None to Accompany Me (3 page)

Ben was almost embarrassedly dismissive of the fact that his daughter had inherited his beauty; part of the quality of that beauty was that he was not aware of it, he was brought to see it only by remarks upon the beauty of the baby girl as the image of her father. Ivan—because he reproduced the face of his mother?—remained Ben's favoured child.

When the girl was born, with the marvellous markings of her father's black hair and double fringe of lashes, even the bevel-edged lips, Vera could have been looking in a mirror where her lover from the mountains was preserved as he was as a child. A tremendous gratitude gushed from her along with the expulsion of the afterbirth. For a year she stayed at home taking care of the baby with the tender emotional fervour of one making amends—for what, to whom, was diffused in maternal energy; from which she looked up, only now and then, at the newspaper headlines announcing arrests, trials, bans, finally the outlawing of political movements. Physical fulfilment is a temporary withdrawal from the world, a sealing-off from threat and demand, whether directed to oneself or others. At the time, it seems the other world, all extraneous, is jabber and distraction, a crowded station passed through, train blinds drawn and compartment door locked. The self-absorption was pierced only by the fact of the baby shot dead on its mother's back at Sharpeville—an infant like her own, like Bennet's. Her life was all touch: during the day the smooth plumpness of her small daughter damply warm against her hip, the hands of her leggy son, roughened and scratched in tussles at play; the caresses of love-making. There could have been a biological explanation for the strong resurgence of eroticism between Bennet and her. Some theory
that after giving birth women experience fresh sexual initiatives and responses. They had been married for twelve years; whatever the reason, the feast of sex begun as a picnic in the mountains again preoccupied her and her lover-husband as it had done. Intelligent people as they were, while they discussed what was happening around them he could be distracted by the bare cup of her armpit showing in a sleeveless dress, and she could be conscious of the curve of his genitals enticing under his jeans.

Bennet Stark carved wood and modelled clay but while recognition for his work in this vocation seemed long in coming had had to make use of a conventional degree he had earned when too young to know what he wanted to do. Bennet Stark was known, behind his back at the Department of English in the university where he worked, as Our Male Lead; as if he were responsible for his looks and the mixture of resentment and admiration these aroused. From the point of view of advancement in an academic community it's a bad sign to have some advantage that is simply a gift of nature, not earned and not attainable for others by any amount of hard work, lobbying or toadying. He remained in a junior position and the ambitions the lovers had for him as an artist when first they exchanged confidences beside a mountain stream were in abeyance while they concentrated on each other and the extension of themselves in their children. He still modelled in clay occasionally over a weekend—the heads of the children, which were growing, changing, even as the clay hardened the image of one stage or another, and the naked torso of Vera, anonymous female body to anyone other than himself, who supplied the beloved head in his mind. But married to the woman he had captivated and captured and the father of a family, he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor. Vera, at least, had attained her easier ambition of qualifying in law. Lovingly, he felt no jealousy; hers was a practical
goal, not dependent on the imponderable mystery of talent, of which, protected by sensual happiness, he came to accept he perhaps did not have enough.

When Annick began to wriggle out of her arms and Ivan distanced himself from the need of her touch on childish wounds, Vera appeared restlessly displaced. She told Bennet she was going back to work.

They could certainly do with the money.

—I'm not going back to the firm.—

He did not know what to make of a sudden announcement that overturned all assumptions.

—I don't want to fight their insurance claims when they lose their jewellery and Mercedes. Or dig the dirt in their divorces.— He looked at her tenderly, patiently. —Set up on your own?—

—I don't know.—

Vera read newspapers and reports, White Papers, was drawn to people who were spread-eagled between their private attachments and those other tentacles, the tug of others' predicaments, the tangle of frustration and misery; women, as she was a woman, lifted out of the humble ramshackle of their lives and dropped, destitute, in the veld, men, as hers was a man, endorsed out of a town where they might find work, driven off farms where their fathers had given their labour; children unlike hers because there was no childhood for them, begging and sniffing glue for comfort in the street. She did come to know. She went to work at the Foundation, not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong. This need must have been growing unheeded—seed shat by a bird and germinating, sprouting,
beside a cultivated tree—climbing the branches of passionate domesticity.

Population removals were being fought everywhere to the limit of the Foundation's resources; she was working until midnight at home as well as all day at the offices; Bennet had left the university and, with a partner, opened a market consultancy in the city. Alone in the house in bed at night, they talked over for hours the disappointments, worries, resentments and compensations each had gathered during the day, giving one another advice, putting together the context, from his experience of one level of society and her experience of another, their life.

Mr Tertius Odendaal had three farms, one inherited from his grandfather through his father, one that came as his wife's dowry, and one that he had bought in the agricultural boom times of the early Eighties. With America and the British—even the Germans who had once been supporters of the war in which his grandfather was a Boer general—interfering in the affairs of the country, embargoing oil supplies, boycotting sports tours, encouraging the blacks to make trouble so that even his ignorant farm boys were no longer reliable, he began to think about looking to the present, if not the future. With the old stern President pushed out by one of his cabinet who smiled like a film star and was said to be having talks with blacks, no one could be sure what that would be. Not twenty kilometres across the veld from his homestead there was a black homeland. He had had to put an electrified fence round his kraal to protect his Holsteins from thieves, after one of his watch-boys had been slashed in a panga attack. Even the old President had dumped blacks too near white farms. On one of his other farms—the one
bought when there were good rains for his maize crop and beef prices were high—that he used only for seasonal grazing, he found squatters, although the herd-boy who had his women and umpteen children with him in his outpost of mud and thatch huts lied that these were just his family, visiting. He told the herd-boy to clear out, get off the farm and take his hangers-on with him. But next time he drove to inspect the place with one of his other boys there were fluttering sheets of plastic and leantos of cardboard, tin roofs held down by stones and old tyres, thrown up on his veld like worm-casts. Only women and children to be seen; the men would have been away at work or loafing somewhere, even as far as town. He got his boy to warn these people with an harangue in their own language: what were they doing there, they must pack up their rubbish and get off his land immediately, if they were not gone by tomorrow he'd bring the police. A tiny child clutched his penis in fear and drew up his cheeks to whimper. The women stood unblinking or turned away. As the farmer's bakkie lurched and swayed off, one screamed something the herd-boy didn't translate to the farmer. The cry trailed in the wake of the vehicle.

Mr Odendaal decided to move with the times; whatever they might be. What the Government had done, was doing, could not be undone by one Afrikaner alone. Fighting its betrayal of the white farmer was something for which political action would be found. In the meantime, farmers would have to—in the businessmen's way of speaking—'diversify resources', yes, that's it, get up to the tricks that make those people rich. He applied to the Provincial Administration for permission to establish a black township on one of his holdings. He would convert the farm into cash as a landlord; he would divide it into plots for rent to blacks. He was going to turn their invasion to profit.

During the year pending the Administration's decision—the application appeared in the Government Gazette and there were ponderous objections from farmers in the vicinity—1,500 squatter families representing approximately 26,000 people took possession of Portion 19. These figures for the Odensville squatter camp (it must have got out among the squatters that Odendaal had thought to commemorate the family name in his township) were ascertained by a field-worker of the Legal Foundation, to which a man who presented himself as the spokesperson of the squatters had appealed for investigation. A station-wagon with a tide-mark of dust and a windscreen dashed with splattered insects drew up at the Odendaal farmstead. Odendaal sensed at once it had been through the squatter camp that had been meant to be his township. A woman with white-streaked hair cut like a man's, speaking the usual badly accented Afrikaans of English-speaking townspeople, introduced herself there on the stoep as a Mrs Stack or Stock from the Legal Foundation.

At the pronouncement of that title his body shifted in reflex to bar the front door; that body would not let her past into his house. She actually had with her the man he had refused to meet, whose existence was a matter for the police to deal with —the black bastard who put up that crowd of criminals, drunkards, and won't-works on his land to talk about ‘rights' they never would have had the nerve to think of. She introduced the man and even the driver, also a black, as if she expected that the two blacks would be received as part of her delegation and greeted as visitors.

She ignored that the farmer did not respond.
Mr Odendaal this, Mr Odendaal that.
Polite and talked so you couldn't get a word in to stop her. —We've come to discuss the situation down at Odensville, which must be distressing for you, don't think the
people there don't realize this. I'm one of the Foundation's lawyers and—we know from experience—the worst aspect of this sort of situation is when the farmer feels he's accepting it if he should agree to talk to the other parties concerned. The Odensville people have a spokesperson, Mr Rapulana, and I can assure you that neither of us is here to deny your position (changed to English, not knowing how to put that sort of sly lawyer's phrase in Afrikaans). We've come because it's in the best interests of everyone … believe me, I've seen it, solutions can sometimes be reached where there has seemed no possible way out while the only communication is the threat of police action … Mr Odendaal, I hope you're going to talk to us, Mr Rapulana and me—oh this morning or whenever it suits you—we're going to hear each other out without prejudice to either side.—

This was the kind of woman who produced a revulsion in him. To him, in fact was not a woman at all, as he knew women, even if she had been young he could never have believed a man would want to touch a woman like that, would never have thought there were breasts you could fondle in the marital bedroom dark, the mouth asking questions and addressing him without the respect and natural deference due to a male, yet offensively quietly, could bring the sensation of a woman's tongue in your mouth.

He made her wait. He was looking over her head as if she were not there. He spoke in Afrikaans, since she thought she would make herself acceptable by trying to speak his language.

—Daar's
geen Odensville se mense nie!
Odensville is my township that's not yet declared, nobody is living in Odensville, nobody! All those people are trespassers and the only thing I'm going to tell you, lady (the term of address emphasized, and in English), I'm going to get them run off my land, I'm going to burn down their rubbish, and you can go back yourself and tell
them I'm not just talking, I'm not talking at all to you, I've got the men to do it with me, we know how to get it done, all right, and if they want to get in the way, that's going to be their funeral. Running to you won't help them. There are no Odensville ‘people', so you can forget about calling them that. They're nothing,
vuilgoed.—

This meddling woman—lawyers, they call themselves!— stood calmly, even the twitch of something like a smile at the side of her mouth, as if waiting for a tantrum to spend itself. He began to breathe heavily at the insult.

The black man he would never speak to—never!—looked at him unavoidably as the dark aperture of a camera aimed. This was a country black, brought up where his parents and grandparents, share-croppers and labourers, spoke the language of the farmer they worked for, and the school for blacks where he learnt to read and write taught in Afrikaans, not his black language. The man's Afrikaans was Odendaal's, not Mrs Stark's pidgin.

—Meneer Odendaal, don't be afraid. We won't harm you. Not you or your wife and children.—

The woman lawyer touched the man's shirt-sleeve (dressed up like a gentleman, jacket over his arm). Before she led the way back to the station-wagon she paused persistently. —Mr Odendaal, I apologize for turning up without telephoning. I'll be writing to you and probably will be able to explain the Foundation's assessment of the situation more acceptably than I've been able to do now.—

The farmer turned his back. He opened his front door and slammed it on them behind him. In the optical illusion of blotchy explosions that comes with leaving the glare of sun for a dim hallway, he, too, paused a moment. He listened to hear the
station-wagon leave his property. As if he had just stopped running, his leaping, bursting heart slowly decelerated to its normal pace.