‘There is risk either way,’ he said softly. ‘To delay is as dangerous as to act hastily. We must choose the exact moment.’
Neither of them spoke again until they reached the bus stop, and Moses parked the Chev on the opposite side of the road. Then he switched off the engine and asked:
‘This polo match. When will it take place?’
‘The Test match is on Friday afternoon.’
‘Your husband will be playing?’
‘The South African team will be announced in the middle of the week, but Shasa is almost certain to be on the team. He might even be chosen as captain.’
‘Even if he is not, he will be the host. He must be there.’
‘Yes,’ Tara agreed.
‘Friday – that will give me the whole weekend.’ He made up his mind. ‘We will do it then.’ For a few moments Tara felt the suffocating desperation of somebody trapped in quicksand, sinking slowly, and yet there was an inevitability about it that made fear seem superfluous. There was no escape and she felt instead an enervating sense of acceptance.
‘Here is the bus,’ Moses said, and she heard the faintest tremor of excitement in his voice. It was one of the very few times that she had ever known his personal feelings to betray him.
As the bus drew up at the halt, she saw the woman and child standing on the platform at the rear. They were both peering eagerly at the parked Chev, and when Tara waved the child hopped down and started across the road. The bus pulled away and Miriam Afrika stayed on the platform at the back of the bus, staring back at them until it turned the next corner.
Benjamin came to meet them, his face bright with anticipation. He was growing into a likely lad, and Miriam always dressed him so well – clean white shirt, grey shorts and polished black shoes. His toffee-coloured skin had a scrubbed look and his crisp dark curls were trimmed into a neat cap.
‘Isn’t he just too gorgeous?’ Tara breathed. ‘Our son, Moses, our fine son.’
The boy opened the door and jumped in besides Moses. He looked up at him with a beaming smile and Moses embraced him briefly. Then Tara leaned over the seat and kissed him and gave him a brief but fierce hug. In public she had to limit any show of affection, and as he grew older, their relationship became more difficult and obscure.
The child still believed that Miriam Afrika was his mother, but he was almost six years old now, and a bright, intelligent and sensitive boy. She knew that he suspected some special relationship between the three of them. These clandestine meetings were too regular, and emotionally charged, for him not to suspect that something had remained to be fully explained to him.
Benjamin had been told merely that they were good friends of the family, but even at his tender age he would be aware of the social taboos that they were flouting, for his very existence must be permeated by the knowledge that white and black were somehow different and set apart from his own light brown, and sometimes he stared at Tara with a kind of wonder as though she were some fabulous creature from a fairy tale.
There was nothing Tara could think of that could fulfil her more than taking him in her arms and telling him, ‘You are my baby, my own true baby, and I love you as much as I love your father.’ But she could not even let him sit on the seat beside her in case they were seen together.
They drove out across the Cape Flats towards Somerset West, but before they reached the village, Moses turned off onto a side track, through the dense stands of Port Jackson willow until they came out onto the long deserted curve of beach with the green waters of False Bay before them, and on each side the mountainous ramparts that formed the horns of the wide bay.
Moses parked the Chev and fetched the picnic basket from the boot, and then the three of them followed the footpath along the top of the beach until they reached their favourite spot. From here anyone approaching along the beach would be obvious from half a mile, while inland the exotic growth formed an almost impenetrable jungle. The only persons likely to venture this far along the lonely beach were surf fishermen casting into the tumbling waves for kob and steenbras, or lovers seeking seclusion. Here they felt safe.
Tara helped Benjamin change into his bathing-costume, and then all three of them went hand in hand to the enclosed rock pool where the child splashed and played like a spaniel puppy. When at last he was chilled through and tired, Tara towelled down his shivering body and dressed him again. Then he helped Moses build a fire amongst the dunes and grill the raw sausages and chops upon the coals.
After they had eaten, Benjamin wanted to swim again, but gently Tara forbade him. ‘Not on a full stomach, darling.’ So he went to search for shells along the tide-mark of the beach, and Tara and Moses sat on the crest of the dune and watched him. Tara was as happy and contented as she could ever remember being until Moses broke the silence.
‘This is what we are working for,’ he said. ‘Dignity and a chance for happiness for all in this land.’
‘Yes, Moses,’ she whispered.
‘It is worth any price.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed fervently. ‘Oh yes!’
‘Part of the price is the execution of the architect of our misery,’ he said sharply. ‘I have kept this from you until now, but Verwoerd must die and all his henchmen with him. Destiny has appointed me his executioner – and his successor.’
Tara paled at his words, but they came as such a shock that she could not speak. Moses took her hand with a strange and unusual gentleness.
‘For you, for me and for the child – that he may live with us in the sunshine of freedom.’
She tried to speak, but her voice faltered, and he waited patiently until she was able to enunciate.
‘Moses, you promised!’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘You persuaded yourself of that, and it was not the time to disillusion you.’
‘Oh, God, Moses!’ The enormity of it crashed in upon her. ‘I thought you were going to blow up the empty building as a symbolic gesture, but all along you planned to—’ She broke off, unable to complete the sentence, and he did not deny it.
‘Moses – my husband Shasa, he will be on the bench beside Verwoerd.’
‘Is he your husband?’ Moses asked. ‘Is he not one of them, one of the enemy?’ She lowered her eyes to acknowledge the truth of this, and then suddenly she was agitated again.
‘My father – he will be in the House.’
‘Your father and your husband are part of your old life. You have left that behind you. Now, Tara, I am both your father and your husband, and the struggle is your new life.’
‘Moses, isn’t there some way they can be spared?’ she pleaded.
He did not speak, but she saw the answer in his eyes and she covered her face with both hands and began to weep. She wept silently, but the spasms of grief shook her whole body. Down on the beach the child’s happy cries came to her faintly on the wind, and beside her Moses sat unmoving and without expression. After a while, she lifted her head and wiped the tears from her face with the palms of her hands.
‘I’m sorry, Moses,’ she whispered. ‘I was weak, please forgive me. I was mourning my father, but now I am strong again, and ready to do whatever you require of me.’
The Test match against the visiting Argentinian polo team was the most exciting event that had taken place at Weltevreden in a decade or more.
As mistress of the estate, the planning and organization of the event should have fallen to Tara, but her lack of interest in the sport and her poor organizational skills were too much for Centaine Courtney-Malcomess to abide. She began by giving discreet advice and ended in exasperation by taking all responsibility out of her daughter-in-law’s hands. The result was that the occasion was in every respect a towering success. After Centaine had chivvied the coloured greensman, and with Blaine’s expert advice, the turf on the field was green and velvety, the going beneath it neither hard enough to jar the legs of the ponies nor soft enough to slow them down. The goalposts were painted in the colours of the teams, t
he pale blue and white of Argentina and orange, blue and white of South Africa, and two hundred flags in the same colours flew from the grandstand..
The stand itself was freshly painted, as were the fence pickets and the stables. A fence was erected to keep the general public out of the chateau’s private grounds, but the new facilities designed by Centaine especially for the occasion included an extension to the grandstand, with public toilets below and an open-air restaurant that could seat two hundred guests. The extensions to the stables were sufficient for fifty ponies, and there were new quarters for the grooms. The Argentinians had brought their own, and they wore traditional gaucho costume with wide hats and their chaps decorated with silver coins.
Garry tore himself away from his new office at Centaine House, which was on the top floor, only three doors down from Shasa, and he spent two days at the stables watching and learning from these masters of horsecraft and the game of polo.
Michael had at last managed to secure an official assignment. He blissfully believed that the Golden City Mail in Johannesburg had appointed him their local correspondent on his own merits as a cub reporter. Centaine, who had made a discreet telephone call to the Chairman of Associated Newspapers of South Africa which owned the Mail, did nothing to disillusion him. Michael was to be paid five guineas for the day, plus a shilling a word for any copy of his actually printed by the newspaper. He interviewed every member of both teams, including the reserves, all the grooms, the umpire and referees. He drew up a full history and score card of all previous matches played between the two countries going back to the 1936 Olympic Games, and he worked out the pedigrees of all the ponies – but here he showed restraint by limiting the listing to only two generations. Even before the match day he had written enough to make Gone with the Wind look like a pamphlet. Then he insisted on telephoning this important copy through to a long-suffering sub at the newspaper offices, and the telephone charges far outstripped his five-guinea salary.
‘Anyway, Mickey,’ Shasa consoled him, ‘if they print everything you have written at a shilling a word, you’ll be a millionaire.’
The big disappointment for the family came on the Wednesday when the South African team was announced. Shasa was chosen to play in his usual position at Number Two but he was passed over for the captaincy. This went to Max Theunissen, a flamboyant, hard-riding millionaire farmer from Natal who was a long-time rival of Shasa’s, ever since their first meeting on this same field as juniors many years before.
Shasa hid his disappointment behind a rueful grin. ‘It means more to Max than it does to me,’ he told Blaine, who was one of the selectors, and Blaine nodded.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why we gave it to him, Shasa. Max values it.’
Isabella fell desperately in love with the Argentinian Number Four, a paragon of masculinity with olive skin, dark flashing eyes, thick wavy hair and dazzling white teeth.
She changed her frock three and four times a day, trying out all the most sophisticated of the clothes with which Shasa had filled her wardrobes. She even applied a very light coat of rouge and lipstick, not enough to catch Shasa’s attention but just enough, she hoped, to pique José Jesus Gonçalves De Santos’ interest. She exercised all her ingenuity in waylaying him, hanging around the stables endlessly and practising her most languid poses whenever he hove into view.
The object of her adoration was a man in his early thirties who was convinced that the Argentinian male was the world’s greatest lover and that he, Jose Jesus Goncalves De Santos, was the national champion. There were at least a dozen mature and willing ladies vying for his attention at any one time. He did not even notice the antics of this fourteen-year-old child, but Centaine did.
‘You are making an exhibition of yourself, Bella,’ she told her. ‘From now on you are forbidden to go near the stables, and if I see one speck of make-up on your face again you may be certain your father will learn about it.’
Nobody went against Nana’s orders, not even the boldest and most lovelorn, so Isabella was forced to abandon her fantasy of ambushing Jose in the hayloft above the stables and presenting him with her virginity. Isabella was not entirely certain what this entailed. Lenora had lent her a forbidden book which referred to it as ‘a pearl beyond price’. Whatever it was, Jose Jesus could have her pearl and anything else he wanted.
However, Nana’s strictures reduced her to trailing around after him at a discreet distance, and directing burning but long-range looks at him whenever he glanced in her direction.
Garry intercepted one of these passionate looks and was so alarmed by it that he demanded in a loud voice, and within earshot of her beloved, ‘Are you sick, Bella? You keep looking like you are going to throw up,’ It was the first time in her life that she truly hated her middle brother.
Centaine had planned for two thousand spectators. Polo was an elite sport with a limited following, and at two pounds each, tickets were expensive, but on the day the gate exceeded five thousand. This guaranteed the club a healthy profit but put a considerable strain on Centaine’s logistics. All her reserves, which included Tara, were thrown in to deal with the overflow and to organize the additional food and drink required, and only when the teams rode out on to the field could Tara escape her mother-in-law’s all-seeing eye and go up into the stand.
For the first chukka Shasa was riding a bay gelding whose hide was burnished until it shone like a mirror in the sunlight. In his green jersey piped with gold, and his snowy white breeches and glossy black boots, Tara had to admit to herself that Shasa looked magnificent. As he cantered below the stand he looked up and smiled, the black eye-patch gave an intriguing sinister nuance to his otherwise boyish and charming grin, and despite herself Tara responded, waving to him, until she realized that Shasa was not smiling at her but at someone below her in the stand. Feeling a little foolish, she stood on tiptoe and peered down to try and see who it was. The woman was tall with a narrow waist, but her face was obscured by the brim of a garden party hat decorated with roses. However, the arm she lifted to wave at Shasa was slim and tanned, with diamond engagement and gold wedding rings on the third finger of her shapely hand.
Tara turned away and removed her hat so that Centaine could not easily pick her out of the crowd, and she worked her way quickly but unobtrusively to the side exit of the stand. As she crossed the carpark and headed around the back of the stables, the first roaring cheer went up from the stand. Nobody would look for her for a couple of hours now, and she began to run. Moses had the Chev parked in the plantation of pines, near the guest cottages, and she pulled open the back door and tumbled into the seat.
‘Nobody saw me leave,’ she panted, and he started the engine and drove sedately down the long driveway and out through the Anreith gateway.
Tara checked her wristwatch; it was a few minutes past three o‘clock, but it would take forty minutes to round the mountain and reach the city. They would reach the parliament building at four o’clock when the doormen were thinking about their tea-break. It was a Friday afternoon, and the House was in Committee of Supply, the kind of boring routine business which would leave the members nodding on the benches. In fact, Blaine and Shasa had tactfully arranged this schedule with the whips so that they, and quite a few of their peers, might sneak away to the polo without missing any important debate or division. Many of the other members must have made plans to leave early for the weekend, for the building was quiet and the lobby almost deserted.
Moses parked in the members’ carpark and went around to the back of the station wagon to bring out the packages. Then he followed Tara at a respectful distance as she climbed the front staircase. Nobody challenged them, it was all so easy, almost an anti-climax, and they went up to the second floor, past the press gallery entrance, where Tara had a glimpse of three junior reporters slumped dispiritedly on their benches as they listened to the Honourable Minister of Posts and Telegraphs droning out his self-congratulations on the exemplary fashion in which he had conducted
his department during the previous fiscal year.
Tricia was sitting behind her desk in the outer office painting her fingemails with varnish, and she looked flustered and guilty as Tara walked in.
‘Oh, Tricia, that is a pretty colour,’ Tara said sweetly, and Tricia tried to look as though her fingers didn’t belong to her, but the varnish was wet and she didn’t quite know what to do with them.
‘I’ve finished all the letters Mr Courtney left for me,’ she tried to excuse herself, ‘and it’s been so quiet today, and I’ve got a date tonight – I just thought …’ She petered out lamely.
‘I’ve brought up some samples of curtain material,’ Tara told her. ‘I thought we’d change them when we installed the new light fittings. I would like it to be a surprise for Shasa, so don’t mention it to him, if you can avoid it.’
‘Of course not, Mrs Courtney.’
‘I will be trying to work out the new colour scheme for the curtains, and I’ll probably be here until long after five o’clock. If you’ve finished your work, why don’t you go off early? I will take any phone calls.’
‘Oh, I’d feel bad about that,’ Tricia protested halfheartedly.
‘Off you go!’ Tara ordered firmly. ‘I’ll hold the fort. You enjoy your date – I hope you have a lovely evening.’
‘It’s so kind of you, Mrs Courtney. It really is.’
‘Stephen, take those samples through and put them on the couch, please,’ Tara ordered without looking at Moses, and she lingered while Tricia cleared her desk with alacrity and headed for the door.