compare one boy’s treatment with another. The facts change with the individual case. Permit me to be frank. So far you haven’t given me any reason to consider Paul’s case in a new light. Therefore, so far as I am concerned, the headmaster’s decision stands.
They waited for the bill. On the borders there were new guerrilla armies. The rouble and the dollar had replaced the pound sterling. The kilometre and the kilogram and the litre were new ways of measuring miles and imperial pounds and fluid ounces. In Zaire, Patrice Lumumba had been murdered on the instruction of the White House. They wanted to expel her son for possessing two bottles of brandy. The measurements made by Curzon College were as outdated as yards and inches. They didn’t know what counted.
Without arranging it, Ann found that she was walking Edward Lavigne to his car. He had parked on a parallel street, behind the City Hall where they hadn’t installed meters, and accepted her company.
Ann thought that they had come to an impasse. She wanted to make him aware that Gert, Paul’s father, had a close connection with the old families of the National Party. Gert’s own father had been Transvaal Minister of Education. The private schools remembered that their subsidies came from the government. They never crossed a sponsor, whether it meant removing Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the library, excluding non-whites, or accepting the son of an expatriate Japanese businessman as an honorary European. The Special Branch might well have advised the school against enrolling Neil Hunter’s stepson.
Lavigne’s car stood in front of the post office. Paul had told her that his Geography master drove a Bugatti, the Italian sports car noted for its attractive lines. Lavigne was a bachelor, usually splendid in a bow-tie, and was sighted tooling around the town of Curzon, the seaside resort of Margate, and hotels in the Drakensberg around Champagne Castle. Who he visited was a mystery. Could it be another man? Ann considered the possibility that he was a homosexual as Lavigne took his car keys from the striped silk lining of his blazer. It explained his style and his exactness with a phrase, his way of holding himself as well as his sentences, and his uncomplicated sadism. She should blackmail him back. Fair was fair.
—If you don’t mind, Edward, before you leave. You run a school for young men, not a convent. Boys get up to high jinx. So I have to ask you, does this turn of events have anything to do with my husband? As it happens, Paul is not Neil’s son. Paul is the son of Gert Rabie. I understand the school is politically sensitive but you cannot punish Paul for my husband’s beliefs. That is not fair play.
Lavigne unlocked the car door, then put his hand on the green bonnet and looked, for the first time, as if he was confused about what to say next. Through the windscreen Ann saw a pair of men’s gloves on the dashboard. They were cream-coloured, heavily stitched around the fingers, and latched together by a string and two beads. They were driving gloves, popular among automobile-club members, who drove for the pleasure of being on the road. She imagined Lavigne fitting them onto his hands in preparation for a particular piece of work. She was his item of business.
—Mrs Rabie, if you ask for my own opinion, then, privately, yes, I will tell you that Paul is not being treated leniently. But then you must come so far as to comprehend our position.
—I fail to understand how it serves Curzon College to push my son out.
Lavigne bent down and took the gloves out of the car. He held them without putting them on, as if he were testing their weight. They must have been too hot from sitting on the dashboard to put straight on.
—Let me offer you two insights into the thinking of the school board. It’s not merely a question of drinking. Paul circulated a petition against cadet training. He didn’t tell you? Mrs Rabie, political agitation is something we cannot have at our school. You may confer with your husband how far it is proper to impress his own ideas on the mind of your son. I can tell you that James Nicholson does not change his mind easily. He makes an assessment based on the relevant facts. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to change the facts. For example, Curzon College is currently raising money for a new music building.
Ann’s family, on her mother’s side, had been bakers, ships’ chandlers, naval accountants, and clerks in Southampton before moving to what was then the South African Republic, a country without a port to call its own, in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Rabies, a family Ann hadn’t managed to leave despite the divorce, produced teachers, priests ministering to congregations in the Boland, a mining engineer who served in the command of Jan Smuts before being elected to parliament, and Gert Rabie, who ran a surgical practice between Dundee and Newcastle in the Natal interior, tending to agricultural towns and isolated households and farms in the high country. As a houseman, Gert was already noted for the delicacy of his hands. When a birth cord needed to be disentangled, or an infant heart needed its ventricle repaired, they summoned him. He was younger than her by a fortnight. When they met, at university, he had been interested only in rugby and medicine. They had been twenty on their wedding day. He talked about her as an old woman.
Gert had a loner’s temperament and would book a trunk call with his son once a month. The other Rabies stayed in closer contact. They visited Paul at Curzon College, driving hours to watch Saturday rugby, to talk with the captains of the opposing teams, consider the performance of the fly half and the flanker, and unpack their hampers in the stands. Paul stayed with them during the July holidays. The Rabies continued to invite Ann along whenever they took Paul. She had the sense they didn’t see her as an individual, therefore didn’t hold her accountable for the separation. They didn’t seem to mind that she never accepted an invitation.
Then there were the Hunters. They turned out redheads and great eccentrics. Neil’s mother ran the family farm for twenty years. His aunt had been the first anthropologist to live in a Fingoland village and record the traditions. Neil’s great-uncle played the piano on a cruise liner, wrote detective novels, had been a friend of Randolph Churchill, and disembarked in Durban from time to time to arrange séances.
Neil himself was not entirely handsome. He had a flat face, bony arms, and legs that made him six feet and two inches. He always had a project. When they met, he had been constructing an alternative system of English spelling with the potential to reduce illiteracy. He was the only person who had prepared for the adoption of the metric system by trying to use metres and litres and kilograms in his head before the conversion started in the shops.
Neil didn’t have to be the model for her son. Paul might never come to believe, like his stepfather, that the Bantu were wiser and more honest than Europeans. Paul was interested in school. He didn’t listen to any and every passing Indian like her husband did, sitting on the patio, his lovely leathery red-freckled hands spread out on his thighbones, attending to the wizened Tamil electrician Chunu’s small-minded opinions, his lectures on Ayurvedic diet, marvelling at the fenugreek seeds Chunu spread out on his palm. Neil admired Chris Padayachee, an advocate who associated himself with Gandhi’s remaining relatives in Natal and the cause of the Phoenix settlement he had founded. The very dark-eyed lawyer, with his detailed knowledge of Nehru and Jinnah, was as pompous as a professor. Neil wouldn’t have listened for a minute if he had been raised in the province.
On Ann’s return Mackenzie and his man were in the yard, stringing chicken wire above the concrete fence. They communicated with grunts as they paid out the thin knotty wire from a spool. In front of them were the hadedahs tipping and rising, dredging the grass with intelligent beaks. They weren’t aggressive but neither did they move aside as Mackenzie’s assistant edged a wheelbarrow past loaded with scraps of wire and uprooted poles. He made no sign of noticing her.
She came in through the kitchen. The radio was on in Neil’s study. She hadn’t expected him to be back. He often returned after dark with a stack of mimeographed articles that had to be read by the next morning. After years of marriage Ann still felt a tightening at the heart when she expected
