She had dropped the joke of dressing-up by now and looked even more conspicuous in the black crowd, in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a dirty fight, and a close one, and the crowd first snarled and reviled and then celebrated wildly. Gideon Shibalo got his tickets free because he knew the promoters, but apparently he considered this sufficient honour for them and never spoke to them. He pushed a way through the crowd as if he knew they would make way for him; but his indifference was met, as he and Ann passed, with glances and remarks of recognition: the regulars had seen them before, now; the white girl and the teacher were part of the circus. A brazen little caricature with stiff straightened hair darted out long red finger-nails to feel Ann’s coat; someone smiled into her face.
The looks, the casual remark of faces in the crowd, set them together; it was a picture imposed from the outside, like a game that partners off strangers. Shibalo drove the car home that night. They laughed and talked all the way; neither had ever been so amusing when Len was there.
Next morning Shibalo telephoned her at the Stilwells’ house. Oddly, she was greatly surprised when she heard his voice; with Africans, she still expected to take the initiative in any attempt to keep up a friendship: they seldom did, perhaps to show you that they didn’t need you.
“Where’re you having lunch today?”
She was supposed to be out with the exhibition, as he must know. “I don’t know, Gid, I’ve got to go into town to do some shopping this morning.” “What about the Lucky Star or Tommie’s, then.” Those were the two places where coloured and white people mixed. “Oh, Lucky Star, I think.” She at once chose the one where she went often, where everyone she knew went and was seen.
She simply did not turn up at the Agency office, where Len usually picked her up with the caravan. At half past one, rather late, Shibalo came into the Lucky Star; she left the people she was talking to and went to him: “Come—” They had something so important to discuss that there was no need for pleasantries. He went swiftly to a table at the wall. “I felt bored stiff at the school today. Ugh, the smell of the place gets me down, the ink, the musty old books.” “Let’s have curry, then, Gid, that’s a good smell.” He looked at her slowly, resentfully, with a smile that was an open, blatant declaration, cock-sure of welcome, full of guile. “You’re the one that has the good smell. Everything you touch in the caravan is full of it. Even the coffee-cup. You hand someone a cup of coffee, and as he puts it up to his mouth there’s the smell of lilies.”
She gave the laugh that is as female as the special note that birds find when they want to call to their young. “Remember, lilies that fester smell far worse than old books.”
“Oh, I remember all right. I’m always careful not to keep them too long.”
They began to go about together. It was another craze, like the boxing one. Every day they ate at the Lucky Star; there was not much choice of places where they could eat, and the food was crude, but this did not worry them: they chose the same table each day, and had their tastes anticipated by the waiter just as, in other circumstances, they might have done at the smartest restaurant in town. And the habitués noted the beginnings of a new grouping in their composition, just as, if Ann had lunched with a white man at the Carlton Hotel, the daily presence of a champagne bucket at the table would have made the necessary announcement. There are certain human alliances that belong more to the world than to the two people who are amusing themselves by making them; this diversion taken up by Shibalo and Ann was one. She was not the first white woman who had been interested in him, but she was perhaps the best-looking, and certainly the least discreet. The open flirtation, for the fun of it, meant more than going to bed with a white woman who was frightened to be seen with you in the street.
Ann was scarcely attracted to him at all, in the strong and sudden way that she had felt matters settled beyond protest between herself and other men. Yet when she saw that he was aware of her, keenly but casually, granting her the power of her sex and beauty but in no way over-valuing her — she was like someone who has no intention of playing the game but finds his hand go out irresistibly to return the ball that comes flying at him. Her sex and her beauty were her talent, her life’s work, the grace of her being that other human beings felt in her; whatever else engrossed her was, in all innocence, mere pastime. The vivid sense of life that she felt when people saw her walk in with Shibalo, laugh at private jokes with him, drive away with him in her little car, came as much from a subtle use of her gifts as from his company. It was a new and amusing variation of their employment to show other men, simply by a companionable silence with Shibalo over a cup of coffee, that she could ignore them for a black man, if she pleased, in addition to all the other incalculables the hazard of her desirableness contained. Even in the restricted clandestine fringe of the city’s activities that was open to Shibalo and her, this was an attitude that carried some subterranean force and audacity, and was seen in the context of the white city, to which, after all, she belonged, and to which she could return whenever she chose.
One afternoon Shibalo remembered the billiard table: “What have you done about it?”
Len made a gesture that suggested the idea had never been serious.
“Ann, eh? What’s happened?” Len seemed always in a lower key than the other two, now, and Shibalo instinctively tried to counter this by an impatient quickening of his own vitality.
“I forgot all about it — so did you,” Ann said to Shibalo.
“I want to have a look at it. Come on, let’s go.”
They were packing up the exhibition; Patrick wanted his caravan back. Everything was dismantled, and lay about, ready to go into the crates. The sun made a structure of hazy blue bars out of the cigarette smoke.
Ann was examining her dirty hands with absorption. She looked up at the stacked pictures and the mess, from Len to Shibalo.
“Come on.” Shibalo was on his feet.
A mixture of opposition and indulgence characterised Ann’s response to him: “I haven’t said a word to the Stilwells, you know.”
But though Shibalo took it for granted that the whole interest in the billiard table was on behalf of Len, and Len found himself suddenly assumed to be taken up again, he would not go with them. “Look at this”—his satisfaction in the work to be done was obstinate.
As they were driving, Ann said, “You know Jessie Stilwell, don’t you?” “I suppose so.” When they got to the house there was silence, anyway. Not even the children were there, and the servant was in her own quarters. Ann’s voice sounded through the rooms and up and down the stairs; Shibalo’s was a murmur behind it. She lugged aside broken toy wagons, frayed baskets, mud-stiffened gardening shoes and an old chandelier, and there was the billiard table, wedged against the wall, on its side. “Match size. That’s what I thought. Most of the felt’s finished.” They tried to pull it upright, but there was no room to turn it over. “I’m sure they’ll be glad to get rid of it. Would you really take it?” She knew that he lived in Alexandra township, but she had never wondered how, in what sort of place, though she knew the cabins, shacks, backyard rooms and occasional neat houses of Alexandra. His shoulders hunched with his inward chuckle. “I might.”
“Have you got somewhere to put it?” On her haunches, she smiled at him in the gloom. “I’ve got a place — maybe. There’s a flat in Hillbrow.” “Hillbrow?” It was a white suburb. So often she felt he simply gave her an answer, any answer, while he was thinking of something else. “Yes,” he said, with a touch of reserve, “Couple of chaps I know. I stay there sometimes.” He chuckled again: “It might be a good idea to give them a present of a billiard table.” “It’s supposed to be for Len.” “Oh of course, I can take anyone there I like. They don’t play.”