Frankie and Stankie (47 page)

‘The bloody thing was here a minute ago. I've had it this morning,' he says.

‘What?' Dinah says.

‘Someone's come in and taken it,' he says. ‘It's Donald. He's forever swiping my stuff.'

‘What?' Dinah says again.

‘The
New Statesman
,' Sam says. ‘Well, it only came this morning.' And he goes on shifting and excavating. ‘It was here. This morning,' he says. ‘Right here. He's taken it. I know. And I'll kill him. I will. Don't look at me like that, because I will.' And, as he speaks, the
New Stateman
emerges, bearing its trademark Vicky cartoon. But Sam doesn't need to blink. He doesn't need to change gear. ‘Well, it isn't any of his business that he didn't take it,' he says. ‘I think I'll kill him just the same.'

Something is happening to Dinah at this moment, as she's watching the sequence unfold. Because Sam's methods for getting through the day are so entirely, so excitingly new to her, so exotic, so convoluted; so wholly unlike anything that she's ever witnessed at home. So, as she stares, she feels her heart within her suddenly lift and lift. And then it's started dancing. She's thinking that there is something about the whole tottering construction which is liberating to her; it's allowing her to take wing. She's suddenly thinking, So what if no one ever marries me? So what if my life's not going to plan? For what do I need plans? All I know is I love this person. I love to be with him. Because he's nuts. Because he's best fun. Because I've never met anyone like him. All the things I do with him, each one is a little adventure, a little escapade. It's all a bit like buying penny scraps at the bus-stop chippie with Maud.

Take that visit, just yesterday, she's thinking. The one to Sam's corner shop. The shop is run by Mr Tomlinson and they've gone there to buy washing powder. But once Sam's got the box on the counter, he's decided to have the larger size.

‘I've changed my mind,' he says to Mr Tomlinson. ‘Hold on. I'll have the big one.'

‘Good idea,' says Mr Tomlinson, feeling himself on safe ground. ‘These native girls, they like to use the stuff like water.'

‘Well, I wouldn't know about that,' Sam says, ‘because I always do my own washing and I use it like water myself. That's why I'm going to buy the big one.'

Dinah is trying to suppress her giggles, because it's a lie that Sam does his own washing. Christine Mkise the washerwoman is coming in that day. That's why he's buying soap powder. Wednesday is Christine's day.

And Dinah hasn't been there very long before Sam's got a houseboy as well. The houseboy is Christine's younger brother and he really is a boy, because David Mkise is just fifteen. Christine wants him rescued from a bully-boy white policeman by whom he's employed as a servant. David has been working there in the hope of clocking up enough time in domestic service to become eligible for factory work within the municipal Durban area. But what's happened is that the policeman has moved house two months earlier, and now he's living just outside the city's boundary. This move has wiped out all the time that David's done so far and, unless he moves back inside the boundary, he hasn't a hope in hell of ever escaping domestic service. If you're black you must skivvy for a year before you earn the right to look for factory work. And David, being just a kid, has panicked and run away. But then he's been caught and the policeman has now impounded David's passbook. So it's vital that Sam employs David, which will require him to sweet-talk the policeman. Plus he'll have to get the passbook off him as well.

Dinah goes along with Sam in the VW beetle, because Sam has a notion that a blonde girl in pink-and-white gingham will have the effect of softening the policeman's heart. She watches him negotiate with the policeman in his Krugersdorp Afrikaans. Sam is using all the terminology he can muster to keep the policeman on his side. He's come for the
umfaan
, he says. His ‘native girl' is the
umfaan's
older sister and she wants to keep him under her thumb. Because we all know what these
umfaans
can be like and she's scared he'll go to the bad. And, finally, amazingly, David Mkise is released and he's settled in the car – a little, cowering Zulu boy whose instinct is to shrink and flinch. Plus Sam's got possession of the passbook, which the policeman has thoughtfully defaced.

And David who, for the first few weeks, cringes and hugs the walls, has soon blossomed into a swaggering adolescent who is anxious to run with the big boys. So he comes home smelling of drink. And, equally soon, Sam is spending long hours in court, rescuing David from a flick-knife frame-up and other more minor charges.

‘Football,' an elderly colleague advises. ‘Football is what can save him.'

So Sam is struggling to sign up his charge for a local black
football club when David catches the eye of the older maidservant who works for the family next door. She and David become an item and the wild boy settles down.

By now, Dinah and Sam are also an item, thanks to Dinah's moment of revelation over the disappearing
New Statesman
. So she and Sam are sleeping together in the large unmade bed. Dinah can sleep almost anywhere, so she doesn't mind the tangled sheets. She can even sleep through the prodigious snores of Mattie and Bart who've been playing chicken on the upstairs balcony, weaving in and out of the balustrades. And then they've fallen off, so their hard palates are cracked, which will take quite a while to heal. Sam is, as usual, hardly sleeping. He's wiling away the early hours, reading Galbraith and Seymour Martin Lipset, while eating lots of rye bread liberally spread with honey. And sometimes, when he's feeling twitchy, he'll drive out in the small hours to see whether the lights are on in the building that once was host to the Maypole Tearoom.

‘Special Branch were working late last night,' he'll say to Dinah in the morning. ‘Watch out for new arrests.'

So he knows before the dawn breaks, before it's announced on the morning news, that something significant has happened. Two of the captured Rivonia accused have made a sensational breakout and the newspapers are very soon filled with demonising articles about Sam's friends Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe, a Johannesburg lawyer who, for years, has been giving his time and his skills for free, in defence of the state's impoverished scapegoats. Dinah, not long before the arrests, has met him with Sam – a chance meeting – in a large Bavarian eating house in downtown Johannesburg. Her only contact with Arthur Goldreich has been through an exhibition of his paintings which are currently on show in the Durban Municipal Art Gallery – presumably because nobody there is quite certain about whether or not to take the pictures down. Because are you allowed to exhibit the paintings of a person whom you cannot quote? Mercifully, the mug shots look nothing like the two escapees and the text beneath makes repeated reference to Wolpe's ‘prominent Jewish nose'.

These days lots of people have started sleeping away from home. And one of the two visiting Special Branch policemen keeps on popping up, like the Cheshire Cat, in Mr Tomlinson's shop. Or
sometimes he's in the local chemist, where he likes to make pleasant small talk. He's living just round the corner, he says, now that he's split from the wife.

‘So you've got yourself some new cats,' he says. ‘Hey, sorry about the old ones!'

‘That's right,' Sam says. ‘New cats.'

‘Do you find there's a big black tom cat around here that's always bothering them?' he says. ‘I tell you, my cat is frightened to death of him. Frightened to death, I swear to God.'

Then it's not long before Bart and Mattie have also come to grief. They've both of them started to court girl cats in the flats across the street. Bart is killed outright by a car. Mattie disappears until, four days later, when Dinah thinks to crawl into the anti-termite zone under the house. And there is Mattie, unable to move, because his back legs have been run over. She and Sam have rushed him to Maud's vet, but his pelvis is hopelessly broken and that's the end of him. So everything around them is just sort of folding up. And then, that night, in the cinema, ten minutes before the film's end, Sam nudges Dinah in the darkness and whispers to her that they should leave.

‘Let's go,' he says. ‘Leave now.'

So they creep out under cover of dark and make for the VW beetle.

‘Why?' Dinah says.

‘Just someone I know in there,' Sam says. ‘He's a little bit of a cowboy. He'd have asked us for a lift home. And he's into stuff, I'm pretty sure. Look. He's not discreet. He likes danger. The cops will be watching him for certain.'

Sam turns the key in the ignition, but then he turns it off.

‘Oh shit,' he says. ‘I really hate all this. I can't stand what it's doing to me. Dinah, for Christ's sake let's get the hell out. Let's go.'

‘Go where?' Dinah says.

‘London,' Sam says. ‘Will you marry me, Dinah, and come with me?'

Dinah is thinking that marrying Sam might just be what she'd most like to do. For tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that, and the month after that as well. For the future as far as she can see it. She can't get her mind round for ever any more. Not after the Didi experience. Plus she's also thinking of Chelsea and
Vauxhall Bridge and of the escalators on the Underground and of all those people she wants to meet from Iris Murdoch's first novel. She knows that by leaving the country she won't be striking any blow for freedom – that's to say – except for her own and Sam's. Because white people can go anywhere. They don't only own South Africa. They have access to the wider world. They get passports. They travel. It's not like having those useless wretched papers from the Bantu Homeland of the Ciskei. Even so, if you're Sam, you're taking no chances with your passport. Sam, for over a year now, has been keeping his passport stashed away in somebody else's house. Dinah's is simply with her mother.

‘But there is one thing,' Dinah says. ‘You don't want to marry me, remember?'

‘Who says I don't?' Sam says.

‘You,' Dinah says. ‘You said.'

‘What rubbish,' Sam says. ‘I never said such a thing. You must be making it up.'

So Sam and Dinah get married right away and Dinah has to be Lisa's Matron of Honour because married persons can't be bridesmaids. But she still gets to wear the pistachio-green suit with the narrow pencil skirt. Before that, for her own wedding, she's made herself a dress. She's made it like a Flower Fairy's dress, with wide, layered petal shapes for sleeves. And she wears it with a little white headscarf knotted under her chin.

Sam's mother has told him that she won't come to the wedding. This is because Dinah's one Jewish earlobe is not quite enough to pass muster. Yet, in the event, she comes. The party is in Dinah's parents' garden, where everything is swiftly melting on account of the Durban heat. The avocado dips and the apple pies are melting along with most of the guests.

Sam has already cashed in his pension. Then, last of all, he sells the car.

‘One Volkswagen wreck,' as the dealer says, fixing the beetle with a jaundiced look.

All of it helps to buy two tickets for the smallest berth on the oldest and cheapest Union Castle boat, which will sail from Durban to Southampton Docks, via Cape Town and Las Palmas. Everyone is suddenly leaving. Going, going, gone. Maud is off to
New York soon, where the beautiful mathematician has got himself a graduate student fellowship at Columbia University. Jenny is off to the States as well, with a person whom she's recently married. Jenny has married a much older man, an eminent medical person, who likes her in tweeds and Burberry. Plus he likes to choose all her clothes.

‘Now
there
's a garment I'd like to buy for my Jennifer-Anne,' he says.

The only hitch about leaving the country is what to do with David, who is still short of completing his year in domestic service, so it has to be a condition for any new tenant that David comes with the flat. Plus the tenant must be willing, when sign-off time arrives, to airmail David's employment papers fraudulently to London, where Sam will fraudulently sign him off and fraudulently post the papers back. So it's good that everyone wants the flat so much. All their friends are lining up to cheat for David Mkise. Sam has arranged to transfer his Ph.D. registration from Cape Town to London University. And Dinah is going to teach. (Teach!) She's got a letter from the Ministry in Whitehall to say that she'll be eligible. But she's telling herself five times a day that she isn't
really
a teacher and that it won't be for very long. She couldn't possibly be a teacher, could she? Because aren't all teachers mad?

The last thing they've got to do is hitch-hike up to Krugersdorp and say goodbye to Sam's family. But Sam's mother's in a fury with him so it's four hundred miles for the privilege of being wrong-footed, big-time. She's furious with Sam because he's going off to lay claim to her native city and to travel on the District Line. Plus the return hitch-hike is not going well and they've missed out on lifts all day. Then, at twilight, they're finally picked up by a local farmer who's returning from the shooting range. It's soon very clear that he's been drinking and his rifle is disconcertingly running the length of the front seat. The farmer is suddenly inviting Sam and Dinah, with a heavy drunkard's hospitality, to spend the night at his farm. And, when they refuse, he just as suddenly goes into a tantrum. He believes them to be ‘overseas foreigners', as he says, and ‘the Afrikaner', he will have them know, is traditionally Very Hospitable. So if they're from England, he'd like to make them welcome on his farm. If they're from Holland, welcome to the farm! If they're from France, or Germany, welcome to the farm! Then
suddenly the car is veering from side to side in the darkness. But if they're Russians, then get out of the car! If they're Communists, out of the car! Then he turns to fix Sam with a look.