'Thanks, Pater. I don't deserve it." 'No,' Shasa agreed. 'You don't - but don't worry too much about it. There won't be any more. That's it, Sean, finished. The first and only insraiment of your inheritance." As always Sean's smile was a little miracle. It made Shasa doubt, despite all the evidence, that his son was thoroughly bad.
TI1 write, Pater. You'll see, one day we'll laugh about this - when we are together again." Lugging his suitcase Sean passed through the barrier, and after he disappeared into the customs hut, Shasa was left with an unbearable sense of futility. Was this how it ended after all the care and love over all the years?
Shasa was amused by the ease with which Isabella was able to overcome her lisp. Within two weeks of enrolling at Rustenberg Girls' Senior School, she was talking, and looking, like a little lady.
Apparently the teachers and her fellow pupils had not been impressed by babytalk.
It was only when she was trying to wheedle her father that she still employed the lisp and the pout. She sat on the arm of his chair now and stroked the silver wings of hair above Shasa's ears.
'I have the most beautiful daddy in the world,' she crooned, and indeed the flashes of silver contrasted with the dense darkness of the rest of his hair and the tanned almost unlined skin of his face to enhance Shasa's looks. 'I have the kindest and most loving daddy in the world." 'And I have the most scheming little vixen in the world for a daughter,' he said, and she laughed with delight, a sound that made his heart contract, and her breath in his face smelled milky and sweet as a newborn kitten, but he shored up his crumbling defences.
'I have a daughter who is only fourteen years old--' 'Fifteen,' she corrected him.
'Fourteen and a half,' he countered.
'Almost fifteen,' she insisted.
'A daughter under fifteen years of age, who is much too precious to allow out of my house after ten o'clock at night." 'Oh, my big cuddly growly bear,' she whispered in his ear and hugged him hard, and as she rubbed her soft cheek against his, her breasts pressed against his arm.
Tara's breasts had always been large and shapely, he still found them immensely attractive. Isabella had inherited them from her. Over the last few months Shasa had watched with pride and interest their phenomenal growth, and now they were firm and warm against his arm.
'Are there going to be boys there?" he asked, and she sensed the first rack in his defence.
'Oh, I m not interested in boys, Papa,' and she shut her eyes tight in case a thunderbolt came crashing down on her for such a fib.
These days Isabella could think of little else but boys, they even occupied her dreams, and her interest in their anatomy was so intense that both Michael and Garry had forbidden her to come into their rooms while they were changing. Her candid and fascinated examination was too disconcerting.
'How will you get there and back? You don't expect your mother to wait up until midnight, do you? And I'll be in Jo'burg that night,' Shasa asked and she opened her eyes.
'Stephen can take me and bring me back." 'Stephen?" Shasa asked sharply.
'Mommy's new chauffeur. He's so nice and awfully trustworthyMommy says so." Shasa wasn't aware that Tara had taken on a chauffeur. She usually drove herself, but that reprehensible old Packard of hers had finally given up the ghost when she was away at Sundi and he had prevailed on her to accept a new Chevvy station wagon. Presumably the chauffeur went with it. She should have consulted him - but they had drifted further and further apart over the last few years and seldom discussed domestic routine.
'No,' he said firmly. 'I won't have you driving around on your own at night." 'I'll be with Stephen,' she pleaded, but he ignored the protest. He knew nothing about Stephen, except that he was male and black.
'I'll tell you what. If you can get a written guarantee from one of the other girls' parents - somebody I know - that they will get you there and back before midnight - well, then, all right, you may go." 'Oh Daddy! Daddy!" She showered soft warm kisses on his face, and then leapt up and did a little victory pirouette around his study.
She had long willowy legs under the flaring skirt and a tight little bottom in lace panties.
'She is probably,' he thought, and then corrected himself, 'she is without doubt the most beautiful child in the entire world." Isabella stopped suddenly, and assumed a woebegone expression.
'Oh, Papa!" she cried in anguish.
'What is it now?" Shasa leaned back in his swivel chair and hid his smile.
'Both Patty and Lenora are going to have new dresses, and I shall look an awful frump." 'A frump, forsooth! We cannot have that now, can we?" And she rushed to him.
'Does that mean I may have a new dress, Daddy darling?" She wound both arms around his neck again. The sound of a motor car coming up the drive interrupted their idyll.
'Here comes Mommy!" Isabella sprang from his lap and seizing his hand dragged him to the window. 'We can tell her about the party and the dress now, can't we, darling Daddy." The new Chevrolet with the high tail fins and great chromed grille pulled up at the front steps, and the new chauffeur stepped out. He was an imposing man, tall and broad-shouldered in a dove-grey livery and cap with patent-leather peak. He opened the rear door, and Tara slipped out of her seat. As she passed him she tapped the chauffeur on the arm, an over-friendly gesture so typical of Tara's treatment of the servants which irritated Shasa as much as usual.
Tara came up the front stairs and disappeared from Shasa's view, while the chauffeur went back into the driver's seat and pulled away towards the garages. As he drove below the windows of the study, he glanced up. His face was half obscured by the peak of his cap, but there was something vaguely familiar about his jawline and the way his head was set on that corded neck and those powerful shoulders.
Shasa frowned, trying to place him, but the memory was an ancient one, or erroneous, and then behind him Isabella was calling in her special honeyed voice.
'Oh Mommy, Daddy and I have something to tell you,' and Shasa turned from the window, steeling himself for Tara's familiar accusation of favouritism and indulgence.
The hidden door to Shasa's parliamentary suite of offices provide› the key to the problem that they had been working on over the weeks that Moses Gama had been in Cape Town.
It was simple enough for Moses to enter the parliament buildin itself, dressed in chauffeur's livery and carrying an armful oJ shopping - shoe boxes and hat boxes from the most expensive stores He merely followed Tara as she swept past the doormen at the front entrance. There was virtually no security in operation, no register to sign, no lapel badges were necessary. A stranger might be asked to show a visitor's pass at the entrance, but as the wife of cabinet minister, Tara merited a respectful salute, and she made point of getting to know the doormen. Sometimes she paused to ask after a sick child, or the janitor's arthritis, and with her sunny personality and her concerned condescension, she was soon a favourite of the uniformed staff who guarded the entrance.
She did not take Moses in with her on every occasion, only when she was certain that there was no risk of meeting Shasa. She brought him often enough to establish his presence and his right to be there. When they reached Shasa's suite, Tara would order him to place the parcels in the inner office while she paused to chat with Shasa's secretary. Then, when Moses emerged from the office emptyhanded, she would dismiss him lightly.
'Thank you, Stephen. You may go down now. I will need the car at eleven. Please bring it around to the front and wait for me." Then Moses would walk down the main staircase, standing respectfully aside for parliamentary messengers and members and cabinet members, once he even passed the prime minister on the stairs, and he had to drop his gaze in case Verwoerd recognized the hatred in his eyes. It gave him a weird feeling of unreality to pass only arm's length from the man who was the author of his people's misery, who more than any other represented all the forces of injustice and oppression. The man who had elevated racial discrimination to a quasi-religious philosophy.