futures have been taken away.’
‘I hardly feel equal to it,’ Ralph said. ‘To such a situation.’
‘Then why did you come?’
He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say, to get away from my family. ‘I thought it was my duty to try to do something. We both thought so. But we have so little experience.’
‘Oh, you have youth,’ the archbishop said, ‘therefore you have resilience. That is the pious hope, at least. May I advise you? In your work, try to relate everything to God. Try to work on the scale of eternity. Do you see? Otherwise you will be fettered by trivia. The daily frustrations will cripple you.’
‘That seems excellent advice,’ Ralph said. ‘Good advice in any circumstances. If one could follow it.’
Anna said, ‘If I were a black person in this country, I’m not sure I would believe in God. Particularly.’
The archbishop frowned.
Ralph said, ‘People may think that when they are so oppressed, when they are told that their nature is somehow inferior, when they have suffered so many misfortunes, that they no longer matter to God. It would be a natural thing for them to think.’
At this the archbishop gave vent to his sentiments, in short bursts of rhetoric, like barks. He referred to ‘feeble secular humanism’ (which he supposed to be a temptation to Ralph) and to the Christian faith as ‘the charter of man’s greatness’. It was clear that these were phrases from a sermon he was writing, or from one which he had already delivered. Anna looked sideways at Ralph, from under her eyelashes. She didn’t know how either of them had dared say what they had said. They would do anything, she supposed, now that they were so far from home.
When the archbishop had finished barking, she put in a feeble, conciliatory word. It was only that they were inexperienced, she said. They were apprehensive – here in a new country, in their first real jobs.
‘Do you also not feel equal to it?’ the archbishop inquired.
‘I am not sure anyone could be.’
This was a good answer. ‘Well, I know I am not,’ the archbishop said. ‘There are two things – no, three things – I ask of you, particularly. Try not to despise your opponents; try not to hate them. It will probably be quite difficult for you, but for a Christian the effort is necessary. And try not to break the law. You have not been sent here to get yourselves into the newspapers or the magistrate’s court. I hope you can remember that.’
‘The third thing?’ Ralph said.
‘Oh yes. When you write home to England, ask your people not to make hasty judgements. It is a complicated country, this. I comfort myself that there is little real wickedness in it. But there is so much fear, fear on all sides. Fear paralyses the sympathies, and the power of reasoning. So it becomes a kind of wickedness, in the end.’ The archbishop looked up, nodded. The interview was over. They rose. Unexpectedly he smiled, and patted at his leg, lying before him painful and inert. ‘Do you know what I did last year? I went to Tristan da Cunha. I expect you did not know my diocese ran so far. They had to tie me into a chair and run me down the side of the frigate on ropes. Then I had to lie in a little boat with a canvas bottom, and they paddled me ashore. Your Uncle James wouldn’t have believed his eyes. But you know, I don’t think I’ll go again. I hardly think I’d weather it, do you?’
He didn’t expect an answer. A secretary ushered them out. He was picking up papers to read as they left the room.
Outside Anna said, ‘The Winston Churchill imitation, do you think it’s deliberate? Do you think he’s studied from recordings?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘He practically accused us of not being Christians.’
‘We are, though,’ Ralph said. ‘Despite provocation.’
‘His heart’s in the right place,’ Anna said.
‘His heart’s irrelevant, I’m afraid.’
At Cape Town Station, the signs said Slegs vir Blankes. The non-European carriages were tacked like an afterthought on to the end of the train.
At stations up the line, children gathered around the carriage doors, their hands cupped for small coins.
At Johannesburg, the station was bustling with black men in slick suits with cardboard briefcases, and with florid white farmers come to town. Their hair seemed insufficient to cover their great heads. Their bellies threatened to burst the buttons of their shirts. Great rufous knees, exposed beneath khaki shorts, butted at the future. Beneath the pavements, Ralph said, were diamonds and gold.
It was cooler than Anna had expected, and the air seemed thin. She shrank away from the hooting and snarling of the traffic and the mosaic of faces in the street. At midnight a noise brought her to the window of their modest hotel. Hailstones – frozen chips of ice, an inch and a half across – rattled at the glass. The bombardment lasted for five minutes. It stopped as suddenly as it began. For an hour, deep in the watches of the night, the city was quiet, as if holding its breath.
The Mission House stood on Flower Street. It was set back from the road, in a kitchen garden in which grew mealies, potatoes, cabbage, pumpkins and carrots. There were three steps up to the veranda, which was netted in against flies. There had been shade at one time, but the big trees had been cut down. Inside the rooms were small and hot.
Everything had been refurbished, Lucy Moyo said, refurbished in anticipation of their arrival. The linoleum on the floor, polished till it gleamed, was offensively vivid: irrepressibly jazzy, zigzagged, sick-making. No expense had been spared – or so Lucy claimed – on providing for the sitting room nylon-fur cushions with buttoned centres, and a coffee-table which splayed its legs, like a bitch passing water. With all the vicarious pride of careful stewardship, Lucy showed off a magazine rack of bent gold wire, tapping with the cushion of her finger at its little rubber feet. In the kitchen was an acid-yellow table with a chromium trim and white tubular legs. There were chairs to match.
The town was set on a height; every day there was a breeze. On clear days you could see the prosperous suburbs of Pretoria – white houses sprawling across green lawns, avenues lined with jacaranda trees. Down there, public monuments, Boer pride: up here, swart gevaar, the black peril. Yet what unfolded to the view, at Elim’s centre, but a vision of clipped, cold-water respectability: wide roads on a grid plan, well-fenced playing fields, neat brick houses? The houses, true, differed as to the state of their repair. The best were freshly painted; and outside them, in regular rows, grew pot-plants in old paint tins. They were not exactly pot-plants, not strictly. They were things that would have grown just as well, and more naturally, in the soil. But these sprigs had been singled out for special treatment. They bespoke ownership. They were nature tamed. They were a form of civic pride. Everyone seemed proud in Elim. ‘We live here as neighbours,’ Lucy explained. ‘Not as tribespeople. We all agree together.’ This was not quite true, of course. But it was a pleasant idea, and could be entertained for some of the time.
In their first few days they were shepherded from house to house, welcomed in the homes of churchgoers and parish workers. Cups of tea were provided; there were needlepoint footstools, framed photos, lace curtains. There was no artefact that did not rest upon its little crocheted mat.
The price of this fussiness, in labour, was clear at once. Water was fetched in buckets,
