Tara sat beside Moses Gama. Although his appetite was hearty, he hardly touched the tumbler of wine. His table manners were African. He ate noisily with an open mouth, but strangely this did not offend Tara in the least. Somehow it confirmed his differentness, marked him as a man of his own people.
At first Moses gave most of his attention to the other guests, replying to the questions and comments that were called down the table to him. Then gradually he concentrated on Tara, at first including her in his general conversation, and at last, when he had finished eating, turning in his chair to face her fully and lowering his voice to exclude the others.
‘I know your family,’ he told her. ‘Know them well, Mrs Centaine Courtney and more especially your husband, Shasa Courtney.’
Tara was startled. ‘I have never heard them speak of you.’ ‘Why would they do so? In their eyes I was never important. They would have forgotten me long ago.’
‘Where did you know them and when?’
‘Twenty years ago. Your husband was still a child. I was a boss-boy, a supervisor in the H’ani Diamond Mine in South-west Africa.’
‘The H’ani,’ Tara nodded. ‘Yes, the fountainhead of the Courtney fortune.’
‘Shasa Courtney was sent by his mother to learn the workings of the mine. He and I were together for a few weeks, working side by side—’ Moses broke off and smiled. ‘We got along well, as well as a black man and a little white baas ever could, I suppose. We talked a great deal, and he gave me a book. Macaulay’s History of England. I still have it. I recall how some of the things I said puzzled and disturbed him. He told me once, “Moses, that is politics. Blacks don’t take part in politics. That’s white men’s business.”’ Moses chuckled at the memory, but Tara frowned.
‘I can hear him say it,’ she agreed. ‘He hasn’t changed much in twenty years,’ and Moses stopped laughing.
‘Your husband has become a powerful man. He has great wealth and influence.’
Tara shrugged. ‘What good is power and wealth unless it is used with wisdom and compassion?’
‘You have compassion, Tara,’ he said softly. ‘Even if I did not know of the work that you do for my people, I would sense it in you.’
Tara lowered her eyes from his smouldering regard.
‘Wisdom.’ His voice sank even lower. ‘I think you have that also. It was wise not to speak of our last meeting in front of others.’
Tara’s head came up and she stared at him. In the evening’s excitement she had almost forgotten their encounter in the forbidden corridors of parliament.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why were you there?’
‘One day I may tell you,’ he replied. ‘When we have become friends.’
‘We are friends,’ she said, and he nodded.
‘Yes, I think we are friends, but friendships have to be tried and proven. Now, tell me about your work, Tara.’
‘It’s so very little that I am able to do—’ and she told him about the clinic and the feeding scheme for the children and the old people, unconscious of her own enthusiasm and antimation until he smiled again.
‘I was right, you do have compassion, Tara, enormous compassion. I would like to see this work. Is it possible?’
‘Oh, would you come – that would be marvellous!’
Molly brought him out to the clinic the following afternoon.
The clinic was on the southern edge of the black township of Nyanga – the name meant ‘dawn’ in the Xhosa language, but was hardly apt. Like most black townships it comprised row upon row of identical brick cottages with asbestos-sheet roofs separated by dusty lanes; although aesthetically ugly and uninspiring, the accommodation was adequate and offered reticulated water, mains sewerage and electricity. However, beyond the township proper, in the bushy dune country of the Cape Flats, had sprung up a shanty town that housed the overflow of black migrants from the impoverished rural areas, and Tara’s clinic found its main clientele amongst these wretches.
Proudly Tara led Moses and Molly around the small building.
‘Being the weekend, none of our volunteer doctors are here today,’ she explained and Moses stopped to chat with the black nurses and with some of the mothers waiting patiently with their small children in the yard.
Afterwards she made coffee for all three of them in her tiny office and when Moses asked how the clinic was financed, Tara told him vaguely, ‘Oh, we get a grant from the local provincial government—’ but Molly Blackhurst cut in.
‘Don’t let her fool you – most of the running costs come out of her own pocket.’
‘I cheat my husband on the housekeeping,’ Tara laughed, dismissing it lightly.
‘Would it be possible for us to drive around the squatter slums? I’d like to see them.’ Moses looked at Molly, but she bit her lip and glanced at her wristwatch.
‘Oh, damn, I have to get back,’ and Tara intervened quickly.
‘Don’t worry, Molly. I can drive Moses around. You get on back and I will drop him off at your house later this evening.’
In the old Packard they bumped over the sandy tracks amongst the overgrown dunes, where the Port Jackson willow had been cleared to make way for hutments of rusty corrugated iron and cardboard and tattered plastic sheeting. Now and then they stopped and walked amongst the shanties. The south-easter was roaring in off the bay, filling the air with a mist of dust. They leaned against it as they walked.
The people knew Tara and smiled and called greetings to her as she passed, and the children ran to meet her and danced around her begging for the cheap boiled sweets she kept in her pocket.
‘Where do they get water?’ Moses asked, and she showed him how the older children had banded old oil drums with discarded car tyres. They filled the drums at a communal water tap at the boundary of the official township a mile away, and rolled the drums back to their hovels.
‘They cut the Port Jackson willow for fuel,’ Tara told him, ‘but in winter the children are always full of colds and flu and pneumonia. You don’t have to ask about about sewerage—’ She sniffed at the thick odour of the shallow toilet pits, screened with strips of old burlap.
It was half dark when Tara parked the Packard at the back door of the clinic and switched off the engine. They sat quietly for a few minutes.
‘What we have seen is no worse than a hundred other shanty towns, places where I have lived most of my life,’ Moses said.
‘I am sorry.’
‘Why do you apologize?’ Moses asked.
‘I don’t know, I just feel guilty.’ She knew how inadequate it sounded and she opened the door of the Packard.
‘There are some papers I must get from my office. I won’t be a minute, and then I will drive you back to Molly’s house.’
The clinic was deserted. The two nurses had locked up and gone home an hour before. Tara let herself in with her own key and went through the single consulting room to her own office. She glanced at herself in the mirror above the washstand in the corner as she washed her hands. She was flushed and her eyes sparkled. She was so accustomed to the squalor of the squatter camps that it had not depressed her as it once had; instead she felt tinglingly alive and strangely elated.
She stuffed the folder of correspondence and bills into her leather sling bag and locked the drawer of her desk, made sure the plug of the electric kettle was pulled out of the wall-socket and that the windows were closed, then switched off the lights and hurried out into the consulting room. She stopped with surprise. Moses Gama had followed her into the building and was sitting on the white draped examination bed against the far wall.
‘Oh,’ she recovered. ‘Sorry I took so long—’
He shook his head, then stood up and crossed the tiled floor. He stopped, facing her. She felt awkward and uncertain as he studied her face solemnly.
‘You are a remarkable woman,’ he said in a deep quiet voice that she had not heard him use before. ‘I have never met another white woman like you.’
She co
uld think of no reply, and he went on softly, ‘You are rich and privileged. You are gifted with everything that your life can offer you, and yet you come here. To this poverty and misery.’
He reached out and touched her arm. His palm and the inside of his fingers were a pale rose colour, contrasting vividly with the back of his hand and his dark muscular forearm, and his skin felt cool. She wondered if it were really so, or if her own skin was hot. She felt hot, she felt a furnace glow deep within her. She looked down at his hand on her smooth pale arm. She had never been touched by a black man before, not deliberately, not lingeringly like this.
She let the strap of the sling bag slide off her shoulder and it fell to the tiled floor with a thud. She had been holding her own hands clasped in front of her hips in an instinctively defensive gesture but now she let them fall to her sides, and almost without conscious volition arched her back and pushed her lower body towards him. At the same time she raised her head and looked squarely into his eyes. Her lips parted and her breathing quickened. She saw it reflected in his own eyes and she said,
‘Yes.’
He stroked her arm, up from the elbow to the shoulder, and she shuddered and closed her eyes. He touched her left breast and she did not pull away. His hand closed around her, she felt it fill his grip, and her flesh hardened, her flesh hardened, her nipple swelled and thrust out into his palm and he squeezed her. The feeling was so intense it was almost painful and she gasped as it rippled down her spine spreading like wavelets when a stone is thrown into a quiet pool.
Her arousal was so abrupt that she was unprepared. She had never considered herself a sensual person. Shasa was the only man she had ever known and it took all his skill and patience to quicken her body, but now at a touch her bones went soft with desire and her loins melted like wax in the flame and she could not breathe, so strong was her need of this man.
‘The door,’ she blurted. ‘Lock the door.’
Then she saw that he had already barred the door, and she was grateful for it, for she felt that she could not have brooked the delay. He picked her up quickly and carried her to the bed. The sheet that covered it was spotless and so crisply starched that it crackled softly under her weight.
He was so huge that he terrified her, and though she had borne four children, she felt as though she was being split asunder as his blackness filled her, and then the terror passed to be replaced by a strange sense of sanctity. She was the sacrificial lamb, with this act she was redeeming all the sins of her own race, all the trespasses that they had committed against his people down the centuries; she was wiping away the guilt that had been her stigmata since as far back as she could remember.
When at the end he lay heavy upon her with his breathing roaring in her ears and the last wild convulsions racking his great black muscles, she clung to him with a joyous gratitude. For he had, at one and the same time, set her free from guilt and made her his slave for ever.
Subdued by the sadness of afterlove, and by the certain knowledge that her world was for ever altered, Tara was silent on the drive back to Molly’s home. She parked a block before she reached it, and keeping the engine running she turned to examine his face in the reflection of the street lights.
‘When will I see you again?’ She asked the question that countless women in her position had asked before her.
‘Do you wish to see me again?’
‘More than anything else in my life.’ She did not at that moment even think of her children. He was the only thing in her existence.
‘It will be dangerous.’
‘I know.’
‘The penalties if we are discovered – disgrace, ostracism, imprisonment. Your life would be destroyed.’
‘My life was a sham,’ she said softly. ‘Its destruction would be no great loss.’
He studied her features carefully, searching for insincerity. At last he was satisfied.
‘I will send for you, when it is safe.’
‘I will come immediately, whenever you call.’
‘I must leave you now. Take me back.’
She parked at the side of Molly’s house, in the shadow where they could not be observed from the road.
‘Now the subterfuge and dissembling begins,’ she thought calmly. ‘I was right. It will never be the same again.’
He made no attempt to embrace her, it was not the African way. He stared at her, the whites of his eyes gleaming like ivory in the half dark.
‘You realize that when you choose me you choose the struggle?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘You have become a warrior and you and your wants, even your life, are of no consequence. If you have to die for the struggle, I will not lift my hand to save you.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I know that.’ The nobility of the concept filled her chest and made it difficult for her to breathe so her voice was laboured as she whispered, ‘Greater love hath no man — I will make any sacrifice you ask of me.’
Moses went to the guest bedroom which Molly had allocated to him, and as he washed his face in the basin Marcus Archer slipped into the room without knocking, closed the door and leaned against it, watching Moses in the mirror.
‘Well?’ he asked at last, as though he was reluctant to hear the answer.
‘Just as we planned it.’ Moses dried his face on a clean towel.
‘I hate the silly little bitch,’ Marcus said softly.
‘We agreed it was necessary.’ Moses selected a fresh shirt from the valise on his bed.
‘I know we agreed,’ Marcus said. ‘It was my suggestion, if you remember, but I do not have to like her for it.’
‘She is an instrument. It is folly to let your personal feelings intrude.’
Marcus Archer nodded. In the end he hoped he could act like a true revolutionary, one of the steely hard men which the struggle needed, but his feelings for this man, Moses Gama, were stronger than all his political convictions.
He knew that it was completely one-sided. Over the years Moses Gama had used him as cynically and as calculatingly as he now planned to use the Courtney woman. His vast sexual appeal was to Moses Gama merely another weapon in his arsenal, another means of manipulating people. He could use it on men or women, young or old, no matter how attractive or unappealing, and Marcus admired him for the ability, and at the same time was devastated by it.
‘We leave for the Witwatersrand tomorrow,’ he said, as he pushed himself away from the door, for the moment controlling his jealousy. ‘I have made the arrangements.’
‘So soon?’ Moses asked.
‘I have made the arrangements. We will travel by car.’
It was one of the problems which dogged their work. It was difficult for a black man to travel about the huge subcontinent, liable as he was at any time to demands to show his dompas and to interrogation when the authority realized that he was far from the domicile shown on the pass without apparent reason, or that the pass had not been stamped by an employer.
Moses’ association with Marcus and the nominal employment he provided with the Chamber of Mines gave him valuable cover when it was necessary to travel, but they always needed couriers. That was one of the functions that Tara Courtney would perform. In addition she was by birth and by marriage highly placed, and the information she could provide would be of the greatest value in the planning. Later, after she had proved herself, there would be other, more dangerous work.
In the end, Shasa Courtney realized, it was his mother’s advice which would tip the fine balance and decide whether he accepted or rejected the offer that had been made to him during the springbok hunt on the open plains of the Orange Free State.
Shasa would have been the first to despise any other man of his age who was still firmly enmeshed in the maternal apron strings, but he never considered that this applied to him. The fact that Centaine Courtney-Malcomess was his mother was merely incidental. What influenced him was that she was the shrewdest financial and political brain he had access
to; she was also his business partner and his only true confidante. To make such an important decision without consulting her never even occurred to him.
He waited a week after his return to Cape Town to let his own feelings distil out, and for an opportunity to have Centaine alone, for he was in no doubt as to what his stepfather’s reaction would be to the proposal. Blaine Malcomess was the Opposition representative on the parliamentary sub-committee examining the proposed establishment of an oil-from-coal project, part of the government’s long-term plan to reduce the country’s reliance on imported crude oil. The committee was going to take evidence on site, and for once Centaine was not accompanying her husband. That was the opportunity Shasa needed.
It was less than half an hour’s drive from Weltevreden, across the Constantia Nek pass and down the other side of the mountains to the Atlantic seaboard where the home that Centaine had made for Blaine stood on five hundred acres of wild protea-covered mountainside that dropped steeply down to rocky headlands and white beaches. The original house, Rhodes Hill, had been built during Queen Victoria’s reign by one of the old mining magnates from the Rand, but Centaine had stripped the interior and refurbished it completely.
She was waiting for Shasa on the verandah when he parked the Jaguar, and ran up the steps to embrace her.
‘You’re getting too thin,’ she scolded him fondly. She had guessed from his telephone call that he wanted a serious discussion, and they had their own traditions. Centaine was dressed in an open-neck cotton blouse and slacks with comfortable hiking boots, and without discussing it she took his arm and they set out along the path that skirted her rose gardens and climbed the untended hillside.
The last part of the ascent was steep and the path rough, but Centaine took it without pause and came out on the summit ahead of him. Her breathing was hardly altered, and within a minute had returned to normal. ‘She keeps herself in wonderful condition, Heaven alone knows what she spends on health cures and potions, and she exercises like a professional athlete,’ Shasa thought as he grinned down at her proudly. He placed an arm around her small firm waist.