IT IS MORNING in Mokimolle and I am standing at the window of the dining room, drawn there by the dirge-like sound of a passing funeral procession. Up front, a coffin – top of the range, with brassy handles – lies across the shoulders of six suited mourners. Behind them stalks a cassocked priest. Then thirty or forty other mourners, many of them children and all so raggedly attired that, apart from their sighing song, you wouldn’t think to connect them with the smartly dressed entourage at their head.
A soft wind is blowing. It lifts the eddying dust raised by the bare, metronomic feet of the mourners into an apparent veil that half obscures them as they turn a corner. Going, no doubt, in the direction of the cemetery – where I too am headed, once breakfast is over.
The houses on the street, each fronted by a stoep and, sometimes, a pavement tree for good measure, stand still and undisturbed, making me feel I may have dreamed the procession. No one appears to live in Mokimolle, that’s the thing: the houses are just too quiet; and without the living, how then any dead?
But of course we do have the dead. I’m proof of that. I would never have come, were it not for past ghosts.
Quitting the window, I return with a wry smile to my unfinished breakfast. Soon, I tell myself – soon, Paul, soon! – the reckoning.
In 1962, Sunday has come round again: October 28th, which by evening would mark the end of the Cuban missile crisis, since it was then that Khrushchev broadcast his agreement to dismantle his missile sites in return for America promising to stop the blockade, not invade Cuba and, at the same time, withdraw its own missiles from Turkey. Although this last detail would only emerge much later.
In Pretoria, that morning, Paul was climbing with a heavy heart into the back of a dusty truck.
‘Everything all right?’ queried Mr du Toit, twisting round to get a better look at his sombre expression. ‘You haven’t been frightened, have you, by what’s been happening? ’Cause it isn’t necessary, hey. Like I’ve just been telling Laura, you’re quite safe here. Honestly. We all are. Believe me.’
Words which, coiled about as they were with the smoke that also issued from his mouth, might have had a more calming effect had Paul been able to think they encompassed not just Cuba, but Spier’s arrest as well. Although it wasn’t absolutely certain of course that Spier had been arrested. All Paul had to go on, in the absence of anyone confirming anything, was what he’d seen. Maybe it was just the handcuffed Pheko who’d been taken into custody? For stealing perhaps – blacks often stole; you were always hearing stories. In which case, Spier might have been present purely as a witness, or as a spokesman for Pheko, who couldn’t be expected to defend or speak for himself. Blacks didn’t have the confidence; the language; the right.
Though on the other hand, Paul hadn’t seen Spier at all on Saturday evening, which often you did. And there was this to consider too: Botma’s freighted words in the wake of the startling scene they’d both witnessed.
‘I think it’s best,’ he’d said, lighting his pipe finally, ‘if you don’t say anything to anyone, Harvey, about what we’ve just seen. Okay? For the time being. You don’t want to start a nasty rumour.’
So all through supper, a particularly anxious sunset watch, getting ready for bed, even after lights-out as he lay staring again at the stars, Paul hadn’t uttered a word. Just worried and wondered, wondered and worried. Alone in his misery.
‘But where is Andre?’ Mr du Toit was asking. ‘Why does he always, but always keep us waiting?’
‘Because he’s a hopeless slowcoach, Pa,’ said Laura. ‘You ought to teach him a lesson.’
‘How?’
‘Stop his pocket money or something.’
‘It’s a thought. But here he comes. Uiteindelik! Good of you to grace us with your presence.’ This as du Toit clambered into the back of the truck alongside Paul. ‘What’s your excuse this time?’ The key was turned in the ignition. ‘It had better be good.’ The engine chuntered into life.
‘So, Pa, tell us,’ was du Toit’s impervious response, ‘this Castro and the Soviet missiles, you must have heard. We’ve been talking about it all week, hey, Harvey? What does the government think?’
The truck was turning into the street to begin its farmward journey. First past the houses that stood so proud in their well-tended gardens. Then the newer, less affluent suburbs on the edge of town: smaller houses, meaner gardens. Then a dirt road, dust behind them, parched earth to either side and, at moments, waddling women with huge boxes on their heads in the middle distance, since that was how black people always carried their possessions: on their heads, in boxes, standing proud. Not proud like the houses that surrounded St Luke’s, but still, in their own way, proud.
In the meantime, the first of that day’s conversations was continuing thus:
‘Like I’ve just told Laura,’ Mr du Toit was saying, ‘and Paul. You’re safe here. We all are. No need to worry.’
‘Is it serious, though?’
‘Ja, of course it’s serious. You’ve heard me talk about how dangerous these commies are.’
‘So we should be worrying, then!’
‘What you must worry about,’ interjected Laura, ‘is if Pa stops your pocket money.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘For being such a slowcoach, of course. Hey, Pa?’
‘That wasn’t my fault,’ said du Toit. ‘Blame Stanford. I had to find Matron for some stupid meeting they’re supposed to be having, all the staff.’
‘A staff meeting?’ asked Mr du Toit sharply. ‘On a Sunday? Really?’
‘So you can’t blame me,’ continued Paul’s back-seat companion, shooting him the sort of look – a look of exasperated complicity, one that assumed the two of them to be equal in their outrage at the way boys could be treated – which previously he would have prized. But not today. Today he just looked quickly away, through the dusty window, to concentrate instead on Pretoria’s newer, less affluent suburbs; then the veld, quite unaffluent.
At the wheel, Mr du Toit, having allowed the blame for his son’s tardiness to remain at Stanford’s door, was asking about their respective weeks; about some concert Laura was practising for; and had anything else happened? Of note. Apart from Cuba. That they wanted to tell him about.
Well?
Mercifully, the questions stopped at this point, since by now they’d reached the farm. Mr du Toit parked, as before, under a blue gum, and together they trooped on to the stoep to find that Violet had again set out some rusks and cooldrink for them. Laura vanished with hers along the stoep, while Mr du Toit, hovering for a moment, lit yet another cigarette from the packet he always kept in his shirt pocket and said, ‘The old boy’s still feeling ’n bietjie vrot, I’m afraid. So! No arguments today. All right? I haven’t the patience and you know what it means to him.’ Casually, he ruffled the Brylcreemed smoothness of his son’s blond hair.
‘Okay, Pa, okay,’ said du Toit, squirming. ‘I get the message.’
‘You don’t mind, Paul, do you?’ continued Mr du Toit, cat-like eyes swivelling in his direction.
‘Of course not, sir,’ said Paul.
‘Sir!’ echoed Mr du Toit with a chuckle. ‘I like it! Sir!’
Then he also vanished, still chuckling, into the house and there was no one to overhear Paul say, as they took up their cooldrinks, ‘So now you have to tell me – you just have to!’
‘Tell you what?’
‘The police were there yesterday, you know. Maybe they’d even been there before, watching from a car. I saw something, that’s for sure. Anyway, Pheko was in handcuffs and Spier was with him and …’
‘Spier?’ repeated du Toit. ‘You mean it’s happened at last!’
‘What, though?’ persisted Paul. ‘What’s happened?’ And here it slipped out – ‘Andre!’ – the only time (I think) he ever called du Toit by his Christian name. ‘It isn’t fair, keeping me in the dark like this.’
He tried to encourage a fuller response by listing the connections he could already make himself. In no special order, these were:
Is this about keeping the country safe?
Die rooi gevaar.
And/or the swart one.
The comb. His report.
Ending with another: ‘You have to tell me! Please!’
He’d started the list while they were both still standing on the stoep; by its close, they were almost at the koppie that overlooked the foul-smelling dam and, beyond it, Tsebo’s kraal.
It was here, litany finished, that du Toit said, ‘Remember when you got so mad about your stupid diary?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Because I’d seen something you didn’t want anyone else to know about. Like some of the things you wrote about me, which weren’t very nice, hey, you must admit; also when your grandmother said she thought this country wasn’t safe any more, how you ought to go and live with her in England. Crazy stuff like that. Which even you didn’t like because you also said – I saw that too – how you felt about being such a sout-piel. So then I had my brainwave!’
‘Brainwave?’
‘I asked you to join my club, duh! A bit because I pitied you, like with Slug. Only with Slug, it’s how fat he is. But also – it’s true – I knew you could help me with Pa. You don’t know what it’s like, how he always goes on at me to do things better, be a ware du Toit. You’ve seen the photos.’
‘You mean …?’
‘Ja, on the walls. Pa’s always telling me how hard they worked to make a place for us. Which Pa does too, but in a different way: he also wants South Africa to shine. And me – because now I’m growing up, he says, now I must also do the same. Be like them. Him. Then he found out that your parents know that priest whose son was put under house arrest last week, the one who also knows Spier – that’s the only reason, hey, why Pa asked you all to visit – anyhow, that’s also when I had my brainwave. I thought that if we did some spying, just the two of us, because you’re good at noticing things, but I’ve already told you that, then I could share with Pa what we saw or found. And if what you say is right – about Spier, I mean, but I’ll ask him before lunch, he can tell us then – well, it’s worked, hey. It’s really, really worked and he can’t accuse me any more of only being Ma’s son.’
As with other such moments from that pivotal month, I can’t swear those were his exact words. Though, as when he’d first asked me, also on the farm, to watch and take note, that was certainly the gist of it. The underlying thrust.
‘But right now,’ he said in conclusion, ‘we’ve got Tsebo to visit. Last one there is a vrot tomato!’ Adding, once they’d both arrived, panting, at the bamboo fence surrounding the kraal, ‘Remember! We don’t go into the hut unless he asks. And leave the talking to me, okay?’
They found the old man in much the same spot and posture as a fortnight ago: stick to hand, on a chair in the sun.
‘Dumela,’ murmured du Toit, coming to a standstill.
‘Dumela, Andre. Dumela, Harvey,’ replied Tsebo, favouring each of them with a distinct smile. ‘It is nice to see you again. Violet is cooking a special lunch. Much better than school, she says. What do you eat most, Harvey?’
Paul would have quite liked to specify – it was a novelty for him, to be standing in a kraal, conversing with a black man – but du Toit prevented this by asking Tsebo how he’d been feeling. And then, after the old man had explained that he wasn’t so well this week, by just as quickly posing a string of further questions, some of them quite unnecessary-sounding. As though he feared even the slightest of interventions from Paul. Why?
Then another thought: although, for Paul, black people (even Mosa) were always confined to the sidelines, much like the chorus in a Greek play (they’d studied one last term), here was du Toit talking directly to Tsebo in a manner that put him in mind of Pheko handing him the handkerchief. Pheko, who’d afterwards been led away in handcuffs.
Meanwhile, du Toit, having asked the last of his questions, was stepping backwards and Tsebo was enquiring softly, ‘Do you see your mother next week?’
Tightly, du Toit nodded.
‘I have a parcel for her, please. She gave this book to Tsebo a long time ago. Can you take it back?’
Again du Toit nodded.
‘It is in the hut. On the table.’
While du Toit went in search of the parcel, the old man, looking hard at Paul, said, ‘It makes me very happy that you are here again. A friend for Andre is good.’ Then, as du Toit emerged from the hut with a small, roughly wrapped parcel under one arm, he raised a hand in farewell. ‘Be safe! And come back soon.’
Du Toit took the lead again on quitting the kraal, with Paul allowing a certain distance to develop between them as he digested their encounter with Tsebo. Until at last, having decided he had nothing to lose, he came up close to ask of the back of du Toit’s suntanned neck, ‘Where do you go, to see your mother?’
The muscles in du Toit’s neck tightened. But that was all. No slackening of pace. No turning around.
‘Lombard says …’ persevered Paul.
Now du Toit did swing round, staring him down with those icy blue eyes of his.
‘Lombard,’ he spat, ‘knows nothing. Lombard doesn’t even know how to mind his own beeswax. And that’s what Ma is – okay? Mine and no one else’s. Not even Laura’s. Got that?’
On regaining the house, which, after this exchange, they did in virtual silence, du Toit left Paul alone for a bit while he went (or so he said) to talk to his father. Then they repaired to du Toit’s room, where somehow they managed to distract themselves, du Toit with his Dinky toys, Paul by immersing himself once more in du Toit’s comics, until it was time to revisit the gloomy dining room with its dark, old-fashioned furnishings and all those photographic portraits on the wall.
‘I hope the baas is hungry?’ Violet said to Paul as she set down her dishes on the table. ‘It’s tamatiebredie, from the madam’s old recipe. Rice also, and a pudding for later, very big, Violet’s best.’
‘Thank you, Violet,’ said Mr du Toit, before lowering his head, closing his eyes and going on to murmur, ‘O Here, en U gee aan hulle almal spyse op die regte tyd. U voed uit U milde hand en vervul alles wat op aarde leef met U ryke seën. Amen.’
Once everyone had helped themselves, and after advising Laura that she could learn too, if she listened, he then launched into a favoured subject of Spier’s: the Western world and communism. He explained how, as an ideology, communism wanted (just as President Kennedy had said) world domination. South Africa, therefore, had a vital role to play in the fight to keep the Western world free from all this. But – and it was a big but – there were elements within the country who wanted otherwise. Who believed in communism, actually held by it, even followed its precepts. If you could credit such a thing!
At first, manifestations of this attitude had been relatively mild, he said. Ill-considered talk, union activity, strikes; stuff like that. Recently, however, things had escalated. Sabotage of important buildings, for instance, and now an article in that morning’s Sunday Times about a hitherto secret branch of the banned African National Congress called Umkonto we Sizwe, or ‘Spear of the Nation’, which had sent the paper a ‘proclamation’ announcing that from now on its motto would be ‘a life for a life’ in its campaign to overthrow ‘white rule in South Africa’. Quotes from the article were indicated by the movement, in mid-air, of paired fingers doing duty as quotation marks.
Which was why, Mr du Toit said, the government had needed to come up with something like house arrest.
‘And so, boys, we get to our friend Simon Tindall. Simon Tindall and his friend, Andrew Spier.’
Without going into specifics – he said he couldn’t do that, it was better kept secret how he did things – he nonetheless told them that, as a concerned citizen of the best country in the world, he must always do his utmost to protect the government from people like Simon Tindall. People who were potentially dangerous in what they said; what they thought. So, when he had learned that Peggy and Douglas knew Simon’s father, he’d grabbed the opportunity to find out more. This didn’t mean he hadn’t wanted to meet Peggy and Douglas too; of course he had. They seemed delightful and anyway, he liked showing newcomers the ropes.
At the same time, he’d learned – at cricket maybe? he couldn’t now remember – that Simon Tindall knew Andrew Spier, which was what had given him the idea that someone should start keeping an eye on Spier as well. Because he’d already heard from Andre of course all about this General Knowledge Club and the sorts of things that were discussed there. Disgraceful, really.
Then the pair of them – here Mr du Toit’s green eyes darted approvingly from du Toit to Paul and back again – had established a link between Spier and the school groundsman. Which the authorities had taken most seriously. When told. As well they might. For Spier was clearly spreading dissent not only among his own pupils, bad enough, but the servants too. Imagine!
Spier and the groundsman would now be questioned, he said, and, if what everyone suspected was true, put on trial, just like that other troublemaker Mr Mandela, then sent away for a very long time. Years and years and years, with any luck.
‘You boys can be very proud,’ he concluded, ‘of what you’ve helped us to achieve. You’re quite a team.’ He raised his beer. ‘Shall we toast ourselves? Why not? I think we deserve it.’
If Paul’s stomach had been knotted at the start of the meal, by the time Violet’s pudding was finished it had practically turned to stone. Except that he didn’t, in reality, pay much attention to his body’s response to Mr du Toit’s long lecture. He’d gone into mild shock, I suppose, and moved through the rest of the exeat in something of a daze.
After lunch, as Violet smilingly cleared away the plates, Mr du Toit took the coffee she’d brought him to his study. He wanted, he told them, to finish the paper. Meanwhile, they were to amuse themselves, please, and not make too much noise. It was a Sunday, remember: the day of the Lord; one of rest.
(Only later would this make me smile: that he could mouth such a platitude when he himself actually never stopped working; for what else had my parents’ own Sunday visit been, if not work? A labour, indeed, of love. Another irony.)
Laura vanished too, leaving du Toit to say, with a smirk, ‘Happy now?’
‘Happy?’
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m going to my room.’
Paul could, he supposed, have gone with him, although he didn’t see that du Toit’s comics – or even the Dinky toys – would distract him now. Nor did he fancy being in du Toit’s company much. So he stepped outside rather, into the afternoon heat.
Initially, he just wandered about in front of the house, kicking at loose stones. Then, because it was too hot in the sun and he worried that he might be seen from Mr du Toit’s study, he headed for the nearest of the outbuildings, the one containing the old car on bricks and the agricultural machinery.
It was here, on the seat of a rusted tractor, as he fiddled restlessly with the gearstick, that Laura found him.
‘Violet noticed,’ she explained. ‘That you’d been left on your own. Have you two argued?’
‘No.’
‘Yissus, but he’s rude, my boet. He’s lucky to have friends.’
At lunch, she’d been in the same simple dress she’d worn on his first visit, blue like her eyes; since lunch, however, she’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt, clothing which allowed her to clamber easily on to the nose of the tractor, where she now settled. ‘Last time,’ she said, ‘you started to tell me about this club of his. Remember? I suppose Lombard must have been a member too, until he made the mistake of talking to Andre about Ma. Tell me again, how does it work exactly?’
Paul hadn’t imagined the exeat providing him with another chance to find out about du Toit’s mother and Lombard. Yet here it was, all of a sudden, in the shape of the unapproachable Laura, unapproachable no longer.
So, in defiance of what du Toit had once told him – If you want to stay in the club, you mustn’t talk about it to other people. Not ever. Got that? – he explained precisely how it worked. Then, while she was digesting this information, he snuck in his own question about Lombard and Mrs du Toit.
Frowning – she obviously didn’t think much of how her brother’s club was ordered – she said, ‘Hell, that’s pathetic, treating your own friends in that way. If Ma knew …’
Their mother, it now came out, was from Johannesburg originally. English-speaking and a gifted musician, she played both the piano and the violin, instruments she also taught at a school in Johannesburg, since that was where she’d gone, back home, after she and Mr du Toit had separated.
‘They’re not divorced – Pa won’t allow a divorce; it’s against God’s law, he says – but she’s not coming back, it just wouldn’t work. Although she still has things here, instruments and stuff, which he won’t allow her to take away.’
Why wouldn’t it work, the marriage? Well, they were very different, apparently. Not only was she English-speaking – which was why, incidentally, Laura and Andre had been sent to English-speaking schools, against the wishes of her father, but her mother had insisted – she was also more of a city person and quite different politically, too. For example, whatever it was that Mr du Toit did for the government, Mrs du Toit hadn’t approved. In fact, it was a mystery really, why they’d got together in the first place, though both of them had often told her how they’d met at a concert in Pretoria where Mrs du Toit was playing and how Mr du Toit had gone up afterwards to congratulate her on her technique. It had, he said, been like hearing angels. Or something soppy like that.
Her mother was also very pretty. That was a factor too. Everyone said how beautiful she was. Soft and kind. Not at all like her hard father.
Another difference.
‘I have more of Ma in me than Andre does,’ she said, still frowning. ‘But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hate her being gone. It’s why he’s like he is, really. Pak vol anger, which he doesn’t know what to do with, that’s what Violet says. She’s sort of our mother now. Here, I mean, at home. Not when we visit Jo’burg, obviously. She’s known us since we were babies. Tsebo also. They take care of us. Or try to.’
‘And Lombard?’ asked Paul. ‘What happened for him and your …’ he hesitated slightly before deploying the Afrikaans word ‘… boet to argue?’
It turned out that Laura, who’d liked Lombard – in fact her boet used to tease her that she really smaaked him, which was silly, she didn’t, he was too young for her, but anyway – one time she’d had much the same conversation with Lombard as she was having now with Paul, about their mother and things. But then Lombard had made the mistake of telling Andre he understood, which Andre hadn’t liked because after that Lombard hadn’t been asked back. No one had. Until now.
‘So be warned!’ she said. ‘If you want to stay in this mad club of his, you’d better keep your trap shut. And now you have to tell me something! What Pa said at lunch. All that stuff about politics and everything and that silly master of yours, who’s been arrested. I don’t understand why Pa had to thank you.’
Did I explain? Or was this a confidence too far? I don’t honestly remember. All I can be certain of is that this was pretty much the moment when I decided, once and for all, that I no longer wished to be a member of du Toit’s ‘mad’ club.
First, though, there was the rest of the exeat to endure. Laura stayed with me for some of it; I think we might even have gone walking together about the farm. Then it was time for more cooldrink on the stoep and the drive back to school, stopping at St Mary’s on the way to deposit Laura, who said cheerily as she got out of the truck, ‘See you later, alligators!’
Though she never would, of course. Not in my case, anyway.
Then St Luke’s and the surprise sight of my parents standing on the steps alongside Stanford in a pose that called to mind the statues you often find in the Transvaal of rifled men and bonneted women, Voortrekkers, facing up to their future with bronzed resolve.
‘Is that your parents, there on the steps?’ said Mr du Toit, bringing the truck to a halt. ‘Something wrong, do you think?’
In fact, something was right. My parents, guessing that I might have found the week upsetting, had come to check I was okay, even though they could only stay a moment.
‘Mum! Dad!’ I remember running up to them at speed and how my mother scooped me into her arms, holding me tight, while my father, standing slightly to one side, contented himself with just a pat on the head.
‘We wanted to make sure you were all right,’ she said. ‘With all that’s been going on. We didn’t like to think of you worrying.’
She couldn’t have known this then, but, by coincidence, she must have been speaking at around the time Khrushchev was making his broadcast.
‘Yes,’ interrupted Stanford with, for him, an uncharacteristic, if rueful, smile. ‘What a week, hey, one way and another? Bound to get quite a write-up in the history books.’
‘As long as you’ve not been fretting unduly,’ said my mother. ‘That’s the main thing. Now! Have you said goodbye to Mr du Toit? And thanked him properly for having you? How was your day? Fun?’
‘I certainly hope so!’ said a deep voice.
We’d been joined by both du Toits, the one shadowing the other.
‘Nice to see you, Peggy. Douglas.’ Du Toit senior nodded at each of my parents in turn. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Now it is,’ said Douglas. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘It’s only,’ added Peggy, ‘that because of last week, well, you know, we just felt we ought to check that Paul hadn’t been worrying.’
‘Ag,’ said Mr du Toit, ‘we talked it through at lunch. Didn’t we, boys? They realise there’s nothing to be concerned about. Not here. Not now.’
‘Good,’ said Peggy. ‘I’m glad. That’s what we want to hear. Isn’t it, dear?’ She slipped her hand into my father’s. ‘But come! We’d better get going. Exeat’s over.’
The memory of my parents standing hand in hand on the school steps has brought sudden tears to my eyes. Unwanted too because, if I am to do today what I have come to Mokimolle to do, I mustn’t be distracted. It’s time to move on.
Downing the last of my coffee, I push back my chair and make for the hallway, where I encounter Giles in another of his shirts, this one covered in what look like splotches of paint, splashed there in a design frenzy.
‘On your way, then?’ he asks.
I nod.
‘You can always leave your stuff here, you know –’ he gestures towards the bag in my hand ‘– if you do want to explore a bit first. Safer than in the car.’
I thank him, but say I really must be off.
‘Where next? The Kruger? Or aren’t you into wildlife?’
I just shrug.
‘Personally,’ he says, ‘if I go east, it’s to the coast. Though you have to be careful, hey, of the currents. Not to mention the sharks!’
He’s already written out my bill, which he now presents. I settle up and ask him please to compliment Lawrence again on his food. ‘Including breakfast.’
‘Well, you must just come back, then,’ replies Giles. ‘Now you know what a fantastic country this is.’ He smiles. ‘Well, in parts.’ He opens the front door. ‘Travel safely!’
As I drive slowly through the small town, I relive my final moments with du Toit, which takes me back again to the playground, where my younger self is hunting for him. It’s some time during the following week, after we’ve been told that the world is not to end.
Except that I couldn’t find him, not at first. Then I saw Slug, who suggested the club house.
Approaching it, as one had to, via the edge of the playing field, I thought of Pheko, Pheko and Spier, which stiffened my resolve. I summoned Sydney Carton. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. Then a formulation of my mother’s: sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you. And Laura’s: pathetic, treating your own friends in that way …
Not forgetting Mr du Toit’s prophecy that Spier and the groundsman would be sent away for years and years and years, with any luck.
The most potent rallying cry of them all.
I found him on his own, sitting hunched on his throne, his plastic helmet in his lap, a roll of fresh Sellotape in one hand. The door was open; he hadn’t bothered to shut it, perhaps because he needed light in order to see what he was doing. So I was able to observe him for some minutes without knocking. And could also start speaking without having to ask permission first.
I told him that I was leaving his club. I borrowed Laura’s phrase. I told him it – he – was pathetic. Let someone else aspire to being his right-hand man if they wanted to. Nor was I scared of him any more, I continued, using my mother’s phrase. Sticks and stones. He could call me anything he liked. I’d rather not belong at all, I said, than be in a club like his. Adding that when I got back to the playground, I was going to tell Slug what I’d done. ‘If Slug has any sense,’ I threw in for good measure, ‘he will do the same. I’ve seen how he looks at you.’
Then I turned away, leaving him there, helmet still unfixed. And, as I pushed roughly past the juniors who had emerged from their own hut to see who’d been berating du Toit, I silently recited one last exhortation to myself:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools …
I have reached the outskirts of the town, the last of its sparse bungalows, where I come across a sign that reads:
CEMETERY ¼ MILE. No turning back now. Somewhat apprehensively, I nose the car along a road that soon turns from tar to bumpy dirt and dust.
As I do this, the past makes proper space at last for the present: my pilgrimage.
I’m a man in my sixties, near the end of his professional life. But not there yet, thanks to which – and the nature of my work – I’m also easy to track down. The articles I write as a political journalist about what the West is pleased to call the developing world (or sometimes, the third world) can be readily accessed on the net, often with an email address attached. And it was to this address that Pheko had written, having lifted it from an article of mine about Nigeria’s criminalisation of same-sex relations, a particular bugbear for me, as a gay man.
He thought perhaps I mightn’t remember him, so he began by explaining that, once upon a time, he’d been a groundsman at my old school, St Luke’s. Had once lent me, even, his handkerchief, which I’d kindly had laundered before returning it. Though that was not a thing I’d likely recall. Such an unimportant detail. He went on to say that he and his partner had often read my articles, always with gratitude and appreciation that someone living in the UK should write about stuff like homosexuality in Nigeria; or how fine the South African constitution was, something else I’ve been known to cover, especially in relation to the creeping corruption that present-day South Africa is heir to. Writings such as mine, he said, were important: they held people to account.
I wasn’t sure I agreed with him; what I do has always felt piffling to me, of quite little account, in the final analysis. And started far too late, of course. Though I do try to write about things that need addressing.
But that’s by the by; it’s what he said next that mattered. His partner, he informed me, was someone I would most surely remember. I had, after all, been a favourite of his.
Andrew Spier. My old history master.
Then it all came pouring out. In 1962, he and Andrew, he wrote, had been arrested on suspicion of political activity; and in the course of being questioned, when Andrew had been asked if there was anything else to their meetings – somehow the authorities had learned that he used to visit Andrew in his bungalow – Andrew, because he was that sort of man, having at first tried to protect Pheko, had then, once he’d seen what was coming, what was inevitable, not even hesitated. Others would have; most did, in similar circumstances. But Andrew was exceptional. Yes, he’d said, no question. No question at all. He and Pheko were lovers. They stood as one.
This bombshell meant, of course, that they were charged not only for having inter-racial sex under the so-called Immorality Act, but for sodomy too, equally illegal, and imprisoned for an initial period of five years. Though all in all they’d actually served just over twenty, since, as a result also of their behaviour in prison and things that were said there to and by other prisoners, further charges, this time related to treason, were brought against them the moment their initial stretch had ended.
They were finally released, Andrew first, Pheko some years later, in the mid-eighties, whereupon Andrew, who’d inherited some money from his parents, long since dead, bought a smallholding in the vicinity of a place now called Mokimolle, where Pheko had come to live as well, ostensibly as Andrew’s servant. By this stage South Africa had bigger fish to fry, so, although the local police did keep an eye on them, sort of, they weren’t harassed. Then came the release of Mandela, elections, the new South Africa, a rainbow nation. Under the country’s redrawn constitution, they’d even been able to marry. The last twenty years or so had, in consequence, been most contented. They didn’t have much money, wrote Pheko, but they could grow their own vegetables, they had a cow, they were happy. They didn’t go out and about much; they kept themselves to themselves. But that was how they liked it. To have each other. It was all they’d ever wanted, really. Just to be together.
Then Andrew had developed cancer. And now Pheko had learned that he, too, was quite ill. Which was why he was writing. Before his own death, he said, he must do what he and Andrew had so often talked about doing, but never had: write to say that they remembered me and to thank me for my journalism.
Up ahead, the road turns and I see the cemetery: a wire fence, a metal gate, then maybe five acres of graves. I park the car and approach the gate. The graves nearest the fence all have headstones, either of granite or marble – stone, anyway – while those farthest from it are simple crosses of wood.
Where will the grave I’m seeking be located? I wonder. Or will there be two? My frantic correspondence with the town clerk after my initial emails to Pheko had gone unanswered had filled in certain of the gaps; but it hadn’t supplied every detail. Not by a long chalk.
I notice the funeral procession from earlier, clustered around a freshly dug grave at the far end of the cemetery. A few of the more tattily dressed mourners are in the process of shovelling earth into the grave, while the priest (job done, presumably) is walking in my direction, speaking into a mobile phone.
I wait until he emerges through the gate, then step forward. He finishes his call and says, with a pleasant smile, ‘May I help?’
Against the prevailing blackness of cassock and skin, his teeth are dazzling.
‘I’m looking for a grave,’ I say.
‘Whose?’
‘Well, two graves, actually. Andrew Spier’s, and one for Pheko Tswana.’
‘You knew them?’ He sounds more delighted than surprised, as though it is entirely natural that a complete stranger should come to this isolated cemetery in search of their final resting place.
‘A little. Long ago.’
He frowns. ‘Ah, the bad old days.’
Not words to welcome, true though they are.
‘In recent times,’ he continues, seeming not to notice how his remark has affected me, ‘their lives were quite different. Happily. They were a sort of inspiration, in fact, the way they lived together. I was honoured to be their priest.’ The frown becomes another dazzling smile. ‘Not that either of them had much time for religion! I had to be very careful not to talk about God when I visited. But still, they were good men. As I say, an inspiration. A true inspiration.’
‘For me too,’ I say, managing to speak at last.
‘How did you know them?’
He has started back through the gate and, as we walk towards the centre of the cemetery, I offer him a little of my background. Just the barest outline. That I’d been a pupil of Spier’s for a while, until – in the November of 1962 – my English grandmother had died and my mother, having returned to England to close up her house, had all at once decided that she wanted to stay there. In her childhood home. Meaning that, at the end of that same year, I’d left my school and flown with my father to England, where I’d lived ever since.
‘So I suppose,’ muses the priest, ‘you don’t really think of yourself as South African any more. Even though you were born here. Just a visitor these days. Is that correct? Still, you’ve come a very long way, after a very long time, to visit. That says something. He must have meant a great deal to you, your old teacher.’
We’ve reached that part of the cemetery where headstones give way to wooden crosses. Up ahead, the mourners from the finished funeral are gradually dispersing, the children by running.
‘Here we are! This is them.’ He steps back. ‘And please, if you need anything more, just ring.’
He extends the hand with which he’s been gesturing to shake my own, then presses into it a card with his phone number on it, plus the details of his church and a small picture.
‘Be safe. Go well.’
He rejoins the mourners, the running children, heading with them for the gate.
Left alone, I remain for a fraction longer with the memory of our move to England. Of how, in this quite unexpected of ways, my grandmother had finally got what she’d always wanted: a safe exit for us from South Africa. Although no one ever talked about any of this afterwards. What my father had felt about following my mother back to where they’d started, he never said. Just as he stopped talking also, in later years, about how he’d dreamed once of being an engineer. Instead, he simply shut himself away in his workshop, surrounded by objects which, ironically, he still appeared loath to let go of, he who’d relinquished so much else.
My mother, too, kept largely silent; if she ever referred to South Africa, it was in the most general and innocuous of terms. Those blue, blue skies (how she’d used to long for a cloud, she would say); the dryness of the veld; the pitiful lack of culture, plays and concerts and the like. Nothing about servants ever; or politics; or the Afrikaners; or knowing a man by the name of du Toit – her part in all of that. The only man in her life, she would tell people – well, when he wasn’t in his wretched workshop – was Douglas. Who, if he were present, would nod agreeably. For me too, he would say. Aren’t I lucky to have her?
Thus did my parents turn their backs on South Africa; and for the longest of whiles I did the same, happy like them to forget all about du Toit and fellow-sufferers like Slug, whom I never did talk to in the playground, as I’d promised myself I would. Though I still wonder – but only with Slug, never du Toit; he and his ilk can take care of themselves – what became of him. Did he perhaps lose weight as he grew up, emerging from childhood’s chrysalis into a happier, sleeker adulthood, where he was seldom, if ever, teased? It comforts me to think this.
And so it all continued until, eventually, come my early forties – yes, that late! – after the unexpected deaths of both my mother and my father, I was helped from my own chrysalis by a miracle man called Josh, who, among the many things he did for me, urged me to revisit, on my own terms, what had happened in childhood and bit by bit make sense of it. To include South Africa in the countries I wrote about. Partly in expiation, but also in an effort to understand my past. Why my parents had done what they had. Why I had. Things like my father telling me once, Adults can be fallible. Remember that and you won’t go far wrong in life. Or how my mother could later say, which I remember her doing on more than one occasion, as she looked about her at my grandmother’s glorious garden, now ours: ‘South-facing. As it should be.’
It’s where I live still, my grandmother’s house, having first shared it with Josh, with whom I shared all things until he stupidly stepped one day in front of a car. Two long, hard years ago. Which is why I have come to make amends – insofar as amends can be made, of course – on my own.
Turning from my memories, I finally confront the double headstone before me, veld-coloured and quite weathered-looking already, despite its newness. The left-hand stone reads: Andrew Gordon Spier, 1939–2015. The right-hand one: Pheko Tswana, 1942–2016.
Underneath, traversing both gravestones and therefore linking them, is a sentence which, because of my tears, I at first imagine I will have some difficulty deciphering. But actually don’t. I know the sentence by heart, you see. It comes from a favourite novel, first encountered, thanks to Josh, in the library where we also met; one in a long line of such libraries that stretch for me all the way from St Luke’s to the present, providers of reading and refuge and light.
The sentence runs:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.