Some of the fortunes had declined so that portions of the grounds had been sold, some of the sons had emigrated again, to Canada or Australia this time. Some grandsons had reacted against materialism, as third generations can afford to, and left the suburb to live and work in accordance with a social conscience. There was a hiatus during which the houses were inappropriate to the taste of the time; they were regarded as relics of the nouveau riche, while newer money favoured country estates with stables, outside the city: the houses would be demolished and the suburb become the site of multinational company complexes.
But it looked as if it might be saved by the unpredicted solution of desegregation. A new generation of still newer money arrived, and these were no immigrants from another country. They were those who had always belonged, but only looked on the pillars and balconies from the hovels and township yards they were confined to. It was one of these houses that Motsamai had bought. Whether or not he admired the architecture (the parents did not have their son’s criteria for determining the worth or otherwise of people’s taste) it provided a comfortable space for a successful man and his family and was now supplied with current standard equipment, electrically-controlled gates for their security against those who remained in township yards and city squatter camps.
The enthusiastic chatter of the television set was part of the company, its changing levels of brightness another face among them. They were gathered in one area by a natural response to the oversize of the living-room where islands of armchairs and spindly tables were grouped. Hamilton Motsamai had discarded his jacket as he shed the persona of his day spent flying back and forth to plead in the Appeal Court at Bloemfontein. — Make yourself at home, Harald!—
A domestic bar that must have been part of the original equipment of the house was stocked with the best brands, a young man who seemed slight in contrast with the confident ebullience of his father was chivvied to offer drinks between Motsamai’s introductions to various others summoned — a brother-in-law, someone’s sister, someone else’s friend; unclear whether these were all guests or more or less living in the house. Motsamai switched angrily to his mother tongue to reproach several youngsters who were lying stomach-down on the carpet, paddling their legs in glee at the pop group performing on television, and had not risen to greet the guests.
The wife and a daughter — so many introductions at once — had entered with bowls of potato crisps and peanuts. Motsamai’s wife was a beauty in the outmoded style, broad-bosomed, her hair straightened and re-curled in European matronly fashion, but the daughter was tall and slender, nature’s old dutiful emphasis on the source of nourishment, the breasts, mutated into insignificance under loose clothing, her long dreadlocks drawn away from a Nefertiti profile, the worldly-wise eyes of her father emerging in slanting assertion under painted lids, and the delicate jut of her jaw a rejection of everything that would have determined her life in the past.
Motsamai’s wife — Lenali, that’s right — was animatedly embarrassed by the behaviour of the children.
— Never mind, they’re enjoying themselves, let’s not interrupt them. — Hadn’t she, Claudia — oh long ago — had the same parental reaction when her own son had ignored the boring conventions of the adult world.
— These kids are terrible. You can believe me. I don’t know what they learn at school. No respect. If you’ve had a boy, of course you know how it is, the mother can’t do anything with them and the father — well, he’s got important things on his mind, isn’t it … always! Hamilton only complains to me! I don’t know if you found it like that!—
This woman doesn’t know what happened to the boy Claudia ‘found like that’; or rather, if she does (surely Hamilton has told her something of the story of the clients he’s brought home) she doesn’t draw attention to their plight by the pretence that their son doesn’t exist, that what he says he has done has nullified everything he once was, the way old friends feel they must do. Duncan is not taboo, tonight, here. — I used to think it was because ours is an only child, and he was too much among grownups, he showed this the only way he could, just ignoring them. Wouldn’t kiss the aunts who patted his head and asked what he wanted to be when he was big … he’d disappear to his room.—
— Oh I find the teenage is the worst! In our culture, I mean, you don’t kiss your auntie, but you must greet her in the proper way we’ve always done.—
Harald, under his conversation with others heard; Claudia was laughing, talking about Duncan.
— You’re in the legal game, with Hamilton? — The brother-in-law, or was it some other relative.
— No, no, insurance.—
— That’s also a good game to be in. You pay, pay all your life and if you live a long time before you die the insurance people have had more of your money than they’re going to give out, isn’t it.—
There was head-thrown-back laughter.
— That’s the law of diminishing returns.—
The different levels of education and sophistication at ease in the gathering were something that didn’t exist in the social life Harald had known; there, if you had a brother-in-law who was a meat packer at a wholesale butchery (the first man had announced his métier) you would not invite him on the same occasion when you expected compatibility with a client from the corporate business world, and an academic introduced as Professor Seakhoa who would drily produce an axiom in ironic correction of naïve humour. Hamilton put a hand on either shoulder, Harald’s and the meat packer’s. — Beki, my friend here doesn’t come knocking on your door selling funeral policies, he’s a director who sits away up on the fifteenth floor of one of those corporate headquarters where bonds for millions are being negotiated for industries and housing down there below — the big development stuff.—
— Well, that must be an even better game, nê. More bucks. Because the government’s got to pay up.—
New faces appeared with the movement in and out, about the room. Some young friends of the adolescents, their voices in the higher register. The academic, whose belly wobbled in appreciation of his own wit, turned to tease them. Claudia — where was Claudia — Harald kept antennae out for her — she was talking to the son, no doubt about the prospects of a career in medicine, he had been captured by his father and delivered to her. A glimpse of her face as she was distracted for a moment to the offer of samoosas: Claudia’s expression with her generous frown of energy; probably about to suggest that the boy come to her clinic, put on a white coat, lend a hand where it could be useful and try out for himself what the practice of medicine should mean in service to the people and the country. She laughed again, apparently in encouragement of something the boy was saying.
A tiny, light-coloured old man had already scented substantial food and sat with a heaped plate on his knees eating a chicken leg warily as a cat that has stolen from the table. Everyone sauntered, talking, colliding amiably, to another room almost as large as the one they had left, where meat, chicken and potatoes, putu and salads, bowls of dessert decorated with swirling scripts of whipped cream were set out. Harald found his way to her. — We didn’t expect a party. — But she only smiled as if she were still talking to another guest. — Oh I don’t think it’s really that. Just the way the family gets together for the weekend.—