Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Frances Taver was one of them. Had been for years. From the forties when she had been a trade union organiser and run a mixed union of garment workers while this was legally possible, in the fifties, after her marriage, when she was manager of a black-and-white theatre group before that was disbanded by new legislation, to the early sixties, when she hid friends on the run from the police — Africans who were members of the newly banned political organisations — before the claims of that sort of friendship had to be weighed against the risk of the long spells of detention without trial introduced to betray it.

Frances Taver had few friends left now, and she was always slightly embarrassed when she heard an eager American or English voice over the telephone, announcing an arrival, a too-brief stay (of course), and the inevitable fond message of greetings to be conveyed from so-and-so — whoever it was who happened to have supplied the short list. A few years ago it had been fun and easy to make these visitors an excuse for a gathering that quite likely would turn into a party. The visitor would have a high old time learning to dance the kwela with black girls; he would sit fascinated, trying to keep sober enough to take it all in, listening to the fluent and fervent harangue of African, white and Indian politicals, drinking and arguing together in a paradox of personal freedom that, curiously, he couldn’t remember finding where there were no laws against the mixing of races. And no one enjoyed his fascination more than the objects of it themselves; Frances Taver and her friends were amused, in those days, in a friendly way, to knock the ‘right’ ideas slightly askew. In those days: that was how she thought of it; it seemed very long ago. She saw the faces, sometimes, a flash in an absence filled with newspaper accounts of trials, hearsay about activities in exile, chance remarks from someone who knew someone else who had talked over the fence with one who was under house arrest. Another, an African friend banned for his activities with the African National Congress, who had gone ‘underground’, came to see her at long intervals, in the afternoons when he could be sure the house would be empty. Although she was still youngish, she had come to think of ‘those days’ as her youth; and he was a vision strayed from it.

The voice on the telephone, this time, was American — soft, cautious — no doubt the man thought the line was tapped. Robert Greenman Ceretti, from Washington; while they were talking, she remembered that this was the political columnist who had somehow been connected with the Kennedy administration. Hadn’t he written a book about the Bay of Pigs? Anyway, she had certainly seen him quoted.

‘And how are the Brauns — I haven’t heard for ages—’ She made the usual enquiries about the well-being of the mutual acquaintance whose greetings he brought, and he made the usual speech about how much he was hoping he’d be able to meet her? She was about to say, as always, come to dinner, but an absurd recoil within her, a moment of dull panic, almost, made her settle for an invitation to drop in for a drink two days later. ‘If I can be of any help to you, in the meantime?’ she had to add; he sounded modest and intelligent.

‘Well, I do appreciate it. I’ll look forward to Wednesday.’

At the last minute she invited a few white friends to meet him, a doctor and his wife who ran a tuberculosis hospital in an African reserve, and a young journalist who had been to America on a leadership exchange programme. But she knew what the foreign visitor wanted of her and she had an absurd — again, that was the word — compulsion to put him in the position where, alas, he could ask it. He was a small, cosy, red-headed man with a chipmunk smile, and she liked him. She drove him back to his hotel after the other guests had left, and they chatted about the articles he was going to write and the people he was seeing — had he been able to interview any important Nationalists, for example? Well, not yet, but he hoped to have something lined up for the following week, in Pretoria. Another thing he was worried about (here it came), he’d hardly been able to exchange a word with any black man except the one who cleaned his room at the hotel.

She heard her voice saying casually, ‘Well, perhaps I might be able to help you, there,’ and he took it up at once, gravely, gratefully, sincerely, smiling at her — ‘I hoped you just might. If I could only get to talk with a few ordinary, articulate people. I mean, I think I’ve been put pretty much in the picture by the courageous white people I’ve been lucky enough to meet — people like you and your husband — but I’d like to know a little at first hand about what Africans themselves are thinking. If you could fix it, it’d be wonderful.’

Now it was done, at once she withdrew, from herself rather than him. ‘I don’t know. People don’t want to talk any more. If they’re doing anything, it’s not something that can be talked about. Those that are left. Black and white. The ones you ought to see are shut away.’

They were sitting in the car, outside the hotel. She could see in his encouraging, admiring, intent face how he had been told that she, if anyone, could introduce him to black people, hers, if anyone’s, was the house to meet them.

There was a twinge of vanity: ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll ring you, then, Bob.’ Of course they were already on first-name terms; lonely affinity overleapt acquaintance in South Africa when like-minded whites met.

‘You don’t have to say more than when and where. I didn’t like to talk, that first day, over the phone,’ he said.

They always had fantasies of danger. ‘What can happen to you?’ she said. Her smile was not altogether pleasant. They always protested, too, that their fear was not for themselves, it was on your behalf, etc. ‘You’ve got your passport. You don’t live here.’

She did not see Jason Madela from one month’s end to the next but when she telephoned him at the building where she remembered him once having had an office on the fringe of the white town, he accepted the invitation to lunch just as if he had been one of the intimates who used to drop in any time. And then there was Edgar, Edgar Xixo the attorney, successor to her old friend Samson Dumile’s practice; one could always get him. And after that? She could have asked Jason to bring someone along, perhaps one of the boxing promoters or gamblers it amused him to produce where the drinks were free — but that would have been too obvious, even for the blind eye that she and Jason Madela were able to turn to the nature of the invitation. In the end she invited little Spuds Buthelezi, the reporter. What did it matter? He was black, anyway. There was no getting out of the whole business, now.

She set herself to cook a good lunch, just as good as she had ever cooked, and she put out the drinks and the ice in the shelter of the glassed-in end of the big veranda, so that the small company should not feel lost. Her fading hair had been dyed to something approximating its original blonde and then streaked with grey, the day before, and she felt the appearance to be pleasingly artificial; she wore a bright, thick linen dress that showed off sunburned shoulders like the knobs of well-polished furniture, and she was aware that her blue eyes were striking in contrast with her tough brown face. She felt Robert Greenman Ceretti’s eyes on her, a moment, as he stood in the sunny doorway; yes, she was also a woman, queening it alone among men at lunch.

‘You mix the martinis, there’s a dear,’ she said. ‘It’s such a treat to have a real American one.’ And while he bent about over bottles with the neatness of a small man, she was in and out of the veranda, shepherding the arrival of the other guests.