Both knew that some form of desperation had made them drive away. Being lovers, both had accepted that this desperation was love; the collective term for the hundred ambiguities of their being together and apart — the wearing thin of interest between them sometimes when they were together, more than punished by the vividness of each for the other when they were apart, the calm with which the interlude of their knowing each other seemed to blend into their separate lives, when they sat chatting, and the crazy obsession with which the interlude filled the whole of living once a day was begun in which it was regarded as over. Fear of the vacuum it leaves behind is as common a reason for prolonging a love affair as continuance of passion. Ann’s inexplicable feeling of “panic” that she had mentioned to Jessie probably came from this fear. Her voice on the telephone (she had taken the single, decisive, outside chance — if he had not happened to be at the Lucky Star at half past one that day she would not have tried again, perhaps, not there nor at the flat nor further away, as far as the townships that took him in and closed over him) — her voice brought him back to swift excitement from the sober, not unhappy but flat acceptance that he would be spending July working for Congress in the dorps and locations. He was saved from the reluctance of doing what he really wanted to do. Stirring a vortex in the grey coffee that Callie Stow had made it difficult for him to drink, he had been going to go and see Jackson Sijake in his own time. He had already forgotten the lie about coaching Indian students; was forgetting other evasions. But Ann’s voice had it: the thing that Callie Stow lacked entirely, the element of self-destruction that found a greedy answer in himself. It was in the voice, that note that takes some of the fear out of life by suggesting that not everyone regards it as such a carefully-guarded gift, after all.
They drove away that bright winter afternoon into the actuality of the escape that everyone put into a phrase and never believes in—“I’d like to go off somewhere, just pack up and go.” It was no different, in its real intention, from the times they had driven into the veld to picnic while other people sat in offices. She looked at his hands on the steering-wheel; he noticed how her head, beside him, tipped back from the chin in her particular way. But although there was the reassuring sameness of their two selves enclosed in the small car, the release and pleasure, as usual, of being together after absence, and the enjoyable consciousness, for each, that absence made minute physical detail and gesture an object of secret observation and wonder — although all these were marvellously the same, this particular impulse was to take them far out of the depth they had sounded between them. They had come together in the constriction of sheltering cracks in other people’s lives — Boaz’s patience, the Stilwells’ tolerance, the young advertising men’s indifference. These seemed irksome but in fact provided a private status for a relationship that, publicly, did not exist. Once they had left behind them, by a few miles, the recognition of a certain group of individuals that they had the free choice of being together, and the anonymity of the city, where such recognition has the chance of passing unnoticed, everything changed for them.
Ann’s response to black people and the world that they were forced to inhabit was one of pleasure; she saw the warmth and vitality, the zest and freshness that existed there in spite of all the white man could do, missed by the white man. She saw the defiant fun of it, not the uncertainty, pain and brashness. She enjoyed the gawping white face staring from the passing car when she and Gideon sat eating chicken at the roadside; but then she had gone home to the Stilwell house when the day was ended. Now, as it got dark, there was the reality of the lights of a country hotel, with family cars drawn up beside rondavels and waiters in their white suits hurrying past on the other side of the windows, and she could not walk in and sign the register and lie talking in a hot bath as she had done hundreds of times, on countless journeys. She said nothing, but it was difficult to believe, in the bones of unreason, where habit is formed in the very pattern of expectation in the body.
At a petrol station she went into the tearoom attached to it and drank a cup of coffee and said, “I want one to take to the car,” and the fat, laconic woman behind the counter shouted to the waiter, “Take coffee out to the madam’s boy.”
She ran across the wide country street to see if she could buy a thermos flask but only an Indian fruit shop was open. Gideon was smoking a cigarette, standing by while the tyres were pumped, and when she got into the car again he came up to the window and said, tersely intimate, “Want something?” She moved her head and smiled, implying that she had only meant to stretch her legs.
The place was called Louis Trichardt, and where the streetlights splashed into the darkness they washed clear of it drapings of cerise and orange bougainvillea. The humps of mountains raised the skyline all round, close to huge winter stars; down in the powdery yellow light of the town she watched some white youths wheel their bicycles up the street and a group of little Moslem girls in trousers playing round the pillars of the fruit shop. Gideon got into the car again; the road lifted up into the mountains that ran together in blackness. There were houses here and there, and a couple of garden hotels shining lights behind the thick lace of trees. Even though it was winter the subtropical forest filled the car with the strong, green, stirring odour that is the smell of the earth’s body. The town dropped behind them like a place that was not a real habitation but a scene representing part of an actual town, in a play, and having, in fact, nothing in the darkness beyond the few props and one-dimensional façades set up in light.
In the half-hour when she had picked up Gideon on the Johannesburg street-corner and they had driven, just as if nothing had happened, through the city with the familiar checks and stops of traffic lights and street-names, he had said, “I want to show you Mapulane’s place, in the Northern Transvaal.” That was enough; after the suddenness and completeness of action, they did not need anything more than the simplest objective.
They came out on the other side of the mountain pass and began to follow the sand roads and tracks of a reserve, in the dark, and there were no signposts, as if the black country people who used the roads could be expected to find their way like cattle. It was late when they arrived at the hummocks of a small village, gone back into the landscape in the darkness. The car woke chickens first, then dogs. The friend was a teacher, and had the only whitestyle house, a brick cottage with a verandah and a wire fence. He lit a lamp, brought out food, with the dazed smiling face of one who sees, the first time for a long time, an admired friend, but he had had no warning of their coming nor any idea who Ann might be or what she was doing there. He kept saying, in English, to include her, “This is wonderful!” and starting up guiltily to refill the kettle, to poke the fire he had quickly got going in the stove, or merely to move, alertly anxious, round the room on the watch for any neglect. He seemed particularly troubled because he had no meat to offer them: “You wouldn’t like a couple of eggs? We’ve always got good eggs from my mother’s hens.”
Gideon enjoyed the spectacle of this generosity and concern before Ann. “James, take it easy, man, we’ve had plenty.”