Tiny skirt winking on a round high bottom, the tilted body on high heels led her to the Chief Matron’s office.
Like — like…to describe Chief Matron to people afterwards it was necessary to find some comparison with an image in a setting that was part of their experience, because she was a feature of one in which they had never been and an element in a scale of aesthetic values established by it alone. Like the patron’s wife in a bar or dance-hall in a nineteenth-century French painting — Toulouse-Lautrec, yes — but more like those of a second-rater, say, Felicien Rops. Her desk was wedged under barathea-covered breasts. She wore service-ribbons, and gold earrings pressed into fleshy lobes. The little wardress’s eyebrows were a fair imitation of her red-brown ones, drawn high from close to either side of the nose-bridge. Her little plump hand with nails painted a thick, refined rose-pink tapped a ballpoint and moved among papers she looked at through harlequin glasses with gilt-scrolled sidepieces. There were gladioluses in a vase on the floor. A wilting spray of white carnations with a tinsel bow stood in a glass on the desk — perhaps she had been to a police ball.
The visitor carried two wooden fruit-trays and a big untidy bunch of daisies and roses from her own garden. — Rosa Burger and Marisa Kgosana. Their names are on labels. Plums, mangoes, oranges and some boiled sweets — loose. In open packets. I can’t bring a cake, I understand?—
— No, no cake. — The tone of someone exchanging remarks on the oddities of the menu in a cafeteria.
— Not even if I were to cut it right open, in front of you? — The visitor was smiling, head inclined, flirtatious, corner of her mouth drawn in contemptuously.
The Chief Matron shared a little joke, that was all. — Not even then, no, it’s not allowed, you know. Just put the boxes on the floor there, thank you so much, we’ll see they get it just now. Right away. — No one was going to equal her in ladylike correctness. — Sign in the book, your name please.—
— And the flowers are in two bunches…could you perhaps put them in a bucket of water? It was so hot in the car. — A couple of Pomeranians were sniffing at the visitor’s shoes. The Chief Matron reproached them in Afrikaans — Down Dinkie, down boy. You’ll tear the lady’s stockings — Flowers are not allowed any more. I don’t know what…it’s a new order just came through yesterday, no more flowers to be accepted. I’m very sorry, ay?—
— Why?—
— I really can’t say, I don’t know, you know…—
— My name’s on the boxes.—
— But just put it down here please — the wardress jumped to offer a large register almost before the signal — Let me see, yes… that’s right, and the address — thank you very much — The manner was that of getting amiably over with a mere matter of form: the necessity for well-intentioned sympathetic ladies to commit themselves in their own hand to acquaintance, to association with political suspects. The Chief Matron moved her lips over the syllables of the name as though to test whether it was false or genuine: Flora Donaldson.
People detained under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act are not allowed visitors, even next of kin. But when later Rosa Burger became an awaiting-trial prisoner she was entitled to the privileges of that status, and in the absence of any blood relative, Flora Donaldson sought and was given permission to see her. Other applicants were refused, with the single exception of Brandt Vermeulen who, no doubt through influence in high places, was suddenly there, when Rosa was taken to the visitors’ room one day. These were not contact visits; Rosa received her visitors from behind a wire grille. It is not known what Brandt Vermeulen talked about in the category of ‘domestic matters’ to which the subject of prison conversations is confined, under surveillance of attendant warders. He is a fluent, amusing talker and a broadminded man of many interests, anyway, not likely to be at a loss. Flora reported that Rosa ‘hadn’t changed much’. She remarked on this to her husband, William. — She’s all right. In good shape. She looked like a little girl, I gather Leela Govind or somebody’s cut her hair again for her, just to here, in her neck… About fourteen… except she’s somehow livelier than she used to be. In a way. Less reserved. We joke a lot — that’s something the bloody warders find hard to follow. After all, why shouldn’t family matters be funny? They’re boring enough. You only realize quite how boring when you have to try to make them metaphors for something else…Theo tells me Defence’s going to give the State witnesses hell. He thinks she’s got a good chance of getting away with it this time — the State may have to drop charges after the preliminary examination. In which case she’ll probably be house-arrested as soon as she’s released…well all right, anything rather than jail? — there’re a lot of things you can do while house-arrested, after all, Rosa’ll get out to go to work every day—
A letter came to Madame Bagnelli in France. It bore the stamp of the Prisons Department in Pretoria but this aroused no interest in the handsome postman who stopped in for a pernod when he delivered the mail, because he could not read English and did not know where Pretoria was. In a passage dealing with the comforts of a cell as if describing the features of a tourist hotel that wasn’t quite what the brochure might have suggested—I have rigged up out of fruit boxes a sort of Japanese-style portable desk (remember the one old Ivan Poliakoff had, the one he used when he wrote in bed) and that’s what I’m writing at now—there was a reference to a watermark of light that came into the cell at sundown every evening, reflected from some west-facing surface outside; something Lionel Burger once mentioned. But the line had been deleted by the prison censor. Madame Bagnelli was never able to make it out.