Len Mafolo was not much of a dancer but he liked to talk, comfortingly shut in by music and noise. He would be in the same corner from nine or ten until one in the morning, drinking, but not too much, and arguing in a slow, lofty way, as if for him getting at the truth was like picking one’s way breath-holdingly, toe-hold by toe-hold, down from some dizzy spire on which one found oneself stranded. He had almost at once forgiven Ann for going to the mine dances; it was a joke between them now. He understood her not very fastidious enthusiasm for anything new to her, and she understood his distaste for tribalism. He described her as a “wonderful kid”: with a pause and a shrugging snort to follow the impossibility of defining her. He liked white girls because those he knew were good to talk to as well as beautiful; she was also extraordinarily easy to work with, undiscouraged by the slowness and difficulty of getting people beyond the planning stage, tackling everything without fear of failure because she found it fun. “Don’t be so limp, Len,” she would say, fretting at his pessimistic objections.
The idea of taking round an exhibition of African paintings and sculpture — that was something he had been talking about for years, ever since he’d been a clerk at the Institute of Race Relations and had been put on to packing orders for their special Christmas cards every year. But the moment he talked to Ann about it, it began to take shape out of all sorts of impossibilities. There were not enough halls, particularly on the Reef, where the exhibition could be seen by white as well as black; “I tell you what — you need a caravan!” she said, “We’ll borrow Patrick’s — that’s it! They’ve just traded in their station wagon for a caravan.” And when he objected: “Who’s going to drive the thing around?” “Us!” she said, “You and I, of course.”
And so the impossibilities were changed, one by one. She was marvellous with the people they got to exhibit, too; if someone sent in something disappointing, she would stand looking at it with Len, and just as he was ready to say he supposed it was all right, an obstinate look would come over the bottom half of her face: “Let’s go and see him and make him dig up something better. Where does he live? Let’s go now—”
She called Mafolo “old Len”: the epithet for the childhood companion, the family friend … He got used to her, but sometimes when he looked at her and saw how she was like some lovely creature in its glossy coat, perfectly equal to its environment, he was seized with anxiety and hope. It was almost as if he were already reproaching himself for having missed something that, at the same time, he really knew never would be offered him.
The caravan exhibition was exactly the sort of venture that occupied Ann most happily. She knew a little bit about displaying works of art — in the fashionable sack-cloth-and-space way — because, although she did not take her attempts at various careers seriously, it was true that she had worked for a time in a small London gallery. She flew in and out of the house for nails, boxes, lengths of rope — all kinds of things — during the preparation of the exhibition. She was always running into Mrs. Fuecht, Jessie’s mother (who was in the house at the time), with the sort of object in her hands that must have appeared to require an explanation — the bathroom mirror, once, and another time a cooking-pot with an old sheet bubbling away inside it in a soup of purplish dye. The old lady showed no surprise, however — she was quite a surprise to come upon suddenly, oneself: rather an impressive old lady, slightly dotty, with the tragedy-queen air that Ann noticed often hung about aged women who were probably very attractive when young and who had given the greater part of their energies to love. “Your mother has been a beauty; she must have had lots of lovers, I suppose,” Ann said to Jessie. But Jessie laughed, and said in that menacing way of hers: “No, she was in love with me.” Perhaps Jessie was jealous of the old lady; certainly she had none of the old lady’s air. Ann always stopped, in passing, to exchange a few words with her; at least, that was what appeared to happen; what was really exchanged was a brief kindling of each other’s beauty, a flutter of recognition across fifty years. Once, the old lady seemed on the brink of beginning to talk to her — but it was not possible, that day. And one day her visit blew over, too, and she was gone.
Ann met Gideon Shibalo when she and Len were invited to take their travelling art exhibition round African, Indian and Coloured high schools. She had heard all about him before, of course; he was the man whose painting had attracted attention overseas and won him a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn’t been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport — he was involved in politics, the African National Congress movement. He came in during the school break and stood looking at his two pictures with the removed yet fascinated air with which one glances through an old photograph album. “Talented chap,” said Len, at his elbow.
“That’s a fact.” They burst into laughter and pushed each other about a little.
“My partner in crime,” Len indicated Ann.
“Again and again, I’ve wanted to see if we couldn’t get something more from you,” she said to Shibalo, “but he said it was hopeless, you don’t paint any more.”
Shibalo chuckled, considering himself. “Hopeless. Quite right.” He and Len had an exchange, punctuated by laughter, in Sesuto. “You should have come to see me anyway.” Shibalo turned to Ann.
“Why?” she said cheerfully. “Any hope? We’ll come if you’ve got something for us, any time.”
“I’ve put away childish things,” he said.
“Don’t you worry, he can still knock out a picture if he wants to,” Len encouraged and reproached, resentfully.
“Do you dislike being probed about not painting, or do you enjoy it?”
They all laughed. “Good God, I live on it. Where has my inspiration gone? Don’t I feel light, shape, colour, thickness, thinness, what-not? Don’t I want to express the soul of Africa? Don’t I want to make the line vibrate? Don’t my guts wriggle and send new forms to my finger-tips? That chap Gauguin started at forty, I’ve stopped long before.”
He scarcely looked at the other pieces of painting and sculpture that Len and Ann were modestly proud of, and when he sat drinking coffee with them remarked that the exhibition was really “a waste of time”. “The shock of modern art — we don’t need it around here, man. You can’t shock my kids in there, in my class we’ve got three who smoke dagga, and two pregnant. Not bad, eh? And they’re not even in matric yet.”