The Covenant (181 page)

“You can’t do that, sir!” he cried in heavily accented English.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Philip said, showing his empty hands.

“You was taking a picture. That’s forbidden, you know, at a banned site.”

“No, sir,” Philip said with great deference. “I’m an architect. I was just taking proportions,” and he framed a box with his thumbs and fingers.

“That’s permitted,” the policeman said.

“What’s going on out here?” Laura asked as she appeared in the doorway with a silver tray containing tea things.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Philip apologized, more to the policeman than to Laura. “I was stupid. This good man feared I had a camera. I am sorry, sir.” To Laura he whispered, “I did it on purpose to throw him a scare.”

“I say, that’s jolly! But we mustn’t appear to be laughing. He has the power to be very unpleasant if he wishes.”

“Why the furor about the photograph?”

“When I’m banned, my house is banned. The evidence that it’s being bombed is banned.” Abruptly she halted that chain of complaints and invited Philip to sit with her, and when he saw the exquisite silver service—tray, teapot, creamer, sugar, small tray for biscuits, little receptacle for marmalade, butter tray, spoons, little forks for the lemon—he almost burst into tears. It bespoke the long heritage of his people, and for the first time in his life he felt like an Englishman.

“Now tell me,” she said brightly, “how did a decent Saltwood ever get to an outlaw place like America?” She laughed.

“As far as I can tell, there was a renegade brother far back. You English are wonderful in producing renegade brothers.”

“Woods are full of them.”

“So about the time your branch came out here, our branch, and a very lowly one it must have been, came to America. Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. If you can visualize the map, they’re stations west. My family was always on the move.”

“The sheriff?”

“I think so. I continued the tradition. Colorado, Texas.”

“You’re a real American. Tell me, have you ever visited Salisbury? The old cathedral town west of London? No? Well, you must. The
Saltwoods have a very ancient house there, with the tiles upside down or something. Quite wonderful, you know, with a river at the doorstep and a cathedral across the meadow.”

“This silverware …”

“A wedding gift in Salisbury, many years ago. My husband and I named this house New Sarum after the little hill where the members of Parliament used to be elected. Do you know about that? Well, we’ll talk about that later. We liked to entertain and had plenty of servants. In the old days white people in this country always seemed to have plenty of servants. And my vanity was to have five complete tea services in silver.”

“Why?”

“Because in the morning we liked to serve our guests tea in bed. At seven o’clock sharp, bare feet came down the hall. Five servants, five tea services. Knock on the door, ‘Tea, Baas,’ and there was your tea.” Delicately she ticked off the silver pieces: “Tea in this, hot water in this, toast in its silver rack, sugar, cream, lemon, one sweet biscuit.” Suddenly she rose and went inside the house, returning after a brief moment with four silver teapots, which she added to the tray.

“These were my only vanity. I wanted to remember Salisbury and tea in the shadow of the cathedral, and these enabled me to do so. But I also wanted to put away childish things and engage myself in Africa. So I helped found the Black Sash, and I spoke as I did, and now I’m banned. For life, I judge.”

Philip dared not speak. Staring at the five glistening teapots, he felt a chaos of thoughts rush through his brain, but there were none he cared to verbalize. Finally he asked, “How do you keep these damned things so highly polished?”

She answered in a curious way: “Do you know what I miss most? Not the meetings, where people say the same things over and over. And not the friendships, really, for people like you come by often. But I do miss the bowls. That’s a wonderful game for relaxation—the proper uniform, you know, the lovely green grass. I miss that.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I can’t bowl any more, of course, so whenever the urge strikes me, I polish my silver. Again and again I polish it. Everyone who comes here gets a cup of tea. It’s compulsive, really, because I want to use a different pot each day. This one, then this one, then this one.”

Philip got up and walked away to hide his emotion, and of course
Laura knew why he had done so. “One must do something to keep occupied,” she said gaily. “One can’t read Solzhenitsyn week after week.”

“Good God! What are these?”

“Bullet holes,” she said matter-of-factly. “At night sometimes they shoot at me.”

He wiped his forehead and sat down. “What I’d really like,” he said, trying to sound casual, “is another cup of tea … from that one,” and he pointed to one of the highly polished pots.

“That can be arranged,” she said, and with an elegant sweep of her hands she emptied the tea from the filled pot into the waiting one, then graciously poured Philip a cup. “But I shall have my cup from this pot,” and once more she transferred the tea.

The policeman took notes.

“What’s going to happen, Mrs. Saltwood?”

“Laura. We’re cousins, you know.”

“How do you see things?”

“For me, a continuation of this until I die. For the country I see some hope. And do you know why? Because every decent and sensible man and woman in this nation knows that changes will have to be made. The Afrikaners who pass these horrible laws are not stupid people. They know this is a last gasp. Our blacks are among the most brilliant in Africa. They know time and pressure are on their side. There is enormous wisdom in this land, and one prays it will be granted the necessary time to manifest itself.”

“Will it? Moçambique, Zimbabwe, Vwarda, Zambia, Namibia pressing in from all directions?”

“The machine gun will guarantee reasonable time, I think. When you return to America assure your people that Afrikaners will use their machine guns if forced to do so. This is not Rhodesia, where retreat became epidemic. This is South Africa, where the gun rules.”

“That sounds rather hopeless.”

“Not at all!” She suggested that they utilize the final two teapots, pouring the cooling tea rapidly from one to the other, to the total bewilderment of the policeman. “What I mean is, the machine guns will be used to buy time, probably through the remainder of this century. But with every moment gained, more wisdom is gained, too. And the day will come when the bright lads from Stellenbosch and Potchefstroom will lead the way in conciliation.”

“Can they do so soon enough?”

“The other great asset we have is the stability of our Zulu and Xhosa. They’re the most patient, wonderful people on this earth. They make me humble, they have behaved so well for so long. Beside them I’m an uncivilized boor, and I think they can wait, intelligently, till the sick white man sorts things out.”

“Sick?”

Laura Saltwood pointed to herself, to the watching policeman, to the closed-in yard, to the bombed front of her house. “Would any society invent banning if it wasn’t sick?”

This seemed to be the period for Philip’s intensive course in African realities, for when he returned to his hotel an urgent telegram was awaiting him from his superiors in Pretoria:
FAVORABLE UPHEAVAL VWARDA. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TEMPORARY DUTY KATOMBE TO PROTECT OUR INTERESTS. ANTICIPATE TWO MONTHS ABSENCE VRYMEER. INSTRUCTIONS AWAIT YOU THERE. PETERSEN
. He caught a plane which took him to Zambia, where a smaller one belonging to the Vwardan government was waiting. Two other Anglo-Saxons who had once worked in that republic were aboard, and they informed him of the revolutionary decision President M’Bele had made last Friday: “He informed London, Geneva and the United Nations that this country was plunging into chaos—industrial, financial—and he was inviting back at full pay plus bonuses some five hundred foreign technicians, mostly English, who had been in charge of technical details at one time or other during the past decade. I’m to head the distribution of flour.”

“Why?”

“You see, I was run out of the country three years ago. Pretty much like you, Saltwood, if I understand your case. My Vwardan understudy accused me of racism because I yelled at him one day. And why did I yell? Because he was supposed to watch the granary levels throughout the country, and he had allowed those in districts occupied by tribes other than his own to dwindle to zero. I really chewed him out and was expelled.”

“What happened when you left?”

“He became chief of grain procurement, and damned if he didn’t continue to let his rival tribes starve.”

The other man had previously been in charge of Jeep and Land Rover procurement and had established a spare-parts replacement
system based upon knowing calculations of what happened to vehicles in a primitive country. After drawing up a table of shrewd estimates, he proposed a law which would forbid the importation of any more Jeeps or Land Rovers until stockpiles of spare parts had been accumulated and stored in nine scattered warehouses, from which they would be efficiently distributed to broken-down vehicles that would otherwise stand useless.

“But a nephew of the president had the monopoly for importing Jeeps, and he demanded that he be allowed to bring in as many as he wanted, and to hell with spare parts. So what have they been doing? Cannibalizing perfectly good Jeeps to get a generator here or a differential there. The rest of the Jeep stands rusting, but the president’s nephew doesn’t give a damn.”

When their plane landed at Katombe they were hustled to a bright new hotel built with Swedish capital, where more than four hundred technical experts were herded together to hear an address by President M’Bele. He spoke with such eminent good sense that even men like Saltwood, who had legitimate grudges against him because of his earlier treatment, applauded, for it was quite obvious that he and they now had identical interests; they were men of Africa:

Saltwood was shipped back to the mines he had once supervised, and when he reached them he was pleased to see that no chaos had resulted from his absence. Dynamite was being handled properly, with safeguards observed, and the lifts that shot workers down and up the deep shafts at incredible speeds were in order. Where the trouble lay was in planning, the subtle shifting of work forces and the movement of ores to logical locations. At the end of a week he reported to President M’Bele:

He found one young fellow who showed signs of catching on; he had acquired skills by working in the gold mines of Johannesburg. He asked the young man if he had any acquaintances who had shared
that experience, and four were brought forward. Two had learned nothing in South Africa, but the other two were clever like the first, and around this cadre he began to build his staff. Fortunately, he found one older man who had had three years at the London School of Economics, and just as factories in South Bend, Indiana, profited by having young men from such provocative schools, so the mines in Vwarda began to function better when he assumed partial control.

Ultimate control remained in the hands of President M’Bele’s son-in-law, who had been mainly responsible for Saltwood’s firing in 1978. He was a much-changed man; having taken his mines almost to the point of bankruptcy, he now knew that he was not free to make decisions on narrow, tribal lines. He was scared, for he enjoyed his Mercedes and welcomed any guidance that would enable him to keep it. This time he listened when Philip outlined the need for a world view: “You must know what Japan is doing with her metallurgy, and what Russia is up to. You’ve got to watch the markets, and you don’t need a computer to do it. Your aim must be constant flow. Keep all parts in balance.”