18 | MATTHEW

PRU AND I HAD ARRANGED to meet a week later, on her return from London. Amsterdam was in the grip of an insistent autumn drizzle and the air was moist and invasive. It seeped in under collars and shirt cuffs. The lamplight was hazy and inconstant in the rain’s shifting motion. We met in the warm fug of the Hotel Americain on Leidseplein, one of the haunts of the city’s journalists and always busy. It had low, gilded lighting and small tables tucked into nooks, and it was easy to blend in. Pru seemed taken by the lounge’s intellectual ambience, set off by its art deco interior, which was a mélange of reds, oranges, greens and blues, the walls hung with tapestries of hunting scenes, animals picked out in angular patterns.

As if picking up where we’d left off, we ordered whiskies. Pru sat nursing hers for a few minutes, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers. Her face was serious and her skin pale. I realised suddenly that this was in fact her first visit to Europe. Until she met me in Amsterdam a week before, she had never left South Africa. And now she had added London to her itinerary.

She began to describe her journey to me – the crossing of the North Sea from the Hook of Holland to Harwich and then the train on to Liverpool Street station in London. Her description of the channel crossing was vivid. It reminded me that Oliver and I had planned to do some travelling when I got my official status in the Netherlands and my job, but we’d never got round to it. We’d stayed unadventurously in our routine instead. I felt a moment’s envy.

“I couldn’t stand the claustrophobia below deck, Matt,” Pru was saying. “All the bodies spread out to sleep on the benches and floors. The smells and the noise. Jesus. And other people obviously setting in to drink through the whole crossing at those horrible little bar tables bolted to the floor.”

She had gone on deck to smoke and to get some fresh air, but that wasn’t any more pleasant. Her description of the icy sting of the spray as the ferry’s prow carved a path through the choppy water, and how it felt like small cuts across her face, made me feel for her. The European cold and its biting wind took some getting used to. The freezing cold soon sent her below deck again. She felt alienated, cold in the midst of strangers and their myriad languages, cut off and fearful.

“Sounds grim. Did you manage to get any sleep at all?” I asked, watching her twist and untwist her hair. I had used to find this habit endearing back in Cape Town, then annoying. Now it was endearing again.

“God. Not a wink,” she said. “The way the ferry rolled. It was bloody awful, especially as we got out into the deeper sea. I didn’t throw up but there were moments when I definitely thought I might.” She took a long sip from her glass. “And the all-nighters didn’t help. They just got drunker and louder.”

Her spirits lifted when they reached Harwich in a grey cumulus dawn, and catching the train had been easy. She’d sat with her face to the window on the way in to London, fascinated by the contours of the English countryside – the green and pleasant land – the hills in the pale morning light contrasting with the flatness and muted blues of Holland. “Rather different from the Highveld at the end of winter,” she said wryly.

I remembered the end of winter road trip I had taken from Cape Town to Johannesburg, dropping Oliver on the way to make his uncertain way across the border to freedom, my heart in my mouth and the pain of his loss already biting. I had been as struck by the colours on that drive – first the Karoo, then the Free State, and finally the Transvaal – as Pru had been struck by a very different landscape on her first welcome to England. Those colours, and the hard, unyielding ground, were of ash, wheat and rich ochre. Thinking of them made my throat ache.

By the time Pru’s train rolled into Liverpool Street station the sky seemed to have closed in on everything and her enchantment with England was already beginning to fade. A smell of wet tar hung on the air and the grey wash of the sky pressed down. As she walked the streets of Bloomsbury looking for her nondescript bed and breakfast off Gower Street, it began to drizzle.

“I’d heard about the London drizzle, Matt,” she laughed, “and now I’ve experienced it. By the time I finally got to my room, which was right at the top of three flights of creaking narrow stairs, I was panting and soaked through. I had to change all my clothes, even my underwear!”

“Well, I hope the city redeemed itself later on?” I said, catching the eye of a waiter on his way back to the bar.

“It did,” she said. “I found the bookshops.”

Later, when there was a pause in the seemingly endless drizzle, Pru had made her way down Charing Cross Road where she was drawn into a warmly lit second-hand bookshop near the Leicester Square Tube station and was soon lost in their tightly stacked shelves. The next time she checked her watch she realised she had been paging through a series of feminist texts at the back of the shop for more than half an hour.

Outside the sky had faded to a dull white and the streetlights were already coming on. A couple of bookshops later, she found a coffee shop a few doors down and, although the coffee was weak and almost tasteless – “boiled in an urn with milk, Matt!” – and the Formica table tops gleamed unappealingly in the surgical fluorescent light, the drink warmed her up and gave her courage for the next stage of her journey and the meeting that was going to be all important. Using her map, she made her way through Chinatown and Soho, taking her time, stretching out the remaining forty minutes so that she wouldn’t be too early.

Mandla, or so she had been told was his name, was her contact. That was all she knew.

“Were you nervous?” I asked.

“What do you think?” she replied. “It’s been a while. I felt rusty, and it was London, not Cape Town or Joburg. I was accustomed to being watched, or assuming I was being watched, back home, but in a foreign city …”

“And you couldn’t have known what to expect, could you?” I added. “Go on. Tell me about Mandla.”

“You’re right,” said Pru. “I had no idea what to expect. Would this Mandla be an austere ideologue, or someone suspicious of a white woman, or simply … I don’t know … perfunctory, you know? Lacking warmth. I felt like a complete stranger suddenly, alone and adrift in this huge, confusing city, so many people rushing along the pavements.” She shuddered. “I felt very foreign.” She finished the last of her whisky. “And scared, yes. Scared too. I wondered what on earth I thought I was doing.”

Pru turned into Poland Street and there, as marked on her map, was a pub, the Coach and Horses – the assigned meeting place. It was an island of bright colour in what was a street of drab, ageing office blocks. Over the pub front hung a series of baskets overflowing with densely packed petunias and lobelia, pinks and purples and whites. I had forgotten what a good storyteller Pru was.

She realised that she was still fifteen minutes early, but she stepped inside anyway.

“I think I realised what Victorian was,” she admitted. “Green and red wallpaper, prints on the walls with horses and huntsmen, and these big old-fashioned-looking brass beer pulls. If anything, I felt even more foreign. It was full and everyone was smoking. My eyes were stinging.”

The bar stools and seats around tables all seemed to be taken by businessman in dark suits; there were a few women in one corner, laughing together.

At the bar she ordered a double whisky to give herself courage. The barmaid leaned in and cocked her head. “What’ll that be again, love?”

She stammered a reply. “A double Bell’s with ice, please,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. She began to fumble for her packet of cigarettes and her money.

A broad hand rested on her shoulder. “I’d know that accent anywhere,” a voice said from behind her. “You must be Pru.”

She turned into the striking features and wide smile of a black man, probably somewhere in his thirties.

“I am Mandla,” he said.

“I stuck out my hand to shake his,” Pru said, “and he just pulled me towards him and said, ‘Not so formal, comrade’. Then he hugged me.”