‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Are you afraid of heights?’
‘No.’
I stepped out there, and the view lived up to his commercial. The balcony faced south, with the kite-shaped Southern Cross flying on its side in the sky straight ahead; and orange lights stretching like a chain away towards Durban down the motorway.
Roderick was not leaning on the pierced ironwork which edged the balcony. With part of my mind shivering and the rest telling me not to be such an ass, I kept my weight nearer the building than his: I felt guilty of mistrust and yet couldn’t trust, and saw that suspicion was a wrecker.
We went in. Of course, we went in. Safely. I could feel muscles relax in my jaw and abdomen that I hadn’t known were tense. Silly fool, I thought: and tried to shut out the fact that for both mike and mine, Roderick had been there.
His flat was small but predictably full of impact. A black sack chair flopped on a pale olive carpet: khaki-coloured walls sprouted huge brass lamp brackets between large canvasses of ultra simple abstracts in brash challenging colours: a low glass-topped table stood before an imitation tiger skin sofa of stark square construction; and an Andy Warholish imitation can of beer stood waist high in one corner. Desperately trendy, the whole thing; giving, like its incumbent, the impression that way out was where it was all at, man, and if you weren’t out there as far as you could go you might as well be dead. It seemed a foregone conclusion that he smoked pot.
Naturally, he had expensive stereo. The music he chose was less underground than could be got in London, but the mix of anarchy and self-pity still came across strongly in the nasal voices. I wondered whether it was just part of the image, or whether he sincerely enjoyed it.
‘Drink?’ he offered, and I said yes, please.
Campari and soda, bitter-sweet pink stuff. He took it for granted I would like it.
‘Katya won’t be long. She had some recording session or other.’
‘Is she all right now?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘A hundred per cent.’ He underplayed the relief, but I remembered his tormented tears: real emotions still lived down there under the with-it front.
He was wearing another pair of pasted-on trousers, and a blue ruffled close-fitting shirt with lacing instead of buttons. As casual clothes, they were as deliberate as signposts: the rugged male in his sexual finery. I supposed my own clothes too made a statement, as indeed everyone’s did, always.
Katya’s statement was as clear as a trumpet, and said ‘look at me’.
She arrived like a gust of bright and breezy show-biz, wearing an eye-stunning yellow catsuit which flared widely from the knees in black-edged ruffles. She looked like a flamenco dancer split up the middle, and she topped up the impression with a high tortoise-shell mantilla comb pegged like a tiara into her mop of hair.
Stretching out her arms she advanced on me with life positively spurting from every pore, as if instead of harming her the input of electric current had doubled her vitality.
‘Link, darling, how marvellous,’ she said extravagantly. And she had brought someone with her.
The barriers in my mind rose immediately like a hedge and prickled away all evening. Roderick and Katya had planted a bombshell to lead me astray, and were betraying their intention through the heightened mischief in Katya’s manner. I didn’t like the game, but I was an old hand at it, and nowadays I never lost. I sighed regretfully for the quiet no-fuss dinner which Roderick had promised. Too much ever to hope for, I supposed.
The girl was ravishing, with cloudy dark hair and enormous slightly myopic-looking eyes. She wore a soft floaty garment, floor length and green, which swirled and lay against her as she moved, outlining now a hip, now a breast, and all parts in quite clearly good shape.
Roderick was watching my reactions sideways, while pretending to pour out more Camparis.
‘This is Melanie,’ Katya said as if inventing Venus from the waves; and there was perhaps a touch of the Botticellis in the graceful neck.
Christened Mabel, no doubt, I said to myself uncharitably, and greeted her with a lukewarm smile and a conventional handshake. Melanie was not a girl to be put off by a cool reception. She gave me a gentle flutter of lengthy lashes, a sweet curve of soft pink lips, and a smouldering promise in the smoky eyes. I thought: she’s done this sort of thing before, and she is as aware of her power as I am when I act.
Melanie just happened to sit beside me on the tiger skin sofa, stretching out languorously so that the green material revealed the whole slender shape. Just happened to have no lighter of her own, so that I had to help her with Roderick’s orange globe table model. Just happened to have to cup my hand in both of her own to guide the flame to the end of her cigarette. Just happened to steady herself with a hand on my arm as she leant forward to flick off ash.
Katya gaily sparkled and Roderick filled my glass with gin when he thought I wasn’t looking, and I began to wonder where he had hidden the tape-recorder. If this little lot was to be off the record, I was a plumber’s mate.
Dinner was laid with candles on a square black table in a mustard-painted dining alcove. The food was great and the talk provocative, but mostly the three of them tossed the ball among themselves while I replied when essential with murmurs and smiles, which couldn’t be picked on as quotes.
Melanie’s scent was as subtle as Joy, and Roderick had laced my wine with brandy. He watched and spoke and attended to me with friendly eyes, and waited for me to deliver myself up. Go stuff the Rand Daily Star, I thought: my friend Roderick is a bastard and my tongue is my own.
Something of my awareness must have shown in my eyes, for a thoughtful look suddenly crossed his forehead and he changed his tack in two sentences from sexual innuendo to meaningful social comment.
He said, ‘What do you think of apartheid, now that you’ve been here a week?’
‘What do you?’ I replied. ‘Tell me about it. You three who live here... you tell me.’
Roderick shook his head and Katya said it was what visitors thought that mattered, and only Melanie, who was playing different rules, came across with the goods.
‘Apartheid,’ she said earnestly, ‘is necessary.’
Roderick made a negative movement, and I asked, ‘In what way?’
‘It means living separately,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t mean that one race is better than the other, just that they are different, and should remain so. All the world seems to think that white South Africans hate the blacks and try to repress them, but it is not true. We care for them... and the phrase, “black is beautiful” was thought up by white Africans to give black Africans a sense of being important as individuals.’
I was intensely surprised, but Roderick reluctantly nodded. ‘That’s true. The Black Power Movement have adopted it as their own, but they didn’t invent it. You might say, I suppose, that the phrase has achieved everything it was intended to, and a bit more besides.’
‘To read foreign papers,’ said Melanie indignantly, warming to her subject, ‘you would think the blacks are a lot of illiterate cheap labour. And it isn’t true. Schooling is compulsory for both races, and factories pay the rate for the job, regardless of skin colour. And that,’ she added, ‘was negotiated by the white trade unionists.’
I liked her a lot better since she’d forgotten the sexpot role. The dark eyes held fire as well as smoke, and it was a change to hear someone passionately defending her country.
‘Tell me more,’ I said flippantly.
‘Oh...’ She looked confused for a moment, then took a fresh hold on enthusiasm, like a horse getting its second wind. ‘Black people have everything the same as white people. Everything that they want to have. Only a minority have big houses because the majority don’t like them: they like to live out of doors, and only go into shelters to sleep. But they have cars and businesses and holidays and hospitals and hotels and cinemas... everything like that.’