She was helpful at the hall, and did not give way to any of those signs of bossiness that usually exhibit themselves in those who volunteer in situations of disorganisation. The afternoon session of the bands contest was for people of various shades of colour only, and a large, amiable and lagging crowd, mostly Africans, wandered in and out. A row of seats that had been shown on the booking plan did not exist in the hall, and this, added to the fact that nobody seemed to stay in his allotted seat for long anyway, confused Jessie’s box-office. Someone who had promised to be there to help her failed to turn up, and so Ann cheerfully did what she was told in his place. By the interval, Jessie had lost Ann entirely; walking up and down the aisles, she came upon her, sitting three rows from the front between two African girls who had been programme sellers, and drinking a green lemonade from the bottle. Jessie had with her, by this time, the young man who should have been there earlier to assist as the row emptied. “Here’s the culprit — Len Mafolo — Ann Davis.” The young man, with the sleepy, veiled look that many town Africans have, murmured some excuse, and sat quietly, letting the smoke curl out of his mouth before his face. Ann had already formed the fervent championing loyalties that take hold of spectators at any sort of contest. “Well if the third lot don’t win, I’ll eat my hat. I mean, there’s no comparison, no one else in the same class …” “… like a lot of tired grasshoppers — don’t you agree?”
“I came too late; I didn’t hear them,” said the young man.
A crowd of young bloods in the front row were whistling piercingly and throwing paper darts at the girls in the aisles; most of them wore teddy-boy clothes, inhabiting them with abandon, hilarity and vulgarity instead of the dead coldness, like lead, with which their white counterparts filled the get-up. Blasts of disgust from a trumpeter warming up off-stage were followed by a long, tootling sigh from a saxophone.
“D’you think I could go now, Len?” said Jessie, asking a favour.
“Yes, why not. I’ll do the returns. It’ll be quite all right, Jessie. I’m sorry”—he indicated an apology for being late.
“Good. Thanks so much, then — Ann, if you want to hear bands, we can fix it any time. You’ll get lots of chances.”
“Of course, if you want to go.” Ann did not demur, though she was enjoying herself. She edged smiling along the row; she had taken stimulus and excitement from the crowd, as some people can. She enjoyed the feeling of being among these good-natured strangers. As she passed before Jessie’s friend, who had stood up, loosely, to let them go by, she said in her dazed glow, “I’m going to see the mine dancers tomorrow.”
“Oh you are,” he said coldly; and then, confused by his snub, seemed to forget they were there. “Len, goodbye,” Jessie called from the aisle, and he recovered himself, half-rose again, and waved to them.
Tom Stilwell met Ann on the stairs when she and Jessie got back. He had been working all afternoon and was coming down to the sound of Jessie’s voice mingled with the voices of the children, in the garden. “Eardrums still intact?”
Ann checked her light flight up the stairs. “Oh yes!” she called, and added, in her English way, “It was splendid. Simply splendid.” He flinched a little, as if he had come too quickly from the gloom of his desk into the sun.
Jessie, as so often, had been waylaid by some need of the garden, and had not got as far as the house. She had kicked off her sandals in order not to muddy them, and was picking her way about gingerly between the leaning apricot tree and the bunch of palms. The palms were of a kind that had nothing of the tropical beauty that the word suggests; they opened out like a pen-knife with a bristling array of blades; once a year a tall stem rose out of the middle and bore a head of cream-coloured bells that usually proved too heavy for the plant: it keeled over, as it had done now. Jessie was trying to right it. The little girls gathered a pile of early windfall apricots, wasp-stung and smelling richly of perfume and rot. Tom lay on the coarse grass and watched these various forms of activity. Presently he called out, “That pepper tree ought to come down. And that bit of the hedge.” Jessie did not answer, obstinately propping one arm of the palm behind another that sagged less. He got up and strolled over to her. “Ought to come down.” He knocked at the crusty trunk of the old tree with his fist. Every few months he would come into the garden, “like Fate,” as Jessie said, and make pronouncements of this kind. They were true; necessary; sensible. He showed her the garden, in a word, as it was; she saw the broken macrocarpa hedge, the stooping pepper trees, the tangle of woody growth bald on its lower level and reaching towards the light. “Oh no,” she said. “Trimming a bit, perhaps.” She withdrew quietly, driftingly, immediately from the garden as he presented it; she picked up her sandals and disappeared inside the house.
The Davises had gone out again, and the emptiness of the house was emphasised by the buzzing of a few sleepy flies; suddenly she remembered that it was not empty — Morgan must be somewhere about. She went to her room and forgot him, for ten minutes, occupied in putting away the clean shirts and socks that Agatha had laid out on the bed. Then, on her way downstairs again, she looked in on his room. She did not think he would be there and so she did not knock, but simply opened the door. He smiled up at her, from the bed. He was lying on his back, with the little bedside radio playing on the window-sill beside him. The curtains of the converted verandah were drawn against the afternoon sun. “Hullo. Is that where you are.” He moved slightly to acknowledge her. “What you been doing?” she asked pleasantly. The noise of the little plastic box streamed between them, rising, falling, soothing, imploring. “Listening.” The braying, weeping, jostling went on. “It’s the Nicky Doone programme,” he offered. She nodded. “You should have come with me,” she said, in the jokingly reproachful tone of offering at least some sort of alternative. She forgot that she had not asked him. His long, half-grown hands played with a piece of matchbox. He smiled at her kindly, shyly, without awkwardness, while her own grew until it sounded in her ears as loudly as the radio. She did not go away but she and her son found nothing to say to each other. There was only the voice of the radio gibbering conversationally. At last, in interruption, Jessie said, “I’d better see if Agatha’s remembered the meat.” Her heart was thumping as she put her hand on the door; she looked at him — she was sure she would speak — but she did not.
The Davises acquired several volunteers for the outing to the mine dances, and while the Stilwell house was finishing late Sunday breakfast, various young people began strolling in. At last they set off in an assortment of cars; the little girls had been waiting, ready, in the Stilwells’ old Peugeot for an hour, but Morgan, who took on the colour of a crowd very easily, went off with strangers.
They drove westwards out of the city and through the settlements of worked-out or nearly worked-out mines that were now being linked to the city by its proliferation: strings of roadside stores, garages, road-houses that seemed to belong nowhere, and to be one with the litter of orange-peel and cigarette boxes thrown from passing cars. At one of the mine properties the cars gathered by prearrangement, and people jumped out to confer about the final directions. Morgan came over to his parents’ car. “Didn’t Granny live in one of these houses, or somewhere?” “No, not somewhere,” said Jessie, setting the words to right as if they were some object knocked over. “On Helgas-drift, on the East Rand.”