smart frocks, a cluster of difference that slowly morphs into a single, fluid body, surging towards the Durban Central Gaol to demand the release of political prisoners.
Yet even had Mark and Nora seen the crowd, or heard the strident voices, would they have understood, noticed the little leaves gathering force on a growing stream? Liliesleaf was one thing, but they both laughed at the joke about how the natives were revolting. For Nora, okay, so black people worked hard and got a raw deal, but as her husband said, wasn’t that because basically they were (not to be blunt or anything) still so bladdy bush, more or less raw themselves? And if there were pass laws, he explained, you knew they were there, like all laws, for a reason. It was logical. A ruling party had to rule, otherwise it was only a party, and things would get out of hand.
Hell, but Mark knew how to make a person laugh! When she thought quietly, Mark’s gregarious buzz absent from her head, even then the best Nora could do was a pretty tight tautology: Wouldn’t things
