He drives her to the Howarths’ big house and instals her in the bedroom overlooking Table Bay and the harbour. He offers her tea, offers her soup, but she wants nothing. She has brought a suitcase; she has brought her own towels, her own sheets. She has thought of everything. He has merely to be around, to be ready if something goes wrong. It is not much to expect.
She asks for a warm towel. He puts a towel in the electric oven. It comes out smelling of burn. By the time he has brought it upstairs it can barely be called warm. But she lays it on her belly and closes her eyes and seems to be soothed by it.
Every few hours she takes one of the pills the woman has given her, followed by water, glass after glass. For the rest she lies with her eyes closed, enduring the pain. Sensing his squeamishness, she has hidden from his sight the evidence of what is going on inside her body: the bloody pads and whatever else there is.
‘How are you?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ she murmurs.
What he will do if she ceases to be fine, he has no idea. Abortion is illegal, but how illegal? If he called in a doctor, would the doctor report them to the police?
He sleeps on a mattress at the bedside. As a nurse he is useless, worse than useless. What he is doing cannot in fact be called nursing. It is merely a penance, a stupid and ineffectual penance.
On the morning of the third day she appears at the door of the study downstairs, pale and swaying on her feet but fully dressed. She is ready to go home, she says.
He drives her to her lodgings, with her suitcase and the laundry bag that presumably contains the bloody towels and sheets. ‘Would you like me to stay a while?’ he asks. She shakes her head. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she says. He kisses her on the cheek and walks home.
She has issued no reproofs, made no demands; she has even paid the abortionist herself. In fact, she has taught him a lesson in how to behave. As for him, he has emerged ignominiously, he cannot deny it. What help he has given her has been fainthearted and, worse, incompetent. He prays she will never tell the story to anyone.
His thoughts keep going to what was destroyed inside her — that pod of flesh, that rubbery manikin. He sees the little creature flushed down the toilet at the Woodstock house, tumbled through the maze of sewers, tossed out at last into the shallows, blinking in the sudden sun, struggling against the waves that will carry it out into the bay. He did not want it to live and now he does not want it to die. Yet even if he were to run down to the beach, find it, save it from the sea, what would he do with it? Bring it home, keep it warm in cotton wool, try to get it to grow? How can he who is still a child bring up a child?
He is out of his depth. He has barely emerged into the world himself and already he has a death chalked up against him. How many of the other men he sees in the streets carry dead children with them like baby shoes slung around their necks?
He would rather not see Sarah again. If he could be by himself he might be able to recover, return to being as he used to be. But to desert her now would be too shameful. So each day he drops by at her room and sits holding her hand for a decent period. If he has nothing to say, it is because he has not the courage to ask what is happening to her, in her. Is it like a sickness, he wonders to himself, from which she is now in the process of recuperating, or is it like an amputation, from which one never recovers? What is the difference between an abortion and a miscarriage and what in books is called losing a child? In books a woman who loses a child shuts herself off from the world and goes into mourning. Is Sarah still due to enter a time of mourning? And what of him? Is he too going to mourn? How long does one mourn, if one mourns? Does the mourning come to an end, and is one the same after the mourning as before; or does one mourn forever for the little thing that bobs in the waves off Woodstock, like the little cabin boy who fell overboard and was not missed? Weep, weep! cries the cabin boy, who will not sink and will not be stilled.
To bring in more money, he takes on a second afternoon of tutoring in the Mathematics Department. The first-year students who attend his tutorial are free to bring in questions on applied mathematics as well as pure mathematics. With only a single year of applied mathematics to his credit, he is barely ahead of the students he is supposed to be assisting: each week he has to spend hours on preparation.
Wrapped up though he is in his private worries, he cannot fail to see that the country around him is in turmoil. The pass laws to which Africans and Africans alone are subjected are being tightened even further, and protests are breaking out everywhere. In the Transvaal the police fire shots into a crowd, then, in their mad way, go on firing into the backs of fleeing men, women and children. From beginning to end the business sickens him: the laws themselves; the bully-boy police; the government, stridently defending the murderers and denouncing the dead; and the press, too frightened to come out and say what anyone with eyes in his head can see.
After the carnage of Sharpeville nothing is as it was before. Even in the pacific Cape there are strikes and marches. Wherever a march takes place there are policemen with guns hovering around the edges, waiting for an excuse to shoot.
It all comes to a head one afternoon while he is on tutorial duty. The tutorial room is quiet; he is patrolling from desk to desk, checking how students are getting on with the assigned exercises, trying to help those in difficulty. Suddenly the door swings open. One of the senior lecturers strides in and raps on the table. ‘May I have your attention!’ he calls out. There is a nervous crack in his voice; his face is flushed. ‘Please put down your pens and give me your attention! There is at this moment a workers’ march taking place along De Waal Drive. For reasons of safety, I am asked to announce that no one is being allowed to leave the campus, until further notice. I repeat: no one is being allowed to leave. This is an order issued by the police. Are there any questions?’
There is one question at least, but this is not the right time to voice it: What is the country coming to when one cannot run a mathematics tutorial in peace? As for the police order, he does not believe for a moment that the police are sealing off the campus for the sake of the students. They are sealing it off so that students from this notorious hotbed of leftism will not join the march, that is all.
There is no hope of continuing with the mathematics tutorial. Around the room there is a buzz of conversation; students are already packing their bags and exiting, eager to see what is up.
He follows the crowd to the embankment above De Waal Drive. All traffic has been halted. The marchers are coming up Woolsack Road in a thick snake, ten, twenty abreast, then turning north on to the motorway. They are men, most of them, in drab clothing — overalls, army surplus coats, woollen caps — some carrying sticks, all walking swiftly, silently. There is no end to the column in sight. If he were the police, he would be frightened.
‘It’s PAC,’ says a Coloured student nearby. His eyes glisten, he has an intent look. Is he right? How does he know? Are there signs one ought to be able to recognize? The PAC is not like the ANC. It is more ominous. Africa for the Africans! says the PAC. Drive the whites into the sea!
Thousands upon thousands, the column of men winds its way up the hill. It does not look like an army, but that is what it is, an army called into being of a sudden out of the wastelands of the Cape Flats. Once they reach the city, what will they do? Whatever it is, there are not enough policemen in the land to stop them, not enough bullets to kill them.