Despite the Darkness, page 15
‘A bloody stupid thing to do,’ she continued, ‘but I might well have done the same – I can just imagine how pissed off that made Venter. It wasn’t nearly as stupid as the idea that shouting at him constitutes evidence that you are a police agent. I don’t think anyone who heard me talking to him on Friday night would have got the impression that I was a police agent.’
‘Too damn right they wouldn’t have,’ Cameron said, ‘but you were a lot more articulate than I was.’
‘I don’t expect the rumour will travel very far,’ Jules said, ‘and none of our friends will believe it. I don’t suppose it matters too much if a few students have their doubts.’
Jules didn’t sound entirely convinced about the last part, but at least she was prepared to make the best of it.
Darkness feeds forebodings, Cameron thought as he lay awake, listening to the last of the rain and the now distant thunder receding out of earshot. He heard the quarters chiming on the mantel clock in the lounge until well after midnight. He knew that Jules had been putting a brave face on what could be a very significant game-changer. Precisely what kind of game-changer didn’t become any clearer, no matter how much he worried at it. All the while, Jules lay very still in bed beside him, always with her back to him. He whispered her name a couple of times to try to establish whether she was awake, but there was no response. The memory of the dark shadows under her eyes brought a lump to his throat.
All the time he was awake Cameron half expected the phone to ring or to hear the sound of the tramping feet that would herald the banging on the door. When he finally fell asleep it was the knock on the door, but not the tramping feet, that woke him. But it was a timid rather than an aggressive knock. His alarm clock told him it was six o’clock. Had Margaret arrived very early for some reason? He hoped she wasn’t in some kind of trouble. Or could it be Mrs Scheepers searching for her Whiskers again? In either case a dressing gown was called for.
As he opened the front door, Cameron was enveloped in coolness and the fresh sweet smell of the rain on the parched grass and settled dust. The temperature had plummeted – the air was crisp and clear. He could have been in a different country.
It wasn’t Margaret or Mrs Scheepers. Philemon Ndlovu, one of the University’s security guards, was standing at attention in his uniform outside the front door. He was a Manchester United supporter, six thousand odd miles away from Old Trafford, and without a hope in hell of ever setting foot there. Cameron chatted to him about football from time to time.
‘Very sorry to disturb you so early, Sir, but I thought you would like to see this,’ he said, saluting and offering Cameron an A5 sized piece of paper. ‘I found many outside the library. Students are also putting them under doors in the residences.’
‘Thanks, Philemon,’ Cameron answered, taking the paper. ‘How’s George?’
George was Philemon’s son, born within a month of Hilton, and named after George Best in full confidence that he would grow up to be as brilliant as Best.
It wasn’t a different country. The leaflet featured two photographs, each set out above a paragraph of commentary. The first was a fuzzy photograph of Mirambo, obviously cropped and blown-up from an SRC group photograph, with the caption ‘Missing Person’, which doubled as the heading of the leaflet. The paragraph below gave brief details about Mirambo, said that he hadn’t been seen since the previous Thursday morning, and asked anyone who had any information about him to get in touch with the SRC. The photograph below was a reasonably good one of Cameron that must have been extracted from the archives of the student newspaper. The caption above the photograph was a single word – ‘Warning’.
‘Students are warned,’ it said, ‘that they should be careful about what they say to, or in the hearing of, Dr Cameron Beaumont, Senior Lecturer in the History Department. Dr Beaumont has recently been seen in conversation with the notorious Mr Venter of the Special Branch. It is strongly suspected that he may be a police agent. Mirambo, the missing person above, was having his research supervised by Dr Beaumont. Is Dr Beaumont’s outspoken opposition to apartheid just a front?’
Nothing directly defamatory there, none of the statements was untrue. He had been seen talking to Venter. It no doubt was suspected, if by only a handful of the students, that he was a police agent. The concluding question was not entirely unreasonable in the circumstances, as the students understood them, though it was a very considerable stretch to be publicly suggesting he was a police agent on the basis of a single interaction with Venter. The ‘Warning’ over his photograph was ambiguously threatening.
Even as Cameron read the leaflet, his mind feeling remarkably clear considering the hour of the morning and his lack of sleep, he could feel the sense of dread growing. Now he would have to steel himself to ignore the nudges and winks, and possibly some very overt hostility, every time he set foot on campus. There was going to come a point when he would have to ask himself whether there was any point in staying.
‘George is very excellent,’ Philemon responded to his question with a smile. ‘He kicks very well now with his other foot. But I can’t talk long now, I must get back to campus or Mr Cole will get very angry. That paper is not talking good sense.’
‘Thanks, Philemon,’ Cameron repeated. ‘You are right, it is not talking good sense, but I did need to see it. Thanks very much for bringing it.’
As Philemon saluted again and turned smartly on his heel to march back down the path to the front gate, Cameron wished the irascible Mr Cole didn’t think it such a good idea to regard himself as the Sergeant-Major of a small private army of campus security staff. There was no point in asking Philemon not to salute him if Cole, in his Sergeant-Majorly way, insisted that all white members of the university staff should be saluted.
‘So what, now, was that all about?’ Jules asked.
She was sitting up in bed as Cameron returned. Her minimalist white cotton nightie, better suited to Berg-wind weather than thunderstorms, somehow seemed to emphasise the winter-paleness of her arms. With her dark hair dishevelled, and the rings under her eyes seeming to have got even darker, she looked tired and vulnerable.
Cameron passed the leaflet to her without saying anything and sat down on the side of the bed to watch her reading it. She might look vulnerable, but the strong lines of her eyebrows and perfectly sculpted nose, and the way she pursed her lips as she read, belied any hint of weakness. Her response to the leaflet was likely to be unprintable; it was just as well the children were still asleep. When she had finished reading it she looked up.
‘Well that isn’t going to make your life any easier, is it?’ she said. ‘Who were you talking to? Who brought it?’
‘Philemon Ndlovu, one of the campus security staff,’ Cameron answered. ‘He’s got a son the same age as Hilton. He’s also a Man U supporter.’
‘It was nice of him to take the trouble to bring it round,’ Jules said. ‘Was he going off duty?’
‘No,’ Cameron responded, surprised by Jules’s equable response to the leaflet. ‘He said he had to get back to campus or Sergeant-Major Cole would bawl him out, though he didn’t use those precise words. You don’t seem particularly fazed by the leaflet. Philemon was kind enough to say it was not talking good sense – but then we are both Man U supporters.’
‘He’s right, of course,’ said Jules. ‘You’ll probably find that half the students on campus are Man U supporters – however bizarre it may be for them to imagine that they can offer any kind of useful support to grown men who choose to spend their lives kicking a ball around on a patch of grass six thousand miles away. Just get yourself a Man U replica kit to jog around campus being supportive in, and they will follow you Pied Piper-like to the ends of the earth.’
‘More seriously, though,’ Jules continued after a brief pause, ‘if a campus security guard can see that it is rubbish, anyone who matters will be able to see the same. It must be another of Venter’s little bits of fun. He really is a bastard – though I suppose he is just a more or less typical representative of a vicious system and shouldn’t be accorded devil-like status. Anyway, practically speaking, there’s nothing you can do about it is there?’
‘No,’ Cameron replied. ‘Even if I could get the leaflets withdrawn and destroyed I wouldn’t want on principle to do so. Universities are supposed to be spaces in which all views can be aired and disputed. One can hardly object to the government banning thousands of books and then try to suppress a leaflet. Anyway, even if hundreds of copies hadn’t already been distributed, I don’t think there would be any legal basis for trying to get it withdrawn. I don’t think it is technically defamatory.’
‘I don’t think it will be too damaging,’ Jules said. ‘Any sensible member of staff who knows anything about you will write it off as bullshit. Most of the less sensible ones wrote you off as a commie agitator years ago, but they are unlikely to believe that you are a good enough actor to have fooled everyone for so long. For the majority of students this will be a one-day wonder, and students are a transient population anyway. Even if they believe what this leaflet says, they will be gone from campus in a year or two.’
Being married to her for seven years didn’t make Jules any easier to read if she didn’t want to be read. Was she now just being comforting, or was she really as unconcerned about the leaflet as she appeared to be? Either way, Cameron set off for campus after breakfast feeling rather less paranoid than he would have expected. He knew that when he got there he would feel exposed, uncovered as a police agent by every glance in his direction, no matter how casual. In the meantime he could hang onto Jules’s words of comfort.
Chapter 12
Either Jules had been wrong when she had suggested that any sensible member of staff who knew anything about Cameron would write the rumour that he was a police agent off as bullshit, or Cameron’s own Head of Department was not a sensible member of staff. Patrick was lurking with intent in the corridor immediately outside his office, clearly working on the assumption that Cameron would follow his normal routine and walk that way to the staff room to collect his post before going on up to his own office. As soon as Cameron turned the corner, Patrick spotted him and took a couple of awkward steps backward, signalling to Cameron to follow him as he backed wordlessly into his office and closed the door.
‘You won’t have seen this yet,’ Patrick said. ‘It’s about Mirambo’s disappearance and it insinuates that you are working for the Special Branch. You aren’t, are you?’
His eagerness to be the one to impart news was reminiscent of five-year-old Hilton.
‘As a matter of fact I have seen it,’ Cameron responded. ‘One of the campus security guards brought it round to show me very early this morning. Of course I’m not working for Venter’s lot – but, if I were, I obviously wouldn’t tell you. Surely we have worked together for long enough for you not to need to think that question is worth asking? That leaflet is patent bullshit.’
‘Cameron,’ Patrick remonstrated, ‘that kind of language is not appropriate in a University setting. Staff should be setting an example.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Patrick, there is nobody in here apart from you who I could be setting an example to. Sorry, I should have said “to whom I could be setting an example.” Thousands of leaflets suggesting that I am a police spy have been distributed all over campus by a handful of students, who will almost certainly have been put up to it by the SB. They are trying to destroy my reputation, and your concern is with four letter words, or in this instance an eight-letter word. I think calling their lies “bullshit” is actually pretty restrained in the circumstances.’
‘It is, very precisely, reputation I am worried about Cameron,’ Patrick said, ‘the reputation of the Department. It is my business as Head of Department to protect the Department’s reputation. A bomb goes off, our one African research student vanishes, and one of my lecturers, who happens to be the student’s supervisor, has his house raided. The three events are being linked together in the media and in the public consciousness. That is not good for the Department’s reputation, and in my capacity as Head of Department I need to follow it up.’
Cameron didn’t feel inclined to dignify any of this with a reply.
‘Beyond the History Department it is the Principal’s business to worry about the reputation of the University as a whole,’ Patrick went on, ‘and I can tell you that he is worried about it. He asked me to tell you that he wants to see you at 9.30. He will almost certainly ask you to prove that you aren’t a police agent. I would be interested to hear your answer.’
‘That is ridiculous, ‘Patrick,’ Cameron replied. ‘How could I possibly prove that I am not a police agent? You can’t prove a negative – or should that be “you can’t disprove a negative”? If I were to take it into my head to tell Derek or Lynn, or the Principal for that matter, that you are a police spy, how would you set about proving that you aren’t?’
‘I am a very well known Liberal and I don’t spend my time in chit-chat with Special Branch officers. What were you talking to Warrant Officer Venter about anyway?’
‘Is this some kind of inquisition?’ Cameron asked. ‘As it happens, as I was walking home I saw Venter throwing a paper bag out of his car window. The crumpled bag was then caught up by the wind and blown into my swimming pool. Improbable as it might seem, I was suggesting to him that he might like to get out and retrieve it. He declined the invitation.’
‘It does sound improbable,’ Patrick said.
‘Of course it does – I said it did,’ Cameron responded. ‘I’m beginning to regret having done it. But if I were a police agent don’t you think I would have a much more plausible tale to tell? The Special Branch creative writing department would have spent the entire weekend working on a less improbable story.’
‘Do they have a creative writing department?’ Patrick asked. ‘It doesn’t sound very likely.’
‘How would I know whether they have a creative writing department?’ Cameron said. ‘I was just making a point. And as for your trying to prove that you weren’t a police spy by asserting your credentials as a Liberal, that wouldn’t get you out of the starting blocks. That could obviously just be a front – police spies planted in universities tend not to go around presenting themselves as fascists.’
‘Even if your conversation with the Special Branch officer was about litter and not about anything more sinister,’ Patrick retorted, ‘there are other things that are making people suspicious. People are wondering why, if the Special Branch think you know where Mirambo is, and searched your house trying to find him, they didn’t arrest you and take you in for questioning when they didn’t find him. They have already arrested well over fifteen hundred people across the country since the State of Emergency was declared on July 21st, why would they not have arrested you?’
‘That is a very good question,’ Cameron replied. He had found himself wondering in the darkness of the night whether the rather convoluted reason Venter had given for not arresting him was a red herring. While he had no doubt that Venter would enjoy watching him suffer, he could obviously make Cameron suffer much more directly and much more intensely out of public view in a prison cell. And Venter gave the impression of being more likely to enjoy applying physical pain very directly, rather than going in for a much more distanced and cerebral brand of psychological torture.
The suspense of sitting in a cell waiting for the moment when Venter decided it was time to detain Jules and carry out his threat would be unbearable. Nobody could do anything to stop Venter arriving on their doorstep to do that any time he liked – apart, possibly, from his senior officers in the Special Branch. He didn’t even need to go to the house, he could detain her at work. Whether Cameron himself was at home or in a prison cell would be wholly irrelevant. That line of thought had not been conducive to sleep.
‘Well? Go on,’ Patrick interjected impatiently into the long pause.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to think this through, and I haven’t been getting much sleep,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t know the answer to that. The mere fact that he has no justification for arresting me wouldn’t stop him from doing so if we wanted to. I think he’s playing games … trying to play games with my mind. The venom he puts into the “Doctor” when he addresses me as “Doctor Beaumont” sounds pathological. It sounds as if he resents universities and may be trying to prove that he is smarter than we are. When he left after the raid on Friday he said something that struck me as being a bit odd at the time. He said: “You think you are clever but you are in for a surprise: we are cleverer than you and you may be quite sure that we are going to win.” This police spy business may be part of the surprise.’
‘I don’t see how that explains why you weren’t arrested if they think you know enough about Mirambo and the bombing to have justified a raid.’
Patrick was clearly at least one step behind.
‘I’m beginning to think’, Cameron explained, ‘that not arresting me may be part of a wider strategy to discredit me, isolate me and drive me out. They make it known that it was my house that was raided, and then immediately circulate a rumour that I’m a police spy. People are likely to conclude that the reason I wasn’t arrested is because I am working for them and that the raid was just a smoke screen to disguise the fact. In fact some members of the SRC jumped immediately to that conclusion.’
‘But of course you are not working for them,’ Patrick said, still not sounding a hundred percent convinced.
‘Of course I am not working for them,’ Cameron said, with all the restraint he could muster. ‘In fact it is quite possible that at the outset this had nothing to do with the bomb or Mirambo. They could have planned some time ago to conduct the raid and simultaneously circulate the rumour, and might have gone ahead with it now because linking me to the bombing, however tenuously, would be a huge added bonus when it came to discrediting me.’
