Despite the Darkness, page 36
‘Would you like to come to bed with me?’ she asked.
‘Are you trying to comfort me after a difficult day?’ Cameron asked. ‘Your dinner and whisky and wine are already doing that, you don’t need to sleep with me to make me feel better about my day.’
‘No, Cameron,’ Lynn said. ‘As it happens I want to feel your chest against my bare breasts and I want to feel you coming inside me. I’ve wanted that for a long time. I can’t help wanting it – you don’t have to give it to me. I know you don’t think like that about me, you probably see me as a big sister.’
‘If I had a sister,’ Cameron replied, ‘and she were to put her hand on my knee I’m quite sure it wouldn’t do what your hand is doing to me. Is that clear enough by way of an answer to your question?’
Lynn didn’t reply. She stood up and slowly undressed in front of him, holding his eyes all the while, willing him to look only into her eyes and not elsewhere until she was fully undressed. When she had slipped her panties off and was standing naked in front of him she looked away into a far corner of the room, releasing his gaze to wander over her, touching her where it wanted. She stood silently there for a minute or so, inviting him to watch her nipples hardening, and then she took his hand and walked in front of him to her bedroom, inviting him to be further aroused by the gentle sway of her bare bottom.
Chapter 28
Cameron was startled bolt upright in bed by the sudden flood of sunlight into the room. If being startled upright was some kind of reflex defence-mechanism it was a pretty stupid one – all it did was provide a sitting-duck target for anyone who might want to shoot him through the window. But it wasn’t anyone with a gun at the window – it was Lynn wearing a demure cotton nightie and carrying a tea-tray. Putting the tray down on the bedside table, she climbed back into bed and passed him a mug of tea.
‘Good morning, sunshine,’ she said. ‘You have been sleeping like a baby, but it would be a lie to say I’m sorry I woke you. I want to make the most of the little time I’ve got with you.’
It was surprising, and a bit worrying, that he hadn’t woken up when Lynn had got out of bed. Jules getting out of bed for any reason during the night always woke him – he mustn’t drop his guard again. Van Zyl’s strategy required him to be kept alive, but there was no guarantee that Venter would necessarily go along with that strategy, particularly if he was smoking dope on a regular basis. Venter might try to ensure that he met with an accident, preferably an accident that could be blamed on the ANC. Shooting him through a bedroom window could hardly be regarded as an accident, but if Venter could get hold of a confiscated AK-47 he wouldn’t have any difficulty in directing blame away from himself.
‘I don’t know what makes babies sleep like babies,’ Cameron replied, ‘but it sure as hell isn’t what made me sleep that soundly last night. It must have been the stunning combination of single malt and red wine.’
‘Not to mention after-dinner activities,’ Lynn added.
‘Not to mention, much less to forget, after-dinner activities,’ Cameron agreed. ‘Kanonkop seems to imply that I should have the sound of canons reverberating around in my head this morning, but oddly enough I haven’t. That should have been a lethal mix of grape and grain, but I feel less hung-over this morning than I often do when I drink whisky by itself.’
‘Well, there are two obvious solutions to that,’ Lynn said, ‘either lay in a stock of Kanonkop or don’t drink so much whisky.’
‘The third, even more obvious, answer,’ Cameron said, ‘is to add you into the mix and sleep with you whenever I have been tempted to mix red wine and whisky – but that would just ratchet up the temptation. Your “don’t drink so much whisky” sounded almost like Jules. She thinks I’m an alcoholic.’
‘She might well be right,’ Lynn said. ‘If she is, you must be an exception to the rule – it didn’t affect your performance last night. But, if you don’t mind, I would prefer to keep Jules out of it while you are sitting in my bed.’
‘Your bed, your rules,’ Cameron conceded.
Lynn’s bed, Lynn’s rules, but there was no way he could keep Jules out of it. There had certainly been no way he could keep Jules out of it as he slipped into bed with Lynn after dinner. Jules had told him to take his erection somewhere else – so he had taken his erection somewhere else, and it had very much approved of what it had found there, thank you very much.
Van Zyl had said he was leaving Cameron ‘helpless and impotent on the board.’ Well he had certainly demonstrated that he wasn’t impotent – in fact he was more than ready to provide further confirmatory evidence. Whether or not he was helpless remained to be seen.
There was no one and nothing to go home to apart from Kali, who wouldn’t need to be fed until the evening, when he would no doubt appreciate a walk. So there was no reason not to spend a leisurely morning in bed, enjoy a light lunch with Lynn, and wander home mid-afternoon. The wind had died, the sun was balmy and it was such a perfect day for a walk that Cameron took a long roundabout route through the suburbs and round the university campus to get home – walking always seemed to help the thought processes.
He really liked Lynn – and it had only taken one night with her to push the Highmoor option into the background. She was a seriously good teacher and researcher; she was kind, practical and down-to-earth; and she managed to combine all that with being unbelievably sexy. Making love to her meant a whole lot more than just ‘screwing’ her, as Jules would have had it – he fully intended to do a lot more of that before he had to leave. But he was going to have to leave. He couldn’t afford to let himself love her too much if he was going to have to say goodbye in just a few weeks.
Mirambo’s words kept coming back to haunt him: ‘Just how committed to the struggle are you anyway?’ Mirambo had doubted his commitment because his first concern had always been to protect Hilton and Nicky and Jules. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out just how successful he had been where that was concerned. Now Jules had taken his children away from him. There was very little hope that he would be able to see them on a regular basis, never mind live with them – no matter how much he loved them. That was the critical point. He loved Jules too, but she had grown distant from him, and the chances of their ever being close again seemed very small. He hadn’t helped those chances by sleeping with Lynn.
Jules had said it wouldn’t make any difference – that if he was lying to her he might as well be having an affair. But it would make a difference. Apart from anything else, it would give her concrete grounds for divorce, if that was what she wanted. He hadn’t slept with Lynn just to spite Jules – he had done so because he wanted to. If Jules really were intent on taking herself and his children away from him, that would leave him a free agent.
At the political level there was no question that van Zyl and Venter had won the battle on Cameron’s corner of the board – and the forces of darkness were certainly winning the war. He hadn’t been paranoid – he had been right in thinking that they must have singled him out for special attention for some reason. Van Zyl had given him the rationale.
The only thing that puzzled him was why he had been the chosen one – it wasn’t as if the little he had been able to do without picking up an AK-47, or starting to plant bombs himself, had made any significant difference to anything. There were plenty of white academics in the country who were doing as much, if not more, than he was. He could only conclude that they must have found him particularly irritating. There was minor, but not much, satisfaction to be taken from that.
Any hopes raised by the media hype before P.W. Botha’s Rubicon speech a couple of weeks before, hopes that there might be a change of heart on the part of government, had been dashed by what the President had actually said: nothing was going to deter them from doing what they thought best. What they thought best was apartheid. Doing what they thought best right now involved detaining and torturing thousands of people, and murdering hundreds of others – brave and good people like Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto, Sicelo Mhlawuli, all in the past few weeks, and all the others like Rick Turner and Steve Biko over the last few years.
Now it seemed virtually certain that Mirambo’s name would have to be added to the long list of those who had been murdered. It hadn’t appeared on any of the lengthening lists of detainees the newspapers were publishing day after day, but there was nothing to suggest that he had managed to get safely over the border –and van Zyl had consistently used the past tense when talking about Mirambo.
What made van Zyl imagine that Cameron was going to abandon a struggle he’d devoted his life to for the past fifteen years just because he had been put out of business as a university teacher and researcher for the time being? And it was only for the time being. Whatever had happened to Mirambo, people would eventually learn the truth. They would find out that Cameron had not betrayed him.
Life as people actually lived it was not a game of Go. Cameron still had his one life and he could still show van Zyl that it had been a tactical mistake to refrain from removing him from the board altogether. If he was going to be a free agent he could still find ways to undermine the bastards. There was no reason to believe that boycotts or sanctions, of themselves, would be enough to do so – violence was the only currency they dealt in. But they couldn’t kill everyone who objected to apartheid – they had an economy to run, so they would lose in the end. The path to that end was going to be bloody.
Joe Slovo had said that, besides civil resistance and large-scale mass activities and strikes, ‘a certain degree of revolutionary violence’ was needed if they were going to bring about the ‘crisis in the enemy’s camp’ that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of apartheid. Cameron had particularly liked the image of a crisis in the enemy’s camp and wanted to be part of creating that crisis.
The ANC had resorted to violence only when it had become blindingly obvious that non-violent resistance was getting them nowhere. Van Zyl had preened himself on the success of his strategy for closing down all Cameron’s lines of peaceful resistance. But why should that be the end of it? People suspected of being police spies could make no contribution to civil resistance, strikes and large-scale mass activities – but they could still contribute to the revolutionary violence.
If he was going to make any further contribution to the struggle it wasn’t going to be as a university lecturer. Mirambo had been right in implying that he had to be free of attachments. He needed to burst the protective bubble white South Africa had managed to blow around him – the bubble that kept him from properly knowing, or being known by, the majority of the people he lived among.
As soon as Cameron came within sight of the house it was clear that he would have to waste time the next morning phoning around to get someone to come to the house to replace a shed-load of window panes. Someone had come by and thrown things at the front windows. Inside the house it became apparent that most of said things were half-bricks, the one exception being a smashed bottle that had had petrol in it. Whoever had thrown it had been hoping to burn down the house. One of the half-bricks had settled comfortably on Nicky’s pillow, so it was just as well Jules had taken the children down to Cape Town.
The light on the answer-phone was shining to indicate that a message had been left – it was probably from Jules, but it could wait. The first priority was to find Kali and comfort him, he appeared to have been so traumatized by the shower of bricks that he hadn’t even come out from under the kitchen table to greet Cameron. After that he needed to clear up all the broken glass so that Kali wouldn’t cut his feet.
Clearing up all the broken glass, and making sure that no tiny fragments were left in the carpets, took the better part of an hour, so it was starting to get dark by the time he got round to the answer phone. There were several messages from Jules asking him to phone her.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Jules asked. ‘Didn’t you come home last night?’
It was difficult to tell whether Jules was more worried than angry, or vice versa. Might as well take the bull by the horns.
‘No, I didn’t get home last night,’ Cameron answered. ‘I had dinner with Lynn and stayed over for the night. I got back about an hour ago and had to clear up about a million and a half fragments of glass before your watchdog cut its feet on them. We’ve had a hob-load of half-bricks thrown through the front windows.’
The silence that followed lasted long enough to justify asking Jules whether she was still there.
‘Yes. I’m still here, and likely to remain here,’ Jules replied. ‘Don’t tell me that you were so drunk you couldn’t get yourself home and so had to sleep chastely in Lynn’s spare room. I would believe the drunk bit but not the rest.’
‘No,’ Cameron said. ‘I wasn’t too drunk, and I didn’t sleep in Lynn’s spare room. I slept in her bed.’
‘So she managed to find her way into your pants after all,’ Jules said, sounding flat rather than angry. ‘I knew all along that that was what she was after. I didn’t think it would take very long.’
‘You make her sound like a nymphomaniac,’ Cameron responded. ‘She isn’t. It takes two to tango and I was very much up for it.’
‘It only takes one to resort to tired cliché,’ Jules said, ‘and I would be the last person to doubt that you were up for it. There is no cause and effect about it, but if you had been at home this morning you would have been the proud owner of a set of divorce papers. I expect they will be delivered on Monday.’
The theory of needing to be a free agent if he was going to make any further contribution to the struggle was very different from the practice. Cameron could feel a rush of anguish sweeping over him at the thought of a formal severance from Hilton and Nicky and Jules. It was Jules’s turn to ask if he was still there.
‘I’ll be at work on Monday,’ was all he could think of to say in reply.
‘You are not the bloody Scarlet Pimpernel, Cameron,’ Jules said. ‘You are findable. If the people responsible for delivering the papers can’t find you at home they’ll find you at work. Thanks, incidentally, for bothering to ask what has happened that would make me want to phone you five times since yesterday evening and leave messages asking you to phone me. Don’t you worry at all about your children any more?’
‘Of course I do,’ Cameron said, suddenly feeling anxious. ‘Has something happened? Venter hasn’t phoned again has he?’
‘No. It’s my mother this time,’ Jules replied. ‘She had some kind of heart attack yesterday evening and I thought I might need you to come down to look after them while I am at the hospital – but I’ve made other arrangements now, and won’t be needing you. Don’t bother to say sorry about my mother or to wish her a speedy recovery, I know you wouldn’t mean it – and no, you can’t speak to the children.’
It wasn’t because he had slept with Lynn that Jules wanted to divorce him – it had made no difference at all. She had said that it wouldn’t. So he might as well go back and spend the night with Lynn after he had given Kali some food and taken him for a walk that would end at Lynn’s house for a change – he didn’t want to leave him alone in the house again. He was sure Lynn wouldn’t mind. The broken panes of glass would leave the house vulnerable to burglars, but what the hell – he would be having to go away soon enough, and would almost certainly have to leave most of his things behind anyway.
Sleeping with Lynn turned out to be something of a misnomer, not solely as a result of the amount of sleeping-time devoted to making love. Lynn’s telephone rang sometime around 3am – there wasn’t a clock on his side of the bed. There wasn’t a telephone on either side of the bed, so after turning the light on Lynn hurried through to the hall to answer it, pulling a bath towel round her as she went. The conversation was brief and one sided, leaving Lynn to return to bed looking pale and shaken. As he wrapped his arms around her, Lynn started crying quietly.
‘I know who it must have been,’ Cameron said after a minute or so, ‘what did he say?’
Lynn reached over for some tissues from a box on her bedside table and blew her nose before replying.
‘It was the man with the voice you described as “gravelly”,’ she said. ‘I knew who it was immediately. He called me a whore and said “If you want to find ways to die that are quicker than fucking yourself to death we will be happy to help you”.’
‘Bastards!’ Cameron said.
‘I’m OK. Don’t worry,’ Lynn said. ‘It was a small price to pay. But I can understand why Jules would find it a relief to be out of range.’
‘Out of range of bullets, perhaps,’ Cameron said, ‘but not out of range of phone-calls.’
Cameron’s experience had taught him that University common-rooms breed rumours and gossip faster than a swamp breeds mosquitoes, so he had little doubt that a rumour that he was having an affair with Lynn would be doing the rounds very quickly. Lynn said that she wouldn’t be particularly bothered if her name started to be linked with that of a suspected police agent, but it seemed a good idea not to flaunt their altered relationship. So Cameron and Lynn went to the university separately and kept well apart.
Cameron phoned Jules every day to be told about her mother’s gradually improving state of health, and to be reassured that Nicky and Hilton were getting on ‘fine’ without him. It hurt that Nicky and Hilton were ‘fine’ without him, and that he was still not being given the chance to speak to them, but he wanted them to be happy, and ‘fine’ sounded at least to be a step in that direction. Losing their grandmother wouldn’t help.
The days were tolerable mainly as prologues to the evenings and nights with Lynn. Some of the evenings were spent teaching Lynn to play Go with a new set of upmarket Go stones – the black ones made of slate and the white ones carved from shell – that he had ordered before his abortive trip to Brighton. There were no more late night phone-calls, and the meeting with van Zyl had, if nothing else, served to reassure Cameron that their strategy did not involve his imminent assassination. One unexpected side effect of the pleasure Cameron enjoyed from being with Lynn and making love to her was that he became marginally more optimistic about the future. Highmoor no longer held any attraction.
