A Sport of Nature (14 page)

Bettie had found cupboards left in disorder, the kitchen raided. Pretending not to know, she demanded where the big plastic container was. And the flask to keep the breakfast coffee hot?

To the young people, Pauline added an awkward rider to her warning. —
Nothing
—to anyone. Is that clear? Not to any of my friends, either.—

This time Pauline had not refused succour; and the man who sought it was not one of those whom she ‘supported'. She had known this Donsi as a young black party-goer at white houses.
Everybody knew him, then; a messenger in some editorial office who tagged along with those favoured invited guests, black journalists, for the free drinks, and paid for his presence by his ability to enjoy himself and generate in his hosts the pleasure of getting on well with blacks. He was (to the perception of whites, anyway) too much of a fat and happy light-weight to be of use in the political struggle, which in those circles meant the African National Congress. His name began to come up as a regional leader of those who left the Congress because they did not want to mix with whites until, they said, white power was broken; it was only later it was noticed he wasn't at parties any longer. His people did not want to dance or sit with whites. But she had found him dancing with her daughter and niece; and she had risked arrest by driving him and his family to a place near the border where someone was waiting to smuggle them across. Donsi Masuku had learnt from a relative in the political branch of the police (there were family connections who betrayed, there were family connections who saved) that he was about to be rearrested and charged, this time in a major trial for treason. What she had done was not something she could explain to friends with whom she supported the African National Congress, and who (no doubt) had heard of her failure to give asylum in a context she might be expected to. Joe had witnessed; but Joe would riot confront her with the paradox. Joe could not, because he himself never would share her fierce faction partisanship or her ferocious doubts: Joe (as she taunted him) defended all who needed defence against a common evil.

As one who has strayed feels a rush of strong and relieved attachment to a permanent liaison, Pauline wanted to be continually among these friends, now. She did not ask Joe to calculate the risk she had taken as opposed to those she had refused; but he volunteered nothing to reassure her that the police might not discover the number of the car that assisted a black man to leave the country illegally. She knew from his silence that the risk existed. The
company of friends was something she needed to wrap around herself against dread. Although it was school holidays and she and Joe made it a rule to be at home when their son was, she accepted the chance to go away with friends for a weekend; Carole did not work on Saturdays and would come along, but the other two had the obligation of their jobs to fulfill. It distressed Pauline that Sasha disliked his holiday occupation so much; that she had been too preoccupied to help him find something interesting. She confided him to the care of adaptable Hillela.—Take Sasha along when you and your friends go out. Don't let him know I asked you.—

The house to themselves. Children with the house to themselves. When they were still children, what wild release that signalled; romping from room to room, all lights burning, bedtime banished, the thrills of outlawry within the safety of home: Bettie's protests to scatter them, shrieking, only to recommence the game of freedom, because her authority was no more founded than the game.

On Friday night after Pauline, Joe and Carole had left, Bettie cooked the meal of chops and chips (Sasha's favourite long ago) for which Pauline had left instructions. Hillela sat on the floor untidily as a rag doll propped there, telephoning, all animation gathered into her chance to talk without interruption from others wanting to use the phone. She was making arrangements to go out; Sasha knew. He went away to some other part of the house so as not to listen to another's conversation. But she did not go out.

Sasha?

He heard her looking for him.

Sasha? Sasha?

She was in the garden, now. He went to his mother's room, which overlooked the direction of the voice. From the silent observation of the room that held the humming continuum of
Pauline and Joe's lives, he saw her shadow sloping away from her. He waited to hear her call again.

—Sasha?—

The cat came running, as it would to anything that sounded like a summons to food or fondling. Their shadows joined where she stooped to chide and croon to it for being so stupid. He opened the closed window that marked absence and jumped. Out of the stiff cold oleander bushes whose dead leaves smoothed past his legs like blunt knives, his shadow joined hers and the cat's. For a while the angled, elongated mobile that was the three shadows jazzed, darted, and leant towards and away from the tilted phantom of the house, all cast over the dead lawn by the light of stars in a spill of cracked ice across the sky. The cat's eyes, as she drew the pair into one of her zany night ecstasies, were moons, rather than the new sliver lifted too high and far in the black clarity of space. Their round phosphorescent gold, the flash of translucence as she pranced in profile, were the moons of summer, the nights of the smell of burning flesh from suburban braaivleis. Then she was gone.

Sasha had on his sweater but like most young males who live in a climate of long summers and never accept the brief reality of winter, he wore about the house, in all seasons, the same shorts and rubber-thonged sandals. The cold steeped his legs palpably as water; Hillela puffed out a breath to see it hang in air. They went through the gate, each with arms crossed, hugging self, and began to walk; to walk the streets of the suburb as people are brought out by a summer night. Block after block; they passed through the planes, bared horizontals and verticals stripped by winter; only among the pavement jacarandas, that do not shed their leaves till spring, each streetlight swam, a luminous fish in a cave of green hollowed out of the night. Although when the three young people were together, or with friends, the adolescent fidgety abhorrence of silence, the need to talk because one is alive, possessed them, the two did not talk much. Hillela hummed one of her guitar tunes
now and then. When they did exchange a remark, a phrase or a laugh shattered the clear cold like a stone thrown. At times there was the feeling, in the rhythm of their progress, that they might be making for somewhere, but neither said, nor asked of the other, where; at others (when a corner was reached), that they were looking for a destination. There was none; or none other. They arrived back at the gate. All the lights were burning in the house, except in Pauline and Joe's bedroom, where a window stood open. Bettie had not locked up, knowing there was no-one to reproach her neglect. The house was one of those legendary ships that sail on, fully rigged, without a living soul aboard.

They stamped in, Hillela putting her hands, warm from her pockets, over red-cold ears. Now she would go to the telephone, now she would put on lipstick, fluff her hair with her fingers and leave him there … Now he waited for her to come and call goodbye. She appeared with a pair of his soccer socks on over her jeans, threw a second pair for him to catch. —Don't worry, I haven't been rummaging into any of your things. They weren't put in your room yet, they were among stuff Rebecca's washed.—

The house to themselves. Even the children had slipped away for ever in the adult silences of a night walk. He offered: —D'you want a fire?—

—Too much fag to go out for wood.—

—I feel like a drink.—

—Okay, I'll make tea. Coffee?—

—I mean a drink. What about you?—

But without waiting for her to say, he went to take a bottle of wine and forgot the glasses. She brought the first thing she saw in the kitchen, two cocoa mugs. —Hillela!—

—It'll taste the same.—

He went for glasses. Smiling, she watched him open the bottle. —You're supposed to wipe the rim.—

—Why, it's not dirty.—

—I don't know. They always do at Olga's. And Arthur sniffs it first.—

—And what's that in aid of.—

—To see if it's corked.—

He filled the glasses. —The education you're getting—what a great start in life.—

Hillela took his sharpness kindly, with enjoyment. Her cheekbones, dusky-red with cold, lifted under her strange shining eyes, whose iris, he had examined and explained to her, had no grain to differentiate it from the dark pupil. —At least I'm learning to drive.—

—But you ought to get your learner's licence, you know. I suppose you're driving around illegally all over the place.—

—In what?—

—Your friends let you, I'm sure.—

Hillela was always in command of the subject; changed it at will. —Teach me to play chess.—

He looked at her. —Now?—

—Yes.—

He drank, drew a note sounded from the glass with thumb and forefinger, didn't look at her.

—What for?—

—To play, of course. Oh you think I'm too stupid.—

At once his face was sullen with anxiety.—You are not stupid, Hillela.— He moved his head as if tethered somewhere; and broke loose. —You are the most intelligent person in this house.—

She laughed, made an exaggerated movement pretending to spill her wine. —There's no-one here except you!—

—And it's true.—

—Then only you think so.— At once she turned away quickly from what she had said. —Come on. We've got all night.—

They took the bottle and went into Joe's study, intending to fetch the beautiful chess set that was kept on a filing cabinet, but
instead of returning to the livingroom settled themselves there, with the radiator turned on and the wine at hand, in that single room in the house that was never for general use, where Bettie was not even allowed to dust because of the importance and confidentiality of the papers and documents filed and piled within it. They lifted the legs of the burdened desk and pulled from beneath it the sheepskin foot-rug, to sit on; they dumped the papers from a stool to make of it a low table between them. Given in, Sasha was explaining to her. —It's too abstract for you. You'll learn, all right. But you'll only want to play when there's nothing else to do. And that's not what chess is. How shall I say—you'll always be wanting to do something else.—

She was setting up the men, an Africanised set made of malachite in Rhodesia (maybe even exported by her father, who at one time had dealt in curios). —I don't want to do something else.—

In the small hours, the child abandoned in the dark and cold came back to possess a body again for a moment. Sasha woke to some awful interruption; he had the sensation of terrible discovery and disbelief he had had when, for a period when he was already around eight years old, he would find he had wet the bed. But it was a regular slamming, and not a physical sensation, that had wakened him; his bed was dry, he was not alone, there was the wonderful heavy warmth of breasts against him, and the passing time that brought him to consciousness was measured by the gentle clock of another's breathing. Hillela was there. There was nobody else. He got up and went, knowing his way in the dark in this empty house, to that bedroom where the window had been left open and was banging to and fro in the wind.

Her charges had cooked breakfast for themselves when Bettie pushed the kitchen door open with the armful of pots and dishes brought back from her man's dinner the night before. She was
satisfied rather than pleased. —You old enough now not to make such a mess!— She washed up for them, her reproaches affectionate, a routine assertion of her field of efficiency. Although Hillela was like a daughter in the house, she did not have quite the proxy authority to give Bettie the day off. Sasha told her she needn't bother, he and Hillela would find their own food. —And tonight? For dinner?— —It's Saturday. We'll be out. Saturday night, Bettie.— She swept eggshells into the bin, laughing. —Him? When do you ever go out dancing? Hillela, she'll be having a good time, but you … Sasha … You afraid of the girls, I'm sure.— Not a man, to her, yet the white man in the house, for that weekend: —Please, Sasha, go and see what's wrong in Alpheus's place. There's no light, the water's not hot, nothing. She can't warm the food for the baby.—

—Probably a fuse blown, that's all. I think there's a box of wires in the broom cupboard. You know, on that small shelf. Alpheus can replace it himself.—

—No, no, you must go. If he messes something up, who is it going to be in trouble? Me, that's the one.—

—You're a terrible nag. Why can't you trust Alpheus?—

—Because Alpheus he'll sit there with candles and he won't ask! Won't say nothing! I'm the one, for everybody. Must speak for everybody.—

Sasha was throwing corks and broken kitchen utensils out of a drawer, looking for the fuse wire.

—Oh you are good to me. Thanks, eh. Thanks, Mouser.— To be called by that name was to meet with blankness someone who makes the claim in the street: Don't you know me? It was himself,
Mouser
, one of the many pet names of childhood that evolve far from their origin, in the manner of Cockney rhyming slang. It might have had something to do with big ears, with a liking for getting into small closed places, with pinching cheese, or the cat-like patience and curiosity of a solemn small boy. Even his
mother, who had so many such names to express her delight in him then, would have forgotten, in her loss of so much that had been between them. That Bettie was still allowed to bring it out incongruously was more a mark of condescension to her than a privilege accorded. Despite her house-training in awareness of her own dignity, she had her lapses into the manner of Jethro, which perhaps needed less of an effort against the grain of their identical definition as servants.

The absent Carole went in and out of what was now the home of Alpheus and his family, and often brought the baby over to the main house. She and Alpheus's girl made clothes for it on Pauline's sewing machine that Carole had taken to the garage. Sometimes she shared a meal there. But Hillela showed no interest in the inhabitants across the yard, and Alpheus was some sort of issue between Sasha and his mother that nobody but the two of them was aware of; when he came home for holidays there was expectation that he would go to talk to Alpheus as he liked to renew acquaintance each time with all that was familiar.