Blanchaille mentioned the suburb where Bishop Blashford lived.
‘Sure. Happy to help.’
‘What disturbs the peace in the townships?’
Breslau shrugged. ‘Everything — and nothing. Of course the trouble is not having what they want, and then getting what they want. Like I mean first of all they don’t have any sewage so the cry goes up for piped sewage and they get it. Then there’s no electricity, so a consortium of businessmen organised by Himmelfarber and his Consolidated Holdings put in a private scheme of electrification. Then a football pitch is asked for. And given. And after each of these improvements there’s a riot. It’s interesting, that.’
‘It’s almost as if the trouble with the townships is the townships,’ Blanchaille suggested.
‘You can’t not have townships or you wouldn’t have any of this,’ the salesman gestured out of the window at the blank and featureless veld on either side of the road. ‘Cities have townships the way people have shadows. It’s in the nature of things.’
‘But we haven’t always had townships.’
‘Of course we have. Look, a township is just a reservoir. A pool. A depot for labour. I mean you look back to how it was when the first white settlers came here. You look at Van Riebeeck who came in — when was it — in 1652? And he arrives at the Cape of Good Hope — what a name when you think how things turned out! A bloody long time ago, right? What does Van Riebeeck find when he arrives in this big open place? He finds he’s got to build himself a fort. He finds the place occupied, there are all these damn Hottentots swanning around. Anyway he sees all these black guys wandering around and he thinks to himself — Jesus! This is Christmas! What I’m going to do is sit in my fort, grow lots of vegetables and sell them to passing ships. And all these black Hottentots I see wandering around here, they’re going to work for me. If they don’t work for me they get zapped. So he sits there at the Cape and the black guys work for him. Afterwards he gets to be so famous they put his face on all the money. It’s been like that ever since.’
‘But he didn’t have a township.’
‘What d’you mean, he didn’t have a township? The whole damn country was his township.’
Ever cautious Blanchaille got Breslau to drop him not outside Blashford’s house, but at the foot of the hill on which the Bishop lived. The salesman drove off with a cheerful wave, ‘Keep your head down.’
Blanchaille picked up his cases and began the slow painful ascent of the hill.
Puzzled by this conversation, in my dream I took up the matter with Breslau.
‘Surely things aren’t that bad? That’s a very simplistic analysis of history that you offered him.’
‘Right, but then it’s a very simplistic situation. There is the view that we’re all stuffed. We can fight all we like but we’re finished. The catch is that if anyone takes that line they get shot or locked up or whipped. Or all of those things. That’s how it was. That’s how it is. Nothing’s changed since the first Dutchman arrived, opened a police station and started handing out passes to the servants.’
‘Can nothing be done to improve conditions in the townships?’ I persisted.
Breslau laughed and slapped the steering wheel. ‘Sure. As I told the traveller. Lots can be done. Lots is done. Ever since the longhaired vegetable grower arrived from Holland, people have been battling to improve the townships. But after the beer halls and the soccer pitches, the electric lights, the social clubs, the sports stadiums, the literacy classes and the best will in the world, the townships are still townships. And townships are trouble.’
‘Even when they’re peaceful?’ I asked.
‘Especially when they’re peaceful,’ said Breslau.
CHAPTER 5
They walked in the Bishop’s official garden. Ceres, Bishop Blashford’s ample black housekeeper, had allowed him to leave his suitcases in the hall and sent him out to join His Grace with the warning that he would be allowed no more than ten minutes before His Grace took tea.
Blashford, the unspeakable Blashford, his open face ringed by soft pale curls, had in his younger days played first-class golf: no doubt clouded the sports-writers’ prediction that he would have gone on to international competition had the Church not selected him first. He was that rare hierarch, an authentic indigenous bishop, born and educated in the country. By choosing a sportsman for this important appointment the Vatican had shown that it understood where the springs of religious fervour truly lay. Now his neatly shod feet pressed the grass. He was wearing what he called his gardening clothes, a fawn suit and panama hat, by which Blanchaille understood him to mean not those clothes in which he worked in his garden but walked there before tea, a trim, elegant figure with a fair complexion which reddened easily in the sun. His black, heavily armoured toe caps glistened, the double knots of his laces showed like chunky black seaweed as his shoes broke free from the bunched wave of his flannels. There was a brief gleam of polished leather with each assured step he planted on the smooth unwrinkled surface of his beautiful lawn. The end of the official garden was bound by a line of apple and peach trees and behind them a thick pyracantha hedge showed its spikes. Heads held high, wagtails sprinted through the splashes of sunlight beneath the fruit trees, their equilibrium secured by the rocking balance of their long tails. They shared Blashford’s dainty-footed confidence.
‘Well, Blanchaille?’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘What?’
‘Parish, priesthood, country. The lot. I’m in a position of a bride whose marriage has not been consummated. My ministry is null and void. In short, I’m off.’
‘I’ve been expecting you to call. The volume of complaints from your parishioners in Merrievale these past weeks has reached an absolute crescendo. Complaints had been laid with the police about political speeches from the pulpit. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to persuade the authorities to allow the Church to deal with this in its own way.’
‘You needn’t have bothered. I also have friends in the police.’
‘We all have friends in the police, Father. The question is will yours do what you ask them?’
He could feel the heat the Bishop gave off as he became angrier. He was vibrating like a cooking stove. He hissed from a corner of his mouth: ‘It’s not like leaving a party, you know. Or getting off a bus. Father Lynch is behind this I’m sure.’
‘Father Lynch has never regarded me as a priest. He sees me as a policeman. I’m beginning to realise he knew what he was talking about. My relationship to the Church is that of a partner in an invalid marriage. The thing is null. I wanted to attack the Regime so I followed the only model I had — Father Lynch. I took holy orders. I would have done better learning to shoot.’
‘Father Lynch is old, ill and not a little cracked. He flips about that decaying church of his like an ancient bat. He says masses in Latin to a band of parishioners as ill and decrepit as himself. He does so without permission. He keeps up the pretence of serving a parish where none exists. The building is scheduled for demolition. We are finding our way back into the world.’
Ah yes, the world. Blashford had been Bishop for as long as anyone could remember. Years ago he had been concerned with safeguarding the Church against the Calvinist aggressor, those who saw it as ‘the Roman danger’. Then came Vatican II, and Blashford discovered ‘the world’.