The white people on the whole had more money, I thought; and undoubtedly more freedom of action. I opened my mouth to make some innocuous remark about the many entrance doors marked ‘non-whites’ and ‘whites only’, but Melanie jumped right in to forestall any adverse comment, which was not in the least what Roderick wanted. He frowned at her. She was too busy to notice.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said inaccurately. ‘You’re going to talk about injustice. Everyone from England always does. Well, certainly, of course, there are injustices. There are in every country in the world, including yours. Injustices make the headlines. Justice is not news. People come here purposely seeking for injustice, and of course they find it. But they never report on the good things, they just shut their eyes and pretend there aren’t any.’
I looked at her thoughtfully. There was truth in what she said.
‘Every time a country like England attacks our way of life,’ she said, ‘they do more harm than good. You can feel the people here close their ranks and harden their attitude. It is stupid. It slows down the progress our country is gradually making towards partnership between the races. The old rigid type of apartheid is dying out, you know... and in five or ten years time it will only be the militants and extremists on both sides who take it seriously. They shout and thump, and the foreign press listens and pays attention, like they always do to crackpots, and they don’t see, or at any rate they never mention, the slow quiet change for the better which is going on here.’
I wondered how she would feel about it if she were black: even if things were changing, there was still no overall equality of opportunity. Blacks could be teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests. They couldn’t be jockeys. Unfair, unfair.
Roderick, waiting in vain for me to jump in with both feet, was driven again to a direct question.
‘What are your views, Link?’
I smiled at him.
‘I belong to a profession,’ I said, ‘which never discriminates against blacks or Jews or women or Catholics or Protestants or bug-eyed monsters, but only against non-members of Equity.’
Melanie looked blank about Equity but she had a word to say about Jews.
‘Whatever white South Africans may be accused of,’ she contended, ‘we have never sent six million blacks to the gas chamber.’
Which was rather like saying, I thought frivolously, that one might have measles, but had never infected anyone with whooping-cough.
Roderick gave up angling for a quotable political commitment and tried to bounce Melanie back into sultry seduction. Her own instincts were telling her she would get further with me if she laid off the sex, because the doubt showed clearly in her manner as she attempted to do as he wanted. But evidently it was important to them both that she should persevere, and she refused to be discouraged by my lack of answering spark. She smiled a meek feminine smile to deprecate every opinion she had uttered, and bashfully lowered the thick black lashes.
Katya and Roderick exchanged eye-signals as blinding as lighthouses on a dark night, and Katya said she was going to make coffee. Roderick said he would help: and why didn’t Melanie and Link move over to the sofa, it was more comfortable than sitting round the table.
Melanie smiled shyly. I admired the achievement: she was as shy underneath as a sergeant-major. She draped herself beautifully over the sofa with the green material swirling closely across the perfect bosom which rose and fell gently with every breath. She noted the direction of my eyes and smiled with pussy-cat satisfaction.
Premature, dearest Melanie, premature, I thought.
Roderick carried in a tray of coffee cups and Katya went out on to the balcony. When she came in, she shook her head. Roderick poured out the coffee and Katya handed it round: the suppressed inner excitement, absent during dinner, was fizzing away again in the corners of her smile.
I looked at my watch. A quarter past ten.
I said, ‘I must be going soon. Early start tomorrow morning, I’m afraid.’
Katya said quickly, ‘Oh no, you can’t go yet, Link,’ and Roderick handed me a bulbous glass with enough brandy to sink a battleship. I took a sip but made it look like a swallow, and reflected that if I’d drunk everything he’d given me I would have been in no state to drive away.
Melanie kicked off her golden slippers and flexed her toes. On them she wore pearly pink nail varnish and nothing else: and with a quick flash of bare ankle and calf she managed to plant the idea in my mind that under the green shift there were no other clothes.
The coffee was as good as the dinner: Katya was more expert a cook than conspirator. Within twenty minutes she again strolled out on to the balcony, and this time, when she came back, the message was a nod.
I looked at all three of them, wondering. Roderick with his old-young face, Katya yellow-frilly and irresponsible, Melanie conscientiously weaving her web. They had laid some sort of a trap. The only thing was... what?
Twenty to eleven. I finished my coffee, stood up, and said, ‘I really must go now...’
This time there was no resistance. They all three uncurled themselves to their feet.
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for a great evening.’
They smiled.
‘Marvellous food,’ I said to Katya.
She smiled.
‘Splendid drinks,’ I said to Roderick.
He smiled.
‘Superb company,’ I said to Melanie.
She smiled.
Not a really genuine smile among them. They had watchful, expectant eyes. My mouth, for all the available liquid, felt dry.
We moved towards the lobby, which was an extension of the sitting-room.
Melanie said, ‘Time I was going too... Roderick, would you order me a taxi?’
‘Sure, love,’ he said easily, and then, as if the thought was just striking, ‘but you go the same way as Link... I’m sure he would give you a lift.’
They all looked at me, smiling.
‘Of course,’ I said. What else. What else could I say?
The smiles went on and on.
Melanie scooped up a tiny wrap from beside the front door, and Roderick and Katya saw us down the hall and into the lift, and were still waving farewell as the doors closed between us. The lift sank. One of those automatic lifts which stopped at every floor one had pre-selected. I pressed G for ground, and at G for ground it stopped.
Politely I let Melanie out first. Then I said, ‘I say... terribly sorry... I’ve left my signet ring on the wash basin in Roderick’s bathroom. I’ll just dash back for it. You wait there, I won’t be a second.’
The doors were closing before she could demur. I pressed the buttons for floors 2 and 6. Got out at 2. Watched the pointer begin to slide towards Roderick’s floor at 6, and skipped quickly through the doors of the service stairs, at the back of the hall.
The unadorned concrete and ironwork steps wound down round a small steep well and let me out into an area full of stacked laundry baskets, central-heating boilers, and rows of garbage cans. Out in the narrow street behind the covered yard I turned left, skirted the whole of the next door block at a fast pace, and finally, more slowly, inconspicuously walked in the shadows back towards Roderick’s.
I stopped in a doorway a hundred yards away, and watched.
There were four men in the street, waiting. Two opposite the front entrance of Roderick’s apartment block. Two others patiently standing near my hired car. All of them carried objects which gleamed in the street lamps, and whose shapes I knew all too well.
Melanie came out of the apartment block and hurried across the road to talk to two of the men. The green dress clung to her body and appeared diaphanous to the point of transparency in the quality of light in the street. She and the men conferred agitatedly, and there was a great deal of shaking of heads.