A Sport of Nature (34 page)

—What is it now, Hillela?— She buried her head in his neck, her hair settled like a soft hand hushing his mouth. —Might as well make love, because we don't have to bother about my getting pregnant.—

Nevertheless the novelty of the first child gave way to inattentiveness, sometimes. She would leave her (everyone
here
knew the little girl was dedicated by name to the cause) with one of the other women—that was the easy African fashion, children sharing each other's mothers. She went about with Whaila in the aura of closeness within which lovers move among rooms full of people, the personal pronoun of her conversation ‘we' and never ‘I', their appearance together consciously striking: the spare,
obsidian dignity of the man and the miniature voluptuousness of a young girl whose pregnancy by him does not yet show in any other way. There are always women who resent such happiness, which they have never had, or have lost; it was remarked among white women: —Of course, she was there—displaying her black husband, full of herself.—

Whaila had for her, beyond sensuality, a concentration within himself that kept her steadily magnetized. The presence of a power. It was related to, but not, in effect, the awareness she had had before the fallen statue. It did not bring fear. The concentration was like that a woman must feel when a general comes to her on the nights before a great offensive begins. A long culmination of tension was not only in his face, his lowered lids, but particularly in the lines of his back when she looked up and saw him standing dead still with urgency. So she shared, in the high emotion of some extraordinary purchase being taken on events, what he did not tell her: there was a decision to join military forces with Joshua Nkomo's guerrillas fighting Smith's army in Rhodesia. What Bra James had foreseen was about to be attempted. Umkhonto men would pass down Rhodesia guided by the guerrillas through the game park of the Western border, and hope to infiltrate South Africa by way of Botswana without encountering the Rhodesian army. It was the ultimate journey for which there had been years of others; for which the gatherings on Tamarisk, the discussions up rotting stairs and in the Manaka flat, the long wait in strangers' lands, the missions to the cold hemisphere had been the victualling. Knowledge of it was growing in Whaila while he lay beside her at night, as the foetus was growing in her. After caresses were over she would clasp his hand tightly in friendship.

The trees in the streets wore puttees of whitewash, the clay-piped calves of the Governor's guard, petrified, left behind. Splashes of blood in garden green were the poinsettias the
songololo
wound
past in Salisbury. But Len was dead and his little sweetheart did not know that he was buried, would stay for ever, in this country to the North where she, too, had been assured she was going to be for a long time. The moment of falling into place that had come to her while a street shoemaker mended her only pair of sandals had been an assurance rather than a premonition of how she moved among the people in this town. The skill of the watchmaker, at his fruit-crate table in the push and flow of the pavement, whose concentration on the ordering of a confetti of wheels and screws was fine as the minute tools that handled them, made her marvel as skills that put a man to walk in space did not. She would pause to see him drop each tiny component of his whole exactly where it must go, and he and she had a greeting for each other; he gave the child the present of an old pocket watch as a plaything. Although she never had her shoes shined, she was acquainted with the man whose violent-coloured home-concocted polishes were ranged at the kerb in old medicine bottles. The opportunity taken by taxi drivers to wash their cars with water from a broken main was the kind of making out, stepping across the streams, she understood. When the little girl lagged against her mother's hand, whining to play in the mud, the men reproached her. —You want to make your nice dress dirty? Why you want to make work for your mother? She so nice to you.— So, in laughter, Hillela became their acquaintance, too. A sign painter whose workshop was the hulk of an old truck parked on the route she walked from Britannia Court past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place to town, was closer to her sense of reality than the dispensation of white wine at an advertising agency. She jostled and pushed along with the gaiety of the women who lined up in a soft-breasted, loud-mouthed army when a supermarket received supplies of cooking oil, and she was at ease in the caper with which they at once set up their own economy of distribution, getting their children to pour the oil from cans into small bottles for resale at the profit of a coin,
and leaving the mess—broken bottles, spilt oil—of their defiance of the supermarket's distribution on its doorstep; A young man made furtive by poverty and the unfamiliarity of a town tried to sell her a ‘stick'—a single cigarette from the packet which was his capital and stock-in-trade. —I don't smoke.— When the white girl smiled and spoke instead of seeming not to see him, as he quickly had understood white women usually did, he begged for work. —I don't have people working for me. — —I can be good for kitchen, garden boy. Please madam.— She did not know if he had enough English to understand, but she was moved by some overflow, pride or plenty, to tell him. —I'm not a madam. We are refugees from down South. My husband's like you …— Not quite true, of course; but if Whaila, the son of a Bettie or a Jethro, had not had a spirit resistant and brain bright as obsidian, it might have been.

The fullness overflowed into her friendships with women. She fell in love—the young mother's equivalent of the school-girl pash—with this one or that, spent her days in the bosom company of the favourite and their pooled children, while Whaila was behind the tin security fence in town or out at the camp conferring with Nkomo's men. Sela is the only one who has ever heard from her again. At one time, Hillela left Whaila's bed only to walk down to Sela's house. The children played in the garden, looked after by Sela's relatives, and the two women settled in the cosy dark cool of the livingroom. Sela had her own car but her lively friend scarcely ever could get her to go out; she sat in calm and stillness, strangely like an object of contemplation rather than in contemplation. Before it, everything could spill over, spill out. There must have been many things about Hillela which she alone could tell; she has never offered them to anybody.

Selina Montgomery and Hillela Kgomani—personages in some race joke: there was this black woman married to a white man, and this white woman married to a black man … The
quartet would have made a neat quadrilateral relationship if not a perfect circle, had Whaila had time for social life that did not in some way further the cause, and if Russell Montgomery had been materially present. Among the crocheted doilies of missionary artisanship and hammered copper plates representing idealized tribal maidens or trumpeting elephants that were African bourgeois taste, there hung in the dimness Edward Lear watercolours of Italy and Stubbs sporting prints swollen with humidity and spotted as blighted leaves. Russell St. John Montgomery was an engineer whose family made a colonial fortune two generations earlier in those raw materials that were exported and sold back, transformed, to those who could afford them. He himself was transformed; he came back to Africa as the member of the family who married a black girl instead of paying her forebears a few British pence a day to labour in field, plantation or mine. She was older than Hillela and had been married twelve years; his engineering projects, begun before independence to help build her new Africa, were more and more delegated to other hands and he spent more and more of his time attending to inherited interests in England and Scotland.

The children with whom Nomzamo played, decorating mud pies with the torn bloody strips of poinsettias and serving them on the split giant pods of the mahogany tree, were not really Sela's but those of her relatives—she had no servants but many collateral retainers who lived in the back yard and the empty rooms of the house, and brought in at eleven and four o'clock cucumber sandwiches or soda-tasting scones on the tea-tray. A photograph of two coloured boys in kilts stood on the piano. (They had not come out beautifully black as the namesake.) A schoolgirl in a pork-pie hat smiling obediently to a photographer's command over the crinkly plait fallen across her shoulder, looked down at her mother from the wall. Sela's children were in England at the schools Russell and his sisters had attended. —He entered them
when they were born.— She had a way of stopping to reflect after a short statement; and then saying something that, perhaps, was not what she might have said. —It's very hard to get into those schools, apparently.—

—I wish I'd known you when we were in England! A house in London and one in Scotland! But you weren't there, Sela, were you—why aren't you ever there?—

Sela's heavy and beautiful head was coiffured in sculptural wedges that seemed carved not combed into place, like those of the wooden figures vendors from Zaïre hawked in Cairo Road. She wore the gold, garnet and diamond Victorian ear-rings of Russell's family jewels dangling to her neck, and from there down the matronly dresses and, no matter how great the heat, the tight varnish of stockings and the high-heeled shoes of a colonial generation of white women who had been her teachers. —When I was studying for my thesis, I stayed there. When I was young. The children were small. But Russell will invite you to his house. Russell has a lot of visitors, his friends. When you go back, you'll see him.—

—Oh no, we're here for good. Well, quite a long time. However long it takes, Whaila says.—

Sela had great delicacy. Her manner stopped any indiscretion that might be coming from Hillela about what it was rumoured was being planned behind the tin security fence; whatever indiscreet fantasy of imminent triumph and freedom, down South, the young girl was about to flaunt.

—But don't you like London, Sela? I had such a good time. To have a house in London, of your own! I've never been to Scotland, but I suppose that must be something, too. Why don't you spend part of the year there? Isn't it lonely for Russell? I was so often alone in London when Whaila had to go away—I couldn't stand it, I moved in with friends.—

—There's this house to see to. My family. Always a lot of problems with our families, such big families … now my father is
dead and my mother has to deal with the uncles. The children come out for the holidays—in their summer, over there. And there's the garden.—

If Hillela did not find her friend in the dark house within its cave of towering trees, she was in her garden, the tightly-stockinged legs kneeling on a sack and the other family's jewels looping forward over her flesh-ringed soft neck. Sela talked of her gardening as she might have been expected to talk of her profession as a physicist—with the achievement and concomitant responsibility of a vocation. She was the first woman in her country to graduate with a Master's degree in science, one of the first to have a university education at all, let alone at an Ivy League American institution. She was not teaching at the local university ‘at present', she said, in the tone of an official communiqué, and had not for a length of time she did not mention. On one of the few occasions when she appeared at a gathering, Hillela heard her respond to the reproachful bonhomie of one of the deans of the university. —It wouldn't be fair for me to take a teaching post, I am away so much, you see, in England.— Her little white friend came up to her and embraced her, and Sela did not know why; well, she was an impulsively affectionate girl and the atmosphere at parties went to her head.

An odd couple. The women friends, not the Montgomerys or the Kgomanis. But while Hillela chattered and Sela, silent, attentive, overcast the seams of tiny dresses Hillela was sewing for her daughter, they complemented each other in a way nobody saw. Hillela, who had been like a daughter, had no longer a comparative status; was at the centre of a life in her marriage to a black man. Sela, in her marriage to a white man, for all her dowager dignity assumed at thirty-six was only making out; and Hillela had been a prodigy at that.

*

Yes, she knew them all. Except Mandela and the others with him. Mandela remained the voice on tape heard when she was a schoolgirl. Mandela was in prison down South, off the very last peninsula of Africa, pushed out to an island in the Atlantic by white men who frightened themselves with rhetoric that his kind would cast them back into the sea by which they came. Her old friendship with Tambo dates from those days when she used to serve him tea at Britannia Court and somehow produce enough food to go round whomever Whaila brought home. There hasn't been anything she hasn't profited by, at one period or another; the cuisine at the Manaka flat stood her in good stead, in its day. Oliver Tambo, even then, had the eyes of sleepless nights behind his thick glasses, and the opacity of flesh that, as it did in Whaila, marks the faces behind which decisions must be made: loosed boulders whose thundering echoes a passage out of sight, into consequences that cannot fully be foreseen. Tennyson Makiwane was one of those who came to Britannia Court, too—another namesake; inheritor of Victoriana—who was there in a Xhosa family who admired Tennyson? Tennyson Makiwane gave Nomzamo a stray kitten he had taken in—Makiwane who outcast himself, years later, from the cause for which, like the other frequenters of Britannia Court, he lived then; a man whose shame was obliterated for him by a traitor's death.

Whaila knew at least an edited version of his young wife's life; she had told him how she had got to Tamarisk Beach via Rey; and when she had expressed wonder that anyone (Rey) who seemed so committed to the cause had abandoned it (she had this wider interpretation, now), Whaila gave one of his held-back sighs that became a grunt. —We'll have them, too. Casualties. And not only operational ones… There'll always be some who won't go the whole way.—