Once or twice during the trial she had noticed this Conrad in the visitors’ gallery of the court. She moved inevitably in the phalanx of familiars, the friends some of whom disappeared, arrested and arraigned in other trials, in the course of her father’s. Once when she had gone out to telephone from the Greek café nearby, she met the chap on the pavement on her way back to the court-house. He offered her an espresso and she laughed, in her way of knowing only too well the facilities of the environs of this court, always she was aside from her generation in experience of this kind — where did he think you could get an espresso around here?
— You can, that’s all. — He took her down a block, round a corner and into a shopping arcade. She understood he must have followed her out of court. Real espresso was brought to a little iron table by a black waiter dressed up in striped trousers, black waistcoat and cheese-cutter. She pulled a funny face behind the waiter, smiled, friendly and charming, any girl singled out by a man. — What d’you think that’s supposed to be? In Pretoria! — He pushed over to her an ashtray lettered THE SINGING BARBER.
— What do you think he feels about your father?—
— My father?—
Her beau broke a match between his teeth and waved its V in the direction of the court-house.
Oh, she understood: the blacks, do they know, are they grateful to whites who endanger their own lives for them. So that was the set of tracks along which this one’s mind trundled; there were others who came up to her, sweating and pitched to their greatest intensity, Miss Burger you don’t know me but I want to tell you, the government calls him a Communist but your father is God’s man, the holy spirit of our Lord is in him, that’s why he is being persecuted. And there were the occasional letters that had been coming to the house all her life; as soon as she was old enough — her mother knew when that was; how did she know? — her mother let her see one. It said her father was a devil and a beast who wanted to rob and kill, destroying Christian civilization. She felt a strange embarrassment, and looked into her mother’s face to see if she should laugh, but her mother had another look on her face; she was aware of some trust expressed there, something that must last beyond laughter. It was a Saturday morning and when her father had come home from his early round of visits to his patients in hospital he had given Baasie and her their weekly swimming lesson; at that moment with the letter before her, ‘her father’ came to her as a hand cupped under her chin that kept her head above water while her legs and arms frogged. Baasie was afraid still. His thin, dingy body with the paler toes rigidly turned up went blacker with the cold and he clung flat against her father’s fleshy, breathing chest whose warmth, even in the water, she felt by seeing Baasie clinging there.
In the coffee bar she was still smiling. She seemed to savour the domino of sugar she held, soaking up dark hot coffee before she dropped it in. — Oh leave the poor waiter alone.
— No but — I’m curious.—
She nodded in jerky, polite, off-hand dismissal, as if that were the answer to the idle question she didn’t ask: What brings you to the trial? A girl in her situation, she had nothing much to say to a stranger, and it was difficult for anyone outside what one must suppose — respect, awkwardly — were her intense preoccupations, to begin to talk to her. An important State witness was due to be called for cross-examination before the court rose for the day; she knew she must drink up and go, he knew she would go, but they sat on for a minute in a purely physical awareness of one another. His blond-brown hand lying across the vice of his crossed thighs, with the ridiculous thick silver manacle following the contour of the wrist-bump, the nave of her armpit in a sleeveless dress, shiny with moisture as she pushed away the tiny cup — the form of communication that is going on when two young people appear to have no reason or wish to linger.
Most of their meetings were as inconsequential. He came to the trial but did not always seek her out — supposing she was right that he ever had. Sometimes he was one of the loose group centred round the lawyers and her who ate sandwiches or grey pies in the Greek café during the lunch adjournment; it was assumed she brought him along, she thought someone else had. He did not telephone her at work but she met him once in the public library and they ate together in a pizzeria. She had thought he was a university lecturer or something of that kind but he told her, now that (without curiosity) she asked, that he was doing a post-graduate thesis on Italian literature, and working on Wednesdays and weekends as a bookie’s clerk at the race-course. He had begun the thesis while studying in Perugia, but given it up when he spent a year or so in France and Denmark and England. He was vague about what he had done and how he lived. In the South of France, on a yacht — Something between a servant and a pet, it sounds—
He was not offended by her joking distaste. — Great life, for a few months. Until you get sick of the people you work for. There was no place to read in peace.—
It was a job for which you did not need a foreigner’s work permit — he knew all the ways of life that fitted into that category. In London he squatted in a Knightsbridge mansion. He’d fixed up a condemned cottage, in Johannesburg, with the money he’d got for bringing in a British car duty-free, after having had the use of it for a year abroad, an arrangement made with a man who had bought it in his name. — Any time you need somewhere to stay… I’m often away for weeks. I’ve got friends with a farm in Swaziland. What a wonderful place, forest from the house all the way to the river, you just live in a kind of twilight of green — pecan-nut trees, you know. — A casual inspiration. — Why don’t you come there this weekend?—
It didn’t occur to him — I don’t have a passport.—
He didn’t make sympathetic, indignant noises. He pondered as if on a practical matter. — Not even to hop just over there?—
— No.—
He looked at her in silence, confronted with her, considering her as a third person, a problem set up for both of them.
— Come to my house.—
— Yes I will, I’d like to see it. Your big jacaranda.—
— Bauhinia.—
— Bauhinia, then.—
— I mean now.—
— I have to go to Pretoria after work this afternoon. — But at least it was a serious answer, a practical matter that could be dealt with.
— There’s an adjournment till Monday, isn’t there?—
— Yes, but I’ve got permission for a visit today.—
— It’s virtually on your way back.—
The mansion and garden of the early nineteen-hundreds to which the cottage belonged had been expropriated for a freeway that was being delayed by ratepayers’ objections; in the meantime the cottage was let without official tenure at an address that no longer existed.
The wavy galvanized iron roof was painted blue and so were the railings of the wooden verandah. From an abandoned tennis court brilliant with glossy weeds a mournful bird presaged rain. The bauhinia tree lifted from shrubs and ornamental palms become a green-speared jungle; the two rooms were sunk in it like a hidden pool. It was safe and cosy as a child’s playhouse and sexually arousing as a lovers’ hideout. It was nowhere.